Wednesday, November 30, 2016

IS A WISH FOR PEACE JUST RIDICULOUS? THEN CALL ME THAT! THE STATE OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA

The recent Presidential election left many Americans, including me, embarrassed and exhausted.  The winner, Donald Trump, might just make America Great Again, one of many campaign promises he made, but he seems to be a mercurial person. 


Many people I've spoken with have told me that they expect campaigns to get nasty.  It was just so nasty, it left me wishing and hoping that we can all hit the restart button, and begin again, in brotherhood and peace, with not politicians but with leadership


AM I JUST RIDICULOUS?  Maybe so, but if there is any time of the year in the Christian world where we can have such hopes, I think that's the Christmas time.   It's become the most materialistic time of the year.  It should be the most idealistic.


It's coming up on us fast, and so is the swearing in of Donald Trump as the President of the United States. People I meet are not idealistic about his - regime.  They are afraid they will go without health insurance or housing and be out on the street.  It's enough to make me think MAYBE CALIFORNIA SHOULD BECOME ITS OWN COUNTRY... WE'RE ALREADY BIGGER THAN SOME!  THE MENTALITY HERE IS JUST - DIFFERENT.  Some people are suggesting we leave the Union - for four years or the end of Trumps regime, whatever comes first.


No, that's not likely to happen.


In particular to my state, California, there is a lot of fears about illegal immigration, that there will be "sweeps," and people will be taken away, like the Nazis taking away the Jews in the Holocaust.


One of my friends is a librarian for the city, of Mexican origin, her great grandfather walked into Arizona, worked full time there, and founded a family that has done well for itself.  On the library desk I found print outs that had been left there by immigration advocates, in both English and Spanish, intended for illegal residents to hand to any police officer that might start asking them questions, stating that they are going to stay silent.  I took one for my wallet, even though I'm legal, as a reminder that I don't necessarily have to answer the questions asked by an officer, though I don't think I'm headed for trouble with the law.  I told her that I did not think there would be sweeps.  Our mayor and police said they would not cooperate if ordered to.  However, if someone commits a violent crime or is dealing drugs, especially if that person has broken Federal law, then I would not be surprised if they were deported.


What is so difficult about becoming a citizen?  If you come legal, it's not!  I have a neighbor from Hungary getting his citizenship.  Another neighbor who got his a decade ago came as a refugee from Kosovo.  There is a Moslem family, peaceable, who are refugees from Pakistan, also in process.   Another neighbor, has just gotten dual citizenship - Great Britain and the U.S.  Yes, there was time involved, and money, and tests, but it worked out.  None of them ever felt their stay here was threatened because they were doing the right thing from the start.


I believe that if you do the right thing from the start, you will be honored.


Recent killing rampages by people of Moslem origin especially, have basically sanctified what Trump is talking about, and that is, that we have let in all sorts of people who do not deserve to be here.


Do we really need more immigrants?  We welcome the educated, but Blue Collar American Trump advocates want their jobs back here and now.  Here is the hitch.  Illegal immigrants are not protected by labor laws and can be hired for cash and less than minimum wage and they are not likely to complain about the worst conditions.  Some of them are afraid that becoming legal will mean no longer getting work.  They also break the Unions, simply because they are willing to be underpaid.  It's not hard to find them.  I suspect that every construction site has some.  Some dirty people take terrible advantage of them including dumping them off after a days hard labor without the promised pay, and the threat to call the INS on them.


It's kind of like the situation for background actors for film.  Everyone who does it wants to get into SAG, the union, because the pay and benefits are then decent, but everyone says that once they got into SAG, their bookings diminished, so they worked less, and made about the same money.


California decided that a person didn't need to be legal to have an ID or a drivers license, which means they have to be insured for accidents, they can have library cards, they can have medical care at County hospitals, and they can have education.  Why?  Because California decided that these benefits benefit everyone, not just the illegal person. 


Much is made of Mexican gangs.  They exist.  They shoot  and kill each other and innocent people.  However, there are gangs of Armenians and Russians, and other ethnic groups as well, and sometimes it seems like identity theft and more sophisticated frauds are committed by these more educated criminals 


So, will a wall actually keep people out - or in?  If you read around it, you'll learn that the wall has been an ongoing project in the Obama administration, and that it isn't always a physical wall. 


Our illegal immigrants are not all criminals and our criminals are not all Mexican.

I DOG SIT FOR MY NEIGHBOR and MY DOG IS ... A LITTLE BITCH!

The other day my neighbor asked me at the last minute if I would please watch her dog. 


We are aware that her dog and mine have a complicated relationship.  You see, when mine was five, theirs was a puppy who upon the sight of my dog did the wail for mommy.  He matured and tried to mount my dog who was not interested.  Pretty much, "been there done that," was her attitude.  I think he took it badly.  Ever since then the two of them have doggie hated each other so when they go past each other they rapidly bark as if they are sassing each other.  But recently when my dog got out this neighbor rescued her and held her for me till I got home.  I'm eternally grateful as it could have been a disaster otherwise.  I would never have said no to her request. 


She needed someone to watch her dog while she went off to college where she is studying for a Master's Degree in Child Development. Her landlord was finally sending in workmen in to repair the flooring of her kitchen which had been water damaged.  There was going to be a lot of noise, hammers and buzzsaws.  No place for a dog to be home alone with strange men.


She brought little Keaton over.  She brought his big cage, his dog bed, his bone, his ball, and his blanket, all of which I suggested just in case.  When my dog saw Keaton coming through the door she stared.  Oh No!  Not him again.


In an attempt to train Keaton and my dog in proper behavior when company, I tried to reinforce that my dog was not the leader of the pack, I was, but that she was second in command.  Keaton, being younger, male, and more energetic and strong than my dog, was skeptical.  He could see his house from our front door, so he knew he wasn't really away, and his person just went down the drive way.  She'd be back, wouldn't she?


And so, in short order, Keaton decided that he would be at the front door, watching and waiting.  So my dog got up on the sofa, leaning over it, and growling to let him know he was on her turf and watching him.


Then my dog started doing bitchy things to Keaton.  She sniffed around his things and she stole his bone, not once, but three times.  Each time I took the bone away from her, put it back near Keaton, and put her in the bedroom and closed the door for time out. 


She got into her second most favorite spot, the chair she likes to sleep on and has pillows and blankets on, again to intimidate Keaton, who was looking around my kitchen floor and sniffing, hoping he was going to get some real food that dropped.


I went to the treats can and pulled out a few different ones, from little sausages, to cheese and chicken flavored mini-bones, and some kibble that comes in little bags and is made of trout.  I put a couple of these down near Keaton's things but my dog was like an eagle coming out of the sun to blind its prey.  Keaton couldn't get one treat because, with incredibly bad manners, mine ate them all, right under his nose.


It all worked out in the end.  I never put Keaton in his cage and I never tied up the dogs inside the house to keep them apart. The noise and vibration across the way was intense and Keaton knew something was going on in his house and for a while he shook.  He let me hold him and sooth him.


However, what I had to remember was how insecure my dog is because she has been dumped and rescued three times in her life.  When she came to me she showed signs of having had to compete for food.  Even though there were no other dogs around, she would take some kibble and hide it, or eat away from her dish, as if she were ready to be attacked.  I believe she was born in a backyard and then was part of a breeding program.  Mine may be the first house she has lived in and it may be the first time she has no other dogs to compete with.  She came to me terrified to have her paws touched, fearful and uncooperative about baths, and generally seemed to have been, if not abused, roughly handled in the past and untrained.  We've gotten so over those fears of hers that she comes to me eagerly when I say "bath."  Like a person who did not have a good childhood, there are elements of her personality that are not companionable.  I love her as she is.


I walked the two dogs together and while my dog tried to keep pace with me, and it was Keaton who started huffing and puffing first, I realized that Keaton was simply not going to perform any command I asked of him.  He was not going to Come, Sit, or Stay, or Heel.  He looked at me as if to say, "I no understand Hungarian!"


Moving into the holidays, I've already bought my dog a new collar and leash, a new toy, and a new sweater.  I sent Keaton home with a new Christmas bow for his collar.


Here's to the days ahead!




C 2016 All Rights Reserved - Including Internet and International Rights



Monday, November 14, 2016

FLOATING LKE BOKODI FISHING VILLAGE ON STILTS NORTH of BUDAPEST

DAILY MAIL TRAVEL - HUNGARY's AMAZING FLOATING VILLAGE ON STILTS  beautiful pictures but it's cooold out there!

EXCERPT: This is Hungary's answer to the paradise islands in the Indian Ocean - a village on stilts northwest of the capital, Budapest, near Bokod, that's known as the 'floating village'.


(is this your great escape?)

Wednesday, November 9, 2016

A SLAVIC BEAUTY WILL BE FIRST LADY OF THE U.S.A. - THAT'S A FIRST! WHY HUNGARIAN and SLAVIC AMERICANS MAY HAVE GONE TRUMP!

Melanija Knavs, Melania Knauss, MELANIA TRUMP, will be our First Lady of the United States, as her husband DONALD TRUMP was elected to be the next President and will take office in a few months.

Hungarians are not Slavs, but because Hungarians and Slavs have lived around each other for hundreds of years and intermarried, and in the United States this is especially true, we're considered to be the same people. (So listen please if you're reading this post in translation while living in Slovakia or Romania because believe me when I say that if you came here you would only be grateful to find another one of you and grateful to find some of the people you may think of as enemies there!).  

Never before have we ever in THE UNITED STATES had a Slavic person in as high a position in our country as First Lady.  In the American mind Hungarians, Slovenians, Slovaks, Poles and Russians - and all manner of Slavic people - have been in the popular mind in the same category; work-desperate legal immigrants who came in such high numbers a hundred or more years ago that their country of origins seemed vacated, not very intelligent and speaking strange languages.

In reading genealogy records of those Hungarian churches in towns in which so many people left during the Industrial Revolution, I have seen the notes, of children born while "father is in America," and of those children named AMERICUS!  (Note September 2022.  I've learned that this given name might relate to the English name Henry or Henrik. However, I've seen it barely used until the industrial age immigration period.)

Those hardworking men and women came and shifted from the agricultural economy that had sustained them to factory work and manufacturing, and ask anyone who comes from this background, they worked for pay but were closer to slaves.  (Some people think the word Slav and the world slave are of the same root.)

Granted Melania Trumps legal immigration occurred in a different time in history.

On my commute home yesterday I switched on my not-so-smart phone and Googled "2016 Election," and up came the most incredibly useful site imaginable which was a map of the United States that showed the voting results as they came in, both popular and electoral college, giving each state a pale red or pale blue color, which became solid red or solid blue, as that state became overwhelmed with Republican or Democratic votes.  A few states changed color as the evening went on, but by about 6:30 in the evening, California time, I was sure that Trump would win.  One could click on the state to get the details, such as what percentage of votes were in, and by county, and I saw what was happening. 

IN THE LARGE POPULATION CITY AREAS and COLLEGE TOWN AREAS the voting was Democratic, but the more rural areas had gone Republican, and the "RUST BELT", the areas where so very many of those descendants of Hungarian and Slavic immigrants had come, worked, and lost their jobs to the export of the work to other countries - including Japan and Mexico- went Republican too.  It was city versus country, educated versus not so much, but certainly part of a long held theory of mine that PEOPLE ALWAYS VOTE THEIR JOBS!

Honesty, though I'd been telling everyone I encountered for the last week who wanted to talk the election that I believed Hillary Clinton would win, when I said I thought the race would be very close, many people got mad at me.   Everyone thought the whole campaigning process had been disgusting and humiliating for us as a county and wanted it to be over.

Here's the thing.  DONALD TRUMP WAS NO MORE A REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE than BERNIE SANDERS WAS A DEMOCRATIC ONE.  Both ran with a party because traditionally it is the way to win, yet Trump financed his own campaign with about one hundred million, and for a billionaire that's not so much, while Sanders did surprising well with near no campaign funds but the free labor of grass roots activists.  AND BOTH TALKED ABOUT ECONOMIC ISSUES as the BOTTOM LINE PROBLEM HERE IN THE STATES. 

I felt vindicated to have written in my candidate when I read this morning that former President George H.W. Bush and former First Lady Barbara had voted but not at all for President, a none of the above vote. 

Remember that it was during President William J. Clinton's office that jobs were sent to Mexico.  Some people thought that if Mexicans could make good wages in Mexico there would not be so much illegal immigration from that country.  I was against that trade agreement.  Remember when President Bush Jr. and other Republican's defended the way big corporations were sending manufacturing jobs overseas, calling it "work Americans won't do?"  I knew that was, to put it politely, B.S.  I knew that because I met out of work people everywhere who were loosing everything, including their houses and apartments, desperately at the libraries looking for any kind of work,  often aged out or in need of retraining, and I remembered the truth of the work that immigrants from Hungary and other Slavic countries generations before.


So when DONALD TRUMP said to make America Great Again he meant that those jobs "Americans won't do" would SO be done by Americans again. That message, that campaign promise, is what got him elected, and it wasn't just against the precedent of the Democratic Clintons but also the Republican Bushs!

The word Campaign before the word Promise often negates the Promise.  However, we can't always say that a candidate once in office then lied, because our President is not a Dictator or King, but must deal with the Senate and the House, our system of "checks and balances" in place to prevent the President from being either.  Currently the Republicans will dominate the Senate and Supreme Court nominees may also be conservatives and so it is possible that Trump can get more of what he promises actually done with less opposition.

Now we come to his wife MELANIA TRUMP and what her role will be as First Lady.  This morning I read Daily Mail UK and saw the headlines from newspapers around the world, in Europe and the Middle East, some in shock, while the leaders of many countries, including Hungary, were at least polite enough to send congratulations, if not having great enthusiasms for DONALD TRUMP as PRESIDENT.

May I suggest that MELANIA TRUMP can be an in the White House representative of the humble people who have immigrated and made good?  She grew up in a communist apartment block, now lives in Trump Tower, and will go to the White House. She is intelligent and she speaks several languages, English not being her first language. She appears to have taken on the traditional role of wife and mother, as well as the traditional role of volunteer worker and charity fundraiser, and she is unlikely to be the "power behind the man," but she is as unconventional a first lady as there has ever been, not because of her first generation American status, but because she was a model who got naked, and is the third wife of a man who has children from three marriages, all who got behind him in this campaign.  She is more of the modern generation than her husband. Her air of sophistication and presence may be more Jackie Kennedy than Pat Nixon or Lady Bird Johnson or Michelle Obama, but we are all hoping that the once womanizing Trump has left his old ways behind in marriage to her! If there is anyone to tell this man to start thinking about what he has to say instead of spewing and back-stepping, she's the one.

Like many Americans I will both keep an open mind and wait and see what happens.  I feel lucky to live in California though!

C 2016  All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights.  Magyar-American Blogspot

Note September 2022.
So much has happened with Trump in office, and of late, the scandal in which he is accused of possessing and using documents that never belonged to him personally and belong in our National Archives. 

Monday, November 7, 2016

IN LINE FOR 6 HOURS TO VOTE EARLY! I'll NEVER DO IT AGAIN!

I've voted, and wrote in a Candidate for President.  Nothing else would satisfy my soul.  I also avoided voting for several candidates for lesser positions because I didn't like any of them.  In my area measures and propositions were also important.  I voted in each case.

WHY, when I could have gone to my polling place on Tuesday morning did I choose this EARLY VOTE?  Well, because I looked at my schedule for Tuesday and realized that I was going to be doing a lot of commuting and MIGHT not be able to also vote, at least not while I still had some energy! 

My dog and I walked to the nearest early voting location and the line was very long looking, but at first, as people started moving up and leaving less space between them it appeared to be moving.  Meanwhile, there were some interesting conversations to be had with people in line around me.  However, one of them left after FOUR HOURS because she had a mail in vote in hand that COULD HAVE BEEN DROPPED OFF, and really, about the four hour point, with ONE FOOD TRUCK, no bottled water, no snacks, and without the foresight to at least bring a good book, which I could have done.


FIVE HOURS INTO IT, we got close enough to an actual tent full of EMPTY CHAIRS.  We went and dragged some back to sit on.  MY ENTIRE BODY HURT.  Getting up and down out of this folding chair hurt.  MY DOG had BEEN SO WONDERFULLY PATIENT THROUGHOUT.  Someone gave her water.  Someone else went out to the store, bought Halloween candy on sale, and the bag was passed back as we all needed the SUGAR for that false boost of energy!

THEN FINALLY WE WERE INDOORS where chaos continued.  My dog stayed under my chair and later went to the voting booth with me.

I HOPE THAT EARLY VOTING MEANS MORE PEOPLE VOTE! 

But I think most of the early voters were so disgusted with the election, THEY JUST WANTED IT TO BE OVER!

BLESS US ALL!

Friday, November 4, 2016