Tag Archives: pennies

Coin

Coin: (n) a flat, typically round piece of metal with an official stamp, used as money.

Can I tell you when I fell in love with me?

I had flirted with myself for years. But always, at the last moment, I pulled away from true affection for my being because I saw ugliness beneath the surface.

Living so close to me, it often made things tense.

Yes, it was necessary for me to love myself–but it had to be legitimate. It had to be real. It couldn’t be some clever concept pulled from a book by an author promoting self-esteem.

But one night it was put into motion. I had been working on the concept of generosity. I was trying to learn to give a damn about those around me who were socially, emotionally and financially damned.

I had made strides.

Back to my story. I was sitting in my chair, and noticed that a young lady, who had come to dinner, was cleaning off the nearby table, and had taken a dime, a nickel and two pennies that she saw lying next to a glass and threw them in the trash.

She discarded the coins.

I perfectly understood her action–seventeen cents seemed insignificant. She had no available pockets. And holding the coins in her hand while trying to grasp glasses might result in an embarrassing accident.

As soon as she walked away, I retrieved the seventeen cents, ran out to my kitchen, found an old pickle jar and threw the coins inside.

I set the jar on my counter, and I challenged my friends to bring all the change they had that might be tossed aside, and put it in my jar.

Every forty days I took the jar down to the local market and poured it into the coin machine. I was always astounded when I walked away with fifty dollars or more each and every time.

I had fifty dollars to give away to someone in need.

Fifty dollars to buy groceries for a family.

Fifty dollars for the guy on the street who made a sign from a piece of cardboard about his destitution.

And it all came from tossed-away coins.

So let me coin a phrase:

Don’t give up on coins. It may take a while, but they quickly change into dollars which can help those who just never have quite enough.

 

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Abuse

by J. R. Practix

dictionary with letter A

Abuse: (n.) 1. to use something to bad effect or for a bad purpose. 2. to treat a person or an animal with cruelty or violence.

It was that second definition that stalled me–the words “cruelty” and “violence.”

It is so easy to go on a tirade against abuse and proclaim that such actions are dangerous, evil and dark. I have just learned over the years the futility of stumping against bad attitudes and horrible actions without looking for the specter of that same vice in myself.

Even though I would never put on a pair of army boots and stomp baby ducks for pleasure, nor would I strike a woman because she failed to fulfill my expectations, the seeds of cruelty and the hint of violence can still slip into my behavior and be justified by me just as easily as the wife-beater explains how he needed to slap her because she was being so stupid.

What is abuse?

You want my definition? Abuse is when we fail to deliver to people what they truly need, but insist that they accept what we have anyway.

There you go.

  • So I think politics can be abusive. It doesn’t provide the laws that enrich the lives of people or promote the common good, yet still insists that we go to the polls and vote as our American duty.
  • I think religion can be abusive. It preaches that we should be grateful for a heaven that will come at the end of our lives as we patiently accept the slings and arrows that bruise and beat us in the present.
  • I think corporations are abusive when they know they could make a better product for a few more pennies, but they refuse to sacrifice miniscule percentages points of profit margin.
  • And I think the entertainment industry is abusive when it continues to pound us with more violence and meaningless sexual content because it innocently profiles itself as a reflection of reality.

Abuse is tricky. It’s so easy to see when watching a television show, as a man strikes a woman in anger, but not so easy to see when a joke is told around a game of poker with five friends–to the degrading of the female of our species.

If I can’t help somebody, I shouldn’t make them put up with my inadequacy. If I do, it’s abusive.

My dear God, I need to work on that. How about you?