The Geert Wilders Saga Continues

Tom Kando

On February 12, the British government denied Geert Wilders entry into Britain. Wilders is the Dutch parliamentarian who is being criminally prosecuted in Amsterdam because he made and propagated an anti-Koran film which depicts acts of violence by Muslims and because he compared the Koran with Mein Kampf. The British authorities said that “people who carry extremist, hate and violent messages are not welcome in our community.” It should be noted that Wilders was not running from Dutch law. He had been invited by some members of the British Parliament to present his views.Pat Condell is a brilliant British on-line satirist who has commented on the Wilders case in the past. Check him out by clicking on Pat Condell's
In his comments, Condell really lets the Dutch have it. But now, it seems that the British authorities have joined the Dutch in their idiocy and cowardice.

As to where I stand, let me make the following points:

1) The Dutch authorities - and now the Brits - are very wrong. I wont re-iterate the reasons why. Pat Condell discusses them far more eloquently than I ever could.

2) Let’s be emphatically clear that the issue has nothing to do with Arabs (or with Iranians, Pakistanis, Indonesians and all the other people whose majority religion is Islam).

3) The problem lies with fundamentalist religion and religious intolerance, including radical Islam.

4) Condell and others may be fervent atheists. I am not. I am indifferent to religion. I am not as animated against religion as Condell and others. In fact, I am against the harassment of religious people. I find it lame when Macy’s forbids its employees to wish people “Merry Christmas,” when municipalities forbid crèches in public areas, when there is a crusade to delete “In God we Trust” from our money, etc.

I find militant atheism and mandated atheism (as in the former USSR) a mirror image of theocracy. Soulless, scientific materialism doesn’t have all the answers, either. After all, the crisis of modernity is upon us, right now, isn’t it?

Let’s not toss out the spiritual and the transcendental altogether. The question should not be: Religion, yes or no? But: What sort of spirituality? We have much to learn from Buddhism, Zen and other Eastern traditions.

5) But this huge topic is not what today’s post is about. Today, I just want to stress the evils of religious bigotry. Today, militant Islam is the prime example of this, and yet the European authorities are punishing Geert Wilders, who is no more than the messenger.

6) Religious bigotry is evil wherever it occurs, and it also occurs in Christian countries. But currently, US fundamentalists do not stone women to death because they had a cup of tea with a man they are not married to. They do not send 16-year old suicide bombers (often girls, lately) to kill innocent men, women and babies. They only vote to ban such things as homosexual marriage. That’s a bit of a difference.

7) The media have told us about Sharia law, the Madrassas, and the Mullahs. I don’t know with how much negative bias these terms are used in the West. Perhaps some of the religious schooling undergone by young Muslims is okay. But there is no doubt that some of this “religion-based” education inspires the atrocities and the mayhem, including anti-Western terrorism, and that it fuels enormous hatred of Western culture. The greatest obscenity is that the “religious leaders” are often old men, while those they send to blow themselves up are often children. But I suppose that’s always been the way of war - old men sending children to die.

8) So now Geert Wilders becomes a cause célèbre, due to the stupidity and cowardice of (some) Europeans.
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Leaving Is a Little Bit Like Dying

by Madeleine Kando

Some people like the excitement of traveling, while others find it anxiety provoking. I react with a mixture of both, but as soon as I start packing, my bohemian ancestry takes over: excitement wins over anxiety.

This is odd, considering that I have recurrent dreams of getting lost in a foreign city, with the realization that I have no money, no passport and no place to stay. Above all I don’t know anyone. I wake up in a sweat and thank whoever is up there that it was just a dream.But either way the problem of what to pack is a universal dilemma. After all, whether we like it or not, as travelers we have to accept the reality that a suitcase has a finite amount of room. And that in itself makes packing a very zen experience. It forces you to focus on the essentials.

’Partir c’est mourir un peu’ say the French (leaving is a little bit like dying) and packing is a little like preparing to die: you have to decide what is essential to bring with you and what is not.

Most people hate to part with their possessions, and having to decide which little pieces of your life you are going to take with you is a very difficult process.

Standing in front of my empty suitcase, I am ready to start the painful selection processs. I open a drawer where I keep my socks, but I find myself unable to select which ones to bring until the whole drawer has been purged and everything is neatly paired and rolled into tidy little sock-balls.

I am not just preparing to travel you see, I am also preparing to leave. I am preparing to die a little bit. Just in case I don’t come back, I want to make sure that whoever will be looking for me won’t find any smelly socks in my drawer. My house is never as organized and well kept as right before I go on a trip.

At the airport you can judge people’s reluctance to part with their day to day existence by how much luggage they carry. I think it reflects a fear of disappearing. The more you bring with you, the more you think you can prove that you exist somewhere out there in the real world, outside of the airport and the neither here nor there world of traveling.

Aside from choices based on purely practical reasons (I wouldn’t recommend packing an umbrella if you go to Hawaii or suntan lotion if you plan on going to Holland in the winter), packing forces you to get down to basics: do I really need 5 sweaters? How about those 3 handbags: would I be ok with just one?

As I get older, I have noticed that more and more of my finite suitcase space is taken up by paraphernalia that is supposed to keep me healthy on my journey: blood pressure gage, pills, vitamins, thermometer, flue medicine, tempurepedic pillow... Forget the 5 sweaters at my age. I am lucky if I have enough room for one. The irony is that the closer you get to your ultimate voyage on this wretched earth, the more room you need to keep you amongst the living.

With age I have also become more frugal in what I pack. One very practical reason is that I just don’t have the muscle power to lug around one of those monstrosities that you sometimes see on conveyor belts.

If I could afford it I would not pack at all, just bring a lot of dollar bills so I could buy everything I need wherever I go. And I would dress in my pijamas, that being the most comfortable outfit in my wardrobe. What better way to spend countless hours in a cramped airplane seat designed for a lilliputian than in your favorite pj’s? leave comment here Read more...

The Self-Confidence Trap

by Madeleine Kando

A few days ago I did an experiment. I googled the keyword 'self-confidence'. Aside from one pitiful wikepedia entry with some factual information, all I could find was innumerable advise on how to improve, increase or build self-confidence and its counterpart, how to decrease, beat, avoid or overcome self-consciousness.

In general, being confident about something means being certain that it is correct. So does self-confidence mean being certain that YOU are correct?As a child I liked having internal conversations with myself, pretending that I was 2 people. For example: I argued that it was good that my family had left Communist Hungary to come to the West. My other self argued that if we had stayed we could have learned Hungarian and we would not have turned ourselves into political refugees. Does that mean that I was never sure whether I was correct? Does this constitute a lack of self-confidence?

Self-confidence is also having faith in one's own abilities, but the danger of being too self-confident is that it makes you think that you are correct when you are not. How can you improve yourself when you are blind to your own mistakes?

And then there is the unpleasant relationship between self-confidence and self-consciousness. I am fairly confident in my own abilities but when it comes to public speaking for instance, I am so conscious of myself that I become speechless, which poses a slight problem while delivering a public speech.

Very self-confident people have a total unawareness of themselves, especially their own shortcomings. But to tell you the truth I see many positive aspects in being less confident and more conscious of yourself. Here are a few: being less self-confident gives you the ability to listen and learn from others. It means having self-criticism which results in a more objective view of the world. It widens your perspective by embracing other points of view.

Self-confidence should be a temporal, ever changing state of mind, based on what you have accomplished, not based on who you are. You have an A in school, your confidence goes up. You shop-lift, it goes down.

But children these days are told by their parents that they are all special. It is based on the politically correct view that everyone is creative, everyone is a genius in the make. Being ordinary becomes every child's fear. It leads to an obsessive self-focus and breeds feelings of superiority.

The worst by-product of our culture of 'self-confidence' is the inability to identify with the underdog, the 'looser', the less fortunate. If you are told over and over that you should be a success, intelligent, powerful, famous, wealthy, how can you show compassion and empathy?

Believe it or not, there are other belief systems that actually teach the exact opposite. Buddhism for instance warns against taking yourself too seriously. The self is not what counts, it is the interdependence and sharing with others that validates who you are. In that sense, the more self-conscious you are the better. My favorite type of person is one who does not show much self-confidence but has a lot of self-worth. They know who they are, so they don't have to prove it.
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Confessions of a Confused Housewive

by Madeleine Kando

For a long time now I have been struggling to understand why my culture, i.e. Western culture has been forced to focus so much on the Islamic/Arab ‘problem’. Where did that suddenly come from?

My first reaction was: ‘what’s that got to do with us?’ Why do we have to be dragged into the affairs of a culture that is in such a state of chaos? The majority of people who die as a consequence of Muslim aggression are other Muslims, not Westerners. So, let them sort it out, I thought, and leave me in peace already.But when more and more of our attention was taken up by this conflict and more and more suicide bombings took place, my ‘resistance’ turned into ‘resentment’. And after the attack of 9/11 this resentment turned into pure anger.

The Western world has basically been hijacked by a conflict that should have happened some time in the Middle Ages. I don’t see any difference between the days of the Inquisition when witches were burnt at the stake because they were supposedly possessed by the devil and Islamic Fundamentalist organizations that declare Jihad in the name of Allah.

I long for the good old days of the cold war. At least I understood what that was about. It was either US, the free world, or THEM, the commies. I was born in a Communist Country and know what I speak of. But this new thing: this Islam thing.. The majority of our political discussions are focused on terrorism, Islam, fear for Israel’s survival, fear of Islamofascism.. is there any room left for more constructive problems?

You see, I am still under the naïve illusion that history should progress in an upward moving direction, towards more enlightenment, more rational thought, more happiness. Aren’t we supposed to learn from the past? From our history? But for a long time now things have been moving backwards. Rational thought has taken a backseat to dangerous religiosity and attempts at explaining the world through insane theories like ‘intelligent design’. Ethnic cleansing is rampant everywhere. Aren’t we supposed to have left religion and tribalism behind in our more enlightened modern time?

Another source of great confusion is how people use the terms ‘Arab’, ‘Muslim’ and ‘Islam'. Let’s make an ‘equivalency’ list: the word ‘Arab’ denotes ethnicity, so we can compare it to the word ‘Caucasian’. The word ‘Muslim’ denotes a person of a certain faith, so we can compare it to the word ‘Christian’. And the word ‘Islam’ is a religion, so we can compare it to the word ‘Christianity’. Saying that ‘Arabs should denounce terrorism’ is like saying ‘Caucasians should denounce the Ku Klux Klan’.

I have to accept that simple people like myself are not equipped to fully understand, let alone influence the course of history. On the other hand it is people, after all, that make up societies. There must be at least one other person out there that is as disillusioned with the post cold war direction that the world has taken as I am. We are all going down like a ship in a maelstrom and no one is able to stop it.
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ABOVE THE ATLANTIC

by Madeleine Kando

I am comfortably sitting in my airplane seat on my way back home to the United States. I spent two weeks in Holland and now I have all these thoughts racing through my head, speeded up by the glass of red wine which I just consumed together with the memorable airplane food.Europe... what can I say? With all her shortcomings she still holds my heart, like an old long lost lover. Even in her old age she has managed to rise to the peak of her career. The level of success she now enjoys is astounding. Do I, as an immigrant to the United States,feel a touch of resentment? A feeling that I have it rough and Europe has it easy? And why on earth am I comparing myself to an entire continent?

At 65 years of age, after having raised a family in the US, I am still trying to give my relationship to Europe a proper place, a place of rest and acceptance. I don't know how other immigrants feel, but in my case, I have never lost the feeling that I am trying to bridge the gap between two continents, like a giant standing on two floating icebergs in the middle of the Atlantic. If you ever tried to balance on two wobbling structures, that is how I feel about me living here in the US, but part of me also being in Europe.

I sometimes look at my relationship to Europe as a daughter's relationship to her mother and as we all know, a mother/daughter relationship is very complex. It boils down to the fact that Europe (the people back home) and me, the immigrant, we are both under the illusion that we are the center of the world.

But there is a difference between me and the people I left behind. I realize very clearly that ultimately, I am not all that important, because I am only one link in a long chain. My American children will continue (delete "on") bearing American children of their own (unless they emigrate of course). I was just the seedbearer of a new immigrant plant. Whereas my European friends, Well, would it be presumptuous to compare them to the inhabitants of the two-dimensional beings in the story of Flatland? That, since they have never experienced being immigrants, leaving their homeland, they are totally unaware of a third dimension? An immigrant dimension? They are not aware of what it is like to live anywhere BUT Europe? The world is a small place for those who do not travel. It is a safe place, nothing frighteningly big to compare yourself to. Hence you are more important.

So where does this feeling of resentment stem from? Partly because America is no longer the country I came to a long long time ago. My new found lover has not kept his word, he is no longer taking care of me. America has given me many things, the need to be strong so I could survive, to be creative and inventive so I could fulfill myself. It has always given me the freedom that Europe never did and probably still does not offer. But it gets harder and harder to stay in love with such a dysfunctional lover.

Now I am flying back to my life, my children, my husband, my job. My continent. Being an immigrant makes you resilient. On the one hand it makes you aware of how small and unimportant you are, on the other hand it makes you proud of the fact that you started out in the new world with just one suitcase and a hundred dollars in your pocket. And I had the most valuable asset one can have as an immigrant: I was young. And after all, we all turn to dust, become food for the worms, immigrant or a flatlander alike.

Bye Europe. I do love you though. I guess I will have to accept being part of two worlds until the day I die.
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You Are What You Speak

By Madeleine Kando

I have a confession to make. I suffer from multiple personality disorder. It is the fate of many people like me who grow up bilingual or multilingual. But you know what? I LIKE it. I like being French one day, Dutch the next and American the rest of the time. I find myself being able to put on many different attires.I grew up in Paris and, to tell you the truth, I have mixed feelings about it.
Don’t misunderstand me: I admire the French culture: French movies, French cuisine. And French literature is absolutely mindblowingly beautiful. But I have the advantage of looking at things from a ‘cosmopolitan’ perspective and my personal experience in France as a Hungarian refugee after the Second World War was not exactly what you would call a positive one. I don’t suppose the French would agree with me, but at the time, the French didn’t fit my definition of a welcoming society. And because all one’s memories are so intertwined with the language one speaks, when I put on my French attire I definitely don’t feel like it fits me all that well. I put it on for special occasions, when I meet the parents of my French students for instance (why not teach French when you speak it fluently?). But I don’t feel all that comfortable in it. I am glad when it’s time to take it off, and slip into something more comfortable.

Now let’s see.. what else is in my wardrobe? Oh yes. My Dutch attire. I like that one probably even less, only because I was being fitted for it at a very critical age in my life: my puberty. In fact, I would’nt even call it an attire. I would call it more of a prison uniform.

Again, I have to apologize to all you Dutch nationals out there who are reading this. You DO fit the definition of a welcoming society, you have a time honored tradition of welcoming the oppressed and persecuted, including me, poor Hungarian refugee. But my personal experience growing up in Holland has revealed a lack of ‘broad mindedness’ on a personal level which resulted in my extreme dislike for wearing this particular attire.

You already have guessed what I am getting at with this metaphoric allusion to ‘attires’. I am talking about a country’s culture. The act of speaking goes way beyond expressing words. Speaking a certain language not only gives voice to your thoughts, it also expresses the nuances of those thoughts through the filter of the society that that language belongs to. And there is something uniquely extraordinary about people who grow up with different languages, they can step out of the mold of a particular culture and see it in a much more objective light. That gives someone a very special perspective.

Language is a verbal representation of a whole society’s history, culture, social norms... We, as individuals, are in fact an amalgamation of everything that a society is made up of. And of course, a society is the sum of the individuals that it encompasses. It’s not just a matter of language: the entire culture associated with that language is really what we are talking about. Parents who wish to teach their children their own native language, see it as a way to pass on their ‘cutlure’, a piece of themselves. In my case, I was so busy trying on my own new found American attire that I didn’t really focus much on passing on the other hand-me downs to my children. They are monolingual individuals. I have not managed to pass on my own 'cosmopolitan culture'.

But let me continue with my wardrobe metaphor and present to you my PIECE DE RESISTANCE, my American attire. If there is a favorite in my wardrobe it is definitely this one. It fits me like a glove, but at the same time it does not constrict me in any way. It is a designer piece, designed by ME in fact.

I learnt English as an adult, and I am sure I must speak it with a foreign accent which I blissfully cannot hear myself. To me this attire represents American know-how, American pragmatism, American friendliness and openness, not to mention the fact that I have a suspicion about the English language itself. I suspect it has become the dominant (second) language on earth because it is innately suited to do so.

As a non-native English speaker, I sometimes look at the English language from the outside in. Like a Neanderthaler would look at a car. Let me give you an example: At times, to cope with the feeling of depression that inevitably sets when one listens to the news, I find myself counting how many 'action' words are being used by the newscaster. It's a fun game to play. Action expressions can not really be translated accurately in other languages. How do you translate ‘jumping to conclusions’ in Dutch? Or ‘all the figures lined up correctly', 'He beat all odds', ‘ out of reach’,’taking steps’, ‘take charge’… How do you say those things in French? I could go on forever. I am not sure why American English is so action oriented, but it is. And that makes it a dynamic and easy to learn language.

Now, I won't start on the written part of a language because that would take another few pages to cover, but let me just allude to it here: when I read a Dutch newspaper I feel like I am walking through molasses. Slow and cumbersome. And even though French is a beautiful, poetic language when it comes to matters of the heart, it is archaic and convoluted in a practical sense. The plasticity of the English language is missing. No wonder English has become the dominant language of the world. The French feel threatened by English to the point of forbidding certain words in the French language. You cannot say ‘computer’ in French, you have to say ‘ordinateur’ or else they’ll get you. This is just as absurd as our attempt at boycotting the words ‘french fries’ during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Did YOU ever order ‘freedom fries’ at McDonalds?
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Diet And Fasting

By Madeleine Kando

Most people are disappointed when they give up a diet. They feel that they have failed somehow. But they don’t realize that every day of their diet, their body has had one extra day of r and r. They have given their stomach a well needed rest.

Could it be that our modern-day obsession with dieting serves as a replacement for the regular fasting and other restrictions of food intake that many religions practiced in the past, and some still do. A Mormon fasts on a regular basis and does not feel like a failure when the period of fasting is over. He goes back to regular eating with a sense of accomplishment. A new beginning, if you will. It has been a period of cleansing and purification.So, why not consider dieting, even if it is for a short period of time, a success? Why do we feel like a failure when we stop our diet? I say: diet as much or as little as you want, and take each dieting day at a time. Consider each day a success story.

I have gotten into the habit of fasting every 3 months or so. Just not eating for a while. I mean, we take a break from work, from exercise, from almost everything that we do on a daily basis. So why not take a break from eating? Eating is a very energy consuming activity. If you are serious about eating you have to think about what to buy so you can plan your meal, cook your meal, eat your meal, do the dishes, usually put the leftovers away.. my, what a chore. Wouldn’t it be a relief to take a break from all that?
And, not to be too blunt about it, but not eating is really giving your stomach a well-needed rest. I know, some of your organs are meant to work non-stop from the day you were born to the day you die: you cannot expect your heart to go on a vacation, or your liver to stop doing it’s job. But your stomach.. well, your stomach does need periods of rest. At night for instance. The problem is that stomachs are so overworked these days with our hectic life style and all, they don’t get a chance to fully rest. So that’s why they need to be sent to rehab once in a while.

If we could have a heart to heart with our stomach, the conversation would go something like this:
You: ‘Hey stomach, how you doin today?’
Stomach: ‘Oh, I don’t know, I’m really stressed out you know. Had a double shift yesterday. Your midnight snack really did me in. Couldn’t punch out till 1 am!’
You: ‘Oh, wow. That’s bad. You must really be exhausted.’
Stomach: ‘Yeah. I hear that I am in for a real whammer tomorrow too. Aren’t we going to a conference where there is a free buffet?!’.
You: ‘Yes, sorry about that. I feel bad for you. Anything I can do to help?’
Stomach: ‘Now that you mention it.. could you hold off on the hot sauce tomorrow? And maybe cut back on the french fries a little? I don’t think I’ll be able to handle it without a serious doze of antacid.’

Gosh, you wouldn’t do that kind of thing to your worst enemy. Let alone your OWN stomach. But stomachs don’t complain until the damage is fairly serious. Heartburn, colitis, ibs..

So, not only do we need to give our stomachs a little break but another benefit of fasting is the time you free up by not worrying about food. Religious fasting frees up time for praying. I happen to be agnostic, so praying is not in the cards for me, but I am free to smell the roses, go for a walk, read more. . .

But the best part about fasting or dieting is knowing that soon you will be eating again. Trust me, eating after a fast or a diet ranks way up there with winning the lottery, having great sex or seeing President Bush enjoy a long-overdue and well-deserved retirement.

Why don’t you give it a try?
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Pronouns

By Tom Kando

Do you realize that some pronouns are nicer than others? Think of their usage in informal conversations, in speeches, in newspaper articles, or in any other context.

You are having dinner with friends and you chit-chat. About the weather, the presidential election, your hometown basketball team, a guest’s new job, the children’s college graduation, a recent trip someone took, whatever. For example, you ask, “hey John, are you planning any trips this holiday season?” I
John starts his answer with, “I....” - as in “well, Tom, I’m flying to Hawaii for ten days next month. I own property on several of the outer islands...”
Someone else butts in and says, “I can’t stand Hawaii. I think it’s a phony tourist trap.” So here we have bragging (which can cause gagging), self-importance, and opinionated negativity.

Another example: you and a buddy may be discussing politics or sports, for example the economic crisis, or the likely Superbowl finalists. He’ll say, “I find the federal bail-out plan a crock,” or “I’m sure that New England can only get to the Superbowl by cheating...” Again, use of the word “I” is associated with asinine behavior.
More often than not, the pronoun “I” is annoying!

YOU
What about “you”? At a stoplight, someone may say, “Hey you! Whatchya doing driving that big gas guzzler?” or a colleague may say “you always talk too fast. Why are you so uptight?” People who talk to someone and begin with “you” are often meddling, criticizing, opinionating, bloviating.
“You” can also often be a drag.

THEY and THEM
What about “they” and “them”? Like in: “Guess what they do, in Saudi Arabia? They cut off thieves’ hands.”
Or “those damn immigrants, we should send them all back to where they came from. They bring nothing but trouble.”
When we talk about “them,” we often generalize about an out-group, and it is frequently to make prejudiced, stereotypical and negative pronouncements about “the other,” those who are not like “us” and who don’t belong with us. We don’t usually say nice things about them.
“They” and “them” are often not so nice, either.

HE and SHE
“He” and “she”? Maybe talking about an individual third person is less harmful than generalizing to entire out-groups, although negative gossip is also bad.
“He” and “she” might be okay, depending.

US and OURS
How about “Us”and “ours”? As in “leave us alone,” or “our music is the best.”
“Us” and “ours” can be awfully exclusionary, which is annoying.

WE
Last but not least, “we”: Your friend says, “we should get together for dinner and go out to see a movie.” Or a leader says “we, the American people, should help each other through this crisis.”
Or my wife and I remind each other that “we” love each other.
Yes, “we” can often be good. It is a lot better than “I,” and it can also be better than “us.” It’s probably the best pronoun.
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The Arts in a Child's Life

By Madeleine Kando

Children start life with the potential to absorb information and learn skills of many different kinds: they can learn how to dance, talk, think, build things, play music, act (pretend) and much more.

In school, however, the emphasis is on ‘academics’, the three ‘R’s”. But we forget that children are multi-faceted in their ability and desire to learn. Even though schools will not admit this, learning does not even have to involve language. A child might tell you an endless story about what happened to them that day, but others would rather move and show you with gestures. Yet another child will draw a picture and still others will build something with a lego set to express their experience.Unfortunately, after a child enters school a lot of that rich caleidoscope is parked in the basement. Only language (writing and reading) and counting matters. I wonder how many children are left behind because they just happen to be weak in ‘verbal intelligence’?

But what is the value of a factual thought without this rich caleidoscope? Just an interesting oddity if you ask me. Yes, I am smart: I know that 2 green apples and 2 red apples make 4 apples. But what makes it interesting is whether red apples taste better than green apples. Or trying to stack 2 red and 2 green apples. Maybe drawing 2 green apples and 2 red apples.? Or carving a green apple..

Once you start applying imagination and creativity, your factual thinking about apples becomes transformational. Thinking about how to juggle apples, how they taste, how they look.. that is what the Arts are all about. And the Arts are not truly concerned about the mind. They tap into our emotions and our senses. Our taste, smell, vision and hearing.

Education that thinks that the ‘senses and emotions’ are not important in the learning process is doomed to fail. Not only are the Arts an extension of our senses, but they are like flashlights that illuminate other academic subjects. The Arts gives meaning to knowledge.

Aside from the fact that many children have intelligences that do not get addressed in a society that does not value the Arts in their educational system, the children who DO excel in those types of intelligences, i.e. verbal/mathematical, miss out on developing their other types of intelligences: kinesthetic, visual, musical and spatial.

A trapeze artist at the Cirque du Soleil who dazzles us with their triple somersaults on a tight rope. The gymnast balancing on one hand on 20 stacked chairs: are they not ‘intelligent’? Does their ability to use their ‘kinesthetic intelligence’ not border on genius? Martha Graham once said: ‘If I could say it I wouldn’t have to dance it.’

The problem might lie in the use of the word ‘Art’. It usually means an art ‘product’: a painting, a sculpture, a sonata. Yet ‘the arts’ are more than anything else a product of creative thinking. It involves problem solving and critical judgment. The process of creating a work of art is where the true value lies. Without The Arts in a child’s life knowledge is bland, like a dish without salt. Soon that child will loose interest and turn into one more ‘drop out’. Let’s listen to our children and tap into their ‘multiple’ intelligences. That is where the true success of education is to be found.

Some of the information contained in this article is based on reading the following :Boston Public Schools As Arts-Integrated Learning Organizations by Eric Oddleifson, Chairman CABC
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Take it With a Grain of Salt …

By Madeleine Kando

It is hard these days to do the right thing to stay healthy. Every time you think you know what’s good for you, some study comes along and says that what you thought was good for you is either bad, not enough or will downright kill you.

Amongst many other things, we are told to eat more fish to get enough vitamin D, take up dancing to avoid Alzheimer’s disease and drink at least 8 glasses of water a day to flush out toxins.I happen to like fish, so for me that’s not a problem, and I run a dance studio, so if they are right I will probably die of something other than Alzheimer. But the water.. well, it makes me pee too much and I confess that I have not kept up with the ‘8 glasses of water a day’ advise. So, if they are right, I will start shriveling up like an old apple soon. I just cannot afford to leave my pre-school ballet classes every 5 minutes to go to the loo. It would be like letting the lions loose in a zoo. So I was relieved to hear that some doctors are now saying that drinking too much poses a far greater health risk than not enough.

But what makes us so gullible to all this so-called ‘expert’ advice? Are we all so insecure that we don’t trust our own judgement?

Could it have to do with fear? Fear of the big IF word? “IF I do this I will be safe from that.” “IF I drink 8 glasses of water a day I will be healthy and able to run a marathon.” This kind of reasoning reminds me of Sarah, one of my 3 year old ballet students. She barged into the studio one day beaming: “I am going to dance real good today, Miss Madeleine. I am wearing my tutu.”

There is a saying in the French language: ‘Avec des si on mettrait Paris en bouteille. (“With ifs you could put Paris in a bottle”. Also known as "If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.") In fact, every country has one of those expressions to denote the IF word. Here is one from Canada: “Si ma tante en avait, on l’appellerait mon oncle” (If my aunt had any we would call her my uncle).

Think about it. If the word ‘IF’ didn’t exist, there wouldn’t be any way to experience fear. Anything you can describe with an ‘IF’ expression is not real. If something is already happening you have other things on your mind then thinking: ‘what IF this car wasn’t about to hit me?’ The car IS about to hit you and you can bet your sweet bippy that you would sprint out of the car’s way, unless you are suicidal of course.

So whenever you hear of another study that is proving your ‘staying healthy strategy’ wrong, take my advice: just wait a little while. Hold off on the fish, the water, the dancing. Soon another study will come along and prove the exact opposite of what the ‘experts’ are telling you today.

The best advise regarding your health is this: take everything coming from ‘experts’ with a grain of salt.
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