Forecast and Faery Finder for 12/09/09

12-09-09
Forecast and Faery Finder
By Janice Scott-Reeder and the Bitwit




According to Llewellyn’s Spell-a-Day Almanac, today’s color is brown and the incense is honeysuckle.



FORECASTS:

Deck: Navigators Tarot of the Mystic Sea.

Today’s Tarot Card is the Three of Cups: abundance. Tempting offers are cleverly disguised means of manipulation. You do want to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Astrological Source: Llewellyn’s 2009 Daily Planetary Guide.
Astrologically:
The Moon enters Libra at 5:47 PM EST.
Waking up in a bad mood is very possible. Things are not clear. However, if you let it rule you, you will reap what you are sowing fast. So plaster a smile on your face and be nice. You don’t want to cut someone off in traffic. Late tonight if you want to make some changes for the holidays, keep in mind elders and authorities are not going to be happy. You are going to have to some cut backs so stop whining and get to work.

Deck: Healing with the Fairies.
The Faeries say:
They are blocks to financial freedom and you might as well plan for them.

Today’s Cat Comfort Card is:
The Cat’s Out of the Bag: “Oops! Quick thinking needed.”

Deck: The Fairies’ Oracle by Brian Froud & Jessica MacBeth
Today’s Faery Finder is on the lookout for:
The Bright Mother is with us today. For her, all life is a miracle. This is a time of nurturing, of creative brilliance and of starting anew.

Today’s Lo Shu Number is 9 and the Element is Earth. The Horse finds conflict today but the Dragon and Snake have ease. Today is NOT an auspicious day for haircuts, construction or births.

Today’s Message from the Universe is: “I let go of my personal worries. My outlook on life expands and I dedicate all my energy to give and to serve. There lies the true source of my happiness.” Annie Marquier creating a world of peace one thought at a time.

COMMENTARIES BY JANICE SCOTT-REEDER

I was thinking today, since the cats have yet to emerge from the last turkey coma and things are quiet…and you know it is dangerous when I think….anyway…I was thinking; what went wrong? We have children killing children. The crime rate from teens in my neighborhood is astronomical…at least two calls per day on vandalism and theft.
I’ve heard a lot of theories. The top one is violence on TV. Oh come on…you couldn’t put the Three Stooges on TV without are an R rating today if that. The cartoons I watched were super violent and the characters survived anvils dropped on theirs completely flattening them. We didn’t poke each other’s eyes out and we couldn’t lift an anvil. There was no such thing as a gun safe and probably a loaded gun in every other house. We didn’t kill each other. We didn’t take guns to school. We all carried a pocket knife from about 5 up, but we didn’t knife each other. I wonder if it was because we had a healthy fear of our parents and they took the time to discipline us.
If I had ever walked through the door with something that didn’t belong to me, I had better have had a good story which would be instantly checked with my friend’s parents, not them. If any adult called and said I did something, I was not going to be asked if I did it. The smack came first and I knew it. So I didn’t do anything to provoke the bear. My room wasn’t mine. My parents owned the house and everything in it. I got privacy when I could pay rent or they just got better at searching.
When I got my first job or let me put it more accurately, my father got me my first job, I did not have a choice…..when I came home with my paycheck….twenty dollars went into their pockets. Back then, the check was only 50.00 for a week’s work. I didn’t tell him I made another twenty taking other people’s shifts for cash. I had learned to be sneaky, too.
You went to work at 16. That was the legal age. You wanted a car, you saved up and you bought it. You wanted to go to the prom, well, guys, you spent all year working after school and on weekends to pay for it. I remember my friend being so tired he made an entire order of whoppers without the hamburger patties one night. Working was no excuse for a low grade in school. It is possible we were too tired to get into trouble. I hear parents whining over two hours of home work a week in middle school. Two hours a night was a good night in my day. I didn’t have a computer to research on. I actually had to walk to the library and drag huge books down and …..shudder….hand write my notes and papers. No, I didn’t have time to break and enter. I didn’t have the energy to shoot my classmates…heck I didn’t even know three quarters of them…who had time? I wanted to get into college.
On the rare occasions we went out to eat, I didn’t run through the restaurant screaming and hitting the other patrons. I wouldn’t have been called spirited; I would have been a spirit. I don’t remember my parents ever asking me if I wanted something. If I didn’t eat it, I was hungry. It broadens your palate quickly. If I had ever talked back to, shoved, made fun of or in anyway harmed an elderly person or handicapped person…well, I am pretty sure I wouldn’t be writing this today.
I learned at a very early age..6..when I learned to count, that if mother said there was no money for anything extra when we left the house, I didn’t grab a candy bar, open it and have a tantrum. No, that tantrum would have turned into a little butt that didn’t sit down that night without a pillow. I never threw a tantrum. The first one taught me that lesson. I never asked for anything. I knew if there a quarter extra and I would carefully agonize over my choices at the candy counter. Funny, that candy tasted so much better back then than it does now. Maybe it is because I worked harder for it. I washed dishes, mopped floors, dusted, worked in my father’s shop until I was old enough for the new job. I didn’t get an allowance handed to me. There was a list of chores checked off each week. If they weren’t check off, I got no money. If I wanted a school lunch instead of a brown bag sandwich, I had to pay for it. I learned nothing in life was free before I was 7.
But before you think how horrible it was, let me point out one thing. We were a family. We all worked together to survive. We may not have liked each other, but we knew cooperation was the only thing that kept a roof over our heads and our bellies full. I may not have respected most of my elders, but I had good manners and that was what counted. I knew my parents didn’t love me. I was an inconvenience that showed up when my mother was 33 and they had their lives planned. I didn’t wind up whining to a therapist, attacking other people, stealing and leading a life of crime. I got over it, because the choices where limited. I was out of the house at 17 and on my own from that point forward. I was expected to support the family. I was expected to work. I paid for my own education. I knew how to survive and I knew one really important thing: no one owed me anything and no one was going to give me anything and that included the benefit of the doubt.
I remember telling that to my mentor in college, a PhD in psychology. The answer I got back was he would not even allow anyone to potty train his kids until THEY were ready. Yup, that would have flown in my house all right. I remember my cousin getting his nose rubbed in his soiled pants at two and I don‘t mean the outside. It didn’t happen again. I remember looking at my professor and saying, “Well, let’s see. Your son is in therapy, unemployed and still in college at 26 with an illegitimate kid and no prospects living with his mother. Your daughter is going sell the microwave you are buying her for drug money and lives in a tenement in squalor with three men. Just between you and me, I think you should have potty trained them.” A good smack now and then would have been helpful but I didn’t say that. Keep in mind both he and his wife had PhD’s in psychology.
The problem is not the TV, it is using the TV as a babysitter. The problem is throwing money at kids without making them work for it just to have some “me time“. My mother never had any “me time”. The problem is not teaching them respect at an early age. The problem is not teaching them limits because pushing the limits is all about being a child. The problem is being a friend and not a parent. The only people who have children as friends are pedophiles. You have to be the adult. You have to be the parent. That’s the job you signed up for when you popped that kid out. That’s why I have cats. I didn’t want the job.
Oh and don’t give me the broken family crap. Kids were shuffled between relatives (my mother was raised by her sisters and their husbands after her father died when she was 8. She spent every day taking care of their kids.), parents died, they split up..though divorce was a no no, moving in with your girlfriend wasn’t. Kids went into foster care. Probably half my parents’ friends were alcoholics. It was common back then. Parents beat their kids for no reason and no one did anything. There was plenty of domestic violence. Goddess knows, I help my mother patch up enough of her friends and sisters. I remember my uncle over 6 foot tall getting drunk and taking a swing at my aunt who was 5 foot 1 in heels. He missed. She picked up the cast iron frying pan and didn’t. He never did that again. He also never chewed anything hard again because there was no money for a doctor to wire his broken jaw and my father had to tape and tie it shut until it healed. Kids died because there was no affordable medical care, as did adults. There wasn’t even insurance back then. The cops didn’t make domestic violence calls and child abuse was discipline. I remember my father going over and explaining to one friend why you shouldn’t beat on your wife and kid. The explanation involved 5 broken ribs, a broken nose and internal injuries but he was good husband after that. He didn’t call the cops because he didn’t want to find out what they could do with a night stick and he didn’t want another visit from my father or his friends. There was always someone around to clue you in on what was and wasn’t socially acceptable back then.
If you slipped and broke your neck in a store you didn’t sue anyone. They would have laughed you out of court. If you couldn’t watch where you walked, you deserved to be on the floor with a broken leg. We watched where we walked. We didn’t have an easy life and we turned out just fine. It was the rich kid that was always in trouble, always having his way paid for that turned into the problem adult. Heck my boyfriend used to come home every night to carry his passed out mother to bed, dead drunk. Then he got himself up the next morning and drove over and picked me up to get to high school. My mother would ask him if he wanted to have some breakfast with me because I was so slow in the mornings. She knew what was going on. I purposely ate very slowly. We all knew what was going on. No one ever said anything. It was social game we played. Everyone saved face and he got breakfast. He turned out just fine. Our best friend came from a single working mother home. He didn’t even know who his father was. He’s an architect and doing better than fine. Perhaps an easy life isn’t the answer. Oh, that was the idealized 50’s you hear about with the family values, we were all good Christians in church on Sunday even if half the women were wearing those pillbox hats and veils to cover the black eyes. Yup those were the good old moral days and all that crap when an unbent coat hanger in the garbage meant someone might bleed to death…ask my friend some day about the 30’s and 40’s. She will open your eyes.
But the bottom line is, we were taught responsibility for our actions from an early age. It might have been a violent lesson, but we learned there were no excuses, no free rides and it was shape up or ship out usually with the boot print on your pants. No one planned to be a movie star, make millions of dollars doing nothing, being on a reality TV show, being famous or having an easy life. You figured you would work just like your parents, get married, buy a house if you were lucky and maybe retire with a little money to survive on after you took care of your elderly parents. There were no nursing homes or retirement communities. If you weren’t well above average intelligence, that was your fate. There would be no college. The government wasn’t giving you anything. There were very, very few scholarships, maybe a couple per college. Your parents didn’t owe you a dime and weren‘t going to have one to leave you. You got a full time job after high school and you worked the rest of your life. End of story. Well, economically, we’re back there so wake up and smell the coffee, if you can still afford a cup and you might work on teaching your kids to survive in this new world. Welcome to how the rest of the world lives.