The age of Thanksgiving, and how to survive it

My "age of innocence" ended on a New Year's Day, back in the early '90s, when I heard a police call about a house fire in southern New Jersey. I was an ambitious, but somewhat undisciplined reporter in a rural area - rural for New Jersey - and I paid attention to police calls as often as I cleaned my refrigerator.

It wasn't just a lack of discipline, I should say. The cackles from the scanner normally sounded like the speaker at a McDonald's drive-thru. All you heard was the buzz. Something about this call, a four-alarm fire, made it louder than all the others.

I drove south, riding along Route 9 and through the southern New Jersey towns that a friend of mine once called "Appalachia by the Sea." They didn't have the big box-shaped shopping centers that New Jersey is known for. They were houses that looked like they were sinking into the ground. When we got to where needed to go, all we saw were these one-story ranchers, each of them looking like little tinderboxes just asking for abuse.

The photographer and I got out of the car, saw the charred house and walked up to it.

A man popped out and saw me and Dave, the photographer. The guy had a big gut and big red beard, a kind of scary looking guy who I didn't really have time to look at.

"Get 'em!" he yelled, and a big, drooling dog came running out, chasing me and Dave. I literally jumped on top of my car, and watched the dog leaping up at me, saliva forming around his mouth. The guy with the big gut laughed as he puffed on his smoke.

Dave? He was doing what he always did: He took pictures.

I went to the police department later, at Little Egg Harbor Township, N.J. I went in there with the prejudice that this is the kind of thing that happens there, that there was something about this class of people that made them not respect holidays. Who would burn their house on New Year's Day?

This was, of course, before meth labs were in vogue, so there was little chance that they blew up themselves.

"You should see what it's like on Thanksgiving," the chief said. "That's the worst day of the year."

He was right. Later, I looked back at old clips from The Press of Atlantic City library. Something happened on Thanksgiving every day for years. They weren't just petty crimes, either. Murders, armed robberies - they were Law and Order stuff, set in Appalachia.

You'd think holidays would be the easy time of year. People get time off, and get paid for it. They get to go somebody's house - hopefully - and eat somebody else's food.

But a lot of people don't get all that, and when they don't, they get lonely. And when they get lonely, they get depressed.

And if they're already lonely and depressed, they could even be angry. If they have to meet with family - family they don't like - the encounters could lead to what the police dispatchers call "domestic disputes." In the years after that fire, I covered a lot of these kinds of crimes, and my image of Thanksgiving changed from turkey and stuffing to crime and punishment.

Family issues inspired me to write about mental health. But maybe it was more than that: Maybe it was the experience of dealing with the average person, and how the holidays they have don't ever symbolize the joy and peacefulness of a Norman Rockwell painting.

Indeed, in this recession, a lot more people are closer to those people in Little Egg Harbor than they think. A lot of people lack money - last year, my brother-in-law joked that we're all going to be eating peanut butter for Thanksgiving this year, and he wasn't too far off - and that added stress is bound to make things busy for police departments across the country.

Worse yet, it could make things busier for mental health professionals who are dealing with people who just don't understand what is making them angry, depressed and lonely.

Mental Health America, a leading mental health advocacy group, understands this, and is trying to fight it and deal with it.

Many factors can cause the holiday blues, according to MHA: stress, fatigue, unrealistic expectations, over-commercialization, financial constraints and the inability to be with one’s family and friends.

The demands of shopping, parties, family reunions and house guests also contribute to feelings of tension. People may also develop other stress responses such as headaches, excessive drinking, over-eating and difficulty sleeping.

Even more people experience post-holiday let down after January 1. This can result from disappointments during the preceding months compounded by the excess fatigue and stress, according the MHA.

Mental Health America offers some suggestions:

- Keep expectations for the holiday season manageable. Try to set realistic goals for yourself. Pace yourself. Organize your time. Make a list and prioritize the important activities.

- Be realistic about what you can and cannot do. Don’t put the entire focus on just one day (i.e., Thanksgiving Day). Remember that it’s a season of holiday sentiment, and activities can be spread out to lessen stress and increase enjoyment.

- Remember the holiday season does not banish reasons for feeling sad or lonely; there is room for these feelings to be present, even if the person chooses not to express them.

- Leave “yesteryear” in the past and look toward the future. Life brings changes. Each season is different and can be enjoyed in its own way. Don’t set yourself up in comparing today with the “good ol’ days.”

- Do something for someone else. Try volunteering some of your time to help others.

- Enjoy activities that are free, such as taking a drive to look at holiday decorations, going window shopping or making a snowman with children.

- Be aware that excessive drinking will only increase your feelings of depression.

- Try something new. Celebrate the holidays in a new way.

- Spend time with supportive and caring people. Reach out and make new friends, or contact someone you haven’t heard from in a while.

- Save time for yourself! Recharge your batteries! Let others share in the responsibility of planning activities.

My own personal suggestion: If you're going light anything up, light up a firecracker or something. Don't play with matches, and stay away from meth.

Something about John

John Clear walked out of a jail two years ago, declared that he found religion and went home, to Point Pleasant, N.J., where he thought he could find a new life in an old place.

Maybe he could patch things up with his father, he thought, even though the two of them never really got along.

Maybe he could find old friends, the ones he left behind long ago, because the drugs got too big even for them.

Maybe he could find a job, and hold it for longer than a month this time. Maybe that brain power that was locked up long ago, the same smarts that made him the funniest guy I ever knew, could be put to good use for once.

John tried. But, like everything with John, it didn't last. Forty-two years old now, the funniest guy I ever knew can only sustain a life as a purse snatcher and drug addict.

At 42, the only thing that's long is his rap sheet. The only thing that's consistent is his drug use, usually heroin.

The only thing that's funny is that there were some of us who thought he could clean himself up this time, after trying many times. Now we play the fools.

You've heard this story before. Smart kid gets into drugs, and finds himself going through the revolving, recidivism door of jail.

For me, however, the old people from the old life never get old. I told his father the other day that no one inspired my sense of humor more than him. When I hear of this kind of thing, I feel like I could be looking at myself.

If I stuck with him, I could have followed the same path. I had a mother who was an alcoholic, too. I had a need to make others like me, too. I had a need to make others laugh. I got into trouble, too. I had the same issues of need, attention and gratification.

I asked his father if he was mentally ill. He paused for a few seconds. "He now says he's bipolar," his father said. "I don't know what to think."

Maybe we need to know that, I told him. Because that could explain everything.

Maybe I'm the fool, again, but maybe it could be the one thing that's needed to get him the right care.

Maybe it's the one thing that can turn him in the right direction, because his future looks far from the kind of life he knew growing up at the Jersey Shore.

Unless he gets a plea bargain, his life before he turns 60 will be concrete walls and bars, the same life that did little for him before, other than teach him how to become a 42-year-old man who snatches purses from people at children's stores.

John faces 10 to 15 years, possibly, in state prison. Last month, he grabbed a pocketbook from a baby carriage in the parking lot of Babies R Us on Route 36 in Eatontown, N.J., according to The Asbury Park Press.

As the woman put her child in her vehicle, John grabbed her pocketbook from her carriage. She began to struggle with him, and the handle of the purse broke. John escaped with the pocketbook, and left in a four-door Saturn, driven by his girlfriend.

By the time the woman managed to cancel her credit cards, John and his girlfriend - his father called her "the wheel" - had charged cartons of cigarettes and gift card purchases at Rite-Aids in nearby Neptune and Asbury Park, police said. Then they tried to buy the same items at a Walgreens in Neptune, but were denied.

The next day, in Wall Township, N.J., the girlfriend grabbed an 84-year-old woman's pocketbook from her shopping cart inside a Foodtown, police said. Some witnesses stopped her and managed to retrieve the victim's purse, but the girlfriend ran from the supermarket and got into a four-door Saturn driven by John.

Police said they sent out an alert to surrounding communities, and Bradley Beach police stopped the vehicle. After their arrest, police found the hold-up note. Now he's in jail, with bail set at more than $100,000.

This time, no one is rushing to get him out.

Two years ago, I got a call from John. We talked about how he wanted everything the way it was, sitting in my house, watching the Mets on T.V. , just like we did in seventh grade.

Or maybe we could watch the Mets at a bar, he said, and talk about running wild in music class, getting Miss Mason upset and getting tossed out in the middle of a square dance.

Two years ago, John was just out of jail, and he was on the phone, talking to me. He didn't want to get off. He wanted to stay on, his deep, husky voice bellowing through the speaker so much that I had to turn down the volume.

He wanted to meet face-to-face. But the more we talked, the more I realized: He needed more than talk. He needed something. He needed help.

He wanted his kids back. He wanted his ex-wife out of his life. The more he talked, the louder he got. By the time we signed off, I had the volume on the cell turned down to nothing.

This was John excited. maybe even manic. This was a man going through an extreme high, or at least acting like it, who had just lived a life of many downs and, apparently, was heading toward an even bigger fall.

This was a man with mental illness, I thought, because many people with mental illness just don't straighten out. Many people with mental illness lie to themselves, and to others. If they find a way to heal themselves, they realize they're never cured. They just find a way to manage.

And if they ever do find peace, they find it through honesty and truth, not deception, false hopes and lies.

But this was John, talking a good game, saying he wanted to straighten his life out. This was John, trying to get people to forget the state prison mugshot that's still on the Internet, a dark, fading picture that adds 15 years to his age.

John wanted me to write about his life, and everything that was wrong with it. He wanted me to write about it all. In the ensuing weeks, he sent me the letters he sent to the Ocean County Prosecutors Office, demanding a hearing that would address his desire to see his kids.

He didn't do this to himself, he said. He wanted me to blow the lid on the judicial system, and bring down all the people who, he believed, did this to him.

He wanted me to do it so badly that he tried to get others involved, getting one of them to send me a large envelope filled with documents that was a paper trail of the guy's criminal history.

"Let me see what I can do," I kept telling him, though I knew I couldn't do much.

I thought of things I could do. I thought of things I could write. Little came to mind, however. Work, school and family life always seemed to get in the way, of course.

But those excuses were easy. There was something else, something more that bothered me. It wasn't the drugs or his shattered family life. It was the jail or the mugshot.

What I wanted to tell him was, geez, John, I don't remember sitting down in my house, watching the Mets.

I don't remember John ever sitting down.

Whenever we did anything, it was usually a prank or something that 12 or 13-year-old kids shouldn't do in department stores.

It involved water balloons going "splat" against somebody's car windshield, with my hands covering my face in embarrassment. "Oh, no, we're going to get into trouble!" I'd say, and John would just laugh.

Back then, John didn't care. He didn't need to impress. He joked, and he joked often. But he didn't really lie.

Now the John Clear I know tells stories. He's in jail after telling his family and friends the same thing, over and over. I'm going to get it right, he'd say. I'm not going to do any more drugs.

He told another friend he had Hepatitis C. He had to be driven up to Asbury Park at 5 a.m. every day to get a shot.

The friend obliged, and this went on for weeks. But after a while, the friend caught on. Nobody gets shots at 5 a.m. for Hepatitis C. Nobody has to wait in the parking lot and wait for them to come out to get a shot.

"It was probably methadone," the friend said, the drug heroin users take as a cleaner substitute.

This was the same time as our phone conversation, when he told me he was done with drugs, that they were just some short, stupid phase of his life.

There's just something about John.

Bruce Springsteen — Nebraska lyrics

I saw her standin on her front lawn just twirlin her baton
Me and her went for a ride sir and ten innocent people died

From the town of lincoln nebraska with a sawed-off .410 on my lap
Through to the badlands of wyoming I killed everything in my path

I can't say that Im sorry for the things that we done
At least for a little while sir me and her we had us some fun

The jury brought in a guilty verdict and the judge he sentenced me to death
Midnight in a prison storeroom with leather straps across my chest

Sheriff when the man pulls that switch sir and snaps my poor neck back
You make sure my pretty baby is sittin right there on my lap

They declared me unfit to live said into that great void my sould
Be hurled
They wanted to know why I did what I did
Well sir I guess there's just a meanness in this world

The life and art of Kimberly Green

Last week, I wrote a well-received blog on Kimberly Green, a woman who's suffering from stage 4 breast cancer, but nonetheless has sacrificed so much of herself to give to so many others.

I was particularly impressed with her organization, the Green Family Foundation, and the work it's done in Haiti with the Clinton Global Initiative and President Clinton. I saw the pictures of the kind of work her foundation performs, and I saw the close relationship the organization has had with Clinton in bringing health care to a health-ravaged nation.

What bugged me was when I did a Google search of Kimberly's work, and I did an additional search of her foundation's association with Clinton. I came up with next-to-nothing.

This blog entry is an attempt to bring it all together. Below are clips of a slideshow I put together that includes clips of the foundation's work in Haiti. The show is accompanied by a voice-over narration of my blog post from last week, spoken by me.

This is an all-attempt to get the Internet to recognize the good work that these people do. This is also an attempt to show that the work the foundation does isn't done in a vacuum. It's attracting help from the most powerful people in the world.

It's time to recognize the Green Foundation for what it is and what it has done.





NOTE: The Green Family Foundation has a Facebook page that can be found here.

Bloggers beware?

What you're about to read was written by me.

All the tools and labor were paid by me.

The advertisers? I probably pay more to have them on my blog than they pay me.

Free products? Scroll down and look at my suit. Do I look like I was outfitted by Starbucks or the Wisconsin Cheeseman (two of my sponsors)?

Have I disclosed enough?

It's hard to say. To the Federal Trade Commission, it may not be.

The Federal Trade Commission is planning to crack down on bloggers who review or promote products while earning freebies or payments. The new rules are scheduled to take effect Dec. 1.

An existing FTC rule that states product reviewers must reveal any connection they have with advertisers was extended to bloggers, according to news reports.

The rules carry a fine as high as $11,000 if product endorsers and reviewers don't comply.

This would, for the first time, bring bloggers under FTC guidelines that ban allegedly deceptive or unfair business practices, according to news reports.

The guidelines, of course, will be hard to enforce, and the FTC admits this. No new personnel would be hired to handle the new responsibilities, and there are thousands - maybe millions - of bloggers to watch after.

One FTC administrator put it best when he said the rule extension could create a "whack-a-mole enforcement" scenario in which the agency goes after only those who blatantly disregard the rules.

Or it'll go after those sites that get a lot of traffic - and there aren't many of those. Most bloggers get less traffic than I do. We all have dreams that, someday, we can turn what we do into a Drudge Report or Huffington Post for our specialty. More often than not, however, that doesn't happen.

To the FTC, the rules would allow the agency to go after bloggers for any false claims or failure to disclose conflicts of interest, according to news reports.

The rules could be quite strict, even extending to the practice of affiliate links - for example, a music blogger who links to a song on Amazon MP3 or iTunes that earns an affiliate commission in the process, according to the Associated Press.

From my vantage point, the rules are a double-edged sword. It's fair for the consumer to know if a blogger is working as an agent for an industry or a company.

Truth - or, as Bob Woodward said, the most obtainable version of it - always wins out over lies and deception. High profile bloggers could ruin their credibility - much like reporters would - if the consumer were to later learn that they're on the side of the seller... not the buyer.

But I'm also a civil libertarian. Besides the obvious free-speech concerns I have, I feel that it's unfair for bloggers to be singled out for something that the so-called mainstream media does all the time.

Why shouldn't Greta Van Susteren disclose that her husband performs consulting work, among many things, for Sarah Palin whenever she provides an always too-gentle profile on the former Alaska governor?

For the average blogger, however, all those issues are irrelevant. Only people with big pockets would be able to challenge the rules in court. They will go into effect, and there is little anybody can do - short of a Bill Gates - to stop it.

The biggest question is what should bloggers do now. Providing a disclosure statement may be difficult for the First Amendment defender who views the FTC's actions as an intrusion on free speech.

In practice, however, adding a simple disclosure statement at the bottom of a post (if that's what the FTC considers a legitimate form of disclosure) should be no different than a political advertiser adding a line from its promoted candidate - "this is so-and-so, and I approve this message" - at the end of a television or radio commercial.

Perhaps advertisers will feel that this disclosure will discredit their message. But, as always, truth should always be the goal.

Nikon can do business with a blogger - and have the blogger write a complementary article on a camera that was provided by the company. The entry should have a disclosure statement, sure. But the disclosure shouldn't matter to the reader if the blog post includes testimony from a Nikon user - perhaps a newspaper or magazine photographer - who has a credible reputation and whose opinions are rarely disputed.

Will the disclosure matter if the blog post carries a slideshow of high-resolution Nikon photographs that are clearly better than what a Cannon camera can provide?

As a Nikon user who hasn't gotten a freebie, I would be glad to oblige.

Behind every gun is a story

President Obama says we shouldn't jump to conclusions about the shooting deaths at Fort Hood. It's understandable, however, what many people's first impulses might be.

There is anger. There were calls of revenge. Worse yet, however, there are feelings of deceit.

The man who is suspected to be responsible for the killings was a psychiatrist.

This, as a result, is more than a case of potential post-traumatic stress disorder. The very kind of person who is responsible for healing the minds of beleaguered troops who have been shuffled in-and-out of war zones could do nothing to heal himself.

But it also shows that the toll of war has gone far beyond the battlefield. Casualties no longer are the "grunts," the enlisted men and women who have seen their lives turned upside-down over the past seven years. They're also the officers, the handlers and, finally, the medical practitioners who have not only suffered personally, but also suffered as a result of their work.

There is a human side to war, and it was, perhaps, best captured by a New York Times piece published this past week. We often hear of evil when we hear death and war and casualties. But behind every gun is a life.

From The New York Times:

Born and reared in Virginia, the son of immigrant parents from a small Palestinian town near Jerusalem, he joined the Army right out of high school, against his parents’ wishes. The Army, in turn, put him through college and then medical school, where he trained to be a psychiatrist.

But Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the 39-year-old man accused of Thursday’s mass shooting at Fort Hood, Tex., began having second thoughts about a military career a few years ago after other soldiers harassed him for being a Muslim, he told relatives in Virginia.

He had also more recently expressed deep concerns about being sent to Iraq or Afghanistan. Having counseled scores of returning soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder, first at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington and more recently at Fort Hood, he knew all too well the terrifying realities of war, said a cousin, Nader Hasan.

“He was mortified by the idea of having to deploy,” Mr. Hasan said. “He had people telling him on a daily basis the horrors they saw over there.”

The Federal Bureau of Investigation earlier became aware of Internet postings by a man calling himself Nidal Hasan, a law enforcement official said. The postings discussed suicide bombings favorably, but the investigators were not clear whether the writer was Major Hasan.

In one posting on the Web site Scribd, a man named Nidal Hasan compared the heroism of a soldier who throws himself on a grenade to protect fellow soldiers to suicide bombers who sacrifice themselves to protect Muslims.

“If one suicide bomber can kill 100 enemy soldiers because they were caught off guard that would be considered a strategic victory,” the man wrote. It could not be confirmed, however, that the writer was Major Hasan.

Major Hasan was wounded and taken into custody by the Fort Hood police after the shooting rampage, in which 12 people were killed and at least 31 others were wounded.

Though Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas reported that Major Hasan was to be deployed this month, that could not be confirmed with the Army on Thursday night.

Nader Hasan said his cousin never mentioned in recent phone calls to Virginia that he was going to be deployed, and he said the family was shocked when it heard the news on television on Thursday afternoon.

“He was doing everything he could to avoid that,” Mr. Hasan said. “He wanted to do whatever he could within the rules to make sure he wouldn’t go over.”

Some years ago, that included retaining a lawyer and asking if he could get out of the Army before his contract was up, because of the harassment he had received as a Muslim. But Nader Hasan said the lawyer had told his cousin that even if he paid the Army back for his education, it would not allow him to leave before his commitment was up.

“I think he gave up that fight and was just doing his time,” Mr. Hasan said.

Nader Hasan said his cousin’s parents had both been American citizens who owned businesses, including restaurants and a store, in Roanoke, Va. He declined to confirm reports that they were Jordanian but said the parents, who are both dead, had immigrated from a small town near Jerusalem many years ago.

His mother’s obituary, in The Roanoke Times in 2001, said she was born in Palestine in 1952. It described her as a restaurant owner “known for her ability to keep sometimes rowdy customers out of trouble and always had a warm meal for someone who otherwise would not have anything to eat that evening.”

Records show that Major Hasan received an undergraduate degree at Virginia Tech and a medical degree at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md. He did a residency at Walter Reed Medical Center and worked there for years before a transfer to the Darnall Army Medical Center at Fort Hood this year.

Major Hasan had two brothers, one in Virginia and another in Jerusalem, his cousin said. The family, by and large, prospered in the United States, Mr. Hasan said.

The former imam at a Silver Spring, Md., mosque where Major Hasan worshiped for about 10 years described him as proud of his work in the Army and “very serious about his religion.” The former imam, Faizul Khan, said that Major Hasan had wanted to marry an equally religious woman but that his efforts to find one had failed.

“He wanted a woman who prayed five times a day and wears a hijab, and maybe the women he met were not complying with those things,” the former imam said.

Mr. Hasan, 40, a lawyer in Virginia, described his cousin as a respectful, hard-working man who had devoted himself to his parents and his career.

Mr. Hasan said his cousin became more devout after his parents died in 1998 and 2001.

“His parents didn’t want him to go into the military,” Mr. Hasan said. “He said, ‘No, I was born and raised here, I’m going to do my duty to the country.’ ”

What can be done about health care?

If you don't understand health care, then maybe you should see somebody who is sick.

Like Kimberly Green.

She's had breast cancer for more than three years. Her treatment costs $6,000 a month. Without it, she said, "I would die."

Myself, Kimberly, some fellow bloggers and health practitioners got together a few weeks ago to talk to her, and to talk about her.

But we also talked about a health care system that's broken. Tens of millions of people are without health insurance, all lacking what she's got that's kept her alive.

As much as we wanted to know about Kimberly, we acted as though we were going to solve this health-care problem ourselves, and we hoped to solve it within a 90-minute span. We didn't get there, but at least we had a healthy dialogue that - if the Obama administration is listening - produced some ideas for finally getting efforts to pass health care reform off the dime.

Click on the below photo to get a glimpse of our Healthcare Reform Blogger Roundtable in New York City, and learn about how Kimberly's work with the Green Family Foundation that has emboldened her to be aware of her environment, and to not take life for granted.

Then, listen to what we have to say (I'm the one sitting against the wall with a tie).


NOTE: The Green Family Foundation has a Facebook page that can be found here.