Ideas - Prevent Child Abuse New York: Fill & Download for Free

Let’s take a look at Free Market New York City in the late 1800s, when the Catholic Church still advertised abortion services for unwed mothers and when 30,000 feral children roamed the plentiful city garbage dumps for food.Ah! How did “free market capitalism” fix people’s needs in those days? Why, it ripped them off! When people MUST have something, you can charge any price. The average wage in 1870 was 1.50 a day but room and board was 5 dollars a week! So flophouses sprang up where rooms were rented for 3 cents a night. You shared a bed with three other people and there were often 40 people in the room. If you needed food you COULD go to a church mission, where for a watered down bowl of soup you were harangued about the “terrors of Hell” and were required to meekly submit to all manner of humiliation for a crust of bread. And if you were a child you could be held in an orphanage or religious mission, which was essentially a prison where the Masters farmed you out as slave labor, and where sexual abuse was rife, especially if you were female. The benefits of “free market capitalism”!There was no need for any kind of silly “safety” legislation. New York was a city of brick; nearly 100 million bricks made in Haverstraw, NY, where entire forests as far as Maine were cut down to fire the clay ovens (hey, free market capitalism - no environmental protections!), and where in winter the unemployed brick makers cut ice on the Hudson and often froze to death or drowned (no safety rules or requirements and we shoot people who try to form Unions - hey, free market!), while in NY brick masons worked six days a week on rickety scaffolding and often fell to their deaths. When they were killed they were often buried in an unmarked grave because their families had no money, no insurance, no settlement to turn to - and the families were then turned into the street because they couldn’t pay the rent. Free market capitalism at work!NYC, a land of free market capitalism with no environmental regulations, published a “Stench Map” that showed where the smells of the slaughterhouses and phosphate plants and manure dumps - some taking an entire city block and 100 feet high - would waft. And because it was easy, the East River was used as a manure dumping ground. Sometimes the manure piled up so deep that ships grounded on it or capsized. Sometimes mountains of manure would just wash up on the beaches. But, hey, it was FREE! Free market capitalism would fix it!And lets not get started on the railroads that before regulation only had brakes on the engine and skimped on the quality of the track steel. Almost 40,000 people died or maimed every year in train crashes compared to 35,000 on the highways today. It was a massacre. When you died, oh well, your ticket said you rode at your own risk and the railroad wasn’t liable. Not only that but your ticket required you, the passenger, to help clean up the accident and assist in putting the train back on the tracks! in 1890 the US government reported 6400 people killed and 35000 maimed in train accidents - not including the over 1000 switchmen who died or were injured because they had to run between trains and couple/uncouple them by hand. It’s free market capitalism!! Not to mention that there were no laws preventing Standard Oil from dumping its oil waste right on the ground! The water became so poisoned that clean water had to be trucked in for the rich! The “free market” still allowed the poor to pump oil-slick water from the ground. It was even considered a form of child abuse to give fresh water to children - beer was preferable. Today, you can still pump oil directly from the ground on the old Standard Oil site. Chase-Manhattan Bank got it’s start as a water delivery service. Hey, free market capitalism!!!And then of course there were the “firewood wars” in Manhattan in the 1850s. A city of 1 million needs firewood in winter - lots and lots of firewood. In 1848 the City of New York used 6000 cords of firewood in a single winter season but New York had very few trees - all the firewood was imported from Maine or South Carolina. And yet in such a crowded city there was no place to store it so it was a hand-to-mouth situation. So what happened? In the winter, the price of firewood soared. Ships from Maine anchored outside NYC and refused to dock unless their suddenly-over-contract price was paid. And along every step of the way, a little bit of firewood was stolen from every cord til you got what you got, no matter the price. People, especially children, froze to death. But, hey! Free market capitalism! There were riots over firewood in winter and ice in summer. There was even a cynical joke about ice sales: “ice is provided to everyone in NYC; the rich get theirs in the summer and the poor get theirs in the winter.”But, hey, around 1860 coal started to displace firewood coal from Scranton where 8 year old boys worked in the breakers sifting coal from slag amid moving conveyors and clouds of coal dust for a few pennies a day; thousands of boys, many who lost hands and died of black lung before the age of 12 when they could go work down in the mines. Yup, good ole “free market capitalism”. And guess what? When winter came the coal trains would stop outside NYC in winter and demand higher prices for their coal… just like the firewood! But it’s the free market! People don’t have to pay - they can choose to freeze to death!In the 1800s when a ship got old the owner would insure it to the hilt and fill it with a worthless cargo and sail to a destination he was betting it would never make; the ship would go down and usually all the passengers and crew would died, but hey, the owner was paid a huge insurance settlement. Called “coffin ships” because it was well known by anyone who sailed that they were risking their lives. More than 2000 sailors were known to have refused to sail on such ships - and were sent to jail in breach of their contracts. The Secretary of Lloyds of London even stated that in 30 years he had never heard of an owner actually having a ship broken up - he simply sent them to their graves with worthless cargoes. Sea captains would take a bonus and gamble they could make the run. A British MP named Plimsoll was finally able to REGULATE shipping by forcing a cargo line painted on the ship to prevent overloading - still called the “Plimsoll Line”. He was roundly vilified for this act, something that saved countless lives - but, hey, the capitalist merchants had a great thing going. In fact, in 1977, an Austrian government official put a time bomb in a ship filled with slag and sank it in the Indian Ocean just to collect the insurance - just pure capitalism after all!We haven’t even touched on the Swill Milk scandal. New York by the late 1800s was a city of 3 million that NEEDED milk and cheese - but as the city grew there were fewer pastures for cows to graze. What to do? I know! Chain up the cows in the breweries and feed them brewery waste! The milk was so poisoned the owners added plaster to it to make it white again. The New York Times reported 200 children a year died from poisoned milk, yet because of “free market capitalism” it was absolutely legal to keep sore-covered cows in the dark, suspended by hooks because they could no longer stand on their own, and feed them waste to produce milk that was grey or blue and feed it to babies because, you know, babies NEED milk. That’s “free market capitalism”.Yup, free market capitalism. Made America what it is today, standing on the backs of the dead, the poisoned and ravaged environment, destroyed so John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie and Cornelius Vanderbilt could have a great life.Edit: Many people wanted a source for the information about train deaths. The book I used was “Train Wrecks” by Walter O. Reed which examines train wrecks since the inception of the commercial rail road in 1827 or thereabouts. Until 1853 there were few, if any deaths in the US from trains; after that deaths became so horrific and commonplace that the New York “Times” called the railroads “Deathtraps”. In 1880 the US Government reported 8216 train accidents in the US in one year. The US government was actually the unwitting cause as they promoted rapid rail implementation and not safety. It wasn’t until 1910 that the government started investigating rail accidents. The group that did this later became the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). There was even a saying in the 1890s - “The grim reaper is always one step ahead of progress” when it came to rail innovation. Even as the T-rail was invented and strap rail replaced, even as the Westinghouse airbrake and the telegraph made it possible to schedule trains the train companies skimped to save money; they scheduled “specials” with immigrants and holiday parties on single-line tracks where the trains ahead and behind had no idea there was another train on the line. Old cars made in the 1830s were uses well into the 1860s. Trains well into the 20th century were heated by coal stove that in an accident would throw burning coal and hot steel throughout the car setting it alight; burning to death was very common. The engines, when they telescoped into stopped trains would blow high pressure steam into the first car and scald everyone to death; the windows were made of thick glass (safety glass wasn’t implemented until 1910 in the Model T and it didn’t catch on til 1938) and the broken glass would cut people to ribbons; bridge builders didn’t even need an engineering degree, just the lowest bid and there are many incidences of train crashes from poorly engineered bridges. People actually enjoyed seeing the crashes - almost 100,000 people showed up at the Iowa State Fair in 1888 to see two trains purposefully rammed into each other, the coaches were filled with gasoline to create an enormous explosion. The engineers opened the throttle and jumped out at the last minute. Trains were capitalism at its rawest - the incentive was to lay more track faster than the competition, no matter the quality, and then run the trains as fast as possible without regard to conditions or safety, then require the consumer to clean up the mess. And like capitalism, the trains became a monopoly until for a time every railroad was owned by one man, Cornelius Vanderbilt. It required the Unions and the Government to step in and declare the railroads to be more than a capitalist tool but critical to the national interest and so they had to be regulated. Trains became increasingly safer once the government took a hand but there were still many, many accidents until trains became obsolete in the 1950s.

Boston had to change because it was a dying, crippled, grimy mess after WW2. If it didn’t change, it would have possibly died.Boston was founded by a nudist named William Blaxton who sold the city to the Puritans because they couldn’t find clean water to make beer in Charlestown. The Puritans got tired of Blaxton walking around Boston naked and banished him. Puritans closed minds who came for the freedom to worship the way they wanted and to kill those who didn’t. They drove away Mary Dyer, a self-taught female minister who was attracting more faithful than they were - so they hung her in Boston Common. Goody Glover was the first “witch” executed by Cotton Mather, executed because she refused to convert from Catholocism, not because she was a “witch”. Boston even banned Christmas in 1659 for ten years because it was becoming a time of licentiousness with drunkeness and sex. It was not the religious holiday it purported to be - it was the one day a year when even the Puritans could let their hair down. There were even riots on Christmas Day where the Catholic “bad guys” would rumble with the Puritan “good guys” in an all day riot of burning effigies, drunkeness, fornication and property damage.When the Irish came in great numbers the Back Bay was filled in to build a white-only, exclusive neighborhood called Back Bay. No Irish or Catholic churches were allowed and even now there is only one Catholic church, recently added in the past fifty years.But Boston was also a progressive place even then. Smallpox was an annual catastrophe where at least 40 percent of the population was infected every year. Even survival meant carrying scars and blackened teeth for life. But Cotton Mather’s slave, Oneimus, told him of how, in Africa, if children were infected with cowpox as children they would avoid smallpox later. Mather tried the experiment on two slave children and his own child - and they did not get smallpox. When he and Doctor Zeb Boylston (for whom Boylston St is named) pursued innoculations, they were threatened, their church set on fire and bricks thrown through their windows at night- and all this in a town of only 4000 people. But secretly parents brought their children to be innoculated and the results were dramatic. Mather wrote a monograph for the Royal Society of England that took the world by storm. He was the only non-native Englishman to be made a member at that time. Boston’s progressiveness had begun.Because Boston was the most important city in America, at least until 1820 when the Erie Canal was completed and New York took the mantle, there was much experimentation and progressivity, even if we don’t see it as such. For example, Boston had the first Police Force in America - more than 200 years before police were employed in London. There were four “peace officers” in Boston, armed with a rattle to call for help, a baton to beat people and a shepherd’s crook to trip up runners. And let us not forget that even in a town of only 20,000 by the Revolutionary War, prostitution was so common that one of the three hills of Boston, Mt Vernon, was called “Mt Whoredom” because there were so many brothels. Even then everyone knew who was visiting them, it was hard to keep a secret.And during the Revolutionary War, one of the only riders to finish the call to arms was a Dr. Prescott who heard the pounding hooves of the approaching horses while he was in bed with his best friend’s wife and leapt from the window. So relieved was he to find he hadn’t been discovered, he took up the reigns from the exhausted rider and completed the job.When the Boston Public Library was built in the 1880s, the architect, McKim, gifted a priceless bronze statue by William MacMonies in the 1890s for placement in the atrium. The statue was called “Bacchante Infant and Faun” and showed a dancing naked woman holding a baby and a bundle of grapes. The “Watch and Ward Society” which was much like the Taliban, condemned the statue as promoting sex, pedophilia, drunkenness and debauchery. It had to be removed and was purchased by the Met in New York where it resides today. However, it was considered such a masterpiece that the sculptor was required to make many castings and copies that have ended up all over the world in museums. Eventually a copy was returned to the Library where it remains today.It must be remembered that there was no separation of church and state then. The leaders were the clergy and they made decisions that fit with the religious strictures of the time. This often came into conflict with the glaring fact that Boston was a booming port city with lusty sailors from all over the world looking for a good time - and they would find it. The churches couldn’t always interfere with trade because America was founded on making profit. This led to the creation of the Scollay Square section, now City Hall. In this area were flophouses and speak-easies and burlesque halls like the Old Howard where women took off their clothes for men on stage. Eventually, in a sweep of urban renewal and prurience, Scollay Square was bulldozed into nonexistence. Very little is left except the Red Hat Bar, now a tame college pub and the statue of Sam Adams that was moved to Fanueil Hall.Boston was, for a time, the rope making capital of the world. And in those days rope was made from hemp and so many, many people were high all the time, either on purpose while working the rope walks and mixing hemp with tobacco or from the contact high that resulted from the stench around the rope walks and works.Boston was a Navy city. Tens of thousands of men looking for booze and whores worked or passed through the Navy Yard and the city was famous for drunken brawls and scandals. In fact, the entire police force went on strike in 1919 leading to a period of lawlessness that even included the world’s largest crap game set up on the Common by the police themselves. The state militia had to be called up to restore order and in an interesting aside they actually used a cannon against rioters; the cannon had been cast in the 1600s in Holland, captured by the English, used by them in the Revolutionary War, captured by the Americans, used by Massachusetts in the Civil War where it was captured by the Confederates and then in a later battle recaptured by the Americans and returned to the Massachusetts artillery and ended up being used against rioters in Boston in 1919. Amazing. It now sits in a museum. As an aside that illustrated Boston’s leadership, the two lions that grace the major museum in New York are merely copies of the two lions that grace the Boston Public Library, which had them first.After WW2 Boston began to fail. The population collapsed as people fled to the suburbs. The laws preventing tall buildings from being built crippled growth. Rent control, racism, drug abuse, pollution and more led to the collapse of stately neighborhoods. Crime skyrocketed. The railroads failed. From a WW2 high of nearly a million people Boston was, in the early 60s, a largely empty city of about 400,000 people. It resembled Detroit today. In my youth I frequently passed through entire burned out sections of the South End; there were race wars and dangerous places even during daylight. The subway was no place for a woman.A major highway plan was envisioned to bring life back to the city. It required a highway circling the city and at least four or five feeder highways leading into the city like spokes. This would relieve congestion by getting cars in and out faster, and by “coincidence” the highways were to pass through the minority neighborhoods and displace them. No one knew where they would go, but no one cared much either. However, for one brief shining moment the Blacks and poor whites whose homes and neighborhood were in the path of the bulldozers banded together in the late 1960s and for the first time in America successfully blocked a major regional highway project. The highway building stopped in its tracks. Ever since, highway congestion has been a nightmare.But in the mid 60s Mayor Kevin White took over with big dreams for redevelopment. Boston’s prudishness had to change or Boston would die. He built a massive skyscraper and shopping complex called the “Prudential Center” when malls were new, to draw people back from the suburbs. He re-installed all the ancient gas lights that had been pulled up to be melted down to play up, not cover up, the city’s history. At that time the Boston Waterfront was a run-down ghetto of abandoned warehouses, burned out trains, rats and drunks. Fanueil Hall was a boarded up ghetto where garbage was dumped. He restored it to a major tourist attraction.In the midst of this, Richard Nixon closed the Navy Yard to punish Massachusetts for being the only state to vote for his liberal opponent. Boston was crushed by the loss but it showed the changing liberal nature of the city. Boston was getting its strength from the colleges, from the new young blood that suddenly found itself powerful and capable of change. Even as the economy plummeted the politics became more liberal. The Massachusetts flag has, in Latin, the words, “By the sword we seek peace but peace only under liberty”, the words of Algernon Frye, a Dutch philosopher from the 1500s. And they took it to heart. One benefit of losing the Navy Yard was the reduction in crime, prostitution and drunkenness. Strip clubs and prostitution was pushed into a small area called the Combat Zone where cops looked the other way while sex, drugs and crime happened.Massachusetts was also a hot bed of organized crime with the Angiulos and Patriacas. There was no word like “Mafia” then - it was called the Cosa Nostra and it terrified the city. To cripple them the legislature bravely instituted a state lottery against the wishes of the powerful Cardinal Cushing: the state was finally separating from the church and this was only 1973. The lottery knocked the stuffing out of the mob and by that time the FBI was clamping down. It would take 20 more years to break the back of the crime families, only to allow a more sinister figure, Whitey Bulger, to rise.But Boston was on the vanguard of abortion legalization. The presence of so many world class hospitals meant that there was an educated public that knew about the horrors of back-alley abortions. In addition, Boston was on the forefront of sex education in schools.Where Boston lacked was in race relations. Boston, once a leader in progressive race relations with the Liberator, the paper of William LLoyd Garrison who shouted, about Slavery, “Will you tell a man whose wife is being raped to wait, wait? Will you tell a mother whose child is in a burning house to wait, wait for things to get better? No, I tell you I will not be quiet any longer. I will speak up. I will not retreat a single inch. And I will be heard.” Boston’s progressivity even extended to stealing slaves from slave merchants and the first integrated church in America, the Tremont Baptist Temple. But after the Civil War relations soured. Irish immigrants and poor Blacks competed in a race to the bottom for the lowest wages and worst jobs. Friction and increasing hatred led to the school bussing wars in the 1970s, a low point for Boston. It reached the nadir about the time this photo was taken:A Black lawyer named Landsmark who happened to be walking through City Hall Plaza attacked by a racist anti-bussing agitator.It seemed that the city wised up a little in the wake of these events but in the background the Boston Public Schools were being systematically destroyed by people who wanted bussing to fail. They have never recovered. Public schooling in America began in Boston with Boston Latin, whose motto “Sumus Primi” or “We are first” still graces the school and until bussing Boston had among the best public schools in America. However with forced bussing the city lost control of the schools, white students fled to the Catholic schools, the Unions became obstinate destroyers of the school system and the result is what we have now - broken down buildings built by graft-controlled legislators and corrupt contractors run by do-nothing administrators feathering their nests while students languish in classrooms with no books, no heat and diamond plate on the doors to prevent the constant gang intrusions. Still waiting for a savior.Boston had to change or die and change it did. It became a haven for young professionals, financiers, doctors and nurses, college students - a laboratory for every new idea, some that worked and some, like the miserable brutalist city hall, failed miserably. Boston had to change because the alternative was to become something like Detroit and there was too much good to allow that to happen.More needs to change or Boston will collapse into itself, a victim of gridlock and its own success.

Wow, Turley is taking a really old, basic way of looking at it. Daniel Comp sorted out an important factor. Shame is not the same as guilt.I am going to run through the set-up first, then some ideas for help.Shame is one of the most insidious dynamics in humans. It seems to be at the bottom of so many of our ills, both individually and as a society. It also is difficult when people seem to confuse guilt with shame. Some people use them interchangeably. “You should feel guilty for that.” “You should be ashamed of yourself.” They are not the same. They are very different and powerful in their own way.Guilt is the difference between a belief and a behavior. If you tell someone you will meet them at noon at a specific restaurant and don't show up...Should you feel guilty? YES! Why?... If you believe in keeping your contracts and don't, there should be your on-board Jiminy Cricket to let you know you are off the road you say you believe in. You have to be honest with your true-self. This is called healthy guilt. Being congruent with your beliefs and behavior.And the next time you see the person you wronged, you will apologize for the inconvenience and try to make it up to them. "I'm sorry, I got held up and didn't make it. Let me buy lunch for you next time." Most of the time, not always, guilt can be repaired.Now toxic guilt is when you do something for someone else's belief.If your mom asks you to call her everyday at noon, you agree, but are resentful. Eventually, like a toxic waste dump, the resentment will contaminate what you did have working.Shame, on the other hand, is who we ARE... what we believe in our heart of hearts about ourselves. This is what we try to cover up so other people don't see it. How do you hide: "I'm a jerk, I'm ugly, I'm fat, I'm stupid, I'm black, I'm a girl, I'm gay”? There are people who try.... But it looks pretty pathetic.It is having eyes on you, judgment from others, you don't measure up in some way. That tends to get triggered from a set-up from our original caregivers (parents), who are seen by the child as literally, God. Not the one sold later in heaven, but the people who gave us life. And how they look at us, talk to us, treat us, tells us who we are and how we fit in the world.One of the important differences with tribes around the world where people give their child that belonging-blessing, is differentiating between what the child does and who they are. When a child is shamed as a correcting technique, not only do they confuse shame and guilt, they also convert love to like. If I don't like what you do, I don't love you. Making a mistake is normal childhood development. Being told you are a mistake is abuse.Everyone has to try to cover their shame up though, because it's our most tender spot. It can be from experiencing abandonment from abuse mentally, physically and/or sexually. Sometimes it is a script about dependency where the child's care giver needs them to remain dependent so they, the parent, will have value or won't be left alone. Sometimes it is the birth order or gender which can set it up. There are literally, thousands of things.Psychological techniques are used by humans to deal with this. Denial, avoidance, projection, anxiety, and rationalization are some of the more common ways people use. But underneath, it still lurks, You'll never be good enough to belong. You have the curse, not the blessing.Smalley & Trent, The Gift of the BlessingThere is the story years ago of a freelance reporter from the New York Times interviewing Marilyn Monroe. She knew that Marilyn lived in many foster homes and so she asked her if she ever felt loved by any of the foster parents with whom you lived? "Once." Marilyn replied, "When I was about seven or eight… the woman I was living with was putting on her make-up and she was in a happy mood. She reached over and patted my cheeks with her rouge puff. For that moment, I felt loved by her." Marilyn had tears in her eyes when she remembered that event. It was such a small act but it was like pouring buckets of love over the parched life of a little girl starved for affection. It is not enough for children to be fed, instructed, and given a place to live...They need to be blessed emotionally. For all the attention, money, and stardom Marilyn received, It never gave her the desire of her heart...A deep and constant feeling of being loved, valued, and believed in. In reality, Marilyn lived with a kind of curse.In order to fill the empty in their heart, the person tends to make a "Golden-Calf-God". That is, they will sacrifice everything, friends, career, family, children, health, even their own life, to feed their form of God. And like all addictions, whatever level you’re at, becomes the new baseline. So you need more and more. I call it filling the Grand Canyon with a bulldozer. Good luck. Even Wiley Coyote eventually hits bottom.All those things that people do to get it... Ultimately fail. Look in your own life and notice how many times you were trying to get someone to think you were okay, to just care about you, to just love you. And notice that even though they might have given you some of that, it always was short-lived. And you could become like a drug addict needing another fix, and another, and another. It never quite was enough. And the reason is because the file was closed so long ago. It's not the "you" who needs it at this point. It's the ghost child inside of us, that still lives in there and is stuck... that needs it.That's why we look so juvenile when that part of us gets out and is so desperate. That little, immature, starving, abandoned child. But the doors to that file in your heart got closed and protected. The only one that can open it at this point is something that will trump your earlier view of God (Parents). People try to rationalize their way in. That never works because it's not a reasonable issue for any of us as a human. It happened when we were emotional and so it has to be healed emotionally.Sometimes people use affirmations as an attempt to heal themselves and although it can help a little, it never really works because again, rational mind can't access that unreasonable spot in your heart. It is about your soul, your destiny, who I am, what is my purpose in life, all the sacred questions that the blessing was supposed to give you, as truth! Now it can't be fixed.... It has to be healed... Because we are living beings, not mechanical computers.Sometime ago my wife and I attended a baby naming ceremony and Jewish covenant of Israel. One of the most striking things the Rabbi did was having the grandparents recite blessings for the child as well as the parents. The Rabbi also charged the parents with repeating that blessing to their daughter every Friday so she heard it.This is one of the blessings that were said.“Every person born into this world represents something new, something that never existed before; something original and unique. It is the duty of every person to know and consider that she is unique in her particular character and that there has never been someone like her in the world. Every single person is an individual, a spark of the divine, called upon to fulfill her uniqueness in this world, to make real her greatest potential to be human.”CareerYou are not what you do, own, or achieve. Those are means to an end. If they are who you are, something has gone wrong. It is an illusion. They can reflect who you are, the process of life.Your statement: > I consider myself a failure (no degree, jobless).Getting a degree is a short cut to wisdom in a field. It is a cram course when we typically have the time and energy to devote to learning. Quora is full of professional people who do not have degrees as such. There are huge success stories of people who immersed themselves into something and became an expert at it.I myself have had five diverse careers but really discovered being fascinated with why people did things was what I was doing way back in high school. Now, I had to get an advanced degree to get third party payments but there are plenty of others who do fine without it. I really learned my best style and tricks post-grad school going to various trainers around the nation, whom I thought would help me experience better skills. I have to keep up 30 hours of new training every two years where it used to be 60 to keep my license.I have seen hundreds of patients who learned their craft by spending huge amounts of time just doing it, from basic programming to Wall Street. Find your passion for what you can get the world to pay you for. Most of the world is not doing what they want to make a living. They work at what they can get.Repair of an empty heart> This prevents me from meeting and engaging with people,Not really. A long time ago I lived on the streets of New York and met up with some pretty incredible people. I am still in touch with one of those. This is something I have done all my life. Go up and talk to people. Sometimes the most interesting ones are the ones servicing the place. When my wife and I have met VIP's, she plays this game: How long before the famous person asks one question about someone else. Sad to say, not very often.>and this lead to a kind of vicious circle.Yep, it can be self-reinforcing and feed itself. This is where we look at tribes again, all over the world, because it is a problem all humans fall into. The sacred ceremonies have similar processes to heal the lost or trapped soul.You have to find something that is higher than your original Gods. Doesn't matter what form it comes in. Most societies have formalized it with rituals. It doesn't always work. I have seen it work at a revival and at a campfire. It has happened for people in dreams and a throw-away comment made by a complete stranger. Some people realize it reading a passage from a book and others from watching a movie. The greater truth from a spiritual source that is experienced through your heart, down to your toes, and settles in your bones.When people try to get it; from parents as an adult, through achievement, possessions, children or the myriad of other things, it just doesn't keep. That blessing is not something you earn, It is who you are. Once you realize (make real) this as a given, no one can take it away from you. It is your truth.Find a method to get your blessing straight and the rest will fall in place.