Love In A Hug

Love In A Hug

What true love is:

“My parents were married for 55 years. One morning, my mom was going downstairs to make dad breakfast, she had a heart attack and fell. My father picked her up as best he could and almost dragged her into the truck. At full speed, without respecting traffic lights, he drove her to the hospital.

When he arrived, unfortunately she was no longer with us.

During the funeral, my father did not speak; his gaze was lost. He hardly cried.

That night, his children joined him. In an atmosphere of pain and nostalgia, we remembered beautiful anecdotes and he asked my brother, a theologian, to tell him where Mom would be at that moment. My brother began to talk about life after death, and guesses as to how and where she would be.
My father listened carefully. Suddenly he asked us to take him to the cemetery.

Dad!” we replied, “it’s 11 at night, we can’t go to the cemetery right now!”

He raised his voice, and with a glazed look he said:
“Don’t argue with me, please don’t argue with the man who just lost his wife of 55 years.”

There was a moment of respectful silence, we didn’t argue anymore. We went to the cemetery, and we asked the night watchman for permission. With a flashlight, we reached the tomb. My father caressed her, prayed, and told his children, who watched the scene, moved:

“It was 55 years… you know? No one can talk about true love if they have no idea what it’s like to share life with a woman.”

He paused and wiped his face. “She and I, we were together in that crisis. I changed jobs …” he continued. “We packed up when we sold the house and moved out of town. We shared the joy of seeing our children finish their careers, we mourned the departure of loved ones side by side, we prayed together in the waiting room of some hospitals, we support each other in pain, we hug each Christmas, and we forgive our mistakes… Children, now it’s gone, and I’m happy, do you know why?

Because she left before me. She didn’t have to go through the agony and pain of burying me, of being left alone after my departure. I will be the one to go through that, and I thank God. I love her so much that I wouldn’t have liked her to suffer…”

When my father finished speaking, my brothers and I had tears streaming down our faces. We hugged him, and he comforted us, “It’s okay, we can go home, it’s been a good day.”

That night I understood what true love is; It is far from romanticism, it does not have much to do with eroticism, or with sex, rather it is linked to work, to complement, to care, and, above all, to the true love that two really committed people profess.”

Peace in your hearts.

Author: Unknown

Mother Jones

Mother Jones

Celebrating Mother Jones is appropriate on Labor Day:

Teddy Roosevelt once called her “the most dangerous woman in America” when she was 87 years old. Mary Harris Jones, or “Mother Jones,” was born to a tenant farmer in Cork, Ireland, in 1837.

Her family fled the potato famine when she was just 10, resettling in Toronto. She trained to be a teacher and took a job in Memphis, where on the eve of the Civil War she married a union foundry worker and started a family.

But in 1867, a yellow fever epidemic swept through the city, taking the lives of her husband and all four children.

A widow at 30, she moved to Chicago and built a successful dressmaking business — only to lose everything in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

Jones then threw herself into the city’s bustling labor movement, where she worked in obscurity for the next 20 years.

By the turn of the century, she emerged as a charismatic speaker and one of the country’s leading labor organizers, co-founding the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).

She traveled the country to wherever there was labor struggle, sometimes evading company security by wading the riverbed into town, earning her the nickname “The Miner’s Angel.”

She used storytelling, the Bible, humor, and even coarse language to reach a crowd. She said: “I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I said if he had stolen a railroad, he would be a United States Senator.”

Jones also had little patience for hesitation, volunteering to lead a strike “if there were no men present.”

A passionate critic of child labor, she organized a children’s march from Philadelphia to the home of Theodore Roosevelt in Oyster Bay, New York with banners reading, “We want to go to school and not the mines!”

At the age of 88, she published a first-person account of her time in the labor movement called The Autobiography of Mother Jones (1925).

She died at the age of 93 and is buried at a miners’ cemetery in Mt. Olive, Illinois.

She said: “Whatever the fight, don’t be ladylike.”
~ The Writer’s Almanac

Happy Jury Rights Day!

William Penn On Juries

It’s the anniversary of the brave jurors who, on September 5, 1670, refused to convict William Penn of unlawful assembly simply for preaching in the street.
“Cler. How say you? is William Penn Guilty, &c. or Not Guilty.
Foreman. Not Guilty.
Cler. How say you? is William Mead Guilty, &c. or Not Guilty?
Foreman. Not Guilty.
Cler. Then hearken to your Verdict; you say that William Penn is Not Guilty in manner and form as he stands indicted; you say that William Mead is Not Guilty in manner and form as he stands indicted, and so you say all?
Jury. Yes, we do so.
Observ. The Bench being unsatisfied with the Verdict, commanded that every person should distinctly answer to their names, and give in their Verdict, which they unanimously did in saying, Not Guilty, to the great satisfaction of the assembly.
Rec. I am sorry, gentlemen, you have followed your own judgments and opinions, rather than the good and wholesome advice which was given you; God keep my life out of your hands, but for this the Court fines you 40 marks a man; and imprisonment till paid. At which Penn stept up towards the bench, and said:
Penn. I demand my liberty, being freed by the Jury.
Mayor. No, you are in for your fines.
Penn. Fines, for what?
Mayor. For contempt of the Court.
Penn. I ask, if it be according to the fundamental laws of England, that any Englishman should be fined or amerced, but by the judgment of his peers or jury; since it expressly contradicts the 14th and 29th chapters of the Great Charter of England, which say, ‘No freeman ought to be amerced but by the oath of good and lawful men of the vicinage.
Rec. Take him away, take him away, take him out of the Court.
Penn. I can never urge the fundamental laws of England, but you cry, Take him away, take him away. But it is no wonder, since the Spanish Inquisition hath so great a place in the Recorder’s heart. God Almighty, who is just, will judge you all for these things.
Observ. They hauled the prisoners into the Bale-dock, and from thence sent them to Newgate, for non-payment of their fines; and so were their Jury. But the Jury were afterwards discharged upon an Habeas Corpus, returnable in the Common-Pleas, where their commitment was adjudged illegal.”
To help you celebrate, the Fully Informed Jury Association has put together a selection of quotes from the trial of WIlliam Penn and William Mead that Jury Rights Day commemorates:

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