The audacity of rights

Human rights are women's rights, are mother's rights, are infant's rights!

America has the audacity to #lecture #China and other countries about #women's rights, yet it forgets that mothers are women! It forgets that #infants also have rights. 

In the USA, there is no such thing as paid maternity leave. Because maternity is seen as a #handicap or a disability! 

The Family Act provides unpaid leave, which is not a viable option for most - especially single moms. Not in a country where the cost of giving birth rivals the cost of brain or open heart surgery! And where the infant daycare costs (aside from the fact that most day-cares don't even accept 3-6 week infants) is more than the medium after tax income of most mothers!

We have laws, in most States, against selling a 6-8 week puppy; but we force the mother to leave her infant the next day after she gives birth! 

How did all the international human rights organizations overlook America's blatant violation of mother and infant rights?

https://instagram.com/p/BMTyBZ8gxVV/

#HumanRights #WomenRights #viral
The Huffington Post ABC News Nightline Human Rights Watch @Human Rights Campaign Women of Influence Hillary Clinton National Partnership for Women & Families

The wasteful saver

Listening to what others say and asking your friends what bothers them most about you might be tough; but there’s a lot you can learn. Everyone forms a judgment. They see you through their own lenses and the life experiences that shaped them. So instead of telling them: “You’re judgmental”, I simply say: ”You haven’t walked in my shoes”.

Take, for example, what some would refer to as “food wasting”. Surely you have heard some remind you that “there are starving kids in Africa…”. Well, when given the chance, I invariably order too much food. And, yes, even when I just order the regular “American size” portions, regardless of how good the food is, I almost always stop eating before the plate is empty. When I feel full, I stop and I take the rest to go.

One of my friends, who always makes a point out of licking his plate clean (not literally), told me, not long ago, that he finds my behavior wasteful. And, invariably, brought up the hungry kids all around the world. I felt quite bad for a minute and tried to consider why I never pictured that I was wasteful in my actions before hearing it from him. It’s true, by any account, getting more food then you can eat is inconsiderate, to say the least.  But here’s how experiences shape one – even when they can’t quite absorb it. I grew up under communism, at a time when half a loaf of bread had to last you a week (until you were legally allowed to buy your next ration). I had to learn to make a cube of chocolate last for months, by only tasting one small bite each day. And, while I never consciously thought about it, to this day I save food. I may seem greedy and unapologetically oblivious to the starving kids of the world. But the reality is, your own pain is always bigger than the pain of anyone else. Eating all my food won’t help those who, by misfortune of birth place or circumstances, don’t have any. But saving my leftovers for tomorrow may very likely save me.
So, yes, if I am full, I won’t finish my plate. I’ll keep that for the next day when I might not feel like cooking, or simply won’t afford to buy any more food.

I don’t believe that you can help others when you can’t even help yourself. But I do believe that saving others can sometimes help you save yourself.

Denisa Dobrin (August 5, 2016)

In memory ...

I am your memory of me
I am when time stood still.
Unsummoned tempest of your sea,
In search for an uphill.

I will forever be within
the happy and the sorrow,
the sparkle of your Eden glow,
the tear when heartbreak thorn us.
I am the comfort and the pain
I am the omnipresent.

You'll think of me when you can't think,
Yet you'll forget the shallow
I'll disappear with every blink
You'll grow beyond my shadow.

May what I gave become a stem
May what I took be given
For though I WAS, today I AM
Forgive all that's forgiven.

Denisa Dobrin (June 28, 2015)

Follower or invincible

Do you know why people remember me?

Because I dare to break the mold. I stand out. I'm different. I dare to live life. There to dance as if nobody else is watching me. From the heart.

They say life is a dance. Well, there are two ways to dance it. You can get a teacher and learn the steps. Follow the rules set forth by others before you. That makes you follower. A good dancer potentially, but, really, a good follower, always stuck within limits and bound by rules; the same old rules invented by others.
Another way is to just close your eyes, take a deep breath, listen to the music and go with it. Let your heart set the rules and the steps "write" themselves.
Later on, if you really care to conform, you can even learn the "set in stone" steps. But you should always be true to yourself. Put your soul in every little step. Don't let others convince you that their way is better. The best way for you is to do what your heart tells you. It's the only way you will have no regrets. You may get it wrong, it may even look weird; but if it feels right then you've made the right choice.

It won't always be easy. And you'll often find yourself dancing alone. Some people won't get you, some will think you're too out there... Those who know what it's like to live life on your own terms will appreciate your dance; the effort, passion and the fact that you can truly take a chance.

There are two ways to live life: you can be a follower, or you can be invincible.

Denisa (Nov. 9th, 2013)

I believe in decency

I believe in decency and reciprocity. Two things that, it seems, are dead in our society. Our generation has replaced them with ignorance and opportunism. And to top these off, a selfishness that makes even a person like me doubt that caring and being a open-hearted human being is good and encouraging behavior.
Humanity has died right before our eyes. We have killed it. The choices we've made, the people we've become, the legacy we choose to leave behind - none of these make us proud. We aim to be the people we trample on, and spit on, and shame.

This hypocrisy has no limits. It has reached the sky and it keeps on going. When even the most hopeful people in the world stop hoping... "Houston, we (definitely!)  have a problem" here!

Denisa

Identity crisis

To my friends who talk about identity.

I am Romanian. Like many of my U.S. Romanian friends, I don't live in Romania. Romania and her history lives in me.
I have all sorts of Romanian palls around me. Most  - even those who have lived here more years than in Romania - still call themselves "Romanians" first (and "Americans", second). I do know those few who think they are "different than the other Romanians".

To them I say: you are who you feel you are. But if you don't have a sense of your own identity anymore, the only thing you can be is: LOST.

Denisa

Carelessness bugs me

What is it that makes people change?
My answer is simple: the environment. The people around them, the situations they go through, the little things.
The Boston Marathon bombers seemed - unlike most other psychos who did such awful things - by all their friend's accounts, normal; friendly even. So what made them switch? What triggered this hate and made them snap at people they didn't even know?

Well, here's a clue. The older brother was pretty straight forward about the fact that he didn't feel like he "fit in".
I hate to say it, but I do understand what he means.
Having been bullied from childhood and made to feel like a social outsider up to recently, even I - an otherwise known as a very "social person" and "life of the party" - have had those moments when I just don't get how some people can live with themselves being so selfish and deliberately horrible. When you are in a new world and you already have to start from scratch, you need friends around you whom you can trust. Far too often careless people with big egos tend to betray your trust. So, once - you let it go; twice - you start to find faults in yourself; three times - it becomes less and less bearable. You get to the point where you have a bunch of "friends", and yet you are completely alone. 
When others are cruel and they don't even know it, when they don't get that words truly do hurt and how much one gesture can cure or wound, or even worse, when they simply don't care... that's when one can easily start to feel like they have nothing to lose anymore.

"Guns don't kill", feelings do. People do - other people. Carelessness kills.
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Instead of P.S.:
My confession, as someone who has been called a "hero" (in light of the Boston Marathon bombings): I don't feel like a hero, and I don't feel like a victim. I simply feel stunned. Or, at best, horrified.
The really sad aftermath of all that has happened is that this tells you how careless we all have become; how ignorant, how indifferent and how selfish. Those who do dare to stay behind and give a hand don't "do their job", or the "human thing to do" anymore. They are "heroes". This kind of "heroism" should be in all of us.
That's what's wrong with our society. That's what breeds killers in "innocent" kids. To my earlier point: Carelessness.