And the Accidental Hero Award goes to President Barack Obama.

Yes, Obama finally “came out”, on Disney-owned ABC morning television, with the long-awaited magic words of support for gay marriage.

Historical, and somewhat hysterical, at the same time.

The hysteria is the gay rights community’s celebratory amnesia about this president’s audacity.

To put it simply, he stalled in “liberating” gay people from Washington-sanctioned discrimination for 3+ years as he purportedly “evolved” on the issue.

See, it turns out that Obama is the leader and public opinion tide turner, the approver—or disapprover-in-chief– and current “father” of America.

The gay community is a patient, loyal group of children, but even so, gay adolescent cries of injustice were beginning to escalate.

If we grant any credibility to Obama’s stated process of “evolving”, and I staunchly doubt the credibility of it, what exactly did he need to evolve from?

Was it an ingrown prejudice, perhaps fanned by Obama’s previous life, his years of Sunday attendance inhaling Reverend Wright’s fire against gays?

Did he not veer apart from those sermons?

More likely, his indifference was authentically part of the hard drive of his character; the gay matter itself an annoying swarm of gnats buzzing around him again and again.

As human beings, we sometimes are blessed with the opportunity and fortune to grow and evolve. Many of us believed we were hiring a president who would make good on his promise to represent “all the people in America”.

We certainly believed he was someone who was already evolved on civil rights.

This was a blind, even racist belief.

Just because Obama is half-black and a member of a minority himself, does not insure his understanding of others who are hated for being different.

I do not agree with those who say that history will delete this president’s four-year stall. Nor will history forget the timing of Obama’s announced turn-around.

We are smack in the middle of campaign season, and the political chess game just turned whimsically in the favor of gay people.

Timing is a big part of the story of civil rights, as is political motivation; each factor not easily struck from the record.

Speaking of striking, Obama’s initial silence was intense in response to the vice president and secretary of education speaking out for gay marriage.

This event obviously cornered him and presented him with a checkmate moment.

Really, what choice did he have?

Let’s review.

#1. The gay community, who so richly supported his 2008 election, backing him financially and emotionally, was stirring in their anger.

The threat of losing that money and that substantial voting block was fierce and urgent.

#2. Both the vice president and the secretary of education spoke out publicly and definitively in favor of gay marriage.

Two potentially deadly chess moves, and whamo! A supporter is born.

The scheduling of the President’s critical Wednesday announcement is a stroke of fortune.

Obama seems to have concluded his evolution just in time for Thursday night’s Hollywood fundraiser!

Without doubt, the President’s public support for gay marriage is nothing short of fabulous for the evolution of humanity. That the President finally was motivated to grant his approval, thus sanctioning and legitimizing the life of every gay person, is a wonderful event.

However, I stand apart from those who believe Obama’s 11^th hour gay marriage support was risky and courageous.

I don’t believe he had many voters to lose in this strategic enactment, even as a beautiful new freedom rings forth.

Perhaps he has disappointed his fellow church people, but they will not turn against him.

Further, white homophobic people are likely not too bullish on black people or Obama either, and probably were never prone in great numbers to support him.

We can thank the vice president and the secretary of education who may or may not have been conscious of the essential role they were playing in politically setting the President up.

Yes, that one thing is certain; Obama was set up.

Set up by a previously generous, essential gay voting block, threatening to remove their resources for his re-election; who in turn were backed up by the common decency of support by our vice president and secretary of education.

This long-fought, happy confluence of light and favor in our time will stand as the key story in the history of justice and liberation for gay people.

In the last and lasting analysis, Obama is, at best, an accidental hero.

This week, the brilliant Arianna Huffington, in her adroit weekly roundup column, introduces the new, “GPS for the Soul”.

She discusses “Freedom”, a popular app that “allows users to cut off from the internet”.

Maybe I’ve been adrift on my own island of the mind, but pow! this hit me awake. Excuse me, but are we authentically at a place where people need a technology to turn off the internet?

What happened to choice, determination, the human finger?

Are we simply embedding the inclination to depend on a technological app rather than encouraging the glee of individual choice and self-generated ability?

In other words, in this case, is a ‘Killer App” a character or “soul” killer? Is the app a killer of strength- building, deleting the responsibility of personally making a tough choice and sticking to it for a specific amount of time?

“Killer”, as in “killer app”, is an interesting word.

I certainly don’t want to be a buzz killer, because I know exactly how exciting a new app can be. I have an app that delivers beautiful food with no calories for a party of eight, delicious and right into my kitchen while I sleep.

So, don’t be thinking I am one of those anti-app people.

It makes good sense to tie the internet with the soul, since we are all involved, to greater or lesser degrees, with the internet, although not necessarily with the soul.

Especially not at the same time.

We might as well be lit from the soul while we engage with the machine.

But is this possible in the most powerful way?

The soul experience is not known to be connected with material machinery, apart from experimental psychology labs in academic basements.

Of course, if this is truly the only access some people can have with the notions of being alive and having soul, then hurray for technology.

I often think that technology is especially wondrous for those who are deeply challenged in human connection, autistic, or suffering from profound phobias.

For the rest of humanity, I have questions.

The most ordinary question is whether there is any soul to be found in technology, or whether this is a snapshot of the emerging close-up of our removed, faux relationship with the soul.

Question: What is the worst-case scenario with the seemingly sweet, benign, even humanitarian, idea of a soul app?

Answer: That the result of the app is to intrinsically remove the entire experience of real-time soul, replaced by a technology that reinserts a concept of soul. What then remains is a wildly popular virtual soul experience, asking nothing of anyone but to just plug in.

Don’t worry about plugging out; it does that for you.

A cruise control for the soul.

My concern turns out to be what in fact has already happened in our society, this social remove of “soul”.

The lack of heartfelt introspection leading to self-knowledge; the lack of truth in social relationships.

The word “connection”, in Arianna’s piece, does not mean deep relating. It refers to social media internet connectivity.

“Disconnection”, similarly, means taking a step back from “over-relating”, again not intimately, but via internet “connections”.

We have unhooked from relating with people and are constantly urged to hook up more with technology, only to be offered an app that gives us a break from virtual connectivity.

As my Greek chorus would say, “Oy!”

Obviously, I am questioning something that people are cheering about and hungry to have.

Hence, the hoped-for popularity of the “Freedom” app.

Sounds like a winner.

Here’s my question:

What now remains of those words, “freedom” and “soul”. What do they mean?

In the blitz of angry, heartbroken writing and media responses about Trayvon Martin’s murder, we have rightfully zeroed in on racism as the critical point to decry .

Too many black people are killed with no media attention or public outrage. So here we are stopping to take notice that this is not a post-racial time in America, that this killing is not okay.

May this hideous tragedy bring us together in common sense and heart, and away from killing and hate.

May it serve to teach us the truth about where we are as a people, as a country, so that our energies can be harnessed and directed to heal what lies between us, black and white, gay or straight, whatever our differences.

Many people have questioned whether the news would tell a different story had Trayvon been a white young man killed by a black man.

We all know there is an excellent chance that, yes, had that been so, the killing would be spun differently, as would public interpretation.

Never mind that, as it happens, the security guard killer, George Zimmerman, was probably not white. Here is where race should not be an issue. The issue is killing. Period.

However, America has racism, however unexplored and hiding in the bushes, in the heavily promoted, artificially labeled, “post-racialism” of Obama’s presidency.

Therefore, it is worth mentioning that in spite of Zimmerman’s not-so-clear racial make-up, (this lack of clarity an interesting fact, since this killing is specifically discussed as a racist act), the murder stands as a black and white case in the public anyway. This is evidence of the ongoing history of hate between blacks and whites in America; so much so that it trumps other obvious racial details.

Speaking of obvious details, if Zimmerman had been equipped with mace rather than a gun, Martin would be alive today and the story a radically different, less explosive one to contemplate.

Shame on you, Florida, for allowing a “Stand Your Ground” law which permits people, including those who are emotionally unhinged or mentally unbalanced, to kill. What is the definition of feeling threatened?

How many people have potentially reacted based on personal terrors or feelings of fear, by shooting down others under this law, I wonder.

And where does this law come from; how is it justified?

Maybe Florida is a seriously dangerous place, rather than the politically challenged Florida of stand-up comedy.

Maybe we have missed the point on Florida, turned our noses and our backs on the place; designated as America’s not-so-bright family member by outsiders. Maybe the comedy of Florida has always been serious.

Yet it is far more than Florida’s sociology, politics, and outrageous self-defense law that we speak about here. Racism is everywhere.

The point is, this tragedy is marked by both racism and out-of-control gun use.

Self-defense comes in many forms. Surely homicide is not the only choice. And yes, there are people who should never be allowed to make the choice to shoot or not.

I don’t have the answer to the matter of cleaning up the alarming mess and dangers of our gun laws.

We need to figure that out.

All I know is that this particular “Bang, Bang” tragedy is a wake-up about guns and hatred for all of us in America.

DeNiro responds to Newt Gingrich’s Response to DeNiro’s Words.

Ann Coulter Defends DeNiro Remark.

These are typical headlines, the Breaking News of our day.

In this case, the question is: how many days will this non-story feed the media?

Apparently, Robert DeNiro, in a New York fundraising event for Obama, made a sardonic quip about whether the country was ready for a white First Lady.

The First Lady, or her promotional representatives, has decried DeNiro’s comment for being “inappropriate”.

There are two blazing issues here.

First, the awful truth is that we are not post-racial in this country.

We cannot even deign to bring up the fact, either straight-up or in an obviously pro-black witticism, that our President is half-black without either appearing racist or inappropriate.

If there is nothing wrong with our differences and those who are black are simply black, then why the outrageous DeNiro call-out, not only from Gingrich, but also from the First Lady?

Second, is this the “news” that we need to be dwelling on?

How does this help us?

And hey, isn’t something more urgent happening in Iran and Israel at this moment?

Personal swipes between politicians and newscasters are everywhere in the headlines.

MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell potentially doesn’t need a public relations alliance as long as he announces a red-hot opinion about what someone public has said that day.

It promises him a headline and coverage in the “news”.

O’Donnell may interest people and his interpretations may be entertaining, but is this news?

Whether this is real news or not, this is what the media is serving.

Hot from the horse’s mouth.

Oh, for the days when words were spoken.

Instead, we are looking at the demise of real talk, and it ain’t pretty.

I realize I have the annoying practice of questioning the emptiness of verbal communication wherever I hear it.

Yesterday at the Apple store, the technical adviser introduced himself as being “actually” there to help.

I replied that he sounded incredulous/surprised that he was there to help.

He looked through me in response and I let it drop.

Obviously I am not up for Favorite Person of the Year, and haven’t been for at least one decade.

Conspiracy theories aside, I believe,  the media direction led by talking heads who would not have passed English in my own high school yet now host talk shows, loudly cheer leads a willing public to use less and less of our dying vocabulary.

Thus, we say as little as possible to one another by a “sort of” (the uber-popular speech softener) social media permission for omission.

Perhaps the Academy Awards are not the speech occasions to study, but I invite you to count the OMG’s, the “awesomes”, the number of times “actually” is inserted in a straight-lined statement.

Has “actually” been unearthed to further disappear the power of communication, I constantly wonder.

As in, “I am actually from Michigan”.

By inserting without emphasis, the word “actually”, am I assuming that you would find this truth of my birth place incredible?

I really can’t say how many “actually’s” I hear each day. I can’t count that high.

The point is, I am concerned that as vocabulary disappears in American communication, we are losing vital connection to one another. In real words, we are saying nothing.

Arianna Huffington’s recent piece on social media and how Twitter is used angles in this direction, only focused on the way people choose to use social media, such as following non-news on Twitter.

She discusses media commentary about the political debates as being “devoid of substance” but there is “little effort to “help start a more substantial debate”.

I believe the missing “efforts” for substance are not deemed necessary in this time of diminishing truth and communication. For every person who notices the robotic clichés and empty sound bites of candidates in those political debates, it does not ring a tinkle of a bell for the remaining hundreds of thousands who don’t notice at all.

When your own life has been emptied of bothersome real communication, you will never find the blank nothingness of debate presentations annoying.

Of course, psychologically, the wild popularity of main dish Twitter abbreviation communication makes sound and sad sense.

Perhaps the truth is that most people have finally found their perfect social intimacy lifestyle: the disconnection that exactly fits.

The word “exactly” is also in great favor as an endpoint to a discussion point.

As in, “You are exactly right”.

Is anything we think about ever “exactly right”?

Tricky little bonding strategy, but unfortunately signally the desire for a quick dash away from connection.

Perhaps historically there have always been more people who would prefer to duck away from truth in speaking with others.

The secrets of one’s life are liable to spill when we are in person, if there be anyone listening.

That’s an increasingly big “if”.

Listening is another lost art and a topic for not just another day, but a weekly symposium.

In the meantime, it might be fun to take a day in the world of your life and tally up the “awesomes” and “actuallys” in and around you.

What you will be hearing is the absence of connection.

Should you be slightly alarmed at this reality, your response may actually be in the neighborhood of, “exactly right”.

This year’s Grammys featured the reality of Whitney Houston’s death as well as the Grammy President delivering a pitch for Music Cares, an organization that helps musicians in need. Repeatedly, he referred to the music community as being a family.

I say, with family like that, you really need friends. Real friends.

Was there ever a more obvious case of desperate need for help than Whitney’s? Everyone saw her decline.

She staged it for us, if we had the stomach to watch that hideous display of personal and professional suicide that was her 2005 reality marriage and family show.

Following that, there were consistent and extreme public enactments of self-annihilation.

The news of her death included the fact that no one is surprised to hear that she died.

Hers was a public, salacious self-destruction.

Was she flinging herself toward us, naked and begging for help?

Bill O’Reilly is railing against her for using drugs and enraged that she obviously wanted to “leave the planet”.

How dare she? Right, Bill?

Bill O’Reilly obviously has his own agenda on this matter, or maybe it’s the show’s ratings strategy du jour.

I believe it is a mistake to jump to judgment about taking drugs or leap into debate about legalizing drugs as a first response to Whitney Houston’s death. We then miss the most elementary point in the tragedy.

I’m talking about the erosion of real love and caring in our society.

When a public person acts out extreme self-destruction, what is our response as a society?

When does the media become cheerleaders for celebrity demise?

The media is not connected humanely in the story-telling of our public figures anymore. Ratings are driven by sensationalism, by audience lust for extremes, by the gamble of hot audience envy and enjoyment of the suffering of the famous; so many success strategies, so not about humanism. Maybe it’s always been this way, yet it seems newly bold, entitled, and normalized.

If Whitney Houston had not in her life been pared down to being a financial commodity, rather than the insanely gifted vocalist she was and growing artist she could have been, she may well be alive today.

Arguably, her musical direction may also have been wildly different.

A commodity she was. Commodities are traded, analyzed through the lens of futures and fortune. They are often favored for a while, suddenly devalued, deemed worthless without warning. The fact that artists are handled this way personally and professionally, those who are often uncommonly sensitive, is a soulless crime. It is a violent act by corporate and personal management with rich rewards; a commodification partnered by the public.

Fellow commodities (other creative celebrity talent) are apparently too busy being commodities themselves to take action on behalf of a fellow artist’s urgent need for support. In short, too busy, self-directed, or who knows what blocks their ability to step forward with care. They are themselves trapped in the manic effort to sustain themselves as commodity winners.

Yes, I know that every one of these celebrities has chosen to partake in this scenario.

The question of whether they knew they were signing on for the swap of life for fame, is a separate subject.

Certainly we are in times of extreme greed and obsession with depersonalization. It is both outrageous and surreal to read about the financial uptick that her death has created. People are authentically studying the business angle and monetary figures resulting from her death, as if her life and death were game strategies.

Similarly, in this political season, the countdowns, scoreboards, daily percentage rankings and horse futures continue to obscure the content, if there is content, of any candidate’s speech.

We find our country at its weakest, our politicians blankly transparent and empty, with the stunning absence of a public who demands that questions be answered substantially.

We are plagued with candidates like Rick Santorum.

Americans are enthusiastically triggered by an appetite for hate. Cowboy-hatted Santorum poses as patriotic, and he, too, is a commodity, albeit a toxic one.

The momentary thunder of positive response to Santorum is scary when you figure how much hate and misogyny the man is driven to deliver.

The prior media sensationalism of the mental sickness and now death of Whitney Houston, as well as the current rise of popularity of politician Rick Santorum, provides an unsettling snapshot of who we have become as Americans.

Tuned out, uncaring, deaf to our own hearts.

I’m told that the very hotel room where Whitney Houston was found dead in the bathtub is fully booked days after her death. I can imagine giddy visitors taking pictures in that very bathtub and posting them madly on Facebook.

The subject of the loss of personal caring in American society is overlooked and unpopular. We gather in Roman arenas—the modern media rooms– to see blood and gore as entertainment.

It is always telling how we respond to pain, not only towards people we know and love, but to the celebrities who seem to desperately broadcast the need for attention and help.

If we, and the media that serves us, came from the heart in response to headline news; if we dared to notice outrageous words and behaviors, and cared enough to question them; if we stepped away from the urge to tune out or in rabid envy, rip apart successful people in the artistic spotlight, this America we see in decline would have a clear chance for recovery.

As would the talent we have lost; as would we recover the American political freedoms we are losing more and more.

It is hard not to wonder, in Whitney’s case, whether all the current public expressions of care and love, had they been acted upon while she visibly struggled, would have saved her life.

Even today, it is curious that people are not asking what really happened to her.

What’s up with the bloody legs and scarred arm in those last pictures of her in Los Angeles days before she died.

These pictures have been sent around the globe. Apart from sensationalism, I do not know of any media inquiry to find the cause of these physical scars and what they say about the potential truth of her life.

Nor do I hear Santorum grilled on his curious passion against gays.

For the country, this is a sign of the absence of soul and mind.

That’s not a good sign.

Americans love sports. These following nine months leading up to the Presidential election appear sadly to be a sport for most Americans, a mesmerizing reality show competition between contestants promoted and funded by various conglomerates for our entertainment and our votes.

Which candidate will be the most popular, the most family identified, (yes, bring those smiling kiddies up on the stage). Who will be the meanest, the most funded, ubiquitous presence in the media, appearing on all sorts of television, invading to the point of becoming our regular programming? Who will have access to talk show titans, a la Obama on Jay Leno last week, or sit repeatedly with the entertaining women on the View, who do not consider themselves known for their heavy political acumen about the state of our country.

The Presidential race is a sport, no doubt about it. Are we Americans conditioned to understand or even have the bandwidth to listen to complicated national urgencies that the newly elected President will preside over? The answer is “no”.

The political strategy of candidate personality vs. the abilities of candidates to take the reins and work things out with opposition in government is a done deal.

Personality rules. And like any adolescent high school society, Americans are glued to the daily nasty name-calling fights between everyone in the political arenas.

This is what we have in front of us for the next nine months.

The political talk show hosts don’t even bother to pretend that it’s not a sport.

Numbers, polls, opinions on horses leading the group on any given day are discussed with rotating sports opinionators.

Chris Mathews emphatically uses “horse race” as shorthand for “political campaign”.

Rachel Maddow expresses open glee for the game of it all, as evidenced in her commentary pre-and-post the numerous Republican debates.

Don’t get me wrong. I like Rachel and her high intelligence.

I only wonder if she is being directed to approach this campaign as a giddy game for ratings, or whether she is independently drinking pitchers of company Kool-aid.

And then there are the inevitable distractions. Which group today hates the gay community more than anyone else? The winner seems to be a group that is a division of the American Family Association called OneMillionMoms.com, raging against Ellen Degeneres for being gay and hired as a JC Penny spokesperson.

Donald Trump is always a great distraction, no matter what he says or who he now endorses (Romney), as is Scott Brown, who is endorsing Obama.

There is importance and reality in questioning Mitt Romney’s authentic global, national, and social positions, as well as questioning Obama’s authentic positions. Both remain mysterious.

So many pundits with theories; so little solid information.

So much attention to candidates as horses, and horses as winners or losers.

The public has been conditioned to use no “intelligence muscles” to approach the election or to have true knowledge of anything else occurring behind the gold curtain having import to the country, and thus, to their lives.

The economy is naturally very familiar and essential as the key issue to the public’s interest.

Is any candidate supplying real plans or brainstorming for solutions?

While the daily flood of media distractions appears on the bottom television scroll, and the loud mouth opinions blast forth on talk television, does it matter that Obama may be planning a war with Iran? Yes, it does.

But what a superb time instead to theorize about which personality is presidential and who today is up a few points in the so-called polls.

In spite of the roar of the horse race blasting away our thoughts and voices, I will yell out on behalf of us all: If there is anyone out there fit to lead this country, announce yourself. Please.

We have received the news that Paula Deen, popular television cook and self-titled “queen of Southern cooking”, has Type 11 diabetes.

There is outrage against Ms. Deen for advertising unhealthy eating, which I find particularly fascinating.

Here’s the question: are we or are we not personally responsible for what we stick into our mouths?

I’m serious. This seems to be an unanswered question in this country.

Let’s briefly discuss Ms. Deen.

Without a doubt, she is a brilliant self-promoter; a comfortable presence whose personality Americans have overwhelming approved as attractive and acceptable.

As we all know, Ms. Deen’s popularity is a matter of taste (no pun intended). It turns out that many Americans are comfortable with the homey, overweight human model on television, I suspect for many reasons.

Southern food is comfort food, and who better to peddle the grits than a Southern mama?

She did a great job in that role.

People bought it and ate it, apparently.

Let us never forget that this is television, folks. Show biz.

If it were not, perhaps if we were to meet this unknown person who enthused at a social event about high calorie treats, we would chuckle and understand that she enjoys eating those things.

End of thought process.

It is her business what she passionately eats.

It is our business what we choose to eat.

It is a free country where anyone savvy enough to snag a slot on television can hawk anything at all.

Here’s where the dispute comes in.

We like to forget a little thing called personal responsibility.

We live in a free country where we can turn the channel away from obvious stupidity, and shut our mouths to empty calories.

In other words, we can just say no to a particular television person who is not our favorite bowl of grains.

So why not turn the channel and understand that this is show business, not science?

We turn to television for expert advice, when really what we are getting is entertainment, be it medical media actors, psychologists, dieticians, financial gurus.

In fact, you are choosing your favorite entertainers when you choose these shows on television.

(It is my hope that there is some real information offered, but I know where hope can lead, and it’s not always good).

One last thought on the media event of Paula Deen’s diabetes confession.

What’s up with those who celebrate her having diabetes?

Not only do we live in a spiritless place where being mean is practiced as an art.

There is also an epidemic of blaming others for our own life circumstances and choices.

Instead, let’s study what it means to be responsible for our own health and actions.

Let’s make a deal to stop celebrating that anyone has a disease.

Right now.

Baby Boomers lucky enough to have parents who are still alive, are headed for the ultimate crisis of their parent’s physical decline and death.

Sometimes, as in the case of my mother, this decline is shocking and unexpected, and dire.

If you and I have been geographically gone from our family for many decades, prepare to reenter the same original family dynamics upon your sorrowful return. You will be thrown into your original place in the family, along with the exact same quality of relationship experiences you left behind years ago.

When your parent’s emergency occurs, what comes along with it is every feeling that ever existed between your sibling and yourself.

What to do with a sibling who acts venomously towards you as a rival?

You may be surprised to find that time has stood still for the members of your family in regards to their old feelings towards you, such as competition, or a reanimated toxic envy.

These feelings emerge in their fiercest form at the time of your parent’s physical emergency.

Further, because you have moved away from the city where your family lives, there may be added resentment when you are present.

If you have a psychologically difficult and severe family dynamic, predating your parent’s illness, prepare yourself, for this is what awaits you.

The most important thing to do is Don’t React.

As your parent struggles to recover, it is your job to find a way to deflect the dead past and any negative talk even as primitive feelings are acted out in real time by a sibling and even by your other parent.

Prepare yourself for this surprise. The original emotional condition of your family relationships is alive today as you had never suspected. But here it is.

Don’t React.

It is as if all these antique feelings have been waiting all these long years to reappear.

Now, because of the urgency of your parent’s survival, everything apart from her needs must be eliminated from the picture.

Nothing matters. Stick and Stones, remember?

Tune out everything emotionally irrelevant to your parent’s well-being. No fighting, no reaction to anything outrageous.

You are your ill parent’s emotional champion. Do not allow yourself any verbal reaction to anything your family wants to fight about.

Speak with doctors and nurses alone, if you cannot communicate with your sibling or other parent.

Your ill parent is the only player on the stage today.

Pay no attention to unkind or vengeful chatter about or around you.

Do not allow yourself to be re-hooked into an ugly relationship groove.

Don’t React.

Nothing is important except for your parent’s survival.

So it was that over three months ago when I received a message from my father informing me that my mother had already been admitted to the hospital and was now returned home two days later.

Why wasn’t I called? This seemed the most appropriate question and yet also the least important.

What was important was my mother’s physical condition.

My father and sister had kept this event a secret from me both for their own reasons and also in the hopes that the hospital visit would be brief and uneventful.

Carefully containing my extreme alarm and shock, I attempted to collate all communicated shards of information about my mother’s condition, and made a beeline to San Diego from my home in Los Angeles.

It seems my mother had felt faint and dizzy and my sister and father chose to have an ambulance take her to urgent care at Kaiser Hospital after normal business hours. This means that her personal pulmonary doctor, her only real and extraordinary doctor as I discovered, whom she has had for years, one who knows her and her health specifics, would not be seeing her or treating her that night.

On her arrival at urgent care, the doctor on duty determined that she had water around her heart and gave her an IV diuretic to remove the problem.

Tragically, they mistakenly gave her by IV too great an amount of diuretics, after which she promptly went into renal failure on the morning of her third day there.

For some still unknown reason, they discharged her at that very point from the hospital to be sent home with a hospital bed.

I arrived to find her at home in that hospital bed, in what I now understand was a beginning process of her death.

My father and sister were waiting for her to come out of whatever “temporary” healing process they believed she was in. In hindsight, it is likely that they had quickly accepted the idea that she was dying. At least this is what they were saying.

She was beyond exhausted, agitated and confused as they tried unsuccessfully and excruciatingly to get her to participate in normal conversation.

Thank God a nurse was scheduled to arrive in just a few hours that next morning, who insisted, against my mother’s general doctor’s previous direction to keep her away from hospitalization’s negative potentials, to indeed return her immediately back to the hospital.

After she was readmitted, it was conclusively determined that she had been released and sent home while in the state of renal failure!

The importance of family members being present to swiftly and deliberately figure out the best choices in these crucial moments—those members who are able to care and are equipped with mental clarity– cannot be overstated.

The ensuing week in the hospital was a blessed one for my mother.

Our great fortune was having Dr. Stanley Salinda, Internal Medicine, oversee a team of other doctors and fine nurses, most notably nurses Linda Beebe and BabyLynn Hynes at the Kaiser Permanente Hospital on Zion Avenue in San Diego.

When discovered in time, renal failure can be 100% reversed.

I thank God again for the brilliance and superb care of Dr. Salinda and his entire team in bringing my mother back.

Finally, there is a time and place to privately peruse and investigate every feeling you have about your parent’s harrowing near-death.

There will be time to privately address what it means to be alive and to love, and time to acknowledge the hurt and anger you, yourself, have survived by your own biological family.

This was discussed in a February 11, 2010 New York Times article by Paula Spans, where she introduces veteran journalist Francine Russo’s book, “They’re Your Parents Too!: How Siblings Can Survive Their Parents’ Aging Without Driving Each Other Crazy” and points out that “family dynamics—old roles, rivalries, resentments—are slow to change, if they change at all”.

A snippet from Russo’s book: “If you have been regarded as the successful outsider, admired yet seen as aloof and resented, your family is unlikely to stop thinking of you this way even if you rush back and try to be more involved now. Each person has a stake in seeing you the way you have always been. They’ll probably resist your help even as they complain that you’re not helping.”

This is an understatement that only grazes the psychological issues that arise in family emergency; the ancient dynamics in family warfare commonly resting unresolved for decades.

And yet, when a parent almost dies, there it all is, freshly baring its yellowed fangs.

Generally, much is made of “family” in this country, each of us in our family presumed to adore one another in that quintessential Hollywood picture.

Family is assumed, not just celebrated, in every song, on every commercial.

We are in the midst of the holiday punctuation of this family promotion with not only “I’ll Be Home For Christmas”, but also “It’s The Most Wonderful Time of the Year”.

Similarly, we see at this very moment how political campaigns use “family” as code for “legitimate” Americans living “normal” lives.

Here’s the stark truth: as a psychotherapist, I know that often people, given the choice, would honestly not choose to share their lives with those very same family members with whom they share biology (and perhaps holiday dinners). I know, because they’ve been telling me for years.

For some reason, we are made to feel shame if we do not enjoy loving, honest relationships with biological family members.

This idea is ever-present in America, all year round.

Perhaps this is ordained to emotionally control the masses.

Maybe even more simply, family is the most obvious American business strategy to ensure that we are bound to shop on various holidays.

No matter the origin of this demand of family, it seems that society judges each one of us as a failure if we do not feel and share real love with our family. If we are not fortunate to naturally have this, then what?

I suspect the genesis of this judgment to be Biblical; beginning with the commands of the Bible, then reflected in commercial societal psychology, and imbedded in each one of our psyches.

In turn, I have spoken to many people over the years—some extremely celebrated—who harbor negative, shameful self-images because of how it feels to not belong to a loving family.

In this American promotion of “family”, it is Ozzie and Harriet gone hideously awry, slapping us doubly across the face if we are suffering from lack of such fortune.

We need finally to fling this societal shame away and understand that if there is just one beautiful, loving biological connection in one’s life, it is a true and rare blessing.

If this is not the case for you, and you would like it to be, there are ways to sustain authentic fragments of connection with select relatives, without cheapening your personal integrity or deleting who you are.

That’s a subject for another time.

When a parent almost dies, the immediate state of emergency often springs forth some very regrettable replays of long-forgotten grudges, bringing out the worst in everyone.

If your family story is anything like mine, there is time to reflect and the opportunity to update your vision in the following days, weeks, and months of your parent’s recovery.

I am filled to the brim with gratitude for my mother’s continuing strength, recovery, and survival.

I am starkly and intimately reacquainted with my role in the family and relationships with my sister and father.

To those of you with similar family conditions, my wish for you is the miracle of recoveries, and the personal freedom that true understanding from this event so powerfully delivers.

Finally, gay is politically popular!

Not only is gayness the core subject in the news, but now every Republican simply finds gays irresistible.

Political strategy aside, those candidates who return, again and again, to the subject of gays, whether it is their quest for marriage equality or their civil rights in general, have an interesting repetitive obsession, don’t you think?

Freud would have a field day.

Thank you, Rick Perry. You have repeatedly returned to your rabid remarks against gays. The psychoanalytic interpretation of your message clearly broadcasts your unconscious lust, and not only for political gain, sir.

(Hope that eventually turns out well for you personally).

As for you, Michelle Bachmann, you are nothing but a parrot hoping to win favor with white bigots while remaining brain dead about any subject other than winning an already lost election.

Yes, you got nailed by an 8 year old, but that’s the intellectual age of the people who take you seriously.

Thanks for the shout out.

As they say, any publicity is potentially helpful.

In that regard, eternal thanks to the cardboard vocals of Ann Coulter.

Ann can always be counted on to illuminate our world with wisdom on gays and babies, offering a yearlong infinite cheap candy box of assorted wild imaginings.

Thank you, psychotic sports coaches of little boy teams.

Although you are specifically guilty of acting out heinous pedophilia sex crimes, the public simply reads this as “gay”.

You are perfectly illustrating what the denial of homosexuality can lead to.

You are the true poster men of homophobic hatred.

Thanks again.

Thank you, terrified heterosexual married people.  You embody something far greater in your insecurity than fear.

The paranoia that gay marriage will taint or hijack the status of your own relationship or threaten your union in any way is a leakage of tremendous mental disturbance.

Support your medical community and get some help with that.

Let me not forget to mention the add-on transgendered alignment with gay people, LGBT.

Thanks a lot.

If indeed gay people needed to be a stronger minority target for disgust and hatred, we hit the jackpot with the transgendered appendage.

It is a gift that keeps on giving.

Transgendered people need their own classification and deserve one, too, in my opinion.

There is just too much confusion to begin with in the cultural brain about what “gay” means. People are overwhelmed and overly busy, as it is, trying to decipher what is on the gay agenda for American society, as well as for their own heterosexual marriages.

One befuddling identification at a time, please.

When Obama won the election, he repeated the ecstatic claim, “It is our time!”

Whoever he was aiming to include in this benediction, chances are, based on his Inaugural pick of buddy Rick Warren, it’s a good bet that he wasn’t dreaming on behalf of all good gay citizens.

Surprise, Obama!

It’s gay time in America.

The gay strategy in American politics may be an election year gift in disguise.

In a symbolic way, the homophobic slurs from political cartoon figures are so extreme that it is tempting to imagine their temporary appearance on the national stage as a deliberate—or cosmic– act of shedding Americans of their homegrown stupidities and hatreds.

Even Hillary Clinton’s equality speech in Geneva on Human Rights Day is being attacked on the basis of her choosing the world as an audience for the message of acceptance over hate and bigotry.

Now there’s a media content stretch.

From every conceivable angle, gay is today’s civil rights synonym.

Gay is the new black.

So thank you, American media, whoever and wherever you are.

I’ll say it again.

The gays are not only popular.

They are irresistible.