MICHAEL GARCIA REFUSES TO SERVE MAN WHO DOES NOT WANT TO BE SEATED NEXT TO MILO CASTILLO, A DOWN SYNDROME CHILD

              5 Year old Milo Castillo

 
                         Michael Garcia

         

Bravo for Michael Garcia

  

How stupid, hateful, and cruel can "people" be? 

Michael Garcia, a waiter at Laurenzo’s Prime Rib steak house in Houston,Texas has won a lot of fans after refusing to serve a customer who made a cruel comment about a special needs child that he did not want to be sat next to.


The incident took place at Laurenzo’s, where Michael Garcia has been working for more than two years and enjoys a good rapport with many of his regular customers.

On Wednesday night he greeted two groups of regulars , Kim Castillo and her family, including five-year-old Milo who has Down syndrome, and another group who sat in the adjacent booth.

Not long after Garcia seated the second family they requested to be moved. Garcia duly obliged and seated them elsewhere, until he heard the man say, "Special needs children need to be special somewhere else".

Garcia was thrown by the cruel remark and couldn't believe that the man had said it in front of his own children. Although worried that he might lose his job, Garcia felt he had to something. "It was very disturbing, my personal feelings just took over and I told this man, I'm sorry, I can't serve you".

WAITER WHO STANDS UP FOR SPECIAL NEEDS CHILD

That family quickly left, but not before Garcia told him: 'How could you say that? How could you say that about a beautiful five-year-old angel?'

Kim Castillo says she noticed the family leaving, but didn’t think anything else about it until one of Garcia’s co-workers told them what had happened. "If he had been obnoxious, which like any other five-year-old he can be, I wouldn’t have thought twice about the family asking to move", she said.

Of the other family, she said, "It's sad that they're ignorant." Castillo, 40, wrote in an online post that she has been taking Milo out to eat since he was born, and said her son, her only child with husband Eric, is better behaved than most children and was not misbehaving that night.

 

His mom takes him out to restaurants frequently and says he's very well behaved. “Was he loud?” she wrote. “Maybe a little in the moment, but honestly, the adults at our table were three times louder than he was. ... If he had been obnoxious, which like any other 5-year-old he can be, I wouldn’t have thought twice about the family asking to move.”

Garcia, knew the Castillos, and has his own special way of greeting Milo. “Normally when they arrive, I pick him up at the door and carry him to the table", he stated.

As news of Garcia’s action spread across the Internet, with praise for him on the restaurant’s Facebook page and elsewhere, customers have been seeking out Garcia.
   
TODAY reports reports that Garcia, along with other waiters, reportedly stopped by Milo’s table to hear the child talk about his birthday and hear some new words he learned (Milo has delayed speech).

As word has traveled about the heroic Michael Garcia, particularly on Facebook, the restaurant has apparently seen a boom in customers. Candace Roberts, a server at Laurenzo’s, describes business as “huge” with people wandering in to shake Garcia’s hand.

When the restaurant’s management found out about the conflict, they expressed disapproval from a managerial standpoint, but agreed with Garcia’s behavior on a personal level. But after the family left the restaurant, locals caught wind of the story and began to praise Garcia for making a stand on behalf of special needs children. 

“We can’t lose track of what this is about,” Garcia said in response to the attention his story has received. “It’s about Milo, it is about educating ourselves and when people are different, why should you treat them any different?”

The waiter said fear of the unknown sometimes prompts people to act in a rude manner around people with special needs, but that people like Milo are a “gift from God”.

Discrimination against people with disabilities is a widespread world problem. A research Team at Liverpool John Moores University’s Centre for Public Health, a WHO Collaborating Centre for Violence Prevention, and WHO’s Department of Violence and Injury Prevention and Disability published a study in July 2012. 

These are the first studies to confirm the magnitude of the problem and they provide the strongest available evidence on violence against children and adults with disabilities. They also highlight the lack of data on this topic from low- and middle-income countries.

The review on the prevalence and risk of violence against children with disabilities, published in July 2012, found that overall children with disabilities are almost four times more likely to experience violence than non-disabled children. 

The review indicated that children with disabilities are 3.7 times more likely than non-disabled children to be victims of any sort of violence, 3.6 times more likely to be victims of physical violence, and 2.9 times more likely to be victims of sexual violence. 

Children with mental or intellectual impairments appear to be among the most vulnerable, with 4.6 times the risk of sexual violence than their non-disabled peers.

The systematic review on violence against adults with disabilities, published in February 2012, found that overall they are 1.5 times more likely to be a victim of violence than those without a disability, while those with mental health conditions are at nearly four times the risk of experiencing violence.
  
The study found last year that in developed countries, 24 percent of mentally challenged  had been a victim of some form of violence in the preceding year. The figure is far greater in undeveloped countries where there are no such statistics kept.

Mentally challenged, disabled children are frequently discriminated against in other ways. 

In September a 16 year old teenager with Down Syndrome was not allowed to board an American Airlines flight.

The airlines’ spokesperson claimed they feared he would be disruptive, but the boy’s parents had spent a significant sum of money to purchase their child the ticket. The family also claims their son usually sleeps through flights and that the discrimination against him was unjust and unfounded.

About one in every 800 American babies is born with Down syndrome, and it is estimated that about 350,000 people in the United States, and just under 6 million people worldwide live with this condition today.(This condition affects people of all ages, races, religions and economic situations.)  

Even though the number of children born with the syndrome has been on the decline, discrimination against people with the disease continues to be a problem in a society where 38 percent of Americans know someone that suffers from the condition. 

The story quickly made headlines across the country and supporters have since sent him cards, gifts and donations in excess of $1,000, according to the Houston Chronicle.

Garcia said he appreciated the outpouring of funds, but that he wasn’t interested in keeping any of the money. He decided to donate it all to Milo’s school, the Rise School of Houston, the city’s first and only school that offers an integrated learning environment to children born with Down Syndrome and other developmental disabilities, the Chronicle reported.

The money will be used for a scholarship fund, according to FOX News.

"When you have something like this with someone who had no reason to be kind -- he doesn't have relatives with special needs, he's not a teacher -- but he did it out of a sense of what was right and from his heart, it gives us this hope," Ashley Kress, the school’s development director, told the Chronicle.

The school thanked Garcia for his generosity and outspokenness by throwing a celebration in his honor. But the kind waiter told Fox News that his main objective is that the story raises awareness and inspires more tolerance for kids with special needs.

“The children are the real heroes,” he told Fox News. “I don’t feel like a hero in any way. It’s the children. That’s what this is about, helping the children.”

Still, Garcia doesn’t think his actions were that big of a deal. “The children are the real heroes,” he explained. “I don’t feel like a hero in any way. It’s the children. That’s what this is about, helping the children.”

That this kind of "simple" act on his part has received so much publicity tells a lot about the current world we inhabit. Instead of this being a rare act of doing the right thing, it would be wonderful if this happened on a regular basis with more people acting morally instead of being indifferent, apathetic, and uninvolved when hatred rears its ugly head. 

It is also a horrible reflection of how much hate exists on the part of many people for anyone they consider "different". 

Some are calling Michael Garcia a hero. I prefer to think of him as a courageous, compassionate, caring human being who stood up for another less fortunate person, in this case a small child. We need many more good people like him to come forward.

Connor Long, an 18-year-old Colorado resident who suffers from Down syndrome, wrote an open letter to Garcia, outlining his gratitude for an action that he says is very rare.

“It is unfortunate that the act of a decent, caring, everyday human being willing to do the right thing is so rare,” he wrote in the letter, which was published on the website of the National Down Syndrome Society. “People with special needs don’t need more heroes, we need more everyday people like you who are willing to do and say what is fair and supportive, simply because it is the right thing to do and needs to be done. That is not a special need – it is an ordinary need.”

It is unfortunate that the act of a decent, caring, everyday human being willing to do the right thing is so rare

Discrimination and hatred knows no bounds, no level of how low those who practice it will sink. 

The truth is anyone who treats another this way doesn’t think much of their self, either

For those who believe they are too superior than the rest of us, take my advice and crawl back into the cave you came from, just GO AWAY! 

SIMON MEYER- A FAMILY'S LOVING SON NEEDS YOUR HELP!

SIMON MEYER NEEDS YOUR URGENT HELP

A friend of mine told me about this brave young man pictured above, Simon Meyer.

Simon urgently needs a living kidney donor transplant in order to live a normal life. His current condition is rapidly deteriorating and his parents have issued a plea to help save him. He is quite ill and in need of a kidney transplant.

His greatest hope for a successful transplant is for him to receive this transplant from a living donor.

Please think of how you would feel if it were your Mom, Dad, Brother, Sister, Daughter, Son, or other close relative in need of this life saving gift. 

I can’t think of a much greater gift to give someone than a second chance at life. You are also giving them back to their family, as the family also suffers when a loved one is so ill.

LETTER FROM SIMON MEYER'S PARENTS:
Last spring our family made a widespread appeal, asking for someone to donate one of his or her kidneys to our son, Simon, as his transplanted kidney was failing. There was a positive response to our request; many people came forward to help. Although several individuals were tested, none of them were a suitable match for Simon.

A year has now elapsed, and Simon’s health continues to decline. So we are re-launching our appeal in hopes of identifying a donor for Simon, who wishes only to return to high school next fall – healthy enough to complete his senior year.

While you may or may not know my son or our family personally, perhaps you will be moved to step forward as a donor after reading this letter. We hope you might be willing to discuss this with your family, e-mail this note to your friends, post it on Facebook, or circulate it throughout your professional community. The more people who hear about Simon’s situation, the more likely it is that someone will offer to donate a kidney to him. Here is Simon’s story:

Simon will turn 19 on May 21. He was diagnosed with total renal failure at the age of nine and required a life-saving kidney transplant in 2004 just after he turned ten. Susan, his mother, had the perfect kidney match for him, and the transplant was successful. Unfortunately, within a year, Simon developed lymphoma and sustained a viral attack that damaged the transplanted kidney. 

Simon has marched on for nine years, despite dwindling kidney function, which has left him fatigued and with dangerously out-of-whack blood chemistry. He has managed to complete three years of honor-level work at Drew High School in San Francisco, where he also competed on the Varsity badminton team and excelled in science and improvisational drama. While he has been out of school this entire academic year, not well enough to attend or focus on academics, he is not sitting idle at home. 

Simon volunteers for two local science programs, teaching one class about animals and the environment, and another instructing children in engineering, using Lego Robotics activities. In addition he collects and trades rare pennies, is a self-taught pianist, and is an accomplished magician with a number of dazzling tricks in his repertoire.

Doctors agree that a living donor would give Simon the best opportunity to receive a new kidney, avoid dialysis and regain his health. The testing process ensures that the donor is healthy enough to donate and that his or her kidney is a match. With a successful transplant, Simon would return to high school in the fall and the donor would resume their life – as did Susan – with no change in activities or health, knowing that their selfless act gave life back to our precious son.

If you are between the ages of 25-50, with Type A or Type O blood and willing and able to donate a kidney to Simon, please contact me at:

themeyerfamily@mac.com. 

There is also a website that the family has created which contains daily updates and more information:

 

Click on HERE to read their Website.

Simon’s current condition necessitates an expedited process. 

It is our hope and intention to have the potential donor begin testing as soon as possible and to plan for a June transplant, if all goes well. All medical expenses will be covered by Simon’s insurance.

We are available to provide you with additional information and to connect you with our Donor Coordinator, who will schedule your compatibility blood test. 

We recognize the magnitude of asking someone to donate a kidney. Our family greatly appreciates your consideration of this appeal; we have been deeply moved by the continued support of our community of friends.

Above letter is written by Danny Meyer and Susan Mack.


I wanted to add some additional information below:

A person does not have to be so-called "medically perfect" to donate. Life goes on completely normal for anyone after they donate. The surgery is done Laparoscopically and the donor is usually home from the hospital in 2-4 days. They are usually back to work in 1-2 weeks.

A person can live a perfectly normal life with 1 kidney as your other kidney will adjust its functioning to act as there are two there. One in 700 adults are born with 1 kidney and do not even know it and live a perfectly normal life.

It has also been proven that people who are kidney donors tend to live longer than non donors because their health has been screened so closely prior to donation.

More than a 100,000 people in this country are in need of a lifesaving organ transplant, and an average of 18 people die every day waiting for a donor. It is estimated that the current waiting list would take 5 years to meet the needs of the current donors, yet the list grows daily.

To view the transplant waiting list in real time numbers, it is updated several times daily, you can click here.

Please spread this request from Simon and his parents as far and wide as you can.

For those of us who care, the value of one human life should be too great to comprehend -"Whoever saves a single life, it is as if he had saved the whole world."

HOLOCAUST STUDY REVEALS NEW INFORMATION-MY GOD, HOW COULD YOU HAVE FAILED SO MISERABLY??

 

I have been hearing that the Holocaust (known also as The Shoah) never happened, it was a hoax, the amount of the people murdered was grossly exaggerated, it is a fantasy created by the Jews, there are "similar holocausts" occurring all the time, and it is all one huge Zionist plot. These are words and statements that are alarmingly increasingly popular in recent years as the "truth".

The passage of time seems to dull the worlds memory and that of the human race about many things, especially when it is considered part of the realm of that which is deemed "over and done with". The world gets tired of hearing, viewing, reading about victims of anything whether it be war crimes, mass shootings, war crime atrocities, injustices, and the struggles of other humans to survive.

The Holocaust happened, a horrific, unbelievable, bestial, organized act of evil joined in by many to deliberately exterminate others simply for their religion or beliefs. Sadly it is not a hoax or an exaggeration of how many innocent souls were murdered by the Nazis, their collaborators, and the cowardly silence, indifference of the rest of the so called "civilized" world.

Keeping all this in mind, it is with great interest that I read today that Researchers from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum have concluded that over 42,500 Nazi camps and ghettos existed during Hitler's reign of terror between 1933 to 1945.

Perhaps you've heard of Auschwitz or Treblinka Nazi Concentration Camps and their gas chambers with massive ovens to burn the bodies, but probably not the Munchen-Schwabing camp in Germany. It was the smallest slave-labor camp run by the Nazis, with maybe a dozen people there at a time forced into manual labor, writes Eric Lichtblau in the New York Times.

Researchers at the The U.S. Holocaust Museum say it's now becoming clear that such facilities were far more prevalent than thought in Germany and throughout Europe during the war. They've identified 42,500 of various sizes, about six times the number they expected to find. The sites ranged from killing centers, to brothels, to ghettos, to labor camps. The Holocaust Museum team also created maps of the sites, which were scattered across Europe.

“Nobody even knows about these places,” says one survivor of five lesser-known camps, who now volunteers at the museum. “Everything should be documented. That’s very important. We try to tell the youngsters so that they know, and they’ll remember.”

Hartmut Berghoff, director of the German Historical Institute, said the research is simply astounding, reports The Times. "We knew before how horrible life in the camps and ghettos was," he said, "but the numbers are unbelievable."

The researchers' work may also help Holocaust survivors attempting to sue insurance companies or recover stolen property."How many claims have been rejected because the victims were in a camp that we didn't even know about?" said Sam Dubbin, a lawyer who represents survivors.

The total is far higher than most historians had previously estimated, according to The New York Times. Geoffrey Megargee and Martin Dean, the lead editors of the project, have compiled the thousands of sites in a multi volume encyclopedia that is being published by the Holocaust Museum. 

Each volume catalogs thousands of sites, providing a comprehensive history of the "living and working conditions, activities of the Jewish councils, Jewish responses to persecution, demographic changes, and details of the liquidation of the ghettos.

Megargee and Dean, estimate that 15 million to 20 million people died or were imprisoned in the sites that they have identified as part of this multi volume encyclopedia. (The Holocaust museum has published the first two, with five more planned by 2025.)

The truth is that the holocaust was the systematic annihilation of at least, if not more than six million Jews during the Nazi genocide. In 1933 nine million Jews lived in the 21 countries of Europe that would be occupied by Nazi Germany during World War 2. By 1945 two out of every three European Jews had been murdered.

While the term Holocaust victims generally refers to Jews, the Nazis also persecuted and killed millions of members of other groups they considered inferior (Untermenschen), undesirable or dangerous.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) states: “The Holocaust was the murder of six million Jews and millions of others by the Nazis and their collaborators during World War II."^[1]

Israel's official memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, established in 1953 is called Yad Vashem

 

Yad Vashem is located on the western slope of Mount Herzl on the Mount of Remembrance in Jerusalem, 804 meters (2,638 ft) above sea level and adjacent to the Jerusalem Forest. Yad Vashem is a 180-dunam (180,000 m²; 1,900,000 sq ft) complex containing the Holocaust History Museum, memorial sites such as the Children's Memorial and the Hall of Remembrance, The Museum of Holocaust Art, sculptures, outdoor commemorative sites such as the Valley of the Communities, a synagogue, archives, a research institute, library, publishing house and an educational center, The International School for Holocaust Studies. Yad Vashem honors non-Jews who saved Jews during the Holocaust, at personal risk, as the Righteous Among the Nations.

Yad Vashem, together with its partners, has collected and recorded (click here) here the names and biographical details of two thirds of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis and their accomplices. Two million more still remain unidentified 

In addition to Jews, the targeted groups included Poles (of whom 2.5 million gentile Poles were killed) and some other Slavic peoples; Soviets (particularly prisoners of war); Romanies (also known as Gypsies) and others who did not belong to the "Aryan race"; the mentally ill, the deaf, the physically disabled and mentally retarded; homosexual and transsexual people; political opponents such as social democrats and socialists; and religious dissidents, i.e. members of Jehovah's Witnesses.^[2][3]

Taking into account all of the victims of Nazi persecution, they systematically killed an estimated six million Jews and mass murdered an additional eleven million people during the war. Donald Niewyk suggests that the broadest definition, including Soviet civilian deaths would produce a staggering, unimaginable death toll of 17 million human beings.^[4]

Despite often widely varying treatment (some groups were actively targeted for genocide, while others were mostly not), it didn't matter in the end.

These victims all perished alongside one another, some in concentration camps such as Dachau, some as victims of other forms of Nazi brutality, but most in death camps, such as Auschwitz, according to the extensive documentation left behind by the Nazis themselves (both written and photographed), eyewitness testimony (by survivors, perpetrators, and bystanders) and the statistical records of the various countries under occupation.

The number of children killed by the Nazis is approximately 1.5 million murdered children during the Holocaust. This horrific figure includes more than 1.2 million Jewish children, tens of thousands of Gypsy children and thousands of institutionalized "defective" handicapped children of all religions.

Small Boy Captured
During the April-May 1943 Warsaw Revolt

To the Little Polish Boy Standing With His Arms Up

I. I would like to be an artist So I could make a Painting of you Little Polish Boy Standing with your Little hat on your head The Star of David on your coat Standing in the ghetto with your arms up as many Nazi machine guns pointing at you I would make a monument of you and the world who said nothing I would like to be a composer so I could write a concerto of you Little Polish Boy Standing with your Little hat on your head The Star of David on your coat Standing in the ghetto with your arms up as many Nazi machine guns pointing at you I would write a concerto of you and the world who said nothing .

II. I am not an artist But my mind had painted a painting of you Ten Million Miles High is the Painting so the whole universe can see you Now Little Polish Boy Standing with your Little hat on your head The Star of David on your coat Standing in the ghetto with your arms up as many Nazi machine guns pointing at you And the World who said nothing I'll make this painting so bright that it will blind the eyes of the world who saw nothing Ten billion miles high will be the monument so the whole universe can remember of you Little Polish Boy Standing with your Little hat on your head The Star of David on your coat .

III. Standing in the ghetto with your arms up as many Nazi machine guns pointing at you And the monument will tremble so the blind world Now will know What fear is in the darkness The world Who said nothing I am not a composer but I will write a composition for five trillion trumpets so it will blast the ear drums of this world The world's Who heard nothing I am Sorry that It was you and Not me .

(Poem by Peter L. Fischl) from the Archives of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Los Angeles, California, USA) 

The Germans kept meticulous, minute, detailed records, documenting every aspect of their systematic progress in annihilating the Jewish people and other non Aryan humans.  

No matter how someone tries to twist it, the facts say it all, but lies repeated often enough are believed by those who don't know the truth. The current sanitizing, minimizing of what actually happened during the Holocaust unfortunately becomes less real as the years go by, and the remaining Survivors, witnesses die.

This latest Holocaust research is yet another piece of evidence that can be used to refute the fringe movement that continues to deny the Holocaust took place, or that its terrible legacy has been exaggerated for political gain.

When Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces during WWII, General Dwight Eisenhower found the victims of the death camps, he ordered that all possible photographs and films be taken of the horrors he found. He did this because “somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened”. 

That time in history began immediately after the war ended, the bastards are many.

According to Bernard Lewis, the three most common positions on the historicity of the Holocaust are: "it never happened; it was greatly exaggerated; the Jews deserved it anyway. On the last point, some more enterprising writers add a rebuke to Hitler for not having finished the job."^[103]

In European schools, colleges and universities, the schools’ study program no longer list the Holocaust as part of the curriculum and members of the United Nations sit in rapt attention as Mahumud Ahmadinijad, the Iranian President and Holocaust denier stands on the podium bellowing his call for another genocide. A chorus of enthusiastic applause rises from the stands as the Jew hater concludes his harangue. Hitler has risen again and the world applauds.

   

In many Muslim countries the denial of the Holocaust has become an obsession and an art of erasing the story of Nazi evil against the Jews as part of their hatred of Israel. Plays, shows, books and publications spew the lie that the Holocaust was a myth, a story fabricated by the Jews in order to extract money and influence.

Denials of the Holocaust have also been regularly promoted in the United States and all over the world by a wide array of anti Semitic hate groups, pro Palestinian propaganda, educational revisionists in Universities, all kinds of people again looking for someone innocent to blame for their own problems.

                 

Catholic Clergy and Nazi officials (See below), including Joseph Goebbels (far right) and Wilhelm Frick (second from right), give the Nazi salute. Germany, date uncertain.

— Bayerische Staatsbibliothek

                

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Dead men will have indeed died  in vain if live men refuse to  look at them."   A MASS GRAVE IN THE  BERGEN-BELSEN  GERMAN CONCENTRATION  CAMP Corpses at Dachau Concentration  Camp Majdanek German Concentration  Camp- Lublin Poland-Crematorium Majdanek German Concentration  Camp- Lublin Poland-Crematorium Ovens MY GREAT GRANDPARENTS AND  CHILDREN-ALL HOLOCAUST  VICTIMS MURDERED  IN PONARY FOREST BY THE NAZIS  AND COLLABORATOR  NEIGHBORS  FROM THE TOWN THEY LIVED IN. The above photo is a poster that  our family circulated in local  European newspapers looking for  two children Gisia and Luba  from our family that were thought  to possibly have survived.  There were never any replies. I do not know what happened to  my family from my grandfather's side,  except that they  were all murdered in the Holocaust,  disappearing as if they  never were alive.  I do know a few things about some  of my family  from my grandmother's side, that  were researched extensively  by my uncle Joey.  My great grandparents and some  of their children  (in the photos above) lived in  Vilnius Lithuania,  they were farmers.  Over the course of the summer  in 1941, German troops and  Lithuanian collaborators killed  in a mass extermination  program the entire  Jewish population of Vilnius.  On the eve of the Holocaust  there were more than 60,000 and within a year  it was reduced  to zero, except for a few hundred  that escaped to fight with Soviet partisans. An eye witness from the village kept  a diary of all the things he saw  during this time  in the Vilnius area.  He was a journalist by the  name of Kazimierz Sakowicz  and the diary was eventually  published as the  "Ponary Diary-1941-1943- A Bystanders Account  of a Mass Murder  (Yale University Press, December 2005). This is what happened to my  family members.  On November 19, 1941,  several hundred Jews  were rounded up in Vilnius  by the  local police  and collaborators.  Included in this group of Jews  were my family members  shown above in the photos.  "They were taken to Ponary Forest,  a suburb of Vilnius.There was only a  small supply of bullets,  so the little babies were taken  from their mothers,  some still suckling at their  mother's breast,  and killed with rifle butts  by smashing their heads  until they were dead.  The rest of the people were then  rushed by the smashing of rifle butts  against them  and pushed into a freshly dug,  open large pit. The local police,  several Nazi soldiers,  and local villagers standing  above the pit,  then shot the people who were  lying in the hole.  A man in the pit resists,  says something  and points to the children  next to him,  they are all immediately shot.  A mother goes alone  to the edge of the pit,  followed by a teenage girl  in a red sweater shouting "mama".  A German soldier kills both of them  instantly with 2 rifle shots". The remaining Jews in the hole are then killed,  buried together in a mass grave as if they never existed, never were  human beings,  and as if this atrocity  never happened.  Somewhere in that unmarked  mass grave  are members of my family  murdered that  day in this massacre. Over the last 70 years  the Holocaust  has been memorialized, theorized,  condemned, denied,  revised, but its sheer scale of  how many people  were exterminated defies  ones imagination,  thereby threatening to turn it  into an abstract, less horrifying catastrophe. The human mind resists  visualizing the above atrocities  and the extermination of 6 million  Jews  plus another 14 million   people considered by the Nazis  as "unfit" to live,  for an unthinkable  total of 20 million people  exterminated. How does one put that  number into perspective  and grasp the meaning of  how large a number 20 million human lives  is in reality?  All of these dead, never to  live again,  never to have families,  future generations  never to be born, aspirations never  to be realized,  dead forever.  How does one explain why many  god fearing,  deeply religious people participated  willingly in the murder of other human beings or simply ignored it? Jewish Children marching  unknowingly to their death towards the  gas chamber  at Birkenau (Auschwitz II). Starving Children in Concentration  Camp-Too weak to work  and exterminated shortly  after by the Nazis My God, How Could You Have Failed     So Miserably?

 In 1945, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander, anticipated that someday an attempt would be made to recharacterize the Nazi crimes as propaganda and took steps against it:

"The same day^[18] I saw my first horror camp. It was near the town of Gotha. I have never been able to describe my emotional reactions when I first came face to face with indisputable evidence of Nazi brutality and ruthless disregard of every shred of decency. Up to that time I had known about it only generally or through secondary sources. I am certain however, that I have never at any time experienced an equal sense of shock.

I visited every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that "the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda".

Some members of the visiting party were unable to go through with the ordeal. I not only did so but as soon as I returned to Patton's headquarters that evening I sent communications to both Washington and London, urging the two governments to send instantly to Germany a random group of newspaper editors and representative groups from the national legislatures. I felt that the evidence should be immediately placed before the American and the British public in a fashion that would leave no room for cynical doubt."^[19]

Eisenhower, upon finding the victims of the death camps, ordered all possible photographs to be taken, and for the German people from surrounding villages to be ushered through the camps and even made to bury the dead. He wrote the following to General Marshall after visiting a German internment camp near Gotha, Germany:

The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where they [there] were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said that he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to "propaganda."^[20]

The list of Holocaust deniers is very, very long and their adherents are far too many. And those who forgive, forget and hide the horror are bound to repeat it.

Already forgotten by many are facts, such as that if not for the genius of fledgling American technology companies such as Innovative Business Machines (IBM) and its subsidiaries, who created a business alliance with the Nazis to sell, install, program the first computers for the Germans in helping them create enabling technologies, step-by-step, from the identification and cataloging of Jewish extermination programs of the 1930s to the Concentration camp selections of the 1940s of who were to be saved and who were to be slaughtered.

If not for the hundreds of millions of dollars in research by pharmaceutical Company's such as Bayer (yes like in Bayer aspirin) into advance nerve agents to render people unconscious in “gas” chambers for easy transport to the ovens, and a long list of other Company's who profited from the Holocaust, then the plan would have been impossible.

But most of all, if not for the willing and complicit support of the allies with the exterminations happening in these death camps, the Nazis managed to kill more innocent people by burning them in the concentration camp ovens in 1944 and 1945 than all the other years combined.

All photos of the camps taken by the allies since early 1940 were classified at the highest level of secrecy. Clear and unmistakable evidence since World War II has emerged that the allied command even went to the extraordinary length of tracking logistical movements and likely process rates of victims by tracking rail movements to the sacrifice camps. 

In the end, they permitted not one single bomb to be dropped on the Nazi Death camps during their construction and while they were in operation.

What should you remember? 

Remember that these were all innocent human victims, with names, faces, just like you. They did nothing to deserve what was done to them

 In the famous Diary of Anne Frank she said
 “If we bear all this suffering and if there are still Jews left, when it is over, then Jews, instead of being doomed, will be held up as an example.”
 

Next time, another mass group or groups of people could be targeted for their complete annihilation. As the late Simon Wiesenthal so eloquently put it, "It is not a written law that the next victims must be Jews."

Remembering the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust and its innocent human victims forever is a lesson, that humanity, at all cost, must always be present, preserved, and remain within us.

Never Again! The famous declaration heard around the world. 

Never again will Jews be herded like cattle, beaten and tortured, starved to death, hanged, shot, gassed and burned to ashes. 

Never again! Will a Holocaust be repeated.

Never again…you say? 

But it never happened. Did it?

DURAND FORD SR.-ANOTHER INNOCENT VICTIM OF STUPIDITY AND INDIFFERENCE

I am contacted by people who want me to write about their personal tragic situations as victims. Everyone wants their nightmare of reality to be told so that others can bear witness to the injustices that have been wrought on them. It is impossible for me to put each of their story's on this Blog but I do answer each of them providing whatever resources I can help with.

Sometimes I receive a particular story that begs to be written and often it is something that the media has either completely ignored or gives it a small space in its format. 

The abnormal has become the new normal, and barely an eyebrow is raised when injustice, even the killing of innocent victims, or some other tragic event takes place. 

Often there is nothing particular uncommon about the horrific callousness, incompetence, killing or just plain cruel indifferent, stupidity on the part of those who practice their evil, as a "normal" example of the manner in which they dispose, like used toilet paper, the lives of innocent victims and their families.

This is one of those stories that show again the ugly reality that has consumed an America without a soul,  where a human life is worthless, compassion no longer exists, and that it is acceptable behavior for most Americans who hide in denial dismissing the horrors of their fellow citizens by thinking, "it only happens to someone else, not me or my loved ones".

It will take you 10 seconds or less to sign this families petition below. Have the common decency to take that time and simply provide some support for what happened to their loved one. If it happened to them, it can also happen to you.

This is about Durand Ford Sr. who died due to "breathing problems" on January 1, 2013. Ford Sr. died 13 days short of his 72nd birthday, according to his obituary in the Washington Post. He was an Air Force veteran and worked as an "advisory neighborhood commissioner" in D.C.'s Ward 7.

Or did Durand Ford Sr. really die because  'It turns out that on New Year's Eve, nearly one third of D.C.'s firefighters called in sick, meaning ambulances sat empty in fire stations".

                
                    REST IN PEACE

                                        
You call an ambulance for an ailing family member. It takes a long time to get there. Your family member dies. You receive a bill for the ambulance. Sound impossible? That’s exactly what happened according to NBC News on Feb. 9.

"Jerry -

This past New Year's Eve was one of the worst nights of my life. That's the night my father died waiting for an ambulance that never came.

Around 1 a.m., my father was having trouble breathing, so I called 911. The nearest fire station is just one mile from our house in DC, at most a 5 minute drive. Firefighters arrived in just ten minutes, but no ambulance. 

I watched my father struggle to stay alive as we waited for Emergency Medical Services. And waited. And waited.

The ambulance that finally came 40 minutes later wasn't even from DC -- it had to come from another state entirely. By the time it arrived, my father was already dead.

Despite this, the DC Fire Department is charging my family $780 for an ambulance it never sent. I started a petition on Change.org demanding they waive the fee -- will you click here to sign?

So why did my father die waiting for an ambulance when there's a fire station just a mile from our house?  

It turns out that on New Year's Eve, nearly one third of DC's firefighters called in sick, meaning ambulances sat empty in fire stations. 

Long response times are a huge problem for ambulances, firefighters and police in cities all over America. The DC fire department needs to see that it can't just let my father die and then take my family's money.

My father was only 72 years old, a retired Air Force Veteran. He did not have to die on New Year's night. And my family certainly shouldn't be charged money for the reason he did.

Click here to sign my petition demanding that the DC Fire Department waive a $780 fee for an ambulance that never came to save my father.

Thank you, Durand Ford, Jr. of Washington, D.C."

The records show that the 911 call was made at 1:25 a.m. A fire truck from DC Fire & EMS arrived nine minutes later, but an ambulance was not available. DC fire did not call Prince George’s County for assistance until 1:47 a.m.

An ambulance was dispatched from Oxon Hill, MARYLAND, to Ford’s home in Southeast Washington one minute later. It arrived at 1:58 a.m. Durand Ford Sr. was dead.

Durand Ford Sr. died before the emergency vehicle arrived 33 minutes later, NBC Washington reports. The younger Ford said he was "angry" and "disturbed" over being billed.

Durand Ford Jr., of Washington, D.C., and his family was grieving, now they are seething. Ford has now received a $780.85 bill from District of Columbia Fire & EMS for the ambulance he had called Jan. 1 to treat his father. 


Obviously, there is a major management dysfunction that occurred within the Washington, D.C. Fire and EMS Department. It happens all the time in most cities across America but we just don't hear about it most of the time.

Ironically, as often happens in these situations, there is no management difficulty in billing the victim for the incompetence of the "system" that has harmed them.

It doesn't take much brains to anticipate that emergency workers, as many other types of employees, call in "sick" way above the the average amount during certain holidays, especially New Years Eve, as happened in this case. It happens in Washington, D.C. and other places every year, and extra staff are as a matter of standard operating procedure called in to insure that there is proper coverage.

Everyone has their health care nightmare stories, unfortunately this man lost his life. His son needs to tell this company to go pound sand over their bogus bill.


The above tragedy is a casualty of not caring enough about our own citizens to protect our lives. This is a time in America where our Congress incessantly claims it has no money to fund the crumbling infrastructure we live in and depend on, to save our lives.

At the same time bureaucrats fall all over themselves by using this as an excuse to save money, consolidate services to dangerously low levels, cheat, lie, kill us by indifference, steal, and bull shit their way through not being responsible about their sworn duties to protect the public.

The truth is that charity should start at home. 

Besides the enormous "pork barrel" domestic special interest waste of money that is pocketed by politicians and their cronies, we also have the albatross of Foreign Aid. Sure Foreign Aid is essential if we are to remain a world leader. But there is huge waste and stealing of billions of our dollars by the governments of foreign nations.

The Congressional Research Service released a report last month which shows that in 2010 the U.S. handed out a total of $1.4bn to 16 foreign countries that held at least $10bn in Treasury securities.

Four countries in the world's top 10 richest received foreign aid last year with China receiving $27.2m, India $126.6m, Brazil $25m, and Russia $71.5m.

Mexico also received $316.7m and Egypt $255.7m.

And yet despite the massive outgoings in foreign aid, the receiving countries hold trillions of dollars in U.S. Treasury bonds.

If countries can afford to buy our debt, perhaps they can also afford to fund OUR desperate needs for assistance programs in America so that the United States can have enough funds to help it's own citizens stay alive.

It's not about blaming Obama care, not about the middle class or the poor in our Country needing to suffer more cuts in the services provided to us, and it is certainly NOT about budget deficits caused by Social Security, Medicare, and other false diversionary reasons that have no credence, except to polarize people.

Your life and those of your loved ones mean absolutely nothing to those in positions of power. Stop being manipulated into believing the horse shit propaganda that you are being fed by the politicians and the phony media talking heads.


Face the FUCKING TRUTH! It's about waste, corruption, and mismanagement by those who pull the strings of our "leaders" to suit their own insatiable, inhuman, financial and political greed. 

Get pissed at them, not each other!

GRIEF DOESN'T HAVE A TIMELINE

This article speaks the truth. Neither attempts to standardize the so-called stages of grief nor construct ("term") limits apply to most people. Each person's grief journey is different and "normal' for their particular situation "You don't get over it. You get through it". Anyone, whether a Professional or lay person who attempts to "judge" or label those who experience grief by intellectual categories, words that tie everything up neatly, does a disservice to those who grieve, by not understanding the permanent forever pain when we lose a loved one, especially a child. 

Grief doesn't have a timeline

By Joan Wickersham

Boston  Globe Correspondent- February 08,2013-Reprinted on this Blog.

"Recently at a cocktail party, I met a woman whose husband had died about four years ago. She mentioned him a lot. Not monologues, but frequent references to him — things he’d said, jokes he’d made, his foibles, his likes and dislikes. Some of it was in the past tense and some in the present. Theirs had been a long marriage — over 30 years — and clearly it was still going on.

Here’s another story. 

A woman I know, also happily married for many decades, was devastated by her husband’s death from cancer. A year later, though still missing her husband, she was surprised to find herself falling deeply in love with an old family friend.

Grief is a lot weirder than we think. It doesn’t follow a logical course or conform to any predictable timetable. Yet we persist in making comments about how other people are doing it. And worse, we are constantly, secretly convinced that because our own grief doesn’t proceed according to our expectations, we must be doing it wrong.

It’s time to get over it. Time to move on. Time to get on with your life. We say these things to and about one another all the time. And we say them to ourselves.

“I don’t seem to be able to get over this,” a friend said of her father’s suicide, which happened just over a year ago.“That’s because it’s so recent,” I said.
She looked relieved — oh, good, someone got it, she wasn’t crazy — and dismayed: She’d been hoping that maybe it would be over soon.

Like a lot of other people, I was appalled when I read about the American Psychiatric Association’s proposal to identify something called “complicated grief disorder” — intense, acute grief that persists for more than about six months after bereavement. The rationale is that since most people get over a death in six months (um, excuse me, but who are these people?), the new diagnosis would allow people who struggle with prolonged grief to get treatment. “Get treatment” presumably means “get insurance to pay for treatment.” Do we really need to pathologize grief and stigmatize mourners in order to pierce the obtuse heart (or heartlessness) of an insurance company?

I asked a psychiatrist to translate the term “intense, acute grief.” He said, “Miss Havisham.” I understood: One end of the spectrum would be someone like the Dickens character, jilted by her fiancé, who spends her life in her tattered, yellowed wedding dress, brooding over the rotten remains of the wedding feast and grieving her lost love by punishing everyone else.

But every grief is different, just as every death and every mourner is different. When my father killed himself in 1991, I sort of kept functioning, and I sort of didn’t. I took care of my son, kept the house going, met my writing deadlines. I also stopped sleeping. I gained 30 pounds. I was numb, and it went on for years. It wouldn’t have helped to be told I had a disorder, or to have what I was feeling labeled as “complicated grief.” I knew damn well it was complicated. I didn’t need anyone judging how long it was taking me to get over it. What I needed was the people — including the psychiatrist — who said, “Of course.”

When my mother died four years ago, after a long illness, the grief was different. It was hard and sad, but it felt straightforward: I missed her.

We shouldn’t pathologize grief; we should let it be whatever it is. I look around at friends who’ve had losses, and I see how long, and how powerfully, many continue to feel grief years later. It doesn’t mean that they’re paralyzed and not going on with their lives. But it does mean that grief can be a continuing presence.

Grief is unpredictable, widely variable, inconsistent. It’s weird because it’s supposed to be weird. We don’t cry when we think we ought to. We keep crying when we think we should be done. We watch the Red Sox game the night after the funeral. We don’t change the sheets for a month. We tell the junk man to take everything. We save an old voice mail for years. 

We get over it when we accept that we’ll never quite get over it. 

 It takes as long as it takes."