May this year that is about to begin here and within the lives of all on earth bring peace and hope where there has been despair and that we never forget that we are one.

As you have wisely instructed those in need, so I return it to you.

I pray this night and all days and nights that those whom watch over me watch over you until that service you volunteered for to be in this life is complete.
If you can find a spot that is warm and can hold your own.
I want you to envision a ball of golden white light above your head. This is God's Love for you.

Call upon this light to shower down upon you. Envision this light like a shower washing over your whole being as it is passing through your skin, tissues and bones. Follow the course of this light down through your body to your feet, out your fingers and out of the bottom of your feet into the Earth.

Call upon Gaia to absorb this light that is traveling through and around you and replace it with Her healing Energies. The light that is passing has served its purpose. The Light of God's Love is replenishing you.

Like an infinity symbol on its side you are being recycled with healing restorative energy.

Call upon God's messengers to keep you safe and warm and with perseverance.

Call upon Gaia to steady you and soothe those discomforts for your tasks are not complete. If they were you would surely know it.

My friend give thanks for the blessings of life in all its myriad forms...even the ones that really irk you. You are sovereign, my friend and know you are always in good company even if it is not seen or heard. I can only share this from personal experience.

You have a great heart. You are needed and when we are in pain we think less of ourselves where we can be of greater service. Don't give in! Let us and others give to you!

I bow to the light that is in you and that is within me.

TANF (Temporary Aid to Needy Families) Including Pets

If we take our penchant of the love of animals to the zenith of devotion we will recognize that homeless people are always risking their own safety and well being for the sake of their beloved family members. This is inhumane for both the pet and person. It is time that we offered assistance to the pet whose owner cannot take care of her safety and provide a hospitable shelter, which includes their pets.

People who have animal friends will admit that they value their relationships emotionally, spiritually and physically as the highest priority and therefore this must be extended by rights to all living beings, including the homeless families that include these members. Temporary Aid to the Family could include all one’s loved ones and provide a place and adequate care for the pets to thrive.

In the decade that has passed since I have extolled the responsibilities of caring for the people of the world I was not as certain about this subject until I listened to a story of a couple who could not find housing because of their two dogs. I realized that this is unjust because they care for their animals the same as many of us care for our children. Therefore a merger must be found of TANF and the care and maintenance of all God’s creatures on earth, including those who are in the custody of homeless people.

What must be done is to find a list of places that will rent to people with pets the same as we would procure a list for other tenants. We also have to provide a subsidy for their welfare that includes any emergency and length of stay that is conceivable. The best way to accomplish this end is to create a fund that would specifically address the need for housing for pets for the families and individual who owns a pet. A contract could be permanently established with the Max Fund to care for the animals on an emergency basis and over a longer period for those whose lives are unclear. A means of tracking the length of stay that is warranted would be determined and a subsidy for the pet’s welfare would then be given to the family.

Issues like food, veterinarian care, and boarding would all be assessed and included in the arrangement for this stipend for the pet owner who has lost their home. John Parvensky, the CEO and President of the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless was once asked, “What the reason was for a swimming pool,” at a family housing program at a new construction site? He replied, with his usual simplicity, “Because it is fun.” A person, whether homeless or not has a right to a standard of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that includes the comfort and vitality of one’s animal friends.

A Tribute to a Warrior of the Spirit

The Next Decade Will Be the Best

The morning will come, a new day beginning, providing both integrity and energy that has for decades nourished the world, making this paradise with all of its frailties function. Responding with conscious verve and pounding determination; with steadfast rocking of the cradle of democratic action, your wisdom shines in your spirit. Your gaze holds fixed on compassion and love for humanity, which does not dwindle.

We are grateful for your mantle of loving kindness and courtesy shown to all who you touch, with your awareness and charm. Your gait is measured in your no nonsense nature. Your wit and wisdom converge in your bearing over delicate matters and in creative strategies concerning how to organize and serve.

With the passage of generations many have come and left their mark but your effect is indelible. We are honored in celebrating your birth and life’s work. We are aware that your efforts in this life will not dissipate in our memory or our community.

You're aware that people who have been homeless have died in droves across the world this year. The memorials for those who have died have been astounding in that numbing feeling that you are left with when you realize that you knew many of those who have died and that your name will one day be
read. We are working on a state wide memorial for those who have died.

Four hundred died in Philadelphia, where I am from.
One hundred and sixty died in Denver and the surrounding communities.

The winter Solstice awakens the sense of the fragile nature of existence and the reminiscence of a time and place that was safe and warm.

We are robbed of our senses and refusing to die measure our steps carefully. We come to a place where we are fretful that we will be next and that no one will know that we have died and anyone will remember us.

This photograph is the model for the memorial from a person at the State Capitol three years ago. This person represents all of us in the awkward and difficult moment of our abandonment.

Go to the image of
Man on a bench jpg in facebook under Randle Loeb.

Link: http://forkfingerschopsticks.com/rum-swizzle-–bermudian-holiday-drink/

Rum Recipe: Swizzle - Bermudian Holiday Drink

According to several sources, swizzle is the National drink of
Bermuda. If you’ve had it, you know why – it’s divine. The rum, citrus
and ginger make for a refreshing libation.

My friend Ernest whose family hails from Bermuda says
swizzle is a favorite at Christmas and New Year’s festivities (as well
as the Cricket World Cup in the summer months). Frankly, after making
this drink, it has already become a staple for me and for entertaining.

Click for more & for recipe. [link: http://forkfingerschopsticks.com/rum-swizzle-–bermudian-holiday-drink/

ForkFingersChopsticks.com

Cooking and eating, one ingredient at a time

“Percy Ellis Sutton, Eminent Politician, Dies at 89”
From the New York Times Sunday December 27

By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: December 27, 2009
"Percy E. Sutton, a pioneering figure who represented Malcolm X as a young lawyer and became one of the nation’s most prominent black political and business leaders , died in a Manhattan nursing home on Saturday, his family said. He was 89.
Marissa Shorenstein, a spokeswoman for Gov. David A. Paterson, confirmed Mr. Sutton’s death but said she did not know the cause, according to the A.P. News Service.
Mr. Sutton stood proudly at the center of the struggle for equal rights. He was arrested as a freedom rider; represented Malcolm X as young lawyer; rescued the fabled Apollo Theater in Harlem; and became a millionaire tycoon in the communications business to give public voice to African Americans.
He was also an eminent politician in New York City, rising from the Democratic clubhouses of Harlem to become the longest serving Manhattan borough president and, for more than a decade, the highest black official in the city. In 1977, he was the first seriously regarded black candidate for mayor.
His supporters saw his loss in that mayoral race as a stinging rebuff to his campaign’s strenuous efforts to build support among whites. But David N. Dinkins, who was elected the first black mayor in 1989, called Mr. Sutton’s failed bid indispensable to his own success.
“I stand on the shoulders of Percy Ellis Sutton,” Mr. Dinkins said in an interview.
President Obama also issued a tribute.
“Percy Sutton was a true hero to African Americans in New York City and around the country," Mr. Obama said in a statement. "We will remember him for his service to the country as a Tuskegee Airman, to New York State as a state assemblyman, to New York City as Manhattan Borough President, and to the community of Harlem in leading the effort to revitalize the world renowned Apollo Theater. His life-long dedication to the fight for civil rights and his career as an entrepreneur and public servant made the rise of countless young African Americans possible. Michelle and I extend our deepest condolences to his family on this sad day.”
Edward I. Koch, who won the 1977 mayoral vote, said only complicated political maneuvering stifled Mr. Sutton’s bid. He explained that incumbent Mayor Abraham Beame did not step aside as Mr. Sutton had expected, but ran himself, costing Mr. Sutton votes.
“I’m glad God intervened and I became mayor,” Mr. Koch said in an interview. He called Mr. Sutton “one of the smartest people I have met in politics or outside of politics.”
Mr. Sutton’s business empire included, over the years, radio stations, cable television systems and national television programs. Another business invested in Africa. Still another sold interactive technology to radio stations.
Mr. Sutton had an immaculately groomed beard and mustache; tailored clothing; and a sonorous, slightly Southern voice that prompted the nickname “wizard of ooze.” Associates called him “the chairman,” and he liked it.
Percy Ellis Sutton, the last child in a family of 15 children, was born on Nov. 24, 1920, in San Antonio, Tex. His father, Samuel Johnson Sutton, was born into slavery and became principal of a black high school. His mother, Lillian, was a teacher.
The 12 children who survived to be adults went to college, with the older ones giving financial and moral support to the younger.
S. J. Sutton, an early civil rights activist who did not use his first name for fear it would be shortened to Sambo, farmed, sold real estate and owned a mattress factory, funeral home and skating rink — in addition to being a full-time principal.
Percy milked the cows, then rode around San Antonio with his father in the same Studebaker used for funerals, distributing milk to the poor. He liked to attach strings to cans to pretend to be a radio broadcaster. He was an Eagle Scout.
At 12, he stowed away on a passenger train to Manhattan where he slept under a sign on 155th Street. Far from being angry, his family regarded him as an adventurer, he said.
His family was committed to civil rights, and he bristled at prejudice. At 13, while passing out N.A.A.C.P. leaflets in an all-white neighborhood, he was beaten by a policeman.
He took up stunt-flying on the barnstorming circuit, but gave it up after a friend crashed. He attended three traditionally black colleges without earning a degree. Their present names are Prairie View A & M University in Texas, Tuskegee University in Alabama and Hampton University in Virginia.
During World War II, he served with the Tuskegee Airmen, the famed all-black unit in the Army Air Forces, as an intelligence officer. He won combat stars in the Italian and Mediterranean theaters.
• He entered Columbia Law School on the G.I. Bill on the basis of his solid grades at the colleges he attended. He transferred to Brooklyn Law School so he could work days. He worked at the post office from 4 p.m. until midnight, then as a subway train conductor until 8:30 a.m. He then reported to law school at 9:30. He kept this schedule for three years and became a lawyer.
• This punishing pace so annoyed his wife, the former Leatrice O’Farrell, that she divorced him in 1950 — only to remarry him in 1952. In between, he married and divorced Eileen Clark.
• Mr. Sutton’s survivors include his wife, Leatrice Sutton; a son from their marriage, Pierre; and a daughter from his second marriage, Cheryl Lynn Sutton.After graduating from law school, Mr. Sutton made what he termed “a major miscalculation.” He enlisted in the Air Force because he mistakenly thought he had flunked the bar exam.
• He returned to Harlem in 1953 and opened a law practice. The initial going was tough: he had to work at supplemental jobs that included scrubbing floors.
• Mr. Sutton threw himself into the civil rights movement. He represented more than 200 people arrested in Southern protests. He heard Malcolm X preaching at the corner of 125th Street and Seventh Avenue. He introduced himself, telling Malcolm he was his new lawyer.
• Mr. Sutton represented Malcolm beyond his assassination in 1965, when cemeteries refused his body. Mr. Sutton arranged for his burial in Westchester County.
• “Had it not been for Percy, I don’t know where Malcolm would have been buried,” Mr. Dinkins said.
• Mr. Sutton represented Malcolm’s daughter Qubilah Shabazz when she was charged in 1995 with hiring a man to kill Louis Farrakhan, the Black Muslim leader she believed was involved in her father’s killing. Charges against her were dropped after she agreed to psychiatric treatment.
• In 1997, Ms. Shabazz’s son, Malcolm, then 12, set a fire that killed his grandmother, Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X’s widow. Mr. Sutton and Mr. Dinkins teamed up to represent him. At the end of each hearing, the lawyers made “a motion to hug” the boy.
• Mr. Sutton took many controversial stands. When Mike Tyson, the boxer and convicted rapist, returned to Harlem from prison in 1995, Mr. Sutton was there to greet him. After the Rev. Al Sharpton refused to pay damages for slandering the prosecutor in the Tawana Brawley case, Mr. Sutton helped pay the fine. Mr. Sutton was arrested for civil disobedience in protesting the shooting and killing of Amadou Diallo, a Guinean immigrant, by four police officers in 1999.
• From the early 1950s, he worked in political campaigns, both for others and himself. Mr. Sutton lost seven times in 11 years in challenges to regular Democrats for a state assembly seat, finally winning by a slim margin in 1964. He was elected spokesman for the 13 black assemblymen.
• In 1966, Mr. Sutton served as permanent chairman of the Democratic State Convention, the first time in American political history that a black had been selected as permanent chairman at a state convention.
• During Mr. Sutton’s one term in the assembly, he helped establish open admissions at the city university; liberalize divorce and abortion laws; and get funding for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.
• In 1966, the Manhattan borough president, Constance Baker Motley, was appointed to a federal judgeship. The city council in September 1966 chose Mr. Sutton to replace her. He was elected two months later to serve the remaining three years of her term, then re-elected twice, in 1969 and 1973.
• Mr. Sutton began investing in communications companies in 1971 when he and a group of prominent blacks bought The New York Amsterdam News, New York’s largest black newspaper. Critics said the borough president was using the weekly to further his own political career, but he insisted he wanted to “liberate” blacks by expanding their influence in the media.
• (Skeptics couldn’t help noting that it didn’t exactly subvert Mr. Sutton’s political career when an Amsterdam News writer wrote that he had never seen “a more diligent or competent public official.”)
• Mr. Sutton sold his stake in the paper in 1975, calling it “a political liability.”
• In 1971, Mr. Sutton and others bought WLIB, a New York AM radio station, making it the first black-owned station in New York City. In 1974, they bought WBLS-FM, which soon became their main profit center with music that appealed to blacks, whites and others.
• Mr. Sutton’s group, which he named the Inner City Broadcasting Corporation grew to own, at various times, 18 radio stations in other cities, and cable franchises in Queens and Philadelphia. Mr. Sutton’s principal partner in the various deals was Clarence B. Jones, a close associate of Martin Luther King.
• In 1981, Inner City bought the Apollo, the celebrated Harlem theater famed for helping launch careers like those of Ella Fitzgerald and James Brown, at a bankruptcy sale for $225,000. Mr. Sutton presided over a $20 million renovation, which included building a cable television studio used to produce the syndicated TV program, “It’s Showtime at the Apollo.” The theater reopened in 1985.
• In 1992, a non-profit group took it over after Mr. Sutton said he could no longer afford to run it. But he continued to produce a TV show, which seemed to draw on the Apollo mystique, though it was taped elsewhere. That sparked a tangled legal brouhaha, with New York State investigating members of the Apollo foundation’s board and Mr. Sutton. All were cleared of wrongdoing.
• One of Mr. Sutton’s major controversies was his role in helping his friend, Charles B. Rangel, unseat Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr. in 1970. Ebony magazine said Mr. Sutton’s role in easing out the congressman known as “Mr. Civil Rights” — however stained he may have then been by ethics charges — “did little to endear him to blacks in New York and across the nation.”
• Mr. Sutton insisted that he and Mr. Rangel were not to blame.
• “We didn’t beat Adam,” he said. “The times beat Adam.”
• Mr. Sutton’s great disappointment was losing his bid for mayor. He had been one of the closest allies of Mayor Beame in the mayor’s 1973 race, and had reason to hope that Mr. Beame would back his own bid in 1977.
• Mr. Sutton saw his path to victory as combining minority support with the white liberals and organization Democrats who had supported Mr. Beame. But the mayor delayed in making a decision on running, causing Mr. Sutton to tell The New York Times, “It’s rather castrating to be waiting on others for your future.”
• Mr. Beame finally threw his hat in the ring, but Mr. Sutton persisted in his strategy of appealing to whites by taking strong anticrime stands and championing white ethnic neighborhoods. But polls suggested that New Yorkers saw mainly the color of his skin. This, to Mr. Sutton, was “the most disheartening, deprecating, disabling experience.”
• Forced to appeal mainly to minority voters, he brought in black politicians from around the nation. It wasn’t enough.
• Mr. Sutton finished fifth, and Mr. Beame third. Mr. Koch defeated Mario M. Cuomo, the future governor, in a runoff.
• Mr. Sutton blamed the media as much as his opponents. “It’s racism pure and simple,” he declared.
• But Mr. Sutton never lost his charismatic smile. He liked to walk through the Uptown neighborhood he had first visited as a 12-year-old runaway, and greet people by name.
• “Hey, Mr. Harlem!” they responded."

Link: http://www.ForkFingersChopsticks.com

Rum Recipe: Coquito - Puerto Rican Holiday Drink

For the holidays we’re mixing things up around here. Literally! We’re not “cooking” so much as we’re getting our holiday groove on, imbibing on one of the top selling spirits in the world .. . . rum. First up is coquito. A deliciously creamy coconut elixir steeped in spices: cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and vanilla. Coquito is standard during the Christmas season in Puerto Rican households, along with pasteles (savory pastries stuffed with meat), pernil (roasted pork shoulder), arroz con gandules (rice with pigeon peas), and tostones (fried plantains).

Much like eggnog, coquito is a rich holiday drink meant for sipping and savoring. A little goes a long way, especially because it’s loaded with several tasty ingredients like coconut milk and sweetened condensed milk.. And, it contains a good dose of rum. Click for more & for recipe. [link: http://forkfingerschopsticks.com/rum-coquito-puerto-rican-holiday-drink/ ]

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Cooking and eating, one ingredient at a time