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Posts Tagged ‘brainwashing’

Charles Winecoff

I Didn’t Quit Drinking to Get High On Hope and Change

by Charles Winecoff

With the holidays fast approaching, I thought it might be a good time to jot down some thoughts on drinking.  Or, more specifically, not drinking – booze or Kool Aid.

Recently, I celebrated my eighth year of sobriety.  I have 9/11 to thank for that; it was shortly after the attacks that I began attending meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous with regularity.  I’d been to AA once before, at 25, when a DUI arrest landed me in “the rooms.”  But at the time, I still had 15+ years of drinking to get out of my system, plus a mid-life crisis to go through that sent me flying out to La-La Land (which is where I was when the towers fell back in my home town).

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I’m proud I haven’t had a drink since 2001.  After spending decades trying to flee my “issues” like an adolescent hamster on an existential wheel, the fog gradually lifted from my brain and I stopped running.

They say when you drink, you stop growing emotionally, that you’re almost in a state of suspended animation – normal on the outside, stunted on the inside.  Sobriety gets the spiritual gears moving again.  Suddenly, years of pent-up, delayed maturation caught up with me – real fast. (more…)

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Posted Nov 23rd 2009 at 5:03 am in Culture, Featured Story, Politics | 85 Comments

Charles Winecoff

DENIED: Bigotry of the Obamatrons

by Charles Winecoff

Recently, at the office (a place I sometimes affectionately refer to as Obama Central), I made the mistake of printing out a Washington Post editorial that questioned the foreign policy expertise of our new Commander-in-Chief.  By the time I got to the printer to pick it up, someone else had already seen it - and stamped “DENIED” across the top of the page in red ink.  Next to that was scrawled, “RIGHT WINGER GO HOME.”

The first thing that went through my mind was: cross burnings.  The second was: children are evil (my workplace is overrun by hundreds of twentysomethings).

I tried to be rational.  Whoever defaced the page had no way of knowing who had printed it out – just as I had no idea who the defacer was – so it wasn’t personal.  Still, it was hurtful.

And it was bigoted.  The defacer didn’t know anything about me – my political affilitation, my sex, my race, nothing.  Die hard Democrats read mainstream editorials, don’t they?  So much for the good will of Dave Matthews’s “American Prayer” starring Idi Amin and Perez Hilton - and Michael Moore’s patronizing, post-Election email exhorting his followers to be kind to their Republican friends (as if they have any). (more…)

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Posted May 4th 2009 at 12:34 pm in Featured Story, Politics | 16 Comments