Halloween a la criolla: un cuento cubano

Antes de que nos mudáramos a Estados Unidos, mis padres intentaron establecer la tradición de Halloween en nuestro barrio habanero. Recuerdo que nos llevaron en grupo de niños a tocar puertas y pedir golosinas, y había que explicar a los confundidos vecinos de qué se trataba. Entonces, nos daban barras de dulce de guayaba y puñados de kilos (centavos) prietos. Recuerdo que por aquel entonces, alguien compuso una guaracha dedicada a Halloween. Ya comenzaba la fecha (10/31) a figurar en el Calendario Nacional de Parrandas Oficiales (invento mío), cuando llegó la Revolución y acabó con todo lo que oliera a propaganda Yanqui. Eliminaron Halloween, pero nos dejaron a los fantasmas-- siempre que fueran fantasmas CUBANOS, claro, o al menos importados de Latinoamérica. Nada de Jinetes Sin Cabeza en el Valle Hudson. No sé por qué en Cuba, tantos cuentos de fantasmas--al menos, los que conozco--tienen lugar en el campo. Difícil comprender como esos paisajes soleados y verdes, bordados de lomas y palmeras, esos cielos tan azules, pudieran inspirar temor a nadie-- y es que de noche, el ambiente cambia y se vuelve más bien tétrico. ¿Será la falta de luz eléctrica? El caso es que nadie quiere que le agarre la noche dando tumbos en la oscuridad de los bosques y quizàs toparse con el fantasma cuyos chiflidos presagian muerte,o con la que llora a gritos por los hijos que mató, o con La Luz de Yara, alma en pena del Cacique Hatuey que flota por los campos de Guantànamo. Nadie quiere anochecer atravesando a caballo una llanura donde la luna lo perfila todo en plateado y negro y no se escucha màs que el silbido lúgubre del sijú (buho nativo). Nunca me encontré en semejantes circunstancias; mi familia sólo salía de la Habana para visitar a mis abuelos maternos en la provincia contigua de Pinar del Río. Entre las promesas que mi padre no cumplió fue la de llevarnos algún día de paseo por toda Cuba --partimos para Miami antes de que eso pudiera ocurrir. Debí conformarme con las historias que mi hermano mayor traía de sus excursiones escolares a las provincias, cuando los estudiantes acampaban en centrales (haciendas azucareras) abandonados. Mi hermano tejía cuentos de murciélagos revoloteando entre los tinajones,cuentos de campanas que tañían a media noche en ausencia de un ser humano que las hiciera sonar, cuentos de sombras extrañas en la oscuridad. Pero el cuento campestre que más me impresionó fue uno que hacía mi padre, de cuando aún era soltero y visitaba la finca de unos amigos. Alguna noche calurosa salieron a cabalgar en grupo, a modo de paseo y para tomar el fresco. Ya se habían alejado de la casa por varias millas cuando a lo lejos divisaron un bohío (vivienda campesina) todo iluminado y hacia allá los impulsó la curiosidad. A medida que se acercaban, podían escuchar los acordes de un guateque (fiesta campesina) en progreso. No anunciaron su llegada para no interrumpir la fiesta; más bien, se limitaron a mirar por las ventanas. Era una boda. Adentro, músicos con maracas, guitarra y un tres (guitarra de tres cuerdas dobles) animaban el ambiente. Los hombres lucían guayaberas blancas; las mujeres, vestidos de algodón a colorines. Todos bailaban. "Las guajiras sin compañero bailaban con otras guajiras", contaba mi padre, a quien por algún motivo le hizo mucha gracia ese detalle. Al centro de la estancia se veía una mesa larga, cargada de manjares típicos: yuca con mojo, tostones, arroz congrí --y un enorme lechón (puerco) que sin duda habían asado al aire libre por el día. Se acercaba la media noche y tras debatir si entrar a la fiesta,o no, el grupo de jinetes optó por marcharse. Al día siguiente contaron su aventura al dueño de la finca, quien pareció sorprenderse y les informó que por allí no había otra vivienda en millas a la redonda-- y que el bonío en cuestión estaba abandonado desde hacía muchos años ya. Incrédulos, reiteraron lo que habían visto, y el hombre ofreció acompañarlos al mismo lugar, para demostrar que era él quien tenía razón. Todos se encaminaron, ahora de día, hacia el bohío en controversia. Al llegar, vieron, no la alegre vivienda de la noche anterior, sino una casucha despintada, con puertas y ventanas tapiadas por tablas de madera. Un bohío abandonado por largo tiempo, al parecer. Para mí lo extraordinario de este cuento es que lo narraba mi padre, un hombre serio e incapaz de recurrir a la charlatanería para entretener a nadie. Y que lo hacía en una voz normal y serena, cual si estuviera describiendo un día de lluvia, y no una noche de fantasmas.

The U.S., Arabs, and 9/11: General Sherman Remembered

As I write this, Israel, with help from the US, is waging war on Arabs, and Arabs are retaliating. And some of us who remember the bad old times are waiting for the other shoe to drop--how will we have to pay for THIS? Years ago, shortly after Arabic terrorists crashed two jet airplanes into the twin towers in lower Manhattan, I happened upon a collection of New York Times Magazine essays about the tragedy. The authors all sounded quite shaken by the rawness, newness, and atrociousness of the thing. Their horrified voices reminded me of a poem my grandfather taught me: "Vinieron los Sarracenos, y nos molieron a palos, que Dios está con los malos, cuando son más que los buenos." It was about how Arabs expelled Visigoths from Spain in 711 by grinding them to a pulp, because "God is with the bad guys when they outnumber the good". Although its authorship is in question, some scholars say Visigoth King Roderick wrote it. The New York Times essays had that same plaintive tone, same theme of Arabs grinding good guys to a pulp. But one particular essay stood out to me. It was by a Southerner, or maybe a longtime transplant to the South, comparing 9/11-- not to the conquest of early Spain by the Moors--but to one particularly egregious episode of the American Civil War: Sherman's March to the Sea. In different parts of the United States, people feel differently about what matters. Maybe that's why 23 years later, I've been unable to retrieve the author's name from the annals of New York Times history online. Has he been forgotten? Maybe. This writer was a Southerner spinning a tale of regional angst-- so do New York Times readers really care, 23 years later? I'm probably one of the few who does. Because I'd spent considerable amounts of time down South--specifically, Georgia--visiting relatives, bunking with them--and absorbing local perceptions of Southern culture and history. Salient in their thinking was that Northern Army General William Tecumseh Sherman Lives On (and On, and On), well over 100 years after his violent conquest of Georgia during the American Civil War. And that in their eyes, he was still a villain of the first order. It's true that Atlanta has changed in the two decades since I read that NY Times essay. The city is now 47% Black, and Blacks don't talk about Sherman. He didn't burn down THEIR property because,as you'll recall, they had none back then. But the 43% of whites who huddle in nearby commuter towns and in the leafy neighborhoods that ring downtown Atlanta are still talking about what happened to their forebears. Then there's the rest of Georgia, where Whites outnumber blacks by nearly 20%, and those Whites will remind you that in 1864, Sherman cut a 60-mile wide swath of death and destruction, from Atlanta in Northern Georgia, to Savannah, 285 miles South, by the Atlantic Ocean. Sherman's infamous March to the Sea lasted a month; his goal, to demoralize and eliminate any support for Southern Armies opposing him in the region. Which he did. Southern property was destroyed and white civilians butchered or abused along the way. Southern tombs were desecrated at the end of the road, in Savannah. The North won the war and President Abraham Lincoln won reelection. Revisionist historians now try to whitewash the sheer brutality of Sherman's March to the Sea by calling it "cruel but necessary." White Southerners, however,continue to see Sherman through the collective memory of their victimized ancestors. People still talk about which towns were razed or left standing, whose great-great granddaddy's barn got burned to the ground, which mansions were totaled and which merely raided by Northern invaders.Then there's the (unverified) assertion that even now, 160 years later, you can see physical traces of the catastrophe from the air. And way above that, above the folk tales of woe, above the smoldering embers of incinerated "legacies", the lament still floats: "why did this happen to us?" Southerners seldom mention that between 17,000 and 25,000 enslaved blacks were freed by Sherman during the March to the Sea. Southerners may want to forget that they held slaves, that they habitually owned, bought, sold, mistreated and even killed, other human beings,that they kept them dispossesed and in abject ignorance. They may want to forget, but others remember. What's more, my New York Times writer suggests that the Advent of Sherman was some sort of biblical vengeance wrought upon Southerners by a God outraged by slavery--and by the blind arrogance of those who still don't understand what their people did to "deserve" the March to the Sea. And here's where my essay writer's comparison to 9/11 comes in. He writes that Americans wring their hands and search for karmic justification to September 11, 2001, when Arabic terrorists crashed four planes into American soil, killing thousands of innocent civilians in Pennsylvania, New York, and Washington DC. We lament: "Why us? Must be because those Arabs hate our freedom and our Democracy". Yet grieving patriots seldom acknowledge how the US has traditionally interfered with Arabic countries stealing their resources, manipulating their governments, battling their religion, supporting their enemies. Does any of that ring a bell? Antebellum Southerners were enslavers of black people; modern Americans have shared in the attempted colonization of brown people.Thus, 9/11 and the March to the Sea could be interpreted as forms of karmic payback. Of course, that would justify neither. One kind of barbarism doesn't absolve another; all who suffered and died during both 9/11 and the March to the Sea are at least worthy of compassion-- no matter what they, their ancestors or their relatives may have done. The point is not to assign blame, but to try to see the nature of a tragedy, its sources, its whys and wherefores,so we may be better equipped to countenance despair and temper it with understanding.

Cognitive Dissonance

This is NOT a pro-Trump MAGA diatribe. Far from it. Trump and most Republicans, with their fascist politics and shameful grandstanding, aren't even an option for sane voters in the USA Presidential Elections in November 2024. We won't discuss them here because they're beyond the pale, beyond the realm of possibility for functional governance. Trouble is, Democrats aren't too far behind. They'll tell you something but you'll be seeing something else. Is the Democratic Party trying to gaslight you for your vote? You know that things aren't as great as Biden claims when large corporations are doing massive layoffs. And nobody, least of all the corporate Democrats who are now running things, objects to this. After all, that's the way of capitalism: a downsized corporation becomes more profitable, the stock price goes up, stockholders get happier, richer, fatter. But Wall Street and Main Street are not the same thing, stockholders are a comparatively small elite. What about the many wretches who lost their jobs in the downsize? Where do they go? Where's the wide open labor market Democrats keep extolling? Where are the many jobs that the economy has supposedly added? Whatever jobs ARE available--do they offer decent pay and benefits? Nope. But nobody will tell you that, nobody will admit that steady employment is fast being replaced by minimum wage gigs or three-month contracts with temp agencies. And that even

those minimum wage gigs are hard to come by; I invite you to apply for a job online. If you seek a position walking dogs, you'll have to compete with 150 other applicants for the privilege of scraping dog shit off the sidewalk. You'll soon discover that major employers want college degrees from schleps who will be required to stack shelves or bag groceries. Worse, you'll need two of these lousy jobs because the pay won't go very far, now that prices are soaring. That's another example of cognitive dissonance: if as Democrats claim, inflation is abating, why are we always broke? There's evidence of this kind of doubletalk and deception everywhere. If the US is the "good guy" in foreign policy issues, why are we contributing to the genocide of millions of Palestinians? Or why has Biden been ignoring the mess at our Southern border? Or the disruptions provoked by masses of immigrants streaming into our cities unsupervised, unfunded, unvetted? These people are draining our resources and making our streets more dangerous, while Biden just lets the problem build up and Progressive Democrats advocate for leniency at the border. None of this represents our opinions or serves our needs as USA Latino voters: We don't want our lives overrun by these strangers, we need border control and financial aid to our cities, but nobody is listening to us. Because Biden wants to ignore the true nature of his base: it is largely composed of brown people-- Latinos, Arabs-- and educated white kids. And let's not forget the black voters who revived his anemic bid for the Democratic primary in 2020. Unfortunately, Biden craves voters who are white old men like him, but those are already taken. Trump has got them, and they ain't going nowhere, as far as anyone can tell, though this doesn't seem to discourage Biden. It will take more than that bit of reality to dent his determination to remain on the throne. Biden, you see, is a guy who feels outdone by the young black upstart who managed to get to the presidency before he did, a geezer who just wants to be President once more before he drops dead, and fuck everything else. Despite his folksy charm, his famous gift for compassion born from personal suffering, he strikes me as an arrogant old coot. Efforts to make him look warm and cuddly fall flat, licking ice cream during photo ops won't make him a nicer person; his nasty nature slips out when he interacts with rank-and-file journalists. Biden has managed to squelch all divergence of opinion within his party to make himself the only choice for the presidency in 2024. Additionally, it's not customary or easy to primary an incumbent, and a progressive third party candidate might split the vote in favor of the GOP. What to do? Biden is IT and he plays on this, because he knows that Trump shouldn't even be an option with non-crazy voters. So I guess we will have to vote in Uncle Joe, the lesser evil, while refusing to believe his bullshit and working to force a more righteous conscience onto his second term.

My Date with a Girl: A Valentine’s Day Tale

I divorced twice, back in the days when nice little Latinas didn't move out on their parents unless they were safely married. To do otherwise was disreputable, so I married both times to get away from my parents--specifically, my mother, a creature straight out of Joan Crawford's meanest maternal exploits (Read "Mami, dearest", April 2021). So, I never really enjoyed one of those idyllic, Hallmark relationships of mutual adoration so celebrated in song and poetry. I've had the dubious privilege of having my heart broken, of feeling that sort of temporaty insanity that typically washes over the lovestruck, and that has to be enough for me. Because mostly, I've loved men who didn't love me back and vice versa. I suspect that many other women are in the same boat though they would never confess it, because all these years after "spinster" became an outdated term to describe a single lady, it's still shameful for a woman not to be someone's object of desire. Like it or not, a woman's value is still largely measured by whether some man wants her, so we tend to choose loveless liaisons rather than being alone. I've seen gorgeous, accomplished women marry wretches just so they can be married. It's been said that if you can't get what you like, you better like what you can get, but I say it's more dignified to be alone than to hook up with some freak. Yes, it's always possible for just about anyone to scrape the bottom of the barrel and come up with some reject to marry. (And if calling undesirable men "wretches", "rejects" and "freaks" seems cruel, remember how cruel men can be when discussing females among themselves). I'm reminded of the stories about women sitting outside prison gates, waiting to take home newly-freed strangers. Likewise, if I wanted a partner badly enough, I could head over to Manhattan's Roosevelt Hotel and pick out a new arrival from the stream of indigents crossing the border. Or I could pair off with my adoring roommate, a dwarf with a yarmulka and a leer. Or with one of the psychos who board at the local hospital (I once had a suitor like that). Or I could try to steal my ugly neighbor's handsome artist boyfriend (he's willing)--and support him, like she gladly does. But I'd rather hold out for someone who doesn't look like Quasimodo, is in reasonable mental and physical health, unattached, straight, respectful and solvent. Age is no problem--I don't mind younger guys and they don't seem to mind me (the love of my life is 18 years younger). And anyway, I'm approaching the time when men my age or older start dropping like flies. My requirements may seem like a low bar for older single women, but they're really a tall order in today's seller's market of mature dudes, also pursued by younger women looking for sugar daddies. So I'm still waiting for my prince. Point being, anyone can get a guy if she's willing to pay any

price. Even knowing this, Valentine's Day is still my most hated holiday besides New Year's Eve (which I call "Compulsory Be Happy Night"). Valentine's still depresses me, making me feel like a loser, as though I'm missing out on something vital, as though I've been excluded from some important club. On this note, I have to wonder why merchants never bothered to expand the concept of Valentine's Day beyond sexual love into all kinds of affection, say, love for your siblings, or your favorite old teacher, or the unfortunates you help when you do volunteer work. That would be more lucrative for the economy and more pallatable for people who are not coupled off. But back to me. I have found a way around my anemic romantic history, I may not have the memory of a great forever love to my credit, but I do have the memory of some single, magical evenings with wonderful people I never saw again. By "people", I mean men, of course. A friend once said that becoming a lesbian is like "giving up". Anyway, I'm not attracted to women and have never been with one, which is what makes this next Valentine's Day Tale so weird. It was a Friday or Saturday evening, and I was drinking alone in a semi-seedy bar accross from the Roosevelt Island Tramway station on 2nd Avenue. Two stools away from me was one of the most beautiful women I'd ever seen, with straight, shoulder length black hair and a navy blue business suit. Her voice was low and smooth, her demeanor poised and intense-- I don't remember her smiling once during the whole evening. And I don't remember what we talked about, but at some point, she said something along the lines of "let's get out of here", and I accepted. We drove to Greenwich Village, to a little blues club much in vogue at the time. We sat at the bar and she slid her arm accross the back of my seat, without touching me. She was paying for everything and I let her. I realized that she had adopted the role of the man, though there was nothing masculine about her. It was more like like play-acting; I don't think she was gay, and there were no sexual overtones to her attitude. She was just being a gentleman and I felt strangely comfortable with that. Eventually, my mystery woman drove us back to the place where we had first met; our goodbyes were brief and curt, no mention was made of ever meeting again. But if she had proposed it, to this day I really don't know what I would have said.

Is it “Me, too”, or “He, too”?

One day, during the weeks leading up to my retirement from Manhattan Criminal Court, I was leaving the building when I noticed a clusterfuck of sorts in a hallway, off to one side. A ring of court officers was blocking someone in their midst from public view, and I craned my neck to see who it was, before the court officers shooed me away. Despite the rudeness of these glorified mall cops, the best thing about working at the fabled 100 Centre Street address is that you get to witness a veritable parade of disgraced celebrities file by, on their way to jail or exoneration. This particular celebrity straightened out, as though sniffing the air, locked eyes with me, then gave me the once -over. It was Harvey Weinstein, the Hollywood mogul of multiple- sexual-harassment-accusations fame. I was amazed not only that someone in such deep shit, someone literally ringed by his captors, could still be spirited enough to feel like checking out strange women at the very site where his infamy was being trumpeted, but also that he'd be staring at someone like me, someone way past the age when men stop ogling women, and way below the beauty standards of the Hollywood babes he supposedly harassed. In the end, he was found guilty of a total of five felonies in California and New York,and sentenced to serve a total of 39 years in both places. After our little encounter in Manhattan Criminal Court, I have to suspect this guy's a dog and probably guilty as charged. I'm assuming not all men are like that, but the species still poses a mystery for me. I find men amusing, I love their company, but I've never been able to sustain a long-term relationship with one-- I think they demand too much and give back too little. I even have difficulty getting along with my own brother. Being a woman, I do know more about women, which makes me question the wholesale legitimacy of the "me, too" movement. Successful men too often fall prey to ambitious women who feel they are owed privileges in exchange for sex. And when these women are not rewarded for putting out, they accuse the guys of sexual harrassment. Also, women often cry sexual harassment to escape blame mostly in situations where they have screwed up and are about to suffer the consequences. This gives feminism a bad name, but it happens because the social pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme. As a society, we are now more than willing to see women --ALL women--as helpless victims and ALL men as ruthless predators. Sexual harassment has become the ultimate no-no. Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo committed all kinds of misdeeds, yet it was his sexual harassment of female underlings that finally got him driven from office. These days, it's easier to get away with murder than with grabbing someone's ass, because when it comes down to he-said versus she-said, we automatically believe the woman's version of events. Fortunately, some awareness of this venomous trend is beginning to emerge; one female lawyer with offices in San Francisco and New York has made a career of defending men wrongly accused of sexual harrassment by women. I know about this because I tried to hire her (but she was too busy). My son had been falsely accused by some bitch who was nasty, incompetent, and about to get fired, and who tried to smear him as a way to save her own job. She claimed he had touched her inappropiately when nobody was looking. The truth is that she'd been trying to pressure my son onto picking up her slack at work, she was doing it in a disparaging, hateful manner, and he complained about it to the Human Resources Department. So she accused him of sexual harassment. Meanwhile, for whoever thinks I'm making this up, know that there are written reports of her nastiness on file somewhere. Before attacking my son, she'd accumulated an official track record as a problem employee, the kind who, in government agencies, gets transferred from place to place before finally being let go. This is standard government practice,it takes a lot to get fired from public employment of any kind, but now her agency was finally giving up after affording her countless opportunities to straighten out. Her latest supervisor had been readying the paperwork to fire her for incompetence, laziness,and general goofing off when she accused my son of sexual harassment. Her timing was deliberate. Firing her after she'd launched a sexual harassment complaint would have been seen as retaliatory, so the termination process was halted pending an internal investigation. We lived through tense moments between the start and end of this inquiry; we realized that a false accusation could stay on my son's record and ruin the rest of his life, and that all too often, reality has nothing to do with the truth. It's more the luck of the draw, like: are the work site investigators male or female? If female, are they predisposed against men? Are they more interested in being fair than in collecting male scalps for their own careers? Will they find it easier and safer to decide against one man than to buck the overall trend of the times, which heavily favors women? "Just be yourself during the interview", recommended my brother the lawyer."Once they get a measure of your character, they'll realize that the accusations ar made up". Truer words were never spoken; my son was victimized not only because he'd spoken up for himself against a woman, but because he was an easy target. He is kind and guileless; I have never seen him be snarky or disrespectful to ANYONE. I've never heard him say anything even mildly teasing or suggestive to a woman. Even if all that were false, I wouldn't care. To me, my son is not just a man; he is a person I carried for 9 months and took 12 hours to bring into the world. Forget "me, too", there can be no stronger allegiance, and most Latinas will agree. I notice that most "me tooers" are white women. Conversely, most Latinos are mama's boys. They place mom on a pedestal and she returns the favor by staying fiercely loyal. I'm happy to report that in the end, the truth did set my son free, and that most of his coworkers--of both sexes--rushed to testify as character witnesses in his defense. Best of all, his accuser was fired, and as long as that episode remains on her record, as long as she can't obtain job references in order to move on and wreak havoc someplace else, she'll have been neutralized. And she'll be unable to victimize another poor, unwitting man, at least for some time to come.

Israel and the US vs. Palestine: Latinos, call it for what it is

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SCAM LIKELY

I never dreamed that my relationship with the telephone would become so complicated.But it has, and as a result, I barely use my phone anymore. It's partially my own fault. I hate the tyranny of service contracts of any kind, the unwelcome surprise of extra charges, the cutting of service if I don't pay by a certain date. So I have a pay-as-you go arrangement, which I've managed, tenaciously, almost desperately, to retain through the various mergers and acquisitions of the company that issued it. Of course, the corporate world hates this type of freewheeling arrangement, they want to hold you by the short hairs in every possible aspect of your life. Thus, they "grandfather" in the older, more liberal agreements for their original users while eliminating them as an option for more recent subscribers. Meaning that only if you've had pay-as-you-go for some time can you continue to use it--albeit, with new limitations. In my case, they took away my caller ID, and that's how I found out that nowadays, people generally avoid unidentified callers. If they can't see a name on the little screen,they just don't answer their phones. So if I want to talk to a human being, not a recording, I can't use my no-name cell phone. I must resort to my landline, which features,not my real name, but one of my more ridiculous screen names as caller ID. Don't ask. I don't know how it got there or how to change it, and as long as it functions as caller ID, I don't care. I can resign myself to the situation because I'm also on its receiving end--as are millions of telephone users, at least in the United States. These days, I mostly use my phone for texting, not speaking, because it allows for more time control and filtering of unwanted calls. I don't answer my phone unless the caller ID reveals a person or a company I recognize. As far as I'm concerned,all else can go fuck themselves because these days, nobody calls to help you or give you anything. On the contrary,it seems everyone has their hand out. But God forbid you should call anywhere for aid or information on some service or item you've acquired --you probably won't get a human being on the line, and the proffered websites will be next to useless. Narrow in scope, some won't even include spaces for written complaints or online chats with LIVE customer reps. In general, you'll only experience "live" calls if they are intended to make you part with your money. Everybody who calls you wants something, and the sales schemes are as aggressive as they are ingenious. The caller ID often shows what looks like a "real" person's name, intended to make you wonder if it's somebody you know but maybe forgot about--and trick you into answering the phone. Pitches come under the guise of offering you something useful "for free"-- but only, as it turns out, if you'll buy this or that. I once had a caller promise me valuable news about my labor union's new, improved benefits. She was a fast talker and I couldn't get a word in edgewise. She roped me into scheduling a phone video conference with a "specialist", while deflecting all my questions about who she was and what she represented. It was only after receiving a text confirmation that I detected, in small print, a company name I didn't recognize, and I looked it up online. It was a supplemental insurance company--they wanted to sell me INSURANCE, using my labor union for cover! (I'd like to know who, in my labor union, approved such a scam.) Of course, I cancelled the video conference. I've also received pirate phone calls in Chinese (again, don't ask) and some rapacious calls even come from people I know, or know about. Dentists and audiologists call to corral me into appointments I do not need. Bank "advisors" call to sell me new credit cards or investment schemes. A physician's office once called me to propose a "concierge" service, whereby I'd pay them a monthly amount whether I saw the doctor or not.Most recently, I got a phone call urging me to reschedule a doctor's appointment that I never made to get checked for a mysterious progressive ailment I didn't know I had. Thankfully, my caller ID labels some of these annoying phone calls as "Scam Likely", so I can head them off at the pass. I hope that's one service that won't ever get lost in the shuffle. My advice: Save your breath. Don't answer your phone if there's no caller ID or if you don't recognize the name it presents.