It is a beautiful cool sunny day.  We have just returned from a short trip to a place I read about in a novel.  Big Stone Gap Virginia.  It was an empowering trip.  The described places  were all there and the imagination came alive.  The warmth of the people  was not exaggerated, and we found  genuine kindness in our travels.   We have traveled many places since we have been together and I am always awed by the sheer numbers of people that walk on this planet.  Houses, upon houses, farms upon farms, towns upon towns all filled with the lives of people who what to make life better for their kids, and still  have enough food for dinner.      I want what they have, not the poverty and desperation and fear of never gathering enough to make it thru the month, I want the strength and resilience they proudly display. 

The country I grew up in and have loved with all my core of being has been a big disappointment of late.  The sense of connectivity is broken.  The speed of changing values swishes past my view leaving this raw destruction in its path.  Like an emotional tornado ripping values out of the mind and dropping them in some polluted stream of behavior.  We grasp at every morsel of hope and pretend it is change.  We close our eyes to the possibility of being again misled into chaos and rush wildly ahead brushing aside the signs in our path.

We stop being kind, and self sufficient and caring and we grasp at imaginary brass rings that promise heapingrewards, failing to recognize that our greed will deprive others. We fail to accept  that  behavior   makes us connected, not those promises.   We call people names to defend our choices never recognizing that the real loss is the diminishing of another human being.  We drink a glass of wine at dinner and cry imaginary tears for the world of destruction we are beyond understanding.  

I am looking around for the place that will  help me connect  again.  Not the phony navel pondering nonsense that passes for spirituality.  The real depth of concern of how I might actually make someones life more livable, and enjoy the result of that change.   I wish we could all spend a day in Big Stone Gap Virginia and take away the calm kindness and hand it out as we take our daily walk.  I dream a world where everyone is useful.

I got out my Susan B. Anthony coin today and tucked it into the "Chi" bag I carry around.  I need all of the karma I can muster right now.  I reviewed the impact that women of great wisdom had on my life and vowed to take the lessons learned from Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer and Susan Faludi and refuse to sit down, shut up and vote.

Yet again the boys get to play their way.  Geraldine Ferraro had it right.  If Barak Obama was not black and a man he would not be where he is today.  No way would a one term white female Senator get catapulted to the nomination with little or no qualifications other than charm and looking good in jeans.   Would not happen...ever.  I am still reeling from the reporter who was told "I will get to you in a minute SWEETIE".  

I am told that if I bolt the party or stay away from the polls I will only be hurting myself with SCOTUS appointments that will take away my rights.  WHAT RIGHTS? I think the men have quite successfully taken away my rights  for a long time now.  I will spare you the list of inequalities.

We point and snicker at the FLDS (thank Maggie for the awesome correction in her comment) women in the long dresses and funny hairdos that affirm their subservience to men who tell them what to wear, how to wear it and when to bend over and get fucked, and who will be doing the honors.   Today they don't look quite so pitiful.  Looking at the John Edwards endorsement we can all hear the words.  Sit down, shut up and Vote for the boys who know what they are doing.

Women are a vast power in this country and they refuse to take the responsibility to make that power known.  This is not about Hillary Clinton, this is about the sexist tone that has determined the nomination of the Democratic party.  If Senator Obama had been depicted in the same racial tones the uproar would have been heard on Mars.  Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, Ted Kennedy all could have stopped the insults at any time by denouncing  sexist remarks.  Funny that Nancy "CZAR" Pelosi is among the silent.   Pulling the ladder up behind her she gives the perfect example of why women are treated like second class citizens.  Women hate to see a woman cut loose from the control of men.

.  "We have met the enemy and the enemy is us"

Want to start a new party anyone?

 
 A character on a TV show last week ask a co worker " Are you in your bad place?"  The reply was a nod and the character stated "so am I",  It was classically funny and pretty much a nail on the head moment. .  

I feel empty of viable choices and would far prefer to have a clear path that could excite my passions.  I know from past experience that "this too will pass" and it is simply a germinating time when seeds....oh how I have come to hate that analogy...begin to germinate.  

Two times in the last two years I have had to face the very real possibility of not continuing in this life.  It is a heady experience that presses you to make the very most of every moment.    I actually feel guilty when I waste time. and I am particularly annoyed if something I have invested valuable time results in what I determine is failure, as momentary as it may be. 

Writing this I was reminded of going to a Pete Seeger concert that put me on the FBI list, but also led me to friendships with many of the people who were so instrumental in changing the outcome of the Viet Nam war.  Ed McCurdy not only wrote a poem for my wedding, he wrote the song that became the rallying cry for the end of the war.  "Last night I had the strangest dream".

I know he had  quite a few days when he was in his "bad place"
Thank you Ed, for reminding me everything ends, even bad places.

 

But, it is more important to remember this:

It's not who we are, but what we give

It's not what we say, but what we do

It's not our accomplishments, how many initials we have after our names,
nor how many zeros there are in our net worth

It is how we love, and only how we love, that counts.

It is not how long we live, but how well we live

and what we leave behind for those who come after.

If years could be meted out based on what one gives to the human
community, Senator Kennedy would live forever.

But, wise men know that mortality is life's best friend

only those who disdain this gift

will dread the passage.

Death is our alarm clock

ever threatening to ring

and remind us that we don't have forever.

But, there are some, like Sen. Kennedy,
who need no reminding who have walked with purpose
who have lived for the greater good.

There are those who embrace laughter in the face of pain
peace in the face of war
light in the face of
darkness and,
in the end, this is all that matters.

"If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed."
- Mark Twain

If Mark Twain were with us today I am absolutely certain he would read blogs.  His facination with people and the way they think would have left him no other choice.  I read blogs, it is a habit I acquired slowly as the threat of war increased after 9/11. Previously I had only read newspapers, magazines and articles.  I started advocacy by contacting various government officials and hounding congressional offices with what I felt were unjust governmental decsions.  At least one staff of my current Senator has come to addressing me by my name.  She is very polite and has at times even been kind enough to point out I am not alone in my struggles to get my elected officials to listen. ....but I stray

My early blog reads were a list of sites that provided measured insight into what  what was really happening in regards to Iraq, Afghanistan and the "war on terror" and the decisions of our government.  I have sources I trust that have given complete and detailed information ignored by mainstream media because the truth was complicated and did not fit in a 30 second sound byte..  I disseminated the most urgent  to a group of people I had collected over the years thru email contacts.  The subject matter was eclectic and eventually led to hard choices of how many were really important.    Over the past few years I had tried to simplfy the process but ended up reading over 45 RSS feeds a day, sometimes more than one time a day when the fur was flying. Early this year my heatlth took a serious hit and the project stopped.  I am now recovered and have continued the reads for my own curiosity.  The curiosity  I think I would have shared with Mark Twain. 

After many years of what seemed like a total immersion baptism I have come to a conclusion.  They start out being about the news, they are intent and make every effort to be factual.  Sadly they end up being more about the blogger than the events..  Not all blogs, not all bloggers, but a good many have succumbed to taking their place in history as an important contributor.  Oh to be  Woodruff and Bernstein. 

This fateful election has polarized the blogosphere.  What was gown to be our newest and best source of truth has become less informative.  Many bloggers became the Fox news of the Democratic party.   Many lost the focus that made them experts in their field.  Most just tire of the daily grind of trying to get someone, anyone to recognize the depth of the rampant insanity that grips this country. It is an impossible task to address the speed at which events are related.

I have started to blog, not to be read, but to be reasoned.  To learn perspective and balance and generosity to those who disagree.   Most of all to regain my sense of humor.  You just have to have a  Mark Twain's sense of humor.


"If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed."
- Mark Twain

http://justworldnews.org/archives/002925.html

Names

Posted by Helena Cobban at May 25, 2008 04:59 PM

On Friday, I was back in Charlottesville and in the late afternoon I biked to downtown to do a couple of errands. There, right next to the magnificent "Free Speech Monument" on our downtown pedestrian mall was the Virginia version of the "Eyes Wide Open" exhibit, set up over this Memorial Day weekend by the Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice and other congregations and groups.

In case anyone's unfamiliar with EWO, it is a simple display made up of two portions. One portion is combat boots, lined up as in a (personless) parade, with each pair tagged with the name of a US soldier killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. The other is a group of just-regular-people's shoes, babies', kids', women's, and men's shoes, each tagged with the name of a civilian Iraqi casualty of the current lengthy war. You can see some good photos of the last time EWO was set up in Charlottesville, here.

EWO started off as a nationwide project. I wrote about participating in the nationwide EWO exhibit on the National Mall in Washington DC in May 2006, here. At that point there were 2,428 pairs of combat boots and the logistics of setting them out, guarding them (including from rain), then packing them up and trucking to the next place was becoming huge. Soon after that, they broke them up into state-level collections. In a sense, this helps "bring home" the cost of these wars even more effectively.

Friday, when I found them down on the C'ville mall, I slapped my forehead in exasperation. I had forgotten it was this weekend they were doing it-- and I'd been meaning to volunteer to help them read the Iraqi names. Because what my good friends in CCPJ were planning to do was every couple of hours have a solemn reading of the names of all 117 of the Virginians killed in Iraq, alternating with the names of "a small sample" of the many Iraqi civilians killed in the war.

Here is a listing of the names of 141 Virginians killed in the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

But it was okay. They were about to do a reading of the names and I was pressed straight into service. Someone had produced a list of some of the Iraqi war dead. That was what I read. The way we did it, standing on the small granite platform there with a sound-system, was a woman called Kelly would read the name of a Virginian casualty; Christine, one of the main organizers of the exhibit, would strike a bell; I would read the name of an Iraqi casualty; Christine would strike the bell again... and we'd repeat the whole process, name after name after name.

We tried to keep the pace slow and dignified, to give each name some full seconds of thought and attention. I found it far more moving than I had expected. The sun was pretty hot. We got into the slow rhythm of the reading and stared out over the rows of black empty black combat boots, or turned to stare at the circles of civilian shoes.

Name after name after name.

Punctuated by the eery chiming of the bell.

Just three days earlier, I had been in New York City, listening to a very expert and attentive reading-out of names. Those were the names of half of the entire Master's-degree graduating class at Columbia Teachers' College. Eight hundred names! Each read out with good attention-- but a little faster than our reading at EWO on Friday.

The Columbia TC graduation was held in Riverside Church, the same soaring, Gothic-style edifice in which, in April 1967, Martin Luther King Jr., started speaking out publicly against the war in Vietnam. It gave me goosebumps just now to press the audio button you'll find on this web-page devoted to the sermon, and hear Dr. King's voice, and realize he was standing in the very same space we were sitting in, Tuesday.

Each of those names read out at the TC graduation corresponded with one of the bright-faced and slightly excitable mass of blue-robed Master's candidates packed into the pews in front of us... Young people in their twenties or early thirties, most of them; young people of now-proven accomplishment and skills who were looking forward to making new contributions to society as they apply those skills in the years ahead. Young people with hopes and dreams, fears and concerns, loved ones, and many of them-- like my daughter, Leila-- with their own distinguished professional record already.

Young people visibly bursting with energy and life.

So then, just three days later, I was myself a reader-out of names. Each of these names, however, corresponded not to an excited young person on the brink of a new phase in her or his life, but to a loss.

A loss that is worse than nothing, unimaginably worse than "just" a pair of empty boots or shoes, though the empty footwear helps represent the loss.

A loss that rips a lasting hole in the lives of loved ones, rips a hole in the universe.

A loss that need never have happened. A loss that should never have happened.

Name after name after name, after name after name after name...

We used to go to Boston more often.  I miss those trips. Listening to  "Inca Sons" play outside Borders, drinking a restorative latte, after hours in Filene's Basement searching for bargains.   They have opened Filene's Basement stores all over the country, we have one here, but it is not the same as actually going down into that maze of endless opportunities for that perfect purchase.  

I have stood on the USS Constitution, running my hands along the smooth sun warmed deck rails.  I have followed the "Freedon Trail" and stopped at the Granary Burial ground where signers of the Declaration of Independence are buried along with the the parents of Benjamin Franklin and Elizabeth "Mother" Goose.   I am always filled with pride and patriotism when I visit Boston.  The kind that makes you cry with gratitude that you are living in the greatest nation in the world.  Well....make that used to be living in the greatest nation in the world. 

I just don't get it.  We had it ALL and we had it NOW and we watched it taken away without so much as a whimper.  During the past eight years we have watched our independence and constitutional rights stripped away with barely a 30 second sound byte on what passes for news.  Habeas Corpus, gone without a sigh of indignation. Torture shown, verified and lost to the place they hide the things they would rather we did not focus on.  Real live human beings held without charges in sub human conditions at Guantanamo or prisons yet to be discovered.  WE the people have accepted that our phone calls, emails and other correspondence are read, listened to and can be used against us if we are lucky enough to actually have a trial.  WE the people have allowed our government to destroy a country that did nothing to us.  NOTHING.  WE the people have let war criminals go free and given our money to men who make obscene salaries.   WE the people have let the credit companies take us to the brink of financial destruction while continuing to borrow from other countries to increase our national debt.   Without a whimper.  Without any protest that could be heard if you were not present.  WE gave it away.

This week we celebrated Memorial Day.  I have no problem honoring the dead soldiers, I just have never been quite sure why we do that.  It might be a whole lot easier to honor them by keepting them alive to begin with.  We might give them adequate care when they come home, regardless of which war.  We could make sure the nursing homes full of the ones who came home from Viet Nam are actually fed and cared for properly. 

I wonder at all of the blood thirsty Hillary haters who foam at the mouth about a woman who chose to run for the presidency.  I suspect there will be equal vitriolic spewing for Obama when his time comes.  What are you people thinking?????   You have had eight years of the worst president EVER and you didn't say boo.  

The tales we hear daily of the latest gaffe, She said, he said, they did, all read by mindless attractive talking heads, or complicated by the rantings of pundits just sure the next poll will prove them right just once.  WE the people listened to them to get us into this war and now you want to listen to them about who to elect president?

I love a good fairy tale, but if you all don't mind I think I will stick with Elizabeth "Mother" Goose 1665-1758.  http://www.mothergoose.com/Rhymes/Azrhymes.htm.  Many of which are no less scary, but I do know how they come out.

Ashes ashes, we all fall down. 

I met your son today.  He was sent out on a service call to intstall a new product.  During the course of the installation we talked to pass the time.  We exchanged views on a number of subjects including race, unions, elections, health benefits, and family.   The conversation just seemed to flow from one issue to the other without any discomfort or guarding of words.  It was a wonderful experience for me, and I think he was equally pleased we talked.   I told him frankly that he had provided me with a sense of hope that his generation is well equipped to handle the messes we are leaving them.

He said he and his mother had been estranged for about three years.  Apparently she took it poorly that he had gotten a girl pregnant and married.  Her disapproval was swift and painful and she cut him out of her life totally.  He sends pictures of the child that he secretly knows she would love.

I would like to be able to talk to his mother. I would tell her he has a wife and a three year old that he clearly adores.  He supports his family by working hard and doing his job .  He is well informed, takes his responsibility as an American seriously and is grateful that he works where he is given full medical benefits.   He is amazed at what his union is able to accomplish for him and his co-workers, but is unhappy when they got a job back for someone who deserved to be fired.  "It reflects poorly on all of us" to permit that behavior.  

I want to tell his mother he is a genuinely good person and she is missing the joy and pride that seeing a grown child can bring.  I hope she sees that her intense involvment with her job and her morals are never going to replace the relationship she has chosen to end.

I was to proud to have had the opportunity to be even a short hour of his life.  

It reminds me of something the Dalai Lama said " never miss an opportunity to talk to anyone"  

I took that opportunity today, I hope someday soon she will find the door and walk thru the joy of knowing a really fine, good person who is someone to be proud of .