JOSEPH'S COAT ROSE

This was a climbing rose we had in our yard years ago. Honestly I don't remember If we planted it or if it was already in the yard. I've going through old files, cleaning out for the newer computer and ran across this. It's called Joseph's Coat. Finally died of old age and we coule never find another that looks like this one. Pops right out of the page doesn't it?

THE BEAT GOES ON

I wrote this a few years ago. Since then a few more individuals, mostly men, have killed. Mostly with guns. A president who glorifies violence has been elected. Not only glorifying violence but darnit, he seems to have absolutely no idea how this country works or what it looks like outside of parts of NYC, DC, and Mar A Lago. All his Tweeting about the violence in Portland. I wonder if he can even find the state on an unmarked map. Or Arizona. Or Colorado. 

 I'm still on the reservation, sort of. More and more indigenous groups are fighting for their rights, against the corporate machine and winning. The Supreme court ruling are not exactly a slam dunk. There's a tiny ray of hope at the end of the tunnel. Or maybe it's just the train. 

I was not exactly in a joyful mood that morning. 

I'm certainly in the joyful mood this morning. Although there is one ray of sunshine. Michelle Bachmann isn't running again in 2014. But, we're still stuck with Mrs. Pray Away the Gay until the end of her term. Oh, joy. NOT.

I briefly crossed swords with somebody with the screen name 4given4ever in the comments section of a story on the upcoming Supreme Court decision on gay marriage. Typical fundie. “I’m right. God told me so and everyone who disagrees with me is going to hell.” More words were used buuuuuut, that’s the short version. And frankly, I’m not going to waste my time replying to his/her comments. There’s that old saying. Never wrestle with a pig. You just end up covered with mud and the pig enjoys it too much.

We wonder how we come up with kids who plan to bomb their high schools, shoot as many of their fellow classmates as possible and then kill themselves before the SWAT Team arrives. To be honest, I don’t believe we need to look any further than the twisted world of the religious fundamentalist. There’s something sinister about their willingness to consign those who disagree with them to eternal punishment. And the suspicion that they agree with the medieval church is that one of the joys of heaven is watching the torments of hell.

Heck hit the comics pages and read the Wizard of Id if it’s there. Almost every strip has a subtext of violence. The violence surrounds us. The violence is so pervasive that half the time we forget it’s there. Until the next kid shoots up a school. Until the next Marine kills his wife and goes on a rampage. Until the next young fundamentalists blow up bombs at the finish line of a race. Until the next kid plans to blow up his classmates. And the crazed dance of the fourteenth century skeletons goes merrily on. I’m a fairly bright member of the human race but even I didn’t realize how tight the tentacles are wrapped until I explored the roots of my Quaker ancestors’ beliefs.

But, I’m at the point where ever the Quakers aren’t enough. I think the final spiral off the reservation has come.

9. We believe that evil is not a matter of inheritance but of intent, therefore actions are not in themselves evil. Rather, it is through the intent behind actions that evil can manifest.

The ninth entry on the list of a druid group’s list of beliefs. I’m not sure I totally agree with this. Genocide is evil no matter what, however the intention to wipe out a whole people through hatred or greed is evil and how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. I’ll never make a philosopher that’s for sure. And volumes have been written to allow us to get around Thou Shalt not Kill.

WHAT ARE WE MAKING WEAPONS FOR Lyrics by John Denver

Found the mysterious lyrics on my computer and this is growing like Topsie. As usual. And now instead of fighting the Russians or the perceived outside enemy we are fighting each other. We are stronger together. And I guess Portland is proving this. I have no support for those who would use violence to further their cause. It simply does not work. That said, the outpouring of attempts to protect the protesters (who probably would have gone home by now) from the heavy handed, illegal, private army from DC by moms in T shirts, dads with leaf blowers and finally verterans should teach us all a lesson. Stand together we stand a chance. Stand alone we go down. 

Found these lyrics in a file. In the mid eighties John Denver visited the USSR. One side trip took him to the cemetary where more than four hundred thousand men, women, and children who died diromg the siege of Leningrad during WWII. He also met Alexander Gradsky, probably one of the most populat singers, songwriters in Russia. Denver wrote a piece known by two names. "Let us begin" and "What Are We Making Weapons For." There are two versions on YouTube. One from the eighteis when the two got together during Denver's second visit sometime in the late eighties. 

The second is from a live concert in Tokyo for Earth Day in 1990. In a background interview with the Chicago Tribune Denver said there were plans to hold a concert every year until 2000. Tragically that never happened. John Denver was killed in the crash of his plane in 1997. Doubly tragic because he had learned so much over the years about using his voice. That said his songs were always wonderful 

The first video has the song as background to a video compilation. In the second video of the Tokyo concert you can see the video on a multi screen off to the side. 

The section in bold was sung solo by Gradsky. There's a back and forth and finally Denver, Gradsky, and a chorus from the Russian army. John Denver. The kid who took a guitar and started singing. Not professionally trained. Got better and better. Alexander Gradsky. Started singing in his teens, reportedly has a three and a half octave vocal range and plays twelve instruments. Totally fantastice together. Denver's lyrics? Priceless. 

What Are We Making Weapons For (Let Us Begin)

I am the son of a grassland farmer
Western Oklahoma nineteen forty three
I always felt grateful to live in the land of the free
I gave up my father to South Korea
The mind of my brother to Vietnam
Now there's a banker who says I must give up my land
There are four generations of blood in this topsoil
Four generations of love on this farm
Before I give up I would gladly give up my right arm

What are we making weapons for
Why keep on feeding the war machine
We take it right out of the mouths of our babies
Take it away from the hands of the poor
Tell me, what are we making weapons for

I had a son and my son was a soldier
He was so like my father, he was so much like me
To be a good comrade was the best that he dreamed he could be
He gave up his future to revolution
His life to a battle that just can't be won
For this is not living, to live at the point of a gun
I remember the nine hundred days of Leningrad
The sound of the dying, the cut of the cold
I remember the moments I prayed I would never grow old

What are we making weapons for
Why keep on feeding the war machine
We take it right out of the mouths of our babies
Take it away from the hands of the poor
Tell me, what are we making weapons for

For the first time in my life I feel like a prisoner
A slave to the ways of the powers that be
And I fear for my children, as I fear for the for the future I see
Tell me how can it be we're still fighting each other
What does it take for a people to learn
If our song is not sung as a chorus, we surely will burn

What are we making weapons for
Why keep on feeding the war machine
We take it right out of the mouths of our babies
Take it away from the hands of the poor
Tell me, what are we making weapons for

Have we forgotten
All the lives that were given
All the vows that were taken
Saying never again
Now for the first time
This could be the last time
If peace is our vision
Let us begin

Have we forgotten
All the lives that were given
All the vows that were taken
Saying never again, never again
Now for the first time
This could be the last time
If peace is our vision
Let us begin, let us begin

Source: LyricFind

Songwriters: John Denver

GNOMES

I don't know if this mural is still there. Summer camp kids painted on the bridge support closest to the park. The rainbow is made of of handprints. Trouble is the picture has no protections from the elements. It's been a few years since I've been to the park. All I know some high water has taken it the way.

STARSHINE

Every once in awhile I remember the website NASA supports. Once picture every day for about twenty five years. Galaxy M31 in the constellation Andromeda. Some two million light years across and about 200,000 light years across. The light we see now left the edge of the stars closest to us two million years ago. Scientists believe that our galaxy and M31 will begin to "collide" in about a billion years. Stars are so far apart that collisions are highly unlikely. But it will be a heck of a light show for anyone with eyes to see as M31 answers the pull of gravity. Just a little tired of politics today.

A SENSE OF SOMETHING PART 2

I wrote this several years ago basically when I was first exploring alternate paths. At the moment I seem to be Quaker/ darned if I know. I still believe that we are letting fear rule our lives. I have learned more since then. If I had been a member of an earlier culture or a native population what happened to me might have been seen as the beginning of a Shamanic experience. And the word shaman has become an umbrella term for individuals from many cultures that become healers, diviners, seers. It takes years and all I'm describing are a few experiences. And some I had forgotten until I started rereading these journals. More later.

I suspect that some of the individuals we call “insane” may be tapping more deeply into this sense of what we’re doing to the earth and ourselves. And they just can’t take the pain. Is this attempt to communicate always there and we’re drowning it out with drugs and objects? Or think it’s the devil tempting us and run screaming to the nearest fundamentalist house of worship. Oh, there’s a devil all right. It’s called fear and we’re choking on it.

I’m still a little overwhelmed by what happened this morning and frankly it scares the hell out me. I’m getting an overwhelming sense that the scales are tipping and it’s not in our favor. I’m also convinced that the answers we need won’t be found in the organizations that run the churches, mosques, synagogues, ashrams or political parties. 

Too many groups are too invested in defining who belongs and who doesn’t. Too worried about what might be happening the bedrooms and not enough about what is happening in the boardrooms. Too tied up in the power games. Too busy screaming that they have all the answers that they can’t even hear the questions. So damned scared that if someone else gets a little “more” of something we’ll end up with “less.” Somehow we have to tap into the individuals that realize that the balance needs to be righted. That if we stick to what really matters, there is enough to go around.

We matter simply because we are. Each of us is unique. Each of the over six billion people on this planet is unique. No one is expendable. And I think that’s what scares us. The refugee in Darfur is just as unique in the universe as President Bush. And just as special. What we can’t seem to admit is that the whole universe matters simply because it exists. Too many are chasing things that they believe will make them better somehow. And so many have so little that just surviving takes everything they have.. One group can’t make the time to look up and the other group can’t find the extra strength.

I know that getting everybody to join hands and sing Kumbayah isn't going to solve the problem.But, I'm not going to give up, I've got too much riding on the outcome of this little thing we call life and so do the rest of us.

There it is. More later. I hope. Comments would be appreciated. 

A SENSE OF SOMETHING PART 1

This is an older entry slightly edited to reflect the fact. 

Something totally freaking weird happened one morning several years ago. And folks that’s the mild description. I was thinking about the journal entry I had written last night. The phrase “the whole planet is alive” popped through my mind. That fits, that was the theme of the entry. Then the sentence completed itself. I was not expecting this, I really was not. I will still swear on a stack of holy books, rocks, trees rivers, whatever. "The whole planet is alive; and it'sscreaming'.  And just for an instant, maybe half an instant, there was this mind-bending sense of “wrongness." A jumble of sounds and images. Continental plates grinding, whole forests falling, winds howling and a feeling of bottomless, endless grief. Sorry, that’s the best I can do with the sledgehammer we call language. I had to get out of the office for a few minutes. I was almost in tears for crying out loud.

That’s the best I can do. I don’t think there are words for what I felt in that microsecond. And I hadn't had anything mind altering this morning. Last time I checked oatmeal, applesauce and lemon ginger tea aren’t on any list of controlled substances. I suspect it was the entry itself. If words are mind altering, then I’m altered. While my brain is still doing little (and not so little) summersaults this had to happen for a reason. What the reason is I’m not sure….yet. I tapped into........what or who?

There is a part two.

I'M SO FRUSTRATED

This was posted on the FB page of one of my cousin's. She's three or four years older than me. There are some reasons why she probably doesn't process information the same way some other members of the family do. Lord knows she grew up during the early civil rights era. Not that the fight is over. I guess it's like "lookee, lookee, we elected a black president so there's no more racism, right?" I'm also olde enought that my response was. "Gee I hope so but, I'll believe it when I see it."

Anyway, I looked at that FB entry. Courtesy of this self satisfied (in my opinion) individual. I looked at it. I couldn't come up with any responses that wouldn't start a war. OK, she's my cousin. And you now what really frosts me" Her mom was a Latina. Family hailed from Arizona, New Mexico and, California. And it's not in the history books, at least it wasn't when I took history but, the people living in the territory we "liberated" from Mexico were treated slightly better than the Native Americans and almost as badly African Americans. She grew up in LA, her dad was a cop, probably was shielded from the worst.

Damn it girl. You take after your beautiful mama. Unlike your two sisters your Latina heritage is written on your face. Funny how breaking the law by protesting only gets noticed when the folks with the extra melanin do the protesting. And I do not support pulling down statues, breaking windows, defacing property. Doesn't solve anything and the folks who do it generally don't get stuck with the clean up. I also suspect that half the demonstrators doing the damgage after dark in Portland do not come from Portland.

There are anarchists on both sides. Too bad we can't build a fence around some of the high desert in Eastern Oregon, toss all of window breakers and gun nuts over the fence and let them duke it out. Tulsa, Oklahoma. Rosewood, Florida. Two black communities wiped out in the twenties by white mobs. Lynchings up into the fifties. Sixties if you count the civil rights workers killed during the push for voting rights. Hell, Viola Liuzzo was just chauferring students and making supply runs.

Armed militia types besieging governor's offices? The month's long sit in at a Wild Life refuge and the damages done? The list goes on but it appears that worrying about obeying the law is not an equal opportunity proof of good citizenship.

THE UNIVERSE CAME CALLING

The prayer that ended up in the entry in I Offer This started out as a more traditional litany. I wanted to use it at work, but I couldn't use a real candle so I decided to try to imagine one. I had a Christmas card that I had scanned in to use for my own cards. Just wanted one little ol' candle. I ended up with a whole room full. Without asking for them by the way.

OK I've got candles. Lots and lots of candles. Blazing candles. And this is where the universe got just a little bit wierd. This was back in the AOL Journals world when there was more interaction between bloggers. Anyway one of the guys who was following was having a hard time. If I remember it right I was commenting along the lines of "gee I wish I could help" when the universe did its thing. The candles popped up and one of those little beggers took off. A sort of US map was in the back ground and I swear that little flash of light headed in the right direction.Without any help from me. OK.

A few days a later a good friend was having some problems. And gee I'm sorry I'm down at the bottom of the valley and you are up north. Repeat performance. Only the candle headed north and it didn't go quite as far as the first one. The first one looked like it ended up around Kansas. The second one ended up just west of Portland.

I believe that's enough about the universe attempting to get my attention, at least for now. And frankly I've never really been sure about how I feel about this. Call me a Work in Progress.

JUST A THOUGHT

For anyone who drops by. Feel free to leave a comment. Feel free to tell me you don't agree with me as long as it's reasonably civil and you take the time to tell me why. Feedback helps.

CANDLES

And this is not the first time I ended up with more than I thought I asked for. Or didn't exactly ask for. I was just imagining candles for Creation's sake. More about that later. 

Something curious happened with the words from that last entry. I had the words but hadn’t organized the candles. So, I changed it a little to “we would light this candle” and used it for our home Sabbath celebration last night. I tried visualizing candles being lit, and it worked. Which is neat, but umm, it didn’t stop at four. Right now, if I stop and think about it. I have a whole table full of lit candles in the background just behind my eyes. If I really concentrate I can visualize one of those old candlesnuffers descending on a candle, but when it moves to another light, the candle stays lit. The blessed thing absolutely refuses to go out. If I try to imagine an unlit candle, it promptly lights. This will probably fade in time. But, it’s sure gonna be nice while it lasts.

I’m not crazy enough to believe that I can personally change things all by myself. But, I can try to keep the candles lit. Oh my, while I was writing this, they started to get so bright I can’t even see the candles just the lights. And I'm feeling unusually centered right now. There's "rightness" to it that's very hard to put into words.

Words. Trying to capture something beyond words. I do not claim to be a mystic. At least I haven't really been. Too much trouble keeping my mind from popping from idea to idea. To keep it still. 

I OFFER THIS

Several years ago the reading I was doing sort of prompted me to try writing some of my own prayers. I played around with some other folks had written. I did a litany using candles and I put it in the form of a traditional litany. Perhaps a little more later about how that little experiment turned out. Then I played around with that for awhile. And the words with the first candle are not mine, but at this point I don't remember who wrote it. If that person happens to stumble on this poor attempt I'll be happy to give you credit. 

The Dominican monk known as Meister Eckhart wrote that faith was like a river with many wells. I've been reading from several sources and while I've tried to remain true to the lessons I've been blessed with, I make no claim to be anything but the typist.

We light this first candle in honor of the Creator of Creation. We are grateful for the plenty that blesses us. In a world where many walk hand in hand with hunger we have abundance. In a world where too many walk in fear we can show our faith freely. In a world where too many are alone, even in a crowd, we are rich in family and friends.

We light this second candle in honor of the earth and the star that warms it. We light this candle in gratitude for the changing seasons, for the coolness of rain, for the shifting mists and warmth of sun. We light this candle to ask healing for our battered world. May we learn .to use only what we need and to respect what we use. Help us to show gratitude for the plants and animals that sustain us. Their infinite variety is wondrous.

We light this third candle in honor of all who share this little world with us. We light this candle in gratitude for our fellow travelers. We light this candle in gratitude for birdsong, the glory of infinite colors of flowers and trees, and the infinite variety of our fellow humans. We light this candle to ask for healing for those who lash out in fear. We light this candle to ask for healing for those who lash out in anger. We light this candle to ask healing for those who lash out in ignorance. We light this candle in honor of the river of faith. Help us to remember that the river that sustains our spirits has many wells.

We light this fourth candle in honor of our family and friends. We light this candle in gratitude for their love and support. We light this candle to ask for healing for any sickness or injury. We light this candle to ask that they may find the love and support to live the lives they were meant to. We light this candle in faith that we can return the love and support that has been so freely given to us.

This will be a two parter. My next entry is about what happened next. I kind of lost track of things over the past three or four years. Bad health. Having to move. Trying to get my groove back. 

PUT UP YOUR HANDS

Just blocked an entry on my FB page. From an African American FORMER sheriff. Hint it's the guy who used to parade with a chest full of medals he never earned and an outsize Stetson. All about how Americans are a mouthy, phone camera wielding bunch of ingrates. The last might be a little harsh but, put up your hands, obey no matter what. And all about the sacrifices members of law enforcement make.

 OK I'm being a little harsh. Last time I checked it was more dangerous to be a logger or ride a crab boat to Alaska than it is to be a cop. And cops aren't the only ones who work holidays and night shifts.

But you know what fries this daughter of the British Isles? What if those kids sitting in at lunch counters had just obeyed orders. What if the Freedom Riders had stayed home? What if the kids who came south to work to get people registered to vote had stayed home? When most of the adults were in jail in Birmingham the school kids stepped up. They faced police dogs and fired hoses and it was all on the evening news.

News flash bro. Americans have always been pretty mouthy. Especially the ones from New England and what became sections of New York and New Jersey. New England may have emphasied public order over individual liberties but only to a pont. If the Minute Men at Lexington and Concord had just said OK and gone home we might be carrying different passports. I didn't bother with the FB entry. Not enough room. And to be honest this journal sometimes serves as a great place to vent.

And imagine. If we'd had some kind of quick way to take pictures and make them public there just might have been fewer lynchings, massacres and other acts of violence against African Amreicans and other minorities.

SALESMANSHIP?

I have been reposting early journal entries. Why? Well they still make a lot of sense with a little editing. And because you look back and it's holy fuck. Some of us did sort of see the current mess coming. And now we kind of look like the Little Dutch Boy only there are too many holes in the dike. 

I’m a logger’s daughter. That might have something to do with a lot of my basic attitudes. If my dad had been a farmer, a miner, a trucker, or a sailor the result would probably be the same. They’re all people whose jobs depend just as much on environment as skill. You can plan all you want but you can’t beat the weather. Fire, flood, storm, lightning, or hail. You can’t beat ‘em. You can only try to work around them.  People who work in nice safe offices can afford to hang on to the illusion that they can control their destiny for a little longer than some of the rest of us. At least they could until their jobs started getting outsourced or mechanized too. Or the stock market tanks and takes some if not all of their retirement savings with it. And this was written before The Great Recession of 2008. Among other events Enron employees who had put their retirement savings in Enron stock watched those savings melt like an ice cube in the Sahara in July when the company put a black out on their ability to sell their stock while it was still worth somthing.

I had a pretty happy childhood but we never had three good years in a row. It’s kind of like the joke about the farmer who wins the lottery. When somebody asks him what he’s going to do with the money it’s “farm until it’s gone." Heck, dad never worked a full year in all the years I can remember. If it the woods weren’t closed down because the winter weather made it impossible to get the timber out, they got closed down for a stretch in the summer when it was too dry to run the equipment. And when the forest ranger came by and said “closer ‘er down.” You turned off the machinery and headed for the landing. 

There was a story about a cat (short for caterpiller, I think it was a bulldozer) driver who ignored the order to shut down and leave it. He brought it down to the landing. Didn't remember how well sound carries in woods. Ranger didn't even come back. Just went down to the office and gave them a choice. Fire the driver or shut down for two weeks. You do not fiddle around with anything that can cause a spark when the temps were high and the woods were dry as a bone. 

Yeah, if things were closed down too long, the guys qualified for unemployment, but it was nowhere near what they brought home from working. And every three or four years there was chunk of wood with dad’s name on it. In a lot of ways it’s a miracle that he managed to last almost twenty five years working in the logging industry. Last time I checked logging is still one of the most dangerous jobs in the country. Behind crab fishing in Alasakan waters and ahead of being a cop. More dangerous than being a cop. Chew on that for a minute. At least he walked away, even if he was limping pretty badly.

Until dad was disabled, mom was a stay at home mom. And she was a busy stay at home mom. Three kids, canning in the summer, sewing all year round, three meals a day, laundry. There were times in the winter when they had to hang dad’s wet weather gear and pants on the clothes line and hose them down before they could be brought in the house. Oh, and we didn’t get a dryer until after kid number two was out of diapers. Heck, I think I was in senior high when we finally swung an automatic washer. But, there was always time to go to the park in the summer. There was time to make cookies for Christmas. I Don't remember how old I was when I was actually asked what I wanted for Christmas or for my December birthday.

I’m not telling this story to make anybody feel sorry for us. It’s just the way it was. Since Oakridge was pretty much a timber town, that’s how it was for most folks. We had a roof over our heads, food on the table, warm coats when we needed them, warm beds, a car, you get the picture. We took two newspapers, subscribed to magazines. Oakridge had a good school system; the city library seemed to have everything I wanted. Oh, and we only had two TV stations. Imagine that. And when you look at most of the world you realize now that we were rich beyond the dreams of a lot of people. When I look back, we were about as happy as anybody else in town.

 There were good days, there were not so good days, and there were a few down right crappy days. The only clothes that came with labels on the outside were Levi’s jeans. We hadn’t gotten to the stage where you’re sold the idea that you should pay for the privilege of being a walking, talking billboard for some designer or store. We hadn’t bought into the idea that wearing clothes with no writing on them made you less of a person.

In the last couple of years my company has been heavily involved with one of these motivational gurus. You know the kind, visualize it happening, believe it’s going to happen and it will types. Secular versions of the prosperity gospel. Folks like these always seem to have specials during the PBS begathons. To say nothing of Dr. Phil and his clonesAnd the clones of the clones.. Since it’s up to you to believe hard enough to make it happen if it doesn’t it’s your fault. You didn’t try hard enough. Never mind that the deck favors the house and what makes you happy may be totally unique to you. What you recognize as success may not work for any of the other six billion people on the planet. Over seven billion now. With more and more of them striking back at the trade agreements that favor the policies favor export crops over local food production.

 I’m starting to wonder if that’s part of the problem with this administration and some of its policies. Especially the war in Iraq. It’s certainly the tenor of the president’s statements. Just keep believing it will work and you’ll reach your goal. Maybe it’s no accident that a lot of these guru’s started out as salesmen. And no accident that the president’s degree is in business not the law or political science. Only now they’re trying to sell “happiness,” “teamwork,” or “democracy” as if these things came in little tins with labels. Happiness by the ounce. Democracy by the pound. Only now the elected hired help doesn't give a damn about democracy for this country or anyone other. 

If you’ll recall the opening statement of the Declaration of Independence, while we have the right to “pursue” happiness, there is no guaranty that we’ll actually achieve it. Or that we’ll have the wisdom to recognize it when we do find it. Harder and harder with the country split six ways from Sunday.

TATTERED THREADS 2

Updated, edited versionof the second part of Tattered Threads. I thought it was bad when I originally wrote this. But what the Current Occupant has done with the aid of a dangerously (traitorously?) complicit Republican party has taken the slashing of community to a whole new level.

I appear to be blessed (cursed?) with a mind that’s like a terrier with a bone. A jack russel? They hang on pretty hard sometimes. Community, like so many things human confronts us as Janus-the double-faced Roman god of doors and (it does make a weird kind of sense) of beginnings and endings.

I read William Shirer’s the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich when I was a freshman-a high school freshman. I was fourteen for crying out loud. I'd seen Judgement at Nuremberg on the movie of the week. The book finished what the film started. Once I was done I don’t think I’ve ever looked at my fellow human beings the same way. Dune finished the job. And more and more I'm convinced that their are warped souled creatures among us with human shapes and inhuman actions.

What the Nazi’s did in their rise to power. What was done during that war. The Final Solution, not only for the six million or so European Jews but also for so many others. The Slavs, the Poles, the Gypsies, gays, the other five million who died on the alter of a diabolical definition of community. I believe I began to realize the kind of actions warped human beings could commit when they know they are “right.”

For too many of the years after the war too many of us-me included bought the line that what the Nazis did was something unique to the Nazi philosophy. Heaven knows there was enough evidence before the war of what human beings can do to each other because the ones we’re attacking don’t fit some definition “us.” Since the forties we’ve seen all to much evidence of what we can do those we see as “other.” We can all recite the litany that just keeps getting longer. From Cambodia to Darfur with the Balkans, Central America, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Rwanda in between.

I used to believe we are too civilized here in America to go in for wholesale extermination these days. We use words instead of guns and act surprised when the words cut more deeply than a knife ever could. For communities of color it isn't only words. It's the over and over from police departments that "I was afraid for my life so..." Even when it's a child with a toy gun. Even when it's a teen with a bag of candy. Even when it's an unarmed unstable mental patient. And now it's militarized individuals with no ID cut loose on the streets of Portland, Oregon. That's my state damn it. Is this pay back in because we're part of the Left Coast? Try LA and even the new Gestapo might get their asses kicked.

Want to hear something really weird? When I started this entry this was not the direction I thought it was going to go. Once I started to type this is where the words led me. They seemed to flow on their own. They do that sometimes. And then the really unexpected reaction kicks in. I never realized what kind of emotions an entry like this would dredge up. I usually keep them firmly leashed and I think there may be two people on the planet who’ve seen or heard me royally po’d. The smile I used  to wear at work and with most of the members of my family feels more and more forced. Keeping it there is getting harder and harder. Family now And their are some subjects that just don't come up. Thank you cyber space for someplace to express just a little of what I’m feeling.

There are threads, connections, whatever you want to call them that tie us to each other, the earth and to the other creatures that ride this world with us They are trapped with us and dependent on our actions to preserve this fragile ball of earth, air and water. Somehow we have to get beyond a definition of community that is so narrow that almost all of us are “other.”

Well this really rewrote itself. There's more hanging out in the old brain box but it needs some more organizing.

TATTERED THREADS

This is another one of my old posts that makes even more sense now than it did when I wrote it. With a few minor changes.

It was one of those days when my cranky genes were rearing their heads big time. This had been simmering just below the surface and it finally had to come out.

William Raspberry was an excellent columnist and he had  a column in the local paper one Monday discussing the changes in our community life since the end of WWII. Actually wrote this a couple of months before he retired. I believe I understand where he’s coming from. I’m not sure I want to give up ease of travel that the car gives us or the fingertip access to entertainment and information that television and computers give us but the loss of community that has crept into our lives over the past forty or fifty years frankly scares the bejesus out of me.

When my folks got married they moved into a little place on D Street in Springfield. Basically the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker were within a dozen blocks of the house. Folks walked a lot more and the meat cutter knew just how you liked your pot roast trimmed. They used an ice box for the basic needs, the milkman still made deliveries, the house still had a wood stove, there was a garden in the back, they used a wrinter washer, clothes hung on the line, mom canned anything that wasn’t nailed down or failed to salute and if you needed to store frozen food you rented a locker at the market on main street.

We moved to Oakridge right after I was born and came back to Springfield eighteen years later. Richer by two sisters and poorer by a disabled stove-up logger. Dad wore himself out working in the logging industry. When his legs gave out he ended up on the scrap heap. Thank you FDR for Social Security Disability. 

When we moved again we ended up all of ten blocks from where it all started. All the basic shops are gone from Main Street except for a large fabric store , and a shop that sells supplies for muzzle loaders. They’ve been replaced by second hand stores, small offices and vacant storefronts. 

The closest grocery store is a Fred Meyer. It’s about a mile and half away on the other side of several very busy streets. Nobody walks there if they can help it, nobody really knows you and everything comes wrapped in plastic. You drive there in your individual tinted window vehicle and you drive home behind your tinted windows and nobody looks you in the eye if they can help it.

We’ve been sold self-service in the name of convenience but all it really does is cut down the number of people they need to hire and pay employee taxes on. The trick is to tell us we're getting it our way, when what they're selling is their way. Orwells’ Newspeak is alive and well. Marketing managers are fluent in it

Instead they use the money they save on people to try to convince me to buy stuff I probably don’t need, didn’t even know existed until I saw the commercial and isn’t worth half what they want for it in the first place, if that. When mom talks about what she and dad had when they got married it wasn't much but they seemed think it was enough. Oakridge had two TV channels and the only clothes with labels were Levis jeans and Izod polo shirts.

Madison Avenue was just getting into the game of convincing us that no matter how much we have it isn't enough. That somehow if we buy just the right combinations of stuff we’ll  somehow be smarter or sexier or some darn thing. We keep shoveling things into the black hole at the center of our spirits and wonder why all we keep hearing is the sucking sound as little pieces of our selves follow them in

I don't want to make those early days of mom's marriage sound better than they were. People spent a most of their time just making sure the basics got done. A lot of time was spent doing the wash in that wringer washer, hanging the clothes to dry and then ironing the blessed things. And man, you did not want to let my grandmother get near the laundry. Dad used to say she could shrink a house if she put her mind to it and no button was safe. There were just as many gossips per square mile as there are now. They just had to be nosy closer to home and most of the local nosiness stayed local

I really don’t know how the repair the tatters of the threads that tie us all to each other but I think we’d better start mending………real fast. 

There is a second section to this. And in the years since I wrote this the threads are stretched long past the limits.

TWO NEEDLES

Comet Neowise ove the Space Needle in Seattle with the Cascades in the background. What a shot.

BEING PREPARED

I wrote this after Katrina and how being prepared isn't something that you can prepare for overnight. Still true. but even worse now since  elected and appointed hired help are not only incompetant, but deliberately or otherwise either just don't give a damn,  or have their heads so far up their asses they can see daylight. 

Back in 1988 the county where Sioux City, Iowa is located organized a “Disaster Preparedness Program,” hired a guy named Gary Brown to run it and proceeded to poke fun at the drills they ran. The drills ran a little better, personalities got meshed a little better and the program got a little more respect.

On July 19, 1989 the crap hit the fan. Their emergency response team had less than thirty  minutes to prepare for a DC-10 with the tail engine gone. Trouble is when the rear engine went it took the hydraulics with it. The plane was flying in great spiraling circles. The pilots were powering the other two engines up or down to try to get some directional control. Sioux City was the closest airport. And didn't usually handle wide-bodied aircraft-so called "heavies." There were units from three states and the Air Guard lined up when that plane hit the ground, did a flip and broke up. The rescue teams moved more than a hundred injured people off the runways, into choppers and ambulances to local hospitals in less than an hour. 185 of the passengers and all the cockpit crew survived because people were trained and no one was willing to quit.

These events were the background for a made for TV film currently called A Thousand Heroes. It was made in 1992 and is barely available on video. You can find resonable version on YouTube. Personally I think it should be required viewing for every emergency team in the country.

So, why did I tell this story?

I’ve been following the finger pointing in New Orleans with as much interest and dismay as every other American. The truth is that very few cities, counties or states are prepared to deal with an event like Katrina.

The biggest problem is you can’t spitball solutions to a crisis like Katrina two days before it happens. You have to imagine it months or better still, years before.  You hope you’ve come up with possible solutions and then practice, practice, practice to work out the bugs.

Folks have asked “why weren’t the residents with no transport gotten out instead of being sent to the Superdome?” Good question. Answer, how? School busses? City busses? Tell the airlines “since you’re moving your planes out anyway, how about taking some people with you? How are you going to get refugees to the airport? Where are they going to go? How much fuel does a school bus carry in its tank. How far can an overloaded bus get on a tank of fuel? Where is this convoy going to get fuel? Send a tanker along with it? Where are they going to go? Will there be shelter when they get there? What about food, water, sanitation, dirty diapers? See where this train is heading? It’s too late to start asking these questions when you realize you needed those answers six months ago.

Carloads of volunteers are on the roads heading south hoping to help clean things up. I agree that they’d be better off sending money and staying home. The people handling this emergency don’t need more people on the scene who will need food, fuel, housing and sanitation.

We’re yelling at FEMA, but FEMA is basically a shadow of what it was. It’s been rolled into the Homeland Security fiefdom. Homeland Security, there’s a joke. I’m not the only one who noticed that in the months before last year’s election, Tom Ridge issued security alerts every time things got bad for Bush.

The current administration rolled everything into a new inexperienced federal agency, diverted resources from levee repair and upgrades to deal with a war we didn’t need to fight, ran up the deficit and issued tax cuts to those who already have more than any of the rest of us could hope to have, need or truthfully want. There’s plenty of blame to be shared. But I’m putting the lion’s share at doorstep of this administration and the neocon theorists who seem to be the only advisors who have the president’s ear.

A lot of things look good on paper and sound great in speeches. Reminds me of the old game of scissors, rock, or paper. You can’t cut water, rocks sink and paper gets soaked. You can’t cut the wind, rocks get blown around and the paper gets blown back in your face.

COMET OVER MOUNT SHASTA

Shot of comet Neowise over Mount Shasta in California from the Astronomy Picture of the Day from NASA. A rare shot with the lake water mirror like. The last time this evaporating dirty iceburg that's about three and half miles wide rocketed through this corner of the solar system it was approximately 4,800 BC. And it won't be back for about 6,800 years. If it survives, refreezes and makes it back to the Oort Cloud at the edge of the solar system. I wonder who will be here to notice the return in about 8,880 CE.

I wonder how many of our ancestors even noticed it the last time it made a trip around the sun. It's only visible in the northern hemisphere this time around. Same track last time. Agriculture was just getting started. The astronomers learning to track the seasons might have noticed that there was a visitor up there with the stars. I wonder what they thought. If they had cataloged enough of the sky to even wonder. "OK, strange star, moved fast, gone now?" Maybe made a note, passed down orally. Who knows.

TRUTHERS BIRTHERS DENIERS AND WORDERS

I've been rereading some of my stuff. And with a little editing still makes sense a few years after I wrote the original post. Especially with the Cult of tRump these days.

While some of you were watching John Muir, we were watching a rerun on the National Geographic channel on the conspiracies surrounding 9/11. Actually I think the Muir program came on later in our area. We had the Roadshow at eight and then a program from OPB on Oregon Oystermen. Anyway, back to the conspiracy theories. The program was interesting. I was aware of the various “theories” floating around but was not aware of just how impervious the truthers are to any attempts to prove that they just might be a couple of stubbies short of a six pack. Along with the birthers, deniers (climate change), and worders (Biblical literalists).

At least until I ran across this. It might have been The Parish blog or researching something I read on Greg’s blog. There are at least two ways people organize information. There’s the “give me a chance to study the facts and I’ll adjust my world view to fit them.” This world view gave us scientists like Galileo, experimental science and the Enlightenment.

OK it turns out that Galileo probably didn't do his weight experiements using the Leaning Tower of Pisa. He probably used smaller balls and ramp apparatus in his lab. But it such a great story I kept it. Probably did use the tower or some other building when it came to experimenting with different shapes. The difference between a metal ball and a bag of feathers.

“Everybody” just knew that if you dropped a one pound ball and a two pound ball from the same height the two pound ball would fall twice as fast. So Galileo took two balls up to the top of that tower in Pisa, probably yelled the Italian version of “look out below” and dropped them. Which was followed by “?????????” when both balls hit the ground at the same time. Which was probably followed by sending an increasingly tired assistant down to retrieve the balls so he could do it again. Which led to the knowledge that falling objects accelerate at the same speed no matter how heavy they are as long as wind resistance is the same. A one pound feather might not drop as fast as a one pound ball of lead because the shape is different.

Then we have the other group. They are the poster children for “my mind is made up. Don’t confuse me with the facts.” Except that they aren’t confused; confronted with what the rest of us call facts, they simply refuse delivery. The 9/11 program took up each objection. Scientists or engineers used computer models or designed experiments to test their objections as best they could, presented the information and were hit with “it couldn’t have happened that way.” They don’t really know how the towers came down, except that it was a huge government conspiracy and they aren’t changing their minds any time soon. In spite of the fact that any of their scenarios would have required so much time to set up and so many people to pull it off that somebody, somewhere would have set up shop in a country without extradition treaties with the US, written a book, made a fortune, bought a house with a state of art security system and hired a very competant crew of body guards.

We see the same attitude the birthers. It doesn’t matter how many people examine the information the state of Hawaii has released and swear on a stack of Bibles that the president was born in Hawaii, they won’t believe it. Ok. They’re several degrees off plumb. It’s distracting and/or infuriating but they aren’t really hurting anyone else….at the moment.

But, those other two groups. Hey, I’m somewhat open minded. Maybe all of the climate change we’re seeing isn’t caused by human intervention. Sure is funny how the CO2 levels started spiking around the time the Industrial Revolution started though. And how industrial level livestock operations give off more green house gasses than our cars. Think that just might be hint that you can't treat steers like widgets? Yes, CO2 levels were much higher in the past. Say about 250 million years ago when Siberia literally erupted and kept erupting for millennia. Before it was over most life on the planet was extinct. The atmosphere was full of CO2 and sulfur dioxide. The seas warmed, currents that brought cold, oxygen rich water to the surface collapsed and the oceans nearly suffocated. The earth survived, cleansed itself and life recovered. Uh, guys, the earth will survive. We, most or all of us cantankerous humans, might not.

Then there are the Worders, the folks that believe that the Bible must be taken literally. And that those who don’t agree with this and their interpretation are wrong. Not just wrong but heretics and apostates. I wouldn’t mind that so much except that some of these folks put environmentalists, even Bible believing environmentalists, and their attempts to clean up our messes on their lists of heresies and apostasies. As best as I can understand their beliefs, the Second Coming is just around the corner. The earth will be renewed. Jesus will take care of it. At this point words fail me. Frankly I didn’t stick around, I got the heck out of Dodge as quickly as possible. This mindset may also underlie the whole "Jesus died for my sins, I'm saved, that's all I need to focus on." The hell with everything He taught.

Yes, the Deniers have freedom of speech, and the Worders can claim freedom of religion. But, in the famous words of Mark Twain “your freedom to take a swing at me ends where my nose begins.” Your right to your opinions and beliefs ends when it endangers the lives and safety of others. Don’t expect us to sit by in silence.

P.S. Just realized I left out the whole Intelligent Design crew. Heck, lump them in with the Worders. They pretty much overlap. Ran across a copy of a page of coloring book put out by these (fill in with description of your choice, nuts springs to mind) with Jesus riding a velociraptor complete with saddle and bridle. Again, words fail me. Unfortunately I may have some relatives that fall into this camp.

SHAPING THE UNIVERSE

Given time, geologic time, The Theory of Plate Tectonics and dying stars creating new elements to be shaped into new stars and new worlds fits this vision beautifully. The universe is a giant recycler.

A non-traditional Celtic take on the traditional Trinity.

Cruthaitheoir (noun): creator Cruth (noun):shape. Cruthigh (verb): to create, to shape.

Honestly, I have no idea how to pronounce the Irish and the net wasn’t much help. In any case when most of us use the word create we mean to bring something into existence. However, the less common definition of create is ‘to bring into a new form.” And, the root word cruth in those Irish words means to shape. Shaping implies that you are working with something that already exists.

In some Celtic mythology stories that have survived, there appears to be no creation myths as we understand them. One of those in the beginning there was  a Void, a cosmic Egg, something that wasn’t there and then it was there, somehow. Something created from nothing. often a something is already there, often the sea, In Ireland out of the seafom a white horse comes trotting up the beach. But the sea is already there.

Since those eternally curious scribes in the ancient Irish monasteries  translated, copied, and recopied every written scrap they could find it seems unlikely to many scholars that any creation myths they found wouldn’t have been recorded even if they were cleaned up to give them a less pagan cast.

Or, perhaps, the Celts never had an “in the beginning” story to start with. The universe didn’t have to come “into” existence because it has always existed. This does answer one problem. If the universe is created, who created the Creator? If somehow the universe has always existed then the Creator has always existed, does exist and will always exist. Creation then becomes a reshaping of what already exists, not the creation of something out of nothing. In this universe even the big bang becomes a reshaping of a “something” that already existed. What that “something” was or is we don’t know. Perhaps as humans with human limitations this is something we can’t know or comprehend.

And where does the raw material for reshaping come from? For some, like the writer Tom Cowan, the raw material the Creator works with is the Creator itself. (arrrrgh! Pronouns describing the indescribable are such fun to try to use.) This ever changing, ever shifting, and always becoming universe is made not only by the Creator but from the very essence of that Creator.

One of the best examples I can think of is this. A giant star is mostly hydrogen with some helium and an almost undetectable scattering of heavier elements.We;re talking a blue white super giant here. One that won't live long enough or life to begin on any planets it may have. It lives its life, burns through its hydrogen fuel in a few million years explodes as a supernova and seeds the universe with star stuff. The carbon that builds our cells, the oxygen we breathe, the iron in the steel that holds up our skyscrapers: these elements were forged in the heart of an exploding star. This star stuff reshaped, renewed, becomes new stars, new planets and wonder of wonders; us.

Cowan, who works with Celtic and shamanic traditions took the more traditional trinity and reworked it using the image of shaping. So the trinity becomes The Shaper of life, the Shape of life, and the Shaping of life. These three are truly indivisible, no one of the three can exist without the other two. It sounds really odd to say it but this trinity does work. And in a strange way we become not only the Created but the Creator. We are the Shaper, the Shape and the Shaping itself. (I know, my brain is feeling a little “sprained” right now.)

And he rewrote an old Irish prayer using the trinity of shaping.

Shaper of life, above me and below.
Shaper of life before me as I go.
Shaper of life, at my sides and
I know that You circle me around
And around and around.

Shape of life, above and below.
Shape of life before me as I go.
Shape of life, at my sides and
I know that You circle me around
And around and around.

Shaping of life, above and below.
Shaping of life before me as I go.
Shaping of life, at my sides and
I know the You circle me around
And around and around.

Sacred Three, above and below.
Sacred Three before me as I go.
Sacred Three at my sides and
I know that You circle me around
And around and around.

From Yearning for the Wind  by Tom Cowan

.

WHEN WILL AMERICA BE AMERICA

African American poet Langston Hughes wrote this one back in the thirties during the depression.

LET AMERICA BE AMERICA AGAIN

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home--
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay--
Except the dream that's almost dead today.

O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose--
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again! 

Langston Hughes

THE PALE BLUE DOT

That little dot below the rings of Saturn is where we live. Humans, whales, bears, fish, butterflies. All of Creation that we know. When Voyager 1 reached the orbit of Neptune Carl Sagan convinced the powers that be to turn the ships camaras back towards the sun and to take a series of pictures of the Family of the sun. This is what Carl Sagan had to say about a tiny dot when the pictures were released. Couldn't get Mercury and Venus. They were too close to the sun.

"That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.

On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar. Every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, live there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturing, our imagine self importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity-in all this vastness- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us.

It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and if I might add, a character building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.."

OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF BABES

 Back in the eighties I taught a Sunday school class of 4 and 5 year olds. I’d started out helping my sister and sort of inherited it when her life got too busy to continue. And I was very thankful to find a stack of old brown around the edges paper in the stock room. I immediately appropriated it. It takes much longer to work through a lesson from scratch than it does to just fill out the workbook. Oops. Slightly off topic.

One week I did the story of Jesus healing the blind man at Bethsaida. I was doing my schtick with the “there are still miracles, sometimes they aren’t as obvious,” when out of the mouth of a five year old came this. “Some people are blind with their eyes open.” After I picked my jaw off the floor, I very carefully asked enough questions to realize that the kid knew exactly what he was talking about.

Talk about out of the mouths of babes. That was back in 2006. Micah would be all grown up now. I think about him every once and awhile. I wonder how he turned out. Well I hope. 

MY SOUL HURTS

Wednesday is showed up on my news feed. The virus is surging in Tulssa and guess where a few hundred of the positives came in contact with the virus. No telling how many took the virus back home with them. About five hundred cases out of about sixty two hundred attendees? That's eight percent folks, eight percent. The folks running the arena had put out notices on the seats that would have enforced social distancing. The tRump campaign removed the notices.Yet someohow this "person" avoids even testing positive.

I consider myself reasonably liberal. But there is this worthy cause. And that worthy cause. All very good causes. All wanting just a few minutes of my time. Many wanting my name on a petition for this cause or that cause. I'm sure posting this material on the net makes you feel like you are accomplishing, I'm not sure what. I'm pretty sure that nobody in the White House of the Senate is going to see your petitions.

It isn't as glorious but organizing voter registration drives would be useful. Organizing transportation networks to get citizens to the polls would be really useful. Renting porta potties to serve folks wating in lines. Making sure polls stay open until everyone has voted. Heck pass out sandwiches and bottled water.

And I discovered that the petitions came with request for a donation. You can probably get around that but now your information is out there and I'm betting dollars to donuts your in box will be overflowig with requests for only three dollars or only five dollars and we'll be over the top. Until next week.

And sorry but, what does stenceling Black Lives Matter in front of tRump's building on Fifth Avenue accomplish. He isn't going to see it. He probably won't even tweet about it. Yeah, it's showy. It's in your face. In the end will it change a damn thing? How do we convince people like the lady in charge of voting in the great state of Mississippi that the black folks registering to to vote are just as much citizens of that state as the white folks?

Some good news. Protests in freezing weather, facing state police and private security have finally paid off for the Lakota. The courts have ordered the Access Pipeline shut down and emptied. Whether it will really happen? It's a step. And if there is one piece of real estate I would love to see blown sky high it is Mt. Rushmore. That is land stolen from Lakota. Their sacred lands.

There's probably more. Rant over. I was damn tired Wednesday night. I couldn't even find a book to read, a show to watch. My soul hurts damn it. I don't know. Maybe it's one death too man over the years. More evidence that the man who is supposed to be a leader is not only not a leader but either a bald faced liar, insane, or suffering from dementia.

I think I'll  go walk in with Ellis Peter's Cadfael for awhile. Haul out my herb books. Find a little "soul' with Tom Cowan. I found a copy of volume one of the Carmina Gadelica on Amazon dirt cheap. Less than two bucks.  Help my brain not hurt so much. Lower the blood pressure.

I really do hope this makes a little sense.

GIVE BACK TO THE EARTH

"Over the time we have been here, we have built cultural ways on and about this land. We have our own respected versions of how we came to be. These origin stories -that we emerged or fell from the sky or were brought forth - connect us to this land  and establish our realities, our belief systems. We have spiritual responsibilities to renew the Earth and we do this through our ceremonies do that our Mother, the Earth, can continue to support us. Mutuality and respect are part of our tradition, give and take. Somewhere along the way, I hope people will learn that you can't just take, that you have to give back to the land." Dr. Henrietta Mann of the Cheyenne nation. Professor Emeritus University of Montana.

Artwork by a member of the Lakota Nation, Angela Babby. I believe it is a stained glass work.

As a dominant culture we take, an take, an give back a fraction of what is taken. Manure that could fertilize the land is turned into garbage. Mountain tops are removed, pipelines leak, dams break. A few try to fight back. It's like whistling in the wind.

BLOGGER THINKING IN PUBLIC

Got some ideas bouncing around not sure where I'm going to end up when they bounce out.

The Quakers are just going to have to wait since I came acros more information that makes some of my information not as complete as I would like. Anyway something else.

I have tap danced on the line between some form of Christianity and some version of the old religion for years. Forget whee I ran across this the other day. That the druids were forbidden to put their teachings in writing. Not so sure about that.

There were druids in Ireland long after the Romans destroyed them in Gaul and Britain. Rereading Mary Renault's novels on ancient Greece I was reminded that almost everything was oral two thousand years ago. One of the threads in The Praise Singer was trying to bring all of Homer into written form. And sifting what they did have between what was probably Homer and what wasn't.

Some druids specialized in the law, the Brehons. The law was in their minds, they repeated it, taught it. Just because the law wasn't written down didn't mean that the people didn't know the law. And knowing the law didn't mean or doesn't mean that the law is obeyed or respected. When did Hammurabi hand down his law code or Moses dome down with those commanments? And we are still lying, cheating and killing thousands of years later. What good is writing the law on paper if the people the law was meant to protect don't obey it?

HYPHENATED AMERICANS

Some white folks are complaing that they can't celebrate being "white" matters the same way "black" matters. Well for starters the only group of white folks that don't celebrate just being white are the English Americans. And if we can trace that part of our heritage back far enough we're likely to go back to the county great grandpa about seven times removed came from.

In my case Yorkshire. The west riding to be exact. York was it's own kingdom a long time ago during the Danish occupation of that part of England. The one thing I thing remarkable is that once that long lost Norman ancestor got there the family stayed there. For five hundred years. Probably married a Saxon. And the County of York was so big it was split into three sections or ridings. An old Viking word. And looking at the map. Yorkshire is just a little more than half the size of Wales.

And if your name was too long, had too many syllables that nobody could rightly pronounce, your English was passable and your accent not too pronounced you move someplace else and lose that first half of that hyphenated description and change your name. Especially back when paper work wasn't so organized and small towns didn't care too much about the details.

Anyway we've got Irish Americans, Italian Americans, Scots, Germans, Finns,Hungarians, Serbians, Poles, Armenians, Greeks, Russians. A real alphabet soup of hypenated citizens. And I have traced on little branch back to Armenia. A very long time ago. I am a walking, talking, union of hyphens.

Even Native Americans have a good idea where at least part of their ancestry comes from. Lakota, Cheyenne, Cree, Cherokee, Mohawk, Yakima, Umatilla. They are rediscovering their roots and not all of them ever lost them in spite of the electied hired help's best efforts to wipe them off the face of the earth.

Now the descendants of the Africans kidnapped and sold into the West Indies and the American colonies and southern states don't have those options. Can't change your skin color. Even worse you don't know which part of west Africa your ancestors came from or what tribe they were part of. There are no Yoruba Amercans, Igbo Americans, Fulani, Ashanti, Hausa, Kongo. At least most folks call them African Americans now. But Africa is a continent, not a country. Although it seems that more than a few of my fellow Americans flunked basic geography.

And as for last names. Slaves didn't have any. The names they were born with were stolen from them. I remember a scene from Roots where Kunta Kinte becamce Toby, if I remember correctly. And if I remember correctly, whipped until he answered to it. And in Stephen Foster's song we hear about Old Black Joe.

 So how did slaves get surnames. Some took or were given the last names of an owner. I suppose some were given the last name of their white fathers. After the civil war some took the last name of Freeman or Freedman. Maybe the job they were good at a Wheeler or a Carter.

 I sincerely hope that some African Americans that share one of my family names were given it because they were owned by my first cousins a few times removed, or they chose it, not because they are family. I would be proud to call them family, but not proud lf how they may have bocome family.

So some of us Scots Irish English Welsh German Americans would do well to remember that some other folks can't call themselves Yoruba Igbo Ashanti Americans. At least not without some pretty fancy DNA testing.

THIS IS A REVOLUTION DAMN IT

WE HAVE TO OFFEND SOMEBODY! John Adams in 1776 during the debate over the wording of what became the Declaration of Independence.

Watching the musical 1776. A movie that I do enjoy, But there is another story. Back in the seventies Eugene was trying to get a decent performing arts center built. To raise some of the money director Ed Ragozzino directed a series of musicals. The King and I for one. Ragozzino managed to get the ball gown from the movie for his production. All forty pounds of taffeta and hoop skirts. And Debra Kerr did the polka in the darn thing.

And 1776 was another production. And did that ignite a series of letters to the editor. Too much cussin'. Nothing worse that damnit for heaven's sake. And then there all the references to missing their wives. There are a couple of wonderful drean sequences between John and Abigail Adams. Richard Henry Lee heading down to Virginia for a declaration of support for independence but he's planning to "refresh" the missis on the way. Jefferson pining for his wife Martha.

Franklin sends for the good lady and there is an interlude, private of course. Except for a note sailing out the window be intercepted by Franklin and Adams. "Gentlemen I am taking my wife to bed." In the middle of the afternoon.

Anyway according to some of my fellow citizens our founding fathers did not cuss or miss their wives. And as is usual with such folks the "offending" production was to be suppressed to guard their delicate sensibilities. One of my favorite pieces referring to that bitter pill that festered in the heart of this country until we had to spit it out with a war.

Rutledge:
Molasses to rum to slaves, oh what a beautiful waltz
You dance with us, we dance with you
In molasses and rum and slaves

Who sail the ships out of Boston
Ladened with bibles and rum?
Who drinks a toast to the Ivory Coast?
Hail Africa, the slavers have come
New England with bibles and rum

And its off with the rum and the bibles
Take on the slaves, clink, clink
Then hail and farewell to the smell
Of the African coast

Molasses to rum to slaves
'Tisn't morals, 'tis money that saves
Shall we dance to the sound of a profitable pound
In molasses and rum and slaves

Who sails the ships out of Guinea
Ladened with bibles and slaves?
'Tis Boston can boast to the West Indies coast
Jamaica, we brung what ye craves
Antigua, Barbados, we brung bibles and slaves!

(Spoken dialogue mixed with Auctioneer chantin

Molasses to rum to slaves
Who sail the ships back to Boston
Ladened with gold, see it gleam
Whose fortunes are made in the triangle trade
Hail slavery, the New England dream!
Mr. Adams, I give you a toast:
Hail Boston! Hail Charleston!
Who stinketh the most?

As it happens in the film this is the most magnificent pieces. John Cullum's voice was absolutely brilliant.

The history is not always accurate. But a bit of a romp anyway. One note. James Wison of Pennsylvania is shown as only voting for independence so he won't be remembered as opposing independence. He was actually one of the leading theorists for independence and was on of the original members of the Supreme Court.