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 They’ve been replaced by second hand stores, small offices and vacant storefronts.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.