Better Terms

Enough Already

2011-03-02T23:18:00.001-08:00

My husband likes to talk about sports. Since I gave him an "e-book" computer for our anniversary in 2009, he makes use of his "library time" (I'll leave it to the reader to figure out which room in our home qualifies as his library) reading sports stories from all over the internet. He has, in fact, become somewhat of a walking sports encyclopedia in the course of the past sixteen months.

Absent a community of other men with whom to engage in analytical sports banter, he sometimes gets really desperate and starts spouting his facts and figures at ME. To my credit, I have enough residual interest in sports (I used to be a genuine fan) and just enough exposure to news outlets that I can generally engage in a moderately satisfying exchange on the subject.

We were sitting in a booth at one of our favorite eating spots—we call it "the sports bar" because from every booth, one has a clear view of no less than five television screens, each tuned to the sport du jour—when the husband began to wax encyclopedic about the latest big story. Seems there is a young man who plays baseball for the St. Louis Cardinals. A very talented young man, who has been with the team for the first ten years of his career. That's nice. Nowadays, the players tend to sell their services to the highest bidder, and never play for more than a couple of years for any one team.

Well, it seems this young man (Albert Pujols) is up for a new contract at the end of this year. And the negotiations, apparently, are no less complex than a trade treaty between international giants. Pujols sets a deadline. Deadline goes by—no contract. Rumors fly, but neither side will tip its hand. The team is said to have offered $200 million over eight years. Cardinals manager theorizes that Pujols is being pressured to "set the bar"—by demanding something exceeding the current fattest contract: Alex Rodriguez's $275 million over ten years. They think $300 million over ten years might properly set that bar.

Three hundred million dollars. Thirty million a year. To play a kids' game.

This young man would earn—well, not earn, exactly…let's say he would be paid—the equivalent of twenty-five years of my husband's current salary in slightly less than a month. We could live comfortably well into our retirement (husband will be 80 in twenty-five years) on what this kid will put in the bank in thirty days.

And the thought occurred to me: there's no shortage of money in this country.

It's simply that more and more of it is going to those who already have more than they could possibly need or use.

How much filet mignon and caviar can the guy eat? How many south sea islands can he own? How many designer drugs can he put up his nose?

Meanwhile, the price of meat and fish has us increasingly dining on…pasta. The price of gas has us vacationing in…our back yard. The price of health care and pharmaceuticals has us…taking aspirin for a heart attack.

And WE are the "middle" class. God help those below US on the food chain.

Enough.

Enough already.

Hindsight is 20/20

2011-03-02T22:59:00.000-08:00

Like many Boomers—the original “Peter Pan” generation—I find it almost impossible to believe I’m over thirty-five, much less fifty. Unfortunately I am rudely reminded of that reality several times a day…particularly when dealing with the—what do they call them, now…generation “y”?—with whom I am in close contact every day. Oh, yes; there are times when I definitely feel like the moldy old relic I am. For the most part, though, I see myself as the same hip, anti-establishment almost-renegade I was thirty-five years ago. Plus a few pounds and a bit of perspective…

It’s funny how the accumulation of years upon the planet begins to impart a sense of history to those of us who are paying any attention at all. It starts when we begin to see our parents as human beings; we notice and understand the things they conquered, the mistakes they made, the hurdles they cleared. And we see how those things eventually became part of who WE are. That knowledge settles upon us like the stages of grief: Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and, eventually, acceptance—that we are, to a large extent, those people from whom we struggled so valiantly to break away and distinguish ourselves. Little do we know that, another decade or two down the road, as our parents pass on and all we have left of them is what we can see in the mirror, we will cling to that connection as if it were the last life ring thrown over the side of the Titanic.

That compilation of years has brought me another bone to chew, of late. I’m beginning to see how we Boomers have failed our children. How our mistakes—those things we did thirty or forty years ago when WE were in charge of writing history—became a less than exemplary model for the generations that have come after us. We were all about bucking the system. We were all about re-writing the rules to suit our own sensibilities. We were young and we were free—or we wanted to be. Our parents’ social mores were stifling, prejudicial and outdated. So we threw away their rules and wrote our own.

Granted, some of those rules cried out for rewriting. We understood that our parents’ rules criminalized behavior that was the sole business of parties engaging in it. We didn’t/don’t need Big Brother hiding under our beds or dictating a social order based on ethnicity or skin color. But we were not at all selective about which of our parents’ rules we flushed down the toilet. Down it all went. We didn’t understand that the kind of freedom for which we clamored carries a great burden—first of discernment, then of self-regulation. We didn’t take the time to discern what part of the social code to which our parents subscribed was valid, timeless and universal. Our governing philosophy became, “We should be able to do whatever we want, as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody else.”

And so, we have passed that watered-down, unspecific credo down to our children—who have proceeded to alter it even further. Today’s rule is, “We should be able to do anything we want.” Evidently, the “as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody else” part of the rule was entirely too subjective—What does “hurt” mean? And who, exactly, is “anybody else”? And why should I care, anyway? So the next generation did away with that caveat completely.

In the end, what we thought was a leap toward great and necessary social liberation, turned out to be that...PLUS a step down the road to utter chaos. All because we didn’t understand that human beings are notoriously incapable of self-regulation. Because we didn’t understand that was why our parents’ rules—which were surely mutations of their parents’ rules—were developed in the first place. Now...NOW that we have managed to put a few decades under our belts and acquire some of that "historical perspective" I mentioned, we GET IT. But what can, what WILL we do about it? How can we rebuild what we tore down? Who will listen to us now?

And can we hope that our children will "get it" before their children, or their childrens' children, drag us down to complete anarchy?

On Taxes

2011-02-16T23:17:00.000-08:00

I read an article today on the NPR website that talks about voters who want what tax dollars will provide (like repairs to the country's aging infrastructure) but have no interest in providing the funds to make it happen. Where do they think the money is going to come from? Heaven? Maybe that's why the far right agenda seems to be more focused on mollifying God than doing any actual governing…

Let's face it: Many of our living wage industries have been out-sourced to greener—cheaper—pastures. Or, as is the case here in the Pacific Northwest, the mills have pretty much cut down all the cheap, easily accessible lumber, so they, too, have upped sticks and moved on to the next lumber mother-lode (Canada? The Amazon?)

What's left for those of us who live here to DO for a living? What jobs/industries are impossible to send overseas or out-source? Well….there's government (don't forget this includes law enforcement and fire protection—your tax dollars at work), education (largely funded by tax dollars), infrastructure construction and repair (cha-ching—more tax dollars.) And we know they can't outsource health care…and what a gigantic money-machine that has become since all the other industries have gone away! And then there is the Service Industry—encompassing everything from WalMart to McDonald's to parcel delivery to garbage collection. Notoriously low-paying and high-turnover jobs, the ones nobody really wants to do.

So we would all do well not to think of our tax dollars as going to entitlements benevolently bestowed upon some undeserving (in our eyes) segment of the population. We need to think about our own livelihoods—or maybe that of the guy next door, or the family who sits next to us at church. If we did away with all taxes, would you still have a job? Would you be able to make use of our tremendously overblown and overpriced health care system? How many of those folks would then lose their jobs? And since discretionary income would be hard to come by, how would that affect the service industry? What if you couldn't even afford to eat out at McDonald's anymore?

Yes, it's very popular—and the politicians know it—to scream about government overspending and a budget deficit that will imperil our economy for decades to come. But in this consumer economy we've created by letting big business get away with sending huge portions of our industries overseas, we really need to understand where those "too many" tax dollars are going. How many of them actually make it back into your own pocket, in some way? How much is government investing in keeping this wrecked ship of an economy afloat? And what would our lives look like if we just…let it sink?

Think about it.

News That Makes Your Head Ache

2011-02-08T23:15:00.000-08:00

Here's the big newsbomb of the day: Due to some kind of renovations, seat-shuffling, or temporary seating arrangements that were not completed by game time, Cowboys Stadium in Dallas was, apparently, not adequately prepared to honor all the tickets sold for Sunday's game. You know. The Big Game. The one I'm not allowed to use the name of because the NFL has that moniker copyrighted.

Anyway, some 1250 fans—holders of tickets for which they had shelled out $800 a pop, not to mention travelling and hotel costs—arrived at the stadium for the game to find they literally had no seats to sit in. Aternate seating arrangements were scared up for about two-thirds of these folks. Leaving 400 or so out of luck. Bummer. Big bummer, to be sure.

Certainly, the NFL owes these folks something. A refund on the ticket price. Re-imbursement for travel and lodging costs. Maybe season tickets on the fifty yard line of their favorite home field for life. At a cost of peanuts to the money-generating behemoth of the National Football League, they could go a long way toward smoothing the ruffled feathers of the fans involved.

The league, however, seems to be offering no more than an official, "Sorry—our bad!" and free tickets to next year's championship game. Huh? What if my team isn't playing in next year's game? If I'm a die-hard Cheese-head, why would I want a free ticket to see, say, the Bears and the Giants duke it out in 2012? Duh.

Some of the fans, however, are intent on taking this to their own level of hyper-stupidity. One Pittsburgh Steeler fanatic was so po'd by the goings on that he has decided to hire a lawyer. And to try to draft others of the 400 or so affected fans to join him in a lawsuit. From the CNN.com story:

[He] has now started suesuperbowl.com, one of at least two websites for fans mulling possible lawsuits over the seating issue. He said he is obtaining legal counsel and is urging affected fans to get in touch. So far he has heard from about a dozen people, he said.
"We're still figuring out what our rights are, whether damages come into play or not," he said. "This is more than just a breach of contract. ... This was a very traumatic experience for a lot of these people."

Where do I start?

1.)I submit that anyone who would pop for an $800 ticket, plus the travel and lodging costs, to personally witness a bunch of astronomically over-paid and over-promoted adult men elevate a kid's game to the level of kill-or-be-killed blood feud, already has more money than sense. They don't need a windfall from the NFL.

2.)Damages? What damages? Do you still have both arms, both legs, all your fingers and toes, and all the brain cells you had the day before you went to the game? Are you able to get up in the morning, go to work, play golf, swig a brew or two at your local pub, kiss your wife, hug your kids? Damages? Give me a break.

3.) And this one most of all: "This was a very traumatic experience." Traumatic? You have to be kidding me. Do you have a clue what real trauma is? Trauma happens when airplanes fly into big buildings, or when you watch your nine-year old get shot in the head by rabid border-control fanatics, or when you drive a jeep in Iraq, waiting for the next roadside pile of rubbish to explode and send you to kingdom come. Trauma. If you can manufacture a crippling case of PTSD out of losing your seat to a football game, you also have more issues than any amount of money is ever going to fix.

Go ahead. Be bummed. Be pissed. I'd be pissed. I'd want my money back, and then some. Maybe a few "gimmes" from the guys who were so focused on squeezing every dollar of profit out of the event that they oversold the damn stadium (nothing, by the way, that the airlines don't do every hour of every day.)

But let's not raise this thing to the level of lingering emotional damage and trauma. Get your refund, get a few coupons, and GET OVER IT!!!

And to the NFL—surely you have enough loose bills lying around that you can figure out how to put a smile back on the faces of 450 righteously disaffected fans. Put one of your seven-figure-salaried marketing executives on that, will ya?

Insanity

2010-07-05T23:12:00.000-07:00

I spend very little time watching, reading, or listening to the political discourse these days. For awhile, just after the 2008 election, I was under the mistaken impression that things would improve; that the inanity was somehow going to dissipate with the presence of an intelligent, well-spoken man behind the desk in the Oval Office. We all know that didn't happen, don't we?

We all know that, if anything, the right has become more shrill and more inane in its proclamations and accusations. Including taking every disastrous, unpopular result of eight years of Bush Administration policies and immediately projecting them on to President Obama. The Economic Crisis? Obama's fault. The Bail-out? Obama's idea (No one mentions the free bailout money the Bush Administration dished out shortly before Bush left office. It's like it never happened…) It's Obama's fault that he has been unable to wave a magic wand and create new jobs for everyone who lost theirs as a result of a runaway financial system left unregulated by the Bush Administration. The Gulf Oil Disaster has been characterized as "Obama's Katrina," even though it was most probably the result of at least eight years (prior to Obama's election) of rule by a Big-Oil Puppet King. Last week, Michael Steele decided to add the war in Afghanistan to the list of Obama's transgressions. (We are supposed to forget this war has been going on for eight years and Obama's only been in office for two…)

And then there's Sarah Palin.

If I let myself think about it, I would still have a nearly irresistible desire to put my house on the market, pack my bags and my animals and head for some remote backwoods in Canada to live out my life in blissful political ignorance (with better health care…)

But I don't let myself think about it. In fact, I just can't go there, because it's all so flagrant and hopeless, this hype/attack/demonize/destroy political method that has taken hold of our country. For the past two years, I've been (metaphorically) trying to function with my fingers in my ears and humming really loud. I almost get to the place where I can choose my own reality—that I'm actually living in a country (a world?) governed by grown-ups. And then something happens that rudely drags me out of that rarified space and douses me with a bucket of cold, green, slimy reality.

Something like that happened last week. I was behind the counter at the café, and an old gentleman walked up to the counter and asked where the offices for the phone company were. (In fact he asked for the wrong phone company…the one that covers most of the county but NOT our little town. Evidently, he finds it inconvenient to read the name at the top of his phone bill…) Maybe it will just be easier to relate the conversation:

LOG (Little Old Gentleman): Do you know where's the office for (wrong phone company) around here?

Me: We don't have (wrong phone company.) We have (right phone company.) And their offices are right across the street.

LOG: I went over there. But there's nobody there.

Me: I know. They don't have a customer service office over there anymore. You have to call the customer service number on your bill.

LOG: Well, I done that. And she keeps sayin' all these things that don't have nothin' to do with what I want. (I assumed this meant that he got lost in electronic phone menu land and didn't hear an option that appealed to him…)

Me: Yeah…sometimes those phone things can be kind of frustrating…

And then he launched into the story all about how his phone bill was fouled up and he got it fixed once, but he can't find the right people to help fix it this time. Went on and on for about five minutes, while I was politely trying to extricate myself from his tale of woe and get him to move on so I could wait on the customers in line behind him.

Me: Well, you just have to call that number and see if you can get to the right person.

LOG: Yeah… But ever since that Obama got in, ever'thin's been messed up…

That's right, folks. This Old Gentleman was going to blame Barack Obama for his woes with the local telephone company.

That's how far the poison has spread. How ingrained and integrated into our society this insane bullshit has become. That some little old guy in Nameless Small Town, USA believes that anything bad, anything negative that happens to him personally is the direct fault of the President of the United States. And, by god, he is going to cast his vote for the other side next time around…because the phone company messed up his bill.

I turned away from that suddenly insane exchange with the Little Old Gentleman, with my fists balled and an almost overwhelming desire to go and beat my head against the nearest wall…

Am I Supposed to Feel Sorry For This Guy?

2010-05-30T23:10:00.000-07:00

Working as many hours as I do, I'm largely cut off from television news, and I wouldn't listen to a radio talk show if you chained a set of headphones to my ears and held a gun to my head. But I do get the opportunity to browse the headlines in the Oregonian when I pick it up off the sidewalk on my way in the door of the cafe in the morning.

I know newspapers are having a really hard time staying afloat these days. And I honestly think it's a terrible shame. It's possible that print media was the last place you could obtain actual news if you went looking for it. But since papers have decided to turn themselves into "news magazines" in an attempt to retain readers, there's nothing much besides a whole lot of fluff splattered between the first and last pages. And there's no such thing as a "news" piece written without a ton of very obvious editorial intent.

So the other day, I spied this story on the front page of the paper:

AT & T Customer Goes To Jail After Shooting At Thieves' Car

...in which some jack-ass with a concealed weapon permit and a loaded .38 in his pocket decided to play "NCIS" and shoot out the tires of the getaway car of some thieves who had run out of the local cel phone store with a couple of hot I-Phones.

He missed. God knows where those shots went, or could have gone. And since when does one resort to deadly force to recover $700 worth of electronic gadgets? The Gresham Police hauled his ass off to jail. And everyone is outraged, because this ballsy guy was "just trying to do the right thing."

I have to say, we live in a crazy world. Every time the police around here actually have to kill someone, there is a monstrous investigation, the cop gets suspended until the investigation is complete, editiorialists from every nook and cranny put in their two cents about how the police misuse deadly force. A cop can hardly taser or bean-bag someone without being painted as an accomplice to the Rodney King assault. But let some Joe Blow on the street with a concealed handgun and an over-developed fantasy life take pot-shots at a petty thief, and he's painted as some kind of folk hero.

I guess this qualifies as my

"WTF"

for this week...

Buyer's Remorse?

2010-03-23T23:07:00.000-07:00

The increased shrillness of partisan rhetoric caused by the passage of the Health Care Bill has caused my blood to curdle to the "political rant" point. I haven't felt one coming on this strongly since the 2008 election…

Let's face it. Barack Obama was elected president in 2008 for two main reasons: First, he was NOT George W. Bush or anything even remotely associated with that infamous administration; and second, he had not chosen Sarah Palin as a running mate. It's utter folly to believe that a majority of American voters carefully scrutinized the platforms of all candidates and chose Barack Obama based on anything he said or promised or represented. Which is not to say there were not those who voted for Mr. Obama for reasons other than his non-Bush-ness. But those true believers alone would not have pushed him to victory. George W. Bush let his house of cards fall down around his Alfred E. Newman ears about six months too early to allow him to hand the mantle of power over to a successor of his own political ideology. The American people were fed up with Bush and everything he stood for. And they voted that frustration.

So when I hear about this "buyers' remorse" that all of us who voted for Obama are supposed to be suffering now, I beg to disagree. Mr. Obama is, after all, STILL not George W. Bush. And he did not clasp hands with Vice President Sarah Palin upon signing the Health Care Bill into law. If he is or accomplishes nothing else in the next three (or seven) years, he will remain exactly what I purchased with my vote sixteen months ago.

However, I am beset by a certain amount of remorse connected with the Obama presidency. When I cast my vote, I foolishly assumed that an Obama victory would put an end to the madness. That the presence of an articulate, educated, intelligent human being behind the desk in the Oval Office would raise the level of political discourse in this country to something at least a rung or two above the putrid, sniping rhetoric of hatred and fear propagated by the previous administration. What was I thinking? What made me believe that the party of "Daschellism" and swift-boating had any intention of abiding by the will of the people, dropping their delusions of national domination and getting down to the business of government?

Mr. Obama, for his part, tried to implement the gospel of inclusiveness he had preached before the election. He was all about bi-partisanship; he did everything but stand on his head trying to get Republicans to come to the table and pow-wow about the changes he had promised the American people (after he spent the first weeks of his presidency desperately trying to keep the country's head above the treacherous economic waters into which the Bush Administration had cast it…)

The newly-demoted minority party richly rewarded the President's outstretched hand. First, they cast aspersions on the bail-outs he was forced to offer to floundering financial institutions (as if he was simply throwing our hard-earned tax money at a bunch of spoiled rich kids for no reason, or for reasons of his own creation.) And then they banded together as a rock-hard block to oppose anything and everything that the President tried to accomplish—with the expressed intention by their own admission of causing this President to fail. No thought to the needs of the people. No thought to the challenges facing any government in 21^st century global politics. Their entire platform, all their energy was sunk into that single mission. Effectively solidifying the minority party into a giant turd clogging the pipes of our government. And, of course, blaming it all on the "other side."

Am I frustrated to near hysteria by what's going on? Of course. Do I blame President Obama? No, I do not.

I know who I believe in my heart is responsible for this entire mess. But I also know that, at this point, fixing blame is pointless. Our government is broken. Perhaps beyond redemption. The patient is dead. Will figuring out who's to blame bring it back to life?

How do you make them shut up? How do you make them care about anything but their own avarice, their personal delusions of power and control? I don't know. Obviously nobody knows. The country has gone completely mad and it appears there is no help for it. For the first time in my life, the thought of just getting the hell away from the madness, rather than working to calm or change it, looks tremendously appealing.

I've always wanted to travel…

Noise

2010-01-06T23:03:00.000-08:00

I have been a tad out of touch since we bought the restaurant… We DO listen to the radio in the kitchen at the café. But after three years, the fact that every radio station we can pick up has a playlist of about ten songs that they crank out over and over again until you can’t stand it anymore led me to a dangerous decision. About a week ago, I rekindled my relationship with public radio. I decided, what the heck, I’d rather listen to “Talk of the Nation” than some pre-pubescent pop star whining through her latest smash hit for the umpteenth time. Now, I’m not so sure I’ve made the right choice. Because the political acid is starting to burn a hole in my gut right next to the cavity created by my job. Maybe not good for my health…

Seems there is a new book out there that has been stirring up the political scene: Game Change, by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. It is supposedly a minutely researched expose of the highlights, and lowlights (of which there are surely many) of the 2008 presidential campaign.

Now, I have not read the book, nor am I going to promise to, given that I finished exactly three books in all of 2009. But my observation isn’t about the book, it’s about the firestorm it has created.

We on the left are still wondering what the hell qualified Sarah Palin for the attention she received as a candidate in 2008; and why the hell anyone still cares about her now, a year past her ignominious and well-deserved defeat. So, when additional tales of her incompetence and ignorance come to light, we can’t help but yuk it up a little at her expense. Game Change first hit the shelves a few weeks ago, and left-wingers took the opportunity to use it to poke fun at Sarah Palin. And of course it wasn’t all light-hearted, good-natured joshing. There are those who are aware that someone needs to make every effort to make Sarah Palin go away for good.

We hardly finish tittering over Palin’s miscues when we are assailed by a barrage of smear over Harry Reid’s comments as quoted by the authors of this same book. “Harry Reid is a racist!” “Harry Reid insulted the (not-yet) President!” “Harry Reid should apologize!” “Harry Reid should resign!” Note, please, that as far as I know NONE of these calls for Harry Reid’s head came from members of the black community (with the exception of RNC Chairman Michael Steele, and we all know where his loyalties lie…) and certainly not from the President himself. Everyone is mystified, even the authors of the book, that this particular aspect of Harry Reid’s involvement in President Obama’s campaign is the one that everyone has chosen to focus upon. After all, the point of the story was to illustrate Reid’s contribution to Mr. Obama’s victory.

What’s not to get, here? Let us not forget that across the aisle sits the party, not of “equal and opposite reaction,” but of “insane and hyperbolic over-reaction.” The party for whom the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter are two of the more (in)famous mouthpieces. The party that, after years of practice, has honed “smear” to a stiletto point; and can—and does—launch it with the deadliest accuracy.

We snicker behind our hands about Sarah Palin, and they launch a full-scale “Daschellism” against Harry Reid. And no one gets the connection?

There are two morals to this story: First: Sarah Palin is the right wing’s Sacred Cow. (Love that imagery, don’t you?) Frighteningly enough, she represents redemption to many in the Republican Party, certainly to the rightest and shrillest wing thereof, and she will be defended with every weapon at the party’s disposal.

Lesson the second: We can't out-smear the Republican party. Democrats are so far behind in this particular arms race that it doesn’t do for them to even attempt to engage the enemy on this field. This is one game at which we can not beat them. And, in my opinion, trying to do so only raises the snarky political noise to a pitch that will surely turn all our brains to mush. If it hasn’t already.

So, here’s an idea for the Democratic Party:

Why not DO something? Why not accomplish something for which history, and possibly even the voting public, will reward you? Why not earn the public’s trust, instead of trying to out-yell the other guy for it?

Just a thought…

On The 2009 Nobel Peace Prize

2009-10-19T20:56:00.000-07:00

I’m sure everyone thought the resident Obama fan would have some comment about the President being selected to win the Nobel Peace Prize. So here are my two cents:

Do I think Mr. Obama’s selection for that lofty prize may have been a bit premature? Yes, I do. Do I think President Obama has had an opportunity to implement his world-peace-enhancing policies? No, I do not. Do I believe that our Congress/electorate/national media will even allow him to implement those policies? Hard to say.

But what I think is not important. In fact, what we as a nation think isn’t important. The Nobel Prize is awarded by a committee that represents, arguably, global interests. And that is key.

What we don’t, as a nation, see—what we refused to allow ourselves to believe for eight years—was how far, under the hand of the Bush Administration, the United States of America had fallen from the ideals that had made her the great nation she was. After the September 11th attacks, the US turned cowardly. Fear made her retract the great wings of freedom and protection with which she traditionally attempted to enfold the world. Fear made her stretch her sharp talons in the direction of any threat, real or imagined. Fear made her claw and snap and growl. A world that had depended upon a strong, brave, free and generous America saw the US turn into a very large, very wounded animal, with the Bush Administration continuously chewing upon the sores to keep them open and to keep her fearful and angry and half-crazed with pain. And the world became afraid—of us.

Finally, We the People regained our senses and drove the party responsible for our loss of respect on the world stage out of the White House. Sure, we elected a man who got the job pretty much because he was as far from the person and policies of the previous Administration as you could get. President Obama was elected because he was NOT George W. Bush, and as far as the rest of the world is concerned, that (obviously) carries a tremendous amount of weight. Mr. Obama has at the very least talked the talk of a complete about-face from the previous administration’s policies. That was enough to impress the Nobel Committee, to inspire them to award the Peace Prize to the man who personifies the restoration of the United States of America to her rightful place in the world—that of Uniter, not Divider.

I look at the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize as having been awarded more to the people of the United States than to the new President. We kicked the bad guys out, and demanded the change that the Obama Administration represents. Let’s just hope that, now, we go forward and implement that change the world so desperately needs to see in us.

If Their Past Is Not My Future, What Is?

2009-10-12T20:54:00.000-07:00

Since my parents died, I’ve adopted this somewhat morbid habit of recalling what was happening in their lives when they were my age. I look back to see if their fifties, sixties and seventies held anything that I might look forward to in my own life. Perhaps something that bears any resemblance to the dreams I used to have for myself, or, for that matter, anything even vaguely appealing.

In their fifties, my parents saw their first grandchildren born, and their youngest daughter (me) married. Okay, being childless, these are things I will not be anticipating….

Mom and Dad bought a travel trailer, made some little trips around the country, even splurged on a few “flying” vacations. They finally felt “flush” enough to begin their tradition of going out to dinner every Friday night. They were, for the most part, contented empty-nesters, established and comfortable and enjoying the fruits of their labors. But the fact is, they were already winding down in those years. Slowing down and gliding into retirement. My mother was only 59 when my parents retired, for god’s sake.

So why in the hell would I even think I could use my parents’ lives as any kind of template for my own? Could there be a more opposite set of circumstances than where my parents were at my age and where I find myself today? I’m an over-challenged, clueless entrepreneur trying to single-handedly drive to victory the one dream in all my life that I’ve managed to yank out of my head and into reality. Slowing down? I’m still going 100 miles an hour…well, maybe only 80, because that’s as fast as I can go. But my foot is pressed to the floor and I’m calling for every bit of power I can coax out of the old gal. Retirement? What’s that?

But perhaps I’ve figured out why people want to slow down. They want it to last. They want to plant their feet in front of all those years that are tumbling by faster and faster and stop the free-fall. Put out their hands and say, “Wait! Stop! Hold on just a minute! I’M…NOT…DONE…!”

Not so very long ago, my future consisted not of fading dreams of things I hadn’t accomplished, but of all the things I fully intended to do. I would have that a-frame cabin in the woods. I would make that trip to The Continent…spend time…six months, maybe a year. I would rediscover my music and my art; take up piano, and learn to ride, and write for money. I could do these things. I had time.

Now, I look at my life, half-gone…or maybe a little more than half. And I’m so busy and time goes so fast, faster and faster every minute, that I know I’ll never get the chance... Maybe I knew that before…but it still felt good, to dream. To think, yeah...I could do that. Because even if I didn’t have the money or the means or the moxie, I had the time. Which somehow made it all still possible.

What is my future, now? What can I still expect to do…and where am I going to find the time?

Choosing Anger over Fear

2009-03-16T11:51:00.000-07:00

I’m convinced that our intrepid media are more than marginally responsible for the economy’s continuing downward spiral. They delight in imparting everything, down to the tiniest, goriest detail; confident that we, the sensation-starved public, will gobble down every poisonous morsel and beg for more. And we do.

With that in mind, I’ve had to limit my exposure to those tainted offerings, lest I simply give up, lock the doors of the café, walk away and go live in my car—the one that has been paid for since 1985. Business is down, but we haven’t gone broke yet. Customers come in, food goes out, and the bills get paid on time. So it’s no good for me to start obsessing about all the gloom and doom the media are spreading around. Not yet, anyway.

And yet, despite my best efforts, one of those deadly stories will get to me every couple of days. And my best defense…is a good offense. I refuse to get scared. I choose to get pissed instead.

So, what did I choose to get pissed at this time? Well, I read the news about AIG using the second infusion of federal bailout money to shell out hundreds of millions of dollars in “bonuses.” I came upon this information via a long, involved story in the New York Times. Wherein I learned that AIG claims, and independent lawyers seem to confirm, that they “have no choice” but to pay out these bonuses.

Have no choice? Excuse me? On how many levels is this absolute horse puckey?

“We promised these bonuses back in 2008, before the economy tanked.” First of all, it has always been my understanding that bonuses are paid for good performance. Bonuses are paid to employees who have contributed above and beyond the call to increase a company’s profits. It can’t be news to you that not only has your company tanked, but it has taken a good portion of the American economy with it. Exactly what, then, have these guys done to rate a “bonus?” To the tune of several hundred million dollars? The very fact that the government has HAD to pump billions into AIG’s coffers should summarily disqualify any employee from receiving a “bonus.”

And if that federal bailout money did not have some kind of clear directives attached to it as to how it could be used, somebody REALLY screwed the pooch.

“We need to pay out these bonuses in order to retain our best employees.” Hello! Your “best” employees are responsible for one of the biggest economic disasters in the history of…economy. I personally would be telling them not to let the door hit them in the ass… And, by the by, where are they going to go? There’s a recession on, dipshits. No one is hiring. Bonuses or not, you’re very likely stuck with them. FIRE their butts. Or let them sue. DON’T GIVE THEM THE MONEY.

All I could think when I read that stupid article was, if someone is so convinced that this money HAS to go out, and they, in turn, have convinced the government that there is nothing they can do to stop it, we have bigger problems than just a broken economy. The rich (and don't insult me by claiming that someone who receives a million dollar bonus is not rich) WILL have their money, if they have to snatch the last dollar out of the hands of a starving family to get it. Something is so fundamentally broken here that it’s going to take generations to fix. If it can be fixed at all.

And that…

THAT scares the hell out of me.

Go Ahead...Give It Back!

2009-03-11T23:57:00.000-07:00

First, we heard certain Republican governors whining that they “didn’t need” federal bailout money and planned on either giving it back or refusing it altogether. It seems one of the big sticking points was that in order to accept certain moneys, the states would have to amend their unemployment policies to include part-time workers. Oh, by all means…we can’t extend benefits to part-timers. We’ll just overlook the fact that some people have to work two or three part-time jobs in order to make ends meet, because our 21st century service-based economy does not have an adequate number of full-time, living wage jobs available. Those jobs—along with the factories and the mills—are all in Asia now…supporting the Chinese and Indian middle class.

The situation kind of reminds me of the joke about the drowning man who refused a life ring, a boat, and a helicopter because “God was going to save him.” When he ultimately drowned and arrived at the Pearly Gates, he asked God, “Why didn’t you save me?” And God said, “What do you mean? I sent you a life preserver, a boat and a helicopter…”

Now that we’ve got that bit of insanity out of our system, the banks have decided to get into the act. Today, I spied an article at The New York Times about banks—big and small—contriving to refuse or send back bailout money. It seems that the Obama administration has put “onerous” conditions on banks accepting federal bailout funds. Things like suspending evictions and offering distressed homeowners the opportunity to refinance. Things like requiring banks to allow shareholders to vote on executive compensation packages. Terrible, awful, reprehensible things to require of a bunch of rich ***holes standing in line with one hand out and the other with fingers crossed behind their backs.

The banks have become so enamored of their unencumbered, unrestricted, unregulated status that they just can’t allow themselves to be controlled in any way. They were all in favor of the “Give us the money and we’ll figure out how to use it” style of bailout. They were overjoyed to stand in line with their stack of bags at the ready to fill up and then stash somewhere that no one would ever see it again (probably in the Swiss bank accounts of their highest executives…)

But now…what? We’re going to try to tell them what they can do with the money? We’re going to try to hold them responsible? We’re going to try to coerce them into some kind of social accountability? Well, then they’ll just have to sputter and turn all red in the face and cry “Socialism! Government control! Ack! Ack!”

All this crap about “socialism” that’s being bandied about these days… I have to ask: Why is it that any time government steps in to try to benefit the poor—or, god forbid, the over-burdened, under-appreciated middle class—the right-wing blares the “S” word like an air-raid siren? What is so wrong with the idea of the government “of the people by the people” making sure the people get a fare shake from time to time? Why does it so infuriate the “haves” when the “have-nots” steal a tiny, cap-gun-sized pop of their thunder?

In the end, I have to wonder: if all these banks are standing in line to give the bailout money back, how much did they need it in the first place? Because I really can’t believe that they’re willing to face certain doom rather than accept money with “onerous” conditions attached to it, just on principle. How does the saying go? Fool me once ($800 billion in unregulated bailout money from the Bush Administration), shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me...

Cross-posted from Women On...

Remember When Freedom Wasn't Free?

2009-01-03T06:30:00.000-08:00

I read last week that Dan Rather is suing CBS news for $70 million, seeking retribution for the debacle following his story on Bush's military record that cost him his job just before election 2004.

You remember that story, right? The one where Rather's team acquired documents that indicated that our illustrious War President had received preferential treatment to avoid serving in Viet Nam during the war, and in fact had been allowed to duck out of the military without fulfilling all his obligations? The story that resulted in Rather's "Swift-boating" by nefarious factions of the Right Wing Media Noise Machine?

I was fascinated to discover, in reading about Rather's current lawsuit, that those documents that were deafeningly decried as forgeries by conservative bloggers (they claimed to have evidence that the type faces and fonts used on the documents did not exist in the military in the 1960's) were never actually proven to be anything but authentic. And that neither Bush nor his team ever denied the contents of the records.

More than anything, this story brought back memories of the Bad Old Days: those months in the wake of 9/11 when George W. Bush was allowed—no, not merely allowed…begged—to ride rough-shod over the American public's freedoms in the name of gathering us all, trembling and wetting ourselves—under his great, fearless, protective wings. Those were dark days, indeed; days when an ambiguous administration, and a man who struggled to attain mediocrity on his best days, were elevated to Knights of the Right and Protectors of All Things Sacred. Days when we traded our rights to privacy, due process, dissent and a free press for a security to which citizens of a free nation should never condescend to aspire.

But that was years ago, wasn't it? The Bush Administration is gasping its last breath, and Barack Obama is waiting in the wings to take over and initiate course corrections to our ship of state. Right? So why is Dan Rather suing now? Why keep beating a dead horse? Why not just…get over it?

I don't know. Bleeding-heart liberal that I am, I was never a Dan Rather fan. Sure, we share many of the same political opinions…but that's the point. Opinions do not have a place behind the anchor desk. At least, they didn't twenty-five years ago. I was never comfortable with the in-your-face liberal slant with which Rather branded his "news" broadcasts. Invariably, I could watch him for about five minutes before I would tune him out in disgust. He always came off as way too "holier than thou." "Just report the news, Dan," I would chide him in my mind. "Don't tell me how to think about it."

Little did I know then that Rather was blazing the trail of the future of journalism. The future where the boundaries between news and editorialism completely evaporated; the future where the public would be bombarded with so much skewed and often contradicting "information," put out there by factions with varying agendas, that they would ultimately be forced to choose a reality.

That future that is NOW.

So, it is true that, in some respects, Rather was hoist on his own petard. He was one of the original polluters of the information stream; eventually, he was forced to drink his own poison. I feel bad for him; I think he got a raw deal. And I think he wants vindication. And if he can get it, though it's too late for it to free us from one more minute of Bush Administration bungling, I think he deserves it.

But more importantly, we as a nation need to watch Dan Rather reopen this can of worms. We need to be reminded of where we were four short years ago. Remember when the president was so revered, almost sanctified, that any whisper of negative press about him was called un-American and punished as severely as law—or society outside the law—would tolerate? Remember when you refrained from voicing political opinions at your local watering hole, lest you meet with some embarrassing or violent incident? Remember when you were afraid that a petty fight with a neighbor might result in him imagining a terrorist plot and ratting you out to the FBI? Remember when one of the nation's pre-eminent journalists was discredited, disgraced, and ridden out of town on a rail on the basis of a story that was, in all likelihood, true?

Remember not feeling very free in the land of the free and home of the brave?

We absolutely need to remember these things. Because we absolutely need to make sure they never happen again.

(Cross-posted from "Women On...")

Can Our Government Shine?

2008-12-31T06:28:00.000-08:00

The weather has gone abominable in the Pacific Northwest, and, since people are staying home in droves—which means they are not darkening the doors of the café—I have found myself with considerable amounts of time on my hands. My first instinct is to wring those very hands in worry and frustration with the evil-looking numbers we are putting up for this week (and probably for the rest of the month, considering that the weather is not slated to improve much between now and New Years'…) Instead, I've decided to pick up the book I've been trying to read for the last month, and see if I can't get through to the end. Yes…I'm still reading Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope.

When I first cracked open the book several weeks ago, I found myself often reading through tears. I was still in the "relief bordering on disbelief" stage of post-election euphoria. I could hardly read a well-formed, comprehensible sentence crafted by the man slated to become our next president without experiencing an almost overwhelming feeling of awe, gratitude and victory. It felt for all the world like a religious conversion experience. (And I know from where I speak on such things, believe me…)

As time has passed, the euphoria has given way to practicality. I'm starting to wonder how many wheels our broken economy has to lose, as one seems to go spinning off into the gutter every few hours. If the wails of woe issuing from the Senate, the auto industry, the energy and oil industries, China, real estate and construction concerns, and just about every other contributor to our nation's financial stability don't snap one's attention back to dire reality, nothing will. So I have continued my reading in a more subdued state of mind.

And, here's the thing. It's not that Mr. Obama isn't intelligent, well-read, even-tempered and introspective…all traits that will indeed be pleasant to attribute to an American president. It's just that he is very much a regular guy. The things he writes are refreshing and reasonable, but they are not revolutionary. What makes him look like the second coming is the backdrop of the last eight miserable years of intellectual and moral retreat through which this nation has suffered under the Bush Administration. It would be hard for anyone not to look like a knight in shining armor coming out of that cistern of muck. What I fear now is that the media, the government, and the American people are going to expect way more from Barack Obama than any human being could possibly deliver. And then turn on him like a pack of wolves…

The nation is watching closely as Mr. Obama selects his cabinet and top advisors. Everyone is still gun-shy of the cronyism that was the hallmark of Bush Administration appointments. We ooh and aaah over Obama's thoughtful selection process as he calls upon experts and scholars, people who might actually have credentials, some of the best credentials, in fact, to fill key roles in his government. Once again, why do we find this so fascinating? Isn't this how the process should look?

Yes, there will be quite a contrast between the government assembled by a privileged, ne'er-do-well scion of a Texas oil baron-turned-politician, and the one brought together by a middle-class Constitutional scholar who came to politics via the route of public service. Bush's philosophy of government is that it act only in ways that will enhance the power of the powerful…thereby keeping our nation strong and, through trickle-down, improving the lives of those without power. And all that power must intersect in the person of one central figure: the President. The guy who at least appears to hold all the cards and make all the rules.

Mr. Obama's philosophy is that government is a coalition of the best minds and practitioners, even those with opposing viewpoints, working together for the greater good of society. The president is the guy whose responsibility it is to call all these various factions together and facilitate their cooperation. I think we can expect Mr. Obama's to be a government of conviction rather than agenda. It is one thing to have solid beliefs and to live by them; it is quite another to have an agenda to force everyone else in the country to live according to your convictions. In Mr. Obama's mind, the way to govern—indeed, the very foundation of our government—is to bring the best, most capable minds together and allow them to have at it. Here are his words on the subject:

"Whether we are for or against affirmative action, for or against prayer in schools, we must test out our ideals, vision, and values against the realities of a common life, so that over time they may be refined, discarded, or replaced by new ideals, sharper visions, deeper values. Indeed, it is that process, according to Madison, that brought about the Constitution itself, through a convention in which 'no man felt himself obliged to retain his opinions any longer than he was satisfied of their propriety and truth, and was open to the force of argument.'"

Imagine that. A government that would be all about encouraging people to open their minds, or even change their minds; as opposed to a goose-stepping regime that adheres to a strict list of written-in-stone commandments, crying "flip-flop!" at the slightest prospect of an enlightened recalculation.

I don't know about you, but I personally am very eager to see Mr. Obama's—and the Founders'—theories of government get a chance to shine. No matter what happens, we will no doubt be living in a very different country than we have been of late. And it is SO about time!

Presidential Reality

2008-12-13T21:49:00.000-08:00

I didn't actually hear the entire speech. In fact, I didn't even know Mr. Bush had spoken at a commencement on Friday (or that there was a self-respecting school on the planet that would want him) until I found this little quote on a friend's blog.

And I immediately thought, "This explains a lot." And it is more than a little disturbing, coming out of the mouth of the man who has been the Leader of the Free World for the past eight years:

"Remember that popularity is as fleeting as the Texas wind. Character and conscience are as sturdy as the oaks on this campus. If you go home at night, look in the mirror and be satisfied that you have done what is right, you will pass the only test that matters."
-- President George W. Bush, from his commencement address Friday at Texas A&M

Isn't this just a fancy and inspiring way of saying, "Choose your own reality?" To hell with truth, justice, and everyone else in the world. As long as YOU can live with what you've done, that's all that matters.

Evidently, Mr. Bush wants everyone to rest assured that he will be able to sleep like a baby every night in his approaching retirement. I'm SO reassured…aren't you?

Bursting The Handbag Bubble

2008-12-11T21:47:00.000-08:00

As is typical of the season, I receive about ninety-five ads, catalogs and solicitations in the mail every day. My kitchen counters are awash in shiny, full color spreads from Home Decorators', Walmart, Kohl's, Touch of Class, Fred Meyer. All clamoring for their share of the general population's fast-disappearing discretionary dollar. Some retailers are even trying to adopt the, "Our loss is your gain" tactic. Kind of like, "We're sinking fast but you can get some real good deals before we go under…"

And then…and then, there's Nordstrom. Steadfast in its appeal to the "Haves." As opposed to the "Have Nots." Or the "Did Have but Won't For Longs."

Nordstrom with its hand-picked selection of $250 costume jewelry watches, with which one can adorn one's wrist while toting a $600 designer handbag. Nordstrom…in all its unerring allegiance to pricey, unnecessary affectation.

Nordstrom stands alone here in the Pacific Northwest as a testament to the excesses endemic to the lifestyle of riding the economic bubble. That bubble which burst…sometime in the relatively recent past. (The Bush Administration is allowing now that it actually burst sometime last December…?)

But burst it has; causing those of us who might once have foolishly considered the purchase of a $600 purse to pull the strings on our shabby little $25 tote bag as tight as we can, the better to hold in the funds we need to merely survive.

Not that I ever entertained the notion of owning a multi-hundred dollar handbag. But it makes you wonder…who would? What in god's name would make a stupid purse worth what many people pay in monthly rent?

What were we thinking?

Makes one realize that this country was badly in need of an…economic correction, doesn't it?

On Our Black Magic Economy

2008-12-02T22:18:00.000-08:00

Here is the opening paragraph in Wikipedia's entry under "Economics:"

"Current economic models developed out of the broader field of political economy in the late 19^th century, owing to a desire to use an empirical approach more akin to the physical sciences.^[2] A definition that captures much of modern economics is that of Lionel Robbins in a 1932 essay: "the science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses."^[3] Scarcity means that available resources are insufficient to satisfy all wants and needs. Absent scarcity and alternative uses of available resources, there is no economic problem. The subject thus defined involves the study of choices as they are affected by incentives and resources."

Okay…I am not a stupid woman. Perhaps I'm less educated than I would like to be, but I think my intelligence level is right up there. And I have no idea what any of that means. A couple of weeks ago, my landlord rather sheepishly confessed that he has a degree in Economics. "Geez, Brian," I groaned, "That's like having a degree in witchcraft."

From all that I can gather, I've come to the conclusion that economics is an infuriating concept which no one really understands, and upon which no two people seem to agree, yet it governs the relative ease or challenge of my daily existence. It can dictate whether I have a roof over my head, food to eat, and decent medical care when I need it, yet it is so ethereal that I have as much personal control over it as I do over spirits on The Other Side. There are words, like incantations, that only a privileged few are allowed to speak, and even those chosen few are loathe to utter them. Words like "recession," "slow-down," "correction," and the most powerful of all—the "Beetlejuice" of the economic lexicon—"depression."

Somewhere along the line, the decision was made that the best way to rebuild the economy after the September 11^th terrorist attacks was to hand the whole smoking mess to the richest of the rich, promise a stream of unlimited profits pouring into their treasure chests, turn the other way and let them have at it. It was so vital that the United States be able to stand up, dust itself off and say to the world, "Ha-ha, didn't hurt!" that we sold our souls to the devil. And the economic witch doctors to whom we turned have conjured and chanted and eye-of-newt-ed us to the top-heavy, over-inflated monster that is even now falling down around our heads.

"Black Friday" is the aptly named holiday upon which we celebrate the apex of our greed-based economy. The traditional game of this holiday involves retailers dangling irresistibly priced carrots in front of frenzied customers, who must then jump through demoralizing hoops—like lining up in the middle of the night in the rain outside the local Wal-Mart. This is the reward we get for carrying the nation's economy on our backs, year-round, by dutifully streaming to the stores and trading a hefty portion of our income for the latest technology, newest toy, or flashiest bling. What is wrong with this picture?

In the past weeks, the demise of our black magic economic model has been the star of the global stage. The entire world has watched as our booming gaseous blimp of an economy has lumbered toward the same end as the Hindenberg. And it is to be hoped that any country in its right mind, rather than queuing up behind us to subscribe to the same system (and help bail our burning butts out of our flaming ship), will run screaming in the opposite direction. I have no idea what healthy national economies are supposed be based upon. But it's pretty obvious, for a whole host of reasons, that rampant consumerism isn't it. For the past seven years, we've built an economy based largely on lending large amounts of money that did not really exist to people and entities that were not likely to be able to pay it back. How can that not fail, in the end?

It seems to me that a healthy economy must first and foremost be a moral economy. There needs to be equal opportunity for all members of society regardless of race, sex, ethnicity, religion; fair wages for fair labor; an equal chance for any business—large or small—to succeed. There needs to be access to superior education, and the best health care must be considered an inalienable right. There needs to be a sense that enough is enough, and too much is never a good thing. There needs to be a sense of stewardship, of protection of the earth and its resources. There needs to be a spirit of service, of the necessity of doing things that help other people, and not just looking out for number one. In short, there needs to be a means to responsible sustainable growth, rather than rampant irresponsible expansion.

Change is always difficult. It is too easy to get into the middle of something that you come to realize is wrong, but you don't know how to get yourself out of it. Perhaps the Universe is doing us a favor with this economic crisis. It is giving us the opportunity to start over. Let us hope it isn't too late. Let us hope that the people taking over the reins now will be bright enough and far-sighted enough to build something meaningful and substantial that will carry us well into this century, and beyond.

Cross-posted at Women On...

What a Difference Four Years Make

2008-11-09T00:26:00.001-08:00

Four years ago, I was so depressed by where our country found herself, so saddened by the depths of inexplicable depravity in which she had wallowed for more months than I cared to count, that I could barely rouse myself on the morning after the 2004 election. I had held so tightly, so desperately,to an unfounded hope that the silent majority would miraculously arise, shake the fog from their heads, and hand the Bush Administration its walking papers. I could not quite believe that my fellow Americans would award the Axis of Evil an additional forty-eight months to indulge its acquisitive lust for power, money, and more power.

And so I rose on the morning after Election 2004--the election that I firmly believed would be the most important of my lifetime--hope warring with dread in the core of my being, looked out the window at the new day and contemplated…

I decided I would let the dawn be the omen. If we had a spectacular
sunrise, no matter who won, things were going to be all right. A rainy, drizzly,
weeping dawn would foretell of dire consequences for our nation. Funny thing…I
knew the forecast was for sun today…knew the rain had stopped and the clouds had
scuttled away before we went to bed last night. I think I was creating a
scenario in my mind where my "good omen" daybreak was more than likely to
happen.

But we didn’t have a spectacular sunrise. The day dawned bright and
brittle. The sun just marched up over the horizon, cold and hard in the east.
And it frosted last night…the first frost of the season. The bright hard rays of
the rising sun glittered off the sodden masses of my garden flowers that were
killed by the frost. So, tell me…what kind of omen is that? Coming to Terms… November 3, 2004.

November 5, 2008 dawned grey and drizzly and dark…very much a typical late autumn day in the Pacific Northwest.

Yet I jumped out of bed, bustled into the café and gushed to my staff and any customer within earshot:

“Isn’t it a beautiful day!"

And I wasn’t talking about the weather.

Tears for the Victor

2008-11-09T00:24:00.001-08:00

Did anyone else watch an eloquent, intelligent young man humbly accept the gift of the presidency of the United States from the hands of the American people—a people burdened and burned by eight dark, oppressive years of an administration devoid of hope, empty of compassion, bankrupt of honor—with tears welling up and spilling into your lap?

I couldn’t help it. There stood a man, a bright articulate man, speaking of change and hard work, healing and unification… instead of mouthing platitudes, whipping up blind nationalism, reminding us of our fears and encouraging our craven trembling in the face of all manner of threats and dangers. And this man…this well-spoken, inspirational man… was designated our next president. Representing the absolute antithesis of the buffoon we have borne in that capacity for way …too…long.

It hardly bears believing.

As I watched Barack Obama address his people, I literally felt as if a great heavy cloud was lifting from our nation. A cloud that no matter how hard we’d struggled or how loudly we’d shouted at it, would not budge, but rather settled more and more heavily upon us until we were utterly immobilized by its weight, a weight more analagous to the granite of a tombstone than the insubstantial mist of cloud.

Oh my god, it’s been a long time coming. I can believe in this country again. I can hope for this country again. I can look forward to seeing her regain her proud place among the nations of the world.

I emphatically wish we hadn’t had to endure the past eight hideous years in order to see this day. And I suppose it is likely that if the past eight years had been any less hideous, we would not be seeing this day. We have seen the worst. Dare we hope that, now, we may see the best?

All I know is..for the first time in a really long time, I can say with some conviction…

I’m proud to be an American.

History Begins Now...

2008-11-04T20:59:00.001-08:00

******

Election 2008

NATION ELECTS FIRST BLACK PRESIDENT

******

On the "Sport" of Hunting

2008-10-26T08:44:00.000-07:00

Cross-posted at "Women On..."

This morning, I left for work just after dawn. I poked my head out my front door, and was greeted by the staccato pop! pop! pop! of shotgun fire from across the channel: Sportsmen taking potshots into the great flocks of game birds wintering in the wetlands on and surrounding Sauvie Island. That sound never fails to grip my heart and squeeze.

I hate guns.

My dad owned a pair of pistols and a rifle. They weren’t loaded, they weren’t kept at the ready in case some hoodlum broke into the house in the middle of the night intent on murdering us in our beds. In fact, the pistols were locked up in a metal strongbox.

Dad was brought up with guns; he grew up in a small town in Oregon where guns and hunting were part of the culture. He spoke proudly of earning enough money on his paper route to buy his first rifle when he was twelve years old. He treasured his guns as a connection to his roots, a memento of a time and place far away and fondly remembered.

But he respected their potential to create mayhem in the wrong hands…knew they really had no place in the sleepy, mid-century exurbs of Chicago. Dad’s guns lived in the back corner of my parents’ bedroom closet. We girls were sternly threatened never, ever to touch, look at, or interact with those guns in any way. Ever. So sternly that I don’t remember even being tempted to burrow into their hiding place to look at them. So began my hate affair with guns.

I’m no longer that frightened little girl, totally cowed by the demonic presence hiding in the dark reaches of my parents’ closet. But even in adulthood I have not acquired any love for or acceptance of the role of firearms in 21st century society. “Guns don’t kill. People kill.” Small comfort, really, when you think about it.

Today, with the sound of shotgun fire echoing in my ears, I wondered about mankind’s fascination with guns. And with killing.

We kill the animals over which, our religious tradition tells us, we were given dominion. We kill each other. For the hell of it.

What is wrong with us? Why must we kill? Why are we the only species on earth that has constructed such an elaborate ritual around the senseless killing of other animals? We call it “hunting.” We do it for sport. Not because we need the food. Not because these animals are capable of, or interested in, killing us if we don’t kill them. They don’t come looking for us. We take it to them.

We kill because we can. Because we want to. Because it gives us some kind of perverted feeling of power.

How sick is that?

Fall is my favorite time of year to walk on the dike. I go to see those stunningly huge flocks of birds flying in shifting waves across the marshes to the island. I go to hear their chaotic barking and honking. That sound always stirs up something wild and restless in me.

And when I think of some idiot dressed in camo with his designer dog at his heel, pointing a blunderbuss into those great wild flocks and blowing the life out of bird after bird for sport…for the fun of it…

I wonder where to hand in my resignation from this race that is truly beyond hope.

Better Terms Rises From the Ashes...Sort Of

2008-10-19T21:01:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, this whole blogging experience can be SUCH a challenge. More challenge than I really want to encounter, most of the time.

This evening, I have discovered two things:

Deleting multiple entries from “Blogger” is WAAAY more trouble than it is worth…

And…

I can SOMETIMES outsmart the capricious cyber-gods and actually bend this recalcitrant medium to my will. To a certain extent.

In other words, I figured out how to convert this old blog to the “Layout” format from the “Template” format, even though it refused to show me the magic buttons through normal channels.

But I will not be able to make the 300+ old “Coming to Terms…” entries I painstakingly copied and pasted into this journal go away without deleting them one by one. Something in which I choose not to invest precious time at this juncture.

So, I cannot restore “Better Terms” to its original ideal of a blog that contains only my “next level” writing.

However…

I can now mess with the template and pretty it up to my heart’s content.

You win some, you lose some…

For Those Who Followed "Coming To Terms..."

2008-10-09T22:10:00.000-07:00

Hey~~

AOL actually did something right for a change. I was indeed able to export "Coming to Terms..." in its entirety to blogger.

It's here. It's intact. And it's where I'll be from now on.

I'm not sure exactly what to do with "Better Terms." It was originally supposed to be a repository for my "next level" writing. A way to present my better stuff to the larger blog audience.

But here I am, with three (count them, THREE) more blogs out here in front of this "larger blog audience."

I'll have to think about doing a little paring down.

Until then, all you who thought you needed to follow me here to "Better Terms," please tune me in at Coming to Terms, blogger version...

Driven

2008-10-06T01:06:00.000-07:00

With all the things I have to do, all the responsibilities I’ve accumulated in the past few years, with the café, and my husband, and my family…I’m driven to save my journal.

Of late, I have barely had two hours a week to invest in the writing I so love, and have so missed. Now, I spend four or five hours a day, copying, pasting, saving.

As soon as the danger became known, there was never any question.

Never any thought that I wouldn’t find the time. Never an ounce of consideration given to just letting it go because I would not find the time, in my real life, to deal with this.

Because this, this journal, has been such a huge part of my life for the last five years.

In many ways, and on many occasions, it has BEEN my life.

Or saved my life.

So, yes, I have AO-hell to thank that my world has been turned upside down. And that an additional dire deadline is hanging above my head.

And I have them to thank that I will spend the next 26 days more stressed, more sleep-deprived, more desperate than I would have otherwise been. Something I definitely did not need.

But I will not let my words disappear at the whim of…well, who knows whom.

Thanks AOL. Thanks for treating us like negligible, expendable crap.

It’s the American Way, is it not?

Tags: leaving aol

How Much Fun Is This?

2008-10-04T23:54:00.000-07:00

Funny how no one has been posting much. AOL tells us they’re going to be closing their doors in 30 days, and we all just…abandon ship. Actually, if everyone else is spending the hours and hours it is taking ME to painstakingly transfer my entries and comments to blogger, I know exactly why everyone has been so incommunicado.

I have spent, oh, about ten hours so far on the "copy, paste, redate, publish" thing… It reminds me of the hellish months I spent trying to re-invent myself as a data entry clerk. Very much why I ran screaming back to the foodservice business. B-O-R-I-N-G!!!!!

And, yet, the entire time I’m doing this, I feel this sense of doom hanging over my head. As if there is no way I’m going to get this all finished before the deadline. Auugh!!!

I have gotten all the way through March of 2004. Which means I have only 4 ½ more years to go.

And I haven’t noticed any helpful e-mails from AO-Hell telling us they’ve figured out how to move our journals to…somewhere else. I’m thinking it will be a cold day in hell when that happens. And I’m also thinking there is no way I would entrust THEM with this precious compilation of the last five years of my life. Sure as s**t they would lose it all into cyberspace, never to be seen again. There is no way I would take that risk.

So, soldier on, everyone. We shall meet again on "the other side!" :-]

Woo-Hoo!

2008-10-02T15:33:00.001-07:00

Okay...I posted a title.

Duh.

Anyhow, the woo-hoo was because I just found out that you can pick the date of a post. So, theoretically, that means I can go to "Coming to Terms..." bring the posts here, and put the proper dates on them, and they will go back into the archives and line up just the way I want them.

Theoretically.

And now I have to go DO that thing and see if it works...

Okay...IT WORKS. It's going to be tedious and time consuming. But it works.

And if anyone knows a better, faster way to do this thing, I'm listening...

Election 2008

2008-10-01T21:26:00.000-07:00

You all knew I'd have something to say on this subject, didn't you....?

Dubya is possibly the lamest duck in the history of the genre. Legless, headless, plucked and gutted, he lies, rotting, while his presidency grinds to a merciful close. And the American people are engaged in the process of choosing his successor.

Four years ago, I firmly believed Americans were facing the most important election in their lives. After four years of goose-stepping nationalism, state-sanctioned racism and payback fever, the 9-11-induced madness appeared to be abating. There was a slim glimmer of hope that we as a nation would come to our senses and reject George W. Bush and everything he stood for.

Or not.

It’s fair to say the Democrats didn’t present us with much alternative. Rather than take a stand and advance a candidate who embodied everything that King George wasn’t, they gambled that Americans would back a Democrat only if he promised do everything Bush was already doing, only better….? So they created "Bushenstein;" I mean, John Kerry. Kerry was easily dispatched by G.O.P. hatchet men back in 2004, perhaps because he was never more than a cardboard collage of a candidate to begin with. My sincere apologies to Mr. Kerry, who, I think, took his candidacy much more seriously than did just about anyone else in the world.

And now, it is 2008. The year for which the sidebar on my original aol blog has yearned since shortly after the 2004 election results became final. But I find myself curiously detached from the process, this time around.

First of all, I’m sorely disappointed in the American people. Oh, they’re all for change…now. They see what a mess Bush has gotten us into…finally. They’re crying, screaming, clamoring for a drastic, sweeping leadership transformation…at last. I’m sorry…for me, it’s a case of way too little, far too late.

So, when people tell me this upcoming election promises to be the most exciting in their lives, I just…cringe. And shake my head. I can’t help feeling they showed up four years late for that boat.

We could have made a statement, could have made a difference, in 2004. We could have shown the world what we thought of Bush and his cronies and their power grabbing, world-dominating, civil-rights-stealing ways. We could have served notice that it isn’t all about the money. That the peons of the world do not prosper or starve, live or die, at the will of the rich and powerful.

Instead, we granted the Evil Empire another four years. Four more years to dig deeper into the cookie jar. For more years to hone and polish the art of the spin, the embellishment of the truth, the outright lie. Four more years to brand the values of greed, dishonesty and arrogance indelibly upon of the Spirit of America.

But change is in the wind. It has to be. We won't be allowed to give Bush another four years (thank god.) So we're hopping up and down and clapping our hands at the excitement of it all!

As the Democratic candidates spar and bicker and one-up each other right down to the wire.

And John McCain sits quietly on his nomination, and the Republicans contrive to dial down the rhetoric and bide their time. Hoping that, in doing so, they will morph the GOP into looking like the perfect alternative to…the GOP.

It looks like it could be a very long four more years….

Settling In and Rearranging (or trying to...)

2008-10-01T15:03:00.000-07:00

Now, I suppose I should make it look like I really LIVE here…

I’ve been screwing around with the template, trying to get it to where I can customize it, but that doesn’t seem to be working for me. And I am not, by god, going to abandon this blog, too, and start all over AGAIN! I’ll make it look like I want it and do the things I want it to do if it takes forever.

And it might…

Anyhow, to any of you sliding over here from "Coming to Terms…." (y’know, I get a little misty just typing the name…)

Welcome.

Let’s see if we can curl up and get comfy here. Or feisty. Or whatever mood strikes us.

Lisa :-]

Very Cool

2008-09-20T18:15:00.001-07:00

Today the city of Scappoose held its annual festival. Which bring the entire community to the blocks right outside the door of my café.

But what we learned from enduring the past two years' Sauerkraut Festivals is this:

Yes, the entire city parties right outside the doors…but they bring their own food.

So, this year, we decided to just…be open. And let the citizens of our fair town feel obligated to buy a cup of coffee so that they can use our bathrooms. Sigh!

Business being what it was, husband and I had the opportunity to "do" the festival. Which took all of about ten minutes. We did, however, come up with one incredible find.

An original oil painting, entered into the fine art contest at the library:

Look familiar?

Probably not.

Hint: The painting is titled "Café in the Heat of the Day."

My café. On the right. Tables on the sidewalk and all.

Very cool.

Our Worst Nightmare

2008-09-06T22:18:00.000-07:00

Sarah Palin is our worst nightmare.

She’s not, as she claims, a pit bull with lipstick.

She’s George W. Bush with lipstick.

She’s everything we’ve loathed, everything that has gone wrong with this country for the past eight years. She’s an uncurious, uninspired, unflinching Fundamentalist. She has deep, deep ties to the oil industry. She’s uneducated to a laughable degree…at least Bush’s rich family made sure he was availed of an undistinguished tenure at Yale. You want to talk inexperience? She’s lorded it over the less than 700,000 souls that inhabit America’s largest and most remote state for just short of two years. Before that, she spent ten years in the city government of Wasilla, Alaska—with a population of not even10,000. Foreign affairs? Here is a woman who freely admits that she has not spent much time thinking about the War in Iraq. Though she seems to have guessed enough about it to call it “God’s work.”

Put a dick on her and she could BE George W. Bush.

Do we want, need or under any circumstances hanker to be saddled with four moreyears of this sort of character in high office in Washington, D.C.?

Not on your life.

She’s an insult to women, an insult to democracy, and an insult to government in general.

And when I think of all the worthy women who have toiled and fought and cajoled and struggled in American government for the past 100 years—women like Bella Abzug and Madeleine Albright, Elizabeth Dole and Hillary Clinton, and, yes, even Condoleeza Rice—I swear that if this, this person becomes the first woman to be elected to high office in this country, I will have to seriously consider renouncing my citizenship and moving to Canada. Or Europe. Or any nation that couldn’t so disregard the good work of so many and award the prize to a hand-picked charlatan from the Evil Empire.

If Sarah Palin is elected Vice President of the United States, it will be the death blow for my faith in or respect for the American people.

We may not be able to change the minds of those who have allowed their pastor or their bible or their red-neck neighbors to dictate their vote. But we can and we must energize any and all voters likely to sympathize with the Obama ticket to VOTE. Don’t take for granted that the other guy is going to make sure thecountry is put in safe, sane hands. Without every possible opposing vote, there could be just enough nut-jobs to give the nod to a McCain/Palin victory.

We’ve weathered so many Bush-generated disasters that perhaps we are desensitized to them. But, mark my words, we haven’t begun to witness the kind of destruction a Sarah Palin administration—should Mr. McCain die in office—would visit upon this country and the world.

Stand up. Vote. Throw these ignorant good ole boys--and gals--out of Washington to the back of beyond, where they belong…

On Poor Choices and Sarah Palin

2008-09-06T22:16:00.000-07:00

I’m sure Sarah Palin is a very nice woman. And she is probably even a competent governor. Of a very large state. With very few people. And a budget fat with oil and gas revenues.
I have to wonder what exactly John McCain was thinking with this pick. Palin has no national credentials. No one has ever heard of her or the dinky Alaskan town in which she cut her political teeth. Her main claim to fame seems to be a strong tie to that mystical, magical, black substance that currently rules the fate of the free world. Isn’t that just exactly what we need? Four more years of someone intrinsically connected to the Big O plunging fingers into pies in Washington D.C.?

And now…we find out she has a seventeen-year-old unmarried daughter who is five months pregnant. Okaaayyyy…exactly what was that little factoid supposed to bring to the national political table? Oh, yeah….that’s another thing for which our nation has been crying out: More validation for teen-agers to have careless, unprotected sex, get knocked up, and give birth to the next generation of young people with dysfunctional moral compasses. That “one man, one woman” sanctity of marriage thing that the right-wingers claim is the basic building block of our society seems to be getting a bit of a bashing from its own side of the aisle. Looks like they can't even get their kids to swallow it.

The moral values people would have a field day with this, if it was a Democratic candidate’s daughter sporting a “baby bump.” I’m dying to see how they spin this for a (recently) prominent player in the good ole GOP.

I’ll be the first to admit that American voters have made really dumb-ass choices in the voting booth over the past eight years. In fact, we are pretty much a laughing stock on the world political scene. McCain must be counting on some truly overwhelming idiocy out here in the electorate… Apparently, he believes we don’t require experience, competency, or charisma of our female political hopefuls. Any person sporting a nice set of tits will rope in the gals’ vote. Oh. My. God.

Up until now, I had leaned toward conceding that McCain, who probably has the upper hand in the coming election due to his general whiteness, might not make an utterly objectionable chief executive. No one, I thought, could possibly be as stone stupid as the Current Occupant.
Recent events have caused me to reconsider that opinion…

2008-08-20T00:07:00.000-07:00

little squares cut
from the past
windows
or doors
flat and neat
no dimension
no substance
no emotion

when I look at them
I’m there, but not
I see, but I don’t
through those little doors
little windows
forever sealed

On Religion: Pros and Cons

2008-08-03T18:29:00.000-07:00

I’ve written in this space previously about my spiritual agnosticism. I’m not an atheist. I believe there exists a spiritual plane to which we are intimately connected, and about which we know almost nothing. Our chance encounters with the power of that realm have led us to create our pitiful forms of religion—mankind’s weak attempts to put something infinitely too huge for our comprehension into terms that we can understand. And manipulate…

Religious clashes have led to some of the most heinous human behaviors in recorded history. For whatever reason, once a group of modern homo sapiens has crafted a set of beliefs based on its perception of the Source of All Things, it has felt obligated to use those beliefs as a club with which to beat other groups into submission. We’ve gone so far as to weave the concept of "blood sacrifice" into our religious fabric, as a means of sanctifying our primal and uniquely human drive to kill large numbers of our own species. Oceans of blood have soaked the pages of history in the name of "God." The overriding question that comes to my mind in view of all this is, "What the hell is wrong with us???"

Clearly, I am no fan of organized religion. And I’ve often thought that if we could purge religion from modern society, the world would be immeasurably better off. Which is not to say that we could then live in blissful moral anarchy. There need to be rules, need to be codes of ethics in order for human beings to coexist peacefully. Yes, religion has traditionally bade us slit the throat of the guy who doesn’t believe as we do, but it has also passed down admonitions to feed the hungry, care for the indigent, honor our elders, and "Do unto others as you would have done unto you." If we do away with religion, what delivery system are we going to use to express and pass on those codes?

My own recent experience has led me to wonder about this. In the past two years, I’ve had the chance to work with young people of varying religious and social backgrounds. Some of the girls who work for me have had little or no religious training. Others were raised in strictly religious households. And there are marked differences in the way these two groups function.

The non-churched group has real problems with moral ambiguity. Having never been instilled with the codes of behavior that are part and parcel of our human "faith," they’ve been left to their own devices to create the filters through which they view their own behavior and make decisions. They’ve been forced to rely upon something else which permeates every aspect of their lives to form their moral foundations: the media. The media have assumed the role of moral compass. Bounced upon the knee of modern media, these children absorb such credos as "Does it work for me?" "How do I get mine?" and "What’s in it for me?" The idea that their behavior and their choices might have real consequences for other people is entirely secondary, if it’s considered at all.

In contrast, the young people who have been raised in a strict religious atmosphere have been endowed with a completely different set of filters through which they view the world. They were born into a belief system that set forth specific rules of behavior. They were brought up believing that they answered to a higher authority than themselves—higher yet than their parents, teachers or other earthly authorities. They’ve understood almost from infancy that any decision they made needed to be made in the context of that authority. They understand that their actions have implications that go far beyond themselves.

I see this in my own life. I was born and raised Catholic. By the time I reached high school, I had almost entirely rejected the confines of the faith in which I was raised. The bigoted, unimaginative written-in-stone-ness of the dogma drove me away as I grew old enough to chafe at the restrictions of it. But the moral foundation I received as a child of the church—any church—was mine for a lifetime. Catholicism and Judaism have been half-jokingly called religions of guilt. We joke about the knee-jerk guilt we experience whenever we try to color outside the lines of our upbringing. But I’m beginning to think that guilt is not entirely a bad thing. A little guilt—a twinge of understanding that what I do creates ripples that go far beyond myself—can be a healthy and necessary thing.

Those young people I encounter who were given a religious upbringing are now at the age where they are questioning, and in some cases, rejecting, their parents’ religious views. But they will carry the moral imprint with them for the rest of their lives. It will serve them well. It will make them more compassionate, more generous, more respectful and more aware of their duty to others than their unchurched peers. Viewed simply from my own little corner of the world, it certainly has made them better employees!

There are those of my generation who bear some responsibility for the lack of moral upbringing of the youngsters I’m working with now. Our churchy childhoods clashed head-on with the social changes of the sixties and seventies. We had to reject the conservative confines of the faiths in which we had been raised in order to embrace loftier ideals like civil rights, world peace, women’s rights, gay rights… As a result, many of us made the conscious decision NOT to church our children. Let them go on their own voyage of spiritual discovery, we thought, when they reached the age of reason (whatever that is.) It seemed like a logical and fair line of thinking. But in the end, it backfired.

Evidently a spiritual quest is best performed from the platform of having rules in place to accept, reject or build upon. We will seek to change or improve upon the moral code handed us by previous generations; but if we were never given any kind of ethics, we don’t seem inclined to go looking for them. At least, not in the right places. If parents leave the void, it will be filled with whatever pop culture jams into it. So by the time our children reached "the age of reason," they were perfectly satisfied with the self-absorbed me-first lifestyle with which they had been stuffed since they were old enough to watch their first television commercial. They're not the least bit inspired to seek out a new set of rules.

I have heard young couples say that, though they don’t go to church now, they will start going as soon as they have kids, because "kids need that." And I have thought, "How hypocritical!" But now, I’m not so sure they aren’t correct. Kids DO need that. Some of it, anyway. So how do we go about rejecting the negatives of organized religion while preserving the benefits? How many centuries will it take mankind to come up with some other way to codify positive moral values and pass them on to succeeding generations, while leaving out the mumbo jumbo of blood sacrifice and the admonishment to beat the snot out of those who don’t view the Almighty in exactly the same way?

I don’t think we have that much time.

On the Obama/New Yorker Flap

2008-07-17T22:31:00.000-07:00

So I guess we’ve all heard the flap about the Obama cartoon on the cover of The New Yorker.

My first thought when the cartoon was described to me (I only just saw it for myself this morning) was that the GOP submarine machine must have paid someone some important money to create and publish something so abhorrent and out of line on the cover of a national magazine. It appeared to be a sly, sophisticated, almost subliminal form of “Swift-Boating”—a political weapon invented and honed by Karl Rove (although I’m sure you’ll never hear him take the blame—I mean credit—for the maneuver…)

But something doesn’t quite ring “Right Wingnut” about this New Yorker thing. It’s too sophisticated. No doubt the Republican smear-meisters would love to have thought of it; and they’re secretly thanking someone for all the mileage they’ll be getting out of it. But their thought processes just don’t tend toward the subtle. They’re much more about in-your-face pandering to the not-so-secret prejudices and fears of the American Everyman.

No, I’m thinking this is a case of the uber-educated left wing having their heads so high in the stratosphere of sophisticated humor that they have left the planet upon which the other 99.99% of Americans reside. They seem unaware that in this age of You-tube and sound-bytes, all most people are going to absorb of this oh-so-witty satirical cartoon is an image of Barack Obama in Muslim garb on the cover of a national magazine. Even I thought, at first, that the kind of people who read The New Yorker would not be likely to miss the point, so how much harm could it do?

But, here’s the thing. Joe Hayseed may live out in the back of beyond, but he has a computer and an internet connection, by golly. Satire, sarcasm, tongue-in-cheek? They are completely lost on him. Why else does he base his political beliefs on the gospel according to Rush Limbaugh? And I can just picture him, yesterday, pointing to his monitor and crowing, “See Martha? I told ya he was one o’ them Muslims. I told ya!”

So The New Yorker editors poke their heads out of the portholes of the Starship Mensa, look down their noses upon the unwashed masses and huff, “Tsk! It was a joke! It was satire. It was Mark Twain...Jon Stewart...Stephen Colbert...!”

Sorry guys. Any idiot knows that a joke isn’t funny if you have to explain it.

Thoughts on Patriotism

2008-07-17T22:26:00.000-07:00

(Originally posted on "Coming To Terms..." July 4, 2008)

Today is Independence Day. The day we Americans celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence—our first step toward becoming a sovereign nation. Not a difficult thing to celebrate. Our founding fathers were a brilliant, driven group of men. They had it in their heads to wrestle their freedoms out of the hands of an absentee monarchy and command their own ship of state.

It was a logical and progressive thing to do, to throw off the chains of an obsolete, distant government—one which was unfamiliar with and often contemptuous of the special needs of its subjects settled halfway across the globe for more than a century. It made much more sense to create a seat of government for this land on this side of the Atlantic. Yet, even considering these things, it was a difficult and eventually a bloody undertaking.

Patriots won us our independence and put us on the road to becoming the country we are today. We bought our independence with blood, we bled to keep it. Our willingness to spill blood—both ours and others’—took us from sea to shining sea, and it nearly tore us in half. A hundred or two hundred years ago, it might have been necessary to pour out blood to preserve and protect the freedoms our founding fathers spelled out in The Declaration. There were plenty of forces in the world for whom success of a nation which trusted the people to choose their leaders and form their government was a dire threat. We needed patriots who were willing to fight and die for that freedom. We needed the concept of patriotism to flourish far and wide in the land, in order for the people to stand behind, and continue to fund and send forth, those soldiers and sailors charged with the protection of our freedoms.

But here in twenty-first century America, “patriotism” has largely lost its purity of purpose. We don’t use the word to describe an abiding love and concern for our country and its revolutionary concepts of freedom and government by the people. We use it to defend indefensible acts—like our president choosing to invade and destroy another country simply because he could. Acts like waterboarding and other forms of torture. Acts like not prosecuting a private citizen in Texas for grabbing his trusty shotgun and killing two men who broke into his neighbor’s empty home.

We use the word as a weapon of fear and hatred. We throw it in the faces of those who disagree with our personal politics. We use it to measure the worth of the guy next door, and he generally comes up wanting. I have never lived through darker days than the tenure of our current commander-in-chief, days when people actually feared to utter criticism of our government and the direction it took us in the aftermath of 9/11. One stunning attack on our homeland was enough to cause us to renege on the freedom for which so many patriots had fought and died on so many battlefields. “We’re afraid,” we cried. “Protect us and you can take our freedoms.” And the administration was happy to oblige. Surely patriots were spinning in their flag-adorned graves…

So who can blame me, now, if I hesitate to snatch up the banner of “patriotism” and wave it over my head today? It looks like something that fell out of Pandora’s box. It’s ragged and putrid and covered with blood. Yet, I should shove it under my neighbor’s nose and growl, “Love it or leave?”

I love this country. I love her diversity, I love her beauty, I love what she still stands for, in most of our hearts, despite the direction in which she has been dragged for the past several years. I love that she has been a noble force in the world, and she can be again. I love that there is still hope in our hearts that the next administration to whom we entrust the wheel of the ship of state can steer her gently but confidently back toward her original worthy course.

And I love that, because of the freedoms for which American patriots have fought and died for centuries, I can declare that I’ll take a pass on waving the beaten-up scrap that passes for patriotism today…until the shining banner of the genuine article is available once again.

Get OVER it!

2008-06-21T16:51:00.000-07:00

This just makes me want to break something. Politics are a hopeless string of lies in this country. There are no such things as honor, accountability, telling any truth without spinning it to make one's own party look good, and the other party look responsible for ANYTHING bad.

What bothers me is, the Conservatives now want to blame Clinton. And/or they declare that blaming the current president would not be showing the proper patriotism or "respect" for the office of the presidency. I see...only Republican presidents are worthy of respect.

I am of the opinion that NO president was responsible for what happened on 9/11. Certainly not Bill Clinton, who had been out of office for nearly a year, and a lame duck long before that...unable to properly conduct the duties of his office because he was dealing with a constant stream of Republican attacks every time he made any move in any direction, personal or political.

But neither is George W. Bush responsible for those attacks. NO ONE, no matter what the 9/11 panel tries to dredge up, or whom they attempt to blame, had a clue that Al Quaeda would plan and be able to pull off such a spectacular example of modern urban terrorism. Now we know. Let's go forward. Let's grow up and try not to pin the blame on anyone. Let's let today be the first day of the rest of our lives.

I think Mr. Clinton might have made a big mistake releasing his book before the election. I don't think he realized that he continues to be a lightning rod for Conservative slander. He won't be doing the Democratic party any good by allowing the Right to dredge up all the old garbage about him and fling it in Kerry's way. No amount of bad news coming out of Iraq, or stories of the Bush administration's collusion with the energy industry, or tax cuts for the wealthy, seem to be able to attract the attention of the American public away from the sensational roasting of Bill Clinton by the Conservative loudmouths in this country. Yet another not very attractive example of human nature....

This entry has 18 comments:

Comment from ginskia
Hi,It is not right that people who don't even vote want to judge our presidents. Our country is a total mess right now and there are still die hard Bush supporters. I have also been featured on AOL right where you were on Mr. Clinton's book site. Here is the link to my entry I made on Mr. Clinton and feel free to read the rest of my journal:http://journals.aol.com/ginskia/whatdescribesanitaasanitaasanind/entries/589Thanks,:) Anita

Comment from mlraminiakEntry Author
It disturbs me that anyone who writes like the comment below (a.)Ever got promoted even one grade level in this country and (b.).....VOTES! Please, please, please...anyone who wants to see a change in our leadership, don't forget that these people vote!

Comment from d448d
I think Mr. Clinton is a very sick person. He doesn't think he was to blame it takes two so he was one of the two. I feel Mr. Clinton has lower the morals in American. Now we have Kerry who thinks men can marry men and women can marry women. At less we now have a Christian in the White Hiuse who believes in the the Bible. Why would anyone want Kerry who throw his medals away?? D448D

Comment from jyoun10461
amen

Comment from warnerauctionco
Bill Clinton is and was a bum for this country. He is out for Number One! He showed his lack of integrity throughout his presidency. Why doesn't he go back to Arkansas and help his home state with its numerous problems.

Comment from obll1963
MR. CLINTON OUR COUNTRY HAD A GREAT 8 YEARS UNDER YOUR TERM . YOU WERE CONCERNED ABOUT US AND THE ECONOMY AND DID A FINE JOB. HOWEVER WHEN YOU LIED TO THE GRAND JURY UNDER OATH, I LOST ALL FAITH IN YOU. I KNOW IF YOU DO SOMETHING ON A PERSONAL LEVEL, IF YOUR NOT THE LEADER OF THE GREATEST COUNTRY ON EATH, IT MAY GO UN-NOTICED. BUT YOU WERE THE PRES. AND LIED TO THE GRAND JURY UNDER OATH.

Comment from lbrown1641
This commentary does not even deserve time on the air. The man (Clinton) wentdown, and on his time and determinations. We were Hit, on our Homeland, et.al., as early as 1993, with several interceptions. This was Clinton's watch and he knew what was in the midst. Time will tell; God Bless America and President Bush; Our future is about America and not the Clinton's pocketbook. By the way, did you forget that this man was Impeached from office and is NOT our President?

Comment from nkatz4
the "spin" is incredible!

Comment from mazzari7
Just wait until Kerry picks his running mate (Edwards) they probably have tons of dirt on him already, and O'really and Limbaugh and Hannidy will lead the pack.

Comment from mlraminiakEntry Author
Here is a copy of the email I sent to "oawinburn" about his/her comment. I thought it would be good to put it here for everyone to read:Thank you for visiting my journal and leaving a comment. I am all for encouraging well-thought-out, polite exchange of political ideas. And you were doing just fine until your last two words: "Wake up." Why did you have to add that? It's rude, and is just too "Rush Limbaugh" for the journal community. If you want to share ideas in an open-minded, non-judgmental way, you are welcome here. If you want to pretend you're sitting behind a microphone on a conservative radio talk show, calling anyone who doesn't agree with your beliefs stupid, then stick to the message boards, please.

Comment from huberburke
Whoa! While I agree that neither President is responsible for the 9/11 attacks, one also should remember that Mr. Clinton, as President, sent a missile attack against what was believed to be an Osama bin Laden hideout in Afghanistan in 1998. The attack was hours too late. I think the perceived threat has been recognized at least since Oliver North testified before Congress. And, I think Mr. Clinton's actions vis a vis al Qaeda and Iraq were completely overshadowed by the witch hunt that began with Whitewater and culminated with Lewinsky.What I find disturbing is the web of lies, half-truths and distortions that Mr. Bush's administration continues to disseminate to the American public. Rather than a concerted attack on al Qaeda after 9/11, we were told that Iraq posed the greater threat because of weapons of mass destruction and we went to war. Oops, no WMDs. Now the justification is ties between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, for which the bi-partisan 9/11 committee found no evidence. And, think about it: Saddam is a hedonistic dictator, surounding himself with opulence. bin Laden is an aesthete, eschewing worldly pleasures for what he believes awaits him in the next life. Why would Saddam jeopardize his position by allowing this charismatic madman to use Iraq? Where is the outrage? Our leaders were posturing and preening when Mr. Clinton lied to us about "inappropriate contact"...aren't the latest lies a bit more dangerous to the health of our nation?

Comment from oawinburn
This appears to be a pro democratic or "Pro Kerry" endeavor written under the guise of a conservative. To completely resolve the clinton presidency of any blame in the terrorism attacks and the state of affairs surrounding that inhuman and cowardly act of war is obviously an effort to gloss over the fact that clinton did absolutely nothing during his presidency to stem the tide of terrorism either at home or around the globe where we, the USA were constantly under attack. Another matter worth comment is the biased view of aol in promoting the democrats without giving the republicans equal time as required by all ethical standards. I believe that the clinton administration was a disaster in all respects. Bush inherited a hot potato that was the result of 8 years of overdrawing on the fruitfulness of the American economy by the clinton administration. Prosperity built on false premises that selling your birthright is a legitimate method of increasing the wealth of a nation. Wake up.

Comment from justcherie
You know what I find interesting? When the first World Trade Center bombing happened on Feb 26, 1993, about a month after President Clinton took office, I don't remember anyone in his administration blaming Bush I for that. I have been reading your journal for a week or so (can't remember if I have commented before or not), but I haven't seen ONE thing that you have had to say that I fundamentally disagreed with! Good job :)

Comment from krobbie67
Wow, I didn't think of his releasing his book now being a blow to the elections, but now that you've said it, I can totally see that. I don't think 9/11 can be blamed on any one individual either. I think it was caused by a collection of missteps. And, yes instead of trying to blame, let's figure out what and how it was missed and take reasonable steps to thwart future attacks. :-) ---Robbie

Comment from merelyp
thanks. i needed that. there are people out there who realize that "i told you so" and "it was his fault" is what we hear on the playground until about age 9. then we start to know better, and we take responsibility for ourselves. Grow up, America!

Comment from snkwarren
Pal, the BIPARTISAN 9/11 commission looked at this tragedy at all angles, including what went on during the Clinton years right up to and past that tragic day on Bush's watch. I do believe Clinton's administration was passive and Bush's team raeacted slowly and eventually didn't have enough time to analyze and re-structure.However, I, too, feel there is no blame to lay. You know the old saying, 'the only people a lock keeps out are honest ones.' Those people were so determined to inflict pain on our great country, they would've found a way despite our best planned defense.I haven't read Clinton's book and don't plan to. But no matter when it would have come out, it would have hurt your party... remember only the sensational sells, and the only thing Clinton is about is his own bottom line.

Comment from debdoc777
greetings! i've been reading your journal for awhile, and generally agree with your thoughts on topics non-political. but since i'm one of those conservatives you seem to need to go off on every few days, i haven't left any comments -- kind of intimidating, you know? but today i just felt that i had to comment as i so agree with your assessment that no one -- neither bill clinton nor george bush -- are responsible for 9/11. the responsible parties were flying the planes, or gave orders to those flying the planes. you are SO right -- now we know. let's go forward.

Comment from punky5678
Whoa Lis! Why don't you tell us how you really feel! LOL I agree At this point no one is to blame accept for those who planned the attacks. Should of's would of's could of's are just a waste of time we should now be focusing PEACE.

Inspired

2008-03-20T09:44:00.000-07:00

Absorbed as I am in my own mercilessly hectic life, I have sort of taken a pass on Election 2008. Too, the experience of Election 2004 left me cynical and jaded. I’ve suffered from a profound disappointment with the American people, and a conviction that not only is our country not headed toward anything resembling progress or greatness, it is in full retreat away from those things.

Still, it has been physically impossible for me to stay entirely ignorant of the over-reported details of the campaign. One would have to be confined incommunicado in a lead-lined room to avoid being poisoned by the latest media-hyped campaign news. I heard about the Geraldine Ferraro flap (and cringed during Keith Olbermann’s five-minute overwrought lambasting of the Clinton campaign over the Ferraro remarks on "Countdown.") And I heard about the latest conflagration over remarks made by the pastor of Barack Obama’s church. (I can hear the wheels grinding in Karl Rove’s evil, twisted mind…"Okay, maybe we can’t believably make Obama a Muslim…but, oh look! We can make him a racist!!!)

So I have been hanging on the sidelines, waiting for the dust to settle in the Democratic campaign. Staying out of the line of fire and lining up to vote for whoever came out on top. I had no preference, as long as it was a Democrat. They seemed equally capable to me.

And hoping against hope that the candidates didn’t do so much damage to each other in their protracted battle for the nomination that they torpedoed the party’s chances to win in November.

News of Obama’s inspired "More Perfect Union" speech—they’ve already given it a name to go down in the annals of American History—just made me more tired. How different could it be from the "you attack, I defend (or back-pedal)" see-saw game that went on in 2004? The issues might be slightly different, the principals are mostly different. But 2008 has promised to continue the onslaught of inflammatory sound-bytes, trumped-up charges of dishonesty, immorality, inexperience, weakness and "flip-flopping;" pelting the American people so fast and so furiously that even those who want to will not be able to withstand the barrage to get to the real issues. And I just DON’T want to play this time around.

But then…I was visiting a friend’s blog, and there was a link to a transcript of the speech.

And I clicked. And I read.

http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/hisownwords

Now YOU click. And YOU read.

And then come back here and tell me whether these words are not the exact polar opposite of everything this country has been about these last eight years.

And whether this is not exactly the direction in which we need to turn, at exactly this time in our history.

Here's An Itty Bitty Band-aid

2008-03-18T11:19:00.000-07:00

I got my notice in yesterday’s mail. The little tear-along-the-dotted-line herald of the Bush Administration’s "Economic Stimulus Act of 2008." Seems I’m to receive $600, with which I am tacitly instructed to run right out and purchase a flat-screen TV. Oh, that’s right….TVs cost more than $600, don’t they? But GW wouldn’t know that. I imagine it’s been, well…maybe never. I imagine George W. Bush never purchased a television in his life.

Any more than George the First had bought a gallon of milk or a pound of ground beef at the local grocery store.

Economic Stimulus. Right. How about "Economic Boo-boo Kiss?"

Dad has ripped off my right arm and beaten the snot out of me with it. And as I lie on the carpet exsanguinating, Mom kneels beside me and coos, "Here, honey…let Mommy kiss the boo-boo…"

Madness.

Surprise!

2008-03-11T10:23:00.000-07:00

Gas Prices Rise to New National Record

Watch for prices of just about everything to reach a bone-crunching crescendo as the Bush Administration grabs for every dollar it can for its Big Energy puppet masters, before it goes down into the tarpits at the end of this year...

Can they accomplish this without laying complete waste to the nation's economy? Probably not.

Do they care what happens to the nation's economy? Obviously not.

Their solution: Go borrow a bunch of money from China, throw a few bucks at the general population as you bow out, stuffing your pockets all the way, and let the next administration worry about cleaning up the mess.

Surprised?

Not really...

Camera Thingie

2008-01-31T15:18:00.000-08:00

$1 Image Stabilizer For Any Camera - Lose The Tripod - video powered by Metacafe

More on Dignity...Point and Counterpoint

2008-01-15T11:05:00.000-08:00

Here is a (the?) comment I received on my last post. He makes some good points, and I would like to open up a little more dialogue here:

One of your bottles washed up on my beach and I must say I've rarely endured such a tongue lashing re: dignity. Yes, I am a baby boomer, aged 54 years as of yesterday. I grew up in the deep south, Birmingham, Alabama to be exact and had it not been for iconoclasts like those you condemn as the source of our cultural decline I dare say we would still have white and colored water fountains. Granted, you seem to make an exception for opposing racism and antisemitism but then make sweeping generalisations about the negative impact my generation has had on subsequent generations. True, there were excesses but that is true of any cultural change. You mention the "greatest generation" and their sacrifices during the depression and WW II but go back and take a look at prohibition and the "roaring twenties". I suspect there were more than a few of those paragons of virtue you describe that drank untaxed liquor and danced in a speakeasy. I could go on but I think the one that needs to practice moderation is you, before you throw all the boomers out with the bath water, like so much sewage.

Arguing that a return to the values of our elders is the only chance of saving the planet must be one of the most grandiose things I've ever read. As the father of two daughters, that would be anathema.

Sometimes, in order to be treated with dignity, one must DEMAND IT!

Respectfully,

Randy Johnson
dreamersdo97@dtccom.net

You are right, Randy. I did make some sweeping generalizations. But in-depth treatment of this particular subject would have required a book…perhaps several. In trying to keep this short enough to make a point in the space of a decently readable journal post, I omitted a lot of the peripherals.

Yes, history is, to some extent, a parade of generations, each rebelling against and rewriting the rules of the previous one(s). Without that intrinsically human desire to stretch the envelope, civilization would have stagnated and disappeared eons ago. But I think that we boomers and our parents faced some unique challenges that caused some rather larger blips on the civilization meter than have transpired in a long time. Or perhaps it’s simply that since I am a part of this particular generational schism, it seems like a really big deal to me.

The "Greatest Generation" (our parents) attained adulthood to find a World War—against a true evil—staring them in the face. Fighting that war, and then reconstructing their lives afterward, kept them from doing too much rejecting of the values of their elders. I suspect that after the upheaval of the war years, they actually craved the relative calm and ease of their parents’ lives, and set about trying to emulate rather than break free of it. They settled down and gave birth to—the post-war baby boom. And because many of them had also faced the deprivation of growing up during the Depression, they wanted to make sure we had all the things they couldn’t have when they were kids. Which may have been one of their biggest mistakes…

The Boomers were presented with a very different set of rules. First of all, we were (here comes another of my infamous generalizations…) spoiled. Our parents, rich or poor, did everything they could do to make our lives better than theirs…because they could. To a point. Unfortunately, we also grew up in the shadow of something our parents gave us that I’m sure they wished they could take back—the mushroom cloud.

Perhaps we believed that if we were going to make changes, we’d better hurry up before the world exploded around us. Perhaps we felt betrayed that our parents not only didn’t contrive to leave us a better world; they created the means by which our world might be snatched out from under us at any moment. I think it’s safe to say that could make anyone a little bit crazy.

Too, as we came of age, many of us were sent halfway across the world to die in a war that we were told had direct bearing on whether that mushroom cloud would indeed explode in our faces. When we figured out that was a lie, I don’t think we had a whole lot of patience left to pick and choose what parts of our parents’ social codes to reject and which ones to keep. We just picked up the whole mess and heaved it.

My argument is not that we need to return to the values of our elders. My point is that we need to understand that some of the things we threw away were not "values of our elders" at all, but things basic and necessary to the survival of a society. What makes dignity one of those things? To have dignity is to be "worthy, honored, esteemed." Respected. What does our society, as a whole, respect anymore? We don’t respect each other; we don’t respect ourselves. Respect, compassion, empathy, charity—these are the things that keep us from annihilating ourselves. As we reject these concepts, we move closer and closer to the brink.

The question is, how does a society go about recouping when it starts throwing away the basic building blocks of its very survival? I don’t know the answer to that. There must be historical examples; then again, how successful could they have been, as it seems that every great society in human history has eventually gone down to decay. Are we there now? Are we on the brink of that extinction? And since we—the Boomers—took such an unusually large step down that road, can we discipline ourselves to take a giant step back? Or is it too late?

…And as to "DEMANDING" to be treated with dignity… One can demand to be "treated with dignity," but if one is not dignified, one would be demanding acknowledgement of a trait one did not possess. That would be like McDonald’s demanding to be treated like a fine dining establishment. (President Bush’s handlers have demanded that he be treated with dignity…but since he hasn’t an ounce of dignity in his body, at least none that he has ever demonstrated to the public, how can he realistically expect to be "treated with dignity?" For that matter, Bill Clinton’s exploits demonstrated his lack of dignity as well). Dignity is no longer cultivated, even in the highest echelons of our society. For whatever reason, our generation branded dignity a stuffy and outdated concept, and we set about not only throwing away our own, but making damn sure no one else had any, either. A glance at any of our highfalutin 21st century media will leave no doubt about that.

On Dignity

2008-01-13T23:09:00.000-08:00

dignity~~
Main Entry: dig·ni·ty
Function: noun Inflected Form(s): plural dig·ni·ties
Etymology: Middle English dignete, from Anglo-French digneté, from Latin dignitat-, dignitas, from dignus
Date: 13th century
1: the quality or state of being worthy, honored, or esteemed

Lately, I’ve contemplated the concept of dignity. We argue and wrangle and orate, these days, about "death with dignity." For whatever reason, it’s of profound importance that we die with our boots on, with our heads held as high as our failing faculties can hold them. But apparently death is the only activity upon which our society will confer the blessing of dignity. Perhaps that is because such a large block of us—we, the ubiquitous baby-boomers—step closer to that eventuality with each passing moment.

Yes, we boomers demand Death With Dignity. But aren’t we also responsible for the death OF dignity? Worth? Honor? Esteem? Haven’t we contrived, since we were old enough to brandish protest signs and burn our bras, to tear down everything our parents—indeed, everything every American generation before us—esteemed, honored, or thought worthy?

Much as we would like to assign the blame for the state of our society to those generations that came after us—to gen-x or –y or Little Cat "z"—the fault is ours. It was our generation that scorned our parents’ etiquette and social behaviors, creating a nation of inconsiderate boors committed to "looking out for number one." Our generation that spawned the shock jocks and the foul-mouthed comedians and the gritty violence of modern cinema. Our generation which threw off the sexual constraints of our forebears, creating a societal obsession with all things pertaining to below-the-waist relations. We were too cool, too hip; too busy cultivating our infant world vision to be constrained by our parents’ "hang-ups." And now, as our parents die and we step into the roles of matriarchs and patriarchs, we wonder why our children, and their children, wouldn’t know dignity if it bit them in the ass.

Dignity is an old-fashioned concept. Our grandparents were dignified. And a little bit scary. They mostly didn’t stray much outside the communities into which they were born. They walked tall through adversity—and they walked through adversity that we can’t even imagine. They kept their personal business to themselves. And yet the community always rallied to stand behind a member or a family in need. Quietly. Without fanfare or hullabaloo, they went about the business of life. With dignity.

Our parents were born into those communities. And the monumental events of the Great Depression and The War changed and molded them. But still, they understood about dignity. They had it themselves, and they allowed for it in others.

Then, along came the Boomers. We didn’t understand the social codes that were handed down to our parents from their parents, and we were in too much of a hurry to take our places as the movers and shakers to learn. While our parents’ society was heavy on loathsome concepts like anti-Semitism and racial bigotry, it also embraced the injunction to care for those less fortunate; the mandate to protect the weak; the obligation to fulfill the needs of others before looking to one’s own needs. The softer and nobler concepts that differentiate humans from lower animals, and that keep a society from destroying itself from within. But we….we were so eager to throw over the outdated prejudices of our parents’ society that we didn’t take the time to sort the good from the bad. Wholesale change was the order of the day. And we threw out the baby with the bath water.

Why is it surprising to us that our children, and their children after them, took our selfishness, our carelessness and our impatience, and ran with it? It’s unfortunate that our progeny did not wholesale reject us as we did our parents, and turn in the opposite direction: toward mercy, compassion and…dignity. Unfortunate that the downward path—toward corruption, self-centeredness and anarchy—is so much easier to tumble down than it would be to clamber up a road to a nobler, more liberal plain.

Life, now, has to be lived at fever-pitch and light-speed. Everything is exaggerated. We all live as perpetual adolescents, where there is no happiness, only ecstasy; and sorrow can only be utter desolation. The measured, circumspect concept of dignity has been utterly forgotten.

I don’t know about you, but I’m too old for this…this world that we have created. What should we do now? What can we do now? Do we bug out of the 21st century? Fade out and live our remaining decades in the quiet shadows of the world we wish we had created? Or do we rouse ourselves, become the critical mass of which we are capable, and foment one more colossal change? Can we all—all xxxx-million of us—drop our feet off the side of the merry-go-round and slow it down, just enough for society to shake its head, get its bearings, and find the stuff that we threw off thirty years ago?

I think the future—of our nation, if not the planet—depends upon us doing exactly that.

Old Life, New Life, and Benazir Bhutto

2007-12-27T23:12:00.000-08:00

This morning, my clock radio woke me with the unhappy news of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. I’m not well-informed about the politics of our "ally" Pakistan. I know I don’t trust Pervez Musharraf any further than I could throw a tank. I know I feel a little soiled, a little jaded, every time I hear Dubya go on about what a great partner Musharraf is in our "War on Terrah." It doesn’t seem to matter that Musharraf’s government presents only the flimsiest pretense of democracy, and only when it doesn’t inconvenience Musharraf.

Benazir Bhutto, as the leader of Musharraf’s chief opposition, was many things. She was loved and revered, discredited and exiled, and tainted by corruption. Who can say, entangled as she was in the political strife inherent to Pakistan, what Bhutto really was. I can only believe that to have become Prime Minister of an Islamic nation—even an unsuccessful and ultimately deposed Prime Minister—she must have been a remarkable woman. I admired her. And I feared for her life when she decided to end her exile and return to Pakistan. May she rest in the peace she was fated never to know in this life.

I considered posting a quick tribute to Bhutto this morning, since I thought I didn’t have to work until 11 am. My life being what it is, however, half my crew crapped out on me today, so I had to give up any nobler aspirations and run to the café.

I get to work, and thoughts of Mrs. Bhutto are still swimming around in my head. I say to my counter girl, "So they killed Benazir Bhutto…!" And she says, "Who?" I say, "Benazir Bhutto." Totally blank face. "Do you know who Benazir Bhutto is?" "Uh, noooo…"

Okay. Counter girl is only nineteen. But she is also in her second year of college. What made me think a college student must have somehow heard of Benazir Bhutto?

Toward the end of this exchange with clueless college student counter girl, my cook walks through the door. Cook is in her late thirties, never struck me as being particularly well-educated…but I also know she is a total internet junkie. "P, do you know who Benazir Bhutto is?" "Who?" No surprise there, really. Apparently, cook zaps right past the news blurbs on her home page…

Over the past year and a half, I’ve had such a hard time letting go of my "old life" and embracing my new life as a (completely lost-in-the-weeds) entrepreneur. And I’ve been trying to figure out what my problem is. Though I’m inching closer to the total immersion I think I need in order to be successful, I really feel like I’ve been dragged to that place kicking and screaming. After today, I have a little better idea of why that is.

I work in the freaking Twilight Zone. I’m surrounded by people who have absolutely no idea what is going on in the world beyond the ends of their own noses. For someone who has spent much of the last four years nurturing and immersed in her personal political identity, this is a particularly bitter pill to swallow. I feel like I’m finding a life, but losing myself. And I’m not entirely sure that’s a trade I’m willing to make.

Christmas 2007

2007-12-25T21:28:00.000-08:00

Around Thanksgiving (was that only last month?) I predicted a hard holiday for my family, and wished for Spring. It did indeed come to pass, that sad and difficult season. Thanksgiving was a non-starter…we were even then in that watching and waiting pattern that establishes itself as a loved one dwindles. Mom passed away on December 3. Her memorial service, and our ability not to tear each other to shreds in the preparation of it, was the single shining moment for the Baldwin family this season. We sent Mom to her rest with love and dignity.

We didn’t feel like celebrating the holidays, but we thought that not celebrating would be too sad and empty. After the funeral, and the unhappy task of cleaning out Mom’s apartment, sifting through her prodigious angel collection and her sixty years’ accumulation of costume jewelry brought us the comfort of fond memories. Each of us chose one or two pieces to hold and remember. By mid-December, that business was mostly concluded, and we tried to scrape together some kind of family holiday. But we just…ran out of gas. Yesterday saw some of the sniping and the anger and the tears that we had worked so hard to avoid.

In the end, maybe it would have been better to just…give Christmas a pass this year. It was so hard not to compare last night’s somber little celebration to "The Good Years" and find it pitiably wanting. No one was really in the mood to count our blessings and put a good face on it. Mostly there was a lot of food that nobody needed, and a few presents that nobody really wanted. Christmas 2007 is just about over now, and nobody in our family is going to miss it, I think.

Hard to believe that the bright spot of my life the last few weeks has been…the café. That thing which has been more inclined to kick my butt than feed my ego for the past nineteen months…

This may be the worst Christmas since the Grinch licked his evil lips over Whoville, but Old Town Café is chugging along at a record pace. Not world record, of course, but record in relation to our own history. The first week of December, while I was in Eugene tending to my sad family business, my crew piloted the good ship OTC to its highest December sales week in its three-year history. And we’ve repeated that performance in each of the last two weeks. As of today, we’re showing a 1% increase in sales over last year’s total December sales, and we still have six sales days remaining. And I haven’t laid out one dime in advertising money all month. I’m having a hard time believing we’re the same restaurant we were one year ago.

Oh, do I remember the goings on of a year ago, though I’d rather forget. 2006—the year of the chronically sick, reliably unreliable and/or disappearing employees, and sales so bad it didn’t really matter whether I had employees or not. The year of no mercy, which threatened to chew me up, spit me out, and grind me into the pavement. The year where the best I could say of it, as it dwindled into its final hours on New Years Eve, was that I had survived. (And yet, I felt giddily victorious to be able to say that much…)

Last year, my family was my life preserver, the thing that kept my head above the waters of my foundering business ship. This year, my business is the thing that my hands are grasping as the waves of grief and loss toss me about. I suppose I should be grateful—and I am—that there is always something to keep me afloat. But I’m still hoping that next year will be a little less tempest-tossed.

Vanity, Thy Name is...Uh, What's Thy Name Again?

2007-12-12T08:12:00.000-08:00

Even had it not been for the sad events of the past couple of weeks, this holiday season was destined to be different from the last several.

I just couldn’t consider tearing every room in my house apart and reconstructing the "Christmas Zone" I’ve enjoyed over the last few years. And not really because I don’t have any time to DO the decorating (though I truly don’t...) More because the thought of UNDOING the decorating come mid-January left me absolutely cold.

So…

No five trees in the house; we’ve cut the population to two. And neither of these is in my bedroom. The bedroom will remain holiday neutral this season. No tree, no snow-kitties on the mantel, no candles in the fireplace, no glitter stuck to my face when I wake up.

Nor will the family room get bedecked this year. Hardly seems worth it, since we spend about two hours a week relaxing there anymore.

The living room will harbor one barely over-decorated tree. Easy up, easy down…

Worst of all, one of my favorite holiday indulgences has finally been made redundant by the hands-on nature of living the dream…

Sigh!

My Mother's Hands

2007-12-07T21:34:00.000-08:00

All through preparations for my mom's funeral, I knew that what I needed to do was to give of my talent, from my heart. An artist would paint, a photographer would snap, a seamstress would sew...and I--needed to write. Something. But the words refused to come.

Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday went by... I understood the imperative, but could not find the inspiration.

The funeral was this morning--Friday. It was now or never. No time to fuss, no time to edit and re-arrange and tweak. And it came, in a rush...

I remember my mother’s hands
Not elegant nor slender
But stout and strong and
always busy

My earliest memories are of those capable hands
Wielding a dust cloth, a dish rag, a scrub brush,
Feeding laundry through the wringer washer
pegging it out on the line to dry
Dipping a spoon into the magic paste
that would become the lumpy dumplings
in our favorite chicken soup

We coveted the gentle stroke
that would calm a fevered temple
And dreaded the near-scalping
when those hands came in contact with
any object surrounding a
shock of hair attached to the backs of our heads
("It’ll only hurt for a second…!)

Those hands, nearly forty years old, were introduced
to the steering wheel of a station wagon in 1961
and carried on a love/hate relationship with that object
for the next thirty years
And in 1966, they traded the dust cloth and mop
for the pencil and the adding machine
The kitchen table for the desk at Woolworth’s--
another love-hate relationship that lasted nearly twenty years.

I remember those hands
fussing with the filmy folds of a veil around my face
taking needle and thread to the great hole in that veil
after I wrapped it around a barberry bush fleeing the rice-throwers
on a chilly October morning in 1976
Those loving hands…those mother’s hands

In retirement, those hands
Clutched a fishing pole or a handful of playing cards
("I’ve got a hand like a foot!!")
Tipped a watering can into one green thing or another
that always responded enthusiastically to her touch
stroked the soft fur of the latest adoptee
or sneaked forbidden bits to furry family members
waiting confidently at her feet under the dining table
Wrapped around a pen, dispatching volumes upon volumes of word puzzles
heavy with the rings and bracelets she loved to pile on
But busy…always busy

I hope now, wherever her spirit is going
they give her hands, as well as wings

Elsie B. 1922-2007

2007-12-05T14:39:00.000-08:00

Requiem

Fold thy hands sleeping!
Angels are keeping
***Watch o’er thee now.
See, it is dawning!
Light of the morning
***Falls on thy brow.

White wings are flying!
No more shall dying
***Darken thy day.
Leave thou Death’s portal!
Spirit immortal
***Speed on thy way!

When skies are paling
And clouds are sailing
***Over Earth’s night,
Only in dreaming
Shall thou be seeming
***Lost to our sight.

Dream mists are drifting!
Fingers are lifting
***Curtains of space!
Framed in its splendor
Wistful and tender,
***Smiles thy dear face.

I Cannot Be That Match

2007-11-11T10:27:00.000-08:00

Sister "D" called me on Friday to talk about Mom’s deteriorating condition. Eventually, she got around to saying, "I suppose you should come down…" The unspoken completion of that thought being, "…if you want to see her before she dies."

I don’t know why I was brought up short by the suggestion. I hadn’t even really thought about it. We made the trip down to Eugene three weeks ago, when Mom first became so sick; and we trekked down again the following weekend, on her birthday. We visited with her when she was…as good as it appears she’s going to get, these days. So the first thing that popped out of my mouth when D communicated what amounted to the deathbed call was, "Why?" I think dear sister was a little taken aback. And then I found I couldn’t articulate my non-intention to attend in any way that sounded sane, even to me. I hung up the phone, having made no commitment I wasn’t prepared to honor.

Why, indeed?

I hardly remember getting ready for work that day, because my brain was so focused on nailing down my feelings about…everything. Mom’s approaching death. My sisters’ total involvement in her care. My developing philosophies about life and death and the journey between the two, which my sisters find difficult to swallow. My impatience with Western medicine’s inability to allow nature to take its course. My commitment to a business that has depleted my emotional and physical reserves to the point where I am consistently running on fumes. Taking all these factors into account, I balanced rushing down to my mother’s bedside against…not. And the scales tipped heavily to "not." What, after all, would be the real reason for going?

For Mom? Most of the time, she is incoherent. She’s regressed to the point where she is more often interacting with her memories than with what is actually happening around her. When she does come out of the fog, and she recognizes my sisters, all she can say, is "Get my shoes. I want to go home. Take me home." At one point, sister D told me she wasn’t sure whether her presence with Mom was more upsetting than comforting. So, why would I want to add to that potential upset? And even if Mom does come to herself enough to realize where she is and that we were all gathered around her, she wouldn’t be the least bit interested in saying goodbye. Because she still has no intention of going.

For me, then? Will I hate myself for the rest of my life if I don’t run down there, cling to my mother’s hand and weep? Well, no. I’ve come to terms with her impending death. I’m sure it’s been easier for me, because I haven’t been involved in her daily care for the past eight years, as my sisters have. I’ve done the deathbed thing. I held my Dad’s hand as he passed from this life. I didn’t plan to, didn’t even think I could. But since I had been chiefly in charge of his care, I felt that I had started the journey with him, and I was by god going to finish it. And I knew that was what he wanted. So I know how my sisters feel about sticking in there with Mom. And I don't feel bad about letting them do it, without any interference from me. Considering my non-existent emotional and physical reserves, I’m convinced the right choice for me is to stay quietly on the sidelines.

Well, then. That leaves one last argument in favor of making the trip. "Support," I am told. "You go down to support your family." Okay…no. In my family, that’s the one thing you definitely DO NOT do. We have no clue how to support, uplift, or even be nice to each other faced with life and death upheaval. We proved that beyond any doubt when my dad was dying.

I will never forget the things we did to each other during and in the months following Dad’s illness. Gloves came off, claws were unsheathed, fangs were bared, and we tore into each other wildly and relentlessly. The collateral damage of that awful time was what drove me away from the "heart" of my family…one hundred-plus miles away. I needed to re-establish my own life far enough away from my sisters that we couldn’t hurt each other any more. It was a wise decision. It brought a peace among us that never would have been accomplished if I had not given up and walked away.

I know with absolute certainty that if I rushed down to Eugene today, I’d have to be on guard every minute. I’d have to watch every word I said, every move I made, lest it be interpreted as a threat or some kind of criticism of the way my sisters have handled Mom’s issues. Any attack, however unintentional, will be met with the most vicious and poisonous counter-attack. At my best, I’m hopelessly impolitic; in my current depleted condition, I am certain to be the match applied to the powder keg. And I cannot go through that again.

The best service I can do for my sisters—for all of us—is to stay away. And honestly, I don’t feel bad about it. I don’t even feel the need to explain my decision to anyone; not that they could or would understand anyway. Their disapproval of my absence will not amount to one tenth of the potential fallout of my presence. I simply know what I need to do, for many reasons that I have judged are best for me and for everyone involved.

go in peace...

2007-10-31T22:15:00.000-07:00

i dreamed of him last night
he was clear
his voice was strong
and he said i
was the only one who knew
but i don’t know
what i’m supposed to know…

i called out to him today
told him to come for you
told him you needed him
to lead you

will you go
light and new and free
or will you stay
sad and tired
frightened and burdened
wizened and stubborn

did he hear
i don’t know
will he come
i don’t know
i can only look at you
and cry out
and hope

More on End of Life

2007-10-25T22:03:00.000-07:00

Thank you all for your virtual hugs and understanding nods about my mother’s plight. I wonder how many of you are thinking, "Why did she not just have a signed DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) order available for any medical personnel called in an emergency?"

Very simply—Mom is not the least bit interested in dying. She’s old, she’s ill…her body is worn out and failing. But Mom isn’t ready to go. And I don’t think she ever will be. Any more than I suspect I will be, when my time comes. The specter of the unknown is just too overwhelming.

A while back, some bloggers did an exercise expounding upon the concept that "Anything I’ve ever let go of in my life had claw marks on it," or something like that. That is my mother, in spades. Her emotional attachments to places and things are more of Super Glue than of Velcro. She never made a change in her life that didn’t leave a psychological crater the size of the Sea of Tranquility. She is not remotely ready to consider the idea of the most profound and final change she will face on this earthly plain. Not long ago, when my sister approached her with the idea of signing a DNR, Mom, in her uniquely mom-like way, deftly changed the subject. Immediately.

Of course, like it or not, at some point she will have to go anyway. Western science seems to be on Mom’s side, standing ready to prolong her life to the nth degree. But Someone, be it God, the Great Spirit, the Almighty, or the Universe, as I’ve taken to calling It, understood my mother’s issues. On the day when she just…slowed to a stop, the Universe had said, "This is the transition appropriate for this soul." And stupid, bumbling human hands snatched it away.

Now…who knows what’s going to happen? She has her good days, and her bad days. At her best, it looks like she might just get sprung from the warehouse of human suffering she is in; maybe even be able to go back to her Assisted Living apartment…or at least somewhere a little more like home. At worst, it looks like the dreaded call from the nursing home staff, "Elsie didn’t wake up this morning," could come tomorrow. Actually, maybe that wouldn’t be the worst. The worst would be for her to linger in that awful place, between life and death, for weeks or months.
And it pisses me off to know this isn’t what the Universe had in mind for her. But arrogantly stupid western medicine had to interfere.

Sometimes It's a Good Day to Die

2007-10-25T08:38:00.000-07:00

My mother died last week.

Two seeks shy of her eighty-fifth birthday, her failing heart slowed to a trembling twenty-five beats per minute. Her care-givers became alarmed. "Elsie, do you know where you are? Elsie, what day is this? Elsie, what’s my name? Elsie? Elsie!" They called an ambulance.

On the ride to the hospital, her heart went silent. The paramedics zapped her. A few more miles down the road, her heart stopped again. And once again, they shocked her back to life.

So Mom, robbed of her peaceful, mercifully muzzy exit from this life, spent four days in the hospital receiving the "gift" of a pacemaker, which will keep her heart bravely pumping while she dies, by inches, of kidney failure. Her doctor gives her three to six months before her kidneys give out completely.

Oh, yes; she’s alive. But she can’t go back to her apartment now; she shares a room in a nursing home with two other women in much the same state as she: mostly cognizant, thoroughly miserable, and afraid.

On top of that, it seems my mother was rudely yanked back into this life only to be at the mercy of the 21st century American health care system. A system rife with absentee physicians, overworked office staff, and so many layers of responsibility that it’s impossible to know whom to call when for what condition. And whether that person will deign to call you back if you do figure it out. Mom’s orders have been lost, her meds have been screwed up, her doctor has gone AWOL. Her care since her miraculous rescue can be accurately summed up with the old WW II army term—" FUBAR."

But, hey. She’s alive. In pain, afraid, and not receiving a tenth of the attention she needs. But she’s alive.

Everyone knows that I am hardly mankind’s foremost cheerleader lately. We’ve screwed up so badly that I honestly don’t know why the Almighty doesn’t just rear back a huge celestial hand and squash us like the poisonous insect we are. Every day, in millions of ways, our science merely proves what ignorant control freaks we are. That we have poured a disproportionately immense amount of resources into our ability to physically control our world, and not nearly enough study and effort into learning the intangibles. We’re not interested in why things happen, we just want to know how to change them.

Doesn’t anybody get the inkling that there’s a reason why bodies shut down as they do? Why has modern science "advanced" only to the point where it feels ethically bound to interfere in the dying process, whether it should or not? And why does our system keep a heart beating only to warehouse the body somewhere and allow it to die of neglect?

And why does my mother have to suffer through all this arrogant ignorance?

Crow

2007-10-02T22:40:00.000-07:00

crow on the gutter
across the street
cah! cah! cah! it cries
good morning!
I call to the rooftop
black eyes black face
look down, head cocks a tick
cah! cah! cah!
the halloo echoes back
and I reply
pleasantly

we spend some moments
in polite conversation
‘til I turn to the door
of my morning’s work
while crow soars off
to the walnut grove
for breakfast
we shan’t sit down for coffee
but we’ve shared
a bright good morning
in spite of the drizzle

Passions Part 2

2007-09-22T23:36:00.000-07:00

"I know that feeling. That feeling that even the dirtiest, meanest task performed in the place you love, the place you belong, is like an embrace. Just to be where you know you are the perfect fit, is a harmony matched only by the most exquisite, exalted music. Anything you touch there is sacred; anything you do, a masterpiece."

So. If my sanctuary is not in the kitchen, where is it?

Outdoors. Pretty much anywhere not constricted by four walls and snuffed by a ceiling, not supplied with mechanical air.

The sun. The breeze. The rain. The moon and stars. Earth. Sand. Water. Snow. Trees in all their seasonal finery. Flowers, grasses, brambles and bracken. Animals, from the tiniest beetle to the greatest whale.

And my personal altar in that boundless sanctuary—my garden.

The kiss of the sun for pardon,

The song of the birds for mirth,

One is nearer God's heart in a garden

Than anywhere else on earth.

--Dorothy Frances Gurney

A Quiz Borrowed From Cynthia

2007-09-05T16:53:00.000-07:00

I found this quiz at "Sorting the Pieces."

I find the results fascinating.... I have to admit,

some of the questions baffled me a bit.

Maybe that's where the 19% fundamentalist part came from(!) :D

Some people I know will not be too surprised

about the "still feels as if there is something

greater than ourselves" part...

You scored as Cultural Creative, Cultural Creatives are probably

the newest group to enter this realm. You are a modern thinker who tends

to shy away from organized religion but still feels as if there is something

greater than ourselves. You are very spiritual, even if you are not religious.

Life has a meaning outside of the rational.

Cultural Creative

100%

Existentialist

69%

Idealist

56%

Postmodernist

50%

Materialist

31%

Romanticist

31%

Modernist

25%

Fundamentalist

19%

What is Your World View?
created with QuizFarm.com

walks in the wild

2007-07-19T12:43:00.000-07:00

i go out
to visit the spirits
and soothe my own

today
he was a kestrel
and she a swallowtail butterfly

they met me
at the gate
hovered a moment
then tipped wings
and returned to heaven

Memorial Day Plus One

2007-05-30T23:31:00.000-07:00

Through my family room window, I caught the movement of a car in the drive next door. This is not a usual occurrence; "next door" is a cemetery. Not much going on with those neighbors, generally. Every Tuesday during mowing season, the guy with the industrial earmuffs guides his John Deere respectfully around the markers. Any more activity than that usually means they are fixing to plant a new neighbor.

The nondescript white sedan negotiated half the circle drive in the graveyard. It pulled to a stop just shy of a spot where a crypt-shaped rectangle of recently replaced sod was evident; a green wire tripod sporting the tired remains of a funeral spray stood sentinel at one end of the patch of yellowed grass. A woman got out of the car and opened the trunk. From my vantage point, I couldn’t tell exactly how old she was. Older. Over sixty…under eighty. She was tall and lanky, sportily dressed in a pair of slim black trousers, a t-shirt and cropped jacket. Not stylish, but not outlandishly outdated. She looked practical and unfussy. A woman on a mission.

From the yawning boot of her car, she extracted a triangular vase—the kind with the sharp point made to poke into possibly unyielding consecrated ground. It held a big pink flower…Fresh? Silk? I couldn’t tell. Any more than I could tell why I couldn’t take my eyes off the little scene. I was held captive by the wondering… Who lay in that all-too-fresh grave, and who was he to her? How would she conduct her visit?

Would she remove the old dead plant, hold it for a moment with a tear in her eye, tuck it solemnly into the trunk? Would she tenderly sink the new offering in the dirt, tap it upright, fuss a bit with the placement? Would she kneel by the grave, hold out her hand as if to touch the loved one below, close her eyes and let the tears silently flow down her cheeks? In short, would she behave as I do, on those less and less frequent occasions when my parents’ sense of duty possesses me and drags my unwilling feet to the gravesides of my dear departed?

She did not. She stabbed the point of the new vase into the ground, strode to the other end of the grave and uprooted the old, faded wreath. Nearly pitched it into the trunk, then took a second look and retrieved some small pieces—baby’s breath, perhaps—and tucked them into the new planter on either side of the big pink flower. She spoke; I pondered the monologue. Was she describing the lovely new plant to the dead loved one? Telling that person how things had been going since he went away? Or she could merely have been ticking things off her errand list—so calm and unruffled was she. Focused and businesslike. Try as I might, I could not spot a hint of a sigh or a tear.

As she drove away, for a moment, I envied this woman, this stranger, this person I don’t even know, and upon whose private moment I should not have been spying. I almost wished I could be like her…so reserved, so matter-of-fact and in control when peering into the great void, searching for some trace of a loved one gone away.

No, I told myself with a sniff. She seemed cold and unfeeling; I am not that, and don’t ever want to be. But, truly, it was like watching a silent movie without subtitles. It’s not good policy to make judgments based on stolen three-minute film-clips with no sound. Below her unruffled surface, perhaps she’s as soppy and sentimental as I am, but she keeps those untidy emotions under control. Even when she’s alone…or thinks she is.

Silly, I suppose, to play guessing games with someone else’s grief. But perhaps I needed the diversion…from the ache of loss and welling of tears that threatened to overwhelm me as I struggled not to imagine myself in that woman’s shoes.

Double Post: A Somewhat Different Ten Things

2007-03-13T21:20:00.000-07:00

What a pain in the &%#*! I decided I wanted to come back here and double-post something I particularly liked from "Coming to Terms..." and I practically had to trade my first-born male child to access the stupid thing (neener-neener, Blogger...I don't have a first -born male child...)

Anyway, since "Better Terms" was supposed to be for my "next level" writing, and I finally have enough brains in my head again to actually produce better writing (at least, today...), here it is:

Awhile back, NPR ran a series called, "This I Believe." Listeners were invited to submit essays describing some important aspect of their personal moral code. Those judged the best were read on the air by the authors.

Being the negative, glass-half-empty type that I am, I decided a better approach for me would be "This I Don’t Believe." You see, it’s not that I don’t believe in God. There are simply several important things I don’t believe about God. So I thought I would use my "Ten Things" format to list some of the highlights of my unbelief…

1.) I don’t believe that God honors, ordains, blesses or in any way sanctions human beings doing violence to other human beings. Ever. For any reason. I don’t believe we were created to inflict suffering upon one another. We do it. We seem to derive some kind of perverse pleasure from it. But let’s leave God out of it.

2.) I don’t believe the Almighty put us upon this wondrously intricate, inconceivably beautiful planet so that we could destroy it with our astonishingly lethal weapons. And…

3.) I don’t believe we were given Earth so that we could alter it to the point of uninhabitability with the filthy by-products of our daily existence. Eons ago, as an infant race, we could reasonably depend upon our Creator to deal with our temper tantrums and our excrement. We have (arguably) grown well beyond that point, now. With "maturity" comes responsibility. Reject the responsibility, and extinction looms large. And rather sooner than later, I expect.

4.) I don’t believe the Author of the Universe has any particular preference for with whom I choose to perform the sex act. Admittedly, having indiscriminate sexual intercourse with anything or anyone can have serious public health ramifications; so mankind long ago created social codes to deal with this issue. Unfortunately, whenever man needs to put teeth into any legislation, he declares it "God’s Law." But I don’t believe that the Great Mastermind of planets and star systems and galaxies far beyond our ken, is all that invested in our puny sexual antics.

5.) I don’t believe God whips up famines, earthquakes, floods or other natural disasters as punishment for evil. Once again, "God" takes the rap for things we don’t understand and can’tcontrol. The Earth is an amazing and fearsome entity in its own right, a living thing. Our job is to live on it, to love it, to respect it…and, sometimes, to die when its life force overpowers our own.

6.) I don’t believe that humans are any more specially connected to the Creator than the rest of creation. We may indeed have been ordained to "communicate" with the Almighty…but who is to say that other creatures were not? Perhaps they even do so with much greater facility than we do, unencumbered as they are by the interference created by our so-called "intelligence." Perhaps an eagle, or a hamster, or even a cockroach has a much more direct line to God than I have…

7.) I don’t believe in the conventional concepts of "heaven" and "hell." There is an aspect of the universe which we encounter occasionally…only enough to be confused, intrigued, intimidated and frightened by it. Call it "the spirit world," or "the other side" or "the after-life." Mankind has brushed against it for millennia, and in many cases has made it part of—if not the basis for—various religions and belief systems throughout history. We will go on to…something at the end of this life. But the idea of a big garden where I will reunite with all the people I have ever loved (what about the ones I didn’t like so much?) seems, in the end, much too…corporeal. Even though the "unknown" aspect of it can frighten me to insensibility if I dwell on it too much, I have it in my mind that, wherever we go, it must be…can there be a word for it? Inconceivable?

8.) I don’t believe God takes sides in human disputes. Once again, backing one horse or another in the endless squabbles, great or small, in which human beings delight in engaging, does not seem worth an eyelash bat from the Creator of more worlds than we have numbers to count…

9.) I don’t believe God randomly answers prayers, or that sometimes the answer to prayer is "no," or any of those other platitudes that various religions have concocted to explain why God is so often indifferent to human suffering. I’m sorry…it doesn’t make sense to me that there is a Being who has ultimate power to alleviate suffering, to heal illness, to create peace, and doesn’t. It’s not that I don’t believe the Author of the Universe is without power. It’s just that I don’t believe the Almighty uses (or doesn’t use) that power in ways we can explain or understand.

10.) I don’t believe that God is going to strike me dead, or smite me in some other nasty way, for my unbelief. Consider the one great aspect that seems to distinguish us from all other life on our planet—our ability, no…our compulsion to ask, "Why???" We are meant to quest after knowledge—knowledge of ourselves, knowledge of our planet and our fellow passengers upon it, knowledge of the universe beyond our own little speck of dust in our own little corner of our own little galaxy. In gaining that knowledge, we come to know the greatness and character of the Entity from which all things sprang forth. I don’t believe that is not what the Almighty intends.

All We Are Saying

2006-11-07T10:22:00.000-08:00

On this election day...

Long Time, No Post. Even Longer Before Another...

2006-10-13T23:17:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Robin and her husband drove all the way out to the back of beyond to stop by the café for a visit. They flew in to Portland for a trip down to Salem to see their daughter at Willamette University. Scappoose is NOT on the way… It was a lovely visit, at a time when I really needed to know that my ethereal "friends" are indeed real people.

It’s funny, isn’t it, when you finally get to see someone you know but have never met. Did you ever experience that? Like when you get a glimpse of a favorite radio personality on TV or in person; you have a picture in your mind formed purely from the sound of the voice. And then you see them, and you think, "Well, that person doesn’t look at all the way they sound."

I have to say, I had that experience with Robin yesterday. She has (as far as I can recall) never graced us with a picture of herself in her journals. And on first sight, she didn’t look at all the way I had pictured her in my mind. And yet, after sitting down and talking with her for about thirty seconds, I realized she looked exactly how she should look. Exactly like a scholar, and a writer, and a teacher, and an aspring divinity student. Does that make any sense? I’m sorry…I don’t make a lot of sense these days….

Anyhow, thank you for visiting, my dear. And for choking down that quesadilla which I suspect wasn’t what it should have been. And I hope to see you again someday when we can spend more time, and I am more coherent. :-]

I have not posted here in almost two months. I just don't have the time or the energy to maintain this blog. I'm doing most of my posting at my old AOL Blog, "Coming to Terms...."--that comfortable cyber home that I could not bring myself to abandon even after the AOL armageddon... "Better Terms" was meant to be the place for my "next level" writings. But I find I don't have any of that in me right now. So I am going to officially abandon this place, at least for awhile...until I recover some semblance of higher brain activity. Anyone who wants to check in on me from time to time, you will find me at Coming to Terms... With AOL's new hugely ecumenical policies, you should even be able to leave a comment.

Thanks for reading. :-]

Time Spent With My Sister's Daughter

2006-08-27T00:35:00.000-07:00

This evening, we sat and explored the possibilities of an "ancient’" game of Intellivision. This fourteen-year-old and I. The young lady who was a baby…yesterday. The one baby, the only baby I have ever loved from the moment I laid eyes on her. As if she were my own.

So much water under the bridge now… Distances and commitments. Lives and loves and jails and little autistic brothers. It seems…it was so long ago. And the connection thought long severed. Yet, in the deepest reaches of our souls, it is there.

That inexplicable love… The first I have ever known of what has been labeled the "unconditional" variety of that particular commodity.

I truly believe that, no matter what that child does…I could never, ever turn my back on her. Never walk away. Though…maybe I thought that same thing of her three cousins. Far away from me, now…distances measured in more than simply miles.

How I long to keep this one close. How I long to be, to her, the aunt I shall never again be to the other three.

Taking Time

2006-08-20T00:05:00.000-07:00

The alarm went off at 6. A creaky arthritic arm snaked out from under the blankets to pound the snooze bar. Twice. These days, I go to bed exhausted, and wake up in the same state. Somewhere around noon, with the help of my two-ounce daily allowance of caffeinated beverage, my eyes will open all the way—for about two hours. Then I float back down into that semi-fogged world of bleary-eyed sleep deprivation I’ve inhabited since July 1.

This morning, I dragged my butt down the stairs after my shower…about fifteen minutes later than I had planned. I wanted to get to the café at 7…a half-hour earlier than I really needed to be there. So I was fifteen minutes late for being a half-hour early. And now I needed to hurry out the door if I wanted to get there in time to let the key-less cook in for the start of his shift.

The sprinklers had been turned on, and mewling livestock had been rewarded with bowls of kibbles slid under their noses. Dog had been sent out the back door to take care of business. Chores accomplished, I collected keys, purse, satchel and prepared to fly out to the car. But the kitchen window was open, just a crack…and the soft calls of the goldfinches hovering around the seed sock derailed my businesslike exit.

My birds! The drip irrigation was still dripping, and I have set up one nozzle to drip into the bird bath, refreshing the water and (hopefully) keeping it from turning too green and scummy in the summer heat. One little yellow bird was merrily bathing under that tiny drip. Fluffing wings, wagging tail feathers, scattering tiny droplets in a joyful shower on the other birds waiting their turn. I was lost in the moment. For several seconds, I couldn’t have moved, couldn’t have dragged myself away from that vignette if the house was on fire. I consciously ignored the little voice that droned that I didn’t have time for this…that I was going to be late. And the thought crossed my mind, about taking time. Taking time to smell the roses.

For several years, I have not had to take time. The roses were there. I had the time. I smelled them.

Now, I have no time. It’s all used up. There is not a moment to spare. If I’m not rushing around putting out fires, walking tightropes, planning changes, poring over invoices and schedules, I’m cramming in a couple hours of sleep in between. And those "boring" days when I had oodles and oodles of time float just outside my grasp. As unattainable as the Grail.

And now I get it. The part about taking the time. So I took it.

I watched, enchanted, while that little bird enjoyed his ablutions. In less than a minute, he finished and flitted away. But those few stolen seconds sent me off with a smile and a calm that changed the entire fabric of my day.

Time. Take some. For the important things.

Look What They've Made Me Do

2006-08-16T23:38:00.000-07:00

Hi. I've been away. In actual fact, I bought a business. I have joined the ranks of the terminally tired, eternally frazzled but gloriously "un-bossed" entrepreneurs of our great nation. I really don't even have time to write this, but...I thought it should be shared.

Let me just say that being a “real” business owner is a fiscal nightmare. And an accountant’s dream, I suppose. I’ve decided that accountants must have a powerful lobby in Washington, because the layers upon layers of IRS rules and regulations governing just payroll are mind-boggling. This is to say nothing of the quarterly, bi-weekly, bi-monthly, monthly, biennial, semi-annual, multilateral, interracial, and multi-orgasmic reports that have to be filed by a legitimate business, with every agent behind every desk of every federal and state bureaucracy in existence. One could hardly afford not to hire an accountant…one would be have no time to run one’s own business if one tried to wade through this by oneself.

We had an amazing weekend catering at an event with my old business (the twenty-foot concession trailer) this past weekend. Like shooting fish in a barrel, as the old saying goes. We brought in more money than we ever have at a weekend event. More money, in fact, than my newly acquired café brought in all of last month. Which gave me pause this morning…and touched off a tiny tug-of-war in my head. For the first time in my life, I felt the overwhelming desire to cheat on my taxes. Not just the little white-lie cheating that everybody does. I mean big cheating.

We don’t use a cash register in the catering booth. You add up the transaction in your head, throw the money in the money box, and hope you have given out the right change. (Those of us of a certain age actually know how to make change, which is more than I can say for any one of the employees I inherited with my new business…but I digress.) So, I thought about that eighteen-inch-tall stack of money I took to the bank, and I thought…no one but me knows exactly what our sales were over the weekend. My accountant doesn’t know…my husband doesn’t know. The bank doesn’t know, because I made deposits in two different banks. We have no cash register, so there is no paper trail. The only figures in existence are in an Excel spreadsheet on my computer, and I can change those to read anything I want.

I’ve never really been tempted to cheat on my taxes before--for two reasons. The first reason being that I am the kind of person that cannot get away with anything. I got pulled over by a cop once, and he told me he’d have to give me a ticket this time, but the next time he might just write me a warning (?!?) I exude some kind of guilt pheromone when I’m trying to get away with something not quite savory. So I generally just don’t bother.

But the second reason is, I always felt that my tax money was, for the most part, being put to proper use. I knew that if I expected the society in which I lived to provide things like education for the children, support for the indigent, good roads and police protection, I needed to ante up. I never could understand these anti-taxation idiots who whine about taxing being excessive and illegal, but grumble out of the other side of their mouths about the potholes and the lack of prison beds, and want to run around the world with a big stick to make the rest of the world toe the line. Where the hell do they think the money comes from to make these things happen?

Which brings me back to my newly-inspired desire to cheat on my taxes. I look at what my country is, in this day and age, and exactly where that tax money is going, and I think, “I’m sorry, I can’t support any of this.” I can’t support an illegal war financed with billions of dollars that could and should be going to support the indigent, educate the children, fix the roads, fund research to free us from the burden of dependency upon foreign oil, clean up our environment and make sure we leave our planet fit for our children to inhabit. I can’t pour my blood sweat and tears into the pit of deficit spending created by our GOP-led government. I can’t give my money to the people who will continue to ignore, abuse and disenfranchise me and the rest of the middle class at every opportunity. It would be like buying a .44 magnum and pointing it at my own head.

So, I wonder…how many tax cheats does this administration create each day? And why do I feel as if this—this difficult choice between two wrongs—is just one more betrayal of the middle class by the Bush Administration and the GOP?

deaths and birthdays

2006-07-29T00:34:00.000-07:00

vague shadows of the long past
and the not so long
torn, jagged churn muted and dark
uncatchable…untouchable

deep urgent longings
assigned to those shadows
passions with no time
nor luxury to explore

buried beneath this rock
this slide this mountain
will I ever find them
will I ever find myself

Old Dog, Old Tricks

2006-07-23T23:59:00.000-07:00

Ago. For the longest time, my whole life, everything vital or important, was “ago.” Twenty years ago…

Twenty years ago today, I was a little more than two months from embarking upon the most successful enterprise of my life. The one that would take fully two more years to develop into the experience of a lifetime.

I was thirty-one years old. I thought I was mature. I thought I was experienced. I thought I knew so much.

Funny how, now, I look at thirty-one-year-olds and think of them as “kids.” Young. Callow. Green.

I would have been pissed, back in 1986, to find out that someone thought that of me.

Yet, la plus ca change, la plus c’est la meme.

I am fifty-one years old. And embarking upon what I hope to be the most successful enterprise of my life. So far.

The bags under my eyes, the shooting pains in my feet, the aching joints in my fingers, have me wondering whether I yet possess the physical stamina to get me through the fourteen-hour days, the ninety-degree heat…the demands that a thirty-year-old body could meet with alacrity, but a fifty-year-old body struggles to conquer.

Are the blessings that I seek from this new venture really too much for this more-than-half-used life-force to hope to attain?

I cannot believe that. I won’t.

But when I drag myself into bed after too many consecutive hours of putting out fires and walking tightropes over boiling oil, I wonder, at least briefly:

Is it worth it?

There can only be one answer.

blog '03-'06

2006-07-17T22:59:00.000-07:00

sneaked in
wrote life
sat mute
got seen
shy smile

shook hands
shed tears
dried some
felt pain
got kicked

kept on
waved ‘bye
stayed in
touched less
and less

hello?
no sound
fade out
see you
or not

One Way or Another, We're Doomed

2006-07-12T19:57:00.000-07:00

For the past sixty years, human beings have held in their own hands the power to annihilate the earth and everything on it. Frankly, I am amazed that we have possessed that power for so many years, and have managed not to unleash it, even accidentally. But, as I grow older, I realize how pitifully short is the human life span. What, after all, is sixty years, piled on top of thousands of years, tens of thousands of generations, of human history? We may yet, possibly in our own lifetimes, see the nuclear “balance of power” slide far enough out of kilter for one of those precariously balanced bombs to hit the ground and explode…to what end, no one can fathom.

And perhaps that is the crux of the matter…the unfathomability of the cost of a nuclear contest. The threat is so huge that we can’t really wrap our minds around it. We only understand that the danger to the entity who launches the first nuclear bomb is as great as it is to the target. And so we hold these things in our hands and we wave them threateningly at one another, certain in the back of our minds that to actually throw one would be suicide. Grimly sobering…and a tad ridiculous.

Judging by today’s news, our ability to totally annihilate one another no longer satisfies our hunger to slaughter large numbers of our own kind. Now, we have spawned terrorism. Obviously, there is something particularly satisfying about blowing unsuspecting non-combatants to smithereens, with minute attention paid to assuring that the deaths will be painful, ugly, and very, very public. We invent all sorts of political, religious, self-righteous grievances…to justify our lust to kill.

So as much as Iran, North Korea and any number of smaller nations lust after The Bomb, perhaps it isn’t the danger it once was. Apparently, our inherent human bloodlust cannot be sated with the “flash, bang, all-gone” nature of the nuclear war threat. We seem to so much prefer the blood, guts, gore and anguish of conventional weapons, which reduce our “enemies” to gratifying piles of dismembered, disemboweled, charred carnage.

Will we annihilate ourselves with nukes? Probably. Time will tell. But, right now, we seem happy enough to pursue that course of ultimate destruction a handful of bloody pulp at a time.

transition

2006-07-09T22:51:00.000-07:00

consuming ache
the mid-century body
chafes at the discipline
of the long-forgotten dance
     two steps forward
     one back
     sidestep, duck, weave…

while mental fibers
desperately clench
clinging by fingernails
to a world of the mind
     hard-won and cherished
     fading…
     dwindling…

that prison, womb, sanctuary
holy place of silence, solace,
and finally rebirth
no turning back
     there to here
     then to now
     healing to healed

must fantasy die
by reality’s sword
must one door close
for another to open
     goodbye to words
     and art and abstract
     buried under concrete rubble

He'll Be There...

2006-06-30T10:31:00.000-07:00

That old talisman mindset dogged my steps this morning, as I wandered, mostly ineffectively, around the house, half-mindedly applying myself to the little chores that need tending before I go to the café. The Café. That place to which I will be committing the lion’s share of my time, energy, blood, sweat, and tears as of about 4:30 this afternoon—June 30, 2006.

Talismans. Good luck charms. The rituals to which I turn when my control-freak self realizes I have no control. The last-ditch effort to court the favor of Things I Don’t Understand. And to which I have traditionally had only the weakest of connections.

I look upon today as if it were a day as momentous, if a tad tardy, as a college graduation. Of all the people past or present who were ever part of my life, the one person I ache to share this day with is my dad. He would be outwardly cautious and stoic but, just under the surface, bursting with pride and anticipation for our new venture. Which would be betrayed by a twinkle in his eye and a slight softening of the poker face he always wore when Important Things took place.

So, I was carefully planning what I would wear to this event. This signing away of my life. This sealing the deal on a dream. This meeting at which I will undoubtedly be the only one present who truly grasps the cosmic significance of the occasion. Conflicting thoughts of “dress for success” and “dress as if it were no big deal” butted heads in my mind. I finally settled on a simple version of what I probably will be wearing to work for the next umpteen months: a pristine white long-sleeved knit shirt and a pair of black pants. The trousers were chosen specifically for their capacity to make me look slimmer and taller.

And then it hit me. The Dad thing. I knew that I had to take something of dad with me today. If it was January, I might have chosen the scarf I knitted for him back when I was in high school. Or even the ridiculous “Elmer Fudd” hat that hangs by my back door, with the scarf…that pair of things that represents the presence of my dad’s gentle spirit wherever I hang my hat. But those things would be a tad conspicuous, here in the middle of summer. And Dad was anything but conspicuous. They wouldn’t do at all.

There was no help for it. I chucked the stylish, slimming pants back in the closet and dragged out a pair of black jeans. Black jeans with belt loops to accommodate Dad’s black leather belt. It’s wide, it’s worn, and it’s extremely seventies, but who cares? My Dad will be there with his arm around my waist as I step forth into this great adventure. Right now that’s the most important thing in the world.

So Close....

2006-06-19T23:43:00.000-07:00

How, exactly, is one supposed to act when one gets within inches of attaining a dream? A dream cherished and nourished and treasured for so many years? Like a baby nurtured too long in an ancient womb…can something dreamed for decades survive the monumental strain of birth into the realm of reality?

The questions lurk in the shadowed pockets of my mind. I can’t address them…cannot even acknowledge them, for fear that the possibilities raised by the contemplation will be so huge that they will put an abrupt end to my forward progress.

It’s the commitment. The commitment overwhelms me now. Thirty years ago, I was on the threshold of the greatest commitment I had ever, would ever, make. And, same as now, I could not think in terms of forever. “If it doesn’t work out,” I reasoned, “we can always get a divorce. Walk away and start over. No hard feelings, just a clean slate.”

Not so simple, of course. Had I allowed myself to think about it, I would have conceded that. But I had to have the fallback. Needed the escape route. Because there was, is, always will be, that contrary little voice in the back of my mind that cracks the whip, hardly allowing me to dream. It scolds that nothing is forever. And nothing ever turns out as you hoped. Dreams are dreams. Reality is…. something else.

Edging away from the larger, more ethereal issues, I stumble over the more immediate sacrifice: I realize that I will be committing to a place that I call my home, that has been my home for the past five years. But to this chronologically-challenged aging child, it doesn’t feel like home. Home is the place to which I have been chained, and from which I have been running, for the past decade. Despite the words piled upon words, proclaiming the need to detach from that place, to break chains and cut ropes and burn bridges--whatever it takes to be free—I freeze. The torch is in my hand, I reach out to touch it to the closest creosote-soaked piling. And I shake uncontrollably.

I will stretch out my other hand, steady that trembling brand. I will set fire to that bridge. And to that part of my heart that has had so much trouble letting go.

...And What Timing!

2006-06-14T07:35:00.000-07:00

I’m absolutely certain those Guantanamo detainees who killed themselves the other day did so purely for the PR value of the act. Obviously, a bleeding heart liberal whack-job sneaked into the prison, disguised as an Electrode Adjustment Technician. Leaned in and planted a bug in the ear of some strapped-down detainee, left momentarily unsupervised, wavering in and out of psychosis: “It’s Torture Awareness Month, Abdul. Think of the impact your death will have if you hang yourself tonight when you get back to your cell. And make a pact with as many other prisoners as you possibly can…the more deaths, the better the press!”

Abdul’s pain-dulled eyes cleared and lit up immediately at the thought of stretching his own neck for the cause of generating negative press for his captors. “This’ll show them…erk. ..llkk ...aakkk ...aughhhh!”

Liberals and ragheads. They’ll do anything to destroy America's good standing among the nations of the world.

Where I Stand Now

2006-06-07T21:00:00.000-07:00

Today, I delivered the non-refundable deposit the seller of the business we’re buying insisted he needed, in order to quit holding "other offers" over my head. So now, more than at any time up until now, this looks like a done deal. How I would love to be breathing a sigh of relief. How I would love to be looking forward, unconditionally thrilled, to assuming the captaincy of my own ship. But this whole exercise is turning out to be like a game of "Whack-a-mole." Have you ever played "Whack-a-mole?" It’s the arcade game where you get a big padded mallet, and you use it to pound these little mole-heads back into the holes they pop out of. As soon as you whack one mole, another pops out of another hole. Sometimes two or three at the same time.

So, I whacked the "financing" mole. And I mashed the "mollify the seller" mole. And I’m working on wrestling the "OLCC" (liquor license) mole back down into his little hole. But, what’s this? A monstrous head just popped out of a crater the size of a manhole. Egad...it’s the "present owner’s overly-emotional manager" mole! Mr. Present Owner has gone out of his way to warn me that this girl’s family has lived in the county for a hundred years, and that even the appearance that she has been ill-treated in the transition could cost me big in terms of community relations for the next...century. Oh. Thank you so much, Mr. Present Owner!

I have met this girl. She is very nice. She is sweet. She is eminently likeable. In fact, everybody likes her—customers, staff and (obviously) Mr. Present Owner himself.

She is the absolute antithesis of me.

Nothing can strike more abject fear into my heart than the prospect of dealing with a sweet, likeable, fragile psyche. I am the personification of the bull in the china shop, when it comes to personal relationships. I have no guile, no political savvy, no off button. As a general rule, whatever is in my mind just falls out my mouth. I know enough not to be outright rude or abusive, but somehow that makes the situation even worse. It really hurts my feelings when people don’t get me. If I had a rhinoceros-tough hide to go along with my social ineptitude, it wouldn’t matter to me that I make such a god-awful impression on most people the first (second, third, gotta-know-me-for-a-year-before-you-can-tolerate-me) time I meet them.

Mind you, I only have to work with this girl for two weeks. And Mr. Present Owner has already promised her a generous severance package. All she has to do is work with me long enough to allow me to get my feet under me concerning the day to day operation of the place. But when you combine what he has been so "kind" as to tell me about her, and what I know from having interacted with her for a couple weeks a year ago, I know that she and I will get along like gasoline and a match.

I am scared shitless. My friends…. Any suggestions?

Taking Responsibility

2006-06-06T10:12:00.000-07:00

Reading a conservative blog this morning, I see that the few remaining faithful are crying that the Marines involved in the Haditha incident should be considered innocent until proven guilty.

Does the concept of innocence even exist for our troops in Iraq? We attacked their country. Our leaders chose to dispatch our forces to a nation that had committed no crime against the United States of America, that presented no threat to our national security. The incumbent administration took full advantage of a political climate charged with 9/11 bloodlust to mount an invasion whose true justifications were back-room politics, power-lust, and avarice. An invasion they had planned for a decade and chose to launch the instant the political tide turned favorable. From the moment the first US jet aimed a missile or dropped a bomb that took one Iraqi life, the hands of the US military were irredeemably covered in innocent blood.

What a country! We’ll slap a fifteen-year-old in prison for the rest of his life because he sat outside in a car while his buddies used a gun he didn’t know about to kill a convenience store clerk. But when it comes to the deaths of tens of thousands directly caused by our leaders’ lust for world dominance, we cry “Innocent!” Make no mistake: All the blood shed in that country since we attacked –the blood of savagely beheaded hostages, the blood soaking the uniform of a soldier cradling the body of a tiny girl mortally wounded by an “errant” bomb, the blood of our own troops dismembered by countless IED’s, the blood of young Shi’ite men herded off a bus and executed by “insurgents”—every drop of that blood is on our hands.

It can come as no surprise that our troops are now in the business of heaping atrocity upon insult. War is atrocity. It’s not a damned video game, people. It’s not about a bunch of superheroes being dispatched to all corners of the globe to whup up on the bad guys. It’s about blood and guts and gore and murder, hatred and fear, aggression and insanity. It’s about every single thing that is ugly and hopeless about the human race. And we made a conscious decision to take that atrocity and release it in another country. A country conveniently distant from our own home shores.

Conservatives are ever so fond of the concept of “taking responsibility.” It is way past time for them to walk the walk when it comes to this war. We started it. Our troops are not innocent of anything that happens in Iraq as a result of the war we chose to make.

Overthinking It

2006-06-05T00:36:00.000-07:00

For a moment, I consider that I am simply too old to be standing with a foot suspended over the abyss of the unknown. On the verge of leaning forward, about to shift the weight to that outstretched foot, confident that the resultant free-fall will be an escapade of the highest order. I have been there, and I have done that. Thirty years ago, that expectation of adventure was richly rewarded. There may have been accompanying bumps, bruises, a compound fracture or two….but they always healed quickly, and always the golden nugget of knowledge, of experience, was squirreled away into memory.

Perhaps there are, at last, too many of those little nuggets stored in the cupboards and closets of my mind. They are stacked to the rafters and oozing out under the doors and around the hinges; no longer golden, but turned to dross. Unrewarded risks, confident forays into mud or mire, heedless wagers placed on losing horses… They mock me; they haunt me. They drag me down. To safety. To uncertainty. To paralysis.

All I can do is strap on the blinders…allow no look back, nor to the side, nor too far ahead. Certainly no further ahead than the next footfall. Just make myself keep moving, and I will get There. And once I am There, the fear, the restraint, the immobility will be pushed aside by the process of contriving to make it from day to day…the simple groundwork of success.

Farewell to One of My Own

2006-05-30T09:49:00.000-07:00

When I sat down to think about it today, I realized I didn’t know how old he was. Between my decaying brain cells and the sheer numbers of animals we have called family, the exact adoption dates have blurred and jumbled in my mind. He was seventeen. Born sometime in the spring of 1989.

In those days, we were the keepers of one very homesick niece who had moved halfway across the country to make a point to her parents…and came to live with us. In an effort to cheer her up, we got her a kitten. She and her uncle cleaned up this tiny, flea-infested scrap of fur…indeed, nearly killed him with an overdose of pesticides, trying to rid him of his cast of thousands. Then she considered the now soggy, slightly groggy mite, with an eye toward giving him a name. Upon hearing his tiny, high-pitched kitten squeak, she laughed. "I was going to call him Willie (after Willem Defoe, her then-favorite screen star), but he sounds more like Beaker (after Muppet character Dr. Bunsen Honeydew’s language-challenged sidekick.)" So Beaker it was.

But even the little mostly-white-with-a-striped-tail-and-matching-nose-splotch kitty couldn’t entice the niece out of her funk. Before he reached his first birthday, his young mom packed up and moved back to the midwest (where she promptly got another cat, which she did name "Willie." Who, coincidentally, died just last month.) Beaker was left behind like a discarded toy. It was a less than amicable parting, and we had to fight with her to keep her from packing him off to the shelter (out of spite?) instead of leaving him in our care, in the only home he’d ever known, where he was perfectly welcome to stay. Eventually she relented, and left him with us to raise as one of our own. And so we did.

We had read all the books when we brought him home. And all the books said to put a pillow or a scrap of cloth in your new kitten’s bed to ease the loneliness he would feel being newly separated from Mom and littermates. So we put a gigantic red wool sock in his bed for him to snuggle. He nursed and nibbled on that old thing for months. Unfortunately, for the rest of his life, wool was Beaker’s "comfort food." We quickly learned to ascertain the fabric content of any upholstery or clothing material that might, unattended, find itself at the mercy of his oral fixation. He licked bald spots in wool rugs, gnawed wool fringe on pillows, and ate holes in my favorite wool jacket. He was like a giant furry moth with whiskers.

When Beaker was only a few months old, we acquired yet another member for our "pride"—a mink-tipped, blue-eyed little acrobat we named "Ming," but has been known for most of her life as "Bebe." From the moment she crossed the threshold, Beaker accepted her as his own personal kitten. The four older cats hissed at, spit at, or ignored the lowly youngsters. But they couldn’t have cared less. The two of them ate, played, and slept together, twenty-four/seven. Their favorite toy was a "Tinkerbelle": a little spot of light, either accidentally or purposely created, that inspires cats to fly off the ends of couches and skitter across glass end tables... I have archive footage of the two of them, rushing from one end of the living room to the other, up speakers, over television, across carpeting, chasing a flashlight beam.

And then there was "kitty fishing"—the toy which consisted of a pocket-sized fishing rod loaded with kitty bait, usually a feather or a catnip mouse, which you would cast across some large open space in the house—across the family room or down the hall. Then reel in any cat who happened to be in the vicinity. Beaker’s favorite lure was a giant jingle bell that had fallen off some ancient Christmas decoration. He would chase that bell until he was too tired to stand up. Eventually, that toy was lost in the bottom of a closet somewhere, but for years afterward, Beak would come running whenever he heard a bell jingle.

How the years have stacked up, one upon another, since those days. Beaker and his mates moved with us from that home to another, and another, and yet another. Hugged the woodstoves in dismal weather, stretched out in the rare sunspots on the winter carpet, sniffed at screen doors and raptly followed the ever-changing cast of Kitty TV in four different back yards. From the "pig tree" to the pines to the Dougs to the poplars. Chickadees and thrushes, finches and grosbeaks, hummers and squirrels, jays and siskins.

Upon the demise of our beloved Andrew—the last of our Illinois cats—Beaker stood to inherit the title of "alpha male" of our brood. He was fat, happy, middle-aged, and ready to rule the roost. But something went wrong. He suddenly dropped a bunch of weight, began to look hollow-eyed and scruffy. A trip to the vet told us he had developed diabetes. At the ripe old age of eleven, he began the two-shots-per-day insulin regimen that he would follow for the rest of his life. And so he became our "problem kitty." The diabetes gave him continence problems, an insatiable appetite and unquenchable thirst, and clouded his eyes with cataracts. Still, for five years, he lived quite comfortably in spite of his condition. Until a couple of months ago, when his appetite tailed off, his eyesight got noticeably worse, and he started having "spells" that were almost like seizures. The vet discovered gum disease and pulled two of his teeth, but warned us that there was probably something more sinister going on with him, since he was showing signs of kidney failure and was anemic. He was a sixteen-year-old cat who’d been an insulin-dependent diabetic for a third of his life. His systems were just starting to wear out.

Last week, it became obvious that old Mr. Beak was probably not going to last much longer. I laid him a bed of an old towel in his favorite spot—under the china cabinet in the dining room. From there, he still had a view of Kitty TV, was close to me as I prepared for my upcoming event, and the other cats could snuggle up to him and lick his head from time to time. He was just…winding down. Didn’t seem to be in any pain, really. I had it in my mind to let him go naturally, in familiar surroundings; spare him that traumatic last car trip to the vet.

But cats are so tough. They don’t let go of life easily. He lingered and lingered, dying by centimeters as the days passed. I had to leave for my job on Wednesday. I knew, one way or another, he wouldn’t be there when I got back. I crawled under the china cabinet, petted him and said goodbye. Told him to go ahead and join his brother Andrew, and grandpa (my dad), and that we knew he would be waiting for us on the other side of the bridge. Husband came home from work on Wednesday, saw how sick he was, and made the tough decision that I had been trying to avoid. He packed him in the cat carrier and took him out to the vet. Mr. Beak was too sick to object. And a few minutes later he died in his dad’s arms.

In the end, we broke down, pushed Nature aside and arranged the death of a beloved pet to fit our crowded schedules. I hate that life’s frantic busyness doesn’t allow us time to deal with the really important things. With all the other colliding agendae going on in our lives right now, neither of us had time to sit vigil beside a dying cat to ease him on his journey. But we didn’t want him to die alone.

I picture him today, sprawled on a wool rug, occasionally rousing himself to chase a gleaming fourteen-karat jingle bell cast by my dad’s expert hand…

Have You Heard About It?

2006-05-24T06:47:00.000-07:00

Inspired by the United Nations’ designation of June 26th as "International Day in Support of Survivors and Victims of Torture," a "who’s who?" list of national and international human rights groups have gathered to endorse June, 2006 as "Torture Awareness Month." Did you ever imagine, in your wildest dreams, that you would see such a grisly reprimand directed toward the United States of America? We were always the good guys, the liberators; the ones who shook our fingers at Moscow and Beijing and Hanoi. That halo turned brass a long time ago. But, apparently, there are those who prefer that Americans continue to think of ourselves as the guys in the white hats. How much have you heard or read about "Torture Awareness Month" in the American media to date? I personally learned about it from Andrea at A Small Group of Thoughtful Concerned Citizens.

Groups of no less stature than the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch , to name just a few , have designated next month as a thirty-day campaign to focus awareness on the Bush Administration’s penchant for playing fast and loose with international law when it comes to torture. In woefully transparent stabs at political sleight of hand, our government has either shipped detainees off to other countries where torture is performed as a matter of course (a process known as "Extraordinary Rendition,") or simply declared prisoners "enemy combatants"—a designation invented by our government as a vehicle to strip detainees of their Geneva Convention rights as "Prisoners of War."

The Bush Administration has irredeemably damaged our stature among the nations of the world with its swaggering, ham-fisted, America-centric foreign policy. And we, the American citizenry, are guilty by association. As long as we find the truth too shocking or too depressing to contemplate; as long as we avert our eyes from the evil we know in our hearts is being perpetrated in our nation’s name--in our names; we might as well be applying the electrodes with our own hands.

Make some noise. Get involved. Make it stop.

And Now, We Wait...

2006-05-19T12:43:00.000-07:00

I feel like I have just run a marathon. Today was THE day. The day to quit the hedging and second-guessing and put my money where my mouth is. Or, try to get someone to put money into my mouth. Or something.

This morning at 3 AM, I was stacking and patting down the last of the documents I had collected, copied, polished and printed for my presentation to the bank. To get the money. To buy the business. I had assembled, as best I could, snapshots of my life—old and new—that I hoped would tell the story of a competent, experienced restaurant manager on the threshold of realizing her lifelong dream of buying a place of her very own. It felt like walking down the runway in the bathing suit competition at a beauty pageant. Half-naked, exposed, wishing real life could be air-brushed…

I dragged myself out of bed at 8:30, attended to my chores, and rushed upstairs to get ready. It was so bizarre…superstition ruled my toilette. I hunted down my "lucky" shirt and built my dress-for-success outfit around it. I thought about lucky earrings, and realized I had one small pair left from the days of my late lamented dream job. They’re tarnished, bent and sticky with old hair-spray residue. But they had to be part of the ensemble. I even found, under my vanity, an old bottle of the cologne I used to wear back in those days. After a cursory test-sniff to determine whether it had gone off from age, I splashed that on as well. Liberally. Like holy water.

In the end, after all that trouble, I never even got to see the Loan Officer. She was busy with another client, so I just dropped off that folder full of my life’s blood at the front counter. She never saw my casual-yet-conservative power outfit, never glimpsed the sticky little onyx hearts that dangled from my ears, never got a whiff of Victoria’s Secret’s "Her Majesty’s Rose." It didn’t matter. All that mumbo jumbo had comforted me. It made me feel as if I had wrapped myself in a robe of positive ions. Old positive ions, but positive ions, nonetheless.

Arriving back home, I had a moment of panic that the ineffective-looking receptionist might not realize how hugely momentous was the information that I had entrusted into his hands. How direly it needed to be relayed to the all-powerful Loan Officer. I walked around the house,making coffee, scrounging up breakfast; but it was no good. I couldn’t get shed of that electric knife in my gut until I made the phone call. Called the Loan Officer, made sure she knew the packet—my life—was in her hands now. Casually, she laughed. "Oh, I haven’t seen it yet. They must have put it in my box." In your box? I wanted to scream. Go get it, woman! Have you no ken of how vital this is to the continued existence of the universe? But, no, that wouldn’t do. So I merely stuttered, "Well, I just wanted to make sure you knew I had dropped it off…"

I hung up the phone, and felt like all the air had just gone out of me. Like someone pulling the plug out of one of those big multi-colored punch balls we used to play with as kids. You’d pull out the cork, it would make that loud, flabby flatulence noise and go limp. And everybody would giggle.

Yep, all the spunk has just farted right out of me. Right now, I’m going to sit with my feet up and stare at…well, maybe nothing. Even television doesn’t sound appealing right now. I don’t want to think or worry or even move. For about an hour or so. And then I’ll blow some life back into myself, get up and go on to the next thing. Carrying around that little knot of apprehension in my stomach. Which is not likely to become untied until about 4:30 Monday afternoon. When I get to hear what fate the mighty Loan Officer has assigned my dream.

CBS Hearts Moms

2006-05-16T09:30:00.000-07:00

I should know better than to watch anything on television that touts itself as a news program. This past weekend, it was CBS' "Sunday Morning" that curdled my non-dairy creamer. I'll assume Sunday's show was intended to be a Mothers' Day nod to American women. Charlie Osgood stepped aside in favor of veteran commentator Leslie Stahl. Happily, we were not regaled with 60's-esque segments on keeping your family happy, healthy, and well-fed, while remianing the petite size 4 that attracted the husband's lacivious eye at senior prom. Program directors are way too savvy for that, regardless of the political preferences evidenced by media ownership these days.

So what did the network deem of supreme interest to today's American woman? In one segment, a reporter displayed two different diamond engagement rings to interviewees and asked them to make certain judgments--about the man who gave the ring, the woman who accepted it, their relationship, and their social status --based on the relative sizes of the diamonds sported by each ring. Big rock--"He's got a good job." "He really loves her." "She's confident, knows what she wants." Little rock (less than 3 carats)--"Well, it's a nice promise ring" "He's trying, but not very hard." "She's a nice girl, not materialistic." Who knew that we were all wearing little crystal balls on our third finger, left hand? Oh..and the median cost of a diamond engagement ring in today's market is $4900 and change. Let's see...that would buy two dozen copies of my 1970's vintage bling.

And then there was the report on handbags, where we learned that a purse is not merely a purse, it's a status symbol. That the guts of your life--the fruit roll-ups, pampers, current novel, and the bic from the teller's counter at the bank--need to be enfolded in an artfully arranged assortment of fabric, leather, buckles, zippers, and handcuffs, preferably displaying a conspicuously evident designer logo, that cost roughly as much as my first new car. And that there are $12,000 handbags which women will endure the ignominy of being placed on a waiting list in order to possess.

I don't know...maybe we are not up for images ofwomen grieving at the gravesides of their young sons or daughters who returned from Iraq in flag-draped pine boxes, or mothers in Darfur lovingly cradling lethargic, emaciated, dying babies, at nine o'clock on a Sunday morning. But surely there is more to American women than this program--this disgusting celebration of shallow materialism and rampant consumerism--contrived to suggest.

I hope you had a happy Mothers' Day, America. And please, contact CBS News and let them know how much you appreciated their "gift."

Opposites Attract

2006-05-12T00:05:00.000-07:00

red coil
steady glow
welcome reliable
burning warming
he is electricity

flame
surging dying
too hot one minute
winking cool the next
she is fire

to him
she is wild
to her
he is constant

together
never quite comprehending
but forever
mated

Looking Forward Through the Past

2006-05-11T10:50:00.000-07:00

Eleven years ago, the world I knew came to an end. In 1995, I might have been gearing up for my fortieth birthday, and all the changes, real or imaginary, that would take place in my life when I exited my thirties—the last decade during which I could be credibly called a "young" anything. Looking back, I sincerely wish that were all I had to worry about. Because my fortieth birthday in July of that year faded into the background of upheaval and grief that was the final desperate illness and death of my big sister. And my misguided notion that I needed to sink every ounce of strength I possessed into comforting and binding the wounds of her bereft family.

Another thing that got buried under that load of sorrow was the demise of my "dream job." After spending fifteen years bouncing around like a pinball on the game board of my chosen profession, in 1986 I fell, quite by accident, into the best job situation I had ever encountered. Possibly the best anyone could hope for. In the next eight years, I accomplished more than I ever thought I could, grew more and in more directions than I had ever thought possible, mentored and guided and taught, spoke my mind and worked my butt off. But I was good at what I did, I was successful at what I did, and for the first time in my life, I felt like I was fulfilling some kind of real purpose. I never realized how much employment success affected every aspect of life. I was happy at work, happy at home, outgoing and magnanimous and on top of the world.

Then the roof caved in. As it often does in the restaurant industry. Times change, fads fade, concepts come and go. When the corporation I worked for started to fall apart, the first guys to take the hit were we managers who had carried it to the top by the sweat of our brows and had been able, for a couple of years, to enjoy the fruits of our labors. All at once, we became an overpaid liability and were targeted for "redundancy," as the Brits so aptly put it. But it was not a quick and merciful severance. It was a traumatic, year-long pummeling process that felt like being beaten to death with a tack hammer. By the end of 1994, I was unemployed, exhausted, and emotionally trashed. And for a little extra added excitement, I was scheduled for major surgery.

I was still recovering from my own health disaster when my sister began her abrupt slide toward death in the early days of 1995. It could be argued that my sister’s illness "saved" me from going down into the pit of depression my own pack of troubles had been pushing me toward. I needed to rouse myself, stiffen my spine and "be there" for her and her family. That mission, that determination to be strong for someone else, actually kept me going for several years. I put my own trauma on the back burner, stepped up for the people who "needed me," and never looked back.

But my relationship to the working world never recovered. Still wounded and shell-shocked from the demise of my once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, I could never quite muster the confidence or the courage to get back on the horse and just…ride. I’d scramble up, but I’d jump off at the first sign of a rocky road. I changed horses so many times over the next several years that it got to the point where they would lock up the stables when they saw me coming. Eventually, the other half of my life began to fall apart, the part where I was supposed to be this rock of support for my sister’s husband and kids. Then, in 1999, my dad passed away, and my remaining sisters and I went through the tortures of the damned trying to deal with that loss.

As my relationship to my family took a nosedive, I realized that in the course of less than five years, I had lost virtually everything I believed I’d gained during that halcyon time when I felt like Queen of the World. I thought I had "arrived," but the place I’d arrived to had crumbled and faded before my very eyes. I was living the darker reality of the old cliché, "Life is a journey, not a destination." I tried to run away from my troubles with my family by running full-tilt back into the world of work. It was then that I found that I had no "world of work" to return to. I was pushing fifty, my resume was crap, and the doors of opportunity in the restaurant world, that I had always slipped through in the past, were only open to younger, happier people who weren’t afraid of their own shadows. Restaurant work is not for the faint of heart.

I tried office work for awhile, attracted by the nine-to-fiveness of it all, but found I absolutely hated it—from the enforced physical stagnation, to the back-stabbing, credit-grabbing, passive aggressive nature of office politics. The more I tried to put my restaurant past behind me, the more it rose up before me as the luminous icon of the only thing I had ever put my hand to that made me happy.

So in 2002 I started my own business. Something I probably should have done a decade or two earlier. But the time was never right, the money was never available. Once again, death changed my life. This time, it was the deaths of my husband’s parents…which provided us with the few extra dollars that made it possible to scrape together my concession business. Scared to death, but with no other real options open, I sallied forth into the world of the small business owner. It’s been a frustrating, enlightening, back-breaking four years. I’ve been able to pick up and dust off some of the scraps of myself that I had thought were irretrievably lost. It’s been a proving ground for me…showing me that I still can do this and I’m still damned good at it.

But the seasonal nature of the business has been at once a godsend and a handicap. Where it’s allowed me to creep forward at the snail’s pace that seems to be all that I can handle, it has also allowed me to be picky and half-assed about the challenges I want to take on. I can back away when I become intimidated by what the next move forward might mean, hit the brakes when I get frightened of putting my heart into yet another doomed effort. I love my little business, but I’ve come to realize that my complete healing lies in the direction of something much larger, much more engaging, and much more challenging.

And there it is, creeping up over the horizon like a late-autumn sunrise. A real restaurant. A roof over my head, a floor under my feet, a full-sized three-compartment sink in the kitchen. A place to go every day, to scheme, to strive, to formulate and refine. Every day. It’s been years since I’ve allowed myself to want anything this much. I want it so bad it hurts. But it’s a good pain…a pain of promise. Not unlike labor pains, I would imagine. This may be the closest I’ll ever come to the privilege of that pain. The pain of wrestling something new and vital into the world.

A snarky whisper in the back of my head mocks me about this. It taunts that what I am actually doing is preparing to lay out what amounts to three years of my dream job’s wages to…buy myself a job. That over the years, I have so trashed myself that I am not fit to be employed by anyone else. That little voice had me going there, for a minute. But I managed to put a sack over its head and conk it with a sledge hammer. Now I’m on my way to drown it in the creek. Because no stinking negative little demon is going to rob me of this opportunity, or tarnish the promise and anticipation. And I refuse to entertain fears that I’m too old, or too rusty, or too timid, or too anything to make this happen. This is my time, for the first time in a long time. And I am going to rise.

My Life's Music

2006-05-06T00:34:00.000-07:00

I was nine at the start of the British Invasion. But I was also the youngest of five sisters, and wherever they went, I followed, as fast as my skinny little legs would carry me. Sister D was fourteen—a high school freshman—in 1964. The perfect age for a Beatlemaniac. And so she was, and dragged the rest of us right along with her. When a Beatles song would come on the radio, we would let out ear-piercing screeches and scramble into the living room to the vintage console stereo that we had got second-hand from some old aunt. The kind that looked like a piece of furniture. The record player, not the aunt. Four girls, ages nine through fourteen, ears glued to the booming tweed-covered speaker, leaving half-eaten plates of food cooling on the dinner table, to my dad’s immense annoyance.

We sang all the songs. Knew every word, all the harmonies. Sang while we cleaned up the dishes after dinner, or in the car on those six-hour station-wagon odysseys to campgrounds in the North Woods. The Beatles, of course—When I was younger so much younger than today… But there were others: Chad & Jeremy--…but that was yesterday, and yesterday’s gone… Peter & Gordon—Woman, do you love me… Herman’s Hermits –Mrs. Brown you’ve got a lovely daughter… Every Simon and Garfunkel song ever recorded. I handled the Garfunkel harmonies. At the ripe old age of ten. Hello darkness, my old friend…

You were either a Beatles fan, or a Stones fan. Never both. I remember seeing the Stones on Ed Sullivan…the same place we had seen the Beatles for the first time. We had swooned over the Fab Four…and complained that the Stones were "ugly." Even in their sterilized, censored Sunday night American TV personas, the Stones were too high test for our vanilla suburban souls. To this day, I’ve never been able to warm up to Mick Jagger… And then along came the Monkees, spurned by the older, more refined fans, who were by now…seventeen. But, hell. I was twelve. I went for them ass over teakettle. Take the last train to Clarksville, and I’ll meet you at the station… When I think of the old music, that's what comes tomind. My brain shorts out when I realize exactly how old it is.

Then there were the seventies…the longest decade of my life. From high school and graduation’s emancipation to marriage and a mortgage in ten jam-packed years. Rocky Mountain High to Saturday Night Fever. John Denver ‘round the family campfire to BeeGees disco lessons with the handsome young husband.

After that, my musical history smears to a blur. We threw over mainstream music for Christian Rock for half of the eighties. Though Heart of Glass and Sweet Dreams are Made of This penetrated sinfully past the halo. The Cars and the B52’s, Devo and Ten Thousand Maniacs dented my consciousness. And after that…I seem to have fallen off the face of the earth.

These days, my "new music" is a collection of New Age, Celtic and Acoustic CD’s. Which, I now realize, I started collecting in the early nineties. I wish I could say my musical tastes have become eclectic and refined. But I know the truth. I have finally gone down into the tarpit of old farthood. And I wonder how I look… On second thought, I don’t wonder; I know how I look…to twenty-first century fourteen-year-olds (I cannot possibly be old enough to be their grandmother.) Rolling my cart down the grocery store aisle singing out loud with the muzak tape--And as we wind on down the road, our shadows taller than our souls, there walks a lady we all know….

Losing Religion

2006-05-02T23:48:00.000-07:00

My personal religious history has led me to a state of profound agnosticism. Raised Catholic, “born again” as a twenty-something; baptized in The Church as an infant and in an elder’s swimming pool as a consenting adult, I have been steeped in both the dogma and the charisma. But, battered and beaten by years and tears, the core concepts of religion became harder and harder for me to swallow without question. Eventually, I arrived at a place where I was so deep into unbelief that nothing short of an intimate chat with a burning bush was likely to penetrate my skepticism.

Milestone birthdays have a way of causing sudden, urgent reevaluation of one’s past, present, and future. Turning fifty touched off an odd chain reaction in what is left of my mind; I suddenly realized that mortality was all too certain and (relatively) imminent. I felt an urgent need to explore the concepts of spirituality and the afterlife, if only to keep myself from becoming paralyzed by the fear of death. Also, I’d been suffering from a feeling of real isolation in my life; I envisioned that becoming part of a community of believers would be a side benefit of my search. I believed I craved that “human connection.”

My spiritual odyssey came to an abrupt end when I realized that the timing—not just my personal timing, but the universal timing—for such a quest was all wrong. Human connection? What was I thinking? What connections do today’s organized religions offer us? War? Murder? Ostracism? Ritualized bigotry? Hatred? Turn on the television or radio. Read the news. From every window on the world, violence and hatred in the name of some group’s perception of God devastates the landscape.

Christians hating Muslims. Muslims killing Jews. Sunni despising Shi’ite. Evangelicals bashing Catholics. Fundamentalists straining to drag us all back into the Dark Ages. It’s painfully obvious that the path to peace, progress and harmony does not lie in the direction of organized religion. It’s entirely possible that the continued existence of the human race might depend upon us eschewing religion altogether.

Yet, old habits do die hard. For years, even as my agnosticism grew, it was important to me that the Christ I had been spoon-fed from birth retain some aspect of deity. I held to the conviction that for Jesus Christ—or any prophetic figure of any faith—to have been remembered, much less venerated for so many centuries, there must have been something, some mystic connection to the Creator that gave his story such amazing staying power. But even that rationalization has been given the lie by the bizarre happenings here in our own country over the last five years.

We have witnessed first-hand the power of groupthink and political pressure, and the ability of talented individuals with hidden agendas to manipulate the emotions of entire populations of frightened or disillusioned people. We have seen for ourselves what happens when a party gathers unto itself enough power to literally turn its every whim into the law of the land. We’ve seen them turn lies into truths which people will embrace to the point of martyrdom.

The antics of our current national leadership have given us a glimpse into a degree of domination and corruption we never thought to witness in this society which touts itself as the beacon of freedom and enlightenment to an errant world. But, beyond that, they have made me completely re-evaluate the phenomena of historically prominent spiritual figures. Like Jesus Christ. Or Moses. Or Mohammed. Or Baha’ullah, or the Angel Moroni, or Jim Jones. The right political climate could make any society desperate for a savior. Or make a prophet out of almost anyone. Even George W. Bush. Just ask him.

How sad that the human race is on a course to destroy itself with the very code it created to keep from destroying itself. Religion is ever the double-edged sword. Perhaps the edge that refined and controlled human behavior has been wielded to the point of permanent bluntness. And now we hold the other side of the blade to our own throats.

writing the night

2006-04-26T23:03:00.000-07:00

there is work
to be done
but I have not
the patience or
the focus for it

in my head
I retreat
to the days of
the music and the bic
and the spiral notebook

so many years
yellowed in candlelight
the words that gushed
and flowed to the old songs
with so much force

I could hardly capture them
now are choked
and stuttered
and micro-managed

I am that girl, but not
now a loose-skinned woman
decades beyond the words
and the heart and the need

but the heart still beats
the need remains
the words still come
more slowly
but not less urgently

Whaddya think....?

2006-04-23T19:12:00.000-07:00

Remember the disastrous job experience I wrote about, right around this time last year? (Come to think of it, I only wrote about the job in "Coming to Terms..." I wrote about the disaster in "Brainsurfing"... But, trust me; it was a disaster.)

Well, guess what? The "scene of the crime" just went on the market. And yours truly happens to be IN the market…for a local restaurant opportunity. Okay…what do you think I should do?

The Old Paper Bag Trick....

2006-04-23T09:16:00.000-07:00

The Bush Administration’s disastrous Iraq War lies like a huge pile of shit on Washington’s sidewalks. They know it. They see it. And they’ve come up with an executive policy to take care of it. They load it into paper bags. Bags labeled “Social Security Reform” or “Immigration Policy” or “Moral Values”. When the hidden mess starts to seep through, they torch the bags. All eyes rivet on the leaping flames; all debate centers on how best to deal with the raging blaze.

There’s one problem with this practice that the Bush Administration hasn’t quite figured out yet. When someone finally wades in to stomp out the fire, the bag disintegrates and the shit flies everywhere. All over the sidewalk, all over the on-lookers, all over the debaters. Only now, it’s hot shit.

Just one more example of the Bush Administration’s execution of sound public policy…

Fear of....?

2006-04-22T00:45:00.000-07:00

I opened the front door this morning to the glorious, too-often-a-stranger sun, prepared to skip down my front steps and trot the half-block to my mailbox. In my neighborhood, our "car route" mailboxes are planted in groups of five or six along one side of the road, to make life easy for the local mail carrier, in her car with the steering wheel on the wrong side… Just as my foot was poised over the sidewalk, I looked up to see the neighbor from across the street heading down his driveway, apparently with the same postal objective in mind. Our mailboxes are right next to each other.

At the prospect of actually meeting and having to interact with another human being, I hit the brakes and veered left, to the gate that leads to my back yard. Surely I could find something with which to busy myself…until the coast was clear. Even as I chickened out and opted for solitude, I chided myself for being such an antisocial old fart.

But as I headed for my gate to refuge, out of the corner of my eye, I saw my neighbor suddenly make his own left turn, head for his car that was parked on the curb in front of his house, and appear to be very focused upon some aspect of his windshield. I slyly detected a kindred spirit. Once through the gate, from the vantage point of the step up into my back door, I could see over the fence just enough to catch Mr. Neighbor heading toward his mailbox as soon as I was safely otherwise occupied.

I was at first amused—that there was indeed at least one other person in the world as transparently allergic to casual social interaction as I am… And then, somewhat relieved—that maybe I am not quite the "old fart" I believe myself to be… But, in the end, disturbed—that the social reticence that I had until now taken as a personal quirk is, apparently, an increasingly common malady in middle class American neighborhoods.

It is sad, isn’t it?

Danger: Whining Ahead

2006-04-15T22:11:00.000-07:00

I have to admit, I don’t often think about being fifty years old. I don’t let myself go there. And when I do, I honestly can not believe it. There’s something about being middle aged and childless. Without an ensuing generation to put one’s age in perspective, one just does not accept that one has attained the age that one has. Fifty? C’mon…a couple of years ago, I was cringing as I inched toward the big 3-0. This coming October, I will have been married for the big 3-0. My oldest niece just turned 36. There is a cognitive dissonance here that surpasses all understanding.

But this…this is one of those nights that I’m really feeling my age. And then some. My knee joints feel like they’ve been injected with spray-foam insulation. If I bend over to pick up one more thing heavier than, say, a piece of kleenex, my spine will split in half just below my waist. My fingers, toes and ankles are snapping, crackling, and popping as energetically as any breakfast cereal. Much as I can’t believe it and I hate to admit it, my little business is beginning to outstrip my physical capabilities. To put it bluntly, I’m too old for this crap!

Today, husband and I dragged ourselves out of bed at sparrow fart (well, the sparrow was blowing bubbles in the liquid air, anyway…) to be hot dog/espresso/hot chocolate vendor at the county’s official Easter Egg Hunt. Easter. Doesn’t that holiday call forth images of daffodils swaying in warm breezes, blue and yellow sky, snuggly bunnies and downy yellow chickies cavorting in the soft green grass…? In Columbia County Oregon, Easter apparently means winter temperatures, sideways rain and hail pelting the pastel balloons attached to the canopy I had to erect over my service window to protect my erstwhile patrons from drowning. Which would, as the wind whipped the fabric of the canopy, occasionally vomit torrents of trapped water onto the heads of them as might be standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. It took all our customers’ strength to force their clawlike fingers to hand me their soaked bills. The look of gratitude in their eyes when we pressed paper cups full of hot liquid into their frozen hands was painful to behold.

I’m sitting here trying to come up with words for how awful today’s event was… It cannot be described. All I can say is, all at once, I came to the realization that I am about two millimeters from the end of my rope with this thing. After nine hours of grueling, cold, slimy, grinding labor, we ended up making about $100. NOT worth the effort. Not anywhere close.

So far this season, we have been frozen, drowned, last-minuted, cancelled, mechanically challenged, and negative cash-flowed. I have about developed an ulcer worrying about my $20,000 “new” vehicle succumbing to a threatened $3000 break-down, or my five-year-old gigantic red elephant of a trailer dying a premature death, as oversized animals are wont to do. And taking me with it. If things do not change significantly, Café de la Rue will not survive past October of 2006.

Riding home next to the husband (whose eyes were glued to the side-view mirror because he swore he saw smoke coming from the back of the truck and/or the wheels of the trailer) I had the most overwhelming feeling of failure. I felt like, “…and this is what I have to show for the last four years.” A darkness settled in my mind...to match the somber clouds spitting needle-like rain onto the windshield.

I want a place of my own. Indoors. In a building. That I can go to every day. Like a real person, with a real job. Please, can I have just this one little slice of...what seems to come so easily to everyone else?

More Fun With Words

2006-04-11T14:40:00.000-07:00

Last week, when I wrote about how blogging has changed the way I write, some folks were probably wondering how someone could write to, well...no one, for more than three decades. Hard to say… I’ve always been a decent writer. A few wonderful teachers in high school recognized my talent and nurtured it. But I wasn’t used to being recognized or nurtured; ultimately, my life didn’t go in a direction where my literary talent was going to get a whole lot of exercise. Even so, I never outgrew feeling that it was easier for me to write what I meant than to say it. I got quite a rep as a note-scribbler. At my little bakery, my crew used to roll their eyes and sigh every time a two-page hand-written missive was posted on the bulletin board. It wasn’t a terribly effective means of business communication, but at least it was communication. Let’s just say, it met with mixed results.

As I said, though, blogging has been a whole different experience. It has been challenging, exhilarating, intimidating and liberating all at the same time. And what a stretching exercise! I’m sure I’m learning things about writing that I would have learned way back when, had I taken my talent to the next level of education. Here I am, fifty years old, discovering by trial and error things that a twenty-year-old college student got out of a textbook in Writing 101. So I’m a bit of a late bloomer…. What can I say?

But my writing isn’t the only thing that has been undergoing a metamorphosis. I have found that my increased attention to words, and how to put them together, has changed the way I talk. I’ll be having an intense discussion with my husband or one of my sisters, and something so creatively metaphorical will burst out of my mouth that I almost turn around to see who said it. Have you ever been watching your favorite TV drama, and a character will come out with some eloquent soliloquy, very emotive, very poetic…and you screw up your face and say, “Oh, come on…people don’t really talk like that!”

I don’t know…maybe they do. At least, maybe the guys who write the scripts do, so they think everybody else must, too. Because that fascination with language doesn’t seem to be something you can turn on and off at will. It just becomes part of you. Time was, I despaired that my vocabulary had dwindled to about a dozen favorite words. If someone told me a sad story, I was more than likely to emote, “Wow! That sucks!” or something equally juvenile. The other day, my sister was venting about her husband, and how he had dredged up some old wound in a fight they were having; and I said to her, I kid you not, “You live with someone long enough, and you learn a lot about them. You can either use that information to cherish them, or you can use it to push their buttons. Unfortunately, some people choose the latter.” Now, that’s not particularly eloquent or literarily significant, but it is about two dozen more words than my response would have been, say, three years ago. Earlier that same day, I was having a discussion with my husband, trying to describe the unbreakable connection I seem to have with my dysfunctional family. I blurted, “Sometimes it feels like a safety belt, and sometimes, like a garrote.” I actually said that. It came out of my mouth, I swear to God. Whoa.

Who knows where this will lead? Either I will soar to new heights of improved communication with my fellow human beings, or I’ll be branded a hopeless snob, intentionally unintelligible to the unwashed masses. I may find that my days of eloquent utterances are numbered; because in a very short time, no one will be speaking to me anymore. This should be an interesting ride…

About Writing...

2006-04-07T00:02:00.000-07:00

There’s one thing I have to say about blogging. It has so changed the way I write. When I first started doing this, back in September of ’03, there was an interesting constraint to the experience: the 2500 word limit imposed by AOL in the early days of "Journal Land." There I was, the one who could churn out four or five single-spaced pages of stream-of-consciousness in a bored hour or two at work, reduced to trying to express myself in what amounted to about four paragraphs.

Eventually, we were freed from the word limit ball and chain. Going forward, I found I had learned a good lesson, and I carried it along with me into the world of the expanded blog. I had learned how to edit. How to distill my prose down to an almost poetic economy of words. And how to stick to making one point about one subject, and not indulge in my usual butterfly-flitting-from-thought-to-thought style of writing. The hyper-examination of every word has worn off some; but I have been bitten by the editing bug. And the computer makes it so easy! I hardly crank out one sentence without backspacing, "control-x-ing," moving things around or just deleting large quantities of print altogether.

Gone are the days when I could jump on my train of thought and shovel whatever came into my mind into the boiler. Suddenly, it has to make sense. It has to communicate. It has to be more than bile, or tears, or hysteria. It has to say something. Writing has gone from the smooth flowing fun with words it once was for me, to being a stutter-step, start and stop process that decidedly does not flow. But I can’t blame it all on editing fever. What’s really to blame is that pesky thing called an audience.

Readers. Nobody ever read my writing. For years. Not since high school, anyway. That would be many, many years. Until now. Readership is a powerful drug. It changes everything. Everything. It has kept me coming back here, even when my heart was sore, when I felt I’d been rejected or misunderstood, when I was afraid I had alienated the world, when I thought I had run out of things to say. Even though my audience includes almost none of the people I started out with. Even though I don’t feel the same "relationship" I did with the first half dozen friends who fell into stopping by and seeing what I had to say. There is a relationship, nonetheless. And for a writer, it’s the only relationship that matters. Someone reads.

Now, I wish I commanded the audience of a Dave Barry, or even a Margie Boulet ("women’s viewpoint" columnist for the Oregonian.) Or maybe I don’t. Because I have a hard enough time trying to write things that are true, meaningful to me, topical, and engaging to the six people who read my journal. I work for literally hours on a 3500-word post. Editing, revising, re-reading, trying to make sure I’m really communicating. I think about people who write for a living…who have to crank out something good, concise, and interesting five days a week. Oh, my god….the impossible dream. Or writing a novel. At the rate I obsess for my handful of readers, it would take me 200 years to write a book.

It’s unfortunate that even a small taste of very limited success makes one crave more. I’m pretty sure I don’t have what it takes to ever get to the point where I might actually be paid for what I write. And, you know…I’m not sure that’s my goal. I write stuff here, and some of it is good. And I know that there is such a thing as making a living as a writer. But I don’t look at writing in those terms. For me, the reward is all about the communication; the connection to at least one other soul on the planet. Having readers is still new enough for me that I haven’t yet reached the point of wondering how I might profit from the experience. But then, how cool would it be to make a living doing the one thing that you have always felt the call on your heart to do?

The world is full of people answering calls on their lives not even remotely connected to their highest calling, to their native talent. We all make do. We all find our lives more influenced by who we know, where we grew up, what our families did, the expectations put on us by others, rather than the true voices of our souls. I feel fortunate that, as one of the misdirected masses, I have stumbled across the world of the blog…this microcosm of what I should be, what I would love to be. I can get the tiniest taste of what it is like to do what I am meant to do. Many people are not that lucky.

Where I'm From

2006-04-05T09:37:00.000-07:00

Cynthia, Wil, and Mary all partook of this wonderful writing exercise. Their resulting pieces were beautiful, magical, deep... And, well...this is what I ended up with:

I am from station wagons, from Kool-aid and Turf-builder.
I am from the three bedroom, one bath ticky tacky box
with the swath of weedy lawn; from lightning bugs, june bugs,
and mosquitoes the size of small birds.
From nights near as hot as the days, spread-eagled on sticky sheets, crickets creaking, horns honking,
trains rumbling and whistling in the distance…
I am from Snow to the eaves, jewel-studded ice storms,
and green-black thunderstorms with sideways rain

I am from bright red tulips, honeysuckle berries,
and worms on the driveway after a cloudburst;
From daisies, tiny wild strawberries, "Queen Anne’s Lace"
and crashing the kite into power lines.

I am from "look what followed me home from school"
and never having too many animals; from Taffy, and Rusty,
and Sunny, the yellow-headed parakeet, who could say
"Happy Birthday" but only when he thought no one was listening….

I am from the women who shuttle the carpool, punch the clock,
scrub the toilet, then climb into the bottle, the herb,
or the fantasy to quiet the noise in their heads
and the men they choose to rescue, or who choose to rescue them

From "when you meet the right one, you’ll just know"
and "Your dad was a virgin when we were married…"
I am from the dutiful eldest daughter who paired off,
home made and pro-created at the appointed time,
and the other four who didn’t.

I am from the tearful Catholic and the stoic agnostic;
the rope stretched taut between belief and unbelief,
pulled one direction, then the other…the eternal tug-of-war never won.

I'm from pioneers of urban exile; before the country clubs,
the soccer, and the rolls royces.
I’m from the first McDonald’s and the last Tastee Freeze.

I am from the great mouldering box in the upstairs closet,
roaring twenties studio sepias stacked on
shiny square instamatic shots discoloring with age.
I am from the five stair-steps, the Christmas trees, the campfires,
and the blurred mountains captured from a moving car.

I am from the unlikely union of a country boy and a city girl,
brought together by Hitler and Hirohito,
and the neighborhood of compromise that kept them both sane…almost.

It's Here. Now.

2006-03-30T00:30:00.000-08:00

Spring has come and gone here in Oregon. We had approximately 2.5 days of it, and now the weather has switched back to its stubbornly wintry ways. I’ve been reading all these stories about global warming lately. But believing the dire predictions has been an exercise in not trusting my own eyes. Because if had to judge by what the weather has been doing here in Oregon this spring, I’d have to swear we’re going into another Ice Age.

That’s why they’ve taken to calling it “Global Climate Change.” “Global warming” is not necessarily descriptive of what climate change means to all areas of the globe. Some places will turn into saunas. But weather patterns and gulf streams and such will undoubtedly be affected to the point that some of us will actually get cooler weather. And my fantasies of owning a house on the ocean may come true without my even having to move. I won’t have to go to the beach. The beach will come to me.

Of course, I’ve been aware of the concept of global warming for a couple of decades, but I haven’t been able to make up my mind about it. It all seemed so vague, so theoretical, so…slow. I understood that we humans have been thoughtlessly fouling our nest for the last hundred years; but the process of the incremental increases in global temperatures still might have been explained away by the theory that we were in the process of emerging from the last Ice Age. A much simpler and much less frightening explanation. It’s amazing how easy it is to rationalize something that scares the shit out of you. Especially something that you feel is completely out of your personal control.

So when I came across articles about bird migrations taking place weeks earlier than they did fifty years ago, or glaciers shrinking by a couple inches more a year than they used to, I filed them away in the folder in the back of my brain labeled “Things That I Probably Should Be Worried About But I Don’t Want To Deal With Right Now.” And then came the hurricanes. And the fires. And the floods. And the huge cyclone that ate a chunk out of Australia. All in the space of the past twelve months. And as I put on my winter coat to take out the garbage, and look at the snow covering the low foothills in the east, the like of which I haven’t seen in the twenty years we’ve lived in Oregon…I get it. All of a sudden, it’s real. And it’s very possible that it’s all going to go to hell a lot faster than we ever imagined. Here’s the clincher, from Jeffrey Kluger’s article on climate change in Time Magazine:

What few people reckoned on was that global climate systems are booby-trapped with tipping points and feedback loops, thresholds past which the slow creep of environmental decay gives way to sudden and self-perpetuating collapse. Pump enough CO2 into the sky, and that last part per million of greenhouse gas behaves like the 212th degree Fahrenheit that turns a pot of hot water into a plume of billowing steam.

Hyperbole? Maybe. Scare tactics? Perhaps… But it sounds, and looks, all too plausible.

My Dining Room Window

2006-03-30T00:26:00.000-08:00

Bush is Losing the War of Words

2006-03-28T10:51:00.000-08:00

Today, I caught the first few minutes of a “Hardball” segment before I growled to my husband to turn it off lest I physically attack him to gain control of the remote. The topic of the day was President Bush’s recent campaign to paint the press as the bad guys in the Iraq War. (It must be mentioned here that we are on vacation; ensconced in a beautiful little cedar-shingled cabin perched among the treetops overlooking Siltcoos Lake, one of a string of freshwater lakes separated from the Pacific Ocean by the sandy hillocks of the Oregon Dunes. I am here to watch the birds, inhale the scent of laurel blossoms, and search out the perfect Oregon coast dining experience. Not to have my stomach soured and my blood pressure raised fifty points by the latest Bush Administration campaign to transfer blame for its history-changing fuck-ups on to anything but its own incompetence.)

It took a few days of following Mr. Bush all over the country, and having veteran Washington analysts gush about how (why?) he unexpectedly set aside his extreme aversion to informal and unrehearsed interaction with the press, to figure out exactly what his game is. Out of one side of his mouth, he is joking, cajoling, bantering, and buddying up to the press. And, out of the other side, he is blasting them for focusing on pessimistic reports coming out of Iraq. Somewhere in there, he is attempting to salvage the image of the plain-spoken, dedicated War President being wronged by the sensationalist, money-grubbing media which insist upon focusing upon images of death and destruction coming out of a war zone. How un-American of these defeatist reporters!

I guess my answer to that is: Mr. President, if you wanted positive images to come out of Iraq, perhaps you should have sent in a humanitarian force rather than an army. Perhaps you should have focused on building schools and improving infrastructure and promoting diplomatic understanding from the outset, not as “let’s make nice now” damage control after an ill-considered pre-emptive military invasion of a sovereign nation with a complicated and convoluted history which you made no effort to comprehend.

In the early days of the Iraq war, with their embedded reporters and vise-like grip upon the information and images trickling out of the war zone , the Bush Administration was able to tell exactly the story they wanted—no more and no less. They were unquestionably (in their own minds, at least) in perfect control of the message; it was an easy step to believing they controlled not only the perception of the war, but the war itself. A classic and tragic case of believing your own press. Alas…in its own stubbornly contrary fashion, the Iraq conflict did not magically resolve upon the airing of the “Mission Accomplished” speech scarcely two months into the nightmare that was, at that point, only just beginning. Though, admittedly, the ADHD-afflicted American people have been a little slow on the uptake, it has become painfully clear—an additional two years and ten months into the steadily decaying process—that the mission is anything but accomplished.

Control of the media has been, from day one, the most powerful weapon in the GOP’s arsenal. Time and time again, the administration’s gurus have expertly manipulated the message that reached the eyes and ears of the American people. What has gone wrong? Could it be that they’ve gripped the information pipeline so tightly for so long, they’re cramping up? They’re starting to tremble, and dance, and juggle, and look more and more foolish as they struggle to hold on to that weapon that is quickly slipping out of their grasp. Bush and Co. are scrambling to reconcile their early-war “We’re out to save the world” image with the increasingly desperate situation that they can no longer hide. Demonstrating their typical bull-headed inability to change gears when the situation calls for it, they continue to reach for that weapon to which they’ve grown so attached. This time, however, they find themselves in the schizophrenic position of trying to kiss up to the press, and slap it upside the head at the same time. It’s quite the Laurel and Hardy moment. And the American people, treated to this sorry bit of slapstick, are finally ready to turn off the movie and focus on reality.

Hello...

2006-03-28T10:21:00.000-08:00

I've been neglecting poor little "Better Terms..." I think it's become a casualty of having too many blogs. I'm going to drag a couple of Blue Voice posts over here...

Meanwhile, I want to change my profile picture...so here it is:

Favorite Fours

2006-03-15T20:54:00.000-08:00

Cynthia (A Crazy Quilt Life) tagged me, but she didnt thinkI'd really do this. It's been a long time since I've done one of these. I think I lost my thumbs this past winter...[obscure Dick Van Dyke Show reference that no one will get :-)]

Four jobs I've had in my life:
(Oh, my! How do I choose…?)
Production worker, Little Monk Home Winemaking Kits
Pizza Queen!!
Manager, Le Chatel Bakery, VRC
Production Manager, Ultimate Baking (biscotti!)

Four Movies I Can Watch Anytime:
Gone With The Wind
Little Women
While You Were Sleeping
Holiday Inn

Four Places I have lived:
North Suburban Chicago
Willamette Valley
Suburban Portland
Columbia Valley

Four favorite television shows:
Boston Legal
Judging Amy (reruns)
What Not To Wear
Designed to Sell

Four Places I have been on vacation:
The Baseball Hall of Fame
Grand Canyon
Door County, Wisconsin
Glacier National Park, Montana

Four of my favorite dishes:
Red Robin’s Mile High Mud Pie
Hot, crispy, batter-dipped French fries
Fresh out of the oven chocolate chip cookies
Spaghetti with garlic bread

Four Websites I visit daily:
The Blue Voice
Bloglines
Dogpile (Search Engine)
Weather Channel Forecast

Four Places I would rather be right now:
Toiling away in the back of the house of my own restaurant
Washburn State Park, feeding the jays from my hand
Getting off the plane for a six-month stay in Europe
Anywhere warm, dry, and sunny

Four bloggers I am tagging:
Tina of Ride Along With Me
Meredith of Another Country Heard From
Jackie of Pixels, Politics, Posies, and Pussycats
and Judi of talking to myself

Winter, Spring, and Words

2006-03-14T23:48:00.000-08:00

Tina wrote on Sunday about the power she gains from some combinations of words that suddenly seem to come to life for her. Her latest discovery is, "It is what it is." I so understand what she’s talking about with these five little words. I recently discovered them myself, and they have unlocked a lot of chains for me.

I found another set of timely words for myself the other day. It’s not a motto…it’s more like a sound byte. But it explains a lot of what is going on in my life right now. And it might even go a long way toward explaining the general "blahness" that seems to be afflicting just about everyone in the Land of J these days.

Only 30 percent of those polled by the Los Angeles Times believe that the country is on the right track. That is such a historically low number it's a surprise Americans even get out of bed in the morning.

The current political scene in our country is so dismal. War. Bigotry. Hatred. Political infighting. And there’s nowhere you can go to get away from it. If you turn on the television or radio, open a magazine or newspaper, it roars at you like a constant gale, blasting away and wearing you down until you are simply…numb. The world, seen through the darkened lens of our national moral turmoil, looks drab and bleak and hopeless. The fitful weather of the last gasp of winter only serves to enforce that lethargy induced by the sheer weight of the depressing issues we face on our political landscape.

Personally, I’m languishing for want of Spring. I’m desperate for soft, warm breezes, coquettish sunlight peeking out from between the clouds, and bright green knobs of new life breaking through the dark, damp, icy earth. And for the warmth of charity, the light of wisdom, and the life of understanding and new leadership to break through the murk of the cold political fog that has settled upon us. I don’t want to hear that "It is what it is." I want to know that it can be so much more…

Choosing Liberalism

2006-03-10T13:34:00.000-08:00

I jokingly call myself a “bleeding-heart liberal.” I’m not a left-wing radical; but, given a choice between leaning liberal and cruising conservative, I choose the former nine times out of ten. But I don’t always walk in lock-step with the liberal mindset that some, friends and enemies alike, would have us believe is carved in stone.

For example: I have real problems with late-term abortions. When does a “fetus” become a “baby?” I don’t know…does anybody know? At what point in time does a collection of cells that, barring any one of nine million cosmic mishaps is destined to develop into a human being, become a viable life? With the advances that have been made in neo-natal care, any fetus that has survived into its seventh month can arguably be called a baby. If it looks like a baby, and cries like a baby, isn’t it a baby? And if you have to kill it because a woman couldn’t exercise her “right to choose” a couple of months earlier in the process…well, then, isn’t something screwed up?

This is where the left-wing lock-steppers get all red in the face and start sputtering the discourse about reproductive rights, and women’s rights, and how right-to-lifers are not about protecting unborn babies, but rather about keeping women in a place of social servitude. And if a woman’s right to choose is not kept sacred for the entire nine months between conception and delivery, then the last fifty years of hard-won women’s rights are going to swirl right down the toilet. We’ll be back in the kitchen in our house-dresses, aprons and Donna Reed pearls before you know it. Or being dragged by the hair into some cave. And I think…whoa. Maybe I’m not really cut out to be a liberal after all. ‘Cause I’m not even coming close to buying this stuff.

But then, I realize: I’ve never been poor; I’ve never been homeless. I’ve never been a frightened pregnant teen-ager; hell, I’ve never even been pregnant. And I haven’t been to divinity school, or medical school, or law school. So I am probably not the best person to pronounce judgment on the issue. Come to think of it, if I had been any or all of these things, I still wouldn’t be the best judge. The point is: I don’t know. And I want to be assured that the people who do make the judgments on questions of this magnitude don’t know, either. I want them to understand there is a kaleidoscope of different perspectives on every issue, and every one of those perspectives demands consideration.

Which, now that I think of it, is the essence of liberalism, isn’t it? That we don’t know. That we recognize every viewpoint, and allow it its fair review. That we don’t resort to advancing a set of archaic proverbs recorded thousands of years ago—a body of literature so old and so obscure that we can assign it any meaning we please—as having the answers to all of twenty-first century humanity’s complex problems. Because we’re too lazy or too intimidated, too rigid or too uncurious, to find our own answers.

Unfortunately, that may be what makes liberalism so…ineffective. “Liberal” means “broadminded, unprejudiced, tolerant.” The openness to ideas, the cosmopolitan inclusiveness of the philosophy, make it almost impossible to choose one person, or even a manageable few, to crystallize the vision of the movement; to lead the charge in the myriad of diverse issues and viewpoints we embrace. But every movement that hopes to promote significant change needs a leader. Who’s in charge? Who is going to call the shots?

We’ve always had a problem choosing one, or two, or even half a dozen issues to advance above all others. Every change we stand behind, great and small, is vitally important to someone. And the antics of the Bush Administration have added items to the list that weren’t in our wildest dreams ten years ago: war for oil, torture, due process for political prisoners, cashing in constitutional rights for “security.” But there are too many of us trying to keep too many plates spinning; they are falling and smashing with disturbing regularity. We need to come to some consensus on what will define us as a political force. We need to choose the biggest plates, confidently hand them to the one or two individuals best suited to getting them up in the air, then gather around and keep those plates from hitting the ground. Better to opt for success on a few great issues, than mediocrity—or failure—on a thousand smaller ones.

And, standing around waiting for the act that’s currently on center stage to self-destruct and get the hook? That shouldn’t even be an option.

In Like a Lion...

2006-03-09T09:48:00.000-08:00

This season has truly been a "Winter of the Soul" for me. And it just doesn't want to go away.

Eleven days until the vernal equinox.

Winter is getting in its parting shots...

Common Bigotry...I Mean, Sense

2006-03-03T21:20:00.000-08:00

Driving home yesterday morning from my early AM encounter with the endodontist, I caught the last ten minutes of a segment on Talk of the Nation. I like TOTN. I’ve learned a lot from the show. But host Neal Conan generally pilots his ship pretty straight down the middle of the channel…avoiding the higher seas and icebergs to the far right and far left. But Neal was out of the office yesterday; the guest host tackled the topic of the recent legislative pushes in several states to ban adoptions by gays and lesbians, and the S.S. TOTN strayed into some slightly choppy waters. And darned if I didn’t find myself hollering (incoherently, through my half-dead lips) at one of the guests—Charmaine Yoest of the "Family Research Council." Such a calm, soft-spoken, rational-sounding raging bigot…

Dr. Yoest’s mission was to point listeners in the direction of a study which concluded that children "do better" in homes with a Mom and a Dad. When other guests referred to thirty years of research that did not back her point, Dr. Yoest politely interrupted, called their research "flawed," or accused them of misquoting it. In the end, backed into a corner by the other guests, and challenged by excellent points made by several callers to the show, she exhorted listeners to check out the research, but, more importantly, "use your common sense."

Common sense? Wouldn’t common sense dictate that a system overloaded with children in desperate need of loving homes should welcome any and all responsible families willing to provide those homes? Wouldn’t common sense tell you that any child would "do better" in a stable adoptive home than being bounced from foster family to foster family? Hasn’t common sense been telling us for ages that homosexuality is not a learned behavior, and that gay couples do not adopt in order to raise up armies of little gay children? (And, come to think of it, what if they did?)

No, Dr. Yoest’s calm, reasonable exhortation was right-wing speak for, "Tap into your personal prejudices. If you feel threatened by homosexuality, we’ll just call that common sense." Common sense, religious right style.

Yep…just made me want to reach right through the radio and slap her upside the head.

It's The Economy, Stupid...

2006-03-03T20:00:00.000-08:00

President Bush, making diplomatic nice in India on Friday, dealt this slap in the face to the hemorrhaging American middle class:

"In my country, some focus only on one aspect of our trade relations with India – outsourcing."

"The United States will not give into the protectionists and lose…opportunities," Bush said… "For the sake of workers in both our countries, America will trade with confidence."

The story by AP writer Terence Hunt, goes on to fill in a little background on what "protectionists" might find objectionable about the US’ trade relationships with India:

An estimated 40 percent of Indians live on less than $1 a day. Yet the middle class has swelled to more than 300 million -- larger than the entire U.S. population -- and India's exploding economy has created millions of jobs.

The outsourcing industry -- in which Indian firms handle everything from software engineering to customer service call centers for foreign companies -- is expected to bring in $22 billion in revenue alone this fiscal year. Much of that outsourcing business is generated by U.S. companies, many that have eliminated domestic jobs for cheaper Indian labor.

The president said the United States should see this rapidly growing nation as a land of opportunity instead of a threat. America's best response to globalization is not to erect economic barriers to protect workers, but educate them to make sure they can compete on any stage, Bush said.

Twelve years ago, my husband took a job with a Portland manufacturer. The company, which had been in business for more than a decade before husband signed on, boomed during the nineties. It became one of the largest players in its market. Executives with six-figure salaries, showroom on Fifth Avenue, write-ups in the trades…the whole nine yards. And then…then, along came the Far East. Their cheap labor, cheap goods, state-subsidized dirt-cheap manufacturing has all but put the company my husband works for out of business.

At the very least, a perfectly good factory, which at one time provided living wages and benefits to upwards of 250 people, has been turned into little more than an import hub. I visited the factory the other day…the machines were eerily quiet. Looking out over the production floor, the only activity I saw was a little group of employees, a tenth of what the work force used to be, repacking goods shipped from China and India. My husband and I have had to face the fact that it is probably only a matter of time before his own living wage and benefits (such as they are after three years of cuts) go away, too. He will be fifty years old this summer. Too young to retire; arguably, a little long in the tooth to start over.

Yesterday, President Bush stood before an audience in India, a nation that the American government has finally conceded to embrace, in all its nuclear proliferation, oil-consuming, booming economic glory. And he had the nerve to call my husband and me "protectionists." Somebody, somewhere, exported our livelihood to India, and the Bush administration believes that we should now embrace that fast-growing economy without bitterness, without rancor. And I should do this from where, Mr. Bush? From the unemployment line? While the Bush Administration coddles and rewards the rich, our poor become more destitute, and the American middle class perishes from excessive transfusion of its jobs and income into India’s and China’s booming middle classes?

What does George W. Bush, privileged son of the oil-rich president that voters rejected fourteen years ago for not knowing the price of a pound of ground beef at the supermarket, know of the middle class? What does he care?

This time around, we have a number of heavy factors to consider when we enter the voting booths. We have an illegal war. We have state-sanctioned torture and unwarranted spying on American citizens. We have incompetent disaster relief. We have a health care, drug and insurance crisis of epic proportions. We have ecological rape. We have lies and corruption. And more lies and corruption. Lofty and worrisome problems all.

But, you know what? Despite all the (cunningly manipulated) facts and figures that point to a strong, thriving, healthy, choose-your-superlative economic recovery here in the good ole U S of A, in my world, "it’s [still] the economy, stupid." And my little sliver of the American dream that has been shipped halfway across the world.

A Shot of The Good Stuff

2006-03-01T09:47:00.000-08:00

Last weekend, we were in Newport (Oregon) serving food to the mostly tipsy patrons at the 29th Annual Seafood and Wine Festival. I had great plans for this, our first event of the season. Optimistically, I had projected a 25% sales increase for the weekend. Since last year was our premiere year at the festival, I just naturally assumed that the word was out and that we had nowhere to go but up. Unfortunately, circumstances conspired to prove me wrong…we ended up actually seeing fewer customers this year, though our new-season price increase bumped our total sales by about 8%. Needless to say, I was disappointed. During the season I sort of live and die by the numbers… So I’ve been in a little funk the last few days.

But last night, I received an email. I almost deleted it, because, as a rule, I don’t open emails from people I don’t know. Imagine my surprise when I opened this one:

Hello,
I had one of your Salmon Dill puffed pastry sandwich pouches at the Seafood and Wine Festival in Newport this last weekend. It was incredible!

Do you have a restaurant in Scappose? If so, can you give me your hours and location, please?

Thank you, I will look for you next year at the festival, but I hope I can eat your wonderful pouches before then.

Thank you –
(a happy customer)

To say that this message made my day…week…month…would be an understatement. I wrote back and asked how she got my email address, since I only remembered giving out one business card to someone scoping us out for another event. Turns out she had emailed the Newport Chamber of Commerce to get the information. How sweet of her to go through all that trouble just to let me know that she enjoyed our product!

Look how someone taking a few minutes out of their busy life to say thank you, send a compliment, give a virtual pat on the back, can suddenly change the whole color of life. Words cannot express how grateful I am to this woman, and to whatever Greater Force led her to send that message at such an uncannily perfect time. It was an upper for which I did not even know I was so desperate.

Moral of the story? We’re so eager, these days, to complain, to bitch, to degrade. We deal with over-worked, underpaid people daily, and the quality of service we get often reflects the degree of over-workedness and underpaidness with which these folks cope day in, day out. Years ago, when I was the one standing behind the counter, I knew how far a kind word or a compliment could go to brighten our bleak world. Since I promoted myself to "entrepreneur," I had forgotten…

Is it so much harder to thank or compliment good service than it is to complain? Why don’t we do it more often? And, you know, I have a feeling if we did do it more often, the quality of the service we receive would rise apace. This dismal pool of acrimony, conflict, and despair that is twenty-first century America could surely use an infusion of positive energy. I, for one, am going to try to carry this lesson with me for as long as I can keep it imprinted on my old dog/new trick brain.