MORE WAYS TO HELP

All right, one more list of aid agencies that are helping the survivors of the ever-more-horrifying disaster in Asia, and I promise this will be the last.  I found this today in our only major Delaware newspaper, and it is an even more comprehensive list than the others to which I have linked in earlier entries. 

PAX VOBISCUM, FOR A MOMENT

So, yesterday we walked in a Nature Area in Maryland, by the Chesapeake Bay, walked and walked until we could walk no more - both because our bodies were worn out and the day had fallen into darkness.  Walked to rid ourselves of holiday eating, holiday stressing, world weariness and angst, soul sadness and grief.  Walked through the winter woods, crunching over frozen leaves and ruts, walked by the Bay as darkness fell and the sun went down in a fiery ball behind the Bay Bridge, as flocks and formations of geese flew in overhead honking their sunset salute.  Saw yellow-rumped warblers, many kinds of sparrows (or, as our Bird Guru calls them: LBJ's - for Little Brown Jobs), jays, cardinals, and at a short distance in the top of a winterbare tree, a bald eagle.  We watched it for some time through our binoculars, then watched it as it took off and sailed away along the shoreline.  It was, indeed, an eagle. I share with you the evening sky over a frozen pond in the wetlands along the trail.  Passing on to you the peace that our afternoon with the grasses, birds, trees, and creatures brought to us - if only temporarily.          

 

MORE ON TSUNAMI AID

I can't stop posting about this, somehow.  Here is an email just received from MoveOn.org, with more ideas for help.  Also an online message to Bush and Congress urging more help for the affected nations, to be signed and sent on to friends.  The fact contained in this email that we are spending as much in Iraq every 7 minutes as we are offering for aid relief puts our offering in some perspective.

Dear MoveOn member,

The tsunami in southern Asia and Africa may be the worst natural disaster of our time. More than 116,000 lives were wiped out within hours. The toll in death and suffering from smashed cities, broken families, rampant disease, and crippled economies cannot even be calculated. In the face of this horror, MoveOn members have poured in requests to help, asking how we can push through our sadness and lend a hand.

Rising to this challenge is at the heart of global leadership, and the world is depending on us. The U.S. government can lead billions of dollars of aid into this relief effort, if it chooses. Americans are generous and ready to step forward, but the U.S. Congress and the Bush administration have made a weak initial contribution to the effort -- first offering $15 million and then $35 million when they came under pressure. Clearly, we can do more.

Let Congress and the President know that Americans are supporting strong leadership in this relief effort -- that millions of lives are at stake and we have to help. In this hour of need, if America chooses to embrace our role as a world leader, we can have an unparalleled impact. Send a message to our leaders at:

  http://www.moveon.org/tsunamirelief/

But we can't just wait for this Congress to move. We can help directly, as individuals, and save lives today. Our friends at Oxfam are already scrambling on the front lines to fight off starvation and disease -- and beginning to rebuild. Because Oxfam has worked for years with grassroots groups in the hardest hit areas, they were able to mobilize local leadership to help survivors immediately after the tsunami hit. And Oxfam will be there for the long-term, helping communities recover and regain their ability to meet basic needs. Oxfam needs to raise $5 million immediately to provide safe water, sanitation, food, shelter, and clothing to 36,000 families in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and India. Your contribution can make this possible.

Please give what you can, at:

  http://www.moveon.org/r?r=631

Of course, Oxfam is only one of dozens of great organizations, like UNICEF, CARE, and the Red Cross/Red Crescent, rushing to help with the immediate need. Their efforts give the victims a head start, but it won't be enough unless the great nations of the world step forward in a big way for the long-term challenges.

Indonesia, by far the hardest hit country, is also the world's largest Muslim nation. Their estimated death toll stands at 85,000 -- in some areas, 1 out of 4 people have already been killed. Now it's time for America to show its true colors. We want to be known as a nation that leads the world with compassion, generosity, and community -- not with disastrous foreign military adventures. We are a nation that values human life, family, and extending freedom and opportunity to where it is most needed. We must now reach out in a serious way to do just that.

The $35 million offered by the Bush administration seems like a lot of money, but it's insignificant compared to what's needed in a disaster relief effort than spans continents and is expected to be the most expensive in history. To put it in perspective, we're spending $35 million in Iraq every 7 hours. (The Bush administration is about to ask for another $80 billion to cover the next installment of this tragic occupation.)1

We can and will do better. Thanks for doing your part to show the true generosity of the American spirit.

Sincerely,

--Adam, Ben, Carrie, Eli, James, Joan, Justin, Laura, Mari, Noah, Rosalyn, and Wes
  The MoveOn.org Team
  December 30th, 2004

P.S. Just as we were finalizing this email, we received a note from 17-year-old MoveOn member Annalise Blum, who has a great idea for New Year's Eve parties. Here's her email:

Dear Joan and Wes,

We arrived in Cambodia today and turned on the TV in our hotel room to learn more about the Tsunami. It has been horrifying to follow the rising death toll and especially learn about all of the children who have died. I really wanted to do something when I learned that just as many more people could die from lack of access to clean water and the spread of disease if not enough is done quickly.

I realized that New Years Eve Parties would be a perfect place to have people contribute online to the relief effort. Someone in our group came up with the name "Throw out a lifeline Online."

If MoveOn were to send out a message to its members suggesting that they turn on a computer and donate money to one of the relief organizations at their new years eves parties, it could save thousands of lives. Maybe this sort of message would be a welcome opportunity for its members to help people directly. I would greatly appreciate anything you could do to help.

Below I have written a message I am planning send to my friends. MoveOn, if interested, could send out something similar.

Throw Out A Lifeline Online
Help the Victims of the South Asian Tsunami

As most of you undoubtedly know, many parts of the eastern coastal regions of South Asia were hit on Sunday, December 26th, with one of the largest tsunamis in recent history. The death toll of the tsunami, caused by an earthquake of 9.0 magnitude, has already risen to over 60,000 people. All regions affected are in desperate need of clean water, food, temporary shelter and medical help to the survivors. Some estimate that one third of the dead are children.

World Health Organization expert David Nabarro told reporters "there is certainly a chance that we could have as many dying from communicable diseases as from the tsunami".

Start this year off by contributing money to an effective aid organization to prevent this humanitarian catastrophe from getting even worse. If you are going to a New Year's Eve Party, make it meaningful by turning on a computer and encouraging everyone to donate.

Footnote:
1. Bush Says America Will Lead Global Relief Effort, Washington Post, December 30, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A33290-2004Dec29.html

ASIAN CATASTROPHE

According to the BBC news, which I just watched, the death toll is now close to 60,000 and still rising.  Help for these countries will be needed for quite a long time to come, as disease will soon begin to spread from polluted water sources.  Go here to find out how you can help.  And then, help.  Anything you can give will be put to use by one of these organizations.

Weds. morning, 11:00:  now the numbers have risen to nearly 80,000 and it's thought that they may reach 100,000.  I am numb with the horror of this disaster.  For more on the relief effort go here.

HOPE IN THE DARKNESS

Before we pile ourselves into the car for the ride in to Washington, one final Solstice gift.  Not from me, or only vicariously from me - no, it's from Rebecca Solnit, who has saved my soul a time or two already in the past couple of years.  This is a woman who believes, who hopes.  Until next week, to any windmills visitors:  blessed be.

Hope at Midnight

By Rebecca Solnit

Most of the acute despair felt in the wake of the U.S. election has faded into general depression or a sense that all the effort, or even any effort, is futile, but I still wonder about the intensity of that gloom. And I'm still an advocate for hope.

One of the starkest contrasts of the campaign was that Bush was selling hope -- even if false hope, something pretty indistinguishable from lies. After all, his good news mostly consisted of the assertion that the economy was doing just great, the war was being won, and America was safer. Or maybe hope -- which is the belief that another world is possible, not that it isn't necessary -- is a misnomer for the message that everything is fine, just go back to sleep. Kerry had the sorry job of saying that actually the war was a disaster, that we'd made millions of new enemies, that we were a whole lot less safe, and that the economy was tanking, and he never figured out any creative way to frame the bad news and the demands that such news makes. As a product, Bush was more tightly packaged, prodding the American people along with the carrot of false hopes and the stick of false fears. Or perhaps displaced fears is a better term -- for the feelings are real but the phenomena onto which they are projected aren't.

I went to Reno just before the election to do get-out-the-vote stuff, and that last week I had the same sense of lightheartedness as did almost everyone else I know, as though we were coming up for parole on what had seemed a life sentence, as though there might be a cure for our loathsome, painful disease. The end of the era of Bush suddenly seemed likely -- because of polls, because of countless unlikely volunteers like me giving the Kerry campaign momentum, because we felt lucky for a change. I didn't know how heavily Bush's presidency weighed on me until I tried on the idea of a world without him.

I mean, Kerry was not the captain of my dreams, but he was going to be pretty good for a few environmental things I care about, and having a "reality-based" person with an interest in international laws and treaties at the helm would have been nice. It was deeply dismaying that some fifty-something million people, give or take all those contested votes, thought Bush was okay -- though he didn't win the majority of voters, since 40% (a larger share than either candidate got) stayed home, and those who voted for him are a tiny unpopular minority in the larger world. And as Noam Chomsky points out, the election was largely a triumph of marketing, a manufactured drama that had little to do with the real desires and values of the electorate. "A large majority of the public believe," he wrote, citing polling statistics, "that the US should accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and the World Court, sign the Kyoto protocols, allow the UN to take the lead in international crises, and rely on diplomatic and economic measures more than military ones in the ‘war on terror.'"

Late in the election season, I vowed to keep away from what I thought of as "the Conversation," that tailspin of mutual wailing about how bad everything is, a recitation of the usual evidence against us that just dug any hope and imagination down into a dank little foxhole of curled-up despair. (One exciting opportunity the left often offers is that of being your own prosecutor, making the case against your own hopes and desires.) Now I listen to people having that conversation, wondering what it is we get from it -- the certainty of despair? Is even that kind of certainty, a despair as false as Bush's hope, so worth pursuing? Let me try to make instead the case for realism and for not giving up.

Locating the Future

What strikes you when you come out of a deep depression or get close to a depressive is the utter selfishness of misery, its shallow, stuck, inward gaze. Which is why the political imagination is better fueled by looking deeper and farther. The larger world: it was as though it disappeared during that season, as though there were only two places left on the planet -- Iraq, like hell on Earth, and the United States rotting out from the center. The U.S. is certainly the central focus of the world's military might, and its war in the heart of the Middle East for control of the global oil supply matters a lot. The suffering of Iraqis matters and so do the deaths of more than a hundred thousand of them, along with the more than 1,200 American kids. This is where the future is being bashed in.

But there are places we hardly notice where it looks like the future is being invented -- notably South America. When I think about this fall's elections, I think of them as a trio. You already know all about the one in the U.S. In Uruguay, after not four years of creepy governments but a hundred and seventy years -- ever since Andrew Jackson was president here -- the people got a good leftist government. As Eduardo Galeano joyfully wrote:

"A few days before the election of the President of the planet in North America, in South America elections and a plebiscite were held in a little-known, almost secret country called Uruguay. In these elections, for the first time in the country's history, the left won. And in the plebiscite, for the first time in world history, the privatization of water was rejected by popular vote, asserting that water is the right of all people… The country is unrecognizable. Uruguayans, so unbelieving that even nihilism was beyond them, have started to believe, and with fervor. And today this melancholic and subdued people, who at first glance might be Argentineans on valium, are dancing on air. The winners have a tremendous burden of responsibility. This rebirth of faith and revival of happiness must be watched over carefully. We should recall every day how right Carlos Quijano was when he said that sins against hope are the only sins beyond forgiveness and redemption."

The U.S. is in many ways the world's big problem; South America is one place that looks like it's coming up with solutions. In Chile, huge protests against the Bush administration and its policies went on for several days, better than any we've had at home since the war broke out. Maybe Chile is the center of the world; maybe the fact that the country has evolved from a terrifying military dictatorship under General Augusto Pinochet to a democracy where people can be outspoken in their passion for justice on the other side of the world matters as much as our decline. Despair there in the Pinochet era was more justified than here under Bush. And as longtime Chileobserver Roger Burbach wrote after those demonstrations, "There is indeed a Chilean alternative to Bush: it is to pursue former dictators and the real terrorists by using international law and building a global international criminal system that will be based on an egalitarian economic system that empowers people at the grass roots to build their own future."

In Venezuela this August, voters reaffirmed "Washington's biggest headache," anti-Bush populist Hugo Chavez, in a US-backed referendum meant to topple him. This spring, Argentina's current president, Nestor Kirchner, backed by the country's popular rebellion against neoliberalism, defied the International Monetary Fund; Uruguayans voted against water privatization; Bolivians fought against water and natural gas privatization so fiercely they chased their neoliberal president into exile in Miami in October of 2003.

Which is not to say, forget Iraq, forget the U.S.; just, remember Uruguay, remember Chile, remember the extraordinary movements against privatization and for justice, democracy, land reform and indigenous rights in Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, and Venezuela. Not one or the other, but both. Latin America is important on the face of it because these communities are inventing a better politics of means and of ends. That continent is also important because twenty years or so ago, almost all those countries were run by violent dictators. We know how the slide into tyranny and fear takes place, but how does the slow clambering out of it unfold? That's something we are going to need to know, because Bush is halfway through an eight-year reign, not at the start of a thousand-year Reich, so far as we can tell.

The third election at the center of the world this autumn was in the Ukraine, where voter fraud, dioxin poisoning, media control, and foreign manipulations (by both the U.S. and Russia) culminated in a ruckus in the streets, and a revote is due the day after Christmas. A brave resistance, camping out day and night in the streets, chanting and dancing, pushing into the parliament, prevailed. The Ukrainians look like they will get, for their trouble, not a saint, not a perfect leader, but at least a sense of their own power. Few more sinister choices can be imagined than that between the Kremlin's candidate and the CIA's. Still, it makes you wonder what would have happened if we had had the passion Ukrainians have, if we had surrounded the Capitol, camping outby the hundreds of thousands on the Mall, demanding that the 2000 election be invalidated because of the evident fraud and disenfranchisement in Florida. Of course, election frauds here in 2000 and 2004 were never as clear-cut. Despite all the flaws, the Ukrainians in the street recalled the nonviolent revolutions in Central Europe fifteen years ago.

For history will remember 2004 not with the microscopic lens of we who lived through it the way aphids traverse a rose, but with a telescopic eye that sees it as part of the stream of wild changes that exploded in 1989 in one of the greatest years of revolutions the world has ever seen, the first great harvest of seeds sown years and decades before. That was the year students sat down in Tiananmen Square in Beijing and demanded democracy, the year that the long struggle of Solidarity in Poland paid off with a democracy, that Czechoslovakia's protracted struggle for liberty culminated in the Velvet Revolution, the year Hungary freed itself, the year the Berlin Wall fell, and the beginning of the end of the apartheid era arrived. Nobody, including the Soviets, woke up on January 1, 1989, thinking that their empire had only a few hundred days left.

Counting Backward, Looking Forward

That was fifteen years ago. Chomsky, who is not prone to irrational exuberance, remarked in his election commentary, "The world is pretty awful today, but it is far better than yesterday, not only with regard to unwillingness to tolerate aggression, but also in many other ways, which we now tend to take for granted."

Ten years ago last April, South Africa held the elections that spelled the real end of the apartheid era and made that once most unlikely of candidates, Nelson Mandela, president of a democratic nation. On New Year's Day of 1994, the day that NAFTA went into effect, a group of indigenous men and women walked out of the Lacandon jungle of Chiapas, Mexico's southernmost state, onto the main stage of history. Nobody else on December 31, 1993, expected the following day to be anything unusual, though the implementation of NAFTA was clearly going to be a long slow death sentence for Mexican farmers. The arrival of the Zapatistas emblematized a wider revolution on the part of the hemisphere's indigenous people, including a revolt against the official version of history. Their version asserted that Columbus was just a colonist, not a discoverer, that the five centuries of genocide had not been altogether successful, and that the people who were supposed to be conquered and extinct weren't necessarily either. Since then, they have been a part of the revolutions in many parts of South America.

Five years ago, on April 1, 1999, the Canadian government officially gave their homeland back to the Inuit, who now govern an independent province about the size of Europe (with a population about the size of a town you've never heard of), almost a quarter of the land mass of this second-largest nation on earth. Plagued with financial troubles -- a hugely diffuse subarctic province is expensive -- Nunavut is nevertheless a triumph of perseverance over the official version of the possible. Five years ago, the Zapatistas and other indigenous people were part of the global uprising against the World Trade Organization as it met in Seattle. Five years ago on November 30, the world took a sudden left turn when a bunch of activists shut down the meeting of the World Trade Organization. The WTO was looming up as the most powerful institution the world had ever known, a force to push transnational capitalism's privileges into every corner of the Earth. Five years ago, on November 29, 1999, the WTO looked like an unstoppable tank that would crush everything in its path. One day later, the shutdown in Seattle signaled the beginning of its decline, and last year's WTO meeting in Cancun -- when indigenous Yucatan campesinos led Korean farmers and a multitude of activists from a global network of resistance -- tipped the tank into a ditch, where its wheels are still spinning.

On that day when Seattle seemed like the center of the world, there was a sister action in Bangalore, India, focusing on Monsanto, which once brought the world the dioxin-laced herbicide Agent Orange and has lately been bringing it a cornucopia of genetically modified crops whose main features seemed to be resistance to Monsanto pesticides and enhancement of Monsanto profits. The corporation that so embodied the WTO's threats has since 1999 closed its European office, been widely attacked in India, given up on commercializing its GMO wheat, stopped trying to spread GMO canola in Australia, been unable to collect royalties on GMO soybeans grown in South America, and this year reported record losses. Citizens in Italy recently turned 13 of its 20 regions and 1500 towns into "GMO-free zones," as did citizens in a few California counties. The huge corporation Sygenta also cancelled all its research and marketing programs for GMO products in Europe because of popular outcry. Europeans have achieved significant successes in limiting the reach of GMO foods and agriculture into that continent.

These stories of liberation have been running concurrently with the rise of the Bush administration and its leap into war. And India's election in May of 2004 threw out the Hindu fundamentalist BJP -- not to replace it with an ideal government but with the Congress Party, the equivalent, more or less, of the Democrats here. "For many of us who feel estranged from mainstream politics, there are rare, ephemeral moments of celebration," said Arundhati Roy after that election.

This is what the world usually looks like, not like Uruguay this fall, not like the US, but like both. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." His forgotten next sentence is, "One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise." You wonder what made Nelson Mandela hopeful in 1973, what made Czech dissident Vaclav Havel keep poking at the authorities in 1979, what kept the indigenous peoples of the Americas going from 1492 to 1992 when their fortunes began to turn a little, what made the people of Uruguay bother to come out to vote after 170 years of bipartisan oligarchy, the people of Chile continue resisting at hideous cost against the Pinochet regime. And you remember that the world turned on Pinochet in 1998, that his own country will likely try him as a criminal, that his old crony Henry Kissinger is afraid to leave the United States for fear of international justice. Is it so impossible then, with another twenty years or so of heading in the direction the world's been heading, the direction the US government is trying to head off, to imagine that Bush may one day find himself in a war-crimes tribunal?

I could count back in other ways, I could count forty years to the birth of the free speech movement in 1964, fifty to the end of Senator Joseph McCarthy's reign of terror, sixty to 1944, when all Europe was in ruins and terror and hunger and the Third Reich was just beginning to look conquerable. I could count back a century to a Republican president, Teddy R, who was belligerent abroad but decent at home, utterly unlike most modern members of his party in his passion for environmental preservation and trust-busting the big corporations -- and yet he was president of a country in which for all intents and purposes only white men had rights and only a marginalized few ever imagined it would be otherwise. But that is truly the past.

The last fifteen years in Poland and Venezuela, in rural Mexico and downtown Seattle are the wide-open present in which we live. And what distinguishes all these hallmarks I have selected -- the case for the defense of hope -- is that they are about the power that lies on the edges, in the shadows, with forgotten, discounted, marginal and ordinary people, not the privileged and spotlighted. It is that power on the edges, the power of the powerless, that undermines the WTO, troubles Monsanto, overthrew a president in Bolivia and election results in the Ukraine, and makes the war in Iraq unwinnable.

Hope at the Edges

The US election was bound to be depressing, since its very nature was to fix our gaze upon national electoral politics, the arena in which they have lots of power and we have hardly any. At these times, the world is organized like a theater; politicians are what's on stage; and the message is that this and nowhere else is where the fate of the world is decided. It's easy to let your gaze lock onto the limelight, helped along by all the mainstream media. And staring at a bright light makes it hard to see in the dark areas around and beyond. It takes time for your eyes to adjust. The brightly lit stage is an arena of tremendous power, but of almost no creativity. Much is decided there, but what is at stake comes from elsewhere. I wonder nowadays if the fear of the Other -- communists, gays, lesbians, immigrants, terrorists -- displaces into safe terms the very real recognition that change comes from the edge. Those with a stake in the status quo are there to protect the center not just from assault, but from imagination and transformation. But change will come anyway.

Take gay rights: I've been watching with fascination the Supreme Court rule on that issue. In the summer of 2003, the Justices overturned centuries of laws criminalizing same-sex sex because even nonstraight people had a constitutional right of privacy, and a few weeks ago they declined to reverse the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision affirming the right of same-sex couples to marry. Now, you can look directly at our nine gentlepersons in black and see the power that they wield, but you can also look beyond and around them and see that they are just ratifying changes that were made not by senators or judges but by grassroots activists and cultural workers, not just the ones who brought the lawsuits, but all the entertainers and writers and people who dared to speak up and come out, who eclipsed the old images of nonstraightness as a rare and dangerous aberration rather than a broad and ineradicable swathe of the mainstream.

This is how culture makes politics; the Supreme Court saw what was legal and commonsensical in ways that would have been impossible had not these heroes and heroines changed the very terms of the world. I mean, Bush says he is in favor of civil unions but against gay marriage, which is a step forward, delivered in a viciously backhanded manner. And if you look at the votes against gay marriage and at homophobia inside and outside the military, they look like the reactions of an endangered species, one that is going to fade away with people who came of age before Ellen DeGeneres and other queer TV figures, and out kids and teachers in Utah high schools, and hate crimes legislation, and countless small gestures of courage and visibility. (Military watchdog Steve Ralls writes, "Fifty percent of junior enlisted service members say that gays and lesbians should be allowed to serve openly in the military, according to the University of Pennsylvania's National Annenberg Election Survey. The number is a significant increase since 1992, when two similar surveys found 16 percent of male service members held the same view.")

Not fade quickly, not without the attacks that are a backlash against change that will probably come anyway. Not that the world is going to be perfect and safe anytime soon or ever, but the kind of criminalization and repression of the nonstraight that was normal in, say, 1965, is gone in many places. Sweden, Denmark, Norway and New Zealand recently introduced civil union rights. Belgium and the Netherlands have legalized same-sex marriage, while Spain -- Spain! land of the Inquisition, land of Franco's ultra-right-wing dictatorship until 1975 -- and Canada are close to legalization.

And never mind the anyone-but-ourselves-to-blame Democrats who make same-sex marriage the fall guy (or gal) for the election outcome, when they might as well criticize Kerry's failure to capture easy constituencies, like the Latinos in the three southwestern states -- Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico -- who could've swung the election. Then, there's the interesting background tale of how Clinton, Gore, Feinstein, et al. campaigned furiously for mainstream Democrat Gavin Newsom to become mayor of San Francisco rather than Green Party contender Matt Gonzalez. After all, it was Mayor Newsom who shook off his backers and turned San Francisco into the gay-marriage Mecca the rest of the world watched in February and March. But then, if the Greens had cared as much about a winnable election as they did about running a presidential candidate in pursuit of 5% of the vote in 2000, maybe they would've done more for Gonzalez, who lost the mayoral election by about the same percentage Kerry lost the national one.

The Wobblies used to say, "Don't mourn, organize!" Do both. The election was deeply depressing, and I'm not arguing against being depressed. I'm just arguing against giving up. And for broadening the arena of evidence under consideration, since the world is larger than the United States and mostly in defiance of it, not to mention utterly unpredictable.

And besides which, if you give up, you'll hate yourself in the morning. If you act, you may or may not have the impact you intend, but you know what the consequences of passivity are. Insurrection is the honorable way to go, and you can be a small victory just by being in public, in touch, and outspoken -- one person who hasn't been conquered. Don't do the Administration the favor of conquering yourself.

Rebecca Solnit is a writer and activist based in San Francisco and a regular Tomdispatch contributor. The ideas here were generated as she revisited her June 2004 book Hope in the Dark for a new edition.

SOLSTICE BLESSINGS ONE AND ALL

A safe arrival home last night, after a long day's journey into same.  Air travel has become such a wearying experience.  The Texas visit was lovely, however.  Quality time with family and friends, beautiful weather, lots of good food.  N's play was fun; though her part was small, her presence was large - she was always in character, always totally with it.  I spent good time with my oldest and dearest friend, and we both had a chance to visit with our friend who is battling cancer.  This is an extraordinary woman, and her light shines as strongly now as ever.  She is someone whose work has always been witnessing for justice and peace, and she continues this work.  We had a lovely and inspiring visit.

Today was spent in recuperation, then the usual time with the afterschool gang.  Tomorrow will be the last day before the holidays, and a party is planned.  Tonight was the holiday concert at the school most of them attend, band and chorus.  A bunch of my kids are in both, so I have just come home from enjoying a real hit of holiday spirit and cheer.  They were adorable. 

Friday we go in to D.C. for several days, hoping for movies, ethnic food, walks, time with family, and perhaps a little confluence with a couple of J-land friends.  This last is very tentative.  I need to do some organizing.  Judith, send me your phone number!  And I will send you mine. 

Please take the message in the sidebar as my holiday greeting to all the dear friends here in J-land - may you stand in a circle of light, with a fire warming your body, soul and heart.  Know joy, peace, laughter and hope.  I hold your hands in mine.

FLYING SOUTH

Early tomorrow I'll leave for BWI Airport, off to Texas for several days.  I will be back next week in time for the Solstice itself, but for now I have to give you my last year's old posts in lieu of any new ones.  If you didn't read them last year, they will be new.  If you did read them, they are still pretty good.  So, good weekend to all, see you next week.  Because this was back in the bad old days of short entry possibilities, some are in two parts.

The Gateway of the Year
Chambers of the Sun, Part 1
Chambers of the Sun, Part 2
The Shortest Day
Christmas with the Deer Dancers, Part 1
Pueblo Christmas, Deer Dancers, Part 2

UNDER THE MISTLETOE

Everyone is familiar with sprigs of mistletoe hanging ubiquitously from lintels at office parties, and other holiday parties attended by people we may not be particularly interested in kissing, or by whom we may not wish to be kissed (there are those of us who NEVER got to kiss some whom we would fervently have loved to lipsmack, long and hard, too shy, too afraid of consequences, too wrongly gendered). Who could know what a long and intricate history this plant has, how far back into the winter celebrations it reaches?

The picture above is mistletoe in its natural habitat, growing in clumps and balls in the bare winter woods. When I was in college in Texas, on a beautiful day such as we are having here today, we would go out into the woods to look for these clumps, climb and clamber into the trees, cut down big bunches and bring it back to decorate dorms, take or send home to our families for decorations. It is sold in roadside stands all over Texas at this time of year, and I even encountered a website where they’ll ship it to you from Texas at insane prices.

It’s hard to get a handle on how to approach the history of this plant (Viscum Albun, or Phoradendron) and its association with the winter revels. It is associated with both Celtic and Teutonic rituals of solstice, as well as Mithraic religion, which migrated from Persia into Rome and then into the areas conquered by Rome. It grows as a pseudoparasite on other trees, remains alive when its host appears dead, and comes into fruition just around mid to late December. Mithras was one of the many sun gods of antiquity, and it is of course the sun that is celebrated at this time. The mistletoe is the bough of the title of The Golden Bough, Sir James Frazer’s great work on early religions. Its berries appear golden or yellowish as they ripen. The plant played an important part in Druidic ritual, as it was believed to grow upon the sacred oak, perhaps even to impart life to the tree itself. Pliny describes (it’s referred to in every book and site I explored) a Druidic ceremony of mistletoe gathering with a golden sickle into a white cloth held upon the horns of two white bulls.

Its current name comes two Old English words, the word for "wren," and the word for "excrement," later transformed into the word for "twig." This name was given at a time when its mysterious appearance was attributed to wren shit on the branches. In fact, mistletoe is a favorite food of wrens and many other winter birds. Its name in Celtic speech was, and still is, "all-healer" for the marvelous powers of healing sickness, averting mistfortune, protection from harm, protection of spirits on their journey to the Otherworld, and increase in fertility, that it was believed to have.

It is from the last of these uses that its current mythology is thought to have evolved. In England it was incorporated early on into what is called "a kissing ball" or "kissing bunch" which were originally hung from tree branches in the woods after a fertility rite or ceremony. Later the figures hanging from the kissing bunch (originally male and female figures bound together with colored threads) were Christianized into three small figures representing the Holy Family in a manger scene. A fascinating fact showing the universality of nature beliefs is this: "In Australia to this day the Aboriginal people believe that spirit children live in the mistletoe that grows on certain trees and that these are awaiting birth, a further indication of the connection that must have existed over a huge length of time between mistletoe and fertility." (Matthews, The Sacred Traditions of Christmas, 1998, Quest Books)

So, the deeply-rooted association of mistletoe with fertility has remained with us into contemporary society, where it shows up as an occasion for rowdy office-party behavior, although the participants quite likely have no notion of its history. Again, forego the plastic mistletoe bunches, go out into the winter sunlight and gather the real thing – it grows over much of the United States, even into New England. Make kissing bunches out of strands of ivy, mistletoe and holly, hang whatever figures you wish from them, kiss anyone and everyone you love, think upon the many possible sorts of fertility – all that which waits within us to be born, the possibilities we have yet to explore.

 

WILL THE CIRCLE BE UNBROKEN

The wheel of the year has almost fully turned, and once again we approach the Solstice. Last year I wrote on the ancient traditions of Solstice through history, and all over the world. Now that my year has slowed down, and I have some time to think and write, I will return to this wonderful and rich treasury of lore. This time I want to focus on some of the themes and decorations still common at the winter holidays, show how they have come down through the ages from times and places when Nature was still recognized as a force and an influence upon our lives. Solstice of course celebrates the turning of the year, the return of the sun; the promise of light, warmth, life, overcoming darkness, cold and death.

Because I just unpacked and hung on our front door a lovely handmade wreath sent by a friend in Maine, I want to start with just that, the making and decorating of our homes with wreaths of evergreens. The wreath itself is in the shape of the oldest of symbols, the circle. A symbol to be found in every culture on the globe, from ancient times to the present. A symbol representing so many things, all of them related: the cycles of life, eternity, the goddess herself, death and rebirth, the moon, the sun. So, we make a circle to symbolize the rebirth of the year, the return of the sun, the unbroken cycle of life. We make it with evergreen boughs, branches from the trees that hold the promise of renewal in the depths of Winter. For our early ancestors the existence of plants that did not wither and die, drop their leaves and appear dead, with the onset of the long dark days of winter, served as a metaphor for the undying deities of the natural world. In nature religions every one of our familiar green branches has a meaning, a symbolism: pine, fir, cedar, juniper, all symbolize continuity of life, protection and prosperity. Holly symbolizes many things, among them the old solar year, protection and good luck.

So – don’t put up those plastic wreaths this year. Take your children, go out into the real world, cut boughs and branches of the evergreens that grow in your area (you can’t hurt them, the more you prune the more they grow), form them into the shapeof the wheel of the year. Place them on your doors, your walls, your altars, to celebrate the continuation of life, to ask for protection and prosperity. The colors red, green and white are the Druidic holiday colors – so, put holly berries and ribbons on that wreath, ask the Great Mother to help us through another turning of the wheel.

I would be remiss not to mention how the wreath has also transformed into a Christian symbol over the ages, through the lovely ceremony of the Advent wreath.  Advent is the liturgical season of preparation for the birth of Christ, and here the wreath is a symbol of God, the eternal, and of eternal life in God.  Four candles are placed on the wreath, three rose colored, one purple.  The wreath usually has a place of honor at the middle of the family table, and one candle is lit each Sunday evening during Advent.  More on this tradition can be found here.  We did this all through my Catholic childhood.  I have to say that making and lighting the Advent wreath is one of my fondest holiday memories.

UNCHAINED MELODY

Free, free, free at last!  Well, sort of.  Finished with college work as of today.  I spent the entire day yesterday (with a dog-walking break) at the kitchen table grading papers, essays, finals, and make-up tests - then computing final grades.  Next semester I'm going to put it all on Blackboard and let the computer do the math for me, save me a lot of bother.  Today I got the final grades into the computer, handed back journals and essays, and went to the First Ever Language Department Holiday Lunch.  We have just become our own department; previously we have been under the Developmental Studies Dept.  This is a big step, and one that makes us all very happy.  We are finally getting a Language Lab for next semester - it's under construction even as we speak. 

My afterschool kids are still with me, as their vacation doesn't start until the end of next week.  We had a splendid day last Friday, doing origami tree ornaments.  I brought ice-cream sandwiches, and it all felt deliciously festive.  The agency has a tree up in the lobby, and we put some of our creations on it.  I brought in a couple of books with origami patterns, a lot of interesting paper, metallic thread to hang them up with.  I simply laid the materials out on the table, and they couldn't get into it fast enough.  Some had had previous experience with origami, others were new to it.  All were unstoppable, when it was time for the bus, no one wanted to go home.  I was a trifle worried that, because they are mainly preadolescent boys, they'd find it girlish or sissy.  No ma'am, no such thing.  My most macho dude was the absolute master of folding - he created wonderful birds in exquisite colors, then asked if he could borrow my book and take some paper home to keep working.  Today he told me he had mastered several more birds and promised to bring me some.  Kirigami may be next.  Gotta say it again - I love these kids.

Thursday I'll be off to Texas for a few days, the acting niece is in another play.  This time it's The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, at the Dallas Children's Theatre.  It's also her 14th birthday on Friday.  The holiday season movies often open on her birthday, and it's her tradition to celebrate by going to Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, whatever, with a few friends.  This year it will be Lemony Snicket, and I'll be there to join them.  This will make her mother (my sister) happy, having another adult amidst the giggling gaggle of girls. I've gotten her the poster for the movie, with the opening date, as one of her birthday presents.  Along with a truly gorgeous poster of Johnny Depp as Capt. Jack Sparrow.  She has almost as big a crush on him as I have. 

For now, I'm going to visit journal friends whom I have so long neglected.  And do a whole lot of laundry.

A BLUE CHRISTMAS IS A GOOD THING

The endlessly inventive minds of internet progressives have come to our aid during this season of retail shopping.  If you haven't yet clued in to buyblue.org, check it out.  It will show you how various chains and corporations allotted their political contributions.  In case you had any lingering doubts, the bargains at Wal-Mart are giving aid and comfort to the Other Guys, big time.  There are some pleasing surprises on this site, places I like to shop are okay to shop!  Places I never shop anyway, or hate, are not okay.  A big exception is Home Depot.  I don't like to shop there, but most of the time it's the only game in town.  From now on, however, I will do my best to avoid it.

FESTIVAL OF LIGHTS

It was already first candle last night, but there are seven more to go - so it's not too late to wish one and all a happy Chanukkah.  May we have light in our darkness, both literal and metaphorical.  This is a time of year when the darkness seems to be winning, these holidays tell us that it is really not.  Last year around this point I somehow had time to extensively journal about the way these winter holidays connect us back through the centuries with our earliest ancestors.  If you didn't know me then, or read those entries, I reoffer them:  they begin here, and continue on through the month of December, 2003.  There certainly isn't time this December to make it a tradition!

BLEEDING HEART

You Are a Liberal for Life
You've got a bleeding heart - and you're proud of it. For you, liberal means being compassionate, pro-government, and anti-business. You believe in equality for every person, and you consider yourself universally empathetic. Helping others is not just political for you ... it's very personal too. What political persuasion are you?  

 I found this on JustCherie's journal just now and couldn't help taking the quiz and posting the results.  I have to say it is right on the money, and I have no apologies to make about it.  Take the quiz, it's fun.  Let me know if you do it, I'll come see your results.

RANDOM MUSINGS

Nope, didn't get back to write here during the weekend.  And only have some spare moments now because I felt so crappy this afternoon that I begged out of my afterschool work with the crew of kids.  I'm not sure what's going on, it feels most unpleasantly like the onset of the flu:  achy all over, exhausted, somewhat distanced from myself.  After a brisk walk through the 'hood with the dog, looking at holiday lights, smelling the wonderful air (clouds full of rain, cold, the sea), I feel actually somewhat improved.  I'm off to bed soon anyway - this is the last week of the semester and I absolutely can't afford to be so sick I can't make it in to school in the morning. 

On Saturday I mentioned Jon Soto and said I'd say more.  So, more:  he's a ten year old whose family is Guatemalan, though he was born here and so is a citizen.  He's smart as a snake, in love with U.S. history, can rattle off dates and facts, knows everything about every president, but is getting failing grades in everything BUT social studies.  I'm trying to get him to work on reading, looking for books that will interest him because they are about history, getting him to do more writing.  Math is another story, I can't figure out how to tie it in to history - although I'm sure there's ways.  His social studies teacher had picked him to be one of six elementary students to lead the Pledge of Allegiance at a Governor's Awards ceremony in Dover.  I only found this out by sheer accident, and then found out he wasn't going to be able to go.  His dad works on Saturday, his mom doesn't drive, and he was stoically resigned to not going.  We talked to his parents and told them someone from La Casita (the name of our program) would pick him up and get him to the meeting point for the trip to Dover.  I'm crazy about this kid, and want to help him in any way I can to realize his amazing potential.  It's very interesting to me to be seeing this first generation of U.S. born kids from such an upclose and personal vantage.  They are living in two such vastly different worlds, the one they inhabit at school and the one they inhabit at home. 

Saturday I also said I needed to spout, ere I explode.  But there just isn't time.  There's a lot of thoughts percolatingaround in my head, almost all the time.  I allude to some of this in an entry in my book journal, but it will be a while until I can put any of it into words.  All I know is that I cannot live in a state of rage, despair, fury, and high blood pressure for however many years it takes to turn the direction of this country around.  And I realize I may not live to see it happen.  The continuation of the war in Iraq, much of which is so hidden from our view, the determination to demolish all environmental protections, make dreadful cabinet and judicial appointments - oh, on and on - all of this really could make me spontaneously combust if I let it.  This does not mean I want to close my eyes to reality, ignore it, live in denial.  Fury accomplishes nothing.  For the moment I remain informed, I read news and commentary, I think, but I am also breathing in, breathing out.  It is a period of retreat in some ways, restorative retreat, not defeated retreat.  The winter break is almost  here - I'll be going to Texas for a visit to my nieces, then in to D.C. for Christmas with my sister and niece, then home to read, walk, think, sleep, and finally have the time to journal.  And read journals, something that I have not done for far too long. 

Right now it's finals, grades, and holiday gift shopping.  For the grandchildren, nieces and nephews.  We don't do much between adults in the family.  We shopped for games and books, both in reality and online most of Saturday and Sunday.  I'm not sure which shopping genre is more irritating - reality or virtual.  They both occasion teeth-grinding eventually.  A large cappucino helps. 

Just a frosty sunny Saturday morning note, before I go off to take Jon Soto to get his ride to a ceremony in Dover where he is one of six children picked to lead the Pledge of Allegiance (more on this later), and then to the college to give makeup tests for two of my classes.  I have so much I want to write here, and never a moment to write it.  In order to avoid another blow-out like I had last spring, I am trying to get enough sleep as well as keeping up with everything else I am doing.  It is seriously cutting into journal time.  But mens sana in corpore sano comes first, I have to think. I am trying to find some peace, trying not to live in rage and despair, so am also finding moments to meditate and exercise.  At some point this weekend I must get to spout a bit here in print though, or I will explode. 

HOME AGAIN, HOME AGAIN

Safely home again in Delaware, after several days that felt like a real vacation - even the two spent mainly sitting in traffic on the New Jersey Parking Lot, I mean: Turnpike.   My contribution to T'giving dinner was the gravy, which turned out spectacularly well.  G's fruit stuffing  (Dear reader, do you say "stuffing" or "dressing?"  This is a question I'd like to explore.  It must be regional.  G says dressing, I say stuffing.) was also heavenly.  We ate entirely too much, but that seems to be what it's all about. 

On Friday other members of G's family came out for a visit.  This included two small boys, so we all trekked over to the Eric Carle Museum.  If you don't have any small children, or grandchildren, or teach any small children, you may have been deprived of Eric Carle.  He has produced some of the most wonderful books for children that exist.  His illustrations are works of art, and to see the originals, be able to see how he achieves his effects, was probably more of a delight for the grownups in the crowd than for the kids.  There is an Art Room, where the current project is making squares (about 6 X 6 inches or so) of translucent paper into "tiles" for a huge mosaic, by pasting designs or pictures made from scraps and bits of colored papers onto them.  The finished squares all go onto panels that will hang in the windows of the Art Room through the holidays.  They are truly amazing - kids have vented creativity in wondrous and delightful ways.  Some of the grownups, and both kids, made squares to contribute to the work.  And had a lot of fun.

We took several lovely walks, ate leftovers, went to bed early and got up late, watched movies, did a little shopping - mine was all books at a wonderful bookstore called "Food for Thought."  It's a beautiful area, but I don't think I could take the winters.  On our way south yesterday, we stopped in Holyoke to have breakfast with friends from our Massachusetts years.  We'd been out of touch the past year or so, and catching up over quiche and coffee was heartwarming fun.  They can't take the winters much longer either, and are thinking perhaps New Mexico.  Which is our thought too, and having them close by would be a dream come true. 

This morning came much too early, after yesterday's Drive From Hell, and I've been working like mad all day.  So, for now, it's into my jammies to curl up and read a while. Then to bed, so I can make the End of the Semester Sprint in good form.

WE GATHER TOGETHER

The Holidays are rolling in with all their thunder, aren't they?  I made the mistake of doing a little shopping after my morning classes.  Oh dear, time to stop that.  Went to buy wine to take with us to Amherst, Massachusetts for the Thanksgiving feast.  We will leave tomorrow after my only class of the day (8:30 to 10:20, but it will probably end earlier than it should) to drive north with all the other crazies going over the river and through the woods.  In our case it's not to Grandmother's house (we ARE grandmother) we go, but to G's sister's house.  This is CR, the sister whose husband died in September, and as this is the first major holiday since then, we thought she might be very lost and lonely trying to figure out what to do.  We've been planning to take this trip ever since G came back from Massachusetts in September.  Other members of G's family will be getting together elsewhere in Mass. and will come west on Friday for a visit.  CR isn't ready for a full-scale family bash yet, but was delighted that we two would come.  It's about all she can deal with.

We love a roadtrip together, and really look forward to getting away from pokey little Delaware for a few days.  Amherst is a lovely college town, and closeby Northhampton is known as Lesbian Heaven.  It has a large population of Our Kind of Folks, with women's bookshops, cafés, music, and more.  We know the traffic on the way north will be monstrous, but - even after 23 years - we can talk for hours, and we see each other so little during the regular workweek that this will be a welcome togetherness. 

I want to wish everyone in JournalLand a restful, peaceful holiday.  Don't go shopping on Black Friday - stay home and play with the kids, read a book, bake a cake, watch a movie, take a really long nap.  It is my deepest hope that everyone has more to be thankful for than they can count, that the harvest of love and delight in your lives is bountiful and rich.  All the political despair, the things that are haunting us day and night, can be set aside while we look around and realize how fortunate we really are. As Lily Tomlin's character in Search for Intelligent Life says, we are all of us just specks in the universe.  In glacial time, this age is a blink of the eye.  Let's enjoy our time as specks: love, laugh, eat, drink, rest.  And return to reality next week.  I love the JournalLand community and I am so thankful to have you as my friends.  (And you, Tim, are a special case.  I'm so amazed and grateful for our long friendship, and its new life during this political season.) 

SATURDAY MORNING RAMBLE

Pre-Script:  If all you're interested in reading is John's Weekend Assignment, scroll down to the end of the post, paragraph six.  The rest is truly stream of semi-conscious ramble.  Of course, it's totally fascinating, but......

So, I've become a once-a-week journaler, it would seem.  Though I have made a couple of posts in The BiblioPhiles over the past week.  I thought once the election was over, I'd have more time in my life - but this proves not to be the case.  I'm instead devoting more time and attention to my Real Jobs, and that's a good thing.  Hard to believe the semester is almost at an end, but it is, with a truncated week for Thanksgiving, then only two full weeks after that.  Crunch time, trying to cram in everything that needs doing before I have to enter those grades into the system. 

And, my work with the after-school kids could easily take up any time I'm willing to devote to it.  They need so much, are eager for so much - so open, interested, interesting.  Yesterday we continued learning about Indians, Native Americans, with a film about young Indian PowWow dancers, a story about a historical young Indian's manhood ceremonies (most of these kids are boys), and pictures from a Dover coloring book of famous historical Indians.  I was a little worried about coloring as an activity, thinking they might feel themselves too old - but these are extremely sophisticated pictures, challenging to color, with biographical information included.  They were totally enthusiastic, wanting more than one apiece, wanting to take the book to the Post Office and make more copies.  Imagine that.  I made them more copies on the agency's machine, and they all ended up with three or four of them.  No one wanted to leave on the early bus, the whole group stayed 45 more minutes to finish what they were doing.  This is a wonderful age group (9 to 12), old enough to be interested in learning everything, young enough to be read to, to color, to not yet be jaded (or have to appear so).  When I was much younger and first teaching, I was interested in the Alternative School Movement:  John Holt, Spring Hill, etc.  I still think it was the right direction for schools, and some of it did filter in. Fridays will be our Alternative School days.  My next move is to ask the kids what they themselves would like to do with our Fridays.  After they finish telling me: "eat pizza, watch cartoons, go outside and play," they'll get down to the real business of letting me know some stuff they're really interested in.  And, goddamn it, we've got to get some money for field trips.  This is ridiculous.

Speaking of older kids (or, alluding to them), every so often during the week some kids from Sussex Tech High School show up to volunteer to work with us on homework help.  These are some fine examples of young people, let me say right now.  It's so good for the children to have them working with them, then after the work is done, playing with them.  I am a firm believer in learning through play - and have brought in math games, word games, card games, to occupy them in groups when homework is finished.  To have a cool big guy play sentence cubes with you is a joy and a treat.  Also an incentive to finish your homework and get it checked over.  Last week when we had two of these volunteers with us we ended up with a giant two-team Uno game.  Is this education?  Of course it is.  Strategy, planning, thinking skills, team work, getting along with others.  All important parts of education. 

Rambling.  Stream of semi-conscious drifting.  I can't talk about politics.  My main feeling about politics is nausea.  I begin each morning reading news: mainstream, alternative stream, beyond-the-fringe stream, and all of it makes me want to hurl.  Dude, where's my country?  Please, let me wake up from this nightmare soon. Our group that began last spring as Sussex County for Kerry is getting together after T'giving to discuss What Now?  Do we want to continue?  If so As what?  To what purpose?  etc.   My sister in D.C. is hosting a house party tomorrow for MoveOn.org to ask the same questions.  Delaware is a "blue state" only in the two counties north of us.  Here in Sussex county we might as well be living in, oh, I don't know - Arkansas?  Alabama?  The vote here went to Bush, and to all the other conservative, Republican, candidates.  Not one of the candidates we worked for locally won.  Not district candidates to the State leg, not the governor (though she did win in the state, thank goddess), not county council candidates.  Okay, no, two county council candidates did win, both of them entrenched Democratic GOB's (if you live in one of those elitist states, you may not know the acronym:  Good Old Boy).  So, yeah, now what?  Where do we go from here?  For me personally, where I go from here is to work within my own sphere, with those I can reach.  The immigrant community, the children of the immigrant community.  The group that formed here earlier this year over the incredible Christian intolerance that has manifested itself toward Jewish and Muslim children in our local school systems. I have not attended meetings of this group during the fall, and have lost touch.  But I intend to remedy that quickly. 

I watched Bill Moyers last night, as always - can he truly intend to retire the end of next month?  He was as spittingly angry over the events of the past week as I am.  See me not talking about politics?  Not talking about appointments and resignations, and House ethics rule changes, and Tom Delay and Condoleeza Rice and blowing up mosques and killing civilian Iraqui families and Donald Rumsfeld is still there and now we have AG as the AG?   No, I'm going to go read other people's blogs, and see them talking about politics.  See if anyone has had a stroke yet.

And while I'm rambling, I'm going to do John Scalzi's weekend assignment.  The topic is to discuss something for which you're actually grateful - but it's not one of those usual things, like family, health, a paycheck every now and then, food on the table, gas in the car.  And I do have one of those.  It's one that's so unusual it may sound unfilial, uncaring, callous.  At the time it happened I was anything but grateful; I was in fact devastated, ruined, my world torn to shreds.  It took me years to recover and fully function.  Now, however, I can feel a strange sort of thankfulness to my parents for dying when I was so young.  My parents were quite a bit older than most, they married older, had children older, and died when we were young, that is - young to lose one's parents.  I was 38, my youngest sister only 28.   My parents were really too young to die, and I hope to defeat my inherited genes and live a lot longer than they did.  My father, who died first, was not much older than I am now.  So, grateful?  you ask.  Yes, as I now see, and have seen for some time, my coeval friends struggling to take care of aged and ailing parents while coping with their own changing lives at the same time, I realize what a huge problem I was spared. That is what I am grateful for:  not their deaths - there is not a day of my life that I don't in some way think of and mourn my mother - but the chance they gave me to have this time in my life to move into my own aging, to enjoy grandchildren, senior discounts, take trips, etc., with selfishness and what grace I can muster.  One of our dear friends, who is ten years older than I am, has only this year been released from the tyranny of caring for a 97 year old father who in mind and personality had long since ceased to be the father she had known and loved.  Caring for him entailed leaving her job, partner, life, in New England to live with him in Florida for extended periods of time.   Other friends have parents with Alzheimer's, I see their lives now consumed with worry, grief, anguish.  I have been given a great gift, by those who gave me life to begin with - time in the later years to enjoy my own interests, activities and other people I love.  Even if I am currently still spending this time working, it is work I love, and to which I am happy to be able to devote myself.   So, Kathleen and Bill, wherever you are - I hope it's a better place in every way than this one, but thanks for what I have here now.  

SMALL CREATURES, ONE AND ALL

Okay, how's this for cute? 

It's Vixen, in all her perfect catness, sitting on the kitchen desk - which has become her dining spot.  Molly eats in the downstairs bathroom, up on the counter, and Honey of course eats on the floor.

My sister came out from D.C. on Thursday, as her daughter had the day off from school and only a half-day on Friday.  I had only my morning classes at the college, no afterschool program - so we had time for fun and frolic.  Not much frolicking on Friday, as it was a day of pouring rain, but Saturday we all spent outdoors at one thing or another. 

 With this child and a kitten around, who could stay gloomy?  She and her mom are lights in my life - it was a shining weekend, election or no election, rain or no rain.  We ate, drew, read, talked endlessly, worked in the yard, played with the beasts, slept long nights under down comforters.

 Here are three darling creatures on the couch - I'm surprised by how big Vixen looks in this picture.  Though Melissa was amused by Vixen, she remains loyal and true to Molly, whom she has loved with a passion since she first met her.  We had kinda sorta hoped Melissa and Vixen would fall in love with each other and Vix would go home with the girls.  But, no, a kitten's wildness is not what Melissa wants in a cat.  She likes the steady personality and rotund dependability of our old girl - whom we could never let move to Washington.  No, Molly will remain with us, as the queen of the house. As you can tell from the photo on the couch, she is beginning to accept the reality of the kitten.  Reluctantly.

I'll be back during the week, to read and post.  Renewed, refreshed, though still bewildered and somewhat lost.  And now there already begins a push to get Arnold elected.  Am I through the looking glass, or down the rabbit hole?  Is this a bad trip?  a bad dream?  Who is writing this script, anyway?

STRANGER, IN A STRANGE LAND

Although I currently feel that I am living in an occupied country, an alien in my own land - life goes on.  I made it through the week, taught my classes, worked with my afterschool kids on their homework assignments. On Friday afternoons we are supposed to be doing "enrichment activities" with the kids, since most of them don't have weekend homework.  So, this Friday I began a series of activities having to do with Native Americans.  Which is what I'll do for the next month, instead of the usual Thanksgiving propaganda about the wonderful Pilgrims sharing their bounty with the Indians.  They'll get enough of that crap in school.  Instead they'll learn how the white Europeans began what turned out to be a trend in American history, continuing to the present. 

The week was made both more fun and more difficult by the appearance in our lives of a kitten.  She had turned up at the home of a somewhat distant neighbor, the Presbyterian minister, who was giving her milk and hoping she'd go away.  She followed G and Honey (dog) home when they were out walking last Tuesday.  On Friday I took her to a cat rescue society, hoping to have her adopted over the weekend.  However.  When I got in the car to drive away - I couldn't do it.  Sitting on the sun porch watching the leaves fall, holding her in my lap and listening to her purr - these were the things that kept me from slitting my wrists Weds morning.  So, I went back in and said - never mind, I'm taking her home again.  We took her to the vet yesterday, had her tested for feline leukemia and AIDS, she got her shots and deworming meds.  She's entirely healthy, a beautiful little tortiseshell calico, her name is Vixen - and eventually Molly will stop hissing at her.  Or at least so we hope.  Honey thinks she's delightful, and it was because she fell in love with him that she pranced along and followed him home.  Pictures to follow.

Here, again, Mark Morford pours out the feelings in my heart in this most recent column:

Hello, Uranus? Got Any Room?
Must. Move. Away. Cannot endure more Bush. Soul about to implode. Right? Not so fast
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, November 5, 2004
I said it, you said it, pretty much anyone with a brain larger than a grape or a soul more nimble than a rock said it maybe a thousand times over.

And you probably weren't even all that drunk when you said it and maybe you were even a little more than half serious and maybe you said it just like this: If Bush somehow snags another election, if the unthinkable comes to pass and the Dubya neocon nightmare refuses to end, well, that's it. I'm outta here.

Done. Over. Gone. Moving away. To Canada. Or France. Latvia. Uranus. Anywhere, really, that doesn't have Bush as leader and that doesn't make me openly ashamed to be a citizen and that doesn't make me feel like a sickened disillusioned ulcerated outcast in my own happily divisive country every damn day including Sunday.

You want a place, you say, that doesn't right this minute seem to be working heroically to make homophobia and born-again fundamentalism and pre-emptive isolationist warmongering and environmental ignorance a national religion. A place where SUVs aren't considered minor deities and where gay people aren't loathed for wanting to slice a wedding cake and where brazen heavily narcotized denial in the face of a veritable mountain of presidential lies isn't the national pastime.

Tempting, isn't it? To just move away to a sunnier, clothing-optional utopia and wait for it all to be over, for the dark days to pass and the Shrub era to sink into the tar pits of history and the fog to finally lift?

After all, most all of us on the progressive Left feel we truly faced the dragon this election, and we put up a valiant fight and marshaled as potent an army of dissenters and intellectuals and moderates and liberal crusaders and feminists and enlightened activists as possible, considering.

And we supposedly had more of the youth vote and the disenfranchised single-female vote and the "Daily Show" vote and the Eminem vote and the celebrity vote and the humanitarian vote and the antiwar vote and the gay vote and the pro-choice vote and the Howard Stern vote and the immigrant vote, and still the dragon just sneered and hacked up another fireball of bogus fear and evangelical Christian self-righteousness and torched our glimmering sword of juicy hope into a smoking cinder.

And now, this. The nation has officially, stupefyingly handed the world's worst president a blank check to do whatever he and his cronies like, without fear of major repercussions or voter disillusionment or damage to an imminent re-election campaign, because there won't be one.

Which is to say, Bush now has no one to worry about now but his true constituents (hint: it ain't mainstream Repubs, or even the born-agains), no one to answer to but the CEOs and the energy barons and the military-supply corporations co-owned by his father, and nothing to guide him but his own deeply regressive, monosyllabic moral compass. Hell, why stick around for more of that?

But here's the catch. Here's the tough part to accept. Here's what everyone who's right now on the brink of packing their bags and checking the real estate prices in Vancouver has to know and has to have drilled into their disconsolate hope-crushed souls right this minute, before it's too late:

You cannot leave. You cannot drop the armor now. Why? Because you are needed, more than ever. You are mandatory to keep the energy flowing, the karmic vibrator buzzing, to keep the progressive and lucid half of the nation breathing and healthy and awake and ever reaching out to the half that's wallowing in fear and violence and homophobia and sexual dread, hoping to find harmony instead of cacophony, common ground instead of civil war, some sort of a shared love of a country so messy and internationally disrespected and openly confused its own president can't even speak the language.

After all, you don't hand over all your children the first time the flying monkeys bang on your door. You don't give up your dream house just because a bunch of gangbangers moved in down the block. You become a bit more wary and alert and you stock up on the superlative porn and the expensive wine and the deepened sense of true beauty and sex and love and hope and you hunker down and grit your teeth and dig in for the long haul, and you work on making your own goddamn garden more beautiful than even you could have imagined, because, well, the neighborhood -- and the world -- needs it, more than ever.

Look. No one said it was gonna be easy. No one said it was gonna be painless. And no one said it was gonna be quick. As I've noted before, the neocons have been planning this takeover for decades. The Bush regime, despite feeling like a massive indigestible incomprehensible fluke, is no accident.

The GOP is deeply entrenched and the razor wire is all around their compound and they are masterful at working the angles of fear and manipulation and of kowtowing to the least tolerant and least morally flexible segments of the population -- this is, after all, how Bush won a second term -- and hence they aren't about to just roll over at the first sign of outcry or dissent or a snowboarding senator, even if he's 10 times the man and a thousand times the intellect of the smirking lunk currently in office.

And besides, most hardcore Republicans would, of course, love it if you'd leave the country, and take your gul-dang gay-lovin' tofu-eatin' tree-huggin' pierced-labia values with you. They would love it, furthermore, if the libs in the morally shredded red states would split for the coastal cities and the major metropolises of America, all those godless heathen places where the neighbors won't yank the Kerry/Edwards sign outta your front lawn and chase you down and beat you with it and call it patriotism. Remember: bullies never deserve to own the playground.

And one of the most stirring e-mails I received during the outpouring of grief the day after the election was from a young female reader, "an artist, an intellectual and a Jew" who's been living in Mexico and who now says she's so enraged and saddened by the election's ugly outcome that she's preparing to return to the States ASAP, just so she can help, so she can join the resistance, keep the right-wingers from coming after our souls. Now, that's patriotism.

The bottom line: Don't disband the newfound army just because one ugly battle was lost. Mourn, commiserate, lick wounds, lick each other, drink heavily, spit out your stale gum of disappointment and pop in a fresh clove of laughter and spiritual heat and then regroup and sober up and take an even deeper breath and watch in hot wet spiritually emboldened amusement as the cosmic circus unfolds.

It's far from over. The tunnel is just a little darker -- and longer -- than we imagined.

Thoughts for the author? E-mail him.

Mark's column archives are here

MEMENTO MORI

If I were still a drinker, my head would be in the toilet for most of the day today.  As it is, I put my clothes on and went to give my morning class a test, with only my heart and soul in the toilet.  I couldn't teach, every time I opened my mouth I burst into tears - so it's a good thing I had planned a test.

There's nothing left to do but grieve and retrench.  I have never felt less like an American, never felt more ashamed of this country, never felt so bereft by anything political.  How I feel is exactly the way I feel when someone I love dies.  Grieving and retrenching may take some time.  I don't know what I'll do about journaling for a while.  Not much, I suspect.  I will read,  walk in the falling leaves (a lot), visit the children in the families, do my best at both my jobs. 

For someone who expresses our feelings particularly well, go read Mark Morford's column today. 

See you, after the waters are crossed.  And may the force be with us.

REALITY OR ABSURDITY? WHICH WILL IT BE?

I've noticed that many of my political journal buddies have added "member of the reality-based community" to the tag lines for their journals.  And I'm wondering where this expression began - did it begin with Ron Suskind's NYT piece on Dubya's faith-based madness, "Without a Doubt?"  That's the first place I came across it.  Did someone else coin it before Suskind?  I like the expression a lot, although it seems to posit that faith is no part of reality.  And I do think it can be, though certainly not in the way that our leaders are currently experiencing (or at least that's what they're telling us) faith.  Faith also includes a lot of doubt, something our leaders haven't yet acknowledged.  Of all the many things that infuriate me about this administration, and this current load of hogwash about a Christian Nation, the most infuriating is the way that faith and Christianity have become some bizarre sword and shield of inflexible morality and a basis for terrible inhuman actions and decisions. 

Were Jesus to get John Ashcroft, George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, et al, together in a closed room, I don't think he would be particularly gentle with them.  Same goes for most of the leaders of the Christian Right not actually sitting in Washington.  Likewise the talk show hosts spouting Christian Nation nonsense over the radio waves.  I think we'd hear the pissed-off Jesus who drove the money-lenders out of the Temple giving these guys a piece of his mind.

So, anyway.  Reality-based community.  I thought about adding it to my tagline here, too.  Then I read a swell article called Time to Hit the Barricades, on salon.com.  The writer, one Katharine Mieszkowki, posits the "unthinkable" - what will you do if Bush wins?  And then asks a varied group of bloggers that question.  It's a lot of fun, actually made me laugh a couple of times.  Get the daypass and go read it.  My favorite was the "nebbish in chief" of a blog called internebbish, who said "I think I will give everyone I know a lot of duct tape to try to hold their skulls together so when Bush talks their brains don't shoot out of the back of their heads."

In the group quoted was a Professor John-Paul Spiro, of a blog with the great name everything's ruined, who said he would no longer call himself a member of the reality-based community.  He would become a member of the absurdity-based community, and live in an absurd universe for four years.  I kind of like this idea, myself.  So - I am reserving my decision until after the election is decided.  Will it be reality I live in?  or absurdity and fantasy?  It all remains to be seen.  None of the people asked what they'd do for this article said they'd move out of the country.  And I myself have decided that I will stay and fight on.  My sister in DC told me the other day she'll be going for the molotov cocktails and matches if the Junta comes back.  She thinks anarchy is the only hope.

EL DIA DE LOS MUERTOS

Now, and for the next few days, I am trying to remember there is a world beyond the elections, there is a life of the mind, heart and body that will continue after November 2.  Towards that end I am striving for some sanity and peace.   Everyone I talk to agrees that what we have begun, the resurgence of political awareness, passionate caring and involvement will go on after the election. The fight will continue, no matter what.  If you saw Fred Trippi on Bill Moyers last night you know what I mean. But so will the cycle of life, the seasons, love, family and some sort of hope. 

My contribution to sanity and hope today is a poem I wrote a few years ago at this same time of year.  I love the autumn, this huge change of weather, scenery, bird and plant life.  It has always been the true beginning of a new year for me.  It is the new year in the Jewish tradition, it is the new year for academic life.  Much of my life has been spent in academia of one sort or another.  And for 23 years I've lived with a Jewish partner.  So, happy new year, let us all continue to fight like hell for the living and pray like hell for the dead.

  ALL HALLOWS

These are the days of long shadows,
houses, trees and barns,
telephone poles,
stretched across the stubbled fields,
the heartbreak of October light.
And then the geese:
morning and evening wedges
crossing the horizon
trailing autumn in their
busy mournful cries;
trailing memory,
the scent of apples,
dark leaves, morning mist.
The season of ghosts,
souls returned,
blowing past like leaves,
cold mornings, early dark;
trying, like the geese, to tell us
something we almost remember,
something we almost hear.

ABUSE ABOUNDING

How about them Red Sox?  I can't imagine Boston last night.  Madness in the streets.  Hopefully no one else got shot in the madness.  I'm happy for the Sox, for my former city, for the rising of the underdogs everywhere.  But I hate the whole "free agent" thing.  I liked it when teams stayed together and you could really be a loyal fan to a whole group of guys for a long time.  Ah well, I'm an old fart, there's no denying that.

And this morning I have Arianna Huffington's last column pre the election to offer you.  On a subject I have been mulling and stewing, ranting and raving, choking and gagging over in the past weeks more than ever.  It's what she calls "faith abuse."  She links to Ron Suskind's article in the NYT magazine a couple of weeks ago, I think it was Oct. 27, a hair-raising look at how this president is making decisions, running a government, a war, and ultimately all our lives.  I've wanted to write a post linking to the NYT article as well as several other sites where this is being discussed, and haven't had the time.  Now, Arianna has done it for me.  I don't know that anything anyone says will deter those who see all this as America's salvation from voting for Bush, but the rest of us need to do everything we can to alert sane voters and get them to the polls.

FAITH ABUSE: WHEN GOD BECOMES A CAMPAIGN PLOY

By Arianna Huffington

This is my last column before Election Day. With less than a week to go, I plan on doing everything in my power to defeat George W. Bush (need a ride to the polls?). Then I'm going to get down on my knees and pray to a higher power.

As someone for whom faith is incredibly important, and who regularly prays for all the people and things that matter to me, I'm hopeful that God is as appalled as I am with the way His name is constantly being taken in vain on the Bush campaign trail, and with how the president is abusing his faith to justify to himself and to the world his disastrous policies.

Lord knows there's a very long list of things to be angry with Bush about, but this one has moved to the top of my personal hit parade because, as Catholic theologians teach us, "The corruption of the best is the worst." And George W. is truly corrupting faith and dragging it into the political gutter. In two fundamental ways:

First, he's using it as a spiritual inoculation against uncertainty and complexity.

Ron Suskind's recent piece  in the New York Times Magazine painted a chilling portrait of a presidency in which thoughtful analysis and moral questioning have been replaced by "God-given" certainty, and where facts and open debate have become an anathema.

Suskind reveals a president who uses his faith to numb himself against reality. It anesthetizes him in the same way a stiff drink — OK, 20 stiff drinks — used to, and allows him to drown out the voices of doubt. Yet great thinkers throughout history have extolled the virtues of doubt. As Paul Tillich put it: "Doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith."

But not in the Bush White House, where doubters are treated as traitors, and inconvenient facts are the work of the Devil — because facts can lead to questioning, and questioning undermines faith. And that would be blasphemy in an Oval Office where unbending resolve has become a holy sacrament. No wonder Bush is unwilling to admit to even a single mistake.

The second way the president is corrupting his faith is by using it as a marketing tool designed to garner support among the over 60 million Americans who identify themselves as evangelical — particularly the 4 million born-again voters who stayed home in 2000.

Nowhere is this blending of church and campaign more evident than in "George W. Bush: Faith in the White House," a DVD being distributed to tens of thousands of America's churches.

Although not officially the work of the Bush-Cheney campaign, it obviously has its approval, and indeed was screened at a party for Christian conservatives hosted by the campaign at the GOP convention in New York.

In the documentary, President Bush is presented as a man with "the moral clarity of an old-fashioned biblical prophet" — and is shown sharing a beatific split screen with the Son of God himself.

So, in 2004, Jesus is not only the president's favorite philosopher — he's his surrogate running mate. I'm surprised we haven't seen any "Bush-Christ 2004" bumper stickers yet. It would make for a heck of an October surprise.

All this pious posturing is also being used as a cudgel with which to attack John Kerry, portraying him as a sorry second in the faith sweepstakes.

Forget that Kerry carries a Bible and a rosary with him on the campaign trail, used to be an altar boy, and has said, "My faith affects everything that I do." The Bushies have made it seem as if they are running against Joe Pagan. Just check out the "Kerry: Wrong for Catholics" page  on the official Bush-Cheney campaign Web site.

What's next? Attack ads from Altar Boys for Truth claiming Kerry never actually swallowed the body of Christ during communion?

What the president calls faith is actually nothing of the sort. It is fanaticism, pure and simple. The defining trait of the fanatic is an utter refusal to allow anything as piddling as evidence to get in the way of an unshakable belief.

This zealot's mindset is what allows President Bush to take in the death and destruction in Iraq and see them as "freedom on the march." And it's also what allows Abu Zarqawi and his followers to coldly put a bullet in the back of the head of four-dozen unarmed Iraqi Army recruits because they are "apostates."

"Either you're with us or you're against us" plainly cuts both ways.

"This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about al-Qaida and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy," explained Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy advisor to Reagan and Bush 41. "He understands them because he's just like them."

I pray that every American of real faith keeps this in mind when stepping into the voting booth on Election Day.

© 2004 ARIANNA HUFFINGTON.
DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.