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.