Winter, Part One of Many: The Zen of Leaves

What Is To Come

My intention is to post as much as possible, hopefully every day...but no promises. My inclination is to post more personal and less political stuff, but we'll see. There are so many people doing great political stuff, and the last years have caused me to look inward more for those reference points that help me make sense of the world. I plan to concentrate more on local and Utah politics, over on my other blog Redrock Critter. I will also be posting more photos than I have in the past. Just because.

Oh, and hot flashes? I have had such hot flashes, I can't even tell you. But so far at least, menopause seems to have made me not crankier but more mellow. After all, when you have spent half--no, all--the night throwing your covers off, then throwing them back on, who the hell has the energy to bitch about anything? I mean, come on. Life's too short. Welcome to the new, nicer me.

Uh....Hi Mom?

Starting up your blog after such a long time is like calling your mother after six months...where to start? I'll skip the part about how guilty I feel and how I promise to do better. I never do do better anyway.

I am currently living in Moab in a lovely old house that just WILL NOT stay warm but I am enjoying every moment nonetheless. I have remembered how to love the beauty of winter...the bare-bones trees, the snowy ground, the fall's dried seedpods still clinging to the rabbitbrush. I will be here over the holidays, having decided not to subject myself to the ordeal of holiday travel but mostly because I want to be able to celebrate/mark the season in my own way, in my own town, in the circumstances which I have so gladly chosen. It turns out that almost everyone and their dog will be leaving town to travel to family, or just to travel to avoid the whole Christmas drama. But not everyone, and not me. I am decorating, I am baking, I am entertaining, I am sending out Christmas cards and throwing myself into the whole scary, glorious mess. I have made my stand, or my bed or whatever and by god I will lie in it. It's not that I refuse to be sad or lonely, just that I refuse to fear it.

It will be a zen Christmas. I like that.

On Hiatus

Be back.....really.

Postcard

I'm a redrock critter, at least for this month. The beauty of this place seems all the more compelling for being so completely unnecessary, in the human scheme of things. That's an atheist's view, I suppose. It isn't beautiful because of us, or for us; it just is. What better evidence of a benevolent universe could one ask for?

Which makes me not-an-atheist but rather someone who is comforted by a landscape that pays absolutely no attention to me but whose beauty cracks my heart. It draws out my grief and loss and turns them into stone, into a curve of rock that warms in the sun and lies against my hand. I can touch it. This is a good thing.

The canyons comfort me, the sky hard and bright like a jewel. How much easier it is to live in the moment, when you are surrounded by the accumulated moments of millions of years turned into a landscape of grace.

Pardon My Therapy

I will resume blogging to try to pull myself out of this funk I'm in. I'm stuck in Florida in my late mother's condo that I may not be able to sell because the housing market has gone flat and homeowner's insurance is going through the roof, if you can get it. My friends, my heart, my life are elsewhere.

Except I guess my life is here--or at least I 'd better start thinking that way, because feeling as hollowed-out as I do now is no life. At least I have a roof over my head. Some residents of New Orleans still don't have that. The people of south Lebanon certainly don't have that. Hell, there are tens of thousands of people in this country who, shamefully, don't have a roof over their heads on a daily basis. So, dear diary, let us rise above self-pity, at least for tonight.

Meanwhile the ridiculous, the sublime and the stupid/scary continue to call for attention, preventing that turning-inward of self that feels like escape but is not:

What global warming? Giant yellow-jacket nests may be the result of changing climate.

What global warming? New coal-fired plants to increase greenhouse emissions by 10%.

(How many days until the fall election?)

The sublime:








Got to see baby loggerhead turtles being released at the beach. Just a second after touching the sand they were crawling toward the water as fast as their flippers would go. They were, quite simply, beautiful. Only one in a thousand will make it to maturity.

Life goes on, fucked-up as it is. At least for turtles.

(crossposted to/from here)

This Is What Happens Next

Am I back? It's been a tough couple of months. Now I am spending the summer at my mother's house to get her affairs in order. I'm living with ghosts and it's hard to concentrate. It's been raining hard here and everything is wet, finally...tonight the frogs were out in force, so loud you could hear them with the windows closed.

Life goes on, I guess. At least for frogs.

Earth Science Bites the Dust at NASA

The space agency has shelved plans for satellites to more accurately measure weather and soil conditions, and to aid in the understanding of climate change, in order to shift more funds to the space station and a proposed moon re-landing. I guess that's so that we can hold the strategic high ground as we watch over a dying planet.

Hey, somebody's got to get the last drop of oil (clean water, clean air, microchip, order of nachos, what have you)...it might as well be us. Or some of us. You know who you are.

Hildegard Hegger (1925-2006)

Rev. William Sloane Coffin (1924-2006)

Crisis Management

Yesterday's Washington Post has a story that sheds some light on the much-hyped "war on boys" in education. Guess we'll have to go back to the war on Christmas, or the war on the war on Christmas, or something to keep the paranoid right buzzing.

Remember when conservatives decried the "victim mentality" of advocates for women and the poor? Turns out they just wanted to claim the mantle of victimhood for themselves. Or as some in the blogosphere have put it, IOKIYAR (it's OK if you're a Republican). Who knew?

The Doctor Is In

President Bush has committed $500 million to his "Healthy Marriage Initiative", which helps "couples who choose marriage for themselves gain greater access, on a voluntary basis, to services where they can develop the skills and knowledge necessary to form and sustain a healthy marriage."

But it turns out that some of these "services" are (surprise!) religious-based organizations that equate "healthy" marriages with ones in which wives stay home and offer helpful advice to their overworked spouses:

"The married man won't go to work hung over, exhausted or tardy because of fewer bachelor habits, and because he eats better and sees the doctor sooner, thanks to his wife. She is also a good adviser on career decisions, and relieves him of chores, so he can do a better job."

In the meantime, the administration is cutting funding for programs that help women break into non-traditional fields of work with much higher rates of pay than the usual "pink collar" jobs. It seems that a healthily-married woman is a dependent one. Or a poor one, anyway.

Life is Cheap, Part XLVII

Why would women leaving a religious event stampede and crush a bunch of other women and children? Were they so covered up that they could not see properly? Were they made to hurry for some reason so that they couldn't stop? How the hell could something like this happen? Maybe I just don't understand crowd dynamics, but there has got to be some serious negligence going on here.

Bad enough when human beings shoot and blow each other up. But when they kill themselves through mindless herd behavior I really wonder if the human race isn't just too stupid to live.

Update: Qatar's The Peninsula newspaper says that the crush was set off when someone yelling for help with a fallen child set off a panic in the crowd. Of course, having more than one exit for 50,000 people might also have helped:

...Dawat-e-Islami party spokesman Nadeem Qadri blamed the authorities for closing off some exit points to the mosque because of earlier construction work.

“These congregations are nothing new in the city. For the last 15 years we held it every week. The incident took place because the government had closed three entry and exit points because of a newly constructed park,” he said.

So it's not mindless herd behavior but mindless official incompetence....the world makes sense again.

State authorities have ordered an inquiry into the incident.

American Idol

Howard Zinn writes about, among other things, the idea of American exceptionalism--that we are taught to believe that we are the standard-bearers of a new and better politics, a new and better life--either because we were chosen for this task by a superior being or because of our superior western culture. Therefore no one could possibly want to resist having our values and institutions imposed--excuse me, bestowed--on them. Therefore anyone who does resist must be, ipso facto, a terrorist and "dead-ender" and we are justified in blasting them off the face of the earth. God be praised.

A more accurate reading of history might lead us to re-examine this belief and conduct ourselves with a little more humility--but that brings us to another problem, for "we" are not the unified body that conventional history and politics would have us believe. We--that is, you and I--may be humble, may desire humility in foreign affairs, may even benefit from it. But this administration and its backers do not represent you and me and the consequences, good and bad, of their actions do not fall equally on all. The people who benefit from wars and aggression are not the same people who pay the price. Ditto for oil price hikes, political instability, unemployment, deficits....

Our present leaders are not so candid. They bombard us with phrases like “national interest,” “national security,” and “national defense” as if all of these concepts applied equally to all of us, colored or white, rich or poor, as if General Motors and Halliburton have the same interests as the rest of us, as if George Bush has the same interest as the young man or woman he sends to war.

Now we are told that the people of Iran will rise up and overthrow their government once the bombing starts. But will they? And if not, who loses? Who wins?

The Mother of All Hot Flashes

So are we going to nuke Iran?

One former defense official, who still deals with sensitive issues for the Bush Administration, told me [Hersh] that the military planning was premised on a belief that "a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government."

And since these guys were so accurate in their predictions on Iraq, we should trust them on this one, right?

It always amazes me when someone expects people in other countries to respond to aggression in ways that we ourselves never would. If we were attacked, would we rise up and overthrow the government? Or would we put aside our feelings about the government (hard as that might be to do) and fight tooth and nail to defend our country, our homes and our families?

Of course we would. And I don't believe that anyone would make this assumption about a westernized society. It is a racist assumption that says that people in Iraq, or in Iran or in Vietnam or in Palestine are cowards. That they are afraid to fight, they have no pride and do not love their countries as we do; therefore, they will give up and do what we want.

Funny how we always turn out to be wrong about that. Funny how we never seem to learn from our mistakes either. Because it's always someone else's fault: the liberals, the media...the French. This would merely be an annoying trait in a ten-year-old. In the men with their fingers on the nuclear trigger, it is dangerous bordering on insane.

The Other Cheek

The late Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater on John McCain's new pal Jerry Falwell, July 1981: "I think every good Christian ought to kick Falwell right in the ass."

-from Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo

Now This I Can Do....

Now this is blogging! In all its glory, copied wholesale from another site:

McCain Embraces Falwell in All His Wingnut Glory

Republican John McCain gives some love to the crazy Reverend:

American military hero and Arizona Sen. John McCain will deliver the Commencement message at Liberty University on May 13, at 9:30 a.m., in the Liberty University Vines Center.

While Sen. McCain and Liberty University Chancellor Jerry Falwell have had their share of political differences through the years, the two men share a common respect for each other and have become good friends in their efforts to preserve what they see as common values. This will mark his first ever appearance at Liberty University.

Ah, a full embrace of the man McCain referred to as "pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance." My question: will Tim Russert ask Senator McCain if he agrees with Falwell's comments? If he thought it appropriate to ask Senator Obama about Harry Belafonte's remarks, why not ask McCain about the following, since he has chosen to so closely associate himself with the good Reverend?:

• Senator McCain, do you agree with Jerry Falwell that Muhammed, the prophet is Islam, is a "terrorist"?
  
• Senator McCain, do you agree with Jerry Falwell's statement that "If you're not a born-again Christian, you're a failure as a human being"?
  
• Senator McCain, do you agree with Jerry Falwell's statement tht "Blacks, Hispanics, women, etc. are God-ordained minorities who do indeed deserve minority status"?
  
• Senator McCain, do you agree with Jerry Falwell's statement that "Most of the feminists need a man to tell them what time of day it is and to lead them home"?
  
• Senator McCain, do you agree with Jerry Falwell's statement that if the Antichrist did exist and were alive today, "of course he'll be Jewish"?

Come on Timmy, I hope you're taking notes. Now that McCain and Falwell are peas in a pod, I'd hope that the media can abandon that whole "moderate" myth.

Can't do any better than that. Thanks to georgia10 at Daily Kos.

Mea Culpa (Part Two)

I think that there have always been religious extremists and people who follow them out of some combination of obedience, ignorance and fear. They have always existed, everywhere. But the world is smaller, as the saying goes, and so now we have Muslim fundamentalists in Afghanistan who want to kill a guy for converting, and it's on TV, it's on the internet. Are they devolving? Probably not. I don't know. It's not for me to say. I'd like to think that there are fewer people in Afghanistan who feel this way than there might have been, say twenty years ago. But I have no way of knowing. I do know that I have no respect for a religious interpretation that demands a man be executed for converting to another faith. But it doesn't necessarily mean that Afghan society is being reduced to some lower level of consciousness, thereby lowering the worldwide morality/enlightenment quotient.

Are we in the US devolving? Probably that's the wrong word to use--it implies an organic process that can't be stopped. Are we slipping backwards down a social and political incline because half the population doesn't know or doesn't care or feels paralyzed to do anything about it? I sure think so. I no longer know what it will take to shake people up enough to reverse the process. I would have thought any one of about a dozen things that have happened would do it. But we move on to the next news cycle and we wait...for some pendulum to correct itself, for the next election, for some deus ex machina process from beyond history to set things right. But history is made, not written.

I hear that Americans don't care about history.

Rome is burning. It's not too late. History is made, not written.

Mea Culpa (Part One)

Frack me! Has it been a whole month since I posted?

I've been having health problems of my own lately as well as taking care of my mother...and the dog ate my homework...but I think the main reason is the outrage overload that I've been suffering whenever I read the news.

People get blown up every day in Iraq (and elsewhere); Bush declares that he's not required to follow the law, Congress agrees; abortion is banned; global warming reaches the tipping point. What the hell can you say about any of this? My outrage alert level is stuck at orange. In Afghanistan they want to kill a man for converting to Christianity. What values can I possibly share with people who feel this way? Are we devolving?

It's not that I don't care anymore. Maybe I've just used up all the adjectives.

(OK, that's just an excuse...more later.)

Cruel Idelogy

Massachusetts Congressman Ed Markey is incensed that House Republicans are going to investigate the (Venezuelan government-owned) Citgo program that provides heating oil at reduced prices to low income people in the Northeast.

"As we all know, the oil industry just made more money than any industry in the history of modern commerce.... There has been widespread concern about price gouging, supply manipulation, speculation and profiteering, but the Energy and Commerce Committee has yet to send a single demand letter to any of the companies alleged to be involved in such activity. Instead, it has decided to spend its Committee resources and staff time trying to prevent CITGO from getting any credit for helping the poor."

Maybe it offends their free market sensibilities. Or maybe standing firm against the Venezuelan menace looks good on their political resumes. It is the campaign season, that time of wheedling and posing.

But the main reason may be to stop any heaving-and-cracking of opinion that American oil companies--or the American government--should likewise be prevailed upon to help. Charity is for suckers and socialists, apparently. Everyone else can just turn down their thermostats and shut up.