Rand Paul Thinks This is a Good Idea??

Photos by Vivian Stockman

Oct. 11, 2001 marks the one-year anniversary of the nation's worst "blackwater" spill. That day, over 300 million gallons (first reports said 250 million) of sludge broke through from a coal waste slurry impoundment at Kentucky's largest mountaintop removal operation, a site owned by Martin County Coal Co., a subsidiary of Massey Energy.

The black goo, (laden with heavy metals present in coal and coal cleaning chemicals and who-know what-they-dump-in-those-impoundments) poured into Coldwater and Wolf Creeks and oozed down the Tug Fork and Big Sandy Rivers, into the Ohio, traveling 100 miles, closing down community water supplies and devastating aquatic life. The disaster "helped" place the Big Sandy on American Rivers' Most Endangered Rivers list.

Residents are upset about the slow pace of the clean-up. Some still can't drink their well water. Septic systems are not working. What's left of stream bank vegetation isn't healthy. People are worried about their health.

Still, Massey Energy insists they are a good corporate neighbor.

But the headlines the sludge disaster generates represent just one aspect of Massey's poor corporate record: Miner fatalities. Aggressive anti-union tactics. Overweight coal trucks. Deadly accident involving overweight coal trucks. Frequent blackwater "spills." Dodged worker's comp taxes.

...when Rand Paul, who is the Republican Senate candidate for Kentucky, is asked what Harlan County (Kentucky) is famous for, this is far from the best possible response:

"I don't know," he says in an elusive accent that's not quite southern and not quite not-southern. The town of Hazard is nearby, he notes: "It's famous for, like, The Dukes of Hazzard."

The Dukes of Hazzard?!?!

(Thanks to Acrentropy for the above.)

The Harlan County War that occurred in the early 1930's during the depression occurred when the mining companies hauled in strike breakers from out of state to crush the unions and the mine workers attempted to fight back. They lost, of course. Trust me, no mine worker or his progeny is ignorant of the history, and the consequences, of the Harlan County Wars.

The significance of these events, to the rational mind, seems to supercede the TV sitcom The Dukes of Hazard.

Lib Watching..My Favorite Sport

I have to admit, one of the reasons for my remaining a staunch Liberal over the years is the entertainment value of it all. This is not the top reason on my list but it is a significant one.

Short of any fashion sense or political correctness myself, I have a strong affinity for those who do not ponder questions of stylish dress and an inherent sympathy for those found in compromising situations. In these matters my fellow Liberals have generally furnished all the entertainment necessary to keep me interested enough in politics to actually go vote.

But alas, in this last decade, conservatives have challenged my chosen political bias with their own flamboyant versions of idiocy and general bizarreness and the occasional glimpse of Conservatives in green plaid trousers and comb-overs in the halls of the Senate has totally disrupted my Liberal loyalties.

However, if the BP spill has done nothing else it brings back to the limelight those lovable Liberals who have been wasting their lives on stuff like saving the planet and all that.

While Conservatives fill the air with cries of "Doom to All Liberals", Liberals have stayed pretty busy shooting at Japanese whaling ships, demanding that oil spill workers have protective gear, pointing out that as far as the ocean and air goes, poison in and poison out is a given and mentioning that most people do not make $250,00 a year nor do they have the $1.3 million that would put their estates at risk of having to pay a dreaded "Death Tax" so derided by Conservatives.

Unfortunately, this last ten years has strained my loyalty in this regard. In the face of all the Bushisms, Palinisms, Bachmanisms, Beckisms and the bouncing, sputtering and wildly gesticulating Limbaughisms it was beginning to look like my Liberals were being outgunned!

However, in the matter of dress and style sense, my lovable Libs still have no equal. Largely due to the urgency of the disastrous BP spill a parade of weirdly dressed and wildly coiffed individuals, easily recognizable as Liberals by their left wing associations, are once again making their presence known.

We haven’t seen much of these people lately. They who wantonly spend their lives trying to preserve the oceans, conserve the species and reserve our resources for us don’t get much press anymore.

Yet, once again they are in the news because of their efforts to convince us to demand policies that preserve, conserve and reserve.

Liberals are so easy to spot it has become a game at our house.

First let me say that I have a deep admiration for the solidarity of Conservatives in all things. As a personal slob myself I am in awe of their well groomed and well coiffed appearance any time, anywhere the cameras run them down. (Or they run down the cameras.) I can only assume they are always like that and I respect them for it.

But Liberals, by their very diversity, stick out in any crowd. If you see an intense little woman, 30 pounds overweight whose wildly mismanaged hair looks like the round bristly brush of a chimney sweep, speaking awkwardly and urgently on behalf of masks and protective gear for clean-up crews, you can bet your next credit card reward that she is a Liberal.

That lanky balding guy in the wrinkled vest with a long New England nose that barely hold his glasses up ?? Speaking almost in a whisper before a Congressional Committee? No tie..plaid shirt..looks like he slept under the mattress instead of on it?? A 4-sure Lib.

If you see two people running for the school board, one a loan officer at the bank with his cell phone tucked into a pocket of his L.L. Bean cargo pants and the other a retired school teacher in stretch knit pants carrying what looks like a beach bag for a purse,..guess which one is the Lib.

Oh, I know there are some very well decked out Liberals and I even know some who get their haircut on a regular basis and buy new clothes twice a year. But I can’t help regarding them with a certain amount of suspicion. In an emergency, how in the world would they find time to scrub down an oil-soaked turtle if they had to stop to comb their hair every half hour or so? And what would it do to their nails I ask you?

Just how long do you think they would last on a Whaling Ship Bombing Mission? What do you think would happen then to their carefully color-treated hair, Designer Speedo pants and Gucchi shoulder bag?

And all those hours spent collecting foodstuff for the poor and clothes for the homeless..how could they do it without good old tennis shoes? If I know anything about style, (and I don’t) you should NEVER wear tennis shoes with nice clothes like one would naturally wear while collecting foodstuff for the poor and clothes for the homeless.

At any rate, I love Lib watching. It is one of my favorite sports.

Compassionate Conservatism Defined Conservatively

"I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family." --George W. Bush, Greater Nashua, N.H., Chamber of Commerce, Jan. 27, 2000.

Well, thanks to the solid Republican "no" block, aided by the invincible Ben Nelson (D-NE), against extending unemployment benefits for the two or three million unemployed people in the country right now, it is even harder for many people to "put food on their families".

For my part, it is a little difficult to work up a good set of tearful apologies for poor old BP, as Sen. Joe Barton(R-Texas) did on the floor of the Senate last week, and at the same time practice tough love on all those unemployed people who, according to Republican ideology, just lay around the shack waiting for that huge windfall of unemployment benefits.

A Fairy Tale for Those Who Think They Never Did

Once upon a time long ago in a valley far away there lived a little girl. She was not a particularly pretty little girl nor was she any smarter than even the most average of the village children. She was careless about paying attention and remembering things so sometimes she appeared to be even more average than the average children of the village.

Consequently she had no skill for her mother to call upon when she needed help, no talent that her father could brag about to his co-workers and her personality left much to be desired as she was often bemused.

Mostly she went through life watching and listening and all around her people were doing the most marvelous things and the wonder of it was that the people did not even appear to know how marvelously wonderful the thing was that they were doing!

One day while walking she came upon a boy sitting on a rock playing a lovely flute. The music was beautiful and the little girl knew that the tune would stay with her for a long long time so she sat down in the grass and listened.

But the boy played listlessly with slumped shoulders and his fingers moved methodically up and down the ebony wood of the flute and the girl saw how it glowed in the sunlight making the music even more pleasant. She wished fervently that she could play the flute but for that moment she was content to listen to the boy.

And when the boy took the flute from his lips to lay it aside she clapped her hands and called to the boy and told him how wonderfully he played and her face shone with the pleasure of the music. So the boy sat straighter and brought the flute to his lips again and the music was even more beautiful so she sat in the grass and listened to the boy for awhile. And the boy smiled when he wasn’t playing and the sound from the flute became clearer and happier and she hummed the tunes all the way down the road.

And she was sorry that she couldn’t play the flute but very happy that the boy could.

And on the way she came to a low spot in the road where the village carts had passed by so many times and the weather had been so wet that the road was impassable and that only the most sturdy carts were able to detour way up around the knob of a nearby hill and back down to the road. And she knew this was why the letter carrier had not been able to bring the expected letter from her brother far away that her mother so eagerly waited for.

She remembered her mother’s anxious face and was happy to see the two men, with mud covered boots and work-rough hands, shoveling gravel into the ruts and covering the gravel with pitch. They didn’t seem to be happy doing this kind of work and the girl did not blame them because the gravel was heavy and the pitch stank and the men quarreled between themselves as to who would have to spread the pitch.

But they were doing a fine job and the part of the road repaired could hardly be told from the old undamaged part and she stopped and told them so. She also told them about her brother’s letters and how happy her mother would be to know that another would be coming once again. And one said to the other, as she passed on by, “I’ll take a turn with the pitch now, friend.” And he did.

She was sorry that she wasn’t strong enough to shovel the gravel and the pitch to hasten the time when her mother would get the longed for letter but she was glad the men were.

She passed a young woman as she went along who had the charge of two small children and an infant that rode high on her shoulder and was held there firmly by one of the young woman’s thin arms. The woman looked distracted and unhappy as if there were a thousand places she would rather be and in more entertaining company but she clutched the infant to her shoulder and allowed the two small children to cling to her worn skirt.

The girl said to her, “It must be very hard to watch out for all three of those children” and she said, “Yes, for if I don’t watch every minute the one will fall into the river or off the bridge and the other is always wandering away and the baby often chokes while eating.” And the girl thought, “How capable this young woman is. I am sure I would never have such patience as she shows. And how wise must the mother be to put her children into her care”.

And she told the young woman those things and the young woman stood taller and softened her face and she patted the sleeping infant and said, “Well yes, well, I do my best” and the girl thought her best was very good indeed and told her so. And the young woman smiled and smoothed one of the children’s hair and tucked the other child’s scarf in a little more snuggly.

And the just average girl who had no particular beauty, and who had no skill or talent, walked on and was glad that she knew so many people who did.

Internet Career on the Ropes!! My Red and Blue Collide

My internet career is careening out of control! I now find that my capacity to offend, alienate and enrage is expanded far beyond my neighbors, acquaintances and immediate family! Go figure!

As an unmarried progressive feminist in a very red section of a very red state I recently made an attempt to do a little “reverse reach-out” in an effort to see just what it is about us liberal progressive types that so infuriates my neighbors, co-workers and fellow red-staters.

I tried watching Fox News but became so confused trying to follow Glen Beck’s little white-board thingy and so distracted by Ann Coulter’s Adam’s apple going up and down and all the former beauty queen “You Betcha’s” the whole thing was lost on me.

I even relented at one point and responded, very politely, to an insult, (which I get daily and generally ignore) from one of my customers at Rudy’s Discount Smoke Shop regarding my Proud to Be a Democrat bumper sticker. My thinking was that we might exchange some enlightening dialogue but he just wound up threatening to shoot me with the gun that he swore “no #@&**N..%## was going to take away from me even if he did think he was president.”

I made an effort to engage some young(er), cosmopolitan progressives thinking that their advantages in education, international experience and lifelong freedom from any physical or financial hardship might give them a leg up on understanding and consensus building. Not so. They just as readily took delight in proclaiming the French as their “bashee de jour” and espoused the plight of the poor Islamic woman and her right to wear her burka as their “cause de jour”. Like we don’t have enough causes right here to fight over.

It didn’t take long to confirm my suspicion that there are definitely wackos on both sides of the spectrum with both groups totally convinced that they were the “real people” and the others were simply “the others” and should be disinherited from all good things due to their ignorance, lack of values, absence of taste etc…

I did, however, find two instances of common ground in these two disparate groups.

1: They both seem to hate the French, a people I always had rather benign thoughts about and couldn’t help being a little grateful too because of the La Fayette thing during the Revolutionary War and the aid to New Orleans in the War of 1812..and then I always did like French fries and never could remember to call them Freedom Fries. And there was that French lady in Paris one night who walked a block and a half in the rain with us, after midnight, to make sure John and I understood the directions to a hotel with a vacancy ….And

2: Both of these groups seem to absolutely and totally believe that they are “the real people” or even “the real Americans.” Everyone else is an adversary and sometimes a downright enemy. This concept seems familiar. Hmmm..

Is it a little similar to the many tribes, primitive and otherwise, throughout history who have referred to themselves as “The People”? Have we come no farther than that?

States' Rights and All That Stuff

All this revisionist theory regarding the glorification of the old South, the sacred honor of the Confederacy, nullification, secession and other blather by people who only used history books for propping up the entertainment center is more than a little weird.

Forget the high falutin’ ideals of Abraham Lincoln. Take a look at “Old Hickory” himself, President Andy Jackson, a true Southerner before he became a Westerner, South Carolina born, and the first “common man” to gain the presidency.

When in 1828 he was faced with the most vexing problem of his administration, a tariff on British trade that would curtail profits in the south, his arch enemy was his own vice-president and S. Carolinian John C. Calhoun.

When Calhoun started spouting off about nullification rights (states could nullify federal laws they consider unconstitutional or could secede) and talked of “setting up their own government” Jackson understood, and stated, that the question was not about the tariff but of Union and the threat of disunion, which he considered treason.

Jackson stated bluntly that such talk was treasonous and if anything came of it he would “hang Calhoun from a tall tree.”

According to Jackson “the tariff can be modified” and it was.

Jackson also stated emphatically that the goal and purpose of the United States was Liberty and Union and as long as he had the power he would uphold that dual premise.

Of course Jackson threatened so often to hang somebody from a tall tree you had to kind of assume he probably had at one time or another. Jackson was not a gentleman’s gentleman.

The ERA and Those Who Opposed It

ERA (Equal Rights Amendment) vs Phyllis Schafley

Here is a lady you, my young daughters and granddaughters, nieces and grandnieces, friends and adversaries, may never have heard of but should come to know. Because her influence was so powerful within the Conservative and Republican circles and because her writings are still widely available in those groups her opinions bear looking at. In many ways she was the Sarah Palin of the 1960s and '70s.

The Equal Rights Amendment that actually made it the law of the land that women were not second class citizens was always strongly opposed by Republican/Conservative groups.

Phyllis Schafley was one of a handful of well-funded women traveling the country to speak out against the ERA. She organized a group that she called The Positive Woman. I remember some of the goals of The Positive Woman. Some of them were pretty laughable even then.

Ms. Schafley’s words on the subject are as follows:

(T)he Positive Woman finds somebody on whom she can lavish her maternal love so that it doesn't well up inside her and cause psychological frustrations. Surely no woman is so isolated by geography or insulated by spirit that she cannot find someone worthy of her maternal love. …women profit most of all (from enacting this philosophy) because it is part of their very nature....

To maintain this little fallacy and the policies that held them in place the conservative argument was that women were already covered by the Constitution. Not hardly.

In 1776, Abigail Adams wrote to her husband John, "In the new code of laws, remember the ladies and do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands."1 John Adams replied, "I cannot but laugh. Depend upon it, we know better than to repeal our masculine systems."2 And he was serious!

The new Constitution’s promised rights were fully enjoyed only by certain white males. Women were treated according to social tradition and English common law and were denied most legal rights. In general they could not vote, own property, keep their own wages, or even have custody of their children

In my lifetime, with few exceptions, women could not rent an apartment, buy a home, a car or open a bank or credit card account without a male co-signer. Stop and think about that for a minute. No matter who the money was earned by, a male had to sign. If you were single either your father, brother, boss or even your 21-year-old son, had to co-sign. No matter how accomplished, educated, hard-working or responsible you were, the eyes of any interviewer slid right over your shoulder to see if there was a male standing behind you.

You who have managerial jobs, work in the financial industry, a health clinic, the educational administrative system and virtually all of the professions, owe your opportunity to the battle fought and won by others before you. In almost all instances in a bank or business or health clinic or school two people, a man and a woman, working side by side were paid a 2-1 differential. That is, the male invariably earned twice as much as his female co-worker for the exact same work. Remember please, it hasn’t really been that long ago.

It took not only Title VIIII of the Civil Rights Act under President Lyndon Johnson but additional effort by the National Organization of Women to get Johnson to complete an Executive order to make sure Title VIIII applied to women and girls. Title VIIII disallows any discrimination of benefits, funded by Federal dollars, to anyone for reasons of race, ethnic background, etc. but did not originally include “gender”. Women fought very hard to get Johnson to put into law the inclusion of women in this protection.

As a student, if you liked any sport other than cheer leading, you needed to do it on your own time and dime. Virtually all school sports budgets, Kindergarden through Graduate School, went toward maintaining popular male sports programs. The programs available for girls interested in hockey, soccer, tennis, running, softball, basketball, skiing were insignificant to non-existent and embarrassingly under-funded. But of course nobody was embarrassed. Title VIIII and the subsequent Executive order changed all that.

As is now the case against health care reform the Conservative talking points against the ERA were greatly slanted by disingenuous statements. They whipped up the religious right by 1: Painting all "Womens Libbers" as degenerate homosexuals and 2: arguing that women who wanted equal rights would also force co-ed bathrooms, public nudity, legal rights comparable to men, same-sex marriage and abortion on demand upon the "real Americans". Do these tactics sound familiar?

Their "fear and destroy" campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment was similar to what we hear today in opposition to any progressive effort to make changes that improve the lives of people other than themselves.

Those who fought for the Equal Rights Amendment and got it passed into law should be remembered.

However, the Phyllis Schafleys of the world should be remembered too, so that we can recognize them when we see and hear them.

As beneficiaries of the ERA you need to see what it was, and is, all about. Check out the site:


http://www.equalrightsamendment.org/. You may have to cut and paste but it will be worth it.

International Poetry Day

Today is International Poetry Day!

In celebration of the day, and in recognition of my own very bad poetry I looked up the definition of poetry as the erudites of the world see it. Well, you don’t want to suffer through most of the very complicated definition given by those very smart people but I did glean a short blurb that I could relate to. According to those that take it upon themselves to define it…

.. While there are reasonable interpretations, there can never be a definitive interpretation….

Well, that’s the sorry truth for sure. Nobody ever understands the stuff I write. I get pretty tired of hearing..”..but what does it mean..??” ..or watching peoples’ eyes glaze over at the third line..

But I like to define poetry as some writing that has the ability to take you to another place emotionally. Poetry helps you to see and hear and feel someone else's thoughts and emotional place and to throw yours out to the world.. Poetry is a connection between what lies beneath the surface of our selves and each other.

Poetry is emotion in song. It gives a voice to fear without retreat, joy without conceit and sorrow without despair.

Poetry is a good thing. We should read more of it.

The Merits of Torture

I am absolutely and totally amazed that we ever came to the point where the merits of torture were, and still are, seriously and openly open for debate.

Besides being only minimally effective, torture is wrong..wrong..wrong. To institutionalize it by integrating it into the national defense character is wrong…wrong…wrong.

As a nation our slow, cumbersome often violent marching towards perfecting a union that embraces the rights of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” for all people while protecting us from those who want us dead never ceases. Great moral questions are never easy to resolve. The longer they remain unchallenged the more firmly entrenched they become.

I can think of only one other time when a subject was so shattering to our national character, so detrimental to our reputation worldwide or so divisive of the national body. That was, of course, the question of slavery.

A very great man had something to say on that subject and I am struck by how appropriate his words are to the question of organized torture.

“I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of it. I hate it because it deprives our republic of its just influence in the world and enables our enemies to taunt us as hypocrites, causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, forces so many good men among ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty.”
Abraham Lincoln

I hear a bell ringing here.

Eating To Kill

Are We Eating Ourselves to Death?

Our diets serve two purposes. The first and obviously the most important though short term goal, is to keep the body alive and functioning.

Secondly, and just as important, is to support and strongly sustain our immune systems for a lifetime.

In the past we necessarily focused on the first goal of getting enough food and how to keep it “safe” from disease carrying pathogens.

We have done a wonderful job in meeting these goals. Our food is safer and more plentiful than in any other part of the world and at any time in history.

But it has come with the cost of sacrificing the second goal of sustaining for a lifetime!

Why? How can that be? Cancer rates remain high and auto-immune, circulatory and respiratory disease are increasing?. Perhaps the answer lies not in what we eat but in how our food source is managed.

We now know that livestock and their produce, raised for food, cannot be forced to subsist and produce in conditions, and with diets, foreign and unrelated to conditions and diets developed as they evolved, and still become or produce healthy, immune-supportive food for human consumption.

In simple terms this means that animals with access to pasture and freedom of mobility to “pick and choose” for their own needs, as opposed to animals confined and force-fed grains and reprocessed animal by-products, provide vitally superior food for humans.

It is not that the meat or milk or eggs or cheese is inherently harmful. It is that these foods, through rigid and confining production methods, have been robbed of much, if not all of their immunity-producing characteristics.

Omega-3 fatty acids and CLAs: Now there is a mouthful! But Omega-3 fatty acids and CLAs (conjugated linoleic acid) are “good fat”. Yes, there IS such a thing as good fat and we cannot live without it. Every cell and system in the human body relies on this good fat. We cannot manufacture it so it must be in our diet.

For instance, Omega-3 is the most important fat in the brain, which largely consists of several fats. Lack of Omega-3 increases the risk of depression, aggressive behavior, ADD and dementia.

People with diets abundant in Omega-3 are half as likely to die from heart attacks or stroke.

A ruminant animal, (that is, animals that eat grass etc.) gets its ability to manufacture Omega-3s from green grass. Every day an animal spends in a feedlot being fed grain the Omega-3s diminish. By the time it is slaughtered and ready for consumption it has virtually undetectable amounts of Omega-3s.

Eggs produced from pastured poultry have 400 times the Omega-3 fatty acid that confinement eggs contain. Surprisingly they also have 10% less fat, 40% more vitamin A and 34% less cholesterol!

The next time you crack an egg from your local super market check out the flatness and paleness of the yolk. Strangely enough, the paler the yolk the lower the Omega-3 count and the higher the fat and cholesterol present. A good pasture-run hen will produce an egg with a bright orange yolk that “stands up” well. That is, it does not lie flat but mounds up within the white.

CLA is made in the rumen of grazing animals. It is very similar to LA,(linoleic acid). One important difference in the molecular structure of CLAs and LAs is their effect on a living body.

LAs promote tumor growth.

CLAs block tumor growth.

LAs are linked with diabetes and obesity.

CLAs block the enzymes that move fats from the blood into storage in the body's fat cells.

The milk from cows fed grass and little or no grain had 500% more CLA than did milk from cows fed grain. Yes, it is possible to produce good, sweet tasting milk without grain and a small, but growing, segment of the dairy industry is beginning to do just that.

It is also possible to produce good, lean, reasonably tender and wonderfully flavorsome beef with carefully orchestrated grazing and little or no grain input. It is being done.

Old mindsets die hard, however, and the negative connotations of “grassfed” in the cattle business is an easy one for confinement producers to exploit.

In the past beef sold as grassfed was almost always the result of livestock that had been on open range, generally the poorest of pasture, and HAD to be slaughtered due to some unforeseen circumstances such as drought, family death, economic emergency and in too many instances, sickness in the animal itself.

That is no longer the case. Much research and experimentation has been and is being done on developing and maintaining correct pastures for this type of production.

Our vegetable and fruit production is also in question. Large acreages, farmed for decades by large conglomerates, have long since been bled of the balance of elements necessary to really sustain our health and natural immunity. All the efforts of these conglomerate companies are focused on production of large vegetables of abnormally perfect physical appearance with as long a storage life as possible. Flavor is secondary and actual nutritional value is a myth.

In short, the overused land is replenished only with the nutrients necessary to grow economically advantageous crops, that is large, low-perishable products that taste nothing like their progenitors and contain far less real nutritional value.

Isn't it time for us to take another look at how our food is grown?

Ref: Grass Fed is Best/Jo Robinson

Ref: http://www.mercola.com/beef/health_benefits.htm

Olympics of Earthquakes

Recently we have seen the unparalled devastation from two record-setting natural disasters and the response of two populations that could not be more paradoxical.

In Haiti, we see a poverty-stricken nation, barely educated, with a travesty of government, no humanitarian services or competent leadership, it's infrastructure totally devastated with a final death toll of 200,000.

Chili, a truly remarkable multicultural nation of Native American and European peoples with strong governmental leadership, highly educated, economically thriving, well-prepared for just such an occurance by advanced architecture and building standards, has a reported death toll of less than 1000.

Yet Haiti showed us, in image after horrible image, the remarkable beauty, patience and stability of its population.

Those first seventy-two hours showed terrible tragedy and sorrow. Grown men walking miles with injured women or children in their arms thinking to reach medical help that wasn't there. Silent women, surrounded by equally silent children, huddled in the dirt clutching each other, waiting for help that did not come. Grown men with tears streaming, fighting furiously, begging for help of any passer by to extricate a loved one. A child gripping the shoulder of a younger child and embracing two even smaller ones searching the moving crowd desperately, probably for a mother or a father whom he would never see again.

The media made much over the sporadic riots and vandalism for food and supplies after only EIGHT DAYS in 90 degree weather with no food supplies, no water, no homes, no protection for their women and children, living under cloths stretched across poles in the remaining open spaces, their injured loved ones dying on the bare ground beside them. Surviving families, doubled by traumatized orphans whom they accepted within the circle of what little care and protection they could provide, stood in line patiently for the few supplies available and the meager and inadequate emergency medical care . Of course the point was finally reached where only the strong could reach supplies and bad things did begin to happen but sporadically.

By weeks end these people, instead of striking out, stealing or destroying, amazed the world by weaving through the sad mutilated streets of their home city, Port Au Prince singing their gratitude, praising in song, in the manner of their community culture, for the lives that remained.

Chili, after only 36 hours of terror and multiple aftershocks, in both anticipation of shortages and plain old thievery and opportunism, is already having to send out troops in an effort to hold back rioting looters. Already we see scenes of the grown men and youths of Chili stripping the stores and homes.

Haiti, I salute you.

Chili, you have my deepest sympathy in this sad hour.

Mortality

I don’t believe in death. Never Have. You can crush a thing, knock it down, cut it off, beat it into the ground and it will lie in wait and emerge again. You can kill a thing, shoot it, stab it, bleed it out..kill it with kindness or just sheer stupidity and mismanagement but you cannot destroy it.

Even a burned thing..an incinerated thing.. becomes the air to be breathed, the ash to fertilize the dust of the field.

The poor dead goat dragged to the far fence line runs again, with the fox and the coyote.. each trotting away, head held high, to better grip a bloodied haunch. Eyes plucked and consumed now see through those of the red tailed hawk perched on that far stump, digesting and the once gentle heart beats with the wings of the Great Bald Eagle, whose yellow talons tore at the breast to gain that tender morsel..so that it might soar to the very heights … and the heart soars with it.

The blood of this butchering bleeds into the ground for a final weeping, and the grass beneath it is the better for it. And in the spring, the hare, the badger, the weanling fawn, savor this delicacy that strengthens their own blood, depleted by harsh winter.

Within this holocaust of slaughter and killing, life is. It cannot be any other way.

I Hate Civil Wars!!

I hate civil wars. They are so messy and chaotic and nobody ever follows the rules.

It’s like..if company comes..in the form of some foreign aggressor or some foreign country that just happens to be irritating, people pull out the rule book and at least pretend to abide by a few rules like..not to shoot babies until they learn to crawl and not to burn down old peoples’ homes until you wake them up and unhook their oxygen and that sort of stuff.

But civil wars are all in the family. And you know we’re never polite to our families!

I remember our first civil war..well not actually, as I am not reeaaly that old, but I’ve read about it. Most people call it the Revolutionary War but if ever a war was misnamed that one was. It was Civil War sure enough.

Brother against brother, father against son and wife’s family against husband..well you get my drift. Not much different from a lot of Thanksgiving celebrations except a lot of stuff got burned up ..or down..and a lot of people got crippled up or killed off. After the dust settled, the losers, them being the “Tories” who couldn’t quit thinking of themselves as Englishmen, were set on the road A.S.A.P. or sooner! They either shipped quick as scat back to England or tramped off to Canada.

Their “holdings”, which meant their homes, land, and anything but the clothes on their backs lose enough to stick in a tow sack, were confiscated by the winners.

The reason this ever came to my attention was because almost all of my ancestors were there at the time. Several Lewis’s, a Lamb, several McDonalds and a few Allens lived to draw government money or get free land in Kentucky.

The Lewis’s for the most part, having at the time been here for a more than a hundred years already, had enough smart to pick the winning side right off the bat. I don’t know of any specific Tory Lamb’s or Allens but I know for sure the McDonalds tried to hedge their bets by some going one way and some another.

It’s just a trick of fateful geneology that I wound up here in the U.S. and not freezing my bum off in Ontario or some other Canadian city. Not to say I’m not freezing my bum off here in North Missouri, but I have hopes that the weather will turn by April whereas Toronto and Ontario and those other places stay cold a lot longer.

That in itself would set me to hollering “Give me Liberty or Give Me Death” up and down the road.

Congratulations to All Independents!!

It seems the Independents are now in the drivers seat when it comes to directing our government. Good luck to them.

To me Independents are really not for much of anything..neither fish nor fowl; flying or swimming, as the case may be, with whatever wind or tide that passes their door on any given day.

It's hard to have a high regard for them. In conversation I have found them to pour out the latest radio talk show format and opinion or that of their favorite TV Evangelist or whatever the neighbor told them or whatever their particular industry house organ published that week. Often with radio listeners it is really funny to listen to because their indignation..and there is always a LOT of indignation..rises at the precise point of the subject that was voiced in the latest radio thingy.

It's like they wake up every four years or so and say "I'm agin it!!". How can we ever get anywhere this way?

Health Care

On a health care cost comparison per person annually of six of the developed nations, Canada at $3,895, France at $3601, Germany at $3,588, Switzerland at $4,417, United Kingdom at $2,992 and the United States at $7,290, our cost is about twice or more that of the four of the five countries and more than half again as much as The United Kingdom, even though their systems cover ALL their people.

And it might come as a surprise to you to know that the people of Canada, France, The United Kingdom and Switzerland like their health care better than we like ours.

A survey by The Deloitte Center for Health Solutions of 14,000 people in these six countries records our percent of satisfaction as fifth. Only the Germans had more negative experiences than we did.

I imagine you are absolutely and totally convinced that our health care service is superior to those of other countries. Well the figures for infant mortality and longevity, the two primary indicators of a nations health, just don’t support that. According to the CIA World Fact Book the U.S. is 48th in longevity. That means there are 48 countries where people live longer lives. There are 21 countries that have fewer infant deaths per thousand than we do. That means that more of our babies die.

However, if you are thrilled and happy with the current health care you receive and don’t want to see it changed you are surely blessed by the God’s and I salute you!

If you are already on a government health care program such as Medicare, Medicaid, VA or as a Government Employee you are risk free!! Why worry about all those pesky other people even if some of them ARE your grandchildren and great-grandchildren? Only you can answer that.

If your health care is not guaranteed by any of the above programs your satisfaction indicates that you are supremely confident that you will never lose your job and therefore your healthcare, that your spouse or any child of yours will never develop an expensive-to-treat condition and be expunged from your policy, that your health will never falter or you will never be left permanently altered by an accident, causing your policy to be canceled or at the very least, turn you into the proverbial pauper when you reach the “maximum” of your coverage.

You are confident that if any of these situations occur, usually in your thirty’s, forties or fifties, you can as easily get additional coverage as you did fifteen years ago when you were younger and less encumbered with a medical record, a spouse with a medical record and children with a medical record. You have no doubt that employment will be renewed elsewhere. Oh that it were so!

Employers seeking new employees have this ghastly little habit of seeking the most profitable employee and medical backgrounds are crucial to the cost of any given employee. And they can and do check!!

Your satisfaction also indicates that you are absolutely and positively certain that your marriage, and the insurance benefits attached, will never end. Ooookaaaay!

Health care reform is going to cost a bundle. Nobody ever mentions how much NO health care reform is going to cost. I am happy that you are not particularly disturbed by projections of your premiums expanding another 150% this next ten years as they have the past ten.

Those committed to destroying this administrations efforts on any subject with any objective have really done a number on any hope we have for health care reform. Now it looks like we may not achieve any bill at all.

We will live to regret this. Well, not all of us. According to several studies, most recently the 2009 Harvard Medical School study, 45,000 uninsured or under-insured people will die this year for lack of medical attention.

Too bad about them I guess.

Women and Their Heroes

When asked, most women will list as the people they consider as heroes men of great reknown, or their fathers or their grandfathers. Seldom do they mention another woman's name. I find this very odd.

I find this odd because so many of the great social, religious and governing accomplishments of the last five centuries have been due to the courage, dedication and leadership of some very outstanding women.

The reason your six year-old daughter is not working beside you in a coal mine or balancing on a narrow platform in a textile mill coughing in clouds of cotton fiber is because of the decades of struggle by a handful of people, most of whom are women. You have no reason to fear the bedlam and sheer Hell of a 19th century mental hospital where women with "nervous" disorders often wound up, because of the efforts of a remarkable woman. The reason you do not have 13 children and are old..old..old at the age of 35 is because of the fight for available birth control, considered a sin by men whom, I might add, wrote the book on sin.

And not the least, and maybe the most important, was that wonderful concept of government called "Suffrage" known to us..the beneficiaries of these great women's sacrifice and work...as voting rights.

As for ordinary everyday heroes for women we might recall that in the 1960's the World Health Organization released the results of a study that showed 70% of the world's labor was being performed by women. I doubt if that has changed much.

So to all the young readers of this blog, (I am sure there are at least two), I am going to introduce you occasionally to some women who deserve to be remembered.

**************
Margaret Fell

If you hate war or are black or have aspirations of church leadership you owe a great deal to Margaret Fell or Margaret Fox (1614 - 23 April 1702) a founder of the Religious Society of Friends. She is known popularly as the "mother of Quakerism", and considered one of the Valiant Sixty early Quaker preachers and missionaries.

Born Margaret Askew in Dalton-in-Furness, Cumbria, England, she married Thomas Fell, a barrister,(lawyer) in 1632, and became the lady of Swarthmore Hall. After her husband's death in 1658, she retained control of Swarthmore Hall, which remained a meeting place and haven from persecution for the embryonic Quaker movement. She subsequently married George Fox, a founder of the Quakers. It is doubtful that he or his movement would have survived without her support.

Her formal petitions to King Charles II and his parliament in 1660 and 1662 for freedom of conscience in religious matters can arguably be the forerunner to the submission later signed by George Fox and other prominent (male) Quakers stating their case that, although Friends wished to see the world changed, they would use persuasion rather than violence towards what they regarded as a "heavenly" (i.e. spiritual) end.

In 1664 Margaret Fell was arrested for failing to take an oath and for allowing Quaker Meetings to be held in her home. She defended herself by saying that "as long as the Lord blessed her with a home, she would worship him in it". She spent six months in Lancaster Gaol, whereafter she was sentenced to life imprisonment and forfeiture of her property. She remained in prison until 1668, during which time she wrote religious pamphlets and epistles. Perhaps her most famous work is "Women's Speaking Justified", a scripture-based argument for women's ministry, and one of the major texts on women's religious leadership in the 17th century. There is no argument that her writings are greatly responsible for the Friends' stance that all souls, mens' and womens' are equal with equal rights and responsibilities.

Surviving both husbands by a number of years, she continued to take an active part in the affairs of the Society well into her eighties. In the last decade of her life, she firmly opposed the effort of her fellow believers in Lancashire to maintain certain traditional Quaker standards of conduct (for example, in matters of dress). She died aged 88.


**************

Courage

COURAGE

like honor and integrity..is an old fashioned word. No one speaks of it anymore..
But I have learned that you cannot live without it... It is not faith..but courage after all, that moves mountains.

You can live without money, talent, beauty or personality..

But you cannot survive without courage.

Contrary to the thought of centuries of religious and philosophers..
who are a lot smarter than I and should know better.. you CAN live without faith and ethics.. People do it all the time. But you cannot live without courage.

You CAN live without education..rank or position... But you cannot live without courage..

It seems to me that the first and most requisite command was left out of the Ten Commandments. Surely Moses, ..blinded by the situation, ..simply did not hear the very first commandment..

That commandment surely WAS...

THOU SHALT LIVE!!!!

Thou shalt live in poverty or grandeur..in health or sickness..
in the bosom of a loving family or cast out to the streets..

Yet you must live...

you must have courage..

You must live!!!

and the definition of courage must therefore be...to live... and to recognize success..or failure.. as merely a byblow of life...

because you are busy living...

The Lives of Presidents Wives

I can personally remember thirteen presidents and their wives. (I told you I was old.) This is what really gets me about the Republicans claim to moral superiority and "family values."

The virtues,accomplishments and family values of all the First Wives since WWII are as follows;

Mamie Eisenhower, Patricia Nixon and Betty Ford, all Republicans, suffered so severely from debilitating alcohol and/or drug addictions through most of their adult life, that it was public knowledge.

Three of the wives of Republican presidents, Betty Ford, Patricia Nixon and Nancy Reagan, were former actresses, chorus dancers or aspiring actresses.

Of the six Republican wives in this time period only three went past high school. Three had four year degrees (Nancy Reagan's was in Theater Arts.)

None of the Republican wives ever held public office or served in a public capacity beyond their own personal charities, such as The Betty Ford Foundation", a for profit facility for the treatment of drug and alcohol addiction or Nancy Reagan's interest in stem cell research because of her husbands Alztheimers condition.

Church attendance prior to their husband's attaining the presidency was scanty at best for almost all the Republican wives, as was their husband's. Nancy Reagan's interest in Scientology and Astrology became controversial when it became public knowledge that she was setting her husbands agenda according to the predictions of her personal astrologer.

Of the seven Democratic wives their are no debilitating addictions. Evidently democrats can't dance or sing as their are no actresses, dancers or singers. Five had four-year degrees. Four of those earned graduate degrees and two of those four earned law degrees. Two served ambassadorships and one went on to serve in the U.S. Senate, ran for the nomination of the Democratic party for the presidency and currently serves as United States Secretary of State.

Eleanor Roosevelt and Bess Truman were Episcopalian and regular churchgoers. Rosalynn Carter is a devout Baptist, as is Michelle Obama. Hillary Clinton was raised in the Methodist church, was very active in it and still attends church. Lady Bird Johnson was presented the Congressional Gold Medal and The Presidents Medal of Freedom for her efforts on behalf of the environment. Rosalynn and her husband together were awarded the Presidents Medal of Freedom.

The Pejorative Nature of the Word Socialism

On hearing the constant accusation of Socialism being applied to most of the values I always thought were pretty important I decided to upgrade my education and look the word up in my Webster’s Dictionary and Thesaurus. True, it was published in 1991. But can we agree that the dictionary does not change substantially in that length of time?

Webster, at least in 1991, said Socialism was: n. A theory of social organization aiming at co-operative action and community of property.

Well that’s weird. I guess I am a Socialist after all. I live in a rural area. I have Federal Water, a Federal Electric Co-op and highways and roads maintained by the co-operative efforts and/or combined resources of me and my neighbors, otherwise known as “The Government”. I love our City, State and Federal parks and campgrounds. I am 70 years old and get my Social Security check like clockwork and my health insurance provider will not pay a dime until my Medicare pays the bulk of it.

I rely on community projects managed and funded by me and my neighbors known as 911, fire protection, law enforcement and emergency medical treatment. It’s true I do not use these services much but I want them to be there. Our lives without these first responders could turn pretty grim at the whims of a fate that can’t tell the difference between people’s ideologies.

I get up in the morning and turn on the light, (FEC) attend the necessary, (Public Water District # 1), cook breakfast (FEC AND Public Water District # 1 plus the FDA (who at least haphazardly makes sure we are not eating dirt), head off to work on good highways, (DOT) with the reasonable assumption that other drivers will obey traffic rules (State Highway Patrol and City Police) and put in a day’s work more or less. (I am 70 years old remember ). When I get my paycheck I can reasonably expect it to be the correct amount for the hours I worked. I KNOW that if it is not, no matter where I work, I have a powerful ally at our state capital. I could go on and on and I won’t.

But I will say that I am proud of the results of our country’s combined efforts over the last two centuries to sustain, protect and enrich the lives of all of us. I know it is not perfect. I know it is costly. We always have to dig into our pockets and yes, so will our children and so will our grandchildren. But we would do well to remember that along with the obligations we bequeath them, there will also be a tremendous backlog of structure and resources in place for them to work with.

One has only to read some of the diaries and journals of the generation before last to know how they struggled. Without good water in dry times, and no organization of services, they would stand by helplessly and watch years of work; a house, school, church, barn or hayfield etc., go up in flames. Their children were lucky to look forward to 8 years of schooling. High schools were few and far between. Roads in my part of the world, North Missouri, were pretty near impassable in wet weather. Winters were better because at least the ground froze. Heaven help you if you got caught away from home in a quick thaw! A day long trip to Kansas City, the nearest emergency medical services requiring hospitalization, cost many an arm, leg, and life. When a mother sickened, her children sickened. When a husband died or sickened, a woman and children often went hungry and just as often sickened.

This may sound like the good old days to some but not to me. And not to any rational person, I think. True, I don’t think of myself as a Socialist. I really don’t want to be a Socialist! It really sounds bad when screamed with huge, drippy red letters painted on cardboard signs carried by very angry people.

However, I always thought that we were kind of a homogenous people, a pragmatic but generous people, who had the good sense to pick and choose what worked for us out of the zillions of ideas blood was shed for in the human history.

I am a simple woman with simple ideas. I think clean water, electricity, allweather roads, law enforcement, emergency help and health care are good things. Sick people, hungry children, uneducated young people, unemployed workers, uncared for old people… These are bad things. To keep the good things working and eliminate the bad stuff takes a group effort. We seem to be in dire straits as a country right now. I think we better get to grouping.