I Can't Even Think of a Good Title for This ...

SCHAGEN, Netherlands (AP) -- The massive central door in the side of Noah's Ark was thrown open Saturday -- you could say it was the first time in 4,000 years -- drawing a crowd of curious pilgrims and townsfolk to behold the wonder.

Of course, it's only a replica of the biblical Ark, built by Dutch creationist Johan Huibers as a testament to his faith in the literal truth of the Bible. (Read it and weep)

I like this part the best:

On the uncovered top deck -- not quite ready in time for the opening -- will come a petting zoo, with baby lambs and chickens, and goats. And one camel.

One camel?? If I were a little kid, I'd feel ripped off! Isn't there supposed to be two of everything?

This leads me to my newest moneymaking scheme: a Quaker theme park! Penn-Land? The Peaceable (Magic) Kingdom? There will be a recreation of Pendle Hill right in the middle, but it will be built out of compost, in keeping with Quaker Earth care principles. Carnival games such as, "William Penn's Sword -- Wear It As Long As You Can! Everyone a winner!"

I think I need to go back to bed.

Politics As Usual (or I Should Know Better Than To Read the News on Sunday Morning)

This quote from Hillary Clinton just infuriates me:

"Somebody said to me that he wished we could just rewind the 21st century and just eliminate the Bush-Cheney administration, with all their mistakes and misjudgments," she said to cheers. "People are ready for leaders who understand it is our votes who put them in power, our tax dollars that pay the bills."

Excuse me, but isn't this the same person who up to a month ago was supporting the war, at least out of one side of her mouth? Has she ever done a mea culpa and said she regrets her war vote? Does she not understand that she and her cowardly and rich colleagues have played a significant role in the last 6 years that we wish we could rewind? When they could have been thorns in this administration's side, instead they have acquiesced. Like neurotic dogs, most of them have simply gone belly up and peed on themselves at the feet of Bush, Cheney, and Rove. Some, like Lieberman, went over to the Dark Side, and Hilary forever straddles the fence. Yuck.

Maybe I will have to eat my words, but I cannot support the duplicitous Sen. Clinton for president.

And speaking of leaders "who understand it is our votes that put them in power", what about impeachment? I got a form letter email from Tammy Baldwin in response to my message from a few days ago: "Thank you very much for taking the time to write to me. Your opinion is important to me blah blah blah woof woof woof." My friend and fellow blogger Poodle Doc got the same response and emailed me,

"She doesn't get that I (and others) want IMPEACHMENT not OVERSIGHT. Oversight is watching a crime, impeachment is prosecuting."

Bingo! That is exactly what is so frustrating right now. They're going to pretend that watching BushCo is the same as doing something. The crimes have already been committed. When you see that someone has robbed the convenience store, do you watch them to make sure they don't do it again? Or do you arrest them and prosecute?

And our supposed representatives are so inaccessible to us. You can email or call until you're blue in the face, but you know that the messages aren't even really getting to them, only to their staff. I see Tammy shopping in our neighborhood grocery store once or twice a year, when Congress is in recess. I'm usually respectful of her right to be an ordinary person, but next time I think I will respectfully collar her.

Sheesh.

Robert Fisk, again

I've posted before about the journalist Robert Fisk. He has a new book out, The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East, which my friend Poodle Doc says is remarkable. Here is Fisk in a nutshell, in an article posted today on Common Dreams. And more. He is one of the smartest journalists around, by far. In fact, he's one of just a handful worthy of the job title.

Greg Palast, another fine investigative reporter, has more along the same lines. We would not be teetering on the brink of fascism (and I believe we are) if the Fourth Estate had been doing its job.

(At our house, we have adopted a Palast-coined term: "Clown meat" for food from Mickey D's. Isn't it great?)

Kris Delmhorst, Hummingbird

In my next life I want to be Kris Delmhorst or maybe Eliza Gilkyson. Or both. Kris is coming to town next week, a concert I'm looking forward to.

Write your Representative to Support Cheney's Impeachment

Here is the email I just sent Tammy Baldwin, may it do some good.

Congresswoman Baldwin,

I am writing with a heartfelt APPEAL that you join your fellow representative, Dennis Kucinich, in moving to impeach Vice President Dick Cheney. If the events of the last 6 years do not constitute what the framers of the Constitution had in mind when they talked about "high crimes and misdemeanors", I do not know what does. Speaker Pelosi says impeachment will impede the Democratic agenda. As a citizen of this country and of your district, I am stating in NO UNCERTAIN TERMS that NOTHING on the Democrats' agenda equals putting a stop to this administration in importance. In fact, I do not see how it will be possible to really move forward in any ways that are much more than symbolic, as long as this administration is in power.

It is my understanding that once articles of impeachment have been introduced, the House must consider them; at least that is the way it has been for the last 200 years. Are you and your colleagues going to simply sit on your hands and continue the precedent of ignoring the will of the American people, or will you take the courageous stand alongside Representative Kucinich? It is what the people want!

Please do the right thing.

Sincerely,
Suzan Grindrod

Linton Kwesi Johnson

Pete Seeger

Now here's a movie that I want to see.

Irony Is Not Dead

Check this out. It's an invitation/fundraising announcement about the Eyes Wide Open anti-war installation, which I received today from the American Friends Service Committee. AFSC, for the uninitiated, is a Quaker organization. You know, the pacifists? Now look closely at the United States Post Office cancellation stamp: "Celebrating the 230th Army Birthday."

Hmmmmm.

(Incidentally, if any of my multitudes of readers are in the Chicago area, this exhibit is phenomenal. Do go and see it.)

John Gorka, Road of Good Intentions

I found this posted at Crooks and Liars today. It's a powerful song, from the wonderful album Writing in the Margins (which is the title of another song about the War on Iraq.) I was just listening to it this morning, coincidentally.

A sign of hope?

Well, maybe.

Kucinich announces impeachment charges against Vice President Cheney
Michael Roston
Published: Tuesday April 24, 2007

After a series of delays, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), a candidate for president in 2008, announced a series of charges against Vice President Dick Cheney in Washington, DC, late in the day. Kucinich alleged that the Vice President had committed a series of impeachable offenses, and he was therefore introducing Articles of Impeachment against Cheney in the Congress today.

Kucinich started off by reading the opening words of the Declaration of Independence, arguing they were "instructive at this moment."

"Whenever any government official becomes destructive of the founding purposes, that official must be held accountable," he said.

The Ohio Democrat's move intended to provide a "defense of the rights of American people to have a government that is honest and peaceful."

Kucinich excoriated the Vice President who he called "a driving force for taking us into war against Iraq under false pretenses, and is once again rattling sabers of war against Iran, with the same intent to drive America into war, again based on false pretenses." (read more)

I'm not holding my breath. On the other hand, everything has a tipping point, and between this and the resolutions in both Vermont and Washington state, perhaps the ball is rolling.

I want my country back!

Shirley Holzman Grindrod Durkin, 1922 - 2001

Today is my mom's birthday. She would be 85 years old. This photo is from when she graduated from nursing school. Don't be fooled by the Trixie Belden demeanor. She was a complex person and I had a complicated relationship with her.

Her parents were Russian Jewish immigrants, who met in Milwaukee. They owned a grocery store. At some point they moved north to Eagle River, Wisconsin where her dad was a wallpaper hanger. (We had an enormous pair of shears in our kitchen that was a relic from that time.) Then they moved back to Milwaukee.

Her dad was a radical. He joined the IWW and the Communist Party. He also did jail time as a war resister during WW1. He associated with the likes of Eugene Debs and Ammon Hennesy. He also suffered from depression and was probably bi-polar, which of course went untreated at that time. He had a violent temper. I suspect my mom carried the scars of that her entire life.

My mom joined the Young People's Socialist League (YPSLs) as a teenager. She was good friends with a youthful Frank Zeidler, who became Milwaukee's Socialist mayor. When WW2 came, her childhood friend Nate Sadowsky (another YPSL) became a conscientious objector. He was stationed in Luddington, Michigan with a handsome young man from Oconomowoc, Wisconsin -- John Grindrod. Romance blossomed, and my mom would take a ferry across Lake Michigan on the weekends to visit him.

They married. My dad went to medical school and they had 4 kids in pretty quick succession. Like good liberal Unitarians (Jewnitarians, as she loved to say,) they adopted a 5th child from Korea, and then -- surprise! -- had me. 6 kids, the perfect 1950's family. Except that my mom inherited her dad's depression as well as his temper. Thankfully she did not have the extreme mood swings, but my overall recollection of her is that she was grumpy most of the time. She had very little help from my dad and she felt pretty stifled and isolated. There was verbal abuse. There were suicide attempts.

As a young adult I was very, very resentful. At some point, not long before she died, I had an epiphany that really helped me heal. I had spent most of my adulthood declaring, "I do NOT want to parent the way that my mother did!" The big AHA came when I realized that my mother did not want to parent the way she did!! And my mantra became "I want to be the kind of parent my mother wanted to be."

My dad died in 1996, and my mom was lost without him. She continued to live in their house, but her memory slipped and we kids began discussing what to do. And then something happened. She went to a YPSLs reunion and became reacquainted with one of her old comrades, Bob Durkin. They married when she was 79 years old, and she was the happiest I had ever seen her! It was such a blessing (even when she called one day and casually mentioned how happy she was, and it "wasn't all about the sex." NOooo -- TMI!!!) She developed nonHodgekins lymphoma and died just after their first anniversary.

For all of her demons, my mom was an amazing woman. She was the most generous woman you'd ever want to meet, taking numerous people under her wing from international students at the university to 3 children whose mother went to the 1968 Poor People's March on Washington to mentally ill people off the street. She profoundly shaped who I am today.

A few more memories:

She took a trip to the Russia in 1966, part of one of the first groups of Westerners allowed into the Soviet Union. I still have the little nesting dolls she brought back.

She dearly loved little kids, and faithfully volunteered twice a week in my Pre-K classroom one year.

My nephew acquired a pet pig named Galahad. Right after my mom's death, I was looking through her Rolodex for people to contact, and on my sister's card she had written not only the names of all the family members, but Galahad as well.

She and my youngest daughter had a special relationship. One of the last times I saw her, we were pushing her around the grounds of the nursing home. She was very sick, emaciated, and in pain. My daughter ran up to her with an acorn cap, and my mom put it on her own fingertip like a little puppet and made it talk to Grace. That was the kind of mom she wanted to be.

When we were writing her obituary we wanted it to reflect her unique world view, so it opened with "Shirley Holzman Grindrod Durkin died after a long and courageous battle with authority ..." and that about sums it up.

I miss her.

Happy Birthday

To Ed, my best friend and dearest husband. I love you. This is the cake I wish I could make for you.

It's Official ...

I've been accepted into the Master's program in Library Science! I've been working on the certification to be a school library media specialist for 5 years. I just have to figure out how to fit in student teaching in a library when I have to teach full time in my classroom, and I'll be done with that. It's that pesky money thang. Last summer I decided that I would go for broke (probably literally) to get the Master's. Who knows? Maybe I'll retire to some little public library somewhere; it will beat being a greeter at WalMart! After that, no more advanced degrees.

I wonder if they'll let me join a sorority ...

The Zimmers: My Generation

I had to post this. I'm 2 years away from 50, and for a couple of years now I've been feeling more and more "invisible" to young people, especially twenty-somethings. Wonderfully affirming!

A hope

The most striking thing about the terrible shooting last year in the Amish community was the fact that so many in that community, where they had just experience devastating loss, showed deep compassion for the family of the shooter. I am holding the family of Cho Seung-Hui in the light (as I am holding all of the families who lost someone in Monday's shooting) and hoping that they are being cared for, not vilified.

(The photo is a pictorial reference to the very lovely song Julian of Norwich by Sidney Carter:

Love like the yellow daffodil is blooming in the snow
Love like the yellow daffodil is lord of all I know
Ring out, bells of Norwich and let the winter come and go
All shall be well again, I know.)

No Words For This ...

The only surprise in this report is that it was published in USA Today. Seeing it spelled out like this makes me sad -- and angry -- beyond measure.

Trauma severe for Iraqi children

Study: In Baghdad, 70% showing signs

By James Palmer
USA TODAY

BAGHDAD — About 70% of primary school students in a Baghdad neighborhood suffer symptoms of trauma-related stress such as bed-wetting or stuttering, according to a survey by the Iraqi Ministry of Health.

The survey of about 2,500 youngsters is the most comprehensive look at how the war is affecting Iraqi children, said Iraq's national mental health adviser and author of the study, Mohammed Al-Aboudi.

"The fighting is happening in the streets in front of our houses and schools," Al-Aboudi said. "This is very difficult for the children to adapt to."

The study is to be released next month. Al-Aboudi discussed the findings with USA TODAY.

Many Iraqi children have to pass dead bodies on the street as they walk to school in the morning, according to a separate report last week by the International Red Cross. Others have seen relatives killed or have been injured in mortar or bomb attacks.

"Some of these children are suffering one trauma after another, and it's severely damaging their development," said Said Al-Hashimi, a psychiatrist who teaches at Mustansiriya Medical School and runs a private clinic in west Baghdad. "We're not certain what will become of the next generation, even if there is peace one day," Al-Hashimi said.

The study was conducted last October in the Sha'ab district of northern Baghdad. The low- to middle-income neighborhood is inhabited by a mix of Shiites and Sunni Arabs. Al-Aboudi said he believes the sample was broadly representative of conditions throughout the capital.

In the study, schoolteachers were asked to determine whether randomly selected students showed any of 10 symptoms identified by the World Health Organization (WHO) as signs of trauma. Other symptoms included voluntary muteness, declining performance in school or an increase in aggressive behavior.

The teachers received training from Iraqi psychologists on how to identify and help students cope with trauma-related stress, Al-Aboudi said.

The study "shows the impact of the violence and insecurity on the children and on children's mental health," said Naeema Al-Gasseer, the Iraqi representative of the WHO. "They have fear every day."

The Iraqi government is aware of the problem but largely unequipped to address it, said Ali al-Dabbagh, a government spokesman. "Until we have proper security in Baghdad, there's not much we can do to help these children," al-Dabbagh said in Washington.

The Buzz

Now THIS is truly frightening.

Nonviolence: Twenty-Five Lessons from the History of a Dangerous Idea

A Book Report by Suzy
I read this book.
It is really good.
You should read it too.

Mark Kurlansky is an author who takes subjects which are either so esoteric or so ubiquitous as to seem inconsequential, and presents them in such a way as to make it clear that not only are they of consequence, but intimately related to and interwoven with our lives. In the past he has written about cod, salt, and the Basque people. Nonviolence offers a panoramic history of civilization, and how in the context of the many wars the concept of nonviolence has been marginalized and painted as a failure. (Indeed there is not a single language in the world that has a specific word for "nonviolence.") Kurlansky argues that war as a technique for problem solving is the real failure, and that those in power are desperately threatened by nonviolence because it is so effective. He makes the excellent and oft-ignored point that the practice of pacifism and the practice of nonviolence are very distinct from one another. This book is thought-provoking and inspiring. At the end, Kurlansky lists the twenty-five lessons. A wonderful and important book!

The Twenty-five Lessons

1. There is no proactive word for nonviolence.
2. Nations that build military forces as deterrents will eventually use them.
3. Practitioners of nonviolence are seen as enemies of the state.
4. Once a state takes over a religion, the religion loses its nonviolent teachings.
5. A rebel can be de-fanged and co-opted by making him a saint after he is dead.
6. Somewhere behind every war there are always a few founding lies.
7. A propaganda machine promoting hatred always has a war waiting in the wings.
8. People who go to war start to resemble their enemy.
9. A conflict between a violent and a nonviolent force is a moral argument. If the violent side can provoke the nonviolent side into violence, the violent side has won.
10. The problem lies not in the nature of man but in the nature of power.
11. The longer a war lasts, the less popular it becomes.
12. The state imagines it is impotent without a military because it cannot conceive of power without force.
13. It is often not the largest but the best organized and most articulate group that prevails.
14. All debate momentarily ends with an "enforced silence" once the first shots are fired.
15. A shooting war is not necessary to overthrow an established power but is used to consolidate the revolution itself.
16. Violence does not resolve. It always leads to more violence.
17. Warfare produces peace activists. A group of veterans is a likely place to find peace activists.
18. People motivated by fear do not act well.
19. While it is perfectly feasible to convince a group of people faced with brutal repression to rise up in a suicidal attack on their oppressor, it is almost impossible to convince them to meet deadly violence with nonviolent resistance.
20. Wars do not have to be sold to the general public if they can be carried out by an all-volunteer professional military.
21. Once you start the business of killing, you just get "deeper and deeper" without limits.
22. Violence always comes with a supposedly rational explanation -- which is only dismissed as irrational if the violence fails.
23. Violence is a virus that infects and takes over.
24. The miracle is that despite all of society's promotion of warfare, most soldiers find warfare to be a wrenching departure from their own moral values.
25. The hard work of beginning a movement to end war has already been done.

As always, if you wish to purchase this book please do so through your local and independent bookseller. If they are unable to get it for you, you can get it here or you can find just about anything at Powells. (Why not Amazon? Do you like giving your money to union-busting Republican contributors? Me neither.)

The Politics of Naming a School

My city is building a new elementary school (on the wealthy side of town while they threaten to close neighborhood schools on my side of town because we're in a budget disaster, go figure, but that's inconsequential to my story here.) They're building a school and they solicited the public for suggestions of names.

[The last time they did this they decided on Cesar Chavez School, then hired a non-local and NON-UNION contractor to build it. The roof leaked and the school developed a building-wide mold problem in the first semester it was open, which caused health issues for both students and staff. It had to be closed for a year and a half while it was essentially rebuilt, this time with a Union contractor. There's a lesson to be learned there -- don't mess with the ghost of Cesar Chavez.]

OK, new school. The names came in and on Monday evening the BOE voted unanimously to call it General Vang Pao Elementary, in honor of the Hmong guerilla fighter/military leader who was allied with the CIA during what the Vietnamese call the American War. The choice is not without controversy, but he is considered a leader of the Hmong community in the US and the choice was made to recognize and include the significant Hmong population in our schools.

I do not know enough about Vang Pao to comment on whether the accolades are deserved, or the good outweighs the bad in his character. What bothers me is the fact that we are naming an elementary school after someone who was/is primarily known as a fighter and a military leader. What kind of a message does that send to children? We work so hard to teach that fighting does not work, that bullying is not OK ... and then name a school after a general who collaborated with the biggest bullies of all in a needlessly devastating war (an alliance which was ultimately betrayed by the US, forcing thousands of Hmong to have to flee for their lives.)

Anyway, I am troubled. The board fell all over themselves to do this, practically fawning, and NOT ONE MEMBER questioned it. The intentions are basically good, but why not a more peaceful choice? (You can read about one here.) Or why not an influential figure from the local Hmong community?

What do you think?

Appliances SFB / Neofacist 1983

Shameless
Promotion
of
a
Loved
One.

See the scrawny bass player in the white shirt? Looks to be about 12 years old? I married him.

I can't wait to be a librarian!

I cribbed this from Michael Moore's web site. (That's okay. His people cribbed it from In These Times.)

August 11th, 2004 10:31 am
I Love You, Madame Librarian - by Kurt Vonnegut

by Kurt Vonnegut / In These Times

I, like probably most of you, have seen Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. Its title is a parody of the title of Ray Bradbury’s great science fiction novel, Fahrenheit 451. This temperature 451° Fahrenheit, is the combustion point, incidentally, of paper, of which books are composed. The hero of Bradbury’s novel is a municipal worker whose job is burning books.

And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

And still on the subject of books: Our daily sources of news, papers and TV, are now so craven, so unvigilant on behalf of the American people, so uninformative, that only in books can we find out what is really going on. I will cite an example: House of Bush, House of Saud by Craig Unger, published near the start of this humiliating, shameful blood-soaked year.

In case you haven’t noticed, and as a result of a shamelessly rigged election in Florida, in which thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily disenfranchised, we now present ourselves to the rest of the world as proud, grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless war lovers, with appallingly powerful weaponry and unopposed.

In case you haven’t noticed, we are now almost as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazis were.

With good reason.

In case you haven’t noticed, our unelected leaders have dehumanized millions and millions of human beings simply because of their religion and race. We wound and kill ’em and torture ’em and imprison ’em all we want.

Piece of cake.

In case you haven’t noticed, we also dehumanize our own soldiers, not because of their religion or race, but because of their low social class.

Send ’em anywhere. Make ’em do anything.

Piece of cake.

The O’Reilly Factor.

So I am a man without a country, except for the librarians and the Chicago-based magazine you are reading, In These Times.

Before we attacked Iraq, the majestic New York Times guaranteed that there were weapons of mass destruction there.

Albert Einstein and Mark Twain gave up on the human race at the end of their lives, even though Twain hadn’t even seen World War I. War is now a form of TV entertainment. And what made WWI so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun. Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don’t you wish you could have something named after you?

Like my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now am tempted to give up on people too. And, as some of you may know, this is not the first time I have surrendered to a pitiless war machine.

My last words? “Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse.”

Napalm came from Harvard. Veritas!

Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler.

What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without a sense of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations and made it all their own?

Just as a postscript, I will admit I don't share Vonnegut's enthusiasm over Fahrenheit 451. I read it a while back when I was on a quest to read every book on the ALA's list of the 100 most banned books, and while the premise was most interesting, the writing itself seemed ... trite. I was also really disappointed with Ray Bradbury when he made noise about suing Michael Moore for copyright infringement over the title of Fahrenheit 911. Sourpuss.

P.P.S. If my dog, the valiant Georgia, had opposable thumbs AND knew how to type, she might publish a blog called "Odoriferous Ether" or perhaps "Deadly Emissions". Whew! It's enough to get me out of this chair and doing something else ...

So it goes.

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’ ”

This quote hangs on the wall of an examining room in the clinic I go to. I love it. If my clinic were a subsidiary of the RAMJAC Corporation, it wouldn't be allowed. So it goes.

I'll miss you, Kurt Vonnegut.

Spring, Sprang, Sprung

Surprise!
A first grader with whom I'm acquainted told me today that "Wisconsin is the opposite of tropical." I think I'm going to lobby to have that replace "America's Dairyland" as our state motto. (Although I have to say, I also like "Shaped Like A Mitten.")

Five Questions

When Thailand Gal offered to send her readers five individual, thought-provoking questions I thought, "Oh, sure. How hard can they be? It'll be fun." Little did I know ...

1) You are God. What would you change in the blink of an eye? Oh, man. Climate change? Hunger? All war to cease for all time? I think I'll go with ending war, forever. It's over, done, obsolete. The business of war sucks up so many resources that could be used to feed, house, and educate people. And how war affects the Earth's climate has not even begun to be discussed.

2) What is your definition of "freedom"? And I thought the last one was hard! I cheated. I went to the dictionary, and this is the definition that most suited what I think of as "freedom."
• Freedom: absence of subjection to foreign domination or despotic government (my italics).

3) What would you consider to be the major epiphany of your lifetime? Now this one is easy. It was definitely the death of my daughter Sophie. Her life and death taught me in no uncertain terms that it's ALL about love.

4) What is your touchstone? My upbringing, to be uncompromising and unflinching in my dedication to nonviolence and justice.

5) Describe yourself as a kid. How did you perceive the world? Me, as a kid: Skinny, youngest of 6. Quirky, creative. I spent long hours building houses in the backyard for my troll dolls or painting with watercolors in my room. I was a "thing finder" (like Pippi Longstocking. It serves me well now, as a kindergarten teacher.) My perception of the world? You know how when you're a kid you generalize your reality to the rest of the world? I assumed that everybody's parents supported Dick Gregory for president, played recorders, listened to Tom Lehrer and went to Socialist Party picnics. Beyond that, I perceived the world as a wide open and interesting place, full of possibilities. We took long trips every summer, out to the west coast many times, to Canada, camping across Europe in a VW bus in 1968, and to Japan & Korea in 1974. We also hosted many travelers from other countries. My family was not without its own peculiar dysfunctions (20+ years of therapy have helped me come to terms with the harder parts,) but on the whole it was pretty stable and a particular set of values was most definitely instilled.

Okay, anyone else who reads this and wants to answer those questions for themselves, feel free.

Sci-ence

OR what we have to look forward to in our brave new theocratic world OR what happens to you when you bang YOUR head against a tree 400 times per second .

I have tried, in vain, to post this wonderful video on my blog. Apparently the Goddess Annoya (she who rules things that get stuck in drawers) or perhaps Offlar the Crocodile God are blocking it. So instead, I will link to it and you can go to GodTube (yes, GodTube!) to view this glorious episode of Chatting With Charley.

Theocracy? No Thanks!

I'm sitting here on my least favorite holiday of the Judeo-Christian tradition, having driven 12 hours yesterday, gotten up too late to do yoga this morning and eaten a healthy breakfast consisting of malted milk ball Easter eggs with a side of jelly beans ... mmmm, feeling really good right about now. It's April 8th, and all my delicate spring flowers that were coming up when I left in 80 degree weather less than a week ago -- the bleeding hearts and the tulips -- are frozen and laying on the ground. Resurrection, anyone?

This is the weekend of Blog Against Theocracy. I have been trying to think of something profound to say about a topic that has ramifications that many of us are not even aware of, so much do we take our Constitution for granted ... and nothing is coming.

Except this: My vacation reading consisted of Mark Kurlansky's book Nonviolence: Twenty Five Lessons From the History of a Dangerous Idea. (I sure do know how to have a good time. But of course, part of my vacation was spent in Pittsburgh so what do you expect? Not exactly anyone's idea of tropical beach paradise.) It's a powerful book, and Kurlansky does readers the favor of listing the 25 lessons at the end (just in case you didn't pick them all up from your reading.) Most pertinent to our discussion here, he says,

"It is often not the largest but the best organized and most articulate group that prevails."

Think about the last 25 or so years in this country. (If you're old enough.) The quiet, but steady growth of the Christian Right. Think about the language that has been continually used in the so-called "War on Terror." The language used by the television and radio mouthpieces of the current administration. And the flames of conflict that are being fanned between "believers" and "nonbelievers" among progressives. (Wake up people; The fomentation of that conflict is classic divide and conquer tactic. It's a paper tiger.)

And here is what first came to my mind when I sat down to write this post, a bumper sticker that says it so concisely:

"The last time we mixed religion and government people were burned at the stake.

Remember ... NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! And we're not there yet, but it is essential to stand up for each and every person's right to believe -- or not believe, to worship -- or not, in the manner which they choose. It is one of our basic freedoms.

Almost Heaven

Heading out tomorrow for spring break in the green and rolling hills of West Virginia, and Pittsburgh. Leaving behind all of the animals (I just dropped the diabetic doggie off at my in-laws tonight, and I'm already worrying about her) AND my blog (I'll probably miss it too, but Bloggie doesn't need insulin injections.)

The weather is supposed to be rotten. It's always rotten over spring break. If I went someplace tropical there would probably be a typhoon ... or a blizzard.

I got pretty excited when I learned that Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood really exists at the Pittsburgh Children's Museum. My kids are way past children's museum ages, but we may have to make a special visit, just for Mr. Rogers. He's one of my heroes -- right up there with Captain Kangaroo and the Friendly Giant.

So long. Back in a week.