Category: Politics

What are You Saying When You Fly the American Flag? Think About It.

Just thinking this morning… as you display the American flag for the 4th of July… contemplate for just a moment about what that flag really represents.

Think about being of a global mentality, not nationalistic, not patriotic, not about building walls to shut people out, not about killing people who are not like you, not about who’s stealing your jobs, not about robbing other people of their natural resources and occupying land that we are not invited into.

Think about, just for a moment, how our country was founded on the usurping of land that was already occupied and the mass murder of First Peoples already living on this continent for our (that’s you, white people) own gain.

Think about the Black people who were brought here as slaves, not paid, not free, not welcomed, not loved, not equal. Thnk about the new Jim Crow. Think about, still, how they are singled out for failure and are still not accepted as equals… equal in anyway.

Think for a moment about your heritage… where your people came from… if you are not native. How did your people get here? Weren’t they immigrants?

Think about our young men and women who have been sacrificed because our military and corporate government commands them to war. Think about the making of more and more disillusioned and suicidal veterans every day, every year, every decade, every century.

Think about how, instead of us being the salvation of the world… a great country that others can look up to, we are becoming more and more feared and hated and becoming a political laughing stock in the world.

Think about how worried you are about corporate greed and the destruction of the environment for economic gain for a few. Think about how hard it is for us to find well paying jobs, affordable housing, affordable health care, a decent and an equitable education for all. Think about the failing infrastructure, not just in your city but, nation-wide.

Think about big pharma and the drugging of America. Think about GMO and the poisoning of our food and water and how we don’t seem to have any control and how our sustenance has been usurped by Monsanto and other large corporate chemical companies.

Think about a lot more as you raise that American flag in the next couple of weeks. Think about whether you are really proud of what we have become. Think about the future of our children and our grand children and future generations. Think about whether we can heal the wounds of the American people inflicted by the wealthy and powerful.

Think about what you might do to change this; change this with your neighbor, your colleagues, your co-workers, your family, your friends… Think about how you might help to open a few eyes, to open a few arms, to open a few hearts.

Think about speaking up when you hear hate talk. Speak up when you see injustice. Speak up when more war is begun and more war continues. Speak up when sick people want to rule America.

Think about what you are saying when you fly that flag. Think about what our flag means to the other… the disenfranchised, those who stand at the end of a loaded weapon held by an American on their own soil… in their own houses, those who are suffering war at our hands. Think about what the other might think that we deserve…

Think about it…

The Cost of Consciousness

One of the advantages of having a house that is three stories tall is that I can look down on all of the plants in the garden. From my vantage point I can look down on the tops of the dogwood trees that are still blooming. The hummingbirds are feeding this morning from the blossoms. From high up here the entire yard looks green. Yum yum, my sweet dog, is lying in a pool of morning sunshine on the lounge. The water is hot and I’m ready to make my 1st cup of coffee. From high up here, I can almost forget what is happening in the wider world.

The advantage of being older is that I can do what I want when I want without being scheduled. This I love. From this vantage point I can look at my life and see the incredible life it has been. And I can also see what a wonderful life I am living, despite the chaos in the world.

From this vantage point I can also see the disadvantage of living in such a priviledged country. We are living on blood soaked land. We are living this priviledged existence because we are able to militarily overcome all other countries. We are only privileged because other countries have knelt before us at the point of a gun. We are only privileged because we have caused others to fear. People say this is the most wonderful country on Earth. What they don’t understand is that we’ve only been priviledged because we have insisted that others submit to us. We’re only priviledged because we have made it so that others have been brought to their knees.

What I hope for now is that we are being brought to our knees. Our powerful greed and hatred have been our demise. Our “democratic/capitalist experiment” is failing.

I don’t know what the future holds. I don’t know how much longer we can go on like this. It is hard to be the privileged person that I am knowing that my privilege has been bought with blood money. It is hard to be the privileged person that I am knowing that my privilege has cost another’s suffering. It is hard to be the privileged person that I am knowing that the leadership of this country consists of wealthy, hateful warmongers and have always been. It is hard to be so joyful and peaceful and comfortable knowing that the majority serves the minority. But so has it ever been. This dichotomy of feelings is the cost of consciousness.

My privileged life breaks my heart.

Te quiero muchisimo. I love you so much.

❤❤❤❤❤❤❤

Our Mother’s Cycles

Change Will Come

We have been in lockdown. We have been quarantined since mid-March 2020. We are expected to wear masks when in public places. Stores and restaurants and bars were shutdown, many to never open again. Businesses have closed. There is massive unemployment. People are infected with Covid-19 and some are dying.

And worse yet, we have a toxic president pushing for a fascist regime. He is up for reelection in November and his campaign is deeply rooted in white supremacy. He is hell bent on destroying not only America but the world. I’m terrorized.

I could write a list of what is wrong but it would be too long for the post I want to write. I will say only that we need real change. We need a universal awakening to stop the engrained systemic racism resulting in police brutality and injustice and inequality in every aspect of life.

We are destroying our home. We have raped and pillaged our only source of life. This just might be the end of us. And yet we persist in this destruction. My heart is sick.

And yet, the earth will heal after our self-inflicted demise, there is no doubt. When we no longer strip the forests, pollute the air, soil and water; when we are no longer here to burn down our home, the earth will recover. I should be hopeful.

While I wake every morning to face yet another day, to sort through what new tragedy has taken place, what new atrocities await us… how much money we spend on war machines to annihilate innocent people, to count how many children are in cages, how many refugees are in transit, and are hungry and homeless, how many US citizens are homeless and hungry, and not to mention the working poor, I become more cynical and without hope. I can hardly take it.

And yet, I am one of the lucky ones. I have shelter, food, clothing family and friends, but that brings no solace. Solace will only come with real and lasting change. History teaches us that only hatred and greed are the only constants in this world.

You will argue with me, I know that. I have heard all the arguments. There is nothing new that you can come up with. NOTHING!. You will say, “but look at all the beauty that surrounds you: nature, music, all of the arts, people who are good, people who are protesting and working towards a better world.” I know. But that doesn’t make change. It never has and I doubt that it ever will. I feel desperate.

But my initial intention for this post is to celebrate our mother, our great mother, who would provide for us everything we need if we weren’t so full of hate and greed. We do not understand her.

Two people have mentioned the changing of the season though we are not quite half way through summer. Do we somehow, intuitively feel the change, see it in the shadows, and see the end of life of earth’s flowering? Fruit and vegetables and all that carry seeds are ready to burst and fall upon the ground.

I have resisted and complained when folks start talking about the season’s ending when we’re fully engulfed in the present season. But I am beginning to understand and to embrace it. I think this follows my lack of recognition of changes in my own body.

I was never really conscious of my own, very intimate, monthly cycles of ovulation and the impending expulsion of my eggs in a flood of fluid and blood. I never experienced PMS symptoms or cramps with my menstrual cycle. I never knew when those changes were about to take place or were taking place until there was obvious evidence. And when the cessation of that cycle came, I wasn’t conscious of the internal changes taking place. I didn’t equate the changes of my emotions and psychology together with the changes in my body. The symptoms of menopause were slight and short-lived.

I am not saying that I didn’t sense the changes as one season was ending or another beginning but I was fully present: summer was summer, winter was winter, etc. Don’t talk to me about spring when it is still winter.

I am just beginning to understand how others more overtly acknowledge and accept mother earth’s cycles, her seasons and how that pertains to my own lack of consciousness of my own cycles… her barreness, her fertility, her impregnation and fullness of pregnancy and then her birthing. And of course there is the building up to each cycle, so I should have been able to put these together. I could be more joyful at the slow turning of the seasons and to welcome other’s acknowledgement that they sense the preparation of the mother to the changes.

Though the universe, the planets and the stars, tell us that the solstice and the equinox turns on this date or that date, we are in the fullness of earth’s cycles everyday and even in the smallest of increments.

How to tie the world’s demise to the earth’s resilience? Well, as chilling March turned into April, winter awoke from slumber and sprang forth in exuberance. Trees grew leaves and flowers. Sprouts burst out of the cold soil. Color was everywhere. Even in April’s cold rains, life emerged, undaunted by the turmoil produced by humans.

If I could wish for anything, it would be peace and justice and a consciousness that this earth is our mother, the very source of life, and that everything is dependent on our loving care.

So friends, let’s talk about the changing seasons. Let’s talk about how “a change is gonna come”. Let’s talk about it. Just maybe it will.

A Woman’s Bravery on Display

Brave but Naive in Portland

Has no one heard of soldiers stripping women of their clothes, raping them, cutting their unborn children from their wombs, excising their genitals, executing them, leaving them for dead, buried in unmarked graves?

It has happened and happens all over the world in authoritarian countries where men rule the world,  own all the resources and mandate the military. Very Franco-esc.

She’s lucky she wasn’t grabbed, thrown in the back of an unmarked car and hauled off to jail and/or “disappeared” or simply raped and thrown back in the street.

Hundreds, maybe thousands, of women clothed and unclothed die everyday while protesting, while the world watches.

History: read it. It happened in the past, it also happens now. News: read it.

Do you really think that soldiers are afraid of naked women? A womans body is not powerful. It’s vulnerable.

This reminds me a little tiny bit, but much less dramatic, of Thich Quang Duc who set himself on fire in Saigon and the student who stood against a line of tanks in Tianamen Square… other than a big news flash and it being documented in history, what good did it do? What permanently changed in the world?

What permanent good has been done by the imprisonment, torture and death of millions of women and men protesting injustice when small groups of wealthy men own the world?

Am I saying give up? No. Adamantly no. Just acknowledge reality before you put your bravery on display.

In response to you, dear voter. It’s not even close to all I want to say.

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This post is in a short response to a Facebook post made by a friend. I won’t include it here but suffice it to say that it released a floodgate of words. This is relatively unedited, so you will read redundancy and ill-composed sentence structure, but I couldn’t care less.

Most of my readers enjoy reading about my misadventures and I am well aware that when I get serious, my “likes and comments” plummet. That’s O.K. I will continue to spout off when the mood strikes because I don’t want to stand silent when our voices are needed. And our voices need to be raised right now.

The post had to do with whether or not your opinion of people changes based on who they support politically. It suggests that it should not. This is my response to, first, the poster and then to a friend of the poster, who agrees with the premise of the post. The name has been changed to protect the innocent.

This is easier said than done, xxxx. The fact that a person would vote for someone who is a known racist, a misogynist, a liar, without empathy for the poor, who is homophobic, anti- immigration, anti-Muslim, etc., and continues to support such a person, says alot about that person who you consider to be a good person and worthy of your friendship. I have friends and family who support such people and I don’t believe I can still hold them in respect or in a close relationship. I choose not to associate with people who hate or support those who hate and are a danger to the health of this planet. I will take a stand against it and cannot look into the eyes of others who can tolerate for the briefest moment those who don’t stand against it be they acquaintances, long time friends, or family.

My comment was not meant as sarcasm. I cannot stand with others who vote for a government of hate, warmongering, whoremongering, scaremongering, and that is spending money, 25 billion dollars, on a wall, and increasing billions on the military, increasing coal mining, oil drilling, dismantling the EPA, using our SS monies to continue wars that serve no one but only to fill the pockets of the already rich, who lie about everything… the list goes on and on. For me to continue in a relationship with someone who supports “not my president” and his band of criminals would be like me saying, as Trump did about the white supremacists and neo- Nazis, that there are some fine people among them, that those who support them are fine people. That would be ludicrous and hypocritical. No. If one hates like he does and supports his policies and refuses to see what damage he is doing, I do not, cannot, see them as who I thought they were. I see them as what they are, in collusion with a would be dictator and so much worse.

I won’t compromise. I didn’t say I voted for Hillary. I didn’t mention my vote. Our history is bloody and I’m not just talking about the U.S. Genocide, oppression, inequality, injustice, xenophobia, are what characterize the human race. Power corrupts and an oligarchy we are. The constitution was written for the benefit of the white landowner. America was built on the backs of slaves and indentured servants, on the backs of the poor and dispossessed.

From our first steps on this continent, from England, Spain, France, Portugal, we have been trailing blood from our hands and feet. We continued the bloody wars that were taking place in Europe, fought over land and resources and we have never stopped. If you want an eye opener, simply read the basic facts on Wikipedia on the US history of war. Peace, freedom? For who? At what cost? What a joke!

The American dream has never been and will never be. It is an illusion created while we were sleeping. Ask a native American, ask a Black man or woman, ask the working poor, ask the homeless, ask the deported, ask the refugee, ask someone in prison on charges of marijuana possession, ask the dispossessed who can no longer afford rent and even less, buy a house, a car or take a vacation. Ask a single mom who has to choose between paying rent or buying food, ask a promising student who can’t afford college… Ask, ask, ask some questions. Then ask whether 25 billion dollars should be spent on a wall when our roads, highways and byways and bridges are crumbling. Ask why we need billions more spent on the military? Could it be because we are hated around the world? Could it be because the government is afraid of civil war if they take our Social Security, our health care, our homes, our land. Have you read why there was a provision for a militia in the constitution? Read it and weep.

Trump isn’t and never was a politician and he’s ignorant and selfish and worse. He’s just the fruit of the horror that we as a country, a white nation, have sown. Take a good look while you still can. And weep. Weep because the human race, at its core, is homicidal. We have devised ways to finish off life on this planet. What an accomplishment. Way to go guys. Let’s see which homicidal leader will start the final war. Let’s see what unregulated chemical manufacturer will pollute the last of our drinkable water and fertile land, what under-regulated oil company will drill and frack away our oceans and lands, what plastics will clog everything including marine life and forest dwellers.

I could go on, but I won’t. Read it for yourself. I don’t need to school you. You’ve heard it all before but you refuse to open your eyes. There’s no way that the will of the people prevails. Never has, never will.

Rise up people and face the torture chamber, the lynching rope, the chopping block, imprisonment, the firing squad, the reservation, or banishment, if you’re lucky. Many already have.

Rise up if you dare. Fill mass graves. Fill the newscasts and newspaper headlines with your death. All this while the rich line their pockets. Do you think they care about you? Why would they, except as you serve them? You answer that question.