Introducing Phoenix Feathers

Featured in my sidebar is (or will be if I don't run out of time by the time I post this) a link list titled Phoenix Feathers. These are links to organizations who are promoting by word and deed one or more of. those values recognized by all Progressives. Among those values (but not exhausting the list) are freedom, opportunity, prosperity, equity, fairness, community building, honesty, mutual responsibility, cooperation, protection of the vulnerable, stewardship of the environment, hope, peace, tolerance, healthy minds and bodies, ethical business, education, open dialog & recognizing the dignity of each individual.

Why Phoenix Feathers? Because the fact of these organizations existence, the large numbers of them, the tenacity of the values they espouse under seige in these dark times, gives me hope that the Phoenix of Progressivism is rising from the ashes adorned in the resplendant feathers of every individual, community and organization that promotes and lives its values.

I've collected dozens of these URLs in my browser favorites. I will indroduce them one by one in posts like this one. I chose to begin with ONE because it is relevant to the G8 conference in Edinburgh this week and ONE is conducting an urgent signiture drive to present to the policy makers attending. Learn about the ONE campaign's vision for making extreme poverty history and if it fits with your own values, if you feel you can support their vision with mind and heart, then

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Happy Independence Day!

Progressives: on this day claim your rightful title as Patriot and proclaim your love for your country with head held high, letting no one, including yourself, deny your right to this just because you do not follow the party line--any pary line.

Any party line that would deny you this has lost the core values nurturing democracy and underpinning the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights--freedom, equality, justice and community. With the loss of any one of these, the grand experiment of government of, by and for the people begun in 1776 will wither on the vine.

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My sidebar links are up and running.

Finally figured it out. Myself. Tho with my husband the code geek sitting two feet away as a ready FAQ whenever I needed to bolster my confidence in my comprehension of the instructions in the Blogger Help article How do I edit my links list?. I probably could have done it while sitting alone in the room afterall, if not for a neurotic need to have confirmation from some kind of authortiy before I committ to an action. Just a common personality quirk? Or more fallout from my Fundamentalist upbringing? Probably some warping combination. Anyway I have a links list now. Tho I don't call it that. So far I have two sections. The first is titled: Joy Renee on the web, and has three (so far) items. The first is my email. The second is to Joywrite, showcasing my stories, poems, essays, Reflections on writing and the writing life, and resources for writers. The third is to Joyread, featuring my reviews of books I've read, Reflections on reading and research, and resources for readers and researchers. Both sites are in their infancy. Especially the resources pages. I've got reams of URLs collected but I've just not got around to creating the HTML pages. Not my favorite part of the process. Witness the fact it took me over four hours to get this task accomplished and the links test drove. One didn't work and I had to go back into the HTML and figure out why. With my living, breathing FAQ long gone to bed.

The second section of my links list is titled Blogs I Haunt. There are only a handful there for now. Will be adding more. Am also planning to add at least two more sections. One for sites I trust for news and analysis of current events. Hint: no MSM. The other a list of organizations with progressive values who are sources of good information and/or outlets for acting on the progressive values in the world. The talk without the walk is naught but chalk dust on the welkin.

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Write Me

Above is the image of my email. I'm tired of being swamped by spam and got wise to the fact that bots are swarming the web harvesting active email links. The following are links to my web sites:

Joywrite featuring my stories, essays and poems and reflections on writing and creativity

Joyread featuring book reviews and reflections on reading, research and literature.

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Pass Along as a Favor for Doc Mishler

Several months ago I blogged an article about Doc Mishler, the Pilgrim, crossing America on horseback to initiate a dialog among Christians and non-Christians alike about the words of Jesus in the Gospels and their significance for us today. I had left a comment, a very rare thing for me to do, and in that way my @ must have been passed on to doc. For I recieved a plea from him to day, just one of thousands he sent out I'm sure, to pass on a message for him by republishing the copy of the message he delivered to Congress, since no one in the MSM has picked up on it yet.

So I am passing it on as is. It is fairly long but worth it. Especially for anyone having an affinity for the prophetic works in word and deed of Martin Luther King Jr., Ghandi, Nelson Mandela, Biship Tutu, The Dalai Lama or Thich Nhat Hanh as Doc Mishler's courage, conviction and compassion is in a class with theirs.

Doc's plea to me:

Hello Joy,

I am sending you the following message that i delivered to congress through Bread for the World; there are children in the world that are so hungry that God can not appear to them except in the form of bread----What we need is a chain reaction of awareness from person to person to person---can you help?

No one has had the "balls" to publish this; perhaps you, or you may know someone???

Peace, doc

Doc's message to Congress and the world::

From: " LIVING IN THE SADDLE AND SLEEPING AT THE FOOT OF THE CROSS"
-----On: WHAT CAN THE GOVERNMENT DO NOW----
Nearly 40 years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said it best:
"I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin to shift from a "thing-orientated society to a "person-orientated" society. When machines and computers, profit motives, and property rights are considered more important than people, the great triplets of racism, materalism and militarism are incapable of being conquered. This call for a world wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind. We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the alter of retaliation. We have committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I am going to continue to say it. And we will not stop it because of our pride and arrogance as a nation. A nation that year after year continues to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."
Never before has it been possible to feed all the hungry children of the world. Yet, because there is national insecurity, our government is engaged in a mad arms race, spending billions of dollars wastefully on weapons of mass destruction (WMD), while millions of children are starving. And yet, just a fraction of what is expanded on the military budget would enable all of God's children to fill their stomachs. Our president has sprouted a weird concept of security and a warped sense of morality. WMD are sheltered like treasures while children are exposed to starvation. The nature of the evil lies in our cooperation! Money spent on WMD belong to the hungry children.
This is the Christian Horseman from Montana who rode on horseback through your town. Chief Spirit, Faith, Charity, Gooddog and I are wintering in Virginia waiting till spring to ride into DC to talk with our President. Mr. President, what did Jesus say? (For those who are interested and into computers type in doc mishler on any search engine for some of the stories about the journey.)
I wish to personally thank all the wonderful compassionate God loving people that welcomed us with God's love on our journey from Montana through Idaho, Nevada, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Lousiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennesse, Kentucky, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsyvania, West Virginia, Maryland, and Virginia. We could not have made it without God and God works through people. All people.
Unfortunately, an air of religious intolerance permeates North America. Many Americans and I am told Canadians equate "Christians" with being kind, decent or good. This implies that non-Christians lack these qualities. Some who call themselves Christians reflect this prejudice. Yet, on this journey I found Christ is love, and in all His created! Praise the Lord. "God is love" (1 John 4:16). This does not contradict His holyness; instead, it compliments and magnifies it and gives it its deepest meaning. The person who does not love does not know God; even love for one's enemies! (Matt. 5:44). True Christians are not judgemental and unloving. They keep in mind that Scripture doesn't command them to go out and rail against false teachings; rather, it encourages them to offer biblical reasons with gentleness and respect (1 Pet. 3:15).
I am especially grateful for the hospitality extended to us in your hometown. I would like to take this opportunity to invite ALL people to e-mail me at doc_mish@hotmail.com and discuss our journey. We can also talk about graduating our government from the Old Testament to the New Testament: What did Jesus say?
The original teachings of Jesus transcend the social conception of life which may be limited by exclusive love of one's family, church family, tribe, nation, race, or even humanity. These socialistic brotherhoods are based on love of personality, but Christian love expands because it is based on the love of God. I find five ideals and commandments of Jesus expressed in the book of Matthew outlined here as a precursor to future elaboration:
1) have no ill-will against anyone, but love all; don't even offend with a word;
2) feed the hungry;
3) live only in the present and don't worry about the future; don't swear and don't promise;
4) never use violence nor repay evil with evil, but suffer insult and give up possessions; and
5) love our enemies and those who hate us by treating them as ourselves...
Using God's love for our foundation premise we conclude with what our government can do now:
From the ancient sages and mystics to modern political activists, the essential reality of peace has not changed. Love for our fellow human beings is superior to hatred and fear. Active nonviolence has been the method of our greatest peacemakers. Philosophers of vision have seen the need for unity of human beings so that differences can be settled by intelligent means. Human civilization is evolving steadily toward a reliance on the Wisdom of God.
What did Jesus say?
The sophistication of scientific technology applied as military force has created an inescapable crises for the human species which must be resolved. To survive, human beings must learn self restraint and less destructive means of resolving conflict.
Not resisting evil with evil is the only way to eliminate evil altogether. It alone makes it possible to tear the evil out by the root, both out of one's own heart and out of the neighbor's heart. This doctrine forbids doing that by which evil is perpetuated and multiplied.
He/She who attacks another and insults them, engenders in another the sentiment of hatred, the root of all evil. To offend another, because they offended us, for the spacious reason of removing an evil, means to repeat an evil deed, both against others and against ourselves.
Therefore it is up to the people to recognize the danger to their lives and demand life-affirming policies from their leaders.
Sanctification of all life: Creation endows all humans with dignity. Moses said that killing humans was wrong because "in the image of God has God made human kind" (Gen. 9:6). God created all human kind (Rev. 4:11). It is by the Grace of and for the Glory of God that we ride...
This is where every person has the opportunity and responsibility to influence the course of our civilization for the good of all.
It does not take a great philosopher to realize that peace in the world would be for the good of all, while war benefits a few at the expense of many.
Some individual government leaders are becoming aware of the true means of peace through active nonviolence. Yet many are still hypnotized by political leaders who use national pride and fear of terrorists to manipulate people for selfish interests.
Over fifty years ago a government leader in Germany said, "Terrorism is the best political weapon, for nothing drives people harder than the fear of sudden death." (As of today over 21,000 wounded U.S. soldiers have been treated at Landstuhl Medical Centre in Germany.) Fear and greed keep the children hungry. Fear weakens the nerves and distorts the judgment.
It is not by fear that humankind must exorcise the demon of destruction and cruelty, but by motives more reasonable, more humane, and more heroic.
Never before has it been possible to feed all the hungry children of the world. Feed the hungry children!
Now that North Korea has admitted that they have been "secretly" experimenting with nuclear weapons (If they had oil we would be poised on the brink of nuclear holocaust), we would be very naive to think that the others in the "axes of evil" don't have or will soon have nuclear weapons.
The threat of nuclear war is to be taken seriously, but it will allow a breathing spell from answering evil with evil against the axes of evil so that better methods can be developed. War can break out suddenly, but peacemaking takes time, patience, education, and communication.
And there is no communication, patience, and education when your children are dying of hunger. There are children in the world that are so hungry that God can't appear to them, except in the form of bread.
The time has come for good people and the goodness in ALL people to rise up and demand that their government feed all the starving children of the world.
Less than two percent of the national budget about 1.25% (10 billion dollars) would feed them all.
Do the math: Eight million people die of hunger or hunger related causes every year, three-fourths of these are children under the age of five. They could all live on less than 2 dollars per day. Two times 365 days equals $730 per year.
Give them each $1000 spread over the year and let them "live it up." One thousand times eight million equals eight billion. The extra two billion would be enough to get the food to them if we didn't buy six hundred dollar toilet seats or five hundred dollar hammers.
These hunger statistics were provided by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
Currently one third of one percent of the national yearly budget goes to foreign aid (about 2 billion dollars), and much of that is for guns. Forty seven percent (now over 400 billion dollars) of the budget is spent on the military, and much of that is spent on weapons of mass destruction. No new money is needed to feed the children: your tax money is being used for WMD! Moneys spent on WMD belongs to the hungry children...
Riding on horseback, I rode by 54 nuclear reactors about 10 miles north east of Arco, ID. These nuclear reactors are not being used to make electricity, in fact many are activly making nuclear isotopes.
The people I talked with are not proud of what they are doing. They fear that if they don't cooperate they will loose their job and woun't be able to feed their children.
The ground at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico is contaminated from testing. We were forced to follow the road and couldn't cut across the land as the crow flies like we often did in other areas on the journey.
We stopped at a guard station to water the horses, and the guard showed us, on monitor, the largest laser in the world. I asked him, "what could the government use that for?"
He said, " sure could kill a lota people with the beam of that big baby." Our government was prepared to retaliate with nuclear weapons and WMD if Iraq had used the WMD that they did not have.
Fear is not a basis for peace. What we ought to fear, especially we Americans, is not that terrorists may drop WMD on us but we may allow our government leaders, acting as our representives, may use such weapons in our name.
It is common knowledge that our government is shifting from disassembly to new assembly of nuclear weapons and biological weapons development all across the country.
The nature of the evil lies in our cooperation with it.
Before political leaders will give up their use of military methods to try to solve problems, enough people must be educated to understand better methods. We will never have peace on earth as long as we keep killing each other's children, but we will when we feed them!
In our hearts, this fundamental truth of love for all is felt even though none of our biological children will die of hunger.
You, who are reading this, are probably more enlightened on these points than most. Those who truly realize that love and understanding are more effective than hatred and force are the people who will be changing the world for the better by communicating and educating others.
As Einstein clearly saw, what is needed is a chain reaction of awareness from person to person to person. You too have a dream: that age-old dream of saints and sages--the great commonwealth of the World as the visible embodiment of the brotherhood of human kind.
Even the smallest person can change the course of the future! All things start small...
If a present day prophet were to lead the masses to peace by way of God's love, they would speak as one human being to another. With the power of the law of love and the gentleness of the Gospel, they would speak thus: Patriotism is nobel, insofar as it approaches that which is humane, but the very reverse the further it is removed therefrom.
"We don't do body counts," as General Tommy Franks, a good man trained to lead men to kill or be killed performing his duty, put it. 100,000 Iraqi deaths in this war (although, this is on the scale of the death toll after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima), at the hands of US and coalition forces, are hardly news. (Our government rejects this research. Sure we can trust our government, just ask any Native American Indian).
The Bible commands obedience to the government (Rom. 13:1; Titus 3:1; 1 Peter 2:13), but civil disobedience is just when the government attempts to compel unrighteousness (Exodus 5; Dan. 3,6; Rev. 13). Creation endows humans with dignity. Worship and serve ONLY the Creator. Yet it is the created that manifests God's glory.
No interests, however great, are higher than those common to all mankind. Among them, the foremost is the old commandment, as old as the oldest documents of any nation: Thou shalt not kill! You are all of one blood. Love one another. People can. Nations can. All this is eminently possible because God's love transcends the limitations of human kind.
The first essential component of social justice is adequate food for all humans. Food is the moral right of all who are born into this world. You can't love God and not feed the hungry children. Money spent on WMD belongs to the hungry children!
What did Jesus say?
A man (he professed to be a Muslim American) in California said, "You got it right Doc our government needs to do unto others as they would have them do unto us. AND DO IT FIRST!"
A woman in Arizona said, "In Christ we have the ultimate example of evil being overcome by good." Resist not evil. Do good to those who hate you.
In Ohio a teenaged girl said, "Ask the president what part of love he doesn't understand?" Love your enemies.
A lady in Maryland told me to tell George, "You can't love God and not feed the hungry children!" Feed the hungry children.
A man in Virginia said tell our president, " We will never have peace as long as we keep killing and torturing each others children, but we will when we feed the children." What so ever you do unto others you do unto me also. God speaks through the people...
"You have heard that it has been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say to you. That ye resist not evil. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your shirt, give him your overcoat as well. If someone forces you to go a mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one that ask you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you. You have heard that it has been said, love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you love your enemies, bless them that curse you. Do good to them that hate you, and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect." (Matt. 5:38-48). "Lord when did we see you hungry and feed you,... I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me." Matt. 25: 37-40).
A true Christian can see the face of Jesus in the eyes of that little child in Iraq that just died of hunger. Did you hear the child? Just before the light in Her eyes went out; She said, "Forgive them Father for they know not what they have done." Then one of them, a lawyer, asked Her a question, testing Her, and saying. "Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?" Jesus said to him, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all yor mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: You shall love others as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the Prophets." (Matt. 22:35-40) All humans are brothers. There is no attack in love!
Let us face squarely the historistic paradox that the nation which goes to war is a nation, usually, genuinely desiring peace. War is the outcome, not mainly of evil intentions, but on the whole, of good intentions which go astray or are frustrated. It is made, not usually by evil men knowing themselves to be wrong, but is the outcome of policies pursued by good men ususally passionately convinced that they are right with God.
The nature of the evil lies in our cooperation with it.
Mr. President, Jesus loves you. And so do WE...
God's love,
Doc Mishler (email: doc_mish@hotmail.com)

I appologize for not reestablishing the paragraph breaks after they were morphed by the cut and paste process. I have run out of time and wore out my eyes to get this far.

Please, anybody who finds this message compelling, pass it along in any way you have available. You can cut and paste into and email, or into your own blog. Or you can send those you think might be interested the perma link to this post so they can read and pass it along.

Thank-you all.
Love Joy Peace

P.S. see my riff on Matt. 25: 37-40 while you are at it and pass it along too if you find it worthy.

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The Rest of the Story

Until I saw this I still had fond, warm and fuzzy memories of listening to Paul Harvey relate the headlines of the day, topping it off with those The Rest of the Story anecdotes with surprise endings throughout my childhood. These may have even played a role in developing my own sense of story; my fondness for O. Henry short stories as a pre-teen was probably primed by the hundreds of Harvey's The Rest of the Story presentations listened to over my breakfast by the time I was eleven. There are not too many nostalgia inducing memories of my childhood left since the tentacles of our fundamentalists religion entwine among each and every one. On a recent broadcast, Harvey closed with a rant. I knew he was a conservative, but I had no idea he was this:

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Winston Churchill said that the American people…he said, the American people, he said, and this is a direct quote, “We didn’t come this far because we are made of sugar candy.”

That was his response to the attack on Pearl Harbor. That we didn’t come this far because we are made of sugar candy.

And that reminder was taken seriously. And we proceeded to develop and deliver the bomb, even though roughly 150,000 men, women and children perished in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. With a single blow, World War II was over.

Following New York, Sept. 11, Winston Churchill was not here to remind us that we didn’t come this far because we’re made of sugar candy.

So, following the New York disaster, we mustered our humanity. We gave old pals a pass, even though men and money from Saudi Arabia were largely responsible for the devastation of New York and Pennsylvania and our Pentagon.

We called Saudi Arabians our partners against terrorism and we sent men with rifles into Afghanistan and Iraq, and we kept our best weapons in our silos.

Even now we’re standing there dying, daring to do nothing decisive, because we’ve declared ourselves to be better than our terrorist enemies -- more moral, more civilized.
Our image is at stake, we insist.

But we didn’t come this far because we’re made of sugar candy.

Once upon a time, we elbowed our way onto and into this continent by
giving small pox infected blankets to native Americans.

Yes, that was biological warfare!

And we used every other weapon we could get our hands on to grab this
land from whomever. And we grew prosperous.

And, yes, we greased the skids with the sweat of slaves.

And so it goes with most nation states, which, feeling guilty about
their savage pasts, eventually civilize themselves out of business and wind up
invaded, and ultimately dominated by the lean, hungry and up and coming who are
not made of sugar candy.

This is conservative of what now?
Are we to infer here that 'civilized' = 'sugar candy'?
That WMD is only immoral when someone else uses it? Then how is that someone else defined? Those who are : Not-white? Not-prosperous? Not-American? Not-Christian?

So much for nostalgia.

My source for the quote was Eric Zorn's Notebook at the Chicago Tribune. The link attatched to the title of this post will time out in less than a week so if anyone reading this can provide me with a more stable link to the transcript, I would appreciate it. I will continue to google for it. This is exactly why I don't link to major national newspapers when I can at all avoid it. I think they are very short-sighted for locking thier content behind coin-operated walls. By the time they put them there it is yesterday's news but it is also our nation's history and to charge three times what one would pay for a used book for a single glance at a single article is.....I just don't have a word for it. But it can only widen the divide between the information haves and the information have nots. And in the long run will errode the very relevancy of their institution. And I don't get the rational for it. The Internet technology should make access to information cheaper not extravagently more expensive. But this is a major digression and should probably have a post of its own and probably will when I have the time to split them. For now, I have to get off line. Have already gone an hour past the confort zone in terms of blocking possible phone calls into my inlaw's home. So I'm going to post without editing and without even checking out how it looks on the page. Will fix any problems as soon as possible.

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don't think of an elephant!

I Have been reading George Lakoff's don't think of an elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate this week. He takes a look, from the perspective of a cognitive scientist, at the recent discussion of the influence of values on voter's choices and how the whole values debate has been hi-jacked by the Right. He says Progressives have so far been befuddled by this because they do not see how their agenda follows with perfect logic from their unconscious value system and because of that they have allowed the Conservatives, who long ago developed perfect clarity about the relationship between their agenda and their own value system, frame the debate. This has put the Progressives on the defensive so that they tend to respond inside the frame provided by the Conservatives. But, as Lakoff points out, this serves to activate the Conservative frame inside the minds of the moderates where the swing votes are and confirm the frame in the minds of the Conservative base. Because when anyone is told, 'Don't think of an elephant.,' envisioning an elephant is unavoidable.

According to Lakoff, both the Progressive and Conservative value systems derive from a family metaphor for the nation; each having distinct assumptions. The Conservative's hold to a strict father worldview in which the world is a dangerous place and the father must protect the family by enforcing order; children are born bad and must be made good with discipline AKA punishment for wrongdoing and reward for correct behavior until they internalize that into self-discipline; the father commands and the family complies. The Progressives adhere to a gender neutral, nurturing parent model in which the world can be improved and we are responsible for applying ourselves to that goal; children are born good (or at least innocent) and can be encouraged to develop their goodness by a nurturing environment; parents are responsible to raise their children to maturity into happy, fulfilled, responsible, empathetic and nurturing individuals who desire and work for the happiness and fulfillment of others as assiduously as their own; parents and children communicate their expectations to each other and negotiate (age appropriately) for win-win scenarios. The values implied by the Progressive model are freedom, opportunity, prosperity, and fairness; open and honest two-way communication which promotes trust; community-building, community-service and cooperation in a community which nurtures its members.

Lakoff advises Progressives to stop trying to argue against the Conservative platform and to start promoting the nurturing family model, claiming without apology all the implied values and re-framing all of their issues and program recommendations with language consciously drawn from this worldview. But to do this they will have to rethink the way they finance their institutions. Currently it is in dribs and drabs (in the thousands, tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands but seldom in the millions) and the grants are contingent on immediate, measurable results defined in terms of the numbers of individuals helped. Lakoff recommends adding very large block grants with no strings attached. With such grants the Progressives can establish institutions that nurture their future thinkers. He stresses that this is important because learning how to frame their message effectively is a science that needs careful research to support it and teachers to train the next generation. Those researchers and teachers and students need to be supported while they do this work. Thus, Progressives need to start subsidizing think-tanks; the college education, internships, fellowships and professorships of promising individuals; and print, TV, radio and internet media outlets as the Right has been doing for thirty years!
Besides developing the message and training the message developers and teachers, they also need to train media savvy individuals to help get that message out there and keep it in the forefront of the dialog--to be the writers of books and articles for the layman, the media commentators, experts who get quoted on and off camera, political speech writers, producers of documentaries and movies, radio and TV talk-show hosts, journalists who do not see reporting as value-free, he said/she said stenography. Concomitant to this would be the development and support of media networks to replace those that have been co-opted by Conservatives and the corporate sector. (Some of these suggestions here I have added to those of Lakoff's. Can I help that I am a natural extrapolator?)

Lakoff identifies six types of progressives and their distinct modes of thought. He shows how they are all rooted in the same overall frame. He advises progressives to identify their type and learn how it is just a special case of a more general set of values and in that way learn empathy for the other types and reach out to one another to unify efforts. Here is the six types quoted verbatim from page 14:

1. Socioeconomic progressives think that everything is a matter of money and class and that all solutions are ultimately economic and social class solutions.
2. Identity politics progressives say it is time for their oppressed group to get its share now.
3. Environmentalists think in terms of sustainability of the earth, the sacredness of the earth, and the protection of native peoples
4. Civil liberties progressives want to maintain freedoms against threats to freedom.
5. Spiritual progressives have a nurturing form of religion or spirituality, their spiritual experience has to do with their connection to other people and the world, and heir spiritual practice has to do with service to other people and to their community. Spiritual progressives span the full range from Catholics and Protestants to Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Goddess worshippers, and pagan members of Wicca.
6. Antiauthoritarians say there are all sorts of illegitimate forms of authority out there and we have to fight them, whether they are big corporations or anyone else.

After defining these six types, Lakoff encourages all Progressives, as individuals and organizations, to ascertain the one they most identify with and then to look for the frame (the theme, the values and worldview held in common) that underpins them all. And then to learn empathy for the other types, to open lines of communication between them and begin cooperative efforts to reframe their messages and implement their agendas.

I was amazed to find that the only one of the six that I do not identify with at all is the second one, Identity politics, though I did dabble in the concepts when in the process of extricating myself from the fundamentalist religion I was raised . But I was made uncomfortable by an ideology that defined the rights of individuals according to their membership in some narrowly defined group. Too uncomfortably close to what I had just left behind. I saw the solution as defining all individuals as having certain rights by virtue only of being born (as in the Declaration of Independence) and that whenever and for whatever reason (due to prejudice, politics, poverty, violence, disability, illness, etc) obstacles were purposefully or inadvertently set in their path, it is the responsibility of the community to rectify it in some manner that does not assign preference to individuals as defined by exclusive characteristics. But it is the responsibility of the individuals who feel slighted or deprived to see their membership in the overall community as primary and seek to serve that community as well as be served by it. Because the Progressive value system requires that service in community be reciprocal. An expansion of the concept of the commons would go a long way towards solving this conundrum. Consider the fact that the healthcare industry, from research to the education of doctors and the financial support of hospitals, is heavily subsidized by taxpayers and then wonder how the exclusion of anybody in the community can be justified. That is just one example. I can think of numerous others in the areas of education, housing, labor, transportation, energy etc. But I digress. Sort of. The point is that a community that values nurturing its members would be shamed to see anyone abused by the system for any reason.

Thirty years of personal experience with significant poverty (the last four of which I have been systematically educating myself in economic and political philosophy) made me sensitive to the economic and class issues but I never did fall into the trap of thinking these concepts were the exclusive possessors of the only ideas or solutions that matter. For one thing it sends a shiver up my spine to think that all of the meaning in life can be accounted for on some kind of balance sheet or that the worth of individuals can be conflated with the worth of the property or power they have accumulated.

I was introduced to Environmentalism when I did a science project in seventh grade in which I extracted water samples from a number of place on the stretch of the Columbia river that passed by my home town, Longview, Washington and put them under a microscope. There was a lumber mill, a paper mill and an aluminum plant and a shipping port on that stretch. This was also the time in which the debate about and then the construction of the Trojan nuclear plant across the river on the Oregon side took place. Throughout my childhood and young adulthood, I witnessed the consequences of the clear-cutting and the winnowing of the lush forests that surrounded Longview. All of this profoundly disturbed me. But I did not learn how to apply the science to support these feelings until after I went back to school in the late eighties. Even then, I did not succumb to the fallacy of thinking these issues defined all that was wrong with the world.

As for the last three, I developed deepening affinities for all three during the difficult self-extraction from the authoritarian religious culture and ideology I was raised in. They all coalesced at once for me during the several years I was extricating my heart, mind and soul from the strictures of the scriptures as interpreted by authoritarian patriarchal elders. Learning to feel free to think for myself along with learning the skill itself was hard won and I will give my life up before I will give it up.

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Questia--Researcher Heaven.or Hype?

I would love to be able to answer that question but I can't afford the subscription fee to check it out. But if it is as comprehensive as they are making themselves out to be, I would dearly love to. I am putting it at the top of my wish list for when my efforts here and here and here pan out into some kind of monetary remuneration. I would love to review it on Joyread. But until then, does anybody out there have experience with it? Comments are open.

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Groping For Doubt Relief

The only way to get the words out on this post is to go for it the same way I do in my journal no stopping to edit. No worrying about word choice or organization of ideas. The only way to do this is stream of consciousness and letting it all hang out clichés included. Grammar spelling punctuation must take the back seat must not intrude on getting said what needs to be said. Time sequence of events too must not be adhered to in strictness when memory is vague because if I try to get all of that right, I will use the excuse of perfectionism to censor myself to procrastinate to make excuses and once again give up. This is all about venting and not about composing a potential essay this is all about confession and laying it out there for inspection this is all about putting my action where my words have been all about doing what I have advocated. Since all three of my web sites are about integrity of mind and heart about reading and writing as a spiritual quest as well as an art about a passion that must be served in spite of all stumbling blocks in spite of all doubt in spite of any judgment against it by self or other and my confession is that I have sinned against the commandment to be dedicated to the heart of it for the joy of it to give it my all even when I don't feel much like it. And I haven't felt much like it at all for almost three months now and today it all came to a head like a pustule ready to burst in my head and heart and I snapped and I cried out to my self and the world, to my accusers--both myself and the others those bodiless voices intruding into my home, my sleep, my thoughts and my dreams--that enough is enough!

To myself: If you believe than do it if you can't follow thru than what business do you have advising others or mouthing the platitudes if that is all they be. If I had an audience here that audience would have noticed a substantial slowdown of postings to this blog and both of its companion sites after the last week of March. Less than a week after the posting of Gift or Temptation? and if so they might be forgiven for thinking that I had gotten lost in the exploration of the Great Books and/or the World Books. See Bringing Home the World On Wheels. But that would be a mistake. For the first week after acquiring them, yes, I did spend a little bit of extra time with them and some small portion of that was borrowed from my night computer sessions. But that wasn't the definitive event. In the post Gift or Temptation? I mentioned that I expected to be wracked by doubt which ever way I chose so I chose to have the books as consolation and I had no regrets for the first week. I continued apace with the revamping of Joystory, Joyread and Joywrite. I was getting pumped up to promote them as soon as the revamp was posted. I was full of hope and ambition and I was working hard. On the computer often from ten in the evening until ten in the morning except my mother-in-law's days off when I would get off by eight. Until the morning or was it afternoon or evening. No way to know as I didn’t record it in my journal. Don't remember which hour of the day the first call came but they come randomly and they come inexorably and they come any time between eight-thirty am and eight-thirty pm. The calls regarding collection of my eighteen year old defaulted student loan. And the shame burns as I write this with the expectation that it will be read by strangers who will judge me the way I have judged myself the way the voices over the wires have judged me, shamed me. But believe me you can't think anything worse about me than I have already thought about myself. And I don't want your pity and I don't want your money. This isn't about that. But just maybe just maybe you will read my story and see in it something of a parable about the very dysfunctions of our society that John Edwards is calling the Two Americas.

I went back to school in January of1985 and ten years after my high-school guidance councilor had advised me that I was not college material, that it would be better if I gave up my then five year old dream of becoming a child psychiatrist who wrote up the stories of her patients to raise the consciousness of the nation about the plight of abused children, ten years after he tells me that I would be better off applying those same interests into becoming a mother and writing stories for my kids, ten years after he wrote me off as a second class citizen, I finished my first quarter of college on the President's list. And for six quarters thereafter on the Dean's list. I was planning to apply my interest in child psychology and language into a career as a speech therapist specializing in very young children. It wasn't likely to be the kind of career path that would make me a millionaire but I wasn't interested in being rich. Never have been. I just needed to be doing something that would give me a wage while at the same time allowing me to feel I was of service to a real need and at the same time support my truest passion which was writing stories. By the spring of 87, by taking on 18+ credits per quarter, I was two credits short of completing my junior year. I fully intended to graduate the following spring. But during that summer, my husband lost his job and I learned I had the RP and was probably already legally blind. We were forced to move out of the Rogue Valley where I had been attending SOSC (now SOU) in Ashland, Oregon. And where we ended up did not have a four year school. Six months later, I started getting notices of my obligation to start paying on the two $2500 student loans I had taken out the previous year. Not long after that I was declared in default and lost my right to receive government grants and loans to continue my education and other things like help on rent or mortgages though the latter was never going to be an issue while our income remained below the poverty level as it did for most of the eighties and nineties. And whenever my husband was working where taxes were automatically withheld, our refund was confiscated every year because of our defaulted student loans (he had taken out a single $2500 loan). He claims that due to that confiscation of our refunds, we have repaid the original loans at least twice over but because of the accumulation of the interest, late fees, penalties etc my debt to the Department of Education now stands near $18,000 and is growing at more than $1 per day. I'm not sure where his stood before they started garnishing his check two years ago. But that garnishment contributes to our continued dependence on his parents though ostensibly his income brings us a bit above the poverty level. At least before Federal, State, Payroll, health and 401k withholdings. We can't afford our own place--first last month's rent, utilities and deposits. Not to mention the outfitting of a kitchen, bedroom and bathroom, plus cleaning supplies and laundry facility. And the existence of my defaulted student loan and other debts puts at risk any accumulation of assets towards our eventual independence. Any bank account is subject to liens and even confiscation. As are any vehicles, any appliances, in fact any belongings including wardrobes over a certain dollar amount and even books. Without a bank account, my husband is forced to cash his paychecks in grocery stores, check cashing joints and bars (which latter are often the only thing still open after he gets off work) Without a bank account it is hard to save towards a future. Without a bank account it is hard to pay bills. Without a bank account I can't sign up for Paypal and thus cannot apply any of the potential moneymaking concepts to my websites. Without a bank account I can't be an affiliate of an online bookstore, accept advertisements, offer my services as editor. Without a bank account I can't cash non-local checks or any personal checks.

So this was the state of affairs last March when I bent my nearly three year long iron will against spending money out of my secret stash to buy those two sets of books to honor my work. I had been spared the collections phone calls for a couple months and the sting of the last one had begun to fade. I was not thinking of those phone calls when I bought the books and thus was not thinking of how handing the money over for them would affect my ability to continue telling the voice on the other end the same thing I had been telling them for years. No resources. No assets. Nothing I can do. It didn't really change anything other than the label in my own mind of that secret stash of cash. By spending it on something it had not been intended for, I had destroyed it's sacrosanct aspect, its set-aside-ness. Though my husband points out that my original intent for the money was as investment into my writing and so were the books so what's the problem? And he points out that the $74 total did not set me back any for the computer either since I have had enough to get it for several months and the only thing stopping me was my fear. Fear of getting a lemon if I went refurbished. Fear of loosing it again if the bill collectors learn of its existence. Fear of my own feelings of guilt and shame for spending money like that while still living with my in-laws. While still owing so many so much. Even tho it is intended as an investment towards gaining a source of income that would free us of this dependence. Even tho. Because of fear that I will not be able to pull it off. That I won't be able to find a way to make an income because every way involves some kind of self promotion every way involves some form of saying look at me see what I can do while holding my hand out for cash. Both aspects of which are very hard for me to handle--both the look-at-me part and the pay-me part.

Then in late March, just days after bringing home the Great Books, the phone calls started up again. It was a different agency than the one before and this one was more aggressive and more intrusive in their questions. And I was already weary of answering those same questions over and over and over and getting nothing but disrespect back. The pattern is that once told of my status as legally blind they send me paperwork that I am supposed to take into a Dr. to have signed verifying that I am 100% permanently disabled and will never work for money again. That is the standard the government uses for waiver of a student loan. But how can I claim that I will never work for money again? Even Christopher Reeves worked for money after his accident. How would I ever justify that in my own mind? How could I ask a doctor to sign off on it? Especially with the memories of the two doctors that the state had sent me to in the past. The one that diagnosed my RP which qualified me for food stamps and SSI and the one that gave me a physical when I entered the state rehab program a few months later.

Rehab. What a laugh. Here I was with just a year to go on my BA which could have made me a productive citizen in service to my fellow citizens as a speech therapist or Russian language translator, technical writer or editor, and my social worker who I will forever think of as Mr. Broccoli wanted to send me to blind school which is glorified jr high school shop and home economics courses undertaken while blindfolded if one still has any vision left. What is the point of that when (at that time) I still had good central vision correctable to almost 20/20 which could, if I followed the pattern of my mother's and her mother's disease progress, continue to allow me to read and to see and recognize faces, watch TV and much much more for another twenty to thirty years. The limitations then were about mobility and safety of self and others outside environments that I could completely control. I could not work in restaurants because of all the movement of people and objects and the often dim lighting. I could not work on assembly lines. I could not drive at all nor could I walk the streets alone after dark. The disease has progressed since then and there are more things I can't do. There are other health issues now that I am nearing fifty after two decades of spotty health care that weren't issues in my late twenties.

I wonder to this day what the point was in asking me to put on a blindfold and learn to operate a table saw and power sander to make a bookshelf. To learn to make bread and put an entire meal on the table, blindfolded. When I was at least twenty years away from needing those skills. Why would the state have been willing to spend the thousands of dollars to send me to that boarding school while being unwilling to spend the same amount--or much less if they could have helped me get access to the Pell grants and student loans again and unlock my credits--so that I could finish my degree with a useful marketable skill? Mr. Broccoli could not imagine what I could do with a degree in languages or linguistics, he said I would have to live near the U.N. for translator to be a marketable skill. He said most parents wouldn't want to entrust their small children to a half-blind speech therapist. His words weren't quite that crude but the meaning behind them was. And as for data processor or computer programmer, (also languages and both of which I'd discovered an affinity for while in college) wasn't that kind of work awfully hard on the eyes? Ditto for word processor, editor or technical writer. The joke was on him (at my expense) when later that year the Berlin wall came down and a year or so later there was a large influx of Russian immigrants into Washington State. And during that same several years, the computer monitors developed better definition and the applications developed accessibility features. The internet exploded into a voracious consumer of talent in all area related to information handling. If he still can not imagine how my talent with languages and information manipulation could have been marketed at that point--he had no business in his job, which was after all about matching his clients strengths with the labor market's needs. Or maybe I was wrong about that all along. Maybe he saw his job as moving society's embarrassments out of sight and out of mind. At any rate, I felt then and continue to feel that I could have done his job better than he did. At least I would have had compassion for my clients and tried to find creative solutions for their individual and unique needs!

I have digressed again which is what this whole rendition of the story has been one digression after another. Which is a reflection of the way the thing plays out in my mind all the time. There are so many elements to it. There are so many constrictions on choices so much hope stomped on. It seems that every time I have tried to dig myself out of the hole someone grabs the shovel from my hands just as I begin to see over the lip and smashes it against my fingers until I let go and fall back into it, reminding me that the shovel is for digging myself in deeper not for digging stair steps out. And again I do not want anyone's pity and I do not want a hand out and I do not want anything except the dignity and respect that is the birthright of every human born into this world.

So. Back to the thing about the doctors. Both times I saw a doctor at the State's request, the doctor treated me like toe-jam. The first one would not tell me the results of the tests he did because it was the state that was his client and not me and his whole demeanor as he examined me was one of contempt. The second doctor giving me the physical for the rehab program also would not discuss with me the results of the exam for the same reason tho he was not nearly as holier-than-thou in our encounters. But those experiences do not make easy to contemplate taking in a form for a doctor to fill out stating that I am and always will be incapable of working for money. The form does not say working for a living but working for money in any capacity. And to make matters worse it would cost me somewhere between $70 and $150 in co-pays for the doctor appointments and the test fees. For in our health plan I have to go thru my primary care physician (which I don't currently have) to get sent to a specialist--in this case an ophthalmologist. So that would be at least two co-pays for appointments. And then the cost of the fees for each of the tests that establish the condition of my eyes. And to add to the weight of my claim I should also have appointments with an audiologist to establish the 50% or more hearing loss. With a Psychiatrist to establish the reality of the mood disorder. And a sleep clinic to establish the sleeping disorder. For each doctor and each lab fee add twenty plus dollars to the tab. I am supposed to do this even tho it is likely to be a wild goose chase, even tho I stopped going to the doctor two years ago because my husband stopped giving me my allowance in the face of all the co-pays. So I have not had my female exams for five years. I have not been on my blood pressure meds for nineteen months. Have not been on my mood and sleep disorder meds for thirteen months. All because it was costing me not just money but hope because it was deferring my dream of becoming independent into a future so far away it might as well be never.

But the voice on the other end of the line reads from their script, playing their psychological head games--good cop bad cop; disappointed mama: shame on you; stern daddy: get used to the sound of my voice because you're going to hear it every day; voice of the taxpayer/bounty hunter, dripping scorn: you deadbeat! The voice is telling me I have two weeks to get that waiver paperwork back to them and I tell them it takes longer than that to get the appointments set up and not only that it would take several weeks if not several months to save the money to pay for them and they say borrow it. Then ten days after giving me a fourteen day deadline they call again and say times up too late you can never exercise that option again. But I know that is a lie because every collection company I've dealt with sends me that same paperwork after I inform them I am legally blind. Now they tell me they are red flagging my social security that I will never be able to draw it as long as I owe the government this money and I'm not sure if this is true or not and I'm not sure if they mean only the retirement benefits or if it is also the disability benefit’s the SSI that has several times been a stop gap when my husband was between jobs. They call my in-laws liars for saying I am unavailable to come to the phone or that I am not at home. They imply to my husband that he is a controlling and abusive spouse for screening his wife's calls. They won't identify themselves to anyone but me and refuse to leave a message so when it is a woman's voice and sweet sounding asking for me by first name only and saying it is really important, they can't take the chance that it isn't my sister calling about a family emergency since my father has been fighting cancer for eighteen months. So they bring the phone to me in mid morning pulling me out of sleep. Or to the dinner table. To my bed when I have the flu or a migraine. I hang up on them and they call back which imposes further on my in-laws because they must answer the phone and bring it back to me. They call every day for a week or more and then stop for a week or so and start up again. I cringe every time the phone rings between eight and eight. I go into anxiety attacks as soon as the phone is handed to me, sometimes full blown panic attacks. And this added to my 50% hearing loss and the way they talk so fast makes it hard to understand much of what they say and I have to ask them to repeat themselves two, three times and they as much as accuse me of being difficult, changing the subject, wasting their time. My husband says stop answering their questions for if it was just about the answers they would enter them into their records and not need to hear the story repeated ad infinitum. They are fishing for information they can use to collect a debt and you have told them the only fact they need to know: you have no resources, no income no assets. There is nothing they can do except torment you in the hopes that you will break and go into debt elsewhere to pay off this debt so they can have their take on it. It is seldom the same person three times in a row and it is a crapshoot whether they are going to be pleasant or obnoxious. I go silent and they chide me like a child. I say I have answered that question a hundred times in the past year in a weary tone and they say essentially So what you owe this eighteen thousand dollars and it isn't going to go away. Yes. Right. Like I haven't known that for eighteen years and isn't the steady rising of the amount enough of a punishment? The eighteen years of confiscated tax refunds? Where is the law that makes this harassment from them a penalty and if it is then where was I when the judge handed down the sentence?

When the calls started coming again in March I started getting off the computer sooner and sooner each morning until I was off before six. So that I would be assumed to be sound asleep by the time the call came. And just in case, I wore earplugs as I often have to do anyway as a day sleeper in a trailer park. When the calls came in the evening it would take me hours to regain my composure and the first half of my session was often very unproductive. I stopped working on creative projects and research and started filling the hours with solitaire and jigsaw puzzles, maze and logic games that would keep my mind narrowly focused or on surfing online without aim or keeping records faux research…anything to help me stop obsessing on the phone calls, the debt, money issues and all the ramifications of it.

And then in late May either the calls stopped coming or were being fielded by my in-laws. As the reprieve grew past two weeks, I started to let down my guard. I started to get interested in my creative projects again and started to tinker with them and I started to stay on the computer past six again. And I started to window shop on-line for my notebook. And I started to hope again. And then today there was another call. I had not gotten to bed until after eight and had fallen asleep with the tv on so my father-in-law called me to the phone. And whether it was the fact that I had relaxed or the fact that my inhibitions were sleep fogged or the fact that as he handed me the phone, my father-in-law said 'she says its important' and I flashed on images of my Dad back in the hospital or worse. But when she identified herself to me, I lost it. I felt myself going into a panic attack and I had had enough. No more. This is not just. This is not helpful. This is not productive for anybody. it’s a waste of my time it’s a waste of their time. It is downright abusive. I have nearly always before been polite and compliant, answering every question tho they kept me on the line for over half an hour. I understood they were just doing their job that their working conditions are often little better than sweatshops. That they work off a script. So I tried not to take it personal tho that was often hard. But I was suddenly thru with polite and compliant. I took a preemptive approach and I went ballistic on her. You pulled me out of bed for this? I have nothing new to say. But you have this eighteen thousand dollar loan and we need to talk about it, she says. I was asleep! It's after nine-thirty she says implying that anyone still in bed that late, especially anyone owing this kind of money to the government has no right to be asleep at that hour. Has she never heard of day-sleepers? I wonder tho I do not say as I am tired of saying it, realizing she could care less. Instead I say, There are no new facts on the ground here. I have no resources. Zero. Zip. Nada. I own nothing of value. There is nothing I can do. There is no need to be rude she says. And I say Some of you people have been rude to me. Meaning tho I did not say Why should rudeness go only one way. And tho I do not believe that two wrongs make a right, why should I wait until I know whether you have the good cop script or the bad cop script. The school marm script or the hick town sheriff script. The nurturing mother script or the disciplinarian patriarch script. Why should I have to take that manipulative crap off of snot nosed brats that are young enough to be my kids? But I say none of that I only say again, There is nothing I can do. Nothing. My voice going up two octaves. She says have a nice day and hangs up.

But my mind did not stop. Nor did the anxiety attack. It lasted over three hours, accompanied by chest pain, which just increases my anxiety because ever since learning that my BP was 220/120 I am never sure the chest pain is just anxiety. For hours I kept replaying the conversation and those of the past and replaying the history of all my attempts to better myself and to get a piece of the American dream. And by that I don't mean riches and fame. Just respect from self and others. And independence. Physical, financial and mental independence. But every time I reach for that dream something yanks it away and uses my very efforts as a means to keep it out of my reach.

It was four hours before I was able to sleep and then only after taking four Ibuprophen and then breaking down for the first time in months into tears and sobbing, spreading the anxiety to my cats who crowded my face, purring and nipping my nose, licking tears off my eyelashes and sticking their noses in my ears. The anxiety went into my dreams and I had a series of falling off the cliff and jerking awake scenarios with chiding voices full of contempt and chanting who do you think you are after all. Deadbeat. Thief. Moocher off family and taxpayers. And as soon as I was fully awake again after only three hours of this fitful sleep, the anxiety powered up again and continued to keep me on edge for the whole evening. I flinched every time the phone rang which averages a dozen times an evening here. Had multiple startle reactions to unexpected noises. I fought the tears thru dinner time and let them come again as I stood alone over the dishwater.

And then about nine-thirty this evening, as my time on the computer approached I remembered that I still had a few Zoloft tablets left from the 2001 prescription that I had had to withdraw from during the week the towers fell in New York when it became clear that my husband's unemployment benefits from his lost tech job, were too high for me to qualify for help from the county mental health clinic and we could not afford to pay for the three meds I was on and the careful monitoring of them which I need because of past adverse reactions. I got the idea that I could maybe put a damper on the anxiety if I took a small chip of one of those tablets. They were already broken in half from the weeks of the withdrawal and I could break those in half again to give me a 25miligram dose which was the size of the very first prescription in 99 so should be safe enough. If I could just get a grip on it to reach a level of calmness from which I could apply the various relaxation techniques to enhance the effect…if I could just get a few moments of relief from this pressure in my chest this sense that I could not get my breath…this inability to think clear coherent thoughts…but the old bottle wasn't where I had left it. And I spent the next hour searching for it, more and more frantic, punishing myself with further silent verbal abuse for being so disorganized for not putting things back where they belong. Did it fall on the floor? And then get kicked under the bed? Or become a kitty toy? Or did it fall into the pile of laundry? Or behind the stack of cardboard boxes aka bookshelves? If that last had happened I would have to wait until the next day after my husband left for work to unload the books onto the bed so I could move the boxes. So I started by lifting every item of clothing in the laundry pile and giving it a little shake. Sorting by load type while I was at it. Might as well accomplish something. I pulled shoes, slippers and water bottles, kitty toys, tissues and more dirty clothes out from under the bed. No prescription bottle. And I finally gave up and started moving my books and papers out to the computer even though I doubted I would be having a productive session and would be moving them all back in a few hours without using them. But I was going to take them with me anyway as a symbol of my intent to try, to have the tools available and to make myself available for the task. Often I have surprised myself by having a productive session in which I did some of my most interesting, most mature and meaningful work when I thought I was a complete wreck or had nothing but boring clichés to contribute to the effort. So I schlepped the stuff out, it takes several trips since the box of materials related to the various projects has gotten too heavy for me to carry. And there it was, after the first trip but not the last, there it was, the bottle--behind a notebook I grabbed up to take with me. And I found my pill splitter and split the half tab in two and took one of them. And half an hour later I clicked the game off, signed online and got busy.

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PERILS OF PERFECTIONISM

OR LOSING CONTROL TO GAIN YOUR SOUL: on how my poem

BECOMING (THAT MOST HOPED FOR) I was composed

During late March and early April of 2000, I spent a month writing and tweaking a single poem. That was the first time I spent more than a day or two on any one poem. Usually they come to me nearly complete, almost like automatic writing. I think that’s because I had been thinking hard about a certain theme and a phrase or two will attach itself it and won’t leave me alone. Somewhat like a phrase of music that keeps playing in your head for hours after you listened to the song. Then over the next several days or weeks or months that phrase starts to collect images, emotions, words and phrases that expand on the theme until something swells inside me and I feel like it will pop if I don’t start writing.

But this time it was different. This was also the first time I had composed a poem entirely via keyboard on the computer, watching the words flow across the screen. I wrote the first two lines for no reason except I needed two short lines to experiment with centering a poem on a page in the word processor. I was on the phone with my Dad who needed my help to figure out how to do this for a poem my Mom had written for her brother’s birthday card. I needed to go through the motions to be able to explain the steps to him. When we finished, I walked away from the computer, leaving that unsaved document sitting there. It confronted me when I came back later that night to do my journal and I started to kill the document but something stopped me. Those lines had been meaningless as I manipulated them earlier but as I looked at them now they became loaded with meaning from the spiritual path I’d been on for several years by then. So I left the document alone. It sat there unsaved for several days before I added a couple more lines. I didn’t save it until I had six or seven lines. And only then because it had started to matter to me enough that the specter of a loss of power or one of my cats stepping on the keyboard began to haunt me. It was for want of a viable title that I had not saved before. I hated to lock myself into a title too early and it bugs me for some reason to create files with throw away names. But I did that time and have many times since. (I learned the magic of renaming files in the computer’s file management window)

I finally did save the unfinished poem but I did not close the file. I had no idea where it was going. Which was unnerving for me as usually the last line of a poem is among the first phrases I write down. I didn’t find out where I was going this time until I got there and recognized it as the Truth my Self was trying to tell me. This was the first of my poems to tell a plotted story. It taught me to trust the process and expect a miracle and to show that confidence by starting something even if I don’t know where it is going. I’m planning to try that on a short story or novel next.

It is that perfectionist’s need to know exactly what a thing is going to look like, be like, work like before I take the first step toward the goal which has caused most of my projects to fizzle in the planning stage. Not just writing projects either. Now, releasing control does not imply abdicating responsibility. For the creative process consists of a series of reciprocal responses between the art and the artist. Each response both effects and affects the response it is soliciting in a back and forth interweaving of responses. Warp and weft. So, to relinquish control is to give up the need to dominate the process and dictate all parameters of the finished product, refusing all input and fearing all deviation from the pattern. Such a product could only be a pale copy of a true creation anyway.. It might be artifact but it would not be art. An insistence on control insures the still-birth of all your creative endeavors whether the products of your art or the products of your heart. Giving up control activates the principle of creativity which is the heart of all art, including the art of becoming.

Now that I’ve teased you with all of that, here it is:

Becoming (That Most Hoped For) I

(Well, I was going to include the poem here, but I can't figure out how to get the line formatting right and since presentation is important to poetry and for this particular poem especially so, I gave the link to it's page on my Joywrite site. The title of this post is a link to an earlier version of this essay posted as a Reflections essay on Joywrite. One of a series of occasional musings on the art and craft of writing and living a writer's life.)

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Grab & Get & Guzzle With Gusto--For Tomorrow We Die

Tho I could have aquired this quote from a number of locations since it has proliferated on the net like lice on mice, I chose Molly Ivin's essay on Alternet to introduce two of my favorite and most depended upon news and information sources. Molly is informative while being entertaining, helping you find your sense of humor in the face of outrageous offenses to justice and truth. Alternet is an assiduous collector of articles and alerts related to the progressive aggenda.

"The aide (a senior adviser to President Bush) said that guys like me were 'in
what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who
'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible
reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and
empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,'
he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.
And while you're studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we'll act
again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how
things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be
left to just study what we do." – Ron Suskind, New York Times Magazine, Oct. 17,
2004.

It isn't new to most us that this administration holds itself above the law. But that they also hold themselve above all reality-based principles with the possible exception of gravity--that is news of the 'man bites dog' catagory. So they think that being an Empire makes them unaccountable to any authority except their own? Too bad we can't channel the spirits of Nero and Caligula and ask them How'd that work for you? Hey, did they stop requiring reading of Gibbon's Decline and Fall in the Ivy League schools? If so, my own audodidact aproach has given me a better education than any diploma could account for. But the reading of history would have little effect on those who think they are all about making it but never about being subject to it. And as Bush has been quoted saying about history, regarding future historians' take on his administration: We'll all be dead then. Ah, yes. Grab and get and guzzle with gusto for tomorrow we die. And he claims Jesus is his favorite philosopher?

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Who Are We To Judge Then?

Bow your head in shame and repent, all ye who reap the rewards of the West's monopoly of power in the last century. For the blood of many innocents is on your hands, on the money in your pocket and the gas in your car. Even the blood shed by the hand of Saddam and his henchman who was from the start the henchman of our own leaders.

Selah. And sigh.

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Orcinus on the Bush Court Appointees Disdain for the Right to Privacy

Take note all progressives. The Right to Privacy as a Constitutional assumption is under attack by the Right. Read Orcinus' erudite take on this. Orcinus is one of my fav blogs. Neiwert's analyis of current events is spot on. His expertise on the issues of homegrown hate and the erroding of rights and freedoms is extensive. He has been researching the agendas of those Bush considers his base for decades. It is not paranoia when the facts back up perception. Neiwert is a meticulous researcher and insiteful analyist. I have grown to trust him in the year I have been reading his blog. His posts never get stale either. They are worth reading even after the event in question is no longer in the headlines.

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What I Heard About Iraq

Refresh your memory with this compilation of quotations by polititians, officials, millitary personal, Iraqi's etc. from the months leading up to the war until recently. And then start paying close attention to the chatter comming out of the administration about Iran lately and consider.... Ready for round two anyone? Does anyone have the courage to stand up and say no?

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The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

This is my definition of evil.

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Gift or Temptation?

When I walked into the library Friday, my mind was still full of the past ten days of blissful exploration in the pages of my 'new' World Book Encyclopedia. I was anxious to get my business taken care of and get back home to them. Few things could have jerked me out of that trance. I can think of exactly four: Someone placing a baby in my arms while saying 'Welcome to motherhood.' Taking possession of my very own notebook computer. A book contract with a publisher. And owning once again Britannica's Great Books set with its indispensable Syntopicon of The Great Ideas. So when I came out of the bright outside into the fluorescent lit library, my eyes blinking fitfully to adjust, I can be forgiven for thinking briefly that I must be dreaming, for right there on the very same shelf the World Book set had sat two weeks before were the distinctive spines of the Great Books.

This was one of the missing pieces of the puzzle for me. (the only other being my own notebook computer) It felt like a gift from the Universe. A blessing on the work that I had done over the past year to get my manuscripts retyped and my web pages back up. I have been itching to get back to work on what I consider to be my magnum opus. One very long novel or a series of shorter novels on the theme of The Fruits of the Spirit. Though my list of the Fruits of the Spirit is longer than the one in Galatians. More on that later. In order to resume work on that project I needed frequent access to the most important reference tool second only to dictionaries: The Syntopicon of Britannica's Great Book set. A topical index of the Great Ideas that occupied some 3000 years of Western Civilization's evolving concept of itself. An intergenerational dialog which the editors, Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer J. Adler, call the Great Conversation. With that Syntopicon I would, with considerable effort, be able to reconstruct the skeleton of that project. I could get access to most of the writings in question via the library, but libraries tend to keep the Syntopicon on reference shelves.

But just ten days ago I spent $20 out of the fund that I had set aside as untouchable except for one of three things. Retrieval of our belongings in storage in San Jose--now irretrievably gone. The move into our own place--which would take me another three years, assuming the same rate of accumulation. Or a notebook computer--possibly refurbished--so I could have 24/7 access to my work and never have to leave it behind again. And--most pertinent to our circumstances--have the tool that is the most perfect fit for both my talents and my disabilities and thus could enable me to rise from this unhealthy state of dependency and sense of burden on my family and begin to contribute financially. Have Computer Will: Write, Edit, Research, Tutor, Webmistress, Consult, Type, Desk Top Publish, Enter and Manage Data Base Data, Beta Test software…

The list could go on. My talent and experience in the manipulation of information is extensive. But my various health issues prevent me using them in the typical workplace under the typical workplace conditions. I need special tools and significant control over my working environment to accommodate my severe visual impairment. I also need significant control over my schedule to accommodate transportation exigencies, joint pain, easy fatigue and a sleeping disorder that makes sustained enforcement of the typical 40 hour workweek impossible. So working from home is the best fit all around. And a computer coupled with the internet and combined with my skill set makes that a viable option.

All of this roiled in my head as I blinked my eyes and the glittering gold of the embossed spines refused to vanish. I quickly counted, confirming the set was intact. Not only intact but in mint condition. I pulled one out and checked the copyright page. The set was from the 24th printing in 1982. But every volume was pristine. In fact, about fifteen of them were still individually shrink-wrapped! And when I fanned the pages the gilded edges across the top crackled, indicating that few if any of these pages had ever been turned. Oh, the pity of it. For twenty years these books had languished on a shelf or in a box, with the riches of centuries of wit and wisdom penned (pun unintentional but apropro) between their covers--nothing but a dead weight or a knickknack to be dusted. The sign said 'Make an Offer'. The other sign regarding the more typical Friends of the Library book sale fare quoted $1 as the price for hardbacks. How could I offer less? Yet how could I justify the $54? But how could I walk away from them? I had only minutes to decide.

Either way I was set up for a marathon wrestle with second guessing? Was this a gift and a reward from the Universe in acknowledgment of the dedication to my work and talents I had evinced over the past fifteen months? Or was it a perfidious temptation to deviate from the plan, a distraction and an offering to the grasping and greedy bibliophilic genie in me that had often and often before lured me off on tangents that diverted me from tending to my work? One could argue that, at least in this case, the books had a direct bearing on my work. One could also argue that I had no right to spend money that way while my husband and I were still living with his parents. Yet the $1 per 54 volumes plus the $20 already spent on the World Book set amounted to much less than my husband spent monthly on cigarettes and designer coffee. But one can not argue that two wrongs make a right. I finally decided that if I had to live with regret either way, I would prefer to have the books as consolation even if sometimes their presence would seem a condemnation. So I made the offer and it was accepted. I said I was going to make the walk back home to get the money and my collapsible luggage cart but the librarian nixed that by offering to deliver the books to my doorstep on her way home from work. That gave me time to get home and do some juggling of things in our room to make space for a set of books that was twice the size of the World Book set that I had struggled to accommodate just ten days ago. I joked with the librarians that I was probably going to have to curtail my usual rate of check-out in order to make room and time for these two sets of books.

Update: as it turned out, the very boxes in which the Great Books were transported became jury-rigged shelving that actually increased the space for books. In the three months since I brought home the Great Books, I have increased the average of books checked out to my account from 60 to 90. It has been a long time since I actually counted them. I get that figure from the fact that I average a weekly turnover of ten books--those checked out and those returned. But more than 80% of the items I bring home are not in high demand and so they typically will renew the allotted twice for a total of three times three weeks. So that I have at any one time nine separate batches of books. This allows me to order books from the county system that I find cited in the books I am reading and have them arrive while I am still in possession of the book that referenced them.
Well, those three cardboard boxes gave me the space to accommodate an increased level of source acquisition. As for the extra time--I'm stealing that from TV (mostly a moratorium on MSM news programs, internet, and sleep accounts. Hence the great slowdown of postings here.

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Bringing Home the World on Wheels

Last Friday on my weekly pilgrimage to the library I found on display, on the shelves set aside for the Friends of the Library Book Sale, a 1999 edition of the World Book Encyclopedia in excellent condition. There were call number labels on the spines of the volumes which had been blacked out. Evidently the set was being retired from the library's collection. The sign on top said 'Make an Offer'. It has been years since I have spent more than a couple bucks on anything for myself. I stood in front of those books and practically drooled. It was as much a nostalgia trip as anything. My parents bought us a second hand World Book set when I was about eleven. I loved it. I started trying to read them cover to cover. But I never made it more than fifty pages into the A volume before I got sidetracked by the list of related articles at the ends of major articles. And of course many of the articles in those lists had lists of their own. My favorite way to 'read' the World Book encyclopedia was to follow those trails from volume to volume. Opening book after book and leaving them spread open, layering book over book in a blossom of pages. I loved the maps of countries and states and the plants and animal photos. That set had been published before Kennedy's presidency and the pictures and maps were all black and white but it was still engrossing. This set I now stood before was full of color photos. Nearly every page sported at least one. And not only that, the covers were an eye popping cornflower blue. One of my favorite colors. Not that I would have turned down the set because I disliked the color of the covers. Hardly. But it seemed an added boon, almost an affirmation as though the books whispered to me by this sign that they were meant for me.

The timing was so providential. I had access to the World Book Online but the internet connection we have is not broadband and major graphics are time intensive to download. So my most urgent need for access to good maps was often thwarted by this limit. My time on the computer here is too precious to waste sitting here staring at a little bar-graph creeping from left to right. I have eight hours--10PM-6AM--and that time has to be split between creating and uploading HTML pages, blog posting, journaling, writing and editing essays, poems, stories, emails and all internet research related to them including news and current events as I no longer have any faith in the MSM.

I didn't dither over my decision for long. I had seen a similar set in a box on the floor directly after a Friend's sale and when I inquired about them was told they were already sold. My disappointment had haunted me into my dreams. How could I walk away from this opportunity? I couldn't and I didn't. While checking out my selections, I spoke wistfully about the set and how it conjured up childhood memories. I said that I really wanted it but would have to go back home for the money. It would mean giving up Dr. Phil and Oprah but it would be worth it. But she said that wouldn't be necessary. She would put a sold sign on the set and it would be waiting for me when I came back which would be Tuesday at the latest as I had another batch of books due that day. I agreed to this and walked home feeling as though I were floating, wondering how long Tuesday would feel like forever.

Forever arrived today. I left home at twelve-fifteen. I got back at two, having brought with me the entire set of World Book. All 22 volumes. Got 13 into the rolling backpack. Another five into the small turquoise duffle which I carried by slinging the single strap over my head and across my chest so the weight of the books rested over my shoulder blades. The last four I put in a paper bag with handles and the librarian helped me by providing a large sturdy rubber band and a piece of yarn. I had to find a way to carry the paper bag in the same hand which pulled the rollling backpack as I needed to keep one hand free to carry my cane. I rested the bag against the bar of the backpacks pull handle holding the handles of the bag and the top of the pull bar together. I was going to go like that before she fetched the yarn and rubber band. She put the rubber band around the bag and the pull bar to help hold it in place and she wrapped and knotted the yarn around the two handles so that I did not have to keep hold of it every second. This left me free to release the handles and let the bags stand alone for short breaks to flex my fingers every couple blocks. I could have left behind whatever wouldn’t fit into the backpack and got them on the next trip. But I just couldn’t bear to. Even though I knew I would not need or be able to look at all 22 volumes today or even in the next week I still wanted them home with me. I wanted to be able to know exactly how much space I needed to prepare for them. Though I could have solved that by measuring them on the shelf before I started packing them. I confess I just wanted them!

I checked out only two items that day, a paperback novel for my husband and a video for his shut-in 90-yr-old grandma. I was walking back out the door in less than fifteen minutes from walking in. So anxious I was to get home and explore the world again as I had at eleven. I felt like I was walking several inches above the ground. Less than two blocks from the library, a tall, bearded gentleman carrying a large sanded tree branch as a walking stick passed me going the opposite direction. The two of us had passed each other in reverse fashion just half an hour or less earlier when we had exchanged nods. I was debating in my mind whether to nic-name him Moses or Walt Whitman when he stopped and, taking note of my white cane, asked if I was lost. I almost laughed as I restrained myself from asking back, How could I be lost? I've got the World on wheels right here. Instead I just said, No. Thank-you, I'm fine. And he said, Oh, I just thot since I saw you going that way just a few minutes ago... But I was shaking my head as I said, I was just at the library and now I'm headed back home. And he nodded saying, I see. And we exchanged Have a nice day and continued on our ways.

I really didn’t get a chance to look closely at them until I moved out to the computer to start my session tonight. At the last second I grabbed the A volume and brought it with me and have been having a hard time keeping my hands and eyes off it.. The color photos and drawings are awesome. But I need to lay off and get busy. I just spent an hour going back and forth between my journal (where the first draft of this post took form) and looking at the pictures and glancing at the articles and just luxuriating in turning the pages and feeling the heft of the book in my hands.

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Support Returning Troops

Smoothing their transition back into their communities should be a given. They should never have to wait for months for health care whether mental or physical. They should never end up homeless. They should never end up jobless either. This belongs in the cost calculation of any war along with munitions, fuel, transportation of troops etc. To cut the troops loose after discharge and accept no continuing responsibility for adjusting to the impact their combat experience had on them, for acclimating them back into their community in every way, is the height of disrespect for the service they performed. Whether you support the war or not, the troops need to be supported in every way during and after their service. It is after all the most healthy thing for the community as well for homeless, jobless, stressed out or otherwise disabled vets not only cannot contribute to the overall commonweal, they often contribute to its degeneration with higher suicide and domestic violence rates, vagrancy and drinking related crimes

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