Post Katrina Environmental Impact

I've been so busy chasing links and reading stories and digesting information regarding the probable long-term environmental impact of Katrina and the reconstruction efforts that I haven't been able to compose my own post regarding any of it for several days. I still don't feel ready. My head is so swamped with facts and theory--rumors and guesses; actual announced policy from the administration (along with speculation about the true meaning behind the Orwellian words); proposed legislation from Congress; alerts from those with credentials in the field--I just don't feel competent to sort it out into anything of unique and substantive value, which is one of my benchmarks for posting.

I feel there are enough blogs out there doing a remarkable job of calling attention to current events and news and commentary with quotes and links (often to articles in the MSM which are quickly archived behind pay-per-view walls, leaving the blogosphere riddled with linkrot) that I would not be adding anything of value to the discussion by doing more of the same. But my struggle to find relevant and substantial information over the last week has shown me that this meme is not spreading through either the MSM, the EzInes (at least the free ones which are the only ones I can afford) or the blogosphere with the alacrity of many of the other Katrina related memes, though I believe it is the most important following only after providing for the immediate life-sustaining needs of the survivors.

I worry that if we don't create a tipping point of demand for responsible, transparent, accountable attention to this issue, it will soon be commandeered by the corporations, the construction contractors, the sea-food and agricultural industries and the tourist industry. And before long even Oprah would suffer distasteful repercussions if she were to frown in public at the thought of being served shrimp gumbo laced with PCBs, lead, mercury, heavy metals, petroleum, arsenic….

There are already laws in place in many states forbidding the libeling of produce on which that state's livelihood depends, laws which have been used to hush whistle blowers and lone activists with crushing financial punishment via fines, loss of jobs, blacklisting and bankrupting legal fees. Watch for such laws to be created and/or strengthened throughout the Gulf states, if not throughout the US, in the near future. The only way to preempt this attempt to preempt open discussion about this is to make such a hullabaloo now that a demand for dependable information and responsible, science-based, clean-up operations will become as unstoppable as Katrina herself.

I have yet to find anyone doing anything resembling a clearing house of information and links regarding the ramifications of the toxic content of the water saturating every surface of New Orleans and being pumped into Lake Pontchartrain from where it will wend its way to the gulf through the estuaries and be spread into the local (thus global) food chain and all the local sources of potable water. I don't have any illusions that I can provide one with my current resources, nor do I want this blog, Joystory, to be commandeered for the purpose as my intent for it is still reflected by the subtitle even though I continue to have trouble overriding my obsession with this issue in order to maintain a balance in post subjects (or in my daily life routines for that matter). But I do want to contribute to the meme stream some of what I have dug up and to put out a call for more relevant links. I am going to periodically update this post with my continuing research results and thus will put a permanent link to it in the sidebar within the next few days.

In Reviving New Orleans, a Challenge of Many Tiers I put this one first not because it is most useful but because it is one of the rare examples of a MSM source addressing the issue (and it will be easier to locate here than elsewhere in the list for removal when its link rots next week).

This is also likely to linkrot which is why I include the relevant quote here. I'm going to keep my eye on Carol Browner in hopes she continues to be vocal: Carol Browner (former EPA head under Clinton) theorized that the city proper may well become the nation's largest de facto toxic waste site: The water, so thick and toxic... is now receding while you watch in places... and I fear the sludge and dust left behind won't necessarily present itself to people as the danger we know it is.

Susie at Suburban Guerrilla alerts us to an AP report that Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the Republican chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is preparing legislation that would allow the EPA to relax or suspend its rules in the interests of expediting reconstruction.

Susie again: The Heritage Foundation, a radical-right think-tank which provides many of the talking-points for the 'conservative' pundits and professional 'experts' consulted by the media and contributes to the writing of legislation and regulations, has issued its recommendations for Katrina recovery and New Orleans reconstruction. Among them: Repeal the estate tax and copiously fund faith-based organizations. Drill the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, suspend environmental regulations including the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act, suspend prevailing wage labor laws. (Including worker safety regulations which would allow them to subject workers now and in the future to toxic levels heretofore considered unacceptable? While curtailing their access to healthcare? And forcing them to work for substandard wages? Don't they have a name for this? Hint: it rhymes with 'rave' but it ain't no party! JR)

(Be not confused: this is a battle between the moral values of billionaires for bottomless greed versus the moral values of the commonweal. The prophets for profit are currently out-shouting the prophets for public and personal well-being. We need to find our voice and soon, before they find a way to buy or steal that too.JR)

BAGnewsNotes has some more stunning photos of the rainbow sheen spread over NO but questions the media's will to keep the toxicity of NO story alive. Not sexy enough, too difficult to research. Not photogenic enough. And someone in the comments on this post leaves behind these links, which while not directly related to Katrina have information with implications for the mind boggling complexity of the problem we are facing:
We have met the enemy...
Huge Cleanup Ahead for Kodak
Photographic Processing Hazards
Hazardous Waste From Computers
Video Display Units — Health Hazards
Cathode Ray Tubes = Hazardous Waste
U.S. Electricity Generation — Fuel Sources

(As you read those sources, consider the implications of the electronic components found in a typical household or office and multiply it by one or two hundred-thousand. Add to that the probable contents of department stores and warehouses in this major shipping nexus--all of this soaking in this water for several weeks. JR)

Solid Waste & Recycling, an online magazine, alerts us to the infamous Agricultural Landfill Site in downtown NO. Said to be on a par with Love Canal for levels of toxins, it is a toxic waste contaminated area several blocks wide, now under three feet of water, making probable the spread of the contaminates it contains.
Appended to this article are links to interactive maps of before and after the flood with directions for locating the ALS.

There is also a link to an Environmental Justice Case Study which offers a detailed history of the pollution problems at the ASL and of residents complaints and health problems.

Also provided is a link to the government site that offers details about the government's Public Health Assessment regarding the ALS. (I predict this one won't stay available for long and I hope someone with tech savvy and file storage resources can stash a linkable copy of it before it disappears down the memory hole. JR)

GIS mapping of sites likely to be sources of toxins released into water by Katrina

Amy Goodman interviews Harold Zeliger re NO Toxic Soup
I do expect Democracy Now to keep their watchful eye on this issue
Toxic Soup: The Deadly Floodwaters of New Orleans
Environmental Pollution Along the Mississippi: From the Headwater to the Delta


Kudos to T r u t h o u t which is shaping up to be a resource on this issue with several articles already and forums for discussion available.
The entire community is now a toxic waste dump
After Katrina: the toxic time bomb

From the Guardian Unlimited:
Katrina oil spills may be among worst on record
According to the Coast Guard, 6.5 million gallons of crude oil had been spilt in at least seven major incidents. This does not include the leaks from 200,000 submerged vehicles and hundreds of submerged gas stations.
Prescott links global warming to Katrina
Oil spills and lost islands add to the hurricane's toll

Cover-Up: Toxic Waters 'Will Make New Orleans Unsafe for a Decade'
Hugh Kaufman at the EPA is blowing the whistle on the administration's attempts at a cover-up already. They are suppressing the release of the test results on the water samples and deliberately preventing the collection and testing of a statistically significant number of samples.

(Let me remind those still clueless: Science and technology need facts with which to work. Facts are the foundation of knowledge and understanding and of the concomitant innovation which provides solutions to problems in the form of technology. This is the true fuel of the economy, without it the billionaires gold is so much gas, dissipating into the global finance network, trading itself for itself, buying itself with itself--one giant Ponzi scheme. In order to adequately address the toxins in NO the scientists and innovators need facts. JR)

He did the same with the cover-up of the highly toxic condition of the air in downtown Manhattan after the WTC towers fell. He was not heeded and today a large percentage of the rescue, recovery and clean-up workers are suffering various degrees of compromised lung function among other health issues, including a statistically higher than normal death rate.
Help me amply his message so that his warning cannot be marginalized by the administration or the MSM again.

Here are two more which have caught the meme from Kaufman:
Culver City News w/ a forum for commenting
Paul Krugman quotes Kaufman in the context of alerting us that the state of most if not all of the government agencies mirror that of FEMA

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Step Up, Medford (and every city in America)

Step up, Medford
According to the Sunday Mail Tribune, refugees from Hurricane
Katrina are arriving in Portland now. With so many thousands of hurricane refugees, totally displaced persons, what if every town and city community in America each provided a house, a job, and the basic necessities of life to just one family. One family who has lost everything, maybe even family members, and have nothing. Can Medford step up? Let’s do it! — D. Yates, Medford

This letter to the editor ran in the Medford Mail Tribune Medford, Oregon on Sunday September 10. This is an idea that should fly. I am proud to live in the same valley as this writer. This is my humble effort to get their excellent idea into the national meme stream.

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Shroud of Shame

Several hundred people attempting to walk out of flooded New Orleans across an intact bridge over the Mississippi were turned back at gun-point by the sheriff of the suburb on the other side of the river and later the encampment that some of them set up on a nearby overpass was purposefully destroyed by helicopter blade wind and their food and water confiscated as they were disbanded and forced to retreat and then prevented from once again congregating in groups of more than a handful or two.

This has got to be one of the most shameful outrages of the entire week of shameful outrages perpetrated by those in authority with moral compasses so off kilter that they see property, political jockeying and personal convenience as having priority even in a time of crisis when lives are in peril.

Besides the obvious evil of forcing imperiled fellow citizens back into a life-threatening situation when relative safety was just a few blocks away, there is also the jaw-dropping fact that they had a helicopter and used it this way instead of for rescue and relief efforts. The shroud of shame belongs to all those implicated in the actions of this sheriff and over the community for which he worked if they do not repudiate this callus abuse of power and prosecute them to the full extent of the law.

Read the article linked to the title of this post. The incident on the bridge is just one in a series of incidents experienced by the authors, two EMT conventioneers trapped in NO before the storm. Their efforts to get to safety were thwarted on several occasions by the actions of those in authority. The shroud of shame belongs to each and every one of us if we continue to tolerate in positions of power and leadership such inept and morally bankrupt people.

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Drown It In the Bathtub

"My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years," he says, "to get it
down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."
~~Grover Norquist

So will the toxic tub which is now New Orleans (and soon to be much of the Gulf of Mexico coastline) be the bathtub which Norquist can finally drown the people's government in. Or will it be the tub in which we the people can finally drown the Norquist/Corporate agenda and take back our government of, by and for we the people.

In other words, will we the people buy the Norquist/Corporate/Consevative frame that the colossal failure of government to ameliorate this is the irrefutable proof that government shouldn't be in the business of ameliorating human suffering in the first place? Or will we the people finally see the corrupt heart of cold hard greed at the center of their value system and take back our government as an arm of our community?

Will we the people fall for their frame that those who get swamped by their rising tide are willfully boatless and thus it is the 'mercy' of the invisible hand of the market that they drown by reason of their irresponsibility for not climbing onto a boat by hook or by crook? Or will we the people finally see the truth that we are responsible for each other as well as our selves for we are all in the same boat?

Will we let the Norquist/Corporate/Conservate coalition commandeer the Katrina recovery and apply their market-system morality to feed their greed? Or will we finally hold the invisible hand of the market accountable for all of the creative accounting and immoral cost externalizing which created for its very foundation both the boatless and the toxic waters they drowned in last week and which the rest of the Mississippi delta and Mexican Gulf Coastlines will be bathing in for the foreseeable future?

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New Orleans must stop pumping now!

I believe that I have just found the issue on which I have something to contribute to the discussion. Both because this aspect of the Katrina catastrophe has so far been under-reported and because I have read widely across the various science disciplines involved in comprehending the scope of this potential reverberation of Katrina's havoc. The word must go out now before it is too late. They simply must not pump that water back into the lake and river untreated. My heart breaks for the further delay that will mean for the rebuilding and the return of its residents. I am not advocating a permanent abandonment of New Orleans but I am pleading that the time be taken to do it right or else we will still be tallying the death toll of Katrina into the next century.

I saw this picture or one like it early last week and immediately understood the implications--that the water flooding New Orleans is laden with toxic chemicals from the dozen or so refineries and chemical plants surrounding the city. Add to that the decomposing food from homes, restaurants, stores and warehouses, the decomposing bodies of humans and animals and the human waste (Do I need to say it?? It rhymes with 'hit and miss? Get it?) and the chemical reactions associated with decomposition of organic components and you have a recipe for huge-scale ecological disaster. Scientists are warning that if they follow through with the plan to pump the water out of the city and back into Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi, there will be a massive contamination of the lake, river, delta and Gulf ecosystem that could have untold repercussions on the entire food chain of the Gulf region.

They also warn of dislocation of dangerous animals such as water moccasins and alligators from their normal habitat into areas where they can wreak havoc on humans and domestic animals. To be more blunt, pumping that water back into the lake and river will kill the lake and river, much of the delta and huge swathes of the Gulf of Mexico at the mouth of the river.

Destroying the delta will remove one of the major defenses against future hurricanes as its presence acts as a buffer which sucks some of the energy out of the storm before it reaches the towns and cities. With the delta buffer eroded or gone, the storm can even continue to gain energy from the overheated shallow waters--heated now both by sun and decomposing organic matter. With the grasses and other rooted plants dead, the ocean will reclaim the soil of the delta at an ever increasing rate.

Poisoned fish eaten by birds will kill the birds or cause birth defects or fragile shells on their eggs. The toxins will permeate the soil and the groundwater and get into the crops and the grass growing where children play and into the milk they drink and the food their nursing mothers eat. And where over the globe do elements of the Gulf food chain normally get shipped? How much mayhem will these toxins do before cause and effect is even acknowledged let alone laws and regulations invoked to prevent further contamination, if by then it is even possible short of abandonment of the entire infected ecosystem for human habitation and food cultivation?

How many years? How many decades? How many generations? How many dead babies, miscarriages, birth-defects, cancer-clusters, clusters of immune deficiencies and normally rare degenerative diseases; organ failures, rashes, chronic respiratory or digestive tract distress, intransigent infertility of human and animal, neurological disorders, learning disorders--all of which and more have been associated with exposure to petro-based products, their by-products and the plethora of chemicals commonly used throughout the processing, storing and shipping of petroleum products, which would have been stored in abundance in a region whose most prominent industry was the shipping, storage and processing of oil.

Will we ever even know which chemicals and in what quantities they were released into the environment? Or will the corporations involved claim proprietary rights to secrecy? We simply must have transparency of this entire issue for without the facts, the ingenuity of science and technology can not be applied to rectify it. Science and technology without facts will go the way of the delta without rooted plants.

Pass this into the meme stream pronto! No matter where you live on the globe, this needs to matter to you. For especially if corporations use the new 'free trade' laws to force other countries to accept shipment of contaminated food product, this would have a direct effect on you and yours for decades.

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Sidetracked

Have been seriously sidetracked this past week with the news about the Katrina Catastrophe. I was reading obsessively online all night every night and occasionally watching or listening to CNN simultaneously. I could not blog about it as I could not sort out my thoughts and feelings. Besides so many were doing so magnificently well, I knew that I could add nothing substantial to the discussion. The only thing left in my head was an endless wail interspersed with incoherent rant fugues. Like I said, Nothing of value to add to the discussion.

I felt myself slipping into the same abyss as I did after the Tsunami. A look at my archives will reveal that I was posting sparsely between Xmas and Memorial Day. The truth is, that most of what is there was actually posted between late April and early June. I just set the timestamp to reflect the approximate date I had begun to compose the essay or had read the article I was quoting. At that time I had no audience so no one was the wiser but me. So this weekend when it became apparent that I was heading down that same road again, I knew I had to nip my emotional tailspin in the bud--and now!

The first step was a reinstatement of the moratorium on MSM TV news. It is the video pictures that go into my dreams with me. It is the yakking heads trying to tell me how to perceive what I am seeing that morph me into a gibbering fool. Once I had stopped watching the horror and listening to the spin. The next step was to get some serious sleep. Sleep depravation was a large part of the disintegration of psyche. This is a pattern for me. My sleep-ability is fragile at best. Add to that my proclivity to OBSESS on whatever has my attention in its grasp!

Which brings me to step three. It was time to try to sidetrack myself. I knew that the more days that I did not post to Joystory, the harder it would get. So I had to start making plans for a post. Something. Anything. Yet anything just would not do. Nothing seemed relevant. But that was my obsession talking. I have to trust that something will occur to me eventually--an insight, an encounter with a unique idea that needs seeding into the meme stream.

Meanwhile doing some webmistressing tasks would keep my hands on the tools and my mind in the game. So I turned to my sidebar which has been languishing for months. After I had messed it up somehow I lost confidence. But then a visitor surfed on and answered my plea for help. The mistress of Alice In Wonderland Or Not offered to take a look at my template. She sent me the fix and after a careful line-by-line comparison between her fix and the existing code, I saw where my mistake had been made and thereby understood the intent of the misplaced tags. There is one pitfall I won't stumble into again.

Anyway, the upshot is that I just added a lot of new links to my sidebar. And I added categories. And I alphabetized inside each category. Collecting the links took most of a session and adding them to the template took most of another. I am not finished yet. I still have more links in each category and a couple or three more categories to add.

One of those categories is links about the Katrina cleanup and relief efforts. Both resources for up to date info and for ways to help. Have been collecting these links throughout the surfing I did from day one. I posted a short list of them early on and intended to get the rest prepared for the sidebar, but then I got intimidated by how well and how prettily some of the other bloggers, not to mention the news sites, were doing similar things. But I know that reasoning doesn't wash. I am still working on that list and hope to have it in the sidebar sometime this week, barring unforeseen developments.

One thing became clear to me as my sanity stabilized the past few days. I must find a way to become part of the solution at some level. What that might be is not clear at this moment but my heart and mind are open and reaching out. I wish to find a way to offer what resources I have, but they do not seem to amount to much. They are not monetary or even physical--time, talent, skillset. That's all I can come up with right now and I don't see a way to apply any of it beyond keeping this blog alive and viable for any opportunity that might present itself.

Meanwhile, I am going to return again to the mandate I set myself to keep a balance among the number of sub themes listed in the subtitle of Joystory. One of those sub themes has been severely neglected from the beginning as it has also been neglected in my daily life and that is my continuing Spiritual Quest. The experience of this past week has taught me that one thing if nothing else--it is imperative that I maintain a balance in my life--to stay centered mentally, to attend to my physical health and to keep my skill set honed. Because those are the minimum requirements for me to be of use to self, family and community (local, national, global).

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In One Neuron and Out the Other

Don't really have anything of substance to say this morning. But I couldn't let another session go without posting again. That is no way to generate loyal returnees. But niether is blather like this.. Last night's time was taken by the Blogcritics post.. Which was essentially a cross post from here. Can't find time for generating new content. (Well there is plenty generated in my head durring the sixteen hours I am deprived of the computer. But you know what happens to that...in one neuron and out the other.) Can't find time to sleep either. Two hours yesterday and am setting myself up for less than four again today. There were special races at the track Friday so I sat with my husband's grandma so everybody could go. Am committed to doing it again today. Wasn't interested in going myself. But it might actually have been preferable to spending four hours involuntarily watching Faux news. Grandma had surfed onto it and been captivated by the scenes of the refugees. Then she forgot that she had the remote and for hours she thought I was the one choosing to stay there while I thought she was. After that, I felt like I wanted to take a bath and I don't know how much of that was from watching all those people walking in that dirty water or listening to O'Really put words into the mouths of his field 'journalists' and 'experts'. Not to mention watching the photo ops for his lowness on his royal fly by lie and cry, hug and shrug mission. . I'm so bummed. Can you tell? Sorry this is not very professional. Am so distraught over Katrina's aftermath am having trouble thinking about anything else. And later this month my Dad is going into surgery and I will probably be leaving town and all of this behind to be with my family until he is out of the hospital again. Which any writer would understand amounts to jumping off a sinking boat without a life preserver.

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Help Katrina Victims

FEMA list of Charitable Organizations
Operation Blessing
Red Cross
Salvation Army
Soldier's Angels

I harvested these links as I surfed the news about Katrina and her aftermath. I intended to get them into my sidebar before I quit this morning but I don't dare attempt it now while pressed for time and suffering eyestrain (the template HTML font on blogger is teeny) I don't want to mess up my sidebar again so soon after a kind visitor to my post Sidebar Woes, Alice from Alice In Wonderland Or Not went to all the trouble of fixing it for me. But watch for major additions to the sidebar soon.

I have a lot to add to it but I lost my confidence after messing it up awhile back. I have a lot more blogs to add to my blog roll but I want to alphebetize it first and am also thinking about splitting it up into thematic sections to make it more helpful.

Anyway. Do help the Katrina victims in any way you can.

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An Online Writer's Community

Was pleasantly surprised to find in my inbox an unsolicited invitation to join a women writer's web ring. When I used the proffered link, I found myself at a writer's community home page where the link for the web ring was found on the side bar. I soon learned that I had to join the community before I could join the webring. I was briefly disappointed, as I was sure that I had just been duped by spam to come to a site offering something for sale.

But just moments later I was reassured because registration for Today's-Woman.net is free and most of the resources of the community are also free to registered users. Registration must be to help ensure users are 18 and over so that discussion can be conducted on a mature level. And by that they don't mean X-rated either. They announce with a SafeSurf button there is adult material on the site but elsewhere they insist that pornography, profanity and incivility are not permitted. All forums are moderated to enforce site standards of conduct.

There are monthly contests for poetry and short stories. There are book reviews. And articles written by members to aid and advise them on a number of things, not the least of which relate to writing, editing and publishing. There are discussion threads, member blog hosting, member profiles w/pics, games forums where members compete for scores against other members. Commenting on other member's writings is not only encouraged it is considered a duty. I was unable to access most of these forums, as my membership must be confirmed first. I gleaned the info off the menus, the faq, the staff's page and the homepage. I am so thrilled to have found this site and hope it lives up to its bright promise.

It was founded by Rosemarie DesRochers a writer from Ontario, Canada,
author of, She is like the wind, a collection of poetry. Her husband Shawn is the webmaster. The original concept of a women's community has expanded to include men as well. Rose admits the name no longer reflects the reality.

On the face of it--literally the surface which is all I've seen so far--it appears to be a vital, growing, indispensable resource for writers who have had enough of the lonely artist's hermit life and wish to give as much as receive encouragement and communion with others who share their passion and dedication to their art. I can't wait to get involved.

I have only one problem. Rose DesRochers has beat me to the very dream I had for Joywrite when I first conceived it in 1998. But that is really more of a blessing than a problem since I do not have the resources to make it happen, not the least of which are the exceptional tech talents and web savvy of Shawn DesRochers, who also has his own techie business, Invision-Graphics.

One of the moderators is Jayel Gibson author of the fantasy series, Ancient Mirrors Chronicles.

Any writer attracted to this concept should surf on over and consider signing up.

Update: I cross posted this over at Blogcritics where I announced that I would be blogging here about my adventures at Today's-Woman.net. Well the first adventure is apparently a snag in the automatic registration. I didn't realize that I was supposed to get an almost immediate confirmation email which contains a link for activating my account. I haven't recieved it yet and according to their faq I now need to email their admin.

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My Heart Is Breaking For NOLA

Since I have been avoiding the MSM fairly assiduously since Feburary, I've been getting my news and views primarily from the Internet during the wee hours of each day. I broke my MSM fast briefly the night Katrina was approaching New Orleans and I breathed that big sigh of relief when the storm jogged east by a notch and dropped its windpower before making landfall. When the sun came up Monday morning and the pictures and talk seemed to confirm that the anticipated worst case scenario had once again been avoided, I shut off the TV and did not succumb to the temptation to peek in for the macabe photos of shredded buildings and lives....

And then I logged online well after midnight this morning to be confronted with the news that the levies had broken and the city was filling with water, that thousands were trapped, that the water was toxic with sludge from chemical facilities.....

So much more. So much loss, pain, heartache. Am typing through my tears.

Sources: NOLA.com, New Orleans Metroblogging, The News Blog

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Brought To You By the Culture of Life

I usually don't opt to open pages with lots of photos or graphics when I get fair warning they exist, I've got better things to do than watch little meter bars change color from left to right all night long. I dream of the day when I have my dream machine and broadband with WIFI and thus 24/7 access to all my files and the www and plenty of time to watch downloaded video from independent media, write novels, stories, essays, poems, multiblog and manage the three plus websites said blogs would interweave, operate an eBay store and grow a community of readers, writers, thinkers and progressive apologists ... maybe someday. Yes, and maybe someday they'll put me in the rubber room along with other non-reality based dreamers--like those who dream of an America loving, free market, democratic government with equality and mutual tolerance for ethnic and religious factions in Iraq bought with blood and bombs and a billion bucks per week. (oh, I forgot. freedom ain't free) I'm sure it would be our mutual hell to share a space. We can spend our time bouncing our heads together when we aren't bouncing them against the wall. It would be about as productive as the neo-con Global War on Terror and the DLC's arrogant assumption of the loyalty of its base no matter how many of their interests they vote against. (oh, I forgot, political offices ain't free either)

Meanwhile, I was led to this Solon.com article by a couple of photos presented on a blog stumbled onto recently via my Blogexplosion surfing for credit. The picture presented there of the bloody body of an Iraqi infant held aloft by Iraqi hands, lured me to the Solon site where I earned my free pass by watching a thirty second ad and loaded this page with a dozen graphic pictures of the reality of this war. Anybody who gives allegiance to the Culture of Life creedos and then supports this and this and this must have a mind made of rubber and easily formed into this.

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Sidebar Woes

Have been working on several items for posting the last couple days but have yet to get any of them polished. Little things like permalinks whet missing among my chaotic notes, fact checking is hitting snags. So all I have to offer today is several new additions to my sidebar in the links lists and in the area below that where site promotion related buttons and banners are. There are also several Web Rings in the footer. Note that I just recieved a favorable review by Blogadvance. :)

But I am having problems getting the code for these items pasted in properly or something. The gifs are showing up any which way. I don't like the crowding or the alignment. i would prefer each item stacked one above the other and not side by side. And something weird happened to the TTLB Javasript as it is dividing itself, leaving part of the text way up at the top of the sidebar next to the top post. Can anyone suggest a solution to these irritants?

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Scrap Metal, Not Soldiers

Will the newest addition to city streets be a guy sitting
in front of a Starbucks with a cup and a cardboard sign that says IRAQ WAR
VET?

So asks Anna Quindlen in her August 8th Newsweek Column in which she remembers the 1946 Oscar winning movie, The Best Years of Our Lives, about sodliers returning from WWII, their disorientation and their family's and community's distaste for their horror-ridden war stories and dismay at their inability to just get on with living the lives they had, after all, not lost. Quindlen asks if we haven't learned enough in sixty years to avoid such insensitivities and the disgrace of not ensuring that our vets have every resource for retrieving their shattered psyches and fractured families, their livelihoods, their health and their hope. Or, in a word, their dignity.

When I hear all the ballyhoo about support the troops, I look carefully at the context, because so shamefully much of it is little more than camouflaged cheerleading for the war. For when it is truly about supporting the soldiers themsleves, there is no tolerance for inadequate armor and ammunition, inadequate nutrition and sanitation, inadequate training and stress management. All of this while they are still on the field of battle. The story only gets more shameful when they come home as they struggle with compromised health and finances under the burden of a frangible emotional balance.

So whether you are hawk, dove or chickenhawk, your cries for 'support the troops' will ring hollow until the consensus of ALL of you brooks no tolerance for homeless vets, servicemen qualifying for foodstamps, weeks long waits for Doctor appointments, reservists denied the jobs they left behind....and so on and on and on. Such should be the epitome of un-American--but, sadly, it is not. Thus, I am with Anna Quindlen when she says:

Never mind the yellow-ribbon magnets; patriotism is an empty, dumb show if it doesn't include adequate health care, a living wage and decent shelter for people who laid down their lives.

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Joining Blogcritics

I spent the bulk of my available time this session preparing my post to Blogcritics. Even though it was essentially an edited and slightly expanded version of my recent post, Cindy Sheehan Reframes It For Us, it was time-consuming as I had to learn new protocols, new rules, set up my profile, search Amazon.com for the product code (one is required to find at least one product on Amazon.com which relates to the content of your post) and search out the permalinks to the three posts on Joystory which related also. It should get easier and speedier with practice. Plus, I will probably tend, in the future, to simply cross-post a current Joystory post. But this time I knew that most of my focus would be on learning my way around a new site's technology and that was no time to be also trying to compose new material. Thus this morning's post is basically just an announcement that I have joined Blogcritics in hopes of soliciting more traffic to Joystory, more exposure of my writing and discussion on the themes dear to me. I like the concept of Blogcritics. I hope it works.

Meanwhile, I apologize for not posting the last two days. Sleep depravation caught up with me. But that is just part of the story. I was reading the old-fashioned way in books that you hold in your hand. I was reading Hamlet, the play by Shakespeare and Hamlet: Poem Unlimited by Harold Bloom, Light in August by William Faulkner, The Exception To the Rulers by Amy Goodman. And still another part of the story is that all this past week, I've been distracted throughout my sessions by frequent Instant Messaging with my sister who is on a road trip to Tennessee From Vancouver, Washington. I was traveling vicariously though her descriptions and the numerous photos she sent as she passed landmarks like the Grand Canyon and the London Bridge.

Update: This may be a case of getting what you asked for and then finding it isn't to your taste after all. My post at Blogcritics generated feedback allright. Eleven comments ranging from vitrolic to vibrantly thoughtful. I need to compose myself before I can compose responses. I prefer thoughtful, well defined arguments based on facts. How does one respond thoughtfuly to 'moonbat'? What is a 'moonbat' anyway?

The respondents comments tend to support the thesis of my post which is that we all view events through the bias of our conceptual models of the world.

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The Name of This Blogging Game is 'Self-referential'

I surrender.

While perusing my states at Site Meter, I discovered that two of my visitors had clicked onto Joystory via www.msnbc.msn.com. I blinked three times but it still read the same. I thought: What??? I mean, I have this fantasy/hope/delusion that someone from an established media might someday discover Joystory and find something here worth linking back to, or responding to via comments or email or--and this is the most over the top fantasy/hope/dellusion of all--discover my awesome [;)] writing talent and point me toward a paying gig in which I can support my habit with my habit. My 'habit' being reading, writing and thinking. But I am not yet deluded enough to think that less than one month's worth of amateurish promoting could have brought me anywhere near such a dream come true. So since Site Meter offers active links to the referrer pages, I was able to click over to the page where some one (two some ones) had clicked over to me. And this is what I found:

Blog Talk
Conversations in the blogosphere about Anna Quindlen

This title headed what appears to be a live feed of a Technorati Watch List which monitors all blogs mentioning the target 'Anna Quindlen' who just happens to be a columnist on Newsweek. It seems they have done this same thing for each of the Newsweek columnists.

Anyway. This was the link to Joystory which I found there:

Summer Reading
... for Nicholas by James Patterson How Reading Changed My Life by Anna Quindlen The Sound and the Fury by William ...
Posted 3 days ago in Joystory 2 links

And I just had to laugh. For of all my posts this one was the least likely to showcase my 'awesome [;)] writing talent' for it is nothing but a list of some of the books I have read this summer. I posted it when I was desperate for a post but too cross-eyed and brain-fried with fatigue to compose anything of substance. And yet this throw away post has generated more search-engine referrers than any of my other posts. And is one of the few that has generated both comments and emails. Go figure.

Maybe I should blog the entire list of 100 books that I finished in 2004.

And, yes, I completely planned this post as an attempt to reproduce the effect. It's at least as effective at promotion as hours and hours of bleary-eyed browsing on Blog Explosion. And self-referential seems to be the name of this Blogging Game. If I can't shake the feeling that calling attention to myself is unseemly if not downright sinful, I might as well get out of this game.

Update: Sorry Anna for misspelling your name in the first attempt. I'm so embarrassed. So much for that awesome writing talent.

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Cindy Sheehan Reframes It For Us

Having advised Progressives in the previous post to learn to apply George Lakoff's concept of value framing, I thought it behooves me to conduct an experiment in looking through Lakoff's lenses:

Cindy Sheehan probably hasn't read George Lakoff's books, but she has instinctively enacted the principle of reframing which he espouses. I don't know whether Cindy sympathizes with the Progressive agenda across the board (how many Progressives do anyway?) Nor do I know how she viewed the world and her role in it before she lost her son and then lost the moral justification for his sacrifice and hers. But it is obvious that she is now embodying the Nurturant Parent Model as elucidated in Lakoff's Moral Politics and don't think of an elephant! But not as the parent figure. No, she stands as citizen/child before Bush as President/Father-figure requesting an explanation for why her most precious asset has been taken from her under false pretenses. As such she claims the right to be heard and assumes the right to an explanation with a bit more substance than "Father knows best."

In contrast, Bush himself continues to embody the Strict Father Model in his response which is essentially the unyielding stance of a quintessential Patriarch. As such he claims the right to unquestioned obedience and assumes no obligation to explain himself--right or wrong, he is the Head of the Family and "Because I say so!" is the only explanation he owes her.

The rest of the nation views this morality play through whichever lens they view the world. If their primary conceptual model is the Strict Father, they will see Cindy as a child throwing a tantrum. Worse yet, as a girl-child with the gall to cry foul against her father! They view her behavior as justification for her husband filing for divorce--such flouting of authority obviously makes her an unfit wife. (Would they, I wonder, turn on Carville's wife were their marriage to disintegrate under the myriad pressures of a traumatic grief lived in the public eye?)

Meanwhile, those whose primary conceptual model is that of the Nurturant Parent will view Cindy as the abused child whose father took her prized possession and smashed it instead of putting it in service for the good of the family--for which it had been required of her and for which it had willingly been offered.

The reason Cindy is attracting so much of both praise and vitriol from all sides is because she has tapped into the power of the unconscious metaphors that generate our most profound reactions to the world. And she has dared to ask the question which so few of those whose role and responsibility it was to ask ever bothered: Why? Cindy asks, Why did Casey die? Which is essentially another way to ask, Why did you lie?

And the reason Cindy has had so much more success than other ant-war spokespersons to attract and hold the notoriously fickle attention span of the MSM is the power of her story to move those who hear it and the power of the symbol she has become of a courageous citizen who, having already sacrificed that which she held dearer than her own life, stands before power as an equal requiring that truth be spoken to her.

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Lakoff's Lessons In Value Framing

Why is there not already much more pushing by Progressives of George Lakoff's cogent explanation of the source of the differences in the Progressive and Conservative value systems and his urgent plea to Progressives to learn what the Conservatives have learned so well--the art of value framing.

First pointer is that values do not arise in a vacuum. They are a natural fruit of one's largely unconscious conceptual model of the world. The trick is to make your own conceptual model conscious and then see how your values are logical consequences of it. It is also helpful to be able to discern another's conceptual model by observing how they project their values via word and deed.
Second pointer is that all language is rooted in metaphor and it is the metaphors that rule the mind's ability to comprehend its milieu. All perception is funneled through these metaphors before language can be applied to describe it to self and other.

In a nutshell the difference between Progressive and Conservative values is rooted in their two very different models of how the world works, each one based on the metaphor of Family. The Strict Father Model and The Nurturant Parent Model. Guess which is which!

I'm still reading Lakoff's Moral Politics so I'm still not ready to do it justice in a comprehensive review. And that is going to have to wait even longer because I have to return the book to the library and may have to wait in queue for weeks again to get another turn with it.. But I didn't want to wait that long to get the meme out there that there is an important prescription for a future Progressive renaissance: Know your Frame (conceptual model), Claim and then Proclaim your Values, and when replying to Conservative challenge (or denigration) stay within your own Frame--Re-frame by translating the value(s) under discussion into your Frame. Thus can Progressives stop being blindsided and constantly on the defensive appearing confused and divided--not just as a body but in their individual minds.

Seriously Progressives, you must read and comprehend and then proceed to apply the advice from Lakoff's Moral Politics and don't think of an elephant!
It could be the key to our come-back in 06 and 08.

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Reading On the Roller Coaster

Have been busy the last several days tending to a number of things that got neglected due to the extra (excessive?) time I spent promoting Joystory coupled with the emotional roller coaster of my personal life--smashing my foot four weeks ago, the family retreat two weeks ago, my Dad's brain surgery last week. Among the many things that got neglected were the library books. A great many of them went back this month having spent their 3, 6 or 9 weeks in my possession with little, and in a few cases no, face time. This was very discouraging, especially considering that for several of them I'd had to wait in queue for weeks or months for my turn and the queue is still quite long behind me.

One such book is Moral Politics by George Lakoff. It was due last Friday and I still have it--one could say I am renting it now at 20 cents per day. Lakoff is the author also of don't think of an elephant! which was a spin off of Moral Politics, a kind of handbook for progressive activists introducing and elucidating in light of current events the themes introduced in this more formal, academic presentation eight years prior to the 2004 presidential campaign.

My review of Moral Politics may have to wait until after the next chance I have with it as I doubt I'm going to finish it this week in spite of the time I've invested into it. Right now I am trying to find a good stopping place. And that is not just a matter of leaving off at the end of a chapter. The chapters are grouped in themes and the related chapters are carefully laid out arguments-in the strict academic sense of that term with hypotheses, evidence, conclusions. The main proposition Lakoff is arguing is that the beliefs and behaviors of both the Conservatives and Progressives can be shown to have an internal consistency and predictability if one factors in the distinct model of the world which organizes their perception and thought. The overarching model is that the nation is a family. The Conservative's model of the family is that of the Strict Father. The Progressive's model is that of the Nurturant Parent. I hope to do the book justice in a review eventually, meanwhile many of the salient points were covered in my review of don't think of an elephant!

So, in spite of the roller coaster my body and emotions have been on this summer, I never gave up reading entirely. I never could. Even on my own deathbed, I imagine that my fingers would fumble for the edge of that next page to turn. See the list of a few of my summer reading encounters in the previous post: Summer Reading

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Summer Reading

The following are a few of the books that I have encountered since May:

Books I've finished recently:

Writing Fiction: An Introduction to the Craft by Gary Disher
Move On's 50 Ways to Love Your Country: How to find your political voice and become a catalyst for change by moveon.org
The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom
She Had Some Horses by Joy Harjo
Deep Writing: 7 Principles that Bring Ideas to Life by Eric Maisel
Blue Horses Rush In by Luci Tapahonso
Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas by James Patterson
How Reading Changed My Life by Anna Quindlen
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate by George Lakoff
Corregidora by Gail Jones
Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta by Gore Vidal
The Judas Testament by Daniel Easterman
Beyond Theology: The Art of Godmanship by Alan Watts
If Grace is True: Why god Will Save Every Person by Philip Gulley & James Mulholland
Hoot by Carl Hiaasen

Books I've been reading recently:

The Dialogues of Plato (Euthyphro & Apology)
Feudal Society by Marc Bloch
The Search for the Perfect Language by Umberto Eco
Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
Fractal Horizons: The Future Use of Fractals by Clifford A. Pickover
Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think by George Lakoff
In God's Country: The Patriot Movement and the Pacific Northwest by David A. Neiwert
Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
Paradise Screwed by Carl Hiaasen
Don't Worry, Make Money: spiritual and Practical Ways to Create Abundance and More Fun in Your Life by Richard Carlson, Ph.D.
Hamlet by Shakespeare (Barron's Shakespeare Made Easy: Modern English Version side-by-side with full original text)

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Remembering What Matters

Thank-yous are due to those of you sending your prayers and well wishes regarding my Dad. The latest news is that he is doing so well post-op that he may get to go home a day sooner than anticipated--today instead of tomorrow.

Spent Saturday sitting with my husband's elderly grandmother and watching a Little House on the Prairie marathon on the Halmark Channel. It was already in progress when I arrived at two-thirty and we watched until it finished at eleven. It was a major nostalgia kick for me. I Remember watching the shows with my family for years. It was a whole family event with pop-corn, chedder cheese sticks and apple slices, sometime smores. I've been trying to remember all day how old I was when the series started and could not pin it down. I was going to Google the show to discover it's start date but I forgot and now I've run out of time for this session. Anyway, I have also been reading George Lakoff's Moral Politics this weekend and the concepts in the book were dancing an intricate tango with the plots, themes and metaphors in the Little House stories today. I was thinking all day about bloging on this but I have run out of time and steam to do it justice right now.

Another one of the impacts this story marathon had on me was to remind me how much I crave stories and how I have been denying myself of them so much lately as I have gravitated with the obsessive grasp of anxiety to the anxiety inducing and perpetuating reading of all politics all the time. Which reminded me too that it was not the original intent for this blog to focus exclusively on politics as I know that I do not have the passion or the expertise to compete with those who are doing it very well indeed, and the blogosphere does not need another dabbler in that genre.

So watch over the next days for the balance to shift back towards what the subtitle above claims for Joystory. A little more of the purely personal like this one here. And a lot more about reading, writing, thinking and being as they relate to my continuing spiritual quest which has bogged in a quagmire with my focus on war and political corruption. But note, I say the balance will shift towards the orginal intent. I'm not going to stop ruminating and ranting on politics as I continue to believe that the personal is political and the political is personal. And I will never stop obsessing on the necessity of freedom for body, mind and spirit and sending up alerts for any potential curtailing of them.

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Freely Marching Towards Fascism

The Pentagon along with major media and a number of businesses and organizations are sponsoring a 'Freedom March' in DC on 9/11 to 'support the troops'. Digby alludes to analogous marches in the Soviet Union during the Cold War, in North Korea and in Castro's Cuba. Then shares a lengthy quote from Christopher Hayes who questions the propriety of major media and the military colluding to stage a blatant propaganda stunt on the fourth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

I question the propriety of anyone colluding to co-opt this anniversary away from the memory of its victims and the mourning of their families. But I especially question the sanity of an entire country which seems to be buying into the proposition that untold multiples of this is a fair exchange for this.

Even more disturbing for me is the concept of setting a precedent that could easily morph into a tradition of commemorating the lives and tragic deaths of the 9/11 victims, and of the trauma inflicted on our nation, with an exercise in military muscle flexing and the invocation of the euphoric Spirit of War.

The power of shared emotion is nothing to play with. The entire nation's emotions are in a vulnerable and volatile state each year as the 9/11 anniversary approaches. It is unconscionable to take advantage of that to entrain the masses to sublimate their grief by celebrating the glories of violence and vengeance.

Because it is not really about supporting the troops. If it were, the Pentagon, Congress and the Administration would have done ALL in their power to insure the soldiers had the appropriate armor, ammunition, numbers and meals; they would never have rewarded Haliburton's incompetence with more contracts to 'serve' the troops; they would not have invoked 'stop loss' to essentially enslave our soldiers; they would be making sure that none of the troops' own children are going without the necessities; they would be making darn sure no returning vet becomes homeless in the America he laid his life on the line for.

So don't buy into the 'support the troops' theme. Because, if you do, you will help fool yourself along with the nation and possibly a good portion of the troops that a big noisy party with marching, flag waving, martial music, blown kisses and lots of flowery speeches is an equitable exchange for the support they are truly owed. And you will be letting yourself be led one more step down the path to fascism which is notorious for these manipulative displays.

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In Recovery

My Dad's surgery went well yesterday and he is in recovery. They don't know yet how mean and nasty the small tumor they removed from his brain is.

Meanwhile I spent almost the exact same hours he was in surgery with an extreme headache and violent nausea. Was this some bizzare sympathy thing? Or did I just forget to wash my hands before our dinner of sandwiches and chips Wednesday evening?

At any rate, the mental angst and physical anguish has left me fairly wordless this morning.

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Who's Milking the Cows?

Here is a short little post for those of you who don't have time to read a long essay. It's just a flippant question which probably reflects how tired I am more than anything else:

Why have I not seen or heard anyone playing with the acronym for the Coalition Of the Willing? COW aka herd beast. What does that make the US leadership but wards of the cows aka COWARDS. And what are those whose task it is to solicit men, money or material from the COWs if not milkmaids? I never wished so that I had the talent for drawing. I can picture half a dozen cartoons playing off this meme. Yeah, I know, its juvenile. So sue me. Or have a little fun with the meme yourself. You know you want to.

Now if you want to know why herd beasts and their herders are on my mind, you'll have to read the long post below, Giving America Away to Terror.

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Giving America Away to Terror

Some of the most level headed writers, thinkers and academicians are using the word 'fascism' to describe our current government. I am not wrong to be afraid. I am not over-reacting! We are losing America and it is not the terrorists who have taken it. We are giving it away to the power drunk crooks whose god is $ because they have mastered the art of saying 'Boo!' I spent my childhood and young adulthood with the strong sense of someone looking over my shoulder and making judgments on what I was reading or what I was watching on TV. These people had the power of approval and disapproval over me which is a strong force and not to be taken lightly. But they did not have the power of imprisonment, nor of life or death over me. They used the specter of God’s power for the purpose and that served to keep me in line until I was past thirty years old. I have fought a hard battle for the freedom of my own mind and conscience and it has been only a decade since I wrested them from the specters created by the religion I was raised in. Ever since then I have watched in horror as those very freedoms were being called into question by various political groups from both the right and the left. I fear the recent renewal of the PATRIOT ACT has sealed our fate.

Some of my earliest memories are of scenes from WWII movies that I saw unbeknownst to my parents and grandparents who were watching them while the children were safely playing in the other room or another corner of the room where the TV was. The adults may have thought we were too busy with our own games, our coloring books, our Tinker-Toys, our Chutes and Ladders. But I soon mastered the art of sneaking peaks and then long eye-popping gazes at the TV screen which so mesmerized the adults. TV was as much a magnate for my eyes from the first time I saw one. We didn’t have one at home until I was nine and no color TV until I was eighteen so whenever I was where one was I was paying attention even if it seemed I wasn’t. I learned early to pretend to be occupied elsewhere and unaware of the TV else one of the adults would send me in the other room. Even then, I would sneak back. Slither on the floor behind the overstuffed chair and peak around it. Or go to the bathroom and dawdle as I walked thru the dining room that gave me line-of-sight of the TV. And dawdle on my way back or even slide to the floor around the corner where I could see and not be seen. I would even crawl under the dining room table among the chair and table legs. The things I saw then were as often funny as scary. Or at least the grownups thought so. I appreciated the slapstick physical humor for the most part (i.e. Red Skelton, Jerry Lewis and Lucille Ball) but often the spoken jokes left me clueless. It was as interesting to watch the grownups reacting to what was on the TV as it was to watch it myself.

The scenes I saw which are relevant to this essay were from WWII movies that showed men in dark uniforms, wearing dark helmets and carrying long black sticks. They busted down peoples doors in the middle of the night. Drug them out of bed. Drug them into the street. Loaded them on trains. They ransacked their homes. They tossed bushels of books out of windows and built bonfires with them. Even then, before I was yet seven, I loved books more than life. (Well at least more than eating, sleeping, playing, bathing etc so it amounts to the same.) I was horrified.
I’ve been haunted by those scenes ever since. Scenes of jack-boots marching down residential streets, the helmeted men with big sticks and guns breaking down doors and herding people into the street in their pajamas. Those men found hiding places where women held infants with a hand over their mouths. They yanked the mother out and threw the baby against a wall. They threw burning rags inside bottles through the windows of bookstores and into the rooms where printing presses were printing newspapers. and into churches. (Actually they were probably synagogues but I didn’t know that word then nor the significance of the difference and the rooms on fire often reminded me of the building our congregation met in which we did not call a church so at that time I probably didn’t think the word ’church’ but either Meeting Hall or Bible Chapel which we used for our house of worship.)

These scenes stayed with me. They filtered into my dreams and became a part of who I am. At three, four. five and six, I was too young to know with my head the meaning of what was depicted. But I knew that the adults in my life were watching theses stories like they were as real to them as the room we sat in. On more than one occasion I saw my Mama weeping, my Dad patting her knee. I was too young then to know the difference between fiction and non-fiction. Or the difference between fiction based on historical events and fiction that was more fantasy than fact. But these scenes bit so deep for me that I never was able to remember them or view them or similar scenes later without shivering deep in my soul. My vivid imagination went to work on the memories of these scenes and wove them into my memories of my own life so that I sometimes thought that I had lived through one of those scenes myself. I was a small child hiding in a hole under a floor. A little boy hiding in a hole in the wall behind a heavy bookcase. I was a woman hugging a stack of books to my breast until a black stick knocked against my head and the books were yanked from my arms and thrown in the fire. I was a mother who held her hand to the mouth of a crying baby to quiet it until it was still and floppy like a rag doll.

When I was about sixteen I was allowed to go on a double date with a girlfriend and her boyfriend’s best friend. Even though the boys were both over eighteen. I was quite surprised by my parents agreement but I think it was the movie we were going to see that convinced them. It was the movie based on Corrie ten Booms experience in a Nazi concentration camp after being caught hiding Jews in her home. It was the story of her witnessing for Christ among the prisoners and the guards. Mom had read the book as had I, and I thought I completely understood what to expect. But this had been only the third big screen theater movie I had ever seen and I had no clue how overpowering the visual and audio effects, the moving images, the oversized human figures acting out the violent events in a dark room could be. I was transported. I was stunned like a rabbit in headlights. After the movie my friend had to sit with me in the lounge outside the ladies' room, talking me down as I bawled uncontrollably and shook and shivered so fiercely I could not walk.

This is one of the reasons why I am so distraught over what the current administration and the far right is doing to our country. We are on our way to a police state if we aren’t already there. Most of the average Americans just won’t be aware of the danger until they’ve already crossed the invisible line and then find the police knocking at their own door. It disturbs me that more people were not horrified by the stories of the FBI and the Home Land Security Agency showing up on college campuses all over after there has been a peace rally, or seminars on the Middle East or Islam. They requested lists of attendees and speakers. And if these speakers or the organizers of the event are an organization other than the school, they want lists of all the members of that organization. Is that scary or what? The government is compiling lists of people who are showing a propensity to question their opinions, methods, policies etc. Once you get on that list then what? The possibilities terrify me. In the name of fighting terrorism or in the name of making America safe or saving democracy we are destroying that which makes America the blessing that it once was for its citizens and all the citizens of the world. Without freedom, what is America?

Today I know much more than I did as a child about the power invested in the state authorities. And I am aware of the advances of technology since then. I’ve read Tom Clancy and Robert Ludlum and equivalent NF accounts that purport to show what the new technologies are capable of in the wrong hands. And this knowledge worries me a thousand fold more than the thought of another 9/11. So it is that it is the new laws and the new methods of law enforcement since 9/11--what seems to have become the new normal--that terrify me more than the events of 9/11. Maybe that wouldn’t be true if I’d been in New York or D.C. on that day. Maybe. But I think not. My imagination is as vigorous as it was at three and six. I can still imagine the horror of that day even though I witnessed it only via endless replays of the video. But I am more terrified of the men in dark uniforms and dark helmets with black sticks that bust down doors in the middle of the night. Men who throw books on bonfires and babies against brick walls. Men who throw people to the ground and strip their clothes off and then herd them into small chambers that slowly fill with deadly gas. Men who would club your face to a pulp rather than let you speak.

They have only gotten bolder since the election, believing it gave them a mandate. How much bolder do they have to get before we all sit up and take notice than to target the Quakers as an organization of interest in the war against terror? It is because they intend to equate the whole concept of protest and dissent with terrorist activities. Thus they have loosely defined, for legal purposes, terrorism as any activity intended to intimidate for the purpose of achieving a political change--change of leaders, laws or policy. Large crowds can be seen as 'intimidating' in and of themselves even when they are comprised of people with strong convictions against violence. Think about this. If protest and dissent equal treason and even the Quakers are already blatantly targeted by authorities as persons of interest in the war against terror--who will be exempt from suspicion?

And so it begins:

Translator convicted of aiding terrorist
Esp. take note of: Professors from "City University of New York, where Mr. Yousry was an adjunct lecturer, testified on his behalf at the trial. His academic colleagues were alarmed that prosecutors had used excerpts from early drafts of Mr. Yousry's unfinished dissertation, seized by federal agents from his computer, and books on militant Islam found in his library to accuse him in court of radical Islamic sympathies."
The possession of a book is enough to proove your sympathies with its author? In America? Since when?

War Plans Drafted To Counter Terror Attacks in U.S.
re military plans for use of troops on home soil for crowd control and assistance of local law enforcement and emergency responders in case of another terrorist attack.
--see also: http://russbaker.com/blog.html Russ Baker's August 8 post, Army Troops In US Streets?, for commentary on this article

Patriot Games

Justified Murder: Don't Ever Become a Terror Suspect!
(As if You Have a Choice)

Keeping Watch Over the Wrong People

Libraries at the Center of Efforts to Change Patriot Act

Schwarzenegger -- People's Governor or Flouter of First Amendment Rights?

Parts of Patriot Act are Offensive, American Bar Association Says

Americans Deserve Look at US Emergency Defense Plans
This is an article by Andrew Greeley, an author of fiction and NF who has been at the top of my fav list for almost twenty years. He is a Catholic priest and a sociologist. He is very level headed, a true academic. And even he is using the word fascism: ' ''Fascism'' is not an exaggeration. It is, among other things, a political philosophy that says that the leader is above the law, that a commander in chief in a time of war has unlimited power in the name of national security. This is a claim that has been made seriously by lawyers in the White House, the Pentagon and the Justice Department in recent years. '

Who's A Terrorist?

Destroying Democracy
Re the tactic in Congress of keeping the vote open until the votes the GOP require have been strongarmed

ACLU Seeking FBI Files on Activist Probes
Who's looking at you?

Fourteen Characteristics of Fascism

Misconceptions Relating to Fascism

The Rise of Pseudo Fascism
This links to part 1 of a 7 part essay by David Neiwert of Orcanus. You can follow the links at the end of each part or you can download the whole essay in PDF format from the sidebar. The same is true for the following two multi-part essays by Neiwert

Bush, the Nazis and America
4 part essay by David Neiwert

Rush, Newspeak and Fascism: An Exegesis
15 part essay by David Neiwert.

____________________________________

[I've been collecting links related to the theme of this essay for nearly a year. Which is how long I've been writing on it. Most of them were dead when I went to vet them in preparation for posting this. The writing of this was finally completed and edited before I left for Bend two weeks ago. I had hoped to post it as my hiatus kick-off post but the dead links prevented me. I spent this past week vetting the links and looking for alternatives for the dead ones. Thank God for Commondreams.org. This is probably still a work in progress as I intend to update the link list as I run across more.

This is a theme you can expect more of from me as this is the area in which I feel I have a truly unique contribution to the dialog. I'm not an expert in an academic sense. My expertise is experiential--my experience in having grown up in a Fundamentalist religion and then having broken free gives me a unique perspective on current events. If you are new to Joystory, you can find more of that story in the archives--especially the first several months. The struggle to free my mind from the totalitarian stranglehold it spent more than thirty years under left me with a profound sense of just how precious and rare freedom is. I will never again submit my mind to another mind's authority--either singular or collective. I would rather be dead than led!]

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Slacking Off

I was trying hard all this week to get a long essay regarding the Patriot Act ready to post. Thought I was going to be able to do so this morning so I did not prepare anything else to blog about. I was thrown off track by the news I was greeted with as soon as I logged online shortly after midnight. My sister was waiting for me and sent me an IM. My Dad, who has been fighting cancer for 19 months, has been admitted to the VA hospital in Portland, Oregon. Either a tumor or swelling is affecting his vision and the deterioration over the last week has been significant. So I guess I can be excused for not having my homework done on time today. Even for someone with no history of a mood disorder and indicators for ADD would have trouble assimilating news like this in a few hour's time. I guess I can cut myself a little slack.

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The Anti-discrimination Solution

Every wisdom tradition has the solution but no religion nor any culture nor any legal system has been able to implement it: Do unto others as you would have done unto you.

Or to restate: Do not do unto another as you would not have done unto you.

And to restate again: Love your neighbor as yourself (where neighbor is defined as everybody you encounter or could possibly encounter, which in this global society is pretty much everybody)

The reason why no religion, culture or government has been able to enforce such a rule is that it is not something that can be coerced without violating its premise.

The principle relies on the acquisition of empathy and responsibility by the individual. I mean by this that one must be able to imagine oneself in the other one's place (empathy) and then be able to respond (response ability) to the other one's pain or joy as if it were their own.

The bad news is that only individuals can implement the solutions to discrimination of all kinds.

The good news is that only individuals can implement the solutions to discrimination of all kinds.

Has no one ever hear of the power of mathematical iteration? Of the exponential growth factor in multiplying 2x2x2x2x2x2 ad infinitum?

Imagine if two neighbors change each others lives with kindness and compassion and then each change another's life and then those two each change one other's life....

Better yet if each person changed the life of three others and those three changed the lives of three more...

How long would it take to change the world?

There was a good movie in America on this principle implemented by a Jr. High School boy. Pay It Forward was the title. Worth seeing if you can get a hold of it. It was based on a novel by Catherine Ryan Hyde and I have it checked out of the library and will be doing a review of it here as soon as I read it.

Meanwhile...Imagine the possibilities.

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The Working Poor: Invisible in America

This is my review of Shipler's book. It is also posted on my site, Joyread.

The Working Poor: Invisible in America
By David K. Shipler
© 2004
Alfred A. Knopf
300p

“The term…’working poor’ should be an oxymoron. Nobody who works hard should be poor in America.” p.ix

So says Shipler in the opening paragraph of his preface to this insightful indictment of an economic system that we should blush to call American. It is rife with injustice and weighted in favor of wealth over against work. But this is just what makes it so shortsighted. Work is the engine of the economy, the ultimate source of wealth, and the very well-spring of our self-worth as individuals and as a society.

So how is it that our vaunted democracy--purported to be “of the people, by the people and for the people” has allowed a system to be established that denigrates, disenfranchises and demoralizes the vast majority of its citizens? One explanation is found in a Time magazine survey in 2000 that found 19% of Americans believed themselves to be in the top 1% of income while another 20% expected they would be someday. Thus self-deluded, many are inclined to vote against their own class-interest.

Ah, but there is another rub. The vilified term of class in a country which has worked hard to convince itself it is classless. Or at least that there are no barriers keeping individuals imprisoned in a sub-par class. And the current climate in politics at all levels has made even discussion of the issues almost verboten by crying foul with the accusation of ‘class warfare’ thrown at anyone--whether politician, academician, or pundit--who attempts to point out the injustices of the system or suggest alternative policies, new programs or more money invested in proven programs which address them.. But, as Shipler makes clear in his closing chapter, Skill and Will, it is not the raising of the issues or the discussion and debate which amounts to class warfare. Rather, the class warfare is in the very policies and programs and laws and codes that have created a structure which, instead of serving the people as Government is supposed to do, serves instead to create obstacles, pitfalls and catch-22s for those who struggle the hardest just to maintain. It is in the actions of the policy makers and law makers who enact the laws that structure the tax codes and pay scales that favor the wealthy and penalize the working poor. It is in the actions of the employers who prevent their employees from acquiring the benefits they would be entitled to with a fulltime position by keeping their hours just under the wire and occasionally requiring them to work off the clock. It is in the actions of the aid agencies when they refuse to give out application forms upon request as required by law and instead ask a few perfunctory questions and turn the would-be applicant away. It is in the actions of teachers who buy into the stereo types and lower their expectations. It is in the actions of child-welfare workers who remove a child from home rather than helping the mother find affordable child-care or advocating with her boss for flexible hours. And it is in the actions of a President, who in 2003, asked Congress for $100 million for the 1996 Earned Income Tax Credit, which has proven to benefit employer as much as employee. But President Bush did not wish to augment the payments which had barely kept pace with the cost of living increases since its enactment. Rather, he wished to hire an additional 650 auditors to look for fraudulent claims. This at a time when the auditing of both wealthy individuals and corporations had dramatically declined. Now that is class warfare.

But this book is not a dry rendition of statistics nor a partisan harangue. Between the Preface and the short final chapter, which summarizes and proposes potential solutions, Shipler has compiled a series of vignettes based on intensive interviewing over three to six years of a number of struggling families. He also interviews employers, teachers, medical professionals, social workers, lawyers and others with hands-on experience with the system--those who have reason to know what works, what doesn’t work, and what might work if it were adequately funded. These are stories of real people and Shipler made a point of emphasizing in his preface that there are no composites. These are real people confronting the everyday realities of being poor in America at the turn of the 21st century.

_________________________

This is the link to the text of the keynote speech by Bill Moyers at the Inequality Matters Forum at New York University June 3, 2004. It was published first on Wed. June 16 by Inequality.org. In it, Moyers discusses some of the very same issues as Shipler:
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0616-09.htm

http://www.inequality.org/

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Am In No Mood

The link in the title to this post is to an earlier post, Pity Hearty, you could also find by scrolling down. It is for those of you who don't yet know the story about the duck that has it in for me. Or is that the duck I have it in for. What is it with this obsessive thought that kicking that #^%$ duck again would solve anything. Even make me feel better. Is this some primitive taproot into a primordial brainspot? Anyway, I keep envisioning that @#%! duck lofting over the backyard fence into the trailor park's dinky swimming pool. At least this time off the point of a pair of steel-toed boots. If I had any that is. It has been nearly three weeks!!! Since I kicked into this cast iron doorstop and severly buised the top of my left foot. It still hurts. Just enought to anoy. Throbs like a fresh bruise. Actually it was feeling quite a bit better Thursday. And then Friday afternoon I put my hiking boots on for the first time since it happened. Laced them up loosely but still the little bit of presure across the top of my foot was tre uncomfortable. I still went ahead and walked the half mile to the library and back in 100 degree heat, careful to keep my left foot flat the whole time. a typical 15 min walk took 35 minutes each way. And my foot has yet to forgive me.

It is so odd. The bruise has never turned dark purple. It has stayed pale but there is a mushy pouch under the skin once the size of a tennis ball now the size of a golf ball. I worry I am subject to bloodclots escaping into the bloodstream. But that is probably just your typical anxiety junkie's obsessive worryitus. I don't know. I just feel like such a wimp. A limping wimp. I feel I should be able to focus on the so many more important issues at stake right now. Instead my thoughts are syncopated to the beat of my heart in the throb in my foot.

Sorry if there are a lot of typos or mispellings. I don't feel like editing. Forget editing. I don't feel like re-reading this. I don't much feel like posting it but it's the only thing I got this morning.

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The Feeling Is Apparently Mutual (The DLC Devalues My Values)

I could rip the logic in this critique of the Democrats' supposed neurotic ambivalence regarding "projection of force" and thus their incoherent expression of patriotism which then leaves them open to charges of Anti-Americanism.....

I could. But I am still fuming too incoherently. And my eyes are crossing with fatigue. And Publius and Digby have already done a great job of it. So I will just make my point: That if this is the current stance of the Democratic Party they are essentially slamming the door in my face. And if this is what Hillary stands behind, then she has lost me. For if we are expected to minimize the Abu Ghraib and Gitmo scandals as minor deviations; if we are expected to dismiss evidence that our government formulated policy to encourage the atrocities committed in our name; and we are supposed to ignore the lies that led to the war and the corruption that now permeates it; if we are supposed to continue spending a billion dollars, sacrificing the blood of a dozen Americans and uncounted Iraqi's each week--all this just so we won't look like sissies and so Democrats won't be subject to 'Swift Boat' smearing in elections--if this is the understanding of 'patriotism' that the DLC is promoting, they are trashing every value I hold dear. And here I was thinking there was room in America for the values of Jesus, Gandhi, MLK, Sojourner Truth....

If Jesus was a sissy than so am I
If Gandhi was a sissy than so am I
If Peace Pilgrim was a sissy than so am I
If Martin Luther King Jr. was a sissy than so am I
If The Dalai Lama is a sissy than so am I


Sissies Rock!

And just to make my point even more explicit and in honor of the anniversary of America's darkest moment (possibly the moment she lost her way) I offer these links in hopes that some of you will read and contemplate the ultimate truth behind those euphemistic phrases: 'projecting force' and 'getting the job done.'

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Labels are for Little Minds (Why I Am Not a Democrat)

I hate labels. And due to past experience, I have an aversion to joining. That is why, when I registered to vote, even though I knew with certainty that I would not touch a GOP candidate with mile long chop sticks, I still could not bring myself to declare for the donkey's. Since then they have proven my reticence wise over and over and over. When Zell Mullethead stood up and shilled for Bush at the GOP convention, I knew I had been right to claim Independent. Since then the Dim Dems have completely lost me with their ultra-flexible backbone contortions on issue after issue. Maybe W could have gotten most of his wishlist passed without any Democrat votes. Even so, they didn't have to sign on and as much as give their blessings to it. Tort reform. Patriot Act renewal. Gonzalez confirmation. Bankruptcy reform. Medicare Prescription. etc etc. All of these were bad enough. But the one issue that disturbs me the most, is one that hasn't been voted on. In fact little has been said that hasn't been processed and canned by PR, by any of them. And that is the Prisoner Abuse scanals at Abu Ghraib & Gitmo, the Extraordinary Renditions and the Dissapearing of Detainees. I do not understand why no one is standing up, screaming foul, and generally just making so much noise that even the MSM would have to take its head out of their sponsor's pockets and take note (if any still know thier history) that when ever a people has acquiesced to the mistreatment of any minority, it isn't long before most of them are subject to the same. What could the motive for silence on this be? Could some of the Democrats be secretly condoning these tactics? Could they possibly want them confirmed as acceptable so that they will be available when next they hold the reins? For be not fooled all who still care--this kind of abuse of power is not unique to the Right.

This is why, I am not a Democrat. Labels are for little minds anyway. But I will never put my whole heart behind a candidate that does not make clear and unequivocal their stance against abuse of power and in favor of liberty of mind (and body except with due process). And they better be careful how they define due process!

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Unsung Hero

I am with Amygdala that there is far, far, far from enough interest in stories like this one. The shame for letting stories of courge like this one sink into the abyss of memory lies squarely on the shoulders of the media. Both the MSM and the Blogosphere. I expected no better of the MSM. But shame on all you bloggers with the audience share and other resources for not flogging this and other similar stories the same way you have proved you know how with the Bush service records story, the Valerie Plame outing story, the Social Security hi-jacking story, the Tom Delay hi-jinks stories and the Duke Cunningham kickback story, ad infinitum... Thus I know you can do it and I know that several of you have sources at least as good as the typical MSM journalist. There is no excuse for letting the prisoner abuse scandals keep on fizzling out when it is in your power to keep the heat on.

One way to keep the heat on and possibly to encourage more heroes like Sgt. 1st Class Micael Pratt to step forward as witnesses would be to cover every such story in such a way that it becomes clear to every potential witness of such abuses of power that we here at home will hold their witness up as a standard of heroism and will protect them from retaliation. How will our representatives & senators know how much we care, if we don't?

Since I didn't have an audience yet when I first posted these related musings, I am going to leave a list of their permalinks here:

Abusing Jesus
By Any Other Name
A Day That Will Live In Infamy
We Are All Torturers Now
None Dare Call Us Sane

Comments are still open on each of these as well as here. Get a dialog going.
Where is everyone's outrage?
Where is everyone's sense of self-preservation?
This is the issue that should be at the top of everyone's list of priorities.
For this is more dangerous for Americans as individuals and America as a nation than terrorism itself. I know that I am more frightened of this becoming the norm than I am of another 9/11 type attack on our soil.

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Still Recouperating I Guess

Slept 12 hours on Tuesday and still can't stay awake. Can't keep eyes or mind focused. Feel like I've lost 50 IQ points. Don't know if I really need more sleep or if I'm just having trouble waking up again after sleeping so hard for so long. Or it is possible that with the sleeping and the dreaming, I am finaly starting to process the emotional elements of the family retreat--seeing my Dad & my Mom's twin sister slipping into what appears to be the late stages of terminal cancer; seeing the two couples reminisce & share congrats on the 50th anniversary of their double wedding August 7, 1955 while coming to terms with the probability thier won't be a 51st for either couple; seeing my neices and nephews all so grown up--no more babies, the youngest is eleven; having my fears of a fundamentalist grilling not pan out & trying to wrap my brain around some subtle evidence and some outright statements from father, brother & uncle that many of the beliefs, doctrines & expectations once held have been either set aside or morphed beyond recognition; seeing my 15yr old neice get a birthday present that meant the world to her--a pair of riding boots and a visit to the Crystal Peaks Youth Ranch to meet the horses recued from abuse and neglect; meeting those horses myself and having a 30 odd year fear of horses evaporate in minutes--a fear induced by having been bucked off a horse my first time on one at age 12. And so much more. Much of it not even processed to the point I can name it in a list like that.

So I guess maybe I need to be patient with myself a day or two or even three longer. Which means any blogging over the next few days will probably be more such personal ramblings. I haven't the wherwithal of mind to compose formal essays; am not in a mood to rant; am at least a week behind in the national and global news events and having a hard time caring--both of which would have shocked me just ten days ago.

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Relatively Speaking

Am back. Relatively speaking. Have had 7 hours total of sleep since last Friday afternoon! Family retreat went well. Not one disagreeable encounter. Including with the weather. No preaching only relative reaching out to relative--heart to heart. Much sharing of tears and fears. Much laughter echoed in the rafters. Lots to blog about but will have to wait. flogging the keys again is such a relief but i can't stay awake. Can't see straight. Cannot tell whether reality meets my eyes' double-takes. Am about to flounder. May soon halucinate if i refuse to sucumb to the greed for sleeping. Of dreams this night there should be no lack.

yes i'm aware of all the rhyming. and that it is tacky. but the effort to stiffle is no triffle. sleep depravation often results in such oddities of word flow. don't know if the phenomenon is unique to me

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