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"I have need of the sky. I have business with the grasses. I will up and away at the break of day to where the hawk is wheeling lone and high and where the clouds drift by."   - Richard Hovey, 1894-1961

Thursday, March 31, 2005

What is Death?

From an editorial by Bishop John Shelby Spong on Tikkun.org.

"Is death a natural and normal part of the life process that needs to be embraced? Is it the ultimate enemy that needs to be defeated as St. Paul suggests or the ultimate punishment for sin as the creation story implies?

"Is there a point where science and medical technology cease expanding life and begin only to postpone death? Can that point be identified and accepted? Is it not true that this debate would never have arisen a century ago because the choices we can make today were not options for our grandparents? Patients, now kept alive by extraordinary means, would have simply died in the past. When the evangelical minister on CNN said that we should not interfere with 'the natural course of life,' he did not recognize that modern medicine is designed to do just that. If we let nature take its course, the average life expectancy would still be 30 or so years. One cannot have it both ways with any rational consistency. I rejoice in expanded life. I grieve when medicine is used only to postpone death. I do not believe that a breathing cadaver is a living self.
"

Thank you, Bishop.

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Wednesday, March 30, 2005

Here's "The Plan"

After four years of being rooted on the Peninsula, I've decided it's
time to shake things up a bit.

1. Welcome to the 90s! - Get rid of land line and get a cell phone

2. Move out of Menlo Park apartment April 9th and crash at Nanette's for
a month

3. Quit my job at Committee for Green Foothills. My last day is May 13.
-- If you know anyone who's looking for a great non-proft job, have
them check out http://www.greenfoothills.org/about/jobs.html

4. Party in SF. Details TBD.

5. Take a break. Go to Missouri for June and July. Visit friends and
family. Help Dad build up his inventory of yarns for OzarkHandspun.com.
Re-evaluate what I want to do when I grow up.

6. Come back to the Bay Area in late July, continue break and visiting
with friends. Take a road trip to Wyoming in early August.

7. Go to Burning Man.

8. Move officially to SF. Begin looking for work.

Whew. I think that's it.

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Friday, March 25, 2005

What is Life?

Is life...
playing with children?
sleeping with your lover?
enjoying a decadent dessert?
laughing with old friends?
appreciating a sunset?

Is life...
slaving away at a job?
keeping up with the Joneses?
surfing the net?
watching TV?
being in a vegatative state?

What is your life like?
What do you want your life to be like?
Would you be sustained by a feeding tube for the rest of your life, with no brain function?
Or would you die?

The Schiavo Case

Anyway: I'm not blessed or merciful. I'm just me. I've got a job to do and I do it. Listen: even as we're talking, I'm there for old and young, innocent and guilty, those who die together and those who die alone. I'm in cars and boats and planes, in hospitals and forests and abattoirs. For some folks death is a release and for others death is an abomination, a terrible thing. But in the end, I'm there for all of them.
-Death (By Neil Gaiman, The Sandman #20, Facade)

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Saturday, March 19, 2005

Shout!

Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."

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Jail to Victory

Page 49-50 – On January 10, 1917, the [National] Women’s Party arranged around-the-clock pickets at the White House. [After three months,] Police began arresting picketers for blocking traffic. Other women quickly replaced them. Over the next six months more than two hundred women faced trials. Alice Paul [the organizer of the Women’s Party] and ninety-six other who refused to pay their fines were thrown into filthy jails and work houses for up to six months. Guards beat and isolated troublemakers in cells. When women refused to eat, they were force-fed. Lucy Burns wrote:

[We] were dragged through halls by force, our clothing partly removed by force, and we were examined…. Dr. Gannon told me then I must be force fed. I was held down by five people at legs, arms and head. Gannon pushed tube up left nostril…. It hurts nose and throat very much….Food dumped directly into stomach feels like a ball of lead.

Reports of cruel treatment outraged the nation. On November 28, [1917], President Wilson ordered the women set free. The White House pickets remained. Member of the National American [Women Suffrage Association], with [Carrie Chapman] Catt as their president since 1915, disliked Paul’s tactics and kept their distance. [National American favored a state-by-state voting rights approach as opposed to the direct action of the Women’s Party.] Still, the Party’s daring moves opened many doors that strengthened Catt’s state groups. Paul’s antics forced the president and Congress to take action.

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Let Women Vote!

Gathering with women has been an invaluable source of strength in my life. Hearing their stories and sharing my struggles has given me the courage to conceive and realize a vision of myself as an independent, loving, loved and fulfilled woman. It is because of these conversations and connections that I see the beauty and power of being a woman. It was a winding struggle before I understood how lucky I was to have femininity as a resource – as a way to be a force for positive change in this world.

By Marlene Targ Brill
Page 15 – “Most early American could not own property or sign contracts. Their husbands owned their clothes, household goods, and anything they brought to the marriage. If a woman earned wages, they belonged to her husband.”

Page 16 – “Divorce between husband and wife was almost impossible. And if a divorce was granted, the woman lost all rights to her children, no matter how badly the father behaved.
After visiting the United State, French author Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, ‘No people, with the exception of slaves, had less rights over themselves in eighteenth-century and early nineteenth century America than married women.’”

Page 23 – “After abolitionists Angelina and Sarah Grimke toured New England, Massachusetts clergy issued a strong letter attacking their speeches. Churches throughout the state read the letters condemning the women. The clergy claimed that ‘when a woman assumes the place and tone of man as public reformer…her character becomes unnatural.’
Sarah Grimke answered the clergy in a series of letters. She argued that they misquoted the Bible to keep women down. She wanted equal rights for women.
‘All I ask our brethren is, that they will take their feet from off our necks and permit us to stand upright on that ground which God designed us to occupy,’ she wrote.”

Page 26 – “On July 13, 1848, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Stanton, Mary Ann McClintock, Martha Wright and Jane Hunt met for tea. “At the July 13 tea, Stanton admitted to the women how truly miserable she was.
I poured out, that day, the torrent of my…long discontent, with such vehemence and indignation that I stirred myself, as well as the rest of the party, to do and dare anything.
…The following day, Stanton announced the Women’s Rights Convention in the Seneca County Courier. The notice read:
A convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious rights of woman will be held in the Wesleyan Chapel, Seneca Falls, New York, on Wednesday and Thursday, the 19th and 20th of July.
The next morning the women met to plan the meeting and prepare a statement of basic women’s rights. At first, Stanton searched through papers from antislavery meetings for ideas. Then she read the United States Declaration of Independence….
Stanton rewrote the Declaration to include the work women: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal….” Then the women agreed on a list of demands for true equality with men. They include the right to earn wages, go to college, own property, pursue a career, have equal say about children after divorce, and be heard in court. Stanton added one more demand – the right to vote….Some women feared that wanting the vote went too far…”

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Peace, love and understanding

Page 114, From Black Women Leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, by Zita Allen, copyright 1996.

Fannie Lou Hamer, who was beaten severely when returning from citizenship training school, said during training of young Freedom Summer volunteers, “The white man is the scardest person on earth. Out in daylight he don’t do nothin’. But at night he’ll toss a bomb or pay someone to kill. The white man’s afraid he’ll be treated like he’ been treating the Negroes, but I couldn’t carry that much hate. It wouldn’t solve any problem for me to hate white because they hate me. Oh, there’s so much hate! Only God has kept the Negro sane.

Help us communicate with white people. Regardless of what they act like, there some good there. How can we say we love God and hate our brothers and sisters? We got to reach them.”

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Got Vote?

Page 113, From Black Women Leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, by Zita Allen, copyright 1996.

The Freedom Summer of 1964 was a “demand for political empowerment” for the blacks of the south. Volunteer activists launched a massive campaign to register blacks in the south to vote. This was to trigger the most confrontational and dangerous of all civil rights direct action.

“…three young Freedom Summer volunteers disappeared in Neshoba County, Mississippi, after being arrested by local police on trumped-up traffic charges. The bullet-riddled bodies of James Chaney, and eighteen-year-old SNCC staffer from Meridian, Michael Schwerner, a twenty-five-year-old Brooklyn-born CORE orangizer in Meridian, and Andrew Goodman, a twenty-year-old Queens College student summer volunteer, were not found until mid-August, after an extensive search by local and federal authorities. According to one pathologist, James Chaney’s badly mutilated body resembled that of an airplane crash victim.”

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What's it worth?

Pages 107-108, From Black Women Leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, by Zita Allen, copyright 1996.

[In 1963] “When the [Mississippi] police officer learned during questioning that [Fannie Lou] Hamer had been at citizenship training school [to teach blacks in the south how to register to vote] in Charleston, he interrupted her, ‘You went to march. You went to see Martin Luther King. We are not going to have it.’

…[Hamer said,] ‘So then I had to get over there on the bed flat on my stomach, and the man beat me—that man beat me until he gave out.’ After the other prisoner beat her with a blackjack, Hamer nearly passed out as she got off the cot. But the police officer said, ‘Hell, you can walk.’ Four weeks afterward, Hamer could still not sleep on her back. She had been disfigured so badly that she wouldn’t let her family see her for a month.

Another member of the group, Arnell Ponder, a coed from Clark College, was beaten by a guard who kept demanding, ‘Cain’t you say yessir, nigger? Cain’t you say yessire, bitch?’ Ponder, despite being repeatedly slapped, repeated reported, ‘Yes, I can say yessir.’ ‘Well, you say it,’ the guard ordered. ‘I don’t know you well enough,’ Ponder replied.

Hamer heard the sounds from an adjacent cell, and recalled, ‘She kept screamin’ and they kept beatin’ her and finally she started prayin’ for em, and she asked God to have mercy on ‘em because they didn’t know what they were doing.’ When [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] workers located Ponder and Hamer in jail and got permission to see the prisoners, Ponder’s face was so swollen she could barely talk. One SNCC worker reported, ‘She looked at me and was able to whisper one word: Freedom.’”

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The Freedom Rides

Happy Mother’s Day from the Freedom Riders
Pages 85-88, From Black Women Leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, by Zita Allen, copyright 1996.

“Then on Mother’s Day, May 14 [1961], their Greyhound bus curved along U. S. Highway 78 and pulled into Anniston, Alabama. An angry mob was waiting armed with blackjacks, iron bars, clubs, and tire chains, with which people smashed windows and slashed tires. Next, they firebombed the bus, which burst into flames, leaving only a charred metal skeleton. Fortunately, the riders escaped the bus. …

The second vehicle, a Trailways bus, pulled into Anniston one hour later. The mob jumped aboard and beat the riders mercilessly, leaving one sixty-one-year-old permanently brain damaged and close to death. This was only the beginning…

Cops didn’t arrive until the group of Ku Klux Klan goons had left. Although on rider had been beaten unconscious and required fifty-three stiches, the group wanted to continue….

…the Freedom Rides continued unabated, pushing deeper and deeper into the South, where the fuzzy link between the Ku Klux Klan, White Citizens Councils, and the established order had allowed a terror to reign. In Mississippi, the riders were arrested and put in Parchment State Penitentiary, a maximum security prison.…When the riders began to sing freedom songs [in prison] (which they did all the time), towels and toothbrushes were confiscated. Even sheets and mattresses were taken away. Some prisoners were subjected to battery operated cattle-prodders and wrist-breakers….

Lucretia Collins, a Tennessee State coed who had left school just weeks before her graduation to join the rides, said ‘We knew we were subject to being killed. This did not matter to us. There was so much at stake, we could not allow the segregations to stop us.’

….Every young woman and man who boarded a Freedom Ride bus knew that they were putting their lives on the line and they did so freely, willingly, and with a degree of enthusiasm that left many in awe. In fact, one of the training questions volunteers were routinely asked was simply, ‘Are you prepared to die?’”

Well, are you?

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Thursday, March 10, 2005

Friends' Blogs

We're all online now-a-days, aren't we?

Mark - my graphic designer and fabulous beau

Enter the Fray - Andi, Jake, Josie and Rambler

Mama Kohl - one of my best and longest friends, still residing in mid-MO, being a mom and helping other women become moms

Scott - the reason I landed in CA and a very good friend

Brian - CGF Advocate and Closet Nerd

Chris and Jana - are storing my dresser!

April - Highschool Friend and PhD candidate, specializing in worms

David - one of the coolest people I met at the Tikkun Spiritual Activism conference

Deb - cool chick and another one of those smart grad student types

Jimbo - who's actually just stopped blogging!

Seth Lombardi - one of my few remaining high school contacts

Daryl Groetsch - a mid-Mo escapee in Portland doing cool music stuff

Martin Beally - in Seattle, making things taste good

ok. well, maybe that's not quite all of us...

V is for vote!

B is for bicycle
E is for echinacea
P is for peace
Q is for quilt
U is for universe

These are from "The Alternative Alphabet Poster for Little and Big People" which I think is fabulous!

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