Remember

I once had a little white on black button from the Holocaust Museum in D.C. that simply said, "remember."  My husband borrowed it, and I never saw it again.  Somehow that is fitting.  Things don't last.  Things vanish.  But memories are different.  We keep them and review them in grief, and for comfort, until they are worn smooth into polished icons of remembrance. 

We got the call from my step-daughter early that day; we didn't have hours, days or weeks of worry.  She was a lovely and quite intelligent young woman, only 25, who worked in lower Manhattan, not all that far from the WTC,  and lived in Brooklyn.  She was okay.  Her building had been evacuated and she was going to have to walk back to Brooklyn that day.  Our younger daughter was in 6th grade and the school called because they were concerned about her.  She seemed to grasp the enormity of the attacks and was emotionally devastated and raw unlike many of her peers who just did not quite get it.  She'd been to the WTC the previous month, August 2001, with her dad, my husband, when he stopped in to see a broker. We didn't know it then but she would spend 7th grade in Arlington, VA with classmates who lost parents in the attack on the Pentagon.   I spent years disseminating real information about the Iraq War that most folks now grudgingly recognize as truth, and during those years many despised me, called me a traitor, and threatened me and my family.  It has been a hard 10 years. 


I wrote, globally, about the initial thoughts I had on the blog/site I ran at the time called Late Boomers.  The three articles I wrote that were "about" the attacks on the U.S. can be read, in the same format in which they appeared then, at:


Boomers Unique Take on Patriotism and Military Service



A Lifetime of Violence: Terrorism, Rates of Information Flow and Baby Boomers



Art, Angst, and Zeitgeist



And I expressed myself through poetry, bad though it was, which was accepted for the Poets Against the War Website .

There was this site, and before that another site, where I chronicled and pondered the journey from 9/11 onward. 



And of course there was a wrap up (for me anyway) of the impact 9/11 had on my life that I posted to BlogHer.com after bin Laden was killed this past Spring: On Realizing I Was Impacted by Terrorism.



I have been feeling numb this past week.  Perhaps because of the approaching anniversary.  Anniversaries of sad events always get to me even if I don't consciously remember them.  This year I have had to add another sad connection to 9/11.  This year, on January 8th, Tucson lost a little girl whose 10th Birthday anniversary is tomorrow. 


Please, let's try to build peace, kindness, and a loving human family. 

Fragments of ... This Week

Blogging Tips and Tricks

There are "tricks" used in the blogging community to simplify, prompt, and facilitate frequent blogging.  One of these is Wordless Wednesdays.  I haven't done wordless anything as yet, because I do not have a good camera to capture the sort of images that I love to hunt.  Never have.  Silly really because we are not poor.  But there is always a larger need for the $400 or so buckeroos that the camera I want costs.

Fragment Fridays is something I just learned about.... so I guess that is what this post is.  It may be something I repeat.   It sounds good to me as it takes time, lots of time, to string my thoughts together sometimes.  Now I will just post them on Fridays! The first mention of them I could quickly find from a Google search is from the same person, Mrs. 4444, pronounced Mrs. Fours,  who wrote a post today that I read because she follows me, and I now follow her, on BlogHer. 

Writing Equipment

Right now I need a new laptop.  I'm a writer.  I've authored only a few things but I've written tens of thousands of things:  letters, essays, poems, stories, nonfiction, some fiction, blogs, email,  journals.  I write all the time.  I've written all my adult life, all my teen life, and a bit before.  I bought an electric typewriter when I was 16.  I've used Apples or Macs since the early 80s.  I have a great desktop computer with a huge screen (for graphics) that I purchased with some of the small inheritance I received when we sold Mom's farm house, paid her debts, and split the remainder 5 ways.  Now my MacBook laptop from 2007 has died and I'm on an older laptop of my daughter's an iBook that would randomly not recognize the keyboard and type gibberish, which I've kluged into working for a while, cross your fingers, but that has melted power cords like lunchtime grilled cheese sandwiches for its entire working life and currently has pink duct tape holing the power cord together.  I have to have a portable computer of some sort that is reliable before BlogHer. 

Unemployment

I've been unemployed for the last 7 months.  I need to go to BlogHer in early August as my writing career, low to no pay though it is at times, hinges on this network of savvy women writers and entrepreneurs.    Fortunately,  I can drive to San Diego where the conference is this year, after I get a cruise control issue on my car fixed.  Damn, these effing uber elite greedy sons and daughters of fascist ruling families that are tanking our economy for a few more coins in their off shore bank vaults.  My husband has worked so damn hard his entire life and his work is for the benefit of human kind, and the rewards just haven't come monetarily. Huge corporations will benefit after his patents expire, but they are just biding their time.  While they have all the rights of people, they are immortal and can wait to profit from any given scientist's labors.


The Last Shuttle Flight


I'm sad.  I'm watching the very last shuttle launch as I write.  T minus 31 seconds. Pause.  Then 10, 9, 8, 7,  6....   Lift-off.  WTF,  I'm tearing up.  I'm crying.  What happened to My America?  Where did it go?  Why did the conservatives want to kill it?   My Uncle Carl worked for NASA.  I remember the Challenger disaster clearly.... I was living on Sylvia Street in West Lafayette when I saw that horrible Y of smoke and debris.  But there are good memories too,  I will always treasure getting into Edwards AFB as a VIP for the first test of the on board computers when the shuttle still reached the sky piggy-backed on a Boeing 727 to then coast in and land on a dry lake bed at Edwards with my uncle and three friends in the late 1970s.  I grew up believing that I and America could do anything... largely because of the space program that put men on the moon.  The development of our space program has been given over privatization. 

It is July 8th

Today is July 8th.  Six months ago my life changed.  I'm a Tucsonan.  January 8th is forever etched into our hearts, minds, and memories. Why?  I still don't understand why.  A man obviously in need of mental health care killed and wounded many people on that day because he was not on medication nor receiving the counseling or environmental setting he needed.  Why?  To my mind at least it is because  Republican Presidents have led the way to dismantling every social service that was put in place between the 1930s and the 1960s.  It has taken them since the time of Nixon's presidency to now to do it, but the SOBs are so good at lying, making alliances with people for the short term, that will eventually f*ck those partners, but benefit  Big R Big Bigness in the long run.

Blogger and Wrap Up

I'm still not sure about this new interface that Blogger dropped on us.  I think I like it. 

These were all supposed to be fragments, but somehow I think there is an undercurrent of a theme here.  Maybe?