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.
Showing posts with label Peace. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Peace. Show all posts
Saturday, September 10, 2011
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Life After Osama
Just some ramblings about week two after almost 10 years.
Osama was killed. He was a vile, evil man. I cannot be as sad as my truly leftist friends would have me be. This whole experience has reinforced what I know to be true about my political beliefs. I am a progressive. I want peace. And yet, inside myself, I am glad that the man who loved to kill and dreamed of death is dead. Yes, I can understand that people have a right to be very upset by the actions of the U.S. in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, South and Central America. The U.S. is not the American people. Rarely are governments good reflections of the people for whom they act or the principles for which they stand.
I have to say that while I am not at all happy with how President Obama has snuggled up to the pharmaceutical, insurance, mortgage and banking industries, he has managed to reflect America more powerfully and more accurately than I remember anyone ever doing. We are our ideals. He manifests the ideals I was taught to strive toward as a school kid. I detest war. I do not condone violating international borders and national sovereignty, but I appreciate that he took responsibility for doing what he ordered. It seems a lot more honorable than Iran Contra, shadow governments, CIA drug wars, and a host of other things that I have seen my government do and in which they refuse to admit culpability, responsibility, and in many cases instigation. The current administration is carrying on far too many of the repressive, reactionary, anti-democratic programs and practices initiated by the Bush Administration, and I doubt that I will ever be able to keep my mouth shut about those things. I do not however have the energy to work with negative topics all the time. I drew from the positive, jester-like boldness of the early organization that was CODEPINK. We spoke in a way that was difficult to ignore and eventually we seeped into the consciousness of a nation. I was there in D.C. when the Illinois delegation of CODEPINKers met with Senator Barack Obama.
My life as a peace activist of sorts and the death of the man who ultimately was responsible for my becoming a peace activist by creating the coordinated attacks on New York City and our nation's Capitol that created one domino leading to another where I moved across country, met like minded women, and worked to understand that peace has to be worked toward with more furious love than the furious hate that leads us to war. I will hold that within me until the moment I die. When I die I will have been no more than a wake on the water. But I changed the reflection of the world for a moment. And perhaps someone seeing a bit of a different world in that wake will make more changes. That is all any of us can do. I believe in the power of individual and collective action.
I am tired. I don't like thinking about war and politics all the time. I have trouble finding the positive, head over heels, positive and life affirming, and powerful iconography of the early CODEPINK in the bitter rhetoric of the anti-war community today. Anti- stances are so different from pro- positions. There is an energetic difference, a qualitative difference, between the differing approaches. I revel in and marvel at the power of creation, the power of the feminine, the power of affirmation.
I can't keep myself from noticing the impact of these things; that is just how I am. BUT I can moderate the duration and intensity of my actions and reactions to them. This is what I have come up with in the last many days of reflection since that Sunday night, not quite two weeks ago, and its special announcement from our president: I need to continue the writing path that I was unfurling before me, some would say making it up as I went along, that I was working on at at my desk when the first plane hit. Of course the path I'm now walking isn't the same path I would have walked had the towers stood.
I was working on increasing awareness of a distinct cohort, the last half of Baby Boom Generation, the Late Boomers, as well as a working on a collection of poetry and a biography of Gene Stratton-Porter when everything changed. I contributed regularly to a feminist comedy site focused on the glamour of old Hollywood. I need to get back to my research and writing that lies beyond the 20th and 21st Century political realm. A new research area has also developed in the last few years; I'm working in the area of Munchausen by Proxy Child Abuse, an ill-named area of factitious medical child abuse.
And there is a new constellation of events that calls to me in the middle of the night these days. My eldest daughter, my step-daughter, has given the world and a neighborhood far away from Tucson a beautiful set of twins, my grand-daughters. My youngest daughter, my biological daughter, has decided she is in love and, come December and graduation from university, will move across the country far from the neighborhood in which she grew up and in which she still resides, to pursue a graduate education and live with her honey, hiking partner, and soul-mate. From my roof deck in central Tucson at night in the moonlight I can hear the Goddess speak, "Get your shit together girl, you still have work to do for me. Now get going and write those books, finish the house remodeling, build the back yard labyrinth and grotto where you can rest in your old age while you compose poetry, watch flowers grow, and receive visitors. Time's a wasting!"
My time and life are of my own conscious creation. I will not allow my life to be choreographed by external forces.
Osama was killed. He was a vile, evil man. I cannot be as sad as my truly leftist friends would have me be. This whole experience has reinforced what I know to be true about my political beliefs. I am a progressive. I want peace. And yet, inside myself, I am glad that the man who loved to kill and dreamed of death is dead. Yes, I can understand that people have a right to be very upset by the actions of the U.S. in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, South and Central America. The U.S. is not the American people. Rarely are governments good reflections of the people for whom they act or the principles for which they stand.
I have to say that while I am not at all happy with how President Obama has snuggled up to the pharmaceutical, insurance, mortgage and banking industries, he has managed to reflect America more powerfully and more accurately than I remember anyone ever doing. We are our ideals. He manifests the ideals I was taught to strive toward as a school kid. I detest war. I do not condone violating international borders and national sovereignty, but I appreciate that he took responsibility for doing what he ordered. It seems a lot more honorable than Iran Contra, shadow governments, CIA drug wars, and a host of other things that I have seen my government do and in which they refuse to admit culpability, responsibility, and in many cases instigation. The current administration is carrying on far too many of the repressive, reactionary, anti-democratic programs and practices initiated by the Bush Administration, and I doubt that I will ever be able to keep my mouth shut about those things. I do not however have the energy to work with negative topics all the time. I drew from the positive, jester-like boldness of the early organization that was CODEPINK. We spoke in a way that was difficult to ignore and eventually we seeped into the consciousness of a nation. I was there in D.C. when the Illinois delegation of CODEPINKers met with Senator Barack Obama.
My life as a peace activist of sorts and the death of the man who ultimately was responsible for my becoming a peace activist by creating the coordinated attacks on New York City and our nation's Capitol that created one domino leading to another where I moved across country, met like minded women, and worked to understand that peace has to be worked toward with more furious love than the furious hate that leads us to war. I will hold that within me until the moment I die. When I die I will have been no more than a wake on the water. But I changed the reflection of the world for a moment. And perhaps someone seeing a bit of a different world in that wake will make more changes. That is all any of us can do. I believe in the power of individual and collective action.
I am tired. I don't like thinking about war and politics all the time. I have trouble finding the positive, head over heels, positive and life affirming, and powerful iconography of the early CODEPINK in the bitter rhetoric of the anti-war community today. Anti- stances are so different from pro- positions. There is an energetic difference, a qualitative difference, between the differing approaches. I revel in and marvel at the power of creation, the power of the feminine, the power of affirmation.
I can't keep myself from noticing the impact of these things; that is just how I am. BUT I can moderate the duration and intensity of my actions and reactions to them. This is what I have come up with in the last many days of reflection since that Sunday night, not quite two weeks ago, and its special announcement from our president: I need to continue the writing path that I was unfurling before me, some would say making it up as I went along, that I was working on at at my desk when the first plane hit. Of course the path I'm now walking isn't the same path I would have walked had the towers stood.
I was working on increasing awareness of a distinct cohort, the last half of Baby Boom Generation, the Late Boomers, as well as a working on a collection of poetry and a biography of Gene Stratton-Porter when everything changed. I contributed regularly to a feminist comedy site focused on the glamour of old Hollywood. I need to get back to my research and writing that lies beyond the 20th and 21st Century political realm. A new research area has also developed in the last few years; I'm working in the area of Munchausen by Proxy Child Abuse, an ill-named area of factitious medical child abuse.
And there is a new constellation of events that calls to me in the middle of the night these days. My eldest daughter, my step-daughter, has given the world and a neighborhood far away from Tucson a beautiful set of twins, my grand-daughters. My youngest daughter, my biological daughter, has decided she is in love and, come December and graduation from university, will move across the country far from the neighborhood in which she grew up and in which she still resides, to pursue a graduate education and live with her honey, hiking partner, and soul-mate. From my roof deck in central Tucson at night in the moonlight I can hear the Goddess speak, "Get your shit together girl, you still have work to do for me. Now get going and write those books, finish the house remodeling, build the back yard labyrinth and grotto where you can rest in your old age while you compose poetry, watch flowers grow, and receive visitors. Time's a wasting!"
My time and life are of my own conscious creation. I will not allow my life to be choreographed by external forces.
Sunday, August 05, 2007
Women, framing, blogging and more.
I've so many things to blog about, and I've still so little time to blog. But only one more week and I will be on the road back in the general direction of Tucson.
Yesterday I ran a bunch of errands. Dropped stuff at Goodwill. Met a progressive friend at a great little lunch restaurant (and breakfast on Saturday) in the one time burg of Dunfee, IN. It is just north of the train tracks north of State Road 14 on the County Line Road between Whitley and Allen County. It is in the back of an antique and country crafts store that has a sub-specialization in equestrian items. The building obviously was a general store -- long rectangular and narrow clapboard, now weathered gray with occasional specks of the original color clinging to the wood.
A perfect setting to begin my good-byes.
I've been in the mid-west, bible belt, rust belt, old union land for 6 months now, and this will be my last week here. I can't say that I will miss the fear driven conformity that underlies so much of everyday life here.
There is a lot made of the supposedly close-knit communities in the small towns of this region. They are held up as supposedly wholesome iconic communities worthy of emulation.
Bull. Bull. Bull. When I walk down the street here, strangers don't smile as they do in large cities. I see looks of intolerance flashed as soon as someone "different" walks by. For heaven's sake, Wal-Mart is the new town square. Plastic junk from China surrounds our center of social information exchange. Far too many of the churches unite groups in their damnation of others who don't believe as they do rather than in the love of all people as the person they name themselves after professed.
There are drawbacks and perks within every sort of living. Both the small town and the international urban metropolis have positive and negative elements, but the success of both are built via social networks. i think it is actually harder to build a supportive community based on distinction when surrounded by a small community rather than a large one. It isn't about anonymity as must as it is about respect.
Community -- that is the core of peace building. The recognition of community across time exists. Community across vast spaces exist. We must build community across socially constructed class to stop the acceleration of artificially enhanced divisive difference.
I'm thinking of starting a "tour" to show any interested women how to connect and communicate via currently available communication technologies.
Is it soincidence that as I was writing this that I flipped through TV channels to find Bill Moyers interviewing Barbara Ehrenrich and found out about her book:
Dancing in the Streets: the History of Collective Joy
Here is the table of contents of the work:
I've always been rather outspoken when it comes to lambasting the "Big Frog in a Small Pond" phenomenon. But now rather than fixate on the big frogs, I'm shifting to simply attempting to have all the women look around at the pond and decide what they want to do with it.
Attendance at BlogHer '07 in Chicago helped this goal solidify into something concrete enough I can begin to meander toward it.
Yesterday I ran a bunch of errands. Dropped stuff at Goodwill. Met a progressive friend at a great little lunch restaurant (and breakfast on Saturday) in the one time burg of Dunfee, IN. It is just north of the train tracks north of State Road 14 on the County Line Road between Whitley and Allen County. It is in the back of an antique and country crafts store that has a sub-specialization in equestrian items. The building obviously was a general store -- long rectangular and narrow clapboard, now weathered gray with occasional specks of the original color clinging to the wood.
A perfect setting to begin my good-byes.
I've been in the mid-west, bible belt, rust belt, old union land for 6 months now, and this will be my last week here. I can't say that I will miss the fear driven conformity that underlies so much of everyday life here.
There is a lot made of the supposedly close-knit communities in the small towns of this region. They are held up as supposedly wholesome iconic communities worthy of emulation.
Bull. Bull. Bull. When I walk down the street here, strangers don't smile as they do in large cities. I see looks of intolerance flashed as soon as someone "different" walks by. For heaven's sake, Wal-Mart is the new town square. Plastic junk from China surrounds our center of social information exchange. Far too many of the churches unite groups in their damnation of others who don't believe as they do rather than in the love of all people as the person they name themselves after professed.
There are drawbacks and perks within every sort of living. Both the small town and the international urban metropolis have positive and negative elements, but the success of both are built via social networks. i think it is actually harder to build a supportive community based on distinction when surrounded by a small community rather than a large one. It isn't about anonymity as must as it is about respect.
Community -- that is the core of peace building. The recognition of community across time exists. Community across vast spaces exist. We must build community across socially constructed class to stop the acceleration of artificially enhanced divisive difference.
I'm thinking of starting a "tour" to show any interested women how to connect and communicate via currently available communication technologies.
Is it soincidence that as I was writing this that I flipped through TV channels to find Bill Moyers interviewing Barbara Ehrenrich and found out about her book:
Dancing in the Streets: the History of Collective Joy
Here is the table of contents of the work:
I've always been rather outspoken when it comes to lambasting the "Big Frog in a Small Pond" phenomenon. But now rather than fixate on the big frogs, I'm shifting to simply attempting to have all the women look around at the pond and decide what they want to do with it.
Attendance at BlogHer '07 in Chicago helped this goal solidify into something concrete enough I can begin to meander toward it.
Thursday, February 08, 2007
Virtual Movement Marches Forward
Turns out there is a virtual movement afoot.
Solidarity isn't just a buzzword for extreme leftiies. (You know, those folks who are even to the left of me...)
Second Life, a virtual world accessible through downloadable software similar to online multi-player games, is creating a bit of a stir in the trendy world of online life. The Peace & Justice Movement is one of the first communities to use this new world to connect, network, and advance their goals.
The recent March on Washington provided opportunity for the SL Net Roots
community (including CODEPINK SL) to stage a companion virtual march on the Capitol while at least a half a million people physically surrounded the U.S. Capitol with an unplanned route change that took the march around all four sides of the Capitol and not just the three sides that were originally permitted.
Here are just a few of the sites that covered the virtual march.
Avatars hold peace march
avatars-against-the-war/
second-life-war-protest
video_of_avatar.html
RootsCampSL
avatars-against-the-war
personaldemocracy
peace-in-the-metaverse-goodwill-toward-avs
Solidarity isn't just a buzzword for extreme leftiies. (You know, those folks who are even to the left of me...)
Second Life, a virtual world accessible through downloadable software similar to online multi-player games, is creating a bit of a stir in the trendy world of online life. The Peace & Justice Movement is one of the first communities to use this new world to connect, network, and advance their goals.
The recent March on Washington provided opportunity for the SL Net Roots
community (including CODEPINK SL) to stage a companion virtual march on the Capitol while at least a half a million people physically surrounded the U.S. Capitol with an unplanned route change that took the march around all four sides of the Capitol and not just the three sides that were originally permitted.
Here are just a few of the sites that covered the virtual march.
Avatars hold peace march
avatars-against-the-war/
second-life-war-protest
video_of_avatar.html
RootsCampSL
avatars-against-the-war
personaldemocracy
peace-in-the-metaverse-goodwill-toward-avs
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