I have always loved the month May. In the area of the U.S. in which I grew up May was filled with blossoms. Probably due to being a May baby, the lilac blossoms, peony blossoms, trillium, lily of the valley, hepatica, and so many more seemed like they heralded the arrival of my personal holiday.
May is a boom time for blooms. What is blooming where you live? Saguaros are not quite blooming,yet, a bit early, where I live. But many cactuses are in blossom. What is the the official flower of your state? (
May 1st
May Day
May is welcomed in with celebration, or at least it once was. May Day, May 1st, was a time for festivals, maypoles, may baskets, May Queen, washing in the early morning dew so you will be beautiful throughout the year. May Day traditions lived on in the Rural United States with pageants, Queens, and poles through the early part of the 20th Century. (6 prompts.) And then of course there is the enigmatic Led Zeppelin lyric involving, “a spring clean for the May Queen.”
Labor Day
And of course everywhere but the U.S., or so it seems, observes Labor Day on May 1. International Workers of the World and all that.
Beltane
Beltane was observed in Celtic regions on May 1st and most likely was forebearer of the more recent May Day. Beltane is the halfway point between Spring Equinox and Summer Solstice. Beltane would be the beginning of Summer in any calendar that considers the Summer Solstice to be the height of Summer, the longest day, and often the hottest day of the year.
Mothers and Others
May closes the contemporary rituals of Spring that celebrate the female and renewal. We have those? Yes we do! International Women’s Day, March 8th, starts the contemporary celebration of women. Earth Day follows as the second node of this new tripartite set of events. Mother’s Day of course provides the third point.
Mother’s Day as a “card and cake” celebration is a recent invention and not one ever intended to be celebrated so superficially. I previously wrote about the Two Mothers of Mother’s Day. Both trace to the post-Civil War era when the U.S. was still mourning the staggering loss of life in that war and dealing with the self loathing associated with the slaughter of kindred. But as that article states the momentum toward creating a Mother’s Day that remembers the sentiments behind its conception.
In the meanwhile, let us remember all mothers throughout time. The love of mothers through time is proved time and again, most recently in the 4,800 years old remains of a mother and child found in Taiwan.
Now moving from scenes of birth to celebrations of birth, let us turn to women worthy of a few words by you, if you are so inclined:
May 4, 1916 (2006) – Jane Jacobs, journalist, author, and urban studies activist, wrote The Death and Life of the Great American Cities in 1961. She opposed the “urban renewal” that demolished supposed urban blight and destroyed vibrant, urban, and chaotic communities.
May 5, 1942 (1998) – Tammy Wynette, country music singer, after first success in 1967 had more than 20 songs go to #1, Grammy Award for “Stand By Your Man” (1968)
May 5, 1864 (1922) – Elizabeth Seaman, pen name “Nellie Bly,” investigative journalist, wrote expose of mental asylum (1887), set a record for circling the world in 72 days (1890)
May 11, 1894 (1991) – Martha Graham, modern dance innovator and choreographer, first dancer to perform at the White House
May 12, 1907 (2003) – Katharine Hepburn, actor, performed for more than 60 years, won four Academy Awards for best actress including “The Philadelphia Story” and “On Golden Pond,” named top American screen legend of all time by American Film Institute (1999)
May 18, 1970 – Tina Fey, television writer, producer, and actor, first female head writer for “Saturday Night Live” (1999), creator of television series “30 Rock”, youngest winner of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor (2010)
May 26, 1951 (2012) – Sally Ride, astrophysicist, first American woman astronaut
May 26, 1924 (1977) – Thelma Hill, dancer, choreographer, educator, co-founder of the New York Negro Ballet Company (1954), one of the founders of the dance troupe that became the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, after an injury focused on teaching dance
Rachel Carson , 1940. Official Fish and Wildlife Portrait.
May 27, 1907 (1964) – Rachel Carson, scientist, environmentalist, and author of several books. “The Silent Spring” which became a cornerstone of the modern environmental protection movement was her most successful and influential work.
Women’s Achievements of May
May 1, 1950 – Gwendolyn Brooks becomes the first African-American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. named Library of Congress’s Consultant in Poetry (later called Poet Laureate) in 1985
May 8, 1914 – Anna Garvis succeeds in having an official day honoring her mother and all the mothers that held Mother’s Friendship Day Gatherings after the Civil War. President Woodrow Wilson signs a Proclamation designating the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day.
May 21, 1932 – Amelia Earhart Putnam becomes the first woman to complete a solo-transatlantic flight by flying 2,026 miles
May 29, 1977 – Janet Guthrie becomes the first woman to qualify for and complete the Indy 500 car race
Music
The music prompt for this month is an image by John Paul Filo – Pulitzer Prize, 1971 – of an event at Kent State on May 4, 1970 that prompted Neil Young of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young to write, “Ohio.” Now go write or record up a storm about these folks, you, and/or the month of May!
I feel the need to start #wombsplaining things, and I hope my smart writerly researching friends will do the same.
1. The medical system and social care network obviously let down a boy who grew up to become a murderer of 17 people yesterday in Parkland Florida. If you look at a picture of him, you can see that there may be physical reasons for the adjustment problems he had. He looks like he may have some of the characteristics of FAS. He was adopted. Both of his adoptive parents died. He’d been expelled from school and identified as a potentially dangerous individual to the school. Our system let him down and because of that 17 people, thus far, are dead. Hundreds or thousands have been traumatized because of this one mass murder.
https://youtu.be/uUZ6LBbaML4
2. I am nauseated when I see Governor Rick Scott talking about the well-being of his constituents. This man has no concern for people, he was the CEO of Columbia/HCA during the time when the company committed the largest Medicare/Medicaid fraud in U.S. History. The company paid $1.6 billion criminal and civil fines for Medicare fraud. The people who committed this crime went, literally, Scott-free. Corporate crime takes money away from the healthcare and social support systems that is desperately needed for dealing with the health and well-being of the cast-offs of American society (rightists often call thsee things entitlements.)
3. The crimes committed by Scott’s company occurred when yesterday‘s shooter was in utero and a small child. Now this immoral corporate white man is “guiding” the state in which there have been two mass shooting recently and dodging questions on gun safety.
4. If the shooter was given up for adoption, unwanted, and suffered from birth defects, I wonder if his birth mother thought about abortion? I wonder if she had access – physical and economic – to all the medical care she needed? (I am allowed to say this as I was an unwanted child and was psychologically tortured by my mother because I was unwanted. No child should have to live with knowing they are unwanted. It warps them.)
—
Perhaps corporations should be killed (dissoved without the ability of owners/board etc. to reform corporate entities) when they do things that kill.
Perhaps immoral people like Scott behind corporate crime should not be allowed into leadership positions ever again.
Perhaps we should not allow weapons of war designed to kill great numbers of people rapidly to be sold to civilians.
Perhaps people should be able to get the healthcare they need regardless of their SEC.
I woke up today thinking I would edit my “fashion/non-fashion” post for a GenFab “blog hop.” I came out to the living room, realized my husband had not made coffee after being awakened at 4 a.m by our 5 month old, 75 lb. guard puppy barking out the front window over at the neighbors, wandered over to the coffee grinder and began the routine for morning wake-up. MSNBC was on in the background as it most often is when Hubby is home. The whir of beans being ground as filtered water fills the carafe. Good. I managed to complete the ground coffee, filtered water, and activation sequence without spills. “This is a good day,” I think as I take a seat near Hubby and open up Twitter to see what the buzz from online community might be this fine morning.
Then I look up at the Farenheit 451ish 4th Wall (TV) and see Roxana Green speaking. She is featured in an ad by Mayors Against Gun Violence. I watch a “news” cycle and also see that Gabby Giffords and her husband Mark Kelly have started a PAC (political action committee) to work its influence counter to the GUN lobby and PACs. Then I watch the woman who kept a shooter / mass murderer from reloading two years ago to the day in the town where I live, Tucson.
It is January 8th. Oh crap, of course, I knew it was coming up. I had tried to ignore it. I think of my bloggedy friend Suzi who was shot 3 times that horrible day, and who lost a dear little friend, the 9 year old neighbor girl and pal, she brought with her to meet Gabby that day. I go to her blog. She inspires me all over again with her positive framing of today... the day we live in… the day we always live in, while we live. She is doing great and wonderful things.
Me, I’m just going to be conscious as I do what I can and what I have to do:
edit that fashion piece
talk to my therapist about the evolving series of dreams I’ve been having about family and the county where I grew up
send a few tweets about the PAC and about Roxana Green’s ad, and ask folks to support the efforts
remember the 20 babies, Veronica Moser Sullivan, and Christina Taylor Green, Briana Flores , and all the innocents who are gone from the world because they were killed with guns, and hold them in the light in my heart. I pray for their rest even though so many speaking their names
plan what to do for Valentines Day – V Day – this year
figure out what to say about the role of women in this new effort to create sane gun laws as well as in
creating supportive, nonviolent infrastructure for our society
What I haven’t decided is whether to place flowers somewhere today, and if so, where to place them. I head a talk at a Semiotic Conference at Indiana University long ago about the semiotics of place in mass tragedy. I want to look more at a book on a similar topic, Shadowed Ground. I’m leaning toward flowers at the site where the vigil was and the memorial grew outside UMC at the University of Arizona.
The children, the babies, are not yet buried and the “Mommy Wars” have started over blog post responses to viral posts. I have many other pressing tasks to do, including traffic court today for forgetting to register my car, and I don’t want to spend the day researching. I probably should because I am a damn good researcher, actually trained in both library and social science methodologies and could probably expound with amazing clarity about the main players in the drama over “I am Adam Lanza’s Mother,” a post that went viral (just Google the phrase and you will see what I mean) from a mother with a very troubled child. Now bloggers are saying that the writer of this piece is the one with mental illness, not her son. I didn’t help. I forwarded the link and the original blog address after I read a republication of the post. I should have done research before forwarding, but really now, does anyone really do research on the info every single time before re-tweeting something? I don’t know what the truth is. And neither do any of us outside of the situation, and from what I can tell there are several truths (perspectives) inside the situation.
And you know what? I don’t care what the truth is. Truth is a personally constructed value. There are facts. There are data. I cannot be the judge of others. I wrote another piece last year, A Cautionary Tale :: Blogs, Lies, and Screen Captures, on a different blog that discusses a different tragedy and the intense emotions that come into play when mothers attack via social media. (Wasn’t When Mothers Attack a B-grade Fifties Monster Movie? Sorry, but I need some levity in these sad, sad days in which the whole country is regrouping.) Everyone who can text is a writer these days. Folks skilled at the art of deception tweet, post and blog. Mothers who are at their wit’s end tweet, post and blog. People who hurt and want to find the reason for their pain also tweet, post and blog.
There are sessions at blogging conferences on the experience of having your posts go viral. Sometimes it is because you did your research, sometimes it is because you let your son and his best friend dress alike for Halloween just like they wanted to do, sometimes it is because you were “shot in the ass.” Memes happen. You cannot know your post, or blog, will go viral. You cannot know when you will become a celebrity.
Geesh girl friend(s), just lighten up. I know, I know, we can’t lighten up about the situation that broke the heart of a nation. But there is civility. Remember civility? Remember Tucson and our call for civility after January 8th, 2011? There is a fund for civility that grew out of that. The desire for a civil society, for people acting civilly, for build a true civilization is real.
I can be snarky, too quick to offer up my sharp tongue, but please, please know that I try to never be intentionally critical of an individual. I haven’t always been successful. My political posts can get very heated at times, less so than they used to be, but let’s just say I learned my lesson. After having lobbied and protested in my congresswoman’s office, met and talked to her at fund-raisers, written scathingly about her being propped up by big money and political machines and specific influence groups, and after seeing her chief of staff’s jaw drop when she saw and recognized me from DC at a local Tucson even, to have her, my Congresswoman fall victim to an attempted assassination that injured and took the lives of many others — well — let’s just say that I can now vehemently disagree with someone while still loving them for being who they are. I learned that even politicos with whom I disagree can be inspirational and have good motives.
I hope the Mommy Wars component of this hoopla fades away quickly. Nothing is more fierce than a woman protecting children. Yes, there are terribly disturbed children in our society. Yes, there are mothers who are mentally ill in our society. Yes, we have too long allowed politics fueled by profit to compromise the well-being of our citizenry. The lives of our children depend on actions, not our words. So let’s work to protect our children and not attack each other.
The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting is ugly, heinous, heart wrenching, wrong and totally unforgivable. Babies shot dead in their classrooms. There are no words to describe the wash of emotion surging through me at this moment. We as adults, parents, citizens tolerate this violence or we would end it, contain it, and prevent it.
Young white children in the Connecticut suburbs killed en masse rightly creates outrage. But the first report found in a quick search whose numbers I trust, one by the Children’s Defense Fund, shows that thousands upon thousands of children are shot dead in America every year.
In 2008, 2,947 children and teens died from guns in the United States and 2,793 died in 2009 for a total of 5,740—one child or teen every three hours, eight every day, 55 every week for two years.
Taking a 30-year snapshot when child gun death and injury data collection began,116,385 children and teens were killed by firearms between 1979 and 2009—enough to fill 4,655 public school classrooms of 25 students each. Since 1979, America has lost nearly three times as many children and teens to gunfire as the number of U.S. military personnel killed in action during the Vietnam War, and over 23 times the number of U.S. military personnel killed in action in Iraq and Afghanistan (5,013).
55 children every week! That is twice the number of today’s shooting every single freaking week.
We are all to blame. Each and every one of us allows this to go on when we do not promote discussions about violence, when we teach – often by inaction and silence – that “the other” exists. We are all guilty when we allow reality tv that promotes stupidity, personal celebrity, and snarky disregard of others to blast out in our homes. We are all guilty when overlook the violent video games are played by our older kids, and we allow or overlook our significant others to view exploitation porn. We are all guilty if we allow our churches to promote any attitude that differentiates ourselves as chosen and better or apart from others. We are guilty if we isolate ourselves and our families rather than to embrace everyone and build community.
We are all guilty of killing these children and the adults who did all they could to protect them.
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May 4, 1916 (2006) – Jane Jacobs, journalist, author, and urban studies activist, wrote The Death and Life of the Great American Cities in 1961. She opposed the “urban renewal” that demolished supposed urban blight and destroyed vibrant, urban, and chaotic communities.
Now go write or record up a storm about these folks, you, and/or the month of May!
