On a recent weekend I spent the morning thinking about women, education, empowerment, information, fundamentalism and the tremendous power we fortunate women who have access to social media and the time to use it are frittering away. I am not lecturing, I am as guilty as anyone.
First of all, I do not expect every woman to want to be political. I understand that politics is man’s game, that is, a game where the rules were created by men. Our current political system is derived from previous systems and those trace back to territorial and resource protective strategies as old as human communities. Rancor is ever-increasing, and it was not great to begin with.
I really do understand wanting to stay out of the fray. To live a functional life I have to manage my stress level quite carefully. Bumping over a stress limit can send me into a fit of tears and fight/flight behavior that is nearly impossible for comfortable folks to fathom. I have learned to recognize these very thing lines between acceptable and melt down levels fairly well and only veer off course a couple of times a year.
Some of this may be my basic constitution that infused my personality with a toughness and resilience long before any trauma and situational stress triggering of post traumatic stress reactions ever came into play. But maybe I learned to be tough after living through nasty situations and breaking through barriers in my path.
But all that said, I expect women who are aware, intelligent, and informed to do everything they possibly can to help others who do not have the luxury of time and money to spend on activities that do not directly support food, shelter and basic hygiene in their lives. Most of the world is hungry, has no access to clean water, water with which to wash, nor access to toilets.
If I can keep knocking away at the problems as I see them and keep crafting solutions as best I can, almost everyone can.
In basic anthropology courses I took when I was an undergraduate, I was exposed to the concepts of environmental degradation, climate change, and that pandemics and starvation are likely to emerge when ecosystems, if not the entire biosphere, begin to fluctuate and exhibit crazy flip-flops looking for a new balance. No guarantees that humans will be around when a new balance emerges. That was a long time ago. We’ve known. Those of us who understood have not been silent, and are not silent now, but most of the women I know, even the really smart ones, avoid thinking about unpleasantries of what life will be like in a decade or two.
We can change things. But we have to act. Now. A major opportunity exists in form of elections next month.
I personally believe if enough of us decide to write about making intelligent choices in this election, in light of current events, that we can have a significant influence on how our women readers think about the issues and get them to the polls. I will be writing pieces about ebola, fundamentalism (as in ISIL,) infrastructure, community, and scientific/critical thinking. I hope these will give others ideas as to how they can frame issues.
Let’s do it.
My Schedule Is My Own For Six More Days
I’m not the best employee. I think too much. I question. I daydream. I invent.
I’m not the best entrepreneur. I’m not rolling in dough and I like to sleep.
I’m a damn fine human being though. Next week, a week from today I will start working a 40 hour a week temp job. I hope to remain a fine person during this process.
6 months of working somewhere I worked 20, count ’em, twenty years ago. A score of years ago I stopped working in libraries because I have a Masters in Science, not an MLS. Working in libraries I was relegated to being a para-professional. There was no exam I could take and pass to join the profession. I was a member of a permanent underclass. I detest hierarchy.
Then there was the Quality problem. The academic research library at which I worked doing desk reference was undergoing a restructuring. TQM. I played the game. I was on the Strategic Long Range Planning Committee that was the initial group that led the way for the rest of the library system to implement Continuous Process Renewal. That team won recognition from the governor of the state. This required meetings, working in teams, at which I would spend at least half of my working the day. It was hell for me. I love process, but even as someone who loves to write about writing or talk about talking, it was too much for me.
I moved on to be a paraprofessional in an academic museum. I was a section head, but still considered an hourly employee. This is the thing about working in a university that sucks. The glut of qualified people near a university depresses the wages in the market. But here, I thought, there would be room for advancement as I had the right degree to move up in the ranks. But I picked an “unsexy” area in which to apply, get a job, and work. Visitor services, facilities, and security. Long story short, the new director, 3 years into my tenure there, was a pig. When I came back from the funeral of my brother he walked by then stopped and said, “Oh I was sorry to hear about your brother.” He then turned toward me and said, “There are so many things I want to do before I die. I’ve never slept with a black woman.” WTF. I should have sued for hostile working environment (I have more stories about him) but I didn’t, I resigned.
So 20 years on from leaving the library, I have a business that doesn’t make much money, but that makes me happy. I’m not getting enough done on it though. Working at home is problematic for many reasons that I’m not going into here beyond whispering the word… distractions.
So when I accidentally ran across a posting for a temp position, I thought, this may be the “stirring” that the dutch oven that is my life, needs. Why?
- Money. A steady paycheck for a few months will help me do some things that are not feasible without it. I would like to help my daughter with a few things as she begins her grad school career.
- Cleaning. I could hired cleaners, always my first action when there is extra cash. I love a clean home and do not love scrubbing.
- Priorities. This will force me to prioritize blogging, traditional book-writing, and ebook-writing in a way that I do not now do.
- Sadness. I think with the transition that is looming in my family, keeping myself very busy with things beyond my own concerns might be very good for me.
- People. I will meet, and in some cases become reacquainted with, people who share my love of information, information preservation, and dissemination.
In 6 months I will revisit this post and see where I am at and how these five considerations played out. Wish me luck.
A Month of Travel, A Lifetime of Stories
This past month-long travel bout began with my trip to BlogHer in San José and ended with a 10 day solo drive (actually my 2-year-old Neapolitan Mastiff accompanied me on the drive) that differed significantly from my other travels during the past 10 years:
- when I traveled by myself, unlike this trip where I was in the company of Hubby for 3/4 of the trip,
- to and from DC to work with other women for peace and to be a voice of reason, caution, and life as our government rushed into war waged in the interest of governmentally connected corporate interests
- or to and from Indiana to see, care for, or attend a funerals for my mother and brother
I intended to change this pattern of political and end-of-life precipitated travel with a lengthy road trip taken with the Hubby in honor of our 25 years of marriage to be made in the spirit of the road trips we both took in our youth. Twenty-five years is a long time, an increment of a century – and we know that centuries are measures of history not lives; it is at these life markers where daily life begins to meet historic time. Hubby and I both, as brainiacs, wanted to acknowledge, celebrate, and find meaning in this life event. A cruise, vacation, or spa outing might have celebrated and acknowledged our anniversary, but to find meaning in what some see as an arbitrary numeric ritual, that feeds the economy more than the hearts and souls of those involved, took some work. We married in the month of June, but we both realized that this was not apt to be when we would celebrate and commemorate our years together. We knew the trick would be to find a find a time period where we both had no other commitments or could clear engagements we might have. So we settled on late July and on into August as the time. So what did we do?
Kitsch & Weird Stuff
There were pink flamingo trail markers at our wedding that took place on top of Mount Lemmon. It is no surprise that Niagara Falls figured into our 25th – flamingo included!
Cultural and Intellectual Heritage
National & State Parks and Forests & Just plain ol’ Nature
Family
We visited daughters in Wisconsin and the Hudson Valley.
Salt Lake & New York Coincidences
There were unanticipated LDS connections along the route.
Canada and Beyond
We had to part ways earlier we had planned while still in St. Catharine because life has a way of getting complicated. I drove back across country with loyal companion Buddy. This allowed Hubby to finish out his conferences and flew back to prepare for school and another trip to the east coast between teaching his first and second class sessions during the first week of school. This allowed me to see my brothers and laugh and lunch with old friends in Indiana as well as visit some prehistoric First Peoples sites, further along in the drive, that I’ve always wanted to visit while taking my own sweet time to do it. I suspect I will be writing about aspects of this trip for many years to come. It was significant, in an idea-connecting way, far beyond anything I could have imagined. We did it right. We summarized and celebrated in ways that reminded us of our life together, our individuality, our successes, and our strengths.
I have a list of topics of some of these article ideas that fills several pages of a legal pad. You will hear more about this trip.
Endless War and Women
An overt political rant is simmering within me. As some of you know, I spent a good chunk of my life, resources, and precious time when my daughter was in her teen years doing peace work. I joined with CodePink Women for Peace in February of 2003 in the streets of DC and last worked with them in DC in October of 2010. Seven years of my life were spent countering the deceit that the Bush administration promulgated to justify waging war on Iraq. All the information that has “come out” in the last many years was known in 2002. Barbara Lee reminds us of this.
I have little respect left for “the media.” The well-scripted talking heads on most cable news and Sunday shows court, kowtow, and lend the legitimacy of broadcast to the architects of the lies that created the framework to support the invasion of Iraq. MSNBC is a notable exception. But they too, far too often, synthesize and sanitize the reports that they air with repetitive sound bytes rather than journalistic presentations.
It can be easy to forget that the “borders” of countries are usually nothing more than calcified artifacts of the spoils of war. I recommend reading The Map that Ruined the Middle East. to refresh your knowledge about the historical partitioning of the old Ottoman and Persian empires. It is a very readable article for those of us who have little tolerance for military history and will allow you to speak on why the words Sunni and Shia, and Arab and Persian are at the core of the violence and horror that is playing out in the Middle East, Africa, and in parts of the old Soviet empire. When reading this, do remember that all writing stems from a viewpoint. The viewpoint behind The Tower is conservative and comes from The Israel Project that is based in Jerusalem. We screwed up an already mangled situation in the Middle East when we supported the Shah of Iran, Saddam Hussein in Iraq (Yes, Virginia we supported Iraq during the Iran Iraq War. Remember the infamous scene shown below?) and later when we invaded Iraq under both Bush I and II.
As women, as mothers, wives, sisters and daughters, isn’t it time that we say, “Stop.” Stop marching blindly forward. Stop acting from political positions. Stop acting like walking on the path we are on will lead us to anywhere but extinction.
At some point every mother learns that you cannot change everything in the world, but you can give your children the healthiest meals you can, provide the safest shelter for your children that you can, and inform the individuals we have entrusted with our governance what we need to raise our children. All we can do is the best we can. We are facing environmental and climate change on a scale that will leave our descendants in an unstable, scarcely life-supporting world that we would not even recognize as our dear old Mother Earth. It is time for the leaders of the world to listen to the leaders of families.
It is time to think sensibly, like a woman, and clean this mess up. There is no room in our planetary home to allow religion, corporate profits, or political or technological allegiances to distract us from the real work of building a sustainable future for our children’s children’s children. Let’s put down the placards, the weapons, the labels of left and right, and even the dogma that overlays our Holy Books, and start building a sustainable peace. Like always, it is ultimately up to the women organize ourselves and our families in productive, sustainable tasks that work toward a better tomorrow.
We cannot all run for office, but we all sure as eggs is eggs, can tell every one of our elected officials that we want war to stop, we want them to stop funding war, and for all of them to start discussing sane, logically constructed approaches to responding to and redirecting processes that are destroying our lives and world.
A Nod to The Obligatory Fathers Day Post
On the way to my Father’s Day post I discovered a couple neat things.
Did you know you can embed Facebook images into a blog? I do now, but I didn’t know it a half an hour ago. I was looking at the pic I’d cropped to show just Dad and me when I noticed the photo editing sidebar:
Then I saw the Embed Post option so I decided I would post my FaceBook profile image which I had posted for Fathers Day along with a comment that I wrote in response to a friend, who is also the mom of a friend, who said that she did not know my Dad was a farmer. A very short summary of my Dad conveyed a bit of his essence.
Gifts from the Goddess: Words and Babies
Two little gifts arrived from the Cosmos today. Twice.
I am blessed.
I began thinking about BlogHer’s 10th Anniversary while waiting for my twin grand babies who are now very grownup three year old girls. From this juxtaposition I made wonderful discoveries.
One of the wonderful things about being a prolific blogger who has started dozens of blogs and scores of forgotten accounts is that I can rediscover myself through found writings from forgotten moments. This is what happened when I was reading about 10 x 10 and this coming year’s BlogHer Conference. I haven’t gotten that figured out as yet, but I started thinking about BlogHer’s influence on my life and writing this past decade and I started to wonder when it was exactly that I connected with BlogHer.
Way back then I was using pseudonyms and not caring particularly much about what the long-term implications of having multiple “identities” would mean over time. I had been The Word Wench on Brazen Hussies, Cuppakona on Yahoo, and Artemesia Pax aka ArtPax on a variety of peace and justice sites. Thinking back, I remembered that I first had joined BlogHer as ArtPax. So I searched BlogHer.com for posts under this name. I found them. Boy, I was stupid back then. I missed out on connecting with some wonderful bloggers early on.
I am soon (soon is a relative word) going to do some serious reminiscence about my last 10 years of blogging through the parallel history of my interaction with BlogHer. When I do I will post a link here.
I was a peace and justice blogger, a CODEPINK blogger, back then. Comments were mainly from trolls. I was not trying to build community, I was just trying to provide information and chronicle attempts to push societal consciousness back toward rational thought during the dark years of of Bush/Cheney. I did not follow the mommy blogging formula nor the blog-for-success formula that was developing way back then. I followed my own beliefs about what online writing should be back then. To find out more you will just have to follow along over the next month or so as writing a retrospective post that covers decade-plus-long blog development will take a bit of data gathering.