Vice President Joe Biden told the author that during the transition, “seven different Republican Senators” told him that “McConnell had demanded unified resistance.” This was after the 2008 election but before Obama and Biden took office. – Greg Sargent quoted by Jonathan Capehart in “Republicans had it in for Obama before Day 1.”
Travel Amid The Fearful
This past week of Thanksgiving and multi-legged travel across the country to see grandchildren during heightened fear and security levels was enlightening for me in so many ways. Not the least of these ways was that 5 year old twin girls with Thanksgiving birthdays are wonderful bundles of joy and non-stop energies of all sorts.
Other darker understanding also dawned on me. I consciously refuse to allow fear to shape my life. I have control over how I choose to respond to life and cultural events. I have control over how I shape my reality. Not everyone, in fact most people, do not understand the power they have to shape how they feel about and see the world. Collectively this ability can transform interaction, processes and ultimately the world.
I recognized fear in those around me as I traveled. Fear in airline passengers, fear in crowds, people with distrust of authority who embrace irrational solutions. I am calling this fear out as manufactured paranoia. So much goes on in our lives at this time of year, that stress alone makes it challenging to navigate the Holidays in the best of times, but when the larger world adds to the stress, things begin to break.
The good news is that women, as always, have the power to shape the information and reaction to that information that comes into their homes. When we do not actively engage in understanding and processing information, we allow it to wash over us, to be delivered to us as a finished product rather than as a bits and pieces of data that have to be assembled.
Big media news adheres to policy and structure of news delivery and analysis that convey a distinct view, a style of delivery that is a branded viewpoint. That view is presented as though it is objective. One of the few things of which I am sure is that nothing is objective.
Who says we have to buy things in stores on a Friday, or shop locally on a Saturday, or order things online on a Monday, or “give back” on a Tuesday? Companies who are selling things and the media that carry their advertising and messages are the only ones I can think of who promote these things. I shop locally all year long. I do purchase from major online retailers who can get things to me quickly when necessary. I try to give and give back all the time.
To me the day after Thanksgiving is a day to play games, take walks, construct models, and put together puzzles, I try to buy nothing on that day and just be with the family with whom I am sharing the holiday.
I will not allow fear to manipulate my healthcare choices or travel decisions. I am sad. I will spend as much time as I can with family. I will maintain my informational autonomy as best I can.
They Could Not Have Known
Today America remembers attacks on our eastern shores that transpired 9/11/2001. This anniversary in 2015, the 14th anniversary, has many people focusing on children who were born on that day.
On Sept. 11, 2001, 13,238 children were born in the United States, according to the Division of Vital Statistics. Today one of those children, Emily Berta, opened the New York Stock Exchange as an ambassador for the September 11 National Day of Service and Remembrance.
https://youtu.be/6WgbSTf_KZM
These children will be impacted by the date of their birth for as long as they live. One never knows what legacy they will leave. Accidents of birth can influence legacy as much as any planned event or deed.
September 11th in Tucson is not quite like the date in other places. A Tucson girl, Christina-Taylor Green, was born that day. Her best known quote is recounted in this Arizona Daily Star piece:
When Christina-Taylor met a little girl her age living in a group home, she told her family: “We are so blessed. We have the best life.”
Christina-Taylor Green was featured in Faces of Hope: Babies Born on 9/11 on page 41 as Christina Taylor from Maryland. Her family then moved from Maryland to Arizona. The 10th Anniversary edition of the book, Faces of Hope 10 Years Later: Babies Born on 9/11, is dedicated to Christina-Taylor, who was murdered in an act of domestic terrorism in which a madman attempted to assassinate United States Congressperson Gabrielle Giffords.
The children of 9/11 will reinvent memorials into hope-filled days of action.
I personally cannot condone the ritual observance of days of tragedy, nor the militarization of remembrances. Legacy is what we make it. As a Tucsonan, as a matriot (feminine of patriot,) as an American, I choose to honor the lives lost, by working to decrease violence in all forms everywhere.
I pray, “Christina-Taylor, sweet Angel of Tucson, help us learn to live in love and peace.” Help us stop war, stop gun violence, stop religious violence. May the violence of the boundary markers of your life, a legacy you did not choose, never be repeated.
—-
As an aside – No I did not know C-TG. I have a friend who loved her dearly. I knew many of the people injured or killed that January day. No I did not know anyone killed in the Towers or the Pentagon or the flights; I know people who were in the Towers and lived. My step daughter worked in Lower Manhattan then in a building that was evacuated and walked home across the Brooklyn Bridge. When we lived in Arlington, my other daughter went to Junior High with kids who lost a parent when Flight 77 hit the Pentagon.
Does Maturity Modify Truth?
Men are territorial in a different way than women. It is not that women do not defend what is theirs. But the theirs which they defend are people and not places, are relationships and not cultural constructs.
I have understood this since my time spent on Cayo Santiago as an undergraduate student. Some of our behaviors are expressly and deeply primate. Many of the elements of society that we would like to believe are cultural, learned and passed on through education and societal institutions and indicative or some sort of moral fabric are biologically-based behaviors.
Yes, culture is learned and passed on generation to generation and the degree to which this happens in people is apparently far greater than in any other species.
What I rarely see mentioned, and never discussed in detail, is that a large portion of our learned systems were created to culturally re-enforce biological inclinations.
Can we disentangle testosterone from the enforcement of wearing a hijab or a wedding veil? So much of our societal infrastructure is built upon territorially derived concepts which are imaginary and just as ephemeral as connections between people. Borders are just lines drawn in the sand, erased by wind, rain, and boot tracks.
Civil society is nothing but agreed upon concepts.
What connects two people? What is friendship? What is a parental-child relationship? Why do you smile when you see the face of an old friend you haven’t seen in years or decades?
I have been thinking about these things in depth as of late because of high school reunions, the death of my last living sibling, and the pride I felt when my daughter said she wanted no veil, nor any tribute to the notion of a veil, as we picked out her wedding dress. This juxtaposition of life passages has made me even more contemplative than usual.
As we age, if we are lucky enough to appreciate that age is a gift of the universe to our transient physical nature, many of us begin to reflect on life and the roads we have walked. Our reflection shares many of the traits of youthful questioning so well summed up in song lyrics, “and the lonely voice of youth cries, ‘What is truth?”
I am still calling out, “What is truth?” My mature iteration of questions to the cosmos understands that there are no answers to these cries formed in the lonely hours of the sleepless nights but the answer, the truth, we find in our hearts that lives beyond the realm of words and definitions. Bliss, happiness, and belonging all exist beyond the material world of things, ownership, and desire.