I had to say good-bye to the bestest puppy in the whole world today.
Daisy Buchanan aka Daisy Doodle, 2004 -2013
Rest in peace my Daisy Doodle. I will miss you. My heart is breaking.
Our Lives Change The World
I had to say good-bye to the bestest puppy in the whole world today.
Rest in peace my Daisy Doodle. I will miss you. My heart is breaking.
Blogging & Writing, Creekside Commentary, Gun Culture, Politics and Government
Today I listen to yet another day of media coverage of yet another mass shooting. 13 dead. Around 300 people are shot every day in the U.S. by guns. For a crowd-sourced data site that lists the basic statistics for named gun deaths in the US starting with the Newtown massacre go to Gun-death Tally. The interactive map can be searched by age, gender, location, or date.
I just checked the tally and the shooter in today’s massacre at the naval yard is the third from the last death listed. The list contains over 8000 names. It is inaccurate as these are publicly reported gun deaths. It is probably grossly under-reporting gun deaths because suicides account for 60% of gun deaths but are rarely publicly identified as such. That means over 17,000 deaths in the last 9 months. That is almost 6 times as many people in 3/4 of a year compared to those killed on 9/11.
Our culture apparently values money more than life. My views on the problem and where efforts to stop the slaughter should begin:
Maybe it is time for women who love their families and are sick of the growth of industries that promote slaughter to consider monkey-wrenching.
Blogging & Writing, Creekside Commentary, Graphics, Home & Family
It is Sunday, day 15, of September NaBloPoMo, so I’m going to post something, but even as I write these words I have no idea what this post will end-up being about. Today I have mainly thinking about my friend Daisy who happens to be a 10-year-old dog that isn’t doing so well. I posted about her yesterday. Today I tried to write about other stuff. The two images I began to alter to my liking to use in a post were both of girls with their dogs from morguefile.com
But I tried to write a post that I hope to flesh out and publish later this week with the title “The Frightening Cost of Stupid.”
I also found an amazing site that I would like to present with some other unique and useful sites called Radiation Nation which presents levels of radiation in specific cities around the country. That also will come later.
A far more heady topic also presented itself to me today to… it will end up being something about my experience doing guerrilla anthropology and my observation of women’s activism as related to phronesis, not sophia, as women’s philosophy.
So that is it for today. Hopefully tomorrow I will be able to string 250 to 500 words together into a cohesive presentation of an idea.
I don’t
My dog Daisy has a large growth on the back of her tongue. We did not find the growth until a couple of days ago. The reason we looked in her mouth was frothy drool tinged with blood. Our vet took one look and said to take Daisy to a surgery center that can do a biopsy. She also said, “It’s not good.”
Our regular vet is a basic vet who doesn’t do surgery or “treat” terminal problems in the contemporary “spare no expense” manner. I like going to this vet as she does lots of rescue work, keeps her rates low so a larger number of people can get basic care for the pets they love, and she has Saturday reduced fee shot clinics. She doesn’t have an excess of bedside manner, but you know you are getting the straight story from her.
Miss Daisy is 10 years old. She was a rescue from the Humane Society who had already been returned by her first rescue family at the age of 16 weeks. She was probably the most hyperactive puppy I have ever seen. The story is that she was a “reject” from a local dog “breeder” who was probably trying to breed a loose skinned, short but thick coated fighting dog from crossing Shar Pei and Pit Bull Terriers. Her one ear sticks up and the other one has the cartilage broken in a way that makes it flop over. It gives her a very quizzical expression. She is brindle in a black and reddish-tan tiger stripe. She has a spotted, primarily black tongue.
She is also one of the most intelligent dogs I have ever known. Usually one “no” is enough to stop her from doing bad things except for chasing small critters. The terrier in her background loves chasing and digging for lizards.
She was terrified of spoons, especially wooden spoons, and didn’t think much of men at first. We believe she was beaten by a man and that is how her ear was broken. Over the years she has developed a trusting relationship with us. She has raised two mastiff puppies. She is a part of our family. She is probably going to leave us soon.
I will take her to a full service veterinary clinic and have the growth biopsied. From the look, her breed, and symptoms, it is probably a melanoma. I want her to have the maximum good time left, and that may not mean surgery that would probably require removal of much of her tongue, feeding tubes, and the like. I will not put her through medical torture that she does not understand for a few weeks more with her.
She is getting around, wants to go for her daily short walk and goes out into our yard with our 1-year-old mastiff several times a day. She eats soft food and still nibbles on treats.
This is so hard. Last year we lost our six-year-old Neapolitan Mastiff to an Africanized bee attack. Daisy was attacked too but she pulled through, somehow, even though she was half of the Neo’s weight. She’s so tough. I did not anticipate this. I’m very, very sad.
Blogging & Writing, Creekside Commentary, Politics and Government, Spirituality & Thought
I could not really write about 9/11 yesterday. I want my normal back. But that will never happen. The world is the world, and we are the ones living this moment and creating the future. Part of me is angry. My life was uprooted and totally changed by what happened on September 11th. I wrote about it on BlogHer on May 2nd, 2011, the day after President Obama announced that Osama bin Laden had been killed. I want to re-share it here on this blog. The BlogHer url is http://www.blogher.com/realizing-i-was-impacted-terrorism.
Photo credit: Annika from morguefile.com
On Realizing I Was Impacted by Terrorism
May 2, 2011
I’m still trying to wrap my head around the last 12 hours of world event news.
The bombing of the Pentagon and WTC Twin Towers changed the course of my life in very significant ways. While I was initially worried about my step-daughter, who was at work a few blocks away from the WTC in NYC, my concern soon shifted. We heard from my step-daughter fairly soon after the plane strikes and knew she was ok. We knew people who worked in the WTC who got out, although for a while we did not know if they were safe or not, but they were. They worked on the 23rd floor. But that was it for direct impact on my life. Like most of the nation I was connected to the events of that day primarily through media coverage.
Indirect impact that day was far more significant for me. My sixth grader was so upset by the attacks that the school called me to ask how I wanted them to proceed with her. She had visited the WTC the previous month with her dad and knew the place and scale of what was happening in a way that most kids from Tucson could not. Her sister was safe but she lived in that city.
I had worked for several years as the head of the security section at a major anthropological museum. I received training in cultural property protection coordinated by the Smithsonian and partially funded by the Getty. My thoughts were about evacuation routes, responders, and infrastructure and the magnitude of what was transpiring. Then like everyone else I mourned. Then I watched the whole world reach out to us and our leadership at that time choose how to react to that embrace of good will.
In October of 2001, a month after the attacks, my husband was contacted by the head of the section at the National Science Foundation with whom he had a fair amount of contact during the first 15 years of his professional career. That gentleman told him they were having absolutely no one express interest in starting a rotation as a grant reviewer for the period beginning the following summer in 2002. They had slots they could not fill. The NSF brings academic and scientific professionals from various research areas to Arlington, VA to rotate through the Foundation for a year or two so evaluations of research proposals are headed up by people actively involved in the research area within which the proposal falls.
Unlike most academics, my husband had done a stint in the military after the draft was eliminated and before he finished his education. We are progressives and we are very patriotic. We decided it was our duty to help keep part of the cycle of scientific inquiry in our country going after the attacks. It was the least we could do. So we uprooted our family over the protests of our preteen daughter, who bemoaned that she would absolutely die if we took her away from her friends, and moved across the country to the Ballston area a couple of miles or so away from the Pentagon in a lovely little neighborhood just off Highway 50. Our daughter went to school that next year with kids whose parents had been killed in the Pentagon attack. It was a good year for us in all regards but financial. We went into debt with the moves and inability to rent our home in Tucson for the whole time, and the extra expense of living in a costly city. It was life-changing.
I expected surgical strikes and undercover ops would take out the Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden within a year or so from the time of the attacks. I did not expect the vast constriction of our rights as Americans nor did I expect the blatant misdirection of our precious resources and lives in war toward a land, against a people, and despot who had absolutely nothing to do with the heinous attacks on the U.S. on Septemberr 11, 2001.
Living just outside the Beltway made me aware of politics in, for me, a very new way. We didn’t have a television that year, but we did have internet, radio, and newspapers. I watched a group of women vigil in front of the Whitehouse, starting in November of 2002, against the invasion of Iraq that the Bush administration seemed hell bent on accomplishing no matter what. I watched huge, absolutely HUGE, anti-war marches in the winter receive practically no news coverage. I began to join in those peace marches in February and March of 2003. I marched with CODEPINK, in their first march, on International Women’s Day, March 8, 2003.
We had been attacked, our land and people assaulted and killed, I allowed my family’s entire life to be upturned so that in some small way terror would not win by disrupting our country’s way of life. I knew there were countless Americans who had made far larger changes to their lives and offered up sacrifices of their lives to serve our country, so I didn’t think much about what our little family had done until our administration insulted and in many ways desecrated the memory of all those who died in the attacks on our country and in the initial attacks in Afghanistan by focusing our country’s energies and sacrifices in a political and economic vendetta against Iraq. Wrapping my home in plastic and sealing it with duct tape just isn’t my way. I wrote about it email lists and friends. I blogged about it a bit. I had to do more. My way is to react consciously and purposively. My father taught me that. We have civic responsibilities and they are precious.
Back in Arizona in April of 2004, I joined together with a few other women and began to bring the PINK message of peace to Arizona through CODEPINK Women for Peace actions. I liked the spontaneous, truly grassroots, and positively focused organic, interconnected nature of the links between individual women that made us respected by the peace and justice community and detested and vilified by the far right wing. I felt my actions were patriotic and proudly still feel so.
Since that time, I have had my patriotism questioned, had my life threatened, been called reprehensible names, and had my resolve and heart hardened. I’ve given up time with my daughter as she grew up so that I might return to D.C. with other women to press the peace and justice message forward and keep it visible so that no one would forget that our country is about plurality and diverse belief systems working together for democratic principles. I was removed from Senate Committee meetings on May 17, 2006 when I could not contain myself and shouted out, “Liar” to Rumsfeld as he ended a report to Armed Services Committee. I helped start the house in D.C. that grew into an “official” Pink House that housed women from around the country for a week or two when they could travel to D.C. in order to let officials know there were and are other views in the country that did not support our men and women being killed and our country being bankrupted and our constitution violated.
Even when I had briefly moved back to Indiana to take care of my mother so that she might leave this world in her own home of 60 plus years, I managed to bring a bit of PINK to Fort Wayne to brighten the peace message that has been a constant in that agrarian and blue collar part of the world through the message of Church of the Brethren, Mennonite and Amish faiths as well as the progressive political community.
It is from this lens through which I have to view the death of Osama bin Laden. I wasn’t filled with joy when I heard the news of his death. Neither was I sad. I’ve become very measured in my response to war. I am on discussion lists where almost every day I read about the deaths of young children from drone attacks. I hate war. I hate violent death. I hate what we do to each other. As I wrote in a rather inarticulate post shortly after I learned of bin Laden’s death, my husband I opened a bottle of wine and toasted. The toast was, “May our troops come home soon.”
I was trying to not make my response to this into a political statement. But everything we do has political impact. We make political choices in everything we do, even if we do not consciously understand or want to think about that. I mean that. The most important thing I have brought into my conscious life since I joined with the efforts of thousands of other women in the U.S. and around the world who work for peace is that every little thing we do, say, or think has consequence.
Mother’s Day is coming this weekend. It seems like a good time to remember the call of Julia Ward Howe, yes the same person who wrote the words to The Battle Hymn of the Republic, when she wrote another document in 1870 when she issued her:
Mother’s Day Proclamation for Peace
Arise then…women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
“We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”
From the bosom of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: “Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”
Blood does not wipe out dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil
At the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace…
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God –
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.
This week I will reflect on where I should aim my efforts in the next 10 years. These last 10 years were not a concrete block of time for me until last night. I have been putting all my efforts into starting a business these last few months. Everything somehow changed again in the last couple of days. This week I will reflect on these past few years and where my next 10 years of effort in this world might be placed. I need to do this. Until I sat down this morning to write my reaction to the death of Osama bin Laden that our President announced last night, I didn’t really grasp how much my life has been directed by actions and reactions to things that this man set in motion. I’m pretty sure I met extremists who worked with bin Laden when I worked at the University Library here in Tucson. I first worked in current periodicals where international newspapers were available. This was during the time when Al Qaeda in the U.S. was head quartered here. An islamic cleric was murdered here during that time. Later when I worked at a museum here I became aware of FBI agents specifically using our buildings for terrorist related training exercises. More was going on around me in my daily life than I ever dreamed. These things have impact. We cannot ever know all the impact single actions may take, but we can know they are vast and immeasurable.
I need a week, I’m giving myself until Mother’s Day, to contemplate the past ten years and the next ten years. What are you doing differently this week?
—–
If I did not wave the flag yesterday, perhaps you will understand why. Perhaps you will not. I still have questions. I am still angry with the Bush Administration and how they dishonored us all with their actions. Flag waving is for parades. I live my patriotism. My hurt is so much bigger than what I can express in a single day, one day a year.
Peace. Let us all pray and work for peace.
Blogging & Writing, Creekside Commentary, Spirituality & Thought
Yes, we all remember 9/11. I do not want to diminish how we speak of it and remember that horrible day and the many unfortunate things that came out of it. But I remember everything, no matter what. I remember my the date of my parent’s wedding anniversary, old boyfriend’s birthdays, the dates my pets died. I remember things I don’t want to remember or have no use for or reason to remember. So today, I am trying to obscure the date of September 11th for myself, so that other things pop up instead of the New York tragedy. The only thing I’ve been able to have reliably co-appear in my mind with the recognition of this date so far is the birthday of Christina Taylor Green who was born September 11, 2001 and died, in Tucson, on January 8th 2011.
It is mid-day after posting this, and I want to add a link the beautiful piece written by the neighbor who just wanted to take her young friend to meet her Congresswoman. Her blog post: Happy Birthday CTG
Photo credit: kconnors from morguefile.com
But from many sources around the net, see the links at the bottom of this post, I have collected a bunch of September 11 events that have nothing to do with planes and the twin towers.
Sep 11th – Benjamin Franklin writes “There never was a good war or bad peace”
1906 – Mahatma Gandhi coins the term “Satyagraha” to characterize the Non-Violence movement in South Africa.
1609 – Explorer Henry Hudson sailed into New York harbor and discovered Manhattan Island and the Hudson River.
Sep 11, 1851: The Christiana Riot in Lancaster County Pennsylvania which foreshadowed Civil War strife
1857 – Mountain Meadows Massacre, Mormons dressed as Indians murder 120 colonists in Utah
1897 – A ten-week strike of coal workers in Pennsylvania, WV, and Ohio came to an end. The workers won and eight-hour workday, semi-monthly pay, and company stores were abolished.
1990 – U.S. President Bush vowed “Saddam Hussein will fail” while addressing Congress on the Persian Gulf crisis. In the speech Bush spoke of an objective of a new world order – “freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace”.
Brian DePalma 1940
Mickey Hart (Grateful Dead) 1943
Leo Kottke 1945
1963 – “The Great White Wonder” first appears in a record store in Los Angeles, CA. The “bootleg” of Bob Dylan songs is believed to be the first bootleg album.
1977 – David Bowie and Bing Crosby recorded a duet version of “The Little Drummer Boy.” The song appeared on Crosby’s “Merrie Olde Christmas” LP.
1996 – David Bowie’s single “Telling Lies” was released exclusively on the Internet. It was the first time a new single by a major selling artist was released exclusively on the Internet.
History for September 11 – On-This-Day.com
September 11 Events in History
http://www.historyorb.com/events/september/11
Blood flowed first at Christiana Riot | Lancaster County and the Civil War – LancasterOnline.com