I have a thing about old letters, images, tawny browns, and filtered light. They remind me of times gone by and the first stirrings of a history written for women, about women, by women. Women’s domains no matter how they are parsed were, and largely still are, focused on the home, and relationships among family and a close community. Legacy of any individual woman depended upon artifacts, often fabric ones, and works created in a woman’s lifetime, letters and diaries, that were displayed or archived by those that remembered her or those who were shaped by her.
Embroidery samplers created by young ladies to showcase their skill with a needle and thread, as well as appreciation of home and their piety, are often the only medium for their words to echo on after a life is over.
Education and literacy had to come to be routine for the average women, and writing supplies had to be priced such that common people could afford paper, ink and the time needed for writing.
It is easy to forget that mass communication is a most recent development. Histories were carefully composed and facts sculpted for them for centuries. The information that fed and fueled our society and informed our actions and decisions was closely controlled by very small numbers of individuals until but a historical heartbeat ago.
Newspapers and other periodicals increased the amount of information regularly added to our knowledge base at an unheard of rate in the last 150 to 200 years. Propriety shaped much of the content of these publications and filters were everywhere.
In the last 15 to 20 years personal publishing developed in both print and electronic forms. Digital information transmission and storage allowed for the generation and consumption of data at a scale unimagined even a decade ago. The size of the dark web of criminal and underworld activity and deep web of information behind firewalls is unknown, but what is available on the open, indexed web is, by itself is creating not only more information than ever before, but of a type never previously collected: the bits and pieces of women’s lives that are creating the first level of a women’s history. The legacy we are writing is not only unique, it is expanding into a new niche.
As some of the women who are creating this new cultural information, we have tremendous influence over the very nature of this new thing we are building and the trajectories that will be built upon beyond our lifetimes. This new type and level of influence over communication is fortuitous as several constants of the physical world and humanity’s place on that world for the last many centuries are morphing in unpredictable fashion.
We may not be able to anticipate what the future will be, but we have opportunity to influence the changes that are transpiring with an openness and a balance that has not been available to us for millennia if ever.
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.
Doctor Who & the Man Who Sent Us To The Moon
50 years ago. This is such as strange phrase. How can I be old enough to talk in terms of half-centuries? But I am. I remember President Kennedy’s assassination. The memories I have from 50 years ago this week are only snippets; I was only six years old.
I don’t remember the announcement from a television broadcast, or my parents telling me what happened. I remember standing in the middle of the bathroom, and crying and thinking or saying, “No.” I remember being angry and bewildered.
I know enough about how memory is created and altered to not really trust details without some sort of corroboration. I never understood why I had this memory associated with JFK’s death since other people my age talk about being at school when the news was announced. Recently, I found the November 22, 1963 entry in my mother’s diary. The entries for that week say I was home sick. So, that makes sense; I was home, and that is why I don’t have school memories related to the announcement of the assassination. All this fixation on “Where were you?” says more about us than about him.
I have many early memories. My first memory about the Kennedy family is just a flash of memory associated with a black, wall-mounted telephone and knowing the President’s wife had lost her baby.
I do remember the coffin, horse drawn and flag-draped, proceeding down the street during the funeral, framed by the TV. Unfortunately, there is no such image, that I can find in any public or news archive, like the one I remember. I have probably cobbled the memory of the Presidential funeral into one single image from the riderless horse that was led down the street and the caisson that carried the President’s flag-draped coffin. In some ways this image from my memory is good and validating, as I know I experienced the event and created my own summary of the events. I didn’t re-remember it by substituting a “canned” image from some retrospective pictorial publication.
Memory changes a little bit every time it is accessed. It is a recursive. It becomes a memory of remembering, and that becomes a memory of a memory of remembering, and so on ad infinitum.
While I remember these things, I know that understanding the influence of an individual is more important than remembering JFK’s funeral. So this week I am delighted to be able to watch BBC’s week-long coverage of the 50th anniversary of the debut of the television show, Doctor Who. The synchronicity of events, especially in hindsight, also falls under suspicion of being altered by remembrance. I choose to pay attention to things, events, and people that are significant. This week events of 50 years ago are being remembered. So I am focused on the hope that came out of the darkness of the Cold War and the Arms Race. The race to put a man on the moon energized the world and gave us new dreams.
A children’s TV series, Doctor Who, debuted on November 23, 1963, historically speaking at the same moment as the funeral of the very man who put the dreams of reaching the moon within a decade into the collective mind of humanity. Uncountable events sparked innumerable culture changes but one change that emerged a year and a half after President Kennedy announced his intention of having a U.S. astronauts land on the moon and return to the Earth within a decade. One of those changes was the debut of a long-lived success of a children’s science fiction show based on travel through time and space.
Kids who were the same age as me grew up believing that the human race, lead by the U.S.A., was reaching for the stars. Yet now, fifty years later, the U.S. Space Program, NASA, seems to be on hiatus, at best. The only part of the dream that is still real for me, and a few million other “Whovians,” is Doctor Who. That is how we connect with our inner child-self that dreamed of peace and scientific exploration of the universe so long ago.
The presence of a continuing Doctor Who series all these decades later also shows how our hopes and dreams have evolved along with the show. It is no longer a kids show. It is a mirror that reflects the heart and soul of the 20th Century. Yes, our President was assassinated. Yes, we landed men on the moon and brought them back home. Yes these events stay with us.
But as the Doctor says in 2005’s episode 6, Dalek, of the new series, “Let me tell you something, Van Statten, mankind goes into space to explore, to be part of something greater.”
Yes, this is what I will focus upon, rather than death and conspiracy theories, I will remember JFK, the space program, and times in which we could believe in what seemed impossible. In these next few days I will raise a glass to the Space Program, the Peace Corps, and a culture that loved science and Dr. Who… I will celebrate the great things a man started “…to explore and to be something greater.”
Happy Chocolate Friday!
That is right, in honor of today being International Chocolate Day, I have decided to totally forget that it is Friday the 13th. It is officially Chocolate Friday!
Photo credit: aophotos from morguefile.com
My favorite chocolate cake recipe was my Mom’s but I was sworn to secrecy on that one, so this link to The Boat Gallery Recipe for Chocolate Upside Down Cake by Carolyn Shearlock is going to have to do.
Purportedly the first use of chocolate in baking dates to 1674 and a London coffee house that used chocolate in cakes and rolls for the first time. That was after the coveted product of the New World escaped from the royal confines where the French had tried to keep it for use only by the elite just as the Spanish had done before them.
Image by Luisovalles
Several forms of chocolate are thought to have originated in the Amazon and upper Orinoco River basins. But it was the Olmec, a pre-Mayan culture of Mexico that left the first evidence of using it as a food/drink. Of course from there the Spanish brought it to Europe.
In any case and no matter how it found its way into my life, I do love a cup of cocoa and a chocolate pastry. Truffles aren’t too bad either.
Election Apps
The election protection site has tons of info, but the App is the most non-partisan element on it. You can check your voter registration status, find your polling place, and report problems with the voting process that you notice. I HIGHLY recommend it! Free of course.
Now for some fun!
One of my favorite apps is not really an election app, but sorta is. Election Indecision is Comedy Central's Election App. Well worth checking out and it actually does have reminders for events, such as the final Presidential Debate, that you can set. Free.
The most potentially useful app to download at this late date in the 2012 election cycle is one that can continue to be used for political research. With Political Time Machine you can easily listen to candidates through time and see what they said when. Yes, you can watch videos of President Obama and Former Governor Romney through time as they speak about issues, but you can also listen to famous political speeches and public events far back into the 20th Century, actually all the way back to 1892.
The app has crashed on me and I had to not just restart the app, but power down and restart the iPad to get it to run again. This crashing may be a buffer issue in my iPad. Fun and educational and it can settle arguments as to whom said what when. And of course it is free.
So these three apps cover my “in the moment” need through the next three weeks, my need for humor, and my need to research past speeches now and in the future. Political apps can be very useful!
Autumnal Equinox
I love the way the words “Autumnal Equinox” roll off my tongue. It is all hummy and soft at first, and then becomes crisp at the end. The light of Autumn lengthens and there is a golden glow to the late afternoon air here in Tucson that gives me the first confirmation of seasonal change here. Unless 99 degrees Farenheit is cool, which it isn't, then the cool crisp nip of air is not a major part of the Autumn experience for those folks who live in the southwestern United States below 4000 ft. elevation. But Mabon, the celtic name for the equinox, arrives none the less though the stereotypic piles of leaves and heavy sweaters have little to do with the season I have experienced in the Old Pueblo for the last, oh my goodness, nearly 25 years.
I arrived for a visit to Tucson in October of 1988. I married here on the top of Mount Lemmon in '89. My daughter was born here at the University of Arizona Medical Center in 1990. While at times it seems like I am treading water, I seem to be moving through this time stream rather quickly. Mrs. Urquides, my next door neighbor for 20 years, lived to be 105, and described the ever quickening passing of time as “at first the days go by quickly, then the weeks and months, and then the seasons come and go in the blink of an eye, and finally the years cascade past.”
While I grew up pouring over copies of Arizona Highways Magazine, and its gorgeous imagery of fall colors that line the canyons and ridges of Northern Arizona, it was listening to Mrs. Urquides tell her stories of Arizona in the early 1900s that really gave me an appreciation of seasons in my new home. Journeys to higher elevations to collect the fruits of the season from Sedona in the north and Wilcox in the south were recounted as grand family adventures of buckboards and bushels of apples. And hidden within her stories were attitudes about the seasons that were very different from mine that formed in the geographic context of the Lower Great Lakes Basin. In the Primeria Alta, the northernmost part of the Sonoran Desert greets Autumn as respite from the extremes of Summer just as Spring is greeted as the ending of Winter extremes.
With climate change increasing weather fluctuations it is difficult to anticipate what any season may bring, decades old trees and plants died when Tucson had extreme cold for several days in a row in early February 2011 where a record low of 18 degrees was set. The growing season in Tucson averages 324 days, with first frost usually happening on December 18th and last frost occurring on January 19th. But Autumn is arriving, not Winter.
So as the days begin to top out below 100 degrees, I'm thinking about spiffing up the patio with some flowers, putting some tomato plants out and maybe some peppers, and some herbs. Sort of inverse of back east, but it is the cycle to which I have become accustomed. When I have a Fall/Winter garden I usually keep sheets handy for covering plants should a cold snap occur. So I will need to do some prep work.
But no matter what I decide to do this season, October is the most gorgeous month of the year in Tucson. It is hiking weather, perfect in that it isn't hot or cold usually during the day and a bit coolish at night. I first came to Tucson in this weather and it is absolutely perfect for exploring historic places and open to the public archaeological sites.