The Tucson community is once again abuzz with news of Gabby Giffords. This time it is good news. While you may not agree with Blue Dog support of everything military as Gabby has tended to do in her political career, she does provide inspiration and shows what determination can do if you have medical and family support to complete a supportive components of a healing triangle.
Today she and her husband Mark served Thanksgiving Dinner on base at Davis Monthan AFB here in Tucson today. Local news coverage of the surprise visit is available at KOLD‘s website. It is worth the watch.
A most important element of her recovery had not occurred to me until I read about what she and her husband Mark’s visit could mean to wounded service persons who are also healing as much as they can from the concussive brain injuries that are routine in this last wave of wars they’ve been fighting. I’m still hoping Gabby will become an active representative in the gun safety movement, but whether she does or not, she will be serving and inspiring one of her most vulnerable constituent populations and doing so from the informed perspective of a fellow brain injury survivor.
How she survived is beyond my level of understanding. That she survived is beyond my understanding. How she manages to do the painstaking rehabilitation work she does, let alone be able to find the strength to make constituent visits like this one to DMAFB is totally beyond my poor understanding.
Home and Family
Thanksgiving approaches and it is a special one.
Aren’t they all? My daughter graduates from college in a few weeks and moves away. She stayed in the old hometown for college, and so this move away is her first real move away from home. I’ve considered myself in the same category as empty nesters for a couple years, and my daughter considers herself independent, though my wallet disagrees, but I’m very happy I’ve had so much time with her. I never had sisters, my mother and I were never close, so my daughter and I learned a lot from each other. I’m so thankful we have had all this time. She has been so good for me, and I will miss her only being a few minutes away at most.
We moved in here, to our current residence, almost 21 years ago to the day. My daughter was 11 months old then. The house didn’t have A/C, central heating, or anything but a lone palm tree, an undernourished pomegranate tree, and a spindly ornamental orange tree in the front yard. It is pretty lush now. The house has 600 square ft more now than it did then. It now has a roof deck, a flagstone patio, and a sprinkler system. I’ve lived here longer than I’ve ever lived anywhere in my life. This home is the only one my daughter remembers. This house has become home in a sense that rivals my childhood home, a family farm, and the land there to which I still feel a nearly visceral connection.
I am enjoying home and family in a celebration of thanksgiving.
Why Buying Local Is Better, Usually
If you are a small business operator starting out in a new direction, as I am, there is so much to consider beyond the usual business plan if you are also a political creature, as I am.
When I was a graduate student studying semiotic analysis of cultural systems, my major professor told me there were two kinds of people: lumpers and splitters. There are those who are contextual and inclusive and those who are detail oriented and exclusive. I try to include as much contextual information as possible in my decision making and I can get bogged down in details, but usually I get wrapped up in threads or linked connections, so I think of myself as a lumper.
So today I am writing about the some of the significant, but often under-valued, contexts within which local business takes place.
We are careening into shopping season. This Friday is called Black Friday. While some say the term relates to Philadelphia and traffic snarls noted on this day in the 1960s, I am talking about its meaning as a day when stores go into the black, as in show a profit. There is some truth to this meaning especially in difficult economic times. Holiday shopping can make or break businesses. It is also promotes buying a bunch of plastic, foreign-made items that no one really needs.
One approach to countering this cult of consumerist crap buying is Buy Nothing Day. Observance of this day is counter to the concept of Black Friday. I don’t go for the stuck in traffic purchase frenzy of flaring frustrations and tempers that is this the day after Thanksgiving. So this year I plan to have this Friday be a Walk to a Neighborhood Store or Buy Local Day. This is where I am a lumper and not a splitter. I am combining the reality of this Friday being a day off from work for most folks when Christmas shopping can be done with the reality that we as patriotic Americans and concerned local community members in that I will NOT go to Target, WalMart, or any Big Box Stores and only go to locally owned businesses. This is a compromise as I’m not saying don’t go to local franchises, and I’m just saying buy local, don’t buy junk, and if possible shop in your neighborhood… and maybe bake something, visit a neighbor, or play a board game with your family.
Militarization, Exploitation and Abuse
Even the military would not start out in riot gear and spray toxic chemicals on peaceful protestors as a first response to students occupying part of their campus.
We are doing just this. Will we tolerate it?
What about the use of hugely expensive equipment created for dropping bombs, predator drones, on the U.S.-Mexican Border as is now being done?
We’ve been allowing members of our national legislature to engage in insider trading? Why?
At least one fifth of our children are sexually abused before they reach adulthood. (It is estimated that 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 6 boys will have experienced an episode of sexual abuse while younger than 18 years.) Institutions within religious education and athletic mentoring are often involved either in the actual abuse or turn away from or cover-up abuse by adults within their organizations.
How can we allow these things to go on?
Untreated mental illness in our nation where treatment is very expensive, is a factor in the man captured this past week who shot at the First Family’s living quarters area in the white house, as well as in this year’s Tucson shooting of which we were all reminded when we saw Gabby Giffords on 20/20 this past Monday.
I’m very sad and wondering what I should do. I feel like writing about these things is important, but is it enough? For me and for right now I have to say, “Yes.”
Graphics
I’m back in graphics mode! I just love what I can do for myself when it comes to making or finding the right image. It took a while to learn the basics, but I consider it time well invested. I learned how to manipulate images, create textures, and how to find out of copyright images so that I could build things for myself in the virtual world of Second Life® way back in 2006. The image above is a marketing image I created for a labyrinth I built in Second Life and then ported into another virtual world. I’ve sold it, given it away, and used it myself many on various platforms.
The image below is of a building and items I put together for Tucson’s Birthday in Second Life and am reusing the items I made myself in the virtual world I am now using for exhibits, meetings and relaxation. The graphics for the city birthday celebration were imported with permission by the nonprofit that organizes the annual neighborly, neighborhood event. The birthday gift was made by someone else as were the crates, but I made the espresso maker and the cake.
I just love this image. This is my avatar, Ana, from Second Life on a building platform up in the “sky” above the “Tucson’s Birthday” area. In virtual worlds you can build using prims, the basic building blocks of most virtual worlds, while punked out and sporting some formal wear. I love it!
Here are some graphics made for import into virtual worlds. First, an ivy covered frame I built from scratch.
I texture I created when playing, but that I have used for walls and floors in virtual worlds that I call, chocolate circuitry.
I couldn’t find a concrete flooring I liked, so I created a concrete-esque repeating tile texture for an contemporary design I built in a virtual world.
I don’t just design graphics for virtual worlds. I made this “award” that people can pick up for themselves for my site, Casita Gaia using iconic brushes in Gimp (Gnu image manipulation program.)
I coordinated the award with the site banner.
Cool, no?
Then there are the logos I’ve created for myself for different purposes. I used Art Text® to create these.
I’m also very good at finding public domain images for use on websites. This is a clipped version of the image I used on my Late Boomer site in the late 90s and early 2000s – I found it in the National Archives digital image collections.
National archives are amazing. I found this poster in them. Totally legal to use! At some point I will clean it up and restore the image.
Here is another public domain image I am using in my Arizona Centennial virtual exhibit.
Some public domain images are so fun I have to download them as I know that some day I will find the perfect use for them. No?
So much information can be conveyed in a single image. I love having this skill that adds “oomph” to my projects and writings.
update: 10 february 2012
Being Smart is Good
I don’t know if you have ever looked at the school books from the 19th Century or even early 20th Century, but the 6th “readers,” along the lines of McGuffy, Harper, Baldwin, Harvey and Appleton readers, but looking at them is an eye opening experience. This is from page 461 from McGuffey’s 6th Reader, revised edition also know as the Eclectic Series. I downloaded the reader it from Project Gutenberg here, but you can read just the section online too. It speaks to a mature person’s free will, implies the expectation for the desire for knowledge,
Every person must judge for himself how long a time he can bestow
upon any single subject, or how many and various are the books in
respect to it which it is wise to read…
Nor should it be argued that such rules as these, or the habits which
they enjoin, are suitable for scholars only, or for people who have much
leisure for reading. It should rather be urged that those who can read the
fewest books and who have at command the scantiest time, should aim to
read with the greatest concentration and method; should occupy all of
their divided energy with single centers of interest, and husband the few
hours which they can command, in reading whatever converges to a
definite, because to a single, impression.
These readers provided the structure that educated our grandparents, great grandparents and great great grandparents. Surely no one can say that these volumes reflected anything other than the basic American culture. These readers obviously prepared Americans to be literate, value education, value life-long learning, and understand that being well educated was part of being a good citizen. We set up libraries and schools to promote an educated democracy.
“All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.” (Aristotle)
So from where does this trend to glorify ignorance and lack of information come? Well it might have come from the loss of critical thinking skills being taught as a core part of U.S. education, but it also comes from an unequal access to information.
The appeal of the Occupy America movement harkens back to olden days, yes the days of the “Readers,” when communities had control over themselves while being guided by the connecting principles of our laws. The people had more say in what happened locally to them because information traveled more slowly, and the forces that acted against the community’s interests would not be able to react instantly. If people needed to meet all night somewhere to figure out what was a threat to their community and what the informed, likely-to-succeed reaction to that threat was, they could. Today we cannot. Parks and public spaces are 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. or dusk to dawn which in the winter can be a short time in the Rust Belt and northern rural areas of the U.S. We are right now readjusting to the instant flow of information and dis-information that we all know exists although we may ascribe it to different groups. One of the things that I personally believe prompted the occupy movement is that when 10 percent of the population, as a rough average, is out of work, they have time to consume more information than when they are employed.
Those of us who have had access to information via the internet and the academy for going on two decades now forget that many people are only now in the second decade of the 21st Century getting access to high speed information networks. Many of my friends from the mid-west are still on dial up access to the internet because out in the country you don’t have cable lines as one of the utilities that is running from utility pole to utility pole the length of every black top and dirt road so you don’t have cable bringing you TV and the internet in a bundle as an option as you do in major cities and suburbs. They might have a satellite TV. These same friends who live in, say, Avilla, Indiana, and Comcast’s Basic Cable package is the least expensive tier of service and gives subscribers access to 18 channels. “Among these stations included are Avilla’s local CBS, PBS, ABC, FOX, NBC and CW affiliates, several public and educational access stations, Home Shopping Network and WGN America. The basic Dish satellite package in the same geographic area provides Fox News but not MSNBC or CNN. Nothing divergent there. Conservative and line towing stations all. Even when you look at Dish TV for the same area, the basic package has no major competition for Fox. There is no CNN, only Headline News, and no MSNBC. The percentage of conservative Christian stations is remarkably high. How are non-conservative ideas even to enter the discussion if they are kept out of the data flow. Radio is similarly biased.
Being well educated is a good thing. Having information to make well informed decisions is good. Being an active participant in our democratic process is good. Being unemployed gives a person time to think, read, and look around at the state of the world. Information is spreading, there are still pockets where unfettered and unfiltered access to information is the norm, but those places are fewer and fewer in number. Is it a coincidence that these places where information is expensive, if it is even available, are also some of the places where ultraconservatives have political power? Nope. It isn’t. I have lived my life in two of the most conservative and closed minded states in the U.S.
Information is power and we have to get information to the people if democracy is to survive. The 99% talking about things that haven’t been spoken of for decades is an education of sorts and will open information channels. This may well be the start of an awakening.