I have another post almost finished, and I will post the third in my series I’ve been working on this week as tomorrow’s post, but I’m watching Diane Sawyer’s 20-20 show about Gabby Giffords struggles and triumphs this year right now and I have to say something about this incredibly moving story. I have to say that I am a Democrat, but I am so far from the blue dog that Gabby is that she seemed like a Republican to me, but this post isn’t about politics. This is about the strength of a woman and the resiliency of the soul, about love, family and miracles.
If you did not get to see this interview with Gabby and her husband, Mark, you need to watch it. I will buy a copy of Gabby: A Story of Courage and Hope, by Gabby Giffords and Mark Kelly that is released tomorrow.
There is so much to the spark that is will. There is so much that is the spark that is love. When you put will together with love, you have the something with the tensile strength of miracles and that seems to be what she seems to be made of.
I was there outside the hospital that night of January 8th, at the spontaneous community vigil, and there was a palpable offering of love, energy, and strength flowing to those who were inside the hospital from the vigil, the community, and so much of the world. I think I heard Tucson breathe a thankful sigh of relief tonight to see that this amazing woman will be able to take that part of Tucson that lives inside her to new places, heights and causes in or outside of Congress.
No matter what Gabby may decide to do, champion, or strive for in this next phase of her life, it will inspire and teach in ways that would be miracles for anyone else, but will simply be the path she walks. She has been given a path that would break most of us, but while I personally do not believe in predetermination, I cannot help but feel that she is only now beginning on what will be her life’s work. We’ll have to see, but what many of us would regard as a life-changing and slowing event will probably only motivate her to reach for heights beyond the imagination of most of us.
Here's Hoping The Lean Toward Political Sanity Lasts
I’m still somewhat awash in happiness over local and far-off year election results of yesterday. While I would have loved to see Mary DeCamp as mayor of Tucson, a Green Party Mayor isn’t in the stars for us just yet. I am very, very happy that the lobbyist for Rosemont Copper, also known as the Republican candidate for Mayor in yesterday’s election, aka Rick Grinnell, was soundly defeated. The airwaves were blanketed with anti-Democratic candidate ads for the days leading up to the election and pro-Rosemont mine ads have been everywhere for the last month. Lots of corporate money went into anti-Rothschild and anti-Democratic, and pro-corporate mining ads before the election.
Arizona knows mines. Abandoned mining towns such as Ruby are evidence of the temporary nature of mines. The toxic warning signs posted around what is left of Ruby are evidence of the long-term impact of the use of toxic substances in the mining process. The Santa Rita Mtns are some of the most beautiful, and avian species rich, land in the U.S.A. Just take a look at Madera Canyon in the Santa Ritas. Birding, nature, hiking, picnicking, vacation cabins and the like are apt to last much longer than a mine while bringing in tourists and providing respite for locals. Of course the owners of Rosemont Copper Company, a subsidiary of Augusta Resource Corporation are sort of like tourists too, just ask the Canadians at its headquarters in Vancouver, BC, but ones with heavy equipment and massive need for limited water supplies.
So I’m still pleased as punch, to the point of being somewhat punchy, over the City of Tucson not being home to a Lobbyist Mayor. I believe small local business will benefit from our more traditional soon to be mayor Jonathan Rothschild even though one large foreign corporation may not want to hear that.
The second happy thought generating event that is still buoying my disposition today is the resounding defeat of Russell Pearce in the recall election in Mesa, AZ.
The fact that the loss of the mayoral race by my friend Mary DeCamp, Green Party Candidate, to a middle of the road Democrat and the election of a moderate Republican, Jerry Lewis, over Pearce, actually makes me happy shows just how extreme the concerns of Progressives like myself have become in the last few years in this state.
The sensible defeat of the attempt to grant personhood status to blastocytes in Mississippi and the reaffirmation by the people of people to be able to gather together and discuss labor issues and act collectively in Ohio are also quite heartening, and overall I am very, very pleased that some sensible movement away from extremist positions seems to have begun across the country including in my own state.
I do dearly hope that the right of individuals to have control over their own lives is being reasserted in opposition to Religious Group and Corporate Group attempts to usurp the sovereignty of the individual over his or her own body and behavior.
Occupy Tucson needs your help!
Make some calls! NOW! This is from the Facebook Wall:
OccupyTucson needs your help! TPD is utilizing a strategy of financial attrition to kill the movement by issuing criminal citations to occupiers in the who stay in the park past 10:30pm. This citation carries a potential sentence of up to a $1000 fine, up to 6 months in jail, and up to 3 years probation. They are bleeding this movement financially instead of using pepper spray and batons. We need you all to take action now! Below is the link with the phone numbers and email addresses of each of the members of Tucson city council. Call them and demand that TPD stop it’s war of financial attrition against OccupyTucson.
Regina Romero – city council Ward 1
Phone: (520) 791-4040 Email: ward1@tucsonaz.govKarin Uhlich – Vice Mayor and city council Ward III Phone: (520) 791-4711 ward3@tucsonaz.gov —
Shirley Scott – city council Ward IV
Phone: (520) 791-3199 E-Mail: ward4@tucsonaz.govSteve Kozachik – city council Ward VI
Phone: (520) 791-4601 E-Mail: ward6@tucsonaz.govMayor Bob Walkup
Phone: (520) 791-4201 mayor1@tucsonaz.gov
Also: There is a march to City Council starting at 4:30 from Armory Park today if I read the post correctly.
The City Council Meeting does begin this afternoon at 5:30 p.m.!
The City Council meets here: Mayor and Council Chambers, City Hall, 255 W. Alameda, Downtown Tucson
I have linked the image above to the Occupy Tucson site, even though I have been unable to get it to load.
Remember
I once had a little white on black button from the Holocaust Museum in D.C. that simply said, “remember.” My husband borrowed it, and I never saw it again. Somehow that is fitting. Things don’t last. Things vanish. But memories are different. We keep them and review them in grief, and for comfort, until they are worn smooth into polished icons of remembrance.
We got the call from my step-daughter early that day; we didn’t have hours, days or weeks of worry. She was a lovely and quite intelligent young woman, only 25, who worked in lower Manhattan, not all that far from the WTC, and lived in Brooklyn. She was okay. Her building had been evacuated and she was going to have to walk back to Brooklyn that day. Our younger daughter was in 6th grade and the school called because they were concerned about her. She seemed to grasp the enormity of the attacks and was emotionally devastated and raw unlike many of her peers who just did not quite get it. She’d been to the WTC the previous month, August 2001, with her dad, my husband, when he stopped in to see a broker. We didn’t know it then but she would spend 7th grade in Arlington, VA with classmates who lost parents in the attack on the Pentagon. I spent years disseminating real information about the Iraq War that most folks now grudgingly recognize as truth, and during those years many despised me, called me a traitor, and threatened me and my family. It has been a hard 10 years.
I wrote, globally, about the initial thoughts I had on the blog/site I ran at the time called Late Boomers. The three articles I wrote that were “about” the attacks on the U.S. can be read, in the same format in which they appeared then, at:
Boomers Unique Take on Patriotism and Military Service
A Lifetime of Violence: Terrorism, Rates of Information Flow and Baby Boomers
And I expressed myself through poetry, bad though it was, which was accepted for the Poets Against the War Website .
There was this site, and before that another site, where I chronicled and pondered the journey from 9/11 onward.
And of course there was a wrap up (for me anyway) of the impact 9/11 had on my life that I posted to BlogHer.com after bin Laden was killed this past Spring: On Realizing I Was Impacted by Terrorism.
I have been feeling numb this past week. Perhaps because of the approaching anniversary. Anniversaries of sad events always get to me even if I don’t consciously remember them. This year I have had to add another sad connection to 9/11. This year, on January 8th, Tucson lost a little girl whose 10th Birthday anniversary is tomorrow.
Please, let’s try to build peace, kindness, and a loving human family.
BlogHer11
The conference is just starting – a.m. of the first day, though I was at the business path section of pathfinder day yesterday. BlogHer has changed so much in the last few years.
Corporations have arrived. BIGTIME. I will be talking about semiotics and corporations in many different ways from the differing perspectives throughout the next month on my topical blogs. Yes, there will be opinions, evaluations and tips. Pay attention chill ones, there is much to learn.
Brands are listening. Brands are doing things right. Brands are doing things wrong. The best ones are listening. The not best ones are hoping for free content
Quickly–just to review my current pitches for BlogHer for readers who are checking me out through a connection made at the conference.
N.F.Hill is my business.
Casita Gaia (TM) is a branded component of N.F.Hill dedicated to the interplay of local community driven economy and informed trajectories specifically directed by networks of women. Tucson-based.
My blogs are topical. Please don’t tell me I have too many interests. Think of my blogs as categories.
Mother Hurt is a blog about Munchausen by Proxy medical child abuse.
Late Boomers is a term I coined and worked five years on developing and pitching, successfully I might add, the distinct cohorts to baby boomers an the demographers and marketers who categorize them and serve to them.
Build Peace is my political blog that has been around for a long time. I’m biased, progressive, and female — live with it. Most of my accounts of pink adventures reside on this blog.
Done Nesting is for empty nesters who do not feel empty. It is an “evolved” Mommy Blog. All mommy bloggers will become the demographic I’m talking to and about with any luck.
Casita Gaia is having a blog carnival on August 20 to celebrate Tucson’s Birthday. Neighborhoods in Tucson celebrate the birthday of The Old Pueblo in August every year. Think of it this way – I am hosting a cyber-neighborhood event.
Explore. Drop me a note. Comments on posts will be opened.
Two Down and One (Child Murderer) Trial to Go
I am a bit of a cynic when it comes to Arizona justice or any justice in any state that prides itself on stupidity, but living in such states seems to be my lot in life. Indiana and Arizona have both had more than is any one state’s right to stupid judicial actions. Indiana rounded off pi in in a House Committee, but fortunately did not allow it to become law. Both states kill people for killing people though they both are “Christian” run states that I’m sure subscribe to the Ten Commandments including the one that goes, “Thou shall not kill.”
I grew up in Indiana and remember getting in my first politically charged “discussion” on a school bus in November 1964 the morning after Johnson won the election over Goldwater. I had to be all of 7 years old, but I remember it clearly. The oldest sister, who had to be all of 9 or 10 years old, of a family on my bus route looked as though a family member had died when I brought up the election. I later came to understand that the parents in the family were ultra conservative and attended The Church of the Nazarene in the town that was the county seat just south of the township grade school we attended.
I was never a 9 year old in Arizona. I’ve only lived here for a few decades. I am however the mother of a native Arizonan, and she was a nine year old here, once upon a time. I was a Girl Scout Leader to a group of 9 year old girls. I was a Sunday School Teacher to a class with 9 year old girls in it.
The faces of these girls I have known and in several cases come to love are the ones who flash before me when I also pull up the class photo mental image of Brisenia Flores. I still cry every time I think of her asking Shawna Forde, Jason Eugene Bush, and Albert Robert Gaxiola why they shot her parents and of her then begging for her own life. Things like this are not supposed to happen to 9 year old girls. Tucson knows all too well that 9 year-olds can die from the heinous actions of deranged people. But the facts of this case push even this understanding beyond what a saddened Tucson can believe. This falls into the same league as sexual predators who torture and kill children. This falls into the category of pure evil.
How could we as a community have allowed such vile predators to reside in and do such harm to our community? I will never understand this. I know people were talking about connections between Minutemen militias and the extremely violent right wing rhetoric that routinely, at least weekly from my understanding, came to our streets in the last 10 years. Recruiters were connected to drug traffickers. Police refused to come to respond to calls for assistance when there were assaults at demonstrations. Individuals burned flags and tried to bait surrounding crowds into violence. The weaving of fringe groups into the daily life of our community must have numbed our outrage when groups of people from outside of our community descended upon our area to create a police state mentality in our backyards. Why did and do we tolerate people who have no business here who supposedly guard a border from people who are for the most part guilty only of not looking like them.
Could we have done more? Of course we could have. The portent of violence was there. Suspected serial killers and mentally unstable individuals were allowed to play soldier with real guns where I live and where so many of the nine year old girls I have loved, lived.
This isn’t right.
I’m not sure that killing individuals who are disturbed enough to carry out such atrocities is any better than what the accused and convicted did. But I am in the minority, supposedly, just as I was when I expressed concern years ago about the influx of militia types into our county. So two of the three people on trial for the murders of Bresenia Flores and her young papa, Raul Flores, have been convicted of murder and sentenced to die by lethal injection. One trial remains.
Killing these people will not ease my conscience of the persistent doubt that perhaps there was more that we could have done, that I should have tried to do more to wake people up to what was and is happening at the edges of our community. The deaths from our ignorance seem destined to climb and include Shawna Forde, Jason Eugene Bush and probably Albert Robert Gaxiola, also accused in the murders, who goes on trial June 1st.
I’m sure I will write more then.