Not All That Spins Becomes Cotton Candy

When I was a child, I hated naps. I suppose I was afraid of what I might miss if I slept in the middle of the day, Now it is my habit to take a nap on Sunday afternoon whether I'm tired or not. The problem with that is that if I'm not really tired I just lay there with my brain spinning. If I do doze a bit, it is full of dreams that sometimes spin  bizarrely as if to simplify chaos theory. Typically I can follow a line, however crooked or fractured, and connect the dreams to something that has happened recently-though that doesn't always explain some of the people who populate the dreams. Every single time I have a disagreement with my husband, I have a dream about my first husband. Why is that? My first husband and I have been apart longer than we were together, and there are almost no similarities between the two men. Recently I talked to my friend who has an Italian boyfriend, Frank from Jersey, and I dreamed I had an affair with one of the characters from the television series, "The Sopranos." (Sorry, Frank!) Once, when I was sick with a high fever I dreamed I was being spun ever tighter in some sort of cocoon-it turned out I was wrapped in my blanket. I'm not sure that dreams really mean anything, but they do connect to our daily lives. When I married my second husband, in January of 2000, we moved from the town in Texas where my family lives to a small house in a small town in Illinois where he grew up. He knew one thing about me-that I love dogs. To the extreme--to a point sometimes where some people have accused me of liking dogs better than people. Which is not exactly true-I love most dogs better than I like some people. But after living in this house without a dog for a little more than a year, I asked him if we could get a dog. This was in March of 2001. Time passed, and still no dog. I started going back to school, along with my full time job, my eyes open all the time to the right possibility of the right dog for our family. On September 11, 2011 we still didn't have a dog-but after the terrorist attacks of that day, there were suddenly other things on everyone's mind. But, as we were told by our president, if we didn't carry on our normal lives, the terrorists won. On November 6, 2011, I went to have a fairly normal thing done-getting my teeth cleaned. My husband and his son who lived with us were at the fall sports banquet celebrating the football season. As I was lead to the cubicle of the hygienist, whom I had never met, but who had known my husband since he was a kid, it was lined with photos of dogs. I asked if these were all her dogs, and she said that she was involved in dog rescue and fostering. I asked if she had any that were adoptable, and she said yes, she had two that had been orphaned by the 9-11 attacks. One she thought was ready for a home, and one might never be. Did I want to meet them? I was her last client of the day, and I "followed her home."

Years before I had picked a name for the next male dog I got; he was going to be "Nestor," after the character played by Antonio Banderas in the movie, "The Mambo Kings." The dog I took home with me that night had been called "Louie," since no one really knew anything about his history. He was beautiful-a border collie mix, with a full black mask instead of the Harlequin mask that one sees on many border collies, and much more white on him than black. I took him home, and when my husband and step son arrived home from the sports banquet, we were sitting in the floor of the living room. I had my arm around him, we had already begun to bond, and my husband said, "Did you get a dog?" Since we didn't have a fenced in yard Nestor had to be walked twice a day. Every day-seven days a week. That duty fell to me, since I was the real dog lover in the house, and we walked all over the little town. I lost forty-five pounds, and Nestor and I were attached at the hip. I was, no doubt, his human. We later did get a fence, and I injured my sciatic nerve, and had to have help with the walking, but Nestor and I were almost psychically, and probably in an unhealthy way, connected. If we were walking and met up with someone who would talk to me, unless it was someone else with a dog, Nestor would snap at them. He did also chase things that moved, like the bicycle of our next door neighbor's daughter. When he, in true border collie fashion, nipped at the back tire and caught her ankle, it caused a neighborhood kerfuffle, to be sure. I was not familiar with the breed before I had fallen in love with this dog, but had I known more about them in advance, I probably would have known that we didn't really have the lifestyle for such an active dog. Sometimes if he was left alone he would tear things up-like the blinds, not just papers and small things. We replaced the blinds several times. The lady I had adopted him from attributed it to boredom and possible separation anxiety, considering he had been orphaned by the 9-11 attacks. I often called him my little orphan boy. His biting became more serious, and despite the fact that he was healthy and had all his shots, he had to be quarantined four times because of biting people. Once I went to visit him at the vet when he was in quarantine, and the vet said that he had never once shown any sign of aggression. Then when I started to leave, he bit the vet. The vet looked at me and said, "This is about you." I was getting more and more hopeless that I would ever be able to stop this behavior. I contacted a trainer who advertised that she could help with aggressive dogs, and we agreed to bring him back. But in April of 2007, I noticed that when a UPS man knocked at our door, he went psycho. I knew that if there had been no glass between him and the delivery man, there would be some real damage done. A few days later, he bit the hand of the neighbor who lived behind us, drawing blood. I will say, that man was not very nice, and I'd been tempted to bite him myself a time or two. But I knew it was the end...I called our vet, and took him to be put down. We couldn't afford the liability of an aggressive dog-and we couldn't risk small children coming to the house and being bitten. He was also prone to nip our guests if they hugged me; I had no choice left but to put him down. We went to the vet, and were placed in a room while the tech discussed with the vet, seemingly forever, how this euthanasia was to be handled since he had just bitten someone. I was falling apart, he knew something was up, so he was going psycho-hound all over the room. The vet finally came in and gave him "the shot." He was wobbly, but still walking around-I was still hysterical, and told her that I was close to changing my mind. She said, "Boy, he's not going down without a fight." They had to give my little orphan boy twice the regular dose, but he finally laid down in my lap and went to sleep. That was the first time I'd experienced this. I'd had other dogs put down before, but I could never bring myself to be there. I'd say my goodbye, and wait outside. But with this dog, I had to be the one to do it.

At the time this happened, April 12, 2007, I was in graduate school; right in the middle of the big project. I can imagine that someone might think the death of a dog would be something to move on from, but I basically fell apart, and wound up flunking out of graduate school. My job was temporary-a grad assistantship that now had to be changed to an 'academic hourly' and would only last until January. My life, and family became very difficult as I tried to deal with the grief over Nestor, and the still unremitting feeling that I had failed him. Bad owners make bad dogs; there had to have been more that I could have done. We had adopted a lab, Maddie, to be his friend, and she and I were the only ones who really grieved for him. I didn't think I would be ready for another dog for some time, but I didn't expect her to be as sad as she was. In fact, I thought she would be happy as an only dog. But she wasn't. In January of 2008 I was out of work, and the economy struck Central Illinois WAY before it spread through the rest of the country, so I could only find part time work, which was not near enough to support our family. My grief and feelings of failure regarding Nestor and school had started to come between my husband and me-things were really spinning out of control. On May 31 I got on a train and moved home to Texas. Supposedly there were lots of good jobs in Texas, my family kept telling me. So I moved, not sure if my husband would join me, but he and Maddie moved down in August of that year. I was glad to be close to my side of the family, but it was hard for Jim to be separated from his side of the family, especially his three sons. Maddie died the following February-at the age of 12, which is pretty old for a lab. Life goes on.

On May 15, 2010 I wrote a blog post, "To Ian, With Pride." Ian is the son of my youngest sister. The night she went into labor, all my siblings were gathered at my house. At that time I was a practicing Christian, and Teresa, Ian's mother, and I were the only ones in the family attending the Episcopal church. As a result of that, and the particularly close relationship we had, my first husband and I w ere Ian's godparents. So, despite the fact that my religious world-view has changed completely, I have always felt a special bond with Ian. May 14, 2010 was the night he graduated from college and received his commission as a second lieutenant in the US Air Force. I remember telling my sister that night that one hope I'd had was that by the time Ian graduated from ROTC we would no longer be at war. Last Sunday, as I took my nap, we were preparing to go to a going away party for Ian, who left for the Middle East, his first post after tech school, on Tuesday. On Thursday the news media were announcing that it was the tenth anniversary of our invasion of Afghanistan. As I cried on the shoulders of my mother and youngest sister Sunday night about that baby boy whose birth is so etched into our lives because his placenta tried to come out first, and his birth was an emergency Cesarean, leaving my apartment where it all started looking as if an axe murder had occurred there, was a grown man, a military officer, going where it was WAY more than a couple of hours to come home for a visit. The spin of dreaming about my dog began to make sense. I wouldn't have had Nestor if not for the 9-11 attacks, because of the 9-11 attacks, we are still at war, and Ian was going to the Middle East. I will add that he is going to a friendly country, and has a fairly safe job-but suddenly it all made sense how much our lives have become defined by the terrorist attacks of 9-11-01.

So, we can take the events of our lives, blend them into the pensieve of our subconscious, turn on the spinnaker and the heat and spin a single thread into something that resembles a full life. It may be completely connected, but it won't always be sweet.

Pensieve-a device used in Harry Potter books, written by J.K.Rowling, which allow a person to see into the memories of another person. 

Not My Cup of Tea

The world is making me tired. There hasn't been a day go by in the last few weeks that I haven't been shaken by something happening somewhere. I need a day of happy news. Just one. Is that unreasonable?

When I was in grad school, studying Environmental Policy, I was introduced to Thomas Robert Malthus. Malthus was an English scholar who proposed a theory of overpopulation, saying that at some point, the earth's population would grow beyond its ability to sustain itself. Once the earth reaches that point, the population would be checked by starvation, war and disease. Most of the twentieth century, economists and philosophers spent suggesting that Malthus was wrong; we were able to exponentially increase food production, and send minimum sustenance to every corner of the globe and prevent death by starvation. We are now in the third desperate famine in Africa that I can remember. We are doing the best we can to send enough food to the people in Somalia to prevent the slow, dreadfully suffering death by starvation and disease, despite the fact that many of the violent and corrupt regimes of the region are preventing some of the aid from reaching those most in need. Yesterday it was announced that on Halloween day, Sunday, October 31, 2011, the world population will reach seven billion. The world is on the downward slide with regard to potable water. Much of the farmland in Africa has been rendered un-arable because of war, drought, and the race for resources such as gold, oil and diamonds. Once the aid workers are gone, the same corrupt war lords will begin to kill with impunity again, using religion and race as an excuse, when resources are actually the reason for the brutal attacks. Malthus wasn't wrong, he was just early. We can increase our food production to a point, and we've come through so far. But those increases require more water and good land, which is becoming more and more rare as the population rises, the climate warms, and drought prevents the rain from watering the farms...and the circle is infinite.

Back in the 1980s I read several books by Stephen King. I loved the fact that, much like the television program, "The Twilight Zone," there was just enough reality to make his plots seem plausible. One of my favorites was "The Dead Zone." It was a story about a man who was in a terrible car crash and went into a coma for a long time. When he awakened, he could touch people and tell the future. One of the people he touched was a politician who was running for president. He touched the man, and knew that a nuclear conflagration would be the result of the election of that candidate. Something eerily like the feeling I got reading that story came over me when I saw this picture on the cover of Time magazine this week:

I'm sorry-there is just something frightening to me about this man. Despite the fact that, as Bill Clinton said, "He's a good lookin' rascal." It's not enough to make him un-scary to me.

I am an unabashed liberal. But I understand some conservative positions, and I come from a very conservative family. When political topics are broached, especially since I am usually outnumbered, I've become a master of the smile and nod, and the, "That's certainly a point of view," reply. But a conversation I had early in the Obama administration with a friend who is just as proud of her tea party activism and anti-Obama passion that was very telling to me as I look back. This particular friend lives in a very closed society-fundamental Christianity, in the deep south, and all of her world view is colored by that giant wall. I tend to believe this is true of all tea party members, including my mother. Most of this group decided that they hated Obama, and anything he might stand for well before he was elected and attempted to do anything. They have held their beliefs, no matter how often President Obama has done exactly the opposite of what anyone would expect of a liberal. But my friend exclaimed to me, when I asked her why, exactly and specifically, she disliked Obama so much, "He wants to CHANGE America." This remark has come back to me time and again, puzzlingly; and in the last month or so, it has come back to me again and again. I have realized that what the tea party wants is a return to an America that never really existed in the past, and certainly could not survive in the twenty-first century. In the days of fuzzy memory, blacks and gays didn't demand their constitutionally guaranteed civil rights. In fact, a black man walking down the street who looked at a white woman, or looked a white man in the eye, did so at his own peril. Homosexuals didn't want to get married-they wanted to hide their true natures so that they could keep their jobs. They never had "partners," they had "roommates." But the white folks lived well, and went to church every Sunday. They were there for their white neighbors, and their white neighbors were there for them. No one knew that George Washington didn't really chop down a cherry tree and tell his father the truth about it. No one ever questioned the Disney-fied history books, or dared to suggest that any of the founding fathers were promiscuous or flawed in any way. Men went to work, and good mothers stayed home and provided clean houses and good meals for the family. Freedom of religion was okay because everyone was Christian or Jewish. There were no atheists or agnostics, and certainly no Muslims or Hindus. There were no illegal immigrants-just gardeners and people who traveled around the country to pick fruit for a pittance that was impossible to live on. That was their problem though-white people had the right to make profit and do well. No one questioned that. But that world never truly existed, and most definitely does not exist now. American businesses can't make profits without going international. But in order to go international, we must learn something about the cultures with which we wish to do business. That may mean we can't steamroll over everyone in another country with the assumption that the only good country is the U. S. and the only good religion is Christianity, and the only good business model is the American one. Facebook and Twitter and the internet in general have made isolationism impossible. And the fact of the matter is, the world has changed, and was changing long before Obama was born in Hawaii. I've been told all my life that "Change is the only constant in life," and anyone who refuses to admit that is burying his head in the sand. Obama didn't cause this, but as the first president we've had in some time who is open to it, rather than trying to deny it, or forcefully and belligerently stop the change, he is still WAY ahead of any tea party candidate.

Time Spent Just Shaking My Head

The last few weeks have given me many, many opportunities to shake and scratch my head. I don't think I've ever seen anything as strange as the republican candidates for president in 2012, or the people who follow them. But personally life is just strange as well. For example, for the last forty years environmentalists have been complaining about the amount of packaging used to sell the products we use. But every day something is being introduced that is bringing more and more trash to our landfills. Now every coffee company is packaging coffee in plastic containers for individual servings. Even allegedly green companies are doing this, and I've contacted a couple of them-they admit that their individual serving cups are not biodegradable. We now have pieces of fresh fruit in glass jars and prunes in a waxed-paper container, then wrapped in individual cellophane wrappers. Grrrrrrrrr! Helloooooo-ooooo? Anybody out there?

I LOVE R&B singer John Legend. At times he's seemed to me the reincarnation of Marvin Gaye. He's touring this summer with Sade, whom I also like. But in a list published in my local newspaper recently, SHE was listed as one of the top grossing concerts this summer. Shouldn't he have been on that list as well?

How can we say we know what prevents cancer? There is a new story almost daily about something that prevents some kind of cancer-but people keep getting cancer, even though,as long as that list is, there can't be much left that everyone on earth does. So it seems that cancer rates should be going down.

I wonder if we set politicians up for corruption and arrogance when we talk about their looks. I can think of two who are about as smarmy and dishonest as any politician in history, Rod Blagojevich and Rick Perry, who have commonly been called "Governor Good Hair," that believe their crimes are not even wrong doing. Maybe good looking people in our world just get away with way too much, and come to believe that the rules don't really apply to them.

Who said that dogs don't really have a sense of time? When I recently babysat a dog for a friend who was out of town, interestingly, his behavior began to change about one and a half days before she returned. Nothing else that we could explain had changed.I  believe he knew "Mom" was coming home.

In Texas 2011, we have had the hottest summer on record. We even beat the dust bowl summer of Oklahoma in 1929. If we had a breeze this drought stricken summer, there was fire danger. If we didn't have a breeze, the heat created pollution alerts. I couldn't help wondering how President Obama, Eric Cantor, and other legislators in this country could reverse anti-pollution rules. Aren't they parents? Don't they know how many children are affected by pollution? I don't want to talk about global warming and its long term consequences. I want to talk about what we are doing to ourselves right now. We are making ourselves sick, and I don't want to live in a dirty world with dirty air. I have two grandchildren, and one more on the way. I don't want them to spend their childhoods in the ER getting breathing treatments because of the oil and coal lobbies.

This past Wednesday there was something called "The Tea Party Debate" with the republican candidates for president. Several years ago there was a giant kerfuffle in Texas when Governor Rick Perry made it mandatory for pre-adolescent girls to get a vaccine against the human pappiloma virus, which has been proven to cause cervical cancer. We have been vaccinating children against communicable diseases for about a century. Some of these diseases have been all but eradicated. But people got angry with the governor for this one. One reason was because of financial connections to the big-pharma company that provided the vaccine-reasonable argument. But I can't help but wonder if a part of the anger was because there might be something like "S-E-X" attached to this one. That certainly seemed to be the case with Michelle Bachman in her criticism at the debate Wednesday. And then she came back with a story of a crying woman who came to her and said that the HPV vaccine "gave her daughter mental retardation." Sigh. Yes, anecdotes are now science, right? So Rick Perry said-he attacked Bachman for taking the woman's story as fact when she had "no science to back it up." The explosion in my gut was hard to contain on that one, when just two weeks ago, Rick Perry was talking about the science on evolution and climate change not being in. Since when does Rick Perry know or care anything about science? He suggested that the pope who imprisoned Galileo was a scientist who just disagreed with Galileo's scientific theories at another debate. The far right of the republican party has been consistently anti-science and anti-intellectual for years. That's exactly why Sarah Palin has the following she does; she suggests that smart people who consider facts before they speak or pick a position are not real American "Joe Six Packs." I'm sorry, Governor Good Hair, you can't have it both ways. 

The Milk of Human Kindness

I work on the phone. Sometimes I get into long conversations with the people on the phone.  This happened last week, with an older woman who, like me, has family members in both the military and law enforcement. We talked about whether or not there are people in the world who have absolutely no good in them. I commented that I don't think so-even the most depraved people have some good in them, though it is buried beneath so much garbage that it can't be seen. She responded, "I can tell  you are a Christian." I honestly didn't know what to say. Obviously I couldn't say much, being in a work setting. But I wonder, as I have for years, where the notion comes from that to have a kind outlook on humankind comes from Christianity. I can point to so much evidence of Christians who definitely do not have a kind attitude toward their fellow man, and I know many non-theists who do. In fact, atheists sometimes refer to themselves as "humanist," and for most of the atheists I know, ethics is very important...after all, this world is all we believe we have, and how we treat each other is of high importance. 


There have been some articles recently about the "Christian Dominion" movement on the right wing fringes. This idea that fundamentalist Christians should run the world isn't anything new. The "K-Street" apartment house, at which some of the sleazier politicians who've been caught with their pants down, so to speak, is a part of this movement. They believe that it is okay for some politicians to screw around on their wives because King David did and God allegedly said David was "a man after my own heart." The thing they forget is that Christianity is supposed to be based on the NEW Testament, and King David was an Old Testament king. Nor was he allowed, by God, according to the myth, to build the temple because he committed adultery and murder. Nor was Moses allowed to enter the promised land with the Jews because he had committed murder. So the whole dominion movement is just a bunch of creeps who cheat on their wives and want to rationalize that their bad behavior qualifies them for leadership. Not only is every bit of this movement ridiculous, it is wrong headed in its alleged adherence to biblical values. It is also scary as hell and needs to be kept on the fringe. 


Speaking of politicians who've been caught with their pants down, I think it is noteworthy that none of them were wearing skirts. 


One legend about St. Patrick says that he used a clover, the three-leaved variety, to explain to the Celts about the trinity-three from one. So why is the four leaf clover considered to be good luck? 

In the last week or so I've heard several pundits referring to the Tea Party movement as "patriotic anarchists." Funny thing, on July 23rd, in my blog post entitled "Demagogue Is Not a Verb," question number 7 went this way, "7. Do the anti-government right-wingers realize that people who hate the government and wish to dismantle it are called "anarchists?" Anarchists used to be considered left wing. Does anyone but me see the irony in that? Anarchy in the USA!! Brought to you by Sarah Palin." So, can I get a little credit for pointing this out first? In fact, if you are going to read my blog and steal my ideas, please become a follower. I need more followers. 

So all this talk about the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution being a rationale for ending anything the federal government wants to do that they don't like. Candidate/Governor Rick Perry, of my state, Texas, likes to call on "State's Rights." He does it all the time. When the state of New York approved of allowing marriage equality, he said that it was fine for New York to do that-in his opinion that day, he said it was a matter to be decided by individual states. But yesterday, August 26, 2011, it was announced that he had signed a pledge to a marriage inequality group that he would support a new amendment to the constitution stating that marriage in the United States under a Rick Perry presidency would be that it is only between one man and one woman. Just one example of how conveniently the Grand Ole Party uses and rejects the Big Tenth Amendment. Which simply says nothing more than, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." That's it. Which demonstrates why it is so easy to find so many different interpretations.  And why its multiple uses must be carefully considered before it is used to reject every proposition from the federal government that any particular governor or candidate might like or dislike at any given moment. (Or in front of any particular interest group or donor!) I do remember a line from the Bush administration, quoting Reagan claiming that "government is not the solution, government is the problem." It was said that the second Bush administration believed that government is the problem, and then spent their whole time in government proving it. 

So, speaking of tea, there is an entire shelf now at the grocery store from which shoppers can buy gallons of tea in the ubiquitous plastic jug. Why would anyone pay from $2.95 to $4.29 for a gallon of premade tea? It doesn't make good economic sense. I pay a bit over $2.00 for a box of 100 teabags, and that makes 20 gallons of tea. Have we become that lazy? Nevermind. Except that lazy doesn't even do it for this one-it takes less energy to put some water in a kettle, boil it, add the bags and let them steep, then top off the jug with water and slip it in the fridge than to drive to the store, shop, maneuver around the aisle hogs, find where it's kept, put it in your basket, take it to the register, wait in line, pay, walk to the car, drive back home, carry in all your bags, put away all the groceries you just bought, etc. Make your own damned tea! We don't need all that many more plastic jugs in the landfills, on top of your soda and water bottles. And don't insist you recycle them; only about three-percent of Americans recycle their recyclables, and there have been billions and billions of plastic bottles placed in landfills in the last fifty years. We don't need unnecessary tea jugs on top of them. 


Since when is "nevermind" not a word? I just had to add it to my dictionary-as far as I know, nevermind is just as much a word as "alot." Which my computers keep lining in red as if they are not part of the English language. Where do they come up with this crap?


Has anyone noticed the evolution of the Exxon-Mobil commercials? First it was just that they are spending lots of money on R & D to find more eco-friendly ways to produce energy. Now they are talking about trying to frac without damaging ground water supplies. And there is one in which the spokesperson actually talks about the tar sands program in Canada, and he honestly says, "We can access this energy with about the same emissions as other forms of energy." WWWHHHHHHAAAAATTTTTTT???? The wording of commercials can be very instructive, and it is quite clear that it takes so much energy to remove the oil from tar sands that it is much worse for the environment than traditional oil production. Interestingly, I heard the Canadian CEO of the company building the tar sands pipeline say that all the protests in the US will only hurt us by sending 25,000 jobs to Canada, and that the oil will be produced anyway. And we always carry on about how "nice" Canadians are-now we are being held hostage by the guys who beat baby seals on the head with clubs. 

Right Man, Bad Time?

Hello. my name is Vonnie, and I come from a long line of racists. Some of the things that have been said to me by members of my family (both sides) still embarrass me, though no one but me heard some of them. My mother, who grew up in rural Arkansas, remembers Jim Crow. In fact, he was a neighbor, and a deacon at her brother's church. One thing I knew from a very young age is that people are afraid of what they are not exposed to. They make up stories so that they can justify their fears. I've heard this from other points of view-Jewish vs. Christian, Christian vs. Muslim, America vs. USSR. Fear is what keeps us ignorant of each other, and ignorance keeps us afraid and apart. I've told the story before of a woman I used to know who worked at a convenience store that was robbed by a black man. She said to me later, "Now, every time a black man walks in the store, I get scared." I guess her family must have told her, as mine did, that all blacks look alike. When I hear comments like that, I think in terms of statistics-how many black men are there in this country? How many of them robbed you? How many would NEVER rob anyone? Which number is larger? I don't just apply this to race questions-I have the same gut reaction when someone tells me at the age of twenty-five that they are terrified of all dogs because a dog bit them as a child. I have a tough time with that one, being the dog lover that I am, because I know that many times a little education of children would keep them safe from dog bites. But I go through that equation in my head, how many dogs in the world? How many bit you? Etc.

I remember in 2007, when President Obama was campaigning, and people commented on his cool, calm demeanor. I don't remember now who explained it, but someone said that he very consciously disciplined himself because he is aware that many white people are still afraid of black people, and often see black men with a bit of trepidation, because black men are so often angry and hostile. This is precisely how he has conducted his presidency. He is the president who has tried harder than I have ever seen to get a contentious congress to come together to solve problems. He tries to ameliorate conflicts between black professors and white police officers with "beer summits." He plays golf with his staunchest opponents from the opposing party. He is trying to bridge the race gap in this country by showing that we are not that different from each other after all. He has a wonderful family-the statistical American family; lovely, educated wife, two precious daughters, a big black and white dog. He is the perfect person to be the first black president of the United States. He is the one who will make white people less afraid to vote for a black man from now on because he is showing that not all black men are angry and hostile, and they have good American family values. He is a faithful husband who adores his wife. Now that we have seen that it can happen, it will not be a big deal next time a black person runs for president. Of course, there is a subset of white Americans, to some of whom I am related, I'm afraid, who will never accept a black person in any role of leadership in this country. They will have to die off-they will never be changed. Hopefully their children have been exposed enough to the truth and will reject their parents lies about the differences between the races.

The problem, however, is that "No Drama Obama" became president at a time of great peril. The great recession actually began in 2007. One of the two wars we are currently fighting started in 2001, the other in 2003. We are going on our tenth year at war, and we are bombing Libya, Pakistan and Yemen (secretly.) The world economy began to sink in 2008, and has not been able to claw itself back into solvency yet. It is getting worse-especially for working people, who seem to be an easy target for people with lots of money who want to limit worker's rights. Not that it matters; many of those "job creators" are only creating jobs in other countries. There are divisions between the American people that keep us from even having civil conversations with each other. Forget civil-we don't even seem to have honest conversations with each other.

In the budget debate, and the health care debate, and in the midst of every piece of legislation that has been proposed by the Obama administration, there have been loud criticisms that the president has not been "leading," he has not strong-armed the congress to get things done that the American people both need and want. And it is true-that is not the type of leader he is. There is not a single person in the United States who ever knew that Barack Obama existed before he was elected president who should be surprised by this. He is the "Conciliator in Chief," the "Arbitrator in Chief." He does not strong arm people, he tries to get everyone to "just get along." This is not a bad thing. We do need to get along-we have big problems to solve. Problems that are leading the United States to decline. If we don't learn from history, the next step will be trying to make deals with barbarian armies, who then decide they don't want to share the US, they want to own us. I'm referring to the fall of Rome-not accusing any other countries today of being barbarian-I hope no one misinterprets me. But we also need a leader who is rational, which President Obama is, but can do a bit of Lyndon Johnson-style strong arming to get smart things done to turn around our economic situation, and to get us out of all our bellicose actions overseas. He needs to have a spine of steel to stand up to the anti-environment positions of  his opponents, and to support the working people of America.

Although I did not vote for Obama in the primary in 2008, I did vote for him as president, and I will again. Quite frankly, I think he is absolute perfect choice to be the first black president of the United States. He is not someone that white people should ever logically fear, no matter what they might have been told by their racist relatives. But I will cast my vote with trepidation, because in order to get some things done to fight Wall Street and the Koch brothers, and get this country back to work, we need a president that his opponents fear.

Recommended reading: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Robert Caro

Can They DO That?

Ever since the advent of the internet people have been sending around questionnaires that supposedly tell friends more about each other. They always seem to include a question about favorite smells. I'm a very sensual person-things I smell or hear can move me in ways that I can't always fully describe. There is a young woman I work with who wears a cologne that lifts my mood every time she walks in the door; there are many smells like that. My answer to that survey question is usually "summer fruit-peaches, watermelon," etc. Last week I walked into the great soul-crushing retailer of our time, and was in the produce section. I smelled that magnetic, sweet peach smell, and looked around to see huge bins of peaches and nectarines. I couldn't resist walking over, my head swimming with the thought of ripe peach juice running down my chin, as I slurped the just-soft enough, not too mushy fruit. I picked up several peaches, and then several nectarines. Every one was as hard as a rock-and none of them had that "peachy" smell. How is that possible? There are some room fragrance products that have come up with peach scents that are pretty on-target for replicas. Is it possible that a retailer could use those scented products to entice customers to buy their produce? Nah! Weeelllll?????

Speaking of enticing smells, popcorn. I love the smell of it at movies, or from a microwave. I recently met my sister for a movie date, and while waiting for the movie to start and munching on my popcorn, I got really angry at all the commercials we had to sit through to get to our movie. We put up with commercials on "commercial" television in order to pay for "free" programming. But we pay a pretty big amount for the privilege of seeing a movie-and we see it in theaters so that we don't have to put up with commercials. We are charged ginormous amounts for snacks at movies when we could have snacks at home and watch movies on cable, where the only commercials are for other programming on the cable channel, and we can fast forward through them. Are you listening theater chains? We don't have to spend our money on you. And if you keep behaving like commercial television, we may not.

Shouldn't your doctor already know what medicines you're taking?

Does it bother anyone that commercials for drugs called "proton pump inhibitors," designed to help with heartburn and acid reflux, talk about being able to eat your favorite things once you take their pills? If we didn't eat a greasy diet, such as the pepperoni pizza shown on one particular commercial, we might not have this problem to begin with.

When I was a kid we had "Stiller and Meara." Now we have Jerry Stiller playing character rolls on sitcoms, and Ben Stiller, their son making comedies. Whatever happened to Meara?

Speaking of politics...not that I was, hehehehe, I heard Mitch McConnell this morning on State of the Union with Candy Crowley, harping, once again, the republican lie that any tax increase of any kind on anyone is a can absolutely not be done with 9+ percent unemployment. He cited as proof that democrats, in a big win for the right last year, must have agreed because they voted to extend the Bush tax cuts. If he is using this fact to support his version of economic truth, why then didn't all the rich-I mean "job creators" instantly start hiring? Surely their certainty was enforced by that two year extension? Don't they keep saying that it's uncertainty about tax rates that is keeping them all from hiring or investing in the U.S. job market? Why didn't Gloria Borger, who sat in for Candy Crowley this morning, pursue that question even one more level?

If we call oil, farm, coal subsidies what they really are, would the right be willing to eliminate them? It is corporate welfare to give money to these gigantic agribusinesses, oil companies, et al, and they don't even need it. They are making obscene profits. How can anyone who supports a free-market economy be for this?

Yes, I mentioned farm subsidies. I realize that farmers are, no pun intended, sacred cows in our country-I see the family farmer that way too. But the family farm is a tiny percentage of farms in our country these days, and huge chemical agribusinesses such as Monsanto own many of the farms from which we get our food nowadays. They make plenty of money, and don't need our subsidies. The family farmer, who has picked an industry that can be a captive of nature, has crop insurance if there is a bad year. They don't need our subsidies either. I'm sorry. I do love this country, and I love farmers. I WAS AT THE TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF FARM AID FOR GOODNESS' SAKE!!! Please don't suggest I'm un-American for saying this out loud, but they don't. So, let companies stand or fall based on the market.

How can an avowed, proud tree-hugger feel this way? Weeelllllll-believe me, when it comes to corporate responsibility for environmental mistakes, if the free market made companies pay for their own mistakes, perhaps BP would not be making such large profits this year, because they would be paying to clean up the gulf and reimburse families they harmed with their carelessness. I learned this idea from Robert Kennedy, Jr. in his book, from 2005, Crimes Against Nature.  One cannot be more of a liberal tree-hugger than that. Even if the cost shut them down-that's the nature of the free market. If Superfund hadn't paid to clean up industrial waste for so many companies, perhaps they would be more careful about setting rivers on fire, or poisoning our water sources.

When my husband asked me this morning what I want for my birthday tomorrow, did he "get it" when I said, "Something romantic and from the heart?" Did he hope I would name something specific instead of letting him call on our 13 year relationship, almost 12 year marriage to give him an idea? Should he need to ask? Should I still be bothered that he had to?

Just asking.

Sometimes Evolution Happens Quickly

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Sometimes Evolution Happens Quickly

I’ve been discussing evolution one way or another for over thirty years. Back then I believed that evolution was a satanic tool for dragging our faith away from God. Yes, I too have been a “Young-earth creationist.” I believed in something that was then called “Creation Science,” but now is dumbed-down to “Intelligent Design,” which basically states that life on earth is so complex that there HAD to be some kind of omniscient being involved in its development. Now, we could spend a lot of time asking why, if that is true, didn’t this being do a better job of designing things like weight-bearing joints, and why there are genetic diseases that kill babies, or (in my view, even worse) auto-immune illnesses in which a person’s own body attacks it, causing illness and death. Doesn’t seem very intelligent to me-but that is not the point today.

The definition of the word “evolution” is change over time, to put it quite simply. Humans have used it to create domestic plants and animals that work according to our desires for thousands of years. That is why water dogs have webbed feet, and Labrador retrievers have water resistant coats, but terriers (their names come from the Latin “terra,” or earth) don’t always care for the water. Now, some would say that this is a sign of “intelligent design,” since humans directed it. But, again, since this type of design has often led to unintended consequences, and harm to the breed or plant, I would say it calls into question, once again, the “intelligent” behind “intelligent design.” But the fact that change over time occurs is without question.

In 1994 Jonathan Weiner published a book called The Beak of the Finch, in which he told the story of two biologists, Peter and Rosemary Grant, who spent twenty-years demonstrating that evolution could occur in closed ecosystems within a few generations. They went to the Galapagos Islands, made famous by Charles Darwin, and observed that the shape of the beaks of birds changed in such a short amount of time based on the scarcity or abundance of particular food sources. These biologists basically put to rest the argument that is often used by creationists that “believing in evolution is also based on faith because none of us were there to see it happening.” We can see it happening right before our eyes. Just this week, in the New York Times “Science Times,” on July 25, an article by Carl Zimmer was published in which we wrote about four biologists who are among a growing group of scientists doing research on “urban evolution,” or showing how urban sprawl is forcing organisms, including rodents and other animals to adapt to  new environments right before our eyes. Other organisms that are evolving right before our eyes are bacteria and microbes, which have spent the last century developing resistance to our insecticides, antibiotics, and other environmental chemicals. There are now bacteria that invade our bodies, and we can’t fight them because they have evolved the ability to absorb our medicines and anti-bacterial wipes and washes. We are not keeping up with them by developing resistance to them because we are not allowing our immune systems to work at fighting them.

All of that being said, there are several states, mostly southern, mostly “red,” that are currently-STILL trying to get intelligent design printed in their science text books. My state, Texas, is one of them. This battle has been going on for nearly a century. The Scopes Monkey Trial, which was fictionalized and immortalized in the 1960 movie “Inherit the Wind.” The trial itself took place in 1925, and some people still will not let this go away, despite the fact that nearly every new discovery supports the fact that all life on earth shares a common ancestor…the basic fact that is at the center of the entirety of our biological lives. Part of this comes from a level of human arrogance, supported by some religious texts, which claim that man is a “higher” form of creation, and is “above” and has dominion over earth and all other life forms. I could go on and on about all the harm we’ve done to earth in the name of this belief, but I won’t. Hopefully any thinking people who might read this will figure out what I mean.

On December 20, 2005, U.S. District Judge John Jones struck a blow to those who wish to teach intelligent design as science. Suit was filed over a school district in Dover, Pennsylvania, where teachers were being forced to give a statement to classes before teaching evolution saying that there were alternative theories to evolution, and that evolution is not “proven” science. After hearing arguments from both sides, Judge Jones decided that intelligent design is not science, and that it violates the constitutional separation of church and state. But the battle goes on. The arguments on both sides of this trial were presented on PBS on November 13, 2007 in Nova, Intelligent Design on Trial.

But wait!!! Barbara Cargill, a (gasp!) biology teacher, and conservative head of the Texas State Board of Education agreed to compromise and not push to have intelligent design added to text books printed in Texas, and purchased by school boards of the entire country. According to reports in Austin news sources, Ms. Cargill gave up the fight because it “looked like they would lose,” and didn’t have enough votes to push their anti-evolution agenda. Well for once, I would love to see some other states follow Texas’ lead.