Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be inclyded within this Union, according to their respective numbers.... The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct. Article 1, Section 2, United States Constitution.

It's census time! Or actually, it's past census time -- the actual deadline for filing the forms was, perhaps unfortunately, April 1.

Then it was time for the long hard slog as enumerators -- the people charged with going door to door and tracking down households that didn't return their questionnaire -- were out in the field.

This matters to me because, as of April 26, I have been a temporary employee of the Census Bureau. I'm a fed. Yay. Unfortunately, my job is almost up. It's been, well, sort of fun.

I am not an enumerator, which is just fine with me: they have to face dogs, and people yelling at them, and the occasional firearm (not in our area, thank God). I'm a clerk, just one of the small army of clerks and other office workers who support their effort in the field: preparing binders, affixing labels to questionnaires, double-checking -- triple-checking -- to make sure that every household who did not return their form gets counted.

It's not rocket science. It's not even remotely glamorous.

There are, however, compensations. I work with and for good people (Hi Mike, Karen and Beth, in the extremely remote chance you are reading this! And Roger and Roger and Karen and Tom and Kristi and... well, everybody else!) And, deep down, I do feel significant.

What I am doing matters. The Census matters. It will affect the life of the country in very real ways. And I am a part of that. A small and probably insignificant part of that (I do recognize that I am fungible), but a part of that nonetheless.

In it's way it's as important as the voting work I used to do. Or more so. Voting changes things. The Census makes voting accurate and fair -- or at least as fair as it can be in this messy thing we call democracy.

So if an enumerator comes to your door, or if they or a Quality Control person calls you on the phone, please be nice to them. They're only fulfilling the Constitution's requirements.

It's your patriotic duty.

Hi, I'm Pat. Will you hire me?

It's downright depressing.

I am 48, with a J.D. and a lot of life skills under my belt, with a recent work history with a former supervisor who is willing to praise me to the skies at a workplace where (I have been told) I am still much missed, and for all intents and purposes I am an entry level employee.

You see, I was at my last job less than three years. And it was a part time job, at that. Before that? A homemaker for twelve years.

Volunteer work? Doesn't count -- not paid. Legal work and law school? Doesn't count, too long ago. Anything before law school? Forget it.

I can write. I can oversee projects. I can coordinate. I can problem solve and troubleshoot. I am a big-picture person. My people skills, according to an art instructor who called to see under what conditions I would return to work at PAL if she could get them to pay me, are "phenomenal." I can get along with just about anyone -- my customer service abilities are kick ass. (I'm not that good of a sales person, though.)

At my last employer, I developed a reputation for calm under fire. (Oddly enough, I often totally fail to bring this quality to my personal life.) I was the one who talked to the difficult instructors, the difficult students. And you know what? I didn't mind doing so. People who would be routinely abusive towards other staff would back off with me.

Oh, and I can data-mine, and I know Word and a limited amount of Excel, and am taking classes in April in Power Point and Access.

I would be an asset to your organization.

Problem is, I am an entry level employee at a time when there have been mass layoffs in my area. Employers are asking for people with two to five times my level of experience -- and getting them -- because they can. Add to this my necessity for a flexible schedule, and I am going to have a damn hard time finding a full-time job, or even a part-time job that pays what I need it to.

I am having a difficult time figuring out even what I should be looking for. I have not seen a lot of jobs in the public/private sector that correspond to my former non-profit job. I did an online job assessment, and some of the answers came back: counselor, clergy, and librarian. In other words, occupations which would take yet more schooling, for which I don't have the time or money. Or, in the case of "Clergy," no calling and possibly not the temperament. The only one that seemed slightly reachable was "First Line Supervisor of Maintenance Personnel."

So I am at a crossroads. I need a job, sooner rather than later, and it is almost certain I will end up with something less than my abilities can contribute. Hopefully I will end up with an employer who will give me an opportunity to grow the job to fit who I am.

Anyone who knows me for any length of time knows that I am irretrievably opposed to capital punishment. Nonetheless, some people just deserve to be taken out and shot: the doctor who published the study linking autism and the mumps, measles and rubella vaccine has been reported to have falsified data to get the results.

I am the mother of a high functioning autistic teenager. Although my son is now doing quite well, it has been a long, hard slog to get to where we are. I understand the frustration and the desire to find an answer -- any answer -- to "why did this happen?"

The MMR study was pernicious. Aside from creating unnecessary guilt in parents and unwarranted anger towards the pharmaceutical industry, its claims led thousands of parents to refuse to have their children vaccinated, on the grounds that they were risking a disease which was presented as almost worse than death.*

There is a reason vaccines were developed against these diseases. To dismiss them as "childhood diseases" ignores the fact that they can kill. When they strike adults, they can cause sterility, or in pregnant women, birth defects. (One of the questions I plan to ask my sons' fiancees when they get engaged is "Have you been vaccinated against rubella? If not, why the hell not?") And it's not just the MMR -- there are parents who refuse to allow their children to have any vaccines.* I have heard some argument about the chickenpox vaccine, and am less dogmatic about that one, but the MMR? And the Diptheria Pertussis Tetanus vaccine? Every child should have those.

Fortunately, we eradicated smallpox -- and polio in the Western world, although it still occurs in Africa and parts of Asia -- before the anti-vaccination hysteria took hold.

There are people who cannot be vaccinated due to honest to God allergic reactions to the vaccine or the ingredients they are made from. But when most people have been vaccinated (i.e., above 95%), the society as a whole becomes immune, protecting even those few individuals who cannot be immunized otherwise.

Vaccination is not merely to protect the individual, it is a civic responsibility; to shirk it is not just poor parenting, it is a failure of proper citizenship.



*And do not get me started on the people who claim that they can "cure" autism, like Jenny McCarthy. Just don't.

Do you like it?

New Administration, new look.

So this week, in his first week in office, President Obama* signed an executive order stating that the detention center at Guantanamo Bay was to be closed in a year. There were immediate protests.

A few, from the very far left, complained that a year was a long time . Well, duh. Due process, which is what is needed here, takes time. You can't simply dismantle something as large as Gitmo, and arrange for the proper disposition of the detainees.

Some of these people are dangerous. Very dangerous. They need to be treated as such.
Some of these people are not dangerous. They need to be treated as such.

Figuring out which is which will take time and the operation of law, the same as it would for any criminal.

The other protest comes from the right, and can be best summed up by the Fox News Headline : "Do you want terrorists in your backyard?"

Funny thing, that. We already have terrorists in our backyard. Remember Eric Rudolph, guilty of abortion clinic bombings and the centennial park bombings? And then there are the Oklahoma City conspirators. We had Timothy McVeigh up until we executed him. Terry Nichols is serving life. Mike Fortier, who testified against McViegh and Nichols at trial for the Oklahoma City bombings, got only twelve years in prison. We have the Unibomber, Ted Kaszinki, and the terrorists behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombings.

We have serial killers. We have mass murderers. We have serial rapists. Somehow we are able to accommodate all these very violent criminals in our system, and keep the rest of us safe.

That's what maximum security prisons are for.

In any case, the purpose of Gitmo was so that suspects could be rounded up and kept under lock and key without due process of law, without the benefits of either the Geneva Conventions or habeas corpus. The Bush Administrati0on fought tooth and nail to delay actually letting any of the detainees have their day in court. Not that they didn't have enablers: the Military Commissions Act passed by Congress in 2006 stripped detainees of some of their most basic rights. (The Military Commissions Act was struck down by a 5-4 vote in the Supreme Court in June, 2008.)

Consider the case of Mohammed El Gharani, who was 14 years old when he was captured in Pakistan some seven years ago. He has been at Guantanamo since then. The U.S. government, according to the findings of U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon, had relied mainly upon statements from two other Guantanamo prisoners in determining that El Gharani was an enemy combatant. These statements, the judge found, were inconsistent, unverified, and not backed up by any other evidence. In short, the sort of thing that would have been tossed out of court had the young man been tried in the U.S. seven years ago when he was first brought in to Gitmo. Judge Leon ordered his release and for the government to the make all arrangements forthwith.

Seven years. Seven years based on unverified reports by other prisoners already in the hands of people who have admitted to using "enhanced interrogation techniques." I do have a concern that this young man is dangerous -- that we have radicalized him by his detention and treatment. That does not mean that we can continue to ignore our ideals, just that we may have increased risk to ourselves.

And then there is the case of the Chinese Uighurs. The Uighurs are a religious minority in China. They cannot be sent back there because they would be persecuted. The Justice Department doesn't want them sent to the United States. so they sit in detention at Gitmo, in limbo. The government claims that they would be a danger to the United States because they have had military weapons training.

So have many members of white supremacist groups. And, as my husband said, "we made the mess, we need to clean it up." And how can we ask other countries to take detainees if we won't ourselves?

In his inaugural address, Barack Obama said:

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our founding fathers ... our found fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake.

Nobody said it was going to be easy.



*Hee hee. The joy of saying that has not worn off yet.

I don't know about you, but one of the things I am looking forward to with the new administration is the capacity to feel outrage over my government again.

For years, the Bush administration committed atrocity after atrocity. There was torture, there was the wiretapping without warrant of members of the public and the military, there was the blatant stifling of science in the name of political and religious agendas, there was the outing of a career CIA operative for political revenge, there was the politicization of the Justice Department and other parts of the administration which should never have been politicized, and I could go on. The Supreme Court had its share of bad decisions -- the Ledbetter decision chief among them -- and Congress, too, disappointed mightily, most notably in its refusal to hold people accountable.

After a while, it began to be too much. Another outrage against conscience, law, or common sense on the part of the President, the Court, or the Congress, elicited an emotional response of "Yeah, it happened again. So what else is new?" Burned out and jaded, I suffered from "outrage fatigue." When you expect absolutely the worst from your government, nothing it does can come as a surprise or a shock.

But this is a new day, to use a hackneyed phrase. I have hope and expectations for and from my new president, and from the new Congress. (I view the Supreme Court as a lost cause, at least for now.) I have standards they need to meet.

They are going to fail in some of them. In some cases it will be a difference of opinion, in some cases because I think they are just plain wrong, and in some cases dangerously wrong. Indeed, there are already one or two areas where I see the Administration heading off in what I think is the wrong direction. (Afghanistan? Really? And in a rather more trivial matter, we could discuss Rick Warren. Or not.)

Over the next four to eight years, I fully expect to be outraged by some of the decisions made by my government. It is an institution made by man, with all that that entails. The men and women who inhabit its branches will fall short, although hopefully from error rather from corruption.

But I have hope that they will not fail so much of the time. This, more than anything, makes the possibility of outrage so much more palatable than its certainty.

Here we come a caroling....

Last Saturday I attended a caroling party, and I discovered an unpleasant truth about myself.

I am turning into a Puritan, at least where Christmas is concerned.

The Puritans, you may recall, prohibited Christmas celebrations as being ungodly. I wouldn’t go that far, but clearly something has to be done.

To get back to the caroling party. We sang all the Christmas carols people remembered liking that were in the songbook. We sang a few non-religious songs (“We Wish You A Merry Christmas,”“The 12 Days of Christmas,” “Deck the Halls” and “Wassailing Wassailing”) But most of the songs we sang were Christmas hymns, beautiful and lyrical and deeply meaningful.

Except we left out “the depressing verses.” You know, the verses that dealt with sin and redemption or sacrifice or the need for salvation. The ones with actual theological content.

I knew very few people at the party. None of them well enough to ask, “why are you singing Christian hymns if you find the basis for Christianity so inherently distasteful and depressing?”

Christmas is not about babies in mangers. Babies are cute, sweet, nonthreatening. Christmas is also not (just) about goodwill towards all people – who could argue with goodwill?

Christmas is about God made manifest on earth in the form of a human being – an unsettling thought – who will sacrifice himself for the sins of all the earth. The enormity is difficult to grasp. (The resurrection? Beggars the imagination.)

That manger stands in the shadow thrown by the cross, from light reflected from the empty tomb. Christmas’s light is thrown out against that shadow.

Without the cross, all you have are babies in mangers. How pretty. How… meaningless.

Don’t get me wrong, I think generalized holiday cheer is great – as long as it is generalized holiday cheer. And I give and get gifts like many other people. But subjecting everyone – regardless of faith – to “Merry Christmas”? Just plain wrong, regardless of what Bill O’Reilly says.* I say, let's have more "holiday parties," because all of us need to do something at the end of the year to cheer up, not so many "Christmas Parties." Because no one should be subject to proselytizing when all you want is to have a good time. Unless you also want to have a hanukkah party (or eight!) for your Jewish friends, and a Solstice celebration for your pagan friends....


Season’s Greetings to you all.



*and before anyone brings it up, I do not think that the Great Commission in Matthew ("go forth and make disciples of all nations") requires you to cudgel people into saying "Merry Christmas," even if they or the person they're speaking to are not Christian.

Writing Exercise #1

[Note: This is the first of several attempts to make myself write whether I feel like it or not. It's pretty rough going. Feel free to skip.]

During the late campaign, Sarah Palin showed herself to be a thoroughly undistinguished individual, unfit to be just a heartbeat -- or a stroke, or a reoccurance of cancer -- away from the presidency. However, I though the Katie Couric interview in which she was unable to state what she read most illuminative.

Not because of what she read, but because she refused to answer the question at all, instead giving a generic non-answer answer.

I am not Sarah Palin. I am more than willing to answer what I read. It's not at all pretty.

I read the morning San Jose Mercury News, most mornings. I glance at the online edition of the St. Petersburg Times, the best newspaper in America. I, I am abashed to say, devour Entertainment Weekly the day it arrives at our house. I read the good parts (i.e., European politics, science, arts) of the Economist when my husband buys it when he flies places. (Is it just me, or has the Economist gotten much much more conservative in the part five years? Or have I gotten more liberal?) In doctor's offices I read Smithsonian, Time, or People, depending upon what is available and what sort of mood I am in. At the dentist's office I read Sports Illustrated, because she is the only office that has an SI subscription. (When I was growing up my father had an ironclad rule: I was never allowed to read SI before he was. Never. I have tried to instill the same ethic regarding the EW in my household and it has failed -- someone is always going off with it. I suspect my eldest son.)

Books? What are they? Every once in a while I will read another one of the Anne Perry Thomas Pitt mysteries, although I am pretty much done with them now. I re-read Pride and Prejudice every so often, because one must, if no other reason than to appreciate the expanded role of Colin Firth in the A&E miniseries. It also has one of the best opening lines in all literature.

And Connie Willis. In discussions of Science Fiction I almost always say "The only sf writer I read is Connie Willis.

I also read nonfiction "list books." These are not books with a thesis and a coherent argument, but collections of disjointed facts centered around one subject. I have a ton of those, and I love reading them. I adore dictionaries and histories of the world.

The vast amount of reading I do is online. Blogs, blogs, and more blogs. LiveJournal. Now Twitter. Not that I comment -- except irregularly at Making Light -- but just that I vicariously tap into other people's lives, either on a perrsonal level (LJ and Twitter) or intellectually (everything else).

I keep trying to think if this means I have too little time on my hand or too much, and it constantly amazes me the people who both seem to engage a great deal online *and read* a lot of books (excepting those for whom it is a profession. That I show a certain lack of intellectual rigor.

Methinks I need to work on this.

If for no other reason than it will make it easier to find something to write about.

Decisions, Decisions...

To work on my beaded Christmas/wedding presents...
Or do my necessary resume distribution for the day...
Or blow off both of those and go see Milk at the Castro Theatre with friends.

I need a Magic 8 Ball.

Reclaiming myself

I am going to engage in that most hackneyed cliche of bloggers: complaining how hard it is to find something to write about.

I pride myself on being a good writer. Good communication skills are part of my self-identification. Yet I have fallen out of the habit of actually engaging in any writing.

Part of it is time. When I was working, my tie was spent working and beading. Beading has an outside chance of being a money source, at least to the point of supporting my beading habit. Writing does not.

I have read that one should write three pages long-handed every morning. I can't do that. My fibromyalgia makes it hard to write more than a paragraph without experiencing considerable pain. I have no such problem when typing. But unfortunately when I type I spend a lot of time self-editing.

So the answer is a to write some every day here. The quality will be rough, and I may not have as many cites as I usually do -- they take time -- but maybe I can relearn the skills which are such a part of who I am.

Picture!

In response to my last post, Barbara requested pictures of Elvis. Attempts to scan the ad were unsuccessful, due to my lack of ability with the equipment I had at hand, but I do have a picture snagged off the web from the Fire Mountain website. (By the way, the same tree is also in the Fire Mountain Comprehensive Jewelry Maker's catalog on page 249.)

Elvis is made from copper wire and malachite beads and 6/0 transparent green seed beads. The ornaments are made from a variety of beads. The snowmen are Swarovski faux pearls.

Elvis was a finalist in the 2007 Fire Mountain Beading Contest. I think they used him for the ad rather than the Christmas tree which did better in the judging simply because it showcased a wider range of their products. In any case, it's cool: I think of it as the equivalent of having a short story published.

Good News

I realize that, because this blog has been nearly comatose, nobody is reading much anymore, but just in case you are ....

One of my beading pieces, officially named "Lilliputian Christmas Tree" but unofficially called "Elvis," is featured in a full-page, back-cover ad for Fire Mountain Gems and Beads in the December 2008/January 2009 issue of Beadwork Magazine.

Full-page. Back-cover. In a slick, nationally-distributed magazine. Hot damn.

Bad News

I realize that I had let this blog go dormant, primarily because I was working.

I have been laid off.

What this means for the future of this blog remains to be seen.

It has been way too long since I have posted here. But I had to break radio silence simply to point out out that I have been a Tampa Bay Rays fan since before they stepped on the ever verdant Astroturf of Tropicana Field, and that the past week makes up for an awful lot of conversations which went like this:

"The X are doing really well this season," other baseball fan.
"I'm a [Devil] Rays fan myself," me.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!!!, or, if they are gentle souls, "Oh, I'm so sorry".

Ten years. Ten years of always being the miserable losing team -- not cute, not lovable, just bad. We weren't even the '62 Mets, who at least were amusing in an Ed Wood so-bad-it's-funny sort of way.

And this. Better than any of our dreams had a right to be. And with the strong possibility of getting better still. I just wish my Dad, who passed away the year before the franchise was awarded but who always wanted to see a MLB franchise in St. Pete, could see it. Not bad for a team representing not a state, not a city, but a body of water.


GO RAYS!



[Edited to add: This was from the year they reached the World Series, but lost to the Phillies.]

Two MIllion, Six Hundred Thirty Thousand, Eight Hundred and Eighty Minutes

As Keith Olbermann would say, today marks the 1827 day since the declaration of "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq.

1827 days. 365 days x 5 + 2 leap days = five years.

How do you measure the years?

In inches of newspaper columns about the war?
In number of times the photograph of George W. Bush, standing so faux-heroically on the deck of the carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln (the irony of that location reduces me to simple incoherence), has been displayed by an uncritical or pandering press?
In in number of chances Congress has had to do something -- cut off funding, and if that did not work, then at least try to impeach the man -- that they have failed to act upon?
In number of politicians that have said, in an error of critical thinking skills so profound it must make one despair of the American educational system, "We fight them over there so that we do not have to fight them over here?"

In terrorists created by our invasion and continued occupation of Iraq?

In lives. Always in lives.

4063 Americans dead. 29,000 wounded. God knows how many others with psychic damage as yet unrevealed.

That's just Americans. A 2006 study published in the British medical Journal the Lancet estimated the "excess deaths" from all causes during the war (violence from all sources (not just inflicted by American military), increased illness due to collapsed infrastructure leading to lack of sanitation. etc.) to be over 600, 000. Even the Iraq Body Count Project, which records only media cross-checked deaths due to violence, had reached over 90,000 as of April 30, 2008.

Families torn apart. Families living in fear. Both here and there.

We have lost other things as well: our innocence, our security, our way as a country. Sometimes, looking back five years, it seems like a surreal dream. We are fighting a war in which young men and women are dying and having their lives destroyed and we sit and argue over what a presidential candidate's pastor said. Or whether another one was telling the truth about something completely inconsequential that happened years ago in Bosnia.

Why the hell are we not talking about THIS? Why is not every news broadcast ending with casualty counts? Would it make us too uncomfortable? Damnit, we need to be made uncomfortable. And not just on anniversaries, every day. We need to be constantly reminded what this war is costing us in human lives and suffering.

Maybe then people in high places will get serious about ending this.

There have been five anniversaries; that there be no sixth before we leave Iraq might be too much to ask for, but there sure as hell better be no seventh.

Jeremiah Wright was Barack Obama's pastor. Hillary Clinton -- and others -- have said that Obama should have left his church after Wright made his controversial statements.

Okay.

But a pastor is not the church. He may run the services and have the most visible role and (in the worldly sense) be the most powerful man in the congregation, but he is not the community.

The community is...

The old ladies who have the prayer group who are always requesting God's help for everybody, whether they ask for it or not. The youth minister who makes sure that a bunch of unruly adolescents have a group to run with that won't lead them into trouble. The men who helped landscape the yard for the woman whose husband was dying of cancer. The mothers who organize the church nursery. The Sunday school teachers. The women who make sure that there are refreshments after the service.

It is the man struggling with addiction; the woman with mental illness. It is the family dealing with death and disability. It is those who found community after a long time wandering in the wilderness; it is those who are descended from generations of clergy and church leaders.

The church is people. At its best, the church is connection. It is the chance to experience God in other people.

How could he walk away from that?

I have been thinking a lot lately about the Jeremiah Wright controversy. Aside from the double standard -- what about all of the conservative politicians over the years who have embraced right-wing religious figures that condemned the United States for its perceived moral failings in language no less strong than that of Pastor Wright? -- Hillary Clinton and many others have stated that they would have just "walked out."

All of which makes me wonder -- what sort of church, if any, do these people attend? Is church a spectacle? Something they consume, like entertainment? Or a community, of which they are a part? Walking out on a show is one thing. Walking out on the community quite another.

I know, because I have done both.

I am a progressive who has spent a great many years in churches more conservative than myself. I was raised Roman Catholic, and was rebaptized (I refuse to say "born-again") as a Southern Baptist in the early 80s. In that time, I sat through many a sermon equating birth control (let alone abortion) with murder, and homosexuality as a grave sin, and (in the SBC) detailing why a woman is subordinate to a man. I gritted my teeth and stayed in my seat, because it mattered to me to be part of the body of Christ gathered in that place. So I stayed, even though my heart and conscience told me the church leaders were wrong.

And I was not alone: there are people in the Roman Catholic church who strive to change it to be more welcoming and more inclusive of all people. It was hard for me; I can only imagine how hard it must be for my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters. I had no calling to the priesthood, but other women I know did, and had to leave the faith into which they were born to follow that call.

The first time I walked out of a church, it was the Roman Catholic church in which I had grown up. On third Sunday in January, the priest gave his usual anti-abortion sermon. And it was a doozy.

Abortion was murder, he said. Women who had abortions were the vilest evil human beings on the face of the earth, for which there could be no forgiveness.

I sat frozen. I was home on winter break from college, my senior year. I knew that a friend of mine had had an abortion. I was saddened by her decision, even though I knew why she had made the decision she had made, and felt deep in my heart that she had acted out of fear and uncertainty. She was not the devil incarnate; she was a frightened woman in her early twenties.

I left. And as I left, I knew I was leaving for good, and it was hard. My mother was there, and a lot of the people I had grown up with in the church. I was walking out on the community of faith that had nurtured me from a child, and it hurt.

The second time I walked out on a sermon... was a very different experience. My husband and I were shopping for a church, and were in a large SBC church which I found uncomfortable from the beginning. And that was before the Tim LaHaye gave his guest sermon.

Yes, that Tim LaHaye. It was before the Left Behind books, with their atrocious writing and even worse theology, when he and his wife Beverly were the hottest shots around on the evangelical lecture circuit.

I expected the "abortion is murder" and the "women be subservient to your husband" exhortations. This was the Southern Baptist Convention, after all. But then LaHaye stated that women who placed their children in child care were selfish and evil and destroyers of society. What? I had had enough. I was sitting about two-thirds back in the sanctuary, in the middle of the row. I got up and left, as noticeably as I could, and my only regret was that I had not been able to get a seat closer to the front. I never looked back.

I had not been a part of a community, had never fit in at that church. I was a consumer, not a participant. Leaving meant nothing at all to me.

The third time I left a church service, I did so quietly, from the back, crying in anger and frustration, during a sermon given by a man I consider a friend at a church which was not merely a community but a home. It was hard, but necessary.

But this time, I did not leave the community. I went in the next week and talked to the priest about what he had said, and what I felt.* In the end, I did not change his mind, nor he mine, but we recognized that disagreement need not mean abandonment. Much like Barack Obama does when he talks about not abandoning the pastor who taught him the love of Christ, even though that pastor has made statements he vehemently disagrees with.

Because that's what being part of a faith community means.



* On at least one other occasion I argued with this pastor while he was giving his sermon. I didn't really intend to, I just couldn't help myself. He was actually amused. I would not suggest trying this with most clergy, however.

Sibling Rivalry...

Now the Manning boys have matching rings. How sweet.

Gold and Darkness

Today, January 31, 2008, is the fiftieth anniversary of America's entry into space. On January 31, 1958, the aptly named Explorer I took to the skies from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, headed to earth orbit where, besides being a "Anything you can do we can do better!" response to the Soviets, it amassed evidence of the Van Allen radiation belts.

Happy Anniversary.

It is an anniversary that falls amid other, more sobering, dates. January 27 marked 41 years since Apollo 1 caught fire on the pad at Kennedy Space Center, killing Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. January 28 was 22 years since Challenger exploded a minute after liftoff, killing Francis R. Scobee, Michael J. Smith, Judith A. Resnik, Ellison S. Onizuka, Ronald E. McNair Gregory B. Jarvis and Christa McAuliffe. As of tomorrow, February 1, it will have been five years (already?) since that horrible morning in 2003 when Columbia, the first and best of them, disintegrated on reentry over East Texas, killing Rick Husband, Willie McCool, Michael Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, David Brown, Laurel Clark and Ilan Ramon.

I suppose one could pontificate pompously on the price of exploration, and how great discoveries often require great sacrifice. It would be true, and crass, and trite.

I make no pretense to being a disinterested observer. My mortgage is paid for by programs which hopefully will someday send humans to Mars. I have lived with a man for twenty-five years who has space exploration as part of his psyche; a NASA lifer who just got his 20-year pin. A man for whom the question has never been "Should we go into space?"but "How do we get there?" And space fever is contagious.

I do not have an answer to the question "Is it worth it?" To state that a loss of any life makes the costs too high , in what is essentially still a complicated enterprise fraught with endless opportunities for disaster, is as wrong as saying that the death of brave men and women -- who knew that they were involved in a possibly catastrophic endeavor -- do not matter. I do think that exploration is part of who we are, for good or ill: we can no more as a people renounce our desires to boldly go where no man has gone before than we can renounce our passions for sunlight and moonlight. To explore is to learn, to know -- curiosity is a basic human drive.

So we do what we have always done: mourn the sad anniversaries and rejoice in the successes. They become entwined, one around the other, the past and the present and the future.

And through it all, we still reach for the stars.

The other reason I've not been around as much is my new time sink: beading.

Including things I've made for myself and those made for others (all my female relations got jewelry this Christmas), I've made probably a couple of dozen (mostly wire-wrap) bracelets (takes an hour), two or three necklaces (ditto), a fair number of pairs of earrings (which don't take that much time individually but it adds up -- and I've lost a shameful number of them), and spent time just playing around. All of which takes up time formerly spent blogging.

And then there is Elvis. And the baby Elvises.

Elvis is a Christmas tree made of malachite and copper wire, with ornaments. It takes an hour and a half just to string the "popcorn and cranberry" garland made of Ornela seed beads. Not to mention the little snowmen made of Swarovksi faux pearls. He stands 15 inches tall; the baby Elvises -- three smaller trees made for family and friends -- stand between six and nine inches tall. All of them were time and labor intensive. (At least by my standards -- I don't have the attention span to, say, knit sweaters.)

Elvis (so named for a LJ post about him which began "Elvis has left the building...") is my first effort at serious designing. He was a finalist (alas, not anything more) in the 2007-2008 Fire Mountain Gems Beading Contest. (Fortunately, Fire Mountain is on the West Coast -- I drove the piece to Oregon, since I saw no way to actually ship it. The smaller trees -- which did not have a base -- were taken East for Christmas on the plane, not shipped.) He also convinced me to keep my day job: I could never to hope to sell them for enough to compensate for the time spent making them. So now I just make them for closest people, blood and chosen.

Art Wars

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far far away…

Oops. Wrong opening.

Once upon a time, er, in Palo Alto, California, there was an arts non-profit organization. It was, although flawed, a good and exciting place. It had potential. It was going places. (Metaphorically speaking, although there was a certain possibility of physical expansion as well.)

Except …

Then it wasn’t. There were (unfounded) allegations of bad faith, backhanded deals and outright fraud. Good and honorable people were slandered, their work belittled. A coterie of people undertook to make what once was a wonderful place to work a battlefield.

So we quit. That’s right, WE. Most of the board of directors (leaving a few for a transition period) and the ENTIRE junior staff (all five of us, including the weekend receptionist) resigned on January 9. It was enough to make the pages of the Palo Alto Daily News (which had provided ongoing – albeit incomplete and biased – coverage of the controversy). Because, let’s face it, a wholesale staff resignation says something about an organization. And not anything really good, either.

The Executive Director, a.k.a., the boss I would walk over hot coals for, did not leave. I can say that I am not the only one who is worried about her.

As for me, two emergency rooms visits in one week with disorientation and heart palpitations, followed by overnight admissions to determine that I had had neither a heart attack nor a stroke, made me consider that just possibly this was not a good situation for me to be in. That, and developing stress-related hypertension.

Several of us have talked about how “someone should write a book about all of this.” So someone should – and from the staff viewpoint – but although the truth is a defense in libel actions I don’t have the extraneous cash just lying around to fork out for attorneys. To tell the truth, I am a tad nervous about this post, although I have tried to make it as milquetoast as possible and with nothing that is not verifiable from already published sources.

I still mourn, a bit: I had a job doing work I enjoyed for a boss I adored with coworkers I very much liked and respected. How many times do you hit that trifecta?

But as rough as the past three months have been, I would not have traded this experience for the world. It has given me a confidence that I previous lacked. I had been out of the paid workforce for a long time – and I now know that I can survive, even thrive there. (Before things headed south starting in late September but really going to hell in a hand-basket in late November, I was doing quite well, thank you.)

I learned that I have skills people value: I write well. I am not afraid of computers. (I became the office registration/membership sysadmin by virtue of saying “I can figure out how to do that,” rather than “No, I don’t know how to do that.”) I have a sense of humor. I have the capacity to be civil to almost anyone under trying circumstances – I almost never raised my voice at a customer, member or instructor (and God knows, some of them deserved it), even though I occasionally had to walk away without speaking. Once, when I was wondering aloud why I got so much less crap thrown my way than younger staff members (I was the oldest weekday staffer by probably fifteen years, other than the ED), an instructor told me that it was that I exuded an “air of competence.” (Either that, or word got around about that law business. I was asked about it a couple of times. Although I don’t refer to myself as a lawyer, and certainly don’t use it to intimidate people, in this case I’m not going to quibble.)

I’m flexible. I am willing to do what needs being done – the words “that’s not in my job description’ were never uttered to refuse a task, although they were sometimes used to point out that I needed to be allowed more time to work on my primary goals. My boss referred to me as the office “Utility Infielder.” It’s a title I held with pride: I wanted it on my business cards. (My actual title was “Education and Development Coordinator,” which is much more boring.)

But I also learned what stresses me out: people. Those interactions I mentioned above? Hypertension city. Even routine interpersonal interactions were, by the end of the day, exhausting. I like my coworkers a great deal, and I was fine dealing with them, but the general public, or the membership, or even the instructors? Tough. I dreaded just calling instructors. (With two or three exceptions.) At the end of the day, I would go home and just want to hide. My family hated this: I was so peopled-out from work I could barely stand to be around them, as much as I love them.

I am an introvert of the first order. People often don’t see this, because I can be a chatty and friendly introvert, but I am an introvert nonetheless. And I can force myself to do customer service, and do it well, but over time it takes a toll. (I have decided not to pursue a job that at least two people have recommended to me precisely because it would require a high level of interpersonal interaction, even though I know I could do a very good job.)

So this has been a learning experience. And I have come through it bloodied but unbowed. My blood pressure is a bit lower, which pleases my doctor. (Dr. W: “What did we say you should do for the blood pressure, other than quitting your job?”) My sense of humor is intact. I have had no lasting ill effects. My major concern is that a prospective employer will see that my last job was of a short duration (under nine months) and be scared off. All they would have to do is talk to my references, though, and it would be clear that it wasn’t my work that was at issue. (Do you think it would be tacky to attach the PA Daily News article announcing the board and staff resignations to my resume? Yeah, probably.)

I’ll still be around the organization a little bit: one of the instructors (one of those who wears a white hat, metaphorically) talked me into taking a watercolor class. Although taking classes was a benefit accorded to employees, I was always too frazzled to actually take advantage of it while I was there: it was always “next quarter, I’ll get around to taking….” watercolor, or printmaking, or stone carving, but I never did. I am tremendously excited: I expect I will be rather mediocre, but that’s okay. It’s going to be fun, anyway.

And there is a possibility I may do contract work for the organization in the future (I have a skill and experience set they need), but the circumstances will be very different. They need me. Hopefully, they are smart enough to realize this. If not, oh well. It's their loss.

And now I have at least some time to write, so you may be seeing more of me in this space. After all, there’s so much to write about…. The upcoming Olympics in China, why I hope the Giants win the Super Bowl, the funniest things my kids say, squirrels and popcorn machines, shoes and ships and sealing wax, cabbages and kings.

Oh, and yeah, isn’t there some sort of political thing going on, as well?

No matter. I'm still here.

Once more: Yes, we do torture.

`I don't know what you mean by "glory",' Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. `Of course you don't -- till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"'

`But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument",' Alice objected.

`When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'*

I listened to the President's protestations (admonitions to the rest of the world?) that America does not torture with sadness and a total lack of surprise. This administration, no, this man, either does not understand what communication means or really does not give a damn. Or probably both.

I actually would have more respect for George Bush if he came out and said "Yes, we torture. We believe it paramount to our national security. We grieve the fact that we have been driven to this point, but there it is." I would still find his actions abhorrent, but he would get some credit in my book for honesty.

Instead, we have this absurd kabuki whereby the President of the most powerful nation in the world acts as though by fiat or executive order he can change what words mean. As if words and what they mean were not the ultimate realm of democracy: for communication to have any meaning whatsoever, people have to have some sort of common understanding between them. And most of the world has an understanding of torture and what that word (or its equivalent in the local language) means. And it includes many of the things we have done to "suspected terrorists". It includes even more of what we send people away to other countries to have done.

All of the hand-waving , all of the Presidential pouting, will not change the fact that some of what we have done to prisoners is viewed by most of the world as torture and is viewed by much of the world as barbaric. As politician Al Smith once notably said, "No matter how thin you slice it, it's still baloney." Or, no matter what pretty names you attach to it (and doesn't extraordinary rendition have such a nice ring to it?) it is still evil.

I cannot believe we are still having this conversation. That it is still necessary to have this conversation.

God have mercy on our souls.

* Yes, I know I used this exact same quote from Alice in Wonderland in one of the first posts I made in this blog. This administration simply seems to call for it -- much the same way they seem to evoke references to Orwell's "Newspeak."

I was not going to write about the school race cases the Supreme Court handed down recently. I'm sort of burned out, to tell you the truth, and there is nothing they could do at this point that would surprise me very much.

However, there is a catchphrase that I've seen repeated numerous times around the fluorosphere*: "The Supreme Court overruled Brown v. Board of Education."

No, they didn't.

For people who don't remember, Brown v. Board held that a government entity -- a school board -- cannot discriminate as a matter of law on the basis of race in admitting students to schools.

Nothing in these decisions would allow a school board to set up as a school where students of one race were allowed but students of another were not. Not remotely.

Yes, these decisions make it hard for school districts to take actions that correct for past segregation. Not allowing any consideration of race in effect acts as though segregation never took place, as though differences in racial makeup of schools were some sort of random historical accident, not a result of decades of deliberate government action. Creating a society where there is truly a level playing field, where the echoes of past evils do not continue to plague future generations, has become more difficult after the actions of Roberts, et al.

But that is a very different creature than allowing the reinstitution of "separate but equal" as a matter of law.

It is very important for progressives not to exaggerate the damage done by the Court, or indeed by any of the right-wing. It is always bad policy to do so, but right now it is paramount.

Because so much of what they do is so appalling as it is. The undercutting of worker protections (Ledbetter v. Goodyear, Inc.), allowing Congress to usurp doctors as medical decision makers concerning late-term abortions (Gonzales v. Carhart), ruling taxpayers have no standing to challenge the use of federal funds to faith-based organizations (Hein v. Freedom from Religion Foundation), the gutting of campaign finance regulation (Wisconsin Right to Life v. FEC). All of these are enough to give most people who are left-of-center (or even left-of-right) nightmares **

Exaggerating simply causes progressives to lose credibility. It makes it easy for others to point and say: "See? You're exaggerating. It can't be that bad."

We already face that danger when we speak the stone-cold truth. We can't afford to do otherwise.




* A much nicer word than "blogosphere."

**It is also important to recognize the things the court has done right, among them: stating that a passenger in a car has a right to challenge the constitutionality of a traffic stop, and staying the execution of a Texas death-row inmate who, the state of Texas's insistence as to his mental competence notwithstanding, claimed that the state was executing him to prevent him from preaching the word of Jesus.

A reminder

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

*********
Art. II, Sec. 4.
The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

The Reason For the Day

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected, whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these united Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States, that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. — And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

Letting go.

It's been a year today since Nadia died.

I think it's time I took her number off my cell phone.

Rock of ages...

One of the fun things about having a teenager is sharing music. He introduces me to Sublime and Gnarls Barkley, I introduce him to Eric Burden and the Animals and Jefferson Airplane*. It's a two way street; albeit with a lot more traffic coming my way since I seem to have raised a major-league (or aspiring to be major-league) rock music geek. It's rare that I can actually introduce him to a band he hasn't heard before, whereas he has managed to get me to listen to people I didn't listen to when I was young, such as Led Zeppelin and Frank Zappa, in addition to more contemporary acts. (And he has a fondness for oddities: Tori Amos's cover of "Smells Like Teen Spirit," e.g., which is simply wonderful. His fondness for heavy thrash metal I find less explicable and less lovely, but then I suppose there have to be some generational differences.)

We have free-ranging discussions about technique, meaning, musicality. Yesterday's discussion centered on why "Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen worked, while "Mr. Roboto" by Styx (or anything else by Styx, for that matter) didn't. (Namely, Queen obviously was not taking themselves seriously. Whereas Syx took themselves far more seriously than any of their music deserved.)

What I've always found interesting, both with him and his two younger brothers, is how to explain songs that depend upon experience for their meaning. Mostly, I just say "You'll understand it when you're older," which is seen by my children as being either lazy or evasive, depending. This is not about sexual content, either, but about, say, complicated relationships ("Drops of Jupiter" by Train) or coming to terms with the fact that life is uncertain and Truth-with-with-a-capitol-T is unknowable ("Closer to Fine" by the Indigo Girls). (I tried to explain that last one to my ten-year-old, and after he said "I still don't get it" several times, settled on "You'll get it when you're older." He was annoyed.)

And then there is one of my very favorite songs: "My Back Pages," as written by Bob Dylan and performed by The Byrds.

"It doesn't make any sense," my eldest said.

"Oh, yes it does," I chuckled. "It's about not being as smart as you think you are."

"I still don't get it."

"Don't worry, you'll understand it when you're, oh, forty."

*glare*

It's true, though. I listen to "My Back Pages" and either smile wryly or grimace faintly, recognizing myself in its verses:

Half-wracked prejudice leaped forth
"Rip down all hate," I screamed
Lies that life is black and white
Spoke from my skull. I dreamed
Romantic facts of musketeers
Foundationed deep, somehow.
Ah, but I was so much older then,
I'm younger than that now.

What, you think I'm a ranting, moralizing crusader now? You should have known me when I was twenty. I'm positively mellow by comparison.

Yes, my guard stood hard when abstract threats
Too noble to neglect
Deceived me into thinking
I had something to protect
Good and bad, I define these terms
Quite clear, no doubt, somehow.
Ah, but I was so much older then,
I'm younger than that now.

Indeed I am.


*That would be Jefferson Airplane, as opposed to Jefferson Starship, which he had heard and pretty much dismissed as being lightweights.

When Mercedes Benz purchased the rights to “Mercedes Benz” by Janis Joplin for a car commercial, it seemed like someone at the ad agency was trying to be too hip and ironic for their own good.

When Ronald Reagan wanted to use “Born in the USA” as a campaign theme song, it was clearly a case of “unclear on the concept.” Make that completely clueless.

When Cadillac appropriated Led Zeppelin’s “Rock and Roll” to sell sedans, it was a boring company trying to remake its image.

When Royal Caribbean Cruises chose Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life” to sell vacations, you can bet they depended upon a large segment of their target population being unfamiliar with the ode to wretched excess.

But the low-water mark for the misuse of great rock songs* in pursuit of filthy lucre has always been Nike’s “Revolution” campaign….

Until the other day, when I saw a Kaiser Permanente ad set to Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a Changin’.” The voiceover prattled on to the effect that it was time to make a revolution in your lifestyle habits.

No….. just….no.

A generation’s greatest declaration of war upon the times they in which they found themselves, reduced to an exhortation to exercise and eat right.

Solipsism is alive and well in America.


*Of course, there is always the misuse of classical or religious music in commerce. A few years ago, when Mitsubishi used seventh movement to Copeland’s “Appalachian Spring” in a commercial, I wanted to throw something through my television. “Appalachian Spring” – or at least the movement used in the ad – lifts the melody from the Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts”, a deep and profoundly moving piece of anti-materialist music.

Trying to reason ...*

Today, June 1, is the start of the 2007 hurricane season.

The state of Florida has declared today a Day of Prayer. I object to this strenuously as a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

Having grown up in the state, and having family within spitting distance of the Gulf, I can certainly understand the sentiment, however.

Here's hoping we all get through the season with the minimal amount of damage possible.**



*It's a Jimmy Buffet song.
**Over at Making Light, Jim MacDonald has some information to help keep you safe.

I'm calmer now...

And I'm ready to talk. No, make that ready to listen. I have nothing to say.

That's not "I have nothing to say to you" that's "I don't know what to say anymore." I have followed the directions in the Democracy 101 handbook -- as have a large number of my fellow citizens -- and it has gotten us bupkiss. I mean, if I felt I were alone.... But polls show consistently that a majority of people in this country oppose the war. What has that gotten us? A "surge"! And a Congress too lily-livered to actually stare down the president, even though only one in three Americans approve of the job the man is doing. So if you were a Bush supporter, and now aren't, and can think of anything at all to do that might actually change things, short of violence or overthrowing the government, I'm all ears.

In any case, I decided to post tonight not because I had all that much to say but because I really did not want last night's -- er, this very early morning's -- rant to sit all atop my blog for days on end. I'm not going to take it down; I figure I need to live with my mistakes as long as they're not actionable, but on the other hand I don't want it to be the first thing I see for n days until I can get the next post of substance finished.

So, just odds and ends...

Substantive posts I am working on, to be finished on Island Time, are about the upcoming Florida Democratic primary election and how that's screwed six ways to Sunday already and it's not even 2008. And about Cindy Sheehan folding her tents and heading home and what it means for everyone else who opposes the war. And about, what else? voting rights and what it means in the context of the Supreme Court, and ways in which the FEC has been politicized under the current administration. Oh, and at some point I want to do a post about what the Justices did before they became Justices, and what that means for the country. Hopefully at least one of those will see the light of day.

Oh, and one on Wikipedia and Devon Island, but that one is taking a while. I was going to do one on SixApart/LiveJournal and their tendency to run around like chickens without heads, but that seems a little pointless now.

On a more frivolous note, I have taken up beading.


(That would be sodalite, freshwater pearl, sterling silver balls and wire, and carnelian and lapis lazuli chips.)

You should see the aragonite, aventurine, and mother of pearl sterling silver bracelet I made. I'll post a picture once I get around to scanning one in.

It's getting late, and I'm getting tired, so I think I'll turn in before I get cranky again.

Sleep tight, boys and girls, and don't let the bedbugs bite. Or anything else for that matter.

I don't want to hear it.

It's very late, and I'm very tired, and very angry, and shouldn't be posting at all, but you know what?

If you are as completely, wordlessly outraged by the Ledbetter decision as I am, or the Attorney General Scandal, or the insanity that is the "surge" in Iraq and...

You voted for Bush in either of the last two elections? I don't want to hear what you have to say. You have forfeited all claim to complain to me of this man's actions. There is no way in hell we would be in the place where we are if GWB were not in the Oval Office. Okay, so I am willing to cut people slack for 2000, even though I think a lot of his actions over the next seven years were predictable even before he took office, since the press did a piss-poor job of actually covering, you know, the ISSUES. But 2004? No way in hell. You people had four years to watch the man in office. And you voted for him anyway.

And the effect of that lapse of judgment on your part will be with us for a very long time: those two new justices Bush appointed created the most reactionary court since... I don't know when... a majority made up of men who live in a cloud-cuckooland where Congressmen are better able to make medical decisions for women than their own doctors and where women will of course know the moment they are being paid in a discriminatory manner so they can file suit before the six-months statute of limitations runs. And those men? Are all relatively young. We will have to put up with a Supreme Court that doesn't give a damn about actual living human beings -- as opposed to fetuses and corporations -- for the next decade, at least, probably two.

And you people who voted for a third party candidate? Revel in your sense of superiority. I don't want to hear from you either. Politics is messy. And yes, the system is not perfect, and yes there are a great many things I am not happy about with the Democratic party both in 2004 and now. (A very big one would be the non-filibuster that did not keep Alito off the Court.) But sometimes the choice between the lesser of two evils is a very stark one indeed. By declaring yourself above the fray, you helped throw it for the other side. Feel good about that, do you?

And you people who did not bother to vote at all? I really don't want to hear from you. There were people who were unfairly denied the right to vote (through erroneous roll purges in Florida and other voter suppression tactics) and people in our history have died to get people the right to vote and you treat it like it doesn't matter. It mattered. Oh, God, how it mattered. How it matters still.

I know I will get over this, and be able to talk to people with other viewpoints, soon, but right now, I just need to get all this down... primal scream therapy for the politically strangled soul.

I'll be back to normal soon. I hope.

It's been twenty-four hours since I found out, and I still can't believe it.

I expected the ban on partial-birth abortions to be upheld. I was hoping it wouldn't be, but I thought the chances with the new make-up of the Supreme Court of it being struck down were slim at best.

But this....

Yesterday, the Supreme Court in all its wisdom essentially gutted the right of employees to sue over discriminatory pay. Well, five of them did, and that's all that's needed.

In Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire, the Supreme Court stated that the six-month statute of limitations for bringing claims did not arise from discovery of the pay disparity, or from continuing discrimination, but from the date the discriminatory act -- the original awarding of less pay for equal work -- occurred.

Lily Ledbetter was originally paid the same as her male counterparts, but over time received smaller raises than they were. After 19 years, she was being paid $6,000 less than the lowest paid man at the same position. Performance, said Goodyear. (Performance? If she was so bad, why did you keep her around for 19 years?) Gender, said Ms. Ledbetter, and a jury agreed with her to the tune of roughly 200K compensatory and a whopping 3.3 million punitive damages.

Take special note of those punitive damages. We're not talking about a minor mishap. Clearly what the tire giant did was outrageous enough to inspire a jury to try and send a message to Goodyear Corporation.

Too bad, said SCOTUS. She sued too late. It didn't matter that they had been systematically paying her less than her coworkers for years, she had to have sued within six months of the first time they decided to pay her less than her male colleagues.

Talk about not living in the real world. A woman -- or a black man, or an older person -- may become aware of discrimination only after the statutory 180 days has run. According to this ruling, that woman (or black man, or older worker) is just shit out of luck, now, isn't she (or he)?

This decision gives an employer a way out for years of discrimination. If future pay raises are based on pay decisions made earlier (i.e., when raises are percentage of wages), all an employer has to do is state that their current pay decisions are equitable and ignore the effects of old injustices.

As Ruth Bader Ginsberg pointed out -- in a dissent read from the bench, which is usually reserved for opinions which the writer feels particularly strong about -- pay discrimination is categorically different than discrimination in promotion or firing/hiring. Who works for a company, and what position they hold, is pretty much public knowledge, pretty quickly. As for who gets paid what....

Why, yes, my employer makes all of their salaries public -- doesn't yours? No? Well, actually, mine doesn't either. I have no idea what my co-workers at the small nonprofit where I work make. I have never worked in place where information about other people's salaries were readily available, or certainly not in close enough to real time to allow for a lawsuit under the reading of the statute that the idiots in the majority have adopted.

Ginsburg is right about something else -- this paves the way for more discrimination lawsuits, not fewer: "Today's decision counsels: Sue early on, when it is uncertain whether discrimination accounts for the pay disparity you are experiencing." From a worker's perspective, it's a damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario: without clear evidence that discrimination is behind the pay disparity, what lawyer will take the case? By the time the discrimination becomes established enough to be worth having a case, though, you are barred by the statute of limitations.

All of which will be quite good for employer/worker relations, I suppose. Not to mention productivity.

Ginsburg urged Congress to take action. I do too -- and please contact your House members and Senators so we can fix this NOW.

It's too late for Lily Ledbetter. But not for the rest of us.

Fifteen second movie review...

I saw Shrek the Third over the weekend. All I can say is...

Best use of Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" ever.

Hi ho, hi ho...

After several years away from the paid job market, I'm working for money again. It's the first time I've worked in an office in over a decade (my last paid job was freelance -- I only went to the office once in two-years to work out a payroll problem).

Okay, so it's a minimal part-time job, it's still a job. I'm working for a nonprofit that I've been volunteering at for nearly a year.

It's amazing how being paid changes my perspective. Before I was completely confident -- what were they going to do if I screwed up, dock my pay? Fire me? Yeah, right. Now, of course, they can do those things. And I find I'm nervous to the point of driving myself to drink. Well, not really, but I think about it. I've driven myself to chocolate, certainly.

I really like the work I've been assigned. I feel a need to do it as well as possible and therefore am probably taking longer than I might otherwise, but by golly I am going to do this right. This is a problem.

It's a problem because I could easily see myself putting in a lot of uncompensated overtime. Not because I was asked to, mind you, just because I really want to get this done, and done well. I have trouble walking away before I have gotten to "a good stopping point," and have trouble not fretting about it when I am not at work. I have to resist the temptation to go in to work when I am not required to be there.

Obsessive, much?

It's going to be a struggle for me, finding a good work/life balance here. And I am worried that the stress I am subjecting myself to will make me stupid -- it's already doing so. And I'm worried about burnout -- and that if I burnout, it will be from self-induced stress, not from the work itself.

Still, a job! What fun.

"Hi ho, hi ho..."

Just a thought...

Whenever anyone starts decrying the fact that those numbers about the monetary value of the work that stay-at-home mothers do are just so much hooey,* and that the real problem is that working mothers are never paid enough to "make their labor profitable" (as I heard a commentator on NPR say yesterday), and yet in their entire five-minute diatribe didn't utter the word "fathers" once, it means they really don't get it.

As long as we as women -- as mothers -- allow the discussion to be framed (or have it framed for us) as a matter of how to structure motherhood, instead of how to structure parenthood and family life in general, nothing will really change. Single parenting aside (and I recognize it's a big aside, but the nastiest battles in the mommy wars are fought between women who are married but who made different choices), raising a family is a joint responsibility between (and among, I suppose, in multi-partner households) the adults responsible for the children.

All the adults. Not just those with two X chromosomes.

* Which they are. The commentator -- whose name escapes me -- rightly observed that the accurate cost of what a stay-at-home mother's labor is worth is what you would pay a nanny and housekeeper. Hers made $35K a year, not over $130K. Of course, there is a question of whether or not she underpays her help, but in general her point is well-taken.

Not a lot of people read the blog. Therefore there have been no trolls and I have had nothing to moderate.

However, I have permission be as ruthless as I need to be in the cause of blog civility here. I even have a certificate from Teresa Nielsen Hayden (the first name in blog moderation -- inventor of disemvowelling) granting me such. (Said certificate was fetchingly designed by Patrick Nielsen Hayden.) Not that, as Ms. Nielsen Hayden pointed out, any of this isn't anything other than common sense, or that any of us really need anybody to tell us that we can do exactly what the certificate suggests we do.

I could do a long post on this, but I mainly wanted to post the certificate. It's hysterical.

Birth Days.

I am 46 today.

I celebrated by meeting with the head of Career Services at Stanford Law School.

It had been a long, long time since I had been on the SLS campus. I have even avoided driving anywhere on the Stanford Campus other than the Medical Center. There is a great deal of “What if someone asks just what I’ve been doing the past fifteen years?” and “You mean you spent sixty thousand dollars, and took up valuable classroom space in a top five law school, to stay home and raise children?” that I worry about.

I have watched as classmates went on to do great things – running for mayor of San Francisco, becoming Executive Director of the ACLU. (And let me just say upfront that Matt and Tony are terrific people who deserve every bit of hard earned success they get.) Stanford alums tend to be high profile people.

So I put on business casual (I figured a suit would be too much) -- except for the pantyhose -- and my best no-nonsense-I'm-a-lawyer-don't-mess-with-me-demeanor (usually reserved for dealing with unpleasant airline gate agents) and sallied forth. After I got there I was much more relaxed -- I reminded myself that I had a right to be there, dammit, I have a piece of paper on my wall which proclaims that I went there and not only got a J.D. but graduated with distinction. Whatever I chose to do afterward, that was *not* chopped liver.

Susan Robinson, the Dean of Career Services, is a lovely woman, and she helped me identify a couple of areas of interest: namely, education disabilities (one of my sons is high-functioning autistic) and election and voter law (gee, I wonder why I might be interested in that?). She gave me information about how to indentify opportunities and look for volunteer opportunities in each field, so as to create networks (something I've never been very good at before, but I'm trying). She also talked with me a little bit about resume construction and gave me pointers about people working with homemakers returning to professional positions.

It feels like I am embarking on a large new adventure. I am by turns exhilarated and terrified. It definitely means stretching out of my comfort zone.

Really, a good way to spend a birthday, with a new undertaking.

Virginia Tech: such unspeakable tragedy. 33 dead, as of the time I read of it, and many more wounded. May the good Lord have mercy on us, and comfort the families of the poor students who died or were wounded, in body or mind. I can only imagine the damage done by seeing people you know blown away by a murderous nutcase with a handgun.

And what was the response of the White House to the shootings at Virginia Tech? According to a White House spokesman, the president offered his prayers to the victims and the people of Virginia. "The president believes that there is a right for people to bear arms, but that all laws must be followed," spokeswoman Dana Perino said.

Thirty three people lie dead. But somehow, the president thought it necessary to talk about the right to bear arms. As if any of the laws on the books would have made one damn but of difference to the shooter.

We don't know the specifics yet of how the gunmen got his weapons, or his ammunition. There will be time later for consideration of action to be taken. There will be time to talk of guns, and rights, and the intersection between the right to bear arms and reasonable regulation that can help all of us be safer.

Now is not that time. Now is the time to mourn, to weep.

It is not the time to play to your political base.... it is the time to remember the fallen.

And so I'm back.

I gave up blogging for Lent. It was an interesting experience.

Originally, I was giving up the Interenet for Lent. That lasted, oh, forty-eight hours. I am a stay-at-home mother with significant health issues, and some days the only significant intellectual interaction I have with people over the age of sixteen is on peoples' blogs.

Instead, I simply didn't blog myself. I had gotten to a point of obsessiveness. I was thinking about blogging all the time, even though I was not writing all that much: everything become potential post fodder, considered and discarded according to its possible readability. I was checking my site-meter stats to see if anyone was reading me -- and who, and where from. I became, as my friend Jen put it, like those people who go through life looking through the lens of a camera, who can't simply look at things without needing to take pictures of them. I would joke that I needed one of these shirts.

So I took time off. I started experiencing things for themselves. Or not -- I found myself much less dialed into to current events, the scandal du jour of the Bush administration (both Walter Reed and the prosecutors scandal broke during Lent) and the turmoil in the Anglican Communion. I found myself struck by outrage-fatigue. I wasn't trying to communicate what was important to anyone, so I found myself saying "What does it all matter? Nobody's paying attention anyway." The act of writing about what is going on the world helps keep me engaged in the world.

I still have decisions to make about the direction I take this blog. In the past I have written both personal posts and political posts. I'm not sure if that dichotomy has served me well. I would like to actually attract a steady readership (which means, of course, I have to settle into a steady writing routine.)

I'm sure I'll still be feeling my way. But for now, at least, I'm back.

Eastertide

Alleluia, Christ has risen!

The Lord has risen indeed, Alelluia, Alleluia!

A day late...

I'm out of here for awhile, until the second week in April. I don't blog a lot but I think about blogging a lot, and I spend an insane amount of time lurking around other people's blogs. I avoid doing work I need to do.

Lent seems to be a good time to change that, to re-orient myself. So that I seek out people -- not distraction.

Besides, anything but giving up chocolate, don't you know.

My take on the Edwards blogger controversy

A recent kerfluffle in the blogosphere has been the hiring/non-firing/resignation of Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan from the blogging post for John Edwards campaign. William Donohoe, conservative head of the Catholic League, had screamed for the two to be fired for alleged anti-Catholic and profane remarks that they had made on their personal blogs, Pandagon and Shakespeare's Sister, respectively. The bloggers on the left, correctly, had pointed out the Donohoe was no one to be calling anyone bigoted, given his own history of anti-Semitic public remarks. In some cases I read, they also criticized Edwards for being too lukewarm in support of the embattled bloggers.

Edwards said that he found the remarks offensive, but that he had talked to the bloggers and was satisfied that they had not intended to malign anyone's faith, and was not going to fire them (they later resigned anyway). Should he have been more forceful?

No. His campaign never should have hired them in the first place.

Look, I am all for free speech. I support McEwan's and Marcotte's right to make the most outrageous and inflammatory remarks on their blogs they desire. And to do so free from the intimidation that has been thrown their way by fanatics -- inflamed by people like Bill Donohoe. They should be free from having to deal with people lobbing obscene and hateful names at them -- not to mention threatening email. The vile and personal -- and potentially violent -- abuse that these two woman have been subject to is a scary reminder that there are some very sick people out there, indeed.

But their inalienable right to free speech does not bring with it the right to any given platform they desire, even if they are not reporting on their own views. A presidential campaign, like it or not, does have to consider all potential voters, for the simple reason that if the candidate is successful all of those voters will be his constituents. This does not mean a candidate needs to pander, but it does mean that candidates -- and the people who work for them -- should strive not to gratuitously give offense. When you refer to a segment of the populace as "wingnut Christofascists," as McEwan did in one post, or speculate about what would have happened had the Virgin Mary taken an emergency contraceptive as Marcotte did, it is beyond credulity that you did not intend such statements to be offensive. Of course such statements were intended to be offensive: just to people who the bloggers believed to be not worth caring about.

The bloggers have claimed that what they wrote on their own blogs is irrelevant, since they would be reporting on their candidates views and not their own. So this means that if John McCain hired Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, known to espouse views that sometime cross the line of common decency (most recently a suggestion that the U.S. should assassinate Iranian government officials and scientists), the left-blogosphere would not immediately jump on this as (further) proof of McCain's lack of fitness for office, and demand that he go? Riiiiiggghht. And I have some lovely prime real estate in Monroe County, Florida I'd like to talk to you about.

A president has to be careful whom they assume to be beyond the pale of civilized discourse. That the people surrounding the current occupant of the White House seem to believe otherwise and resort to stating that those who oppose them "embolden the enemy" doesn't change that.

Bloggers and commenters I have read have argued that there is too much deference given to religion, and that one should be able to discuss or challenge religious principles without being attacked as being disrespectful of religion and religious people. Point taken. But the answer is not to drag discussion of religion -- or the intersection of religion and politics -- into the sewer where so much of the rest of public discourse takes place these days. And I'm not referring to merely the presence or absence of profanity: the right-wing blogosphere, which prides itself on refraining from four-letter words, contains many a high-profile cesspool. Simply because something is not profane does not render it not obscene. (See above suggestion by Glenn Reynolds.)

It is possible to discuss politics and religion -- heatedly, even -- without viewing the people on the other side as less than human. And unless we do that, the breech in the national fabric is only going to get wider.

Because, whether people in the blogosphere, right and left, like it or not, we're all in this together, "profane anti-Christian bloggers" and "Christofascists" alike. The world is a complicated and nuanced place. We need to grow up* and act like we recognize that fact.



UPDATE: You know, I really shouldn't bother writing these, since between the time I started writing this (I write things, and then put them away to think about them) RMJ of Adventus came along and wrote about the whole situation more completely, more cogently, and more eloquently than I could. You can read his take on things here, here, here and here. Heck, just read the blog. It's worth it.


* Ovlzl has compared the blogosphere to high school. That sounds about right.