The hollowing out of public education – no longer teaching civics and good citizenship – and those in power feeding our fears, telling us to fear anyone who does not look, act, or believe as we do.
So much is happening around us it is overwhelming – on purpose.
As one person we cannot possibly hold onto all the terror.
Hitler rose to power and was followed so fervently because he, like Trump, knew how to manipulate and feed into fear. How is 150,000, and counting, dead Americans acceptable? How is taking children and babies from their mothers and families for seeking a better life in America not reviled?
Trump successfully got people to believe “those” people are the rapists, murderers, gang members, looters, lazy grifters – when he is credibly accused, with current court proceedings against him by at least 2 women, backed up by at least 32 other women, of rape and molestation, and several of those he harmed were children. He has robbed people of their wealth, and his wealthy ‘gang’ is wreaking havoc across our nation. I’d rather see a territorial street gang in one city, than a cross-country crime spree USING OUR MONEY!
But that does not bother anyone? That does not disqualify him?
Learned helplessness is a thing. But I am not helpless. There are answers, and they are not easy, and they require dedication and sacrifice – sometimes our lives – but not one movement has changed anything without great disruption to the status quo. My right to vote was granted through spilled blood. Our right to direct representation was a desperate fight.
We are there. Oppressed people, and thankfully their allies, have come to the point where their oppression is so onerous that they would rather die fighting mob and dictatorial rule than be stomped on anymore.
And the resistance to their uprising among other, mostly ignorant, citizens is painful to witness.
We are so good at xenophobic responses when it is the people who look like America’s idea of the “right” color and class status doing the greatest harm.
Yeah, I could calm down and go for a walk or something, and I do step away and recharge, but this is not ending.
Maybe this is what my life has been all about. I have seen the writing on the wall since I was young. I did not witness an assassinated President, and his brother, or Martin Luther King, or Malcolm X, or any other freedom fighters in our nation, but notice how the ones who are killed are fighting oppression.
Other modern presidents have had assassination attempts, such as Reagan, but it was a crazed person, not a coordinated effort to kill his message or movement.
This world is ruled by evil, but good gets to moderate it as best we can. I am sure I contribute to the evil in ways I might not even realize, but I am championing good to win.
Our summer has been hot and humid – and I’ve already heard “Hot enough for ya?” greetings where a nod and a commiserating look suffices in answer.
We have been edging into drought since late May again for the third year in a row. There was no rain for over a month, but then a string of storms descended, like a fire hose on a match, and the town crews got busy removing felled branches and trees in the aftermath, while the electric company restores power, and residents clean up their yards and assess damage to their gardens or land.
We were lucky. Our garden sits to the side of the house, looking like it has no idea what the bother was.
Our neighbor’s weren’t so lucky.
A large tree crashed down, gouging into a long swath of the neighbor’s prized asparagus patch, the tree branches swiping through most of the row of blackberry bushes he planted last fall – sending not-quite-ripe berries scattered through their yard. Their asparagus which had grown tall and spindly with seeds, is no more. The roots are deep though, and next spring will likely see a new crop – and if the neighbors are brave, they’ll plant blackberry bushes again.
We pick ourselves back up and move on, if we haven’t been flattened. Maybe pieces were scattered over our soul’s yard – crumpled, raw, and overwhelming to look at, but we start somewhere. Maybe picking up bigger pieces and try to salvage whatever we can.
The job is too big for a day, and time fills in with other necessary tasks, and days turn to weeks turn to months – but we see it out there. It’s not going anywhere until we do something about it.
After inspecting our oblivious growing garden, I pull on my work gloves and start picking up branches and twigs in the neighbor’s yard and put them on the burn pile for next spring.
My neighbor is pushing bigger limbs with his tractor back into the tangle of vines and poplar trees that line the back of his property. I wave and smile and after he’s through we look at the damage together.
“Could have been worse,” he says with a grimace.
“Could have been better too,” I think, but just give a sympathetic smile and return to picking up some of the debris before heading back into the coolness of my house.
“Mom, mom, mom, mom, mom, mom!” I just kept saying it over and over for several days, as if I could conjure you. I was lost. My guttural howls could not take away the emptiness.
I knew I would not be prepared. How could I be?
I thought our relationship was solid and clean, but regret has inched in anyway. Why couldn’t I save you? Did I do enough? Was I a good daughter, Mom? Did you feel loved and cared about?
You were.
I am limited, and I wish with all my heart I could have made your life better. I never got beyond thinking about how to do that, and everything we talked about doing felt like moving a mountain.
I imagine you’re free and flying around in the spirit world – or have you reincarnated (which was your fervent desire)?
Doe taking direction from Jerri – “Come on, Mom, it’ll be hilarious!”Doe having a great time: “Take the damn picture,” she said.
It breaks my heart to think you might have stepped into another life – abandoning me again. I was too much for you – your children were too much – so you left, even if not physically. I was a child and needed you Mom. All your children needed you. I still feel like I need you.
I can understand how difficult your life was, and I know you loved us, but love is also a verb.
I forgave you as life went on, and I thought we got whole. I guess the onion metaphor is apt, but how many damn layers are there?
You did make living amends when I had my son, your only grandson. You were such a great grandmother. You helped heal so many of my childhood wounds, but your passing opened them again.
Grandma Doe with AustenDoe with her daughters and grandson 2017
I wanted you to be here my whole life, as unrealistic as that is. I would have kept you suffering in your painful body for my selfish desire to have you near me, like I owned you or something. Like you somehow belonged to me – and I think that’s a trauma bit from when I was so very little, and so much terribleness was happening in our family, and in the world – just like it is again.
You’re lucky Mom. You got out. You’re not suffering anymore.
Do you miss being here though? Or is it better “there”? Where is“there”? Are you conscious? Is consciousness outside of the body, and we just believe it’s in the brain, or are you completely gone?
Please forgive me for my lack, Mom. Please forgive what I couldn’t manage. I don’t know if it was my job to make life the best it could be for you, but it feels like I failed you.
I liked our conversations and our mostly shared values and morals. I am grateful for the time I got with you. I am so glad I was close enough physically and emotionally to help you and spend time with you regularly.
Doe and Jerri in 2010Laurel Lake swim day
I had wanted to do a “Tuesdays with Morrie” thing with you, but never got it together. I was going to call it “Wednesdays with Mom.” I have never been accused of being original.
Today is Wednesday, so, I guess I’ve begun. If you’re answering me, I’m too dull to hear it. I keep waiting for a sign that you’re still around, but I would doubt whatever you would send me anyway – and you probably know that – so why waste your energy?
Energy is something I absolutely know you still have because of the first law of thermodynamics: energy is neither created nor destroyed. It can only change form or increase. Physicist I am not. I don’t even understand much of it beyond the simplest of terms. Not that I don’t try. I blame my love of standing in front of Dad’s Lincoln Continental and breathing in the leaded gas fumes coming out of the car’s grill for my intelligence deficits. Sweet Jesus, why didn’t anyone stop me? I was 5? Did you even know about that, Mom? I doubt it.
Now, of course, we know that the leaded gas was spewing toxic lead into the air and landing everywhere, especially into my tender lungs and organs and bones as I stood there breathing deeply.
You wanted to make it to 103 years to best your Dad’s 102 years on earth, but you missed 90 by two months instead. Still, not a bad stretch.
I believed you though. My whole life you repeated that like a mantra. You were going to live to 103. It was just a fact we all accepted. You seemed to know, but obviously it was just hope.
Doe March 22, 1930 – January 2, 2020
And maybe you would have made that milestone if you didn’t drink so much, or if you had let us clean up your mildewing/ moldy stuff trailer while you lived – or if I was able to follow through on getting you a new-to-you trailer, or a tiny house that could have given you those 13 more years?
I know that what I was able to do was worthwhile. I have some sweet memories to savor. My job now is to keep the bitterness from spoiling them.
I love you Mom.
Doe circa 1936High School graduation 1947Doe 1950 something
I haven’t been here in a while. It’s all different, just like out in the world.
Pandemic, Epidemic
I’ve never been in one before – likely, neither have you. I say likely because there have been some epidemics – Ebola (continuing, but largely contained), MERS, and SARS (of which COVID-19 is one).
The article talks about a locale that has just ‘opened up’ and how everyone is feeling so chipper, and alive, and connected – and holy shit, isn’t that wonderful?
I get it. I do. But if/when they’re sucking air on a ventilator, or their loved-ones are, whom they blithely exposed to a deadly virus, will they feel the same?
I read with envy and despair. A moment of pleasure means more to them than coping with hardship. They would totally eat the first marshmallow in the marshmallow challenge.
So, no amount of dead is too much for them. Some were quoted as how much this has been ‘overblown’. Did they see any fucking news for the last few months? Overblown?
Under-counted is the reality – but hey, whatever you need to tell yourself! Just stay the hell away from me and my family and friends. Cool? Cool.
The commune/cult I was in was fond of talking about Earth changes. They weren’t the prognosticator of such views/predictions, but they championed them. I see how they were on the right path in that instance. Even a broken clock is right twice a day…
The Earth has been ravaged by the worst among us – for years – and we’re finally paying the price.
I have been complicit too. I like my car. I like the open road, but not the pollution.
I don’t know what can be done about it. I weep for the Earth. A dear friend of mine says she weeps because “we could have made the Earth a paradise”. That makes me weep too.
This year is barely half over and it has sucked like few other years have sucked in living memory.
I love my friends and I am grateful for the chance to try to help. Emphasis on “try”. I have been selfish too. I wish I hadn’t. I wish I had been one of those born with others as my raison d’être, but I’m trying – and I applaud all others who have that as part of their being.
I cannot abide what is happening in the country I love – so I rise.
I will be named among those who sought to stop the kleptocracy and cons, the users and abusers.
Our teeth are so important to full functioning, and well-being. Mouth health is an important indicator of our overall health.
A dental revolution is important – worldwide. While hampered by circumstances like disease, accidents, disasters, drought, poverty, war, and greed, or other reasons for lack of access to good nutrition and care to keep their natural teeth, either full implants or implant-supported dentures is the way to go.
It’s currently prohibitively expensive for most, but that’s due to price setting. It’s inexpensive to make durable implants and caps, but skilled dentistry is needed for placement, and then good health practices while jawbones heal and continuing.
Or you can just get all your rotten teeth pulled and have to suffer with no dentures or dentures that won’t respond as your mouth changes over time (which is why my preference for all is permanent implants over implant-supported dentures).
Maybe there is bone disease or other illness that makes implants impossible, but a good friend who really wants to eat has dentures she hates, can’t taste her food with them in, and already has trouble feeling hungry due to multiple bouts of cancer and how that, plus radiation and chemotherapy, ravaged her body. She’d love a good steak. She can’t bite into it, and can’t really taste it with her dentures in.
The sooner an implant is placed – like immediately after a tooth removal if possible – the better the prognosis. Sometimes there isn’t enough bone, so a bone graft is needed before the implant body can be placed. It takes another six months or so to heal and set so that the implant can then be placed, and then more special care while that heals before the cap is finally placed.
However, those costs are wildly variable depending on where you get them, and what dental insurance covers. Besides that, with education and lobbying, there is enough tax-money that could be diverted and used to help defray the costs of permanent teeth for all – at least in the U.S. Foundations and charities also exist to help with costs not covered by insurance, or could be set-up to help cover costs.
Proper nutrition and keeping our natural teeth our whole life is best, of course, but humans chronically lack consistent good care for a myriad of reasons, and keeping teeth is more valuable than is currently recognized. Not only does it increase self-esteem to have proper teeth, but our communication and even our facial structures change when we lose our teeth and jawbone anatomy.
Medicine is constantly improving and evolving, and there may be further dental care improvements with 3-D printing, and laser surgery, but until those are perfected, life-long teeth, with its associated less suffering, is achievable. We just have to have the will to see it through.
The numbers were coming in for voting and the Democrats were winning big. We were going to be okay. There would be a lot of damage to undo or repair, but we weren’t succumbing to dictatorship. The worst elements among us were shown the door. You want a theocracy? Why don’t you move to Saudi Arabia, or any of the desert nations that control their populations under the only version of belief allowed. What if your religion is banned? You think dictators have it right? Move to your beloved Russia where they routinely kill, poison, or maim those who disagree with the party line. What if YOU were against their policies and practices? Better get a food taster, or keep your opinions to yourself…
We can co-exist, and it will be an uneasy alliance, but it will work because while we don’t all get all of what we want, we will get most of what we need. We will shore up our Constitution, and follow it. We can be a better version of Democracy, or we can vanish with something you will not want in its place, but it will be too late to do anything about it then, so I hope it’s to your liking – and that you’ll remember you did it to yourself. To those of good will: Vote Democrats, all the way!
Fourth of July parades, honoring those fighting, allegedly keeping America ‘safe’, or trying to topple the powerful of other nations committing atrocities.
At least we always said they were atrocities.
Now we’re doing it, and the administration wants it to be as heinous as possible so we’ll capitulate to their demands, and to satisfy their base.
What kind of people their base must be if that satisfies them? They’re a cabal of bullies, and America thinks that’s a good fit for us?
Is it?
Nursing mothers having their babies taken from them. That makes you glad? That makes you proud? That makes you think America is strong, and won’t be fucked with?
This is no country our ancestors would recognize. We had the idea that we would be the ‘shining city on the hill’. We would stand for goodness, compassion, fairness, negotiating, inclusion – help!
We all came from elsewhere, and now we’re all: “I’ve got mine, too bad for you.”
We can do better. Our immigration policy can evolve. Hint, it won’t be a wall. Ever hear of tunnels? Air travel? A wall is symbolic, and in history, walls have never stood for justice.
Dictators, autocrats, heinous deeds done in our name, are not inevitable. They’re allowed through apathy, disengagement, and complicity.
Ben Franklin retorted: “A republic, if you can keep it”, when asked what the founders had wrought after our bitterly hard-fought sovereignty and our Constitution’s creation.
We are always negotiating who we are, what we stand for, and how we wish the world to see us.
That light we carried – that hope we offered – is nearly out.
It’s up to us citizens to keep our Republic, to shore up our ideals, and to pull the reins on the powerful factions ever trying to re-make us in their own image.
We were never perfect, and we’re never going to be perfect, but we’ve had a pretty great template for a relatively balanced society and country.
Oppressing people works for a while, but we eventually rise up when the burden becomes too onerous. I think we’re at that time, and I hope America puts down this latest attempt to change our fundamental ideals.
Only those who want to take your power tell you voting doesn’t matter.
Don’t let them, and if you’re too cynical to believe that, then don’t make it easy for them.
Making A Way 