It's That Easy

While watching All In With Chris Hayes the night he had the clip of the scruffy guys with guns shooting up a female mannequin while sniggering through the whole thing because they didn’t like the women from the organization Moms Demand Action for Sensible Gun Laws, or Moms Demand Action for short, I immediately went to the website: www.momsdemandaction.org and signed my name as a supporter.

 

And then after the horrible tragedy in Santa Barbara this past week a small group of us decided to take action and affiliate with Moms Demand Action here in our county.  We have received much help from the Moms group, and have been promised more.  And we have received much support via Facebook

 

With that being said, the following are the thoughts I have had regarding the 2^nd Amendment, gun violence, and mental illness.  First off, I carefully read the 2^nd Amendment again, and I was struck by the fact that the first four words are, “A well-regulated militia…”  Because of the tremendous pressure put on Federal legislators by the NRA, which is funded now by the gun manufacturers, we do not have a “well-regulated militia” we have unregulated vigilante individuals and groups who are not in place to insure the “…security of a free State…” but instead are terrorizing our homes, neighborhoods and schools with their completely irresponsible behaviors.  The NRA should go back to doing what it started out doing, and that is teaching gun safety and responsibility.  Frankly, as it is now, in my opinion, it should be listed as a terrorist organization.

 

The second half of this equation, however, is the status of our mental health system, or lack thereof, in our county, state and with the Federal government.  I was elected to office in 1999, which wasn’t all that long ago.  One of my fellow Supervisors commented to me when he assigned me to be on our Mental Health Board (now called Behavioral Health) that, “We probably don’t even need this.  People should just pull themselves together and get on with it.”  Since I had members of my own family who were battling mental illness, this comment didn’t sit well.

 

People who exhibit at-risk behavior which may indicate they are perhaps a danger to themselves or to others deserve, as human beings, the care and services they need.  This is where our priorities must be as well.  At this time there are many bills before our State legislature regarding both gun safety legislation as well as mental health issues, and this is very hopeful. 

 

As citizens, we need to keep up the pressure.  With those of us who still have busy lives, one way of doing this through computers, is to go to: www.momsdemandaction.org and sign up to support sensible guns laws.  It’s that easy.

 

Transitive Verbs and the Death Penalty

When I first got into politics years ago, the current mantra from those with a more conservative viewpoint in my county was that we “have to protect agriculture.”  That really brought me up short because in my mind “protect” is a transitive verb.  That is, it carries a thought from one side of the noun over to the other side.  Therefore, I kept asking, “Protect agriculture from what, or to do what?”  This didn’t sit well with a lot of people who wanted to protect agriculture’s right to develop the property willy-nilly for development.  But, they didn’t want to say that right out in front of God and everybody, so they hid it in what sounded like a really good thing. 

So, imagine my amusement when I heard a Tea Partier say the other day, quite pompously, “We have to trust people”.  That sounds really good, also, but what are we trusting people to do?  To further restrict women’s access to health care?  Restrict voting?  Even cutting taxes further for the wealthy and corporations?  We have to be really careful of those transitive verbs and use them correctly, and even more, demand that politicians use them correctly as well.  When you hear stuff like that, don’t assume you know what is meant.  Ask questions, and demand real answers. 

Which brings me to the death penalty.  Years ago when my own kids were quite small, there was a particularly gruesome crime in the San Francisco Bay area.  A man named Greg Abbott kidnapped and killed a little girl.  Or, that was what he was found guilty of doing, and he was eventually electrocuted.  He never confessed.  There was so much media frenzy over this that it even reached down to Fresno.  One of my daughters asked me what the word execution meant, so I was explaining that when a person did a really horrible thing like killing someone, that person was executed which meant that his life was taken away; that he was killed.  She didn’t answer for awhile, then asked, “Who kills that person?”   

Overtime I have given much thought to the subject of the death penalty because of that question, and because of other reasons.  Eventually I have become adamantly opposed to the death penalty.  Now we have the situation wherein much wiser people in Europe are refusing to sell the drugs in the United States that have been used to render the person being executed unconscious in order to administer drugs that will eventually kill him or her.  As a result we have the example of the botched execution in Oklahoma a few weeks ago wherein it took the man 45 minutes to die.  One state is considering bringing back the electric chair, and I believe it is Utah which is considering using a firing squad.   

We have all of these discussions on ways to implement the death penalty, when the subject ought to be why have it at all?  Some arguments are that it is a deterrent, but that doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny.  Others are that some people are so rotten they deserve to die.  Or that they must be gotten off the streets.  The last one is sort of silly because if someone is put in prison without possibility of parole, that certainly gets them off the streets.  The argument that some people are so rotten they deserve to die is the one that most people use.  I find this one the most difficult to explain.  Perhaps they are – but there have been too many people executed that have subsequently turned out to be innocent that the danger of killing even one innocent person ought to be enough to stop using the death penalty.   

But the strongest reason, in my opinion, is what it does to the rest of us.  Our society’s obsession with guns, violence and death are fueled to some degree with our callous disregard about whether a prisoner might be innocent.  And, we hear a lot from the right wing about abortion.  Life starts at conception.  But one of the great secrets of our time is that more main-stream churches, including, for some time now, the Catholic Church, are just as adamantly opposed to the death penalty.  If one is pro-life, then be pro-life.  Stop picking and choosing whose life has more value than someone else’s. 

 

All life has value.

 

 

 

Pistol Packing Mamas?

As I have mentioned in previous posts, I can remember when I was a very young child hearing my mother and my grandmother argue over whether women should vote.  My grandmother, apparently, was adamantly opposed to it, but my mother said she was going to vote anyway.  My childhood and young adulthood was pretty much dictated by what society expected of girls and young women.  When I was in high school I also remember my mother telling me that I must not let the boys know how intelligent I was because they wouldn’t like me, yet at the same time being expected to make all ‘A’s.  Talk about a double message! 

When we got to the 1960’s and ‘70’s and the rise of feminism, what a heady time that was!  We were encouraged to make our own choices about our lives, our bodies, our thoughts, and whatever we wanted to.  My parents had taken out a life insurance policy for me when I was about 10, and in the mid ‘70’s it became apparent it was not worth much, and the funds could be invested better elsewhere.  When I went to our insurance agent, who was also a fellow parishioner in Fresno, he told me I had lucked out – that the law had just changed and I didn’t need to have Bill along with me to sign that it was OK if I cashed it in.  I could just choose to do that all by myself!!  I also have some memories that were horribly denigrating to women regarding rape, and sexuality in general.

Consequently, the rise in the past 30 years or so on the part of the radical religious right to roll back some of the advances made by women have had me somewhat concerned for my beautiful great-granddaughters.  My daughters and granddaughters can really take care of themselves better than I ever could have at their ages, but it is the little ones I worry about.  Here in California we aren’t impacted so much by this roll back, but using Texas as an example, it really is worrisome that the state government is complicit in closing women’s health clinics across Texas that provide basic health screening to women.  They are being closed because they also offer abortions.  Forget that they provide screening for the cancers that are the most prevalent among women (breast, ovarian, cervical), but also diabetes and cardio-vascular health, and the education that must go along with this.  I have singled out Texas, but this attitude is also gaining ground in too many states to mention here.  It is indicative of an effort to prevent women from becoming equal to men in decision making.

My understanding is that the logic for this is that women need to get married and have their husbands take care of their health needs – they don’t need specialized clinics just for them because it encourages them to be independent of men, and to make their own decisions about their health care.  All of this under the guise of being anti-abortion.  When Bob McDonnell, the past Governor of Virginia, and his Attorney General, Ken Cucinelli, determined that a woman in Virginia who needed an abortion would have to undergo, at her own expense, a trans-vaginal ultra sound probe, in my mind I could hear them snigger behind their closed doors that they would show these women who was boss.

But the final straw for me was the clip from All In with Chris Hayes this past week that showed a bunch of scruffy men who are outraged over a group of young women who have formed a group, Moms Demand Action, firing multiple times at a naked female mannequin, nearly destroying the mannequin.

My grandfather and my dad taught me how to shoot a gun, but of greater importance, how to treat one with the great respect a gun deserves.  Not to respect the gun itself, but to respect the damage and horror the misuse of a gun could generate.  But this new gun worship really has me deeply concerned.  Responsible and mature male gun owners are not who I am talking about.  I am talking about the non-thinking male who believes that a gun is what makes him “a man”.  But turning a bunch of non-rational gun-toting men loose on women who they just might disagree with is terrifying.  Without ever turning back from any of these anti-woman decisions, our rights as women, and now our very selves have once again become endangered. 

I am speaking metaphorically, but we gun-toting women, so to speak, need to all join Moms Demand Action.  A pistol packing mama with a fast trigger finger might work, but what is better and more effective, an even faster mouth.

 

In Conclusion, Pickled Pig's Feet

Before I start writing, I have to acknowledge that I have not read the Common Core standards that have been set for the schools in this country.  But, as usual, I have some fairly strong opinions on the matter of education and its vital importance in a democracy.  These opinions were formed by my own educational experiences in the public schools of California in the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50’s, and then in the ‘60s and ‘70’s with my own kids. 

Fortunately for me I had some really excellent teachers, and of course, some really rotten ones.  This is par for any school system, I think.  The same held true when my own kids were in school.  They had some really outstanding teachers, and some that I refused to let some of the younger ones have.  Sorry that the elder ones had to try them out first! 

My own major in college was English Literature, and with this it was, in those days, required that we take world literature, as well, so I became at least acquainted with literature from around the world, even if it was only a nodding acquaintance.  Better that than nothing because it gave me some conception of the ideas that the ancient Greeks and Romans held, as well as ancient Sanskrit writings.  Thus I knew about ideas that they had millennia before the United States was ever a twinkle in anyone’s eye, and experiences that other civilizations had that would truly be better if we did not!  Of course, history came right alongside the literature.

What really disturbed me about the educational concepts that produced No Child Left Behind was that it did not teach children to think, at all.  They needed to memorize ‘stuff’, but that ‘stuff’ had no relation to anything else.  It did not teach if one, or a group of ones, or if a country did thus and so, there might be a final result that no one really wanted.  Or contrarily, that would benefit everyone.  These concepts were in place in some areas of our country long before No Child, etc. and could produce the idiotic statement by a southern preacher, “If the King James Bible was good enough for Jesus, its good enough for me.”  No history, no concept of when the King James Bible was written, or what the conditions were in England that caused it to be written.  A fascinating time then, for sure, and in some respects it reminds me of our own. 

My little understanding of Common Core is that its desired result is, among other things, to teach kids how to do critical thinking.  So of course the radical right is freaking out.  The last thing they would want are people who can see right through their faulty logic.  As an example, the radical right is still touting the ‘trickle down’ theory of economics.  Instead of trying to be reasonable in discussing this, we should be asking the question, “And what year are you expecting this to happen?  It has been 30 years since this became established economic policy in this country, and have you been trickled on yet?” 

There may be a lot wrong with our educational system, but it is not the teachers, but those in authority who are trying to push an economic and social agenda associated with keeping the 99% stupid, and the 1% eating high on the hog.  Frankly, I never did like pickled pig’s feet!

 

 

 

 

God Did Not Say That When One Turns On The Faucet, Water Must Come Out

The other late afternoon when the temperature was in the upper ‘90’s, I went into the kitchen to start dinner, and turned on the faucet.  Nothing!  Nada!  Zilch!  No water!  It turned out to be a simple fix, at least for my husband.  He had forgotten to turn the hose off after filling the dog’s water bowls about an hour before I turned on the faucet.  It was an easy fix – the pump had emptied the spring box, and as a result had lost its prime.  He had it filling in no time, but we had to wait to use water for a little while.  That was not a bad experience, but a very significant wake-up call, for sure.  It had taken less than an hour to empty the spring box which meant that not very much water was flowing in to the box. 

For those who don’t know where we live, or why this was such a big deal, we not only live in California, but when one looks at the drought map of California, there is a sort of bump out on the coastal map about half way between Los Angeles and San Francisco.  All of California is in a moderate drought, and so the whole state is colored a dark pink on the drought map.  The severe drought areas are colored a light red, while this bump out area is a really dark red, and where we are it is so red it is almost black.  The colors are listed as moderate, severe, and extreme.  I maintain we are severely extreme!  Today about four or five cattle trucks have gone down our road, filled we presume, with cattle headed for the livestock market in a nearby town, since the springs are way down, and the grass is very short, and already drying.  All of our springs and stock ponds are dry, or very pretty limited.  We up here can make it through the drought OK, but our worry is the people who live in town who are dependent on the aquifers at the mouths of our canyons.

Many of us who live in these upper watersheds have been warning the decision makers in our community that there will be a major problem with water supply in a severe drought.  We warned that the growth of the number of households, or water using businesses, was rapidly approaching non-sustainability Those whose livelyhoods depend on population growth, such as real estate, construction, and development and tourism in general, have maintained that we were all just ‘no growth’.  That we were ‘anti-business’.

This kind of language reminded me of what I had heard in the 1950’s and after about the Soviet Union; that everyone there was subservient to what the Communist State wanted; that their journalists could not print anything that was antithetical to the State; and that all speech, etc., must be positive toward the State or one ended up in prison, if lucky.  Supposedly the joke in the Soviet Union was that if one read something in the state newspaper, Pravda, then one simply assumed the opposite since no one believed anything they read in Pravda.  Sort of like Faux News.

Now we have the opposite on the verge of becoming true in this country.  All of our decisions must be based on what is good for business.  We can’t raise the minimum wage for poor people because it might harm businesses; we can’t raise taxes on the wealthy to fund basic needs of the people such as roads, bridges, schools, necessary services for people because it will not help the wealthy or corporations.  Notice that those who are the most adamant climate change deniers have strong ties to those corporations who are dependent on fossil fuels, natural gas, or coal, with other people denying climate change for religious reasons. (Reputable religions agree that the scientists are correct in their data based theories proving climate change.)  So, it is not profitable for corporations to accept that the climate is changing, and we the people are going to have to pay dearly for this intransigence. 

And, in my opinion, as vital as business is to our social structure for all of the reasons that anyone could give, it is not more important than the entire people of the country.  We all should not have to base every one of our decisions based only on what is good for business.  One rule of thumb I used, though not in every decision I made, was the greatest good for the greatest number.  If a developer, for example, wanted to build a subdivision, and the resultant overuse of resources would cause stress for the citizens already there. I voted no.  I could see no reason to burden the rest of the population with problems that resulted from a development that would benefit only one person.  (As a reminder, in California after Prop 13 many years ago, development does not pay for itself.)

It is not a good feeling when one turns on the faucet and nothing comes out. 

 

Back From The Future

One hates to admit that a portion of the news is completely opaque.  Try as I might, I simply could not understand from the media what had happened at the Supreme Court this past week regarding affirmative action in Michigan.  Probably because those people reporting perhaps didn’t understand it either!  What I understood, perhaps incorrectly, was that the majority of the Supreme Court believed that if the people voted in a law, or voted out an existing law, unconstitutional as that law is or was, it must stand.  That the people had spoken, and this took precedence. 

Consequently I located Justice Sotomayor’s minority rebuttal and read that.  This rebuttal was magnificent in its ordering of the history of cases in this country regarding the ways in which the white (or Anglo) majority in this country had tried its very, very best in the past to prevent minorities from having even the most basic of civil rights, from a good education up to and including voting.  Case after case, with the majority of these laws, ordinances and policies being declared unconstitutional under the 14^th and 15^th Amendments to the Bill of Rights progress was made at a snail’s pace to protect all of the citizens of these United States.  These two amendments read: 

14.  No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privilege or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws… 

15.  The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude… 

What the Supreme Court this week did was deprive minorities in Michigan due process of law.  This case involves this last chapter of discrimination:

 After a century of being shut out of Michi­gan’s institutions of higher education, racial minorities in Michigan had succeeded in persuading the elected board representatives to adopt admissions policies that took into account the benefits of racial diversity. The members of those boards are nominated by political parties and elected by the citizenry in statewide elections. After over a century of being shut out of Michi­gan’s institutions of higher education, racial minorities in Michigan had succeeded in persuading the elected board representatives to adopt admissions policies that took into account the benefits of racial diversity.”  Justice Sotomayor.

Justice Sotomayor goes on that what the Supreme Court did was to deny minorities due process.  She explains:

 “The effect of §26 is that a white graduate of a public Michigan university who wishes to pass his historical privilege on to his children may freely lobby the board of that university in favor of an expanded legacy admissions policy, whereas a black Michigander who was denied the opportunity to attend that very uni­versity cannot lobby the board in favor of a policy that might give his children a chance that he never had and that they might never have absent that policy”. 

Now a minority Michigander must change the Michigan Constitution in order to challenge the admission policy.  Race has become the defining entity that determines whether an admission policy is valid or not.  A white Michigander can lobby the Board of Regents for a change of policy.  A black, and presumably brown, Michigander must change the Michigan Constitution to change the policy.  This is a blatant denial of minorities’ right of due process.  Although this is a Michigan problem right now, it sloshes over into California’s UC admission policies as well, but this thing in Michigan, in my opinion, is much more blatant and cause for concern. 

Since we have four daughters, two granddaughters, and three great granddaughters, the Republican efforts to roll back all of the successes women have achieved over the past 40 years really rankles with me.  I have lived through all of the various cultural attitudes toward women that have been prevalent from rape to subtle denigration over these 80+ years, and I do not want to go back to those times myself, nor do I want our progeny to have to live through them.  Even in the past 15 years or so I have experienced subtle denigration over gender from overt comments to some men thinking they had the right to give me less than welcome hugs.  This will, in time, wear out as new generations come into being, but let’s project into the future a bit.  Although I hate speculation in the news, it is good to occasionally do it on issues because that is where our understanding of “what is afoot” comes from.

Let’s suppose the Michigan decision is allowed to stand and minorities are denied the right to question admission policies.  Other universities in other states can now go the same route.  If enough of them get away with it, then state propositions to deny LBGT people the right to lobby admission policies, and be required to change the state’s constitutions are a possibility. 

Or, hey, let’s go after the 19^th Amendment:

19.  The rights of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

You think this is farfetched?  I was denied the right to attend San Luis Obispo’s public college, California Polytechnic (Cal Poly) back in the late ‘40’s and early ‘50’s because I was female.  And don’t think this couldn’t happen again.  The attitude of we’ve got to keep those women from being educated is right under the surface.  They only introduce emotionalism into politics, and present a sexual diversion into the important decision making required of us white men.  Yuk!!!

 

 

 

Yes, Paul Ryan Loves Me

Since the Republicans have brought fundamentalist religion into the political sphere, during this holiest of weeks for both Christians and Jews, I do not believe it to be inappropriate to comment on this, particularly after Paul Ryan, who claims to be a Catholic Christian, presented his federal budget in the House of Representatives, and it passed.

Ryan’s budget would gut nearly every social program that is funded by the federal budget.  These include, but are not limited to, programs that help children to have food and medical care; programs that help families over some really tough financial times brought about by asinine policies during the W and Chaney presidency; programs that help the elderly.  Since I try to keep this blog at about 600 words, there is not room to go through the budget in detail, but it would be a disaster for millions of Americans.

There is little or nothing in Ryan’s budget that would raise taxes on the wealthy, close tax loopholes that allow the obscenely rich to keep $3 T+ in overseas accounts to protect that money from being taxed, nor to stop subsidizing oil, gas, and coal industries – industries that are some of the wealthiest corporations in the history of the world.

Bible-banging federal Legislators are fond of going through the Bible and finding single verses that support their position on defunding these programs.  They insist that funding these programs are really detrimental to the people receiving the assistance because it makes the people lazy and unwilling to work.  What amazes me is that they ignore those many, many verses and chapters from both the Old and New Testaments that emphasize love, mercy, justice, and peace.

The fundamentalists in all versions of Christianity like to blame someone else for the death of Jesus.  But I like what Sr. Joan Chittester wrote in, “In Search of Belief”, pg. 119.

“Love, mercy, peace and justice—These are the apogee of human existence…  And they are no more acceptable now than then.  Call for an end to military pulverization carried out in the name of foreign policy initiatives and see what people think of you.  Call for life sentences for those on death row and see how people look at you.  Call for demilitarization in the name of human services and see how fast you’re accused of being unpatriotic.  Call for public daycare centers, wage equity, standardized promotion policies, and universal health insurance instead of abortion and see what happens then to the proclaimed concern for women’s rights.  Call for a distribution of wealth in a world where profit, power, and personal freedom are the gods of the day and see how quickly you lose your place at the tables of the rich and the powerful.  Call the Church to discuss the question of women’s ordination and see how long you are considered pious.  Or, more to the point: Cure lepers on the Sabbath, forgive adultery, refuse to bear a sword, contest systemic evil in both church and state, cure a woman with a hemorrhage of blood and see how long you last in society.  These are the things that put people on crosses.  These are the things the cross is all about.”

Paul Ryan, and the rest of the radical right-wing Republicans are forgetting one of the most germane verses in Matthew 6:24, “No one can serve two masters.  He will either hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other.  You cannot serve God and mammon.”  (The definition of mammon is avarice or greed.)

One of my favorite courses in college was the study of John Milton, who wrote Paradise Lost.  It is a wonderful poem and Milton describes the rebellion of some of the angels against God.  In Book II he has one angel trying to convince the other angels onward in their rebellion.  Every time Paul Ryan gets up to discuss his budget, I think of the below passage:

On the other side up rose

Belial, in act more graceful and humane;

For dignity composed and high exploit:

But all was false and hollow, though his tongue

Dropped manna, and could make the worse appear

The better reason, to perplex and dash

Maturest counsels:  for his thoughts were low:

To vice industrious, but to nobler deeds

Timorous and slothful:  yet he pleased the ear,

And with persuasive accent thus began: