armed liberal

Thoughts on liberals and guns and the second amendment, posted at Sirens Chronicles.

no thank you

A note to the right wing: You are everywhere. Your voices have been heard at a level that is deafening and contrary to the health of this country. You are everywhere with your rants and your ravings, your misinformation, your accusations and lies masquerading as truth and shouted out at such volume that we are finally willing to accept the false as true if only to silence you, to be free of the unbearable racket of you locked-in-step talking-points-spouting no-thinking fools.

I understand you, to a degree. My voice is often raised in protest, in outrage, in anger, and sadness. I despair over what has happened to my country and I blame you. All of you. Your superficial, judgmental, condemning approach to virtually all of America's problems sickens me. Your insistence that we're all out for ourselves, that we've no responsibility for one another, that there is no future in caring about our fellow citizens makes me want to hurt you. And isn't that crazy? Me, wanting to hurt you? Or anyone? I can't even kill a cockroach.

Yet your virulent ranting and your attacks and constant verbal assaults, the fact that you have infiltrated every public arena, that yours are the voices behind the news, behind the politicians, yours are the voices that shriek the loudest and thus get the most attention, well it drives me nearly mad.

Your refusal to recognize the corporate power behind our political structure, the actual fact of people dying every day so that our nation can become richer, or at least the very few of us who actually do become richer. And that's not you, you idiots, though you're willing to eat the shit of those who disdain you and use your allegiance to suit their purposes; an audience of the blind, deluded by the powerful who laugh at you and your sworn fealty to their causes, not yours. Wake up.

I am sick of it. Sick of you. Fuck you, all of you. Enjoy the disaster you have wrought in this country. Continue to lick the boots of your idiot "leaders" like Limbaugh and Coulter and Hannity and all of the rest of the lunatic fringe. You are despicable, so sick with the disease of hate and yes, I hate you, passionately, and so I am sick with it too.

No more. Enjoy yourselves somewhere else. I am past done with you. Fuck you, every single one of you who refuse to open your goddamned eyes and look around you, to recognize the path we are on, the changes that must be made, and quickly, if we are to survive as a nation, if this world is to survive. Fuck you. And to your comments, no thank you. Spread your disease somewhere else.

hungry yet?

You may be soon. The food crisis worldwide is growing daily, creating desperate conditions for millions of people who rely on commodities of wheat and corn and rice. Almost everything I read mentions ethanol as a prime reason, but few sources note that the US has vast acreages of tillable land which could be turned to corn production if farmers weren't being paid to let it lie fallow.

Mr. Bush suggests that India is eating better, thus throwing the world into panic. India's justifiable response is "fuck you fat American pigs" and rightfully so. Nouveau riche China is increasing its consumption of meat and this, too, is blamed for the worldwide, spreading crisis in food.

But there's little discussion of how countries like Haiti lost their small farmers, because that is a tragedy that relates to mindnumbingly complex intervention by the never-benevolent IMF and World Bank, subsidized exports from this and other first world countries. It is mind numbing and important, because the destruction wrought upon Haiti and other 3d world nations by globalization and free market economics has been devastating. Another post, another day.


But almost none of the articles I read about the food crisis mention hedge funds and the speculation that is part and parcel of those secretive enterprises. They operate with billions and billions of capital with virtually no oversight or regulation. None of our presidential candidates, Democrat or Republican, have any interest in exploring the possibility of regulating these incredibly powerful financial institutions.

One hedge fund manager took home $3.8 billion last year. That's about $1.9 million an hour, assuming a standard work week of 40 hours and a standard (ha!) vacation of two weeks and that math takes me back to Teddy Kennedy's rant on the minimum wage, his desperate fight to get it raised to a little over $7 an hour for the lowest wage workers in this nation.

$3.8 billion in a year. That is, honestly, obscene. Obscene. And riches accumulated through hedge fund "work" are generally taxed at 15% ~ about what your average low- to mid-range wage worker pays in taxes.

I don't like hedge funds. I don't like the secretive nature of them, their ability to do on an incredibly damaging and very large scale what one-man-and-a-keyboard day traders were accused of doing to the stock market in the late '90s. That is manipulation on an unimaginable scale; having the ability to wreak havoc in the world's economy with no accountability at all. They can make money from things going well, but they can make as much, or more, when the economy goes to hell and the world is in crisis and it's a tiny little step to creating that very crisis in the interest of more profit.

Which brings me back to food. Britain's New Statesman says it far better than I.

This latest food emergency has developed in an incredibly short space of time - essentially over the past 18 months. The reason for food "shortages" is speculation in commodity futures following the collapse of the financial derivatives markets. Desperate for quick returns, dealers are taking trillions of dollars out of equities and mortgage bonds and ploughing them into food and raw materials. It's called the "commodities super-cycle" on Wall Street, and it is likely to cause starvation on an epic scale.

The rocketing price of wheat, soybeans, sugar, coffee - you name it - is a direct result of debt defaults that have caused financial panic in the west and encouraged investors to seek "stores of value". These range from gold and oil at one end to corn, cocoa and cattle at the other; speculators are even placing bets on water prices.

Just like the boom in house prices, commodity price inflation feeds on itself. The more prices rise, and big profits are made, the more others invest, hoping for big returns. Look at the financial websites: everyone and their mother is piling into commodities. It is the great bull market of the Noughties. The trouble is that if you are one of the 2.8 billion people, almost half the world's population, who live on less than $2 a day, you may pay for these profits with your life.

So we now have a food crisis, fast on the heels of a housing crisis, essentially created by the same conscienceless investment organizations whose sole aim is to turn a profit no matter the cost. I recognize that's the purpose of business; that's why the pure free market as proposed by Milton Friedman and other neoliberal economic asshats will never work. Unbridled greed is dangerous to living things.

At this point, there is little or no political interest in providing oversight of the hedge funds and their activities. No one is seriously proposing limiting them in any way; not in this country, never here, where we worship the myth of the free market, the very one subsidized by taxpayers in the form of corporate welfare.

In this country, most of us can suck it up and pay higher prices at the grocery store and cut back a little elsewhere. But we are fortunate, far more so than the world as a whole. What we can suck up and deal with, too many in the rest of the world cannot.

Just for one day ~ one single day ~ I would like to see Wall Street awash in the blood of innocents destroyed by greed. How much is enough for us? How much is enough for the man who takes home $3.8 billion dollars? How much is enough when that profit is taken at the cost of thousands of lives, of millions? And when will America wake up?

why i love teddy kennedy

I believe that, to his dying breath, he will advocate for the poor and disenfranchised in this country. I love this man and his passion and his sense of social justice. I pray that he will recover from his recent health scare and can continue his irreplaceable work in the Senate throughout the next president's term.

Here he takes Republicans to task for blocking the minimum wage bill. He is magnificent.

unfuckingbelievable: US drugs deportees

More US government jackassery, courtesy of the Washington Post.

The U.S. government has injected hundreds of foreigners it has deported with dangerous psychotropic drugs against their will to keep them sedated during the trip back to their home country, according to medical records, internal documents and interviews with people who have been drugged.

The government's forced use of antipsychotic drugs, in people who have no history of mental illness, includes dozens of cases in which the "pre-flight cocktail," as a document calls it, had such a potent effect that federal guards needed a wheelchair to move the slumped deportee onto an airplane. . . .

Involuntary chemical restraint of detainees, unless there is a medical justification, is a violation of some international human rights codes. The practice is banned by several countries where, confidential documents make clear, U.S. escorts have been unable to inject deportees with extra doses of drugs during layovers en route to faraway places.

I don't know why I should actually be surprised that these cowboys occupying the US government should continue to act in defiance of agreed world standards, but I am. God save us from this fuckheaded idiots. Can somebody please invade us and remove these criminals? Doesn't any country besides the US practice regime change? Somebody save us from these thugs!!

getting out

and not a moment to soon. mexico. beaches. sun. sleep. be well, everyone.

US exports misery and death: the failure of capitalism

The US has done more to create the current worldwide food crisis than any other nation. It is an outrage and one more reason why I find myself feeling ashamed of my country. This purported free market, the darling of right wingers everywhere, is supposed to save the world. But freedom is only free for the ultra rich and the biggest multinational corporations which line their pockets with government subsidies. The very, very few reap rich benefits from government policies and the actions of the IMF and the World Bank, while destroying entire cultures and indenturing the developing world. And now starving it. Profit over life. What a fucking shame.

In 1995, as a condition of providing a desperately needed loan, the International Monetary Fund required Haiti to cut its tariff on imported rice from 35% to 3%, the lowest in the Caribbean. The result was a massive influx of U.S. rice that sold for half the price of Haitian-grown rice. Thousands of rice farmers lost their lands and livelihoods, and today three-quarters of the rice eaten in Haiti comes from the U.S.[6]

U.S. rice didn’t take over the Haitian market because it tastes better, or because U.S. rice growers are more efficient. It won out because rice exports are heavily subsidized by the U.S. government. In 2003, U.S. rice growers received $1.7 billion in government subsidies, an average of $232 per hectare of rice grown.[7] That money, most of which went to a handful of very large landowners and agribusiness corporations, allowed U.S. exporters to sell rice at 30% to 50% below their real production costs.

In short, Haiti was forced to abandon government protection of domestic agriculture – and the U.S. then used its government protection schemes to take over the market.

There have been many variations on this theme, with rich countries of the north imposing “liberalization” policies on poor and debt-ridden southern countries and then taking advantage of that liberalization to capture the market. Government subsidies account for 30% of farm revenue in the world’s 30 richest countries, a total of US$280 billion a year,[8] an unbeatable advantage in a “free” market where the rich write the rules.

The global food trade game is rigged, and the poor have been left with reduced crops and no protections.

In addition, for several decades the World Bank and International Monetary Fund have refused to advance loans to poor countries unless they agree to “Structural Adjustment Programs” (SAP) that require the loan recipients to devalue their currencies, cut taxes, privatize utilities, and reduce or eliminate support programs for farmers.

All this was done with the promise that the market would produce economic growth and prosperity – instead, poverty increased and support for agriculture was eliminated.

The Food Crisis and the Failure of the Capitalist Model.

bill moyers and the reverend jeremiah wright

When Barack Obama's pastor, Jeremiah Wright, burst into the public consciousness a while back, I'd only been an Obama convert for about a month. I watched the endless loops of Wright hollering God damn America and was horrified. In part, it was because I assumed that these tapes signaled the end of Obama's candidacy.

Even though I stay pissed at my country these days, it felt like a slap. It wasn't just the God damn America stuff, but what I heard was racist and that hurt. It's what I heard. With cooler head and less emotion a few days later, I listened to what the man was saying and I realized that I'd thought and believed many of the same things.

I believe that our foreign policy decisions and our disregard for the sovereignty of other nations led us to the point that we were attacked by terrorists on September 11. Some of the other things Wright said were nothing new, but seemed a bit harder to swallow. I'd heard before that the US government infected African Americans with HIV and I'd heard before that the US was behind the crack epidemic and honestly, I gave those things little thought. I am prone to donning my tinfoil hat at times and I am happy to allow others to don their own.

It's so easy to stay on the surface of things, surface thinking, not bothering to go any deeper than what's just obviously apparent because it's easy and quick and much less painful. But the reality is that this country has infected people with diseases in order to study the results. Right here in this country, in an experiment running from 1932 to 1972, scientists withheld treatment from black men with syphilis in order to see how the disease would run its course. Even after 1947, when the disease was curable with penicillin, treatment was withheld even though it could have saved the lives of the study participants because scientists wanted to see exactly how the disease kills. Participants were prevented from seeking treatment elsewhere and the study wasn't discontinued until it was leaked to the press. Black men. Expendable. Of no real import, nothing more than lab rats.

In 1963, 20 chronically ill non-cancer patients were injected with cancer cells without their knowledge as part of a USPHS study. In 1953, an infant was given high levels of oxygen without parental consent. Oxygen was suspected to cause blindness. It did. Severely retarded children at Willowbrook State Hospital in New York were deliberately infected with the hepatitis virus, while their parents "gave consent" by signing a document which implied the children were being vaccinated against hepatitis. In Cincinnati between 1960-1972, a group of black men were given huge doses of whole body radiation without their consent. The men thought they were receiving treatment for cancer. Instead they became terribly ill from radiation sickness, experienced painful burns, and some died prematurely. That travesty was courtesy of the US Army. There's more, but you get the point.

So yeah, the US has done some dirty shit to its people, especially its people of darker hues. But drugs? Seriously? Oh . . . well, there have always been vague rumors about the CIA and dope in Vietnam. And the CIA and dope in South America. The CIA and military and dope and Iran-Contra. There are whole websites devoted to this and I won't go into it. But I will say that on this point, and at this point in time, I would put nothing past my government. Nothing.

So I was fairly quickly okay with the Wright thing, wishing it would go away, that it had never happened. Then comes Bill Moyers, one of the last true journalists in this country, and his interview with Reverend Wright last night.

How many times do I have to learn this lesson ~ that soundbytes mean nothing without context ~ before I really get it? In 40-45 minutes or so with Moyers, Jeremiah Wright provides the context for what seems to be so shocking taken in disjointed bits. He tells us about his church and what it means to him and the good they've done and will continue to do.

Wright is a gentle man, a good man and if the whole Wright controversy has bothered you at all, even if you're over it at this point, listen to him. He is intelligent, thoughtful, generous, kind. He's a real American, a patriot, a man who loves his country enough to stand up and dissent when it's necessary. It's an excellent interview. Please listen to this man. I did, and came away feeling that I'd be a better person if I'd had the good fortune to associate with him for 20 years.

Wright Interview, Part I

Wright Interview, Part II

And here this gentle man tells it true. "America's chickens" are coming home to roost.

what i hate about america

I am patriotic and I love my country, but I hate most of what has happened to it in the last seven years. I don't drink Kool-aid and I can't stomach the rah-rah destructive crap that has passed for patriotism in this country since 9/11. I never believed in this war, not for a minute, and I was attacked for it by the gung-ho boot-in-your ass don't-fuck-with-the-yooo-esssss-aye crowd that has controlled the public discourse for far too fucking long, led on by the most incompetent, most ignorant, most destructive, most shameful president ever. Ever.

So when I came across this piece at The Agonist, it had a profound effect on me. I have never believed that we are invincible in this country or that we are special and thus deserving of special treatment, special rights, that the rules of good world citizenship don't apply to us. There's a tragic irony in the fact that we helped set up the rules of good world citizenship, yet we've shrugged off those restraints and discarded them as if they mean nothing.

I don't discount that we can be pretty kickass in a lot of ways, creative and innovative, generous and high spirited and just good fun. But our aggressive, bellicose posturing when it comes to foreign affairs has always offended me deeply, and the grotesque bullying arrogance that has passed for foreign policy since 9/11 is a horror and makes me ashamed of my country.

Because I am still a product of my raising, I have to confess that I was aware of this, of the impact of war around the world, but vaguely. To see the actual numbers was deeply disturbing. In general, in this country, we tend not to try to see things from the viewpoint of others. That's considered a weakness which we attribute to liberals, commies and misguided socialists. So when France was not on board with Iraq, we poked fun at the weaklings and we renamed our fried potatoes and I was inundated with emails from strangers chastising me for selling French antiques.

But it's true that we have little context in this country for the bloody reality of war. War is hell for everyone, but it's a special kind of hell when it's fought where you live. That's not our experience here, and so it is, perhaps, a bit easier to be somewhat cavalier about the next war and the next one. For all of our tough and hawkish posturing, we've never suffered the kinds of losses that other countries have. Not even close.

In World War I the US suffered slightly fewer than 120,000 combat deaths. For the UK, France, and Germany the figures are respectively 885,000, 1.4 million, and over 2 million. In World War II, when the US lost about 420,000 armed forces in combat, Japan lost 2.1 million, China 3.8 million, Germany 5.5 million, and the Soviet Union an estimated 10.7 million. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., records the deaths of 58,195 Americans over the course of a war lasting fifteen years: but the French army lost double that number in six weeks of fighting in May–June 1940. In the US Army's costliest engagement of the century—the Ardennes offensive of December 1944–January 1945 (the "Battle of the Bulge")—19,300 American soldiers were killed. In the first twenty-four hours of the Battle of the Somme (July 1, 1916), the British army lost more than 20,000 dead. At the Battle of Stalingrad, the Red Army lost 750,000 men and the Wehrmacht almost as many.

With the exception of the generation of men who fought in World War II, the United States thus has no modern memory of combat or loss remotely comparable to that of the armed forces of other countries. But it is civilian casualties that leave the most enduring mark on national memory and here the contrast is piquant indeed. In World War II alone the British suffered 67,000 civilian dead. In continental Europe, France lost 270,000 civilians. Yugoslavia recorded over half a million civilian deaths, Germany 1.8 million, Poland 5.5 million, and the Soviet Union an estimated 11.4 million. These aggregate figures include some 5.8 million Jewish dead. Further afield, in China, the death count exceeded 16 million. American civilian losses (excluding the merchant navy) in both world wars amounted to less than 2,000 dead.

As The Agonist's Sean-Paul Kelly writes, "We don't even begin to comprehend what suffering war causes."

state of oklahoma mandates vaginal probes for women

My sorry assed fucking state just passed one of the most regressive anti-abortion bills in the country. In order to freely determine what happens to her body once SB 1878 goes into effect in Oklahoma, any woman who has made the decision to terminate a pregnancy will have to undergo an ultrasound an hour before the procedure.

This is a trans-vaginal ultrasound, which requires a probe to be inserted into the vagina. This will be mandated by the state. Along with this physical violation, "medical personnel must then provide an explanation of the ultrasound. They also must display the ultrasound so the woman can view it, although she may avert her eyes."

She. may. avert. her. eyes. Really? Doesn't the state fucking own her goddamned eyes too??? I have written about abortion before and I know from my own experience that it is a rare woman who makes that decision lightly.

This fucking law intrudes into the private life of a woman at what is, for most, a vulnerable and difficult time of life. I am outraged. I really can't believe it. Our democratic governor, Brad Henry, vetoed the bill, but only because he thought it didn't provide exceptions for rape/incest victims.

His veto was overriden by the legislature, including dozens of democrats. And it's them I'm most pissed off about. It's one thing to have some fuckheaded right wing lunatic like Sally Kern blathering on about gays and hate. At least she is what she is and it's evident for all to see. These fucking democrats are selling us out at every level of government, everywhere. I am sick. Furious. Disgusted. I hate my state today.

fifty. one. years.

That seems impossible. Fifty-one year olds are old, doddering, wrinkled. Old. How can I continue to feel 25 when my back cracks and my knees shoot the occasional warning pain? It's bizarre that there are no significant wrinkles, yet keeping away the gray is a weekly endeavor. Fifty one years ago on Palm Sunday, eight pounds of dark eyed, curly-haired baby girl dashed her daddy's last hope for a son. Life is filled with disappointments, yes? And joys. Yes. Happy day to all of you.

self administered medication: $72.63

Seriously, our health care system is totally fucked. The "self administered medication" in question? Two 2.5 mg Percocets I took in recovery, post-surgery. How could it possibly cost $72.63 for a nurse to shake two pills from her bottle, walk five steps, hand me a cup of water and two tablets?


My insurance company will undoubtedly bargain this down significantly. But what of those who have no insurance? How can any single uninsured working person possibly afford to pay $8,900 for the facility fee only for a 90 minute outpatient surgery? That's not even counting the pathologist's fee, the anesthesiologist, the surgeon's hefty pound of flesh, or any of the assorted radiology or lab fees that always fill the mailbox after an encounter with a hospital.

George Bush's solution is "health care savings accounts," whereby American can surely pay for . . . I don't know, maybe a typical prescription which, without insurance, generally runs at least $100 and often as much as $400-500. With the US savings rate in the negative, can anyone besides the ultra rich save money at a pace which could easily cover an unexpected health event like this one? Ninety minutes in the hospital. Ninety. Minutes. Two. Pills. $8,900 and more to come. It's madness.

whatcha reading?

Having been under the weather a bit, and utterly exhausted by the yapping of the newsheads on MSNBC and CNN and the rest, I have been reading more than my usual a lot.

Inspired by Al's recent posts on Naomi Klein's End of America, I gave up trying to find it at the library and it's just arrived from Amazon today. I did, however, snag her Shock Doctrine just yesterday, a book I've put off reading because I find it so horrifying.

On a more escapist note, I've just finished That Old Ace in the Hole, Annie Proulx's story of the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, the wretchedness of corporate hog farms, and finding community in unexpected places. Wonderful, especially for anyone who's ever lived anywhere near the prairie.

I've just put Kiara Brinkman's Up High in the Trees, again thanks to Al. So since all of us loosely connected blogger folk have such great tastes in reading material, what are you reading? What have you just read? What do you recommend for the library list?

body parts

I had hoped to make it through life with all body parts intact. Alas, 'tis not to be. I am being punctured at 7 a.m. to remove my "great BIG stones and the gallbladder's packed full!" Such indignities associated with any medical procedures. Boo.

god's golden spotlight

I don't pray anymore. It was a shock to realize this, but just as the fact of prayer had become, after deliberate practice, an automatic behavior, the fact of not praying has become automatic and I am back where I started with this praying thing over 27 years ago.

It was not a habit I took up lightly. My early introduction to Alcoholics Anonymous did not go smoothly, in large part because of my rebellion against the idea of religion. That wasn't what AA was about, but it was what I heard when they said godasyouunderstandgod and I heard God, capital G, bold, religious Lutheran God.

Alcohol can kick some ass, though, and it kicked mine hard, into the gutter. Into a flophouse, actually, where I resided with a few dozen other down on their luck women, each of us angry and hostile and bitter, hating that place, hating each other, ourselves. Mrs. Niven's rooming house was an institution among female addicts and alcoholics in this town and a steady stream of her hard luck residents populated the AA clubhouse around the corner. They were welcomed there by goodhearted AA members, but also by a kind of man common to AA clubhouses, the kind who welcomes a fresh supply of vulnerable young women, no matter how roughed up they are by life, by chemicals.

I got out of Mrs. Niven's place quick. My anger was so intense I could not tolerate living with another, nor they with me. I hate that phrase ~ "my anger" ~ as if it's a possession, like my purse, my shoes, the antique desk I'm writing from. It was definitely a thing, though, and I owned it, could not get shed of it. My oldest AA friend tells me that the rage was palpable, that it was something he could feel as he sat down next to me. Wilbur, me, my fully loaded sack of fury and hate and despair.

I really am going to write about prayer, but it's hard to do that without explaining how thoroughly opposed I was to the idea. I came to the opposition after years of failure. Even as a five year old sitting in the pew at the Missouri Synod Lutheran church, I'd bow my head, clasp my hands, say the words and experience . . . nothing. I'd peek out beneath my lashes at the others and they seemed so intent, as if they truly felt something, some connection with the mysterious Other. I'd redouble my efforts. Nothing. I was a fake in church, in Sunday school, in the parochial school of my youth.

Given the opportunity, at 13, I left that church. What followed was 12 years of drinking and dope and an excess of men and wild living of every kind, not all of which I regret and a great portion of which was absolutely magnificent and tremendous fun. And then it wasn't, of course, but more about that shortly. My launch into the outlaw life was not connected to my departure from the church, because church was nothing to me. It was something I did, something I showed up for, but there was nothing real there, nothing that touched me, moved me, spoke to my heart. Nothing. Ever. Not once.

Ten years into the outlaw life, at 23, I was sick. I couldn't drink without blacking out and my blackouts were taking me to frightening, dangerous places. I couldn't have a drink without drinking it all and going for more. My complete lack of control was stunning. I got sick every time I drank. It was a natural reaction to the ingestion of enormous quantities of alcohol, my body's effort to prevent alcohol poisoning and I would fight against it, this poor abused body of mine trying its best to save my life. I would drink, throw up, drink, black out and God knows what would happen then but I continued to drink, that I know, because the blackouts sometimes lasted for days. I would drink and drink and drink. It was a constant.

My first AA meeting created one of those head-spinning moments when I saw the G word in those 12 steps on the wall. I sat down in my skin tight jeans, my braless self in a see through blouse, dangerous spiked heels, spiked purple hair, black-ringed eyes. Everything about me was hard and pointy and mean. I felt mean and angry, like a scream with skin on, but nothing like what would come later, after the alcohol was gone. I looked at the squares and the old people and knew there was no help for me in these rooms. Someone said "I was afraid to pray because then God would know where I was" and I was riveted by the G word on the wall and in the voices and my arms were tightly crossed and my mind was shrieking no no no no no anything but that, anything but God, no.

But where to go at 23 when the street life is no longer an option and my best efforts to give up drinking for even a day had failed utterly? Where to go? It is the last resort of drunks everywhere, the only place, in the end, that will not criticize or condemn or judge or say get out as I had heard from both parents and a sibling. Get out. Alcoholics Anonymous. The choice at that point was not to live or to die, it was to die or to go to AA where God hangs on the wall and floats through the air in the words of hopeless drunks.

I wasn't very good at dying; the resilience of this body is truly breathtaking. And so to AA where it took me years to hear what I needed to hear to take the last drink. Two years of meetings and drinking and periods of not drinking, nothing like sobriety, just days alcohol-free. The absence of alcohol does not produce sobriety. It can, in fact, make life much, much worse.

It is said in the rooms that alcoholism halts development, that the age at which you start to drink is where you will be developmentally when you get sober. I don't remember being so wretched at 12, when I sucked down that pint of bourbon and found what I'd been missing my entire life, but neither was I filled with joy. Alcohol gave me that, that missing piece in my life, the thing that made me whole, turned me into what everyone else seemed to be, only better.

My last drink was an accident, a moment after a period of sober days where I found myself drinking again. Unintentionally, not wanting to, drinking. This is what went through my atheist, agnostic, anti-religious head at the moment I put down the empty glass and realized what I'd done: Oh God, I can't do this.

I. Can't. Do. This. Oh God. I meant that I could not stay sober, I had no idea how to do it because my best efforts to that point brought me to another drink. I can't do this, are you listening God? I was asking God??? It is called the alcoholic's prayer in AA. In nearly every speaker's tale, it appears at the moment of surrender, in the same words or similar. God help. I can't do this.

Newly surrendered, I was receptive for a moment. It's hard to hear anything with a mind suffering the agony of self obsession, but momentarily quieted by my stunning defeat, I really could hear. This is what they said: Take the action and the result will follow. Act as if. Do it anyway. Just say the words. You don't have to believe anything. And most important, godasyou- understandgod godasyouunderstandgod god as you understand god.

With no other options, I did what they said. I said the words, I took the actions, I acted as if, I did it in rebellion, in surrender, in anger, and ultimately in gratitude and peace. This is not, though, a story of religious conversion. I remain unconverted and, it would seem of late, lapsed in even my rudimentary spiritual practice. It's just a story of something that I have come to believe is within most of us, a need, a longing, an emptiness, and the only thing I know to make that go away when alcohol and drugs and food and men and money and gambling no longer work.

The important thing for me, though, was that I had the latitude to figure out what was missing in me. The keys were given to me in the actions suggested. I wasn't assured of any outcome, though the secret of Alcoholics Anonymous is clearly stated in the 12th step where it's missed by too many for too long. We fool around trying to wrestle life into submission, making it complicated and difficult, when the only thing we're ever promised in AA is a spiritual awakening. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps. All I was assured of was that things would change if I acted as if and they did.

The words eventually became something more than acting, than faking it. The process was long and marked by setbacks, but the end result was a connection with something else. I would say something outside of me because my Lutheran upbringing continues to place capital G God in the clouds somewhere, perched at the beginning of a rainbow. But the godasyouunderstandgod of AA was something else.

In Chapter 4, We Agnostics, the big book tells me that the power that will save my ass is within me. We found the Great Reality deep down within us. In the last analysis it is only there that He may be found. And in an appendix to the book, I'm told this: With few exceptions our members find that they have tapped an unsuspected inner resource which they presently identify with their own conception of a Power greater than themselves. Again in Chapter 4, I'm told that I must choose my own conception of God for this thing to work. I must.

The more disciplined among us will read that and think "of course, you found self control," but that is not the case. One of my freight drivers told me this week that he "used to be an alcoholic," but when he had kids, he just looked at them and decided he was going to give them a better life and he made up his mind and so he quit. I appreciate that and I think it's grand, but no alcoholic just makes up his or her mind and quits. Heavy drinkers do it every day, but the alcoholic makes up her mind to quit and drinks again. And quits and drinks and quits and drinks and drinks and drinks and drinks. By definition, alcoholism is the inability to quit, no matter the power or strength of the made up mind.

But back to God and god, and finding that power. I've known people who wrote lengthy descriptions of what their conception of God was going to be, what s/he would be like, would do for them, how it would act, this imaginary spirit. That never worked for me, but with relatively clear eyes, I could see around me in the rooms of AA something greater than I was alone. In the laughter of people so recently hopeless, I could see that something positive was at work. Watching people get sober was the most amazing thing and the clearest evidence of the Great Reality I've ever come across. Actually seeing the physical transformation of the walking, shaking, reeking-of-alcohol dead turning into calm, content, sober citizens is hair-raising and chill inducing and as much a miracle as Lazarus rising up from his grave. There is God ~ or god ~ in that; it is otherwise inexplicable.

Through the process of acting as if and saying the words, I reached a point of such intense spiritual connection that I felt as if I were going through life bathed in a warm golden spotlight of love and joy and happiness and content. I was utterly at peace, long since freed of the rage that plagued my early years of sobriety. The sense of being clean and open and whole and healed and filled up with joy was remarkable and delicious and as fantastic as anything I've ever experienced in this life.

And so I quit praying. That is classic behavior for me, to do something that makes my life better and then quit. I didn't just quit. Mike got terribly sick and life became ridiculously stressful and the demands on my time were unbearable and unavoidable. Between my agency work and my business and caring for him and sponsoring a dozen women and going to five meetings a week, something had to go.

The spotlight winked out long before the busy-ness overtook my life, but I kept taking the actions I knew to take, sure that it would be okay and life would get better. In the midst of it all, even with the light gone, I had a profound, physical spiritual experience that was a comfort and was grateful for it, for the promise in that.

But there's no room even for godasyouunderstandgod in a life filled with too much and there was no way out of my life as it was and I fell back. I had to cut back on meetings with so much time at the hospital, and I couldn't do justice to the women I worked with, so encouraged them to get help elsewhere. And my prayer became sporadic. Mike and I spent our first eight years together hand in hand every morning, on our knees, each of us praying to the god we understood, that lifesaving gift of AA. With him semi-conscious and in bed most of the time, the morning ritual was impossible.

In truth, I was pissed, too. My perfect, charmed life, my precious husband, everything in ruins. My heart was broken and life seemed frightening and so uncertain. Maybe people of the Big G God redouble their efforts at prayer in times like that, but my prayer life just faded away. At my core, I'm still a drunk, inconsistent, a little unreliable, weak.

Not until I left my agency work to do my business full time, though, did the praying cease entirely. Now I pray about once a month, maybe. Less often, probably. I don't even know when I pray, and isn't that a sad thing for godasyouunderstandgod's golden spotlight girl? So much of life is habitual, and I don't like habits much, but the habit of rolling out of bed to my knees was a good one.

I'm not sure how to get it back, but I know it's worth the effort. I've been doing some meditation work, practicing mindfulness, and that helps too. It makes me sad to think I might have thrown away a once in a lifetime gift of grace. I read about the monks who meditate for years to reach that pinnacle of spiritual connection and I think that I nearly had that, or maybe I did have that, it certainly felt like it and now it's gone.

I want to find that state again where nothing else matters but that connection, because in that connection is absolutely everything. Everything. I miss it terribly. I am bereft this evening thinking of the loss of that gift. Do you pray?

kayla

Kayla is blind and paralyzed on one side. She is lying in her bed in pediatric ICU, slowly turning her head to the left, where she grimaces, shivers and then repeats. Over and over she does this, a pained writhing, the sole outward manifestation of her swelling brain and spinal cord trauma.

Head injury. Blunt force trauma. These dreadful things would seem mysterious ~ what happened to this little girl? ~ were she not also covered with bruises, bite marks, pinches, red scrapes and abrasions. The injuries are technicolor shades of yellow, green, blue, purple. They span days and days, but the worst, the most recent, are near black.

Enormous brown eyes, wide open eyes, she looks and sees nothing. She cannot respond to my voice. I tell her she is safe, that no one can hurt her and I will keep her safe from those who did this. But who, who did this? I desperately need her to tell me who did this. She cannot talk and it's too early to tell what's permanent, if she will recover at all. Six years old, a Native American child from near where I grew up. She is very thin, so pale, her long black hair missing in patches where it was ripped out from the roots.

The detective beckons me from the hall. We huddle with the doctor, with the uniformed cops who were first to the hospital after the ambulance brought her in. Who did this? Which one of them, stepmother? father? Who could do this to her, this systematic destruction of a tiny little girl's body, of her mind?

We have no answers, any of us, and so they leave and I return to my task. My job is to keep her safe, to determine if she goes home again, what happens to her if she does not. That Kayla can't talk is driving me mad. I don't know who to protect her from. Who did this to her? Who could have hurt this little girl so terribly?

I talk to stepmom who denies ever seeing anything amiss, no bruises, nothing. She was gone from Saturday evening to Sunday noon, at work. It was 2:00 a.m. Monday morning when the ambulance was called because Kayla was struggling to breathe. Stepmom says that Kayla was sleepy and stayed in her room all of Sunday evening. Didn't eat. Never came out. No, she did not think that odd. No, she did not think to check on her. No, she did not see any injuries. No. No. No. I hate her.

I talk to dad who denies ever seeing anything amiss, no bruises, nothing. He was home from Saturday evening to Sunday noon, caring for Kayla and her half siblings. Dad says that Kayla was sleepy and stayed in her room all of Sunday evening. Didn't eat. Never came out. No, he did not think that odd. No, he did not think to check on her. No, he did not see any injuries. No. No. No. I hate him too.

Both clamor to see Kayla. They are concerned, so very concerned. One at a time, I tell them, and I take stepmom to the room. I tell Kayla who is here to see her and there is no response. Stepmom's voice sounds wrong to me. Her comforting words seem stiff and they don't ring true. She leaves quickly and I follow her out, asking her how she could not see these injuries. She tells me Kayla falls a lot. I despise her.

I take Dad to the room. I tell Kayla he is here and he says Kayla, baby? Her agitation is immediate and extreme. He says how are you, baby? and she thrashes like a wild thing, pulling the IV from her arm, moaning. Sudden tears unlike any I've ever seen, she is soaked, instantly soaked, and still she can't talk and she's moaning with her mouth in an agonized grimace and the phrase rictus of fear comes from nowhere and runs through my mind and the moaning, the tortured moaning, is a godforsaken, dreadful sound.

She needs to get away, away from that voice, but half her body won't work and she can't see, she doesn't know where to go, she is trapped in her blindness and her terror and this is happening in moments, between his Kayla, baby? and how are you? In an instant I am moving toward him but it feels like slow motion and I can see in his eyes a sheen of pleasure and I know that he is a monster and I am at last across the room shoving him out the door, get out get out get out of here get the fuck out, go now, get out.

Kayla has spoken in the only way she can. It is hours before she stabilizes. Every footstep in the hallway spikes her heart rate. I whisper over and over you are safe, he cannot come back, I will not let him, you are safe, safe, safe, really, believe me this time even though I have let you down, I am so, so sorry.

Grandmother is here and when Kayla is better, I let her in the room. Grandmother is crying, but trying to be brave. She whispers to Kayla of grandpa and the chickens on the farm and Kayla's dog, the one Dad would not allow her to keep when he took her from grandmother's home. Kayla's heart rate drops even more and it steadies. Her writhing is less intense, though it continues at the same appallingly rhythmic pace, a wretched harbinger of a brain ruined by clotting and pressure and brute force.

I walk grandmother out and she tells me that Kayla was not abused. I am stunned and enraged, my head hot with an explosion of disbelief and a high voltage urge to slap her senseless, how could she? We argue and I know I am on the line, too close to losing control as I did with dad, but I get it, finally, of course, I know this stuff but everything I know has vanished in the face of my horror that I let the monster into Kayla's room.

Grandmother feels responsible for letting Kayla live with her dad and this gives me hope, so we agree to meet at my office next day because this one may be workable if that is why she denies. If she is guilt stricken and hating herself for her failure and so cannot admit the truth, there is hope. If she denies to protect the adults, Kayla has no one.

It is late and this endless day is at a close because I can't stand anymore of it and everyone is gone but the nurses and Kayla, who lies wide-eyed in her bed, writhing, turning, listening to the soft plop of the IV fluids and the mechanical beat of her six year old heart on the monitor next to her bed.

On the dot next morning, grandmother arrives and I bring her coffee and we discuss what happened to Kayla. Grandmother thinks she must have fallen. She's been on the phone all night with dad's local kin and there are vague reports circulating among family members that Kayla fell off a bike, or the curb, maybe the porch, oops, yeah, she was climbing on the dresser and fell, another kid hit her and it's bullshit and I know and they know and now this grandmother, the good grandmother, is saying the same thing.

I have pictures. I have doctor's reports, exam results, tests. I have seen every inch of this tiny little girl's body and the harm that has been done her, the hideous violence of slapping and pinching and pounding and kicking and the inconceivable atrocity of bite marks on her inner thighs and her labia and her buttocks and breasts and this woman tells me she must have fallen. I feel the electric hum of rage in my muscles and my head is hot with it again and I can't detach from this one, can't do it.

I slide a picture of torn flesh across the table and I ask is that from falling? Another picture of deep bruises, falling? Another, and another, and then I'm around the table and next to her, fanning every photo of this child's living hell in front of her, the brutality of it evident in every shot and then the last image of Kayla, the blank stare of this baby girl now blind and paralyzed, did she fall? Did she fall?? Is that FROM FALLING????

I've made her cry. I've hurt another human being while trying to protect a little girl. She is weeping, doubled over with her head in her hands, saying no, no, no, she did not fall, I know it and it is my fault I should have kept her, I should have kept her, why did I let him take her.

Now we are sisters, this grandmother and I, because I am not over, will not get over, having taken the architect of this nightmare into the room where Kayla lay blind and paralyzed, infinitely vulnerable, safe for the first time in months.
And this grandmother will never get over having let him take Kayla away from her. We are sisters in guilt.

We are bit players in the wretched script of Kayla's life of torment, but our shared guilt is the foundation of our commitment that she will never return to him. Never. And in that we succeed and I am able at last to say to this violated child, now you are safe. Now you are safe.

roe, wade and me

Thirty five years ago, I had an abortion. It was the first of three in a period of four years. I could explain all of the circumstances in an effort to gain your understanding, but that's not why I'm writing this. I am bravely writing these words and still, still, I feel the urge to tell you that one of those was the result of being raped and one was because . . . because . . . and therein lies the problem. I feel that I must justify, must explain, must make you experience what happened to me in those years between 15 and 19 so you will not judge me, so I will not be diminished in your eyes because of the choices I made. I'm writing this because I am tired of the message ~ subtle and not so ~ that I should be ashamed.

It's not that I'm proud. I guess I am neutral. And I am not psychologically wrecked. My heart doesn't ache when I see an infant. I don't mark the dates as they pass, longing for the children I could have had. More than anything, I am grateful, so very grateful, that I became pregnant one month after the Supreme Court's decision that would, at last, legally allow me the right to choose what would happen with my own body.

Women have always had abortions, always, since ancient times. Whether Roe v. Wade ultimately stands or falls will change nothing except the quality of our lives as people who live with the potential of pregnancy. It will change the quality of women's lives and if we lose Roe, women will begin dying again because women will not stop terminating pregnancies.

I was essentially a child when I became pregnant, yet I had long been aware of abortion and the various means to accomplish that absent the clinics which came later. Friends from junior high had, variously, consumed poisonous substances, taken blows to the belly, jumped from a roof (with resultant broken leg and intact fetus), gone to Mexico, been flown to England for the dread late stage saline termination. There were rumors that the marginal physician downtown, a butcher by all accounts, would accommodate women in need for sexual favors.

In a short period of time, my junior high years, in one small town known for its high educational level, prosperity, and relative sophistication, one girl died as the result of her efforts to stop the life growing within her. The coathanger abortion is almost mythological, and yet Juanita punctured her own uterus late one Saturday night, bleeding to death in her bedroom. There were probably others, but I knew Juanita, a peripheral figure in my junior high set of friends.

I was lucky. Roe v. Wade was newly minted and there was a clinic 100 miles away and I had a parent who agreed that a pregnancy was unacceptable. The fact of being pregnant imbued me with a clarity about my life that had been missing to that point. I came back determined to rid myself of an abusive boyfriend, determined to finish school and convinced that the only way I'd ever have the kind of life I wanted would be to get the hell out of that Oklahoma town.

I am coming out of the closet with my abortions on this 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade because I think it is important to do so. Almost all of the women I know have terminated a pregnancy, yet almost no one talks about it except in hushed tones, one on one, and perhaps it should remain so. Yet I cannot help but think that we are at risk of losing this critical affirmation of privacy and the right to self determination because we are silent. We are silent out of shame or out of sadness, or we are silent because we are not ashamed and we're not sad and we're only grateful and that's really not acceptable in this country, this land where we exalt the potential life of a mass of cells and diminish the value of the woman who owns them.

It would be more acceptable if I could say that I am anguished about the decisions I made in those crazy years in my teens, that I wake up thinking of those potential children, that I feel something missing in my soul. I am not and I do not. I never wanted children and have always wished I could pass on to some other woman my breathtaking fertility. I do still have passing moments of anger for the doctor who, after considering my request for a tubal ligation, patted me on the knee and said "you're far too young, you'll find a fine man one day and then you'll want children." Had he honored my request, I would be writing this confession about a single pregnancy.

We will reduce the need for abortion when we make inexpensive, quality birth control available to all women of childbearing age. When we provide thorough, quality sex education to every student in every school, the need for pregnancy termination will diminish. I'm not holding my breath for those changes, despite the spectacular failure of abstinence only prevention programs. It is a farce and it infuriates me that politicians play games with something so intimate and personal as this. It is my uterus and any life within depends on me. It is my choice and mine only. I hope to God we never go back.

Okay, now that's off my chest, back into hibernation with my papa. Hugs.

daddy

I google his name and 10 pages of papers and honors and awards rise to the surface from this thing he does not understand, this internet. He retired in 1980, long before there were computers in every home and hand. I read ultraviolet spectroscopic analysis and biodegradation of hydrotopes and cyanoethylation of amino acids. I see his work translated into French, into Japanese, Spanish. I feel an almost intolerable rage over the destruction of such a magnificent intellect.

It doesn't help to wonder why, to agonize over the injustice of it, this fucking dementia. I speak to him several times a day and each time, as he repeats his queries about my sister, her kids, "the Floridians," my dogs, I can see in my mind's relentless and unflinching eye the black space on the MRI where the fullness of his frontal lobe used to be.

I fight off the rage with gratitude: he is still with us, he can still communicate, can still laugh. His personality is mostly intact. We are fortunate, in part, because of the magical combination of Namenda and Aricept. And still I miss my other father, the one with whom I would argue politics, human rights, and religion. He is here and I am grateful and so fortunate, and still I miss my Daddy.

It occurred to me as I walked to work this morning that he is 90 years old and yet I see him rarely. My priorities are out of whack and I don't want to live with regret, the most wretched of emotions. I will keep up with all of you, but I am done here for now. There is so little time left. Thank you for your support and kindness and brilliance over the last 18 months. It's been a blast. Hugs to all of you.

doctor! doctor!

I can hear my backbone. It's pretty freaky. When I stand on one foot to put a boot on the other, I hear it clattering around, and even sitting in my chair, I can hear my bones rubbing together if I move from side to side.

You? Can you hear your bones? I don't think this is normal, but is it worth a trip to the doc before it hurts?

lesbians, tractors and AIDS

I've spent the first day of 2008 ~ a year I know is going to be a good one ~ at home cooking chicken mole enchiladas and tomato florentine soup. And I've read from start to finish a marvelous book by this woman, Catherine Friend, a writer who fell in love with Melissa and turned into a farmer.

The book ~ Hit By a Farm ~ was a delicious treat. I laughed out loud and cried just enough. I love the way Catherine writes about her relationship with Melissa, with honesty and frankness and love. It's a book I randomly picked up off the library shelf because a glance at the cover reminded me of my old dream of living in the country.

I sometimes think I've missed my calling and really belong out in the hinterlands raising chickens and milking goats. When I bought this city house, I fully intended to keep a couple of goats and chickens in the back yard, with the plan of making cheese and building a chicken tractor to keep the bugs out of the garden beds.

After reading Catherine's account of life and death on the farm, I'm rethinking that for the 100th time, but the book was a delight and it was an extra treat to find that the farmers are a couple of gay girls with a bigass tractor. In my dream, the tractor's a spiffy little Kubota, but these women have got a honkin' big red monster and I've now got a bad case of tractor envy.

And then there's this Post of the Year thing for which I was unknowingly nominated and, surprisingly, won along with another blogger called Little Red Boat. It was quite a surprise to drop by Joe's and see my name practically in lights. Sweet. The post was an old one from April called piano music. I mention it again only because it honors my friend Wayne, who loved and lost his Ronnie to that fucking disease. So now I've confessed and that is that and a big thank you to the Post of the Week folks. Thank you.

And the last good thing is this: I know we are going to prevail against these thugs who have seized control of our government. It is not hopeless, it will be frustrating and frightening but I am certain that this will be the year things change for the better and we will rid ourselves of the likes of George Bush and his band of zealots.