Taking Stock

Last fall, I purchased a park model in a wonderful wooded site in Show Low, Arizona. Show Low is in the White Mountains, and it and it’s surrounding towns are a popular place for those from Tucson and Phoenix to flee the summer heat.

The weather is great up here, and I’m getting bored. I haven’t read myself out yet, but enough is enough. I’ve got an ‘assignment’ from my art class, so I guess I’ll work on that today. Maybe I’ll join the pinochle group. I used to really enjoy playing that. There’s also something called hand and foot, which is some kind of a canasta-like game. Then there’s always bridge, but it’s been so long, and I really don’t think I can keep track of the cards like I used to, plus it became so stressful for me.

They have golf, which I don’t play, and bowling, but not with my arm. There’s something called po-ke-no for which you need lots of pennies. I don’t have lots of pennies. I barely have enough nickles and dimes after losing at social dice both times I went. Bingo is not a game I’ve enjoyed since childhood, but I eagerly await 7:00 on Bingo night. I am learning mah jongg, and think I will enjoy it.

I’ve met a lot of nice people here, my immediate neighbors, folks out walking their dogs or taking themselves for a walk.

It’s very quite. I sit on my screened in porch and watch the finches at my feeders, book in hand, or with my computer. I’ve seen squirrels and jaybirds from my porch, and even a big fat robin one day. They say there’s a jack rabbit in the park, but so far I haven’t got a glimpse.

I may feel a bit bored, but one thing I don’t feel is guilty. I don’t feel guilty because I’m not constantly doing something, because the Red Cross can’t reach me here to ask me to drive half way across town and sit for several hours at their facility. I can skip bingo without a twinge.

There may be boredom in Paradise, but I think on the whole, I’m enjoying it.

My grandson recently wrote about his disappointment in President Obama.

It is because Obama is backing down on the Don’t ask don’t tell policy in the military, he won’t suspend the ejection of Gay military members pending revision of the policy. He CAN do that as Commander in chief. He also does not support gay marriage, and in other issues he is expanding the war in Afganistan. This is not what I voted for.

Oh, and plus he is totally waffling on the issue of Torture in the Bush admin. He did admit water boarding is torture, and that we do not torture, but he is trying to protect the lower level officials by using the Nazi-apologist excuse that they were “just following orders”. Obama is FAST losing his moral standing.

I can understand the disappointments. I am so pleased with all the things Obama has accomplished, especially in view of the messes we are in and that don’t stop coming.  I’ve been watching some of the Senate committee meetings on Health Care and Environmental Protection Budgeting, and it looks like they are taking him seriously. There certainly isn’t the acrimony and in-fighting I’ve seen in the past over these issues, not that it might not start up again.

I don’t understand why he didn’t clear away the don’t ask, don’t tell issue with the stroke of a pen in the first few days like he did so many other things. Gay marriage is something else - a much more devisive issue, and I think it needs more debate because the country is so split on it. I have the answer, of course, but no one’s listening to me. In my opinion, marriage is a religious concept, in many religions it is a sacrament. The government should have no say in who gets married to whom and should leave that up to the churches. However, the forming of a family unit is also a legal or secular issue, providing benefits, legal responsibilities, tax consequences, etc. So I think anyone who wants those benefits, and wants to take on those responsibilities should be able to have a civil union sanctioned by the government. Marriage, should they want it, would be handled by their religious institution. It seems so obvious, I don’t understand why no one is discussing it. However, my feelings about it are that it’s still going to take time, but that we are getting there a lot more rapidly than I would have imagined a few years ago. Fortunately, the alternatives are growing every day - with more and more states opening up to gay marriage. I know two men who recently went to California to get married. Well, not too recently, but before the marriage law was rescinded.

I’m disappointed that the war in Afghanistan is being expanded, but that was part of Obama’s campaign, and though I didn’t like the idea at the time, I believed in most everything else Obama stood for. In this recent election, he was the only choice available for me.

Also, Obama is going to make mistakes, I can only hope his good decisions outweigh his bad ones, both in consequence and in number. So far, he gets high grades from me.

Migrant Trail Bears Witness
to Human Rights Crisis
Tucson, AZ-

On May 25, 2009, a diverse group of individuals will begin a 75 mile walk to call
attention to the human rights crisis occurring on the southern border. The
sixth annual Migrant Trail: We walk for
Life is a joint endeavor of community groups and individuals from both
sides of the border walking in solidarity with migrants to demand an end to the
deaths in the desert.

Sponsors include the Migrant Trail Walk Committee, Coalición
de Derechos Humanos, BorderLinks, Mennonite Central Committee US, Catholic
Relief Services - Mexico Program, No More Deaths - Phoenix and Tucson, 8th
Day Center for Justice, Coloradans for Immigrants Rights, Frontera de Cristo,
Humane Borders, American Friends Service Committee, JPIC Office of the St.
Barbara Province Franciscans, Shalom Mennonite Fellowship, Casa Maria, and
Church of the Good Shepherd.

“For the sixth year we stand together in solidarity with
migrants in our call for action to prevent the tragic deaths and division of
communities along the U.S.-Mexico border,” says Tom Kowal of AFSC
Colorado. “Thousands of men, women, and
children have died due to failed border militarization tactics and unjust
immigration and international economic policies. This must stop.”

Since the 1990s, it is estimated that more than 5,000 men,
women and children have lost their lives crossing the U.S./Mexico border. As the
summer approaches, and Arizona is
already seeing triple-digit temperatures, the number of migrants dying in the
desert will begin to increase dramatically. Many will die the horrible death of
dehydration and exposure. These
deaths, a direct result of failed and flawed border and immigration policies,
must be prevented.

The Walk will begin Monday, May 25 at 2:00pm in Sásabe,
Sonora. Carpools will depart at 11am from
Southside Presbyterian (317 W. 23rd Street). Walkers will arrive on Sunday, May
31st
at 11:00am at Kennedy Park, Ramada #3, for a closing ceremony. The Migrant
Trail is a non-violent event, and is free and open to the community. Participants
and organizers of the Migrant
Trail call on all people of conscience to stand in solidarity with our migrant
sisters and brothers.

“The Migrant Trail is an important spiritual witness to the
challenging reality of our borderlands today,” says Brother David Buer, a
Franciscan brother serving in Tucson. “It
is a moral imperative that we embrace our desperate migrant brothers and
sisters with more humane policies and action.”

The Migrant Trail:
We Walk for Life
———————
May 25-31, 2009

A 75 mile walk from Sásabe, Sonora, MX to Tucson, AZ.

The precarious reality of our borderlands calls us to walk. We are a spiritually diverse, multi-cultural group who walk together on a journey of peace to remember people, friends and family who have died, others who have crossed, and people who continue to come. We bear witness to the tragedy of death and of the inhumanity in our midst. Lastly, we walk as a community, in defiance of the borders that attempt to divide us, committed to working together for the human dignity of all peoples.

When I told my granddaughter, Bryn, a little story about my lemon tree, she labeled it a Haiku moment. I decided to test it out to see if it really was a Haiku moment by trying to make a Haiku poem out of the story.

Here’s my attempt:

The Lemon Tree

I, black thumb’d, saw the deep green lemons turning yellow
What’s wrong,
I thought

TORTURINGDEMOCRACY.ORG.

When the publication of the photographs from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq made prisoner abuse an international controversy in April, 2004, both the National Security Archive and Washington Media Associates were already pursuing the story.

Award-winning producer Sherry Jones was in the final stages of editing the first full-length television investigation of the Administration’s detention and interrogation policies, with a focus on the detention camp at Guantanamo. That ABC news special, “Peter Jennings Reporting: Guantanamo” aired on June 25, 2004.

The Archive had just published a reference collection of more than 1500 documents on U.S. counter-terrorism policy - from the earliest plane hijacking crises in 1968 through the war in Afghanistan in 2002 - and had filed hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests for Bush administration documents on terrorism and detention policies.

In May, 2004 the Archive was the first to post on the web the historic CIA interrogation manuals that were precursors to the treatment of prisoners in U.S custody during the war on terror. In June and July, 2004 the Archive added the full posting of the administration’s legal and decision memos on interrogation policies - from the officially released papers, and the more revealing leaked documents.

Over the next two years, Washington Media would keep in touch with its sources and keep on the story. And the Archive would collect thousands of primary source documents, thanks to a multitude of investigations, leaks, journalistic coups, and successful lawsuits brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Associated Press, and others. (For a more complete list of sources, see the introduction to the “Entire Archive.”)

In January, 2007, the Archive and Washington Media decided to join forces, as we had done on documentary film projects over the past 20 years. The results are seen on this web site: The documentary, “Torturing Democracy,” and the first stage of a comprehensive Torture Archive that aims to serve as the online institutional memory of the essential documentary evidence.

Watch the documentary, explore the timelines, and read the key documents at TORTURINGDEMOCRACY.ORG.

I received this from Noah Mann-Engel, and am passing it on.

Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 16 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 16 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you.

If you read this, consider yourself tagged!

1. I am reading Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
2. I go to water aerobics three times a week
3. I live in Tucson, Arizona
4. I joined my grandson, Noah, in England in 2005 and was there the day the subways were bombed.
5. I missed my family very much this Christmas
6. I don’t always make my bed in the morning
7. I have one daughter, one son-in-law and 5 grandchildren
8. The last movie I saw in a theater was Four Christmases
9. I hope to live about 20 more years.
10. I once thought I wouldn’t be alive to see the turn of the century.
11. I enjoy painting in acrylic, watercolor and pastels.
12. I can see the mountains from my front windows.
13. One of my favorite TV shows is Ugly Betty
14. I belong to the UU church
15. I don’t know how to tag 16 people, but will post this on my blog.
16. I grew up in Waukegan, Illinois and Sioux City, Iowa

Awakening Compassion on the Border

“Are You Angels?”

Gonzalo lay on the side of a remote ranch road in the Arizona desert, hovering in and out of consciousness. Since drinking contaminated water from a cattle tank three days before, vomiting and diarrhea had left him severely dehydrated. Alone and immobile, without medical care or water, Gonzalo resigned himself to death only a dozen miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border.

But fate brought angels to Gonzalo in the form of humanitarian aid workers who found him as they patrolled the Sonoran desert.

Volunteers from No More Deaths NMD, a ministry of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Tucson, carefully laid Gonzalo in the back of their pick-up. He asked if he was dreaming, then if his rescuers were angels.

Read More: UUA: Awakening Compassion on the Border.

So happy Obama won the presidency, and I’m very impressed with his acceptance speech - I especially liked the inclusivity of it, may we as Americans all pull together to face the future. I was also pleased with the kind concession of John McCain. He helped show that we can all be on “our” side now.

Gore Vidal has written an open letter to Barack Obama. In the last two elections Democratic candidates conceded the election, in one case while votes were still being counted, and in the other, after the election was contested in the Supreme Court. It is generally agreed upon that the 2004 election was stolen.

I join with Gore Vidal and the thirty-three signators of this letter to plead with Senator Obama, if there is any reason to contest the election, do not concede!