January 31, 2003

Earlier this week, I got an email forwarded to me by a friend of mine who is a member of the National Association for Poetry Therapy.

The original email sent by Sam Hamill, a poet and editor of the highly regarded Copper Canyon Press, asked that every poet speak up for the conscience of our country and lend his or her name to our petition against this war, and to make February 12 a day of Poetry Against the War. We will compile an anthology of protest to be presented to the White House on that afternoon. Read about the history of the effort here. And if you want to submit a poem or statement of conscience, email it to kokua@olympus.net. I already did.

According to today’s Yahoo News, Hamill had expected about 50 responses; he's gotten about 2,000, including contributions from W.S. Merwin, Adrienne Rich and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose poem, "Coda," includes the lines "And America turns the attack on the World Trade Center-Into the beginning of the Third World War."

The subject of the Yahoo news article is a report that a literary symposium that was supposed to be hosted by Laura Bush has been indefinitely postponed, and Two former U.S. poet laureates criticized the White House on Thursday for postponing a literary symposium it believed would be politicized. Stanley Kunitz and Rita Dove characterized the decision as an example of the Bush administration's hostility to dissenting or creative voices.

It’s become so easy for me to feel powerless these days. But, between Camilo giving me an email pep talk and a chance to contribute to the compilation of Poetry Against the War, I’m feeling a little better.

January 30, 2003

There is so much compelling and thoughtful stuff about our national crisis being written out there! For example:

This from a NY Times article by Bob Herbert --
President Bush has learned how to deliver a moving speech. But Tuesday night's State of the Union Message did not address the most important question facing the American people: What kind of nation are we becoming?

The Bush administration is changing the nation in fundamental ways. However one feels about a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, over the long term a bullying, go-it-alone foreign policy wedded to a military doctrine of pre-emption is a recipe for destabilization and paranoia around the world.

This, by Gunter Grass in The Guardian: (this was sent to me in an email from a poetry therapy list; I haven't found a link yet, but I'm trying.)

This looming war is a wanted war. It is already going on in the heads of the planners, in the world's stock exchanges, and in what seem to be forward-dated TV programmes. The enemy target is in the sights. He has been named and - along with other enemies on the stocks who will be targeted and named next - he fits the bill for those who want to conjure a danger so grim that it undermines careful reflection.

We know how people create enemies where none exists. We know, and have plenty of pictures to illustrate it, what happens in war when the target is not quite hit. We are familiar with the words for damage and casualties which we are told to accept as inevitable. We are used to the relatively small number of its own dead that the world's number one ruling power has to count and mourn while the mass of enemy dead, including women and children, go uncounted and are not worth mourning.

So now we wait for the new war and the old repetitions. This time new missile systems will be even more accurate. We can be confident about the choice of pictures from this looming war. The flow of images will be sanitised of every detail of horror. Familiar TV channels will be there to give us a new installment of war as soap opera, interrupted only by ads for consumers who are living happily in peace.

I need to fix a skirt for my mother. I really need to go out and walk in the sun. I need to see and cuddle my grandson. I need to start doing exercises for my bad back. At the least, I need to do the dishes in the sink since yesterday. Instead, I read what others are writing about my country's slide into darkness, and I want to go back to bed.

January 29, 2003

I watched Bush’s address yesterday and cringed through his every mispronunciation of the word “nuclear.”

Bush is sacrificing American democratic strength in favor of his egotistical quest to "democratize" the rest of the world, which is pretty much what he said he wanted to do, starting with Iraq. First, I say, democracy, like charity, begins at home. Bush needs to better understand what democracy really is. It sure isn’t just for the already rich, which seems to be what he and his Party supporters believe. Let’s get it right (or at least a whole lot better) here before we try to convince others to follow our lead.

Second, I kind of like the proposed alternative strategy to war detailed here by columnist Thomas Friedman.

As Maureen Dowd aptly explains in her column today, "They [Americans] will understand the Bush rationale for war only if they look at the metaphysical evidence, the perfect storm of imperial schemes and ideological stratagems driving the desire to topple Saddam." Yes, imperial, egotistical, ideological schemes.

And, finally, this quote from True Majority:
In his State of The Union Message President Bush made a passionate case for making stock dividends tax-free. Most of us who own stocks already have them in tax-free retirement accounts, so this benefit only really benefits the super-rich - to the tune of $27,000 a year for the average millionaire. Meanwhile The Children's Defense Fund calculated that just the money going to this millionaire tax cut could provide health insurance for every American kid who doesn't have it and Head Start for every eligible kid who needs it. And unlike Bush's "millionaires need more caviar" plan, this would actually create jobs right in the communities getting hit the hardest AND prepare our youngest to be successful.

Tell your Senators and Representative that they should worry more about the well-being of America's kids and economy than its millionaires.

January 26, 2003

I agree with Tribune Media columnist Matthew Miller that “free markets” and the resulting skewed distribution of wealth are NOT moral.

As he explains:
If you're a "markets are presumptively moral" type, you're almost certainly in favor of President Bush's previous and proposed tax cuts. Government would simply be giving people their own money back, or "not taxing it twice." Opposition to such simple justice must be motivated by envy or resentment - that is, "class warfare."

Like me, they oppose them because they don't think tax cuts mostly benefiting those already well-off should be a national priority, given what else is on America's unfinished agenda - like insuring the uninsured, bolstering Medicare or recruiting teachers for high-poverty schools. This is especially the case when, moral questions aside, we know that marginal tax rates in the current range are consistent with those that in the 1990s produced the longest economic boom of our era.

And what he says here seems so amazingly clear and true to me:
People like me who say "no" start from a different premise. Markets are an entirely human construct, we say, with an infrastructure of property law, contract law, central banking and myriad other mechanisms devised by the mind of man to serve human purposes and social goals.

President Bush, it must be said, is an odd spokesman for the "markets are presumptively moral" school. In Ann Richards' memorable gibe, the president was "born on third base and thinks he hit a triple." His personal fortune is a direct result of government subsidies that boosted the value of the Texas Rangers.

It’s Superbowl Sunday. I don’t even know what teams are playing. But then, again, I don’t think football is “presumptively moral” anyway.

This is an old photograph/postcard of a "witches" coven at the Home of the Aged in Norfolk, England.

Today I spent a few hours in an expressive arts workshop given by a friend of mine. In addition to doing some yoga stretches, freeform movement, and meditation, we were asked to choose a photo/postcard from among dozens laid out on the floor -- one that appealed to us for whatever reason, and get into it emotionally. I picked the one above.

Then we were asked to take sheets of paper and crayons and either write or draw what we were feeling. This is what I drew.

I loved these old, wrinkled women, having tea together outside, where everyone can see them, pointed black hats giving fingers to the rest of the world that thinks they're weird hags, dressed in funny clothes. But they know better, and it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks of them. They have each other to laugh and remember with, and their afternoon teas in the sun.

But, since I'm not there yet, at the suggestions of my Commenters to the post below, I'm going to check out 90-year-old Caleb.

January 25, 2003

Jennifer Balderama posts this ee cummings quote:
Stolen wisdom: to be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

I saw the movie “The Hours” tonight. It’s a movie about that battle.

As Blog Sisters registrar, I’ve been registering new sistahs almost every day, many of them young enough to be my granddaughters. Their blogs tend to be about that battle.

The Blog Sisters who’ve been there from the beginning – Jeneane, Shelley, Halley – never stop fighting to be nobody but themselves. They blog their struggles, their questions, their answers – refusing to become everybody else. Their posts are about that battle.

At different times in our lives the battle is different. Jeneane, who is exactly my daughter’s age, writes
But I do admit to an affinity for reading bloggers who wade around in the same 40-ish trenches as me. What they write, because of where they are in their journey from birth, often resonates with me. They're looking back at the hard stuff that brought them to this edge of mid-life, and they're looking ahead, lugging a backpack of worries and concerns not unlike my own.

There are lots of women bloggers in their 40s. Even more in their 30s. I often feel that I sit alone here at the edge of the blog community of women – all so much younger than I. I read their blogs and think “I’ve been there; done that.” You’re so right, Jeneane. I often can’t keep myself from wanting to say (and lately actually saying in not those exact words) "Watch out!" or "Oh no, don't do that--I tried it and it did not, I mean not, work." It’s hard for me not to feel like I want to mother the blogaverse.

When I started weblogging, I put out a call for “older/wiser” bloggers (like age 60 or over). I know that there have to be more out there than Tom Shugart, who is most definitely wise as well as in the age range. But where are the others – the ones who are at the same place on their journeys as I am on mine? Is it that they are not comfortable with technology, having (probably) worked at and retired from jobs that didn’t give them the chance to play with it a while? Are they uncomfortable with the public nature of blogging, with the notion that the whole world will then somehow know who they are? Sometimes I feel very alone here on the blogrim. Aren’t there any others out there like me? Others who have fought the battle for themselves and won? Others with a long view, a still-curious mind, and a passion to help somehow make this a better world for those we will leave behind?

I find myself truly admiring the younger bloggers – their ease with the medium, their facility in connecting with each other. I love that some of them insist on being nobody but themselves. I think this new Blog Sister (who ran for elected office on the Libertarian ticket and appears as below in a Ladies of Liberty Calendar) is way cool:

I love how some of them refuse to give up fighting that battle.

I saw the movie “The Hours” tonight with three women friends with whom I used to work. One of them is getting divorced after 29 years of marriage. She got married right after high school. She feels that she is finally going to give herself the opportunity to be nobody but herself.

I don’t have to fight that battle any more. I won it a while ago. And now what?

January 23, 2003

These are dark days, both literally and metaphorically. It’s too cold to go outside. I’m stuck in my dark apartment. I miss the sun. I miss the hope of sun. I miss feeling hope.

I don’t think I’ll ever get used to living on the third floor in an apartment that doesn’t get much sun, even in the summer. It won’t be forever. But it is for now.

Outside of my dark apartment, the happenings are just as dark. My cousin called today to tell me that his daughter (who, along with her fiancé, is in the army reserves and lives in Denver) eloped yesterday because her fiancé’s unit has been called up. Hers probably will be as well. We are looking into the hellmouth of war. It is appropriate that on the TV show Angel, the sun has disappeared.

During dark times, I dig out my copy of Roethke’s collection Words for the Wind and read through the section “Meditations of an Old Woman.” I ride his words into a place beyond light and dark, a transcendent place where every detail of life – stones and bones, ripples in water, moss at midnight – breathes, sovereign yet connected.

There is something about stones that has always fascinated me. I have baskets filled with tumbled stones -- bloodstone, red jasper, carnelian, sodalite, Apache tears..... I’ve learned their lore and their mythologies. I use them to conjure hope. Perhaps I am a stone at heart.

Charles Simic wrote a great poem entitled “Stone:”

Go inside a stone
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger's tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.
From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river;
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen.
I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed,
So perhaps it is not dark inside after all,
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill --
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star-charts
On the inner walls.

In dark times, it is good to be a stone.

January 22, 2003

Robert Jensen, a professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, offers one of the best analyses I've seen on cultural violence in his essay in the online journal, Feminista. It's worth linking over to and reading.

Blow Bangs and Cluster Bombs: The Cruelty of Men and Americans makes the connection between pornography and war, explaining that "Pornography and the wars of the U.S. empire both depend for their success on the process of rendering human beings less-than-fully-human so they can be hurt -- in the case of pornography to provide pleasure for men, and in war to protect the comfort of Americans."

Jensen is a member of the Nowar Collective, author of the book Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream, and co-author of Pornography: The Production and Consumption of Inequality.

His pamphlet, "Citizens of the Empire," is available at
http://www.nowarcollective.com/citizensoftheempire.pdf.
Other writings are available online at
http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/freelance/freelance.htm.
He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.

A female friend of a male friend contacted me to see if I know of any websites that list male scumbags who lie and otherwise deceive women who meet them over the internet. A Google search only turned up this site, which lists women who have done the lying and deceiving – but only women from the area around Russia.

It would be great if there could be a website where women can log on and say “Duh. Do I feel dumb! I thought that I was meeting this wonderful, intelligent, compassionate, single guy through an Internet matchmaking service, and he really turned out to be a scumbag. He wasn’t any of those things. Even his photo was a scam. So, if you run across [insert name] through one of those Internet dating services, run fast the other way!”

The potential misuse of such a website is obvious, given the fury of a woman scorned. But the value of such a website to adventurous single women who opt to use such a service is immeasurable. Unfortunately, it’s probably illegal.

While I’ll admit to checking out (for free) the photos of the guys in my region who sign up with match.com, I’ve never been even remotely tempted either to contact them or to put myself out there. I’ve also always thought that checking out blogs is a much safer way to search out interesting people of both genders. You’ve a much better chance of crossing paths with a kindred spirit that way than you do using the services of Internet matchmakers. It might cost more in terms of time to cruise weblogs, but it doesn’t cost any money and it doesn't put you at risk. And, you can learn more truths about a man from how he spins his blog entries than from how he spins his personal profile.

January 21, 2003

B!X, who has traded in his personal weblogging shoes to focus on thinking/writing globally and acting/writing locally, sends me this link to a piece in salon.com about A new film from "Slacker" director Richard Linklater [that] offers a daring, crackpot vision for the World Trade Center memorial…

In the 20-minute film, "Live From Shiva's Dancefloor," Manhattan walking-tour guide Timothy "Speed" Levitch posits that the site should be turned into a park full of free-roaming American bison, popularly known as buffalo. "Sixteen acres of blazing green grass, a place for togetherness, healing out loud, and spontaneous culture," says Levitch. "And in the middle of the park, the memorial should not be an inanimate slab of stone, but should have a heartbeat." Thus, the buffalo…..”

"We're serious about this," says Linklater of the park. "It's kind of playful but that's the point." It is unlikely that "Live From Shiva's Dancefloor" will move a committee of bureaucrats to take the bison idea seriously. The hope is that the film will spawn new thinking on a greater scale, change the scope of thought and vision on a fatigued subject. "Even if it doesn't actually happen," Levitch says, "there is triumph in just having people imagine it."

My feeling exactly.

January 20, 2003

My mother is crying. Her brother is dying. Well, he’s 89 years old, in the hospital with pneumonia for the second time in as many months, and thinks it’s always somewhere around 1950. It doesn’t look good.

For decades, my uncle and his wife lived in the apartment below my mother and father in the two-family building that they jointly purchased. My dad died first. Then my aunt. And then it was just my mother and her brother until I finally moved her up to live near me three years ago. My uncle refused to leave the apartment that he and his snappy mean-tempered dachshund had committedly shared for all those years.

My mother called her brother every other week since she moved. She often had to remind him who she was. My cousin told me tonight that he no longer remembers who anyone is.

Tonight, despite the tears, my mother began to worry that she didn’t have any black shoes to wear to a funeral. It’s very important to her to look appropriately dressed at all times. So, tomorrow I will take her out shopping to buy black shoes. I’m waiting for her to start getting on my case about what I am going to wear. No problem. I have plenty of black.

My mother will be 87 next month. I know that she’s thinking that her turn is coming soon. Do you want to bet that she’s soon going to start going through all of her clothes to make sure that she has something appropriate to wear?

January 19, 2003

With his usual grace, honesty, and wit, Tom Shugart posted a response to my fantasy of a world with a diminished level of testosterone. He mentions that women are attracted to strong, aggressive, powerful men. In other words, Alpha Males. The kind of Alpha Males that Halley Suitt is writing about.

That is something we women should think about. If we value powerful, aggressive, competitive men (and the genes of those kind certainly were necessary in much earlier times to prevent the bear from eating you), then what we are doing is reinforcing the testosterone-driven tendency of men to strive toward achieving those things. If we bring up our sons to strive to achieve those qualities, we are perpetuating the kind of world in which we continue to find aggressiveness becoming aggression and in which competitiveness leads to violence, and not just physical violence.

We no longer need mates who can kill the bears before the bears kill us and who will pass along genes to give us sons who will do the same. This world needs men with different skills, different values, different genes – ones that foster tendencies to cooperative, to negotiate, to be fair and empathetic, to nurture, to protect and preserve with a strength based in gentleness and compassion, not arrogance and aggressiveness.

The last few nights I’ve had dreams of men from my past who are Alpha Males – sexy and successful. (And they sure are fun to play with as long as you never forget what theyare.) However, my dreams played out scenarios that reminded me of the other side of their coins – their manipulative sweet-talking arrogance, self-centeredness and amorality; their constant need to believe that they are controlling the action.

There are warriors and there are warriors. It’s time to demote the Alphas to the back of the pack.

My newspaper today has a good article by John Balzar of the LA Times about the fault-ridden plan, which is designed to put more economic power into the hands of those who already have too much. He says:

Yes, America prospers by the enterprise of its individuals. But America gained its greatness with the understanding that individuals do not prosper apart from the fortunes of the nation. Aristotle put it this way 2,325 years ago: "The most perfect political community is one in which the middle class is in control and outnumbers both of the other classes."

Jennifer Balderama has a really good piece about Martin Luthor King and his messages that relates to this.

Bill Moyers' NOW on PBS last Friday night covered several areas -- including the digital copyright issue and proposed repeal of the inheritance tax -- that really reflected just how widespread the divide is going to get if something doesn't change. The middle class is fast disappearing, and the elite are retreating within gated communities. I wonder how long this can go on before we find ourselves in some sci fi movie nightmare.

January 18, 2003

Brain research is making it more and more evident that, while our environment and nurturing can make a crucial difference in what kinds of adults we mature into, nature deals us each a very definitive hand, and much of it is in the form of chemicals that our brains produce. If we don’t have enough seratonin, we feel depressed. If we are females and our estrogen and progesterone are out of whack, we get major PMS. (These are just two of hundreds of examples.)

Many of us women have come to recognize that we can control PMS – with everything from herbal supplements to wild yam cream, from progesterone suppositories to Prozac capsules. Because humans have evolved the way we have, it might be “natural” to be at the mercy of our erratic human brain and glandular chemistries, but that doesn’t mean we can’t take our fate into our own hands and alter those defective ebbs and flows. Doing so doesn’t make us less ourselves; indeed, it often frees us from the tyranny of our chemistries and allows us to be so much more our loving, caring, creative, and nurturing selves – in other words, better human beings.

Research has also made the connection between high levels of testosterone and violence/aggression/competitiveness. It has also made the connection between high levels of testosterone and sex drive. It makes sense, then, that men with high levels of testosterone might find their sex drive jumbled up somehow with aggressive and even violent feelings. Note the example that Suzanne posted in her Comment to this BlogSister post: I remember hearing about how the U.S. fighter pilots during the Gulf War in '91 were taking speed and watching porn flicks in the hours and moments before they flew their missions. I would like to see this connection between sexual violence toward women and war be seriously explored.

I suggest that it has been explored in the research on testosterone. Of course it makes perverse sense to rev up the guys’ testosterone with porn flicks and then let them loose to pillage and rape. That’s what high levels of testosterone help to make happen.

Now, if we women understand that it makes both our lives and the lives of all around us better if we get our estrogen and progesterone under control so that we don’t become PMS bitches, why don’t the guys recognize that controlling their testosterone levels would make them so much humane and loveable. It wouldn’t make them less “male,” just as controlling our hormone levels doesn’t make us less “female.” (I don’t even think researchers have come up with any way to keep testosterone levels at a manageable level. Maybe because most medical researchers and funders are male?)

Heh. What if we “crop-dusted” the entire Middle East with some sort of “testosterone reducer?” Would Arafat and Sharon be more inclined to make long, lazy love (it would probably take them longer than usual) instead of hot heavy war?

Or maybe there’s something in the food or water of the Middle East that inhibits the brain’s production of seratonin, resulting in negative, antagonistic feelings. Maybe dumping truckloads of Prozac in the water supply would make compromise seem like not such a bad thing after all.

Just imagine a world with no alpha males, no pissing contests (both metaphorical and actual), no rape, no war, and probably no robber baron megamillionaires either. Of course, football and hockey might become obsolete too, but that’s no big loss for me, anyway.

I spent today at a workshop for caregivers on how to take care of themselves. I find that what I really need for myself is a chance to commiserate with other caregivers, so I offered to set up a private weblog for the the 6 of us who took the workshop. I'm hoping that they take me up on it. I know that some Alzheimer patients use weblogging both as a support group and, even more importantly, to have an easily accessible record of what they can't totally remember. When they blog every day, they have a record of their activities to which they can refer.

I gave the other caregivers my url and Blog Sisters' so that they can check us out as examples of weblogs. I hope that they notice the link to my E-mail up near the beginning of the sidebar so that they can get in touch with me if they want to follow up.

While most of the bloggers I read are looking for ways to use the Internet and even public weblogging to make money, I'm more interested in it as a tool for individuals who need a support group for some specific reason. That means a private site, and that's certainly no problem. I was part of a small private women's poetry weblog, which ran its course; but it worked well for a while.

I'm trying to think of a title. I'll probably do it through blogger, since that's the only one I know how to set up. I also know that you can opt out of Google's system; I'll just have to dig out the code. Of course, then I'll have to find someplace to get a Comments feature, since I used YACCS for my old blogger weblog, and I understand that you can't get that any more. If no one responds, this is all moot anyway. At least I've tried.

January 17, 2003

This, my way of imaging prayer, visualizing vibes, willing wishes into the world.

This, for Burningbird, inspired by Rage(B) and my racial runic memories; echoed in the far-flung voices of Sisters loosely joined.

The image:
- My new silver amulet with a coral-centered double dorje (symbol of strength and wisdom that cannot be destroyed) on the front and the monogram of the kalachakra heruka on the back for protection against suffering, negativity, and conflict.
- A bindrune symbolizing the transformation of obstacles into successes, the discovery of lost investments and legacies, fulfillment in career matters, and increased health, strength, and confidence.
- A necklace owned by three Sisters in remembrance of hearts loosely joined.
- Burningbird aflame, rising, turning the full Cold Moon ablaze.
- And a feel of spring in the background, the eternal egg, rebirth, resurrection, renewal, hope.

Shared and joined hope for Burningbird and sent out into the filling moon.

January 16, 2003

On Blog Sisters, Jennifer Balderama wonders what she’s doing with her life. It seems to me that, like the rest of us, she’s living it – as best she can under the circumstances.

Unemployment is rampant. Gambling is out of control for too many people. We are very close to a global war. Violence against women and children is as widespread as ever. Global warming is affecting where certain crops and plants are able to grow. Education budgets are being decimated. “Sophisticated computers, robotics, telecommunications, and other cutting-edge technologies are fast replacing human beings in virtually every sector and industry - from manufacturing, retail, and financial services, to transportation, agriculture, and government.” (quoted from here)

These days, if we have any kind of income, have any people who love us and whom we love, can afford to have computers with Internet access – we are the lucky ones. If we can read and write grammatically, if we are not in great debt, if we have cars that run and rooms without vermin, we are the lucky ones. We are really lucky if we have health insurance and all of our teeth. If we are not overweight and/or depressed, terminally forgetful, hungry, lonely….and on and on and on……

We think we have come so far from “either you eat the bear or the bear eats you,” but maybe we haven’t. Life has always been a dangerous crapshoot with no guarantees.

Living (as most of us here in Blogaria do) among the lucky ones makes it easy to forget that there are more unlucky ones than there are lucky.

Back in the mid-90s, I read Jeremy Rifkin’s The End of Work.

The world, says Rifkin, is fast polarizing into two potentially irreconcilable forces: on one side, an information elite that controls and manages the high-tech global economy; and on the other, the growing numbers of permanently displaced workers, who have few prospects and little hope for meaningful employment in an increasingly automated world…. Rifkin suggests that we move beyond the delusion of retraining for nonexistent jobs. He urges us to begin to ponder the unthinkable - to prepare ourselves and our institutions for a world that is phasing out mass employment in the production and marketing of goods and services. Redefining the role of the individual in a near workerless society is likely to be the single most pressing issue in the decades to come. .. Rifkin says we should look toward a new, post- market era. Fresh alternatives to formal work will need to be devised. New approaches to providing income and purchasing power will have to be implemented.
(Quoted from here.)

In a current update to his original book, Rifkin warns:
The great issue at hand is how to redefine the role of the human being in a world where less human physical and mental labour will be required in the commercial arena. We have yet to create a new social vision and a new social contract powerful enough to match the potential of the new technologies being introduced into our lives. The extent to which we are able to do so, will largely determine whether we experience a new renaissance or a period of great social upheaval in the coming century.

Today, I’m reading Shoshanna Zuboff’s book, The Support Economy: How Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism. (I’m reading it because I’m interested to know what kind of thinking is going on at lucky places and within the active minds of some lucky bloggers and thinkers.)

I’m only a hundred pages into it, but I am already bothered that it seems to be solely from the perspective of the lucky ones – the “consumers and employees,” the ones who will have good enough jobs to have disposable incomes in this brave new information-based economy. “For the new individual” according to Zuboff, “the purpose of consumption is life itself – the acquisition of the time and support necessary to pursue a life of psychological self-determination."

If Rifkin turns out to be right, and things keep going the way they are, it seems to me that we will find ourselves with a large disenfranchised, inadequately educated, and dangerously unemployed underclass; a much much smaller cadre of these self-determined and financially secure “new individuals;" and a bunch of us not-as-lucky ones in the middle who are expected to provide what Zuboff calls “deep support” to help these new individuals “meet the challenges of their intricate lives.”

Of course, Zuboff starts from a place that is optimistic about American capitalism and its ability to adapt to the changing needs and attitudes of consumers. And, of course, I’m neither an economist nor anyone even remotely knowledgeable about the potential of such systems to evolve into more human-friendly constructs.

I’m just a retired government employee, living on a pension and social security, a grandmother worried about the kind of world it will be when her grandson will have to learn how to find a way to eat the bear before the bear eats him.

And, as I surf and read and listen and read and watch, I have a growing feeling that Rifkin’s view of how it will go down is more realistic and accurate than Zuboff’s. But then, again, I haven't yet finished Zuboff's book.

On a related matter, tomorrow (Friday, January 17) at 9 pm EST on PBS (check local listings ) NOW with Bill Moyers takes a look into the digital future of intellectual property and the debate that has pitted private control against the public domain. You can tune in and share your views on the issues by joining the post-broadcast online discussion. I find it helpful to get non-blogger perspectives on these issues every once in a while. :-)

January 12, 2003

Rim Walking. It’s not the same as fence sitting. When you sit on a fence, you’re neither/nor. When you’re a rim walker, you have the choice of being both, or either, or none. The advantages and disadvantages have everything to do with not being a major player.

But, I guess if you walk around the rim near where major players hang out, sometimes they mistake you for one. I find that I’m on an e-mail list, composed of (in the mailer's words) mostly strange-bed-fellow power-bloggers…. Drawn from all walks of life and all manner of scurrilous employment, you represent the epidemiological ground zero of the new new {{{NEW}}} economy.

There are some names on that email list that I recognize; there are many that I don’t and so I do some Googling and discover just what major players they really are. One of them, Shoshana Zuboff, has written a book that I’m going to read. If I hadn’t been on the “power-blogger” list, I probably wouldn’t have come across the title, being mostly an outsider where technology and the economy are concerned. But I am always interested in learning about where people more knowledgeable than I think that the big picture is heading. Hanging around the edges of in-groups has its advantages, if only to make me aware of some interesting topical directions.

Rim walking. I haven’t been doing much walking – rimwise or other – for the past few days. Degenerative disk disease they call it – the old pinched nerve/muscle spasm/bone spurs/can’t do much about it because your bones are wearing out thing. Sitting around on 15-minute bouts of icepacks and making daily visits to the chiropractor while I’m waiting to get an appointment with an orthopedist just to make sure that it’s not something else. I’m going to have to do some serious back exercising when all of this subsides.

Oh to be in my forties again – energetic and strong and confidently giving the alpha males something to more than think about. Or to be in my forties again – words carving into life deep and sharp and telling.

Fifties wasn’t bad either. Last week, on one of my sedentary ice-pack bouts, I saw fifty-something Susan Sarandon on Oprah. When she walks, it’s way far from any rim. I wonder how her bones are doing.

January 09, 2003

Blech. I've got all the symptoms. TV really is a wastland, especially during the day. And CNN is too depressing. Blech.

January 05, 2003

Six of us women have been friends for more than a decade. We met in a discussion group for divorced women that I was facilitating at the time, and we eventually drifted away and formed our own little circle. We’ve been on vacations together, helped each other out during catastrophes (like when I badly broke my ankle and was in a wheelchair for 6 weeks), and try to get together monthly – sometimes to share food, sometimes just to sit around and catch up on our lives, sometimes to actually discuss a particular topic.

We’re all still single, although, over the course of these ten years, one of us has been married (again) and divorced (again), one has been living for the past three years with a man she loves, one is in a two-year relationship that has lots of ups and downs, two are not even dating at the moment, and I’ve been in and out of several relationships since our friendships began and now have opted to spend my time blogging instead. :-)

Today, we had a pot luck brunch and spent the time talking about the fact that we are all going through a time in our lives when we are no longer what we were but are not sure who we’re going to be – now that we’re all past menopause and heading out of the range of middle-age into whatever comes next. We have worked hard to support ourselves and our children; we all wish that our marriages had worked out; we all miss having that satisfying kind of life-long “growing old together” relationship with a man. While there are only two of us who are adamant feminists (the one living with her man and me), the truth is that we are all financially self-sufficient, professionally successful, sassy and smart women.

We somehow drifted into discussion of that old Fascinating Womanhood book from the 50s that urged women to (among other dutiful things) wrap themselves only in Saran Wrap and greet their husbands at the door with a drink every evening. And then we shared stories of times when we’ve done something similar – BUT it was always done out of our own choice/motivation and not out of some sense that it was our duty to amuse our husbands/lovers.

So, I come back from this great afternoon of camaraderie, silliness, supportiveness, and good food to find my mother watching Phyllis Schlafly on C-span because that idiot female is promoting her latest offensive against the Feminist Movement -- her new book, Feminist Fantasies.

I recognize that we are all entitled to our opinions. My opinion is that Schlalfly is a pampered pompous idiot who can’t have ever lived in the same world with most of us women who have to actually work for living and are not attached (by choice or circumstance) to a man. Of course, she’s a religious and political conservative. She probably also thinks that Megiddo is a great movie.

She’s enough to give me a major case of indigestion.

As I sit here writing this, the TV program American Dreams is playing out in the background, as the 50s-brainwashed-but-starting-to-wake-up Catholic wife and mother lies to her husband about going to a pot luck supper and goes instead to the movies to see Lolita.

That’s how it all started, Phyllis. That’s why we’re still ranting. All except for you, Phyllis. You still thinks it’s the 50s.

Now I’m going to watch Alias.

January 04, 2003

If you've been reading my weblog, you know that I've been unearthing all kinds of family memorabilia. One of these is a copy of an article that I wrote and that the local Hearst newspaper published in the early 70s. That's 30 years ago, and that's signficant, since I find that I'm still advocating for the same attitude change. So, I'm posting it here because, although I could have said some things better then, it's what I believed then and it's what I still believe. And I will probably die before my beliefs become much more widely shared than they are now. Certainly that seems to be the case on the national leadership level.

Self-described in the newspaper as a "human being, a writer of poetry, a woman, a wife, a mother of two children, and a feminst, in varying order of importance," I wrote the following:

Contemporary women’s conversations and writings seem almost exclusively centered around the concerns of the feminist movement. As a contemporary woman, I share in these concerns and support the feminist goals of equality – including, however, the assumption that we must be equal and complementary rather than equal and the same.

It is time not only for new structure, but for new methods as well.

January 03, 2003

I'm going through all of the stuff I've stuffed into bags and boxes that chronicles my life -- photos, published articles -- and lots of stuff from my kids' past. I"m winding up with a pile of photos I'm going to toss out, and most of them are of scenery from vacations etc. I can see why I took the photos in the first place --something about the esthetics of the sandy vistas, the roiling surfs, the craggy drops, the abstract lines of the masts of the houseboat.

But I find that what's meaningful to me now are the photos of people, including myself, that trigger the memories that I want to keep. Here are two of my favorites: my son (b!X) at about five years old on our family trip to Washington D.C., when his career goal was to drive an intergalactic garbage scow; and me at Versailles. I have plenty of photos of the palace and grounds that I'm tossing away. Seeing me there, wearing the leather jacket I had (the week before) bought on London's Carnaby St. and the jeans I bought on the Left Bank in Paris, brings back sensory memories of that rainy day and the excitement of that once-in-a-lifetime adventure.

I wonder if other people my age have that same reaction -- it's the images of faces, not just simply places, that re-awaken the sweet details of memory.

January 02, 2003

On New Year's Day I went to the movies see Lord of the Rings and watched as good battled evil in a mythic fantasy universe where the lines between good and evil are not always clear cut -- where fictionally fantastic beings struggle to make the right decisions, struggle to understand who they are in relation to others, struggle to overcome less-than-noble inclinations in themselves as well as to battle the evil machinations of their fellow creatures.

On New Year's Eve, I watched a movie (online) on Trinity Broadcasting Network called Megiddo, in which good battled evil in the ?real? world and in which the lines between good and evil were very clear cut. I went to see Lord of the Rings for all of the reasons why everyone goes to see it. I watched Megiddo because I was curious about how the religious right is presenting that ultimate good vs evil battle.

As one might expect, in Megiddo, the individual who rises to power -- for the EXPRESSED purpose of uniting the world so that there would be peace and prosperity for all -- is the anti-Christ who really only wants to rule and manipulate the world's ppulation for his own ultimately evil ends. And, of course, the United States and its president are the good guys, battling that ultimate evil.

I couldn't help but compare the two stories -- a total fantasy that reflected many truths of the human heart and soul and that stirred as many questions as answers; and the other, a supposedly realistic projection into the future of this actual world that was clearly manipulative propaganda designed to define what is evil and what is good. No questions. Just very definitive answers. And one of the answers is that the United States is always on the side of good. The other, of course, is that God is on the side of the United States.

The one thing both movies have in common, however, is the idea that there comes a time when fighting back and killing others is unavoidable. And that'-s what scares me, makes me feel trapped in a time and a world that is taking me along with it toward a future I don't want.

Armageddon.

January 01, 2003

A real-life good friend of mine buried his mother yesterday. The father of a blog friend died today. After such a loss during the holidays, those holidays will always bring with them a touch of great sadness. I know. My Dad died the day after Christmas eighteen years ago.

New offspring come into the world; aged parents leave it. We are lucky when their journeys overlap, which is how it was with Gary Turner’s daughter and father. We rejoice, we grieve, we try to keep the glass at least half-full. We offer our friends our sympathy and support and love. We live our human lives connected by our humanity.

I’m starting the New Year off right by a trip to see the Wizards -- the Wizards of the Two Towers of course. Heading for the movies with a female friend of mine who is between male partners at the moment. After that, she’s coming over to join my mom and me for some Boeuf Bourguignon with roasted rosemary potatoes, a salad, and Key Lime pie for dessert. I’m cooking.

Maybe we’ll even do a little New Year ritual before she leaves -- early enough to beat the ice storm that’s coming.

I’m reminding myself that the secret of happiness is not getting what you want; it’s wanting what you have. Easy for me to say. I pretty much have all of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs covered. It could be better, but it could always be better.

Here’s hoping that this New Year makes it better for all of those people who don’t have what I have.

And here’s hoping that we can all start this New Year with a clean slate.

Happy New Year, all!