The One True b!X – 09 July 2002 – The Return
Now, where are all the other Phil Donahues of this world? He’s the only reason I envy Marlo Thomas these days. I can’t wait for his new program to begin on July 15 at 8 p.m. on MSNBC.

The One True b!X – 08 July 2002 – Doing The “Smirk And Shuffle”
Two purposes to this post: to see if I finally remembered how to do the Trackback and to point you to another great post by b!X, which ends with:
I wonder just how many people in America are aware of how much of the rest of the world laughs at us, shakes its head at us, because this is who we have running the country. Have we no sense of shame at all? Are we really more satisfied with an idiot than we were with a philanderer? Are we really more satisfied with someone whose “malfeance” has to do with his performance in office, rather than his performance in the sack?
Are we really, after all, exactly that stupid?

Last week, I went to a picnic at the local home of a young woman artist with whom I worked very closely for several years in the field of interdisciplinary education. My friend is a funky visual artist with an incredible aptitude for technology, and so she took a job doing both at a small college in New Hampshire. Her real home with her really cool boyfriend is not too far from where I am, however, and she does go back and forth a lot. We never seem to find the time to hook up, so I was glad to have this chance over the holiday. While she focuses mostly on painting (now she’s experimenting with painting on digital images) the piece she did that I like best is a little white table on which she glued white plaster casts of her nipples. Heh.
Over the weekend I went to a family picnic at the lakeside home of one of my cousins — about a half-hour from where I am. He’s the only cousin of mine with whom I’ve ever felt enough in common to consider a friend. I don’t see too much of him and his live-in lady during the rest of the year, but I love going out there in the summer. He had also invited some other relatives — all Polish born and still bilingual. I grew up being able to speak Polish, and I get a kick out of realizing that I can still follow conversations in that language even though I can’t remember enough of the vocabulary to speak it. Except for my cousin and his girlfriend, I felt as unconnected to these relatives as if they were just passing acquaintances. And it has nothing to do with the language. It has more to do with the way we view the world and our places in it.
It must be awfully nice to have your family members also be your friends. It must be.

Old friends, memory brushes the same years,
Silently sharing the same fears….
— Old Friends, Simon and Garfunkel
Over the course of a lifetime, you meet a few people who become your friends and stay your friends, even if you lose touch for a while. I don’t know what the variable is that keeps the connection open between some old friends but not between others.
Yesterday I had a visit from a former Significant Other. He lives in Pacific Northwest now, and we exchange emails every once in a while. He had come out to visit his family in various locales in the Northeast, and he had a few hours in between visits, so he stopped by. We had had a few good years together, years ago, — dancing, vacationing, just hanging out, arguing politics (both government and gender). One summer we rented a houseboat and cruised around the St. Lawrence Seaway for a couple of weeks. I remember that he invented coffee bags long before anyone else had every heard of the things. He would empty out tea bags and fill them with ground coffee beans, and then he could just make himself a quick cup of regular whenever he wanted. (I neither drink nor make coffee). I guess our relationship just ran its course.
Before he moved across the country, and long after we had stopped being each other’s Significant, I ran into him at a ballroom dance and he told me that he was going out to Oregon to check out where he might want to live. When I mentioned that my son was living out there, he invited me to come along on the trip and pay a visit to theonetruebix and the cybercafe that he owned back then. My old friend and I had a relaxed, comfortable, and Platonic time visiting and sightseeing and even making it out to the Pacific Ocean for the first time in both our lives. My mother still says he was the nicest guy I dated since my divorce.

Last week, Tom Bolton rescued a bird in danger of being run over in traffic. He has since found out what he should do with the lost creature, and he’s done it.
According to this site,
Native and tribal peoples believe that all living things have lessons to teach us. By observing the characteristics and behaviors of our four legged and feathered relatives, we can become aware of these lessons. Many native peoples carry or wear carvings of animals or birds (fetishes) as a reminder of the wisdom, experience, understanding and medicine power of that animal or bird. These likenesses honor these teachers, as well as inspire us toward a clearer understanding of our own strengths and remind us of where we may need to concentrate more effort in our own lives.
Over the years, working with my shaman/medicine man/therapist, I accumulated several totem animals — two salmanders, a young fox, a bear, a tiny dragon the size of a dragonfly, and an osprey.
Last year, I had an encounter with a woodchuck. Really two woodchucks. I passed one dead by the side of the road, and, as I always do with roadkill, I sent a mental apology to the spirit of the creature, honoring its short life and hoping that its death was quick and painless. My thoughts stayed with the idea of woodchuck and what its spirit might teach me. And then, several yards in front of me, a very much alive woodchuck stops to watch me. Of course, I had to write a poem about this synchronicity.
A chubby woodchuck
in the middle of an empty parking lot
stops to watch me walk in circles
around a June afternoon
awash in dandelion seeds
and gently dappled sunlight.
He twitches his nose,
ambles a few more steps
sits on his haunches,
rests his paws on his full belly

I wonder how many of you remember that cute little blonde-mopped tyke who danced and sang her way through her childhood and was known for pursing up her cute little mouth and saying Oh my goodness! I know that Tom Shugart probably remembers, but I forgot to remember to mention that he’s the latest intervewee over at Frank Paynter’s, and, again, Paynter strips away some of the net anonymity and gives additional dimension to our already warm impression of this blogger friend.

Why aren’t more people getting really, really angry about situations like this and this and this?
And why aren’t all Americans as angry as I am about this country and its leadership. The Ticking Bomb, an article by anthropoligist Wade Davis that appears in The Globe and Mail, pretty much provides the best of my reasons. Thanks to b!X for most of the above links. These are some angering excerpts from The Ticking Bomb:
A nation born in isolation cannot be expected to be troubled by the election of a President who has rarely been abroad, or a Congress in which 25 per cent of members do not hold passports. Wealth too can be blinding. Each year, Americans spend as much on lawn maintenance as the government of India collects in federal tax revenue. The 30 million African-Americans collectively control more wealth than the 30 million Canadians.
A country that effortlessly supports a defence budget larger than the entire economy of Australia does not easily grasp the reality of a world in which 1.3 billion people get by on less than $1 a day. A new and original culture that celebrates the individual at the expense of family and community — a stunning innovation in human affairs, the sociological equivalent of the splitting of the atom — has difficulty understanding that in most of the world the community still prevails, for the destiny of the individual remains inextricably linked to the fate of the collective
The Western model of development has failed in the Middle East and elsewhere in good measure because it has been based on the false promise that people who follow its prescriptive dictates will in time achieve the material prosperity enjoyed by a handful of nations of the West. Even were this possible, it is not at all clear that it would be desirable. To raise consumption of energy and materials throughout the world to Western levels, given current population projections, would require the resources of four planet Earths by the year 2100. To do so with the one world we have would imply so severely compromising the biosphere that the Earth would be unrecognizable.
True peace and security for the 21st century will only come about when we find a way to address the underlying issues of disparity, dislocation and dispossession that have provoked the madness of our age. What we desperately need is a global acknowledgment of the fact that no people and no nation can truly prosper unless the bounty of our collective ingenuity and opportunities are available and accessible to all.
We must aspire to create a new international spirit of pluralism, a true global democracy in which unique cultures, large and small, are allowed the right to exist, even as we learn and live together, enriched by the deepest reaches of our imaginings. We need a global declaration of interdependence. In the wake of Sept. 11 this is not idle or na