Frank Paynter posted about it, and I’m embarrassed to admit that I didn’t pick up on the implications until I read what he wrote. He begins his post with this:

This post is not about the grim and twisted irony of the violence of a school shooting in Amish country. Rather, I want to draw attention to the unspoken horror of the misogyny, the hate crime against the female gender that it represents.

Frank links to several female bloggers who posted vehemently and accurately about what seems to be an increasing number of hate crimes against females. He ends his post with this:

Misogyny is everywhere. It’s in the burka. It’s in the genital mutilation of so-called “female circumcision.” It’s in the Chinese infanticide of baby girls. It’s practically a human condition. Yet once slavery was a human condition too, and now, except for a few corporate monsters, some backwards nations, and the perversion of sexual slavery it has largely been wiped out. Can we make progress against misogyny too?

I wonder why all of us female bloggers aren’t all posting about how the status and safety of all of us females is consistently being eroded. Why aren’t we mad as hell!
Every night, my news stations report the rape and murder of some female, the lethal violence against some child. Tonight it was what was believed to be a mother and daughter murdered in an apartment on NYC’s upper west side.

Despite the parallel construction, the two statements in the title of this post are not related.
The truth is, I’ve got a wicked sore throat and a cold sore in the corner of my upper lip that even Abreva is having a hard time with. I’ve been spraying my mouth with a zinc acetate spray, which really does help, but now everything I put in my mouth tastes like zinc acetate. I have to stay away from my mother so she doesn’t get sick. Every cloud has a silver lining, right?? On the other hand, while I have lots of projects I’d like to work on, I’m just too wiped out to get into any of them.
And, on top of that, my daughter and her family were going to come and visit this weekend, but both my grandson and I are sick. So it goes.
Meanwhile, here’s the best of this week’s Harper’s Weekly Review:

That’s what a 14 year old boy who was locked in a burning shed by other boys said about the lesson he learned from the experience.
Most of us have always known that. Everyone has the potential to do evil deeds, but whatever sense of morality we have tends to keep that potential in check. It seems to me, however, that these days there is a worldwide shift to the darkside.
Violent crime in England and Wales has risen 14%.
Murders in the United States jumped 4.8 percent last year, and overall violent crime was up 2.5 percent for the year, marking the largest annual increase in crime in the United States since 1991
With the number of homicides in Sacramento already past last year’s death toll, 2006 could prove to be one of Sacramento’s most violent years in recent history
And on and on.
Elder abuse is a growing problem.
Whatever the reason/s, an increasing number of people seem to be either unable to keep their cool or have simply forsaken their humanity.
You just can’t help wondering what’s pushing so many of us in that dark direction. Is it the war and all of the publicized violence associated with it? Is it the glorification of violence and immorality in video games, on television, in the movies? Is it the frustrations of living in poverty — getting poorer as the rich get richer? Is it the tragic lack of role models among our leaders — both cultural and political?
I suggest that it’s the cumulative effect of all of the above (and more). More than ever belfore, we are surrounded constantly by seductions toward the darkside.
No, nobody’s all good. But it used to be that most were mostly so.

Have you noticed that if you turn upside down the date of Cory Lidle’s airplane crash into the NYC high-rise apartment building — 10/11/06 — you get 9/11/01?

On the day this nation celebrates Columbus Day, i watched the televised parade in New York City with my mother. She likes parades. It seems that everybody’s Italian on Columbus Day (the way that everyone is Irish on St. Patrick’s Day). At least that’s what Major Bloomberg was heard to say.
Now, those of us who were taught the accurate version of history know that the Vikings actually discovered this land long before Columbus missed landing on the continental shores of what became America. What I didn’t know until I watched a Discovery Channel special that aired on the afternoon of Columbus Day, was that Christopher Columbus might not have been Italian at all. Chances are that he was the son of a Catalonian mariner/mercenery and his last name was really “Colom.”
Garrison Keillor in a Common Deams piece suggests because George W. Bush bears a great similarity to the real Christopher Columbus, we should change the focus of Columbus Day:
The following are excerpts; it’s worth it to link over and read the whole thing.

How did we get here? Good Germans–and many of them were decent, moral people–asked themselves the same thing. The answer is incrementalism, the tendency of radical change to manifest itself in bits and pieces. People who should have known better–journalists, Democrats, and Republicans who are more loyal to their country than their party–allowed Bush and his neofascist gangsters to hijack our republic and its values. They weren’t as bad as Bush. They just couldn’t see the big picture.

And it ends with:

It doesn’t matter how much food aid we ship to the victims of the next global natural disaster, or how diplomatic our next president is, or whether we come to regret what we have done in the name of law and order. Our laws permit kidnapping, torture and murder. Our laws deny access to the courts. The United States has ceded the moral high ground to its enemies.

We are done.

If these two articles made you really depressed, take a minute to read “What the Amish are Teaching America” by Sally Kohn, which ends with:

Our patterns of punishment and revenge are fundamentally at odds with the deeper values of common humanity that the tragic experience of the Amish are helping to reveal. Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done in life. Someone who cheats is not only a cheater. Someone who steals something is not only a thief. And someone who commits a murder is not only a murderer. The same is true of Charles Carl Roberts. We don’t yet know the details of the episode in his past for which, in his suicide note, he said he was seeking revenge. It may be a sad and sympathetic tale. It may not. Either way, there’s no excusing his actions. Whatever happened to Roberts in the past, taking the lives of others is never justified. But nothing Roberts has done changes the fact that he was a human being, like all of us. We all make mistakes. Roberts’ were considerably and egregiously larger than most. But the Amish in Nickel Mines seem to have been able to see past Roberts’ actions and recognize his humanity, sympathize with his family for their loss, and move forward with compassion not vengeful hate.

We’ve come to think that “an eye for an eye” is a natural, human reaction to violence. The Amish, who live a truly natural life apart from the influences of our violence-infused culture, are proving otherwise. If, as Gandhi said, “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind,” then the Amish are providing the rest of us with an eye-opening lesson.

——————————————————————————————————
It is Friday the Thirteenth of October, and there’s two feet of snow in Buffalo.

My daughter’s sister-in-law, who was the same age as my daughter (mid-forties), passed away yesterday. She had MS.
It just seems so unfair that she had to suffer as much as she did before she finally died. She leaves two young daughters behind, as well as a family and extended family who will all miss her.
I can’t begin to imagine what it’s like to lose a child, no matter how old that child is. I am heartsick for her parents. I can’t imagine. I can’t imagine.
And yet my mother keeps on keeping on. She has no life-threatening illness. Only very old age. Well, I guess that’s life-threatening, isn’t it?

This is the road I walk late in the afternoon, when my mom is calm or napping. This is a perfect road to walk, devoid of traffic, the cloudless sky a sunny blue, the shadows cool, the trees still full and just starting to color. Two hawks glide on the currents above the mountain, but they are too far away to catch with my camera. This road is one of the reasons I can live here, where her tears run endlessly like the stream that feeds the pond beyond the soundless forest.

Just before 4 p.m this afternoon., I was channel surfing to try to find something on tv my mother might sit down and watch. We had just watched Bonanza on TVLand. I thought she might sit a while for the Ellen DeGeneres show, so I punched in NBC.
Instead of Ellen, a news report was on. A plane had just crashed into a building in New York City, and the screen showed flames pouring out of the windows of the bujilding.
OMG. Not again! I could feel my stomach clenching.
No, not again.
This time it’s a small private plane that came down nose first into an apartment building and crashed into the street. Four people dead; one still strapped into a cockpit seat.
The newscasters get on the internet and start searching for the type of plane, the owner, etc. etc.
I watch the fire blazing from the 40 something floor of the building, the black smoke billowing out, the fire engines rushing to the scene. When I actually post this later tonight, I no doubt will have links, but right now, it’s still happening.
There just seems like an awful lot of bad things happening in NYC. Last week or so, a building mysteriously “detonated.” This week, the plane, the plane.
We get the NYC news here in the Catskill Mountains. Each night we are innundated with killings of all kinds. If it’s not the killings in Iraq, it’s the murders in New York City. No wonder I escape these days into Adriana Trigiani’s books about Big Stone Gap and Big Cherry Holler — filled with people who don’t kill and live deeply and uniquely in a world that I’m sure must still exist somewhere.
It is almost 7:30 p.m. now, and they’ve identified the pilot of the plane. Cory Lidle, Yankees pitcher, is already being memorialized on the Internet. I heard on the television news earlier that four people were dead, but Lidle seems to be the only one at this point being mourned.
My mom doesn’t like living here in such an isolated piece of the woods at the foot of the mountain. She’s afraid of the dark.
That is not the kind of dark that frightens me.

I couldn’t make up news like this:

Often I look in the mirror and I can’t believe it’s me. My mind’s eye sees me as I was 25 years ago — with an actual waistline and strong, slim legs; with wide eyes and energy to burn. Growing older is unavoidable. One can avoid growing wider and droopier, but that takes determination, perseverence, and lots and lots of exercise, lotions, and pampering. If you can afford to go that route, that’s just fine. Me? I have not the time, energy, or resources. Anyway, it’s easier to let time take its toll and learn to laugh at the ignominy of it. Like Maxine.
Over at Time Goes By Ronni continues to protest the stereotyping of older individuals. Her latest post on Frailty and Stereotypes is excellent, providing references to research that indicates that we can do things to avoid becoming frail. Yes, ofen we can — again: systematic excercise, good nuitrition, optimistic attitude. In the best of all personal worlds, that’s the ticket. But many of our personal worlds are far from even good. I, for one, find it difficult to keep an optimistic attitude. Like Maxine.
Now, some might say that these Maxine cartoons perpetuate a negative stereotype of the “old lady.” Except there are grains of truth in them. And they are funny. And it’s therapeutic to laugh at oneself.
But that can’t be the end of it, and it’s how we feel about and deal with the realities of getting older that make the difference in how we are perceived — and will be perceived — by younger generations.
I found a post on ZDNet very telling in relation to how many “elders” relate to all of the rapidly evolving Internet offerings:

…only a few of the faculty members I questioned about YouTube knew what it was. For them, the phenomenon of user-generated video was something abstract. This highlights a knowledge gap between the twenty-somethings that attend the university and the 30-60 year-olds who teach there.
If community-based sites are the bread and butter of Web 2.0, then it’s mostly the people who grew up with the ‘Net who are participating. Most older folks have their communities and they’re not online. What’s that mean for business models as the ARPA crowd gets steadily bigger with the influx of baby-boomers? Are we going to settle for part of the population, or will someone break the age-barrier with online communities?

Phil Windley, who posted the above, also links (from his Technometria) to a suggestion by Google’s Adam Bosworth:

Interestingly, Adam talks about content in the context of community (no big surprise there) and spends a great deal of time talking about the health care industry. Adam claims that there’s a growing need for tools that allow patients to add value to health-care related communities by sharing information and experiences. These tools could lead to better predictors of health conditions, earlier diagnosis, and more successful treatments. And we’d save a lot of money too.

“Elders” like my 90 year old mom with increasingly disturbing dementia will continue to avoid anything new, especially technologies. But those others who have avoided technology so far can be lured in by offering them the kind of online community Bosworth has in mind — IF the offerings are constructed to be solidly elder-user friendly.
Meanwhile, little (or not so) old ladies like me, who make every effort to keep our “mind’s eye” image of ourselves as vital as possible, will always keep up with whatever new “YouTube” type fancies rise up from the younger Net set. We’ll keep blogging and wondering and giving our finger to the stereotypes that try to limit what we are and can be.
And meanwhile, some of us will always think that being an old lady can be a real hoot! Like Maxine.