Category Archives: blogging

The Whole Truth

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We never really know the whole truth, we ordinary people who try to survive in a context over which we have no control. We try to follow the trail of newsworthy events, forgetting that news and histories are written — well, by whoever writes it all up.

And, sometimes acknowledged fiction writers, creating a fictional story line, seem to come closer to the truth than what we are fed as the truth.

The Whole Truth, David Baldacci’s 2008 international intrigue novel, might have a story line metaphorically closer to the truth than what we are being fed by the “news. There is a character that might well be an (only slightly exaggerated) embodiment of the Koch Brothers and a story line that takes the premise farther than Wag the Dog.

One commentary piece that everyone should read that accurately and succinctly gets to some of the bottom-line truths about what’s happening in America today is Ronni Bennett’s (Time Goes By) post, “Something’s Happening Here.”

She supports the following statement with factual links and graphs:

Although citizens of the U.S. are not detained, imprisoned, tortured, executed or shot in the streets as in some Arab countries, we are nonetheless oppressed. Our government, in long-time cahoots with the corporate elite, started decades before this current financial crisis to steal for themselves all but the shirts on our backs.

And, in addressing the incendiary situation in Wisconsin, she says what I hope lots of us are thinking:

If I am right about what they and their supporters are doing, the protests will spread throughout the land, particularly when the weather warms up in a few weeks. Massive street protests are the only power we the people have left against the corporate/government plutocracy.

God, I hope I’m right, that these people are the vanguard of what is coming. If so, it will be a long and bitter struggle against Mr. Jones, but I don’t see an alternative. We must fight back even if, in the end, we lose.

They’re doing it in the Middle East, setting a standard for the value of human rights and freedom,

Of course, in Baldacci’s novel, there’s a “hero” who determinedly figures it all out.

But we have no heroes. We only have ourselves.

why I haven’t been blogging

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Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.
— Friedrich Nietzsche

While I believe that the above quote is true, that’s not the reason I haven’t been blogging here.

The main reason is that I’ve been setting up a WordPress.com blog for my 50th college reunion as a way of generating some nostalgic interest among my former classmates — in hopes of getting them to attend. The reunion isn’t until the Fall, and the site won’t go live until May, but I’ve been brushing up on html codes so that I can add a little pizzazz to the look of the site. I don’t have a great design eye, but, using a simple WordPress template as the basis, I’ve been able to figure out how to insert lines to break sections and how to format a table within a page, and how to do some other tweaking that I wanted to do. I actually like doing this stuff, and hours can go by before I notice that my butt’s numb from sitting so long.

The other reason is that I’m figuring how to knit a sweater on a bias. I have a pattern, but I’ve had to change the stitch count because I’m using a different yarn. I’m sure getting my math-phobic brain some exercise.

Then, of course, there’s my FaceBook games of Scrabble, Lexulous, and Wordscraper, which I also do for brain exercise. And lately I’ve been doing an online picture puzzles as well.

I’m reading mystery novels and listening to an unabridged audio version of The Help, recommended by a friend and downloaded from my library. The narrative is totally engrossing, pulling me into the lives of everyday people whose lives were affected by the Civil Rights turmoil of the early 60s.

I just finished reading (for a book club I hope to join later this month) Home Repair, which has a story line very close to my own life’s narrative.

It is definitely great to be retired so that I can have this fun playing.

I did notice, however, that the taxes on my Social Security went up. Now, that doesn’t make for much fun.

I have to remind myself that it could always be worse.

Our Secular America: the truth is out there (part 1)

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Every once in a while I get obsessed about some issue — usually not a minor one. I try to deal with my obsessions with some degree of intelligence.

Occasionally I do a really worthwhile job, and so before I embark upon several posts that are developing from my current obsession, I’m going to share some evidence of my credibility, my ability to do a worthy job of intelligently obsessing.

More than six years ago, I posted a piece that is no longer accessible online because some of my archives were lost when I switched from a MoveableType to a WordPress blog format. But I did have the text saved as a document and it will be my next post.

Right now, however, I am self-servingly sharing part of an old post with the response I got to that six-year-old piece from a (then) doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago. And here it is:

Hello Elaine,
I recently discovered your website, and was so delighted (and sincerely impressed with the very good content) that I mention it in my most recent column, “Voices of the Peoples” at the ClarkPost. This month’s column is called “The Death of Democracy in America: The Foundering Fathers and the White Roots of Peace” and includes a paragraph or two about your site.

I do hope you’ll understand my discussion of your site in the appreciative and playful spirit it is intended. It is a wonderful place to visit.

Another dissenting Crone,
Lilian Friedberg, PhD
Cognitive Dissident

Dr. Friedberg’s piece [no longer available online] is long but worth reading for the well-researched perspective she gives not only on the death of democracy in America, but also on its origins and the misconceptions most people have about its development.

Of course, to me, the best parts are what she says about Kalilily Time, which I post here with a big dissident smile on my face. Note that the kitschy clip art to which she refers was the design of my old format.

To my cognitively dissonant delight—one ray of inspiration did appear on an otherwise dim string of search results which led me to the weblog of Elaine of Kalilily, Self-Proclaimed Resident Crone of Blogdom, who also describes herself as a “True Blue American,” and whose blog entry for November 5, 2004, “My Blue America,” glimmers with subtly placed signs of hope. The real gems are buried in the links she supplies: truths debunking myths of Puritans fleeing religious persecution only to export it to the colonies in the form of domestic tyranny abroad, truths about witch-burnings, and about the foundational principle of genocide underlying the birth of this nation—on a link that’s worth singling out here, since it’s rather cleverly cached behind a hyperlinked reference to the military that benignly obscures the page’s content. [link no longer works] (Genocide and The American Indian Peoples)

Nor did I leave Kalilily’s site without finding the scoop I was looking for on the founding fathers, in particular as they relate to the third part of this essay, The White Roots of Peace—but we’ll return to that in a moment.

Emoticons cannot express my response to the quality and truth content of these treasures on a site that looked, at first blue blush, to be an exercise in kitsch- and cupcake-artistry. Just goes to show, never judge a blog by its clip art.

About the time I hit the genocide link, I went back and, with a quizzed “who-the-hell-is-this-person” look, and clicked on the “ABOUT ME” link. Voila!: My faith in the American people restored. At the risk of offending the self-proclaimed Crone of Blogdom, I must admit what first came to mind: “Well, I’ll be damned,” I thought, “it’s just a little old retired grandma sitting there raising hell at the keyboard!” (That wouldn’t be an altogether fair assessment of a rather accomplished career woman and crafty writer who truly has earned her Crone-Coronation, so I invite the reader to read her site for the rest of the story.

And it was on Elaine of Kalilily’s site that I found one of the spokes in the wheel I was hoping to “uninvent.”

The people of the Six Nations, also known by the French term, Iroquois Confederacy, call themselves the Hau de no sau nee (ho dee noe sho nee) meaning People Building a Long House. Located in the northeastern region of North America, originally the Six Nations was five and included the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas. The sixth nation, the Tuscaroras, migrated into Iroquois country in the early eighteenth century. Together these peoples comprise the oldest living participatory democracy on earth. Their story, and governance truly based on the consent of the governed, contains a great deal of life-promoting intelligence for those of us not familiar with this area of American history. The original United States representative democracy, fashioned by such central authors as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, drew much inspiration from this confederacy of nations. In our present day, we can benefit immensely, in our quest to establish anew a government truly dedicated to all life’s liberty and happiness much as has been practiced by the Six Nations for over 800 hundred years. The Six Nations and the Oldest Living Participatory Democracy on Earth.

More than six years have gone by since I wrote the lost-in-cyberspace “My Blue America.” The dispute over the origins of our secular democratic roots has reached disturbing proportions, and, sadly, many of the most vocal political people in this country still don’t get it.

So, watch for my re-post of “My Blue America,” which will be Part 2 of my series on “Our Secular America.”

happy belated blogaversary to me:
9 years and counting

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I started blogging on November 29, 2001, and the old bloghome is still here, reminding me why I started and how I grew as a “personal blogger.” I still keep in touch with many of the bloggers who were around at that early time in blogging history, only now it’s mainly through Facebook.

In reading some of my old posts, I realize that I still write about the same things: politics, injustice, being a woman, ordinary magic, getting older, being me. Things change. Things stay the same.

Let’s see if I can make it to year 10.

The Deathwatch Diary (One)

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My mother’s room looks out over a roof with the HVAC and other protuberances. But over the left corner of it all, I can see the Hudson River and the Palisades. I can see it, but my 94 year-old mother can’t.

Day by day, she grows smaller in the hospital bed on the oncology floor with the patients who are at the point at which “Comfort Care” is their last best option. My mother doesn’t have cancer, but, with advanced dementia (can’t swallow) and renal failure, “Comfort Care” is her last option as well, and this is the best place for her in this hospital. (At least I think so; my brother doesn’t agree.)

I have blogged about my mother’s condition before, and you can read those posts by searching this blog for “dementia” and/or “caregiving.”

For the past ten years (which, not coincidentally, is when I began this blog) my brother and I have disagreed about the effects on my mother of her journey into dementia. What he insisted was her usual stubbornness and feistiness, I believed, from my own research, was that insidious deterioration that had begun in her brain and would end just where it is ending. I had read The 36-Hour Day, I logged onto online forums on the subject of symptoms and care. I subscribed to Care ADvantage magazine to get tips on what to look for and how to help her manage the changes I could see in her behavior and her perceptions of what was going on around her.

My brother and I brought our mother to the emergency room last Sunday, after she had refused to eat or drink for several days, was obviously dehydrated, and had begun to tune out the world. In retrospect, perhaps we should have let nature take its course, and she might have simply gone to sleep at some point and never woke up. But she seemed in severe distress — couldn’t find a comfortable position to lie or sit in, and finally, unsuccessfully, tried to sleep sitting up. She had stopped communicating and kept rubbing her legs. We couldn’t tell if she were suffering, and so we took her to the hospital,

She is sedated, now, as “comfortable” as possible during this time when her body is shutting down. Her awareness already has, except for brief and seldom moments when she is physically disturbed and then responds with wide-open, red-rimmed eyes and an unearthly howl that resonates with a primal fear.

I have slept in her hospital room every night since she was admitted last Monday, listening to her labored breaths and getting up to check her when her breathing stops for several seconds at a time. When my brother comes to stay with her during the day, I take some time and slip away to shower, change my clothes, eat something other than hospital cafeteria food, walk in the crisp fall sunshine. The time drags while I am sitting in that room with a partial view, and so I knit, read, play games on my iphone, check in with FaceBook and my son’s Twitter, check my email.

But this isn’t about me.

Or is it?

all that’s wrong

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From The Narcissus Society by Roger Cohen in the NY Times:

Community — a stable job, shared national experience, extended family, labor unions — has vanished or eroded. In its place have come a frenzied individualism, solipsistic screen-gazing, the disembodied pleasures of social networking and the à-la-carte life as defined by 600 TV channels and a gazillion blogs. Feelings of anxiety and inadequacy grow in the lonely chamber of self-absorption and projection.

[Be sure to read the rest of the above piece.]

And that’s just the “little picture.” Add the above to the stonewalling of the RIGHT(eous) GOP that is preventing what is supposed to be our “big picture” government from fixing what it can, and we wind up with an American society that has too much wrong because it has too much RIGHT(eous).

I have never felt so powerless to affect the big picture.

Maybe we need a real Luke Skywalker so that this Empire can Strike Back.

extended-family living

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I am blogging from a Daily Grind coffee shop above the community room where my daughter and grandson are enjoying a Home School Co-op Thanksgiving party. My daughter is still on a crutch as a result of knee surgery and can’t drive yet. So I chauffeur.

For the first time in a long time, I feel that I am living a real life, part of a busy family. I mean REALLY part of a family. We do things together, and we do things separately. We take walks, we play games, we cook, and I continue to learn science and history facts that I never knew as I my grandson shares with me his Home Schooling learning adventures,

Over a year ago, as I made plans to move in with my daughter, son-in-law, and grandson, friends expressed some skepticism about the wisdom of my doing such.

Granted, it was a risk. But the risk was lessened by my adding space to the house so that I could have my own couple of rooms and by the fact that my son-in-law is unusually easy-going.

And so, for the first time in a busy while, I’m taking a few minutes to blog, sitting here by the window of the Daily Grind, since there always seems to be so many more fun and interesting things to do with my life these days other than blogging.

Including making slippers for various family members and playing baseball on my new wii with my grandson.

For every thing there is a season, and a time.

And I’m enjoying this time of solitude. And blogging. And now I will knit for a while as I wait for my family downstairs to let me know that they are ready to leave.

writngs from a workshop

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Having strayed so far from my poetic roots, I am taking a brief writing workshop based on the Amherst Writers and Artists Method. Blogging has given me plenty of practice with the first person essay; but it’s poetry where my heart is. I need some help getting my brain to follow.

The writing “prompt” for the exercise was the word “breathe.”

She does not swim –
afraid to breathe against
the weight of water, afraid
of those breathless wet depths.

But she goes to a sweat lodge
where steamy smoke rises —
thick breath steadily blinding
a clear winter sky.

She lets herself be led into the wet
dark already slick with steam
and sweat, cool water hissing,
smoking stones.

Thoughtless with dread
she stumbles out into the cold,
blinded by water and smoke
and a clutch of fear that sends
breath into memory:

— a child’s cry for breath stunted by fever
lungs rattling beneath a tent of steam
thick as smoke, heavy as a depth of sea.

Well, its a start.