Political Correctness…

Lately, it’s been occurring to me how often, before the current administration took control, we progressives were battered by the label “politically correct.” When it was applied to us, it was always confusing. We do hold out a vision, a hard line for forward movement: toward greater fairness and civil rights, for better use of the planet and its environment, for greater freedoms, and for more fun.

Now I see that when the Right lobbed that label in our direction, it was a stealth weapon designed to undermine our credibility and to try to set the stage for their eventual religious/emotional/warlike coup. Their one brilliant stroke was to define the few values various groups on the Right shared in order to unite and exploit them. This is their great achievement, and one that the Left could rarely achieve. In all of its diversity, the Left often conflicted with itself and did not bring about the sort of consensus that Carl Rove orchestrated on the Right in 2000. This orchestration, added to the shenanigans of the 2000 election, was the perfect formula to bring them to office, to begin their Sherman-like march to the sea. Stomping on our progressive dreams and salting the ground, their fervor has wrought much destruction that will be hard to undo and put back in order so that humanity can begin to progress again.

The tragedy expands when we realize that it is the U.S. that should be leading the way and not committing wars to keep the oil agenda in place and power in the hands of men like these. What we have today are the values this collegial body has always held, in organized form. Their true agenda has been to centralize and control scarce resources and ride them on down. They’ve bided their time and found ways to frame their ideas that sound like good, conservative thinking.

Some claim that George W. Bush claims to hear God, and that he’s a convinced Christian. I say, “Malarkey.” But it’s a great cover story for him. As an unrepentant, unrecovered alcoholic who has transferred other addiction behaviors onto a pseudo-religiosity, it’s been the perfect organizing cover. Cheney, in his cold, reptilian cunning, has not had need for this cover. He’s the master of the “double-double-unthink,” looking at the color purple and declaring it golden. Together, along with their advisors, they’ve helmed our nation as if it is their own personal buccaneer ship.

When the current Bush administration first took control, the drumbeat for war began – well in advance of 9/11 – and it became unsafe to be a progressive. Now, only narrow, conservative, “Christian,” “patriotic,” and centralizing behaviors were politically correct. It became unsafe to speak out against what had occurred. But all critique of their program to shut down the great gains in human and civil rights, in environmental policy, and economic success was initially deflected. It should have been labeled as a new “political correctness.”

Let one politician, movie star, rock star, or other luminary speak out against what the administration is doing in Iraq or on the ground here, and the big guns of the administration are immediately on camera working to discredit the critic and to get their pernicious vision back in place. They know their house of cards cannot stand once a critical number of American citizens awaken to their smoke-and-mirrors game, and so they must stamp out every critique. Only in the story of Hurricane Katrina and the administration’s failure to respond to it effectively then or now has revealed the true priorities of this administration. They have robbed Peter to pay for Homeland Security, at the expense of disaster response. Even ordinary Americans, including those who are on the Right, cannot be in denial about this great misalignment of resources and concern. But the reality is that this administration has failed at everything we want to stand for, succeeding only in their rhetoric.

The great sorrows of America is that we operate on the myth that what’s good for us is good for the world; that we can import all the IQ that we need and don’t have to educate our own citizens very well. In fact, we have allowed the courses that foster good critical thinking skills to dwindle away. We spend our educational dollars trying to remediate our students – all of them – to become proficient in the three R’s, but not to be able to put actual ideas together. There is a parallel between enforcing a skill set designed to make good warriors and worker bees and the sports and entertainments that have so captured our attention.

The arts are disappearing, and so is our society’s appreciation of anything not immediately action-filled or entertaining. NPR and PBS are under constant attack, and even Right wing infiltrators have done their dirty work there. Replacing Great Books and discussions at the dinner table is the onslaught of computer/video games, wall-to-wall IPOD and other isolating technologies that dumb down the great fountain of young intelligence and prepare them for unending war. These will form future citizens who cannot analyze political or cultural situations, or act in their own interests outside of the war agenda the society comes to hold.

I watch my otherwise peaceful 16-year-old stepson choose to act on his addiction to virtual street fights, battles and space wars instead of developing a normal, feet-on-the-ground social network. To get him to read in any other genre, or to discuss the issues of the day, causes war or great sulkiness at the dinner table. Will he vote for future Bush-like administrations, or be able to think clearly about what is good for humans in a changing world?

I remember great battles at the dinner tables of my youth, too. But they were fostered by great political passions. When I brought the first strains of feminism to our table, I remember my father’s emotionally violent reaction. My timing wasn’t very good. He was a hardworking architect who gave up his personal life to make his way in architecture and to support his family. My early and awkward analysis set off all of the feelings of an aching, risk-taking father. And set the tone for our relationship for the next 36 years of our relationship.

We have had many political battles since that moment. We didn’t get along in the Nixon or Reagan years. I have always been solidly progressive and outspoken. And he has sampled most of the dishes at the political banquet that has been our culture. But we have arrived, mostly, at the same place at the table. I think that today we disagree only on the issue of gun ownership and the place of guns in our society. He owns guns. I don’t.

But, what a great process. Great minds may disagree. But if political correctness – especially the version enforced by the Right – is what must prevail, then this organic, strengthening, enlightening, growing process can never take place. And many things are lost.

Fathers and daughters cannot struggle toward a real understanding, not only of their own relationships, but also of the world, of the universe. If it’s not safe to really be ourselves and say what we think at that moment about the Big Things, then human society –fundamentally – does not work.

Despite our differences, my father did not try to silence me and I refuse to be silenced by Bush’s administration, none of whom is one bit smarter than the people in my own life. In fact, none of the people in my own life would take us into a war precipitated by double-double-unthink. Uninsulated by great wealth and not holding an agenda to control the world – but instead to see what the world holds for us – it would never occur to real, working people to make false reasons to send their young into battle for nothing.

The underlying reality of this administration and their ilk is, as the world’s oil runs out and gets harder to bring to market, they will try to ride it down by keeping energy and political power in their most centralized forms. They long ago abandoned their own conservative principles in favor of this new version of world domination. They will send our children to their wars to buy a little more time. How different are they from other despotic regimes?

While the Left did not see what was coming – we took the beauty of our inclusive plan for society as being so self-evident that everyone would eventually buy in, and got too cozy and comfortable with our own leadership roles, that we failed to believe in the sensibilities of those who do not seek enlightenment and improvement on human society – and the Right wing leaders seethed beneath the surface, waiting for their own chance to act on plans made in secret university societies.

We citizens must come to understand what has happened. We have been hijacked and the resources of our nation have been stolen, for their efforts at world domination. Oil is the currency of that global struggle, because oil controls all transportation, all home economics, and all industry. Control the fuel that runs the world and you control the world.

The oil men now in charge of our government and acting in our behalf on the worldwide stage are taking a huge gamble with all that is human. They are setting the tone for the future to come. Unless we awake and un-elect them and turn back the tide, we are hapless in the face of their agenda. They speak of Christianity and patriotism and the good of America, but they do not act on the real meaning of those ideals. They act on their own interests. This is a plan cooked up by oil men and their allies, who have waited a lifetime for this opportunity.

It took allying with the sleeping religious groups to get into office, and while the Right wing religious voters must be appeased, I believe they truly do not understand how they have used as pawns. Sadly, this unholy alliance enforces a new political correctness upon us all.

Our best hope is that their façade is cracking now. With a terrible three more years to go before we have a chance to replace this administration, we must continue to speak out and critique their silliness – and their true intent -- however settled and authoritative it may appear.

When they say that the Democrats have no ideas, they are wrong. They have been successful in undermining and destroying our progress on those very ideas and ideals already in motion when they came to office. They’ve spent great effort to dismantle, one by one, the great gains that had been made toward peace, a safe environment, a healthy economy, intellectual freedom, science, human rights, and love and joy in these past five years. Hopefully, the core of these will survive even this destructive administration and we can get back onto the path of righteousness and good will when this nightmare ends. Pray that it ends in time.

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A Prophet Not Accepted in His Own Country…

It is the observation of my husband, who, along with me, is suddenly interested in the metaphysics of quantum physics, that Jesus’ miracles were not observed nor accepted in his hometown. But in other lands, they were, and are reported upon in the Bible.

Why is this? Was he not capable of producing miracles in his homeland? Or were the people there not capable of observing them?

If the postulate that atoms exist in organized form when we observe them, and only exist as potential, or as waves, when we do not is accepted, then perhaps it can be said that his fellow citizens could not turn their attention toward the miracles, to observe them. When he traveled to the wider world and arrived there fresh, the new people he encountered could observe them. Perhaps they had no prejudices against observing them.

Haven’t we all had the experience of not being seen or respected in our own “country?” When we cut out teeth in a community, slip and fall and pick ourselves up again and struggle on, perhaps we build into the minds of our observers a sense that we are not credible. At least not yet.

It would be interesting to observe whether having a new start on life, going to a new “country” where we arrive more wholly formed already would allow observers to experience our own “miracles.”
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Journaling/Dreams…

More and more, I dream of buying land above Atlanta, in north Georgia or Tennessee’s Upper Cumberland region, with Chattanooga as the “big city” I relate to from afar. Less and less, do I see that Florida is the place for my dreams to come into reality.

Although it has been my birthplace and my home state for all but two years of my long life. My Scottish ancestors came to north Florida in the 1800s, and so I am an actual “native,” as much so as a European can be. But, with hurricanes, threats of coal plants and bombing ranges nearby, the exploding population and development, and the heat, I cannot see myself locked here and growing old.

I feel I have one more Great Adventure in my soul. One more relocation. My best friend, Melanie, moved herself and husband, four cats and a dog, to Vermont this season. And, while I am not as well resourced as she, I realize it is possible for me to move in the direction of my own dreams, too.

The Southern Highlands call to me. My mother’s ancestors settled there and lived their lives there. Her parents were the ones to come to Florida during her early adolescence, and while she remains in Central Florida, she understands the pull the Highlands have to me now.

It’s as if it’s been my destiny to grow up in Tampa/north Florida until now, and now it is my destiny to move toward the ancestral grounds of my mother. She is the one to notice that.

Do I want to leave the Tallahassee community, where I have lived for 28 out of the past 30 years? No, not completely. My grown son is here and the majority of my important friendships are here. My husband’s career is here and my stepson’s high school life is here.

But this area is exploding with people in my field, dividing the small market into ever smaller pieces. Without a true craft heritage, it is taking a long time for such consciousness to develop. I hope I have done my part in nurturing that consciousness.

In the Southern Highlands, great craft schools abound. I want to explore them all. Great folk art galleries and art shows abound, and I want to participate. I want to see skylines of Appalachian Mountains rather than be hemmed in by trees. I want the ratio of summer: winter to shift in favor of longer autumns and springs and less summer. I want to get out from under the humidity zone that is seen as a physical line in the sky as I approach the Gulf coast from the north. I want to leave the no-see-ums that have awakened an environmental illness in my skin. My very skin needs escape from this rainforest. I want to look upon new things, hear new accents, and experience new ways of relating.

I am not happy in the land of Carl Hiaasen, Edna Buchanan, Dave Barry. They revel in the craziness of this state, but John Sayles is the one who got it right in his movie, “Sunshine State.” A state running on the logic that is land development is crazy. They’ve figured out a way to make the money up front, and they make it again when hurricane breath blows their fragile concoctions down.

My life has taught me the lesson that when we’re young adults, we should search the continent for the place where the climate and culture satisfy our souls the most. Have our children there; because it is there we will likely be for the next 20-30 years, maybe forever. Children link us to land like nothing else. We may blow as tumbleweeds until they come, but when they do, we root to place so they can grow. Children need to be the chaotic ones, while their adults remain strong and constant.

But as my own son approaches the age of 25 next month (!), I find I want to be a jellyfish and not a live oak now. At least for a little while... It’s an honest process. I have been domestic goddess for many, many years. I sense what time it is in my own race. I am afraid, but I have always faced fear down in matters like these, have been brave, have jumped off the cliff with no parachute in sight. And have landed softly on my feet, running.

This is the image the feminists advised when I was in my twenties, in the late 1970s, and it has worked. This time, if I let fly, I want to stay connected to the good things in my life now. I want to open a gateway for Glen, Phillip, Kevin and Kelly to add to their lives a foothold in the Southern Highlands. No one has to disrupt their lives now. But they can come when they are ready.

And so I am studying the map to see where the perfect spot for me might exist. Can I get back to Tallahassee in a comfortable day? Is it near enough to the mountains without having to deal with winter reality each day? Is the culture there enlightened enough? (I would not do well in a serious Bible-belt setting!) Has it escaped the greedy capitalist/developer’s ax, and will that be true for the foreseeable future? I want an enlightened Third World culture in the heartland. (And this is what Tallahassee felt like to me when I arrived 30 years ago.)

Glen and I have often remarked, as native Floridians, how much we have seen destroyed and rebuilt in the image of Disney in our home state. Native beaches that are now wall-to-wall condo, in defiance of everything natural and good. We cheer when these things fall before hurricanes. But they are rebuilt. Every tourist state has a Gatlinburg or Panama City or Daytona Beach. Babylon. The question is: is it contained to just one small area? Will the cancer grow? Or will we finally learn to cherish what is unique and natural in each small area and preserve that? With the new development of the Big Bend region and the Emerald Coast, we are seeing the last great preserves in our state go.

I see the day coming when our last cub leaves the den to begin his own life. He’s a wonderful cub and our home will remain stable until he graduates from high school. We hold the expectation that he will attend college, and we are waiting to see what form that will take. He is currently earning the grades that will earn the Bright Futures scholarship and allow him to attend Florida colleges at a discount to us. Our older son did this, too. This is one of Florida’s upward trend decisions, to develop such a scholarship, and we are lucky to have offspring capable of taking advantage, through their hard work.

I see the day coming when it’s decision time again in my spouse’s career. For the foreseeable future, he’s content with what he is doing. I see the day coming, however, when his life becomes less structured and stressful and he reinvents himself in a new landscape. I hold that possibility out for him. If we land in a new region that is more satisfying and lucrative for me, we can depend less on the rewards of his career for our living.

I am happy to work and I work hard. Now I need to work smart. One more year of evolution and strategizing and I hope to rise to a more polished and coherent level. I can feel artistic things awakening; more complete thoughts ahead. I am tired, already, from my convoluted holiday show season. A little more to go, and then I will rest in a way that comes only in the holidays, only in winter. Recharge. And ready myself for spring.

And so I hope that buying land in the Southern Highland or lowlands is an investment in our future, in a time not so far away when things will naturally change. A segue into the third act of our lives, with a rootedness that invites our children and possible grandchildren into a home anchored in the land of our ancestors and our nation. Our craft and our law. Our recreation and our love. Our future and our history.

Yes, the mountains are calling.
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Sometimes We Give Up What’s in the Way…

My mother-in-law suffered a stroke last week. Interestingly, despite her physical frailty from other causes, the stroke has taken only her ability to understand information through her eyes and some of her memory.

Always an avid reader, she can no longer read, or at least recognize letters and words, nor connect to what those symbols on the page mean. She is not blind. She suffers no paralysis, no verbal slurring. And, according to her eldest son – my husband’s brother – she still understands information arriving through her hearing. And she still understands what’s going on in the world.

Jackie is a consummate introvert, requiring little attention but enjoying the company of loved ones in small doses. Highly intelligent, she enjoyed a long career as a public school classroom teacher. The mother of three sons, she has been content to bask in their individual successes. They have brought her many grandchildren and many more great-grandchildren, in a multiplying effect. Both she and her deceased (and wonderful) husband, Giff, sprang from small families, and so the large family they have become in the modern age is a great joy.

She has loved playing board games (as does my husband), Scrabble and bridge on the computer, and doing the newspaper’s crossword puzzle until very recently. She and I have traded mystery novels in recent years. She likes hers grittier and I like my nice and safe, more about place than suspense, with the violence episode well in the past of the action. We have laughed about her having a greater spine for suspense than do I.

She has looked on, in great interest, over the development of my evolving career as a jewelry designer. I have often bought beads when visiting her, and she has always enjoyed exploring them, reveling in their colors and textures and asking eagerly what I plan to do with them. She has seen my work move forward, in fits and starts, as I’ve grown from mere beader to capable metalsmith, attempting to marry my two artistic loves: stone with metal. She has been one of my cheerleaders in the world.

And she and I have not been afraid to go up against one another, in this past decade. She’s not all sweetness and light, and neither am I. But we have not dissolved into conflict, despite differences (such as where we stand on Glen’s ex-wife, or our thermostatic incompatibility). And over this decade, we have developed mutual admiration for each other, I like to think. Two very different kinds of women who cannot be lumped into one female stereotype. We are both world citizens. In her frailty, quietness, and light touch, I have found great strength.

Some years ago now, when Giff passed away, Jackie seemed so very frail that we all wondered how long she would live into the future. She has surprised us and she has surprised herself. A lifelong smoker, she has brought our attention to the fact that it has not shortened her life.

And so now, as the late hour of her life approaches, I stand stage left holding my breath. Again, knowing that neither of us is all sweetness and light, I hear that she’s angry at her new situation and doesn’t want to work hard to regain what has been taken from her. Another insult from ageing and inevitable mortality. Have we not earned better than this? In recent years, she has asked for so little: just to read, to dream, to live in her little daily routine, to know that the many family members springing from her are well, to follow the news a bit and to enjoy storms when they come. She loves to step outside and feel the wind as it shakes the treetops.

She has a faith, of a sort. She defied her anti-Catholic father and attended Catholic services as a girl. She has an open mind and open heart on such matters. She wonders deeply on issues of faith. She practices forgiveness. And the last time we visited with her, she brought up her own last battles with her own racism. One last sliver of it that she has not been yet able to eradicate. This was one of the bravest conversations I’ve ever experienced with anyone. She gave no excuses, no justifications; just wondered at it, at the edge of the cliff, as if she were afraid to make that one last jump into holding no fear and no prejudice.

I have had an amazing mother-in-law. I pray that she passes gently into that sweet night where, surely, Giff waits in anticipation of receiving her. Theirs was a great love, and they have missed each other terribly. We will be sad to let her go, but it is in the nature of things. The deal that is struck. We come, we last awhile, we use ourselves up, and we go. Some of us leave a mark. Some of us walk lightly on the land and leave as quietly as we came.

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And I’m Growing Older, Too…


Now that I am in my fifties, the “afternoon” of my life, I can see how many things that have felt much more substantial than myself that I, in fact, have outlasted.

How many favorite shoes have been worn out? I’ve watched steel tools break in my hands from use, while my hands are still here and in pretty good shape. Towels, wash cloths, cars and pets have fallen by the wayside, while I carry on.

My original houses (the one my parents married into, the one they built together on Davis Islands, and the one Dad designed for his parents) are all gone. There are no edifices from my youth that I can stand before, evoking memories of years long past.

I have worn out people, too. I am a lucky one who hangs on to many friends forever. But not all of them. “Some are gone, and some remain,” but are distanced now. And the ones still in my life, like me, are always changing. Always evolving.

This week I learned that a favorite Tampa restaurant (the Colonnade on Bayshore Blvd.) will close and be replaced by more boring condos. And tonight I learned that Aaron Brown, my favorite news anchor, has been shoved off of CNN, to be replaced by Gen-Xer Anderson Cooper whose style of delivery I cannot fathom.

Gone, too, is our collective sense of immortality. Two dear friends are journeying through breast cancer, and another through prostate cancer. All are younger than I am.

My parents are both 80 and daily they see their friends’ names fill the obituaries. Lillyan, my dear friend’s mother, died nearly two years ago. She was such a tour de force, how can it be true that she suffered and is gone?

Having brown hair used to be a no-brainer. Now it takes lots of work. But I cannot yet bear turning gray. And so my hair has been several shades of red and brown already, as I struggle to stay who I’ve always been. My brunette hair is such a part of my identity, how can I let it go to silver?

“Age is Power,” so says a wise friend of mine whose blonde hair shows little sign of graying. But it is. I can see this. After awhile, no matter how timid or ineffectual we may have felt when we were young, by this age it’s all irrelevant. It is interesting to find that I look back less and less, and instead look forward to the future, as if I’ll be here forever. I’m still deciding what I want to be and do when I grow up, and yet many friends my age are already grandparents. This paradox does not escape me.

A wonderful teacher advised me to discover and listen to my own inner language, my private language, and to manifest it in my work. She said that if we do this, those who can “hear” will hear what we are saying. I think this is true about life as well.

And so, as I outlast material things and move on through life, this is what I cock my ear toward, hoping to hear that quiet voice in a noisy, changing world, trying to reveal to me my own truth. Maybe one that lasts.

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