About what happened in Ferguson, MO

Watch this. It takes a whole hour, but it's worth it:

http://www.democracynow.org/shows/2014/11/25

If you'd rather watch or read the individual stories from Democracy Now!, here are the links:

• Black Lives Matter: Ferguson Erupts After Grand Jury Clears Officer in Michael Brown Killing 
•  "It's Officially Open Season on Black Folks:" Legal Expert Decries Handling of Wilson Grand Jury
• Riot as the Language of the Unheard: Ferguson Protests Set to Continue in Fight for Racial Justice

The place of the police in a humane society

I have been so absorbed in the process of taking care of my dying cat, Spot, that I had almost forgotten that tomorrow is the Fourth of July. So this evening when it got dark and cool, I folded a towel and put it on the porch, and set out a dish of fresh ice cubes as well. Then I picked Spot up out of the bathtub and took her outside. She is almost too weak to walk now, but going outside is one of her favorite things. She was sitting on the walkway with her front paws crossed and enjoying the cool night breeze and looking very happy.

You know what happened next.

Some nincompoops down the street started setting off large and loud fireworks.

Spot dashed back onto the porch and tried hiding under the bench. I picked her up and took her back inside and put her back in the bathtub.

I have never liked the sound of fireworks, and I have never understood why people think it is clever or fun to endanger their limbs, their eyeballs, and their children's safety by setting off small explosives. This makes even less sense as the weather grows hotter and drier, and the wind is blowing. Add to this the fact that this neighborhood consists almost entirely of old wooden houses. Doesn't this sound like a recipe for disaster?

In Oklahoma City, following this particular recipe for disaster is also illegal.

So yes, I called the police.

My anarchist friends--for whom I have great respect--would say that in a situation like this a person should try to talk reasonably with her neighbors. Point out how important it is not to set the neighborhood on fire.Explain how bad it is to make every little dog ion the street whimper. (Not to mention the fact that they scared the hell out of my poor dying cat.)

But sometimes, under great provocation, a person is not capable of talking reasonably. If I had gone down there, I wouldn't have trusted myself to remain nonviolent. And frankly, calling the police is probably the thing that kept me from going over the edge and going down the block and hurting someone.

With luck, I will still be able to take Spot outside in the morning.

What is marriage?

About a month and a half ago, President Obama announced that his position on gay marriage had "evolved" to the point that he now supports the right of same-sex couples to marry. Depending on the perspective of the commentator, this meant Obama was defying the will of God, had committed a serious political blunder, had made a wishy-washy statement that "sold out" gay rights, or had done something "historic and brave."

Despite the controversy over the president's statement, it seems that same-sex marriage is becoming more and more accepted. According to blogger Richard Kim of thenation.com, we have reached the point that "it is increasingly untenable for anyone bidding for mainstream credibility to remain opposed to same-sex marriage."

Kim said this in an essay about the changing position on same-sex marriage of one David Blankenhorn. I've never heard of David Blankenhorn before now. He seems to be the founder of something called The Institute for American Values. He appeared as an "expert witness" as part of the legal defense of California's anti-gay marriage Proposition 8. Recently, Blankenhorn very publicly recanted his opposition to same-sex marriage. Richard Kim used this occasion to share some thoughts on the issue of marriage that are much closer to my own than what I usually see in the gay or progressive press:

Back in 2005, in the wake of a rash of state constitutional bans on same-sex marriage, Lisa Duggan and I argued that the gay movement—and progressives at large—should focus on advocating for a range of household recognitions, for “decentering” marriage as an institution even while fighting for legal equality. Here’s what we wrote:

For gay activists, and indeed for all progressive activists, it would be far more productive to stress support for household diversity—both cultural and economic support, recognition and resources for a changing population as it actually lives—than to focus solely on gay marriage. By treating marriage as one form of household recognition among others, progressives can generate a broad vision of social justice that resonates on many fronts. If we connect this democratization of household recognition with advocacy of material support for caretaking, as well as for good jobs and adequate benefits (like universal healthcare), then what we all have in common will come into sharper relief.

Of course, Lisa and I lost that argument, at least when it comes to setting the strategies of gay and progressive organizations. The fight for same-sex marriage has scored some significant victories in the intervening years, including Obama’s recent “evolution,” but those wins have come within the framework of same-sex marriage as an isolated right granted to a minority group, the equality/dignity line that Blankenhorn acknowledges has become the dominant framing of the issue. In some cases, the passage of gay marriage has actually eliminated alternative forms of household recognition like domestic partnerships and reciprocal beneficiary statuses. And despite our perhaps outlandish wishes, no progressive movement has risen up to champion the proliferation of diverse forms of household recognition, despite the fact that Americans increasingly continue to live outside of marriage (see Eric Klinenberg’s excellent new book, Going Solo, for example, in which he documents the rise of living alone as the predominant residential pattern). Indeed, in the years since we wrote that article, I’ve often felt as if the debate over same-sex marriage has raged on the national stage while queer radicals like myself and marriage advocates like David Blankenhorn were off to the side, hosting our own tangential debate. We lost the war over issue framing—and in a way, so did Blankenhorn.

My opinions and feelings about marriage are not quite the same as Richard Kim's. For one thing, despite his unease with marriage as an institution, Kim says he's been a consistent supporter of the right of same-sex couples to marry. I have taken the stand that I don't need the right to participate in an oppressive institution. But as an old-school radical lesbian feminist, I can certainly identify with his feeling of simply being cut out of the entire national discussion.

I think the biggest question here is, what is marriage? Is it a commitment between two loving adults to engage in a lifelong relationship, and the commitment of the larger community to support them in this? Or is marriage an institution designed to enforce a set of social patterns and norms that society finds desirable? Richard Kim offers an excellent illustration:

The primary difference, of course, is that Blankenhorn and I fundamentally disagree about what marriage should mean—for gays and straights alike. As the founder of the Institute for American Values, Blakenhorn has attacked single mothers, championed federal marriage promotion as welfare policy, railed against cohabitation and no-fault divorce and opposed access to new reproductive technologies. One of his institute’s latest crusades has been against anonymous sperm donors because it leads to “fatherless” children, an abiding preoccupation of his. Suffice to say, I don’t agree with any of this. I think divorce can be a great thing—as anyone leaving an abusive marriage might confirm. And I think all the debates over which type of family produces the best outcomes for children ought to be meaningless as a matter of state policy. Gay or straight, single or married, let’s try to create the conditions in which all families can succeed. Blankenhorn sees an inner circle of honor and benefits that should be attached to marriage, and he’s now extended that circle to include gays and lesbians. I want to scramble that circle.

Richard Kim seems to believe that some version of "marriage" is possible without this kind of patriarchal baggage. I disagree. But I'm pleased to see that on the edges of the oversimplified national debate about same-sex marriage, there are thoughtful and complicated voices such as Richard Kim's.

Three views on Trayvon Martin

Trayvon Martin is the African American teenager who was shot to death by Sanford, Florida neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman in late February. This tragedy took place in a social context in which young black men are considered dangerous criminals because they are black males.

Here are three posts about this story that I have found to be useful and informative:

1. Pamela Merritt, who writes the blog Angry Black Bitch,  points out that if Trayvon Martin did the things George Zimmerman accused him of, Martin was "standing his ground" and should be considered the innocent party.
2. Judd Legum at Think Progress provides a point-by-point summary of the case.
3. In an interview on Fox News, posted at MEDIAite, civil rights leader Jesse Jackson denounces the so-called "New Black Panthers" for offering a "dead or alive" reward for Zimmerman's apprehension. For me, the most interesting and significant part of this interview was Jackson's prediction that this case could provide an inspiration to the civil rights movement equivalent to that provided by the murder of Emmett Till in 1955. This offers hope that this tragedy will ultimately fuel the cause of justice.

And when do women get to be persons?

I have been too immersed in my schoolwork to give more than passing attention to the daily news. This is not entirely a bad thing. I really don't think it is necessary for me to keep track of every time some wingnut patriarch celebrity or right-wing Republican legislator says something truly stupid about a woman, women, or women's rights. Such nincompoopery has been so widespread for so long that it is hardly worthy of notice, and frankly, some of the nincompoops seem to thrive on the attention, any kind of attention. It's probably a good thing that my attention has been focused on Information and Communications Technology and Management of Information and Knowledge organizations instead.

I do regret that I can't keep up with the anti-woman shenanigans of the 2012 Oklahoma Legislature. This is not merely some kooky talk radio show that a person can turn off. These people are passing actual laws, and one of the laws that they seem poised to pass is called The Personhood Act, which would declare a fertilized egg to be a human being, with all of the rights and privileges of any other citizen or resident of Oklahoma.

I've found what looks like a pretty good explanation of the situation on a blog called God Discussion, including the text of the bill that's making it's way through the Oklahoma Senate. God Discussion reports that House already passed a similar bill on Tuesday.  As other commentators have noted, this is a law that would ban many forms of contraception. The creative and courageous Oklahoma Coalition for Reproductive Justice held a "Barefoot and Pregnant" rally at the state capitol in Oklahoma City, and is leading the campaign against the Senate bill (and against a possible ballot measure that would add this type of language to the Oklahoma Constitution). OCRJ also provided this link to help you take action to defend women's control over our own bodies and our own lives.

Not so long ago, the US Supreme Court decided that corporations are persons. The Oklahoma Legislature wants to declare that fertilized eggs are persons. I would like to know when women get our chance to be persons, too.

Asking and telling

This poem, which I wrote two or three years ago, expresses the complication of my feelings upon hearing about the end of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy that allowed lesbians and gay men to serve in the U.S. military so long as they did not reveal their (our) identity. It's a long poem. I've got a lot of feelings about this topic.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell

You didn't ask, but I am going to tell you
how back in 1969,
My junior high school was a school
for smart kids from all over Philadelphia.
But my classmates were all smarter than I was,
because all of them were protesting
the Vietnam War.
Me, I was protesting them,
I was the only one who would pledge allegiance,
I was the only one who would try to sing
the Star Spangled Banner in the school assembly.

You didn't ask, but I am going to tell you
that back in 1969,
when I was 13 years old,
I wanted to be a man,
I wanted to be free,
not protected and controlled as women were.
I wanted to be free and strong and brave.
I wanted to be the one who did the protecting.
and at the end of the musical comedy,
I wanted to be the one who married the girl.

I would have volunteered to join the army
or maybe the marine corps.
I would have volunteered to go to Vietnam.
to protect the people from communist aggression,
to help them be free from tyrants and dictators.
I wanted to go.
but the army would not take 13-year-old girls,
whether or not they were going to become lesbians.
They didn't allow women into combat at all.
They said that war was too horrific for women,
but years later it crossed my mind that they
didn't really mind women being in combat
so long as
the women couldn't shoot back.

You didn't ask, but I am going to tell you
this story from the Vietnam War.
How the helicopters brought our soldiers
into the hamlet of My Lai,
with instructions to destroy it,
and to kill all of the enemy there,
and they did.
Our soldiers killed all of the enemy,
but on that day,
the enemy was not strong young men
armed with rifles and shooting back
at our troops.
On that day the enemy was old people,
and babies, and little children,
and of course women,
who could be raped as well
as bayoneted,
shoved into the irrigation ditch,
and slaughtered with bursts of
automatic rifle fire.

Our soldiers followed their orders
so well that in the morning there were 700 people
living in My Lai,
but by the end of that day
fewer than 200 were left.
As the saying used to go,
they destroyed that village in order to save it.
Not only did they butcher the people,
they also killed all of the animals,
burned down all of the buildings,
and poisoned the wells.

This happened in March of 1968,
and the army top brass was modest about it, too,
They said only that 128 of the enemy had
been killed in a fierce fire fight,
and they stuck to that story for over a year,
(well certainly, they admitted, there are
always a few unintentional civilian casualties),
they stuck to that story for over a year,
but then the truth came out.

The truth has a way of coming out,
even if no one asks for it.
People who know the truth, people who feel
the truth, always seem to want
to tell. There were brave men who were
there at My Lai,
brave men who could not stomach what they had seen,
what they had been forced to do,
and they told the truth without being asked.
They told the truth again, and again,
until congressmen and journalists had to listen.

After that, the generals said what
generals always say,
They said what they said after
Wounded Knee,
after the fire-bombing of Dresden,
after Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
after Kent State and Jackson State,
after they overthrew the democratically
elected governments of Guatemala and Iran,
after they trained the Islamic militants
who eventually became Al Qaeda,
after they mined Nicaragua's harbors,
after they blockaded Iraq and allowed
half a million children to starve,
after the revelations about the abuses
at the prison at Abu Ghraib.

They said that the My Lai massacre was
a tragic mistake,
that civilians cannot imagine the stress
of soldiers in combat,
that those men went a little bit
over the edge in what they did
but they were defending our way of life,
our freedom of speech,
our right to be ungrateful and criticize
our government for its conduct of a war
in defense of innocent people,
a few of whom, unfortunately, must always
be sacrificed in furtherance of that goal,
that now of all times was not the time
to cut and run, just because a few bad apples
had gone to a slight extreme in their
defence of liberty.
And they took one lieutenant and
locked him away for a four and
one-half months to show just how sorry they were.

In the middle of everything that was
happening to me when I was 13 years old,
I could not comprehend that my
government was lying to me.
I didn't know that
it hadn't been our civil war
until my government decided to take charge
after the Vietnamese drove the
French colonialists away.
I didn't know we had stopped elections
from taking place,
because we knew our side would lose.
I didn't know we'd installed a president
in South Vietnam, then murdered him
when he didn't do what we wanted.
I didn't know about people
being forced to live
in strategic hamlets, and if they didn't
stay there, they would be in free-fire
zones where my government would attack
them with napalm and rockets and bombs.
I wanted to believe my government when
it told me My Lai was a mistake.
I could not bear to ask
whether my government
might be
lying.

But the truth has a way of telling itself
even when you don't ask to hear it,
and later, when I was just a little older,
I fell in love with a woman who was a
little bit older than myself, a woman
who had been a protester.
I fell in love with a woman who knew
what our government had done, and I
believed what she told me,
I read for myself,
and I thought about what I'd read,
and then I understood that my government
hardly ever told the truth,
especially when it talked about its
foreign adventures.

I found that my government had a nasty
habit of supporting dictatorships
in the name of democracy,
in the Phillipines, in Latin America,
in Iran. I learned that
my government
has the nasty habit of supporting dictatorships
in the name of democracy,
and overthrowing elected governments
in the name of democracy,
and it crossed my mind
that my government was giving
democracy
a bad name.

And since then I have spent many
hours standing on many street corners
holding up protest signs,
sometimes in the freezing cold,
sometimes in the pouring rain,
I have stood on street corners
sometimes by myself,
often with just a few others,
I have stood on street corners
trying to tell my sister and
brother citizens the truths
that my government doesn't want them
to hear.

And in my own way I am doing my best to
serve my country,
I am doing my best to
defend democracy,
because free speech cannot be defended
with bullets or bombs,
democracy cannot be defended by
shoving helpless people into a ditch
and slaughtering them with bursts
of automatic weapons fire.
Free speech can only be defended by
speaking out,
by writing,
by doing your best to think for yourself.

And so,
to my gay brothers
and lesbian sisters,
here is what I want you to know:
If you say it is your country,
and your right to serve,
and I look at the world through your eyes,
I have to admit that this is so.
But can you look at the world
through my eyes?
Can you understand why once,
I would have volunteered to join
the army, or maybe the marine corps,
but now that is not so.
Can you understand why,
that if they asked me,
I would not go?
That even if the generals ordered me,
I would not go. I would say no.
I would say, "Hell, no."

Iowa woman jailed for thinking about abortion

Thanks to Feminist Peace Network for a link to this story about an Iowa woman who was thrown in jail after confiding some of her thoughts and fears about her pregnancy to an emergency room nurse. Christine Taylor had become light-headed and fallen down a flight of stairs in her home. As blogger fiver explains:

Yes, as if Ms. Taylor's existing problems weren't enough, the anti-choice zealots got her jailed for 2 days for thinking of having an abortion, even though she voluntarily went to the ER to assure the health of her fetus. Funny how "pro-lifers" have never met a victim they don't want to punish. After three weeks, the District Attorney declined to prosecute, but not because of the obvious encroachment on a woman's right to choose (similar laws for which this woman was held exist in 37 states), but because she was only in her second trimester, and not third when she fell.

Fiver provides a link to the original story on change.org.

Entering the Fourth Spiral Galaxy

I have been thinking about hope and hopelessness. I have been thinking about individuality and community versus individualism and conformity. I have been thinking about the possibility of social and political transformation versus the possibility of annihilation of truth, beauty, freedom, and the entire planet. And sometime soon -- I hope -- I will write a long blog post about all of this. If you know me, you know that I generally come down on the side of hope. Because I think hope is what is necessary if we are going to have any chance of things turning out right. I don't know if we can transform the world, but if we give in to hopelessness, it's not going to happen.

My current reading material seems connected to this topic. I have been reading Outercourse, the intellectual biography of the late radical feminist philosopher and theologian Mary Daly. One of the characteristics of Daly's work is her ability to feel and express the full horror of the way the world is -- at least in the foreground -- with a joyous connection to a different Background reality and the hope that the Earth can be saved.

In that spirit, here is a quote from Daly's "Prelude to the Fourth Spiral Galaxy" from Outercourse.

If I were not home already, I could not have arrived.

But there was such an urgency to arrive! I had to get here even to begin. And it is absolutely necessary that I begin, and that I begin again. Because I know more Now. Not enough, but more.

My Cronies and I--Who are we? A ragged remnant, maybe. But also the Conjurers of a different Course. Staggering on the edge of a doomed world, we soar in our souls...sometimes, even often. Basking in Be-Dazzling Light, we ponder the holes out there as they grow, leaking in the sun's kiss of death, the kiss of our Elemental Sister, who, like our sisters here, has been turned against us.

Shed tears no more...or tears galore. But summon the guts to keep going. My mantra for Outercourse: "Keep going, Mary. Go!" Because they want me to stop. The undead vampire men, the bio-robots gone berserk, the leaders. They want us to stop because they are winding down.

Keep going. Not really because they want me to stop, want us to stop. But because I am surging with Life. Because, you see, I have arrived here, Now, and I can begin. Because I was born for this Time, and I am strong.

Daly was known more as a theorist than as an activist. But if you visit MaryDaly.net, which formerly explored Daly's work, what has been left behind in her memory is a link to this activist web site, The World Can't Wait! It is a fitting tribute, indeed.

A rambling rant about reaching con-census

Today on my way to the Red Cup, I saw a federal census taker walking up my street. I shook her hand and thanked her for her service to our country. I'm as much of an anarchist as the next person, but in the face of all the tea-party protests, I find myself getting downright sentimental about the federal government. At least in theory, the federal government belongs to all of us, male and female, black and white, rich, poor, capitalist and worker. At least in theory, the government could be wrested away from the control of big business and forced to serve the interests of ordinary people. At least in theory, we could make our government take its troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan and Okinawa and Kazakhstan and set it to fixing roads and repairing schools and creating an environmentally sustainable economic base. The tea party folks, in theory they are in favor of freedom, too, but their waving of guns and their hurling of threats and insults at people who disagree with them, well, it sure looks like their real goal is to keep the same rich white guys in charge. So I shook the hand of the census taker, and smiled at her, and engaged her in a brief conversation as a way of taking one small stand in favor of peace and civility.

Besides which, I thought the census taker might be headed up to my place to ask me some questions, and I knew I'd be absent when she got there. So I thought I'd save her the trouble of having to come back again. You see, I filled in my census form and mailed it back, but I didn't fill it out the way the nice folks at the Commerce Department hoped that I would. I just couldn't wrap my head around some of the questions.

First off, why on Earth did they have to ask whether I was male or female. As I explained to the census taker, I'm old school, I came up with the women's liberation movement, and I can't stand it after all these years that the first question we still ask about anyone is, "Is it a boy or a girl?"

I was also going to explain that I'd done my best to get around the race question, too. The tea partiers are getting awfully riled up about the fact of our having an African American president. The tea partiers are even more riled up about the fact that large numbers of Latino people are making the United States their home. One big reason for this is that the tea partiers are all too aware that someday soon, people of  European extraction -- "white" people -- will no longer make up a majority of the US population. Maybe keeping track of racial demographics is just inflaming the situation? "Whiteness" is such an artificial and arbitrary thing. The world would be better off without it. As a person who happens to be of northern European extraction, white privilege is part of my life, and I need to acknowledge that and take responsibility for it. But when it came to the census, being an undefined beige person just seemed more responsible. When it came to the race question, I checked the box marked "other," and filled in "human." It's an idea I got by listening to the radio.

But I didn't get that far, because the census taker had her own remarks about the questions we are expected to answer. If you have children, you are supposed to say whether they are biological or adopted children. The census taker didn't like this. She told, "According to the law, they're both the same, and in your heart, they're both the same, but according to the census, you're supposed to say which is which." She happened to have adopted some children, and she didn't like this approach. "I have to ask some stupid questions," she said with a smile, but it's my job." She and I agreed that sometimes all of us is required to do stupid things because it's our job.

Then she checked her list, and said that I was not on her list of houses to visit. Apparently, the fact that I had filled out the form, however imperfectly, is all the Census Bureau cared about. So I bid the census taker a fond adieu and continued on my way to breakfast.

This started out as a post about the health care summit

Democracy Now! has this fascinating analysis of yesterday's healthcare summit. Amy Goodman interviews Trudy Lieberman of the Columbia Journalism Review and pediatrician Dr. Margaret Flowers of Physicians for a National Health Program. PHNP advocates for a single-payer system. Despite PHNP's requests to be included in that discussion, no advocate for single-payer was included in the summit. (Rep. Dennis Kucinich would have been a logical choice.) Dr. Flowers talks about the role of powerful campaign contributors in keeping single-payer off the table. Trudy Lieberman says that since its founding, the United States has been deeply divided on the proper role of the federal government. (A link to video of the entire summit is here.)

Lieberman's comments on this topic were particularly interesting to me. My own reading in American history tell me that she's right. I've been pondering the irony that the forces that advocate "individual freedom" and "small government" have often been the same voices that advocate the freedom of rich white men to dominate everyone else. During the Civil War, for instance, the South broke away in order to preserve the property rights of slaveholders against the supposed tyranny of the federal government.

It seems to me that even in the 21st century, the US keeps re-fighting the Civil War, with the so-called red states representing a slightly reconfigured Confederacy. In the 19th century, we had slaveholders. Today we have giant corporations that battle to keep the federal government from interfering with their property rights. These corporations portray the federal government as a tyrant that would interfere with our individual freedom to choose our own healthcare options. They cover up  their own control over our lives. They manipulate us with rhetoric about "individual freedom."

I find myself terrifically ambivalent about the role of government. In the imperfect world we have now, it seems to me that the government has the potential to act as a countervailing power to large and oppressive private interests. My anarchist friends would remind me that the government is often the wholly owned subsidiary of corporate interests. This internal debate has been at the center of my political life -- how to work toward a radically transformed, egalitarian world, while not being frozen by some idea of revolutionary purity into opposing programs that help real people right now.

I don't know if I'll ever have a solution to this dilemma. We humans are such contradictory creatures. We can never be truly independent. We are born naked and helpless, and we rely on each other for survival throughout our entire lives. Yet we aren't sheep. We have these stubborn, creative individual selves. I think radical lesbian philosopher Sarah Hoagland has the best take on the topic, with a concept that she calls "autokeonony." But that is a topic for another time.

What's the emergency?

The things that right-wing Republicans and mainstream news outlets use to stir up and manipulate popular fear are not always the things that really endanger us.

For instance, Truthout has cross-posted Hold Onto Your Underwear: This Is Not a National Emergency from TomDispatch.com. In this essay, Tom Englehardt compares the 290 fatalities that would have occurred on Northwest Flight 253 on Christmas Day -- if "underwear bomber" Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had been successful -- with the things that actually kill US citizens:

In 2008, 14,180 Americans were murdered, according to the FBI. In that year, there were 34,017 fatal vehicle crashes in the U.S. and, so the U.S. Fire Administration tells us, 3,320 deaths by fire. More than 11,000 Americans died of the swine flu between April and mid-December 2009, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; on average, a staggering 443,600 Americans die yearly of illnesses related to tobacco use, reports the American Cancer Society; 5,000 Americans die annually from food-borne diseases; an estimated 1,760 children died from abuse or neglect in 2007; and the next year, 560 Americans died of weather-related conditions, according to the National Weather Service, including 126 from tornadoes, 67 from rip tides, 58 from flash floods, 27 from lightning, 27 from avalanches, and 1 from a dust devil.

In this list, Englehardt doesn't address our national health insurance situation, but I think he should have. Lack of access to lack of health care seems to be a real emergency in the US. According to the authors of this report,

44,789 Americans each year—123 people every day—die because they lack health insurance. Others are driven to financial ruin. Medical debt was a key reason that 62 percent of personal bankruptcy filers sought court protection in 2007.

Meanwhile, according to the same report, health insurance companies made record profits while 2.7 million more people lost health insurance coverage. (Thanks to Reclaiming Medusa on Facebook for the link.)

Right-wing Republicans insist that the United States has the best health care in the world and tries to frighten citizens about the possibility of socialized medicine. President Obama and other centrist Democrats seem to have crafted a "solution" to the health care crisis that forces uninsured people to buy insurance from private companies, with some subsidies that may or may not cover the cost of this insurance. Meanwhile, public discourse takes place in a climate of irrational panic.

I wish I had a clear idea of a good course of action to deal with this mess.

Haiti

I think that Haiti is on many people's minds today after a devastating 7.0 earthquake hit that country yesterday. Angry Black Bitch has links to sites where you can donate to relief efforts and search for family members and friends in Haiti. Truthout has reposted a report from the Christian Science Monitor. It's interesting to compare the CSM report--which notes that "Wracked by political instability and poverty, and hammered by a series of hurricanes in 2008, Haiti faces a tough recovery ahead"--with this account from Democracy Now, which shows the origins of that instability and poverty in an ongoing history of intervention by the US and European powers. (Thanks to Common Dreams for reposting that account.)

Kern confronts heterosexual menace

Oklahoma State Rep. Sally Kern is well known for promoting the view that gay men and lesbians -- particularly those who advocate gay marriage -- are a threat to the stability of marriage as an institution. Reasonable people have been inclined to answer, but what about all those straight people who wreck their marriages and get divorced without any help from evil homosexuals?

Kern's answer is to propose a bill to make it much more difficult for heterosexual Oklahomans to get divorced. Oklahoma City television station KOCO provides a video of Kern explaining her proposal here.

Thanks to Right Wing Watch and Pam's House Blend for alerting me to this story.

Pray tell

Thanks to Alternative Tulsa for a link to a report about this bizarre call by our own Senator Tom Coburn for Americans to pray that a Democratic senator would be unable to show up for a vote on the health care bill.



Perhaps there is a more charitable explanation for Coburn's prayer request. Perhaps he would only pray for a Democratic Senator to get stuck in traffic, or to take a long nap and oversleep, rather than to die or be injured. But a senator with a lick of sense would know that these words could be interpreted in a very bad way.

If I were a praying person, I would pray that Oklahoma had at least one senator with a lick of sense. Coburn will face the voters again in 2010.

Just read this guy's post, okay?

Writing at truthout.org, Mike Elk explains why My Grandmother Takes a Stand for Gay Marriage in Church Despite Being a Glenn Beck Follower

My mother called it Armistice Day

My father was a veteran of the Second World War. My mother and father both were civilian employees of the US Army at Frankford Arsenal in Philadelphia. I always thought of my mother as being conservative, as supporting US military efforts overseas that I considered unwise at best, but several times she expressed her regret to me at having helped to make armaments for a living. She felt this was something she had to do to support two young children, one of them disabled, after my father died.

My mother was five years old when the First World War ended, and she used to tell a story about how she fell down and skinned her nose on the pavement, and a returning veteran gave her a quarter to get her to stop crying, and called her his "rose of no-man's land." The holiday that we in the United States celebrate every November 11 is now called Veterans Day. But it began as a celebration of the end of the First World War on the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of the eleventh month of 1918. My mother always called the day by its original name -- Armistice Day. Other nations still celebrate Armistice Day -- or Remembrance Day -- on this day.

There are only a handful of veterans of this horrific conflict who are yet living, and not very many others who remember that time. I've heard World War One described as the first modern war, but maybe in some ways the US Civil War was that -- war in which modern technology created effective machines of killing that efficiently slaughtered millions of people quickly. At any rate, the First World War was horrifying and hideously destructive, shattering dreams that technological and economic "progress" were creating a peaceful and prosperous world. Woodrow Wilson sold this mess to the US public as a "the war to end all wars" and a war to "make the world safe for democracy." (Wilson is often portrayed as a progressive idealist, but he was also a notorious racist, and pursued many anti-democratic policies.)

Even today in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US government promotes the polite fiction that its military interventions are designed to make the world safe for democracy.  But we have lost even the hoped for ideal of ending all wars, and I think you can see that in the change from Armistice Day to Veterans Day. Armistice Day celebrated the end of what people were hoping and trying to make the last war. Veterans Day assumes that we will always have wars, that there will always be a justification for the United States to invade some other nation and make it right. On Veterans Day, we are supposed to thank military veterans for their service to their country. Especially on Veterans Day, if we question US military intervention in other countries, we are accused of dishonoring the brave men and women who wear our country's uniform. Heaven forfend that we might stop invading far-off places and use all that money and person power to make our own country right.

Meaning no disrespect to anyone who now is in the US military, or who has been in the military, I am not celebrating Veterans Day today. Today I am celebrating Armistice Day, when the guns fell silent to end the First World War, and when we can hope and dream and commit ourselves toward working for a day when all of the guns in all of the wars will fall silent.

And today, I would like to thank some other people for their service to our country. First of all, I would like to thank the activists who work for peace, for women's rights, for civil rights for people of color, for health care reform, for an end to poverty, for the preservation of our natural world. I want to thank the poets and the artists and the singer-songwriters. I want to thank the school teachers and the day care workers, and the people who labor in hospitals and nursing homes. I want to thank the librarians, and the historians, and the civil libertarians. I want to thank the people who volunteer for food banks, and food co-ops, and the people who tend community gardens. I want to thank the bloggers. I want to thank the bicycle mechanics and the drivers for public transport. I am sure I am forgetting someone, but I think you get the idea. I want to thank the people whose work and whose quiet courage make the possibility of peace more real. To all of you, I want to say, thank you for your service to your country, and to the entire world.

And now I think I'm going to get back to work on that anti-war novel of mine.

The scariest costume I'll see all day

So I walk into the Red Cup just now for a breakfast burrito, and this guy comes in behind me in a Confederate uniform.

I think this is why I gave up doing Hallowe'en. Somewhere deep in my bones, I don't believe there is any such thing as a harmless fantasy. I remember an old dyke back in Oregon who told me once, "What you practice is what you get good at." Fantasy is a form of practice. (Or sometimes, it's a form a memory, but that's a different can of worms.) I don't think we completely create our own reality, but visualization is very powerful.

So I'm kinda procrastinating about finishing my breakfast and walking home. I'm kinda hoping this guy goes away before I do. Because I think it's best that I not have any opportunity to discuss his costume with him. Because from my point of view, there is nothing about the Confederacy that is quaint, comic, romantic, or worthy of emulation. If you think I'm joking, start reading the first autobiography of Frederick Douglass. And yes, the Civil War was about slavery. Lincoln may have started out with a willingness to continue to allow slavery if the union could be saved. By the time he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, that was all over. The Emancipation Proclamation was a matter of pragmatic war strategy. The Union absolutely depended on the armed service of free blacks and emancipated slaves in order to win the war.

And yet, in some ways the Civil War is still not over. The war between Blue and Gray is the historical beginning of the hostility between "blue states" and "red states." Slavery was once known as "the patriarchal institution," and in the 21st century, neo-Confederates do their best to defend the rule of the richest white men over everybody else. So the guy in that gray uniform is definitely the scariest thing I'll see all day--unless someone else has the bad taste to show up wearing a storm trooper costume with a swastika or a white sheet with a pointed hood.

What I did on my summer vacation

On the first day of my summer vacation, I spent a lot of time researching health care reform. On the second day of my summer vacation, August 13th, I went to Congresswoman Mary Fallin's town hall meeting in north Oklahoma City. This was a strange and intense experience. I took notes carefully. They were probably coherent. I have been meaning to turn these notes into at a blog post, and sometime soon I probably will. In the meantime, News9.com seems to have a video of the entire town hall meeting, if you'd like to watch it for yourself.

I thought that one of the things I would do with the rest of my summer vacation was to write the blog post I just refering to, and many other blog posts on the subject of health care reform. But I just couldn't. Every time I thought about blogging, my stomach started to churn. It's not just that health care reform is a complicated issue, it's also that the public debate has turned so truly ugly. It reminds me of , oh, say, the political climate when I lived in Oregon in the nineties and Ballot Measure 9 was before the citizenry. It feels like the same sort of right-wing nastiness, backed up by the same hints of threatened violence if the right-wingers don't get their way. It was dispiriting, if not surprising, to watch Fallin (and later Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn) pander to the extreme right. I'm committed to blogging about this issue, to help myself (and anyone who might be reading) to make sense out of the complicated mess that is the debate over health care reform.

But first I needed to take a vacation. So. I spent time hanging out on the front porch by myself and with friends, listened to live poetry, listened to live music, got my car back from the repair shop, finished painting my bedroom and moving in the bedroom furniture, had coffee with friends, did some reading, played a little bit of online chess--and now I'm almost ready to get back to trying to figure out health care.

Is this bad luck or good luck?

 

So, after the healthcare rally, I stopped at the Red Cup for lunch, and I was waiting at the counter for my sandwich, when someone came in and asked, "Is there anyone here who is driving a white Corolla?"

Witnesses told me that the driver of the car that hit me hit a telephone pole first, and then backed into my car. By the time I got out there, someone had already called the police. Soon a police officer came by and got my information and interviewed the driver of the other car. A little bit later, the police officer told me the other driver had failed--I think he called it an "STSI." Probably a sobriety test. The officer said the other driver was going into jail for driving under the influence. I'm sitting here in the Red Cup right now waiting for another officer to come in to talk to me.

So, this kind of sucks, having my car hit. I don't know at this point if it's drivable or not. It will especially suck if the other driver doesn't have insurance. On the other hand, I wasn't in the car when it was hit. And the people who hang out at the Red Cup are the very best. They were all over the situation like white on rice, so if the guy was thinking about hightailing it out of there, he wouldn't have had a chance.

Those of you who know me may remember that something similar happened to me three years ago, when I was sound asleep in my old apartment and a drunken driver totalled my pickup truck. That time they never caught the person.

I think there might be some greater social or political importance in this situation, but I'm not sure what it is.

Yes, again.

Feministing reports that there has been a second case of an 11-year-old boy committing suicide because of anti-gay bullying.