Posts

Showing posts from November, 2015

givingthanks

Image
A pumpkin that is too small for anything else cowers near her front door,               She cobbles a holiday together from scraps of buttered imagination.

Knock Knock Knockin'

Image
Trouble in mind.  I recently read that a new poll reports that 29% of the American people still doubt that their President, Barak Obama, is not a muslim.  Though he regularly identifies himself as a Christian, so do they.  I feel like conjuring up the ghost of Woody Guthrie to deal with this one.  Political and religious denial of the worst order.  What would Woody do, I keep asking myself?  Aside from a few clever retorts in the form of barbs, the great American folk interpreter would no doubt have a few unusual ideas. "Get these here folks in a room together and then bring in the Pres, " he might say.  "Let them talk face to face with the man they try so hard to ignore.  I'll bet they find they have more in common than not." What a great idea.  Demystify the cloak of separation and be required to tell a lie to someone's face.  Oh the psychopaths will do just fine, but the one's with a heart and soul might have difficulty.  It could be the start of

Dark and Darker

Image
The temperature is changing.  In every way.  One minute we are dealing with air conditioning and then it's the concern over freezing pipes. One minute it's the solid red Starbuck's cup and the disappearance of holiday symbols and the next we're on high terror alert. The President of France declares, "We are at war."  Ten U.S. governors simultaneously say they will not accept any Syrian refugees.  A few of them conveniently forget they once were refugees who fled the political consequences for their families in difficult times. The sabres are rattling and the machine is crying for oil.  The bombs are already falling and as the season of Peace on Earth Goodwill towards mankind approaches, we have collective PTSD. If our hair and beards are darker than most, we have cause for concern. As a culture we like our wars to be the "good war" variety and our warriors to come from the "greatest" generations.  After the recent events in Paris (N

Disconnection

Image
This week has been full of disconnects.  I finished reading Michelle Alexander's important book The New Jim Crow about how the Drug War is the new form of racial caste system in this country.  Her research and statistics are impressive.  Simply put, she argues that we have gone from slavery to Jim Crow laws, to mass incarceration.  All are a form of race control. Fascinating too how she quotes both Martin Luther King Jr. and James Baldwin in her final chapter.  Would that both were with us today to provide additional insight. So then, the day after I finish the book, I sit down for the best entertainment of the week, the next Republican "debate."  Of course these two hour "watch me talk over you and get my time" telecasts aren't really debates, but they are fun to watch because they expose just how polarized our politics are these days both within and without our political party affiliations. No mention of racial issues anywhere.  Not even connected to the

Face Facts

Image
It's been about 9 years since I wondered onto Facebook for the first time.  I'd been retired from full-time teaching only a couple of months and I was trying to track down an Amnesty International petition so I could keep up my involvement.  Amnesty had gone to Facebook in an attempt to use social media to reach more people.  Without thinking too much I filled out some information via my new laptop and suddenly I was confronted with the challenge of filling out a profile.  Literally within minutes of this initial log on, I began to receive "Friend Requests" from former students.  The first one came from Paris, France. In my 30+ years in the classroom, I must have had a few thousand students.  Suddenly, they began to return to my life.  This was heady stuff.  Of course I wondered what ever happened to so many and now I began to find out.  I soon realized that as I accepted new Friend requests, I was getting more exposure.  As the class of 2004 began to find me, so too

Water Signs

Image
The clocks are re-set; Halloween is over.  Rainfall graced the streets with a few ponds and made the curbs small versions of the bigger dams that surround the local rivers.  The calendar page reads November and a brief glance out my window makes clear the reason that Portland, Oregon was named after Portland Maine. Orange is ubiquitous.  Butternut squash, pumpkins and candy corn, Indian corn, popcorn, persimmons and a new crop of navels. Leaves...many leaves. Fall is inevitable. It means I must stow away all my fishing equipment until Spring...except for that travel rod which offers hope when snow is on the ground.  I reluctantly remove all the gear from metric and wonder where the chains I think I have might be.  Time to think about holidays and winter travel and of course, time to take stock of the previous year. I've heard this is the time when some folks think the moon is in Scorpio.  I don't follow astrology, but history shows us that strange things do happen between th