Have you heard the not so Good News?

I heard yesterday that the reason some people would be voting in the upcoming Presidential election for a criminal on the run was that God has chosen this man at this time in American History to lead the free world. Mon Dieu! Let’s just say unequivocally that this goes against all notions of separation of church and state on which these here United States was founded. Anyone with an eighth grade education learned that fact no matter what part of the country you got your upbringing.

When I was growing up in the industrial Northeast, I was taught principles of the Catholic tradition by nuns who spoke about God working in “mysterious ways,” while they simultaneously taught about the pilgrims who risked their lives to leave an oppressive homeland because of an imposed religion by their government in England. Those men, women, and children chose to migrate across a vast open ocean in rickety wooden boats to escape (sound familiar?) and begin a NEW England without religion at the seat or heart of their chosen Government. If we remember that one fundamental elementary school lesson that was taught to all Americans whether on the Prairies, in the South or Back East, we understand that choosing our freely elected leader is squarely at the center of separation of church and state. However and by whomever those basic facts were taught there was no ambiguity in the founding principle that our government would be separate and apart from any religious beliefs.This principle has defined the United States going forward from the original thirteen colonies to today’s fifty separate states spread geographically from sea to shining sea.

Given these facts, established and presumably accepted as truth by all citizens of the United States, it comes as not so good news that God would be the one choosing the highest officer of the land usurping the will of the people! When President Thomas Jefferson held that esteemed office he wrote in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association that the First Amendment . . .”built a wall of separation between church and state.” A wall!

Years later, in 1947, in a Supreme Court case, Justice Hugo Black wrote: “The First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state which must be kept high and impregnable.”* Walls seem to be a constant in our History and in the collective psyche from our third President to the highest court in the land, and to this day as part of the political debate. If we break it down, so to speak, walls can be seen as the one thing that Americans put up to protect ourselves against something or someone we deem as a significant threat to our personal freedom as citizens of a free country. When the wall is breached, it brings a threat inside the democratic system most especially the democratic voting system that is meant to allow for everyone's coveted and cherished right to vote. To cavalierly toss that right to high heaven as if the choice is not of one's own free will, is to believe that an election is a fait accompli prior to election day. If that is the case, why bother to hold a fair and free election? Why would anyone but the chosen one be on the ballot? Why would citizens from across this vast country bother to stand in line in the snow in subfreezing temperatures? Or, in the heat of the day? Or, through the night, if necessary? Why bother at all with separating church and state as proclaimed at the outset by the the oppressed who came for this very reason?

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for God. Yet, when Americans step into the voting booth free from duress from the government, we each have the right and responsibility to choose between candidates who tell us beforehand why they want and deserve either me or you to choose them to be the officer in charge of our country. We vote accordingly, and not by any other means.

*FreedomForum.org What is Separation of a Church and State?

Banned in Florida . . . Period!

I decided to begin a blog the day after the 11 p.m. signing of the Florida six-week abortion ban by Governor, Ron DeSantis, behind closed doors with his puppet legislators. He has been AWOL from this state ever since. Meanwhile, back on the ranch, women have been stockpiling and planning to protect ourselves from future back door legislation that these Neanderthals are surely cooking up.

I chose the title: Banned in Florida . . . Period! A small play on words, you’ll notice, if you read between the lines. I could have written six months worth of weekly blogs on that topic alone after other states followed Florida and that once, illustrious Supreme Court, turned the final “screw” on ALL women. I am considering changing the blog title to: “No Rights. No Sex.” As a strategy this has been tried before with such positive results as ending a war! The ancient Greeks knew something about the power of sex from a different angle than that of mastering control over women’s bodies from the legislative body. Just writing that sentence seems so ridiculous, yet it is its own plot line in a recent tragedy that disempowers all women in 2024!

That ancient Greek story of Lysistrata, is about one woman who organizes her counterparts to withhold sex from their husbands or partners in order to secure peace by ending the war du jour, the Peloponnesian War. The women agree that there will be no sex until that war is over and done. Theirs is a show of nonviolent resistance extraordinaire. We might be tempted to shrug this off as just a myth, but let’s not be so quick. If we go way back to those days of hunter-gatherers (Did I already say Neanderthals?), women gathered themselves in solidarity and said NO to men asserting a different control over their private, reproductive parts. In more recent times, 2006 A.D., wives and girlfriends of Colombian gang members in an attempt to stop violent gang murders, started “La Huelga de las piernas “ or “The strike of the crossed legs.” Their goal was to have gang members give up their guns. Years later, the murder rate had declined by 26.5%. I would call these nonviolent strategies effective in both changing minds and saving lives! So, there’s the rub: The whole issue of women’s reproductive rights has been framed as one of protecting life. The women who peacefully resisted by withholding sex wanted only to protect the lives of their husbands, sons, brothers, fathers. Therefore, an argument over the sanctity of life as the sole reason to ban all women from free choice does not hold up against women who instinctually protect life itself. If the argument had begun and ended over life and not choice, it would never have become the national debate of the past fifty years. It did not begin or end there. Let’s be clear on that fact.

Women walking in peaceful resistance to bans on choice, myself included, know full well that those troglodytes screaming spurious, vile accusations from behind police sidelines as intimidation tactics, have not thought things through: Women carrying a sign that says: Bans Off Our Bodies, once carried them. We are their mothers, sisters, daughters, wives who have proven without a doubt our belief in life by protecting our own sons, brothers, fathers from dying in one more war or on the streets. Women do not wish to send their sons into war or watch them die in the streets. Period! Full Stop.

Let's face it,

all women’s rights from salaries to voting to choice over our own self-care have been challenged, chopped and blocked going as far back as cave man days. There is no power in the club of the barbarians against the simple, non violent act of women’s resistance against unjust, unfair, so-called rules of law aimed directly at women. When Ron comes back after his failed attempt to rule the land with nothing but his tail between his legs, he will learn the hard way about women's resistance to his archaic decisions.

2024: How will it end?

Years ago, fourteen to be exact, I was in the midst of writing a graduate thesis on pilgrimage. I undertook some solo pilgrimages to corroborate my own writing which would have otherwise qualified as research trips, if it had been that cut and dried. Pilgrimage is anything but, and opens up worlds beyond one’s limited imagination. But, academia being what it is, I had to qualify whatever I put on the page. As preparation for a pilgrimage to the Hopi Reservation in Arizona, I contacted my daughter’s fifth grade American History teacher to ask for books he might share about Native Americans. “We do not teach about Native Americans in American History,” he said, unapologetically. An explanation did not follow. Clearly, this too is part of the dreadful apocalyptic story of Indigenous peoples in the U.S. and elsewhere. I then asked the College President and Dean, Steven Charleston, a native Choctaw, how to approach the Hopi, “people of peace.” He offered the following: “The Hopi are the most secluded of all Indigenous people. In order to preserve their rituals and culture, the Hopi have retreated from the world.” I would not be allowed to photograph or to participate in any rituals of the clan, if I was lucky enough to catch one of their impromptu ceremonies. A few days at the Hopi/CulturalCenter/Museum/Restaurant/Inn offered a glimpse of a way of life that both seemed different and the same in some ways to my own small community on the tip of Cape Cod. Encounters were brief. I spent more time driving alone in a car without cell phone service or radio for long distances between mesas stirring up a sense of endlessness. "Take only what you carry in your heart," say the Hopi. What I took home from the pilgrimage, was an enormous sense of an endless world of time and space. The Hopi have been living on "Turtle Island," aka North America, for longer than any other native peoples and "longer than anyone can count," says Charleston in his new book in which he dedicates a full chapter to the Hopi. He does not reveal sacred rituals to the reader but instead points to an enlightened way of approaching a world and culture destined for apocalypse, as all native peoples have endured and survived. Hence the title: We Survived the End of the World.

Many people today are anticipating an apocalyptic 2024 given global crises manifesting everywhere at once. Rather than spelling these out, I will say they are all of a piece, all tightly woven together without knowing exactly which is most important or what can be done about any one of the major issues facing the whole world. How did the Native peoples do it when faced with the fear of decimation of all they valued and held sacred? Apocalypse, is the word that Charleston explores through their eyes. Doomsday was not in their vocabulary.

The lessons to be learned from Hopi and Native peoples is that it is the very nature of rituals and cultural norms that hold the community together in spite of a looming apocalypse that threatened to destroy it all. An apocalypse will not come as an ending the way that fearful minds imagine, but will effectively end the detrimental ways that we ourselves have wrought by our choices for or against wars and weapons and human and animal rights, and all the rest of it.

The day is coming, many would agree, when change will end life as we know it today. How that will look in the end, which according to Hopi is never ending, is a choice we can each make for ourselves, and collectively as community. When my pilgrimage to Hopi Land was coming to an “end,” I saw posted on the Center’s door a notice for a ceremony in the plaza that Saturday. No time was given. The location was: “Tuwanasavi: The Center of the Universe.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwI0ZAdaKwY