"Stop the World, . . .

I want to get off!" These words were a mantra for my beleaguered, single mother of five kids, always underfoot. Who could blame her for wanting all the commotion to stop, or else, stopping the world all together, so she herself could get off. Such a powerful thought to speak out loud. It propels one into a kind of magical thinking. What if she, or you, or I could actually get off of this world? Think about that . . .

The world these days, this one and only world we call home, seems more and more to be spinning faster and faster out of control. Imagine if we issued a collective cry to “Stop . . . I want to get off!” Mother Earth herself would sigh with relief. Imagine the quiet that would descend like snow in the night.

In the early days of COVID (remember those strange days?), the planet became a different world. That was the moment when we had an actual chance to change things. I recall one morning thinking that the sun looked different in the way it shone in my study where I write. That wasn’t magical thinking. The air had cleared so quickly because jet planes everywhere were grounded and cars were not driven anywhere. Imagine that! Clearly, the world we inhabit needs our habits to change. We know it’s true, but we engage in magical thinking by telling ourselves that we have time. Why?

I’m not an expert, but I think we come to beliefs by listening to what we want to believe. My mother who believed she could not change the circumstances, gave in once in a while to the pressure by releasing it, like a pressure cooker that releases the built up pressure at just the right moment. Or, else! Believe me when I tell you that a head of steam forcing a weight to fly off the top and hit the ceiling is not a place you want to be standing when it goes the other way. Well, friends, the pressure on our world is very close to hitting the ceiling. We cannot go on collectively believing that there is time and that individually we have no choice but to accept the circumstances: The very circumstances that we ourselves have created! Something’s gotta give. Or, else!

If we use magical thinking to consider how we could change our tune from Stop the World, to Save my World, what would such change look like? A train, bus, or bike ride to work or school? A phone call before a wasted trip in the car? A lot less hot water in a shorter shower? A cloth napkin? A coffee in a real mug? That's just counting on one hand the smallest changes that we can effectively make right now without actually changing our lives. Done together, we can change the circumstances of our life on this one planet. You have ideas of your own on what to do, please share them in the comments below. We will all benefit from sharing and Mother Earth will be relieved of the pressure a little bit while we try to buy the time that we so believe in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYi--Mzm8Qk

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.