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Yesterday, in the States, was Veteran's Day. I remember it being Armistice Day when I was very young...
Anyway, one US-centric article and one US-centric memoir-essay about war, and the wish for peace.
The Anguish of War for Today’s Soldiers, Explored by Sophocles.
By PATRICK HEALY
Published: November 12, 2009
A project uses ancient theater as a vehicle for sharing pain, learning and healing. (NYT)
( Full text in case link will not work )
Sgt. First Class Tony Gonzalez, an Iraq combat veteran from Brooklyn who was on the panel, recalled that post-traumatic stress disorder was rarely discussed when he first joined the Army. He described his own pain after his platoon captain was killed and he went to pay respects to the man’s wife, also a friend and member of the military.
And he praised the use of theater to help put a spotlight on trauma.
“I’ve been Ajax,” he said. “I’ve spoken to Ajax.”
~~
One Grizzled Veteran's Dream
Huffington Post
William Astore
Writer, Professor, Retired Lt. Colonel, Air Force
Posted: November 11, 2009 08:05 AM
( full text in case the link won't work )
On this Veteran's Day, what if we began to measure our national success and power, not by our military arsenal or by the number of new recruits in the ranks, but rather by the gradual shrinking of our military ranks, the decline of our spending on defense, perhaps even by the growing quiet of our legion posts and VFW halls?
Wouldn't that be a truer measure of national success: fewer American combat veterans?
Wouldn't that give us something to celebrate this Veteran's Day?
I know one old grizzled veteran who would quietly nod his agreement.
Professor Astore currently teaches History at the Pennsylvania College of Technology in Williamsport, PA. He writes regularly for TomDispatch.com and can be reached at wastore at pct.edu.
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Starting on Thursday, November 5 at Boston University, Howard Zinn and producers and cast from THE PEOPLE SPEAK are embarking on a national college tour for Howard's forthcoming documentary feature film THE PEOPLE SPEAK.
All events are FREE!
To reserve a seat in advance (highly recommended) and for more info visit:
http://www.history.com/thepeoplespeakcollegetour
http://www.facebook.com/HowardZinn
( Coming soon to a campus near you! )
And check out The People Speak -- airing on History on December 13, 2009 -- the documentary inspired by Voices of a People's History of the United States and produced by Matt Damon, Josh Brolin, Chris Moore, Anthony Arnove and Howard Zinn, and featuring Damon, Brolin, Rosario Dawson, Bob Dylan, Morgan Freeman, John Legend, Viggo Mortensen, Bruce Springsteen, Marisa Tomei, and Kerry Washington.
See a sneak peek preview at http://www.thepeoplespeak.com
( Read more... )
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Review here of Sigrun and Gudrun, a pair of long poems, written in an English approximation of Old Norse heroic metre, that attempts to reconcile certain crucial differences between the Icelandic Prose Edda and the 13th-century Volsunga Saga. It’s pretty arcane, but fortunately both Wagnerians and Tolkien fans will be at home with the basic lineaments of the story: chosen hero, dragon, obsessive personal jewellery and lashings of destiny. (Tim Martin)
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| 2009-03-31 15:09 |
| moar books, movies, etc. |
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| amazon, black studies, books, child lit, education, europe 2009, friends, fun, gender studies, history, language, lj, movies, music, native american studies, nursing, philosophy, psychology, religion, women's studies |
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Apparel and shoes on sale at Amazon until April 3rd. (yeah, I get referral points if you buy after going in through my portal. geez, don't I sound like a pro, or a shill, or something? lol)
Sample listings:
( A Tolkien Treasury )
Amy's Eyes
( Read more... )
BRITISH COLUMBIA: A CENTENNIAL ANTHOLOGY [Hardcover] Edited by Reginald E. Watters
The five sections of this Centennial Anthology attempt to portray in words and B&W pictures the varied life of British Columbia in both the past and present.
30 Days to a Simpler Life; A Medieval Woman's Mirror of Honor: The Treasury of the City of Ladies; Boycott; Capitol Hill in Black and White; Canciones Infantiles [Audio CD] El patio de mi casa; Child in the Night [VHS Tape] JoBeth Williams; Tom Skerritt; Tim Choate, Elijah Wood IMDb; Conservation Medicine: Ecological Health in Practice [Hardcover] Gary M. Tabor; Core Curriculum for Lactation Consultant Practice [Paperback] by Walker, Marsha; Essentials of Nursing Research: Methods, Appraisal, and Utilization; Eve's Bayou [DVD] Jurnee Smollett; Meagan Good; Samuel L. Jackson; Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols by Bynum, Caroline W.; Guide to Rembering Japanese Characters (Tuttle language library); Howard Street by Nathan C. Heard; Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West by Rebecca Solnit; Spiritual Gardening [Audiobook] by Handelsman, Judith (cassettes) among other books, movies, and music.
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With thanks to ![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) imafarmgirl in whose journal I saw this. you're such a grand, generous resource person (among your many other talents).
Jan 21, 2009
http://www.indiancountrytoday.com/living/37893109.html
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – White Bison Inc. is a 20-year-old Native nonprofit organization that focuses not only on alcoholism recovery but also on the ways in which a history of colonization contributed to addiction in the American Indian community.
Operating from a modest office on a quiet street, White Bison reaches Native communities well beyond this city south of Denver that is home to Focus on the Family and the North American Aerospace Defense Command.
One of White Bison's key programs is the Wellbriety Movement, which extends past sobriety into the talking circles of its multicultural, cross-country Hoop Journeys, firestarter circles for local sobriety efforts, and other grassroots, culturally based programs and practices.
Central tenets of the organization are contained in White Bison's "The Red Road to Wellbriety in the Native American Way," a 12-step program adapted from Alcoholics Anonymous' Big Book. The book has personal recovery stories chronicling the lives of Native addicts from various communities and walks of life.
In many ways, the organization reflects experiences of its founder and president, Don L. Coyhis, Mohican, who addresses Native history in "Alcohol Problems in Native America: The Untold Story of Resistance and Recovery-the Truth About the Lie," which he co-authored with William L. White, a senior research consultant for Chestnut Health Systems.
Provided with an accurate history of North America, Native people can heal from alcoholism and other illnesses that result from colonization's legacy of intergenerational trauma, Coyhis said. "The truth about what happened to us is very important, but the story wasn't told. I found out the truth about the lie."
"It is time Indian people rejected alcohol, not because some Indians develop alcohol problems and alcoholism, but because alcohol is a symbol of efforts to exploit and destroy us as a people," the book states.
Coyhis said the result of silence about intergenerational trauma is similar to the effect of messages passed on by dysfunctional families.
He likens the result of silence about community trauma to the effect of messages in dysfunctional families. "I grew up thinking I was no good, not good enough, not very smart. When I found out I wasn't dumb, everything changed – relationships, jobs I applied for, just everything."
The same can be true for communities when the truth is known about the history of colonization, he said, but errors about what happened are often perpetuated by schools, Native studies programs, other institutions and communities. "You may question them and they'll tell you there's something wrong with you."
"When we researched Native alcoholism, we found that a number of myths were being taught," Coyhis said. "One of them is that `something is wrong with our immune systems' compared to Europeans. It's not true – there's been a study done on our immune system."
Another myth is that Indians "go crazy with alcohol," but boarding schools, taking children away from their families, and other losses are the real culprit. "What surfaces is an organized assault by government on our community.
By 1920, 99 percent of American Indian people had been wiped out and small groups were left with nowhere to go, "except future generations didn't know that because the story wasn't told," in the resulting climate of shame and sorrow.
"If you don't know about intergenerational trauma, you'll try to blame everything (about alcoholism) on `genetic disparities' which have never been tested," he said.
Positive changes have occurred in cities and in reservation communities where there are language immersion programs and cultural revitalization, "after all, one ounce of culture equals 10 pounds of healing," Coyhis said, and if that is coupled with the practice of spirituality, even greater benefits occur.
In addition to myth-busting, culture and spirituality, "What we were learning is that we need a whole new language. ... We're more colonized than we think."
For example, when such terms as "war on poverty" or "war on drugs" are used, the elders whom he consults told him that by setting up the conflict "you create an enemy where none exists."
"How you name something is very, very important," he said, suggesting that "drug czar" could be "healing czar" and a phrase like, "My name is Don and I'm an alcoholic" could become, "My name is Don and I'm in recovery."
Everyone has the responsibility to "find the truth, because it's accurate to say that `the truth shall set you free,'" he said.
The organization offers a number of recovery-targeted products, including books, material for youth prevention programs, video documentaries of sacred Hoop Journeys, meditations with Native elders, an online magazine, and, most recently, a CD version of "The Red Road to Wellbriety" for prison inmates and others with limited reading skills.
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and the Asian Art Museum's exhibit of the Hidden Treasures of Afghanistan. going with my housemate. will come home v. tired, nap, and head off to work tonight.
am taking addresses and stamps- may actually send postcards! (depends on if memory is functional)
stories to come. xoxoxoxo ya'll. special best to those who need it.
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Free Obama ringtone
"Let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations."
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“El lamento del cabrón” from Perceval Press
( text of article )
I'm not through translating this (for my own use, I'm not so good to try and translate it for everyone! but if someone DOES translate it, I'd love to see it) but essentially Sr. Gelman says Mr. Bush and his administration lie now, lied then, and have lied all along, about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, and that for Mr. Bush to say that one of his main regrets about his presidency is the lack of good intelligence about that is like a goat crying. (Cabrón translated at wordreference.com- street meaning and formal meaning. crying goat, my ass.)
I got curious about the song El Lamento del Cabrón, so here is some information about that and the band Orthodox:
( lyrics, english )
about the band:
http://www.headheritage.co.uk/unsung/albumofthemonth/1494
http://www.metal-archives.com/review.php?id=109944
Orthodox performing on YouTube
for download (ripped from youtube)
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Open letter to white activists by lj user slit thanks to lj user princessofg who describes it as "Brilliant and timely stuff on coalitions and minority groups...."; in addition it contains excellent thought-provoking writing on "...sex and freedom..." and privilege.
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And how does the government pay for universal tax-payer funded
healthcare and universal tax-payer funded education? You might say it
is only a utopian dream, that it is naïve to ask for the government of
the United States of America to provide free comprehensive healthcare
and education for all of its citizens. I say that it was not dreaming
to expect Barack Obama to become president, and it is not dreaming to
expect the United States of America to behave like a modern, civilised
democracy. Where does the money come from? For one thing, it comes
from not bailing out the privileged few who have, through willful
mismanagement of their financial institutions and through corporate
piracy, raped and pillaged the nation's economy and robbed the U.S.
tax-payer blind with the encouragement of the government officials
whose campaigns they continue to fund. It does not come from
continuing to make a lucrative business of war-profiteering and
military-backed corporate imperialism, from perpetual armed corporate
robbery around the world, largely funded by U.S. taxpayers of today
and tomorrow.
Barack Obama received considerably more campaign funding from "Wall
Street" than John McCain did. Does this mean that he will
automatically bail out the rich who continue to steal from the hardly-
as-rich vast majority of U.S. citizens and their children? Ask him. If
he tells you that it is just too complex an issue, that bailing out
these for-profit failed capitalistic institutions and corporations is
a necessary stop-gap measure to save the economy, I would venture to
say that the answer is "yes". I would venture to say that he is as
bought-and-paid-for as George W. Bush, Bill "Nafta" Clinton, and every
other president in memory. Sadly, this would mean that "Change", that
word Mr. Obama so eloquently used - if often vaguely - as a
rhetorical cudgel to win the presidency and a chance to really make a
difference, is worth nothing more than a handful of pennies to the
economic future of the average citizen and to the hope of a socially-
responsible democracy. If the answer is "yes", then those who have
stolen Big will be richly rewarded and the profitable (for the
privileged, amoral few) military-industrial empire will thrive and
prosper as the noble dream of a just society suffers ever greater set-
backs. Let capitalism function as a responsibly-regulated system, not
as a costly welfare safety-net for billionaires and their capitalist
enterprises. We have a dream. It need not be further compromised by
the next U.S. administration. Sometimes the picture is quite clear.
Take a stand.
Viggo Mortensen
The People Speak
"Democracy is in dissent. Democracy is in resistance. Democracy doesn't come from the top: It comes from the bottom." ~~ Howard Zinn
Please. I know it can come off as ranting. I don't think it is. I think it's an impassioned plea for each of us to own our citizenship, to own the commonwealth that is ours by virtue of our labor, by virtue of our participation, however indirect it may seem to be, in the governance of and economy of our country.
I know it would be a long project, re-making the way we take care of our health as individuals and as a society. I am well aware of the limitations of "Universal health coverage" in Canada, in the UK, in the Scandinavian countries, and I can imagine as well limitations and risks of universal tax-payer funded education. But I like to think these are public conversations, conversations in the national interest as well as in the personal, and I hope that as I pursue my part in it my President-Elect, soon to be President, will be at least willing to listen while I speak.
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Smithsonian Folkways recently released Nobel Voices for Disarmament: 1901–2001 (SFW47005), a stirring collection of new and archival spoken-word recordings by the most prominent advocates for peace during a century marred by war and bloodshed. With thirty-nine tracks organized into eight chapters, Nobel Voices offers testimonials from luminaries such as Kofi Annan, Bill Clinton, John F. Kennedy, Jane Addams, Jody Williams and Linus Pauling.
Introduced and narrated by Academy Award-winning actor, producer and United Nations Messenger of Peace Michael Douglas, Nobel Voices honors the achievements of the last century’s Nobel Peace Prize winners in disarmament and arms control and those who have been inspired by their work. (Streaming tracks available at the moment.)
At times, because there is still a nuclear arsenal, and still countries who think that having MORE nuclear stuff is necessarily in and of itself a good thing, I am disheartened.
Then I listen to something like this, and realise it's an on-going process to keep things on an even keel. And then I can keep going.
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In light of the Obama/McCain health care plan differences (well outlined here) I'm posting a couple sites i've found about the history of health insurance in the US (would welcome sites about other countries' insurance/care programmes).
Medical History and Ethics/History of Health Insurance in the US from neurosurgical.com, and from Thomasson encylopedia: US Health Insurance.
It's quite astonishing, actually. I'm in the field, have studied this off and on over the years, and STILL learned a lot, even from two relatively short high-lights only entries.
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Not a bad day, as days go. Enough sleep, always a blessing.
Got the printer moved over by the BigMac and the rest of the semester's readings printed out. Still working on the Real Women Have Curves paper, but it's coming, it's coming. Might just post it up here for concrit/nose-holding before I go home from work in the morning, if it's at all in that kind of shape.
Blind fury doesn't begin to say how visceral my response is to the world economic crisis. There's a scene in Three Kings (I should look for it on youTube, it might be there) that encapsulates the relationship of the middle-class America I grew up in, the attitudes of which I attribute a large part of our current ills to (sorry, Churchill old pal). One of the American GIs who is after stealing some Iraqui gold from a bunker in Kuwait has been captured, and is being 'interrogated' (since that seems to be my country's new word for 'torture', thank you Dick & Condy for redefining the language, I'm sure it needed that).
His interrogator- an Iraq-born, US-educated engineer, asks him, our car-salesman National Guard GI, as he's sitting tied in a chair, "Do you love oil? Do you? Do. You. Love. Oil. Then here, I will give you some-" here shoving a CD case into the GI's mouth, effectively wedging it open "-have all the oil you want!" pouring a quart of motor oil into his throat.
When I was a little girl in Santa Monica, one of my most vivid memories is of a "Gas War". Four stations, one on each corner- Shell, probably, and Standard Oil, and most likely Phillips 76 and maybe an Atlantic Richfield- I don't remember when each merged into the next and how the names changed along the way- and a gallon of gas, that weekend, got as low as 13 cents.
13 cents. And there were incentives- glassware, or dishes, or cooking pots. Not made in the USA, those incentives- made in Japan, most likely, at that point, I'm guessing.
And I remember my father trying to explain to two little girls why it wasn't less expensive to go to the station with the cheapest gas, because you had to know where the gas came from, and how that company did its business with the country the gas came from, and all that was part of the real cost of the gas even if it wasn't part of the posted sale price.
And you know, I grew up feeling like I was stupid because- since this was a thing fathers explained to their daughters, so surely other people knew it before me, understood it better than I did, as I was only just being taught it now- I couldn't figure out why people- governments, consumers, economists- kept going on as though gas was always going to be 13cents on that corner, and there'd never be any hidden costs, and you could practically furnish your house on what they were bribing you with from gallon, to gallon, to gallon.
Of course now I know it's more complicated, always has been. I make my decisions based on so many factors, and usually come down on the side of judicious use- save gas and money here, so that I can afford to pay an airline to fly me to Germany there- but somewhere I think that if I'd just understood, then, that most people- MOST people, including executives, economists, business owners, government officials, elected representatives, gas station owners, the neighbors- most people didn't understand where the gas came from, and how much it cost, really- if I'd understood that, then, and been able to help with explaining it, then...
And then I wake up. Because it's not all my fault- one little girl couldn't have changed all that- it was all already going on, wasn't it?
"Lord, actually," says Cutler Beckett to Governor Swann. "Just good business."
I am so sorely disappointed.
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So the deadline for the HHS resolution about changing access to birth control/abortion by changing the rules re: requiring providers to prescribe/dispense comes up on September 25th. That means there are only a few more days to contact your Congress or Senate people, or contact Health and Human Services yourself, and make your point of view known.
I don't really care for having the government- any government, be it local, state, or federal- in my business. I'd much rather practices affecting the common health be made by the commonwealth- by the educated, practiced judgment of my fellow citizens and peers.
But this decision relates to collected, pooled tax money that is used to pay for and support our collective, pooled health- and it's being proposed without the kind of large-scale, in-depth, educated national conversation that I feel is crucial to maintaining a healthy nation.
Maybe it's true. Maybe abstinence is the best method of birth control, taking into account physical, emotional, and spiritual health of all concerned. Then in that case, isn't the conversation about why everyone- everyone- should be practicing abstinence if they're not up for supporting and raising (well) the child of any act of intercourse that leads to conception?
I can never quite get my thoughts to go in a straight enough line to have this all make sense in a post- but I do feel it's a hugely important subject, one that gets a lot of inflammatory energy thrown at it but not much deep, reasoned, compassionate thought.
Which, now, I'm going to go and try to give it more of, while I do my coursework for Native American Studies (in which I finally nail down the shameful role of some Quakers in the destruction of Native American family life through boarding schools, and find my shame is not deep enough, yet, to help me formulate some action that can, in some way, help me try to put things right at this late hour).
Blessings on your heads.
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this is harder than it looks.
it would be so easy if there weren't so much i want to talk about, and if my brain would stay awake long enough to actually help me make coherent posts.
1) tammy212 has better posts than I about the Health and Human Services "conscience rule". Deadline for HHS to decide is 10 days away now; Planned Parenthood Petition is here.
2) I love it when one sentence in a book opens the world tenfold for me. From The Wild Swan (my find from San Francisco last week) these sentences- just a bit of background information setting up Andersen's first round of travels as an adult: The Germany of independent states through which Andersen passed on his first visit was to be transformed within his lifetime. The Holy Roman Empire with its three hundred and ninety-six principalities, ecclesiastical states and free towns had been completely reorganized by Napoleon in 1806. After his defeat it was found impossible to restore the old order[...]
Which both reinforces that even in the known and incomplete history of the North American continent (about which, between Native American studies and Chicano/Latino Cinema, I am being given new points of view) there are orders and orders which came and went before Europe came; some of which is recorded, still, in the oral histories of the people still surviving and some, did we have eyes to see, in the geography and ecology of the continent itself.
3) I bought Miss Sarajevo. For a lot of reasons- because I have a good friend who is becoming a director of documentaries. Because people I admire and respect are involved in bringing his bookFools Rush In to the screen.
A lot of things about this film have made deep impressions on me, but the one that I'll mention here is the sight of the Bosnian National Library burning after being bombed, and Bill saying that '...with it burned basically all the history of Bosnia because Bosnia is a country with a lot of history written by monks and and clerics and whatnot and it pretty much is gone and that's a problem today because now you have a country with no real written history which can lead problems because it allows people to make up their own history and that is a problem in Bosnia today.' (quoted from the DVD.)
4) There are all kinds of ways history rewrites itself. Sometimes it's because one person pulls together threads and odds and ends of impressions and sees the pattern formerly woven that has been hidden from view by misdirection, by forgetting, by not-wanting-to-know.
My uncle, my father's oldest brother, was a bomber pilot in World War 2. I met him once. Over the years, in scraps of information from my father, I learned my uncle been shot down and captured at some point, came home very ill, and died young of cirrhosis caused both by starvation while he was a prisoner of war and partly by his drinking after he got home.
What I've put together since is this: he bombed Heroya, Hamburg, Paris, in 1943. He was shot down in France. He was held in one of the concentration camps, I don't know which one. I've walked in places that are changed forever because, before I was born, my father's older brother was dropping bombs on them.
I don't know what to do with that, really, or what it means, except that just as these two classes this term are giving me opportunities to re-view and re-learn, more globally, the smattering of history I've had in the past, so too this more personal connection to place, people, and history gives me opportunity to appreciate, to not take so much for granted, everything I have in my life.
Including my right to consider my body my own: not pre-or-post-pregnant, not a tool of the state or church or a man, but mine. I remember before Roe vs. Wade, before Planned Parenthood; I remember the thalidomide scandal and the deep shame that a man in our Friends Meeting, a physician who had prescribed thalidomide to mothers, felt as the facts came out, as he confronted what it meant to have been an unknowing part of that, and as he worked out how he, as a doctor, had to change his relationship to 'who owns the woman's body'.
This was in the 1950's. It was shocking and progressive and unusual that he spoke so, but I didn't know that- I thought it was part of some larger national conversation about how to be healthier, more intelligent, more compassionate, less insane.
And so here endeth PETDM # 14- with my (rambling, incoherent) plea to look again at what is being done in your name. I understand about conscience, I do- I could not give lethal injection. I have argued with surgeons about keeping some patients alive and allowing others to die. I recognize that there is indeed something precious and sacred about new life, and I'm not in a position to absolutely, categorically state when that life begins.
But taking away from the woman carrying the baby the right to determine her own health- that bothers me. Not developing the national conversation about the obligation of men to prevent unwanted pregnancy, to support the health and safety of communities, of mothers, of daughters- that bothers me.
So please. Go. Read. Take a stand, and stand behind it. You never know when, with the swipe of a pen or the pressing of a button, your life and all the lives you know are changed, irrevocably, and all you have left is how you've lived up until this moment.
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am looking for a torrent of, or hoping someone on my FL has this and can rip/share it with me.
A Very English Genius.
narrated by Jack Davenport
( Read more... )
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It's Spring in San Francisco, sunny and warm -wait a few weeks and the Summer chilly fog will be around all day- but today my son's roommate and I are going to Chinatown today, and tomorrow the Asian Art Museum. He's Chinese-Canadian, traveled a lot in Asia/Southeast Asia, and he's offered to give me an 'insider's' tour. (poetic_self, xchasingtailsx- like you did for me, remember?].
I will pick up a variety of postcards to send on. Not promising hundreds [a few things are already promised; you know who you are :)], but if you want one, comment, and how ever many I have, I'll send you one.
Be well, do well, feel well, live well.
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