Goodbye 2020, It's Been Real.

 In 2020 we saw the theatre of a mock impeachment for a sitting president, we witnessed a president downplay a virus and berate scientists who warned that a pandemic was ensuing, and then we watched in horror as Covid-19 put a stranglehold on NYC. And still our president did little other than pontificate and bluster and make excuses and hand out false promises. But we felt relatively safe in rural America. We weren’t New York City. It wouldn’t touch us. There’s no way the virus would move in on the rest of America in the same way as it did in New York City where bodies were stored in refrigerated trucks because the morgues were full.  Except it did touch us with its rotting death fingertip and now almost 350,000 Americans are dead.

 In my little rural Georgia county of 12,838, we rank as the 59^th worst county in the nation out of a total of 3,143 counties to be hit by Covid-19 cases. In the United States 98% of the counties are faring better at containing Covid-19 than my county is. Every time I walk into a local store and see people unmasked I have to stop myself from screaming at them. Three weeks ago I went into a local popular butcher shop and as I got to the cash register there was a cashier with her mask under her chin. I asked that she please put her mask on because I was on my way to pick up my mom from breast cancer surgery. I shouldn’t have felt that I even had to explain that, but I did anyway. She looked at me as if I had just asked her to show me her tits. She pulled her mask up over her mouth, not her nose, mind you. Before I even finished checking out, she had pulled the mask back down under her chin. I got to my car and phoned the manager and complained, all the while feeling that I was somehow in the wrong. Of course, nothing will be done to the cashier and I will have to make a decision if I want to risk exposure by going back into that place of business, but there are several restaurants and stores in my town that I’ve had to make that same choice about because they refuse to follow any sort of Georgia Dept of Health Guidelines. (Private email me and I will let you know the names of these businesses). My experience at the butcher shop is just one example why my region of Georgia has no ICU beds left. And why 2020 sucks donkey balls.

This year has been defined by listening to a president deny the danger of a new virus as thousands of people kept coming down with Covid and thousands died, Tiger King binge sessions (WTF was that???), making sure I have my mask whenever I leave the house, forgoing travel to visit my sons, making sure my can of Lysol and hand sanitizer is in my car at all times, and not getting together with friends or family for holidays.  On a grander scale I have watched in horror as the social fabric has been ripped by our president and white supremacist groups like the Proud Boy, a president who denies the democratic election process, economic destruction for too many middle class American families (the super wealthy are doing just fine, thankyouverymuch), and an ugly division among Americans not seen since the Civil War.  History will judge this time and find us lacking in common sense and compassion. 2020 will be remembered as one long Purge movie come to life.  Through a dark lens our perplexed ancestors will study us, much the same as I’ve tried to study how the world could have stood by as Hilter murdered 6 million Jews with impunity.

 I’m holding on to the promise of 2021. I’m holding on for a president who can effectively run our infrastructure to get the vaccine into the arms of Americans so we can conquer this virus, for a re-formation of a National Pandemic Unit so we can be better prepared when another novel virus happens again (and it will), for a serious evaluation of how many Americans are merely living paycheck-to-paycheck in the richest nation on earth, a raise in the minimum wage and increased worker protections, a complete overhaul of our for-profit health care system into a system where every American will have access to healthcare, water and air protections so my great-grandchildren will have a clean planet, climate change action on a national level and a budget that stands behind the exploration of alternate power sources (sorry, big oil, your time is up), and lastly for people to reach inside themselves to try and find that part where compassion resides.

 2021, I will not jinx you by saying that things can’t get worse than 2020, because I know that they can. I only hope, 2021, that you will be more forgiving of our human fragilities and defects and that you give us the time and space to try and set things right.

A Letter to Trump Supporters After the AP called the election for Biden

 Trump supporters, please. Let me put your mind at ease about a Biden/Harris presidency.

 You don't make $400,000 a year so your taxes won't increase.

 Oil prices might go up a bit, but that money will be invested in renewable resources so maybe my grandchildren will still have planet to live on when they're my age.

 There isn’t going to be a flood of immigrants coming to take your jobs (immigrants do everything from picking your strawberries to operating on your duodenal ulcers- our strength has ALWAYS been our immigrants), but the Dreamers who have contributed so much to this country will finally be able to say, “I’m a United States citizen!!"

 Education will not suffer. In fact, more monies will be appropriated for public education and hopefully that money will be divided fairly so that majority minority Title I schools can have actual working a/c, new text books, band equipment, computer technology, and after school programs.

And your health insurance? Please. If you're paying $600.00 or more a month for private health insurance, how is paying the same amount through an exchange so EVERYONE can have health care going to hurt you? It won’t, and costs and will go down. The only ones that universal healthcare will hurt is YOUR private health insurance company and MY private health insurance company who are helping to drive up costs as I type this. They're the ones lobbying HARD against a healthcare exchange for all. They know their profits will shrink. Healthcare should NEVER be tied to profits.

 And then there’s the word “Socialism.” Settle down, it won’t bite you. You’re so scared of the boogeyman word "socialism" that you fail to look at the way socialism impacts your daily life for the better: 

 Public roads and highways

Law enforcement

Public libraries

Public schools

Social security

Medicare

Earned Income Tax Credit

Section 8 Housing

Housing for Persons with Disabilities (HUD)

Worker protection laws, including child labor laws

Fire departments

Pell Grants

Public water

Job Corps

Family Planning

Legal Aid Services

Headstart

The electricity that comes into rural homes

The Hoover Dam

National Parks

The military

Garbage pickup

Public transportation

 So, sniff up your tears and calm the fuck down. You’re going to be okay. I’m going to be okay.  But you know who will throw a temper tantrum? The uber wealthy in this country (like Zuckerberg, Bezos, the Walmart family, and 50 Cent), that for some insane reason you keep defending.  The tax increase is not going to hurt them except they might not be able to buy a fifth extra mansion or another yacht. Their turn is over. They've reaped disproportionate profits while the lower and middle class have lost substantial ground. It's time that the lower class and the middle class - the backbone of this country -have policies enacted to help THEM. 

 And that science stuff? It’s real. I don’t care if you read some Facebook post about how a virus was made in a lab and unleashed upon an unsuspecting world (it wasn’t)  or watched a YouTube made by some dubiously educated doctor saying masks cause illness (they don’t).  I’M listening to the doctors who have spent their lives furthering their education and who have dedicated years to gaining knowledge through actual research: doctors who have published in prestigious medical journals and have won numerous awards in their fields, doctors who have worked in their fields, who have started at point A to get to Point R and not worked backwards from Point R to prove Point A (because that’s not how science works). 

Oh, yeah, and Climate Change? That shit is real too and human actions have sped it up exponentially.

 Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon who I referred to earlier, saw his wealth rise by $48 BILLION dollars during the pandemic, a sum that is unfathomable to most people. Meanwhile in a Center for Budget and Policy Priorities report, that was updated on November 2, 2020, it was found that due to Covid-19, 1 in 7 adults with children lacked sufficient food in the last seven days. Nearly 1 in 6 renters are not caught up on their rent and are risking homelessness. This is the greatest nation on earth?

 Meanwhile, the virus continues to ravage not only our economy but our citizens and our country. The virus spreads unchecked under a current president who has decided to effectively ignore the virus. Biden won’t ignore it.  His virus task force (who by the way believes in science) will hit the ground running on day one.

 The rich are growing vastly richer and average Americans are sliding into poverty at dizzying rates. The virus is running unchecked. Unemployment is mounting. The disparities in income have become a huge chasm. We have to start building bridges over that chasm or we will collapse into that oblivion.

Joe can start the bridge building process. WE can start that process, but it’s going to take everyone being informed about what is really going on. Read books. For God’s sake, just read some freaking books.

 I recommend the following list as a jumping off point:

 Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich

 The Working Poor: Invisible in America by David K. Shipler,

 The American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take it Back by Elisabeth Rosenthal

 The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America’s Broken Education System and How to Fix It by Natalie Wexler

 Hand to Mouth; Living in Bootstrap America by Linda Tirado

 White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin Diangelo

 The Warmth of Other Suns:  The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson

Dark Money by Jan Mayer

With Biden as president, you won't be subjected to late night rage tweeting, watching a president suck up to dictators, sitting by as a president makes millions of personal dollars off taxpayers, hearing a president refer to people with childish schoolyard nicknames, or being slammed with headlines where a president has blasted an allied foreign head of state out of pettiness. 

The wealthy will pay their fair share, minimum wage increases will mean you don't have to scrape to buy food or get a new pair of glasses, and renewable energy sources will mean JOBS!  Our national forests and parks and wildlife, the shining diamonds of our country, will again be protected.

 So, how's that looking for you? 

Turn off Fox News and OAN and start reading/listening to award winning journalism like Associated Press and Reuters. Facebook memes aren't news. Twitter isn't news. Learn to practice discernment. Learn to shift the bullshit from the truth, even if you don't like the truth. What’s the old saying? The truth shall set you free. However, you must first be willing to look at the truth and not flinch. Do you have the courage to do that?

I’m betting on America. Are you? 

We're still here, baby!!

 

 

Why I Vote. Tuesday, Nov 3 , 2020 1:56 p.m

 

One June 10, 1963, President John F. Kennedy signed into law The Equal Pay Act of 1963. I was almost five months old.

 

On August 28, when I was one year and seven months old, The March on Washington occurred with the keynote speaker, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. giving his now famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

 

I was one year and ten months old when President Kennedy was killed in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

 

 I was three years old when in 1965, President Johnson signed The Voting Rights Act that halted efforts to keep minorities from voting. That same year the Supreme Court ruled on Griswold v. Connecticut, that struck down a law restricting access to contraception for married couples.

 

In 1967, when I was five-years-old, President Johnson amended Executive Order 11246, which dealt with affirmative action, to include sex discrimination on the list of prohibited employment discrimination.

 

 On April 4, 1968 Rev Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in Memphis at The Lorraine Hotel.

 

On June 28, 1968 when police tried to arrest gay patrons in New York City at the Stonewall Inn for simply being gay, the patrons rioted for three days.

 

In late summer 1968 I came to Georgia school for first grade while my dad went to Vietnam. I saw school and other social racial segregations for the first time in my life.

 

On November 22, 1971 when I was nine-years-old, the Supreme Court case Reed v. Reed declared sex discrimination a violation of the 14th Amendment.

 

When I was ten-years old in 1972, the senate approved the Equal Rights Amendment and it was sent to the states for ratification (to this day, it has not passed). That same year, the American Psychiatric Association finally agreed to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders.

 

In 1973 the Supreme Court ruled on Roe Vs Wade, giving women, for the first time, the legal right to reproductive choice. I was eleven-years-old.

 

I was a senior in high school on October 14, 1979, when 75,000 people descended on Washington for a National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights.

 

In 1980, the year I graduated high school, Paula Hawkins of Florida, a Republican, became the first woman to be elected to the U.S. Senate without following her husband or father in the job.

When I was nineteen-years-old in 1981, the first woman Supreme Court Justice was confirmed. 

On June 26, 2015, when I was fifty-three years old, the United States Supreme Court ruled same sex marriage legal in all 50 states.

 

In 2017 when I was fifty-five-years-old, thousands of immigrant children, including infants, were separated from their parents by our government. To date, over 500 children have not been reunited with their families.  

 

I was fifty-eight-years-old when George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were murdered by law enforcement officers.

I was fifty-eight-years-old when 231,477 Americans had been reported dead from Covid-19, a virus that our leadership failed to address. 

 

I vote so that we might protect the rights that women, blacks, and the LGBTQ community have fought so hard to obtain.

I vote for all Americans no matter the race, creed, age, sexual orientation, sexual identity, or religion.

I vote so that all Americans will have equal protection under the law.

I vote on the right side of history.

 I vote for unity and not division.

I vote for social justice.

I vote so that all Americans might have healthcare.

I vote so that education is equally funded for every child.

 

I vote Joe Biden because our country will not survive another four years of Donald J. Trump. We are standing on the precipice. This is our moment.

See you on the other side.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Road to Being a Humanist (Or "You're Going to Hell, Lady!")

When I was a little girl my mom and dad taught me this bedtime prayer:

Now I lay me down to sleep

I pray the Lord my soul to keep

If I should die before I wake

I pray the Lord my soul to take.

            Parents for generations have taught their children this prayer, and maybe for some of those children the prayer was a comfort. But for me, the overactive imagination child who created fictional characters in blank notebooks and would kneel over ant mounds for hours and watch the ants as they went about their little ant business, this prayer was disturbing, and perhaps my first hint that organized religion and a belief in an invisible man in the sky might not be for me. “If I should die before I wake”? Wait, hold the prayer. I mean, what the hell? Every night after I fell asleep was a chance that I, through no fault of my own, might never wake up? That blew my little child mind to smithereens. Might be why I have always dreaded going to sleep. Even today, I have to be utterly exhausted to give into sleep.

            Then there was Vacation Bible School, Baptist style, the summer my dad left for Vietnam. I was six-years-old, impressionable, and wanted so much to please the adults and be a good girl, so for a solid week in the summer of 1968, at 9 a.m, I dutifully walked down the road from my grandmother’s house to attend a little white clapboard church where I was indoctrinated by adults, some of who probably had never even finished eighth grade. There were Popsicle stick crosses to glue together and colored macaroni bead necklaces to string interspersed with tales of God drowning people in a great flood, the death of babies if their parents forgot to put a red X over the door, and a burning bush that talked. None of it made any sense to my pragmatic mind, but I was just a kid and all the adults seemed to believe what they were telling me, no matter how preposterous it all sounded, so who was I to question? Then after all the stories and the crafts, we’d sing as loudly as we could:

Jesus loves the little children.

All the children of the world.

Red and yellow, black and white,

they are precious in his sight,

Jesus loves the little children of the world.

That fall I started first grade in deep south rural Georgia and there were no black children anywhere in the entire school. I knew blacks lived in the town because I had seen them. I had also seen black children. On the first day of first grade, I registered that I was awash in nothing but a sea of white faces, but I couldn’t quite put two and two together. I just knew something wasn’t right and I didn’t possess the vocabulary to enable me to express what I was feeling. One day not long after while my mom drove- we were probably going to put flowers on my grandfather’s grave- my grandmother pointed out a run-down red brick building and she informed me the building was where the black kids went to school. My school building was new and crisp and fresh with new text books about Dick and Jane and a grass carpeted playground with all the latest play equipment. The black children's school looked as if it was slowly crumbling along the edges and the playground consisted of a weed-choked, dusty dirt plot with rusty, broken swings and slides. Jesus loves the little children?  I knew something was wrong but I couldn’t put my finger on it. So it got buried like a seed.

           

            We moved the Crete when I was in third grade and we lived downtown for a year. The upstairs Greek lady was very nice to me and would invite me to her apartment for grape preserves. She had a different looking cross in her house hanging on the wall and every time I rode the bus and it passed a church all the Greeks on the bus would cross themselves, and I learned to do it by watching them. I can still do it expertly enough to fool any Greek Orthodox Bishop. I didn’t equate the hand movement with religion; I just thought it was a polite way to say hello to the church as we passed by.

           

            Fast forward to Texas a few years later. Sixth grade. The school bus didn’t come past my house so Mom paid a lady a small weekly sum to take me to and from school in her fifteen passenger van. I wasn’t the only kid on that van, because driving it was how the lady supplemented her retirement income so the van was packed with kids. Some even sat in the aisles on the floor. When we’d get to school the Van Lady wouldn’t let us off the van until we had prayed to Jesus, then every afternoon when she picked us up, we were again led in prayer. Then one day she introduced us kids to a young, long haired, hippy looking man and his equally hippy looking young wife who started telling us kids about “being saved” and how we were living in the last days, and one day soon a rapture was going to happen where all the righteous in God would be caught up in the clouds to return to him before God unleashed a multitude of evils upon the world. They explained that the only way we could return to God was to “be saved” and that entailed saying a prayer in which we asked for forgiveness and invited Jesus into our hearts. Poof! That’s it. Magically we would be transformed and have a one way golden ticket into the clouds for the rapture. I pictured the saved people flying up into the sky while a lot of confused people left on earth watched as the saved floated away like helium balloons.

           

            The poor Jews, Hindus, atheist, all those people who had lived before Jesus or lived in remote parts of the world and were never “saved” would be tossed into a fiery pit of eternal fire and damnation.  Once again, maybe the adults knew what they were talking about and I was just a dumb kid. The Van Lady gave me little Bible tracts to insert in doorways and hand out to my neighbors. The tracts were always cartoons depicting how one evil person, who not only smoked and drank and did drugs, but also fornicated (I wasn’t really sure what that was, but it sounded pretty bad). By the end of the cartoon booklet the evil person knelt to accept Jesus as his/her savior and he/she was  transformed in the blink of an eye into a shiny new person who had Jesus in their heart. And that made Satan pretty angry.

           

            Since my dad was in the military and we moved so often, I was desperate to fit in somewhere and I began to respond to the Van Lady and the Hippy couple and feel a “burning in my bosom” (admittedly a still flat bosom). By the time the Van Lady invited me and some other kids on a weekend retreat with the young hippy couple, I was ecstatic. Why my mother ever let me attend that weekend is beyond me. She didn’t really know those people. Today it would be unthinkable for a parent to allow a child to go off for a weekend with people they barely know. At the retreat we sang songs, sat around a bonfire and roasted hot dogs while the hippy guy talked about Jesus and played guitar, and I got saved. But the doubts lingered and I thought that since I had doubts I just wasn’t being a true believer. It must be my fault. It couldn’t be God’s fault because God was perfect. So I struggled with my child faith and passed out more tracts and even built a fort and tried to convert the neighborhood kids. But no one seemed really interested. After about a year we moved, and since my new house was closer to the school, I could walk. Van Lady and my conversion became a distant memory.

           

            A few months later Mom and Dad decided we’d go to church and they started taking us to a church building that in a previous life had been a fried chicken restaurant. I could almost feel a thin coating of leftover cooked grease lingering in the air and on the pages of the hymnals. Everything was okay until one Sunday about three months later when a woman proceeded to fling herself on the floor in the middle of the service and started babbling nonsense. Mom later told me that the woman was “speaking in tongues.” We never went back.  And that was the end of my limited childhood exposure to religion.

           

            Later, after I grown up and married and had two children, my then husband became interested in the Mormon church and I felt an attraction to their family values, especially since my own marriage was rapidly disintegrating. Maybe they could help me save my marriage. Here, I must digress, because I still have friends who are members of the church. I am not trying to make fun of or undermine their faith. It just didn’t work for me, but I’m glad it works for them. I’m just as skeptical of Baptist, Catholic, or Islamic fables, so don’t feel singled out.

           

            I was baptized into the Mormon church, my ex was baptized, and when my oldest son was eight, he was baptized. The more I learned, the more the old doubts from my childhood roared back to life. Golden plates that were translated in a hat? An angel? Underwear that was supposed to protect me? Secret ceremonies? Different levels of heaven that I could only get into with the help of a husband?  Maybe I just needed more faith. So I became very active in the church, teaching teen classes, and giving my testimony openly, while my then-husband graced the church doors sporadically due to his work hours.  One month after I gave birth to my third baby, I decided to have my tubes tied to prevent any more pregnancies. The patriarch of the church found out and berated me for my decision. That was the first crack. It was my body. Who was this old man to tell me what to do with MY body?

            It slowly fell apart from there over the next three years. I found myself divorced with three children to take care of and a nagging sense of a God who had turned his back on me mostly because I was just a lowly female.  I was angry for years. Desperately angry but I didn’t know who I was angry with. Until one day I decided not to be angry anymore. I started calling myself agnostic because I didn’t have any answers and I knew I didn’t have any answers. But I also knew that other humans, some not as intelligent as me, didn’t have any answers either. From my experience it seemed that most of them were just pretending they had answers. For some reason, my acknowledging this calmed my internal voices a little for a few years.  The final straw came when a Baptist preacher refused to marry me and my now husband in his church. It stung a little but I now thank that preacher for what he did for me. He allowed me to truly question what it was that I believed. Not what the Baptist preacher believed or what the Vacation Bible School lady believed or what the hippy preacher believed or what the Van Lady believed or what the Greek lady believed or what the Mormon patriarch believed, but what I, Teri, believed. It was a process, but one day I woke to find that I didn’t believe in any god with a capital G, and an internal peace washed over me.  One I had been searching for my entire life.

           

            People ask me how I can NOT believe. They are incredulous because my not believing causes them discomfort.  I don’t understand how what I believe should matter to them or even be any of their business. They ask me if my life is empty. They ask me if I’m scared to die. I answer by saying that THIS is what makes life works for ME. My life is full and peaceful.  I receive comfort from kindness, openly questioning, and from continual learning. I’m not scared to die, well, not any more than the next person, because I know that I won’t know that I’m dead, just as I didn’t know that I didn’t exist before I existed. This is the only Merry-Go-Round I’ll ever ride, so I try to squeeze every single drop of wonder and happiness and meaning out of every single rotation before I’m returned to cosmic stardust. I search for beauty in newly bloomed flowers, in cotton wisp white clouds, in bright stars against an ink jet night, in a fire reddened sunset, or the loving touch of another human being. I cry, I rejoice, I hurt, I long, I create, and I live. Every single day I understand more and more how interconnected we all are across time and space. We are each a ripple that contributes either positively or negatively with our thoughts and our actions to the chain that is life itself. We are here to learn and apply what we have learned and that’s about it. If we don’t learn and contribute positively, then we have wasted a precious and rare gift from the unexplainable ever-expanding universe, and that is the only fiery pit of eternal fire and damnation that exists

Signed,

Your Friendly Neighborhood Humanist

           

             

Days of Covid-19. Help Me Out, People

Life in the face of Covid-19.

Well, to be more specific: life of a high risk person in the face of Covid-19. My poor body has fought against autoimmune issues since April 6, 2001. One day I was healthy, the next I wasn’t. I’ve been diagnosed with psoriatic arthritis, Lyme disease, and now doctors think I might actually have Lupus (the hits just keep on coming). My last two tests for Lupus markers were positive, so off I go to a teaching hospital in Augusta, GA soon. My rib cage and sternum feel like I have a small elephant named Louie sleeping on my chest all the time. Louie is not cute. He's a demonic, lazy ass elephant with razor sharp teeth and no sense of humor. 

             

In 2005 I tested positive for TB exposure and went on year long treatments through my local health department. Also that year I was hospitalized for cytomeglovirus, which normally doesn’t make people noticeably ill, but it took me out of commission for three weeks.  In 2013 I was bitten by a tick and came down with a nasty case of Lyme that went undiagnosed for way too long. In the past three years I have battled sinus issues that have not been resolved through surgery and I’ve had surgery for Freiberg’s disease on my right foot. The foot surgery didn’t work out and I sometimes limp like a drunk wounded pirate on a rolling ship, so it looks like I’m headed down the foot surgery road again shortly.

Growing up I easily had three bouts of strep throat almost every single year and was hospitalized for a severe case of double pneumonia when I was fifteen (I missed Black Sabbath over that- something I will never forgive my body for).  I’m not giving you my medical history so you can gloat over what I hope is your own fantastic, wondrous, untarnished health (oh, go ahead- gloat away. I'll wait), but to show that there are reasons that people like me are just a tab bit more concerned about being exposed to Covid-19 than maybe you are. I’m 58 years old and I’m high risk. I don’t relish the idea of getting Covid-19 because I know it won’t go easy on me. A virus like that would spiral into my body and my lungs and proceed to knock the last vestiges of my fragile immune system out of the ballpark. 

 So, if you staying home for a few weeks is going to help people like me, and there are A LOT of people like me, then damn it, stay the hell home. Listen to the medical experts. Do it for your next door neighbor who has heart issues. Do it for your cousin who is taking chemo for cancer. Do it for your child's teacher who has M.S. Do it for the choir director at your church who has rheumatoid arthritis. Do it for the cashier at Walmart who has the beginning stages of COPD. Do it for your best friend who has Type 1 diabetes.

The libs aren’t trying to destroy your churches by asking you not to go to services for a few weeks. Yes, I’ve heard this is part of Satan’s plan, but I assure that Satan has nothing to do with this (he told me he didn't). The libs aren’t trying to dismantle this country by using the virus to do our evil handwork. We aren’t trying to politicize it against a totally incompetent president who didn’t take appropriate measures back in January when he had the opportunity (You know I had to go there, right? I’m pissed). The virus will not discriminate based on social standing, race, religion, or if you prefer Coke over Pepsi. Covid-19 isn’t going to ask your political affiliation before it latches onto you or your grandmother or your beloved uncle who keeps peppermints in his pockets just for the neighborhood kids.

Social distancing, which is what the CDC is asking people to do, is just plain common sense, just like washing your hands is. Social distancing is an effort to try and slow down the spread of the virus. There is no vaccine. There is no treatment. When cities across the nation are closing down bars and restaurants, when Disney takes off the mouse ears, when schools are shuttered, when Canada has bolted its border to the United States, when the stock market is in free fall, when stores like Nike have either cut their hours or locked their doors completely, when the world famous Metropolitan Museum of Art pulls in the welcome mat, when we have absolutely no idea how many people in the U.S might have Covid-19 because there aren’t enough test kits and people are contagious before they even show symptoms, then the situation just might be more than “hyped up” and “fake news.”  

On Monday the number of people in Georgia who were affected by Covid-19 was about 20. A week later that number is over 100. That number is going to keep climbing.

           

Stay home, people. Don’t go to bars. Don’t go on nonessential plane trips. Don’t go to family reunions. Don’t take your kids for play dates. Don’t go visit Aunt Thelma in the nursing home. Don’t go to church. Don’t go spend the day at the local Barnes & Nobles. Don’t go the E.R for your hurt pinkie. These measures are all temporary, but if you decide to ignore the CDC warnings about social distancing, then you just might make it permanent for someone like me or for someone that you dearly love. And I’d really like to hang around for a few more years, and I’m sure your loved ones would too.

P.S Wash your damn hands. 

(map: New York Times)

Brain Souvenirs

Memory is a slippery beast, especially as a person becomes older and stores more memories in the crannied, gray recesses of the brain. It seems that the brain would eventually run out of room for new memories, but no, it just finds new dark hideaways, like maybe behind the recipe for your grandmother’s biscuits or underneath the dusty blanket that covers the time the dog tried to bite you when you were four-years-old. And during our day-to-day life of going to school, working, raising children, paying bills, most of those memories stay locked away, but come night as our body relaxes and inches towards the oblivion of sleep, some stubborn random memories refuse to stay shut away. They want to breathe again and they pop out like Jack-in-the-Boxes without the warning music:

Talking to my latest teen crush when a bird flew over and shit directly on my head.

My high school German teacher insisting he smelled Grape deodorant in the classroom, when in fact it was the reek of marijuana.

Sea urchins with their black spines poking up from the salty Mediterranean sea foam like Neptune’s goth needles.

A flash of Angus Young jumping high on stage in his school boy outfit while he made his guitar scream the rift to Whole Lotta Rosie.

The backyard clothes line undulating like some twisted Escher painting as waves from the earthquake turned the land to jelly.

Searching hopelessly for Tippy whom I’d been told had run away.

The small contractions that singled the birth of my first child and me thinking naively “This isn’t so bad.”

Weeping to a former lover that I did indeed want him back, when I really didn’t.

The crease-faced old woman in Crete giving me the gourd canteen her grandfather had used in the Turkey/ Greek war.

There are the words I wish I had said, words I wish I hadn’t said, people I wish I hadn’t hurt. Shame flames and inches up my body to my cheeks until they are on fire.

An old love who turned into my worst enemy and anger flares.

My dad's lopsided smile, as if he couldn’t decide if he should smile or not.

I take each memory out as they push to the surface and examine them individually before locking them away again, never knowing when they will again reach up from the depths of my brain and assault me. I go to bed every night wondering which ones will crawl forth like a wet mewling newborn demanding to be reborn as I slip towards sleep.

What is the purpose of these memories? Couldn’t I function just as well, or maybe better, if I could somehow purge them? Why can’t I remember important happenings in my life yet recall insignificant ones in detail? The little brown dress with the alphabet across the bodice. The way my mother’s face twisted when she realized I had snipped my hair off unevenly with her scissors. The placement of the candy dish in one childhood home- the candy dish that never held candy. The location of nearly every bathroom in the 30 odd houses I’ve lived in my life. How after the Robin Trower concert everyone sounded like Minnie Mouse and I humiliatingly ran face first into a pole. My phone number in Texas rises from around a dark corner of my nearly asleep brain, as does my ex’s social security number. I can summon up the sharp reek of brown bottled rush (ispbutyl nitrate), see against the backs of my eyelids as the Texas air turns to rippled green silk, hear the low hum and throttle of a teen boyfriend’s motorcycle as it rounds the corner to my street. 

Why in the hell do these memories bubble to the surface just as sleep begins to overtake me, grabbing me so violently that I am shoved away from the line that denotes the conscious world from the unconscious one, only to slip back down again after I examine the memory thoroughly? And where do they go afterwards? Back into the same hiding place, or does my brain construct  new boxes to hold them?  So many boxes of different sizes. Some with secure locks and some that aren’t secure. So many hidden corners and crevices and hidey holes and dark closets.

When my brain’s electrical impulses are interrupted like a t.v signal suddenly switched off, those memories will also cease to exist unless I tell someone about them.

And I just put a few of those memories out into the universe. Now, in a way, they’re yours too.

Empowered Women Empower Women

I spent my 58th birthday today in Washington, D.C at the Women’s March surrounded by thousands of like-minded women and men: cis, gay, straight, trans, black, brown, white, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, atheist, young, and old who descended upon Washington and other U.S cities to uphold women’s reproductive rights, demand immigration reform, and fight for climate change legislation.  I saw sign carrying women in wheelchairs pushed by more able bodied sign carrying women, pig-tailed little girls barely out of toddlerhood carried high on shoulders, men marching with pink hats perched on their heads (my husband one of them!), hijab draped women standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Christian women demanding equality for all, and an umbrella carrying woman who blocked counter protesters with her umbrella who were trying to engage a woman holding a pro choice sign.

            I met two other women who were also celebrating their birthdays and another woman whose almost twelve-year-old daughter was turning thirteen next week. I saw tall, gorgeous drag queens, beaded and feathered Indian women and men, and several women dressed as 1920s era suffragettes. I saw a woman who stood in one spot for three hours dressed as a handmaiden from Handmaid’s Tale and a man wearing a Trump face mask and orange jumpsuit holding a newspaper whose headline screamed “Trump Jailed!” I met women from Virginia, Michigan, Maryland, North Carolina,  Florida, and even fellow Georgians.  Women who had traveled all night to attend the march and who were heading back out tomorrow so they could be at work Monday morning.  Those thousands of strangers left  me feeling renewed. They gave me a feeling of commonality and community toward a greater purpose. They recharged me.  

           

            I attended my first Women’s March in January 2017 in New York City and I remember the pervading sense of loss and sadness that was thick as fog that day. It was a day where women held one another up almost physically while tears were shed, including my own. We were afraid. Afraid of what this new president would do; a newly electorate college chosen president who had no experience in public service in any way, an ego bigger than his newly opened grandiose Trump Hotel, and deep personal financial connections to Putin, one of  most pro-oligarchy fascist dictators of the 21st century.  Three years later our fears, and more, have been realized. Standing in Freedom Plaza today as the march gained momentum, I didn’t feel that sense of loss or fear. No, today I felt strength and justified anger over children in cages, individual reproductive rights of women being slowly chipped away, and a world increasingly being altered by climate change. Today, standing side-by-side with my sisters (and brothers) in arms, I felt hope that all of our hard work of marching, writing letters to our elected representatives, voting, and being vocal the past three years is paying off at long last. We have proven that we won’t be ignored or dismissed, and with that comes a simmering rage over the audacity and criminalizing hijacking of the White House. OUR White House.

           

            This year, women’s voices were clearer and their voices stronger. There was courage in those voices. Martin Luther King’s son, Martin Luther King II and his wife Arndrea Waters King, spoke to a rain soaked crowd reminding everyone that it was 100 years since women have earned the right to vote and that we must be vigilant to protect the rights that we have gained. Ms. King reminded us that there is yet so much work to be done for the next generation of women.  For my granddaughters. And yes, for my grandsons. The Civil Rights movement and Women's Rights have been closely intertwined every since abolitionists first gathered in numbers. Now we stand together in numbers again and there is hope. Hope for a country that will one day respect individual reproductive rights, a country that will address long overdue immigration reform, and a country that will use scientific data and research to effectively tackle an exponentially alarming climate crisis. Yes, there is hope for 2020 and beyond.

           

            Today as snow lazily drifted over Freedom Plaza and the wind chill factor dipped into the 20s, and a woman standing next to me said, “I can’t feel my fingers,” I listened to the Chilean performance group, Las Tesis perform “A Rapist in Your Path” and the raw emotion nearly blind- sided  me.

And it’s not my fault, not where I was, how I was dressed.

And the rapist was you

and the rapist is YOU

It’s the cops

It’s the judges

It’s the system

It’s the president.

About two hours before the march I told my husband something I’d never told anyone except my daughter: when I was nineteen years old I was sexually assaulted at Keesler, AFB hospital during a routine gynecological exam by two white coated men who said they were doctors. I always felt it was my fault because I didn’t stop them. I was nineteen and it was only my third gynecological exam. The men's laughter and their sneering sexual whispered remarks washed over me and turned to deep shame.  I left the hospital that day and in instinctive flight or fight mode, I put the experience into a mental box and locked it away and I didn’t think about it for over thirty-five years until the #MeToo movement hit with full force. It took the collective voices of women across the United States for me to finally open that box. Today I loudly, sang, “And it’s not my fault!” I couldn’t have done that three years ago.

            Now sitting in my hotel room with my fingers finally thawed and my feet sore and aching, I almost relish the physical discomforts that remind me that, yes, I am 58 years old, and I’m happy and energized and hopeful that tomorrow or tomorrow or the day after will see sanity restored to this country, but even if it doesn’t, I can fight and I can march and I can ignore writers’ cramp as long as needed, even to my last breath because this is MY country and every human being deserves dignity and to live without fear and with truth.

The Drums of War

Each new generation has to have its war. A war in which boys who hold fast to the illusion that they are a warriors and only need a war to prove it, march off into battle fields with eyes bright. They come back home at best jaded and disillusioned and at worst shattered, used, broken, and angry. They come back to a country that has yet to take care of the thousands of vets that were broken in past wars. They come back to words such, as “Thank you for your service” and 50% off meals at IHop on Veteran’s Day, but still have to fight the powers-that-be to make an appointment at the V.A when they’re feeling suicidal or when chronic acid reflux caused by the toxic Iraq waste fires burn their esophagus.

            “War, what is it good for (to borrow a phrase that dates back to my childhood)? The answer of course, is nothing. Diplomacy, level heads, and compromise should always be the natural order before war is ever even considered. War should not be fought impulsively amid dreams of grandeur by powerful men in their safe towers and $2000.00 suits who lust over having their names immortalized in history textbooks. War should be reserved for justice, and not revenge and not glory and damn sure not as a diversion.

            The United States is still trying to fly high on the after effects of World War II in which we were the heroes, the saviors of the world who helped demolish two nationalistic and authoritarian governments of Japan and Germany, but that glory is tainted and long burnt to ash by a disastrous war in Vietnam, the Iran Contra Affair, Iraq, Afghanistan, the United States coup in Pakistan, the War on Terror, and other overt and convert inferences in other countries’ autonomies. We have become what we profess to hate. We are war mongers and can’t, as one of my students used to say, “Get over ourselves.” We aren’t “all that” anymore. We are just one cog in a great machine, granted we are a powerful and wealthy cog, but a cog nonetheless in a world made smaller by the development of the internet and transportation. We are part of an interdependent modern world in which each country relies on others for their economics, trade, safety, sciences, and technologies. Yet we still flex our muscles and beat our chests and shout about how great we are while we bomb civilians, line the pockets of the industrial war complex, and turn our backs on the helpless in which just and necessary wars might be fought. In a little over seventy-years we have taken the good guy reputation that we earned on the battlefields of Europe and the waters and islands of the Pacific, and carelessly traded it in for greed, power and political gain. We’ve made fresh enemies the world over and created more and more terrorists with each bombing of a civilian village or assassination of a leader.

            We have tipped over into the pinnacle of lust for power and strength that toppled Rome and the Soviet Union. Rome was never able to recover, and Russia is currently trying to recover, to the determent of the United States, but that’s for another discussion.

            I believe we crossed a line with the assassination of Iran’s General Soleimani on Iraq soil, a nation who was an uneasy ally of ours in the Middle East. Notice I wrote “was” because I don’t think that’s the case any longer. I think we’ve made Iraq our sworn enemy again, as well as Iran, and there’s no going back. We went uninvited into a sovereign nation and assassinated a well known general from another country with whom we canceled a nuclear deal. What is the end game? I don’t think there is one. I think that history will prove that the assassination was the act of an unfettered and ill advised president whose impulsivity got the better of him.

            I remember my dad being deployed to Vietnam when I was a child. I remember how, at the end of his life, Vietnam haunted him. I sent my own son off twice to Iraq and my best friend’s son served multiple nightmare tours of duty in that country at the height of tensions. I comforted my then three-year-old granddaughter when her father was deployed to Afghanistan. I was an Air Force brat until I was nineteen and I thought everyone stood at attention for the National Anthem in movie theaters. When I was a child my friends and I would stop playing hide and seek to stand at attention in the evening as the colors were lowered on base. I bleed red, white and blue; I do not however bleed nationalistic blood because that is the color to degradation and failure.

            While we beat our drums of war and spread the falsehood of patriotism being dependent upon support of war, no matter if it’s an unjust or impulsive war, we are preparing to line up our young men, our not-of age-to-smoke-or-drink young men, and almost physically feed them into the war machine and spew them out at the other end as cannon fodder. The young don’t know any better. They don’t have the experience of living through this same scenario again and again and again. The drums and the pats on the back and the flags and the crispness of new uniforms will mar their vision. It is only when they are entering the last decades of their lives, and history has written the truth across the sands of time, that they will wonder why their government lied to them, and they will either bury that knowledge deep within, because to take it out and gaze upon it in the glaring light will cause confusion and pain, or they will be able to say, as my father did, later in life, “They lied to me.”

            Don’t confuse patriotism with nationalism. Don’t confuse truth with propaganda. Don’t confuse historical lessons with shiny rhetoric. Don’t confuse flag waving with morals. Don’t confuse military strength with common sense. Don’t send our children off to die in order appease a leader’s lust for an historical footnote.  

           Have we learned nothing at all?

(Photo credit: Department of the Air Force)

           

How an Auld Lange Syne Becomes a Love Letter

Twenty years ago, at just about this moment, ten minutes after midnight, I had just breathed a sigh of relief knowing that the Y2K scare had been what I suspected all along: a load of horse manure, and I was wondering what in the hell the recent ex was going to do with all the Ramen and canned meat he insisted we store (hoard) in our walk-in closet. Thankfully, I left him in July, six months before Y2K, and the divorce was final in November of 1999. I guess he ended up having to eat all that potted meat all by his lonesome. I started the new millennium out on a clean slate in a nightclub filled with strangers, feeling more alone than I’d ever felt in my life. I didn’t know anyone in the club. Two minutes after midnight, yelling into my blind date’s ear over the fading notes of Auld Lang Syne, I told that puzzled man to take me home and I never saw him again.

            

         Regrets, I’ve had a few, but in the end too few to mention. Good ole Blue Eyes (Frank Sinatra for all of you born before 1980).   It’s been a helluva ride. In 2000 I started work as a high school teacher, in 2001 I came down with autoimmune issues, (thanks germy kids), 9/11 happened, and my house burned down. Nowhere to go but up, right?

            

          The next five or so years were a blur of trying to raise three kids, work, juggle bills, and trying to get a handle on how my body was betraying me with almost constant mind numbing fatigue and pain. Work, rest, work, rest became my life. I just got out of bed every morning and made it through One.More.Day. I had to. I was a mom.

            

          In 2005 I met My Jim. We went on our first date to a jazz club in Macon on July 9, 2005. Three years later, on December, 21, 2008, I married him in New York City. I knew a good thing when I saw it. The past fourteen years have been a roller coaster of traveling to places I never dreamed I’d go: Midway Atoll, Hawaii, touring every museum in D.C four times, the Met in NYC five times. We’ve sat in the pews of the majestic St. John the Baptist cathedral and celebrated Winter Solstice, we’ve had salt water spray in our faces on ferries to Ellis Island and Ocracoke Island.  Together, My Jim and I have pilgrimaged to probably fifty independent book stores, even driving hundreds of miles out-of-the-way to buy books and cuddle yet another bookstore cat. We’ve been to Broadway shows and Niagara Falls. We’ve sat in smoky jazz clubs in New Orleans and New York City. We’ve eaten in Chinatown, Nathan’s Hot Dogs on Coney Island, and run-down roadside BBQ stands in the Mississippi Delta. We’ve put more miles on a car in one year than most people put on a car in five. We’ve flown, rode on trains, and stood on crowded subways.

             

          We lost our beloved dog Truman, and mourned his death together, and welcomed two new pups who had no homes and gave them love and laps to sit on. We’ve welcomed six grandchildren, and though they aren’t of My Jim’s blood, they are of his heart. My Jim helped me pack when I wanted to go teach overseas, he held me when my dad died an agonizing death,  he told me everything was going to be okay and that it wasn’t my fault when I became too ill to teach any longer, and held me up after I delivered the eulogy at my best friend's funeral two years ago, and I held him up when his only sister recently passed away.

          These are the moments that make up the years, that make up a life. All mixed together like raindrops on a spring day splashing into a sun soaked puddle.

            

          This started out as a look back on the past nineteen years and how I’m looking forward to the next two decades, but it ended up being a love letter to My Jim because he has been a part of almost every day of this millennium that matter the most to me. He's made the past fourteen years worth living and has turned each and every day into a supreme, exciting adventure. He loves me with short or long hair, sick or well, purple hair or blonde, blue jeans or dresses. He loves me with a picket sign in my hand or when I’m writing late into the night on a short story that I have to write NOW.  He loves me when I bring home a new dog and when I ask him to go out late at night because we've run out of dog food for the dogs or chocolate cereal for the grand kids. He loves me when we're both sitting quietly reading or when I'm bouncing around the house talking a mile a minute over a news article that's gotten my dander up. 

And because I was all alone on New Year’s Eve 2000 in a nightclub filled with drunk, happy confetti throwing strangers and was more lonesome than I’d ever been in my life, tonight I cherish 2020 even more.

            

          Here’s to many more decades, love of my life..