We get email....

This arrived from LRH on the left coast yesterday, and in honor of Memorial Day, 2010, I'm posting it here:

To Naomi's friends across the country,

Many of you have already made your statements about ending the wars, so why forward this? Ron and I think much about the future for our 4 grandchildren: Memorial Day needs a NO WAR effort. Thanks

The occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan are making us poor. Right now, America spends $159 billion on contingency operations for the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. That’s enough money to eliminate taxes for everyone who makes under $35,000 a year, while cutting the deficit.

Progressive hero, Congressman Alan Grayson, is once again leading the charge to put an end to this disastrous spending. I signed the petition to support 'The War is Making You Poor' Act, an act that would cut waste, fraud and abuse in the disastrous occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Join me and sign the petition at www.TheWarIsMakingYouPoor.com

Join me in signing it, too.  Happy Memorial Day Weekend, everyone--yes, you, too, Mr. President.  You took office in January and (a) inherited a mess and a half from your predecessors and (b) had the pleasure of being in charge when some feckless oilmen befouled the Gulf of Mexico--and ultimately the planet--with their greed and misjudgments.  About now, you must feel your election was a ticket to hell. Hang in there and enjoy Chicago, that toddlin' town!!! It'd be nice if you, Michelle, Malia, and Shasha could find time to go out to Wishbone and have some corn pancakes!

Uplifting Sight!

This is something I have never even heard of or seen before. This woman lives in a Hummingbird fly zone. As they migrated, about 20 of them were in her yard. She took the little red dish, filled it with sugar water and this is the result.

The woman is Abagail Alfano of Pine, Louisiana - she had been studying them daily and one morning put the cup from the feeder (with water in it) into her hand. Since they had gotten used to her standing by the feeder they came over to her hand.

She says in touching they are as light as a feather. Abagail also said if she had known her husband was taking pictures she would have put on makeup!!

--You look very pretty, Abigail...don't need help from the factory, as we say where I come from. :)

These pictures are amazing. I hope you'll send these pictures to your Friends and family.

Robert Schumann's Widmung--one of my favorite liede

One thing I used to love, back when I was fully hearing, was singing in a choir.  My own voice was neither strong nor beautiful, but when blended with others', it grew powerful and nourished my spirit.  This is a song we sang for the spring concert when I was at St. Benedict's.  "Du meine Seele, du mein Herz"--you are my soul, you are my heart....so wonderful.  The young singer with the amazing voice is Lena Belkina, a native of Tashkent. She was not yet 21 years old in this video.
 
Friedrich Ruckert wrote the original German love poem:

Du meine Seele, du mein herz, 
Du meine Wonne, o du mein Schmerz, 
Du meine Welt, in der ich lebe, 
Mein Himmel du, darein ich schwebe, 
O du mein Grab, in das hinab 
Ich ewig meinen Kummer gab. 

Du bist die Ruh, du bist der Frieden, 
Du bist der Himmel mir beschieden. 
Daß du mich liebst, macht mich mir wert, 
Dein Blick hat mich vor mir verklärt, 
Du hebst mich liebend über mich, 
Mein guter Geist, mein beßres Ich!  

Here is an English translation by iGoogle mixed with a few 

phrases from the formal translations by Bertram Kottmann

and Brian Cole:

Thou my soul, you my heart,

You my bliss, you my pain,

You are my world that I discover

My heaven you, in which I hover,

You my grave, in which I gave

My eternal sorrow.

You are rest, you are peace.

You are summoned from the sky to me.

That you love me makes me worthy

Your gaze has transfigured me.

You raise me lovingly above myself,

My good spirit, my better self. 

A mother speaks.....

Peggy sent this to me last weekend, and I haven't had time to post it until today.  Here's the link to the article in case you want to pass it on yourself:  http://www.andrewtobias.com/newcolumns/000504.html
 And congratulations to Sharon Underwood, the mother and author of the following letter.  It's especially sad to know homophobia thrives among persons who consider themselves authorities on morality and who pass their ignorant, misguided attitudes on to their children, who then make life miserable for those they either know as, or consider, gay.

Sunday, April 30, 2000
By SHARON UNDERWOOD
For the Valley News (White River Junction, VT)

Many letters have been sent to the Valley News concerning the homosexual menace in Vermont. I am the mother of a gay son and I've taken enough from you good people.
I'm tired of your foolish rhetoric about the "homosexual agenda" and your allegations that accepting homosexuality is the same thing as advocating sex with children. You are cruel and ignorant. You have been robbing me of the joys of motherhood ever since my children were tiny.
My firstborn son started suffering at the hands of the moral little thugs from your moral, upright families from the time he was in the first grade. He was physically and verbally abused from first grade straight through high school because he was perceived to be gay.
He never professed to be gay or had any association with anything gay, but he had the misfortune not to walk or have gestures like the other boys. He was called "fag" incessantly, starting when he was 6.
In high school, while your children were doing what kids that age should be doing, mine labored over a suicide note, drafting and redrafting it to be sure his family knew how much he loved them. My sobbing 17-year-old tore the heart out of me as he choked out that he just couldn't bear to continue living any longer, that he didn't want to be gay and that he couldn't face a life without dignity.
You have the audacity to talk about protecting families and children from the homosexual menace, while you yourselves tear apart families and drive children to despair. I don't know why my son is gay, but I do know that God didn't put him, and millions like him, on this Earth to give you someone to abuse. God gave you brains so that you could think, and it's about time you started doing that.
At the core of all your misguided beliefs is the belief that this could never happen to you, that there is some kind of subculture out there that people have chosen to join. The fact is that if it can happen to my family, it can happen to yours, and you won't get to choose. Whether it is genetic or whether something occurs during a critical time of fetal development, I don't know. I can only tell you with an absolute certainty that it is inborn.
If you want to tout your own morality, you'd best come up with something more substantive than your heterosexuality. You did nothing to earn it; it was given to you. If you disagree, I would be interested in hearing your story, because my own heterosexuality was a blessing I received with no effort whatsoever on my part. It is so woven into the very soul of me that nothing could ever change it. For those of you who reduce sexual orientation to a simple choice, a character issue, a bad habit or something that can be changed by a 10-step program, I'm puzzled. Are you saying that your own sexual orientation is nothing more than something you have chosen, that you could change it at will? If that's not the case, then why would you suggest that someone else can?
A popular theme in your letters is that Vermont has been infiltrated by outsiders. Both sides of my family have lived in Vermont for generations. I am heart and soul a Vermonter, so I'll thank you to stop saying that you are speaking for "true Vermonters."
You invoke the memory of the brave people who have fought on the battlefield for this great country, saying that they didn't give their lives so that the "homosexual agenda" could tear down the principles they died defending. My 83-year-old father fought in some of the most horrific battles of World War II, was wounded and awarded the Purple Heart.
He shakes his head in sadness at the life his grandson has had to live. He says he fought alongside homosexuals in those battles, that they did their part and bothered no one. One of his best friends in the service was gay, and he never knew it until the end, and when he did find out, it mattered not at all. That wasn't the measure of the man.
You religious folk just can't bear the thought that as my son emerges from the hell that was his childhood he might like to find a lifelong companion and have a measure of happiness. It offends your sensibilities that he should request the right to visit that companion in the hospital, to make medical decisions for him or to benefit from tax laws governing inheritance.
How dare he? you say. These outrageous requests would threaten the very existence of your family, would undermine the sanctity of marriage.
You use religion to abdicate your responsibility to be thinking human beings. There are vast numbers of religious people who find your attitudes repugnant. God is not for the privileged majority, and God knows my son has committed no sin.
The deep-thinking author of a letter to the April 12 Valley News who lectures about homosexual sin and tells us about "those of us who have been blessed with the benefits of a religious upbringing" asks: "What ever happened to the idea of striving . . . to be better human beings than we are?"
Indeed, sir, what ever happened to that?

I [Andrew Tobias, author] had the chance to speak with [Sharon Tobias] yesterday. Her son is doing fine now, the first in his family to graduate from college.


If you have friends who think Jesus would have been a Republican -- on the side of billionaire Pat Robertson, et al., in opposing Hate Crimes Legislation, opposing the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and, yes, opposing Vermont's extension of economic benefits to same-sex couples -- please feel free to forward this column to as many of them as you like. Can't you just see it? Jesus arm-in-arm with the NRA trying to maintain the gun-show loophole? Stumping the Holy Land in favor of a massive tax cut for the rich, while opposing a hike in the minimum wage? Somehow, I think not.

Syttende Mai, Stoughton, Wisconsin

Syttende Mai, Stoughton, Wisconsin

Mors dag, Rehoboth Beach, 2010

You can't vote because you have car pool??? or it's raining? or you have to pick up the dog from the vet?

This email with photos arrived today from A Little Red Hen out there on the left coast.  She is not the author, but she passed it along to me.  Sad to say, this is something I know very little about.  1920 was the year before my parents were married.  It's not so long ago.

This is the story of our Mothers and Grandmothers who lived only 90 years ago.
 
Remember, it was not until 1920
that women were granted the right to go to the polls and vote.

The women were innocent and defenseless, but they were jailed
nonetheless for picketing the White House, carrying signs asking
for the vote.














And by the end of the night, they were barely alive.
Forty prison guards wielding clubs and their warden's blessing
went on a rampage against the 33 women wrongly convicted of
'obstructing sidewalk traffic.'



















(Lucy Burns)
They beat Lucy Burns, chained her hands to the cell bars above
her head and left her hanging for the night, bleeding and gasping
for air.

(Dora Lewis)
They hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed her
head against an iron bed and knocked her out cold. Her cellmate,
Alice Cosu, thought Lewis was dead and suffered a heart attack.
Additional affidavits describe the guards grabbing, dragging,
beating, choking, slamming, pinching, twisting and kicking the women.

Thus unfolded the 'Night of Terror' on Nov. 15, 1917,
when the warden at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia ordered his
guards to teach a lesson to the suffragists imprisoned there because
they dared to picket Woodrow Wilson's White House for the right
to vote.
For weeks, the women's only water came from an open pail. Their
food--all of it colorless slop--was infested with worms.

(Alice Paul)
When one of the leaders, Alice Paul, embarked on a hunger strike, they tied her to a chair, forced a tube down her throat and poured liquid into her until she vomited. She was tortured like this for weeks
until word was smuggled out to the press.

So, refresh my memory. Some women won't vote this year 
because--why, exactly? We have carpool duties? We have to get to work?
Our vote doesn't matter? It's raining?

(Mrs. Pauline Adams in the prison garb she wore while serving a sixty-day sentence.)

Last week, I went to a sparsely attended screening of HBO's 2004
movie 'Iron Jawed Angels.' It is a graphic depiction of the battle
these women waged so that I could pull the curtain at the polling
booth and have my say. I am ashamed to say I needed the reminder.

(Miss Edith Ainge, of Jamestown, New York)

All these years later, voter registration is still my passion. But the
actual act of voting had become less personal for me, more rote.
Frankly, voting often felt more like an obligation than a privilege.
Sometimes it was inconvenient.

(Berthe Arnold, CSU graduate)

My friend Wendy, who is my age and studied women's history,
saw the HBO movie, too. When she stopped by my desk to talk
about it, she looked angry. She was--with herself. 'One thought
kept coming back to me as I watched that movie,' she said.
'What would those women think of the way I use, or don't use,
my right to vote? All of us take it for granted now, not just
younger women, but those of us who did seek to learn.' The
right to vote, she said, had become valuable to her 'all over again.'


HBO released the movie on video and DVD . I wish all history,
social studies and government teachers would include the movie in
their curriculum I want it shown on Bunco night, too, and anywhere
else women gather. I realize this isn't our usual idea of socializing,
but we are not voting in the numbers that we should be, and I think
a little shock therapy is in order.

 











(Conferring over ratification [of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution] at [National Woman's Party] headquarters, Jackson Pl[ace] [Washington, D.C.]. L-R Mrs. Lawrence Lewis, Mrs. Abby Scott Baker, Anita Pollitzer, Alice Paul, Florence Boeckel, Mabel Vernon (standing, right))

It is jarring to watch Woodrow Wilson and his cronies try to persuade a psychiatrist to declare Alice Paul insane so that she could be permanently institutionalized. And it is inspiring to watch the doctor refuse. Alice Paul was strong, he said, and brave. That didn't make her crazy.


The doctor admonished the men: 'Courage in women is often mistaken for insanity.'

Please, if you are so inclined, pass this on to all the women you know.


We need to get out and vote and use this right that was fought so
hard for by these very courageous women. Whether you vote democratic, republican or independent party - remember to vote.

(Helena Hill Weed, Norwalk, Conn. Serving 3 day sentence in D.C. prison for carrying banner, 'Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.')


Register to vote…

XE update: This movie is available on DVD, and you can get it from Amazon or Netflix. 

"I'm a U.S. Citizen Because my Ancestors were Immigrants"

Look up the Facebook group by the above name (I'm a U.S. Citizen Because my Ancestors were Immigrants). It's the jolliest site around. We're ALL immigrants. Where does the governor of Arizona get off? Most of the immigrants in Arizona are white people.

Interesting Bloggers

Please welcome Duchess Omnium and also Margaret and Helen. The Duchess stopped by XE last week, and I just spent an hour re-reading M&H. DO lives on a houseboat in the UK--wotta life, huh?--and M&H live in *cough* Texas. I've missed Molly Ivins, but M&H have her feisty, unabashed way of expressing their displeasure with Republicans and other vacuities.

Also, Whoopee, another UK blogger and one of my favorite writers, had a wonderful post recently about her new baby, Oscar, who arrived weighing almost 10 lbs at birth and created wreckage on the trip. I was tempted to tell her that my sister-in-law's first baby weighed about that much, and they had to break his collar bone to get him out. Anyway, here's the post.