going forward

I have reactivated my brookgarden.net domain and future posts will be to the brookgarden blog http://brookgarden.net/blog/

I Choose

to believe the man for whom I voted last November. 

Over the past month I have called and sent emails to President Obama asking him to withdraw our troops from Afghanistan. Tonight he announced that he will send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan.  Am I happy – hell no!  But because of one line in his speech  

If I did not think that the security of the United States and the safety of the American people were at stake in Afghanistan, I would gladly order every single one of our troops home tomorrow. 

I will support his decision – for now.

 

See the full text of President Obama’s speech here: http://bit.ly/6N9b7A

It’s Not About

It’s not about power or money

It’s not about him or her or them or us

It’s not about yesterday or tomorrow

It’s about how you and I treat each other today

Embrace the Roller Coaster

Excerpted from Civic Duty by Peter Suderman 18 Aug 2009 09:50 pm
I don’t think it’s possible to have a politically involved citizenry and avoid the sort of nuttiness we’ve seen. This — the chaos and absurdity of competing interests fighting for what they want and believe — is what politics looks like. 
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/08/civic-duty.html

I feel this way myself some days, but then I remember Grandma in the film Parenthood:

You know, when I was nineteen, Grandpa took me on a roller coaster… Up, down, up, down. Oh, what a ride! … I always wanted to go again. You know, it was just so interesting to me that a ride could make me so frightened, so scared, so sick, so excited, and so thrilled all together! Some didn’t like it. They went on the merry-go-round. That just goes around. Nothing. I like the roller coaster. You get more out of it.
http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0155310/quotes

She died

a little more each day until there was nothing left but an unmarked grave where her soul had been

Chrysalis

clueless to ruthless in 12 not-so-easy steps

 

 

She said

as the Queen, circumventing reality, “I told you they wouldn’t know.”

Considering further, “Not that it matters. We’re all dead tomorrow.”

 

 

Distractions

from our blood flowing and toenails growing

Jazz

and the symmetry of the wizard

How Far Have We Come?

I turned on msnbc last night (7/16/09) and caught President Obama’s entire speech live at the NAACP 100th Anniversary celebration.   Wow!   Once again I am reminded how far we have come as a nation since 1950, when I was born.   Growing up in Phoenix, Arizona I went to school with other whites and with Mexican Americans but no African Americans, who had their own school (Percy Julian) in our district.   In fourth grade (1960) I did a report on slavery.   I can’t remember if we all had the same assignment, but after reading about the Middle Passage, I was forever changed.

Later, watching Rachel Maddow and screaming at Pat Buchanan’s assault on Sonia Sotomayor specifically and on affirmative action in general, it was as if I had been transported back forty years.  In the early 1970′s I worked for an ice cream manufacturing company in Phoenix whose white owners had some oddly prejudiced hiring practices:   All employees were white with the exception of our bookkeeper, who was Mexican American.  The owners believed that if you had more than one Mexican “they would talk all the time” .   Women were not employed in the manufacturing plant because of their menstrual cycles, and blacks were not hired at all.

In contrast, during a discussion of this week’s confirmation hearings tonight on Hardball, Lawrence O’Donnell (sitting in for Chris Matthews) asked former Representative John Danforth this question,  

Senator, do you see this truth that you’re speaking of, that we’re done with the white-male Supreme Court, we’re obviously going to have African Americans, we’re going to have Latinos and Latinas now and women, do you see that as a political inevitability and just a political fact or is there also an argument to be made for the possibly synergistic flares of intelligence you get by having people from different backgrounds in a room together who are highly intellectual and highly education discussing these subjects from those perspectives?

synergistic flares of intelligence you get by having people from different backgrounds in a room together – for me this is the legacy of Affirmative Action.

8:22 p.m.  just announced on msnbc  — Walter Cronkite is dead