How an Ancient Singing Tradition Helps People Cope With Trauma in the Modern World

https://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/how-an-ancient-singing-tradition-helps-people-cope-with-trauma-in-the-modern-world-20170516

She was not amused...a classic from Nick News

Yes, it's THAT Meghan Markle.

An important reminder

Yeah, let's reclaim Jesus from the creeps in the last post

A Former Neo-Nazi Lays Bare the Campus Strategy of White Supremacists

From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

http://tinyurl.com/ybj54ajv

"You know we see you. And we want you to see us. We hold you accountable for what for what you do. We don't agree with that, but we're also not going to attack you and adopt the same tactics that you use."

Community and purpose. We can do it!

He Wrote About Racial Resentment in the White Working Class. Then White Nationalists Proved His Point.

He Wrote About Racial Resentment in the White Working Class. Then White Nationalists Proved His Point. Authors: Mangan, Katherine (AUTHOR) Source: Chronicle of Higher Education. 5/10/2019, Vol. 65 Issue 32, pN.PAG-N.PAG. 1p. Document Type: Article Subject Terms: *RESENTMENT *ATTITUDES of ethnic groups *RACE discrimination *WHITE nationalism Company/Entity: VANDERBILT University Abstract: A professor says the protesters who commandeered his book talk demonstrated the corrosive power of racial resentment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Chronicle of Higher Education is the property of Chronicle of Higher Education and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.) Full Text Word Count: 1338 ISSN: 0009-5982 Accession Number: 136864668 He Wrote About Racial Resentment in the White Working Class. Then White Nationalists Proved His Point A professor says the protesters who commandeered his book talk demonstrated the corrosive power of racial resentment. Jonathan M. Metzl couldn't have asked for a larger megaphone to call attention to his new book on the toxic effects of racial politics. Metzl, a professor of sociology and psychiatry at Vanderbilt University, was speaking at Politics and Prose, a bookstore in Northwest Washington, D.C., over the weekend when a group of self-described "American nationalists" interrupted the event. Marching in with a megaphone and a videographer, the group of about 10 lined up in front of Metzl chanting "this land is our land!" and reciting white-nationalist propaganda. About five minutes later, they marched out chanting "AIM, AIM, AIM" amid loud boos from the audience. So this bullshit just went down today at Politics & Prose. White nationalists disrupting @JonathanMetzl talk on his book Dying of Whiteness. Point made. @PM_Learn pic.twitter.com/nucKlrJ8X2 — Catherine Wigginton (@cewigginton) April 27, 2019 "AIM" was a reference to the American Identity Movement, which took credit for the protest on Twitter. The Southern Poverty Law Center describes the group as a rebranded version of Identity Evropa, a white-supremacist group that has been targeting college campuses for years. (AIM leaders have denied that they're essentially the same group but say they have welcomed many of Identity Evropa's former members into their ranks.) Metzl, who directs Vanderbilt's Center for Medicine, Health, and Society, was at the popular independent bookstore promoting his recently released Dying of Whiteness:How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland (Basic Books). Writing as a physician and social scientist, Metzl describes how, in his view, policies pitched to lower- and middle-class white people as ways to make their lives "great again" end up cutting their lives short. Resistance to health-care reform, cuts in school budgets and social services, and laxer gun laws are among the policies of the Trump era that put Americans at greater risk of sickness and death, he writes. Metzl spoke on Monday with The Chronicle about the unexpected protest, how it plays into the themes of his book, and what it means for campuses facing an emboldened white-nationalist movement. How did your talk at Politics and Prose take such a disturbing detour? It was ironic that, at the moment in the talk before the disruption happened, there was an 80-something-year-old man in the audience who had been one of the people who helped bring my dad to the United States after he and his parents escaped Nazi Austria. He was a member of a host family who had basically put his life on the line for someone he didn't know. I was talking about how there were moments of remarkable bravery, even among people in this room, and how America is always at its best when it's at its most bold and confident and open-armed. While I'm acknowledging this man, all of a sudden there's a commotion in the back of the room and in walk these — I'm pretty sure there were nine men and one woman — with a guy in front with a bullhorn. And they just march in a single-file line and commandeer the front of the room. After this moment of talking about safety and generosity, two seconds later, white nationalists are standing in the front of the room. They had a speech they'd prepared, a little song-and-dance performance. At first, nobody knew what was going on. They were wondering if it was part of the presentation, and some worried these guys might be armed. When the audience figured out what was happening, they started booing. How did you regain control of the discussion and tie it in with the themes of your book? After they left, I said, "Let's process what just happened," and we had a community conversation about what it meant. One of the main points of my book is the toxic effects of racial politics. They certainly proved that point. Ironically, my book agrees with one of the main points they make. The entire book is a catalog of how the lives of working-class white Americans are being made considerably worse. People are dying or living lives of despair and suffering from economic disparities. It's not because of immigrants streaming across the border. It's largely because of the policies put in place by the GOP and the Trump administration, including rejecting health-care reform without offering viable alternatives. People are coming into emergency rooms in much worse shape. The general argument of the book is that the politics that claim to make white America great again end up, for working-class white people, making their lives harder, sicker, and shorter. If they had hung around, maybe we could have had a conversation about that. Do you see any connections with the demonstrations that white-supremacist groups have been staging on college campuses? Bookstores and college campuses are places where people feel safe enough to exchange ideas that might be challenging or hard or uncomfortable. But it was very clear that this wasn't about exchange or openness — it was about intimidation. I don't have any desire to have any dialogue with them, but I do think there are larger conversations about race and whiteness in America that we need to be having much more publicly. If whiteness is what's at stake here, we should be talking about it because it's obviously a trigger point for many issues now. Anyone who spends time on a college campus knows that it's a complete mischaracterization to say that challenging ideas are silenced. They are in fact encouraged. This is a time for college campuses to double down on supporting free speech and freedom of expression. In the past, groups like this have often spread their messages through leaflets dropped in the middle of the night. What does this kind of public confrontation say to you? I think the problem is that they probably feel emboldened. They might not feel the need to hide behind masks in the middle of the night right now. There's always been this kind of hatred in our country, but it hasn't been as out in the open. What impact do you think this confrontation, which blew up on social media, might have on the sale of your book? You joked, after they left, that you should take protesters like these around to all your book talks just to illustrate your point. I heard Politics and Prose sold out of the book. I'm very encouraged by the response I've gotten. I have friends across the political spectrum, and I have conservative friends — we don't see eye to eye on a lot of issues — who reached out to me on social media and said things like "We may not agree politically, but this isn't the America we want." They were making sure I was OK, and I was encouraged by that. Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter@KatherineMangan,or email her atkatherine.mangan@chronicle.com. PHOTO (COLOR): Jonathan Metzl of Vanderbilt U. Jonathan M. Metzl Footnotes 1 Social media 1: " The general argument of the book is that the politics that claim to make white America great again end up, for working-class white people, making their lives harder, sicker, and shorter." Social media 2: "One of the main points of my book is the toxic effects of racial politics. They certainly proved that point." Social media 3: A Vanderbilt professor says the white nationalists who commandeered his book talk might have found common ground with some of his points if they'd stuck around to listen. One more: 'The politics that claim to make white America great again end up, for working-class white people, making their lives harder, sicker, and shorter. If they had hung around, maybe we could have had a conversation about that.' ~~~~~~~~ By Katherine Mangan Reported by Author The Chronicle of Higher Education: (http://chronicle.com) 1-800-728-2803 Copyright of Chronicle of Higher Education is the property of Chronicle of Higher Education and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. Hide Left Column Document Viewing Options: Detailed Record MARC Record HTML Full Text

Thoughts of "home"

Easiest retweet ever -- "Arbeit macht frei" echoes

Truth. Is. So. Hard.

Elections matter

Reposting this on fb got me into hot water with a couple of family members in 2018. I needed to repost this on my blog because fb is no longer a safe space to declare political truth.

Thanks to Dr. Dobson and others too numerous to count, this was actually published on the Washington Post's website!!!

The Debate Rages On...
"Left Behind" Authors: Obama Not Antichrist

All I have to say...

...about James Dobson's critique of Barack Obama has already been reported, far more eloquently than I could ever hope to say, by these folks...

And on the Eighth Day, Dr. Dobson Created Himself

...especially page 4. If you don't have time to read all 8 pages, just read page 4. It tells you all you need to know.

Appalled by Bush. But still willing to vote for Trump. Huh?

I don't agree with everything Frank Schaeffer says in this piece (starting with his title--Dr. [James] Dobson Has Just Handed Obama Victory), but I sure do agree with this paragraph:

If you're one of many Americans who thinks that the war in Iraq was a mistake or believe that the Republicans have run the economy into the ground or think that perhaps the chaos George Bush unleashed in our foreign affairs has something to do with the price of gas at the pump... then you have Dr. Dobson to thank -- personally. No one worked harder to get Bush elected then reelected. Dobson delivered his millions of dupes. But now many of them see through him and like most Americans, are appalled by Bush.

For more, click here.

THANK GOODNESS SOMEBODY ELSE IS THINKING ABOUT THIS!!!

From 2008--the link no longer works but the article is presented below verbatim. It's that important.
Welcome to Gilead, Governor Palin

If you've ever read Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel, "The Handmaid's Tale," you will recall the key role that was played by the women assigned to be the "Aunts." The story revolves around a futuristic American society in which fundamentalist Christians install a gender-based caste system where each woman is assigned a specific societal function. It is a commentary on the dangerous erasing of the line between church and state in the contemporary United States. The merging of religion and government is carried out by a group of older, white male "commanders" whose propaganda demands that citizens be constantly terrorized into submission and obedience. The resulting regime is Atwood's vision of the worst-case scenario: an American police-state theocracy where every woman's identity is reduced to her sexual attributes, and each is assigned to a category based on her physical qualifications. Subtle references to racist philosophy are mixed into the literalist religious rhetoric.

The attractive young women of reproductive age are the "handmaids"; the attractive but infertile middle-age women are the "wives"; the dark-skinned women of any age are domestic servants, and so on. All women are forbidden from reading or writing. The country is renamed the Republic of Gilead, a reference to the biblical homeland of the patriarchs. And the Aunts - who are middle-aged white women of some previous prestige and education - are especially sinister characters. The primary job of the Aunts is to keep the handmaids (the childbearers) subservient. They go about this by convincing the handmaids that they are powerless and can only contribute to society when they fulfill their God-given responsibility to serve the commanders. The Aunts' job, put simply, is to exploit other women by keeping them submissive and telling them that it's for the good of all (and even more insidiously, that in obeying, the handmaids "empower" themselves.) What makes the Aunts so remarkable is their collective failure to realize that they are simply being used by the commanders to keep other women in line, and their willingness - glee, even - at doing so is simultaneously sad and terrifying. So what compels the Aunts to become traitors to both their sex and their country? First, they believe that their contribution to the repressive social order is righteous, and second, they've found that under this rigid system of social control, they have the illusion of a tiny bit of power.

Does any of this sound familiar? It should. Governor and Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin is the Gileadian "Aunt" manifested. Her sudden emergence onto the American political scene, accompanied by a burst of enthusiasm on the part of many American women, is a surreal example of life imitating art. Much of Palin's rhetoric, tactics and personal philosophy seem to be taken directly from the Auntie training manual. By accepting the position on the GOP ticket despite her astonishing lack of qualifications, Palin signaled that she was prepared to be used - on the basis of her sex alone - in exchange for the promise of status and power. Refer to Palin's RNC convention speech, which was mostly a fawning homage to McCain's patriotism and leadership, sprinkled with condescending references to Obama as "our opponent." Although the lines were delivered with Palin's own folksy vernacular and over-enunciation, it was not Palin, but McCain - or more accurately, the GOP elders at whose feet he finds himself on election eve - who wrote the speech and whose voice echoed through the hall that night in St. Paul. Women who find themselves drawn to Palin because they think she epitomizes the classic "woman who has it all" might want to take a closer look. Sarah Palin was picked for the ticket solely because of - not despite - the fact that she is female. By keeping her sequestered from the media, McCain has confirmed he does not have faith in an unscripted Palin's ability to represent the campaign to the world. By going along with it, Palin is telling us that she's perfectly fine with being controlled by her male superiors. And by portraying herself as the candidate of the empowered woman (while simultaneously promoting policy that is openly hostile to the interests of working and middle-class American women), she reveals the sad truth about how little progress we've actually made.

Lest we think that Senator McCain is hesitant to keep pushing this stereotype in the face of abysmal performances by Palin in news interviews, the most recent reports reveal that his campaign intends to hype the expected wedding between Palin's pregnant daughter and her boyfriend, the date of which is apparently being set just prior to the November election - with McCain and Palin sitting in the front row. Is it possible that Sarah Palin is just blissfully un-self-aware, or is it that she so eager for any illusion of power that she'll allow herself to be marketed no matter what the cost to the dignity of all women? If Palin were truly an empowered woman, she would have refused to allow herself and her daughter to be used in this manner - to assist a party whose rhetoric and imagery promote the ideal woman as deferential to established norms rather than acting as an independent - or critical - thinker. If her selection was intended to signal to American women that empowerment is possible, why is Palin being kept under lock and key? Clearly, this is not an individual whose intelligence or perspective McCain respects, or else he would permit her to speak for herself. To continue pretending that Palin's selection was anything other than an attempt to manipulate the voting public on the basis of a straitjacketed view of sexual roles is a dangerous lie that no American of any gender can afford to abide.

--------

Cynthia Boaz is assistant professor of political science at Sonoma State University.

Most want church out of politics

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0808/12696.html
And this from the annual Pew Religion and Public Life Survey... certainly not a fly-by-night organization...

The link is: http://www.facebook.com/adognamedmiracle/

http://www.facebook.com/adognamedmiracle

Click on the link above for more of this doggie's incredible back story

Leroy Sievers...

...passed away on Friday, August 15, 2008.
Here's the link to his remarkable blog.

Retweet from 4/18/18 - love these two!

This is my grandmother, Antonette Lentine Gamberale, who passed away on May 27, 2018 at age 100.
She will never be forgotten.

Let's lighten up for a second...

I'm a big fan of this beautiful person, and not just because of the ranking below!

six years ago yesterday

Originally posted December 2, 2009

six years ago yesterday
my world exploded
and is only now
starting to reassemble
a few of the parts are missing
some in wrong places
but at least i can now put
supper on the stove
without doubling over in pain
and wanting to die
but would never do that to my family

and for those who refused to understand
be gentle
be kind
their life in the next world
will be cursed
but for those who held me
and were not ashamed of my anger
my rage
my tears
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven

©2009 Sheri L. Donaldson (@seagull_girl)

Speaks for itself

A very dear person in my family died in an accident. This was written in response to that event.

i was in the bathroom
when she arrived
for the last time.

there was, as always, an electric stir,
such as the entrance of a pop star
or as if the leading scorer of the state champions
Had arrived.

i felt myself lift inside and hurried out.

She was holding court, naturally, saying:

Oh my gosh my hair looks so bad it’s still wet we got up at 4AM to make sure we were out the door at 5 to get to Kohl’s when the doors opened at 5:30 and we got a lot of our Christmas shopping done then we went to Penneys and got home about 11:30 we were exhausted and we took a nap then we got up and showered and came over here

It was Thanksgiving.

“i was in the bathroom”

©seagull_girl

May 18, 2004

On rick santorum

He is not a fool. He simply believes that everyone who does not agree with him should be eliminated.
He also believes in survival of the fittest, which is the antithesis of the gospel in which he "believes". He is going to have a big surprise when he takes his last breath.

I have despaired that our country was going to be destroyed by these goons. But the kids from Parkland have restored my faith.

The kids know

Resurrection (an incomplete poem)

I am tired.
I am tired of fighting.
Every day is a fight. The fight to stay positive, to smile, to type our reports and fulfill our duties.
The fight to stay sane in a world gone mad.
Everyone is afraid, of course. A frightened populace is easier to control.
We are living in a world of darkness and hate, and none seem to care.
But this time, the goons convinced one of their own to kill some more.
Kids sitting in their desks.
But this time, the wrong school was targeted.
The kids decided to fight back.
They chanted "#NeverAgain" and "#WeAreStrong"
And some of the adults listened.
And finally, maybe,
Change is Coming.

For those of you who think that getting rid of Donald Trump will solve all our problems...

George Bush surprised world leaders with a joke about his poor record on the environment as he left the G8 summit in Japan.

The American leader, who has been condemned throughout his presidency for failing to tackle climate change, ended a private meeting with the words: "Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter."

He then punched the air while grinning widely, as the rest of those present including Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy looked on in shock.

What this blog is all about

...or rather, what should this blog be all about? What should be the purpose of writing and publishing a blog, even if it is only for my eyes to see?

I originally wanted to post snippets of others' poetry and my own, then I switched to online articles I found interesting, evocative, sobering. Then, I wanted to make this a running tally of all my retweets and posts, primarily concerning my horror at the state of the world in the early 21st century.

But, I want this blog to now be all those things, and much, much more.

No matter how insignificant, everyone has a story.

Not only does everyone have a story, everyone has the need to tell that story to someone.

If I were to be honest to myself, I am an insignificant office worker in one of the world's great medical institutions. Even one such as I needs to tell my story.

Parts of my story are pretty mundane. Parts of it are inspirational. Parts of it are so fanciful, some may believe that they never happened. But I can assure you, they did.

Hopefully, somebody will stumble across this blog and find comfort or insight. Someone in the future may find this blog and get an idea about, along with others, what regular people were thinking during this period of time, with all its upheaval and renewed fear of "the other." This may well help future generations to not make the mistakes we have made. That is my hope.