The Day After 9/11

When the first plane hit the Twin Towers in New York City on September 11, 2001, I was working a part-time job at a law office to supplement my freelance income.

One of the lawyers rushed in and told us to turn on the TV. We did, just in time to watch the second plane hit.

At first, we weren't sure we'd seen what we'd seen, but as CBS replayed it and began analyzing it, and then more reports of hijacked jets came in, and the Pentagon was hit, we realized this was big stuff.

We all stood around the small set, watching. When the towers tumbled, my coworker gasped. "All of those people," one of them exclaimed.

"All of those firefighters," I murmured. Being married to a firefighter, I knew who was climbing the stairs while everyone else was fleeing.

The lawyers closed the doors and sent us home. Everyone in the small county seat headed home. My husband was out with his father installing a septic tank, and I had no way to reach him. This was 2001, after all - and he didn't have a cellphone. I wasn't even sure where he was.

I walked into my quiet, empty home and turned the TV on. I sat for hours, watching over and over as the towers burned and then fell, again and again in replays. I listened to stunned announcers try to make sense of this attack on us, heard their voices falter, heard them try to distinguish facts from guesses.

My husband did not come home until about 4 p.m., a little early for him. Someone had seen them working and stopped and told them the country was under attack. My husband and father-in-law had packed up and came home.

So, my firefighter saw the towers collapse in a replay, but he did not see it real time. He did not know, at the moment he was watching, the exact minute he was watching, that people were dying. By the time he watched the towers fall, those folks had been dead for hours.

He was devasted, of course, by the loss of his New York brothers. Firefighters are a close-knit group. Losing 343 of them in one blow was tragic.

But I had seen it happen in real time, along with millions of other people.

Every year since then, I have hunted up footage of the fall of the towers around 9/11. I have watched numerous documentaries about it, seen the conspiracy theory videos, or a lot of them anyway, and occasionally stumble upon some recently uploaded footage someone in New York shot out of a window and then forgot about it.

Different angles of the second plane hitting are always gut-wrenching. I've only seen a few shots of the first plane hitting; no one knew it was coming, after all, so cameras weren't pointed there. However, there is one video that shows the first plane hit; an interview some blocks away, and they heard the plane suddenly come in and the videographer caught the moment of impact.

You can see that here at about 19 seconds in:

In the days after, I remember seeing blue skies unmarred by the trails of aircraft, because the planes were grounded. It was eerie to look up and see the sky so blue without the chem trails of planes, the crisscross patterns that indicated people were going on about their day, flying hither and yon without a care.

People were quiet, at first, and helpful, at first. But after a few days, the air changed. I felt anger, hatred, and evil seething in the store when I went after groceries. It has ebbed and flowed over the last 21 years, that feeling that I have when I am in a crowd, but it has never gone away, not since September 12, 2001. For a day - maybe two - we were one nation, pulled together by the horror of what we'd witnessed.

But after that? We were an angry, scared bunch of people, and we've stayed that way. We frayed. We pulled apart. And the distance and the turmoil grew, and in the end, the terrorists won after all, for all that they've been dead for 20 years.

In the end, they destroyed us - because we have destroyed ourselves.

We've raised an entire generation in that atmosphere of fear and hate. They don't know anything except fear and hate. That's all they know.

What has it been like for them, growing up in this new world that we allowed to happen, the one where everyone is afraid, and big men must carry guns with little, deadly bullets to compensate for their fears?

I know what it has been like for me to live in this time - it's been basically an ulcer-creating atmosphere. But what must it be like for those young folks, the ones who are now turning 21?

What do they think and feel, having grown up every moment with this disease of the soul, this dark pall that has fallen over this nation?

I remember the blue skies on September 12. I looked up at the blue, blue skies, those brilliant September skies.

And the memories of what we were before, knowing what we could have been, and the thought of those clear blue skies, are what pulls me through.

The Slap

I use my blog for many things - inspiration, a place to try out different techniques, videos, music, poems, etc. Sometimes it's like a journal, and that's especially true when I feel like things around me need to be remembered. This post is sort of a mix.

In the news these days, we have the Russian invasion of Ukraine, or Putin's war, as some are calling it. Ukraine has been valiant and held back the tides of Russian soldiers but is slowly giving way. President Biden is working with NATO, we've sent support, imposed sanctions, and performed other political feats aimed at stopping the Russian aggression in its tracks.

The former guy has called upon Russia to aid him in attacking President Biden. He still can't get over the fact that he lost the election in 2020. I don't care what Hunter Biden did or didn't do. President Biden hasn't placed his son within the Whitehouse and given him places of authority and power. The former guy put all of his adult children (except Tiffany) into places of power within the federal government. There is a huge difference there. What his children did actually impacted the United States because they were part of the government after his election. Hunter Biden is a nobody, except a president's son.

Additionally, the January 6 committee continues to smash away at the Republican insistence that the insurrection of that date was just a "tour" gone wrong, or however they're framing it. A federal judge yesterday released some paperwork that had been withheld to the committee and in doing so stating there was obvious obstructionism on the part of the former guy and obvious efforts to interfere with the electoral count process and obstruct Congress in its official duties. The noose tightens, but will it close fast enough?

Also, the Senate is on its way to confirming the first black woman to the U.S. Supreme Court. Susan Collins (R) said today she would support the confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson, meaning "bipartisan" support, even if she is the only Republican to vote yes. This still leaves the court wildly mismatched, although the Supreme Court should not be the political football it has become.

Locally, Virginia, now a red state with Governor Trumpkin at the helm (though the state senate remains blue), is looking at a late budget, which always holds up the process for the localities when it comes to sorting out school funding and other spending priorities. 

In the entertainment world, the big talk was about how Will Smith walked up the stairs at the Oscars and slapped emcee Chris Rock after Rock made a joke about Smith's wife. And this is what I will end up talking about.

Let me say I'm not a big fan of either Rock or Smith, though I've seen movies with both of them in it. Independence Day is one of my favorite movies, and Smith stars in it. I also like his movie Hitch. Rock I know more as a foul-mouthed comedian than an actor.

At any rate, my thoughts on this are many and varied. I do not condone violence.

The slap was obviously premeditated - Smith had a good walk before he reached Rock. He could have stood there and verbally insulted him, which though bad, would not have been as violent. Smith later said he was defending his wife.

And that, I confess, I admire. And envy. How many times in my life have I wished someone would have stood up for me?

Multitudes. 

How many times was I picked on at school, and no one stopped it (except perhaps a teacher stepping in, but not because it was me, but because she needed to get the class rolling). But my classmates did not step in.

I have had many instanced where people hurt me or laughed at me, or attacked me, even, and no one else stepped in. I felt marginalized and like I was nothing.

I can recount many, many times in my life when I needed someone to stand up for me, and no one did. Many of those times involved men being assholes.

People have helped me, but few have protected me. I have fought my own fights, as best I know, and as best I knew how. Maybe I am forgetting something, have misremembered a few incidents, maybe someone stuck up for me and I never knew about it. I secretly hope so.

With that in mind, I applaud Smith's defense of his wife. She has someone on her side who has her back. 

I don't applaud the way he went about it, but he did stand up for her.

We should all stand up for one another when we see wrongs happening. Everyone needs somebody in his or her corner.

(Ukraine needs someone in her corner right now.)

(This has been edited from the original.)

Blog4Peace - Ukraine

 

Things Going On

A mish-mash of things -

My husband's cousin passed away on Monday after a long bout of Covid. He spent some weeks on a ventilator before succumbing. The funeral is tomorrow. I have an earache and so will not attend. George was well known and a respected member of the community, so there will be a crowd. My husband looked upon his cousin like a brother. He will represent us at the funeral.

Russia invaded Ukraine yesterday, or I guess really Wednesday night. Many people see this as the first step in World War III. I think another world war will not look so much like the last two - this one will be fought with technology. Computer hacks, degradation of lifestyles, loss of the electric grid, downing satellites, plus drone bombings in various cities - those things I expect. This is not how I expected my senior years to play out, watching the world fall apart. But we all can only do what we can with the time given us and play our mostly insignificant roles therein.

Still, there are boots on the ground in the Ukraine, so traditional warfare also continues. I watched a video earlier of a Ukranian woman telling off a Russian soldier. She called him a fascist and gave him sunflower seeds to put in his pocket so they would bring up something beautiful when the soldier died. It was an intriguing notion, to bring something lovely from the destruction that was coming, or rather, has come, and continues to come. She also cursed them, not just with foul language but as in an actual curse or hex. As well she should.

For some reason, the video of all of the talented singers who participated in USA for Africa and sang We Are the World in 1985 popped up in my youtube feed, so I watched that. I remember when the song came out, how it much impact it had. I believe most radio stations agreed to play it at the same time, and the song was everywhere. I doubt we could ever have such a thing again. I will hope, though, because we are indeed the world, all of us, even those who are different in whatever way. We're all one, really, little grapes in the great vineyard of life. Some of us are purple, some are blue, some are withered raisins, some are squishy, some are seedless. I hope I'm a Concord grape. They're my favorite. I haven't had any in a long time. They're hard to find. My husband's grandmother used to grow them, but I don't know of anyone who grows them now.

At my age, I am still learning life's hard lessons. One of these is trust. I trust people to do the right thing. To do what they say they're going to do. To not hurt me. To be kind. To be nice. And guess what? I'm wrong to do that. I should trust no one. This morning's lesson came to me via a video game I play. It's a city building game called Elvenar. Not a war game, or a shot people game. A game where you trade goods to create new buildings and advance through a research tree. It's the first, only, and will be the last multiplayer game I have ever played. In this game, you have fellowships. You can have 25 people in your fellowship. Some of these people I have been playing with for five years. You do get to know people a little over that period of time. I am the archmage of my fellowship, which means I'm the leader. I can promote people to mage. My mages are the people I've come to feel are trustworthy.

This morning, I woke to find one of them had violated that trust. I have a chart on my google drive where I keep track of various things in the game - players have goals to meet, for example - and I'd given the chart to three of my mages. This morning, when I went to the chart to update it, someone had turned the thing into a garish, difficult-to-read document. I copied it over so I would be the only one with the link and then had to spend about 45 minutes trying to get it back to the way it was. It upset me so much that I cried. I also left a message for my three mages, and I let whoever had done this know that I was not happy. I demoted the fellow I think did it, and if he confesses (which is doubtful), I will throw him out of the fellowship. 

At any rate, I think I am done with the game. It takes time, but I enjoyed it. It kept me thinking and was an exercise in patience and creativity, because one really had to give thought to the goods and how to keep things equalized, and suddenly not have more planks than marble or whatever. I shouldn't have to give up something I enjoy because of someone else, but I have found that to be the story of my life.

It is no wonder I have about given up on people in general.

Too bad I can't give myself a hug.

Pandemic 2020 - Day 18

It was a Friday the 13th when the United States stood still - and the toilet paper disappeared.

That day in March of 2020, the public realized that we aren't immune to things that affect the rest of the world, and the race to the grocery stores left everyone stunned and frightened.

Essential supplies vanished overnight.

Here at the ol' farm, I'd been stocking up a little bit at a time for about two months, picking up an extra can of soup and such here and there. We have always had plenty of toilet paper, a habit I apparently inherited from my grandmother. It's a staple we have always purchased in bulk and in multiples of that.

What I miss the most is the fresh food - and getting out of the house once a week or so for a tour around the grocery aisles. I have not been in a store since the 13th, as I have asthma and my husband believes that he has a stronger immune system than I do, even though he is older.

I've had a few Sunday drives with him, but mostly I've stayed home. It rained most of March, so the weather was dour and glum. This did nothing to help the situation. On warmer days I tried to get outside a little, wearing a dust mask because I am allergic to everything and the pollen has been high. I also was sick for two weeks with something - not Covid-19 - I had a little sore throat and laryngitis but ran no fever. It is another reason for my husband's insistence I stay home, though.

My hair is growing by leaps and bounds, and a week ago I took the scissors to my bangs. Unfortunately, I wear progressive lenses, and I can't see a thing without them, but I can't cut my hair with my specs on. The cut was too high and crooked, but the hair is out of my eyes for the time being. I discovered one needs a very sharp pair of scissors for hair cutting. Mine were incredibly dull. I thought about ordering a pair but apparently so has everyone else, as all but the very expensive hair cutting scissors were out of stock.

Oh well.

I still talk to my friends on the phone, and we text and email. Aside from my trips to the chiropractor and the grocery store, little has changed except for this general uneasiness that has gripped me. I've had vivid dreams and nightmares, and I've noticed it is difficult to concentrate. As much as I'd like to start a new project, I'm not sure now is the time to do it.

We did have one issue come up this weekend - the mattress on the bed has developed a failure on one side. The mattress is still under warranty but it will be some time before we can attend to this matter. For one thing, I don't want strange people in my home right now and for another I don't think any of the mattress stores are open.

Today, Governor Ralph Northam initiated executive order no. 55, which tells us to shelter-in-place. We are only to leave our homes for food, medicine, and fresh air/exercise.

That's a rather clinical assessment of the last 18 days, I think. Perhaps I will get more into the emotional toll at another time.

For now, I simply wanted to make a note of this strange and unprecedented time in my blog.

Be well, dear reader, and may the universe look after you.

Notre Dame in Paris

Yesterday I returned home from an errand to learn that Notre Dame in Paris was on fire.

The structure lost its spire and the roof but the stone parts remained mostly intact after a long night's work by firefighters. They saved the cathedral's main structure and two towers of the cathedral.

This structure is nearly 900 years old. Construction began un 1160 under Bishop Maurice de Sully and was largely complete by 1260. It was modified frequently throughout the centuries and it houses priceless artifacts and history. In 1804, the cathedral was the site of the Coronation of Napoleon I as Emperor of France, and witnessed the baptism of Henri, Count of Chambord in 1821 and the funerals of several presidents of the Third French Republic.

After Victor Hugo published The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, interest in the church renewed, and the building underwent major restorations between 1844 and 1864. During this time, the iconic spire, which collapsed during yesterday's fire, was added by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, who had supervised the restoration. Throughout the last two centuries the structure has undergone several renovation and cleaning projects.

Millions visit Notre Dame every year.

In 1978, I was one of those visitors. I have only two photos to show I was there, small polaroid's taken outside. At that time, cameras weren't allowed inside, if I remember right. Most historic places did not allow pictures to be taken inside. I have only vague memories of my visit there, conjured up as I watched images of the structure burning.

It is too an important event not to note it in my blog. History matters, and I have to wonder if mankind today is capable of constructing the kind of architecture that made Notre Dame so lovely and endearing. Has that kind of craftsmanship has gone the way of the telegraph machine?

May the rebuilding of Notre Dame be the beginning of something great, a phoenix rising from the ashes of what was, and may it prove my earlier statement wrong by bringing out the best of humanity in the restoration efforts.

My polaroid from 1978. This is the bell towers and main entrance. You can see the spire in the middle.

A little better shot of the bell tower and spire.

Firefighters putting out the fire last night.

The structure ablaze.

Down the Drain

This is a rant. Go away now if you are looking for cute pictures of niceties. You can come back tomorrow for that.

________________________

Most people who have been reading my blog for any length of time are probably aware that I am not happy with the current state of the nation.
 
Give it a year, and I think a lot of people are going to be really unhappy, but they will have to find it out for themselves. Some will never figure it out, and will blame somebody else. It's the nature of being human.
 
With all of this quick change going on, to me it feels like a chronic beating over the head. Unfortunately, every time Republicans are in charge of the government, I feel like I am being beaten. It is the verbal patronizing, the language, the authoritarianism, I suppose, that makes me feel like I have a boot over my face. Not only that, Republicans in Congress are just mean. And they really dislike women. Honestly, every mean person I know is a Republican. I know nice Republicans, too, but I can't think of a single mean Democrat. I probably know some, but I don't know who they are. I know that I know mean Republicans.
 
Anyway, since that is how I have been feeling, like a beaten down dog whimpering in a cage, it has been hard to blog. I try not to blog too much about political stuff here because that is not what I want on Blue Country Magic. But when it is all I can think about, and all that is in the news, and all that is eating at me, it is difficult to write about fawns and daylilies.
 
I am not writing on Facebook, either, even though I sometimes want to scream out responses to the things I see posted. But I am not very good at arguments. I can state my case and you can agree with it or not, but I don't want to argue with anyone about it. So I don't argue. If I do post something, if you don't agree, don't agree. I generally won't waste my time fighting about it. Usually I just hit "delete." It's the best key on the keyboard.

That type of thing, of course, pertains to opinion. Now, if I'm stating a fact, like, say, 4+4=8, or the ground is made of dirt and rocks and compost and dead things, and you don't want to agree with that, well, that just means you're ignorant. I might argue with you over a fact. A real fact, not an alternative fact.
 
A friend, a moderate Republican who occasionally shows glimpses of a soul when he talks to me, doesn't post a lot of political stuff on Facebook, either. I still have hope for him,  but yesterday he posted a video on Facebook but he made little comment about it except that it made him think (about what, I do not know). The video was by some dude who claimed to be in Iraq (no way to know for sure, he might have been in his basement in Mississippi). He said that he had been told that right now, with the [whatever name I decide to call the person leading the country]'s ban on immigration, the Iraqis are fired up. After all, we're supposed to be on their side but their nation was spelled out as being bad and their people couldn't come here, not even the ones that fought with us. This guy said if he went out on the town, the Iraqi people, not ISIL or Al Qaida, would kill him. Torture him, behead him. And is that the kind of people we want in the U.S.?
 
What I wanted to respond to this video was this:

Matthew Shepherd (December 1, 1976 – October 12, 1998), beaten, tortured, and left to die near Laramie, Wyoming on the night of October 6, 1998. Significant media coverage was given to the killing and what role Shepard's sexual orientation might have played as a motive in the perpetration of the crime.

Nine black church congregants were killed by a white shooter June 17, 2015 in Charleston, S.C.

The KKK and black lynchings.

Any newspaper reporting crime in any day in this country.

For further information, here's a report in the Washington Post on Hate Crime. 
 
And there is this graph here at the FBI site:

I just pulled out Virginia because that is where I live. In just those areas, which doesn't even include most of Southwest Virginia, there are over 160 murders. And look at all of those violent crimes.
 
And then I would have liked to have responded with this:
 
FBI Hate Crimes Statistics

Overview

• In 2015, 14,997 law enforcement agencies participated in the Hate Crime Statistics Program. Of these agencies, 1,742 reported 5,850 hate crime incidents involving 6,885 offenses.
•  There were 5,818 single-bias incidents that involved 6,837 offenses, 7,121 victims, and 5,475 known offenders.
• The 32 multiple-bias incidents reported in 2015 involved 48 offenses, 52 victims, and 18 known offenders.

Single-bias incidents

Analysis of the 5,818 single-bias incidents reported in 2015 revealed that:

• 56.9 percent were motivated by a race/ethnicity/ancestry bias.

• 21.4 percent were prompted by religious bias.

• 18.1 percent resulted from sexual-orientation bias.

• 2.0 percent were motivated by gender-identity bias.

• 1.3 percent were prompted by disability bias.

• 0.4 percent (23 incidents) were motivated by a gender bias.

 
Because we're such a calm, non-violent society, after all. We worship our mammas and apple pie. We don't gang up on gays, or black people, or Muslims, or people of different faith.

What crap.

My point is, this weird view that Americans have that we're such a peaceful, tolerant and welcoming nation is bullshit, and the world is calling us on it. We are violent. We are mean. We are as bad, if not worse, than any other nation in this word. as far as violence and hatred and just plain vileness goes. Only we do it in the name of "Christianity" instead of some other religion, so somehow or another, because a bunch of people worship a really blatantly fucked-up version of "the Prince of Peace," that makes shooting one another and dropping drone bombs on people all right.

And to make this point even more strongly, here is this, from The American Bar Association:

In 2003, there were 30,136 firearm-related deaths in the United States; 16,907 (56%) suicides, 11,920 (40%) homicides (including 347 deaths due to legal intervention/war), and 962 (3%) undetermined/unintentional firearm deaths.

CDC/National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, WISQARS Injury Mortality Reports 1999-2003 http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/wisqars

• The rate of death from firearms in the United States is eight times higher than that in its economic counterparts in other parts of the world. Kellermann AL and Waeckerle JF. Preventing Firearm Injuries. Ann Emerg Med July 1998; 32:77-79.

• The overall firearm-related death rate among U.S. children younger than 15 years of age is nearly 12 times higher than among children in 25 other industrialized countries combined. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 1997;46:101-105.

•  The United States has the highest rate of youth homicides and suicides among the 26 wealthiest nations. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
  Rates of homicide, suicide, and firearm-related death among children: 26 industrialized countries.MMWR. 1997;46:101-105. Krug EG, Dahlberg LL, Powell KE. Childhood homicide, suicide, and firearm deaths: an international comparison. World Health Stat Q. 1996;49:230-235.

Still think we're so nice? Let's see. How about the 2006 murders at Virginia Tech? The Sandy Hook murders in 2012? The Oklahoma bombings in 1995? How about the guy who beat another guy to death in the gas station about four miles from me, because he didn't like the way the other guy was driving? Or maybe the murders of a couple of young women near UVA? Or the shooting of a couple of journalists at a local TV station?

Or maybe the stabbings, gunshots, fights, and domestic violence runs that my husband's EMS/Fire crews see every single night in Roanoke would convince you, dear reader, that we are not a peaceful people?

We are the ONLY nation to have used an atomic weapon on real, live people. We have lynched people on the say-so of a single person. We are completely capable of ostracizing and being cruel to someone different than us. We do it every single day. Every. Single. Day.

And we're terrified of people who are thousands of miles away from us.

Frankly, I am as frightened of some of the people in my community as I am anybody else in the world.

We can keep fooling ourselves that we are better than others in the world, but we're not. That boat has sailed and is so far gone it is too late to wave bye-bye to it. The only thing we have is greed and a religion that worships money.

Some of us, though, want a better world.

We ain't gettin' it today.

An Historic Moment

Tears came to my eyes earlier in the week when Hillary Clinton received the nomination to be the first female candidate for president. When she showed up on that big screen, crashing through the glass ceiling, I cheered.

Last night, when she finally said these words, "And so it is with humility, determination and boundless confidence in America's promise, that I accept your nomination for President of the United States" - I cried.

"Tonight we've reached a milestone in our nation's march toward a more perfect union," she noted. "The first time that a major party has nominated a woman for President. Standing her as my mother's daughter and my daughter's mother, I'm so happy this day has come. . . . When any barrier falls in America, it clears the way for everyone. After all, when there are no ceilings, the sky's the limit."

I never thought I'd see the day.

Suffragettes have had my attention for some time, because the women's right to vote was a battle, a hard-fought battle that had women literally beaten, spit upon, belittled, and run down as less than. Always less than.

It was and still is something to fight against. The war's not yet won.

My county's own Mary Johnston fought for women's right to vote, along with Virgina's Ellen Glasgow and other notable women of the early 1900s. Johnston, in a prophetic moment, said this in a New York Times interview in 1911:

"I regard the fight for the franchise as a piece of roadbuilding. One and all of the women who are engaged in this piece of engineering are the servants of the woman who is to be—of a creature great and strong and wise and free and lovely—a woman magnificently beyond to-day's most wonderful dream. She may not come in the fullness of might and beauty for 500 years, but she could not come at all but for the road we are building to-day. She must come over that road. So we build in faith and in the service of that great woman and of the children she shall bear, and it is a work of great religious significance."

It did not take 500 years. But it took nearly 100. Women received the right to vote in the United States in 1920. Fortunately for Clinton, other women have moved mountains to give her a platform - nameless women who have raised children, created homes, and served as teachers. Women who have gone into the Armed Forces, become police officers and firefighters, writers, poets and environmental leaders. Women astronauts and engineers, scientists and doctors. Geraldine Ferro, first vice president nominee of a major party. Jill Stein, the nominee of a third party (the Green Party) and others who have knocked and beat on the bottoms of the shoes of the patriarchy until finally the men have fallen over with sore feet. It took a world of women, beating on that glass ceiling, so Clinton could break through.

I am 53 years old. I have always had the right to vote. It was a right my mother refused to exercise because of a silly notion that she might have to serve on a jury. Serving on a jury, to my mind, is another great right of a citizen, and a duty she shirked over some nebulous fear.

But perhaps that was because my mother thought, as she taught me, that she was less than. Women all around me have always been less than in the eyes of the patriarchy that forms America, and especially rural America - from my grandmothers to my mother, my aunts, and to myself. In Southwest Virginia, this Appalachian mountain land, women are currency, not humans.

I grew up knowing I was less than from the moment some male doctor pulled me from my mother's womb and spanked my bottom to make me breathe. I knew it when my father told me he was saving money for my brother's education, but not for mine (though I'm the one with the masters degree). I knew it when a male coworker tried to rape me in a back room before I married and when a friend of my father's grabbed me in a parking lot and felt me up. I knew it when every male doctor I saw for infertility looked at me not with compassion, but with pity and spite because I was, from then on, even less than all the other less than women who could carry a child.

Do you understand? This is not something I expect everyone to understand. Not even all women will understand, and they may not want to. Examining one's life can be painful, and I acknowledge that many do not take the time to do this. And many women are happy with their status.

That is their right.

I have never been happy being less than. In many instances, I am more than and I have always been equal to - as are all women - even when those around me refused to acknowledge it. I may not be physically strong, but there was a time when I was smarter than many men I knew.

I still am. We all bring something to the table, regardless of gender. We all have something to add to this world, and no contribution outshines another. If it does, it is only because some mind has made it so.

My husband, a kind and intelligent man, knows last night was important to me. He handed me a tissue last night when I burst into sobs, but I do not know if he understood the momentous occasion or the reason for the tears. I don't know if he understands the implications. I do not know if any man truly understands what it is to be a woman, any more than I can truly understand what it is to be a woman of color in this country.

Last night, women were no longer less than. Women can now be equal to and even if Mrs. Clinton losses this election (so get out and vote for her so this does not happen), that glass ceiling will have a truly large crack in it, one that may be repaired but never solely replaced.

At long last, Mary Johnston's vision from 105 years ago has come true.

And finally, after having female leaders around the world look at the United States in confusion, we are with them. Croatia has a female leader and has for some time. Canada, Chile, Germany, Great Britain, Denmark, Finland, Grenada, India, Ireland, Jamaica, Latvia, the Netherlands, Poland and on and on have female leaders in the 21st century (and many way before that - remember Cleopatra? Queen Victoria? Mary, Queen of Scots?).

And here we are now, the United States of America, after 240 years as an independent country, on the cusp of making a woman a leader of this nation.

Finally.

This is no fantasy we are living in. Hillary Clinton is not Wonder Woman or Xena. She's no daughter of Zeus. She's a human being who has worked hard, solidly, for decades to better the world and to move herself up, fighting battles against men who would deny her the right to take that first gasp of air she needed when she was a wee baby if they could. Men who proclaim to love life, so long as that life serves them.

We are servants no longer. Take notice, men. You are no longer kings.

I'm with her.

I'm a Democrat.

I vote.

The Men on the Chessboard

My local daily paper today is full of anger. It usually is. Americans are angry people these days. Fearful people tend to become angry people, because they feel they've lost control.

There is not usually so much local anger, though. But today we have Montgomery County angry over a Circuit Court Clerk's decision to fire half of her staff, Rockbridge County is upset over Botetourt's near-certain approval of 25 wind turbines on North Mountain, and people in Botetourt are upset because the supervisors want to tear down historic structures to build a big shell building.

The state of Virginia is upset because somebody rooked the Commerce and Trade Department out of $1.4 million.

Nationally, people are angry over polluted water in Michigan and Planned Parenthood (pro and con). Online, people are still talking about those men in Oregon who took over a federal facility and for some reason are still there, and I see as I write this there are reports of yet another mass shooting. Sad that those have become so commonplace one barely blinks at the headline anymore.

And this is all caused by those in power. Yes, we have class in America. We have people in power who don't know what they are doing, and we have people behind the people in power who probably know what they are doing, but what they are doing is not in the best interest of the rest of us. Power only serves power, and it most certainly does not share it with the likes of the little people, of which I am one.

I learned to play chess when I was about nine years old. I never was very good at it. But chess is an interesting way of looking things going on in the world.

You have the king, who can only move one square at time and who, in my opinion, is weaker even than a pawn, though the rules say otherwise.

The queen is the most powerful piece. She can whiz about the checkered board with impunity. She can knock off bishops and knights, destroy castles (rooks), and eat pawns for lunch.

The queen is the power behind the throne. I firmly believe that in the U.S. the power behind the throne is something - or a group of someones - that Americans are not even aware of. Maybe it is simply rich folk like the Koch brothers, using their lobbyists and money to bend our elected representatives to their collective will. Perhaps it is something more sinister, like in the movies, an evil coalition set about to destroy all that was once good in this world in a grab for more power.

Which means I believe our government is broken, and is more like the chess board tossed about by a two-year old than any sort of conventional play. No, we have a president who was unable to bring forth his vision for the country because of the can't do Congress and Senate, and they can't do because of that invisible power - the Queen - who really runs around the board and takes care of the business of the rich and the powerful.

This even plays out on the local level. I will use my own county as an example. We have five elected representatives, a few of whom appear to believe they must answer to the people who elected them. They have collectively assumed the role of queen, and tossed the pawns completely off the table. The king - I'm not sure who that might be - will step around his single square waiting for the Queen to offer permission.

As for the rest - the bishops, the rooks, the knights - they are all loyal subjects. Lower level administrators, maybe, and other county employees. They have a place on the local little chessboard (and no place on the bigger, state-sized one, and not a prayer of ever being on the national chessboard) but some, I suspect, aren't sure whether they are rooks or knights. They may even really be pawns and not realize it.

Every locality plays its own game of chess, even the tiny towns that lie within the boundaries of our county. We have three little towns and they have their own versions of king, queen, and supporting players. It happens everywhere, not just here.

The problem is always the queen, though. Who gets to be that power player? That's where the fighting and anger comes in. The public, who does the electing, thinks it is the queen - and rightly so. This is supposed to be a democracy, after all, so those who vote should be the ones to move around the board, overseeing this, looking at that, whispering in the ear of the king so he will move from front to side and back again.

But instead we have reversed power - we've given it all to those we elect, because we are now not even on the board. We're not pawns, we're watchers. We do not participate in the game at all. We're content to go to work, watch TV, eat a Milky Way, and go to bed.

About half of us aren't even aware that there is a game being played, and that whatever these kings, queens, and bishops do, it affects us in some fashion or another. The only time we look up to see the board is if the word "taxes" appears, blinking like a magic neon sign over the bar in which the chess game is played. Then, maybe, we speak up. But most of the time we simply go back to watching Netflix.

I wish citizens would be more active in their government, whether at the local level or at higher levels. Many times we have offices up for election and no one has opposition. This is wrong. People should always have a choice. I understand that it is a time commitment and the financial rewards can be limited, especially in local politics, but there is more to life than money.

My actions have been to vote in every election (I don't think I've missed a single one), to write letters to representatives and newspapers, and, when I was a working journalist, to report on topics as objectively as I could so that the citizenry could make an objective opinion on issues. I also served on an appointed board as a representative for my district (the local library board, which is not a major determiner of destiny, but I still served). I continue to write letters and monitor things and work on issues I care about. Others do too, of course, but so many do not.

If you have never written a representative about an issue, I encourage you to read up on something you have an interest in, and then express your opinion in a letter to the editor, or a letter to your representative. Email makes this easy (though a "real" letter tends to be held in higher esteem by some officials).

We can't "Make America Great Again" unless we all participate. If we're sitting back waiting on a sugar daddy to save us, we're going to slide right off that sucker and into a drainage ditch full of sewage. Is that really what we want for our selves and our children?

Take action today. It really is important.

Nothing to See Here

I consider myself fairly well-read and I did not hear about the bombings in Beirut (which happened Thursday before the Friday bombings in Paris) until Sunday. The media, which has become too narrowly focused, offers only the points of views of its owners now, points of views which I do not share. I love all of humanity, not just the ones I feel some cultural connection with. I should not have to read the newspapers in other countries to feel like I have a better, more well-rounded view of the world, but I do and I must.
 

To put this in perspective, when 32 people at Virginia Tech were murdered, it was a global story. When 43 people die by suicide bombings in Beirut, we hear nothing. Are we that immune to the suffering of others? Is it us or the media? Or both?

 

We are a world, not a nation. When will we realize that we are all connected? We are not islands unto ourselves. Even if we wanted to do it, corporations would not stand for closed borders and loss of trade. That's all bluster and buffoonery.

 

This world operates on many levels. I cannot do a thing about the powerful who control what goes on, but I can still open my mind, read, and learn. I can formulate my own opinions. My opinions, generally, are not the same as the ones who control things. It is as if the world operates on more than one axis, and I swirl around on one and others on another.

 

If I could tell people one thing, it would be to read and reach outside of their bubble of information. I read right-wing and liberal things. I wish everyone would.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/11/14/us-mideast-crisis-lebanon-idUSKCN0T314120151114#iW5eo4vu5c0ZxJG2.97

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2015/11/beirut-paris-attacks-151115075935564.html

The Lost Generation

Sunday I read an article about how baby boomers who are my age really don't belong in that category.

I wholeheartedly agree. I have long called myself a member of a lost generation. We are too young to be baby boomers, and too old to be Generation X.

I did not come of age in the 1960s - I was born then. The hippie era was a blimp on my radar, something I saw from a distance but could not experience because I was too young. I admired go-go boots, tie-dyed t-shirts, and long hair on guys, but by the time I was old enough to make those decisions for myself, it was 1975. Tie-dye was out and preppy was in. Rock 'n roll was out, and disco was in. I grew up watching The Brady Bunch and Charlie's Angels, not Leave it to Beaver or Father Knows Best.

So I am quite happy to see someone confirming what I have known all along - I don't belong with the Baby Boomers. The US Census defines baby boomers as folks born from 1946 to 1964. I am 50 years old and someone who is 18 years older than I has little in common with me. We grew up in different eras.

I grew up reacting to the world someone who was 18 when I was born was making. I could only sit back and watch because I was but a child, and unable to do anything else.

My first national memory is watching a man walk on the moon when I was six years old. I don't remember when JFK was killed because I was only 5 months old. My first real political memory is of the Patty Hearst kidnapping, not the Vietnam War, even though that was going on while I was alive. But my awareness was that of a young girl growing up in a rural area, where we only received one TV station.

Patty Hearst was kidnapped in 1974, when I was 11 years old. The things a true Baby Boomer would have been horrified by - Kent State, the shooting of Bobby Kennedy - went over my head. I was vaguely aware but my goodness, Kent State happened in 1970. I was seven years old. I was playing with Barbie and in the second grade!

So to lump me, and all of us who were born from about 1960 - 1968, in the same era, just seems wrong. I imagine there are some older Generation Xers who feel like they are in the wrong generation, too. And they belong with me, in this lost generation.

A book that will be released in the next year calls us "Generation Jones," named after the term "jonesying" which apparently my lost generation coined. It is not a term I use or care for but Generation Jones works for me. We might just as well have been Generation Smith.

For we are a small legion that cannot move forward because of those before us. We were not able to get the good jobs, make the decent money, and be upwardly mobile. We did okay, but we did not do as well as our older true Baby Boomer counterparts. By the time I turned 18, Ronald Reagan was elected president. There was a recession. When we built our house in 1987, the interest rate on it was 13 percent. At the time the talking heads said, "Oh, it will never go lower again."

Shows what they know.

But I am not a Baby Boomer. The US Census can stick me in there if they want, but I have not been, nor ever will be, satisfied with that moniker. I am not sure I will like Generation Jones, but I will say, as I have for many years, that those who are around my age are really a lost generation.

Remembering the 343 on 9/11

Twelve years ago today, over 1,000 men and women, all of them dressed in 50 to 75 pounds of firefighting gear, faced the worst event of their careers.

An attack on the Twin Towers in New York City had the structures damaged and burning.

The first plane hit at 8:45 a.m., and the New York City Fire Department had its incident command center established by 8:50 a.m.

The fire department was on the scene within five minutes.

As business people hurried outside, firefighters raced inside to help.

They wanted to save lives, these firefighters. That is what they were trained to do.

What they loved to do.

What they would die doing.

As firefighters valiantly tried to reach people believed to be trapped on the upper floors, above the point of impact, the unthinkable happened. At 9:59 a.m. the first of the tallest towers of the World Trade Center collapsed.

As we all know, the tower fell without warning. The building was rubble and ash in a matter of seconds.

And 343 firefighters - heroes all - died, along with over 2,000 other people.


I am the wife of a firefighter. Every day could be the day that something goes wrong on the fire scene. This could be the day that a building explodes, a roof caves in, a car crashes into firefighters standing on the side of the road putting out a burning vehicle (something that happened in Roanoke in 1985, killing several firefighters).

Firefighters do a job that most people wouldn't dream of doing. They risk their lives every single time they go to work. When you are running away in fear, they are putting on their hats and heading off to face down whatever it is you are afraid of. Tornadoes, hurricanes, fire, flood, derecho winds, downed power lines or a terrorist attack do not halt these dedicated people. They go forward when the rest of us would hang back.

In 2011, there were 2,450 deaths in the United States as a result of 364,500 fires. There were 13,900 injuries in those fires, and the resulting damage from fires cost $6.6 billion. That same year, there were 80 deaths as a result of 85,400 fires in businesses. There were 1,100 injuries in those fires, and the resulting damage from the fires cost $2.4 billion.

Firefighters responded to over 30 million calls in 2011.

Like other public servants, emergency service workers have been attacked by various political sectors in recent years. How anyone can deny these brave men and women a livelihood in exchange for running into a burning structure is beyond me.

On this 12th anniversary of the attack on New York City, please remember the sacrifices of firefighters and other emergency services workers. They go where no one else dares to go.

You might want to say thank you to them, too. You never know when the life they save might be yours.

A Day of Silence in Solidarity with Connecticut

 

Read this:

I am Adam Lantz's Mother

A Culture That Condones the Killing of Children and Teaches Children to Kill

Religion and Gun Culture

Last night I attended a Christmas program at a local Baptist church. I had family members singing in the choir and had reason to be there. I went to support them.

The program was about 90 minutes long, and it included children singing, lots of hymns, a few carols, some scripture, a guest singer, an offering and prayer.

It was very upbeat and the hellfire and damnation was at a minimum. Overall it was a nice production, and I could tell a lot of work and effort had gone into it.

One section included a mini-play. A father and his two teenager sons sat around a table, and they were joined by a teenage sister.

The father said this year he wanted to talk about Christmas memories, and each told a memory they wanted to share.

One of the memories went like this:

The children were in the house and the father was napping. A noise occurred and the father, bleary and sleep-filled, jumped from the bed and grabbed his shotgun. He ran around the house in his underwear with his gun, finally opening the front door to point the loaded weapon at his wife, who was coming back from shopping. The father spent the next month sleeping on the couch.

I was appalled at this story. To have it been deemed an acceptable message in a church setting at any time is not acceptable to me, but to have it deemed acceptable less than 60 hours after a national tragedy where an unstable young man shot and killed 27 people in Connecticut was just horrid.

Did no one think about the implications of this story? You had several impressionable young people there, all of whom now think it is perfectly fine to hear a noise and grab a gun.

Why is this the first thought? If you are that fearful that grabbing a weapon is the immediate response to something that startles you, I feel sorry for you. You need help. You don't need to be lauded for that action. You need to go to jail or a mental health institution, if you want that story to have an acceptable moral. You don't go around pointing guns at people.

There are a million things someone could have remembered about Christmas. And this story that makes pointing a gun at someone an acceptable past time was what they came up with. Nearly shooting Mom, who, by the way, apparently died six months later from something unmentioned?

Later, someone pressed me as to why I did not attend this particular church. Exasperated, I told her it was too militant for me. She did not understand.

Obviously not.

What Good Are Words

I feel like I should say something about the shooting in Connecticut yesterday, where little children were gunned down in yet another senseless act of violence in this country.

Yet I can't find the words. What do you say?

Do you say - why does this continue to happen?

Do you say - there must be something very wrong with our society, for this doesn't happen (at least not this frequently) in other countries?

What do you say?

Do you say - we need gun control, because we don't need assault weapons in the hands of the masses?

Do you say - we need better mental health support, nationwide, an entire network set up to catch the people who are most likely to take the lives of others?

Do you say - our entire society needs to be reviewed, from religion to education to media and beyond, so that we can understand why we've become a nation of murderers?

Do you say - we're one sick society, maybe the sickest in the world?

What do you say?

Peace To the World

Several years ago I joined the Blog Blast for Peace. I took part in it for several years but I think last year I let it slip past me.

You can learn more about this movement, such as how it started and how many other people are blogging about peace on November 4, at this website.

The idea is to have a lot of people posting about peace in hopes that someone with authority will take heed and realize that peace is what the little people want.

It is not, of course, what the people in power want. They want more power. War is power. Killing and death is power. Living your life and being left alone is not power.

So what is peace, anyway? Is it no killing for an hour? A day? If we went a single hour, world-wide, and no one died, would that be peace?

Or is peace something a lot more dense, something more tangible, something we all have an idea about but seldom express? Is peace actually more about equality, the brotherhood of humanity, than it is about destroying one another with machine guns?

When I say I want peace, I mean I want all of humanity to be humane, kind, and rich of soul. But in order for that to happen, people would have to have their basic needs met. However, we cannot even agree on what basic needs are. Even that seems to be a reason to argue. I think if people had their basic needs met, they would not be hungry. They would not be cold. They would not be stealing from someone else because they need more. They would not be arguing over who has the better idea. They would be shaking hands, agreeing, and moving forward.

The other day a little video of a girl crying because she was tired of the political commercials made the viral rounds. In the United States, we've been abused by horrid commercials and wicked rhetoric coming from both sides. This political season, I have felt like a bride with two husbands, both of them duking it out in front of me in hopes that I would spread my legs and let the guy with the most testosterone have at it. The political process in this country has become abusive; the political system is abusive, our systems, social and economic, are abusive. We have become a nonpeaceful place, a land where the guy with the biggest is the winner, and the rest are losers. And they know it too, those losers. They know what has happened to them: they have been f**cked.

There is no peace when there is so much abuse, abuse that comes across the airwaves and seeps into the souls of crying children. That is not healthy. This country has been on a drinking binge filled with domestic violence ever since the new millennium. A single act of terror emasculated an entire nation, and the menfolk in particular have been acting out ever since. It was loss of face to the great patriarchy, and they have been taking it out on the country as a whole for over a decade now.


So my wish for peace includes more than war. It includes fair play, civility, equality, humanity, and manners. A little of that would go a long way toward bringing peace into the realm of possibility.

As it stands now, gentlemen may cry peace, peace, but there is no peace.* Is life so dear and peace - however you define it - so sweet, that it will be purchased at the price of poverty for the unemployed masses and wage-bound slavery for the rest?

Has it really only been just 236 years since this country was the next great experiment, the hope of the poor, the hammock for the tired? Where has the humanity gone? What have we done?

Remembering the 343

Eleven years ago today, over 1,000 men and women, all of them dressed in 50 to 75 pounds of firefighting gear, faced the worst event of their careers.

The Twin Towers in New York City had been attacked and were burning.

At 8:50 a.m., the New York City Fire Department had established its incident command center at the World Trade Centers. The first plane hit at 8:45 a.m.; the response was immediate. The fire department was on the scene within five minutes.

These brave firefighters hustled inside while everyone else was doing their best to get outside.

They were saving lives, these folks. They were doing what they were trained to do.

What they loved to do.

What they would die doing.

At 9:59 a.m., the first of the tallest towers of the World Trade Center collapsed. The firefighters who were valiantly trying to reach people believed to be trapped on upper floors, were unable to get out. As those of us who sat watching the events unfold on TV know, the collapse occurred without warning. The buildings were down before anyone could react.

And 343 firefighters died, along with over 2,000 other people.

As the wife of a firefighter, I know that every day could be the day that things go wrong on the fire scene. This could be the day that a building explodes, a roof caves in, a car crashes into firefighters standing on the side of the road putting out a burning vehicle (something that happened in Roanoke in 1985, killing several firefighters).

These people do a job that most people wouldn't dream of doing. They risk their lives every single time they go to work. When you are running away in fear, they are putting on their hats and heading off to face down whatever it is you are afraid of. Tornadoes, hurricanes, fire, flood, derecho winds, downed power lines or a terrorist attack do not halt these dedicated people. They go forward when the rest of us would hang back.

On this 11th anniversary of the attack on New York City, please remember the sacrifices of these brave men and women, the firefighters who go where no one dares to go.

You might want to say thank you to them, too. You never know when the life they save might be yours.

Definitions of the Day

It seems to me that a lot of folks, including the media, blogs and elsewhere, are using words and concepts without truly knowing the definition of what they are saying.

In the interest of clearing that up, at least in my mind, I thought I’d look up some things in my Shorter Oxford Dictionary.

torture - The infliction of severe physical or mental suffering; anguish, agony, torment; the infliction of severe bodily pain as a punishment or as a means of interrogation or persuasion; a form or instance of this.

socialism - a political and economic theory or policy of social organization which advocates that the community as a whole should own and control the means of production, capital, land, property, etc.

fascism - The principles and organization of the Italian Fascists, the Italian Fascist movement; a similar nationalist and authoritarian movement in another country; loosely, right-wing authoritarianism.

fascist - A member of a body of Italian nationalists which was organized in 1919 to oppose Communism in Italy and controlled the country from 1922 to 1943; a member of any similar nationalist and authoritarian organization in another country; loosely, any person with right-wing authoritarian political views.

authoritarian - favoring or characterized by obedience to (esp. political) authority as opp. to personal liberty; tyrannical, dictatorial

right-wing - Orig. those members of comparatively conservative opinions in a Continental legislature, by custom seated on the right of the president. Now the views and aims of any party or political group favouring conservative views. Also, the more conservative section of a philosophical, religious, etc., group.

conservative - characterized by a tendency to preserve or keep intact and unchanged; characterized by caution, moderation, or reluctance to make changes; avoiding extremes

nationalist - a person devoted to his or her nation

liberal - free in giving, generous, open-handed, unprejudiced, open-minded, esp. free from bigotry or unreasonable prejudice in favor of traditional opinions or established institutions, open to the reception of new ideas; holding opinions less traditional than those accepted as orthodox; favorable or respectful of individual rights and freedoms, esp. favoring free trade and gradual political and social reform that tends towards individual freedom or democracy.

left-wing - the radical or socialist section of a group or political party; the more liberal or progressive section of a right-wing or conservative group or political party.

oligarchy - a form of government by a small group of people

republic - the state in which supreme power is held by the people or their elected representatives as opp. to by a monarch, etc.; a commonwealth.

democracy - government by the people; a form of government in which the power resides in the people and is exercised by them either directly or by means of a elected representatives; a form of society which favours equal rights, the ignoring of hereditary class distinctions, and tolerance of minority views.

Grey Gardens

I watched an HBO production of Grey Gardens just over a week ago.

I am still haunted by this picture.

The true story of Jackie O's aunt and first cousin had eluded me. I never heard of the 1970s documentary and knew absolutely nothing about these people. I watched the film because I have always enjoyed Drew Barrymore's work, though I have on occasion wondered about her choice of film.

She was absolutely fantastic in this role. Scarily so, actually. This was acting at its finest. She played opposite Jessica Lange and they were an incredible team.

In the 1930s, these two ladies were used to wealth and servants and the good life.

Somewhere along the line, things went terribly wrong.

The movie did not really give an indication to me as to what happened. They feel upon misfortune and lost their money because Dad left the house and didn't give Mom any allimony. Perhaps the documentary makes it clearer, I don't know.

The filth the women lived in, complete with cats and racoons, troubled me greatly. Obviously they were both mentally ill, but that for me needed to be clearer in the movie. The movie almost made it seem as if they thought that picking up their own trash was beneath them. So they'd rather live in squalor. There wasn't enough focus on the reasons to suit me, I suppose.

Which is the scary part, isn't it? That it can just happen... one minute you're living the good life and the next you're eating cat food. Sometimes there aren't any reasons and that makes it all the more terrifying.

The mother, played by Jessica Lange, was overbearing and dominating. She had her daughter under her fist, and the younger Edie never stood a chance. Mother Dearest was a rather scary woman as Lange portrayed her. Her daughter Edie had lots of sympathy from me but after a while I wanted to shake her into action. Obviously she could not take action, though.

In some discussions of young Edie I have read online, there is talk of schizophrenia, etc., and I can accept that. For both of the women.

That's because there was something deficit in the souls of these characters. Something strangely amiss.

By the 1970s the two were living alone in a falling-down ramshackled mansion. The city wanted to condemn the place. Jackie O and her sister stepped in and fixed the home back up.

And then some fellows came along and made a documentary, which from what I've read was an eye-opener that brought some modest fame to the younger Edie, at any rate.

I am always disturbed when I learn of people living in poor conditions, for whatever reason. It happens with greater frequency than most folks realize. I would hazard a guess that in every neighborhood in the US there is at least one home that has someone in similar circumstances. It might not be visible from the outside, but inside ... what a disaster.

But I believe these people are doing the best they can. It just doesn't live up to societal standards.

There are lists of homes with city health officials where people like firefighters are told they should not enter the home. I have seen them.

I think I live in fear of becoming a person like this. Someone beyond eccentric.

Anyway, I haven't been able to shake Grey Gardens from my brain. I am hoping this post will knock it loose from my skull.