The Flower Ladies of Franklin Street

Today when I came across an article about the "Flower Ladies" of Chapel Hill posted by The North Carolina Collection at the UNC Library today, I cried.

I went to live in Chapel Hill for the first time in the late 60s. i truly loved the "flower ladies," as did everyone i knew. Chapel Hill was still in the hands of citizens and leaders who were committed to preserving its Village character and flavor. It's as though the loss of the flower ladies was the first of the mortal blows to the charming village that I loved so dearly and almost do not recognize today The changes are far from what I could call progress. I always thought that a person must really know they are old when they come to see just about all change as decline, and the timing of my sorrow does nothing to argue against that explanation. But I honestly reject that notion. 

What we have lost since the Revolution of 1980 was our best and most beautiful, The world we built from FDR, and that was way before my time, to RWR was a heyday, a constant struggle but a struggle for the Good and Beautiful: a strong middle class, the expansion of rights and opportunity and equality, mom and pop businesses, the beginning of the meaning of Earth Day, people who knew a difference between fact and opinion. 

Of course there were bad and negative things, but as MLK said, "“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." Now, I wonder. Was the 20th century just a blip, a passing fantasy? And God, how I miss the Flower Ladies of Franklin Street. 

Blood on the Tracks

If Trump turns Fethullah Gülen over to certain torture and either imprisonment or death in Turkey, everyone from everywhere who sought survival and safety in the US, a country they trusted and used to deserve that trust, should keep their suit cases packed to flee. I'd be seeking emergency asylum from Trudeau. 

More blood is on the hands and beyond of a president who is truly without decency, an amoral sociopath. And because we are a democratic republic, every elected Republican in Congress and every Cabinet member who has failed to invoke the 25th amendment to lawfully remove this madman and strip him of any and all power shares the shame. 

I assert that there is blood and more on every person who voted for him and is not resisting by voting to balance and disempower him in the midterm election and who is not overwhelming their reps with protest calls and letters. They are covered with blood like Sissy Spacek in "Carrie." 

Whether one is willfully ignorant or helplessly stupid enough to still be on the wrong side of history and humanity no longer matters. We are SELF-GOVERNING so the responsibility falls upon us citizens. This is true of friends I had thought I knew and family I love but cannot respect because they are collabrators. May there be a God in Heaven to help us, but even if there is, WE must help and save ourselves. 

Are we really no longer "America"?

Don't even get me started on the Commander-in-Chief's behavior toward our military from his absence to this shameful attack on Admiral McRaven.

BABY JAILS

There is no acceptable euphemism for baby jails. Americans, if you are not awake to the crimes against humanity being committed by the government of the United States, WAKE UP. Only our expressed outrage will stop this discretionary atrocity. No branch of Amnesty International can agitate in its own country., but AI has declared what's happening to be torture.  I hope Amnesty around the world buries these devils in letters and protests. You may not believe this, but thousands of prisoners have been freed because the sheer quantity and bulk of letters from Amnesty members overwhelmed their offices and officers. 

But we Americans must do it as individuals since Amnesty USA is not allowed to work cases in the USA. So make your lists, get the addresses of all your representatives and powerful people and crank up your computer printer. Spend hours and dollars inundating these people with protests. And don't just write. Email. Call. Call repeatedly. Talk, shout, scream, yell. Not once but hours per day until our beloved country is allowed to stop destroying families and the lives and psyches of babies and children with damage that will NEVER heal. Never. March. Go hoarse from screaming. Fight for their lives of babies, childrens, and families. 

If you have a soul.

Stop saying this is not who we are. It IS who we are!

Children's lives being ruined at our Southern Border

What part of "traumatized for life" do we not understand?

the life of Frederick Douglass

We ignored family relations during the slave trade. Mother, father, child might be initially sold each to a different slave holder. Later, on the plantations, marriage was prohibited. A parent or child might be sold to different plantations. Newborn infants were taken from their mothers often the day of birth and cared for by a wet nurse until they were old enough to work, at age 5 or so, and were often sold without ever having gotten to know either of their parents. New mothers were usually sent back to the fields the day after giving birth, permanently damaging their health and life. One parent, the father, was often, very often, the while slave owner or his workers who were free to force relations giving the female no choice. In Modern America, family formation has been discouraged and prevented by taking benefits to the mother of children born out of wedlock if she married the father of her children or gave them a step-father. Our policies promoted and encouraged illegitimacy and absent fathers.

We forcibly took Native American children from their parents and sent them federal government oardimg schools fatr from home to be made over in hair, clothing, language, beliefs like the white majority. They were stripped of their native culture. Their hair was cut; their clothes were changed, their culture was stripped from them,

Before and After

and they were brutally beaten for using their Native American languages. These beatings continued in our public schools into the 1950's, some right here in western North Carolina.

If you were as much as 1/16th Japanese, you lost your freedom after Pearl Harbor. Thousands and thousands of Japanese American citizens, people who were born here and couldn't even speak Japanese, were incarcerated in concentration camps, a practice euphemistically called

"internment." Although there was little overt and deliberate shattering of family structure, conditions were terrible. An entire family could be forced to live in one horse stall with no facilities to cook or clean themselves.. Tar paper shacks were sometimes rapidly built. Historians have shown beyond doubt that the claim that the Japanese Americans were incarcerated because they were a national security threat is totally false and that pure and simple racism fueled this movement.

We are going through another epoch in which white supremacy drives America. The same problem is growing in Germany and Italy. If we are not a facist country at this moment, we are hurtling through time and space to become one. Fascism is nascent all through the Western Democracies in which freedom and equality ruled for almost 70 years.

MR. SESSIONS' SCRIPTURES

Now that Sessions has brought the Bible into the discussion, let's look at a few examples of what Biblical scripture tells us to do:

Deuteronomy 10: 19 You shall love the stranger, for you were once strangers in the land of Egypt.

Leviticus 19:34 The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.

Matthew 25: 35 I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me.

Matt. 25:40 Truly I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of my brethren you did it to me.

We have too many citizens among us who have not learned from history. Too many don't even know history.

America is currently ruled and controlled by apostates and philistines -- faux Christians, and they don't even know it.

Edmumd Burke said that all that is required for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.

Only a minority are perpetrators. But the rest of us must each decide for ourselves whether we will be accomplices, accessories, aids, abettors, silent partners. Good people who do nothing.

I will NOT be a person who does nothing.

My Cow Cat

Addendum: 

My beloved cow cat Readmore lost his battle with cancer and walked down the cat lane of the Bridge across the Rainbow on Novemer 28, 2017. He was welcomed by the loving siblings he had never met but who went before. He will be loved by Rabbit, Wheel, twins Razzy and Rachel, Cecil, Bobbi, Steve, Fang, Gray Cat (who dismembered his stuffed Newt Gingrich doll) and Hei Mao, and my Shadow. When the time comes, Readmore will joined the welcoming party for newbie Colleen and others who may join the family before my turn to be reunited with all my fur children comes. Catministrators should note that he loves the internet and that he may sneak over to the Dog Park to snuggle with his Pyr Kia. 

💗💔

Violence

Little Miss Huckabee Sanders almost made me throw up today. The epidemic of kids murdering kids in Chicago is a "MORAL PROBLEM," opined the predictably permanent tabula rasa, spawn of the man who once said there is more freedom in North Korea than in Obama's America. 

In Dostoyevsky's great work, Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov has a dream, an ugly, grotesque nightmare, that is so effectively narrated that its horror made me almost unable to get through it, and still does. I ask of you the patience to read the excerpt below:

"… He ran beside the mare, ran in front of her, saw her being whipped across the eyes, right in the eyes! He was crying, he felt choking, his tears were streaming. One of the men gave him a cut with the whip across the face, he did not feel it. Wringing his hands and screaming, he rushed up to the grey-headed old man with the grey beard, who was shaking his head in disapproval. One woman seized him by the hand and would have taken him away, but he tore himself from her and ran back to the mare. She was almost at the last gasp, but began kicking once more. 
“I’ll teach you to kick,” Mikolka shouted ferociously. He threw down the whip, bent forward and picked up from the bottom of the cart a long, thick shaft, he took hold of one end with both hands and with an effort brandished it over the mare. 
“He’ll crush her,” was shouted round him. “He’ll kill her!” 
“It’s my property,” shouted Mikolka and brought the shaft down with a swinging blow. There was a sound of a heavy thud. 
“Thrash her, thrash her! Why have you stopped?” shouted voices in the crowd. 
And Mikolka swung the shaft a second time and it fell a second time on the spine of the luckless mare. She sank back on her haunches, but lurched forward and tugged forward with all her force, tugged first on one side and then on the other, trying to move the cart. But the six whips were attacking her in all directions, and the shaft was raised again and fell upon her a third time, then a fourth, with heavy measured blows. Mikolka was in a fury that he could not kill her at one blow. 
“She’s a tough one,” was shouted in the crowd. 
“She’ll fall in a minute, mates, there will soon be an end of her,” said an admiring spectator in the crowd. 
“Fetch an axe to her! Finish her off,” shouted a third. 
“I’ll show you! Stand off,” Mikolka screamed frantically; he threw down the shaft, stooped down in the cart and picked up an iron crowbar. “Look out,” he shouted, and with all his might he dealt a stunning blow at the poor mare. The blow fell; the mare staggered, sank back, tried to pull, but the bar fell again with a swinging blow on her back and she fell on the ground like a log. 
“Finish her off,” shouted Mikolka and he leapt, beside himself, out of the car. Several young men, also flushed with drink, seized anything they could come across—whips, sticks, poles, and ran to the dying mare. Mikolka stood on one side and began dealing random blows with the crowbar. The mare stretched out her head, drew a long breath and died. 
“You butchered her,” some one shouted in the crowd.
“Why wouldn’t she gallop then?” 
“My property!” shouted Mikolka, with bloodshot eyes, brandishing the bar in his hands. He stood as though regretting that he had nothing more to beat."

And now please think how many human African slaves were starved, worked to near death, brutally beaten on beautiful ante-bellum manicured estates. Each of their murders was an Active sin, an Active crime, committed by White America. 

What we are now standing back and allowing to happen in Chicago and other places to young people, especially African-American teenagers and young adults is also a crime, but a crime we PASSIVELY commit by things like standing back and doing nothing except feeling morally superior. Just hearing of each murder should make us all as sick to the point of vomiting as the Dostoyevsky horse dream does to me. AND THESE ARE HUMAN BEINGS, NOT HORSES. THEY ARE OUR CHILDREN.

Note: In 1979, the great actor John Hurt portrayed Raskolnikov in a superb three-episode TV mini-seriers. If the horse scene is in it, I've blocked it out of my mind! I think I'll see where it's streaming. 

EVERYTHING'S CONNECTED.

Worse than Watergate

Nixon never, never, and never would have, let an unfriendly foreign power, let alone one run by a KGB agent, hack into or meddle in or influence any United States election. Yet he was guilty of impeachable offenses and resigned 2 years and 2 months AFTER the Watergate break-in took place and was reported all over the world.

Trump WILL BE taken down, hopefully to a traitor's noose, but St. Elizabeth's Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Washington, DC. It may take years. Sun Tzu said it around 500 BC. It's been said more than one way since Plutarch lamented the slowness of juststice. Today's expression adds hope: "The wheels of justice turn slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine."

We will be shouting truth after truth for years. MLK's "fierce urgency of now" makes it difficult to be patient. Every day is full of danger. But we all know people who will laugh at our outrage, looking straight at evil but neither thinking or caring what it is they see. It could take several years, but we will be vindicated, the insane criminal will be found guilty of soooo many crimes, and the wheels of justice will succeed.

I can hardly wait.