American Cancer Society's Write 30 Minutes a Day Challenge

 

I am participating in the American Cancer Society’s challenge to write for thirty minutes each day in May. I do a lot of writing and I can meet this challenge. What I plan to do is make a blog entry each day with what I’ve written.

I wanted to participate in memory of loved ones who fought cancer bravely but succumbed:

My brother-in-law Jeff

My sister-in-law Ann

My dear friend Kay

I also wanted to help raise money to support research and a cure for all those who are currently fighting with this vicious disease.

My Facebook to the fundraiser is here.

Thank you to all who wish to support the American Cancer Society this month.

The First Earth Day

 

When I was a kid, before junior high school, I can remember going with my family on a long road trip into Virginia. We were led there by friends of my parents from the Deaf club in Baltimore. They were outdoors people and knew of beautiful, isolated places in which we could picnic and swim in the Potomac River.  I remember the deep green of the seeming forest and the quiet, except for singing birds and rustling unseen little animals. The water was clear, cool, and refreshing. It was clean. I fell in love with it, and so did my family. When my aunt, uncle, and cousins came down for a visit from Long Island, we remembered our way back and took them there.

I have no idea what it looks like now, over 50 years later. I’m pretty sure the water isn’t clean anymore, and that people shouldn’t swim in it.

I remember the first commercial I saw about pollution and the environment, and it made a big impact on me. I noticed litter along the sides of roads and highways from drivers carelessly tossing their trash out an open window. I noticed litter dropped wherever a person might be walking, and in parking lots where they’d just dump their car ashtrays.

 

Nowadays, I see masks littering the parking lots of stores along with the usual drink containers and snack bags.  Even on our rural roads, there’s always trash poking up from the grass along the sides.  People don’t seem to care at all.

I have seen people dump their drink cups and snack bags when there is a trash receptacle just a few steps away.  I wonder what is wrong with people that should be so careless with the only home we have?My husband and I will pick up trash we see lying around and dispose of them.It's so easy to put trash in its proper place.

There was a difference on our first Earth Day, this day in 1970. There was more of a spirit of cooperation and concern for the Earth. I was 15 years old on that first Earth Day, and I felt hopeful. I hoped that the waterways would be cleaned up from the poisons polluting them from companies dumping their wastes. I hoped drivers would stop throwing their trash out the window and wait until they came to a place to safely dispose of it. I hoped pedestrians and picnic goers wouldn’t litter as they walked or ate.  So much for the hopes of a teenager.

I read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring some time in the late 1980s-early 1990s. I wish everyone would read it.  I didn’t understand all the chemistry she wrote about, but I did understand one thing she wrote that gave me a kick in the stomach: anyone born after 1954 (year I was born) carried DDT in their livers.  DDT. That’s a poison freely used until it was banned years later. But many of our parents and we small children were sprayed with it as the dust croppers flew overhead.

Now we have forever chemicals and tiny bits of plastic this’n’that that we’re breathing in or ingesting.  Forever.  They don’t go away. They become part of us.

Last August, the Inflation Reduction Act was passed. Tucked into it were funds to help the environment and combat climate change. It was the first piece of legislation to address environmental issues in years. This year, the Rethuglicans would like to gut it and roll back other measures President Biden put into place to fight climate change and help poor beleaguered Mother Nature.

Where do these Rethuglicans think, people are supposed to live after planet Earth has been destroyed?  Maybe they think Elon Musk will have built enough spaceships to take all the rich people to … where?

I miss the 1970s.

For more on Earth Day and the background leading up to it:

Heather Cox Richardson 

This Day in History 

 

 

Another State Goes Fascist

There was yet another school shooting two Mondays ago, at a Christian school in Nashville, TN. Three little kids and three adults were shot and killed by yet another rampaging person trying to murder as many people as possible. The police responded quickly, thankfully, and killed the shooter.

And what was the response of Rethuglican lawmakers in Washington? Crickets.

But some of the Rethug legislators in TN did say something, mostly having to do with a cowardly it sure was horrible but "we're not gonna fix it." Cowardly because they all depend on their campaign contributions from the National Rifle Association. I knew nobody was going to do anything productive. The best the Rethugs could offer was more hypocritical and useless “thoughts and prayers”.

Something very encouraging happened the other day. Thousands of young people, the Gen Z folk, walked out of their high schools and colleges and began to march. They were joined by other supportive adults but these were mostly the young.

I was so proud of them. They reminded me of my generation once upon a time. It was a time when we Boomers were young, had enough of Establishment ways, and took to the streets. Gen Z were on a march to save their lives. They’d had enough of Rethuglican excuses and deflections and denials. Now they wanted action. They were amazing.

They flooded the capitol building, where most of the legislators there just brushed right by them. There was one State Assemblyman that did agree to meet with them and why he did, I couldn’t begin to guess. He was the most useless Rethuglican spokesman ever. All he did was ask the young people to show him which firearm they’d be most comfortable being shot with. What the fuck was that?

Three legislators inside interrupted the session briefly to support the protestors and they were promptly kicked out. The angry Rethug majority threatened to expel them permanently. They voted to do so and then truly showed their racist colors! Two of the legislators were young Black men. The other was a middle-aged white woman. Two were expelled; one was not. Guess who. If you guessed only the Black guys were expelled, you’d be spot on.

They were initially accused of instigating an insurrection ala January 6^th. Then I guess the charge was disorderly behavior. But still: why was the white woman spared?

So, does the Tennessee state government reject the First Amendment? Or is it only when it’s the minority objecting to the majority’s way of doing things?

And while we’re talking about disruptive behavior, why do we still have traitors and legislators who engaged in treasonous behavior still service in the nation’s House and Senate?

This is in-your-face-we-don’t-give-a-fuck-how-it-looks fascism, racism, suppression, and repression going on right out in the open for everyone to see.

Rev. Barber might ask: “What are we going to do with this?”

Our votes aren’t enough. People need to be speaking up and pulling a Howard Beale: “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.” We need to get into “good trouble” like the Tennessee Three. We need to be joining with other organizations that are fighting fascism and the attacks on democracy. We need to start paying attention to what’s happening around us.

I felt better this morning and into the afternoon when I began reading and hearing about the pushback going on over what happened to the two Black legislators. I’ve been reading articles today in which the Tennessee Assembly is condemned for an illegal action in violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment.

One of the expelled legislators is from the Nashville area and their city council is moving to reinstate Mr. Jones to his seat. They are outraged by what happened.

Mr. Pearson is from the Memphis area and there’s no word on what will happen with that council. He should be reinstated too.

I will not set foot in any fascist state. Increasingly more and more red states like Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and now Tennessee are going on my do-not-go-there list.

We are having issues with spreading fascism because once the Rethugs began to realize they weren’t going to be able to steal elections by crying they’d been cheated of a win, they began stacking the school boards, township councils, city councils, and state legislators with ultra-right wing conservative and/or evangelical MAGA QAnoners. Now we have these people trying to run democracy into the ground.

I got an email from an organization called Run for Something. They are encouraging that WE start running for these positions too. I thought about Rev. Barber again. “What are we going to do with this?” I thought about what I could do. I saw that there would be a position on my district’s school board, and I decided I would run for it.

We must DO something.

Other worthy articles I read yesterday and today:

Dan Rather

Alternet

Truthout

Huff-Post

Raw Story 

Bullying

 An 11-year-old middle schooler committed suicide in a bathroom stall at her school on February 6^th. I’ve only begun to see stories about it here on Friday and here today. The child went to a middle school here in Burlington County, not terribly far from where I live. How could this happen? I know how: nothing seems to effectively stop bullies, especially if the adults in the picture don’t act.

Why do children and adults bully? Is it a result of growing up in a home where they, themselves, are or have been bullied? I don’t know and I really don’t care. It’s never okay to be a bully.

Many of us have been bullied and have different ways of responding to get through it. I was bullied in junior high school. I was socially naïve when I entered seventh grade in 1967. My bullying began with a childish story I wrote for a creative writing assignment in English. The other students were brutal and continued to be throughout the year.

I had one friend, a quiet student who probably would’ve caught the brunt if the class hadn’t descended on me first. We were all in the enrichment track because of how we’d performed academically the year before.

It got so I didn’t want to go to school. Every morning, my stomach began to hurt. I couldn’t eat. I was filled with dread. At first, my parents thought I might have a virus and that saved me for a blessed week. After that, they realized it wasn’t a virus as I continued balking about going to school. It got to the point they’d have to literally drag me to the car and drive me to school.

My homeroom teacher noticed something was wrong and brought me out to the hallway to discuss it. I told her what was happening. She had me meet with my guidance counselor, who tried to convince me that it would be different next year. The thought of having to go through my junior high school years with this group of students made me burst into tears. I wanted off the track.

The counselor couldn’t believe his ears.  Didn’t I realize that I would be bored if I left this enrichment track? I didn’t care. I preferred boredom to the daily torment of one classmate after the other. Reluctantly, he agreed to switch me to the next track down the following school year. I just had to get through the last few months of seventh grade.

The following year, I made friends with the other kids in my class. I was happy the rest of my time in junior high. I wasn’t bullied there anymore, nor in high school. I am very happy that I dropped that track because whenever I encountered any of those students in the halls during 8^th and 9^th grades, they attempted to insult and intimidate me. But I was confident, surrounded by friends who accepted me and so I laughed at them.

What would have happened if I’d stayed with that group? It might have been different later, as we got older. But what would have happened to me, emotionally? I don’t credit that counselor for saving me. I think it was the homeroom teacher who saw how unhappy I was. The rest of it was me, saving myself.

Two of my children were bullied. My son is on the spectrum, high functioning and brilliant. He was successful in elementary school but encountered bullies in middle school. His initial response was to humiliate them in the classroom by exposing their ignorance of topics. That didn’t endear him to some students. In shop class, one person got his revenge by throwing sawdust into my son’s eyes. Another vandalized his jacket and backpack. I went to the school and made a big stink and then something was done. In high school, my son took to practicing martial arts moves and successfully kept the bullies away during lunch.

My youngest daughter got bullied in elementary school. And why? Because she had a pixie haircut, the girls in her class told her that she must be a boy because her hair was short. With very straight hair, my daughter preferred to keep the length short and so this kind of thing followed her throughout high school. Then her sexuality was questioned in earnest. My daughter did have a group of friends she was close to throughout and so she ignored her tormentors as I did.

But it still hurts.

It’s terrible that bullying still runs rampant in schools, even when the parents and victimized students speak up. It’s not dealt with adequately or is minimized or, at worst, completely ignored. That seems to be what happened in the case of this young student from Mt. Holly.

Her mother has become very vocal about what’s happened.  Both she and her daughter attempted to have the issue addressed and redressed, but complaints were ignored. And now that mom is without her child.

As for the bullies, do they feel any guilt for the death they caused? I’ll bet they don’t. They’ll have somehow put the blame on the child they victimized, leaving themselves free to torment the next student they want to bully.