"I am enough"

My sister-in-law sent me this.  I highly recommend it.  Don't worry about being afraid, enjoy the adventure.  You are enough.

Peace and joy

My wishes for my family, friends, neighbors, and all living beings on the planet, as well as for Mother Earth herself at this turning of the year:

Peace & Joy

Sorry to be absent so long.

The end of my working is coming fast, and it has been busy.  Here's a comment I posted on Blue Hampshire in a discussion of celebration and refusal to celebrate at this time of the year:

 I come back again and again (0.00 / 0)

to the renewal of the solstice.  Being of a scientific bent, the fascination of the planets, the stars, the universe bring me the greatest joy.  So does the knowledge that under the frost there are seeds of spring.  And then, being a anthropology student at times, I know that all the mid-winter celebrations spring from this well of old, old knowledge of the turning of the year and underlie the other celebrations.  With the solstice, I feel safe.  There is none of the human history of religion, with its hatreds of the "other" and its wars and tortures.  There is simply hope.

A reminder - re: maple syrup & the local economy -

that while we are bogged down in a very important disagreement about taxes and spending, climate change is gathering steam:

Rock said the acceleration of global warming, which began in the early 1900s, became "more aggressive" from the 1970s on.

He said all the warmest years on record have occurred within the last 12.

He added that, going into the second decade of the 2000s, people are seeing weather changes that had previously been predicted to occur much later on in the century.

"The maple is on the edge," Rock said.

On top of all the usual reasons that the Republicans are pushing their destructive agenda, they are also distracting us from the greatest threat of all,  climate change.  It is really, really important not to lose track of that, and to remember that there will be enormous economic impacts from this, that may make our current problems pale in comparison.
How much of the NH and New England economy is tourist-based?  Dependent on snow and foliage?

Dickishness

Steve Benen comes back again and again, and quotes others coming back again and again to what the media WILL NOT DISCUSS.  He quotes Andrew Sullivan:

What we've observed these past two years is a political party that knows nothing but scorched earth tactics, cannot begin to see any merits in the other party's arguments, refuses to compromise one inch on anything, and has sought from the very beginning to do nothing but destroy the Obama presidency. I see no other coherent message or strategy since 2008. Just opposition to everything, zero support for a president grappling with a recession their own party did much to precipitate, and facing a fiscal crisis the GOP alone made far worse with their spending in the Bush-Cheney years. There is not a scintilla of responsibility for their past; not a sliver of good will for a duly elected president. Worse, figures like Cantor and McCain actively seek to back foreign governments against the duly elected president of their own country, and seek to repeal the signature policy achievement of Obama's first two years, universal healthcare.

This is a great deal of why I really can't attack Obama and the Democrats as a party without feeling like I am not telling the whole story.  I wish it were so simple, that the Democrats are entirely feckless and we should just leave them behind and move on.  Over and over I realize that you and I here know a lot more about what is really going on than the rest of our fellow citizens, and there is a reason for that. Steve Benen quotes Steve M:

[T]here's an MSM take on Republicans that strengthens the GOP: namely, that no matter what the party does, it's a legitimate party interested in governance. It's one of our major political institutions -- it can't ever be talked about as if it's gone off the rails, as if it's thuggish and deliberately acting in opposition to the national interest. Major political parties just don't do that with malice aforethought.

Think about laundry detergents -- all those well-established brands made for years by well-established companies. Now imagine that there was a change of formula that meant one of them -- Tide or All or Wisk or Cheer or Gain or Fresh Start or whatever -- was suddenly made with illegally massive doses of carcinogens. Imagine that this wasn't a secret -- it was openly available information -- but it was never reported, simply because, well, Procter & Gamble and Sun Products and Unilever and the rest are fine, upstanding, well-established companies, so it's just unthinkable that one of them would be selling dangerous products in the supermarket, blatantly and unashamedly.

So I guess I have to add to my pressing projects, campaign finance reform and the end to corporate personhood, fixing the media so our fellow citizens realize what is going on, that our political process is being poisoned and is very, very ill as a result.

Cross-posted at Blue Hampshire.

Whose failure?

In the December 6th edition of The Nation, a magazine I continue to get by snail mail so I can read it wherever I can pick it up, Eric Alterman has a thought-provoking piece reminding us that, despite some obvious miscalculations on the part of the president, we just might share some of the blame for the failures to reach the goals we thought we voted for in 2008.

But Obama's mistakes in office are nowhere near the entire story. The rest of us must shoulder our share of the blame as well. A few days after the midterm elections, Van Jones spoke to a progressive gathering in Washington. After recalling the pageant of progressive performers who came to DC to celebrate Obama's inauguration at the Lincoln Memorial...Jones reminded his listeners, "You had the full beauty of the American people, the full force of our culture on display.... None of those people quit the movement and joined the Tea Party. All that creativity, all that power, all that spirit, all that soul-it's still here. We went from We Are One to We Are Done.... Well, guess what? The days are now over when any of us can afford to wait for a politician in Washington, DC, to set the tone and the tenor and the face of our movement."

One of the things that really, really bothered me in the run-up to the 2010 election was hearing too many people who were activists in 2008 complain that Obama hadn't fixed it all.  And these were Democrats I was trying to work with.  I know that some of the problem was exhaustion on the part of those of us who had working our hearts out since Howard Dean came to town (perhaps we had not learned how to pace ourselves, or perhaps the climb was steeper and more difficult than we realized at the time?).  But some of it was, OK, we elected him, why hasn't he fixed it?

Yes, I would agree that it might have been better to push for the stars and compromise on reaching the moon or Mars afterwards, but I suspect we also forgot that there were a lot of people out there who helped elect Obama who were voting to get rid of the Bush agenda and who expected Obama to rise above politics and somehow bring everyone in line, including the Republicans, to make things better.  How many of us have been shocked by how truly dreadfully the Republicans in Congress have behaved in the past 2 years?  I know I have been, I really did not imagine they would become traitors for political gain.

This is what makes this so hard for people like me.  I really, really want us to save this country, and it feels like it is slipping away.  I am terrified of climate change and terrified for my grandchildren. I am not particularly happy about perhaps finding the retirement I am about to undertake so that I have TIME to work for the causes I believe in (I probably could have worked for pay for a couple more years, limping along emotionally and sometimes physically, with only my own future in my tunnel vision) made much more difficult as the Republicans destroy the economy and the scant but, with care, adequate retirement income I planned to use to support my activism.

I desperately need to find what is the best use of my time over the next couple of years.  All ideas are welcome.

"Do you know what is happening?!!!"

He turned on the news this morning and discovered that the Republicans are not going to let unemployment insurance continue for millions of unemployed people.  He still sort of buys the idea that people should just take any job, and that some of the unemployed are lazy, but it is starting to penetrate his prejudices that his world view may have a few holes in it.  That maybe there aren't even any low-paying jobs out there, that maybe all the Republicans want is to make Obama a failure, no matter who they hurt in the process, that hope is passe', that we really are going to go there.

Next step, what are we going to do about it?