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Posts Tagged ‘War’

Touch Points

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , , on March 10, 2026| Leave a Comment »

Our twin Grandbabies are learning to walk. They have push carts and ride-on trikes and their parents’ fingers to hold, but soon enough they will venture out on their own steam. Tiny steps, then stopping to look back; are we good? And we adults will clap and tell them how wonderful they are to explore the world upright, from point A to point B. Soon they will be leaving the couch behind and walking across the living room floor, and sure at times they will fall. It’s all part of the process.

After Sunday’s celebration of International Women’s Day, this morning I read a disturbing essay on Substack titled, “Never Eat With Women.” As usual, Anand Giridharadas’ take on the Epstein Class is lucid and enlightening. He had combed through pictures of the Epstein files and noticed something – apart from the parties with young women and girls posing in compromising positions, there were no women sitting down at tables where men had gathered for a meal. None. https://open.substack.com/pub/anandwrites/p/never-eat-with-women?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

Now I guess the Justice Department might be withholding more pictures. The DOJ recently removed approximately 47,635 files from public view claiming they were redundant and needed further redactions. Honestly I’m not sure how many files are left, thousands, tens of thousands, millions? And maybe that’s the point, overwhelm the press with data, expose the victims, and hold back the FBI notes on that 13 year old who claimed our President raped her.

“The woman who directly named Trump in her abuse allegation claimed that around 1983, when she was around 13 years old, Epstein introduced her to Trump, “who subsequently forced her head down to his exposed penis which she subsequently bit. In response, Trump punched her in the head and kicked her out.” Out of more than 3 million pages of files released by the Justice Department in recent months, this specific allegation against Trump appears only in copies of the FBI list of claims and the DOJ slideshow. But a review of FBI case file logs and discovery documents turned over to Maxwell and her attorneys in the criminal case against her point to one place the claim could have come from — and how serious investigators took it.” https://www.npr.org/2026/02/24/nx-s1-5723968/epstein-files-trump-accusation-maxwell“

But back to the billionaire bros who like to dine amongst themselves. Anand’s point is that the 1% are very different from you and me in that they have fewer checkpoints in their day to day life. In their private mansions, their yachts and their jets, life is choreographed like an episode of Downton Abbey. Everything is designed to run smoothly, they rarely have to deal with the common folk. Think about Spring Break, maybe your family is trying to connect to a flight for Paris, in say Chicago, but weather is going to make this impossible. You are going to have to deal with ticket agents, gate agents, TSA agents, people on the phone (if you’re lucky) and of course your children, and maybe even passengers on the plane, if you manage to board – all of these personal interactions combine to make “touch points.” An average family on vacation, flying from one place to another, has many touch points.

OTOH, Anand quotes a luxury jet employee: “When you fly commercial, there are more than 700 touch points,” says Alexandra Price, brand communications manager at the jet-charter company VistaJet. “When you fly private, it’s just 20.” And of course, when you OWN the jet and can gift a ride to a royal and his family, well that gives you unlimited access to the halls of power. And the number of touch points goes down into the single digits. And you might think you are untouchable, that you can get away with murder on Park Avenue.

We are now into the second week of a war the American people want no part of, and the American president has yet to explain despite his rambling speech yesterday. Operation Epic Fury has resulted in almost 1,500 deaths in Iran, including hundreds of civilians. Regional fighting has spilled over into Lebanon where 400 have been killed, and a dozen in Israel. Last night, another US soldier was returned in a body bag to Dover Air Force Base, making that seven so far, with an eighth dead American not yet returned.

If we started connecting the dots, the touch points of this administration make no sense, unless you count the money the president’s family is making from his connections and predictions market. Buried in the weeds of some independent reporting we can read what’s driving their epic fury. Greed wins out over glory every time.

Don’t you wish some judge would order Mr T to sit down to a dinner, not hamburgers mind you, with Senator Elizabeth Warren? I can only hope that by the time these two grow up we’ll have elected a woman president…

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World Repair

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 3, 2026| 2 Comments »

I was going to write about darning. You know, the process of fixing or repairing holes or worn-out areas in fabric, woven or knitting goods using just your hands with a needle and thread. It’s something our grandmothers all learned to do at an early age, but somehow it’s become a lost art. During the pandemic I learned a Japanese technique called Sashiko to repair an old pair of corduroy pants. I wore them recently and noticed the other knee was getting rather thin. My knees have the same ‘use by’ date, so why wouldn’t my pants? Of course, I could just let my knee poke out, but I’ve resisted that fashion transgression so far.

And then over the weekend we went to war.

In the middle of diplomatic talks with Iran, Mr T and Mr N of Israel decided to bomb Tehran. And depending on your news source, your point of view, our country is slowly waking up to a new reality. There was no Pearl Harbor, no supposed weapons of mass destruction, no reasoning behind this decision, albeit whispers of ‘regime change.’ The spin from White House sources makes me dizzy, now they are hoping to sell the story of stopping their nuclear program. Period. Instead, France is boosting its nuclear arsenal.

The death toll in Iran is 747, so far.

Let’s not forget, during Trump 1.0, back in 2018, we withdrew from President Obama’s multi-nation Iran nuclear deal. Mr T ripped it up and spit it out because he’s a vengeful man. Abandoning this Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPA) left our allies holding the bag and imposed economic hardship on the Gulf. Now we have an unchecked, unbalanced president willing to put American lives at risk.

The death toll of American service members is 6, so far.

I opened my editor Lisa’s blog this morning. She was planning a trip to Israel to see her grandchildren for Purim, but her airline cancelled her flight. She had baked hamantaschen to bring along for this fun, festive Jewish holiday. Instead she got to video chat with her family sheltering in a bunker. Her grandson asked her if we have sirens here. https://lisakwinkler.wordpress.com/2026/03/02/flight-to-israel-cancelled-again/

The death toll in Israel of civilians and soldiers is 12, so far.

And yesterday, yesterday Melania Trump spoke to the United Nations Security Council in NYC, where she actually lives, advocating “peace through education,” saying: “… that nations should promote the values of tolerance and “empathy for others, transcending geography, religion, race, gender” and denounced “rigid thinkers who embrace prejudice and shun human dignity… When a nation restricts thought, it restricts its own future.” No, I am NOT making this up. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/02/us/politics/melania-trump-un-peace-education.html

The death toll of an Iranian elementary school for girls is 165.

How can we fix this? Can our elected legislators even begin to mend the damage this administration has done? Our journalists need to step up and keep covering the Epstein files. He was allowed to continue his network of influence, bribery, corruption and sex trafficking because seemingly good people stood by and did nothing. Silence and indifference fueled the Holocaust and continue to haunt us to this day. One brave reporter will not let it go, and I recommend following Anand Giridharadas’ “The Ink” on Substack. https://open.substack.com/pub/anandwrites/p/epsteins-network-of-bystanders?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

I had to stop on my way to the Farmers Market on Saturday. Our newly blooming cherry tree was humming with bees. Tikkun olam.

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Vertigo

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , , on August 19, 2025| 2 Comments »

The nurse asked me yesterday if I’d broken any bones in the last few months. I had to think…. We were at Vandy. I was hooked up to a machine delivering my annual “life-saving” bone-building medicine Reclast. Bob was sitting next to me, on his iPad and we’d been puzzling over Connections in the New York Times. We were settling in for over an hour’s wait as this miraculous infusion worked its way through my veins. It should have been an easy question, Bob immediately said “No.”

He also said “No” when I opened my iPad to the NYTimes and announced that we could watch Mr T’s meeting LIVE with President Zelensky and European leaders at the White House. My husband is well on his way to becoming an official curmudgeon! He wasn’t always like this. Over the years, people would tell me that Bob wasn’t like most physicians; after all, he translated medical speak into normal language, and he was so laid-back and easy-going.

I mean, how many doctors do you know who drove an old school bus to Woodstock? He was the exact opposite of a curmudgeon, “a bad-tempered, difficult, cantankerous (old man) person.”

“What about my clavicle?” I said. My last broken bone was my right clavicle which I never mentioned before dear reader because after the Big Fall last year, preceding the second election of a disgraced, twice impeached, indicted president, that resulted in a broken neck and hands, I was too embarrassed. It hardly seemed relevant. We’d returned from LA in May after the twins were born, and I went to see the dentist. After putting my chair back, positional vertigo took hold resulting in my tipping over later that day and BANG. Broken clavicle.

Coupled with osteoporosis, vertigo is my enemy.

On occasion, the ceiling would spin when laying down after a severe cold. I learned not to pay much attention to that because in a family of doctors These. Things. Happen; a virus can linger and it’s best to just ignore such symptoms. Which I did because they always went away. Until the vertigo continued that day, after the dentist visit. My sister Kay has had  Meniere’s disease for most of her life, and I wondered if this was it. Am I doomed to a chronic disease of the inner ear that will make my world spin out of control at the drop of a hat?

Since the last presidential election, I’ve been caught up in this healing journey. After all, my personal scaffolding was collapsing and I had to concentrate on building strength and resilience. But the fact is, this administration is intent on carving away many of our cultural and social norms, on deconstructing our civil rights. Political theatre captures our imagination; the GOP courts Russia on Friday and the EU on Monday. Hypocrisy much? There is nothing to see here, Mr T didn’t “rape” his victim – he was convicted of sexual abuse and defaming E Jean Carroll. We have a president who sues anyone and everyone, a despot. Academic institutions, main stream media, and large corporate law firms are bending their knees.

This country is experiencing communal vertigo, deluged by a slew of alternative facts and fear. Russia DID invade Ukraine! The BBC’s headline – “Ukraine’s President Zelensky managed to avoid another disastrous Oval Office meeting with Donald Trump,” says it all. The Epstein case retreats as more shiny objects are thrown into the mix. We are trying to find a life line, a way to keep this fledgling Democracy from toppling over. And I am hoping that positional vertigo is simply a phase, and my bones will continue to heal.

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Compelling Speech

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , on May 27, 2024| Leave a Comment »

There is a movement afoot in our country that is downright dangerous. A friend recently told me that silence is best, whenever Israel and Hamas and college protestors might come up in polite conversation. But as I’ve said before countless times like a mantra – it is silence and indifference that led to the Holocaust. At first with small things, like where Jews could go to school, and later with bigger things like where Jews could live and finally sending Jews off to “work camps.” It doesn’t happen all at once, genocide is a big word that begins slowly, with small changes in rules and regulations.

Between packing today for our twice Covid-Osteoporosis-delayed Italy trip, I happened to read about PEN America cancelling our country’s highest literary award ceremony. Why? Half of the participants dropped out of the running because they wanted PEN members to sign a petition stating that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. And an anonymous group on X has created a spreadsheet, titled “Is Your Fav Author a Zionist?” complete with color-coded categories like “pro-Israel/Zionist!”

“Over the past several months, a litmus test has emerged across wide swaths of the literary world effectively excluding Jews from full participation unless they denounce Israel. This phenomenon has been unfolding in progressive spaces (academia, politics, cultural organizations) for quite some time. That it has now hit the rarefied, highbrow realm of publishing — where Jewish Americans have made enormous contributions and the vitality of which depends on intellectual pluralism and free expression — is particularly alarming… Compelling speech — which is ultimately what PEN’s critics are demanding of it — is the tactic of commissars, not writers in a free society. Censorship, thought policing and bullying are antithetical to the spirit of literature, which is best understood as an intimate conversation between the author and individual readers.” https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/27/opinion/publishing-literary-antisemitism.html

Compelling a literary society to speak in a certain way, to denounce a whole group of people, (and believe me at least 80% of Jewish Americans believe Israel has a right to exist, which makes us Zionists I guess) is using the same playbook as banning books IMHO. There have been over 4,000 book bans in schools in just the first half of this year! Parents, going to a public School Board meeting to try and weave their ideology or religious views into the curriculum, are misguided at best and malicious at worst. Our Founding Fathers would roll over in their graves because our very liberty is dependent on separation of church and state.

Of course being able to speak and write what’s on your mind presumes we live in a free society. But do we? Over 339 writers are being held in jails around the world, mostly in China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam. In this country, an ex-President can denigrate a judge’s family without being thrown in jail, he can mock reporters with cerebral palsy and talk about grabbing women by their privates. Nothing happens. In fact, he just might get re-elected. But when a comic, say Kathy Griffin, put a bloody picture of T’s head on social media, she was investigated by the DOJ and the FBI and was cancelled. Still, the twice impeached ex-Prez can call for a bloody rebellion…and that’s his free speech I guess.

This morning Bob only scooped five cicadas out of the pool, instead of 50, so maybe we’re over the hump? They should be gone by the time we return from Italy. Last week, Bob and I attended a 6th Grade debate in the halls of the TN Capitol; Hamas and Israel didn’t come up. But I was proud to hear these 12 year olds discuss AI and gun control. Our future Activists are bright and engaging, compelling even, and gave me hope. If only we could start a middle school through high school for Palestinians and Israelis.

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Quilting Pumpkins

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , on October 23, 2023| 1 Comment »

It’s true, I’m just an old arts and crafts counselor at heart, who was masquerading as a boating and canoeing counselor at Camp St Joseph for Girls. Teaching water skiing by day, and knitting at night. Over the years I’ve tackled: crocheting Irish flowers; needlepointing fancy footstools; Celtic cable knitting; sewing pandemic masks; and quilting elephant crib toys. Those tiny grey elephants of differing shades and textures, suspended over a new baby’s crib, gave me the most pleasure. That is, until now.

The arts festival we bumped into on our glamping getaway is the reason my kitchen is doubling as a sewing room, again. The owner of a little shop had the cutest small, handsewn pumpkins I’d ever seen. If you’d rather have a real pumpkin slowly dying on your front porch read no further. Bob and I are finished carving pumpkins and roasting seeds. But if I were to decorate, and that’s always a big IF, for Halloween, I’d want something sustainable that can do double duty on Thanksgiving. So I paid attention when instructions were given on how to quilt patchwork pumpkins, and then I heard,

“You can always look it up on Pinterest, DIY Fat Quarter Pumpkins!”

What the heck are fat quarters? Well a fat quarter is a piece of fabric cut crosswise from a 1⁄2-yard piece of fabric – ie an 18×44″ rectangle cut in half to yield an 18×22″ “fat” 1⁄4-yard piece. And it just so happens the store had bunches of ‘fat quarters’ already cut in lots of fall colors and patterns ready to sell. Surprise. My next grandparenting craft activity, after mosaic birdbaths, was set! I hauled out the ironing board and iron and started cutting out cardboard ellipses as pumpkin templates.

It just so happens that the war in Israel and Gaza has been escalating in tandem with my pumpkin project. The Grands finished their pumpkins in a day last weekend, but then I couldn’t stop. In the middle of a brutal conflict half a world away, I’ve found some comfort in keeping my hands busy, in making something beautiful despite growing despair. Bob reminds me that I have no control over the Mideast; I remind myself that I do have control over needle and thread.

I walk through the Fall garden, still trying valiantly to hang on. The sage and rosemary are bountiful while the tarragon begins to wither. This is my favorite time of year – a time to think about new beginnings, for harvesting, a birthday season for my family. The unbearable heat of a southern summer is gone. This is the time of year to witness squirrels collecting nuts and cardinals standing out like sentries in trees.

Thankfully my Parnassus book arrived in the mail – “The Comfort of Crows: a Backyard Year,” by Margaret Renkl. Her words about nature, about the flora and fauna in her own backyard, are a balm. Her stories soothe me into sleep.

As we move through the seasons—from a crow spied on New Year’s Day, its resourcefulness and sense of community setting a theme for the year—what develops is a portrait of joy and grief. Joy at the ongoing pleasures of the natural world: “Until the very last cricket falls silent, the beauty-besotted will always find a reason to love the world.” And grief at a shifting climate, at winters that end too soon, at songbirds growing fewer and fewer.” 

https://www.parnassusbooks.net/comfortofcrows

And the universal grief of war. I have to believe, to hope that peace is attainable. So I’ll continue to quilt as a meditation.

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Ring of Fire

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , on October 16, 2023| 1 Comment »

The war invades my thoughts. It seeps into my dreams.

A friend from the midwest asked what I thought of the war because I am the only Jew she knows. I said, “And I’m an Irish one at that!” I try not to watch the images, still I can see the brutality in my mind. Dancing with the Torah at night, dragged out of your ‘safe’ room in the morning and loaded onto a truck. Grandparents, babies, and children, sisters and brothers all herded into Gaza.

Did you know that fourteen of the 199 hostages are citizens of Thailand? They are not just Israeli citizens, some are also Americans, Italians, and Germans. I wonder how you negotiate with Hamas; do you trade Israeli soldiers for Palestinian prisoners?

Israel has a well-proven expertise in hostage rescue, which it trains for intensively. Set up in 1957, its secretive Sayeret Matkal unit is broadly similar to Britain’s SAS or America’s Delta Force. It shot to fame in 1976 with its Raid on Entebbe where its commandos rescued hostages from a hijacked plane at a Ugandan airport. The commander of that unit was Yonatan Netanyahu, the only fatality amongst the Israeli commandos. Today his brother Benjamin is Israel’s Prime Minister and it is with him that the decision rests as to whether to wait it out in the hopes of a negotiated release of the hostages or go in hard in the hopes of rescuing them by force.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-67084408

On Friday night, a week after the attack, we gathered at home around a live stream Sabbath Service from the synagogue. We listened to the Rabbi grapple with grief. In the Torah portion, we went back to the beginning, to the Creation story – a tale of the forbidden fruit. But what if the apple wasn’t a test? What if we were given free will, and the test is yet to come?

In other news, I’ve been sewing quilted pumpkins to keep my hands busy. Bob and the real Pumpkin – who wants to be Einstein for Halloween – made a pin-hole box in order to view the partial eclipse safely. It transformed the ring of fire into a small white ellipse on cardboard! And the Bug is starting to look like a California skater girl.

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Sunrise

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , on October 11, 2023| 2 Comments »

I was going to write about our glamping getaway with friends to Wildwood. But then I thought I’d have to start off before our Granville, TN jaunt, with our trip to the Emergency Department of the Bride’s hospital. And then Hamas attacked Israel.

At sunrise on Saturday the war began. The terrorists entered the country by land, sea and motorized paragliders – launching over 2,000 rockets and overwhelming Israel’s Iron Dome defenses. The descendants of Abraham are caught once again in a biblical battle and my heart aches for all the innocent Jewish and Arab citizens who are caught in the middle.

But make no mistake, their hatred runs deep.

Before glamping with friends last week, our whole southern family met up with my step-brother Eric at the Land Between the Lakes in Kentucky. If you recall, the Flapper married Eric’s father, her third husband Mr B, when I was in middle school. He was a distinguished judge in town, and he and Bob’s father shared the honor of being first and second presidents of the Dover Jewish Center Brotherhood.

Eric and I have been wanting our Grands to get together forever; he has three granddaughters living close by in St Louis, about the same age as our Bug and Pumpkin. Eric spoke fluent Hebrew and worked on a Kibbutz after college. When Vietnam happened he was drafted, and because he is a pacifist, he served as a med-evac Huey pilot. He introduced me to Arlo Guthrie and the fine art of passive resistance.

I was looking forward to hearing his thoughts on the politics of Israel today, on the extreme Orthodoxy that would like to turn Israel into a theocracy like Iran… before Saturday.

Many years ago I was visiting Eric and his wife Bev with the Flapper for their daughter’s Bat Mitzvah. He’d been a practicing dentist for over 30 years at that time. We were sitting in their living room with friends of theirs from Israel, one a young lawyer and judge who I’ll call Anat. I’d been complaining about Newark airport, about an Army soldier being searched before boarding our plane. It was the early 90s, long before TSA. And Anat said,

“You don’t think they would dress like a soldier?”

No, I hadn’t thought of that. Just like I didn’t think a plane hijacking meant a suicide mission. But her eyes changed, her posture changed, her essence changed before my eyes – Anat became a soldier. And so I immediately thought of Anat’s beautiful family in Ramat HaSharon, Israel on Saturday. I texted Bev to see if they were OK, and for now they are safe. I checked her facebook page but it was all in Hebrew, nothing past mid-September when the Holy Days began.

They should have been celebrating the end of Sukkot, a Jewish Thanksgiving and more. Last Saturday marked the end of reading the Torah in synagogues everywhere, and opening the book again to the first of the Five Books of Moses. It is a joyous time. Instead they are under attack from an enemy that wants to annihilate OUR people, the Jewish people. Their hatred runs deep. The British tried to draw boundaries on an area of nomadic tribes with fluid borders. But since shortly after the Holocaust, since 1948, Israel has been a sovereign state, a democracy, the size of New Jersey, surrounded by Arab states.

Make no mistake. Israelis do not slaughter Olympic athletes, or fly jets into buildings. They don’t strap bombs on themselves and walk into markets or behead journalists and children to post on Facebook live. Hamas must be stopped.

The sun is rising on part of my family in California – can you tell who is Jewish?

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“Strategic Ambiguity”

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , on May 2, 2022| Leave a Comment »

Yesterday’s Zoom with siblings was fun. My sister Kay and I enlightened our brother Dr Jim about the powerful, witchy ways of women. Particularly in courtship rituals – Jim always thought it was the man who usually chose his mate. Being a scientist, he saw reproduction in Darwinian terms. In fact, women have been helping women pick and choose their ‘forever after’ since Biblical times.

For instance, there was a friend of the Bride’s who was ready to settle down with her long-term boyfriend, but there was no ring in sight. Enter my single response to her plight – he says he “thinks” he loves me.

“In love there is no THINK. You either do or you don’t love someone. Move on.”

They were engaged within three months. Kay told one of her friends in an extra long relationship to buy a ticket home to South Africa. That ticket was the catalyst to a long, happy marriage. When ambiguity is a state of mind and living with uncertainty is untenable, give back what you’re receiving. Bend like the willow.

So when I read an article about the US policy regarding Ukraine this morning, I was intrigued. Written by a Rumson man I had interviewed at the Miller Center, Eric Edelman urges the State Department to abandon its “Strategic Ambiguity” policy. He is looking ahead to Taiwan, to the Peoples Republic of China, and urges us to plan accordingly by reinforcing their military capacity now. IF…

“…we are not prepared to see a thriving, prosperous democratic society swallowed up by a brutal autocratic regime led by a messianic zealot, there are a series of steps the United States must take—and soon.. .Deterrence ahead of time could very well be the stitch that saves nine.”

https://www.thebulwark.com/the-lessons-of-ukraine-for-taiwan-and-the-u-s/

Most of you know I am very much a pacifist. If only the women of the world could somehow convince men not to rattle their sabers. But after our collective experience with Mr T and a pandemic that killed millions of people, continuing an ambiguous strategy does not feel right at this time in history. Being Switzerland is NOT an option.

IF in fact, we want to save our democracy and defend fledgling democracies around the world, being proactive makes perfect sense. What do you value? Free speech? Let’s not worry about Twitter. A woman journalist for Radio Free Europe was killed by a Russian bomb in Ukraine last month. https://www.rferl.org/a/rfe-rl-president-pays-tribute-to-journalist-killed-in-her-home-in-russian-missile-strike-on-kyiv/31827576.html.

It was beautiful to see the night sky in NYC ablaze with blue and yellow buildings. But wearing the colors of Ukraine can only do so much.

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Sleepwalking Toward War

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , on March 14, 2022| Leave a Comment »

Waking up to snow a few days ago was the perfect start to Spring Break.

I always loved flying off to our favorite island in a storm, and returning to a spring full of robins and daffodils. The Rocker and Aunt Kiki flew cross country to attend the wedding of the last, single, Parlor Mob bandmate. The drummer with “Oh Yeah” tattooed across his chest said “I Do” to his new bride this weekend. And our Bride and Groom’s family took off for the mountains.

We stayed home in Nashville – to pack for The Big Move, and run our temporary kennel of three rescue dogs!

I’ve let a sober January turn into a sober February and March so far. Before the 2016 election, I’d gotten used to a glass of chardonnay with dinner; but afterwards it turned into wine while cooking dinner during a pandemic and after dinner and a tornado too. Day drinking was never my thing, although I do remember a certain soccer mom who brought a thermos of vodka cocktails to a practice in the 80s.

I’m not opposed to drinking, in fact, I’ll probably be the first to order a margarita whenever we go out to an actual restaurant again!

I’m remembering my foster Daddy Jim, every now and then he’d stop off at a bar for a beer and leave me in the car. I know, he’d be arrested today, but back in the 50s this was normal. Especially if your foster mother didn’t allow any alcohol in the house! The Flapper was a coffee addict, her liquor cabinet was locked up tight. She always said there was NO alcoholism in our family. And by filming my brother drunkenly climbing a set of stairs after his high school graduation, and showing the film every so often, she tried to insure our sobriety.

Honestly, my sleep has been so much better. In sleep hours alone, I figure I’m buying myself a few extra years of life. I was listening to a classical music station on the radio when an advertisement came on for a hospice care facility. Its mantra was – “Calm Comfort Clarity.” And my immediate response was – why can’t I have that now?

It turns out, I can…

… except for the war in Ukraine. Every day I wake to a sense of impending doom. Russia puts nuclear weapons on alert, another journalist is killed, and today we learn of a pregnant woman dying from an air strike in Mariupol. We can see her body on a stretcher. her left hip drenched in blood.

Every day I wake to see if the capital city of Kyiv has been invaded. The shelling of innocents in that city started four days ago, and still its citizens fight for their freedom. They say they would rather stand tall than live on their knees. Putin’s tanks and missiles are getting closer to Poland. I wonder what NATO will do. Will Biden step up to the bully?

What can we Americans do? Ignoring a bully like Putin won’t stop him – it was silence and indifference that allowed Hitler to invade Poland after all. I would like to put my money right in the hands of those Ukrainian people who are staying to fight for their land. A British Twitter writer I follow suggested we book an Air BnB in Ukraine, but is that a good plan? That would just help the top 2% of the population that has wifi and property to rent to others.

“The reaction to Russia’s onslaught on Ukraine has inspired innovative new ways of supporting people on the ground. Two students at Harvard designed their own “stripped-down” version of Airbnb to quickly connect Ukrainian refugees with emergency housing, Google rolled out an air raid alerts system for all Android phones, and the US State Department has even partnered with GoFundMe to establish a channel for businesses, philanthropies, and individuals to support organizations providing humanitarian assistance to Ukrainians. Separate from individual customer bookings of Ukrainian properties, Airbnb has started a refugee fund, where it is aiming to offer free, short-term housing to up to 100,000 refugees fleeing Ukraine.”

https://www.vox.com/22973133/ukraine-russia-airbnb-booking-donate-effective-altruism

I don’t mean to imply that the war is damaging my serenity. I’m about to move again, and that is my American, immediate stressor. I’m not bunking in a metro station or learning how to make molotov cocktails. I’m not running for my life. Just be careful what you say to your children and grandchildren about war and freedom. Now is the time to be clear-minded. Our country must light the way forward.

How many humans do you need to put up a chandelier?

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For the Love of Language

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , on February 28, 2022| 3 Comments »

Coming home to a cold and rainy Nashville has been hard. But our daffodils are in bloom, the tulip magnolia has tiny pink buds, and today the sun has returned. The promise of spring is in the air, along with all the construction noise of living downtown. It’s time for a rebirth; for us to start sorting, cleaning and organizing. After all, next month we move into our cozy, quiet, new/old bungalow!

Then the non-stop news from Ukraine disrupted my Pollyanna tendencies. How could a war like this happen in the 21st Century?

If we could flip a switch back to the last century, I would be heading toward the local library to read up on the history of Ukraine and Russia. After all, I have a vivid memory of my foster mother Nell (a first generation Slovak) crying in front of our black and white TV when Russian tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia. My generation came of age during the Cold War, we are primed to distrust Vladimir Putin. My children OTOH, can barely remember the Berlin Wall.

Instead of visiting the free public library, I Googled the conflict. Did you know that Stalin actually killed 4 Million Ukrainians? FOUR MILLION.

Maybe the reason this earlier genocide didn’t catch the attention of the international press was because Germany was bigger news? Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, but in 1932 Stalin ordered his soldiers to confiscate all Ukrainian grain and farm animals – he deliberately tried to starve the Ukrainian people to death. Children were eating acorns.

Still earlier, Russian Czars knew that to extinguish a culture, you start with their language.

“And, very early, the Russian Empire recognized the threat posed by a separate and particularly literary Ukrainian language to the unity of the empire. So, starting in the eighteen-sixties, there was a more than forty-year period of prohibition on the publication of Ukrainian, basically arresting the development of the literary language… and in the middle of World War One and revolution, with other nationalities trying and in some cases gaining independence, Ukrainians tried to do that but were ultimately defeated.“

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/vladimir-putins-revisionist-history-of-russia-and-ukraine

Along with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine finally won its freedom. “On 21 January 1990, over 300,000 Ukrainians organized a human chain for Ukrainian independence between Kyiv and Lviv.“

Once an authoritarian state begins to flex its muscles – to demolish a free press and ban books, including those written in a certain language – we must all pay attention. With the election of Mr T, our country came very close to the edge of democracy; our school board members were threatened with violence, and his followers are still trying to ban books! Why would the GOP continue to flirt with our twice-impeached, retired golfer at Mar-a-Lago? The craziest Florida Man I know has been praising Putin. He even fantasized aloud about being president forever like Xi Jinping!

And just like Mr T, Putin is stuck in the past. He probably wishes he’d thought of a “Make Russia Great Again” slogan. Only young Russians aren’t buying it. They live in a wired world, where truth confronts fiction. Only the elderly watch state-sponsored Russian TV. Only the old venture into libraries; young Russians and Ukrainians alike have the world at their fingertips, in their smart phones. This is becoming an intergenerational war, one Putin didn’t predict. Ukrainian civilians aren’t throwing flowers at Russian troops, they are making molotov cocktails!

My Irish ancestors taught the Irish language in schools, even though it was not allowed at the time. What can we do here to help Ukraine? The Flapper always said, “Charity starts at home!” First, I’d work to make sure our own elections are safe and secure, and that ALL Americans who are eligible to vote actually have the chance to cast their ballots. Let’s make election day a national holiday! I’d fight the misinformation and propaganda machine that is FOX news, and I’d contribute to the cause of independent journalism. Subscribe to a newspaper online that isn’t owned by a venture capitalist.

The Washington Post has an excellent article on how we can donate directly to help Ukraine. “Journalists with the Kyiv Independent have done tremendous work covering the war, offering the world constant updates as they fear for themselves, their families and their homes. The Independent has started a GoFundMe asking for support, but they’ve also promoted a separate GoFundMe — “Keep Ukraine’s media going” — for journalists around the country who have received less international attention.” 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/02/27/how-to-help-ukraine/

We need a virtual human chain today to fend off the Russian bear.

The next generation

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