"Here's another question I've been pondering - what is all this shit about angels? Have you heard this? Three out of four people believe in angels. Are you fucking stupid? Has everybody lost their mind? You know what I think it is? I think it's a massive, collective, psychotic chemical flashback for all the drugs smoked, swallowed, shot, and absorbed rectally by all Americans from 1960 to 1990. Thirty years of street drugs will get you some fucking angels, my friend!" - George Carlin (attributed: source unknown)
I know you and I don't believe in god, George (or life after death, so who the hell am I writing this to anyway?), but if there is a god, I'm pretty sure it would have sense of humor enough to make you an angel. You'll be missed.
We headed down to the Alameda County Clerk-Recorder's Office at 5 p.m. to take part in an historic day. These things don't seem to happen too often, but today was a day when love, enlightenment, and compassion won out over hate, intolerance, and ignorance. It was a beautiful and inspiring scene. Here are a few of the pictures I snapped.
More signs of progress... one lone, sad little protester:
I just got off of the phone with my dad. My dad is a young 69-year-old man, and first generation American on his father's side, who is originally from Japan.
My dad grew up in East L.A. in the '40s, and knew he wanted to help people, so right out of high school he joined the Christian Brothers. When he found himself realizing one day that he wasn't happy, nor feeling particularly fulfilled, he left the Brotherhood and became a sort of latter day hippie. He played the guitar, singing mostly folk songs about love and peace and possibility. He became a public school teacher to some of the most troubled and inspiring kids he'd ever met, and after more than 25 years in education, he turned his life towards helping senior citizens with their financial issues, wanting to give them the tools and support they needed to survive in this increasingly impossible economy of ours.
My dad is a dreamer. No, what I mean is, my dad is a Dreamer. And I am his daughter.
So tonight, after crying and clapping my hands red while listening to the presumptive Democratic Party's 2008 presidential candidate make a gorgeous, hopeful, inspiring, grateful speech, I called my dad.
"It's him! Oh, my God, it's him! I'm so happy! I can't believe it! Oh, please, please, be our President!"
I was hysterical with that odd mixture of hope and fear that I think a lot of us are feeling these days while eagerly drinking in every nuance of every word and movement of our country's greatest hope: a simple, honest man. I think my roommate said it best: "It's kind of a weird feeling. I mean, I feel good about national politics? Is that right?"
A lot of my friends that are following the presidential race this year seem to be restating the same sentiment in a mish-mash of descriptive language and nuance. Can this be real? Are we allowed to be hopeful? Isn't Hope for the foolish?
I said to my dad -- once I'd become semi-coherent again and he'd had a chance to get a word in edgewise himself -- "It's nice for my generation to have our own kind of Bobby Kennedy. I mean, I know there's no real comparison, but still --"
"I know," he said. "I know what you're feeling. And you have to."
I love my dad.
Because it's true: We have to. We have to live as both thinking and feeling creatures. We are not exclusively one or the other. And the choices we make in our politics must reflect the Full Person that we are, because to me the bottom line is very simple: We are the choices we make. Right or wrong. Good or bad. Hell, labeled or unlabeled!
In past writings, I have encouraged you all to take the time to find something you believe in, that will get you up and out and Into the Thick Of It. This is why. It's your life. It's your country. It's your environment. We are an ownership society, but not in the way some progressive writers have purported us to be. We are an ownership society because we are Human Beings who live with Consequences. We belong to the choices we make, just as surely as those choices are our own, and that is why we are able to marry that which we feel with what we know. As complex as each of us may be, that is how complex our world is. And we are of that world.
So, yes, be afraid. But also be hopeful. Be courageous. Be involved. Make a choice.
And whether or not you and I make a similar choice come November, that's not really the larger point. The thing is to step into this world that is yours and mine and everyone's. The most honest way to do this is to do it whole-heartedly, and I for one will not fault you for doing so.
Hitler, Stalin men who need no introduction King Leopold of Belgium, that’s right Everyone thinks he’s so great Well he owned The Congo He tore it up too He took the diamonds, he took the gold He took the silver Know what he left them with? Malaria
A President once said “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” Now it seems like we’re supposed to be afraid It’s patriotic in fact and color coded And what are we supposed to be afraid of? Why, of being afraid That’s what terror means, doesn’t it? That’s what it used to mean
From “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country” Written by Randy Newman
Welcome to the WE campaign: a new Web site and this new campaign, whose apparent intent is to emphasize that, with a little commitment and determination, and a lot of hope and positivity, We The People are fully capable of literally saving our planet. (Not a bad line of work, I'd say!) So check it out, get pumped, and jump on board! I'll see you there!
On Sunday, April 13, Darfur activists around the world will speak out together for the children of Darfur. Activists will participate in Tents of Hope, a project that unites the global Darfur movement on a single day to show support for children suffering through genocide.
Tents of Hope asks communities to respond to the crisis in Darfur by building a tent and making it their own work of art – a simple symbol hope for the millions of Darfurians driven from their homes.
On April 13, communities will hold events around their Tents of Hope to remind world leaders that the children of Darfur have suffered for far too long.
The site is part of Save Darfur, and includes a link to help you find events in your area.
Also, for those of you in the S.F. Bay Area, a group of human rights activists are planning a peaceful protest against the Beijing Olympic Games on April 9th, the day that the Olympic torch arrives in San Francisco. The point of the event is to protest China's human rights record, especially in light of the ongoing tragedies in Tibet. If you want to know more about this event, e-mail me, using the link on our homepage, with the subject line "April 9th Event" and I'll put you in touch with one of the organizers.
Regarding the whole Geraldine Ferraro debacle, I really quickly wanted to repeat something I heard Randi Rhodes say (on more than one occasion):
Geri's right; she was an affirmative action candidate for Vice President. But her candidacy was nothing like that of Barack Obama's. She was appointed to her candidacy. Barack Obama has constructed, from the ground up, one of the best, most efficient, and most effective political campaigns in the modern political realm.
The people are choosing Barack. Mondale chose Geraldine.
Maybe I should start a war. Or a cult. Or a cult about war, with T-shirts and headscarves and a big glowing gold-rimmed messiah with fangs and guns and red spiders for eyes. I will call it something wicked like "Serpents of the Devouring Void" or "Warriors of the Crimson Misery" or maybe just "the Republican Party."
Would it help? Will I feel younger and more vibrant and important, like I've accomplished something noteworthy and fulfilled my destiny and can therefore pass through middle age more gracefully, foregoing regular fistfuls of Prozac and lots of piss-water light beer and slumped shoulders and long miserable stretches of "Tell Me You Love Me" on HBO?
Will it, in short, help me skip over the next decade or so wherein I might otherwise be doomed to suffer the tepid, ignoble hell known as the mid-life crisis because, well, that's just what happens?
Here is the bad news: It might be unavoidable. Turns out researchers compiled data from a couple million people across 80 nations and every income level and social status and gender and demographic and hairstyle, and the conclusion was pretty much irrefutable: The famed mid-life crisis, that feeling of depression and angst and what-the-hell-happened-to-my-dreams, is universal.
It's true. No matter where you live or how much money you make or how much of your mortgage payment you spend on lap dances in Las Vegas, somewhere between ages 40 and 50 (closer to 40 for women, 50 for men) feelings of futility and spiritual barrenness peak, and you feel like it's all been for naught because you're suddenly on the slippery slope toward cold, beckoning death and you never got around to writing that novel or opening that combo porn shop/laundromat/tattoo parlor or having 2.1 perfect kids or hang-gliding naked over the Swiss Alps.
[...]
Alas, there is no talk of prevention. Amid all the research and evidence, no one says what might alleviate or even eliminate the fear and the vague sense of doom, what might help you cruise over the mid-life hump with something resembling wisdom and gratitude and insight.
My guess is it starts with the usual combination, a personally customized admixture of regular, vigorous exercise, conscious food habits and minimal reality TV and great heaping doses of travel and nature and mental stimulation and truly excellent bedsheets, combined with absolute refusal to be fixed in time and place, to shrivel and hunker down and cling, as so many do, to one set of rules, one ideology, one notion of How It's All Supposed To Be.
Oh yes, also: Lots of regular sex and yoga and meditation and the best wine you can afford as you realize that this little blip of an eyeblink of a gift of a life races by just impossibly fast, and therefore staring too long at the future or the past, at expectation and longing, memory and regret only means you don't get to truly experience the moment you're in right now.
Isn't that the real secret? The simplest truth? Isn't that what the gurus and wise ones have been saying since before Jesus was a tingle in the loins of God? To be so present, so hotly, divinely connected to the moment you are in that time loses all relevance and age means nothing and opportunity shows up exactly as it should, and the real accomplishment, the real sense of achievement comes from celebrating each and every breath like it was a shot glass of molten meaning?
Yes. I'm going with that. What a lovely, Zen-licked, tantra-soaked perspective. I hope to suck down great heaping gallons of it, before it's too late.
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