President Trump says he may strip the security clearances of 6 former government officials who have been critical of him. This is the type of tactic a dictator uses, using his power to punish those who speak out against him. This is unacceptable in America!
I AM A LIBERAL
I am a liberal.
I believe in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
I believe that all men and women are created equal, and that all people deserve respect and equal protection under the law.
I believe that people are people, and that corporations are not.
I believe in a fair market which provides livable wages and opportunities for all.
I believe in the Second Amendment, which provides for a “well-regulated militia,” enabling both the right to bear arms and common sense gun regulations.
I believe that health care should be universally available and affordable for everyone.
I believe that America’s diversity adds to our strength.
I believe that a woman has the inherent right to decide whether she wants to bear a child or not.
I believe in high quality public schools to educate our next generation of citizens.
I believe in America and love it enough to try and make it even better.
I am a liberal.
by Lorie Staffan
SOLAR-POWERED HUMANS
It occurred to me the other day that humans are solar-powered. The sun helps us to make Vitamin D and it helps us sleep by regulating melatonin levels in our brains. My mood is better on sunny days; we even talk about being in a “bright, sunny mood.”
We are intimately connected with nature. We are a part of our environment. We need to keep it healthy in order to keep ourselves healthy. It’s the least we solar-powered humans can do for Mother Earth.
Filed under Environment
WHAT IF YOUR SOCIETY IS SICK?
While working on an inpatient mental health unit many years ago, a social worker friend of mine and I were debating how to define mental illness. The official definition looks at various factors like personal distress, impaired ability to function, and social convention (what society considers abnormal). It was this last one that was giving us problems. I argued that social convention is a valid factor in determining what is considered mental illness. My friend wasn’t letting me off that easy.
“But what if your society is sick?,” she asked.
I’d never considered that before. But I’ve thought about it a lot since.
What constitutes a mentally healthy culture? What does a sane society look like? Can a country be sick?
If we apply the same standards to America as we apply to people, then America doesn’t look like a sane, mentally healthy society.
A sane society doesn’t have mass shootings nearly every week. Surely, this has caused many Americans personal distress. It causes all Americans to feel less safe. It has necessitated schools, businesses, airports, and government facilities to put in metal detectors, hire more security personnel, and conduct lock-down drills. This costs money and interferes with the smooth functioning of these facilities. So we can check off the boxes beside the “distress” and “impaired functioning” criteria.
A sane society doesn’t have so many of its people working two or three jobs just to keep roofs over their heads and food on their tables. This not only causes people personal distress; it also impairs families’ ability to function. How can a family function if the parents are working multiple jobs? How can these parents spend time with their children, teach them all those things kids need to learn: how to cook, how to do laundry, how to change a tire, and, most importantly, how to live ethical lives. When families are unable to function well, society suffers as fewer students graduate high school and college, and crime and poverty increases. The “American dream” becomes more difficult for people to achieve, and the cycle of poverty becomes even more difficult to break. Do these meet the criteria for distress and poor function? You bet they do.
A sane society doesn’t have a greater proportion of its population in prison than any other nation on Earth, many for non-violent offenses. Society pays the cost of incarcerating the inmates and the inmates’ families pay the price of their absence. Distress and impaired functioning? Yes!
A sane society doesn’t tolerate law enforcement officers killing black people when video evidence shows they were no threat to the officers’ lives. It demands equal justice for all. Does killing innocent people cause distress to their families and friends? Does it cause distress to fair-minded people everywhere?
Does it reflect poor functioning by law enforcement, and cause impaired functioning of those left in the wake of these deaths? Of course it does.
“But what if your society is sick?” By most prevailing mental health criteria, America is sick. Now, what do we do about it?
Filed under Mental Health, Mental Illness, Society
REDNECKS FIGHTING WHITE SUPREMACISTS
There was a good article in Yes! Magazine about the “Redneck Revolt,” a group of self-proclaimed rednecks who are fighting racism and white supremacy in rural white communities. The article makes good points about how powerful people sow racial division to keep poor people of different races from working together for their common interests. To find out more, click here.
Filed under Race Relations, Redneck Revolt, White Supremacy
DON’T MALIGN THE DANDELION!
I’m sitting at the dining room table, looking out the huge window like a contented kitty, and I’ve noticed a difference between our yard and our neighbors across the street. Our yard has lots of cheerful, bright yellow dandelions. Theirs doesn’t. That’s probably by design; they may have sprayed herbicide to kill dandelions. I never understood that. Why would anyone want to kill them? They’re beautiful. They’re like little happy faces in the yard. Why kill them?
Dandelions aren’t only beautiful. They’re useful, too. You can make dandelion wine with them, and you can use the leaves early in the season as salad greens or you can cook them. I remember collecting dandelion greens once for my grandmother. Why poison the yard to kill them and the other useful weeds? Who wants a uniformly green, boring lawn? How dull! We have a smorgasbord in nature. Even though I don’t take advantage of it, I still like knowing it’s there. In case of dire emergency, I could harvest dandelion greens, plantain, and chicory roots. I’m not a survivalist or prepper per se, but I do like the idea of being able to live off the land if I had to. It must be the farmer’s daughter in me. I have happy memories of chewing on wild red clover for its sweetness, smelling the wild spearmint that grew by the big tree in our yard, and going to Michigan one year to hunt wild mushrooms. I grew up with the idea of wild plants (aka “weeds”) as useful and fun.
So, here’s my advice: Let the dandelions live. Let the other weeds live, too. You’ll have a more beautiful and colorful yard, you’ll save yourself a lot of work, and you’ll spare the environment toxins that are bad not only for plants, but also for us and for all animals. Why do you think they put up those little flags warning you not to walk on grass that’s been recently sprayed with herbicides? A former neighbor of mine sprayed his yard and his dog was poisoned and died.
In fact, we’ve gotten too good at killing weeds. Part of the reason that the monarch butterfly is threatened is that we’ve killed so much milkweed, the only food that monarch butterfly caterpillars can eat, that their numbers have decreased dramatically. They were very common, ubiquitous even, when I was a child. I didn’t even like monarch butterflies that much when I was a kid because they were so common that seeing one was nothing special. I’d get excited to see the other, less common and differently colored butterflies. Now I’m thrilled to see a monarch butterfly. I probably saw no more than 15 or 20 all last year. Now I’m ashamed that I didn’t appreciate them when I was younger.
We humans need to learn that when we pull at one thread in the web of life that it affects everything connected to that thread, and the threads connected to that thread, and down the line. Let’s stop trying to control everything. Let’s appreciate all of nature’s diverse beauty and the wonderful things we can do if we learn to work with nature. If you’re interested in learning about edible weeds, check out Edible Wild Food and The Balance. Now, get out there and explore your yard or the nearest park. What do you see that is edible? What do you see that is beautiful? Let’s work together to preserve it. Enjoy!
Filed under Dandelions, Edible Weeds, Environment, Herbicides, Monarch Butterflies
WHO ARE THE TRUMP SUPPORTERS, AND WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
I was hoping it wouldn’t happen, but I knew it was possible. And now it has happened. Donald Trump has been elected to become the 45th president of the United States of America. Many people, including my political junkie boyfriend, had assured me that Trump wouldn’t be elected, but I know some Trump supporters and saw how nothing he did dissuaded them from their backing of this man.
So here we are, on the verge of a Trump presidency. As a liberal Sanders supporter, I’m dismayed, of course. But Trump tapped into a disenfranchised group that I know very well, the white working class (aka “Rednecks”). I can say that, as I have redneck roots. I’m a proud farmer’s daughter, and the granddaughter of a hillbilly maternal grandmother and a bootlegger paternal grandfather. So I know these folks because I come from them, live among them, and to some degree still identify with them. Most are good people who value family, hard work, church, and country. But they have felt left behind by an increasingly less religious, more educated, and more liberal nation. While I embrace the simple lifestyle and love of nature and animals that my rural background has engendered in me, I have long been opposed to the religiosity, jingoism, and narrow-mindedness of many rural people. Now these very people have united to usher in a Trump presidency.
So why did they elect Trump? While he does embody the machismo that is so valued by the white working class, he doesn’t reflect their lifestyles or religious values. But that’s not why they elected Donald Trump. The main reason the white working class elected Donald Trump is found in the class title itself: white working class. Many members of the white working class are no longer working. Their jobs have been outsourced to foreign countries or have been replaced by automation. The jobs available pay so poorly that they have to work two or three of them just to feed their families. Some have given up on trying to find work. The world they used to know, where good-paying factory jobs were plentiful, is gone and they are ill-prepared to survive, much less prosper, in this new world. So they elected a man who promised to bring their old world back. For all the racist rancor of the campaign, I don’t think most Trump supporters are racist. They just want their jobs back, or at least they want an economy that doesn’t leave them out in the cold (sometimes literally out in the cold, as many people became homeless after the Great Recession).
The working class, regardless of race, has been poorly served by both political parties. The Republican party is the party of big business (or at least it was; who know it will change after this election?). The Democratic party was supposed to be the party that stood with the working men and women, but it has been beholden to big business for many years, too. This left the working class unrepresented by either party. For better or worse, Donald Trump filled that vacuum.
So far, Trump has been conciliatory after the election, reaching out to all Americans. I’m heartened to see this. I was also encouraged to see that the first meeting of President Obama and Donald Trump apparently went well, and that the two men were respectful and gracious to each other in their statements to the press afterwards. While I believe that Bernie Sanders would have been a more effective champion of the working class, that isn’t who they chose. We have a political revolution, though not the one I was wanting. In any case, the people have spoken, and now it is our duty as Americans to unite around President-Elect Trump and try to move forward as a country. We don’t have to stifle criticism of Trump’s policies, once articulated. But let us move beyond the vitriol and name-calling of this past election, and indeed the last several elections. Let us try to restore civility to our body politic and be respectful of each other, even when we disagree. Since the election, Donald Trump, President Obama, and Hillary Clinton have called for reconciliation. We owe it to each other and to our country to follow their examples.
Filed under Donald Trump, Politics, Presidential Election, Society
I MAY HAVE SPOKEN TOO SOON ABOUT COMEY…
I may have spoken too soon in praising FBI Director James Comey for informing Congress that there are emails that may be relevant for the Clinton private email server case. I thought he was doing this out of a sense of duty. Maybe he was. However, his release a few days later of information from an FBI probe of Bill Clinton’s pardon of a donor during his administration years ago. No charges were filed. Maybe Comey has a political motive after all, trying to undermine Hillary Clinton’s prospects for election. I hope this isn’t the case, as Director Comey has a reputation for being impartial and honorable. It does raise questions, though, which is unfortunate.
Filed under Politics, Presidential Election
COMEY’S ACT OF INTEGRITY
FBI Director James Comey has been getting a lot of criticism for his decision to inform Congress about possible new evidence in the Hillary Clinton email scandal. Though it was a break with protocol to make such information public so near an election, it was the right thing to do. The American people have a right to know that possible new evidence exists, and I hope Director Comey will release the FBI’s preliminary findings before the election. Maybe there’s something there, maybe not.
I don’t like Hillary’s penchant for secrecy, but I will vote for her. She is a smart and competent woman and there is no question that she is a better alternative than Trump. While I hope this doesn’t derail her election prospects, I still think Director Comey did the right thing. That takes courage and I commend him for it.
Filed under Politics, Presidential Election
LET THE POLITICAL REVOLUTION BEGIN!
Bernie Sanders’ strong showing in the Iowa caucuses signals that Americans are fed up with the way our nation no longer belongs to all the people, but only to the rich. We decry a system that no longer fairly rewards workers. We want our labor to enrich us, not just the richest members of society whose wealth has increased while the rest of us have gotten poorer.
Bernie Sanders says America needs a political revolution, and he’s right. Things can’t keep going like this. We can’t continue to redistribute wealth upward to the rich and deprive the rest of us. It isn’t right, it isn’t fair, and it isn’t American. We were founded to be a nation of equal opportunity, not a nation of privilege, but for at least the last 30 years this isn’t how it’s been. It’s time to make America once again a land of equal opportunity.
Let the political revolution begin!
Filed under Politics, Presidential Election, Society
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