a little red hen

Bees, You and Me...Earth Week 2013

 

Bill McKibben narrates a short, mellow video, "Dance of the Honey Bees."  Planning an evening program for my retirement community about what's happening with bees, my search for resources turned this up on a Bill Moyers show.  Sadly it ends with the dark side about honey bee demise.  The link is from TruthOut, with transcript included along with a pledge you can sign to let Bayer (aspirin company) know you want them to stop killing bees. 

Recently a number of scientists have identified neonicotinoids, a pesticide produced by Bayer, as the major culprit.  Meanwhile, EFSA ( European food safety watchdog) has identified neonicotinoids as "an acute risk to honeybee health" but not to colony collapse.  Bayer and Syngenta, major producers of the pesticide, have suggested their own plan to avoid the ban of the product that many are demanding.

Environmental groups in England and some other European countries appear more public in their demand for a ban than those in the U.S.  In the past week, England has rebuffed this concern.  Since Bayer is a German company, there is more interest in protecting it as an important player in the economy.

In this country the XL pipleline and fracking currently take front and center in the media.  Speaking for the bees, the voices we hear in the U.S. are largely beekeepers and farmers and there are many in Oregon.  Tom Foster, a neighbor of mine, had bee hives, sold honey before he moved here.

 

We're working on a program for June.  Following his own deep history with bees--his father and grandfather were also beekeepers in the Northwest--we'll show a 20-minute excerpt from "Vanishing of the Bees."  We hope to stimulate bee-connected interests among our members to buy local honey, maybe consider a bee hive on the roof of our building (where we grow tomatoes).  Or, more modestly, borrow my copy of Foodopoly by the Wenoah Hauter, Exec Director of Food & Water Watch.

This informative and engaging 90-minute documentary, produced in the U.K., will be shown in Albuquerque, New Mexico in the next week.  For a delightful, funkier take, an American one, try "Queen of the Sun."  I'm hoping to find others as fascinated by bees as myself, an urban person moved to think more about the earth since connecting with a backyard in mid-20th century Baltimore.

"American Winter" Kickstarted to theater near you...

Were you with us when HBO announced the new film "American Winter"?  At the website there's more about it's producers, Joe and Harry Gantz, and their focus on social justice films. Maybe living in Portland, Oregon, where it was filmed gave it a certain immediacy for us.  Also that it was about real middle class families who have fallen into poverty since--what do you call it now--the economic disaster  of the last decade.

Seven of them white, one black, all doing okay and then...  When there is so much focus on the funny and forthy "Portlandia" picture of the city, it's crucial that more people see the reality of everyday life here for so many.  

 

At Lettboxd, reviewer Steve Pulaski comments:  

The staggering amount of people on unemployment begs a documentarian analysis, and American Winter provides the best one I've seen yet. High on reality, low on statistics, and often emotional, this is 2013's best documentary thus far. It is the third I've seen detailing the poor's struggle in an increasingly complex world, next to Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare and this year's limited/VOD release A Place at the Table. Needless to say that American Winter sores past the goodness of both films into gratifying greatness.

He brings up a secondary problem frustrating many of us.  Access to documentaries.  If you do not have cable, and HBO, you were dependent on the kindness of interested friends to see "American Winter."

That's why I was pleased to join their Kickstarter campaign (check out the site for a model of hands-on change at their Portland premiere) to raise funds to expand outreach for

"...a series of events around the film...bring together speakers, comics, and social theater to draw attention to critical needs of working poor and disappearing middle class...."Cirque Du Soleil" meets "Les Miserables" that will bring people together in an invigorating movement to create change."

Thrilled to learn yesterday we were among the 217 Kickstarters who made it happen!

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Writing this post, I discovered Mom Bloggers for Social Good--another to watch along with the quickly growing Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense, seen here in the past week's "Stroller Jam" happening at various congressional offices around the country.  

Worthy followers of Gray Panters, Grandmothers against the War (see blogroll).  Personally satisfying for this grandma to hook onto the local Moms Demand group at demonstrations and on Facebook; my futile resistance to FB ended last summer. 

 

Greatest thing since sliced bread?

Saved this page from New York Times Sunday magazine.  What was it about a slice of bread that was so compelling?  That the shrinking, obsessively up-scale newspaper paid attention to an object from everyday life?  Just a slice of  a pre-sliced white, the kind my father described as "punk bread."  He was good an naming things he disdained, ideas and objects favored by people different from him.  It's a trait passed along that I must be cautious about in my judgementalism.

The article is part of a "Who Made That?" series in the Times.  It is filled one page of odd facts that tie together many aspects of the influence of the industrialization of America in the early 20th century.  Last year a social history, White Bread, by Aaron Bobrow-Strain (oh, people, why did you do this to your offspring; the hyphenated name is sure to create relationship problems) was published.  [There it is-- the too judmenta...sigh]

"The sliced loaf becomes a kind of small, edible promise of a better world."

Much more interesting to me than recent explorations about  cod or salt, I now intend to purchase it from Alibris for hardly any money (as the almost-free economy moves on).  In a New York Times review of the book, titled  "Against the Grain," there was further exploration of how problems of unsanitary public bakeries led to the business solution:  industrialized bread. What would another review deliver?

Libby Copeland wrote a longer essay a harsher title, "White Bread Kills".  Subtitled-- "a history of a national paranoia," she addresses the present-day "...backlash against white bread" and the growing interest in gluten-free products and increase in people receiving a diagnosis of celiac disase which afflicts one in 133.  She points out that little is known about how gluten sensitivity may effect the majority of us.

In turn, there was another book also published last year, emeritus Canadian historian Harvey Levenstein's Fear of Food: Why we worry about what we eat.  This one, as one food writer explains its message, 

"...from the ‘germophobia’ of the 19th century to concerns about cholesterol and chemical residues in the 21st. Read this book and you’ll understand why warnings about the safety of your food should always be taken with a pinch of salt. (Just a pinch, though — too much could be bad for you.).”

Even though my results are not always edible--like this one (left) which looked much like the one in the book (middle), and filled with many good pumpkin seeds, I'm working on getting comfortable with major mishaps.  The successful ones are always better than packaged and pre-sliced American white bread.  In Mexico, similar product is Bimbo!

ADDENDUM  Every now and then, not often enough, bread-making is enhanced by doing it with Zoe, our seven year old granddaughter.  I have a sense that she is learning something that will be long gone by the time she has her own household.

Something grander than Google will speak to her about what the ancients once did in kitchens.

Video that solves EVERYTHING

 

Many thanks to Pied Type who posted this CURE.  For what, you ask.  Listen and discover!  

Women, we are the ones...we must seize the moment

Needed right now:  more women like Rosa Parks.  The Detroit News on the centennial of her [The link is to a new biography that begins with her activist life before her famous bus ride.]  The Detroit News on the centennial of her birth (1913) marked by a new Forever postage stamp and Obama unvieling of her statue in the Capitol.

Charming and satisfying for us old ladies from the Second Wave to travel down memory lane as our moment in 20th century feminist history rolled by on"Makers:  Women Who Make America." Surprised that public television would offer something with the "F word so prominent.

Most satisfying for me was that two younger women I suggested it to--one in college, the other in her forties--watched and responded with enthusiasm.  In another time we would all have been in the same room, the same movement, working on gun control, violence against women.  So many issues, so little time.  That was the theme in early meetings of the Women's Political Causcus in 1972 in my Baltimore living room.

Needed right now:  women to move gun control into the direction that only women have the courage to do, i.e., take on the biggest challenges.  Think Elizabeth Warren and banking.  Now Robin Kelly, Illinois legislator now running for Jesse Jackson's Congressional seat with a total focus on gun control.  While looking for a photo of her, I encountered a vicious site, "Legal Insurrection," a window into her crazed Republican opposition.  [photo: Charles Rex Arbogast/AP] 

 The Griot, an NBC blog, reported on her win and her commitment to "fight to ban assault weapons. To close the gun show loophole.  And to ban high capacity magazine clips...We will do whatever it takes to end this epidemic of gun violence, once and for all."

Women's History Month was marked on March 1, at  Folkways Notebook with a post on  Women and Inequality.  Barbara linked to the L.A. Times on the reauthorization of VAWA, the Violence against Women Act.  The Times used a group photo of Native American Women at a meeting on the Tulalip Reservation (Washington state).  They have gathered to promote passage of the Act which has special meaning for them.

Needed right now:  women of all colors to move voting rights into the center of public discourse.  The League of Women Voters' blog  keeps its eye on what the Supreme Court is up to in Shelby County v. Holder.  That's how I found the February 27 rally outside the court on February 27.  Speaking on the Voting Rights Act to is Francine Lawrence, president of the American Federation of Teachers. 

 

Often I miss being back East.  And then I found in the Oregonian, our conservative, clueless local newspaper, a photo [Bilal Hussein/AP] from Beirut.  "The Uprising of Women in the Arab World"  commenorating March 8, International Women's Day. 

Translation:  I want society to see me as a woman first before they see me as a mother, wife or daughter.  

Women's, the people's action, continues in many places.  

Related articles

My political life requires a placeholder...

Too much going on to be a frequent poster here...or infrequent.  Yet I want to stay with blogging as a practice even while I need more thought on its structure for the future. 

My neighbor Joella demonstrates a perfect solution for all those buttons we collected in second wave activity in last century--coast to coast.  Hers in Oregon, mine mostly Baltimore and New York.  Gun control is a shared focus through Ceasefire Oregon.

Marian Wright Edelman on Inauguration Day 2013 in conversation with Melissa Harris-Perry wears image of Sojourner Truth.  Takes our feminism back to the 19th century struggle for African-American equality.  Read Ta-Nehisi Coates in the March Atlantic on why the re-election of Obama matters even more than the first. 

Speaking of blogging, the life in bread has not had enough attention here. It has not had as much attention as I would wish.  Here's a whole wheat sourdough made in October 2011.

My personal challenge is should I emulate one of my favorite, 19th century feminists, Frances E. Willard of the WCTU (Women's Christian Temperance Union).

"Do Everything" was her motto. Is it mine?   Her unusual book,  "A Wheel with in Wheel: How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle" used that newly-introduced contrivance as a metaphor for women's lives.  An excerpt HERE  with comments by a contemporary blogger.

And so you have it: Black History month (a young friend recently pointed out is the shortest month of the year) and the upcoming Women's History Month.  Both of which call out for celebration more often.  I hope to do my part one day soon but till then...  

Portland, when it's good for old people

Oh, it is a challenge to keep batting away like summer mosquitoes our national bad news. Especially when I start the day by reading the local, daily newspaper.  The Oregonian shapes its content to appeal to dwellers on some far-off planet. Many of them live right here in oppostion to the trendy, very young and hip types celebrated on Portlandia.

If mine were one of those everybody-reads-blogs on Huffington Post, I'd run a contest to name the group of dailies across America that ignore/disparage all ideas sensible people hold dear...gun control, CHOICE, climate change.  I wish Rachel Maddow, an excellent "namer" would come up with something.  See her post "This Week in God" for the latest on a a favorite category she calls, "the God Machine."

However, in the tradition of  What Would Rachel Maddow Do? Let's turn to my good news.   As privileged old lady and man, we take advantage of our reasonably good health (thank you Medicare and Maryland retirement system) and disposable income to go to the theater often. [Too many disclaimers but often have company at Hattie's Web.  Especially today it turns out.]  Since we're drawn to what we knew in New York as "off" and "off-off Broadway," the cost of the habit is reasonable.

"The Road to Mecca,"  presented in a small space by Profile Theater was one of three we've seen in the last week.  (Overdosing due to baby-sitting schedule.)  Glorious photo by Jamie Bosworth; enlarge it to see the perfect set--worn rugs, many glass bottles on tables, hanging from above.

Made me think of Grandma Prisbrey's Bottle Village, how many of us fill space, aloneness with  objects endowed with special meaning. Portland Monthly's useful, thoughtful review here.  

It was invigorating to be with actress Eileen DeSandre, who embodies aging perfectly as Miss Helen, the central character, has found her own bliss through non-traditional art-making.  Of course, I could very much identify with that.  Though South African playwright Athol Fugard writes about his own country, it could be mine. The other two actors played parts familiar to many of us.  There was Elsa, played by Amanda Solden, the young friend, both powerful and gentle, who wants Miss Helen to embody personal strength she seeks in herself.   David Bodin was an oppressive church minister, determined to convince  Miss Helen to move to an old people's home. He had more dimension than we'd expected as he ultimately revealed a softer side wrapped in his judgemental exterior.

Talkback.  As I've written elsewhere, Ron and I gravitate toward these.  How else can strangers in a city, women and men who may never meet again, share our pleasure, our questions about a theatrical experience.  Last night's included two of the actors, the young director (how do they have so much insight so early), and Katy Liljeholm, Artistic Director of Well Arts, an arts-in-medicine nonprofit theatre company.  "Voices of Elders" is one of their life-review projects at a local senior center.

We were a most suitable audience for her:  a mostly over 50 group, mostly women, with much to relate to about our own roads to Mecca.  Great evening...preceded by that other thing Portland does well: FOOD, delicious, moderately priced for happy hour (unknown to us in New York), a short walk from the theater at Accanto.

 

 

ROE v. WADE is forty: CHOICE still needs your support

 

Ultra Violet teamed up with Daily Show co-creator and producer, Lizz Winstead about what's at stake on the 40th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade.  I'm on my way to a Planned Parenthood event where Sarah Weddington will give the address.  She was the lawyer who took Roe to the Supreme Court.

More later....

2013 & what's to love?

It is as if I have bought into the worldwide, or at least nationwide malaise of the end of 2012, the start of 2013.  That's about how long it's been since my last appearance here. Do you look for reasons for how you feel--something in the air, something beyond your personal space? I do.

There's the personal/political that always envelops me.  There were so many things pleasureable in December 2012.  Introducing two granddaughters to the idea of giving to others as a way to mark the New Year.  We spent a December Saturday night looking at the possible animals that could go from Mercy Corps to help families in other parts of the world.

Elie was convinced she was getting her very own sheep.  That's a four year old.  Zoe, always the older, clarifying sister, explained otherwise.  Later the two of them visited our retirement community which surprised me with a screening of the original "Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs"  film.  Elie was only momentarily frightened by the Wicked Queen, and probably the menacing music.  Then enjoyed it along about 20 other children.

Family--I am very fortunate-- was a soothing distraction from Hurricane Sandy and the gun violence here in Portland and in Connecticut. Stunned by all that, it turned out that sulfa medication was part of the reason for my two-week lethargy.  I'm beginning to return to a more energetic feeling.  And school started again! 

 

The Working Life, Baltimore feminist therapist

Images that match ideas for writing hang out on my desktop.  The local tech suggests that fewer of these could improve the computer's function. They are too important to an old lady's memory bank to hide. 

When both our children were in school, I entered a fulltime program in social work at the University of Maryland.  Graduating in1976, I thought there'd be a job where I could do clinical work in a family agency.  Now 42 years old with a considerable resume in public relations in New York, the challenge was finding a fit for the next step.

Though I'd done community work and developed innovative workshops  in Baltimore, it was another 20th century recession with intense competition for professional placements. It was ten years since I'd worked fulltime.

During social work school I had an internship at Johns Hopkins Hospital and had an exhilarating experience with another younger student.  We designed a group for relatives and visitors to the Intensive Care Waiting Room.  Joe Lynch and I co-led a new collection of anxious people twice a week with anywhere from ten to 25 individuals, wide range of ages, ethniticies.  We published about it and hope this would be a model for Hopkins to us with other grad students--in nursing and other disciplines.

Because Hopkins was not oriented toward group work--something Joe and I discovered when one patient complained-- I was surprised that I was asked to work there.  I turned down the offer because social workers were at the bottom of the Hopkins' hierarchy and moving toward less emphasis on clinical services.  

When an instructor of mine who was an exceptional clinician at another hospital, offered me a position, I was tempted. She explained I'd start at the same level as 22 year olds recent grads in spite of my past employment.  As she explained,  "None of that was in social work."  My response, "I've just spent two years as 'school student' and I need to feel I'm moving on." That was my ego speaking.  Looking back, I think there would have been value in working for her but I was not a fit for a medical setting. 

We lived in a three-story house in Baltimore, had two young children.  The house was not one we'd have chosen but was what we could afford--$30,000 in 1971.  Twelve rooms on 3/4 acres with a 200 year-old black walnut in the front yard, built in 1923.  The smaller places we'd seen were more costly.  

Houses were cheap in that city after the 1968 riots. We'd arrived in '69 from Oberlin, Ohio, a small college town where we lived for a dizzying two years like others on college campuses in the late sixties. Our best experience, the birth of Rachel, our first child, was shadowed by Martin Luther King's assassination eleven days before her birth.  

At lunch with a friend from school I was asked to identify my ideal goal.  "Running groups for women," I answered.  Building on my experiences with feminist activities--starting Baltimore's Women's Political Caucus with two others, attending N.O.W. meetings in a small room at a local college, strongly influenced by second-wave feminist energy, this seemed my destiny.  My friend had focused me:  I'd have to begin my own practice.

A few weeks later the phone rang.  "A woman I know told me that you are a women's counselor.  I'd like to make an appointment."  Pulling myself together, I looked at the calendar, and suggested an afternoon time.  Of course, I remember J,  first of many.

Late fall 1976, I sat in the rocking chair  facing the camera in the top photo. J. sat across from me in the other rocker.  She could look out  the window behind me onto our back yard.  Between us was an oak washstand facing the alley.  I kept cash and checks in the drawer.  My fee was $15.00, payable each session.  One year later I began two women's groups.