Before you know it, I will look like this too. Known as La Mujer de las Palmas, she seems familiar, "short, spry, slightly graying hair." Kind of like the dress, her big stick--the slightly curved staff, could be helpful any day now. The shoes look like a leather version of my green (Iguana) canvas Keen's. All together it is a smart and comfortable ensemble, with a pair of fused glass earrings, and a NO WAR patch. That's why bumper stickers read, "Stop Endless War." Might qualify for a special edition of Advanced Style.
Links to Ancient Woman and her story offered here along with another recent discovery, oldest leather shoes for your consideration on astounding progress made by modern man (yes, we ladies had nothing to do with urge for "betterment"--bras and high heels).
Searching, as my life script has determined, for my own possible employment--useful work suitable to pensioned, Social Security enabled, Medicare granted old lady--I believe it is here. Every day I pin this small NO WAR patch to my outfit. This is my job: end the wars--current and future.
Button highlights the word "employee." Such a relief to say farewell to "retired" and retrieve my proper identity.
[Thanks to Sunday Oregonian "Business" section for the article that led to above graph at the blog, Calculated Risk. An investment adviser in Oregon notes, "The disturbing notion is that the slope of the line is now headed back down."]
Ehren Tool, veteran of the first Gulf War and a potter, was "installed" at Portland's Museum of Contemporary Craft in June. A museum member, I'd heard earlier about his work, looked forward to his "durational performance."
Exchanging with Ehren was all I could hope for-- an old political activist encountering a young one. He was the first Marine I'd ever met, had to adjust my stereotyped expectation of what he'd be like. Ehren surprised me with with an open, gentle manner. I am challenged by his attitude, different from mine, not anti-war rather focused on raising general awareness of war.
Three years ago, Allison Smith, posted a long, thoughtful interview with Ehren. He spoke of what drives him:
"It's this freaky thing. To me, it's like there's a siren going off in
the background all the time. There are so many veterans and
refugees who've seen war firsthand, but then they don't talk about it
when they get back to the States. So what regular people know about war
tends to come from toys and pornography and video games. I give away the
cups because, it's like, 'Drink out of the cup with skulls on it.
Drink
out of the cup with bombs on it.' We don't have money for schools, we
don't have money to make the corrections system a corrections system
instead of a penal system, for any of that. But we do have money for
million-dollar Tomahawk missiles and $13,000 cluster bombs.
And every
single one of us is part of that system whether we act like we know it
or not."
Ehren threw his cups at his wheel in a windowed, first floor temporary studio in a corner of the Museum. Passersby could watch him from the street. Our three visits were uplifting for Ron and me, a powerful reminder that there can be hope in a time of darkness.
One of his porcelain cups sits on our windowsill. I hope you will enlarge the closeups to see the images; they are instructive, not pretty. Better, closer ones are HERE. But this one is mine, a reminder of how "lifelong learning" is more than sitting in classrooms.
Without my usual note-taking of our conversatons, my memory of Efren has a kind of purity. It is hard to describe my feelings about this chance to be with this young man, a soldier in the war I'd energetically protested. He had lived the life reflected in the images on the cups--now close to 10,000 of them are out in the world. The NO WAR patches Sally Mericle and I rubber stamped in 1991 Baltimore, while Ehren was a young marine in combat, only numbered one thousand. Something other than the difference in scale has been on my mind since my time with him.
His ability to put values and craft together in a sustained way are a lesson for me. He continues to throw more and more cups, to look for venues that will bring others to join him in cup-making--war veterans, communities of caring Americans. With all his intensity around his craft and message, he is a very gentle man with a delightful sense of humor. When Ron and I spent time with him on the final day of the installation, we learned that where he is now is miles away from the 18 year old who joined the Marines, wanted to be a policeman. After his military service Ehren went to college, then art school. He was very even in reflecting on gallery visitors who glanced at his work and withdraw from its directness-- or did not respond at all. I'd like to be as balanced about responses to my own creative efforts.
Ron promised to mail him one of his knit hats; I enclosed a No War patch. Ehren sent an email "thank you" with this somewhat elfin photo attached.
Talking about him has made July 4th a more meaningful day for me and, I hope, for you.
A bookmark from The Emma Goldman Papers, University of California, Berkeley. On the reverse side, a contemporary message about the importance of remembering our history of struggle, "Stirring the embers of the past to inspire the future.
Emma Goldman (1869-1940) and Alexander Berkman in a "Farewell, [to] Friends and Comrades," wrote this line before serving almost two years in prison for opposing the conscription of young men into the First World War.
Partial to her feisty spirit, I once bought a 1916 issue of Emma's publication, Mother Earth News. It includes a reminder of the upcoming "Mother Earth Ball" to celebrate the publication's 11th anniversary (Admission 35 cents, Hat Check, 15 cents). Somewhere in my photos, there's one of me standing in front of a brownstone where she lived near Union Square in New York City.
In the Portland Red Guide, I learn she came here in 1915 to speak, was arrested for distributing birth control information. A Portland Circuit Judge dismissed the case with the words, "There is too much tendency to prudery nowadays." She also spoke at the Portland Public Library on "The Sham of Culture." A local blogger last year named her Portland's Fairy Godmother. Her spirit lives on!
A few years ago, the bookmark on the right arrived in the mail. I've saved it for its message and its different, gentler view of Emma--feminist, anarchist, immigrant--to share among ourselves. In these days when it often feels as if the forces of evil have taken over reasonableness, I offer her words to recall that we have survived narrowness of thought in earlier times. Her message, as always, is pertinent to 2010.
"Sooner or later the American people are going to wake up. --Emma Goldman, Detroit, Michigan, 11/26/1919, on deportation to Russia" reads a cup (mug) on my kitchen counter. Make sure you click on this image from her 1901 arrest, a frequent happening.
Celebrate her birthday on June 27, with a contribution to the Papers so you too can be a part of the ongoing effort to write women back into history.
Soooo many of us are disappointed. We've been making excuses for why this administration could not do better on this issue and that one. But we have had it. The hip might say, "It's over, boyfriend."
The failure of meaningful healthcare reform has brought us to the brink. After personally working for significant changes, watching HR 676 pushed aside, been open to new ideas like the public option, I can only relate to Howard Dean's NO, NOT THIS ONE approach.
Why encourage our congressional representatives, the somewhat willing, to vote for meaningless healthcare reform...then wait to see what that actually means once it's delivered?
Do you feel your voice has been heard? Only by all the progressive groups that have been doing the work and offering me a way to send many messages to Congress, like Representative Grayson (D.Fla) whose petition I signed as one of the 100,000 against the escalation of the war in Afghanistan.
This morning I took the only route that made sense, the one that Obama and his people might actually "hear." I unsubscribed from "Organizing for America" a/k/a/ Barackobama.com. The request to "ring in reform" and call my senators seemed especially hollow on a rainy day in Portland, Oregon, where we read one terrible story after another about the suffering of the uninsured, the underinsured.
When we have watched Joe Lieberman (you don't need a link, do you?) free to bully the Democratic Party into submission.
The only positive thing about unsubscribing OFA is that finally I can leave a comment. Mine starts wih "Devastated" and points to Obama's waiting too long to come out for meaningful healthcare reform, sending more troops to Afghanistan. If you join me in this, please let me know.
Tonight on the PBS program Point of View, I'll be watching again a beautifully conceived movie we saw last July before we left New York. With a low-key title, "The Way We Get By", is one you will want to see no matter your attitude toward U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. Is it anti-war? Not exactly. Pro-war? No.
It is about women and men like us: older citizens, looking for a way to make a difference, some hoping to relieve their loneliness as spouses and friends are gone. There had been little publicity on the film when we saw a notice about it last July. And I was not quite sure what to expect reading it was a documentary about a group of seniors in Bangor, Maine, who meet soldiers both leaving for and returning from war.
It's this airport where most soldiers leave the U.S. and the Maine Troop Greeters have welcomed home or said goodbye to one million of them! I spoke with Gita Pullapilly, the film's producer, and asked if Grandmothers Against the War had been contacted for support. She'd tried but had not heard back.
But my effort to contact my friend in the group, Joan Wile, did not get a response either. Too bad because the story is not a pro-war or anti-war one. The three "Greeters" focused on make that clear: they wanted to do something for these soldiers to let them know we are aware of them, care about them. My argument with "Grandmothers" always was that we of all people needed to find ways to do more than demonstrate; we could give time to families directly affected by the wars.
We even had a chance to meet the director (son of one of the Greeters) who has just married the producer (it's all on the PBS website. We got an update and chance to talk with another featured Greeter who had successfully recovered from heart surgery. It was all very personal--and political--in the best sort of way.
If you do not have a chance to see it tonight, "The Way We Get By" is traveling around the country and may show near you. Their dedication moved me so much as a pacifist who has looked for a personal way to express gratitude to women and men in the military even as I oppose the idea of war.
There's also a DVD out now that could be passed around among friends who are eager to see often-unseen older folks as caring actors in the public space.
Sally Mericale and I got the idea in 1991 for a different way to talk about peace: NO WAR. A graphic and rubber stamp designer, she developed what we turned into a rubber stamp to produce thousands of little 2"x2" badges. We tore up white cotton sheets from secondhand stores (you could find these then in Baltimore).
BEWARE: White men in dark suits was another of Sally's creations. Always in style unfortunately. We'd stamp it on envelopes--bill payments (remember that?), protest letters, and along with other decoration our concerns became something new to me, Mail Art, http://www.actlab.utexas.edu/emma/Intro/intro3.html (TypePad quirky again, so you're on your own for the link.) Maybe "invented" by Marcel Duchamp.
What has changed? We are still at war--in real time. That other war, the one where frightened men act out their fears of women contines in the Congress of the United States. Like so many others, I keep demanding a better future for my grandchildren.
Times' editors wanted to make me angry this morning with this on the front page. How phony and infuriating for this "opinion-making" newspaper to herald McNamara's death with "Architect of Futile War." That's what they write now...What did they learn as their editors learn from Vietnam as they waltzed their important readers into support for invading Iraq?
Not till page 18, was the page that should have been on the front. Emma Shulman, an inspirational old lady whose comments and lifestyle could make all ages pause. Notice that Ralph Blumenthal's color photo in the online edition is even better than the black/white. Who decided?
Finally, Bob Herbert's column, "After the War Was Over" (have to wait till Op-Eds, page 23), belonged alongside the McNamara one. I could continue by re-arranging the other sections but have to get into the shower.
Why haven't they asked me how to improve the Times?
All my love and thanks for all the places we've been, crises we've survived, children and grandchildren we've loved...
...and your great patience in teaching me too many things to list...what I've learned from your pleasure in sharing with everyone who comes within your range.
All of us look forward to many more June tenths with you--
most especially yours truly ...
Celebration: High-Rise Style...Last night--a building party where we live. Lee Morgan, Ron's co-chair and great party-giver, suggested this one as they wrapped up their term of office, turned it over to another pair. Singing the Birthday song was a high point of the pot-luck evening...who says New Yorkers don't care about one another?
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