The Velvet Hammer

Let me share a true story - a moment in the history of my country when heaven came to earth for three days.

It was called The March Against Death in November of 1969 long before you were born...

I was a teenaged hippy then and had been a die hard activist for 3 years. I began by picketing (at 14) the local Pick and Pay (no longer in existence) for exploited the Mexican grape pickers in California, lead by Caesar Chavz. Once I started I could not stop.

Well, The March Against Death was an anti Viet Nam protest. Not anti soldier but antiwar. Most of the soldiers were not much older than I was at the time. I was 17 and MOST of them were 19. There is a song about that I will go look for..

Anyway, I was not legal adult and was going to miss school to do this and my father (who worked for NASA and happened to detest the government - he liked space but not the government and it pissed him off that there was no private space program...) told me I would flunk ALL my classes while I was gone because he WOULD NOT call in to excuse my absense. I said, fine, and got on the bus to D.C. My (now estranged) older brother also got on the bus with me. He had avoided Viet Nam service by being the only son of an only son - last in line...

Anyway, when we got there we wer taken by car to one of the volunteer homes for protesters. They were people who supported the Antiwar effort. They bedded and fed us and drove us daily to the protest. They were real angels,

At the protest there was a 3 mile walk carrying a candle and wearing a placard of a soldier who had died. It began at the Lincoln Memorial and ended at the White House. Once at the White House there was a line of White Coffins. When you got there you threw your name into the coffin and screamed out the name. Three days. Without any stopping.

The heaven part is this: It was windy the whole time and candles kept going out. Because of this we had to endlessly help each other with fire and this made us closer. Also we were (in general) generouos people and everyone kept giving things to others. Mostly food. I once ended up with so much food that I had to give some away. No way I can eat five whole food sandwiches! So I gave all but one away. And then I noticed that others were doing the same. It created abundance,

And so I say to the world. Whatever you have, please share it. In this way we can care for all people. That is my hope and that is my dream.

I am saddened that the world has lost a great musical talent. Lord knows I love music more than anything but nature...

But I have to say that the sudden death of MJ is not really a shock. I felt it coming. In fact I said that he would die soon the day he died. I am that psychic.

MJ was blessed but also cursed. Something in him ran from his own race. Otherwise he would have let his natural beauty be... He would not have bleached his skin, whittled his nose to a needle nose about to collapse into his face nor gotten the Kirk Douglas cleft in the chin.

He also, having no childhood himself, got the wrong ideas about children. I still think he was a pedophile. I also think any father that dangles a baby off a balcony is performing child abuse.

Celebrity should not excuse bad and mentally unbalanced behavior...

I am sad that he died. He should have left himself alone....

I am a voracious Facebook resident and belong to many causes and groups there. I play a lot of games. I have a lot of friends. I choose to share now a message I snet to a group member who wrote about a near billionaire betting a dime a hole in a game of golf at a swanky club. I have many more concepts percolating and will write more tomorrow. It's on my list. LOL!!!

Anyway, for your enjoyment:

"I don't ever pretend to not have opinions or to be all that nice although "Kindness" is my religion and I aspire to it.

Your wealthy friend was frikking typical and a sign of the devastating economy (and part of the cause, IMNSHO)

The wealthy are cheap, mean, selfish, small people - by and large. That's how they make and keep their money.

It has beeen proven repeatedly through socialogical tests that the only genuinely generous (consistantly) and helpful people are the poor.

It was and is a civil/social war. The blue meanies and the flower people.

It is exactly that now.

The rich are willing to let most people die. Eat the rich.

lol"

Well, I survived another birthday and still have a job which is a frikking miracle in the evaporating city (one 1,600,000 and now a mere 400,000 - and now that the resident requirement for government and city workers has been removed - thanks a WHOLE lot! - we'll be 200,000 in 2 years and the Village of Cleveland.)

Things are screwed up everywhere - the economy is tanking and the bailouts were like black hole plugs that did not work. As a NASA kid, I did predict this... The medical megopolis is fighting giving anyone reasonably priced health care and jobs keep slipping away. Yet the media - that blind mole - insists that happy days are here again is a few or several months. I want the drugs THEY are taking. No, babies, it is not going to go away or even get better soon. Dreaam on you shiny diamond. Still reality remains. Sorry. I talk to people daily and no good news yet - except for the wealthy who have always - since Day 1 of time records - said: we are just fine here - let them eat cake. Or some version thereof... All BS. New era and same rotten message. Which is why P. J. O'Rourke said Eat the Rich.

Wikipedia:
"Eat the Rich is a 2001 book by P. J. O'Rourke about economics. Its chapters include Good Capitalism (The US), Bad Capitalism (Albania), Good socialism (Sweden), Bad socialism, and an intermission on "Economics 101", teaching facts that your economics professor didn't tell you, including the ten less basic rules of economics. Subsequent chapters are on How to make everything out of nothing (Hong Kong), How to make nothing out of everything (Tanzania), How to build (or not) an economy (or not) if there is (or isn't) one (Russia) and Eat the rich, the last an encomium to Capitalism — "the worst economic system anyone ever invented, except for all the others"."

Take for example California...a bread basket built upon a desert. It is now at risk from the nuclear power plant ON the San Andreas Fault. This fault line is connected to the line which includes the earthquakes in Washington http://www.pnsn.org/req2/ with a recent medium quake in part of the Ring of Fire:

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Ring_of_Fire

"The Pacific Ring of Fire (or sometimes just Ring of Fire) is an area where large numbers of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions occur in the basin of the Pacific Ocean. In a 40,000 km horseshoe shape, it is associated with a nearly continuous series of oceanic trenches, volcanic arcs, and volcanic belts and/or plate movements. The Ring of Fire has 452 volcanoes and is home to over 75% of the world's active and dormant volcanoes. It is sometimes called the circum-Pacific belt or the circum-Pacific seismic belt.

About 90% of the world's earthquakes and 80% of the world's largest earthquakes occur along the Ring of Fire. The next most seismic region (5–6% of earthquakes and 17% of the world's largest earthquakes) is the Alpide belt, which extends from Java to Sumatra through the Himalayas, the Mediterranean, and out into the Atlantic. The Mid-Atlantic Ridge is the third most prominent earthquake belt.[1][2]"

You see everything is connected. Not only are we all related but the places of stress on our planet are all related.

It is only a matter of time until the coastlines go underwater from polar melt - and the gulf stream will stop.

It is only a matter of time that the deforestation will hamper the lungs of the world and even if we plant a billion trees a year it will not be enough to stop humanity dying of self-created emphysema.

It is time to plan to go off planet or go underground. I really wish that I could say better. Without some amazing new technologies or major reduction in governments (lol!!!), we are in for a bumpy ride.

So take my hand darlings and we'll ride this shop to the bottom of the ocean with some pride.

No I didn't die and I am still a writer. That came back to me tonight. With a vengeance.

It isn't time to be quiet or cowed by the evaporating economy nor the damaged ecosphere. Okay...it will take two or three generations to fix the money pit and we probably can't fix the ecology...even with billions of trees and treatment of the oceans so that the sea life doesn't all die and the gulf stream stop. We may have to invent ways to cope with the complete and utter mess that we have made of things.

So, this is when my warrior self rises and the mother's heart beats... I can't give up until my very last breath and I encourage you to do the same. If we don't try to fix the things we can fix now, future generations are lined right up for extinction and they will NOT thank us nor should they do so.

What were we thinking? Nothing? What have we been doing locally? Nothing?

Well, get off your collective duffs, honeys and speak, think and act now.

What are you waiting for????

p.s. love to all....

In my own opinion, it is time...

My own John:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87yq372R4Ts

My Tracy Sister

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rZbvi6Tj6E

Goodness! NOTHING in February? It's not like I'm not glad it is Obama/Biden and not the McCain/Palin nightmare but I knew that it was like the guest getting stuck with the oversized dinner bill when the hosts ran out of the restaurant without paying to the waiting limo. It will take us 10 years to recover from the financial rape under King George the First of America. If not forever.

And in the recovery process, CEOs still reward the inner circles and lay off worker bees. Banks, Insurance Companies, Financial Companies suck in billions and it evaporates. Meanwhile many in America - and maybe me - lose their jobs - AGAIN - and may lose their homes. Now families are committing suicide. Fabulous PR for the "free" world!

Right after the suicides and the foreclosures in the "Unfortunate Events of our Days" is the Deluded mother with a litter of EIGHT when she already had SIX little ones! Two of the SIX are disabled and have public assistance from California, the Black Hole of money. She is living with her Mom in a house that is about to be foreclosed, like most homes in America. She is unemployed and refusing to marry the Dad - oh, sorry - he is already married! He is simply a sperm donor. Thanks a lot!!! You put bad ideas on a dang pedestal!

Family values. Uh huh. Tie her darn tubes. Place the children with rational people. Stop asking for money on the Internet! LOL She just slays me!!!!

Oh that's it! Make her a reality show. Have them all eating water naked but please KEEP that dysfunctional family TOGETHER! I agree with some. Force the doctor to adopt all of them. Let him begin to have a clue. Oh, never mind, a Porn company has made her an offer.She'll be fine.

Oh, what am I thinking? We are all at the Madhatter's Tea Party now!

Curiouser and curiouser...

http://www.thenadyasulemanfamily.com/

Please tell me how great these spuds look...as an exMom I know they are going to have serious physical challenges. 2-3 pounds is not enough for developed lungs and other organs. Oh, I so want to smack her upside of the head...but I know that I would only hear the tiny balls bouncing off a skull... (very big sigh)

One of my favorite stories, as a child was Hans Christian Andersen's Snow Queen. As you know me by now, the sliver of darkness is the spice of my life and perhaps that began with this story - a set of seven stories, really...but seven is my number. There were a few other stories that are equally as provocative and shadowy. I think that I will visit them also because the dark-yet-educational stories are not read all that much anymore and they should be read.

This is the first of the Seven Stories:

"FIRST STORY. Which Treats of a Mirror and of the Splinters

Now then, let us begin. When we are at the end of the story, we shall know more than we know now: but to begin.

Once upon a time there was a wicked sprite, indeed he was the most mischievous of all sprites. One day he was in a very good humor, for he had made a mirror with the power of causing all that was good and beautiful when it was reflected therein, to look poor and mean; but that which was good-for-nothing and looked ugly was shown magnified and increased in ugliness. In this mirror the most beautiful landscapes looked like boiled spinach, and the best persons were turned into frights, or appeared to stand on their heads; their faces were so distorted that they were not to be recognised; and if anyone had a mole, you might be sure that it would be magnified and spread over both nose and mouth.

"That's glorious fun!" said the sprite. If a good thought passed through a man's mind, then a grin was seen in the mirror, and the sprite laughed heartily at his clever discovery. All the little sprites who went to his school--for he kept a sprite school--told each other that a miracle had happened; and that now only, as they thought, it would be possible to see how the world really looked. They ran about with the mirror; and at last there was not a land or a person who was not represented distorted in the mirror. So then they thought they would fly up to the sky, and have a joke there. The higher they flew with the mirror, the more terribly it grinned: they could hardly hold it fast. Higher and higher still they flew, nearer and nearer to the stars, when suddenly the mirror shook so terribly with grinning, that it flew out of their hands and fell to the earth, where it was dashed in a hundred million and more pieces. And now it worked much more evil than before; for some of these pieces were hardly so large as a grain of sand, and they flew about in the wide world, and when they got into people's eyes, there they stayed; and then people saw everything perverted, or only had an eye for that which was evil. This happened because the very smallest bit had the same power which the whole mirror had possessed. Some persons even got a splinter in their heart, and then it made one shudder, for their heart became like a lump of ice. Some of the broken pieces were so large that they were used for windowpanes, through which one could not see one's friends. Other pieces were put in spectacles; and that was a sad affair when people put on their glasses to see well and rightly. Then the wicked sprite laughed till he almost choked, for all this tickled his fancy. The fine splinters still flew about in the air: and now we shall hear what happened next."

Well, what happened next and after that is a journey which requires courage and love for it is just packed with evil influences...kind of like our current day.

Speaking of our current day, I sing the Body Frozen here in Cleveland, Ohio. With the "wind chill", it is 15 degrees below zero. Our bodies are 98.6 degrees and this is a temperature not fit for bodies.

Here we have next to no city services and so cars are still spinning tires and getting stuck in intersections a week after the 14 inch snow accumulation. It's a winter wonderland out there! The things I like about it today are: I am unemployed and don't have to go out in it, the snow crunches when you walk on it and it sparkles like a blanket of diamonds because it is so otherworldly crystal cold. Just like my Queen.

Unfortunately, everyone forgot how to drive and there are about 3 dozen major accidents in the area. On top of that, people are so stressed they are leaping from said crushed cars and trying to kill each other.

So much for merry christmas and a happy new year... Hmmm...

Be careful out there, darlings.