Hekate
Hekate's Journal88,888 posts is a very auspicious number, so I am told. So good luck to all you DUers...
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May all beings be peaceful
May all beings be safe
May all beings awaken to the light of their true nature
May all beings be free from suffering
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No worries -- they'll be along, plus the people begging Israel to unconditionally stop because, Peace
Same ones who spent a year saying Ukraine should just give Putin anything he wants because then there will be Peace. Before they got distracted by Israel.
My dear people, what Putin wants is Ukraine knee deep in rubble, all the Ukrainian children shipped off to be “adopted” by Russians, and everyone else pretty much dead. He does not say it but his actions speak for him. (he says it’s de-Nazification, but I doubt anyone believes that)
Hamas wants all Jews everywhere dead, and the thing is they keep SAYING it. They don’t CARE how many Palestinians die in the process because God wants them to be holy martyrs and go to Muslim Paradise. They say it and they mean it and they make terrorist videos of their rapes and murders. It’s all God’s Will.
No one ever says how the victim of the original assault will achieve “Peace” by rolling over and exposing their belly. Pet dogs get a belly rub, but among wolves all you get is disemboweled.
🪷The Library. The lady we bought the house from called it the Music Room because of the stereo setup...
🪷🪷🪷 I have an unreasonable number of books and there were built in bookcases and I added more, same as in the living room.
The room is a cozy size. There’s a bay window with a view of the California oak next door that I see straight on from my chair. The TV is in the living room — there is no TV in the Library, and there will never be. I left plenty of wall space for several oil paintings: seascapes and landscapes.
The bookcase behind me has one shelf that I have made into an altar to Brigid in her 3 aspects — a few months after I moved in I got a text from my sister, who was on her way to a scary medical appointment. She asked if I could make an altar for her, and I immediately took all the books off that one shelf. (She was fine that time) It’s been the place I work with in this house ever since, a focus for intentions, creating and changing as events warrant.
I love this space — I never thought I’d have something like this. 🥰
Thank you kindly. I did forget to add, on the subject of plantations, that we had them in Hawaii
Sugar cane and pineapple don’t just grow themselves, after all. And in this instance, people were induced to migrate voluntarily from Japan, China, the Philippines, and some Portuguese who were hired as luna, or bosses, of the workers, as well. (One rather cheeky guidebook to the Islands pointed out that Hawaii is the only place where Portuguese don’t count themselves as “white” because that’s haole — they are “local” and don’t you forget it. )
As with all emigrants they hoped for a better life than they had back in the old country, and definitely did not plan on their children and grandchildren remaining in that backbreaking, killing, line of work. The cultures of Japan and China had especially prized literacy, and knew education was the key for their kids, so they pushed them hard once they were able to get them in school. Despite a lot of discrimination, and because the workers were in fact not enslaved, many of my teachers were Nisei, and the children and grandchildren of many former plantation workers dominated various professions. And you bet they networked among their own groups.
Things really changed after WWII. The generation of young Japanese-Americans who returned from fighting overseas in the 442nd decided some changes needed to be made, and among other things a bunch of them went into politics.
I took my husband and grade-school age kids on a trip to Oahu once about 35 years ago, and like many a haole Mainlander before him, he fell in love and wanted to stay. At the time his profession was in such demand he could change jobs whenever he wanted, but I thought he better talk to someone besides me. So when we got together for dinner with my old friend Jeff (Chinese-American, generations in the Islands) and his wife, I laughingly asked Jeff to give my husband the scoop. Bottom line: it was a small place and you had to know people and be related to people.
Can’t remember Jeff’s verbal diagram of which ethnic group ended up where, but it was enlightening, especially if you were contemplating being an outsider trying to break in. Because of the history of haoles having taken over the Islands, and then having overthrown the rightful native Hawaiian government, and dominating the financial and social structure ever after, there was underlying suspicion and resentment below the Aloha-spirit. Jeff went into real estate — he met his Minnesota Scandinavian wife at UH, and she went into business with him; with the advantage of her husband’s last name and extended family, she became “local.”
As for the plantations, as the supply of workers gradually eroded, the business of growing pine and cane finally moved overseas where there was still cheap labor to be had. The pineapple cannery where I worked one summer in high school was long gone (and turned into a cluster of boutiques) by the time I came back for my 25th high school reunion.
O'ahu, Hawai'i. Civilian family, but Lockheed got a Navy contract to service their planes...
So we were there from before statehood til 1965, when I graduated high school, and Lockheed’s Navy contract was up. The Mainland hires like my dad were supposed to be moved back per the contract, and since there was little in the way of aircraft work in Hawai’i at the time, most went. They ended up in some odd places, too: Jackass Flats Nevada, Sunnyvale California, Saudi Arabia. My folks chose Cucamonga California, a parched high-desert location with a Lockheed installation by Ontario Airport. After a few years of college and working on a presidential campaign, I moved back and went to UH, intending to stay forever.
Anyhow, neighborhood and school. There was a sampling of nearly the whole world in both, but predominantly Polynesia, Philippines, and Asia. And white or brown they had been intermarrying enthusiastically for at least a century and a half, which made the Mainland’s preoccupation with that kind of thing incomprehensible. My family wasn’t exactly a minority, but our Irish whiteness surely stood out. (There were few African Americans in my large high school, like, three altogether, and they were all military dependents. One family lived next door to us. They were definitely a minority in the 1960s. )
I got my US history not just from classes but from the evening news, where the Civil Rights movement had been playing out since I was little, and Vietnam era anxiety and protests just segued right into my high school years (my boyfriend sarcastically joked about the draft: “Be the first on your block to step on a punji stick. “ ) And TIME and LIFE magazines. What I learned in school seemed to reinforce what I learned outside, so I didn’t experience cognitive dissonance, and what I learned outside filled in the gaps so I didn’t notice there were gaps.
Slavery, incidentally, was presented as A Bad Thing in our textbooks. The Triangle Trade of slavery, sugar cane, and rum was diagrammed and explained, so we definitely got the economics of the business of treating human beings like things. My multi-ethnic classmates were not about to believe any fantasies about happy slaves. I knew from my own independent reading early on about the role of Christian belief as a driving force among the Abolitionists — far from making me “feel bad about being white,” reading in 6th grade about a Quaker girl made me identify with the courage of her and her family as they did their part on the Underground Railroad. Read a biography of Moses Tubman the same year. These books were in my school library. (Only as an adult did I find that New England Transcendentalism heavily influenced the Abolition movement, and that their striving for women’s rights and labor rights were set aside until slavery was abolished — but groundwork had been laid in me, so to speak. )
Most of all my mother was my teacher, and she believed wholeheartedly in equality and the Golden Rule, and that America’s founding fathers were Sons of the Enlightenment, and that she should teach her children why that was so. She was born and raised in Colorado when the KKK had it in for Roman Catholics, which her family were. Whatever Mom experienced as a kid, I think she kept her own counsel and drew her own conclusions (and left Roman Catholicism behind by the time I was born ) . Her father, a Ford dealer until the Great Depression, got Henry Ford’s newspaper and Ford was a raving anti-Semite, which her father imbibed as gospel. Not his daughter — She told us what anti-Semitism was, and the role it played in WWII, who Father Coughlin was, and who our own American fascists were. When she was an adult, Senator Joe McCarthy’s witch hunts scared the absolute crap out of her and stunted any political activity she might ever have done, altho she didn’t put it that way.
When my folks married after WWII, they were stony broke and first got a place to live in a trailer park, which was full of Nisei families relocating back to normal life (“You were conceived there, dear!” “But mommy, what do you mean they were relocating back to normal life? What happened to them? “ — and that is how I first heard the tale of America’s shameful Japanese internment camps before I had barely learned to read. )
She vividly remembered the events of the 20s thru 60s of the 20th century, and used her observations as teaching tools. If a family who survived the Holocaust moved into our neighborhood — that got mentioned and their story got told. They were real people, and their kids were our real friends and neighbors. In Hawaii, one of our neighbors had a friend who was a survivor of a Japanese prison camp in the Philippines, which was as grim as anything you may have ever heard.
I was a lucky, lucky kid in that regard. What it did for me was open out the world in many directions, and made events real.
Unlike many others, I really loved History as an area of study, altho I was almost done with my BA before I admitted that what I really loved was the narrative and learning about what people living in it thought they were about. Hence my senior thesis was about Japanese Literature and the Greater East Asia War and not some other aspect of WWII in the Pacific and Asia.
Speaking of narratives, sorry this one was so long. Looking back 60 or so years — so very much has come and gone.
It's worth reading. One salient paragraph about AOC's statement...
Drawing parallels between Jesus’ persecutors and present-day Israel, Ocasio-Cortez wrote in an Instagram story on Sunday that Jesus was born in “modern-day Palestine” under a government carrying out “a massacre of innocents.”According to the New Testament, Jesus was a Jew who lived within the modern borders of Israel and was killed by the Roman forces ruling the territory at the time.
It’s important because that very charge, “The Jews killed Jesus” led to pogroms and other savagery, and finally to the Holocaust. In fact at the time Jesus and his disciples lived, Israel was occupied by the Romans, crucifixion was a Roman method of execution, and iirc the charge was sedition, a political act, because the Roman Empire was weary of this one population that would not submit to the idea that in a polytheistic world, their Caesar was a god. Instead the Jews had this eccentric notion that there was only one god, and theirs was it.
Because of the great power of the Christian mythology to shape the European (and hence American) mindset and history — for good and for ill — it behooves politicians to be mindful of how that works and has worked. It’s easy, very easy, for the malevolent to grab bits of this and that and throw it out there for the stupid to gobble up. It’s harder for the intelligent and thoughtful to be heard. AOC is a politician, not a mythologist, and she’s got a lot going for her: intelligence, passion, beauty. Because she is a politician and a very public person, I think there are times she needs to choose her words very carefully. Calling Israel Goliath and not David with the slingshot is one thing — bringing Christ into it has echoes of something quite different.
Israel, that little plot of real estate, is the nexus of not two but three religions: the Abrahamic religions that all trace their origins to the prophet Abraham. Each has a stake in the notion that one God has given them alone the deed to this real estate. To deny the power of religion to bollix things up on all sides is a fool’s errand, just as denying the ability of the malevolent to use religion to cause chaos is as well.
I need more coffee.
Awesome & timely portrait of The Buzzard Who Guards the Gates to the Underworld...
…which is not an ordinary or common enterance
Blessed be Donkees who bears him to us. 
He only cares about himself. Even so, billionaires think their money will protect them from climate disaster
It is a weird and warped mindset — they know it’s coming but they are convinced that they can buy their way to safety.
Donald, though, is so psychotic that it’s hard to tell what he knows.
I highly recommend Douglas Rushkoff’s book “Survival of the Richest: escape fantasies of the tech billionaires.” Or the interview/lecture on YouTube:
It's the people with arsenals against all the rest of us. From babies in preschools to old people dancing...
From young people dancing to folks in any house of worship praying and opening their hearts to the stranger in their midst. All of us just going about our lives.
There is a streak of madness and hate running through American culture, and I have lived long enough to watch it burst into poisonous bloom, every petal a bullet.
I have lived long enough to experience duck & cover drills — growing up knowing that at least the Enemy was outside our borders. To watch the drills go away with the fall of the Soviet Union.
And I have lived long enough to watch us turn on ourselves, and to create an Enemy inside our borders, such that the smallest schoolchild is now taught “active shooter drills” — which are no more protective than “duck & cover,” except that the Enemy is right here and right now, and schoolchildren from K - 12 are shredded to unrecognizability by weapons designed for use on the battlefield. “We’ll need to use DNA to ID them all” has become a thing.
Pogo was right all along. “We have met the Enemy, and he is Us.”
Query for Old Timers Who Remember Post 9-11 Laws Restricting US Civil Liberties...
I need some sources I can readily cite. All my activist files from the Post 9-11 era are in an old computer In the garage. I did start looking online this morning, because I wanted to pull together my thoughts, but inquiries about incursions into our civil liberties brought up volumes and volumes of info (remember “Total Information Awareness” ? ) We were well and truly fucked. As I said when Barack Obama was elected: “It’s not over. All this is, is a chance for America to get it right.” And we didn’t — we elected Trump after Obama.
This query is specifically related to the BushCheney administration’s desire to monitor who purchased what books and who checked out what books. I distinctly recall that:
* They wanted Librarians to keep tabs on who checked out what, and be prepared to report it to the federal authorities upon request
* They wanted booksellers to do the same
What brings this up for me is a current discussion at DU (link below) in which it seems that history has all gone down the memory hole. There’s some who just don’t get it that book banning is not trivial, and not about “protecting” kids. They really think book stores are using it as a sales gimmick.
I started writing, but wanted to say more. I know you all can help me dredge up what seems buried in my memory.
Thanks to whoever replies.
https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=18515251
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Gender: FemaleHometown: Central Coast, California
Home country: USA
Member since: 2002
Number of posts: 90,648
