Step outside of the shit storm.

When the train is coming, get off the tracks. With no disrespect to Brian Willson, who heroically stayed on the tracks, this is generally great advice. How does one do this? One exercise that has served me well is to mentally step back and watch what is going on, including my own role in it, as if it were a movie, or a football game, or whatever works. When I can remember to do this, I get much needed objectivity. Using the objectivity, I can see what I would tell myself to do if I weren't myself. Very often the smartest thing to do is to lay low and let the storm burn itself out. Kind of what we do when there is a tornado.

I have been watching someone very close to me be at the center of a kind of hysteria at her workplace. Every move she makes has the potential to come back and bite her. I am telling her that she can't lose by standing calmly in her integrity and let what happens happen.

I can be a real fighter if I am certain of my righteousness. So can she. But in my thinking, the only way to fight hysteria is to be calm and steady. In something like the Salem witch trials, the lives of the accused were at stake. But the trials were rigged so the women were damned if they did and damned if they didn't. It is interesting to watch the situation that when people feel that things are getting out of their control, they often turn to bullying or abusive tactics to get the feeling that they have control.

We see this happen internationally and in our own homes. What I can't really figure out is why when people are frightened, they get nasty. One of the hardest Buddhist teachings that I am trying to practice is to not gossip. Gossiping can be so satisfying. But Lama Marut teaches that even when you think gossip is constructive, it is not. Bummer. But this situation that my friend is in has been fired by gossip, rumor, bullying, and false sentimentality. She is in the strongest position of power if she steps outside and lets the others make their own karma. (make their own beds and lie in them). That's what I think at this moment.

One way to get rid of old bad karma is....

One way to get rid of old bad karma is to make good karma right now.

I was watching footage of the Iraq Veterans Against the War protest at the NATO conference in Chicago this week. The 50 vets who threw away their metals from "The Global War on Terror." were angry, hurt, damaged, ashamed, disenfranchised, and more. But they are also courageous, changing, sharing their message that war in general and this illegal, imperialistic occupation of Iraq, in specific, is a terrible crime.

Many of them spoke words of apology to the countless and uncounted Iraqi children who have been killed, maimed, left without parents, homes, safe drinking water. These soldiers are transforming their karma. It is a beautiful sight to see warriors turn into fighters for peace.

Sorry that John McCain never got that courage.

It is a sad truth that almost wherever you go in this planet, people will have a living memory of war. When I was a kid visiting  my grandparents in Kutztown, PA, I met the man down the street who had fought in our Civil War. My grandfather Braucher died at a young age from pneumonia. He was a farmer raised on a beautiful Pennsylvania Dutch farm. He had to leave the farm at a very young age when he returned from WW1 with permanent lung damage from having been mustard gassed. He was lucky. He lived to come home.

I really admire the Bradley Mannings of the world and each and every soldier who has turned toward the work of stopping the senseless killings and ending these shameful wars. When I speak in terms of karma, it may not match their verbiage, but the turn they have made must help them to sleep and to breathe better. They are using their present time and present consciousness to make god karma for this life and future lives.

'I beg you, I emplore you, I beseach you, in the name of God, stop the repression." Archpishop Oscar Romero right before his assassination.

I was talking with a young acquaintance the other morning. She was telling me about a Peace University she had studied at in Ireland. We were talking about the age old question of whether it is more effective to work on policy issues at home or to be on the ground in paces where abuses are taking place in solidarity with the local people. There is no right answer. My experience was that we have to trust our instincts. Personally, no matter how painful being in Central America during the 'troubles' was, I always got more than I gave. The peasants were inspiring to be with. The power of heart I felt from them trumped all else. I didn't have to wonder, however, where I could help the most. They told me, "Go home and tell our story."

I did just that. But, we do have a frightening blind spot here in the USA regarding taking responsibility for our actions elsewhere. I was good at telling the story of what we were doing in Central America, especially Guatemala. But, our well schooled belief that we are the best and brightest country in the world made it hard for many to take action.

One day I was at a friend's house in New Hampshire. She worked for the Clinton administration. At that moment Jennifer Harbury was fasting in Guatemala to get some action on the disappearance of her husband, a Mayan man. The Clinton people wanted to know whether she was some kind of nut case. She was no such thing. She just happened to have so much more courage than most mortals that we could hardly relate. As she continued her campaign, going back and fourth between Washington and Guatemala and also working with immigrant legal affairs in Texas, several assassination attempts on her life occurred. We have read about the recent court case involving the former president of Guatemala and his US backed genocide. Much horrible suffering could have been stopped if we had listened to what was going on (WITH OUR MONEY AND FULL BACKING) at the time.

The thing is...what can we do? We have known about the daily drone strikes in the Middle East since they started to happen. Congress is just now "looking into the situation".  We know that our CIA and many other organizations are dealing drugs, assassinating leaders, and arming everybody. Jeremy Scahill and Noam Chomsky and others are telling the real story in real time, yet we go about our daily business and wait for the same people who are doing this shit (IN OUR NAME) to rectify it.

I think that we don't know who we are any more. After 9/11, there was a resounding moment in which we had a cosmic opening to change our course, to take the high road. We blew that one. We are still using up truckloads of money fighting wars that we know were based on lies. Why are we doing this? Even recently we could have captured Bin Laden and had a fine public trial and showcased our democratic tradition. The cowards who killed him won't even get a trail, I bet.

If history is any indication, we will pay for this dearly, at least our children and grandchildren will. What goes around comes around.

Here is a brief look into the life of Jennifer Harbury:
Jennifer Harbury -From Wikipedia Jennifer K. Harbury (born 1951) is an American lawyer, author, and human rights activist. Her personal story, writing, and activism are significant in revealing the complicity of the CIA in human rights abuses, particularly in Central America.
Harbury grew up in Connecticut, graduating from Harvard Law School and Cornell University. In 1990, Harbury met her husband Efraín Bámaca Velásquez^[1] (whose nom de guerre was Commandante Everardo). Bámaca was a Mayan commandante of the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG) during Guatemala's civil war,^[2] a period of brutal repression and genocide against Guatemala's indigenous populations at the time.^[3][4][5][6]
In 1992 Bámaca was "disappeared" by the Guatemalan government. As a U.S. citizen and lawyer, Harbury set out to find her husband's whereabouts by protesting and through legal action despite receiving threats on her life and safety for these efforts.^[1][2][7] Among the actions she took were two hunger strikes in Guatemala, one in front of the White House, and a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the CIA.^[1][2]
During this period, both the Guatemalan and United States governments claimed they had no knowledge of Bámaca's whereabouts. However, as a consequence of Harbury's actions, U.S. State Department official Richard Nuccio ultimately became a whistleblower and revealed the fact that not only did the CIA know of his whereabouts, but that it had a close working relationship with the Central American death squads that were involved with his disappearance.^[7] It was revealed that on March 12, 1992, the local Guatemalan army captured Efraín Bámaca Velásquez alive, that the army had secretly detained and tortured Bámaca for over a year before killing him in September 1993 without trial, and that his torturers and murderers were paid CIA informants.^[1][2] For his whistle blowing, Mr. Nuccio was stripped of his security clearance and effectively purged from the CIA and the State Department.^[8][9]
The revelations caused a scandal for the U.S. government. As a result, in 1998 then-President Bill Clinton ordered declassification of secret archives on the Bámaca murder and other human rights crimes committed by the Guatemalan military. Clinton also issued a public apology in Guatemala for the United States' role in supporting the country's abusive regimes.^[1][4]
Since that time, Harbury has made it her life's work to fight for human rights by documenting, exposing, and speaking publicly about human rights abuses, with special attention given to abuses perpetrated by the United States both historical and contemporary.

Win Some, Lose Some

Health foods fads have been around a long time. In the late 19th century, Kellogg, the cereal king, had a famous sanatorium in Michigan. There he advocated whole grains, yogurt enemas, exercise, vegetarianism and abstinence from sex. But this only impacted a few people. Many were very famous (Henry Ford) and all were pretty wealthy.

When I was young, in the fifties, Mother was a pretty terrible cook, but she was, for her time, pretty weird. We had to eat whole wheat bread and didn't drink sodas. Aside from those snubbings of Wonderbread, and Coca Cola, our diet had a lot of packaged or canned foods. Betty Crocker was the kitchen goddess of the times. Delivery trucks brought us bakery goods and the milk truck brought us dairy. Dad had a garden for summer veggies and we had a few fruit trees.

In the late sixties, married and living in Oregon, we ended up going to Santa Cruz, CA to hear Adelle Davis at the great hippie bookstore. Her book shook our generation. "How to Eat Right and Keep Fit" That's what I think it was called. She taught a whole generation about vitamins and minerals and the advantage of fresh fruits and vegetables and brewers yeast shakes and yogurt and whole grains and making whole proteins from grain combinations. That kind of stuff.

Suddenly organic gardens and community gardens and agricultural type communes sprouted everywhere. We had little money but bought expensive vegetarian vitamins. The rest of the US culture was eons behind. On the road in the US you couldn't find a yogurt from sea to shining sea. We had to grind our own wheat berries to make whole wheat bread. I made my own tofu for heaven's sake! Long half day trips were required to go to the farms to get whole raw milk with the cream on top.

When I returned from England pregnant, US Customs confiscated my jar of Folic Acid. It was a prohibited substance by the food and drug folks. Adelle Davis had told me I needed to take it when pregnant. Turns out she was right about a lot of things. Now it is a top priority in prenatal vitamins.

There were pockets of awareness all over, but it took a very long time for the corporations to catch on. Thankfully now times are different. The very fancy places have the most organics. I can go into any city and find tons of healthy food. But the challenges have changed also. Coca Cola sells tap water for a dollar a bottle. Huh? Monsanto is polluting the planet and has started the seemingly unstoppable epidemic of GMOs. One would expect that food grown without pesticides, herbicides, growth hormones, antibiotics, unradiated and so on would be less expensive. But it hasn't worked out that way.

Back when we were eating Wonderbread and Twinkies, other countries had great local produce and meat and chickens raised in healthy environments. When I went to Italy as a young woman, I knew I was tasting food for the first time. It was so different, so good. Why had we been snookered into eating canned veggies instead of the real thing?

One one hand I can't applaud enough the spread of health food in the past 50 years. On the other hand I understand that for every gain, there seems to be a defeat. As always, the poor get the shaft the worst. And the corporations win round after round. The first line of defense is not to buy GMO anything while there is still a slight chance to turn things around. Same goes for polluted meant and eggs and fish and corn. Stop buying anything with corn syrup and other dangerous nasty ingredients. The bottom line is the first line of defense in any action against corporations.

Sometimes I am not sure about modern conviences.

As I sit here being annoyed at the noise the dryer is making, I was thinking about washing the clothes in Rio Lempa, El Salvador. There, I was not alone. In fact, it was the one time when women's solidarity was the strongest. As the day got heating up, we carried our dirty clothes down to the river. Women with small children brought their kids. The babies slept in the shade, the older kids played in the river.

We each were washing our own stuff, often sharing a sliver of soap. But as we pounded and rolled and rinsed and spread out on the rocks, we talked. It was so different from formal meetings. The women told their heart's secrets. They told of their pain and suffering. They told of their joys, their yearnings. The conversations often drifted away with the dirty water. Conversation isn't exactly the right word. It didn't center around responding to each other. Our job was to hear, to open our hearts.

One woman had had to drown her crying baby in that river when the army was killing everyone in the village. Most of the people were hiding in the river, breathing through reeds. If the soldiers had heard her child crying, everybody would have been killed. I found it hard to breathe through some of the stories. But we kept pounding and rolling and rinsing and ringing.

As the tasks got finished, there was laughter and splashing and playing with the kids and singing. We talked about the new cow the village had gotten recently. We talked about how wonderful it would be for everyone if they could breed her and have more cows. I had a talisman with me which mostly insured my gaining trust from the women. The Peace Abbey had given me Archbishop Romero's eye glass case. He isn't yet a saint in the official Catholic Church (although the new Pope was there last week having discussions about the possibility), but he was a saint and a martyr to the peasants of El Salvador.

The thing that struck me so strongly today was the isolation of our modern lives. We have the wonderful appliances which make our lives so much lighter, but then we have to join the gym or go to class to reach out and be with other people.

About thirty five years ago, I was in the Artist in the Schools project in New Hampshire. I was a weaver. I was assigned to do a project in an impoverished rural school. I brought gorgeous wool and we made a huge wooden frame and stated an old fashioned, hand made tapestry. On the lower levels of the work, about 6 kids at a time sat on the floor, weaving the picture. They also began to talk almost in the same way the women of El Salvador had. Their hands were busy. Their hearts opened up. There was almost something sacred about the space. I now understand my grandmother's joy in quilting bees, and women getting together to spin wool.

I think we miss something having machines doing our work and then going out for entertainment.

I realize that the sun is always there...

I realize that the sun is always there, but it is hard work to keep this knowledge alive after weeks of cloudy weather. I am in Portland, Oregon, USA. Even for rainy, drizzly, low cloud cover, dark sky Portland these past weeks have been brutal. There were some weeks of the loveliest spring weather, then it turned freezing and rainy. The locals keep saying that they need the rain and put on a brave front. Last night we had to have a fire in the living room as well as the heat on. Outside summer flowers are blooming and the peonies have taken a beating from the rain. It is just not right.

I am trying to 'get' the metaphor herein. None of this cloudy business, none of this cold and darkness means that the sun is gone or not doing its job. The sun is steady in its activity. When I forget this I can end up feeling abandoned, enfolded in darkness. The same deal happens when I forget that absolutely everything that happens to us or doesn't happen for us is perfect, filled with Light. I get snookered into thinking that the fog or the thunderclouds or the mist are the reality. I loose sight of the light, the sun, the wisdom and the force which is constant.

My friend, John Gardner, always reminded me to "Keep your eyes on the Light." This sounds like a good idea, but in my orbit, I can get heavily into the fog. One of Rudolf Steiner's exercises for inner development is to pick out something beautiful in every situation. Oh man, do I forget this practice with great regularity. The Portlanders who say "We need the rain." are coming close to this. Watching the rain fall as a thing of beauty regardless of need, might be a better practice.

In any case, in both the weather and in my inner fog, I am having the most wonderful opportunity to remember that the sun is always there and to remember to keep my eyes on the Light. Life is good.

An interesting ADD article, thanks Tom.

Suffer the Children

The case against labeling and medicating children, and effective alternatives for treating them

by Marilyn Wedge, Ph.D.

Why French Kids Don't Have ADHD

French children don't need medications to control their behavior.

Published on March 8, 2012 by Marilyn Wedge, Ph.D. in Suffer the Children

In the United States, at least 9% of school-aged children have been diagnosed with ADHD, and are taking pharmaceutical medications. In France, the percentage of kids diagnosed and medicated for ADHD is less than .5%. How come the epidemic of ADHD—which has become firmly established in the United States—has almost completely passed over children in France?
Is ADHD a biological-neurological disorder? Surprisingly, the answer to this question depends on whether you live in France or in the United States. In the United States, child psychiatrists consider ADHD to be a biological disorder with biological causes. The preferred treatment is also biological--psycho stimulant medications such as Ritalin and Adderall.
French child psychiatrists, on the other hand, view ADHD as a medical condition that has psycho-social and situational causes. Instead of treating children's focusing and behavioral problems with drugs, French doctors prefer to look for the underlying issue that is causing the child distress—not in the child's brain but in the child's social context. They then choose to treat the underlying social context problem with psychotherapy or family counseling. This is a very different way of seeing things from the American tendency to attribute all symptoms to a biological dysfunction such as a chemical imbalance in the child's brain.

French child psychiatrists don't use the same system of classification of childhood emotional problems as American psychiatrists. They do not use the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or DSM.According to Sociologist Manuel Vallee, the French Federation of Psychiatry developed an alternative classification system as a resistance to the influence of the DSM-3. This alternative was the CFTMEA (Classification Française des Troubles Mentaux de L'Enfant et de L'Adolescent), first released in 1983, and updated in 1988 and 2000. The focus of CFTMEA is on identifying and addressing the underlying psychosocial causes of children's symptoms, not on finding the best pharmacological bandaids with which to mask symptoms.
To the extent that French clinicians are successful at finding and repairing what has gone awry in the child's social context, fewer children qualify for the ADHD diagnosis. Moreover, the definition of ADHD is not as broad as in the American system, which, in my view, tends to "pathologize" much of what is normal childhood behavior. The DSM specifically does not consider underlying causes. It thus leads clinicians to give the ADHD diagnosis to a much larger number of symptomatic children, while also encouraging them to treat those children with pharmaceuticals.
The French holistic, psycho-social approach also allows for considering nutritional causes for ADHD-type symptoms—specifically the fact that the behavior of some children is worsened after eating foods with artificial colors, certain preservatives, and/or allergens. Clinicians who work with troubled children in this country—not to mention parents of many ADHD kids—are well aware that dietary interventions can sometimes help a child's problem. In the United States, the strict focus on pharmaceutical treatment of ADHD, however, encourages clinicians to ignore the influence of dietary factors on children's behavior.
And then, of course, there are the vastly different philosophies of child-rearing in the United States and France. These divergent philosophies could account for why French children are generally better-behaved than their American counterparts. Pamela Druckerman highlights the divergent parenting styles in her recent book, Bringing up Bébé. I believe her insights are relevant to a discussion of why French children are not diagnosed with ADHD in anything like the numbers we are seeing in the United States.
From the time their children are born, French parents provide them with a firm cadre—the word means "frame" or "structure." Children are not allowed, for example, to snack whenever they want. Mealtimes are at four specific times of the day. French children learn to wait patiently for meals, rather than eating snack foods whenever they feel like it. French babies, too, are expected to conform to limits set by parents and not by their crying selves. French parents let their babies "cry it out" if they are not sleeping through the night at the age of four months.
French parents, Druckerman observes, love their children just as much as American parents. They give them piano lessons, take them to sports practice, and encourage them to make the most of their talents. But French parents have a different philosophy of discipline. Consistently enforced limits, in the French view, make children feel safe and secure. Clear limits, they believe, actually make a child feel happier and safer—something that is congruent with my own experience as both a therapist and a parent. Finally, French parents believe that hearing the word "no" rescues children from the "tyranny of their own desires." And spanking, when used judiciously, is not considered child abuse in France.
As a therapist who works with children, it makes perfect sense to me that French children don't need medications to control their behavior because they learn self-control early in their lives. The children grow up in families in which the rules are well-understood, and a clear family hierarchy is firmly in place. In French families, as Druckerman describes them, parents are firmly in charge of their kids—instead of the American family style, in which the situation is all too often vice versa.
Copyright © Marilyn Wedge, Ph.D.

"Natural Disasters"

Although there is much speculation about how 'natural' our disasters are, how much the actions of mankind contribute to creating them, any idiot can see that we are going to face more and more. My thinking today is that if we (collectively and individually) are dumb enough not to do everything in our power to make life on earth sustainable, and even if we are smart enough to do our best, we will still get tested in our reactions to crisis.

When we lived in Battle Ground, Indiana, a bit of a nightmare in itself for a native New Englander, there were legends afoot that the reason the great Indian tribes had chosen the area for their huge gatherrings was that tornadoes never touched down there. There seemed to be some wisdom in that as there had been no recorded ones since the white men had come and killed the Indians.

There was a good reason for the name 'Battle Ground':

History of the

Battle of Tippecanoe

Native American Settlement

Early man and many Indian tribes roamed this part of the Wabash Valley before the thriving trading post of Keth-tip-pe-can-nunk was established in the eighteenth century. Known to many as "Tippecanoe", the village thrived until 1791, when it was razed in an attempt to scatter the Indians and open the land to the new white settlers.

Seventeen years later a new Indian village was established on or near the old Keth-tip-pe-can-nunk site at the Wabash/Tippecanoe River junction. Known as "Prophet's Town", this village was destined to become the capitol of a great Indian confederacy -- their equivalent to Washington, D.C.

The town was founded in May, 1808, when two Shawnee brothers, Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa (the Prophet), left their native Ohio after being permitted to settle on these Potawatomi and Kickapoo-held lands.

The Protagonists

Tecumseh and the Prophet planned to unite many tribes into an organized defense against the growing number of western settlers. Through this union they could defend the lands they had lived on for thousands of years.

In addition to being a seat of diplomacy, Prophet's Town became a training center for the warriors, with a rigorous spiritual and athletic regimen. As many as one thousand warriors were based in the capitol at its peak.

The white settlers of the Indiana territory were disturbed by the increasing activities and power of Tecumseh's followers.  In the late summer of 1811, the governor of the territory, Gen. William Henry Harrison, organized a small army of 1,000 men, hoping to destroy the town while Tecumseh was on a southern recruitment drive. The regiment arrived on Nov. 6, 1811, and upon meeting with representatives of the Prophet, it was mutually agreed that there would be no hostilities until a meeting could be held on the following day. Harrison's scouts then guided the troops to a suitable campsite on a wooded hill about a mile west of Prophet's Town.

The Battle

Upon arriving at the site, Harrison warned his men of the possible treachery of the Prophet. The troops were placed in a quadrangular formation; each man was to sleep fully clothed. Fires were lit to combat the cold, rainy night, and a large detail was assigned to sentinel the outposts.

Although Tecumseh had warned his brother not to attack the white men until the confederation was strong and completely unified, the incensed Prophet lashed his men with fiery oratory. Claiming the white man's bullets could not harm them, the Prophet led his men near the army campsite. From a high rock ledge west of the camp, he gave an order to attack just before daybreak on the following day.

The sentinels were ready, and the first gunshot was fired when the yells of the warriors were heard. Many of the men awoke to find the Indians upon them. Although only a handful of the soldiers had had previous battle experience, the army bloodily fought off the reckless, determined Indian attack. Two hours later, thirty-seven soldiers were dead, twenty-five others were to die of injuries, and over 126 were wounded. The Indian casualties were unknown, but their spirit was crushed. Angered by his deceit, the weary warriors stripped the Prophet of his power and threatened to kill him.

Harrison, expecting Tecumseh to return with a large band of Indians, fortified his camp soon after the battle. No man was permitted to sleep the following night.

Taking care of their dead and wounded, the demoralized Indians left Prophet's Town, abandoning most of their food and belongings. When Harrison's men arrived at the village on November 8, they found only an eldery Indian woman, whom they left with a wounded chief found not far from the battlefield. After burning the town, the army began their painful return to Vincennes.

The Aftermath

Tecumseh returned three months later to find his dream in ashes. Believing the reconstruction of the confederation to be too risky and the chance of Indian survival under the United States government to be dim, he gathered his remaining followers and allied himself with the British forces. Tecumseh played a key role in the War of 1812, being active in the fall of Detroit, but he was killed at the Battle of the Thames on October 5, 1813, at the age of forty-five.

Scorned by the Indians and renounced by Tecumseh, the Prophet took refuge along nearby Wildcat Creek. Although remaining in disgrace, the Prophet retained a small band of followers, who roamed with him through the Northwest and Canada during the War of 1812. He died in Wyandotte County, Kansas, in November, 1834.

That is the white man's version of what happened. Probably a bit watered down. It is amazing to me that places where great amounts of blood have been spilled all over the planet  haven't had altered weather. I can't believe that the only factors in weather anywhere are physical ones. 

I have been several places in my life where the earth felt sad. One was in Greenfield, NH in the field of a beautiful farm. I spoke of this to a friend and he told me that there had been a horiffic Indian massacre there. 

When we lived in Battle Ground, Indiana in our huge rented house with the tower, and we saw a tornado coming, I took the kids into the far corner of the cellar and we huddled together. My then husband went to the top of the tower to watch the excitement. The tornadoes jumped over our little town, just as the Native People had known they would.

I have read that some people in Tornado Alley run out in the open to catch the excitement of watching tornadoes. I had the excitement at a very young age, living through the Worcester tornado at age 9.

The 1953 Worcester Tornado was an extremely strong tornado that struck the city and surrounding area of Worcester, Massachusetts on June 9, 1953. It was part of the Flint–Worcester tornado outbreak sequence, which occurred over a three-day period from June 6—9, 1953. The storm stayed on the ground for nearly 90 minutes, traveling 48 miles across Central Massachusetts. In total, 94 people were killed, making it the 21st deadliest tornado in the history of the United States.^[2] In addition to the fatalities, over 1,000 people were injured and 4,000 buildings were damaged. The tornado caused $52 million in damage, which translates to $349 million today when adjusted for currency inflation. After the Fujita scale was developed in 1971, the storm was classified as "F4", the second highest rating on the scale.
At approximately 4:25 pm (EST), the tornado touched down in a forest near the town of Petersham, and proceeded to move through Barre, where two people were killed.^[3] It then moved through the western suburbs of Worcester, where 11 more people were killed. The storm then passed through Worcester, where it destroyed Assumption College and several other buildings, killing 60. After striking Worcester, it killed 21 more people in the towns of Shrewsbury, Southborough, and Westborough, before dissipating over Framingham. According to National Weather Service estimates, over 10,000 people were left homeless as a result of the tornado.

These experiences leave a big impression. My biggest impression was of my mother's relief as we found out that our whole family was safe. She was the only one home at the time. We kids and my Dad were all at friends houses, Dad at work. My other big impression was of the hail and then the air being sucked out to cause a stillness in which we could hardly breathe.

One of my hopes is that the various physical and psychological hardships we have endured in our lives will act like fire tempering steel and that when the call comes we can be strong and help others. Isn't this the goal after all? Oh, ya, and world peace and enough food for everyone.

What would a modern day noblesse oblige look like?

"Noblesse oblige" is generally used to imply that with wealth, power, and prestige come responsibilities. ^] In American English especially, the term is sometimes applied more broadly to suggest a general obligation for the more fortunate to help the less fortunate.

We could look at unemployment from  the point of view of noblesse oblige or more simply from the angle of what does it mean to be a citizen in a society. There is something in the idea of being a citizen that could resonate with the idea of the common good, the commonwealth.

I was thinking about what the 1% could do in a country like Spain where the unemployment among young people is around 38%. It seems to me that the extraordinarily wealthy could find some work for the unemployed and if they each hired 10 young people at a half way decent wage for even a month, the economy would start to smarten up.

It is probably a dumb idea. But it seems to me that borrowing more and more money, increasing debt without any output, letting the constructive energy go wasted is also a dumb idea.

When the economy tanked in Oregon leaving some towns, especially those involved in fishing and lumber, to die, I wrote a letter to President Obama. I said that there were lots of people looking for work. They were not used to high wages, but everyone was suffering from the lack of jobs. The state is significantly deforested. Why not hire as many people who want to work and replant the hills and mountains? It seemed like a better idea than having everyone go homeless, shops and professions shut down, depression setting in..all that kind of stuff. And the trees would grow and profits and jobs would be assured down the road.

Months later I got a letter back. It said that there were a lot of nice ideas out there. Washington bailed out the financial sector by printing money and raising the debt. The towns died. The hills are still bare. Sometimes I think we really are happier screwing things up than solving problems.

I am a simple thinker. I think we have made things very complicated in the modern world.  Giving work to someone is a lot better for everyone, in my humble opinion than giving charity. I give both, but I know work is better. The US is a country that had a tradition of "can do" attitudes.

My dear friend, Carol Gardner, used to tell me about her mother's actions during the depression. The family lived in the well-healed Oak Park, Illinois. During the worst days a steady stream of men would come to the kitchen door of the house looking for food. But they always asked whether there was work, not for a sandwich. They were going to be fed, no matter what, but Mrs. Hemingway kept a bunch of rakes, brooms, shovels by the door. She would act so happy that someone showed up to help her. She thanked them and fed them and gave then a bit of money. Carol said no sidewalks had ever been so well cared for. She gave them a lot more than lunch. She gave them their dignity.

I know the stock market is going strong at this moment. I also know that I have never seen so many homeless, hopeless people as I see on the streets of Portland, Oregon right at this time of recovery. Something is deeply out of whack here. There have to be some simple solutions.

When Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated, he had recently been in Detroit, MI at a rally where he spoke of the many, many, homeless, jobless people. He also spoke of the many, many, empty homes and apartments. Was it possible that the homeless could occupy the empty houses? Very revolutionary. Very simple. Grounds for murder? Or a simple, logical solution?

Dear Adolpho, my foster kid from El Salvador

I was thinking about Adolpho this morning. It is hard to think of him and not know whether he ever made it home to his mother.

During the eighties, when we were backing horrible wars against the peasants of El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala and so on, hundreds of thousands of people fled those wars to come to the US. The great immigration influx was a direct result of our policies of genocide in funding and backing horrible dictators. (see the recent verdict against the then president of Guatemala, E. Rios Mott)  In Salvador, as in the other countries, the military was trained by the US at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning Georgia.

We were terrorists of the highest order.  As was our policy in Southeast Asia and is now our policy in the Middle East, we called anyone whom we wanted to an enemy. Babies, women, anyone was fair game. The scorched earth policy was among our often used actions to wipe out subversives. We went to a village, killed everyone, killed all the animals, burnt down everything including crops, poisoned the water supply and moved on.

The army met school buses and forcibly conscripted very young boys. This was a terror to all the peasant families. Then, the boys were forced to fight against their own people. Why would any kid ever do such a thing? Easy answer. The army had made examples of families where the boys didn't co-operate. In one well documented case, the military had heard a rumor that a family was hiding an army age son. When the mother left home to bring tortillas to the men in the fields, the army came to her house. When she returned, the table was set for lunch and on every plate was the head of one of her children. This was an effective warning.

This is what led Adolpho to leave home. He couldn't join the army and kill his own  people. They were not safe if he hid or stayed at home. It took him six trips from Salvador to the Rio Grande before he made it into the US. He was fourteen when he left home. During the first year of his walks to Texas, his father died in Salvador. He was a cowboy and got killed in an accident at work. Each time in the unsuccessful trips to the US, Adolpho was captured in Mexico and returned to the Salvador border.

He kept trying. It took him a year and a half until he made it into Texas and was put into a detention facility. It was a prison, but he was fed. He regained his strength and was eventually sent to our house in Marblehead, MA as a foster kid under the Unaccompanied Minor Alien Act (or something like that)

He was a sweet, attractive kid. He went to Marblehead High School were he struggled to learn English and spent night after night telling my kids and their friends his story. That was his best therapy. He told his story over and over until he somehow didn't need to tell it quite so often and in quite such detail. This was a good thing because one of the many times the police came to my house was to respond to a complaint from a neighbor that Spanish was being spoken on my deck. (What! Maybe they thought the maids has taken over the neighborhood. The police were good enough to be very embarrassed.)

Adolpho wasn't really thriving and I asked he what was the matter. It seems he missed farming and most of all animals. Some nice local woman gave him an after school job helping with her horses. Yet the real thing was that we couldn't get in touch with his family. Everything he worked so hard to do was so he could someday go back to Salvador and help his family. He was a good soul.

He proposed marriage to me one night. I asked him why. He told me that if I married him, he could move into my room and then we could get another kid in his room. I told him it was a kind and romantic offer.

He had to move to a different foster home when another refugee kid in my house made trouble for everyone. But we saw each other fairly often. I went with him to the Peace Abbey to meet Raul Julia who had just made Romero, the sad beautiful movie about Salvador in 1980. Adolpho went to community college in Boston.

We lost touch. I am certain he made it back to Salvador, but after the war his country was in ruins. I just think of him often, especially when I meet 14 year old kids here. How many of our kids could do what he did and remain sweet?

I Forgive Myself and Those Who Hurt Me

I am coming to think that forgiveness is just another muscle we need to exercise in order to keep strong. If we practice forgiveness on the little things, then we are in practice when the heavy stuff comes up.

We all know and we all read that this business about forgiveness is much better for us than resentment, holding grudges, letting old stuff eat away at our cells and our spirit. But we all know when we are being/have been wronged and we cop a righteous attitude and hold onto our burning coals while running around crying "Ouch!"

Years after my divorce, I was in a friend's house in Oregon. My kids were in varying stages of disappointment or resentment with their father and I was getting pissed off. Some little, long forgotten passage in White Eagle's Quiet Mind came to mind. I had read that I needed to forgive myself and the offending party. My anger was like a brick wall that light couldn't come through and I couldn't climb over.

So, I sat down in the living room and said, "I forgive myself for my part in this sad situation." It takes two to tango. "What goes around comes around." And then I did so with my ex. I proclaimed it. I did not feel it. Then I had to redo a few times. I didn't know what I was supposed to feel. I didn't know if it could work. I just did it.

At first I felt nothing. So, I went on with my day, vowing to do the practice again after lunch. Lunch was delayed because I got three phone calls, one from each of my children. They were in varying stages of excitement and disbelief. Their dad had called each of them and apologized for his seeming neglect of them and asked whether they could move forward onto a better relationship. I felt a fifteen year burden lift off my shoulders.

This could not happen. This did happen. I had a little cry and thanked the goddesses for this miracle. This was way more than I was hoping for in my little practice.

Today, I am practicing again. I have some active hot coals to let go of. But, I am going to back up and forgive right now the people and their actions which I am finding annoying. I forgive myself. I forgive M., R., and so on. I am proclaiming this and not feeling it.  But I know that I can knock down brick walls and years of hurt. I am doing this right now as I write.

Isn't the Sky Always Falling?

Has any doomsday prophesy come true since our old friend Noah believed and built his arc? I don't know, but it seems as though all my life the world has been coming to an end and people have believed the end was coming and have gone so far as to kill themselves in preparation. Many Tea Party people are hearing and believing this message right now. True believers in the immanent apocalypse are preparing right now by stockpiling weapons and canned food and other shit that will help them survive until the rapture. George Bush 11 seemed to have this view that he was righteous by starting his crusade in the Middle East. There doesn't seem to be any other reason that holds water for our provocations against the Muslims.

Some doomsday predictions in my lifetime have spurred people to positive unselfish actions in response. The Nuclear Freeze movement is one example that comes to mind. The last big protest at Seabrook, NH was so successful that the second reactor there was never built and there has not been another nuke built in the US since. To me, an activist response dedicated to changing the conditions that are threatening us seems healthy.

Anger, turned into action for the greater good,  can be positive anger. I am angry that my taxes are primarily used to kill people. I think we should be able to dedicate our taxes to something in line with our values. I would like my tax money to be used to feed the hungry and house the homeless and educate the ignorant. I would like my taxes to pay teachers as much as we pay people who develop drones and other weapons. I would like my tax money given to other countries to be used for the same thing, not to enhance the power of murderous dictators and build more US bases in other countries.

If I gave an endowment to a university, I could dedicate that money to something important to me. I have always felt that I could be happier about paying my taxes if I knew they were going to help others. I have not seen much success in the Tax Resistors movement. I would welcome any ideas out there for constructive non-violent action to allow similar voices to be heard.

I am one of those people who can do a lot if I can get a clear picture of what I am doing. Until I 'see', I wait and watch.  With the help of Howard Zinn and other wise men, I do understand that positive change in our country doesn't come from the top down. "Mr. President, please do something about Civil Rights.", but rather comes from the bottom up. Rosa Parks, where are you? We all need to be Rosa Parks about the things we care about. I pray for the courage.

Again, If It Doesn't Work, More of the Same Might

I was just thinking about the way we work here in the US. I was thinking about our tax code. We moan and complain about the unfairness of low wage scale workers ending up paying more than rich people. Instead of making a single rate tax for everyone earning over a certain income, we make taxes so complicated that we seem to end up with a greater divide. As I said before, if schools don't work, the answer is a longer school day and more homework. If sanctions don't work, harsher sanctions certainly will. We are upside down.

This from a recent book by Eduardo Galeano: Children of Our Days, A Calendar of Human History

War Against Drugs

In 1986, President Ronald Reagan took up the spear that Richard Nixon had raised a few years previous, and the war against drugs received a multimillion-dollar boost. From that point on, profits escalated for drug traffickers and the big money-laundering banks; more powerful drugs came to kill twice as many people as before; every week a new jail opens in the United States, since the country with the most drug addicts always has room for a few addicts more; Afghanistan, a country invaded and occupied by the United States, became the principal supplier of nearly all the world's heroin; and the war against drugs, which turned Columbia into one big US military base, is turning Mexico into a demented slaughterhouse.

This is a sad picture. Where are our minds? We still have the conceit that most Americans have big hearts. We give aid to the needy. That kind of talk. I am not seeing the evidence of this. The money we gave to the banks in the bailout could , by some estimates, have fed everyone on earth for more than 100 years. I never heard any arguments for that use of my tax money.

I betray my hippie roots by believing that some competition is fun and sometimes exciting. But, I do not believe that those who can't be winners should be left on the street to die of hunger and cold. I also do not think it makes for good economic hygiene. Think about the money we spend on jails and police and courts and hospitals for each and every addict.

Here is a touching an illuminating story my friend sent me:

Saskatoon remembers: citizens mourn homeless drunk they considered a friend

CHRIS PURDY

The Canadian Press

Last updated Friday, May. 10 2013, 8:00 PM EDT

Alvin Cote is shown in a sketch a detention worker made of him and is now on T-shirts worn by other workers and police officers. (HO/THE CANADIAN PRESS)

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He was one of the most recognizable residents in Saskatoon, and some people consider the Prairie city a little different now that he’s gone.
Alvin Cote wasn’t a well-known politician, businessman or hockey player, but a ragged, homeless alcoholic whose tough talk would easily melt into a hearty chuckle and a big smile short on teeth.

He spent the past couple of decades living in Saskatoon. He could be seen curled up on the floor of a bank foyer, sleeping on park benches or reading worn copies of National Geographic in the drunk tank.
He died April 19, a few days shy of his 60th birthday.
Saskatoon police officers are still talking about his death, even though they considered it an inevitable fate. It’s believed Cote had been arrested more times for public drunkenness than anyone else in the city’s history. Some officers put the tally at close to 1,000.
Although his obituary does not list an official cause of death, police say Cote was in hospital with pneumonia when he died.
Downtown beat officer Constable Derek Chesney was surprised and saddened when he heard the news. He saw the man almost every day over the past five years.
“It’s not often that you can arrest somebody on multiple occasions and end up being friends with them. But such was the case with Alvin,” Chesney recently wrote on his official police blog, Cops and Bloggers.
The officer confesses that he had a good cry after writing the online tribute. He fights back tears again as he talks on the phone about the important life lesson Cote taught him.
“You realize that people can fall through the cracks,” says Chesney. “And just as much as a good person can have a bad day, things can happen to people in their lives where they end up going on a path that perhaps they didn’t choose.”
Cote was from the Cote First Nation in the Kamsack area, east of Saskatoon near the Manitoba boundary. He was carted off as a child to a residential school on a neighbouring reserve and suffered years of abuse, says Chesney.
He says Cote never talked about it, but the abuse likely set him on his destructive path. Cote has a sister in Saskatoon and she tried to look after him for a while, says Chesney. But Cote wouldn’t stop drinking.
Chesney remembers meeting Cote for the first time in the winter of 2009 outside the old train station downtown. Chesney had just earned his badge and saw the man with a scraggly beard tapping and flexing his arms, yelling his catch-phrase: “I’m a fighter.”
Chesney calmed him down by asking, “I heard you were a lover, not a fighter.”
“Well, I’m that too,” Cote laughed.
Chesney and his partner then put Cote in their cruiser and, as they were heading back to the police station, Cote knocked on the dividing window with $5 in his hand. He said he was hungry. Chesney ran into a McDonald’s and got him two double cheeseburgers. Cote happily devoured his meal during the rest of the ride.
Chesney says he and many other officers looked out for Cote. They checked on him at night and made sure he had enough to eat. Sometimes, when Cote was hanging out on his usual bench in the public lobby of the police station, officers changing shifts would hand him their lunches as they walked by.
One time, when Cote was in detention on his birthday, staff rummaged up a cupcake and stuck a candle on top. “They actually had everybody on key and everybody else in cells sang Happy Birthday. He blew the candle out through the bars.”
Chesney says he last saw Cote a few weeks before he died, sitting outside a Tim Hortons. Chesney patted him on the back and they ended their chat the way they always did.
“OK, Bud. See you later,” Chesney said.
“You will,” Cote replied.
Chesney says he and other officers have made their way in recent weeks to the home of Cote’s sister to drop off sympathy cards and kind words about the man they miss. Some even say they thought of him as family.
But the police aren’t the only ones mourning Cote. Chesney’s blog has received hundreds of clicks and comments from people who had seen Cote on the streets, even though they never knew his name.
A McDonald’s manager wrote about how she will miss waking Cote up outside the restaurant in the mornings and asking him to move along. Another woman said she’ll miss buying him lunch. One man talked about how he once saw Cote sleeping inside a bank foyer. He slipped some money under the pile of clothes the man was using as a pillow.
“Sounds like this guy may have been an angel in disguise?” wrote a woman named Amy. “He seems to have brought out the best in humanity.”
Constable Robbie Taylor often sat and had coffee with Cote. He laughs as he recalls his favourite stories about the man, like the one about how Cote used to wear a second-hand sweater from the Salvation Army. On the front it read, “What the world’s greatest mom looks like.”
Then there was the time when Cote pitched a fit in detention because officers gave him a magazine with singer Anne Murray on the cover. “I hate her!” he ranted.
Taylor says Cote loved to read but was always losing or breaking his glasses. So officers usually grabbed him glasses from boxes of used, donated pairs that were supposed to go to Africa.
Taylor once gave Cote an amateur eye exam. He had him read an oatmeal box while trying on different glasses. If he squinted, Taylor had him try on another pair. The ones Cote liked best were large and red and made him look like TV talk show host Sally Jessy Raphael. Cote suspected they were women’s glasses but he still tucked them away in his pocket.
“I still have a couple of pairs in my locker. They were ready to go if he broke them again.”
Cote was such a character that a worker at the police detention centre sketched his picture, put his mug on some T-shirts and gave them to other staff. Orders for more are now rolling so people will have something to remember him by.
The workers tried to give one of the T-shirts to Cote last year for Christmas but he didn’t want it. He grumbled that he looked too much like Santa Claus.
Cote’s celebrity grew after reporters at the local newspaper, the Saskatoon StarPhoenix, spent months piecing together the details of his life. The resulting feature netted the daily a National Newspaper Award nomination.
Even Saskatoon’s police chief knew Cote. Clive Weighill recalls seeing him at a Tim Hortons just a few weeks before he died. Weighill slipped him some cash.
“I think most people thought I was telling him to leave but I was just giving him a five dollar bill so he could go get himself something to eat.”
Weighill says a study completed last year tracked Cote and 22 other homeless people with substance abuse problems. It showed that they cost the city $2.8-million over one year in policing, ambulance and hospital costs.
That’s why police, health officials and other agencies hope to build a wellness centre in the city to house the group. Weighill says it’s a more dignified solution than sticking them in police cells.
The centre could also provide faster access to treatment services, but Weighill concedes some people just don’t want help.
Chesney says he did everything he could for Cote. “I couldn’t make him sober up. I couldn’t bring him home and put him in my basement and give him a bath. He lived the way he wanted to and you almost have to respect somebody for that.”
Some officers say they would have gone to Cote’s funeral but he was buried on his home reserve some 350 kilometres away. There’s talk of a local memorial, but nothing has been organized.
Chesney hopes the bench in the police lobby that Cote sat on for countless hours will be decorated with a plaque in his name and moved into the new police station that’s under construction. That way Cote will always be there.
“He was a fighter. He was a survivor. And he’ll be remembered.”

So, it isn't just the United States. I don't know whether that is comforting or not. I can hardly think about this poor man because Saskatoon gets to 60 below zero. I nearly die just thinking about zero degrees anymore. I think one gift that our leadership could give us all would be to inspire us with a  view of ourselves that uses ideas like, well, like Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and Justice for All. Or even Brotherly Love, or Land of Opportunity, or Chicken in Every Pot, or that there kind of thing.

I want the goodness of our hearts to have a shot of blooming in the world around us.

Thank you, Anne Lamott

With no permission from the author, I will quote from Anne Lamott's wonderful book, HELP THANKS WOW. She is talking about trying to help someone else when it just isn't working.

When you get your hooks out of something, it can roll away, down its own hill, away from you. It can breathe again. It got away from you, and your tight sweaty grip, and your stagnant dog breath, the torture of watching you do somersaults and listening to you whine "What if?" and "Wait, wait, I have ONE more idea..."

You can go from monkey island, with endless chatter, umbrage, and poop-throwing, to what is happening in front of me. God, what a concept. It means I stop trying to figure it out, because trying to figure it out is exhausting and crazy-making. Doping it has become the problem.

So when we cry out Help, or whisper it into our chests, we enter the paradox of  not going limp and not feeling that we can barely walk, and we release ourselves from the absolute craziness of trying to be our own--or other people's--higher powers.

Help.

For those of us who have been here, we know this is true. We know that at first we have to repeat the process a thousand times a day, but the moments of release can start to stretch out into half hours and so on. I would like to make a link for you to this book, but I can't figure out how just now and I have to go give thanks for all the help that streams to me.

My latest addiction. ".Hi, my name Julie and I am an......."

I play solitaire on the phone. I win 42 1/2% of the time.My wins are faster. My game really improves, but in the end, I lose more than I win. Some days when I can't focus well, I turn off the timer and just hope to solve the game. Sometimes when I nail the first few games, I think I am having good luck and I think, "This is going to be a good day!" I am a winner! But, in actual fact, my statistics have remained the same over the years. It is a really good thing I don't play for money.

When the phone or computer doesn't work, I play with cards. My hands feel clumsy, the cards feel heavy. Cards were all I knew until eight years ago. Now they are painful. When I first started playing, I loved the cards. They slowed me down and I breathed better. Now they seem like a punishment. It is weird . I still play, but I don't get the original benefit.

Is my game now an addiction? I think so. I am not getting the feeling I liked at first. I am playing more games because they are so fast. I feel slightly uptight and breathless after playing. I am wasting time.  When I started playing with cards only, I was taking time out. Now I sort of have to recover afterwards. I think I have to stop. But if it an addiction is this going to be easy?

I am not successful at limiting my playing. I will say that I am only going to play for ten minutes and a half hour later I am still playing one more game. It is helpful for me to write this to you. Now, I have realized that I have a problem. I am going to deal with it. There must be a support group.  I hope my Higher Power doesn't laugh at me and say, "You think you have problems?" I guess I need to keep this in perspective.

The other day my friends almost five year old identical twin grand daughters were having a fight about some trivial thing like a crayon. The one was crying bloody murder. The other look at her and told her to get a grip, "It's not like your cat died."

It is not like I am drinking a quart of vodka a day, but the nature of the addiction seems to be the same. Other people can play solitaire anytime they want and get the satisfaction they enjoy. I can't stop and don't any longer get what I want from doing so. It is not like my cat died, but it is something to be dealt with. Now.

Another Wonderful Camino Movie

Last night I saw Walking the Camino, Six Ways to Santiago, a new documentary about this wonderful, crazy, adventure of making a pilgrimage.  The audience was packed with people of all ages. That, in itself, is sort of rare because retirees seem to outnumber  the young at most events here.

The first thing that struck me was how similar the Camino Pilgrimage is to life. I can plan something, big or small, and then life happens. By what miracle of karma do we end up meeting just the perfect person at the perfect time? By what miracle of karma do we end up in a seemingly terrible situation with a difficult person at just the right time? How could we ever arrange life the way it turns out?

Even a non planner-like I am goes to the Camino with some sort of idea that I have packed the right stuff, figured out the route, have a purpose. The early pilgrims, like Saint Francis (before he was a saint) walked with nothing. People along the way provide. They get their blessings from easing the way for the pilgrims. You can't 'get' it until you do it. And I guarantee that the best plans will fall apart or drastically change so that at some point the pilgrim will be naked. (metaphorically speaking)

The experience is exactly like our real life except we have contrived many ways to hamper our freedom and close off the avenues to walking our path freely. People in the audience were most amazed that no one knew where they would sleep or eat on any given day. Everyone who has been a pilgrim has some story about how, when the inn was full, the weather bad, the feet sore, someone appeared with a solution. A door opened at a farm house and an invitation was offered. Food or wine appeared by the side of the road with a note to the dear brave pilgrims to enjoy.

Stories like "Stone Soup" or the "Loaves and the Fishes" come to mind. This is archetypal stuff. I know the Camino has some powerful earth energy that sustains the walkers. I know that I drew inspiration from the millions of souls who had gone before me. I know that the Catholic tradition was strong for me. But, that being said, I had pretty much my unique experience and the very same experience that everyone before me and with me had.

Last night I thought of the bravery and simplicity of Peace Pilgrim who shed her possessions and her life and did a pilgrimage across the United States. She carried nothing, brought no food, had no money to speak of and was provided for the whole 3,000 mile walk. She also made wonderful friends and brought her simple message of peace to countless people both on her pilgrimage and later with her book.

I was impressed with this film because I could see the people in the audience coming to  an understanding of themselves and picturing themselves with nothing walking to Santiago for no understandable reason. There is also something to be said for doing the impossible. Even for those who can't make the whole walk or who get sick and go home or who die on the way, something big has been accomplished. It is not a race or a competition we each get what we need. Just like life itself. Buen Camino!

Education Fads Can Undermine Childhood Joy

None of my children learned to read until they were 7.  I didn't learn to read until I was 7. None of us had any problem. We all learned almost instantly with little practice. The veil was withdrawn and the code revealed. We were ready. The other thing was that my kids either went to Waldorf kindergartens or no preschool or kindergarten at all.

The story of my very brief foray into kindergarten was that I eagerly bounded into the classroom in Worcester, MA. I was happy and excited. I love people. In the second or third week we were making hats and boats from folded newspapers. I was a genius at this because my older brother had taught me how. I was showing, helping everyone when the teacher called for quiet. I didn't get the call. Next thing I knew, she was standing next to my chair with a huge (to me) pair of scissors next to my head telling me that if I didn't stop talking she would cut my tongue out. I screamed and screamed. I never spent another day in kindergarten. One of my shortest educational careers of my lifetime.

By first grade, I was ready to be part of the class and I never had a problem. I can remember my seat in the room the day I learned to read. The teacher was pointing to the big book "See Jane Run" and all of a sudden I was reading the next line and the next line. I got it! I was ready and it was easy.


My granddaughter, however, is coming  of age in a different era and a different place. She has been at a wonderful Montessori preschool since she was two. She is now 5 1/2 and about to enter a fine public school kindergarten in Marin, CA. She is a bright, well rounded, interested in everything kid. She is very athletic, can spend who afternoons making a fairy house for princesses, relates well to everyone. Loves to be read to, but hasn't learned to read yet.

She is the only person in her class who hasn't learned to read. She has a big problem. How can a child go to kindergarten so unprepared? She needs testing at Berkeley. She needs remedial work. She needs specialists. She hears the worry. She is 'less than'. She needs to practice all summer.

I have been an educator. I have taught adult literacy. I have worked with hundreds of kids. My evaluation is that she will read when she is ready. I know she loves books. I hate to see this pressure on her. I hate to see this worry surround her. The school is pressured. "We have paid all this money and she can't read yet!" The parents are being pressured. "You need to do this and this and this." But most of all it is the start of the pressure on Isabella. Who, with any wisdom, can show that early reading does anything to predict a happier or more successful life?

I feel that the concern and comparison is the damaging part, not the fact that a five year old can't read. I have watched this go back and forth over my lifetime. I have watched educational fads lock in then get kicked out. The best advice I can give is so very old fashioned. Good healthy food, plenty of sleep, lots of fresh air and play time, no more TV, and lots of stories. You can't go wrong. Then if there is a real reading problem, it can be addressed later when the developmental age is appropriate.

What do you think?

The courage it takes to live in poverty must be huge.

I have had plenty of flirts with voluntary poverty like hippie days, like living with the poorest of the poor in El Salvador, like being out of work for too long. But, in so many ways I can never be poor. I have my health, my education, and my family and my friends.

I think that visiting impoverished neighborhoods, or working with the poor, or for the poor should be part of our education. Their struggles are otherwise incomprehensible. The balance between life and death is often really thin. The pain and agony it takes to survive is huge. They lose too often.

I think it is a measure of our humanity how we treat the people who have nothing. How can we do this if we haven't met them? What would desperation drive us to do? Would we share or would we hoard? We moan and groan about our economy, yet we benefit always from the impoverishment of others. Cheap tee shirts from WalMart: how about those workers in Bangladesh? The scope of the problem is so huge, the temptation is to dig into our own stuff and turn a blind eye.

The divide is getting wider. It brings to mind that song from the twenties, "The rich get richer and the poor get poorer". Would you take your child on a class trip to a Reservation or to any desperate area of your city or across the 'tracks' in your town? The weird thing is that there is a very good chance you would be greeted with warmth and interest.

I recently spent several full days waiting in line with a friend in the Welfare Offices in the Mission in San Francisco. There were some very fucked up people there. There were people who were dressed in dirty rags, people without shoes, people who were obviously impaired from booze or drugs or injuries. There were hundreds of people in various stages of desperation. There were very strict protocols and rules, some nearly insurmountable for the least fortunate (or most impaired) or those speaking a language no one recognized. The workers there were wonderful. They treated everyone with respect. They smiled a lot. They solved problem after problem.

I went with trepidation, I left with a different feeling. We are all human. We all want things to be better. We all do. I had a Buddhist friend who was feeling guilty about spending so much time on his own enlightenment that he wasn't acting for the benefit of others. He left his fancy life in Marin and lived with the homeless for a few weeks begging for his food. His big discovery was that he instantly became ' the homeless guy'. The brightest moments of his day were when some passerby introduced himself and asked him his name. By saying his name he felt more human. Simple stuff can make a world of difference.

When it comes down to it, all we can really own is our humanity. If we think and act from our hearts, we can never lose anything important.