Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." Back in 1983, as my late former husband and I stood on the fringes of the crowd at MLK’s March on Washington, straining to hear King’s words, we had no idea that our gathering would become such an iconic event. Security was evident but less than at subsequent commemorative events that I’ve attended. We’d come into town for another meeting and just happened to have that Sunday free. My ex-husband is now long gone and my own last days are approaching. Yet King’s words live on and his statue still stands tall in West Potomac Park, not far from where he spoke 60 years ago.
A birthday
Today, Sept. 4 was my late son Andrew’s birthday, my very first child, so precious, so exciting, a brand new experience. He would now have been 56. We lost him when he was only 27. I like to remember the good times we all had together as well as his untimely death. His headstone lies under the stump of the old maple tree bearing an inscription taken from Walt Whitman, “I stop some where waiting for you."
SEPTEMBER 8 @ 8:00 PM ET: Kick off Peace Corps Connect 2023 with remarks from RPCV Congressman John Garamendi (D-CA) and Peace Corps Director Carol Spahn.
Then right after Franklin, tropical storm Idalia hit Florida’s Caribbean coast, but fortunately, my daughter, granddaughter, and great-grandson, living just a few miles from the coast on higher ground suffered no harm or damage, after staying home from work and school as per the governor’s orders.
- Idalia made landfall early Wednesday on Florida’s Gulf
Coast as a powerful Category 3 storm. It's the strongest hurricane to make
landfall in the Big Bend region, the nook between the panhandle and
peninsula, in more than 125 years.
- The storm caused flooding in some areas and left over 400,000 customers in Florida, Georgia and South Carolina without power.
- Storm
surge from Idalia set records
for highest water levels
from Tampa Bay through Big Bend on the Gulf Coast.
While Florida was getting an abundance of water, drought prevailed in parts of Texas.
CNN, Low water levels reveal dinosaur tracks dating back 110 million years As Texas baked in record-breaking heat this summer and a growing drought pushed water levels down, a group of volunteers uncovered something sort of magnificent: new giant dinosaur tracks that are believed to be from around 110 million years ago.
Congratulations to India and its people for the successful landing of an unmanned spacecraft on the moon.
Wash. Post, Prigozhin’s apparent death a boost for Putin, leaves Wagner’s future in doubt Putin must have decided to kill Prigozhin to protect himself. Therefore, the man’s death was no great surprise. Nor was the delay, which may have caught Prigozhin off-guard. He knew the risk but still boarded an aircraft, so, he died as he had lived, recklessly. Putin had apparently waited for his chance, then said publicly that he wouldn’t be attending the funeral, about which there was no news. Prigozhin is now dead and buried, so that chapter has been closed.
Ukraine is now using drones to attack inside Russia. Turnabout is fair play.
Reuters, Trump raised $7.1 million since he was booked Thursday at an Atlanta jail Donald Trump never overlooks a chance to make money which he is not in the habit of sharing.
Although over many decades, I’ve never considered voting for a Republican, if Nikki Haley should turn out to be the Republican presidential candidate, I would be quite tempted to vote for her as the first Republican woman to realistically have a chance. Other women might feel the same, as did those who voted for Hillary, who actually did carry the popular vote in 2016. So Donald Trump needs to take note.
Republicans, Haley said, “have to face the fact that Trump is the most disliked politician in America. We can’t win a general election that way.” If Republicans want to win, they should choose her as their presidential candidate.
Women’s sports are now attracting fans for the first time, a trend likely to continue.
Telegraph, ‘I was told transitioning would save me. It destroyed my life’
A young California woman “de-transitioned” after age 18 after getting breasts removed at age 15 and living for a time as a boy, reverting back again to female. She reported having felt that doctors had pressured her to undergo breast removal, perhaps because that was their business and what they were getting paid for doing. Estimates for those like this woman, who then later decided to return to their birth gender currently range between 2 and 13 per cent of transgenders, according to The New York Times.
Estimates
for those like this woman, who then later decided to return to their birth gender
currently range between 2 and 13 per cent of transgenders, according to The
New York Times. However urgently a young person might press to “transition,”
parents should resist, letting offspring only make such a choice after age 18. Is
giving young folks a “choice” on their physical gender expression really of benefit
to them and to society? Minors cannot marry, vote, or live alone, so should
they be able to change their gender? In my opinion, the answer is “no.” Hope this pressure for gender change is just
a fad. (The grass may look greener on the other side.)
Claims of sexual abuse have been leveled predominantly, almost exclusively, against male religious figures, teachers, medical staff, and community leaders.
Could that be because testosterone, the male sex hormone, makes men more prone to aggression and to seeking out forced sexual encounters, including rape, as also happens in the animal kingdom, perhaps even according to natural design? Doubtless testosterone is an important factor in explaining why most of the accused are male. Women should not assume that men have as much personal control over aggressive and sexual impulses and urges as most females have.
Sacramento Bee, Northern California man may have molested dozens of boys, says FBI. He wasn’t stopped for years This man was married and a youth pastor.
What is the significance of the fact that those claiming abuse by Catholic priests, or by evangelical pastors, scoutmasters, male nurses, or male teachers, are now often only coming forward in their own later years? Is that because timidity held them back initially or is it because now substantial payouts have been reported, or perhaps both? Normally, the negative personal impact of such experiences would diminish over time. (For me, even the emotional and financial impact of my unwanted divorce and of my older son’s unexpected death have become less acute than they once were, and I’ve even come to regard the divorce as something positive for me personally.)
Claims of sex abuse have come to light, not just trickling in one-by-one, but in bunches, and coming only at most accusers’ later ages when their actual pain might be expected to be less acute, indicating that claimants are now not only feeling free to come forward, but incentivizing each other and that there is a social contagion component involved. The prospect of punishment of the abuser is also incentivizing.
But I would also posit that the example of some other alleged victims actually receiving substantial financial payouts, especially from churches, for long-ago abuse provides an incentive for many former alleged victims to seek compensation for themselves. And does money actually help compensate for the harm done years before?
I know of no other time in human (or animal) history when a gay male couple (just a handful) has started caring for a newborn infant, the bio offspring of one of the, right from birth,. The exception may be male penguin pairs sitting on eggs and raising hatchlings together. Caring for and raising newborns and very young children throughout human history has nearly always been done by the women who have born them, nourished them with their breast milk, or sometimes have had them fed by a wet-nurse or another female, often a relative. With only a few notable exceptions, not many mammal dads (only 6%) stick around to help raise newborns being nursed by their mothers. Nor do human fathers necessarily stay with the new family.
Gay male couples living together in the past, representing themselves publicly as just “good friends,” rarely took in young children, and, if ever, those youngsters would have been family members, usually well past infancy, and usually boys. So gay male pairs now raising bio offspring produced deliberately from the sperm of one of them is something entirely new. We’ll have to see how it works out.
The very few “out” gay male couples of my acquaintance have never tried raising children. I’ve not known any such female couples, at least none any open about their relationship, only representing themselves as long-time roommates (and without any children). Among conventionally straight young couples I know these days, none have more than 2 children. That seems to be a family norm now in our country. Of course, some married couples have no kids or only one. The US birthrate is currently less than replacement, only 1.6 births per woman in 2020. There may have been a slight uptick since then, though not enough for replacement, requiring an average of 2.1 births per woman (to account for some unfortunate deaths among offspring).
I have a daughter with no kids, another with only one, and my older son died at age 27 without producing offspring. The exception would be my younger son, whose family came to stay with him in W. Va. for several months before returning to Hawaii. He and his wife, to whom he is still married, have a son together, but she has 3 older children by 3 different fathers. My son is the only one she ever married. (My son also has a college-age son by his first wife.) A native of Micronesia, a US Pacific territory, his current wife moved to Hawaii and has never really mastered English and was not very comfortable in W Va. My son hopes to be able to visit her and the family, but he doesn’t want to live again in Hawaii where they first met. Meanwhile, they do video chats and he sends them money whenever he can.
The occupational therapy association, where I worked for 16 years before joining the Peace Corps in Honduras in 2000, taught me the importance of “purposeful activity,” as subjectively defined by the actor. Both humans and animals routinely engage in such activity. But once they reach a goal, their satisfaction is short-lived, with little time spent resting on their laurels. The diploma is duly framed and the first-place cup is put on display, but the individual then moves on to other goals. We do like to encounter surprise rewards in the goal-seeking process, but most of the time, we are engaged daily in fairly routine “purposeful activity,” especially in our later years, whether just getting dressed, making and eating breakfast, or going out for a walk afterward to breathe in fresh air, get some modest exercise, and simply greet our neighbors. I am speaking of myself at age 85 now engaging in such very limited “purposeful activity,”
Those of us living on earth for some decades now have witnessed and participated in so many social changes! I remember the days when women saved their virginity for marriage. Yes, we did. That idea these days is laughable. Sixty-five years ago, after college graduation, when I worked for the Alameda County Welfare Department, we female employees were required to wear skirts of a certain length and nylon stockings with seams running straight up the back. No such dress code was imposed on male employees, though they invariably wore suits and ties. When our male colleagues were all suddenly promoted to a higher-paying job involving working with punch cards, a precursor to computerization, did we women complain of gender bias? No, we simply smiled and congratulated them.
As has been mentioned before, in the US now at my age, 85, there are almost 2 women for every man and most of those surviving men are married, while of us women are single, divorced, or widowed.
Who knew that collecting auto license plates is now quite the thing, with even a national society of such collectors? An item is valuable only because its owner and others consider it so. Nearly all present-day license collectors are male. Will their collections still be valuable after they pass on? Only if younger men take up the hobby.
My bank account theft still has not been resolved and a new annoying wrinkle has appeared. My phone rings daily accompanied by a message supposedly from my bank, but is it really from my bank? Spam messages seek to copy real messages, making them very hard to distinguish. Some are trick messages seeking confidential personal information to steal from our bank accounts. I’ve already had more than enough trouble with bank account theft, making it hard for me to respond to any supposed bank call, legitimate or not.
I also got a phone call from my health care provider, Kaiser Permanente, which always seeks ways to reduce costs. It was from a bot, but was a legitimate call. I verbally answered all the prompts about my age, social security number, member number, names of meds, until I was asked for the Rx numbers on the bottles, which I no longer had. The meds are sent out via regular postal mail in very large, hard to open standard-size bottles, so I then transfer them to carefully labeled smaller bottles, but without including the Rx numbers. So I hung up on the bot call, and just to prevent a bot callback, I ordered med refills on line, even though I wouldn’t run out for more than 3 weeks. This is health care aiming for greater efficiency.
Someone on our neighborhood website has been offering kittens for $100. She’s an optimist who will find trouble even giving them away for free. That’s true of many other “for sale” items featured on the website. We all have way too much stuff already. Even items put out on the sidewalk often end up being taken away as trash.
Dreams usually fade in the light of day. But I had 2 dreams last night that have stayed with me. In both dreams, I was in a Spanish-speaking country. In one, I stayed on as a teacher for kindergartners. In the other, I was on a group hike in the mountains and somehow got separated from the others, then tried to reconnect with them, asking for directions in Spanish along the way. I walked through a lovely and unfamiliar countryside, talking with people tending animals who seemed content despite their lack of material possessions.
Because of difficulty today pasting images, lost pets will appear next time.
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