windthread

"  I was born the summer the Berlin Wall went up,  into a world shadowed by the Cold War between the United States and the USSR.  Many people then expected a nuclear war was imminent and that such a war could mean the end of the world.  People have always been good at imagining the end of the world,  which is much easier to picture than the strange sidelong paths of change in a world without end.  In the early sixties,  international politics seemed deadlocked,  but elsewhere things were stirring.  The civil rights movement had already transformed the status quo into a crisis,  not only for the officials dealing with demonstrators but for Americans whose conscience had woken up or whose patience had worn out.

That year Women's Strike for Peace was founded when a hundred thousand women in a hundred communities across the country staged a simultaneous one day strike,  launching an antinuclear peace movement that also prefigured the women's movement soon to be born.  That year, Cesar Chavez was considering leaving his community organizer job to try to unionize California's farm workers, and the science writer Rachael Carson was finishing Silent Spring,  her landmark denunciation of pesticides published in 1962.  Just as the civil rights movement achieved not only  specific gains but a change in the imagination of race and justice,  so Carson's book was instrumental not only in getting DDT banned in the United States, which reversed the die offs of many species of bird   but also in popularizing a worldview in which nature was made up not of inert objects but of interactive, interconnected systems, a worldview that would come to be called ecological.  Step by step, ecological ideas have entered the mainstream to transform the imagination of the earth and its processes, of fire, water, air , soil, species, interdependences, biodiversities, watersheds, food chains (the latter words also entered the common vocabulary in recent times).  In 1962 Students for a Democratic Society,  the key organization for the student movement in the United States , was founded, and the environmental movement began to matter in public imagination and public discourse.

I was born into a world in which there was little or no recourse and often not even words for racial profiling, hate crimes, domestic violence, sexual harassment, homophobia, and other forms of exclusion and oppression.  In my own country, which considered itself then as now a bastion of democracy,  some of the Ivy League universities did not admit women,  many of the Southern colleges and universities only admitted whites, and quite a few elite institutions still banned Jews.  It was a world where the scope for decisions about religion, sexuality, living arrangements, food and consumption patterns was far narrower, though there were also many old ways of life disappearing.  Pristine wildernesses, family farms, small businesses, independent media, local customs, and indigenous practices were under siege by the homogenizations, consolidations and commercializations that  would super nova into corporate globalizations and the very premises from which to resist these eradications were still mostly embryonic.  This is the way the word changes,  as Dickens understood when he opened his most political novel with  "It was the best of times,  it was the worst of times."   It usually is."

Rebecca Solnit.  pgs 35 and 36.

RS is a little younger than i am but here on these pages and the more to follow,  she tells me in black and white what my world was.  History.  She tells me my history.  All these things,  every single one i can give examples of in my own experience.  I know these things.  But i have never seen them written as one thing,  as the history of my own time,  the history of me.

so i will continue to read.  After all,  this is only pages 35  and 36.  There's a lot more.  But to learn to look at what is happening in terms of seeds planted,  seeds sitting in the dark and then seeds splitting and opening OUT at some particular moment in Time

and i will let my Original Thought just sit for now.  I am OutSide here and it means Everything to me.  I don't want to be IN side,  thinking and writing things down just so i can feel like i am participating in some way….i will participate by being Out Side.  Giving Water.  Stinking of Goat.  

But there is an Opinion on Salon  5-29-2016  Carol Anderson    Donald Trump exposes the GOP's dirty secret.  They build everything by nurturing white rage.  

this is the bottom line.  From there,  i am guessing that it has become time for there to be a Radical Change in the two party system,  a radical change in Campaign Finance.  The Electorate of this United States of America is changing face and hesitantly becoming Confident.  More and more people feel like they are Americans.   Mr. Yellow Hair is shoving this into our faces and we can't breathe.  If it weren't for the dire straights of the Planet,  i would look forward to what will come of this.  

But, for the Planet,  there is no time to waste.

 

 

the Golden Current  which has been there,  planted,  for i don't know how many years…but this year is STRONG and has

3 currents.   How can it BE?  I'd given up on currents thinking it would be necessary for another bush for cross pollenation….that would explain it.  But…………………………….  Three.  Three pea sized fruits.

 

the Shelling Peas have many blossoms and this One Pod….a shelling pea….in the desert….a shelling pea,  in the desert

 

looking Through,  the chairs and the bench are on the West side of the Old Woman Apricot and that's the side that insects damaged two of her strong boughs.  They are dead now and offer no shade.  But because the chairs and bench have "always" been there,  they are in SUN,  offer no relief in any day.  Today i squat and look…What if i moved the chairs and the bench?  over here to the East side of Old Woman?  Where there is ample shade?

 

 

Dog.  Beauty FULL dog.  Friend.  Partner.  SisterDog.  This Dog.