Pat Political

Pre-op Thoughts

Computer and I will be shut down for a few days, maybe a week, while I begin recovering from surgery tomorrow. For anyone who is interested in knowing, I have asked my friend Morgan to put a comment on this post telling everyone how I am doing.

And for anyone who is just dropping by, I offer a short “course” on who I am, how I got there, and what concerns me.

To begin with I believe without any equivocation that the Declaration of Independence is the spiritual foundation of this country. Therefore it is clear (1.) that we all-- and this includes every person in the world-- are equal; (2.) that every person in this world is unique and has his/her uniqueness protected by “certain unalienable rights” which cannot be taken away by any government, whether based on the rule of the majority as in a Democracy or on the rule of a dictator; (3.) that all of the individuals who together form the community governed are the Government. It was the potential for tyranny over its citizens by any form of government which most concerned the men who wrote our Constitution . I believe they did an excellent job of creating the mechanism of a government which cannot take away the rights of either the states or the individual citizen. I believe that the first Ten Amendments have as much relevance to our lives today as they did when they were first drafted. I cannot with any conviction belong to any of the present Parties and have to characterize myself simply as an Independent

How I got where I am today is pretty well told on www.womansvoice.org. Look for my story (Patricia Hejny) on the button “Who We Are”.

A good place to start on what concerns me is with the post From About 1900 to Now, 12-20-2004.

I wrote about Social Security on 12-06-2004; Illegal Immigration on 12-16-2004; Roe v Wade on 2-01-2005; Health Care in Vermont on 3-10-2005; the Prisoner Abuse Scandal on 1-15-2005; Taxes on 10-30-2004; My Voting Morals on 12-14-2004. If you missed these posts, I hope you find them of interest.

Education and power failures

Saturday we had three separate periods of power failure plus a number of power dips throughout the day. Not a good day to turn on the computer and blog. But the flip side was a whole series of delightful phone calls, which I would have pretty much have missed had I been doing what I wanted to do. And Sunday I had some very nice company. One of the bonuses of imminent surgery is that one gets paid attention to, and I have been reveling in it....

But any power failure is a sharp reminder of how distorted our values have become.

No CEO has the ability to do the line work needed to fix whatever problem was causing the trouble Saturday and yet we regard any CEO as more important to society than the lineman who could. Indeed because this country has for so long given business a disproportionately high position, we tend to give any administrator the highest ranking. I recall clearly hearing the husband of one of my cousins speak of how well he could keep the scientists who worked for his company in line because of his business training.

The reality is that the most important people to society are the people who provide us food-- farmers. The next most important people are those who understand whatever infrastructure is in place and how to keep it working-- the water, the sewage, the garbage, the electricity, the phones, the roads and bridges, buildings both private and public, and-- I’m happy to hear people beginning to speak of this as part of infrastructure-- health care.

Yet our present educational system tells young people that the most important of them are the ones who will go on to college and most of them will go for some sort of business training. Those poor souls who can’t make it to college are told they can take the inferior type jobs described above.

Does this reversal of values bother you as much as it does me....?

It's been a while...

Sorry to have been so long without a post. Health problems which should be resolved by surgery on April 26th have been leaving me little energy. But there’s a lot I want to say and four days to do some posting, so here goes.

I’m told that Nature looms ugly on all sides. The East coast will disappear in a tsunami caused by the explosion of a volcano in the Canary Islands. Most of California will vanish in a tsunami when a super volcano under Sumatra goes. And the middle of the country is threatened by overdue action from a big one under Old Faithful. And what can all our technical prowess, our certainty that we have nature under our control, do to help us? Not a thing..

So what to do? How about what all the rest of life on the planet is doing-- live one day at a time as best we can until something comes along to stop us...

When I get my mind off volcanoes, what really bothers me most is that everyone talks as though fossil petroleum is a good thing and we need to find more of it at cheaper prices.

Oil is poison. It and the many chemicals derived from it have polluted our land, water, and air. We live in a sort of chemical soup and it is no surprise that our over loaded immune systems are breaking down and gifting us with a plethora of immune system failure illnesses, the cancers, MS, rheumatoid arthritis, etc., we see in more and more young people. We pass all sorts of laws against smoking but don’t think twice about riding our children to school in busses loaded with carcinogenic diesel oil fumes. I’ve never had anyone to whom I talk about this dispute it, but at the same time I’ve never seen any negative statement about oil in any form of public media. It’s almost as though there is the same taboo surrounding oil that there was around sex before Freud.

What is needed is a break away from oil as our primary source of power to biomass. Wind power is excellent where it can be utilized safely and sensibly but does nothing for the health of the planet itself. Biomass both takes from and gives back to the earth. Corn and soy are both proposed by agribusiness to be the base for a vegetable diesel oil and ethanol industry. But both require so much input of energy by way of fertilizers that the energy gain from these crops is actually negative.

Nature has offered mankind a true miracle crop and we are the one nation on the earth insane enough to deny ourselves its benefits. I am, of course, talking about hemp. And, no, you can’t smoke it. In fact if marijuana is grown anywhere near hemp, the THC content of the marijuana will be degraded. No other plant offers the range of products that hemp can provide-- from food to fabric and paper to diesel and ethanol fuels to plastics. It essentially grows like a weed, requiring little cultivation energy and is simple to process. Colonial farm wives easily produced everything but the very modern fuel and plastic applications. It offers very little of interest to big business except possibly as a base for plastics but a great deal to small local business. And the ecological benefits for the land are beyond measure.

Fortunately there do seem to be more and more people ready to push for some action. The legislatures of North Dakota, New Hampshire, Oregon, and California all are considering bills which will make it legal within their states for farmers to grow hemp. You can check www.votehemp.com for more on this.

And-- a further thought on the possibilities of hemp-- we are always bemoaning the difficulty of getting farmers in Columbia and Afghanistan to stop growing drug crops. Maybe if we could offer them hemp which would give them so much more, they’d be interested....

Higher taxes for Medicaid?

Vermont’s better heeled citizens are petitioning Governor Douglas to raise taxes on their financial bracket so that benefits will not have to be cut to Medicaid recipients. What a lovely news item! I am eager to see how our good governor will respond. His Bush Republican teeth have been showing through that bland smile lately as he tries Bush Republican fear tactics on efforts to develop some sort of equable public health system. Can he force Bush Republican insistence on the basic selfishness of humanity and keep low taxes for our wealthier citizens. Or will he have to accept that a sense of community well being can prevail over any personal considerations.

These good Vermonters are typical of what makes Vermont a jewel among the states of the Union! Vermont’s beliefs should be the model followed by our federal Government. Vermont never permitted slavery. Vermonters feel that government should be only whatever regulation makes the community run better. Vermont’s approach to property rights is that you should be able to do what you want with your property provided you do no harm to your neighbor or your community.

If the rest of the country ran on these principles, we would all be a lot better off. Think for example, how much easier it would be to fight inter-state power plant pollution if Vermont’s approach to property was used instead of the now prevailing absolute right of property ownership to do whatever it wants....

Pope John Paul II

The funeral of Pope John Paul II on Friday was truly a world event.

The number of people who crowded themselves together in St. Peter’s Square, the additional numbers who gathered in front of the huge TV screens set up around Rome and before the many TV’s throughout the world made this the most impressive coming together of people this planet has ever seen.

But even more impressive was the diversity of this audience which came from every known religious group. For wherever this man of God went, he practiced the equality of all people before God, the equal worth of all our pathways to God. And at his funeral he reaped the rich harvest of his reaching out.

For if, as Jesus tells us, God loves all his children equally, there can be no one way to Him. Therefore there can be no chosen people.

But we have Jews, Muslims, Christians, all claiming to have the one right pathway to God, all claiming the right to call anyone who does not share their belief ’evil’, and all claiming the right to take whatever actions they wish against ’evil doers’.

Is it not this ’chosen people’ statement of the Old Testament that is the source of all the ugliness in the world today.  Is it not this which we should be fighting.

More on the Comet...

Yes, it’s not a comet but an asteroid which NASA has been tracking and which was calculated to hit us on Friday, April 13th, 2029. Appropriate date, right? However, we have had this threat removed. More recent observations and calculations have led NASA to conclude that this space rock will not hit us, but pass nearby,. possibly even between us and the moon. I would think that its passing between us and the moon might cause us some severe tidal disturbances, but I am no astronomer.

I have been using the idea of an impending disaster as the rational of the Bush Republicans for their fiscal policy which otherwise sounds like sheer insanity. And now my “comet” is removed. But their interest in being able to get off the planet has even increased recently. Is there a potential hanging over us for more disaster?

Yes, indeed. Super volcanoes. On Grr Radio this past Sunday night Grace and Rama talked about a super volcano under Sumatra which some geologists feel may have been stirred into activity by the two recent major earthquakes and which could blow all of southeast Asia out of existence.

This jogged a vague memory I had of something here in this country, and poking about on the internet I found it. Under Yellowstone Park is anther of these super volcanoes. This one is due to blow at any moment, and when it does it will absolutely devastate our country. Who needs to care that the Chinese own a mortgage on the country if all they can collect will be a hole in a doughnut.

And this leads me to wonder whether the almost frantic interest our present administration has in getting off the planet for a few years at least may be based on some information to which we are not privy. Not much we can do about it other than send in all our ideas about travel in space to NASA....

If you are interested in checking some of this out for yourself, you will find some links on grrradio.com and more information on the BBC website which is bbc.co.uk, on www.space.com/scienceasronomy/ and www.space.com/scienceastronoy/asteroid_update_B_041227.html, and by Googling “April 13, 2029”. Sorry that I don’t have the technical capacity all of you have to set up links directly, but, who knows, I may get it yet....