StumbleUpon | Opal-Tallulah's blog posts

http://Opal-Tallulah.stumbleupon.com/review/5416190/

Wed, 30 Aug 2006 15:53:04 -0700

http://stinging-nettle.blogspot.com/2006_08_01_stinging-nettle_archive.html#115686433258101141
"Brain damaged soldier? Who cares...
... not the government, that's for sure.
More than any other war in American history, the war in Iraq is sending home young men and women who suffer from closed-head trauma. IEDs, mines, urban combat, traffic accidents: all these things can lead to head trauma, and are, in increasing numbers. As a result, an entire generation of soldiers is returning home suffering from the sometime's baffling effects of head injuries.

And your government is slashing the funding for their treatment.

Sayeth the Republican Party to America's wounded vets: "Thanks for your service. Screw you."

Whether through the incompetence of Secretary Rumsfeld's Pentagon number-crunchers, or through the heartlessness of the Republican Congressional majority, it is now clear that the U.S. Military's cutting-edge brain-injury research and treatment centers could have their budget slashed by over 50% this year."

http://Opal-Tallulah.stumbleupon.com/review/5034153/

Mon, 31 Jul 2006 05:09:18 -0700

Ugh. I have to go back to work today. I don't know why, but there is an enormous difference between being up at 5:30 am so you can drink coffee and hang out on the internet and being up at 6:30 so you can get dressed and go to work. I think I prefer the former.

http://Opal-Tallulah.stumbleupon.com/review/5002909/

Fri, 28 Jul 2006 16:34:06 -0700

OK. I've been online, but I've just been screwing around. I created a "secret identity" over on livejournal, and I've been swanning around as someone completely different just to see what it's like. I haven't really read anything serious today; I just can't take it today. Maybe tomorrow.

http://Opal-Tallulah.stumbleupon.com/review/4939375/

Sun, 23 Jul 2006 18:58:13 -0700

OK. I signed up for about 100 meetups. I've decided that I need a wider social circle (outside of the internet I have about 5 friends - and two of them live elsewhere). I signed up for the nerdiest ones I could find; coincidentally, those were the ones that matched my interests and I figured those were the people I'd be most likely to hit it off with. We'll see if anything comes of it.

http://Opal-Tallulah.stumbleupon.com/review/4919713/

Sat, 22 Jul 2006 06:24:42 -0700

Despite the fact that, as I exercised this morning I watched the conflict between Israel and Lebanon grow steadily worse, I am in a good mood today. I don't know why. I have one more week of freedom before I go back to work, and Verona is home from her business trip (with a promotion and a pay raise!) and I'm just happy. Oh! And my internet connection seems to be holding steady!

http://Opal-Tallulah.stumbleupon.com/review/4890126/

Wed, 19 Jul 2006 20:59:39 -0700

I have been having internet connection problems all day. Consequently, I've been in internet withdrawal. Do you know the feeling?

http://Opal-Tallulah.stumbleupon.com/review/4872779/

Tue, 18 Jul 2006 13:00:26 -0700

Yesterday I was browsing through the SU pages and came upon a commentary by someone who affirmed that he hated Democrats. He proclaimed it several times, in all caps.

I don't understand that. I mean, I disagree with the priorities and values of the Republican Party very strongly, and I am repulsed by a lot of their policies... but I also have friends and colleagues who are Republicans. I don't agree with them very often, but we are able to be civil and hold each other in mutual respect, even when we do disagree. How could I cut that dialogue off by saying that I hate all Republicans? How could I destroy any chance of perhaps convincing them to see my point of view? Or of at least persuading them that my opinions are as motivated by love of country as theirs? How could I prevent myself from being able to work with them? How could I see them as an abstract evil, rather than as human beings? What kind of fool hates like that? Even Christians purport to hate the sin rather than the sinner, and I have never felt that Christianity was a very tolerant religion.

Ironically, many of the people who espouse such violence of opinion have American flags in their avatars. Is that what America is? Is that all we can be? Whether they like it or not, liberals are Americans, too. The secular have a stake in this country as well. Gay folks have a say in the direction our country takes.

And no, I'm not excusing the left from this kind of hyperbole and intolerance, attack and counterattack, either. I won't even get into who started this slide into mutual enmity. But we cannot survive as a house divided.

The way I see it, there are way too many people hating in the world. All hate does is bring armageddon down on all our heads, because it prevents us from reaching across, working together to stop violence and suffering.

http://Opal-Tallulah.stumbleupon.com/review/4696053/

Mon, 03 Jul 2006 22:20:28 -0700

Put away the flags

by Howard Zinn

"On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed.

Is not nationalism -- that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder -- one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred?

These ways of thinking -- cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on -- have been useful to those in power, and deadly for those out of power.

National spirit can be benign in a country that is small and lacking both in military power and a hunger for expansion (Switzerland, Norway, Costa Rica and many more). But in a nation like ours -- huge, possessing thousands of weapons of mass destruction -- what might have been harmless pride becomes an arrogant nationalism dangerous to others and to ourselves.

Our citizenry has been brought up to see our nation as different from others, an exception in the world, uniquely moral, expanding into other lands in order to bring civilization, liberty, democracy.

That self-deception started early.

When the first English settlers moved into Indian land in Massachusetts Bay and were resisted, the violence escalated into war with the Pequot Indians. The killing of Indians was seen as approved by God, the taking of land as commanded by the Bible. The Puritans cited one of the Psalms, which says: "Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the Earth for thy possession."

When the English set fire to a Pequot village and massacred men, women and children, the Puritan theologian Cotton Mather said: "It was supposed that no less than 600 Pequot souls were brought down to hell that day."

On the eve of the Mexican War, an American journalist declared it our "Manifest Destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence." After the invasion of Mexico began, The New York Herald announced: "We believe it is a part of our destiny to civilize that beautiful country."

It was always supposedly for benign purposes that our country went to war.

We invaded Cuba in 1898 to liberate the Cubans, and went to war in the Philippines shortly after, as President McKinley put it, "to civilize and Christianize" the Filipino people.

As our armies were committing massacres in the Philippines (at least 600,000 Filipinos died in a few years of conflict), Elihu Root, our secretary of war, was saying: "The American soldier is different from all other soldiers of all other countries since the war began. He is the advance guard of liberty and justice, of law and order, and of peace and happiness."

We see in Iraq that our soldiers are not different. They have, perhaps against their better nature, killed thousands of Iraq civilians. And some soldiers have shown themselves capable of brutality, of torture.

Yet they are victims, too, of our government's lies. How many times have we heard President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld tell the troops that if they die, if they return without arms or legs, or blinded, it is for "liberty," for "democracy"?

One of the effects of nationalist thinking is a loss of a sense of proportion. The killing of 2,300 people at Pearl Harbor becomes the justification for killing 240,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The killing of 3,000 people on Sept. 11 becomes the justification for killing tens of thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And nationalism is given a special virulence when it is said to be blessed by Providence. Today we have a president, invading two countries in four years, who announced on the campaign trail last year that God speaks through him.

We need to refute the idea that our nation is different from, morally superior to, the other imperial powers of world history.

We need to assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one nation."

from my Rethinking Schools email

http://Opal-Tallulah.stumbleupon.com/review/4352436/

Fri, 02 Jun 2006 17:29:44 -0700

I see that some folks use this as a blogspace in addition to the linky thing. So I'll try it, although I have actually updated my "real" blog. Today I mowed grass, played with dogs, made curtains for my classroom, played on the internet, read Fast Food Nation, watched TV, and dyed one of Vero's shirts that she accidentally spilled bleach on. Oh, and I did a little tie-dye, just to see if I could. I haven't actually made anything tie-dyed since I was in Girl Scouts.