"Dumb Anger, Dumb Plan"

I can’t take credit for the title. I traveled to it last night in a lovely Chinese novel, “Brothers,” set during the Tiananmen Square upraising. At a time that brought students and workers together to fight for…democracy. The protests around the country are not lost on me, yet, I remember panicked rhetoric after Nixon’s and Bush 43’s elections as well.

I have been searching all week for the words to capture my string of thoughts on the outcome Tuesday.

I went to bed Tuesday night secure in the knowledge that I would awake to the first woman president. My security was shaken by the first email subject line I read Wednesday morning: “This is a very sad day for our country.”

I immediately went in search of election results and was stunned by the amount of red that swept our country. Including my own state, Michigan, which went conservative for the first time since 1988 when President George H.W. Bush was elected. I reasoned thoughtfully:

1.     I must be in an episode of “The Twilight Zone” or for you younger readers “The Black Mirror.”

2.     I have to run this past Snopes. This has to be someone’s idea of a gag.

3.     Should I take the day off from work to mourn? It seemed just and appropriate somehow.

I listened to the week’s coverage of the election and was comforted by the thoughtful reporters and voices of our nation that reminded me that all of Trump’s supporters weren’t the hateful bigots that he is. And saddened by the realization that the same voters with the “dumb plan” to shake things up in Washington had put their Republican incumbents back in office. The very Washington insiders who have done nothing for the voters since they have been too busy blocking this administration for their own personal and political gain. “Dumb Anger, Dumb Plan.”

I was also comforted by at least one reporter on NPR’s Sunday All Things Considered, who acknowledged that while there were many hardworking and sincere reporters out there covering this campaign, the media as a whole didn’t do a very good job (my words) challenging a candidate who actually used a campaign stop to promote his new Washington, DC hotel and the media covered it. (International free advertising is exactly what the news media is apparently about these days --- free advertising and pandering to the base interests of the American people while the international media tries to legitimately cover our news --- much to their own entertainment.)

http://trumplandmovie.com/

Monday night, I had the opportunity to view Michael Moore’s “Trumpland,” with Moore himself at a rally in Flint. In the film, Moore reads an eloquent essay he wrote to the angry blue collar white American man. He readily acknowledges all of the reasons these men and their ethnic fellow Americans have a right to be angry. Yet, he cautions all voters that when one votes in anger there will be consequences to pay long after the moment spent in the voting booth. And those consequences, Moore reminds his audience, affect the whole nation. Getting even through one’s vote is a “dumb plan.” (I note the loss of union power over its membership in this union state with this election. While the unions might endorse Democrats, the workers are seriously conservative on social issues. I think the union members just taught their union leadership a lesson in independent minds and votes.)

I am fearful now for my students, friends, family and neighbors whose religions, cultures, races, disabilities, and gender orientation put them more at risk than ever before. Pundits had predicted that should Trump win, his legacy of hate on the campaign trail would give those, who supported for him because he gave credence to their ignorance, fear and hate, the license to act on their hate towards others unlike themselves. Other pundits predicted that had he lost, those same haters would have reacted violently toward other Americans and immigrants unlike themselves. I fear we may be in a “Catch 22” here. Win or lose, someone is going to get hurt who instead deserves the equal protections under the law that we claim are afforded to all.

I am fearful about our “right to know” as Trump has already prevented the media from reporting on his actions as president-elect. Our media are already in a tenuous place and Trump’s disrespect for the First Amendment and its role in our free and open society is concerning to say the least.

I am worried about human rights issues, the environment, and our Democracy as it becomes ever more vulnerable to capitalism with Trump at the helm and the Koch Brothers and others exercising their free speech rights with piles of cash. We worried about Clinton booking the Lincoln Room for a fee. What’s going to be for sale in DC with Trump as our CEO?

At this moment in time, I am going to choose to take comfort in the belief that the good and decent men and women who hopefully still exist in our Congress, will block Trump’s less lucid maniacal actions and protect the values that those of us were taught by our parents, teachers, family, and friends. You know, things like respect, fairness, honesty, kindness, generosity, equality, and tolerance.

But I will be paying attention and I won’t hesitate to voice my opinion and protest those actions that strike me as unjust.

I can’t help but wonder if our silent majority may have just gotten what it deserves. Stay silent, don’t act, it will all be OK, is a “dumb plan” too.

Musical Interlude: Songs for life

Music seems to attach itself to the different parts and pieces of my life. Songs trigger memories and maybe even preserve those memories for me. The soundtrack, I suppose, to moments in my time. They bring events, people, and emotions alive again for me…even if only in my mind.

There are a couple of songs that have traveled with me over time. Flexing their meaning to the changing path of my life and sticking with me. They remind me of how valuable each turn on the path is.

Kenny Loggins has long been my poet. Long ago he and Jim Messina teamed up to create the song that I have traveled along ever since.

"Watching the River Run" - Loggins and Messina, 1974

 

Although he died in 1981, Harry Chapin is still my storyteller. It's liking getting lost in a good book when he sings his stories. His "All My Life's a Circle" song puts life in perspective "from sunrise to sundown" and through the seasons of life.

"All My Life's a Circle" - Harry Chapin, 1977

 Perhaps they will speak to your life or help you put things in perspective. Enjoy.

Our Lady of the....

I first saw her on the porch of a neighbor sunning herself.

I didn’t run into her again until that neighbor passed away, her estate settled and her condominium cleaned out. About that time, I opened the dumpster to trash my trash and there she was lying on the heap…with a broken neck.

I wrestled her out of the dumpster. Loaded her into my Jeep and headed for the only artistic urgent care facility I knew of. My artist brother and his artist spouse. There, she received the care and neck support she needed to cement the healing. Since I lived then in an apartment style condo, I had nowhere to put her so she happily settled in their back garden on the edge of some Bay City cornfields.

Our Lady of the Garden.

(We thought about Our Lady of the Cornfield but flashes of a Stephen King novel nixed that idea.)

By 2008 and the economic plummet, the family was relocating to Tennessee for employment and my brother asked if I wanted. I was by then in a new house style condo in East Lansing with a yard. So Our Lady came to call and stayed. She found a perfect place on the edge of a dense woods and took to feeding the critters in the winter and watering others in the summer.

Our Lady of the Woods

Semi-retirement and new adventures took me to a home on a lake toward the middle of the Michigan mitten. We uprooted her from the woods, said goodbye to all of the critters and headed north. There, she settled down by the lake and spurred rumors of a new and deeply religious family on the lake. Instead, she partied with the best of us and kept up her watering duties.

Besides major storms and high winds sweeping down the lake and threatening her stance, life got particularly eventful when she was kidnapped in 2015. At risk of being drowned by my ex led to this mysterious disappearance. It still tickles us that we got away with such capers.

Our Lady of the Lake

You'll find Our Lady of the Lake to the far right by the boat

Last year, this portion of our lives together came full circle as I returned to the original condominiums at which I had met her. Again, I found myself with no place to put her and spent some time trying to find friends with yards who might adopt her and take her on her next journey.

But life had changed a bit at the Parkview Manor in Flint, Michigan (yes, Flint). Many green thumbed neighbors had transformed a barren forgotten backyard into a glorious, lush, colorful oasis for meditation, reading, sunning, and visiting.

And that’s how Our Lady of the Garden found her way home…with me in tow.

It’s all an adventure.

A Child of the World

I’ve always known I was a child of the world. I was kind of hoping that I was a child of the universe but sadly, a recent DNA test shows no alien heritage.

I didn’t take the test but my brother did. His children gave him and his wife the tests for Mother’s and Father’s Day this year, and I have since told them that it was a pretty darn good gift for me as well.

Before the test, when people asked my heritage I could easily respond: 75% German, 25% Irish – loosely rounded out of course. Now, I have to ask them if they have an hour? (My mother would have responded “American,” and that would have been the end of that discussion.)

A Benetton Ad that speaks well for itself.

My brother teased me through the reveal of our heritage. He asked what DNA I thought was running around my body. I gave him the usual, to which he revealed that our Western European heritage, including German, was just 37%. With my sense of DNA self already coming undone, I learned that this portion of my heritage could include ancestors from Poland, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Croatia, Hungary, Slovakia, and/or Romania.

No wonder I have never particularly liked German food.

I’d known that my mother’s family immigrated as Germans to the U.S. but from Russia. This opened up a discussion between my brother and me about that side of the family. I knew that somehow we were descendants of Germans who had gone with Catherine the Great to Russia when she married the Tsar. What I didn’t know was that Catherine the Great had invited Germans to immigrate to Russia to help populate the huge country. However, the Germans didn’t assimilate well, kept to themselves and lived as Germans in Russia, including maintaining the German language. So, ultimately, while my mother was the first of the Sturtz children to be born in the U.S., she didn’t learn English until she started kindergarten in the mid-1920s.

Oh, now I get it.

Twenty-two percent of my DNA comes directly from Great Britain. No way! I’m British! No wonder I’m addicted to Brit Coms on HULU. OMG, I must have ROYAL DNA in here somewhere…but where? I must now insist that you all refer to me as Dame Donna or Lady DU. (I’m doing the Queen’s wave to you all.)

Another 20% of my DNA make-up is from Ireland. OK, so I wasn’t too far off and I do really like the accent. My grandmother, Edna Louise, was Irish…but now, who knows what else?

By this point, my brother and I have had several text exchanges as he continued to reveal parts of pieces of my heritage.

Twelve percent, he tells me, has been traced to Italy and Greece (I love Greek food! --- except stuffed grape leaves and lamb ;-). This portion of me can reach into Serbia, Kosovo, Bulgaria, Albania, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Macedonia. Serbia, Kosovo, Bulgaria, Albania, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Macedonia --- are you kidding me? Except for news coverage and restaurants, what do I know about this part of the world --- and yet their in me.

Now he tells me we’re down to trace regions for our DNA. Four percent from Eastern Europe --- Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, Ukraine, Czech Republic, and Moldova.

This makes sense to me since we knew that second cousins had traveled through some of those countries in the 60’s or 70’s in search of relatives and found them. Of course, by now, I am coming to understand the impact of migration on my make-up.

One percent of the DNA is solidly from Norway and other Scandinavian countries.

Less than 1% can be traced to Finland and Russia --- I told you those Germans kept to themselves.

The most interesting surprise to me was my West Asian and the Caucasus connections. Ancestors of mine could be traced to Israel and Palestine. (I make this point specifically. It wouldn’t be the first time that my ancestors found themselves on different sides in a fight.)

Yet also from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Iran. (These very people and places our politicians and hate mongers have tried so hard to teach us: 1. to hate because they are all a bunch of terrorists, and 2. that they like many other ethnic groups shouldn’t be allowed into the U.S. and if they are already here --- even the ones with citizenship --- should be shipped out.) Now what do I do? I’m truly one of them, even if just by a trace. Can I stay?

As I am writing this, I am listing to a discussion with Pakistani American parents Khizr and Ghazala Kham, whose son, Army Captain Humayun Khan was lost in Iraq while serving in the U.S. military. They came to public attention after presidential candidate Donald Trump attacked all Muslims including American Muslims.

How is it that we can so easily condemn all people for the bad actions of a few? (Which begs the question: Why haven’t we shipped out some of those crazy extremist Christians? I bet I could trace their DNA to somewhere else. Ok, I couldn’t do it, but I’d be happy to pay for it!) tee hee.

All of this also suggests to me that while I was raised Christian, my ancestors may well have been Jewish, Muslim, Greek Orthodox and who knows what else.

I’m a very diverse party of one headed to Taboon’s for my comfort food: Chicken Ghallaba. Middle Eastern food, I love it.

 Post Script: I have since received several website links from a friend that seek to prove that we can all trace our DNA to Mars. So perhaps I am a child of the universe after all.

My brother has advised me that since the Earth is in the universe, I can safely claim to be a child of the universe. So I do.

Now, I'm working on the title of Child of the Galaxy!

That's what friends do

We couldn’t find him anywhere.

We called out his nickname: Johno. We made jokes at his expense knowing his sarcastic chuckle or, when something really got to him, his deep huge guffaw would give him away.

He was with his grandparents we were told.

We had the whole place to ourselves. Well, except for the residents and they weren’t talking.

He died in February but wasn’t buried until June (Michigan winters and frozen ground.) We thought we’d find his grave easily enough. Yet disturbed ground or a new marker at least but John Clyde just wasn’t there for us.

John C. Brandon, 1990

I suppose that’s fitting. A bit of a joke on us since we couldn’t make it to his funeral. I arrived back in the state just an hour after his funeral ended.

The point is, he was always there as a very long term friend is and neither of us made it to his send off. We feel especially bad because I’d just talked to him about the three of us having dinner when I got back from my travels. And then he was gone.

He’d been confined to a wheelchair. Years of dialysis had taken its toll. So many health problems setting in and bodily systems shutting down. Still, always cheerful and ready to play.

John had come into my life with my first husband. Best friends since kindergarten they were. BFFs long before acronyms became the language of lazy teens.

While divorce often gives custody of friends to the spouse who brought them into the marriage, John was among the few who assumed joint custody quite comfortably.

Our politics were 180-degrees. We never hesitated to make sure the other understood our position ---- not always so respectfully expressed…yet somehow the overall respect remained and we remained in touch even though our lives took us in very different directions.

Since his death, we have both felt that we didn’t get to properly say goodbye or pay tribute to a loyal, decent, funny guy.

So, here we were on a day trip to say finally pay our respects in our own way. A CD of John Denver and a quart of milk (he was addicted to milk) replaced by a pot of mums because I couldn’t find the CD. But no luck and while I doubt he’s rolling in his grave (he was cremated), he’s definitely guffawing at us from above.

He knows us too well. We won’t give up. I’ll call the small town’s city hall and his address, section and plot numbers. Then, I’ll find the CD and we’ll make another day trip to say farewell because he was always a friend and that’s what friends do.


In memory of John C. Brandon (1955-2016)

Post Script 9.3.2016 - We found John after calling the city clerk for the burial plot. Just in time for his birthday. His nephew told us that a marker wasn't in place yet so we took our own...and his favorite drink for a toast.

Now Playing... John C. Brandon on piano with John Denver sitting in on vocals. Play on friend! Play on!

 

"Over and Next": Underrated for seizing life

“Over” and “next” are two of the most underrated words in the English language according to Norman Lear, creator of “All in the Family,” “The Jeffersons,” and “Maude” among other groundbreaking television programs.

On a recent “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me,” broadcast on NPR, the 93-year-old was asked what he thinks has  contributed to his longevity in life and work.

“Over and next,” he responded without pause.

Paraphrasing him: When it’s over, it’s time to move on to the what’s next.

We often cripple ourselves reliving the past, paying penance for our regrets, and trying to undo what can no longer be undone. In the meantime, we’re missing what’s next.

“Over and next.”

Sound like a good mantra for those of us who strive to get the most out of our lives.

Watch a short video featuring Norman Lear.

Not Dead Yet

By HEIDI EWING and RACHEL GRADY | Jul. 6, 2016 | 7:44

At the age of 93, Norman Lear is still entertaining America. What’s his secret?

Stop Trump's hate

Trump's vote mongering among the gun toting haters of our country is making targets of our American Muslim and gay friends, neighbors, and co-workers for this same group. (As well as our immigrant neighbors. Remember, this country was founded on welcoming people in need AND protecting their religions as well. Imagine that ;-).

Each-ONE-of-us has to work to stop Trump's hate. We can't sit back and wait for someone else to do it for us.

We have to remember that across cultures, the majority of us are peaceful decent people. We cannot let the few fanatical haters justify violent actions against innocent people as defense of this nation.

Trump is giving those people permission to act on their hate every time he opens his mouth.

We have to stop Trump's hate. Denounce it and vote to defeat it.