America, America, Where Are You, My America?

Update: Please see the first comment below this blog, by yours truly. It turns out that I had the date of the anti-nuclear rally wrong (my bad!). Therefore, when you read this, I want you to know that going in, so you don't think that the wonderful people of my dear city are truly as apathetic as I momentarily thought when writing this blog. It made no sense to me and I was in shock over it, so I'm very heartened to learn that I was wrong about the date of the rally and thus right that it made no sense that folks didn't show up. They DID show up, bless them all. They DO care! There IS still hope for our world! With that cleared up, I am leaving the blog up because my theme about America being in Great Depression II still stands, sadly. The good news is, since people do care and do get out and protest and work for social change, there is hope. And that is very good news indeed. Fight da powa and keep the light of hope burning!

Yesterday, I walked 32 blocks to the downtown location of an anti-nuclear rally. No one was there. Not a single living soul showed up except me. The '60's died with Jerry Garcia, thought I, and a black cloud of depression engulfed me. Then I thought of what is happening on Wall Street with the protest growing and growing, and I felt a little better. Yet, as I walked the 32 blocks back home, being asked for money by 8 homeless people along the way and passing vacant storefront after vacant storefront, then foreclosed home after foreclosed home, I thought: don’t people realize that the economy and the environment are CONNECTED? WHY did no one show up?

One older guy I passed, looking very beaten down by life, inquired “Baby, do you have a few dollars so I can get some soda pop?” “Soda pop”, struck me as such an old-fashioned term. For a minute, I wasn’t sure if I was in 2011 or 1933. Am I in The Great Depression? He stared into my eyes with such a hopeful intensity, as we stood there amidst the vacant businesses and desperate people. My eyes filled with tears. I’m sorry, I said, I don’t have any money with me. I was thinking: I’ll bet you wouldn’t really spend it on “soda pop” anyway, and even if you would, that isn’t what you need: high-fructose corn syrup and phosphoric acid are not something I would donate to the cause of you obtaining. If I had any money, I would take you to that “Five Guys” burger place I noticed a few blocks away and get some PROTEIN into you. But all I had was the clothes on my back and a political button stating “solar employs, nuclear destroys.”

As I walked the rest of the way home, I felt I no longer recognize my country. This is Lord of the Flies, this isn’t America. It isn’t the American Dream, anyway. It’s the American Nightmare.

I have a dream today.

Yesterday, the new Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial opened on the National Mall, just a stone’s throw from the Lincoln Memorial, where Dr. King delivered his inspiring “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963. The very fact of this memorial is a breathtaking testament to how far we’ve come in the realization of Dr. King’s dream. While the memorial opened to the public yesterday (see link below), the official dedication will take place this coming Sunday, August 28, 2011, on the 48th anniversary of the “I Have a Dream” speech.

I was one year old on August 28, 1963. Too young to remember the speech when it was originally delivered, yet it became deeply etched in the DNA of my entire generation, even those of us who were babies when Dr. King actually delivered it. His dream was for us. I’m white yet I feel his dream included me. He dreamed of black children and white children together, no “separate but equal”, just equal. To this day, I cannot listen to that profoundly stirring speech without tearing up. So much of his dream has been realized, just as he envisioned it from the “mountaintop”. He would be (and I imagine he is, looking down on events such as the inauguration of the nation’s first African-American president) so gratified and glad of that. Yet so very much is left to be done, not just for people of color, but for all oppressed people. Dr. King deeply cared about his specific people, African-Americans, yet he also clearly saw the non-violent fight for civil rights and freedom as a universal struggle.  If any are not free, none are truly free. As Dick Gregory once said: “Oppression is more detrimental to the oppressor than it is to the oppressed.” A society and a world that tolerates violence, let alone encourages it in any way(s), against any group will never be healthy, will never be truly free.

In our own country and in our world, there is so much of Dr. King’s dream, so much of the work of it, left to do for those of us who were one year old or not even born yet when he gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. Just focusing on our country (if I panned out to the entire world, that would make for a LONG blog), it is hard to know where to start and easy to get extremely discouraged. There is so much inequality, so much hatred, so much bigotry. Inequality takes many forms. There is inequality in the law as, for example, gay people cannot marry in many states, which is a clear, classic denial of civil rights. Separate but equal water fountains were never really equal, nor is a civil union really the same thing as a marriage certificate. Failed private corporations are bailed out with tax dollars while children live in poverty and elected officials at all levels try to slash and burn programs like Medicaid, Headstart and WIC that help them. I WANT my taxes to go to our children, not to failed corporations like AIG. Our government wants to subsidize new nuclear plants but decimate public education, Social Security and Medicare. In other words, private corporations come first in our society, actual human citizens of the country are a distant second.

I think that Dr. King would see all of this as part of the struggle, as the ongoing work we need to do to fully realize the dream. Folks, we are nowhere near done. As my mom often says about various and sundry things, “Thank God we’re this far!”, yet while it is important to acknowledge how far we’ve come, it is even more important to honor Dr. King’s dream by honestly seeing that we are nowhere near done. There is hatred, there is bullying, there is oppression, there is violence, there is an ever-widening chasm between rich and poor, there is disparity in our laws.  There is still “separate but equal”, it just takes new forms. We have to see it with clarity and fight it with the same “soul force”, the same creative, non-violent means that visionary, inspiring, effective leaders like Dr. King and Gandhi employed.

Are the days of marching in the streets, hand in hand, standing one for all and all for one, over? No. As Dr. King said in 1963, this is “not an end, but a beginning”.

Further reading:  WAMU article on MLK Memorial opening to the public

I’m living in a “Night Gallery” episode!

Earwig ALERT!  Am I the only living person who remembers that horrifically terrifying episode of “Night Gallery”?  Well, brace yourselves, because now I’M LIVING IT!

I've said from the outset that living in my house is like living in a Hitchcock movie, from the possums and rats that were in the attic when I moved in, to the Subaru-sized palmetto bugs that periodically light on me, to intractable termites eating my sole asset, to you name the fauna and I’ll guaran-damn-tee you it's in my house SOMEWHERE!  My house is wood-frame, in Florida and built in 1946.  Really, need more be said?  Answer Key:  YESSS!  WAY MORE!  Because last night took the horror show cake!

Some background: mosquitoes have been dogging me in my bedroom at night for years, and my theory is that this is from my incorrectly installed, useless gutters that were put up in 2002-ish, which do nothing but serve as a mosquito breeding ground, and which may actually be getting removed as we speak (yay, WINNING!).  So, I’m used to the occasional sleepless night due to mosquitoes trying to eat me alive.  But, a few weeks or so ago, I kept feeling something on my arms.  And my hair.  And my neck.  And my FACE.  Now, you know how, when you are half asleep, you aren’t thinking straight?  I mean, it wasn’t like if I were wide awake and felt something on my arms, and immediately snapped to and CHECKED IT OUT in an alert fashion.  No, my comatose thought process was more like:  "*WHACK!* ...eeeeeew, I just smushed something…that was one BIG, lethargic mosquito  …eeeeeew  …I can’t wait until the gutters are down!  Oh, well, just another night in Florida.  Goodnight, Gracie.”

Then it happened again another night and I realized, wait a hair, PT, those aren’t mosquitoes!  What the heck ARE they?  Then again, I’m too exhausted to care:  back to trying to sleep.  I should pause here to let you know, as I can tell that you are sitting there thinking “WHAT, something is crawling all over her and she doesn’t get up, turn on the light, and try to figure out what it is?”, that when you live in Florida, you become the opposite of hysterical about bugs, lizards, possums, rats, snakes, etc.  Frankly, after all these years of living in Florida, a grizzly could show up in my bedroom and I’d probably be like, “Duuuude, whatEVER:  just don’t shred me and try to keep it down, okay, I have to be at work at 7:30 a.m.”  So no, I didn’t really get up and investigate then, either, I just kept swatting and killing and ruining my karma until eventually I either fell asleep or it was time to go to work, whichever came first.

Well, last night, I kept feeling these mysterious critters all over my arms and neck and SUDDENLY I felt—as U2 would say—wide awake in America, I got REALLY freaked out to beat the band, GOT UP, TURNED THE LIGHT ON, and decided to launch a full-scale investigation.  2:45 a.m., mind you.  Well!  Turns out, I THINK, that what the creatures are—brace yourselves—are SILVERFISH!  Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeew/oooooooooooooh, the HORROR, the HORROR!  Silverfish!  Only they aren’t silver, they are dark brown or black.  And they don’t have wings except the occasional one seems to.  And, folks, I’ve got an INFESTATION on my hands!  They were EVERYWHERE!  The bed, the curtain, the wall.  Me, who can’t tolerate any sort of pesticide, chemical, etc., has to somehow combat The Attack of The Killer Silverfish?  So I’m going to have to go the boric acid powder route, but I think this may be beyond boric acid.  I think we may finally be talking about waving the white flag on my house, here.  As in:  SELL, MOVE, NOT NECESSARILY IN THAT ORDER!  And not only that, but I may have to throw away all my books that I have collected and cherished over a lifetime, and my most cherished material thing, my LP record albums.  Silverfish live on and IN books, cardboard album covers, plaster walls, DUST, I mean, I’ve got it all, baby:  my house is a veritable silverfish paradise!

And here comes the freakiest, most HORRIFYING part:  I Googled silverfish and learned that they can GET INTO YOUR EARS AND LAY EGGS THERE.  Now, I’ve been going through some stuff with my ears lately, namely:  vertigo (fixed, thanks to the most awesome medical care I ever experienced) and a rare thing called pulsatile tinnitus, which we don’t know what the cause is and we are monitoring.  I’m so grateful to have the vertigo taken care of and to actually have a good ENT who is conservatively monitoring the pulsatile tinnitus sitch, so the LAST thing I want is for some silverfish to go and take up residence in my ear, lay an egg or several thousand, and plummet me further into a “Night Gallery” episode!  I was hoping, when I read that they can do that, that it was just some sort of urban myth, but I can’t find anything on the net saying to disregard all the things on the net that say this is a real, truly live THING.

So, folks, I think there is nothing else for it but to throw out everything I own and go into a new house—and, by “new” house, I don’t just mean new to me, I mean NEW, as in, no wood, no plaster, no paper, no drywall, no NOTHING that can be ruined by Florida.  I mean a concrete and steel dome home that can withstand a Cat 5 hurricane, THAT’s what I mean by new, peeps!  And I won’t have anything to move in there except me, my cats, and my dog.  I am going to jettison the few material possessions I have that mean something to me:  my vinyl record albums, my books, and the WOOD furniture I inherited from my Grandma.  And I’m going to jettison everything that means nothing to me yet harbors silverfish, such as all my CLOTHES.  As for photo albums, of course I cherish those, but I'll have to find some way to load them all onto Picasa even though I have no access to Picasa, thanks to a boring series of facts about my internet access at the present juncture.  ...MAYBE I can keep a FEW cherished albums (photo and record), books, and clothes, IF I inspect them thoroughly.  Are silverfish eggs microscopic or seeable via the human eye?  I NEED TO KNOW!  Thank God for Google!  I'll find out, but meanwhile, worst case scenario:  I and my dear pets are going to show up to our new Cat 5-worthy concrete dome wearing nothing that nature didn’t give us, namely:  BUCK NAKED, no possessions.  And I’m putting a sign up saying that this is a termite-free, silverfish-free, rot-proof, hurricane-proof zone, so check yourself at the door, Florida!  Ha ha!  WINNING!

(Yes, you are correct, dear astute reader:  Peppermint Twist has finally lost it.  Advantage, Florida.  Game, set and match.)

Still LOST

4 8 15 16 23 42!

If you are a LOST fan, you instantly recognize those numbers and are transported to another world simply upon seeing or hearing them.  It was one year ago today that the series finale of LOST aired.  I have never loved a television show the way I loved LOST and, I hasten to add, I’m a TV addict, so that is saying something.  For the first time in my life, I finally understood what it must be like to be a ‘Trekkie”, one of those people who is obsessed with Star Trek, even years after the original series wrapped, and who goes to conventions and other events, living la vida Star Trek.  I thought those folks were a tad pathetic…until I became a “LOSTie”!  LOST, at its best, was a completely compelling, riveting, beautiful, captivating whole world, with characters who were complicated, deep, multi-layered, exquisitely developed, cast and written, and a storyline that was even more complex and, unfortunately, in the end, perhaps not as well-developed as some of us fans had kept the faith that it would be.  Like many true loves, LOST broke a lot of hearts in the end, mine among them.

People who didn’t get it, who weren’t true LOST fans, always said there were too many unanswered questions for them to get into the show, too many loose ends, too many mysteries.  But those of us who loved the show countered with, but that’s precisely part of what is so compelling about LOST and, in the end, the writers will answer all the questions, or all the BIG questions, anyway.  The writers won’t let us down!  I loved the questions and the mysteries and all the possibilities and suspense.  I didn’t want or need all the answers right away.  I stood by the show through the ABC writers’ strike and through ABC continually moving the time slot and putting it on long hiatuses.  There was even one dear LOST fan on the official fan forum who got cancer and bravely quipped that she didn’t want to die before finding out the ending of LOST!  Very sadly, she did die, and it was a few seasons before the show ended.  After I watched the finale, I thought of her and thought:  as far as LOST goes, you can be at peace now:  you didn’t miss anything.  WE STILL DON’T KNOW WHAT HAPPENED!

Now, mind you:  I don’t have cable, I don’t have a PC (don’t even ask how I write this blog, but rest assured that I suffer for my art!), and iPhone isn’t compatible with something called “Flash” that one needs in order to watch episodes of television shows on such sites as ABC.com and Hulu.com.  Therefore, I cannot re-watch the finale, as I feel any LOST fan worth her or his salt ideally should do at least once and preferably several times before issuing forth a comment on it.  I’ve only seen it the once.  But it’s been a full year now, and the initial shock and awe and RAGE (!) has worn off, and I feel I must comment now on the anniversary of the finale, or forever hold my peace:  So, here goes:  I’m not happy with the finale.  Not happy at all.  As I read one fan say in a comment on the internet about the finale last year, the LOST writers are, quote, “the Bernie Madoff of writers”.  I thought, THAT is so true, that is the perfect way of putting it, as the LOST writers got us to emotionally invest in LOST, and then made off with our hearts!  They ripped us off!  And, now that a year has passed, I have calmed down sufficiently to write this blog, even though, as I admitted, I’ve only seen the finale once, so MAYBE I would feel differently if I could see it again...but I doubt it.  Here’s why:

For six years, we had faith in the writers.  We thought they loved the show at least as much as the fans, if not more.  It was their baby.  Surely, they would do right by their baby.  We thought the mysteries and questions were part of what was wonderful about the show, and like I said, that all the big questions would be answered in the end.  But we were wrong.  In my opinion, as someone who watched every single nanosecond of LOST from the moment Jack opened his eyes in the pilot until he closed them in the last episode (and after that, when ABC panned out to the smoldering wreckage of 815, which I’ll get to momentarily), all the passengers on Oceanic Flight 815 perished in the plane crash immediately, except for Jack, who managed to stagger a short distance before collapsing and dying.  The entire show consisted of the souls of the passengers of 815 working out their individual life issues together before moving on to the afterlife.  Since they all perished together, they had to work out their “stuff” together, and the island was a sort of purgatory (which, by the way, the writers SWORE all along was NOT how the story of LOST would end, but that in itself isn’t why I’m so upset by the ending—it’s okay if they didn’t tell us the truth about the ending before it aired, it could be argued they were just protecting the secrecy and integrity of the story until the end).  Now, while that ending is terribly sad and poignant and not what I would want, as someone who came to love all the characters and want a “happily ever after” ending (or, one could argue, is that a happily ever after ending, after all?), I could have accepted it and one great thing about it, IF it is really what happened (which we don’t know and THAT is what is so maddening/infuriating!), is that it DOES answer ALL the questions, from the tiniest one to the most major, because one could simply say that anything that doesn’t make sense in the normal world, from seeing the numbers crop up everywhere to seeing visions of dead fathers and horses, to ANYTHING and everything that happened, is explained by the fact that the island was a purgatory and they were working out their collective issues, and the normal rules of science don’t apply in purgatory.

So what I’m submitting to you, dear readers, is that, shocked and awed though I would have been by the end being that they all died in the plane crash, I could have taken it, I could have made my peace with it, I even could have come to respect it and appreciate certain things about it, such as the finality and elegance of it, the answering of all questions, and at least knowing that all the main characters did work through their life issues and move on.  There is only one problem:  IT WAS NOT MADE CLEAR IF THEY DID OR DID NOT DIE IN THE PLANE CRASH!

In fact, me thinking that they did is actually the minority opinion among hard-core LOST fans.  And the writers REFUSE to answer the mystery, saying that it is very “LOSTian” to leave the fans with ambiguity and questions versus certainty and answers.  Well, NO.  As one of my favorite characters, Hurley, said to Danielle in a classic scene from Season One:  “Okay, that thing in the woods, maybe it's a monster, maybe it's a pissed off giraffe!  I don't know. The fact that no one is even looking for us?  Yeah, that's weird, but I just go along with it because I'm along for the ride. Good old fun time Hurley! Well guess what? Now, I want some friggin' answers!”  I was defending all the mysteries and questions throughout the series, but in the end?  Yeah, note to the writers:  that is NOT the time for leaving it open to interpretation!  DID THEY DIE IN THE PLANE CRASH OR NOT?!

After the final credits, they panned over the smoldering wreckage of Flight 815.  That settles it, thought I, through my tears, THEY ALL DIED IN THE CRASH.  But then it comes out after the finale aired that, well, ABC (not "Darlton", as the show's main creative minds and writers, Damon Lindeloff and Carlton Cuse, are affectionately known by LOST fans), in its infinite wisdom, decided to put that shot in as—and I couldn’t make this logic up, folks—a way to ease the transition for LOST fans out of the shock of the last episode into the local evening news!  Like I said, I can’t make this stuff up, look it up on the net!  Or, better yet, I will link the information at the end and you be the judge:  ABC says they added that, but I think they just said that they did, after there was an OUTCRY about the ending.  I think the writers, OBVIOUSLY, put that last shot in (Darlton has never confirmed or denied, to my knowledge, if the smoldering wreckage was put in by them or as a woefully misguided afterthought by ABC).  Ah, but then why, say some LOST fans, was it AFTER the final credits?  Anything AFTER the credits is obviously not part of the “official” show, right?  WRONG:  hello, that was the SERIES FINALE.  Having the wreckage of Oceanic 815 after the final credits was a final punctuation mark to the series and to what the ending was, in case there was any doubt.  THEY ALL DIED IN THE CRASH.

And I could be at peace with that ending IF the writers would have had some backbone and said:  “YES, they all died in the crash.  PERIOD.”, not instead being coy about (a.k.a., refusing to answer) who put in that footage, and saying, well, we just can’t say yay or nay re if they all died in the crash or not, because, tee hee HEEE, aren’t we just so delightful and coy?!!!  And isn't mystery and leaving things open to interpretation the FUN of LOST?!  Weeee!  All the ways of looking at things, all the questions!  Ha ha!  We purposely made it open to interpretation so that you poor, engrossed, totally emotionally invested fans could spend the rest of ETERNITY arguing about it!  Isn’t that wonderfully LOSTian of us?”

Do you see me laughing, Darlton?  Do I seem amused AT ALL to you, a full ONE YEAR LATER?!  I, who loved your television series like nobody’s business.  I, who defended the questions and the mysteries, saying that indeed that WAS part of what was great about it.  I, who lived, breathed, ate, slept and dreamt LOST for six years, do I SEEM AMUSED?  There is a time for mystery and a time for clarity and, FYI:  THE FINALE IS THE TIME FOR FRIGGIN’ ANSWERS!  There were things I liked about the finale and how it was done.  My only TRAUMA is that it is STILL not clear WHAT HAPPENED!

Six years of my life I invested in this story, in the characters.  I think they all died in the crash.  But I don’t KNOW.  And I want to KNOW.  I NEED TO KNOW!  So, Darlton, if you are reading this, stop being so coy:  now, I want some friggin' answers!

Link:  Did ABC or Darlton add the shots of the 815 wreckage after the final credits? Do you believe this linked report?

Fukushima: Glowing in the Dark

I'm usually not a conspiracy theorist, but when the mainstream news media in the USA presents a united front of total silence as a full scale NUCLEAR MELTDOWN is in process, what other conclusion can one reach? I've said from the beginning: WHY ISN'T THIS THE TOP NEWS STORY EVERY NIGHT? And now, when at least one reactor is actually in full meltdown, it not only isn't the top story, they virtually aren't covering it at all!

Do we need to hear about celebrity goings-on or do we need hard news about a nuclear disaster with fall-out that is spreading worldwide? Information is power and it is a teacher. Silence and fluffy filler on the part of the mainstream media is nothing but lulling people into a false sense of normalcy and business as usual while Fukushima glows ominously in the dark.

Link to OEN article:
Fukushima - Deadly Silence

Link to Japan Broadcasting Corporation piece on YouTube:
Fukushima Reactor 1 in state of meltdown.

Link to Financial Times article:
Doubt Over Meltdown Disspelled

Einstein said: "Nuclear power is a hell of a way to boil water."

God bless Helen Caldicott! She's one of my heroes. She's been trying to wake our species up to the profound dangers of nuclear power and weapons for decades and, as far as I can tell from listening to this horrifyingly sobering video, her passion and eloquence on the subject has only intensified over the years and with each new nuclear disaster. Will we ever learn? What will it take? Nuclear power sure is, as Dr. Caldicott quotes Einstein as saying, a hell of a way to boil water:

Helen Caldicott on Fukushima

Nuclear Power is not Green, It's Death

Nuclear power is the opposite of everything the industry's lobbyists sell it as: it is NOT safe, efficient, sustainable and green. It is profoundly deadly, infinitely expensive, disastrous and mean.

If anyone doubts that, consider Fukushima. In a sobering interview on "Russia Today", Professor Christopher Busby of the European Committee on Radiation Risks tells it like it is. He says "we're not being told everything", which is an understatement, and "I think that we're going to get another pack of lies after this, so people should watch out."

I'm providing a link below to the YouTube video of the full interview. It says it all about the nuclear industry. What they define as safe, efficient, green energy, most of us can clearly recognize as death. Judge for yourself and then, please, if you agree that nuclear energy only leads us down a terribly expensive path of doom and death, get active and write to your elected representatives, telling them you don't want taxpayer dollars going to subsidize new nuclear plants, and you do want all existing nuclear plants phased out as we move to solar, wind and other truly sustainable energy sources. Tell them, in the immortal words of an old anti-nuclear slogan that I find myself quoting more and more: solar employs, nuclear destroys.

America is still a representative democracy, even though big business wields tremendous power. If enough voters make enough noise, we can make our representatives take notice. No more Three Mile Islands, Chernobyls or Fukushimas. We cannot afford it in any way.

Link: Professor Busby discusses Fukushima and the nuclear industry on "Russia Today"