I'm blaming bows.

I have noticed that the politics here and kind of everywhere else, also, has taken a decidedly "woman are second class citizens" stance.  Being a feminist before I knew that everyone wasn't one or that there even needed to be one, I had to really try to examine my memory to tell how we got to where we are today.
I once argued with a male teacher in public school about whether women had equal rights.  He said no, not by law, I took the stance that was impossible because I was equal to anyone.  My lack of understanding of the law and what the law had to do with that was huge.  I'm still pretty sure I'm equal to anyone, though.
But I get the law part now.  It only took 50 years of anecdotal stories and news reports, but I get it.  I do think that women in this country were making an effort, and then I look up and almost all the women in politics look like Tammy Faye Bakker, perfectly coiffed church hair, doll make-up, wearing nice office skirt suits and heels.  I work.  And the people in skirts are inevitably in the executive offices in Jimmy Choos.
Why would anyone subject their body and their feet to work, even highly powerful, executive work, in uncomfortable shoes (sorry jimmy, I'm sure they are the bomb, but 4 inch heels are 4 inch heels).
Then you catch them commiserating with their other female power brokers about men not giving them respect, not treating them seriously, calling them doll saying something ridiculous like," honey, how about a cup of coffee while we men work" even though they are totally lateral on the organizational chart, and they are angry.  I get the angry.  I have felt that anger--but I have not felt the anger from a lateral or higher position while decked out like a Barbie doll.
I'm blaming hair bows.
If you watch the popularity of hair bows, as it goes up, women are seen as more vapid, girly, (and girly is the same as calling you a child--what adult wants to be called a child?) more shallow, superficial, more worried about attracting a man and less worried about impressing a business/campaign/world.
Hair bows have been more popular for the last 15 years than since the 1950's.  We stick them on the heads of our baby girls ("don't put that thing on my son, are you nuts") right after birth, and continue to decorate our daughters with them throughout their lives.  I have seen competitive softball teams where all the girls had matching pink and zebra bows instead of hats (wasn't that hat bill about the sun?).  And there are adult female hair bows, usually less pastel, but frequently more flamboyant, with jewels and feathers and chiffon, perfect for a masquerade ball, but seen in the office hooked into a messy ponytail.
I am not really against self-embellishment.  I am not the "tattoos are of the debil"  or the piercing police that every workplace has--usually made of women in skirt suits and high heels and hair bows.--the tats and studs don't bother me because they are pretty equal opportunity and permanent without going to some effort to remove them.  But no one can say--"I know the shoes are not really work appropriate and bow is awfully cute, but they were affixed to my body at a much earlier age and won't come off"
Women need to take themselves seriously.  They need to see themselves as more than something to be looked at, more than someone whose power comes from their appeal, someone that is just of capable of giving orders and creating game plans and managing meetings in a pair of chinos and a shirt standing flat on the ground as anyone else in the room.  And they need to stop being the first person to denigrate the coworker that is not dressed to the nines, 3 hour hair, killer shoes and pretty face.  Unless you are a model, that is not your job, and no one really takes models seriously when they open their mouths---even if they are brilliant.
I would love to see the equal rights amendment ratified in my lifetime.  At eight, I was sure that had happened hundreds of years earlier.  But in an hour, when I go to work, I will be invisible (and I like it that way) but the women in powerful positions will be giggling to the jokes the men tell, even if they aren't funny, getting them
coffee, and batting their eyes as they get in the personal space of whatever man is in charge of what their department needs.
The message is simple, teach your daughters they are all right in jeans and a t-shirt that has no glitter or sequins, even if it is just one day a week.  When they talk, listen to what they say, don't pat them on the head and tell them how cute-pretty-beautiful-sweet-funny-nice- they are or look.  When they talk about how someone else dresses or someone else's bad hair day or ugly shoes, let them know those things aren't important.
And as a role model, do not spend 4 hours getting dressed for a 1 hour event.  It makes your own focus obvious.  If it ok to be plain.  It is ok to have your hair that does what your hair does.  It is ok to get older or have scars or whatever thing about your own appearance you hate.  And if you can be ok in your own skin, she will see she is ok also. 
If the only way we can tell the difference between our daughters and our sons is by the way they dress, perhaps we are trying to make more of those differences than was ever intended.

god

God, not the name of God or a god; not the belief in God or a god; and not the religion created to worship a god; but god, the concept, has always fascinated me.  I don't mean like a magic window book or a freak show fascination, I mean come back to my mind and sent me on many searches for answers. The fact that someone's concept of god has caused almost every war we have known, whether directly or indirectly, should not shock me.  I am shocked, though.

Most of us develop our concept of god, our beliefs about god starting as children.  We are schooled in our parents version of god, through either formal training or through the strange osmotic process that occurs when no one talks of spiritual things but beliefs about good and bad, life and death, and feelings about other peoples religious, spiritual or life beliefs are either ridiculed or held up as correct.

I was no different, my parents were both raised in mainstream protestant religions and those basic beliefs were built into my life lessons at an early age.  As children, we went to church sometimes, and sometimes didn't go to church.  Neither parent was devout.  My father had been angry at his concept of god since his mother and sister died in his late teens.  My mother was a reader and we had books with maps of the holy land, and bible commentary and multiple versions of the bible in the house.  We prayed before meals when my mother's mother was around.

By my teens, I attended church regularly, read the bible in search of answers about the nature of god and the reason we are all here and what happens when we die.  Our bible study focused on the meaning of original translations, taught by a man that was trained in ancient Greek and Aramaic.  We rarely delved into the old testament except for the prophets.  We argued about the meaning of nouns and verbs, and discussed whether killing was wrong or only murder.  We tried to decide if we were living in the end times.  My father, usually silent if the bible came up at home, expressed the opinion that people had been saying we were in the end times since revelations was first written.

By my twenties, I too was angry at god as I understood him from my earlier life.  Unlike my father, I became obsessed with finding out who or what god was.  What god had to do with me.  I even considered that the desire to know and understand god might be some genetically determined quirk of the brain that bore no more spiritual importance than the paranoia of an unmedicated paranoid schizophrenic.  It was an exhaustive search, and took twenty years for me to move past the obsession to a kind of  spiritual peace.  (At this point, I could probably argue the whole chemical basis of the schizophrenics paranoia, also,but that is another subject).  My outcome is that I found the answers I needed to live comfortably in my own head without ever needing to kill anyone that disagrees with me about my concept of god.  I guess that qualifies as Peace.

So why do people fight about god?  Why do they feel the need to punish people that say things about their beliefs, impugn their religion, speak things that they consider blasphemous or heretical.  Why?  When not a single version of god is based on anything but love and peace and learning to live together successfully?

I do get, that when the first leaders of each religion finished with god, they went on to justify the maligning of their enemies: other religions, misogyny, racism, not giving enough money, not being devout enough.  It might be that those leaders thought they were doing a good thing.  First they explain god to the rabble, then they give them very specific, rigid rules on how to live.  Then they tell them not to question either one--their concept of god or their rules, as that is a sign of a lack of faith or an act of ego, (or heresy, or blasphemy, or an affront to god) in simplest terms--wrong..

My first ten years of searching for answers was very slow.  I was hobbled by fear of being blasphemous.  I feared the wrath of GOD.  I worried about disloyalty to this powerful, unknowable spirit, about making god angry or jealous, about being struck by lightning.  And I wonder about the millions and billions of people that had chosen the wrong god, whether by poor judgement or by being born in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Were they in hell?  in purgatory? in limbo?  no where--just dead?   I got angry.  I was scared.  I was horrified.  But I kept looking, wandering farther and farther from the god I was born to.  I found people living by concepts that had no spirit being, yet they still believed in something, a unifying principle or consciousness, something directing things, creating.  An endless group of people had proceeded me and many of them had stopped on the end of the branch they had followed outward, then wrote down their beliefs, turned it into a new religion, "the one true religion" every time.

There seems to be a most common belief that god has not spoken directly to anyone since the person that wrote down the holy book set it to paper.  God does not change and therefore the one true religion can not change.  If a person lives in a community where most believe the same thing (and while the geographic community has broken down in this new global world, the religious communities, even in places with freedom of religion, remain quick to call anyone that does not believe as they do, an atheist.  If the person they are denouncing responds that they are a member of an organized religion that is not at all similar to the one of that community, they are free game to proselytize, a form of love aimed at taking them from their erroneous ways to the correct way.  It is not pleasant having someone try to change your beliefs against your will.  All the church suppers, prayer meetings and new friends in the world can not change that.

My own father left this world less angry at god, but scared of dying, because he "was not right with god".  His childhood beliefs--we used to joke that his family was old testament baptist, since it was all hellfire and brimstone with little mention of love or forgiveness, were never really shaken, just ignored on a day to day basis.  He felt that maybe the god of the animals had more in common with his view of god.  Oddly, I don't know that this god was not one he created himself, as he seemed to have a horrible time with the idea that animals might not have souls.   My mother, reader with an adventurous spirit, would venture out then pull back when she got too close to what she saw as dangerous ground.  We had some strange and conflicted conversations while I was on my search for god.  Neither of them ever expressed any concern for my soul.  I never felt judged by them on that front.  Perhaps they had their own searches that they didn't speak of.

So now i have my peace, my "higher power" as they say in AA.  I am fond of the Taoist beliefs, and they are technically an a-theistic philosophy, but so different than the usual person that refers to themselves that noun.  I have been asked many times how I can not believe, how is it possible to believe in nothing.  What a funny idea.  Try for one minute to NOT believe in anything.  It is harder than not thinking of an elephant once someone tells you not to think about an elephant.  My whole world is defined by my beliefs.  It always has been.  They just aren't the ones I had earlier.  They are the ones I have have chosen to have now.

And god, well, god is not a name.  It is a title.  If you believe there is only one, and the actually name can-for whatever reason-never be spoken, then GOD is fine.  Or if you call your god by a specific name, or no name, referring rather to it all as more process than noun, or as something so unknowable and undefinable that no single word can come close to a name or a description,  that is also fine.

But about god, we all have had some inner conversations that may or may not be done.  In mine, while I have some peace about the subject, I also have decided that god---whatever that means--is changing.  That may be just my perception, or it may be absolute truth.  I don't mean in some erratic or unguided or unhinged way, but rather that god is evolving just as we--humans, animals, everything, are evolving.   I think maybe that is why we are all here.

SPINNING GOLD FROM WORDS>

It recently was stated on some news show that the people that were really running the nation were not the politicians but the speech writers and campaign managers and assistants and lobbyists.  I was dumbfounded.  What an idea--the whole political process nothing more than an illusion. (shocking to me, but basically being a somewhat paranoid realist, I survived the jolt.)  Could it be true?  Wholly true, partially true, or merely some attempt to make me feel even more powerless in my own life?

What makes us all tick in unison?  Is it the news?   The latest hot story?  We have all been affected by buzzwords, new bands with gold songs, authors that are suddenly being interviewed everywhere we turn?.  does that affect us?  Does it change who we are even a little bit?

I know I am not the same as I was 40 years ago, my beliefs have changed about the world around me if my values have not.  And how I view the world, that is not so rosy as it once was.  It is also not such a trusting view or as simple.  At this point, every story seems to be webbed to every other subject in my world.  A person is murdered, and it isn't just a bad person killed someone, it is the childhood of the person that chose to kill and the victim, and what the victim represented to the person that killed them and the news the day before and the stock market the week before and the housing market and what we spent on education and the unemployment rate and the cost of a loaf of bread.  No single event exists.  Everything is tied in to every other thing.  Our choices, the decisions about those choices, our beliefs about who we are regarding those choices, everything.  One thing.

The people putting out the news have a big influence--is the car wreck with no one hurt news?  Is it a "feel good story" or is it only filler if nothing better shows up.  Do we side with the gun buffs or the gun control when there is a modern shoot-out at the local drive-in.  Each news program knows who they cater to and they know the hierarchy of grabbers of our attention.  Warriors are not the only ones that appreciate a body count.  Younger, more innocent, is more sympathetic than older, seamier, and scarier.  Politics is simple, they know who they back, then paint their side positive and the other negative.  Of course, a good, steamy scandal is always good about either side, just figure out how to frame the blame.

But what about those speech writers, campaign  managers and lobbyists. Well, we have all heard good speeches, and while the opposing side will always find fault at the time, those of us that suffered the assignments of memorizing past speeches can tell you that twenty years later, the naysayers kids are memorizing the same ones and everyone recognizes the way they pull at the heartstrings and prod the person toward action.

Campaigns, lobbyists, money people, those individuals that are in the background deciding what the rest of us will see and not see, hear and not hear, those people might be the most powerful of all.  They are why activists, scientists, and attentive citizens are important.  If a lobbyist with bottomless pockets comes to your state, you may not have a single person on the ballot that is not in their debt.  If the campaigns are being run by people with close ties to a cause, or a business, then the campaign will be aimed at the success of that cause more than the success of the candidate. And the easiest way to control it all is to make sure that both sides are for the same thing.

Our state doesn't need that yet.  We have a firm majority going one way and almost no one trying to fight them.  But if we were a purple state, those lobbyists would be wining and dining twice as many people.  So money gets to decide what is important enough to come to the public's attention.  And words are used to capture our attention, our imaginations, our hearts.  Words have two purposes, one is their definition, but the other, the one that serves a more important purpose is the nuance of a word.  If you want to influence, you need those nuances.  If you would lie, sway, make people sympathize, scare them or egg them on, the choice of words is important.

If I say that someone passed away last night in their home,  a picture forms, it is sad, and sympathetic and will incite feeling about our own losses.  If I use a different word, say, killed, or stabbed, or tortured to death or consumed by fire or even "suffered a heart attack after years of drug use",  that picture changes.  I may be less sympathetic, less sad, more judgemental of the victim.  Or I may be scared for my own safety or my families safety.  I may blame it on the local leadership or law enforcement.  I may suddenly decide to deport everyone ties to some other country. 

There are words that are without much emotional load, and words that are very emotionally loaded.  Words like lover, hate, terrorist, loyal, criminal, extreme or extremist, funny, patriotic--all those words have an emotional load that can be used to increase or decrease the response to a story.  We don't call international groups that are currently bombing or kidnapping people patriots or loyal or funny, although individuals in those groups can be any of those things.  And we do not call our favorite people in our  personal political party extremists or hate-filled although both can be true.  We choose words that paint them in a better light.  We use words we view as positive to describe what we want others to view as positive and words we view as negative to describe people we want them to view as negative.

What?  Do I really want terrorists and criminals and hate-groups and murderers to be viewed in a more positive light?  I personally wish no one would ever do anything that could be called those things.  But it really is all about perspective.  I have many ancestors that have served in the armed forces.  I know that they may have killed in that capacity.  I also know that the families of the people they killed did not look at them as heroes.  Our nation has committed atrocities and war crimes, our leaders have been caught in scandals and in acts of corruptions, our news stations and journalists have used non-neutral words to describe the actions of the people they want me to like and the people they want me to hate.  Is it propaganda?  Of course it is.  Is it a well organized plan to make us think the world is different than it is, maybe, maybe not. 

We know a lot about psychology now.  We know a lot about marketing.  We know how to use words and campaigns and advertising and fashion and style and education to alter how people react to situations and respond to events.  And that means that we can all know.  A magic trick is only magic is you don't know how it works, and puppets are only amazing if you never see behind the curtain to the puppet master. 

We all need to start peeking behind the scenes and translating the words and viewing more than one source.  Be informed and think.  Unless you really do just like being led by the nose or only take in what confirms your own hates and prejudices. 

Get a world view that means something real.