Sunday Stillpoint: The Sacred Space of Home

"Home…had a heart and a soul…it was of us, and we…lived in its grace…We never came home from an absence that its face did not light up and speak out in eloquent welcome--and we could not enter in it unmoved."
--Mark Twain

"Homecaring--carving out a haven for yourself and those dear to you--is a sacred endeavor."
--SIMPLE ABUNDANCE: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy
Sarah Ban Breathnach


About a year ago, and through no fault of her own, my sister suddenly found herself homeless.

Oh, she wasn't out in the street or blown away by a hurricane, but when her husband unexpectedly left her, a misogynistic judge handed her whole life over to the man, and then she was laid off…she found herself--for the first time in her life--in rather drastic circumstances. A friend offered her a place to stay, and she took what possessions she had and put them into storage. She fully expected to be back on her feet in a month or two, but an exceedingly tough job market turned a month or two into something like ten months.

Her friend could not have been kinder, but her situation was expected to be temporary, so she was not encouraged to gather together, say, treasured photographs of her two grown sons, prized books, or other favorite things. There wasn't room, and after all, this was not her home. It was shelter until she could get a place and move.

There is something spiritual, something sacred, about taking a space and breathing some of your own soul into it. It doesn't have to be a mansion--just look what people tend to do with job cubicles or high school lockers or college dorm rooms or even military foot lockers.

As an actor, my daughter sometimes has to live the life of a nomad and carry her life around in a suitcase, but no matter where she goes or what she does, she has a few things that are absolutely sacred to her. One is a photograph of her and her brother, clowning around together the weekend she graduated college. She loves that picture and takes it with her everywhere. Another is a snapshot of her dad and me. And Squeakers, her stuffed mouse, a gift to her from her Aunt Kay. Even when Jessica had eye surgery at the age of nine, the doctors allowed Squeakers to accompany her to the operating room. On the plane to London to study for a year--Squeakers was along in the backpack. When she left for New York, Squeakers was with her. Recently, when she had to go into the hospital, her sweet boyfriend came for a visit and, grinning, produced Squeakers from a hidden pocket in his backpack.

Stop most any soldier or Marine on patrol in Iraq or Afghanistan and ask him or her what they've got either in the band of their helmets or tucked down in a pocket or safely snugged away in their rucksack, and I guarantee you there will be something "lucky" that was given to them by a child or girlfriend or good buddy or mom or dad. (One of my favorite pictures from the siege of Fallujah is that of a young Marine in my son's unit with a G.I. Joe doll poking out of his ruck.)

We make a home for ourselves wherever we can, and this is one reason that the tales of Katrina survivors camping out for months at a time with scarcely a pan for cooking to their names tugs at our heartstrings so deeply. It's not the warm bed that matters nearly as much to us as our child's irreplaceable baby book. I've read story after story of people returning to their flooded-out homes, braving the nastiest conditions, including dangerous black mold, just so they can salvage photographs, treasured toys, or family heirlooms. I haven't heard about anybody going to so much trouble to get back expensive things that society usually considers "valuable." They don’t care about those things; they care about things that make "home."

During the time my sister was staying with her friend, she grew very depressed. Granted, she had many reasons to be despondent, and this is not to imply that she was not deeply grateful for the generosity of her friend, (even though she was paying her share of expenses). But she was displaced. In-between. One minute, it seemed, she'd had a beautiful four-bedroom home, a home she loved, where she gardened and painted and cooked and entertained and played with pets and celebrated Christmas with her kids--and the next, she was sleeping on someone else's couch and her kids' baby pictures were stuffed down in a box somewhere, locked away.

They say that "home" is just the people who you love. This is true, of course, don't get me wrong. But even the most modest possessions, arranged lovingly nearby, can give us a sense of place, a sense of self. A monk might live in a spare room with a small cot and a short shelf, period. But on that shelf he may have his favorite Bible, a book of inspirational poems, a journal he keeps, a candle, and a rosary given to him by his mother before she died. Those simple, modest possessions are the whole world to him.

A couple of weeks ago, my sister finally got the wherewithal to move out of her friend's apartment. We'd been talking about her moving closer to me for some time, and she finally did so, finding a perfect little Victorian fixer-upper on the shores of a lake. We call it her gingerbread house.

At long last, her things were taken out of storage, boxes of things she hadn't seen in months. Scrapbooks. Framed prints. Needlepoints. Christmas decorations. Cozy comforters. Candles. Little things her kids had given her. Books. Music. Art supplies.

Nothing luxurious or splendid. Nothing trendy. No supersonic electronic must-haves. Just the things of home.

In his book, Meditations On the Monk Who Dwells in Daily Life, by Thomas Moore, an author and psychologist who lived for twelve years as a monk, he says, "Every home is a monastery. There, it is to be hoped, we can find solitude, community, beauty, nature, oratory, and food. There the spirit can be nourished, and the body pleased with arts and pleasures."

When my sister came upon her little gingerbread house, it had been neglected, abused, and eventually, abandoned, by a bunch of derelict renters. It looked tired and defeated and sad.

She knew just how it felt. And she knew just what it needed.

Ignoring the more obvious bumps and bruises from renter's scorn, she went to work, hauling off trash, scrubbing and cleaning, sprucing and painting. She prospected dollar-stores and the goodwill for buried treasures--discontinued curtains, overlooked furnishings, festive fabrics. Like an artist with a palette, she took the blank canvas of that old house and filled it with color, warmth, and love.

And in so doing, she transformed herself.

"The ordinary arts we practice every day at home," wrote Thomas Moore, "are of more importance to the soul than their simplicity might suggest."

To visit that little house by the lake now is to enter a whole other world from the one those renters so callously discarded. It's a place of peace, a warm sanctuary overlooking sun-spangled waters and whispering trees.

And to see my sister now is to see a different person. During her darkest days she resembled someone shellshocked, her eyes like empty rooms. Now she's vivacious and smiling. Even her loyal little cat, Rowdy, seems so much more serene, curled up on her favorite comforter on her old bed in a splash of sunlight.

"Homecaring" is not the same thing as housework. Nobody really likes the nuts and bolts of keeping house. But creating a soft place to fall, a place where strangers can enter and sigh, This feels like home…that is soul-work. It is sacred and it is spiritual. It expands our souls. It is healing. It is worship.

It is finding eternity in the everyday.

Friday Funnies

Lawyers know the funniest lawyer jokes...

This little gem was sent to me by a lawyer friend in Dallas:

"Press Release:
The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department issued a statement today saying Vice President Cheney broke no law by shooting a lawyer instead of a quail over the weekend.

A TPWD spokesman noted that, in Texas, lawyers are not considered game creatures, and are thus not subject to seasonal limitations or bag limits. It was further noted that lawyer hunting was encouraged as the state is over-run with the pesky creatures.

A local food critic said that, contrary to rumor, lawyers do not taste like chicken, but rather like bovine-dung, which is a major component of their composition."

We Don't Deserve Them

"Give me, oh God, what no one else asks for;
I ask not for wealth, or for success or health;
People ask you so often for all that,
That you cannot have any left.
Give me what people refuse to accept from you.

"I want insecurity and disquietude,
I want turmoil and the brawl.
If you should give them to me,
Let me be sure to have them always,
For I will not always have the courage to ask for them.

"May God be with you, my fine young Marines,
As you head out once again
Into the heat of the Iraqi sun,
Into the still of the dark night,
To close with the enemy.

"Beside you, I'd do it all again. Semper Fidelis."

--Lt. Andre Zirnheld, USMC


This past weekend, I finished reading NO TRUE GLORY, a Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah, by Bing West. It details, from the highest corridors of Washington, D.C. to the raw-sewage soaked dusty streets and bloody back alleys of Fallujah, from ranking generals and presidents to lowly corporals and privates--the fiasco that was Fallujah--from the time four American contractors (three of whom were military veterans) were mutilated, burned, and hanged from a bridge in April of '04, to the aborted battle to take the city, to the months after the fiercely brave Marines were prematurely pulled out and where Abu Mussab al Zarkawi turned the city into a nest of jihadists, insurgents, bombers, kidnappers, torturers, terrorists, and killers, to November of 04, when Marines and soldiers of uncommon valor cleaned up the snake's nest and secured the city for Iraq's first democratic vote in January of '05.

My son was among the number.

The author, a former Marine and Vietnam combat veteran, made six trips to Fallujah and interviewed dozens of Marines, where he sat down with generals and humped it with corporals and privates. He laid out the final, historical battle sector by sector and described the bone-jarring deafening cacophonous roar of combat and the screaming silence of bloody death. So good are his descriptions, in fact, that the rights to the story have already sold to Universal Pictures.

This war is different than any other before it. Thanks to digital technology, the field of battle is no longer the private purgatory that burns with the fires of hell in a man's--in fact, these days, woman's too--tortured thoughts. Embedded journalists no longer have to send film by helicopter and plane to their home papers or networks, where they can be carefully censored before airing or publication several days or weeks later. Nor do they have to do as they did during the Gulf War, which is place themselves near a satellite dish for their broadcasts, which, needless to say, are not always handy to the battlefield.

Nowadays, they take digital photographs, then sit down at the first opportunity with their laptop computers and e-mail the photographs or video straight to their Internet websites.

Through a fluke, really, I managed to learn the names of several embedded journalists with my son's unit during the weeks of November of '04. Two or three times a day, I would go to gettyimages.com, call up my son's unit and company, and look at hundreds of color photographs taken, sometimes, only an hour or two before. (We thought we saw our son many times but it was everybody's sons.) My husband and I were seeing much the same things our son was, minus the stench and thunder and danger and much of the horror, because even embedded journalists hesitate to show the worst.

But it was enough.

And even if we hadn't seen that website, we'd have seen the pictures, because our son fell into the habit of dropping a cheap disposable camera in his pocket when he went out on patrol. Any stray moments not taken up with actual fighting, he would slip the camera out of his pocket and snap a photo. Weeks later, he would wrap up the camera in what looked like an old paper grocery sack taped up into a makeshift envelope, address it, and mail it home. I would develop the pictures, have duplicates made, and send him his photographs. Many of them were almost identical to what the embedded journalists were selling for thousands to magazines like Time and Newsweek.

When he came home, I presented him with a beautiful leather album, the photos he'd taken arranged in chronological order. On the front was a brass plate with his unit, company, and platoon numbers and the dates of his deployment.

I noticed, he didn't show everyone the album. Only those rare few whom he trusted. This cousin but not that one. This friend but not these others. It was an intensely private thing but something of which he was deeply proud. He did not want to waste it on somebody who would not appreciate it.

These were his memories of his war, and he did not want to waste them on the blind.

With us, he went over every picture, named every name, identified every place, every experience. But he did it in that way peculiar to combat veterans, choosing to relate the experiences as funny stories, when he could. If he couldn't, he chose not to talk at all, other than to speak in glowing terms about his staff sergeant, who got the whole platoon home in one piece, and the company commander, who did everything in his power to protect his men as much as possible with artillery, tanks, and air support, and who got all but one of his men home alive.

His staff sergeant, Dustin said, was the quintessential movie-Marine, square-jawed and hard-charging, and he took care of his men. He went home two weeks ahead of them, and when they got off the plane, young "boots" just out of boot camp, scurried around gathering up the weary men's sea-bags and carrying them back to the barracks, where the men later found their things, in their rooms, unpacked and neatly put away.

In the book by Bing West, there was chapter after chapter, story after story, detailing courage unimaginable to the rest of us…men who braved a fuselage of bullets in a house loaded with insurgents, just so they could recover the body of a buddy…men who refused to leave the battle after suffering wounds that would render the rest of us into screaming mounds of jello…men throwing their bodies over their wounded buddies even as they barely clung to consciousness from their own losses of blood…men who put themselves right smack in the line of fire because they handled bigger, more deadly weapons that could stop the bullets for everybody else if they survived long enough to take aim…men who, as my son put it, became seemingly deaf to "the whiz and whir of bullets flying past your ear."

I could only read small portions at a time, but as I neared the end of the book, I burst into tears and traipsed into my husband's home office, where he was working at the computer. He glanced up and paused, astonished at my tears, and said, "What's wrong?"

I waved the book, and said, "He doesn't deserve them."

"Who doesn't deserve them?"

"This president," I wept. "He doesn't deserve the men and women he flung into war. He doesn't deserve them."

My Republican husband, a combat veteran himself, did not angrily defend Bush or yell at me for my foolishness. He smiled at me in a very sad way and said, "None of them deserve them. No politician-president has ever really deserved the troops he has sent into battle. It has been so in every war."

I was sobbing now. "They are the brightest and best this country has to offer," I cried. "Their courage should shame us all."

He nodded. "It has been so in every war. They have always been so very brave."

He got up and came over and hugged me, saying, "The vast majority of people in this country not only do not fully UNDERSTAND the sacrifice these men and women are making every day, but they don't APPRECIATE it--and that goes for the president and that goes for all the rest of us who have not made that same sacrifice."

I thought of something my son wrote once, commenting not just on the bitterness of battle but the unflinching, horrific poverty of the people: "It is here in Iraq, I see the blessed life I have been given…My family, friends, girlfriend, opportunities; all were and are far richer than anything these people in Iraq have experienced in terms of a whole connected Mandala of living…"

He described coming upon an insurgent in one house they searched, how the man was, "scared and shaking uncontrollably. He was a terrorist, and he had the look of shock…I stared him directly in the eye for about five seconds. Face to face with my enemy, his image burns in my thoughts. His eyes were wide with fear; seemingly asking only the single question: WHY? Indeed, perhaps in my aggressiveness, I too had that question stenciled in my stare…"

He talked about how his heart aches for the families and friends of the men who did not make it home. "People, CIVILIANS, all back home, will never, ever truly realize just how good they have things. In a way," he said, "the blood of our country's Marines, soldiers, and sailors are all on their soiled, well-fed hands."

This war is not a video game, although I know a lot of young people think of it that way because they buy and play video games based on it. They get to skulk around corners of crowded urban-desert buildings and blow away the enemy without ever having to leave the comfort of their bedrooms.

This war is not a three-minute network news story, although I know a lot of people think of it that way because that's the only time they ever think of it at all.

This war is not a movie, although I know a lot of people think of it that way because they enjoy a two-hour popcorn adventure where they can live vicariously through the rugged hero's dance with death and triumph over tragedy.

This war is not a television show, although I know a lot of people think of it that way because they see it featured on so many fictional TV shows where the celebrity-soldiers get to fly off to the desert for various glamorous "special ops" missions to dusty glory and soaring soundtracks.

This war is not a chess piece on a political power-board, although I know a lot of people think of it that way because they hotly debate it on radio talk-shows and Internet blogs and in the op-ed pages of the newspapers and in political campaign ads and in State of the Union addresses, where the president can parade the latest crippled hero or read aloud a letter he received from bereaved parents to the American populace to demonstrate his resolve and patriotism.

This war is corporals and sergeants and privates and platoon leaders dodging bullets and bombs and rockets and grenades in the grit and the sweat and the stink and the blood and the boredom and the hunger and the heat and the cold and the wet and the dirt and the sweet letters from home and the snapshots tucked in their helmet-bands and the heartache for home and the fierce fight just to get, as my son put it, "the man to the right of me and the man to the left of me and the man in front of me and the man behind me…home in one piece."

That is the glory and that is the misery and that is the sacrifice and that is the power of war and NONE of us, NOT A DAMN ONE OF US WHO HASN'T BEEN THERE DESERVES THEM.

Not one.

Sunday Stillpoint: Withstanding Storms

"A tree with strong roots can withstand the most violent storm, but the tree can't grow roots just as the storm appears on the horizon."

--The Dalai Lama, in his book, THE ART OF HAPPINESS: a Handbook for Living


Our daughter called us from New York today in tears. It is not the first time she has done that in recent weeks, in fact, she's called sobbing several times, but not because she is a drama queen or a crybaby, but because she's been agonizing and enduring through the worst crises of her twenty-five years. Just about every day, it seems, she is faced with another fear, frustration, or physical failure.

Back on December the 10, I sent out a Christmas letter to family and close friends, saying I was excited that our son was going to be able to be home for the holidays for his first time in three years, and that our daughter was flying in from New York, and that we hadn't had both kids home for Christmas since they were in college. It was to be a bittersweet visit, to be sure, for Dustin was due to redeploy to Iraq right after the new year, but for that moment, we were all excited and happy.

I put the stack of letters in the mail on December 12. At midnight, Jessica called, suffering severe chest pains and soon to be on her way to the hospital by ambulance. She'd had a cough for a while, she said, and was planning a visit to the doctor the next morning, but a coughing spasm had brought on a sensation of being stabbed in the chest with a knife, and she could not postpone medical attention. A friend of hers who is a doctor had urged her to call 911.

If you want to know what is the most horrifying sensation of being completely out of control and powerless to do anything about it, have your child call from 2,000 miles away, on her way to the hospital, alone, in the middle of the night. Next to something happening to Dustin in the war, this has been my worst nightmare, and here it was, happening live at midnight. I can only imagine how terrifying it must have been for her.

From the ambulance, she called again, simply because she was frightened and overwhelmed and didn't know what else to do. The ambulance attendants had reassured her that she would have a chest X-Ray and that it was probably a form of pneumonia and that they would put her on antibiotics and send her home.

From New York University Medical Center, she called again. It seemed the chest X-Ray had revealed a hole in her lungs.

A hole. In her lungs. She was 25 years old and she had a hole in her lungs and they were admitting her to the hospital.

Of course my first thought was to book a flight immediately, but a calming phone conversation with her boyfriend reassured me that although he'd been at work when she first went to the hospital, he was with her now, and would stay with her and take care of her and let us know what--if anything--they needed us to do.

So we waited pretty much by the phone for the next four days while she had CAT scans and blood screens and other tests.

She was diagnosed with tuberculosis.

Tuberculosis! Who gets tuberculosis any more? My mother's mother died in a tuberculosis hospital in the 1930's, when Mother was only a toddler. She was adopted by a friend of the family. That was 75 years ago.

Jessica was immediately put under strict quarantine. Though she was permitted to return to her apartment, she was not allowed to leave that apartment for any reason except to visit the health clinic for her powerful antibiotics, sputum smear tests, and chest X-Rays.

At first, her boyfriend offered to rent a car and drive her home, but our son said, "I can't be exposed to TB right before I deploy. I could spread it to my buddies and there's no treatment for it where we're going."

But don't you get shots for that? we asked.

No, he said. You just get tested for it when you get back.

So we canceled her flight home and shipped her Christmas presents to her by UPS overnight. Her boyfriend tested positive for latent TB, and though he had to start the medication, was not put under quarantine, and he did what he could to keep her company, though his own apartment was at the opposite end of the city, and he was working.

For the next two months, Jessica was forbidden to leave her apartment for any reason other than visits to the clinic--they'd send round a car to pick her up. Other than that, she ordered in groceries. She couldn't work, of course.

And so this fiercely independent, resourceful, hardworking, disciplined young woman who had been entirely self-supporting her whole two years in New York, who had gotten her foot in the door on her own as an actor by auditioning and getting cast in plays "off-off Broadway", who had worked all through college, who was confident and strong and talented and determined….was trapped in a tiny Brooklyn prison of an apartment. Her whole life revolved around what the weekly sputum smear tests revealed. As long as she tested "positive" for active TB, she could not leave. Visitors to her home had to don surgical masks.

When we offered to come, she ordered us to stay away, because, "you'll only get sick." So we wired money from our bank account to hers and sent her care packages and called her daily and e-mailed constantly and sent funny cards in the mail and gave her a Netflix movies membership and there was nothing else we could do.

Nothing. Except pray, of course.

The hardest thing for Jessica to take in all of this was that she was suddenly--and completely--dependent upon others for every single aspect of her life. My dear brother stepped up one month and paid her rent. Her own dear brother, before he deployed, directed us to pay her rent from his checking account one month. Family and friends from all over the country sent check after check and strong long-distance bonds of love to sustain her.

Her boyfriend did everything we wished we could have done and more, God bless him, but for this Gethsemane, she was alone in the garden.

There's a phenomenon psychologists call, "kindling," in which stresses pile up, one after the other, like fire kindling, until the whole mess explodes into flame. If it wasn't enough that Jessica was desperately ill and in pain and washed out from the drugs and flat broke, she was still having to cope with living in a major metropolitan area. Soon after her diagnosis, there was a mass-transit strike in New York and the clinic couldn't send the car for her. She had to walk. Four miles. In winter. Coughing.

Her skinflint landlord decided a good way to save money would be to turn off the heat during the day. She had to track him down by phone and explain that the apartment was not empty during the day and she was FREEZING. Rains came and the bathroom window flooded--two inches of water in two rooms. Every ten-minute visit to the clinic meant a two-hour wait. Misery upon misery.

And still she could not leave. Her brother left for war and she could not hug him good-bye.

She got her cellphone bill. It was $500. Her only lifeline to family and friends had become a hangman's noose.

Every problem that came along assumed the proportions of an insurmountable, impossible, Great Wall of Life that she could not climb over or tunnel under or get around. Her helplessness magnified everything. Some days she cracked wise and made jokes and watched movies and endured. Other days she called home in tears. She would cry until the coughing set in and we would listen until our hearts cracked open.

They say when you are sick, you are never sick alone, because your illness affects all those who love you and must watch you suffer. This is absolutely true.

But as the Dalai Lama points out, the Buddhists have a different way of looking at pain and suffering from those in the west, and that is that everyone suffers, period.

In the west, especially in this magnificent country, where the right to the "pursuit of happiness" is written into our laws, we often have a sense of entitlement, that happiness is a guaranteed privilege of being American. When painful experiences come along, we tend to make things worse because we are so outraged that this is happening to us, so convinced that we are not meant to suffer in life, that suffering is an aberration or some kind of horrible luck--that we fight it. We fight our own pain.

And in the struggle against our pain, we compound our own suffering. By howling at what we perceive as the unfairness or plain bad luck in life, we actually make ourselves feel worse.

"If your basic outlook is that suffering is negative and must be avoided at all costs and in some sense is a sign of failure," says the Dalai Lama, "this will add anxiety and intolerance when you encounter difficult circumstances, a feeling of being overwhelmed."

What this does is make us feel like victims of life. Furthermore, the Dalai Lama points out that we often "perpetuate our own pain by replaying our hurts over and over again in our minds, magnifying our injustices…We also add to our pain by being overly sensitive, overreacting to minor things, taking things too personally and blowing them out of proportion…"

When we've been under sustained stress for a period of time, we find our coping abilities have become so overtaxed that they just wear out. My son says that after they'd been in combat conditions for several months, everyone became exceedingly short-tempered and irritable, impatient with their buddies. This is natural in any sustained-stress situation.

For my daughter to call home in tears is healthy--it's a good thing, because it's HUMAN. Anybody in her shoes, especially as young as she is and as far away from home, would react in much the same way to such a lonely and scary situation. For her not to reach out to those who love her the most in the world would seriously isolate her and cause her to give in to despair.

It's not spiritual failure when we feel overwhelmed sometimes by fear, negativity, or powerlessness. It's important, emotionally, for us to embrace those onslaughts the way a tree embraces a high wind--bending with it, sacrificing a few leaves.

But like a sturdy tree, it's also important for us to stay grounded in spiritual practice--rooted, held safe and secure. It is only when we allow our fears to take over our minds, dominate our emotions, and direct our decisions…that we break.

When we rage against our fate, our suffering, we are really giving in to our deep primal fear that we will not be able to survive. It's like being trapped behind a closed door and wanting desperately to get out. But sometimes, we beat against that closed door of life until our fists are bloody…only to discover that it opens inward.

The secret to getting through a period of sustained suffering is counter-intuitive to those of us (myself included) who consider ourselves fighters. There are times that fighting will do nothing but exhaust us.

The secret is in surrender.

The Dalai Lama puts it this way: "If the situation or problem is such that it can be remedied, then there is no need to worry about it…The appropriate action is to seek a solution…Alternatively, if there is no way out, no solution, no possibility of resolution, then there is also no point in being worried about it, because you can't do anything about it anyway."

(Granted, that's easier said than done--I'd be the first to admit that and my daughter the first to say so, right to my face!)

Also, for those of us who consider ourselves spiritual people, we can sometimes feel guilty or ashamed because we somehow don't seem to have enough faith to get us through this crises. But the truth is that all of us go through periods where we feel weak and frightened, alone and stubbornly without faith or hope.

Surrendering is not something you can do all of a sudden, when confronted with an insurmountable difficulty. It is something you practice. You have to train yourself, says the Dalai Lama. You have to re-wire your brain, re-program your mindset. And you have to do it pretty much on a daily basis.

The practice of surrendering to fate, God, destiny, the Universe--whatever you want to call it--is like a tree putting down roots. It takes time. It takes sunshine and it takes rain.

This week, Jessica will finally--blessedly--be released by the New York Department of Health. She is no longer considered contagious, though she will remain on medication for at least six months, and she is still nowhere near ready to return to work. Her boyfriend will, at long last, be driving her home.

Here, in the quiet country, in the embrace of family, she will finally be able to rest and recuperate. She'll stay here a couple of months, until she gets back her old energy. Here, in the roots of her childhood, she will regain her strength.

Out back, behind this old farmhouse, there's a mesquite tree at least a hundred years old. Part of that tree is dead, and some years ago, threatened to split the tree in half. My husband drove a gigantic bolt right through that tree, fastening the deadened half tight to the thriving half. Since then, that old tree has flourished and grown taller and stronger than ever, the leafy living part completely overpowering the dead barren part.

Even when you are young, and your roots are not yet that deep, you can be shot through with love, bound and sustained by family and friends, and strengthened enough over time to withstand the violent wind and galeforce rains of any storm.

Friday Funnies

Got a couple of good laugh-out-loud jokes for you today!

Osama at the Pearly Gates

Guys, this is an old joke that's made the rounds on the Internet, but it made me laugh out loud when I reread it recently, which means it meets my Friday Funnies criteria:

*When Osama Bin Laden died, George Washington met him at the Pearly Gates. He slapped him across the face and yelled, "How dare you try to destroy the nation I helped to conceive!"

Patrick Henry approached, punched him in the nose and shouted, "You wanted to end our liberties but you failed!"

James Madison followed, kicked him in the groin and said, "This is why I allowed our government to provide for the common defense!"

Thomas Jefferson was next, beat Osama with a long cane and snarled, "It was evil men like you who inspired me to write the Declaration of Independence."

The beatings and thrashings continued as George Mason, James Monroe, and 66 other early Americans unleashed their anger on the terrorist leader.

As Osama lay bleeding and in pain, an angel appeared. Bin Laden wept and said, "This is not what you promised me."

The angel replied, "I told you there would be 72 Virginians waiting for you in Heaven. What did you think I said?"


This next one's a little saltier, but I simply cannot stop laughing.

Usually, when I see "You know you're a redneck if..." stuff, I just sigh and delete. But this one was so funny I had to share it.

You're an EXTREME Redneck When...

1. You let your 14-year old smoke at the dinner table in front of her kids.
2. The Blue Book value of your truck goes up or down depending on how much is in it.
3. You've been married three times and still have the same in-laws.
4. You think a woman who is "out of your league" bowls on a different night.
5. You wonder how service stations keep their bathrooms so clean.
6. Someone in your family died right after saying, "Hey guys, watch this!"
7. You think Dom Perignon is a Mafia leader.
8. Your junior prom offered day care.
9. Your wife's hairdo was once ruined by the ceiling fan.
10. You think the last words of the Star Spangled Banner are, "Gentlemen, start your engines."
11. You lit a match in the bathroom and your house exploded right off its wheels.
12. The Halloween pumpkin on your porch had more teeth than your spouse.
13. You have to go outside to get something from the fridge.
14. One of your kids was born on a pool table.
15. You need one more hole punched in your card to get a freebie at the House of Tattoos.
16. You can't get married to your sweetheart because there's a law against it.
17. You think loading the dishwasher means getting your wife drunk.

Republican Revolt & the Comeback of Common Sense

"The rebels were not whistle-blowers in the traditional sense…They were not downtrodden career civil-servants. Rather, they were conservative political appointees who had been friends and close colleagues of some of the true believers they were fighting against…They did not see the struggle in terms of black and white but in shades of gray…"
Article in Newsweek magazine, "Palace Revolt", February 6, 2006

"This party that sometimes I don't recognize anymore has presided over the largest growth of government in the history of this country and maybe even the history of man….When I think of issues like Iraq, of how we went into it--no planning, no preparation, no sense of consequences, of where we were going, how we were going to get out, went in without enough men, no exit strategy…I'll speak out. I'll go against my party."
Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, in a recent cover story for the Sunday New York Times Magazine

"Bill Clinton's fiscal and economic approach produced results conservatives should have hailed…At least on economic policy, there is much to praise and little to criticize in terms of what was actually done (or not done) on his watch."
Conservative analyst Bruce Bartlett, in his new book, "IMPOSTER: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy."

"McCain is finding new chums among the same Republicans who invested so much to keep him out of the White House six years ago…even though…his maverick bent has alienated many in his party."
Article in Time magazine, "The Establishment's Pick?", February 20, 2006.

"It's easy for a White House skilled at the art of the permanent campaign to dismiss Democratic criticism as politics as usual. It's far harder, however, to discount the increasingly vocal concerns of those on the president's own side of the aisle."
Editorial, Boston Globe, "A Reassertion of GOP Common Sense," February 14, 2006.


I wondered when it was going to happen, when the winds were going to shift.

Six years ago--really, back further than that, going all the way back to Newt Gingrich's so-called, "Contract With America" and the takeover of Congress by the Republican party in 1996--I had this uncomfortable feeling that has since grown into full alarm, that the Republican party was hi-jacked by the far right and kept hostage for nearly a decade.

With help from right-wing talk-show idealogues, powerful right-wing publishers and media moguls--extremists from the far right set out an agenda and went about bulldozing it through the wall of government and over the prostrate bodies of the American people--a majority of whom really didn't want it.

Both parties have extreme ideological wings who can be very vocal, both on the Internet and the airwaves, howling to the moon about their respective injustices and injuries. And on both sides, there are one-issue voters. On the left are peace activists, abortion rights activists, labor unions, consumer advocates, and environmentalists who will nearly always vote Democratic. On the right, there are religious fundamentalists, energy, pharmaceutical, and insurance-company activists, the NRA, and fiscal conservatives who are nearly always going to vote Republican.

These groups either make the most noise and folderol or spend the most money to get their points across.

But in the vast hinterlands of the American middle, there are centrists. Moderates from both parties, independent-minded thinkers, and those who just don't pay that much attention until a political campaign is underway and then can't seem to make up their minds--these are all people who make up the Big Middle of American political thought.

The far right and the far left will fight to the death to win the votes of that bunch, and starting about eight years ago, the Republicans captured most of those votes. People who were not necessarily all that conservative went ahead and voted Republican because they were either uncomfortable with the Democratic alternative or voted on a single issue, like gay marriage or national security.

Unfortunately, the ideologues on the far right of the party seized control of the Republican party, and through some of the most hammer-fisted bullying techniques I have ever witnessed in politics, they managed to gag and bind anyone in their party who disagreed with them. Those who did speak out were either defeated at the polls by unprecedented amounts of money thrown against them at the primary level, or were either forced out or smeared if they managed to take or keep office.

Many of you may not realize that when Senator John McCain was running for the Republican nomination back in 2000, the Bush-Cheney-Rove smear machine set up a persistent whispering campaign to the effect that his years as a POW in Vietnam had left him crazy. Years later, while appearing on a nationally televised program with the president, McCain flat-out stated how badly those tactics had hurt his feelings. After some stammering and stuttering, Bush, to his credit, did apologize.

Even some conservatives who agreed on the issues, disagreed with the underhanded tactics, and when those who accumulated vast amounts of power grew mad with it, those thinking conservatives were aghast at what was done in the name of that power, such as pork-barrel run amok, or congressional intervention in a painful private matter (the Terry Schaivo case), or the out-of-control deficit. Many felt betrayed by their own party.

This is the atmosphere in which politics has festered and turned putrid in recent years. Long-time politicians on both sides of the aisle say they have never seen a more poisonous atmosphere in Washington, D.C. At its worst, it has virtually shut down the government.

In that void, and in the name of "national security," this White House has moved swiftly to seize as much power as it can get away with, usually in secret, and often on the outer limits of the law.

For a long time, if members of their own party tried to speak out as a voice of reason, they were either haughtily ignored or brutally punished in ways both public and private, and for a long time, the White House got away with it.

But the winds are shifting.

For one thing, a restless American public is beginning to awaken from its five-year bout of 9-11 post-traumatic stress syndrome, look around, and say….waaaait a minute…What's going on here?

As more evidence comes to harsh light that we were lied into invading Iraq, and as more American men and women die there, people are starting to ask questions and to look past the gigantic flags waving in their faces to demand answers.

As corruption and cronyism from the top down comes to light and the exposed cock roaches run to hide behind plea bargains, people are beginning to ask serious questions of their elected representatives.

As disasters like Katrina and its aftermath are mismanaged and mishandled by the White House to such an extent that a Republican panel's own investigation was titled, A Failure in Initiative, more and more people are growing more and more outraged.

And finally, at long last, common-sense Republicans have squirmed out of their ropes and spit out their gags, and they are saying, enough.

Behind the scenes, a handful of brave and careful-thinking conservative legal minds such as former deputy attorney general, James Comey, and former head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, Jack Goldsmith, rose up and fought the White House on such issues as torturing suspects, scooping up American citizens and shipping them off to prison without access to lawyers or even criminal charges being leveled, and wiretapping Americans without court oversight.

In Congress, more and more have been willing to speak out, on the record, like Rep. Heather Wilson, Sen. Arlen Specter, Sen. Mike DeWine, and Sen. Chuck Hagel.

They're not just questioning the administration's policies, but also demanding answers on their actions in Iraq, the Gulf Coast, the budget, and other outrages.

The White House scoffs at these pioneers, pointing out that they're in tight elections back home, or they're "mavericks" who like to criticize the president.

But the winds are shifting.

Elections are decided, not by Karl Rove, but by the PEOPLE. Congressional representatives are questioning the White House because their CONSTITUENTS demand it.

Brave lawyers in the Justice Department are standing up and being counted not because they are running for election but because the CONSTITUTION demands it.

And the American people are starting to ask questions of this administration because COMMON SENSE demands it.

In a powerful piece in Newsweek called "Palace Revolt," about those Justice Department lawyers who refused to give down under relentless White House pressure tactics because they stood firm on the Constitution, one of these heroes, former deputy attorney general James Comer (derisively nick-named "Cuomer" by Bush because he was comparing him to liberal NY politician Mario Cuomo), finally left the Justice Department and took a job with Harvard Law.

In his farewell speech, he thanked the people who, "were committed to getting it right--and to doing the right thing--whatever the price." Some of those people (like himself) he went on to say, did pay a price, when they were forced out of the Bush administration.

So, he goes to Harvard Law--that bastion of knee-jerk liberalism, right? And for a while, anyway, this good man was snubbed and mocked, (here, Newsweek quotes The Harvard Crimson), as "an atrocity-abetting war criminal."

They didn't know, you see, how hard he had worked behind the scenes to stop those very atrocities.

Let this be a lesson to all of us. As mid-term elections approach, extremists on either side should beware of automatic characterizations of anyone in any party as "liberal" or "right-wing." They should think twice about lumping a party member into the extremes of his party.

Instead, they should study carefully his or her actions--not just words, which are cheap in an election year--but get a feel for the candidate's history of common-sense thought, negotiation, compromise, and the other hallmarks of governance that get things done.

Liberals should be careful about dismissing any Republican by painting them with that raggedy old Bush brush, and conservatives should be careful about dismissing any Democrat as a "bleeding-heart liberal," and see, instead, if this person stands on sound personal principles and is capable of governing with pragmatism.

As a person whose convictions flamed into outrage during what I like to call the "Clinton Crucifixion" years, I would have liked to have seen more of these brave Republicans bare their teeth at the extremists who ramrodded their policies onto the rest of us…but as a political realist I understand the nature and machinations of government.

I salute all of them who speak out now, who fight for right no matter what the consequences, and who hail the comeback of common sense.

Mythology 101

"If there are people inside our country talking with al Qaeda, we want to know about it, because we will not sit back and wait to be hit again."
--Vice President Dick Cheney, speaking to the Conservative Political Action Committee

"President Bush believes that if al Qaeda is calling somebody in America, it is in our national interest to know who they are calling and why. Some important Democrats clearly disagree."
--Karl Rove, speaking to the Republican National Committee

"Our enemy is listening."
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, during Senate hearings.


For the past, oh, three or four weeks, I have been doing in-depth research into this whole domestic spying--oh, excuse me, I forgot. We're supposed to say TERRORIST spying now--the White House has been very clear on that terminology.

I just want to get it right.

I've done the same kind of research I use when writing a book, and have downloaded and collected so many different treatments of the subject that I've had to create a filing system: Constitutional Issues, Technological Information, Political Ramifications, History of, and, my favorite, Spy Agency Data Dead Ends.

I realized fairly quickly that this issue is far too complex and complicated to be boiled down to simplistic terms like, oh, say, You either want us to do our jobs to protect the American people by tracking down al Qaeda on United States soil…OR you're some wimpy card-carrying ACLU type who thinks our so-called "privacy" is more important because you don't care if another 9-11 happens here and, obviously can't be trusted to see to it that that does not happen, and that, furthermore, even discussing it gives aid and comfort to the enemy.

That about sum it up?

At first, I had so much information gathered that I thought I was going to have to do another five or six-part series, the way I did the Iraqi war, in order to explain to my readers what, say, ADVISE means (Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement), or "dataveillance", or "signals intelligence"--which relates to technology--or go into such terms as "constitutional avoidance" and "Marbury v Madison"--which relate to Constitutional and legal matters--or explain how, out of say, 5,000 wiretaps, FBI officials admit that maybe only TEN ever actually turn out to be worth serious investigation, and out of those ten, so far, NOT A SINGLE ONE HAS RESULTED IN AN ARREST--or, define "Dutch Cleanser,"--a term used by Republican Senator Arlen Spector in reference to what the attorney general must be smoking if he thinks all this stuff is legal.

*(Note to the Senator: I don't think they make Dutch Cleanser any more, and I'm not even sure how one would go about smoking it, but we get your point.)

But the deeper I dug and the more time passed, the more I realized that most of the American people--including, no doubt, a cross-section of my readers--just don't really care all that much about this issue. At least, not enough to read even a SUMMARY of all the information that explains its details.

And the reason they don't care is that they have already begun to fall into that peculiar hypnotic trance I've seen before whenever this administration's spin machine gets started. Aided and betted by an eager television news media accustomed to presenting complicated issues in simplistic two-minute sound bites, most harried and hurried people just go ahead and swallow whole whatever mythology that is presented to them.

Which boils down to, once again, ARE YOU FOR US OR AGAINST US?

Do you want al Queda terrorists calling your neighbor and getting away with it so they can plan their latest bombing on American soil, or are you worried about your privacy?

And OF COURSE, we all want al Qaeda terrorists to be caught by any means necessary, and if, well, it means the government listens in on us giving hubby our grocery list over the phone well, then, so be it. We just don't care IF IT KEEPS US SAFE.

Most people simply don't GET that the president has been authorized all along to wiretap anyone the FBI or NSA seems to think is up to no good, for any reason, any time. It has always been so.

This is not an EITHER-OR issue. And the White House knows it.

In 1978, a secret court was created for one reason, and one reason only--to oversee domestic spying, or terrorist spying, or whatever frightening term you want to give it. The court exists strictly at the president's whim, and over the years, has swiftly approved literally tens of thousands of wiretaps on American soil of American citizens.

After 9-11, the White House asked Congress if, rather than going to the court first, they could go ahead and start data sweeps and wiretaps and come back, say, within 72 hours if they thought there was anything of significance. Congress agreed to the request immediately and with no debate.

(I've seen at least one former head of the NSA, Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, proclaim the 72-hour leeway an "urban myth." But Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told Senator Arlen Spector that yes, the 72-hour rule did indeed apply. But Gonzales was speaking before the Senate. Hayden was on a nationally televised Sunday talk show. He could spin the mythology--or LIE--outright and nobody would check him on it, and it would make the Internet rounds. Same as Dick Cheney claiming on a Sunday news program that "thousands and thousands" of lives had been saved thanks to illegal wiretaps.)

Congress then offered to change the laws in order to expedite wiretaps and serve at the needs of the president no less than FIVE times, but the attorney general refused.

They were refused because this administration didn't neeeeed no steeeenkin' legal, Constitutional, or Congressional oversight because they were already listening in on whomever, whenever, and how-long ever they wanted.

We don't know exactly how many because all they have to do is throw up the scare-words NATIONAL SECURITY to claim that they can't say.

When they claim that other presidents have done so in the name of national security, they are always very careful never to mention Richard Nixon, whose abuses were so legendary that the secret court had to be created, back in 1978, under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA.

We now know that Nixon routinely used Herbert Hoover's FBI to spy on anyone he considered an enemy, which included war protesters, politicians who were opposing him in elections, journalists, and Civil Rights activists, among others.

This is why our founding fathers insisted upon "checks and balances" between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of our government--so that unscrupulous leaders could not use their almost unlimited power to spy on ordinary Americans and use what they learned to garner for themselves greater power.

This administration claims that they're only listening in to conversations of potential al Qaeda operatives--hence, the "terrorist spying" moniker--but according to the FBI, they were so FLOODED with requests for wiretaps and data traps from the White House and NSA that they became almost overwhelmed, (estimates run in the thousands) tying up hundreds of agents for literally tens of thousands of man-hours trying to investigate them all.

And although Vice President Cheney claims "thousands and thousands" of lives have been saved by going around the FISA courts to spy on Americans, the FBI says that, so far, they have not made a single arrest.

And the Pentagon, which was doing the same thing until just recently, openly admitted that many innocent Americans were caught up in the sweep.

So, what about all the scary stories we've been hearing about terrorist plots that have been thwarted?

Law enforcement thwarts terrorist plots every day in this country. Of course, we don't hear about it because it's not their job to notify the media when they have a success (we'll leave that up to the president)--but the point is that the wiretaps that MAY or MAY NOT have led to the thwarting of the said plots could very well have been put in place by the FISA court, legally and swiftly, within a couple days of the request. (We can only hope that they were, since now that we know some of the wiretaps were ILLEGAL, then the information obtained in them was classic "fruit of the poison tree" and INADMISSABLE IN COURT.)

So, here's how MYTHOLOGY 101 works:

(1) Do whatever you want in secret until you are caught. (2) Immediately attack whoever caught you and investigate them for breaching national security. (3) Go before the American people and put the issue in incredibly simple EITHER-OR terms that have nothing to do with truth or accuracy. (4) Come up with simplistic catch-phrases and repeat, repeat, repeat. (5) If it does not appear to be working, attack those who oppose you as being weak and downright dangerous. (6) If that does not work, then whip out the fear bludgeon, making broad claims of how, if it weren't for you doing whatever you were doing in secret before you got caught, we would all be dead by now. (7) Say anything that backs up your claims--true or false--on national television news interviews where you are not likely to be caught on it. (8) Spread your quotes far and wide on the Internet and in friendly publications so you will look strong and resolute (9) When confronted with the truth, hide behind the terms, "national security," or "ongoing investigation." (10) When flat-out backed up against the wall, say you are "looking forward, not past."


There is no doubt that, with technology advancing at such a breathless pace, Congress needs to re-examine such laws as relate to wiretapping, because data sweeps are so much more all-encompassing these days, involving e-mails and text messages and disposable cell phones and so on that did not even exist in 1978.

And, certainly, the war on terror does change the nature of law enforcement to some extent. But this country has remained strong for more than 200 years by relying on the bedrock of the Constitution, which has withstood many a terrible challenge. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights were written, in the first place, to protect Americans from a self-serving executive branch who, in the name of "trust me," could do anything, anywhere, any time, that they wanted.

If this president thinks that the newly-named long war on terror gives him the right to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants and to whomever he wants in the name of "national security," then what is to prevent him from using that logic to spy on…oh…John Kerry? Or Howard Dean? Or Hillary Clinton?

Maybe he would decide that they would not do as good a job as he could, or as his hand-picked successor could, and would therefore be DANGEROUS and a THREAT TO OUR NATIONAL SECURITY. Maybe he would no longer trust that the American electorate would know what is best for them, and could then use whatever information he gleaned to manipulate the public into believing only what he wanted them to believe. Only Father knows best.

And if you think I'm being a paranoid liberal…okay…then how would you feel if, say, President Hillary Rodham Clinton had unlimited powers to do whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted, and to whomever she wanted, in the name of "national security"--with no checks and balances and no oversight because, well, Mother knows best. (Just trust her.)

This past Sunday, I was stunned to see arch-conservative columnist George Will state, flat-out, that this president has more of a monarchy than a presidency. And even more surprised to see that he was none too happy about it.

But the truth of the matter is that a growing number of Congressional Republicans and thinking conservatives (not just Democrats) are uncomfortable knowing that, once the American people--and Congress--become so complacent, or so frightened--by whatever mythology is shrink-wrapped and presented to us, that we enable the executive branch to assume the powers of a defacto monarchy…then we should expect that monarchy, no matter who is in the White House, to eventually abuse that privilege. It is the nature of power.

Hence, those pesky little checks and balances.

Sunday Stillpoint: The Dark Guardian Angel of Anger

Sunday Stillpoint

"Anger gives you the impetus you need to change conditions that need to be changed. In this way, anger is like a dark guardian angel…that offers guidance and spiritual support."

--Thomas Moore, Ph.D.
--DARK NIGHTS OF THE SOUL: a Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals
Gotham Books, a division of the Penguin Group, 2004


Several times in this blog, readers who have posted comments have mentioned what they refer to as my "liberal rage." They complain that my point can sometimes be lost in the anger used in expressing it.

However, if those same commenters also read the comments posted by other mothers who have Marine sons posted to Iraq, they would notice a common thread. The rage often seen posted on this blog is neither LIBERAL nor CONSERVATIVE. It is not even political.

It is a MOTHER'S rage.

Mother's rage can accomplish a great deal. Very little was made of the disastrous meandering in Iraq by war planners that left no exit strategy and threatened to bog down into a hopeless morass…until one grieving, angry mother parked herself in front of the president's vacation home and asked one simple question: Why did my son have to die?

And just a couple of decades ago even, drunk drivers were routinely returned back out onto the highway after third, fourth, and fifth infractions with no worse punishments than fines, until one woman whose daughter was killed by a drunk driver was filled with such a holy rage that she created an organization that spelled out the word: M.A.D.D.

Perhaps people take for granted the enormous strides that have been taken in this country to address drunk drivers since Mothers Against Drunk Drivers began their campaign to educate the public and get the laws changed, but it all started with one angry mother.

In South America, mothers whose adult children had been vanishing off the streets--presumably "disappeared" by government hit squads--hit the streets in such unignorable numbers that a ruthless dictator was eventually overthrown.

Pop psychology makes much of the destructive force of anger. We are taught not to suppress it, because that can result in psychosis. We are taught not to vent, either, because that can cause our blood pressure to soar.

Mostly, we are taught to medicate it.

Not much is written, however, about how to CHANNEL it.

Thomas Moore, the author of such seminal bestsellers as The Care of the Soul and Soulmates, is perhaps one of our nation's wisest of men. A Catholic monk for twelve years as a young man, Moore went on to get his doctorate in psychology and to become a psychotherapist. He also studied theology, music, and religion. He got married, divorced, and remarried, and he brought children into the world.

In his writings, he avoids pat banalities from either psychology or religion, and digs deeper to the truly spiritual, the holy wise. His book, Dark Nights of the Soul is perhaps the most profound I have ever read on how not only to endure through great despair and difficulty in life, but how to glean from it the greatest truths life has to offer--how not to run from depression, in other words, but how to embrace it and even turn it into the most powerful and meaningful moments of your life.

I read this book during my son's first deployment, when I felt a rage coursing through my body like an electrical current, sparking and popping at inappropriate moments and overall threatening to completely overwhelm me. They say that anger is actually the flip side of fear, and the greater my fear for my son, the more potent my rage, until I feared it might destroy me.

And then I read Dr. Moore's book, and was absolutely astonished to find, in a chapter entitled, "The Deep-Red Emotions," that not only did anger not have to be a destructive force in my life, but that it was indeed a force to celebrate.

"Anger is related to power and creativity," wrote Dr. Moore. He explained that channeling our rage into a cause worthy of our emotion can give us a renewed sense of purpose and direction in our lives. "It's obvious that social wrongs are only corrected when the abused get angry enough and resist."

I like this part so well I'm going to bold-face it: "Anger can draw out the knight and warrior in you…Many men and women going through a dark night describe how they were changed by it, often becoming more of a warrior…someone who has taken on an edge and discovered unknown power."

He explains that, until we learn how to channel our rage into productive, creative means of expression, we often retreat into a place he calls "dark and quiet." A far more dangerous place, in other words, that can lead to such disasters as suicide.

"Anger is your spirit flashing out of you," Moore says, the "pulse of life."

Anger, he explains, can make you strong, can help you endure, can inspire you to take charge of your life.

Now, it goes without saying, of course, that anger has a very dark side--a violent side, a sado-masochistic side, a passive-aggressive side, a murderous side. Dr. Moore addresses these issues in his book, but I am assuming that my readers understand the difference, here.

I'm talking about the kind of rage that can lead not to violence, but to despair, not to harming others, but to the kind of eating away at our souls that depletes us of our life force and leave us spent and exhausted.

This happens when we turn our anger on ourselves, or when we let it rage in a frustrated, futile manner. Imagine a downed power line writhing on the pavement, its potent charge spent against the concrete, useless and hopeless until someone inadvertently bumps up against it and is electrocuted.

Dr. Moore talks about taking that same rage and transforming it, he says, "through a channeling of your life force, and this liberated vitality gives you your presence as a unique personality."

My sister-in-law, Kay, could not be more different from me both in temperament, personality, and politics, but her son, my nephew Mike, is currently serving with the Marines in Ramadi. She's as terrfied as I am, and as angry, but she has channeled her energies into volunteering for the USO. At DFW airport on every Sunday, the Army sends out their deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan on commercial airliners. (Marines leave from Air Force bases.)

She gathers with other USO volunteers there every Sunday, passing out care packages and hugs and other touches of home to troops both seasoned and angry--like my son--and fresh and terrified, like someone else's son or daughter. From someplace deep within, she summons the energy to say good-bye to someone else's child for them each and every Sunday of her life.

And if a Marine from anywhere in the Dallas area dies at war, my sister-in-law is there at the funeral, offering comfort and help. I don't know how she does it--I couldn't, to be honest--but this is her life force, her rage, channeled into a unique expression of her being.

I take my own gifts and talents and use them in my own way, an expression of this mother's rage, that is meant to educate and inform, inspire and uplift, or even just to make others think. And if, in the long run, I can make even one small contribution toward making the world a better place, then I have fulfilled my purpose.

"The force you need to thrive and create is your anger turned upside down," writes Moore. "Anger gives you all the power and motivation you need to live every minute originally, as yourself. Without it, you will surrender in the wrong places and you will become overwhelmed. Anger both keeps you out of certain dark nights and lifts you out of them once you have succumbed. It is your precious angel, deserving of your attention and cultivation."

"There will be no true glory for our soldiers in Iraq until they are recognized not as victims, but as aggressive warriors."

--Bing West
No True Glory, a Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah
Bantam Books, 2005


Just yesterday, I received my copy of the book, No True Glory, which documents--from politicians to war-planners to officers to grunts--what took place over the course of a year and a half to secure the terrorist stronghold that was Fallujah.

I had ordered the book because my son's Marine unit took part in the November '04 Operation Phantom Fury to avenge the deaths of four American contractors--and dozens of Marines who had fought and died in an aborted mission to secure the city the previous April--and to drive out insurgents and take back the city, which had become a stronghold for Abu Musab al Zarkawi and his bloodthirsty gang.

It was my son's unit that took back the Blackwater Bridge (dubbed the "Brooklyn Bridge" in the book), from where the mutilated and burned bodies of the contractors had been hanged the previous spring. They also uncovered and destroyed torture chambers where Westen hostages had been beheaded, and discovered and destroyed huge weapons caches.

From street to street, house to house, room to room, my son and his fellow Marines fought, until every house in their path was cleared. Months later, they provided security to the Sunni citizens who had returned to Fallujah and wished to cast a vote in Iraq's first elections.

I have not yet had a chance to read all of Mr. West's book, which documents the most savage battle Marines have fought since Que Sahn in Vietnam, thus securing my own son's place in history, but I did cherry-pick sections dealing with his unit specifically, and read the concluding chapter. I'll finish the book soon.

I'd like to quote at greater length the section Bing West wrote about warriors:

"In World War II the Western press--believing in its cause--had extolled the Greatest Generation of Americans. The warriors who fought in Iraq would not be called the Greatest Generation, because America was divided about the cause for which they were dying. The focus of the press was upon individual deaths as tragedies.

"This was an incomplete portrayal. The fierce fighting at Fallujah attested to the stalwart nature of the American soldier. In The Illiad a warrior in the front ranks turned to his companion and said, 'Let us win glory for ourselves, or yield it to others.' For Greek warriors, there was no true glory if they were not remembered afterward in poem or in song. There will be no true glory for our soldiers in Iraq until they are recognized not as victims, but as aggressive warriors. Stories of their bravery deserved to be recorded and read by the next generation. Unsung, the noblest deeds will die."

In this blog I have often raged about the inept, inefficient, and just plain stupid way in which this war was launched and executed by the morons in Washington. I have stated flat-out that my son and nephew did not want to return for repeat deployments to Iraq and that, as the war drags on and on, have a harder and harder time understanding just what the hell they are doing there.

BUT MAKE NO MISTAKE ABOUT IT. I come from a family of distinguished warriors. More than most, I understand that the business of war is warring. And warriors go to war because that is what they do. It is their job.

Not all soldiers and Marines are necessarily warriors. It is said that for every infantry grunt out in the field, there are at least TEN support troops doing such things as providing food, driving trucks, managing supplies, and taking care of the paperwork of warfare.

There are high-ranking officers planning operations and junior-level officers overseeing those operations and taking part in them.

But for the infantry and the special forces, there is nothing like doing the very thing for which they trained. They are eager to do it, and proud when they have done their parts. If they are not permitted to take part in combat for whatever reason, they are frustrated, as was so beautifully spelled out in the book and movie, Jarhead.

For the better part of a generation--with the quick exception of the Gulf War (which I privately refer to as the "hundred-hour war")--this nation has been at peace. And yet, for centuries, young men have met their measure by going into the military and--to the ultimate--going to war.

A man does not know what he is made of until he is challenged, body and soul, by the very worst, most extreme circumstances he can face. If he meets that challenge, then for the rest of his life, he is secure in the knowledge that he stepped up, did his part, and has nothing to prove to anybody anywhere ever again--most of all, himself.

I have long believed that the proliferation of so-called "extreme" sports during the past decade or so came about because most young men do not any longer automatically go into the military, as their fathers and grandfathers might have done. They jump out of airplanes with a boogie-board strapped to their feet in order to prove to themselves that they're tough. It's that simple.

Because we have been at peace for a generation, I see a lot of military moms, especially those whose kids went into the military right out of high school and thus were never able to share the college experience with them--treating their kids' service much in the same way soccer moms cheer on their kids at games.

They often fill the house with Marine or Army memorabilia and volunteer with other parents to put together hundreds of care packages and slap so many yellow ribbons on their cars that you can hardly tell what color they are. This is not to say that they are not equally terrified for their children's safety--in fact, they are often so much more terrified than military moms and spouses because they don't understand the nature of warfare--that for every five minutes of hot action there are 12 hours of boredom.

But I have always understood that what my son and his buddies do is their job, and they do it better than anyone else in the world. Period.

After 9-11, when my son decided to enlist, he said something I never forgot: "I don't feel comfortable being one of the ones who needs protecting. I'd rather be one of the ones who protects."

He knew, too, that in a military family such as ours, he would meet the measure of manhood and earn lifelong respect.

SO…WHY DO I RAGE ABOUT THIS WAR WHEN I UNDERSTAND ALL THESE THINGS?

When my son first went to war, my sister warned me that I could not even THINK anti-war thoughts, because to do so would be undermining my son's effort.

Nonsense.

Soon after Dustin deployed to war, I contacted Col. David Hackworth who was, at the time, the most decorated war veteran alive. He had served in four different conflicts and taken home more medals than he could count. I asked him, point-blank, the following question:

Is it possible to love the warrior and hate the war?

I needed to know, from someone who had BEEN THERE, whether I was indeed doing or saying anything to harm my son. My son, you see, knows full well how I feel about the Iraq war, but he also knows that no one has ever been more supportive of him than his mom. Every week he gets funny cards and letters, most every week, care packages. When he calls home, he gets a laugh and warm love to wrap around himself on cold nights.

He is smart enough to realize that what I rage against is not him or his buddies--but those who send them into battle without first fully considering the consequences.

Ask anyone at the Pentagon, and they will tell you that the people most reluctant to go to war are warriors who have fought in previous conflicts. They know that it should always be a very last resort, because they know, only too well, the terrible, terrible price.

Col. Hackworth uncategorically agreed with me. He wrote, "There's the personal attack on anyone with a point of view that's different from the party line: You're un-American; or you're supporting the enemy or not supporting the troops. The latest tactic is to say you're sending out mixed messages that hurt troop morale.

"But according to our soldiers in Iraq, this is just not true. They say their morale is in the toilet because of how badly the war's been handled, not because of what's being reported or debated by politicians."

Col. Hackworth spent the last few decades of his life, after returning from Vietnam, doing everything in his power to shed light on the needs and genuine worries of our troops. He traveled to just about every hot zone our troops were in and reported back for Newsweek and other publications.

Even though "Hack," as he preferred to be called, passed away much too soon of cancer, I hope he knows how very much his words provided comfort to a terrified Marine mom in Texas.

He gave me courage to fight for the fighters, to use what weapons I have--in my case, the pen and computer--to draw attention to and to protest stupidity and gross negligence and the reprehensible tactic of using the war for political gain (on either side) whenever I see it.

Does it mean that I do not appreciate what my son and his buddies did in Fallujah? Absolutely not. Does it mean I'm somehow less proud of him, or that I somehow love my country less, because he's serving in a war I vehemently protest?

Well, if you seriously think that, I suggest you take it up with my son and my nephews. Go ahead. Look them in the face and give it your best shot.

See who they defend.


(For a change of pace, scroll on down for a new edition of Friday Funnies.)

Friday Funnies


The following quotes are from one of the greatest American humorists who ever lived, Will Rogers (1879-1935). I guarantee at least one laugh:

"Diplomats are just as essential to starting a war as soldiers are for finishing it…You take diplomacy out of a war, and the thing would fall flat in a week."

"You can't say civilization isn't advancing: in every war they kill you in a new way."

"The minute you read something you can't understand, you can almost be sure it was drawn up by a lawyer."

"The short memories of American voters is what keeps our politicians in office."

"This country has come to feel the same when congress is in session as when a baby gets hold of a hammer."

"We are all here for a spell: get all the good laughs you can."

"Being a hero is about the shortest-lived profession on earth."

"Claremore, Oklahoma is just waiting for a high tension line so they can go ahead with locating an airport."

"Everything is funny as long as it is happening to someone else."

"Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with all the time we have rushed through our lives trying to save."

"I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts."

"If stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it gets us out?"

"Just be thankful you're not getting all the government you're paying for."

"There's no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you."

"We can't all be heroes because someone has to sit on the curb and clap as they go by."

"It's outrageous, ridiculous, and unconscionable. I wanted to stand on a street corner and yell through a megaphone about this."

These aren't the words of a politician, though God knows they should be. They are the words of a mother who has just learned that her son, Army Lt. William "Eddie" Rebrook, whose arm was nearly blown off in Iraq, was presented with a bill for $700 that he was forced to pay before he could leave the Army on the medical separation discharge that they had insisted upon.

It seems that was the cost of the body armor he was wearing at the time his Bradley Fighting Vehicle was hit by an IED (roadside bomb).

The OTV (outer tactical vest) was so blood-soaked that the medic ripped it off his body in order to apply a tourniquet to the severed artery in his shattered arm, before loading the severely wounded lieutenant into a Blackhawk helicopter for swift relocation to a field hospital outside Baghdad. The armor, then considered a biohazard, was burned.

Since a battalion supply officer failed to document this battlefield destruction of said body armor, Lt. Rebrook was told he would have to pay up or spend many weeks more in the Army while he tried to track down witnesses who could write letters backing his claim that the body armor had been burned.

Rebrook, who was an honors graduate of the US Military Academy at West Point and had spent four years in the Army (six months in Iraq), tried to get a waiver from his First Cavalry Division battalion commander at Fort Hood, where he was stationed when he was discharged, but the BC refused. So the lieutenant had to scrounge the money from his buddies.

The new policy is called "report of survey," and Rebrook says he's not the only combat-wounded soldier he knows who's had to pay for equipment destroyed in battle.

What I want to know is, WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE?

Why did I have to read about this in an article in the small West Virginia Gazette, after picking it up from a link at the official Democratic party website? Why didn't I read about in the New York Times or Washington Post? Why wasn't it reported on all the network news broadcasts?

By the way, within one hour, readers of Americablog had raised the money to repay Rebrook, and by the end of the day, they had raised more than $5,700.

Americablog is a liberal website.

The day after the article appeared, Senators Robert Byrd and Jay Rockefeller--both Democrats--had demanded to know WHY soldiers were being billed for equipment destroyed in battle by the enemy. They went straight to the source and asked our esteemed secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, and Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army's chief of staff.

Both claimed not to have any idea what the senators were talking about.

YET ANOTHER MYTH BUSTED ON BLUE INKBLOTS--the outrageous lie that Democrats and/or liberals hate the military.

They don't hate the military.

They hate military HYPOCRITES.

Ask my son or anyone serving right now and they will tell you that they have to buy much of the combat gear that was once issued by the military. They have to buy their own medals. Up until just recently, many of them bought their own body armor because it was not provided.

Now, it seems, if they don't have official documentation to show that their bloody body armor was cut off their bodies by medics and burned as biohazards while they're loaded onto helicopters and sent to hospitals to save their lives, well, they have to pay the bill. The Army apparently needs the money.

(I've even heard rumors that if a soldier or Marine is killed while wearing body armor provided by, say, his parents, then they do not receive his death benefits, but I have not confirmed that rumor.)

Meanwhile, the budget recently submitted by this conservative Republican president--who never speaks with less than a dozen flags in the background--has the biggest increase in military spending in history, but not for things like body armor. Much of the money is earmarked for massive Cold War weapons systems that, to quote the Boston Globe, "have stratospheric price tags and no discernable enemies to use them against."

Which should make all those fat-cat K-Street defense industry lobbyists who live on Capitol hill very, very happy.

Incidentally, Lt. Rebrook is not going to keep the money that was raised for him both in his Charleston, West Virginia hometown and on Americablog. He's going to give it to the mother of a buddy who saved his life in Iraq. She lost everything she had in Hurricane Katrina.

The right-wing knows all about how to whip up fake outrage over non-issues like the so-called "war on Christmas" and other feigned insults they can shout about on talk radio. They know how to wrap themselves in the flag and get all teary-eyed when they talk about how "our" troops are fighting for "our freedom" blah blah blah.

But it took a bunch of liberals to bring up a REAL outrage.

I thought I was going to write about something other than the war, but you know what? It just keeps getting more and more outrageous, ridiculous, and unconscionable.

Sunday Stillpoint

Welcome to our first "Sunday Stillpoint." My intention was to have this posted early so that you could find it any time on a Sunday, but our server was down--so far down, in fact, that even the tech-support number did not ring.

Me being the intrepid soul I am, I visited my sister, (newly moved to Abilene), and she took me to an Internet cafe so that I could post a message on Blue Inkblots explaining about the downed server.

Was a great idea. Would've worked, too, IF ONLY I COULD HAVE REMEMBERED MY PASSWORD!!

However, I've just read an exceedingly powerful book which was chock-full of great coping strategies. It's called, THE BEETHOVEN FACTOR: The New Positive Psychology of Hardiness, Happiness, Healing, and Hope. (Hampton Roads Publisher, 2003.)

The author is bestsellling author Paul Pearsall, PhD. Pearsall is one of a founding group of psychologists who made a decision to change the direction of psychiatric thought--by concentrating, not on all the PROBLEMS human beings have (various and sundry "personality disorders" and mental illnesses)--but on how the healthiest of us have learned, not only how to survive the truly horrific--but to THRIVE.

The title is based on Ludwig von Beethoven, a gifted musician and composer who went tragically deaf right at the pinnacle of his career. Naturally, he despaired and cried out to God...but then he went on to compose such masterpieces as Ode to Joy and the Ninth Symphany.

Pearsall wondered, how on earth did Beethoven do it? He spent years interviewing people who had survived concentration camps, deadly disease, violent crimes, accidents, bankruptcies--any manner of sad upheavals in the course of one's lifetime. But there was something different about the individuals Pearsall interviewed. These were people who seemed filled with a buoyancy to life, an inner sparkle. They laughed frequently (often at themselves) and seemed possessed not just with optimism about the future, but with a hard-earned wisdom that he decided to share.

And then Pearsall was himself stricken with a deadly form of cancer, was told there was no chance of survival, put in the hospital for months of treatments so harsh he almost died from that alone. During that ordeal, which occurred more than ten years ago, he put to use the things he'd learned from his brave subjects.

He survived, and he thrived.

There's too much wonderful stuff in this book for a brief blog entry, but I thought I'd share what Dr. Pearsall refers to as a Daily Plan for Psychoimmunity Enhancement.

You know how, (especially as baby boomers age) there is more and more information floating around out there on how to boost one's immunity system, with vitamins and minerals, exercise and meditation.

This goes a step farther, by giving some suggestions on how to boost our own ability to cope with the slings and arrows of fate. Here is a brief synopsis:

1. Let it go.

The way Pearsall expresses it is, "Don't spend $100-worth of psychiatric energy on a 10-cent problem..No one upsets you," he adds. "YOU UPSET YOURSELF."

2. Have faith.

"Don't get emotional about being emotional. Stop aggravating yourself," Pearsall advises. "Unless you cling to them, all emotional states pass." (I have to remember that whenever I get upset about war news.)

3. Calm down.

"Don't be a thrill-seeker." Or as we say at our house, a drama queen. My daughter is an actor, and when she was in college, she used to giggle about how over-wrought some of the people she knew would get over common difficulties. It doesn't help, really. Just makes you feel worse.

4. Wait a while.

Sadness is absolutely natural when we are dealing with some very serious situations, such as catastrophic illness or a death in the family. Of course we SHOULD feel sad. But the people Pearsall interviewed advised us to "stop ruminating." He says, "Don't despair over sadness." Give it time.

5. Suffer humbly.

On the other hand, Pearsall says, "Don't be a martyr." Everyone suffers. Suffering, though difficult, is a natural part of life--essential, even, if we are to feel true joy. In our family, we often joke about the "Mills Family Curse." Actually, there's no such thing. We will all have our share, at one time or another.

6. If necessary, give it up.

I found this truth to be incredibly profound. In this country, especially, catch-phrases such as "quitters never win and winners never quit," are such a powerful part of our national psyche that to do anything else can make you feel like a total failure. However, an increasingly vocal group of wise-thinkers are beginning to be heard, and what they are saying is that, there are times when quitting is the smartest thing you can do.

"Thriving through a crises often involves intentional and considered disengagement from failed efforts," Pearsall explains, "or scaling back to a lesser goal in the same domain."

In a physiological sense, when we engage in creative giving-up--I prefer words like "relinquishing"--this actually allows the psychiatric system to "reboot" as Pearsall calls it, so that it can "focus its efforts more efficiently and effectively."

"Strength is not always about overcoming, but is sometimes about allowing oneself to be overcome...Strength is not always about victory over the outside world, but sometimes changes in our inside world."

I like this so well, I'm going to bold-face it: "The hardy know that persevering can turn out to be glorious stupidity and that giving up at the wrong time can turn out to be a tragic loss...Choosing wisely between these options is also an important human strength."

Thrivers, Pearsall points out, "have good outcomes in their lives because they are good at construing crises in such a way that they can focus on what they are already good at instead of what they cannot do."

7. Cheer up.

"You're much stronger than you feel and think..." Pearsall says. "Until we personally come to know just how bad things can get, we often fail to see just how powerfully resilient we are."