Peace IS Patriotic

With the upcoming Fourth of July celebrations, it's time to start reclaiming the meaning of the holiday. In case people have forgotten the meaning in the current swarm of fireworks as simulated bombings and, explosions, the smarmy excuses for hatred wrapped in the flag, and the hijacking of the term "Patriotism" to abuse many of us into submission, it was to celebrate the birth of our country and the leaving behind of religious intolerance, monarchy rule, and unfair taxation on the backs of the poor.

Here's what we need to reclaim in order to get our country back and restore our true independence:

1. Quit glorifying war. It only makes the munitions makers and arms dealers wealthier and does nothing for peace, democracy, and spreading tolerance for one another around the world. You can start by taking back the word "Peace." The right wing warmongers have turned this into a nasty four-letter word to further their own political agenda without taking into account it will be their children and grandchildren who will die in dirty little wars as a result of their ancestor's stupidity. Peace is all that will save us from the Cheneys of the world. Wear Peace. Display Peace. Speak Peace. Live Peace. By doing so you will be doing your part to put the warmongers back under their rocks of hatred where they will stink up only each other's space and not the rest of the world's.

2. Repeat after me. Peace is Patriotic. Those who tell you differently are too blinded by their own hatred to see the truth. They wrap themselves in the flag and think it will protect them from the consequences of their behavior. They have foolishly been led to believe that a piece of cloth can make up for loss of integrity, the endorsement of torture, spying on Americans who have done nothing wrong, wars fought for oil and profit instead of honor and security, and spreading hate as if it were something than shit that will eventually bury them no matter what color the shroud used to wrap around their decaying bodies. It is up to you to get the message out there that Peace is the highest form of Patriotism because it doesn't depend on killing or imprisoning or torturing someone to get them to believe what you do. A nation that tolerates and expects equality and diversity is a peaceful nation.

3. Fight back against the mono-theistic blindness that a small minority in this country is trying to inflict on everyone else. Yes, the Supreme Court has ruled that you can't challenge Bushco's faith-based crap programs. But you can fight back by expanding the meaning of faith to include other belief systems besides wacko fundamentalism that spreads and encourages and funds hatred of anyone who does not belong to that particular cult. If you are a Buddhist, a Wiccan, a Pagan, a flower worshipping cat loving peacemonger, then it is your obligation to get your beliefs defined as faith and eligible for federal dollars. Make this biased Supreme Court stacked with Bush fundies tell millions of you that your beliefs are not valid, not equal, and not part of the religious freedom guaranteed by the laws they are sworn to uphold. Demand that your beliefs are given equal status, equal money, equal respect. Start schools and day cares and after-school sessions that the fundies are using to rake in the dollars and make your beliefs equal to what they are using to get those dollars. Make this hypocritical government go on record trying to prove that what one group believes has more or less validity than another. That's what our ancestors fought and died for. Are you going to sit back and let their deaths and sacrifices become meaningless in the face of religious wackos and their big, greedy hands sucking all the funds for themselves and their political agendas?

4. Bring Democracy to America. This means reining in Cheney and the rest of Bushco. Contact your congressional representatives and make your voice heard. Let them know your vote depends on their actions. Let them know they can no longer let someone like Cheney control the fate of this country. Let them know you are paying attention and will continue to pay attention. Get loud and get heard.

5. This fourth of July, don't cringe from Patriotism. Reclaim it. Clean it up and make it shine again. Make Peace, Tolerance, Diversity, and Democracy a good thing again. Wear a button, a shirt, send a card, make a poster. Do what it takes but do something because your silence implies consent and is that a good thing for your grandchildren to one day believe about you?

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Peace IS Patriotic

Anti-War Voices

It was cold and rainy and windy here in the PNW. As we huddled together under umbrellas and rain hats and posters turned sideways to keep the rain off, many of us felt that underneath the familiar images of an anti-war protest something else was going on. It felt important and those of us who were there understood something was beginning again in this country--the stirrings of a more persistent voice for Peace. It was different than the ones previous. Those felt calm, subdued, well-behaved. This time there was an underlying anger, an energy to do more than play nice.

But we ARE nice people, nice non-violent people. Our whole reason for being there was to demonstrate against the kind of anger and rage and despair that leads to violence. No one I talked to wanted to put into words what that uncomfortable feeling inside us was. But we saw it in each other's eyes. We felt it in each other's voices, in the fed up tone of enough is enough that seeped through the crowd. We were part of a difference, a very important difference. A difference that grows as a feeling in the eyes that comes from the heart, from the depths of the heart where anger grows a shell around love to protect it from evil.

We were there because we understood The Bush War Machine is the worst of evils right now. It has an insatiable hunger not only to keep enriching itself on wars fought solely for profit, but also a hunger to protect itself from the crimes it has committed and continues to commit in that drive for profit and power. Firing prosecuters. Defaming anyone who disagrees with their addiction to wealth vast enough to buy the silence of every objector, torturing confessions out of everyone they can get their hands on until it sounds like some demented Jerry Springer show: Yes, I slept with Osama Bin Laden! I am the father of Anna Nicole's baby! I blew up the towers! I killed Kennedy!

The vast majority of the country is too disgusted with the lies continually spun by the Bushco War Machine to even laugh at the absurd desperation these sudden confessions reveal about an increasingly trapped administration facing an angry populace that is slowly starting to wake up. It's the rainbow hued terror alerts all over again. It's Karl Rove throwing tainted meat to the ignorant starving masses. Once they gobbled it up in the form of free hotdogs and Coca-Cola and support the troop rallies that were really rallies to stir up blood lust. Once they fed at the pulpit of hate as stereotypes and fear took the place of what used to be sermons and became right-wing propaganda spun doctrine. Once it worked so well and so easily. People fell asleep and became sheeple drugged subservient by the latest feel good mood pill brought to you by a subsidiary of Halliburton-Frist-Rumsfeld Incorporated.

But the stakes are higher now. And so is their desperation. It makes the Bushco War Machine very dangerous. It's a threatened beast spinning around in an ever smaller cage. The room holding it back has grown smaller and more constrained. The indictments are coming. The stench of fear is rising from the White House. From The Vice-President's Office. From those committees within committees within Pentagon death chambers. From the mockery of Justice Department. All inside these halls are desperate caged beasts hungry for a distraction, and that distraction is Iran, or Syria, North Korea or some other poor sap country that will allow itself to be drawn into the Bushco lie machine.

That is why this is the time when people must take to the streets. This is the time when it must be made very clear that the sheeple are done walking subserviently on all fours. This is the time when we must make it very clear that a diet of lies and crap isn't going to pacify the anger so easily anymore. We, who live our lives trying to convince others of the value of playing nice, have to develop a less nice backbone. We have to get louder. We have to get out in the streets every weekend instead of on approved anniversaries. We have to make it clear that we are listening every day, we are paying attention to everything, and we will express our opinion on every damn thing they throw at us.

That is what has been missing and has allowed Bushco to destroy the foundations of this country. Every time the constitution was trashed a little more, we were too busy, too dismayed, too pre-occupied. Every time more money was taken from schools, from communties, from VA hospitals, we looked away because our power was too little, too futile, too subject to being called traitor, troop hater, wimp, weak, and any number of insults those who want to continue to do evil throw around so easily. It's time to remember these are the same people who made the word Peace an obscenity and free speech an impediment.

It's time to take it all back. It's time to take to the streets seriously, not just once a week. Not just when others say so. Not when it's convenient. If you don't, the price is high, so high you may not survive. That price is war and if you think just recyling the same troops over and over again is going to satisfy the War Machine's desperate hunger, then you need to look up the meaning of the word "draft" because that's not a cold breeze closing in on you. It's your indifference, your mistaken and foolish belief that it has nothing to do with you.

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Peace Skull design available on t-shirts and other items from Ursine Logic. Changing minds one t-shirt at a time. Visit Ursine Logic for more designs.

Anti-War Voices

The Gift Of Hate

I was taught early in life how to hate. My grandmother would never believe that is what she was teaching me. In her mind she was warning me about bad people who hurt her and her family. The pain in her voice was real as she described the beautiful house with the flower gardens, the many precious herbs tended for decades that both healed and brought in necessary income in times of need. And the team of white horses that identified the family carriage to anyone who saw it.

It was the horses I always remembered because when she spoke of them a shine came into her eyes, the kind of shine one gets when looking upon something so magnificent it literally brings tears to your eyes. And it was the horses, in all their majestic beauty, that was my first lesson in hate.

"So many in town hated my family for those horses," she would whisper to me as if it were such a deep and horrible secret that she didn't dare speak it aloud. And of course I felt the first stirrings of hate in my own belly as she described the injustice of having such creatures and not being able to openly enjoy them without drawing forth envy from those who resented "us" for our good fortune.

I learned these same people, one family in particular, lead the hate. "It was over politics," she would whisper as the sheer filth of that word fell from her lips. Politics. The ultimate bad guy in all her stories. It went hand in hand with hate because you couldn't have politics without hate. "They hated us for not believing what they believed, but our family was unshakable. We believed what we believed and that was it." I felt the passion of that injustice in my stomach and swore always to believe what I believed and I felt angry at these mean people who would deny me and my family that right.

Next came the real killer: religion. I come from a long line of Atheists mixed with a few religious fanatics. My family has straddled the religion fence decade after decade with a sort of blind faith that they will end up on the side that isn't lined up against the wall and shot, so it didn't surprise me that some hated them for their faith or lack of it. Why should the inner workings of my family be any different than the outer workings?

"The bastard hated us because we didn't believe in his Jesus." I felt her anger, her despair and I became ferociously Atheistic. I hated the family who judged us, the father and his son who stopped my family on the street and spit at my family and called them heathens. I could see him whenever she told this story: his hair black as his soul, his cold eyes, his crude language that no gentleman would be caught speaking. By the time I was in my teens I hated him with a passion so deep that I was certain if he was in the room with me, I could easily hurt him and feel no remorse. That is the power of hate, that is what it can convince you to to do: hurt a stranger because he did something to someone else you also never met.

But the worst part of this story was the horrible ending. "They came in the night," she told me with tears in her eyes. "First they poisoned the horses..." We always stopped to cry together at this part of the story. I loved horses as a young girl and this was a crime too horrible to ever forgive. I could see their eyes close in death as they suffered from the poison. I hated this horrible horrible man and his family and all his relatives and all the children he would bring into the world.

And then they came back and burned down the house and tore up the flower gardens and destroyed a decades old garden of medicinal herbs the town depended upon for healing. "We left and never returned," she said with that perfect note of despair that has left me feeling my entire life as if I were a homeless refugee, a displaced Atheist waiting for the first hail of bullets to strike me down for my terrible crimes of not believing in Jesus, of having politics that differed from the most powerful man in town and his evil son, and just being hated for no reason other than for who I was. The injustice of it was so strong, so much a part of how I grew up and why I became the adult I am.

My grandmother is long dead and it wasn't until I was in my twenties that I found out the truth about this family, this horrible man and his even worse son. Yes, they did all that. Yes, they were bad people. Yes, they caused my family endless and unjust suffering. I also found out they died at least a hundred years if not more before my grandmother was born. None of the bad things they did was done to her or to me or to anyone who was alive. They were long dead, but yet they lived on in this perverse way.

My grandmother was only repeating what was told to her. She gave me the only legacy she had left, the memory of an injustice committed on our family long before any of us were born. She gave me hate instead of love. It is a gift that I decided needed to die with me. I do not want to know more about this man and his son. I do not want revenge as a dish best served cold. I want him to die with the all the stories, all the unforgiven wrongs, all the hate he spread far into the future.

It ends with me. And what begins with me is a sense of peace, a feeling of moving forward in time instead of backwards, a reworking of hatred so it becomes love, a reworking of intolerance so it becomes acceptance, and a reworking of eternal and perpetual war so it finally, at last, becomes peace. It begins with me.

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Changing minds one t-shirt at a time. Visit Ursine Logic for more designs.

The Gift Of Hate

President Hillary Clinton?

It's really hard for me to figure out how I feel about Hillary running for president. She lost my heart when she didn't come out and say the Iraq war is wrong, based on lies, and let's get the hell out. It's why candidates like Obama and Edwards have my heart.

Obama says yes when asked if he did things like get high. He doesn't hide it like Bush does or stretch the truth ridiculously far like Bill who didn't inhale. He says what I want to hear about Iraq. I like Edwards for saying what I want to hear about Iraq. I like him even better because he acted like a real husband who cares about his wife when she had breast cancer, unlike Newt who ran into the arms of his intern mistress--and then condemned Bill for a blow job, when HIS wife got cancer.

But more than anything it comes down to Iraq for me. From the beginning, right after 9/11 when the bullshit began, I read what I could easily find online and immediately came to the conclusion that the reasons for the war were a crock and a case was being made that was based on flimsy heresy. Experts were ignored and discredited. "Suicides" of those who could verify this suddenly increased. It didn't take much for me to figure out Bush and Cheney were lying the country into war.

My anger at Congress is based a lot on this. If I knew, if a few days a couple hours at a time let me know the excuses for war were flimsy and stretched beyond belief, why didn't Congress who were much closer to the situation than I ever would be? Are they that stupid? Or were they that bought.

That is my problem with Hillary right now. Who owns her? She rides the centrist train as if it were the only ride in town with a promise of getting to the destination. I don't want centrist, Republican-lites. I want someone with the courage to go against the war machine. If Hillary can't even speak against it, is she strong enough for the job? And if she isn't, why should I vote for her instead of Obama or Edwards who at least make a pretense of being strong enough?

I don't want to vote for Hillary just because she is a woman, although as a woman in my 50's the time is getting shorter to see a woman president in my lifetime. I cried when Nancy Pelosi became Speaker of the House. Only someone who grew up when I did and remembered what it was like to be a subservient secretary to an incompetent boss, or have all our accomplishements prefaced with female poet, woman writer, girl geek, or have school counselors tell us we could be Nurses and Teachers and Wives while the boys were told they could be anything they wanted, can ever possibily understand how important seeing a woman become President is to me and why I cried at the words: Madame Speaker.

But I didn't come all this way to compromise my principles just to see a woman become president. I am a Pacifist first and foremost. That is my soul and that is how I will vote.

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Changing minds one t-shirt at a time. Visit Ursine Logic for more designs.

President Hillary Clinton?

Global Orgasm for World Peace Day

My main holiday of the year is the Winter Solstice. For the last couple decades I've celebrated it with an ever-growing and changing group of people. We are a mix of many communities: Pagans, Wiccans, Atheists, New Age Christians, Scientists, Teachers, Geeks, Artists, Musicians...you just can't fit us, the collective we, into a nice neat box. We are who we are and that is what has made this yearly ritual so powerful for all of us.

Sure, there are things we do, movements, chants, songs and we meet in one place once a year to herald the return of the sun. And also to acknowledge our ancient blood that understands we are Nature and we are the Sun and together we create ritual to give meaning and momentum to the change of the seasons.

I begin anew each Winter Solstice. I grow myself from the ritual seeds we plant that are wishes, dreams, hopes, aspirations, needs, desires, and our version of what we hope to find under Santa's tree. Each year the ritual evolves and changes. In that way, it mirrors the patterns of Nature who grows, evolves, changes, and becomes.

That is just part of why I am passing this information on to you about the Global Orgasm day for World Peace. I've heard about it for weeks now and the momentum seems to be picking up as I received several email letters, saw some artwork, heard some songs, and created a design in the last few days.

Since I dismiss nothing as a potential seed for world peace, I pass this on to you because it makes such sense to me who lives by the teachings of Mother Nature. I have always believed we live in a world we create each day by our actions, our dreams, our collective visions. I would not spend a moment of my life working for peace if I didn't believe my work is like a snowball that grows and grows and picks up people and their dreams and visions as it rolls along and gains momentum. This is not hard Science or Religion or Woo-Woo Spirituality. It is common sense. If we put our energy towards making something happen, it generally does as long as we do not give up.

The information describing the idea behind Global Orgasm day can be found at

Global Orgasm Day

Here is some information directly from the website:

"Donna Sheehan and Paul Reffell co-founded the anti-war
organization www.baringwitness.org">Baring Witness, a worldwide collective of peace activists who are alarmed enough to spell peace publicly with their naked bodies. The Global Orgasm is a way for even more men and women to be involved in changing the way human affairs are conducted in the world."

WHEN?

Winter Solstice Day - Friday, December 22nd


"At the time of your choosing, in the place of your choosing and with as much privacy as you choose."

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Design from Ursine Logic. Changing minds one t-shirt at a time. Visit Ursine Logic for this and more designs.

Global Orgasm for World Peace Day