Why Haven't Bush and Cheney Been Impeached Yet?

For those who wonder what it takes to impeach a President for real crimes instead of lying about a blow job, here are the articles of impeachment used on Nixon. (and if lying to Congress is as serious as the right wingnuts claimed when they were screaming about Clinton, why isn't it serious when Bush does it repeatedly?)

In reading over these Articles of Impeachment, I am struck by how many of the crimes listed as committed by Nixon could just as easily be listed as committed by Bush. In many of the statements, the crimes overlap so closely they could be the same man committing the same crime.

So I ask as you should be asking after reading this, why isn't Congress seriously considering impeachment against Bush? Who bought their silence and obedience? Why is this criminal still President?

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Articles of Impeachment:

RESOLVED, That Richard M. Nixon, President of the United States, is impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, and that the following articles of impeachment to be exhibited to the Senate:

ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT EXHIBITED BY THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA IN THE NAME OF ITSELF AND OF ALL OF THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AGAINST RICHARD M. NIXON, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, IN MAINTENANCE AND SUPPORT OF ITS IMPEACHMENT AGAINST HIM FOR HIGH CRIMES AND MISDEMEANOURS.

Article 1: Obstruction of Justice.

In his conduct of the office of the President of the United States, Richard M. Nixon, in violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has prevented, obstructed, and impeded the administration of justice, in that: On June 17, 1972, and prior thereto, agents of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President committed unlawful entry of the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in Washington, District of Columbia, for the purpose of securing political intelligence. Subsequent thereto, Richard M. Nixon, using the powers of his high office, engaged personally and through his subordinates and agents in a course of conduct or plan designed to delay, impede and obstruct investigations of such unlawful entry; to cover up, conceal and protect those responsible and to conceal the existence and scope of other unlawful covert activities. The means used to implement this course of conduct or plan have included one or more of the following:

(1) Making or causing to be made false or misleading statements to lawfully authorized investigative officers and employees of the United States.

(2) Withholding relevant and material evidence or information from lawfully authorized investigative officers and employees of the United States.

(3) Approving, condoning, acquiescing in, and counseling witnesses with respect to the giving of false or misleading statements to lawfully authorized investigative officers and employees of the United States and false or misleading testimony in duly instituted judicial and congressional proceedings.

(4) Interfering or endeavoring to interfere with the conduct of investigations by the Department of Justice of the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the office of Watergate Special Prosecution Force and congressional committees.

(5) Approving, condoning, and acquiescing in, the surreptitious payments of substantial sums of money for the purpose of obtaining the silence or influencing the testimony of witnesses, potential witnesses or individuals who participated in such unlawful entry and other illegal activities.

(6) Endeavoring to misuse the Central Intelligence Agency, an agency of the United States.

(7) Disseminating information received from officers of the Department of Justice of the United States to subjects of investigations conducted by lawfully authorized investigative officers and employees of the United States for the purpose of aiding and assisting such subjects in their attempts to avoid criminal liability.

(8) Making false or misleading public statements for the purpose of deceiving the people of the United States into believing that a thorough and complete investigation has been conducted with respect to allegation of misconduct on the part of personnel of the Executive Branch of the United States and personnel of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, and that there was no involvement of such personnel in such misconduct; or

(9) Endeavoring to cause prospective defendants, and individuals duly tried and convicted, to expect favored treatment and consideration in return for their silence or false testimony, or rewarding individuals for their silence or false testimony.

In all of this, Richard M. Nixon has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and subversive of constitutional government, to the great prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States.

Wherefore Richard M. Nixon, by such conduct, warrants impeachment and trial, and removal from office.

(Approved by a vote of 27-11 by the House Judiciary Committee on Saturday, July 27, 1974.)

Article 2: Abuse of Power.

Using the powers of the office of President of the United States, Richard M. Nixon, in violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in disregard of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has repeatedly engaged in conduct violating the constitutional rights of citizens, imparting the due and proper administration of justice and the conduct of lawful inquiries, or contravening the laws governing agencies of the executive branch and the purposes of these agencies.
This conduct has included one or more of the following:

(1) He has, acting personally and through his subordinated and agents, endeavored to obtain from the Internal Revenue Service, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, confidential information contained in income tax returns for purposes not authorized by law, and to cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigation to be initiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner.

(2) He misused the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Secret Service, and other executive personnel, in violation or disregard of the constitutional rights of citizens, by directing or authorizing such agencies or personnel to conduct or continue electronic surveillance or other investigations for purposes unrelated to national security, the enforcement of laws, or any other lawful function of his office; he did direct, authorize, or permit the use of information obtained thereby for purposes unrelated to national security, the enforcement of laws, or any other lawful function of his office; and he did direct the concealment of certain records made by the Federal Bureau of Investigation of electronic surveillance.

(3) He has, acting personally and through his subordinates and agents, in violation or disregard of the constitutional rights of citizens, authorized and permitted to be maintained a secret investigative unit within the office of the President, financed in part with money derived from campaign contributions to him, which unlawfully utilized the resources of the Central Intelligence Agency, engaged in covert and unlawful activities, and attempted to prejudice the constitutional right of an accused to a fair trial.

(4) He has failed to take care that the laws were faithfully executed by failing to act when he knew or had reason to know that his close subordinates endeavored to impede and frustrate lawful inquiries by duly constituted executive; judicial and legislative entities concerning the unlawful entry into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, and the cover-up thereof, and concerning other unlawful activities including those relating to the confirmation of Richard Kleindienst as attorney general of the United States, the electronic surveillance of private citizens, the break-in into the office of Dr. Lewis Fielding, and the campaign financing practices of the Committee to Re-elect the President.

(5) In disregard of the rule of law: he knowingly misused the executive power by interfering with agencies of the executive branch: including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Criminal Division and the Office of Watergate Special Prosecution Force of the Department of Justice, in violation of his duty to take care that the laws by faithfully executed.

In all of this, Richard M. Nixon has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and subversive of constitutional government, to the great prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States.

Wherefore Richard M. Nixon, by such conduct, warrants impeachment and trial, and removal from office.

(Approved 28-10 by the House Judiciary Committee on Monday, July 29, 1974.)

Article 3: Contempt of Congress.

In his conduct of the office of President of the United States, Richard M. Nixon, contrary to his oath faithfully to execute the office of the President of the United States, and to the best of his ability preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, had failed without lawful cause or excuse, to produce papers and things as directed by duly authorized subpoenas issued by the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives, on April 11, 1974, May 15, 1974, May 30, 1974, and June 24, 1974, and willfully disobeyed such subpoenas. The subpoenaed papers and things were deemed necessary by the Committee in order to resolve by direct evidence fundamental, factual questions relating to Presidential direction, knowledge or approval of actions demonstrated by other evidence to be substantial grounds for impeachment of the President. In refusing to produce these papers and things, Richard M. Nixon, substituting his judgement as to what materials were necessary for the inquiry, interposed the powers of the Presidency against the lawful subpoenas of the House of Representatives, thereby assuming to himself functions and judgments necessary to the exercise of the sole power of impeachment vested by Constitution in the House of Representatives.

In all this, Richard M. Nixon has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and subversive of constitutional government, to the great prejudice of the cause of law and justice, and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States.

Wherefore, Richard M. Nixon, by such conduct, warrants impeachment and trial and removal from office.

(Approved 21-17 by the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, July 30, 1974.)

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

Why Haven't Bush and Cheney Been Impeached Yet?

Thank You Mr. Vonnegut

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

(Kurt Vonnegut, November 11, 1922-April 11, 2007)

The day that Kurt Vonnegut died I was going to write something around that quote because it's the one that I felt described what was so important about him as a writer and as a man. I was going to write how he knew about kindness because he also knew about cruelty, the kind of cruelty only another human can inflict upon another. I was going to write that Kurt Vonnegut the man had suffered the indignity of being no more than a name and number inside the enemy's meat locker so that Kurt Vonnegut the writer could try and teach us that all human beings have value. I was going to write that the sadness inside his soul, that unbearable sorrow you could see in his eyes was what made love such a vital force in his writings. I was going to write about myself and how I grew and found the courage to be who I am from reading his words grown from pain, suffering, disillusionment, and a life that went on longer than the man himself.

But the days went by as I kept saying tomorrow I will get to it, tomorrow I will write about how important it was to be kind. And I was going to write about the horrors, the absolute evil that happens when you are not kind. I promised myself that tomorrow I would write about how it feels to be disenfranchised from the human race by those who felt it was their place to judge another human being. I promised myself that tomorrow I would write about the sadness that held tinges of anger for those hurt by the perpetually foolish act of loving another human being too much, and the even more preposterous idea that you can love someone too much. I was going to write about the pain of losing a friend, a lover, a confidant, a heart connection because you weren't good enough, pretty enough, handsome enough to keep them in a world where second best becomes insignificant.

I was going to write about how Kurt Vonnegut the writer kept me alive during some of the darkest times of my life by reminding me that love was stronger than hate, that it didn't take everyone to love to make the world a better place, that it could be done a handful at a time if those people believed in the power of love strongly enough. I was willing to be one of those people, a sort of flawed missionary of love willing to help spread this amazing truth. It made such sense to me. It was so simple. All we had to do was be kind to each other and the rest would take care of itself. It made so much sense.

And I had been hurt enough by love, by false friendships, by people who only took and never gave back that I believed I could be an effective missionary. I'd suffered with the best of them, been wounded and betrayed by the worst of them. I'd loved the total bastards, befriended the selfish, trusted the wrong people, and I was raised by people whose bodies survived too many wars to ever leave their hearts intact. I'd been used, abused, dumped, forgotten, put at the bottom of the list enough times to have respectable credentials to flash when I said love was a choice we all make. I earned those credentials by continuing to love the abusers, users, shit spouting so-called friends for life who tried to take that away from me and failed. I wanted to thank Kurt Vonnegut for their failure to strip me of what he gave to me the first time I read his words: an unbreakable, unshakable, unwavering belief in the power of love.

And then a sick, twisted, excuse-ridden, disturbed discard of society shot up a school and I couldn't write a word until today when I finally stopped crying. I had to write today because there is this burning question in me that won't go away: would it have made a damn bit of difference if people had been kind to this sick bastard? Would it? And on the off chance that the answer is yes, then isn't it way past time that we start being kind, that we stop making war on each other, that we stop drawing lines in the sand and saying this is your side and this is my side, that we stop punishing those who are different, those who aren't pretty enough, those who aren't handsome enough, those who have no social skills to save them from all the punishments that can be inflicted on them simply for being who they are. Isn't it past time that we start living as human to human instead of thing to thing? Isn't it about damn time we started being kind?

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

Thank You Mr. Vonnegut

My Grandpa Snorts Dead People

When I was growing up the image of "grandparent" was this sweet little old person who smelled like lavender and served you tea in fragile and lovely cups if they were female, or if they were male, were always immaculately dressed, polite, and extremely Republican with perfect lawns. But I always suspected they had pasts that were far more interesting than our parents let on. After all, most people don't want their parents to compete with them for wild and crazy behavior and hooliganism moments, and our own parents were under that same pressure to conform to the Ward and June Cleaver role models provided for them as their parents.

But there were always cracks in that perfect TV world. My parents fought like wild beasts and separated multiple times. I came of age in a time when divorce became more common than long term marriages. The price for trying to maintain that picture perfect ideal was often alcoholism, drug addiction, and cheap, sleazy affairs that were more about relieving boredom than they were about love or need or friendship. Divorce saved lives because in many cases they ended the hypocrisy.

As I grew older I began to find out more about my grandparents and parents and little bits and pieces of wildness that slipped into the stories told late at night after a few bottles of wine and conversation. But there was always an underlying sense of normality to it all. They were the WW2 and Great Depression generation and that made them serious people. Sure, they laughed, but underneath that laughter was the pain of loss, the hunger of deprivation, and the appreciation of simple things like a home and a good job and money to take an occasional vacation somewhere.

I'm not naive and I have lived enough to know they did have lives that were anything but normal under the surface, but they spent a lot of time trying to convince everyone that those moments were reserved for the crazy degenerates which they most certainly were not. They embraced normality as a goal. They wanted to blend in because they grew up in a world where those who didn't ended up dead. They wanted the boring jobs that were the same day after day because stability was a dream after the turmoil they went through as they grew up and the country went to war. They wanted us to believe the myth for as long as possible because it was a way of sheltering us from the truth they knew far too well.

In return they raised children who would rebel against anything that was stable or normal. Instead of tranquilizers to make us accept our desperate lives, our generation took drugs that opened up all the crevices and re-arranged the thought processes. We refused to accept the ordinary jobs at the "company" and instead created a revolution of digital worlds our parents and grandparents looked at in awe, wonder and mostly lack of understanding. We protested against war, bigotry, hate and anything we perceived as an injustice. We became groupies to degenerate musicians and followed them around the country and the world in what our parents saw as hobo camps and we saw as communities. We joked that when we grew old all the RV parks would be taken over by painted hippie buses and dope-smoking degenerates.

Then we went to sleep. The Reagan years took our spare change and good jobs. We became wage slaves. We got married, started having children and forgot we were once free as the wind and wild as any animal in the jungle. We raised our children and struggled to stay together in the face of shattered illusions and partners who turned out to be ordinary. Just like our parents. And we got the punishment we deserved for this hypocrisy as many of our children became little corporate Republican fascists.

But every generation must be different than their parents and that is what is saving us now. Those creepy little robots our beautiful innocent children became gave birth to a generation of children who are what we dreamed to be and they share our values far more than we share our parents' values. This new generation cares about the planet, about human rights, about peace, about making a difference. And they are not ever going to be satisfied as Corporate Clones. They'll work for themselves in direct competition to those companies before it ever comes to that.

So what it comes down to is that I am who I am not because of my parents, but because of my grandparents and the children of my peers. My grandparents who spent most of the prohibition years drunk and dancing, no matter what they tried to claim afterwards, share that sense of rebellion with the current generation. That is a very good thing because we have enough little corporate fascists trying to take over the world and we are getting too old to fight them alone anymore.

And we are also more visible in our rebellion against normality. No one is ever going to accuse my generation of being normal. It's our children who disappointed us. Their children give us hope. Our children had the horrors of Disco and Reagan to shape their consciousness. We had rock and roll. And Keith Richards. No matter how many of my generation and those that came afterward like to pretend normality is good, we will always have Keith Richards to shake things up and remind us that inside us all lives one crazy-ass maniac. So for that reminder, that bit of laughter that comes from having such a crazy old man be the symbol of our grandpa years, I made this design. It's the least I could do to show my appreciation. Thank you Grandpa Keith. The world is far more interesting place with you in it.

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

My Grandpa Snorts Dead People

I have to cut the ropes and fly free

A couple decades ago I thought I wanted to be a teacher. I went through all the rites of passage, got the pieces of paper, got the job, and after nine months realized it wasn't what I wanted to do. I was young then. It was easy to walk into the office and say I've changed my mind. I want to do something else with my life.

I count it as one of the smartest decisions I ever made. Recently I've made a decision that is about on the same level as that one for the potential to change my life. I have days when I shake in fear and others when I can't wait to get out of bed to begin my day. The deciding factor for me was realizing that if I want to do certain things with my life, now is the time to do them. I'm not a kid anymore. I don't recover as easily anymore. But the tradeoff is that the decisions I make now are based on so much more than I WANT. They are based on what happened in the past, what I know and don't know, and my ability to learn. I have a lot more confidence in myself at the age of 56 than I did at 30. It comes from knowing I can pick myself up from the ground, dust myself off, and move forward in any direction I choose.

I've shaken some people up with my decisions lately. They don't understand why I have to cut the ropes and fly free with no real destination in mind other than the desire to fly. Sometimes that just has to be enough. :-)

One of the people I shook up dug up this story I wrote the week I quit teaching. He or she chose to send it to me anonymously, using an old email address I long ago let go. They went through the trouble of re-opening it in my old pseudonym and becoming me and sending it to my current email. I cannot let such efforts go unrewarded. Therefore, I share the story they sent me that I wrote all those years ago. I was about the same age as many of you when I wrote it. Maybe it has something for you. Consider it a true gift from me on a date when people are less than serious as a reminder that those who fail to laugh at themselves never really learn what it means to be alive.

Peace! COL of Peace
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RITES OF SPRING


Today my Zebra finches gave birth--round, pink, hairless bodies echoing the spring births outside my own nest.

“Rites of passage, rites of self."

I think how strange that your words should return now, weeks later, to blend with the sound of those new-born voices, the sound of the wind rising off the bay. I feel a quiet sadness as I watch the wind claim the last of the clinging blossoms from the small apple tree outside my window. As the fragile petals float past my window, my sadness brings back the memory of you sitting at the kitchen table that last evening we spent together, that last meal we shared with each other.

"We’ve grown apart," you said, refusing to look at me, refusing to touch me.

"I love you," I said. "Isn’t that enough? Isn’t love enough?"

Your answer was to go out in the garden and pick a branch of apple blossoms from the small tree. As you set the branch on my kitchen table you said: "You have shown me I will never understand writers."

I touched the frail blossoms and said softly: “Never is a long time. “

It is such a small tree, such a shadow of the larger one growing beside it. The large tree will one day give so much fruit; the small one will remain a memory of blossoms following the wind. For weeks, I watched that branch of apple blossoms go through the process of dying. Each day, as I watched that branch wither and die a little at a time, I knew something else was dying. Yet after all these weeks, the scent still remains, the memory of fruit is still so strong.

“Words...goddamn words," you said to me as you were leaving. I gave you a poem written on delicate tissue paper. “Leave before they steal your soul,” you said to me, crying, afraid to touch me because then you would no longer have a reason for leaving.


”I love you,” I said instead of goodbye.


“I love you,” I now say to the wind, to the finches, to the memory of you. Today is a reminder of passing time, a reminder that with the birth of my finches, I have been set free--from you, from my job, from my students, from my absurd life. If only I could somehow let you know. But, I could only do it with more words, and there are too many of those separating us as it is. If only you could have seen me today when I decided to celebrate birth by resigning from teaching. I did it so gracefully, with my first genuine smile of spring.


“I’m not coming back,” I said. It was so easy, so quick, so anti-climatic. Such a painless birth. I should have done it sooner; perhaps the day before, the day one of my students leaned in the open doorway of my office.


He stood there for several minutes, afraid to come in, afraid to reveal the words so painfully written on the pile of papers he clutched to his chest. His smooth face was too young for the despair in his eyes, the despair I recognized as coming from trying to re-create life, from trying to isolate feeling into lines of black ink on white pages.


”I want to be a writer,” he said as I pushed aside my pile of half-written stories, hunted for my overflowing ashtray underneath the pages of empty poetry--nine months of words which never came close to what I really felt.


“What on earth for?” I said with too much dismay in my voice, too much kinship with his pain. “It’s such an absurd thing to be.”


But, he came in, sat across from me, looked me honestly in the eyes--and I listened to his poetry, shared my scraps of thoughts with him. When we finally parted, it was as co-conspirators, loving the illusion, loving the role of fool, magician, spinner of dreams. That would have been the day to quit.


With the birth of my finches, I knew I could not return, could not face another pile of freshman essays filled with the agony of quickly spun lies, spinning wheels of thoughts. So often these last few months, I saw myself as the keeper of the zoo, the curtailer of free, unstructured thought. Who am I, I questioned myself daily, to tell my students their words failed to communicate their thoughts. As their essays waited on my desk to be graded, to be judged, their words mixed with my own discarded attempts at making life rhyme. After a time, I came to know their struggles too intimately--we came to know each other as fellow fools. We fell in love with each other because of our shared agony.


No, I cannot return, not since my finches gave birth, and my world grew to accommodate the span of their naked wings--tiny strands of flailing flesh fluttering in synchronized time. Parted beaks so small, like a lover’s kiss from a distant world. I thought of you. I thought of what I could say to you that I have not already said with a touch, a smile, a caressing of the eyes.


The other night, I awoke in the middle of a dream, a dream which carried off the last of my illusions. I dreamed of a woman in a red satin dress who said she was your lover as she lifted yards of material and exposed long, graceful legs. I could feel your hands lifting the dress from her body, touching her smooth, young skin, kissing her easy, accepting smile. She revealed her secret to me, the sacrifice she had made for you, as the material floated upwards, wing-like-- she had shaved off all her pubic hair. I cried, astonished at such easy innocence, such honest love, and I knew I could never be that young again--not even for you.


We all love someone else, I wrote in a story once. That story was a moment of honest illusion, a misguided message to a friend many years in the past, when I was too young to understand that love is not a limit, not a fence, but the open space between the clouds, the dreams we forgot, the people we once were.


Sometimes, now, I see you as another story in my life, one I have yet to write; or perhaps you are the poem I wrote at the age of twelve-- a poem that began with the words: "When I was a child..." I remember myself writing that poem, a child writing about being a child, and yet, when I needed to be a child, needed to become innocent and vulnerable in order to get lost in the depths of your smile without fear, I couldn’t bring any of it back.


“You are so serious about life,” you said to me one night as you watched me methodically reading.


“There is so much to learn,” I said, looking up from the pages of words.
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“Don’t you realize life is not contained in those damn books,” you said angrily, grabbing the book from my hands, and throwing it against the wall.


Perhaps it was fortunate for us both to meet at a time in my life when the future had too much significance. Everything I did, I explained to you, was a preparation for something else.


“Someday,” I said to you, “my writing will not cause me such pain. Someday I will find the words I need.”


“I can’t believe you,” you said, refusing to understand. “Your eyes tell me your pain comes from deeper places--places you refuse to look at honestly. What is the true origin of your pain?”


At that moment, I quit trying to explain my life to you. It became so easy to lie to you, so easy to lead you to believe in my happiness. I began to wear a smile for you--a smile of lies.


“See how quickly I have recovered,” I said, laughing, hiding the torn up pages of words I had written the day before. “See how easily the words now come,” I said, typing lines and lines of words I did not believe.


If my finches had not given birth, if you had not failed to understand me, I might have gone on in this crazy world, might have worn that smile forever, that bizarre mask of lies. One night I decided I could not lie anymore, could not disguise my pain any longer.


I walked down to the water, waded out to a large rock, and sat on it, looking out over the dark bay reflecting lines of moon. My breath steamed in the cold, night air, and I started to sing: “Merrily, merrily, merrily...life is but a dream." I felt my words echo in the darkness, and then, return in the voice of a stranger. His hand touched my shoulder very gently, and. I quietly motioned for him to
join me on the rock.


“Are you trying to drown yourself,” he asked me in a voice which sounded like the gentle waves brushing against the rock we both shared.


I turned to look at him, and he smiled cautiously, the tenderness in his eyes reflecting moon. “No, I assured him, “I’m just being born.”


He smiled, hugged me softly, and asked if I was lonely. I told him, yes. “We all need love,” he said, looking at me, understanding the origins of my pain.


“Then...make love to me, I said, “because I need to feel.” So we made love, on that rock, in the water, our bodies alive with moonlight. Even now, I think I imagined his gentle spirit, his pale, lean body touching mine. So much of him listened, so much of him understood.


“You gave your pain to a stranger," he said to me as we walked back to the shore, "because it was too awesome a burden to give to a friend."


I touched his hand softly goodbye, and thought of you again, thought of how amazed you would be at my freedom at that moment. I became a bird that night, rising towards the sky.


And, today I resigned, and my finches gave birth, and I called you on the telephone to celebrate birth--mine and the finches. But there was no answer, and I was relieved because the ringing of the telephone echoed the words coming from my heart: we all love someone else. And I knew those words would mean nothing to you, would never explain my freedom. So, I hung up the phone, and yelled the words loudly across the open space where my backyard meets the water in the bay, and I was struck by the peculiarity of that landscape, that Northwest landscape--beaches with no sand, just rocks, just happy survivors. As I looked out over the water, I thought that I, too, am a rock. I, too, sit in the water and let the waves brush against me, feeling their movement, but not their chill.


“We can never blend because our worlds are so different, our internal landscapes so much ourselves,” I explained to you the night you said the connection between us had ceased to grow.


You looked into my eyes, trying to find an answer in their reflected image of you. I looked away, broke the thread between us. You cried softly as I retreated further into my silent world, my inner world of miles and miles of silent desert.


You always brought me flowers, flowers to remind me that I came from a lifeless place--a place where nothing grew easily except the voices of spirits in the night bouncing off the moon, and the distant wailing of coyotes echoing thoughts.


“But, I too had flowers,” I said to you the day you gave me the apple blossoms, “only I had to crawl on my hands and knees to see them.“


I tried to explain to you how most were not to be picked as they were protected by thorny, impenetrable barriers. In my world, in that silent desert filled with the music of mirages, things remain forever in their place.


In your world, I wanted to say to you, things are too easy; everywhere you sit, your senses are overwhelmed by color, by beauty, by the ease of reaching out and plucking a flower with no thorns. I wanted to give you roses filled with thorns so you could understand, but the rose bush outside my door had not yet bloomed.


“Be careful,” you said to me the night you watched me rewrite a line of poetry over and over again. “This world will steal your soul because of its obsession with words, with meaning, with the need to define life too clearly.”


"But, I love teaching,” I said to you, knowing how much your own students loved you.


“I teach magic,” you answered and smiled, waiting for me to compare my rigid world with yours.


I looked away from you, annoyed that once again, you had pulled me towards you with your eyes.
“I used to be like you,” you continued. “But one day I quit. An institution is no place to practice art. One day you will understand.”


I listened to your words quietly, trying to understand and yet remembering the student who came to my office a few days before with a beautiful paper which had no conclusion--at least, not in the Standard English sense of the word. He had ended his essay with a riddle: “What did they see?”


The words stood out, blatantly, dreadfully wrong--yet so right. “This is not a conclusion,” I said in my best teacher voice, my voice of respectability. Please, I thought to myself, let him believe I know what I’m talking about. “You must tell the reader what he sees.”


“But, why?” he asked me. “Don’t they have eyes of their own?”


This student, who was from a tiny island in the South Pacific, told me his language had no adjectives. “When we say flower, all the flowers of the world are within our hands, not just the red and yellow ones.”


He was my first moment of rebellion. “You’re right, of course, I said to him. “Leave the ending as it is...just don’t tell anyone." I gave him an "A" simply because he came from a place with no adjectives.


“And, what will you do?” you asked me that last day, that day I told you I wanted to quit teaching, that day I imagined what it would be like to bask in a goal-less state of mind.


I laughed and said: “I’m going to visit my friend in Hawaii who wanted to be a Philosopher, but ended up teaching Remedial Religion instead. I’m going to live on a goat farm in Northern Arizona, and learn about living through my body instead of my mind. I’m going to love a beautiful man for no reason other than his beauty. I’m going to India to search for my friend who disappeared three years ago looking for enlightenment. I’m going to make complex sculptures out of clay which will have no meaning. I’m going to eat pounds and pounds of fresh salmon. I’m going to write another novel. I’m going to write poetry again. I’m going to complete the circle, make it come back around to where it all began. I'm going to dance, and love, and feel, and walk upside down, inside out. I'm going to touch everyone I know, and everyone I have yet to know. I’m going to love my illusions, my mind, my life, my madness--I’m going to do anything but think. I’m going to leave the business of making sense out of nonsense to the Philosophers, and I’m going to dwell in the beauty of insignificance.”


Very quietly, you got up from the couch we had been sharing, kissed me lightly on the forehead, and walked out my door. I wanted you to look back, wanted you to see my tears--the tears I could finally cry--but it was too late. Instead, I sat alone on my couch, my hand over the warm spot where your body had rested, feeling it grow colder and colder, like a corpse, like a dying storm. I watched the sun set over the bay through the window, through the branches of the bare apple tree. As the room grew dark, the silence grew louder, and all my memories became one feeling. I began to mourn the death of apple blossoms, the passing of time, the futility of words explaining feelings.


“We are parting from each other with a sense of relief, a sense of having escaped from each other,” you said to me over dinner.


“But, such feelings are meant for those unable to love, those unable to look into the eyes of others and see themselves,” I answered, trying to make you understand. “Don’t you see that in this running from each other is the illusion of freedom,” I continued, reaching for your hand, and finding it cool to the touch, cool as indifference. I let you go. In that moment, I let you go in order to free myself.


And today my finches gave birth. Their tiny, trembling chorus fills my room, and from their vulnerability, their need to be fed, I find my own strength. I feel my own frail wings grow strong, feel my heart fill with new freedom. I sing softly to myself: “Merrily, merrily, merrily...life is but a dream.”

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Earth Day is coming. Will you be ready? Ursine Logic

I have to cut the ropes and fly free

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

Save The Planet, Save Ourselves

Whenever I need a break from the stresses of day to day life, I go for a walk. It helps that I live in a magnificent part of the world. Within a half hour of my home I can walk by a river, a couple lakes, a saltwater bay, and numerous parks with tall trees and creeks and ponds. By most people's standards, especially those who live in urban environments, I live in a wondrous nature paradise. I show it off to visitors. I live in awe of its stunning beauty even now, a quarter century since I first moved here. It never pales for me. It never loses its magic.

But I can also see the changes. The mountains and hills that surround much of this area have bald patches from the obscenity of being one of the few places in the world that still clear cuts entire mountainsides without any thought to future or even present generations. In the rainy season, which is a good deal of the year here, the clear cut patches become conduits for mud and debris filled flood waters that destroy homes and farmlands at their foothills.

In the out of control greed of slash and burn GOP rule these last few years, the families in those homes and farms become insignificant. It doesn't matter how long they've lived there or if their family homes and farms get washed away in the debris. Only one thing matters and that is how much the corporate clear cutters can get for the mountain's "lumber." There is no thought to the safety and well-being of the people below. The spindly replacements are reforested into the ground using desperate, transient and undocumented laborers willing to work for little money. And then everyone moves on and what the deer don't eat, the winter rains wash away, leaving a few tiny twigs to replace the thick forests that were clear cut away.

The mountains and hills stripped bare by cut and run profit taking are forgotten. They become as insignificant as the human beings whose lives were permanently devastated by the profit grabbing from above. Sadly, in some of the cases, those who were destroyed and will be destroyed are the same loggers and their families hired by the corporations to put their own property in danger. The Corporate Pigs know people don't dare complain or worry out loud when they're desperate for work. They shut up and pray. And they collect their paychecks until the Pigs move on to somewhere else. And then the loggers pray the unemployment checks don't run out before they find more work, and their homes won't wash away, and that mudslides won't turn into raging avalanches of boulders, uprooted stumps, and small trees left to rot because they weren't big enough to put on the truck or small enough to plant back into the ground. In the meantime, the rains come and the hill turns to mud and prayers don't seem quite enough anymore.

I also see this same lack of foresight when I look to the bay. Salmon comes from out of town now. Some of my once favorite fish aren't safe to eat in large quantities anymore. I can't find any fresh mussels in the store and the shrimp and clams come from China instead of from the fishing boats these days. The waterfront is changing from industrial to overpriced condominiums for urban refugees and wealthy retirees. But the train still runs below these condos and parts of the bay are preceded by the words: Superfund cleanup...

It's also impossible to walk from one end of town to the other anymore without crossing a major highway or intersection. The interurban trail system crosses more and more through urban areas and instead of forests, they are part of people's backyards. The traffic is horrendous and the roads are falling apart. There's no money to fix anything and yet new housing developments take over more homeland, and more poor and working poor are evicted from apartments that are converting to condos. The air smells like fuel, gasoline, diesel and continual traffic in many parts of town now. It is noisy and crime-infested in more and more of it. It is a dying paradise.

But the saddest part of all this is what is happening to the wildlife. Unchecked growth has displaced so many of the creatures who live around here. During a cold stretch a few weeks ago when the snow froze on the ground and didn't melt for days, I ended up with squirrels, raccoons, possums, and so many birds they would empty the feeder in less than an hour. I put out pans of hot water that they drank thirstily and quickly before it froze.

And the deer came. Skinny, hungry, thirsty deer who were so desperate they put aside all their fear of human beings. I fed them apples and gave them water and felt both a sense of awe that they were eating from my hands and also a deep sadness that in a place so lush, so beautiful, so filled with plenty, these beautiful creatures were starving because their homes were gone. Their grazing meadows were now condo villages. Their creeks were now in the middle of housing developments. They had to dodge traffic to go from block to block to try and find something to eat that wasn't frozen solid under the snow.

I took a picture of one of them after he hungrily ate three apples in a row and drank a bowl of water. He's tiny with ribs showing through his fur. But he's so beautiful and such a symbol of what greed and a total disregard for nature leaves behind. Look at him good. Look in those eyes. And then get out and do something to reverse the damage being done to our planet because no human should be able to get so close to a wild creature. It's just not natural. And it's our fault.

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

Save The Planet, Save Ourselves

Why Al Gore has to be our next President

I watched the Oscars for probably the second or third time in my entire life for one reason: Al Gore. I had a bottle of champagne cooling "just in case." And when the evening ended without the rumored announcement, I didn't open the bottle. I don't even like champagne. But it would have been worth it if Al Gore said the magic words.

Some of you may wonder why this is so important to me. I make no secret of the fact that I am a strong Obama supporter and have been ever since I heard him speak at the Democratic convention. Obama would make a good President. He has compassion, intelligence, and the ability to see what the people want and find a way to give it to them, as any good leader does. I don't doubt for a minute that America would thrive with Obama as our leader. But I think America NEEDS Al Gore to be our next President.

My number one reason is for the sake of the planet. He is the only one who truly gets it. He is the only one who has been trying to educate people for the last few decades about the dangers that Climate Change can cause. Through his passion and unwillingness to give in to the status quo, he has made the words "Global Warming" familiar enough so that just about everyone knows what they mean. It doesn't matter if people agree or disagree with him. He got the message out and that is what matters. Those of us who understand are perfectly willing to help him educate those who disagree or fail to understand that our planet is in danger of dying from our neglect and abuse.

I remember the excitement I felt when I read "Earth In The Balance." I remember thinking this was a man who understood not only Science, but the Metaphysical dialogues that give birth to such hard truths. Halfway through the book I found myself falling in love all over again with the processes of critical thought, with the ability to take a concept and thread it through a needle with skill and precision.

It has never been enough for me that a leader be intelligent as there are lots of intelligent people in the world who do nothing for anyone but themselves. A leader also needs to be able to think, to conceptualize, to see outside the lines drawn by advisers and self-interests groups. A leader needs to lead from compassion, from vision, from an inner reality that translates to an outer truth. This is the kind of person who holds a diverse population together because he gives equal, intellectual weight to all sides. This is the kind of person who could lead America into another golden age.

My other reason is that he should have been our President. And no, I will never get over this. The election was stolen. He won it fair and square and the Supreme court members who voted to install George Bush as Puppet-In-Chief will go to their graves with the blood of American soldiers staining their robes. Even though I'm an Atheist, I hope they believe in a fierce and damning hell because they know they did wrong and I want them to be very afraid of dying. I want them to suffer for the evil they inflicted upon America by selecting Bubble Boy to be the President against the votes and wishes of the American people. Their grandchildren will have to live with the shame of their legacy. History will remember them as traitors to the Democratic process called America. When measured against that truth, fear of hell is nothing. They are still young enough to suffer the humiliation of having their grandchildren come home from school one day and ask them to defend their unconscionable act. There is no answer they will be able to give that will take away the shame in their grandchildren's eyes. That will be their true punishment.

I will never get over being angry at them because this body of judicial whores stole the integrity of our country. They made our voting process a mockery and sullied our democracy. The only way this can ever be fixed is if Gore becomes the President we voted for in 2000. It is the only thing that will heal this country because it will correct the wrong that has been inflicted on it. It will make things right, and if this country needs anything desperately right now it is to have things made right.

So please, Mr. Gore. Run. It's not about you, just as Global Warming and Climate Change is not about you. It is about all of us, about the planet, about healing the deep wounds Bushco has inflicted on everyone. We need you. America needs you. But most of all, the planet needs you..

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

Why Al Gore has to be our next President

That Ethnic Thing

This Ethnic Thing

In the last few weeks I've been working on St. Patrick's Day designs for my shop. It's been an interesting experience because there isn't a drop of Irish anywhere in my genetic make-up...at least that I know about. However, I did get assimilated into a big old crazy Irish family and whenever I'm with most of them, there's something that starts to simmer inside me. They seem so easy with being Irish, with having a solid identity that withstands both moves all over the world and the urge to culturally merge that is so much a part of being American.

It's that culturally merge bit that always gets me personally. I wasn't physically born in this country and half my family spoke with strange and bewildering accents to most American ears. The best way to strike panic in most of us kids, even after all these years, is to make some reference to "accents," such as: you pronounced that wrong! Or remarking that a few weeks spent visiting the old country has left its mark on your pronunciation. Hey, you came back with a slight accent. No! Yes. Did not. Did. Aieeeee.

As children, we did all the talking to strangers because our family's English skills weren't fully developed enough to answer the door, the phone, or to ask directions and understand them and have them understood. Once we were teenagers and our parents could speak proper English, often grammatically better than the average American, we still did all the talking because we were mortified and embarrassed that our parents spoke "funny." It was horrible going through all the angst of teen-ness, and have to also deal with family members who weren't cool enough to speak without an accent.

There was a blissful period of time in this country before Bushco when it was actually cool to have an accent, when being "Ethnic" was something interesting and unique. People wanted to know about your accent, where it came from, who you were culturally, how you differed from them, and what we could learn from each other.

Bushco changed that. They made foreign a bad word. They made accents suspect. They made enculturation mandatory and immediate. They once again made it bad to be from somewhere else because if you were, you were either a terrorist or wanted to steal shit jobs. They made ignorance of other cultures a reason to hate and suspect and punish them for being from somewhere else, for believing different things, for gasp! Not being white, Anglo-Saxon Christian Republicans.

I would not want to be a child immigrating to America in these times. It was difficult enough as I was growing up, but foreign-ness still had a certain charm and allure then. It made you interesting. Women with thick dark accents were considered exotic, especially if they also smoked cigarettes to give them that lower sexy tone of voice that would eventually kill them from lung cancer. I both used to smoke and exaggerate my long lost accent as a young woman because it was an advantage over prettier, blond American girls. I was short, dark, and an Atheist. I needed all the advantages I could get.

Then we became the great melting pot where everyone was expected to jump in and become part of the same bland stew. Immigrants weren't allowed to spice it up. They were boiled until all the ethnicity was gone and only then could they jump in. Only then could they be bland enough to be part of the American dream.

With the civil rights movement in this country also came the right to be foreign. It was a magical time. People asked me how to say their names in my native language. They asked me for recipes they could serve their guests as something unique and different. Children began to learn foreign languages in the schools that included cultural components instead of just plain vanilla grammar. America began to truly be the land of immigrants.

Then Bushco came into power and all that started to decay. They introduced hatred and suspicion and served "freedom fries" with their ignorance burgers. White Christian cowboys skyrocketed in the music charts with hateful anthems bringing shame upon everything this country once stood for. Education became something for the elite and it became cool to be dumb, inbred, and spewing hatred from the car stereo as the pickup truck dug deep craters into the earth. Television shows were bland and made fun of anything that wasn't dumb and ignorant and poorly educated like the President. America began a backward slide into the kind of ignorance that once kept slaves and denied women the right to vote. It became a banana republic where English, bad uneducated, grammatically incorrect English was proposed as the official language. Hee-Haw.

There were a couple things that saved this country from itself and continues to do so. One was shows like the Sopranos where even though it feeds on stereotypes and makes one ethnic group seem like idiots and cold-blooded killers, it did break the mold of white people TV. These were not characters who played at being the Sopranos but spoke with white people accents and ate pot roast for dinner. No, these were out there Sopranos were were as different as they could be from the standard American prototype.

Another was the fall of the wall. It allowed communication and intermarriage between cultures that were once kept separated by government induced fear of each other. We became each other's forbidden pleasures and once again those who were from these previously hidden cultures, became desirably exotic.

But most important in all this are the Irish. What other culture has such a day that is celebrated year after year in such large numbers? There's no St. Italian Day or Russian Day or any other Ethnic holiday that draws in all the other cultures and makes them so much part of them on that one day a year. There's no other holiday that brings in the camaraderie and fun and acceptance of both being Irish and being honorary Irish on one special holiday.

So these designs are both my thanks to the Irish for being who they are and most importantly, for accepting me with such open, festive and loving arms. America still has much to learn and it wouldn't hurt to learn some it from the Irish.

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

That Ethnic Thing

The Seeds of Self

Today is the anniversary of when my life changed. I mark it each
year as if it were a grave tended by my careful hands. I remove the
weeds lovingly, one small blade of grass at a time and relive a
quiet moment in a time I thought I'd never leave behind.

But leave it behind I did. I call that period of my life "The Cruel
Time." Everything about it was a stripping of my soul in order to
bind new wounds that grew daily from loving a real bastard. He
almost destroyed me. He almost took away everything that made me who
I am. He almost made me scratch my own eyes out so I would never
have to look at him again. He almost made me throw myself from the
highest building I could find so I could die screaming his name on
the way to my death with only the wind to hear. He almost made me
leave everyone and everything just to escape ever hearing his name
again. He almost destroyed my belief in the power of love, in the
eternity of friendship, in the unbreakable bond of my word. Almost,
but not quite, because in the end I was simply the stronger force.

The reason for this is simple. I value people and he never did. He
would be surprised and even insulted to know this about himself and
appalled that I would think of him in such a way. It was the worst
curse you could place on him, on me, on others like ourselves who
grew up believing everyone was bad and the only people you could
trust were the ones in your small circle of confidants. Everyone
else was dangerous.

He was dangerous. It's what drew me to him. He had that dark soul of
a man who'd destroyed so many lives that he no longer wore the guilt
of that destruction anywhere on him. He would swear he never
intended to hurt people, he never intended to lie to people, he
never intended to cheat people. He was just incapable of living any
other way. His way was the only way he knew.

I'm a stubborn woman and I also have this questionable ability of
being able to see past the outer crap and cut straight to the inner
meat. This has caused more trouble for me in my life than any other
thing because as I've learned, that outer crap is supposed to keep
people like me out. It both disturbed him and intrigued him that I
found a way in.

I saw in him what I see in everyone who becomes my friend: deep
wounds, excuses, rationalizations, fear, and a restlessness that
remains a lifelong unfulfilled hunger. Where he differed was his
inability to see human beings as anything other than objects to fill
whatever needs were the most predominant. He didn't discriminate. No
need was better or worse than any other. They were just needs.

It gave him an aura of being a free spirit who was tied to no one
and no thing. We spent a lot of time outdoors among the trees and
rivers and mountains because it was his natural element, the one
place where his animal nature found a comfortable home. This was the
man I came to love and cherish and need with all the depths of my
soul. But the moment the stink of city assaulted our lungs he became
a sort of urban werewolf, a blood-sucking creature who drained
everyone until they shriveled up and disappeared.

I didn't disappear. I have an overdeveloped loyalty gene. Once I
give my friendship, it is for life because whomever wins it fought
for it with honor and sincerity. And once I love, nothing the person
does can kill that love in me. Once given is forever beholden.

But he didn't deserve this kind of devotion. He treated me badly. He
treated the women he dated and married badly. I befriended them,
picked up the broken pieces and he hated me for this. He hated that
I took home and healed that which he discarded. He told me once it
was embarrassing, almost as if he caught me rummaging through his
trash for bread scraps.

And he loved me. He loved me with a passion and sincerity and depth
that surprised both of us. It was the secret I carried with me, that
he was capable of deep and overwhelming emotion, that he felt to the
point of madness, that his skin was sometimes a barrier that he
wanted to rip away so he could feel more.

But it wasn't enough to have this with me. It wasn't enough to heal
him, to show him a better way of being. He saw it as an anomaly, an
aberration that he grew to hate me for bringing out in him.He began
to try and prove it to me that he really was the bastard everyone
thought he was. He insulted me. He challenged my ethics, my honor.
And he questioned my love, my friendship, my devotion.

That is when I left him to fester in his own world. I learned that
moment that I had limits, that I had self-respect, that I had honor,
and integrity, and a healthy sense of self that I refused to turn
over to someone who didn't deserve it. I walked away.

Five years went by before we saw each other again. He was dying. He
had stomach cancer. All those cigarettes, all that vodka, all that
rage, and anger, and hostility, and most importantly lack of love
for himself and others, was killing him. Cancer was just the
convenient name for it.

I still loved him and told him. He was astonished. He was
incredulous. And finally, he believed me. In that moment he learned
what it meant to love.

He died six months later. It's been seven years now and I still
grieve for him, for the life he could have lived but didn't. I
grieve for the person I knew that no one else could see. I grieve
for him as as anyone would grieve for a precious friendship.

But I also mark this day as the day I learned that you can still
love someone and not let them abuse you. You can still love someone
and walk away and not look back because my love and anyone who knows
what it means to truly love, understands it lives on its own. Love
is its own entity. If it depended on a person, if it depended on
being valued, if it depended on being received, then it would be
called something else.

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

The Seeds of Self

Love, Anti-Valentines, and Friends For Life

I couldn't let my least favorite holiday go by without some comment, so on Valentine's Eve, here are some thoughts on this "holiday." Many of you are probably surprised that I don't like Valentine's Day. After all, I've said many times that only love will heal this planet and that the healing must begin inside us first.


I still say that. And I also say I don't believe Valentine's is a day of love. It is a day to get stressed out over love, to give it a financial value, to make one person happy and another one sad when you choose who gets the best valentine. Remember when we gave Valentines at school? There was always one or two of the really cute girls and guys who got the fancy, elaborate valentines. Their bags overflowed with unrequited love.


Meanwhile, the rest of us looked at our mass-produced bits of paper and said screw this, I'm going to hang out with my friends and practice unconditional love to fight against this injustice. And we did. And we grew up hating Valentine's Day, no matter how many cool, elaborate valentines we got from admirers, lovers, partners, husbands, wives, and all the mixture of love, sex and paying for it dearly clubs we belonged to.


I fell in with a bad crowd in high school. We protested against war. We became vegetarians. We listened to music that stirred our blood and bodies to create a sexual revolution that changed forever the roles between men and women in this country. We began to talk about and write about and sing about things that mattered to us like overpopulation, pollution,the strip-malling of our hometowns. And we redefined love to mean something that was genuine and not bought, felt and not enforced, and celebrated instead of feared.


During that time one of us created the first anti-valentine, a work of art on bits of paper and cardboard and even tin foil. We exchanged these little gifts of love with each other on Valentine's Day, no matter what the relationship or gender. We gave each other these gifts as a way to express that we loved each other, we appreciated each other, and that we understand a very basic concept: lovers come and go, but friendship is forever.


Each year since then many of us have continued to exchange these anti-valentines. And truth be told, one of the major reasons I became a Cafepress shopkeeper was because I fell in love with their anti-valentine designs. It was the one place I could go to see how others were reacting to the enforced day of love. I saw at once that not only was my little group far from unique, we also had many friends in the world who thought the same way we did.


This year I made this design. I bought it for myself and wear it a lot. It's a sentiment that always brings a smile to my face and it also pokes fun at the whole idea of dating, valentines, and the ridiculous idea that we should only express our love for each other one day of the year. Enjoy!

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

Love, Anti-Valentines, and Friends For Life

Anna Nicole and The Bubble Boy

There's something deeply obscene and sad about the way the world came to a sudden stop the other day over Anna Nicole Smith. People who had shut out most of the Iraq war horrors, and the reality of a leadership that sees its own citizens as impediments on its path to perpetual war, and the juvenile and vengeful reactions of the Libby-Cheney cabal over someone who dared to insert some truth into their bullshit--they all stopped to pay a weird sort of homage to this pathetic caricature of a woman.


After I got over my outrage and stopped my stream of insults directed at the simple mindedness and short attention span of my fellow citizens, (her death replaced a crazed astronut in diapers, for dawg's sake!) I began to understand exactly what Anna Nicole represented and why she had such a pull on people. She was the America we've come to know in the last few years of the Bush Junta.


She was the garishness of an ideology that was fed by greed, an unfathomable lust for power, bling instead of substance, and the indifferent coupling required to move forward one notch on the political belt. With her inflated, unreal breasts, exaggerated red lips, and hair so stripped of color it was an anti-color, she paralleled the inflated expectations of world domination based on unreal mountains of evidence, an exaggeration of all fears and ethnic groups to more clearly create a red and blue divided country, and propaganda so stripped of truth that it became its own doublespeak crapped out daily by the White House press secretary of the quarter.


She was crude as Bushco is crude. She was uneducated as Bushco is uneducated. She was a package put together to appeal to the lowest common denominator just as the Buscho political agenda was put together to appeal to the dumbest of the dumb, the weakest and most gullible of the flock. She was portrayed as both the used and the user, just as Bush is portrayed as both puppet and inflexible ideologue. Everyone wanted to be her daddy but no one wanted to step up and take responsibility while she was alive, just as everyone can see the daddy issues between Bush the bubble boy and the daddy who loves Jeb best, but no one can step up and say get some therapy you assholes before you kill all of us.


And now the vultures that always follow train wrecks so they can pick the bones clean are circling Anna Nicole's preserved by court order body to lay claim to money she might be granted sometime in the mythical future. They are claiming paternity of her baby now that it is a child of future wealth and privilege instead of the product of their white trash coupling. They are saying oh how awful that she was so exploited as they stare transfixed at those enormous breasts, those red lips and hear that breathless little girl voice coming through the television screens once more.


And while they are so transfixed, Bush the Bubble boy is pulling wings off the fly that is Iran while shiny, ideological toys are waved in front of him by the neo-con vultures getting ready to wind up the idiot for one more spin around the room of smoke, mirrors and lies. If we fail to stop this next war in Iran, it is only fitting that Anna Nicole Smith becomes the historical symbol of our generation. We'll have earned her.

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

Anna Nicole and The Bubble Boy

Some Enraged Thoughts On Global Warming

After watching "An Inconvenient Truth," I was left with a wide range of emotions that mixed with the ones I had over the stolen election of 2000 and the subsequent disaster the Bushco thieves have wrought upon the planet. I rarely get angry. I believe anger is something that feeds on you and turns you into a hate zombie consumed by things beyond your control. But I've been angry for a long time now and today when everything the Bushco bastards tried to suppress about Global Warming and Climate Change was finally allowed to see a glimmer of daylight, I became furious.

From day one this administration has threatened, blackmailed, intimidated and bought off Scientists, Doctors, Teachers, Scholars, and just about everyone who believed something that threatened Bushco bank accounts. They inflicted their junk science creationism voodoo on a generation of school children who couldn't fight back and demand a real education. They turned stem cells into a political tool instead of using their influence to help those who have long ago given up on hope. They cheated human beings out of real research that could have found the cure for cancer in favor of enriching pharmaceutical donors with millions of dollars of happy pills sales, that also had the added benefit of keeping people drugged and indifferent. They lied and sat on proof of Global Warming so oil companies could make billions of dollars in profits without having to even clean up their messes--like Exxon and the still unpaid costs of the Valdez environmental catastrophe. They let an American city die and have done shit to make it live again.

Everywhere they could cut a corner for security, safety and the common good in favor of lining their own pockets, they did. I long ago realized that Bushco cares only about money and the power it brings. All the rest of it, the religious crap, the fetus worship, the Middle East plan to slaughter everyone into democracy has nothing to do with ideology. They will pretend to believe whatever pays the best. And they will find a way to silence anyone who threatens their obscene and money-hungry pursuit of power. If the Republican Christo-Fascists ever cut off the money supply they use to buy legislation that puts us square into another dark age of religious persecution of the non-believers and the turning of women into chattel, they would turn on them as well. If the oil in the Middle East disappeared overnight, the very next day the troops would be coming home and there would be no interest in bringing "democracy" to places like Iran anymore.

But the worst damage they did was to the planet, a place that belongs to everyone and not just Bushco, a place that belongs to future generations and not just the greedy bastards that have staked their oily, greasy claim all over it. They tried to hide the damage their policies were doing. They lied about the effect of those policies. They cheated their grandchildren out of the only real legacy they had any right to pass on: a clean and healthy planet. For this reason alone, they should hang for their crime of murder, because it's a murder that doesn't end with this generation. It will continue to kill and destroy for generations to come and that is what makes them truly evil. Future generations will curse the names of these bastard ancestors that make up Buscho and if there is such a thing as an afterlife, may they hear their voices loud and clear for eternity.

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

Some Enraged Thoughts On Global Warming

Meat Puppet In Chief

There are days when I just can't believe this is what we have for a President. He reduces me to childish retorts, sneering insults, and frat boy jokes. More and more it is clear that the only reason he became President was the same reason idiot Kings were put in charge of countries--they are the meat puppets who stand in front of the curtain while the real bastards pull the strings.

Meat Puppet In Chief

Crazy Men in their 40's...

I'm very selective about the people I let into my life. I know what kind of friend I am, how seriously I take the word and the obligation of friendship. I also know this is what attracts people to me who want only to feed off that which I am. I know the world is full of people who have issues, who have dramas, who are on paths that will eventually grow them into actualized human beings. I also know that I've put in my time helping some of those people walk that path at the expense of my own sanity at times, and that I will continue to do so.


But the years have also taught me to be selective as I told a new acquaintance. We were sharing a cup of tea on a cold rainy day. The conversation was wonderful with just that touch of danger an underlying attraction can take on. We agreed politically, mentally, about love and friendship and all the cornerstones that form a solid connection. When he left to go home I experienced a momentary sense of sadness that so much potential wouldn't be developed further.


He left angry. I won't see him again. It's a conscious choice I made the minute he started to talk about his marriage, his kids, his frustration with his job, the gray that was taking over his hair, his fantasy of just bagging it all and buying a motorcycle and traveling the world before it was too late.


In other words, he just told me that he was offering me the typical friendship a woman has with a man in his mid to late 40's...months of dependence on me every time something went bad at home or work, gratitude for listening without ever saying much in return, an intertwining of his life with mine so complete that all that was missing from a total bonding was the sex that would never be. (The reason for that is simple. I don't mess with married men. It's disrespectful to the women and there's always complications.)


Nothing is simple with a man, especially friendship. They are either actively hunting a mate, in the throes of raising children and therefore not available unless it involves "the children." Or they are about to go bat shit crazy starting in their early to mid-40's when the children become teenagers and their marriages start to tighten around their necks.


In the last few years I've let myself get caught, for the sake and honor of friendship, in the whirlpool that was created by these men experiencing all the typical symptoms of a full-blown mid-life crisis. It always starts the same way. The woman they've been with for a decade and more is suddenly dragging him down, making too many demands, stopped loving him, is gaining weight, and becoming boring. If it wasn't for her, there's so much he could do, but now it's too late and it's all her fault because SHE makes him unhappy. And the children hate him, want him only for money and expensive presents, and as a chauffeur if they aren't old enough to drive themselves.


Think I just know some strange people? Well, I do. But I'm not the only one. Many women have been stunned to hear out of nowhere that their husband of many years suddenly wants a divorce.


I've been on the other end of hysterical phone calls at least twice a year now for the last few years as I tried to explain to my distraught women friends that it wasn't all their fault, that maybe it wasn't even the man's fault, that they were just caught up in a psychological whirlpool so intense they couldn't fight their way out and survive.


Sadly, it usually does end in divorce and even though the men always swear the girlfriend came later, she was usually in the picture when things started to go crazy. She became a symbol of all that was wrong in their lives. She became the unattainable Goddess they could have if only if only if only. And worst of all, these men often do end up with the Goddess who ends up becoming their new wife. It takes about 18 months for love and lust to become ordinary. This is after maybe another child has been conceived or since she is always younger than him, she often brings young children into the new relationship.


And the man finds himself in the exact same situation he escaped from. But instead of the bliss, he often has less money because now he is supporting two families on the income that was barely enough for one family. He often goes from having teenagers to having infants and young children in the home. Instead of more freedom he suddenly has less. Most of these new relationships end within two years and the man is left with nothing. Two of my friends became suicidal. One ended up killing himself for, as he put it in his suicide note, "Throwing away a beautiful family and a wife who loved me."


So what has this to do with me and friendship with a man in his 40's? Actually, quite a bit. You see, as the Patron Saint of difficult people, I draw these fools to me like bear to honey. I start out with friends who are couples and end up with two friends who won't be in the same room with each other and who spend most of their time trying to make me take sides. If the friendship is solid enough, I'll risk it.


Why risk? Because in the end, I'll still have the woman as a friend. We'll still stay in touch frequently. We'll call each other all the time and share emails. At first I have this with the men too...until one day the calls stop coming, the emails go unanswered, the voicemail doesn't get returned. Then I know he has begun the next relationship and I cease to exist. I become insignificant, an annoyance, that friend who becomes an obligation whose call he must answer as he and his new love giggle privately as he rolls his eyes to take my call. I become part of his past, the friend of his ex, the one who knows how low he went and the throes of his despair. I know too much about him. It doesn't matter squat that I gave him the depths of my friendship, that I cancelled appointments because he needed to talk, that I listened to him for hours on end go on and on about stuff that was essentially boring and tedious and annoying because I'd heard it so often from men before him. My friendship didn't matter anymore than it matters to him that his wife gave him her life, her youth, love and support for all those years.


And that is why I am acquaintances with men in their 40's and save my deep heart connections for men who are at least in their 50's and have already gone through all that nonsense. I'm a good friend. I have a lot to give. And I don't believe in wasting anything, especially my time, my love, and especially my friendship.


So, he left mad. He'll probably call me in a few years and say, hey you know what? You were right. Let's meet for tea, and I'll happily agree. Maybe I'll even invite his ex to join us.

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

Crazy Men in their 40's...

What do you mean is Obama BLACK enough???

Ever since Hillary and Obama announced their presidential runs, watching the news "actors" delivering their commentary is giving me bad flashbacks to the 1950's. That's the last time I heard such bullshit about whether a WOMAN can do anything as opposed to a man. Are we hearing anything about John Edward's gender? Do we hear about oh gawd, not another southern white man! Has anyone asked Elizabeth Dole lately if she would have risen so far in politics if she hadn't been married to Bob? And yet some meathead actually asked Hillary that today. He asked her if she would be running for president, if she would be in such a position of power if it hadn't been for Bill--which completely shit on the fact that she's been a successful senator who won re-election all by herself without Bill.

The pathetic excuse for commentators are falling all over themselves to see who can get the dumbest remark in that focuses just on her gender and not her qualifications. Next people will be saying she is too "pushy" to be president, too much of a bitch, too hormonal, too emotional, too castrating...the list goes on and on for those who want it to go on. The rest of us think of castration as something that's going to happen to welfare for the rich and corporate and not something she's going to do to Bill or anyone else with a butcher knife as they sleep.

But all that pales, literally PALES as in stupid white people pales, when compared with the idiocy coming out of people's mouths over Obama. All the closet racists are coming on down to get their two cents of marginalized intellect into the dumbshit stew. They are asking us, we the people who know better, we who haven't thought this way for years if at all, if AMERICA will vote for a black president? WTF!!!?????

In my never humble opinion, the best response for that came from a woman who runs a discussion list I've been on for her over a decade. I made the following design to capture as best as I can remember, her perfectly reasonable solution to those who ask if Obama is BLACK enough to run for president. It's the one at the top of the page that says: "Will slap next person who says Barack Obama isn't black enough."

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Design from Ursine Logic. Changing minds one t-shirt at a time. Visit Ursine Logic for more designs. And a great big thank you to Kamal from 3blackchicks.com for suggesting this design and others. If you're into movies, this is the site to visit. Tell her I said Hi!

What do you mean is Obama BLACK enough???