Sunday morning

Ella and I managed a walk in the park both this morning and yesterday morning, squeezed in between downpours and showers. It has rained for what feels like 40 days. The potted flowers and plants I put out on the back steps 2 weeks ago are so saturated that the latest rain just lays on top of the soil so the plants appear to be growing in 3 or 4 inches of water. I keep pouring it out. Rain keeps putting it back. Still we squeezed in walks both days during a period of non-rain, still damp, but not soaking.

I had thought this week would be the peak of the roses in the rose garden at the park, and perhaps it would have been if the ceaseless rain and accompanying wind had not beaten down the bushes creating what I admit is a lovely scattering of multi-colored and sweet smelling petals below the rows of rose bushes. Only the newly planted annuals in the annual garden seemed to be thriving; elsewhere the plants had a worn out, damp and distressed look. Good for the ducks and geese, however, who have been venturing from the pond into the various open fields of the park to graze, I presume on worms and insects driven out of the ground by the water to avoid drowning, only to be gobbled up by hungry fowl. No heron either yesterday or today. Perhaps she's seeking shelter under the tall pines on the little island in the middle of the north side of the pond.

Just spoke with my daughter who is on her way from Atlanta to Miami and from there back to Port au Prince. She expects to be in Haiti at least another 3-4 months. SOIL ran into abrupt and unexpected funding problems not too long before she came to the US 12 days ago, and that has changed the outlook for the organization and the environment for her job quite a bit. It's hard to accept that agile productive organizations like SOIL lose funding while big top-heavy inefficient NGOs earn a return on donors' moneys and spend on bureaucratic processes more than productive actions. Anyway... it's been good to know she was on the same continental land mass as I for the past 12 days, even if it didn't work out for me to see her. It's hard knowing she's being carried so far away, not just geographically, but in other ways, too. I keep her and her work in my heart.

I read some articles this past week from an on line edition of a recent special issue of Time magazine on cancer. One of the articles was on cancer charities. Really disturbing, but interesting. I learned there exist non-profit organizations whose mission is to check on other non-profit organizations/charities and how they use the donations they receive. What does that say about us human beings? Anyway, one thing I learned that was of note was that the Susan B Komen breast cancer organization that sponsored the Race for the Cure I wrote about last week is actually highly rated as a cancer research non-profit. That was good to know in light of some of the not-so-positive visceral feelings I'd experienced about the size and marketing-heavy aspects of the event. If it actually ends up significantly benefiting cancer related research, that's all to the good.

Shall we turn our eyes to the wider world? Chaos among the field of those running for, thinking about running for, denying they are running for and being watched to see whether they will ever run for the Republican presidential nomination. I heard an interesting discussion of Mitt Romney the other day, saying he is more of a technocrat pragmatist than an ideologue, and is having to bend himself into unnatural shapes to satisfy the Republican powers that be. And it was pointed out that if he won the nomination, instead of disavowing the Romney-care health plan in Mass, he might be able to use it to attract independent voters. He's very much like Obama, it was said. I agree with that. Pox on them all.

All this talk about "the economy," the "debt ceiling," "creating jobs," etc. etc. etc. It seems like no one that I'm reading in the mainstream media including on line - except possibly Paul Krugman - sees what I see when I look at the underlying conditions we face today. We don't just have a "recession" and some "unemployment" that can get "fixed" by "creating" jobs. We have bigger deeper issues; we sent the American, and to a large extent, the world economy in an untenable direction, permitting the financial markets to puff themselves up with artificial "growth" like a blow fish. Puffing up a blow fish doesn't make it a shark; it's still a puffed up blow fish. Now the air (albeit in my view not ALL the air) has been let out, and we're back to being what we were all along - a not very healthy, increasingly inequitable economy. How do you "create" jobs on top of that? We have 10% of our population in prison, for God's sake. Another 10% (in the narrowest definition) are unemployed. That's 20%. 1 in 5. And over the past 2-3 decades, our schools have sunk into and beyond mediocrity into disgrace. Kids leaving with degrees from many colleges are less well educated than kids with high school diplomas were 30 or 40 years ago. I see those college graduates in my job. Many can barely write a sentence. My guess is they are uneducated as far as history, geography, the arts and literature.

We won't be able to overcome in ANY president's 4- or even 8-year term what we (including me) people permitted to take place over the past 3 decades while we paid attention to other things.

And, for good measure, global warming approaches that tipping point - beyond which today's half-assed "solutions" fail to do anything whatsoever toward solving the problem.

I guess it's the non-stop rain that puts me in such a cheerful mood.

Perhaps the sun will come out, tomorrow.

Peace.

Saturday morning

After a rough 3-day work week - which just goes to show me that Big Mama, as we called my grandmother, knew what she was talking about when she said "Be careful what you ask for; you might get it." since I was so gung ho about having a 3-day work week - Ella and I went to the park this morning. Goslings. Fuzzy, creamy light brown, very very cute goslings. Hard to believe they grow into the great stately honking hulking Canada geese. We had a good walk. Cool morning, supposed to turn sunny and warmer later. No heron, no muskrat, and the Mallards' ducklings apparently haven't hatched yet.

Today is the Race for the Cure event to support breast cancer research fundraising. I signed up and solicited donations last year, and received a lot of support (thanks again to all). It was moving to participate, in part because I had finished chemo only 6 weeks before, my hair was just coming back in, there were so many other women who "looked like" me. At the same time, the whole thing was so ... corporate as in structured, programmed, choreographed, and massive. Also I had some sense of an odd elitism or at least silo-ism, as is, "this is a BREAST cancer event, BREAST cancer kills MORE women is a BIGGER threat than XXX cancer." No one said those words, there was just some sort of underlying thrum. As I said to some one this week, all I guess I was looking for was to hear the message that while breast cancer is a huge problem for women and women in CT in particular, ALL cancer is horrible and all cancer survivors and families and friends of all cancer survivors are welcome to join Race for the Cure (even if the $ raised goes to breast cancer research, in some ways that benefits ALL those dealing with cancer). But that message was missing.

At any rate, I did finally register this year, and thought about going, but have decided not to. I figure my registration fee is a donation. I wish the event well. Perhaps I will participate again in the future more fully.

Otherwise, looking forward to a quiet weekend. My daughter is in SF, visiting for 10-12 days from Haiti. Her organization, SOIL, is having funding difficulties. Too bad, because here is a small group of committed young people actually doing somethign needed in Haiti - assisting people in creating and learning how to manage ecologically friendly sanitation facilities - what can be more basic than sanitation? without sanitation, the quality of water is affected, disease is rampant, etc. - working on a really shoestring budget, living simply themselves right in the community (not in some NGO compound) - and they can't keep their funding, while across town, multi-million dollar NGO's employees are driven around in big gas-guzzling cars while donations sit in the bank. It's not right.

I heard an NPR story this morning about a new documentary just coming out about mining in West Virginia, strip mining or whatever they call the type of mining nowadays where they basically blast the top of mountains off. Unbelievable the details about how corporations have purchased the political process in the towns, counties and states involved.

Supreme Court decisions permit corporations to buy political elections.

Kids getting college degrees incur $100,000 + in college loans and start their careers as indentured servants.

One in 5 people in America has or will develop type 2 diabetes.

One in 5 people has no health insurance.

What's wrong with this picture?

It's a beautiful early June morning. There must be in the birds' songs outside my window, in the wisp of cloud passing overhead, in the sun striving toward the top of the day, hope for better times.

Peace.