Pamela Jean Owens off-line

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

So reads what is known universally as “The Serenity Prayer” as it is used in 12-step groups all over the world. So wrote Reinhold Niebuhr, or so the story sometimes goes, on an envelope, or the back of the bulletin, or some other random piece of paper, during the morning service one Sunday in 1942, or thereabouts. It was only the opening stanza of a longer prayer he would deliver in that service, after a sermon on Practical Christianity, never dreaming it would have a life that extended far beyond his own.

Although in later interviews, after “the prayer” had become famous, Dr. Niebuhr did take credit for the prayer, he also admitted that the ideas in it may well have been “floating around for centuries”; research has shown he was correct in that statement, although he never revealed whether he recalled the source from which he had borrowed the ideas. Whatever its true origins, within a few short decades the prayer had taken on a life of its own, and a title: “The Serenity Prayer.”

I’ve always had a problem with the Serenity Prayer. In fact, I’ve rejected it much more often than I’ve prayed it, a fact that almost everyone I meet finds close to heresy. Rejecting the Serenity Prayer has become the unforgiveable sin against modern civil religion, against “common knowledge,” tantamount to blasphemy against the public manifestation of all that is holy. To question the Serenity Prayer is seen as speaking against the very fabric of the self-help movement itself. The reaction of people ranges from shocked disbelief to outright pity, so I don’t mention my heretical thinking often.

Far be it from me to suggest that the word “serenity” is only one of three petitions lifted up in the prayer, and not the one in the ultimate position, syntactically. I am well aware that if anyone “Googles” the phrase, “Serenity Prayer,” there is not a single doubt that this is the only prayer to which thousands of links will direct their browser. Thousands of websites present the Serenity Prayer, probably tens of thousands, if not millions, in every language imaginable, in words I can’t pronounce and scripts I do not know.

Google took just 0.14 seconds to tell me that there are “about 721,000 results,” for “serenity prayer,” but I think that may just be the ones in English. If some are in some other language, I know Google translator can translate them for me, but I don’t need it to. No matter the language, I know what it says and what it means to whoever posted it on the page. Googling “courage prayer” or “wisdom prayer” will also return thousands of results, but they will point to all manner of prayers posted for all manner of reasons. No one can quote “THE” Wisdom Prayer or “THE” Courage Prayer, even if many of us might have our own nomination for each of those designations.

“Serenity: the quality of being serene.”
That’s what the dictionary says “serenity” means, which only begs the question.

In all the times I’ve heard the prayer said, it has seemed to be almost forbidden to ask what “serenity” actually means. I’ve always felt as though I’m just supposed to intuitively know, yet if there is one thing I do know it is how very NOT intuitive I am. Ask a recovering alcoholic about serenity, and you’ll probably hear the word “sanity” in his definition. Ask a recovering battered wife at an Al-Anon meeting, and you might well hear “survival.” Ask a group of adult children of alcoholic parents, and you would probably hear something about coming to terms with their childhoods as they were, instead of wishing childhood had been the way they wished it had been.

Going a bit further with the dictionary search uncovers this as the meaning of “serene”:
1. a: clear and free of storms or unpleasant change “serene skies” b: shining bright and steady, “the moon, serene in glory” (Alexander Pope)
2: august — used as part of a title, “his Serene Highness”
3: marked by or suggestive of utter calm and unruffled repose or quietude, “a serene smile”

I don’t think the “august” title is relevant, but both of the other meanings intrigue me.

I can hardly imagine a life clear and free of storms. Not in this world, anyway. And unpleasant changes are hard to avoid. So how can one even imagine the state of being serene as a human quality? “Unruffled repose or quietude”? How very boring that would be, other than for periods of deliberate meditation and prayer.

The Serenity Prayer actually petitions for more than serenity: it also requests courage and wisdom. Courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference between what I can change and what I cannot. Serenity is prayed for in a particular type of situation, when there are things “I cannot change.” If I can change it, then I ask for courage, or at least I do in the Serenity Prayer. Sometimes I feel like those lines are simply being quoted by rote. Like “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Who really wants to only be forgiven to the extent she is willing to forgive others? Not me! What I should be praying desperately is to be forgiven in much greater measure than I have been able to forgive others! But who is thinking that in the Sunday service, half asleep, when responding by habit to the intro, “Our Father…”?

Back to the Serenity Prayer: ultimately, if I pray that prayer, I am asking for wisdom. Specifically, “wisdom to know the difference.”

Ah, that is the rub. Knowing the difference. Wisdom is much harder for me than courage. I can do courage. But how do I know when to call on it? How do I know the difference between serenity and mere resignation? By wisdom. And isn’t wisdom much harder to gain than serenity? Might not it be that what some people call “serenity,” others would call “giving up integrity”?

All the years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus in Montgomery, had it been wise for black people in Alabama, and elsewhere, to take their appointed seats at the back of the bus, serenely accepting what they could not change? Should Rosa Parks have continued accepting Jim Crow laws as something she could not change? Had it previously been wise to accept, or had the people simply lacked the courage to change the things they could? Was it that Mrs. Parks was wiser than others, or was she simply crazy? Believe me, I ask that question with absolutely no disrespect. Is the wisdom to know the difference the product of rational analysis? Or is it the stuff of daydreams? Or, rather, might it be the craziness of patience stretched beyond endurance? Is wisdom the knowledge of the right time, or is it eternal truth, outside of time and space?

Most times that I recall having demonstrated what others called “courage” in my life, I thought I was simply doing that which I could not not do. At the time, courage did not enter into it. I didn’t decide to organize women to get rid of “women’s hours” at Vanderbilt University. I simply did what I had to do not to lose my sanity, as well as my patience. Later my friends would tell me that they only went along with my outrageous ideas because I was acting so bizarrely they were afraid if they refused, I might just jump out the window. I don’t remember it already being “after hours,” so I think I could have still walked out the door, but maybe that wasn’t really what they meant.

It struck me as very funny when they told me later how I had looked to them that day. I don’t remember it that way at all. I remember being very rational in devising a strategy and carrying it out: petitions, floor meetings, picketing, finally a rally. I remember endless discussions of what would be most effective and what we needed to do to get enough women to join us, so as not to become marginalized. I also remember being positively evangelical about it, and I remember consciously knowing I was using many techniques of leadership that I’d learned in Training Union as I was growing up at Gaston Avenue Baptist Church. I don’t remember anyone at my church ever telling me that women were supposed to be silent in church, that’s for sure! The Daves and the Withers and the other leaders taught us to stand up for what we believed and never mind the cost.

That first afternoon of what we would come to call “the campaign,” when I received a letter from my friend Judy Johnson who went to a small Lutheran college in Iowa, telling me they had just successfully gotten rid of hours for women at their school, I do remember storming into my friend Mary’s room waving the letter, and I probably was shouting. I still remember what I said, more or less anyway. “They’ve managed to abolish women’s hours at some little Lutheran school in the middle of nowhere. If they can do it there, we can do it at Vanderbilt.”

I am almost certain I know what the answer would have been that afternoon if anyone had telephoned the chancellor, or the members of the Board of Trustees, or certainly the parents of many women students, and asked if there were any possibility that before the year was out women at Vanderbilt would have successfully petitioned the Trustees to abolish the long-held tradition of women’s being required to sign in and out whenever leaving their dorm at night, much less successfully challenge the idea that the university was entitled to, even perhaps responsible to, set the hour by which “co-eds” must be safely stowed away in their dorms. I am very doubtful that anyone, except possibly Chancellor Heard, who seemed almost prescient at times, would have said it was remotely possible. Now truth be told, I think our Dean of Women was quite delighted with the events as they unfolded. I already admired Dean Cunningham for having been one of those rare women who had the chance to earn a Ph.D. in the roaring twenties, never imagining how long-lasting would be their echo. I’ve often wondered if she and her cohort of feminists had any idea how long it would be before another decade would roar as loudly for women as the twenties did.

Was what I did courageous? I hardly thought of it that way. It was exhilarating. It was remarkable. Perhaps it was brilliant. I know it was fun. But courageous? Not that I recall.

And was I wise? If that means, “Did I act because I was wise enough to know that rules could be changed?” the answer is certainly “no.” But I believed they could be changed, if we did it right. It was 1968, after all. The summer of love had faded to the summer of rage, and change was in the very air we students breathed that fall when we returned to our campuses. I hadn’t been at the Atlanta Women’s Conference, but I knew it had been important.

I hadn’t been to Chicago, to the Democratic Convention, but I had touched Bobby Kennedy’s hand as he came down the aisle when he spoke on campus the previous spring, and I’d cried when I woke up one morning that summer to hear my clock radio telling me he was dead. But I had also looked out my dorm window in the spring of 1967 and seen the National Guard tanks process by as they headed to take up their positions in Centennial Park for the night on which Martin Luther King, Jr., and Stokely Carmichael were speaking from the same stage on the Vanderbilt campus, anticipating unrest that never occurred.

Last November we elected Barak Obama, voting for “change we can believe in.” But before we could believe in it, we had to imagine it. And before we could work for it, we had to have the wisdom to recognize what could be changed. To tell the difference in what could be changed and what should be serenely accepted. Is wisdom knowledge? Or is wisdom dreaming big dreams even when those around you scoff?

I’m glad Rosa Parks did not serenely take her seat at the back of the bus that day in Montgomery. I’m glad I did not serenely keep following the rules laid out for women at Vanderbilt in 1968. And I’m glad the American people did not serenely accept the common wisdom that our country was not ready for a black president “yet” in 2008.

They say Neihbuhr prayed the “Serenity Prayer” at the end of his sermon on Practical Christianity. I’d be interested in reading that sermon. I may see if I can find it anywhere.

Who ever heard of such a thing as “practical Christianity”? How can belief in the impossible being possible be practical? How can belief that life can overcome death be “practical”? The very idea strikes me as absurd. Maybe Neihbuhr explored how one can live Christianity, as a practical matter. Maybe the sermon was really about the practice of Christianity?

Refusing to move to the back of the bus was hardly “practical” in Montgomery, Alabama, in the era of Jim Crow. “Practical” was serenely riding to work, any way you could get there, and being glad you had a job in the first place. “Practical” is “going along to get along.” Challenge to the way things are is seldom practical. It may be courageous. It may even be wise. And it may be the only way for some people to ever achieve serenity.

The wisdom to know the difference. That is the prayer I think the world needs. Otherwise we run the risk of calling something “serenity” when it should be labeled as what it truly is: giving up.

I make no claim to understand economics. None whatsoever. Never took a course in it, have no “investments” other than the Pension Fund and the Credit Union accounts, and have no idea what “retirement” would even look like.

But I’ve been doing some thinking, since watching the Super Bowl ads on Sunday and thinking about Cokes. Cokes Then, like the famous Mean Joe Greene ad, and cokes Now, Coke Zero, as in the new remake of the same ad with the current nice guy of pro-football, (somebody please send me his name before I have to google him).

When I was a kid, a coke cost a nickel. It didn’t matter if you got a fountain coke at the soda fountain at the drug store, or the lunch counter at Woolsworths, which was also known as the “dime store” or even the “five and dime,” or from a machine in some public place. As far as I can remember, a coke probably cost a nickel at the picture shows as well, and pop-corn a dime, but I can’t swear to that.

I’m not just talking about the 1950s here. I’m talking about the 1960s as well, when I went off the college. Every morning I went downstairs in my dorm and bought a coke from the machine and took it with me to breakfast, where I poured it over a cup of ice, just like I’d been doing since I was a teenager. Back then in the C-Shop (the central campus snack shop and quick lunch place), an ice cream cone also cost a nickel, or a dime for a double dip. As far as I knew, that was what ice cream always had cost and always would, a nickel a dip.

Then the president put a boycott on Cuba and the price of sugar soared sky high. Coke machines doubled their prices to a dime, and I toyed with boycotting the coke machine in the basement of the dorm, buying mine in the grocery and bringing them back, but with no car, there was really no percentage in trying to do that. Friends who could went to Cuba on Venceremos Brigades, and die-hard Coke addicts like me bit the bullet. After all, Carolyn Candler, one of the heiresses to the coca cola fortune, was in my class at Vanderbilt and on Lupton 1300 with me freshman year, and they were doing the best they could just to scrape by. Sort of like the Wall St. barons are doing today. Who could begrudge them an extra nickel per coke? Of course that was double the old price, which seemed to pay for a bit more than higher sugar prices, but, hey, the machines couldn’t very well charge 6 cents could they?

Actually, there were some places, like church offices, where the machine was owned by the place, not by the vending machine distribution company, and regular people put the drinks in and took the money out. They couldn’t change the price so easily — who’d have ever thought they’d need to do that? — so they came up with various solutions. Most popular was putting a box on top of the machine and trusting everyone who got a drink to put in an extra penny! I’m not kidding. I well remember the machine in the Christian Church in the Southwest Regional Office in Ft. Worth still had that system when I was there years later, around 1978 or so.

I remember at Vandy we soon discovered that at the BSU the campus minister had decided not to raise the price, so more and more of us started ducking through there on the way across campus to buy a coke. Trust those old mainline Southern Baptists to get us in their door one way or another (that was in the days when Baptists were BAPTIST, not fundamentalists…. but that is another story). Anyway, God bless old Pitts Hughes (that was a woman), for saving us anyway she could. I haven’t forgotten her welcome offer of salvation on the pass-through to one and all, that’s for sure. (That last sentence was for those of you who didn’t catch the bad pun in the previous sentence, sorry.)

Back to the price of coke and the economy: somewhere by the time I got to grad school at Chicago, coke had climbed to a quarter, then gradually to fifty cents, depending on who owned the machine and where it was. We addicts had an internal compass to the cheaper machines again, and once again, leave it to those immersion baptizers to get us in: at the University of Chicago, the last 25 cent hold out was the Disciples Divinity House basement. That wasn’t quite as easy for the general public to make use of on the pass-through, since you had to have a key to the front door or know someone to let you in, and you had to go back out the door you came in, unless for some reason the fire exit to the alley was open, so it was a little harder to be subtle about your reason for being there. But for those of us who were House or Out-House Scholars, it was a cheap fix and the Disciples didn’t ask nearly as much in faith as the Baptists had done. (Just kidding, they didn’t really ask us to believe anything at all at Chicago, so I exaggerate in saying they only asked “not nearly as much.”)

Ok, I finally got my ph.d. in 1997, and by then I think the DDH had gone up to at least 35 cents, by close vote of the House Council, and machines across campus were running anywhere between fifty cents and seventy five. Hotels had gone up to a dollar a coke on the machines in their hallways, and movie theaters were out of sight with what they were charging for drinks, and for popcorn too. Restaurants, however, were really all over the map, and of course by then that included pepsi and a host of flavors, amounts of sugar and caffeine, and even fruit flavors in the cans, not just at soda fountains where they added real limes or cherry syrup. Moving from the south I discovered that some strange people thought “coke” only referred to a coca cola, not all soft drinks. What a strange idea that was the first time I heard it!

Another new idea was born, as restaurants tried to decide what to charge: the idea of soft drinks as being a drink that entitled you to refills, like tea or coffee or water. That certainly would have been laughed at if anyone had suggested it back when coke was a nickel. Of course, cokes were a LOT stronger back in the fifties, so a large coke, which cost a dime, was about all the caffeine any kid could handle. Somewhere in there fast food restaurants came alone and the size of sizes began to change almost day to day, along with the price.

Raise your hand if what Wendy’s now calls “small” was what McDonald’s sold as “large,” not so very long ago. Really, it wasn’t long ago at all. The old “small” is now “senior size” or even “kid’s size,” depending on where you are. Current “large” didn’t even exist until after it had been introduced as the “super size” for hot summers in the south. Most places do offer free refills now, which seems to give at least a nod to the idea that coffee and tea drinkers might well be using as much sugar as coke drinkers, which I argued back in 1967 or so! Why didn’t they raise the price of coffee, I asked, as I watched friends stir spoonful after spoonful of sugar into their nickel cup of coffee, and its free refills, while I paid a dime for my one coke and never thought of getting a free refill. Well, of course they didn’t raise the price of coffee because people would never have stood for it. Remember that argument?

It was related to the “people will stop driving before they pay $2.00 a gallon for gas,” or was that $3.00? or maybe $4.00? We didn’t find out who would stop driving if it got to $5.00, at least not where I live, but the common wisdom was defeated with all the other increases, so that one would have probably gone through too. Now more people complained about the price of gas than complained when coke went from a nickel to a dime, but that was only a matter of scale and of who was doing the buying, I want to argue.

The reasons for coke going to a dime and on from there and gas going to — well, whatever the oil barons want to charge — are just about the same. We boycott Cuban sugar so coke goes up. We subsidize oil companies and sleep with the shieks, so they can charge whatever they want, and brag about it to congress, and pay themselves bigger and bigger bonuses to go with the higher prices of everything.

That’s my nickel’s worth on the economy. I don’t bother watching for the Dow Jones numbers. I know what’s happening by the price of a coke. That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it. That’s making me thirsty, so I’m headed to get a coke now, check you later.

I found this blog item in my documents folder — I can’t quite figure out if I ever posted it.  In the melancholiat at coming to the end of a momentous 2008, personally and for the world, I was feeling rather down, feeling the house too quiet after the holiday bustle of family and a baby once again.  But with so many stars in my sky, how can I not give thanks for my life?  My posting again starts with those who are gone, but it is about life, not death, something I need to daily remind myself to remember:

“Let the dead walk before you and acquaint yourself with their names…”
So speaks the motto splashed boldly across the print Jim Dombrowski gave me of an original poster he created commemorating one of the bloody police massacres of union organizers in labor history.  I do remember those who have walked before me and I endeavor to acquaint myself and others with their names, as my elders taught me to do.   I consider myself to be one of the most fortunate and blessed individuals I know, for the lifetime I have had to sit at the feet and be taught at the knee of such great men and women of social justice history as those with whom I have crossed paths and sometimes shared a day, a week, a month, a year, or more.

Jim Dombrowski — Th.D. Union Seminary, 1920’s sometime — thesis on communistic societies of the early American republic — old line union organizer, North Carolina and throughout the south — beat up and ridden out of town on a rail, countless times and places I’m sure.  C.P. member? Maybe.  Freedom fighter,  Definitely.  Widower, grandfather, lover of justice, of art, of kindness, of life, of family and friends, and of New Orleans.  Mentor to young adult organizers my age, but just as much of budding toddler artists like our little Ruthie.  If I were to “google” Jim today, what would I find?  I wasn’t on-line as I wrote these thoughts, but I’ll check it later.  Would I be as amazed at what I would find about Jim as I was when I “googled” Anne Braden, my old friend, the widow of my primary mentor in organizing, Carl Braden?  I had no idea how widely she was known, being out of the south so long.  Fire brands when I knew them in the seventies, she died not so long ago, respected by all strata of those who love justice.

Anne and Carl were my teachers, my surrogate parents at times; they showed me what parents of activists could be like when I felt far from my own. Carl brought Jim Dombrowski to meet me, interview me, and then go to New York City to raise the money to pay me to organize on the Charolotte Three and the Wilmington Ten.  Carl and Anne were committed to the struggles in North Carolina, in particular, because their own correspondent for the Southern Patriot, Jim Grant, was one of the Black organizers who had been targeted.  And oh, what I learned from Jim, who still lives, as far as I know.

I was blessed to live in the house with T.J. and Vicki Reddy when Julien Bond, then “merely” a poet, came to visit T.J., a fellow poet, in jail.  I was blessed to be sleeping in the apartment whose steps made the platform for the late Allen Ginsberg to do his “after-hours” reading when he came to Vanderbilt University in 1969.  My boy friend’s roommate was Allen’s host, and was sent to buy Allen a toothbrush, since Allen had forgotten his at his last stop.  What little things we remember.  I don’t remember what he read, but I remember that he sat on the stairs as we spilled out of the hallway into the street, because there was no other place to be, and that he waved his hands as he spoke, and that he needed a new toothbrush.  Oh, the importance of poets for our movements.  Denise Levertof, who I never met but who T.J. spoke of as a sister.  So many more.

And the priests — some dead, and some still living, in my life, I’ve known them well.  George Celestian, who took me to hear John Prine in Austin when he had an extra ticket, then soon went to Central America with his order and I don’t know what became of him later.  Tom Sheetz, the Jesuit who was getting a Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Texas so he could vote the Jesuit’s shares in companies such as Gulf and Western, and bring social conscience to the stock holders meetings of large corporations doing evil.  Father Al Moser, Paulist Priest, lover of life and love, gentle soul who told us to name our children something we were comfortable with (when we asked how to do the last name thing), because if they were our children, they would choose their own names when they wanted to anyway.  How right he was!  Still I say the prayer he taught us, “Holy Spirit of God, take me as your disciple. Guide me. Illumine me. Consecrate me.  Be my God.  Be my guide.  Wherever you lead me, I will go.  Whatever you say, I will do.  Whatever you forbid, I will abhore.  Lead me then, into the fullness of your truth.” I think I may have a few of the words wrong, but more or less correctly, that has been my prayer for the past thirty plus years.  Father Al Moser, I don’t know whether you live now on earth or in heaven, but I appreciate you and thank God for your being in my life.

Father Joe Znotas.  The stories I could tell . . . . Another day, another blogging.  We named our first son for you.  That says it all. I strive always to do what I think you would do in any situation of daily life, for you taught me more than anyone that the real work for justice is in the minutes and the hours, not in the campaigns and the headlines.  You died too young.  You are sorely missed.

I am thankful that Angela Davis and I crossed paths for a few days in North Carolina, shared a bedroom in Professor Helen Otho’s home, sat through a trial together and spoke on the same rally platform.  I learned from you, my tall black sister, and I think perhaps you learned from me as well, though I will probably never know.  I saw you vulnerable, soon after you had been those many months in solitary confinement in jail, for no reason, innocent but held anyway, with no blankets but the ones they let you crochet to pass the time, with poor food, for you were a vegetarian, with nothing but time to think, to meditate, possibly even to pray.  I wondered if you, an avowed Communist, were truly an atheist.  You seemed full of the spirit to me.

Some are dead: Elizabeth Chavis.  Igal Rodenko. My grand parents.  My Aunt Maude. Rachel Henderlite. John Jansen.
And some are living:  Ralph DiGia.  David McReynolds, Karl, Judith, Walter Harrelson, Martin Marty, James Gustafson, David Tracey, Anthony Yu, Prescott Williams, Bob Shelton.  In my life, I’ve loved them all.

I have roots.  I have a base to stand on and a reservoir of wisdom to tap and call upon.  I have never gone out into the world alone, even when I knew no one in the room, for the cloud of witnesses behind me are always with me.  The cloud of witnesses is not just a pretty platitude from the epistle to the Hebrews; it is reality and I feel it daily, hourly, minute by minute.

I am so very very blessed by those I have known, loved, and been loved by.  How, then, can I want for anything?

Well, here I am in Tyler, Texas, in the coffee shop of my mom’s retirement home.  Not a particularly exciting place to watch a debate!  And I’ve already bummed her out by my up-front witnessing to the good news of the Democratic Party in public wherever we go.  How come it’s ok to witness to the good news of Jesus Christ and no one should be offended, but it’s considered bad manners to witness to the good news of political change?  I’m proud to be a Democrat, all the time, but especially this year!  If you are proud to be a Democrat, let it be heard.  Shout it out!  “Read my lipstick:  I’m voting Democratic” (bumper stickers available from Emily’s list).

It’s been exciting in the Dallas area to see a collection of “I’m voting Democratic” yard signs.  “Had enough of Bush now?  Vote Democratic ‘08″ and many more.  So much fun to see them all over my hometown!

CNN is now going bonkers about the poll changes today — wow!  the multi-colored map doesn’t look like it did a few weeks ago AT ALL!

CNN says the whole world is watching the debate tonight to see what the next U.S. President will be doing that will make a difference in the world economy.  Duh!  This is sort of important, isn’t it?  Why is the economy hurting McCain and not Obama?  Well, maybe finally faith in the rich guy has been shaken.  If so, it’s sure about time!

Will he raise the issues of Bill Ayres and Rev. Wright tonight?  Are those issues for the American public at this point?  Surely not at this point.  I knew both of them in Chicago, Bill as a friend, Rev. Wright as an adjunct faculty member at the Divinity School.  I hope McCain has something more important on his mind than Obama’s pastor or his colleagues in city government.

8:02 p.m

It is so good to see a moderator respected by absolutely everyone!   Let’s hear it for Bob Schaefer!

well, right off the bat, one leveler -0- they are sitting instead of standing.  That means we don’t see anybody’s cute backside, or not cute.  No walking or pacing or getting up and down.  No way to tell who is taller than the other.  Remember, until 2004 the taller candidate won every election since television debates in 1960.  Al Gore?  Remember, he DID win the popular vote, just not the Supreme Court.

8:17 p.m.

“Countries that don’t like us very much” is a pretty large category these days, Sen. McCain, have you been to Europe lately?  We aren’t liked much anywhere except where we are buying oil; they love us, just the way we are.

“The most spending since the Great Society……”  Well, the dollar is worth a lot less than it was in LBJ’s day — my rent was $17 a week, for a nice little two room apartment with a bathroom down the hall on what is now Music Row in Nashville.  But would everyone about to start getting MediCare, or who is thankful their parents are getting MediCare, really want to go back to before the Great Society?  When I was in high school, what we now call MediCare was being opposed by the Republicans as “socialized medicine.”   Now we have a Republican president who wants socialized financial institutions.  Something is very confused here, IMHO.

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9 p.m.

Education and Health Care are the Civil Rights issues of the 21st Century.  McCain acknowledges that on education, but he just doesn’t get it on health care.  They are a right, not a privilege.  Joe the Plumber knows that, give him some credit.  If he’s making $250,000, he’s now management, not labor!  Duh!

Please comment if you want to, or if my comments aren’t working, drop me a note here or on Facebook.

AND REMEMBER, GET OUT AND VOTE!  VOTE EARLY, VOTE ALL THE WAY DOWN THE TICKET. AND GET EVERYONE YOU KNOW TO VOTE TOO.

2nd Congressional District Nebraska, Today’s Poll Numbers at www.fivethirtyeight.com

47.3 Obama, who is opening a 2nd Nebraska office tomorrow, with a 31% chance of victory taking the 2nd District electoral vote!

51.3 McCain, who is now pouring money into Omaha!

Nebraska Polls as of 10-7-08

WHAT  ARE  THE  REAL  ISSUES  TONIGHT?

If anyone is concerned about Bill Ayres, the supposed “terrorist pal” of Obama, please get in touch with us (me and Rick, my husband).  We ARE the same age as Bill and Bernadine, and our older son played baseball against each their younger son and their step-son in Little League when they were in grade school, and played baseball with each other in High School.   They were also buddies in Advanced Latin class and various  Our daughter and their older son went to high school together.  Bernadine and I were active in an interfaith organization Women Against War during the FIRST Gulf War, and also during the Clinton blockade of Iraq.  They are very extraordinaty people, and we have been in their home, just like Obama has.  But what is extraordinary about them is not that they were once part of the Weather Underground wing of SDS.  What is extraordinary about them is how committed they are to making the world a better, safer, kinder, healthier place for us in America, and for the rest of the world.

 Let’s see. McCain doesn’t want to raise taxes on anybody.  And he wants to buy up all the bad mortgages, my friends, which is going to be expensive, but he can do it, after all, he’s a maverick. 

I’m sorry, that sounds like funny money to me.  Whats he going to use for money?  Is he using Monopoly money?  Or monopoly money?

Barack Obama and Warren Buffet do not think the American economy is fundamentally sound.  Neither do I.  How does Warren Buffet for Secretary of the Treasury sound?

Let’s see, was it Wall Street that got drunk, or was it George Bush, or both?

How about a tax on all the homes owned by people with more than one, or, ok, since some elderly people have one in the south and one in the north, how about on all the homes past two per family?  That would be good news!

BEST LINE SO FAR as of 8:39 p.m.: “I think [Senator McCain's] Straight Talk Express lost a wheel along in there.”  (with regard to leaving the tax cuts on the rich alone).

Hello, have you told Sarah you think we have a damaged planet, John?  Oh that’s right, she does agree now that the climate is warming, but she has private knowledge from one of her fellow church members that it is another sign that we are near the end of days.  As soon as she gets that nuclear button, she can help Jesus get on down here to start the Millenial Times.

Q:  How many times had McCain voted against alternative fuels?

A:  Zero.

And alternative energy is part of the GOP plan?  I’m confused.

Places where we agree:  America is the greatest nation in the world.  Let’s get that clear.

VERY GOOD QUESTION, Tom Brokaw:  Define your doctrine with regard to the use of American military force in humanitarian situations that do not impact our own national security (Darfur, etc.)

Obama tells us what he will do.  McCain only says what he won’t do, and that we have to do whatever we can.  What does that mean?  Cool hand at the tiller?  Maybe a president with a vice president who can also advise would have a cooler hand, how about that?  Instead of one who has seen Russia off the back deck.

I’m sorry, but telling us that when he sang, “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran,” was when he was just joking with an old military buddy doesn’t wash with me.  Bombing Iran is simply not something I want my president joking about.  What if I joked about carrying a gun as I walked through an airport?  Some things are off-limits for jokes, that’s the truth of the matter, and the voters know it.

Question, “How do you reorganize U.S. Strategy in Afghanistan?”  Are they giving Petreus the same money to pay the Taliban tribal lords not to attack in Afghanistan like he’s done in Iraq?  That sounds a lot like we helped the Taliban throw out Russia.  I don’t think that is going to work now that we’ve created a stronger Al Quaeda in the hills than they had before 9/11.

CNN’s uncommitted Ohio voters, male and female, seem to be much happier with Obama than McCain.  Good news.  Let’s watch the polls in Ohio closely over the next few days!

Ok, I can answer the question, No, Russia is not an evil empire now, it’s not an empire!  First rule of debate, Define Your Terms!  Dumb question, Tom.

Saying we have to make “Iran abridge their behavior” sounds like a good idea, but I don’t know what it means.  Obama is giving me a straight answer:  He will never take the military option off the table, but first he will go to the table.  McCain won’t go to the table unless he gets to set the table exactly the way he wants to.  I vote for going to the table.  At least let’s give it a try.  Evidence is, it works. Refusing to talk is not working with either Iran or North Korea, so how about trying talking.

Wow!  Was this a night, and a week, or what?  I have so many random thoughts, that they are just wanting to come pouring out.  So here they come:

On the juxtaposition of Bill Clinton and Barack:  single moms trying to raise brilliant sons while working and getting their own education, kids who went to college on scholarships and student loans, just like me and most of you.  Which sounds more like the story suiting a president?  That one, or two multimillionaire who are son and grandson of a multimillionaire who contibuted money to Hitler’s party while America and Britain were preparing for war and France was being invaded?

On the housing crisis as seen by Obama, Biden, and McCain.  Biden takes the train back to Deleware every night, doesn’t even have a second house in D.C., and never has.  Barack and Michelle only paid off their student loans and bought a large, but not gigantic, home in Kenwood on the south side of Chicago after his book hit the best seller list.  McCain owns seven homes, or maybe it’s five, he can’t quite remember where they all are.

On pain:  prisoner of war, decorated and welcomed home with banners, or single dad whose young wife and daughter died in a car wreck on the eve of what should have been the young family’s happiest day.  Hard choice, but either one is more than enough, and neither is qualification for being president.  Survival isn’t enough.  We need to do more than just survive.

Barack and Michelle were our NEIGHBORS in Hyde Park.  They were just plain Hyde Park activists like we were.  His first political race was actually a couple of years before State Senate:  first he ran and was elected to the Local School Council, and his opponent?  My husband Rick!  They shared that stage at the candidate forum.  And when he was campaigning for State Senate, and when he was campaigning (unwisely) against our great First District Congressman, former Black Panther Party Education Chairman Bobby Rush, one of the senior members of the House Education committee, Barack came to speak at the progressive political organizations at University of Chicago that our daughter was a member of, and at the little Haymarket Housing Co-op where Rick and John lived for the year I was teaching and living by myself in Ohio.  He cared enough about 12 progressives, aged 12 to 54, to come for dinner there and talk about his campaign.  That was just 8 years ago last spring.  This is a REAL person, not far away from any one of us, except the super rich, and those he knows well enough to work with.

Bill Gates and Warren Buffett both support Barack.  So he can hardly be seen as a threat to the unselfish wealthy.  And, frankly, I want him to be a threat to the selfish ones who have been coddled by the Bushes, especially the Shrub Jr. one.  The rest of us have been threatened enough financially to last several lifetimes, and so has the U.S. economy.

Why don’t the commentators know how those common folks who spoke ahead of Barack got there?  They must not be plugged into the netroots, shame on them! You know, of course, because you are reading a blog that isn’t a very big one.  Anyone who contributed $5 at a certain opportunity was entered into a sort of a drawing to pick 10 people to be backstage with Barack tonight.  I guess they picked the most eloquent of the 10 to speak.  But they were all there, and their profiles are all on the Obama campaign website.  They have wonderful, typical, AMERICAN stories.

For any of my newer friends who have doubts, I truly welcome open dialogue between now and November.  I respect McCain, and I truly think we would be much safer and much better off if the Republicans had selected him in 2000 instead of G.W.Bush.  But he is not that McCain.  Karl Rove is running this McCain, not John McCain.  All he offers is Bush 3, and only a small percentage of Americans actually want that.  Don’t be fooled into thinking you have the chance to vote for the John McCain of 2000 or the John McCain of the primary season:  he’s long gone.  But he doesn’t want you to notice.  I think you are smart enough to notice.  I hope so.

That’s it — not very connected or coherent — but real.  Michelle is just a woman, not someone who ever expected to be famous.  Chelsea has offered to help the Obama girls know how to be in the spotlight, from the point of view of a girl who was where they were and remembers it well.  Isn’t it time for a president who represents the best of us, not just the wealthiest of us?  Yes, it is, and yes, we can!

Could RFK + MLK = Barack? or maybe BaRacK?

I don’t know who first made the analogy between Barack Obama and John F. Kennedy, but the analogy doesn’t work for me. Obama himself admits he isn’t old enough to remember John Kennedy, but I am, and Obama is no John Kennedy. However, after what I saw yesterday in Nebraska, I have concluded Obama isn’t less than JFK; I think he may be more. I think Obama may be the sum of two dreams, the Kennedy dream and the King dream and, more importantly, I think the Obama movement may finally be the movement that can unite multiple sets of dreamers.

I am suggesting, if I may be so bold, that Obama = RFK + MLK. Because after what I have seen in Nebraska this past week, I am reminded not of 1960, when I was only 12, but of 1968, when I turned 20. And since 1968, until last week, I had not seen or heard or felt or known the press of the crowd, the smiles and laughter that can only come from hope, the feeling of being in an enormous family of the human race, finally united with one voice, a voice of peace and of justice — I had not again been in the realm of a sense that “yes, the time is now,” since 1968, until last week.

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Being only 20 in 1968, I was not yet old enough to vote. But I was old enough to campaign, old enough to protest the war, old enough to work for civil rights, old enough to see men I knew go to Vietnam and come back crippled in body and, as we soon saw, even more crippled in mind and spirit.

I was old enough to have heard Martin Luther King speak at my college in 1967, the only time he ever appeared on stage with Black militant Stokely Carmichael. Read the rest of this entry »

PREFACE:

I grew up in Texas where we always chose our delegates in caucuses — precinct caucuses. I didn’t know exactly what they were, but my dad was precinct chair and I remember going to the caucus with him. They were in the evening. I somehow don’t remember Mother going — maybe my brother was too young to go, or maybe I just don’t remember it all. And then I was an adult in Austin, and we caucused not for candidates but for platform plank issues. Many people don’t realize that the party platform does get presented, argued, and approved at the convention. First the county convention, then the state, then the big D-N-C.

When I was growing up the convention was always in the summer, when school was out, and I spent a lot of time with my Helton grandparents in the summertime. In those days, Walter Cronkite and Huntley-and-Brinkley, and the rest of the guys on TV and radio covered both conventions “gavel to gavel” and were they ever proud of it! That was long before cable, of course, and we only had 3 channels, then we got “educational tv,” and then we got a local station that wasn’t one of the big 3. All 3 covered the conventions and would never have dreamed there would come a day when they wouldn’t — I’d never have dreamed of it either, and I still forget every 4 years that it’s not going to be that way still. I keep wondering if we should get cable but I just can’t imagine paying for tv — that’s just…. wrong ….. that’s unAmerican ….. they pay for tv in England …. we get our tv free, don’t we? That’s what I remember learning. I think pay tv was right up there with socialized medicine and the queen.

TODAY: WOW!!!

Today NEBRASKA held a caucus. Its first caucus. Read the rest of this entry »

I was first introduced to computers in my senior year of high school, Hillcrest High School in Dallas, Texas. I graduated high school in 1966. As a young math whiz, I was part of an honors math class that learned so much Calculus that I placed into the third semester of Advanced Calculus as a freshman at Vanderbilt University, and during that semester I tutored the sophomore science and engineering students in the class with me. And we didn’t get to anything that was new to me until most of the way through the semester.

Our amazing math education was not just because we were young prodigies, although some said we were. More important than who we were had to be who our teacher was, Mrs. Lee Ellwood, a genius of a teacher who had taken every math course offered at S.M.U., undergrad and graduate, but wasn’t interested in writing a dissertation so they couldn’t give her a doctorate. But the math profs at S.M.U. were in awe of Mrs. Ellwood, so naturally, when they kept bombing out trying to teach Fortran, the new computer language that was so important in the early days of serious computer use, to their freshman Engineering students, they appealed to Mrs. Ellwood to figure out what they were doing wrong. The deal they offered her was that she would learn Fortran, which she was bound to do anyway, then she would bring us out to S.M.U. once a week for an evening class and teach us Fortran. Read the rest of this entry »