Heathcare Reform is half way to reality!

They actually did it!

We're not dreaming. The US House of Representatives voted for Healthcare Reform tonight at just after 11 PM.

Now will the Senate join them?

Much is left to be done, and by no means can the Democrats claim victory yet. We figured that the House would be more representative of most Americans' hopes than the Senate. We have many more members on our side there, and could even afford to have a few Blue Dogs eating their dog poop on the fringes.

So from here, we go to the Senate. And if we are finally successful there, we go to a conference committee.

In the meantime, say a few prayers. The very hardest is yet to come. We have our work cut out for us.

And watch Rush and all his ditto heads next Monday. They are going to be foaming at the mouth. But then occurances like this help their ratings. Secretly they're thanking us.

No go to bed. Have sweet dreams. The work continues tomorrow.

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"The Lacuna" by Barbara Kingsolver premiers in Asheville!

Lacuna isn't laguna misspelled.

Keep your eyes open because you'll be seeing The Lacuna around a lot in the next year.

The Lacuna is novelist Barbara Kingsolver's most recent book, and it's poised to knock your socks off!

We folks in Asheville tonight filled a high school auditorium, paying $28 plus tax to pay for her book before we were admitted to the school auditorium.

Malaprop's Book Store, Asheville's social place for book lovers, put on the book reading. But gosh, I never saw a Malaprop's book reading that attracted some 500 persons, all waving The Lacuna high above their heads as they sat on the edge of their seats to hear what Kingsolver had to say about Asheville in her novel, which is also set in a Mexican coastal island jungle with a Lacuna.

Merriam Webster defines Lacuna as:

"......a blank space or a missing part : gap also deficiency, a small cavity, pit, or discontinuity in an anatomical structure."

Kingsolver uses this word in her new novel as she describes a cavity on the tropical island as one "that goes down to the middle of the earth, down as far as the devil himself."

Her novel also features a search for a gap, such as a missing part of a manuscript. On the book jacket, with a hole smack in the middle of it, Kingsolver writes of the lacuna as "between truth and public presumption."

I can't tell you much more about the novel because I just got my book tonight. It won't be officially released until tomorrow, November 3rd. So we beat 'em to it by being honored as the first on Kingsolver's book tour. She demanded that Asheville be first because half of the book is set in 1940s Asheville, with its downtown hardware store, its Tunnel Road, Biltmore Mansion, Grove Park Inn and Grove Arcade.

In her research for the book Kingsolver discovered that during World War II the Japanese attacked the refineries in Los Angeles while the Nazis sank our tankers off the Carolina coast. She asked how many of us were aware of this information? I personally was doubtful because no one had ever told me that.

This was just one point she was trying to get across in her book: American's insistance that we are invincible. We are the best! After all we are Americans!

In Kingsolver's book we get another look at Diego Rivera, Lev Trotsky and Joe McCarthy's Committee on Un-American Activities.

The big question that drew Kingsolver to write this book, she claimed during a Q & A after the reading, was why we Americans have such a hard time bringing art and politics together, unlike most of the other countries she has visited around the world, which frequently honor their artists with leadership positions in their governments.

What do Americans do? We censor them. We label them as Communists, as Un-American. Even in the years following the great Communist scare of the McCarthy era, note how we Americans have continued to put down our artists when they enter the political realm. Watch out liberal Democrats like Jane Fonda or Brad Pitt or Sean Penn! (Exceptions to this, however, include Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger, both California Republicans, and Democratic Sen. Al Franken of Minnesota.)

How fitting that Kingsolver would choose Asheville as the setting for half of this novel, since this small city's art community is often found to be politically active. In my opinion, Asheville is a fine example of an activist artist community which believes that art and politics can be wedded, that politics is enriched when it brings the voices of our artists into its life.

Kingsolver's protagonist Harrison Shepherd, born in the USA but reared in Mexico, "casts his lot with art and revolution, newspaper headlines and howling gossip, and a risk of terrible violence."

The jacket of The Lacuna tells us:

"In her most accomplished novel, Barbara Kingsolver takes us on an epic journey from the Mexico City of Artist's Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo to the America of Pearl Harbor, FDR and J. Edgar Hoover. The Lucuna is a poignant story of a man pulled between two nations as they invent their modern identities."

So go out to your locally owned independent book store tomorrow and be the first, along with me, to read the sure to be controversial new novel by the lady who gave us The Poisonwood Bible, Prodigal Summer, The Bean Trees and most recently Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life.

The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver.

One last note: Kingsolver noted that she majored in biology in college. Whereas an in-depth research paper on an important biological and ecological issue might get her 12-14 readers, she can now get readers in the millions to read her novels, in which she brings to life much of what she learned as a scientist.

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Quiting the blame and no one listens games

Ever wonder why you take the blame for so much while at the same time no one seems to ever hear what you're saying, so much so that eventually you feel absolutely powerless?

Does this make sense?

If you're the blame for so many bad things happening, then maybe you're more powerful than you thought. Ah ha, maybe you're not so powerless after all. There is something positive about you and your influence after all!

Or conversely, so you are powerless. No one acknowledges whether you are alive or dead. No one listens to your ideas. You get more attention from your little plant than you do from a colleague. All is not lost. No one can blame you if projects go bad because they didn't take any of your advice anyway, whether it was good or bad. So sleep soundly and refuse to take the blame.

Even with this rationalization in mind, those of us who have this ever-vigilant Critic or Censor on our soldier seem to have no trouble thinking the worst of ourselves. We are always the blame for family dysfunction, losses in the financial market, arguments with just about anyone (if they bother to even argue with us).

Meanwhile, we walk in a fog all too often seeing others speaking with confidence while people listen to them ready to hop to their jobs. They come to other people's desks to ask for advice, to read their opinions, to follow their directions. So naturally we feel powerless like a feather in the wind being blown into the garbage along with all the other trash.

What negative concepts! How can any of us delude ourselves to such an extent?

Perhaps we had extra critical parents who had no trouble keeping us in line, putting us in our places. If it wasn't our parents, it may have been the other kids on the playground, our teachers, siblings. Maybe we were the oddballs in a group, lived in poverty, were shy or introverts. Perhaps we had buck teeth, were fat or skinny, had acne or came from an ethnic culture that caused us to be picked on.

Although today we know that these traits can sometimes bring us strength down the road, sometimes they have the opposite effect. They cripple and dig holes to swallow up our little self esteem into a deep hole of darkness, cold and misery.

Thus we slink into the corners of life. We stay home and only go out when our four walls squeeze the breath out of us. Or we see those around us sometimes who also are suffering. Our Critic tells us it had to be our faults. No one else will take the blame, so the struggles others are going through had to be our fault.

Do you get the picture? Many of us are in this lose-lose predicament. What does it add up to? Sadness, depression, melancholy, negativity, guilt, hopelessness and exclusion while we crave for happiness, hope, joy, peace, inclusion, creativity and recognition of our value --- from anyone whether he be the janitor or the dog.

There are no magic bullets to get the critic off our back. We can blame all kinds of people from our childhoods. We can begin to understand why we feel the way we do. But then comes the hard work of changing these old thought patterns.

Turning on our creativity may be one tool we can use to let a little more light into our lives.

A friend has told me about a book called The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. A couple of her suggestions for us who are caught in self-pity and despair are two commitments we make to ourselves.

• First thing in the morning just as we awake, we write down three pages of whatever thoughts come to our minds. This is a time of day when the so-called Censor is still not completely awake yet, so you can write without the judge telling you that it stinks. Basically, you are letting your spontaneity come to the forefront. You don't allow anything to inhibit your writing, even if at first it reads like a bunch of jabber.
• Second, for a couple hours at one time once a week, you give yourself a art date. No matter how inempt you think you are when it comes to sketching, water-painting or sculpture, treat yourself once a week with total absorption in some type of art. Don't study it. Just do it and most of all have fun with it. Don't let the Censor compare what you do with the world's great masters or the art hanging in the nearest art gallery. Art is your soul, not a game of winner beats loser.
  

I'm not saying these two practices are going to re-orient my thought patterns and at last bring me to the new day I've been searching for, but maybe they can be tools to silence the Critic within that really needs a little break, as well. Or maybe she can go enjoy life herself.

Meanwhile I hope to find myself, gain some power in exchange for the blame I intend to release.

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Is Barack's Peace Prize a Bit Premature?

Does President Barack Obama deserve the Nobel Peace Prize already?

As we look at what's going on in Afghanistan, as PBS prepares to run a Front Line show entitled "Obama's War," does President Obama still deserve a Peace Prize?

President Obama is good with a speech. He can mesmerize with his poise, his inflections, his choice of words, his command of the English language. But is this enough to win a Peace Prize?

President Obama is a hundred percent better than his predecessor, but does that mean he deserves the Nobel?

Mr. Obama seems to be a great father, a husband and American. He's even served a stint as a low-paying community organizing job, but so have I. No one has offered me a world peace prize (although I did get a diocesan award for something like that).

Mr. Obama is brave to push for healthcare reform in a country where anything that appears to bear a slight resemblance to nasty socialism gets dumped in the nearest trash bin. But does this domestic policy proposal deserve a Nobel Peace Prize?

No, in my opinion the Nobel Peace Prize going to President Barack Obama was premature. But it was given to him nonetheless.

Now it's the future that is given to Mr. Obama. He can seize the moment as he stands in the shadows of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, former Vice President Albert Gore and former President Jimmy Carter and truly become a Man of Peace. He can change directions in Afghanistan. He can improve relations with North Korea and Iran. He can clean up Bush's War in Iraq and he can at last lead the world in really doing something about Climate Change.

Today I challenge President Obama to grasp the Nobel Peace Prize to his heart, and to promise the Nobel Committee and people worldwide that he will do all in his power to step out of the shadows of great men and women of former times, and go on to truly take the lead in bringing peace and prosperity to a globe at-risk because of greed, war, famine and environmental degradation.

May he shine, and may this just be a beginning of a great Presidency in the US. Remember, another winner of the Nobel Peace Prize was Henry Kissinger, and many of us wonder why?
I hope we don't wonder the same about why Obama was chosen a few years from now.

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Why do I cry every time I watch Ken Burn's "The National Parks."

Why do I cry each night I watched Ken Burn's The National Parks: America's Best Idea currently being shown on PBS?

Maybe it's because I have lived for so long by the Great Smokies National Park, but yet have visited it...really visited it...so seldom.

Maybe it's because, like those heroes who made the National Parks possible, nature speaks to me and calms my fears and worries while nurturing my hopes, like nothing else I know.

Maybe it's because I see God in nature.

Maybe it's because they became a reality despite dollars that were used to try to prevent them so that a few could profit.

Maybe it's because that dollars, especially the pennies and nickels that my neighbors' grandparents in Tennessee and North Carolina contributed to the cause, that finally made the Great Smokies possible.

Maybe it's because I know they will be there for my children and my grandchildren and their grandchildren.

Maybe it's because I know that wild critters and sweet birds, even salamanders and copperheads, can find safety and their own peace in our National Parks.

Maybe it's because this project of setting aside lands for the public (folks like me) can make me proud to be an American at last.

Maybe it's because I find me there, as Ruth Kirk says at the beginning of the most recent segment.

Maybe it's because I have actually seen so few of the National Parks.

Maybe it's because I miss having a family which really cherished camping out, taking long hikes on a regular basis.

Maybe it's because, despite this, I have known some terrific people who did do what our family was unable to do.

Maybe it's because I was born and raised in Iowa, one state with no National Parks, unless Herbert Hoover's Birthplace counts.

Maybe, unlike land in Iowa that has to be "doing something productive" like raising corn or soybeans, the land in National Parks can just "be."

Maybe it's because I "own" these parks just as much as any of the Rockefeller or Vanderbilt.

Maybe it's because the "spirit of the woods" continues to call me.

To my soul, there are no maybes. It alone knows that just as the centipede finds solace in the unspoiled virgin of the wild, it is also there who my soul becomes one with the universe.

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Come on, Women! We need to stick together here!

I attended a movie last night that was sponsored by a local rape counseling service in Asheville.

Since that time, I seem to be bombarded with reminders of how we women just don't get the respect and honor I think we deserve.

Most women in the world are at the mercy of men. From the time they are conceived in the womb they become less treasured than the male. In a number of countries, including China which has a one-child per couple policy, females are either aborted or abandoned more often than their male counterparts.

Once born, they often become a second-rate member in the household, along with their mother. The valued son gets preference, the most food and more respect. The daughter, no matter what her position in the birth order, becomes like a hired girl, to help her mother cook, clean, mend and care for the other children in the family. Sons are too special to even get their fingers dirty, it seems, unless they belong to farmers or car mechanics.

Of the illiterate persons around the world, nearly two-thirds are women, and things aren't getting any better. Of children who are not receiving any formal education, two-thirds are young girls.

Eventually our young girl child develops into a beautiful young woman who attracts young (and in many cases old) men in the community. She is not desirable only for her charm and good looks, but also because of her dowry. Without one, she may be doomed to live with her parents the rest of her life.

In instances in India, many brides have been burned by her husband's family when her parents refuse to pay increased amounts as part of her dowry. In other words, the young woman is a possession, first of her father and then of her husband's family. But instead of the new man in her life buying her, he requires her family to pay to have him take their daughter into his home.

Let's say the dowry gets worked out, and our young woman is allowed to live and start a new life in her husband's household as his possession. She dare not refuse him sex any time he wants it, and she will probably work circles around her husband the rest of her life, while also bearing children for him and raising them to adulthood.

So basically, since a vast number of woman are not allowed to be educated, are not taught equality with men in the home, and often can only see poverty and loneliness if they were to remain single, their only option is to hope for a merciful husband.

But even if a woman does find a husband (usually picked out for her by her family), her life is far from secured. In some countries, such as the Congo now and Bosnia before that, women become a pawn in war and crime.

When you want to create fear, to fracture families and communities, you go after the women. In the movie I recently saw, women in the Congo weren't only raped by a man who thought she was made to service him, more frequently they were violently raped by up to 20 men, often in front of her children. Finishing the job, many had guns and sticks shoved into their vaginas, rupturing bladders, uteruses, rectums, so if they survive, they may never bear children and they will be incontinent the rest of their lives. They are condemned to be ditched aside by husbands and to beg for assistance with pee running down their legs the rest of their lives.

The message of this movie was to tell us that we people who use electronic devices are responsible for this conflict and violence. My laptop and cell phone uses precious metals necessary for computers and phones. These materials are mined by young men in crude ways for shipment to the industrial countries. And how the military and crime lords get what they want is through these random rapes of women throughout the country.

This may well be true. And I would like to help them out to break up the organized crime that is perpetuating this system.

But I don't think even this gets to the heart of the problem. The main reason, buried beneath national conflicts and war, is the general de-valuation of half of the human population, its women.

The movie showed a man at the end of the movie sitting outside his hut. He was very critical about what was happening in his country, but while he talked leisurely, his wife was in the backgound washing clothes, cooking, caring for the children. She was at his beck and call. He loved his family, but in my opinion, she was doing all of the backbreaking work while he sang his favorite song.

In another scene, we heard about a woman who was raped, but was "lucky enough" to find a husband who would accept her. She had given him at least three children in four years. He's old enough to be her father. The interviewer asks her if she is now happy. She shakes her head negatively. They ask why not. She quietly answers, "My husband."

I read this to mean that the rape is continuing, except now it is legal because her husband is doing it.

In other shots, we see women carrying loads of wood bent down like cattle. We see them constantly working in the fields, washing clothes, cleaning their huts and feeding their children, unless they're laying on hospital beds recovering from surgery because of their rapes.

We in America could say that things are better here. And I guess they are. But things aren't perfect. I too grew up feeling like a second class citizen. As a wife in my marriage, I also felt secondary to my husband. I felt that I must be submissive for family unity.

And even in this country, rape happens once every six minutes, and some sources estimate that it's more like one rape per every two minutes. Either way, women continue to be at-risk.

Looking at statistics, this is what former President Bill Clinton shared this information recently:

According to the United Nations, women do 66 percent, two thirds of the world's work, produce 50 percent of the world's food — a factor which would stun people in this country given the way agriculture is organized — earn 10 percent of the world's income and own one percent of the world's property.

Don't you think it's about time that we women stand up and say "We're as mad as hell, and we aren't going to take it anymore?"

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