Preaching Truth to Power

 I am so glad I tuned in the National Cathedral Prayer Service for National Unity this morning. I always enjoy the pageantry of the National Cathedral. It's interesting to see the heads of so many of the religions in our country and to see how they robe or don't robe for such an auspicious occasion. I have to say, the Episcopal crowd are as berobed as any and the LDS representative in his tailored suit was pretty basic. 

But appearances aside, the church folk were unanimous in their calls on behalf of the poor and downtrodden, women and LGBT+ folk, immigrants documented and not. There were many calls for justice, but none so clear as the sermon by Bishop Mariann Budde. She truly preached truth to power, speaking directly to the President calling on him to consider those made insecure by his actions. I was so proud of her and now I worry if he'll find some form of retribution against her and our denomination.

I wish I had a transcript of her sermon because it was so soft, yet powerful. She called for unity as one might expect, but she was specific in three areas where unity is crucial.

So, to the National Cathedral and all the religious leaders and the people who worked so hard on prayers and music, I thank you. It was just what I needed.

These United States

It's hard to believe I've been blogging for 16 years. I vividly remember writing my first blog after the inauguration of Barack Obama. Now, it's the eve of Donald Trump's second inauguration and we're in a very different place.

Eleven or so years ago, I started a blog that I didn't publish:

I'm wondering what the founding fathers would react to what has become of the colonies become states within the United States. The clear delineation between state matters and federal matters has become muddled by states deciding federal laws are in appropriate locally, by federal lawmakers wanting uniformity, by interstate commerce and the even broader world of international trade including the internet.

Now, I'm wondering what the founding fathers would say about the Supreme Court deciding that the President has immunity from prosecution which led to a President fomenting insurrection, disrespecting State secrets, etc. I bet they'd have a lot to say about a President claiming dictatorship and forming a shadow cabinet.

So no, this country has being tiptoeing to the edge for a while now. I don't know what I can do. Many of my friends are going into a strange form of isolation, no news programming, newspapers, etc., which seems like a head in the sand solution. If I can't see it or hear about it, it doesn't exist. Some of my friends are pretending that practicing random acts of kindness will make things better. I mean, it doesn't hurt, but it won't save my social security checks or preserve access to health care for my nephew or nieces or their children. I have a journalism background that connects me to wanting to know what's happening and letting others know what I've learned. It is all a challenge, isn't it? Despite our incoming President's threats, we really don't know what he will do. If past is prologue, he won't carry through on much of anything except defaming a lot of innocent people. Because he can. Because the Supreme Court said the US Constitution doesn't apply to Donald Trump. 

What are you doing in these times?

Majority Rules

So, another election day is here. Our ballot is full of fairly complex utility regulations that I do not really understand because I did not do my research. That's an odd situation because I'm usually the one who did hours of research on the ballot issues and who can discuss them in excruciating detail. This year, I'm in a majority I want to end -- uninformed voters.

I've always viewed governing as the adult version of the "majority rules" votes we did in school. Increasingly, I'm not so sure about that. No, I'm not talking about the bizarre power grab attempted by a previous president now facing four trials. 

I'm looking at statistics that 61% of all Americans favor responsible gun legislation. I'm looking at a similar percentage who favor protecting women's bodily autonomy. But I still live in a country where we cannot get rid of AR-15s, where many states have no protection from people with known histories of mental health issues buying guns, where many women have neither access to birth control nor abortion.

So, why does the majority not rule? I guess you could say money trumps majority. The NRA, once a bastion of gun safety training now a well-founded defender of gun makers, no longer offers all the gun safety classes we took, but spends it's dollars making sure unrestricted gun sales rank ahead of gun safety. Where's well-funded connection who call themselves "pro life" foment laws that are "anti" -- anti birth control, anti life of the mother, anti the life of the child once it is born.

Somehow, a well-funded militia of people whose views are in the minority supercedes majority views. So how do we restore majority rules? We vote and we help others vote. We have to work a bit harder than we should because the minority has also made it harder for many people to vote. We help people find out if they are still registered to vote and, if needed, help them re-register. We organize rides to the polls. We educate voters to recognize the mail-in ballots they may have gotten in the mail. We work with election officials and the League of Women Voters to get accurate, un-biased information to all the voters.

My BHAG is to compile a list of voting resources, initially in New Mexico, eventually across the country, probably as a web-based resource to get informed voters to the polls. I fear we have only one year to get this together and failure could be disastrous.

Let me know if you can help and how.

Can a Foodie do IF?

 I have always believed that cuisine defined culture. So, here I am, almost two years in a new culture. Not a new culture in the sense of traveling to a different country, but definitely not Kansas or even Colorado. I'll probably write about that in another post. But my indulging in New Mexican cuisine and beverages has taken me far from careful eating. 

At my last appointment, my PA suggested I try intermittent fasting as a possible means of getting my weight under control. I was, and am, skeptical, but I am giving it a solid try. I jumped in too quickly, without doing any research other than how many hours a day I should fast. And I didn't think things through in terms of scheduling. 

I fasted 16 hours (a fairly standard IF is 16:8, meaning fast for 16 hours, eat in an 8 hour window). Oops. I had an appointment across town when I was supposed to break my fast. So I wound up fasting 18 hours. In my ravenous state, I tried to eat a big lunch. Big fail! I ate about a third of the very spicy, very filling meal. By the time I got home, I wasn't sure I'd ever want to eat again. It took me three days to eat that meal.

After my too big lunch, I didn't care about food until about the time my husband was ready for dinner and my eating window was over.

Now, my husband just naturally does something like IF in that he eats breakfast around noon, lunch around 4:00 and dinner around 8:00. But we wake on a different schedule. I wanted to start fasting by 7:00pm.  This is a continuing challenge for my IF experience. Another challenge is that I have a medication that I am supposed to take with a meal and at a consistent time. Before IF, I woke at 6:30, had a healthy breakfast and took my medicine. So, it seems like it would be a simple thing to change the medication to 11 am when I break my fast. But, I'm not often breaking fast at 11. It worked when I ate when I got up, but now life isn't conforming to my schedule.

One possibility is to go back to breaking fast around 7:00. That has long been my habit. The challenge is that has me ending the eating window around 3:00. That would not allow my husband and I to have a meal together. And that plays heck with our social life which seems to involve dinners around 7:00. I'm sure I'll work that out somehow.

Beyond scheduling, or maybe because of it, I'm eating about 800-1000 calories a day which is a bit less than the recommended minimum. So the pounds should be falling off, right? Wrong. After almost 6 weeks of this craziness, I've lost 1 pound. 

So, I haven't been enjoying the local cuisine I love, I have been stressing about trying to eat within the IF timeframe, and I haven't lost much weight. I'll give it another month and report back.

More than Politics

One of my first memories of a presidential election came on November 8, 1960. The radio announced the election of John F. Kennedy as President of the United States. My mother broke into inconsolable tears, "The Pope will rule the United States; we will all have to be Catholics."

So, my earliest experience of an election was the impact of disinformation that led my mother to believe something that could never have come to fruition, something that shook her very foundation as a Christian.

My mother was a dyed in the wool Republican. Her parents, particularly her immigrant father who came to this country from Germany in the 1890s, believed that the Republican party, which takes its name from the view of the country as a republic, was the party of the working class. That's not to say that they approved of everything that came from Republicans. Certainly, they did not approve of ending slavery, but in the 1960 election, they held to the idea that the GOP was protection from those darn Democrats who will make us all bow down to the Pope. They were, in that year, single issue voters. Where did they get their information? From their churches, from their friends, from their preferred radio stations, newspapers, and magazines. We didn't have a TV or internet, but radio was as much a source of information and disinformation as TV and the internet are today.

Some 60 years later, partially because of John F. Kennedy and more because of Lyndon Johnson, and the programs and policies they promoted (Vietnam not withstanding), I am a Democrat. And, I am watching legal proceedings I never imagined could happen as the former President of the United States is arraigned on four criminal counts for actions while he was in the White House, after being arraigned on forty some counts from misuse of documents after leaving the White House.

Later in my youth, the candidate who lost to President Kennedy got his chance in the White House.  Aside from Vietnam, the other scandal of my college and grad school days was Watergate. First, Vice-President Spiro Agnew resigned his position because the Department of Justice had uncovered widespread evidence of political corruption and accepting bribes. That was totally unrelated to the Watergate scandal, but it set up a rather unique Presidential cycle that ended a President never elected to that office. That was a time we truly had to appreciate the framers of the 25th Amendment to the Constitution, because not only did Vice-President Agnew resign, but President Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment and possibly an arraignment of his own.

So, I'm old enough to have a personal and first-hand memory of some significant events that, I believe, set a stage for our current events. And those memories and the history I have lived made me a person who researches the candidates before I vote. 

Donald Trump has quite a history. He and his father got in trouble for discriminating based on color in to whom they rented apartments. He's had amazing luck agreeing to a price for items ordered, but finagling ways to avoid paying for goods delivered. I forget how many small businesses have been closed because of his resistance to paying his employees and suppliers. He has a long history of filing bankruptcy to avoid financial obligations. There are multiple cases of his company "cooking the books," misstating the valuations of his assets and his tax obligations. I'd say he has a history of being a bad actor in his business dealings. But, while I have seen documentation of these things, I am removed from these actions.

But, once he became the President of the United States, his actions impacted me. He did not play straight with us regarding COVID, he misled us about immigrants from Middle Eastern countries and from Latin and South American countries. He lied to us, all of us. And, as was said in his latest indictment, some of his lying was legal, lying, but not cause for legal action. But when he used those lies to deny our right to a fair election, when he lied to stay in an office he did not win the right to hold, when he lied to some of his supporters so they would serve as false electors who knew he did not win the vote in their state, he did break the law.  When he kept secret documents that belonged to the government, not to him, he broke the law. It makes me exceedingly concerned that he might claim the presidency to hold himself above the law.

How does he have so many supporters? It's not unlike that election in 1960. There's a much broader range of ways to spread his messages. There are at least three national television networks who specializes in what one of his former staffers called "alternative facts." There are countless ways to spread his message on various social media sites. And there are the same means used in the 1960 election that led to my mother's certainty of the Pope's involvement in our government.

Starting a New Chapter

 It had been an idea for a while now. Even before the surgeries, we knew we were going to need a single story home. And after the surgeries, particularly the femur tumor, the  advantages of single-level life were apparent. Then, housing prices in Denver skyrocketed and we knew it was time.

We learned about Swedish Death Cleaning where you get rid of things you don't use and that you can pretty much guarantee the next generation doesn't want. We filled a pickup truck to the brim and that was just the kitchen. I boxed up clothes until my clothes were way less than half the clothes in the closet. I discarded the research for my Master's thesis, and copies of all the courses I developed. I thought I had eliminated my share of the clutter. I was ready! 

Friends moved to an active 55+ community in Albuquerque that we had liked five years before. The prices were still relatively low there and we started following the sales in the neighborhood. We toured a house on Facetime and fell in like with it. A neighbor had friends looking for a house like ours. We sold that house and bought this one in a single day. That's not to say it was easy to make the move. There sere repairs to make on the old house and repairs to request on the new house. The negotiating drove me to distraction.

Our living room the first day.

At last, we were moved in. Or partially moved in. Despite all the cleaning we thought we did, we needed a second truck r husband's clothes that haven't fit him for 10+ years. At least I packed four days of clothes for the move and the workout clothes made it on the first truck

Sunsets, hot air balloons and sunrises are regular reminders that, despite the craziness and continuing unpacking, the move is worth it. In addition to the beauty, living in an active 55+ community means an immediate group for activities, wine tasting, ladies who lunch and men's lunches. Our common thread is our age, but we're finding a lot of folks who love to travel as much as we do, maybe even more. We're already thinking about a cruise on the Douro River in Portugal when we feel more comfortable with the direction of the pandemic.

So, don't be surprised if I add a new obsession to the old ones...

How Time Flies!

Twelve years ago, inspired by the inauguration of our first Black American President, I started this blog. At times, it has been highly political; at others, it has been much more a food blog; I have spent little time on religion, though it is integral to my entire life. Most recently, I've spent much time describing personal journeys I did not even dream could happen 12 years ago -- my DNA journey to biological relatives and my experience rehabbing from surgery to replace some of my leg with a partial prosthetic femur.

Tonight, I eagerly anticipate the inauguration of another president, a man who was inaugurated as Vice-President of the United States the day of my first blog post. Tomorrow, my country will inaugurate three firsts in a single Vice-President: a woman, a black and an Asian in the single person of Kamala Harris.

I freely admit that I am thrilled to say goodbye to the 45th President and all the evil he represented in our White House. Because of his administration, there are thousands of young children separated from their parents with whom they may never be reunited. Because of him, our country has lost its status throughout the world. When I traveled to Germany to meet my newly identified relatives, I saw in a police station the depths to which my country's reputation had fallen. BTW, I was at the police station because my cousin is a police officer, so in a personal situation rather than a professional one. I've experienced a president who never acknowledged that he lost the election fair and square and who incited an insurrection by nearly 1,000 of his followers who invaded the Capitol building of my country.

Many of us are nervous despite 20,000 National Guard personnel to protect our new President and Vice-President. Our outgoing mercurial president may have other things planned to disrupt the ceremony tomorrow. He is not following the norms and niceties of tradition in our country. He has no respect for what is right.

The other interruption in normalcy is a pandemic largely out of control because the outgoing president ignored the problem, preferring to promote witchcraft fixes liek injecting bleach and other "treatments" proven not just ill advised, but dangerous. Yet, when he got the virus, he had the latest, greatest and most effective treatments available.

Twelve years ago, I was optimistic, hopeful, excited. While I am hopeful about the next four years as a return to norms and a rational President, I am saddened that, because of Coronavirus COVID-19, the scene will not be the normal inauguration with all the pomp, celebration, cheers, and such that has surrounded previous inaugurations. Our new President has wanted to be president for decades. Tomorrow is his day, but it will be a mere shadow of what he might have hoped it would be. What we all may have hoped it would be.

So I intend that this blog will be revitalized. I'll spend more time on my faith, some time on what this pandemic has meant for my life, maybe some time on the great political division in this country. I intend to return to my original mission of this blog about My Magnificent Obsessions, but with the flexibility to discuss my newly identified ancestry. I have no information on my biological father other than having a significant Scots/Welsh/Irish blood. When the pandemic permits travel, I hope to explore those countries.