Armed and Dangerous

Our Children: 3,000+ gun-related deaths per year. Ohio ranks 8th in the number of children & teens killed by guns. The gun owners care more for their guns than they do our children.

Our Women: One in every four women will experience domestic violence in her lifetime. An estimated 1.3 million women are victims of physical assault by an intimate partner each year. Access to firearms increases the risk of intimate partner homicide more than five times more than in instances where there are no weapons. In addition, abusers who possess guns tend to inflict the most severe abuse on their partners. The gun owners care more for their guns than they do our women.

$14 Trillion debt and rising, failing schools, perpetual warrior, violent, armed and dangerous...we are becoming a Third World Nation.

Nothing will be right in this country until we put our children first.

Angel's First Christmas

                       

Angel is one of the 89 dogs that were rescued by the Delaware County (Ohio) Humane Society last summer. She is ten years old. She and the other dogs were living out their lives locked away in filthy cages. She had had puppies; one can only imagine how many times. She had never been outside. When she first came home with me, she shook in terror at sounds we take for granted and hardly notice. It took her three months of coaxing before she took off running and playing with me and my other dogs.  She is a brave little girl, and safe now in our home.

“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated." - Mahatma Gandhi

                         



Afghanistan

                                                                 

I urge everyone to go to The National Geographic website: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2010/12/afghan-women/rubin-text/1 and read about the plight of Afghan women who "suffer under the constraints of tribalism, poverty, and war".

The pictures tell the story of their heart-wrenching despair and sorrow. When I saw the photos and read the stories about the abused women of Afghanistan, I literally cried. This is the institutionalized abuse of an entire nation of women. We cannot abandon them. It would be immoral to do so.

If that is not reason enough, consider that Al-Qaeda and the Taliban of Afghanistan pose a real threat to all freedom-loving Nations. Pakistan, with it's nuclear arsenal, is in danger of falling to them.

From the beginning, this war should have been conducted by a mulitnational force with shared sacrifice of lives and resources by all. Nations everywhere need to step in and let our war-weary soldiers come home.

It is time to begin dismantling the "military-industrial complex" that President Eisenhower warned us about. We have gradually become the Perpetual Warrior State. It is time to stand down, America. Let the rest of the free world carry the load for awhile.

Drill Baby, Drill

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              
Republican legislators have just come out with their recommendations for balancing Ohio's budget, including the recommendation to "allow drilling on state-owned lands to help fund the Ohio Department of Natural Resources".

My friend has a farm that abuts part of the Wayne National Forest. For years her daughter, Amy, and I rode horses there. To begin, the trail led upwards. Enveloped in a canopy of trees we rode higher and higher. At the top, our horses waded through flowing water at cliff's edge. We watched as it cascaded downward to the forest below. I imagined us as time travelers, riding into primeval forests untouched by man.

Onward we rode through meadows and woods. No sounds did we hear but the stomping of hooves, the swishing of tails and high-spirited snorts as we leaped over fallen trees and washed out gullies along our way. Every so often my horse, Trisket, would dance a little jig then come to a halt, spooked by shadows falling across our path. Then off we would go again, into the unknown, awaiting the next adventure just around the next bend.

Then one day the drillers came in. They downed trees and bulldozed over the top of the waterfall, literally putting a stop to the flow of water. They ruined that land with their machines and their drills.

Our parks and public lands are an integral part of the fabric of our Nation ( see Parks, Our Natural Heritage 09/05/10).

Do not let the Republicans and the gas and oil exploiters destroy our public lands. They have been set aside for future generations and should not be violated.

We the People

When our Legislators refuse to legislate, the People have the right to put an issue on the ballot to let the People decide. The latest trend is to stop issues from going to the ballot.

In my community, the men on Council refused to let the People decide if pit bulls should be banned. They refused to put the question to the voters when offered the opportunity.

500,000 Ohio voters signed the ballot initiative that would let the People decide upon improving the conditon of farm animals. The Governor and special interest groups made an agreement behind closed doors and stopped the issue from going to the ballot.

The greatest form of free speech is one person, one vote. The Conservative Justices on the Supreme Court recently ruled that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections. In dissent, Justice Stevens said the majority had committed a grave error in treating corporate speech the same as that of human beings. Corporations may not have the vote, but they have the cash to buy our legislators through campaign contributions.

This is supposed to be a Nation of the People, by the People and for the People. Instead we have  special interest groups who have the power and money to dictate policy; politicians who spend their time raising money for the next election instead of doing the People's business; and, there are those who are so concerned about getting re-elected they cede their responsibilities to the citizenry to those groups making the loudest noises and the greatest threats.

It is a sad statement on the condition of politics in the U.S. If our legislators will not do the job, stop blocking the People from doing it for them.

The Destroyer & The Appeaser

It is a known fact that the Republican Party's plan, for decades, has been to bankrupt the country so that there would be an excuse to do away with the social safety nets put in place by Democrats... unemployment compensation, social security, Medicare, Medicaid and the minimum wage, to name a few.

In Geoge Bush, they found the perfect instrument of destruction. It has now come to fruition. And, at every step the Democratic Party has folded.  Democrats have become the modern day equivilant of Neville Chamberlain. Barack Obama is not the great compromiser, as he sees himself. He is an appeaser.

You will notice in the bi-partisan commission's recent proposal to lower the budget deficit, the recommendations include cuts in social security, a rise in the retirement age for social security recipients, an increase in Medicare costs for the elderly. There is no recommendation to raise taxes on the wealthy. There is no recommendation to raise taxes to pay for two wars, which to date have been funded by borrowing billions. There is no mention of shared sacrifice. The middle class and the least among us will be the ones paying.

At sixteen, I "met" my hero. Where are our heroes today? jkt

War

photo

by

Rex B. Thompson

When I heard that George Bush was contemplating the invasion of Iraq, I became alarmed. His whole premise to justify an attack rang false to me.  I knew that the UN inspectors on the ground in Iraq had found no stockpiles of WMD and claimed to be close to resolving the remaining issues of disarmament as mandated by the UN Security Council. They concluded that it would take just months to finish their task to verify compliance.

Patriotism is nothing more than a political tool used to justify war. George Bush used the specter of 911 to manipulate doubters into submission in his march towards war in Iraq. There were no weapons of mass destruction. Thousands of American and innocent Iraqi lives have been lost for naught. 

We have more to fear than the burgeoning military-industrial complex.