Rest needed before I could tackle the world again...

Above photo my favorite of the ones Doc is taking to replace most of the photos of myself I have used in the past with glasses! I think I look so different in some photos without glasses. I was looking around me at the ballpark and nearly every person there was wearing glasses! Only the young and now the old after cataract surgery seem able to go without. It is no wonder I am set on taking some good ones before I die of me since I have worn glasses since I was in the 5th grade. Near sightedness runs in my family on my mother's side. My daughter had to start wearing glasses quite soon, too, even though my sons did not inherit the condition and were able to go many more years without wearing glasses. In fact Raymond still doesn't wear glasses! Gary wears them for reading. Dan is the only son who now wears them all the time.
I was exhausted last night, wiped out. I had written two days in a row about the subject of legalized abortion and there is no subject more draining to write about for me. It's a good thing I trained for many years in the trenches of abortion protesting or I would not be able to do it, however I think that this issue although not talked about often now in the press will influence the next election even more than it did in the last one. Abortion was a surprisingly troubling issue for the democrats in the passing of the health care bill because pro life democrats also added their opposition to the republicans against abortion funding and might have stopped the plan from passing had not Obama made a solemn promise to Stupak, a pro life democrat, to issue an executive order that would not allow government abortion funding. We will see now if he tries to find a way around that promise. If a president is not as good as his promise he may find himself in serious trouble.
I also got a comment on one of my blogs yesterday on this issue which Doc and I spent the rest of the afternoon responding to, since 'Bill Pasadeaux' took some pretty hard swipes at him, too. We know Bill which is not his real name. He was a resident of the Westward Ho who was evicted and is now banned from the property basically because of hassles with management. I helped Bill (Dave) vote the current officers of the WHo Tenants Organization out of office. I supported his run for chairman which he won and then I dropped out because of basic disagreements with Dave's way of doing things.
You can go to my comments posted on the side of the page and click on Bill's long comment and read Doc's response to his attacks on him for being the alcoholic he is and on me for allowing him to be my partner and show his face on the Internet in my videos. I keep company with Doc and when I make a video on my issues he is limited to only a few remarks. If he sabotages my video in any way I don't use it. Doc bought the equipment to make these videos. He has been an enthusiastic supporter of me making them, so drinking or not, I don't exclude him from them or from saying something. I think it would be hypocritical to do otherwise. Why should I discriminate against an alcoholic any more than a cigarette smoker, or the obese or overweight as I am, or one on methodone to control a heroin addiction as Dave is? This would suggest I should not make videos for the public because I am too fat.
That is a bunch of baloney. No wonder we have eating disorders in this country. My sister was bilimic in order not to gain more than 5 lbs in her life, and this was undoubtedly harder on her health, since she passed some 20 years ago. Dave is also overweight. Yes, alcohol alters thinking ability more when the person has drunk way too much, which I wanted to display in two of the videos I posted recently in which Doc was extremely drunk and clearly exasperating me almost to death. Doc was in charge of making those. He could not tell how obnoxious he was on them except by my reaction. He did quit drinking for 10 days after we made these videos, the longest he has gone without drinking since I have known him.
I don't know what Dave's savage attack on him will do to him, I suspect nothing, since all it did was make him mad. He and I both thought it was overkill. Doc finally calmed down enough to respond with a few funny remarks even which I thought were far more effective than trying to trade insult for insult. It is my opinion that not very much valuable thinking goes on in an insultfest.
Dave is a formidable slinger of big words. Nobody could touch him in here, which was why I thought the trouble he got into was unfortunate since he did read and always sounded reasonably intelligent. I say sounded that way. He would keep disappointing me in the content of his conclusions.
For example here is a quote from him on the subject of abortion in that comment: the same kind of tyranny that would pass laws to revoke and criminalize a woman's choice of dealing with her own body according to her own beliefs. Are you going to deny that a fetus is part of the mother's body? You who put forth the idea of some kind of absolute morality under an all-powerful God have little consistency in your sense of Justice or the slogans you try to send out that are supposed to crystallize all nuance and render us subjects of a black-and-white world of good and evil. You have suffered, you say, as a victim of larger forces politically averse to your beliefs, but my experience shows that the incontractable are quickly deemed insufferable and are shut out of the scene by their own intolerances.
Your shrill videos are made tolerable only by the charming way you parade your wrong-headedness... but when serious topics like racism, fascism and theocratic hucksterism threaten to rear their heads again after a hard-fought and far-reaching enlightenment of the body politic, the charm wears thin and the ghost-gossip and way-down-home homilies need to be firmly rebuffed. Sorry..."
Here is the argument about the fetus being part of the woman's own body so therefore subject to choice. Well, never before had the idea been put forth in our society that after a baby has been implanted and is growing in the uterus a woman should have the right to choose whether to continue the pregnancy because it is her body. This was a convoluted way to try to claim she was justified in trying to get rid of it as long as it was in her body and bothering her. That was supposed to take precedence over the fact that reproduction is universal among all female species and considered to be a very important part of the survival process. Now all of a sudden, we have an objection! Hey, a woman should have the right to choose. Oh, I believe she did choose to go to bed with the guy and do what normally causes pregnancy. So there very definitely was choice involved here, and so now if she decides she does not like this baby in there, she is going to have to kill it. Boy, she is going to have to go to terrible extremes here in order to choose what to do with her own body. She is going to have to take the life of this baby that she has conceived with her own actions. Isn't that going way beyond what we have ever thought was right before, conceiving a child than wanting to kill it because of this reason or that. (95percent of legal abortions are done now for birth control purposes and not for birth defects, rape, incest, etc, about the only reasons most states allowed it before.) Instead of having a noble mother here, carrier of the race, we have what sounds like a very spoiled woman who does not want to deny herself untrammeled sexual pleasure to keep from hurting a child she might conceive she won't want. So we have legalized abortion for her convenience so she can kill this baby up to 9 months as long as she does it while it is still inside the womb. Sounds like some very unsettling and cruel lawmakers here, too. Who suddenly don't care what is done to a little baby who shows horrifying signs of pain and anguish as it is being killed as taken in sonograms.
He is calling me insufferable with my down-home-homilies about the existence of God I suppose he means who must be rebuked. Sorry.
Well, I am not killing anyone here. In fact, that is what I am trying to get stopped. I want to see Roe vs Wade over turned. I admired John McCain for stating on The View that abortion should never have been made legal.
I am hoping now for more strength among the women politicians. I think our Governor Janet Brewer is coming on strong, and she will be able to stand beside Sarah Palin as another powerful woman we might think of running for president. I am so proud of Sarah Palin for not aborting her Downs Syndrome child even though she knew that her baby was affected. That took real courage not to do that in this day and age, because she and her husband will be responsible the rest of their lives for the care of that child. But many women before 1973 would have carried such children to full term and raised them.
The advocates for legalized abortion obviously thought society should start eliminating the defectives as a matter of course. Well, we can say this should be a choice, and most states had it on the books that if a child showed serious defects, the mother had the option of an abortion and still many would not have thought of exercising that option. I say that some of these serious reasons for wanting an abortion such as for incest, rape, and serious defects would stay in the law books as justification, but when people use abortion for birth control this strikes me as unconscionable. Abortionists should not be able to perform abortions for such reasons legally. We gave up a lot of integrity in our nation when we made a big business out of abortion. And the people didn't do it.
We have to concede that Supreme Court Judges are only human, they are not infallible. They can make mistakes. They can be flawed people. In this case I thought they did an unprecedented thing to legalize abortion. They went beyond the laws that had been passed to legalize a very significant law themselves which was like renegades taking the power invested in them to express their own beliefs. And we were going to be years undoing this mistake. And getting back on the right path.
In the meantime many people embrace this law especially the younger ones who have not known anything else. To them, a world without legalized abortion would now be foreign and they would not know if it could work.
So older people have to exert their influence over the younger ones to express their own knowledge of the truth of spiritual law.
Dave does not know how high the price came for my testimony of my belief in God. I was facing certain death. I prayed and was guided through a crisis and managed to survive the illness that had come upon me through the actions of others. A woman may very often face death if she stands up to men when she knows they are wrong. That's what I was doing. I expected to be killed, and following this crisis there were more like it. My many years of ordeal started with a man molesting me when I was very young. Then another at ten. I was living in a society where molestation was common, where people were turning blind eyes to it. I just could not safely get it told and dealt with. I could not get justice. The oppressors including my own father was going to stop me, force me to keep my secrets. I was going to have to risk my life to tell it.
So one way or another I was going to bring the men who did it and the men who protected them to justice, even if it included my own father. He protected the molesters rather than me, his own daughter. He would not listen to me. He would not let me tell him because he had been involved in illicit relations with the molesters. That was a way of life on that ranch.
It was going to take me years to get out all I knew about the corruption I saw on that ranch, in that town, and in the town where my father grew up. Women were high pressured not to look at these things. Even my own sister wants to stop me, is fighting my efforts now to get my story out about this kind of corruption. Telling me she did not see it. I am making too big of fuss over it. I am bringing disgrace on the family. As though that huge great big problem did not exist. It was far bigger than I am suggesting here. But she wants things to go on as they are. We are locked in combat over what I insist on telling and where she does not want me to go.
But I am going there because I saw too much, had too much done to me, and saw too much done to others. She can keep on turning a blind eye if she wants to, she can be high pressured into seeing nothing.
But if the crime has touched you, you are not going to be able to deny it, and that is that.
When you stand up to such corrupt people you can be killed. Your life is always in danger as you walk among them. It can even come through a psychiatrist's insistence on giving you electric shock when you know you are too weak and too close to death to get through it.
Because I could not get my secrets out, because of my father's heavy drinking, and violence under the influence, because of the suppression I experienced in that society, because of years of severe prolonged stress, my health broke down at 11 years old and I thought I was going to die.
Dave is a big strong man who is probably one who stresses women, not one who is stressed by them. Women are generally the ones who get murdered in our society. And in a suppressed society, the chances of them being any more than servants and child bearers is slim. They will be abused.
My mother was 8 years younger than my dad but she had to be incredibly strong to live through what he put her through. His homosexual affairs, his temper, his violence. She was afraid of him. He was stronger than she was, and what is more he would not hesitate to threaten with a gun, a butcher knife, whatever he could lay his hands on when he was crazy drunk. He knew he was into homosexual affairs when he married her, but that had become common there in my opinion. She didn't, or if she did, she did not dare even think it, let alone say it. He might have killed her. She was afraid of him, and so was I. I regarded him as an outlaw, especially when he was drunk. I regarded my grandfather especially with a bull whip in his hand as an outlaw. I thought both he and my dad knew that his 14 year old grandson and nephew would be violated on a week long camping trip to take care of the cattle with the hired men. They knew it because I think they had done it.
That is what I was up against, too, and if I did not watch out the hired men would do more than harass me, they might rape me and murder me. That is what kept me awake nights trying to figure out how I could escape this fate. The hired man was after me. He had his eye on me. He was watching me. Stalking me. And I was still under age. Not even into puberty yet.
Danger everywhere. That's what I thought. God help me. Who would save me. How would I escape alive?
So I think about Dave who thinks my beliefs in God are just down-home-homilies that need to be rebuked. I can see he has not been a woman up against the wall with a drunk insane man threatening her life and maybe her kids. How many times has that happened to me? Way too many. It can still happen here when a strong male drug addict neighbor goes on the rampage and for no good reason starts pounding on my door and yelling at me. He's out of his mind on drugs. How am I going to protect myself?
He can even make the men nervous he is so young and strong and if he keeps on like this, they will help get him evicted because he has threatened them, too. Thus my sympathy for cops who must go up against the out of control and dangerous.
I cannot state strong enough how many women in this country must face strong males in their home, drunk or out of their minds on drugs and threatening them. Alcoholism and domestic violence are my issues of a lifetime. But I cannot 'make' any man quit drinking. If he has a tendency toward violence that will bring it out in him.
It is unrealistic to expect women not to have kids or live their lives alone. They will marry whoever is available for them to marry, and if our society is heavily addicted they will team up with alcoholics and drug addicts, because a life alone is no life. A life without a family is half a life. I took a lot of chances to have a family, and with impaired health, I had to depend on alcoholics to support me and the kids some times. I just tried to survive them.
You bring kids in the world and they might drink, too. That's another chance you take, but you get involved. To me, my relationship with Doc is better than being alone. I believe that many and many a good woman companion who put her kids first has helped their fathers to find themselves and even sober up. I believe Dave is reading this blog in spite of himself, in spite of his resistance because it still offers more hope and more reason to him than he can find elsewhere.
He keeps coming back to it, because I keep trying to reach the alcoholics and the addicts like him without ever saying they are a lost cause. I see the chance for redemption for Dave, for control of his thoughts. I believe that if a woman has found God the outlaws will be drawn to her because they know she has been through the fire. She has stood up to the outlaw.
I used to say I was created to ride into hell and bring my father out of his eternal damnation. So I rode with him until he knew I loved him and then they said you are the only one he will listen to. He listened to me because he knew that I cared about him, that I wanted him to have redemption. For that he was going to have to acknowledge and repent his wrong doing. That is what any person has to do to receive God.