Always Farmer's Market on Saturday morning!

I purchased corn on the cob, cucumbers, tomatoes, potato, onion, and peaches this morning in a quick trip to market as Doc was off to Fresh N' Easy to get his favorite bread, sourdough green chili, yes!
My neighbor came home with some fresh beets that looked awfully good. I would cook the greens, too. I do believe in the very freshest vegetables you can find and just across the street, too!
I will have to take my little water cart and go get fresh water, too, over to the Circle K where you can buy it for 25 cents a gallon.

The newspaper reported indignation from the government in Mexico over the shooting of a 15 year old boy who was throwing rocks at the border control agents. Another story on the Internet reports another Mexican teen confessing to killing a border control agent somewhere by San Diego. He is on trial.
I am still gathering stories on the Immigration problem. There will be another Stand with Arizona rally today at Bolin Park across from the state capitol in Phoenix with the weather expected to be considerably cooler than to the last one. Out of state people are in danger of expiring if hit with one of our early 110 degree days when they are not prepared for it.
I am getting settled in for the usual hot summer in Phoenix with the only relief for me in our giant sized swimming pool, newly renovated and all ready for use. Hardier souls are already jumping into it, but they don't have Hashimoto's as I do!
I was talking to another resident out in the patio who told me she has Hashimotos and that it affects your body temperature so that you get cold and stay cold longer than other people. (I knew that!) She said it tends to run in families. She was told that both parents have to have it in their genes to pass it on.
I talked to her long enough to hear a very sad story that almost completely echoed one that Doc and I had just seen on a true crime station on cable. She married a guy from a foreign country and went there to live with him. When their son, born there, was so old she found photos her husband had taken of him that bordered on porno. She called the police, but they did nothing, and she was thrown out of his home by her husband who retained the child. Her parents paid for her passage home, but her child remains beyond her reach. She is a fighter who just keeps thinking of things she might be able to do. But she has quite a serious weight problem related to Hashimoto's, which affects the thyroid and causes hypothyroidism which I also have.
The different stories of disability that affect the younger residents are always interesting.
I also promised my mother (passed) that I would interview her sometime in my blog as she is now up to going around and visiting her daughters and grandchildren, accompanied by my sister LaRae who has also passed. She thinks I just as well interview her as I have other relatives since she was so involved in my memoirs of childhood. I reported that she was a mean mother. Let's see what she has to say.

GERRY: Mother, how do you like this photo? It is my favorite of all I have seen of you in your 'twilight' years.
MOTHER: It will do. It might surprise you to learn that I do consider myself to have been quite mean to you, not realizing all you were keeping from me in an effort to 'protect' me, namely that Bill Isabel molested you at the age of 5.
GERRY: It was a decision I made at the time that I have to stand by now, even though I did make some attempt to start surfacing what had happened at the age of 8.
MOTHER: Which I never heard about. I must confess that I learned a lot about the Kings marrying into the family but what you say you saw I did not, so I was handicapped in dealing with the man I married.
GERRY: It just struck me the way they were both acting that something was going on when Daddy took us along to go visit him so often.
MOTHER: I was not aware where you were going all the time, but I trusted Clyde to take you girls when he was sober. That way I was able to go ahead and work in the house and get things done.
GERRY: I got the idea he was a little nervous about going to see him during the day but took us along to kind of add respectability. Which caused me to feel quite indignant. This was the first time it occurred to me that he might be having some kind of affair with this man. I remember thinking that I was not too aware that men might have sex with each other but I thought something unusual was going on, since they were going inside and staying around an hour or so. Daddy said they had some kind of business, and we weren't to knock on the door or bother them in any way. Years later, another bit of information surfaced suggesting that Bill might have been making moonshine and selling it, and so Daddy could have been involved with that, too, but I would still say some hanky panky was going on, since Bill was later so sexual with me, and he also said something to Daddy one day that was the most obscene thing I had ever heard an adult man say, as they were walking up to the cabin door. I was walking along beside them so Bill had to know I could hear it.
MOTHER: I have had a lot to say to Clyde about taking you girls along with him and involving you in whatever he was doing.
GERRY: I never expected us to have this conversation right off about what happened during those visits. I recall running all over that property to play, including down in the bottom of the hill where we found some very deep gullies. Daddy never came out once to see where we were. He trusted us to take care of ourselves, but I thought later, we were only 4 and 5 when we were running all over that property. I even asked Barbara Coleman to go along with us once so I could show her the gullies, when she came to visit once. Barbara told her mother and her mother told her she was never to go over there again, and to come home when we said we were going to Bill's.
MOTHER: That's what made me so furious, to think all this was going on under my nose and I did not know hardly a thing about it.
GERRY: I am getting awfully tired of going over and over it, so everybody will know just what happened.
MOTHER: If you are going to write a memoir you want to get published, you had better talk about it first, before you take it that far.
GERRY: Just where have you talked to Daddy over there?
MOTHER: After I recovered enough so I could talk I requested that I be allowed to see him. He agreed to talk to me since it was about you.
GERRY: Did he get mad? Was he on the defensive.
MOTHER: No, he just let me say what I heard happened. I told him this was a major crime had it been reported and just because it wasn't didn't mean that we shouldn't treat it like one. Since it had done so much damage. I told him I felt it had affected your health in time. It and his alcoholism. He of course said he did not know what Bill had done. I am not clear who took it upon themselves to scare Bill out of the country by taking a shot at him. This was supposed to be after you began to tell some garbled story about him molesting the little Baker girl older than you which she said never happened. But whoever heard this story must have thought some molesting happened, only since Bill had worked for your dad, it more likely happened to you. Clyde just listened to me. I guess he had been here long enough he had gotten tired of denying what happened. I told him that I had decided he had not been on the up and up with me when he married me. But I married him in haste without knowing a lot about him, and was no different than other women who married men like him. I think they thought it was not necessary to tell a prospective wife what their previous sexual activities had been. Otherwise they would likely not find anyone to marry. So I think Clyde decided it was time for him to get married, and I thought he was smart and had prospects of earning a good living, so I took the chance. I have since talked to my dad about the whole thing. He agreed that he didn't think I would be happy with a bad drinker, which certainly proved to be true, but I was a headstrong girl who was determined to marry who I wanted to.
I think marriages like that are still going on, but I was just unfortunate enough to marry a drinker as well as one mixed up with such goings on. I was too young and naive to be suspicious, even after. So this is a mighty dreary story of a marriage.
GERRY: Do you think I am doing naive women a favor to write my story? That's what I am going for.
MOTHER: If any of them will listen. It is a horrifying enough story. Probably the only thing worse that could have happened to me is if I died of pneumonia or flu like some did, because that was before the invention of antibiotics.
GERRY: It's no wonder you have not recovered enough before now to come and talk about it. Good Lord, it is no wonder I can't go to Utah. I am still recovering from that child hood ordeal.
MOTHER: I always felt I was a very strong girl which I had to be to survive marriage with your dad.
GERRY: Well, he surely had to be strong to survive his life of ranching in such primitive ways camping out for days.
MOTHER: His father was an exceptionally strong man because he did not drink or smoke, but he was a mean one, a ruthless man. You had to be so tough to run cattle the way he did it. So I don't know exactly how he was involved in what happened to Clyde and his other sons, but I know I told him he was never to take a bullwhip to Clyde again which he had done when Clyde was 32 years old. What kind of father does that?
GERRY: I don't know. Grandpa is probably the key to what happened to Daddy. My impression was that Grandpa may have gotten into homosexual activities camping out with other men years before he married Grandma. She was a very naive religious girl, so I think he was able to continue on with those after he married her with little problem. He established her in a home in Escalante and then he homesteaded the ranch in Salt Lake and added another ranch in Boulder to his holdings later on. She came to the ranches in the summer which were over 30 miles away by bad roads and left in the winter so the children could go to school in 'town.'
MOTHER: Men tend to get into mischief when they are away from their wives any time at all which is why most women try to keep them at their side at all times.
GERRY: Everybody was very impressed with him because although he did not drink and smoke, he did not seem to need church to keep him straight. He would support town projects with money, but he just would not go to church, even though he did not stop his wife from her church going. But his boys, living in town all winter, got to running wild and out of control of his wife and sampling alcohol. I think that since alcohol releases inhibitions they were more susceptible to whatever bad influences they ran into, either in town or on the ranch. I don't know how involved Grandpa was in all this, but if he was in the habit of mixing it up with the hired men when he camped out, which was a lot, or in the winter when they were gone, the boys might have become aware of it, especially Daddy who probably was drafted to go do the riding on the range a lot. His older brother Glen married young and started a family, and his other older brother Reed was very frail from severe childhood illnesses so was probably not even able to go camp out in the winter. Daddy's younger brother Max might have been more protected since he was the youngest in the family, born nearly ten years after he was.
MOTHER: Clyde was 'managing' that ranch when I married him, since Grandpa was too old by then to do a lot of the heavy work. But Grandpa did not want to pay him hardly anything. He wanted control of all the money that ranch earned. He felt Clyde was unreliable because he was a bad drinker. I intend to go and study his dad more, since I have five daughters by his son. I need to know what happened to him and why as much as you do. I have always been one to send away for books on the subject, and I intend to seek knowledge about this condition in the other world. In a few years I will probably know a lot more about it than I do now.
GERRY: Well, thanks, Mother, that sounds like a good idea. I am sure you will. We will surely meet again in the sweet bye and bye.

Angelina and I lunch at nearby Chinese Restaurant

We had a very good lunch to a Chinese restaurant I can see from my apartment. She brought me flowers for my hats I had arranged to buy from her some time ago. I love the way they change a hat. We caught up on all kinds of things before we parted, she to go home to her little kids, Carlo and Bella Rosa. My grandson and her son, Dante, is living in Calif. and going to school. He will have a birthday at the end of this month, so we talked about that. She promises to call with his address so I can send him a card. I love getting together with Angelina as she is a kind and lively girl. We also talk on Facebook! I will put these photos of her up there. Angelina said she likes the videos Doc and I make for You tube, so she is a dear girl for that. She is trying to lose weight so she will probably appreciate the last one for the women with beefy arms, only her arms and legs are very slender. She is not built like a sausage.



I spent some time this morning sending off some books I purchased on a trip to Borders yesterday. I had such a great outing over there. I bought "A Sudden Shot" for my sister Linda for her birthday since she lived here then and agonized over these two serial killers terrorizing Phoenix in 2006. I bought a book I could not resist called "The Soul of a Dog" about a man and his border collie Rose, other dogs and animals inhabiting his small farm. He says he could not handle this farm without Rose, especially in the winter back east. I can remember how my dad said he could not get along without a cow dog that could learn sic 'em. (which means he runs and nips the calf to turn it back into the herd saving a man on a horse considerable chasing) He tried to teach a number of dogs sic 'em which they just could not learn. Finally he acquired Sox who was part Australian Shepherd and he was the ranch cow dog for a number of years after wards because he learned sic 'em very well.
I loved the book which touched me, reminding me of all the farm animals I had known and loved. Since Raymond is very busy I decided to send it to my sister Ann who did a lot of farm work and she can send it on to him. I also bought a pocketbook of quotations to send to Amrita in India who writes the blog Yesu Gardens. She has been having a rough time lately with the heat in India coming on strong just like it does here, only their air conditioning is not as reliable as mine is. Amrita said she would like a book of quotations a long time ago when I was sending her a few books.
I got an urge to do karaoke which I get every now and then which is strange for a woman who can't sing but owns a karaoke machine. I found the Ace karaoke company on line with a sale on Christmas ones so I must see if I can talk Doc into buying early since he is the one who can carry a tune supposedly. He ought to be able to as much music as he listens to. I also want to find some funny country western as his karoake videos are his most popular.
He called for me to come down and see something, so now I am curious and must go!

Ranch Homestead book created for Boulder Heritage Festival by Sister Ann, and neices, Camille and Cheryl

The scenes are from a page featuring my mother and her store, government corral scenes west of the store, and my Grandfather King building 'rip gut' fence. Click to read print.

I just got my copy of this impressive book, the subject of much research by the authors, my nieces, Cheryl Roundy Cox and Camille Griffin Hall, and my sister Ann K. Roundy. The photos are all in color whenever possible. I thought this was a very original idea to trace the ranch history back to the original homesteads up to property owners of the present time. I am sure many will want to keep a copy of this book around. My sister Ann had the foundation send me one for my birthday. I will treasure it.
I also got a newsletter to which I subscribed listing other original books that will be available this summer to the festival. One is a cookbook with original paintings that features old pioneer recipes (I love those). The other book is a series of sketches of pioneer women of Boulder submitted by relatives and others. Cheryl said she got a good number of contributions so that should be another book of memory for people who have an interest in Boulder history. My sister Ann is also hurrying to see if she can finish a book she has been working on called The Escalante Staircase Monument and Me, featuring photographs along the way and her text. I can hardly wait to see that one!
I am very pleased to see publishing these books become an important part of the Boulder Heritage Foundation activities, especially since I am working on my memoirs about growing up there. I don't know that they will publish mine, but my niece has certainly encouraged me to overcome all the obstacles in my way and continue my writing of them.
My son Raymond King Shurtz is the other member of the Heritage Foundation who has been working on it from the beginning. He will emcee the music part of the 3 day festival held on the grounds of the Anazazi Indian Center, a lovely spot. Some of the history features will be done outside as well as inside the center in conference rooms. This year a Smithsonian roots of music display exhibit will be shown this summer. A Bake oven cook off dinner is always featured which is just delicious.
I have been very sorry not to make it up there this summer, but I have been involved in so many conflicts about the issues I am addressing in my memoirs that I decided to give it one more year or so before putting in an appearance. I don't want to run into any unpleasantness since I have been featuring my memoirs so far in my blog and have also been writing other pretty controversial entries. I wanted more people from Utah to read my blog but I expected there to be reactions.
My neo counter as you can check and see (click cities) suggests that a number of people from Utah have tapped into my blog. In fact my neo counter registers 85 hits from Cedar City, Utah, which puzzles me, as I know my relatives are not reading my blog to that extent, who live there.
But I grew up on ranches in Boulder and I did quite a lot of cow punching with my dad and Grandfather King. I was a child of the times when horses were even more important than they are now in the ranching world. Since my dad had no sons I had more opportunity to do boy's work than most girls, which was a mixed blessing for me and my sisters. We had no electricity or running water in the house when I lived there, so our work was double what it would be today or more, having to build fires all the time for heating, washing, cooking, and bottling. It's no wonder I developed chronic fatigue as a child which I attribute more to the stress I experienced from my dad's alcoholism which had tragic consequences in the King family.

Critic objects to alcoholic Doc blowing chunks all over the Internet on my channel

Here is a quote from Bill about Doc: so we wind up with the "free entertainment" that is a Daughter of a Shadowman and her depressingly self-destructive side-kick Doc, an arrogant pity-magnet whom you have no business propping up to blow chunks all over the internet whilst he swirls his way down a HUD-subsidized toy-toy to an alchoholic demise.

Here is Doc's response to this criticism: Doc said...

This missive is directed toward Bill Pasadeaux aka David Albert. I don't blog. Gerry, on the other hand, does. She read your comment on her blog to me. Because you see I am blind. So therefore I was unable to read your fantastic unbelievable, intellectually stupifying comments. See, Dave, actually I can use words longer than the f-- word. We made a video which will not be posted on You Tube about what I really think about you and please stay on methodone. If you want to see the video I will send you a copy and I won't even charge you $2.50 for it like you did me on the CDs. And by the way thanks for the compliment about me blowing chunks out of the Internet on these videos on Youtube. I didn't know I was that powerful. I know I can pass gas butt. Gerry said HUD is enabling him but his alcoholic demise is not coming soon enough. She is promising not to read any more comments to me from Bill or Dave or whoever the hell you are. Dictated by not read.

And here is my response in a video, appropriately I thought. See what you think.

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.

Latest news on SB1070, Arizona's new Immigration law

"Obama Asks Supreme Court to Overturn Napolitano-Endorsed Immigration Law
By La Shawn Barber • June 7, 2010 09:16 AM

I’m convinced the federal government has no intention of enforcing immigration laws against illegal aliens from Mexico.

But that isn’t the worst. The government wants to give illegal aliens from Mexico amnesty and a “path” to citizenship. Republican George Bush tried to push through an amnesty bill, and failed, and Democrat Barack Obama eventually will try to push through an amnesty bill.

The Department of Justice, squarely on the side of non-citizens on this issue, has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision that upheld a 2007 Arizona employer immigration law signed by the Department of Homeland Security’s Janet Napolitano when she was the Democratic governor of Arizona. (Source) The same year, Oklahoma’s Democratic governor Brad Henry reluctantly signed into law a similar bill.

Called the toughest sanction against employers who hire illegal aliens, the law requires Arizona employers to verify the status of employees through the Basic Pilot Program. First offenders who “knowingly” hire illegal aliens will lose their license for up to 10 days. Second offenders (on probation) face permanent license revocation.

As FOX News points out, our own Congress allows an exception to federal immigration law enforcement (emphasis added):

“The provisions of this section preempt any state or local law imposing civil or criminal sanctions (other than through licensing and similar laws) upon those who employ unauthorized aliens.”

Is Obama’s DOJ ignorant of this exception? That Arizona’s employer law was endorsed by his current homeland security chief and upheld by the left-leaning 9th Circuit apparently has no influence in Obama’s DOJ."

It looks as though President Obama is against what Arizona is doing even going back as far as 2007 to a law our then Governor Janet Napolitano signed into law with the toughest sanctions yet against employers who hire illegals.

I also read that Los Angeles Country voted to boycott Arizona because of the law. That will be uncomfortable. A few years ago California tried to get tough laws against immigration passed because then San Diego was a corridor across which many illegals passed. Now I read that a border fence below San Diego has been built to deter far more illegals from passing which is the kind of fence Senators McCain and Kyl are talking about to better fix the problem at the border instead of after they have crossed and settled in somewhere.

As I have said before we better not get too attached to this law since our President appears to be very much against it, but we can hope that all the support may convince our president that he needs to address this problem in a way that is going to satisfy the states contending with so much illegal immigration.

Touching moment in a Tea Party rally when a speaker talks about keeping God in our country's thoughts

This video touched me as I was thinking about the most difficult volunteer work I have ever done which is protest legalized abortion for years as a pro life believer. It is still the most difficult subject I ever write about. This veteran in this video I am sure experienced some moments of danger when he thought he was going home to his God on the battlefield which comes across in his response to the speaker by singing our country's national anthem. The left is trying to demonize the tea party movement, implying it has roots of violence in it and racism, but has never acknowledged that legalized abortion meant a turning away from God and the values of many Christian religions that was unprecedented.

I was always very fascinated with the stories of thinkers who may have spent years contemplating the nature of God in retreats, monasteries, or nunneries. There are many places where people have gone to do this work. And until Roe vs Wade it was common for newspapers to do stories on religious thinkers and movements. Respected thinkers like Paul Tillich and others would write articles for newspapers. It was a different kind of society not divided into pro choice and pro life factions that disagreed with each other to the point that pro life thinkers were pushed out of representation in the newspapers as much as possible by the controlling pro choice faction.
So it has taken quite a long time for people to take in what has happened and to try to decide how to 'take the country back.' Actually it is the left which has supported a violent solution while not above accusing the right of being the party of violence. Directly contradicting what the democratic party has come to stand for as the pro choice party. I became very alarmed when I saw a video on You tube claiming that Obama was going to be responsible for 7 million deaths during his tenure of office, which I found out meant the amount of abortions expected to be performed in this country with the democrat pro choice faction determined to make abortion rights untouchable with Obama's promise to help them do it. It seems that the health care plan including abortion funding was one of the ways they were going to do it. A pro life republican faction and some pro life democrats forced Obama to promise that he as president would issue an executive order that would exclude abortion funding if the pro life democrat Stupak and others would sign it. So they did. Now we will see if he keeps his promise.
But since I believe that we all survive death, I also believe that aborted children will survive death which paints a staggering picture of the numbers of children that must be cared for like orphans of a holocaust which they are. To me, it is no wonder that every morning when I prayed and asked what my creator needed me to do he said protest abortion. This was a thankless job for years. Nobody was going to reward me for it. It would not pay. In those years all the writers who went pro choice and echoed the new philosophy that justifies legalized abortion would make money. They would keep their jobs, get books published. I could not get books published because I would protest abortion in them. Talk show hosts in order to stay popular dropped the subject of abortion from their shows, and if they did not openly go pro choice they kept silent about the way the country had gone.
Their silence was not strong enough. Nothing would change with them ignoring it. Even churches like the Mormon one had trouble expressing strong enough protests about abortion to make any difference. The Catholic Church as it had done for centuries continued to be the strongest church voice speaking out against abortion in our land. I have seen some very powerful messages sent out by the Catholic church to the public at large.
I have not affiliated myself with any church just because I thought their responses to this weakening of our moral fiber at the core, in a mother's protection of her fetus in the womb, was not strong enough, that I could do more independently than I could affiliated. Even though I am always supportive of any church's efforts to work on this issue. I had to decide how I thought I could be the most effective.
Protesting did not make me popular in my family. My sister remained pro choice up until her death of ovarian cancer at 51 which I thought would continue to affect her daughters. I clashed with another sister, a nurse, who opened a clinic under Planned Parenthood in Utah. She felt that she was in the clear on abortion because her clinic would not be performing abortions, but Planned Parenthood's prosperity came from their abortion clinics, not from the clinics that just did other procedures. The fees charged for abortion is what made this provider a multi-million dollar business.
Just recently in a fight I had with this sister she accused me of being a frivolous person who did not care about making money, but just spending it (my father's inheritance) and my kids knew that I could not help them with money because I did not make any. I have said that I had hoped to make money as a writer, but legalized abortion intervened in 1973. I was penalized over and over for my pro life beliefs and for writing constant letters of protest to the papers over the abortion propaganda they were printing. I could not get my plays produced because I was soon regarded as a fanatic in a theater world gone pro choice. I had clashes with other playwrights over my reviews of pro choice plays.
I wrote volumes of protests on the issue of legalized abortion, copies of which I saved, knowing very well that the newspaper would not print any of them! They printed letters from the head of Planned Parenthood in Arizona, who became the National Head still sending them letters, and they printed letters from her successor in Arizona, and a number of letters from the leading abortion doctor, Dr. Finley, up until he was charged for molesting women who came for abortions in his clinic and sent to prison. But I was too fanatical ever to be printed, as I still am today in that newspaper. An old staff writer has still been retained by the Republic after they sold to Garnett who would now see I never got printed. But I could only be printed anyway on a limited basis so I don't let that bother me now I have outlets elsewhere in my blog and on You Tube. For the record only one letter of mine has ever been printed in the Arizona Republic in 35 years of protest letters.
I still talk about the Republic often in which I still get news reports as well as on the Internet.
But my sister's accusation about my frivolous personality and inability to make money did not set well especially since she has made her money the last ten years before retirement in a Planned Parenthood Clinic. She would get upset because she would be picketed every year by protesters of legalized abortion, saying, I don't know why my clinic is being picketed, I don't do abortions. (Mormons don't believe in abortion) but it was the name Planned Parenthood that was being picketed, and because she wasn't fussy bout operating under their banner she got picketed, too, I thought rightfully so. Had she been providing abortions which are not provided at too many clinics in Utah, she would probably have been picketed daily by some protesters.
I thought I could be more effective as a protest writer than walking a picket line at an abortion clinic, so I chose the writers way to protest. The pro choice faction had to read my letters or recognize my name to reject them, which was as far as many protest letters started to get after the initial flurry of protest letters were printed for a few years following Roe vs Wade.
I think if my sister had really wanted to protest abortion, she should have gotten out of that clinic and figured out how she as a nurse could fight for the cause, but I felt she did not want to go into the problem deep enough to do that. So she remained a quasi-protester, not really strong in what she was saying because she was not backing it up in action. And she made money that she is now criticizing me for not making.
My writing is permeated with pro life beliefs. I stand by them. If I had to live in poverty for years over them, so be it. I would not profit by going pro choice to the slightest degree, because that is what helps keep legalized abortion going. Every person who decides to go along even if they don't believe in it.
We have seen God disappear from our lives in America by the Supreme Court deciding to legalize abortion. We know very well God is not going to be with us on this one. The pro choice faction claims we have to have the legalized killing abortion entails to survive in a crowded world. Every country has it. Somehow or another this has become something akin to saving the whale and the polar bear, going green, go abortion. How that got into the mix is a wonder to me but shows how people can justify whatever they want to justify if they are hung up enough on certain solutions. And the left certainly got hung up on abortion.
It was really going to take some undoing of what a leftist Supreme Court did in making it a fait accompli over night. Those who tended to think that way then jumped on it to protect this decision, and so they have done that for 35 years, which has essentially divided our country into those who do not believe God sanctions abortion and those who are willing to diminish the importance of God, or the idea of God, to protect abortion rights.
The decision about whether there is just cause to go to war has been disputed, but both sides have generally come to agreement that there must be compelling reasons, and if the reasons were not compelling enough as in the Iraqi war both sides have lost their enthusiasm and belief in the cause and faith in the President that led them into this war. God is not going to be on our side unless we have been attacked and must fight to keep evil from engulfing the world. We have participated in those wars. But this is not the case with the fetus, an innocent victim who does not deserve to die for just about any reason as is legal in this country now. How can that be right? I would rather we all went down together in an overcrowded world instead of singling out the fetus as a less painful way to us to do population control.
You may wonder when I will ever come to the end of writing on this subject. When Roe vs Wade is overturned. Remember I have 35 years of suppressed writing on this subject in my file cabinet, time enough to form many thoughts about the attack on human life at the beginning to 'save' our world so we can have a better standard of living. Yes!