April 5, 1969. San Francisco.

Hrmmmmm. Brrrrrmmmmm. 

I can hear the deep thrum of the bass guitars from the rock group on the sound truck way ahead in the line of march. It resonates in my chest. They’re playing a piece I don’t recognize, with strange minor harmonies like music for the end of the world.

“Who is it?” I ask some people coming the other way.

“The Grateful Dead,” they tell me. 

“Far out!” my friend says. “And we’ve already passed The Byrds and Jefferson Airplane. The best rock groups in San Francisco are part of this demonstration.”

“Everybody’s part of this demonstration,” I say, glancing around at the throng that curb to curb fills the wide street in the Haight-Ashbury district. Many are hippies, with long hair and love beads — a tribe I will soon join. They have been passing us six Los Angeles church ladies as we sit resting on a low wall for what seems like an hour — more and more people carrying signs, and chanting, “Hell no, we won’t go.” Their faces are grave, because we are protesting graves, so many American graves from the senseless Vietnam War.

October 15, 2011. Encinitas, California

But that was forty-three years ago, and today I am on my way to go with my sister Diane and her husband Dave to another protest march for a different painful issue — the recession. Here in this wealthy North County beach town, we are going to show our participation in the Occupy San Diego movement. Will it be like the old days? I hope this will be not just an exercise in nostalgia, but a useful political action.

When I arrive at my sister’s elegant house, she has squares of stiff brown cardboard and a box of felt pens ready. “Let’s make our signs before lunch,” she says. We hunker down on the floor like kindergarteners in art class and discuss the possibilities. “There are so many issues that are part of this mess,” she says. “The banks, election reform, the wars, health care, the corporations and the rich not paying their fair share… But we need to ask for something specific, something that can actually be done.”

“Yes, and we need to say it in three or four words so people passing by can get it in one glance.” Peace is always the central issue. That hasn’t changed since 1969, so I pick up a pen and print “Cut the military budget” in big letters. On the back I write “Out of Iraq and Afghanistan.” I have to think a minute about the spelling of the last word.

“Put a skull on it,” Di suggests. I have a hard time with the shape, but when I add round black eyes it looks pretty good. My sister the financial planner is more subtle; her sign says “Corporate money corrupts Congress.”

“Nice alliteration,” I comment. She starts decorating the “c’s” with triangles that look like teeth. “But where did you hear that we’re not supposed to have sticks for the signs?”

“That’s the way it was with the crowd on the news last night. I guess it’s for safety. And by the way, I read that oil combines with pepper spray to reduce the burn. Do you want to use some face cream?”

“Di, come on. This is Encinitas.”

“Well, I saw a kid get sprayed on television last night.” She’s right; I remember.

“And another thing, did you use sun screen this morning? And did you bring a hat?”

“Yes, yes. Jeepers, you’d think YOU were the big sis.”

We eat a quick lunch of cold chicken and fruit. I am anxious to get going, afraid that we will arrive after the march has departed and we won’t be able to find the others.

“Aren’t we going to wait for Dave?” I ask when she picks up her purse and her sign.

“He’ll come later, after his meeting is over,” she assures me. I ‘m surprised to find that I’m a little uneasy not to have a man with us.

When we arrive at the assembly place — the intersection of Encinitas Boulevard and Pacific Coast Highway — we see that the plan is not to march anywhere, but to hold a stable occupation of all four corners. I rejoice to see that there are lots of protestors — maybe 500 — most of them in their forties or fifties, nicely dressed and holding hand-lettered signs. There can be no doubt that this is a grass-roots movement and not sponsored by any outfit rich enough to pay for professional signs. We join the group and begin holding out our slogans to the oncoming traffic. People show each other what they have written and exchange approving words and high fives. Many facets of the causes of the recession are expressed on the signs. The big placard of the tall man next to me says, predictably, “We’re mad as hell and we aren’t going to take it any more!” Another urges “Bail out people, not banks!” My favorite is an adaptation of a commercial “going out of business” sign with “America is” written in at the top, and “Politicians for sale — cheap!” added at the bottom. That is, it’s my favorite until my heart rejoices to spot an older man holding a reproduction of the iconic Mothers for Peace image: a single flower and the words “War is not healthy for children or other living things.” He and I exchange reminiscences of the Old Days, and I tell him I used to have a lapel pin with that image on it.

The crowd keeps on growing, and with it, a feeling of jubilation. The traffic passing four ways at the intersection is an ideal situation for getting our message to the most people in a short time. Cars honk approval as they pass, and we yell encouragement back at them. I am astonished at how many passers-by seem to be with us. They wave and smile and — oh joy! — flash peace signs with two uplifted fingers. In sharp contrast to my former experience in demonstrations — for peace, for civil rights, for women’s equality — there is not one ugly shout, not one mean look. Can it be that the American public, even in this conservative upper-middle-class town, is fed up and ready for action? With the guidance of the protest leaders, we begin to chant joyfully. “We ARE—the ninety-nine percent!” and “WE’VE been sold out! YOU’VE been sold out!” We cross the street with the change of light, holding our placards high; we lean out from the curb to show our messages, and the shouting and honking gets louder and louder. My sober, scientific brother-in-law Dave turns up in the crowd, having as much fun as a kid let out of school.

Then a massive red truck comes down the street and honks with a mighty air horn as he turns the corner. Laughter and cheers greet the driver. The story passes through the crowd: “His mother is standing on that corner, and she called him on her cell phone and told him to get his truck over here.” But then — “The cops have pulled him over! Let’s go protest his arrest!” A group of about a hundred hurries down the block.

“This could get ugly,” I think. I tag along at first to see what will happen, but then decide to watch from across the street like a wise coward. Soon the group straggles back. “What happened?” I ask.

“Aw, they gave the guy a ticket. I’m hoarse from yelling at the cop, but it didn’t do any good,” says a young man. I give thanks that nobody lost control and shouted an obscenity at the police and got themselves arrested. THAT would make a pretty story on the evening news. The media, I had learned, always goes for the most sensational aspect of any story. So where IS the media? The protest has been going on for two hours, and there has been no sign of interest from local TV stations. I notice one young girl taking notes and ask, “Are you the media?”

“Well, not really,” she says modestly. “I’m doing an article for my high school newspaper. Can I interview you?” So I give her my best sound bites. At last, when things are beginning to wind down, an NBC channel 7 truck arrives, and a lone cameraman sets up on one corner with a tripod. I tell him the story about the truck, but he just looks at me with a blank face and tired eyes. Later, I hear that an elderly woman sitting in a chair on the curb has been coming to this corner with protest signs for four years. When I talk with her, I find that she is articulate and informed, and has run for Congress three times, so I go back to the cameraman, point her out to him, and am gratified when he takes his mike over to interview her.

Di and I, although we are exhilarated and still having fun, are getting tired arms from holding up our signs, so we reluctantly decide to leave, but Dave is enjoying himself and elects to stay for a while longer. On the way home I feel cleansed and hopeful, but that evening when we look at the news, although it is heartening to see crowds all over the world supporting the movement, I am discouraged to see that for our little North County protest the camera has caught only one of the four street corners, making the crowd look meager. However, the elderly woman in the chair is given a good fifteen seconds on camera to make our many complex points.

But was anybody listening? Did we make a difference forty-three years ago in race relations, gender equality, ending war? How long is it going to take this time?

. . . . . . . .

Patty Campbell is a former librarian and belly dancer who lives on an avocado ranch in Fallbrook.

Occupy Encinitas photo from The Leucadia Blog.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

You know that thing we used to have to do at the end of summer, the thing that whopped you upside the head with the brutal inevitability that vacation was over, that tar-bubble popping adventures and rhubarb-sucking loll-abouts were done, done and gone with the finality of a bee between your naked foot and the clover that enticed the insect to its death and you, to your hopping pain? You know, that “What I did for summer vacation” short essay assignment that taunted you from the dusty cool of the blackboard and picked at the mosquito bites oozing down your leg, making them itch all over again — as though defining your youthful joys would pack them away and yank from more distant springtime memories some mythically compliant learning mode?

Yep, that. I really hated that. Yet that’s what I wish I had to do right now. Being over and done with my summer vacation would be far preferable to what I’m actually doing right in the middle of it — studying families and gender and theater and social taboos.

What the hell was I thinking!

Well, what I was thinking was that it would be really cool to cram a cacaload of courses into a five-week intensive session. What I was not thinking about were the emotional repercussions of such an academic extravagance.

I was not thinking about our national descent into the ignominious status of having the highest poverty rates in the Western industrialized world, until I read a chapter from Sharon Hays’ Flat Broke With Children about a punitive welfare system designed to avoid making welfare payments; a system eager to drop families from its rolls and into economic oblivion when mothers are too sick to work or have chronically-ill or disabled family members to care for or they can’t keep jobs in a heartless economy; a system rich in self-righteous moralizing that calls denying aid to the impoverished success.

And now California will add to the rosters of the economically disappeared as mothers and children try to make sense of the 8-percent cut to their welfare-to-work checks, passed by the state legislature in last week’s budget bill. What do you suppose these mothers and children will do to fill the gap between the whopping $700 per month they used to receive and the new rate for a family of three — $640?

Neither was I thinking about the intimate pain of The Laramie Projec, until the play unfolded the linens of the town where Matthew Shepard was beaten and left in the darkness of homophobia to die; or the ambivalence of Matt’s fellow college student who played a gay man in Angels In America, yet mimicked the script of his church and parents that “Homosexuality is wrong”; or the 10-years-later perspective of the same young man, still ambivalent.

And now San Diego has a beating victim of its own, but this victim is homeless and gay, not a middle-class college student and gay. Will anyone write a play about Jason “Cowboy” Huggins, bashed in the head with a rock and not expected to live?

Nor was I thinking about wartime rape, until Lynn Nottage’s Ruined played unrelenting scenes of battling Congolese factions making war between women’s legs — with penises, sticks, gun barrels, bayonets, broken bottles…

And now, despite the United Nations’ 2008 resolution declaring rape a weapon of war, the ruination continues in the Democratic Republic of Congo — and the United States of America, where 3,158 incidents of sexual assault in the military were reported in 2010.

And I think I’ll stop there.

Perhaps the season’s joys can be salvaged. Maybe not. Maybe they shouldn’t be. But I could sure use a little break, a wee respite to suck sun-warmed sour from the neighbor’s purloined rhubarb or pop roadside tar bubbles in the summer’s shimmering heat.

Love,
K-B

Crossposted by the Ocean Beach Rag and San Diego Gay & Lesbian News.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

My mother tried to make a sandwich with the TV remote control.

It might seem sadly funny, but there was some context for her pursuit: She was watching a cooking show from her hospital bed. Watching and processing in her own inimitable style, and she just didn’t like the way the celebrity chef was doing it. She didn’t know where she was, but she knew she could do better.

“I need to put the bread on top,” she said with the slurred tongue of a stroke victim, pointing the remote in the television’s general direction.

“Yes, that would be good, but the remote won’t do that for you, Mother.”

She persisted, and my heart shrank into that tidily distant place that allows the practical to reign supreme, as I searched for unemotional words to explain to the hospital staff that Houston, we’ve had a problem; Houston, my mother is leaving us; Houston—

But then it occurred to me how glorious a response Mother’s was. How satisfying it would be to encounter idiocy, point the remote and press a button to fix it. I relished the thought as the chef smeared a heinous concoction on bread made from special grains probably harvested by child laborers in some far-off fascist stronghold.

Someplace like Libya or Saudi Arabia or Yemen, where people donate their lives for the hope of freedom; where women just want to be able to drive themselves to the market, unfettered by male watchdogs; where the innocent are splattered on city walls while power-seekers conduct pissing contests overhead with deadly weapons.

Wouldn’t it be great to be able to just push a button on the remote and fix it all?

Or how about someplace like Uganda or Afghanistan or Colombia, where ignorance and hate might try again to decree death on homosexuals; where girls and women are tortured for trying to learn; where Chiquita swapped lives for bananas.

Hit the button and — zap! — all the bad guys are gone.

Or even someplace like the United States, where people I love are not allowed to marry or to be themselves without institutionalized condemnation; where women’s wombs are purchased with the campaign contributions of ideologues and theocrats; where free speech has descended to profanity; where voters cast their lots for their wallets and politicians run on egos — not ideals.

Zap, zap, zap, zap — all better!

Yes, Mother’s new world seemed a more satisfying — a healthier — place to be. Just point, press and be done with the horror. Except—

“This is frustrating,” she slurred through the neural fog, thrusting the remote at the chef with quixotic determination, pressing random buttons to no avail.

“Here,” I took the remote, “let me help you with that.” I held the thing with both hands, aimed at the bastard chef and fired with rage. “Bull’s eye — got the sucker! He didn’t know how to make a sandwich, anyway. And look: It’s one of your judge shows.”

She relaxed into the pillows, half a whispered smile on her peaceful face.

Love,
K-B

Crossposted at Ocean Beach Rag, The Progressive Post and  San Diego Gay and Lesbian News.

White House White Board

Austan Goolsbee, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, discusses the President Obama’s compromise framework on tax cuts, unemployment insurance and job creation.

From the White House Blog

In the fourth edition of White House White Board, Austan Goolsbee, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, discusses the President’s tough decisions on the American auto industry in light of the General Motors IPO.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

There is nothing like a midterm election to reveal our putrid political underbelly. It is a dark, stinky place where paranoia, distrust, disaffection and outright deceit are reduced to hatred in a cauldron fired by fear and boiling over in a miasmic wave of bigotry.

Gross, eh?

Throw in a recession and all its attendant terrors, and what do you get?

“Double, double toil and trouble” from a bunch of — well, to be kind, let’s call them “witches,” and they are dishing misogyny, homophobia, racism, Islamaphobia and your everyday fear mongering, while they await the party that would be king.

And the lowly peasants, what do we do? Do we stand idly by, lackadaisically poking pitchforks at those we’ve been told are monsters? Pretty much, a lot of us do, but let’s take a closer look.

Pick your favorite monster and respond.

Strong women in the political arena? What would you do?

1. Call her a whore for snagging a coveted endorsement.
2. Call her a whore for simply serving in public office with chestal hangings.
3. Push her to the ground and stomp on her head, then demand her apology.
4. Take a swing at her.
5. Admit you’re a misogynistic troglodyte and stay home until you’ve read the entire Domestic Violence Awareness Project website.

Homosexuals claiming equal rights? What would you do?

1. Resort to the abomination theory.
2. Promote the disenchanted gay voting bloc theory, that slow progress will keep gays from the polls, thereby undermining further progress, à la Sharron Angle (see below).
3. Tell straight-and-narrow folks homophobia is A-OK — because Brian Brown says so.
4. Post a Facebook rant, encouraging gay suicides.
5. Admit your sins, beg forgiveness, then lighten up and have a gay old time.

Brown immigrants turning your day gray? What would you do?

1. Run an ad à la Sharron Angle that attempts to disenfranchise Latino voters by discouraging them from voting.
2. Run ads filled with threatening Latino faces and claim they aren’t racist.
3. Tell Latino high school students that you can’t distinguish Latinos, because some of them actually look Asian.
4. Declare undocumented immigrants are rapists.
5. Admit you’re a bigot and stay out of politics.

Deluded into believing all Muslims are terrorists? What would you do?

1. Redefine “Arab” as a slur and sling it at a campaign opponent.
2. Redefine “Muslim” as a slur and sling it at a campaign opponent.
3. Spread your irrational fear by announcing that every time you see someone in Muslim garb it gives you the creepers, even though you know it shouldn’t.
4. Tell your supporters Sharia (Islamic religious law) is creeping into U.S. cities.
5. Remember Timothy McVeigh, read some Tea Party Patriots comments, and admit to the enemy within.

So, how’d you do?

There are, of course, no right answers. But, then, what is the answer?

What do you suppose it is that renders such behaviors acceptable in our political discourse? It’s dismaying to think that our economic woes, September 11, and all the other crises we’ve borne in the last few decades might have turned us into a nation of loathsome, Bubbafied bigots. Have we transformed the welcoming arms of Liberty into xenophobic fists? Home of the brave to home of the bully? Land of the free to land of the terrified? Are our huddled masses yearning to take out their miseries on the lesser fellow?

A friend signed off a recent email with, “Hate fills the air. Best regards–,” and I wonder: Which candidates are best equipped to fill the air with love?

Love,
K-B

Crossposted at the OB Rag.

The Penny Ice Creamery

Let the naysayers eat ice cream. …

California’s Republican U.S. Senate candidate Carly Fiorina died Saturday when her Retire Boxer Money Bomb exploded prematurely, killing Fiorina immediately and injuring a campaign aide. Fiorina, the infamously fired CEO of computer giant Hewlett Packard, was 56.

Distraught and slightly singed campaign manager, Marty Wilson, stood outside Fiorina’s Sacramento campaign headquarters as firefighters extinguished a small fire caused by the explosion.

“We don’t know what happened,” Wilson said. “Carly was getting ready to launch the money bomb email. She’d just put another million bucks into the campaign, but that was it; she wasn’t going to risk any more of her own money, so we really needed contributions. Anyway, the fuse must have been faulty. The thing went off in Carly’s face. It’s gotta be [U.S. Senator Barbara] Boxer’s fault. Or [President Barack] Obama’s. We demand an immediate investigation and an apology to Carly and the California voters, not only for this deliberate assault but for Boxer’s refusal to have an honest and serious debate about the issues during this crucial time for our nation!”

Paramedics treated Wilson on the scene for a minor head injury and first-degree burns.

The deadly explosion followed another life-threatening incident just two weeks ago at the Republican Party’s Hispanic 100 Awards Gala in Newport Beach. According to an event volunteer, Fiorina had been “slamming down tequila shots, trilling her tongue and shouting ‘Andale!’ in this really pathetic accent. Then she passed out. We thought she was dead at first. But, nope, she barfed and got up to dance.”

Republican Party insiders had purportedly been concerned about Fiorina’s “self-sabotaging behaviors” since she became an economic advisor to the 2008 McCain-Palin presidential campaign, which made Wall Street and CEO compensation reform key platform issues. Skydiving into a campaign event, Fiorina had become entangled in the lines of her golden parachute, preventing the chute from fully opening. Skydive experts at the time said she would have plunged to her death had she not had the presence of mind to pull the cord on her bonus chute. Still, she made a hard landing when she said Sarah Palin was unqualified to run a corporation, and the campaign fired her from the media circuit.

Although Fiorina’s tenure at Hewlett Packard was longer lived than her time on McCain’s campaign, she suffered a more devastating crash from HP and was eventually ranked by Portfolio magazine as one of the 20 worst CEOs ever:

“A consummate self-promoter, Fiorina was busy pontificating on the lecture circuit and posing for magazine covers while her company floundered. She paid herself handsome bonuses and perks while laying off thousands of employees to cut costs. The merger Fiorina orchestrated with Compaq in 2002 was widely seen as a failure. She was ousted in 2005. THE STAT: HP stock lost half its value during Fiorina’s tenure.”

Despite her very public HP failure — or perhaps because of it — Fiorina was determined to prove herself in the public arena, and Boxer’s senate seat became her next target. She reconciled with Palin, who endorsed her in the primary, when Fiorina depended on the conservative Republican vote to topple moderate Republican Tom Campbell.

But just last weekend, noting Palin’s sagging polling numbers, Fiorina declined to appear with her at a Republican event in California. Palin’s husband, Todd, subsequently leaked a scathing email:

“Sarah put her ass on the line for you, Curly [sic]. She thought you were the real deal. But you and me both know you’re no Joe Sixpack. All that crap about starting as a secretary. You pulled yourself up with your family’s gold plated bootstraps. And now you can’t answer a simple invitation with a yes? Please explain how this endorsement stuff works, is it to be completely one sided, cuz if so, you don’t have a wolf’s chance in Wasilla of getting a cabinet seat in Sarah’s administration. You think you can throw a punch, but my Sarah can take you out in one shot! From a helicopter!”

Fiorina’s past job performance was not her only weakness on the campaign trail. She was A-rated pro-life in a pro-choice state. She supported offshore drilling in an anti-drilling state. She supported Arizona’s anti-illegal immigration law in a state where 71 percent of Latino voters oppose it. And, in her op-ed piece announcing her campaign she highlighted her failure to exercise her right to vote: “Admittedly, I have not always been engaged in the electoral process, and I should have been.”

One of the few votes Fiorina reported casting was for California’s anti-same-sex marriage ballot measure, Proposition 8. That revelation, apparently intended to woo conservative voters, attracted the National Organization for Marriage, an anti-gay lobbying organization, which invested in anti-gay, pro-Fiorina advertising targeting Latino voters.

“Wouldn’t you know it!” said Juan Bautista, an independent gay voter, who was passing by Fiorina headquarters when the money bomb exploded. “One of the few times Fiorina bothered to vote, and it was for Prop. 8. What a poop she is, er, was. And the NOM ad, have you seen it? It’s pure manipulation. At least it’s not as bad as that pissy Sharron Angle ad telling Arizona Latinos not to vote at all. ¡Pendejos racistas!”

Most daunting of all Fiorina’s political challenges was her claim to be a jobs champion, which was contradicted by her corporate experience, noted for mass layoffs and outsourcing jobs overseas, strategies that have not been forgotten by California’s workforce.

Pedicab driver Bobby Sneed, who dropped off a fare just before the explosion, had little faith in Fiorina’s commitment to creating jobs for Californians.

“She laid me off from HP, shipped thousands of jobs overseas, and got a $45 million boot out the door. Now I’m essentially unemployed, she’s worth $120 million, and she was asking voters to give her money? Good lord! She wanted the senate badly enough, she should’ve just sucked it up and bought it, like Meg Whitman. Look, Fiorina soared to the corporate heights by whatever means she had at her disposal — and her dad’s telling her she’d never amount to anything surely motivated her — but she lacked the ability to translate her personal ambitions into a vision that captured the voter’s heart. And, I know it’s petty, but I couldn’t get beyond that snarl she was always trying to hide.”

Perhaps feminist activist Gloria Steinem captured the tormented essence of Carly Fiorina best, after Fiorina committed a live microphone faux pas in June:

“We had the prospective joy of two powerful women competing for a U.S. Senate seat. And in a moment of unintended, unedited honesty, what did we get from Fiorina? A pearl of wisdom? A poignant revelation? No. We got a snarky comment about Senator Boxer’s hair. That, Sweetie, is not feminism.”

Love,
K-B

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Crossposted at The Progressive Post.

Note: Carly Fiorina image from Carly for California campaign ad; Carly punch, from Californians Opposed to Carly Fiorina Facebook page; Carly Out of Control from Carly for CA website.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

The book was a struggle, but I felt duty bound to stay put in my yard chair and honor the author’s effort to finish the thing. Consequently, even a trail of ants, Fallbrook’s ever-present organic waste abatement crews, distracted me from the chore of reading. I watched the good little refuse engineers tidily toting to their nest the remnants of a mourning dove egg, probably dropped from its cedar nest by a murderous Blue Jay. I’d heard a ruckus the day before and ducked inside to avoid its calamitous end. But damn if fate didn’t catch up with me! At least the ants were swift and effective. Perhaps too effective.

I remembered the gift my father sent to my kiddo when she was small enough to still handle insects as though they were playthings. It had been a surprise, a special grandfatherly treat. And, according to the accompanying literature, we all — yes, children and adults alike — were in for hours of entomological fun as we played audience to the life’s work of the inhabitants of Uncle Milton’s Ant Farm.

Actually, said inhabitants of the green petrochemical-based farm were shipped separately, which meant a wait for all that fun we knew was coming our way. In the meantime, we filled the bottom couple inches of the farm with the lily-white synthetic sand provided, and eagerly anticipated the ants’ Herculean feats, their mind-bending commitment to earthmoving, their fastidious exercise of home economics — all the requisite behaviors of a proper ant.

The estimated day of arrival drew near, and we tacked the ant poster that came with the farm to my daughter’s wall. Together, we reviewed Milton’s ageless discourse on the wondrous world of ants. With a couple of honored bugologists in the family, I thought this might prove a prophetic science experience for the kid, soon to graduate from daycare to real school.

At long last, our ants arrived — as expected, only soldier-workers of ambiguous gender. Queens were prohibited from travel. In we poured our new housemates to their escape-proof quarters, while I considered the years of effort I’d previously expended to keep the little bastards out of our home. Nonetheless, we gave them a welcoming honey-water spritz and set them in a place of honor at the dining room table.

Thankfully, Uncle Milton had adequately forewarned us, so we were not surprised when a few ants died the first day or two. This was to be expected. What was a bit disconcerting was the ants’ method of disposing of their dead: They broke down their brethren and, piece by piece, added their teeny black body parts to the white synthetic hills. And, to my maternal dismay, the ants continued dropping like, well, flies. Every day, we awoke to a grislier scene of death and dismemberment as the lily mounds became speckled with the black grains of dissected ant bodies.

In fear for my daughter’s psyche, and not a little grossed out, I poured through Uncle Milton’s brochure, a desperate review in search of advice I might have missed, critical guidance for keeping ants alive and well, but to no avail. The ants continued their unthinking hill building and their dying, only to be recycled as pepper to the sand’s salt by their surviving peers.

As the ant population rapidly dwindled and the hills darkened, I wondered about the significance of the ants’ unnatural existence on my table. Even when confronted with increasing mortality, the soldiers just plodded along, following the mandate of their biology — until the sad day when but one ant remained alive.

A lousy way to start the morning, I groped my way to the kitchen for day-old coffee and the eye dropper of honey-water, and returned to find the sole survivor atop the tallest hill peering skyward. I was grateful that the poor thing was too brainless to experience the bitter isolation of such utter aloneness, too rudimentary to beseech some great ant god in the artificial green sky to end this brutal abandonment. Unwilling to expose my daughter to such angst, I shattered the plastic and dumped the last ant outside in the garbage — to eat himself to a happy end.

I was certain then, as I am now, that we are not intended to keep ant farms on our dining room tables. Any more than we are intended to live in petrochemical plastic and perpetuate our soulless behaviors into our own extinction — our reckless Wall Street finanigans, our natural resource guzzling, our political demolition derbies, our hate-mortared border walls.

But, hey, it was just a bunch of ants, you might say? Yes, and if we don’t do any better than Uncle Milton’s ants, the species in my yard is likely to outlast us all, tidily toting our remnants back to their nests.

Love,
K-B

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Note: K-B is on vacation.

Academics vs. Athletics: Where Does the Money Flow?

By Hunt Gressitt, S.A., P.A.-C.

I am infuriated every time I hear of an academically capable student whose family is going into deep hock to pay tuition at a public institution of higher learning, while multiple teams full of illiterati who happen to be skilled at basketball or football are getting free rides — plus God only knows what all else in the way of special privileges and other goodies. Granting bachelor’s degrees to people who were too busy playing ball or sucking down the Coors to bother going to class, and who need tutors to help them read the TV guide, has been eroding the value of those degrees to the point that they’re no longer worth the parchment they’re written on.

To add insult to injury, these public colleges and universities are heavily supported by tax dollars, thus enabling them to provide an opportunity for professional athletic recruiters to have a venue in which to survey the current crop of prospects without having to pay for the privilege — as if there were so little money in professional athletics that they couldn’t afford to do it any other way. Snarl!

It’s an old issue, but it has grown out of control. The amount of money available to scholastic nitwits now seems relatively boundless. National Collegiate Athletic Association data for 2003-4 indicate that 138,216 students received an average of $10,409 in athletic aid. Compare that to 8,486 National Merit Scholarship students who received $2,500 each in 2007-08 or the maximum Pell Grant award for 2009-10 of $5,350.

Even physicians, into whose care we entrust our lives, have to pay through the nose for the privilege. Unlike most civilized nations, which subsidize the education of their health care providers, in the United States, physicians finish medical school with an average debt of $140,000.

I recently spoke with yet another parent who is racking up debt to her eyeballs, courtesy of the tuition bills of her two university student progeny, both of whom are working part time to help pay the bills, both of whom are on the dean’s list, both of whom will graduate with a mountain of debt that they will share with their mama, and neither of whom has been able to get any academic scholarship funds. It surely doesn’t seem fair.

I wonder how long it will take a teacher living on an average salary of $51,000 to pay off the average undergraduate debt of about $24,000, all the while accruing more educational costs in order to comply with the requirements that most decent school systems have for their teachers, to complete a master’s degree.

Meantime, the average professional athletes’ salaries would make a teacher’s head spin:

Basketball (NBA) — $5,000,000
Baseball (MLB) — $2,800,000
Football (NFL) — $1,750,000
Hockey (NHL) — $1,500,000
Men’s Golf — $973,495
Women’s Tennis — $345,000
Men’s Tennis — $260,000
Women’s Golf — $162,043

If the numbers are an accurate measure of perceived social value, the message is dismaying.

Note: Hunt Gressitt is an emergency room physician assistant in Ellsworth, Maine, down to her last $4,000 of student loan debt after way too many moons.

©2009 Hunt Gressitt

(Football photograph by Dirk Hansen via a Creative Commons license. Reading photograph by VolaVale via a Creative Commons license.)