Category: Aging

BOOK BANNING: THIS IS NOT (EXACTLY) ABOUT SARAH PALIN

Nazi_book_burning
You know this photo:  Nazis burning books in Babelplatz, a large public square across from Humboldt University in the heart of Berlin.  Germany was a highly cultured society, yet it wasn’t too difficult to get to the place where its students willingly burned the books they were to supposed to be studying if they had been written by Jews. 

Ulysses1
The U.S. wasn’t immune in those years either. In the 1930s there were huge battles about James Joyce’s classic Ulysses, a gorgeous and very moving book but so difficult to understand that I took an entire college course on it. Hard to believe that anyone would bother working through it for any but literary reasons.  Even so, copy after copy was seized from trans-Atlantic passengers arriving on ocean liners in Manhattan.  Finally, in 1932, after an edition of the book intended as a model for U.S. publication had been seized along with the others, Judge John M. Woolsey lifted the ban in a famous, highly cited opinion* that appears as a preface in many editions.  There are many such stories, about many books, but most of them well before the 1960s.  After that, it seemed we’d "grown out of" book banning.  Wrong.

Catcher_a
I read Catcher in the Rye in the 7th grade.  Years later I had the privilege of reading it aloud with my own  son at precisely the same age.  Nearly 20 years apart, we both loved it.  Yet efforts to ban it in both school and community libraries have gone on almost as long as the life of the book itself.  BlogHer and book blogger SassyMonkey, in a detailed BlogHer post, reminded us that Banned Books Week is here (September 27 to October 4, 2008).  The American Library Association created this week in 1982, and sadly, we still need it today.  Sarah Palin was not the first, nor will she be the last, government official to fire a librarian after a discussion about removing books from library shelves.  There’s a long history of such behavior, and other, more overt attempts, both here and around the world.

Try to imagine a time where you had to hide the books you love.  Or where you couldn’t get Harry Potter  from the library to re-live the Hogwarts adventure with your own children.  Or you couldn’t get access to published health information from books like Our Bodies, Ourselves.
Imagine no Huck Finn, no Maya Angelou or Toni Morrison or John
Steinbeck or — and this is a biggie in the book banning world, no Judy
Blume.  Right now there are community and school librarians risking
their careers to fight to protect their shelves from marauding
moralists.  Right now.

Continue reading BOOK BANNING: THIS IS NOT (EXACTLY) ABOUT SARAH PALIN

Blogging Boomer Carnival #84

So_baby_boomer
Well the Blogging Boomers have returned after a Labor Day respite and we are loaded with remarkable new content.  It’s all housed over at John Agno’s So Baby Boomer.   There are plenty of political links, but also some interesting perspectives on retirements and aging, spiritual retreats,religious belief, marriage and the 5-th birthday of AARP.  So don’t miss it.

MUSIC, POLITICS, PATTI SMITH, KRIS KRISTOFFERSON, ROBERT HUNTER AND A LONG WALK

Kristopherson_2For weeks I’ve been writing about politics here, but today – some personal politics. They say the personal is political, and for me, the personal is music (and political) — and music makes all the difference — through time, sadness, joy, loneliness, political anguish, even spiritual connection. 

I’ve started walking every morning – around two miles.  Part of the reason is that I never get to listen to music anymore, so on my walks, I pretty much let my iPod take me wherever "shuffle" wants to go.  For while we moved from Bruce to Great Big Sea to Juno.   Then things got serious – an anthem really, of a time in my life when I valued awareness, aliveness, presence above all else: along came Me and Bobby McGee.  Kris Kristofferson wrote it but this is one of the few videos I could find of him performing it – Janis Joplin’s version was the famous one.  Still — it was this version, Kristofferson’s, that spoke to me.

A cut-loose road song and a love song too.  "Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose."  I remember my mother railing against this chorus — claiming that freedom was real and important and much more than "nothin’ left to lose" and she was probably right, but then…  Then that road life was one I craved but never had the nerve to undertake and this song was my chance to travel along.  Later, on Saturday Night Live, Gilda Radner did a monologue as "Bobby McGee" who had moved home, and whose "mom even kept my room for me."  She’d given up.  There I sat on our water bed in our Upper West Side apartment in our married, new baby life, and cried. It was way too familiar.  Made me face the gap between what I had wished and what I was, that gap we all face as we enter "grown up" lives, with kids and responsibilities.

Then, around the time my walk reached Georgia Avenue, I traveled to London’s Grosvenor Square, and Scarlet Begonias.  The Robert Hunter/Grateful Dead song included this description:  "Wind in the willows playin’ tea for two;   The sky was yellow and the sun was blue, Strangers stoppin’ strangers just to shake their hand, Everybody”s playing in the heart of gold band."  It sounds comical now, I suppose, and it was really about Dead concerts, but I remember so many marches where people passed food around, each taking what they needed, and driving on the turnpikes on the way as we gave M&Ms to each tollbooth operator along with our quarters and even, at the first Clinton inauguration, being hugged by some guy I’d never met as I stood alone, close to tears (again) when Bob Dylan came out and surprised everyone.   

Continue reading MUSIC, POLITICS, PATTI SMITH, KRIS KRISTOFFERSON, ROBERT HUNTER AND A LONG WALK

MARTIN LUTHER KING AND BARACK OBAMA: ANOTHER COSMIC ANNIVERSARY

Mlk_wave_from_podiumI was about to be a senior in high school that summer, with my family on vacation in Provincetown, MA, at the tip of Cape Cod.   All I really wanted to do was find Edna St. Vincent Millay’s summer hangout and the theater used by Eugene O’Neill  and the Provincetown Players.  Those were gone; instead, I tripped over a future that quickly ended my quest for the past.

Walking by a restaurant, we passed a TV sitting on the sidewalk, on a milk crate so everyone could watch.  On the air: the March on Washington and the speech by Dr. Martin Luther King.  I was transfixed.  Living in a little town outside Pittsburgh, I hadn’t really paid much attention.  Until that moment.  It was August 28, 1963, and it launched the next phase of my life.  As I watched, I knew that I belonged there – where there was purpose – in the middle of history.  It was a profound thing to listen to this man, to see the sea of people around him, watch the individual interviews, hear the music.  When people wonder how we became a generation of activists, I know that this was one of the moments that drove us forward, if we weren’t there already.

How beautiful then that EXACTLY 45 years later, Barack Obama will accept the nomination of his party to be the Democratic candidate for President of the United States.  I heard Rep. John Lewis, so badly beaten in the 1965 march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, tell an interviewer that he wasn’t sure he could make it through his own speech — that if anyone had told him that 45 years after that Selma march he’d watch an African-American man accept the presidential nomination, he would have told them they were crazy.  Obama adviser and friend Valerie Jarrett, describing what it would mean to her parents in an interview with our own Erin Kotckei Vest, struggled to contain her own tears.  This is important.

Continue reading MARTIN LUTHER KING AND BARACK OBAMA: ANOTHER COSMIC ANNIVERSARY

1968-2008 FORTY YEARS SINCE THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION IN CHICAGO AND I WAS THERE

68chicago There they are.  While this was happening in front of the Chicago Hilton  I was first in the streets and then, as I’ve written before, upstairs helping to convert our McCarthy Campaign floor of rooms into a hospital.   The entire hotel reeked of the tear gas outside; everyone was scared, and angry, and sad.  I’ve told this story before, but it’s one day before the 2008 Democratic Convention — people are streaming into Denver, picking up their credentials, getting ready for welcome parties and scamming invitations… all forty years after this landmark in my life  and so many others.  Just take a look so you understand why these memories refuse to die.  And consider that the belief in Barack Obama today, which so many equate with the impact of John Kennedy, is also much like the hope engendered in us in those days.  I suspect it’s where a lot of the boomer support for Obama began. 

I wonder if you can imagine what it felt like to be 22 years old, totally idealistic and what they call “a true believer” and to see policemen behave like that.  To see Chicago Mayor Richard Daley call the first Jewish Senator, Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut, a “kike” (you had to read his lips – there was no audio but it was pretty clear) and to see your friends, and colleagues, and some-time beloveds with black eyes and bleeding scalps.  To be dragged by a Secret Service agent from your place next to Senator McCarthy by the collar of your dress as he addressed the demonstrators, battered, bruised and angry. To see everything you’d worked for and believed in decimated in the class, generational and political warfare.

That’s how it was.  I’ve been thinking about it a lot, of course, on this momentous anniversary – when hopefully another, happier landmark will emerge in the extraordinary nomination of Senator Obama. I’ve been to every Convention from 1968 until this year.  It’s kind of sad to break the chain after 40 years but I think I’m ready.  I did a workshop on convention coverage at the BlogHer conference to pass the torch; I’m so excited for all the women who are going.  Just as Senator Obama is a generation behind me – in his 40s to my 60s – a little kid when we faced billy clubs and tear gas in his home town, so are many of the bloggers credentialed to cover the week.  I know it will be great for them and that they’ll make certain we know – in twitteriffic detail, what’s going on.

I know too that, 40 years from now, it will still be a milestone
memory in their lives.    I started to write “hopefully, a happier one”
but despite all the agony of those terrible days in 1968, I’m embarrassed to tell you that I wouldn’t trade the memory.  It’s so deep in my soul and so much a part of my understanding of myself and who I’ve become that despite the horrors within it, I cherish its presence.  So, what I wish my sisters in Denver (and Minnesota) is to have conventions — happy or not — as important to their lives, sense of history and purpose and political values as Chicago was to mine.  Along with, of course, the fervent hope that this time, there will be something closer to a happy ending.

DON’T MISS IT: BLOGGING BOOMERS CARNIVAL #81

Carnival
The fabulous Blogging Boomer Carnival – the 81st in fact – has
landed here at Don’t Gel Too Soon.  And a real feast it is. 

As the Baby Boomer generation approaches retirement age, over 7.7 million business
owners will exit their businesses over the next 10-15 years.  John Agno at
So Baby Boomer says this demonstrates a tremendous need for exit planning.

And while we’re talking money, two more posts this week.

This comes from Janet Wendy at Gen Plus:  If, like
much of America, you are sick of watching your dollar shrinking, Janet Wendy at
Gen Plus, points you to an eye-opening post on what banks are NOT doing with your money. Oh…and be
careful.  You might bust a seam laughing.

And this from Ann Harrison at Contemporary Retirement:  Although
we’ve always been told that money can’t buy happiness, an increasing number of
studies show that, if you know the right way to spend it, money just may be
able to buy you happiness after all…  Find
out how at Contemporary Retirement:

Meanwhile, Rhea Becker of The
Boomer Chronicles has noticed something interesting about this
year’s Olympics: "A number of athletes in the Beijing
Olympics are older than the usual crop."  She’s profiled some of
them.  In the Northwest Arkansas area where
I make my home, that was the case with every community. Unfortunately, it is
also the case that every one of them has closed.


If you’re looking for someone
else to fix things, Laurel Lee at Midlife Crisis Queen says
"Cut it out."  No one else can change your life for you, no matter how
much you pay them."
“Spiritual work is not something you can copy from someone else’s
homework…."

One of those things you have to do for yourself is keep a marriage going.  Dina at This Marriage Thing says:  "Counselors say marriages are
strengthened by honest talking.   But when was the last time you
really communicated with your spouse?   Here are a couple of
questions that might do the trick."

If that doesn’t work, and you’re facing the end of a marriage, Wesley Hein at
LifeTwo offers an important consideration: In a divorce, who gets custody of mutual
friends? This moral dilemma is discussed
in "The
Post-Divorce Custody Battle for Mutual Friends". Make no mistake about
it, in divorce every aspect of your life changes–including friendships.

On a lighter note, no matter what the status of the rest of your life, you can fix your hair.  If you color your hair, then you know how the blazing summer sun and chlorine
pools can really fade and damage your hair. Is there anything you can do about
it, short of wearing a hat? Check out what the Glam Gals have to say about it at Fabulous after 40.

 

Our friends over at Vaboomers have an interesting offering too – a
kind of online mall they call "viosks"
–sort of online kiosks offering art, music, cookies — lots.  As they put
it:   "Vaboomer is excited to announce the Grand Opening of Vaboomer Viosks on Aug 8; A Suite of
“Viosks" with the best of Boomer reFiree’s original art, books, music and
education."

 

My own entry is a
pensive one – about a Jewish holiday with a huge emotional  punch.

BlogHer, Bella, Books and Us Women

Bella_bw1_2 Two weeks ago I spent the weekend with 1,000 remarkable women.  You know where; the Web has been full of posts and tweets and messages about BlogHer, the women bloggers conference.  Since its founding, BlogHer has held four conferences, and I’ve been to three of them.  For those three years I’ve wondered at the strength and power of both the gathering and each woman, most far younger than I, who is part of it.  Audacious and rambunctious, honest and gifted, they are far beyond where I was at their age.  I’ve always known that all of us, sisters from the 70’s and 80’s and 90’s, scratched and kicked and pulled and fought to move our lives, and those of the women around us, forward.  In many ways, we made a difference.  I’m proud of that.

Today though I was reminded of a real heroine, one whose star lit the way for much of what we did, in a wonderful piece in The Women’s Review of Books: Ruth Rosen‘s review of  Bella Abzug: How One Tough Broad from the Bronx Fought
Jim Crow and Joe McCarthy, Pissed Off Jimmy Carter, Battled for the
Rights of Women and Workers, … Planet, and Shook Up Politics Along
the Way–an oral history of the life of Bella Abzug.  Among other things, Ruth says:

She fought for the
rights of union workers and African Americans, protested the use of the atomic
bomb and the Vietnam War, waged endless battles to advance women’s rights, and
spent the last years of her life promoting environmentalism and human rights.
When she plunged into the women’s movement during the late 1960s, Abzug infused
feminism with her fierce, strategic, take-no-prisoners spirit. As Geraldine
Ferraro reminds us,
She didn’t knock lightly on the door. She didn’t even push it open or batter it
down. She took it off the hinges forever! So that those of us who came after
could walk through!

And with a bow to Bella and so many others, walk through we have.  It’s tough to pass the stories ‘I walked six miles to school in the snow’
fogey.   Younger women, though, would find courage to fight their own
battles in Bella’s story and in many of our own."

For me, Bella was a brave, untamed beacon of defiance and energy. Her story, and ours, laid the ground for these determined, gifted "blogger generation" women. I would so love to be able to tell them about her – and about all of us, just so they could know the solidarity, the battles, the anger and the hope.  And why seeing them all together, hugging, laughing and raising hell, makes me so damned happy.  And that Bella would have loved them.