Celebrating Womens Equality Day August 26, Friday 2022

Today I decided to devote the day to all things ERA, so I began by making a portrait of Alice Paul. She is my lifelong hero because of her dedication to the women of the future, her fierce determination, ahd her unrelenting devotion to the cause of Suffrage for women and the ERA.

Along with painting the portrait of Alice Paul, I am reading her biography and have committed myself to finishing Chapter 5 today, and while I am getting my car serviced tomorrow at the Kia Dealer, I will read Chapter 6.

That's not all! Tonight, I will watch one of the many documentaries and films about the Suffrage Movememt: Ken Burn's Documentary NOT FOR OURSELVES ALONE, about Eliz. Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony,or the pbs American Experience documentary about Alice Paul, or the British film SUFFRAGETTE, or IRON JAWED ANGELS. Haven't decided yet and may just wait and see what I can rent or find.

Every time I watch one of those documentaries, I am struck by the disdain so many men had for women and the careless cruelty inflicted upon them. To punish and blackmail women, it was so often the case that men took the women's children away. I remember that scene from the Russian film Anna Karenina. It didn't matter if the children were hurt in the process, all the more pain for the mothers.

In the British film, SUFFRAGETTE, the husband does the same thing; he gives away their son to another family to punish his wife for her persistence in joining the Suffragists and leaving the house unattended. He says "What else was I supposed to do?" What he was supposed to do was find a childminder, like his wife did when she was working.

When I was looking for an image of the Occaquan Work House. the prison that the American Suffragists were sent to for picketing, I found out the prison has been repurposed into an Arts Center and a Museum to celebrate the Suffragists who were imprisoned there, beaten, and when they went on hunger strikes to demand to be treated as political prisoners and not criminals, they were tied down and force fed which left them with damaged throats and noses from the Rubber pipes and hoses forced down their throats.

They suffered all of this and didn't give up. They gave their lives so that we, women of the 21st century might have the opportunity to make our way freely in the world with equal opportunity for education and our legal civil rights as citizens.

Among the many things for which I am grateful, one is that I was able to get divorced from a mentally unbalanced and raging man and save my life, and that I was able to get birth control when young from Planned Parenthood, so I didn't get pregant and give him a weapon to use against me.

By the time I did get pregnant, it was possible for a single mother to have her child, make a liveable wage, and get protection under the law. So I raised my daughter in freedom and independence. My life has been changed by the women who came before me and sruggled in the cause for our equality.

Right at this moment, women all over the Middle East and particularly in Afghanistan, are not so lucky. Women in Afghanistan cannot go out unchaperoned, must be covered head to toe, cannot work or leave the country, and the culture has returned to child bride bartering which is, in fact, child abuse, and enslavement of lower caste girls, the Yazhidi females. Women are beated, abused, and mutilated by having their noses cut off for speaking out. In some places they are stoned to death, and raped with impunity.

I am grateful I live here and now, and that my ancestors came from Europe where strides had already been made for equality for women in some degrees before the modern movement.

Thank you to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, the Wollstonecrafts, the Pankhursts, Margaret Sanger, and all the women beside them, behind them and supporting their efforts to make this mass movement get as far as it has. When I see women tv journalists, print journalists, politicians, congressional representatives, senators, governors, experts in so many fields such as medicine, science, business and education, I look back on my own childhood when none of this was happening.

HAPPY WOMEN'S EQUALITY DAY TO ALL! Jo Ann

BIRTH CONTROL AND THE VOTE - THE MOST IMPORTANT POWERS, having children gives others power over you and makes you a slave to their domination. We must regain the right to Abortion, the right to choice, and young women must become more responsible and use birth control to control their own lives. Take back the power! The power over your own life. And thank you Margaret Sanger!

Agism: The Gray Pnthers and Accomplishments in Old Age

Although I almost never engage in the public debates on the internet, recently I read a short psot about Nancy Pelosi being too old to be in Congress. It is going right along with the Republican campaign against Joe Biden because of his age. Although it is true that we all age and with age comes a variety of deteriorations: some of us (like me) have eyesight deterioration, hearing loss, sometime we have back problems and joint problems from arthritis, and some of us experience dementia, it could also be said that there are a host of problems with younger people and with people at all ages! A provable fact is that different people age in different ways and there are also many attributes that we acquire from the experience of living for a long time. We gain maturity, and from experince comes skill in every area of human endeavor. When I replied to the attack on Nancy Pelosi by recounting her many areas of success as House Speaker, her skill in unifying people (a master skill for her) and her skill in framing the goals of her party to show others the benefits to them and to the country, her political savvy in holding her place in the savage and expensive world of politics, she is a marvel. Age is no detraction for her. But when I posted a shorter version of that observation, I received a few insulting and ignorant responses mostly calling me names like idiot and stupid. In fact I am voth intelligent and well educated but their responses said more about them than about me.

But this made me think about the Gray Panther Party and Maggie Kuhn and how the social awareness that group promoted has fallen away over time. They organized in 1970 after founder, Maggie Kuhn was forced into retirement at age 65. Now, we have a president in his 70's and Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House in her 80's and there is so much complaining about the ages of these two stellar politicians. Both have demonstrated their competence and reliability, mental balance and talent, and there is no way that their ages have detracted from their performance in their work.

I just checked and The Gray Panthers are still active although not much in the news in recent decades. I feel as though we need them now more than ever!

Personally, I must admit that I do feel my age, and I really felt I had to retire to save my life as I had developed high blood pressure and I felt I was always on the cusp of a stroke when things got too adrenalin fueled in the classroom. Also, in my mid 50's, I had gone through my mother's death from stroke, and I had developed chest pains on the many trips back and forth to West Virginia to visit in her last 50 years of life.

Well, I am going to look up the Gray Panthers and see if I can join because I think we need them now more than ever! Happy Trails - Jo Ann I almost forgot to mention, you can look up accomplishments after 80 and find a whole bunch of web sites with lists of people who broke records, made discoveries, climbed Mt. Everest and did all kinds of amazing things in their last decades. I would have listed them here but there were too many! I might add there were a great many accomplishements and successes of Centenarians as well!

From Debt Collectors to debt Relievers!

Recently I read an article about mass protests and their effectiveness or lack thereof. One of the protests mentioned as non-effective was OCCUPY WALL STREET. I didn't think anything of it at the time, although the essay gave a negative slant by observing that the OWS protestors left a ton of trash on the streets, very unecological.

Today, however, I read a short news item about two former debt collectors who had a TRANSFORMATION after talking to OWS protestors and switched from being debt collectors to being debt relievers. They formed a non-profit, RIP Medical Debt, to take donations which they used to buy delinquent medical debt parcels for pennies on the dollar which they then wrote off.

One of the 3.6 million people they helped to erase debt was a Georgia high school math teacher who was faced with insurmountable medical debt after the birth of her daughter, prematurely, 13 years earlier. She was haunted and burdened by the debt which she could not pay off as her salary just covered their living expenses. She like the other 3.6 million debtors, received a yellow envelope in the mail saying her debt had been paid off and she was now free and clear.

My own experience with debt collectors was when my daughter went off for her 'not quite a year' of college around 2001. She left in the Spring of the year for California and I was left with 16,000 college loan to pay off which I did over subsequent decades at $100 a month. However, while she was in college, predatory credit card offers came in and she had also run up about $4000 in credit card debt that she defaulted on. Those credit card debt collectors hounded me and even called neighbors and family. I repeatedly told them that they had not consulted me, her mother, before givig her the credit cards so why should they think I should be held responsible for them. Also, I reminded them that I hadn't co-signedor in any way backed those loans and as my daugher no longer even lived with me, I didn't see why they thought I should pay. Nonetheless, they continued to harrass me by phone and although often sypathized with my situation, they reminded me that my daughter's unpaid debt would cripple her in the future should she try to buy a car or rent an apartment. It would follow her forever. Naturally, I didn't believe them and didn't want to pay those credit card balances, BUT, a friend at school, another teacher, advised me that it was true that her credit history would cripple her, so I did pay off $3000 and her father paid off about $1000. And as time went by, my daughter did, in fact buy a car, rent an apartment, and in time, get married and buy a condo in Brooklyn. So I am glad I paid off her credit card debt. She also applied for and paid off an American Express credit card which she used to get airline points for her many flights back adn forth from New York to California in her acting career. I am glad now that I was able to help her and I am glad these kind men found such a worthy cause in helping other people saddled with debts they can in no way pay off.

Hospital costs are astronomical. My own recent visit to the emergency room and the hospital for a heart problem which forced me to stay overnight, cost $38,000 which fortunately was covered by my supplemental medical benefit from my teacher retirement as well as medicare, so I only had to pay $50. If I had no coverage, I would have not gone to the hospital and possibly suffered a stroke and died. And I am sure that is happening all over America, today, because people are so frightened of the insurmountable level of debt that medical care/hospital care costs today.

My other point is that those people who occupied Wall Street and spoke to the former debt collectors, made a HUGE difference in the lives of 3.6 million people without even knowing about it, so if that was the only good to come out of the Occupy Wall Street movement it helped millions of people!

What we do can often have unintended consequences. Happy Trails wherever they may take you - to the woods, to the city, to a new idea! Jo Ann

How I came to feel about my own painting.

Probably, I began to think about Art when I was a child and I was entranced by the storytelling of Norman Rockwell on the Saturday Evening Post covers of the magazines we subscribed to. AS I got older, it was hurtful to me to see the disrespect and even mockery that was directed at Rockwell's work by modern abstract painters. Of course, eventually I realized it was a familiar pattern in any new regime whereby the old leaders are sacrificed and the new 'top dogs' take over. Even though I studied art throughout my life in a wide variety of institutions from Glassboro State college, to the Academy of Fine Arts, and the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and numerous smaller art schols such as Perkins Art Center, personally, I was always drawn to an artisan side of art, possibly best manifested in Illustration.

In a painting course that I took when I was an Art Minor at Glassboro, I disovered how to develop a 'concept' upon which to hang a dozen paintings, an exploration of color relationships where I put together puzzle pieces of colors that bounced off one another which gave the whole a kind of jumpy quality. I was pleased with my work but no one ever understood it and I had to explain the concept which inevitably ended in a kind of fade out. That was not what I wanted.

Soon enough, it became apparent to me that I was interested in communicating with y fellow humans, not just some level of elite viewers with Art backgrounds who could puzzle out what I was getting at. I wanted people to understand and enjoy what I painted immediately. Also, I wanted to become profiicient at realistic depiction. I wanted to learn and practice the skills of the tradition.

Along with that practice, came a current of desire to paint things that were meaningful to ME. The paintings were kind of worshipful objects, kind of relics. First I began with places near me that seemed to hold an emotional quality that reflected how I was feeling - that was the color pencil series of buildings in South Philadelphia. Then, I branched out to people, and to other objects tha reflected a feeling I had about something, for example, I did a still life painting of summer vegetables harvested from a friend's garden that spoke to me of the lively abundance of summer itself.

I guess that became the kind of piece meal of my personal style, places or people, or animals or things that had meaning to me personally, not a theory or idea. Also, when I realized my career was in teaching, not in the Art World, that had a big influence and kind of set me free. I didn't have a wider public to whom I had to appeal or customers or gallery owners, or even shows.

However, that did lead to a kind of dead end because then what do you do with all those paintings? Lately I have been giving them away.

Just wanted to share some thoughts about painting this morning as I sit here after our dog walk, my Uma and me. I should be thinking more about smells because the foul air of rotten eggs is wafting over all of us in the South Jersey and South Philadelphia area due to a truck at TA Travel Center, Berkeyley Rd in Paulsboro, having become overheated yesterday and forced to release some chemical called LUBRIZOL 1389 in order to vent rather than explode. Everyone in a 10 mile radius is smelling sulphur odor of rotten eggs. It isn't too bad here but it is held down to the ground by the cloud cover.

SUICIDE

Today, I am fulfilling one of the items on my chore list which is to read at least one magazine every day until I make a dent or reach the bottom of my magazine pile. Today I am reading HARPERS August 2022 issue, an article entitled THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY: Can Suicide be predicted, by Will Stephenson. It should be no surprise to anyone who has been reading the newspapers or magazines that suicide has become a big problem not only in America but in the whole world. It is the second leading cause of death of young people ages 15 to 24, the ages when humans should be at their most vital and exuberant, their reproductive years! It is the 4th leading cause of death in people ages 18 to 65. They didn't give a statistic for my age which is 76. But I would guess that suicide declines at my age because death by disease beats us to it.

Suicide is very interesting to me because we have so much of it in our family, on both the paternal and maternal sides. Just to give two examples, My mother's maternal grandfather, William Collins Garwood shot himself. We know from oral history that he had a drinking problem which haas passed down through the generations of both sides of my family to my siblings but has somehow missed me, although part of that is choice as I chose at an early age to avoide consumption of any alcoholic beverages just as I chose to avoid putting any money into the lottery because among our addictions we have gambling addiction, also on both sides of the family. On my father's side, his maternal aunt, the twin of my grandmother Mabel Wright, whose name was Ella, hanged herself in the 1960's in the attic stairwell of Grandmom Mabel's house in Ocean City. The oral history has it that she had been mugged at her home in Indiana, and had fallen during the crime and hit her head which left her with dementia, depression, paranoia and eventually suicide. My grandmother and her brother, Joseph, known as Yock, had driven to Indiana to rescue her and brought her back to their home in Ocean City, but it was no use. Her paranoia and depression overtook her and she gave up her life.

Nearly everyone I have know has either had suicidal thoughts, attempted suicde at some point in their lives, or dated or known people who have one of those options in their history. Personally, I really enjoy the simple basics of existence, the sun in the trees, the dance of the leaves, the cool breeze, the companionship of cats and a dog, the change in the seasons, the outdoors, simple foods - so many many items on my smorgasbord of happiness that I can't list them all, so I have not wished to end my life, although I have read some books on it to prepare for the future should I become incapacitated in some terrible way.

The article gives the history of the spotty and so far, ineffectual research into suicide via the fields of Psychology and Statistical data collection, and neuroscience. So far there has been little of scientific standard level to base anything on though various pioneers have paved paths through the juncle of mysteries. One of the most promising is in the field of data gathering by a company called Qntfy (an abbreviation of 'quantify') which seeks ro mine social media use, e-mails, texts, browsing history, streaming and media history, to find patterns that algorhythms can quantify to predict suicidal potential. in Pittsburgh, cognitive scientist Marcel Just is working on using a device to evaluate fMRI brain scans to see if they can find a connection to suicidal behavior. The phrase that struck me was "you can look at the brain scan and see what is wrong with the thought"

What I found most surprising, as did the author of the article, was how little is actually known about such a widespread phenomena. What is more unnatural than to willfully end ones own life when most of nature is compulsively directed towards preserving it. And yet there has been evidence that other creatures have committed suicide as well as humans, even dogs!

To me, it seems as though some of the most essential life strategies that a person can research, develop and apply, are in the realm of creating and maximizing thought and behavior patterns that maximize health, positive thought patterns and orderly life habits. Even this week at my religious gathering, the Woodbury Society of Friends Meeting, our early discussion group before Silent Worship, had turned our minds to comtemplating how best to cope with the despair that the losses of aging often bring. We are half younger people, 24 to 50, and half older people 65 to 76. Some of us older people are facing disability due to accidents and aging, one is no longer able to get around on her own and most have faced loss of spouses or loved ones. Just being together and talking about these issues is one of the most healthful and pratical methods of coping. We find we are not alone and we get tips from one another on how to open the dark curtain and find the light.

Perhaps that is the single most effective behavior in which we can engage to help us in regard to the main causes of the loss of the wish to live: despair and hopelessness. For myself, along with socializing and talking about these things, I have found reading to be a rich resource. There are many choices we can make and which turn into habits which in itself turns into character, that can help us to create the kinds of lives we wish to inhabit and not the kind that are so painful we want to leave. It has been at those times of my greatest despair that I have turned to friends both casual and religious and where I have found the lifeline to my own rescue.

"Throw out the lifeline, throw out the lifeline

Someone is drifting away

Throw out the lifeline, throw out the lifeline

someone is sinking today.

An old Salvation Army hymn.

A beautiful and heart stirring rendition by a youth choir and orchestra from the Eastward Missions in Australia is on YouTube, and I had to contemplate these young people are the age of the group with the highest threat of suicide. Presumably membership in an orchestra and singing group such as this one might be the medicine to save a young life.

Happy Trails and while you are on the happy trail, throw out the lifeline to someone not as lucky! = Jo Ann

Magazines and Mom - a duty and a pleasure to stay informed

Today is Thrsday, August 4th, 2022, and the opening headline on all my uninvited electronic newsfeeds, by which I mean my yahoo e-mail account, and my cell phone, was Alex Jones and his many attempts through INFO-WARS to wriggle out of responsibilty for his actions as a spreader of scurrilus lies and the force that sent a tide of crazed fans to torment the grieving parents of the chidren saughtered at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012.

On that date, 20 year old Adam Lanza shot and killed 20 children aged 6 and 7 years old and six teachers at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. That tragedy was followed by an attack by Alex Jones via his filth spewing internet program, Info Wars, claiming that the shooting was a hoax, the parents were "crisis actors" and the whole thing was a plot to deprive Americans of their guns by inflaming the public. His legion of ill-informed and obviously disturbed fans bought into the lies he spread and several of them stalked, harrasssed, and threatened the grieving parents of the slain children.

Finally, several of the sets of parents took to the courts to stop Alex Jones from continuing his spew of deluded lies by suing him for slander and defamation. Jones immediately began to seek out ways to declare bankruptcy so he wouldn't have to pay the fines levied against him by the courts. The courts are now in the process of assigning the monetary damages.

First Jones tried to say he didn't say any of those lies, but evidence in the form of videos and recordings and text messages were produced that showed he knew he was lying and he did it to use the hysteria of his fans to promote his various 'snake oil' products which have so far made him millions in profits while it sickens his already sick fans. Along with his 'tonics' he sells survivalist gear, and military type protective armor.

Sadly, I have a relative who actually listens to him and believes him and dosed himself with some 'colloidal silver' concoction he bought until we had a family intervention and brought it to his attention that the skin of his face was turning purple and his nails were turing black. The Food and Drug Administration ordered Jones to stop selling these fake products and his array of products to kill the coronavirus (a blue toothpaste) none of which had any useful properties and many of which were also harmful

My nephew fell down the rabbit hole of Alex Jones conspiracy theory horror world and took his daughter with him. They both believe all the crap he spews, including his repetitive attack on all his detractors which consists of accusing them of being paedophiles and human traffickers. He was one of the instigators of the Pizza Gate idiocy that accused Hillary Clinton of running a child trafficking ring from a pizza parlor in Washington D.C. which eventuated in a gunman attacking and shooting up the place.

All through my childhood, our home had incoming magazines of many kinds: Saturday Evening Post, Life, Look, National Geographic, House and Garden, Family Circle, Newsweek, and the daily Inquirer newspaper. My mother subsribed to all of these and I devoured them. We were well informed from a variety of sources - the newspaper, the magazines and the television news on the big three channels ABC, NBC, and CBS. Later, of course, we added PBS. My parents, both raised during the Depression, had gone to work in their teens and were not able to graduate from high school, nonetheless, they stayed well informed and they were self-educated.

So many working class and lower income homes today have no such investment in learning and they seem to slide into the warm and easy groove of getting all their information from facebook, on their cell phones, or internet sites. And even if they do get tv news, they tend to stick with the easy and scandal mongering FOX, owned by Rupert Murdoch, the pollution behind our own fouled information waters as well the the Fall of Britain into Brexit via Murdoch's take-over of their tabloid news media. He has been a mega-toxic pollutant in our time.

We are no longer an informed population, or rather I should say, too many are informed by one source and it isn't unbiased or in any way committed to the common good, but to the interests of oligarchs in our Capitalist society who use it to buy off the ignorant public, like the evil Donald Trump.

I have to honor my mother here for subscribing to those magazines and for supplying so many of the cultural tools that informed my youth and our whole family. She bought us book and both she and my father read the Readers Digest on subscription.

I have had to cut back on some of my subscriptions because unread magazines began to pile up in a basket by the sofa. I couldn't keep up. I had to let go of the SUnday New York Times as well because the print is too small for my diminishing eyesight. I have had to let go of Atlantic, Harpers, Vanity Fair, and the New Yorker, but I am keeping The Week (an international news magazine), Discover (science), Early American Life, and Archaeology. This, I think, is a well rounded set of reading materials that I may have a better chance of keeping up with.

Adding to this array, I also read some online bulletins from The Society of Friends, of which I am a member: Friends Journal on-line, and the Salem Quarterly e-bulletin, to which I also contribute book reviews and other items usually regarding environmental issues.

What's on your coffee table? Happy Trails, my friends

Jo Ann