Peg Kerr's Journal

I'm still reading news and analysis on it. But the icon really says it all. Thumbs up.

I think the Republicans will realize, oh maybe in the next ten or fifteen years that they were really on the wrong side of history on this. By that time, they will have lost the next generation. My daughters are definitely two of 'em.

All week, I've been troubled by the news that in attempting to kill Gaddafi, Americans instead killed his son and three of his grandchildren. There seemed to be very little discussion, much less abhorrence, of this fact in the news, just a general impression of, oh yeah, bad guy, let's kill him. If innocents get in the way, hey, that's war.

I kept thinking about the fact that Obama's been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, a fact that seems more embarrassing and awful the longer various conflicts drag on.

And then there was last night's news regarding Osama Bin Laden.

A great ethical trap which we have not managed to avoid is the danger of becoming what we oppose. I keep thinking of the exchange in The Lord of the Rings between Gandalf and Frodo:

Frodo: It's a pity Bilbo didn't kill him [Gollum] when he had the chance.
Gandalf: Pity? It was pity that stayed Bilbo's hand. Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends. My heart tells me that Gollum has some part to play yet, for good or ill before this is over. The pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many.

I don't think that America has much pity any more. Osama Bin Laden didn't, of course. He reveled in the deaths of many. But in answering the threat that he presented and in responding to the actions he set in motion, we have followed the path and the role he deliberately manipulated us into assuming: we have done much to present ourselves to the world as pitiless, cruel and oppressive, and consequently, we are loathed through much of the world. We have rivers of innocent blood on our hands, and the blood of the guilty, even those as guilty as Osama Bin Laden does not wash it away.

I am not excusing or minimizing what he did, heaven knows. At the free speech section in the May Day parade yesterday a contingent was marching with signs proclaiming that 9/11 was an inside job of the U.S. government, and I was so angry at such a pack of lies that I left the parade route and didn't watch any further. But I will not gloat or rejoice in Osama Bid Laden's death. I would rather see us turn our efforts to re-finding the country's soul, which we seem to have lost along the way.

Mark Tiedemann wrote an excellent and thoughtful blog entry about Palin's speech. I commented

What no one seems to have pointed out yet is one way that, weirdly enough, Palin allied herself with Loughner. By insisting that her words should not be taken as having had any effect on events, she seems to agree with one of the thoughts that came to be an obsession for Loughner: that words in fact have no meaning (other than, perhaps, the meaning he personally attributed to them).

As peeved as I've been with the man lately, I thought Obama's speech was really excellent, and quite a pointed contrast with Sarah Palin's.

I've been thinking a great deal about the gunman, Loughner. One thing that has bothered me is the way that the media has been attempting to frame him (i.e., is he a political liberal or a conservative), without sufficiently taking into account what seems in hindsight to be blindingly obvious: the man was mentally ill. Sarah Palin characterized him as "an evil man." Obama did better, referring to him in factually more neutral terms, i.e. 'the gunman' and 'the killer' and said, in rather more measured nuance

Scripture tells us that there is evil in the world, and that terrible things happen that defy human understanding. In the words of Job, "I looked for light, and then came darkness." Bad things happen, and we have to guard against simple explanations in the aftermath.

For the truth is none of us can know exactly what triggered this vicious attack. None of us can know with any certainty what might have stopped these shots from being fired, or what thoughts lurked in the inner recesses of a violent man's mind.

I am sure that Mr. Loughner will be carefully assessed, and I suspect that the diagnosis will be something close to paranoid schizophrenia. This is a disease that often shows up right when he started showing symptoms, in the late teens, early twenties. He showed classic symptoms: incoherent thought, inappropriate laughter and hostility, and confusion about causality.

As some have taken care to say, the mentally ill are not in most cases likely to become violent; on the contrary, they are most often likely to become the victims of violence, because of their vulnerability. Whatever his actions, I do believe that because of his illness he has diminished responsibility. I do feel very deeply for his parents, who according to all reports are in desperate anguish over their son's actions.

Obama sounded a note of compassion in his speech about almost all parties in his speech involved in the events in Arizona with I think one exception: Mr Loughner and his parents. He did touch about the necessity of discussing the adequacy of our mental health system, and that, I suppose is something. Perhaps it just wasn't politically feasible for him to say something sympathetic about a man who commited such a heinous act. I still wish that he had. I understand that he visited and spoke with many of the people he mentioned in his speech. I wish and hope that he had visited and spoke with Loughner's parents too, but I suppose political realities might make that impossible--people would be outraged at the idea that the parents of "such a monster" might need comforting, too.

But the situation of the medically ill in this country can be truly desperate. There is so little help for parents of a child who is sick in the mind, so little assistance, so little guidance, and most bitterly of all, very often so little compassion.

So many have expressed their condolence for dead and the wounded. I wish that more could have spared a sympathetic thought or even dared to speak aloud condolences for the family of this young man who lost his way in darkness and madness. I am sure they are hurting, too.

Edited to add: Saw this link elsewhere: a truly stunning first person article written by Susan Klebold, mother of Dylan Klebold, one of the perpetrators of Columbine, talking about what insights she has gleaned, ten painful years afterwards.

My hands are extremely painful, with cracked dry skin.

I hurt all over today. I went back to karate class yesterday (I'd intended to be going to two classes a week by now, but I've missed two weeks of classes due to all sorts of conflicts, plus depression). I'm using this knee brace, which works pretty well, and gives me good support, and keeps it warm, but of course, it prevents me from chambering my kicks very tightly.






It's so hard not to get discouraged. This knee problem, I've decided, seems to be a permanant injury. It still hurts, hurts, hurts when I do a full squat, even fourteen months later. I still can't do slow kicks on the injured side without holding the bar--my balance on that side is entirely shot. I have no more balance on that side than a green belt. I'm in the class below my belt level, and it still just seems so hard. And I'm not even going back to sparring class yet. After sparring class on Monday night (I was waiting because Fiona was attending), I joined the class to do the killer abs workout (the dreaded Ab Ripper DVD) and that's making me even more sore today. Alarmed by my physical deterioration, I've re-started the leg exercises I'd been doing when I was going to rehab, and so my hips and butt are sore, too. Gah. I WANT the black belt, but I just have a hard time believing I'll be able to accomplish it. Fiona is trying to buck me up, and I try to cheer myself by reminding myself that even if my side kicks seem lousy to me, there are very few women I know my age who can do a side kick at all.

Fiona is testing for a section star this Saturday (her second of three she needs to begin the screening process for black belt second degree.) She's doing the bo form, Soishi No Kang. She looks absolutely great doing it, except for one fault that just drives me crazy: her back heel pops up off the ground in almost every single one of her front stances. It's a bad habit she's had since she was a purple belt. I'll try to get a video of her doing it when she does the test this Saturday.

The girls are very difficult to rouse in the morning. Delia, poor thing, has to be out at the bus stop at 6:50 a.m., and she is downright snarly when I go in to wake her up (the alarm clock doesn't work for her. I have to rub her arms and legs for five to ten minutes every morning before she reluctantly surfaces). And Fiona has been incredibly groggy lately, too. We usually can't get her out of bed for as long as forty minutes after her alarm goes off, and then she attempts to dress, eat, and get out the door in ten minutes. The results are not happy.

The garage door is cracked, making it extremely difficult to close.

Cooking has been...interesting lately, mainly because I've been depending more on whatever we get from the food shelf. (Thank heavens for the food shelf. It's been just a God send for us.) It's different than shopping for yourself; instead of going to the store for what you intend to buy, you take whatever they happen to have on hand and then try to figure out how to use it. Often, stuff at the food shelf is distributed right before the expiration date, so sometimes its a challenge to use it in time. Rob's been volunteering there on Tuesdays, so we're entitled to two visits a month. At church this week (our church is one of the ones supporting this week) they said that food shelf visits are way up. They distributed 5,000 pounds of food last week.

We've been working on cleaning the house, in preparation for starting to cull stuff so that we can rearrange two and possibly three rooms. As I mentioned, I am giving up my office to give Fiona a bedroom. I'm viewing this as a temporary solution, until she goes away to college, but it's very difficult emotionally. We are trying to work out a way to carve out at least a small space for me, either in my bedroom, or in a room downstairs. The process of all this rearrangement will take us quite a while.

Rob has started another short term job with the Census. He's pleased because they went to more than the usual amount of trouble to call him back and promote him to a higher position. He's also gotten a call back for a legal editorial position. This means he's cleared the first hurdle, but he has to pass a test and, of course, battle with a bunch of other candidates for a limited number of slots, so it's useless to get hopes up yet. Still, it's more movement on the job front than we've had for months.

I'm really really really angry at Congress over the loss of a chance to pass health care reform, and I'm pretty ticked at Obama, too.

There is stuff that Elinor Dashwood isn't talking about (isn't there always). It's been preoccupying me a lot lately, which is why this journal has been quiet lately. I'm still here, though, still battling to keep my family together, moving forward through this tough time.

As gina_r_snape says:

President Obama, I'm still mad at you about the whole ignoring DADT thing and the DOMA thing [Peg adds: me, too].

But Mr. Colbert, you are truly made of win and awesome. This is so FTW.

I had no idea they'd met to record this.

Enjoy.

Here's a map of who's officing where in the West Wing of the White House.

From the New York Times.

From austen_blog:

The St. Petersburg Times has launched an interesting project:

PolitiFact is a project of the St. Petersburg Times to help you find the truth in American politics. Reporters and editors from the Times fact-check statements by members of Congress, the White House, lobbyists and interest groups and rate them on our Truth-o-meter. We’re also tracking more than 500 of Barack Obama’s campaign promises and are rating their progress on our new Obameter.

Follow Politifact on Twitter here.

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