The Greatest American Moment in American History

I'm a firmly middle-aged white woman living in southern California, born fifty years and one day ago, the one day, today, that the great Martin Luther King stood up in front of the Lincoln Memorial and let loose one of, if not the most, amazing speeches in the history of my country. I listened to the speech today while I folded clothes warm from the laundry. The hair on my white arms rose, tears pricked at my eyes, I wondered again at the preternatural magic that man possessed, how he wove history, the present and the future into words -- that glorious cadence of his oratory. As sabers rattle and metal machines lie in wait to drop bombs, yet again, in desolate places across the globe, I wonder, too, whether the words he spoke of, that dream, will ever be realized fully, whether the principles of nonviolence will ever take utterly and completely. I know better. They will not. But I know that I will take those principles into my own heart and teach them to my children and hope that by so doing we will be that many more added to the peacemakers.

Here's the speech:




And here's an excellent article for those of you, like me, who struggle with so-called patriotism and honoring soldiers and killing and dying for liberty. 

It's also for those of you who don't understand people like me.

No, thanks: Stop saying "support the troops."

Sequestration, Shame and Children with Disabilities with a P.S.

Just so you know, I'm not an expert on any of this government business, and every time I see The Tan Man's face (that would be Speaker Boehner**), my insides curdle, so you could say I'm very biased, but this is what I understand will happen if the Congress doesn't figure out the budget, and sequestration occurs:

The impact of sequestration on education programs is an estimated $3.5 to $4 billion. That includes a $1.2 billion cut to Title 1 grants for disadvantaged students and an estimated $900 million to Special Education under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) for the 2013-2014 school year.

More specifically, the resulting $1.2 billion cut to Title 1 could mean denying funding to nearly 4,000 schools serving nearly 1.6 million disadvantaged students, and more than 16,000 teachers and aides could lose their jobs and more than 10,000 special education teachers, aides and other staff providing support to children with disabilities.

U.S. Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan 

How proud are you as an American citizen to be living in a country that demands sacrifice and belt-tightening from children, the disadvantaged and the disabled?

I did a little, a very little, research and found out that one drone called a 10-MQ-9 Reaper (how hideous is that name for a piece of technology that kills?) costs

$12,548,710.60.

If you do the math, that comes to approximately how many drones that -- I might add -- have been implicated in killing children in distant lands --to balance out the coming cuts in education for the disadvantaged and the disabled?

How proud are you as an American citizen to be living in a country that spends more on high tech equipment that kills people than on the education of children who are disadvantaged and disabled?

I'm ashamed to be an American and I'm not ashamed to assert that.

P.S. And we haven't talked (or ranted) about the state of Georgia nearly killing a cognitively disabled man in prison for murder yesterday. Or the death penalty at all.


**Spell check suggests the word Boner when I type Boehner which perhaps provides the only bit of levity in this post.