Project Avalanche - One Snowflake Can Make A Difference

I'll do a Project Runway Junior recap in tomorrow's blog since the summaries I use for photos and secondary information are published online later for PRJr than for the standard PR. No problem though, since my brain is running a bit slower today anyway. Instead, I want to talk about the next step in the "10 Actions for 100 Days" movement.

There were a lot of Pink Pussyhats in Women's Marches throughout the world.
A veritable sea of pink. Chickie is still wearing her hat proudly, as are others
throughout the nation. 

If you recall, the initial focus was on the Women's March to Washington, at which millions of women around the world marched to show their support for human rights, women's rights and LGBTQIA rights. Pink "Pussy Hats" were worn by many and a feeling of solidarity with others was achieved. The first of the followup actions was to send postcards to your Senators, telling them which issues were most important to you, and reminding them that you are as valid of a constituent as any other. Did that.

Huddles will be informal gatherings to establish what is most important
to focus on and how best to continue to make an impact. 

The second action has now been announced, and it's one I won't do, at least not on the physical level. It's called "Huddle" and focuses on gathering together with others in a public venue or a private house to discuss issues of importance and ways in which the women can keep their focus, working for rights and changes under our new government. Although it's a really great idea for those who are social beings and who enjoy networking, it's a total "No" for me. I'm not huddling with anyone, I'll just stick to huddling from the frigid temperatures in my long purple coat. I am huddling in a virtual room, though, joining with Project Avalanche and mailing letters and snowflakes of concern. One snowflake, joined by many others, can become an avalanche.

One snowflake, when joined with millions of others, can
create an avalanche. 

Does that mean I won't be involved? Heck no! I'm tackling immigration and other issues of importance to me instead with Project Avalanche. Instead of focusing on our Senators, as the first action did, this one focuses on writing letters to your representatives. Inside of these letters, we encourage people to include snowflakes, one or many, each one identified as an issue of importance to you. The letters and snowflakes should be mailed between the dates of March 16-20 so that the offices of the Representatives are deluged with snowflakes - an Avalanche of Concern burying the offices of our Representatives in snowflakes. Are you looking for templates for your snowflakes? Follow this link for some really nice ones. I used one of these yesterday as a test and it worked really well.

On to the 365-day Meme for today ...

What kind of car are you driving?

I love my Mazda CX-5. It's the perfect car for me, although it
might be a bit too large for others. Chickie liked my car so much
that she bought a used 2014 model, identical to mine, when
she upgraded her car last year. 

I drive "Minion", a 2015 Mazda CX-5 in Red. I totally love my car. It has the space that I need, the versatility that I was looking for, gets excellent gas mileage (which would be a LOT better if I didn't do almost 100% short-run city driving) and makes a great Minion. I have two miniature Minions on my dashboard (from the Despicable Me 2 and Minions movies) and I actually have seat warmers as a standard feature - something I only found out about less than a month ago. Sometimes I can be a total dork.

List your pets.

Well, unless DH counts as a pet, I don't have any right now, so that's pretty simple. In the past I've owned several dogs and cats. Although I love both types of pets, my allergies have gotten worse as I've aged and I don't think I could tolerate a cat any more. I might look for one last dog when I retire because I do miss my dogs.

So that's it for a very cold Friday. The pool water will be so warm compared to the outside temperature, these are the best days for a good swim. Have a wonderful Friday. I'll be back tomorrow with my Project Runway Junior recap for the week.

The Women's March - What Now? and the 365-Day MEME

Saturday was the Women's March throughout the world. Women and many other supporters took to the streets, many in their pink "pussy hats" to demonstrate solidarity and concern. Although the original Washington DC march was sponsored by Planned Parenthood, that wasn't universal and that was clear in the variety of signs carried by the protesters. The signs weren't just about keeping women's rights untouched, they were about human rights in all forms. I've looked through photos of hundreds of signs now, but two of them really made my day.

I loved this sign by my LJ friend Dawn. These
are words to remember and never forget. Dawn
made it to Washington DC with her group of
ladies from Vermont. It was an unforgettable
experience for each of them. 

But the March is over, and we're all returning to our jobs, families, and homes. What to do now? How to keep the momentum going? For that I recommend "10 Actions for the First 100 Days". Click on the link to get to the website. Every ten days there will be a new action on a shared issue. The first action is to write a physical postcard to your Senators about what matters to you and how you're going to continue to fight for it in the days, weeks and months ahead. I can do this, and so can you. Let's keep this ball rolling throughout the 100 days of tRump's "honeymoon" and beyond. Let's keep the strength in numbers that we discovered on Saturday and hold proud to our feminine ideals of love, cooperation and working together toward a better future for generations to come.

Another LJ friend marched in Texas. One of
the signs she saw was this one, and I really
loved it. Obviously it was a lot warmer down
there. The 90,000 marchers in Saint Paul were
bundled up in coats, scarves, boots and hats. 

Before I dive into the meme, I have to say how disappointed I was in the Division Championship football games yesterday. I'm hoping the Superbowl in two weeks will be a better game, certainly a closer match-up. Both teams I wanted to win, lost. So I'll be watching an Atlanta/Patriots game in two weeks. Fortunately, there are commercials to watch!

I swim, but DH usually runs for several miles on the days
he's not at work. I probably should do more on the
machines, not just the pool, but I really love my daily
mile swim. 

WHO ARE YOU IN LOVE WITH?

DH is the love of my life, my companion and my friend. It's rather amazing that we found each other, and even more amazing that we're still together after all these years. I don't think anyone else would put up with me, and I'm absolutely certain nobody else would put up with him. We're the prefect foils for each other, and when we put our heads together, we can move mountains.

I do love pizza - the perfect food for me. We were just in
the mood for it while watching the football games and then
the hockey game. 

THE BEST PART OF TODAY WAS ______?

Waking up was good. In fact, I awakened 15 minutes earlier than usual, so I'm a bit less rushed with my blog this morning. Huzzah! The second best part of today will be closing the shop and warming up the rest of yesterday's pizza for dinner tonight. So good to eat, so bad for my weight. But I'll swim it off by the end of the week, and enjoy it tonight.

Have a great Monday and think about what I proposed above. Check out the "10 Actions for the First 100 Days" website (link above) and stay involved. Together we can roar, just like the old song https://youtu.be/V6fHTyVmYp4

The Other Side

Looking across at the other side. On the heels of the historic Brexit vote, I'm looking for pictures that will illustrate looking across at other things, places or people. I have no idea how the vote will ultimately affect Britain or the European Union, but it reminds me of the vote for secession taken by the Confederate states before the beginning of the Civil War in the United States more than 150 years ago. Of course Brexit is different in so many ways, but there is a similarity there that worries me.

People will be celebrating or will be aghast at the results
of this election. But the election is over. Now everyone
will need to learn how to work within the new mandate. 

An on-line friend posted this yesterday and I just had to pass it on. What does this have to do with looking at the other side? Well ... I'm older, and I can look back at my life from the far side now. Over my lifetime I've made 100's of friends, but those whom I label as my true friends are few and are cherished. Maybe that's my correlation with my subject today. I gazed across the valley of my life at a mass of people I've met and interacted with over the years, but just a few had moved from the milling crowd into the open center. Here they stand as people whose welfare crosses my mind often and as those with whom I would choose to share experiences any time.

Real friends are those who are with you through
thick and thin over time. I'm fortunate with
my friends - we have staying power. 

In ancient times before we had instant communication and air transport, entering an unknown valley was dangerous. What would the new valley hold? Were there people? Would they be friendly? Maybe there were fierce animals and any people living there would rather kill you than share a meal. You wouldn't know unless you took the bold step of walking away from the familiar and entering the unknown. As children we do that often - it's how kids learn. Most of us lose that sense of exploration and adventure as we grow older and more "responsible".

Looking across at the other side of the valley could be frightening.
What would we encounter as we passed through toward the
mountains ahead? Yet, as people, we have passed through these
valleys throughout our history in a quest to discover and
to understand the world around us. 

So as the world enters a new phase, the people within it will cross a new bridge and discover what lies on the other side. The days to come will be filled with new experiences and lots of rhetoric, but it's a year of change for everyone and we'll all have to cross this bridge. Britain made their feelings known with yesterday's vote and the USA Presidential election will take place in November. Both events will change the world as we know it. Here's hoping we all look back on these events in later years with a smile because we're crossing that bridge whether we want to or not.

Crossing a bridge is an act of faith in some ways. You hope
that you'll have positive experiences on the other side of
the bridge, and you cross a chasm or boundary of water to
get there. 

Here's hoping your week has gone well and will continue to do so. I'll be back tomorrow, hopefully a bit less pensively. Happy Friday!

Prejudice and Backlash - I Thought We Were More Grown Up

Are we reverting back to the 1950's? Or maybe even earlier than that, into the turn of last century or even the time of the American Civil War? I'm flabbergasted, because I thought as a nation we had moved beyond senseless hatred and the inability to look beyond racial stereotypes. I guess I was seriously mistaken and I'm stunned.

I liked this ad and thought the couple looked like a great
family unit in it. I fail to see why there should be such
controversy about it, but I know people around the world
would be upset with an interracial marriage. 

Old Navy is a clothing store for casual clothing at low prices (i.e., they're not good quality and won't last for a long time, but they're affordable, especially when kids grow out of clothes faster than budgets allow). They recently ran an advertising campaign featuring the couple and child in the photo above. The implication, of course, is that it was an interracial family, and it comes across as a loving family unit. The backlash the company received on social media because of this photo was ridiculous.

Here's a protest occurring in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1970. Have we
 really not moved past this point? It seems that protests today are
saying the same or quite similar things and protesting for the
same rights. Have we wasted the past 40+ years on nothing? 

When I was in high school I fully admit that people were a lot more uptight about interracial unions. But that was in the late 1960's and early 1970's and I thought we have grown beyond that outdated attitude. When I was in high school, one of my school acquaintances fell in love with a black man and a few years later, while I was in college, she married him. Her family disowned her and, to the best of my knowledge, they never reconciled. Her marriage was happy and she never regretted her choice of partner.

Domestic violence is still prevalent with one in four women
being abused by their spouse in any given year. In some areas
of the world, it is almost an expected part of marriage. To me
that is shocking and something that should never be tolerated, but
I have had co-workers in abusive relationships and I know how
hard it can be to leave them. 

On the other hand, another school friend, Ann, was the perfect Jewish daughter. She was obedient, soft-spoken, very well dressed (her parents had a higher income than most of the rest of us experienced) and did I mention obedient? Yeah. She married the man her parents chose for her - a good Jewish man who married her and took her to Israel. Once there, she was beaten and traumatized, eventually ran away from him and returned home. She divorced the abuser and married a second time into a better situation. But her parents were unforgiving. She had left the man of their choice and they could no longer hold their heads up in Temple. They turned their backs on her for leaving the husband they had chosen.

When are we going to learn that love is the key. We sing about love
all the time, but don't really seem to subscribe to that in our
lives. Posters like this and books showing choices are a good beginning, but that's
all they are - just a beginning. We still, after more than half a century,
have a long way to go. 

My parents, thank goodness, thought both sets of other parents were treating their children poorly for the choices they had made. I'm not sure what my mother would have done if I had expressed the desire to marry a black man, but she knew I was dating one for a while. I had him home for dinner and the folks were great. It just seems to me that getting angry about the people we love is beyond reason. If two people fall in love, marry, and forge a family together, and the marriage is strong and healthy, who really cares if the marriage is interracial, gay, lesbian, or otherwise? What's important are the words strong, healthy for both partners, and loving. Here's to a loving Tuesday for all.

70 Years Ago Yesterday

Seventy years ago, on January 25, 1945, the Russians walked into Auschwitz and rescued those who remained alive in one of the most notorious of the death camps built and operated by the Nazi regime. Those prisoners still in the huge complex were those considered too sick or weak to go on the forced march the others had been forced on. It is the one time in their lives when being sick actually saved their lives and when being in the infirmary didn't equate with death.

Several camps had the "Arbeit Macht Frei" signs, but this one
is notorious. Arbeit Macht Frei, translated, means Work (will)
Make (you) Free. What a joke! 

Why start a week out with something so shocking? Why dredge up old history one more time? Because there are still some children who survived that day who still live and still remember January 25th as the start of their changed and forever interrupted lives. And because there are some of us, including myself, who are inextricably tied to Auschwitz and the events that happened in that place of horrors.

All tracks led to Auschwitz/Birkenu. The tracks have been straightened
in more modern times to make a more pleasing entry. 

While I write about Mordor and the evils of man towards man, I always have the death camps of the Nazis in the back of my head. My father's parents were killed at Auschwitz, my grandfather's trunk is/was in the museum there for many years. Is it still? I have no idea. But I do know that my father's half-brother went to the camp one year and he saw his father's trunk there. When he visited us some years later, he told Dad and me about having seen it.

In the selection process, men would be separated from women, children would be
pulled away from parents. Most people would be dead within 24 hours
of their arrival. You can see the tower from the previous picture in the back
left side of this one. 

The camps existed because people turned their backs and said if things didn't affect them directly, everything was all right. They turned their backs on human rights, they turned their backs on what was happening in the next nation, the next city, or across the pasture. They turned their backs and closed their eyes and that left sadists a wide field in which to operate. Sauron's got nothing on how easily men turn their backs on their brothers.

Everything was taken from the murdered, and everything was kept - stockpiled
for some unknown future use. There's a lot of people represented by this
pile of shoes. 

It was not only Jewish people who were killed in the camps. Never lose sight of the fact that even though the Jews were the larger percentage, there also were Gypsies, political malcontents, and homosexuals. Basically, those perceived to not fit the mold of the Aryan race were imprisoned, pulled into ghettos, pushed onto packed rail cars, worked to death, shot to death, or gassed to death. Millions upon millions of them. That happened less than 100 years ago! So as we look at the world and tsk about the conflicts throughout the world, let's not kid ourselves. This kind of mass death happened in modern times and if it happened once, it can happen again. What are you doing to keep that from happening?

One-and-one-half million people killed in five years. That's
amazing. And the fact that we continue to kill our fellow man
for any number of reasons astonishes me. 

Have a good Monday and I'll be back tomorrow with something a bit more uplifting.

A Discussion of 'Alternative Lifestyle'

An LJ acquaintance has been exchanging posts with a number of us about what he is calling 'Alternative Lifestyle'. In his particular case, he is referring to homosexuality. Those of us responding to his initial post are almost universally stating that homosexuality is not an alternative lifestyle. Do you agree?

Is the practice of yoga an alternative lifestyle?

The dictionary defines 'alternative lifestyle' as: a way of life considered unconventional or nontraditional according to a social or cultural "norm". I don't consider hard-wired human sexuality as an alternative because I don't consider our choice of sexual partners to be an open buffet of options. As much as I might want to be attracted to women sexually, it's not going to happen. There's no 'zing'. I can admire a beautiful body, but I am only admiring and don't want to take it to the next level.

Is an Indian Fakir an 'alternative lifestyle'? 

Acts of sexuality can be alternative. Entering into a Dom/Submissive partnership could be considered an 'alternative' choice.  Choosing to have a relationship that embraces varying degrees of BDSM, bestiality, or polygamy can be considered an 'alternative' choice. Your sexual life, as an adult walking this earth, can be as plain or elaborate as you and your partner(s) choose. But your choice of partner - no. That's not.

Is polygamy considered an 'alternative lifestyle', a mandate of God, or
just against the law?

Yet, as I look through images of 'alternative lifestyle' it seems predominantly focused on gay and lesbian couples. Why is that? Why do we consider same-sex relationships to be deviant? Why are we threatened by the sight of a same-sex couple walking ahead of us on the road? And even more than that, why are same-sex couples or LGBT people so often singled out for violence by others?

Are Dom/Sub relationships an 'alternative lifestyle'? 

Beatings, whippings, even rapes and murders of LGBT people have been ignored or condoned for centuries. In our enlightened society, law enforcement has often turned its back when the crime is committed against an LGBT person. In other areas of the world, homosexuality is criminalized and punishable by multiple years of imprisonment or even death. Why? Again I ask - what is so threatening?

Why are gay couples singled out as living an 'alternative lifestyle'? 

I lived through the 60's and early 70's. I clearly remember the prejudices and occasional violence against the hippies that was openly displayed. My parents remembered the horrors of Nazi Germany and signs telling them that 'No Jews Welcome Here'. Push a bit farther back and you'll see the same signs for the Irish, and Native Americans, and of course, Blacks. So where do we draw the line for the extension of human rights? I firmly believe that all human beings are entitled to full human rights, regardless of their sexual choices.

Who makes the determination of what is and isn't acceptable behavior? 

I wasn't planning to write a full essay on a weekend, but there you go - darned muses. Have a great weekend.