Virus Head is one of the most gracious people I’ve encountered in my years of blogging. She has a gentle patience that almost makes me feel bad for the chainsaw approach I take to some of my more notable commenters. I DON’T feel bad, of course, but seeing her way stops me dead in my tracks from time to time.

For those who answer blog comments, emails, and make their visitors feel at home on their blogs. For the people who take others feelings into consideration before speaking out and who are kind and courteous. Also for all of those bloggers who spend so much of their time helping others bloggers design, improve, and fix their sites. This award is for those generous bloggers who think of others.

This means a lot to me, all the more so because at times I really have to struggle to maintain civility. It is very comforting for me to know that some readers notice (and care) that I try to be as gracious and understanding as I can (even when provoked). I don’t always succeed. It is very tempting for me to give in to my flair for a kind of wicked wit; it’s fun! I enjoy argument more than dialogue, and I really, really enjoy winning an argument. It’s true. What can I say?

When the urge comes, I try to remember that I can’t see the person, so I miss all sorts of nonverbal cues in the communication. I can’t adjust my rhetoric or style when I am missing vital information. I can’t add a smile or convey a sense of irony. Words on the page come across differently. You can’t broadcast the tone of voice, the facial expression.

People are also at all sorts of levels in different areas. They are from all sorts of backgrounds, and a wide range of personal, community, and cultural experience. You have to take people where they are to get anywhere… if it’s worth bothering at all. Online, it is sometimes difficult to get much of a sense of where someone might really be “coming from.”

It’s the teacher in me that usually wins the battle over my inner debater and warrior. Sometimes it’s a strain. I can get a little derisive from time to time. But I think less of myself when I do.

So – thanks, Jolly Roger. The admiration of a pirate is a wondrous thing.

Yes, this is another of those “Create-a-network” meme awards. You can link this back to me if you wish, you may choose to name others, or not. It’s up to you.

Can I toss it back in your general direction, JR? I am so glad to have met you online.

Todd at Postcards from Hell’s Kitchen is my earliest blogger contact on the net. He gets out there and explores everything there is. He is kind and caring and witty and very gracious.

Maria has a MySpace blog. She is a doll (I mean that in the good way). I first encountered her through the site Women Evolving. I can’t find it on the net anymore, but I used to visit the site years ago to be refreshed. She’s so very sweet and kind it almost kills me sometimes. We are contemporaries from Massachusetts, but we’ve never met.

Actually, I’ve never met anyone on this list. If I were to list people I knew, the list would be unmanageable.

Vance’s Meditations on an Eyeball illustrate the value of quality over quantity. He wrestles with difficult religious and philosophical questions. His posts are somehow both opinionated and open. In correspondence, he is a thoughtful and gracious writer. I’m putting him on the list because I hope that he will get more comments on his blog and have more of a chance to let his inner hospitality shine.

Don at Life Cycle Analysis posts on environmental change, archaeology, and human interactions with the environment. He always gets a fair number of comments. Here’s a “moonbat” who rises above it all (note the url of the blog – I know that “moonbat” is meant to be an insulting word to signify a crazy liberal, but I love the sound of the word). His blog has some interesting things you won’t see elsewhere.

Some of the most thoughtful kind people I’ve encountered online don’t blog at all, or not much.

For example, Elainna is a long-time online friend and Care2 buddy (her site is The Wild Side). She is a tireless worker for spirituality, the environment, progressive politics, and a host of other causes. I get a whole bunch of leads from her on petitions to sign, letters to write, news to read, things to do. She is always gracious and caring, and I am rather fond of her.

Dennis doesn’t post very often at his blog, but he does post at his Care2 group Love, Tolerance, and Ridiculous Stuff. Do you really want to see the thoughtful and hospitable response? He’s got it down to a science. I think he even means it.

Some actions for my fellow armchair activists. Click on the links for more information and to take action.

• Don’t Give Alberto Gonzales the Power to Speed Up Executions. You’ve got to read this just to believe they are even considering it.
• Demand the immediate release of renowned Iranian-American scholar Dr. Haleh Esfandiari, who is imprisoned for the 100th day in Iran’s notorious Evin prison, a location infamous for the torture and detention of political prisoners. Dr. Esfandiari, 68, is the director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.
• As a consumer, support workers’ rights at the Tar Heel, North Carolina, Smithfield Foods plant, the largest hog slaughterhouse in the world. The mistreatment of injured workers – and the conduct of Smithfield Foods in past union elections at the Tar Heel plant – is completely unacceptable (and perhaps unlawful too).
• Fat lot of good that it will do, but go tell the Bush administration to reject the proposed Desert Rock power plant. Oppose the plans for a dirty, coal-fired power plant in northwestern New Mexico that would release mercury and other toxic contaminants into the environment, pollute waterways and threaten human health. A “global energy company” and the Dine Power Authority want to build the plant on the eastern edge of the Navajo Nation.
• Sign the petition for an independent investigation that would seek to establish whether the Bush Administration intentionally delayed the capture of Osama Bin Laden in order to justify the invasion of Afghanistan.

Outer-space, that is.

Congratulations! Blog in Space has deemed you “Most Likely to be Contacted.” Your blog will be showcased on the home page of BloginSpace.com on October 29, 2006. We’ve provided a button below for your blog to assist in helping off-world entities locate your blog. You are no longer considered part of the World Wide Web. You are now officially part of the Intergalatic Wide Web. Welcome.

That almost makes up for ML beating me out for the “Best Actress” in senior year of High School (she was in the much cooler play).

It even makes up for the fact that I never saw any evidence whatsoever of a ghost at the beach house where we were staying recently, although the guest journals were full of anecdotal narratives.

Aliens! Your views on what we’re doing to our beautiful world? Is our “higher purpose” simply to produce plastics and pollution for the greater complexity of the cosmos? Comments? Criticisms?

Aliens?

I still haven’t seen the movie. Still working on the babysitting situation…

I’ve added it to my sidebar for a bit. It’s strange that the javascript will work in the sidebar but not in a post.

In the words of an English teacher at Wellesley College…

O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

Oh beautiful, for heroes proved
In liberating strife,
Who more than self their country loved
And mercy more than life!
America! America!
May God thy gold refine
‘Til all success be nobleness
And ev’ry gain divine!

Oh beautiful, for patriot’s dream
That sees beyond the years!
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
Till selfish gain no longer stain
The banner of the free!

For what avail the plough or sail, or land or life, if freedom fail?
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives.
~Dorothy Thompson

Our defense is in the spirit which prized liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism at your own doors.
~Abraham Lincoln

We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
~William Faulkner

Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.
~Abraham Lincoln

He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from opposition; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach himself.
~Thomas Paine

Freedom has its life in the hearts, the actions, the spirit of men and so it must be daily earned and refreshed – else like a flower cut from its life-giving roots, it will wither and die.
~Dwight D. Eisenhower

There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.
~William J. Clinton

I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.
~Simone de Beauvoir

Where liberty dwells, there is my country.
~Benjamin Franklin

John Gray of Cincinnati, Ohio, highlighted liberals’ contributions to the U.S. this way: “Joe gets up at 6 a.m. to prepare his morning coffee. He fills his pot full of good clean drinking water because some liberal fought for minimum water quality standards. He takes his daily medication with his first swallow of coffee. His medications are safe to take because some liberal fought to insure they are safe and work as advertised.

“All but $10.00 of his medications are paid for by his employers medical plan because some liberal union workers fought their employers for paid medical insurance, now Joe gets it, too. He prepares his morning breakfast, bacon and eggs this day. Joe’s bacon is safe to eat because some liberal fought for laws to regulate the meat packing industry.

“Joe takes his morning shower reaching for his shampoo; his bottle is properly labeled with every ingredient and the amount of its contents because some liberal fought for his right to know what he was putting on his body and how much it contained. Joe dresses, walks outside, and takes a deep breath. The air he breathes is clean because some tree-hugging liberal fought for laws to stop industries from polluting our air.

“Joe walks to the subway station for his government-subsidized ride to work; it saves him considerable money in parking and transportation fees. You see, some liberal fought for affordable public transportation, which gives everyone the opportunity to be a contributor.

“Joe begins his work day; he has a good job with excellent pay, medical benefits, retirement, paid holidays and vacation days because some liberal union members fought and died for these working standards. Joe’s employer pays these standards because Joe’s employer doesn’t want his employees to call the union. If Joe is hurt on the job or becomes unemployed he’ll get a worker compensation or unemployment check because some liberal didn’t think he should lose his home because of his temporary misfortune.

“It’s noon time, Joe needs to make a bank deposit so he can pay some bills. Joe’s deposits are federally insured by the FSLIC because some liberal wanted to protect Joe’s money from unscrupulous bankers who ruined the banking system before the Depression.

“Joe has to pay his Fannie Mae underwritten mortgage and his below-market federal student loan because some stupid liberal decided that Joe and the government would be better off if he was educated and earned more money over his lifetime.

“Joe is home from work, he plans to visit his father this evening at his farm home in the country. He gets in his car for the drive to Dad’s; his car is among the safest in the world because some liberal fought for car safety standards.

“Joe arrives at his boyhood home. He was the third generation to live in the house financed by Farmers Home Administration because bankers didn’t want to make rural loans. The house didn’t have electricity until some big government liberal stuck his nose where it didn’t belong and demanded rural electrification. (Those rural Republicans would still be sitting in the dark).

“Joe is happy to see his dad who is now retired. His dad lives on Social Security and his union pension because some liberal made sure he could take care of himself so Joe wouldn’t have to. After his visit with Dad, he gets back in his car for the ride home.

“Joe turns on a radio talk show, the hosts keeps saying that liberals are bad and conservatives are good. (He doesn’t tell Joe that his beloved Republicans have fought against every protection and benefit Joe enjoys throughout his day.) Joe agrees, “We don’t need those big-government liberals ruining our lives; after all, I’m a self-made man who believes everyone should take care of themselves, just like I have.”

–thanks to Jackson Thoreau at OpEd News.

The pre-pregnant. The pre-pregnant?

Well, if all women of reproductive age should consider themselves pre-pregnant, then I guess there will have to be a resurrection of real sex education and easily available birth control. Prenatal services and care for women will take top priority, and corporations will immediately address exposure to environmental toxins in the workplace. Mercury in fish, overuse of antibiotics in beef and chicken, the pesticides on our fruit and vegetables – all of this will be addressed to protect the “pre-pregnant.” Right? Right?

From the Bush administration? Dream on. If you haven’t caught the similarity to the new word “pre-born,” you haven’t been paying attention. This is a working example of the inscription of rhetorical, cultural, and even legal precedents for the prioritizing of a potential (not even actual) pregnancy over the life of the mother. We are allowing a woman to be defined solely as a baby-making machine, valued only in the capacity of being a potential mother.

It’s one thing to encourage all women of child-bearing age to take folic acid, have checkups, etc etc. But there are many other implications (one of which will clearly _not_ be holding men responsible for anything). It’s one of the many building blocks in the anti-choice and anti-woman agenda (these are two different agendas, but they get more and more overlap).

Once these are fully in place, I can see scenarios in which, for example, a woman could be held criminally liable for drinking or smoking, just in case she might become pregnant. I can see women becoming property again, with husbands or fathers as the “stewards” of the breeding stock.

Where is the parallel term for men? It would only be fair, would it not, to discuss the “pre-paternal” guidelines? Last time I checked, male genetic material was included in the process.

The example of health guidelines is relatively benign (I take folic acid every day), but I think women are right to object to the inherent implications of the term.

There is, first of all, an aesthetic objection to be made. “Pre-pregnant” is silly and it sounds stupid. Ick.

This is so ripe for a George Carlin or Lewis Black or Chris Rock routine. It’s next in line for Carlin’s sketches on “pre-boarding” a plane and the historical vocabulary series from “shell-shock” to “post-traumatic stress disorder.”

Think of what it actually means to categorize women (and girls) as “pre-pregnant” for some 30-45 years of their lives, which is the reproductive span of women from first menstruation to the end of menopause.

A little satire can point to some of the problems with using this kind of vocabulary. Imagine some other words:

• pre-baptised
• pre-raped
• pre-inseminated
• pre-productive
• pre-taxed
• pre-educated
• pre-civilized
• pre-terrorist
• pre-wounded
• pre-bombed
• pre-radiated
• pre-dead

You don’t have to be a linguist or a political junkie or a discourse analyst to see some of the implications of using words like these.

Are there actually women who accept being envisoned as valuable only in terms of being a walking uterus/incubator? Pop one out for Bush und Gott? There are real effects on women’s lives already. Here is an example:

“I have been unable to obtain adequate medical care for my epilepsy because I am what they’d call pre-pregnant. As my neurologist puts it, I am a woman of child-bearing age. As such, they flat-out refuse to try me on any medicines other than the ones proven least likely to affect a fetus (read: the ones that are paying off my neurologist). Despite the fact that I have declared my belly a no-fetus zone. My neurologist does not trust me to not get pregnant. My neurologist puts a potential fetus’s potential health over my health. And now the government wants to officially sanction that.”

Once we get used to thinking of women as “pre-pregnant,” it opens the doors to wider acceptance of even more anti-female legislation than is already on the table with attempted definitions of the “personhood” of the fetus and abortion bans (even in cases of rape, incest, and danger to the life of the woman). The disappearance of family planning clinics, incitement to hate and violence against doctors who perform abortions, and the proliferation and funding of fake clinics across the country should already have shown us what is happening here.

The CDC guidelines seem to be aimed at health education (at least primarily), but the slant in the Washington Post article is chilling. Is there anyone here who can really doubt that the very vocabulary here is indicative of the political and cultural influence of the pseudo-religious, dominionist right-wing?

The kind of men who need to dominate and control women (as these folk seem to want to do) are pathological – and boring – and make terrible husbands, fathers, brothers or friends. Just my personal opinion.

Wherever you are in terms of your beliefs about pregnancy planning, education, abortion – I do hope that the women and men of this country are not really quite willing to turn back the clock on women’s “personhood.”

Aren’t we claiming to “spread democracy and freedom”? Ask the women of Afghanistan and Iraq, or for that matter, across much of the world, how we’re doing on that.

I do hope you’ll be voting and supporting more progressive candidates (or even running for office yourself).

“To my knowledge, there has never been an administration that has been more hostile to women’s equality, to reproductive freedom as a fundamental human right, and has acted on that hostility. They certainly have pursued abstinence-only sex education programs and gutted and gotten rid of comprehensive sex education. They’ve pursued the gag rule that uses U.S. foreign aid to suppress reproductive information, and that has literally endangered and damaged the lives of millions of women in poor countries. And they’ve suppressed AIDS information and emergency contraception. In addition to their clear drive to criminalize abortion, there has been no opportunity of which I’m aware that they have not taken to restrict women’s rights and to oppose reproductive freedom.”

— Gloria Steinem, 2004