Life is a Journey - Not a

Marianne Williamson and The Peacemaker

Malibu, CA. - Speaking at a fundraiser for Andrew Dougherty Vision Foundation (ADVF), co-hosted by Free & Equal Elections Foundation, Marianne Williamson, best-selling author, Congressional Candidate 2014 (Independent, CA-33) endorsed Christina Tobin and the Free & Equal Elections Foundation. Marianne will be a keynote speaker at Free & Equal's upcoming United We Stand Festival at UCLA, May 10th, 2014.

“I agree wholeheartedly with Christina that the chokehold the two major political parties have on our political system right now is, in fact, sucking all the oxygen out of our public discourse.  I think JFK meant it, and I think he was right, when he said, ‘Let us find not the Democratic answer or the Republican answer but the right answer.’ I think the spirit of the American people at our best is not necessarily desirous of being filtered through the dogma of a major political party. Abolition didn’t come from a major political party; women’s suffrage didn’t come from a major political party; the civil rights movement didn’t come from a major political party. There’s a course correction. There’s a yearning of the American heart right now. While the political parties have a role to play—Christina is absolutely right—they were not intended by the founders. They are not even mentioned in our Constitution. George Washington warned us against them. There is something trying to happen in American, and we shouldn’t be limited by anyone or any institution. What Christina is trying to do is pure American, in its most radical sense. Hats off to you, Christina Tobin.”


I am excited to join with Marianne Williamson and promote this event in Los Angeles on May 10, 2014. This summary of what Marianne stands for can be validated by reading the historical accounts of abolition and women's suffrage and the peace movement chronicled in "The Peacemaker" available at http://kentuckywoman.net. Mark your calendars for this event so those of us who are like minded can come together and make a stand against the "choke hold the two major political parties have on our political system right now."

Why this "Mama Made up Her Mind" to write "The Peacemaker

My roommate gave me a book entitled “Mama Makes up Her Mind and Other Dangers of Southern Living” by Bailey White for Christmas. I was excited to delve into a book that I assumed would be full of local color and bring back lots of images about a life I could relate to having been brought up in Kentucky.

This book did indeed provide images of growing up in small backwoods southern towns in the latter part of the 20^th Century. Indeed, the writer had been a child in the postwar era of the 1950’s and reached middle age near the end of the 20^th Century just as I did. I had a lot in common with her because southerners from rural areas live simple lives and don’t travel much or very far from home. They are not affected by the trends of fashion and cosmopolitan living so the southern people develop differently from their urban counterparts.

Southerners develop unique qualities that don’t bear a rubber stamp counterpart of their peers. Each section of the book contains vignettes about individuals with eccentricities the sophisticated world would find unappealing to say the least. But for those in South Georgia, these individuals were part of that southern landscape that no one questioned.

There was, however, a degree of sophistication about Ms. White that came from her training as a school teacher. Because she taught school, she was responsible for opening up the larger world to her students through exploration of the natural world where they lived to exploring history and ideas through the world of books.

Ms. White has many stories about lessons she taught throughout her teaching years but the one relating the story of Jeanne d’Arc which led to her own Aha experience describes perfectly my “Aha” experience after ten years of teaching American history to 8^th grade students in Albuquerque, New Mexico. My Aha experience led to writing “The Peacemaker.” It takes me a lot more time to relate my story than this brief vignette Ms. Bailey has in her book. With her permission, I now retell the story in her own words. The message should be clear.

“I have in my possession an old children’s book, the story of Joan of Arc, movingly written and wonderfully illustrated by a Frenchman name Boutet de Monvel. He has a way of using color and texture and a delicacy of line that makes you want to sink into his pictures.

I took the book to school one day to read to my first-graders. I had to change the French to English, but I tried to keep the high drama and charged emotion of de Monvel’s old-fashioned, rhetorical style. I showed them the pictures: hazy summer days and misty moonshiny nights, the archangel Saint Michael glowing gold, and the costumes of the royal court, painted so that the children couldn’t help reaching up to touch the page to feel the damasks and brocades of those robes.

The most glorious pictures are the battle scenes. There is Joan of Arc, leading the charge, with the head of her great horse bursting out of the frame and onto the next page, and the forward-thrusting lances, and the gleaming silver armor. And best of all, de Monvel has draped over Joan a filmy garment that billows out behind in the fury of the fray and unfurls itself in graceful tatters over the heads of her faithful soldiers.

The book was even more successful than I had thought it would be. Not a single child stirred, and when we got to those battle scenes, I could almost feel their eyes sucking the images off the page. At the end, I read de Monvel’s personal note to the reader: To be victorious, you must believe in victory. So remember, my children, this story of Joan of Arc, against the day when your country will call on you to give her all your courage.

Thirty pairs of hands reached out to take the book, and there was a chorus of voices, Read it again!

After school that day I looked through my Joan of Arc book before I packed it up to take home. I found some new smudges on top of the old smudges left on those pages by French children almost a hundred years ago. Then I thought of something, I turned to the title page and checked the copyright date. It was 1898.

Little French children six years old, reading that book when it was new, would have been just military age in 1914. And here am I, who should know better, in another country, with that very book in my hands, telling other children the same old lie:

Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori

From: “Mama Makes up Her Mind and Other Dangers of Southern Living” by Bailey White.  First Vintage Book Edition May, 1994.

That was my same Aha experience about teaching white man’s political history and the glorification of war for over 15 years in Albuquerque, NM in 1986. I decided to start telling a different story.

Preview: The Path of Positive Resistance | Moyers & Company | BillMoyers.com

Preview: The Path of Positive Resistance | Moyers & Company | BillMoyers.com

Bill for Renewable Energy

http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250&username=nirsnet  

Please consider contacting your senators and representatives to get support for this bill.

Amendment 14 and The Right to Choose and the Affordable Health Care Act

Amendment 14, the Right to Privacy, Roe vs. Wade and the Affordable Health Care Law

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

This is the Amendment used to guarantee the freedom of the slaves given by the 13^th Amendment because Congressional leaders were well aware of the bias that existed in the South after the Civil War and wanted to make sure the freed slaves would remain free. This Amendment was disregarded by the establishment of what were known as the Jim Crow Laws that kept African Americans in bondage for 100 years after the end of the Civil War. In a case challenging the segregation laws that came before the Supreme Court in 1898 (Plessey vs. Ferguson) the biased Supreme Court kept the African American population of the South in bondage for over fifty years by declaring segregation Constitutional in the “separate but equal clause.”

Only massive civil rights protests and years of violence and riots put an end to this “final word on segregation” from 1898.

In 1971 the Supreme Court overturned state abortion laws giving females the “right to choose what happened to their bodies” by using the 14^th Amendment in the famous (or infamous) Roe vs. Wade Decision. I was a woman of child bearing age at that time and was am still am dedicated to the principle of pro-choice. But, unlike most of my female counterparts today, I am still dedicated to the principle of choice when it comes to any issues surrounding any medical procedures that invade my right to choose what goes into my body.

 I am opposed to and have rejected any medical treatment that debilitates my body in any way or destroys my God given immune system which is my best treatment against disease. For that reason, I have rejected insurance that covers invasive procedures such as x-rays, mammograms, Pabst smears, unnecessary surgeries, radiation or poisonous chemo-therapies as well as any drugs including over the counter drugs. I have treated all my illnesses since 2003 when I was without insurance with alternative treatments and visits to naturopaths who have helped me with diet and exercise as the best treatments to prevent autoimmune disorders, arthritis and diabetes. I have maintained accident insurance and hospitalization insurance but I have a living will with strict orders about treatments I refuse to accept to maintain my life when I am terminally ill. With the passage of the Affordable Health Care Act I am now told that I must register with a nationally controlled web site and turn over all kinds of private information about my body and its functioning and then I must purchase insurance to pay for the above mentioned treatments I do not want to use or pay a tax penalty. It is my belief that the same Amendment that protected a female’s right to choose in 1971 will protect my right to choose in 2014. Therefore, I am choosing to opt out of this program and if forced to will challenge the Law in the federal courts of the United States the way Roe did in 1971. It is my right and no one has the right to impinge upon the rights of others, especially after they have been members of disenfranchised groups that have fought to gain their rights under the law. You can’t have it both ways in a free country. You cannot use your rights to step on my rights. It doesn’t work that way.

Preserve, Protect and Defend What in Syria

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

This oath has been taking by every President since George Washington took the first oath of office as our country’s first President. It is a requirement before the President can assume office and must be taken at the beginning of every four year term whether the first or second. This oath presents the President’s primary duty and obligation. This promise first states that the President is to faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States and the duties of that office are delineated in the Constitution.

 According to historians, the framers of the Constitution spent much less time on delineating the powers of the President. Instead, when defining the Presidential powers in Article II of the Constitution, the framers wanted to create a chief executive whose power came from the people rather than heredity or force. The Constitution provides little basis for what the Office of President looks like today as compared to what the framers intended. The framers assumed that the legislators would be far more influential. In fact, James Madison wrote that it would “rarely if ever happen that the executive as ours is proposed to be would have firmness enough to resist the legislature.”

Well Mr. Madison, despite all the precautions you and other Founding Fathers took with all the assurances you gave the American people who ratified the Constitution, it has happened. The United States is now run by the Executive Department with a leader (and I do not intend this to be personal toward any President) whose sworn duty has become to his political party, corporate executives and the military. 


In the past week, I was encouraged that the voices of the American people seem to have been heard by this sitting President when he became willing to take the action needed to make sure the voices of the people were heard by letting Congress approve his actions before making a decision on the Syrian crisis. I was appalled to hear the news casters from every major network announcing that the President’s decision to turn over decisions to the will of the people of this free country was somehow a victory for Assad. What are we doing in Syria – are we trying to support people in every way to help them have a democracy like ours where the will of the people is the government and not the will of one person or the military and all of his group of advisors? What is the example we are setting for the free world if the President of the most powerful free country ignores his own Constitution and uses his power to show Mr. Assad that it is our military that makes us strong and not the fact that our people are free? Sadly, this is the state we have come to. I am concerned that the American people and the so called “free press” have come to this state. If the President does not carry out his primary obligation as stated in his oath of office to “protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” how can we support and protect and defend the rights of other countries who seek to have the same freedom?