Maple seedlings left alone, to fight and try to crowd one another out edging towards the light --leaning, yearning for the sun and growth and life.
Oh, but they will be mercilessly mowed down and no maple hardwood forest will ever grow in our backyard... just crab grass and clover --as wild as our suburban lawn will ever be.
Nice try though, propeller seeds that clog our gutters and delight our kids hurled so high into the air...
By Robert Barnes Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, June 26, 2008; 1:06 PM
The Supreme Court, splitting along ideological lines, today declared that the Second Amendment protects an individual's right to own guns for self-defense, striking down the District of Columbia's ban on handgun ownership as unconstitutional.
The 5 to 4 decision, written by Justice Antonin Scalia represented a monumental change in federal jurisprudence and went beyond what the Bush administration had counseled. It said that the government may impose some restrictions on gun ownership, but that the District's strictest-in-the-nation ban went too far under any interpretation.
Scalia wrote that the Constitution leaves the District a number of options for combating the problem of handgun violence, "including some measures regulating handguns."
"But the enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table," he continued. "These include the absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home."
The court also held unconstitutional the requirement that shotguns and rifles be kept disassembled or unloaded or outfitted with a trigger lock. The court called it a "prohibition against rendering any lawful firearm in the home operable for the purpose of immediate self-defense."
Scalia was joined by the most consistently conservative justices -- Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr.
Justice John Paul Stevens spoke from the bench to denounce the decision, which he said violated the court's precedent that the Second Amendment refers to a right to bear arms only for military purposes.
He spoke dismissively of the court's "newly discovered right" and said decisions about gun control should be made by legislatures.
"This court should stay out of that political thicket," he said. Stevens was joined in dissent by the court's most consistent liberals: David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer.
In announcing the opinion, Scalia specifically mentioned that some restrictions on owning and carrying a gun are valid, such as denying the sale to felons or the mentally ill, or restricting the possession of guns in "sensitive places," such as schools. ad_icon
But he acknowledged that the majority opinion was not setting standards that might be easily apparent to governments deciding how to restrict gun rights. As a result, Scalia said the ruling will probably result in more litigation.
"Since this case represents this court's first in-depth examination of the Second Amendment, one should not expect it to clarify the entire field," Scalia wrote. "And there will be time enough to expound upon the historical justifications for the exceptions we have mentioned if and when those exceptions come before us."
President Bush's press secretary, Dana Perino, said in a statement that "the President strongly agrees with the Supreme Court's historic decision today that the Second Amendment protects the individual right of Americans to keep and bear arms. This has been the Administration's long-held view. The President is also pleased that the Court concluded that the DC firearm laws violate that right."
Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the presumptive Republican presidential nominee quickly put out a statement endorsing the decision, calling it a "landmark victory" for Second Amendment rights. "Today's ruling . . . makes clear that other municipalities like Chicago that have banned handguns have infringed on the constitutional rights of Americans," McCain said.
Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.), the Democrats' all but certain nominee, also issued a statement saying that "I have always believed that the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to bear arms, but I also identify with the need for crime-ravaged communities to save their children from the violence that plagues our streets through common-sense, effective safety measures.
"The Supreme Court has now endorsed that view, and while it ruled that the D.C. gun ban went too far, Justice Scalia himself acknowledged that this right is not absolute and subject to reasonable regulations enacted by local communities to keep their streets safe."
In a statement on its web site, the National Rifle Association's executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre called the decision "a great moment in American history. It vindicates individual Americans all over this country who have always known that this is their freedom worth protecting."
Paul Helmke, President of the Brady Center and the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence said in a statement that "our fight to enact sensible gun laws will be undiminished by the Supreme Court's decision in the Heller case. While we disagree with the Supreme Court's ruling, which strips the citizens of the District of Columbia of a law they strongly support, the decision clearly suggests that other gun laws are entirely consistent with the Constitution.
The lawyers challenging the District's 32-year-old law were able to persuade the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit last year to do what no other federal appeals court had ever done: strike down a local gun-control ordinance on Second Amendment grounds. ad_icon
The amendment says that "a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed," and all but one of the circuits that had considered the issue previously had interpreted it as providing a gun-ownership right related only to military service.
But Senior Judge Laurence H. Silberman, a conservative icon, wrote for a 2 to 1 panel that the amendment provides an individual right just as other provisions of the Bill of Rights do. And because handguns fall under the definition of "arms," he wrote, the District may not ban them.
To some the decision was not surprising. Even a small but growing group of liberal constitutional scholars -- "against my political instincts," in the words of Harvard law professor Laurence H. Tribe -- have endorsed the individual-right view.
The District had received an unlikely lifeline from the Bush administration, which told the court that the amendment provides an individual right but that the appeals court erred in deciding that the District's ban was automatically unconstitutional.
"If adopted by this court," wrote Solicitor General Paul D. Clement, who earlier this month left his post, "such an analysis could cast doubt on the constitutionality of existing federal legislation prohibiting the possession of certain firearms, including machineguns."
The court's last examination of the amendment was in 1939, when it ruled in U.S. v. Miller that a sawed-off shotgun transported across state lines by a bootlegger was not what the amendment's authors had in mind when they were protecting arms needed for military service.
The other day, I went shopping at Whole Foods to get my overpriced, whole foods. I was on a fairly busy road when I came up behind a big tattooed guy on a Harley. You know the kind of motorcycle where the front fork sticks way out, like in Easy Rider, except this guy was not exactly a hippie type. Instead of an American flag motif painted on his gas tank, he had this sticking out of his back seat,
The Stars and Bars were fluttering and waving in the wind. You could tell he felt strongly about some notion of superiority because he also had this as a rear view mirror,
He had an iron cross rear view mirror. Kind of a theme of socio-political expression. He liked racist symbols from here and abroad. Who isn't multi-cultural? Who isn't expansive in their thinking?
I can appreciate socio-political expression as well as he does. I have some myself on my little, very well used car. For example, on the left side (of course!) of my bumper, I have this sticker,
Yep. I'm an Obama Mama. I want that man to be our next president--that black man with Hussein as his middle name! And, I'm a white woman...Imagine.
My bumper has more room, so I have more stickers. In the center, I have this gem,
Which is true. My husband commutes to and from work every day on his bike. He also runs errands to the store and the library on his bike. As a family, we've been trying to use our bikes as much as possible.
My bumper has space on the right side, so I slapped up this beauty,
Which is also very true for us. My kids learn all day long from various places wherever we go. Learning doesn't just take place reading certain things, sitting at desks in our living room, for a certain set of hours every day...except weekends...and whole stretches of time during the Summer when learning will not be tolerated or encouraged...My kids are learning all of the time.
I was kind of amused to pull in front of the motorcycle and realize that the rider might read my stickers on my car.
I'm also thinking that he might not have read them. That's kind of knee jerk thinking on my part--the whole racist=ignorant meme. But, I think this guy had to be kind of savvy to get the iron cross rear view mirror--you don't find that everywhere--maybe he looked it up on-line, just as I did to get the image of the iron cross rear view mirror. That's a certain level of sophistication and ability there.
Any way, if he did read my stickers, I wonder what he thought...
and my daughter's vivid imagination, she will transform herself into:
Rosalind Russell from His Girl Friday
and,
Jean Arthur from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
It seems my daughter has especially latched onto the strength, charm, quick wit and style of these ladies and really got how they saved the day in these two movies. We watched these movies this month and the kids both understood the story lines, but it is my daughter who has been completely captivated by them and has decided that she can pretend to be these great dames and have a swell time.
In order to help her along, I have to pretend to be Cary Grant or James Stewart or the awful, corrupt Claude Raines or the escaped prisoner hiding in the roll top desk that Rosalind Russell helps, even though her new stuff shirt fiance is waiting for her, but still, she can not shake the thrill and allure of the newspaper biz--her blood is made of ink.
Clearly, my daughter was born in the wrong decade.
What do your kids imagine with every fiber of their being? What creatures or story lines do they inhabit? And, don't you think this kind of creativity will serve them their whole lives?
Is there a war going on? What? What do you mean...oh wait, there's a SALE!!! Look--I could get some great deals and get more stuff and feel good about myself because I got that stuff and then, I could get rid of it because it would be OLD stuff and I could go out and get MORE stuff.
George Carlin died yesterday. He was 71 and a critical voice in the "counter culture". He spoke on ideas and how we get ideas--who forms the words and how they get disseminated.
This is some anonymous polyphemus moth caterpillar image that I got from the internet somewhere. Anonymous polyphemus...say that 10 times fast.
However, the guy above looks exactly like the guy that was crawling on my L.L. Bean's boat bag that I had at Park Day last year sometime in August. We were all getting ready to leave and there he was, slowly plodding, scooting, undulating along up the green stripe looking for a place to call home.
We did bring him home, my friend M. told me what she thought it was and I looked up what they eat and what their habits are. I took some maple leaves and stuffed them and it inside a bug hut and waited to see what would happen.
He/she wrapped itself up in the leaves and made a silky tan spun cocoon. This was at the end of August in 2007. Here we are in June of 2008 10 months later and I wondered if it would ever come out. We had it kicking around on our back porch all through the changes of seasons. They overwinter in a cocoon wrapped up in leaves on branches, and so there was no reason that it wouldn't come out, and yet it is still so amazing when it happens. And, it did.
Here is our polyphemus moth after it emerged from the cocoon just a couple of nights ago.
I had to tilt it towards the circular opening and gently shake it to get it out and then it flew up and away over our house. Beautiful and amazing.
This year, my husband agreed to attend our homeschooling conference that the kids and I always go to. In the past, I have understood that he didn't want to attend because he really doesn't like crowds and being talked at and he doesn't really care about various educational approaches--he thinks the kids are interested in life and that he and I are doing a fine job with them and he doesn't want to be lectured about anything ever. He also has no strong feelings about homebirth or extended breastfeeding or the family bed or cultured food or raw milk...he never gets up on a soapbox, unlike his wife. So, I was really glad that he wanted to come to the conference and was enthusiastic about it and got a lot out of it.
Towards the end of the two days, we were both punch drunk and feeling very silly. We attended a workshop on multiple intelligences, where we learned there are 9 kinds of intelligence that have been identified, a couple added just fairly recently. My husband was bored out of his mind. Not only that, he thought it was kind of silly to announce that new forms of intelligence had been discovered...weren't they always there? Moreover, do we have to quantify and label everything? The presenter had a monotone delivery and wasn't very enthusiastic about the subject, although obviously knowledgeable about the idea that there are 9 forms of intelligence.
She had given us handouts that outline the characteristics for the various intelligences.
Here, you see some of them listed.
Here are some more.
My husband couldn't take the droning on and on. So, in classic husband form, he started to joke around. First he wrote this on my handout:
To which I responded: (It's blurry--it says "spaz")
Together, they look like this on my multiple intelligences handout:
Nice, huh? Children, do not ever emulate your parents. You can become much better people than we have become. This is our wish for you.
Besides claiming that he was "...with stupid.", he also created an entirely new area of intelligence: It's a little blurry, but it says "stacking/building" and the trait is "stacking". He continued with this, explaining how it is manifested:
It says "stacking things".
I was trying to suppress giggles and was equally silly at this point. So, I added another intelligence and wrote under his: It says, "sarcasm/smart assness" its trait is "find fault: point and laugh". I continued, explaining how it is manifested:
It says, "hilarious in private situations; however a real asshole around others". That sounds harsh but it killed in the moment. In between bouts of incompetently suppressed giggles, I was frustrated with my husband for mercilessly making me laugh.
Really, the conference would have been worth it for this workshop alone. Good times.
I bring all this up only because I was reminded of this when we recently went to our kids' tap dancing recital. Both of our kids are in a tap dancing class with some friends and my friend M. teaches them. They had a giant dance recital last Saturday.
Have you ever been to a dance recital? It goes on and on--this one was three hours. Their performance was maybe at most three minutes. They had just one dance and then spent the rest of the time, before and after, in the green room with some volunteer moms and lots of other kids.
I will tell you that they did beautifully--they sounded crisp and in step with one another and really fearlessly danced for the crowd with a lot of energy. They were great and so were all of the other dancers of different ages and dance styles in the other performances.
At one point, a bevy of blue beauties came out in filmy ballet attire and they started to dance to a classical piece. They started to dance to "Blue Danube" by Johann Strauss II. They were lovely...but, my husband was again tired and punch drunk. So he crudely formed a spaceship out of his fingers and veeery slooowly lifted it up from his lap arcing over to mine as if it were floating in space. And then I got it--2001: A Space Odyssey.
My husband cracks me up.
Enjoy this youtube and try to picture teenage girls dancing ballet to the music and my husband floating a spaceship over to me with his hand.
Jeez, this is almost as good as April Fool's Day! I have been pulling your guys' legs for soooo long!! We're not going to vote for Obama! (I hear he's a Muslim...have you heard that too? Barack HUSSEIN Obama? Come on...) Of course we're not. We're voting republican and this youtube video really outlines why.
My Dad was born in Paris in 1928. In September he will turn 80 years old. He has lived an interesting life and has been a good Dad. On this Father's Day, I'd like to tell you a bit about him.
Right after he was born, he contracted pneumonia and also had to have surgery for a growth behind his ear. He's lucky to have survived. As a little kid he had crossed eyes and had to wear glasses to correct his vision. It worked, but in the mean time he certainly looked like an easy target to a big kid who saw him waiting outside a store for his mom. The kid announced to my dad that he was going to hit him in the jaw. My dad with his confused, bright, crossed eyes asked the kid what a "Jaw" was. The kid told him and then did not hit him there. I think my dad's pitifulness won him over.
When my dad was really little the very nice lady at the bakery gave him a cookie as he was holding his mother's hand during her purchase. The next day, my dad had a gang of 5 kids asking for a free cookie at the bakery. Uh, no.
He had a friend with the nickname "Fish Ears" because he had nonexistent ears. As a scrappy Jewish kid in the 1930s, my Dad spent a lot of time proving that he was valid and valuable and so he excelled at sports; he played football, baseball and basketball. Because he was a Jew, at Easter time he got beat up, which was a whole other sport...
He grew up, got a B.A. from Columbia and an MBA from Harvard and he and his new wife went to Venezuela in the mid 50s to continue their new adventure together. My brother and sister were both born there. My other sister and I however, were born in a south suburb of Chicago--not quite the same romance as being born in a foreign, exotic country during a mostly peaceful revolution. Harvey is not Caracas.
My Grandpa taught a Sunday School for all the Reform Jews in my Dad's neighborhood and as part of it, my Dad, Uncle and all of the others had to go outside and shoot hoops at the end. Grandpa believed in a sort of ancient Greek ideal of intellect and physicality being married and supporting each other. He himself had gone to school in Madison on a basketball scholarship. So he got my dad and Uncle D. boxing gloves because that might be fun for the boys. Except the physicality wasn't really part of Uncle D.'s make up. Also, my father was older. Plus, my father was a big sturdy kid who would later on play football in high school and college.
Here is how the boxing went. My father would beat the crap out of his little brother for the length of a 78 record. He would want to bow out, and then my Dad would convince him that he really made progress that last round and they should just do another record--same thing all over again. My dad also wouldn't let his little brother into the "One Million Club" which had one million members, but not Uncle D. apparently. Thems the breaks--what are ya gonna do? Being the youngest just stinks sometimes. That's the law of the land.
When my dad was older and had a summer job driving a Coke truck making deliveries he very slowly backed up and very slowly ripped out a fence, picket by picket at a posh country club. The club was not his scene. When he married my English/Dutch, Episcopalian, gentile mom, both sets of dads tried to talk them out of it. My mom's dad felt she was too young to get married at 19. My dad's dad warned my mom that there would be certain country clubs that would not let them in. It really wasn't their scene any way. Really, that was OK. The last time my Dad was at a country club, he ripped their fence out.
Every summer, my dad took us camping in the North Woods. He taught me how to fish, how to paddle a canoe, how to read and orient a map, how to portage. It's largely because of my camping experiences that I understood how I was part of the natural world which led to my wanting to homebirth. I knew that I could, because I am natural. I knew that my anatomy and physiology and mind and body and heart could work like that because that's what they're all supposed to do.
I think one of the reasons my Dad felt strongly about going camping with us every summer was that he wanted to get away from the rat race and he wanted to act out his childhood's greatest ambition. When he was little, he was asked what he'd like to become when he grew up. He answered that he'd like to be an Indian. Not to co-opt a Native American culture or a very vague Great Neck, Long Island 1930s idea of "Indian", but to live a life in Nature, with Nature and with the Nature within is what he really meant but couldn't quite say as a boy.
Nowadays, my Dad writes plays and has them produced at community theaters and even had one produced as part of a juried selection in New Jersey. When my Mom goes to aerobics class a couple of times a week, my Dad rides his bike to the local lake where they have their canoe docked and he paddles himself around for exercise and maybe to connect with Nature and to clear his head. I like to picture him doing that. I can see him making sure, steady J strokes through misty, early morning smooth water, it broken only by the ripples radiating out from his paddle and the canoe.
My Dad gave me sage words growing up:
Time is all you have. (His father had told him that too)
Perfect is the enemy of good. (He got that somewhere)
Make a good today, which will create a good tomorrow and a good yesterday. (I think he might have gotten that somewhere)
Act as if the world isn't going to blow up, because it just might not...(This is definitely his)
I should explain that last one. During the early 80s I was very concerned with the nuclear arms race. I was sure that we were going to have a melting, firey, nuclear holocaust either by crazy choice or by accident. I knew we would have a nuclear war. My Grandmother (my father's mother) told me I had Weltschmerz which means world pain. My father wanted me to live my life and not get hung up by the world's problems, except that's not how I roll! Besides, I learned at his knee.
My Dad was on the school board in my town when they figured out how to desegregate the schools in our district by busing African Americans from a separate area at the edge of town to our local schools. I have faint memories of being at board meetings with my mom and me doodling with chalk on the blackboard at the back of the room. I remember trying to discuss all of this at the tender age of 7 with my neighbor down the street as we walked to school. She told me if you were against busing, you were for Nixon. Her family was for Nixon. I wasn't sure who I was for or what busing was, but I knew we weren't for Nixon. God!
Once, we were on a family vacation to Colorado, when we saw a smushed snake in the road. It had probably been run over and was struggling. My Dad insisted that we put a bandaid on it to at least cover the wound and maybe give it a chance. It probably didn't work, but it showed me what caring meant. It showed me that it's OK and good to stop and try. I've carried that lesson with me my whole life.
It's not all sweetness and light with my Dad. Don't be fooled. I've also learned that my Dad can grow increasingly paranoid and accusatory under certain circumstances. One time, we were all at my parents' house and we were all bustling around helping with meal preparations. My Dad was doing the bulk of the cooking and was keeping track of everything he was doing except for one thing...
"Alright! Who's the wise guy who stole the dill!!"
He said that in all seriousness. Really. Well, as you might imagine, no one had stolen the dill. He quickly found it. All I know is, do not get between my Dad and his herbs. Seriously.
Happy Father's Day, Dad! I love you and hope you have a fun day today.
Last soccer practice I explained to the coaches that while their coaching ability is top notch, it's just fine, really, my daughter nonetheless has decided that she hates soccer. Doesn't care for it. Is not interested in it. Could not care less if her team wins or loses. Doesn't matter. I just wanted the coaching couple to know that as my daughter's mom, I certainly appreciated their volunteering their time to the park district to teach our girls how to play soccer, in spite of my daughter's abhorring the game.
I also told them how I gave my daughter the whole "If you make a commitment to the team to play, you need to try hard for the team" speech. And actually, I wouldn't have minded if my daughter did quit the team--it would have been OK with me--but, there were only 7 girls on their team and the team needed her. They needed everyone. You field a team with 6 girls.
The coaches told me they understood and had given their daughter the "commitment to the team" speech the previous year. Seems to be universal. They then went on to congratulate me on our upcoming adoption that was drawing close..."What?" "Your adoption. Your daughter told us how you're adopting a baby. Congratulations!" "Um. No. We're not." "Oh. That's what she told us..." "Oh. Well. We're not."
My daughter: never letting reality get in the way of a good story! Any way, it's more fun than soccer...
The other day, the ideas of creationists came up. We were talking about evolution and I told my son how there are some people who don't believe in it. I explained how there are some people that believe the the Bible is absolutely true instead, and they've added up all the generations in the bible and the time since those stories and believe that the 6,000 years or so it tallies to is the age of the earth. They don't believe in evolution and they believe that Man walked with dinosaurs...my son was beside himself.
He knows that Greek myths have been around for thousands of years. His point regarding Creationists and evolution was this,
"If Man walked with dinosaur, wouldn't there be some stories about it? That would be a pretty big deal if that were true. I mean, come on!! Think how those stories would be told in families--if you had a relative that killed a dinosaur you would talk about it, right?!"
As a family, we like to go on field trips. It's just me and the kids and I usually surprise them as to where we're going.
Recently, we went into Chicago to the Children's Museum of Immigration at the Swedish American Museum where my daughter played that she was Elsa, or Ingrid or Agda or Svea as she milked a cow and took care of babies in the old stuga in Sweden. She pumped water and hung up clothes on the line (which no longer has any novel appeal as that's what we do at home...). She cooked at the wood burning stove.
Everything was wonderful, until the crop failure. Oh no! Thank goodness we'd been saving our kroners so that we could travel across the Atlantic to Uncle Ivar's place in Minnesota. We could create a new life in the New World.
Look at his beautiful garden--we can have a good life here. And, the vegetables are easy to harvest from the little rubber chunks that are the dirt.
It's beautiful inside. It's light and airy and we can hang our embroidery from the Old World and we can hang skins to sell later on. Our view out the window is the Great North Woods where we see loons on the lake ringed with birch trees.
We were tired when we first got here. Our trans-Atlantic journey took a long time and was exhausting. We sat down in the cabin and Ivar welcomed us with some bread. With our renewed sense of energy, we harvested vegetables from the garden, gathered eggs and my daughter cooked us a feast.
We soon grew tired of this section of the new world, so we time-warped back to about the year 800 when the vikings held sway over much of Europe and went on a Viking ship to possibly Britain or Newfoundland or some other good place to conquer.
Over all it was an especially fun trip for my daughter. My son has decided that he no longer cares for the Swedish Museum the way he used to. He has outgrown it. However, he felt it was not so bad once he realized he could try to juggle apples in the stuga in Sweden.
I guess you can have fun anywhere as long as there are objects to try and juggle and you're an almost 10 year old kid.
Originally, We Don't Buy It was about my family's life experiment of not buying new things for a year in 2008. We mostly did it and learned a lot about our relationship to things. Now, this blog is more about the ideas we don't buy. Oh, so many awful ideas and pressures out there. We're rejecting a lot of them--ideas that keep people boxed in, and stuck. We're going our own way. We still don't buy it.
Maple seedlings, sprouting all through yard
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