Quotes from Audre Lorde's "Sister Outsider"

"Your silence will not protect you."

"If we wait until we are unafraid to speak, we will be speaking from our graves."

"I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood."

"The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives."

"It is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence."

"When I dare to be powerful--to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whather I am afraid."

Found in Paris Barclay's "Final Cut"
The Advocate, May 25, 2004, p.60

From "The Misfits"

"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.

Anybody who believes that has never been called a name.

This is what I think about names. I think that names are a very small way of looking at a person...

Another thing I think about names is that they do hurt. They hurt because we believe them. We think they are telling us something true about ourselves, something other people can see even if we don't.

Lardo fluff fatso fairy dweeb mutant freak ree-tard loser greaser know-it-all beanpole geek dork...

Is that me? we think. Is that who I am?

If you haven't been called any of those names, think about the ones you have been called. Is that who you are?" p.250-1

Imagine how many young people can find comfort in these few words. Add characters that you can relate to and a great plot and you have one wonderful tale.

BUT, there are some folks who refuse to allow any young people to read this book. I doubt they've even read the book themselves. Some preacher or other leader tells them the book is naughty, so therefore No Name-Calling Week is, heaven forbid, a work of the devil and has to be a tool of the nefarious homosexual agenda. These leaders incite a riot or anything to guarantee that school board members (who have so little time to do the work to help all our kids) are unable to do anything else but placate folks who have no idea what they are protesting against to begin with.

So don't let your kids read the book if that is what you want. Turn the channel. But, I'll be damned if you are going to get away with keeping "The Misfits" out of my kids' hands or any other person who wants to read it.

No Name-Calling Week

More schools try 'No Name-Calling' [Excerpt]
By DAVID CRARY
Associated Press
Published on: 01/24/05

..."No Name-Calling Week" takes aim at insults of all kinds — whether based on a child's appearance, background or behavior. But a handful of conservative critics have zeroed in on the references to harassment based on sexual orientation.

"I hope schools will realize it's less an exercise in tolerance than a platform for liberal groups to promote their pansexual agenda," said Robert Knight, director of Concerned Women for America's Culture and Family Institute.

"Schools should be steering kids away from identifying as gay," Knight said. "You can teach civility to kids and tell them every child is valued without conveying the message that failure to accept homosexuality as normal is a sign of bigotry."

In Iowa, complaints by scores of parents about the gay themes in "The Misfits" prompted the Pleasant Valley school board to rule that teachers no longer could read it aloud to elementary school classes, although it could remain in school libraries...[You don't find out one of the characters is gay until the book is almost done. I would not call that a "theme."]

"People who would criticize this, regardless of who came out with it, are people with bad hearts," said Jerald Newberry, who directs the NEA's health information network.

"This is as vanilla as you get in terms of creating safe environments in schools," Newberry said. "To criticize this program would, almost without exception, be a political attack, not an attack on its content."

James Garbarino, a Cornell University professor who has studied school bullying, said harassment based on sexual orientation "ought to be No. 1 on the list" as educators combat name-calling. Such taunting has led to violence and suicides, he said...
http://www.ajc.com/news/content/news/stories/0105/24namecalling.html

HOPE

“Hope is not attached to outcomes but is a state of mind, as Vaclav Havel says, an orientation of the spirit.” And I have faith; maybe more than hope, I have faith. I think of my great-grandmother, Vilate Lee Romney, who came from good Mormon stock. She always said to us that faith without works is dead, so I think if we have hope, we must work to further that hope. Maybe that is the most important thing of all, to have our faith rooted in action…I really do believe if there is hope in the world, then it is to be found within our own communities with our own neighbors, and within our own homes and families. Hope radiates outward from the center of our concerns. Hope dares us to stare at the miraculous in the eye and have the courage not to look away.
I refuse to walk away.”
--Terry Tempest Williams

The Progressive Interview by David Kupfer’
“The Progressive”, February 2005, v.69 n.1, p.39

Keep Pushin"

Got this via e-mail. Wow!

On Nov. 18, 1995, Itzhak Perlman, the violinist, came on stage to give a concert at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center in New York City.

If you have ever been to a Perlman concert, you know that getting on stage is no small achievement for him. He was stricken with polio as a child, and so he has braces on both legs and walks with the aid of two crutches. To see him walk across the stage one step at a time, painfully and slowly, is an awesome sight.

He walks painfully, yet majestically, until he reaches his chair. Then he sits down, slowly, puts his crutches on the floor, undoes the clasps on his legs, tucks one foot back and extends the other foot forward. Then he bends down and picks up the violin, puts it under his chin, nods to the conductor and proceeds to play.

By now, the audience is used to this ritual. They sit quietly while he makes his way across the stage to his chair. They remain reverently silent while he undoes the clasps on his legs. They wait until he is ready to play.

But this time, something went wrong. Just as he finished the first few bars, one of the strings on his violin broke. You could hear it snap - it went off like gunfire across the room. There was no mistaking what that sound meant. There was no mistaking what he had to do.

We figured that he would have to get up, put on the clasps again, pick up the crutches and limp his way off stage - to either find another violin or else find another string for this one. But he didn't. Instead, he waited a moment, closed his eyes and then signaled the conductor to begin again.

The orchestra began, and he played from where he had left off. And he played with such passion and such power and such purity as they had never heard before.

Of course, anyone knows that it is impossible to play a symphonic work with just three strings. I know that, and you know that, but that night Itzhak Perlman refused to know that.

You could see him modulating, changing, re-composing the piece in his head. At one point, it sounded like he was de-tuning the strings to get new sounds from them that they had never made before.

When he finished, there was an awesome silence in the room. And then people rose and cheered. There was an extraordinary outburst of applause from every corner of the auditorium. We were all on our feet, screaming and cheering, doing everything we could to show how much we appreciated what he had done.

He smiled, wiped the sweat from this brow, raised his bow to quiet us, and then he said - not boastfully, but in a quiet, pensive, reverent tone - "You know, sometimes it is the artist's task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left."

What a powerful line that is. It has stayed in my mind ever since I heard it. And who knows? Perhaps that is the definition of life - not just for artists but for all of us.

Here is a man who has prepared all his life to make music on a violin of four strings, who, all of a sudden, in the middle of a concert, finds himself with only three strings; so he makes music with three strings, and the music he made that night with just three strings was more beautiful, more sacred, more memorable, than any that he had ever made before, when he had four strings.

So, perhaps our task in this shaky, fast-changing, bewildering world in which we live is to make music, at first with all that we have, and then, when that is no longer possible, to make music with what we have left.

Our Elders Deserve Our Thanks

This quote is from a report published by the Australian Insitute of Family Studies, entitled "Measuring the value of unpaid household, caring and voluntary work of older Australians", by Matthew Gray, David de Vaus and David Stanton. This paper was presented at the 4th International Research Conference on Social Security in Antwerp, May 2003:

"Much of the unpaid work of older people provides support that would be difficult to provide using market-based services...Austalians aged over 65 years contribute almost $39 Billion [that's $27 billian U.S.] per year in unpaid caring and voluntary work [to society]."
http://www.issa.int/pdf/anvers03/topic2/2gray.pdf

Think of that the next time you mumble about how the elderly are just a drain on the economy.

Sponge Bob is OK

my kids like him. nuff said.