Food Not Bombs

This weekend I fed about 200 people. It was one of the most depressing and yet uplifting experiences of my life. I am going to do it again next weekend.

Fear

Recently there was a shooting in Knoxville, TN at a Unitarian Universalist Church. The guy that did it wrote in a manifesto of sorts that he was motivated by his hatred of liberals. I am sure you have all heard about it.

Things like this are why I am always paranoid of being openly liberal in the South. I have heard stories of people being beat up and harassed for their beliefs, and now we have a mass shooting.

I wanted to bring that up as a preface to a recent event that occurred to my husband and I. For the first time in my life, I had a gun pointed at me. Here is how I ended up at the wrong end of a handgun:

I went to Alabama to visit my family for the 4th of July. I had only been there a couple of days when I noticed there was some friction in the neighborhood. The neighbors down the hill from my sister and her husband seemed to have some problem with them. The first incident I witnessed was the day they called to police on my sister because her dogs went near their land and supposedly seemed threatening. We all knew it was bull, and the cop seemed to be annoyed that he was bothered by such a trivial thing. Oh well, the neighbors are unfriendly assholes, no biggie. It's not like we have never had those neighbors before. So, we went on with our business.

This brings us to the 4th of July. It was getting late that night and there were fireworks going off in the neighborhood, like every year (although it is technically illegal within city limits.) Then, I started to hear something weird. It sounded like fireworks hitting the roof of the house. My husband and I went out to investigate. When we went out back we saw the first firecracker hit a pecan tree in my parent's yard. Then, we saw the the second (one of the big ones) go off at ground level in my sister's backyard only feet from her backdoor. It lit the entire backyard up. We saw that the people down the hill were aiming fireworks at my sister's house. We ran over there to tell them to stop. That is when we had a gun pulled on us.

The wife is the one who pulled out a handgun. The male just stood there and said "get off my land", although we were on my father's land. My husband was the first to notice the handgun pointed at him. He said that having a gun pointed at him made him uncomfortable and asked if she would kindly put it away. That is when she went all right wing nutso on us, saying, "it's my right to carry a gun, you can't take my rights away." Seriously, she said that. So, we stood there longer than most people would have if there was a gun pointed at them and continued to ask them to be careful where they are pointing their fireworks. After we left, they packed everything up and went inside.

Anyway, you might wonder how this story ties into the above story. Well, it turns out that the animosity towards my sister started when she got a Wiccan bumper sticker on her car. She dared to be openly Wiccan. These people were simply following the trend of expressing fear of what is different in the form of hatred and violence. As a result, I had a gun pointed at me on the 4th of July.

A few days after the incident the woman gun toter came to my dad and apologized for "the gun thing". She claimed that the reason she pulled a gun on us was that she was afraid for her husband's life. See, he was in Iraq and now has a pin in his back and she thought we were going to hurt him and she said that they had accidentally shot all those firecrackers at our houses. Yeah right. Why was her first response to pull a gun on her neighbors if they were innocently shooting fireworks and accidentally shot some at our houses?

Of course, they are patriotic, gun loving, Christian, conservative Americans. And that gives them the right to pull guns on their neighbors because they thought that they were above the law and common decency since he was injured in Iraq. I said that night that I was done. I disown Alabama and the South in general.

Gardening

It is almost August and I haven't posted a single picture of this year's garden. I have seriously been neglecting this blog. I guess there is a lot going on here, but that really isn't it completely. I just don't have the motivation anymore. The more it looks like things aren't going to change, the more distant I get.

Anyway, here are some pics:

Maybe soon I will put up some pictures of the actual garden. I just haven't taken any in about a month. I have gotten tons of tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers this year. The first plate of tomatoes pictured went into some homemade spiced tomato jam that I jarred. The second picture is just what I have picked in the last week. I will find something to do with those shortly. Although I did use some of them, along with the basil I grow, to make some bruschetta the other day. (This picture was actually taken after I made the bruschetta)

Here are a few more pics I have on hand of some of the other things I grew this year:

Other than gardening, I have recently been house hunting. I will be moving in just two months. It has been hard to find anything affordable. I am currently in sticker shock. It has been almost impossible to find something less than 1000 dollars a month to rent. That means that in two months, my rent will go up by about 400 dollars a month (at least). Ridiculous. We may just get lazy and live on base. It will be more convenient and the commute will be shorter. However, we will have to shell out over 1300 a month to live there.

So, hopefully, this will be more than just a monthly update. I may not write a lot about politics necessarily, but I am definitely going to try to be around more often.

Salvation

Life Changes

Sometimes too many things happen at once and you can only struggle to keep up. So, here is month of May, so far, in a nutshell:

1. My mother, father, and sister came to visit for a week.
2. At the end of that week we attended my husband's graduation and commissioning.
3. My mom stayed for another week because my husband and I were planning to go to Alabama to buy land anyway.
4. The day before we were going to leave for Alabama, my cat started having seizures. We took him to the emergency vet.
5. The next day, I stayed behind to care for my cat, my husband and mom headed out.
6. The day after that, I was officially a land owner.
7. The next night, my cat's condition got worse.
8. Husband rushed home the following morning. That evening, my cat was taken to the emergency vet and stayed another night.
9. Yesterday, picked my cat up from the emergency vet and transported him to neurologist in a nearby state and left him there for the night so they can monitor him.
10. Tomorrow I will find out what the neurologist has to say.

To sum up, the blog had to take a backseat for a few weeks. My head is still spinning trying to take in all that has happened since May 1st. This is probably the first break I have had since then and it is a brief one. Tomorrow I will hopefully know more about my cat's condition and more changes may come. So, at the moment I cannot deal with much more than what I am already dealing with. I am hoping that soon life will be back to normal because that would mean that everything turned out fine.

Land of the Free?

From the New York Times: Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.

Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment.
...
Indeed, said Vivien Stern, a research fellow at the prison studies center in London, the American incarceration rate has made the United States “a rogue state, a country that has made a decision not to follow what is a normal Western approach.”

Unfortunately, most of the rest of the article is crap. Once they move from stating numbers to analyzing them, the article goes downhill. The conclusion they come to is that the high incarceration rate is due to our democracy. Utter garbage. What they, not surprisingly, fail to mention is the privatization of our prisons and the rise of for profit prisons in the US over the same time period that the prison population started rising. They also don't mention the racist factor to our prison system. For example, while African Americans make up a small minority of our overall population, they constitute a much larger percentage of our prisoners.

So, just look at the numbers and ask yourself, are we really a free country?

SC Insanity

"His name is so close to Osama I feeling might be Islamic therefore he doesn't recognize Christ," Pastor Byrd said.

If you think the story is ridiculous, you must read the comments. Here is an example:

Russia still has a large nuclear arsenal. Barack Hussein Obama is a muslim name. If Americans elect Obama this country deserves to be nuked.

Is it just me or do you also feel like you are surrounded by crazies? One day I will leave this state and never look back.