October 17, 2016 by IdealisticRebel

A Beautiful Day on Pisgah Mountain

My best friend Maggie and I took a day trip down the Blue Ridge Parkway to Pisgah Mountain today, to see the fall leaves which are beginning to turn.

My children were able to return to Lumberton, and they have power, although no clean water except what they have been able to get in bottles and in buckets from their friends and the charities that are assisting after Hurricane Matthew’s devastation.

Yesterday, they helped served meals to the people who are homeless now. My grandchildren are learning more about charity and compassion, from both sides of the equation. I am proud that, even in hard times, my daughter and her family are able to give to others.

It helps me to take a moment to remember the beauty around us, so I wanted to share these photos with all of you, in gratitude for your thoughts and prayers for my family.

Namaste,

Barbara

All photographs taken and copyrighted by Barbara Mattio, 2016

October 10, 2016 by IdealisticRebel

An Emergency

Hello everyone

I am having my oldest daughter and her family her today and for and indefinite time. They live on the coast of NC and the NC governor did not evacuate people. They live in a small town right on I-95. They have been out of power, water since Thursday. They still have no power or water, food, or gas. The levee on the river just broke a little while ago I heard on the weather channel. They had to airlift people out. So the kids are coming here to Asheville while they can still get out of Dodge.

I will try to entertain them with a little sight seeing. I and also going to breathe. Long slow breaths. We had company coming for the weekend which we have postponed. My best friend is taking Stephanie’s dogs. So any prayers anyone might want to raise up would be more than appreciated. My love to all my readers. I will be back up when there is room to blog. There will be wall to wall people here this week.

Namaste,

Barbara

October 9, 2016 by IdealisticRebel

Nat Turner and the Forgotten Women Who Resisted Slavery

Lily Rothman@lilyrothman

Oct. 7, 2016

The famous slave rebellion shown in The Birth of a Nation was not the work of one man alone

Colman Domingo as “Hark” and Aja Naomi King as "Cherry" in THE BIRTH OF A NATION. Photo courtesy of Fox Searchlight Pictures. © 2016 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation All Rights Reserved

The 1831 slave rebellion that is the inspiration for the new movie The Birth of a Nation is commonly known as Nat Turner’s Rebellion, after the enslaved man (played by controversial filmmaker Nate Parker) who led the uprising that left dozens of people, including children, dead.

But there’s another name for that historical event: The Southampton Rebellion, after the Virginia county in which it took place.

And, says Vanessa M. Holden, an assistant professor of history at Michigan State University who is working on a book about the topic, that name is a more accurate description of what actually happened. Though Nat Turner was the man whose name has gone down in history as synonymous with rebellion, the entire community was involved. Holden recalls reading about the rebellion as an undergraduate student and realizing that almost everything she could find approached the event in one of two ways: dissecting Turner’s character to figure out why he had instigated the uprising, or examining the broad implications and impact of what he did. There was little time spent on the rest of the people who participated, and especially little time spent on the women.

“There’s a broad misconception that it’s almost impossible to find material about enslaved women, but when I’m asked what sources I look at, I actually look at the same sources everybody else looks at,” Holden says. “I just ask, Where are the women?”

And in fact, though only person among the dozens tried for the rebellion and executed by the state was a woman, Holden says she has found plenty of evidence from court records and other sources that women were deeply involved in what happened. The involvement of the woman who did hang was undeniable—she held her mistress down to try to ensure that the rebels would kill her, Holden says, but her mistress lived to tell the tale—and many others who were not found guilty were just as implicated as some of the men who were later executed. For example, both women and men were spotted near the sites of murders along the route of the uprising.

In addition, historians have shown that free women of color and enslaved women were deeply involved in the work of “everyday resistance” to slavery. That resistance could take forms that ranged from work stoppages or slow-downs to sheltering and feeding runaways. They were involved in illicit meetings that kept the black church alive, and they were crucial conduits for information.

“Women were essential to those sorts of everyday actions,” Holden says. “They’re not afterthoughts and they’re not being told what to do by men. They’re actually orchestrating these kinds of actions every single day.”

So why isn’t that history better known?

There are a few reasons, Holden explains. For one thing, there was an obvious incentive among the slaves and their supporters to minimize the number of people implicated in insurrection. And the source material historians use makes it easy to focus on Turner. His published jailhouse “confession” helped spread the word about what had happened, helping it become, as Holden says, “historicized almost as soon as it happened.”

For another thing, a primary goal of the trials and executions that took place following the uprising was to lessen the impact on white slaveholders, not to achieve justice. (Holden points to Patrick Breen’s scholarship on the subject as supporting this view of the trials as “an elaborate exercise in mastery.”) Emphasizing Nat Turner’s role was a way to create an image of “this ultimate rebellion slave who was just deranged and convinced people who would otherwise have been happy slaves” to rebel. As a result, the idea of resistance didn’t have to be quite so terrifying—which comforted slaveholders and served as a rebuttal for those who might use the uprising as a reason to support abolition. In fact, even the Virginia legislature did debate ending slavery in the wake of the event, but the voices in favor of maintaining the institution were stronger. It was safer for the rulers of the slave economy to position Turner as one bad apple than to admit that any person of color in the region would have had a motive to do what he did.

“If they really did investigate everybody who could have possibly been involved, they would have had every slave in Southampton in the courtroom,” Holden says. “The truth is that everybody had a reason to rebel.”

And that, she says, is the most important thing for anyone seeing The Birth of a Nation to remember: slavery was always awful. That always crucial point gains an extra layer of importance in light of the brutality and violence of the Southampton Rebellion.

“Slavery wasn’t evil at the hands of one evil master; it wasn’t only evil in moments of extreme violence and torture or extreme moments of deprivation; it wasn’t only evil when families got separated. It was evil every moment of every day. In turn, resisting slavery always meant making a conscious decision to do harm—economically, socially, physically, mentally, emotionally—because the system was abhorrent,” Holden says. “It’s important to remember that the violence [in Southampton] was a direct response to the specter of violence that was American slavery. It’s not fair to the historical subjects that I study, the women, to assume that they could only be victims of that violence.”

BJSquiggel

I dedicate this post to the thousands of men and women who were sold into slavery and treated like animals. My heart is heavy for you and I can’t tell you but I will work for your grandchildren and great grandchildren. I will speak for them and support them. I will stand up for them. They are equal to me and my grandchildren.

Namaste

Barbara

Slavery in the Old South

October 7, 2016 by IdealisticRebel

The Spirit of Peace

There is One God and our Universe is One and there is One unified humanity.

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

—Albert Einstein

Physicist Albert Einstein

We need to feed the hungry,

to house the homeless,

to free those in bondage,

to clothe the naked,

to embrace the despised

to reject the obscene

and to destroy complacency.

That’s what God wants—

nothing more and nothing less.

—Rabbi Greenspan

“There is an old Chinese tale about the woman whose only son died. In her grief she sent to the holy man and asked, “Fetch me a mustard seed from a home that has never known sorrow. We will use it to drive the sorrow out of your life.”

The woman set off at once in search of the magical mustard seed. She came first to a splendid mansion, knocked at the door, and said, “I am looking for a home that has never known sorrow. Is this such a place?” They told her, “You’ve certainly come to the wrong house,” and began describing all the tragic things that had recently befallen them. The woman said to herself, “Who is better able to help these unfortunate people than I, who have had misfortune of my own?”

She stayed to comfort them for a while, then went on in her search for a home that had never known sorrow. But wherever she turned, in hovels and in palaces, she found one tale after another of sadness or misfortune.

Ultimately, she became so involved in ministering to other people’s grief that she forgot about her quest for the magical mustard seed, never realizing that it had in fact already driven the sorrow out of her life.”

–author unknown

colorful-1254538__180

Peace

“Let us live in peace, God.

Let children live in peace, in homes free from brutality and abuse.

Let them go to school in peace, free from violence and fear.

Let them play in peace, God, in safe parks, in safe neighborhoods; watch over them.

Let husbands and wives love in peace, in marriages free from cruelty. Let men and women go to work in peace, with no fears of

terror or bloodshed.

Let us travel in peace; protect us, God, in the air, on the seas, along whatever road we take.

Let nations dwell together in peace, without the threat of war hovering over them.

Help us, God. Teach all people of all races and faiths, in all the countries all over the world to believe that the peace that seems so far

off is in fact within our reach.

Let us all live in peace, God. And let us say, Amen.”

—Naomi Levy

BJSquiggel

Everyone talks about peace. And then the conversation ends and we put the thoughts of peace aside. Peace begins within each and every one of us. We must develop peace within our own hearts and souls. Then we have to make the effort to spread it out by giving old clothes to charity, volunteering in our communities, helping the sick and homeless. We can show compassion for those who are suffering financially, or who are struggling with mental illness. Then we can care about the politics of our country and our world, we can join a peace and/or justice organization.

We can pay attention when, in times like these, people talk and promote war and injustice, and we can speak up for justice and peace. We cannot allow ourselves be caught up in talk of war.

What do we get from war…nothing

What does peace bring…everything.

Namaste

Barbara

October 5, 2016 by IdealisticRebel

3 Genocides Erased from Western history

I am old enough that I remember the Chinese Genocide. I read a lot and I thought a lot. But today I don’t want to scare anyone but to remind us all that men and women who run governments are capable of killing their own citizens for power, greed, and money. If you have listened to any of the American election rhetoric, you know candidates don’t always say what they mean but what they think think citizens want to hear. It is a concept as old as time.

The key to having power and money is not having people who are different. They should not look different or act different. They should not think for themselves. Citizens should not band together and create fraternal orders or unions. They should not be educated too much, just enough to do what is required of them. They should also have no or little to say in the government. It is the government of the leaders, and not the people.

With every life which is ended in Genocide, we, the human family, potentially lose great musicians, the cure for cancer, the next great art movement. We lose the scientist who may have been more intelligent than Einstein. We may loose the mathematician who invents flying cars or the biologist who figures out how to raise enough food to feed every person on the planet. We will never know what all the genocides have robbed from the family of man.

What is important now is to be informed. If the media isn’t discussing something, get a book, look it up on the internet or ask someone who does know. Ignorance is not bliss. Ignorance can lead to war and genocide and the marginalization of human beings. If you think you are being lied to by your government, investigate. George W. Bush told us we had to go to war with Iraq because they had weapons of mass destruction. Iraq did not. Bush started his Presidency in the black. We had extra money and he left the White House terribly in debt. A debt President Obama has been working to whittle down. Humans often try to change history to make certain acts and/or misdeeds more palatable. Be aware, look for the truth. Speak up when you know that the text books are not exactly telling the truth.

Namaste

Barbara

BJSquiggel

A chart of the genocides the world has endured and their severity

October 4, 2016 by IdealisticRebel

American Land Grab

The Negroes are not the only people America has not treated as equals. The Native Americans were murdered by the thousands, their land was stolen, they were herded onto reservations and killed the Buffalo, a species key to the survival of many tribes and nations.

Now our government is trying to quietly pass a bill through congress too take more land away from the Utes in Utah. So we are now stealing more land from the Native Americans. Again.

The Native Americans are protesting the building of the Dakota pipeline through their sacred land. They care about what we are doing to Mother Earth. The state has been given permission to shoot protesters who do not leave.

What kind of world are we living in? President Obama you must stop the shooting of protesters. Peaceable protest is a First Amendment right. What is needed here at a minimum is to sit down together and negotiate and use diplomacy. These are America’s first people. They deserve to be treated with respect and honor.

Namaste

Barbara

BJSquiggel

Native Americans protesting Dakota pipeline

October 3, 2016 by IdealisticRebel

One God

October 2, 2016 by IdealisticRebel

A Clean Slate

White butterflies, with single

black fingerpaint eyes on their wings,

dart and settle, eddy and mate

over the green tangle of vines

in Labor Day morning stream.

The year grinds into ripeness

and rot, grapes darkening,

pears yellowing, the first

Virginia creeper twining crimson,

the grasses, dry straw to burn.

The New Year rises, beckoning

across the umbrellas on the sand.

I begin to reconsider my life.

What is the yield of my impatience?

What is the fruit of my resolve?

I turn from my frantic white dance

over the jungle of productivity

and slowly niggun slides,

cold water down my throat.

I rest on a leaf spotted red.

Now is the time to let the mind

search backwards like the raven loosed

to see what can feed us. Now,

the time to cast the mind forward

to chart an aerial map of the months.

The New Year is a great door

that stands across the evening and Yom

Kippur is the second door. Between them

are song and silence, stone and clay pot

to be filled from within myself.

I will find there both ripeness and rot,

what I have done and undone,

what I must let go with the waning days

and what I must take in. With the last

tomatoes, we harvest the fruit of our lives.

—Marge Piercy, feminist poet and author, from The Art of Blessing the Day

“God does not predetermine whether a person shall be righteous or wicked that God leaves to us.”

—Midrash Tanchuma, Pekdei 3

October 1, 2016 by IdealisticRebel

Israel

It is the last day of the Jewish calendar. Tomorrow begins Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. This article is an important one for Jews and non-Jews around the world to read.

Namaste

Barbara

“Extreme polarization around issues facing Israel is one of the most difficult challenges our Jewish communities in North America face. On the one hand, there is a great desire among Jews to feel a sense of peoplehood or family resemblance, a set of principles, values and identifiers which connect us to one another. Until a number of years ago, one could say that participating in the revitalization of the Jewish people in the State of Israel was one of those core values. Despite deep differences in theology, culture and ritual practice, most of the Jewish world cried together when Israel hurt and rejoiced together when Israel prevailed.

On the other hand, the narrative of Israel around which North American Jews rallied had been a somewhat idealized one: one which promised that Jewish sovereignty would look different from the nations of the world. We were captivated by the notion that we might fulfill the Herzlian dream of Israel as a model nation-state to the world, emanating light, peace and unity of all peoples. Planting a tree in Israel was like planting a little bit of our souls in its soil. And there was no purer, sweeter place to breathe the air of being Jewish.

If this was the content of why Israel became a powerful “religious” nation in the 20^th century, an emerging feature of 21^st century Jewry is a growing fragmentation of the narrative. For some North American Jews, there is a growing discomfort with the direction Israel is heading as it confronts its geopolitical and internal realities. For them, today’s Israel isn’t fulfilling her mission of being a state that reflects their most previous values, responding to its challenges instead in ways that mystify their Jewish consciences.
Others remain stalwart in seeing Israel’s growth and development as a nation over the decades as nothing short of a political, religious, technological and economic miracle despite overwhelming challenges to its survival. Not only that, in a world with anti-Semitism on the rise, supporting Israel as a safe haven for the world’s Jews feels essential. For their friends or family members to speak of Israel’s failings mystifies their Jewish conscience. They might expect those views from people outside of the Jewish community or from anti-Semites, but it is nothing short of betrayal coming from one of “us.” There doesn’t seem to be a middle ground on this point: one is either loyal to Israel, or a self-hating Jew.

As difficult as it is for those of us who feel deeply bound to the Jewish State and those who feel disillusioned though ultimately loyal, it is critical for us as a community to be open to the possibility that those who express “anti-Israel” sentiments might be expressing deeply Jewish intuitions. We can choose not to fragment ourselves into camps and believe we are resilient enough as a community to hear what our fellow Jews feel they need to contribute to the conversation. If there is a truth with which we need to grapple together, we will all be stronger for it. Our dialog around Israel must be for us machlket l’shaym shamayim, one serving the highest of purposes, not one that tears us apart. At the end of the day, what it at stake for us all as Jews is how true we each can be in reflecting the face of Torah when we speak and act on our convictions. It’s not only remaining in relationship with Jews of all kinds but in the pureness of our intentions in how we engage in difficult conversations that we may discover again how bound we are to one another and find a way forward.”

–Rabbi Betsheva Meiri, Congregation Beth HaTephila, Asheville, NC