tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21220704067959225762024-03-13T08:18:18.682-04:00ThinkAboutWritingA potpourri of political, scientific, and writerly musings.Mary Battenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443381203090280044noreply@blogger.comBlogger70125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2122070406795922576.post-71637004802040982020-01-04T12:33:00.000-05:002020-01-04T12:33:10.321-05:00SPIT featured on Salimetrics<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I am so honored to have my book featured on <a href="https://salimetrics.com/product/spit-whats-cool-about-drool-paperback-book/">Salimetrics</a>' website. Salimetrics is an international company that delivers the most accurate salivary (spit) assays for scientific researchers in many different fields. These assays are designed to detect and measure hormones, such as cortisol (the stress hormone), enzymes and other substances in saliva. Salimetrics' role as a leader in standardizing salivary bioscience testing methods allows researchers to deliver the best results and drive salivary bioscience research forward. Thank you, Salimetrics.</span><br />
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Mary Battenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443381203090280044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2122070406795922576.post-2747878001320959382019-12-15T12:02:00.000-05:002019-12-16T12:15:35.467-05:00More to Spit than just Drool<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif;">I am honored by the great reviews coming in for my new book, </span><i style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif;">SPIT: What's Cool About Drool</i><span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif;">.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">School Library Journal calls it <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">"Well researched and intriguing, the book delves into the scientists who studied </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">saliva, examines current research about what spit can tell us about our ancestors and how it can help diagnose illnesses, and relays impressive tales of how other animals use their spit to communicate, defend themselves, or spread disease. The combination of full-color photographs, humorous cartoons, short chapters, and a disgustingly fun topic will especially appeal to reluctant readers."</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34);"><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">From the Canadian Review of Materials:</span> </span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">"</span></span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-size: 14px; text-align: justify;">This drool-worthy nonfiction book rigorously defends the intriguing thesis that spit “is actually the unsung hero of our time – or at least of our mouths.” Early chapters outline the important jobs spit (“or slobber, drool, saliva or whatever you like to call it”) perform in the human body, from helping to speak to aiding in digestion. The healing and life-saving properties of spit are explained in the “Spit for Your Health” section that delves into saliva screenings used for hepatitis C and HIV detection. Other chapters explore creatures, like snakes, llamas, and the slow loris (the only venomous primate), who wield their spit like a deadly weapon."</span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: justify;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">Kirkus says: "</span></span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-size: 16px;">Along with dipping into the biota and biology of spit, venom, and related substances, the author introduces relevant scientists and others, from Ivan Pavlov to baseball spitballer Elwin Charles “Preacher” Roe, as well as a host of animal spitters, including snakes, mosquitoes (“the only creatures that can suck and spit at the same time”), and venomous shrews. Saliva’s roles in both healing and in spreading disease also come in for look overs, and a final chapter gathers up competitive spitting events involving not just watermelon seeds, but also crickets and kudu poop."</span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-size: 16px;"> </span></span><span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "crimson text" , "times new roman" , "times" , serif; font-size: 16px;"></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><span style="font-size: 16px;">As a child I was disgusted by an uncle who chewed tobacco and was </span>constantly spitting into a brass</span> spittoon next to his chair. <span style="color: #333333;">I knew from observing him and watching baseball games that men especially like to spit. The more I looked into the subject, the more fascinated I became with the antibiotic, antifungal and antiviral properties of spit. </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Dentists have been pioneers in the study of saliva. Spit tests can tell whether you're more likely to develop cavities. They can also tell if people and other mammals are suffering from stress. Zookeepers and vets use spit tests to check the health of animals, including dogs, elephants and gorillas. Some coaches use spit tests to tell whether certain elite athletes are stressed from over-exercising, which might impair their immune systems. Spit tests can replace some blood tests. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Animals and insects use spit in all sorts of ways, such as keeping blood from clotting to using it as a weapon.</span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "crimson text" , "times new roman" , "times" , serif;"></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Attitudes toward spit differ from culture to culture. In the United States, men spat wherever and whenever they wished, including offices, churches, even the halls of Congress. After 1896 when New York passed the first spitting ban, spittoons were as common as trashcans in bars, banks, offices and other public places. Not all states banned public spitting. It was women who called for an end to the habit. Some men protested the ban as an assault on their "right to spit." Each Supreme Court justice had his (only men were on the court at that time) personal cuspidor behind the bench, but they are now used as wastebaskets.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">People like to spit so much that they spit for sport in a variety of contests with watermelon seeds, pumpkin seeds, olive pits, date pits, cherry pits, and even crickets. The most unappetizing contests involve spitting antelope and sheep poop.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Whatever your attitude toward spit, be happy if you can drool. In private, of course.</span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "crimson text" , "times new roman" , "times" , serif;"></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "crimson text" , "times new roman" , "times" , serif;">SPIT is available from your local bookstore or from Amazon.com <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Spit-Whats-Cool-About-Drool/dp/0228102324/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=mary+batten&qid=1576428222&s=books&sr=1-3">Amazon.com</a></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "crimson text" , "times new roman" , "times" , serif;">and BarnesandNoble.com <a href="https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/spit-mary-batten/1131015115?ean=9780228102328#/">BarnesandNoble.com</a></span></div>
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Mary Battenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443381203090280044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2122070406795922576.post-27362443907959554732019-06-09T14:57:00.000-04:002019-06-09T14:57:35.976-04:00Brainless as BeetlesI originally wrote this essay in 2012. It was published in <i>The Smithfield Times</i> and on my blog March 27, 2012. But it's time to update it and publish it again. I am incensed that a bunch of primarily old white Republican men are continuing to use government to control women's bodies. Every woman and every decent, enlightened man in the U.S. should share my outrage and commit to doing everything they can to kick these men--and sadly a few women--out of Congress and state legislatures. With every legislative snip of women's constitutional reproductive rights, these men are taking our country backwards into a pre-scientific era when both women and men lived at the mercy of their gonads.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-RkZi6dVAg3Y/XP1QFL1D5EI/AAAAAAAAANY/C0qPxcpV2KMS_3589eyLj7_mlGxKwxfkQCLcBGAs/s1600/Bess_Beetle.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-RkZi6dVAg3Y/XP1QFL1D5EI/AAAAAAAAANY/C0qPxcpV2KMS_3589eyLj7_mlGxKwxfkQCLcBGAs/s320/Bess_Beetle.jpg" width="320" height="240" data-original-width="800" data-original-height="600" /></a></div>
Above is a beetle. Beetles and other insects do everything they can to subvert female choice. Men who criminalize reproductive choice, as the Alabama legislature just did a few weeks ago, are no better than male bugs. What pathetic specimens they are, their manhood so fragile, they need to subjugate women in order to feel like big men!<P><P>
It’s easy to understand these misogynist Republican men if you view them in the context of the animal kingdom. Males, from fruit flies to men, have an anatomical limitation. They cannot produce eggs, and if they’re mammals like us, they cannot get pregnant or give birth. This biological limitation drives some men crazy. Their only contribution to reproduction is sperm. And sperm must leave a male’s body in order to fertilize an egg. Bye, bye! In the act of mating, males lose control of their most precious biological product, their sperm. Once sperm leave a male’s body, they are under the control of the female. She can eject them, kill them, block them or allow them to fertilize her eggs. Females are scary creatures!<P><P>
Among waterfowl, where rape is common, females have evolved vaginas with dead-end sacs, a kind of internal burial ground for an unwanted male’s sperm.<P><P>
The only way males can try to control their sperm investment is by controlling the recipients—females! And males—insects to humans—do anything and everything they can to exert control and subvert female choice. (Of course there are many wonderful liberated men who think with their brains instead of the instrument below their belt, but those who want to make women’s bodies property of the state are as backward as slime molds.)<P><P>
Subversion tactics are seen most clearly in insects. Female insects mate with several males and store sperm in their sperm-storage chamber. Scientists have discovered that female choice goes on internally in the female’s reproductive tract. It is within the changing climate of this internal environment that hidden or “cryptic” female choice takes place, perhaps at the level of the ovum itself, in determining which sperm of which male, if any, will be allowed to penetrate the egg’s membrane to achieve fertilization. Such internal female choice may be going on in women, too! Oh, mercy! Sex for men is fraught with peril.<P><P>
So males across species engage in sperm competition and mate guarding to ensure that only their sperm fertilize their mate’s eggs and sire her offspring. Among insects, some bizarre tactics for ensuring confidence of paternity have evolved.
One tactic is the copulatory plug, a gluey substance secreted by the male to block the female’s genital opening, preventing a rival’s sperm from getting inside. The male damselfly has a kind of scooper on the end of his penis that he uses to scoop out previously deposited sperm before mating with a female. Some male fruit flies inject toxic semen, which thwarts rivals but also hastens the female’s death.<P><P>
Men don’t use genital glue or sperm scoopers but they do use religion, laws and politics to achieve the same end – controlling women’s reproductive biology. The use of mutilating genital surgery in some 28 countries of Africa and the Middle East wounds about three million young girls every year.<P><P>
The current profusion of ultrasound and “personhood” bills passed by Republican male legislators across the U.S. are the human equivalent of insects’ copulatory plugs. These men are probably no more aware they are acting out such a primitive biological scenario than are male insects. They are caught up in a form of mass hysteria reminiscent of medieval witch hunts and persecution of women. Indeed, the attempt to vilify Planned Parenthood is similar to medieval persecution of women who gave advice on preventing births. Some self-righteous men have recently called for jailing women who get abortions. Some sickos would jail women who miscarry. Some call for banning birth control!<P><P>
If the current misogynist movement led by Republican men, including the current president, were not so dangerous and harmful to women and our entire society, it would make an interesting anthropological field study. It’s unprecedented in U.S. history, to see males, primarily in one major political party, using the legal process and available medical technology to turn back the clock, prevent access to, and even ban medical advances that benefit men as well as women. Yes, there are some women who still accept patriarchy. But would they if they understood that from a biological perspective, these men are acting as brainless as beetles? With this difference: Male insects are out to protect their individual sperm investment, and they have no choice in the matter. Their reproductive behavior is genetically hard-wired. Humans have choices. This makes it all the more astounding that the male fanatics are turning their backs on centuries of scientific and social advances and espousing the most primitive level of the human species’ animal nature. The anti-choice movement is functioning as a mass sperm protection society, with Republican men like the self-righteous gang who dominate Alabama’s senate, Catholic bishops and sniveling evangelical pastors clamoring to protect any man’s sperm investment by preventing women from exercising reproductive choice.<P><P>
Science literacy reveals the ridiculousness and primitiveness of the current wave of misogyny. Not surprisingly, this gang is also anti-science. Facts just get in the way of their hateful anti-woman campaign. The fact that this extremist movement appeals to so many people demonstrates the urgent need for improving science education before America becomes the most socially backward country in the Western world. We’re already on our way.<P><P>
Want to read more? Check out my book: <a href="https://www.iuniverse.com/Bookstore/BookDetail.aspx?BookId=SKU-000094214"><i>Sexual Strategies: How Females Choose Their Mates</i></a> Mary Battenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443381203090280044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2122070406795922576.post-90618367028131663572018-12-28T11:15:00.000-05:002018-12-28T11:26:24.273-05:00Free BookThrough January 1, 2019, you can get my e-book, HOW TO HAVE SEX IF YOU'RE NOT HUMAN, for free. <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ZOlW5BSivtw/XCZL4dl1JpI/AAAAAAAAALw/ZIP7m0lVdxouAX9_oydZtujpzrGQvUszQCLcBGAs/s1600/How%2Bto%2Bhave%2Bsex%2Bif%2Byoure%2Bnot%2Bhuman%2BCOVER.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ZOlW5BSivtw/XCZL4dl1JpI/AAAAAAAAALw/ZIP7m0lVdxouAX9_oydZtujpzrGQvUszQCLcBGAs/s320/How%2Bto%2Bhave%2Bsex%2Bif%2Byoure%2Bnot%2Bhuman%2BCOVER.jpg" width="200" height="320" data-original-width="1000" data-original-height="1600" /></a></div> Here's <a href="http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/111297">link</a>
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Enjoy being a voyeur in the nonhuman world of sex-changing fishes, hermaphroditic snails, and walking sticks.
Everything alive has evolved some amazing ways of "doing it"!Mary Battenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443381203090280044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2122070406795922576.post-61895330506618702812018-09-24T12:53:00.001-04:002018-09-24T12:53:48.036-04:00Protecting Patriarchy
We’ve seen this play before--Republican men scurrying like rats on steroids to ram through a Supreme Court nominee without a full investigation of women’s allegations of sexual misconduct. The old white boys club is circling their patriarchal bully sticks around one of their own--Brett Kavanaugh--who has, in his various opinions, displayed the same anti-woman bias that binds them to a past when women were considered men’s property and had no rights except those dispensed by their fathers or husbands. Make no mistake, confirming Kavanaugh to the high court, would shift the balance to the far right and take women back to a pre-scientific era when there was no respect for women’s personhood, no reproductive health, no reproductive choice.<P><P>
Thankfully this is a different world. The old white male supremacist ship is not going to make it out of its patriarchal harbor. Because of the #MeToo movement, male Republicans’ rhetoric is a bit different from 1991 when Anita Hill testified that Clarence Thomas subjected her to sexual harassment. Two of the same committee members, Hatch and Grassley, who vilified Ms. Hill in 1991 are now choosing their words more carefully. They say Dr. Christine Blasey Ford deserves a hearing but they aren’t convincing. The smear-mongers mobilized faster than a swarm of bees, calling Dr. Blasey Ford “confused,” “mistaken.” It couldn’t have happened because she didn’t report it years ago. Haven’t they noticed? Victims of sexual abuse, whether by priests or politicians, don’t report for many years. Some never report. For her bravery in coming forward, Dr. Blasey Ford received death threats and had to move out of her home for her and her family’s safety. Senator Diane Feinstein, who released Dr. Blasey Ford’s letter, has received threats to her staff. Patriarchy in full vicious display. Such big men.<P><P>
As of September 23, 2018, a second woman, Deborah Ramirez, has come forward with allegations of sexual misconduct against Kavanaugh. It turns out that Republicans on the Judiciary Committee knew about the second woman last week but only speeded up their efforts to confirm Kavanaugh without a full investigation. Senate czar Mitch McConnell proclaimed that Kavanaugh would be confirmed. The clear message here is that sexual misconduct by a rich white boy should just be shrugged off as “boys-will-be-boys behavior,” nothing to make such a fuss about. But they aren’t going to get away with it this time.<P><P>
Senator Feinstein and other senators are again calling for a full investigation. With two sexual misconduct allegations against Kavanaugh, and possibly more, an investigation must be held. A full investigation. With witnesses who are waiting in the wings.<P><P>
This is about more than the constitutional right to obtain an abortion. Yes, that right is critical to women’s health and must be protected. But more is at stake here. The sex-abuser-in-chief and his servile courtiers are all out to reinstate power and control over women, body and soul. While decrying large government, these smarmy male hypocrites have no problem using every legal tool at their disposal to allow government to invade the most intimate orifices of women’s bodies. If Roe v. Wade is gone, women’s bodies once again become, in effect, property of the state. The use of physical force to overpower women is rape. The use of laws to control women’s bodies is legislative rape. Kavanaugh is one of their boys.<P><P>
Imagine installing a man who called birth control “abortion-inducing drugs” on the Supreme Court. Kavanaugh sounds like someone left over from the age when dispensing birth control was considered witchcraft. He has already argued in a 2015 case, Priests for Life v. HHS, and in the earlier “Hobby Lobby case,” that religious organizations should not be forced to provide contraception. Obamacare required employers to provide birth control to employees. Women’s health is unthinkable without contraception. Enlightened men whose sense of masculinity doesn’t ride on women’s backs know this is true. These are the decent men whose masculinity doesn't depend on an erect penis or a loaded gun.<P><P>
Confirmation to the Supreme Court is a lifetime appointment. Whoever becomes a justice could be on the Court for the next 30 years. Clarence Thomas, confirmed without full investigation of Professor Anita Hill’s allegations of sexual misconduct, has served on the Court almost 27 years. The process of confirming a lifetime appointment must take whatever time is needed for a thorough investigation, not hustled through committee like fast-food. Women--and the American people--deserved better than Clarence Thomas. Now we deserve better than Brett Kavanaugh. No more male use of the law to control women. No more protecting white patriarchy at women’s expense. No more!
Mary Battenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443381203090280044noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2122070406795922576.post-2983587045062596532018-07-04T12:42:00.000-04:002018-07-04T15:18:49.615-04:00Declare Your Independence with Your Vote
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Last night I watched the local fireworks celebrating our country’s declaration of independence from a tyrannical king. Ironically we now have a tyrannical president who, with the compliant political party he owns, is working as hard as he can to undo some of the values and rights so many of our forebears fought and died for.<P><P>
I re-read the Declaration of Independence. These are the key passages: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. -- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”<P><P>
Let’s analyze these precious lines in today’s context. According to the wannabe dictator who is sometimes in the White House when not on one of his golf courses, there are no truths. He speaks and tweets more lies than a shark has teeth. In case you didn’t know, sharks continually replace their teeth throughout their lives. The Trumplicans (I cannot call this once respectable party Republican any longer.) have replaced truth with “alternative facts,” following the Nazi dictum that the repetition of lies conditions the less discerning masses to believe them as truths.<P><P>
Since taking office, hardly a day has passed without Trump’s vilification of the press, most recently calling it the “enemy of the people.” This drumbeat, along with his repeated rhetorical incitements to violence, recently had tragic consequences--the murders of five journalists at the Maryland newspaper, <i>Capital Gazette</i>. <P><P>
Then there’s the passage about all men (women weren’t recognized as full citizens in 1776) being created equal. Equality was a radical concept to the wealthy white men who signed the Declaration. Some of them, including Thomas Jefferson who wrote the Declaration, owned slaves. They did not practice what they dared to preach, but they left the noble concept of equality that we are still trying to live up to. And we were making progress until the current administration took office and began working to take us backwards and resurrect the worst abuses in our racist history. With slave-master cruelty, this administration is empowering white supremacists. It has violated every tenet of moral decency by wrenching children from immigrant parents and holding them in cage-like internment camps.<P><P>
Appealing to hatred and prejudice against people of color, this tyrannical president calls immigrants of color “criminals,” “animals,” and “rapists.” He never mentions he is the son of immigrants. His wife is an immigrant. But they’re white. So they’re OK. He called Haiti, El Salvador and African countries "shit holes."<P><P>
With respect to the Declaration’s “unalienable Rights” of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” the Trumplicans are doing as much as they can, as fast as they can, to strip those rights from everyone except the privileged 1 percent of the wealthiest Americans. To avoid any ambiguity about the Trumplicans' position on people's rights, the United States has withdrawn from the United Nations Human Rights Council. <P><P>
Trumplican denial of decades of scientific evidence for climate change poses an unprecedented threat not only to national security but also planetary security. Climate change has already started creating extreme storms, flooding, heat waves, and other conditions that will make it difficult if not impossible for many people to enjoy life, liberty or any kind of happiness. On the home front, we have an EPA administrator whose Trumpian-endorsed goal is to weaken hard won environmental protections of clean air and water and conservation of our wild national parks. <P><P>
Trumplicans worked hard throughout the two Obama administrations to trade patriotism for power. For eight years they worked only to destroy a presidency rather than work on behalf of the American people. In my book, that was treason. Their shameful efforts to deprive millions of people of health care have endangered life, liberty and the health necessary to pursue any kind of happiness.<P><P>
Trumplicans wage war against women. Apparently they never recovered from the fact that women can vote. This gang of men vow to take women backwards into a pre-scientific era by taking away women’s fundamental liberty to make their own reproductive choices. Repeatedly these men try to enact legislation that would enable the government to control women’s bodies as if they were commodities. <P><P>
Trumplicans have a problem with that last passage: “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Representative democracy is only as good as the education of its citizens. Trumplicans know that and are doing all they can to promote ignorance--ignorance of science, the U.S. Constitution, complex thinking, and basic educational skills. Under slavery, reading was banned among slaves. Anyone who taught a slave to read could be punished. Nobody has dared suggest that reading be banned, but the current education secretary is doing everything she can to destroy public schools.<P><P>
Trumplicans do not want an educated people who can think critically. In order to stay in power, they need a people who will follow them without question or criticism. And this leads to the most insidious action of all -- suppressing the vote, especially among voters of color, through voter suppression tactics, including gerrymandering of districts to favor one party. In the 2016 election, governmental officials close to Trump and members of his family, even reached out to a foreign government to interfere in our election. Some of these officials have already been indicted on criminal charges.<P><P>
So here we are on Independence Day 2018 with a corrupt, tyrannical president who idolizes totalitarian dictators, again with the support and approval of a once respectable political party that now seems bent on destroying basic democratic institutions.<P><P>
In my mind, this calls for a new declaration of independence this coming November. View your vote as your declaration of independence from the tyrant in the White House. Vote as if your life and your country depended on it, because they do.
Mary Battenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443381203090280044noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2122070406795922576.post-13944214319916511042018-06-03T14:58:00.000-04:002018-06-06T21:57:14.957-04:00Keep 'em In Their Place<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-58kDTSDp8Tg/WxQ6IV2SetI/AAAAAAAAAK4/csF1szzd4ikDyL2o3NrVlwvSbmVUJRRpACLcBGAs/s1600/firstamendment_0-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-58kDTSDp8Tg/WxQ6IV2SetI/AAAAAAAAAK4/csF1szzd4ikDyL2o3NrVlwvSbmVUJRRpACLcBGAs/s320/firstamendment_0-1.jpg" width="320" height="259" data-original-width="450" data-original-height="364" /></a></div><b>I</b> am a white senior citizen who grew up in the racially segregated South. Even as a child, I sensed there was something terribly wrong with the way we were living. Nothing made any sense. I felt I was getting stop and go signals simultaneously. <P><P>
Love your neighbor as yourself, said the church my family attended. But I was also taught I could not love my black playmates in the full sense of love. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” said my church and school. But this, too, was not what segregated life exemplified. Blacks were not treated as whites treated themselves. Aunt Sarah and Uncle Bill, the black couple who worked for my parents on the Virginia farm where I grew up, did not sit and eat with us at the same table. Why? When I asked my mother whose sister was Aunt Sarah, she patiently explained, after recovering from the shock of my question, that “Aunt” and “Uncle” were titles of respect that white children used for older colored people (Colored was the term used in the South during the 40s and 50s.) Well, then why didn't we respect them and eat together and visit together? <P><P>
I was getting more and more confused. My brother and I could play with the children of our black neighbors at home but we could not go to church or school or movies or parties together. Nobody could explain in any way that made sense to me why we were had to live a divided life--intimate friends and playmates privately but separated in all public areas of life. I would sometimes examine my skin in a mirror and I knew that if my skin were brown I would be the same person but I would not be treated the same.<P><P>
Whites, some in my own family, said, “Good niggers know their place.” It was mostly men who used this language. My brother and I knew that if we used that "N" word, we would be punished as severely as if we cursed. I wondered about this “place.” What was it? Where was it? It was clear it was not the same “place” whites reserved for themselves. I later learned it was a subordinate place. But why? What had whites done to earn a place of privilege? <P><P>The answer, of course, was nothing. They believed their white skin was enough to ensure privilege. It was their security blanket. But to maintain that superstition, they had to invent laws and traditions that punished Blacks for no reason other than the fact that they were not white. Sadly that attitude is a rabid infection in our culture today. Because of the changing demographics many whites act terrified of losing the privilege they believe they own solely because they happened to have been born with white skin. Instead of working to transform society and make things better for themselves and everyone else, they are beating a militant retreat into the racist sewer.<P><P>
What Roger Goodell and the NFL have done by banning the respectful taking of a knee is the equivalent of segregationalists using every tactic at their disposal to put and keep Blacks in their “place.” The NFL was already guilty of gross injustice by effectively banning quarterback Colin Kaepernick from football because he exercised his First Amendment rights in the most respectful way. Taking a knee is basically a prayerful posture. This new policy takes the NFL to the bottom of the racist barrel. It is offensive that the NFL has chosen to endorse Trump’s blatant racism rather than showing leadership and acknowledging that athletes who take a knee have a constitutional right under the First Amendment to do so. Depending on which analysis you read, Black athletes make up some 70 percent of NFL players. Without those Black athletes, football as we know it wouldn’t exist. Black athletes are in leadership positions throughout sports. The NFL’s action says loud and clear: “Put those uppity Blacks in their place.” <P><P>
I can’t believe I’m writing about football. I’m not even a football fan. But this is much bigger than football. It’s about the racist dregs of white supremacy being used punitively against Blacks who dare to bring attention to a huge social problem--police violence and brutality that target and criminalize Black men and boys in particular. In a sane world, their protest would be heard, examined and lead to vigorous efforts to transform the culture that continues to criminalize and punish Blacks. It is my hope that entire teams--and spectators, too--will protest in solidarity by taking a knee on the field and off. It would be great to see a stadium of spectators take a knee when the national anthem is played. Democracy is on the line here. Its promise still has not been fulfilled. It would be gratifying to see the NFL follow the Black athletes’ heroic lead toward greater democracy rather than taking us backwards into one of the ugliest periods of our history. It is no less ugly today.Mary Battenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443381203090280044noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2122070406795922576.post-46264231168131428632018-04-15T14:08:00.000-04:002018-04-15T14:08:23.229-04:00THE CRY OF JAZZ NEW UPDATED HD FORMATIn 1958 my late husband Ed Bland and three friends and colleagues made a semi-documentary film they called <a href="https://Thecryofjazz.com">THE CRY OF JAZZ</a>. This film marked the first time American blacks directly challenged whites about white supremacy and the racist culture in the United States. So committed were the people who worked on the film that some 65 people gave their time and talents freely. First released in 1959, the 34-minute film ignited controversy wherever it was shown. In 2010, Anthology Film Archives received a grant from the Martin Scorsese Film Foundation to preserve the film. It was transferred from the original 16mm to 35mm and selected for inclusion in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. Over the years, the film has been shown widely in university film departments and film festivals. Now, for the first time, an authorized, updated version is available in high-definition digital format. Bonus features include two in-depth commentaries by Ed about the making of the film. <p><P>
In 1971, Willard Van Dyle, pioneer American documentary filmmaker and then Curator of Films at New York's Museum of Modern Art, called the CRY "The most prophetic film ever made . . . [because] it predicted the riots of the '69s and '70s and gave the basis for them."<p><P>
In the film, Ed used the musical structure of jazz as a metaphor for black life in the United States. The film is a milestone in filmmaking by black Americans. It was far ahead of its time in 1959 and is more timely than ever now.
<a href="http://edblandmusic.com">Ed Bland</a> directed the film and co-wrote and co-produced it. <P><P>
Writing about the film, journalist Matt Rogers said: "Relying on dozens of volunteers to pull it off, the short—shot on 16mm for a cost of roughly $3500 and first screened in '59—is a monumental literal and figurative black-and-white dialectic that uses jazz as both lens and springboard for interpreting America's past, present, and future ills (and possibilities.) Black life is seen as a reflection of jazz and jazz as a reflection of Black life, all broken down by Black men who are not only their white peers' equals but clearly are schoolin' them. The blunt, didactic style pushes a jungle-fever tinged (hey, kickin' that knowledge is sexy!) history lesson that not only peeks into ghetto life on Chicago’s South Side—from the streets to the church to the pool halls and jazz clubs—but also presages, among many things, the popularity of rock and roll, the rapturous embrace of jazz by other countries, the American race riots of the late '60s, as well as, believe it or not, the evolution of hip-hop. True, no rappers, but the science of the loop is heard in full effect. Not to mention the rare live footage of Bland's friend, Le Sun Ra and his Arkestra, featured throughout."Mary Battenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443381203090280044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2122070406795922576.post-25673178657962160692018-03-17T12:58:00.000-04:002018-03-18T10:15:37.930-04:00Enough!
<b>S</b>chool used to be a place for learning,<br>
A place for education,<br>
Not a place to die from a shooter’s gun.<br>
Not a place to cringe in fear,<br>
Wondering if you would be alive at the end of the day.<br>
<P><P>
One school shooting a week,<br>
Since January 1, 2018:<br>
Birmingham, Alabama<br>
Jackson, Mississippi<br>
Mount Pleasant, Michigan<br>
Norfolk, Virginia<br>
Ita Bena, Mississippi<br>
Savannah, Georgia<br>
Nashville, Tennessee<br>
Oxon Hill, Maryland<br>
Los Angeles, California<br>
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania<br>
Italy, Texas<br>
Winston Salem, North Carolina<br>
Parkland, Florida<br>
Oh, that one made news<br>
17 human lives gunned down<br>
The others not so bad--just one or two killed.<br>
How many killings are tolerable?<br>
<P>
<P>
Cry for the children<br>
if you care<br>
But celebrate the Parkland students who say “enough,”<br>
Enough of thoughts and prayers<br>
Enough of politicians and the NRA<br>
with their BS and their campaign contributions<br>
protecting guns over human life.<br>
Enough!<br>
<P>
<P>
Bullet-proof vests should not be the new school uniform<br>
for students and teachers<br>
No military occupation of schools either.<br>
PTSD is not a college degree.<br>
<P>
<P>
As for arming teachers,<br>
Really?<br>
Add lethal weapons to<br>
language and literature and science and math and art?<br>
And where should the teacher put her gun or his gun--<br>
shoulder holster? Boot? Purse? Locked drawer?<br>
And what if the gun goes off accidentally,<br>
as it already has in at least one case?<br>
Where does fear for one’s life fit in the curriculum?<br>
<P>
Are we trying to develop minds<br>
or set land mines to development?<br>
<p>
<P>
Cry for the children<br>
and the adults gunned down,<br>
And after shedding your tears<br>
Do something.<br>
<P>
<P>
The school’s business is education,<br>
not target practice.<br>
ENOUGH!<br>
<P>
Dedicated to the students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Parkland, Florida, and
students across the country who are challenging our legislators to pass gun controls.</P>
Mary Battenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443381203090280044noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2122070406795922576.post-65640197801030219512017-08-07T16:54:00.000-04:002017-08-07T16:54:37.576-04:00Saving the World From Adolescent LeadersMen like Trump who are insecure about their masculinity are especially dangerous in positions of power because their concept of manhood is associated with show of force. They have never learned that being a man involves much more than firing a gun or measuring the size of their penis. They lack the knowledge needed to conduct diplomacy. We now have two adolescent boys--Trump and Kim Jong-un--in positions of power where they can wreak destruction on the world. Each is jerking off with weapons of mass destruction. Trump can order a nuclear attack. In April we saw how impulsively he ordered a missile strike on Syria. In July we saw Kim Jong-un test an intercontinental ballistic missile that some experts said could reach the United States. Each of these adolescent boys seems to be trying to assert his manhood in the least intelligent way. <P>
We don’t know whether North Korea has a nuclear warhead it could mount on such a missile. But we do know the U.S. has the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons on the planet. We know that Trump has access to the nuclear codes. We know Trump is ignorant and incompetent, and we know he will do anything--lie, promote violence, humiliate his minions, scapegoat others, threaten anyone he feels is in his way--to embellish his self-image and safeguard his fragile masculinity. <P>
Trump and Kim Jong-un are on a collision course. The North Korean leader has no legislative control on his impulsiveness. Here we have Congress that so far in Trump’s presidency has not shown any collective spine to curb Trump. It’s up to the American people and concerned legislators who must raise their voices more strongly than ever before to demand that Congress impeach the mad man masquerading as president before he starts a nuclear war. Mary Battenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443381203090280044noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2122070406795922576.post-90919563032881144722017-07-26T13:14:00.000-04:002017-07-26T13:14:43.815-04:00Doing Harm“Do no harm” is the core principle of medical practice and bioethics. But Congressional Republicans, with a couple of exceptions (Senators Collins and Murkowski) have no ethics. Never have I seen so much frantic effort devoted to doing as much harm as possible to as many people as possible.<p>
Under the guise of a healthcare bill, this McConnell/Ryan gang of suck-up toadies is trying to pass a no-care bill that would take medical insurance away from millions of the most vulnerable Americans and provide a huge tax break to millionaires and corporations. This is no healthcare bill; it’s tax relief for the rich riding on the backs of the poor and middle class.<p>
For seven years, Republicans turned their backs on the American people and worked to destroy Obama’s presidency. Proudly declaring themselves the “party of NO,” they blocked, obstructed, and propagandized everything President Obama tried to do for the American people. They have been ranting and raving for seven years about what a disaster the Affordable Care Act, which they dubbed “Obamacare,” has been, but by many measures they are wrong. Not to worry. This is a party that does not accept facts or evidence about anything. Does the Affordable Care Act have problems? Yes. But it is a working structure that is in place. As many Democrats have pointed out, the problems in the ACA can be fixed, but Congressional Republicans will not hear of it. Working behind the scenes with no debate, until forced to do so now, they have repeatedly tried to force votes on a vicious bill that would only do harm by stripping benefits that people already have under the ACA.<p>
Rather than working for the people who elected them, this gang, made up largely of men, has had three items on their agenda: repealing and replacing “Obamacare,” depriving women of reproductive health options, and giving tax breaks to the one percent of the wealthiest Americans and corporations.<p>
In recent months, they’ve had the opportunity to reveal the plan they presumably have been working on for these past seven years. And they've come up empty. Neither the would-be emperor in the White House nor the so-called healthcare bill has any clothes. They are bare for all to see who they really are: a bunch of liars, con-men, and immoral stooges, many of them blatantly anti-woman and racist. They are cheered on by the infantile destroyer-in-chief in the White House whose only interest is in using every tool of government to enrich himself and his family. The country be damned!
Mary Battenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443381203090280044noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2122070406795922576.post-10925770601620688592017-07-04T15:27:00.000-04:002017-07-04T15:27:40.594-04:00<b>SALE</b> on my Ebook; <b><a href="https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/111297">HOW TO HAVE SEX IF YOU'RE NOT HUMAN</a></b>
Half-price throughout the month of July 2017.
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-waymLnbM1Gg/WVvrdTM3RSI/AAAAAAAAAKY/AE9csOEthZoQ6L3ZS1e1-lOa9xltbHbBgCLcBGAs/s1600/How%2Bto%2Bhave%2Bsex%2Bif%2Byoure%2Bnot%2Bhuman%2BCOVER.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-waymLnbM1Gg/WVvrdTM3RSI/AAAAAAAAAKY/AE9csOEthZoQ6L3ZS1e1-lOa9xltbHbBgCLcBGAs/s320/How%2Bto%2Bhave%2Bsex%2Bif%2Byoure%2Bnot%2Bhuman%2BCOVER.jpg" width="200" height="320" data-original-width="1000" data-original-height="1600" /></a></div>Mary Battenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443381203090280044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2122070406795922576.post-5982120387247254972017-04-08T11:05:00.000-04:002017-04-08T11:05:25.760-04:00School Visit Nansemond-Suffolk Academy<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-3QR0V6eTzrw/WOj7d37PkqI/AAAAAAAAAIc/s4vbPAyTWvMjVl3YDuBtt7Blg4VVYSwdwCLcB/s1600/Aliens%2Bfrom%2BEarth%2BREV%2BED.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-3QR0V6eTzrw/WOj7d37PkqI/AAAAAAAAAIc/s4vbPAyTWvMjVl3YDuBtt7Blg4VVYSwdwCLcB/s320/Aliens%2Bfrom%2BEarth%2BREV%2BED.jpg" width="320" height="289" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-hjuJl5NmQTc/WOj7aIhnnRI/AAAAAAAAAIY/DjoFmiw2gLQnNv_Cy8N1MLaNrxwr4HplgCLcB/s1600/Baby%2BOrca%2Bhi%2Bres.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-hjuJl5NmQTc/WOj7aIhnnRI/AAAAAAAAAIY/DjoFmiw2gLQnNv_Cy8N1MLaNrxwr4HplgCLcB/s320/Baby%2BOrca%2Bhi%2Bres.jpg" width="319" height="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-g6sgrxL9A58/WOj7iAhuB0I/AAAAAAAAAIg/UBVjx32dAc0WoMXaVqtuN_H6EeL3AyCPwCLcB/s1600/Rattler%2Bhi%2Bres.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-g6sgrxL9A58/WOj7iAhuB0I/AAAAAAAAAIg/UBVjx32dAc0WoMXaVqtuN_H6EeL3AyCPwCLcB/s320/Rattler%2Bhi%2Bres.jpg" width="319" height="320" /></a></div>
I love author visits to schools. On Friday, 7 April 2017, I had a delightful time presenting to young students, K through 2nd grade, at the Suffolk, VA, campus of <a href="https://www.nsacademy.org/page/about/our-campuses">Nansemond-Suffolk Academy</a>. During my presentation, "Where Do Ideas Come From," I told students where the ideas for several of my books had originated. Mrs. Ann Woleben, the school's wonderful librarian, had prepared students by reading the book, <i>What Do You Do With Ideas?</i> by Kobi Yamada and Mae Besom. Student questions are my favorite part of author visits. Lots of hands and eager faces were ready. Unfortunately there is never enough time for all of the students to ask their questions. My favorite questions: "Are we animals?" "When did you become a writer?""Do Mama and Daddy dolphins take turns caring for the babies?" I spoke about the ideas for my newest books, <i>Baby Orca</i>, <i>Rattler</i>, <i>and Aliens From Earth</i> (revised edition). This school has wonderful programs in science and the arts. The children who attend are so fortunate to be able to come to this truly great school.Mary Battenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443381203090280044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2122070406795922576.post-2358123784987511742016-11-15T16:48:00.000-05:002016-11-15T16:48:23.472-05:00Great Review of My BooksLovely review of three of my books that came out this year: BABY ORCA, RATTLER, and ALIENS FROM EARTH.
Thank you, <a href="http://pilotonline.com/entertainment/books/for-mary-batten-writing-for-kids-is-a-natural/article_9036e2fa-bb29-5030-9e1d-444245a10e8d.html">Bill Ruehlmann, Norfolk Virginian Pilot Online</a>.Mary Battenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443381203090280044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2122070406795922576.post-43951041748589222612016-10-30T12:57:00.001-04:002016-10-30T12:57:45.641-04:00New BooksI'm pleased, happy, elated to have three new books this year:
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Baby-Orca-Mary-Batten/dp/0448488396/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1477846503&sr=1-1&keywords=mary+batten+baby+orca//">BABY ORCA </a>, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Rattler-Penguin-Core-Concepts-Batten/dp/0448488418/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1477846587&sr=1-1&keywords=mary+batten+rattler">RATTLER</a> and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Aliens-Earth-Animals-Ecosystems-revised/dp/1561459038/ref=dp_ob_title_bk">ALIENS FROM EARTH</a>, about invasive species.
Killer whales, rattlesnakes, invasive species. Nature is fascinating, beautiful, wondrous.<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-avdRgo_87-M/WBYkwWvw6sI/AAAAAAAAAHQ/sLhl6MJZ-_YslFKGf0ah5-qJMx3bwnv8ACLcB/s1600/Baby%2BOrca%2Bhi%2Bres.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-avdRgo_87-M/WBYkwWvw6sI/AAAAAAAAAHQ/sLhl6MJZ-_YslFKGf0ah5-qJMx3bwnv8ACLcB/s320/Baby%2BOrca%2Bhi%2Bres.jpg" width="319" height="320" /></a><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ejoJg0a29Ac/WBYk5YM-asI/AAAAAAAAAHU/6j4p0IoVo1kNzGkbWIu3jpkdarnChSwlQCLcB/s1600/Rattler%2Bhi%2Bres.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ejoJg0a29Ac/WBYk5YM-asI/AAAAAAAAAHU/6j4p0IoVo1kNzGkbWIu3jpkdarnChSwlQCLcB/s320/Rattler%2Bhi%2Bres.jpg" width="319" height="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-GTmfd6Yap4Q/WBYlFQnunOI/AAAAAAAAAHY/5RR7DQQ_w2gusfazQeHHJTdhRMQKOWkSwCLcB/s1600/Aliens%2Bfrom%2BEarth%2BREV%2BED.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-GTmfd6Yap4Q/WBYlFQnunOI/AAAAAAAAAHY/5RR7DQQ_w2gusfazQeHHJTdhRMQKOWkSwCLcB/s320/Aliens%2Bfrom%2BEarth%2BREV%2BED.jpg" width="320" height="289" /></a></div> Mary Battenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443381203090280044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2122070406795922576.post-49444357617795947832016-07-16T15:18:00.001-04:002016-07-16T15:18:18.418-04:00Is It Too Much to Ask?
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-OkSgOIfA8Yc/V4qIURbmPLI/AAAAAAAAAG0/T04OimaePxI_JTHhLJMVdQ3fYOX1UDNbQCLcB/s1600/handshake4-150x150.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-OkSgOIfA8Yc/V4qIURbmPLI/AAAAAAAAAG0/T04OimaePxI_JTHhLJMVdQ3fYOX1UDNbQCLcB/s320/handshake4-150x150.jpg" width="320" height="320" /></a></div>
Is it too much to ask that each of us appoint ourselves a committee of one and do one kind thing each day? Start with your children, your spouse, your partner, your co-workers. Few of us will have an impact on life at the global level, but all of us can affect our families, our friends, and our communities. We all have the gift of life on this one planetary ship. Our lifetimes are short and none of us will get off this ship alive. Can we not respect each other as fellow members of the one human species that inhabits Earth? You do not have to love a person to respect him or her. We all share the human condition. We are all fellow travelers on the journeys of our lives. What a wondrous gift this is, but some people live as if they hate the fact they were born and try to make life as miserable as possible for others. Years ago my mentor, well known attorney Morris Ernst, the person who helped me get my first book published, said there are no big things in life. There is only trivia. But if we tend to the trivia in positive ways, the effects are cumulative and can make profound differences. Being kind is easy: smile at a child, call a friend, touch the hand of a person in pain, speak out against injustice, have real face-to-face conversations, not just text messages. Our country is reeling from pain. We need to connect, to listen to each other, to stop playing the blame game and try to understand each other and find solutions together.
Mary Battenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443381203090280044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2122070406795922576.post-59345799997278923502016-07-02T15:07:00.000-04:002016-07-02T15:07:13.174-04:00little Donnie TrumpsterLittle Donnie is a strumpet<br>
A blowhard of his own trumpet<br>
Chorusing hate, bigotry, and fear<br>
Spreading lies far and near<br>
With ideas from a racist dumpster<br>
Bottom of the barrel is all he can muster<br>
Endorsed by the KKK<br>
He Insults women, Mexicans and gays<br>
Violates separation of church and state<br>
Trashes people of a certain faith<br>
Bans members of the press<br>
Who question his preparedness<br>
A rich spoiled bully boy<br>
He treats America like a broken toy<br>
That only he knows how to fix<br>
But offers no policies, only tricks.<br>
Refuses to release his tax returns<br>
Is he afraid of what we might learn?<br>
Cares nothing for the needy<br>
Money is his god, little Donnie's greedy.<br>
<p>
If being president were not such a serious matter<br>
We could dismiss him as a mad hatter<br>
But he's made his way to the top of the Republican pack<br>
Too late they realize they can't send their monster back<br>
To his TV reality show<br>
Where he can strut and deal his firing blow<br>
He's made his way wooing right-wingers<br>
Kissing ass of NRA gunslingers<br>
How I wish he were a cartoon<br>
I wish we could send him to the moon<br>
Rocket him into space<br>
To orbit eternally with the other debris cluttering up the place.<br>
But we have to confront him on election day<br>
Tell him he's fired without any pay.<br>
This would-be emperor, as any child knows,<br>
Is naked; he has no clothes.
Mary Battenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443381203090280044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2122070406795922576.post-50814478651824774142016-04-27T13:05:00.000-04:002016-04-27T13:05:39.089-04:00Bully Boy, Puny ManTrump’s sexism has always been blatant but yesterday he outdid himself in expressing his contempt for women. It was Trump, not Hillary, who introduced “the woman card” into the campaign. He did it in the way male sexists have always expressed their attitude of male superiority--women are deficient simply because they are not men. Like the flat-Earthers who believed Earth was the center of the universe and all celestial bodies revolved around it, Trump and other such males, believe they are the center of the social universe, entitled by birthright to measure females against the lie that devalues women. Sexist men are incapable of relating to women as full human beings. Their masculinity is so fragile that it depends on putting down women with insulting jokes and laws that restrict women's mobility and attempt to seize legislative control of women's bodies. Gender equality is not part of such men's world view. Trump has exposed his pitiful, deficient masculinity before, in comments meant to reassure his supporters about the size of his genitals. Thankfully, there are many more enlightened men out there who do not base their masculinity on the size of their penis or on bullying women. Trump's latest anti-woman statement takes even his campaign to a lower level: He said: “If Hillary Clinton were a man, I don’t think she’s get 5 percent of the vote.” Well, Donald, Hillary is not a man, and she's doing just fine on her own terms. The question you've raised, Donald, is what kind of man are you?Mary Battenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443381203090280044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2122070406795922576.post-79325225882587762712016-03-08T10:44:00.000-05:002016-03-08T10:50:35.608-05:00Two New BooksI'm so happy with BABY ORCA, published February 23, 2016. Chris Rallis created beautiful illustrations, and the production team at Grosset & Dunlap/Penguin did a superb job designing the book. I'm grateful to them all, as well as the scientists who share their work on orcas with me. The book is perfect to show and read to a young child. First or second graders may be able to read it by themselves. They'll love the pictures.
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-U7YjBbrtPQc/Vt7y5vt8lCI/AAAAAAAAAF8/TjHyAYBAZlM/s1600/Baby%2BOrca%2Bhi%2Bres.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-U7YjBbrtPQc/Vt7y5vt8lCI/AAAAAAAAAF8/TjHyAYBAZlM/s320/Baby%2BOrca%2Bhi%2Bres.jpg" /></a></div>
<P><P>
On March 1, 2016, an updated edition of ALIENS FROM EARTH, my book about invasive species, was released by Peachtree Publishers. Beverly J. Doyle did her usual beautiful job with the illustrations. Thanks to the great production team at Peachtree. I added two new species to this edition: Asian carp and the brown tree snake. I also have an author's note in this edition. Older kids will enjoy learning about some of the major invasive species.
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-4oMIaGyJUnk/Vt7xyRySEVI/AAAAAAAAAF0/F4Q7Icpvekw/s1600/Aliens%2Bfrom%2BEarth%2BREV%2BED.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-4oMIaGyJUnk/Vt7xyRySEVI/AAAAAAAAAF0/F4Q7Icpvekw/s320/Aliens%2Bfrom%2BEarth%2BREV%2BED.jpg" /></a></div>Mary Battenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443381203090280044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2122070406795922576.post-89049812189909941582015-09-20T14:30:00.000-04:002015-09-20T14:33:12.635-04:00New Album of Ed Bland's MusicMy late husband composer Ed Bland was a prolific composer. He composed music in a variety of genres: Jazz, Blues, Soul, Gospel, Hip Hop, Ragtime, and contemporary classical. He wrote for the recording industry, TV, film, dance, bands, and orchestras. This new album <a href="http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/edbland">URBAN FUNK</a> contains 25 tracks of the last music he composed. The first 12 tracks he conceived of as a dance suite that might be used by modern dancers; the remaining 13 tracks are funky, top-tapping, and highly original. Ed's music synthesizes three musical canons: European, West African drumming, and African-American.
<P>
Writing about his artistic journey on his website, Ed said: "Throughout my professional life, my creative efforts have been haunted by aspects of a cultural warfare that has been simmering under the world’s cultures for several centuries. It is a warfare between a pagan prolongation of the eternal moment found in the traditional religious rites and music of Black West Africans living below the Sahara and conventional Western civilization’s pursuit of postponed rewards. As a consequence, in Western civilization there is never a Now, only a vague future.
<P>
Ironically, the African slave trade, with all its horrors and social disruption, also presented an opportunity for transformation. It was the slaves’ ability to rise to the occasion and create a new culture and persona that enabled them to survive and coexist in America. Traumatized by slave-ship voyages, deprived of languages, Gods, families, communities, and rituals, it became necessary that the slaves modify what remained from their past and invent new cultural forms.
In a range of work encompassing “Urban Funk,” Atari Video Games,“Skunk Juice,” THE CRY OF JAZZ, Urban Classical, the Detroit Symphony, Dizzy Gillespie, Hip Hop, “Urban Counterpoint.” I have composed music that celebrates the pagan prolongation of the eternal Now.
<P>
You can read this entire essay on Ed's website: <a href="http://edblandmusic.com/composerstatement.htm">EdBlandMusic.com</a>
Mary Battenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443381203090280044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2122070406795922576.post-64699258007413885192015-07-14T18:29:00.001-04:002015-08-08T19:36:29.407-04:00Shedding the Skin of Entitlement<style>
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<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>I</b></span>
am a white woman who grew up in a small farming community in southeastern Virginia
during the days of segregation. Even as a child I sensed something was terribly
wrong with our way of life. I felt I was getting stop and go messages, mixed
signals, all the time. My parents and my church taught me the "golden
rule." Do into others as you would have them do unto you. But it was clear
that this golden rule was white rule. No white people I knew wanted to be done
unto as they were doing unto blacks -- forced to wait in line at the post
office until all the whites had been served, forbidden to sit at a table in the
drugstore and enjoy a Coke and Nabs like the white society ladies, barred from
ordering ice cream at the soda fountain, from eating at any local restaurant, from
swimming in the so-called public swimming pool, from going to the same school
my brother and I attended </span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; line-height: 200%; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">–</span><span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"> barred from
doing everything I took for granted. And it wasn</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; line-height: 200%; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">’</span><span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">t
as if these blacks were strangers. They were our neighbors and friends whom
some of us had known all our lives. Although my brother and I could play with the
children of our black neighbors just like regular kids on our farm, we couldn't
acknowledge that friendship in public. We couldn</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; line-height: 200%; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">’</span><span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">t
ride the same school bus and go to school together. We couldn</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; line-height: 200%; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">’</span><span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">t
go to church together and we couldn</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; line-height: 200%; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">’</span><span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">t go to the
movies together. Well, we could, but whites had to buy tickets just inside the
street entrance and sit in the lobby; blacks had to buy tickets in the alley </span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; line-height: 200%; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">–</span><span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">
the same cashier sold the tickets -- she just rotated the stool on which she
sat to face the window where blacks bought their tickets, and they sat up in
the balcony. When I asked my parents why we couldn't sit and eat at the same
table as Bea and James, the black couple who worked for my parents, they told
me white people and colored people -- that was the term white Southerners used
then -- didn't eat together. But we were eating the same food that my mother
cooked for all of us. When I asked why, nobody gave me any answer that made any
sense; they just said that</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; line-height: 200%; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">’</span><span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">s the way
things were. Some people said if God had wanted the races to mix, he wouldn</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; line-height: 200%; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">’</span><span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">t
have made us different colors. Well why? You</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; line-height: 200%; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">’</span><span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">re
not supposed to question God. But why not?</span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: .5in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Then
there was the pledge of allegiance to the flag. You know </span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; line-height: 200%; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">–</span><span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">
the part about </span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; line-height: 200%; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“</span><span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">liberty and justice for all.</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; line-height: 200%; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">”</span><span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">
But there was no liberty and justice for all. Whites had more liberty and
justice than blacks.</span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: .5in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">So
I began to wonder if what my parents and the church and the pledge were
teaching me were all lies because the way we were living did not exemplify
those teachings. The song we sang in Sunday School was particularly bothersome.
</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; line-height: 200%; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“</span><span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Jesus
loves the little children, all the children in the world. Red and yellow, black
and white, all are precious in his sight.</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; line-height: 200%; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">”</span><span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"></span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: .5in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Well,
if we were all precious why did white children have privileges that black
children didn</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; line-height: 200%; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">’</span><span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">t have?</span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: .5in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Why
did my white skin give me privileges that Bea and James and Emma Jane and Aunt
Sara and Uncle Bill and Rachel and Annie Lee and Carrie and Nancy and other
blacks in my community didn</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; line-height: 200%; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">’</span><span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">t have?</span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: .5in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Sometimes I </span><span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">inspected
my face in the mirror. What if I had been born with brown skin? I would still
be me but white people would treat me differently. I just happened to be born
with the skin of privilege. I hadn</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; line-height: 200%; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">’</span><span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">t done
anything to earn that privilege nor had any other white person. The whole
system rested on the pernicious lie of white supremacy that undergirded slavery
and segregation and Jim Crow laws and that still undergirds racism today. White
people don't want to talk about it and don't want to own up to it because it
would expose the darkest side of their heart and soul. But until we have that
painful discussion, we will not take meaningful steps toward healing our country
of its racist wounds.</span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: .5in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">I
listen to white millionaire male politicians in Congress talk about Social
Security and Medicare as entitlements but that</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; line-height: 200%; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">’</span><span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">s
wrong. These are programs into which Americans have paid throughout their
working lives. If these politicians want to confront entitlement, they only
need look in a mirror to see they embody the entitlement of the lie that being
born white carries privilege. You don't have to do anything to earn that
privilege. It</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; line-height: 200%; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">’</span><span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">s your birthright if you have
white skin. This lie of white supremacy is the ultimate entitlement, the one we
should eliminate, not Social Security and Medicare.</span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: .5in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">For
a few days following the murders of nine people by a racist assassin in
Charleston, it seemed that meaningful actions to flush racism from our country
might begin with renewed vigor, that maybe after all the sorrow and grief and
anger and outrage, this time we wouldn't go back to tolerating racism as usual.
White politicians finally seemed to get it that the Confederate flag symbolized
slavery and lynching and raping and segregation and injustice and oppression.
It only took 150 years! The flags started coming down and several major
merchandisers announced they would no longer sell them. These were important
symbolic gestures, but symbolic gestures alone will not end racism. For a
few days, after the Charleston massacre, it seemed Americans were united
against this heinous crime, that instead of starting a race war, the white
supremacist terrorist had triggered a unified surge of blacks, whites,
Hispanics and other minorities in common commitment to heal this nation's open sore.
For a few days that's the way it seemed, but then the fires began </span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; line-height: 200%; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">–</span><span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">
at least eight predominantly African-American churches torched as of this date in
five southern states (Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and
Tennessee) since the Charleston murders. Not to be outdone by funerals for
slain African-Americans, the racists crawled out of their sewers to do the only
thing they seem capable of -- destruction.</span><span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: .5in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span><span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">It
makes me wonder -- how do racists live with themselves? Are they so devoid of
compassion, so bereft of humanity that they cannot imagine how they would feel
if someone came into their church and opened fire, killing their loved ones for
no reason other than the color of their skin? Have their hearts become so
frozen with hate that they would not shed tears or grieve their loss? instead
of showing compassion, these soulless barbarians have exposed their pitiful personhood
by burning black churches. In a former time they would probably have been among
the white people who brought picnics to lynchings as if attending outdoor
theatre. </span><span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span>
</div>
<div class="Body1" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: .5in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span><span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Yes,
white people did that and some whites are still killing black Americans in the
modern equivalent of lynching -- the shooting of black men and boys by white
policemen and this latest atrocity in Charleston. Black Americans have been living
with these atrocities for centuries and too many whites have tried to deny
racism still exists, that it</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; line-height: 200%; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">’</span><span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">s all in the
past. Charleston should demolish that illusion.</span><span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span>
</div>
<div class="Body1" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: .5in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">We
need to fess up. Yes, white people have to own up to racism. No, those of us
alive today didn't create slavery but some of us born in the South have
ancestors who kept slaves. Many of us abhor this legacy of evil and many whites
have given their lives fighting for civil rights and justice for all, but the
historical truth of our racist way of life </span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; line-height: 200%; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">–</span><span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">
the truth our segregated history has conveniently whitewashed -- rests on whites
who kept slaves and went to war to maintain that awful system, and later generations of whites who perpetrated that system with discrimination </span><span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"><span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">against African-Americans</span> in housing and employment opportunities and education. Although slavery
ended with the passage of the 13<sup>th</sup> Amendment on December 6, 1865,
its terrible legacy of the myth of white supremacy continues to rip apart our
national soul and wound our nation more than any foreign threat from Al Qaeda
or ISIS. The young white man who shot nine of our fellow Americans Charleston,
South Carolina, didn't come out of nowhere. He is the product of our racist
culture, nurtured and groomed by the belief in white supremacy that continues
to influence racist attitudes, discrimination, criminalization of black men,
shooting of black men and boys by white policemen, and now this latest mass
murder of African-Americans. We should be grief-stricken and we should shed our
tears and mourn, but we should also take action beyond collective grief. And we
should stop trying to paint those who murder black Americans as mentally
deranged, lone wolves or bad apples. Racists know what they're doing and to
whom they're doing it.</span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: .5in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">In
his eloquent eulogy for Reverend Clementa Pinckney, the slain pastor of Emanuel
African Methodist Episcopal Church, President Obama said it would be a betrayal
of all the reverend stood for </span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; line-height: 200%; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“</span><span style="color: #151515; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Times; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">if we allowed
ourselves to slip into a comfortable silence again once the eulogies have been
delivered, once the TV cameras move on.”</span><span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"> He also
noted a lot of real racial progress has been made. I have experienced that in my own
life, growing up in a segregated southern community that is now so integrated
that interracial families can live here comfortably and safely. This happened
because blacks and whites of good will banded together to transform this
community. For me, it</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; line-height: 200%; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">’</span><span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">s a powerful example that we are
not beyond redemption if we commit to working together with mutual respect. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: .5in; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body1" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: .5in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">It's
not easy to own responsibility for perpetrating a system that has and continues
to hurt so many of our fellow Americans, but we would not still be a racist country if whites
had not tolerated racism, had not elected racist politicians who passed
legislation to obstruct voting rights and who support policies that only
perpetuate racist violence.</span></div>
<div class="Body1" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: .5in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">Perhaps
we could take a page from South Africa</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; line-height: 200%; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">’</span><span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">s
Truth and Reconciliation process, which helped that country move from apartheid
to democracy. We are in a struggle here to maintain and fulfill the promise of democracy. Put yourself in a black American</span><span style="font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; line-height: 200%; mso-ascii-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">’</span><span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">s
shoes. Would you be man enough or woman enough to walk in them? Shed the skin
of entitlement that has so permeated our culture, conveyed in thousands of
insidious ways. Know that we are more similar than we are different. Beneath
the superficial color of our skin, we carry DNA that connects every human being
on Earth today to people that appeared in Africa some 200,000 years ago.
Scientists tell us that race is meaningless biologically, that we all belong to
the one human species on our planet, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Homo
sapiens</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sapiens means wise. May we
strive to live up to our species name.</span><span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
Mary Battenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443381203090280044noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2122070406795922576.post-71401460084546284142015-04-20T17:46:00.000-04:002015-04-20T17:46:43.127-04:00Writing is Good for the Body and the SoulPeople write for all kinds of reasons: to create an imaginary world; make a statement; escape. Some people even write for their health. Writing in <a href="http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/19/writing-your-way-to-happiness/">The New York Times Science section</a> (January 19, 2015), wellness blogger Tara Parker-Pope says: "Studies have shown that writing about oneself and personal experiences can improve mood disorders, help reduce symptoms among cancer patients, improve a person's health after a heart attack, reduce doctor visits and even boost memory.<br />
<br />
"Now researchers are studying whether the power of writing--and then rewriting--your personal story can lead to behavioral changes and improve happiness."<br />
<br />
She quotes Timothy D. Wilson, a University of Virginia psychology professor and lead author of a Duke study of the effects of personal story on struggling college freshmen. “These writing interventions can really nudge people from a self-defeating way of thinking into a more optimistic cycle that reinforces itself,” he said <br /><br />Dr. Wilson, whose book “Redirect: Changing the Stories We Live By,” was released in paperback in January 2015, believes that while writing doesn’t solve every problem, it can definitely help people cope. “Writing forces people to reconstrue whatever is troubling them and find new meaning in it,” he said.<br />
<br />
<br /><br />Mary Battenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443381203090280044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2122070406795922576.post-37060233077685345652014-10-12T14:34:00.001-04:002014-12-01T11:31:42.437-05:00Endangered in AmericaNo, this is not about the greater sage grouse, the mountain yellow-legged frog, or any other endangered nonhuman species. It’s about members of our own species. Black men -- particularly young black men -- are endangered in America. They are criminalized, incarcerated disproportionately and, in far too many incidents, killed by police – the very people charged with protecting us. All of us. <P>
In city after city, young black men are routinely stopped by police for “walking while black,” sometimes on the street where they’ve lived for years. Some black men have even been stopped or arrested by police while trying to enter their own homes, most notably prominent Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2009.<P>
Some years ago in Los Angeles, a friend was stopped on a street outside his apartment and held at gunpoint in a squad car for two hours. The police were looking for a suspect in his 30s; my friend was in his 70s, but he “fit the description!” Black men, from teenagers to adults, have heard this accusation all too often. But the only description they fit is that of being a black man, and too many white Americans think that in itself is associated with criminality. The “crime” is simply being born a black male. <P>
America’s wretched racist legacy has conditioned many whites to fear non-white skin color – the “we” and “them” attitude gone pathological – and some in positions of authority respond by unpacking the national weapon and unloading on black men. <P>
Young black men are 21 times more likely to be shot by police than their white counterparts, says a new report from <a href="http://www.propublica.org/article/deadly-force-in-black-and-white">ProPublica</a>, released October 10, 2014. In an analysis of 1,217 deadly police shootings from 2010 to 2012, ProPublica found that “blacks, age 15 to 19, were killed at a rate of 31.17 per million, while just 1.47 per million white males in that age range died at the hands of police.” Imagine the national outrage if a proportional number of young white men had been shot by police during that same time period. We need a surge of national outrage over the murders of young black male Americans. <P>
August 2014 was a particularly deadly month: Michael Brown, age 18, killed August 9, 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri; Ezell Ford, 25, shot in Los Angeles, California, August 11, 2014; Dante Parker, 36, tased in Victorville, California, August 12, 2014. When he developed trouble breathing, Parker was taken to a hospital where he died. Not even black male children are safe from police shootings. On November 22, 2014, police in Cleveland shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice who was carrying a toy pellet gun.<P>
Criminalization of black men has a long ugly history in America, as Khalil Muhammad, head of the New York Public Library’s Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture and author of Condemnation of Blackness, explained in an interview with <a href="http://billmoyers.com/segment/khalil-muhammad-on-facing-our-racial-past/">Bill Moyers</a> on June 29, 2012. “If we think about the moment immediately following the Civil War, there was the invention of something called ‘the Black Codes’ in every Southern state. And those codes were intended to use the criminal justice system to restrict the freedom and mobility of black people. And if you crossed any line that they prescribed, you could be sold back to your former slave owner, not as a slave, but as a prisoner to work off your fine after an auction where you were resold to the highest bidder. It tells you something about the invention of the criminal justice system as a repressive tool to keep black people in their place,” Muhammad told Moyers. “And it’s still with us. It’s still with us, because ultimately, as a social problem, crime has become like it was in the Jim Crow South, a mechanism to control black people’s movement in cities.”<P>
Slavery ended long ago but the psychological dregs remain with us. President Obama has not been immune to the racism that still infests and sickens our society. Since he campaigned for the presidency, he has been the target of racist epithets and cartoons, vilification, unprecedented disrespect, and attempts to paint him as non-American. Although his election is one of the most triumphant moments in American history, it has not triggered a post-racial era. On the contrary, it unleashed a virulent Obama hatred and blatant resurgence of political racism. One entire political party – the Republican Party – has spent the past six years trying every tactic in its book of dirty tricks to destroy the Obama presidency. Any day, I expect to hear some Republican or Fox News wag blame Obama for bringing the Ebola virus into the U.S. Think it’s far-fetched? It’s not impossible from a party that rejects the findings of science, spurns evidence, celebrates ignorance and has done everything it could to block, obstruct or kill every social policy President Obama has tried to get through Congress. It’s as if Republicans are trying to exact revenge on the American people for electing Barack Obama president.<P>
In campaigns throughout the country, Republican candidates have only one issue: anti-Obama. At the Congressional level, Republicans have supported only two issues: more tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires; and overturning the Affordable Care Act, which is, in fact, providing health insurance to millions of previously uninsured Americans, reducing medical costs and working much better than even its proponents expected. They have put nothing positive on the table. Because of their inaction and right-wing ideology, I have come to a conclusion I don’t like, namely, that the Republican Party, which once had real statespersons like Eisenhower, is now a party of rich, racist old white men who care nothing about the poor, the middle class or minorities. Indeed, a right-leaning Supreme Court majority gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and Republican-governed states have gerrymandered districts to isolate minority voters most likely to vote Democratic and have set up obstacles to discourage minorities, the young and the old from voting. Racism run amuck at the highest levels of government.<P>
You see, Barack Obama was never supposed to be president. He was never supposed to make it through the racist maze. He was never supposed to get out of the “place” that racism designed to confine all African-Americans but particularly African-American men. The fact that he did – that a majority of American voters elected him twice – sent a shockwave through the racists among us. And they are trying to ensure that it never happens again. Of course, they won’t win. America is too diverse, and that diverse population is only increasing. But in the meantime, we have to waste time and precious human resources putting up with those racists who occupy some powerful positions. More importantly, we have to recognize the ugly racist undercurrent of some local and national politics and exercise our votes to get racists out of office. There <i>are</i> more intelligent, more compassionate, more tolerant Americans out there. We know this because they turned out to elect the first African-American president in our nation’s history, and every day they make significant positive contributions at every level of community life, from operating free clinics to raising funds to provide fuel assistance to needy people. There is much unheralded goodness and generosity in this country, and we need to tap into it.<P>
In 2008, President Obama said, "Yes, we can." And we did. Twice. Now we have to do everything we can to rid our culture of racism. Ultimately, our democracy and the social health of our nation depend on it.
Mary Battenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443381203090280044noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2122070406795922576.post-65923363974288067012014-05-25T15:40:00.000-04:002014-05-26T09:42:48.325-04:00Why I Write Nature/Science Books
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-H3EXIuT5Rxw/U4JHDYhOCBI/AAAAAAAAACs/OqI7FYg4gOo/s1600/earth3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-H3EXIuT5Rxw/U4JHDYhOCBI/AAAAAAAAACs/OqI7FYg4gOo/s320/earth3.jpg" /></a></div>
<b>P</b>eople ask me why I write nonfiction – nature/science books in particular. I didn’t plan it that way but after some 30 years making my living as a science writer of books, magazine articles and television shows, I figure I must not be too bad at it. I knew I wanted to be a writer from around age 8. I loved reading more than anything in the world – fairy tales, Nancy Drew mysteries, Hardy Boy mysteries, and Book-of-the-Month-Club novels that an adult cousin passed on to me after she finished reading them. I thought I would write fiction, but life takes many unexpected twists and turns. The adventure of life is to follow them and see where they lead.
<p>
The first twist for me was an opportunity to write a book about scientific discoveries that were made by chance or error. I had to work really hard to write that book because I had no background in science. I was a literature major with a minor in creative writing. The year I worked on that book was grueling. I had a full-time job but spent weekends in the New York Public Library doing research for the book. I did get a book, Discovery By Chance, written, and after it was published, other science writing jobs on television documentaries came my way. To write one of those films, which was about tropical rainforests, I traveled to the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute’s field station on Barro Colorado Island, Panama, to do research. Being in the rainforest and meeting a bunch of field biologists hooked me on science, especially evolutionary biology, the science that deals with life on Earth, who we are, and how we evolved.
<P>
I don’t know anything more fascinating than the fact that life evolved on this fortunate planet, and that of all the directions life could have taken, creatures like us evolved. Chance figured in our evolution as well. We wouldn’t be here had it not been for a cataclysmic accident that wiped out the dinosaurs. Some 65 million years ago, an enormous asteroid (6 miles across) hit the Earth, sending up dense dust clouds that blocked the sun’s rays and darkened the skies. Without sunlight, plants couldn’t carry out photosynthesis and manufacture food that is the base of all food chains. Without their plant food, the vegetarian dinosaurs and many other species died of starvation along with the carnivorous beasts like T. Rex that fed on them. Without the sun’s warmth, the Earth also experienced cold winter conditions. Scientists think the fallout from this asteroid killed up to 70 percent of all plants and animals on Earth at that time – a mass extinction.
<P>
It was a fortunate extinction for us, because living in the shadow of the gigantic beasts was a small shrew-like insect-eating mammal that may be the ancestor of modern placental mammals. A specimen 160 million years old has been found. Over time, following the extinction of the dinosaurs, numerous mammals evolved, including primates and the great apes that are our ancestors.
<P>
I find it exciting to learn what we share in common with our closest primate relatives – the chimpanzees – and how we differ. Our modern human species, Homo sapiens, first appeared in Africa about 200,000 years ago -- only a flicker of evolutionary time. DNA analysis shows that all of us who are alive today are descended from those early humans who lived in Africa. At the deepest level of our cells, our genetic blueprint, we are all African. What is more profound or exciting than that?
<P>
I write about nature and science because they form our knowledge base, provide evidence for what we know, and point toward solutions if our leaders are wise enough to embrace evidence. Sadly, today too many people in positions of power deny science and embrace superstition. I write science because I cherish life and hope in some small way to contribute to the education needed so desperately to protect our planet and save humanity from its self-destructive ways. Think of this: Dinosaurs ruled the Earth some 135 million years; our species hasn’t been around even a quarter of a million years. We are babies, and some of our grown-ups act like toddlers having tantrums. At the current rate of willful destruction of the planet’s resources, we won’t need an asteroid to wipe us out. We’re doing it to ourselves.
<P>
Is there hope? I like to think so. We’re a resilient, hardy species with huge brainpower. If we use our intelligence, creativity, compassion and ability to cooperate with each other and solve problems, we could protect our home planet and improve the quality of life for everyone. But it's a big IF.
Mary Battenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443381203090280044noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2122070406795922576.post-4998670690963760982014-05-17T17:38:00.001-04:002014-05-17T17:45:12.286-04:00Looking Back and Moving Forward
<b>T</b>oday, May 17th, is the 60th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. I was a junior in an all-white Virginia high school (there were no racially integrated schools in the South at this time) when the decision was announced. In my naivete, I thought there should be a celebration.
<P>
But there was no celebration. Instead Virginia politicians turned to fear-mongering against “mongrelization” and mounted a policy known as “massive resistance” to implementing the court’s decision. Using every political tactic at their disposal, including closing schools to prevent desegregation, Virginia’s politicians succeeded in delaying school integration until the late 1960s. One entire county, Prince Edward County, closed its public schools for five years rather than integrate. Here and in other areas of the state, private academies for white children sprang up but black children sometimes had no education at all. It was an ugly time in our history. Looking back now, I wonder how grown people could have acted so hatefully against children and against people they had known all their lives.
<P>
Even when I was a child, segregation never made sense to me. It went against everything my parents, my school, and my church taught me: love your neighbor as yourself, all men are created equal, respect everyone, liberty and justice for all. An old Sunday school song depicted a world quite different from the one in which I was living: “Jesus loves the little children, all the children in the world. Red and yellow, black and white, all are precious in his sight.” I felt I was getting mixed signals from these institutions and my community. When I asked why, nobody seemed to be able to give me an answer that made any sense. I felt I was getting simultaneous stop and go signals about how life should be lived.
<P>
Growing up on a farm, my brother and I played with the children of our black neighbors. We were friends. It was okay to play together in our yard, but we couldn’t express that friendship in public. We couldn’t go to school together; we couldn’t go to church together; we couldn’t go to the movies together.
<P>
The cultural mantra was “separate but equal,” but there was no equality in separation. I remember the “White Only” and “Colored Only” signs next to water fountains and on waiting room doors; the “White Only” and “Colored Only” sections of the local movie theater. Blacks weren’t allowed to sit at tables in the local drugstore/soda shop. Even the cemeteries were segregated. Did this mean heaven and hell were segregated?
I felt that segregation made victims of both blacks and whites, that it limited freedom for all of us, though I knew I wasn’t humiliated and discriminated against as black people were. By the luck of the genetic draw, I was born white, but I would be no less me if I were black. Skin color was just another feature like eye or hair color. But segregation exploited skin color as an inborn badge of superiority or inferiority. Segregation said being black diminished a person's humanity, relegated a person to second-class status. But whites had done nothing to deserve their superior status. It didn't make any sense.
<P>
I didn’t understand how anybody calling themselves Christian could embrace segregation. Throughout my teenage years, I argued with my father, who was a devout Christian, on this point. Neither he nor my mother were racists. Like many other decent, well-meaning white southerners, they were born into the system of racial segregation, but they harbored no hatred of blacks. Indeed, there were some genuinely loving friendships between blacks and whites, especially between black and white women. But they were emotionally shackled by a system that required holding back feelings and avoiding openly embracing each other’s humanity. So there was intimacy and denial of intimacy – a system of wounded love. Always you had to be aware of how far you could go. The social taboo – the line that must never be crossed, on fear of death for black men – was interracial mixing – the great sexual bugaboo. Until 1967 when the Supreme Court struck down Virginia’s law against interracial marriage as unconstitutional, mixed marriage was a felony in the state of Virginia and other southern states.
<P>
We’ve come a long way since 1954. Interracial marriage is no longer taboo, we have an interracial president who was raised by a single white mother and his white grandparents, and schools throughout the country are racially integrated though still segregated in many areas because of housing patterns. But we’re not in a post-racial society yet. Blacks still experience discrimination in job opportunities, housing, educational opportunity, access to medical treatment, and administration of justice. Black male children are especially at risk of racial hatred, such as the wanton murder of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, whose murderer was acquitted. Black male students in grades K-12 are nearly two-and-a-half times more likely to be suspended from school than white students. Young black men are stigmatized as criminals or potential criminals. According to the Center for American Progress, people of color are “ disproportionately incarcerated, policed, and sentenced to death at significantly higher rates than their white counterparts.”
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So segregation is no longer legal but America still suffers from racism. Indeed, since President Obama’s election, racism seems to have surged particularly in the Republican Party. Legislation to hinder and limit the voting rights of African-Americans and other non-white minorities has been passed in various Republican-led states. Jim Crow has resurfaced under the guise of preventing so-called voter fraud. The journey to get beyond racial segregation that began 60 years ago with the Brown v. Board of Education decision hasn’t been completed yet. But I choose to believe we can overcome racism if enough people of good will speak out and remain vigilant. In some small pockets of the country, including many in the South, it has already happened quietly and peacefully.
Mary Battenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15443381203090280044noreply@blogger.com1