The White Man's Burden....a conversation

Some goddesses are puzzled by this...like me...okay, this was a phrase I had heard all of my life and kind of glossed over, "The White Man's Burden." I didn't even know where it came from. Then I had a conversation with my immensely intelligent daughter who is majoring in history and discovered it was from a Rudyard Kipling poem, written to defend Eugenics and the Euro-centric beliefs spreading at the time that the "white man" or read "western man" were somehow superior to everyone else in the world and it was our duty through imperialism to guide and shepherd other races to civilization (in our image of Industrialism and Christianity). The poem was written in the era of 1897-99, originally for Queen Victoria's Jubilee, but then replaced and reworked and written to support the U.S. conquest of the Philippine Archipelago from Spain.

I couldn't help injecting a whole load of irony, satire and sarcasm in every word of it when I read it. The plain text of it was just that strange to my modern, indoctrinated, and PC, way of thought. Plus the ignorance of disregarding civilizations that had far outstripped the complexity and sophistication of Victorian England in Ur, Central Africa, Egypt, and Middle and South America in previous centuries just because they weren't "industrialized" or "Christian" necessarily and polluting our planet to the point of unlivability for the rest of the world's inhabitants to thrive seems specious.

Reading this made me draw some very unhappy parallels with some of our extreme politicians over the last 8 years like Michele Bachmann and others who can't seem to keep their race hatred out of their comments about politics. I hate negative campaigns. Discuss the issues. Discuss inflammatory statements or stupid statements or dumb things the person or official has said or done as AN OFFICIAL or that are ILLEGAL. I don't like hate on religion. I don't care about consensual sex. CONSENSUAL being the word. If you are paying an aid, not consensual in my book. You are pandering. But I don't care what color your skin is, or what team you bat for, or how many people you are married to. if you are the President you have my respect. I took an oath and I never rescinded it. Sometimes that kind of worries me when I look at the people running...what ever happened to the Greek Golden Mean in Western thought, and Do Unto Your Neighbor? The Bible sure never said neighbors were all white. The Queen of Sheba certainly wasn't. None of the tribes of Isreal were. JESUS CHRIST wasn't! He was Middle Eastern, Duh! So was Allah. Gee! What happened to harm none? That's a good one to follow.

from a goddess who remains a very puzzled and a determined TRUE moderate on most issues...

Pain full thoughts...

Some goddesses are puzzled by this...like me...

I've had low blood sugar, migraines, colitus, acid reflux, back problems, and high blood pressure since my mid teens. Fibro in my late teens. Chronic fatigue, hyperthyroid, thoracic outlet, and carpal tunnel in both hands in my late twenties. I got pregnant and my migraines went to clusters and then daily clusters. Then they gave me drugs that made me obese. I developed high cholesterol, hypothyroid, high spinal pressure. Now finally diabetes, Hashimoto's thyroiditis, and uveitus.

Now by the luck of the draw the pain isn't upping my blood pressure, it's lowering it.  Which I didn'..t know could happen. So now if I bend over at the wrong time or move too fast I pass out. Orthostatic Hypotention...? WTF?  Sounds fun, huh? Wee.... yes, that's sarcastic. One more weird ass thing to explain to people that doesn't kill me,  or put me in more blinding pain than I've been for the past 17 years, but one more time my body triumphs over my mind.


I watch others who I know are in so much pain, and I try not to make it a contest about pain. Just getting through each day is a miracle, so how can pain become a contest? But when you so constantly feel like you have failed at all life has thrown at you, it's hard not to see it as one more in a long string of things you've failed at...pain tolerance....you just don't measure up there either....no wonder you just can't take any more...

Knowing that I'm going back to biting, grinding, soul numbing pain that never ends, of the sort that if you were an animal and could bite a limb off to it stop you would and that there is no medicine or trick or activity or meditation or THING that I can do or NOT DO in my life to stop it from coming back to me scares the hell out of me. The medication is not as effective as it was...soon it won't be effective at all...again

The pain doctor, and the psychologist she sent me to, think I'm giving up, and that I have a negative outlook. I don't think that's the case, or I would have swallowed a gun long ago. I just don't think either one of them intimately knows pain. Most of the people who try to regulate it I don't think have ever known or lived with much real pain in their lives or they wouldn't really give a rat's ass about the small percentage of people who abuse medication and would have more compassion for those who have to live in the pain. If crawling into a bottle or a bottle of pills would give me back some of my cognitive function or reasoning powers around the pain, I'd do it in a heartbeat. Hell, I'd do it if only to get a teensy break from unrelenting agony occasionally.

But I'm not dying and so I have to live on in unrelenting agony because my government wants to be my mommy and knows what's best for my body...even better than my doctors...and they've known so well what is best so far....

yeah...from the sometimes goddess of sarcasm and pain

More of life intervening among the living...

Some goddesses are puzzled by this...like me...

The eye, something they are calling uveitus is still decreasing my visual field to half. I've been referred into another pain clinic to let them put me through their paces and see if any new treatment stuff pops out. Not holding out much hope, but it's bad enough that I've got to spend some real time and effort to see if they can do anything that will help alleviate some of the pain.

Had some xrays and an MRI done; another pschological evaluation (oh, please, tell me I'm imagining this so you can tranq me and let it stop!), and today another PT evaluation. It sounds like they have a few new techniques I haven't tried yet...we'll give it the old college try and see how it goes, not much it can hurt.

Tomorrow we talk about the needles in the eye. They can't seem to find a cause, and the symptom isn't going away, and since the symptom is almost total blindness in that eye....well they're finally going to do something about it. Yay! and scared at the same time. But I've been missing my sight there since August and I'm starting to worry about more permanent damage. There's already retinal scarring around my pupil...the eye won't dialate very well....it looks like a chewed up flower edge when seen with the optometrist's cameras. (Here it just looks fuzzy and almost blue...no, it doesn't belong to smurfette! She can get her own!)

I'm up because "medicine is gggggooooooddddddd" especially after a day of bending, twisting and being stuck in a tube that roared and was 2 sizes too small for my current well padded and claustraphobic bulk. Yuck! Came out of there shaking. But I sure wasn't gonna hit the panic button and have to nerve myself up to start all over, NO, and HELL NO.

I've still got the sniffly flu and am sleeping when I can, cooking and doing the occassionally housewifely laundry pile when I can't and struggling to ride herd on 2 cats in the form of teenagers who need to be kept on track so they get some of their time for themselves!

The kids had a cool trip, and for those who didn't hear all the details, I'll post more later when I can access their pics. Great experience and mom and dad are so proud! R is hanging in there with his winter/Spring SADS and we all are just trying to hold it together until our budget can recover from the rape by the oil companies this last year.....wouldn't it be neat if the government made the oil companies contribute those usurous 'record profits' to bailing out the nations banking system....gee, or just tax the shit out of companies who bomb the economy and try to tank the country just because they can.

from a puzzled goddess in a funky mood....later....

Scary people...

Some goddesses are puzzled by this...like me...

I'm still fighting that cold, but I looked at some of the blogs I follow, and was extremely disturbed by this:



Since when do people running for office in a country that supposedly believes in the separation of church and state hold a prayer that denigrates one of the largest growing religious segments in the country?

Obviously, now.

I am so scared about what is going on in this country. I've become afraid to raise my voice in protest because I'm not sure my country protects my right to protest anymore. Even writing this scares me. I wish I could be as calm as Deborah Blake in her response to Palin.



from a puzzled goddess who is shaking in her broom closet