Wondering

Jerry Falwell

Hi I've been busy with school holidays and college deadlines. I just had to post this quote fromDreaming of Danzan Rajvaa

OK, last thing about transitions, this time about the “Rev.” Jerry Falwell being called home. Brother Palzang writes in to say that he and others are busy praying for his auspicious human rebirth – as a black lesbian. Amen!

hahahahahah  - v.funny

I wonder if any Roman Catholics are praying for Falwell's early release from Purgatory.

Atheists in the USA are probably very happy.  I watched a You Tube of Christopher Hitchen's summation of Falwell as a pickpocket which was an interesting angle.   The trouble  with that was not the content, so much as the delivery  made in a real heat of anger.  Bust a blood vessel!    Pickpocket or perhaps Ear Tickler to presidents and to ordinary people too.  People love to pay to listen to what they love to hear ... its market economics at work...

But more seriously......

those who do pray.......

pray for the still.....

living Jerry Falwells....

that they get to know the Jesus they ought to know.....

not the One they think they know.....

Amen.

Perhaps Falwell is meeting Jesus right now? Now that would be interesting to witness.  But then when I meet Jesus for the rest of eternity, after I have shed this tent, that might be interesting too.   I feel reluctant to point the finger in a way, I'm not so perfect either.  We are all being perfected by Grace.  And part of this is to say we forgive the Jerry Falwells of this world. Forgiving him releases us from the power of anger that his image or persona or person may hold over us.

Gosh, that got a bit religious didn't it?

Politics, religion and money should all get separate bedrooms; threesomes can be very damaging. 

 

 

Another Temujin

Christina Noble Children's Foundation  has given me a new child to sponsor , T a nine year old boy and youngest in his family.  Although both parents are working very hard, too hard, the conditions they have to live in are very poor - poor by Mongol standards. The NGO will also endeavour to keep in touch with B   T lives in a harsh environment with his parents and siblings but he has a big smile and hope by the bucket load.

I wonder if the  Live Earth  event will draw attention to plight of the poor in Central Asia?

Is Central Asia ignored because of former alliances with the old USSR?  In the past decade the post communist societies have experienced economic melt down.  Cradle to the grave health care and education have all but disappeared. Worsening climate - colder winters, hotter summers and desertification have taken their toll upon the nomadic pastoral life. Circa 2003, hundreds of thousands of head of livestock froze to death.  Livelihoods were lost.  People pour into Ulaan Baatar seeking work which is not there.

In the West we hear nothing about these issues unless individuals deliberately seek out information.  The government struggles to assist it its own people with the help of NGOs.  TB is a particular problem.  The  government also has to tread a difficult balancing act with foreign industrial conglomerates who wish to exploit the country's mineral reserves.  As an emergent democracy there are of course issues relating to represention and full debate.  In the meantime the Mongol Army contributes to world peace by supporting USA initiatives in Iraq.  Mongols are putting their lives at risk for people who don't even know they exist.  The Mongol army is underpinned by National Service.  All males between 18 and 26 years serve a mandatory year in the military- unlike Brits or Americans.

 Mongolia is a country of roughly 3 million people. The West could easily help this country back onto it's feet.  What will it take for us to remember them?  Another Temujin?

Grow Your Own

A new movie on it's way to our screens is Grow Your Own  .  Opening on 15th June with a great British cast it looks at gardening and contemporary society. 

Don't skip the website intro.,  it's beautifully put together.

Global Warming

                                    

Another angle from that which I posted upon in  April's This Lent- This Planet .   George Monbiot looks at the role of censorship upon climate scientists The Real Climate Censorship

I wonder what on Earth is going on?

The climate is changing but can I stop it?   What should I believe?

News

I had news from Mongolia on Friday that left me feeling sad.  My sponsorship child has moved with his father out of reach of the link charity CNCF -   Christina Noble Children's Foundation    B is 17 soon and I hope he is OK.  I've sponsored him since October 2005.   He has gone to live in a mining town about 330kms from UB with his father who has obtained work. Hopefully B is in school but it is possible that he is working in some form of mining.  There seems to a mixture of controlled mining and wild cat prospecting in Mongolia.  I wonder which it is that has attracted B's father?   I'm not likely to find out until Summer when B should visit UB to pick up his savings book.  CNCF will try to maintain contact with B as far as possible.  In the meantime I am going to be allocated a new child for sponsorship.   This is an exciting prospect, but I can't forget B.  I hope he is safe.  God and Blue Heaven go with you B.

mg.timeinc.net/.../2006/0807/mongolia.jpg

   This picture is from a book b
by  Marco Van Duyvendijk called Mongolia available from www.artimo.net

 

click for link to site
                
mg.timeinc.net/.../2006/0807/mongolia.jpg
This is artesian mining for gold by self employed miners, sometimes called Ninja miners, after the green packs they carry on their backs - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

 

Girl Soldiers

Girls in the Armed Services have been very much in the forefront of media attention.  A whole variety of issues have arisen, from the rights or wrongs of selling a story and giving interviews; to whether women should be on the front line; to why recently killed service women get more attention than the men who died alongside them. 

In this post feminist era we are having a discussion about women which is blind to the fact of women's involvement in military action throughout history.

Going back into the mists of history - Bronze Age women warriors are well documented with supporting Central Asian archaeology.  Then there is the woman war leader, Deborah of biblical book, Judges. More recently we have the startling case of  Joan of Arc . Whilst this young girl stands outside the norm of what we would consider appropriate to Medieval Women it is our view of the past that flies in the face of the history and in the face of what many saw as appropriate female behaviour at the time. Throughout the middle ages women led militarily often protecting castles or overseeing rearguard actions in support of their men who were on military campaigns elsewhere.

Only as patriarchy has extended it's control of the roles of women, have we began to question the role of women in war.  We see it as civilised of us to keep women away from front line action.  This is probably a view which extends back into the nineteenth century and is dressed up as chivalry.

These ideas allow us to overlook the role of women on the front line in WWII Russia, both as soldiers and as civilians; the squadrons of  Soviet Women Pilots  some known as Night Witches. All can be conveniently ignored along with the many women partisans in wartime Europe because as a culture we subscribe to the belief that women are never directly involved with war.

Warfare has however always included women as front line civilian fodder -  as well as children, the elderly and the frail.  There  is a sickening hypocrisy, a shadow of Victorian chivalric whimsy, the idea that women should be kept from the horrors of war.  Which women would that be?  Certainly not the women of the enemy; chivalry only extends to one's own women, not your enemy's women. Which then extends in the question about women as the property of men.

And so you manage to keep the little woman away from the Front, for around two centuries, if we consider British history. Is this a legacy of colonialism, where very often the Front was thousands of miles and months of travel away?

About these women thousands of miles away from the Front, were they any less cushioned than the men? Dealing with daily grind of the Home Front; dreading the telegram.  I don't think so somehow. When a women receives the news of the death of her father, husband, lover, brother or son she dies too.

And then there are the women who really are on the Front; the military nurses, the modern day women in all the Armed Services and the local women and girls.

I wonder whether Iraqi and Afghan women consider themselves to be in the front line of a war?

Lent

Anglo Saxon Lent

Lenctentide , the time when days lengthen

Lencten-foesten,  the Lenctentide fast

Clocks forward

Lengthened Days toward

Summer

I am alive again; I am rising.

Copyright 2007 The right of Karen R Springer to identified as the author is asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

Murmurs

EJECTION  SYSTOLIC  MURMUR

Blood floats around my heart
lingering indissolubly
airless

Compressed of all work
my fingers starve
and die

Limbs without ardour frost
seized in the death
stiffness

Thin pulsed blood seeps
away from my white
heart.

copyright 2006
The right of Karen R Springer to be identified as author
of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77
of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

Temptation

View this photo you know  you want to....................

Khadak

A new movie from Mongolia. KHADAK  Nomads, plagues, shaman, secrets and revolution