lobeliatoadfoot

This isn’t the first time I’ve experienced harassment on Hubpages. The first time, a perpetual five-year-old bully who according to Hubpages was “unverified” and went by the name “john” posted the comment, “fuck you,” at the end of one of my Hubs, a completely apolitical excerpt from my London journal. I go by the name of Lobelia Toadfoot on Hubpages and have a photo of me riding the yak, so creeps know that I’m female and strangely believe that means they’re entitled to attack me. Of course, I noticed that back when I was four years old: that misogynists consider the fact that I’m female to be enough reason to attack me.

Hubpages.com sends me an e-mail every time someone posts a comment on one of my Hubpages. Ever since the above incident, I’ve made a point of promptly checking to make sure it isn’t harassment. I can go to the comment and either click on “approve” or on “delete,” and I can also click on “spam” and “delete permanently.” I have done the latter with this second douchebag, and I’ve unfortunately discovered that clicking “spam” doesn’t prevent the douchebag from continuing to post b.s. I searched “Help” on Hubpages, hoping that I could find a way to report the creep’s misuse of the website, but no luck. I ought to contact Hubpages in order to report the douchebag.

All three of the comments have been on my Hubpage “The Oldest Buddhist Temple in Tibet,” in which I describe being at a noodle café and discovering yak meat on my noodles. In this journal excerpt, I mention being vegetarian. That’s it--I don’t go off on people who aren’t vegetarians, I don’t harass people who aren’t vegetarians, all I do is identify as a vegetarian. For this bully, that was an excuse to attack me.

The first comment was: “You missed out when you didn’t eat the yak meat.” I deleted it without reporting it as spam. The creep returned to the same Hubpage within days and wrote, “You should eat a yak burger. Especially with beer, then it’ll taste good. Did you have altitude sickness? I’ve seen lots of foreigners go down.” I deleted it and clicked on “report spam.” Then just now I read the third comment: “Yak meat = good food.” Before I even read it, I had already decided to remove the essay from Hubpages all together, and I did just that, after selecting “delete” and “spam.”

It is obvious that the perpetual five-year-old is trying to provoke me, trying to get me to retaliate, just like Aunt Heinrich Himmler deliberately trying to pick a fight with me (countless times) and gloating on the extremely rare occasion that I showed anger in reaction to her verbal abuse. Usually I remained deadpan, which infuriated the harpy. Intellectually I am aware that the insane and inappropriate behavior of perpetual five-year-old bullies is their problem, not mine, but emotionally it’s still disturbing. I know that people who feel good about themselves are not bullies, so when this creep harasses me, it’s because he feels like a big stinking pile of excrement, and no wonder.

When reading each of these comments, I have felt my heartbeat pounding faster than normal and my hands shaking. I’m not sure, but I think this is called a panic attack. It’s a feeling I’ve gotten when reading vicious e-mails or while someone (whether or not they’re a relative) is verbally attacking me. I know I’ve been labeled “hypersensitive” and “prickly” but the truth is, despite what this toxic society tells us, being sensitive is a good, healthy thing. I’m still feeling nervous, and this time I felt panicky just reading the e-mail from Hubpages.

The creep has a Hubpages account, under the username tksensei. I checked his homepage, and sure enough he’s male; even though the creep has the emotional maturity of a five-year-old bully, he’s married, but of course I’ve met many humans who look like adults and act like five-year-olds. You could say that the joke is on smug and self-righteous anti-vegetarians: what they consistently prove is that they’re closed-minded, smug, willfully ignorant, malicious, and incredibly immature.

I just took several deep breaths and feel a little better. This is one of countless situations in which I am feeling hurt and panicky because I am getting the opposite of respect and acceptance.

When I was a teenager, I liked seeing "It's a Wonderful Life" every year.

Several.

1) As an undergraduate, all in one term a misogynistic barbarian harassed me every day; I took a Holocaust Literature class; and I took an essay writing class...and I woke up and went from being a clueless liberal feminist to being a radical feminist, one who is acutely aware that we need a major paradigm shift.

2) The bombs started falling on Iraq, and I decided that I needed to learn more about nonviolence and become more conscientious about being a pacifist. Since looking up nonviolence on a library database tends to bring up books on engaged Buddhism, this led to my become Buddhist (even though not all Buddhists are wonderful).

3) My two most deranged, immature, and vicious aunts ganged up on me and verbally abused me to such an outrageous and insane extreme, and all because unlike them I'm not a fascist, militaristic, war-mongering white male supremacists, that I finally snapped out of being in denial about how I feel about my mother's side of the family. Thus I became much more proactive about seeking truth and changing for the better. Ever since then, I have analyzed my mother's bizarre side of the family and learned a great deal about them, things they wouldn't want me to know or figure out. This clarity has helped me on my path.

Here is an excerpt from a petition on Care2.com:

"For years, America's health insurance companies have treated being a woman as a pre-existing condition. Women pay 30 - 40 percent more than men for the same health insurance policies. Women are subject to denial of coverage from pregnancy, c-sections, and even domestic violence.

We deserve to be protected from practices like "gender rating" and "pre-existing conditions" that unfairly discriminate against women."

Toto, I thought we weren't in the Middle Ages anymore. Mind-boggling. Absolutely mind-boggling.

On top of that, a douchebag senator dismissively has no objections to charging women more for the same health care as men, making the completely insane and inexplicable metaphor of, "We charge smokers differently than we charge nonsmokers." WTF???!!

It's mind-boggling especially when you think--well, for one thing, it's not 1850 according to my calendar, but that's not what I was going to write. It's mind-boggling when you consider that women are paid less than men, and on top of that we're charged more for insurance. This is clearly a case of forcing women into poverty in an attempt to force us to be financially dependent on men rather than independent. It's all about control, keeping women oppressed, just as taking away women's right to reproductive health care (as in birth control and abortion) is all about taking away women's indepedence, since if women don't have control over our own bodies, we don't have control over our own lives. Evil, evil, evil, evil.

The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20500


December 11, 2009


Dear President Obama,

No matter how frequently short-sighted male authority figures claim that war is sometimes just and moral, the truth is that war is by definition invariably unjust and immoral. War is the ultimate patriarchal evil. As Jane Addams spelled out approximately a hundred years ago, war is barbaric, backward, obsolete, and devoid of any valid place in a modern world. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi said, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” His grandson, Arun Gandhi, recently said at a peace conference, “Peace is not the absence of war. Peace is not the absence of violence. Peace is when we create a harmony of love and respect for all today.”

The only evils in the world are war, imperialism, occupation, patriarchy, violence, bigotry, willful ignorance, and greed. These are not beings that can be murdered with guns or bombs. We cannot do away with evil by practicing it, but rather by nonviolently striving to do away with it. Globally we need education reform: an entirely secular educational system that teaches compassion, nonviolence, and communication skills. This needs to begin in kindergarten and continue through college. Just because we grew up constantly bombarded with a militaristic and power-tripping white male perspective, doesn’t mean we must continue to dwell in such a toxic, broken world.

Foreign policy requires diplomacy, dialogue, and sanity, and plenty of people can be employed at diplomacy, dialogue, and nonviolent action rather than with a system of institutionalized murder. Two hundred years ago, Benjamin Banneker suggested the federal government create a Department of Peace. Clearly we are behind the times. Dennis Kucinich is, so far as I know, the only contemporary American politician who has the sense to agree with Benjamin Banneker, so I suggest you listen to him.

During the last presidential administration, it became glaringly apparent that the United States is the bully on the world playground, hardly a laudable role. Obviously no supporter of the Taliban, the president of the nonviolent organization Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) has pointed out that Afghanistan needs to solve its own problems, not be occupied by foreigners. The traumatized country has a long history of bullies invading and occupying and warring on their land, and it’s past time to stop perpetuating this nonsense. The equally unnecessary war and occupation in Iraq set Iraqi women’s rights back at least fifty years, has a striking resemblance to the Vietnam War, and has no reason whatsoever to continue.

Instead of wasting hundreds of billions of dollars on the war racket, the federal government needs to use its wealth toward ending war and poverty. According to the film The End of Poverty?, countries have become poor due to colonialism and occupation. The federal government needs to take a minimum of eighty million dollars from the military budget and use it to end global poverty. The federal government needs to take some more money out of the military budget and use it to create effective schools that teach compassion, nonviolence, and communication skills and put as much emphasis on these subjects as schools put on reading, writing, and math. Martin Luther King, Jr., said, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of spiritual uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

Urging other countries to do away with their nuclear weapons and build no more is a good thing, but the United States also needs to have absolutely no nuclear weapons whatsoever. The entire world needs to be completely devoid of nuclear weapons, the most insane manifestation of patriarchy.

Those who support and perpetuate war disregard the very basic principle of interconnectedness. To quote Virginia Woolf: “As I am a woman, I have no country. As I am a woman, I want no country. As I am a woman, my country is the world.” We are all members of this planet and we all have the same needs and emotions. Growing up in a society in which we are taught to value and get in touch with our emotions and with the needs that trigger them is a very crucial part of sociological evolution. Institutionalized murder, a.k.a. war, has no place in it, or in a just or moral world.

Pessimism accomplishes nothing, and the only thing permanent is impermanence. War has only existed for approximately six thousand years. Even if it takes a hundred or two hundred more years, we shall reach an age that is devoid of war. Then we will have finally become civilized.

Cordially,



Susan E. Wiget

 
Here are some books that I highly recommend:

Adams, Judith Porter. Peacework: Oral Histories of Women Peace Activists. Twayne Publishers, Boston, MA: 1991.

Addams, Jane. Editor, Marilyn Fischer. Jane Addams's Essays and Speeches on Peace. Thoemmes Press, 2006.

Alonso, Harriet Hyman. Peace as a Woman’s Issue: a History of the U.S. Movement for World Peace and Women’s Rights. Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, NY: 1993.

Benjamin, Medea, and Jodie Evans, editors. Stop the Next War Now: Effective Responses to Violence and Terrorism. Inner Ocean Publishing, Inc, Makawao, HI: 2005.

Boulding, Elise. Cultures of Peace: the Hidden Side of History. Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, NY: 2000.

Chopra, Deepak. Peace is the Way: Bringing War and Violence to an End. Harmony Books, NY: 2005.

Cortwright, David. Gandhi and Beyond: Nonviolence for an Age of Terrorism. Paradigm, Boulder, CO: 2006.

Diamond, Louise. The Courage for Peace: Daring to Create Harmony in Ourselves and the World. Conari Press, Berkeley, CA: 2004.

Eisler, Riane. The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future. HarperSanFrancisco: 1988.

Eisler, Riane, and Ron Miller. Educating for a Culture of Peace. Heinemann, 2004.

Erikson, Erik H. Gandhi’s Truth: on the Origins of Militant Nonviolence. W. W. Norton & Company, NY: 1969.

Gandhi, Mohandas K. Autobiography: the Story of My Experiments with Truth. Dover Publications, Inc., NY: 1983.

Griffin, Susan. A Chorus of Stones: the Private Life of War. Anchor Books, NY: 1992.

Gyatso, Tenzen (the Dalai Lama). An Open Heart: Practicing Compassion in Everyday Life. Hodder & Stoughton, London, England, 2001.

Hanh, Thich Nhat. Creating True Peace: Ending Violence in Yourself, Your Family, Your Community, and the World. Free Press, NY: 2003.

Hooks, bell. Killing Rage: Ending Racism. Henry Holt and Company, NY: 1995.

Hopkins, Jeffrey, editor. The Art of Peace: Nobel Peace Laureates Discuss Human Rights, Conflict and Reconciliation. Snow Lion Publications, Ithaca, NY: 2000.

Hutchinson, Francis P., F. Hutchinson, and Frank Hutchinson. Educating Beyond Violent Futures. Routledge, NY: 1996.

Iram, Yaacov, Hillel Wahrman, Zehavit Gross, editors. Educating Toward a Culture of Peace.
Information Age Publishing, Inc., 2006.

Jack, Homer A. The Gandhi Reader: a Sourcebook of His Life and Writings. Grove Press, NY: 1956.

Juergensmeyer, Mark. Gandi’s Way: a Handbook of Conflict Resolution. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA: 2002.

King, Mary Elizabeth. A Quiet Revolution: the First Palestinian Intifada and Nonviolent Resistance. Nation Books, NY: 2007.

Kurlansky, Mark. Nonviolence: the History of a Dangerous Idea. Modern Library, NY: 2006.

McAllister, Pam, ed. Reweaving the Web of Life: Feminism and Nonviolence. New Society Publishers, Philadelphia, PA: 1982.

Meltzer, Milton. Ain’t Gonna Study War No More: the Story of America’s Peace Seekers. Random House, NY: 2002.

Piburn, Sidney, compiled and edited. A Policy of Kindness: an Anthology of Writings by and About the Dalai Lama. Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, Delhi, India: 2002.

Rosenberg, Marshall. Nonviolence: a Language of Life. PuddleDancer Press, Encinitas, CA: 2003.

Roy, Arundhati. An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire. South End Press, Cambridge, MA: 2004.

--War Talk. South End Press, Cambridge: 2003.

Stafford, William. Edited and with introduction by Kim Stafford. Every War Has Two Losers. Milkweed Editions, Minneapolis, MN: 2003.

Walker, Alice. We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness. The New Press, NY: 2006.

Woolf, Virginia. Three Guineas. Harcourt, Inc., NY: 1966.

The End of Poverty?

It's the most recent film I've seen, so it's fresh in my mind, although I also highly recommend Iron-Jawed Angels.

I received my bachelor's degree in 1994 and didn't know anything about the Internet. I just finally started grad school this fall, and we use computers all the time, not just for word processing. We use the Internet a great deal, for e-mail communication and for research. It's amazing how many online journals and e-newsletters are available. Compared to other students, I'm feeling behind, primarily because I'm completely unfamiliar with programs that make pictures, such as Photoshop and InDesign, and I have decided to take the class on Software (although not during Winter term).

I also registered online for classes, something I would never have thought of back in the early nineties. For next term, I even figured out how to look up my class status, to make sure I'm actually in (last term I found out the hard way that my Intro to Book Publishing class was full and I had been kicked out).

I just e-mailed my representative about voting No on the Nelson Amendment, which would prevent health care insurance from including abortion.

Even with legal abortion, it is easier for wealthy white women to get proper reproductive health care (including abortions) than for women who live in poverty. Ever since abortion became legal, power-tripping white male supremacists have been getting in the way of women's reproductive rights because if women have control over our own bodies, we have control over our own lives. Thus abortion rights and abortion coverage are a threat to the patriarchal status quo, and the power-trippers do indeed feel threatened.

Last night I saw the intense documentary The End of Poverty? at Living Room Theatres.

We all need to call Obama or hand write him a letter demanding that a minimum of eighty million dollars is taken out of the federal government’s military budget and used to end world poverty.

This film is about global interconnectedness. It points out that imperialism has resulted in poverty in colonized countries. I have seen a connection between the two in the past, but this film clarifies it.

Publisher's Weekly has a little article about a writer who's politics are controversial. I figured it meant that Stupid White Male Trapped in a Woman's Body, Sarah Palin, but no, oddly, it means Amy Goodman, the awesome journalist I recently saw onstage. The article emphasizes that she represents "leftist" politics yet somehow refrains from mentioning that she in fact is a Truth Seeker and represents Truth. You'd think after eight years of the Bush nightmare that the general public would be more open to Truth, but that clearly is not the case.

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6709688.html?nid=2286&rid=#CustomerId&source=title

Publisher's Weekly recently had a top ten list of so-called "Best Books" that included only male authors, and their top 100 list only included 29 female authors total, so you know how progressive this publication is. Unfortunately, it's the main journal of the publishing industry, so I'm reading it online daily anyway.

Given that Publishers Weekly gobbles up patriarchy so unquestioningly with their top ten list, I shouldn't be surprised that it's too conservative to admit that Amy Goodman is on the side of Truth. That is, their judges have been conditioned by this toxic culture to see the world entirely from a white male perspective and to be dismissive toward women writers and female perspectives. That's another example of smugly avoiding Truth.

The Blackwell list, from Victoria Gallagher, “Blackwell names top 10 titles of the decade,” November 25, 2009, http://www.thebookseller.com/news/104192-blackwell-names-top-10-titles-of-the-decade.html.rss (accessed 12/1/09):

2000 - The Tipping Point - Malcolm Gladwell (Abacus)
2001 – Atonement - Ian McEwan (Vintage)
2002 – Life of Pi - Yann Martel (Canongate)
2003 – Music of the Primes - Marcus du Sautoy (Fourth Estate)
2004 – Watching the English - Kate Fox (Hodder & Stoughton)
2005 – The Secret Life of Trees - Colin Tudge (Penguin)
2006 – The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins (Bantam)
2007 – The Uncommon Reader - Alan Bennett (Faber)
2008 – The White Tiger - Aravind Adiga (Atlantic)
2009 – 2666 - Roberto Bolano (Picador)


My response:

Oh, what a surprise: only one woman is on the entire list. Perhaps I should be impressed, since that's one more than Publishers Weekly's top ten list. In both cases, the judges are perpetuating the patriarchy they grew up with and have internalized. Instead, they should wake up and realize that discriminating against women authors, female protagonists, and female perspectives is wrong and it's time they stop seeing the world entirely from a male perspective. Thus the cycle continues: male authors get the recognition and therefore get their books sold, while female authors are ignored. This is really getting old.

I’m in grad school and, in reaction to Publishers Weekly’s top ten list, I wrote a term paper about discrimination against women writers and female protagonists. I’m kind of tempted to add a comment about this list, though of course this discrimination is the norm.

The following link is to an essay about gender discrimination in creative writing workshops, covering elementary, high school, and college courses. I realize this document dates back to 1999, but things haven't changed so much in the past ten years. Earlier this month, Publishers Weekly proved to be extremely dismissive toward women writers and books from a female perspective, when their top ten list included only male writers and their top 100 list included only 29 female writers. I'm glad there was a great deal of public outcry, but Publishers Weekly didn't admit that they're perpetuating patriarchy and, as a highly influential trade magazine, they are perpetuating discrimination against women writers, women protagonists, and the entire female experience.

http://www.womenwriters.net/editorials/Weiser1.htm

A book on how to declutter. Or how about a Buddhist book on detachment, on not wanting so much material stuff. How about the book "Radical Simplicity."

It's ironic that the nation has been working on "health care reform" when a part of this so-called reform consists of attempting to prevent women's reproductive health from coverage. Douchebaggery galore.

Women who don't have control over their bodies don't have control over their lives, which is just what the shrieking hysterical misogynists who attempt to do away with reproductive health rights want. We need health care reform, not health care deform.

A novel by Ariel Gore

The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show is about Frankka, a lapsed Catholic with a rather peculiar psychic ability: while fasting, she can concentrate on her wrists and make them bleed. For seven years she lives on the road with a performance troupe that includes a drag queen who levitates while dressed like a Catholic nun, a fortune teller and former battered wife with a small child, a fire-breather, and a bearded woman. They rarely stay in the same town or city for a week, and satirizing the Christian religion means they sometimes encounter hostility from fundamentalists (including the “God Hates Fags” picketers whom I frequently saw in Kansas). Meanwhile, Frankka has very realistic and moving flashbacks to psychological traumas from her childhood and youth.

Normally I avoid books that are from a Xian perspective, after dwelling in the Midwest for most of my life and experiencing a great deal of harassment from smug, self-righteous, phallocratic, Goddess-rejecting monotheists. If their religion were so superior, they wouldn’t attack people who believe in thinking and know how; and if they practiced genuine spirituality, they wouldn’t attack people who believe in thinking and know how.

However, I decided to read The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show because Ariel Gore impressed me at a couple of author readings. To my relief, this book did not handle Xianity in a way that made me want to hurl chunks: instead, the narrator is very critical of the patriarchy in organized Catholicism and aware that goddesses such as Brigit were taken and turned into saints. The book goes on to show that even Christianity--and dare I saw Catholicism--can involve genuine spirituality, when it is in the mystical tradition rather than the way it is practiced as an organized religion. Frankka has a hobby of writing her own versions of the lives of saints, each a mystical individual. If only they were typical.

Now shrieking hysterical Catholic bishops are blatantly flaunting their misogyny by doing all they can to destroy what progress we've made in the rights of women's reproductive health. Via Planned Parenthood's website, I just sent the following letter (with some changes on my part) to my representatives:

I am writing to urge you to stand up for women in the coming debate over health care reform legislation. The current House bill ensures access to reproductive health care -- and those protections must remain. As the full House moves to consider the health care reform bill, I strongly urge you to pass this crucial bill intact, and reject malicious efforts to remove reproductive care from health care reform. Women should not lose benefits they currently have after health care reform, just because of a large number of blatantly misogynist power-tripping white males (not to mention quite a few power-tripping white males trapped in women's bodies). They should be better, not worse off. Reducing women's reproductive health care is the opposite of reform--it's deform.

Any efforts that keep health care out of reach for low-income families, or that impose additional costs or barriers for women, should be voted down. Furthermore, any efforts that weaken a woman's right to choose -- including those that would keep women from choosing a health care plan or provider that offers the full range of reproductive health services, including abortion -- are fundamentally unacceptable.

Women in our state, and across the country, are counting on you to stand up for them in the coming debate. Please do all you can to protect women's health care and stand up to the bullies who are attempting to do away with what progress we've made.

I haven’t awarded Asshole Awards since I moved away from Topeka, Kansas. But of course no place is perfect.

Yesterday’s Asshole Award goes to the misogynistic pile of excrement with the emotional maturity of a five-year-old bully that harassed me on Hawthorne Boulevard in the middle of the day.

I was walking down Hawthorne after having dropped books off at the public library, when a slimeball just behind me was walking at my pace and quietly burping at every step. My asshole radar went off: I felt very creeped out and eager to get the hell away from this creep. At that stage, I told myself that this wasn’t an attack on me.

Suddenly the slimeball said, “You’re growing whiskers!” Nobody else was around, and I was extremely shocked by this completely insane remark.

In the Midwest, situations like this were an everyday, “normal” occurrence, but since moving to Portland I have gotten more at ease rather than in a constant state of tension, a constant state of being on my guard. I typically have a higher level of safety in Portland, and safety is on the most basic level of Maslo’s list of needs; however, you can’t be in a feminist bookstore or organization 24/7. Instead of having the good sense to just keep quiet and ignore the slimeball, I partially turned to the pile of stinking excrement and said in a cold and disdainful voice, “Excuse me?”

The slimeball abruptly made a sound like a cat shrieking. Completely insane. In hindsight, I should have said, “The fact that you’re a turd with the emotional maturity of a five-year-old bully is nothing to flaunt.” The one thing I did that I think was the right thing to do was right after the psychopath made the cat noise. Powell’s Books on Hawthorne was right there, and I turned and went inside. Instead of continuing to follow me, the pile of stinking excrement said, “Bye,” and did not enter the store, to my vast relief.

This was one of millions of situations in which I was experiencing absolutely no respect or acceptance. I know that no place is perfect, and even in Portland I can’t expect to always be around feminists, pacifists, and vegetarians, but that psychopath’s behavior was completely insane and out of the blue, and it was the first time since moving to Portland that I have wished I had a burqua.

Street harassment was an everyday experience in St. Louis and Topeka, where I could scarcely step outside without such verbal attacks from misogynists, but I have scarcely ever experienced it here in Portland. Since I moved to Portland, a construction worker once whistled at me (I was wearing a skirt for possibly the first time since moving to Portland), and I could swear I heard another construction worker shush him; a couple of stupid boys downtown were talking among themselves, and one of them said, “That’s your girl friend,” sneeringly; and some creep downtown said, “Hello, beautiful,” in what I believe was a sarcastic tone. (Given the wide range of opinions on my looks, I shouldn't assume he was sarcastic, but I depend largely on vibes. I do know that misogynist males, whether insulting or "complementing," believe that my appearance is my most important trait, even my only important trait, a truly insane belief.)

Bookstores and libraries are havens for me, and after I crossed the threshold into Powell’s I stood still for a beat and took a deep breath in and out. I wandered to a display of new books and started reading the back cover copy on one of them, but I had trouble concentrating, because I was so agitated. I have many layers of post-traumatic stress disorder, and countless situations involve bullies treating me with contempt and my having no respect, acceptance, or safety. All such situations are interconnected in terms of the emotions and needs involved, so of course I felt extremely agitated. I picked up another book and had trouble reading the back cover copy of it. Meanwhile, many other shoppers were around me and I wanted to be invisible, to not be around any humans. It didn’t take me long to get to the Buddhist books and start browsing. I moved further into the store, into the mythology section, and I was better able to concentrate and even smiled at a book.

I walked out of the store with six books, and although it’s true that only one of them was a new and regular-priced book, that was an extravagant example of my shopping as therapy, something I did a lot in Kansas but not here in Portland. (I've had to be much more frugal since losing my job.) Extravagant impulse-shopping in bookstores isn’t the purpose of my financial aid! I know that it was in reaction to that traumatic situation and my sense of rejection (even though I’ve told myself hundreds of times that if assholes were to accept me instead of reject me, it would indicate that I’m doing something wrong).

The books I purchased included Spilling Open: the Art of Becoming Yourself; a book on Quanyin called The Bodhisattva of Compassion; a meditation book by Sylvia Boorstein called Happiness is an Inside Job; a travel-related goddess book called Longing for Darkness: Tara and the Black Madonna; and a book about, among other women, a female storyteller-this is called Mondays on the Dark Night of the Moon: Himalayan Foothill Folktales. Lastly, I saw a display of many copies of Bury Me Standing, a book about Gypsies, discounted to $7.98 and decided to get a copy and let a friend keep the one I lent him, since he’s descended from Gypsies. I reminded myself that I have friends in Portland, that there are people who support me and respect me and who are worthwhile companions. All told, it was a healing selection of books.

I'm not usually around a friend who would make racist or homophobic remarks. Such bigots are not my friends.

Relatives are a different matter. Unfortunately--before I moved to the west coast and thereby cut myself off almost entirely from my mother's toxic side of the family--I had a tendency to say as little as possible around verbally abusive relatives. That--very unfortunately--includes not responding to their outrageous racist and homophobic and patriarchal remarks. I had no sense of safety, but more to the point I knew that anything I said would be an excuse for them to lash out at me...and what little I did say was an excuse for them to lash out at me.

There have been times when I have spoken up in such situations, particularly when I dwelled in St. Louis and was with friends or coworkers. Since moving to Portland, I definitely speak up. Environment has a huge effect on my level of feeling safe.

I recommend not associating with humanoids who look like adults but act like five-year-old bullies.

Since I am sane, I disagree with such an insane policy. As long as the military and war (the ultimate patriarchal evil) exist, there will be no such thing as socioeconomic equality.

We need to stop wasting money on institutionalized murder and use it on healthcare and education. Compassion and nonviolent communication skills need to be an integral part of the educational system, so that this barbarity will no longer continue. If we stop teaching children that their emotions and needs are of no importance, then people will grow up aware of and responsible for their emotions and needs and not attack each other so readily.

Sanity is so underated. It's time we value sanity.

www.worldwithoutarmies.org

The dressy event, “Sweet and Saucy Sixteen,” will take place at the Q Center, on Thursday October 29th, from 6 to 10 pm. It will include readings from various authors, including Ariel Gore, Emcee Sossity, and Hope Hitchcock. The event will include hors d’oeuvres, a disc jockey, and a silent auction. The lounge will include a cash bar and live musical performances by Marisa Anderson and The Charming Man. This event is ASL interpreted. The cost per person is $7. The Q Center is located at 4145 N. Mississippi Ave.

In Other Words Women’s Books and Resources is the only remaining nonprofit feminist bookstore in the United States and is located at 8 B NE Killingsworth St., Portland, OR 97211. It serves as not only a bookstore but also a community center with discussion groups, author readings, concerts and more. For more information: www.inotherwords.org.