Pirate Papa: A Journal of Anarcho-Green D(o).I(t).Y(ourself). Parenting

Elementary School Budget for the 21st Century

2012-01-04T15:14:00.001-08:00

Budget at my daughters' elementary school in Olympia, Washington

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

A Thesis Thing: Free Play and Democratic Education for A Better World

2011-12-23T15:33:00.000-08:00

I won't hassle them too much for misspelling Democratic in their thesis title (I fixed it here)... since the rest of it is pretty good. I'm lucky my kids are enrolled in an alternative public elementary school that has a lot of free-play factors built into their curriculum and really strives to put a child's perspective first in most matters.

Schools today don’t play fair. We’re on a crooked path educationally because of an addictive dependency on academics. Unmistakably our reliance on experts, instruction, and anything curricula related has caused a destructive path to our society and the way in which we relate to each other and the natural world. We’re an “uptight” and “rigid” society that has almost forgotten how to play.

Our traditional school system in archaic, unsustainable, and fails at preparing students as citizens to take utmost responsibility with their education and in facing the critical issues and concerns of our times. Play barely makes the class schedule or curriculum agenda. Little time in schools is devoted towards providing non-structured and uninterrupted activities for kids to freely choose. Conventional schools have the home field advantage on academics and play is usually the first to be ejected, suspended, cut from the budget or other wise broken up into chunks of time on the school bell schedule, we call recess. Recess, a time when youth common freely play, has culturally become marginalized by the high demand of standardized testing, prescribed curricula, methodologies, and surveillance measures sprung forward from bureaucratic policies and demands. In school the pupil is “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is “schooled” to accept service in place of value (Illich, 1972).” In a world of academics there is no balance, imagination, creativity, and our natural pull in childhood to freely play receives a crushing blow. The purpose of these pages is reexamine the value of free play as a trusting way for youth to follow their interests and guide themselves towards taking on more responsibilities.

What is Radical Parenting?

2011-12-14T23:30:00.000-08:00

Came across this article: Extreme Parenting: What Radical Parents Do Better Than You... and it got me to thinking about how I define myself as a radical father, and what's so radical about the way that I parent? So here are some thoughts, enjoy them:

I thought it was a little dumbed down... but I guess that's the point. At least its giving gender-neutral parenting a bit of limelight, even if its getting boxed as 'radical' when its more widespread than most folks would imagine.

To me, radical parenting means parenting for your child with their perspective in mind, with the knowledge and toolbox of an adult at hand to draw lessons from in a shared experiential mutually educational relationship. It means humbling and educating oneself in order to educate and raise a creature capable of changing our world for the better. In order to do this one must invariably challenge the given norms of our day and age, from rampant capitalist consumerism, to coercive schooling, cultural imperialism, and general apathy and ignorance.

Developing the ability to teach yourself these lessons in order to impart them to your child while juggling work and responsibilities and family and life and flying by the seat of your pants is the hard part.

thanks for the pic Microcosm!
I thought it was befitting

I attempt to hold these intentions in my heart and mind while juxtaposing them with the hurdles of generational poverty, corruption, crime, gender bias, domestic violence, and an increasingly authoritarian, militarized society and government in bed with huge corporate conglomerates waging wars on drugs and terror and effectively wiping out the bio-diveristy and general well-being of our planet at a rapid pace. Then I try not to scream, or you primal-screamers can scream at this part, and swallow my pride and fear and forge and forage ahead, into this future, hand in hand with our children.

And here I still have the pipe-dream of raising non-violent, anti-authoritarian little tree-hugging people without an evil bone in their bodies... when the sad truth of the matter is that I should probably ramp up their radical sustainable eco-activist herbal Ewok monkeywrenching training camp time so that they're ready to go out and kick the shit out of capitalism with a smartphone and a laser rifle by age twelve... (you got that Technoccult?)

I better get a move on.

Here's the Radical Parenting Reading List from wiki's infoshop. Check with the folks at Last Word Books, Olympia's awesome radical independent bookstore, they've probably got some of 'em in stock.

Teaching Good Sex

2011-11-30T18:23:00.000-08:00

By LAURIE ABRAHAM

Published: November 16, 2011

“First base, second base, third base, home run,” Al Vernacchio ticked off the classic baseball terms for sex acts. His goal was to prompt the students in Sexuality and Society — an elective for seniors at the private Friends’ Central School on Philadelphia’s affluent Main Line — to examine the assumptions buried in the venerable metaphor. “Give me some more,” urged the fast-talking 47-year-old, who teaches 9th- and 12th-grade English as well as human sexuality. Arrayed before Vernacchio was a circle of small desks occupied by 22 teenagers, six male and the rest female — a blur of sweatshirts and Ugg boots and form-fitting leggings.

“Grand slam,” called out a boy (who’d later tell me with disarming matter-of-factness that “the one thing Mr. V. talked about that made me feel really good was that penis size doesn’t matter”).

“Now, ‘grand slam’ has a bunch of different meanings,” replied Vernacchio, who has a master’s degree in human sexuality. “Some people say it’s an orgy, some people say grand slam is a one-night stand. Other stuff?”

“Grass,” a girl, a cheerleader, offered.

“If there’s grass on the field, play ball, right, right,” Vernacchio agreed, “which is interesting in this rather hair-phobic society where a lot of people are shaving their pubic hair — ”

Read more...

Parenting in the Occupy Movement, or Give That Kid a Megaphone!

2011-11-29T06:11:00.000-08:00

I haven't personally spent much time at any of the Occupy Protests, though I do support the Movement's general principles and aims. In lieu of joining in the festivities (we're more Direct Action advocates, I suppose, though both hands are necessary in a revolution) Last Word has donated $200 worth of gift certificates to Occupy Olympia, as well as sent down some clothes and blankets. And any cold philosophically inclined Occupiers are welcome to come down and Occupy Last Word Books' armchair for some stimulating conversation and some hot tea.

I am amazed and entertained by how divided people are on the issue of protests and children... and how quick to judge folks can be. It's either scabies, child-porn pushing police, random jack-offs and I-Can't-Believe-You'd-Put-Your-Child-In-That-Sort-Of-Situation mentalities, or it's the dawn of a new age, with ten year old labor organizers and soapbox speakers spouting anti-capitalist rhetoric with the best of 'em before joining in the drum circle. I have one thing to say to you people: the world is not this black and white. Go down to the nearest Occupy Protest, take some food and a blanket and a good book and have a few conversations. That's how minds are changed.

In the meantime, here's some interesting links regarding parenting and the Occupy Movement:

"OCCUPY" PARENTING: How Parents Have Been Sharing Occupy Wall Street With Their Children

"Occupy" Movement Parents Forum Post (Anyone can change their mind)

What the Occupy Movement Could Learn From Us Parents

Not All Movements Are Created Equal

Occupy Eugene Extends Reach to Children

'Children's Brigade' Joins Occupy Wall Street On Two-Month Anniversary

Occupy Denver: Protest With Kids

Occupy Children: Kids Night Sleepover at Zuccotti Park in NYC

Memorable Kid Quotes Part Ninety-Seven

2011-11-24T09:58:00.000-08:00

(Happy International Protest Against War Toys Day!)

"I wish we had never invented guns. Why can't people just die on their own?" - Lyli Dei Marcos, on the assassination of J.F.K.

"The world would be a much better place, and people would die a lot less, if there were no cars and no war." - Lyli Dei

"When I want to go to sleep I just think of blank paper... or a dolphin jumping." - Scarleht Eyve Marcos

Radical Fatherhood in the 21st Century

2011-11-22T19:26:00.000-08:00

I wanted to take a moment to congratulate my friend, editor, and fellow Rad Dad Tomas for all his hard work over the past several years on Rad Dad out of Berkeley. Rad Dad won Utne's 'Zine of the Year in 2010, Best of the Bay in 2011, and came to print as a book this year as well.

I'm proud to have written for half a dozen issues of the 'zine. Keep up the good work Tomas!

And this is a nice little project I just found recently:

Re-post from From the blog Cuntastic.org:

Just wanted to give a shout out to a fabulous rad-parent-zinester across the oceans over in Fiji, Lara at Tricycle Zine Distro! We’re thrilled that CUNTastic is now being distro’d by Tricycle, along with other titles that are the backbone of any radical parenting library.

Here’s some info about her 3 new exciting projects:

Tricycle Zine Distro was created to distribute and inspire the writing of radical parent/ing* zines and other zines/resources useful to parents, caregivers and allies.
Building Blocs Zine: parenting, movement and little folk is a compilation zine of radical parenting* challenges, experiences and reflections. The zine is open to contributions from parents, caregivers, children and allies .The theme for the inaugural issue is “Firsts.”
Raising Rebellion is a zine I started writing when I was pregnant. I wrote the first issue to share with my unborn fetus, family, friends and friendly folk. My plan is to keep writing as life with Ruby unfolds.
*Radical Parenting is an imperfect term and is meant here as inclusive and diverse – an exploration of parenting styles that value respect, trust, autonomy, diversity, non-oppression, learning, love and revolution.

For more info, or to submit a piece for the upcoming issue of Building Blocs, or if you have a zine or resource you’d like to distro through Tricycle, email Lara atutopia@riseup.net.

Testing PP's Twitterfeed

2011-11-21T11:17:00.001-08:00

You will not become a saint through other people's sins. -- Chekhov

2011-11-03T22:19:00.001-07:00

Random Etymological Post #3

2011-09-18T10:33:00.000-07:00

Papa, father. (F.-L.) Not found in old books; rather, borrowed from F. papa. - L. pāpa, a father, bishop, pope. Cf. L. pappas, a tutor, borrowed from Gk. πáππas, papa; Home, Od. vi. 57. Due to the repitition of pa, pa; see Pap (I); Pope. Due to the infant's call for food.

Rad Dad Book Release!

2011-08-06T01:07:00.000-07:00

Congrats to Tomas and the whole crew of us writers behind Rad Dad for several awards in the past couple years and for the recent release of Rad Dad, the book! I'm excited to see what we can muster next! Long live Rad Dad, Daddy Dialectic, Pirate Papa, 'Zines and Parent-Bloggers! ~

From the PM Press website:

"Rad Dad: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Fatherhood combines the best pieces from the award-winning zineRad Dad and from the blog Daddy Dialectic, two kindred publications that have tried to explore parenting as political territory. Both of these projects have pushed the conversation around fathering beyond the safe, apolitical focus most books and websites stick to; they have not been complacent but have worked hard to create a diverse, multi-faceted space in which to grapple with the complexity of fathering.

Today more than ever, fatherhood demands constant improvisation, risk, and struggle. With grace and honesty and strength, Rad Dad’s writers tackle all the issues that other parenting guides are afraid to touch: the brutalities, beauties, and politics of the birth experience, the challenges of parenting on an equal basis with mothers, the tests faced by transgendered and gay fathers, the emotions of sperm donation, and parental confrontations with war, violence, racism, and incarceration. Rad Dad is for every father out in the real world trying to parent in ways that are loving, meaningful, authentic, and ultimately revolutionary.

Contributors Include:

Steve Almond, Jack Amoureux, Mike Araujo, Mark Andersen, Jeff Chang, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jeff Conant, Sky Cosby, Jason Denzin, Cory Doctorow, Craig Elliott, Chip Gagnon, Keith Hennessy, David L. Hoyt, Simon Knapus, Ian MacKaye, Tomas Moniz, Zappa Montag, Raj Patel, Jeremy Adam Smith, Jason Sperber, Burke Stansbury, Shawn Taylor, Tata, Jeff West, and Mark Whiteley."

Survival Preparedness With Toddlers: Wilderness Awareness and Skills Sharing With Children

2011-08-03T01:42:00.000-07:00

a touch religious and too mainstream for me, but there's not much out there...

Survival Preparedness With Toddlers in Tow, by H.P.

By James Wesley, Rawles on August 2, 2011 9:05 PM

As a former Boy Scout and long time minimalist, survival preparation is a natural fit for a “hobby” as I enter my thirties. Of course this “hobby” is an important life decision, unlike how one might approach golf or poker. The importance of this life decision really becomes clear when I think about my wife and our two little girls. As anyone with small children will confirm, hobbies and social activities take a backseat to the needs of your toddlers. My longtime interest in the outdoors, camping, and shooting have provided a sensible platform for a jump into the survivalist lifestyle...

Read More...

Rad Dad in the New York TImes!

2011-07-28T12:09:00.000-07:00

Nice work Tomas! I'll see you at the Olympia reading!

By Jeremy Adam Smith
New York Times
July 6th, 2011

Jeremy Adam Smith is the author of The Daddy Shift, co-editor of the forthcoming anthology Rad Dad: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Fatherhood and a founder of the blog Daddy Dialectic.

Greater gender equality in school and on the job has led to greater equality in housework and childrearing. Today in America, fathers now spend more time with their children and on housework than at any time since researchers started collecting comparable data. I call it “the daddy shift”—the gradual movement away from a definition of fatherhood as pure breadwinning to one that encompasses a capacity of caregiving.

Fathers need to encourage each other to take advantage of leave policies and participate in family life.

Rising inequality and economic instability has meant that families can’t afford specialists anymore. And so they’re moving from a family model that stresses efficiency to one that tries to build resilience in the face of economic shocks. In the ideal resilient family, both women and men are capable of working for pay and working at home.

But families often fall short of this ideal, partially because of lingering structural and interpersonal sexism, and partially because men lack support for their new caregiving roles at both home and work. Studies consistently show that 80 percent to 90 percent of mothers still expect fathers to serve as primary breadwinners (and very few will consider supporting a stay-at-home dad). At work, only 7 percent of American men have access to paid parental leave, among other structural limitations.

How can the daddy shift continue? The to-do list is long. It includes an education campaign to help men of all social classes understand what workplace and public policies can help them be the fathers they want to be—and legal campaigns that will defend their jobs against backward attitudes at work. Men whose mindsets are still shaped by the sole-breadwinner ideal need explicit permission and encouragement from both their female partners and their bosses to take advantage of leave policies and participate in family life.

We also need to shift the language we use to discuss work-family issues in a more inclusive direction, so that it includes fathers as well as mothers. That language should stress resilience and meaning to men instead of the language of equality that has mobilized women. In the end, it's up to guys to tell the stories of our lives and speak up for what we want. No one will do it for us.

You know what? You shouldn't lick a knife during an earthquake." -My daughter Lyli, age 7.1

2011-07-06T10:55:00.000-07:00

Fukushima radiation fears: children near nuclear plant to be given monitors Dosimeters to be given to 34,000 children in city 45 miles from Tepco plan

2011-06-30T12:53:00.000-07:00

Tens of thousands of children living near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant are to be given personal radiation monitors, as concern grows over the long-term health effects of exposure to radiation.

Dosimeters will be given to 34,000 children aged between four and 15 living in Fukushima city, 45 miles from the plant, after abnormally high radiation readings were recorded in the area.

The risks posed by radiation from the world's worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl have already driven 80,000 people from homes within 12 miles of the plant. Many of the child evacuees from communities that now lie empty attend schools in Fukushima, a city of 300,000 people.

Local authorities have provided monitors to schools outside the exclusion zone, but this is the first time they have been supplied to individual pupils. Data from the dosimeters will be analysed to assess the risks posed by cumulative radiation exposure.

The move, the latest concession to growing parental anger over patchy official information about the risks of radiation exposure, came as the company that operates the plant faced repeated verbal attacks at a rowdy annual shareholders' meeting in Tokyo.

More than 9,000 investors attended the meeting, held at a hotel under heavy police guard, with many berating Tokyo Electric Power [Tepco] executives over their response to the 11 March tsunami, which crashed into the plant and knocked out vital cooling systems to reactors.

The crisis has knocked 85% off the value of Tepco shares and resulted in annual losses of $15bn (£9.4bn). The company also faces a compensation bill that could exceed $100bn, while a government plan to help fund damages claims has yet to be put to a parliamentary vote.

Read More...

And, of course:

Child’s risk of cancer from radiation is 10-100 times higher than an adult who had same exposure (VIDEO)

Our Natural Well Being an interview with Jean Liedloff

2011-05-26T23:17:00.001-07:00

Joanna Harcourt-Smith interviews Jean Liedloff – Consultant and author of “The Continuum Concept” a book offering a new understanding of how we have lost much of our natural well-being and showing us practical ways to regain it for our children and for ourselves.

www.Undergroundparent.com & Caveman Parenting

2011-05-26T23:11:00.000-07:00

Props to Underground Parent for leading me to this article on Primitive Parenting.

Do-It-Yourself Prepper and Survival Gifts Kids Can Make

2011-05-25T23:27:00.000-07:00

I know it's got a christmas-bent to it, but it's got heart.

As far as I’m concerned, a home-made Christmas gift with some thought behind it trumps the most expensive thing you can buy. And, this is guaranteed: If a child makes a survival and/or prepper gift for a loved one, that item will be cherished, included in a survival kit and used! And if you can save some money while making a valuable piece of survival gear, that’s even better!

by Leon Pantenburg

...Read More...

It is a sick society that flies robots around murdering people

2011-05-24T14:41:00.000-07:00

(or something to that effect) found on a sticker on Last Word Books' bathroom wall.

Anarchist Parenting, Why Discipline is So Important.

2011-05-19T17:14:00.000-07:00

From Identity Check:

There is an aspect to Anarchy that isn't often addressed, but has been brought to my attention through some well meant ribbing. That would be parenting. Because many people believe that Anarchists have little use for any rules whatsoever, and amount the entire ideology to that of a chaotic and violent world, it's only logical to assume that this thinking would apply to parenting as well.

Well, it doesn't...More...

Survival for Kids, Bug-Out Bag Article on Packing Up the Wee Ones

2011-05-13T10:30:00.000-07:00

Packing Up the Kids

Jan 13th, 2011 | By Samara | Category: Education, Prepping | Print This Article

We have all thought about packing up for a grab and run scenario. We get the duffel bag, the important papers, a case of bottled water and throw it all in the car. Then we load up the kids.

Oh yeah, the kids.

If you have ever taken your children on a car trip for an hour or longer, you know that special considerations need to be made. If they are bored after five minutes, what will happen in an extended bug out situation? Thinking about their needs and wants ahead of time will help an already stressful situation to not escalate into an impossible one.

Kids Packs

The good news is that even though children need more stuff, they also come ready-made with additional hands to help carry it. However, you do need to be aware of realistic expectations. As a general rule of thumb, children should not carry much more than 10% of their own body-weight in a backpack. For a 30-pound toddler then, you want something that is about 3 pounds, whereas a 100-pound 12-year-old could handle about 10 pounds. You will want to put your kids and the finished pack on a scale separately to make sure you do not overload them, which could cause injury and fatigue.

This is another great opportunity to get your children involved in the process of preparedness. Let them pick out their own backpacks and have some input on what goes in it. Depending on their age, they may be able to pack the whole thing themselves and just have you review it together. It may make a great activity for them while you are putting the finishing touches on your own Evac Pack. Here are some ideas to consider...more...

Kid-related articles at Deoxy.org

2011-04-05T23:45:00.001-07:00

Interesting articles and links on children:

Amnion for the Human in Embryo

Children, don't reach for the secrets too soon...

Creativity and What Blocks It

Kids Lib Now

Kids, Sex and the State

Kids and Psychedelics

McLuhan/Conversation with high school students

Warning: reality, environment, psychology, entheogens.

Why Children Should Rebel

WildChildren

Youth and Regression in an Infantile Society

Hold BP Accountable for Environmental Degradation!

2010-05-23T12:02:00.000-07:00

We have to do something to hold BP accountable for what's turning into the worst oil spill of all time! This is just a first step--and it's not like there's a good oil company--but I just signed a pledge to boycott BP for three months. You can join the boycott at www.BeyondBP.org and make at least a dent in the profits of at least one negligent corporation.

Parental Rights Lawyer for Fathers With Criminal Records

2010-04-21T14:49:00.000-07:00

Do You Have a Criminal Record?

You are still a father and may retain your rights as a parent, even if your criminal background includes a conviction, felony charges and even jail/prison time.

All Dads have Equal Rights
1-800-DADS-LAW

At DADSLAW, INC., our fathers' rights attorneys represent the interests of fathers who are incarcerated and those who have served their debt to society. Many men convicted of felonies, falsely believe they no longer have any right to see their children. Unless your conviction had to do with a list of specific crimes (such as child endangerment), that's just not true.

If you have been released from incarceration, we will work to establish a plan to reintroduce you gradually to your children in a manner that is comfortable for them and you.

Modifying Child Support Payments

Often, incarcerated men don't understand that their child support obligations do not stop just because their ability to earn income has ceased. Unless you petition the court for a modification of child support, you will be in arrears in support and faced with a huge bill upon your release. Once incarcerated, you should immediately file for a change in child and/or spousal support. This can be accomplished by a DadsLaw attorney without the necessity of your appearance in family court.

If you are currently incarcerated, contact a fathers rights attorney at DADSLAW, INC. for skilled legal assistance in child support modification as soon as possible. If you have been released and hit with a massive bill for back child support, contact our family law attorneys for assistance. We may be able to get the amount due reduced substantially.

No matter where you live, if you are a dad with a criminal record and you have a divorce or family law case, call the divorce lawyers experienced in fighting for the rights of men and fathers – DADSLAW, INC.

Credit cards accepted. Low-cost initial consultations.

Bill Ayers and Pirate Papa on Radical Parenting and So Much More

2010-02-13T20:53:00.000-08:00

A slightly condensed version of this interview will soon be published in Rad Dad #17 on the eve of the San Francisco Anarchist Bookfair. Despite some continuity issues due to conducting an interview over the thankless medium of e-mail, I thought folks might enjoy the interview in its entirety. Please feel free to send me any comments, questions or advice on these pertinent subjects, take care of those kiddies and stay Radical!

_______________________________

PP: I’m chatting with Bill Ayers, Professor at the University of Illinois and former member of the infamous Weather Underground, which carried out a direct action bombing campaign against United States Government buildings in protest of the Vietnam War and U.S. imperialism. For a period of ten years Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dohrn lived on the lam from the Federal Government, eventually having two children before resurfacing in early 1980. In 1973, after the existence of COINTELPRO, a covert FBI program used to gather information on, as well as discredit radicals, came to light, Ayers was exonerated, but remained underground with Dohrn for an additional seven years. Dohrn eventually was fined and served three years probation for her acts with the Weather Underground. Both are now highly regarded experts in their fields, Ayers in Education and Dohrn in Law, both with an emphasis on juveniles and families.

I use the terms “underground”, “counterculture”, “anarchist”, and “alternative” within this interview... but these are all just synonyms for the same group of outsiders who have always been around. I’m sure Bill got called a dirty commie or a godless socialist more times than I’ve been called a hippy or an anarchist. Good old labels, just got to live with them.

____________________________________________________________________

BA: Well, and resist them—in your own life and in the lives of others.

PP: Just to set the stage here for our readers of Rad Dad and Pirate Papa, charges against you were lessened in 1973, but when were they dropped or dealt with completely? Bernadine surrendered to the FBI in 1980... so that leaves about ten years that you two were on the run, three years with one child then the last year with two, correct?

BA: Zayd, our oldest child, was born in 1977, and Malik in 1980. We adopted a third child, Chesa, in 1981 when his parents were arrested and sentenced to life in prison.

PP: How did you and Bernadine come to the decision to have children while living underground?

BA: I’d been an early childhood teacher for many years, and we both had strong relationships with children. We reached a point in our lives when if we were to start our own family, it was now or never. We chose now.

PP: How did having children affect your eventual choice to turn yourselves in?

BA: I’m not sure. Certainly the rhythm of our lives became centered on the awesome responsibility we took on by choosing to bring new life into the world.

PP: As a father, what were your personal reasons for having kids and how did this decision alter or reinforce your political ideals?

BA: Reason isn’t the exact register. Passion, desire, ecstasy, exuberance, awe…But raising these children was the best thing we’ve ever done, the least conflicted and the purest, the most astonishing and energizing, surprising and humanizing (followed by the experience of caring for our elderly and finally dying parents in our home for many years after our kids had left home).

PP: What were those last few years like living underground with kids? What were some of the ways this affected your family? I would imagine you had strict guidelines that all parties had to live by, structured fictions to deliver under certain circumstances? What else? What was your support community like? What resources were available to you? Did you both have good, steady jobs and sources of income or were you relying on the help of friends and family?

BA: No, none of that. We were quite poor really, sketchy incomes, work in the shadow economy mostly. But we had lots of friends and family, many of whom knew our former identities, some who didn’t. We were who we were, living in the margins but with our values and commitments intact, avoiding political demonstrations, of course, but open about everything but a few delicate details. And being focused on the lives of your children does not require money or equipment or stuff. We hung out in parks and museums and felt we owned them. The only investment the kids want is emotional, thoughtful attention, and money can actually obfuscate that.

PP: Once you had resurfaced, did your children attend public school? Did you ever homeschool or unschool them at any point? Did you or they ever get denied certain resources or opportunities because of your radical past?

BA: They attended public school in New York City, and when we moved to Chicago, the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. Certainly our past has meant that Bernadine, for example, has never been admitted to the bar, but I don’t think it’s had any negative impact on any of us (who needs the stinkin’ bar to be happy?).

PP: What advice would you offer to young parents in trouble with the law, or forced to live in hiding for whatever reason? What resources are available to them without exposing themselves to watchful eyes?

BA: Breathe, hydrate, eat real food, sweat, sing, and then keep on breathing. The world is large, and most people are compassionate and decent. Be a full human being, active and participating with others, and don’t hide or slink around.

PP: Before you had children of your own, what were your views on kids, parenting, over-population and their inter-relationship with politics?

BA: I taught little kids starting in 1965. I oppose poverty, war, empire, capitalism. Those are problems that we can and must address.

PP: How closely has the government continued to follow your work since you resurfaced and became an upstanding citizen?

BA: Ask them.

PP: At one point in your book Fugitive Days you describe your lives underground as “extending childhood indefinitely.” I was hoping you could talk about that idea a bit more.

BA: I was being glib: we were going to live our Peter Pan complex forever. I still feel connected intimately to my childhood.

PP: How do you view parenting within the contemporary anarchist/alternative/peace/activism movement?

BA: What do you mean?

PP: How do you think this intersection has changed since you raised children within the counter-culture movements of the 1970s and 1980s?

BA: No idea.

PP: For young parents who have not yet built some sort of infrastructure to financially support their families within a capitalist society, it can be quite hard to remain an effective part of whatever social movements they may belong to. These voices and opinions are seldom heard due to hectic schedules, lives based on eking out a meager living for one's family, and a general lack of communal resources available for struggling parents. While small, dedicated groups of activists are working hard to combat some of the anti-breeder philosophies within these movements and provide child care at anarchist book fairs and other gatherings, what other strategies could we use to better include parents in our ongoing political dialogues and activities?

BA: Build your community—right here, right now, just this. Share everything. Pay attention. The greatest gift we give our children id the gift of integrity, and that requires authentic dialogue starting in the first minute of life: I see you, I hear you, I understand. Don’t let anyone—the school, the teacher, the neighbor, the comrade—disrupt that precious and irreplaceable thing.

PP: How can parents support their families and still find the time and energy and monies necessary to tune in, turn on, drop out or some combination of the three?

BA: Priorities—live your values, and include the kids.

PP: In your book A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court you make the simple but astute observation that “violence against children generates violent children.” Most violence, I would go so far as to say, is a direct result of poverty and the myriad difficulties which ensue. What, then, are some simple ways that we, as communities and as individuals, can support parents and children around us, as we strive together for lasting social change? How can we effectively combat violence and poverty both on a local level and on a national and international scope?

Your role within our educational system since the early 1980s speaks for itself and you obviously carefully chose which ways to re-engage the system, approaching matters from an educational standpoint with an eye on the juvenile justice system. What have you learned about social justice and creative ways to engage the system from within, as well as from the outside? How does this relate to the youth of today and their parents?

What are some strategies that you’ve learned for engaging with troubled youth? With young parents?

How do you see racism rearing its ugly head in the 21^st century and what anti-racist parenting tactics can we employ to combat its negative effects for future generations?

Do you think there is enough direct action being taken within the activist communities today?

BA: No.

PP: Armed in hindsight by your parental history and assuming you could turn back the clock, would you change anything? Would you still embrace direct action and the destruction of government property to prove your political points and draw attention to neglected issues?

BA: It’s quite impossible to make any causal claims in regard to something as massive, complex, and indistinct as “changing the world.” In the 1960’s a French journalist asked the Chinese premier Chou En Lai how he calculated the impact of the 18^th Century French revolution on the Chinese revolution of the 20^th Century. His response: It’s too soon to tell. Quite.

People make all kinds of quick judgments on history, and most turn out to be bullshit.

If you take perhaps our most straight forward and easily understood goals, you would have to say we failed to achieve them: we wanted to end a particular war, and even after much sacrifice and struggle and success at persuading people to oppose it, the war ground on for ten excruciating years, and 3 million people were thrown into the furnaces of death; and then we wanted to end empire and usher in a world of equality and mutual recognition, a world without war, and look where we are. We set out to create a society built on a foundation of racial justice, and decades later, massive disparities (life expectancy, infant mortality, incarceration, school success, employment) are still etched along the color line, still reflecting the astonishing power of white supremacy; and then we wanted to eradicate poverty and upend economic exploitation, and the yawning chasm between haves and have-nots intensifies.

From there it gets both murkier and lighter: We wanted to say goodbye to schooling that’s arid, dry, self-referencing and self-satisfied, to teaching as a trivial pursuit of the obvious, to deference, didactism, ego and complacency in a heartless world, to prisons and border guards and walls—whether in Palestine or in Texas—and to quarantines, deletions, and closures. Goodbye to all that. We wanted to welcome the unknown, to say hello to jumping off the edge, to endlessly learning how to live again and how to love anew, to the dance of the dialectic. We tried to embrace relentless curiosity, simple acts of kindness, the complexity of humanity, the wonder of it all, struggle and the poetics of resistance, history, and agency, world peace and inner peace. We wanted to embrace the surprising and contradictory harmonies of love at all times, stunning in all the hopes it held out for a better world. We wanted free love and free land, free food and free housing, dancing in the streets and daring to taste it all with a kiss...I guess we have a ways to go there as well.

So my expansive and expanding dreams are not realized, of course, not yet, not in my lifetime, but neither are they dimmed nor diminished. I’ve always lived with one foot in the mud and muck of the world as it is, and another foot striving toward a world that could be, but is not yet. Like other freedom lovers, I dwell in possibility.

PP: What advice would you offer to young activists flirting with the dangers of direct action? How about young parents? What can they do, short of taking risks that might endanger the safety of their children or their ability to provide for their familes?

BA: The world is as it is, a mass of contradictions and tragedies, rich with beauty and human accomplishment and possibility, vicious with human denial—an organism that both drains us and replenishes us, gives us life and kills us. What gets me up and going every morning is all the unnecessary suffering, the undeserved pain. I choose to love the world and embrace the moment, but my love is neither romantic nor blind. Rather it’s edged with horror and anger, charged with new discoveries and understandings.

It’s great to feel the energy of rising expectations, to hear the sounds of heavy chains dropping from our minds and our imaginations, to see the shining faces of hope everywhere. Like last year’s election, it’s a moment to embrace, a moment to hold onto in tough times. But as I said to students on election night, there’s no sense trying to read the new leader’s mind—it’s up to us now to get busy transforming ourselves, linking up to change the world.

After all, Lyndon Johnson, the most effective politician of his generation, was never involved in the Black Freedom Movement, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt wasn’t a labor leader. Abraham Lincoln didn’t even join an abolitionist political party, but reality forced upon him the freeing of an enslaved people. Each of these three in fact responded to grassroots movements and reality on the ground to do the right thing when it mattered.

And it’s to movements on the ground that we turn as we think beyond the election or the administration, and consider the problems and possibilities of building a future dramatically and decisively different from today. We must agitate for democracy and egalitarianism, press harder for human rights and a sustainable world, link the demands that animate us—for peace and education and universal health care and lifetime guarantees of income, against war and incarceration and surveillance—learn to build a new society through our collective self-transformations and our limited everyday struggles. We must seek ways to become real actors and authentic subjects in our own history.

In the heat of the primary battle, Senator Obama was asked which candidate he thought Martin Luther King Jr. would support, and he responded that Reverend King would not likely endorse any of them, because he’d be in the streets building a movement for justice. That’s a good place to begin again, both in the US, in Australia, and around the world.

Become radicals (go to the root of things), study, learn, organize, talk to strangers, mobilize, display your ethical aspirations publicly. On the important issues of the last two centuries, political radicals from Jane Addams and Emma Goldman, John Brown and Harriet Tubman, to Eugene Debs and WEB DuBois have gotten it right. The legacy continues with the work of Ella Baker and Septima Clark, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X 40 years ago, and on up to today. Of course as Ella Baker said, “Martin didn’t create the Movement, the Movement created Martin,” and it’s true: for every remembered leader there were hundreds, thousands putting their shoulders on history’s wheel. We might reflect then on the people as they make and remake history.

I have no nostalgia for the so-called 60’s, now thoroughly commodified and sold back to us as myth and symbol. It happened—and it was neither as brilliant and ecstatic as some would have it, nor the devil’s own workshop as others insist—move on. Whatever it was, it remains prelude to the necessary changes and fundamental upheavals just ahead. Let’s get busy living, loving, linking arms right now.

The tools are everywhere—humor and art, protest and spectacle, the quiet, patient intervention and the angry and urgent thrust—and the rhythm of and recipe for activism is always the same: we open our eyes and look unblinkingly at the world as we find it; we are astonished by the beauty and horrified at the suffering all around us; we dive into the wreckage and swim as hard as we can toward a distant and indistinct shore; we dry ourselves off, doubt that our efforts made enough difference, and so we rethink, recalibrate, look again, and dive in once more. Repeat for a lifetime.

Radical Parenting

2010-01-23T22:16:00.000-08:00

Just noticed that my blog made it on the Radical Parenting Wikipedia page! Ahhh, fame and fortune are sure to soon follow.

But seriously, what's wrong with me? I thought I was a writer but these past few years have been rather pathetic. Stay tuned though, as I have an interview in the works with Bill Ayers, yes of the Weather Underground, on parenting, counterculture and educating for social justice. Between this and Last Earth Distro I'm sure to make it on some terrorist watch lists. I just hope they'll still let me fly to Hawaii.

Praise from a Fellow Father

2009-10-07T09:04:00.000-07:00

Thanks for the props Erik, sorry I didn't find this months ago when you wrote it!

Glad you are well for the most part. Get to see your beautiful kids every now and then at school or downtown. Look forward to touching base again sometime. In the meantime, I will share the love. It feels good to be able to inspire others. Makes me feel like writing...
_________________________________
From RadicalShift:
Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Thanks Sky! (http://piratepapa.blogspot.com/)
I ran across this blog, belonging to a friend of **********'s, and got the idea that maybe I owed it to myself to write a little something here.

I have been through much in the past 3 years. I went from more-than-flirting with polyamory and being intoxicated, ruining my marriage, betraying my wife and children, nearly devastating another person who is one of the most important people in the universe to me, to going sober, jumping headlong into another relationship, filing for divorce, fighting for custody and losing, changing careers, hurting my back, rebuilding most of the muscles in my body, getting a state job, going back to school, and now getting my own place, the first on my own since august 97' when i met *******.
I think that's about it.

There is more inside that capsule of a re-living but the details hurt this person, or that one, or me to go reliving.
******* and I are getting along famously, I finally am trusting her with our children and being thankful for our marriage. I have been reflecting on something interesting since I had a particular conversation with my kids.
Long-story kept long:
##### painted a beautiful picture and gave it to ******** and I for our engagement in early January 1998 that said on the back "may your souls be forever intertwined" or something close to that. I decided after storing it all this time that I needed to double check that ******* didn't want it and then give it back to %%%%% and ##### as a belated marriage gift. I had it in the car on the way over to their house, and (one of my kids) read it and commented that they really weren't intertwined forever after-all. I started into a really nice explaination (to her and to myself) about how once two people decide to get married, and/or start a family, vacation together, pay bills late together, own a house, get forclosed on it etc, that wether they like it or not, for better or for worse, they are definitely intertwined. Also what occured to me in that Teaching Opportunity, as my father might call it, was that to reject a person that close to oneself, was to reject part of oneself, and that really hit me hard.
That wasn't the turning point for trying to accept ******* and Respect her, but it gave me a nitris-oxide boost down the path of MAKING it work by hook or by crook. We will raise these kids, We said we would, We will do a good job, We will be grown-ups about our differences, We will be flexible for each other, We don't have to be jerks to make sure we don't fall back into that aweful patttern, the past is the past, and damnit, we are family.
The sobriety part has been.. I can't say easy, but i will say it has been a no-brainer up until now.
recently I have been feeling tempted to slip into a buzz here or there, and so far I have been strong with the force. I quit using everything except caffeine on 7-11-06, and haven't so much as dabbled since. I think that helped me get through the last few years and has cleared up a lot of things for me. I think it would be foolish to go any other way.
I am looking at myself as causal in my life, and using my break for independance to push myself to be a better dad, boy, man, student, worker, and anything else I am.
Over the last few years in my relationship I have been less mindful than I wish, and had become a financial and emotional depentant. I foolishly let my ideas about parenting and who it is ok for me to be to get derailed by another persons ideas and I am determined to find myself.
Another issue on the table for me is a thing I think common to many disasterous family breakups; I threw the baby out with the bathwater on a lot of cultural influences.. friends, family, customs, celebrations, philosophies, anything that felt ******* was out and I adopted a whole new set of what it was to be me. A distinct break that made my life definitely different from *******'s. The problem with that is that it forced everyone in the family to live two distinct lives. It took away traditions that bound us together in memories and experiences and took thekids out of their element when with me. Suddenly what it meant to be with dad was a rejection of everything it was to be with mom. This has hurt everyone. I am sorry to have done it. I also understand I am not alone in it, and the job at hand is to carefully cull through all of it and decide what is a keeper and what is thrown back to the cultural river. There are people I love and care about that I literally haven't talked to since the start of our family drama.
I desire a break from being a chamelion to another person, long enough to see my own colors and decide who I am post divorce- who has emerged out there other side.
I am up to the challenge of forgiving myself and ******* for this huge misunderstanding and give her credit for being who I fell in love with. And I'm up to the challenge of not compromising my choice to be seperate either. She has a right to be herself wether I agree with how she does it or not. My job is to be here for the kids and rebuild who I am for me, and for them, and re-create the family value/culture to suit who we all are on the other side of the huge chaos we created.
I am up for the challenge.
And it is hard.
Let's hear it for more pirate papas.
Thanks Sky. Keep the faith.

posted by radicalshift @ 3:37 AM

What the fuck is Yoga, and Who Took My 40oz?

2008-09-03T00:15:00.000-07:00

The title of this could be: "Parenting Through a Breakup" or "Overcoming Addictions as a Young Parent and Treading Water in the Aftermath" or "Having Kids, A Girlfriend, and a Baby Mama All at the Same Time" or "Holistic Therapy & Utilizing All the Resources of Your Community, Even if Part of You Hates Doing It" or "What the Fuck is Yoga and Who Took My Forty?"

Silence is a fence around wisdom. ~German Proverb

Nowadays most men lead lives of noisy desperation. ~James Thurber

Now all my teachers are dead except silence. ~W.S. Merwin

The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence. ~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

What page was I on? Why haven’t I written on Pirate Papa for a year and a half? What happened that distracted me from my ongoing project of self-documen-realization-tation? Perhaps there really are times to live, and times to write about living, as those wise-ones sometimes deign to tell us.

So... where to begin, for those of you who do not know the details of our sordid little web of worries, wants and wily individuals wreaking havoc with each others lives here on the Northleft Coast? Do you want/need to know the details? Do I want you to know the details? No, not really. So I’ll summarize to spare us all the brunt, blunt edge of truth: the details are a lot of pain and suffering, some very unhealthy violence, a dash of rejoicing, a few periods of intense personal growth, some fucking and some fucking over of good people on all sides of some painful issues, some healing, too much drinking, not enough writing, good food (always good food), tears, blood, sweat and ink.

There you have it.

Fast forward to now. I have a beautiful, doting Hannah who lives with me. I get my ladies half the time and have for the past nine months. Week on with me, week off with their mama… Someone said a few weeks ago: "You must be grieving." And I realized… I am grieving. I'm grieving and learning how to recover and balance and thinking about my posture, liver, kidneys, spleen, blood flow. "Am I standing up straight enough?" I think. "Am I clenching my butt enough for this to be better for my back than slouching?" I think. "You are standing up straight enough and this is good." My back thinks back at me. I walk taller now. I breath a little deeper in order to do so and that feels good. Sometimes I forget. I’m getting acupuncture and learning about my own body and my body feels good too and this makes me smile.

Like most other periods of my life, this past year and a half is blurred now, already, by whatever blurs our memories of things, faces, events. Evidently I have a surplus of that mysterious substance floating around in my brain, and not much else. I look at pictures and see myself smiling and my girls growing and I let the sounds and smells of what I do remember flood over me as often as I can. I try to live each day at a time and as a step towards something greater that I am trying to build and fashion from this clay of mortality I embody. I try to focus on whatever is in front of me. Nothing more. Nothing less. I give it my attention as best I can. I try not to dwell on broken hearts or fights or fanciful flights or past happenings of any kind, unless they directly pertain to what is at hand and then I try to embrace them, forgive them, gift them wings and let them fly away from my heart and disperse their bad energies back to whatever depths or heights from which they may have sprung.

Today I have a wonderful woman who loves us and lends her beautiful hands to our labors of love with joy and cunning and vitality and a smile. We have a large garden overflowing with vegetables. The ladies are walking and talking with amazing multi-syllabic words and rambling sentence-thoughts and a very advanced vocabulary for their boisterous, exuberant age of four. We care for a lovely Great-Dane Bull Mastiff mix named Deezle who weighs more than I do and gets spoiled like I want to be, but that's okay. The books continue to pile up, as they have a tendency of doing in my family. My job progresses as I grind my nose to oblivion on a stone. But I like my job. Sometimes I really don't like parts of my job but I do them anyway. I sell underground books to perfectly normal weirdoes all day long. We travel a little and go to book fairs, barter fairs, anarchist gatherings. I shop at bookshops, thrift stores, yard sales, a few auctions. Every few months some combination of us goes to Walla Walla to give the girls some Grandpa time and for me to get another load of antiquarian and interesting books to drag back over and on which to work for the next two months. We watch movies and put vintage paperbacks in bags and smoke into the night. Hannah helps guide me back into myself through every day.

I went a bit crazy for a spell back there and hurt myself a lot before I could pull out. Drinking too much on too little sleep for too long. Being single for all of six months and now missing it from time to time, in some stupid sentimental way. But not liking myself when I was single either. Too self-destructive, and thusly, too destructive of others selves as well, some of those closest to me. Slept around, flirted with poly-amory, drank myself into oblivion whenever I didn't have my kids, tried to keep my journals and my wits about me and my businesses growing and my friends happy. Nothing worked. Wasn't trying to keep myself happy. And I definitely didn’t feel like the ‘real man’ I wanted to be. Hannah found me like that, in the bars, pretending to be happy and social and healthy. She didn't try to ‘change me’ or ‘fix me’ or whatever, thank god, that's such a turn-off. She just stood beside me until I didn't feel like doing it all anymore, at least on the reckless level I was before or, as my father so delicately put it: “burning the candle at both ends.” Ouch. What was that about the truth? About saying these things that stab us outloud. About release. To heal myself I had to hole up inside, cut ties to everyone and everything I could. Now I slowly have to rebuild those damaged bonds (doomed stocks?), as time goes by. What an investment friendship is.

Now I have to deal with the wreckage and aftermath and conflicts of interest and vendettas sprung from my selfishness and emotional immaturity. Now I have to reckon with the results of my own actions. And I have to learn how to do all this without tearing myself apart with guilt and self-pity. I wish I hadn't had to do it the way that I did, the way that I am. I wish I had found a better way, a way to communicate my ideas and feelings to my friends as I pulled away, to explain my self and my necessary, temporary, painful absence from their lives but not their hearts. Instead I just donned the tough-guy mask and plodded forward stubbornly. I didn't share myself. I didn't share what was in my head, what was in my heart. Those bonds take so much longer to build back up after they've been broken. So that now I have to write about it, so that others can hear and perhaps avoid some slightly similar situation in a healthy, nonviolent, creative way.

We really are the only ones who can fix ourselves. Other people can aid us, give us gentle guidance, instill us with new methods or ideas. Around me people burn bridges that were so beautiful and leave each other in the ashes. Around me people abuse their bodies and minds and push themselves into a stupor closing in on death. Around me, flames burn bright and fast and threaten to extinguish themselves or each other. As communities we must learn to band together to fend off these flames from engulfing the fragile camps we have set into this wilderness of stimulus. Through a wicked cocktail of drugs, media, and privilege we have effectively stunted our own emotional growth and development. We must learn how to voice and share and thereby re-channel our collective anger and regret and fear and hate and worry into a cohesive, constructive force to be aimed at the heart of these issues: health care, poverty, anger-management, family planning and sex education, male bonding, patriarchy, alternative resources and support networks for young parents, other options to state-mandated assistance, a fundamental revamping of our educational system and a focusing-in on systemic problems contributing to our fractured society and sense of place. Need I go on? I share myself with you and ask for nothing in return save that you listen and let my words move through you.

Rattle 'n Roll

2008-01-14T12:32:00.000-08:00

Get a baby announcement printed up like a Rock 'n Roll flyer? Sweet. Only the Dragon could dig this one up. Maybe the utter genius of his blog will inspire me to post more this year, or maybe it will just make me a bit more humble to bask in shadows as great as his.

2008-01-02T18:04:00.000-08:00

Who Is To Blame For The Death of Childhood?

2007-11-05T22:29:00.000-08:00

Thanks Raf, for shooting this one over. Hey, maybe I'll start writing again soon, would that be a good idea?

In a letter to The Daily Telegraph, 110 teachers, psychologists, children's authors and other experts call on the Government to act to prevent the death of childhood.

They write: "We are deeply concerned at the escalating incidence of childhood depression and children's behavioural and developmental conditions."

The group, which includes Philip Pullman, the children's author, Jacqueline Wilson, the children's laureate, her predecessor Michael Morpurgo, Baroness Greenfield, the director of the Royal Institution and Dr Penelope Leach, the child care expert, blames a failure by politicians and public alike to understand how children develop.

"Since children's brains are still developing, they cannot adjust. . . to the effects of ever more rapid technological and cultural change," they write.

advertisement "They still need what developing human beings have always needed, including real food (as opposed to processed "junk"), real play (as opposed to sedentary, screen-based entertainment), first-hand experience of the world they live in and regular interaction with the real-life significant adults in their lives.

"They also need time. In a fast-moving, hyper-competitive culture, today's children are expected to cope with an ever-earlier start to formal schoolwork and an overly academic test-driven primary curriculum.

"They are pushed by market forces to act and dress like mini-adults and exposed via the electronic media to material which would have been considered unsuitable for children even in the very recent past."

The letter was circulated by Sue Palmer, a former head teacher and author of Toxic Childhood, and Dr Richard House, senior lecturer at the Research Centre for Therapeutic Education at Roehampton University.

Mrs Palmer said: "I have been thinking about this for a long time and I just decided something had to be done.

"It is like this giant elephant in all our living rooms, the fact that children's development is being drastically affected by the kind of world they are brought up in."

She cited research by Prof Michael Shayer at King's College, London, which showed that 11-year-olds measured in cognitive tests were "on average between two and three years behind where they were 15 years ago".

"I think that is shocking. We must make a public statement – a child's physical and psychological growth cannot be accelerated.

"It changes in biological time, not at electrical speed. Childhood is not a race."

The other signatories include Sir Jonathon Porritt, the environmental campaigner, Prof Tim Brighouse, the Commissioner for London Schools and Sir Richard Bowlby, the President of the Centre for Child Mental Health.

Mr Morpurgo said: "We have so much anxiety about children, their protection, their care, their education, that this has developed into fear. There is a fear around children, both from schools and politicians, which has led to this target-driven education system.

"That has put children into an academic straitjacket from a very early age which restricts creativity and the enrichment of childhood."

He condemned the "virtual play" represented by electronic games and internet surfing.

"That is where children are getting their ideas from and I find it quite "toxic" and pretty scary for the future."

Jacqueline Wilson said: "We are not valuing childhood. I speak to children at book signings and they ask me how I go through the process of writing and I say, 'Oh you know, it's just like when you play imaginary games and you simply write it all down'.

"All I get is blank faces. I don't think children use their imaginations any more."

Baroness Greenfield is so concerned about the effect of technology on children she has set up an all-party group in the Lords to look into it.

The other members are three former education secretaries, Baroness Williams, Baroness Shephard and Baroness Morris.

nice one

2007-09-27T01:34:00.000-07:00

Mama: Here's your zuchinni and toast with tahini
Lyli: Hey, tahini zuchinni. They rhyme!
Mama: Hey, you're right! You are SO good at ryhming. When are you two going to start freestyle battling?
Lyli: In four months.

Parenting as a Green Anarchist

2007-08-23T15:28:00.000-07:00

I consider myself to be a pirate in some contemporary sense of the word. This is the lens through which I try to view our world. I am a nice pirate, where others rape and pillage I salvage and sow; where others sack and burn I liberate and grow. I pirate software, vegetables, herbs, bulk food aisles at corporate grocery stores, garbage, books, clothes, thrift stores, free boxes. I find homes for books lost on these high seas of a culture that, for the most part, doesn't read. I steal from the rich and give to the poor whenever possible. I try to be free in the fullest sense of the word and dream always of furthering that freedom.

I live with my twin three year old daughters on an old 250 acre farm outside of Shelton, Washington at the inner-most tip of Puget Sound. I try to live as a Green Rebel and a Pirate in this commodified world of disposable consumables. Does this mean I live a zero-sum harmonious existence with my local ecosystem, feeding wild animals by hand and growing or scavenging all my food while refusing to pay taxes and stockpiling an enormous underground arms cache of sustainably gathered weapons of creation? Well... not yet.

So I try instead to let these simple ideas bleed into my everyday interactions with nature and with the individuals around me. I try to be anti-authoritarian with my children for the most part, but every parent raises their voice or demands some sort of obedience from their kids, because that is the world we live in, try as we might to escape it. But I have become acutely aware of what a collaborative process parenting is and, as surely as I am raising two beautiful, intelligent, gentle girls in this crazy world, they are raising and molding a new kind of parent in me. And these new kinds of people we are helping each other foster and create and assemble from old bones will be the same people faced with solving the growing problems of tomorrow and bridging our polarized communities with what common ground we have: our children and our desire for them to be healthy and survive.

I vaguely recall mulling over possible titles for my fatherhood blog before settling on Pirate Papa: An Anarcho-Green Journal of D.(o) I.(t) Y.(ourself) Parenting. The ones I remember are: Running with Scissors , Don't Tell Mommy, and Hip-Pop. When I use words like 'Anarcho-Green' I am attempting to bend accepted norms by sheer use of language, I am attempting to lure in folks who are curious about these ideologies (even while I am obviously alienating whole other groups), I am attempting to extract everything I deem to be of value to contemporary parenting from both movements and synergize it into a harmonious, sustainable whole systems anti-corporate naturally organic approach to parenting and child-rearing in this day and age.

I relate 'Anarchism' to parenting in several very simple ways: I firmly believe that large-scale industrial capitalism is inherently bad for babies; I think all children are inherently anarchists and that these qualities need to be nurtured and respected rather than repressed; I advocate a refusal to follow accepted norms (without massive research) as applied to my children's diet, medicine, entertainment, education, etc.; I think that families are best served and children best reared by as much economic and political freedom as possible. I believe in creative problem solving, involving children in political activism, and being as anti-corporate, anti-capitalist and anti-standard as possible. I believe we need localized communities operating on a face-to-face basis in equilibrium with each other and their surroundings without official hierarchies and centralized establishments to arbitrate and rule our lives. We have learned from this system of coercion, capitalism, domination and patriarchy that it does not work, does not jive with the natural human spirit or bodily rhythms. Now it’s time to try something else.

I relate 'Green' to parenting thusly: I see today's generic diet and monocropped culture as definitely deadly to the kids and mothers and fathers of the future (that's all of us); I see lowering the ecological footprint of today's typical American family as a fundamental first step to saving tomorrow's children, as well as maximizing our own limited time here on the planet; I believe that, as a species, we require a healthy chunk of re-wilding in order to return to some sustainable balance with nature as well as with our own collective psyche; I believe that a resurgence to THE LOCAL for food and medical needs for our families and elderly and children will best sustain our communities and revitalize our economies with the inherently unique culture granted them by place.

If we don’t want a world full of standardized testing and rulers and competition then we need children who can live outside the box and be the most unique individuals they can be. If that is what they want to do. And I think it will be. If we want a world without bars on its windows then, more than ever, will we need children who are free.

Further Reading:

http://www.grizzlybird.net/greenparenting.html

http://motheranarchy.blogspot.com/

http://piratepapa.blogspot.com/2007/01/too-cool-for-kids-how-anarchist-bigotry.html

http://piratepapa.blogspot.com/2005/12/what-methods-of-child-rearing-do.html

http://piratepapa.blogspot.com/2007/02/revolutionary-parenting.html

http://piratepapa.blogspot.com/2007/01/taking-children-seriously-and-anarchy.html

http://piratepapa.blogspot.com/2007/05/taking-children-seriously-future-of.html

This essay was first published by Tomas in Rad Dad #7, July/August 2007.

Utne Reviews Rad Dad!

2007-08-21T11:49:00.000-07:00

Evidently they like us radical papas over at Utne. They reviewed the first (and hitherto only) Pirate Papa 'zine awhile back.

Rad Dad "is not cool," according to founder and publisher Tomas. "[I]t's not about being hip, not about trying to be in style... Rad Dad is for radical parenting. The uncomfortable kind." And so the zine's seventh issue picks up where previous ones left off: by interrogating and reevaluating the role of fathers in radical politics. Articles range from "Green Parenting," in which writer Sky looks at the relationship between anarchism and parenting, to "On Being Jewish," in which Bruce contemplates the religious example he wants to set for his child. A contribution from Tomas himself -- "Who's Your Daddy: Fathers in Pop Culture" -- offers a forceful critique of how "cool parenting" has become an apolitical and upper-middle class trend that reinforces "dad" stereotypes. -- Eric Kelsey

Here's another link to a review of Tomas' Rad Dad from Mamazine.

Drop Tomas a line at Rad Dad and pick up a copy of issue # 7.

The Taliban is Alive and Well in Ohio

2007-08-02T20:17:00.000-07:00

From Common Dreams

Well, this is really weird. I, for one, believe that fathers should have some sort of say in whether a woman gets an abortion or not, even if it has no power beyond an idea logged in some karmic court. I mean, ideally everyone could just talk about the matter and sort things out... but we all know how well that works.

Giving the father sole veto power seems just a touch patriarchal and as one-sided as allowing solely the mother to make the decision. But it is her body after all. And personally I'm tired of The Father being the head of household and supreme familial dictator (rarely benevolent). Maybe some form of arbitration (Anyone want that job?)? If a father wants to accept sole responsibility for the child's well-being and agrees to support the pregnant mother at least until birth if not until the child is finished nursing then why should the mother be allowed to make the decision by herself? Indeed, it is her body and don't get me wrong, I am 100% pro-choice, having experienced abortion from the male end of the proverbial stick no less than three times myself and grateful for it every time. But we talked about it, twice before, once after (that one felt a bit different)... it's just such a murky subject... Let whichever being you call God be the judge, I suppose.

Who am I to tell any woman what to do with her body? But, then again, who are they to abort a life that doesn't just belong to them without first checking with the father of the unborn child? I'm fine with consensual abortions and abortions where the father is not present and thusly not asked. But when the father is present and wants the child and the women denies him that by aborting the child? Not so down... Thanks to Fern for pointing this one out. Damn. Makes me queasy too. I definitely don't think there should be legal repercussions involved. This stinks of a right-wing plot if you ask me. No one else can come up with such gaping plot holes.

Wow. I just changed my own mind ninety-seven times.

Check out the comments section, as the best ideas are down there, not in the article.

Several Ohio state representatives who normally take an anti-abortion stance are now pushing pro-choice legislation - sort of.

Led by Rep. John Adams, a group of state legislators have submitted a bill that would give fathers of unborn children a final say in whether or not an abortion can take place.

It’s a measure that, supporters say, would finally give fathers a choice.

“This is important because there are always two parents and fathers should have a say in the birth or the destruction of that child,” said Adams, a Republican from Sidney. “I didn’t bring it up to draw attention to myself or to be controversial. In most cases, when a child is born the father has financial responsibility for that child, so he should have a say.”

As written, the bill would ban women from seeking an abortion without written consent from the father of the fetus. In cases where the identity of the father is unknown, women would be required to submit a list of possible fathers. The physician would be forced to conduct a paternity test from the provided list and then seek paternal permission to abort.

Claiming to not know the father’s identity is not a viable excuse, according to the proposed legislation. Simply put: no father means no abortion.

“I’m really pleased that this has been proposed for one reason - it draws attention to the fact that many men are concerned and care for their unborn children,” said Denise Mackura, the director of the Ohio Right to Life Society. “You have no idea how many men call telling me about their girlfriends who plan to abort, asking what they can do to help her. They do want to help and they should have a voice.”

With the proposal, men would be guaranteed that voice under penalty of law. First time violators would by tried for abortion fraud, a first degree misdemeanor. The same would be the case for men who falsely claim to be fathers and for medical workers who knowingly perform an abortion without paternal consent.

In addition, women would be required to present a police report in order to prove a pregnancy is the result of rape or incest.

As is the case whenever abortion is the topic, sharp opposition has come from members of the House, along with multiple activist groups. The National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Activist League and the Ohio Right to Life Society have both spoken out against the legislation.

“This extreme bill shows just how far some of our state legislators are willing to go to rally a far-right base that is frustrated with the pro-choice gains made in the last election,” said NARAL Pro-choice Ohio executive director Kellie Copeland. “It is completely out of touch with Ohio’s mainstream values. This measure is a clear attack on a woman’s freedom and privacy.”

The proposal came less than two weeks after Rep. Tom Brinkman proposed legislation that would ban all abortions in Ohio. Brinkman, a Republican from Cincinnati, was one of eight representatives to co-sponsor Adams’ bill.

With the recent liberal swing in Ohio state government, neither bill is likely to come to fruition. However, Adams’ less extreme proposal has an outside chance of becoming law - a law that would have a major impact in Portage County and surrounding areas.

Portage has been among the leading Ohio counties in abortion-to-birth ratios since abortion was legalized in 1973. Since 1996, about 20 percent of Portage County pregnancies have been aborted - the seventh highest percentage in the state according to information from the Ohio Department of Health. The total comes to more than 4,300 abortions in 10 years.

Cuyahoga County has the highest abortion percentage with more than 30 percent of its residents’ pregnancies being terminated. Summit County is also near the top of the list with a 21 percent termination rate.

Mackura doesn’t think those numbers are likely to change anytime soon, though. Precedent from the U.S. Supreme Court indicates that, even if Adams’ bill passed, it would likely be ruled unconstitutional by the courts.

“Simply taking a look at this as a possibility is a step in the right direction,” Mackura said. “Pregnancy is a unique human condition and obviously a woman is affected differently than a man. As a woman, I can sympathize. However, to completely take rights away from the father is unfair.

“Currently, even in a marriage situation, a man has no right to even be informed of an abortion. But if a woman doesn’t have an abortion, men sure have a lot of responsibility then. It’s really not fair.”

Two nice sites recently unearthed

2007-08-02T13:37:00.000-07:00

http://greatgreenbaby.com/

http://organicbaby.co.nz/

Smashing Capitalism One Canoe-Pool At A Time!

2007-07-10T16:51:00.000-07:00

That's right, I'm a friggin' genius. Screw the kiddie pools that cost money, my dual-purpose canoe rules the day.

Censored thanks to those fucking sickos who viewed the naked pictures of my daughters I accidentally put on Flickr so long ago. Note the resemblance of censored bars to frowny faces and buzz off, we're well armed out here in the woods.

In the News: Made in China, II

2007-07-03T13:12:00.000-07:00

From Green Baby Blog

Remember the antifreeze-laced cough syrup exported from China and shipped 'round the world to disastrous effect? Well, it turns out diethylene glycol is back on the market, this time in children's toothpaste brands "Excel" & "Mr. Cool." And where did this latest batch of tainted merchandise come from? I'll give you one guess.

But according to Zou Jianjun, spokesman for the Chinese trading company responsible for using the chemical, none of us has anything to worry about:

"Proper amounts of diethylene glycol are not toxic if it remains uncontaminated."

Have chemicals become so commonplace that we really believe it's okay to ingest--in any quantity--the same chemical responsible for keeping our cars running smooth?

I sure hope not.

For the latest information, click here: Tainted Toothpaste.

Things I find ironic about military shopping abroad

2007-06-29T15:09:00.000-07:00

From my friend Libby @ Diary of an Air-Force Wife - Keep up the good work overseas and give that beautiful family hugs from the pirate twins and me.

As a stay at home mommy and wife shopping for the house and the family is a big part of my job. Here are some things I found to be a little giggle inducing along the way.

Germany statistically rains 85% of the year, yet the BX does not carry rain jackets, rain boots or warm weather clothing. However, they do have a very wide variety of swimsuits, sandals and essential summer pool equipment. For that ever so average enlisted member sitting in the rain relaxing at their personal pool.

Second, in a career field where being on time is considered late and be early is considered being on time an alarm clocks is the number one item needed in making this possible it puts a smile on face that the BX does not sell ANY type of alarm clock; they do however sell six different types of 62" screen TV's.

On a base where following the US laws of car seats for children under age and weight is mandatory it is strange to see that the BX does not sell car seats. They do however sell many (MANY!) designer diaper bags.

In a job where you are required to iron your uniform daily it is funny that they do not sell ironing boards here, but they do sell many different types of irons. Though you can only by milk by the half gallon you can by many types of whisky by the gallon. Even though all the floors in base housing are hardwood the BX does not sell furniture leg protectors. They do sell a very nice selection of lawn mowers (more then a quarter of base housing is apartment living).

When shopping for shampoo you can find mostly what you need at the commissary but for all your conditioning needs you must shop at the BX on the other side of the base. You can find all your cookie sheet needs at the BX, but it doesn't do you any could because none of it will fit inside the oven.

You can also find a very large variety of drop in toilet bowl cleaners; although german toilets do not have visible, accessible toilet tanks. German toilets are designed to only provide water when flushed (meaning there is no standing water at any time) Though you will never find a toilet bowl brush in the BX.

If you are someone who like to use those throw away toilet brushes you will find many different types of refills, but you will not find any type of handle to hold those refills. For your mopping needs the commissary provides many types of floor soap, none of which can be used on porous floor tile, or hardwood; all base housing is hardwood, with all kitchen and bathroom floors being unsealed porous floor tile.

German voltage is 240 and all light bulbs need to be that voltage, the BX however sell a very large selection of 110 voltage lights.

Well as you can see there are a few things that make shopping here on Base a little surprising at times; maybe they do it to keep us on our toes.
:)
love always
us

Stretch Marks for Dads: What fatherhood does to the body and the brain

2007-06-24T10:50:00.000-07:00

By Emily Anthes

Thanks to Rebel Dad for linking to this one!

Last weekend, Tufts University hosted a scientific conference on the "parental brain." Or at least the maternal brain, which was the subject of eight symposia, while fathers and their brains were the focus of just one. Once, this imbalance would have seemed inevitable, since there didn't seem to be much to say about how becoming a father affects men physically. But now, evidence is accumulating that pregnancy and parenthood leave their marks on men's bodies. Women are not the only ones who are built for parenting, and recognizing that is good for fathers and the rest of us, too.

Historically, when men did more than donate sperm to a pregnancy—by suffering physical ailments along with their wives—they got called crazy. The condition labeled "sympathetic pregnancy," or couvade syndrome (from the French word couver, or "to incubate"), describes expectant fathers who are stricken with some combination of weight gain, nausea, food cravings, backaches, insomnia, and other delights familiar to pregnant women everywhere. Until recently, couvade was relegated to the overwrought TV medical drama as a "psychosomatic" curiosity, with a list of potential causes that would please any Freudian (identification with the fetus, pregnancy envy, pseudo-sibling rivalry).

But in the last handful of years, scientists have shown that normal, healthy, non-pregnancy-envying men often undergo real bodily changes when they're expecting children. READ MORE...

My Anarchist Parenting Hero

2007-06-22T15:12:00.001-07:00

Sorry China, my review is still pending. But I frickin' love the book! So here, I'm reposting this other review just for you. Come visit us again sometime. We're still here while you're shooting to stardom. You deserve it.

The Future Generation
China Martens Created Her New Book the Way She Raised Her Daughter--One Day at a Time

By Violet Glaze

If you went to a punk show in Baltimore in the early '90s, you remember Clover Martens. She was the only toddler in attendance, a wispy-haired imp in Goodwill sundresses darting in and out of the crowd of slam dancers and malcontents. Her supermodel-tall mom, China, was always with her, available for a quick snuggle or suckle but otherwise letting her daughter zip around at her own whim.

There was sometimes talk that China Martens didn't have a steady partner to help raise her daughter, that her anarchist principles meant she wasn't going to enroll Clover in school or immunize her. One of two things (or sometimes both) crossed the minds of the callow suburban punks who'd never seen this model of parenting before: That kid is going to have an amazing life, or Is she going to turn out all right?

She turned out great. Seated next to her mom at the dining room table at a reporter's house, the now 19-year-old Nadja (nee Clover) Martens is much curvier and darker-haired than her toddler self would have indicated, but you can tell it's her in the almond-y slant of her eyes and the unselfconscious way she owns the space she occupies, in marked contrast to the cringing unease affected by some teenage girls. She says "please" and "thank you" and asks to interrupt when she's got a good idea. If she's any measure of the validity of an anti-authoritarian rearing, there ought to be Emma Goldman memorial day care centers nationwide.

"This is my new realization of my parent stage right now--of how incredibly great it is," China Martens beams. Her voice is gentle and tentative--it sucks any intimidation out of her prodigious height and enviable slimness. "Like, when you have a baby they think you're the best, and they always want to be near you," she continues. "And then preadolescent--I can't speak for everybody, but I think it's pretty common you start to not like your parents and everything your parents like is not cool. And so when they become a young adult, for the first time in your life you experience [your child] kind of balanced. They don't love you too much, they don't hate you too much, you can have conversations, you have history and in-jokes. Nobody ever told me how great it would be to have a young adult for a child."

That realization is the culmination not only of China's experience as a parent, but as creator of the zine The Future Generation, one of the first publications dedicated to alternative child-rearing. This week, Atomic Book Co. (co-owned by erstwhile City Paper contributor Benn Ray) releases a paperback collection/retrospective of China's magnum opus, a two-decade endeavor that addresses the question "What is an anarchist parent?"

"That's a hard question," China acknowledges, addressing the common conundrum of defining a political movement that resists all dogma and decree. "When you are a parent, by nature you have some control and power over this person who's smaller than you. So [anarchist parenting is] such an oxymoron in some ways. But I think that's what's so interesting about it, because that's a very practical subject." In other words, there's no room for ivory-tower hypothesizing when kids in your care have immediate needs. China agrees: "Parenting is in-your-face, daily experience."

China, who herself grew up in a "very maternal, loving family" with her peripatetically employed government-worker dad and housewife mom, addressed that immediacy in The Future Generation's very first photocopied issue in April 1990, from how the struggle to snap one last button on a fussy infant's clothes can be a microcosm of military force vs. diplomacy, to a love poem to her infant daughter: "can't say it here/ but we are revolutionaries." It's heady with the unfettered spirit of China's first years as a young mom.

"I had this very romantic, different reasoning," she recalls. "I will have the perfect witch baby, she doesn't really belong to anybody, we don't belong to anybody and we're free."

The experiment showed fruit early. Clover grew into a gentle child who was better behaved than any other kid during story time at the library. But as the years went on, China, who dropped out of high school (a decision she still stands behind: "It was the first and best radical thing I ever did."), found it increasingly difficult to provide for her daughter. After staying on welfare for eight years until the Clinton-era reforms kicked her off (just as she had just gone back to college to earn a nursing degree) she worked a variety of low-prestige jobs that could never provide enough cash. By the zine's ninth issue, she documented a humiliating venture to the welfare offices, and the pang she felt at the now preteen Clover's ubiquitous question, "When we have money, can we (fill in the blank)?"

"This is intensely embarrassing," Nadja admits with a sheepish grin. "Because when your mom is this anarchist cool writer mom, then you become, `Oh, let's go to the mall, and get a crush on all those'--I don't know any of the cutesy guys names anymore, but you know, those heartthrobs. You want to be a cheerleader and date the captain of the football team." China says she knew her daughter had undergone a sea change when Nadja declared she would never shop at thrift stores anymore because "the clothes smell."

"I went through that phase and it was intensely embarrassing," Nadja blushes. "I was just outrageously bad."

"By 16, you were great," China assures her, with a mom's forgiveness.

After positive experiences in free alternative schools, Nadja experienced tremendous culture shock when China finally did enroll her in public school in the second grade. "I couldn't take those people bossing me around," Nadja recalls. "I went through a phase where I was totally the outlaw child." And she hit a rocky patch in adolescence experimenting with the same identity crises and chemical opportunities common to many teenagers. But due to the self-discipline instilled by her anti-authoritarian rearing, she curtailed her destructive activities when their benefits became dubious.

"You think about [drugs and alcohol], What has it really brought me? A whole bunch of bad memories? And then you just stop," Nadja says. "I think for my friends who live in a house where [the parents] don't want you to do that, you do it anyway. But you do it in a more irresponsible way, a more chaos-type way, whereas I did that and I learned. I didn't go to any other crazy drug, I didn't get pregnant, because basically, you just learn."

"I also think an anarchist parent offers more to their child of being alive and doing cool stuff," adds China, who let Nadja make her own decisions on nearly every front. "Every year it's like, `Do you want to go to school or do you not [want to] go to school?' So I feel like in [an anarchist] family you have more of a model of freedom of different opportunities you can do."

Like her mother, Nadja also dropped out of high school when its limitations became too frustrating. "For years [my mom's] telling me, `High school destroys you, why would you want to go to high school?' And [then] she was like, `Do you really want to drop out of high school?'" Nadja gently jibes.

"Because I had gotten used to her conservative self," China counters. "She was always talking about, `I'm going to go to college.' So I just wanted to make sure there wasn't some kind of problem. She seemed so different, so I was concerned." Sure enough, after a stint in an alternative high school, Nadja opted instead for a GED and enrolled at Baltimore City Community College, from where she's hoping to transfer to a film studies program at UMBC. She's also started her own zine, Dildo, subtitled "Masturbation for your brain," a serendipitous continuation of "the family business" that tickles her mom.

"It's been a long trip, this parenting thing," China reflects. "And I think that's why the book's going to be really exciting because it goes through all these different eras."

"I feel kind of like a movie star, because you can really see me growing up," Nadja concurs.

Compiling The Future Generation into a book was not China's idea. "I'm a very shy person." she says. "I feel like I'm a very--it's not the right word, but like an unofficial person. Not a person who's in the media. I like the informalness of zines. So I don't think I would have ever approached anybody on my own."

After China was invited to read with Ariel Gore (founder of Hip Mama, the most prominent alternative parenting publication) on a book tour, The Future Generation started attracting more attention from places like WYPR's The Signal and from Rachel Whang, co-owner of Atomic Books and the Atomic Book Co. "When I came back from the book tour, Rachel was like, `We want to put out your first book,'" China says.

With the help of Gore, activist/friend Vicky Law, and suggestions from Nadja, China sifted through 18 years of typewritten journal entries, original cartoons, birthing photos from compatriots, and culture-jammed ads for baby wares to form the book's text. "[The zine] just wasn't really meant to be a book," she says of the herculean effort. "It was before the internet, so I would reprint essays. I was researching things in the library and reprinting things from books. I was trying to foster a network, and communication, and stuff for us to share, and it's all Xeroxed and cut-and-paste goodness." The finished book preserves some of the DIY feel of the original but has a much snappier layout that impresses China to no end. "It looks so good," she gushes.

Nadja is grown and China says she's not as much of an "active parent." ("When you're the mother of a teenager, you're wiped out. It does a number to you.") So China is refocusing her efforts on building that kind of all-ages community spirit in the counterculture.

"We [alternative parents] can't do this on our own," she says. "We fall through the holes and we wind up struggling in more mainstream things. So that's been really important to me, to build community, to not focus on nuclear families per se." After all, she has no regrets about the unconventional path she's taken raising her daughter. "Being a single mom, I got to explore and grow on my own," China says.

"Well," Nadja says as a vulnerable smile creeps across her face and everyone in the room knows what she's about to say, "You were growing with me."

MARRIAGE AND LOVE

2007-06-22T14:57:00.000-07:00

I'm on a quest to dig up anything relating to parenting and children that Emma Goldman and other anarchists may have postulated or (better yet) practiced. so send anything pertinent my way!

By Emma Goldman, from Anarchism and Other Essays. Second Revised Edition. New York & London: Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1911. pp. 233-245

THE popular notion about marriage and love is that they are synonymous, that they spring from the same motives, and cover the same human needs. Like most popular notions this also rests not on actual facts, but on superstition.

Marriage and love have nothing in common; they are as far apart as the poles; are, in fact, antagonistic to each other. No doubt some marriages have been the result of love. Not, however, because love could assert itself only in marriage; much rather is it because few people can completely outgrow a convention. There are to-day large numbers of men and women to whom marriage is naught but a farce, but who submit to it for the sake of public opinion. At any rate, while it is true that some marriages are based on love, and while it is equally true that in some cases love continues in married life, I maintain that it does so regardless of marriage, and not because of it.

On the other hand, it is utterly false that love results from marriage. On rare occasions one does hear of a miraculous case of a married couple falling in love after marriage, but on close examination it will be found that it is a mere adjustment to the inevitable. Certainly the growing-used to each other is far away from the spontaneity, the intensity, and beauty of love, without which the intimacy of marriage must prove degrading to both the woman and the man.

Marriage is primarily an economic arrangement, an insurance pact. It differs from the ordinary life insurance agreement only in that it is more binding, more exacting. Its returns are insignificantly small compared with the investments. In taking out an insurance policy one pays for it in dollars and cents, always at liberty to discontinue payments. If, how ever, woman's premium is a husband, she pays for it with her name, her privacy, her self-respect, her very life, "until death doth part." Moreover, the marriage insurance condemns her to life-long dependency, to parasitism, to complete uselessness, individual as well as social. Man, too, pays his toll, but as his sphere is wider, marriage does not limit him as much as woman. He feels his chains more in an economic sense.

Thus Dante's motto over Inferno applies with equal force to marriage: "Ye who enter here leave all hope behind."

That marriage is a failure none but the very stupid will deny. One has but to glance over the statistics of divorce to realize how bitter a failure marriage really is. Nor will the stereotyped Philistine argument that the laxity of divorce laws and the growing looseness of woman account for the fact that: first, every twelfth marriage ends in divorce; second, that since 1870 divorces have increased from 28 to 73 for every hundred thousand population; third, that adultery, since 1867, as ground for divorce, has increased 270.8 per cent.; fourth, that desertion increased 369.8 per cent.

Added to these startling figures is a vast amount of material, dramatic and literary, further elucidating this subject. Robert Herrick, in Together; Pinero, in Mid-Channel; Eugene Walter, in Paid in Full, and scores of other writers are discussing the barrenness, the monotony, the sordidness, the inadequacy of marriage as a factor for harmony and understanding.

The thoughtful social student will not content himself with the popular superficial excuse for this phenomenon. He will have to dig down deeper into the very life of the sexes to know why marriage proves so disastrous.

Edward Carpenter says that behind every marriage stands the life-long environment of the two sexes; an environment so different from each other that man and woman must remain strangers. Separated by an insurmountable wall of superstition, custom, and habit, marriage has not the potentiality of developing knowledge of, and respect for, each other, without which every union is doomed to failure.

Henrik Ibsen, the hater of all social shams, was probably the first to realize this great truth. Nora leaves her husband, not---as the stupid critic would have it---because she is tired of her responsibilities or feels the need of woman's rights, but because she has come to know that for eight years she had lived with a stranger and borne him children. Can there be any thing more humiliating, more degrading than a life long proximity between two strangers? No need for the woman to know anything of the man, save his income. As to the knowledge of the woman---what is there to know except that she has a pleasing appearance? We have not yet outgrown the theologic myth that woman has no soul, that she is a mere appendix to man, made out of his rib just for the convenience of the gentleman who was so strong that he was afraid of his own shadow.

Perchance the poor quality of the material whence woman comes is responsible for her inferiority. At any rate, woman has no soul---what is there to know about her? Besides, the less soul a woman has the greater her asset as a wife, the more readily will she absorb herself in her husband. It is this slavish acquiescence to man's superiority that has kept the marriage institution seemingly intact for so long a period. Now that woman is coming into her own, now that she is actually growing aware of herself as a being outside of the master's grace, the sacred institution of marriage is gradually being undermined, and no amount of sentimental lamentation can stay it.

From infancy, almost, the average girl is told that marriage is her ultimate goal; therefore her training and education must be directed towards that end. Like the mute beast fattened for slaughter, she is prepared for that. Yet, strange to say, she is allowed to know much less about her function as wife and mother than the ordinary artisan of his trade. It is indecent and filthy for a respectable girl to know anything of the marital relation. Oh, for the inconsistency of respectability, that needs the marriage vow to turn something which is filthy into the purest and most sacred arrangement that none dare question or criticize. Yet that is exactly the attitude of the average upholder of marriage. The prospective wife and mother is kept in complete ignorance of her only asset in the competitive field---sex. Thus she enters into life-long relations with a man only to find herself shocked, repelled, outraged beyond measure by the most natural and healthy instinct, sex. It is safe to say that a large percentage of the unhappiness, misery, distress, and physical suffering of matrimony is due to the criminal ignorance in sex matters that is being extolled as a great virtue. Nor is it at all an exaggeration when I say that more than one home has been broken up because of this deplorable fact.

If, however, woman is free and big enough to learn the mystery of sex without the sanction of State or Church, she will stand condemned as utterly unfit to become the wife of a "good" man, his goodness consisting of an empty head and plenty of money. Can there be anything more outrageous than the idea that a healthy, grown woman, full of life and passion, must deny nature's demand, must subdue her most intense craving, undermine her health and break her spirit, must stunt her vision, abstain from the depth and glory of sex experience until a "good" man comes along to take her unto himself as a wife? That is precisely what marriage means. How can such an arrangement end except in failure? This is one, though not the least important, factor of marriage, which differentiates it from love.

Ours is a practical age. The time when Romeo and Juliet risked the wrath of their fathers for love when Gretchen exposed herself to the gossip of her neighbors for love, is no more. If, on rare occasions young people allow themselves the luxury of romance they are taken in care by the elders, drilled and pounded until they become "sensible."

The moral lesson instilled in the girl is not whether the man has aroused her love, but rather is it, "How much?" The important and only God of practical American life: Can the man make a living? Can he support a wife? That is the only thing that justifies marriage. Gradually this saturates every thought of the girl; her dreams are not of moonlight and kisses, of laughter and tears; she dreams of shopping tours and bargain counters. This soul-poverty and sordidness are the elements inherent in the marriage institution. The State and the Church approve of no other ideal, simply because it is the one that necessitates the State and Church control of men and women.

Doubtless there are people who continue to consider love above dollars and cents. Particularly is this true of that class whom economic necessity has forced to become self-supporting. The tremendous change in woman's position, wrought by that mighty factor, is indeed phenomenal when we reflect that it is but a short time since she has entered the industrial arena. Six million women wage-earners; six million women, who have the equal right with men to be exploited, to be robbed, to go on strike; aye, to starve even. Anything more, my lord? Yes, six million age-workers in every walk of life, from the highest brain work to the most difficult menial labor in the mines and on the railroad tracks; yes, even detectives and policemen. Surely the emancipation is complete.

Yet with all that, but a very small number of the vast army of women wage-workers look upon work as a permanent issue, in the same light as does man. No matter how decrepit the latter, he has been taught to be independent, self-supporting. Oh, I know that no one is really independent in our economic tread mill; still, the poorest specimen of a man hates to be a parasite; to be known as such, at any rate.

The woman considers her position as worker transitory, to be thrown aside for the first bidder. That is why it is infinitely harder to organize women than men. "Why should I join a union? I am going to get married, to have a home." Has she not been taught from infancy to look upon that as her ultimate calling? She learns soon enough that the home, though not so large a prison as the factory, has more solid doors and bars. It has a keeper so faithful that naught can escape him. The most tragic part, however, is that the home no longer frees her from wage slavery; it only increases her task.

According to the latest statistics submitted before a Committee "on labor and wages, and congestion of Population," ten per cent. of the wage workers in New York City alone are married, yet they must continue to work at the most poorly paid labor in the world. Add to this horrible aspect the drudgery of house work, and what remains of the protection and glory of the home? As a matter of fact, even the middle class girl in marriage can not speak of her home, since it is the man who creates her sphere. It is not important whether the husband is a brute or a darling. What I wish to prove is that marriage guarantees woman a home only by the grace of her husband. There she moves about in his home, year after year until her aspect of life and human affairs becomes as flat, narrow, and drab as her surroundings. Small wonder if she becomes a nag, petty, quarrelsome, gossipy, unbearable, thus driving the man from the house. She could not go, if she wanted to; there is no place to go. Besides, a short period of married life, of complete surrender of all faculties, absolutely incapacitates the average woman for the outside world. She becomes reckless in appearance, clumsy in her movements, dependent in her decisions, cowardly in her judgment, a weight and a bore, which most men grow to hate and despise. Wonderfully inspiring atmosphere for the bearing of life, is it not?

But the child, how is it to be protected, if not for marriage? After all, is not that the most important consideration? The sham, the hypocrisy of it! Marriage protecting the child, yet thousands of children destitute and homeless. Marriage protecting the child, yet orphan asylums and reformatories over crowded, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children keeping busy in rescuing the little victims from "loving" parents, to place them under more loving care, the Gerry Society. Oh, the mockery of it!

Marriage may have the power to "bring the horse to water," but has it ever made him drink? The law will place the father under arrest, and put him in convict's clothes; but has that ever stilled the hunger of the child? If the parent has no work, or if he hides his identity, what does marriage do then? It invokes the law to bring the man to "justice," to put him safely behind closed doors; his labor, however, goes not to the child, but to the State. The child receives but a blighted memory of its father's stripes.

As to the protection of the woman,---therein lies the curse of marriage. Not that it really protects her, but the very idea is so revolting, such an outrage and insult on life, so degrading to human dignity, as to forever condemn this parasitic institution.

It is like that other paternal arrangement ---capitalism. It robs man of his birthright, stunts his growth, poisons his body, keeps him in ignorance, in poverty and dependence, and then institutes charities that thrive on the last vestige of man's self-respect.

The institution of marriage makes a parasite of woman, an absolute dependent. It incapacitates her for life's struggle, annihilates her social consciousness, paralyzes her imagination, and then imposes its gracious protection, which is in reality a snare, a travesty on human character.

If motherhood is the highest fulfillment of woman's nature, what other protection does it need save love and freedom? Marriage but defiles, outrages, and corrupts her fulfillment. Does it not say to woman, Only when you follow me shall you bring forth life? Does it not condemn her to the block, does it not degrade and shame her if she refuses to buy her right to motherhood by selling herself? Does not marriage only sanction motherhood, even though conceived in hatred, in compulsion? Yet, if motherhood be of free choice, of love, of ecstasy, of defiant passion, does it not place a crown of thorns upon an innocent head and carve in letters of blood the hideous epithet, Bastard? Were marriage to contain all the virtues claimed for it, its crimes against motherhood would exclude it forever from the realm of love.

Love, the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; love, the defier of all laws, of all conventions; love, the freest, the most powerful moulder of human destiny; how can such an all-compelling force be synonymous with that poor little State and Church-begotten weed, marriage?

Free love? As if love is anything but free! Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love. Man has subdued bodies, but all the power on earth has been unable to subdue love. Man has conquered whole nations, but all his armies could not conquer love. Man has chained and fettered the spirit, but he has been utterly helpless before love. High on a throne, with all the splendor and pomp his gold can command, man is yet poor and desolate, if love passes him by. And if it stays, the poorest hovel is radiant with warmth, with life and color. Thus love has the magic power to make of a beggar a king. Yes, love is free; it can dwell in no other atmosphere. In freedom it gives itself unreservedly, abundantly, completely. All the laws on the statutes, all the courts in the universe, cannot tear it from the soil, once love has taken root. If, however, the soil is sterile, how can marriage make it bear fruit? It is like the last desperate struggle of fleeting life against death.

Love needs no protection; it is its own protection. So long as love begets life no child is deserted, or hungry, or famished for the want of affection. I know this to be true. I know women who became mothers in freedom by the men they loved. Few children in wedlock enjoy the care, the protection, the devotion free motherhood is capable of bestowing.

The defenders of authority dread the advent of a free motherhood, lest it will rob them of their prey. Who would fight wars? Who would create wealth? Who would make the policeman, the jailer, if woman were to refuse the indiscriminate breeding of children? The race, the race! shouts the king, the president, the capitalist, the priest. The race must be preserved, though woman be degraded to a mere machine, --- and the marriage institution is our only safety valve against the pernicious sex-awakening of woman. But in vain these frantic efforts to maintain a state of bondage. In vain, too, the edicts of the Church, the mad attacks of rulers, in vain even the arm of the law. Woman no longer wants to be a party to the production of a race of sickly, feeble, decrepit, wretched human beings, who have neither the strength nor moral courage to throw off the yoke of poverty and slavery. Instead she desires fewer and better children, begotten and reared in love and through free choice; not by compulsion, as marriage imposes. Our pseudo-moralists have yet to learn the deep sense of responsibility toward the child, that love in freedom has awakened in the breast of woman. Rather would she forego forever the glory of motherhood than bring forth life in an atmosphere that breathes only destruction and death. And if she does become a mother, it is to give to the child the deepest and best her being can yield. To grow with the child is her motto; she knows that in that manner alone call she help build true manhood and womanhood.

Ibsen must have had a vision of a free mother, when, with a master stroke, he portrayed Mrs. Alving. She was the ideal mother because she had outgrown marriage and all its horrors, because she had broken her chains, and set her spirit free to soar until it returned a personality, regenerated and strong. Alas, it was too late to rescue her life's joy, her Oswald; but not too late to realize that love in freedom is the only condition of a beautiful life. Those who, like Mrs. Alving, have paid with blood and tears for their spiritual awakening, repudiate marriage as an imposition, a shallow, empty mockery. They know, whether love last but one brief span of time or for eternity, it is the only creative, inspiring, elevating basis for a new race, a new world.

In our present pygmy state love is indeed a stranger to most people. Misunderstood and shunned, it rarely takes root; or if it does, it soon withers and dies. Its delicate fiber can not endure the stress and strain of the daily grind. Its soul is too complex to adjust itself to the slimy woof of our social fabric. It weeps and moans and suffers with those who have need of it, yet lack the capacity to rise to love's summit.

Some day, some day men and women will rise, they will reach the mountain peak, they will meet big and strong and free, ready to receive, to partake, and to bask in the golden rays of love. What fancy, what imagination, what poetic genius can foresee even approximately the potentialities of such a force in the life of men and women. If the world is ever to give birth to true companionship and oneness, not marriage, but love will be the parent.

Green Baby Blog

2007-06-22T14:44:00.000-07:00

I applied for a job but no luck so far... looks like she's got the site up and running though. Welcome to the club. I must have been a little too radical for her. Or maybe my kind of green is a touch damper than hers. Ahhh, the 'Clean Green' parents, how I love to sit back and chuckle as they scramble over eco-friendly household cleaning products while I grab a big jug of vinegar and get the hell out of Fred Meyer, conveniently 'forgetting' it under my orange shopping cart/toddler car.

Books for Multiples!

2007-06-21T14:27:00.000-07:00

A perfect children's book for triplets
One of the most popular children's stories on the market is Guess How Much I Love You written by Sam McBratney and illustrated by Anita Jeram. The pair teamed up again in an equally enjoyable book called You're All My Favorites which is a perfect story for triplets. The story focuses on a family with a mother bear, a father bear and three baby bears. Each night, the parents tuck their three babies into bed and tell them they are all the most wonderful baby bears in the world. The baby bears wonder how their parents know they are the most wonderful bears in the world. Each baby bear questions how he or she could be as wonderful as his or her siblings when they are all quite different. The first worries that he does not have patches on his fur like his brother and sister. The second is concerned because she is the only girl bear, and the third bear is confused because he is the smallest of the three. The mother and father bear explain that the baby bears are all perfect exactly the way they are, and the differences between them don't matter at all. They're all still their mother and father's favorites.

Top 9 Books for Parents of Twins/Multiples
During pregnancy, I read every available baby book. When we found out that we were expecting not one -- but TWO -- babies, my husband's first reaction was, "I guess we need to get more books!" Among the numerous books about twins and multiples, many are extremely helpful; some are merely interesting, and others, well... who has time to read them all? Here's a list of some of the best.

Twins Magazine - What a bunch of crap. I can't believe we commodify every last niche and cranny. I'm so glad I live in the woods

City of Olympia to charge parents for after-school programs???!!!

2007-06-15T18:27:00.000-07:00

I lifted this in its entirety from Olyblog.

Thanks Emmett, this is pretty ridiculous. If they tried that shit out in Shelton (where we live), no one would show up to S.O.C.K. (Save Our County's Kids) and they wouldn't make any money off it. Sounds like a good way to propagate unnecessary domestic violence, additional youth crime and a hell of a lot more bad mojo. After-school programs need to be free to the families and kids who need to use them. We, as a community, are responsible for figuring out ways to support and improve these selfless and direly-needed organizations however possible without incurring fees on their patrons, who doubtless are fairly hard-up.

My BIG QUESTION however is this: What happens to the poor kids? The ones who get edged out of this brilliant new picture for a closer-to-self-sustaining after-school program?

Trouble is, these programs can't be self-sustaining. (Unless we install rooftop gardens, gather together some hotshot fundraisers and canvassers, employ slave labor from the kids, or get them really, really interested in making and/or selling something or themselves... which is a whole slew of cans of worms to figure out.)

_______________________________

Almost every week this is the "What's on the city council's plate this week" review. I don't cover everything, so if you want the full rundown, read the packet and agenda yourself.

It looks like the city council is going to start charging kids (or rather their families) $100 to attend after school programs that the city runs in several Olympia School District buildings. Which is too freaking bad, I know some parents are probably using these programs as baby sitters, but that is honestly where the need is coming from. A lot of families have two bread winners, and middle school aged (and younger) kids don't have options for supervised play outside of these programs.

Here is the meat of the city's decision making process for this Tuesday. A bit of the background (OPARD is Olympia Parks and Recreation):

During 2007 operating budget deliberations last fall, Olympia Parks, Arts and Recreation (OPARD) staff was directed to prepare some options for a fee-based middle school after school program. These options would be an alternative to cutting one of the four after school sites as originally proposed by our department in the 2005 constrained prioritization process. Council agreed to continue full funding for the entire after school program through the 2006-2007 school-year to give staff time to come back with some options for a fee-based program. Council directed staff that when looking at cost recovery for the after school program to consider an amount that will make the program sustainable into the future and that will have a sliding fee provision for those students that qualify for free or reduced meals at school.
This past winter and spring, staff has met with Olympia School District (OSD) administration on a regular basis to discuss options or a fee-based program, including how much to charge and how to administer the fee collection.
During their research, it became clear to staff that a significant number of students would not be able to afford the full fee. The middle school principals estimate 30-50% of the students that attend the after school programs also qualify for the free and reduced meal program. While OPARD has a scholarship program in place for families that can’t afford to pay, we do not have enough annual donations or staff capacity to fundraise for that account to meet the likely demand that we will see on the fund.

Here is the option that city staff is recommending to the city council:

Implement a fee of $100 for 25 visits which is projected to be 25% cost recovery.
Pros
1. This fee level is reasonable compared to what many families pay for childcare or for other youth after school programs or day care.
2. This is a good starting point for the fee, both for the families of current participants to get used to the fee, and as a way for our staff to get comfortable collecting fees and gauging year to year how much revenue will be collected.
Cons
1. Implementation of any fee may reduce participation in those families that may not be able to afford the program but might not take advantage of fee waivers. OSD staff have concurred that there will be a likely drop off in participation due to stigma issues. While OSD gets high levels of participation in financial assistance programs such as free and reduced meals in elementary schools, those numbers drop off in the middle schools.
2. Current operating rules prohibit OPARD from waiving fees for some participants while charging for the same services for a different group of participants. The City’s scholarship fund does not have the resources to meet the very likely increased demand for scholarships. For this reason, staff requests a change in policy to allow us to waive fees for those children that qualify for free and reduced meals at school.
3. There will be an unavoidable shift in some site staff time spent administering the fee program, leaving less time to give participants their complete attention.

The staff ruled out my idea of trying to bring the Boys and Girls club (here and here ) in the fray:

Option 4. – Contract the program out to another agency

Pros
1. Could potentially save more than the original proposed budget cut of one site.
Cons
1. Large reduction in staff hours would impact other programs areas in which the after school staff also work. This would inhibit OPARD’s ability to sustain the large spectrum of very successful programs it runs for our public.
2. OPARD could not guarantee the quality of the program run by another agency.
3. An outside agency would still likely have to charge participants to keep the program sustained, as is the model for other current youth after school programming in the community.
4. Would have impacts to the OSD/OPARD 5-year joint use agreement. If the program was no longer an OPARD program, it would shift the balance of what we provide OSD vs. what we get in return.

Just some quick thoughts on their con points:

2. If an outside group (like the B&G club) were to come in and replace the city, would it be the city's responsibility to guarantee quality, or would it be the school district's, since it would be in a school building? It isn't like the Boys and Girls Club is a fly by night operation, they have a track record.

3. The Tumwater B&G Club charges $25 a year.

1&4. Sounds like "it would change the status quo." Duh, that isn't a good reason not to do it.

If the Boys and Girls were to come in, I'm not saying it would be cheaper on us, either through the city or the school district. It is perfectly feasible that Tumwater and Lacey both provide funds to B&G Club for their services, I really don't know.

Wow, that sucks.

Submitted by Janet B on Mon, 06/11/2007 - 3:04pm.

On top of rising gas prices, $100 for 25 visits... that's a lot! What if you've got three kids? That's going to be very hard for some families.

Taking Children Seriously & the Future of Liberty

2007-05-16T12:15:00.000-07:00

This chick kicks ass.

TCS: The Final Phase of The Enlightenment

Transcript of a speech given at the World Libertarian Conference in London, Ontario, in July, 2000.

by: Sarah Fitz-Claridge

Taking Children Seriously (TCS) is the name of an organisation I founded to promote the libertarian educational philosophy.

How can there be such a thing as the libertarian educational philosophy? Aren't parents in a libertarian society free to educate their children in any way they wish?

Yes. But that doesn't make every possible choice morally right, or best for the child, or compatible with the survival of the libertarian society. To satisfy these criteria, we must look more deeply than libertarian political philosophy – which is basically about how a society can run without the initiation of physical force.

What justifies both libertarian political philosophy and TCS education theory in my opinion is reason – something which, I fear, has yet to emerge in the spheres of education and childrearing.

Many parents do a very good job of bringing their children up to believe in authority and obedience to dictators, whether parents or the state. Recently, I had the misfortune to be present when someone I know was subjected to a violent attack by his parent. I was very shaken and didn't throw myself between my young friend and the angry adult, but I did manage to pluck up the courage (once I poked my head up from behind the sofa where I was hiding) to express the opinion that hitting children may not be the best way to deal with disagreements, and that it may not be entirely morally unobjectionable. Perhaps I was less diplomatic than the parent thought appropriate, because he accused me of trying to coerce him into changing his parenting practices, and then played the “children-are-property” card: “It's none of your business how I raise my child.” ...Read More...

More TCS links:

Wikipedia - Taking Children Seriously

Genius Toiling in Obscurity's take on TCS

This is not the same as that... so don't any of my Aussie readers mistake the two.

The Real Costs of Nuclear War: Radioactive Breastmilk, Birth Defects, Contaminated Food Chains

2007-05-16T11:33:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm an Eastern Washington baby, born and raised in the downwind nuclear shadow of Hanford, so this kind of stuff hits especially close to home. If you think humans only suffer injury or death when a plant melts down or a bomb goes boom, think again. Isn't reproduction a freedom and a right to be protected at all costs? Shouldn't the health risks to pregnant women and small children, when coupled with the environmental costs and wreckage, be enough to convince people that nuclear energy is not even remotely safe and we should perhaps find better ways of reducing energy consumption rather than increasing energy production? Anyway, here's a bunch of terrible news on uranium mining in other countries and on Native American reservations, depleted uranium, radioactive breast milk, birth defects in infants due to radiation sickness acquired by their mother from working in nuclear power plants, Hanford's Environmental Impact Statement ... you know, some of that dark underbelly we don't often hear about unless we go looking.

Miscarriage, stillbirths after mining

Genetic Effects and Birth Defects from Radiation Exposure - Hanford Health Information Network

Campaign Against Depleted Uranium

Uranium Mining in Utah
History of Uranium in Utah

Gulf War Syndrome, Depleted Uranium And The Dangers Of Low-Level Radiation

The High Cost of Uranium in Navajo Land

Claims by uranium companies in the United States have soared

Indigeneous Peoples Call for Global Ban on Uranium Mining

Wikipedia - Uranium Mining

New Uranium Mining Projects in the USA

Libertarian Socialist Alliance for Self Managed Energy Systems

Australian Message Board on uranium mining and a nuclear waste dump

Online Book on Uranium Mining in Saskatchewan

Industries that are Harmful to Women

Fighting breast cancer: A Native woman's journal

Miners' health may be the cost of a nuclear future

Cancer mortality in a Texas county with prior uranium mining and milling activities, 1950–2001

India's Uranium Nightmare

Final Hanford Site Solid Waste Program Environmental Impact Statemant January 2004

Hanford Comprehensive Land-Use Plan
Environmental Impact Statements
September 1999

Uranium mining left a legacy of death

Manuel Pino at THE WORLD URANIUM HEARING, SALZBURG 1992

Uranium Mining and the Laguna People

The First Carnival of Radical Feminists

2007-05-16T10:50:00.000-07:00

Thanks to my gang down under at http://www.katipo.net.nz/stanselen/ for bringing this to my attention:

The First Carnival of Radical Feminists

I can't wait until we have stuff like this organized for fathers and groups of young men.

Other recent highlights from my radical anarchist sister:

Trafficking of Women and Children

Raising children collectively…

So I hacked the tip of my left thumb off with a two-century old sugarcane harvester about a week and a half ago. That's been a joy to deal with. Got to learn how to shuffle cards, change diapers, garden, shower, dishes, etc. with no left thumb. Give it a shot sometime, it's trickily challenging and it might even be fun if you were only pretending to be a crippled gimp. Good thing my gorgeous girlfriend has been around to pamper me and help with the near-impossible tasks.

Still plugging away on my goddamn lawn and garden, trying to knock most of the grass down before the girls' birthday bash on June 2nd (e-mail Steph or I for details if you're planning on attending). Camping with your favorite crazies, big and small! Anyway, I've devised a brilliant system for keeping the deer (and my stupid cats) out of my garden:

or

just kidding. i just curse at the deer and throw kids books at my cats and dream of the days (next year?) of fancy fences when my future fat wallet learns to be a little less fickle.

Despite my infrequent posts and scattered correspondence skills, Pirate Papa has been getting more and more traffic. I just have yet to find that happy medium of personality and privacy demanded by this marriage of publicity and parenthood. So as soon as I find my new voice we'll get this hunk 'o junk really up and running.

Thanks to my faithful, loyal audience (friends and strangers alike) and to all those weirdos who find my site through google image searches or strange poorly spelled pornographic searches resulting in the mangled english versions of my twin toddler's twisted talk. It takes all kinds.

Had a great trip to Walla Walla with Hannah and the girls. More decompression time (there's never enough) at my old cabin near the Oregon border. Girls got Grandma and Grandpa time. All those friggin' books got worked on and over a bit more, the slow evolution of our little book empire.

My vegetables are thirsty and so my words must wait until this clock again corresponds with the proper channels of inspiration, piled-up notes and housework apathy.

No Nightmares, Please - Why is so much children's poetry full of sadism and doom?

2007-05-15T10:46:00.000-07:00

A nice piece by my new internet buddy.

by Jeff Gordinier

One day it dawns on you that your kid has watched too many episodes of Dora the Explorer. Every time the Dora character known as “Map” shows up on screen and sings, “I’m the Map I’m the Map I’m the Map I’m the Map,” you entertain private fantasies of dousing him in lighter fluid, torching him with a match, and giggling uncontrollably while he flails in agony. If a cartoon inspires this much raw hatred before you catch the train to work, it’s probably not a good idea for your kid to watch a ton of it.

So maybe you want to expose your children to fine poetry instead. Which is great, except that you live in a country where some moron makes way more money than you do by writing lyrics like “I’m the Map I’m the Map I’m the Map I’m the Map,” so you’re sort of on your own. And when you come right down to it, reading poems to your adorable offspring is, like breastfeeding, much harder than you think.

When I first tried to introduce my daughter to the wonders of verse, I thought I would kick things off with a couple of haikus, mostly because they are super-short, so she wouldn’t have time to run away. I picked up a collection by Basho, the magnificent Japanese poet of the 17th century, opened the book at random, and flipped to this:

Nothing in the cry
of cicadas suggests they
are about to die

Ummm. Gosh, I thought . . . impermanence, death, a melancholy beauty—couldn’t we wait until kindergarten before we got into all that? (Now, if only it was the Map who was about to croak . . . ) I flipped around, and up came this little gem:

Whore and monk, we sleep
under one roof together,
moon in a field of clover

Uh, no. Won’t be reading that one...Read More...

Nature Deficit Disorder

2007-05-02T15:21:00.000-07:00

Just got a copy of the Book Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature Deficit Disorder and started reading it today. It is reinforcing a lot of ideas I knew to be true, having grown up in forested seclusion, and helping me realize a whole skill set of which I was only vaguely conscious until recently. Will toss up a review upon completion (which at my current speed of reading might be one or two months unfortunately). In the meantime, here's what the web has to say:

http://www.xanga.com/Pfeffy/445299279/long-time-to-write.html
http://dir.salon.com/story/mwt/feature/2005/06/02/Louv/index.html
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4665933
http://www.edutopia.org/1629
http://www.wbhm.org/News/2006/NatureDeficit.html
http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2006/03/30/louv/
http://www.truthforce.info/?q=node/view/1175
http://www.truthforce.info/?q=node/view/2186

Alternative Medicine in Danger!

2007-04-16T13:49:00.000-07:00

Speak Up For Health Freedom
by Owen Waters

You wouldn't think it could happen in the USA.

"The land of the brave and the free" is about to become a lot
less free unless enough of the brave stand up and voice their
opinions by April 30th.

The Food and Drug Administration plans to pass laws to
"protect" you from alternative health care, complementary
medicine and natural supplements.

If the FDA passes these proposed laws, you will no longer be
able to buy vitamins, visit a chiropractor, acupuncturist or
massage therapist... UNLESS you first obtain permission from a
medical doctor.

Now, I don't know how much your M.D. knows about natural
health care. Most of the doctors that I've met so far know
nothing beyond how to select the most capable, poisonous drug
to SUPPRESS the symptoms of illness. I have yet to hear one
talk about actually CURING an illness.

If this legislation passes, you will no longer be free to make
your own natural health care choices. The medical doctor from
whom you will HAVE to seek permission will have no knowledge
whatsoever of the many natural therapies which actually help to
CURE illnesses.

Make no mistake about it. While medicine has made great
strides in the last few decades, we are still very much in the
MEDICAL DARK AGES.

Alternative and complementary medicine IS the future. It is
from these fields that the miracle cures of tomorrow will
emerge... unless these emerging alternatives are squashed and
you are left in the tender care of the poisonous drug industry
and their Medical Doctor sales force.

In fact, this thinly-disguised ploy for power over your body
sounds more like the brainchild of a greedy drug industry
rather than the public servants whose duty it is to protect
you. With this legislation, they plan to protect you so
vigorously that, should you try to work around it, you will
face fines and prison.

Time is running out. The period for public comments on this
proposal ends on April 30, 2007.

The Health Freedom USA organization has made the public
comments process easy with a pre-defined petition to the FDA.
Just add your name to the list and you'll be joining hands with
millions of caring people just like yourself.

Either visit their web site at www.HealthFreedomUSA.org or,
better yet, use this direct link to their active campaign:

http://tinyurl.com/2u7ghc

times change as often as diapers

2007-04-08T12:00:00.000-07:00

So I've spent less time with my grls in the past week and a half than ever before in their lives and I realized that I have to get used to this... because they won't always be two and a half, because they're growing up before my very eyes, because they have friends and family above and beyond the sheltered care I've given them on this first leg of their journey in the world.

It's an interesting melange of ecstatic joy at my own slowly rediscovered freedom, painful lonliness at losing little bits of myself selflessly gifted to these gorgeous creatures I call my daughters, realizing at the same time that they are not mine, or anyone else's for that matter. They belong to themselves and I can never change that, only grow and guide and change alongside them.

Almost gone are those days I've grown so accustomed to, lounging around most of the week at the farmhouse pretending the rest of the world doesn't exist. What comes next? Little roving packs of young children, activities with friends, maybe school, daycare, whole weeks with grandpa and grandma and not me. I imagine the next several rungs of the ladder all the way up to begging for the car keys, worrying about sex and whether it can ever be 'safe', sneaking out at night, college, careers, lovers of their own, families, grandkids, legacies, all those brthdays tumbled into one another. What would it be like, having the same birthday as your closest friend and sister year after long or short year?

Breakfast beckons. I shove this tangle of emotions back down inside before it bubbles over completely, that metaphorical bucket of crabs we always kick around like old stories or rusty cans...

Gone A Spell, Back Again

2007-04-06T23:06:00.000-07:00

I beg no forgiveness for my recent absence. A much needed vacation in Walla Walla, with a serious theme of self-improvement and re-creation. Girls get grandparent time, I get time with Hannah, some book work done, and a nice four night stint at my childhood cabin. Head muddled, diet unsatisfactory, head cloudy but clearing. We arrive back past seven tonight, Hannah makes a marvelous feast for us. I put the girls to bed as Tomas from Rad Dad arrives with his daughter, her friend and Artnoose in tow.

Catch their Radical Parenting & Radical Letterpress presentation at Last Word Books Saturday night at 7pm!

A few steampunk baby pics in this series...

2007-03-30T22:07:00.000-07:00

although there is a serious lack of material in this category of The Underground Baby League I'd like to point out. Guess I'll have to get The Dragon of the Honk and Tonk out here to improvise a few costumes and pix one of these days so we can get the corner on this underappreciated market.

if only it were acceptable to wrap yer kid in tin foil and shuffle them off to some Mechanical Wizard's Academy. Aren't we supposed to stimulate their little mind-boxes with fresh fruit from the imagination tree? Well let's kick into high gear and take them back a century plus-half, garb 'em up 'er down and toss those babes out on the cobblestones to garner themselves a little living, wot?

Who's Your Daddy? - Best Daddy and Papa Blogs of 2006

2007-03-29T21:51:00.000-07:00

Knew about a lot of these but a few were new to me.

Getting ready to go to Walla Walla for four days with my girls and Hannah, been full to brimming with gardening and personal emotional realignment, a little surgery from the inside out. Being in a relationship again so soon, even a good one, strains me at times. I find myself scared without knowing why, a smell I can place but not locate. I trudge through the monotony of chores and bills, checks and balancing acts, searching the small stuff for some substance to shore up my sore heart and patch me through 'til tomorrow.

My hard-copy zine of Pirate Papa got reviewed in Green Anarchy's magazine. Not a very good review, but Zerzan gave me a good word after Felonious Skunk wound his way through a long-winded, self-deprecating piece of boredom. I took offense at first but then I just felt sorry for him. He's a new father and doesn't think fathers are interesting? Watch out buddy. You're in for a ride. Any publicity is good publicity in my opinion and if you don't like my work then don't waste your time reading it.

Even if I didn't like his review I suppose I've taken a few tips from it and changed the attitude of Pirate Papa a bit, less journaling and more journalism as of late. Then again, maybe that's just due to the fact that my time has been swallowed whole by spring and the world and the beauty encapsulated within a toddler's blossoming eyes and big, big mouth.

A few links I've turned up in my internet travels:

Dads & Daughters - WE ARE the only organization dedicated to maximizing the power and potential of father-daughter relationships. We support fathers and stepfathers no matter where they are. We work hard to make a better life for every girl.

WE BELIEVE that all dads and daughters benefit when fathers and stepfathers actively and deeply engage in the lives of their daughters and help transform the pervasive cultural messages that devalue girls and women.

Divorced Dads Matter - Practical Information and Support for Divorced and Divorcing Dads

Good Parenting Resolutions

Family Pride is the national non-profit organization committed to securing family equality for all loving families, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer parents, guardians and allies. Our work consists of strategically linked initiatives—broad in scope, but simple in vision—love, justice, family, equality. We make change. We share information. We build community. We are visible.

Marijuana and Children: A Smattering of Articles from the Web

2007-03-24T08:49:00.000-07:00

I'm glad there's some decent articles, books and discussion boards kicking this idea around the edges of the mainstream in more productive ways than when I was in D.A.R.E. so many years ago. What a joke that was. You ever try parenting on weed!??! Enjoy the articles I dug up:

Is it always wrong for kids to smoke marijuana? Two families discuss their pot-smoking kids.

Kids and pot; a controversial topic if there ever was one, with many pot advocates buying into the prohibitionists' idea that it's always bad for children to use marijuana.

"Protecting kids from drugs" is the mantra of justification for prohibitionists who want adults thrown in jail for using cannabis. But it isn't just anti-potties who decry underage cannabis use. For example, at a marijuana rally, three high school kids came up and asked me if I would smoke with them. I did and found them to be witty, savvy, fun people. When I returned to the activist's booth I'd been at, however, one of the powerhouses of the marijuana movement told me I was immoral for smoking with the kids.

"We believe it's wrong for kids to get high," I was told. "You're setting a bad example."

I was surprised that a person who publicly states that the cannabis plant is a healing herb with medicinal, spiritual and industrial uses would so vehemently oppose its use by young people. I realized then that it would be helpful to discuss kids and pot, and to solicit a dialogue on the subject between this magazine and its readers.

We want to hear what you have to say about the issue, and I'll be sharing what I've learned as a marijuana writer and researcher.

In future articles you'll read about high school students who got tired of drug dogs and strip searches and stood up to their oppressors, and a tribe of pot-smoking pygmies with kids who smoke African weed while running through jungles and climbing trees. You'll think about dilemmas faced by parents, whose love for herb is complicated by prohibition and love for their children.

In the world of enlightened cannabis use, there are no pot crimes, but there are choices. Should kids get high? What happens to them when they do? Why do they use pot? What should parents and society do about it, if anything? Let's answer these questions together.

Communication and experimentation

I was at an Oregon farmer's home photographing his grow room. His ten-year- old son, Jeremy, was cooking dinner, some kind of Thai recipe, with coconut milk, lemon grass, and cannabis leaves.

It smelled wonderful, but I was wondering if Jeremy was going to partake of what I assumed would be a psychoactive supper. I saw him tong a fat Indica leaf from the soup and pop it in his mouth, which pretty much answered my unspoken question: he used pot.

At dinner, I questioned Jeremy and his dad about marijuana use as I greedily slurped down the delicious soup.

Jeremy's father John told me that Jeremy had asked him two years ago about the plants in the garage, about the wacky tobaccy dad smoked after a day on the tractor.

"It was obvious the boy wanted to try some," said John, a single father who'd raised Jeremy since age 7 when the boy's mother was killed in a car wreck.

"I told him, 'Go ahead,' but it's strong stuff and you best not smoke up all my stash,"...Read More...

More Links:

Tips for talking to your children about marijuana.

Kids and Pot: Scary? Not!

Adults Teach Small Children To Smoke Pot - Youtube

A good message board discussion on this topic

It's Just a Plant: a Children's Story of Marijuana - written by a former DARE Officer.

The above book causes a bit of a stir, all the way up to Congress

Papa - Wikipedia Entry

2007-03-23T17:08:00.000-07:00

Papa can refer to:

* affectionate for father in Latin and various Romance languages
o hence, Pope in various languages
o also, Papar (Culdees), Irish monks
o many languages (often unrelated) have words with labial consonants and open vowels as their word for "father" and "mother"; /papa/ is just one example. A discussion of this phenomenon can be found in the article Mama and papa.
o some people also refer to their grandfathers as "papa".
* P in the NATO phonetic alphabet
* Papa class submarine
* pāpa in Sanskrit, the concept of sin in Hinduism
* Potato in Spanish, in some dialects slang for "food"

people:

* Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), nickname
* Nick "Papa" Kho, former professional pick-up artist and part owner in the pick-up and seduction company Real Social Dynamics
* Papa Bouba Diop (born 1978), a football (soccer) player from Senegal.
* Rav Papa (?-375), a Babylonian Amora from the Talmud

in mythology:

* Rangi and Papa, the primordial parents according to Māori mythology

in geography:

* Pápa, a town in Hungary
* Papa Stour

in arts and popular culture:

* Papa (drama), a South Korean drama
* Papa Lazarou, a fictional character from The League of Gentlemen.
* Papa (song), from the popular BBC film/Tv Film Gideon's Daughter.

acronyms:

* Professional and Amateur Pinball Association

The Low-Down On Organic Veggies for Yer Family

2007-03-22T17:56:00.000-07:00

Feeding Your Family: Organic Veggies on a Budget

"Anybody who's shopped for organically-grown produce has probably experienced the sticker-shock that goes along with it. It's a fact that in most cases organically-grown supermarket produce is more expensive than its non-organic counterpart, but I think a larger number of parents would likely grab the organic stuff if the two were closer in price..."Read More...

I'm really lucky to live in the Pacific Northwest, where we have superb access to organic, locally grown foods without expending much effort. But, with the current trend of 'going green' being set by places of such ill-repute as Fred Myer and Wal_Mart hopefully everyone will soon be informed as to the benefits, politics, pitfalls and corporate scams revolving around the food we eat.

I would add to this nice little snippet from Strollerderby a few things: Food Co-Ops are a great way to save money, support local agriculture and dine on organic foods without signing on to a yearly CSA plan, which some family incomes cannot logically support (directory of food cooperatives); I would also recommend growing your own food! Check out the book Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades by Steve Solomon, or, if you live in an urban area, research rooftop gardens to see if your building can support one or start a kitchen garden. Think you have no room? Ha!

Think again. In a hundred square feet with twenty minutes a day one can grow enough fruit and vegetables to heavily supplement their family's food needs. And, if you live in a tiny apartment you'd still be shocked at the amount of plants you could cram in there and the money you'll save growing your own food. Also, I'd like to throw a few reasons why Organic Foods are awesome (this is from Wikipedia):

For the environment

In several surveys that have looked at smaller studies to build an overall comparison between conventional and organic systems of farming a general agreement on benefits has been built. In these surveysit has been found that:

Organic farms do not release synthetic pesticides into the environment—some of which have the potential to harm local wildlife.
Organic farms are better than conventional farms at sustaining diverse ecosystems, i.e., populations of plants and insects, as well as animals.
When calculated either per unit area or per unit of yield, organic farms use less energy and produce less waste, e.g., waste such as packaging materials for chemicals.

See "Organic FAQs" in the journal Nature for more details.

One study found a 20% smaller yield from organic farms using 50% less fertilizer and 97% less pesticide.Studies comparing yields have had mixed results.Supporters claim that organically managed soil has a higher qualityand higher water retention. This may help increase yields for organic farms in drought years. One study of two organic farming systems and one conventional found that, in one year's severe crop season drought, organic soybean yields were 52% and 96% higher than the conventional system and organic maize yields were 37% higher in one system, but 62% lower in the other.Studies are also consistent in showing that organic farms are more energy efficient.

For producers

For those who work on farms, there have been many studies on the health effects of pesticide exposure.Even when pesticides are used correctly, they still end up in the air and bodies of farm workers. Through these studies, organophosphate pesticides have become associated with acute health problems such as abdominal pain, dizziness, headaches, nausea, vomiting, as well as skin and eye problems. In addition, there have been many other studies that have found pesticide exposure is associated with more severe health problems such as respiratory problems, memory disorders, dermatologic conditions,cancer, depression, neurologic deficits, miscarriages, and birth defects. Summaries of peer-reviewed research have examined the link between pesticide exposure and neurological outcomes and cancer in organophosphate-exposed workers.

For consumers

A study published by the National Research Council in 1993 determined that for infants and children, the major source of exposure to pesticides is through diet.A recent study in 2006 measured the levels of organophosphorus pesticide exposure in 23 schoolchildren before and after replacing their diet with organic food. In this study it was found that levels of organophosphorus pesticide exposure dropped dramatically and immediately when the children switched to an organic diet.

Most conventionally grown foods contain pesticides and herbicide residues. There is controversial data on the health implications of certain pesticides. The herbicide Atrazine, for example, has been shown in some experiments to be a teratogen, even at concentrations as low as 0.1 part per billion, to emasculate male frogs by causing their gonads to produce eggs – effectively turning males into hermaphrodites.

The US Environmental Protection Agency and state agencies periodically review the licensing of suspect pesticides, but the process of de-listing is slow. One example of this slow process is exemplified by the pesticide Dichlorvos, or DDVP, which as recently as the year 2006 the EPA proposed its continued sale. The EPA has almost banned this pesticide on several occasions since the 1970s, but it never did so despite considerable evidence that suggests DDVP is not only carcinogenic but dangerous to the human nervous system – especially in children.

The Battle For Our Children's Minds

2007-03-22T00:14:00.000-07:00

Interesting article, can't say that I necessarily agree on all their points, but I must applaud their tone.

"A global and social transformation is taking place being manifested through the media, television, corporations, government agencies, the United Nations, and the educational system. The agents of change and the social engineers wish to purge our children's beliefs, value systems, their independence and individuality; their aim being to replace them with more global beliefs, universal values, and interdependence thus molding their fragile little minds, shifting them into group think. All the while with the state trying to undermine parental authority and influence, playing a greater role in a child's life and contributing to the further breakup of the family.

There is a battle on for our children's hearts and minds. With the educational system assuming direct control and responsibility for the development of children's attitudes and values, and through mental health screening, the government will be incorporating social and emotional development, a place where it does not seemingly belong. John Dewy, considered to be the father of progressive education said, “the society or groups is most important, and that independent individualists have a form of insanity.” Much of his teachings have become dominant in the American public school system..."Read More...

It’s Two Coochies to the Wall...

2007-03-20T22:14:00.000-07:00

...all day long with that boundless energy which can only be captured, exponentially magnified and fired directly at your central nervous system by parenting twin toddlers (or multiple toddlers of any kind). Mood no longer has anything to do with it. In fact, when they’re sick or miserable or pouting, they’re easier to care for. On the other paw, when they’re bouncing off the goddamn walls and more chipper than my chainsaw it seems like my energies are sapped even faster. I equate it with working room service at ______ hotel for someone like Anna Nicole Smith. If the light isn’t too bright in the bathroom for the fourth time that evening then the salmon wasn’t cooked just right or the napkins don’t match or she doesn’t want the napkins to match. In between housework and computerwork and bookwork I run little errands for my children all over the house, at their beck and call while constantly and gently demanding use of the word please, the phrases “thank you” and “you’re welcome” and the signs for all.

Their vocabulary and articulatory skills progress in amazing leaps and bounds, stop dead for a few days and then explode again, roman candles reflected in the mudpuddles and pools of apple juice beneath the kitchen table. I come to consider each day a dance of different activities, best choreographed by exhausted parents moments before each step must be made. This is the part where we collectively sigh and think to ourselves how we all feel that way sometimes but thank goodness we have a few things going for us, some semblance of a plan and a basic grasp on the art of the long view. Right?

The number of times a day I am brought to the brink of tears by some beautiful twist of Lyli’s little pink tongue or by some gracious act (often a rarity) by Scarleht on behalf of her temporarily beloved twin sister steadily increases with each passing week. Back and forth their mercurial moods rage on a pendulum anything but pacified. And I sit, seaside, watching their tides roll in. And it’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever born and birthed witness to.

Raising a Working-Class Culture

2007-03-20T13:47:00.000-07:00

Building a radical working class culture is part of the aim of many activists, unionists, and workers. For us in the Industrial Workers of the World, that idea is part of our very preamble: we say that “By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.” But it is not only our workplaces that need reorganization and solidarity: it’s also our homes and families, no matter what they look like. Women and single parents are especially hard hit by the way in which capitalism considers childrearing a ‘personal choice’ with no bearing on employer responsibilities. Pregnant women are pressured to leave decent jobs, and after giving birth find it increasingly difficult to find a job that will pay their bills. No parent wants to give up their children, but our society makes it intensely difficult to both have children and care for them. This burden falls disproportionately on women. Working women are 41% more likely to live in poverty than men, according to a study published by policy research center Legal Momentum. Another way of looking at this same statistic is to note that of all the adults living in extreme poverty - defined as making less than half of the poverty standard - sixty percent are women.

Childcare is a part of this problem. Parents who need to work to pay for housing, clothing, and groceries need to pay for childcare, and the average monthly cost of childcare in 2003 was $340. Single women are again hit disproportionately by this problem. Although men like the author of this sentence may talk a lot about gender equality and feminism, we rarely pull equal weight in the home, whether the work involved is the raising of our own children or the doing of the dishes. Even in dual-income families, women still do the vast majority of this ‘reproductive labor.’ Increasingly, we recognize the importance of supporting parents and children in this culture. Once they have children, new parents - especially mothers - often find themselves marginalized and overworked by the very movements that they helped build. Dependable childcare is often not provided at events. This is a problem for all parents, but women are perhaps the hardest hit. Across nearly every category, women still do the vast bulk of childraising. While women are doing this most vital of labors, radical men tend to have more relative freedom to engage in public work, union organizing, or activism. By default, men continue to dominate our institutions, set our priorities, and find themselves as the most active members of our union... Read More at the Embassy of Arcturus

a-parenting@lists.mutualaid.org

2007-03-19T23:57:00.000-07:00

An awesome discussion group I've known about for awhile now but just got around to joining. So I'm stealing their welcome letter and sharing it with ya'll. Makes me want to say: See we're not all commie-slackers, Louie! Louie is this guy who drinks across the street from my bookstore and ducks his head in to yell: "Godless Commies!" at anyone inside. This one's for you, Louie.

"Anarchist Parenting" is a forum dedicated to the sharing of practices and experiences which relate towards non-coercive parenting, child care and community support (or building such support structures) in a society in which strong emphasis is placed on hierarchy, domination and isolation of the nuclear family.

This is a place intended for the discussion of how parents and other child caregivers do and should treat and relate to children and young people, while focusing on the anarchist perspective. This forum also explores how various forms of hierarchy and domination, such as the State, capitalism and patriarchy, affect and relate to child-raising. This is also a place to exchange ideas on how to overcome the hierarchy and domination that exists in the area of parenting and child care.

Though it may touch on it, this is not specifically a forum for the discussion of schooling or educational approaches. Nor is this a forum for the discussion of anarchism or youth liberation in general.

This e-mail list exists to have an informative, respectful, and open discussion about anarchist parenting. With this being the case, it must be clear that anyone who persists in behavior contrary to this will be kicked and banned from the list. Here are some clear examples
of the behavior I am talking about:

- flaming or personally insulting other list members (including guilt-tripping others about their parenting methods)

- inhibiting a clear understanding of anarchism by continually insisting that anarchism is "pro-capitalism" or "pro-chaos".

- spamming the list with commercial advertisements
______________________________

___________ You may be interested in joining some other e-mail discussion lists that are indirectly related to anarchist parenting. Some of these lists are:

The TCS List, dedicated to discussing Taking Children Seriously and it's implications. To subscribe to this list, send a message to: listserv@listserv.aol.com saying (in the body of the message)

subscribe TCS your-first-name your-last-name

then follow the instructions to confirm your subscription.

The Radical Unschoolers List, dedicated to all families who choose to radically unschool their children. To subscribe to this list, just send a blank message to: RUL-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

The Anarchist Education List - "Discussion of various facets of anarchist thought as relates specifically to education." To join, send an email to: majordomo@boink.clark.net with the words: "subscribe anoked-l" in the BODY of the message.

The Anarchist Teachers list A list for anarchist and anti-authoritarian teachers, educators, schoolworkers, free skool instructors, and educational workers. You don't have to teach a class
in anarchism to join. If you teach math, but consider yourself an anarchist, please feel free to join. If you work in a school cafeteria, you can also join.

To subscribe, send an email to: lists@tao.ca with the message: "subscribe teachers" in the body of the message.

The Organise class struggle anarchist list, dedicated to discussing class struggle anarchism and related matters. To join this list, please go to: http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/org_list.html And read the Organise List Statement.

Revolutionary Childcare

2007-03-15T21:27:00.000-07:00

Very interesting, thanks for the link Blog Green.

...Organizing themselves and imagining strategies to defeat the Architects of Despair was not an easy task for these mamas. They came from different places and spoke different languages. Sora was from Chile; Olivia was a black woman whose family lived in Bushwick for as long as she could remember; Celia was from Ecuador, and there were other mamas who came from around the world. Despite their differences, they created a new organization called Pachamama: the Bushwick Childcare Cooperative.

Pachamama means something like “Mother Earth” in Aymara, an Incan language. It was a good name because it reflected the Latin American roots of many of the mothers, yet still had the word “mama” in it, so people who spoke English could understand the name too. With a room full of toys and games in the Sista II Sista office, and with lots of determination, they invited more mamas to join them in raising their children together…Read More...

And another article on the same topic from Zapagringo.

More links and articles:

Regeneración Childcare NYC is a network of awesome childcare volunteers in New York City. We provide childcare to facilitate the participation of low-income mothers of color in building movements for collective liberation.

How Collective Childcare Liberated Women in Maoist China

Children of Che: Childcare and education in Cuba - An interesting book I came across awhile back.

Community Child Care Co-operative is a not-for-profit organisation established in 1978 to promote, support and advocate for quality children’s services, meeting the needs of children, their families and the community. - God, Australia is so cool.

Sustainable Sex Toys - A Revolution Between the Sheets

2007-03-09T15:18:00.001-08:00

Now this is what I'm talkin' about. Living in Olympia, I know a lot of girls who have gone glass... but they usually espoused local economy or support-your-local-glass-blower reasoning, not enviro/health/what the hell am I putting in my cooter? logic. There are a ton of links on these various articles too for the blossoming green-kink in all of us. Solar vibrators? Sweet. Thanks to Treehugger, we now have a few alternatives to choose from:

How to Buy a Green Sex Toy - So you eat organic veggies, drive a hybrid, and use eco-friendly detergent? What about sex toys? Make sure you are sitting comfortably to learn about what chemicals you may be taking to bed with you. Do you dare to go green between your organic sheets? TreeHuggerTV gets the sweet lowdown with a report inspired by writer Emily Gertz. The phthalates found in traditional sex toys can cause cancer, damage our reproductive systems, impair sperm, and damage the planet. Watch the vox pops in the streets as people realise that the objects they’ve been using to pleasure themselves and their partners might have longer terms effects on their bodies than they wanted. Carolyn Riccardi, Education Coordinator at Babeland, gives us a tour of PVC-free green sex toys that keep us sexy and healthy. Love the earth while you make love!

Sustainable Sex Toys - For treehuggers, it can be hard to get through the day without guilty, pre-occupied micro-decisions. You might regretfully take a cab rather than the bus, or grab Styrofoam take-away instead of just sitting down and eating from a plate. In the bedroom, it can be an accomplishment to wade through all of the cultural pollutants and just enjoy ambivalence-free pleasures. So, once you’ve happily integrated one into your life, who wants to worry about a carcinogenic dildo? Or non-biodegradable paddles whose ultimate punishment will mean an eternity of landfill stink? Not sexy. We have assembled an array of toys and info for you and your partner(s) in crime! Be sure and let us know what we’ve missed.

How to Green Your Sex Life - Whether you’re single and playing the field, settled down with that special someone, or someplace in between, most of us consider good, satisfying, sexy sex an important part of this complete breakfast. It might not be the first thing we think of while working towards a sustainable and graceful life on this fragile planet, but there’s a lot we can do to make our sex lives greener. In the process of greening the ecological footprint of our love making, we might also open up some new doors to deeper pleasure, satisfaction, and romantic connection.

Naughty by Nature: Ever thought about the toxins in your sex toys? - Many popular erotic toys are made of polyvinyl chlorides (PVC) -- plastics long decried by eco-activists for the toxins released during their manufacture and disposal -- and softened with phthalates, a controversial family of chemicals. These include invitingly soft "jelly" or "cyberskin" items, which have grown popular in the last decade or so, says Carol Queen, Ph.D., "staff sexologist" for the San Francisco-based adult toy boutique Good Vibrations. "It's actually difficult for a store today to carry plenty of items and yet avoid PVC," Queen says. "Its use has gotten pretty ubiquitous among the large purveyors, because it's cheap and easy to work with."

Poisoned Baby Bottles! - Bisphenol A - Time to switch from plastic back to glass?

2007-03-09T14:45:00.000-08:00

Hey folks,

By now you have likely seen some of the national attention our recent report about Bisphenol A (BPA), an ingredient used in plastic bottles and in the lining of food cans, has generated. BPA has been shown to be toxic in low doses, and has been linked to breast and prostate cancer, diabetes and infertility. Pregnant women and infants are most at-risk, and yet there are currently no safety standards established.

After a recent report by Environment California and a blog post by Julie Deardorff, the top manufacturers of glass baby bottles have had their supply completely depleted.

So, we here at EWG have come up with a plan to make several more glass bottles available, and hopefully raise a few bucks to put toward our continued research and advocacy to keep kids safe from toxic chemicals.

Currently listed on Ebay, here, here, here, and here, are gently used, 4-oz glass breastmilk collection and storage bottles made by Lansinoh. They were used by an EWG staffer, who realizes the importance of non-plastic alternatives for collecting and storing nature's best food for babies--breastmilk.

We would appreciate your help spreading the word and giving our auction a mention to you readers.

Thanks everyone.

Have a great weekend,

Matthew

enviroblog.org

environmental working group

1436 u st., nw ste. 100

washington, dc 20009

ewg.org

NPR's Reportage

this is the way the volvo ends, this is the way the volvo ends, this is the way the volvo ends, not with a whimper but a bang

2007-03-08T02:11:00.000-08:00

girls up at 6:30... I rise, bake potatoes, start coffee, play a bit with the girls, start laundry, feed cats, have a cigarette with my coffee while the girls clean up their play-space in the window. Put on BBC World Service, enter some books online, putz around and tidy until 8:15. Start breakfast. Hannah rises and we dine on scrambled eggs with tomato and sweet pepper, bacon for big people (bake it in a pan in the oven at 375, 7 minutes on one side, six on the other - for those who prefer "wet" or "limp" bascon to crunchy), potatoes with rosemary, orange juice, coffee, forget the toast in the toaster oven (as usual). Hannah off to work in Shelton, then into Oly for a spell. Girls demand to run around sans shirts. I grudgingly acquiesce.

Day is filled with computer work, shirked household chores lazily accomplished in sloth time and eventually completely abandoned and put off "until tomorrow" (wink wink), curse words over my broken volvo. Tried to start old Puff up to go to the post office (have to ship everything priority now goddammit) and she spat something out her tail or mouth, couldn't tell which but I suspect, from the plume of smoke issuing from her nostril region, it was something under the hood. Couldn't get 'er to turn over after that. Had a talk with the girls about "member 'ast time tow twuck come 'n take-ah owr cah away?" a few tears when "papa not fixxxxx it!!!!" right away. Lyli issues with an adorable whine: "Papa get in ouh an' fix 'eyo things and tuhrn... it... on!" So we walk out to the mailbox instead and they get totally wiped out running over a quarter mile. I carry them most of the way back to the house until my arms cramp, mail crammed in the back of my pants down my long-johns. It's windy and Lyli & Scarleht's sun-kissed hair blows back in golden slivers, their little bright blue eyes squinting into the afternoon sun. We enter the house, eat some leftovers from breakfast and the girls excuse themselves for a nap. I try not to take it personally that they sometimes just want to go to bed with each other and not me. Then I come to my senses and revel in the bliss of independent twins.

Work is piled up around my house in the form of piles of books and stacks of boxes full of more books, bookshelves full of books, gardening I need to get crackin' on, wood to be split, housework (&*% *#$% &#$% &*$%&$), computer work and springtime yard work. Sometimes I loathe working on the computer but I suppose I enjoy at least having a wide variety of different things to do on one. Although that does tend to just cause things to back up even more at times. I sort my e-mail for an hour. Whittle it down from 159 to 67 and then quit in disgust. Glance at myspace inbox at all the unreplied incoming messages. Decide to delete the 22+ superfluous messages from the answering machine instead. Instead of cleaning I try to just not make anything else dirty (excepting dishes of course). Tow truck gets here, drags volvo away to mechanics again. Rent due again in two days. I shudder at the frail balance of my bulimic checking account. Put more books online until my brain is fried. Make dinner and cuddle with the girls to watch a movie. I fall asleep. 7:00? 8:00?

Wake up at 9:15. Girls have gone to bed on their own sometime. Window is clean but rest of downstairs trashed. At least they dig playing with empty cardboard boxes. I try to read, fail. Sit and think about old friends lost in the wind. Put more books online. Fret a bit. Watch The Godfather. Stop fretting. Try to psych myself up to see a show in Portland later tonight. Should probably nap with the girls before Emma arrives tomorrrow so I'm not absolutely shellshocked.

Lyli and Scarleht have been really high energy the last few days, an energy I assume can only come from me, since it appears to have a directly proportional draining effect on me as it shoots them through the roof. I take my vitamins and a quick shower (that was this morning after breakfast, I just got around to typing it now).
At least their obnoxiously high energy levels are filled with giggles and practical jokes and light-hearted piercing shrieks and circles run around in. At least we live in this beautiful place.

More books online. Remember to eat a little snack. Prepare to collapse. Replay upon awakening with minor modifications.

What day is it today, Jasper? It's NWA Day!

2007-03-07T13:15:00.000-08:00

Help the Police! This is hilarious. That's why I'm posting it under humor. If you don't get it, well, I'll give you a hint... "Help" the Police isn't really the name of the song. And NWA stands for Niggaz With Attitude. Proceed from there.

found friend

2007-02-25T05:25:00.000-08:00

I finger an old book from my shelf, toss words around with familiar ears, though foreign as of late. Head and heart, head and heart. The phrase won't leave my head and heart. Mile a minute madness of details I focus on in order to ignore/postpone/fend off emotions/feelings/sins. This old friend gets in my blood, and I in his to be sure. It feels like mere moments (several of them) or decades have gone by. Yet here stands our bridge, here runs our streams of consciousness conjoined, a testament to this ship of friends, fools, fantasies.
Intense fervor grips me in the middle of the night and I write and read and smoke and cannot sleep or eat or think except to act or reminisce. Vivid sensory memories assail me from all sites I lay my tired eyes upon. I am grateful to have such friends who bouy me (most of the time without knowing they are aiding so) and bolster my self-esteem and keep me inspired and cruising on a most marvelous high. I am lucky to have a life laid back as this, even though my pace can reach a frantic hum at times. I am lucky to have good food and a place for my children to be warm and safe at night. I am lucky. So, so lucky. How can I ever let the little things get me down?

Mukilteo Ferry

2007-02-25T04:09:00.000-08:00

Scarleht, Lyli & Myself hitchin a ride across the tide. Remember to unbuckle your kids from their car seats while riding ferries, just in case you need to get out of the car in a hurry! Thanks Jayne Mardesich on Guemes Island!

2007-02-23T00:51:00.000-08:00

Snow all day today. Lyli up early with grandpa to eat cereal before he walks to his bookstore. Scarleht and i cuddle in and dream a bit more before rising. Gramma runs off on some appointments and errands while my girls and I hang out: count snowflakes, eat cornbread, read books. I finish a book in two days! Granted it was just a short novella (Green Angel by Alive Hoffman)... but it still acted to boost my self-esteem a bit after slogging through these past months subsisting on one or two books per, rather than my requisite twelve to twenty. Oh, how to evolve without losing past passions?

We set off a small showering fountain of a firework on the porch for chinese new year/fat tuesday/mardi-gras/presidents day/the hell of it. Toddler eyes bulge and mouths stutter attempts at sentences as colored lights dance down the drive in their eyes. My girls get a little bratty at Grandpa and Grandma's house, which I attribute to the differences in environment, attentions, schedule, diet, etcetera. But then again, they like being spoiled and I think it's important for them to learn that it doesn't happen all the time.

Fast-forwarding a bit, Rob and I work our hands to a dusty sheen on boxes of books, eventually retiring to my mother's house to read, write, watch Marx Brothers. Make plans to eat with friends tomorrow night, would imaigne pictures will ensue. Excited to see my old friend Cary and for him and Rika and Carly to spend time with my children. Sometimes I can hardly bear to watch my old friends interact with my kids, a surge of emotions like water rushing downhill.

tONs oF nEw LiNKs uP!

2007-02-22T01:20:00.000-08:00

just take a gander to your right and down, there's a bunch of newbies at the bottoms of each section (mostly). Enjoy.

Road notes from the tail end of February

2007-02-21T15:44:00.000-08:00

Girls are little angels for the most part on our oddysey across Snoqualmie Pass in a rented minivan. Stop to buy chains since traction tires are required. Drive half an hour up the mountain. Pull over to chain-up. Chains are wrong size for tires (that bitch at Shucks with the cute smile; if you work at the bottom of a mountain pass you should know yer friggin' chain and tire sizes). Attempt to jerry-rig at the behest of dudelio who charges $25.00 a pop to help morons chain their rubbers on right. Drive 1/4 of a mile. Decide this could potentially be a terrible idea. Flip coin. Smoke cigarette quickly in massive blizzard before it gets wet. Turn around at exit, unchain (with massive complications). Wash filthy hands and sleeves in freezing stream. Girls wake up from twenty minute nap (note spike in loss of hair at this very moment). Drive back to North Bend. Exchange chains. Force smile. Get right size this time and proceed over Snoqualmie Pass once again. Get almost all the way to the top. Pull over to chain up. Guy in orange vest with truck approaches saying: "Don't know if I can push you out or not..." Rob responds: Oh, we're just putting our chains on." Man advises us to proceed without chains. We make it. One hour and $48.00 later we pass a semi-truck where something (propane tank) has blown up in rear of living quarters. One cowboy boot, pair of levis, one smoke stack, contents of fridge litter highway. Girls ask for more food. Their backs hurt, they say. Their feet hurt, they say. Their necks hurt, they say. I think they lie about 85% of the time.

Drop Rob in Moses Lake. Quick social play time, apple, coffee and smoke for Road-Papa with Rob's Ma and step-pa.

After jumping on enormous, comfy bed girls sleep all the way to Walla Walla. Wake up and play with G-ma & G-pa for a while before cuddling with Grandma to sleep. Papa reads and works on the computer until the wee hours, subliminally sorting huge loads of crazy information, emotions, stress, etceteras behind these curtains of night.

Why is it when we stop looking for something sometimes that something suddenly finds us? I refer, of course, to the human heart and head and the myriad number of emotions we seem able to process, compute, acknowledge, disregard, freak out about. Time steps up and slaps you in the face with all your past sins, a glove and hate relationship meant for dueling tongue in someone else's cheek until your fragile urn cracks and your contents spill all over the closest hearts. Bemused and befuddled by my own ambitions and desires and shit, how can I sort through the jewels and gemstones, offal and silt of other people's souls hoping to find my fix, my fill, my fantasies?

Part of me wants to turn inward only, the other part argues. My head butts itself. I banish these thoughts from my mind with a simple spell, for a simple spell, but they always return with friends in tow.

My girls get grandma time. Grandma gets girl time. I get some time to write and write back to my multitudinous friends whose words fill my self-imposed void(s). Schedules whirl around me and I loathe them but depend on them as well. Walla Walla tacos fill my belly. Burgess elucidates on the terrible state of world affairs in regard to human rights violations and gross actions on the parts of corporate lawyers. That's a phrase we should hear more of... "parts of corporate lawyers littered the streets today in the imagination of one young rebel father..."

When Rob and I came down Snoqualmie Pass there came a little bend in the road beneath an overpass where we both held our respective (or not so much, if you know us) breaths and made eye contact. Right then we both saw the wide Eastern open spread out before us, home, if you will, to a couple of tumbleweeds such as ourselves, who do not tumble nearly as much as we meant to.

I inhale this dry, fresh air and try to remember. Anamnesis kicks in, courtesy of the human sense of smell, and I revel in the vague memories of sense which a well-haunted place ellicits. I vow to myself to be better friends with the other single fathers in my vicinity. I vow to try to start over with my conceptions of giving love and being loved. I vow silently to work harder to better myself in the face of this challenging dawn. I vow my act to clean. I vow my hands to sully. I vow my dreams to fruition.

An herbal cough syrup for kids (and grown ups)

2007-02-16T11:54:00.000-08:00

Whipped this up yesterday morning in response to the wet, hacking coughs of my wonderful twin daughters. I just use pinches of each herb, so adjust to suit your tastes and needs:

- Make a tea with Marshmallow Root, Mullein, Rose Hips, Licorice, Echinacea, and Slippery Elm

- Then take two cups of the tea and boil it down with a mixture of sugar and/or honey (I added some molasses too for extra texture). Toss some garlic in towards the end. Stop when you've reached the desired consistency.

Voila! Homemade cough syrup that kicks ass. Careful though, it tends to wind my girls up a bit with the sweetness.

A fabulous conversation about fatherhood with the guy who towed my car this morning

2007-02-14T12:50:00.000-08:00

Of course, I already forgot his name (not Jim, which was stenciled on the tow truck and probably was the catalyst leading me to space his name in the first place). He has three daughters , youngest 17 so he's run the gauntlet. He quips about keeping his gun collection near the front door to greet any of the "gentlemen" who come calling on his daughters. He jokingly tells me of the only time he ever actually used it on some shady character: "So... what kinda lead do you want, case anything happens to my daughter? .357? 9mm? .22?" His wife freaks: "You can't say that to someone! That's a threat!" to which he calmly replies: "Now dear, I was only asking this young man a question..."

Hilarious and well-told. This guy's worked in Mason County as a tow truck driver for over twenty years and spoke well of parenthood, showed me pictures of his children and spoke about his marriage to his wife and the difference between being a father or mother and being a parent, fully present and attentive. He talked about the families he and his wife came from, the joys of fatherhood over the long haul and wished me luck. Firm hand shake and a gleam in the eyes. I feel lighter as I make the trek back to my house as his truck lumbers down the drive with my green Volvo station wagon, Puff, skirt in the air, nose to the gravel, rumbling along behind.

I give him a good recommendation when the phone rings asking if the truck's arrived and done the job but neglect to ask his name due to twins shrieking and gnawing on my ankles.

Shout out from Honky Tonk Dragon

2007-02-09T17:13:00.001-08:00

Thanks Ben!

"

Last of Loompanics' Books

Gotta make sure you get your Harry Potter fix ASAP, so you pre-ordered using the link below? But now, you're feeling a little guilty because that purchase took money away from an independant bookseller who is just barely scraping by?

Well bruthas and sistas, Rev. Dragon has the route for the absolution of your literary sins!

The Dragon's good buddies over at the Hungry Hollow Book Farm, have managed by hook and crook to get their hands on what remains of the now defunct Loompanics Press's stock.

I know for sure they still have copies of the Loompanics' edition of the Principia Discordia, and here's just a small taste of some of the titles in their stash:

Cao Dai Kung-Fu: Lost Fighting Arts of Vietnam $14.25

Check Fraud Investigation $22.50

Close Shaves: The Complete Book of Razor Fighting $75.00

Combat Knife Throwing $25.00

Community Technology $10.00

Comparative Data: State and Provincial Licensing Systems $49.95

Complete guide to science ficiton conventions $14.50

That's right kiddoes, instructions on building a new identity, building siege engines, hacking computers, all kinds of forbidden information is available from Pirate Papa and his book pirate cronies. Proceeds go to feed and shelter these lovely ladies, so don't hesitate to go purchase some titles that will make your mother and George Bush cringe.

And if you tell 'em that the Dragon sent ya, they just might send a little love my way...

(Yes, many of these titles are for informational purposes only, as well as not intended for minors, all other disclaimers apply. Your mileage may vary.)

Beyond Primetime: Will Media Help Grow Healthier Kids?

2007-02-09T16:04:00.000-08:00

The Kids And The Media Conference 2007 just finished in New York City, awesome info for any rational, intelligent parent raising children into this nightmare world. Below are some notes of mine from a media literacy workshop which my business partners from Last Word Books and I delivered at the Olympia Public Library several years ago. Thanks Dadventure for the link!

dictionary definitions of ‘media’ and ‘literacy’

media – plural of medium

medium – a channel of communication;

a publication, or broadcast, that carries advertising

there we go, as early as my 1971 Webster’s Dictionary, advertising is inextricably linked to media

literacy – the quality or state of being literate

literate – educated, cultured, the ability to read and write

media literacy is defined as “the development of skills to empower persons to be both critical thinkers and creative producers of an increasingly wide range of messages using image, language & sound.”

now we’ve all heard Marshall McLuhan’s famous aphorism: “The medium is the message.” So, how the message is conveyed is just as important, if not more so, than what it has to say.

now remember, media is a representation of reality, only one representation, not the representation. We are representations of reality, you and me and everyone here. And media is a constructed representation, a machine, not a human being.

one of my primary arguments is that the person sitting next to you is just as valid a source of news as a newspaper these days and they don’t cost $1.50 on Sundays. And really, what good is reading the newspaper if you don’t talk to anyone about what you’ve just read? Where does your media come from?

Check your sources. 1st hand info is more reliable than 2nd hand info. Like the game telephone, each conduit thru which a piece of news passes is a filter, a lens through which that piece of news can be distorted, whether it be by accident (misinformation) or on purpose (disinformation). Take everything with a grain of salt and research all sides of an argument.

Know this: Media literacy does not give you the answers. It gives you the ability to ask the right questions…and the left questions. How often do we question things as opposed to accepting them on blind faith?

Media Literacy is also defined as: “The ability to access, analyze, evaluate and communicate messages in a wide variety of forms.” The ability to communicate across cultural, social and economic boundaries, the ability to read and write and indeed begin to rewrite the world itself, and to be a good writer or reader, one must have a love for life as well as a love for language. Bad journalism can love language while disrespecting life, can be well written but distort the facts, be persuasive towards its points but ultimately dishonest. Rachel Carson, one of the most powerful figures on the Environmental Front throughout the 20th century said: “You must ask yourselves: Who Speaks? And Why?” What media sources do you find biased and how and why do you deem them so?

Context is crucial. Reported Israeli deaths versus unreported Palestinian deaths is a great example of media bias. What are the motives and political agendas behind the media? Who’s not being heard? Was anything taken out of context? To what end? Indeed, content and intent are two very different things. Look beyond the letters, look past the flashing lights, read in between the lines and listen through the sounds and background music. Media has ulterior motives.

In 1977, entertainment news averaged 15% of total content on televised evening news; by 1997 that number rose to 43% of total content. Celebrity gossip, movie advertisements, name brand clothing and products pushed on daily sit-coms.

Why is control of public information moved into the hands of the private sector? Why is our news controlled by corporations looking out for number one? How does mainstream media define patriotism? How do media and politics interact? If media literacy is about receiving information from a wide variety of sources, then why is our mass media controlled by eleven companies? I, for one, would rather receive my news from four million people as opposed to four.

Change starts small, understanding media helps you to better understand your neighbor’s point of view, regardless of whether or not you agree with them. Just talk to people, that’s all I ask. I know I’ve asked a lot of questions but we do have the tools to find the answers.

Revolutionary Parenting

2007-02-07T13:31:00.000-08:00

A discussion of "Revolutionary Parenting" by bell hooks
From Feminist Theory From Margin To Center, bell hooks, Boston: South End Press, 1984. Date Reading Was Discussed: September 7, 1993
Present: Catherine C., Renée D., Jaime B., Colleen M., Mary Ellen B., Stephanie R., and Cathleen M.

I'm lifting this whole thing 'cause it's pretty sweet. But you should still check out the site I found it on: Eve Online: Ecofeminist Visions Emerging

Drawing on her experience growing up in a working class African American environment, bell hooks finds collective parenting to be a radical alternative for raising children. Although none of the women at this month's session are mothers, we were by and large receptive to approaches that circumvent the nuclear family socialization process.

As a microcosm of patriarchy, it serves as the primary training ground for hierarchical, authoritarian values. Long before the nuclear family's arrival, communal childcare for thousands of centuries was a fundamental element of human society. Throughout much of the world today, kin as well as kith continue to share parental responsibilities, as exemplified by the African saying, "It takes an entire village to raise a child."

One woman, however, argued that it is unrealistic to expect extended parenting to work in an industrialized world. The maw of capitalism has eviscerated community and family bonds. A lot of people no longer live with or near their families, neighbors are often strangers, and friends too busy to impose upon.

Childcare centers are clearly necessary, even though too many of them commodify the rearing of children. hooks advocates more small, affordable, public, tax-funded centers. In keeping with an ecofeminist ethic of inter-connectedness, community-based childcare centers have the potential to strengthen fragmented community ties.

Given a restrictive "family values" climate, a few women were reluctant to trust their own communities. For example, a growing number of lesbian mothers have had their children taken away from them and placed with heterosexual relatives. As one woman remarked, "I don't want the community involved if the community is homophobic."

While certainly not as harrowing, another woman mentioned an article written by a working class mother who took issue with the Big Brother/Big Sister organization, a mainstream variation of community parenting. She criticized the school guidance counselor for recommending that her children participate in the program, as if all working class families are disadvantaged and need help raising children. She wondered whether similar options are presented to upper and middle class parents.

In exploring collective parenting possibilities, class issues continually surface since low income families have fewer resources to pursue alternative strategies. A particularly insensitive incident was the Ms. Foundation's Take Our Daughters to Work campaign designed to introduce young girls to career opportunities.

How many domestic workers, for example, took their daughters to work in hopes that they might follow in their parents' footsteps? And what about migrant workers who often have to take their daughters to work? As hooks points out, childcare was not an issue until middle class (white) women needed it.

One woman questioned hooks' frequent use of the words "fathering" and "mothering," since these terms seem to perpetuate the idea of separate ways of parenting. Another woman responded that it is problematic to speak generically about parenting because it's still too widely perceived as the mother's responsibility. hooks warns:

"As long as women or society as a whole see the mother/child relationship as unique and special because the female carries the child in her body and gives birth, or makes this biological experience synonymous with women having a closer, more significant bond to children than the male parent, responsibility for child care and childrearing will continue to be primarily women's work."

Some of us felt hooks mistakenly combines childrearing with childbearing, as if both were examples of myths about mother/child bonds. While it is true that men are just as qualified to parent as women and that women are no more inherently nurturing than men, a woman's ability to give birth and to bond with her baby during pregnancy are indisputably unique and special.

We must honor our essential biological powers, not diminish them or distance ourselves from them. Additionally, we can't allow society to use this as an excuse to confine the rearing of children to women or for enabling men to avoid full, equal participation in the parenting process.

Both men and women today need consciousness raising to be non-sexist parents. hooks cites Elizabeth Janeway by saying that "the idea of an individual having sole responsibility for childrearing is the most unusual pattern of [human] parenting in the world." We especially empathize with the problems single mothers face. If society can find ways to help senior citizens or the handicapped, surely we can assist single parents.

One woman suggested special privileges such as discounts at movies to offset the cost of a sitter. Or front row parking at supermarkets to facilitate the management of kids and groceries. Another woman proposed single mothers band with other single mothers to set up households for sharing resources, camaraderie, and parenting. Someone else mentioned an innovative custody arrangement devised by a divorced friend. For stability, the children remain in the family home. The parents each reside elsewhere and then rotate weekly stays with the kids.

Alternatives are possible! Has patriarchy so programmed us for the nuclear family that we've forgotten our historical heritage of community parenting?

my eyes looking at you

2007-02-01T00:24:00.000-08:00

I can’t remember which one of my twin toeheads said this to me ‘cause my heart and head are full to burst and my hands are lackadaisically behind schedule. All the wood is wet here at Hungry Hollow Farm, and so the little needle perched atop our chimney-pipe rarely reads much more than 400 degrees. We bundle up, dry wood atop the stove.

John and Eamon are settled it seems, as are the girls to ebb and flow of their presence. Hannah hangs out several times a week and plays with them and helps cook. She and John enjoy talking food and process. Eamon reads his book for class, waiting for another Friday to lift his spirited sails, nose into a wind of dreams.

The Book Farm has become a reality. I have two minions (term of endearment) and a functioning at-home book business that is only on the up-and-up. My dreams continue to work themselves into reality, however steep or rocky the roads may be.

Too many people demand my attentions and I yearn to satisfy them all and fail, falling flat on my face for half of my scheduled appointments for coffee or phone calls or something resembling genuine friendship. Relationships are hard as a single parent, as I have only begun to learn over these past six to twelve months (depending on how you choose to look at breakups or the fallout of love).

How do I talk about this and respect everyone involved? Fuck (I meant that as an exclamation, not an answer). Maybe I’ll just talk around it. I can barely read a book. It takes me two weeks to stagger through half of Valis by Philip K. Dick. Rob reads it in one day and I curse his name through the haunted barrooms. My attention span is shot and my habits borderline neurotic at times (though I harness energy and redistribute it well, towards productive tasks for the most part). Some days I laze around and read a few pages of several different books, or plow through one comic, or watch too many movies and enter books to sell online.

E-mails and phone messages pile up, duties are shirked, monies are low, chores clog the arteries of a house well-lived in. Little stacks of notes about the girls and memorable quotes make tiny towers atop the sixth ring of hell that is my desk. I vow to sort them all and write and clean house and get my life in order and file my taxes from the last two years. I pledge to get my act together and then the fog sets in and the grass freezes solid overnight and the geese plop down in the meadow for a few days and I steep in my own lack of go-to. Sigh and say to oneself: “Come the spring my talents will turn.”

I enjoy this new community our house has become, and Lyli and Scarleht bask in the extra attentions, the spice of life this variety brings to their beings.

I fish in new pools this winter’s rain forgot to swallow, whose heart the ice di'n't clutch. Or p’r'aps I’m only thawing now, in the sunshine of love, in the X-Ray of gazes, in this awkward rediscovery of self and soul and sex and life and lucid dreams and my daughters look up into my eyes and say things like:

“my eyes looking at you”

or

“i see my eyes in the dark.”

and everything just melts into easy, all my troubles tempered by a casual calm I call “now”.

“born like this
into this
as the chalk faces smile
as Mrs. Death laughs
as the elevators break
as political landscapes dissolve
as the supermarket bag boy holds a college degree
as the oily fish spit out their oily prey
as the sun is masked

we are
born like this
into this
into these carefully mad wars
into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness
into bars where people no longer speak to each other
into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings

born into this
into hospitals which are so expensive that it's cheaper to die
into lawyers who charge so much it's cheaper to plead guilty
into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed
into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes”

Chalres Bukowski, excerpted from Dinosauria, We

All of this that I do each day is for my friend Boston Jon, among a multitude of others lost at sea. On this, the anniversary of his disappearance those many moons ago.

Too Cool For Kids – How Anarchist bigotry supports the nuclear family.

2007-01-31T22:36:00.000-08:00

Superb article I dug up thru a back-link from New Zealand's Anarchist Forums. Kudos to Kakariki at BlogGreen!

This article was first published in The State Adversary (Aotearoa Anarchist Mag, Winter 1996

By Billie Clayton.

" This is a rant born of my frustration, some of these views are personal – no apologies.

It seems anarchists in general consider that children suck and people who have them are boring dickheads. It is quite acceptable in anarchist circles to slag off children in a way that would be condemned if it were any other group. Jokes about mutilating babies generally find favour. So do jibes about people who chose to stay home with children “not having a life” or “selling-out”. Comments such as “Oh God, I would never have children” are delivered with a scoffing snideness. I’m sure most of my readers are in amused agreement about my observations so far. Before you get too comfortable I have a few revelations about the origin and implications of the anti-child view.

Firstly, being anti-children and anti-parenthood is not rebellious or unique. It seems many anarchists express these views as part of a rejection of the parents values. Just because you can’t understand your parents doesn’t mean the values of any person choosing to become a parent are incomprehensible. As anarchists we have many criticisms of mainstream society, including such concepts as “family values”. However, dismissing children and parents all together is throwing out the baby with the bath water.

There is nothing unique about having no respect for children or parents. This is not only the attitude of many anarchists, but of New Zealand capitalist society. Children, like any other unwanted minority are institutionalised – in their case in schools. There is no place for children and babies in a capitalist society. Buses and public transport are difficult to use with babies and children. Cities and buildings are designed for adults, children are seldom considered. Many people object to women breast-feeding in public. Babies and children are not welcome in workplaces. What’s more, babies take women out of the work force, where capitalism wants them, because women are cheap to employ. Women also look nice round the office and besides, who else would do some of the work that women do?

Mainstream views on children and parenthood have changed since the fifties. The world is now considered overpopulated and the need to reproduce the workforce has diminished. Industry can now depend on third world and immigrant labour. Pressure is put on young people in our society not to settle down and have children, but to “succeed”. Young women who want to be mothers are looked down upon, young women who want to be lawyers are applauded. Rather than challenge these values, anarchists have swallowed them hook, line and sinker. The disdain for children and parents expressed by many anarchists is typical of the individualist grab-what-you-can-and-fuck-everyone-else values fostered by capitalism today. Good one Generation X.

While the anti-children view is not rebellious or unique, it is bigoted and oppressive.

I define bigotry as the belief that someone is inferior to you simply because they are different. Many of you will have experienced bigotry as vegetarians, punks, queers, feminists, Maori, anarchists, women and as many other things. Bigotry against children is no different.

When you discriminate against children, you also discriminate against the people who care for those children, mothers, fathers and other caregivers. This again is nothing new. Anarchists are repeating the exact dynamic which patriarchy uses to discriminate against women, who are more likely to be primary caregivers. Children and parents are so underrated by mainstream society that they are pushed out of public places, into dormitory suburbs or sub-standard urban housing. Many, as punishment for procreating, live on, or just below, the breadline. Women (and some men) who fall victim to the stress of raising children with no money, no support and no recognition of the value of their work, are written off as “hormonally unstable” and treated for “post natal depression”.

Yes the nuclear family sucks, I’m sure almost all anarchists agree. But the nuclear family does not exist because people who want children prefer to live that way. The nuclear family exists because children and parents have been pushed into a corner by industrialisation. Post-industrial western society has been divided into public (work) and private (home) worlds. Work done in the private sphere is not recognised, financially or otherwise.

The last thing you need when you are trying to raise children in this environment is to be scoffed at by the I-want-to-be-a-rebel-and-get-in-the-paper young people with too much leisure time on their hands to appreciate the reality of working class existence.

Now that I’ve got that out of my system, I want to offer some suggestions of the implications for the anarchist movement of these anti-child views, and some ideas of how a change of attitude might be beneficial.

I see anarchist ideas as a haven and anarchist activities as the first building blocks of a new society based on cooperation and egalitarianism. I believe anarchists should be able to offer alternatives to institutions that are oppressive and alienating, such as the nuclear family. Anarchists further entrench the nuclear family in their attitudes and in practice. Anarchist ideology offers a new vision of work, love and sexuality, evolution and revolution. Yet there is no new vision of family and what family might mean in an anarchist society.

The reality is that people have children, and having children today is a difficult task. Parents and children do not deserve to be discriminated against. Discriminating against children and parents alienates against people who may potentially be involved in the movement.

Anarchists can avoid discriminating against parents and children and further the idea of collective responsibility in the following ways:

* If you chose to be childless, remember this is a personal choice that should be valued and respected as much as choosing to have children. When you voice your preference try to do it without denigrating other peoples choices. The choice not to have children is as influenced by socialisation and mainstream as the choice to have children.

* Start seeing yourself as responsible for children around you. If a child is doing something dangerous or disruptive at a gathering don’t just expect the parents to deal with it. Be involved, offer to help.

* If you are planning an anarchist gathering consider the needs of children and parents as you would any other group. Provide a crèche if necessary, toys and a quiet place for parents and children. Offer pregnant and breastfeeding women the comfortable seats. When there is food, offer to hold babies or mind children while parents or caregivers eat. People with babies have to wait to eat most nights; you could wait for your meal once in a while.

* Be prepared to have children present at any anarchist event including meetings. Remember, excluding children, means parents are also excluded. Children and babies are often noisy – tough shit – their parents have a right to be there and anarchists should learn to cope with children. If a child is proving too disruptive to a meeting offer to look after them while the parent or caregiver attends.

Most importantly, anarchists need to understand and appreciate the work of parents and caregivers. If looking after children was valued by society, more men would be involved with the children they are happy to help conceive, but not take responsibility for, and more people would take on support person and co-parent roles for children in their community. This would be the most effective way to break down the nuclear family."

2007-01-30T16:47:00.000-08:00

Thanks Maeve!

Hitting Bottom: Why America Should Outlaw Spanking

2007-01-29T22:36:00.000-08:00

Judge for yourself... thanks Human Iterations

"Sally Lieber, the California assemblywoman who proposed a ban on spanking last week, must be sorry she ever opened her mouth. Before Lieber could introduce her bill, a poll showed that only 23 percent of respondents supported it. Some pediatricians disparaged the idea of outlawing spanking, and her fellow politicians called her crazy. Anyone with the slightest libertarian streak seems to believe that outlawing corporal punishment is silly. More government intrusion, and for what—to spare kids a few swats? Or, if you're pro-spanking, a spanking ban represents a sinister effort to take a crucial disciplinary tool out of the hands of good mothers and fathers—and to encourage the sort of permissive parenting that turns kids ratty and rotten...Read More...

Online Parent-Lit Writing Workshop to Start in January

2007-01-27T00:14:00.000-08:00

This is interesting, even though it started two weeks ago...via Literary Mama

Starting January 7, 2007

Anyone who has had a child knows that parenting is one of life's most exhilarating, awesome, maddening, humbling, crazymaking, joyful and wrenching experiences--which is what also makes it excellent inspiration for writing. This past decade has shown an explosion in "Parent-Lit," or the literature of parenthood, in all forms: creative nonfiction, poetry and fiction.

This workshop is for anyone who wants to tap that rich vein in their writing. It's for new parents, prospective parents, grandparents, stepparents, adoptive parents and birth parents. It's for people all over who want to come together and share their stories and their words, to learn something about the craft of writing.

It's not easy for some parents who want to write to get out of the house for a writing workshop. So this workshop will allow parents to participate while breastfeeding, sitting at home in a robe and pajamas, hanging out at the playground (with wireless internet, that is) or in the wee hours of the morning.

About the class:

The class will run for 10 weeks, starting January 7, 2007. Fee for the class is $350. Participants will learn the fundamentals of both creative nonfiction and fiction writing, using parenthood as a theme. We will read and discuss published examples of great parent-lit, and write some of our own. Assignments will consist of a combination of short exercises and more developed projects. Class size is limited to ten.

Workshop topics will include (more to come, based on class requests):

* Turning Life Into Fiction
* The Parent Pantoum: the Poetry of Repetition
* The Many Faces of Creative Nonfiction
* Writing Columns: the Slice of Life
* Taking a Stand: Writing Op-Ed and Opinion Pieces
* Flash Fiction: writing short-shorts
* My Family, My Material: How to be intimate, yet not invasive when writing about relatives
* Fun with Research

About the instructor:

Susan Ito is fiction co-editor and columnist (starting December 2006)at Literary Mama. She co-edited the anthology A Ghost At Heart's Edge: Stories & Poems of Adoption. Her work has appeared in The Essential Hip Mama: Writing from the Cutting Edge of Parenting, Growing Up Asian American, Making More Waves: New Writing By Asian American Women and many other journals and anthologies. She is the mother of two daughters, a preteen and a teen.

Email susan@susanito.com for more detailed information, or to enroll.

paternagoraphobia, the fear of being a father in public beacuse, for some reason or another, your society eschews your right to paternity

2007-01-26T22:54:00.000-08:00

It’s an all-thumbs mix of shun and sun when I take my girls out in public. Depending on my mood alone the stares of strangers alternately fill me with pride and make me want to hide in a dark hole. And they do stare, let me tell you. The only times they don’t is when I am with a woman, then they just stare at my gorgeous kids.

Last August Lyli and Scarleht and I went on a road trip with my friends Brendan and Eamon. Three mid-twenties young men driving around the San Juan Islands with two little toe-headed twin two year olds? A sight unseen by most eyes, judging by the variety of reactions we received, especially at ferry landings where the nuclear gape of families in air-conditioned SUVs permeated us with its fallout of fascination. I must admit, at times I find it entertaining when someone looks at my girls, then at me, then around their field of vision for someone approximating a mother.

It’s especially strange when I’m out with my girls with a lady friend and everyone thinks that she’s their ma. Usually they pick up on this phenomenon and mention something about how “awkward” or “interesting” it feels. Sometimes this makes me smile and look away. Sometimes it makes me sink into my shell. Rarely it makes me hold eye contact and blush and sweat.

On Olympia’s streets even, some of the most diverse I’ve wandered in my sheltered Pacific Northwest existence, my little rag-tag group of thrift-clad toddlers and hairy hippy papa me garners gazes from all ages, genders, classes, ethnicities, etcetera. Personally I find it unnerving to be the needle in the haystack but, as my roommate Eamon wisely put it: “better than a needle in a box of needles.”

No surprise then I seek solace and solitude instead with my girls in the woods around our farmhouse outside the city of Olympia. Most of my social tendencies are counterfeit anyway, set in place to compensate for the quietudes of my youth, having grown up detached from general society in the foothills of the blue mountains amidst ponderosa pines and stacks of books instead of televisions and those scrapers of the sky. Plus I enjoy the time I get utterly alone with my children in a

For the most part, I can trace the qualities I like about myself back to that secluded, natural setting, and can only wish something of the sort for my progeny. Hence why I jumped at the chance to live on an old farm in Mason County, only slightly removed from the main drag of Western Wash where I get my urban fixes, society style and business done.

As I slowly force myself to broach my shyness and begin to hang out at public playgrounds with my kids every now and then (I try for twice a month) I begin to realize that I’m not alone, even in my own community, and meeting fathers I haven’t met before bolsters those emotions. Most of my papa parties have been mostly close to failures, though I suppose I should give myself and us a bit more credit than that and admit that “these things take time” as folks are so apt to aphorize.

But gradually I come around, learning to deal with these nervous bouts that strike at the most inopportune of moments. I fondly dub it paternagoraphobia, the fear of being a father in public beacuse, for some reason or another, your society eschews your right to paternity. Solve this problem and we solve so many myriad problems by ripple effect that it will make the politicians smile for once and the philosophers and poets drink and make love (as usual).

Babble: A Magazine and Community for the New Urban Parent

2007-01-26T15:53:00.000-08:00

Okay, so I found this via my vicarious friend Sarah of Sarah and the Goon Squad and it is hands down the coolest site I've come across in the last while. So here, have some highlights:

Strollerderby- the blog at Babble for which Sarah writes.

Is Wall-Mart Too Evil for Parents?

Parent Blogosphere Focus: Meet the GLBT Parents

Angsty is the New Happy: Parents Eschew Therapy for Blogging

Junk Food Ads Contribute to Childhood Obesity. In Other News, Pope is Catholic.

The Little Yogi kit gives kids an early start at calming down

2007-01-23T13:41:00.000-08:00

Thanks Baby Gadget! Even though this is mostly made from petroleum products, the intention is pure.

One of the biggest challenges with children can be trying to teach them to calm down. Sometimes Luke and Ivy can get so excited about something they just flip out and lose control. Yoga is good for this sort of thing, but how does one get the little ones interested in something that may at first seem boring? I was excited to see someone actually has a product for this: the Little Yogis Kit gives them a sense of ownership over their yoga experience, and everything is easily understood and attractive to children.

The kit comes with stickers, a mat, a poster, a video, and also a tote bag so the kids can carry the whole thing with them. I like the idea of getting them interested in yoga at a young age, and this package is well-rounded and includes a lot of stuff to get the kids jazzed about their new activity. This is a hobby that could last for the rest of their lives, and it's also something you can do together.

Just some old laundry I found lying around...

2007-01-23T13:09:00.000-08:00

Baby Gadget

scarleht crying and wanting mama to come back to papa’s home

“becca and papa, owie” – lyl

a day of easy lines elliciting hard thoughts

“goodnight fire in the book” – s, referring to the fireplace in Goodnight Moon

they care more about their pillows than they do which side of the bed they’re on

“papa hurt inside”

“papa no read books” - goddamn, this one made me run in the laundry room and cry while pretending to turn the dryer on.

there’s nobody that wouldn’t hurt you if it helped them

funny how yer smile opens the parentheses

the tuba is the only instrument which can approximate a distress call

“As some warn victory, some downfall
Private reasons great or small
Can be seen in the eyes of those that call
To make all that should be killed to crawl
While others say don't hate nothing at all
Except hatred.

Disillusioned words like bullets bark
As human gods aim for their mark
Made everything from toy guns that spark
To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark
It's easy to see without looking too far
That not much
Is really sacred.” – Bobby D.

D.I.Y. Herbal Abortions

2007-01-23T12:04:00.000-08:00

I posted on this apparently taboo topic awhile ago and just dug up some more stuff:

Blogger publishes D.I.Y. Abortion Manual - although the original blog appears to have just gone down this month. South Dakota Conspiracy?

Here's Boing Boing's rather disappointing coverage.

Herbal Fertility Control: Contraception and Abortion - An Ancient but Practical Approach for Women Who Want to Take Charge of Their Reproduction and Fertility, and Make Every Child a Wanted, Loved, and Planned-For Child! - an excellent article including recipes.

What Sister Zeus has to say

what my friend crystal does

2007-01-20T23:12:00.000-08:00

Yeah, so this is what my awesome friend is busy doing while we're whittling away in our little corners... please support her in her amazing endeavors and visit these sites. Screw the Red Cross, find a real charity and stick by it.

"the world is a vastly fucked up place. anyone with at least one brain cell knows that. but it takes a few more to realize that WE can change it. so that's what i do.

i have the privledge to save the world. and i get paid to do it. i am part of the most fortunate group of people on this planet, and i am thankful for that everyday.

developing counrties need some dire assistance right now. and i am not talking about a hand out, or something else that just ends up perpetuating the problem. i am talking about giving to SOUND charities that are empowering to these people and are souly focused on sustainability. and almost everyone can be that aide, and if you ask me, everyone has the responsibility to. and yes, this means you.

check out these organizations. and if you haven't yet, sponsor a child. and not from the guy with the white beard on the infomercials. do it through me. do it because it is our duty and our joy as human-fucking-beings.

www.children.org

www.savethechildren.org

www.doctorswithoutborders.org

www.amnesty.org

www.planusa.org

www.oxfam.org

www.care.org"

Lamentations of the Father

2007-01-20T22:54:00.000-08:00

This is so cool I had to steal the whole thing! Thanks Honky Tonk Dragon!

by Ian Frazier

Of the beasts of the field, and of the fishes of the sea, and of all foods that are acceptable in my sight you may eat, but not in the living room. Of the hoofed animals, broiled or ground into burgers, you may eat, but not in the living room. Of the cloven-hoofed animal, plain or with cheese, you may eat, but not in the living room. Of the cereal grains, of the corn and of the wheat and of the oats, and of all the cereals that are of bright color and unknown provenance you may eat, but not in the living room. Of the quiescently frozen dessert and of all frozen after-meal treats you may eat, but absolutely not in the living room. Of the juices and other beverages, yes, even of those in sippy-cups, you may drink, but not in the living room, neither may you carry such therein. Indeed, when you reach the place where the living room carpet begins, of any food or beverage there you may not eat, neither may you drink.

But if you are sick, and are lying down and watching something, then may you eat in the living room.

Laws When at Table

And if you are seated in your high chair, or in a chair such as a greater person might use, keep your legs and feet below you as they were. Neither raise up your knees, nor place your feet upon the table, for that is an abomination to me. Yes, even when you have an interesting bandage to show, your feet upon the table are an abomination, and worthy of rebuke. Drink your milk as it is given you, neither use on it any utensils, nor fork, nor knife, nor spoon, for that is not what they are for; if you will dip your blocks in the milk, and lick it off, you will be sent away. When you have drunk, let the empty cup then remain upon the table, and do not bite it upon its edge and by your teeth hold it to your face in order to make noises in it sounding like a duck; for you will be sent away.

When you chew your food, keep your mouth closed until you have swallowed, and do not open it to show your brother or your sister what is within; I say to you, do not so, even if your brother or your sister has done the same to you. Eat your food only; do not eat that which is not food; neither seize the table between your jaws, nor use the raiment of the table to wipe your lips. I say again to you, do not touch it, but leave it as it is. And though your stick of carrot does indeed resemble a marker, draw not with it upon the table, even in pretend, for we do not do that, that is why. And though the pieces of broccoli are very like small trees, do not stand them upright to make a forest, because we do not do that, that is why. Sit just as I have told you, and do not lean to one side or the other, nor slide down until you are nearly slid away. Heed me; for if you sit like that, your hair will go into the syrup. And now behold, even as I have said, it has come to pass.

Laws Pertaining to Dessert

For we judge between the plate that is unclean and the plate that is clean, saying first, if the plate is clean, then you shall have dessert. But of the unclean plate, the laws are these: If you have eaten most of your meat, and two bites of your peas with each bite consisting of not less than three peas each, or in total six peas, eaten where I can see, and you have also eaten enough of your potatoes to fill two forks, both forkfuls eaten where I can see, then you shall have dessert. But if you eat a lesser number of peas, and yet you eat the potatoes, still you shall not have dessert; and if you eat the peas, yet leave the potatoes uneaten, you shall not have dessert, no, not even a small portion thereof. And if you try to deceive by moving the potatoes or peas around with a fork, that it may appear you have eaten what you have not, you will fall into iniquity. And I will know, and you shall have no dessert.
On Screaming

Do not scream; for it is as if you scream all the time. If you are given a plate on which two foods you do not wish to touch each other are touching each other, your voice rises up even to the ceiling, while you point to the offense with the finger of your right hand; but I say to you, scream not, only remonstrate gently with the server, that the server may correct the fault. Likewise if you receive a portion of fish from which every piece of herbal seasoning has not been scraped off, and the herbal seasoning is loathsome to you, and steeped in vileness, again I say, refrain from screaming. Though the vileness overwhelm you, and cause you a faint unto death, make not that sound from within your throat, neither cover your face, nor press your fingers to your nose. For even now I have made the fish as it should be; behold, I eat of it myself, yet do not die.

Concerning Face and Hands

Cast your countenance upward to the light, and lift your eyes to the hills, that I may more easily wash you off. For the stains are upon you; even to the very back of your head, there is rice thereon. And in the breast pocket of your garment, and upon the tie of your shoe, rice and other fragments are distributed in a manner wonderful to see. Only hold yourself still; hold still, I say. Give each finger in its turn for my examination thereof, and also each thumb. Lo, how iniquitous they appear. What I do is as it must be; and you shall not go hence until I have done.

Various Other Laws, Statutes, and Ordinances

Bite not, lest you be cast into quiet time. Neither drink of your own bath water, nor of bath water of any kind; nor rub your feet on bread, even if it be in the package; nor rub yourself against cars, nor against any building; nor eat sand.

Leave the cat alone, for what has the cat done, that you should so afflict it with tape? And hum not that humming in your nose as I read, nor stand between the light and the book. Indeed, you will drive me to madness. Nor forget what I said about the tape.

Complaints and Lamentations

O my children, you are disobedient. For when I tell you what you must do, you argue and dispute hotly even to the littlest detail; and when I do not accede, you cry out, and hit and kick. Yes, and even sometimes do you spit, and shout "stupid-head" and other blasphemies, and hit and kick the wall and the molding thereof when you are sent to the corner. And though the law teaches that no one shall be sent to the corner for more minutes than he has years of age, yet I would leave you there all day, so mighty am I in anger. But upon being sent to the corner you ask straightaway, "Can I come out?" and I reply, "No, you may not come out." And again you ask, and again I give the same reply. But when you ask again a third time, then you may come out.

Hear me, O my children, for the bills they kill me. I pay and pay again, even to the twelfth time in a year, and yet again they mount higher than before. For our health, that we may be covered, I give six hundred and twenty talents twelve times in a year; but even this covers not the fifteen hundred deductible for each member of the family within a calendar year. And yet for ordinary visits we still are not covered, nor for many medicines, nor for the teeth within our mouths. Guess not at what rage is in my mind, for surely you cannot know.

For I will come to you at the first of the month and at the fifteenth of the month with the bills and a great whining and moan. And when the month of taxes comes, I will decry the wrong and unfairness of it, and mourn with wine and ashtrays, and rend my receipts. And you shall remember that I am that I am: before, after, and until you are twenty-one. Hear me then, and avoid me in my wrath, O children of me.

The Atlantic Monthly; February 1997; Volume 279, No. 2; pages 89-90

Raising Children of Color in White Anarchist Circles

2007-01-17T11:53:00.000-08:00

Written by Victoria Law
Sunday, 19 September 2004

Siu Loong means "Little Dragon" in Cantonese.

But Siu Loong herself isn't Cantonese. She isn't even one hundred percent Chinese. Through me, she can claim to be Hakka, Suzhonese and Shanghainese. From her father, she can claim to be Finnish, Hungarian and Jewish. But she is also an American living among American anarchists, where none of this supposedly matters.

Before motherhood became a consideration, I paid little attention to the lack of color in the New York City anarchist "scene." So what if no one looked like me? Weren't we all struggling for the same thing?

Pregnancy made me sit up and look around at the demographics of the anarchists around me. Yes, I had followed (but not participated) in the short-lived discussion on white privilege in Seattle's protests against the WTO. Yes, I would confront my fellow anarchists about their internalized racism. But I never really went further and questioned why there were so few people of color-never mind people of color like me-in the anarchist movement.

Motherhood forced me to open my eyes. Before the recommended six weeks of postpartum rest were up, I was up and about on my various projects. Virtually everyone was supportive of my new role as mother and on-call cow. However, I started noticing small things that bothered me about my (mostly white) activist circles.

For starters, no one could pronounce my daughter's name correctly...Read More...

Link via:

Links and Crap

2007-01-16T16:03:00.000-08:00

Neal Pollack's Alternadad

Modern Tots - Cool, but ridiculously overpriced. I spit on anyone who spends this much money on this kind of junk. Get a hammer and grow some balls.

Diversity, Culture & Parenting - a study by the University of California's Cooperative Extension

My Little Cthulhu vinyl doll

Spain Dad's Blog

Daddy Zine

Wooden Toys from the UK

Babies go green: Parents thinking organic when it comes to infant food, clothes

The Parenting Manifesto Project

2007-01-16T15:56:00.000-08:00

Thanks Embassy of Arcturus!

"One of the more interesting bloggers out there is Hugh MacLeod from gapingvoid.com (occasionally NSFW). Lately, he's been calling for manifestos of 500 words or less on any topic and posting some of the more interesting ones. It's a fascinating effort, and a wonderful way to spread wisdom.

I'd love to reproduce some of that wisdom-sharing. While my stab at a parenting manifesto is below, it should be pretty obvious to all of you that I don't have the market cornered on parenting advice. So I'd like to tap into the wisdom of all of you: e-mail me (at rebeldad+manifesto@gmail.com) a manifesto of no more than 500 words (on any parenting/balance topic you can think of), and I'll post them all at rebeldad.com/manifesto.html"

A note from David Steinberg!

2007-01-11T13:09:00.000-08:00

Hi Sky,

I happened across your blog post about Fatherjournal and thought I'd drop you a line. Glad to hear you're finding the book interesting.

You ask about times Change Press which is more or less defunct, was bought by Michael Sherick in Sebastopol, CA some years ago. I think they've run out of copies of Fatherjournal, but I have copies on hand if you know anyone who's interested in getting a copy.

For the record, Dylan is now 35, married, living in Philadelphia, starting a second career as a lawyer. My life has moved in many directions since I wrote Fatherjournal so long ago, mostly related these days to sex as a political issue. I have written a column on sex and gender issues for 15 years, and am now involved in what I have dubbed fine art sexual photography. More on all that, if you're interested, at my website -- www.davidsteinberg.us.

Good luck with your blog. I certainly like the topic...

take care,
David

Thanks for the words David, I am honored that you like this site and look forward to corresponding with you in the future.

This note is in reference to a series of posts of mine from about a year ago. My dad had just given me a copy of David's book Fatherjournal and it pretty much saved me. Peruse said past posts here:

Fatherjournal: Five Years of Awakening

When Susan Was Pregnant I Imagined...

Most of Our Friends Don't Have Babies