BARACK OBAMA'S MOTHER ~ A GREAT ROLE MODEL

I wanted to include this with the post below, but it was too long to post together.
So, now here is the front page New York Times article from today:

The Long Run

* A Free-Spirited Wanderer Who Set Obama’s Path

By JANNY SCOTT

In the capsule version of the Barack Obama story, his mother is simply the white woman from Kansas. The phrase comes coupled alliteratively to its counterpart, the black father from Kenya. On the campaign trail, he has called her his “single mom.” But neither description begins to capture the unconventional life of Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro, the parent who most shaped Mr. Obama.

Kansas was merely a way station in her childhood, wheeling westward in the slipstream of her furniture-salesman father. In Hawaii, she married an African student at age 18. Then she married an Indonesian, moved to Jakarta, became an anthropologist, wrote an 800-page dissertation on peasant blacksmithing in Java, worked for the Ford Foundation, championed women’s work and helped bring microcredit to the world’s poor.

She had high expectations for her children. In Indonesia, she would wake her son at 4 a.m. for correspondence courses in English before school; she brought home recordings of Mahalia Jackson, speeches by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And when Mr. Obama asked to stay in Hawaii for high school rather than return to Asia, she accepted living apart — a decision her daughter says was one of the hardest in Ms. Soetoro’s life.

“She felt that somehow, wandering through uncharted territory, we might stumble upon something that will, in an instant, seem to represent who we are at the core,” said Maya Soetoro-Ng, Mr. Obama’s half-sister. “That was very much her philosophy of life — to not be limited by fear or narrow definitions, to not build walls around ourselves and to do our best to find kinship and beauty in unexpected places.”

Ms. Soetoro, who died of ovarian cancer in 1995, was the parent who raised Mr. Obama, the Illinois senator running for the Democratic presidential nomination. He barely saw his father after the age of 2. Though it is impossible to pinpoint the imprint of a parent on the life of a grown child, people who knew Ms. Soetoro well say they see her influence unmistakably in Mr. Obama.

They were close, her friends and his half-sister say, though they spent much of their lives with oceans or continents between them. He would not be where he is today, he has said, had it not been for her. Yet he has also made some different choices — marrying into a tightly knit African-American family rooted in the South Side of Chicago, becoming a churchgoing Christian, publicly recounting his search for his identity as a black man.

Some of what he has said about his mother seems tinged with a mix of love and regret. He has said his biggest mistake was not being at her bedside when she died. And when The Associated Press asked the candidates about “prized keepsakes” — others mentioned signed baseballs, a pocket watch, a “trophy wife” — Mr. Obama said his was a photograph of the cliffs of the South Shore of Oahu in Hawaii where his mother’s ashes were scattered.

“I think sometimes that had I known she would not survive her illness, I might have written a different book — less a meditation on the absent parent, more a celebration of the one who was the single constant in my life,” he wrote in the preface to his memoir, “Dreams From My Father.” He added, “I know that she was the kindest, most generous spirit I have ever known, and that what is best in me I owe to her.”

In a campaign in which Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, has made liberal use of his globe-trotting 96-year-old mother to answer suspicions that he might be an antique at 71, Mr. Obama, who declined to be interviewed for this article, invokes his mother’s memory sparingly. In one television advertisement, she appears fleetingly — porcelain-skinned, raven-haired and holding her toddler son. “My mother died of cancer at 53,” he says in the ad, which focuses on health care. “In those last painful months, she was more worried about paying her medical bills than getting well.”

‘A Very, Very Big Thinker’

He has described her as a teenage mother, a single mother, a mother who worked, went to school and raised children at the same time. He has credited her with giving him a great education and confidence in his ability to do the right thing. But, in interviews, friends and colleagues of Ms. Soetoro shed light on a side of her that is less well known.

“She was a very, very big thinker,” said Nancy Barry, a former president of Women’s World Banking, an international network of microfinance providers, where Ms. Soetoro worked in New York City in the early 1990s. “I think she was not at all personally ambitious, I think she cared about the core issues, and I think she was not afraid to speak truth to power.”

Her parents were from Kansas — her mother from Augusta, her father from El Dorado, a place Mr. Obama first visited in a campaign stop in January. Stanley Ann (her father wanted a boy so he gave her his name) was born on an Army base during World War II. The family moved to California, Kansas, Texas and Washington in restless pursuit of opportunity before landing in Honolulu in 1960.

In a Russian class at the University of Hawaii, she met the college’s first African student, Barack Obama. They married and had a son in August 1961, in an era when interracial marriage was rare in the United States. Her parents were upset, Senator Obama learned years later from his mother, but they adapted. “I am a little dubious of the things that people from foreign countries tell me,” the senator’s grandmother told an interviewer several years ago.

The marriage was brief. In 1963, Mr. Obama left for Harvard, leaving his wife and child. She then married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian student. When he was summoned home in 1966 after the turmoil surrounding the rise of Suharto, Ms. Soetoro and Barack followed.

Those choices were not entirely surprising, said several high school friends of Ms. Soetoro, whom they remembered as unusually intelligent, curious and open. She never dated “the crew-cut white boys,” said one friend, Susan Blake: “She had a world view, even as a young girl. It was embracing the different, rather than that ethnocentric thing of shunning the different. That was where her mind took her.”

Her second marriage faded, too, in the 1970s. Ms. Soetoro wanted to work, one friend said, and Mr. Soetoro wanted more children. He became more American, she once said, as she became more Javanese. “There’s a Javanese belief that if you’re married to someone and it doesn’t work, it will make you sick,” said Alice G. Dewey, an anthropologist and friend. “It’s just stupid to stay married.”

That both unions ended is beside the point, some friends suggested. Ms. Soetoro remained loyal to both husbands and encouraged her children to feel connected to their fathers. (In reading drafts of her son’s memoir, Mr. Obama has said, she did not comment upon his depiction of her but was “quick to explain or defend the less flattering aspects of my father’s character.”)

“She always felt that marriage as an institution was not particularly essential or important,” said Nina Nayar, who later became a close friend of Ms. Soetoro. What mattered to her, Ms. Nayar said, was to have loved deeply.

By 1974, Ms. Soetoro was back in Honolulu, a graduate student and raising Barack and Maya, nine years younger. Barack was on scholarship at a prestigious prep school, Punahou. When Ms. Soetoro decided to return to Indonesia three years later for her field work, Barack chose not to go.

“I doubted what Indonesia now had to offer and wearied of being new all over again,” he wrote in his memoir. “More than that, I’d arrived at an unspoken pact with my grandparents: I could live with them and they’d leave me alone so long as I kept my trouble out of sight.” During those years, he was “engaged in a fitful interior struggle. I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America.” Ms. Soetoro-Ng recalled her mother’s quandary. “She wanted him to be with her,” Ms. Soetoro-Ng said. But she added: “Although it was painful to be separated from him for his last four years of high school, she recognized that it was perhaps the best thing for him. And she had to go to Indonesia at that time.”

That time apart was hard for both mother and son.

“She longed for him,” said Georgia McCauley, who became a friend of Ms. Soetoro in Jakarta. Barack spent summers and Christmas vacations with his mother; they communicated by letters, his illustrated with cartoons. Her first topic of conversation was always her son, her female friends said. As for him, he was grappling with questions of racial identity, alienation and belonging.

“There were certainly times in his life in those four years when he could have used her presence on a more daily basis,” Ms. Soetoro-Ng said. “But I think he did all right for himself.”

Fluent in Indonesian, Ms. Soetoro moved with Maya first to Yogyakarta, the center of Javanese handicrafts. A weaver in college, she was fascinated with what Ms. Soetoro-Ng calls “life’s gorgeous minutiae.” That interest inspired her study of village industries, which became the basis of her 1992 doctoral dissertation.

“She loved living in Java,” said Dr. Dewey, who recalled accompanying Ms. Soetoro to a metalworking village. “People said: ‘Hi! How are you?’ She said: ‘How’s your wife? Did your daughter have the baby?’ They were friends. Then she’d whip out her notebook and she’d say: ‘How many of you have electricity? Are you having trouble getting iron?’ ”

She became a consultant for the United States Agency for International Development on setting up a village credit program, then a Ford Foundation program officer in Jakarta specializing in women’s work. Later, she was a consultant in Pakistan, then joined Indonesia’s oldest bank to work on what is described as the world’s largest sustainable microfinance program, creating services like credit and savings for the poor.

Visitors flowed constantly through her Ford Foundation office in downtown Jakarta and through her house in a neighborhood to the south, where papaya and banana trees grew in the front yard and Javanese dishes like opor ayam were served for dinner. Her guests were leaders in the Indonesian human rights movement, people from women’s organizations, representatives of community groups doing grass-roots development.

“I didn’t know a lot of them and would often ask after, ‘Who was that?’ ” said David S. McCauley, now an environmental economist at the Asian Development Bank in Manila, who had the office next door. “You’d find out it was the head of some big organization in with thousands of members from central Java or someplace, somebody that she had met some time ago, and they would make a point of coming to see her when they came to Jakarta.”

An Exacting Idealist

As a mother, Ms. Soetoro was both idealistic and exacting. Friends describe her as variously informal and intense, humorous and hardheaded. She preached to her young son the importance of honesty, straight talk, independent judgment. When he balked at her early-morning home schooling, she retorted, “This is no picnic for me either, buster.”

When Barack was in high school, she confronted him about his seeming lack of ambition, Mr. Obama wrote. He could get into any college in the country, she told him, with just a little effort. (“Remember what that’s like? Effort?”) He says he looked at her, so earnest and sure of his destiny: “I suddenly felt like puncturing that certainty of hers, letting her know that her experiment with me had failed.”

Ms. Soetoro-Ng, who herself became an anthropologist, remembers conversations with her mother about philosophy or politics, books, esoteric Indonesian woodworking motifs. One Christmas in Indonesia, Ms. Soetoro found a scrawny tree and decorated it with red and green chili peppers and popcorn balls.

“She gave us a very broad understanding of the world,” her daughter said. “She hated bigotry. She was very determined to be remembered for a life of service and thought that service was really the true measure of a life.” Many of her friends see her legacy in Mr. Obama — in his self-assurance and drive, his boundary bridging, even his apparent comfort with strong women. Some say she changed them, too.

“I feel she taught me how to live,” said Ms. Nayar, who was in her 20s when she met Ms. Soetoro at Women’s World Banking. “She was not particularly concerned about what society would say about working women, single women, women marrying outside their culture, women who were fearless and who dreamed big.”

The Final Months

After her diagnosis, Ms. Soetoro spent the last months of her life in Hawaii, near her mother. (Her father had died.) Mr. Obama has recalled talking with her in her hospital bed about her fears of ending up broke. She was not ready to die, he has said. Even so, she helped him and Maya “push on with our lives, despite our dread, our denials, our sudden constrictions of the heart.”

She died in November 1995, as Mr. Obama was starting his first campaign for public office. After a memorial service at the University of Hawaii, one friend said, a small group of friends drove to the South Shore in Oahu. With the wind whipping the waves onto the rocks, Mr. Obama and Ms. Soetoro-Ng placed their mother’s ashes in the Pacific, sending them off in the direction of Indonesia.

Source: www.nytimes.com March 14, 2008

BIGOTRY, HOMOPHOBIA AND ME

VALUES INVENTORY

When you judge me at the end of my life,

judge me,

not my associates, not my family

or by those who didn't like me.

I have written before (Legal to Have Skin Color and Hair) about my own experience of being raised in a white culture and in 1960 having a crush at the age of 11 on a negro boy at a fundamentalist Christian summer camp in northeastern Indiana. So when I read about Barack Obama's mother's experience, I have some personal perspective what it is like to do something that is not considered normal or acceptable. Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro is Barack's mother's name. And she must have been so very dynamic, individual, courageous, strong and possessing high ideals and valuable principles. A great example and a great mom.

And since I too had to let my son (who was adopted when he was 11) choose to live his high school years physically away from me, I felt another connection to the turmoil that I have experienced and know Stanley Ann had to feel. We love and that means at times we have to do what life requires of us, even though it is not what we would have wanted or chosen. To have to trust that life will take care of our children is an act of great faith.

I just went back to the first blog I started on TV Guide's website, where I wrote from the inspiration I felt by the first year of the TV show Brothers and Sisters with a gay adult sibling. What follows is part of what I wrote in one of my posts. This includes my experience with the bigotry in my own family and my broadening understanding and acceptance of gay people. Two issues that are still unresolved in the United States of America.

...Words can be used to disguise and hide what we are really thinking and feeling, and they can highlight and enhance the otherworldly experience of being human.

About this thing of gay human beings and a slice of America that thinks they are offended with gays being openly gay, two men kissing and what follows. Let’s put this in perspective. How outraged are people with men killing men, in genocide, war, whether with any kind of reasonable explanation for going into a war, OR NOT? It just doesn’t make any sense, well – to me,...that two men kissing is unpleasant or odious in any way. I didn’t know this about myself, until this show, Brothers and Sisters, put it in my face and I had to deal with it. I love it just as much as I would love seeing a man and woman kiss, who truly have feelings for one another. And in a way, I love it more, because, well, it opens up a whole new dimension to my life that I never had the opportunity to welcome into my consciousness. I don’t mean I plan to add this dimension to my own personal experiences. Not at all. I mean I can love life and the human race even more. Gaining something new to my awareness of life, human beings and diversity - just makes my life richer, broader and more dynamic.

I was raised in the Hoosier-Hysteria-Land, aka Indiana. I was raised Republican. My whole family is Republican. Only me - and well, I learned later, my Dad’s oldest brother had turned on the family tradition and was Democrat, too. My Dad was from a personality-diverse family of five siblings. Sitting at my uncle’s dinner table, after he had retired from his active physicist research, that he had done around the world, my uncle was surprised to learn that I had been raised no differently than he had been raised a generation before me.

The house where I was born is in a small Indiana town, which proudly has a sign out on the bypass for the Dan Quayle, Vice-President Museum. Very Republican. It was my second college boyfriend’s apartment-mate, who turned me into a Democrat. A memorable night in college for me was when we sat around listening to the draft numbers be called off for my boyfriend and his apartment mates. The Viet Nam War was going on. So this stuff was serious.

I was raised in a fundamentalist church. Where a lot of things are considered a sin. We couldn’t dance, swear, wear make-up, go to movies, talk back to our parents – ever!, the only sex - was married sex, ... you get the idea. When I was in second grade there were days of serious discussions about whether or not I would be allowed to go with my second grade class to see the Disney movie, Bambi. I had to tell the boy who asked me to the high school prom my junior year, that I could go with him, but I wouldn’t be allowed to dance. And we didn’t. I have been condemned to hell many times by my family members. Wearing mascara was one reason for condemnation, that I remember and another was rolling up my skirts above the knee in high school where my father was the high school basketball coach, as well as a teacher. The condemnations didn’t stop when I became an adult.

My life was pretty imposed upon. I felt smothered. But I knew what was right and what was wrong. You know, by my parents’ standards. The community I lived in was all white. I graduated high school in 1967 and entered college that fall, a commuter train ride away from Chicago. My family never said a word about Martin Luther King, Jr. or the civil rights that was on the TV every night. But it impacted me big time.

As a child, I always looked forward to going to summer church camp, which was always all white. In seventh grade, there were two black boys from Gary, Indiana, at camp. One night in the camp church service, the cutest black boy sang with this beautiful, clear voice. I still remember the song. I cried night after night when I found my two love letters from this young boy were taken from my bedroom’s desk drawer along with our picture together, which I read and looked at every night. Never a word was said where these things went. But I knew who. And I knew why.

...Betrayal of trust and the difficulty in understanding why I couldn’t “love” someone who wasn’t white - confused me when I was eleven. After all, I was always told to treat everyone as equals. Fortunately, I internalized this value, before it became apparent that they were just words. The family didn’t really believe that. But I do.

I’ve lived a diverse life. When I started my career, I moved a long distance away. Sorta had to - to find my own spirit. I am grateful for a life that has so far been very dramatic, colorful and full of graces. I have few regrets. I have traveled outside the U.S., for one. That alone is a great lesson in widening our small-mindedness. And I don’t care what the more narrow-minded might say about my chances not to go to hell. Our heaven or hell starts here on earth. And my life is heavenly to me.

In my childhood, I got religion. Jesus never said anything about sexual orientation. Jesus was gracious toward a prosititute, even. I have a problem with giving carte blanche to Old Testament’s words. The OT informs us how to treat our slaves. And the New Testament’s Paul has a great chapter, to the Corinthians (I, Chapter 13), but Paul also places females as subordinates to males. Not something I believe in.

So I don’t know - does the fact that there are some words in the Bible which people use to condemn same sex marriage and partnering - make it so off-limits to our using our brains to question the validity of the perception that God, gender-neutral, him or herself, may be just fine with gays being free to be who they are?

It takes nothing away from your life to live and let live. Really. It takes so little to be a good human being on this planet. Kindness is kindness in any language. And it is free.

In Brothers and Sisters, Scotty delivered a great line to Kevin in the episode, Date Night: “When you get home, more nights than not, you’re alone. Cause the one place you don’t feel secure and comfortable is in your own skin.” When things, such as two men kissing one another, rankle the senses, my guess is that you don’t feel comfortable in your own skin.

“…Take me down
You can hold me,
but you can’t hold what’s within.
Pull me round,
push me to the limit,
maybe I may bend,
But I know where I’m not going...
I will not be broken,
I will not be broken.

I will not be
someone other than who I am
I will fight to make my stand
Cause what is livin’
if I can’t live free,
what is freedom
if I can’t be me?"

I Will Not Be Broken
By Gordon Kennedy, Wayne Kirkpatrick &
Tommy Sims
Sung by Bonnie Raitt

From the Gettysburg Address:

......The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us --that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion-- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth. Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, November 19, 1863, By Abraham Lincoln

ARE WE FREE YET?

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This Belongs to You and Me
. . . NOT our elected politicians. Not Corporations, not the media, not corporate-paid lobbyists.
But to you and me. But we must claim it, proactively.

And why should we care when other people aren't free? Other than it is the morally, ethically and spiritually the right thing to do ~ it lends to our own security at home and in the world. When there is unjustice in other countries, there is more of a chance that we will have less leverage and influence in those places and also terrorists love to go to those places and build their forces. This is what happened in Sudan.

Whether we like it or not, we are only a player in this world. We are not king. And we have lost our influence around the world during the George W Bush administration. It doesn't take much travelling outside the United States of America to learn the effects of the torturing that we have been doing in the name of the USA, the Iraq war and our stubbornness to ignore environmental effects of our lifestyle choices.

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From: lovethec

I actually typed in the google window Bush Killing the Constitution and found this Youtube.

MARTIN LUTHER KING'S LETTER FROM THE BIRMINGHAM JAIL

EXCERPT:
We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait."

But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking:

"Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair.

I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws.

One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."

A TESTAMENT OF HOPE: THE ESSENTIAL WRITINGS AND SPEECHES OF MARTIN LUTHER KING

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"The Constitution is just a piece of paper" ~ George W. Bush