July 24, 2005

• SUNDAY GOOD NEWS

  Raging Grannies

  Having finished my last Sunday series awhile back (see People Who Knock Me Out in sidebar), I’m going to start a series on my 66th birthday today to honor the good news we never see in that box in our living room. As a grandmother myself, I thought I’d begin with a group of my peers who are out there in all our communities raising hell on behalf of peace, the environment, the poor, and everything else good you can think of.

  The Raging Granny “movement” started in Victoria, BC (hats off to Canada once again) in 1988 and has since spread around the world. You can probably Google your local group (they call them gaggles). ‘The Granny Grapevine’ newsletter editorship rotates among the gaggles. It is how they exchange songs expressing social concerns, sharing of ideas and record events. The cartoon logo figure of an umbrella-wielding Granny was created by Art Simons from Salt Spring Island, B.C. The entire world of Raging Grannies gets together periodically at Un-Conventions. Bet you haven’t seen this on your local TV news station – just within the past 24 hours the BBC reported the arrest of five Grannies and four reporters for attempting to enlist at a military recruitment center in Tucson, Arizona to go to the war in Iraq so that their grandchildren could come home. They’re due in court Monday. Well, it isn’t exactly my style of protest – wearing elaborate hats and garish costumes out in public – but I have the deepest respect for what they’re doing and I can picture my mother (the extravert in our family) happily among them. Today as I add a few more grey hairs to my collection, I’ll wear those bright colors in my heart.
  

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  Deep Thought: “Instead of a welcome mat, what about just a plain mat and a little loudspeaker that says “welcome” over and over again?”
  Today I am grateful for: Finishing the research for Chapter 9 of my story and starting to write.
  Guess the Movie: “Why, anybody can have a brain. That’s a very mediocre commodity. Every pusillanimous creature that crawls on the Earth or slinks through slimy seas has a brain. Back where I come from, we have universities, seats of great learning, where men go to become great thinkers. And when they come out, they think deep thoughts and with no more brains than you have. But they have one thing you haven’t got: a diploma.” Answer: Wizard of Oz, 1939. Winner: thenarrator.
  Liberals Gather to ‘Demand Answers’
  Venues Include Parties, Town Hall Meeting, Convention
  by Kelly St. John
  The political left came out in full force across the Bay Area on Saturday.
  In Berkeley, they explored the spiritual side of being liberal. In Oakland, they blasted the Bush administration over the war in Iraq at a town hall meeting with Rep. Barbara Lee. And all over the region, Bush bashers heard former Ambassador Joseph Wilson rip into Karl Rove via conference call.
  Such a harmonic convergence of activism could almost be dubbed “liberal bliss” day — if everyone weren’t so fighting mad. (Rest of article here.)
  End of Day:
  You cannot believe how close I came to apoplectic fit last night when my DSL disconnected and after an hour of struggling I had to call tech support, which I discovered has been outsourced to The Phillipines so that not only did the tech have an accent and spoke quickly but I totally could not hear him. In the end, I swore at him and hung up and went to bed. Then this morning I calmly did what worked once before – unhooked absolutely every cord on the back of every machine around and including my computer and plugged it all back in. Voila!

  • 11:39 am
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