DRAGGED INTO THE 21st CENTURY.

If it seems like we are giving thanks on this august day set aside for reflection, we are. Only the pictures are belated. Jim took the pictures so one chair is empty. We are: Doug, with his back to the camera; Cedric;  grandsons, Theo and Owen; daughter, Virginia; and myself. The rest of the family celebrated in their own homes


Virginia is very organized and reported that last year she had to toss half a moldy pumpkin pie among other assorted containers of food that somehow get hidden in the back of the frig. This year, she ordered, everyone takes home anything they brought that is left. That works for me because I love living for a week out of the frig.


Theo peeled thirteen potatoes before Virginia said, "Halt."  All of us took mashed potatoes, turkey and gravy home.


Doug mashed that mountain of potatoes. It takes muscle to wade through them and get the butter and half & half thoroughly mixed.


Every year, as a tease to Cedric, we set up cranberry man. Doug decorated him with torn napkin snow this year.


Both of Virginia's salads have pomegranate berries in them.

While the rest of us played Quidler, Cedric spent the entire time at the stove. Watching the turkey. Stirring up gravy with roasted vegetables. Heating up Mary's gumbo and Doug's Lasagna.  Virginia put a skillet of  Johnny Cake in the oven, and made pear tart ahead of time. Doug always makes huge batches of cookies from his own original recipes.


Everyone had a hand in the works.
We skyped with Daughter Kristanne, with son Austin and his brother Alec who drove up for the day. And, I HAD a picture of them. Ken called and talked to everyone.


In fact, Jim took 128 pictures on my new camera, plus this video of Theo on stilts made by his brother Owen. (It made me a bit nervous because they are a bit heavier and don't fit as well as commercial stilts.) He juggled while walking as well. It takes courage to be tied onto legs six feet tall.
Now, I would have liked to add more pictures. There were better ones but my choices were slim. The reason is my brand new camera does not sync well, sometimes, not at all, with my system 7 computer.
 Hmm! It took two phone calls to Consumer Cellular on the 24th. And, six hours between Jim and Me trying to figure it out from the book we downloaded. I went to bed exhausted. More of the same yesterday. And finally, this morning, an hour phone call with a cellular genius, who got me partially into the 21st century of phones. But, it was frustrating to be dragged into it and not be able to post nor edit anything. Nor even choose from a fat 128 picture album.
The help-line genius said, "Well we say it works with system 7, and it does, sort of. But don't try it again. You might as well get a new computer that has system 10 on it."
He was terrific and now, just before Christmas sales, I have an excuse to buy a new computer.
It would have been wonderful to have my first experience with pictures on my new phone be a pleasant one. The learning curve is challenging.


Everyone is smiling. But, they are already using those new-fangled devices with smarter phones than mine.  But, my trusty Sony Camera will accompany me where ever I go for just a bit longer. The 21st Century is still young.

SZECHWAN PROVINCE

It’s a long ride across Szechwan Province and we talk among ourselves about how political our guide, Vicki, is. She was very open about Tiananmen Square, the skimming of tips on the ship and the workers hot, miserable quarters where they have to live and about her own family and so on.   We had a paid family visit and we speculate what it would be like to visit a family that is not paid. I get elected to ask. And, much to our surprise, she instructs the driver to pull over on a side street in the next village we come to. The picture above is the one I took on our walk back to the bus, but the building was the first one we came to.

The building was divided into three units, a small store, a barbershop and a meeting room. A guy was getting his haircut.

And a bunch of older men were playing majong in the meeting room in the middle of the afternoon.

As we walked past the building, I saw a  stack of reeds and hay in front of a pond. We learned later that the pond supplies lotus roots and leaves and edible fish for the table.The roots feed the pigs along with another pond weed, the leaves are used to wrap things. Food can be eaten from them wrapped picnic style and carried to the field in a cloth sack.

On the right was a group of houses with people out in front raking cotton. Each house had a garden in which I saw chard, lettuce, cukes, beans and squash, spinach, radishes.  The houses are modest and close together.

It appeared that all members of the family worked the cotton at every place.

And Vicki confirmed that this province is known for its agriculture having at one time provided the entire food supply for China. Now, only 7% of the land here is used for farming and this area is predominantly cotton.Some areas have wheat and orchards and other ground crops.

We are unsure whether we will  be able to get inside one of the houses so I asked if we could approach. Vicki asked me to pick out a house, and I did.  She knocked on the door and asked the lady of the house if we could come in and see her house. She felt honored to meet big nosed people for the first time.

We walked past her garden and there was a pig sty in front of her house. Super clean, no unpleasant odor.

She agreed to allow us to have our picture taken with her. With Vicki as our interpreter, we learned that she has two grown sons, one is working at the dam as a silt catcher, the other is an architect in Beijing.She farms with her husband who was out in the field.

She showed us her kitchen which only had room for two people, really, with a column rigged with a huge gas wok.  A shelf held a few implements. No table, nor chairs to sit and eat that I could see. I took the picture surreptitiously because Vicki couldn’t fit in the room with us and I didn’t know how to ask.

The same for the bedroom, a double bed that stretched from wall to wall. Very small areas in which you could barely turn around. When we stepped back outside, Vicki said the woman was apologizing for her housekeeping, though the place was very clean.

She looked at me oddly when I took a picture of her broom. They all use these straw brooms they make themselves. Bathrooms are communal outdoor pit toilets.
We asked Vicki if we could offer her money as a  thank you for her hospitality. Vicki said yes and we did and she wouldn’t take it and kept refusing until Vicki insisted she  take it. She was lovely, and positive and everyone enjoyed the visit through Michal and I. But, if the reverse happened, could you see an American family inviting a tour bus load of strangers off the street into your yard, and even two people into your  house?  The others stood around and watched and got to peek in through the door. All the neighbors were watching us.

On the way out, the fellow who had been in the barber chair was finished with his hair cut. I asked him if I could take his picture. Then I showed it to him. The fellow standing behind watching is the store proprietor and not to be outdone, he whipped out his cell phone and asked me if he could take MY picture, then showed the picture to me. I felt like and idiot, the ugly American. I didn’t even own a cell phone at the time.

We loaded back into the bus. We see motors like this everywhere.

People here seem happy and content. They have a great community life, everyone knows everyone else in the neighborhood. Life is simple and good on the farm.

These people are obviously taking their cotton to market, but we also saw hot peppers and loads of pigs going to market.
We continued our long bus ride. Vicki pointed out many farms with ponds and a shack where the farmer sleeps at night when his fish get big enough to eat. He protects his fish so no one will steal them. They raise mostly cod and eels. Raising fish for sale is quite  profitable as is the lotus roots they harvest from the same ponds in the winter. In summer they grow a seed used in tea. It is very bitter-tasting but the locals like it.
In New China, under Mau, the farmers suffered the highest taxes. They were made to take risky ventures. He asked them to make iron. They couldn’t market it and transport it to the cities and their efforts failed. They weren’t skilled and didn’t strengthen it properly and it was weak steel. When the people in the provinces claimed the Yangtze was dirty and making people sick. Mau demonstrated how wrong they were by having a newspaper reporter take his picture swimming in the river, instead of taking steps to clean it up. He raised his Red Guard from high schools and elementary schools because anyone who didn’t join was subtly punished. The people were offered rewards, things they desperately needed, to encourage their children to become part of the Red Guards, or join themselves. He instructed the people to capture “useless” song birds to eat when they were hungry. He sent out plans for cages and the people practically decimated the song bird populations for a tiny bit of protein, on his instructions. That is why Chinese people value song birds in cages, explained Vicki.  They are very rare in China now.
We arrive in Wuhan City, population, 8 million.  More tomorrow.

ANARCHY 2012

The U.S. Constitution has been a model for other countries since its inception more than two centuries ago. Our Bill of Rights is considered one of humanity’s finest achievements. People from many nations have sought refuge here  to enjoy those freedoms. Yet, our current government has suspended important protections in the name of terrorism. A dangerous precedent via the Rave Act, the Patriot Act and the National Defense Authorization Act. With those and U.S. drug policies we are the most controlled and monitored society on earth.  There are cameras watching our every move on practically every street corner, every store, every mall. From the satellite above, every vehicle can be tracked by GPS  devices; there is one in every cell phone. Big Brother Is Definitely Watching. And, we’ve allowed it to happen.
Legislators are toying with interfering with our Judicial branch of government, by making laws against the court’s  unpopular decisions. Whether we like them or not we must not give up our checks and balances because they are currently unpopular. Let them stand the test of time.
We must give thought to what is happening in our country and become involved. It has swung out of control, prosperity evades us, and anarchy approaches, carried in a flag with a cross. Thomas Jefferson was famous for the Virginia Statute as much as for writing  the Declaration of Independence. He organized a Virginia  colony that separated Church and State, the very choking environment the colonists left behind in England,  the new colonies wanted to reinstate in “their” particular view of God. Thanks to the Virginia Statute we didn’t have to fight that  same nightmare all over again. And now, religionists are pushing strongly for laws that inject their morality into our laws on same-sex marriage, abortion, doctors rights to counsel, planned parenthood, and other bills slipped by us by both Democrats and Republicans.
With idyllic frenzy we’ve made laws that affect our country negatively. Two million Americans are incarcerated in the U.S., most of them for non-violent drug crimes.  Billions of dollars have been spent building prisons to house all of the Americans convicted of drug crimes. For carrying a half ounce of marijuana, a man who works and supports his children can go to prison for life in California and Texas.  Now Oklahoma is considering a similar law.
We are living in a police state not only from the surveillance, and the drug wars, but an increase in Police over-reaction. Nevada police have skipped free after killing an American Woman who came to the aid of her husband whom they had just killed when they asked him for identification and he reached into his jacket for his wallet. Such things should not happen in America. Protestors tasered, more police attacks on unarmed citizens.  America  imprisons more citizens  than any other nation. The government cannot afford to pay lifetime care for people who could and should be working and paying taxes. It is  insanely expensive and yet, they are willing to pay an informant, even a convicted felon, up to $250,000 to testify against someone charged with a drug crime. Of course, what convicted felon would lie to receive that kind of cash?
America’s prohibitionist policies have eliminated freedom all over the globe and the high money paid for drugs crossing our borders has helped fuel the terrorists instead of our tax purse. It is draconian.
Now, I read where the Occupy Wall Street protests are bothering the government enough to instigate a huge anti-public relations move and that the FBI will penetrate large OWS  groups to sabotage their effectiveness, make petty arrests and harass them.
Beware!  We don’t lose our freedoms, we give them away.