Imbolc                                                           Valentine Moon

I remember the campaign rhetoric that this election was a battle for the soul of the USA.  Would we be one people, bent on personal enrichment at the expense of everyone else, or would we be one people, bent on enriching persons at the expense of everyone else?  If this election was such a battle, the liberal forces won.  The new demographics of young people, gay people, Latinos and blacks all together with a strong cohort of white women and few of cranky old leftist males flexed its biceps.  And the shirt ripped.

It wasn’t such an election, of course.  Those are base rallying slogans, make sure the Tea Party folks get their tricorn hats and their strait jackets on before coming to the polls in great numbers.  Or, likewise, push the left edge of the Democratic out of their cynical chairs on polling day.

What this election was, as Barack Obama’s surprisingly good State of the Union speech reflected, was a turning point in a slow motion melding of a new coalition, one that did not rely on the Solid South or the Moral Majority, but one that patched together gay and lesbian citizens yearning for full lives with a rapidly expanding Latino population, part undocumented, most not, wanting the same thing and the two of them with a rising liberal voice among the young and white women, all grafted onto the traditional Democratic core of blacks, what labor remains and the few bona fide lefties like myself that are no longer pining for revolution.

It has been, for me, a joyous realization that perhaps for the first time since the early 1970’s I can hear my own political thoughts in the mouths of elected officials.  I’ve given up on the idea of a socialist America, not because I no longer want it, but because I don’t see the conditions that would make it possible.  Still, my political heart bleeds for safety nets, welcoming immigrants, accessible health care for all.  That sort of thing.  At least now these hopes will not be shouted down.  And I’m glad.

Imbolc                                                                             Cold Moon

Texas Secede This is the website and logo for a group who want to take Texas out of the union.

My response?  How can those of us in the other 49 help?

Winter                                                                   Cold Moon

Women in combat.  The Israeli’s have had women in combat for a long time.  Though it’s sad, I’m glad to see this extension of the women’s rights movement.  It means that barriers from an age of chivalry are still falling, recognizing women as able in yet another formerly all male realm.

When I started college in 1965, men had to leave women at the dormitory door at 10:00 pm.  No men in the building after hours.  This was the university acting in loco parentis.  An almost invisible part of the Sixties, far overshadowed by civil rights and the anti-war movement, the student’s rights movement had as one of its first targets in loco parentis.  It fell before I graduated in 1969 and I helped it go.  This struggle had many other aspects, among them student evaluation of professors, but in loco parentis was the most visible issue.

When I entered seminary in 1970, there were three women on campus, two in my class and one a year or two ahead of us.  When I graduated in 1976, the seminary student body was half women.  There came a time at some point in the 1980’s when there were no men in the entering class.  Similar movement has come in medicine and law, the other two traditional professions and therefore the most rigid relative to gender inclusion.

The women’s movement has been a powerful engine for change in our culture, a change that is not over yet.  Many barriers remain, especially those in the upper reaches of business management and to a lesser extent in many realms of science.  Nonetheless women have made extraordinary strides since my high school days, 1961-1965.