Service

On Wednesday, my grandfather who has been fighting lung cancer for the last five months was told by his Oncologist that there is nothing more they could do for him. I knew it was coming. Another tumor popped up on his stomach last week and is growing at a fast pace.

Both of my grandfathers mean the world to me. I've had a relationship with both of them that I will treasure for the rest of my life. I've always referred to them as my favorite people. They've shared and imparted moments with me where I truly knew peace and could see myself growing as a person just to be at their side. I realized early on in my childhood that it was rare to have that sort of relationship with an elder, especially in modern times, with a grandparent.

Just before my grandfather's doctors appointment, I was screaming back at Elisabeth Hasselbeck on The View. I feel personally insulted by how she treated Rosie O'Donnell and I feel worse about how she dismisses how people like me feel about the troops than the eminent death of my "Papa." I feel worse about it, because it dishonors my grandfather--a Korean War veteran and staunch Republican until the 2000 election where he promptly registered as an Independent the day after Bush was elected by the Supreme Court.

I'm depressed for Rosie O'Donnell, not that she needs my help with depression, but because I genuinely feel just as bruised and battle-scarred as she does. It's so depressing to be constantly told that you are disrespectful by speaking out passionately and even aggressively against a group of people (Elisabethian Republicans) who believe not only that this war is justified in order to fight terror, but that they also say that anyone who is against the administration is against the pawns in the game--the troops. To make this into a game, to try to strategize ala Battleship and kill unseen "enemies" is completely ridiculous and irrational. My heart bleeds for every single man, woman, and child who has died as a result of decisions made by the Bush Administration.

I don't agree with our government policy. If I were an Iraqi civilian, I would want to fight against us in the best non-violent way I could find. Plain and simple. This does not make me an insurgent. This makes me human. This does not mean I don't support our troops. Every living being, even one who has mental (Hitler, for instance) and/or a physical disability has emotions. To discount emotions, to devalue human life makes people feel, yes feel completely powerless and have the need to fight back for their beliefs and dignity--whatever shreds they can scrap up. Some just want to survive and do no fighting at all, in fact, only a small percentage have fought back.

To be designated one of the "other" who believes the troops are terrorists is to be against my very own grandfathers. I would feel like I was kicking dirt in their faces, spitting at their feet if I were to disrespect the heart of the military. Both of them were in wars. Both were "the other" to someone. At home, to most of us, they are heroes.

My maternal grandpa was in World War II and though he didn't see very much combat because he worked as a navigator in the Navy, he made sacrifices in the war. While he was in New Zealand, he contracted Malaria which has left him with the shakes ever since. He can't even pick up a fork without dropping the contents 40% of the time. It only gets worse as he ages. He joined the Navy, because he wanted to be an architect but was failing classes. His family wasn't well off and he needed to have some off years to work it out. When he got out of the Navy, he went back to college with support of the GI bill. He wasn't sure what he wanted exactly to do, so I believe he majored in mathematics and then decided to become a teacher mainly because that's what my grandma, whom he met in college, wanted to do. He was a copycat, but he ended up being an amazing high school math teacher--all thanks to his lack of direction which was remedied through the Navy and the love of his family.

My Papa also started college after high school and dropped out. He has nearly the same story. I believe he, too, wanted to be an architect flunked math class. I'm really going to have to ask him that--ask them both that or I'm going to go crazy--before I lose either one of them. At any rate, Papa decided that it would also be easier to go into the military to help pay for his education. He ended up in the Korean war. He learned to drive a car by going down this steep road that was curvy. He spent his teens in San Francisco, so he never needed to learn how to drive. His commanding officer forced him to learn. He had an injury in the war, too. I know he saw gratuitous death and/or had to kill people, because he couldn't walk through the Holocaust museum in DC. He said he had already seen it. He literally sat at the entrance the entire time we were there and let me walk through. He never has talked openly about the darker parts of war--at least never to me. He went back to college after he got out and became an accountant and then continued on to get his CPA license.

It would be much more difficult and practically impossible for these men to become who they presently are without their military experience and their education as a result of that experience. I have so much respect for the decisions they made. I understand why they went to war and why most kids go to war. So yes, the fact that Elisabeth wouldn't defend Rosie and answer the simple yes or no question angers me and feels as if it was personal.

I had a professor at my university who was very much anti-war from the beginning, as was I, but said he resented these young kids for enlisting. He was teaching a class about identifying racism and trying to understand how it works through each other. There were eight of us in the class. We learned how to talk one on one about such things and then once a class we'd come together as a group and talk about ourselves. The technical name is re-evaluation counseling. We learned how to just sit and listen and guide the other person with questions occasionally but let the other person talk. The trick was to talk non-stop for about five minutes saying whatever was in your mind without hesitation. Anyway, I had a session with the professor about this very topic. I looked at him and asked, "How would you feel if Amanda was broke and she wanted to become a teacher, but could only do so by joining the military?" He began giggling, as he always does and did when he felt really uncomfortable and upset. It was his way of coping. He realized that he was being completely irrational and that there were many kids, just like Amanda in our class, that had to do that. That were just as intelligent, friendly and capable as she, but were faced with the choice to go into the military, even before war was declared (although it wasn't officially declared, but that's another can of worms). We actually did this in front of the class. He kept looking over at Amanda and--wow, it was just a moment I'll never forget.

This is why I see Elisabeth's words as a personal attack. A personal attack on my grandfathers. A personal attack on anyone who has had a family member serve in a war they may not agree with (ie: Korea), but served because they honestly didn't know all of the components to the war at the time, and because they were young and they saw hope in the future in which they wanted to build families and get an education they might not have had otherwise.

Back to Rosie. Rosie gave me hope. Rosie made me feel like my voice could be heard when it has been silenced and twisted around for political gain. Domineering? Perhaps to some, but O'Donnell is genuine. She shows real anger--the anger all of us should feel about this war who are opposed to it and we've been forced to hold it back like the Prozac Nation that we are. The laws we ascribe to ourselves to be better people and survive--are our politics. As much as I feel grand about Kerry, Obama, Clinton, and Pelosi taking a stand yesterday with lots of others in the funding legislation, I feel like we failed. We failed at preserving the stories of men like my grandfathers who are very much against this war and are too tired to speak out and fight back. We have failed at getting these views out there. If these two are anti-war and very much anti-Bush, there's a good reason for it. Ugh, it's so depressing.

And I think part of it is that I see myself as one who preserves lives. That is my ultimate passion. I want people to live on long after they part. I think every life is important. Ying-yang is important, because you must have good and bad to balance into a rational person. And the fact that there are so few voices with the power and passion of Rosie O'Donnell's out there in the mainstream kills me. I know that if her last episode was on Wednesday, a piece of me will ultimately go with her. If it's in three weeks, it will be then. I feel that emotional about it. You don't just kick dirt on my grandfathers service and accuse them, their children, and their grandchildren of being the villain. It doesn't work that way. We need voices like Rosie's and that of my grandfathers with the military experience and knowledge to insist that we stop this Administration from making any more calculated mistakes. They never want this war to end. We need to force our hand.

Somehow it will balance out, but I have no idea when or how. Our "others" are playing dirty.

Democracy? Riiiight.

Apparently this article is being tracked down and disposed of. It comes from my hometown ABC news. Here you are:

Mar. 10 (ABC7) — We're all watching gas prices climb towards three dollars a gallon and most of us are not happy about it. But in San Francisco there's a group that is very pleased to see oil prices at $50 dollars a barrel. ABC7's Mark Matthews covered that group's meeting today.

Today and tomorrow, oil refiners are attending a conference in San Francisco. You never saw so many people so happy about rising oil prices. This has been a very good year for the refining industry and they don't expect it to change anytime soon.

The lunch time speaker at the World Refining & Fuels Conference was the president of Connecticut-based Premcor Refining - the country's biggest independent.

Hank Kuchta, Premcor: "The refining industry obviously had a great year in 2004."

Premcor's president told the audience his companies stock is up 50 percent, and he credited high oil prices and the fact that demand is up and supply is tight.

Kuchta: "We're finally in a situation where we don't have a lot of extra supply."

Usually you don't get oil refinery chiefs to be this forthcoming. Ordinarily we don't hear from the oil refinery chief at all. But at the conference, the head of Premcor felt comfortable enough to encourage his colleagues to keep supply tight.

Kuchta: "If it stays tight, we're all geniuses right?"

Premcor, he says, won't be over-producing.

Kuchta: "We are going to meet the demand that exists and not some theoretical demand."

And demand is expected to rise dramatically. Korea's biggest refiner says China is going to take care of that with a double digit jump in oil consumption this year.

Dong-Hyong Sheen, SK Corporation: "More than 30 percent oil consumption is predicted. Yeah, that's a huge amount."

It's not a pretty picture for U.S. consumers. The refiners are talking about linking with oil producers to make sure demand and supply stay tight.

Kuchta: "The moral of the story is we have a few good years before we shoot ourselves in the foot."

The president of Premcor did tell his colleagues that the only way they could screw up is if they didn't invest in clean technology and if they didn't take the concerns of the environmental community very, very seriously.

----

I find it very upsetting that this segment was on, without a transcript (because it is important), that someone had to write in to force a transcript on (my mother was the one that did) and now it's being forced from public eyes by Premcor. Yet, people say this sort of thing couldn't happen in a democracy. I've got news for you -- those who do not vote, those who make a conscious choice to be ignorant, they help to perpetuate this kind of activity. Living in ignorance is not participating in democracy. Keeping people ignorant is not promoting a democracy.

New Blogspot

I had a blogspot a long time ago. I don't even remember what my user name was, but it was mainly to play around with what was new and web building. I thought I'd start anew and maybe place some political rants in here. I admire other bloggers who have been able to reach into unexpected places and make a difference.