Communism/Socialism Aren't Dirty Words

My mother and grandmother never missed a minute of the televised 1950s McCarthy Hearings. They avidly read every word about it in our morning and afternoon newspapers. They talked about the danger of communists in our midst. Their friends were also scared.

As kids we hid under desks for regular bomb tests when the siren blew.

The TV Show I was a Communist for the FBI  and a companion radio program reinforced the fear of communism.

It took years for people to realize even after Lawyer Joseph Welch said, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?" cCarthy was red baiting.

There was also the fear of creeping socialism which I discovered as a cub reporter covering Reading's Town Meeting. What was the creeping Socialism? Fluoride in the town water. 

It's happening again. Only this time the president is using the threat of communism is the scare tactic. The president said, “There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success.

“Communism is the enemy of free people everywhere, everywhere in the world, never works, it’s the enemy of the Constitution, above all, it’s the enemy of July 4, 1776 – it is the enemy indeed.

"Americans will never let anyone take our freedom away . . . And all these talks from the communists, they haven’t got a chance. We don’t want communists in our country. Never worked, and it never will work. . .Right now, it’s happening in New York and California, but you’ll live in squalor . . .There will be no food, there will be no housing, there will be no military, and there will be no law and order. There will be no nothing. You’ll be a Third World country in every way, and everyone will suffer or die. That’s what happens. Crowds of evangelicals and Catholics who are part of the nonprofit Faith and Freedom Coalition which advocates for traditional family values and religious liberty. "These ruthless communists will attack all religions, but in particular Christianity. They always do."

Many countries have communist parties some in almost total control like China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea.

When I was first in France I was shocked to see election posters saying "I'm a communist and I vote"  Je suis communiste et je vote. At work in Switzerland, a very un-communist country, one of my staff was communist as was all her family. I see offices for the communist party sometimes as I drive through towns in France. 

There's nothing like a scare technique to promote a political party. We've had: Hordes of insane immigrants swarming the border to take jobs. Soon the immigrants will take over the whites. Now its the communists that are the danger.

Freedom House, Founded in 1941 in Washington, D.C. to promote Freedom and pro-democracy puts out a list each year on the ranking of Freedom Countries.

Notice the U.S. is on the bottom of the list. Notice at the top of the list are the countries the current American government considers socialist. 

 

 

 

 America is not in danger of being taken over by communists, democrats, democratic socialists. They are in danger of being destroyed by the current administration starting with their scare tactics.

On Rape and Politics

 

I’ve been a card carrying feminist since forever.

I’ve had friends raped. I have friends and myself who have been sexual harassed in different degrees. I deplore it all.

Now we come down to the Maine Senatorial candidate.

I don’t know if he’s guilty or not. The timing is such and as filthy as politics are, it could be a move for the opposition to get rid of a candidate that could unseat Susan Collins.

Rapists should not sit in Congress. I also remember that:

• The U.S. president is a convicted rapist.
• A supreme Court Justice is a suspected rapist.
• Susan Collins voted to put a suspected rapist on the Supreme Court.

All three of them should not by in office.

The reality is that even if Platner is innocent, his chances of being found innocent in time for the election put the results of the November election in jeopardy.

As a feminist I want to think the woman is innocent. 

But how would you prove her guilty? How do you prove that with no rape kit, no bank account verification that she is being paid off? 

Just writing about the possibility of guilt or innocent about another woman bothers me, but in this toxic world, that thought runs through my mind along with the words "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sor...) marching through my head.

 

 

 

Free Write - Expletive Deleted

 

In place of a photo prompt for our weekly Free Write, Rick chose two words...Oh, Shit... making it a slightly different challenge. Since all three of us are in the same country now for these sessions, we decided instead of taking turns giving a prompt, we would decide on the prompt together and write for ten minutes. There are several other people whom we send to prompts so they can do a free write from a stranger's prompt.

Rick's Free Write

"Oh, shit," in my personal vocabulary, is shorthand for something I’ve done that’s stupid but not of serious consequence.

Spilled spaghetti sauce on my pants.

Dropped a dish in the sink and chipped the edge.

Hit a bad shot on the golf course.

For issues of electronics such as computer software glitches or balky printers, I’m inclined to other expletives. The semi-meaningless F***! Or, for emphasis, F*** F*** F***. These issues may eventually prove inconsequential, or not, but they are not (usually) my fault. More likely one of Bill Gates’s minions who like to tinker with program updates just for the hell of it.

I don’t swear a lot (I don’t think), and generally only at home in private.

I get it out of my system and then start trying to solve the problem.

To my recollection, I’ve never smashed a computer in anger.

Clothes will wash.

Dishes can be replaced.

The bad golf shot… well, that’ll stay with me awhile.

(Postscript: After we returned home from this free write session, I dropped a glass in the sink and it broke. Yes, I automatically said ‘Oh, shit.’)

Julia's Free Write 

Oh shit indeed!

This morning as I checked messages, I saw one from a friend and opened it.

Now, usually he sends as reel, a cartoon or an article on politics: nope, it was today’s free write prompt “Oh shit.”

And that was exactly in tune with my sentiments: turning one’s mind away once one knows is not easy!

I tried but probably wrote it a half a dozen times before we actually met.

I was brought up in a very conservative family, and environment, where we weren’t even exposed to “dirty” words.

I remember one famous road trip where my mother actually ended up forbidding the word “man”. We had it down pat, inflection, emphasis and all exactly like “damn”.

Now damn had we said damnation would have been o.k., after all, it was in the Bible.

Then there are language differences: when I first came to France my then boyfriend had me convinced that the parrot in the coffee shop was called “merde” (the French version of shit).

I still cannot use the word shit but find the German “Scheisse” ever so satisfying!

D-L's Free Write 

Gina had spent six Tuesday nights from 6:30 to 9:30 in a cake-decorating course. She had watched every episode of The Cake Boss. 

Now she was ready.

Measure the flower, add two eggs, chocolate and the other ingredients. Beat air into the batter as if she were a sadist.

Grease the pans just so. Bake, but set the times four minutes in advance of being done. Mix the sugar and chocolate for the frosting. The frosting was perfect.

Add the cowboy, cow and fence figurines and if Evan was 32, he still loved cowboys. The cake was for him along with cowboy boots for his birthday. 

Gingerly, she put every decoration on the cake. She carried the plate into the dining room which had been decorated like a western ranch house.

 Phoebe the dachshund ran under her feet. The cake flew through the air landing against the giant television.

Oh Shit! 

Rick Adams is an aviation journalist and publisher of www.aviationvoices.com, a weekly newsletter reporting the airline industry  top stories . He is the author of The Robot in the Simulator. AI in Aviation Training.  

Visit D-L.'s website  https://dlnelsonwriter.com, She is the author of 15 fiction and three non fiction books. Her 300 Unsung Women, bios of women who battled gender limitations, can be purchased  at https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/300-unsung-women-d-l-nelson/1147305797?ean=9798990385504 

Visit Julia's blog. She has written and taken photos and loves syncing up with friends.  Her blog can be found: https://viewsfromeverywhere.blogspot.com/ 

 

Coat Hangers and Knitting Needles

 

Fertility Fights

 

What frustrated Sanger was how many women she met had tried self-induced abortions. Most had been told when they asked their doctors how to prevent pregnancy—abstinence

When Margaret Sanger became active in fighting for women to have access to birth control, she was often ignored. The message that too many children could destroy a family because of inadequate resources took years to reach lawmaker’s ears.

Margaret Higgins Sanger (1879-1966) made the term “birth control” popular. Much of her early adult life was spent crusading for women to have access to birth control. To do it, she had to break the law.

Sanger was born Margaret Louise Higgins in Corning, New York.

Her father, Michael H. Higgins, was an Irish immigrant who left the Catholic church.

Although he wanted to be a doctor, he ended up working as a stonemason.

Her mother, Anne, emigrated from Ireland during the potato famine. The couple had 11 children and seven unsuccessful births. Anne died at 49.

How being a child from such a large family shaped Sanger’s attitudes about birth control is conjecture.

Her older sisters helped Sanger go to Claverack College and Hudson River Institute. She started nurses training at White Plains Hospital.

She married William Sanger in 1902. They had three children.

After a fire destroyed the Sanger couple’s home in Hastings-on Hudson, the family moved to New York City.

The marriage ended in 1921. Although she remarried, she continued her work under the Sanger name.

Not Preventing Pregnancy Led to Abortions

Sanger worked in the slums as a visiting nurse. Her husband was an architect. Both were social activists. What frustrated Sanger was how many women she met had tried self-induced abortions. Most had been told when they asked their doctors how to prevent pregnancy—abstinence.

The advice was unrealistic and unsatisfactory.

Sanger considered women controlling their own fertility mandatory. Her method of activism to promote her belief that contraception and empowerment were linked was through the written word.

She created pamphlets, which could not legally be distributed through the mail because of the Comstock Laws. Instead she used family-planning and birth control clinics such as Harlem Birth Control, which she founded, boosting distribution to several hundred thousand copies.

The clinic had all-female doctors and a 100% African-American advisory council. Later, African-Americans were added to the staff.

She created a monthly newsletter, The Woman Rebel. Its slogan was “No Gods, No Masters,” borrowed from the Industrial Workers of the World who used it in the 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike. Sanger’s pamphlets with detailed descriptions of contraception methods challenged the Comstock Laws.

The Postal Service suppressed seven of 11 issues of her newsletter. Sanger was arrested. She escaped to the U.K. in 1914. While there, she came under the influence of Havelock Ellis, who believed sex should be safe and pleasurable for women.

Sanger wrote two articles for New York Call that would produce some outrage for their frankness:

•  “What Every Mother Should Know”
•    “What Every Girl Should Know”
•  Theywerepublishedin bookformat in1916. A1917 editionalso hadinformation on: Cervical cap
•    Diaphragms
•   Douches
•  Herbook,Family Limitation,cause her to be prosecute ununder theComstockLaws. It is still available in a 2017 edition. On Amazon, many of the reader reviews show a lack of understanding of the danger that this advice, the best available at the time, brought her.

It is hard to believe today that something like distributing birth control information would lead to 30 days in a workhouse and include force-feeding. That happened to Sanger’s sister and fellow birth-control advocate Ethel Byrne. 

Even more disturbing, at Sanger’s trial the judge said that women did not have the right to “to copulate with a feeling of security that there will be no resulting conception.”

Sanger would be arrested eight times.

She refused to promise she would not break the law again. A victory of sorts happened when Judge Frederick E. Crane ruled in the New York Court of Appeals that doctors could provide contraception information. The catch was that they should only prescribe birth control for reasons of health.

In 1917 Sanger began publishing the Birth Control Review, which was designed to promote support to the medical and legislative communities as well as the middle and upper classes. It encouraged readers to join the American Birth Control League (she founded ABCL in 1921), which later became Planned Parenthood. Publication stopped in 1929. The themes were:

        Children should be conceived in love

        Children should be born of their mother’s conscious desir        Children should be created only under conditions which make possible the heritage of health

 Sanger had the financial support of John D. Rockefeller Jr. for her ABCL.

Her work was not limited to the U.S. She discovered that the method of family planning in Asia was infanticide, most often of a female baby. She worked with writer and 1938 Nobel Prize for Literature winner and fighter for women’s rights Pearl Buck to open a family planning clinic in Shanghai.

Sanger had internal political problems with one group. Recently, her belief in eugenics sparked criticism that surfaced again in the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign for U.S. president.

• Sangerdivided societyinto groups:
•  The educated and informed, who limited family size
•  The intelligent and responsible, who wanted to control family size despite lacking in some of the resource
•   Irresponsible and reckless people with “religious scruples” She felt that the third group should be stopped from reproducing. She continued to lecture and write, including:

        Woman and the New Race

        The Pivot of Civilization

        My Fight for Birth Control

        Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography

        Motherhood in Bondage—500 letters from women desperate for birth control information.

Her National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control, a lobbying group to overturn restrictions on contraception, began in 1929.

Frustrated by lack of results, she ordered a diaphragm in 1931 by mail, which was confiscated.

Finally, in 1936, a court decision overturned part of the Comstock Laws. Doctors could order contraception products.

A greater victory came in 1937. The American Medical Association decided contraception was a medical service and was added to the curriculum of many medical schools.

She was nominated for but did not win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Sanger died at age 86 from congestive heart failure, but she lived to see the Griswold v.

Connecticut Supreme Court decision legalizing birth control for married women.

Today birth control in many forms is considered normal. Many people today cannot imagine that not only was birth control once considered immoral it could result in prison.

Meals and Memories

My mother, the late Journalist Dorothy Sargent Boudreau, loved family memories and cooking. She combined meals and memories after her retirement several decades ago into a regular column for the Lawrence Eagle Tribune. 

Never do I cook one of my mother's dishes when memories of my mother, grandmother and brother J. (also deceased) sitting around the table .

Especially now when there is a surplus of zucchini. I bet everyone has a story when they politely thanked friends for zucchini while thinking, "what am I going to do with all of them."

Periodically, I will publish one of her recipes on Substack. Here's the first. In this article she combined an interview with zucchini pickles.

Here it is

Back in my newspaper days I was assigned to do a feature story on Ann Morgan of Gray and Cole Nursery,Inc., and before we got through the interview the talk had turned to cooking.   

Naturally!   

Ann is an accomplished hand a growing, freezing, canning and cooking. When she mentioned “zucchini pickles” I was intrigued for that was the year of our last garden and we were overrun with the ubiquitous zucchini.   

Ann very graciously wrote out the recipe for us and it was a top favorite then and now.

• 3 quarts thinly sliced, unpeeled zucchini squash, (If you want to use up your larger zucchini, slice thinly and halve or quarter, dependent on size).
• 2 medium onions, peeled and thinly sliced    
• 1 tsp. celery seed
• 2 tsps. mustard seed
• 1/4 cup pickling salts
• 1 tsp turmeric
• 1/2 tsp. dry mustard
• 2 cups vinegar                                             
• 1/2 tsp. dry mustard 
• 2 cups sugar

Combine zucchini and onions. 

Sprinkle with salt, cover with cold water and let stand two hours.   

Drain, rinse with fresh water, drain again.  

Combine remaining ingredients in enamel or stainless steel kettle and bring to boil. Cook two minutes.   

Add zucchini and onions, remove from heat and let stand two hours.  

Bring again to boil and cook five minutes.   

Ladle hot into hot sterilized pint jars and process in boiling water bath for five minutes to ensure a seal.   

Makes about four pints.   

You’ll be asked for this recipe! 

Betcha!