The last of my father's sisters passed away on New Year's Day - Rose Bordo, eldest of the five daughters born to Philomena DiAndriole Rizzo, for whom I have chosen my use-name.

As I prepare to drive with my father and son to her wake tomorrow, I remember the summers spent witih Aunt Ro, Uncle Frank and their daughter Francine, who was like a sister to me. We played Barbies together, caught raindrops on our tongues, learned to knit, and listened to our parents talk of adult things as we whispered together iin Frannie's room. Our cousins Marina, Nicky, Bea, Carmen, and Michelle often joined us for elaborate storytelling sessions and jokefests.

Aunt Ro's home was as gracious as a woman gifted in handcrafts, with a classic Italian taste for decor, could make it. I remember her pride as she would present my parents with her ceramics...afghans...knitted booties...and assorted knicknacks through the years.

She and her sisters inherited their mother's culinary talents...learned at Gram's side, feeding family and friends, with countless days spent gathered with the family around Gram's kitchen table putting up garden vegetables or making linguine or cookies or the curious pastry called "anthills" - mounds of honey-saturated balls of dough, which tasted like heaven and settled like lead. Communal cookery days like quilting bees, with all the Rizzo women chattering and rolling and snipping and frying. Cholesterol? Never heard of it!

In fact,  girth to Gram signified health, and she led by example, with soft and generous curves and pillowy lap concealing the muscles of a powerful home keeper, the hardworking daughter of peasants. Dad often recounted the story of Aunt Ro letting out his pants while Gram tut-tutted "Louie, Louie, you're looking so thin!"

Her children called Gram "the iron fist in the velvet glove," enforcing a distinct division of labor. Gram's daughters Ro, Marie, Delores and Bea, were wizards at  the cooking, mending, gardening and lighter tasks, and my father and Uncle Dom would leap, unasked, to do the heavy lifting and repairs. Gram could be a martinet: her daughters were expected to take care of their men, and the sons and sons-in-law were expected to serve their wives, no questions asked. But to the next generation, she was an adoring and indulgent grandmother.

Visits "up home" were fragrant affairs: riding up with a bushel of steamed crabs firmly wedged in the back seat between Mom and me. We would arrive at Grandma's and Aunt Ro and Uncle Frank would quickly arrive with Frannie. We'd all settle down to a massive crab feast, with Mom tsking over Uncle Frank's exuberant shell-pounding and lack of surgical precision, and Aunt Ro wondering how we could eat anything that looked so much like an insect.

When I was reaching adolescence, Uncle Frank died suddenly, leaving Aunt Ro and Frannie in their new-bought home, where the basement was divided into his pool room and her quilting rooom. He was the first of his generation to go.

The family grew, with more grandchildren arriving to swell the ranks. Gram's seven children produced 15 grandchildren, who went on to produce...well, let's just say it was a crowd that continues to grow as the great-grandchildren arrive.

Gram died in 1980, and Aunt Ro and Aunt Bea - the oldest and youngest of her daughters - together worked to fill in the gap left by her passing. Our trips "up home" were spent now with Aunt Bea, with long summer evenings spent on Aunt Ro's big back porch. The sisters would reminisce with my parents while the cousins chatted and our children played.

It was in the late 1990s that Bea died after a long struggle with cancer, and the linchpin came out of the family. One by one over the decade that followed, the sisters passed on. As they slipped away, I had the sense that the tide of their generation was going out, washing their lives away with it.

Aunt Ro was the last of the sisters to go, dying 14 months after my mother and less than six months after Aunt Delores. Of Philomena Rizzo's children, the last remaining is my father, Louis.

And the choices of the family's future are being passed now with our generation - whether and how to maintain old patterns and traditions, or to move forward with a new  and different path.

From Starhawk, on Gaza

Dear friends,

All day I've been thinking about Gaza, listening to reports on NPR, following the news on the internet when I can spare a moment. I've been thinking about the friends I made there four years ago, and wondering how they are faring, and imagining their terror as the bombs fall on that giant, open-air prison.

The Israeli ambassador speaks movingly of the terror felt by Israeli children as Hamas rockets explode in the night. I agree with him—that no child should have her sleep menaced by rocket fire, or wake in the night fearing death.

But I can't help but remember one night on the Rafah border, sleeping in a house close to the line, watching the children dive for cover as bullets thudded into the walls. There was a shell-hole in the back room they liked to jump through into the garden, which at that time still held fruit trees and chickens. Their mother fed me eggs, and their grandmother stuffed oranges into my pockets with the shy pride every gardener shares.

That house is gone, now, along with all of its neighbors. Those children wake in the night, every night of their lives, in terror. I don't know if they have survived the hunger, the lack of medical supplies, the bombs. I only know that they are children, too.

I've ridden on busses in Israel. I understand that gnawing fear, the squirrely feeling in the pit or your stomach, how you eye your fellow passengers wondering if any of them are too thick around the middle. Could that portly fellow be wearing a suicide belt, or just too many late night snacks of hummus? That's no way to live.

But I've also walked the pock-marked streets of Rafah, where every house bears the scars of Israeli snipers, where tanks prowled the border every night, where children played in the rubble, sometimes under fire, and this was all four years ago, when things were much, much better there.

And I just don't get it. I mean, I get why suicide bombs and homemade rockets that kill innocent civilians are wrong. I just don't get why bombs from F16s that kill far more innocent civilians are right. Why a kid from the ghetto who shoots a cop is a criminal, but a pilot who bombs a police station from the air is a hero.

Is it a distance thing? Does the air or the altitude confer a purifying effect? Or is it a matter of scale? Individual murder is vile, but mass murder, carried out by a state as an aspect of national policy, that's a fine and noble thing?

I don't get how my own people can be doing this. Or rather, I do get it. I am a Jew, by birth and upbringing, born six years after the Holocaust ended, raised on the myth and hope of Israel. The myth goes like this:

"For two thousand years we wandered in exile, homeless and persecuted, nearly destroyed utterly by the Nazis. But out of that suffering was born one good thing—the homeland that we have come back to, our own land at last, where we can be safe, and proud, and strong."

That's a powerful story, a moving story. There's only one problem with it—it leaves the Palestinians out. It has to leave them out, for if we were to admit that the homeland belonged to another people, well, that spoils the story.

The result is a kind of psychic blind spot where the Palestinians are concerned. If you are truly invested in Israel as the Jewish homeland, the Jewish state, then you can't let the Palestinians be real to you. It's like you can't really focus on them. Golda Meir said, "The Palestinians, who are they? They don't exist." We hear, "There is no partner for peace," "There is no one to talk to."

And so Israel, a modern state with high standards of hygiene, a state rooted in a religion that requires washing your hands before you eat and regular, ritual baths, builds settlements that don't bother to construct sewage treatment plants. They just dump raw sewage onto the Palestinian fields across the fence, somewhat like a spaceship ejecting its wastes into the void. I am truly not making this up—I've seen it, smelled it, and it's a known though shameful fact. But if the Palestinians aren't really real—who are they? They don't exist!—then the land they inhabit becomes a kind of void in the psyche, and it isn't really real, either. At times, in those border villages, walking the fencelines of settlements, you feel like you have slipped into a science fiction movie, where parallel universes exist in the same space, but in different strands of reality, that never touch.

When I was on the West Bank, during Israeli incursions the Israeli military would often take over a Palestinian house to billet their soldiers. Many times, they would simply lock the family who owned it into one room, and keep them there, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days—parents, grandparents, kids and all. I've sat with a family, singing to the children while soldiers trashed their house, and I've been detained by a group of soldiers playing cards in the kitchen with a family locked in the other room. (I got out of that one—but that's another story.)

It's a kind of uneasy feeling, having something locked away in a room in your house that you can't look at. Ever caught a mouse in a glue trap? And you can't bear to watch it suffer, so you leave the room and close the door and don't come back until it's really, really dead.

Like a horrific fractal, the locked room repeats on different scales. The Israelis have built a wall to lock away the West Bank. And Gaza itself is one huge, locked room. Close the borders, keep food and medical supplies and necessities from getting through, and perhaps they will just quietly fade out of existence and stop spoiling our story.

"All we want is a return to calm," the Israeli ambassador says. "All we want is peace."

One way to get peace is to exterminate what threatens you. In fact, that may be the prime directive of the last few thousand years.

But attempts to exterminate pests breed resistance, whether you're dealing with insects or bacteria or people. The more insecticides you pour on a field, the more pests you have to deal with—because insecticides are always more potent at killing the beneficial bugs than the pesky ones.

The harshness, the crackdowns, the border closings, the checkpoints, the assassinations, the incursions, the building of settlements deep into Palestinian territory, all the daily frustrations and humiliations of occupation, have been breeding the conditions for Hamas, or something like it, to thrive. If Israel truly wants peace, there's a more subtle, a more intelligent and more effective strategy to pursue than simply trying to kill the enemy and anyone else who happens to be in the vicinity.

It's this—instead of killing what threatens you, feed what you want to grow. Consider in what conditions peace can thrive, and create them, just as you would prepare the bed for the crops you want to plant. Find those among your opponents who also want peace, and support them. Make alliances. Offer your enemies incentives to change, and reward your friends.

Of course, to follow such a strategy, you must actually see and know your enemy. If they are nothing to you but cartoon characters of terrorists, you will not be able to tell one from another, to discern the religious fanatic from the guy muttering under his breath, "F-ing Hammas, they closed the cinema again!"

And you must be willing to give something up. No one gets peace if your basic bargaining position is, "I get everything I want, and you eat my shit." You might get a temporary victory, but it will never be a peaceful one.

To know and see the enemy, you must let them into the story. They must become real to you, nuanced, distinctive as individuals.

But when we let the Palestinians into the story, it changes. Oh, how painfully it changes! For there is no way to tell a new story, one that includes both peoples of the land, without starting like this:

"In our yearning for a homeland, in our attempts as a threatened and traumatized people to find safety and power, we have done a great wrong to another people, and now we must atone."

Just try saying it. If you, like me, were raised on that other story, just try this one out. Say it three times. It hurts, yes, but it might also bring a great, liberating sense of relief with it.

And if you're not Jewish, if you're American, if you're white, if you're German, if you're a thousand other things, really, if you're a human being, there's probably some version of that story that is true for you.

Out of our own great need and fear and pain, we have often done great harm, and we are called to atone. To atone is to be at one—to stop drawing a circle that includes our tribe and excludes the other, and start drawing a larger circle that takes everyone in.

How do we atone? Open your eyes. Look into the face of the enemy, and see a human being, flawed, distinct, unique and precious. Stop killing. Start talking. Compost the shit and the rot and feed the olive trees.

Act. Cross the line. There are Israelis who do it all the time, joining with Palestinians on the West Bank to protest the wall, watching at checkpoints, refusing to serve in the occupying army, standing for peace. Thousands have demonstrated this week in Tel Aviv.

There are Palestinians who advocate nonviolent resistance, who have organized their villages to protest the wall, who face tear gas, beatings, arrests, rubber bullets and real bullets to make their stand.

There are internationals who have put themselves on the line—like the boatload of human rights activists, journalists and doctors on board the Dignity, the ship from the Free Gaza movement that was rammed and fired on by the Israeli navy yesterday as it attempted to reach Gaza with humanitarian aid.

Maybe we can't all do that. But we can all write a letter, make a phone call, send an email. We can make the Palestinian people visible to us, and to the world. When we do so, we make a world that is safer for every child.

Below is a good summary of some of the actions we can take.

Please feel free to repost this. In fact, send it to someone you think will disagree with it.
Starhawk

www.starhawk.org

Updated Action Alert on Gaza:
We Need "Sustained, Determined Political Action"December 29, 2008

As of this writing, a third consecutive day of Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip have killed an estimated 315 Palestinians and injured more than 1,400. According to the UN, at least 51 of the victims were civilians and 8 were children. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak has vowed ominously "a war to the bitter end."

Israel's attacks on the Gaza Strip are being carried out with F16 fighter jets, Apache helicopters, and naval gunboats all given to Israel by the United States with our tax dollars.

From 2001-2006, the United States transferred to Israel more than $200 million worth of spare parts to fly its fleet of F16's and more than $100 million worth of helicopter spare parts for its fleet of Apaches. In July 2008, the United States gave Israel 186 million gallons of JP-8 aviation jet fuel and signed a contract to transfer an addition $1.9 billion worth of littoral combat ships to the Israeli navy. Last year, the United States signed a $1.3 billion contract with Raytheon to transfer to Israel thousands of TOW, Hellfire, and "bunker buster" missiles.

Make no mistake about it-Israel's war on the Gaza Strip would not be possible without the jets, helicopters, ships, missiles, and fuel provided by the United States.

Ali Abunimah, of The Electronic Intifada, wrote, "Palestinians everywhere are asking for solidarity, real solidarity, in the form of sustained, determined political action." In light of our country's enabling role in Israel's war on the Gaza Strip, it is the least we can do. Here's how:

1. Attend a protest or vigil. We've compiled a list of more than 60 emergency protests taking place in 25 states and the District of Columbia, many of which are taking place today or tomorrow. Find one near you and bring as many people to it as you can. If you know of a protest that isn't listed on our website, please send us all the logistical details and contact information by clicking here . More events are being posted all the time-check back frequently for the latest updates.

2. Contact the White House, the State Department, your Representative and Senators, and the Obama Transition Team to protest Israel's war on Gaza and demand an immediate cease-fire.

White House: 202-456-1111 or comments@whitehouse.gov
State Department: 202-647-6575 or send an email by clicking here
Congress: 202-224-3121 or find contact info by clicking here
Obama Transition Team: send an email by clicking here

3. Make your voice heard in the media. Contact your local media by phoning into a talk show or writing a letter to the editor. To find contact info for your local media, click here .

4. Tell President-Elect Barack Obama that " We Need a Change in Israel/Palestine Policy ." Join more than 200 organizations in 38 states plus Washington, DC and abroad and thousands of individuals by endorsing this letter which will be published as a full-page ad on Inauguration Day. Let all your friends know by copying and pasting the graphic below into your email signature, blog, or website and by joining our Facebook group .



5. Sign up to organize people in your community to end U.S. military aid to Israel. We'll send you an organizing packet complete with our brand new postcards featuring the icon below. If we're going to change U.S. policy, we've got to go beyond agreeing among ourselves and educate and organize others as well. Sign up today and we'll send you a package tomorrow by clicking here .



6. Join us in Washington, DC for Inauguration Day on January 20. Upwards of 4 million people are expected in Washington, DC for President-Elect Obama's inauguration. This is a perfect time for us to reach out to and educate our fellow citizens about U.S. policy toward Palestine/Israel. If you plan to be in Washington for the inauguration and would like to help us distribute information and get signatures on postcards calling for a cut off of arms transfers to Israel, please click here .

7. Join us again in Washington, DC for a Grassroots Advocacy Training and Lobby Day on February 1-2. Interfaith Peace-Builders and the US Campaign are organizing this exciting two-day event, featuring interactive, skills-building workshops and the chance to meet with your Representative and Senators to discuss U.S. policy toward Israel/Palestine. Spaces are filling up fast. For more details, and to register, please click here .

8. Forward this email to everyone you know and ask them to take action.

Thank you for doing all you can during this tragic time.US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation DONATE | SUBSCRIBE | UNSUBSCRIBE
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At long last, Australia is waking up to the centuries of suffering that have been imposed on Elder peoples. Now if only the U.S. and Canada could follow this good example...

Here's the story from Reuters:

CANBERRA - Aborigines playing didgeridoos and smeared with white body paint overturned hundreds of years of British tradition in Australia on Tuesday by taking part in the official opening of the nation's new parliamentary session.

The indigenous ceremony came a day before Prime Minister Kevin Rudd delivers an historic apology to Aborigines for past assimilation policies, in which aboriginal children were taken from their families to be raised in white households.

Aboriginal elder Matilda House, standing barefoot and wearing a coat of animal skins, delivered a traditional message stick to Rudd to mark the first sitting of parliament since Rudd's Labor Party won power in last November's elections.

"With this welcome comes a great symbolism, the hope of a united nation through reconciliation," House told the politicians and guests in a crowded Members Hall.

The welcome was followed by traditional dances from Aborigines, some carrying boomerangs, and indigenous Torres Strait Islanders, with some of the performers wiping away tears over the symbolism of the event.

For more of the story, see http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23123014/

Starhawk posted this yesterday - I think it's the best affirmation of the TRUE meaning of Christmas I've found. :

“Whereas Christians and Christianity are of undeniable importance in the world and the foundation of this country, in respect for his example and story at this time of year we make the following statements:

“Whereas Jesus Christ was born in a stable because his parents could not find shelter, and whereas in the last weeks we as a nation have allowed the destruction of the last remaining housing for the poor in New Orleans, and whereas our streets are full of the cold and the homeless, we repent of our policies and in his memory commit to housing all who wander without a roof or a welcome in our cities and our towns.

“Whereas Christ was born among the poor, lived and preached to the poor, we repent of the selfishness and shortsightedness that has failed to provide for all of our children, and commit ourselves to provide health care for all children and for all of the poor.

“Whereas Christ commanded us to ‘love our neighbors as ourselves’ we repent of the walls we have drawn across borders, the deaths of those who have tried to cross the deserts in search of a better life, the wall we have supported that cleaves the Holy Land itself in two and confiscates the farmland of the Palestinians, cleaves villages in two, and stands as a lasting monument to our failure to achieve peace, and we commit ourselves to establish justice which alone can provide true security.

“Whereas Christ has been called the Prince of Peace, we repent of our eagerness to use war and violence as the answer to every international situation, of the horrific and destructive war we have waged in Iraq which has claimed tens of thousands of lives, and we commit ourselves to a withdrawal of our armies, to a new foreign policy based on the building of relationships, not the bombing of children, and to fostering and nurturing peace.”

I'm not normally a haranguer...but this news story made it so clear that key information just isn't being communicated, that I think this point needs to be made a little more intensely than perhaps I might make it otherwise. After all, it does have an immediate impact on the environment and the success of your green business!

There's an article in GreenBiz News today about an EcoPinion survey that found Consumers Don't Understand Green Terms. Good article, important data being revealed about mainstream consumers' buying decisions. And it reminded me of a crucial point I've made oh-so-many times to my clients...quite probably the single most important point that will convert browsers to committed green buyers!

What is that point? Check it out (and learn more about that survey) at The Tree-Huggin' Copywriter - and if you like what you read, join my blog community!

Green business has been a growing force in the marketplace for years now...but what about green copywriting? It's taken a while, but this eco-niche is beginning to grow...come and learn more at The Tree-Huggin' Copywriter!

If there's anything all of us want these days, it's to change the world...and every way we turn,  new prescriptions are being offered as one global system after another enters a danger zone. Ongoing and never-ending environmental  crises demand immediate attention... ongoing and never-ending socila abuses demand immediate action...and in the midst of all the crushing, immediate demands, who's looking  to change the long-term patterns that underly the devolution?

On Oct. 19-21, at the Maryland Institute of Art’s Brown Center in Baltimore, MD, a gathering of brilliant scientific minds and social innovators will focus on practical and visionary solutions for restoring the Earth’s ecosystems and healing communities.

As a newly-launched satellite of the  globalocal Bioneers Conference - now in its 18th year - the Baltimore Bioneers event  will combine a simultaneous broadcast of the California-based parent conference's plenary talks with regional speakers, panels and workshops.

The audience for the Baltimore conference is unusual in that it brings together local visionary leaders representing business and the arts, as well as the environmental and social justice movements. The conference’s goal is to encourage cross–discipline dialogue and offer opportunities to create new solutions.

National plenary speakers include Van Jones, Majora Carter and Winona Laduke. Local
programming features plenaries, workshops, live performances and a Woodberry
Kitchen dinner.

Local topics include “The Power of Dialogue,” “Business with Conscience,” “Demystifying your Carbon Footprint” and “Art and Social Change.”

“Baltimore Bioneers will bring together people from many different disciplines –science,
business, and social service organizations to name just a few– all working to change the
region and the world. At this conference, we will witness how the power of collaboration
across all disciplines can solve problems that some think are unchangeable,” states Ted
Rouse, a Bioneer committee member.

Tickets start at $65 for one day and are $195 for all three days. Please register by
September 21 for an early bird discount. Go to www.cultivatingchange.org for more
information on Baltimore Bioneers: Cultivating Change….Inspiring Solutions, or contact: Brittany Murray # 410.337.2390

If you'd like to know how green/sustainable copywriting differs from the straight mainstream sort - please visit me at The Tree-Huggin' Copywriter!

To appreciate the people I love while we're all here

Since I started taking the Thirty-Day Challenge at the beginning of this month, it seems that my life has gone into warp speed - too many projects and new directions to juggle, and all demanding attention.

For right now, I'll discuss the hottest - my new blog, The Joy of Cat Herding - Solving Your Cat Behavior Problems , which began as an exercise in Web 2.0 social networking and has turned into a mission of its own. Namely, to offer cat caregivers information and resources for dealing with the issues that too often lead to cat-abandonment or euthenasia. I'm making connections now with cat doctors, rescuers, fosterers, behaviorists, and communicators, and seeking expert voices - so if you have expertise in dealing with any cat behavior problems, please let me know!

With the onset of harvest, I'm doing a lot of research on composting and wintering-over...ti's early yet, but there's a lot to learn. I'll probably be sharing more about this as I go along...always looking for likeminded folk!

And of course green copywriting - just now promoting the Second Annual Gala Dinner of the William E Proudford Sickle Cell Fund on Sept. 15.  I knew very little about Sickle Cell when beginning this project, and was appalled to hear the statistics...

Experts estimate that between 70,000 and 80,000 Americans suffer its effects, and over 1,300 babies are born with the condition each year.  It’s a complex, painful, lifelong and life-threatening disease requiring intensive social and economic support for the patient at every stage of development, from simply getting through school to gaining and retaining employment and insurance in adulthood.

 Roughly 500 men, women and children die each year from sickle cell disease.

 While it is considered a rare condition, it is by far the most common genetic blood disorder in the U.S. According to a 2006 article published in Pediatrics, however, the combined amount of public and private funds raised for sickle cell disease amounted to just over $1,000 per patient (as a comparison, $9,000 per patient was raised for cystic fibrosis). Sadly, the greatest deficit has fallen in private funding, giving a rough idea of the lack of public awareness regarding this disease.

If you plan to be in Baltimore at that time, and have any interest in health issues - please do check this out.

Thrilled to be with Zaadz and see all the wonderful people here...

Namaste!