Hekate
Hekate's JournalDear DUers: All thru this terrible COVID year I've felt a sense of community at DU.....
All thru this terrible year I’ve felt a sense of community here — as if we're holding each others’ hands, being encouraging voices in the darkness that Trump created.
Praying for the sick and terrified, grieving with the bereaved, upholding the weary and fearful. Rejoicing at each step forward — each recovery, each vaccination. Being a community.
All of a sudden in the last few days, our “family” is turning on itself. In multiple posts and OPs we who have managed to work our way thru the distribution labyrinth are being accused of “gloating,” being “disrespectful,” being uncaring of others, hogging medication that should go to others, and of being unconscious of our “white privilege.”
How dare we have even a glimmer of hope and a sliver of relief?
No. Just no. This only serves Trump, who malignantly and maliciously killed at least half a million of our friends and loved ones. He and his family and cronies did this to us, and they did it on purpose.
Turn your wrath toward he who deserves it, turn your energies toward working somehow to make the system work better, and recognize that each person who is protected brings you and others closer to protection as well.
Please.
Love your origin story & would love to hear your storytelling...
At the time I joined DU in 2002 I’d recently finished a graduate program in mythological studies.
Before I started that program I’d spent years dealing with an unruly adolescent daughter, which got me to thinking about Demeter and Persephone. Looked at from one point of view — in my case, askance — the daughter had dragged her mother through Hell. I wrote poetry about us.
When I started writing papers it seemed natural to delve deeper into the mythology of Demeter and Persephone, and a very rich mythology it is.
But as with so many goddesses, they are part of a triad, and Hekate is the third one. I asked myself if I wanted to continue with researching the mother-daughter myth and decided to take a different path. Hekate is not a mother, and one of her names is Eldest, because she’s from the Titan brood that predated the Olympians.
So when I came here I took Hekate’s name.
But in deciding to become very politically involved, I also took another road, away from writing about mythology. And that was also Hekatean, for she stands at the road where three ways meet, and as Frost noticed (in talking about only two roads) when you choose a path, you can’t really return from whence you started.
7 Republicans stood with us? Couldn't even find 10 righteous? God destroyed Sodom & Gomorrah...
...when 10 just men could not be found.
I have issues with the Old Testament God, but stories like this come to mind today, given all the alleged “believers” there are in US politics. “Believers” who swore an oath on their holy book before their god to uphold the US Constitution.
I am a Big Fan of women having access to the full range of women's necessary medical care ...
You may not be a big fan of men having access to prostate exams, but it is part of men’s medical care. You may not be a big fan of prostatectomies, but on occasion, they are necessary. You may not be a big fan of vasectomies, but some men find them necessary.
Don’t judge human beings’ private medical decisions, especially about their reproductive parts.
I spent too much of my life parsing the abortion issue, trying to allow for the “sincerity” of abortion foes. Several years ago I finally, finally realized it was a hopeless endeavor. The RW in particular cares nothing about my level of sincerity, nor do they care about my or any woman's life or health. If they did care they would not be trying to outlaw all forms of contraception. If they did care they would ensure that all children would be fed, housed, and schooled, instead of abandoning them to hunger, poverty, and ignorance.
I understand your inner struggle with the word and concept of abortion. But that uncertainty is the wedge the RW anti-choice fanatics uses against us. I am over 70 and I decided to not even allow that any more. To hell with the RW, and I mean that. To hell with them.
Instead, what I hold to is: I believe women should have full & affordable access to the full range of women’s necessary medical care. Full stop.
Melania will never understand that the difference between herself & Dr Jill is caring about others
Dr Jill cares about others, has real accomplishments to her name, and works hard. Those traits, more than her new title and more than her husband’s title, make her beloved, & make her of public interest (oh, say, to your average magazine editor) now that she has the title.
FLOTUS Michelle Obama had all that and glamor, too. The camera just loved her.
Of course Melania Trump is bitter with envy. She thought adulation on a royal scale came with the title, and it doesn’t. She still doesn’t understand — she never will — she is incapable of it. She is pathetic.
In my youth I read any number of Russian novels & short stories from different eras...
Solzhenitsyn was very popular in the 1960s. I was assigned Lower Depths in college. And so on.
More recently I read a lengthy memoir of a very observant Englishwoman who lived in Russia for about a decade prior to the Crimean War.
There is a common thread among them all: melancholy, misery among the lower classes, gaiety of a sort among the upper classes, and ultimately an all-pervading fear of the government and its spies. The Englishwoman was sent home for her own protection, and her memoir was published anonymously for the protection of everyone she was friends with or had even met while living there.
It was not just about the Tsar. It was not just about Communism. It’s not just Putin. It’s Russia.
The issue of domestic terrorists has been neglected for decades, as in, there is no such category...
...in the law, from what I have heard. This needs to be rectified soon.
Anybody who supports Planned Parenthood and other women’s reproductive rights organizations has known for 40 years about one network of domestic terrorists that has moved way past clinic protests and supports arson, murder, maiming, stalking, and doxxing. Their heroes are sheltered, hidden, and supported when on the run. When in prison they are still treated as heroes and receive visits, gifts, and letters.
The USA PATRIOT ACT (1 & 2) was shocking. Many of us believe it was overreach, but I am not going to argue the case now.
In all sincerity, there were American elements that were simply left out: white Christian men with personal armories and a simmering grudge against society and the federal government. Now, right now, we all just witnessed a political insurrection in which our Capitol was overrun. By these men and their female cohorts. They are fully networked across social media — so much so that there’s even a Proud Boys chapter in Honolulu.
The Legislature needs to name them for what they are — domestic terrorists — and enact a coherent body of laws to deal with them.
Profile Information
Gender: FemaleHometown: Central Coast, California
Home country: USA
Member since: 2002
Number of posts: 91,038
