Letters to the Editor
warrior dowager
Published Letters: 25 Editor's Choice: 2
-
Women unbound
[Read the article: Cleric: Unveiled women burn men to ash]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The news from afar sounds a lot like the fundamentalist preachers in the back woods of
America.
Witness the raid upon the Mormon farm in Texas.
Or closer to home, I have seen this in the rural South most of my 73 years.
Two cousins of mine got religion and had their wives not cutting their hair, wearing long dresses, no make up. Then the next news I had was that they two wives had a thriving business in hair styling and artificial nails. What hath God wrought?
In the 15th and 16th centuries when the English Bible could be printed and read by many literate people in, a Jesuit visiting in London commented that without a learned cleric to read and interpret the scripture, in time the
scripture will become anything a person who can read will interpret it.
So a matronly family friend decided that it was not in the Bible that they could serve meals at Church,
And a nearby preacher who let his hair and beard grow like Jesus (though he kept his Packard) could be heard shouting prayers at night--until neighbors told him that it disturbed the chickens and they would not lay. And act of God?
One church had a piano, another none.
In a small Georgia town, two preachers were having dinner on the ground. And they began to discuss predestination--one for and one against.
One stuck his fork in a chicken gizzard and intoned, "I believe, that at the beginning of Time, God determined that I would eat this gizzard on this fork on this day. Whereupon his
rival picked the gizzard off the man's fork,
popped it in his mouth, chewed, swallowed and said "NOW how 'bout predestination?!"
Until this good day there are two Baptist churches in that small Georgia town--one believing in predestination and the other not.
-
Don't sit under the apple tree; Women are not guilty any more
[Read the article: My last word (for now) on sexism]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I am dismayed at the way men hate Hillary but
not surprised.
Men are just scared silly by strong, intelligent women.
Hillary sould print up some T shirts that read
Don't be afraid, guys. If Hillary is President,
it won't fall off--I promise.
-
Linguistically Attacked
[Read the article: Seal Press scandal]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I am an elderly white southern woman.
When I was younger and new to the intetragion upheaval in the South but I was also welcomed in the the Maryland college where I was teaching.
At a party, the son of one of my colleagues burst into a rage and said as leaving, "I will not be in ANY room with a southerner who talks like the white Selma sheriff."
That was only the beginning. At another party,
the wife of one of my colleagues thought I was
affecting a southern dialect and was roundly ridiculed for it.
Black people raise a great hue and cry about slavery--which, if memory serves, was lifted before the end of the Civil War.
A gentile white person with a cultured dialect is nevertheless mimicked, cursed, ridiculed, and wouldn't you know that the man who married me for my accent turned Yankee on me and ridiculed me for my speech.
All that by way of saying is that there are people who will ridicule what is new to them,
scary to them, half informed or misinformed about the origin of that speech.
If I sat around pissing and moaning that I came along before "capable women were invented" I would have lived a very twisted and resticked life."
I am who I am and who I am can achieve, receive honors, make friends with people unlike me, travel where people do not speak my dialect.
As a child, I was among many more black people than my white family members. Our love transcended what we could not--dared not--change.
I wept many, many a tear for how my beloved blacks were treated. The first time a tall lovely black woman spoke in my speech class, I sat on the back row and wept openly that she could do that.
White southerners can no more be coralled in the same pen anymore than every black is like another black. My parents taught the first integrated nigh school in our small city. They literally risked their lives. But to every black person they met, they were the enemy. They were white.
I think I must sound like the last lines of
Absolam Absolam: "I don't hate the South. I don't." as he gazed in the iron New England dark.
-
Mother's Milk
[Read the article: Shocker: Angela Merkel has boobs!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Women are not necessarily all brains but no boobs.
It's about time!
Hark back to Athena--big, beautiful,and in every way capable of even miraculous work.
Let's just hope it doesn't become a trend among the world's most powerful women--lest they
distract congresses and parliaments.
-
Been there done that, been done unto me
[Read the article: Will Obama's debate stumble hurt him?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I did not teach at the college level for thirty-four years without learing the myriad ways of young men with "letters."
Yes, Obama was not expecting the come downs he got.
And yes, them's the breaks.
What if a North Korean abassador tells him what he does not want to hear and will not give him waht he wants?
What if the sumbitches in the Senate will not do right?
If Obama does not have a poker face and a smooth
way to interact with his challengers--both foreign and domestic--he has a lot of episodes to face like the one from the last debate.
It is time--and long past time--for Obama to be tested not only in the heat of debates but in the ruthless and belittleing encounters with the powerful of the world.