Transiting Central America–1976

Continuing with my long letter home, written May 3, 1976

We started out in the morning for Guatemala.  The border didn’t open that morning until 10:00 AM.  It took two hours to drive through all the customs and border checks, and bug spray, etc.  We ended up selling Mike’s little .22 rifle for $85.00 rather than argue any longer about a transit permit.  C’est la vie.  We drove through Guatemala, saw iguanas, parrots, bananas growing on the trees, sugar cane, rubber plantations, etc. and came to the border.  It took us an hour or so to check out of Guatemala and another hour or so to check into El Salvador.  OUr daylight was gone and we raced along in the dark to San Salvador.  What a surprise.  We came up over a dark jungle road and down below us was a BIG city.  The first thing we came to was McDonalds and we stopped immediately for dinner.  Then we found a hotel–the nicest one in town and spent the night in comfort.  We wasted some time the next morning and got a late start out of town.

We crossed El Salvador and entered Honduras with the normal border delays.  Honduras was horrible.  The countries on both sides are q thousand times better.  (We only saw the Pacific side during the dry season on this trip.) There were only hot rocky fields everywhere with people sitting around in rags.  The little children were all naked and had bloated stomachs.  Right at the border we saw some people with kilns and clay making big pottery animals, but that was the most activity we saw in the entire place.

We picked up an American hitchhiker in Honduras–no one should have to stay there–and took him into Nicaragua.  Right at the border–after a two hour delay–things changed.  Off in the distance we saw smoking volcanos and stopped for pictures.  Unfortunately our camera was later stolen (out of our van parked on the street in front of the Hotel Roma in Panama City).  We passed lakes and green fields.  

Outside of Managua we got a flat tire on the van.  We stopped on a sort of hill.   Mike and the hitchhiker got out to change it, I got out to watch, and Meggie stayed in the van asleep.  The van was jacked way up when suddenly everything started to slide.  The jack popped out, Mike started yelling and pushing the van that was tipping sideways over on top of us.  Megs woke up inside and started screaming.  My heart was racing at eighty miles an hour.  Nothing happened.  The van didn’t tip over; Meg went back to sleep, and they changed the tire, but I thought we were in for it for a minute there! 

Managua was a shock.  This city is still flattened from the 1972 earthquake. The only nice place to stay was booked up for a week so we stayed in the second best place–a one time medical clinic without hot water and with cracks down the walls.  For that we paid $32.00.  The hitchhiker stayed with us and the next day we dropped him off in an old town to see an old church.  We never did know his name.  

We got to the Costa Rican border at 12:10.  The border is closed from noon until 2:00 PM.  So we waited.  Costa Rica was a lovely little country.  We stayed in San Jose and the next day drove across the mountains to David, Panama.  

We spent the night four hours from Panama City and finally arrived the next morning.  Our first night in David we got a taste of things to come–cold water and spiders.  We rented a trailer for the night–it was David’s version of a hotel.

Our first night in the City we went to a party at the church to see if anyone knew of anywhere to stay.  Mike had to go in flip-flops but they were so impressed with our activity that they called Mike as second counselor in the Elder’s quorum the next week and me as a counselor in the Relief Society.  

We have been teaching English for more than a month already.  Time has flown by since we got here.   We have found hundreds of friends in Panama, at school, on the base–this is a friendly city.  We got an apartment and a maid and furniture but still don’t have a hot water heater or fridge or gas for the stove.  But who needs those little things??

On a Thursday and Friday we had off from school we went out to the San Blas Isalands and lived in bamboo shacks and slept in hammocks.  When we came home I told Ely, our maid, what adventurers we were.  She laughed and said she grew up in a palm house with a well and no electricity.  I guess we weren’t so daring.  We went diving out in the islands and loved it.  The coral and the tropical fish were better than we could even exaggerate.  

Another day we went out to a Pacific Island, Taboga, and sunburned ourselves nearly to death.  Meggie had blisters and peeled right along with us.  

Another day we drove over to the Atlantic to Colon and saw ruins from an old Spanish fort now nearly overgrown by jungle.  The old cannons were lying everywhere.  We saw butterflies and lizards and parrots.  You must come visit–you won’t believe how beautiful it is here.

Anyway, we are settling in and I am tired of typing.  When you come we’ll go everywhere again and show you the ruins of Old Panama, and the public market and the canal locks, and anything else we think of.  Oh, we are expecting a second Hopkins child in December–just in time for our summer vacation.  The rainy season is beginning and things will soon be greener than ever but still warm.  

Write soon, Love Karen-Mike-Megs

 

 

Driving through Mexico–1976

I found a second letter from Panama typed on a manual typewriter and dated May 3, 1976:

“I keep starting letters and never finishing them, so I am going to write one long letter!

We got into Panama City on March 19 after leaving Utah on March 6th–two months already. We drove from Utah to Los Angeles, visited with Tui and Bob (They loved Megs) and took care of our paperwork with the Panamanian consul.  Then we set about getting our visas to travel through Central America.  At the Guatemala Consul we were told that it would be impossible to enter Guatemala because of the recent earthquake (see Shaman Priest on Kindle) and they would not issue us a visa.  We were a little taken aback, but decided we would go ahead on the power of faith and bluff! When we got to Guatemala itself there was no problem.  (Boy I make that sound easy.  We waited in a line that stretched for miles behind us including a huge Silverstream caravan group, and we were one of the first cars allowed into the country after the earthquake.  We happened to reach the border on the day it finally opened.)

Anyway, we left LA on March 9, and drove to Tucson for the night.  We debated whether we should go down through Mazatlan or on to El Paso.  We decided on the El Paso route because it was a little shorter and we assumed that in the USA the roads would be better and gas cheaper–if you ever have the choice, go through Mazatlan!

From Tucson to Mexico City we saw cactus, cactus, cactus.  It is the desert route.  Our first night we stayed in Delicias, south of Chiuaua (Chihuahua).  It is supposed to be one of the most interesting places in north-central Mexico.  That’s because there is nothing else in north-central Mexico!

The next night we stopped in San Luis Potosí.  The town there is pretty big.  We passed miles and miles of stone walls, some following the road and some taking off over the hill tops.  It was the most interesting thing we saw and we speculated for hours on what the walls were for.  We finally concluded that the people were just moving rocks over to plant and ended up with walls.

Once in awhile we passed irrigated land and it looked like heaven. Evidently the government is in the process of irrigating large areas of land. We passed one area where for miles and miles government crews were set up drilling deep wells.
Coming down into Mexico City we decided to turn off to see the ruins at Tula. Then on our way back to the freeway we took a wrong turn and got lost, spending hours wandering through the hills north of the Capital. (We were looking for a turn-off at a town at Actopan. I asked over and over and no one knew of anyplace called Actopan. Finally one old guy corrected my pronunciation–I was putting the accent on the wrong syllable and no one understood what I was asking about. When we got to Actopan we discovered that it was also named El Progreso. Oh well. We took the right turn instead of the left and came into Mexico City past Pachuca, an area where years later we spent many happy summers collecting insects.)
We finally got straightened out and into the City at the 5:30 rush hour. It was so terrible and noisy and smoggy that Meggie who had been a little trooper–sleeping through anything–woke up and started to scream. I could see that Mike was was about to join her when he pulled over in Chapultepec Park. We got our bearings and headed for a hotel, only to find we were in the wrong lane and couldn’t turn. But there just ahead was an on-ramp that Mike took and we zoomed down to Puebla for the night. Sanborne’s Insurance Guide recommended a place–the Spa Agua Azul. The review must have been twenty years old. The Spa Agua Azul was a once glorious resort. But, we had single beds with sarapes as blankets, and we were out in the woods where it got cold at night. We ate dinner in a huge dining room and were the only ones there. It was spooky. (The waiter took our order, then walked back and put on a chef’s hat to cook the meal, took off the hat and served our meal.) I expected ghosts to come out of the walls. We started off early the next morning, got up on the freeway and ran out of gas. We sat and waited for the green tourist truck for two hours and then Mike set off for a town we could see in the far distance. I watched him go up over a rise and out of sight and then looked back to see the tourist truck coming behind us. They gave me five gallons of gas and eventually Mike and I got back together.
Next, going up over the high mountain pass on the road to Vera Cruz we passed a car that had blown the clutch. We stopped and gave the driver a ride to his hometown back in the mountains. He was taking his oldest daughter to Mexico City to start at the university and had the whole family with him. By then we were nearly out of gas again so we stopped at the next city of any size and filled up. Then the gas station attendant told us they didn’t accept traveler’s checks–and on the weekend with the banks closed tight no one else in town would accept them either. I had given our cash to the tourist truck that morning so we spent a couple of hours trying to cash checks.Finally we got all but about $1.25. The attendant took it and cussed at us as we drove away.
We zoomed onto the toll road, came to the last toll booth and of course had NO money. By this time we were hysterical (with laughter). We were kicked off the toll road at a little, beautiful town called Fortín de las Flores. We finally entered some jungle! We stopped at a little inn called Posada Loma (The owners were the most accommodating people I have ever met; they cashed traveler’s checks for us and the Posada Loma is to this day one of our favorite places to stay in Mexico. We stopped there again and spent a night or two on our way home from Panama and have returned many times since.) We bought lunch–they only had thick soup and fat sandwiches and fresh squeezed orange juice and strawberry ice cream. We ordered everything. Meggie lay on the cool tiles drinking OJ and we started to like Mexico again.
If I ever go back that way I guess we’ll stay there! (See above, definitely a place we have returned to over the years!) Maybe we won’t travel on Sunday after this though.There were just too many attempts to discourage us.
We drove on after lunch past Vera Cruz that evening and stayed in a nice played called Lake Catamalco. (Mel Gibson filmed Apocalypto in this area) The next morning we went wading in the Gulf of Mexico and headed back across Mexico to the Pacific coast–driving through cactus. We spent the night in Tapachula on the Mexican border and started out the next morning for Guatemala. The border didn’t open that morning until 10:00 AM. It took two hours to drive through all the customs and border checks, bug spray, etc. Finally we could say Adios, adios Mexico Lindo. More adventures lay ahead!

Panama and other thoughts

So much going on.  I’m still writing.  But I needed to stop and think about Kiko and Maggie Perez and their next adventure after writing three books with them out saving the world. And I had to decide whether I wanted to go a completely new direction with new characters. I can come back to Kiko and Maggie. They’ll stay busy in the interim. 
My husband Martin and I tossed around ideas, and in the meantime I finished a children’s book I started a long time ago.  So Little Mouse on the Prairie is now available on Kindle for $.99 (by Karen Hopkins).  

Since the funeral I’ve been sorting my mother-in-law’s papers.  I think she kept everything she ever made a note on, every newspaper clipping, every piece of mail.  I know that’s not possible because we periodically sorted and tossed papers for her over the last forty years.  But, luckily some things escaped us. Fortunately among her papers I found a letter Martin wrote to his mom on July 29, 1965 from Fort Ord, California where he was stationed for advanced training.  That takes us back a ways!  

And I found two letters we wrote to her from Panama, mailed from Balboa, Canal Zone, May 23, 1976. Discovering these old letters and notes is like finding hidden treasure.  Details we’d forgotten pop up and our life thirty-seven years ago comes back into focus a little bit.

So here is some of what was in the envelope from Panama: First letter: 25 April 1976  (Annotations added in parenthesis.)

. . . .First Item: We are expecting another Hopkins sometime around December.  That’s quite a ways off still but it’s kind of exciting. (This was our second daughter, born in mid November)

Second Item”  We’re waiting to hear from everyone–when are you coming to visit?  We are having a fantastic time.  We’ve been out to the Caribbean twice.  Once we went to the San Blas Islands for three days.  It’s like a movie set–white sand, blue ocean, palm trees and grass shacks.  Meggie slept in a hammock, Mike went diving and I walked around the island and bought molas.  We stayed in grass shacks and ate in the communal dining room.  We forgot our camera!!  

(The Kuna Indians loved us because we brought our six month old daughter out to the islands.  They rarely saw tourists with kids, especially not babies.  They called here Sipu pipi–little white one–and she took us into every home on the islands.  Women would snatch her up and run off to show her to their friends.  I found her taking a bath in a 50 gallon drum that had been cut in half.  I found her sitting by a cold firepit eating ash cakes out of the ashes.  She had her own little mola shirt and a balsa wood doll.  And we had friends in every house!)

The second trip was out to San Lorenzo by car–an old sixteenth century Spanish fort, where the gold from Peru was brought and shipped to Spain.  It’s on a point of land with cannons aiming out in all directions.  The old well is still there with water in it.  But the fort hasn’t been kept up and the walls disappear off into the jungle.  We’ll send pictures as soon as we have them developed.  (Remember those days, before digital cameras and internet??)

Yesterday we went to a little zoo with native animals out in the Canal Zone.  We’ve been to a few locks at the Canal and hear you can book passage through the canal for $10.00.  (Why didn’t we do it?)

This first letter was short, but it brought back lots of memories.  I think our next novel will be set in Panama.  It is a relatively undiscovered tourist paradise compared to its neighbor Costa Rica–which we just visited again last February.  But we loved Panama.  We loved the city, Panama Viejo, Colon, the Canal Zone, the jungles, the mountains, the oceans and the islands.

For Matin the Canal Zone and the jungle took him back a little to Vietnam where he has spent three tours.  I didn’t know at the time how much nostalgia there was for Vietnam.  It’s funny how black and white we assume everything to do with a war is. 

But, I am ready to write about Panama.  My characters are forming and becoming friends.  We’ll see where they take me!

 

The World’s Top 10 Best Images of Climbing Goats

Reblogged from The Worlds top 10 of Anything and Everything!!! :

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Let me tell you that living here in the Welsh Valleys is not a bad place to grow up at all, we have stunning views, amazing friendly people and of course sheep. But something else we do have is goats! Many people will buy them as pets and let them run around free in the wild commons we have here. And the other day I do not lie, I saw a goat in a tree!

Read more… 222 more words

I love goats!!

Up (and Down) the Devil’s Highway

Here is the Devil’s Highway, the land that has to be crossed to reach the cities of Tucson or Phoenix, the land that must be crossed to reach Interstate 8–a ride, water, and safety.  But first a Crosser must get across the fence, the wall, the Border.

 

This is the San Miguel Gate.  There are Ports of Entry on the border, and then there are gates.  The border crosses Tohono O’odam land.  The gate allows tribal members to access their land in both Mexico and the United States.  They cross freely at this point.There is beauty here.  But it is covered with thornsWalkers leave their tracks on the desert floor crossing a road, working their way north.Desert, always more desert as far as the eye can see.Saguaro buds are beautiful.  The Thorn O’odam harvest the fruit.  Crossers have been found with their mouth and lips full of stickers.  Desperate for water they gnaw at the saguaro.  But the saguaro and barrel cactus are not full of water as many believe.In “Up the Devil’s Highway”, by Karen Hopkins Bernard Joaquin and his wife stop for gas and hotdogs at a trading post similar to this one.Mo Black looks for information at a small house out on the Res.  The wind and sand come in through every crack and crevice.The Saguaro thrive in their desert ecosystem.Mother and child walk single file.A rest stop in the desert without comfort or shade.Everything has thorns.  This little cholla is about six inches high, just big enough to catch your foot if you don’t watch where you step.  Notice the long yellow thorns.I ate cholla bud salad at the Desert Rain Cafe.  These buds are too far along to eat, but they are a good source of vitamin C. In the spring when they are still tender and spineless they are a delicious food source.Playground bleaching in the sun.  I wonder where the kids are who used to slide down the white-hot slide.At the border.  Mexico is on the left side of the posts, the US is on the right side.  The gate in the fence can only be used by Native Americans with a valid Tribal ID.  Everyone else has to duck under the barbed wire.Baboquiviri Peak is always in the background.  This is the Tohono O’oddam’s most sacred spot, the Peak where the Man in the Maze lives. Sorry little guy. There’s not much shade out here, and no place to hide.

A Journey Back in Time

I came across something I wrote on October 12, 1984 yesterday.  I had forgotten the details of an adventure that I still think of from time to time and was happy to see that I had actually written them down.  We lived in Ticaboo, Utah, down near Lake Powell, so everything is measured from Ticaboo:

“On Friday our family went hiking up to some caves that we’ve had our eye on about fourteen miles up the road from here.  We hiked about four miles, spent half a day, and saw some beautiful country.  

When we finally reached the first cave we looked around for clues of early habitation, wondered who and when people may have been there before we arrived (there are Indian ruins throughout the area) and then on a slab of sandstone leaning against the back wall of the overhang we spied a message: “Loa, Utah  E. O. June 10, 1916.”

Someone had been here.  Not the Ancient Ones, the Anasazi, much more recent than that.  Someone had carved his initials in stone in that isolated spot nearly a year before my mother was born. He had probably been on horseback and then hiked up to the cave itself–my husband says a horse would have had trouble making it up to the overhang.  Possibly he stopped in that protected spot to escape the rain or the summer sun.  

What was he doing? Why was he out in “our” country, so far from Loa?  The lettering was well formed, even beautiful with the loops and swirls of an earlier time.  Did “O” stand for Okerlund?  Some distant relative–distant both in time and space? My great grandmother was an Okerlund, born in 1868 and raised in Loa, Utah, a tiny community of farms and ranches.

Perhaps on returning to Loa “E. O.” wrote in a journal his experiences from that June day on the Little Rockies or down in the Bullfrog Basin.  Maybe he wrote about sitting in an overhang, the very one where we now stood, sitting and carving his initials and the date on a slab of soft sandstone in the back of the cave.

All these thoughts went through my mind as I looked at the writing from so many years ago.  I hope “E. O.” kept a journal.  President Spencer W Kimball (another distant cousin) wrote that personal journals “should be kept carefully.  You are unique and there may be incidents in your experience that are more noble and praiseworthy in their way than those recorded in any other life.”

I think generally we don’t feel very unique, and yet I treasure the journals my ancestors kept.  They tell me not only about those who went before me they tell me something about who I am.

Our personal record can help bind us to both past and future generations.  I imagined reading an old, yellowed journal, finding the story of the trip from Loa south, recognizing “our” E.O. when he told of stopping to rest in the shade on a hot afternoon spent chasing cattle; carefully carving his information into the stone and setting up the slab in a back corner. I don’t know who he was, but someone living in Loa right now may know.

President Kimball continued, “I promise you that if you will keep your journals and records, they will indeed be a source of great inspiration to your families and others, on through the generations.  And as our posterity read of our life’s experiences they too will come to know and love us.  And in that glorious day when our families are together in the eternities, we will already be acquainted.”

When I wrote the above I had just turned thirty-five.  I am now sixty-three, with children and grandchildren and I think more about generations than I did then.  I remember reading my grandfather Woolley’s journal where he gives an account of the Great San Francisco Earthquake and fire in 1906 as he awaited passage to New Zealand anxious to go and serve as a missionary.  His account collapses history, making both history and my grandfather seem closer and more real.

I am fast approaching the time when I will be one of the Ancient Ones.  My journals are scraps of random papers and notes that surprise even me when I stumble across them!

But time keeps moving forward; my mother-in-law died last week.  Her funeral is tomorrow.  And so another generation passes. My oldest daughter agreed to clean out her grandmother’s small apartment, bagging clothing, towels and bedding for Goodwill, piling books and personal items into “keep” or “toss” piles. She has also gone through her grandmother’s papers, sorting, tossing and saving.  She wrote a note about what she found:

“Cleaning out my grandma’s apartment today … flipping through pictures and old letters, looking at the clothes she wore, the books she read, and the bed she died in … I couldn’t stop thinking about forgiveness. Forgiveness isn’t easy–sometimes it seems impossible–but how many people do we hurt and how much do we lose when we can’t let go, forgive, and learn to love again?

“I thought a lot about my own stuff too! Folding her clothes into a bag destined for DI, I couldn’t help thinking of my own closet.  And I remembered cleaning out my maternal grandmother’s closets too. They were two very different women, but looking through the things left behind is always a revealing or at least a thought provoking experience. 

“I really like the phrase “burden of hurt”–it’s exactly what I was reaching for when I wrote “let go.” My dad’s mom led a difficult life and her relationships with her children were strained at best. Looking at her things, thinking about her as the woman who wore those clothes and and read those books and who, at 90, still walked a mile every morning … well, I thought a lot of deep and silly thoughts and I prayed that my own child (or, if I’m lucky someday, children) will forgive me for the mistakes I’m bound to make too.”

 

It is in the things we do, it is as we come to know our family, past, present, and future that love and forgiveness can blossom.  We are more than just our own hurts and fears, our own aspirations and dreams.  We are a link in a long chain of generations.  

And yes, we will and do make mistakes.  But so did our parents and for the most part we survived, and so will our children.

When they want to know who we were what will we have left behind?

 

 

 

 

Sparrow Hawk and the Boston Marathon

In my novel Sparrow Hawk, a terrorist cell is stopped by the FBI as they are about to set off massive explosions at Wrigley Field in Chicago. Why Wrigley Field? Well, it is a very public spot set in the middle of the city. Baseball is an All-American sport, and the stadium is full of cheering fans. The terrorists get a lot of bang for their buck. They destroy an American icon and kill lots of Americans.
So today, non-fiction, explosive devices are set off at the Boston Marathon. Why the Boston Marathon? It is a much loved race, in the middle of Boston, a very public spot full of lots of runners and spectators. The terrorists get a lot of bang for their buck. Wouldn’t it be nice if reality could be controlled like fiction–if the FBI had stepped in just in time to stop the explosions.
But it didn’t happen. My niece ran in the Boston Marathon this morning. Luckily she runs fast; she finished the race about thirty minutes before the explosions. She and her family are unhurt as much as any of us are unhurt who were not wounded by an explosive device. We carry only the wounds of another assault on our country and on our way of life.
And no, this was not the act of right-wing militias.
But right-wing, left-wing, Muslim, or crazy is not the only issue. There has to be a more forceful response, that includes the recognition of evil in our world. As long as the reality of evil is ignored it will grow and spread. We will and do see more and more acts of terror and seemingly senseless violence in our world today.

It’s certainly easier in fiction. You can buy Sparrow Hawk for just $.99 on Kindle and read an exciting story where the government ends up one step ahead of the bad guys. Kick back, relax, and give reality a rest for an hour or two.
It will still be there when you come back waiting for us to decide how to respond.

Reposted from Selwyn Duke

Isn’t it time we get serious about the roots of violence??

Why the NRA is Right about Hollywood

By Selwyn Duke

Upstate New York’s Catskill Mountain Range is a bucolic place near and dear to my heart. It’s where storybook character Rip Van Winkle enjoyed his legendary slumber, and its scenery hasn’t changed much since he was born of Washington Irving’s fertile imagination. Yet, like Van Winkle, if I’d fallen asleep for 20 years when first arriving in that verdant heaven, I, too, would have noticed some profound changes upon awakening.

About two decades ago, many rural Catskill teens – sons of farmers and hunters and fishermen – suddenly started donning baggy pants and reflecting “gangsta’” counter-culture despite living nowhere near any large urban center. The following generation of teens experienced today’s recent cultural evolution and often sport multiple tattoos and body piercings despite living nowhere near NYC’s grungy East Village. Yet I’m wrong in a sense: those places were actually very close – a television set away. 

My old hinterland haunt was once place where, if you wiggled the rabbit-ear antenna just right, you could pull in one or two TV stations. And what could you see? Perhaps reruns of The Brady Bunch, perhaps the news. But about a quarter century ago came VCRs and video stores; then cable and satellite TV; and, finally, the Internet. The serpent had entered Eden.

In the wake of the Sandy Hook tragedy, much fire has been directed at gun advocates in general and the National Rifle Association in particular. In response, the organization has implicated Hollywood and popular culture in general for mainstreaming mindless violence. Yet even many Second Amendment advocates part company with the NRA on this point. After all, blaming entertainment for crime smacks of blaming guns. Yet there’s quite a profound difference: guns don’t transmit values. But how we use guns – and knives, fists and words – on screen certainly does.  

This message is often a tough sell, however, as it’s very natural to defend one’s entertainment. We grow up with certain shows, movies, characters and music and often become emotionally attached to them; in fact, we may identify with them so closely that an attack upon them can be taken personally. It’s the same phenomenon that causes an avid sports fan to defend his favorite team as if it’s his favored son. And it is then we may hear that old refrain, “It isn’t the entertainment; it’s the values learned at home” (they’re actually one and the same since entertainment enters the home with, in the least, the parents’ tacit approval).

Yet it appears few really believe that refrain. Sure, depending on our ideology, we may disagree on what entertainment is destructive, but that it can be destructive is something on which consensus exists. Just consider, for instance, that when James Cameron’s film Avatar was released, there was much talk in the conservative blogosphere about its containing environmentalist, anti-corporate and anti-American propaganda. At the other end of the spectrum, liberals wanted the old show Amos ‘n Andy taken off the air because it contained what they considered harmful stereotypes. Or think of how critics worried that Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ would stoke anti-Jewish sentiment or that Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ would inspire anti-Christian feelings, and how the Catholic League complained that The Da Vinci Code was anti-Catholic. Now, I’m not commenting on these claims’ validity. My only point is that when our own sacred cows are being slaughtered, few of us will say, “Well, yeah, the work attacks my cause, but I don’t care because it’s the values taught at home that really matter.”

The truth? Entertainment is powerful. This is why Adolf Hitler had his propaganda filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl, and why all modern regimes have at times created their own propaganda films. It’s why the ancient Greeks saw fit to censor the arts and American localities traditionally had obscenity laws. And it is why, while “The pen is mightier than the sword” and a picture mightier still, being worth a “thousand words,” we have to wonder how many words moving footage coupled with sound would be. How mighty art thou, Tinseltown? Well, we worry that a child witnessing one parent continually abuse the other will learn to be violent, as children learn by example. Yet often forgotten is that while a person can model behavior seven feet away from the television, he can also model it seven feet away through the television.

And what effect do our entertainment role models have? Much relevant research exists, and the picture it paints isn’t pretty. For instance, a definitive 1990s study published by The Journal of the American Medical Association found that in every society in which TV was introduced, there was an explosion in violent crime and murder within 15 years. As an example, TV had been banned in South Africa for internal security reasons until 1975, at which point the nation had a lower murder rate than other lands with similar demographics. The country’s legalization of TV prompted psychiatrist Dr. Brandon Centerwall to predict ”that white South African homicide rates would double within 10 to 15 years after the introduction of television….” But he was wrong.

By 1987 they had more than doubled.

Then the Guardian told us in 2003 that, “…Bhutan, the fabled Himalayan Shangri-la, became the last nation on earth to introduce television. Suddenly a culture, barely changed in centuries, was bombarded by 46 cable channels. And all too soon came Bhutan’s first crime wave – murder, fraud, drug offences.” The serpent had struck again.

And exactly how it strikes is interesting…and scary. Lt. Col. David Grossman, a former West Point military psychologist and one of the world’s foremost experts on what he calls “killology,” explains the process well. In his essay “Trained to Kill,” he speaks of how the military learned that during WWII only 15 to 20 percent of riflemen would actually shoot at an exposed enemy soldier. Yet this rate was increased to 55 percent during the Korean War and then 90 percent in Vietnam. How? By applying psychological principles, says Grossman, identical to the forces our children are exposed to through entertainment. They are (all quotations are Grossman’s):

• Brutalization and desensitization: this occurs in boot camp where the training is designed “to break down your existing mores and norms and to accept a new set of values that embrace destruction, violence, and death as a way of life.” Entertainment can perhaps be even more effective when doing this to children because the process often starts when they’re too young to distinguish between fantasy and reality. Grossman explains:
  • To have a child of three, four, or five watch a “splatter” movie, learning to relate to a character for the first 90 minutes and then in the last 30 minutes watch helplessly as that new friend is hunted and brutally murdered is the moral and psychological equivalent of introducing your child to a friend, letting [him] play with that friend, and then butchering that friend in front of your child’s eyes.
• Classical conditioning: the Japanese employed this during WWII. Soldiers would have to watch and cheer as a few of their comrades bayoneted prisoners to death. All the servicemen were then “treated to sake, the best meal they had had in months, and to so-called comfort girls. The result? They learned to associate committing violent acts with pleasure.” Likewise, today “[o]ur children watch vivid pictures of human suffering and death, learning to associate it with their favorite soft drink and candy bar, or their girlfriend’s perfume.”
• Operant conditioning: “When people are frightened or angry, they will do what they have been conditioned to do…. [It's] stimulus-response, stimulus-response.” Thus, one of the ways the military increased riflemen’s willingness to shoot exposed enemies was to switch from the bull’s-eye targets of WWII training to “realistic, man-shaped silhouettes that pop into their field of view.” The soldiers have only a split-second to engage this new “stimulus” with the response of firing reflexively. As for kids, “every time a child plays an interactive point-and-shoot video game, he is learning the exact same conditioned reflex and motor skills.” This can help explain, says Grossman, why robbers under stress will sometimes reflexively shoot victims even when it wasn’t “part of the plan.”

If the above seems at all simplistic, note that it’s a life’s work boiled-down to 500 words. Suffice it to say, however, that entertainment has an effect. And do we really consider today’s entertainment benign? We’ve transitioned from a pre-TV America where boys sometimes brought real guns to school for target shooting to a TV-addicted America where boys bring toy guns to school and get suspended. And, of course, the reasons for this societal sea change are complex. But if we’re going to point to one factor, is it wiser to blame the AR-15 than PG-13?

 

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/03/why_the_nra_is_right_about_hollywood.html#ixzz2QZTEnI7l 
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A Ceiba in Arizona

The Ceiba tree, otherwise known as the silk floss or the cotton floss tree is a remarkable, beautiful tree. It is considered the Maya Sacred Tree of Life, growing to be extremely tall and connecting the earth to the sky, holding earth and sky in their proper positions to one another.
The Ceiba tree is indigenous to Central America. There it grows rapidly reaching heights of 80 feet or more, and a diameter of five to eight feet across above its buttresses. Besides the spiny trunk, the tree also has characteristic seeds imbedded with a soft material known as “kapoc”.
Fifteen or more years ago I picked up a seed pod from a transplanted Ceiba tree growing in the Los Angles County Arboretum. I asked one of the arboretum docents about the tree. She knew very little but assured me that the tree would not grow in Arizona. It is very difficult to grow the Silk Floss tree outside it’s natural habitat in the best of circumstances. It needs the humidity and the heat of the tropical rain forests. I could never grow a Ceiba in Arizona, and not from a seed.
Undaunted I carried my seed pod home to Tempe where I broke it open and studied the hard black seeds encased in strands of kapoc floss.
I decided to sprout the seeds in a glass jar. I filled it with kapoc-wrapped seeds soaked in warm water and put the lid on tight. Then I kept the jar warm and waited, and waited, and waited.
One day I saw that several of the seeds had sprouted, a small green stem had broken through the hard covering of the seed and was reaching up toward the light.
I planted the seeds and soon had several tiny Ceiba sprouts growing inside the house. It was no problem keeping them warm, but I had to work to keep them humid. When we left town for a few days or weeks I put my Ceiba pots in the bathtub filled with several inches of water and closed the sliding glass door. The window above the tub brought in indirect light and my tiny trees thrived. They thought for sure they were in the warm tropical jungle.
What did they know, they started life in a glass jar!
However, when we came home the Ceiba trees had to move out of the bathroom.
Eventually all the little sprouts died except one. That one grew and grew until it was maybe twelve inches high, and it put out a little sucker on the side–a little bonus tree. Over the years I watched my little ceiba. Unlike its Central American cousins it was not a fast grower. Every year it added an inch or two. After about five years it began to grow the conical spines on its trunk characteristic of larger trees.
Then we moved south and my ceiba suffered. It did not do well with the move–wait that’s an understatement. One day it just dropped all its leaves and died. But the sucker hung on. There must have still been life in the roots because the little sucker began to grow and within a few years I had a tree that was maybe eight feet tall.
The winters were hard on it. Several winters the ceiba dropped all its leaves, but then came back in the spring.
This year we had a hard frost in March well after I thought my tree was safe outside. (It was getting a little big to move in and out every year.) I was afraid that maybe I had lost it for good this time. But now the bottom four feet have put out bright new green leaves and the green in the trunk is beginning to spread up into the part I was sure was completely dead and was just about to snap off.
Maybe the docent would eye my little ceiba with scorn and nod her head. “Nope, you can’t grow a ceiba in Arizona.” But I think we are doing very well thank you. We’ve been through a lot together and we’re both still here!
I am convinced of one thing–patience is required for most worthwhile things in life and if we give up too soon, decide there is no hope, no coming back to life, we will never see the miracle of life nor will we sit under the shade of our tree. I have a ways to go and so does my little tree. But its roots are stronger than ever and all we have ahead of us is time.

More Blessings–Finding Family

 Last spring one of my sons did a DNA test through Ancestry.com.  We were excited to see what our blood lines showed.  Not surprisingly we were mostly Scandinavian, with a little bit of Southern Europe–Spain–mixed in and about 7% from the Volga–Russian?!  It was interesting, it was fun, we had a cool map and it told us most of what we basically already thought we knew.

Soon we began getting emails showing 4th and 5th cousins matched through DNA.  Then unexpectedly my son got a first cousin match. I looked at it and told him it must be an error.  We know all the first cousins.

But when the “first cousin” sent an email explaining that he had been adopted and was looking for his birth family, wondering if one of our brothers or sisters could be his birth parent I suddenly had an entirely new understanding of DNA!  

My mind traveled back forty-one years to the tiny baby boy I had put up for adoption.  I could see his tiny face, his cap of dark hair.  I remembered the kindness of the nurses who moved his bassinet into my room where he stayed with me for twenty-four hours a day during my three-day stay.  (Such a thing was unheard of in 1972.  Babies stayed in the nursery and parents and family peered at them through the windows.) I remembered the calendar I had on the wall, marking off the days one by one, I had cut open the 30th, making a window like an advent calendar and attached a picture of a baby on a spring behind it.  That was the due date, the date I would not check off–he would pop out!  But like all my children he came nearly two weeks early.

Not one to jump to conclusions, I responded to the message, asking for date and place of birth, etc.  I soon had the pertinent information and had to write back that my son was not a cousin, but a half-brother and that I was his birth mother.  Was I filled with joy?  What a blessing!  No, I was filled with doubt and questions.  I waited for his phone call and wondered what I would say.

A closed adoption meant just what it says.  It was closed.  The birth certificate was sealed.  I never knew the name of the adoptive parents or where they lived.  There would never be any contact between us.  The baby had a family and was no longer a part of me.  I never told our eight children they had a half-brother.  It was irrelevant to their lives.  

Now suddenly it was very relevant.  And so I told them, one by one.  It is not an easy thing for them to assimilate information making your family different, more, other than you have known all your life.  Someone out there–a complete stranger–is also a brother.

That took a little time.  We traveled to Memphis.  The trip was physically difficult for my husband.  We visited with our oldest son.  He was very accepting.  We traveled to Costa Rica with our sixth child and his wife.  My husband became critically ill and was hospitalized and stabilized so that we could fly home.

After that I talked to the kids by telephone.  And finally, when everyone knew and responded in whatever ways they chose, I felt a sense of relief.  And that was when I got a call from the Katie Couric Show.  

Would I be interested in going to New York and appearing on the Katie Couric Show.  I could tell no one because I was not only going to meet my son, I was going to surprise him.  He didn’t know I was coming.  I had some reservations.  Is TV really the best place for a reunion?  But if not the best place it was A place.  And with my husband’s health I didn’t see another trip together in the immediate future.  And I felt a debt to Ancestry for the gift I had received and for the great work they do.  So, I agreed.  The son who took the DNA test came with me and was a part of the show.  

And we met.  It was exciting, it was emotional it was fun.  Afterwards we went out to dinner with my “new” son and his wife and nine other members of our family.  Finally we could relax, talk and get to know each other in a more personal way.

It is strange to sit with a blood relative, a son in my case, a person that you should feel love and attachment for, and to realize you are complete strangers.

Not so much strangers anymore.  Family in the process of getting to know each other.