madranchwife

So I’m not sure exactly what happened…well, I have a pretty good idea…but we entered the Twilight Zone along about the 1st of May and have just now emerged on the other side.

In a galaxy far, far away…

Cue the weird music…doo-do-do-do…doo-do-do-do…

I’m not flippin’ kidding you.

I was going along minding my own business, watching the little blades of green grass slowly start reaching for the springtime sun, thanking the Universe for every raindrop that was falling..and sometimes the snowflakes, but I digress…

And whammo!   Just like that, I got knocked into June.  Well, almost June.  For all intents and purposes June.

Whatever.

The husband brought home some zombie virus that pretty much wiped out life as we knew it here.  He ended up in the Steamboat Springs ER one Saturday night with pneumonia.  (Not to toot my own doctor-type horn, but by Friday afternoon I was talking pneumonia and getting pretty concerned, and finally got some agreement that maybe there should be a trip to see a bona-fide PEOPLE doctor…as I don’t really count you know…only being licensed to work on EVERY other species but homo sapiens.  But again, I digress.)

Then the munch-i-kin and I succumbed to the zombie virus.  And all h*e*double toothpicks broke loose.

All this was going down in the days leading up to the annual Dance Recital in Laramie.  That we have spent umpteen bazillion dollars on for the last year…between gorgeous costumes and monthly lessons and yada, yada, yada.  Now both the dancer and the dancer’s mom were too feverish and sick to even think about trekking over the mountain to rehearsals.  Needless to say the dancer’s mom was NOT a happy dancer’s mom.  Not in the least bit.

Somehow, the fevers left us two days before the big day and the ADORABLE little dancer felt well enough to tap onto the stage and NAIL her dance!!!  Woo hoo hoo hoo hooo!!!!  She was phenomenal!  I am so proud of my little dancer…what a  cutie!  If I could I’d post a pic or two to show you, but I’ve been banned from doing so.  (Bad internet-abusing people out there who snatch little kids’ pictures and do bad things with them…lovely world we live in, eh?)

Anyway, we managed to tap and ballet our way through those days, interspersed with numerous showings of Episodes 4, 5 and 6 of the Star Wars world…the ORIGINAL, theatrical versions thank you very much.  Blessedly, the 6 year old I live with is in agreement with me that Han shoots first.  Period.  No questions asked.  And the doctored Special Edition that George tried to pass over on us is really pathetic.  And anyone worth anything knows this.  She can pick out all the things that really shouldn’t be there (like Jabba the Hutt outside the Millenium Falcon, Greedo shooting first, the funkier funky creatures in the bar)…I’m telling you what.  If the month of May was good for anything, now I have a die-hard Star Wars fan to commune with.

Nirvana.

So, also too, the hummingbirds arrived in full force on Mother’s Day weekend.  Pushy little things.  Between taking care of the pneumonia patient, caring for the sick child and nursing myself (though mommies aren’t supposed to get sick, you know??????????????????)…I had the flighty little dive-bombers to contend with.  Luckily there was some of the 20 lb bag of sugar from last year left.

At any given time there’s 20 or 30 of them zipping around out there juking and jiving.  It’s quite a site to behold and definitely signals the beginning of summer.  I think we sort of skate quite quickly through spring and land in summer, even though officially summer doesn’t start til mid to late June.  

See, we have to start summer early, cause it goes WAY too fast here.

Though, it really is quite cool so far as compared to last year at this time.  We’ve had much more moisture (rain, hail, some snow in mid-May), so that’s part of it.  I’m hoping it won’t get as hot and dry as last year, but we’ll just have to see.

Down side of the moisture?????

Bugs.

Shortly after the arrival of the hummingbirds, we had an infestation of…shudder….flying ants.

I HATE those things.  I had to drag the pneumonia-afflicted man out of bed to deal with them.  I know, that sounds SOOOOOOO tacky, wussy, chickenshit.  But what can I say?  It’s sort of like the flying monkeys in Wizard of Oz.

Monkeys aren’t supposed to fly…that’s what makes them so scary.  Ants aren’t supposed to fly either.

And no, it’s not that I’m scared of them, per se.  I just can’t deal with them.  They make me squeamish…and I feel like my skin is crawling.  Yuck.

Now…it’s the ticks.  Just crawling around in the house.  In fact, at nap this afternoon, I found one crawling on Caroline.  For those of you who don’t know, Caroline is the American Girl doll who came to live with us in December.  She was napping with us today and ended up with an American Dog Tick jaunting along in her golden locks.  Lovely, just lovely.

Ticks rank up there with flying ants and monkeys.  They just aren’t right.

See the next post for the rest of the recent visitors to our humble abode here on the side of the mountain.

All around…little signs of spring here are, well, springing up hither and yon.  (So trite, I know, what can I say?)

But seriously, the grass seems to be growing in front of our eyes.  It’s beautiful.

And!!!  And…the spots of bare dirt thrown up from below by those pesky damn voles/moles/pocket gophers/RODENTS last year actually have little blades of grass poking through.  I’m doing a lot of whispering to these little blades.

The flower garden in front however is another story.  Not so pretty.  In fact, right smack dab in the middle is one of those small piles of freshly thrown up (from below) dirt in a little mound.  Bastards.  I’ll get you yet my little pretties.    I just have to figure out how.   I don’t have an army of flying monkeys to sit out there and pounce.    Hmmm….how can I get an army of flying monkeys?  Things to ponder when I really don’t have much time to do so.

It’s also raining…thank goodness.  Probably not enough though.  I just heard on the radio that we don’t have nearly enough moisture this year to make a difference in the drought.  Even though the last few storms increased the snowpack level, the runoff won’t be enough to make a difference as the ground is simply absorbing all the moisture.  And the runoff is what allows the irrigation, etc.    And they’re predicting a hotter than normal summer here.  Bummer dude.  Seems we’re not out of the woods just yet.

In Star Wars speak (which is common around here lately)…I have a bad feeling about this.

You will have to take my word on this.

I know.  Sort of smacks of the story about the the big one that got away.

But seriously.

Having my camera at the ready at 9:30 pm as I’m coming home from working all day after leaving at 4:30 am just isn’t going to happen.  I can tell you that right now.

Plus, it was dark.

BUT ANYWAY…I try to drive the last little bit down to the house without my brights on and rather slow, cause you never know who you’re going to spook and what might come flying out of the trees (seriously..that was last Sunday night…gigantic owl soared down in front of me and off to the barn), galloping across the yard or sauntering down the road.

So I was meandering slowly past the front yard and Gracelyn’s room when two big dark shadows started galumphing along!!

A big momma moose and her calf from last year!  I stopped and watched them stop and watch me.  We all sort of hung out for a few minutes.  Then I decided that they weren’t going to flinch first and perhaps I should get the car in the garage and let them go on their merry way.  So I pulled on into the garage.  Then I got out and walked over to peer into the darkness on the other side of the little stream/pond that meanders behind the garage…nothing.  But then, my eyes are not my best feature…and I’ve not had a lot of carrots lately…so the only thing that clued me in to their presence was the “munch..munch..munch” I could hear.

So then, me being me, I tried to talk to them and get them to come a bit closer.

Which, in case noone has let you know this, is NOT what you want to do with a moose.  Especially a momma moose.  You think you shouldn’t get between a momma bear and her cubs.  A momma moose trumps a momma bear any day.  (Take that Sarah Palin.)

Ugh.  I did it.  Injected politics into a warm,  fuzzy, feel-good morsel.  Sorry.  Lots of nasty swirling around out there in the atmosphere.  I know we can’t let that touch our lives so much that it corrodes them.  But at the same time, I do think we need to be aware of the crazy, insane, asinine things that are being perpetrated.  Because that stuff coalesces and grows and eventually poisons our world.

That’s my struggle right now.

I have backed off on writing, because I’m trying to cleanse my brain.  Not sure how well I’m doing.  Sometimes this backfires and instead of cleansing I get that coalescing instead and before I know it, there’s a huge clump of junk stuck right in my cranium…maybe around the area of the amygdala.  And it begins to ooze ickiness.  So then I need to get it out.

I don’t know.  I figured for a while I need to write about sweetness and light.

Ha!

SO…if I had a picture….this is where I’d put it.  Imagine with me two brown mooses (meese???) galumphing along in our front yard.

Cheers!

What I woke up to this morning:

A small hand caressing my cheek…followed by a small, cherubic voice saying “You are so beautiful.”

Ahhhhhh…the sweetness of a six year old.

I am so blessed.

Yeah.  She really said that.

And I tell you what…I could hardly see through my tears.

She was sad about her missing puppy Max.  We say a prayer for him every night asking God to watch over him and keep him safe and keep us in his heart and mind so that he knows we are thinking of him and wish he was here with us.

Tonight she was particularly sad…and was having a difficult time letting it be.  Some nights are better than others.  Some nights it’s all ok, the way it is.  Tonight that wasn’t so.

She was overtired for one thing…making her easily teary.

I told her that we could let God take our sadness and our hurt, just for the night so that we could get some rest and some calm in our hearts.  And then we could take it back in the morning, but that God would hold it safe for us for the nighttime.  She made sure to interject, when I was making the request to the One much bigger than me, that God needed to keep them separate…my hurt and her hurt.  She didn’t want them to be mixed up.  After I was finished, she was still teary.  I talked some more about how God will always be with us to help us through the hurt and the sadness, but that we can’t change the things that have happened in the past.  She talked some more about how if she just would have let them in that morning, then Max would still be here, that it was her fault and she should have just let the dogs in.  And that perhaps if we had decorated the tree the day before, then this wouldn’t have happened because we wouldn’t have been distracted…and we would have let them in.

?????

This had me at a loss.  I tried to tell her that sometimes things just happen.   And we never know the why of it.  And there isn’t any way for us to go back and change the past…we can’t go back and fix our mistakes.  This of course after I emphasized and reemphasized and reemphasized yet again that it was in no way her fault…I have no earthly idea where this came from.  But I told her it’s like Simba…he felt guilty for his daddy’s death.  She piped up right away with “it wasn’t his fault!”  I told her that he felt like it was and he felt guilty and he couldn’t face the past or the rest of the pride because he hurt so much about it.  But Rafiki helped him to see that you can’t change the past.

At this point, she rolled over, put her little hand on my face and said, in her sweet sing-song voice, “mommy, I don’t know what I would do without you.”

And that, right there, is the raison d’etre.  The reason for being.  There is simply nothing else.

Yes, I know.  What, WHAT exactly, did I expect?????

When it snows for a week in April (and seriously, I stopped counting how many days in a row we had snowflakes of some sort floating around)…one can only assume that the next phase of a snowflake’s life is going to be of the liquid sort.  Which when mixed with a solid, in the form of soil, well, the resultant mix is nothing short of M-U-D.  With a capital M.  And now we’ve got trouble.  T-R-O-U-B-L-E.   That’s Trouble with a capital T.   Right here in River City.  (Name that movie and you can win an all-expenses paid vacation to Mud City.  And I’ll even throw in some mud boots as well.)

Ha ha.  Trying to not be PEEVED about the mile and a half long mud trail that serves as our driveway.  Nor the gigantic, GI-FLIPPIN’-GANTIC, holes in the middle of said “drive” in the last 1/10th of a mile before the garage.  Just adding insult to injury.  Seems the ranch was too low on gravel last year to fill those gigantic, GI-FLIPPIN’-GANTIC, holes.  So big are they that I told Gracelyn to hold her breath, I gave the order to “DIVE!!  DIVE!!”  You could hear the klaxons ringing throughout our stalwart, ruby red, not so brand new anymore but still very fast Subaru.    Then I shouted “Up periscope!”  ………….. (this is what happens when you listen to too many Clive Cussler/Dirk Pitt adventure audio books).

And then we surfaced on the other side.  No worse the wear…unless you take into consideration the ruby red sparkly Subaru is now a chocolate brown, not so sparkly more on the dull side, shadow of her former self.

But never fear…Herbie the Love Bug rode again (and no, I’m not talking about the farcical remake with what’s her bucket teen starlet…what a disgrace to Herbie that must have been)!  I’m sure that, someday, the mud will dry…the ranch will find some gravel…the gigantic, GI-FLIPPIN’-GANTIC, holes will be filled…and the sparkly ruby red wonder will once again grace our presence.

I will say that I did receive a fine compliment on our traverse down the “driveway” this morning.  The youngster in the back piped up with “wheeeeee…mommy this is just like Space Mountain!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  This is great!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Now just before all y’all go getting these fantastical images of our ruby red wonder surging through outer space and 17 turns at a breakneck speed with the wind whistling through our hair and screams echoing all around………….I was only barreling down the drive at approximately 13 mph.  Promise.  Cause any faster and we would have been airborne off the curve.  Then that herd of antelope would really have had something to run from.  As it was, I was “slip-slidin’ away…..”  (Name that song for a second, all-expenses paid vacation to Mudland…hip waders included.)  Seriously…the top layer of soil mud didn’t allow much traction.  Comments from the other inhabitants of this idyllic home:  “if your car had 4 wheel drive…”  No love I say.  There’s no love for the trusty ruby red wonder  chocolate brown spaceship. 

Well.  If I do say so myself, this entire post is one gigantic, GI-FLIPPIN’-GANTIC, digression.  I really had so many other things to say. 

But then I remembered why I started writing in the first place.  Because there are so many things about living out here that make me truly mad, nutso, crazy, off-my-rocker insane. 

AND MUD SEASON IS PRETTY CLOSE TO THE TOP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Maybe right behind the bloomin’, blasted gophers and moles in my yard and the maggots crawling out of the doorjambs. 

Time to take a deep breath and go watch the snowflakes fall.  Just to remind myself of the pretty things around here.

Maybe that fox will come back.  She (or he…could have been a he…twas dark and I was without glasses yesterday morning on my way to work) was in the backyard Saturday morning about 5 am.  I was halfway to the garage and heard something rattling the fence.  Let me tell you.  There should not be a sound at 5 am in the morning out here.  Nada, zip, zilch, zero, nothing.  I froze.  Then, my super awesome night vision eyes made out a small furry thing running up and down the fenceline…inside the fence!  Now, since I was on my way to work, and since it was 5 am, and since I didn’t have the camera, you’ll have to trust me when I say it was a fox. 

Anyway…I started talking to her, trying to calm her down and let her know she needed to turn to the right and then run straight…out the gate…same as she came in.  Only she wasn’t listening to me–for some reason “what we have here is a failure to communicate.” Don’t worry, if you name that movie, I won’t make you come here to Mudsville.

Anyway, I realized our failure to communicate and quickly shut the hell up.  As soon as I got quiet, she got her neurons synapsing again and made a dash out the gate and down the drive.

And that is all I can write tonight.

It was a hell of a week.  I’m still trying to put it all someplace.  I realized today that I was pretty out of sorts.  I wasn’t tired..though the 18 hour work day yesterday didn’t help…and get this…my last patient and I discussed String Theory, quantum physics, and multiple dimensions during our walk around the hallway!!!  Lord love a duck but I hope and pray when I’m his age I’m reading books about String Theory and anxious to learn new things.  What a delightful man he was.

But I digress.

I’m not tired.  I’m not sick.  I don’t have a headache.  But I don’t feel good.  Not a lot feels good right now.  The triple 1/2 caffe dark chocolate mocha with whip isn’t cutting it.  The sweet, sweet feel of a six year old’s arms around my neck sure comes close to wiping out all the bad though.  Thank the universe for my daughter.  Because I realized today that I must put this last week where it belongs….last week.  I must move on.  We have to.  This last week was so full of pain…not just the events in Boston, but oh so much more.  It just seemed like each day and night there was something else to batter at our collective conscious.

Interestingly, I read a couple of blog posts this afternoon that mirrored what I was attempting to say in my last few.  One of them invoked Dr. Martin Luther King and his words about love and she commented on how we need to be the good in the world.  We need to focus on the good, and the love, and it is up to us to make that the way of things.  I wanted to say “Amen sister amen.” 

We need to feel the love tonight.  I need to feel it.  Cause my soul has been battered by the darker side of the force this last week.  I can’t even begin to touch on all the drama being associated with the details of the suspects in the Boston marathon bombings.  It’s too big, it’s too ‘political,’ it’s too emotional…I don’t have it in me.  I take solace in knowing that there are several out there (mostly in the blogosphere, cause that’s where I get my news) that feel as I do, and that tonight, my part is to be the change I want to see.

For me, that means I need to work on evicting those things inside me that prevent me from feeling joy, those things that prevent me from passing on joy, those things that prevent me from seeing the good in others and being grateful for all that life has to offer us.

I think that’s the challenge here isn’t it?  We must accept life on life’s terms.  We are not required to like it.  We are not required to love it.  I suppose we could possibly hate it, but hate opens the door to the Dark Side of the Force, and doesn’t really toe the line with acceptance.

So…we  don’t have to like it, but we most certainly need to accept it.  Life that is.  I have to start accepting that someone has my daughter’s puppy Max.  And that someone is not going to bring him home.  I have to accept this.  And all the hurt and sadness that goes along with it. 

I have to accept that the world is the way the world is.  Life is not pretty sometimes.  There is sadness, grief, pain, suffering…sometimes in quantities so great that it seems as if the words joy and happiness have been blackened out for eternity.  But life just is.  Period.  I have to accept the pain and grief of this last week.  I cannot take away those peoples’ grief or sadness.  I can feel empathy for them, but when it starts to affect my circle here, then I have gone too far.  The good that I need to do is to carry forth the idea that life is good.  It is inherently good.  Good always wins.  That’s why the Dark Side failed…that’s why the Emperor lost.  Doesn’t mean it’s not going to be messy along the way.  It just means that we’re not on the Yellow Brick Road, dancing along.  Well, that’s sort of a bad analogy isn’t it?  I mean there was that green-faced virago and her shrieking monkey minions–life wasn’t all that fantastic there.

Hmmm…I can feel myself babbling.  I ended up where I didn’t want to be.  And now look where we are.  1600 words later.

I have GOT to work on brevity.

One of my cousins is fantastic at brevity.  And every email from him, be it all of four or five words, is chock full of brevity-ness.  And I get so envious.

Sadly, or not…depends how you feel about loquaciousness…I inherited the ‘gift of gab’ from the dominant Irish side of me. 

Whatever.

Buenos noches.

Just in case you were wondering……………………..

………………it’s still snowing.

And now, in just four days, we’ve gone from 79% of average snowpack for the year to 93% of snowpack.  In 4 days!!!

The upside to all the white stuff….I may not have to worry as much about the well running low (as it did last year, as evidenced by a fine layer of red dirt in the bathtub), and this just might carry us through the worst of the fire season.  Maybe.

The downside….I’m going to have to go through a second mud season here shortly.  It’s supposed to be in the low 50’s by next Friday, which means the 18 or so inches on the ground right now will be melted and making for some ginormous mud pits.

Irritating and icky…yes.  But mud and dirt on the floor are just a part of life out here in the middle of nowhere.  And I would gladly, GLADLY, take more of the brown stuff if it means there might be a slightly lower chance of fire this season.  That’s why I’m keeping my mouth shut and not complaining that we’ve had 5 straight days of snow–and I mean snow.  You can see from the pics that it hasn’t even been warm enough to melt the snow off the tree branches where it’s fallen.  Maybe a high of 20 degrees or so today.

Beautiful though, wouldn’t you say?

And…the Abominable showed up again!!  Go figure.  Buck didn’t seem bothered, so I decided not to worry too much either.  Friendly little Abominable that one!  🙂

It was kindly brought to my attention that perhaps the views I expressed in my last post may have been a bit…well…over the top.  Reactionary.  Too much.  Almost “pot calling kettle”-esque.  (Of note, these weren’t the kind words used to discuss the post with me…these are my own words.)

I felt that perhaps some clarification was necessary on my part.  Not for anyone else’s sake but mine (as I truly don’t write this for anyone else but me…but that begs the question of why the hell are you writing a blog then????…because ultimately blogs are written for the reader, right?  I personally need to get these words out of my head.  I need to stop the circular treadmill in there that threatens my daily serenity.  I could just journal you say.  True.  I could.  But that seems so…lonely, really.  And sometimes, just sometimes, I have something witty and ingenious to add to the daily doldrums of life…and I feel it my obligation to put it out there.  Rather conceited of me don’t you think? )…but…back to the clarification being made, for my sake I say not yours.  But once again, conceit rears its ugly head and I must be honest and tell you that I am really clarifying lest anyone think poorly of my communication skills.  There.  I’ve said it.  Conceited, arrogant person am I.  Well…so be it.  And so here goes–the clarification that is.  Let’s see if I can make this point more clearly.

When I wrote of evil triumphing when good men do nothing, I meant “evil” as it pertains to the dictionary definition of such:  adj.  1. morally bad or wrong; wicked 2. harmful; injurious 3. unlucky; disastrous —n. 1. wickedness; sin  2. anything causing harm, pain, etc.   In this case I was using the word “evil” as a noun in some parts and as an adjective in others.   I tend to think of evil in the terms of the second definitions above for each…harmful and injurious and anything causing harm or pain.

With that being said, I wasn’t in any way, shape or form, equating the heinous violence perpetrated in Boston on Monday with the few examples I gave of some of the vitriolic, ignorant rhetoric I have heard, and continue to hear, on a daily basis.   I can think of absolutely nothing that would compare with the incomprehensible grief of the loss of your eight year old son and the horrific injuries imposed on his mother and surviving sister.  I cannot imagine what that family is feeling–or the many others injured or killed–or what the following days, weeks, months and years ahead will bring for them.  I cannot even begin to understand the level of their grief.

What I was attempting to do instead was to lay the groundwork for a thought that had been circling on that rotary treadmill in my sometimes addled brain.

It started with the quote on the refrigerator.  It is right next to the coffee bar, so that every time I stand there and feed my addiction, I read it.  I was reading it on Monday night.  I read it again Tuesday morning.  “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”  Then I heard the ridiculous, asinine (yes, that’s a harsh word…but if it waddles like a duck and quacks like a duck, chances are it’s a duck…and this was waddling like something asinine..so there you go) words about hoping it was a Muslim not a white person who planted the bombs in Boston.

That flipped the switch.  I saw red.  I tried not to.  I tried to stand back.  I tried to distance myself.  I made another coffee.  And I read the quote again.  And I realized what I was feeling and why.

And here is where I’ll try to clarify.

Whomever is responsible for the cowardly act in Boston on Monday did so to try to prove a point maybe.  Maybe it was done to air a grievance.  Maybe it was done for kicks and jollies.  I have no earthly idea.  Anything at this point is all speculation.   Whatever.   But here I am, in my little corner of the world.  I cannot go to Boston to offer my services to help.  I cannot do anything that at this point will make a difference in those peoples’ lives.  But I can effect a change here…in my little corner of the world.  It’s like this:  envision a girl or boy in high school who desperately wants to be liked and to fit in with the “in” crowd.  He or she will do anything to be liked, to gain acceptance into the inner circle of circles…including standing silently by as members of the in crowd, that elite circle of golden, chosen ones, taunts and bullies another student, making horrible, nasty statements about the bullied student, calling them names and just generally being incredibly cruel.  The student says nothing…in effect, condoning the behavior of the ones doing the bullying.

(I’m not sure how I’m doing with the whole clarification thing…but I hope I’m making some inroads.)

Back to my little corner of the world…I have witnessed a growing tide of nastiness, directed at those who are different–be it through their skin color, their religion, their sexual orientation or their political beliefs.  I have sat meekly by, at times cowed into silence for fear of saying something that will disturb the peace.  Ha!  Peace permeated by nasty, ignorant, vitriolic, racist rhetoric.  How peaceful is that I ask you??  (Sorry, I slipped.)

I thought of my corner of the world.   I thought of wanting to help those touched by the events in Boston.  I looked at the refrigerator.

I realized that my part can be no longer standing silently by when someone calls the President of the United States a nigger.  Having the right to express your opinion is one thing.  You have every right in the universe to possess a different political opinion than the highest elected official in the country.  But I do not believe you have a right to perpetrate evil.  Meaning–harmful, injurious, morally wrong statements, name-calling at its worst.  And when I stand silent, I do nothing.  And that is how evil triumphs.

It is my belief that when this vile rhetoric is allowed to go on unanswered, when it fills our airwaves, when it begins to permeate every nook and cranny of our society, that is what stokes the fires of hatred that could lead to events like the one that occurred on Monday in Boston.

If I drew an inference or made a suggestion regarding the bombs in Boston, I did not mean to.  We do not know the who or the why.  We may not know for some time.  But I do know that ignorant words bandied about by individuals who would rather have the perpetrator be a Muslim instead of a white person feeds the hatred.  It allows the evil to triumph.  And I choose to stand up and no longer be silent.  I will not be complicit in the pervasion of evil.

That might be another thing right there.  My continued use of the word “evil.”  Ironically, I used to cringe every time I heard President George W. Bush use the word, as in “the axis of evil.”  I was raised in a church that made it pretty clear that evil meant sin and the devil and hell and bad things.  So when President Bush used it, I thought he was being a touch melodramatic.  The irony is that now I see what he possibly meant.  I don’t know exactly what definition of evil he was thinking about when he coined the phrase (or his speechwriters for that matter), but if he was thinking the way I’m thinking (and I honestly don’t know if that would be a good thing or not…to think like G.W. Bush), then perhaps he was going with the second definitions…meaning injurious, harmful and without morals.  I don’t know.  And it’s not like I’m going to call him up and ask him…so we’ll just have to leave well enough alone.   

All of that being said, I stand by my use of the word.  Only because it’s in the damned quote on the damned refrigerator and because I’m so damned addicted to the espresso machine, I read it a bazillion times a day.

And honestly, I don’t want to be a part of the hatred that fuels the hatred that perpetrates vile (look closely at those letters in that word…..) and horrific acts.  I am not resorting to name-calling.  And I don’t want to get into a shouting match with individuals who use the rhetoric that is so damaging.  But in my opinion, in my little piece of the world, being the change that I want to see means standing up for what I believe is right, and no longer standing silently by when the “in crowd” blusters loudly and with ignorance–racist, vitriolic, degrading, disrespectful or otherwise.

FYI:  To those of you who might follow me on Facebook, I wanted to let you know I am now deleting my FB account.

I’ve said I’m going to do this for a couple of years now…but I always chickened out.

I’ve decided to finally do it.

If you so desire, you can subscribe to this blog and you will receive an email update each time a new post is made.

If not…then you might be able to follow at http://www.madranchwife.com if you are so inclined.

And if not that, then later dudes and dudettes!!

So many thoughts and emotions swirling through me this afternoon.  So many images in my brain…things I didn’t need to see, yet wanted to see so that somehow I could understand what they were talking about.  They being the news commentators on NPR.  Fortunately, we do not have television in this house.  So I am not tempted to turn it on and click through the channels, being bombarded by the onslaught of the media.  Instead, I have sat at my computer since last night…trying to find new bits of information, being overwhelmed by sadness and despair at the state of this world, then abruptly turning off the power and returning to my daily routines.

Because that is what happens, isn’t it?  An unspeakable tragedy occurs…that slowly becomes speakable…and then passes into a state of being acceptable…and then worms its way into the past…to be put on a shelf, tucked away from the daily routines of life…to be, unfortunately, relegated to the distance.  And then we slowly forget the chaos, the terror, the great sadness at what has become of us–a people, a nation.  Until the next time……………

………………..and there will be a next time.  Won’t there?  Newtown, CT.  Still fresh in some peoples’ minds…yet now possibly eclipsed by the latest tragedy.  Are there no new words to use besides these?  Tragedy.  Unspeakable.  Terror.    I must dig out the thesaurus because it seems that at some point, we need to find new words.  If only to mark this time as being different.  This time we’re going to react differently.  This time we’re going to remember…and hold on to it…and change.

But will it be so?  This time?

Sadly I don’t think so.

And all last night and today I’ve been reminded of the above quote…”the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”  (Interestingly, this quote has been widely and for quite some time attributed to Edmund Burke, a great Irish philosopher.  But much work has been done to confirm this, with no success.  It seems this quote is actually some sort of interpretation of something he actually did say, many years ago, that has been reworded and reworked through time.  JFK was one of the ones to use these exact words.  But I digress…)

The words have been running through my brain in a constant loop.   What can we do to avoid the evil acts of yesterday from triumphing?  What can I do?  And then I heard something that was said today, somewhere in the vicinity of our idyllic mountain home.

I quote loosely…paraphrasing…”well, sure hope the person who did this was a Muslim, not a white man.”

???!@$@$%@!#$%!@#$????

Why?  Because then you would have incontrovertible proof that all Muslims are bad?  Because then your hatred of all things and people different from you would be justified?  Because then your belief in white supremacy would be proven to be true?

This is evil.  Your racist, ignorant, bigoted beliefs are evil.  And I now know what I can do to prevent the triumph of this evil.

I sat quietly by when I heard our President referred to as a “nigger.” (Please forgive me for using that word…this is a direct quote in this case.)

I sat quietly by, while working in a local restaurant, when I heard a joke made loudly about some Kenyan village missing their idiot.

I sat quietly by while I was referred to as a pinko, fag-lovin’, Subaru-drivin’ liberal.

I removed the bumper stickers from my car when my car was vandalized for me expressing my beliefs–I removed them because I was frightened there would be violence perpetrated against me and my daughter.

But no more.  To sit quietly by is for this good person, me, to do nothing.  And I will no longer allow evil to thrive, in my small little corner of the world.  I will not let it pollute the air I breathe.

Ignorance is evil.  Intolerance is evil.  Bigotry is evil.  And I do not use the word “evil” lightly.  I never have.  I never will.

But in this case, I feel strongly, with every fiber of my being, that it is warranted.  The acts yesterday in Boston were evil.  But the ignorant rhetoric being tossed around today is evil as well.  It does nothing to help this nation.  The angry, ignorant, intolerant, bigoted rhetoric is not that of a “patriot.”  I highly doubt that our founding fathers, who so many are so quick to hide behind these days, would have condoned intolerant, vile, bigoted words as being either American or patriotic.

The wish that the perpetrators of this heinous act in Boston are Muslim is sick.  It is based in ignorance and fear.  It is based in hatred and intolerance.  These are not the measures of good men.  These are the characteristics of cowards.  Yes, cowards.  They mark the people who utter these wishes as something akin to the one who wiped out six and a half million Jews simply because they looked different and were thought to be inferior.  These cowards are akin to the ones who wore white cloaks and burned crosses and committed unspeakable acts on a people who were of a different color or ancestry.  SHAME ON YOU.  Shame on you.

We must not let this evil permeate our society.  We must not let this evil triumph.  For this evil, this intolerance, this bigotry, this racism, this hatred, is what will feed the hatred that caused the act in Boston yesterday.  Hatred breeds hatred.  We must fight this evil with good.

Because, in the end, good will triumph.  It is the beauty of our human nature.  It is the bright side to the small, darker side.  We can rise above the evil.  The people in Boston yesterday who performed heroic acts rose above the evil of the day.  The parents and family members of the 26 victims in Newtown, CT have slowly started rising above the evil that touched their lives on December 14, 2012.

And I for one will no longer tolerate the intolerant, bigoted, small-minded, racist rhetoric that I hear on a daily basis.  I will no longer sit by…and do nothing.

Vaya con dios.