Family

David and Michael have the uncanny ability to read my mind. David and I hadn't spoken in a while and yet the day he posted this photograph, I was toying around with a new banner for the front page with another photo of "Barackelle".

Yes, I've Brangelinaed Barack and Michelle, so sue me.

The front page image hadn't changed in a while not only due to the surprisingly long primary we're experiencing but because I have to code that particular part of the page by hand.

Not anymore, and not a moment too soon.

I've been DYING to use our galleries more and to be able to create impactful front page posts on the fly. Now we can. The image is being pulled from the a photo gallery called "Banner Posts". As long as the image is 660 pixels, we'll be able to have the site automatically pull a new image when a new banner post is created.

Awesomeness.

And I'm happy to test it with not only the woman who is our presumptive First Lady; but my namesake. You see, my full name is Liza Michelle Sabater Tirado.

Not only that, but Michelle reminds me a lot of my sister-in-law Milly. I spent quite a lot of time during my pre-teens with my oldest brother and his then fiancee.

This is one of the most powerful speeches I have ever seen given (I was able to catch the whole speech in bits and pieces as people were reporting about it through YouTube) and it is even more powerful once read.

Why? Rudd enacts with this as law an acknowledgment that white privilege is founded on government policies that sought to make Aborigine Australians extinct.

Here's the quote :

The uncomfortable truth for us all is that the parliaments of the nation, individually and collectively, enacted statutes and delegated authority under those statutes that made the forced removal of children on racial grounds fully lawful.

There is a further reason for an apology as well: it is that reconciliation is in fact an expression of a core value of our nation - and that value is a fair go for all.

There is a deep and abiding belief in the Australian community that, for the stolen generations, there was no fair go at all.

There is a pretty basic Aussie belief that says that it is time to put right this most outrageous of wrongs.

It is for these reasons, quite apart from concerns of fundamental human decency, that the governments and parliaments of this nation must make this apology - because, put simply, the laws that our parliaments enacted made the stolen generations possible.

We, the parliaments of the nation, are ultimately responsible, not those who gave effect to our laws. And the problem lay with the laws themselves.

As has been said of settler societies elsewhere, we are the bearers of many blessings from our ancestors; therefore we must also be the bearer of their burdens as well.

Therefore, for our nation, the course of action is clear: that is, to deal now with what has become one of the darkest chapters in Australia's history.

In doing so, we are doing more than contending with the facts, the evidence and the often rancorous public debate.

In doing so, we are also wrestling with our own soul.

Full text after the jump

It's in moments like these that my love for dictionaries knows no end. Today is Epiphany Day. Here's what I found for the definition of epiphany :

epiphany |iˈpifənē| noun ( pl. -nies) (also Epiphany) the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles as represented by the Magi (Matthew 2:1–12).
• the festival commemorating this on January 6.
• a manifestation of a divine or supernatural being.
• a moment of sudden revelation or insight.

DERIVATIVES epiphanic |ˌepəˈfanik| adjective

ORIGIN Middle English : from Greek epiphainein ‘reveal.’ The sense relating to the Christian festival is via Old French epiphanie and ecclesiastical Latin epiphania.

Now, I've repeatedly said here how even though I am an atheist, I am strongly attached to many of the catholic rites I grew up with. This has to do with what Joseph Campbell called The Power of Myth. I love mythologies, I love the stories humans have created and propagated through millennia in order to justify our existence.

I've been missing "Navidad en Puerto Rico" for a long time. It is the perfect social expression of our mulatto culture and mythologies and it's nothing, and I mean, nothing like Christmas in New York or anywhere in the United States.

In Puerto Rico we call today El Día de los Reyes Magos. It's the day catholics all around the world use to commemorate the Three Wise Men's visitation of the baby Jesus in manger in the middle of nowhere in Bethlehem. That's where the "manifestation of a divine or supernatural being" comes into play on this day.

On this day we kind of do what anglos do with Santa Claus. On the evening of the 5th, kids gather grass and water dishes for the three kings' horses. Parents put together candy with a little "ofrenda" of rum. "The magic revelation" happens when the kids go to sleep.

My parents loved to get their Reyes Magos on and would go as far as get coconuts and, in an unironic Monty Pythonesque moment, clopclopclop their way around the house while scattering the grass, emptying the bowls full of water and washing down a coconut candy or two with the "ofrenda" they had left out for themselves.

I tried doing the same for my kids but it just doesn't work out the same. For one, all the kids in Puerto Rico wait eagerly for Los Reyes Magos. Here in New York? Not so much. Not even american catholics celebrate the day!

Yet what I love and miss about los Reyes Magos is that it marks the half-point of our Christmas festivities.

Yes people, we Puerto Ricans have to do things differently, especially if it involves partying. In Puerto Rico we don't have 12 days of Christmas. We have 22 days.

Coney Island, 1 September 2007

I think unitedstatians have a weird sense of humor. How can you explain celebrating Labor Day on the last day of Summer?

In this household we are not typical americanos by any stretch of the imagination. As good slash-puertoricans, would rather be boogie boarding in Isla Verde than fighting the crowds at Sandy Beach. So we are going to high-tail it to the park and the museum for our last day together, to have some fun.

How are you spending your 'labor' day?

8am in Puerto Rico

This is what, in theory, we have been doing for the past 7 days here in Puerto Rico. We have allegedly gone to the beach each day, played and enjoyed ourselves.

The reality is that, as part of the new working class, I have been squeezing in vacation time around my work schedule. I will blog about all the things I have been working on while here, but I just have to say that in spite of how difficult it is to have to work while being in a remote part of the island and alone with the kids, I am happy to be here. It's good to be back home.

My kids and I should be on our way to San Juan by 9am. We're staying at the vortex of civilization for almost 3 weeks. Can't wait.

I am going to be off the grid most of the day --although once we get to our vacation spot, I am going to make the most of my EVDO card. Let's see how it works in the part of PR where I am going --and no, I won't tell you where exactly I am staying --I'll turn it into a guessing game

So the controversial Cindy Sheehan is quitting her one-woman crusade, maybe giving up her citizenship in disgust and moving to Canada? Did her 15 minutes of political celebrity make her a heroine, did it serve life, liberty and pursuit of happiness for the American people, or just serve as spectacle?

"I have tried ever since he died to make his sacrifice meaningful," she wrote. "Casey died for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives.

"It is so painful to me to know that I bought into this system for so many years, and Casey paid the price for that allegiance.

"I failed my boy and that hurts the most."

Whatever her failures and disillusionment, is there anything better one individual struggling within massively failing systems could expect? Not according to the 1990 holistic system thinking movie "Mindwalk" (which btw is airing this week on Showtime channels if you want to catch it and think about it in this updated context). . .maybe save the system, save the world?

Actor Sam Waterson's answer, after starring in Mindwalk, was to lend his celebrity to Unity08, trying to reform the whole system through new interconnections rather than win-lose adversarial elections. Both Democrats and Republicans (who together "are" the entrenched political system) are naturally resisting and ridiculing him in these efforts, as they have successfully done to Sheehan, manipulating all the media they can dominate to keep systemic change from being taken seriously by real, regular, reasonable people going about their private business and wondering who can save them from what they have wrought.

I think (though Sheehan doesn't seem capable of such analysis) the opening trick we can't manage is thinking well enough to understand what "saving" the system even means, in such complicated plotlines populated with infinitely interdependent characters, aka the Real World. Making it do -- what? Making it work -- how? Making it serve -- whom? Because we fail at that, we fail at everything we attempt after that.

This morning my expert public policy eye spots a (rare imo) right answer in the New York Times business news, real analysis and insight for all those of us who puzzle over public schools and party politics, religious wars, et cetera and just can't understand why we keep doing all the wrong things wronger, regressing rather than progressing.

"Overbooking, Bumped Fliers and No Plan B"
by Jeff Bailey

The whole story is about aggressive and insulated data analysts crunching endless numbers to create operational models that are statistically attractive to their own part of the "enterprise" but unfit for human consumption, thereby infuriating regular, responsible people just trying to participate in the system in good faith, in their own private, statistically insignificant roles.

Necessity being the mother of invention, savvy front line folks experiencing the fallout have to cope somehow. They create practical workarounds at their own lowly level that seem to compensate the consumer reasonably well and thus protect the system from its own longterm self-inflicted wounds. But that in turn makes the analysts redouble insistence on THEIR strategies, further infuriating users and further hurting the systems's credibility, requiring even more creative counterprogramming and loss of respect from the people caught up in it all. More and more regular people wise up to the system's escalating adversarial shortcomings, thus making it all even worse. Finally the system becomes neither workable nor fixable at any level . . Dörner's Logic of Failure.
"Stuck in a quagmire . . ."
"Scant credbility. . ."
"People view [it] as not on the up-and-up"

. . .what psychologist Dietrich Dörner shows, is that the problem lies not in the world, but in our own world-view . . .most of us are too simpleminded, especially when it comes to anticipating future trends or interactive processes. We don't think about the implications and consequences of what we want, or want to do, with results that come back to haunt us.

Nevertheless, and contrary to many current claims, Dörner also argues that there is no secret formula or mental trick . . . to overcome complacency or over-confidence. The world always has been very complex, but as the ambition and scale of our intentions has increased in modern times, the malevolent implications and consequences of our simple-mindedness becomes more and more frequent and compelling. . .
This is a book that public policymakers, politicians, planners, and the general public desperately need to read. We are squandering our environmental capital and undermining our social capital because we are trying to do things, or avoid doing things, that cannot be sustained for very much longer. . .

Remember that Kansas town that got wiped off the map by a giant tornado? Its mayor just quit, said he would not lead the rebuilding effort, wasn’t temperamentally suited to that kind of system work with competing ideas about what to do and how to do it. The town council said oh, don’t quit, we’ll just consider that you’re on sabbatical to get your own family squared away and then maybe you’ll come back and lead us. We’ll just wait.

I'm writing this on Mother's Day, a day that is filled with joy and also bittersweet for this year my grandsons and granddaughter have been given their freedom, the freedom to live without fear, without danger, without verbal or physical abuse, without the scourge that drugs bring into a home, without hunger or wanting of a different life, a better life, a secure and safe life, a home to call their own, a bedroom in which to lay their heads at night and know the nightmare is over, that they are wrapped up in the bosom of the love of a family who will do everything in our power to show them it doesn't have to be the way it has been for so many years, that peace and freedom are theirs now, that they have a future they only dreamed of, that it has finally come, the day of liberation for them, a glorious day.

My son has been in a custody fight for his children for several months, it's been a difficult time but has come to a happy ending but it brings with it the pain of a mother who has lost her way and hope by those who have watched that she finds a better way.

I say bittersweet in the title because this Mother's Day is a day of hope and wonder, the hope of dreams lost coming true, the hope that we can turn away from drugs and alcohol, the hope that we will find it in us to reach further than a glass pipe or a bottle, the hope that we have it in us to do better for our children, the hope that we can save ourselves and thus save our children. That the we that once was my son and me becomes the we for my daughter-in-law as well.