Family

Back in July I wrote a post titled Pain that went under the radar for a lot of people but for my hardcore readers. It's interesting looking back at it that it's a post almost at the year's mid-point and that it was the first time I was openly acknowledging in more than a year that offline Liza was living a very different life than Liza online.

And yet I really didn't own up to everything that was and has been ailing me : 2008 goes down as the year I had to contend with the fact that the life I've lived for the last 10 years is over and that the physical pain that has been bashing me for the past year and a half has been amplified by the emotional anguish of knowing that my marriage is over.

Today is Veteran's Day and instead of saying something trite, I wanted to pay a small tribute to my baby brother, Frank Sabater-Tirado. My brother joined the Army at about 19-20 years of age and served for over 15 years after years of debating whether to join a seminary, go to college or join the army.

He ended up in the military at a very young age. He trained all over the United States, Korea (from where he has some hilarious stories about the kinds of foods he tried to eat with very little success) and Germany.

Then Bush #1 declared war on Saddam Hussein.

I was visiting with a friend in Italy and we had literally talked to him over the phone the very day before the war was declared. What a fucking mess it is to have the US declare war and have yourself carrying an American passport, looking like you could come either from the enemy country or its neighboring states. To say I was harrased in Arabic, Italian, French and English for looking Arab and having a US passport is to say the least.

Anyhow, I totally freaked out because, after all, he is my baby brother.

At the time there were no cell-phones, no web, no digital cameras nor mainstream use of email. The fastest I could get him anything was a week because even if I sent things Express Mail or money through Western Union, being he was in a war zone, he would receive things one or two weeks delayed.

I felt I wasn't doing enough. I felt that I was a pussy for being here while I knew he was over there in a war he really didn't look forward to. At the time, being in the Army was more about peace-keeping but this was Bush #1, who had a score to keep with the monster he and his covert US operations had created in Iraq. My brother was going to war to fight a grudge between a tyrant and a maker of tyrants.

Yet letters and care packages are what kept him going. In those little things I found that I least, I gave him a reason to go on. They were not only incredibly important to his sanity; they became important for mine as well.

9/25/1990

Dahran, S. A.

Dear sis,

[...]

If you've been keeping track of time (something that iI'm not doing because it's a mental health hazard) I've been in the desert for a month or so. I'm used to the climate (it's as hot as being caught in a traffic jam in Bayamón at noon with no A/C in the car) but the scenery sucks. There's nothing but sand, dust,, rocks, a few bushes and not a single cloud in the sky all around you and as far as the eye can see. The wildlife is limited to a heard of camels every once in a while, jackals or wild dogs at night and lizards, scorpions, sand vipers and ants as big as your toe nail roaming around you all the time. Oh, I forgot the never missed desert flies and sandfleas which manage to get anywhere --even inside your protective mask or the crack of the your ass after you've used the field latrines. It may or may not be funny to you but for me it's just a reality.

We work between 12 and 14 hours a day, our days starting at 2 o'clock in the morning or "o-too-dark-hundred hours" in our lingo. Then, if possible, we go to the rear in our trucks for a shower and a hot mean and a "beauty sleep" in A/C before we go back to work. We rest for a whole 24 hours but it's not enough for almost a whole day of scorching sun and no place to hide from it and working at a rate that makes ants look like the laziest creatures on Earth. But that's part of the mission and "ain't nothing to it but suck it in an' drive on", or so we say.

[...]

Love,
Frank

ZAMBONI.

If she gets away with being invisibly pregnant a 6th time, her choice would be to call him or her after an ice resurfacing company.

Mmm'kay. 

In other news, the soccer mom gets $150, 000 clothes allowance from the RNC. That's about 3 times the median household income in the United States --which is, if you need to know  $50,233.00 (2007 Census numbers).

Please remember, Sarah Palin is not an elitist.

Dan Savage has an incredibly moving story about the day his mother died.

In In Defense of Dignity, he talks about how he watched his mother die, slowly asphyxiating under the dead weight of pulmonary fibrosis:

Suddenly, the doctor was at the door to my mother's room again. He waved me out into the hall. He needed a medical directive. Immediately. Her vital signs were tanking. If we were going to put a tube in her, and put her on machines that could breathe for her, it had to be now. Right now. So it fell to me to walk back into my mother's room, tell her she was going to die, and lay out her rather limited options. She could be put under and put on machines and live for a day or two in a coma, long enough for her other two children to get down to Tucson and say their good-byes, which she wouldn't be able to hear. Or she could live for maybe another six hours if she continued to wear an oxygen mask that forced air into her lungs with so much force it made her whole body convulse. Or she could take the mask off and suffocate to death. Slowly, painfully, over an hour or two.

It was her choice.

"No mask," she said, "no pain."

I urge you to read his account, especially if you live in Washington state, where they are considering Initiative 1000, a measure that would make it legal for physicians to prescribe lethal doses of medication to terminally ill patients.

I have a similar story albeit not so pretty.

My father had given me a proxy some years before he fell ill. He an I had a long history of butting heads but when it came down to it, it was because I was the one from his eight children that was temperamentally the closest to him.

It's why my father trusted me with his life or in this case, his end of life. He knew I'd fight for his right to die. He knew I'd stop anybody from forcing him into a life he didn't want.

Unfortunately he didn't know I would fail so miserably the first time around.

if John McCain wins this November, our country faces what I call "A Billy Carter Crisis". two reasons lead me to this conclusion: Sarah Palin's family and Cynthia McCain. John McCain looks like he loathes both of these women. Palin is the new Lyndon B., baby. and Cynthia McCain is the right's answer to Jackie O. though she wears a lot of red to evoke memories of the golden Reagan years.
anyway…

Todd Palin looks like new pop country. real mavericks like Johnny Cash or Merle Haggard would stomp kick his ass, but he has something to prove. if McCain wins, Todd will buy a cobalt blue Camero which he sets on forty-inch chrome rims. he will then proceed to pick fights with people like me over parking spaces. such antics will result in repeated butt whoopings for Todd. Sarah strikes me as the kind of woman who can throw back a few beers or snort a few lines, but never allows it to interfere with her goal of running the world. Todd will be so wasted that he uses the "red phone" to call Roger Clinton for advice. this, after he uses it to order Papa's Johns for some real goddamn Italian food. country does not always equal ignorant just as city does not always equal smart. everyone suffers some form of ignorance, but when your ignorance stems from close-minded greed rather than lack of experience or knowledge, disaster looms. that whole damn family gonna be an issue.

Can you believe that after Hillary Clinton's assassination remark, her campaign spinned the comment as an attempt by Barack to make her look bad? Yes, Hillary Clinton and all her boot lickers blamed Barack for the words she herself uttered on her own accord not once, not twice but now four times during the course of the campaign.

They blamed him for blowing the thing out of proportion and yet, as I've told many, many people since this happened HOW DARE YOU TELL US THIS IS NOT A BID DEAL! How dare you tell us that putting the words ASSASSINATION and BARACK on the same page is not cause for concern?

Well, the Huffington Post has an amazing chronicle of one of Michelle Obama's campaign stops. This is what happened :

She called on another supporter, whose voice quivered and broke with barely contained emotion as she explained how important it is to her, personally, that our country change course. She explained that she had just returned from Oregon where she campaigned for Obama and attended the 75,000-person rally by the river. She had noticed, she said, that the Secret Service had increased security dramatically for Barack Obama's rallies since the Phoenix rally in January.

The room collectively gasped and murmured, some aghast that these fears were being spoken aloud directly to Barack Obama's wife. Some nodded, concern and fear on their faces. Others shifted on their feet, displaying a range of emotions -- concern, discomfort with the topic, indignation.

This is not a pundit spewing or a campaign boot licker spinning. This was a common woman, who has volunteered to get the man she believes will bring change to this country. This is not a political expert lost in a moment of bobble-head theatrics but a real woman shaken by Hillary Clinton's words.

And yet, with the poise and class that Hillary nor Bill Clinton have, Michelle Obama told this shaken woman and the rest of the audience this :

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