Pacific Marine Mammal Center

Cute Sea Lion Begs for Votes

THERE ARE MANY POSTS I almost make, many I mean to make, and a few that I actually say I will make, but don't get around to. One of the latter category was when a friend of mine (one I made when I first visited Oregon in 2002-ish, let's refer to this friend as "Mariana") actually rescued a sea lion. Here is text from one of Mariana's emails:

so i climb over rocks for about 20 feet through water trying not to get slammed into the wall by waves at the deep part. i get to the sandy part where the waves only occasionally got my feet wet and was at the cove FINALLY. there's the sea lion, looks emaciated and has an almost perfecly round wound on his flipper where you can see tendon and bone exposed (from a cookie cutter shark.) i only had a couple towels on me because the kennel carrier weighs 45lbs and we couldnt trek it all this way from the truck. i had to towel over his head with him trying to bite the towel (or me if i got close enough) until i got it over his head and pinned him down (he tried to get away, i had to grab his tail flippers while a life guard helped get the towel back on him.) so then i pick him up, he's heavier than he looks, about 50-70lbs and compact. i had to then carry him back through the rocks and the water, and manage to climb up the rocks i jumped down in the first place.

This "inside source" of mine works at Pacific Marine Mammal Center (PMMC), an organization dedicated to rescuing and helping marine animals in need. I was speaking to Mariana and got a lot of inside details on this story, for example. That was another post I meant to write up, but didn't get to.

The picture up top is a shot Mariana sent me of the sea lion described in the passage above. And this is the crazy stuff PMMC does on the regular!

I have to say I have mad respect for those people and organizations who are in it for the Good of it. From volunteer fireman to nurses to sea lion rescuers to peace corps members to activists of many stripes to volunteer poll workers... and so on.

As is the case when people are more motivated by a principle than a profit, they often need help from the rest of us, be it monetarily or with a simple online signature or vote. I write here now because PMMC is up for a small grant that will help them do what they do. Requires nothing from us but an electronic vote. No rock-scrambling, no towel wrapping, no sea lion cajoling. If you have the time and the energy, I ask you to please vote for their receiving this grant.

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Words to live by

These new-found tensions which are present at all stages in the real nature of colonialism have their repercussions on the cultural plane. In literature, for example, there is relative over-production. From being a reply on a minor scale to the dominating power, the literature produced by natives becomes differentiated and makes itself into a will to particularism. The intelligentsia, which during the period of repression was essentially a consuming public, now themselves become producers. This literature at first chooses to confine itself to the tragic and poetic style; but later on novels, short stories and essays are attempted. It is as if a kind of internal organisation or law of expression existed which wills that poetic expression become less frequent in proportion as the objectives and the methods of the struggle for liberation become more precise. Themes are completely altered; in fact, we find less and less of bitter, hopeless recrimination and less also of that violent, resounding, florid writing which on the whole serves to reassure the occupying power. The colonialists have in former times encouraged these modes of expression and made their existence possible. Stinging denunciations, the exposing of distressing conditions and passions which find their outlet in expression are in fact assimilated by the occupying power in a cathartic process. To aid such processes is in a certain sense to avoid their dramatisation and to clear the atmosphere. But such a situation can only be transitory. In fact, the progress of national consciousness among the people modifies and gives precision to the literary utterances of the native intellectual. The continued cohesion of the people constitutes for the intellectual an invitation to go farther than his cry of protest. The lament first makes the indictment; then it makes an appeal. In the period that follows, the words of command are heard. The crystallisation of the national consciousness will both disrupt literary styles and themes, and also create a completely new public. While at the beginning the native intellectual used to produce his work to be read exclusively by the oppressor, whether with the intention of charming him or of denouncing him through ethnical or subjectivist means, now the native writer progressively takes on the habit of addressing his own people.