Time to Stop Ordering, Buying and Eating Tuna

There comes a time, and that time is past due now, when we, people of the united countries of the earth HAVE to see the big picture and recognize that INDUSTRIAL forms of FISHING have the capacity to and ARE indeed depleting species of sea life.

Blue Fin Tuna are in threat of extinction. Reports say 2012 - is that three years from now - one of the most popular fishes for sushi and seafood - is liable to be depleted from the oceans.

Would you care to? Would you be willing to? Can you agree to stop eating tuna? To stop eating sushi made from fish that are over-fished.

Can our appetites be kept at bay long enough to allow for a rebuilding of Tuna populations?

It's time for us to stop ordering Tuna sandwiches, stop buying cans of Tuna, start writing the tuna producers and distributers and ask that they help rebuild the tuna population.

It's time.

Watch this BBC video and see other videos related to that.

Homeowners' Association Bylaws

One of the consequences of a down economy is that people return to thinking about self-sufficiency. Can I grow my own vegetables, or more of them? Can I store more water? Could I have chickens for eggs? What about putting up solar power panels on the roof?

Reading the bylaws of the homeowners association of the new development I live in, I saw that vegetable gardens are disallowed, chickens are not legal, and it is not OK to have solar power panels on the roof?

Americans are so interested in appearances, that in this time of very serious economic downturns and unbelievable loss of jobs, we are tied by rules made to make our neighborhoods prettier than functional.

It's a stark reminder that no matter how developed we are, we're never out of risk of needing to survive on more of our own resources. And perhaps we should never give up some core self-sustaining practices for the safety and well-being of all of us.

Granmother Mary Wore a Bed Jacket

Granmere was my step grandmother. She wrote my grandfather after her classmate, Susan had died, and they became friends, and then more, and he invited her to be his wife and come be the head of his household in beautiful victorian Cambridge Massachusetts.

At night she wore a pink bed jacket, which she had trimmed with lace on the outside, nice buttons, and with ribbon at the waist, so it would last longer with the washings.

Between her room and my grandfather's room there was a secret closet, with a door between which they could travel with no one knowing.

Every room in the house had a fireplace. This was a beautiful home with a grand wood staircase and three floors and a basement.

Everything would unravel after my father died, leaving his four children the trunks of his father, and those who came before. A thick 6 inch wide leather bible. Army clothes and badges and patches. Swords and citations. Pictures known and unknown. All this history, come down, with us having no time to look at it.

Grandmere had perfumes in her closet that had a mirror above drawers. She had the perfumes displayed. She had a silver trimmed comb and a silver backed mirror, and a big beautiful diamond ring.

Grandmere would change into her bed clothes in the evening after she put away the dinner's dishes. I could go in to watch Loveboat with her. She would dose. Then I would kiss her goodnight and turn off the light.

I got to stay in my grandfather's room, in his bed for 8 months in 1976, when I was 18.

Grandmere wore a pink bed jacket at night while she sat up in bed and darned clothes, fixed a button, read or watched her tiny TV.

I would pull the oh so small wooden rocking chair with the odd lime green pillow she had made for it, over to her bedside to watch with her.

Granmere is the only person I ever knew to wear a bed jacket; a pretty pink bed jacket which she had made just as she liked.

She died sometime in the 1990s. She wanted nothing to do with her family. She wanted to be gone. And so with my last call to her she said, do not call anymore. And she had a way of being stern. My father's older brother's ex-wife, the first daughter in law in the family, was a nurse and came down from New Hampshire to help care for her. I, once so close, was far away in Maryland, having left Massachusetts in 1994, when my divorce was final, and when I learned my father would be nearby in Maryland for six months before leaving again.

Those six months would be the last six months of my father's life, and I was there for that. In being close to my father, I was no longer near my grandmere.

Tonight, 15 years later, in 2008, yet farther away from Massachsetts, in North Carolina, I felt chilly and wanted to put on a bed jacket, which I don't have, and I remembered her, my granmere, how she wore one every night over her nightgown.

World Aids Day: In Memory of John

For years I only knew that a friend of my brother's had tested positive for HIV. As the quilts were shown around the country, I wondered why I knew no one personally, when so many were suffering. I watched the video documentary of a gay couple where one of them was dying from AIDs. It was stark, the suffering, the wasting away. I watched many movies on TV, about the fear we have of getting AIDS, about people who got it from unexpected places - not sexual encounters.

Then, about ten years ago, I saw a man, tall and thin, gaunt as if he were dying. I don't know why but I was drawn to him. The man I was with introduced me. His name was John. He was living, and now dying with AIDS. We shook hands. We exchanged numbers.

I'm not sure why we connected, but he didn't live far from me, with his lover. He told me his story. About being married and knowing that it wasn't right. About ending his marriage amicably. About having one wild, crazy day, having unprotected sex with strangers. About having the sense that he had endangered himself. About that night, in a gay club, meeting the man who would be the love of his life. About their being together, to this day, was it 12 or 15 or more years now.

He told me that he was never with anyone else after that day, but that day was deadly. He tested positive for HIV, and in time, started showing the signs of AIDS.

John was a librarian, working for a government agency, so he was very educated and had access to the most advanced research. He got himself into studies to get experimental medicine. He became an activist for the cause, traveling around the world to conferences to speak about AIDS. He told me he was able to prolong his life for way longer than others at the time, because he was so well informed, and sought out the latest treatments. But now, now that I was meeting him, his life was winding down.

My son and I took him to the library where he liked to borrow books. He was a very kind and gentle man. We visited his house. Watched him take about 15 pills - vitamins and supplements to help his body. So humbled by his daily effort to stay alive.

We had met at a Buddhist prayer park. I was a practicing Buddhist at the time. He had lived in Cambodia, if I remember right, and his family had given food to the monks who came around begging regularly. He had some burgundy cloth he wanted to give me, I felt it so interesting that he had an early connection as a child with Buddhist monks. And now, as he was dying, he was again connected with Buddhist monks.

As his time neared, people and monks from the Tibetan Buddhist community where we had met, came to pray by his beside, chanting. I was not around at the time, but I heard from my friends that they had gotten the call that his time was near, and they were able to be there around his bedside as he was dying.

The Buddhists believe that what you do for others will be done for you. It felt good to think that his family's early generosity with Buddhist monks had some connection with his having monks and lay Buddhists at his bedside as he lay dying.

I am grateful for having the opportunity to know John, for the short friendship we had, and for the chance to learn more about this devastating, community crippling, disease.

Awareness both Gives us Options and Confines

The old adage, "What you don't know, won't hurt you," couldn't be farther from the truth. What we don't know absolutely can hurt us, and worse, or at least as bad, can hurt others.

Gaining awareness about where things come from, and what it took to make them, really can alter one's daily choices.

Once I learned from PETA about conditions in factory farms, the normal farming done for raising animals for meat, I didn't feel I could ever buy or eat meat that came from animals raised that way. Knowing about their suffering just makes it horrible to be part of the consumer demand that fuels those farms. I'm sorry for the people who earn their living from providing meat this way, but sometimes as we become more conscious of the suffering we cause we have to change our behavior. It can be limiting because we may not be willing to do things which cause suffering any more.

Later I discovered that the workers who have to prepare chicken for packaging as meat get repetitive motion disorders and can get crippled from the work. There have been stories about this in the Triangle area, as there are chicken farms and plants near Pittsboro and Siler City.

Still, it's hard to make the change when the culture around, the people in my life, the businesses that I interact with, are still OK with things as they are. Those of us who want to make a change really have to undergo a lot of resistance.

As I started to research more, there was the suffering of the miners for diamonds, and the suffering of the crabs and lobsters and oysters; the suffering of the oysters who were cut open to have grains of sand put in to make pearls... and the bears that are caged to take some of their inner fluids for Chinese medicine. I won't continue. It's so ugly, none of us want to hear about it. So ugly, we want to forget that it is happening. Yet it is happening, and living beings with the capacity to suffer are caused ongoing suffering by humans who could make a different choice, the choice for less suffering.

This can get extended, to which countries one buys products from, which manufacturers. It can get extended to know that we have the choice in how we spend our disposable income, how we distribute our resources, how much we spend on ourselves, versus on those who might need help. This kind of broader thinking can be hard on ordinary folk. One finds this kind of awareness more common among religious orders, and devout believers who may choose to become missionaries. Most of us can hardly bear that kind of radical choice. And maybe we don't have to. Each one of us does get to choose how much we want to try to do.

Dog Food

Many will find this ridiculous, but I am horrified, literally horrified at the scenes of animal cruelty in factory farming and meat processing. With most animals capable to feeling pain, not to mention suffering, I can not bear to be part of the chain of consumer demand that maintains a market for factory farmed meat.

As such, I buy vegetarian dog food for my rescued beagle. It is one of only two brands available at PetSmart. I buy the dried vegetarian food and cans, and mix half a can and 3/4 cup of dried food for her meals. For a long time that's all she ate, no meat at all. Cans with meat and meat by products are probably produced with factory farming methods, and if possible, should not be bought.

I buy my meat at Whole Foods, that's almost the only thing I buy there, because very few other stores sell meat from Range Raised animals, or animals that were free to roam and cared for humanely. So when I have chicken or turkey - I no longer buy or eat meat from cows or pigs - I take a little of that and add it in the vegetarian dog food.

Ridiculous some would say, perhaps many. But I learned from the movie about Gandhi's life, that as consumers we have tremendous power. With our dollars we vote for certain things and when we withhold our dollars, we are discouraging other things. So I am using my small but important power as a consumer to vote for humane care of animals by not buying meat products for dog food.

The Electric Hair Dryer

To use or not use an electric hairdryer. I can see it now, eyes rolling. Who cares? Why even ask the question.

Then too, I can see the curious one, tilting their head, and wondering. Why is she writing about an electric hair dryer. It's like writing about the air.

And that's the point.

We know now that air is not something we can take for granted. In Japan and some parts of China you can see people wearing face masks to filter the pollution in the air. When I lived in China for a year in 1981/82 I breathed in so much coal dust - that's how everything was heated in Beijing - that I got bronchitis and coughed up black particles. Ugly, right? Well think of how that tender pink tissue of the lungs felt with the coal dusted air coming in.

Same with the electric hair dryer. When I was a teenager in the early 1970s in Maryland, on the East coast of the US, using a hair dryer was like drinking milk and brushing my teeth. Take a shower daily. Blow dry my hair to style it a little - and I even had straight hair already, didn't have to straighten it. I didn't question it.

The questioning came when I went to Taiwan.

Want to hear more, comment and you'll get the rest of the story within a week.