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#now he's forever free on thousands of acres of land
girlactionfigure · 6 months
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Something else for those history deniers that think Zionism & Israel just popped up out of nowhere in the late 19th/early 20th century.
After Napolean was on the march through Italy & Egypt, he entered Eretz Israel (occupied then by the Ottoman Turks) in 1799.
He conquered Jaffa. 
And as he approached Acre, he camped and made a remarkable decision that could have changed the course of world history. 
Napolean issued a letter to the Jewish people offering they may return to their homeland & live as a free nation again, under French protection. 
The letter stated, among other things, that it was addressed “to the rightful heirs of Palestine … Israelites, unique nation, whom, in thousands of years, lust of conquest and tyranny have been able to be deprived of their ancestral lands, but not of name and national existence!” 
He went on to tell the “exiled” Jews to “rejoice” because France was offering “Israel’s patrimony!”
Then he exalted the Jews that “now is the moment … to claim the restoration of civic rights the population of the universe which had been shamefully withheld from you for thousands of years, your political existence as a nation among nations, & the unlimited right to worship Jehovah in accordance with your faith, publicly & most probably forever.”  
Unfortunately, this offer could never be accepted or enforced. 
Back then, the Ottoman Turkish Empire was still rather strong, and they sent a mass of troops that sent Napoleon packing.
Captain Allen
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cowboyshit · 3 years
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i just want adam to get that community number thing so i can send him links to all the wild horse stuff i follow and introduce him to the mustang side of social media because i think he’d really dig it and also hopefully gush with me about the horses 🥺
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artificialqueens · 3 years
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Galactica, Chapter 74 (Group Fic) - TheDane/Veronica
A/N: Click here if you’re looking for previous chapters (or here if you’d rather read on AO3). 💫
Previously: Galactica shut down for the holidays, and Bianca turned Courtney’s shitty day around.
This Chapter: Christmas Eve. Fame plays hostess for Juju and Detox’s family, Bianca and Courtney jet off to Puerto Rico, Violet spends the evening with Sutan, Raja and Raven, and Pearl thirsts for Dahlia.
***
“Patrick?” Fame called over her shoulder, a big porcelain vase on the table in front of her.
“Yes darling?” Patrick was sitting in an armchair, his finger holding his place in the crime novel he was reading, Charles curled up on the floor in front of the crackling fireplace.
“What do you think of this?” Fame took a step back, showing off the greenhouse bouquet she had arranged, their gardener bringing them in after his rounds, snow covering the ground outside. “I was hoping they could be the centerpiece for tonight?”
They were upstate, in what Karl had jokingly started to call The Farm one summer. In reality, it was a mansion with several acres of land, the incredible garden the reason for the nickname, though Karl had insisted it was because upstate New York was basically Hicksville.
Fame and Patrick had bought it forever ago, the property supposed to be a real estate investment, but when they had visited it to oversee the remodel during the fall of the year they got it, Fame had fallen in love instantly.
She adored The Farm, loved the open land, loved the space that reminded her of her childhood’s free roam, loved that Charles had all the space in the world, the property so big that no one ever bothered them while they were there.
“I think that’s lovely dear,” Patrick smiled, taking a sip of the spiced eggnog the chef had made. “Juju’s going to love that.”
“Good.” Fame smiled, a moment of happiness washing over her body. Juju and Detox were coming up for Christmas, bringing their children along, the bedrooms already prepared for them.
When Detox and Juju had accepted her invitation to join them upstate, Fame had been overjoyed, spending the holiday with her friends instead of family so much more enjoyable, and best of all, it required absolutely no flying.
Unlike the Manhattan townhouse, The Farm was decorated in a traditional Christmas red and green, a fresh cut actual pine tree set up in the parlor, copious amounts of gifts for Kelly and the twins already under the tree.
“I’ll go check up on the chef.” Fame put down her garden shears, quickly drying her hands on her tea towel, collecting the scraps for the compost out back. “Make sure they’re cooking the Brussels sprouts correctly.”
The night's dinner was a wild lemon and honey salmon, a spinach salad with goat cheese and beets, the dessert spiced tea-poached pears for the adults and a sundae bar for the kids.
“And the mac and cheese?” Patrick raised an eyebrow.
“Of course,” Fame smiled. “I specifically instructed the chef to go for the mega size Kraft. The little ones should know it’s Christmas too.”
In reality, Fame had requested a complete restock of what Patrick lovingly called the kids cupboard, a whole section dedicated to the Sanderson kids, Kelly always going straight there the second she stepped foot inside. Just because she was a teenager who rarely attended family events anymore didn’t mean that Fame would forget about her.
“The sleds are ready to go too.”
Fame had never wanted kids of her own, but she loved and adored her entire chosen family, especially the little ones. Spoiling them had been one of her favorite pastimes since they’d met, when Kelly was still a chubby little baby with a passion for sticking jewelry into her mouth.
Today, she’d planned a lovely afternoon of fun in the snow for when everyone arrived. Fame had even bought a new snow set, the pure white Prada demanding to go home with her, her new mittens lined with rabbit fur so she could truly get down and dirty while building the snowman she hoped they had time for.
It was one of the most liberating things about The Farm, the acres of land meaning that there was a sense of privacy she could never feel in the city.
“And did you go for the wood?”
“Of course I went for the wooden sleds,” Fame rolled her eyes, Patrick so often playing stupid on purpose just to rile her up. “The antique German design.” There was no way Fame was going for anything but the best, and Julia and Owen deserved the best sledding experience money could buy, gourmet marshmallows and Jacques Torres hot chocolate already in the kitchen ready to go.
“Mmh?” Patrick smirked, taking another sip of his egg nog, and Fame went over to kiss him, just to wipe it off his face.
***
“Kelly Sanderson! Don’t you forget your scarf!”
“Yes mom,” Kelly rolled her eyes, but snatched her scarf, putting it around her neck before walking towards the house with her gym bag over her shoulder, and Juju couldn’t help but smile.
They were emptying out the car, the drive upstate a complete pain since she had been nauseous the entire time, Detox driving while Kelly was in the front seat, so Juju had been alone in the back with the twins because someone had to keep an eye on them, and Kelly refused.
“Okay champ,” Detox looked at his son who was still in the car, Julia standing on the snow-covered ground in her Frozen jacket. “I’m going to unbuckle you, but that doesn’t mean that you can-“
“Bye dad!!”
“Fuck!”
Juju laughed as Owen ran as fast as he could towards the front door, his sister right behind him.
“We got them!”
Juju turned to see Patrick call from the door, a big smile on the man's face, Fame right behind him.
“Your death wish!” Detox yelled, and Juju smiled before digging back in, her husband quickly gathering enough suitcases to make his first trip up to the house, Juju taking a moment to enjoy the blessed silence of private property upstate.
She fished her phone out of her handbag, a sense of relief washing over her when she saw that Bianca had texted. They had only spoken once last week, when Juju called her to apologize for the dinner party pile-on, and Bianca said it was okay, but she also seemed a bit rushed and distracted. Juju was hoping that it was just work, that she wasn’t genuinely mad, but she couldn’t be sure, especially since she hadn’t responded to any messages the night before. Looking at the messages today, though, it really did seem like they were good.
JUJU: Hey there. Thinking of you, hope you’re good.
JUJU: To be clear, I was thinking of you because I got up to take a very large dump.
JUJU: :-D
JUJU: Hehe
JUJU: <3
JUJU: OK goodnight! xo
JUJU: Merry Christmas Eve, lady! I love you.
BIANCA: Love you too, kiddo. Sorry for being MIA last night.
BIANCA: I’m taking Courtney to PR for Christmas, we’re heading to JFK right now.
BIANCA: Tell the monsters that I owe them some presents when I get back.
JUJU: Oh wow!! Have fun!!!! (And trust me, they will collect on those presents, lol)
She sighed, slipping the phone back into her bag, thinking that perhaps she should keep Bianca’s vacation plans under wraps for now. She turned towards the house, watching Fame on her knee, unlacing Julia’s shoes. Yes, better not to be the messenger for this particular news.
***
“So...is it everything you imagined?” Bianca asked, a wry grin on her face. She’d been a bit shocked when Courtney revealed in the car that she’d never flown first class before. She thought that surely someone as cute and charming as her had been slipped a free upgrade or two by a flight attendant trying to hit on her.
“It’s perfect.” Courtney tilted her champagne glass towards Bianca for a toast, her eyes taking on that slightly glazed, naughty look as she sipped on her third glass.
“Perfect, huh?” Bianca asked, clinking her glass lightly. “Then I guess you don’t want another present…”
“Wait, no...I do!” Courtney exclaimed, suddenly looking so serious that Bianca couldn’t hold back her cackling laughter.
Drunk Courtney was turning into one of her favorite people, the comically exaggerated faces she made when her defenses were down too cute for words.
“Oh, well in that case…” She reached into her bag and pulled out a box wrapped in sparkling pink and gold.
“How did you fit that in there?” Courtney asked, letting Bianca take her glass so that she had both hands free for the large gift, examining it closely. “Are you Mary Poppins?”
“Yeah, that’s me. A g-rated singing nanny.”
“Hot,” Courtney giggled, and Bianca gave her a stern look. “What, I like sexy nannies. Maria Von Trapp...Fran Fine?!”
“You’ve gotta be kidding me.” Bianca shook her head, amused.
“Oh no, am I being naughty? Are you gonna spank me?” Courtney’s eyes glittered.
Well, this was an unexpected turn. Perhaps something to explore when they weren’t flying thirty thousand feet over an ocean, surrounded by people.
“Open your present.”
“Yes, ma’am…” Courtney said, making Bianca laugh again as she tore into the package, first pulling off the excessive ribbons and bows (Joslyn really shouldn’t be trusted with that kind of thing) and then the glittery paper. She lifted the lid on the box, revealing 5 brand-new designer bathing suits, all from this year’s hottest resort collections. Her eyes lit up. “Ooooh, wow! This is much better than the plan I had.”
“What was your plan?”
“I was just gonna go without a suit,” she said, shrugging a bit as she fluttered her lashes.
“Huh.” Bianca’s brow furrowed in mock disappointment, adding, “Yeah, no, I like your plan better, give these back.”
She reached over and attempted to swipe the box from Courtney’s hand, but Courtney clutched it greedily to her chest.
“No! They’re mine now!”
Bianca laughed, leaning over to press a kiss to her cheek, just as Courtney grabbed her face and went right for her lips.
“Thank you, B. I love them. I love you.”
“I love you too, sunshine.” Bianca rested her forehead against Courtney’s with a happy sigh. “And I can’t wait to see you in them...or out of them.”
***
“Are you sure it’s okay that I’m not helping?” Violet asked. She was sitting on a silver bar stool and feeling absolutely useless, her fingers drumming on the marble breakfast bar.
Raja and Raven’s apartment looked like something from a catalog, big art pieces hung everywhere, fresh flowers in vases even though it was December. Violet had spotted the heavy oak Raja preferred, and the green and gold she gravitated towards, but it was clear that Raven was the main decorator.
“Of course,” Raven smiled, flashing her teeth over her shoulder. She was standing at the counter, filling up the sink so she could rinse off their dishes.
“Let her have the fantasy,” Sutan grinned, putting the empty tray he was carrying down, Raja right behind him. “This is the one time of year Raven pretends she’s the perfect housewife,”
“Fuck off.” Raven flipped him off, “I’m always perfect.”
When Sutan had told Violet he usually spent Christmas Eve with his sister and Raven, Violet hadn't been surprised. What had surprised her was when Sutan told her that Raven insisted on cooking every year. It had been a simple meal, roasted chicken and potatoes with gravy, but it did really seem like Raven had made it herself, Raja in charge of buying the dessert.
It was the first time Violet had celebrated Christmas Eve with anyone since she was 17, and while it was very different from what she usually did, which was wine and a movie, it was nice.
“You are, Princess,” Raja smiled, pressing a quick kiss against her hair as she dropped their dishes. “Now, does anyone want another drink?”
“Me,” Raven grinned, and Violet had to fight not to show the surprise on her face when Raven just grabbed the dirty dishes. She had never thought Raven would be someone who did chores, who’d willingly get her hands dirty.
“I’m driving tomorrow, so no,” Sutan was leaning against the counter, a smile on his lips. He was wearing a blue turtleneck sweater, and Violet had to admit that he looked stupidly hot in it.
“Actually…” Sutan paused, narrowing his eyes. “Raven, what’s going on with your nose?”
“Her nose?” Raja tilted her head, looking at her fiancée. “What do you mean?”
“It looks different. There.” Sutan pointed with his pinky at the edge of her nose.
“She seems normal to me.”
“Can’t you see it? Here, I’ll adjust- Let me push her head back.“ Sutan was just about to reach for Raven’s chin, when he was cut off.
“Hey!” Raven pulled away, “Crazy agent, I’m in the room.” She raised an eyebrow, her tone sharp, “I’m trying a new makeup technique.” Raven pushed Susn’s hand away from her face. “Is that a problem?”
“Of course not…”
“Good,” Raven rolled her eyes. “Now can we please get this done so we can watch a movie?”
“Sure.” Sutan rolled his eyes too, grabbing a dish towel before bumping his hip against Raven, making her yelp, laughter filling the room.
Violet let out a breath of relief she hadn’t even realized she had been holding, the knot in her stomach slowly releasing. She was probably overreacting, a childhood of tense Christmases just under her skin, but it had almost felt like Raven and Sutan were about to get in a fight.
Violet took her glass, a smile on her face as she took a sip of her wine, the uncomfortable feeling thankfully already fading.
***
Earlier, Courtney had enjoyed a healthy buzz from all the first class champagne, but then she fell asleep for half of the flight, and by the time they got to the resort, she felt refreshingly, deliciously sober, closing her eyes to feel the warm, fragrant ocean breeze blow in through the windows.
As Bianca directed the hotel staff with their suitcases, Courtney wandered over to the glass doors, eyes widening when she peered out at the terrace.
“B! Omigod, is this an infinity pool?” She threw open the doors and stepped outside, where a table was set up with a romantic, candlelit dinner. But even better, what was clearly a private infinity pool, which made her so excited she squealed with glee. “I’ve seen pictures of those but I never thought I’d see one in person!”
Bianca appeared in the doorway, a smirk on her face as she replied, “It’s not an infinity pool. It’s an infinity hot tub. The pool is down those steps.”
Courtney giggled, already slipping off her shoes to feel the heavenly warm water. She sat down at the edge of the hot tub, letting her legs dangle into the water while she gazed out at the gorgeous view, the gentle waves under a night sky sparkling with stars. When she mused last week about wanting to go to the beach, she certainly wasn’t imagining a private beach at this posh resort. But for once, everything in her life had worked out perfectly. All because of Bianca, who was now chatting with the hotel manager about their meal.
“Es esta la comida? Todo es vegano, verdad?”
“Si, of course. I hope everything is to your liking, Señora.”
“Es perfecto. Gracias.” She pressed some bills into his hand, adding, “Feliz Navidad!”
As soon as he left, Bianca turned back to Courtney, head tilting curiously when she took in her enraptured expression. “What?”
“I just think it’s sexy when you speak Spanish,” Courtney explained, biting her lip.
“Oh yeah? That’s what gets you going? My shitty high school Spanish?” Bianca asked, strolling towards her, dimples deep in her cheeks.
“Uh huh. I like the accent. Say more things…” Courtney leaned back, lashes fluttering, as Bianca laughed and pretended to think real hard.
“Hmm…” She settled in beside Courtney at the edge of the hot tub, slipping an arm around her waist and pressing a kiss to her shoulder. “Dónde está la biblioteca?”
“Ahh, yeah, that’s it,” Courtney growled, and Bianca laughed some more.
“Tu eres una gringa loca…”
“Uh huh…wait, what does that mean?”
“It means you’re a crazy white girl.”
“Oh. Yeah, fair.” Courtney cupped Bianca’s face in her hands, pulling her in for a kiss. Things were just starting to get a little heated when Courtney’s phone began to ring. She had a brief moment of panic before realizing that it was her personal phone, not her work phone. And since very few people made phone calls anymore, she was fairly certain that it would be her parents.
Coming out to her parents had been strange. She knew already, from how they reacted to Ben’s coming out when he was just 13, that they would be fine with her not being straight. But Ben hadn’t been dating someone nearly 20 years his senior.
So she was nervous, more than she’d have admitted, when she finally told them everything that was going on in her life--that she was dating, or rather in love with, a woman.
A woman who was, incidentally, a famous fashion magazine editor many years older than her.
Turned out, it was even more of an anticlimax than she anticipated, Mum giving her some bland platitudes about how love is love and Dad telling her to make sure she takes her vitamin D.
Which at first seemed like an innuendo, but actually was just him being his usual health-conscious self. Either way, they seemed both unsurprised and unbothered by the whole situation, which was a relief, she supposed. It was strangely reminiscent of when she was 16 and she’d announced that she wanted to graduate from high school early and go to America for University. Measured, unemotional support.
Courtney reached for her bag, pulling out the phone and answering, her family’s face popping up on the screen as she tried to figure out the time difference. It must already be Christmas morning in Brisbane.
“Hi, Mum! Happy Christmas!”
“Hello darling!” her mother cooed, elbowing Dad and Ben on either side of her, who she’d clearly forced into position, sitting on the sofa with the Christmas tree behind them, the picture of suburban bliss. “Happy Christmas!”
“Happy Christmas, love!” said Dad, pretending that he wasn’t thoroughly engrossed in whatever crime novel Courtney could see open on his lap.
Mum poked Ben again with her sharp elbow, and he scoffed.
“Yeah, yeah. Happy Christmas. How’s your rich girlfriend?” Ben asked.
“Great. How’s single life?” Courtney shot back, and Ben opened his mouth in mock offense.
“You fuckin’ cunt-”
“What was that, dickhead-”
“Kids!” Mum interrupted, putting on her best scolding voice as Courtney and Ben both broke out into giggles.
“She knows I’m kidding, Mum. Calm down.”
“I’m perfectly calm,” Mum said, rolling her eyes. “I’m just trying to have a pleasant conversation with my daughter, thanks very much.”
“Thanks Mum,” Courtney said, kicking her feet in the warm water. “It’s fine, though. It wouldn’t be Ben if he wasn’t giving me shit.”
“That’s called love, ya slag! Appreciate it!” Ben cut in, and Courtney blew him a kiss.
“Well darling, we just want you to know that we miss you terribly, but we’re so happy that you’re having a nice vacation. Right?”
“So happy,” Ben echoed, sticking out his tongue.
“And we’ve been talking about it, and-” she patted Dad on the thigh, then hit him harder when he didn’t say anything.
“Oh, yes. Ahem. We’ve been talking about planning a trip to New York next year,” Dad said. “How does that sound?”
“That sounds fantastic!” Courtney exclaimed. She hadn’t seen any of them since a quick trip to Australia last spring, before she moved to New York.
Bianca sat down beside her again, silently handing over a glass filled with ice and some kind of milky liquid along with a sexy wink, just out of camera range.
“Guys, check out the view!” While her family exclaimed over how beautiful it was, Courtney took a small sip of the drink, eyes widening with delight. “Omigod, this is like Bailey’s but better. Cheers!”
“Cheers,” Bianca murmured back.
“Hi, Bianca!” Mum called loudly. “Thank you for the wine!”
Apparently, Bianca had sent a whole case of high-end wine to her family home--and even signed both of their names on the card, although her family knew for damn sure that wasn’t something Courtney could afford.
“Um...hi. You’re welcome,” Bianca grinned, giving a quick, friendly wave and then leaning back out of frame, tilting her head towards the table with their food. Courtney nodded, reaching over to squeeze her thigh.
“Mum, thanks for calling. But we should go, we have dinner here and it’s getting cold.”
“Alright my love,” Mum said, smiling warmly. “Have a wonderful night. So long, Bianca!”
“Bye, Mrs. Jenek. Merry Christmas,” Bianca said, and Courtney giggled behind her hand.
“Mrs. Jenek…” she snickered, and Bianca grimaced, then put a hand on her hip.
“Well...shut up, I’m from the South. That’s just what we do.”
“You could at least say ‘doctor.’ She has a Ph.D.”
Bianca facepalmed, and Courtney laughed again, kissing her on the cheek. It was adorable how much she cared about making a good impression on Courtney’s family. “I’m just kidding, she doesn’t care about that stuff.”
“I care, though.”
“I know.” Courtney nuzzled into Bianca’s face. “And I love you for it.”
***
“Hey! I saw that!” Trixie gasped, pointing at Kim, who had just skipped a square on the Monopoly board.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Kim smirked, leaving her car piece as she took another cookie.
They were all gathered around the coffee table, mugs of hot cocoa and Katya’s Christmas cookies on plates, a crackling fire playing on the TV, music playing from the speakers.
“You’re cheating,” Trixie looked around. “Say something!”
“I didn’t see anything, sugar butt,” Katya smiled, her knitting needles in hand. She was weirdly good at Monopoly, Katya dominating the majority of the board. When Trixie had asked her how, and what her strategy was, Katya had simply grinned and told him it was simply how it was done in Soviet Russia.
“Pearl, what about you?”
“What?” Pearl looked up from her phone. “Oh. Sorry. No.”
“Who are you texting?”
Pearl smiled. “No one.”
“Not again,” Trixie groaned, not even interested in whatever girl had managed to capture his best friend’s attention for more than two seconds. “Pearl please. It’s Christmas.”
“Relax Trix,” Pearl grinned, leaning over so she could press a kiss against his cheek. “You’re the only one for me.”
***
PEARL: Was just thinking about you...so I thought I’d say hey ;)
DAHLIA: Oh yeah?
PEARL: Uh huh
DAHLIA: What were you thinking about?
PEARL: Mostly I was hoping to be suffocated by your thighs real soon.
PEARL: Your thighs are the stuff of dreams
DAHLIA: Right now, my thighs are stuck to the plastic cover on my grandma’s couch...but thanks.
PEARL: Hot
DAHLIA: Lol
PEARL: Can I tempt you to sneak away at some point in the next few days? Without pissing off the fam, of course
DAHLIA: Possibly...I have like 40 cousins, so no one would even notice I’d gone
PEARL: Fan fucking tastic
PEARL: Hey guess what?
DAHLIA: You’re horny and wanna fuck?
PEARL: Yes
DAHLIA: Patience, darling
PEARL: But also...it’s midnight. Merry Christmas.
DAHLIA: Shit, I missed mass again!
DAHLIA: For the 7th year in a row!
PEARL: Hahaha
PEARL: Oh god. My roommates are singing happy birthday to Jesus.
PEARL: With a fucking cake and candles
DAHLIA: LOL, HBDJ
***
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whywishesarehorses · 3 years
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Success Spoils a U.S. Program to Round Up Wild Horses
A New York Times Article, found here. (There’s a cool interactive video feature you should go check out.) This article shows some of the plight of the BLM and the Mustang - too many to handle, no population control, not enough adoptions, and no ability to downsize because of animal rights activists. It’s a no-win situation all around.
Article shown under the cut, to save y’alls dashes. Keep reading for pretty photos
By Dave Philipps       Oct. 14, 2016
OSAGE COUNTY, Okla. — As the sun set on the honey-colored prairie here, a herd of wild horses grazed belly deep in Indiangrass and big bluestem. On the next ridge, a dozen more horses nibbled in the pasture, and beyond them even more, dotting the hills almost as far as the eye could see.
The head of the Bureau of Land Management’s wild horse program, Dean Bolstad, tipped up his cowboy hat and looked out at the animals from a hilltop. “I love seeing this,” he said, “but it’s also an absolute anchor around our neck.”
The horses were grazing on a ranch the agency rents, one of 60 private ranches, corrals and feedlots where it stores the 46,000 wild horses it has removed from the West’s public lands. The cost: $49 million a year.
Trying to make that rent has pushed the wild horse program into crisis. The expense eats up 66 percent of the federal budget for managing wild horses, and it is expected to total more than $1 billion over the life of the herds. The program cannot afford to continue old management practices that created the problem in the first place, or afford to come up with solutions that might fix it.
In short, the agency cannot break its cycle of storing horses because it is too busy storing horses.
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“We’re in a real pickle,” Mr. Bolstad said. “We have huge challenges ahead of us, and we don’t have the resources to respond.”
Spending a billion dollars on pastures is a symptom of a broader problem. The agency says there are far too many wild horses roaming the West, and it must limit them to stave off damage to fragile ecosystems. But it never found a strategy that does not put more horses on storage ranches.
Some critics say management must become broader and include other options, like fertility control drugs for horses in the wild. Others say policies that eliminated predators like wolves, which once helped keep the horse population in check, need to be reconsidered. Still others say it is time to kill horses to free up resources. Animal-rights groups, meanwhile, oppose any killing of horses.
The bureau has struggled to limit wild horse populations since Congress passed a law in 1971 protecting the wild horses and burros that roam patches of public land in 10 Western states, and whose numbers increase naturally every year. The agency says the land can support only about 27,000 animals, but these days, there are about 77,000.
Repeated government audits going back 26 years have warned the bureau to find alternatives to storing horses before the cost crippled the program, but it never has. For decades the bureau used helicopter roundups to thin herds, but it can now barely afford that because it spends so much on storing horses.
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In recent years, the bureau tried fertility control drugs — administered through an annual shot delivered by dart gun — that would reduce the need for roundups. Now money for that has been spent on storing horses, too.
“The entire budget is tied up in feeding horses; we need to do something drastic, now,” said Ben Masters, a filmmaker who adopted seven wild horses and made a movie about riding them to Canada from Mexico. He now sits on the program’s nine-member advisory board.
In a phone interview from a wild horse area near Eureka, Nev., Mr. Masters described seeing thousands of acres damaged by overgrazing. “It’s totally degraded, and we need to save it, both for the horses and for the other wildlife.”
In September, the board voted 8 to 1 to kill the horses in storage. Mr. Masters said voting for the measure broke his heart. “It kills me. I’d love for there to be another way out, but I just don’t see it.”
After the vote, though, the bureau was flooded with outraged calls and emails, and officials quickly assured the public they had no plans to kill any horses. They have just signed contracts with ranches that can store 6,000 more horses.
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Ginger Kathrens, a longtime wild horse advocate who sits on the bureau’s advisory board, cast the lone vote against killing the horses in storage, saying she favored increasing adoptions and finding places to put horses back out on the range. “There are lots of things the B.L.M. could do besides selling horses to kill buyers,” she said.
Federal law allows the agency to kill excess horses to maintain what it calls “a thriving natural ecological balance.” But regulators never took the step, in part fearing public reaction, and in part because Congress in recent years has added riders to various bills banning the killing of healthy wild horses.
Instead, the agency has encouraged people to adopt wild horses. But the number of people offering homes has rarely equaled the number of horses gathered in roundups.
The rest go to places like the Hughes Ranch, here in Oklahoma, where for about $2 per horse per day, Robert Hughes, a cattle rancher, maintains just over 4,000 horses on thousands of acres of prime grassland.
“I basically run an old folks home for horses,” he said with a chuckle as he looked out at the grazing herds. “They’re in good groceries right here, I can tell you that.”
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Asked whether the agency should continue to store horses or euthanize them, he shook his head: “Hey, look, man, I’m in the grass-farming business.”
He said he did not have anything to do with policy. “If this deal ended, we’d get back into livestock in a big way.”
The agency now finds itself buffeted on all sides by lawsuits. Ranchers who share the range are demanding that horse numbers be brought down to prescribed levels. Animal rights groups are demanding an end to roundups and darting.
By next year, the agency expects an increase of 15,000 horses.
In September, the advisory board toured a wild horse herd area in Nevada that had not been grazed by cattle in eight years. Sue McDonnell, a board member who teaches equine behavior at the University of Pennsylvania, said she opposed euthanasia until she saw the battered grasses and invasive weeds.
“It was awful,” she said in an interview. “A lot of that land is under severe stress. If we don’t act now, there will be parts that will be lost effectively forever. The horses will die, other wildlife will die, and that will be that.”
While few people disagree that regions of the West are overgrazed, critics of the agency say it is wrong to blame wild horses, which are outnumbered by cattle 10 to one on bureau lands.
Killing horses in storage would only enable unsustainable practices that favor ranchers, they say.
“The population problem is just a symptom of a failed public lands wildlife policy,” said Michael Harris, a lawyer for Friends of Animals. To find a lasting solution, he said, the federal government must address decades of management policies that have eradicated wolves and mountain lions, which prey on horses, from public lands, creating a landscape where horses reproduce rapidly.
“We’re not going to solve this problem unless we have a policy that makes room for wildlife on the land — all wildlife, not just horses,” he said.
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newstfionline · 3 years
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Saturday, February 27, 2012
New York woman loses job, leads pantry feeding thousands (AP) While dozens of New Yorkers lined up outside in the rain, shopping carts at the ready as they waited for free food, Sofia Moncayo led her team in prayer. “We’re super grateful for these people here. In Jesus’ name we pray,” she said, and the group of women around her clapped, cheered and replied: “Amen.” “Now,” she said, “let’s get to work.” By then, they had worked almost nonstop for hours. They picked up heavy boxes, separated thousands of items and removed snow from the curb. They were cold, wet and tired. No one would pay them and they didn’t care. They were just happy to be there for someone else that day. During the coronavirus pandemic, Moncayo has led the food distribution program through Mosaic West Queens Church in the Sunnyside neighborhood. Since then, Moncayo has had her own struggles. She was furloughed from her job at a construction company and remains unemployed. And she also owes five months of rent for the martial arts studio that she owns with her husband in the neighborhood. But she has continued to lead fundraisers and coordinate dozens of volunteers who distribute more than 1,000 boxes of food to families twice a week. “I think helping others has to do something to your brain chemically because if we had not being doing everything that we’re doing, I think this would have been a much scarier time,” she said. “Being able to dig in and help others, it really gives you perspective and helps you believe that you’re going to be OK too.”
Residents of a Texas Border City Long Felt Overlooked. The Storm Made It Worse. (NYT) Surrounded by ranch land, towering mesquite trees and acres of thorny brush, the border city of Del Rio can feel like the definition of rural Texas. Residents said they have long felt alienated from the state’s power centers and bewildered by the shifting approaches to immigration by their elected leaders in Washington. And that is just in typical times. Last week’s epic winter storm, which blanketed the area with more than 11 inches of snow and collapsed the state’s power grid, plunging most of the county’s residents into dark and unheated homes, left many feeling even more isolated, overlooked and forgotten. More than a week later, many shelves remain empty at local grocery and hardware stores, and a notice to boil water was finally lifted in Val Verde County, which includes Del Rio, on Thursday. “I definitely feel that we are a bit unseen and unheard,” said Michael Cirilo, a 39-year-old juvenile detention officer. Like most of his neighbors in Del Rio, a predominantly Hispanic city of about 36,000 residents, he lost power for several days last week. “Sometimes we feel that we’re kind of alone out here.” “When they’re running for office is when we see them,” one man said of politicians.
Not Cages, “Temporary Holding Facilities” (Vox) Generally, migrant children arriving in the US through the southern border are sent to permanent holding facilities run by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which are separate from the “cages” used by US Customs and Border Protection. Due to an increase in the number of children coming into the country, the Biden administration has begun reopening temporary facilities, sparking fears for the welfare of children inside. Biden’s camp has said that they have no choice but to reopen such facilities due to COVID-19-related capacity restrictions combined with the increase in border crossings. The children in these facilities are held until they are either matched with foster parents or united with family members in the US. There have been plenty of reports of abuse in both temporary and permanent HHS shelters: these reports include sexual abuse, neglect, dangerous living conditions, and even the administering of psychotropic drugs. To make matters worse, some of these facilities are located in inaccessible areas, making external oversight of their conditions difficult to conduct.
‘I can’t buy food’: As Cuba’s economy worsens, desperate rafters risk their lives at sea (Miami Herald) Marisol Monteagudo’s son gave her a kiss goodbye as he headed out the door to spend a night out with friends in Cuba’s Isla de la Juventud. What he didn’t tell her: That instead of grabbing a drink or watching a movie, they were planning to board a flimsy raft en route to Mexico. That was three months ago. She hasn’t heard from him since. In recent months, U.S. Coast Guard officials have detected a new uptick in Cuban rafters, with the number intercepted at sea in the fiscal year that started in October already surpassing the total for the previous 12 months. Though still vastly lower than previous surges, the recent increase has sparked concern that as economic and humanitarian conditions in Cuba worsen, more will risk their lives at sea. U.S. President Joe Biden’s proposal to transform the immigration system is also believed to be a driving factor. “It’s a combination of the rising desperation of a good part of the Cuban population over deteriorating life conditions, as well as the illusion of getting to the United States under a president who is more tolerant of undocumented immigrants,” said Jorge Duany, director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University.
Bhutan’s success under the radar (Foreign Policy) There have been plenty of coronavirus pandemic success stories from Asia—Taiwan, Vietnam, New Zealand—but one small country has gone largely unheralded: Bhutan. Despite its poverty, ratio of 1 physician to every 2,255 people, and its shared border with hard-hit China and India, Bhutan has recorded only one COVID-19 fatality. In the Atlantic, the science journalist Madeline Drexler chalks up Bhutan’s success to quick actions by top officials, clear and consistent messaging from health authorities, and strong public trust in government. But she also identifies an additional factor unique to Bhutan: the spirit of compassion and altruism reflecting its “Gross National Happiness” index. The index considers noneconomic aspects of well-being, including health, as essential to sustainable development.
US carries out airstrike against Iranian-backed militia in Syria (ABC News) The United States conducted a military airstrike in eastern Syria along the border with Iraq targeting Iranian-backed militias in retaliation for a recent rocket strike in Erbil in northern Iraq that left several Americans injured, according to a U.S. official. The airstrike targeted structures in the eastern Syrian town of Al Bukamal that belong to Kataib Hezbollah and other Iranian-backed militias that have launched rocket attacks in the past against American facilities in Iraq, said the U.S. official. The airstrike was ordered by President Joe Biden in retaliation for a Feb. 15 rocket attack against a U.S. base in the northern Iraqi city of Erbil that killed a coalition contractor and left several American contractors and a U.S. military service member wounded.
In Iraq’s Biblical lands, scattered Christians ask ‘should I stay or go?’ (Reuters) A jihadist message, “Islamic State endures”, is still graffitied on the front gate of Thanoun Yahya, an Iraqi Christian from the northern city of Mosul, scrawled by Islamist militants who occupied his home for three years when they ruled the city. He refuses to remove it, partly in defiance of the militants who were eventually beaten by Iraqi forces, but also as a reminder that Iraq’s scattered and dwindling Christian community still lives a precarious existence. “They’re gone, they can’t hurt us,” said the 59-year-old, sitting in his home which he reclaimed when Islamic State was driven out in 2017. “But there aren’t many of us left. The younger generation want to leave.” Iraq’s Christians have endured unrest over centuries, but a mass exodus began after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and accelerated during the reign of Islamic State, which brutalised minorities and Muslims alike. Hundreds of thousands left for nearby areas and Western countries. Physical and economic ruin remain. Iraqi authorities have struggled to rebuild areas decimated by war, and armed groups that the government has not been able to control vie for territory and resources, including Christian heartlands. Christians say they are left with a dilemma—whether to return to damaged homes, resettle inside Iraq or migrate from a country that experience has shown cannot protect them.
US implicates Saudi crown prince in Khashoggi's killing (AP) Saudi Arabia’s crown prince likely approved the killing of U.S.-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, according to a newly declassified U.S. intelligence report released Friday that instantly ratcheted up pressure on the Biden administration to hold the kingdom accountable for a murder that drew worldwide outrage. The intelligence findings were long known to many U.S. officials and, even as they remained classified, had been reported with varying degrees of precision. But the public rebuke of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is still a touchstone in U.S-Saudi relations. It leaves no doubt that as the prince continues in his powerful role and likely ascends to the throne, Americans will forever associate him with the brutal killing of a journalist who promoted democracy and human rights. Yet even as the Biden administration released the findings, it appeared determined to preserve the Saudi relationship by avoiding direct punishment of the prince himself despite demands from some congressional Democrats and Khashoggi allies for significant and targeted sanctions. Rep. Adam Schiff, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, urged the Biden administration to consider punishing the prince, who he says has the blood of an American journalist on his hands. Rights activists said the lack of any punitive measures would signal impunity for the prince and other autocrats.
Unfriending Myanmar’s Military (NYT) Facebook has announced that they have banned Myanmar’s military from all its social media platforms, a few weeks after the country’s government was overthrown in a military coup. Facebook’s decision comes after years of criticism over how Myanmar’s military has used the site to further their political agenda and spread misinformation. For years, members of the military were behind a systematic campaign on Facebook that demeaned the Rohingya as foreigners illegally living in Myanmar, even though many had been there for generations. Since the coup early this month, the military has repeatedly shut off the internet and cut access to major social media sites while continuing to use the platform to spread misinformation and make statements about the state of the country. In response, Facebook wrote: “Events since the February 1 coup, including deadly violence, have precipitated a need for this ban,” adding that the risks of letting the Myanmar military remain on Facebook and Instagram were “too great” and that the military would be barred indefinitely.
North Korea: Russian diplomats leave by hand-pushed trolley (BBC) A group of Russian diplomats leaving North Korea were forced to leave the country by hand-pushed rail trolley as strict coronavirus measures bring travel in and out of the country to a standstill. After travelling 32 hours by train and another 2 hours by bus from Pyongyang to reach the Russian border, the diplomats and their families loaded up their luggage on the rail trolley and pushed themselves the final kilometer to a Russian train station. The Russian foreign ministry singled out the Pyongyang embassy’s third secretary Vladislav Sorokin for providing the bulk of the effort. Photos shared by the ministry showed the diplomats on the trolley with their suitcases amid a wintry landscape. They were also seen cheering in a video as they crossed into Russia.
Massacre by Eritrean troops in Ethiopia’s Tigray region may constitute crime against humanity, Amnesty says (Washington Post) Ethiopian and Eritrean forces committed war crimes during an offensive to take control of the town of Axum in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region late last year, with one massacre by Eritrean troops a potential crime against humanity, according to a report released by Amnesty International on Thursday. The human rights group said that hundreds were likely killed during a roughly 24-hour period from Nov. 28-29, when Eritrean soldiers carried out house-to-house searches and shot civilians on the street. Eritrean troops “went on a rampage and systematically killed hundreds of civilians in cold blood, which appears to constitute crimes against humanity,” said Deprose Muchena, Amnesty International’s director for east and southern Africa. The United Nations defines crimes against humanity as “widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population.” In its report, Amnesty calls for a U.N.-led investigation into the violence in Axum as part of a broader international inquiry of the conflict between the Ethiopian government and forces aligned with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) that began on Nov. 4 last year.
Nigeria faces third mass kidnapping of schoolchildren in 3 months (Washington Post) Gunmen raided a boarding school in northwest Nigeria early Friday and kidnapped around 300 girls, marking the third mass abduction of children since December in Africa’s most populous nation. The assailants struck the Government Girls Secondary School in Zamfara state in a predawn ambush, residents said, waking up neighbors as shots rang out. By daylight Friday, community members were still working together to tally the missing—it remained unclear how many girls were forced into the nearby woods—while police officers scoured the area, which has been plagued by kidnappings in recent months. No one has asserted responsibility for the attack, but criminal gangs known as “bandits” are known to capture groups for ransom—a scourge that has prompted some Nigerians to call for a national state of emergency. The latest high-profile targets across the country’s north: Schoolchildren.
The placebo effect: ‘As a man thinks, so is he?’ (NYT) Give people a sugar pill, they have shown, and those patients—especially if they have one of the chronic, stress-related conditions that register the strongest placebo effects and if the treatment is delivered by someone in whom they have confidence—will improve. Tell someone a normal milkshake is a diet beverage, and his gut will respond as if the drink were low fat. Take athletes to the top of the Alps, put them on exercise machines and hook them to an oxygen tank, and they will perform better than when they are breathing room air—even if room air is all that’s in the tank. Wake a patient from surgery and tell him you’ve done an arthroscopic repair, and his knee gets better even if all you did was knock him out and put a couple of incisions in his skin. Give a drug a fancy name, and it works better than if you don’t. You don’t even have to deceive the patients. You can hand a patient with irritable bowel syndrome a sugar pill, identify it as such and tell her that sugar pills are known to be effective when used as placebos, and she will get better, especially if you take the time to deliver that message with warmth and close attention. Depression, back pain, chemotherapy-related malaise, migraine, post-traumatic stress disorder: The list of conditions that respond to placebos—as well as they do to drugs, with some patients—is long and growing.
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kuramirocket · 3 years
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In some ways, what happened to Mexican Americans in the Southwest happened time and again throughout American history. Promises were made to the community, but many were never kept.
“I just don't think people get the passion that's attached to this,” said Rita Padilla-Gutierrez, whose community has lost tens of thousands of acres of ancestral land over generations. “It's the history, for God's sake. Plain and simple. Your language, your customs, your food, your traditions. But for us, it's being a land-based people.”
What we now consider the Southwest wasn’t part of the United States at all 172 years ago -- it was the northernmost part of Mexico. In 1845, the U.S. annexed Texas, which Mexico considered part of its territory. This spurred a long and bloody war with Mexico and, ultimately, Mexico ceded half its country to the U.S.
The agreement between the two countries was immortalized in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which gave around 100,000 Mexican nationals living in those territories citizenship if they decided to stay. More importantly, the agreement protected the rights of any Mexican whose land was now a part of the U.S.
“When Mexico negotiates the treaty in good faith, assuming that all of its citizens' rights will be respected, what it doesn't understand is that for the United States, only whites have the rights to full citizenship,” said María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, author of “Indian Given: Racial Geographies Across Mexico and the United States.” “[Shortly after the treaty,] territorial governments systematically go about disenfranchising all Mexican citizens who they deem to not be white.”
Indeed, when the treaty was sent to Congress, the Senate removed the article that laid out the process by which the land would be protected.
In 1848, there were 154 communities in New Mexico to whom the U.S. government guaranteed land. But most of those agreements, or land grants, were never honored. Today, only 35 communities remain.
While the country prospered, the treaty would forever change the fate of generations of Mexican Americans to come.
Heirs to land that’s been owed for generations
“There's a huge disparity here in terms of poverty and [in] terms of education,” Arturo Archuleta, a land grant heir in New Mexico, told “Nightline.” “These communities have been left behind.”
Heirs like Archuleta are working to get reparations for the land that was taken from their communities, which existed long before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was even created, according to Jacobo Baca, a historian with the University of New Mexico’s Land Grant Studies Program.
“It's beyond [a] sense of place,” Baca said. “Our identity is tied to place, but we don't see that place having an identity without us, either. So it defines us just as much as we define it.”
At the University of New Mexico, a collection of documents shows how a variety of land grants were vastly diminished over the years. One of the documents showed how an agreement for over 40,000 acres was reduced to less than 1,400 acres.
“I think for land grant heirs, there's this recognition that this treaty was a promise that was made that wasn't kept, and that the federal government owes the recognition of these communities,” Baca said.
Archuleta is an heir to the Manzano and the Tierra Amarilla land grants.
“We come from Spanish communities that came over, [and from] Native American communities as well,” Archuleta said. “So we really are sort of mestizo. We're mixed… We're a land-based people. Half of our soul was here before Columbus ever hit the sand.”
Archuleta says that these communities should be able to thrive where they are.
“It's not just surviving, but thriving. Our cultural connections are still in place,” he said. “The land grant and the treaty issues is probably what you consider the first Latino issue in this country, and it's still unresolved.”
Padilla-Gutierrez’s family in New Mexico has also seen its land vanish over time. For centuries, she said the family has been living in the area near Tomé Hill in Valencia County. Now a hiking trail and site for religious pilgrims, its hillsides are filled with petroglyphs and its summit contains several large crosses.
“We have very deep, deep native roots here,” Andrea Padilla, Padilla-Gutierrez’s sister, told “Nightline.”
Padilla-Gutierrez said their land used to encompass 123,000 acres but that it has since been reduced to only 400 acres.
“America owes us the opportunity to take care of our own communities,” Padilla-Gutierrez said.
“I think regaining some of our land back would be justice,” her sister added.
The family still has the patent it was given to honor the land grant.
“It's signed by Ulysses Grant, who was president at the time -- seal and everything -- granting us that our land grant will continue to be ours again,” Padilla said. “But then later, they stole our mountains.”
The Tomé land grant lost 50,000 acres to the federal government in 1906. Like many others who held land grants, the family later had to sell their land.
“It hurt my father deeply, because he fought to the very end, telling people, ‘You can't do this. … Once you sell your land, that's it, you're nothing. You lose your culture. You lose everything,’” Padilla said.
Her sister says their family’s land should’ve never been sold. The community lost more than acreage, she said. They “lost their way of life.”
The betrayal of these land grants sowed racism that still exists today
Mexican American culture has been maligned for generations, and the racism born out of that continues to be espoused at the highest levels of government today.
The president himself famously kicked off his bid for office by saying Mexican immigrants are “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” And as recently as June, The White House suggested that travel from Mexico was contributing to COVID-19 infections rather than states’ efforts to reopen their economies.
“It does hit me in the heart,” Padilla said. “We always worked hard... And we did the right thing. So when they talk about lazy Mexicans or, ‘These Mexicans are all drug dealers and murderers,’ I'm, like, ‘Where? I haven't seen that. I'm not [one].’ You know?”
Saldaña-Portillo says this bigotry results from Mexican natives’ land being given to white settlers.
“[It helped create] the representation of Mexicans as these barbarous Indians,” she said. “That's annunciated every day when we hear Mexicans described as rapists, murderers and thieves.”
Archuleta said he's not surprised that there's racism in the U.S. because in communities like his, racism had "never gone away."
“We've always felt it,” he said. “We've always known it. We've seen it. We've been on the receiving end of it, either through the institutions, through the bureaucracies or at the individual level.”
Juan Sanchez, a sixth-generation native of the Chililí Land Grant in New Mexico, remembers activist Reies Lopez Tijerina of the 1960s.
“We are called the forgotten people,” Sanchez said. “He came to New Mexico preaching the treaty and preaching and telling the people that they were gonna lose their land.” Tijerina was a major figure in the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which sought to reclaim Mexican Americans’ indigenous heritage and original territories.
“They were articulating it concretely, saying, ‘We have these land grants and we want these land grants honored as per the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo,’” Saldaña-Portillo said.
Tijerina’s story culminates in June 1967, when he led an armed raid on a courthouse in Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico, to free imprisoned activists and place a citizen’s arrest on the district attorney who ordered a police crackdown on them.
“They were gonna go make a citizen’s arrest and so it just got outta hand from there. The frustration of not being heard just exploded,” Sanchez said. “They [had] put all the heirs of different land grants that were the followers of Tijerina in a corral like sheep.”
In the ensuing shootout, two police officers were wounded and two hostages were taken as the activists fled Tierra Amarilla. After a week-long manhunt, Tijerina surrendered. He was found guilty of assault on a federal officer and sentenced to two years in prison.
“He opened our eyes. He taught us,” Sanchez said. “He always said, ‘Change the law,’ and we've always tried that.”
For fellow land grant heir and activist Steve Polanco, this fight is personal. His family has lived on Tierra Amarilla since the late 1800s, and now in his 60s, he is the president of the Tierra Amarilla Land Grant.
“We took a stand that … the only way we were gonna be taken from here … was dead,” Polaco said.
Polaco said the original stewards of the land shared 550,000 acres and that they would help each other.
“These mountains were full of herds of sheep, herds of pigs that were being taken care of,” Polaco said. “They’d head off for the day and they’d take care of their flocks, pigs, herds of horses all over these mountains.”
His land has been under siege for decades, he said, with outside investors hoping to develop the lands into everything from a ski resort to a landing strip, the latter of which is visible from his property.
“The building of the airstrip makes me feel really bad because, number one, they destroyed the property. It looks very ugly. It's gonna cause erosion. It’s so dry that the dust kicks up, and there's elderlies that live in the area; that dust affects them,” said Polaco.
“It's very emotional, especially when you see these outsiders coming in and doing destruction and taking advantage of us,” he said.
Today, he continues to harvest hay and attempts to keep the land as undisturbed as possible. He says he wants the Treaty of Hidalgo to be honored and the lands respected, particularly in the face of a changing climate. To that end, he said it’s important to elect public officials who “know the culture and our struggle” so that their Constitutional right to the land can be upheld.
What comes next?
Archuleta says it took generations for these communities to fall into poverty and other socioeconomic issues, and that it’ll take a long time to solve their problems as well.
“We're in a marathon. We're not in a race,” he said.
Archuleta’s grandfather is buried in Manzano, New Mexico. His dad grew up there, too.
“He left in the ‘70s. He didn't have opportunities. That's the stuff that's hard to swallow when you're like, ‘Man, this is something that was in our family and it belonged to us,’” he said. "And because of circumstances beyond our control, the loss of the commons, the poverty that that created… This drives the work that I do. Working with land grant communities and trying to get justice for our communities.”
In June, Archuleta spoke before Congress as it considered a bill to give land grant heirs access to their former lands.
“What the current legislation does is it would create a federal definition of traditional uses on federal lands for land grant communities,” he said. “Access to fuelwood, for example, to heat your home. Access to pasture to graze livestock. And it would also require that the federal agencies work with land grant communities and consult with them.”
For Sanchez, “the dream of reparation would be that we'd get our land back. But we know that's impossible; times have changed.”
“Short of that, I also think our communities are due some type of reparations in terms of monetary compensation for all the hardships that they've endured,” Archuleta said. “What that figure looks like to us, if we did a calculation, probably about $2.7 billion. Not to pay out individuals but to pay our communities for community development and to buy back land.”
Meanwhile, Padilla-Gutierrez hopes to transform a historic jail in her village into a museum.
“The idea is to keep the legacy alive. Do not destroy and forget the history,” she said. “We wish that our parents could be here to see this that we've done. We're slowly inching back to being a legitimate and prideful land grant.”
Her sister emphasized that the family doesn’t “want handouts.”
“We wanna provide for ourselves. So justice would be giving us that opportunity to do that,” Padilla said. “We've always been here and we're not going anywhere… This is where we come from. This is our land and we're gonna protect it and we're gonna continue to be here as long as we possibly can.”
“The hard work of my dad and my grandfather and my great grandfather -- their blood, sweat, and tears... I have to make sure that none of that was [in] vain,” Archuleta added. . “That their hopes and dreams survive on, and [that] they survive on in my kids and their kids.”
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sciencespies · 4 years
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The Great Koala Rescue Operation
https://sciencespies.com/nature/the-great-koala-rescue-operation/
The Great Koala Rescue Operation
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I ​arrived on Kangaroo Island bracing myself for the sight of acres of blackened trees and white ash, but I had not expected the parasitic bright green vines wrapped around almost every charred trunk, glowing phosphorescent in the sunlight. This was no parasite, I learned. It was epicormic growth, bursting directly from the burnt trunks themselves, a desperate bid for photosynthesis in the absence of a leaf canopy.
The growth looks nothing like a eucalyptus tree’s normal adult leaves. It’s soft and waxy, with rounded edges instead of long pointy tips, and it blooms from cracks in the trunks or right from the tree’s base, rather than along the branches where leaves typically grow. It is beautiful, and also very strange, in keeping with the surreal phenomena that became almost commonplace over this past apocalyptic Australian summer, even before the coronavirus pandemic further upended life as we know it. A few weeks earlier, in Sydney, I’d watched red-brown rain fall to the ground after rain clouds collided with ash in a smoke-filled sky. During a recent downpour here on Kangaroo Island, burnt blue gum trees foamed mysteriously, as if soap suds had been sprayed over them.
Even in less strange times, Kangaroo Island can feel like the edge of the earth. Although it sits fewer than ten miles off the southern coast of Australia, about 75 miles from Adelaide, it is a geographical Noah’s Ark; its isolation from the mainland 10,000 years ago because of rising seas transformed it into an ecological haven. It is vast and rugged, with dramatic views of bush or sea- or cliff-scapes in every direction. National parks or protected wilderness areas make up a third of the island’s 1,700 square miles. Much of the rest of the island is farmland or privately owned backcountry. In recent years, the island has rebranded itself as a high-end tourist paradise, with unspoiled wilderness, farm-to-table produce, fresh oysters, and wine from local vineyards. But while there are luxury accommodations here and there, the island’s few small settlements feel decidedly unglamorous, befitting laid-back country and coastal towns.
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Left, Kangaroo Island sits a few miles off the coast of South Australia. Right, at the height of the fires, in January, most of the island’s western half was ablaze, as seen in these images based on data from a NASA satellite.
(Guilbert Gates; NASA Worldview (2))
The fires started here in December, after dry lightning strikes on the island’s north coast and remote western bushland areas, and then escalated and jumped containment lines, ripping through the island in early January, with high winds and hot temperatures fueling the front. Two people died, and hundreds of properties were affected, many of them farms. Tens of thousands of stock animals were lost in the blaze. While the bushfires all over Australia were horrific, burning more than 16 million acres—nearly eight times the area lost to fire in Brazil’s Amazon basin in 2019—people around the world focused on Kangaroo Island because of the relative scale of the fires, which consumed close to half the island, as well as the concentrated death and suffering of the island’s abundant wildlife, including wallabies, kangaroos, possums and koalas. Wildlife experts worried that certain vulnerable species endemic to the island, such as the glossy black-cockatoo and a mouse-like marsupial known as the Kangaroo Island dunnart, might be lost forever.
Flinders Chase National Park, the vast nature preserve encompassing the island’s western edge, is closed indefinitely. There were rumors that parts of this natural bushland, which depends on fire to propagate, might never fully regenerate, because the heat from the fires was so intense that the soil seed bank may have been destroyed. Climate change researchers are warning that while fires in Australia are “natural,” they’re now so hot and frequent that even fire-adapted plants don’t have the chance to recover. A major fire burned 85 percent of Flinders Chase just 13 years ago. Matt White, an ecologist at the Arthur Rylah Institute for Environmental Research, in Victoria, told me the fires are almost certainly decreasing biodiversity, despite “the oft-repeated rhetoric about the resilience of Australian flora.” Now the fires are out, and the immediate danger has passed, but life on the island is very far from normal. On certain parts of the northern coast, coves are silted with ash, black tide marks on the sand. Outside several towns are signs directing people to a Bushfire Last Resort Refuge, a chilling reminder of how bad things can get.
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A lone koala clings to a charred trunk in a severely burned plantation of eucalyptus trees.
(David Maurice Smith)
Kangaroo Island’s east coast, where I disembarked from the ferry, seemed relatively unscathed, but as I drove west through the central agricultural area, known as the Heartlands, I crossed a line into devastation. The color palette shifted from the beige and olive green of roadside scrub to charcoal trunks and scorched leaves in shades of orange, an uncanny simulacrum of autumn. The deeper into the fire grounds I went, the more the shock of that green epicormic growth scrambled my perceptions, as did the long green shoots of grass trees, emerging from their blackened, pineapple-shaped trunks. These trees are pyrophytic—they thrive after fires.
In Parndana, a small agricultural town, I saw a handwritten sign outside a makeshift store offering free groceries to families affected by the fires. A newsletter posted in a gas station reported on wineries going under, tourism businesses destroyed, and burned buildings requiring asbestos cleanup. In a roadside café near Vivonne Bay, on the south coast, I found mental health pamphlets and notices of counseling services and depression hot lines for a community reeling from losses. An Australian Psychological Society handout was stacked on the counter: “Now, a few months after the fires, many people are feeling tired and stressed, and they know that their daily struggle isn’t going to be over any time soon.”
The news media’s fixation on the island as the fires raged has created a complicated legacy for any reporter who turns up a month or two later. I was aware of being viewed with distrust by locals who’ve felt justifiably used in the media storm’s sudden descent and then abrupt disappearance. The press attention, combined with social media’s refraction of certain stories into trend roller coasters, has had the undeniable upside of an outpouring of genuine sympathy and generosity. An effort to recruit 120 volunteers to set up food and water stations for wildlife throughout devastated areas, organized by Australia’s Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, was inundated by more than 13,000 applications in a matter of days. Online crowdfunding has raised close to $2.5 million for Kangaroo Island bushfire recovery. But there’s a downside, too: a trading in the suffering of others. In the midst of the fires, one foreign journalist demanded of a shellshocked local resident, “I want to see burnt animals, and where those two people died.”
The immediate compassionate response of people pulling together in a crisis is now wearing thin. Tendrils of suspicion are snaking their way through the community, as locals assess the distribution of government and crowdfunded resources. Almost everybody has their heart in the right place, but the reality is that these decisions are political and contested. Old divides are widening—between, say, stock farmers in the Heartlands and those motivated to protect the island’s unique wildlife, to say nothing of the divide between locals and outsiders.
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Tens of thousands of koalas were killed in the island blaze, and an additional number perished from starvation or dehydration after the blue gum plantations where they lived were destroyed.
(David Maurice Smith)
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The remains of a Tammar wallaby. Where the fires raged, populations of kangaroo and wallabies were devastated; up to 40 percent of the island’s unique kangaroo subspecies may have been killed.
(David Maurice Smith)
In every conversation, whether with a lodge manager, the owner of a feed business, or at the corner-store café, people wanted me to know that they’re upset about the way resources were being distributed. Special anger was reserved for rogue operators who have raised huge amounts of cash for wildlife work on the island, but with no real right to be there. Many singled out a Japanese outfit, reportedly run by a guy who turned up on the island with good intentions but zero clue. He had set himself up in a house in Kingscote, the island’s largest town (pop. around 1,800), and without coordinating with any recognized wildfire rescue operations was bringing in koalas from the wild that were healthy and didn’t need rescuing. Yet he had raised a small fortune through his organization’s website, from good people donating to the wrong cause. One islander told me, “I never realized disaster would be like this. At first, everyone helped. Then it got scary. It became about money, fame, randoms making an absolute killing.”
* * *
Kangaroo Island was given its modern name by the British navigator Matthew Flinders, who sailed the HMS Investigator to its shores in March 1802. The island was then uninhabited, but archaeologists later found stone tools and other evidence that ancestors of modern Aboriginal Tasmanians lived there thousands of years ago, at least until the island was cut off from the mainland, and possibly afterward. Rebe Taylor, a historian, writes that the Ngarrindjeri people of the coast opposite Kangaroo Island call it the “land of the dead,” and have a creation story about rising seas flooding a land bridge to the island.
Flinders and his men were amazed to find kangaroos—a subspecies of the mainland’s western greys—that were so unused to humans that they “suffered themselves to be shot in the eyes,” Flinders recalled in his expedition notes, “and in some cases to be knocked on the head with sticks.” In gratitude for this meat after four months without fresh provisions, he named it Kanguroo Island (misspelling his own). The French explorer Nicolas Baudin, sailing the Géographe, was disappointed not to have arrived before his English rival—their ships crossed paths as Flinders was leaving the island—but Baudin took 18 kangaroos with him, in the name of science. He made two of his men surrender their cabins to the animals in a bid to keep them alive. Baudin himself died from tuberculosis on the return journey, but some of the kangaroos survived, and they reportedly became part of the menagerie outside Paris owned by Napoleon’s wife, the Empress Josephine.
The recent fires killed as many as 40 percent of the island’s 60,000 or so kangaroos, yet worldwide attention has focused mostly on the fate of the koalas. At least 45,000 koalas, or some 75 percent or more of the island population, are thought to have died, and the crisis has revived an old controversy, with battle lines drawn anew between those who believe the koalas don’t deserve all the attention they’re getting and those who do.
Koalas have always had the species advantage of being considered cute, cuddly Australian icons, but they are not native to Kangaroo Island. They were introduced by wildlife officials only in the 1920s, from a breeding program on French Island, off mainland Victoria, with a founding population of fewer than 30 animals. The effort was an early attempt at conservation; habitat loss and hunters trading in their fur had driven koalas on the mainland to near extinction. Since then, the island had become overpopulated with koalas, which some people think are in danger of eating themselves out of house and home. In fact, since the late 1990s a government-run koala sterilization program has tried to stem population growth, not only for the koala population’s sake but also because the animals wreak destruction on native vegetation, including rough-bark manna gums, a type of eucalyptus that is key to preventing soil erosion, and paddock trees.
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Charred eucalyptus trees sport green epicormic growth— shoots emerging from cracks in the bark to give the trees another chance at life.
(David Maurice Smith)
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New growth springs from the trunk of a charred blue gum tree after the bushfires on Kangaroo Island.
(David Maurice Smith)
In addition, tens of thousands of koalas lived in eucalyptus plantations owned by a timber company with plans to harvest and export those trees; those animals would have to be moved eventually. Finally, the Kangaroo Island koalas are so highly inbred that some experts argue they may be of little use in bolstering northern Australia koala populations, which are classified as vulnerable.
Some wildlife advocates believe that preventing species extinction, or saving species that are endemic or unique to the island, should be the priority. They argue that funding would be better channeled toward specialists working to save the few remaining Kangaroo Island dunnarts, or Tammar wallabies (which are almost extinct in mainland South Australia), or pygmy possums, or endangered glossy black-cockatoos, which mainly feed on the seeds of casuarina trees (many of the trees burnt), or Ligurian bees, introduced in 1885 and believed to be the species’ last genetically pure population in the world.
Island farmers, meanwhile, feel that wildlife has unfairly consumed all the attention when so many stock animals burned during the fires. Many local farming families are descended from soldier-settlers who were given parcels of land after each of the world wars, which they worked hard to make productive in difficult circumstances. (The island’s natural soil quality is so poor, and the lack of surface water so severe, that most British colonists backed by the South Australian Company who settled the island in 1836 left after just five months.)
One islander confided to me that, while he felt bad for the farmers, stock animals are “replaceable,” and often covered by insurance, but wildlife is not; and while it may seem from news media coverage that Australia cares about its wildlife, the government in fact has an appalling track record when it comes to protecting wildlife and biodiversity. “Australia is a global deforestation hotspot,” Suzanne Milthorpe, from the Wilderness Society Australia, told me. “We are ranked second in the world for biodiversity loss, and three unique animals have gone extinct in the last decade alone. In comparison, the United States’ Endangered Species Act, which contains real protections against harm and habitat destruction, has been 99 percent successful at preventing extinction.” (Critics of American species conservation efforts point out that less than 3 percent of listed species have recovered sufficiently to be removed from protection.)
The koalas on Kangaroo Island were also fortunate in being able to be rescued at all; many were found sheltering high enough in the treetops to have escaped the flames. Hundreds were saved, treated and survived, and many were set free. Even young, orphaned koalas that must be bottle-fed and tended by hand would survive in captivity. By contrast, kangaroos and wallabies often couldn’t outrun the fires, and most of the rescued animals were badly burned and had little chance of recovery.
All of this helped me understand why legitimate, professional koala rescues on the island really do matter, and why the stakes feel so high for those who are skilled at and committed to this grueling work. For people desperate to help in the aftermath of the fires, rescuing and treating injured koalas and relocating koalas stranded in devastated forest areas has become a kind of humane religion, something to cling to and thus avoid descending into despair. Each and every rescue becomes a small but holy and tangible act to stem the wider suffering.
* * *
As soon as the story began to circulate, during the fires, that the Kangaroo Island Wildlife Park, outside Parndana, had become the impromptu center for the emergency treatment of burned wildlife, the place was inundated with journalists. The largely open-air park, which was already home to 600 or so animals, including snakes, wombats, cassowaries and an alligator, is owned by Dana and Sam Mitchell, a couple in their late 20s who moved to the island in 2013, after meeting while working at a wildlife park in Victoria. Journalists turned up even as the fires were burning, sleeping uninvited on the floor of the park’s café, barging into the Mitchells’ house at all hours.
This, to be fair, had some positive outcomes. An Australian TV channel, for instance, arranged for a popular home renovation show to build a wildlife hospital in the park, and the Mitchells have raised more than $1.6 million through crowdfunding to pay for professional veterinary costs, new buildings for wildlife care, and an islandwide koala rescue and rehabilitation program.
Yet it was overwhelming, too. Dana had to evacuate twice with their toddler, Connor, during the peak of the fires, while Sam stayed with staff and other family members to defend the property; the park and its animals were spared only after the wind changed direction as the fires were bearing down.
Meanwhile, hundreds of injured wild animals were brought to the park by Army personnel, the State Emergency Service and firefighters. As the roads reopened, many locals also began to arrive with injured wildlife, unsure where else to take them. Since the start of January, more than 600 koalas have been brought to the park, though not all have survived. Kangaroos with melted feet and koalas with melted paws had to be put out of their suffering. Orphaned baby koalas, called joeys, arrived with ears or noses burnt off. There were severely dehydrated older koalas with kidney disorders, and possums and wallabies blinded by the heat. “We were having to make it up on the spot,” Sam told me. “We were just a small wildlife park. These animals weren’t my responsibility, but nobody else was doing anything. The government wasn’t giving any direction.” In the first weeks, they operated a triage center out of a tin shed, with no power.
Sam and Dana soldiered on, and by now they have an impressive setup for koala rescue, treatment, rehabilitation and release. Behind their house is a series of brand-new buildings and dozens of koala enclosures, tended to by vets and veterinary nurses from Australia Zoo, Zoos South Australia, and Savem, a veterinary equivalent of Doctors Without Borders, as well as trusted local volunteers.
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Oliver Funnell, a veterinarian at Zoos South Australia, and veterinary nurse Donna Hearn attend to an injured koala at the Wildlife Park.
(David Maurice Smith)
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A hospitalized koala has pink spots on its paw that are healed burn areas.
(David Maurice Smith)
Sam has a grim sense of humor to help deal with the trauma of the past months, but he and Dana are physically and emotionally exhausted, as is everybody I met on the island. I felt bad asking them to retell their experiences during the fires, the ins and outs of how they survived, aware of the symbolic violence of being forced to perform your own private trauma for outsiders over and over again. Yet they did so, graciously, describing the unusual warning of white ash hitting the park even before the smoke. Desperate for sleep after staying awake several nights, Sam eventually brought a blanket outside and laid it on the grass, setting his phone alarm to go off every 15 minutes. He was worried that if he slept inside he wouldn’t see the fire coming.
In spite of their fatigue, they welcomed me into the joey clinic one morning. Dana was in the middle of individually bottle-feeding some 15 baby koalas while also caring for Connor. He was toddling around holding a branch of acacia and following the family dog, Rikku, who is remarkably tolerant of human babies and a tiny kangaroo named Kylo that likes to practice its boxing on the dog’s face. Staff and volunteers swirled in and out of the clinic, eating breakfast, getting medical supplies, asking about treatment plans. Dozens of rescued, slightly older joeys under 18 months old live in enclosures outside, since they no longer depend on milk, along with 30 older koalas with names like Ralph, Bonecrusher and Pearl; the number changes constantly as they recover enough to be released. Dana sat on a sofa cradling a baby koala they’d named Maddie, feeding it a morning bottle of Wombaroo, a low-lactose formula. When Maddie was rescued, she weighed just two pounds. “She had no burns when we found her,” Dana said, “but also no mum.”
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Dana Mitchell feeds an injured baby koala at the Kangaroo Island Wildlife Park, which Mitchell owns with her husband, Sam. The park has treated more than 600 koalas since January.
(David Maurice Smith)
Nearby sat Kirsten Latham, head keeper of Australia Zoo’s koala program, holding 10-month-old Duke, who was swaddled in a towel. He was rescued in January with second-degree burns and was missing several claws—which are crucial for tree-climbing—and had to be fed with a syringe before he started taking the bottle. “You have to really concentrate when you’re feeding them, as they can aspirate the milk when they’re young,” Kirsten said. “It helps to wrap them in a towel and keep a hand over their eyes, because when they’re drinking from their mums they keep their heads tucked right into the pouch, where it’s dark and quiet.” These feedings are done three times a day, and it can take each person three hours to feed all the baby koalas during a mealtime.
* * *
In the clinic’s kitchen, I found Kailas Wild and Freya Harvey, both fit and sunburned, wearing black T-shirts and cargo pants. They were studying a map of the island’s plantations and natural bushland, planning their next koala rescues. They are old friends and skilled climbers, and have been on the island for weeks, doing the dangerous work of climbing the tall, burnt blue gum trees to reach koalas perched at the very top, sometimes as high as 80 feet.
Kailas is an arborist and volunteer for the State Emergency Service in New South Wales, and Freya is currently based in New Zealand, but they both dropped everything to go to Kangaroo Island as soon as they realized their tree-climbing skills could help save wildlife. Kailas drove the 900-odd miles from Sydney to the ferry terminal in Cape Jervis in his pickup truck, sleeping in the back along the way, and bringing it across to the island on the ferry. It took them a little while to earn Sam’s trust; his classic Australian suspicion of “blow-ins” has been compounded by having been let down by others who turned up offering help but haven’t followed through. But now that they have it, I can see the three of them have formed a close-knit team, daily coordinating koala rescues and treatment.
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Kailas Wild, an arborist from Sydney who aided rescue efforts on the island, with a young kangaroo. He saved more than 100 koalas.
(David Maurice Smith)
The ground rescue crew that Kailas and Freya have been working with is a local family of four: Lisa and Jared Karran and their children, Saskia and Utah. They live near Kingscote, where Jared is a police officer. They’ve spent almost every day since the fires out in the bush rescuing animals. At first, the ground was so hot it was smoking, and they had to wear special boots so the soles didn’t melt. Now the risk is falling trees. They work up to 12 hours a day, the kids uncomplaining and involved, outfitted with gloves and hard hats, handling the koalas like pros, and accompanying Jared for long drives at the end of each day to release rehabilitated survivors into a distant unburned plantation. As of last count, they’ve helped rescue 143 koalas.
Outside the clinic, in a nearby field, a Robinson R44 helicopter had just landed after an aerial survey using a thermal-imaging camera to locate koalas by detecting their body heat; this is one of several ways that Sam and the rescue team are now experimenting with technology to find where koalas are clustered and whether those habitats are burned or still viable. Sam was paying a lot to rent the helicopter, and the results have been promising, but Sam is still learning how to operate the infrared camera from the air—it’s no easy feat to adjust the focus and pan-and-tilt speed while fine-tuning koala heat signatures from inside a moving helicopter—and the data is complicated to interpret.
At this phase of the recovery effort, the goal is no longer strictly to rescue injured koalas and get them to the hospital for treatment. The team is also trying to figure out if koalas remaining in the wild have enough food to survive. The fear is there will be a second wave of koala deaths, from starvation. The team is also experimenting with drones, and Thomas Gooch, founder of a Melbourne environmental analytics firm called the Office of Planetary Observations, has donated recent satellite-observation maps that display vegetation cover to identify areas that have burned.
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California wildlife rescuer Douglas Thron and environmentalist Freya Harvey launch a drone outfitted with an infrared camera to spot stranded koalas.
(David Maurice Smith)
A newer member of the koala rescue team is Douglas Thron, an aerial cinematographer and wildlife rescuer from Oakland, California, who was brought to the island by Humane Society International. In the 1990s, Thron used to take politicians and celebrities up in a little Cessna to show them the impact of clear-cutting old-growth redwood forests in California. Last year, he spent months after California’s devastating fires, and in the Bahamas after Hurricane Dorian, using a custom-made drone to spot dogs and cats trapped in the debris.
Douglas had been on the island since late February, using his drone—configured to carry an infrared camera and a 180x zoom lens and spotlight—to help the team identify where in the vast acreage of burnt blue gum plantations there were koalas needing rescue or resettlement. So far, he had spotted 110, of which 60 had been rescued.
Douglas, Kailas and Freya had spent most of the previous night in the bush, using the drone to do thermal imaging and closer spotlighting of the treetops in the darkness, when it’s easier to see the koalas’ heat signatures. From the ground, Douglas used a video screen attached to the drone controls to identify ten koalas in one section of a burnt eucalyptus plantation. Today, it would be up to the ground rescue team to head out and see what they could find by daylight.
* * *
“We were calling it Pompeii,” said Lisa Karran as we drove past a tragic tableau of carbonized Tammar wallabies huddled in a clearing beside rows of burnt blue gums. The hardest part, she said, was seeing the incinerated family groups together—baby koalas holding onto branches beside their moms, dead possums and kangaroos with their young beside them.
Standing amid rows of charred trunks, Utah, who is 13, was readying the koala pole—an extendable metal pole with a shredded feed bag attached to the end, which the climbers shake above the koala’s head to scare it down the tree. Saskia, who is 15, held the crate at the base of the tree. Jared had spotted this particular koala—“because I’m koalified!” he joked—curled right at the top of a black trunk with no leaves.
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Upper left, a climber wielding a “koala pole” persuades an animal to leave its towering hideout and descend to the ground, where rescuers could examine it and crate it for later treatment. Upper right, Rescuers placed vegetables in devastated areas to feed animals. Some 13,000 people applied for 120 openings for volunteers to distribute food and water. Below, Utah Karran, 13, releases a recovered koala into an intact blue gum plantation. Karran and his sister and parents spent two months rescuing animals at risk.
(David Maurice Smith)
The luminous epicormic growth was sprouting from many of the trunks around us. The rescue team had begun to wonder if this growth, which is known to be more toxic than mature leaves, as the tree’s natural defense against insects and animal browsing while the tree itself struggles to survive, might be making the koalas sick. Some of the koalas they’d seen eating it, and had subsequently brought in for treatment, had diarrhea or gut bloat. They’d also observed koalas eating dead leaves rather than epicormic growth, suggesting the animals may not find it an ideal food source. Koalas are naturally adapted to the toxins in eucalyptus leaves, with gut flora that help digest the leaves and flush out the toxins. But the higher toxicity levels of the new growth may be beyond their tolerance. Ben Moore, a koala ecologist at Western Sydney University, said that there are no detailed studies that directly compare the chemical makeup of epicormic growth with adult leaves, but he hypothesized that any dramatic change in a koala’s diet would change that individual’s microbiome, and in turn affect its gut function.
In recent weeks, the group has rented a mechanized crane, which makes it easier to get to the tops of the trees, but there are still many rescues where the koala is so high up that Freya or Kailas need to clip in and use the arborist’s technique of throwing a weight and line to climb the burnt and brittle trees, and then shake the koala pole above the animal’s head. Typically, a koala grunts or squeals and climbs down a trunk amazingly fast. After Lisa or Utah plucks it off the trunk at the bottom and places it in a crate, it becomes surprisingly docile, gazing up at its human saviors.
The first koala rescued that day was underweight, and others had pink patches on their feet signaling healing burns, but some were healthy enough, the group decided, to be released elsewhere without needing to be checked by vets at the Wildlife Park.
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Out of the hundreds of koalas that volunteers and staff have rescued, many are being raised in captivity. Older koalas are released into intact eucalyptus plantations.
(David Maurice Smith)
Hours and hours passed like this in the hot plantations. It was gripping to watch. Each rescue had a unique emotional texture—a dramatic arc of growing tension as those on the ground waited for the climbers to encourage the koalas down, the adrenaline spike of grabbing the animals behind their strong necks and getting them into the crate, and the communal relief if they were found to be healthy. Each of the ten koalas rescued that day was found almost exactly where Douglas’s drone had spotted them the night before.
During one rescue, a koala kept up a plaintive high-pitched wail but would not budge from its perch. Freya and Kailas both had to clip in and climb up in order to coax it down. Once on the ground the team knew this koala was seriously unwell: its paws were covered in fresh blood, from the loss of several claws—a sign of previous burns or infections. Kailas, in particular, was devastated, and sobbed openly. They knew from experience what fate awaited this koala. Later that night, after its condition was checked at the Wildlife Park, it was euthanized.
The next day, Kailas made his 100th rescue. It also happened to be Jared’s last day doing rescues with his family. The next Monday, he’d be back at work as a police officer. “There’ll be criminals robbing the bank, and I’ll be gazing up into the trees, looking for koalas,” he said wistfully. He’d been scrolling back through his photos, and had been struck by a picture of Saskia and Utah swimming in the sea the day before the fires started, two months before. “Every day since, it’s just been so different,” he said. “I was thinking this morning that I want to get back to that.”
At dusk, the Karrans drove out to one of the only plantations that didn’t burn, called Kellendale. They had six healthy koalas in the back seat and the trunk of their SUV, rescued from plantations with no leaf cover for food. After the eerie silence of another long day spent in burnt plantations—not a single insect hum or bird song—it was a joy to see a flash of pink from the belly of a rose-breasted cockatoo, and to hear the soft, wavelike rustling of living eucalyptus leaves in the breeze. It felt like paradise.
Utah and Saskia released the koalas from their crates one by one, and the family laughed together as one of their feistiest rescues, a female koala with lovely fluffy ears, sprinted for a tree, climbed about 15 feet up, then stopped and stared back down at the humans for a good long while. Then she climbed higher, cozily wedged herself in the fork of a branch, and held on tight as the narrow trunk rocked in the wind.
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Despite Bitcoin’s Dive, a Former Soviet Republic Is Still Betting Big on It
Tax breaks, land deals and cheap energy have spurred cryptocurrency mining in Georgia, which wants to be a digital data leader.
TBILISI, Georgia — For three years, a windowless warehouse on the edge of town has been whirring with enough energy to power nearly 50,000 homes. Day and night, the warehouse, and dozens of cargo containers in a windswept valley, are generating Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency that has created a virtual gold rush in the former Soviet republic of Georgia.
Bitfury, a bitcoin technology company, is churning out millions of dollars’ worth of the digital money using ultracheap hydropower harvested from waters rushing down the volcanic peaks of the Caucasus. Even as the currency has tumbled in value, thousands of Georgians have jumped into the game and sold cars — even cows — to buy high-powered computers to mine Bitcoin and join what has become a state-supported dash toward data supremacy.
A former prime minister encouraged Bitfury, then based in San Francisco, with a $10 million loan in 2015. The governing Georgian Dream party sold 45 acres for $1 for Bitfury to set up shop. The government has been selling energy at half the rates charged in the United States or Europe, and it has created tax-free zones to draw in tech-savvy entrepreneurs.
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The efforts have given Georgia, with 3.7 million people, a dubious distinction. It is now an energy guzzler, with nearly 10 percent of its energy output gone into the currency endeavor. The country consumed so much power in recent years that the World Bank ranked it one of the most active cryptocurrency sites in the world.
The whole experiment is likely to face immediate challenges as the price of Bitcoin declines, after a spectacular rise tempted investors around the world to bet on cryptocurrencies.
Most companies tend to lose money when the price of Bitcoin falls below energy costs, and mining operators worldwide have recently been scaling back. The largest mining company, the Chinese company Bitmain, has been closing offices and laying off workers. Last week, Bitfury, which incorporated in London in 2018, announced layoffs at a facility in Canada.
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Georgia, however, has been betting its economy on luring blockchain technology, the encrypted storage capability behind all crypto transactions.
Bitfury has helped migrate most of Georgia’s land registry to blockchain, making the government one of the first to rely on the secure digital ledger. Its tax system may soon follow. Georgia aims to beat Malta, Bermuda and other countries known for light-touch regulation of cryptocurrencies to dominate blockchain development.
“The economy’s digital transformation is our highest priority,” said George Kobulia, the economy minister. “We’re supporting this any way we can.”
A Low-Tax Frontier
In downtown Tbilisi, a neon-lit Marriott welcomes tourists. A nearby shopping mall installed a special A.T.M. for Bitcoin withdrawals. A cryptocurrency exchange flashes the prices of Bitcoin, Ether and other digital money on a ticker.
When street protests ousted the last Soviet-era leader in 2003, the government, struggling with poverty, corruption and grinding bureaucracy, began selling itself as a business-friendly low-tax outpost for investment. Big financial institutions came in. So did casinos. A private company willing to take a risk was Bitfury, founded in 2011 by a tech savant from Latvia who was proselytizing about a strange virtual industry.
Remi Urumashvili, a well-connected lawyer and now Bitfury’s main representative in Georgia, said that when Valery Vavilov, the co-founder and chief executive, approached him to seek advice on building a cryptocurrency operation, he was baffled.
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“They told me they wanted to mine Bitcoins, and I’m asking them, ‘Hey, guys, what’s a Bitcoin?’” Mr. Urumashvili recalled.
Mr. Vavilov told him that the currency had introduced a new technology, blockchain, that had the potential for widespread use in business. Mr. Urumashvili said he had seen a potential tax advantage.
“They explained that it’s money that exists on the internet,” he said. “So I said, ‘If a thing doesn’t exist in reality, maybe the tax will be zero.’”
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Mr. Urumashvili worked hard to lobby lawmakers to keep Georgia an open market for cryptocurrency. “I don’t like regulations,” he said, arching an eyebrow. “And there are very few regulations here for anything.”
As soon as Bitfury opened its doors, Georgia created “free economic zones” where mining activities and electricity weren’t taxed. When Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies were exchanged for dollars or pounds, Georgia treated the exchange as an export exempt from value added taxes, so Bitfury could keep every penny of earnings.
Rumors have swirled that Bidzina Ivanishvili, a former prime minister from the Georgian Dream party and the country’s richest oligarch, has been a secret beneficiary of the digital experiment. He gave Bitfury a $10 million loan through his investment fund when Bitfury’s executive vice chairman, George Kikvadze, sat on his investment board.
Mr. Ivanishvili declined an interview. Mr. Urumashvili of Bitfury said that no laws had been violated to encourage Bitfury, and that the former prime minister’s loan had been paid off. He had no other ties to Bitfury, Mr. Urumashvili added.
The government even expanded an entire power station next to the Bitfury facility to pump in electricity at no extra cost. With energy prices at 5 to 6 cents per kilowatt-hour, Bitfury and its supporters could envision prosperity, if not around the corner then somewhere just beyond the fog of Georgia’s storied mountains.
Mining With Friends
When Bitfury came to Georgia, one Bitcoin was worth around $350. It spiked to nearly $20,000 before tumbling. Big players like Bitfury have bandwidth to keep operating. But smaller investors have been far more vulnerable.
In villages across Georgia, an estimated 200,000 people secured mining computers to set up in basements and garages. For young people especially who struggled in a tough economy, Bitcoin seemed an alluring alternative to just making ends meet.
Joining the rush was George Kirvalidze, 35, the former owner of a small internet company in the town of Kvareli, three hours from Tbilisi in Georgian wine country.
About half the town’s 6,000 households have some kind of a mining rig, he said.
“Most people who bought in thought high prices would last forever,” said Mr. Kirvalidze, who has managed to mine 20 Bitcoins.
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Even farmers got involved. “At one point it was more profitable than owning a cow,” he said. “Now it’s not so sure.”
Cryptocurrency lives off a blizzard of mathematical calculations. Computers, or miners, around the world compete to solve complex formulas on the blockchain. When a mining computer gets the right answer, it is given a bundle of new Bitcoins as a reward.
The constant calculating superheats computers, and the energy demand — to power the computers and to cool them — has spiraled in places where such currencies are pursued.
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To save energy, Mr. Kirvalidze created a mining pool with nine friends, who grouped their machines in a friend’s garage. One November afternoon, 15 of the 60 miners were turned off because Bitcoin prices had fallen too low to justify the energy use. More would shut down if prices continued to slump, he added.
“Bitfury is one step ahead of us,” Mr. Kirvalidze observed, citing the company’s cutting-edge technology and quasi-state backing in Georgia.
“If we could get cheaper energy prices, too, we could make more,” he said. “That would increase money circulating in the economy and eventually improve growth.”
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‘Onto the World Map’
Forty-five minutes from the center of Tbilisi, trucks rumble over two-lane roads and past faded pink and yellow high-rises. A prison, in matching pink and yellow paint, blights a cow pasture. In the middle of the valley rises the gray confines of Bitfury, plunked on a 40-acre concrete strip protected by guards and a high wire fence.
In a warehouse as big as a Walmart, Ilia Koranashvili, a muscular engineer with a snake tattoo, walked around 160 hermetically sealed stainless steel tanks filled with power-efficient chips and a special cooling liquid. The tanks are Bitfury’s experiment to keep energy costs down and make the mining cost effective almost anywhere, said Mr. Koranashvili, who heads Bitfury’s monitoring team.
Industry estimates suggest the company mines just over 5 percent of all Bitcoins, although no one would say how much was being mined here.
But competitors in Georgia reckon it was a fortune. Vakhtang Gogokhia, the chief executive of Golden Fleece, a small cryptomining start-up, said he was pulling in around 10 Bitcoins a month using one megawatt of energy, enough to light 1,000 homes. Bitfury says it constantly consumes at least 45 megawatts of energy, though Mr. Gogokhia suspected it was more.
Critics say the government, by subsidizing operations like Bitfury, is ripping off taxpayers by forcing them to foot the bill for well-connected companies.
Zurab Tchiaberashvili, a lawmaker from European Georgia, the largest opposition party in Parliament, said the government’s generosity toward Bitfury had deprived Georgians of millions in tax revenue.
“It’s a huge conflict of interest,” he said.
Mr. Urumashvili brushed off such concerns. “Bitfury has given our country many things, including a path to the future,” he said. “When you have a ticket to get onto the world map,” he added, “you should use it.”
Still, as Bitcoin prices highlight the uncertain nature of cryptocurrencies, the government isn’t putting all of its eggs in one basket.
“Georgia is interesting for cryptocurrency miners,” said Mr. Kobulia, the economy minister. “But would it be a major source of our economic growth? Maybe not.”
Correction: Jan. 23, 2019
An earlier version of this article misstated the nation where Bitfury, a blockchain technology company, is based. It is incorporated in Britain, not the United States. The error was repeated in a photo caption. The article also misstated the position that George Kikvadze holds at Bitfury. He is the executive vice chairman, not the vice president. The rate for the energy prices paid by Bitfury was also incorrect. It is 5 to 6 cents per kilowatt-hour, not per hour.
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aw-a-ke-blog · 6 years
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It’s You
a/n: i wrote this ages ago for a friend of mine, before she convinced me to start posting my writing on here, so this scenario is close to my heart 💓
summary: Your best friend, Namjoon, owns a tiny book shop, where you go to study while he works. One day while sitting in his office to work on a paper, through a clumsy accident, you realize that he may not be just a friend to you anymore…
word count: 3.2k
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The block you’re walking down is short and narrow, with a stretch of small shops lining the brusque sidewalk. The bookstore on the corner is set back slightly from the rest, with a thin blue door that has a small window framed with patterned curtains, looking in on a dark, mahogany room. You open the door and step inside. The soft wood surrounds you, and the bookshelves rise up overhead, stacked tightly between the floor and the ceiling, the small room barely able to support the furniture stuffed into it. As you move toward the back of the shop, you run your hands over the spines of the books, touching the soft feathered pages and the worn-in covers, breathing deeply.
At the back, Namjoon, your best friend since before you can remember, is hunched over the cash register with a notebook beneath his elbow, scribbling something furiously. He looks up when he hears your footsteps and reaches to push his glasses back up on his nose. The motion feels familiar to you. His mouth turns up at the edges into a soft smile that grows into a grin slowly, also familiar. Namjoon shoves his ink-stained hand through his hair and sticks the pen behind his ear, coming out from behind the counter. You smile at him, and a soft, exhausted sigh falls out of his mouth. “Hey, Y/N.”
You reach over to fix his bangs, which are falling over into his eyes, almost covering them. “Joon, you’re a mess.”
He grins again and leans back. “Look who’s talking.”
You make a face at him, and he rolls his eyes. “Come on, Y/N. You can study in my office while I finish inventory.”
He grabs you by the hand and laces his fingers through yours, gripping tightly. The feeling is warm, like being inside somewhere while it’s snowing. A familiar feeling that seems like home.
Namjoon
Her hand is warm in mine. Her thin fingers wrap around mine, and I can feel my heart beating heavily in my chest. She smells like lavender, and part of me wishes I could stay like this, wrapped up in the books and the shelves and her lavender smell, overwhelming me, always. Shaking my head, I quickly snap my mind away from those thoughts. She’s your best friend, I think to himself. Stop thinking like this.
I lead her through the store to my office in the back. I close the door, and she falls into the chair behind the desk, dropping her backpack on the floor. I reach over to turn on the desk lamp so that she can see.
The room is small and dark, with wide mahogany floors that eat the little bit of light that comes into the room from the small window on the wall. For some reason, Y/N loves it in here. She likes the books and the desk and the warm smell and the creaky chair and the small window and everything else. I watch as she unpacks her things, pulling out her laptop, her planner, her folder, her notebook, her pencils and pens and highlighters. After a few moments, she catches me staring and turns to glare back at me. “What?”
I shake my head and smile again, rubbing the back of my neck nervously. The habit eats at me, making me more nervous, until I don’t know what to do with my hands or arms or mouth or body or anything else. I just stand there nervously, staring and smiling at her. “Nothing. I’m going to go finish inventory, okay? I’ll be back in an hour or something.”
Y/N
“Okay,” you say, nodding. As you speak, your voice almost seems to fill the small space; you feel magnified in the room, between its close walls and heavy wood. Joon smiles at you again and walks out, closing the door quietly behind him. Leaning back in the chair, you look up at the ceiling, dreading opening your laptop to finish writing this paper for your Education class.
Instead of starting on your work, you look around the room, eyeing the small shelves and piles of books and papers, the messy but somehow organized desk, the soft light coming from the lamp, the posters and notes on the walls, the boxes stacked in the corner. You get up and wander around the room slowly, distracting yourself by fingering the stacks of bills and statements, the books he has stacked on the floor beside the desk, the post-it notes stuck to the walls with scribbled reminders. Eventually, you end up sitting on the floor beside a small stack of books in the back corner, reading through the different titles. In the middle of the pile, a book of Walt Whitman’s poetry pokes out from the rest. You tug it out of the pile and flip it open, landing on Whitman’s poem Song of Myself.
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.
The words protrude from the page, the ink hard and smooth beneath your fingers. You read the passage over and over, letting the words fill the small room with something that feels like nature. You can almost smell soil, nurturing the grass and the earth. You turn back to the book and keep reading.
Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes,
I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it,
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.
The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless,
It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.
The smoke of my own breath,
Echoes, ripples, buzz’d whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine,
My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs,
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and dark-color’d sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn,
The sound of the belch’d words of my voice loos’d to the eddies of the wind,
A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms,
The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag,
The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hill-sides,
The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun.
Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much? have you reckon’d the earth much?
Have you practis’d so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.
The poem seems to fill the floor around you; you can taste sweet air, the dewy earth of outside seeming to come in through the walls. Whitman’s voice moves like glass, soft and smooth, or like water, rushing. You flip through the rest of the book, skimming the lines, picking out phrases here and there to read again and again in your head, letting them sit inside you, filling you up with the soft-spoken art.
After a while, you put the book back on the pile and stand up again. You stumble slightly and fall back, tripping over your feet and catching yourself quickly on the desk--your foot accidentally knocks a pile of boxes over, and a mess of papers and cards and books spill across the floor. You groan, exasperated with yourself, and bend over to scoop them back up and put them back in the box. You shuffle all the cards and papers back into one box, and begin to put the books away in the other one. But as you stack them, something catches your eye and you look closer--Joon’s handwriting is all over these books. You grab one and open it--on every page, Joon has written things in his messy, scribbled writing--some of it is Korean, some of it English--you look closer.
she is an ocean
black waves,
crashing
purpling veins between
white frothing lips
they call her soft
like silk,
lost heavens
sinking
in the dark
the black
mountain skyline
kisses her, rolling
sunken ships
she quenches
the earth
of its
sallow thirst,
she is
airy
steadfast, and
free.
At the bottom of the page, still in his messy, scribbled handwriting, he’s written two words, followed by a date.
for her, august 7
As you flip through the pages, you see small sketches of a girl and sometimes a character that almost looks like Joon. You feel a smile pulling at your mouth, stretching it widely over your face, almost bursting. You keep looking, keep reading.
when i sleep, i can see
something soft in your eyes.
lush green forests used to grow
between them,
and it felt something like
heaven breaking apart
in my hands.
you touch the storms
in my stomach, and
kiss the black oceans in my chest
calm.
your hands melt me,
and your eyes bring me
home.
i never believed in god, but
when your eyes closed as i
touched you, i thought i could feel heaven
between my hands.
Again, the same words, followed by a date.
for her, august 10
You hear something at the door, and you almost throw the book in desperate fear, caught red handed in your snooping. There’s no time to hide any of it. The book is open in your hand, wavering, and the rest of them are still scattered on the floor as Joon comes in, rubbing his tired face.
“Hey, Y/N. I--” When he looks up, he sees you. He sees the book. You can’t recognize the look that crosses his face--it’s abrupt and silent and stricken--you smile at him nervously, clearly caught in the act.
“Joon, please don’t be mad--I tripped, and the boxes fell, and I was putting the books away, I promise. I’m--”
“Did you read that?!” He shouts, his eyes wide. His voice reaches at the ceiling, like it’s too big for this room. You flinch at him and set the book down into the box quickly, moving away from it. You start to stand up again, feeling guilty and intrusive. A deep nervousness spreads out into your arms and legs, reaching desperately throughout your body, jumping anxiously at the anger in Joon’s voice, the way he’s looking at you.
“Joon, I’m sorry, really,” you stutter. “I didn’t mean--”
“Y/N--”
“I really didn’t mean to, I’m...sorry. I’m so sorry, Joon.”
“No, Y/N--No, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to yell, I shouldn’t have yelled. I’m sorry. Just--here, give me the box.”
You set all the books back into it quickly and push it toward him. “Here.”
He rearranges them carefully, like he’s afraid they’ll break. Picking the box up, he sets it on a high shelf and turns back to look at you again--his eyes are set back, shy and embarrassed. You roll your eyes at him and smile, swallowing the heavy air in the room.
“So, who is she?” You ask, sitting on the edge of the desk, facing him.
He looks at you sharply. “What?”
“Who is she? Who did you write all those poems for, who did you draw those little doodles for? Come on, Joon, I’m not stupid. I know all of that was for someone. That wasn’t your regular writing...You never write poetry. I’ve never seen you write anything like that, ever.”
He just stares at you. His mouth opens, closes, opens again, like he’s going to say something, but he just closes it, silent. You laugh a little and stand up. “You can tell me, Joon. Who is it? Who do you like so much? You can’t write poetry like that for just anyone. It doesn’t happen like that, and you know it.”
He shakes his head, almost smiling but biting it back quickly, keeping a straight face. You lean in, trying to draw it out of him; you look up at his wild brown eyes and smile, trying to entice him, trying to open him up so that he’ll tell you. “Come on, Joon. Please? Tell me who it is. Do I know them?”
Namjoon
I can’t look at her. I can feel the air building up around my head, and the anxiety tightening in my stomach; it’s violent and tense, stretching between the muscles in my chest, bracing around my heart, beating wildly. I can’t look at her. How do I look at her? Her hair falls over her shoulder as she leans in toward me, and her hand on my arm feels like it’s burning my skin--she’s so warm, and I want to hold her. God, fuck, no. I can’t think like this, I can’t feel like this, fuck, just stop, this is stupid.
There’s too much silence. I can see her slowly giving up, and I don’t know what to do or what to say. Where do my hands go? What do I do with my hands now? Where do I look? Am I breathing? Everything feels too real, in this small room, in this tight air, under this short ceiling--I can’t look at her.
“Okay, fine, don’t tell me,” she says jokingly, grinning. “You know I’ll figure it out eventually.”
I can’t help myself. As she turns away from me to grab her bag, I feel the words fall out of my mouth, uncontrolled, tumbling, breaking, small--“It’s you, Y/N.”
Y/N
You feel your breath catch, and then it ceases in your chest, caught beneath your throat, pulsing--you stare ahead at the wall, your back to him, your hands frozen on the straps of your backpack--What did he say?
“It’s...you, Y/N.”
You feel your body turning slowly--you didn’t tell it to do that. Suddenly you’re facing him, and his eyes look different than before--they’re warm and soft in the way they’re looking at you, but he looks scared. I can’t speak, you think. What do I do? I don’t know how to look at him.
His hands reach out slowly, touching yours, tracing small, concentrated circles on the backs of your fingers. You don’t stop him. He steps closer--you feel warm now, and you can’t breathe. Joon, Joon, Joon. His name repeats itself over and over in your mind, and you can’t stop it.
He takes another step closer. You can hear his soft, staggered breathing. Finally, his voice fills the space again, quietly. “Please say something, Y/N.”
“I...Joon, I--” Your voice stumbles, caught beneath your tongue.
“I love you,” he says, cutting you off. “I’ve been in love with you for so long...I never thought I would ever say it out loud...especially not to you. I never want you to leave, Y/N, but now I’m scared you’re going to, so I have to tell you. Okay? It’s been years that I’ve wanted to stand this close to you, telling you these things, touching your hands like this...I don’t want to lose you--but I can’t lie to you. Those poems, those stupid drawings, those books, they’re all for you, I can’t...I can’t breathe when I look at you. I can’t think about anything else. I...I love you, Y/N.”
Your hands move slowly upward, touching the edge of his chin, the crook of his jaw, your thumbs laying softly against his cheeks. A warmth swells in your stomach, and it knocks the wind out of you. You stare at him, open-mouthed, wordless. You can’t think.
You feel yourself leaning up, standing on your tiptoes, your mouth so close to his--you press a soft, gentle kiss to the corner of his lips, letting a heavy breath fall out of you. Your forehead falls against his chin, your feet falling back to the ground, and the breath in your chest knocks out three soft words: “I love you.”
There’s a moment of shock, and you can feel it under your fingers still pressed against him. His hand moves quickly, his thumb and forefinger lifting your chin up, his brown eyes staring. “You love me?”
His voice is so soft that you almost don’t recognize it. You feel another swelling wave in your stomach, crashing, gasping, and you still can’t breathe. You suck in your stomach, willing yourself to speak. “I didn’t...know. I didn’t know, Joon.”
His head bows down, so that his face is almost level with yours. Your chests press together, and your proximity presses out the last bit of breath left in your chest. He whispers, softly, almost desperately, “Can I kiss you?”
You can only nod. His mouth touches yours, engulfing you quickly, and suddenly you understand the tender Whitman poem--you feel the nature crowning in your chest, blooming up into a wild forest. You feel the soil, nurturing. “A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms, / The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag, / The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hill-sides, / The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun.”
It feels too soon when you both pull away from each other, breathless and grinning, with the gentle light of the desk light glowing around you. You breathe out against his neck, pressing your forehead against his collarbone, reaching desperately for his hands. His fingers grip yours tightly. “I love you, Joon.”
He lifts your face and you see the broad, wild grin stretched out on his face, pushing back his cheeks, scrunching his nose. “So is this...are we...?”
You kiss him again, unable to help yourself. “Only if you keep writing me poetry like that.”
He grins at you, and a laugh jumps out of him, shaking both of you. “Anything for you, Y/N...Always.”
You lean up to press another small kiss to the end of his nose. You whisper softly, quietly, “Your eyes bring me home. I think that’s my favorite line.”
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plusorminuscongress · 4 years
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The Birth of Juneteenth; Voices of the Enslaved
The Birth of Juneteenth; Voices of the Enslaved By Neely Tucker Published June 19, 2020 at 08:56AM
On Saturday, June 19, 1865, in Limestone County, Texas, plantation owner Logan Stroud stood on the front porch of this house to tell more than 150 of his enslaved workers that they were free. Photo: Historic American Building Survey. Prints and Photographs Division.
On June 19, 1865, Logan Stroud, one of the largest slave-owners in east Texas, walked to the front porch of his plantation home, which he called Pleasant Retreat. More than 150 of his enslaved workers gathered around to listen.
Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger. Brady’s National Photographic Portrait Galleries. Prints and Photographs Division.
He pulled out a dispatch from U.S. Maj. Gen  Gorden Granger — General Order Number 3 — issued that very morning in Galveston from the Union Army’s Texas headquarters. The Confederacy had officially surrendered in April, but the last holdouts in Texas had fought on until they, too, were defeated. Now that the war was settled, President Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation would become the law of the land, even in the Lone Star State.
“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, ‘all slaves are free,’ ” Stroud began, reading the opening line of Granger’s order. “This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves…”
Stroud’s family had come to Texas when he was just a boy. They built an empire of more than 11,000 acres — cotton, cattle, corn, wheat, pigs, sheep — and grew wealthy on slave labor. Now he was 51 and all that was over.
Stroud began to weep.
One of his daughters had to take over the reading. “…the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor….”
The details of the day were partly recorded by the Limestone County Historical Commission. And so it was that the Stroud front porch became one of the birthplaces of Juneteenth — when the final group of enslaved people in the United States were informed of the end of the Civil War, of slavery and of the brutal bondage that had defined their lives.
The Library has a photograph and architectural drawings of the house, both made in 1942 by the Historic American Buildings Survey. It’s antebellum prosperity long gone, the one-story, wood-frame house looms up out of the flat landscape like an abandoned, Greek-Revival testament to Southern Gothic, a Faulknerian mansion brought to life.
It’s one of  the thousands of documents, recordings and photographs in the Library’s collections that document Juneteenth and the aftermath of slavery by the people who endured it. The Historic Buildings survey also documents the origins of Emancipation Park in Houston, where some of the first and largest Juneteenth celebrations were held. From the survey: “The first description of the park grounds comes from elderly former residents, who describe the park at the turn of the century as being enclosed by a six-foot-high privacy fence and encircled by a racetrack, with the remainder of the property containing two dance floors, a stable, and a beer tavern.”
A portion of a handwritten copy of the Emancipation Proclamation, signed by President Abraham Lincoln, with the famous phrase “shall be then, thence forward, and forever free.” Rare Book And Special Collections Division.
The most extensive collection of stories is in ”Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938.” It contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts and more than 500 black-and-white portraits of formerly enslaved people.
Billy McCrae grew up in slavery in Texas. Photo: Ruby T. Lomax. Prints and Photographs Division.
Some of the most haunting aspects of the stories are the matter-of-fact nature in which they’re related, both in interview transcripts and in recordings. Through the crackles and hisses of a 1940 recording in Jasper, Texas, the voice of Billy McCrea shines through, narrating his youth “way back in slavery time.”
“Right at the creek there, they take them (runaways) and put them on…a log, lay them down and fasten the and whup them,” McCrea tells interviewer Ruby Lomax. “You hear them (runaways) hollering and praying on them logs….Now I see all of that when I was a boy.”
McCrae’s memories are in “Voices Remembering Slavery: Freed People Tell Their Stories,” a collection in the American Folklife Center. These 23 interviews were recorded between 1932 and 1975, and offer fascinating glimpses into a world gone by. (Note before listening: Speakers often recount racial epithets used to describe black people. Also, in an inadvertent window into racial attitudes during the time of the recordings, the interviewers often address their subjects as “uncle.”)
Baltimore’s Fountain Hughes was a remarkably clear-voiced 101-year-old when he was interviewed in 1949. He was a teenager when the Civil War ended. He remembered it well.
“We were slaves,” he says of his youth in Charlottesville, Virginia. “We belonged to people. They’d sell us like they sell horses and cows and hogs and all like that. Have a auction bench, and they’d put you on, up on the bench and bid on you just same as you bidding on cattle, you know…selling women, selling men.”
After the war ended, he said, “We was just turned out like a lot of cattle. You know how they turn cattle out in a pasture? Well, after freedom, you know, colored people didn’t have nothing.”
This, then, is what was coming to an end on June 19, 1865, on that front porch in Limestone County, Texas. The end of an era and the beginning of the celebrations of Juneteenth.
The new era, though, was not a clean break from the past, not even more than a century later. In 1981, a few black teenagers were celebrating Juneteenth on a small boat in a Limestone County lake. Police came out to arrest them on charges of having a small amount of marijuana. While trying to ferry them to shore, the boat capsized. Three teens drowned. The New York Times reported the results of the subsequent trial on page 30 of the A section, under a roundup of of news items headed, “Around the Nation.”
The lead sentence:
“An all-white jury today acquitted three former Limestone County officers in the drownings of three black teenagers who were in custody when a boat capsized on a Texas lake.”
That, too, is a story from Limestone County that resonates on Juneteenth 2020.
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sonofhistory · 7 years
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Thomas Jefferson and Slavery Part 1
In view of Thomas Jefferson’s abhorrence of slavery, which he coined a “blot” and a “stain” upon America, why did he remain a slave owner for his entire life and fail to direct that his slaves be freed after his death? Why so did Jefferson not play a more forceful role in the antislavery movement branching from the occurrence of the Enlightenment and the American Revolution that he was so heavily influenced by or influential towards? What induced him to couple the emancipation of slaves with the removal of the black population from the United States “beyond the reach of mixture”? Why did he insist upon measuring the intelligence of illiterate, hopelessly disadvantaged black slaves by criteria applicable to free white Americans?
Jefferson himself denied the allegations of him bedding a young mulatto slave girl named Sally Hemings which to this day exists as the most controversial crack on Jefferson’s character. There remains a paradox of how that the author of the Declaration of Independence--the largest document of personal liberty and freedom--was one of the largest slaveholders of his time.
Thomas Jefferson was intimately associated with slavery from the cradle to grave. His first memory was of being carried on a pillow by a slave; and a slave carpenter, a brother of Sally Hemings, constructed the coffin in which he was buried in at Monticello. Without the abolition of slavery, Jefferson realized that the attainment of a society based upon the freedom and equality of opportunity would forever allude the American people. His father was a slave owner from whom young Thomas inherited both land and slaves after his death. All the Virginia Randolphs, who he was related to via his mother Jane, held slaves. When he went to Williamsburg in 1760 to attend the College of William and Mary he took with him a personal slave named Jupiter, whom he later made his coachman. Jefferson’s wife’s dowry consisted of 132 slaves and many thousands of acres of land. He recognized his wealth principally in slaves and in land. By the time he wrote the Declaration of Independence he had become, by inheritance, purchase and marriage, one of the principal slave owners and one of the wealthiest men in Virginia.
While Jefferson regarded slavery (as stated previously) as a “hideous evil”, the bane of American society and wholly irreconcilable with his ideal of “republican virtue”, he was never able completely to cast aside the prejudice and the fears which he had absorbed from his surroundings toward people of color, he did not free himself from dependence upon slave labor and, in the end, he made the expansion of slavery into the territories a constitutional right. If Jefferson as a Virginia planter was caught inextricably in the toils of slavery, as a man of the Enlightenment he knew the institution to be antithetical to the ideals by which he lived. The men of the Enlightenment condemned slavery as a vestige of barbarism.
As a student at the College of William and Mary, Jefferson was introduced to Enlightenment ideas by his mentors: Dr. William Small, Edmund Pendleton, George Wythe and finally Lord Francis Fauquier. The direction given to Jefferson’s thinking by these men was reinforced by his wide reading in history, philosophy and the classics; he found in Stoic philosophy and Cicero and Seneca conclusive evidence that many Enlightenment ideas had pedigrees that could be traced to classical Greece and Rome. Among these ideas, Jefferson always included the Enlightenment’s uncompromising rejection of slavery. He did not forget the rights of the slaves--a position which set him apart from most of his contemporaries. When he was elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1769, one of his first acts was to attempt and make the manumission of slaves easier for owners. Jefferson sought to give every slave owner the right to free his slaves if he so desired.
Characteristically, Jefferson chose to work through others to effect this reform. In 1769, following through on his life long traditional aversion of personal confrontation, he induced his cousin Richard Bland, a longtime member of the House of Burgesses, to introduce a bill facilitating manumission--Jefferson’s role being confined to that of seconding the motion. It was his cousin who received the scorn of the delegate--not him. As a lawyer admitted into the bar in 1769, Jefferson took several cases dealing with slavery. In 1770, he drew up without charge a brief in support of the claim of the grandson of the mulatto woman and a black slave who was suing for his freedom. Jefferson had a weak case; for a while the law was specific in providing that the child of a white woman and black slave father was to go free after serving until the age of thirty years as a slave, it made no exception in the case of the children of grandchildren of a mulatto woman.
With the facts against his client, Jefferson had no choice but to try and move the case beyond the law of Virginia. He did so by asserting that “under the law of nature, all men are born free, and everyone one comes into the world with a right to his own person, which included the liberty of moving and using it at his own will. Unless with natural right to freedom were recognized, Jefferson declared, the status of the mulatto grandmother would be transmitted not merely to her grandchild but to her latest posterity. The judge dismissed the case, not because Jefferson had appealed to a higher law but for he had failed to prove that his client was the descendant of a free woman and was therefore entitled to freedom.
Jefferson recognized that the emancipation of the slaves waited upon the voluntary act of their owners or upon the will of the majority as expressed in statute law. 1769, he advertised for the return of a slave who had stolen a horse and run away. 1772, Jefferson was appointed by the court as counsel to a mulatto suing for freedom, however, his client had died before judgement would be rendered. Two years later, Jefferson abandoned the practice of law in order to devote himself to the management of his estate and to the American Revolution.
Jefferson delivered his first attack in print upon slavery in 1774 when he published a pamphlet entitled A Summary View of the Rights of British America. A Summary View took the ground that America owed no allegiance what so ever to British parliament, a position not assumed by the Continental Congress until 1775. Jefferson’s handiwork was denounced and rejected by the House of Burgesses. Had it not been for the publication of A Summary View, it is highly unlikely Jefferson would have ever been designated by John Adams in June 1776 to author the Declaration of Independence.
In a Summary View, Jefferson assailed slavery where it was most vulnerable: the traffic in human beings by which slaves were transported from Africa to enslavement in the New World. He declared that the abolition of slavery was the “the great object of desire in these colonies” and that the American people had been thwarted in this objective by the king, thereby proving the existence not only of a “deliberate, systematic plan of reducing us to slavery” but of an equally sinister plan of compelling American who asked to be free of the institution of slavery to keep in servitude: men, women and children of another race.
Jefferson laid it down as an incontestable truth that the American people had set their hearts upon abolishing slavery and that they had been prevented from accomplishing that objective by the malice and greed of King George III. Jefferson amplified the charge that the King was responsible for the perpetuation of slavery and the slave trade. Jefferson and other American patriots had repeatedly accused the British government of trying to reduce them to “slavery.”
To Jefferson’s mortification, the Continental Congress struck out this climactic passage from the Declaration of Independence. November 1775, Lord Dunmore, the Royal Governor of Virginia issues a proclamation promising freedom to all slaves belonging to rebels who joined “His Majesty’s Troops… for the more speedily reducing the Colony to a proper sense of their duty to His Majesty's Crown and dignity.” On strength of this promise, a thousand slaves rallied to the British lines and Dunmore had little force at his command and he and his allies were easily routed. The slave uprising had been crush and Jefferson rehearsed familiar rhetoric that Americans wished to abolish slavery but were prevented from doing so by the intervention of the Crown; and now the king was inciting his slaves to murder freedom-loving white Americans who had been free of royal control, would have abolished slavery of their own accord. Colonists with slave holding sympathies either began or accelerated their preparations for war, Jefferson among them.
When writing the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson added a paragraph in which he denounced slavery but of which was eliminated in the debates between representatives. “The clause, too, reprobating the enslaving [of] the inhabitants of Africa, was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and to Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue it,” said Jefferson years later. “Our Northern brethren also I believe felt a little tender under those censures; for though their people have very few slaves themselves yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.” Jefferson blamed the removal of the passage on delegates from South Carolina, Georgia and Northern delegates who represented merchants at the time actively involved in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. He had tried anew on slavery and fallen short anew.
The clause, initiated the most intense debate among the delegates gathered at Philadelphia in the spring and early summer of 1776.  It seemed to be the most vital section removed from the final document and was replaced with a slightly more ambiguous passage about King George's incitement of "domestic insurrections among us." This original passage reads:
“He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.  This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain.  Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce.  And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.”
Jefferson understood the “inalienable” in the sense that no man could be lawfully deprived of rights and no man was privileged to divest himself of it. “Self-evident” in Jefferson’s vocabulary meant that this postulate carried the force of words when presented as reason and moral sense of man. Since all men were sensible of this truth from the beginning of time, “self-evident” truths must be regarded as irrefutable an eternal. Jefferson did not assert the legal and constitutional rights of man; he asserted the natural, imperceptible and “self-evident” rights of all men everywhere. A more urgent question in the American context was whether these “universal” human rights applied equally to black slaves. One third of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were slave owners, most of whom had no intention of sacrificing their right to hold human being against their will in enslavement. Anthony Benezet a Philadelphia Quaker wrote, “When men talk of liberty, they mean their own liberty and seldom suffer their thoughts on that part to stray to their neighbour.”
By omitting the word “property from his rights of man--life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness--Jefferson seemed to place human rights above property rights, thereby removing one of the principle obstacles to the emancipation of slaves. Jefferson himself never put forward this explanation of his failure to include the right to property among the inalienable rights of man. If Jefferson excluded property from the inalienable rights of men in the Declaration of Independence, for any purpose, he did not do it in order to weaken the hold of slave owners, but to foster the confiscation by the new state governments of property belonging to Loyalists and other British subjects. Even before in August of 1774 did Jefferson propose an invasion of property rights. In that time, Patrick Henry and himself had recommended that all payments on British debts by suspended for the duration of the dispute with the British government--the entire revolution. January 1778, the bill proposed to confiscate enemy property for benefit of the state became a law.
Yet, Jefferson’s concept of property rights and his regards to the absolute rights of man led him to regard the possession of human beings as an illegitimate form of property. No man had a natural right to enslave another man and to take from him the “fruits of his labor”. By taking the word “property” away he made it possible for the opponents of slavery to cite the Declaration of Independence as support of human freedom. Jefferson was convinced the self-evident truths he precluded continued existence of slavery in the United States. Shortly after the adoption of the Declaration, he drafted a constitution for the state of Virginia in which he supported the gradual abolition of slavery. He did not insist upon the immediate and absolute emancipation of slaves. He never once ceased to believe that there was an invisible line between color that divided the two races by nature.
By the summer of 1776, he became convinced that slavery was far to solidly rooted into society to be easily rid of. He knew that, while many Virginians deplored slavery and professed the wish nothing so fervently as to be delivered from its “hateful embrace”, however, when a plan for eliminating slavery was proposed they became immobilized; silent. To Jefferson, as most Southern patriots of the revolution, “slavery” was primarily an evil which King George III and his government had imposed upon the American people rather than an institution which held almost half a million blacks on American soil in bondage and to which they held some type of responsibility for parenting. 
TO BE CONTINUED.
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keywestlou · 4 years
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MAX YASGUR'S WOODSTOCK
Max Yasgur was a farmer who will forever be known because of Woodstock. It was the summer of 1969. He rented his farm land for 1 week to Woodstock’s sponsors.
The sponsors had been trying for some time to find a site to hold what would become a musical event never to be forgotten. They sought a central New York place for the event.
The area small town America. City fathers and residents were not in favor.
Finally, the sponsors discovered Max Yasgur. He owned a farm in Bethel, N.Y. He agreed to rent 600 acres of his farm for 1 week. The rental fee not certain. Most suspect it was $75,000.
Max was approaching 50 at the time. He was a pro-Vietnam War political conservative. Believed in the right of free expression. Respected people with lifestyles and beliefs different from his own.
Once word got out re Yasgur’s renting of his farm, his neighbors became aroused. Most were unhappy. Yasgur not only grew produce,  he was a dairy farmer. Signs suddenly went up around Bethel: “Don’t buy Yasgur’s milk.”
Fifty thousand were expected. Five hundred thousand showed up.
Everything was insufficient. Crowd control, toilets, water, food being examples.
Some neighbors sued Yasgur after the event for damage to their properties. Yasgur sued the sponsors for failing to do whatever was necessary to control the event. Everyone sued everyone. In the end, the lawsuits amounted to next to nothing.
Yasgur’s neighbors gradually returned. They threw him a dinner to show their renewed love for him. Except for the proprietor of the general store. Yasgur and his wife remained persona non grata.
Yasgur purchased a vacation home in Florida. In the Keys. Marathon to be exact. He moved to Marathon full time following the sale of his Bethel farm.
Yasgur died in Marathon in 1973.
Rolling Stones published obituaries. Only musicians were given the honor of a full page obituary. Rolling Stones opted to give Yasgur a full page. Though not a musician, he was recognized as having played a vital part in Woodstock.
Key West has many musicians residing here. I am confident a number were at Woodstock. I am only aware of two. My friends Larry Smith and Chrstine Cordone. They had to be kids back then.
Larry often talks about Woodstock.
Last night was Syracuse basketball. Syracuse beat Wake Forest by 2 points 75-73.
A typical Syracuse game this season. Syracuse had a 12 point lead in the first half, 10 at half time, and then had to work hard to come out on top by 2.
A win is a win, however. Syracuse keeps crawling back.I think they have won 7 of their last 9 games.
Today busy. Sloan at noon. Hot Dog Church later in the afternoon. Followed by Kate Miano’s Gardens.
Shoestring Weekends ran an interesting blog this morning. Made reference to the Last Chance Saloon. Not a Key West bar. Rather located just south of Florida City at mile marker 126.7. The “unofficial official” entrance to the Florida Keys.
The significance of the Shoestring blog was a sign on the outside of the Last Chance Bar: Inside Toilets.
Brought to mind a Stock Island bar that was the place to be for fun and rowdiness in the mid 1900’s. Its name I cannot recall. The sign on the front of its building I can: Free Beer Tomorrow.
I have begun the podcast show I stopped doing 2 yeas ago. Renamed it. Now: What’s Bugging Me Today.” Found on my Key West Lou page.
The podcast short. Yesterday’s 7 minutes. Today’s will be less than 1 minute.
Tino time again.
Tonight, the Academy Awards. There should be an award for best “extra.” Tino would win.
Yesterday he played a political hack. Today, a mail man.
Talented.
    Enjoy your Sunday!
  MAX YASGUR’S WOODSTOCK was originally published on Key West Lou
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naturecoaster · 5 years
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Discover the History of Florida's Nature Coast
"A string of counties studded with emerald-like gulf waters, deep springs and rivers, stretching along the same Florida coast" is how world-famous naturalist John Muir described Florida’s Nature Coast in 1867. In the 20th century, the Nature Coast of Florida was known as “the lonesome leg” of Florida by boaters and other travelers because of the lack of light along the coast from Tallahassee to Clearwater.
How did we become Florida's Nature Coast?
Florida’s Nature Coast begins at Ochlockonee Bay in Wakulla County and works its way south along the Gulf Coast of Florida. In the 1990s, the tourism leaders of each of the eight counties that today make up Florida’s Nature Coast banded together to market themselves as a region. One city joined the “Nature Coast Coalition” – Dunnellon, Florida. The name "Nature Coast" was devised in 1991 as part of a marketing campaign to attract vacationers to the area which was also formally known as the "Big Bend" of Florida. There were meetings held at various locations and each member contributed to the branding campaign which was truly a bootstrap effort. Because the area is so large, about 980,000 acres, attending meetings was a full day effort, with participants bringing their own lunches and carpooling.
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A poster was commissioned and printed. NatureCoaster proudly has a copy of it framed in our office. "Walkin' Lawton" declares Florida's "Nature Coast" name through Proclamation The governor at the time was Lawton Chiles, known as “Walkin’ Lawton” because he embarked on a 1,003-mile, 91-day walk across Florida from Pensacola to Key West in 1970. The walk earned him the nickname that would follow him throughout his political career. In his journal, Chiles wrote that sometimes he walked alone, while other times he met ordinary Floridians along the way.
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"'Walking Lawton' walked 1,033 miles in 91 days from Pensacola to Miami, and into the US Senate, defeating a former Governor and a Speaker of the House. (Florida State Archives) Chiles would recall how the walk allowed him to see Florida's natural beauty, as well as the state's problems, with fresh eyes, and one of his acts as Florida’s 41st governor was to issue a proclamation in 1994 that the area from Wakulla County to Pasco County along Florida’s Gulf Coast would now and forever more be known as Florida’s “Nature Coast”. Driving is the best way to see Florida's Nature Coast Wikipedia states, “The Nature Coast is an informal, unofficial region of the U.S. state of Florida. The broadest definition of the Nature Coast includes the eight counties that abut the Gulf of Mexico from west to east, Wakulla, Jefferson, Taylor, Dixie, Levy, Citrus, Hernando, and Pasco counties. Driving is the best way to experience Florida’s Nature Coast. US19/98 allows travelers to see this region up close, with its historic towns and cities, vast state forests, parks, and natural springs. A Nature Coast Driving Tour project was created by the Nature Coast Coalition. Big prizes, including a week on a houseboat, tours, dining, gift certificates and more were contributed by regional businesses.
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Bears moving mean more bears crossing roads. Please be on the lookout for native wildlife while driving. FWC photo. A driving tour was developed for each county in the Coalition. Entrants were to take the tour, recording their adventures and submitting photos and more. It was a lot of fun. You can find (and download) the Driving Tours for Citrus, Hernando and Pasco Counties by clicking on each county's name. Be forewarned, some of the places on the tours are no longer the same. For example, J.B. Starkey's Flatwood Adventures in Pasco is now primarily Starkey Ranch. People lived in Florida's Nature Coast as far back as the Pleistocene Era The indigenous people of Florida date back to 12,000 years before Christ, including human fossilized bones of the Pleistocene era found in the Nature Coast (Devils Den, Williston). Paleo era Indians used the Crystal River Archaeological State Park as a ceremonial burial place, with a large mound located on the site with actual remains in it, as well as some unique steeles. Tours are available, as well as artifacts preserved onsite in the museum.
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The Crystal River Archaeological State Park houses the remains of prehistoric Native American lives. The view from above Temple Mound A gives visitors a glimpse into the magnificent environment that supported these early peoples. The first white settlers to come here included Ponce de Leon, who brought cattle and horses to the area. In fact, until the 1950s, there were no fences to hold livestock in. Florida was an open range state. As the U.S. government sought to “settle” the land of La Florida through the Armed Occupation Act of 1842, which stated that a “head of family, or single man over eighteen,” provided that claimant could bear arm was required to live “in a house fit for habitation for 5 consecutive years” and “cultivate at (least) five acres” to receive up to 160-acres free and clear. Senator David Levy was a NatureCoaster Area resident, and congressional delegate, David Levy encouraged settlers to take advantage of this offer enthusiastically. In a letter to the National Intelligencer, Levy sold the advantages of living in Florida: “To the wealthy planter, Florida is eminently inviting … But to the poor and the moderate in circumstance, it is, beyond comparison, the paradise of earth. There are no freezing winters to be provided against by close houses, magazines of supplies for embargoed and shivering families … The means of subsistence are obtained with less labor, and labor is more productive, and industry more quickly blessed with accumulation and plenty than is conceivable to the inhabitants of a less fortunate region.”
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The Yulee Sugar Mill Ruins State Park was once part of a thriving sugar plantation owned by Florida's first State Senator, David Levy Yulee. Mr. Levy owned a large plantation in the Homosassa area, called Tiger Tail, where he grew sugar cane and processed it into cane syrup. The remains of his sugar mill can be seen on Yulee Road at the Yulee Sugar Mill Ruins State Park. If you would like to see the process of making syrup from sugar cane, the Pioneer Florida Museum has a sugar cane festival each February. Natural Beauty is a big part of Florida's Nature Coast - then and now The springs are an amazing natural phenomenon where hundreds of thousands of gallons of fresh water push through the karst geography of the region to create rivers, lakes and “holes” of clear, clean H2O that stays at a constant 72 degrees. They have been a stable source of drinking water for fauna including fish and manatees, as well as humans for millennia. Throughout time, Florida’s Nature Coast has had an abundance of natural beauty. The cedar forests were decimated in the early 1900s for shipment to the north. There were entire towns built around sawmills, very few of which exist today. Centralia, a company town once located in what is now the Chassahowitzka Wildlife Management Area off US19 in northwestern Hernando County is an example.
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An old growth cypress tree in the Chassahowitzka Wildlife Management area left over from the 1900s logging company in Centralia. Phosphate was a huge industry around the same time throughout the Nature Coast. High-grade hard rock phosphate was discovered near Dunnellon in 1889 by Albertus Vogt, triggering a land boom as 215 phosphate companies were started locally within five years! Today there is a phosphate trail that highlights this history. Today, the culture of Florida’s Nature Coast is still one of southern small towns. While Pasco County has rebranded itself as the Sports Coast and Hernando County has rebranded itself as the Adventure Coast, and the Gulf coastline has become more built up over the years, it is still common to see large water birds flying overhead, dolphins and manatees frolicking in the sea and fish of all sizes propelling themselves along.
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The historic courthouses, eateries and specialty retailers in historic buildings, an abundance of nature-based tour operators and fishing guides are all part of what makes Florida’s Nature Coast a magical place. Let's work together to keep it that way!     Read the full article
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thescienceofequus · 7 years
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Wild Horses: The Consequences of Doing Nothing
Failing to manage wild herds in Western states, experts say, could have devastating effects on rangelands—and all of the animals that depend on them.
National Geographic | 7 February, 2017
Article and above images by Ben Masters
The ecological consequences of poor grazing management in the desert ecosystems of the American West’s Great Basin can be severe. To find out how severe, I met Dr. Barry Perryman, rangeland ecology professor at the University of Nevada, at a dry water well near the 230,000-acre Fish Creek Complex Herd Management Area on public lands managed overseen by the Bureau of Land Management near Eureka, Nevada.
About 50 wild horses greeted us and stood around the well, waiting for BLM staff to fill it up because there isn’t enough naturally occurring water to keep the horses alive. The BLM’s Appropriate Management Level—the population of horses for a thriving natural ecological balance—here is between 101 and 170 horses, but the current population is nearing 500, pretty standard overpopulation rate for Nevada wild horse herds. Statewide, the appropriate management level is 12,800, but the current population is estimated to be more than 34,000.
I had questions for Perryman about the landscape, threats to the local ecosystems, and the possibly fate of the wild horses that call the rangeland home.
Ben Masters: What did this land look like before European settlement, livestock grazing, and the introduction of exotic plants?
Barry Perryman: How far back do you want to go? What is pristine and what is natural? Lots of people want to replicate the land to what it looked like when Lewis and Clark came out here in 1804, but that was at the tail end of a 300-year mini ice age, and no matter what we do, we can’t replicate that. But why 1804? Why don’t we go back thousands of years to the altithermal period, a 3,000-year-long drought that would’ve made this landscape now look like a rainforest? We can’t replicate the past. We’ve put fences on highways, developed infrastructure, introduced exotic plants, and forever changed the ecology of these landscapes. What we can do is plan for the future and manage the land using the best available science to provide habitat, conserve biodiversity, and control exotic plants that we’ve introduced.
A lot of wildlife biologists, ecologists, and conservation organizations blame wild horses for rangeland damage. Why?
Wild horses aren’t at fault. Wild horses are here making a living like every other animal. The fault lies in management. Up until the Taylor Grazing Act was passed in 1934, this area was a grazing free-for-all for anyone with the courage to come out here and bring livestock. It’s undeniable that historic unregulated livestock grazing contributed to erosion and overgrazing, and we still occasionally see some of those legacy effects today. The science of rangeland ecology hadn’t come along yet and the ranching industry didn’t understand the dynamics of the ecosystems they were using. Public land ranching today is highly regulated. But any population of unmanaged large herbivores in an area, even if it’s a million acres, without predators can ultimately cause vegetation damage, whether its deer, elk, cows, sheep, horses, or bison.”
What exactly is overgrazing?
“Grazing isn’t a noun. Grazing is a verb made up of three components: timing, duration, and intensity. Timing is what time of year the grazing occurs. Duration is the amount of time the grazing occurs, and intensity is the amount of animals doing the grazing. There are three main grazing categories that we manage: big game such as elk, deer, and pronghorn; wild horses and burros, and livestock. We can’t do much about timing and duration of big game animals; they’re out there year long and can go anywhere they want. But the intensity, the population size of the big game animals, is managed through predators such as coyotes and mountain lions or through culls and permitted hunting licenses.
All three components of grazing are managed for livestock, mainly cattle and sheep. The BLM tells the rancher how many cattle he or she can graze, how long they can graze, and what time of year they can graze. Wild horses and burros are more similar to big game animals in management except they have limited predators and no hunting permits to manage the grazing intensity or population size. Instead they are rounded up by the BLM. But now that the BLM has stopped conducting enough roundups because they’re spending all their budget warehousing unwanted horses, they’ve allowed wild horses and burros in some areas to become three times, five times, or even 10 times more than the appropriate management level.
This creates a massive problem for the rangeland because the horses are putting unmanaged pressure on forage all day, every day, for the entire year. Eventually, that landscape reaches a threshold where native high-forage-value plants lose the ability to compete with unpalatable, undesirable, or nonnative species. Those undesirable species could then take over a landscape. In the case of cheatgrass, that has the consequence of creating an unnatural fire cycle than can forever change the ecology of the land. The problem isn’t the wild horses; the problem is the inability for the BLM to manage the wild horses at a population size the landscape can healthily sustain.
What is cheatgrass, and how bad can it get?
Cheatgrass is an Asiatic, introduced annual grass that has taken over about 50 million acres of the American West. It is found on about 100 million acres. The problem with cheatgrass is that it’s unpalatable for much of the year and it changes the fire regime. Instead of fires occurring every 100-plus years, cheatgrass can increase the fire regime to every three to seven years, which doesn’t allow enough time for many of the important brushy species to grow back. The more fires there are, the more prevalent the cheatgrass becomes.
As for how bad it can get? I call it the cinder bowl—a play on words of the Dust Bowl that occurred in the 1930s. If we don’t change our management practices to tackle this problem and we continue to lose acreage to cheatgrass monocultures, we could experience fires that are millions of acres, even tens of millions of acres, in size, every single year in the Great Basin. This would affect air quality in Salt Lake City, Reno, Boise and other communities, drastically reduce forage availability, and be the potential nail in the coffin for some local populations of endangered or threatened species.
But this doesn’t have to happen. We have in our management arsenal the tools to manage cheatgrass and conserve native plant communities and the wildlife that depend on them. Lots of people think of the wild horse and burro issue as a political one, as a battle between ranchers and wild horses, and we need to start considering the ecological consequences of continuing to allow unmanaged, exponential growth of wild horses.
What does your crystal ball predict for the wild horses and burros in Nevada?
It’s not pretty. I think there will be an implosion. We have dysfunctionality in the box; we can make the box bigger by taking away more land and forage from wildlife and livestock, but then we would just have more dysfunctionality in an even bigger box. This would buy us time, but eventually we’ll have to make a hard decision or the hard decision will be made for us. If we continue down this path of unregulated breeding and mismanagement, the BLM’s wild horse populations will continue to expand to, say, 100,000, 120,000, or 150,000, maybe more, depending on how many good precipitation years we have.
But eventually a bad winter or extended drought will occur. When that happens, natural regulation will take place. Wild horses and burros could begin starving by the tens of thousands along with the mule deer, elk, pronghorn, and other native wildlife. During the process, all available forage will be under extreme grazing pressure and the ecology of the landscape could be damaged for generations. When the public sees the horses starving to death, there will be an outcry for the BLM to gather them to save their lives. The horses will then be warehoused for the rest of their lives and saved.
But what about the rangeland and everything that depends on it? How is it fair to the reptiles, songbirds, small mammals, pronghorn, and future generations of people to inherit a degraded rangeland that we could have prevented?
How do you define good land management?
That is an interesting question. It has to do with the future. What do we want in the future? What do we want to leave, in terms of legacy, to future generations of humans, landscapes, and wildlife? To me it boils down to resilience. If we have resilient landscapes, with lots of biodiversity in the wildlife and vegetation structure, then they will be able to persevere through whatever changes may occur, whether that will be climate changes, drought cycles, wet cycles, fire, war, you name it. The land will be able to face those things. The more resilient our landscapes are, the better off they, and we, will be in the future.
SEARCHING FOR SOLUTIONS
Perryman’s bleak prediction is already a reality in some areas. During the summer of 2015, public outcry over starving horses in the Cold Creek Area of the Wheeler Pass Herd Management Area just west of Las Vegas, Nevada, pressured the BLM to act. The photos were hard to look at: starving foals suckling from mothers who were just skin and bone; horses with their ribs and hips protruding, too weak to be rounded up. Forage conditions were so dire the horses were eating spiny Joshua trees. The Appropriate Management Level for the herd management area is 47 to 66 wild horses and 20 to 35 burros, but the estimated population was about 400 horses and 150 burros. The BLM conducted an emergency roundup of more than 200 animals, and vets made the decision to euthanize 30 desperately weak individuals. The gathered horses were put up for adoption, and some will likely live in a holding facility for the rest of their lives along with 45,000 other wild horses already locked up.
There isn’t a lot of agreement between different interest groups regarding public lands grazing and the wild horse and burro issue. Wild horse activists often claim “welfare ranchers” have caused tremendous ecological damage, shouldn’t receive government subsidies, that wild horses should receive forage priority on public lands, and that public lands ranchers are costing taxpayers a huge amount of money. Proponents of public land ranching claim that managed grazing is an efficient way to eradicate invasive plants, feeds humans, and stimulates rural economies. And, they argue that public land ranching preserves the livelihoods of cowboys, which are often dependent on public lands and equally or more important than conserving the wild horses.
Meanwhile, many wildlife organizations question why livestock are at the center of a public lands grazing battle when native animals like bison, bighorn sheep, elk, pronghorn, mule deer, wolves, and grizzlies still have lots of room to expand to their historic ranges since being nearly eliminated a century ago.
Nationwide, the BLM currently authorizes 8.6 million animal unit monthlys (AUMs) to ranchers to graze livestock on 150 million acres of BLM public lands. This is fewer than half of the 18 million AUMs issued in the 1950s. In comparison, there are approximately 75,000 wild horses, three times the Appropriate Management Level, effectively utilizing 900,000 AUMs on the 31.2 million acres designated for wild horses.
In 2013, the most recent year I could acquire forage allocation data, the BLM gave out nearly 1.1 million livestock AUMs to ranchers in the Herd Management Areas that were shared with wild horses. Since then, some of those livestock AUMs were decreased due to lack of forage, resulting in the nationwide ratio of wild horse AUMs to livestock AUMs to be about 1:1. This ratio can and does change due to rescinded cattle and livestock permits during drought, rising horse populations, and livestock AUMs reduced due to forage competition by wild horse. In some Herd Management Areas, there is still forage to take away from livestock operators to give to horses. In other areas, especially where horses are up to 10 times over appropriate management level, all or most of the forage has already been taken away from livestock permit holders. Bison, the undisputed native large herbivore in North America, are nonexistent on these same lands.
Every wild horse advocate, rancher, ecologist, BLM employee, biologist, and citizen I’ve interviewed about the complex issue agrees on only one thing: that natural regulation, thousands of horses starving to death, and the destruction of millions of acres of public lands is the very worst scenario possible. But managing excess wild horses is an emotional subject that politicians, public figures, and even the press avoid. Some organizations have filed lawsuits or launched campaigns to sway public opinion toward prohibiting management solutions, including population control, euthanasia, sale, roundups, slaughter, or culls. While the stagnation within the BLM, state governments, and Congress continues, wild horse populations grow exponentially.
Is there a sustainable solution that is publicly acceptable to all stakeholders? I went to the 22,000-acre Spring Creek Basin HMA in southwest Colorado to find out if wild horse advocate TJ Holmes’ technique—slowing population growth with fertility control—was the key.
Ben Masters is a filmmaker, writer, and horse hand who splits his time between Bozeman, Montana, and Austin, Texas. Masters studied wildlife management at Texas A&M University, is a proud owner of six mustangs, and serves as wildlife management chair for the volunteer BLM Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board. Masters is best known for Unbranded, an adventure documentary where he and three friends adopted wild horses and rode 3,000 miles across the American West to inspire people to adopt mustangs. This four-part series and short film presents his experiences, research, and interviews on the controversial wild horse issue in the United States.
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i stg some of my family are so fucking worthless it isn’t even funny 
like...jesus christ, man, can piece of shit cousin just fuck off forever until the end of time already??? 
so my dad made some vague post on facebook the other day about how he doesn’t appreciate other people’s bill collectors calling him and how shitty he thinks that is 
he didn’t name names 
like the way he worded it, you wouldn’t even be able to tell who it was about, it was basically just a “wow, this keeps happening and it’s really pissing me off, next time it happens i’ll escort them to your door” kind of deal but again like...nothing in his original post would have suggested who it was 
he’s got plenty of worthless relatives, it could have easily been about any of them 
but piece of shit cousin (likely feeling guilty as she should) takes it to be about her (and it was) and unfriends him so it’s like lol ok 
he made some other post about being unfriended but again, didn’t say who, didn’t really go into details, just kind of a “good riddance!” type of thing and whatever whatever 
but she then makes her own post (which you can still see even if you’re not friends with her, i should know, lol) about how people need to stop talking shit about her and they just don’t understand and blah blah this, i’m such a victim that, but her post actually directly quotes one of his so...yeah, if someone were looking at hers and his they’d be able to put the two together finally  
plus she said some nasty shit in there about how he should go smoke his life away or some bullshit and so...yeah. 
and so like...y’know, like a human being who’s eaten his acre of shit, my dad directly name calls her the fuck out tonight and in comes piece of shit cousin’s shit for brains brother to defend her 
he’s trying to police the situation like “well, i don’t see why you should drag someone’s personal business out on facebook” and “it was only a few phone calls, i don’t see what the big deal is...” and shit and so...y’know, i had to open my big goddamn mouth and get into it 
so like i explained that it’s actually more than “just a few phone calls” it’s actually been a lot of fucking phone calls and letters and people coming to our goddamn door, so there’s that 
and initially he’d tried to be like, “well, she used to live with you all, naturally they might still have your number” and i shut that shit down like...they haven’t lived with us for like...two fucking years, dude, she should have updated her shit 
especially since she KNOWS. we would take her all the mail we kept getting, that should have been a clue like, “oh yeah, i need to call these people and given them my new address” 
but she didn’t. for any of it. and i know because i myself called some of these places and gave them her new address and they were like, “thanks, she never bothered!” so...there’s that 
like i get it, dude, she’s probably in so deep by this point it’s fucking hopeless but at the same time like...that’s not our problem 
especially not since we gave you a fucking unheard of opportunity to try to get your shit together. 
like...what other grown ass adult gets the chance to come live with family rent free for over a year so they can try to get back on their feet? 
we didn’t ask her for shit and maybe it wouldn’t have solved everything, but it should have been adequate time to get yourself together again 
i mean... she pissed away a good portion of it just sitting on her ass doing nothing about getting a job, but ya know whatever 
occasionally my mom might have asked her for help doing something but again it wasn’t like, “rawww, you have to do this or we’ll throw you out on the streets!!!” it was just “hey, you like to do crafty things, can you help me with this project?” and she’d say “sure!” 
sometimes she’d cook and that was a nice gesture, that was appreciated and nobody demanded she keep doing it 
all we ever asked was just...respect us and respect our house. that’s it. 
and i can tell you in the time they lived here i don’t think she ever once cleaned my bathroom even though i shared it with her and her son and her husband when he was here 
now he would help. even though he’d only be able to drop in every once in a while because he drives a truck, he’d still clean 
and i remember once cleaning that goddamn thing for like...3 hours and it was messy again in less than a week so there was that 
my mom asked like once that in the mornings when she finished making her and her son breakfast if she could just...y’know, clean up after herself because it was kinda frustrating for her to come behind them to make her own and have to wash out those dishes so that she could use them and she’s trying to get to work and just...doesn’t have time for that? 
i mean obviously she put it nicely and shit, but that was like...super duper offensive to piece of shit cousin and so after that she didn’t even bother making breakfast here anymore and would instead just go get fast food or some shit and it’s like...wow, someone asked you nicely to clean your fucking dishes and you have to be petty like that? okay
and of course i pissed her off because i brought up the time piece of shit cousin’s daughter just...invited herself to come stay with us during the summer and when my mom asked she straight up LIED but then lo and behold, my mom comes home and there she is!!! 
and not to mention when she left she took a stack of my books with her and didn’t even ask so that was a thing but whatever 
but like i just made the point that it’s just a courtesy thing, like im their own kid but i still don’t just...have people show up without warning because i dunno if they’ve got something on, like maybe mom doesn’t want to have company over this weekend, it’s her house, she pays the bills, it’s not my place to just thrust that upon her 
i didn’t really go into that much detail, but i just kinda brought that up and man, if looks could fuckin kill, dude, she would have murdered me right then and there 
but so after that she was suddenly able to find a place to live and was out of our hair like that and it was like...alright, cool 
we tried to maintain a good relationship with her, like we still went over to her house for stuff and still spent time together and shit, it’s not like that was the end of it, but it was the beginning of the end, i think 
because gradually as time went on like just shit started spilling out, all the shady shit and it’s just built up and up and up and finally my dad’s just...he’s had it 
he’s been dealing with this kind of bullshit all his life and he’s just...he’s over it. he’s done. rightfully so 
and so like...i don’t give a fuck if he puts it on facebook or takes out an ad in the paper that says “hey everyone, let me tell you about this bitch i know” because i think by this point he’s fucking entitled to that????? 
i mean...if for nothing fucking else then the shit about the land 
he gave her a small piece of land that he explained was deeply important to him. it’s important to him that it stays in the family and he explained the entire meaning behind it and everything, k? 
all she had to do was pay the taxes on it and like...jesus christ, it was ridiculously cheap. i’m talking like...less than $100 once a year cheap, if i remember correctly 
but even then like he said, “hey, but if you get into a tight spot and you can’t pay that please let me know and i’ll help you out because i don’t want anything to happen to that land, i won’t mind a bit” and she said okay 
he assumed everything was okay and any time he ever asked her about it she swore up and down that she was paying it, that everything was taken care of, etc., etc 
but then lo and fucking behold, he finds out that they’re about to put that piece of land up for auction or some shit because the taxes haven’t been paid so the state’s taking it back 
and he’s understandably FURIOUS but even then he doesn’t go straight to her 
he spends a lot of time trying to get with a lawyer and driving up to kentucky and getting together enough money to pay back what’s owed (which with fines and shit is now in the thousands) but he eventually gets it back and even still he doesn’t say anything
he does tell her husband, though and at some point he tells her so now she knows that my dad knows 
do you think she ever bothered to confront him about it, though? do you think she ever had the fucking courage to do the right thing and sit down with him and apologize? NOPE 
she never fucking bothered 
she was gonna try to get by with that for as long as she could and hope that no one would notice and as long as she wasn’t being directly called on it, she didn’t have to deal with it 
and that’s how she operates, like...that’s what this whole fucking thing is about 
she will try to get by with whatever she can so long as no one confronts her about it and when they do then they’re the bad guy and nobody understands how hard it is for poor her, she’s such a victim in all this!!!! 
never mind the fact that somehow she made it out of our house with a box full of my sister’s things and had them for two years and somehow just never noticed and never returned them and then when she packed up and left she left those behind to get fucking thrown away 
had it not been for her husband (soon to be her ex, he’s working on it but she’s not doing her part) going over there and cleaning up after her we would have never gotten them back 
also there are some pictures my dad kept in his truck that are now missing. they were like old pictures back from when he and my mom first started dating and they’re not bad pictures but they really only mean something to the both of them but now they’re just...gone 
oh and let’s not forget when we let them stay with us when their power was out during the summer and $60 ended up missing from my mom’s purse... 
but yeah no, man, like she’s a TOTAL beacons of purity and goodness and never, ever does anything wrong 
everything bad that ever happens to her is because of someone or something else, she never has any control whatsoever and it’s this big, bad world that’s made her this way 
everything’s either her parents’ fault or one of her ex’s faults or us or just...who the fuck ever she can blame shit on 
whatever gives her an excuse to point the finger at someone so that she doesn’t have to own up to her shit and actually do something about it 
she’d rather sit on her ass and have a giant pity party while trying to make it seem like she’s just so underappreciated and unloved and boo-hoo 
fuck that nonsense 
i get that people who have been through some shit and had shitty upbringings have a hard time in the world, i really do 
but like...jesus christ, we did not mistreat her and yet the way she’s done us you’d think we had day in and day out 
it’s also not a fucking excuse because like...hell-goddamn-o both of my parents had it rough 
my mom was sexually abused by family members (including a grandfather and one of her brothers (not one of my two uncles, the one i’ve never met who apparently died a few years ago and we just found out so that’s been fucking with her this week) and physically and mentally abused by both her parents growing up. her family was fucking poor as shit and she had to fight so goddamn hard to be where she is. 
i know everyone on that side of the family thinks she’s some stuck up bitch living in a big house looking down on everyone or some shit but like...she worked for it. she didn’t inherit some money or win the lottery, she fought tooth and goddamn nail for what she’s got. she’s tried to build a life for herself and no, she’s not perfect, she’s still weighed down by a lot of demons and the loss of a child hasn’t helped a fucking bit, but she’s still trying, she’s not giving up 
and my dad like...christ, neither of his parents wanted shit to do with him. his mother way physically and verbally abusive to him and he ended up living with other relatives and had to work from a very young age to help support the family. he’s been through goddamn vietnam and when he tried to build a life for himself and his three sons his wife made sure to ruin all of that. he’d be out busting his ass all week long to make a paycheck and she’d turn around and put them in debt before he could even get to the bank. she turned his kids against him and to this day he doesn’t have a good relationship with any of them (even though well into their adulthood he still tried to help them, giving all of them at different points jobs and helping with school and giving them vehicles to drive and a roof over their heads, etc., etc). and again, has he been perfect? no. but like...he still kept working. his business went belly up and he ended up retiring. but he never just...laid down in a ditch and started blaming everyone else for his problems even though he could have 
both of them could have like...shit, if i’d been through even a sliver of what either of them has i wouldn’t be able to function, honestly. 
and i realize everyone’s capacity for shit is different, everyone’s mental state is different, etc. etc, but still. 
point being, she had someone at some point in her life who tried to help her and didn’t ask for shit in return other than “please respect us” and even that was too high a request and it’s been a constant stream of bullshit and disrespect ever since 
and if he’s bringing this to facebook then...who gives a shit, honestly? it’s fucking facebook 
we’ve already established that trying to handle shit in person gets us fucking nowhere 
either she’ll make up a lie and tell it to your face or she’ll just not say anything and pretend like she’s gonna consider what you’re saying and then the next second she’s finding 500 ways to fuck you over and give you the finger while doing it so...ya know 
the only thing she has to fall back on is the idea of herself that she can sell to people who don’t know any better and that’s all she does online 
she builds herself up as this tragic hero who’s doing her best and life just won’t give her a break 
she’ll talk shit all day long about how this person needs to be doing this and this person ought to be doing that but when it’s time for her to actually be responsible...eh 
so fuck her 
and fuck this family, man like...god 
i’m so sick of this shit and this all again is more reason why when people try to tell you to defend your family no matter what, that blood is thicker than water blah blah blah like...nope 
i didn’t choose to be related to these people because if i’d been given the choice i would have stayed as far away as humanly possible 
you don’t owe anyone shit. if you share some blood, doesn’t fucking matter. if they’re not showing you respect you honest to god don’t owe them anything, i don’t care how fucking related you are. 
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notsdlifter · 4 years
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Middle Children
                    "A historian who would convey the truth must lie. Often, he must enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his reader would not be able to see it."  -- Mark Twain
            It is a philosophical conundrum that I first encountered in college. A professor, looking at stadium seats filled with students nursing hangovers, asks the class “do you want to know where you are going to die?” Someone stifles a yawn. A jock in the back-row T’s off “nah . . . it’d spoil the fun.” A bookish girl in the front row wades in deliberately, “knowing would enable a person to plan and live life to the fullest.” The classroom splinters over the next twenty minutes as students interject answers that are subtle variation of those two camps. This question has troubled scholars and teenage potheads since time immemorial.
I do not know when you are going to die, but I can tell you exactly where the death will originate. The place has produced every near apocalypse in American history. The death toll runs into the hundreds of millions and counting. And it is the very last place that you’d expect to be on the forefront of the next, great American catastrophe.  
The place is a sleepy little town in Kansas. The birthplace of madness and the garden of the future apocalypse.  Kansas is a paradox, a difficult thing to pin down, a place so backwards that the land itself can’t even make up its mind. Most think that the history of Kansas is all progress propaganda and the pioneer spirit. The iconic image of the brawny settler perched atop a wagon squinting his eyes while he surveyed the “Great American Desert” is the Great Plains’ version of Betty the Riveter. The settlers came, they saw, and they kicked Kansas’ grass covered ass. It is the version that Hollywood portrays in its movies about the Sunflower State. It is a secret history that hides the true excitement behind the Wizard’s purple curtain. For there is another side to the tale that few writers or historians have ever touched.
Kansas prairies were occupied long before the Egyptians built pyramids in the Valley of the Kings. The history is ancient, the mystery is unsolved. The tale that most American’s know is a half-truth; a partial representation that filters the State’s macabre history through the canvas of Norman Rockwell that is closer to cliché than reality. The people that could tell this tale are dead, murdered by white settlers coming to terminate the “great market for bodies and souls” or pursue the dream of free land riches.
But if you listen to Kansas’ history, the real history, you can hear it whispering its enigmatic legacy. An amazing string of evil coincidences defines the region. For Kanas has had its finger on nearly every American war, international disaster, and global pandemic since the human beings crossed the ice bridge.  And that evil is still here waiting under an ocean of winter wheat waiting . . .
Brief Revision
For those of you who missed the minute history class devoted to Kansas history let me take you back before human beings. Eons before the Great Plains stretched across the borders of Kansas, the whole place was the Western Interior Sea. Even today, it is not uncommon to find a fossilized tooth shark in the middle of a wheat field. Geology indicates that Kansas was once home to a great mountain range. Once mountains, then ocean, and now the largest tall grass prairie in the world. You might say that confusion is in Kansas’ blood.
There is a wildness to Kansas. A mixture of uncontrolled rage and relentless ambition that have made the state a breeding ground for a special kind of “madness.”
The madness—if it can even be called that—originated in the geographical enter of the United States thousands of years before the signing of the constitution. Resting inside of the rib cage of the burgeoning nation, within the heartbeat of a vast Indian community, was a hidden power that would dictate the outcome of world history.
The madness is ancient, perhaps as old as the land itself. Some say it began after the Indians were forced off their land, taught Christianity and beaten till their tan plains skin bled a socially acceptable brand Uncle Sam blue. An ancestral curse, or some form of national karma for the wrongs done to the Indians.
Various Indian tribes inhabited Kansas throughout the ages, but the dominant tribe was the Osage. A proud people whose Indian name, Ni-U-Kon-Ska, means little children of the middle waters, the Osage inhabited a swath of prairie stretching from the Kansas plains all the way down to the deep canyon cut rocks of the Texas panhandle. The Osage were not specifically a warrior-like tribe, nor where they agrarian. They were a nomadic band of hunters that managed their massive prairie land. For centuries stretching back millenniums before Columbus, the Osage grew into the land. The earth, much like the buffalo they hunted, become an integral part of the tribe. They listened nature, respond to her wisdom, and adapted their lifestyle to suit this knowledge. This connection ran deep, and the prairie flourished.
Then the Spaniard came. He was one of the firsts in a maddening string of Kansas’ firsts. It was the promise of riches that brought Spaniards 5,000 miles across the Atlantic. In 1540, at the height of Spanish power, Francisco Vázquez de Coronado y Luján marched his army right through the center of the Osage country. He brought only 330 armed Spanish soldiers clad in plate metal and morion helmets capped with a steel Mohawk and a single read feather. He had a thousand Indians in tow. Some as scouts, most as slaves, Coronado’s Indians spearheaded north through the center of the Osage country in search of Quivira, the mythical seven cities of gold. Coronado was especially interested in gold bars and rumors of hyper-sensuous virgins. He marched for years and ended up stopping in what is now Token-Oak, Kansas.  He set up camp on the top of black hills now known as the Hollows and stopped. After three years marching, Coronado stood on those barren hills and decided to return home.
Shortly thereafter, things went to shit. He never found the gold to fill Spanish coffers, only Indians, buffaloes, and grass as far as the eye could see. When he left the rolling hills of Token-Oak, he walked west back into the prairie. With such flat land, there were no landmarks for the Spanish use for navigation. The ominous prairie sky, unobstructed by trees and mountains, closed in on the party. The elements and the Osage descended.  
Then the madness came—as it comes to all people in this narrative—and seized Coronado. As his party began to fracture, he wanted to make an example out of the discontent. In the open prairie, just outside of Token-Oak, he tortured, raped, and dismembered Indian members of his party.  And sleeping under the vast sky, surrounded by natives, listening to the strong night winds sweep the ocean of prairie grass across the flat plains, the madness tickled Coronado. The subtle sound of millions of bottlebrush husks floating on top of the wind like barely audible whispers. Underneath the wind, all the time, was the fear.
Coronado left the state forever, but it never left him. The madness walked within the conquistador’s ranks taking the life of his compatriots in an endless series of bizarre accidents. Starving Spaniards stumbled off the edge of cliffs. One soldier cut off his own scrotum. Another got syphilitic dementia so bad that he gorged himself on his own flesh. Of three hundred Spaniards, less than twenty made it home. Coronado lost his considerable fortune and, due to the atrocities that he committed on those Kansas Plains, his respect. Penniless and ostracized from the government, he died in Mexico City.
Only a handful of Coronado’s party made it back to Spain. The Spanish Empire, which crossed oceans with its mighty navy and dominated indigenous people the word over, collapsed.  The greatest import—at least in terms of impact on the nation—that the Spaniards ever brought back was not Aztec gold, Chinese silks, or African diamonds. It was Kansas crazy. And that crazy brought the empire to its knees.
The second explorer to visit Token-Oak, Kansas, was the world-renowned Meriwether Lewis, of the Lewis and Clark Duo. As manifest destiny began to sweep the nation, and the burgeoning country “bought” millions of acres of unexplored territory. Thomas Jefferson commissioned a small band of explorers to chart the newly acquired land. Lewis and Clark shot up the raging waters of the mighty Mississippi river and paddled up its largest tributary, the Missouri River, on their way to the west coast. The two men left the river and explored the Northeastern corner of Kansas for a three -week period.
Lewis and Clark encountered small bands of mounted Osage Indians in the areas surrounding modern day Token-Oak. Meriwether, a man that had a legendary drinking problem and a rapier wit, took things too far and had his way with some of the local. He tasted all the local fare he could wrap his nasty prairie-caked hands around. Allegedly, there were three scourges of the Plains Indians: whiskey, disease, and Meriwether Lewis. Lewis and Clark pushed their way up the Missouri River, all the way to the pacific shores of Oregon leaving Token-Oak and its bizarre black hills behind.
After “conquering” the great unknown, Lewis and Clark returned to their respective homes, Clark to St. Louis and Lewis to Louisiana. Conquering Indians became a passion for Lewis as he became the head of the newly formed Bureau of Indian Affairs and directly assisted in white settling of the plains. For years, Lewis cleared land and managed various tribe’s relocation.
When the madness overcame Lewis, it brought him down in style. Apparently, the old Indian slayer checked himself into a hotel on his way from Louisiana to Washington D.C. He was speaking some crazy shit. He demanded a bowl of soup with three spoons. Hotel proprietors heard him orating to himself as if giving a thunderous closing statement at a trial. He secluded himself in his room. The end came in the predawn hours of October 11th, Lewis pulled a shotgun from his horse saddle next to his bed, stuck the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
Now, here is the crazy part. The proprietor noted two clear shots and Lewis had two wounds. Wrap your mind around this thought. Lewis pulled the trigger and probably blew the lower set of teeth and a cheek out of his face. The blast burn alone would be enough to sear exploded flesh. After the first shot, with half his face gone, Lewis picked up his rifle, loaded the gun powder and ball, and fired a second shot into his stomach. That, my friends, is Kansas crazy. The madness in it rawest, physically overcoming, other worldly form.
About fifty years later, the madness went national. The most devastating war ever to strike the United States. A conflict that killed over 600,000 civilians and burned dozens of American cities to the ground . . . yep, that started just outside of Token-Oak, too.
With the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the growing nation decided to allow residents of the new territories to decide if the area would be a slave-bearing state. In that sense, moving out to Kansas was either a noble endeavor or to ensure the furtherance of the slavery establishment. To Kansas went prophets, hermits, abolitionists, fundamentalists, pro-slavery settlers, and profiteers. Kansas was the first “actual” battle ground of the Civil war. The idea of popular sovereignty—the agreement that each new state would decide by popular vote to be anti- or pro-slavery—became a lightning rod. Slave states, especially Missouri, sent thousands of pro-slavery settlers to win a majority in the vote for slavery in Kansas. Conversely, abolitionists from Iowa to New England sent people, too. Two governments sprung up in Kansas each vying for control of the new constitution. Conflicts raged around the newly established territory. Bombs went off. Cannon boomed hot. Years before the War consumed the nation it soaked Kansas soil red. A mere reference to “Bleeding Kansas” had a one southern member of the House of Representatives brandish a walking cane and nearly bludgeon his northern colleague to death on the floor of the United States Senate.
About eighty miles southeast of Token-Oak, a northern abolitionist, John Brown, attacked a gang of slave drivers with a broad sword. Brown had a giant set of testicles and a stare that could burn a hole through steel. He hatched a plan was to drive a small group of followers into the heart of the south, seize the weapons stash, and lead an army of slaves across the southern United States on a veritable romp in the name of the Lord. Brown died in the raid at Harper’s Ferry, but his ideas lived on. The long-held fear that he exposed in Southerners ignited the conflict. Slaves made up nearly half of the Confederate population. The simple thought that a man could run into the South, arm slaves, and lead a rebellion was too much for the slave drivers. The roots of that fear were planted in Kansas soil and sprouted the bloodiest conflict in American history.
And the madness was just getting warmed up.
In 1881, Kansas was the first state to outlaw the sale of alcohol in its state constitution. A fierce lady named Kerry Nation burst into salons with a hatchet and smashed barrels of whiskey and bottles of beer. She described herself as “a bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what He doesn't like.” Arrested some thirty times for her raids on saloons and unabashed temperance, Ms. Nation never backed down from a fight. She personally sowed the seeds of the prohibition movement that led to the birth of organized crime and the development of the drug trade.
Then the madness went global. In 1918, in an army barracks just outside of Token-Oak, a soldier in Fort Riley, Kansas, came down with the flu. A few days later, that soldier was dead, and half the barracks were sick. A global pandemic had ignited outside of an eerie Kansas town that sat on the Smoky River and spread across the world. This flu infected over five hundred million people at its peak. Once the dust settled, estimates state that seventy million people across the world died from H1N1.
About twelve years after the Kansas-based super flu nearly crippled the planet, another sinister disaster sprung from Kansas soil. Just west of Token-Oak, farmers watched two-thousand-foot-tall clouds roll across the ground towards their homes. The low moving blackness sent waves of birds and jackrabbits screaming ahead of the dirt like an army of half a billion Paul Reveres warning of hell. Trillions of dust particles carried static energy so strong that it fried the electrical systems in cars and shorted radios. Waves of grasshoppers descended upon any scraps of plants in an Old Testament style reaping.
Before the Great Depression, people fled to Kansas in droves. Towns sprung up along newly established railway roots. Settlers came to farm the prairie and plant Kansas' biggest cash crop: red winter wheat. A family could cheaply buy a section of land (640 acres) and begin to plant. Brand new Kansans turned millions of acres of centuries old prairie grass upside down in the span of a few months. As the hopeful inhabitants carved up the prairie on the backs of their lumbering John Deere’s, the land struck back. The rains stopped. The winds came. And they blew—and blew—and blew rolling mountains of earth across the plains.
The giant dusters brought a hundred thousand tons of earth in tiny dust particles. Houses in the wake of these black monoliths were stripped of paint and buried in sand-like dunes of dirt that drifted fifteen feet high. Kansas dust filled the lungs of children and the elderly choking their capillaries creating a wheezing cough the produced pitch-black phlegm. As gritty Kansas earth invaded people's lungs, they expelled it with a hacking cough mixed with blood. Every American in those black days swallowed a little piece of the prairie. The dry dirt drowned the oceans of freshly planted wheat and caused entire herds of cattle to go blind. For nearly a decade, these storms romped across the Great Plains at it most vulnerable point in history. It took the French and then the Americans nearly 50 years to dig the Panama Canal. Each dust storm produced three times that much dirt in 5 minutes. 
Then the madness began appearing in world events like a drive by shooter. Right at the end of the Dust Bowl, the eyes of the world were fixated on the massive Zeppelin landing in Manchester Township, New Jersey. The Zeppelins were a scientific marvel that would surely soon be frequented by bourgeoisie travels from across the world. Initially, the monstrous blimps were designed to use helium as their lifting agent. Helium, after all, was not nearly as explosive as hydrogen. Ironically, the largest supply of helium in the world rested underneath the prairie grass of Kansas. Poor Kansas had the most bountiful source of rare gas and, due to a trade embargo, was not sharing. A spark of static caused the hydrogen-fill blimp to ignite. Kansas gas claimed the first lives of WWII through the trade embargo that kept its helium locked beneath its soil.
In the mid-1940s, at the beginning of the United States nuclear weapons testing boom in Nevada, scientists began studying nuclear fallout. After the Trinity detonation in July of 1945, the government started receiving complaints across the nation from Kodak about foggy X-ray film. Fact is that film canisters were packed in a corn derivative from Kansas that had become irradiated. Turns out Kansas was especially susceptible as heavy plains storms pulled iodine 131 out of the air and bathed the ocean of buffalo grass in radioactive soup. If someone passed a Geiger counter across the Midwest, Kansas will betray the Chernobyl-like fallout.
Kansas kids were the most affected by this governmental misstep. As cows consumed the contaminated grass; kids drank the milk. Long before the milk industry launched its “got milk” campaign that glorified consuming the opaque cow product by shooting celebrities with yogurt-stained upper lips, there was a twenty-year decline in milk drinking. Why? Because the milk went bad. It picked up radiation and the kids—the poor effin’ kids—drank the shit like it was straight from their momma’s teat. Does a body good my ass! The radiation, though it did not originate craziness in Kansas, certainly compounded the problem. But that was just the beginning of Kansas’ nuclear worries.
Kansas does not just create disasters, wars, and madness; it also creates hall of fame college basketball coaches. It is a virtual mecca of the sport. James A. Naismith, the inventor of the game was the University of Kansas’ first coach. His predecessor, Forrest “Phog” Allen brought accolades galore. The paragon of other tradition powers—North Carolina’s Dean Smith and Kentucky’s Adolph Rupp—both played from the Jayhawks before coaching their teams to multiple titles at their respective schools. Moreover, Wilt “the Stilt” Chamberlain was born and played his college ball in Lawrence. That’s right, the only guy to score 100 points in a game and, I will argue the more astounding accomplishment, is the only man to have slept with 20,000 women.
20,000 women. Imagine that. Essentially, “the Stilt” was able to rise above the limitations that the Lord gave him. He battled through STDs, fatigue, a depleted sperm reserve, and the inevitable road rash to tap twenty . . . thousand . . . women. Mathematically, he had to have a woman a day since he was 15 years old. It sounds impossible, I know, but when you start throwing in the weekend orgies it is totally doable. It took devotion, a high pain threshold, and a hell of sex drive, but the Stilt swung is stick with more consistence than DiMaggio's 56 in 41’. When all is said in done, and centuries pass, and governments rise and fall, the people of the future will look back on Chamberlain’s 20K lay. It is a record that will never be broken.  
Kansas’ sports acumen is not limited to the hardwood of the basket basketball court or the bedpost. The madness has created an innate desire to run. The town of Wichita, Kansas is home to some of the best runners in world history. Local Wichita track speedster Jim Ryun was the first human being to break the four-minute mile. The greatest running backs ever to play were born or played their football in Kansas. Jim Thorpe played his college ball at Haskell University. John Riggins, a bruising runner nicknamed “the diesel” nearly two decades before Shaq. The “Kansas Comet” Gale Sayers also came from the city. Perhaps the greatest of them all; the slipperiest small man to ever tote the pigskin, was Barry Sanders. Watching Barry play the game was like watching smoke slide through keyhole. His diminutive frame could devilishly contort through the smallest spaces. He was an ankle breaker, a shake-and-bakester, that could have had all the records but quit after only a decade.
The greatest turnaround in college football history occurred in Manhattan, Kansas. For half a century, the Wildcats where the epitome of suck. There are two eras of football in Manhattan, that before Bill Snyder and that after. Before Snyder, K-State had lost 500 games, by far the most of any division one program. The team had the fewest scholarship players of any program in the country. There was serious talk of demoting the Wildcats to division two. Players on the football team didn’t wear letter jackets out of sheer embarrassment. The school didn’t even have carpet in most of the athletic facilities. After Snyder, the team has two conference championships against schools with quadruple its athletic budget and played in several New Year’s Day bowl games. Bill Snyder, the “Purple Wizard”, used Kansas madness to his advantage. The Wildcats now romp around in a $300 million dollar stadium aptly named after the man who resurrected the team from the dead.
Some of you from bigger states might be saying to yourself that any state could produce a list as astounding. Fact is that Kansas accounts for less than a single percentage of the national population, yet it is involved in over 95% of the shit that goes on in the nation. There is something in the water out here. Something that drives tragedies and fuels success stories. And that something is the madness.
Kansas is the great initiator of events that have shaped national and even world history. It is the place myths and dreams. This fact has not gone unnoticed in popular culture through the years. After all, it is the birthplace of Superman, the home of the man behind the curtain from the Wizard of Oz, and the home at least one blonde haired, squared-jawed soldier in every Hollywood war movie since the development of moving pictures. The poor bastard that got blown to bits attaching sticky bombs to German panzers in the Opening scene of Saving Private Ryan, you know that fucker was from Kansas! Holla! The iconic phrases “WWJD” and the “Great White Hope” originated here in the boyhood home of the man of steel, the place where Dorothy desperately wants to get back to. “I can't see my hand in front of my face” developed in the middle of one of Kansas’ dust storms. It is a land of flying monkeys, town destroying tornadoes, and Governors who campaign on a platform of implanting goat testicles into humans to cure impotence (true story . . . and the bastard almost won the race). If find myself wondering, at least once a day, how it is the nation has missed the enigma is the clipped rectangular state of Kansas.
For those Kansas prairies hold a unique history and a vibrant heritage of conflict, confusion and “madness.” Kansas represents a wide-open frontier that sits between America's two dominant ideologies of rugged western individualism and reserved eastern puritanism. Kansas is the space at the beginning of the sentence. It’s the place that people look down upon from 35,000 feet and see irrigation circles and an ocean of grass and think of nothing at all. What people fail to see from the sky are the roots. The roots of the nation’s deadliest war and the worst modern, global pandemic began a stone’s throw from Token-Oak. The nation's most devastating natural disaster sent suffocating Kansas soil on a ten-year smothering spree. The first legal abortion occurred inside the clipped rectangular borders of Kansas. Electroshock therapy was invented in Kansas. The most psychologically devastating food item, the White Castle tiny, dog-flavored, shit burger, started in Wichita. These little sliders have tortured a billion buttholes across the world. Fact is, whatever you ate today, whatever pissed you off politically last week, and the next time you fucking snap; chances are whateveritis originated in the Sunflower State.
It is not just Kansas, but a sleepy little town in Kansas that sits on the Smokey Hill River and nestled at the edge of the Flint Hills. It is a place that has been the epicenter of the all of the above. It is a place that has taken current events of the day—slavery, poor farming practices and influenza—and magnified them into national and global crises.
Now there are two issues in Token-Oak, both related to drug abuse. It is a town that has long suffered from the methamphetamine epidemic. For decades, the local jail has been full of meth cooks and addicts. In the past few years, a new addiction has hit Token-Oak with a vengeance. Somewhere in the black hills northeast of the Token-Oak, the roots of the next great America apocalypse will spring anew on those Kansas prairies that have long been the garden of the apocalypse.
Per aspera ad astra
It is the State's iconic mea culpa. An admission that the environment is totally fucked, and the expectations of the people are even more out of whack. It is like saying “sure . . . we got problems, but when we get through this shit, we're gonna conquer the fucking world.” That is the driving force inside of us all. It is a great motivator of passions, a destroyer of rational perspectives, and a perfect place to begin this dizzying little jaunt through the craziest thing of all: the story of Token-Oak, Kansas.
Per aspera ad astra
Anytime I come within a few feet of a ledge or drive my car over seventy miles-per-hour or hold a gun; I can feel the “madness” festering inside of me. I tell myself that I have a fear of heights, that there is something about the bird’s eye view that conjures some visceral, subconscious fear. But none of that is true. And somewhere, deep inside me, I know it is not the height that scares me. It’s the all-encompassing, parasitic madness. A stomach-turning, teeth-clenching rage that that takes over a person and destroys them completely. I know I am not the only one that feels this. I believe that anyone with Midwestern roots or even a drop of Indian blood in their genes knows exactly what I am talking about.
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