ABAB

Nine thirty is bedtime,

That is when,

The clock in the hall chimes,

And even the dog scurries to his den!

Family Reunion
Aunt Margaret sits
With wide-brimmed hat on her head.
We bend to greet her,
She rises only for Joe.
We will miss her when we leave.

Queen of Her Castle
Oma makes the rules,
And she makes the punishment
Oma rules the house

FLAG BURNING

Essays I think that flag burning is an area of speech. Speech is protected under the first amendment Therefore, why have a NEW amendment to strike down our basic American rights?

An amendment to strip our right to disagree with the government is one more step toward a dictatorship. The founding fathers intended America to be a nation where the people governed themselves. When the government puts its bureaucracy over the will of the American workingman it is our "duty" (The People's Legal Front) to put the government in its place. As patriots, people do everything they can to get the government to notice them, and if it takes burning "Old Glory" on the White House mall then that's what people should do!

This issue is controversial, and even within one's self there is a battle of ideas raging. www.esquilax.com/flag who, at the beginning sounds against flag burning
says:
"We cannot pass and enforce laws against flag burning unless we modify the US.
Constitution and remove an important part of the first amendment."

The "Flag Burning FAQ" site sound very anti-Flag Burning but the fight of ideals surfaces when it says:
"It's an idea that becomes illegal, not an act, when flag burning becomes illegal."

The proper way to dispose of an old flag is to burn it. People do it all the time, boy scouts, government organizations, military and even retired military that keep the tradition alive. The public is getting the message that it is OK to burn the flag, as long as it is peaceful. Most the protests that I have heard of people burning flags at are. What arresting the people at these protests is doing is the government contradicting themselves. They are saying that if you have ideas conflicting with the government, and to make those ideas public you burn the symbol of that government, you will be punished.

This is supposed to be a wonderful and free country.
"A truly great country will allow its citizens to express the most rabid hate for the very nation that exalts freedom of speech to the max; a stable, free country is not threatened by disparaging acts [flag burning]; We were promised that freedom of speech was this glorious, let us not degrade freedom of speech, by banning flag burning." Andrew Bushard of the Autonomy Party said all this, and I totally agree. I know I chopped up his essay a bit but it is truly revolutionary.

I researched and researched on both sides of this issue and came to the conclusion that the only real, constitutional decision to come to is to let the Constitution be. I think so because even the founding fathers burned the flag of the British whom they were revolting against. In my mind there is no way not to come to the same conclusion.

Gloria Steinem

While other minorities were rising up to be noticed, so were women. Women had been thought of as unequal to men since the beginning of time. They had a liberation movement during the sixties that was the "largest social movement in the history of the United States ". Gloria Steinem was a leading crusader during this revolution. Gloria Steinem affected change in the nineteen sixties and influences society today.

Carolyn Daffron described Gloria Steinem as the “daughter of two children”. She was born to a financially unstable father and a mentally unstable mother, who had suffered a nervous breakdown just a little while before Gloria was born. Leo tried to keep the family together but to no avail. He couldn’t take the stress when his wife became totally unable to take care of herself. He left Gloria and her mother in Toledo, Ohio (Gloria’s older sister was away in college). Ten-year-old Gloria had to take full responsibility of her mother and was only able to go to school sporadically, when her mother was better than usual. The two moved from house to house in east Toledo until Gloria’s junior year in high school.

That year her sister, already in her twenties persuaded her father to take their mother so Gloria could come stay with her in Washington DC to lead a “normal” senior year of high school and possibly bring up her grades to go to college. She did bring up her grades and eventually got accepted to Smith College and, like something out of her book “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions," she majored in government, a very “un-ladylike” subject at the time. In her senior year at Smith she applied for the study abroad program, she was accepted, and got a scholarship to study further in India after graduating. She graduated with honors, with her whole family looking on.

After graduation she left for India. In India, she became involved in their political system. Primarily, she took part in the movement to get more equal ownership of land among the poor, middle and upper class. India was a country where most of the land was owned by the upper class and the poor sharecropped it. She stayed in India for four years before going back to the U.S.

When she went out to work in the world, she was discriminated against, like most women seeking journalistic jobs, or any jobs at that time. She was given things to write about like fashion shows and style. One of her most famous of such “light” articles was “I Was A Playboy Bunny” which took her undercover into one of the playboy clubs dressed as one of their good looking waitresses or “bunnies”. This gained her renown but also skepticism about how well she could perform the job she wanted to do, report political stories. Over the next five years Steinem freelanced and pushed her employers for serious political assignments. The prominently male editors would not give her these assignments because they were “men’s issues.” She saw this happen again and again to herself, but thought that theses were isolated instances of discrimination.

By 1968, through her "celebrity" status, Steinem was finally able to land an important political assignment. She covered Senator George McGovern's presidential campaign. Her article led to a position at New York magazine. Her career as a political writer and activist had begun.

As contributing editor and political columnist for New York magazine, Steinem covered everything from the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., to United Farm Workers demonstrations led by Cesar Chavez. While reporting on these issues, she was often moved to join the cause. She spoke at many events and helped to raise money for the organizations she supported. Her work as editor and her political activity taught Steinem to organize effectively. When first she started reporting she didn’t really understand why she sympathized so strongly with the oppressed, but then, while attending abortion hearings in 1969, it became clear she was part of one (she had had an illegal abortion in England right before leaving for India). Every woman in America was part of a minority; every woman in the world was part of one! This was a turning point in her life. She realized that those times she was discriminated against were not isolated instances. She had not before comprehended that such a majority of women felt oppressed by society and that so many women had suffered as a result of restraining government policies on abortion and other concerns.

After that day, Steinem’s literary focus shifted to the new women’s liberation movement and the second wave of feminism, while she still wrote about her other causes. She used her public status to inform the general public about the feminist issues. Feminist issues at that time were things like abortion and issues that dealt with mainly females. Abortion was not legal back then, and it had a lot of women feel guilty for having illegal abortions in other countries, like Gloria had.

In the early seventies, feminism spread like wildfire. People from all walks of life came to support Steinem at her many speeches that she gave to endorse her feminist views and the rest of the crusades that she joined. By far, the feminist movement was the one that won her the most fame.

Steinem and some of her feminist friends got together to find a way to bring even more interest into feminism. They decided to make a feminist magazine. They named it Ms., the new abbreviation for a woman’s name who didn’t want anyone to know her marital status. This was a magazine long in the making and very popular, even to begin with. The first day Ms. hit news stands as a supplement to New York magazine it was a huge success. Later on it became it’s own magazine, completely aside from New York Magazine.

Steinem and a lot of other feminists was an advocate of the ERA or the Equal Rights Amendment. It was proposed in 1923, shortly after women won the right to vote. It was finally approved by the U.S. Senate 49 years later (1972, the same year that Ms. was founded) but was destined to be ratified by only 30 of the 50 state legislatures. Critics to the ERA claimed it would cause women to lose privileges, such as exemption from military draft and economic support by their husbands. Steinem and other supporters, led by the National Organization for Women (NOW, of which Steinem was a prominent member), argued that discriminatory state and federal laws left many women in a state of economic dependency on men.

Now, thanks to the bravery of Gloria Steinem women are equal to men. Women also have the full right to a legal abortion. Also, women are not allowed to be discriminated against in the workplace and must be paid the same as any male with the same qualification. Maybe the most important thing to bring up is the fact that more jobs and social opportunities have sprung up because of the second wave of feminism. One cannot doubt that there will be sexism, just like racism and religious discrimination, in the future. One must hope though, that this generation will be as ready for the battle as the last one.

Gloria Steinem did a lot for women in the sixties and the after shocks people still feel today. Women have fought for equality since the beginning of time and may have to fight to the end. The last generation of women was up for the battle… will this one be? Will this generation settle for a job second to men? Will they remain on the lower tear that the other sex has put them on? The goal should not be to have one sex superior to another, but two sexes equal in the world. This may never happen but one can hope we go down fighting.

Kidnapped by Aliens
SciFi It was a warm summer morning and Jack was out on his wake-up jog. He came across a man that looked familiar but distant in some way. "Follow me," said the tall, lean fellow (he had an accent that jack could not distinguish). Jack, being trusting, followed him. They move along at a great pace. Jack had no idea of where he was being taken, but followed the "man" anyway, despite the worries in his mind. He assured himself that the man wanted to show him his house, or something of that nature, but he had not put up his guard enough for not being shocked at what he was about to see.
They stopped at a clearing that Jack, despite years of living in the same neighborhood, had never noticed or seen before. He sat, dumbfounded, on the ground, asking himself how he could forget such a vast space. Suddenly, he felt himself being pulled upright and placed in a hard wooden crate. The hands were rough and many, but he had not heard anyone sneaking up on him.
Now he was very frightened. He yelled and pounded on the inside wall of the crate. Abruptly, he was lifted and set down again a little while later. The people carrying the box had lifted him and climbed a great number of stairs with great ease, even through his thrashing about.
He peeked out a newfound hole in the box and all he saw was the color of chrome. The floor began to move beneath him and when he and it stopped, he was lifted, once again easily, onto what he thought to be a platform or table.
There were many strange and high-pitched voices yelling they halted the pounding inside the box and made Jack cover his ears. A light came through the top of Jack's crate as the top was lifted off. All of a sudden, Jack was lifted up by the collar of his shirt and held in front of an audience of… ALIENS! They looked similar to this:
His ears perked up to the word brain, as a much bigger alien came at
Him with a scalpel and another two jumped on him to restrain him.
No matter how much he struggled, he could not remove the aliens, and their strength seemed to grow with the roar of the crowd. Jack never came back.