Check-in with Fire Ants

RantWoman is transfixed by the flotillas of fire ants atop all of the Hurrican #Harvey flooding. Definitely more cheerful than thoughts of chemical plant explosions and other environmental disasters lurking with the flood waters.



Fire Ants
Cuero River

Guns in my head that won't go....

Just North Korean missile tests, donations of "surplus military hardware to local police departments, and the annoying nearby accessible ped signal, on top of steady and excessive levels of actual gunfire in the 'hood

spirits in my head that won't go...

Various deceased figures popping up in email for various reasons. Not like I entirely want them to go but ...Sigh.

Yep.  Still need to find a new mental health practitioner. Most recent one Just Is Not Working. Really basic but not the only reason Just Is Not Working: entryway to office is a driveway with no separate sidewalk. RantWoman needs to quit even trying to get past that. Things Just Are Not Working. Move On. Move On. Move On.

Like go find some kind of spiritual growth seminar

or participate in what turns out to be surprisingly nourishing blindness related conference call.

Or go find a spiritual growth seminar

Or at least for cripes' sake see if one can land a different ear worm.

Gogol Bordello - "Wonderlust King" (official video)

Warning: Loud. Irreverent. Which is why this is here.

RantWoman was delivered unto this path of Wander/wonderlust by an innocent inquiry (Innocent? It was the Association of Bad Friends. That's how Innocent.) about what "we are all ministers of God" Quakers wear as clerical garb. No, there was not consensus even about "just wear something." But on to the music.

And by the way is GOGOL Bordello, not Google Bordello.




Only ONE of a number of Bad Friend moments, besides the song title: Mr. Gogol Bordello is just putting out a new album called Seekers and Finders. Start your search engines if you want to know more!

Air Rights

RantWoman is posting these two article links in HOPES that others may also find them useful. The articles have to do with the Los Angeles Regional Library, air rights, and housing development issues.

Here are some articles as reference:
• http://articles.latimes.com/2007/mar/14/local/me-airrights14
• https://www.laconservancy.org/issues/los-angeles-central-library


RantWoman notes that the articles mention other cities where similar deals have occurred. RantWoman also notes that the articles are old enough that perhaps there is some literature about how things have turned out.

RantWoman is seasoning a number of other meditations on the word "library" in a land of really cool materials of HUGE historical interest as well as the land of modern digital technologies, indexing, digitization, and sundry related buzzwords. RantWoman hopes these meditations will shortly have their own post but is leaving this tickler here just because.

Afghanistan War, round n+1, plus national anthems

The current occupant of the White house announces...that he is for once flip flopping on campaign rhetoric and intends to continue 16 years of US military intervention in Afghanistan. There are many vagaries, like what would winning look like, what about Congressional oversight or declaration of war or at a minimum revised Authorization for the use of Military Force. No mention of hollowing out diplomatic capability by severe cuts to the State Department and competent people fleeing any association with the current administration. Ai-yi-yi!

What on earth is a RantWoman to do?

Read a wonderful tweet about how by next year this time the US will be deploying troops who were not even born on 9/11/2001, the catalyst for US deployment to Afghanistan. Another Tweet pointed out that also means a whole generation of people in the Middle East and SW Asia who have never known a time without US weapons in their countries.

Not even to mention previous decades of US entanglement in funding of various strands of insurgent and extremist.

What on earth is a RantWoman to do?

Another tweet happened to mention the Afghan national anthem. Which one?

The Youtube has options for striking reflections. The examples here are really different. Most of them below have English subtitles. For now, RantWoman is simply posting what appears to be an incomplete succession of anthems. Further research and reflections pending.

Published on Aug 19, 2013

National Anthem of Islamic Republic of Afghanistan Da Watan Afghanistan De The Afghan National Anthem was adopted and officially announced by a Loya Jirga in May 2006. According to article 20 of the Constitution of Afghanistan,




The National Anthem of the Democratic Repbulic Of Afghanistan 1978-1992, the government the Soviet Union invaded to support. The words are very different from the older version below. The video also shows women in very modern dress, a characteristic of the cities but definitely not of the countryside. These cultural differences are part of what made the Taliban viable. RantWoman is for now refraining from comment about opium cultivation, warlords, and other ills which foreign intervention contributed to.



The National Anthem of the Daoud Republic of Afghanistan, 1973-1978, presented here in sequence with absolutely no further pretention to competence about anything but timeline.




This seems to be the earliest version available but it is undated. More to the point arguments in the comments about whether the "real version" should be in Farsi / Tadjik or in Pashto suggest that Afghanistan has plenty of problems even without foreign troops weighing in. RantWoman will refrain from any pretention of actual competence about regional affairs.

What Have we Done / Senzeni Na

RantWoman is for the present somewhere between reflexively holding in the Light and ignoring:

--the most recent Islamic State outrage this time in #Barcelona

--the parade of heavily armed Nazis and the car attack on counterprotestors in #Charlottesville

--Various threads of recent protests in Seattle including an echo of elsewhere in the form "Officer, if we agree the stick on my sign is a weapon, do I have a second amendment right to keep carrying it around?"

--Re North Korea #DPRK, is North Korea a cheap way for China to antagonize the US? Should threatening nuclear war by tweet be a violation of Twitter Terms of Service? Should the Terms of Service just include a disclaimer. This platform may not be suitable for sensitive international negotiation and Twitter is not responsible for the outcomes if you insist on trying to use it that way"?

--No, RantWoman still has not read Google dude's MANifesto. Sight unseen, RantWoman is torn. On one hand, RantWoman suggests that Google dude be assigned to a project with a female manager and a team that is 50 % female for the duration of his working life. On the other hand, should Google Dude express even the slightest willingness to serve on the Still Didn't Get the Memo Committee on Email Immoderation, the Committee on Discernment, Leadings, and Nominating, could probably find him a place there. meanwhile, RantWoman has not been tracking but thinks it would be Just Fine if more men would speak out as men about Google Dude.

Now to what is really on RantWoman's mind:

How is it God and the Google and the former choir director at RantMom's church between them served up something RantWoman clearly needed and would not have known even where to look?

How is it RantWoman has never until now heard of

Senzeni Na  ?

Senzeni Na means " What have we done. It has been described as the South African Equivalent of We Shall Overcome. RantWoman finds the phrase "What have we done" theologically curious to say the least. RantWoman is not going to get that thought through in the near future, but is definitely filing it under needs further chewing..

Here is a Wikipedia Entry
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senzeni_Na%3F

Here are a number of videos in some cases with the descriptive text copied. The Google is bountiful about videos; RantWoman is curious why none of the videos she has sampled so far mention that a group of women sang this song nonstop outside the building where the Truth and Reconciliation Commission met, for the entire duration of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. RantWoman is also vaguely mulling the concepts of Truth and Reconciliation as a whole bunch of labels are getting flung around with respect to identity and people in the United States.

But the videos and in some cases, the short descriptions posted with the videos.
https://youtu.be/j5xp2j0F3wg

With info in Portuguese
https://youtu.be/VS1H4si1igI

Cape Town Youth Choir
https://youtu.be/5fDU1PYWT8A

Stanford Talisman Youth Choir 2016
https://youtu.be/5DkGyhchzYk
The title translated into English is "What have we done?". A well-known South African anti-apartheid protest song, “Senzeni Na” has been sung since the 1950s, and reached the height of its popularity in the 1980s. Since then, “Senzeni Na” has been sung across the world by choirs of all races and colors but has a message that has been particularly poignant for Black South Africans.

https://youtu.be/U8wrRMnxZXM
This song, more correctly spelt as “Senzeni Na?”, means "What Have We Done?. It is a South African anti-apartheid folk song of unknown origin in the Xhosa/Zulu language. It has been around at least since the 1950s, and it reached the height of its popularity during the 1980s. Activist Duma Ndlovu compared its influence to that of the American protest song, “We Shall Overcome". It is commonly sung at funerals,

Other nuggets that also came with Senzeni Na:
RantMom's church got some kind of a Renewing Worship grant through one of their denominational channels. They used part of their money to bring back their former choir director, now a professor of music for a workshop.

RantWoman can totally see why former choir director reminds RantMom of RantDad as a young professor, down to the crew cut, updated just a bit. RantWoman is impressed that academic work included study of the cultures of song and revolutions in Eastern Europe.

RantWoman does not particularly want to think of growing up in a police state. RantWoman is delighted though to think of a teenager finding freedom in his Dutch Reformed Church upbringing by delving into the centuries of hymn tunes catalogued in the back of his church hymnals and in stories of the Old Testament.

Other nuggets from the exercise:

Consensus about worship: intentional gathering in community to connect with each other and encounter God. (Look: they're Presbyterians. RantWoman describes herself as theologically multilingual and can definitely handle these terms. RantWoman was struck by the agreement of several groups in slightly different terms.)

Hymn tunes carrying over across centuries and without regard to language.

The value of singing in languages one does not know as  a way of widening the circle of community.

RantWoman curiously is still not doing so well about "We Must All Sing TOGETHER." On the other hand, RantWoman hates it when she is one of the loudest voices trying to sing. RantWoman can usually hear when she is not in tune and has not the foggiest idea how to fix the problem beyond adding pipe organ enough to bury...

Hold us ALL in the Light.

Mark Calendars: Event about solvintg Homelessness at Seattle U April 2018

Cities, Churches, God, Real Estate matters

RantWoman is growing impatient with the plodding evolution of a discernment process in her Meeting. RantWoman means to elaborate in a separate post or more likely in several posts.

RantWoman today simply wants to talk of a vision where the whole community, not just some small committee might have the opportunity to read some of the same materials, chew them over in conversation, and let the chewing feed the different pieces of research and discernment likely to be involved. RantWoman would like to know whether others share this vision, but RantWoman is for now clear in her own Light regardless.

RantWoman has a vision of an electronic resource where people might both contribute articles, videos, and other materials and participate in conversations. RantWoman envisions a resource where public processes might be tracked by collecting the public record agendas and videos.

RantWoman would kind of like to light a fire under someone to make a shared effort, perhaps even a cleaner and more simply tagged effort than RantWoman's blog but again RantWoman is not doing well about patience and frankly has a leading just to collect info here and trust that the collecting will increase the chance of finding things on RantWoman's mind more than once.

RantWoman will try to post with queries and invite comments. RantWoman moderates comments and hopes mainly to have a very light touch about moderation, to spare her readers the ads and bizarre hateful bile that occasionally shows up behind the Blogger scenes.

By way of launching this collection, two resources that swam out of recent RantWoman Twitter streams:

NY Times article about city congregations, their buildings, and the real estate market

What do Friends consider important as far as historical preservation, connection with history?

What do Friends consider appropriate financial stewardship?

Another resource: a lecture by Diana Butler Bass at the Chattauqua Institute about cities and the Bible. The language may or may not speak to everyone, but RantWoman finds it an interesting presentation about cities and the Bible.


What language do Friends find most helpful in talking about the spiritual dimensions of a process that is going to involve complex vocabulary from a number of different public policy and economic domains?