Spring Fundraiser 2013, Day 3

This has been a karmic Fundraiser Week. I’m reeling from the public and personal events I’ve experienced so far. Just to mention one that probably hasn’t grabbed much attention in the news: Oklahoma had a series of small earthquakes early today. I wouldn’t have known about them except for a cryptic message from the Lurker that the donation to Gates of Vienna will be very delayed. That made me go look, of course.

And I forgot about the Marathon and Patriot’s Day and the doom of Tax Day on April 15th. We pay our taxes in October and I wasn’t thinking. But I swan, we sure picked a doozy of a week to ask people for money.

Yesterday would have been my “turn” to put up a fundraiser post but halfway through the essay, my notebook computer died. Or rather the power cord did, followed shortly by the battery. I hadn’t noticed the latter was the real power running the thing and that my cord was kaput — I know, I know, you geeks out there are saying, “How could you not notice?” Take my word for it, not noticing is my specialty.

This has been a blessing for the Baron — for all I know he has dancing girls and booze upstairs. There was one time when he pulled off a surprise birthday party for me with a whole lot of people who’d tiptoed into the yard and I was clueless till we rounded the house (we’d been out in the woods looking for pink lady slippers)…

So yesterday before the big computer crash, I was intensely caught up in dealing with themes and consequences. So many consequences to consider it, would make a good Catholic girl wall-eyed. I was on a bit of a tear, actually. I had begun gaining speed in a thank-you note to one of our donors. I got wound up and set a-going like a cross between the Energizer Bunny and Cotton Mather. The more I wrote, the more I thought about the moral ramifications of the issues I was addressing, and off I went.

My themes were the various kinds of butchery you can presently find on offer in my native land.

The Progressives preach that American history is hopelessly contaminated by butchery — e.g., the cruel ways in which white men displaced the Indians from their land, or the widespread slavery in the South, fed by the owners of slave ships from New England. But of course it’s not that simple. I mean, find one unbloodied spot on this earth that is “owned” by its “original” inhabitants and then show me how these indigenes lived in peace and harmony until the arrival of the Eeevil White Man. Bah humbug! Every square inhabited inch on God’s green earth has been fought over repeatedly by successive waves of human beings spreading out and taking charge. They often left little trace of the people who came before, marrying the women and killing the men and children.

England is a good place to start on that kind of journey; it’s small and many of the displacements have been recorded extensively. Or focus more widely on the Northern European peoples, by turn benevolent and/or butchering, depending on the decade or the differences among them. Remember the Treaty of Westphalia and the beginning of the nation-state? Fast forward to Peace in Our Time; didn’t that usher in the bloodiest century of all? Having moved on to the next millennium now, we have no idea whether we’ll do any better.

Somehow I think we won’t, but that may be the mistake of Presentism. As in, never underestimate the complications you can’t see. I have a few ideas on how we might improve our record. First though, let’s examine the most pressingly bloody problems clamoring for attention.

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Spring Fundraiser 2013, Day 2

Today is the second day of our quarterly bleg. However, due to this afternoon’s appalling events, I’ll put aside my pitch for the moment and focus on what happened in Boston.

This week’s theme is “putting our heads over the parapet”, so take a look at the emergency workers in the above photo, bearing in mind the roles they play during a terrorist attack. Talk about putting oneself in harm’s way!

Just like the firemen and cops at the WTC on 9-11, they have to run towards the place that everyone else is running away from, screaming. Despite the possibility of more bombs, or terrorists with automatic weapons, or radioactive materials, or vapor from poisonous chemicals that might have been added to the bomb to enhance its lethality — despite all that, they still have to go there.

It’s inspiring to see them in action. And, whatever political footballs are made from today’s events and tossed around in the weeks ahead, these brave people deserve our respect and gratitude. These heroes make up part of the basic decency that is still woven into the fabric of everyday men and women of this country.

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In addition to the hideousness of the act itself — the horror it unleashed upon the citizens of Boston and the participants in the Marathon, the permanent damage to a cherished annual event, the years of suffering that lie ahead for the victims and their families — one cannot help but dread the political use to which today’s (or rather, yesterday’s) events will be put.

If the conspirators who carried out the atrocity turn out to be Muslims, we can expect a mad, intricate pirouette by the Obama administration’s talking heads designed to make sure that nobody (well, no media person at least) ever dares to connect what happened with Islam. “Lone wolves” are bound to make an appearance. And no one who does such things could possibly be a “true Muslim”, of course.

And, if it does turn out to be an Islamic terror attack, the most important aspect of the aftermath of the Boylston bombing will be to make sure that there is no “backlash against American Muslims”. Avoiding this will be the number one priority. In his first breath after a non-zero Mohammed Coefficient for the suspects is revealed, the news announcer will remind us that the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful patriots who work hard and are wonderful Americans. Oh, and one more thing: if this incident were somehow to result in increased “intolerance” in the country, then the terrorists would have won, and the victims in Boston would have died in vain.

And on and on and on. We all know the drill.

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Spring Fundraiser 2013, Day One

Alert readers will have noticed that we are overdue for a fundraiser here at Gates of Vienna. We generally hold one every quarter, and although we often slide pretty close to the equinox or the solstice, we have managed to maintain the quarterly regime for the past several years.

This year, however, we skipped the winter 2013 fundraiser, which normally would have occurred at about the end of February. That happened to be the time when the symptoms of my eye ailment (choroidal neovascularization, a.k.a. “wet macular degeneration”) first appeared and threw me off my game. I told Dymphna at the time that I just couldn’t manage a fundraiser; it was too much. Furthermore, before I received my diagnosis and began the treatment, I couldn’t in good conscience ask our readers to donate, since for all I knew incipient blindness might at some point have driven me entirely out of this line of work.

Fortunately, as you all know, the situation has now stabilized. I’ve fallen into a new routine, gotten used to blogging with one eye covered, and can reliably maintain a steady workload, albeit at a somewhat lower level than I was used to a few months ago.

So it’s time for us to hit y’all up again. Better late than never!

Fundraising has not only become possible again, it’s an absolute necessity at this point. The treatments for my condition — an injection in my left eye every month or so — are quite expensive, and they will continue indefinitely. My self-employment insurance policy is of the “catastrophic” type, which means it has a high co-pay and a very high deductible. Economic times here at Schloss Bodissey have become quite a bit leaner as a result.

Nevertheless, I intend to keep this enterprise up as long as I can still see the screen and climb the spiral staircase to my eyrie. Based on what the doctor tells me, my long-term prospects are very good, so the watch here at the Gates will continue.

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The theme of this quarter’s fundraiser is “putting our heads over the parapet”, which is something we’ve been thinking about for a long time, and especially since the Breivik massacre in 2011.

The two takedowns by Blogger during one week in January only added to the feeling of exposure. Even if they were entirely coincidental — which is quite possible — they still intensify that uneasy sense of being watched.

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