Pilates was all that and more. I got through about 45 minutes ok, the instructor kept saying "good, that's it," and then it happened. My right hip seized up, and I was in danger of getting a charleyhorse in my butt cheek. I don't know if you've ever had a charleyhorse in your ass, but I have, and it AIN'T funny. Ranks right up there with receiving intravenous potassium and waterboarding as things you don't ever want to have happen to you!
(I must admit, I looked like a cute little buddha, sitting on my mat with my little tummy all round and . . . round, in my exercise clothes! It must be a very appealing tummy, because when I went to We Care afterwards, a three-year-old boy made claws of his hands and growled at me, then bared his teeth, ran toward me, and actually bit me in the belly! That was a first!)
Aside from the biting, I'm glad I went to the meeting. My mission, should I accept it (already did) is to purchase the syrups for the snow-cone booth for the Spaghetti Dinner and Carnival! I can do it, I know I can!
Dinner with Nancy at Palace Station (they do a decent Greek Salad), then off to the meeting on Warm Springs and Cimarron. When I went online just now, I got a terrific email from my old high-school friend, Zi Pinsley. She forwarded Deepak Chopra's comments on the current political climate as it expresses spiritual states of being. I am not a Chopra fan, but I found it compelling, and myself in agreement. It's as if he put into words what I've felt in my heart. I'm going to post it here in it's entirety, because it's worth reading, even if you disagree.
Sometimes politics has the uncanny effect of mirroring the national psyche even when nobody intended to do that. This is perfectly illustrated by the rousing effect that Gov. Sarah Palin had on the Republican convention in Minneapolis this week.
On the surface, she outdoes former Vice President Dan Quayle as an unlikely choice, given her negligent parochial expertise in the complex affairs of governing. Her state of Alaska has less than 700,000 residents, which reduces the job of governor to the scale of running one-tenth of New York City. By comparison, Rudy Giuliani is a towering international figure. Palin's pluck has been admired, and her forthrightness, but her real appeal goes deeper.
She is the reverse of Barack Obama, in essence his shadow, deriding his idealism and exhorting people to obey their worst impulses. In psychological terms the shadow is that part of the psyche that hides out of sight, countering our aspirations, virtue, and vision with qualities we are ashamed to face: anger, fear, revenge, violence, selfishness, and suspicion of "the other." For millions of Americans, Obama triggers those feelings, but they don't want to express them. He is calling for us to reach for our higher selves, and frankly, that stirs up hidden reactions of an unsavory kind. (Just to be perfectly clear, I am not making a verbal play out of the fact that Sen. Obama is black. The shadow is a metaphor widely in use before his arrival on the scene.) I recognize that psychological analysis of politics is usually not welcome by the public, but I believe such a perspective can be helpful here to understand Palin's message.
In her acceptance speech Gov. Palin sent a rousing call to those who want to celebrate their resistance to change and a higher vision. Look at what she stands for:--Small town values -- a denial of America's global role, a return to petty, small-minded parochialism.--Ignorance of world affairs -- a repudiation of the need to repair America's image abroad.--Family values -- a code for walling out anybody who makes a claim for social justice. Such strangers, being outside the family, don't need to be heeded.--Rigid stands on guns and abortion -- a scornful repudiation that these issues can be negotiated with those who disagree.--Patriotism -- the usual fallback in a failed war.--"Reform" -- an italicized term, since in addition to cleaning out corruption and excessive spending, one also throws out anyone who doesn't fit your ideology.Palin reinforces the overall message of the reactionary right, which has been in play since 1980, that social justice is liberal-radical, that minorities and immigrants, being different from "us" pure American types, can be ignored, that progressivism takes too much effort and globalism is a foreign threat. The radical right marches under the banners of "I'm all right, Jack," and "Why change? Everything's OK as it is."
The irony, of course, is that Gov. Palin is a woman and a reactionary at the same time. She can add mom to apple pie on her resume, while blithely reversing forty years of feminist progress. The irony is superficial; there are millions of women who stand on the side of conservatism, however obviously they are voting against their own good. The Republicans have won multiple national elections by raising shadow issues based on fear, rejection, hostility to change, and narrow-mindedness.Obama's call for higher ideals in politics can't be seen in a vacuum. The shadow is real; it was bound to respond. Not just conservatives possess a shadow -- we all do.
So what comes next is a contest between the two forces of progress and inertia. Will the shadow win again, or has its furtive appeal become exhausted? No one can predict. The best thing about Gov. Palin is that she brought this conflict to light, which makes the upcoming debate honest. It would be a shame to elect another Reagan, whose smiling persona was a stalking horse for the reactionary forces that have brought us to the demoralized state we are in. We deserve to see what we are getting, without disguise.
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