Category Archives: Current Issues

Women and the Trolls

7 Replies

As one who lived during  the beginning of the women’s liberation movement and civil rights movement, I have been complacent in thinking,  ” well that’s done.” Thinking that these changes were made permanent and all is right in the world.

Like with our American Bill of Rights, I now realize we must be ready to fight these battles over and over.

I have thought younger women who minimize the contributions of the feminist movement have been naïve and ignorant in their comprehension of what actually happened back then. That much of the freedom and opportunities that women enjoy today can be attributed to that time. As women’s right to vote can be credited to the efforts of the suffragettes.

We need to be aware of and appreciate our own history.

In recent years, I have become more and more aware that the enemies of women’s freedom were not truly vanquished but retreated for a time to their dens or in some places never retreated at all.

Smoke has been seen rising from Mount Doom. The forces of evil are awake in the world.

When I read their poisonous rantings and comments degrading women for daring to speak out and have an opinion or hear about the horrid oppression of women and girls in other places in the world I am sickened.

I realize that I can not be complacent. The creature is still out there lurking and leaving a slimy trail.

"Trolls" Photo by Tristan Schmurr

“Trolls” Photo by Tristan Schmurr

I was inspired to write this post in response to an article in the New Yorker about Mary Beard, entitled “The Troll Slayer.” And because I have become aware more and more of all the misogyny and ageism in the world.

Aging with Attitude

Leave a reply

Be yourself-not your idea of what you think somebody else’s idea of yourself should be.-Thoreau

I have always been a rebel at heart. You know, “marched to the beat of a different drummer.” Don’t put me in a box and tell me what to do and when. Don’t tell me I have to disappear at a certain age and be content with puttering about and going on bus tours to Las Vegas with the Senior Center. Unless that is what I really like to do. Which I don’t. So I love hearing about older people who refuse to be boxed in by society’s limited expectations of them and go on pursuing their passions with a passion.

 I follow a few great blogs and websites like EngAge and National Center for Creative Aging and recently a newsletter called Senior Planet. In my latest newsletter from them was a great video post about older people who have decided to go on living as fully as they can and the way they want to, called “  63 Minutes of Aging with Attitude.” I love it!

I don’t mean to imply that we have to prove anything to anyone else. Just to give ourselves permission to follow whatever path we have chosen.

Message To The Stars

Leave a reply

We all need stories that ignite our imaginations and provide inspiration for our lives and dreams.The story of the Voyager Mission  has been an inspiration for me. There were two Voyager spacecraft launched in the late 1970s. I was first married around that time but I did not become aware of Voyager until the Fall of 2009 when I was a student in a teaching credential program. Learning about Voyager really captured my imagination. I created a lesson for my students which included some of the great photos from the NASA website. I hoped it would inspire them as well and engage their interest in space exploration and science.

The Voyagers were designed to perform studies of Jupiter, Saturn, Saturn’s rings and the larger moons of those two planets. Later the mission was expanded to include Uranus, Neptune and a total of 48 moons of the four planets. Voyager sent back many beautiful images of these planets and moons. The voyagers made several discoveries including 3 new moons of Jupiter, 11 new moons of Uranus and five of Neptune. The Great Red Spot of Jupiter could be seen through earth telescopes but Voyager found out it was actually a storm moving counterclockwise across the planet. One of Jupiter’s moons, Io, was shown to have nine erupting volcanoes. These were the first active volcanoes seen anywhere else in the solar system. One of Saturn’s moons, Titan, has an atmospheric chemistry that may be like Earth’s before life evolved. On February 14, 1990, Voyager 1 took the final pictures of the mission 3.7 billion miles away from us. Voyager turned back toward earth and captured an image that Carl Sagan called ” a pale blue dot.”  More information about the mission can been found on the Fact Sheet.

Placed on each spacecraft is The Golden Record  which contains our message to any extraterrestrial intelligent life that may discover our spacecraft in the future. Each record has encoded on it images from earth, information on anatomy, DNA, spoken greetings in 55 different languages, music and natural sounds including a human heartbeat, animals, birds, ocean and weather. You can listen to these sounds and see some of the photos on the NASA website.

Written on the cover of the record are instructions for accessing the information and images, spoken messages, music and sounds ; a pulsar map showing the location of our solar system; a drawing of the hydrogen atom, and a kind of radioactive clock that would allow extraterrestrials to determine when the spacecraft was launched.

Recently the Voyagers have entered interstellar space. They will continue on their journey through the Milky Way. The last instrument on the spacecraft is expected to stop working in 2025.

The Voyager Mission was an inspiration for part of the first Star Trek movie in 1979 which is about the Enterprise finding an alien spacecraft that calls itself V’ Ger. The crew discovers that is was originally an earth probe called Voyager 6 that was redesigned by an alien machine race and sent back to find its creator.

Maybe someday our descendants will receive a return message.