Be the resistance

I've struggled these last months. Even lost my mojo. Seriously, I've woven less than a dishtowel over so many weeks they've become months.  

Some time ago I read Ellen's call to action. The national 24 hour Economic Blackout on February 28th:

I will participate.

The 24 hour Economic Blackout

As our first initial act, we turn it off.

For one day we show them who really holds the power.

WHEN:

Friday February 28th from

12:00 AM to 11:59 PM

WHAT NOT TO DO:

Do not make any purchases

Do not shop online, or in-store

No Amazon, No Walmart, No Best Buy

Nowhere!

Do not spend money on:

Fast Food

Gas

Major Retailers

Do not use Credit or Debit Cards for non essential spending

WHAT YOU CAN DO:

Only buy essentials of absolutely necessary

(Food, Medicine, Emergency Supplies)

If you must spend, ONLY support small, local businesses.

SPREAD THE MESSAGE

Talk about it, post about it, and document your actions that day!

WHY THIS MATTERS!

~ Corporations and banks only care about their bottom line.

~ If we disrupt the economy for just ONE day, it sends a powerful message.

~ If they don't listen (they wont) we make the next blackout longer (We will)

This is our first action.

This is how we make history.

February 28th

The 24 Hour Economic Black Out Begins.

A day of rage will be cathartic, and I'm looking forward. And then, thinking backward, I thought of the boycotts I've been part of in my lifetime, and many I've not. I wasn't there for the Montgomery bus boycott, but I have participated in many consumer boycotts.

Remember supporting the United Farm Workers by boycotting produce? Grapes and lettuce. Other movements we helped as we could. The ending of apartheid. Greenpeace. Heinz. More I can no longer remember. The National School Walkout. (Another damn cold day!)

Here's a list purportedly posted by Heather Cox Richardson, but actually by the Heather Cox Richardson Community. You can find it on Facebook, if you still have an account.

It's a list of Project 2025 adherents. It doesn't include the big guys, like Amazon and Tesla; it's the minor players, who equally do not deserve our support. Use Ctrl+ to enlarge the print, if necessary.

This list is published by democratsabroad.org, a good place to look for resistance efforts. Sadly, about half our country could be on this list, which seemingly halves our available world. Or not.

Most of us are no longer raising children, managing households. We still control our purse strings and can make informed purchasing decisions. Research products before you purchase. Purchase locally. Use renewables and reuseables. I gave up most paper products years ago. Buy handkerchiefs. Buy kitchen towels. Be thoughtful about cleaning products.

Be vocal. Don't buy a Tesla, but also don't boo the Canadian national anthem. And don't begrudge them the opportunity to vocalize their displeasure with our government. That's all.

Anamneses

I can scarcely pronounce that title. It refers to a memory, probably of another lifetime. This is about such a memory; I am now so far removed from most of my past, it seems like another life time.

For many years I was a prolific knitter; the art I learned from my mother. I started in college, age 18, and truly stopped only a couple years ago, when I bequeathed the last of my yarn, all my patterns and needle stash to Caroline, the last grandchild.

Even before Jan and I left our "civilian" jobs to form a weaving studio, I was waist deep in yarn. Basically I had come to dislike most synthetic yarns available in the seventies and not able to afford the beautiful wools out there.

What to do? Make it yourself, I concluded. I bought a wheel and figured it out. Actually, I bought several wheels before I settled on my favorite, a wheel made by a weaving friend's son-in-law. Beside being a practical tool, it was a woodworking bit of art. This is the only picture I can find of me and that wheel, spinning at a show in Boston.

After we ended our weaving careers in 2003 Jan and I took separate artistic directions. She became an accomplished and acclaimed quilter and I became a dabbler, a dilettante. There were pounds and pounds of carded wool in the studio that needed spun, a neat task while watching TV. So, I spun and spun.

What to do with the yarn, except knit it. So, I knit it and sold the garments in a local gallery. 

But I could spin faster than knit, so why not sell it! I explained what an electric wheel would look like to my brother Walt, and he made one. Here's a picture of it.

You can see the bobbin with some yarn in the middle and the unit around it is called the flyer. It distributes the spun yarn onto the bobbin. A typical flyer uses hooks to distribute the yarn along; you must stop the wheel and move the yarn to the next hook. 

This flyer had something I discovered shortly after I began spinning, a travelling screw. A continuous screw in that black tube carried the yarn constantly. I'm notorious for cutting to the chase and it took me no time to find a fellow who made travelling flyers.

My wholesale yarn business was off to a great start with the addition of Walt's electric wheel, comprised of parts from my old mechanical wheels and a sewing machine motor. I sold to knitting shops all over Ohio and Wisconsin.

That is the whole lead-in to my anamneses moment today. Beth had asked to come visit and at once sat us down and opened her tablet (the electronic one). Pretty soon we were on a face time (I think that's the name) with Caroline, who had a mystery box from her mother to open.

Out came two great bundles of yarn.

"OMG, that's my old label!"

Beth is a great fan of Facebook Marketplace and one day, unsolicited, this yarn for sale came up. Probably because she occasionally searched for yarn. I suspect it came from a yarn shop in Columbus. The owner was so delightful I even shared my Aran Aran pattern with her. If I can find a picture, I'll post it.

So Caroline has enough yarn to make a lovely sweater. It's in good hands.

I made and sold yarn for about a year. Then we took in three grandchildren. They take up a lot of room, and the wheels had to find a new home. I sold them all, in one fell swoop.

No direction home

Beth and I went to see A Complete Unknown this afternoon. I won't lie, this was me in the sixties and later. I teared up several times, but didn't need a tissue. I remembered my twenties (and my motorcycle, for some levity).

More than once lately I have wondered, "Where are the kids?" Why aren't they in the streets, blocking traffic, holding up signs, chanting? But I've come to terms with some of it now. 

Back then, we didn't affect change. We didn't effect change. It ground along at it's own pace, swelled occasionally by the undercurrents of the time.

That war in Vietnam lasted almost fifteen years, and that was just for us. The French and the Russians had their go for years before that. When I started college in 1961, Kennedy had just sent some advisors. My own children were in school when it ended.

All those students who protested the Gaza war, Columbia, George Washington, California, Ohio State, are looking at passport revocation or worse. As are their parents. At least four of them did not wind up lifeless on a Kent State campus.

When I protested the bombing of Cambodia, wrote letters, joined protest groups at CWRU, the worst that happened was the IRS audited my puny twenty grand tax return. The stakes are far higher this time. 

It has been this bad in the past, and cycles around to the next spate of badness. When my grandparents were starting out, there was war, there was poverty, there were oligarchs in charge. Carnegie, Rockefeller, Morgan and Gould controlled supply chains and wages. Men and women organized and fought and died for rights that were gradually built into the law. 

We all know the history. The depression, the fight for rights, the fight for the future of the world. Next the triumph of the middle class, the rise of the unions. Love them or hate them, unions made regular citizens of millions of people in this country who could own homes and send children to school, not to the factories at ten years old.

And here we are back to dark days again. It didn't need to happen. 

I fear we will stumble in this wilderness long past my life time to sort the current idiocracy. There has been violence for no good cause. Capital police were injured and died four years ago. The men (and women) deluded to think bullets trumped ballots are up for the next round. There is plenty of mental and physical violence to come.

It's just so stupid to do it over and over and over. 

I can't fix it. I can only work against it. My grandma used to say "Pull up your corset strings girls, we have work to do."

I see much of northeastern Ohio has ordered ICE not to enter safe places (schools, churches, designated areas) without a search warrant, and they cannot carry guns. It's just a middle finger, but an excellent start. 

Still sobbing

Yesterday I sat down to rest my stupid leg on my trip back to my room. Sometimes I break out the phone and read some news while I wait. This time I pressed the Local tab, and for fun selected Akron.

Akron, Ohio that is. The home of every important tire company when I was a child. Goodyear Aircraft, who employed my father all his life to work on, first blimps, those wonder aircraft that escorted ships across the Atlantic during the war, and finally space craft. What a city.

I've written about growing up in North Hill, home of all the Italian immigrants and infiltrated in my childhood by immigrants from all over the country and world for employment in the factories. We had to tell mom if we were going to the black Wagners for the afternoon, or the white Wagners.

The International Institute of Akron was on the other side of the street from my junior high school. It welcomed immigrants and refugees from around the world to their new home in Akron. We went to school with children for whom English was a second language. I walked to school with Sonja Jones, who lived with her grandparents a street behind me. Sonja's family was from East Germany.

Where am I going with all this? The headline on the local, Akron news yesterday was the lockdown at Forest Hill Elementary School because ICE was patrolling the neighborhood. Driving their stinking cars up and down Damon Street, so the kids couldn't go out for recess.

Tears rolled down. A friend stopped and asked and I told her, the effing feds are trolling for immigrants at my elementary school. She said "Well, they voted him in!" and I lost it. I have not checked, but I sincerely doubt Akron voted red. Never, ever! Those children did not vote. They just went to school, like kids. Babies, five year old kindergartners. Ten year olds off to middle school in a year. Still walking to school, no one lives far enough away for the bus. She apologized.

I am overwhelmed by the knowledge I cannot throw enough sand, support enough marches, write enough letters, weave enough towels to abate this cruelty from the capital.

Such a week or so

Too much new going on. I was a couple of weeks without the new computer. It was set up, and transferring the data, but silly little glitches held up progress. First, Beth assumed I had a monitor, but the old computer actually was self contained, and the monitor left with the CPU (if that's what it's still called). 

New monitor arrived, synching set up, but it took some time for the new kid on the block to absorb all the information. Beth came back in a week or so for the wrap and all seemed well. But soon I realized my new monitor had no speakers. Back to the well. I expedited the speaker; back in business.

Then...ever since that high blood pressure attack several months ago, I've been plagued by my startle response. An unexpected noise and I jump. I threw my Chrome button off the screen when my phone rang yesterday. I can still use the start function to access Chrome, but I simply could not drag and drop that shortcut to the home screen.

I cleverly decided just to download Chrome again. Bad choice All my old Chrome settings are lost. That's enough of that. I am leaving well enough alone. I can still get around until my computer guru's reappear.

In the meantime, I saw on this morning's news that Anna Maria of Aurora has been named by Newsweek as a (the?) number one in their "America's Best Nursing Homes of 2025". I certainly have always been impressed by the services. Decent food, good staff, good housekeeping. My only complaint is that people keep dying.

We have one resident who, to me, epitomizes the sort of care at Anna Maria. Bill is a Vietnam veteran, who has PTSD. Bill never stops talking, except to listen a bit and then rejoin with his knowledge. He is a very well read man who knows and pretty well understands 20th century history. He can hold forth for hours, and does.

Interestingly, he has a core of friends and acquaintances who keep him company much of the day. If they don't know WWII, he fills them in. WWI, the same. Don't know what each president accomplished, well, Bill does, and he'll get you up to snuff. A happy, harmless veteran who does need reminded to change his clothes.

That same resident who cannot be responsible for her walker also believes Bill should be in a veteran's home, "where he can get the help he needs." She's pretty adamant about that. She's bothered that he talks so much.

Veteran's homes are not run by the VA; they are administered by the individual states, under their nursing home regulations. There are two in Ohio. Ohio does not have a sterling nursing home reputation. My knowledge is limited to two veterans I have known before and after they lived in a veteran's home in Ohio. From my experience with them I think Bill would be chewed up and spit out in such a facility.

I disabused Jean of her belief that the VA runs veteran's homes, at least in Ohio. I think Bill's family did well to place him here in such mixed and accepting company, and asked her to just stop listening to him at the next table if he interrupted her thoughts that much. Sadly, he's not the only resident on her last nerve.

All that's left is the weather. We had ten inches of snow, and though it's sagging, it's still here. Daily flurries and temps from twenty down have seen to that. It will not change in the next couple of weeks. So, let's see if I can dig through Windows 11 and find a picture.

Here's one. I'm currently weaving the purple. It's lovely!