Progressive Values in Action: MS Gulf Coast Volunteer Slideshow
by Ana Maria
From my New York progressive friends who came down to the Mississippi Gulf Coast to volunteer their winter holiday time to help building four homes for Katrina families here in Bay St. Louis and Waveland, Mississippi, located in Hancock County--the county that Hurricane Katrina hit the worst comes this slide show of their time here in the rain and muck, cold and humidity. This slide show has FABULOUS music playing, so turn up your speakers and be ready to dance around!!
Sure, we have our troubles down here. Great music and dancing is always a great salve on our souls. I believe it will be yours as well. These are photos of my many new friends who remain in my heart for their extreme generosity and true compassion for our plight.
May each of them be blessed many times over throughout their lives. They came here to help because they saw the need and put their faith, their beliefs, their values in action. This is so much more than we've seen out of a White House that talks about faith and whose acts betray their words.
© 2008 Ana Maria Rosato. All rights reserved.
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11 comments:
I think it is great that your friends came down on their vacation to help Mississippians.
I don't think, however, that helping people in need is a Progressive or Conservative value. It's an American value, A.M. Why does everything have to be about politics? Why did you even mention their religion?
JOHN F. KENNEDY: "I am the Democratic Party's candidate for president, who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me."
What religion? It's true that they came down with 30 plus members of their church, but that isn't something I thought about mentioning. So, why are you bringing it up? Ahhhh. yes, you want me to mention that these folks get their progressive values from their church. You're right, that is important to note. Ok, so noted.
Regarding the other part of your comment, in case you have failed to read what is at the top of every page, this is a progressive political site. Progressive describes my politics, and politics describes the kind of blog this is.
Ahhh, shucks, redwood, surely you already knew that and are simply looking for a little attention from your favorite Bay St. Louis blogger, A.M. in the Morning!
I am a bit concerned, my friend. You seem weighed down a bit. Yeah, as I look at what is weighing your down . . . things are becoming ever so much clearer as to what that might be . . . of course! You are named after those fabulous trees all over Northern California. Naturally, geing around wood, you would be weighed down from what appears to be . . . Ahhh, yes, I see it from here. Looks like it's a BIG chip.
Well, BIG trees can create BIG chips. By the way, up in the northeastern part of California is a place called Big Trees. And HUGE would be a more accurate description of the trees there. MASSIVE!!
Ahhhh, the beauty of this country of ours. :)
Back tø chips. Let's try to do something about that. Chips are good . . . with salsa or if they are chocolate chips, those are wonderful to make yummy chocolate chip cookies.
And, I've been thinking about making a big batch of homemade chocolate chip cookies later today. Did you know that I love to cook? Just like many others in the Greater New Orleans area, I am a fantastic cook. Though I tend to cook when I'm happy and have the time. Additionally, I share my goodies generously with those I like. I tend to specialize in decadently divine tasting desserts. I cook plenty of great things that are not desserts, but my specialty is dessert. Always a hit where ever I go.
So be nice, darlin. Be nice. ;)
Great post pardner! We'd be shit out of luck without them volunteers. Lord knows ole Bushie and his band of big business boot licking republican friends has screwed us up enough!!
Title: Progressive Values in Action
"They came here to help because they saw the need and put their faith, their beliefs, their values in action. This is so much more than we've seen out of a White House that talks about faith and whose acts betray their words."
Faith, beliefs, values: that, my friend, is religion. Back to your title. It is incredibly flawed. I'm not saying that progressive don't have values. Au contraire: Americans have values. Is helping people not an American value?
Question. You hate questions. Why is that A.M.?
I'm not saying that this is not a progressive blog. I'm just bringing in a different view. But it seems you equate this different view to a southern gal with faux pearls.
Thanks Coastal Cowboy! I always appreciate your comments. Always a breath of fresh air, indeed. ;) Besides, you also put a big ol' smile on my face and my eye light up whenever I see you have left a note for us to read. Clever, insightful, delicious, and exciting. Quite an eyeful of yumminess with your down home way of looking at our lives. ;)
- am
Katrina recovery, insurance reform, and vets issues are intimately connected for plenty of South Mississippi families, like my own.
The DAV records are crystal clear on who consistently showed up for duty and who simply chose to tuck tail and run in the other direction when duty called.
For FOUR years in a row, Congressman Roger Wicker consistently failed to show up for duty to support our disabled American veterans.
In 2005, the DAV rated Wicker with a whopping goose egg-->0%.
In 2004, the DAV rated Wicker with another whopping goose egg-->0%.
In 2003, the DAV rated Wicker . . . with another goose egg-->0%.
In 2002, the DAV rated Wicker . . . with another goose egg-->0%!!!.
When it came time to show up for his duty to support our disabled veterans, Wicker did more than go AWOL. He completely abandoned our disabled vets. In my book, that's outright desertion.
By way of contrast, the DAV rated former Congressman Ronnie Shows 100% in 2002, 100% in 2001, and 100% in 2000. [No online data currently exists for 1999, the other year in which Congressman Shows was in that office.]
In other words, when it comes to disabled veterans, Ronnie Shows shows up for duty. That's what many veterans and their families--like mine--want in a U.S. Senator: someone who shows up for duty ready to take action to protect and serve our communities, our neighborhoods, and our families.
To this I say a big AMEN!
Note: How to get to these links from the DAV website.
Go to www.dav.org.
On the top, go to "Legislation" and click on "Legislative Action Center."
Click on "Issues."
Click on "Key Votes" and scroll all the way to the bottom.
You'll see the following.
Vote Scorecard
Select a year and click "Go" to see how members voted on important legislation.
Pick a year, hit "go", then scroll to the name you desire.
The end.
"Faith, beliefs, values: that, my friend, is religion."
Actually, those are all elements of religion. And they are not all the elements, either. Specific religions entail faith in certain things, and they all have their own particular types of beliefs and values.
People who are not religious at all *gasp* can have faith, beliefs, and values, too. So that definition of religion isn't very useful for any purpose other than trying to claim all the "faith, values and belief" for one very narrow perspective.
"Americans have values. Is helping people not an American value?"
People have values. People can arrive at the same values from different perspectives. But, I do not think that "helping people" is a value. It is a behavior that all sorts of people engage in because of their values.
A lot of Christians, no doubt, help people because they believe in loving their neighbors as themselves. Spending your time and effort helping people in this context is the way you show that you actually hold that value instead of just paying lip service to it.
A lot of Progressives probably help people because they value things like equality and fairness and justice and community. And for Progressives helping people who really need it is one indicator that those values are real in people's lives and not just nice words.
I could go on, and on, and on. I could talk about how some people are probably motivated by both Christian and Progressive values, since Christianity and Progressivism have never been mutually exclusive. Helping one another is a human activity. People do it all over the world. There are lots of value systems that teach helping one another is a good thing.
So, especially after actually reading A.M.'s post, I don't really understand what Redwood was getting at in his first comment.
Helping one another is something that some Americans do because of (very diverse) sets of values that they hold. It is not something that all Americans do, and people other than Americans also do it. So I do not think we can say that it is encouraged by any value that we could claim as uniquely "American."
And I'll add that the conservative people I know (such as my entire family except one younger sibling) don't go out and help others because of any conservative values.
The conservatives I know who do things like this are mostly on the independent fringe. They do not have strong political ideologies and don't pay much attention to politics. They are motivated to help other people because their sense decency or religious commitments or memories of their own past hardships are more real in their day-to-day lives, and thus have a greater influence on their behavior, than their so-called "conservatism."
Well said!
Faith, beliefs, and values are a religion even if it is a pseduo-religion. Show me something where people share faith, values, and a common belief and prove it is not a religion.
G.K. Chesterton. “A man who ceases to believe in God does not believe in nothing; he believes in anything.”
To prove that faith, values, and a common belief at least is a pseduo-religion:
(from J.R. Dunn, the American Thinker)
"The apocalyptic vision of global warming serves a deep need of the environmentalist credo, the dominant pseudo-religious tendency of our age in the prosperous West. For good or ill, human beings are constructed to believe, and faith has its demands. Along with the concrete elements that demand belief (that fire burns and that it's not wise to walk off cliffs, for example) there exists an apparent necessity for a belief in ‘the rock higher than I' - a belief in a superior entity that can inspire awe and gratitude, that can be turned to in hard times, that can act as witness to injustice and dispenser of mercy. … Religious belief is hard-wired into human beings, by what means and for what purposes we don't yet understand. … That environmentalism is in fact a pseudo-religion goes without saying. Like all such, it possesses every element of contemporary legitimate belief. It has a deity, in this case the goddess Gaia, the personification of the living Earth, (first envisioned by James Lovelock, whom we can slot in as high priest). It has its holy books, most changing with the seasons, and most, as is true of the Bible with many convinced Christians, utterly unread. It has its saints, its prophets, its commandments, religious rituals (be sure to recycle that bottle), a large gallery of sins, mortal and otherwise, and an even larger horde of devils.” And one of those devils would be me and anybody else who doesn't believe in their religion of global warming.
“Another item that a pseudo-religion must have is an apocalypse - and that's what global warming is all about. In fact, the apocalyptic is the major fulcrum of environmentalism, the axis around which everything else turns. It's environmentalism's major element of concern, its chief attraction, and the center of discussion and speculation, in much the same way that some Protestant variants of Christianity are obsessed above all with sin. So crucial is the apocalypse to environmentalism that there has been a whole string of them, one after the other, covering every last aspect of the natural world. If one don't git ya, the next one will. Green emphasis on the apocalyptic appeared early, accompanying the introduction of mass environmental awareness itself. Silent Spring, published in 1962, represents the first environmentalist scripture -- nothing other than a modern book of Revelations. Rachel Carson, a popular nature writer, was dying of cancer while writing the book, and Silent Spring became an outlet for her rage and grief. Carson predicted the imminent coming of a stricken world, a world poisoned by the synthetic products of the chemical industry, in which no birds sang and human children would not be immune. The early 60s were marked by fears of the consequences of atmospheric nuclear tests, and the suggestion that chemicals were just as deadly found a willing audience.
“Pollution - a word that itself bears many religious connotations -- became a byword of the era. That fact that the phenomenon encompassed virtually every aspect of technical civilization including car exhausts, household plastics, and power generation, guaranteed it a good long run. Truly grotesque stories, ranging from dioxins eating sneakers from children's feet to hushed-up epidemics of cancer, made the rounds. None were anything more than grist for Snopes.com, and the promised chemical doomsday never arrived. But Carson's work set the pattern for all the environmental apocalypses to come. The next example was overpopulation, its prophet the notorious Paul Ehrlich. His set of tablets was titled The Population Bomb and if anything, it was even more popular than Silent Spring. Ehrlich's thesis was that relentlessly burgeoning population would overstress the earth's "carrying capacity", use up all available resources, and lead to the collapse of civilization before the 20th century was out. The argument seemed irrefutable to those not familiar with the uncertainties surrounding demography (Thomas Malthus had made similar series of predictions early in the 19th century).”
This is the story I love to tell, Julian Simon, the great scientist, now late great scientist, made a bet with Ehrlich that at the end of the period of time Ehrlich thought we would all be destroyed, that there would be more resources and that their prices would be cheaper and they made a bet on various minerals and elements, and Simon won every one of them. Ehrlich could not have been more wrong. Didn't matter. He has never been discredited and still remains a disciple, a prophet, a god in the church of environmentalism.
"Countless offshoots of Ehrlich's book appeared, and overpopulation became one of the standard ideas of the late 60s, embraced by the counterculture, policymakers, academics, and the media. Even today, an era in which deflating national populations are the problem, it's by no means unusual to come across people still living in Ehrlich's nightmare world, much the same as the Amish or Mennonites have preserved their far more pleasant way of life into modern times. Ehrlich became quite wealthy, and the master of his own foundation devoted to the study of the 'overpopulation threat’. To this day, he contends that his thesis is correct. The whole episode is begging for a detailed historical study. A variant combining aspects of both theories had a brief run in the early to mid 70s: the doctrine of universal famine. Pollution would poison croplands and stunt agricultural production, and overpopulation would do the rest. The problem here was the fact that proponents insisted that doom was imminent, with famine appearing as early as 1975 or 1980 at the latest. The experience taught the Greens to be a little more vague with dates.”
OK, from the top . . .
Katrina recovery, insurance reform, and vets issues are intimately connected for plenty of South Mississippi families, like my own.
The DAV records are crystal clear on who consistently showed up for duty and who simply chose to tuck tail and run in the other direction when duty called.
For FOUR years in a row, Congressman Roger Wicker consistently failed to show up for duty to support our disabled American veterans.
In 2005, the DAV rated Wicker with a whopping goose egg-->0%.
In 2004, the DAV rated Wicker with another whopping goose egg-->0%.
In 2003, the DAV rated Wicker . . . with another goose egg-->0%.
In 2002, the DAV rated Wicker . . . with another goose egg-->0%!!!.
When it came time to show up for his duty to support our disabled veterans, Wicker did more than go AWOL. He completely abandoned our disabled vets. In my book, that's outright desertion.
By way of contrast, the DAV rated former Congressman Ronnie Shows 100% in 2002, 100% in 2001, and 100% in 2000. [No online data currently exists for 1999, the other year in which Congressman Shows was in that office.]
In other words, when it comes to disabled veterans, Ronnie Shows shows up for duty. That's what many veterans and their families--like mine--want in a U.S. Senator: someone who shows up for duty ready to take action to protect and serve our communities, our neighborhoods, and our families.
To this I say a big AMEN!
Note: How to get to these links from the DAV website.
Go to www.dav.org.
On the top, go to "Legislation" and click on "Legislative Action Center."
Click on "Issues."
Click on "Key Votes" and scroll all the way to the bottom.
You'll see the following.
Vote Scorecard
Select a year and click "Go" to see how members voted on important legislation.
Pick a year, hit "go", then scroll to the name you desire.
The end.
Please note, never once did I mention a congressional race in this thread until now. It's been you every time.
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