Awesome Women: Phyllis Rodriguez & Aicha el-Wafi

It is Mother's Day many countries around the world. Today I  honor TWO AWESOME WOMEN OF THE DAY, Phyllis Rodriguez, whose son was killed in the World Trade Center on 9/11, and Aicha el-Wafi, the mother of Zacarias Moussaoui, accused, tried and convicted by the United States of being the missing "20th hijacker".

Women can bridge vast rifts. Women can heal the world. Only women. Happy Mother's Day to all of you. Regardless of how many children you do or don't have, your powers of love and care and action and courage are what the world needs now. ♥



My Awesome Woman posts were first written for and published to a closed Facebook group, and are republished here.

All forms of terrorism, some thoughts on 9/11/2010

• On September 11, 2001, about 3,000 people died in the United States at the World Trade Center in New York City, at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and on five hijacked airplanes. This was a horrible, shocking display of the hatred of one group of humans for another. And many thousands of family members of the victims continue to suffer under the memory of what happened.
  
• On September 11, 2001,  about 24,000 children died on our planet, most from preventable causes, with undernutrition contributing to about one-third of these deaths and vaccine-preventable disease causing another 14% of those deaths.
  
• In 2001 there were 6.13 billion persons in the world. The United Nations Survey of Crime Trends and Operations of Criminal Justice Systems, covering the period 1998 - 2000 arrived at an average of 1 person in 1,000 -- or 613,000 -- being raped each year. This would indicate that on September 11, 2001 around 1,700 persons were raped on the planet, most of them women.

I find  research into unfair deaths and egregious injustice and personal crime statistics to be spiritually exhausting, so I need to stop now. Therefore I will not be providing handy little statistics re the number of children and women sold as sex slaves within their own countries or shipped in containers around the globe,  the number of women beaten each day by their husbands, the number of people who did not have clean water to drink, the number of girls denied an education, the number of children and teens forced to make our rugs, sneakers and other commodities, the number of women who are genitally mutilated and/or forced to marry ...

There are all kinds of terrorism. Human beings can be very twisted in their actions towards others, and in their inactions as well. 9/11 was ONE day. Every single day on this planet the above statistics replay themselves, except for the first one covering 9/11. Every day 24,000 children die of preventable causes and every day 1.7 million people are raped.

If you are one of those who get all riled up by what Al-Qaeda did on 9/11, do you get equally fired up about all the other horrible fates imposed by humans upon their fellow man? Upon children? Did you take even one small action this year to help a victim? Give five bucks to a homeless person? Did you help serve even one meal in a shelter for battered women and their children? Did you even give a small scared child a loving smile?

Bush v. Cheney

Sherlyn Gay Stolberg has drawn an interesting juxtaposition of the differences between Bush's brand-new reflective, candid mood and Cheney's unflagging bombast.

The difference in tone, friends and advisers say, reflects a split over Mr. Bush’s second-term foreign policy, which Mr. Cheney resisted as too dovish. It also reveals their divergent approaches to post-White House life. Mr. Bush, who is planning a public policy center in Dallas, is trying to shape his legacy by offering historians a glimpse of his thinking, while Mr. Cheney, primarily concerned about the terrorist threat, is setting the stage for a role as a standard-bearer for conservatives on national security.

I wonder whether Cheney will find many adherents in the post-Bush/Cheney era. From what I've gleaned in my readings of Conservative analysis, well, "I don't really think many Conservatives are hitching their wagon to your star, Dick."

Let's see: Spend a trillion dollars fighting a war for the past six years (a war whose very premise collapsed within the first few months), engender a heretofore unknown depth of hatred towards our country making it difficult to negotiate any issue to our advantage, give no-bid contracts in the most astounding act of cronyism and insider illegality ever to companies to which you have strong ties only to have it uncovered that they are defrauding our country and wasting our money and doing a really bad job in many cases, and spread our troops so thin and abuse their willingness to serve to such a degree that our military power is teetering. And, a full seven years after 9/11, only a miniscule percentage of incoming shipping containers are inspected, the Federal budget is so shot they're gonna have to take police back off the streets and defund Homeland Security programs, and that immensely sad gaping hole in my beloved downtown Manhattan, a site that was an engine of American competitiveness, profitability, and power -- well, today, seven years later, it is .... a sad gaping hole!

Pardon me for shouting, but WHAT DID ANY ACTION CHENEY TRUMPETED AND INFLUENCED HAVE TO DO WITH (1) CONSERVATIVISM, OR (2) NATIONAL SECURITY?