The Norm Report - Month 90
July 1, 2009
E-mail: norm@bmi.net
Norm Lee’s website: www.nopunish.net
Over 26,300 visits
We are visitors on this planet…
during this period we must try to
do something good, something useful
with our lives.
H. H. Dalai Lama
Leaving Arizona
After nearly 24 years in this overheated state, I’m moving on, leaving this hostile "desert floor" for the lush San Joaquin Valley of California. Destination: East of San Franciso & the Bay Area, near Yosemite National Park, where there is abundant fresh water, vineyards by the dozen, friendly, awake people, and my son, Russell. He has found a house near his, on which he is currently applying his multiple skills to doing what needs to be done there before I arrive.
The Plan: Russ flies here in a fortnight, we load a UHaul truck, then joyfully release the surly bonds of this desert land of scorpions, rattlesnakes, black widows, tarantulas, javalina, coyotes, and gila monsters, all of which I’ve confronted in my back yard. To be fair, there are also bunny rabbits, squirrels, my brilliant resident Cardinal and his wife, hilarious roadrunners, hundreds of bird types, and, every morning, 40 quail who come for their breakfast, all with the backdrop of magnificent Mount Graham. In many ways, I’ve learned to love this place.
Russell, Sherrie and I came to AZ in 1986 from the Finger Lakes of NY State, my bronchitis forcing the move. We hauled Spook (pony) & Jenny (burrow) in a horse trailer behind us. Greed and hatred are everywhere, we know, but here it was rampant. We saw this sign: "Welcome to Arizona. Now go home." Countless Arizona enterpreneurs greeted us with sneering comments about our NY license plates - unless we bought something. Clearly these xenophobic "Zonies" hated and feared (read: resented and envied) New Yorkers, and supposed we and the entire state population lived in Manhattan. (Yet they’re addicted to NYC TV programs.) They felt inferior, and we agreed. Sherrie and I are experienced gardeners who’d survived raising our food and we knew those horticulturally deprived cowboys were buying their produce in supermarkets. They couldn’t grow a carrot to save their saddle.
We three bought a manufactured home in Glendale (akin to Phoenix), where Russ framed home in the a.m. and worked his way to a degree at AZ State Univ. in the p.m. Sherrie and I sought to get established in the magnificent and artsy Sedona & Oak Creek Canyon. She taught calligraphy courses in Northern Arizona University, and freelanced in the art community while I wrote feature articles for the art section of the Sedona Times. It was part-time but steady writer-photographer work as I was teaching a creative writing course at Yavapai College.
In rapid succession, the semester ended, the newspaper ceased publication, the college severed relations and Sherrie and I parted after eleven years of remarkable achievements together. Starting from a rented plot of land, we had bought 22 acres of prime Finger Lakes land, built two cabins and a two-storey home, founded and published a national magazine, created a "community of homesteaders", fielded annual self-reliant festivals for hundreds of our readers, and traveled the speaker’s circuit offering ten seminars from NY to California. I was - and am - fiercely proud of Sherrie’s work and our work as a team. We remain close even today, after nearly 20 years in love (and counting).
Back in Glendale, confident I would find my group, I joined the Phoenix peace organization in protesting the Gulf War. It was astonishing and puzzling to be treated uncivily by people ostensibly devoted to Peace. When questioned, I had foolishly admitted to 30 years experience in street protest and civil disobedience. That proved to be unacceptable, even offensive, since no one there was better qualified. So I was cast not as an ally, but a threat. Following a public talk I had given, a reporter from a large Phx paper called asking to interview me. After 5 minutes of questions the reporter huffed, "So! You’re one of those Eastern liberal professors!" and hung up the phone. It never saw print. I quickly learned that what we knew as the extreme right-wing John Birch Society line is here called "conservative".
Russ met Audrey; found computer work in a company that recognized his disciplined work ethic, soon promoted him to salaried and sent them U-Hauling it to Lodi, CA. Alone again and all but friendless, I taught short-term writing courses in five colleges, and extended gardening courses in Glendale and Tucson. I had been talking with state legislators urging laws prohibiting CP in schoools (and encountered lawmakers raging at my audacity in challenging sacred "woodshed discipline") when Diane Bishop, president of the State Board of Education, called a hearing on the matter of school corporal punishment. I testified. At voting time my testimony was cited as critical: with only one dissenting, the vote was abolishment. Jubilant, I left for Mexico, joyful that CP was outlawed in Arizona. On my return I found that the AZ attorney general had ruled that only the legislature could stop schools from battering kids with paddles. Winter months I lived in a Mexican fishing village on the Sea of Cortez, where I found real friends. There I helped build a schoolhouse, raised an organic garden, smuggled tools & clothes to them, played "The Little Mermaid" video for the delighted kids. With the solar panels I had installed on my motor home roof powering my MacIntosh, there I wrote several books.
Back in Glendale the nice lady manager of the mobile home park had retired, replaced by an ill-humored German couple whose principle approach was to issue orders and dominate the residents under their "command". Worse, they allied with the Swastika-waving Nazi who lived a few doors from me, forming an axis to enforce the New Order. For years this was a peaceful park, but under the new regime the Nazi grew bold and took hissing "swine" at me and shrieking "Seig heil!" when I passed until I wearied of it and stood up to him. In brief: After my futile attempts at organizing resistence among park residents, Adolf (I’m not making this up) called in his skinhead harrassing team. They buzzed me for days circling on their Harleys, then the managers served legal notice for me to leave the park.
When I sought a restraining order to keep the Nazis out of my face, (the cops would do nothing), the Justice of Peace scheduled a "trial". At the outset the judge, also German, issuing decisions in a heavy gutteral accent, disallowed my speaking altogether, and cast me as the defendant. I was not allowed to answer Adolf’s accusations, or even to question his lying witnesses; thus I was characterised as the harasser of Adolf and the Skinheads. I had found myself in a festering nest of Holocaust deniers still loyal to the Third Reich. I said goodbye to my only friend, the Glendale librarian, and sought more peaceful climes. I would go where I could garden all year round.
On a map of temperature zones, there was, in remote Graham County, a small, secluded valley between two mountain ranges. I checked it out. It is my custom, when I see a beautiful child or baby, to clap my hands in glee and exclaim, "How beautiful!" There in Gila Valley the people smiled appreciatively and proudly said, "Thank you!" Whenever I did that in Glendale or Phoenix, they called the police. So I moved to Graham County and bought a home. The following week my neighbor said, "You can’t buy a tube of toothpaste here without supporting the LDS church." I had landed in a Mormon-ruled community. Thus began my 12+ years in the fundamentalist Gila Valley, Arizona, with its 36 denominational and "non-denominational" churches, and 37 Latter Day Saints churches or "stakes". Plus several catholic churches for the Mexicans, both documented and not. Sin is a thriving business here, with its five several lockups, including federal and state prisons, the county prison, the children’s jail ("Juvenile Detention Center"), and several other slammers. Most of my neighbors are prison guards, nearly every school, business and political & law enforcement institution is headed & controled by LDS.
I came here without an agenda. What, I asked myself, is the best thing I can contribute to my new community? I could teach writing, or how to make A’s in college, or speed reading, or yoga, or Buddhism, or self-reliant living, or food gardening, or home schooling… One morning, breakfasting in a diner, I saw a woman drag her 10-year-old boy into the ladies room and wallop the daylights out of him as he screamed for help. I could get no one, employee or patron, to go in there and put a stop to the abuse. In that instant I knew what I had to give to this community in Gila Valley, Arizona. What lay ahead was my biggest and toughest challenge in Arizona. - Norm
[Next month: Children’s Advocate.]
TOGETHER, WE CAN STOP THE MALTREATMENT OF CHILDREN. You are invited to join the many others in pledging to interrupt the violence against children. TO SEE THE COMPLETE LIST of those vowing to STOP THE HITTING, visit Norm’s website, PARENTING WITHOUT PUNISHING:www.nopunish.net You are also invited to send us a brief anecdote describing a time you intervened on behalf of a child, and what was effective - or not. There is nothing sold here, nothing to buy. This information is Copyright 2009 by Norm Lee, and offered here free of charge. Commercial use of this material, in whole or in part, is strictly prohibited. Permission is here given to forward a complete document, and/or to print complete copies for friends WITHOUT CHARGE to them. All quoting must provide source, author, and website www.nopunish.net. List addresses are never sold, exchanged or shared. If you wish to be added to the mailing list for this NORM REPORT e-letter, send name and general location (state, city, or country), with "Please subscribe" in the subject box, to norm@bmi.net. If you have received this by mistake, and/or it is unwelcome, simply click Reply and type "Please remove" in the Subject box.
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