pafret Loc: Northeast

"You Can Be Sure..."


“Never, ever forget that nothing in this life is free. Life demands payment in some form for your "right" to express yourself, to condemn and abuse the evil surrounding us. Expect to pay... it will come for you, they will come for you, regardless. Knowing that, give them Hell itself every chance you can. Expect no mercy, and give none. That's how life works. Be ready to pay for what you do, or be a coward, pretend you don't see, don't know, and cry bitter tears over how terrible things are, over how you let them become.”
- "For Whom the Bell Tolls"

"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it k**ls. It k**ls the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will k**l you too but there will be no special hurry."
- "A Farewell to Arms"

"Man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated."
- "The Old Man and the Sea"

- Ernest Hemingway

The Poet: William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming"



"The Second Coming"

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

- William Butler Yeats, January 1919

"How It Really Was"

lindajoy Loc: right here with you....

As always, simply outstanding..

America’s relationship with the Thanksgiving holiday has evolved several times since those initial harvest festivals. In 1777, George Washington proclaimed a day of “thanksgiving” in honor of the American defeat of the British at Saratoga. For generations, Thanksgiving was not an annual holiday but a sporadic celebration marking years of prosperity, and it wasn’t until Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 proclamation of a national Thanksgiving Day on the final Thursday of November that the United States celebrated the holiday with much regularity. Then, in 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in hopes that an earlier Thanksgiving would increase spending during the Great Depression, declared that Thanksgiving would be a week earlier, allowing for more shopping time before the winter holidays.

Of course, the holiday, which falls near the end of Native American Heritage Month, is also a reminder of the displacement of Native Americans from their lands. In her poem “A Tribute to the Future of My Race,” early twentieth-century poet and Native American activist Laura Cornelius Kellogg reflects on cultural assimilation and the history of federal appropriation of Native American lands, ending on a somber note of loss:

Yea, the hearts’ right hand we give them,
Blue-eyed Royalty American,
Theirs, our native land forever,
Ours their presence and their teachings.
Ours the noblest and the best.

Henry Wadsworth~
It is the Harvest Moon! On gilded vanes
And roofs of villages, on woodland crests
And their aerial neighborhoods of nests
Deserted, on the curtained window-panes
Of rooms where children sleep, on country lanes
And harvest-fields, its mystic splendor rests!
Gone are the birds that were our summer guests,
With the last sheaves return the laboring wains!
All things are symbols: the external shows
Of Nature have their image in the mind,
As flowers and fruits and falling of the leaves;
The song-birds leave us at the summer's close,
Only the empty nests are left behind,
And pipings of the quail among the sheaves.

pafret Loc: Northeast

Great Commentary Linda.

Peewee Loc: San Antonio, TX

Glad you guys like to type... cuz... I enjoy reading it...if the muscle memory in my fingers hadn't been trained on a manual typewriter... I'd join in...:)

Alicia Loc: NYC

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I truly appreciated your cartoon. Seems like the European settlers brought the devil with them.