“Why do American mothers send their children to kill others?” by Cindy Sheehan

by Cindy Sheehan
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox Blog
Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox
August 6, 2011

Image by tsweden via Flickr

I am not the only international guest speaking at the rallies against nukes and for world peace here in Hiroshima, Japan—a pediatrician from Iraq was also invited—Dr. Hassan.

Dr. Hassan has seen and is treating numerous cancers and other problems in children stemming from the US invasion and occupation and the use of conventional weapons coated with depleted uranium, or DU.

In the Name of Love by Cindy Sheehan

by Cindy Sheehan
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox Blog
Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox
May 25, 2011

Thirty-two years ago today, I was very pregnant with my first child. In those days, of course, we didn’t know if we were having a boy or a girl and the pre-natal care usually consisted of a few blood tests and getting to hear the baby’s heart at every appointment.

With the June 5^th deadline looming, on Sunday May 28^th, my husband and I, went to an air show in Long Beach, Ca where we decided on the names: it would be Julie Anne for a baby girl or Casey Austin for a baby boy.

When Will The Killing End? by Jill Dalton

by Jill Dalton
Guest Writer
Dandelion Salad
Originally published at http://proactvoice.wordpress.com, May 8, 2011
May 9, 2011

Image via Wikipedia

Sunday night when I learned of the death of Osama Bin Laden I did not feel elated, I did not hop on the #1 subway and head to ground zero, nor did I celebrate in the streets, drink champagne or chant USA, USA, USA!   Honestly, I wish he’d been brought in alive and put on trial like we did at Nuremberg.  I’d like to hear what he had to say and expose him for who and what he was.  I prefer justice to murder or assassination.  So instead of reveling in his demise I took a moment to reflect on what this has cost our country and our souls.

Stuck in Stage Two by Cindy Sheehan

by Cindy Sheehan
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox Blog
Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox
February 1, 2011

Image via Wikipedia

The 5 Stages of Grief:

1) Denial
2) Anger
3) Bargaining
4) Depression
5) Acceptance

In 1969, Swiss psychiatrist, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross published a groundbreaking book called: On Death and Dying. The five stages of grief listed above are called the Kubler-Ross Model and were originally designated for people who were diagnosed with a terminal illness but were extended to anyone who has suffered a major loss such as: losing a limb, losing freedom, or a death of a close loved one.

Haiti: Mirlanda’s story + Nixon, the boy who survived Haiti’s earthquake

https://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/

msfuk | January 12, 2011

Six months after the January earthquake, photographer Nicola Vigilanti travelled to an MSF reconstructive surgery in Haiti. There he met Mirlanda, an inspiring 10 year-old girl who lost her mother and her leg in in the earthquake. Vigilanti recorded her slow recovery, as she received treatment for a crushed arm and learned to walk again with the use of a prosthetic limb. Despite the severity of her injuries and restricted mobility, Mirlanda always continued smiling and never let the fact that she had lost a leg stop her joining in with the other children in the hospital, even to play football.

The Man In The Bathtub, December 1, 1940 by Philip A. Farruggio

by Philip A. Farruggio
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
December 1, 2010

He was born and raised in a little town just outside of Licata, Sicily. By the time he was 18, the young man was accepted into university in Tunisia, a far more scholastically advanced place than the Sicily of the early 1900s. Upon graduating, he decided to do what many young Italians chose to do, and he emigrated to the United States. He married a pretty young Neapolitan girl that he met in New York City, and they settled down to raise a family. She could only bear one child, a son, in 1915. Her husband could not get his Tunisian university degree to count for anything here, so he found whatever work he could.

The Family Jewels – A Veteran’s story + Gil & Gladys Palast interviewed by Greg Palast

Updated: Nov. 11, 2010 added video

by Greg Palast
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.gregpalast.com
10 November, 2010

In 1930, when my father was an 8-year-old kid in Chicago, he asked his older brother why people were outside in the cold snow in a long line.

His brother Harold said, “It’s a bread line.  They don’t have anything to eat.  They’re hoping for bread.”

My father ran to his mother’s bedroom, grabbed my grandmother’s diamond brooch, ran downstairs, and gave it to a man in the line.

Detainee 239 by Felicity Arbuthnot

by Felicity Arbuthnot
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
13 October, 2010

Image via Wikipedia

” …and if any one saved a life, it would be as if s/he saved the life of all mankind. …” (Qur’an 5:32)

“How does it become a man to behave towards the American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.” (Henry David Thoreau,1817-1862.)

On Tuesday,13th April, as British politicians travelled the country, promising a brave new world on Election day (6th May) a letter was delivered to the British Prime Minister’s residence, Number 10, Downing Street.

Eco Home: Escaping the Big City – A Place Under the Sun

https://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/

Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr

RussiaToday | October 10, 2010

Meet the people who build ecological settlements to live in harmony with the natural environment. Are they just escaping big city life for a short break, or rejecting modern civilization altogether? And are such ecological settlements a refuge for misfits and outcasts, or a place for the independent and strong-minded?

Book TV: In Depth: Ralph Nader

https://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/

with Ralph Nader
C-SPAN Book TV

Mother’s Day Manifesto 2010 by Eileen Fleming

Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr

by Eileen Fleming
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
May 6, 2010

The genesis of Mother’s Day in the U.S.A. began when Anna Jarvis, an Appalachian homemaker, organized a day to raise awareness of poor health conditions in her community and fifteen years later, Julia Ward Howe, a Boston poet, pacifist, suffragist, and author of the lyrics to the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” organized a day encouraging mothers to rally for peace.

eileenfleming

Letter of Condolence I Never Wrote, and Should Have by Daniel N. White

by Daniel N. White
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
April 3, 2010

Clif Grubbs was an economics professor of mine out at UT in my days there, more than two decades ago now. I took an intermediate economics course from him, don’t remember if it was micro or macro, those details are now lost to memory. What isn’t lost to my memory is what an outstanding teacher Clif was, how he kept the class somewhere between mesmerized and spellbound the entire hour, lecturing on economics, and how skilfully he brought the fairly dry and technical material to animated and useful life with his lectures. I wasn’t his only fan–Bill Moyers, who was a student of his in the late 50’s, did one of his Bill Moyers Reports shows on Clif in the early ’80’s on him entitled “The Volcanic Professor”, and in it treated Clif with a mixture of admiration and affection, attitudes that most all his students had towards him.

Why I Hate Palm Sunday by Cindy Sheehan

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by Cindy Sheehan
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox Blog
Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox
first published in Islam Times
March 29, 2010

Six years ago, I woke up on Palm Sunday listening to the birds sing and already feeling that it was going to turn out to be a warm one.

I got up and was surprised that the constant anguish that I had been feeling for two weeks since my oldest son, Casey, was deployed to Iraq wasn’t that bad. I chalked it up to the beautiful spring day and the fact that my other children were safe and sound in their beds.

I went about my day doing laundry, shopping, going to brunch with my best friend at the time, and getting things ready for my impending workweek as a benefit’s analyst for the County of Napa. It was also the first Sunday in over two decades that our family didn’t go to mass on a Palm Sunday. Our separation from the church had already begun.

Pride, Prejudice, and Propaganda: Salvaging the American Dream By Robert S. Becker

By Robert S. Becker
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
rbecker@cal.net
March 2, 2010

It is a truth universally acknowledged that predatory bankers in possession of great fortunes are in want of media lackeys, especially after savaging the American Dream.  Actually not, considering the corporate media outlets reinforcing the clownish social gospel from Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs: conglomerates do good, indeed “God’s work.”

At Christmas, Ex-Guantánamo Prisoner Is Reunited With His Family by Andy Worthington

by Andy Worthington
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.andyworthington.co.uk
25 December 2009

On December 21, the following article, written by Kevin Cullen, was published by the Boston Globe. It brings up to date the story of Oybek Jabbarov, an innocent man from Uzbekistan, held in Guantánamo for nearly eight years, who was finally freed in September and given a new home in Ireland. As I reported at the time, Jabbarov had been cleared for release by a military review board in 2007, but was unable to return home because of fears that he would be tortured if he was repatriated. It took almost three years for the US State Department to find him a new home, but even after being freed it seemed that Jabbarov’s life had been irredeemably ruined through his lost years in Guantánamo, because he had no idea where his wife and two young sons were, and no way of knowing if he would ever be reunited with them. In his article, Kevin Cullen explained what happened to Oybek Jabbarov’s wife and sons, and I can think of no better way to mark Christmas than to cross-post his article.

A Holiday Reunion