Lewis Grizzard

My Mama's pain over; I still hurt
By Lewis Grizzard The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Published on: 10/06/1989

Moreland, Ga. - We buried Mama on her birthday, Oct. 3. She would have been 77.
We were blessed with a beautiful autumn day. One of my mother's sisters remarked, "What if it had happened last week when we were having all that rain?"
We took Mama down to the little Moreland cemetery and put her next to her own mother. In the last year or so, Mama often would become confused and would ask relatives where her mother lived.
"She's dead, Christine," somebody would answer her.
And that would make Mama sad.
She was Christine Causby Word Grizzard Atkinson, and she died from a disease called scleroderma. I don't know much about the disease except that doctors told us they had no way to cure it, and it killed my mother slowly. It tortured her.
The family was trying to remember when Mama first got sick.
"It's been at least 20 years," was one thought.
But I knew to the day, almost. She was hospitalized for the first time on the day John Kennedy was buried. That was nearly 26 years ago. I watched the funeral on the television in my mother's hospital room. In the last years she spent all of her time in one of two places - either in a hospital bed in a hospital or in a hospital bed in the living room of her house.
I can't recall the last time I saw my mother standing.
She was a tiny thing in the end. I doubt she weighed 100 pounds. And the painkillers never seemed to put her at ease for very long. A preacher said to the family, "She's better off." He said it twice.
The mother who raised me had been gone for a long time already. That happens so often. The parent becomes the child and the child, the parent.
And, yes, her suffering, as far as we know, is over.
But it still hurts when I think I will never see her again. Will never hear her speak. Will never get to lean over her in that bed and stroke her hair and kiss her and say, "Mama, I love you," and hear her strained reply, "And I love you, too, Sugar."
What she had to go through in her life. I wrote a eulogy that was read at her funeral and I said, "It seemed that every time something good happened to my mother, something bad inevitably followed."
She fell in love with my father and a child was born. But she had to send her husband off to war, twice. And war destroyed him and took him away from her.
After a time she did find another man's love. They were married 35 years, but for 25 of those years, she was so ill she could not enjoy the good parts about being a wife.
Her legacy, though, is she never went quietly. After my father was gone, she was faced with finding a way to provide for herself and her child. She was already in her 40s at a time women had no easy access to financial security of their own.
But she worked by day, and went to school at night, and if there were a hall of fame for first-grade teachers, she would be in it.
And the illness. Her doctor said, "I've never seen a patient fight for her life as hard as she has."
Ten years ago the doctors were telling us to prepare for the end. Ten years ago.
My mother loved me. She protected me. She praised me. She consoled me. She gave me knowledge and values. She inspired me. And when there was no man available, she went outside and tossed a baseball with me.
I should have called her more often.

A Bridge to Far

From Sen. Ted Kennedy's questioning of Attorney General-designate Alberto Gonzales yesterday:

Well, just as an attorney, as a human being, I would have thought that if there were recommendations that were so blatantly and flagrantly over the line in terms of torture, that you might have recognized them. I mean, it certainly appears to me that water boarding, with all its descriptions about drowning someone to that kind of a point, would come awfully close to getting over the border, and that you'd be able to at least say today, "There were some that were recommended or suggested on that, but I certainly wouldn't have had a part of that, as a human being."

A Wall Street Journal editorial yesterday described the interrogation technique of "water boarding": "It involves strapping a detainee down, wrapping his face in a wet towel and dripping water on it to produce the sensation of drowning." Apparently it is frightening but harmless. It might be worthwhile for the Senate to call a witness who has experience with actual drowning to comment on the difference. Where's Mary Jo Kopechne when you need her?

Crips and Bloods

Salvadoran Gang Linked to Al Qaeda
East Boston street gang linked to al-Qaeda.

A burgeoning East Boston-based street gang made up of alleged rapists and machete-wielding robbers has been linked to the al-Qaeda terrorist network, prompting Boston police to “turn up the heat” on its members, the Herald has learned.
MS-13, which stands for La Mara Salvatrucha, is an extremely violent organization with roots in El Salvador, and boasts more than 100 “hardcore members” in East Boston who are suspected of brutal machete attacks, rapes and home invasions. There are hundreds more MS-13 gangsters in towns along the North Shore, said Boston police Sgt. Detective Joseph Fiandaca, who has investigated the gang since it began tagging buildings in Maverick Square in 1995.
In recent months, intelligence officials in Washington have warned national law enforcement agencies that al-Qaeda terrorists have been spotted with members of MS-13 in El Salvador, prompting concerns the gang may be smuggling Islamic fundamentalist terrorists into the country. Law enforcement officials have long believed that MS-13 controls alien smuggling routes along Mexico.
The warning is being taken seriously in East Boston, where Raed Hijazi, an al-Qaeda operative charged with training the suicide bombers in the attack on the USS Cole, lived and worked, prosecutors have charged. Also, the commercial jets that hurtled into the World Trade Center towers in New York City were hijacked from Logan International Airport.
“The terrorist aspect, especially when you think in terms of 9/11 and how intent these terrorists are, will turn the heat up on our efforts with MS-13,” Fiandaca said.
MS-13 members congregate near the Maverick Square train station sporting white and blue bandannas, their skin inked with spider webs and “laugh now, cry later” clown faces.
“MS-13 is the most dangerous gang in the area,” Fiandaca said. “They are big. They are mobile. Now they have a terrorist connection.”
The theory that Salvadoran criminals manage to smuggle people over the border was bolstered this month when two Boston men described as MS-13 leaders were spotted on the North Shore days before Christmas - a year after they were deported by Boston Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigators for gang-related crimes.

Safe Area Gorazde 1992-95

I picked up an interesting graphic novel by Joe Sacco that details his experiences in Bosnia. This snippet was included in an interview with him and it seemed to summarize the situation as good as anything-

Yugoslavia -- or The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, as it was initially called -- was the artificial byproduct of World War I and it was here that the Croats' and Serbs' troubles began. The First World War left the Serbs in a dominant position, which they took advantage of when they set up the government to the discomfort of the Croats.
Relations between the two were exacerbated in World War II when Hitler, who was not prepared to occupy Yugoslavia, employed the Ustasas, the party that had most recently come to power, to govern Croatia. Unfortunately, the Ustasas proved to be insane and genocidal and proceeded to treat the Serb population as the Germans treated the Jews, with a cycle of massacres and concentration camps. The brutality was fierce and unrelenting. After World War II, Yugoslavia was eventually split into states: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia Montenegro and Kosovo. Josep Broz Tito, a professional revolutionary and committed communist, who fought against the Germans, ruled Yugoslavia from 1945 to his death in 1980 and, through the adroit use of carrots and sticks -- "brotherhood and unity" was the ubiquitous slogan -- maintained the ethnicities in relative -- but fragile -- harmony.
On April 27, 1986, in the village of Kosovo Polje, a party hack by the name of Slobodan Milosevic (who had achieved the Presidency of the Central Committee of the Serbian League of Communists) essentially installed himself at the head of the Serbian government by giving a rabble-rousing speech, exploiting the aberrant policies of the Croatian Ustasas 40 years earlier, preaching hatred and violence toward Croats to an audience of eager Serbs. This is, effectively, where the war began.

Interstate Ate

North Interstate Avenue & Skidmore Street
Screw Hooters. Last week North Portland's Interstate MAX line became home to Fire on the Mountain Buffalo Wings, the city's only bistro devoted to the best bit of the bird. Owners Jordan Busch and Sara Sawicki were horrified by P-town's dearth of chicken smeared with bleu cheese dressing and Frank's RedHot when they moved here from Denver in 2003. Now they've opened their own spicy joint, which will also offer its own special sauces and assorted artery-cloggers: Fresh-cut fries, fried pickles, fried mushrooms and, good lord, fried Twinkies.

$1 Million Paranormal Challenge

The James Randi Educational Foundation is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1996. Its aim is to promote critical thinking by reaching out to the public and media with reliable information about paranormal and supernatural ideas so widespread in our society today.
The Foundation's goals include:
Creating a new generation of critical thinkers through lively classroom demonstrations and by reaching out to the next generation in the form of scholarships and awards.
Demonstrating to the public and the media, through educational seminars, the consequences of accepting paranormal and supernatural claims without questioning.
Supporting and conducting research into paranormal claims through well-designed experiments utilizing "the scientific method" and by publishing the findings in the JREF official newsletter, Swift, and other periodicals. Also providing reliable information on paranormal and pseudoscientific claims by maintaining a comprehensive library of books, videos, journals, and archival resources open to the public.
Assisting those who are being attacked as a result of their investigations and criticism of people who make paranormal claims, by maintaining a legal defense fund available to assist these individuals.
To raise public awareness of these issues, the Foundation offers a $1,000,000 prize to any person or persons who can demonstrate any psychic, supernatural or paranormal ability of any kind under mutually agreed upon scientific conditions. This prize money is held in a special account which cannot be accessed for any purpose other than the awarding of the prize.

KISS

ISRAELI-born Kiss bassist Gene Simmons (above) has caused an uproar among Muslims by attacking Islamic culture. During an interview with an Australian radio station, the lizard-tongued rock god described Islam as a "vile culture" that treated women worse than dogs. "Your dog, however, can walk by your side," Simmons said. "Your dog is allowed to have its own dog house. You can send your dog to school to learn tricks, sit, beg, do all that stuff . . . None of the women have that advantage." We're guessing Kiss won't be invited to play for the Saudi royal family anytime soon.

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