Lisa > Recent Status Updates

Finished reading; RTC.

A butcher-bird has a lot of songs, Andy. It's got its territorial song, and its mating call, its distress call, its warning cry. And sometimes, it just sings to itself, because it wants to; because it can. . . Just because you've heard one song, doesn't mean you know the whole bird. . . Good rule of thumb for life in general. No one's just one thing.

Finished reading; RTC.

If the thing you remember is called a memory, what's the work for a thing you've forgotten?

I don't actually thing there is a specific word for a thing you've forgotten.

Is that because you don't remember what you've forgotten?
I reckon there should be a word. 'Forgetment," say. A 'forgetment' is the opposite of memory. Everything turns into a forgetment eventually.

There is a time when anything is possible: a time when we could be whoever we dream of being. Then life gets in the way, and our existence shrinks to a single moment. . . .

There are some events you can't come back from. . . A single moment in your past denies you a future: condemning you a death in life.

Maybe we're all just stories in the end . . . My family's version of my story isn't much like mine.

We think we know who we are: that each day, we'll wake up more or less the same person. Bu just as rocks are weathered, we are perpetually formed and changed by time and experience until we leave this world with not a single cell we came in with. . . . Sometimes, instead of a gradual metamorphosis, a single event changes a life completely, and when it does, it changes everyone who has ever loved them.

Above all, you keep them [the sheep station diaries] because, a day at a time, they help you make sense of the world; add shape and meaning to a life as subject to chance as any roll of the dice.

It's funny . . . You feed them the same. You love them the same. But every child's its own country.

Finished reading; RTC

[After 8 years, on 12/3/1844 the gag rule was finally defeated.]

In its earliest incarnations, the gag rule had to be reintroduced with the beginning of each session of Congress. This loophole, if you will, made the hours before the rules of the House were introduced and voted on an opportunity to let a few anti-slavery petitions slip by. . . . In 1840, the gag rule became a standing rule of the House.

Adams trial offered the nation a 360-degree view of American history. It looked back at the principles of the nation's founding as much as it foreshadowed the coming destruction.

after two weeks of trial, Marshall moved to table the censure resolution [against Adams], never to be taken up again. . . .

[1-24-1842}
Adams presented a petition from a man named Benjamin Emerson and 45 other 'citizens of Haverhill, in the State of Massachusetts, praying Congress immediately to adopt measures peaceably to dissolve the Union of these States' because 'no union can be . . . permanent which does not present . . . reciprocal benefits. . . .'

Set in motion purposefully, Adams dare his opponents to expel him.

[1841 and Adams is still working around the gag rule as best he can.]

Adams believed it would be more effective to attack the slavocracy not on the issue of slavery itself, but on First Amendment freedom of speech grounds as he had done since 1836. He even came up with his own pet name for the Select Committee on Slavery: the 'Committee of Friends of the Right of Petition.'

[Adams predicted that] the day of emancipation would be 'preceded by convulsions and revolutions in the moral, political, and physical world' of the United States. There could be no longer any doubt about it, the slavocracy had corrupted American democracy.

Adams found the idea of immediate emancipation something impractical for which there was no real plan to implement. . . .

Adams said although the cause they fight for is noble and just, the abolitionists are in their 'martyr age,' driven in large measure by 'religious principle.'

Adams wanted to squelch any talk of Texas annexation. All the better if he could break the gag rule in the process. . . .

Never 'a nation damned to everlasting fame by the reinstitution of that detested system of slavery, after it had once been abolished withing its borders [Mexico had abolished slavery; Texas had fought for independence from Mexico], should be admitted into union with a nation of freemen'

In the pages of his diary, it is easy to see that Adams weighed the pros and cons of getting involved. He understood there was a fine line between defender of free speech and anti-slavery activist. If he overstepped, it would not only jeopardize his own political future, but it would also be a grave setback to the movement.

If you once admit the principle that the right of petition is limited, and will not apply to slaves, the next thing will be to limit still further, by extending the limitation to free colored people . . . the next limitation will be to the question of the character of the petitioners; then the next limitation will be to inquire what side of political parties are the petitioners; . . .

Adams knew that if he was censured, he would have a right to a rebuttal of the charges against him. In doing so, he would have the ability to speak free of the gag.

Adams warned about what happens when the First Amendment right to freedom of speech is denied to the citizen who sent the petition and the congressman who offered the petition.

The very definition of a grassroots activist, Theodore Weld knew that if he could convert the folks in the countryside to the cause of anti-slavery, the politicians would have no other choice but to follow.

To defuse the issue, Pinckney chaired a committee at the start of 1836 to figure out what to do with the thousands of anti-slavery petitions flooding into Congress. . . .

{Basically the final resolution said] We are not just going to ignore all these antislavery petitions in Congress . . . we are going to ban even mentioning them. They. Do. Not. Exist. . . .

{This resolution] would become know as the gag rule.