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Wichita, Kansas—Angelo Lopez is familiar to Everyday Citizen readers who enjoy his cartoons, his interviews with artists, poets, and activists and his other thoughtful Everyday Citizen blogs on a wide range of subjects. Angelo is one of those rare people who knew from a young age what he wanted to be when he grew up. As a child, he drew on any scrap of paper he could find. As an adult, he has realized his dream of being an artist in the same vein of artists who influenced him, artists as diverse as Charles Schulz, creator of Peanuts, and Missouri artist Thomas Hart Benton. His drawings and cartoons, while humorous, also reflect the social conscience that he first developed growing up in the Catholic church. He discusses his life, his artistic commentaries, his love of Charles Dickens, and his political activism in this interview. He, as a member of the younger generation, should give us hope for future.

Since we can't use the comments section on the Everyday Citizen blog site, I suppose we have to respond with blogs of our own. Thanks to Ken and Angelo for their thoughtful responses to my blog. My blog idea came from a blog I read on Alternet written by a man who had gone through his own spiritual journey.

For most people, life and what we think of it is a journey with many paths open to us. We have to find peace within ourselves in the best way we can. On the other hand, nothing is ever really settled. The search is ongoing. Forgive me if this all sounds cliche'. It's difficult to avoid those large ideas when one is thinking about the search for meaning in one's life. Long ago, when I studied existentialism in college, I came to the conclusion that the only failing is failing to make choices, that is, to let those choices be made for us. I found it especially enlightening to read Kierkegaard, a Christian theologian and according to some, the first existentialist philosopher. In his philosophy, one takes a leap of faith; one doesn't look for proof. One makes a choice to believe.

I agree, Ken, that there is a difference between religion and Christianity. When I said in my blog that many people use their religion as a stick to hit others over the head, I had that difference in mind. If a person is following the teachings of Jesus, he or she doesn't have to announce it. It will be evident in the person's life.

Angelo, I think it's healthy that you are asking questions. What is unhealthy is closing the mind. Who knows what possiblities may present themselves as time goes by.

I won't belabor this. I do appreciate the feedback.

Wichita, Kansas—Politicians use religion like a stick, hitting citizens over the head with it in order to convince voters that a vote for a certain pious politician is a vote for Jesus, God, or whatever deity the particular politician claims allegiance to. Backers of politicians who want to ease taxes and regulations on business while they build great fortunes, use religion to mobilize the troops to carry forward the free market message under the guise of following what they claim to be the teachings of Jesus about such social issues as legal abortion, gay and lesbian rights, and equality for women and minorities. How successful these ersatz religious politicians and their backers have been may be ascertained by the number of religious zealots now serving in Congress or running for office, mainly on the Republican ticket. Even that many-married sinner womanizer, Newt Gingrich, managed to find Jesus in the form of the Roman Catholic Church once he married the woman with whom he’d been in an adulterous relationship while he was married to another, less Roman Catholic wife.
I say all this to trace my own religious journey, which has been twisting and surprising in ways I never imagined when I was a child in the Southern Baptist Church of my small southeast Kansas hometown.

United Nations action for the advancement of women has taken four clear directions: promotion of legal measures; mobilization of public opinion and international action; training and research, including the compilation of gender desegregated statistics; and direct assistance to disadvantaged groups. Today a central organizing principle of the work of the United Nations is that no enduring solution to society's most threatening social, economic and political problems can be found without the full participation, and the full empowerment, of the world's women

Today, March 8, 2012, is International Women’s Day, a day marked by the United Nations in its initial 1945 charter “to proclaim gender equality as a fundamental human right.” Since that date, women’s rights, while often trampled on at various times and in various places around the world, cannot escape scrutiny.

Wichita, Kansas--The Koch brothers. Wichita's gift to the right-wing 1%. Recently, just before the Feb. 18th Occupy Koch-Town demonstration, Wichita Eagle reporter Roy Wenzl did a long, front-page piece on the Kochs and the death threats they had received. These death threats, according to Charles Koch, came from left-wingers in response to their support of Scott Walker's attack on public employee unions and the Kochs' alleged ties to the Keystone Pipeline. Charles Koch had his say in the article, denying any monetary interest in Keystone, and said his support of Walker and other right-wing politicians was minimal.

Wenzl, a reporter who is known for writing in-depth human interest pieces, quoted Koch and Koch employees at length, He included only a few rebuttal comments from the Occupy Koch-Town demonstration leaders. Even though I'm not involved in either of the groups that organized the demonstration, the Sierra Club and Occupy Wichita, I know many of those people and I know their actions are open to the public. Their opposition to right-wing policies may be noisy, but it does not include violence or take the form of death threats. When I saw the picture in the local section of the Eagle, Tom James, a Wichita poet and musician, was pictured playing his guitar and leading the group in a song. It looked more like the peaceful anti-war marches that I'd participated in the '60s than a threatening demonstration.

My history as a peace activist started in the late ‘60s when I took part in a five-mile march against the Vietnam War. My history with Stieg Larsson’s character, Lizbeth Salander, dates from January 2010, when my daughter-in-law sent me The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the first book in the Girl series. I devoured that book. I mourned when I heard that Larsson had died of a heart attack at the too-young age of 49. He left behind a fourth manuscript, which is now tied up in litigation between his partner of many years and his birth family.

Since my first encounter with Lizbeth Salander, I’ve read the second and third books in the series, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. The plot of each book carries forward the story of Swedish magazine editor Mikael Blomkvist and Salander. The mystery of Lizbeth’s life unfolds with the plot twists and turns of the books.

A family in our neighborhood is facing the New Year without the home they’ve lived in and paid the mortgage on for the past eleven years. This is the fifth family in the past three years to meet such a fate. The people in this neighborhood who lost their houses have jobs and are upstanding citizens just trying to get by.

We live in older neighborhood in Midtown Wichita. Our immediate area comprises a mix of houses, two-story four squares, bungalows, and mansions. In the last few years, five of our close neighbors have lost their houses to foreclosure. The first to go was a single woman who lived next door to us with her two dogs. She had a good job at a nursing home, but when she had to undergo heart surgery, she could no longer do the heavy work her job required. Not old enough for Social Security, she applied for Social Security disability benefits. I tried to find agencies in Wichita that would give her some aid so she could stay in her house. In the end, however, nothing worked out for her and she ended up moving in with her daughter.

The Saturday, Dec. 10, 2011, issue of the Wichita Eagle carried a small news item about a few New York cops who, working overtime, earned close to two and half million dollars a year. My husband, who once taught public school as I did most of my working life expressed outrage that these cops would earn that much money guarding bridges, The Port Authority, tunnels, and other New York sites.

My response to him was that I think public servants should be paid at least as well as stock brokers and other financial advisers, most of whom spend their work days playing with other people’s money. I have nothing against people who go into that profession. Before my 401k went down the drain, right after George W. Bush took office, I sent my money to a financial adviser who did well for me and who was an extremely nice person. Why, though, are stock brokers so much more valuable to our social welfare than the public servants who keep our streets safe or teach our children?

“… We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point… is not in a position to speculate as to the answer….It should be sufficient to note...the wide divergence of thinking on this most sensitive and difficult question. There has always been strong support for the view that life does not begin until live birth….[O]rganized groups that have taken a formal position on the abortion issue have generally regarded abortion as a matter for the conscience of the individual and her family.” U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun, in the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade

Elise Higgins, a young Kansas pro-choice advocate and an organizer of Speak for Choice in Kansas, asked me to speak at the Speak for Choice rally on Sept. 3, 2011. The rally took place at the state capitol in Topeka on the same day that a hearing was being held on the new abortion clinic rules put in place by the Kansas legislature.

Wichita, Kans.—Given recent actions of Congress, Americans are bemoaning the gridlock that has gripped our political process. Media reports often focus on such gridlock, as reporters interview men and women who complain about the inability of our elected officials to pass laws. The most recent example of political gridlock is the failure of Pres. Barack Obama’s $447 billion jobs bill, a bill that contained provisions for public works spending and a tax hike on the wealthy. The bill failed in the Senate and would have most likely died in the House if it had made it that far.

Gridlock is defined, according to The Washington Post, as “The inability of two opposing groups to accomplish any sort of remedy or compromise on a political issue because one side manages to prevent matters from moving forward.”