Thursday, November 26, 2009

Happy Thanksgiving!

Posted by Bob Sommer at 1:00 AM

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Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Call President Obama today and tell him not to escalate the war in Afghanistan: 202-456-1111.

Posted by Bob Sommer at 6:48 AM
This e-mail recently came in from Ira Harritt, the Kansas City Program Director for the American Friends Service Committee:

Now is a crucial time!

Taking a few minutes today to call the President and tell him that more troops in Afghanistan will make us less secure and not bring more stability to Afghanistan can have a lasting impact!

In a recent interview Obama has said “we're not signing up for a permanent occupation.” But he has also expressed concern that, while Al Qaeda is not currently in Afghanistan, “an Afghanistan that has completely fallen apart that can further destabilize Pakistan…, a government that has nuclear weapons - so we've got some significant interest in the region.”

Obama is being pressured to send more troops to Afghanistan by military contractor lobbyists. He needs to hear from concerned citizens who are not profiting from U.S. war making.

Help us send a message to President Obama that we don't want more troops sent to Afghanistan.

We call for:

1. No additional troops to be sent to Afghanistan.

2. A timeline for the withdrawal of US troops and for diplomacy and dialogue with all parties to the conflict without preconditions.

3. The provision of badly needed development aid by civilian-led organizations not the military.

4. Redirect the more than $44 billion spent yearly on war funding to human needs in Afghanistan and at home.

Call the Whitehouse comment line: 202-456-1111 (takes calls from 9am to 5pm Eastern) or email the President at http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact or use Peace Action’s Toll free number: 1-888-310-8637.
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Tuesday, November 24, 2009

The irony speaks for itself

Posted by Bob Sommer at 3:18 PM

So boasted Humble Oil in Life magazine in 1962.
(Humble is granddaddy, via its offspring Standard Oil, to our very own Exxon!)
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Sunday, November 22, 2009

Kansas has a new Teacher of the Year!

Posted by Bob Sommer at 12:05 PM
At a banquet in Wichita last evening, Karen Tritt, a Spanish teacher at Shawnee Mission West High School, was named the 2010 Kansas Teacher of the Year. This announcement culminated months of preparation and competition in school districts throughout Kansas. Tritt won out over ninety candidates statewide.

I heard her speak at the Region 3 awards dinner in September, at which she was named a finalist for the competition, and believe she’ll be an exceptional advocate for education in the state of Kansas.

I have to disclose a more than passing interest in this event, for my wife Heather was also in the running.

Here are Heather (holding the plaque on the left) and Karen Tritt (on the right), with members of the Shawnee Mission School District Board of Education.


Congratulations, Karen!
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Monday, November 16, 2009

Clean Energy for Kansas

Posted by Bob Sommer at 12:29 PM

Clean Energy Day II
Topeka, KS
A great new video from
The Sierra Club - Kansas Chapter!
Click here


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WHERE THE WIND BLEW

WHERE THE WIND BLEW
What they’re saying about WHERE THE WIND BLEW …

“This blistering, fast-paced tale of a man whose radical past catches up with him…cross-examines our culture, then and now.”
—Nina Shengold, Chronogram

“WHERE THE WIND BLEW is a story of the past and an allegory of the present.... Bob Sommer hears the music and voices of the past and gives you what America has become today.”
—Mason Williams (of “Classical Gas” fame)

“I found WHERE THE WIND BLEW engrossing and heartfelt…. Emotionally taut and historically intriguing, this novel explores the psyche of a man whose past finally catches him. Although set in the past, its themes transcend time.”
—Ron Jacobs, author of The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground

“I had a hard time putting WHERE THE WIND BLEW down.”
—Robert Pardun, author of Prairie Radical: A Journey through the Sixties

"...WHERE THE WIND BLEW is not intended to be a story about a hero but a parable of regret, and those stories are truest when the protagonists are people like us, ordinary people who are neither excessively virtuous nor intrinsically evil."
—Stephanie Eve Boone, American Book Review

“WHERE THE WIND BLEW…is sure to ignite strong reactions, regardless of political affiliation….The novel is vividly-realized, bringing both past and present to life.”
—Cynthia Reeser, Prick of the Spindle

“This story if so believable and well-told that I felt I had an insider's knowledge of what it would have been like to live through the protests on college campuses during the Vietnam War era.”
—Kristin Johnson, Whistling Shade

"I was 18 when the Vietnam War started, and the author does a wonderful job of creating a sense of time and place that brought back my memories of those days."
- Norm Jensen, onegoodmove

“I wanted to let you know that I am reading WHERE THE WIND BLEW and LOVE it!…Excellent writing! I am recommending it to everyone.”
—recent email from a manager at Borders

“What a great accomplishment! The emotional range in this book is just great. I felt close and attached to the characters.”
—unsolicited email from a reader

Two passages from WHERE THE WIND BLEW:

From Chapter 3:

"The idea seemed not only clearer to him last night, but vital, even urgent, and the conversation comes back to him now—how they sat for a long time on a rug beside the coffee table, passing joints and downing beers, while Simon picked the tobacco of filterless cigarettes from his teeth and described his tours in Vietnam—to Peter, to a couple of others nearby, but mostly to Peter—described the sharp, booming explosions of the five-inch guns on the Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin in ’64, firing hundreds of rounds into the darkness, hitting what Simon never knew, he said, ammo bunkers, VC, children, water buffalo, maybe Americans. What the fuck were we even shooting at? he asked Peter, leaning close, lowering his voice into a sharp whisper, as if Peter might explain it to him, might finally clear this up, and he waited until Peter shrugged helplessly and then continued, There’s no sense to any of it, man. No sense! He described his second tour, also, this time on a swift boat in the Mekong, where he saw a stack of rotting bodies on a buffalo path alongside the river, and what it was like to unleash the fifty-cal into a free-fire zone without a clue if they were hitting the enemy or just terrified villagers who had the bad luck to live where the VC wanted to hide. But Peter, these people—the North Vietnamese, the Vietcong—they just want their country back. They want everyone out—the French, the Americans, even the Communists. They’re nationalists, Peter. Their country’s been overrun by foreigners for decades, for centuries. He squinted, knowing what Peter would say next before he said it, and asked, Did you know that Ho Chi Minh wanted Truman’s help against the French before he went to the Communists? No, Peter said, as expected, trying to follow him, trying to piece together the fragments of unfamiliar history in his narrative, trying to listen as people came and went, as laughter and talk surrounded them, as someone strummed a guitar along with a Beethoven symphony booming through the stereo speakers; as he tried to fit classical music into the kaleidescope that whirled around him, and to connect the water buffalo and the North Vietnamese and Truman, searching for a pattern, an image, a story woven into the fabric of Simon’s talk.”

***
From Chapter 18:

“And she wondered, too, if he—if all those people like him back then—hadn’t done some of the things they did—maybe not…no, not all of them, but some of them—would anything have changed? It was true, she reasoned, that changing things meant rupturing what existed. That’s what was happening to her—right now. They had all been living on this thin, shiny veneer, living comfortable lives, fretting over trifles, burying themselves in the vicarious lives of celebrities, entertaining themselves with the false realities of reality television, but the veneer had cracked, and when they crashed through, nothing was underneath it, and they were still falling. And now she looked back up as she plunged downward and saw that all around her, that’s how others were living, though they didn’t know it yet, and anything could change their lives, just as hers changed. That was how she lived when she was young, too—while a war exploded, while the country nearly came apart. But she knew so little of what was beyond her small world. She’d been oblivious to everything else. Boyfriends, dances, dresses, music—that’s what that time meant to her, while all of this turmoil bubbled beneath it, and she wondered now, if everyone had just gone along like that, oblivious, indifferent, would the war have ever ended, would blacks still drink from separate water fountains, would the FBI spy on you?”

WHERE THE WIND BLEW (a novel), by Bob Sommer
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