Dona Nobis Pacem -Blog4Peace 2011

First, check out this Fan created video. I was thinking of using this song for another Blog4Peace video, but this video stands "as is" OUTSTANDING!   Keep Talking by Pink Floyd.

Peace means don't fight it out... Talk it out!

I think of myself as a born again human. I think it much better than saying "recovered drug user". I was fortunate to just walk away. I never wanted to go back. It started out with the festivities of a party, but ended with the gloom of a funeral. I just hope that society demonizes drugs and NOT the people who use/used them.

Addiction should never be treated as a crime. It has to be treated as a health problem. We do not send alcoholics to jail in this country. Over 500,000 people are in our jails who are nonviolent drug users.
-Ralph Nader

Demonize the drug not the people who do/did them. Compassion not conviction.
-MADeline Woe 1996

(MADeline Woe has been my artistic "nom de plume" since the mid 90 drug war)

Peace is overcoming Drugs and Violence. 

I made a video for the Blog4Peace about this:

On the ending selections, I also made the video called "Chanc Tidwell-A Digital Memory"  in memory of a friend who was a collateral victim to a race/gang fight. Some friends need to just shut up with it. Chanc was NOT driving the vehicle. He was not an Aryan Nation, but the 'friends"  he was with at the time were . All they had in common were weed and music. Unfortunately, he was riding with them . A ride that changed his life tragically!
Chanc.was such a shining young soul. Everbody liked him. He was a friend's son's best friend. Uncle to two mixed race kids he loved dearly. He never was hateful. When he would visit, the whole house would light up and become lively. He was that kind of kid. Great smile.

I really believe that the topic of Peace and that a near thousand blogs will be posting on Nov. 4th is a great social deed. Thanks to Mimi Lenox who created it, 7 years ago. One day. One voice. The tradition is to fashion a globe. There are templates on Mimi Writes (her blog) or you can create your own.

I want to add my mother's war child story below. I included it in my 2010 Blog4Peace post.

The Story of My War child Mom

My mother was rescued by Allied forces in 1945. She was the youngest of  four young debutantes from Manila. They abandoned their lifestyle when rumor came that the Japanese were going to take Manila. The eldest sister, my aunt Elisabeth (Ivy) (they called her Elli) had stayed in Manila because she believed the Americans would come and stop it.
She was killed by sniper fire and her body never found.

My grandmother Catalina Rosalewski told me a story she had heard about how the people would hear yelling saying, "Food Food" and Japanese soldiers waving on people from the back of a truck. When the crowd rallied up to the truck, weapons were exposed and people shot in mass. This was one story of many of what happened when the Americans were on their way to freeing Manila and the Philippines. The Japanese destroyed as much as they could and killed off as many as they could so that when the US came there would be NOTHING is what I was told.
Women and children.

Elli had married a man we only know as Ivy (his last name) from Georgia who worked with my grandfather on the docks after leaving the US Armed Service. My grandfather was an old German American stevedore at the Manila Harbor. They say he had arms like Popeye. My aunt had returned with her one year old baby before the war hit the Phillipines from an attempt to live in the States. She left Ivy because she could not handle the harsh opinions of race and cultural changes. The sisters all say it was because she had no maids. The were debutantes, after all.

My mom was only 12 yrs old and her niece Carol (Elli's baby) who was 2 yrs old spent from the last part of 1941 in the interior province of Pampanga hiding from the Japanese until 1945 when the Allies marched in.

Under the Japanese, all Americans in the Philippines had to be registered and interned into the concentration camps. My grandfather was taken to a POW camp in San Thomas when the Japanese took Manila in Jan. 1942.  His best friend Mr. Todd was pictured with the famous three emaciated POW's on the Life Magazine cover.  Since my mother and sisters (not Carol they had to hide her) were half American, they did not "look" American.

My grandfather Albert Johannes Rosalewski died of Beriberi a disease that is associated with starvation and eating only polished white rice for long periods. His family lost everything to WAR and they were also starving.  To this day, my mother does not eat sweet potatoes because apparently they had only that to eat many times.

When the Allies gained control of Manila on their way they found my mom's family.  My 'aunt' Carol was about 6 years old and was a toe head curly topped malnourished version of Shirley Temple.  My mother remembers the names of the soldiers that saved her. 
The 6th Ranger Battalion.

My mother's family came to the US on a medical ship and settled in the San Francisco Bay Area. 
My mother was 15 when she arrived.

I surely cannot imagine one day of war and my mother waited almost 3 yrs (and as a child). It was enough time for my grandfather's health to degrade into a starvation disease and die.

There are forces out there that hear no peace and will not stop unless they are put in check with the gun.  The gun moved in and forced the enemy from my mother's homeland and saved her.

Japan and Germany are now peaceful and productive nations. The treaties following were orchestrated by the leaders of peaceful nations.

I and my family hold no grudge for those nations.  My grandmother would just say, "I no liking Japanese", but they did not pass hate to us children. Most of the information I state here, was what I pried from my aging grandmother's memories when I was an adult.

My mother has had a few Japanese friends in life.

War is not always that forgiving in a family. War propagates generations of hate and sadness in continually war torn regions of the world.

To live with hate is death and one might as well been shot instead and be over with it.

Why and who would want to feed poison to your children? Hate, bigotry, and narrow no tolerance views.

We all share this planet. All I can think of it to say to the haters is "Shut the Fuck up and get along"!

Peace is saving war torn children 

and families from 
despair and starvation!

Why I am recalling my mother's war child story is because it is a great opportunity to share it with the blog world. It also represents how much the world can change generations after a massive war like WWII. I see it as that is all over and we have and are trying so to have a World at Peace. So please continue to be peaceful and strive to ensure this.




Thank you for taking the time to read my BLOG4PEACE post.

PEACE BE WITH YOU.
Susan (aka Bluezy)