Sunday 8th March 2015…a day!!!

You are going to need a glass or cup of your favorite beverage as this is a long post…

First all today is International women’s day and I tip my hat and give thanks to all the wonderful and special women who have been and  are still in my life(I sound like Willie Nelson)……bless you all.

Today’s hike was a little different I have been pestering Pierre to take me to the petroglyphs that I have heard about for years up in  the mountain range where we hike…it is not a long hike I was told and Pierre agreed to do the hike today and in all we were 9 that drove out to the village where we parked and we are going to go up and around the V of the mountain in this shot

 

It was a bit cloudy when we started but as we entered the canyon the sun  came out…

The canyon walls were neat

The sign basically says you may to go to prison for ten years if you break some of the rules but neglects to tell you what those rules are!!!

  Looking back down to the village…

It has ben about 8 years since Pierre was here and although we found the rocks

we could not  find the petroglyphs and we looked for about 25 minutes the opinion  was with the erosion maybe the rocks have crumbled away… anyway Pierre is going to go home and look at his photos from years ago and see if he recognizes any of the rocks we saw today….it was still a great hike and so nice to get out into the country.

I went and did some grocery shopping when we came back to town and now just enjoying a nice evening at home with some tea and I do believe I have a soccer game to watch.

The following two articles are I think important today!!!

Women's Sport Pioneers: Hostility lit fire under me - Michaela Tabb

BBC Sport is paying tribute to pioneering women in sport in the run-up to International Women's Day on 8 March. Here, three women who have refereed men's sport in snooker, rugby and football share their experiences.

First woman to referee World Snooker Championship final - Michaela Tabb

Tabb is a former pool player and referee who has officiated at two World Snooker Championship finals, the first woman to do so.

"I was a nine-ball pool player and started refereeing pool matches when I was pregnant with my first son.

"World Snooker had taken note and, unbeknown to me, there had been a little bit of chat going on because they wanted to change the profile of their refs at that time.

"They wanted to change the image, bring some younger refs in, bring a female in and there was me out there flying that flag.

"My husband and I talked about it because it was a big thing for me to go away because my son was only four at the time.

"But we saw it as such a big opportunity that it was too good to turn down and we thought we will give it a shot and if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. At least we tried. And off I went.

Tabb warned Ronnie O'Sullivan (left) for making an obscene gesture with his snooker cue in 2013

"I was fast-tracked through the system and there was certainly hostility from some of the established referees at the time.

"But it lit the fire under me, because I thought, I'm going to show you. It really motivated me and was actually the best thing that could have happened because it made me work so much harder to be the best and never make mistakes - not that I never made mistakes but that was my aim.

"I found out I was refereeing the World Snooker Championship Final in 2009 and I spent the whole week panicking but when I walked out it was unbelievable. It was one of the greatest moments of my life.

"There have been downsides and in 2013 I had to warn Ronnie O'Sullivan for making an obscene gesture with his snooker cue.

"Ronnie did admit it afterwards but you should see the flack I took on Twitter and Facebook. I have never been so abused by some real die-hard Ronnie supporters that don't see past the fact. They said I made him miss the next shot- rubbish!"

Ireland's top female rugby referee - Helen O'Reilly

O'Reilly is the first woman the Irish Rugby Football Union (IRFU) appointed to its National Referee Panel. She also officiated at the 2014 Women's Rugby World Cup.

"I played rugby for about 13 years and when I retired I wanted to stay involved in the game so it was either coaching or refereeing.

"I started off refereeing a lot of junior rugby and women's games but you get assessed and if you're good enough, get promoted up the leagues.

"Fortunately, I got promoted quite quickly through the ranks and I was taken on by the Irish Rugby Football Union and that's when I started to go on to the national panel.

"I used to pull up in the car park and men's teams would think I was the physio, and they would point me to the physio room, that happened on a regular basis.

"But my profile has built a little, so they now know who I am when I show up.

"I've never had an issue with the lads on the pitch but they know that they've got to work with me for the next 80 minutes, so it's fine.

"I can't go out on the pitch and show any fear at all, with guys 6ft 8ins and 6ft 9ins, I can't show any fear.

"If I thought of myself any different as a female official I was going to be lost, so I have to go out there, hold my head high, shoulders wide, and referee the game like any of my male counterparts.

"There were a few question marks in the Women's World Cup about the standard of refereeing but I think it was great that it was an all female panel.

"I do believe that we have to keep pushing ourselves to improve the standards though as the game itself has improved from where it started a few years ago, and I think that the refereeing has to come up to that standard as well.

"If I don't perform this week I could be dropped next week, so I take it game by game. I could eventually officiate Guinness Pro 12 and Heineken Cup matches but the National Panel of Ireland and the Women's World Cup again are my goals for the next couple of years."

Former football referee - Janie Frampton

Frampton is a former football referee and became one of the Football Association's national referee managers. She now runs a sports officials consultancy.

Janie Frampton, Wendy Toms and Amy Fearn were the first all-female officials at a men's professional game in 1999

"I started playing football at the age of 15. I then had children in my early twenties and I wanted to get back into it, but there were no opportunities playing and the only way I could get back into it was to be a referee. So I took up refereeing and it went from there really.

"I got to professional football level. I was the second woman to reach that level behind Wendy Toms, who was an excellent friend, role model and mentor to me over the years.

"In 1999 Wendy and I, along with Amy Fearn, became the first all-female officials at a men's [professional] game, which was Kidderminster against Nuneaton in the Conference.

"The pathway for women then was different, no-one knew what to do with us. Over the years, it's come an awful long way. We have a long way to go, but women are starting to become equal in that environment.

"I believe we will have a woman refereeing in the Premier League when we have one good enough and I still think that will be some years away.

"One thing I would never want is to have positive discrimination which means they get the job just because they are women.

"They have to manage that expectation and live with their peers and their peers will know that maybe they've got there because they are women. I know, 100%, that the women we do have currently at a high level are there because they are good enough.

"Women face different challenges than men do. We are looking at it with Sian Massey now. Sian is having to put her career on hold as she is having a baby. Amy Fearn has had two children and she has been the most amazing role model for coming back and retaining her fitness.

"We still have incidents of sexism and it's about education. It's about changing mindsets. Football is predominantly male, the decision-makers are predominantly male and until we can make a difference at the top to cascade down, it will be difficult to change those mindsets.

"But I know that the Football Association are looking very seriously at the demographics of people at a high level and we just hope that will make a difference, cascading throughout all football."

 

 

 

 

America's 50-year journey from Bloody Sunday in Selma

By Nick Bryant BBC News, Washington

A 17-year-old civil rights demonstrator is attacked by a police dog in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963

 

Of all the battles of the civil rights era, few have been lodged quite so firmly in the American memory as "Bloody Sunday" in Selma, Alabama.

On one side of the racial divide was that brave column of protesters, two abreast and smartly dressed, who knew they could end the day as martyrs.

On the other was the Alabama state troopers, helmeted and holstered, carrying truncheons and wearing gas masks, who were eager to play the brutal role assigned them by history.

Brute force

They faced off on what became a great landmark of the freedom struggle, the Edmund Pettus Bridge - a stark, geometrical structure that provided an eerie setting for this climactic showdown.

The soundtrack came from the chants of the movement and the anthems of determined hope: "Ain't gonna let nobody turn me 'round." But it was the brute force of that day, shrouded though it was in dense clouds of tear gas, which lingers most powerfully in the mind.

Fifty years on, those violent images still have the capacity to shock and shame. The blows from those truncheons. The charging police horses, with their trampling hooves. The bloodied bandages. The broken bones. The fractured skulls.

Martin Luther King called Bloody Sunday "the greatest confrontation so far in the South"

More so than the courage of the protesters, however, it was the viciousness of police that turned Selma into such a milestone.

Martin Luther King, who was in Atlanta on Bloody Sunday but soon travelled to Alabama, called it "the greatest confrontation so far in the South."

And it produced precisely the kind of violence that the non-violent black protesters relied upon to achieve major breakthroughs. Had it not been for police brutality, the civil rights movement would never have made such major strides.

Confederate central casting

Part of the reason why Selma had provided the ideal setting for such a historic showdown was because it was so easy to foretell the ferocious response of local and state police.

In Sheriff Jim Clark, black leaders had the perfect adversary. A former rancher, Clark had for years corralled black protesters seeking the right to vote with a cattle prod. A portly man, with a penchant for military regalia, his uniform was emblazoned not just with the six-pointed sheriff's star but a badge proclaiming "Never." A son of Dixie, he seemed to have stepped from Confederate central casting.

On Bloody Sunday, Clark's posse of officers had meted out some of the most violent beatings, with the sheriff in the vanguard. But the civil rights movement, for all the blows and its injuries that its members sustained that day, needed him to be there, because he personified southern intransigence. Had the march passed off peaceably, there would be no cause for commemoration.

The communities in Selma and Montgomery are preparing to mark the historic civil rights marches

As it was, the bloodshed in Selma prompted President Lyndon Baines Johnson to push for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, one of the most significant pieces of legislation ever passed by Congress. As a writer for the New Republic observed at the time, "Selma's Sheriff Jim Clark can take much of the credit for the bill."

Eight days after Bloody Sunday, LBJ also delivered perhaps the greatest presidential speech on race relations, in front of a joint session of Congress and a primetime audience of 70 million viewers.

"At times history and life meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom," he intoned, in his Texan drawl.

"So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama."

Then, in a dramatic rhetorical end-piece that aligned him with the foot-soldiers of the struggle for black equality, he told Congress: "We shall overcome."

Creative tension

Two years earlier, in Birmingham, Alabama, non-violent protests had also produced a violent rejoinder from police.

The police's German Shepherd dogs snarled and lunged at black protesters, tearing their clothes and ripping their skin. High-pressure fire hoses, with the power to rip bark from trees, were trained on children.

Civil rights marchers flee from Alabama state troopers in Selma on 7 March 1965

As with Selma, this was the intention of black leaders all along: to orchestrate protests that would provoke such a vicious response that it would prick the conscience of white America and pressure a reluctant president, in this case John F. Kennedy, to act.

As he languished in one of the city's cells, King laid out this strategy in his famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail.

"Non-violent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension," he wrote on scraps of paper, "that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue."

Gestapo-like methods

Like Selma, Birmingham threw up a model adversary, the grandly named Theophilus Eugene Connor, who was better known as "Bull". In the country's most thoroughly segregated city, police used what King described as "Gestapo-like methods".

Way in advance of the militarisation of American police forces, an armoured personnel carrier already patrolled the streets of the city, called "Bull Connor's tank".

Mounted in the spring of 1963, the Birmingham campaign was pivotal.

Not only did the ugly images of police brutality build white support for an end to southern segregation, but they unleashed a wave of black fury that deeply unsettled the Kennedy brothers in Washington.

National Guardsmen were sent into Alabama by President Lyndon B Johnson in 1965

Between May and late August of 1963, there were 1,340 demonstrations in over 200 cities across 36 states. Fearing that his presidency could be overwhelmed by the great social revolution of his age, Kennedy finally agreed to send a meaningful civil rights bill to Congress.

In June 1963, he also delivered a long overdue televised address to the nation in support of desegregation.

"We are confronted primarily with a moral issue," he said from the Oval Office. "It is as old as the scriptures and it is as clear as the American constitution."

Need for thugs

Had it not been for Bull Connor and those snarling police dogs, Kennedy, a bystander on civil rights for so much of his presidency, might have remained on the sidelines.

When the president hosted his first summit of civil rights leaders at the White House that same month, he even acknowledged the Alabaman's role. "You may be too hard on Bull Connor," he said.

"After all, Bull has probably done more for civil rights than anyone else." At first there were sharp intakes of breath, until they realised that Kennedy was joking. But it was only a half-joke. The civil rights movement needed thugs like Bull Connor.

Without him the 1964 Civil Rights Act might never have been enacted.

Police brutality in Alabama unleashed a wave of black fury that deeply unsettled US politics

Long forgotten now is the failed Albany campaign in 1962, where King's leadership of the civil rights movement - a broad amalgam of often antagonistic groups - was brought into question.

King's great misfortune in Albany was to come up against a police chief who understood the strategy of creative tension. Laurie Pritchett had studied Gandhian principles of non-violence and how protesters would apply them in this Georgian backwater.

Throughout the demonstrations, then, his police force was a model of restraint and calm. King suffered an embarrassing defeat.

National reckoning

In the decades since, the catalyst for many of the most meaningful national conversations about race relations, and many of the moments of national reckoning, have been acts of police brutality or failures of the criminal justice system.

The merciless beating of Rodney King by cops from the Los Angeles Police Department in 1991, and the deadly riots a year later that followed the acquittal of the officers involved, prompted major police reforms.

Lifetime terms for LAPD police chiefs came to an end. This led to the creation of an independent inspector of police. A new emphasis came to be placed on community policing, not just in Los Angeles but across the country.

The death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, last year provoked national introspection

To this day, Barack Obama, the first black man to occupy the White House, tends to discuss race mainly in the context of police excess or criminal justice.

The controversy in 2009 surrounding the arrest of the black Harvard academic Henry Louis Gates prompted his strongest racial remarks since taking office.

By arresting Professor Gates as he tried to enter his own home, the Cambridge police had "acted stupidly", the president complained, adding: "there's a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately".

The killing of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 17-year-old shot dead by a neighbourhood watch volunteer in Florida, prompted another presidential intervention.

"My main message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin. You know, if I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon," Obama said.

"All of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves."

'Selma is now'

The deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner in New York, both at the hands of police officers, have more recently been the spur for national introspection and protest. Both bridge a contemporary edge to this weekend's commemorations, and with it the sense that many race-related remain unsolved.

That is why when the singer-songwriter John Legend proclaimed that "Selma is now" from the stage of the Academy Awards in Hollywood, as he picked up the Oscar for his song Glory from the movie Selma. It had such resonance.

Manifestly, race relations in America have come a long way since Bloody Sunday, when a system of racial apartheid was still in the process of being dismantled in the south, when citadels of segregation, like Selma and Birmingham, finally surrendered.

But not every wall of prejudice has been demolished.

 

Yashi Kochi!!!!