three women of song who will be remembered long after they’re gone
Trouble, we have known trouble In our struggle just to get by Many times the burden’s been heavy Still we carried on side by side And when we’re gone, long gone The only thing that will have mattered Is the love that we shared And the way that we cared When we’re gone, long gone And when we’re walking together in glory Hand in hand through eternity It’s the love that will be remembered Not wealth, not poverty And when we’re gone, long gone The only thing that will have mattered Is the love that we’ve shared And the way that we cared When we’re gone, long gone When we’re gone, long gone The only thing that will have mattered Is the love that we shared And the way that we cared When we’re gone, long gone
“For ALL Women and Girls: Rights. Equality. Empowerment.”
This year’s theme calls for action that can unlock equal rights, power and opportunities for all and a feminist future where no one is left behind.
—United Nations
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Like many twenty-eight-year-olds I wasn’t interested in finding a personal physician because I hadn’t been really sick after surviving the usual childhood illnesses during the 1950s and 60s. Unlike most young adults in the 1970s, I lived in a city that was a thousand miles from my roots and I needed to see a doctor. A friend at my new job recommended Dr. J. Frank Martin, Sr.; I liked him immediately, but I loved his wife who was the center of warmth for their family practice which has been my medical home for fifty years. Dr. J. Frank Martin, Jr. continued the tradition of his parents following his father’s retirement.
This past week Sarah Kay Cox Martin died in her home in Hopkins, South Carolina, at the age of 93. I will always remember her kindness, her smile, her sensitivity to a young woman from Texas who found a family practice where family was more than a word. So many memories…
Three years ago today, February 24, 2022, Russia without provocation invaded Ukraine. I know it – you know it. On March 16, 2022, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy addressed a joint session of the United States Congress to ask for America’s help, and I published this pieceon that day.
In listening to an emotional virtual appeal by Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy to the Congress of the United States this morning, I felt the despair of this leader who had watched his beautiful country together with many numbers of its men, women and children obliterated by an evil neighbor for reasons known only to that neighboring country’s president and his supporters.
If President Zelenskyy could sing, and I don’t know whether he can, he could have closed with some of the words and music of “I Look to You,” singing along with the American gospel group Selah from their album Hopeofthe Broken World:
“As I lay me down, heaven hear me now. Winter storms have come and darkened my sun. After all that I’ve been through, who on earth can I turn to? I look to you, I look to you. After all my strength is gone, in you I can be strong. I look to you. And when melodies are gone, in you I hear a song. I look to you.
I don’t know if I’m gonna make it. Nothing to do but lift my head. My levees are broken, my walls have come crumbling down on me. The rain is falling, defeat is calling, I need you to set me free. Take me far away from the battle – I need you to shine on me.”
The people of Ukraine are looking to us and our Allies around the globe for help to stop not only the physical crumbling walls but also the assault on our vision of freedom and our democratic way of life. Make no mistake, as President Zelenskyy has consistently reminded us, the destruction of Ukraine is but the beginning of a world war against securing the blessings of individual liberty for all people and for their posterity.
I have a dream, Zelenskyy said to the Congress today, but I also have a need to reclaim the skies over Ukraine, to stop the senseless bombing of my citizens and our homes. The Ukrainian President is looking to us.
Yes. We see you, we hear you, we feel your pain. We will respond with gratitude for your fight against a common enemy to serve a greater good.
We Americans suffer from long term memory loss – the lessons we painfully absorbed about world wars, global conflicts, political corruption, identifying our enemies, supporting our friends – all 20th. century instructional tools we have conveniently forgotten in this 21st. century have now come home to roost in a new administration that seeks to say No to the needs of our Allies and Yes to the demands of our enemies. Shame on our leaders, shame on us for electing them.
Old King Cole was a merry old soul, And a merry old soul was he; He called for his pipe, and he called for his bowl, And he called for his fiddlers three.
Old King Don was a grumpy old soul,
and a grumpy old soul was he;
he called for his pens, and he called for his friends,
and he mowed down democracy.
Heh, heh. Sometimes I have to entertain myself and cross my fingers somebody else thinks I’m as funny as I fancy I am.
Since 1709, the Brits have had a nursery rhyme about the fictional Old King Cole. Starting this week in 2025, the Americans across the Pond from the Brits have a chief executive who fancies himself to be a King with the absolute authority to demolish democratic rule in these United States.
Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye, Elon and Don – we ain’t picking up what you’re putting down. The next time we vote for a King, your names will be deleted by the thousands of people affected by your doge department layoffs.
“It’s well-documented that transgender people, especially transgender women of color, were leaders at Stonewall and in the movement for LGBTQ+ equality. Removing the T from a government website certainly doesn’t change that.
I’m in my 40s, and the Stonewall Inn was designated as a National Monument less than a decade ago. For most of my life as a transgender man, the government has not marked our history or celebrated our achievements. LGBTQ+ people were fighting for justice long before Stonewall, and we’ll keep fighting long after.
The government does not determine our value or worth. LGBTQ+ people know who we are, and no presidential administration can take that away.” – Jace Woodrum, Executive Director of ACLU of South Carolina
On Thursday, February 13th., the National Parks Administration removed all references to transgender persons from the Stonewall Inn National Monument website in response to an executive order signed by President Trump on his first day in office, an EO designed to be anti-transgender across the entire federal government in its scope. ABC News reported the following saga of what I have dubbed “T-Gate.”
What used to be listed as LGBTQ+, has been changed to LGB.
“Before the 1960s, almost everything about living openly as a lesbian, gay, bisexual (LGB) person was illegal. The Stonewall Uprising on June 28, 1969, is a milestone in the quest for LGB civil rights and provided momentum for a movement,” the website now says.
The Stonewall Inn in New York City’s Greenwich Village became a national monument in 2016 under former President Barack Obama, creating the country’s first national park site dedicated to LGBTQ+ history.
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Full disclosure I had lived in Seattle, Washington, for a year in that summer of 1969. I was twenty-three years old, single with no prospects, no lesbian dating sites, singing in a Southern Baptist church choir with typical homophobic rhetoric coming from the pulpit. But I still loved the music and made a major life decision to return the 3,000 miles to my native Texas to enroll in the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth in the fall of 1969. God does work in mysterious ways, I am here to testify. My first long term lesbian relationship began in the seminary with another woman who shared more than our love of music. Twenty years later I learned about the uprising at the Stonewall Inn and understood my debt to the brave transgender women who risked their lives to spark a movement for equality.
What if, I wonder, the new president decides to ban all historical sites that refer in any way to a “T.” Hmm. For example, think about the Old South Meeting House in Boston, Massachusetts, the site of the Tea Party in 1773 which sparked the first revolution against oppression in America. Colonists disguised as Indigenous Americans boarded three ships in the harbor and dumped 342 chests of tea into the river. Should we take the “Tea Party” off the historical sites since the colonists were really a rowdy group of immigrants who thought they shouldn’t be ruled by a King?
I'll Call It Like I See It 
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