Author: janpriddyoregon

BOOKS I TAUGHT

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A student wrote to me the other day to thank me for assigning Mountains Beyond Mountains when she was  junior in my class. The young woman is in her third year of medical school and credits Tracy Kidder’s true story of Dr. Paul Farmer for inspiring her ambition. It was not the only nonfiction I taught, but it was the only nonfiction book I taught.

I showed films to introduce my students to other lives and other times. I am proud that I taught the novels Their Eyes Were Watching God, The House on Mango Street, Things Fall Apart, and A Yellow Raft in Blue Water.

A self-proclaimed “non-reader” in my regular English class agreed to keep reading Yellow Raft after I’d read the first chapter of part one “Rayona” but could not read “Christine” because she was “too much like my own mom.” So we struck a weekend bargain. He would read seven pages and if he still couldn’t stand to read that part of the book, I would given him a summary and he wouldn’t have to read the rest. He came back to class on Monday and declared he “loved Christine.” She helped him understand his own family and the fictional character remained her favorite in the novel.

Sometimes we find ourselves or people we need to understand in a novel.

I taught both The Catcher in the Rye and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for over 20 years. 

I generally shared William Raspberry’s column about Huck Finn, and worked hard to introduce my students to satire. The novel was a consistent failure in my Honors classes. These “good readers” were unwilling to slow down and hear Huck and Jim speak, they were too good at skimming. As a result they found the novel unfunny and boring. However, when my voice could manage it, for several years I read nearly the entire novel aloud to my “regular” students. They got every joke.

Huck is a poor boy with a rotten father, a racist boy who eventually learns to respect and honor his friendship with the young man, the slave Jim. He is on a hero’s journey but he fails because he does not figure out that slavery is wrong. He cannot overcome society’s instruction about what is decent and proper. Even at the end, he believes it is a sin to help a runaway slave. Nevertheless, he is willing to go to hell rather than betray a friend: Jim, who is far craftier and kinder than Huck recognizes. Jim reveals himself as one of the view decent adults in the novel when he risks his life staying with the critically wounded Tom. Some students responded to the moral lesson in the novel and the humor throughout. Many missed it completely.

By contrast, for more than twenty years, students loved Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye.

Holden is a rich white boy attending elite private schools but with neglectful parents. He is grieving and riddled with guilt. He does not overcome these challenges. Parents of my students sometimes balked at the language, but the real problem with this novel, from this parent’s perspective, is that Holden is suicidal throughout and in a mental hospital as he relates his story and he’s been there for months and still lying about where he is and why.

Teaching this novel allowed students to develop understanding of “voice” in literature, and to realistically extrapolate Holden’s future (they were never optimistic). One girl waited after class to speak to me and sobbed that Holden would not like her if they met. Sadly, she was right. Holden’s tolerance for most people is slim.

I used Jane Smiley’s ridiculous take-down of Huck Finn and Calvin Trillion’s questionable 50th anniversary review of Catcher in order to introduce my students to opposing views, to critical thinking, and evidence-based argument. The more they liked the novel, the more passionate was their response to the reviews. To be fair, however, even people who had not initially liked Huck Finn sometimes became fans after recognizing the false equivalency of Smiley’s comparison of Huck Finn to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. As if Jane Austen failed because she did not write novels more like Charles Dickens.

Eventually the tide turned for Holden, and one year a majority of readers found Holden “annoying.” I gratefully replaced him with Jason Taylor in Black Swan Green by David Mitchell. That book also contains language, but deals with bullying and class. Jason is also a relatively affluent white boy, but younger and in many ways nicer than Holden. He is not oblivious to social injustice. He is not so obsessed with his own suffering that he is largely incapable of noticing others’. 

We read all of The House on Mango Street aloud in class, each student choosing a story to read and I read the rest. It is brilliant and a superior trigger for personal stories. We talked about fiction and creative nonfiction and prose poetry. It’s all there.

I taught Toni Morrison’s first novel The Bluest Eye for 25 years. I warned students about content. I advised them to skip pages or call me if they had trouble. I had an alternative and more euphemistic novel in the wings. But Toni Morrison is our only living Nobel novelist, and she is among the best writers to ever exist. There are no substitutes. She writes about love, including the love of little black girls, the most neglected of all. She teaches paradox of pain and beauty, of survival when someone loves us and tragedy when we are unloved.

Isn’t that what all novels are about?

UP?

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I have spent two days trying to get online with WordPress. Yesterday the site told me that I did not exist—not my password or email.

Yet here I am.

I have no idea what happened.

Am I back? Fingers crossed.

Yesterday I finished seaming three woven panels together. The yarn up above is on its way to being something later this summer. I cleared off my work table and folded the leaves back in. Gary is preparing for the garage sale we plan for next Friday. Lots of Christmas ornaments and other lovely vintage and antique items.

I have ordered a desk, which Gary has been nudging me to buy for months. I had saved more than half the cost and perhaps the garage sale will allow me to pay it off.

There were 200 yards of sand at the end of our walk. We found 26 bits of sea glass. On our way home from the long walk, a woman asked Gary if his trash bag had oysters in it. Oysters? No. Beach trash and a strange rock—oysters do not grow on our shore. They like a sheltered environment, a bay or cove. We have mussels and razor clams. Just now the Dungeness crabs have been molting and the little sand crabs (seagull eat them) are laying eggs.

The horizon is still misty after 10am.

LOST and FOUND

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There was fog and some low clouds in the coast when we went out just after 6 this morning. We walked north, as we usually do, picking up trash and hoping for beach glass. I found three pieces in three colors, but my husband had no such luck and thought he would be skunked again.

On our way home, Gary saw what he assumed was a clear jelly fish cast onshore. As is his habit, he gave it a nudge with his foot. Instead of wobbling, the clear object spun around on the sand. Gary had his sea glass. A huge piece found.

In the mean time, fog closed in and as we walked further south toward home, both the waves to our west and the houses fronting the shore to our east became mere suggestions. This reminded both of us of a time my old dog show partner, Bonita, was here with her husband and children. We went for a walk and fog closed in so thick that visibility was reduced to perhaps ten feet. It was extraordinary!

One of Bonnie’s children became lost and searching for the child was impossible, like search for a penny on the floor in absolute darkness. Moments later, as best I recall though it seemed like hours in frantic effort, the child was found. The father began to yell, a reaction I remember from a day long before that when Alan went missing in Lower Woodland Park in Seattle. Gary and I were both nearly hysterical. My mother was with us and commented mildly that Alan had probably gone to the bathroom. But his parents were panicked and running everywhere to search. It was my mother who strolled over to the public restroom and returned our toddler (perhaps he was 4?). Our immediate impulse was to yell at him, but my mother calmed us both.

When we lose those we love, even for an hour or a moment, the adrenaline and sorrow can overwhelm good sense.

That is what we spoke of on our way home. We recognized the faint rooflines silhouetted against the brighter eastern sun.

A friend and his wife have lost a baby at 20 weeks gestation. They are handling this with grace, from what I can see. Hundreds of miles away, I am not there to offer physical comfort. Is there any comfort to be had? I cannot imagine. What they have lost will not be found again. Perhaps they believe in another life and reunion then, but for now, that child is gone as if never was. Lost in fog.

When we have fog like today in summer, this is generally a sign that Portland will have a 100° day. It is what is forecasted. It is a best guess, but only an educated one, not a certainty. There few things certain in life other than morning and loss. We all lose people we love during our lifetime. It is rare to survive to adulthood without gathering ghostly memories of people we will never see again on earth.

Just now, I want to remember the little girl walking out of the fog, my son grasping the hand of his grandmother. Those children are grown now. They, like my friend who lost his baby, will experience the entire range of human losses. They will also find courage and companionship. They will find meaning where they can. They will create and consume. They will share good intentions and make mistakes. And sometimes what they most love will seem lost.

Like all those before them, they will take their losses in hand and search for meaning. And they will, sometimes, find what they need to walk on in the fog.

“Father, Son, and the Holy Spigot”

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Dr. Salk developed the polio vaccine. My title is a line from Four Weddings and a Funeral, otherwise notable for the use of an elegy by W. H. Auden, listed as “Funeral Blues” but also known as “Stop All the Clocks.” It is a poem of friendship and devotion and love.

But I mean to write about not partisan or political tolerance, but about the actual support for Donald Trump. On most levels this supportive base completely mystifies me. The man disrespects nearly everyone, including what might be considered the conservative base. He is a friend to our national enemies and an enemy to our friends. He has been married three times, and committed adultery while his most recent wife was in childbed. He has used language on tape that the men I admire would never use. He has insulted a Gold Star family, a POW, and the men and officers of his own military. He admires dictators and autocrats and seems indifferent to nations struggling to achieve what we have in the way of freedom. He is a hypocrite by both claiming religious faith and failing to evidence any knowledge of Christian teachings.

So here’s my understanding of why some still flock to his message:

  1. Money. Despite the fact that he was born wealthy, was handed wealth, and apparently had squandered more than he actually possessed at election, Trump is filthy rich. We admire money, don’t we? Money is power. Money is success. Never mind the seven deadly sins of pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth, the man is selfish and mean. But he’s rich and America loves a rich man. “Wealthy”, by the 19th century, was used as a girl’s name. In that case, of course, the meaning was not about wealth in terms of money, which the Bible and Jesus absolutely condemned, but “wealthy in the sight of the Lord.” It was that much-denied group the Puritans who preached that monetary success was a sign of God’s favor, despite an entire book in the Bible designed to refute that notion. Americans gave up Puritanical notions about sex, but decided we liked money. So some like the man because he’s rich.
  2. Vulgarity. He says exactly what he thinks and what many Americans apparently also think. He’s rich enough not to care if some object to his racism and sexism and bias against compassion and humility. They like that Trump attacks the poor for being poor, that he supports religious freedom so long as that religion is the one he pretends to follow. It is a cynical view of many Americans that everyone, or a majority of people, would speak exactly as Trump does, that they would ridicule a disabled person if they could get away with it. They like him for spouting hatred they dare not spout themselves, and for providing an opportunity for that venom to achieve acceptance.
  3. He is Everyman. Trump proves that anyone can be President. We don’t have to know the Constitution or pay attention to the news, study the complexities of international and national events, or even vote in elections. Certainly, if we are smart, we avoid paying taxes. We can brag that we “know more than the generals” and belittle those who have devoted their lives to the public good. Seriously. Some like the idea that a President can be as ill-informed, perhaps even as stupid, selfish, and self-serving as they are themselves. They genuinely believe no one is nicer than they are themselves. And they are not nice.
  4. Government. There are individuals in the world more powerful than small governments. There are companies more powerful that most nations. Yet, paranoia about government control is rampant. Children raised in strict, top-down households, particularly households with a strong authoritarian father, are often fearful of government. The psychological theory explaining this well-documented tendency postulates that when a child’s initial introduction to control and power is cruel and arbitrary, the child often retains distrust of governance throughout life. Trump removes government controls, and many do not seem to mind that those left in power are now the ones more concerned about profit than people. It’s the money again. Some will forgive most anything if a profit is to be made, even at the cost of health, safety, opportunity, and futures of others.

In contrast, it is an essential part of the American character to respect the needs of each individual, so long as this does not trespass on the needs of others. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness is at our core. To this end, we live together as human beings have always lived in community. There is evidence of this truth.

I offer Dr. Salk.

“On March 26, 1953, American medical researcher Dr. Jonas Salk announces on a national radio show that he has successfully tested a vaccine against poliomyelitis, the virus that causes the crippling disease of polio. In 1952—an epidemic year for polio—there were 58,000 new cases reported in the United States, and more than 3,000 died from the disease. For promising eventually to eradicate the disease, which is known as ‘infant paralysis’ because it mainly affects children, Dr. Salk was celebrated as the great doctor-benefactor of his time.”

Both my husband and I were spared this disease when we were children because Dr. Jonas Salk invented a vaccine that protected us and he gave it away for the public good. Both of us knew people who had polio, were confined in iron lungs for weeks or months, and spent the rest of their lives struggling to walk. Dr. Salk made an adequate living as a doctor, he claimed. “His sole focus had been to develop a safe and effective vaccine as rapidly as possible, with no interest in personal profit. When asked who owned the patent to it, Salk said, ‘Well, to the people I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?’ ”

There is irony throughout my explanations. It is ironic to trust Trump because he is “successful” and “says what he thinks” and is as petty as the worst of us, because our life experiences should tell us that success is rarely gained only by those who are deserving. Surely, some people are kinder than others, not out of any selfish motive, but because they sincerely care about being good.

I am genuinely grateful that there are people willing to sacrifice for the common good, that some people are smarter and more generous than I am myself, and that consideration of the needs and feelings of others is not a conservative or liberal notion, but a humane one. And I am grateful that the majority of Americans feel as I do.

My hope and the hope of a majority of Americans is that we will soon inoculate our government against the current virus infecting our nation.

Yet, there is good. There is good in each of us. We fear and are comforted. We hunger and are fed. We are homeless and are housed. We join together to maintain the common good, because as human beings that is what we must do to survive. It is what we have always done. A strong nation protects weak from strong, the vulnerable from powerful, and small from the great. That is, ultimately, our greatness.

NEVER TURN YOUR BACK

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“Never turn your back on the ocean,” we were warned as children.

Most people think of the “front” of their home as the side facing the street. What we call the front faces the Pacific Ocean. It is a beautiful view.

The hummingbird above—can you see her?—she has her back to me. I was fifty feet away when I shot this photo and she was at least 15 feet in the air, sipping nectar from a semi-tropical plant in the neighbor’s yard. Perhaps it is from New Zealand? The hummer was not alone. We counted at least four hummingbirds feeding a couple of days ago.

Just now, I spotted a hummer in our own garden, checking out the lavender and pale thyme, before settling to dine on the royal purple blossoms of our butterfly bush. The dark pink escalonia pulled her away for a few seconds, but then she was back hovering over the purple. We also have purple hebe, pink geraniums, glistening red-orange “Lucifer,” and white rugosa roses blooming.

In the front yard, the wild roses and ceanothus are done, the honeysuckle past its prime, but another pink rugosa hydrangeas are in full flower. The native salal, which flowers and fruits simultaneously, will feed bees with nectar and us with berries for months. Soon the montbrecia will begin opening while the salal and hydrangea go on to September.

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She seems to have turned and looked at me in the photo above, but I was deliberately distant. I did not want to disturb her.

There is always something blooming in the garden.

This is a deliberate choice. Most of the garden is evergreen plants, shrubs and bulbs and other flowers were chosen each season to ensure we could feed local bees and birds throughout the year. Even in winter, we have blooms.

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On the beach we also avoid disturbing the birds, though Gary and I both talk to the crows, and sometimes he pretends to want to pick up a seagull. Gary goes straight toward one saying, “Kitty, kitty, kitty.” The gull doesn’t mind him much, but walks away if he gets too close.

My strategy is different. I do not walk in the direction of gulls resting onshore, I do not look at them directly. They seem to understand that I have business of my own that does not involve them.

Yesterday morning an osprey was right out in front. Later one of the four eagles passed overhead. We saw a Cooper’s hawk just a few months ago when it rested on our garden gate. It’s leaving was too fast to see.

The ocean is always in front of our house. Before our house was here, there was spruce forest right down to the beach. Before that, the beach itself followed a different line. The water washes and washes the shore, sweeping up from its basalt basin onto the edge of the continent. It is not only water but the shore that moves. One day the Cascadia fault line will give way and a wave is likely to take not only our home but the land now under it. Everything I recognize as front or back of our house will vanish in an hour.

But the ocean? The ocean will remain. I expect the birds will too.

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WRITING EDUCATION

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I was Class Speaker in 2007 at Pacific University’s MFA in Writing graduation.

A writer friend of mine who has taught in an MFA program for several years reported that not one of her students had become a “successful” writer by publishing a book. I shared that among students from the two years of my MFA program, only a handful had published books. Of those, most were poets and most came to the program with a chapbook already published.

Tom Jenks writes in the newest edition of his online publication:

“By 1975 the number of graduate programs had grown to fifty-two, a number that in the subsequent nine years tripled to 150, and by 2017 the number grew to more than four hundred. If undergraduate programs are included, today’s number exceeds two thousand. Across approximately eighty years, writing programs have proliferated as the accepted foundation for the would-be writer’s route of entry to a life of writing, publishing, and/or teaching. …

“The 2016 AWP conference in Los Angeles hosted twelve thousand attendees, a number that represents perhaps 7 percent of an estimated 170,000 MFA degree holders and students in the US. Currently, graduate writing programs and undergraduate programs with an emphasis in creative writing turn out some fourteen thousand new degree holders each year.”—Narrative

Need I point out that we do not publish 14,000 books from “new” writers each year? The industry published a bit over 316k titles in 2010, but actual sales were down by 14 million that same year. More books, fewer buyers. A book has less than a 1% chance of showing up in a bookstore. That is a bit better odds than being published by most noted literary magazines, which rarely pay anything to their authors.

Academic life? Other than the (very) rare person who lands a tenure track position, the demand for college professors without substantial publications and research means most work as adjunct. Trust me, a high school English teacher is paid much better. A good cocktail waitress is paid much better. Retail sales at least do not result in hours spent scoring papers.

Years ago, I read that the average full-time writer earns less than $10k/year. True, Neil Gaiman, but there is only one of him. The nation does not need many new writers. They will not earn a living through creative writing of any kind. A writer I knew from years ago had this piece of advice: “Marry money.” Unlike the graduate of an engineering program or even one with an English degree, very few creative writing majors will find work relevant to their education. Their odds are about on par with the high school character actor becoming the next Cate Blanchett.

So of the majority of people who graduated with me in 2005, what are we up to? Several are not writing at all. They have stopped pursuing “writing, publishing, and/or teaching” altogether. Some have moved on in their academic careers. At least half published work in literary journals or books, but several of those are not actively writing now. Only two that I know of have new books out in the past few years. They are not making even $10k/year from those books.

I am mostly retired from teaching but still writing. I am publishing in journals. According to Duotrope, an online resource I use to locate markets and track my submissions, my publication rate has consistently been “higher than the average for members who have submitted to the same markets.” My acceptance ratio has varied over the years from a low of around 5% at the start to a brief high of 14%. Just now I am at 8.5%. I submit to journals than accept less than 1% of submissions recorded by Duotrope. At no time have I made a profit on my writing. I have been published in fine journals (without pay) and have presented to regional and national conferences (for zero pay). I have been paid for technical writing, but I was better paid freelancing graphic design, which was not my major, or drawing plans for an architect, for which I had no educational preparation at all. Even when I was judging field trials across the West, a hobby, I was paid travel expenses and was housed and fed. Writing and presentations on writing? Not a chance. I have never actually been paid for any literary work, though I do expect a small check to arrive in the next month from a paying market. Maybe.

So why the degree?

I had promised myself an MFA. I assumed it would be in the visual arts since my undergraduate degrees were in the visual arts. I have BFA degrees in ceramics and metal and a BA in Arts Education. I came to writing relatively late in life because I wanted to return to teaching and there were no arts jobs available. I thought I would teach Social Studies, those classes where I learned to write essays, but instead I began teaching English, where all writing is taught these days. I did not need an MFA for that job.

My MFA cost me $20,000 and I will never see a return on that investment in any job. I had already written three novels and published essays, stories, and poetry before I began the program.

So why?

There were people in my program who only wanted to write a book, people who needed a terminal degree to advance in academia, and people who left the program and became musicians. I have kept writing and reading and writing and reading. Why the MFA? I was already productive and growing.

It was that promise to myself. Self-indulgence really. Just as most the other actual writing is self-indulgence. My sons had graduated from college and I found that the frugal habits I had developed when we were a one-income family and throughout our sons’ education were not as easy to break as I once thought they would be. I was at the top of the pay scale as a teacher, my husband was also working, and we went no where on vacation, drank only cheap wine and good homemade coffee, used no drugs, and ate out rarely at restaurants labeled with one fork, for “cheap eats.” I could afford $20,000 spent over the course of two years.

The degree was for me. I hoped to become a better writer and to find a writing community since my efforts at finding a writing group had failed again and again. (There was the group where the poet-leader declared fiction “annoying.” The group that wanted mostly to gossip. The one that wanted to get high. The one that self-published horrible trendy fiction.)

Jenks assures me that I didn’t need that MFA degree, that I will likely join the tens of thousands who will never “use” their degree to be a “successful author,” a term even he finds it difficult the define. Did I enjoy the program? Yes, very much. Would I do it again? Absolutely. Did I find the writing community that I desired? Not really. Did it make me a better writer? Perhaps it did. Did it help me to become a published writer? No, it did not. That is something else again. I got something from the program, made a few friends, and often consider how to return. That is enough.

Were I today in my early 20s, a white girl, even a white girl from a modest upbringing _MG_0049and married to a man raised in poverty, what value would I bring to fiction? What story do I offer? It is a question I ask myself even now.

“Some things can be taught, some learned—so much depends on the character of the writer.”—Tom Jenks

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CLEANING OUT

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Seeking a loving home: nearly 100 pieces of Havilland porcelain, a pattern called “Ranson” made in France about a hundred years ago and emblazoned with a W or M in 24k gold. I have never used these pieces. Even my grandmother never used them, to my knowledge.

We paid off our mortgage on Tuesday. We asked for a payout balance and had the bank wire the funds. The trick is that we will still be putting the money into the bank to cover insurance and taxes. It feels good even so.

As I type, my husband is realizing a long-term goal. He is emptying the attic. It is part of a broader effort to streamline the house and rid ourselves of accumulated stuff. We have filled the garage and atrium with things that will not return to the house.

For many years I have presented my husband with a pair of champagne flutes on our anniversary. We generally broke them, or at least one of them, but I still have twenty or more cluttering up a cabinet.

No one wants this sort of thing anymore, I find. And neither do I.

In my childhood, coming to the beach was an enormous effort. The highway through Arch Cape was so evenly lined with aged spruce that finding the turn to the narrow gravel track leading to my grandfather’s house was tricky. My mother had spent all her childhood summers here, but even so we always overshot the turn. Today, and especially during the 4th, the change is unmistakable. Nearly all the houses are short-term rentals. A new business of several thousand square feet will be added to the property that was a tiny deli and post office in my childhood. The three-unit rental cabins south of us are converted to year-round rental use and a new 7-unit motel is only the latest.

This is not the quiet, isolated beach where my great grand-aunts purchased property for $10 in 1911. They packed up toilet paper for the summer and drove on the beach at low tide to get here on Memorial Day and stayed till Labor Day. My grandfather inherited the place in the 30s and continued the tradition. My mother raked crabs for supper as a child. She and her sister had to clean the lanterns of soot once a week. There was no electricity or running water. The outhouse hung over the swamp next door. The house on that sand-filled lot rents for $695/night in September these days. It’s fully booked for the rest of the summer at over a thousand/night.

The house was always “too rich for our blood” with taxes costing more than the mortgage on our Seattle house. When we moved to my grandfather’s house, it was a two-bedroom, 1 1/2 bath, one story house. We added back the second story my grandfather removed in the 40s. Our children were born here and raised and went to public school here. Beyond home improvements, we have added too much stuff.

I have bins of yarn and fabric and some day I must have whittled down our possessions so that our sons will not be faced with the monumental task of doing it for us. We did that for my mother, my grandmother, my aunt, and even my grandmother’s second husband’s brother. We still have unexamined boxes of family documents and photos that my mother never sorted and which I will never sort. All the lifetime accumulation of stuff no one wants. If I could sell it, we might afford a vacation. In 44 years of marriage we had no honeymoon and have never traveled for longer than the week spent with friends in Alberta nearly 30 years ago. It is memories of that sort I still desire. But then I live in a vacation paradise, too beautiful to leave. Instead I have beautiful things.

I confess even I no longer want them.

When I explained to my mother that inheriting my grandfather’s house was the reason we had children, that having a safe and largely undeveloped place for children to play was essential to our vision of child-rearing, she called that “a ridiculous reason to have children.”

Maybe she never made the connection between her own childhood spent playing in the woods in Gresham and on the sand here, and my own childhood play in woods and swamp north of Seattle. I cannot imagine growing up in a city. I cannot picture what sort of childhood that would have been. My husband and I both “ran wild” as children. We were determined that our children would have that opportunity.

Those times and those ideals of childhood freedom seem to have gone the way of typewriters. Manual typewriters.

Taxes were the largest portion of our mortgage payment, and living here is really more than we can afford. It always was. There has been no time since 1978 when we could have afforded this house. It has been an enormous gift to live here. Every morning we go for our walk. And Gary is about done emptying the attic.

The china is beautiful. Want it?

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WHY WE DO NOT LOVE THE 4th

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It is not a “victimless crime.”

One of our neighbors takes her dog to British Columbia right after Canada Day until after the 4th. Other people drug their pets in order to spare their nerves. My husband and I do that too. We would happily have left the country, but we are afraid to leave our home unattended over the 4th of July. Instead, Gary hooks up the power-washing nozzle on the hose, and we watch the drone filming the action with trepidation. Yesterday morning, an osprey was fishing right in front of the house, and then the pyros arrived on the sand.

Years ago, a person actually trained in fireworks put on a display on our beach. Eventually the crowd of onlookers grew so large that he no longer felt it was safe. Now all the illegal explosives and fireworks are lit by ordinary people bent on having a good time.

It’s not good.

“Each July 4th, thousands of people, most often children and teens, are injured while using consumer fireworks. Despite the dangers of fireworks, few people understand the associated risks – devastating burns, other injuries, fires, and even death.”

The safest 4th of July on my beach was like last night. We’d had some damp weather so the hedges were not quite tinder. The temperature was mild, the air light and breezy, tending to flow from the east or south rather that onshore. There was a sprinkle of rain. The tide was going out all evening so there was plenty of sand and no need to set off fireworks too close to the hedge. True, some people build fires too close to the hedge anyway, but we found the remains of only one rocket in our yard. That was how it was yesterday night until after 11.

There was the year it rained and people blew up their illegal fireworks every single night for the rest of the summer. There was the still year when the smoke from nearby blasts was so thick we were forced indoors to breathe. There was the year bottle rockets landed, still blazing, on our cedar roof. We replaced that roof, but last year we watched floating lanterns drift over shore. One landed, still glowing, in an old spruce tree.

“Smoke from fireworks is harmful to health, study suggests. Summary: The metallic particles in the smoke emitted by fireworks pose a health risk, particularly to people who suffer from asthma, new research shows. … The different colours and effects produced in these displays are achieved by adding metals to the gunpowder.”

Mostly, the fireworks were gold and green and red this year. Last night it was a particularly loud and lengthy display. Rockets with a diameter of up to 6 inches managed not to light any homes on fire. So you could say it’s been worse, more dangerous, more frightening, the smoke more choking.

And then this morning, one person came out with a wheelbarrow to police the area directly in front of their beach camp. Along the rest of the shore is filth my husband and I will be picking up for the next year.

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It is not harmless. Chemicals enter the air and percolate into soil and sand. Seabirds are disoriented, and the impact of the chemical refuse remains. The paper wrappers are impregnated with toxins but will unroll and dissolve. The plastic cones will wash into the rocks where we will gather them in January. And that only counts the stuff we see.

“Although much of the perchlorate present in pyrotechnic devices is transformed into harmless compounds during combustion, any remnants of the chemical that fall back to earth can enter into the soil and water. When ingested, perchlorate is absorbed by the thyroid gland in place of iodine, which can interfere with the production of thyroid hormone, an essential part of metabolism and mental development. As a result, perchlorate exposure may be particularly harmful to fetuses.

“A recent study of lake water in Ada, Okla., before and after annual fireworks displays found that the perchlorate concentration in the water increased by up to a factor of 1,000 in the hours after the show, exceeding several states’ maximum allowable levels for drinking water. The levels took between 20 and 80 days to return to normal.

“The heavy metals that colorize fireworks can also be dangerous, and unlike perchlorate, they’re not used up during the combustion reaction. ‘What you start with is also what you end up with,’ Chavez explains. ‘They can get aerosolized and breathed in, or they go into the soil and water.’  Particularly harmful is barium, used to produce green; studies suggest it may cause respiratory problems, among other maladies. One study found that barium levels in the air increased 1,000 times after a fireworks-heavy Diwali festival in India.”—Newsweek

 

Green.

To be clear, aside from the danger of injury and fire, research proves that fireworks are hazardous to our health. They are made of dangerous, poisonous chemicals. They not only frighten birds, they poison people. They do not “just go away” because they are blown up. They land on sand and water, they infect the air. The party on our beach is over and people are checking out of rentals and heading back home. They leave behind a mess.

Some beach fires still smolder 18 hours later. That was once a beautiful drift log in the photo below. Beer cans, pop bottles, plastic trash, and the remains of a great many completely illegal explosions. The began yesterday afternoon with a dense black cloud. The refuse at top is from this party. There are people out trying to clean up, but the making of this mess are not among them.

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The people who made this mess do not live here, they are not people who walk the beach at sunrise or enjoy the quiet or nature. They come here to drink and blow things up—illegal explosions that they indulge in here because there is no one to stop them.

“ ‘When people think of air pollution, they think of other kinds of things—smoke stacks, automobile exhaust pipes, construction sites,’ says study author Dian J. Seidel, senior scientist for climate measurements at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). ‘I don’t think most people think of fireworks.’

“The level of particulate matter, or small pollutants like dust, dirt and soot present in the air, increased by 42% on average across the U.S. on the Fourth of July, according to the study. Air conditions are at their worst between 9 and to 10 p.m. on the day of the holiday. The researchers, who looked at data from 315 sites across the country, found that ten of the sites met a threshold deemed unsafe by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) when sustained for a prolonged period of time.”—Time

I sometime indulge in a fantasy where I drive to Lake Oswego and light explosives in a driveway, set a fire in a Laurelhurst lawn, or drive all the way to Seattle and set off firecrackers in the middle of the night.

 

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“The Supreme Court traded one injustice for another 74 years later.”

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FIGHTING HATE // TEACHING TOLERANCE // SEEKING JUSTICE

JUNE 30, 2018

Weekend Read // Issue 86

Fred Korematsu was 23 when he defied the order sending him to an internment camp.

He was one of 120,000 Japanese immigrants and Americans detained by the federal government under Executive Order 9066. He fought his case all the way to the Supreme Court.

He lost.

Korematsu v. United States — in which the Supreme Court ruled that the internment was justified — was never overturned.

Not even after President Gerald Ford formally terminated Executive Order 9066; not after President Ronald Reagan provided each detainee with financial redress; not even after President Bill Clinton awarded Korematsu with the Presidential Medal of Freedom did the Supreme Court overturn its ruling upholding the internment of Japanese Americans.

That all changed Tuesday, when the Supreme Court finally repudiated Korematsu v. United States, writing that it “was gravely wrong” — at the same time that it upheld Trump’s discriminatory Muslim ban.

It was painful irony, especially for Korematsu’s daughter.

“Racial profiling was wrong in 1942 and racial profiling and religious profiling is wrong in 2018,” Karen Korematsu told The Washington Post. “The Supreme Court traded one injustice for another 74 years later.”

Using the “same dangerous logic underlying Korematsu,” wrote Justice Sonia Sotomayor in a powerful dissent, the Supreme Court “blindly accept[ed] the government’s misguided invitation to sanction a discriminatory policy motivated by animosity toward a disfavored group, all in the name of a superficial claim of national security.”

Or, as Karen neatly summarized it, the court allowed the government to “racially profil[e] a group because they looked like the enemy.”

It’s not the only parallel between the Trump administration’s actions and the incarceration of people President Franklin D. Roosevelt deemed “alien enemies.”

Once targeted, Japanese Americans were interned for over four years. They were held in converted racetracks, fairgrounds and horse stables in camps west of the Rocky Mountains. Korematsu himself was held in a horse stall with a single light bulb.

“Jail was better than this,” he told one biographer.

Today, migrant children are being detained — soon, ostensibly, to be held with their parents — in “tent cities” and converted Walmarts.

Their trauma, according to psychotherapist Satsuki Ina, herself born in an internment camp, is all too familiar. As she detailed for Splinter:

They have no idea how long they’re going to be held. They have no idea if they’ll ever see their parents again. That level of anxiety causes tremendous emotional stress, and we know from the research in neuroscience that constant release of these stress hormones can affect a child’s ability to learn, a child’s ability to self-manage, to regulate themselves. The long-term impact that I’ve seen in my own Japanese American community is this hyper-vigilance … a reaction to having been incarcerated unjustly. This kind of treatment has consequences for a lifetime for a child. The trauma effect is pretty severe when there’s been captivity trauma. We were unjustly incarcerated when we weren’t guilty of anything.

Today, people across the country will rally to protest Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy toward migrants who cross the border. We’re partnering with the ACLU and the Alabama Coalition for Immigrant Justice to host the Families Belong Together rally here in Montgomery, Alabama, as well as in Atlanta and Washington, D.C.

Now, more than ever, apathy is not an option. As Ina recalled for Splinter:

When thousands of Japanese Americans were being removed from their classrooms, from their jobs, and their neighborhoods, there was no outcry. No one instituted any kind of protest. … My hope is that people will know how important it is to stand up for the injustice that’s happening right now.

We couldn’t agree more.

The Editors

THE FLAG

/ janpriddyoregon / 3 Comments

 

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With baby Ian in 1982. Maybe not the 4th, but there are the colors.

When I was a little girl, I looked at a book with colored illustrations of flags. Compared to the emblems and gilded centers of others, I did not like the U.S. flag much. It was out of balance to my eyes, and the color scheme did not appeal to me. It was not so boring as all those European flags with only two or three horizontal color bands, but far less interesting that the ones with colorful emblems, or Japan’s elegant simplicity. I understood as I aged that the flag is symbolic, however, and that it represented notions of fairness and opportunity and liberty admired throughout the world.

Nevertheless, the reason I have never cut or damaged or worn the flag might signify less respect for our flag than artistic preference.

Still, a flag is a symbol and symbols matter.

A symbol is less important than what it symbolizes. It is less important than its people. It is less important than its ideals.

So I wonder sometimes, what people mean when they use the flag.

Men driving around with a flag hanging off the back of a vehicle seems less patriotic than disrespectful. The stars and stripes made into headgear likewise causes me to cringe.

I am loyal to my country, despite recent developments, despite the man in the Whitehouse, despite my discomfort with fellow citizens who get the news from shock radio and memes, do not read books, and perversely assume politics are beneath their notice. The 42%, give or take, who still support what this administration is doing to our global reputation.

Our reputation has already taken hits.

Who has the right to use the flag for their personal agenda? This is the Land of the Free, so anyone may. If some are offended by flag burning, let me say here that I am offended to see a United States flag wrapped around someone’s head or dragged behind their pick-up truck.

Some of my ancestors have been here a long time, the more recent arrived in the 20th century. My immediate family was born here, but distant and not-so distant relatives came from other nations including England and Mexico, Finland and Scotland. Those traveling north from south, west from east. The eldest moved east to west. Such is the passage of human migration, the claim of humanity on any land. The only claim I have on this soil is personal.

Just now the flag flying day and night in the yard of a house due south of me is hanging still. I do not display a flag, but I know that proper treatment of our national symbol includes taking it down unless it is lit in the dark. I know it is not proper to use this symbol of respect and righteousness as a bludgeon. I am sorry that my country is no longer a beacon light of hope in the world but become the bully on the block.

I will go out on my walk, and along the way I will greet other walkers, the roar of water constantly in motion, just as I must remain moving to be alive.

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