politics

HERO

/ janpriddyoregon / 6 Comments

In her essay, “We Don’t Need Another Hero,” Roxane Gay quarrels with labeling Cassidy Hutchinson a hero for her recent testimony:

“It took courage, I suppose, for Hutchinson to do the right thing. I can imagine she was facing a lot of political pressure, and perhaps even danger for coming forward to share what she knew about the January 6th insurrection. … Let me be clear. Cassidy Hutchinson is not a hero. The bar for heroism must be higher than doing the bare minimum before it’s too late to salvage what remains of one’s future. … Let us not forget how she is perfectly fine being part of a party that demands the surrender of her bodily autonomy and is also fine with that circumstance for the rest of us… “

—Roxane Gay

Is Cassidy Hutchinson a hero?

Continue reading →

GOOD TROUBLE

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Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., speaks as the House of Representatives debates the articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump at the Capitol in Washington, Wednesday, Dec. 18, 2019. (House Television via AP) An adherent of the philosophy of nonviolence, Lewis was beaten by mobs and arrested 24 times.

from Letters from an American by Heather Cox Richardson:

A year ago tonight, Georgia Representative John Lewis passed away from pancreatic cancer at 80 years old. As a young adult, Lewis was a “troublemaker,” breaking the laws of his state: the laws upholding racial segregation. He organized voting registration drives and in 1960 was one of the thirteen original Freedom Riders, white and Black students traveling together from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans to challenge segregation. “It was very violent. I thought I was going to die. I was left lying at the Greyhound bus station in Montgomery unconscious,” Lewis later recalled.

. . .

Last June, Representative Lewis told Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart that he was “inspired” by last summer’s peaceful protests in America and around the world against police violence. “It was so moving and so gratifying to see people from all over America and all over the world saying through their action, ‘I can do something. I can say something,’” Lewis told Capehart. “And they said something by marching and by speaking up and speaking out.”

Capehart asked Lewis “what he would say to people who feel as though they have already been giving it their all but nothing seems to change.” Lewis answered: “You must be able and prepared to give until you cannot give any more. We must use our time and our space on this little planet that we call Earth to make a lasting contribution, to leave it a little better than we found it, and now that need is greater than ever before.”

“Do not get lost in a sea of despair,” Lewis tweeted almost exactly a year before his death. “Do not become bitter or hostile. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble. We will find a way to make a way out of no way.”

TRUTH TO POWER

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Below is yesterday’s entire post from Heather Cox Richardson that arrived in my inbox after midnight. I know people do not read my blog for political wisdom, but I need to clear the air. My grandchildren can’t breathe. Richardson has more than enough wisdom to share. I wish more people were reading her. It can be empowering to remind ourselves that the majority of Americans care about democracy and our nation, are concerned about truth and justice—what in my childhood was termed “the American way of life.” This is a reminder to vote.

Letters from an American September 15, 2020

Heather Cox Richardson

Exactly a year ago, after about a six-week hiatus during the summer, I wrote a Facebook post that started: 

“Many thanks to all of you who have reached out to see if I’m okay. I am, indeed (aside from having been on the losing end of an encounter with a yellow jacket this afternoon!). I’ve been moving, setting up house, and finishing the new book. Am back and ready to write, but now everything seems like such a dumpster fire it’s very hard to know where to start. So how about a general overview of how things at the White House look to me, today….”

In my roundup, I noted that we had just learned that a whistleblower from within the intelligence community had filed a complaint that the inspector general of the intelligence community, Michael K. Atkinson, deemed “credible” and “urgent.” This meant that it was supposed to go to the Director of National Intelligence to be cleared of anything that needed to be hidden, and then sent on to the House Intelligence Committee. But, rather than sending it to the House as the law required, Trump’s then-acting Director of Intelligence, Joseph Maguire, had withheld it. On Friday, September 13, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, California Democrat Adam Schiff, had written a scathing letter to Maguire, telling Maguire he knew about the complaint—we now know that Atkinson had alerted him– and that Maguire had better hand it over. Schiff speculated that Maguire was covering up evidence of crimes by the president or his closest advisors.

Readers swamped me with questions. So I wrote another post answering them and explaining the news, which began breaking at a breathtaking pace. Within a week, we had learned that the day after Special Counsel Robert Mueller had testified before Congress and seemed to shut down any further investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, Trump had tried to pressure Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky into announcing an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter. On July 25, Trump suggested to the new Ukraine president that he would release funds Zelensky badly needed to continue Ukraine’s fight against Russian incursions only after such an announcement. And people asked more questions, and I wrote another post…

And so these Letters from an American were born. 

In the 365 days since then, we have lived through the Ukraine scandal, which revealed that the president was secretly running his own foreign policy team whose goal was to strong-arm Ukraine into helping the president’s reelection campaign. Their attempt to get Zelensky not to run an investigation but rather simply to announce one reflected backward onto the 2016 campaign. The 2016 Trump campaign hammered on the Clinton email “scandal,” and badly damaged her candidacy. But, in mid-October, the final report from the State Department concluded that there was no systematic mishandling of information, that people tried to follow the rules, and that none of the information that did get mishandled was classified at the time (some of it was retroactively classified by the Trump administration).

We lived through the abrupt withdrawal of U.S. troops from northern Syria in early October 2019, leaving our former Kurdish allies to be murdered by Turkish troops, just as experts had warned would happen if U.S. troops pulled back. ISIS freed compatriots from jails and launched new attacks, and Russian troops moved into the positions we had held in the region. 

We have lived through the House impeachment hearings in October and November, when it became clear that the Republicans were not, in fact, interested in whether or not Trump had committed “high crimes and misdemeanors,” but rather in badgering witnesses to provide sound bites that could be stitched together into a fictional narrative on social media and the Fox News Channel. Then, on December 18, for the third time in history, the House voted to impeach a president. Driven by the Democratic majority, it impeached Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

We lived through the Senate impeachment trial early in 2020, where Republican Senators refused to hear witnesses or subpoena documents. On February 5, the Senate acquitted the president of the charges. All but one Republican senator voted to acquit. Utah’s Mitt Romney voted to convict on abuse of power. 

We lived through the purge of career government officials and their replacement with Trump loyalists that began two days after Trump’s acquittal. On February 7, Trump dismissed Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman from his position on the National Security Council, where he was an expert on Russia and Ukraine. Vindman had been on the July 25 call and testified before the House Intelligence Committee under subpoena, that White House officials had put the transcript of the call onto a high security server, where national security secrets are held. Vindman also explained that the readout Trump provided the public did not contain key parts of the conversation: Trump had explicitly mentioned both Burisma—the company on whose board Hunter Biden sat– and the Bidens themselves. Trump also ordered the ouster of Vindman’s twin brother, Lt. Col. Yevgeny (Eugene) Vindman, an Army officer on the NSC staff. Since then, Trump has continued to replace career officials with his own loyalists throughout the government everywhere from the Department of Homeland Security and the United States Postal Service through the CDC and the Voice of America.

On the same day he was retaliating against the Vindmans, Trump picked up the phone and called veteran journalist Bob Woodward to tell him there was a deadly new virus spreading around the world. It was airborne, he explained, and was five times “more deadly than even your strenuous flus.” “This is deadly stuff,” he said. He would not share that information with other Americans, though, continuing to play down the virus in hopes of protecting the economy.

This, almost 200,000 of us have not lived through.

And now, as the coronavirus continues to ravage our country, our people, and our economy, the president is trying to win reelection by dividing us, convincing enough voters that “radical leftists” are destroying “Democrat cities” that he can emerge as a “law and order” president. He is suggesting that any result other than his own reelection will be illegitimate, and that he should get a third term because of how badly he has been treated in the first. 

It has been quite a year. Those of us who are exhausted have earned it.

But from the chaos and crisis of this past year has emerged a renewed dedication to democracy. You see it in Lt. Col. Vindman telling his father that he would be all right if he testified before Congress against the president, because “this is America… and here, right matters.” You see it in the incredible work of the House impeachment managers and their constant invoking of our Constitution, our laws, and our principles. You see it in how Americans have come together to take care of each other when the federal government went AWOL during the pandemic, and in people of all ages and background mobilizing for Black lives.

You see it in people donating money to candidates and causes, organizing voter drives, and making sure their children and their parents and their cousins and their friends are registered to vote and have a plan to do so. You see it in people working for a cause that is important to them, calling their elected officials at all levels, writing letters to the editor, and pushing back on the false narratives that spread through social media and from there to our communities. 

For me, though, I see it most of all right here. I see it in how many of you bother to read these long and complicated letters and who write to ask questions, send me news articles or personal stories, make corrections, and say how afraid you are that we might lose American democracy. I see it in your insistence on facts and accuracy, your constant questioning, your dismissal of trolls and bots, and your kindness to the community you have built. Most of all, though, I see it in your overwhelming support. 

I am not exaggerating when I say I have come to see myself simply as a translator. I could not do this without you. 

Thank you all for being along on this journey.

WOUND

/ janpriddyoregon / 4 Comments

The sky is raining down hard, we expect a “king” tide flood at the time I am supposed to be driving north, and I should be asleep as I type this. I am thinking backward and forward. I will not get back to sleep.

I think about war and how it is wound and stain. I wish I could explain myself better.

During WW2, my father served in France and Germany. He earned a Purple Heart and insisted he would probably have lost his leg if not for penicillin. My mother’s sister served in San Francisco, working with military personnel returning from and leaving for the Pacific theater. My father- and mother-in-law both served in the Southwest. They would marry in Roswell, where some people believe beings from outer space landed. People will believe such tales.

During the second Gulf war, we believed in weapons of mass destruction, even though UN investigators on the ground were quite certain that they did not exist. They didn’t.

During the first Gulf war, we were told babies were being tossed out of incubators in the maternity ward of a hospital in Kuwait. That lie was invented by an American PR firm and testified before Congress by a person with ties to people who had a financial and political interest in leading us to war.

It is always like this. War is great for business. War unites us. War solidifies national pride. It distracts us from what matters most. It gives us an enemy. Korea. WW2. The Great War. Spanish American War. Remember the Main. Rallying cries built on lies.

Some men such as Teddy Roosevelt believe war is ennobling, many believe that a uniform conveys automatic heroism. Such an adrenaline rush! Powerful men are eager to send others off to war because they will profit. Some advance their political futures with the blood of other people’s children. Some look forward with religious zeal to the coming Rapture. (A reminder that these last call themselves Christian.)

“May the best man win.”

The best man win? He won’t. He almost never does. I have heard that line spouted all my life, but it’s true only in the narrowest sense. Fastest on the day in a race (unless he’s using drugs, unless, unless unless), perhaps, but fighting is an irrational determiner of righteousness. War does not determine the “best” of anything, merely the biggest, best armed, luckier.

The allies did not win WW2 because they were righteous, because they were better. They won because of superior firepower. It might have gone the other way. If Hitler had won, would that have made him “best”?

I knew someone who got all the way to Vietnam and realized he was a pacifist, successfully claimed CO status, and got home again without killing anyone. The great poet William Stafford was a CO in WW2. The actions of these men required tremendous courage. Instead of the knee-jerk reaction to praise soldiers, perhaps honor those who refuse to kill on command.

I know, I can hear the “but-what-abouts” hustling up in all our minds. The Nazi war machine was an abomination. But it is not so simple. Life is not about our team versus their team, a sporting event with clear winners. In war everyone loses, except those powerful men making money in the back room. And everyone, weak or strong, win or lose, everyone sins. The Allies also committed atrocities. Warriors always do. Brutality, murder, rape, theft, torture—always in war. War makes us mad. War makes us ruthless. War makes us cruel. We commit unspeakable acts in order to win. We always do. We should admit that. Instead, we make excuses, we praise and hand out medals. We hide truth. We should acknowledge what war means to other people’s children. And to our own.

You cannot trust battle to reward the “best” of anything. War hurts everyone it touches. Those defending their homeland will go beyond what seems possible in acts of sacrifice. Those with bigger bombs will kill them anyway. Superior firepower is not determined by who is better, but it determines who wins. And both winner and loser suffer destruction.

Allow me to say it again: War destroys good people. War is a violent crime. Fighting in any war is damaging. Monstrosity does not happen to everyone, but those who fight are invariably injured even if they come home walking because we ask them to do something deeply immoral: kill other human beings. We struggle afterward to justify killing, to tidy away the inconsistencies, to hide our horror at our actions, to deny our trespasses, to minimize awareness of lingering destruction. (My student’s father came home whole-bodied but forever lost in his mind.) The uniform does not convey heroism to those safe playing music in Utah, recruiting in Seattle, training pilots in Arizona. They are free to pump themselves up for their service. They are safe. No one escapes battle unwounded.

We are all supposed to admire those who “sacrifice” to keep our country safe. But now, late in my life, I want a greater sacrifice. I want us to abandon this ridiculous notion that battle serves justice. I want an end to the pretense that all members of our military are automatically heroes. The lives of those who fight are ruined. I want that ruin recognized, that lasting ruin of those who survive. I want an end to the destruction of people’s children.

 

DEFINE TERMS

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Early in the school year, I used to do vocabulary activities in my junior English classes. They required the use of hardcover dictionaries and most often teamwork. In each case the terms and their definitions were written into classroom journals which could be accessed during quizzes and exams. No need to write any of this down, I’d say, but if you find you need the information during a test, you can look it up in your own journals. Sometimes I did this twice.

The short version had four words: “sympathy,” “pity,” “empathy,” and “compassion,” and illustrates the classic case of dictionary definitions that reference one another. Continue reading →

HIM

/ janpriddyoregon / 7 Comments

I have avoided saying his name or typing it, but it’s really getting out of hand now. I am sorry if you disagree. (Trump supporters had best avert their eyes. I am not likely to devote another post to this particular issue. It will be safe to return.)

Recent events and words are beyond offensive. They seem to me insane. And much of the medical community and even the more circumspect political analysts are speaking out. This is not my rant, but another’s. Follow the link and read the whole thing.

from James Fallows in The Atlantic, “If Trump Were an Airline Pilot”:

“But now we’ve had something we didn’t see so clearly during the campaign. These are episodes of what would be called outright lunacy, if they occurred in any other setting: An actually consequential rift with a small but important NATO ally, arising from the idea that the U.S. would “buy Greenland.” Trump’s self-description as “the Chosen One,” and his embrace of a supporter’s description of him as the “second coming of God” and “King of the Jews.” His logorrhea, drift, and fantastical claims in public rallies, and his flares of belligerence at the slightest challenge in question sessions on the White House lawn. His utter lack of affect or empathy when personally meeting the most recent shooting victims, in Dayton and El Paso. His reduction of any event, whatsoever, into what people are saying about him.

“Obviously I have no standing to say what medical pattern we are seeing, and where exactly it might lead. But just from life I know this:

  • If an airline learned that a pilot was talking publicly about being “the Chosen One” or “King of the Jews” (or Baptists or whatever), the airline would be looking carefully into whether this person should be in the cockpit.
  • If a hospital had a senior surgeon behaving as Trump now does, other doctors and nurses would be talking with administrators and lawyers before giving that surgeon the scalpel again.
  • If a public company knew that a CEO was making costly strategic decisions on personal impulse or from personal vanity or slight, and was doing so more and more frequently, the board would be starting to act. (See: Uber, management history of.)
  • If a university, museum, or other public institution had a leader who routinely insulted large parts of its constituency—racial or religious minorities, immigrants or international allies, women—the board would be starting to act.
  • If the U.S. Navy knew that one of its commanders was routinely lying about important operational details, plus flaring up under criticism, plus talking in “Chosen One” terms, the Navy would not want that person in charge of, say, a nuclear-missile submarine. (See: The Queeg saga in The Caine Mutiny, which would make ideal late-summer reading or viewing for members of the White House staff.)

“Yet now such a  person is in charge not of one nuclear-missile submarine but all of them—and the bombers and ICBMs, and diplomatic military agreements, and the countless other ramifications of executive power.

“If Donald Trump were in virtually any other position of responsibility, action would already be under way to remove him from that role. The board at a public company would have replaced him outright or arranged a discreet shift out of power. (Of course, he would never have gotten this far in a large public corporation.) The chain-of-command in the Navy or at an airline or in the hospital would at least call a time-out, and check his fitness, before putting him back on the bridge, or in the cockpit, or in the operating room. (Of course, he would never have gotten this far as a military officer, or a pilot, or a doctor.)

“There are two exceptions. One is a purely family-run business, like the firm in which Trump spent his entire previous career. And the other is the U.S. presidency, where he will remain, despite more and more-manifest Queeg-like  unfitness, as long as the GOP Senate stands with him.

“(Why the Senate? Because the two constitutional means for removing a president, impeachment and the 25th Amendment, both ultimately require two thirds support from the Senate. Under the 25th Amendment, a majority of the Cabinet can remove a president—but if the president disagrees, he can retain the office unless two thirds of both the House and Senate vote against him, an even tougher standard than with impeachment. Once again it all comes back to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.)

“Donald Trump is who we knew him to be. But now he’s worse. The GOP Senate continues to show us what it is.”

“IF IT BEEN A SNAKE . . .

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Gary wearing all his hats at once. He posed.

. . . it woulda’ bit’cha.”

When there was a break in the weather, we walked north, our usual direction. There was sand, but on our way out we were mostly in the rocks at the eastern edge, picking up trash. I found the hilt of a plastic knife and then the sheath. Gary found a stainless steel serving spoon. Other than that we bagged the typical mix of plastic rope trimmings, broken food container lids, candy bar wrappers, bottle caps, valves and fireworks debris, squashed polystyrene foam, shattered straws, and mysterious thick nylon chunks probably once part of shipping containers. Colorless, white, purple, faded red, blue, green, and yellow bits and pieces.

Two pieces of Mt. St. Helen’s pumice. A handful of agates. An ugly-clam shell (which is beautiful). No glass.

Tammy waved from her solitary walk in the opposite direction.

Just before I got to the creek, Charlie ran right to me and allowed I should scratch his back and ears. Then he greeted Gary. This was a rare treat for me, since Gary greets all dogs with, “Hello, pup!” and they generally go to him first. We stood, five locals—counting the dog, because the dog does count—on the sand and chatted. We made a tentative coffee date after New Year’s with his people.

We walked home on the sand. A chaise lounge has been stuck at the tideline for a week now. I think it blew off a deck and wonder if the owners haven’t been here, failed to notice it was missing, or believe it has been stolen. Gary is beginning to wonder if it washed onshore. If it’s still there next year, he says he’s going to use it to haul home a piece of driftwood he’s been eyeing.

Last week our tenant told us that our neighbor John was taken to the hospital. By the time we heard about it the next day, he’d had a pacemaker installed, and the morning we were talking about walking over to see him—Would he feel well enough to come to the door? Would he even hear the bell?—he showed up here. We had a gift ready for him and the three of us sat in the living room with the fire in the stove and talked for a long time. Just like last year. Except John has a tiny device on his upper left chest that prevents his heart from taking a break. He told us all about that.

Inevitably, Gary retrieved a bit of plastic I didn’t notice this morning, though I nearly trod on it. A few days ago, I picked up a bit of bottle green sea glass right beside where Gary had put his foot. Right in front of our house. We cross the same ground but see different things.

Isn’t that how it is for everyone? Even side by side, we see something different. We see a storm bigger than anything, but we are safe indoors and no pet is cowering under the bed, which means it’s a different experience from Eva and Marsha’s. We watched the high waves roar up our path, almost to the garden gate, but that is nothing like being drenched to the waist, hanging on for dear life because we were on the beach. We watched safely from indoors.

Sometimes reality is too much to bear.

Two children died in the past week while in ICE custody. Children. That is no joke. Even Fox News is upset. Felipe and Jakelin had families who loved them. The U.S. has about 15,000 migrant children in custody, often removed from their parents’ custody after crossing the border with Mexico. “The average length of stay for a child detained ranges from 100 to 240 days, and these children are often held far from family members and without legal representation.” They are being kept, often without proper identification necessary to reunite them with family later, and almost never without proper housing and other childcare available.

The two little children who died were both fleeing potentially lethal threats in their home country. Guatemala is a nation with a brutal recent history, a history the U.S. has a part in. They had traveled, mostly on foot, over a thousand miles to gain safety. They did not find it.

My great grandmother Rosa came here to marry and then had to support her children when her husband was imprisoned. My grandfather came from England to make a new life. One of Gary’s ancestors fled Sweden to Finland, and from there to America. Some of our relatives have been here during the past couple of centuries. Some came more recently to make better lives and to escape political persecution.

I am reading novelist Kent Haruf and he reminds me that life is often harder than we might wish, that some good people are ground up and cast away.

Homeless men always came up to Gary on First Avenue when we were visiting pawn shops to look at guitars. That was a very long time ago when we were young, in college, and on our way toward a better life. The homeless were generally much older and had harder lives than we could imagine. Most people walked right past them without looking, but Gary gave them his full attention. Gary always had a few coins for them, but more important, he listened to their stories. These men were often displaced, often veterans, sometimes from the war our fathers fought in, sometimes from the war he did not. They always thanked Gary for listening to their stories, for asking questions. They nodded to me, and went on their way. There was no harm in them, but often harm had been done to them.

Everything that matters is not about money or about winning and losing. And what costs little kindness? Who wins . . .

My husband and I have been blessed this holiday to have health and family and friends and neighbors. We have peace in our country and food and a comfortable home. There is suffering all around us in the world, and we recognize we have done little to deserve our good fortune. We don’t deserve it, however grateful we are to have it.

A step to either side, an accident of birth, an error of judgement, might have made our lives quite different.

When I was young, the new idea was that human beings, as animals, were all about competition, about being the strongest, about beating out those competing for limited resources. A few decades later, I read a careful study by an evolutionary biologist who details the evidence that altruism—self sacrifice—is likely an inherited trait. “The Selfless Gene” by Olivia Judson (of Stanford and Oxford) talks back to that earlier popular understanding of human nature. Far from being selfish and brutal animals, we have survived because we are willing to do for others. Sailers give their seats in lifeboats to passengers. A philosopher dies rescuing a drowning child she is not even related to. It is not merely heroic, but in our nature. And this is true not only for human beings, but for other life forms too, from amebae to baboons. We survive because it is instinctive to care for others.

It is possible to see life merely as a battle ground, but when we have the choice, we are better than that. I prefer to see my life as something better, as an opportunity. And lucky. I am grateful for my luck. I am grateful for a life of hard work and attention.

 

 

 

WRAPPING UP

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The year is not over, but with Hanukkah already past, five days to the beginning of winter, and just over two weeks till 2019, “the season” is closing in. The day before yesterday I wrapped gifts for twenty people. Yes, I am amazed too. We sent out fewer holiday cards, but we did get them out.

It was been an interesting year, and by “interesting” I mean in the sense of the Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times. I mean both marvelous and traumatic for me personally. A man who pursued me on the beach, screaming obscenities, pretty much ruined summer, and then the Kavanaugh hearings brought up old stuff I could have lived without reliving. The determination of people to deny a bad word about the dead, the continuing horror that is the current national administration . . . I did not sew a dress. I did not bellydance for an hour a day. I recklessly ordered a custom desk, but when it arrived it was nothing like what I asked for and it took a month to get the brute out of my office space.

I might not be blamed for feeling a little down.

Instead, we feel cheered to have paid off our mortgage this year. We are not yet accustomed to having disposable income. There is a large open space in the middle of my office space that I quite like. I read several dozen books and gave away books, and there will be more about that later. Reading aloud to my husband is something we have enjoyed in the past. Just now we are beginning the fourth book of Patrick O’Brian’s 20-volume series. It’s my third time through and it’s better each time.

We replaced our skylights, repaired some plumbing, and I painted the entire upstairs myself, including floors. We have been seriously divesting lovely things we do not need, have no room for, and our family doesn’t want either. The attic contains only a cardboard box and plastic tubs to catch the leaks, and no rodents. It’s never permanent, of course, but Gary got the job done. (Next year, the roof itself needs replacing, obviously, and the deck now has holes large enough for both my feet to step through.)

We went on vacation, several times, and not merely 6-hour daytrips to Portland that we have counted as “vacation” in the past 16 years. We went to Canada for two nights, Seattle, Forest Grove, Nye Beach, and Decatur Island. Nine days away. Imagine!

I sold a story and an essay—yes, actual money changed hands. I did not find an agent for my newest novel, but that is the result of my determination to indulge in an unpalatable structure. I am working on something else now. Plus, during NaNoWriMo, I wrote a lot of new material, and in the new year, I will work on that too.

On the visual arts front: I knit hats and sweaters; wove blankets, scarves, and shawls; and pieced one completed quilt. This was not all I had planned and a baby blanket is still waiting for me to complete a warp on the loom so that I can put on a blue-gray warp. Still.

Gary and I picked up half a ton of trash off the beach, and gathered an assortment of seaglass, shells, and pebbles that I have only half-sorted.

I taught Writing 121 and 122 last school year, and I have begun teaching that series again this month with a large class of willing and capable students (hooray!). This Thursday, a half dozen former students will be speaking to my college class about their college experiences. I will have made at least three batches of “the chocolate thing” from a Canadian recipe. (That making will happen after I get home late from school on Wednesday.) It is cream, good chocolate, egg yolks, and a tablespoon of orange liquor for nuance.

51mVnm2RrDL._SCLZZZZZZZ__SY500_SX500_Confirmation of my order of The Speed of Darkness by Muriel Rukeyser revealed the cover image, which I immediately recognized. I thought: I have that book already, downstairs in Ian’s old bedroom on one of the poetry bookcases. I have not yet looked to be certain it’s there. If this book was inherited from my aunt or mother, and I have possessed it all this time without reading it, well, that would be both bad news and good, wouldn’t it?

My husband is most pleased that I am regularly using my grandmother’s desk. It is tiny, a ladylike drop-front desk of satinwood, and unsuited to spreading out. I must confine my mess to a narrow surface and that might be a part of the appeal. I generally sit on the sofa with my laptop, or in bed as I am now, typing this post, but I open that drop-front desk each morning and sit at it for a time, and then in the evening, I plug my laptop in on a chest to my left and close my grandmother’s desk. Gary finds all of this precious.

IMG_0015aThe tree downstairs has a thousand LED lights and is decorated with glass birds and tiny stuffed, winged animals made by Margaret Swanson-Vance of SewWing Studios. Some are more than 30 years old. This flying tiger has painted embellishment by her husband, who has passed (marked T  W  MS ’94 ‘Nar Bachcha’). The silver-winged pig at top is brand new. Upstairs is a little white paper tree in the front window. It has only a few lights and white ornaments, some of which are also from Margaret. A unicorn is on its way.

I have learned to bake panettone this fall. The sourdough start has not died but provided waffle batter, sweetrolls, and crumpets throughout the year. I did not make jam or jelly, but there are packets of fire-roasted peppers in the freezer, and we picked up tamale-ground organic masa from Three Sisters Nixtamal. For our Christmas there will be tamales! I plan to bake panettone, rugelach, and pecan cookies for the holidays, too, though it’s tight between the beginning of Winter Break (this Friday) and Christmas Day (next Tuesday).

We’ll manage in joy.

 

‘When something like this happens . . . ‘

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Many people are finding it emotionally challenging to watch the news these days. They do not feel connected to events, to politics, to the ebb and flow of our national debate. I understand that.

Just last week I was thinking over my personal experiences with accidental shootings leading to lost use of legs, to murders, and to suicides—yes, plural for each. I have known no one who was killed by a serial killer or terrorist, but people I know have been crippled and murdered, and all were the victims of white men. There is nothing unusual about that. In my country, most murderers and terrorists have been white, male, and Christian, even when the majority of citizens were not.

I love and would trust with my life, most every white male I know personally. They would not harm anyone based on color, religion, or politics. They are joined to one another through their communities and by love and respect.

So then, the past few days.

Things happen. Terrible things happen to everyone. A father commits suicide in the driveway while his daughter desperately beats on the locked car doors and windows to stop him—something similar happened to more than one of my students. A girl slept on the dirt floor of a shed, determined to stay with her homeless mother who was mentally ill and drug-addicted. A father returned from Iraq with no visible wounds but still changed beyond recognition. A student hospitalized, not for the first time, in a mental facility. Mothers and fathers died. A student drowned. Students died in car wrecks. Students killed themselves.

Ask any teacher in a weak moment and they will share their stories.

Then there was the student who slammed a school desk into a wall, the one who threw a chair, a padlock. The ones who did not want me to know what bothered them. The cruel parent, the near fatal overdose, the guilty confession of keeping score of girls, the marks on my board to count off the days without drinking.

I do not know how to adequately respond to cries for help. I have done my best as a mandatory reporter. I have offered comfort, I have listened. I have tried to be what my students needed from me, and often I have failed.

What leadership and decency look like:

“When Rabbi Joseph Miller learned of the Squirrel Hill massacre, less than a mile from his own pulpit, he ordered the doors of his synagogue locked,” Franklin Foer writes. “Despite his congregants’ terror that they would be next, they recited the mi sheberach. They didn’t pray for their own protection; they prayed for the healing of others.”

A dear friend has just managed to let those of us who were concerned know through social media that she is well, despite hospitalization with a terrible health crisis. She begs people will vote in lieu of flowers.

There is no point trying to avoid the pain. It comes and it comes. We can deny our responsibility or face what comes with compassion and care. The best we can do is take steady, honest steps toward healing our beleaguered nation.