Current Affairs – Page 9 – Don't Gel Too Soon

Ferguson, Bloggers and Race in America: Even if We Think We Know, We Don’t

One of the bloggers I admire most is Kelly Wickham, who writes Mocha Momma. I “met” her online 7 years ago because she was a reading specialist and, as the parent of a dyslexic child, I was so grateful for the committed, loving, determined way she wrote about her work. I kind of stalked her in comments until we met at BlogHer in 2007. (Actually I also stalked her after that, too, but at least by then she knew who I was.)

She writes, with honesty and rage, about race. About family, and love, and education and whatever else occurs to her, but also about race. I’ve learned a lot from her, including how much I didn’t know. As the years have passed, and more women of color have joined BlogHer and Kelly’s Facebook feed, I’ve learned from others, too. The BlogHer community grew and widened, and with it the gut understanding of the whole community. On our blogs we tell the truth, and the different truths shared by the bloggers who are now a part of my life have been an immeasurable gift.

Of course it is beyond wrong that, in 2014, we still have to seek diversity, to go out of our way to learn lessons we should have learned long ago, and that those most in pain still experience so much that we haven’t figured out how to learn.

The trouble is that there hasn’t been nearly enough intersection between us and those experiencing the harshest emotions that emerge in response to American racism.

I remember once talking with author Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, who said to me “Don’t you see, we black mothers must be lionesses to protect our sons.” I thought of her statement often as I was raising my own.

I remember a colleague describing to me, when we were both pregnant, her fear of the first time someone called her not-yet-born child a “n*$%#&r” – of what she would say to him, what she would do.

But despite having African-American colleagues and friends, I’m not sure I ever, until these past days, completely heard the depth of anger and despair that lives within so many.

It’s not that I didn’t know; most people I know care about and have seen plenty of racial injustice and have worked, in our own ways, to change it. But that’s different from opening someone else’s door and walking in. It’s on fire in there. And it should be.

Listen to these:

Everyone can’t stand up the moment something pisses the off and we’re all different in how we react. Some people shut down because they don’t even know where to start. Some people just need a nudge to be emboldened to speak. Some people need to know they’re needed before they speak.

Well if you need that nudge, here it is. If you’re afraid because you don’t want to say the wrong thing, push past that fear. Because right now, your silence about the continued devaluation of Black lives is wrong. Your lack of acknowledgement is not ok. If you need tips before speaking out here’s 3: don’t blame the person who was killed. Don’t say you’re color-blind. Acknowledge the racism at play.

Speaking up when it matters is usually when it’s also the hardest. When your voice shakes, that’s when you’re standing in truth. But that’s usually when it is most needed. And when you do it, someone else might be encouraged to do the same. Do not be silent. Awesomely Luvvie

I am outraged but I do not know what to do with my outrage that might be productive, that might move this world forward toward a place where black lives matter, and where black parents no longer need to have “the talk” with their children about how not to be killed by police and where anger over a lifetime of wrongs is not judged, but understood and supported. Roxanne Gay

Black bodies matter. Black bodies matter. Black bodies matter. Say it with me: Black bodies matter. This isn’t a question. This isn’t a euphemism. This isn’t an analogy. This is a fact. Black cis and trans boys, girls, men, and women and non-binary folks, they all matter. Until that fact becomes a universal truth due to the precise liberty and justice the Constitution of this country promises, I won’t stop fighting and neither should you. Jenn M. Jackson

But it wasn’t what I could see and hear as Ferguson residents fled and were pursued into residential areas that gave me chills. It was what I couldn’t see. Because behind the walls of those smoke-shrouded homes were parents comforting their frightened children. I couldn’t see them, but I knew they were there. They could have been me. They could have been my children.Kymberli Barney for Mom 2.0

This is what I need, dear friend.

I need to know that you are not merely worried about this most tragic of worst case scenarios befalling my son; I need to know that you are out there changing the ethos that puts it in place. That you see this as something that unites us as mothers, friends and human beings.

My son needs me, as much as yours needs you. Sadly, my son needs me more. He needs someone to have his back, when it seems that the police, the men he’d wave to with excitement as a little boy, see him as a being worthy only of prison or death.

I need you, too, because I can’t do this alone. Keesha Beckford “Dear White Moms” on BonBon Break

This is where the story gets tricky. This is where our son paced up and down the stairs—in his under shirt, gym shorts and crew socks—telling us about the police who came to our door and handcuffed our son and pulled him outside. “Why?” It was the only question I could come up with — “why?”

His hands ran over his face and found each other behind his head. I knew this look too. The one of lost words—of previous trauma—of discouragement.

“I don’t know. There’s some robberies in the area? I guess? And they saw me here—I don’t know. They thought it was me. They thought it was me and wouldn’t listen. They didn’t believe me that this was my house.”

He shook his head and looked at me. “It didn’t even matter that I had a key, moms.” Elora Nicole

For each of these there are dozens and dozens more. No more to say.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/20/white-people-black-people-michael-brown-death-ferguson

How Did I Miss “The Giver?”

The movie is coming. I saw the trailer. But it wasn’t the story I thought it was; it turns out that all these years the book I remembered as Lois Lowry’s The Giver was in fact Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s The Keeper!. Which is pretty embarrassing given that I reviewed that one for The Washington Post. And The Giver? I hadn’t even read it.

Yesterday I did. I so wish I had been 14 when I found it, but it was published in 1993 and won the Newbery Medal in 1994 so that’s past not only my 14th birthday but that of one of my son’s! It’s very gripping and beautifully written, but there’s been so much YA dystopian fiction since then that it’s hard to imagine the punch in the gut it must have been when it appeared.

As a veteran of the Divergent trilogy and The Hunger Games (and, ok, the Twilight Series but they don’t count) as well as countless post-nuclear–holocaust novels and a ton of cyberfiction, I’m an old hand in this neck of the woods. Even so, the intent of The Giver is a little different. There’s no hunger, no war, not even any pain. It’s a twisted version of John Lennon’s Imagine.

Except, of course, it isn’t.

The “sameness” that rules this world has murdered color and music and laughter and love. Oh – and babies, too. One person, “the Giver” is the sole custodian of all memories of the bitter, the painful and the sad. We know this will not stand. And that’s the point.

We had a sign up in my college dorm – a banner across the front porch: “Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.” — William Faulkner, The Wild Palms Those are the words and feelings of young people and artists. And it is the battle against nothing the Lowry offers her young readers. As she told the New York Times: “Kids deserve the right to think that they can change the world.”

When the Giver helps our young hero Jonas decide that beauty and emotion are worth the terrible prices we pay to be fully human, we are all empowered to imagine that we can — no must, join him. Take a stand. Change a mind. Solve a problem. Correct an injustice. Fall in love. Break our hearts or someone else’s. Be alive.

And that’s the power of The Giver, as the rest of you have probably known for years.

Margot Adler Sang at My Wedding

Margo in the foreground; that's me in the back. — Margo in the foreground; that’s me in the back.

It was 1971. The song – no surprise to anyone who was young then, was Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream, Ed McCurdy’s anti-war anthem. We knew we couldn’t get married in the middle of the war that had defined much of our lives without acknowledging it, and the song was the perfect way. Margot was amazing, her voice clear and passionate; people even cried as we two 20-somethings stood, mid-ceremony, and Margot sang. She had a great voice, had actually been a music person forever, and attended the famed Music and Art High School in Manhattan.

We met cute. A friend brought her into the Senate Radio-TV Gallery, just off the press balcony overlooking the Senate. Reporters wrote their spots there, and there was a small studio where Senators could come and make statements for the cameras. I didn’t know Margot, but her Pacifica Radio friend knew she had a question that any pal of Margot’s would have loved.

“Pacifica (the progressive, listener-supported NY-based FM radio station) wants to hire me to cover the White House. I’ve just come back from Cuba where I was helping the Venceremos Brigade harvest sugar cane. Will that be a problem?”

This was Richard Nixon’s White House she was asking about. You can imagine my answer.

It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

From then on, until I left Washington with the man who is still my husband, our adventures were many, and varied and intense. The moment that rises to the top though, is a small one, very Margot – precise and painful.

We had seen Love Story, the shameless, sentimental, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry” Love Story. (Yeah, I know, but everyone went – even politicos like us.) She was quite upset, more than I would have thought – and I never go by Mt. Sinai Hospital on Fifth Ave without remembering it. “What I hated most” she said, “was the scene on the street outside the hospital where my mother died. It was like they threw it in there to make the whole thing extra painful.”

It’s a small story but it always stayed with me. Along with the time we came to NY after we had moved to Palo Alto so Rick could finish school. We were staying with her and we walked in and there in the front hall was her altar. It was the first time we learned of her decision to follow her Wiccan self and it was such a weird way to find out. She kind of said “Well I couldn’t just put it in a letter, right?”

She was, of course, a brilliant reporter and writer and thinker. She was fun and alive and full of curiosity and political brilliance and personal warmth and charm. I hadn’t seen her in a long time, but this week, she’s very much with me, along with the memories of that day, and of course, this song.

Obvious Child: So Much More than an “Abortion Movie”

My hands were shaking as I left the theater. Obvious Child is not traumatic, exactly, it’s just so real. There’s even a line about “old men in black robes.” You already know the story. What you don’t know — can’t know — until you see the film is that the story is just a frame upon which to hang a remarkable set of truths, some painful, some still painfully true, some funny and touching and surprising.

At first I wasn’t even sure I liked our heroine, Donna. She was careless and immature (but also lovable and self-deprecating) and — funny. Of course in some ways she had to be. These circumstances can’t be picture-book or the movie is propaganda instead of the affecting work of filmmaking that it is.

I am closer to her parents’ age than to hers, so the role that they, particularly her mother (SPOILER ALERT) played was especially moving, as she told her “kitchen table abortion” story and, when it counted, flattened the wall that had kept mother and daughter apart for so long. It was a stark reminder not only of the realities that all women share, but also of what women my age knew to be true when we were young: termination of an unintended pregnancy was a risk to our lives. A risk many of us fear has returned.

Right now, today, we face assaults on all sides: contraception, equal pay, voting rights, civil rights and of course, abortion. The quiet, sometimes funny, sometimes incredibly sad, journey through this film evokes grief over the threats we know are emerging with more and more power. It’s one woman’s story from one wild night to shock to truly loving families and friends who can’t quite compensate for the crisis to the inevitably sad, lonely moment as the procedure unfolds to the life that lies ahead.

The difference, the reason Obvious Child is so much more than “that abortion movie” is that it offers characters we come to love, a crisis we all recognize, a family clearly a product of the open child rearing that many of us chose over the stratified parenting we experienced as well as loving, truth-telling, strong friends and fully-developed principal characters with depth and, under all that irreverent Millennial camouflage, deep sensitivity and honor.

Living with History: Ghosts of WWII Still Haunt Europe

Outside the shipyard where Solidarity was born

There’s Europe, and then there’s Europe. Before St. Petersburg, we visited Gdansk, Poland and Klaipeda, Lithuania, each with a great (and strategically valuable) coastline and harbor. Along with those very desirable traits came a dark, terrible, history of invasion and occupation, Nazis and Communists and pre-Nazi Germans in the 20th Century alone. Listen to the guides and it sounds as if the last of them left only last week, the memories are so fresh. Each city was all but obliterated after the War, first by the Nazis as they fled and then by the victorious Russians who declared the residents “Nazis” and burned much of what hadn’t been bombed.

In Gdansk, along with the Jews, many Poles, including 3,000 priests, died in concentration camps. This statue of Jesus mourning the 3,000 priests murdered in Auschwitz is from the gorgeous Gdansk St. Mary’s Church was placed there in their honor. A visit to this city is a rapid education in the continued immediacy of the devastation and misery of the War and the Soviet occupation that followed. It isn’t history, it’s family.

Veterans of Siberian exile sing songs of their country
In Lithuania they work to preserve memories of forced exile to Siberia and Soviet abuse through an ever-shrinking choir of village elders, many of them survivors of the Siberian deportations, on the lawn of a one-room museum that combines these memories with a commemoration of WWII partisans.

While there is little argument about the roles that Poland and Lithuania had in the Holocaust, I’m offering these examples to demonstrate the immediacy of the War that remains among the communities even today. Wherever we’ve gone in these places, or in Helsingborg Sweden entire tours are constructed around these memories.

It was quite a shock to meet the ghosts that still haunt these old cities. Gdansk is charming, and of course visiting the scene where Solidarity was born was wonderful. What really left with us though, was the enduring impact of a war that ended long before many of those affected were even born.

Petersburg and the End of the Road

This is the Petersburg (we World Travelers have learned NOT to say “Saint Petersburg”) monument to the heroes of the World War II siege of Leningrad. For nine hundred days, the city was surrounded by Nazis. Many were evacuated before then, but those who remained lived in cold, fear, and near, sometimes overpowering, starvation. What they suffered was unimaginable.

The 872 days of the siege caused unparalleled famine in the Leningrad region through disruption of utilities, water, energy and food supplies. This resulted in the deaths of up to 1,500,000 soldiers and civilians and the evacuation of 1,400,000 more, mainly women and children, many of whom died during evacuation due to starvation and bombardment. (Wikipedia)

It is this story that the monument is designed to honor. Unlike so much Soviet art, the statues are human and lean – no giant muscles and super-strong Soviet Realism here. The glory went to the suffering instead. The museum itself is underground, below the wall where these statue stand,.

It holds with panel after panel of the names of those who died, somewhat reminiscent of Yad Vashem. There are relics of very human moments and a film that’s almost too hard to watch.

Even so, the day we were there, like every other weekday, groups of school kids, many quite young, came with their teachers to hear the story. Russians are very proud of the courage and strength demonstrated in those days, and determined to pass the story on.

We in the West have always been so preoccupied with the European Front, with the dramas of Normandy and the Resistance, that the other two fronts, in Russia and the Pacific, have gotten far less attention.

Besides, the Iron Curtain that surrounded Russia for so long made outside praise for or even commemoration of the Russian sacrifices less likely. It’s impossible to come here, though, and not be stunned by the reality of what happened.

The drama of the memorial is intense, but there are small memories too.

We visited one of the pillbox defense structures that held the final line around the city. It is being refitted to be an exhibit and hadn’t been open in a very long time. We were fortunate enough to be there when the workmen were cleaning out old trash and dirt, and able to go inside.

It eerie to imagine people, desperate with hunger, waiting in there in shifts to prevent the conquest of the city.

That’s just part of what was a remarkable day that ended in the Hermitage. Gorgeous and thrilling, but a little like too much gooey candy all in one place. It was tough to absorb, especially after the grim realities of the siege.

The beauties of Catherine’s Palace and the Synagogue and museums and churches and cathedrals will appear soon. For now, this sober and very moving set of memories will stand alone.

Life and Death on the Coast of France REDUX

It doesn’t look at all real – I know that. But it is. It’s also a place I’ve wanted to see for as long as I can remember. And here we are. Here we are! The sweet, formidable beauty of this place is matched only by its astonishing history – as a monastery, a prison and a target, from ancient times to the carnage and suffering of D-Day.

Mt-Saint-Michel has, for more than a thousand years, stood atop the rock upon which is was built. Its timelessness is much of what attracts people, I suspect, along with its ice-castle beauty and the awesome commitment of its inhabitants: the sacrifices made by these men on the mountain top, alone, virtually silent, with nothing to do but pray and take on their assigned chores, meditate and live out their lives in as holy a way as possible

SMEglise ike diorama crop — Ike sends US troops off to the D-Day invasion of Europe that helped win WWII.

Nearby, the small town of Saint-Mère-Élgise and its museum await the summer celebration of the 70th anniversary of D-Day and its remarkable exercise in vision, courage and grit. This diorama of General Eisenhower’s last visit with the men he was sending to fight and die is a moving one. Anyone who has ever seen his 1968 conversation with Walter Cronkite knows how well the General understood that half of those he sent out on D-Day would never return.

SMglise resistance — Resistance Armbands

SMeglise death book crop — Prayers to say if death is near; provided by the military

One group of special heroes and heroines represented at the museum were the Resistance – women and men who parachuted behind enemy lines, worked with local opponents of the Reich to complicate their war and, at great personal risk. transmitted by hidden radios everything they learned about their German enemy.

Aside from their real-life-spying, they also served in special, high-risk, low profile operations, commemorated in history, in films and in novels. I often used the Resistance stories and the children running messages and doing other support work as a way to engage our sons in history when we traveled. The drama and courage, and relevance, was and still is irresistible.

What you see here another of the profoundly moving exhibit items at the museum. Look carefully; it’s a page of prayers to support young soldiers dying in the field. Breathtaking as you stand among the photos of these young men and see how wise it was to offer them this comfort, and wonder if today’s military is inclined, or allowed for that matter, to provide similar comfort.

In all, the life of the monastery and loss that surrounds the beaches of Normandy really are bookends to how we live our lives. Life and faith, war and peace, courage, sacrifice, defeat and victory. It is the greatest gift of travel when these things present themselves and we remember how fragile, and how wondrous, the privilege of being alive and aware really is.

NOTE: This post was first published on May 8th, the day we made this trip. But today, on the anniversary of D-Day, it seemed right to offer it once again.

The Statue and the Synagogue

This is what the women saw. There are few sanctuaries more beautiful and moving than this 1675 Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam, and here the women, while separated, were still able to share its beauty. In fact, in many ways, they saw more.

The service, certainly, but also the outside world for which they prayed. It was a hike to get there, of course, but the dignity and faith that infuses the place was more available to them than in many other observant synagogues. It’s difficult to describe the peace and beauty of this place, even with a photo. Or two. The black and white one is a wedding photo taken in the synagogue.

So where you ask is the statue? Well, he’s right here. Baruch Spinoza, whose ideas wreaked havoc in religious communities of Europe. Here’s what Wikipedia says:

Philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel said of all contemporary philosophers, “You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all.”^[8]

Spinoza’s given name in different languages is Hebrew: ברוך שפינוזה‎ Baruch Spinoza, Portuguese: Benedito or Bento de Espinosa and Latin: Benedictus de Spinoza; in all these languages, the given name means “the Blessed”. Spinoza was raised in the Portuguese Jewish community in Amsterdam. He developed highly controversial ideas regarding the authenticity of the Hebrew Bible and the nature of the Divine. The Jewish religious authorities issued a cherem (Hebrew: חרם, a kind of ban, shunning, ostracism, expulsion, or excommunication) against him, effectively excluding him from Jewish society at age 23. His books were also later put on the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books.

A powerful figure in Jewish history and history in general, he stands just steps from the Synagogue, there – and not there; a compelling figure of faith — and doubt.

We are currently sailing through the Kiel Canal, an engineering feat that cut northern Europe in half and created a pathway that reduced isolation for many. Tonight we stop in Helsingborg, Sweden and Friday night, in Copenhagen.

Antwerp and the Immigrants

That’s the view from the deck tonight. We docked late so had just over an hour to visit the new immigration museum built in the former headquarters of the Red Star Line, which for years carried dreamers from the old world to the new. Here’s how they looked through the eyes of painter Eugene Van Meighan, whose parents owned a pub across the street.

This fellow stands watch just a block away, reminding us of those who trudged, carrying all their worldly goods, from the railway station at the end of a grueling trip to Antwerp to the embarkation point: the Red Star Line terminal. It was quite a trek.

The museum has managed to take a story we all know and, with the very ordinary tools of words and pictures, make it new again. There is a sweetness to the presentation, including portrayals of physical examinations, decontamination, and general misery, combined with respect for the travelers and pride in the role the company, and the city, played in so many futures .

Of course this city is more than an immigration hub. It’s also got a long history of its own, built around, among other things, the guilds that preceded trade unions. Their icons top several of the buildings that surround this lovely city hall.

Just down the street is the Cathedral and a flurry of chocolate shops, coffee houses and souvenir vendors. We could have gone to Brussels tomorrow, but have decided to stay here and enjoy where we are. We’re a bit weary of moving so fast, although grateful for all we’ve seen and learned. It’s time for a nice, slow day, and that we shall have.

Pilgrims and the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela

Pilgrims come here. They walk 100 km or bike 200 km in order to be certified as religious seekers. They walk slowly so they can think about their lives and their souls. They have been coming for centuries. It’s a beautiful old place, smaller than the grand cathedrals but fraught with meaning and swimming in ghosts and souls.

Why is this “porch” above the main section? So that pilgrims could sleep there and not have to pay for the privilege of coming from very far away to pray for forgiveness or a miracle.

The power of this place is exceptional. Statues that pioneer portrayal of textile surfaces for clothing, and statues with facial expressions. Golden altars, a bloody Christ, St. James’ beautiful silver coffin – combine to contribute to the soulful mystery that hovers over it all.

These columns, for example, are ornate and golden because they were meant to resemble those in Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem. A saint sits atop two open-mouthed lions who represent the (sadly premature) celebration of human victory over sin. Moses joins the Apostles on the “Portico de la Gloria” that rises over the main entrance.

And is now, as are so many other wonderful historic locations, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

It’s awesome no matter what brand of faith one carries to a visit here. It took centuries of prayer and construction and design and love to put this cathedral here and its power still surprises and moves visitors.