ROSH HASHANAH ONE REDUX: ONE YEAR AGO

I’m posting this again, one year later, because the feelings remain and the holiday arrived last night.  I’ve set the timer to post this during the holiday [That way I didn’t have to break the rules and post it during down time.]  When you hear about things like the urgency of the bail out vote because of the Jewish Holiday of Rosh Hashanah – this is what they’re talking about.   
September 12, 2007    A NEW YEAR, A 36th WEDDING ANNIVERSARY, A LOT TO THINK ABOUT

Wedding_familyTonight begins Rosh Hashanah – the New Year celebration that launches the holy season of the Days of Awe that continues until Yom Kippur – the Day of Atonement.  It’s also a huge day for me – in more than one way.  Rick and I were married 36 years ago today.
On a boat on the Monongahela River.   We’ve been through a lot – maybe
more than most couples – but we’ve hung on and we’re reaping the
rewards of a shared history.  So to have this remarkable landmark fall
on the eve of a holy day of renewal is really something.

This is another anniversary, too.  Our third living an observant
life.  We first came here for Rosh Hashanah services 4 years ago, met our remarkable rabbi and began the journey that has led us to a new, moving, inspiring, frustrating, challenging, occasionally painful, sometimes completely uplifting life.
We share new feelings, new friends, new aspirations to goodness and a
sense of God, new challenges and inspirations.  AND we’re still sharing
them with each other.  That too is remarkable.

Now as we move toward observance of these days, toward prayers and
meals and friends and — especially joyful – a visit from one of our
sons and his girl friend, I am both grateful and anxious.  We are
supposed to think about debts and obligations, sins and redemption.  I
still carry a painful resentment – toward someone who
has hurt me deeply and, I suspect, believes that I hurt them.  I need
to deal with this but am still struggling to figure out how.  But I
know I will – that I must.  That’s the other gift of this season – a
confrontation with the personal flaws that impede our prayers and our
happiness. 

To those who have offered us so much guidance and support, with whom
we’ve had such fun and such meaningful prayers (and meals – and visits)
I wish you the gift of as much goodness as you’ve brought us – an
enormous deluge of joy.  To our dear rabbi and his family a special
thanks for being our gateway to this new life and all that it has
meant. 

Rick_cindy
And to Rick, my partner, love and best friend, eternal gratitude to you
for your courage and determination, love and generosity, talents and
humor and incredible incredible soul.  Happy anniversary.  Thanks for
the memories, the adventures, our amazing children,  and this
astonishing, still emerging journey.  L’shana tova.

Posted by Cynthia Samuels on September 12, 2007 at 09:54 AM 

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BOOK BANNING: THIS IS NOT (EXACTLY) ABOUT SARAH PALIN

Nazi_book_burning
You know this photo:  Nazis burning books in Babelplatz, a large public square across from Humboldt University in the heart of Berlin.  Germany was a highly cultured society, yet it wasn’t too difficult to get to the place where its students willingly burned the books they were to supposed to be studying if they had been written by Jews. 

Ulysses1
The U.S. wasn’t immune in those years either. In the 1930s there were huge battles about James Joyce’s classic Ulysses, a gorgeous and very moving book but so difficult to understand that I took an entire college course on it. Hard to believe that anyone would bother working through it for any but literary reasons.  Even so, copy after copy was seized from trans-Atlantic passengers arriving on ocean liners in Manhattan.  Finally, in 1932, after an edition of the book intended as a model for U.S. publication had been seized along with the others, Judge John M. Woolsey lifted the ban in a famous, highly cited opinion* that appears as a preface in many editions.  There are many such stories, about many books, but most of them well before the 1960s.  After that, it seemed we’d "grown out of" book banning.  Wrong.

Catcher_a
I read Catcher in the Rye in the 7th grade.  Years later I had the privilege of reading it aloud with my own  son at precisely the same age.  Nearly 20 years apart, we both loved it.  Yet efforts to ban it in both school and community libraries have gone on almost as long as the life of the book itself.  BlogHer and book blogger SassyMonkey, in a detailed BlogHer post, reminded us that Banned Books Week is here (September 27 to October 4, 2008).  The American Library Association created this week in 1982, and sadly, we still need it today.  Sarah Palin was not the first, nor will she be the last, government official to fire a librarian after a discussion about removing books from library shelves.  There’s a long history of such behavior, and other, more overt attempts, both here and around the world.

Try to imagine a time where you had to hide the books you love.  Or where you couldn’t get Harry Potter  from the library to re-live the Hogwarts adventure with your own children.  Or you couldn’t get access to published health information from books like Our Bodies, Ourselves.
Imagine no Huck Finn, no Maya Angelou or Toni Morrison or John
Steinbeck or — and this is a biggie in the book banning world, no Judy
Blume.  Right now there are community and school librarians risking
their careers to fight to protect their shelves from marauding
moralists.  Right now.

Continue reading BOOK BANNING: THIS IS NOT (EXACTLY) ABOUT SARAH PALIN

RADIO SILENCE ONCE AGAIN

Shabbat_computer Here we are again – Friday afternoon.  So here’s my standard message:  I hate being off the grid for even a moment in these weirdest of times
but from sundown Friday until sundown Saturday I’m gone.  If you’re
looking for me, I should be caught up and posting by Sunday some time.
Have a lovely weekend. (and thanks to Steven and Linda, whoever they
are, whose photo this is.)  Their MYSpace page is private or I would
link to them – it’s perfect for a webrat like me who has to stay
offline to honor the Sabbath.  Shabbat Shalom indeed.

OBAMA AND RACE: THE LESSONS OF DINKINS AND BRADLEY

Dinkins_campaign
I lived in Manhattan in 1989 when David Dinkins ran to become the first African-American mayor of New York, challenging an entrenched but increasingly unpopular Ed Koch in the primary, then defeating  Rudy Giuliani in the general election.  In that race, Dinkins was far ahead in the polls but didn’t win by much.  Here’s how Adam Berinsky of The Monkey Cage describes it:

I
examined data from a 1989 New York City Mayoral election. There, the black
candidate David Dinkins held a fourteen- to eighteen-point advantage over his
white opponent Rudolph Giuliani in polls taken only days before the election,
but ended up winning the race by less than two percentage points. Correcting
the polls using statistical techniques that accounted for the “don’t know”
improved the predictive power of those polls. Clearly, some people who said
they didn’t know how they were going to vote in fact did know – they just
didn’t want to tell us.

Tom_bradley
The same thing happened earlier, in 1982, to one of LA’s most popular, and first black, mayors, Tom Bradley, when he ran for governor of California.  The gap between the polls and the electoral results was so large that the phenomenon was named "the Bradley effect."  Way ahead in polls right up to election day, Bradley lost decisively to George Deukmejian.

 

Obama_stars
I’m so afraid that this presidential race may be tainted by some of the same behavior.  Of course I’m not covering new ground, just aggregating some good thoughts.  Listen to the work of the very wise Jill Miller Zimon at Writes Like She Talks, in which she quotes Tim Wise’s "This Is Your Nation on White Privilege."  The fact that that post generated some very heated comments speaks to the currency of this issue, right now.

Continue reading OBAMA AND RACE: THE LESSONS OF DINKINS AND BRADLEY

C-SPAN HOSTS CAMPAIGN DEBATE, TWITTER/BLOG “TIME CAPSULE”

Debate_hub_3
If you were watching C-SPAN at all during the conventions you probably remember the reports from Leslie Bradshaw, who was one of the senior editors of the "Convention Hub," which ran tons of blog posts and tweets and sorted wheat from chaff.  It also let you pull video from C-SPAN archives to insert into blog posts.  Now, Leslie tells me (full disclosure, she is my friend) that they are doing the same for each debate- four sites in all.  They announced the plan on C-SPAN on Friday but I was unable to post about it until now.
Leslie_on_cspan
Given the live-blogging madness that has overtaken all of us during big speeches, and the high interest the debates are certain to generate – this seems to me a good thing.  So I’m passing the word to you.  Here are the main points (Oh and that’s Leslie next to Susan Swain on C-Span during the conventions):

1. The four sites will launch later this week.
2.  Each website will be a "time capsule" complete with blog posts, tweets, transcripts and video from each debate.
3.  They will also tracking twitter posts with: #debate08, Palin, McCain, Biden and Obama
4.  C-SPAN is also very active, and very popular, on Twitter. 
    

I got majorly addicted to these hubs during the conventions and you’ll love them.  You can also submit your own posts, and they will read them and often include them in the crawl.  So, later this week, check it out for yourself.

SHOWER THEM WITH LOVE – FOR KRISTEN, AND ALL OF US

Best_cindy_danielWhat an emotional shock it has been to write this.  I need to start with that; the feelings, years later, are still there.

Since this baby shower is for one of my favorite bloggers, and friends, the inimitable creator of Motherhood Uncensored, our own Kristen, (and her friend Rebecca, of Girl’s Gone Child,) and since it’s organized by four amazing bloggers in their own right,  I’m grateful to be part of it.  Our task is to share those lovely early moments with our brand new children.  That’s why I’ve added this – which may be the most perfect photo I own because it says just what we all know.  The connection of a mother and newborn is so complete that it’s almost impossible – even with writers as remarkable as this community — to describe.  At least I can’t find words that say what I know this photo says.

This is actually my second son, very soon after he arrived.  He’s 28 now and more extraordinary than even I, proud mama, could have imagined that cold November day in Roosevelt hospital in 1979.  He and his brother both started off with beautiful souls though.  They are beautiful still. 

When I think of those early days, it isn’t all the getting up at night (although it could be) and it isn’t that I had so much trouble nursing that I needed to supplement (although it could be) and it isn’t the absolutely perfect terror that I might do them harm that accompanied the first days of their lives (although it certainly, indubitably could be.)

Nope.  Here’s what I remember, and what I wish for the two of you and all you other moms and moms-in-waiting:  it’s a cold winter night, maybe after about a week as the new parent of son number 1.  It’s dark, but out the window you can see the boats going up and down the Hudson River (even though our windows leak so there’s ice on our windows, on the inside.)  You hear a cry and struggle out of bed, grab a robe, go retrieve this new little person from his crib, change him and move with him to the bentwood rocking chair (of course there’s a rocking chair) facing the window.  And you hold him in your arms and you feed him.  The dark envelops you, the dim skyline across the river in New Jersey is the only light you have, except for the tiny pinpoints of light on the tug boats and barges as they make their way.  And it’s silent.  Not a sound.  And, with this new life in your arms, you rock gently back and forth.  The gift of peace of those nights in the rocker was so intense that as I write this, I can feel it. If I let myself, I could cry.

I remember watching my mother with each infant – can still see her face as she responded to them,  thinking to myself then "Oh.  This must be the way she was with me.  How beautiful.  How beautiful."

And I remember this.  My parents came to us very soon after our first son was born, helped put the crib together, celebrated with us.  Late one night, as I stood with our baby in my arms, my dad walked into the room. Looking at the two of us, in perfect peace, he said to me  "NOW do you understand?"  Of course I did.

MOTHERS WITH CANCER: SOME OF THE BRAVEST WOMEN ON THE PLANET

Mothers_with_cance_croppedrThis is the logo from a blog called Mothers with Cancer.  (We are twenty (or so) moms
fighting cancer. Some of us have been in remission for years; others
are newly diagnosed, or battling a new recurrence. All of us have
something to say.)  I’ve spent much of the past week reading personal and group cancer blogs for a project and I’ve been near tears for most of that time.  The sadness, the courage, the resilience in the face of multiple recurrences, the joy in small moments – there’s only so much of it you can read before you start to crumble.  Then you tell yourself that they’re living what you’re reading, and, out of respect, you force yourself to go on.

In 1998 there was a big cancer March on Washington.   I was around DC for much of it; because of my husband’s long-time work on prostate cancer advocacy I’ve been around cancer advocates and survivors for years.  But none of that, and none of them – brought truth to the words "you’ve got cancer" the way these bloggers do, as their realities become ours.  I’ve come to believe that we owe them our attention – that, as Willie Loman‘s wife Linda said:  "Attention must be paid."  And so it must

You’ll find many of a legion of cancer bloggers on Mothers with Cancer and many more on their individual blog rolls.  I urge you to visit their sites and leave a message.  They may not know us, but through their honesty — and their pain — we know them.  And we can’t leave them sitting out here alone.  Listen:

The truth is, I am scared. I am trying to reassure myself with the fact
that I have been feeling pretty good, that I have been biking and
running But I was diagnosed with breast cancer when I was feeling the
healthiest and most fit that I had in years. And I was diagnosed with
liver mets three weeks after I returned to work, at a time when I was
feeling strong, energetic and (so I thought) on the road to reclaiming
my life from cancer.   Not Just About Cancer

Continue reading MOTHERS WITH CANCER: SOME OF THE BRAVEST WOMEN ON THE PLANET

PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE WOMAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN: SARAH PALIN IS THIS ELECTION’S WIZARD OF OZ

Wizard_of_oz2_3
This is an argument for a change of focus.  As I began to write it all I could think about was the Wizard of Oz, the fake behind the curtain who had everyone believing he could save them all.  When he finally presented gifts to all but Dorothy, it sounded horrifyingly like the tactics of the current "wizard,"  nominee Palin, and her boss.  I am as angry and uneasy as anyone over the nomination of Sarah
Palin but I think it’s time to stop now. 

This morning I heard Paul
Begala say on MSNBC that every day McCain isn’t talking about the
economy, he wins.  That he can’t win ON the economy so if he keeps
distracting the voters and the press he will be better off – a premise
supported by the current poll numbers.  Begala also kept comparing
Palin to the "shiny object in the water" on a fishing line that makes a
fish take the bait.  I think he’s right.

The issues of this
election are, as we all know, so enormous and scary that it may be
easier to keep focusing on the governor, but that will not win the
election.  We need to help remind people of the real issues – the
devastating effects of the sub-prime crisis and it’s sequel, investment bank failure so evident in the past few
days, the state of the economy generally, our sinking competitiveness
in education and the  tragic decline of many of our schools, the
attempts by the Right to place (with hat tip to Auntie Mame)"braces on
our brains" and of course, Iraq, Afghanistan, healthcare, energy and
infrastructure. 

We’re in a mess.  It wasn’t caused by pigs or
lipstick or tanning beds or even community organizers — it was caused
by the people currently in office who want four more years and are
Orwell-ing us into giving it to them.  This community has enormous
impact and knows how to raise a ruckus (If you don’t think so, mosey on
over to the League of Maternal Justice!)  Let’s get some message
discipline here, leave Sarah to others and push the issues.  We’re
going to kick ourselves if we don’t.

A version of this post appears on Blogher.com.