Positives and negatives in a single edition
Several stories will evoke consequences
What a whipsaw morning. As I sat down to write, I see indications that Vlad the Impaler exchanged Evan Gershkovich, Paul Whelan, and two others in exchanged for several persons (one of whom the Wall Street Journal notes is a murderer) held in the west. What does it say about people that we treat other humans as commodities, whether it was in the subhuman industry of slavery or wrongly incarcerated prisoners used as barter for others? Please understand I am relieved to see someone held unjustly freed but human behavior towards other humans, regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, or religion, too often is sickening.
What I intended to write about today was how stories can touch our consciousness across decades, sometimes piquing emotion, because of three stories in just today’s first section of The New York Times and two others in the “Arts” portion.
To begin with the most predictable item, a number of folks appear shocked by FPOTUS’s performance yesterday afternoon before the National Association of Black Journalists’s meeting in Chicago. Mr. Trump’s thirty-four minutes on stage were many things but the least surprising of them was the reminder he is racist.
Have people genuinely forgotten most of Donald Trump’s stances, as evident over his nine year run for king of the world, are wildly inconsistent? He respects Xi Jinping for being strong but says he will be ‘tougher on China’ than anyone. He claims to be the best negotiator in the world but his administration held the talks setting the stage for the Afghanistan collapse (plenty of blame out there for this one). He thinks he can be best friends with Vlad the Impaler while he refuses to acknowledge the guy is a revanchist ultra nationalist. The list goes on.
For the past thirteen or so years, however, he consistently focused on race, particularly African Americans as illegitimate for one reason or another. “Birtherism” brought him to the fore as he cast doubt on a Hawai’ian-born U.S. national as president without providing a shread of evidence for the attacks. FPOTUS descended the Trump Tower escalator in 2015, after all, accusing all Mexicans of being murderers, after all. Now he is questioning Vice President Kamala Harris’s self identication as black. Come on, people, this is the essence of of a bitter, racist, out-of-ideas and out-of-touch aspirant so let’s move on. The problems we face as a nation are beyond one man’s predictable attacks; spotlighting those ludicrous appeals will not change those whose support he will get.
Otherwise, several stories with long histories appear today which I found noteworthy to occur simultaneously. When was the last time you heard we still have 9/11 prisoners in the decades’-old Guantánamo Bay detention center? Three of the men held there will acknowledge murder and conspiracy efforts by guilty pleas en lieu of the death penalty, according to the Times. We had no intention of ever releasing them so this brings Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Walid bin Attash, and Mustafa al-Hawsawi to the best justice we are likely to get, twenty-one years after their captures. Sadly, it also resurrects for the 9/11 victims’ families the painful history which may or may not be lessened by this closure.
Similarly, today’s paper reminded us that in the old days (pre-pandemic old days, that is), we as drivers were more responsible behind the wheels of our cars, whether because we feared traffic stops or because we were. With the cursed illness, law enforcement suspended pulling over people. After the Pandemic (how many things in our lives fit this category?), surprise! Actions create consequences: more people are dying from traffic accidents even though the article states it’s challenging to “draw a straight line from the decline of enforcement to the rise of road deaths”. One more bloody thing caused likely by the hideous experience.
Other things have changed in tandem with COVID, however. Truth be told, conditions and tolerance for police activity fell over the past decade following a series of high profile incidents between police and African Americans that appeared to some communities as motivated by institutional racial hatred. Whatever the reason, a automobile journey over any extended period in the United States appears to support the hypothesis that police are stopping fewer dangerous drivers but drivers’s entitlement syndrome is alive and all too visible every day.
The subtext of profound struggle between Israel and Iran also brings anxiety as it has for decades. Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government defiantly warned Teheran not to engage in retaliatory moves following the death of two anti-Israeli figures in the Islamic Republic earlier this week while the Israeli leader did not take credit for either assassination. Israel and Iran have long-standing animosity, not the least because the mullahs advocate for the destruction of the Jewish state. More recent simmering problems result from Iran’s support for Hamas which Netanyahu vows to smash.
Again, most in the United States might have misunderstood the depth of this bilateral hatred but it is hardly news, and the recent trend is towards an unsustainable future since Teheran, embarrassed by Israel more than once this year, vows to make the perpetrators of the assassinations pay. Israel’s war cabinet, however, appears no less determined to punish Iranians and their allies for the 7 October attacks. This fight is anot as immediate for most U.S. citizens as the Yankees battling the Red Sox but for Jews still concerned about their safety and the afflicted afflicted in the region, the saga never abates.
The Interior Department released a sobering study this week of abuse that the federal government allowed against roughly 1,000 Native American children sent to boarding schools “on their behalf” beginning in 1880. Reading the news story, the camps became locations for the children’s gross maltreatment. Racial issues bedevil our history but I doubt many of us knew these boarding schools existed, much less as recently as the 1960s. Many Americans recoiled from the separation of illegal immigrant children from parents at the U.S. border within the past decade probably not realizing forceable family splitting was standard operating procedure for Native Americans on the mainland or on the Hawai’ian Islands for eighty years. In an era of criticizing our missteps, this public rebuke forces me to reconsider so much about our history. It’s no wonder some people are trying to rewrite history to exclude these reprehensible incidents that we cannot roll back.
Tragic items often force us to seek our own lives or the nation’s history which looked purer, happier, simpler. It would appear that history may not have existed yet we seek it as the sadness and questions mount.
Yet the human spirit is one also of joy. Culture often provides those positive points in life—some personal and others aspirational—that allow us time to consider the bad while feeling hopeful about our ability to ameliorate our world. Two final stories from the “Arts” section of the aforementioned edition delighted me rather than saddened me as I thought about my emotions. Both Hawai’ian mat weaving and calligraphy are pretty specialized arts for people willing to spend copious amounts of time learning intricacie yet intricacy sometimes frees the mind from the “doomloop”.
I have never seen anyone weave the moena, floor mats no longer as common in islanders’s homes, probably because the skill is disappearing as generation follows another into a more globalized world. I confess I had never thought about mat weaving but the idea that a group entitled the Pu’uhonua Society struggles to preserve this native activity provides a germ of hope for a better time. What a fascinating way—creating a common weaving experience—to sustain a treasured aspect of the culture while respecting the plants, the homes, the spirits integral to Hawai’i’s culture. I doubt one learns sufficiently to become useful on short periodic visits as tourists but the islands’s ideas, the community, the revival of a culture, and the time individuals donate to this goal is invigorating while it embodies optimism we all seek but rarely find. The article was an enticing one as the act of learning something new can offer a profound extension of an idea into future generations while soothing the weary of each individual involved.
The most alluring article today was on calligraphy. Be still, my beating heart. When I moved to the nation’s capital in the late 1970s, I was single and bored. I came across the now long-closed Crystal City Fahrney’s Pen Shop (the original is still in Northwest not too far from the White House). It…was…magic. The array of spectacular pens with varying nibs, hand made papers, commercial pads of paper, and array of ink options excited me.
The late 1970s heralded calligraphy’s rejuvenation in the United States so community colleges, such as Northern Virginia’s, offered classes with superb teachers. I can’t recall the woman’s name but I signed up as quickly as I could for the beginners’s class. I actually practiced for hours, attempting to perfect what had always been appalling handwriting. The course was on calligraphy for banners or lettering for something on the wall rather than handwriting but I did not care. I became consumed.
For the next several years, I never gave anyone a gift that wasn’t calligraphy in some form. No, I don’t mean I did this work well (I was a pretty pedestrian calligrapher, despite my efforts) but I was so enthusiastic that I did not care about the quality; I wanted the experience of putting pen in ink, resulting in something elegant, crafted, personal, and creative (the latter a term I had never applied to myself). When I was in London during these years, I went deep into Covent Garden to a pen shop with enormous sheets of handmade, rag paper. I carried that paper home as if it were the Crown Jewels. I was all in on calligraphy beyond any shadow of a doubt!
I eventually went to graduate school when I had less time so my interest ebbed. I appreciated seeing beautiful works other did produce but other interests filled with my available time so calligraphy competed with them. Unfortunately, a true devotée requires time to clean the ink out of nibs, to prepare the paper through a lot of light drawing, and enact other steps for which I gradually lost patience. I bought a couple of nibs before I retired two years back, thinking I would surely spend much time practicing the individual letters but have not been as dedicated as I hoped. Alas.
As people struggle valiantly against Artificial Intelligence and “fakes”, the grand skill is renewing itself yet again. It is also a memory motion that can bring the best out in its practitioners. As the article noted, one calligrapher stated “Some people do yoga. But I do calligraphy”. Hope runs eternal that I will reconnect with this incredibly beautiful art.
Finally, as I began editing, my husband mentioned Simon Biles again won the gold for her sublime skills in gymnastics. Hearing that brought tears to my eyes as I so appreciate anyone with grit, persistence, and talent to conquer what seems unconquerable at times. I wish that for all of us in the unique things we excel at yet we often give way to things that deter us. Watching someone exercise exquisite skill is a remarkably satisfying experience.
What links these stories? Each is an action that will trigger more actions, on the individual, national, or international level. None of them began today and each will create consequences. The key will be how we respond to those consequences.
Thank you for your time today. If you find this valuable, please feel free to circulate it. I appreciate the subscribers, in particular, who contribute their resources to sustain this work.
It was pretty this morning after a monsoonal storm for about ten minutes last night. Heat is here for a few days but by early August, it can’t last too long as that orange ball is already moving south in the sky each day. Please note the moon determined to make a guest appearance this morning.
Be well and be safe. FIN
Emily Badger and Ben Blatt, “Traffic Stops Fell in Pandemic, and Didn’t Return”, NewYorkTimes.com, 1 August 2024
Patricia Leigh Brown, “On the Verge of Vanishing, then Getting New Life”, NewYorkTimes.com, 1 August 2024
Jenny Gross, “Countering Digital Fatigue, Calligraphy is on the UpSwing”, NewYorkTimes.com, 1 August 2024
Drew Hinshaw, Joe Parkinson, and Aruna Viswanantha, “WSJ Reporter Evan Gershkovich is Free”, WSJ.com, 1 August 2024, retrieved at https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/evan-gershkovich-free-cde745b3?mod=latestheadlines_trending_now_article_pos1
Aishvarya Kavi, “Report Shows Hundreds of Native Children Died at U.S. Boarding School”, NewYorkTimes.com, 1 August 2024
Patricia Kingsley, Adam Rasgon, and Ronen Bergman, “Iran Vows to Seek Revenge in Death of Hamas Leader”, NewYorkTimes.com, 1 August 2024