Green Reads

Wendy Becktold writes in Sierra about owning sorting books:

Clearly, there are just too many books.  E-readers were supposed to solve this problem, but they are hard to bond with and aren't necessarily better for the environment.  I'd have to read a minimum of 40 volumes on one for it to be the greener choice, according to a life cycle assessment by Daniel Goleman and Gregory Norris in the New York Times.

What serious reader can't read 40 volumes?  Becktold does this idea for book shelves.

More than "I Have a Dream"

This is one of my favorite passages from this speech: 

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check that has come back marked "insufficient funds."
 But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and security of justice. We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children. 

I turned on the radio for the last piece of the Diane Rehm Show today.  There was a good conversation going on with Isabel Wilkerson (!), David Garrow, and Anthony Cook about how well the “bank of justice” is doing today.  I plan to go back and listen to the first part.  (The listening link isn't up yet, but I assume it will be there soon.)

West Highland Way

We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again — to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.  (Pico Iyer, “Why We Travel") 

I have posted the above passage before.  It has touched me deeply.  But now, as I prepare for hiking the 95-mile West Highland Way slightly northwest of Glasgow, I can only have faith that this is true.  I have been upping my walking miles for months and getting things sorted out for weeks, and I have felt a lot of stress.  In a few days, I expect my heart to open, etc., etc.

Daisy, Daisy...

Two years ago--before I knew there would be a new movie version of the story--I reread The Great Gatsby.  I hadn’t remembered what a grim story it is.  I continue to read reviews of the film but can’t bring myself to see it.  Today I came across this interesting critique of Daisy Buchanan: 

Daisy isn't awful, [as many reviews proclaim] she is trapped and scared -- and that is how Mulligan plays her, timidly. Raised a debutante in Louisville, she is expected to marry as a teenager, and she does, to the alcoholic, racist, chronically unfaithful Tom Buchanan. Daisy hasn't had the chance to go to college, or travel the world in the army, as the male characters have. She has a baby before she becomes an adult, and thus is hardly prepared to be an attentive mother. If there are opportunities out there for Daisy to live a more exciting, fulfilling life, she is only dimly aware of them. Is it any wonder she idealizes her first, adolescent romance, with a sweet young officer? Her brief affair with Gatsy is probably one of the only things Daisy has ever done fully by choice. Look at her wrists, bound by diamond cuffs. She is shackled by her own privilege. 

(From the blog of Dana Goldstein)

Haiku by Wendell Berry

And I Beg Your Pardon

The first mosquito:

Come here and I will kill thee

Holy though thou art.

Song for Sunday

It's interesting to see what some of the "professional"
bloggers  post on their sites.  This song was posted on http://www.3quarksdaily.com/  The clothes are fascinating.

Facing the Past, continued

When will we achieve the dream of Martin Luther King, Jr.?  Joshua DuBois offers a different perspective from the last post.  

My first instinct has always been to answer that open-ended inquiry with an equally squishy response, one that we will hear again and again from politicians, preachers, and activists during the next week: “We’ve come so far, but we have so much further to go.” I’ve said this line myself, as recently as this past Wednesday, in the pulpit of a Black Baptist church. 

It’s a phrase that sounds practical, realistic, and even useful. But the problem is: I think it’s wrong. And more than just wrong, it is perhaps the primary barrier to real racial progress in this nation…. 

A Night in the Sky

A week from today, I'll be flying to Scotland.  As I get ready for the trip, I'be been thinking of Sylvia Boorstein's description of spending the night on a plane.  It's comforting.

Facing the Past

“Can America face up to the terrible reality of slavery in the way that Germany has faced up to the Holocaust?” ask Susan Neiman in “History and Guilt,” an article in the online magazine Aeon.  Neiman, born in Atlanta and living in Berlin, questions whether the United States has faced its history of slavery.  I think not.

Neiman, living in Germany, is impressed with how Germany has dealt with the guilt of Hitler’s reign.  According to Neiman, the Germans even have a word “for coming to terms with past atrocities”:  Vergangenheitsbewältigung.  There is also a slogan: “Collective guilt, no! Collective responsibility, yes!” 

The Way of the Cross

Alice Walker is shown here wearing a silver necklace.  When an old friend saw this photograph, she was upset that Walker was wearing a cross.  Walker responded, "This necklace...was made by a Native American artist; it represents the four directions.  There have always been four directions, you know, long before there was a cross."

She goes on to tell about an African American artist who gave her a "cross," and explained, "I think for most folks the cross is something people die on, but to me, when I was making the necklace and pondering its four directions, it seemed to represent choices."

Here is Walker's favorite definition
of the cross:  "the cross represents the place where spirit crosses matter."  Maybe her favorite definition is more lovely than mine though their meanings are similar.   To me  the cross represents the intersection of the vertical and horizontal or depth and breadth.  These definitions can mesh with the traditional Christian meaning of the cross, but they add a more universal meaning.  Here are two of my favorite crosses

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The quotations from Alice Walker come from her book The Cushion in the Road.

What is race?

I believe I first saw this video on Facebook.  In a speech to the Florida Press Association and the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors, Leonard Pitts talks about the experiment in the video and more.

[Y]ou may remember that I made reference to a social experiment I once saw on television. What Would You Do? is one of those hidden camera shows in which they set up a situation and watch to see how average people respond. In the segment I wrote about, a young white actor sets to work trying to steal a chained up bicycle in a park. He uses a hacksaw, a bolt cutter and even an electric saw. The cameras watch for an hour. A hundred people pass by. A few mildly question what he’s doing, but most don’t even bother. Out of that 100 people, only one couple calls authorities. ABC also tried the setup with an attractive blonde woman. Five white guys stopped – and helped her steal the bike.
It was when they did the experiment with a black kid that things got interesting. And you know where this is going. Within the first minutes, there’s a crowd of people around him. They challenge him.

They lecture him. They whip out cell phone cameras and take video of him for use in court. They call the police. And afterward, when they are asked if the color of the young man stealing the bike had any bearing on their actions, they all swear it did not.

As one man put it, “Not at all. He could’ve been any color, it wouldn’t have mattered to me.”

So when you ask yourself what I mean by “race,” I mean that. That is race.

I recommend the whole speech.

See You?

“It’s good to see you,” I said to my ninety-one-year old Uncle Bob.
  
“You won’t be seeing me many more times,” he answered.

I have visited many relatives and old friends in the past three weeks.  This is the most memorable exchange, but visiting people I haven’t seen for 20 or 30 years and not visiting so many who are gone, Uncle Bob accurately sums up the long view.

Running Out of Songs

Songs about summer

The Daily Beast says, 

‘Blurred Lines’ may be the song of summer 2013, but plenty of older songs are more seasonally appropriate. From ‘The Heat Is On’ to ‘Under the Boardwalk’ and (of course) ‘Hot in Here.’ Listen to ‘hot’ songs of decades past. 

These “hot” songs were songs from the past that I was somewhat familiar with.  I was not familiar with “Blurred Lines,” so I looked up the video.  The main refrain was,

“I know you want it…” and video was a collection of cute, attractive women almost naked and cute, attractive men fully clothed.  I found it both catchy and offensive.  Maybe I'm running out of songs for Sundays.

Fear It

Today, Ta-Nehisi Coates talks about becoming bilingual and the vision necessary for such a journey.  He includes in his post a French video where Jacques Brei stresses the importance of fear.  Brei seems extreme in his belief the fear is crucial to success, but Brei's perspective is a useful balance to our usual avoidance of fear.  He says this: 

…a man who has no fear is not a man.  It is important to accept your fear…if someone says he has no fear, he is insane...Living without fear is not living.  You’d better be dead.

Sunday Song: "Class Reunion"

I just finished the 5-6 hour drive from Washington, Indiana to South Bend.  My class reunion was yesterday.  It’s not your typical reunion, not like the one in the song though the song still hits the spot.  My school was so small that every year there is just an all-school reunion for Epsom High School.  The reunion was a surreal over-view of life after high school.  Glad I went; glad to be home.

"Words" for the Day

Ta-Nehisi Coates is living in France right now, and today he writes this:

There's something illuminating about living in a place with other foundational myths and other foundational evils.

Back Home Again...

Yesterday my friend Jean and I walked about five miles on some of the country roads in Daviess County, Indiana.  We both grew up here, both have moved away.  It was like traveling back in time.  Back, because it was back to where we were kids, and back because many of the houses on the main road of our walk were Amish houses without some of the conveniences of 21^st century living.  No electricity or cars.  Big gardens where much of the family’s food was raised.  Laundry hanging on the line.  We love this walk, love ending up at the Gasthof Restaurant in Montgomery for lunch, love talking and walking as we have done since we were teens. Love driving home in our modern cars,

Talking in France about Race in the United States

I'm in the process of writing a post about why Ta-Nehisi Coates is one of my favorite writers and definitely my favorite blogger.  In the meantime, here is an interesting video from his blog: he talks about the role of white supremacy in our country’s history and the Trayvon Martin case as one piece of that history.  To me, it seems like a nice balanced view but some of it is harsh.  It’s not a short video—23 minutes of focused talk and another 10-15 minutes of Q and A on a number of topics.

"What does aversion feel like?"

Last week I posted four behaviors that may kill a relationship:  criticism, contempt, denial, and stonewalling.  Since then, I’ve been reading Practicing Peace by Pema Chödrön.  She discusses dealing with aversion which seems to me the emotion behind the four behaviors listed above.  She asks, “What does aversion feel like?”  Then she offers this practice to help explore the feeling.

For the purpose of doing this practice, try to connect with a feeling of aversion to something. Whether this is a smell, a sound, or a memory of a person, an event, dark places, snakes-whatever it is, use your discursive mind to help you contact the feeling of aversion. And then, as much as possible, apply the technique of letting the thoughts go so that you can abide in the experience of aversion as a felt quality....

“Who am I to judge them?” Pope Francis said.in a conversation about homosexuality.  Beautiful.  Yesterday, I was walking and thinking, and I had a very uncharitable thought about a long forgotten acquaintance.  Then I thought, who am I to judge?  Beautiful.  Since then, I’ve had this thought a couple more times in response to some small critical thoughts.  It feels like a good practice.  I hope I don’t forget about it as I have, in the past, forgotten about other good practices.