Fair winds, following seas

As I stand on the front porch, watching them on the sidewalk, it strikes me I am performing an age-old female ritual: I am sending the men off to war.

He’s my great-nephew, and his dad is about to drive him to the airport, for a return flight to the base where he is stationed.

He’s just a few months shy of 20, and it sounds like he’s doing a great job at his post on the other side of the country. He’s been a Marine for more than two years now, and if you know him, you know how smart and personable he is.

He’s scheduled to be deployed to the Middle East in about six months. He seems to be taking it in stride and even to be looking forward to it. I guess for a young man (no names, please, we’re military, to paraphrase the old British gag) — I guess it would be exciting.

For me, as I linger on the porch,  I notice that I haven’t gone back inside and shut the door. Instead, I am standing still, not speaking, standing watch in an odd but unmistakable way.  That’s when I think of how many centuries of women have stood watching and waiting.

The men linger there quietly talking, smoking, commenting on how warm it is for a winter day. His dad observes it feels almost as if a hurricane is brewing, as the wind from the west stiffens.

But this is January, the first day of the new year, so there will be no hurricanes. They’ll drive to the airport, about 50 miles from here, and he’ll be gone until his next leave.

And maybe by then we won’t be fighting wars on distant continents. Perhaps … I can’t even think that far ahead in these days when our president has, and then has not, decided to do whatever he will do next about Syria, immigrants, the so-called war on terror and a bunch of other stuff. Right now, I just can’t think about any of it.

They finish their cigarettes and walk to the garage, take the Subaru out and are gone. Dad has his eyes on the road; son is leaning back, his eyes closed, likely to slip into another short sleep before the airport. They don’t look back.

I return to the house, clear the table, clean up the breakfast dishes. The day and the year stretch ahead. May it bring us all, as I like to say, good health, good friends, good fortune. And I add, safety and some sanity. Peace and justice. Compassion and perhaps some wisdom, while there is still time for this old world of ours.

The sky outside is grey. Inside, an amaryllis — gift from a good friend — is blooming. I take it as a harbinger of hope.

 

 

 

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Time like a river

Hola, kith, kin and world … last time I was here, we were in the middle of a #MeToo moment … and we still are. In case you missed it, This American Life just ran a stunning interview with LaDonna Powell, the woman who blew the whistle loudest on a firm called Allied Universal Security. Check it out at https://www.thisamericanlife.org/647/ladonna or https://www.thisamericanlife.org/647/transcript.  Her story broke first in NYC last fall — and it is a pretty uglyone. As NPR picked it up this spring, a harassment lawsuit had just been filed..

The story makes you want never to fly again … since Allied staffs most of the airport security you might encounter — like from New York City, where the story broke, to LA, and everything in between. But wait, Allied also serves (or in a particularly icky terminology of their own, “services”) college campuses, chemical facilities, and just about anything else you can think of.

So in case we think this #MeToo issue is anywhere near getting resolved … well, at least one big company has been hauled into court for looking the other way while its employees were — to quote the headlines — “forced to watch sex romps” and “harassed and forced to quit.”

At the end of the interview, Ms. Powell was asked if it made her feel empowered that her harassers had been called to account. Not surprisingly, she said no.

Indeed: Her job is gone, her peace of mind with it, a whole life she had built for herself. And worst of all, perhaps, she is just one of many. Because a big (huge?) company like Allied knows that it can always find someone else to do the job. And they do. Routinely. And it all blows over.

You know what I call it? Persecution.  Persecution of the people of our culture, our nation, our world who have the least to gain and the most to lose. Minorities,whether of race, gender, nationality, ethnicity, economics, you name it. Anyone without the luxury of the material resources or the time — or the political or social clout — to fight injustice when it happens to them or someone they care about.

Persecution. Institutionalized persecution. And it applies not only to women who have been and are being routinely sexually harassed at the workplace, though some of those women are the ones who’ve put #MeToo on the map.

It applies to everyone from the children being separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border, even when their parents actually have a legal right to be there — everyone from those children right on up to the NFL players who “took the knee.”

You think I’m veering off into the deep weeds here? Think about it. My ancestors and a bunch of yours too, probably, came to this country fleeing religious or political persecution, virtual economic slavery, or a host of other injustices.

And persecution is what it’s about here today, at the hands of powerful institutions including some of our own “American” governments, from the federal level on down.

And by the way, in conclusion, anyone who thinks kneeling is a sign of rebellion or disrespect needs to read Elizabeth Bruenig’s “The NFL fumbles on kneeling” in the Washington Post:

Kneeling during the anthem was always a kind of plea — for an America that works the way the civics textbooks say it does. But making the plea raises the fact that America doesn’t, in fact, function according to its founding story … Some are protected more than others, and some better than others, and some at the expense of others, and it isn’t clear that our representative bodies are interested in doing anything about it. All Colin Kaepernick and others ever did was ask.

You can find it at http://thewashingtonpost.newspaperdirect.com/epaper/viewer.aspx.

So time, like a river, has rushed past me since last fall, as family and friends dealt with some health issues — we’re better now, thanks, all OK — and so … and so you get a twofer.

Onward … and, as I always say (T.S. Eliot, “Dry Salvages”), Not farewell, but fare forward.

 

 

 

Charlottesville. And beyond.

We’re an hour southwest of Charlottesville, and I was horrified but sadly not wholly surprised as events unfolded there in Emancipation — formerly Lee – Park yesterday.

A friend who has worked for the State Department in some pretty dicey locations abroad — a man still in his early 30s — sent this message: “Let there be no confusion: this was deliberate terrorism. My prayers with victims. Stay home.”

This is not just about Charlottesville, nor even mainly so. This is about all of us and our divided nation. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know.

In the 24 hours since, two more messages, if you will — one of hope, one of warning — and a prayer.

The warning, from “The World of Evan Osnos” (New Yorker), in an essay on the Chinese dissident Xu Hongci: “What is the precise moment, in the life of a country, when tyranny takes hold? It rarely happens in the instant; it arrives like twilight, and at first, our eyes adjust.” (Like the proverbial frog dropped first into lukewarm water on the stove?)

To that, I would say, find and read “The Dark Valley,” a scholarly study of how fascism arose and World War II followed in the 1930s. We’re seeing something all too similar.

On a more hopeful note, yesterday NPR was talking with Volusia County, Fla., sheriff Mike Chitwood, who is requiring de-escalation training for his deputies following a rash of shootings. He’d built a  successful police department in Daytona Beach, he said, in part by requiring all   prospective officers to take a course in the history of racism — because, he said, “We are a racist country, have been from the start.” He had a good deal more to say — identifying the racism implicit in the theft of native American homelands and destruction of their culture as well as slavery, Jim Crow and all that has followed it.

Chitwood also served in the Philadelphia, Pa., police department. He spoke about getting retrained, as an officer, how not to be trigger happy. About how just a split second can tell you that a man is pulling out his wallet and not a gun. About how police involvement in communities doesn’t stop with visits to schools, but requires constant feet on the street.

Can’t find the newscast — and his reputation as “top cop” in Daytona may not hold up — but as events were unfolding in Charlottesville — and as that city’s police failed to de-escalate a situation that many  had foreseen —  it did offer a sliver of hope.

At least someone, somewhere, in a position of some authority is thinking: Thinking about how incidents like what happened yesterday do not arise out of thin air. Thinking about the long, thick and tangled legacy of racism in this country, and what we can and must do to dismantle it.

Last, this from NYC, from a friend who’s been a parishioner at  St. Clement’s, located in what used to be called Hell’s Kitchen,  for many years:

O God, you have bound us together in a common life. Help us, in the midst of our struggles for justice and truth, to confront one another without hatred or bitterness, and to work together in mutual forbearance and respect …

Amen.

Tribalism: It’s not always pretty

Back in freshman history, Ms. Marcia Colish flung the story of Western civilization at us at warp speed.

She talked about how empires rise and fall. First, there would be tribalism, though she didn’t call it that.

No, she didn’t call it that because back then, we mistakenly thought that tribes only existed in “uncivilized” parts of the world, which didn’t even merit mention. Her course started with the fall of the Roman empire, but didn’t dwell on its causes. Instead we waved at the Patristic (dig that etymology) scholars and then sailed on to the Merovingians and Carolingians.

So the story back then began with warring dukes and wannabe kings and emperors. Back then, as Rome fell and Byzantium faded eastward, there was of course the “Holy Roman Empire.”

But what there really was, was tribalism. We just didn’t call it that. Still, Ms. Colish gave us the fundamental principle: Empires fall. They crumble into chaos and then – she taught us – nation-building starts. Nations arise and then they grow into empires, and then those empires fall and so it goes, on and on.

What we didn’t appreciate, because we didn’t see we were in the middle of it, is just how messy the fall of empires can be.

And we never studied what really happens when an empire crumbles. It doesn’t go right back into nations; now we see, it goes down to the bones. And the bones, because evolution is slow, are tribes.

So here we are now, in a global economy with 24/7/365 ¼ communications, working at the tribal level to get the world’s work accomplished every day and try to prevent incinerating ourselves in the meantime.

How’s that working for you?

Two good essays on Salon.com this morning tackle the subject as it’s manifesting itself right here in America. Never mind the lethal and tragic tribalism of street culture vs. the police; this morning’s essays look at why Trump voters can’t even admit to themselves that they might have  been wrong – because tribalism is such a deeply embedded survival mechanism:   http://www.salon.com/2017/06/21/watch-why-trump-fans-wont-dump-him-now/

And in an interestingly congruent essay, Lucian Truscott IV – he of the Jefferson family scandal and many trenchant  insights into our society – writes about “power without money” – about how you motivate scared human beings to go out and fight a war when there’s no  immediate reward in it for them and they are too many to punish … and how that is exactly what our nation’s underpaid, unloved but faithful government bureaucracy is, and how Trump hates those bureaucrats because he doesn’t understand the concept of power without money.

Or maybe, I am thinking, he understands it very well on an instinctive level. Instinctively, he knows these faceless functionaries are not of his tribe, and he is exerting all of his own power to dismantle and destroy them.

Just thinkin’ … read Truscott at http://www.salon.com/2017/06/21/power-in-the-absence-of-money/ …and hope that our justice system and those patient, faceless bureaucrats survive this bout of tribalism. But as Ms. Colish never quite pointed out, when empires crumble, nations are not what they crumble into. They crumble into tribes, and it is messy and dangerous. Like the Dark Ages.

Let us pray ..

“From heres” and “come heres” ~ Rockbridge County ctd.

 

Do I know you?

The way her eyes narrow says it all. She’s walking toward me as I drive across Myers Street and raise my hand in the customary (hereabouts) greeting-in-passing.

Her face bears the stamp of our mountain country: weathered skin, strong bones, creases at the corners of those pale blue eyes that traveled across the North Atlantic a couple of centuries ago, the creases proof of years of outdoor work.

Her gray hair is neat and nondescript and she is wearing a purple sweatsuit, a nice one.  She is clearly not someone who steps out for a trip to the post office or a walk around the block without some forethought.

What’s it to you,  I hear her thinking as I put my hand back on the wheel. Not for her this Johnny-come-lately habit of waving at strangers. Back in the day, you only greeted people you actually knew, from church or school or perhaps the grocery store, and that’s good enough for her. None of this raising a hand or doing the two-finger waggle now popular on our narrow county roads as two vehicles weave past each other.

I stand reproved. She is right. I’m not from here, even though I was born in this very town more than sixty years ago. I am not a “from-here.” My family were outlanders, “come heres,” and from the North to boot, which sometimes still matters here.

She is not. She is from here, and these mountains are truly her home, their shifting patterns of light and shadow ingrained in her being from so far before birth that she has to stop and count the generations. And count them she can. They are buried in a family cemetery somewhere in the county, or in old church cemeteries with names like Ebenezer or New Providence.

I want to protest. I grew  up here. I too know the light and the shadow, and I see – or rather hear, coming back from the flatlands where I spent most of my adulthood – how in the mountains, the sound only travels from one end of the hollow to the other. It does not travel miles, the way it does over flat land, so that you might hear the noise of a highway five miles distant if the wind is blowing your way.

Not here. Here, you will only hear what the mountains let you hear. You will not hear the dog or the child or the highway from the other side of the ridge line.

And I want to tell her that I too see how their colors change, these mountains, how right now they wait for fall’s flaming brilliance but will soon  lie brown and sleeping in the winter sun. How the spines of their leafless trees stand up like prickly fur. How they will turn pale green in spring, darker in summer, flame bright again in autumn. How we can walk their trails and listen to the birds call.

But we won’t have that conversation, she and I. There are many divisions besides ridgelines in these mountains. She is of the tribe J.D. Vance calls his “hill people,” and I know it is a term of hard-earned and well-deserved respect. But we won’t have that conversation either. Her purple sweatsuit recedes in my rearview mirror, and we go on into our respective days.

Photo caption:  Looking across Rockbridge County to the Blue Ridge from the top of the road where I live … this is her ancestral land. I’m just a “come here,” but it is my land too.

9/11/2016

Fifteen years … so much has happened that we couldn’t have foretold, in these fifteen years. But today I am not thinking about all we might wish to have changed, or what we now know about ourselves and the world that we didn’t know that we knew, on that day.

Today I heard from a friend who was working for FEMA that day. And I’m thinking of another who was living in New York.

Susan, then working for FEMA, sends this:

I was supposed to fly to Europe that evening .  Instead, FEMA deployed me …  I was assigned to Arlington to do what we could for Virginians affected by the attack on the Pentagon.  My daily morning task was listening to the general brief families. Day after day we were told about non-viewable remains recovered from the rubble of the Pentagon.  I accompanied the families on the last site visit before it was closed. As difficult as being in Washington was, I was grateful not to be called to New York, which held so many more personal connections.  I still struggle with retirement and have been going through  years of files.

My young friend Emily was living in the Apple, bartending at an East Side sports bar.  New York was her dream. She lived on Liberty Street, right under the towers. She called them her mountains – they were central to her love of New York and her life in the city, a landmark that could take her safely home to her little shared apartment in  southern Manhattan no matter what the time of day or night.

That morning, she woke to thunder in the sky and an earthquake below. Her building was vibrating. She threw on her new Nikes and ran to the roof. There she saw it all – the flames, the wavering buildings, the people leaping from their windows. She was maybe 22. “We have to run, they’re going to fall,” she told her roommate. They fled their tiny building and ran – ran in their pajamas amid falling debris and burning shreds of paper – across Manhattan to the Brooklyn Bridge. Across the Brooklyn Bridge to safety at a friend’s apartment.

They all survived that day, those young people, and they are living and working and thriving as I write this. But I know that a part of their core being, in their minds and their hearts, remains forever rooted in that day.

And so it is for those of us who stood farther from the hideous signal of a world we did not completely, perhaps at all, understand. We are still struggling to get to sanity. Let it be.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5vGho1fEw4

 

 

Looking for America — again …

“Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike/ They’ve all come to look for America … America …”

~ Paul Simon

But the place where I’m looking for America these days is not the New Jersey Turnpike.  Life here in Rockbridge County, VA is never dull. On the one hand, you have breathtaking views and a county seat of some 8,000 inhabitants of whom perhaps 25 are published authors.

There are two nationally known colleges –Washington & Lee University  and  Virginia Military Institute – both of which annually rank high in the ubiquitious US News & World Report liberal arts colleges ratings.

As Labor Day signals the start of a new school year,  tomorrow’s opening convocation speakers will be  Charles R Johnson at W&L, award-winning philosopher and scholar, whose novel  Middle Passage is being staged as a theater production in Chicago this fall; and at VMI, renowned foreign-policy observer and best-selling author Robert D. Kaplan.

           

But scratch our polished surface and you’ll find a county where Trump-Pence lawn signs abound; where typically the town votes blue and the county votes red; and where both colors surface together pretty frequently in the form of the Confederate battle flag on T-shirts, trucks and alas, even flagpoles.

And that’s why I’m currently reading Hillbillly Elegy by J.D. Vance, recently interviewed on NPR’s” Fresh Air.”  I’ve said before how much of what’s happening in our country right now can be explained by the long-suppressed rage of  Angry White Men (another book touted on NPR). I cited Joe Bageant’s Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War as the best explanation yet of why we’re in this mess: Why Donald Trump can incite riots at rallies; why we can’t rein in police departments run amok; why – fifty years after we thought we’d declared human rights as our nation’s civil rights — we are still struggling to leave a deeply stained past behind.

Yesterday in neighboring Buena Vista  — once the thriving industrial hub of our rural county, now the crossroads of Appalachia and post-industrial America – the Labor Day parade featured a near-life-sized figure of Donald Trump astride a rearing acrylic white stallion on a truck-drawn float. The parade’s slashes of red and blue  just served to underline in bold strokes  the deep divides in this deceptively pastoral county:  We have “from heres” and “come heres” ; multigenerational farm families who raise bees and know how to fix a tractor, and double-degree  academicians; mainstream Christians and fundamentalist evangelicals; people who support gay marriage and people who attend Tea Party gatherings. You name it, we have it: atheists, Muslims, Sikhs and Jews;  descendant of settlers from the 1700s and newly arrived Congolese refugees struggling with English … we are, in short, in this tiny community, a perfect microcosm of our strife-torn, battle-weary nation.

Pretty much the only thing we haven’t done here so far is start shooting each other – credit all of us for maintaining the frayed surface of civility, but it’s wearing thin. And that’s why I am reading Hillbilly Elegy. Because J.D. Vance explains how and why his “hill people” aren’t doing so well. How they left the destitution of eastern Kentucky to fan out across Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois, to Chicago and Detroit and beyond—to give their children a shot at the American Dream, and how that Dream turned its back on them. Why they are angry, and sick, and weary beyond telling.

Like Bageant, Vance acknowledges that the woes of impoverished  post-Appalachian whites are often self-inflicted. They cling to family even in dysfunction; they are too proud to ask for help;  they often blame everyone else for their failure; and – thanks to the post-World War II industrial boom — they are now spread all the way across this country. Their religion, what’s left of it, is and always was an angry, punitive Calvinist doctrine. They lack the community faith that has sustained black Americans through the worst adversity and the hope that propels arriving immigrants.

And that brings me to my plea:  Don’t judge, don’t excuse, but please read the background of what has brought us to this national divide, cynically manipulated by powerful interests. We know that the angry white  minority is just the lever those interests have long employed to keep the races, and more recently the entire nation, divided.

The crisis in this country IS a class war, and it has been in progress for a long time. It won’t be over unless and until everyone is included – whether we think they deserve it or not. And that means a national conversation that includes the out-of-work, down-and-out, gun-totin’ people of eastern Kentucky and southwest Virginia.

Read Hillbilly Elegy or Deer Hunting With Jesus.  Please.

 

The Anthropology of Food …

Image courtesy of wholeuniverse.com: “The Anthropology of How We Eat”

… check out my new food blog at http://wholeuniverse.com/anthropology-eat-sugars-fats-salt/ :

The Anthropology of How We Eat: Sugars, Fats and Salt

by Lisa TracyLook up “food anthropology” on the Web, and you’ll find some fascinating tidbits. One study posits that our gut bacteria are responsible for our cravings. Another says it’s whatever culture we grew up in. A third talks about the uniquely human phenomenon of cooked food. It’s the dopamine, says a fourth site ~ our brains are wired for pleasure, and sugars, fats, and yes, salt trip the nervous-system wires that send the signal to the brain to release the pleasure-linked chemical.

Yes, all good. But WHY?

Why do we eat what we do, and why do we WANT to eat foods we know aren’t healthy?

Let’s start somewhere on this side of the Paleo Diet: Let’s start with potato chips, candy bars, and the Industrial Revolution … read more at http://wholeuniverse.com/anthropology-eat-sugars-fats-salt/

Flag Over Ferguson

Ted Cruz thinks this is unpatriotic. Get a clue, Mr. Cruz: This is the ultimate sign of our country in distress.

Centuries old, the internationally understood cry for help. When will we start listening?