The Big Fail

 "On July 6th, he posted another of his incendiary all-cap tweets. 'SCHOOLS MUST REOPEN IN THE FALL,"'it read. The next day, at a White House event, the president said, 'We're very much going to put pressure on governors and everybody else to open the schools. It's very important for our country. It's very important for the well-being of the students and the parents.' Trump was right. It was important. But by this late stage in his presidency, just about every democrat assumed that anything he said was a lie. That was especially true with his pandemic statements. This, after all, was  a man who suggested that ingesting disinfectant might deter the virus. If Trump thought schools should be open, all the more reason to fight to keep them closed. The strong reaction against anything that came out of Trump's mouth was understandable on one level, but on another level, it was inexcusable. Long before vaccine hesitancy became an issue, the fight over schools was an early sign of how stupidly polarized the country had become. And in this case, it wasn't the red states refusing to follow the science. It was blue state democrats, who valued their political affiliation over common sense, and even over their pre-pandemic pretensions about protecting the underprivileged."

The Berry Pickers

"Hope is such a wonderful thing until it isn't. That sadness that Mom had managed to harness since Ruthie went missing and since Charlie's death, threatened to unravel right there and then."

"Things always seem worse just after they happen."

"Alice always said that holding in tears is like holding in pee. It's gonna hurt eventually. So you might as well let them go as soon as you feel them."

What You Are Looking For Is In The Library

"Being born is probably the most difficult thing that we ever have to do. I am convinced that everything else that comes after it is nowhere near as hard. If you can survive the ordeal of being born, you can get through anything."

"'...I want to try and change. Thanks to this book.'

A broad smile lit Ms Komachi's face. 'You may say that it was the book, but it's how you read a book that is most valuable, rather than any power it might have itself.'"

"'Does this kind of thing really happen? It's too good to be true. I can't believe an opportunity like this would just fall into my lap.'

Shuji looked at me. 'You're wrong,' he said earnestly. 'This didn't just come to you. It happened because you did something for yourself. You took action and that caused things to change around you.'

I started at him, and he smiled at me reassuringly. 'You made this opportunity happen.'"

The Man Who Could Move Clouds

"There are many ways to erase the past. In the 1990s, in Bogota, my secondary school thought it important that students learn English.... In their classrooms... they lectured us on things that were hard for us to grasp. For example: that realistic fiction was Jane Austen, and fantasy fiction was Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Magical realism was just realism to us, and Jane Austen was not any life that was possible in our land. Still, they renewed their efforts to teach us clear boundaries, strict differentiations. There were names for what some of us lived, saw, and believed--legends, superstitions, fictions."

"A circle is a straight line, haunted by something living at its middle-- a ghost that causes it to bend and bend." 

Time off

Ideas

• Aristotle taught on the mobility of leisure. He said we rest for the sake of work, and we work for the sake of leisure. It is the highest on the pyramid.
• Bertrand Russel thought we should work for 4 hours and not engage in frivolity for the rest, but to do things that contribute to culture. The goal is, for example, anyone to be able to paint (no matter how bad they may actually be at painting) and not have to worry how he will eat.
• The Protestant work ethic was a way for the Puritan upper class to control poor people, and they said work (and work alone) was noble. This fostered the idea that work = good and idleness = bad. And apparently this was all based on (an apparently corrupted from) the idea that God left us work to do.
• We used to work to be productive, then with the Industrial Revolution, it wasn't about productivity but time, so leisure became money lost. Historian EP Thompson said, "Time is now currency."
• Reminds us of Newport saying "Busyness as a proxy for productivity"

"This book exists because we are extremely optimistic that our culture can find its way back to moble leisure, one little step at a time. But we want to reiterate, if it’s not already abundantly clear, that we’re not advocating a culture of laziness, sloth, or stagnation. It is a culture in which productivity and the joy of life go hand-in-hand, a culture of productivity in a much brighter sense rather than just economic output. A culture of creative, scientific, spiritual, and humanitarian progress. A culture of noble leisure" (45). 

"Counterintuitively, putting more energy into leisure can energize us overall" (57). 

The Best of You by Alison Cook

"Simply put trust is the 'belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something.'"

Oath and Honor

 "...the Republican National Committee, or RNC, convened for its winter meeting. They adopted a resolution censuring Adam Kinzinger and me. In a statement referring to the January 6 investigation as 'the persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse,' the RNC accused Kinzinger and me of engaging 'in behavior which has been destructive to the institution of the US House of Representatives, the Republican Party, and our republic...'"

"...Trump and I weren't having some kind of policy disagreement or political debate. I wasn't going to capitulate: 'Trump tried to overturn an election. He went to war with the rule of law. He violated his oath to the Constitution.'"

"There was no bitterness in Vice President Gore's voice as he left to carry out his constitutional duty...Al Gore had conceded the race, saying, in part: 'Almost a century and a half ago, Senator Stephen Douglas told Abraham Lincoln, who had just defeated him for the presidency, "Partisan feeling must yield to patriotism. I'm with you, Mr. President, and God bless you."'"

"duty above partisanship"

Diabetes: A History of Race and Disease

 "In the past, Jews may have suffered disproportionately from diabetes, and today statistically significant studies show that the rate of diabetes is higher among American Indians, African Americans, and Hispanic Americans than among whites as a whole. The critical question is: how have those rates been explained?" (xvii).

on the difficulties of having a disability in the US: "The fears and concerns... articulated, while clearly a response to losses in their own and their loved ones' physical abilities, were also shaped by the cultural and political meaning of dependence. In a society that went beyond merely idealizing rugged individualism to making 'independence' a key qualification for adulthood and thus, by implication, for citizenship, becoming dependent carried a heavy burden" (48). 

"In the years following insulin's discovery, individuals with diabetes struggled to understand the meaning of this new drug in their lives. There can be no question that it gave me any of them the miracle of a longer, fuller life, allowing them to contemplate a future beyond the average of three years post-diagnosis for those with the acute form, and six years for those with the milder form. It also raised new questions about the nature of diabetes, its effect on one's ability to be a 'productive' member of society, and its relationship to other conditions widely viewed as 'disabilities'" (49). 

"Kellyl Miller, a black mathematician educated at Harvard University and Johns Hopkins University, issued an immediate rebuttal [to the idea that the "black race was on the road to extinction" due to "the race traits and tendencies" of black people]... He... argued that high morbidity and mortality rates had nothing to do with innate racial traits and everything to do with social factors. The genius of his approach was to turn to studies of London's poor, which revealed health problems similar to those of black people in the United States. Class, not race, he argued, best explained excessive mortality" (75).

"...medical researchers and physicians read African Americans' low rate of diabetes as biological 'evidence' that they lacked the sensibilities and sensitivities that made a race like the Jews so prone to the disease. Similar to other scientific studies that alleged to offer proof of the inferiority of the "African race" and its descendants, medical writings often presented black people as occupying a step lower on the evolutionary ladder than whites, which meant they were considered less developed neurologically. 'The higher the organization, the higher the physiological development, the higher the nervous system, the greater the sensation,' asserted a physician at the meeting of the Saint Louis Medical Society in 1884, adding that is why black people, who had 'less brain' and a 'less developed' nervous system, did not suffer from 'a great number of diseases' that affected whites.' .... 'Nervous system strain, intense application to business, mental shock and worry have frequently served to plan an important role, at least in precipitating the phenomena of the disease [diabetes] or aggravating it. The negro race is to a very great degree free from these influences. The average individual is happy-go-lucky, living from hand to mouth and from day to day, without great responsibilities and without great ambitions which carry with them great cares...'" (75-76). 

"African Americans and Jews were constructed as polar opposites: one primitive, the other civilized; one carefree, the other high-strung; one simple-minded, the other intellectually astute. In this way, the diabetes literature produced, legitimized, and proliferated two sharply drawn, differentiated stereotypes and put the two groups at cross-purposes" (76). 

Later higher rates of diabetes were recognized, and especially once studies realized that there was a self-reporting bias.

M. C. Guthrie, the chief medical director of the Bureau of Indian Affairs said "'ignorance, prejudice and superstition'...led Indians to seek the help of 'so-called medicine men and other charlatans,' rather than taking advantage of 'trained personnel.' To Guthrie, this was the mark of a primitive people,' a characterization with which few would have disagreed at the time.

"But what did 'primitive' signify in this context? Guthrie's comment alluded to one meaning: the direct antithesis of Enlightenment ideals of rationality, science, and hygiene, each of which symbolized the ability to control nature" (108). 

Geneticist James Neel described Native Americans as "'one of the last great resources for the study of primitive man, one of the last opportunities to attempt to fathom the nature of the forces to which man was responding during the course of human evolution.'

"...he and other scientists were imagining them as frozen in time at an earlier stage of human history.... Of course, in theory, Neel and other human geneticists could have viewed 'primitive' populations as simply having different gene frequencies than less 'primitive' populations--perhaps as the result of becoming reproductively isolated at some point in time--but the claim that one population represented an early stage in another population's evolutionary development reintroduced not only the notion of stasis, but also of racial hierarchy. Native Americans, they were implying, did not have different gene frequencies because their paths diverged from that of whites; they had different gene frequencies because they had not changed, while whites had. Put differently, they were less evolved" (119).

"The narrative that Neel ended up constructing could have been lifted almost entirely from early twentieth-century explanations for why Native Americans had succumbed disproportionately to tuberculosis. Once again, underlying structural inequalities were ignored and the bodies of primitive peoples were imagined as being forced to deal quickly with changes to which more civilized populations had had ample time to adapt" (132). 

Other geneticists developed observations that "are consistent with Neel's hypothesis that diabetes results from the introduction of a steady food supply to people who have evolved a 'thrifty genotype'" (134). 

Hell of a Book by Jason Mott

 "It takes me awhile to notice, but the woman is actually creating something on the wall behind her. She has three different colors of Post-it notes, and is positioning them with the most meticulous precision I have ever seen. 

"And the longer I stare at the wall of Post-it notes, the more I begin to understand that I'm not just staring at a wall of notes. I'm staring at something greater than that. 

"The post-its blend and bleed into one another, slicing out the silhouette of a castle--Gothic and grand-- perched upon a cliff ,dangling ovwer a breaking sea. Violet sky. Ebbon stone. A salty sea of paper and dye fluttering in the blow of an approaching storm.

"It's a glorious thing. An honest-to-God work of art. And I wonder if anyone else can see it. These kinds of things go unnoticed by too much of the world, in my opinion.

"I sit there with Renny at my side and all of Renny's alcohol in my blood stream and I stare at the Post-its. How many hours it must have taken to create such a thing, I can't honestly say. Anything worthwhile takes time. Maybe that's what time is for: to give meaning to the things we do; to create a context in which we can linger in something until, finally, we have given it something invaluable, something that we can never get back: time. And once we have invested the most precious commodity that we will ever have, it suddenly has meaning and importance. So maybe time is just how we measure meaning. Maybe time is how we measure love."

"Only certain tax brackets get the luxury of knowing something'll kill you, and being able to choose not to do it." 

"It's amazing how much you can get used to the intolerable, right up until the moment when you realize you have to pass it on to some pair of bright eyes that have no choice but to be dimmed by it."

I envy this minister. I envy the way he’s able to give solace to these people and what they are going through, while I’m only able to come here and watch and worry about the fact that my second book is due soon and I’m still not any closer to getting it written. Yes, there are better things in the world to be worried about. Yes, there are tragedies, and shootings, and rapes, and violence, and starvation, and human trafficking, and all those other things and I have found the way to ignore them is simply by thinking about myself. I like to think that’s what the minister is talking about when he talks about the ability to look past things and still be happy. The only problem is that I can’t honestly say that I’m happy. For sure, I’m something, but I damn sure wouldn’t call it happy.

Despondent, maybe. Confused, certainly. Horny, without a doubt. But happy? No. I’m not sure Black people can be happy in this world. There’s just too much of a backstory of sadness that’s always clawing at their heels. And no matter how hard you try to outrun it, life always comes through with those reminders letting you know that, more than anything, you’re just a part of an exploited people and a denied destiny and all you can do is hate your past and, by proxy, hate yourself.






I know why your mom taught you to be invisible. She wanted to protect you. Being who we are . . . it’s hard. We get shot or put in jail. It’s all we see. It’s all we know. Our whole story is about pain and loss, slavery and oppression. It defines us. It seeps into our skin. We bleed it even as we’re covered by it. All we want is to be something other than the pain that we have been born into. All we want is to be known for something else. We want the great history we see in others. And all we’re ever given is the story of being in pain and being forced to overcome.

Your mama, she wanted to protect you. Protect you from bullets. Protect you from cops. Protect you from judges. Protect you from mirrors that you would look into and see something less than beautiful. She wanted to protect you from the black skin that you should adore and be proud of, but that you’re going to spend your whole life trying not to hate. You’ll hate it in yourself and in anyone who looks like you. You’ll secretly see other Black people and hate them for not solving the riddle of the self-loathing you’ve been taught. It’ll follow you through everything in your life. You’ll be angry and not know why. And the anger won’t ever go away, not really. It’ll hang in the back of your mind. It’ll hang in the back of your world, haunting you, guiding all of your decisions. And when you get tired of being angry, it still won’t go away. It’ll just change into something even worse. You’ll take that anger and turn it on yourself and it’ll call itself depression. And, just like anger, it’ll take over your life. It’ll live with you every day. You’ll look in the mirror and hate what you see. You’ll tell that person in the mirror—with that skin that looks so dark—that it’s broken. You’ll tell that person that they deserve less. You’ll tell that person that the good things in this world are not for them.

And then, rarely, you’ll try to break out of that. The pendulum will swing in the other direction. Maybe you’ll take a stab at being an optimist. You’ll say that race doesn’t matter. You’ll say that everyone is treated equally and you’ll try to live that life. You might even say that you don’t see color. You’ll hide in not being as Black as some other Black people. You’ll look at Black people who don’t behave the way you do as doing it wrong. You’ll divide yourself up. You’ll make fun of the way they talk, the way they dress.

But all you’ll really be doing is making fun of yourself.

But, for a little while, it’ll feel good.

And then, when you’ve been optimistic for long enough, you’ll turn on the news and someone who looks just like you will have been shot and killed. And maybe the optimism will hold for a while. Maybe you’ll be able to say to yourself, “Well, that’s just one case. A freak accident. It doesn’t mean that the world is like that.”

And then—and this part won’t take long—you’ll see another case. You’ll see another person who looks like you that’s been shot. And then you’ll see another. And another. And another. And maybe you’ll stop reading the news. You’ll retreat into books or movies. But then you won’t see anyone who looks like you. Or, if they do, they don’t act like you. They act like those stereotypes. They act like those Black people that you always thought you were better than, those people who use the language you don’t. Those people that dress the way you don’t.

And then, eventually, you’ll come to understand that you’re all the same person. You’ll finally come to understand that you’re a part of it all. That they’re you. And that’ll break your heart and make you proud at the same time. And the anger and depression will cycle back through again and again and the only way to escape them is to pretend that you don’t see how broken the world is. It’ll be that way every single day of your life.

And then, you’ll have kids one day, and you’ll want desperately to protect them from all of that.

I walk over to The Kid and open my arms and he looks frightened for a second, like he doesn’t know what I’m doing. But he knows exactly what I’m doing and he’s afraid of it. Hell, so am I. But I’m also tired of being afraid. My whole life I’ve lived afraid. My whole life I’ve been afraid. I’ve been running. I can’t remember anything else. Same goes for him. And I know it because he and I are the same. Me and everyone who looks like me are the same. We all carry that same weight. We all live lives under the hanging sword of fear. We’re buried under the terror that our children will come into all of the same burden and be trapped, just like we were. So we stay put, running in place. Most of all, people like me fear that we can’t do anything to break the cycle.

And I don’t know if we can or not. I just know that we have to try.

That I have to try.

Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon

 "Like all mothers, I have long since mastered the art of nursing joy at one breast and grief at the other."