The Sky Is Burning

Oakland, California, 11 a.m., September 9, 2020 (Photo courtesy of Macy Salzberger)

Red brown copper colored sky 
dropping ash smoke fear 
lighting up Twitter across the country 
as texts say I’m okay Mom
but I don’t believe it.  

I am not okay. You are not okay. 
We are not okay when the 
sky is on fire and forests in flames
and evacuation orders fly like 
cinders on a hot dry wind.  

Nero is fiddling, Donald is golfing
we are all going to hell in a handbasket
and no one knows how to stop. 
The sky is burning, Chicken Little,
the world is falling to pieces.       

Morning on the Mississippi

I love to walk along the river, especially early in the morning. These photos come from one such walk.

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Signs of Hope in Pandemic Times

When you feel despair at the size and scope of disaster, said Mr. Rogers, “Look to the helpers.” Beautiful people are out there, down the street, all around us. So here are three stories of hope from Black Dog Café, Trevor Noah, and New York City. If these inspire you, read to the end for two actions you can take to help.

All the Colors of Green

Start with clear green of new grass,

pale green of tulip blades

golden green of fringed tree blossoms

yellow green of birch catkins

gray green of cedar

blue green of spruce

green leaves silhouetted dark in the dawn

green mists of barely-there leaves against blue skies

greens as variegated as bird song

as glorious as sunshine

as fleeting as spring.

Ideas for Spending That Stimulus Check

This is part of an amazing series created and generously shared by Ricardo Levins Morales for this time of crisis. Check out the whole series on his Facebook page and at his studio https://www.rlmartstudio.com

I got my $1,200 stimulus check today, and I’m proud to say that most of it is gone already. I still have some work, as well as Social Security (yes, I’m old), so I don’t “need” the money as much as others do. I chose to donate most of it to places that help people who do need the money, many of whom will not get stimulus checks. If you can, I hope you will consider doing the same. Here are some of my choices for places to donate.

Spring Still Coming

Saturday saw sunshine and 60 degrees. I walked around the neighborhood, planted lettuce and arugula in the garden, cleaned the patio, walked some more. Spring!

This winter was especially hard, filled with sickness and dying, with an invincible virus and an invincibly ignorant president. Even though the pandemic persists, the promise of spring blooms with each leaf and flower.

Crossing Class Lines and Borders

My philosopher daughter gave me a book written by a colleague: Jennifer Morton’s Moving Up Without Losing Your Way. I found it both challenging (it is philosophy) and resonant with my own long-ago experience as a first-generation college student. Like me, Morton grew up “somewhere between working class and middle class.” Now she is a philosophy professor. Morton identifies us and students like us as “strivers,” among the tiny minority who move upward across class lines.  Her book considers the ethical challenges posed by this upward mobility mediated by college education.

One kind of challenge comes from change:

“[O]ne’s own life starts to feel removed from the relationships, concerns, and viewpoints with which one grew up. The amount of distance required can vary a great deal, but negotiating it is often a feature of the experience of upward mobility.” (Morton, Jennifer. Moving Up without Losing Your Way. Princeton University Press. (47-48)

Using many stories drawn from her teaching experience, Morton describes the unavoidable tension between working on one’s own achievements and responding to family needs for financial and emotional support. This distance has ethical costs, but those costs are not only individual responsibilities. Strivers should not “see their achievements and failures through the lens of individual responsibility instead of correctly allocating a significant share of the responsibility to the social and economic structures that undermine their access to the opportunities they seek.” (pp. 43-44)

In a completely different kind of book, Soraya Membreno describes her own experience in attending a small, elite liberal arts college, as an immigrant from a non-upper-class background. She chooses a “red-and-white-polka-dotted Minnie Mouse dress” for her graduation, and then sees all of her classmates in “a very specific kind of dress, a white or cream-colored or pale pastel shift, simple and strapless.”

Her mother cannot get a visa to come from Nicaragua for Membreno’s graduation. Her father manages to attend but looks as out of place as she feels.

“Somewhere along the line, in the flurry of niceties and ceremonies, with my father relegated to the sidelines of my peripheral vision, that weekend made clear the very thing I had been denying for the past four years: I was being subsumed by something else, going to a place where my family could not follow. I stood out like hell, a polka-dotted dress in a sea of white, but there I was, still in it. Still part of it. And he could do no more than snap a picture.”  A Map Is Only One Story: Twenty writers on immigration, family, and the meaning of home. Edited by Nicole Chung and Mensa Demary.  Catapult, 2020.

Morton, herself an immigrant, says that, while strivers from different backgrounds have different stories and experiences, the immigrant narrative offers insights for all strivers:

“The immigrant narrative is built on four distinct features that I think, not coincidentally, are also the crucial elements of an ethical narrative. First, it affirms a plurality of ethical goods that matter to one’s life—one’s relationships, culture, and connection to one’s community—rather than focusing only on educational or economic achievement. Second, it makes it clear that some of those ethical goods will have to be traded off or sacrificed for the sake of other goods and opportunities. Ideally, though not always, it situates these trade-offs in a historical, political, and socioeconomic context. Third, it is cognizant of the risks to one’s identity that the process of immigration entails. As the immigrant striver becomes more at ease navigating the new country, his or her skill at navigating the culture of the home country may wane. And finally, though this is not as frequently a part of the immigrant narrative as I think it ought to be, the experience of being an immigrant enables one to think more critically and reflectively about the broader social, political, and economic context of both one’s adopted country and one’s home, and how one might play a role in changing them for the better.” (p. 128)

Working to change social, political, and economic structures for the better is a central ethical challenge for all of us. Moving Up without Losing Your Way analyzes the ethical questions carefully and clearly. A Map Is Only One Story tells twenty stories, in twenty voices, and manages to raise many of the same ethical issues of connection and separation, unjust social structures, and individual responsibility and possibility.

Virus Season

Published in Bearings Online

We Have Heroes

Nurses and nursing assistants. Doctors. Janitors, cleaning hospital rooms before, during, and after. These are heroes, risking their own lives and families to take care of the victims of our 21st century plague.

Sidewalk Chalk

“Be happy even when it is hard!”

I walk to stay sane. (Healthy is a side benefit.) Chalk drawings help—like the “Be happy even when it is hard!” message I saw today, as well as yesterday’s beautiful butterflies. Sooner or later, the real butterflies will return; sooner or later, this virus, too, shall pass; sooner or later, we will figure out what the new normal will look like.

Will we have voting by mail and will that really mean that Democrats always win?

Sounds crazy, but he really said that.

I will keep on walking. I get to see things like the Mississippi at flood stage, and a cardinal singing, and a pair of mallards returning to the pond in front of an apartment building.

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And chalk drawings. Thanks, neighbors and kids, for the chalk drawings!