Colorado History Museum

Hey fellow indies! It’s been a few weeks since I’ve been on. The Indie Carnival is in the process of coming up with cool new discussion topics, which will include information on how to get onto Net Galley, a site where writers can find reviewers and vice versa! And more Indie Author Spotlights are coming up soon.

In the meantime, I wanted to point people to an amazing experience I had at the new History Colorado Center. It’s our history museum that was recently opened, or at least renovated and put in a new building with new exhibits. It was designed as a classroom in motion, so it’s not like a regular museum in many ways, which makes it great for kids (or adults with ADD).

There are sections on the first Colorado town, with working displays of things that the kids can play with, and character actors of snake oil salesman doing their schtick and pretending to sell you everything from arsenic to laudanum. Hilarious! There’s a ski jump simulator. This one I could only look at for about one second before I had flashbacks to the Blair Witch Project. There was a mine simulation complete with a rattling mine car ride, a storytelling tommyknocker, and a blast simulator. My daughter and her friend loved that display because it allowed them to push ‘dynamite sticks’ into the wall in a kind of mining version of Simon Says, in the right sequence, and set it off. Once they pushed the blaster plunger, a computer screen simulated what would happen, and whether or not they did it right, or just buried themselves. This sounds gruesome, but the kids were all giggling and jockeying for their chance to blow stuff up. After the kids got done, it was their daddies’ turns. Men and explosions…

As you’re leaving that area, there’s a computer game very much like WWF throwdown, except it’s between various well-known Colorado figures, such as Molly Brown, etc. This cast of characters also included ‘the brown cloud’ that used to hang over Denver before we cleaned up the pollution, and the terrifying red-eyed Sleepy-Hollowesque blue horse that everyone is subjected to upon entry into Denver from the airport. The Blue Horse Throwdown even had the horse shooting lasers from its eyes (which we all secretly knew it did, in our nightmares anyway).

But by far, the most powerful display to me, was of the Granada Japanese internment camp. I never knew this existed in Colorado. I had heard of the internment camps before, in history, and also from one of my nerd icons George Takei (Sulu from the original Star Trek). He spent part of his childhood in one, and sometimes talks about it. But hearing about it over the internet, even from someone who was there, or learning about it as a passing footnote in history class is nothing like what I saw. That’s the nature of the internet, and the nature of classrooms and history books, I suppose. They still maintain a distance.

There was no distance here. You walked through a room no larger than your living room at home, where several people spent half their lives after giving up most of their belongings and whatever futures they had on the outside. As you looked at their belongings donated by some of the folks who had been there, there were voice-narrated stories told of what it was like, or letters that they had written.

It’s been two weeks since I’ve been there, and this is the first time I could talk about it. Because I realized when I was standing in that room that this was a concentration camp. In Colorado. It wasn’t called that. It was called a War Relocation Center. But it required people to give up their homes, their jobs, and move themselves and their families to a strange place built like a camp, one room for many families with cots for beds, strangers who someone on the outside thought were alike because of their color, descent, culture. No, they weren’t gassed. They weren’t shot, or tortured in the same way as the Nazi versions. But they had to live with the realization that they were asked by their fellow citizens to give up everything because they spoke a certain language and looked a certain way, and that the country they belonged to and were loyal to, didn’t trust them. I heard that in the story this teenage girl told, it was her valedictory speech at her high school. It was, in the literal sense of the term, a concentration camp. In America.

When that hit home, as I was sitting at this young girl’s desk, I started bawling. Thank God I was the only one in the display at the time. I don’t mean a couple sniffles. I mean cover-your-mouth-and-go-into-a-corner-hoping-nobody-sees-you-until-you-can-calm-down kind of bawling. Of course people did filter in, and chickenshit about showing emotion to strangers as I am, I faked a sneeze and left, which I’m sure fooled no one.

George Takei recently showed a photo on Facebook that shows him outside the internment camp he was in as a kid, with a sign “This Place Matters’. It does. It’s incredibly instructive to me to really understand that there were concentration camps here in the U.S. That we did discriminate based on color, creed, etc, and not in the distant past, less than a hundred years ago. But one thing that really got me was one of the last things the girl on the recording said was that America had made a mistake, and that she believed America would correct it someday. She still had faith, she still believed. Wow.

Kinda put things into perspective for me. I’ve been bitching about a lot of things in politics.  I’ll never be a politician. I have no editor between my brain and my mouth. Generally not a useful trait in a politician. But this experience made me think about how I deal with the current climate. Man, this little girl didn’t lose her hope, she never gave up even after we’d just taken everything away from her, and stuck her and her entire family in a tiny box because she was Japanese.

As a writer, this was one of those Holy Cow moments that stay with you, and you hope make you a better (or at least less bitchy) person in addition to hopefully a better writer. So here’s my advice as a writer for today, at least what I found. I’ve lived in Colorado for ten years and never knew this existed here. It was right under my nose, these people’s lives. The message I got that day was ‘Look around you.’ There are stories everywhere, some which really need to be told, and aren’t, not much.

See what stories there are to tell in your own state or town. And if you happen to be in Colorado. This is a site worth visiting.

http://www.historycolorado.org/museums/history-colorado-center

http://coloradopreservation.org/projects/current-projects/granada-relocation-center/

The only way I know how to communicate to any significant degree, is through writing. I imagine that as this keeps seeping into my brain, it will work its way into my stories. I hope I can do it justice.

 

 

 

 

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New Release! Pestilence by Jeani Rector

As a public health worker, I was excited to pick up Pestilence, by Jeani Rector. And I was not disappointed. Whenever I pick up a book in which disease is a big feature in the story, I often get ready to pick it apart if it’s not someone who has a background in infectious disease, because I’m kind of a jerk like that. But there wasn’t much to pick at. Ms. Rector has clearly done a lot of research, not just about the disease and its history, but about the conditions of London and the feudal system. And she does something that few authors do so well as this author does: show how all of the different conditions contributed to the perfect storm. I’m a medical anthropologist. I have little snippets of knowledge about very specific things, but I’ll confess that medieval history, names and dates, are not my forte. I struggled to stay awake in history class as soon as dates and names of people started droning from my teachers’ mouths. But if I had had a book like this when I was in school, I would have remembered every history lesson. Not only does she explain the history of the Black Death, but each of her characters was alive and engaged me in caring about what happened to them, whether that was holding my breath hoping that the heroine survives, or wanting to stab the bad guys and rub fleas all over them. She has created a living history. I would use this book to teach because bringing events to life is the best way to engage people and make them remember.

You can find out more about Pestilence at Amazon or Barnes and Noble. You can learn more about Jeani Rector at the Horror Zine, a very cool online horror zine. You can also like her on Facebook or follow her on Twitter.

Ereshkigal and the Persephone Myth

One of the most fascinating characters to me in myth, Sumerian or otherwise, is Ereshkigal. For people who know me, this might seem obvious. Queen of the Underworld, zombies, dead people, ghosts. I have make-believe zombie preparedness posters in my office at work. However, my love of all things morbid and creepy is not the key reason I’m interested in Ereshkigal.

Many people do not see her as a sympathetic character. Like most other gods in mythology everywhere, she is vicious, cunning, vengeful, all of the delightful qualities of ancient gods. But if you know her whole story, suddenly, the reasons for her ruthlessness take on a different tone.

She did not begin as a dark frightening goddess of the dead. By all accounts, her story began very much like Persephone’s. She began as a young beautiful maiden sun goddess. Until she was raped, abducted, and dragged to the Underworld by a dragon named Kur, at least in one version he is a dragon. In others he is a mountain. At one point, the Underworld is referred to as Kur…Until, unlike the demure Persephone, she kicked her rapist’s ass and took over the Underworld. From this point on, the Underworld is referred to by one of her other names, Irkalla. This seemed to mark the shift in dominance. If Persephone had been depicted differently than she was, rather in the same way as Ereshkigal, it would have ended with her kicking Hades’ ass, and renaming the Greek Underworld Persephone. Ereshkigal was not going to be content with becoming the consort of some controlling jerk. She was going to take his stuff and kick him to the curb.

So basically, she starts as a rape victim, and instead of succumbing to the fate someone else was forcing upon her, decides somehow to use her circumstances to her advantage and create her own future. I don’t know about anyone else, but that is much more interesting to me than just her label as the goddess of the Underworld, it was how she got there. Like Thelma and Louise, told the Addams Family way, and with a happy ending.

Though I didn’t go into her backstory in Pazuzu’s Girl, I made a reference to it, when she told JD that she would look after his abused mother when the woman died, because she ‘understood what it was to feel powerless’.

I’m now writing a sequel to Pazuzu’s Girl, in which Ereshkigal’s origin story will be told from her point of view.

I can’t help but wonder if she were a real woman today, she would probably be jailed for doing the things she does, and then there would be protests for her by feminist groups, Facebook campaigns with her face representing women’s rights. Interesting to think of the tropes we see throughout history showing up in different ways, perceived differently in different ages.

Milgram’s Experiment and the War on Terror

Many politicians and citizens have raised an uproar decrying the comparison between our use of tactics, such as profiling against a group of people, and against detainees who have not been proved to be guilty of terrorism, and those used by the state of Germany prior to the rise of the Nationalist Party. Invariably, the catchphrase ‘patriotism’ and ‘national security’ get thrown into the argument, and what I believe is the real shape of the situation becomes distorted. Indeed the very mention of the Nationalist Party, because of its overuse as an icon of ultimate evil, sends people flying off the handle in indignation, without any analysis of what the central issues really were that allowed a situation in which otherwise normal sane people did evil things. Or failed to prevent them. And this blanket gag order certainly makes an analysis of our current situation almost impossible. Taboo subjects cannot be explored.

Well, I’m exploring them anyway. I’ve known quite a few German people in my life. I’ve visited Germany. My husband has visited Germany. Everyone I met was very hospitable, nice and about as more or less normal as anyone I encounter here. Though everything was insanely punctual.

This is not to say that the people who did do terrible things or the people who knew about it and did nothing are absolved of their crimes. No. Their actions were inexcusable. But after looking at the Milgram experiment, and frankly, reviewing incidents that cannot be swept under the rug such as the torture at Abu Ghraib, it is somewhat more difficult to look at the individuals involved in the original ‘Axis of Evil’ and say we are different. It makes me wonder how many of us have the potential to become the same kind of monster in similar conditions. This experiment scared the crap out of me.

I think that this topic of comparison has become taboo because we are afraid. We don’t want to see our own potential for such evil acts, so we place a firm barrier there and say, ‘this could never happen here’. But in the 1960s, Stanley Milgram proved definitively for the next twenty years with repeated experiments that it could absolutely happen anywhere in the world with any group of people.

The Milgram experiment consisted of a triad of players: the teacher-subject, the learner-actor, and the authority figure-researcher. The subject was told to have the learner repeat pairs of words. Every time the learner got one wrong, the ‘teacher’ subject was to administer an electric shock. The shocks got progressively stronger until there was a final voltage that would render the learner unconscious. They would begin screaming and pounding on the wall and then finally stop responding if the teacher did administer the final shocks. If the teacher hesitated or asked to stop, they were given verbal prompts to continue four times by the researcher who told them that they must go on, that it was very important. If the teacher protested more than four times, or if they refused to go on, they were released. The learner was an actor. There were no electric shocks in reality. But as far as the subject-teacher knew, they were real.

And consistently in all variations of this experiment in different populations, do you know how many of the subjects continued to the final shocks? Between 61 and 66%. Over half. Over half of people inflicted progressive, painful, and dangerous shocks to someone, rendering them ‘unconscious’ or ‘dead’, since in a few of the scenarios the actor stated they had a ‘heart condition’, simply because they were ordered to do so. These were not enemy soldiers or Nazis. They were not skinheads, they were not white power advocates, or sociopaths. They were school teachers, doctors, lawyers, grocery store clerks, truck drivers, friends, next-door neighbors. They were you and me. That’s a terrifying realization. One that has somehow been lost in the current jingoistic move toward our own brand of nationalism. And I use the term nationalism not as an epithet or a curse word, but as the definition of what we are doing, rallying behind an image of what our leaders decide the US stands for. That’s what nationalism means.

Nationalism has its uses. It can make people proud of who they are. It can make us build a nation with amazing things like roads, sewage systems, as the Romans did, purely on the steam of national pride. The dangerous part of nationalism, however, is that it can be used by the greedy, by the power hungry with some other political agenda, to sharpen the borders between what is and is not American, creating an Other where there was none before. Does it look familiar? It should and if it doesn’t, it is because we are mired in denial.

We are so horrified by the revelations of Milgrams experiment and what it says about the human race, that we forget to be analytical. Some of us declare disgust with humanity, without the most critical question. Why was Milgrams experiment recreated so consistently, and why does it happen in history so often with the same results? Why do we fail to learn from this particular mistake? Because we are primates. Every primate species in the world reacts to an authority structure in a similar way. We do not question authority, whether by force of arms, or by persuasion and influence, except in direct challenge, and this is the exception rather than the rule. The majority of times we are faced with a dilemma to do something wrong which is sanctioned or encouraged by authority, we will do it even when we have an idea that authority is wrong. Because on some level, we are fighting hundreds of thousands of years of programming as a primate species. Does that make humanity evil? No. We are what we are. Does it excuse appalling acts of torture and cruelty? No. But it does explain it. And as we look for answers as to whether we can overcome this programming, they are there.

There was a baboon troop that was documented some years back to have a structure different from every other baboon troop studied. Most of their alpha males had been killed off by some kind of disease, or poaching. In any case, only the gentler males were left. These males became the authority structure, though they chose not to exercise authority except when absolutely necessary. They stood up and fought only if another more aggressive male tried to come in and take over the troop, then the whole troop banded together to ‘discourage’ the intruder from being aggressive. The result was that the aggressive males often stayed in the troop and changed their behavior to become less aggressive and more laid back, because they apparently seemed happier there. In fact, the longevity of these baboon compared to others was marked. They were living longer too.

The amazing thing about humanity is our ability to evolve, to learn from our mistakes, to become different, like these baboons. Milgram’s experiment will rear its ugly head in history again. And maybe we’ll fail another hundred times when faced with the choice between our own internal compass, and an errant authority. But someday we won’t. And that will happen more and more. Why do I believe this? Because many of the past subjects of Milgram’s experiment wrote him later on, despite the emotional distress they felt after a review of the experiment, to tell him that they were glad they had been shown about themselves what the experiment revealed. Many wrote to tell him that they were becoming conscientious objectors when it came to the Vietnam War, because of what they had learned. Whether you agree or disagree about the wisdom of the Vietnam War, the point is that they decided for themselves rather than relied on an authority to make that moral decision for them.

I also know that this slow advance toward individual thought is still happening. If we take the world as it is now, and the world as it was during the Roman Empire, though we make jokes about being the new Roman Empire just short of orgies and vomitoriums, there are profound differences. We collectively agree that slavery is wrong. The proportion of nations who agree that all people should have basic civil rights is the majority. However well or poorly this is executed, the fact that this is even attempted on such a global scale is light years from where we were during the Dark Ages, the Crusades, and the Inquisition.

But progress grinds to a halt if we aren’t allowed to discuss certain issues for fear of offending, if we can’t even have a conversation about history without being branded unpatriotic or accused of disparaging veterans. Veterans are respected with good reason. They are people who act on an urge to be part of something bigger than themselves. This is never a bad thing. It is however a good trait that has been used by unscrupulous people in authority, who then veil their own agendas by forbidding conversation about the history that follows. But the fact remains, and most veterans I have spoken with agree, that the first step to learning from our mistakes, is to admit, collectively with collective responsibility that we’ve made them. Many veterans I’ve encountered, being also honest self-evaluating people, like Milgram’s conscientious objectors, welcome the chance to air their own thoughts instead of keeping them locked behind a wall of silence.

11/11/11

“This one goes to eleven.” This week on the Indie Carnival is the number theme eleven. When presented with a number theme, I have to admit I was stumped. I don’t generally know what date it is from day to day, including people’s birthdays, to my mom’s chagrin, and even to everyone else’s hilarity, my own birthday. So particular dates would often whiz by if I had no social network to mark them.

Yesterday, I gave a talk to my daughter’s first grade class on Mayan myth, and showed a video of the Popul Vuh, the creation myth. After trying to figure out how to explain the occasional theme of sacrifice in the video (I expect I’ll get some interesting comments from fellow parents), one of the things that ran through the myth was the use of numbers. The featured Mayan characters had names like One Hunter and Seven Hunter, Seven Macaw, and so on.  Why? This seems an odd thing to name one’s children, the bizarro world of movie stars notwithstanding. Until you realize that in most cultures, though there are freaks like me who can’t keep track of the passage of time with an atomic clock in front of my face, most cultures place some kind of mystical or metaphysical value on numbers, and certainly on dates.

On the most basic level, dates determined by the number of days the moon progressed through the sky told farmers when to plant and when to sow, so that they and their families could eat. Shepherds whose lives revolved around where to bring their herds or flocks to pasture also had to pay attention to date. This particular date dependence has lost its significance for those of us who can run to the Seven-Eleven (telling us with numbers that it’s almost always open), when we’re low on something. And we tend to forget that somewhere, somehow the people who grow our food, when we’re not eating things like Twinkies, still have to keep track this in some fashion with numbers and dates. By the same token, date is very important when foraging for milk in the refrigerator. This is one of the few food/date anchors for floaters like me.

Then slowly, built upon such agricultural or pastoral date dependence, combined with the belief in what we cannot see, numbers sometimes took on  mystical value. My own culture, Judaism developed a mystical system using the power of numbers when they developed Kabalah. I remember hearing about Kabalah in whispers of awe, and being given the explanation that you had to be an adult who had been studying Torah for years before you could even understand the Kabalah, and that if you tried without the proper training, it would drive you mad. Well, since math drives me mad on a normal basis, this seemed a plausible assumption. Kabalah revolves around the concept that all of the Hebrew letters have both a numeric value, and attached to that, a spiritual meaning. If you accept that principle, then Hebrew words combine meanings to deepen the complexity. Therefore five long books of Hebrew words encompassing the history of our people becomes a universal code containing the history of possibly…well everything. For example, Chai, the Hebrew word for life, contains the letters ‘chet’ and ‘yud’. Together they are the number 18. 18 is considered the number of life, because of this, and the derivatives of 18, 2 and 9 also have significance. At some point which eludes me because, unlike Madonna, I am not ‘a disciple’ of Kabalah, this is diagrammed as a tree of life with different principles, numerically based, at different points of the tree. The principles include Binah, or Compassion etc. The idea, I understand, however, as it resembles so closely many other trees of life, such as Yggdrasil, the central world post of the Aborigines, the poteau-mitan of vodun, and so on. But the mathmatic among us just had to stick numbers in there somewhere. That whole ‘building blocks of the universe’ thing.

As I mentioned earlier, I was stunned and impressed as I learned about the Mayan glyphs such as the symbol for chocolate pods. Here was a number system that didn’t involved what we consider numbers, but encompassed mathematic concepts that would have floored Einstein and on which great buildings were created. I always thought that a society that runs on an economy that values chocolate as currency must be the most advanced in history. But one begins to see from this, from the dizzying Mayan calendar, from the Egyptian calculations for the building of the pyramids, how important dates and numbers are to so many cultures.

Counting years, months, days, hours as we all move toward death, whatever that means to us, maybe numbers become a tool of apotheosis, marking our days, noting changes in different periods of life, and ultimately giving us some sort of guide into the unknown, making order out of chaos.

See what the number 11 holds for our other Indie authors in the carnival. What does it mean to you?

http://www.refractedlightreviews.com
 Danny Snell’s Refracted Light Reviews

http://pattilarsen.blogspot.com
 Patti Larsen, Author of The Ghost Boy of MacKenzie House, the Hunted series, and the Hayle Coven novels.

http://courtneycolewrites.wordpress.com
 Courtney Cole, Author of Every Last Kiss, Fated, Princess, and Guardian. Also a contributing author in The Glassheart Chronicles.

http://wrenemerson.wordpress.com
 Wren Emerson, Author of I Wish and a contributing author in The Glassheart Chronicles.

http://laurasmagicday.wordpress.com
 Laura Elliott, Author of Winnemucca.

http://nicoleawilliams.blogspot.com
 Nichole A. Williams, Author of Eternal Eden, and the upcoming Fallen Eden. She is also participating in the Glassheart Chronicles.

http://fisheramelie.com/blog/
 Fisher Amelie, Author of The Understorey, as well as a contributing author in The Glassheart Chronicles.

http://amyjonesyaff.blogspot.com
 Amy Maurer Jones, Author of The Soul Quest Trilogy as well as a contributing author in The Glassheart Chronicles.

http://thewarriorseries.blogspot.com
 T. R. Graves, Author of Warriors of the Cross.

http://ctefft.blogspot.com
 Cyndi Tefft, Author of Between

http://pjhoover.blogspot.com
 P.J. Hoover, Author of Solstice, The Emerald Tablet, The Navel of the World, The Necropolis.

http://www.aliciamccalla.com
 Alicia McCalla, Author of the upcoming science-fiction novel Breaking Free.

http://heathercashman.com/better_off_read
 Heather Cashman, Author of Perception.

http://www.abbiglines.com
 Abbi Glines, Author of Breathe, and the upcoming Existence and Vincent Boys.

http://cidneyswanson.blogspot.com/
 Cidney Swanson, Author of Rippler.

http://cherischmidt.blogspot.com
, Cheri Schmidt, Author of Fateful, Fractured, and Fair Maiden, Fire Dancer

http://www.lexusluke.com/
, Lexus Luke, Author of Manitou, The Sky People Saga, Fire Breather

http://www.suzyturner.com/
, Suzy Turner, Author of December Moon and Raven, Dragonslayer

http://kasi-kcblake.blogspot.com/
, K. C. Blake, Author of Vampire Rules, Elephant Trainer

http://hereventuality.blogspot.com/
, Gwenn Wright, Author of Filter, Ring-Leader

http://kimberlykinrade.com/
, Kimberly Kinrade, Author of Bits of You, Pieces of Me and Forbidden Mind, Prestidigitator

http://jlbryanbooks.blogspot.com/
, J.L. Bryan, Author of Paranormals series- Jenny Pox. Tommy Nightmare & Alexander Death

http://darbykarchut.com/
 Darby Karchut, Author of Griffin Rising, and soon Griffin Fire

http://puttingpentopage.com/
 Heather Self

http://brynabutler.wordpress.com/
 Bryna Butler, author of the Midnight Guardian series

And don’t miss what’s new this week in books!

To help honor our veterans this Veterans Day, a few YA Indie Carnis are participating in Blog Tour de Force to give free ebooks to the troops oversees. Click the image to participate with a chance to win 50 free ebooks! Carnis participating include: Kimberly Kinrade, TG Ayer, &Laura A. H. Elliott. Thanks for supporting the troops!

The Vincent Boys Blog Tour Starts Monday!

Check out The Rippler Blog Tour!

From Skinhead To Hero

There are stories that come along every once in a while that leave you speechless. We look at people and make sometimes educated, sometimes not so educated guesses about what is on their inside based on what is outside. In some instances, as with clothing, tattoos, things we do to our appearance, this process is intended. But every once in a while, what we see gives no hint at all of what is really underneath. And every once in a while we get a glimpse of how fluid we really are as humans, or can be, how we can begin as one thing and become something else. This man’s story is such a story.

This man, Bryon Widner, began as one of the worst racist skinheads. He was described by anti-skinhead movements as one of the most aggressive and confrontational. Then something changed. I don’t know if we will ever know what. I’m guessing that having kids may have had something to do with it. But he not only left the white power group he was in, but decided to speak out against them. He underwent multiple surgeries to remove his facial tattoos, after seeking help from one of his former enemies to get the surgeries. He received death threats against himself and his family. And still continued and spoke up.

I could expound on what kind of courage it takes to leave such a group, or speaking out against their terrorism, or even finally going to a group of people who were enemies and admitting you were wrong. But none of what I am relating conveys the extreme nature of his story or the magnitude of what he did in renouncing his status as completely as he did. None of this conveys the magnitude of what his wife did to support him, or what his family went through. So here is a more extensive article that still does not convey it, but it comes closer.

http://news.yahoo.com/reformed-skinhead-endures-agony-remove-tattoos-162205881.html

I am a cynic and a pessimist. I don’t watch the news because I get too angry. I’m not Anne Frank. I can’t say that I believe that there is good in everyone. But when someone like this comes along, I believe, at least for a little while, that maybe I’m wrong about that. Good luck, Mr. Widner and good luck to your family. I hope you find the peace that you seek. As far as I am concerned, you have earned it. You have made a transition from monster to hero in such a way that we find in myth and legend. And I hope that your message and what you have gone through will change the world. It has certainly changed my perspective of it today.

Troy Davis: Victim of Jim Crow Mentality

Troy Davis, an African American man in jail for the past couple decades, convicted of killing a police officer, is now scheduled to be executed today,  
http://news.yahoo.com/troy-davis-issues-parting-cry-execution-025053052.html

This execution in Georgia comes despite condemnation from a former president, and a former pope. And, more important, it comes despite what appears to be overwhelming reasonable doubt that he committed the crime at all. He has maintained his innocence for the entire time of his imprisonment. I know that this alone doesn’t mean much, because the prisons are quoted as being full of innocent men, but given the other circumstances, I am beginning to wonder if that is in fact true. Seven of nine ‘witness’ testimonies were recanted and accompanied by allegations that they were coerced into those testimonies by the police. And there was never any physical evidence, circumstantial or otherwise linking this man to the crime. Amnesty International has taken up this cause. While many activism organizations are plagued with internal problems, in my experience, Amnesty does not take cases like this lightly. If they are paying attention, there is usually something worth paying attention to.

I was a juror once on an assault case. And just one of circumstances alone, the lack of evidence  or the recanted testimonies and allegations of coercion, would have been enough for me to pass on a guilty verdict. But this blatant disregard for reasonable doubt makes me cynical of the justice system of state of Georgia, and the impartiality or even sanity of any citizen who would convict this man and condemn him to the death penalty.

Normally, I don’t jump on the bandwagon of believing that racial bias fuels most decisions, but in this case, I would have to agree when the ACLU cries discrimination. I haven’t seen a more public and frank display of racism since the Jim Crow laws themselves.  And the lack of any question in continuing with execution in the face of so much public doubt, and no consideration or even discussion of clemency makes be actively believe in the claims of forced testimony. In fact it leads me right to notions of corruption in Georgia’s ‘thin blue line’, to claim a scapegoat for the murder from the most convenient victim available to them. And there would be no chance that this corruption would be limited to a couple officers. Such a decision at this point in the justice system is not made by a only few low-ranking officers.

I hope that the authorities reconsider their decision to accept ‘expediency before justice’ as they said in Babylon 5, before Wednesday. And if not, then I hope that something can be done for the Davis family, since it is unlikely they will find justice themselves. Social media is a great tool. I’ll be looking on the internet for sites donating condolences to the family in the event of their loss. I imagine, with the popular response, that there will be many such sites.

Here is the address of Amnesty International, in case you read this and believe that he should not be executed. They have a petition to stop the execution. 
http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/siteapps/advocacy/ActionItem.aspx?c=6oJCLQPAJiJUG&b=6645049&aid=516533&msource=WPSBTL2970

I never prayed much, except at Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. It is ironic that those high holy days begin slightly over one week after his execution date. Rosh Hashanah is the beginning of the Jewish year, and the first of the days of atonement ending in Yom Kippur. It is a time for people in the Jewish culture to start over, and to reflect on our sins of the past year. Though Troy Davis is not Jewish, and probably neither are most of the other people involved in this case, for me, it is no small tragedy that the biggest sin that could possibly be committed will be within days of our new year, for what seems likely to be a false accusation. I think I’ll pray a little more this year and the theme will be truth.

I’m not into praying for other people. I don’t mind when someone religious who genuinely believes in their faith and has good will says ‘I’ll pray for you…’ to me. Even though it’s not my bag, I feel honored and appreciate the gesture. But I get irritated when someone who is sanctimonious and judgmental says that to me, “I’ll pray for you,” as some parting shot to win an argument, as if they have a direct line to God and are gracing me as a godless heathen with their prayers. Blech. So I won’t pray for these people making the execution decisions, because I won’t pretend good will that I don’t feel toward them. Maybe I should atone for that too, if I were a God-filled person who believed that everyone should be forgiven for everything. But I’m not. So instead, I will take a close look at my own beliefs in the past year and identify if I’ve made judgments about people, or worse, decisions about people that were not based on logic, but on emotionally-based assumptions.

Taliban and Spaceships

I love how little kids think. Driving to camp today, my daughter heard a news clip about the Taliban. All news clips about these jerks are sobering. But it is nice to see such things through non-cynical first grader eyes. She asked who they were. Once again, as in previous politically-inspired conversations, I was forced to slow down, take all the million dollar words out and distill the situation into something a first grader (albeit very smart) would understand. So I explained “that they are a group of people who want to tell other people in their countries how to live and dress, and what to think, ( not like your parents do, kiddo), and they hurt people who don’t do what they say. So a lot of people are unhappy and don’t want to be ruled by them.”

She thought about that for a minute, and said, “Well why don’t they go somewhere else, away from the Taliban?” (Since we often tell her that if someone is bothering her to walk away and go play with someone else.) So I explained that when it is somewhere you live, it is not always that easy. Not everyone has money to go somewhere else. It takes money to move. Also, the Taliban are in a lot of different places, and we don’t always know where they are. To which she asked, “Well, why don’t we give them ships so they can get away from them in space? Are the Taliban in outer space?”

At this point, I bent double over the steering wheel, but explained that we really only have one spaceship that can carry people and it just went on its last mission, the Space Shuttle, and it only carries a few astronauts. So from there, the conversation took a left turn into why we don’t have more space ships, and money for the Space Program. And that conversation ended with our arrival at camp, an explanation of thermodynamics, and why popsicle sticks wouldn’t work for space ship material. After the physics reasons, she added that people would get fat from eating all those popsicles to build the ship.

Well, we didn’t solve any world problems today. But despite the normally depressing topic, I was really glad, as I always am of talking with my daughter. I don’t make light of the horrific plight of folks who are trapped in oppressive situations like those facing coup by the Taliban. On the contrary, my daughter’s innocent yet innovative suggestions remind me that I can have those conversations, and how lucky she and I both are to not be in such a situation. Nor is this meant as a blanket statement about freedoms in the U.S. Really, I just wanted to remember that moment when my day got a little brighter thinking about solving problems with popsicle-stick space ships. That’ll never get old.

Vampire Mania

In the past decade, America has been consumed (haha) by an obsession with vampires. Guilty. I love True Blood. My husband and I wait avidly for the Netflix discs to come, and for our daughter to go to bed, and then, like college kids just out of our folks’ homes, pull late nights staring incredulously at the television screen until our eyes are about to fall out and we know we’ll have sleep-deprivation hang-overs the next morning. Then, after the episodes are done, we grab the disc, shove it in the envelope barely before it has stopped spinning, and almost nail it to the front door to make absolutely sure the mailman doesn’t miss it, God Forbid, so we can get our next installment as quickly as possible, like True Blood’s own V-junkies.

Vampires have always commanded attention alternately as objects of dread and loathing as in ancient folk-tales and in some movies like Nosferatu. And at other times they have been romanticized as mysterious and alluring creatures of the night, or sometimes dreaded and desired at the same time, as in the classic Dracula, the more modern Dracula, Twilight, True Blood. Pick a rock and throw it and hit another mention or conception of vampires. In the past couple decades, we have explored vampires up, down, and sideways, from dissertations on HIV and the nature of addiction, from ideas of parasitism and predation, to simple entertainment. From alternate explanations of historical figures such as Dracula, to adolescent love stories and wish fulfillment in Twilight, to re-invention of raw power and sexuality in True Blood, we have poked into every corner of these demonic figures (by demonic I do not mean ‘Satanic’. ‘Demonic’ refers to the older meaning ‘daemon’ or spirit).

So what is at the core of this fascination, especially recently, when this fascination has now gone mainstream, re-invented even by conservative populations, such as the portrayal in Twilight?

I started looking at this obsession as part of a larger picture. At first, I was surprised by what I saw, then when I started thinking about it, wasn’t so surprised. We are an adolescent nation. In every way. I don’t say this to judge, adolescence is part of life. It’s exciting, passionate, dramatic, brave…and not always logical, wise, or steady.

Think about the following things:

Our media predominantly portrays standards of female beauty as lanky, pouty-lipped, and coltish, eschewing the more full-bodied images that are often associated with later life as a wife and mother, with only occasional deviations such as Marilyn Monroe and Kate Winslet.

Standards of male beauty and desire are often associated with playfulness and wildness, in our choice of advertisement for sporty cars and trucks, in our obsession with sports in which the most typical expectation of male behavior is ‘proving oneself on the field’ like a young warrior or conqueror, whereas older male figures and family scenes are not as prominent.

We actually are adolescent, historically speaking, having separated and declared ourselves a nation only about four-hundred years ago by symbolically dumping boxes of tea into Boston Harbor. While all Americans, including myself, agree with those choices, it was still the historical equivalent of yelling, ‘I’m not going to live under your roof, or follow your rules!’ storming out, and slamming the door behind us. I don’t think it’s an accident that by our law, teenagers can be freed from their parents by a legal process called ‘emancipation’.

Look at our politics: Extremely bi-partisan in almost every arena. Independent voters or candidates and moderate proponents of anything are viewed largely, as weak,  ineffective, and likely unable to survive. ‘You’re either with us, or against us.’  You’re either Liberal or Conservative, Democratic or Republican, Pro-choice or Pro-life, the list goes on. I’m not so old that I don’t remember my teenage years, full of fire and passion and a determination to change the world, make a mark, and lacking in any sense of middle ground whatsoever. And when I watch our politics, it sounds exactly like that.

Not that we don’t ‘focus on family’ too. Indeed, the ‘conservative’ and certainly fundamentalist elements among us holler and trumpet their perception of what a proper family should look like at every chance. It’s the way such proclamations are made that points to our adolescence, insisting that the world is as black and white as our national mood.

Add to that a now mainstream obsession with dark figures who are immortal, who do not have children and who embody the wildness and carefree nature of eternal bachelor-hood. Vampires are the perfect symbol of someone unfettered by the normal, boring, mundane human life of settling down with someone/anyone, having normal boring kids, and growing old and dying with that person.

Despite our twin obsession with defining what constitutes a  family, the furor going on about who we should be allowed to settle down with, the fact is, we cling to and revel in, and mourn for that image of freedom, mystery and sexual allure represented by the vampire that is associated with an earlier period of life after the loss of childhood dependence, initiation into sexuality, but before responsibility. I’m guilty. I love vampires. They are a secret pleasure my husband and I share after our wonderful responsibility goes to bed. But I recognize that. I acknowledge and suck it up with delight. The fear that I have for us as an adolescent nation is that we will become arrested, that we will not mellow in our politics, in our views, or gain any balance in our way of viewing the rest of the world or ourselves because, like our Puritanical forbears, we can’t admit our own needs and passions.

Unknown American History

It is amazing to me the things that I don’t know as an American, that I feel I should. This has never been brought home to me more than recently. Two events were recently brought to my attention that I never knew, and that I’m fairly certain were never in any of the history books I ever read in school, even on days when I wasn’t daydreaming, doodling, or staring at the crush-of-the-day…

One event was brought up at a party by a Vietnamese-American friend who recently moved to Ireland. She regaled us with things she saw on a recent trip to one of the Irish cities in which they had constructed a commemorative monument to the Native American tribes who sent life-saving shipments of supplies overseas during the potato famine.

Huh? Let me repeat that. One or a few Native American tribes, the Choctaw in particular, saved up what is estimated at $710, what was then a small fortune, despite their own troubles, and sent it to the struggling Irish nation. I know that many of the Irish know of this event since a monument was constructed to the Choctaw. But I wonder how many American Irish, especially those who are third or fourth generation here know about that contribution to their forbears. Or how many Americans in general know of this. I certainly didn’t. The only thing I remember learning about Indians in school was events like the Trail of Tears and other battles, told in general terms. There was seldom anything personal, cultural, or definitively positive taught. Knowing things like this change everything, or should. What a tremendous act of generosity and humanity, that has been completely lost on most of us. They never did it for attention, and probably knew that such an act would never reach the consciousness of most Americans considering the political climate of the time toward them from the American government and settlers. That makes it all the more remarkable.

In addition to this, I learned that the Ottoman Empire under Islamic (yes Muslim) Sultan Abdulmecid offered 10,000 pounds of aid to the Irish. Ten thousand pounds. That is a staggering amount of money for the time. But the Queen asked the sultan to reduce it to 1,000 pounds so as not to give more than the British Crown, which was giving 1,000 pounds themselves. He agreed but sent three ships of food to Ireland in addition, secretly in defiance of the Crown. The Crown found out and tried to block the ships, but they successfully landed in Drogheda Harbor. What happened to the food after that I don’t know. But they sent it. This is something I also, as a citizen of a major world power, hadn’t known about a major world event. The sultan sent the ships in secret, against the wishes of a major ally, so it was unlikely to be motivated by political gain, but more in the interests of real humanitarian concerns.

The second event, I learned about this weekend, at an event hosted by a new non-for-profit organization beginning within the Vietnamese community in Colorado, called the Big Heart Organization. Their mission is to pull together the many organizations within the Vietnamese community to serve on any issue of concern, whether heart disease, smoking cessation, emergency preparedness, refugee aid, etc. At my table was a leader of one of the Hmong clans. I never knew much about the Hmong culture. Only that they came from the hilly regions around Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos. I knew that they had their own language, and they were clan-based. I knew that they sometimes used methods of healing such as coining, rubbing heated coins along chi points of the spine to alleviate certain symptoms of illness. I also knew, from past anthropology studies, that this practice had been painfully misinterpreted by some social workers as signs of domestic violence, since it could occasionally cause bruising.

What I never knew, that I think every American should know, was the reason so many Hmong came here, and the meaning of some of the jewelry worn. During the Vietnam War, the Hmong clans were the ones who provided passage to our soldiers through Cambodia and other hostile areas, when no one else would. They assisted the U.S. in extremely dangerous situations, because they believed in the cause our soldiers were fighting for. And when the war was over, and our soldiers left, the Hmong remained to face the wrath of the governments who disagreed with the U.S. Because even though most Americans, and even many soldiers didn’t realize or or even know of the aid that was given to them, or at least from whom, the governments and despots in the countries these allies lived in, did. The Hmong were captured, tortured, expelled from their homes, murdered for political revenge. So they fled, to China, here, other surrounding countries. In China, they have been persecuted as another minority that the Han want to assimilate. So they have been forbidden from speaking their language and practicing their culture. When they were imprisoned, they were forced to wear heavy collars to differentiate them as prisoners separate from the Chinese. And the silver torque that they often wear commemorates the freedom they won from this imprisonment, as they practice their culture in a new land, openly or in secret. As a Jew, remembering the practices of the marranos of Spain, following the Inquisition, who would close up all of their windows and doors, go into their basements and light two candles on a Friday night without knowing why they did such things, I well understood the symbolism.

As for their flight to and reception by the U.S., I think most Americans don’t, certainly I didn’t, appreciate them as more than just one more group of immigrants in ongoing waves of immigrants. I have no problem with immigration or folks coming over. I am a third generation Ashkenazic Jew…married to an Ojibway. It would be the height of hypocrisy for me to have a problem with any other group of people coming here for any reason. I am the child of immigrants, and even a hundred years from now, my people will still be immigrants in a land that wasn’t mine, if you want to get nit-picky about the definition of immigrant. We’ll go from new-comers to old-comers…But the point is that the current climate in the U.S. has become fairly hostile toward immigrants, presenting them as clingers-on and nuisances to give charity to and to be tolerated, or who ‘drag America down’ (I have actually seen that nasty comment). But very few people make the realization that many of the people we view in this manner have already paid their dues as Americans, personally, and we never know it, let alone acknowledge their contribution in any way.

This is what makes history as taught in schools frustrating to me. We see the sanitized, general version of things, many events which are summarized to the point of uselessness. I’m not just making excuses for my lackadaisical approach to my high school history studies, though I am the first to admit that I wasn’t a good history student. But what I want to know when I learn history are these little tidbits and how they changed us, as a nation, as a world. And I think kids today do too. It is these stories which transform our general characterizations of different ethnicities we encounter into real people and connected members of the human race.