In Public

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I’ve written about the virtues of reading in public before.  Book reading, that is.  I was reminded once again how restorative an exercise it can be.  The occasion this time was a book sale at the Bethlehem Public Library.  We didn’t realize this was one of those bi-monthly kinds of events—at least this year there are six such sales.  We met some friends there and I exercised considerable restraint, buying only two books.  One was a copy of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style.  I’d had a copy of this, but it was ruined in the flood.  I decided to replace it.  The other book was a collection of all Flannery O’Connor’s stories.  I’d been thinking just the day before that I should read some of her work.  It happened that I finished before other members of our party so I waited in the hall and started reading the story “Geranium,” with which the book starts.

After a few minutes a college-aged guy walked by and said, “Great book.”  I thanked him for affirming my choice.  He said, “I’ve just been reading O’Connor, you’re in for a real treat.”  This brief exchange reminded me of being in Easton on a warm evening a few years back, reading in a public square.  I was there to pick someone up and they weren’t quite ready yet.  A couple of young women, probably Lafayette College students, walked by and asked what I was reading.  It was Toni Morrison’s Beloved.  They weren’t familiar with it and asked me what it was about.

Now, I’ve always been quite a shy person.  I don’t mind responding when someone talks to me, but initiating a conversation is something I don’t do very well with strangers.  I’m happy to respond when someone shows an interest in a book I’m reading.  I’ve had dentist hygienists ask about the book I inevitably bring in with me, asking if it’s any good.  The few times when I forget to bring a book and I have to try to entertain myself on my phone (it’s not easy; I quickly grow bored), I’ve never had anybody stop and ask what was interesting on my phone.  It’s the printed book, at least in populations with college students, that seems to bring out a willingness to chat.  I wonder how much of that bookish sociability that we’ve lost now that the electronic revolution has taken place.  How many discussions does a Kindle start?  It’s a virtue to read an actual book in public.

Class Privilege

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A recent article in the New York Times explores something many of us know from experience: your hopes of getting tenure in higher education plummet if you’re from the working class.  One of the causes the article points out (I think I can gift it, if anyone wants to read it), is that working class folks don’t learn networking from their parents.  That was like a lightbulb being switched on.  Schmoozing is so essential when dealing with anyone in power.  I started to learn this at Nashotah House.  My mother taught me always to be honest and forthright.  Employers have walked all over me ever since.  I never learned to schmooze well.  I still don’t do it.  Until reading this article, in my sixties, I didn’t realize that my academic career was doomed from the start.

It’s like this: neither of my parents finished high school.  I grew up poor and working class.  My grades were great throughout high school and college and I was being groomed to be a minister, not an academic.  But I felt the call of academia as soon as I’d acclimated to Grove City College.  I love reading and learning.  I have innate curiosity.  I question everything.  This seems to fit teaching better than preaching.  Before settling on a doctoral institution, I asked my professors where I should go.  Their advice: Europe.  Bad mistake for pre-internet days and a kid who knew nothing about networking.  Edinburgh is a world-class research university.  Its only real connection (at the time) to US schools was Princeton.  Particularly Princeton Seminary, if your degree was from New College.  Otherwise, the professors didn’t pay much mind to American higher education.  Networking, which I didn’t realize you needed to do, wasn’t emphasized or encouraged.

I was hired by Nashotah House because of two factors: they could find nobody else, and I was Episcopalian.  The chances of networking while at a remote, conservative campus in the woods were nil.  I went to conferences, but Ugaritology was a very small field.  I remained an unknown.  I wondered how my friends, if they ran into unemployment situations, always managed to find other jobs.  They knew, apparently, something I did not.  Networking.  Even getting into publishing was rocky for me.  I had two editorial posts for two years only.  I didn’t network or schmooze.  Authors loved me because I was honest and forthright.  Those are working class values.  And, it seems, they will be deficits to advancing in your career.  Be careful before deciding on a doctorate.  It can backfire unless your parents went to college and taught you what to do.

Walking Thoughts

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Once, on a rare day off work, I decided to take a long walk.  One of the places to do this in the Lehigh Valley is the Saucon Rail Trail.  At the moment it doesn’t quite reach Bethlehem, so if you start from that end, you go south.  I noticed something on my long walk.  On the northern end of the trail there are informational signs.  One of the favorites that I spotted is this one, on dinosaurs of the Saucon Valley.  Some of the others are town names and commemorations of the rail stations that are no longer there.  There’s one of these in Hellertown and another in Bingen.  Educational signs are one of the simple pleasures in life.  It was a long walk, however, and I was just getting started.  The trail skirts along some wealthy properties.  During the fall, these often display right-leaning signs and banners.  As you head in that direction, the educational signs disappear.

More “private property” signs show up.  If you go far enough, “Residential area: please keep the noise down” (I don’t recall the exact wording) signs appear.  It seems less friendly.  Then “No Loitering” signs.  I was disappointed on my long walk, but not surprised.  My understanding of local politics are that the northern part of the trail leans blue.  Indeed, it too is a residential area, but there were no shushing signs, just educational ones (and the necessary ones about trail rules).  In fact, some property owners put out whimsical, occasionally interactive, diversions to amuse walkers, bikers, and joggers.  The near southern section goes through deep red territory.  The signs are less friendly, at least as far as I went.

I didn’t walk the entire length of the trail; it’s seven-and-a-half miles.  In my post-Nashotah days of shock I used to jog nine miles, but I’ve had a desk job far too many years and my daily jogs are now down to one or two.  I’m curious if the trend continues.  The Saucon Rail Trail used to be part of the North Pennsylvania Rail Road.  There’s a bit of history along the trail.  The Thomas Iron Company used to have a factory on the northern end of the path.  I see from the map that it also skirts DeSales University.  Perhaps, if I ever retire, I’ll be able to work back up to walking the entire distance.  Maybe by then there’ll be more friendly signs than warning ones.  But then again, I could be a dinosaur.

Child Snatcher

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Folk horror, like folklore, is a commonplace of the human condition.  We are afraid and some of our fears are deeply rooted.  Some go back to traditional monsters.  The Moogai is an Australian folk horror film.  It’s based on the fact that from the turn of the twentieth century until the seventies indigenous children were taken from their parents to integrate them into white society.  The moogai is a character like the boogeyman that comes to steal children.  Set in present-day Australia with an adult child of one of these stolen children, the movie concentrates on a parent’s fear of losing her own children.  It also sets up modern medicine against folk wisdom.  Sarah is embarrassed by her birth mother Ruth.  She doesn’t like the ideas she puts into her own daughter’s head about the moogai.  At the same time, Sarah’s unable to sleep and has been seeing things not easily explained after the birth of her second child.

This leads to her husband and others questioning whether she’s experiencing from postpartum psychosis or whether something real is happening.  Then her husband sees the moogai while Sarah’s restrained in a psych ward.  When her husband is arrested for breaking her out of the hospital, Sarah realizes that she has to get to her birth mother to destroy the moogai since no “rational” people will believe her.  Using traditional methods, Ruth and Sarah confront the moogai and rescue her children.  In the process, Ruth dies.  Belief comes at a price.

As a horror film this was recommended by the New York Times.  The moogai is shown perhaps a little too clearly to be scary, but his two faces are creepy.  The really valuable part of all this, however, is the folk tradition.  And the “social programming” that stands behind the horror.  The white men stealing children are the real moogai.  It’s a movie with a conscience.  Similar assimilation efforts were made with indigenous peoples of the Americas.  There’s a horror is being told, “Assimilate or die.”  Capitalism, of course, can allow no other systems to survive.  How can you get rich if everyone doesn’t agree to play along?  Movies like The Moogai ask that trenchant question: what if native peoples know something that the power-hunger interlopers do not?  What if there really are monsters out there?  Of course, in the movie the moogai is symbolically white, just as are the government men at the beginning who come to snatch the children from an indigenous settlement.  Heavy lifting by folk horror.

Hope and Reason

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Jane Goodall was a scientist for whom I have a great deal of respect.  She earned her scientific credentials in the field before getting them in the university.  And she had no room for materialism in her world.  Studying our nearest relatives in the animal kingdom taught her that animals think and feel—standard science uses that bugbear of “anthropomorphism” to tell us such things are all in our heads.  Evolution would disagree, n’est-ce pas, Mr. Darwin?  The reason I especially wanted to read Reason for Hope was because here Goodall describes a spiritual, indeed, mystical experience she had that won’t be too unfamiliar to those who’ve allowed themselves to be open to the wonders of the universe, even if found in a church.  Her own experience convinced her that there is something more.  Like any reasonable person she didn’t dismiss science but she realized that it can’t quantify everything.  Biologists should understand that, if they get out of the lab once in a while.

This book also tells, in part, Goodall’s life story.  She explains at the end that this was supposed to be a series of interviews with her, but that didn’t work out and she was essentially compelled to write it out.  It’s just a sense, but I intuited that she was probably not too comfortable describing her spiritual experiences.  I can understand that.  Even in a world that (apart from its leaders, elected or not) is becoming more understanding, discussing religious experiences leaves you vulnerable.  Critics are quick to pick up on this and attack one for not being rational.  The myth of Mr. Spock really has us in a Vulcan neck pinch.  Our emotions are part of our reasoning brain and we ignore them at our peril.

Goodall’s life wasn’t one of a series of pleasant strolls through the forest.  She experienced violence and loss.  She saw how cruel both humans and animals could be.  This book stands as a testament, however, that there remain reasons for hope.  Even if we persist in being as foolish as we have at the polls, and if that leads to the destruction of our species, life will go on.  It will recover.  The more we learn of the universe the more certain it is that life is fairly abundant.  It’s not the rarity it was supposed to be when I was a child.  And in a universe full of life, hope is everywhere.  Parts of her account are difficult to read, but Goodall left us with a hopeful message, if we’ll only do our part.

Everything Theory

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Many years ago I read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time.  More recently in time, I’ve become a fan of dark academia in several of its forms.  One of those forms is the biopic of famous, often challenged, academics.  The Theory of Everything is offered as such a biopic.  The darkness is, of course, Hawking’s Motor Neuron Disease.  The movie was critically acclaimed, and watching it made me think it was from before a time when academia fell under sustained fire from various governments.  So much of what we know of the world, indeed, the universe, derives from those rare individuals paid to pursue the life of the mind and take the rest of us the places they discovered.  In the case of Hawking, it seems that without his tragic disease his fame may well have never taken off.  Few people, in my experience, are really interested in physics or cosmology.

The movie, of course, dramatizes the life of Stephen and Jane Hawking.  It deftly focuses on the dynamics and strains of their relationship.  The academic part also plays a role, of course, but this is more of a personal story.   As usual, such films make me miss the academic life I’ve been denied.  I was never good enough at math to manage a career in the sciences.  Some of us have brains that focus much more clearly on the humanities (which, of course, sustain the heaviest fire from critics, despite being the grounds upon which higher education itself was founded).  Many, if not most, dark academia biopics focus on scientists or mathematicians.  Perhaps their lives are naturally more dramatic.  Their discoveries are more often newsworthy.  (Newsworthiness is, however, not the sole measure of importance.)  I’m wandering off topic (how human of me!); this is a very good movie.  It does play off of the fact that Hawking’s atheism was a bit of a difficulty for Jane’s Anglicanism.  Interestingly enough, she was a humanities student and did, in real life, earn her doctorate in literature.  Hers, while not as famous, would also be a life worthy of dark academic exploration.  

The acting in The Theory of Everything is pretty incredible.  And the film does make you interested in learning more about these very human people caught in a tragic, but somewhat heroic, situation.  Ironically, the religion and science fields perhaps come closest in cosmology.  This shows up in the final lines of A Brief History of Time, and continues to be a point of discussion in academia, both dark and light.

Artificial Iscariot

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It was only a matter of time.  A recent story on 404 Media confirmed what others had suspected, Amazon is ordering large numbers of rare books and destroying them so they can be scanned for AI “learning.”  Apart from the infuriating aspect—some of us save up our money to afford rare books—is the flawed premise behind the whole AI craze.  Words, as much as I love them, do not embrace the entirety of the the thinking process.  Scientists have argued for years that feeling—emotion—is essential to how we think.  We don’t understand emotions, but we do know they’re an essential part of being both biological and conscious.  Other animals experience them too.  Destroying books so they don’t have to pay to use copyrighted material stirs an emotional as well as a rational response.  All for a fad.

Generative AI is a waste of money and resources.  Sure, it can look things up quicker than I can, but it can also lie and hallucinate and make things up.  It wastes my time by sending me bogus emails.  It’s after my savings.  And yours too.  People don’t want the massive data centers required to process this one part of human experience.  Kids who grew up emulating Mr. Spock, perhaps uncomfortable with their own emotions, are now trying to run the world.  Like all fascists they do so by destroying books.  The end game isn’t to make life easier.  It’s to make a product to sell.  To take over the marketplace.  To take books that can’t be replaced, cut them apart, and scan them.  Other publishers, by the way, also do that but with the intention of republishing the books.  At least there’s some form of resurrection there.

Time and again we’re reminded of the mess that’s made when those who have too much money try to run things.  They don’t know the experience of the vast majority of people who either struggle or get by but who do so by dint of being human.  They have determination—which isn’t always rational, but which is a great motivation—to survive (biologically) and thrive.  Some of us have lived our lives for the cause of books.  In desperate days as a younger person I sold rare books I’d obtained to meet current needs.  Some booksellers are noting large, anonymous orders for rare books.  One put a tracker in the package and learned that they were going to Amazon to be destroyed.  The company that once sold us books is now taking them away for good.

Stuffed

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Although a satire, The Stuff has a serious message.  This horror comedy from the eighties bears some similarities to The Substance, but in a more comic and environmentally conscious way.  The eponymous stuff is edible and discovered at a mining site in Georgia.  Its good taste soon challenges ice cream and millions become addicted to it.  The problem is, it takes over people’s minds.  Soon they will eat nothing else.  Some industrialists in the ice cream industry reluctantly hire a specialist in industrial espionage to learn what The Stuff is.  They engage Mo Rutherford, who, although crooked, is quite likable.  The film follows him as he investigates.  He eventually finds Jason, a young boy whose family has been taken over by The Stuff.  Jason saw it moving and knows it’s alive.  Mo rescues Jason and teams up with Nicole, an advertising executive who’s been marketing The Stuff.  Together, and with “Chocolate Chip Charlie” Hobbs, they decide to expose that The Stuff is animated by an alien life form and is dangerous.

There’s a lot of madcap stuff here.  The horror element comes from what happens to “Stuffies”—those addicted to The Stuff.  It hollows them out, eating them from the inside.  They’re left as hollow shells.  When shot they leak the white Stuff.  This leads an Army colonel who is also trying to stop it to his classic line, “I kinda like the sight of blood… but this is disgusting!”  There are so many corny lines that it’s no wonder that the movie has a cult following.  It’s also a parody of how industrialists will stop at nothing to get money, even when they know what they sell is dangerous.

Watching the movie, which wasn’t half bad, I wondered at how I’d never heard of it before.  There are so many movies out there and now with the internet so many websites.  Classic TMI.  I only found it by scrolling through a streaming service after a night of very little sleep when something kind of silly sounded appealing.  Comedy horror is a genre that can produce some good results.  This movie also made me think of The Blob, another shapeless monster that critics tend to dislike.  The film had a decent budget for the time and the production values are generally good.  The Stuff isn’t a great movie, but it’s a pretty good one.  The social commentary that it packs is just as relevant now as it was forty years ago.  It’s a satire worth seeing.

Humanity Wrought

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“What hath God wrought?”  So the first telegraph message read.  There was a wonderment and fear of technology in 1844.  Although at today’s rate of change, to us tech seemed to crawl back then, but it was changing rapidly.  What strikes me as I think about AI is that we’ve lost our humility.  “What hath humans wrought?” is the new motto, and one that presumes it can only be good.  How easily we forget Thoreau, even as we valorize him.  He feared that machines would end humanity, and in a way they have.  Fearing that trains would mean that schedules would be determined by clocks rather than human lives, he understood something that we’re still missing.  He feared trains would make humans in their own image.  And so they did.  We live by a 9-2-5 schedule, no matter how dehumanizing.

“What hath God wrought?”  With confident, angry atheists telling us there is no god, and that there is nothing more amazing than human intellect, we now see what we’ve wrought.  Many people object to AI.  They don’t want their power centers in their neighborhoods.  They don’t want the cost of electricity to rise just so Silicon Valley technocrats can get richer.  They know that as wildfires burn American cities, huge amounts of water are required for running data centers.  Even Three Mile Island is being restarted to help supply the electrical power they require.  Protest as loudly as you can, it will not stop them.  God is no longer in the equation.  God has left the building.  This is the age of humanity.  No, a very small segment of humanity.  A segment that thinks it’s god.

Technology is good if it serves to make our situation better.  AI is now starting, according to the New York Times, to both lie and cheat.  It is made in the image of humans, so of course it does.  Look at the White House and try to protest.  No longer does the imago dei hold any meaning.   We no longer aspire to that image of God in which we once could see reflected in our better natures.  No; we can so we do.  Even as Frankenstein keeps lumbering back to the screen, and new versions roll off the presses, we simply don’t get the message.  We have no time to stop and glance—no, stare—out over Walden Pond for hours at a time.  We must work so that our fellow humans can be put out of work.  What hath humanity wrought?

Nextdoor

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Eight years we’ve been in this house.  In that time the only neighbor’s name we knew was the guy who owned the house immediately next door.  He bought the house only a couple of months before we bought ours.  We were sad to see him move out over the winter, but when I saw new folks milling about in the spring I went over and introduced myself.  Thankfully, they’re nice folks.  While I was talking to them a neighbor across the street who’d seen me hundreds of times without a word called out and introduced herself to them as well.  She didn’t ask my name and apparently didn’t feel the need to know it.  She did say that she grew up in the house on the other side of ours.

That is the house we see from all our south-facing windows.  Four different sets of people have lived there in eight years.  Only the second set ever told us their names and talked with us.  To be fair, it is a rental property, owned by the real estate agent who sold us this house.  All day long at work I can see the tenants coming and going.  A married couple maybe a decade younger than us was there first.  Then a couple in their twenties/thirties—the friendly ones.  Then another couple with a couple of kids.  From overheard observations I gathered he worked in recruitment for Binghamton University (where my daughter went) and Rutgers (the last school at which I taught).  We have both Binghamton and Rutgers swag, but that never spurred any interest on their part.  Now I can’t figure out the renters.  They look like students to me, maybe from nearby Lehigh University.  There’s two men and two women (I think) but they never act like couples.  Who knows?

The other day I was out fighting the weeds when another neighbor across the street was outside.  She asked my name and this led to a conversation and learning, after all these years, hers and her husband’s names.  All of this brought to mind something I learned as a candidate for the ministry in the United Methodist Church.  Methodists practice itineracy—bishops move ministers every few years so that a “permanent” minister doesn’t become too settled.  It was then that I learned most congregations (neighborhoods?) don’t really feel comfortable with a minister until after about seven years, I think it was.  Seems like our timing is about right.  For the first time in eight years we know the names of two sets of homeowners in our immediate vicinity.  Welcome to the neighborhood.  

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Scary Scripture

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The question’s not as simple as whether chocolate and peanut butter go together.  What is it with horror and the Bible?  A number of us have explored that question in book form, but probably the most prolific is Brandon R. Grafius.  His Scared by the Bible is a mapping through terrain that will feel foreign to some: if you live for the beach in summer, why would you fly to Antarctica to visit the South Pole instead?  Part of the reason is clearly that the Bible isn’t the rainbow-and-unicorn book that it’s often made out to be.  Some parts—not a few—are pretty scary.  That’s Grafius’ entry point into how horror and the Bible are surprisingly compatible.  Interestingly, we had similar starts down this path.  A Bible given to us by a grandmother when we were a child, and the determination to read it.  My world was a bit more hellfire and brimstone than Grafius’ but we’ve ended up near the same place.

Often I thought, as I was reading it, “Are people going to get both these references?” (i.e., both the biblical story and the horror movie being cited).  After all, many Christian denominations still teach that horror is not helpful at best, and satanic at worst.  I just wonder how many of us there are who never found watching horror a spiritual problem.  I grew up thinking about death a lot.  Part of this was because Evangelical children’s literature raised the question of where would you spend eternity if you died today.  Seriously, some of the stories I read, along with Dick and Jane, still scare me today.  Religion often uses fear for its own purposes.  So does the Bible.  Grafius comes down to this at the end, asking if it’s intentional on the Bible’s part.

It seems to me that this is an important question to explore.  Religion has been weaponized through fear since at least the Reagan years.  More recently it has been aimed specifically at us “evil” liberals and our “culture of death” even as conservatives rain bombs on Iran.  We desperately need to understand religion’s now very intentional use of fear to retain power.  People are afraid.  They have reason to be.  Generally it’s not the emotional issues politicians hand-pick to garner votes.  Yes, the Bible is a source of fear.  Horror films are often also a source of scary thoughts.  They do have a lot in common.  We just need someone to come along with an open jar of peanut butter to run into someone eating a chocolate bar.

250 Years

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America doesn’t seem to be in a partying mood.  With more than the usual inanity coming from Foggy Bottom, and hot air being added to this heat dome, well, it might just be best to keep it simple.  Algae will grow, no matter what the self-appointed-divine say.  I remember a half century ago.  America seemed optimistic at its bicentennial.  Nixon was safely gone and Reagan hadn’t reared his fanged head yet.  It seemed like the country had a future.  These days, with more than regressive rhetoric, when emails from the Social Security Administration go out of their way to say how great Trump is, well, I think I’ll just stay home and watch a horror movie.  It’s less traumatic.

For me, as a kid, the Fourth of July was all about sparklers, black snakes, smoke bombs, and staying up late for fireworks.  Black snakes were these black discs about the size of a button coin battery that you lit with a match and the ash would fizz out the top into a “snake.”  It was an ephemeral thrill.  What we called “smoke bombs” were small colorful spheres that gushed colored smoke when you lit them.  We never played with anything explosive, but even the thought of these simple pleasures still brings a smile.  I haven’t seen anything like these trinkets (except sparklers) for many decades now.  I see from YouTube that they’re still being sold.  Almost as if the past fifty years never happened.  And staying up late to see fireworks only means being excessively sleepy at work on Monday morning.

I won’t be around for the tricentennial, presuming we survive what the Republican Party has up its sleeves.  I do hope things are more optimistic then.  I’ve been around long enough to notice the distinct difference in national outlook a mere fifty years can make.  I was born less than twenty years after the Second World War when everyone knew fascists were an evil to be avoided.  In just the last decade that has done a 180.  And we see what it’s like.  Our grocery bills are double what they were before our fearless leader took his post, claiming to make things better.  If I’m to believe the propaganda from the Social Security Administration things would be just rosy, could I afford to retire.  So our social experiment in democracy seems to have lasted only about two-hundred and fifty years.  Hopefully in another fifty what’s left of the United States will have come back to its senses or will have come up with something better than we have today.

Remembering Downtown

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Monroeville Mall.  Even those who’ve never been to Pittsburgh may recognize it as the site of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead.  I have to confess that, although living in Pittsburgh for a little while I never got there myself.  It has nevertheless been a pilgrimage site for fans of the movie, but, according to the New York Times, the mall has been purchased by Walmart.  Their plans?  Tear it down.  No empathy.  No sense of decorum.  Just cheap prices and sub-par goods.  I recently had to go to a Walmart.  It had literally been perhaps a decade since I entered one.  I dislike their business practices and they have ruined many a small town downtown area as well as many a mall.  In fact, the one I’d be in prior to this recent trip was the store located in Seneca, Pennsylvania.

Across from that giant Walmart stands the husk of the once trendy Cranberry Mall.  Not far away is the struggling downtown of Oil City.  My aging mother lived in Seneca—had once worked in the mall—but getting down the hill into Oil City was more difficult than nipping over to the super Walmart for groceries or other necessities.  Prices were cheap and she wasn’t flush with cash.    The same applied to many of her neighbors.  Walmart exploits such situations, becoming the only show in town.  Mom and pop stores can’t compete with their prices.  Malls, although many affluent specimens still exist, have struggled in working-class areas.  They served for more than shopping, however.  They were meeting places.  They too contributed to the troubles downtown.

Monroeville Mall never went upscale enough to survive.  Ironically, it was the message that shopping had become a source of meaning that was critiqued by Romero’s movie.  It’s that same corporate greed for more and more market share that will be the eventual death-knell of capitalism.  Any system founded on greed is the same thing as “might makes right.”  We’re seeing that in the politics of our own day.  The paradox of this ouroboros will become clear eventually, if our species survives long enough to observe.  We become attached to places.  While not all movie props can be preserved, we’re compelled toward pilgrimage, and Pittsburgh is the home of the modern zombie.  A message that may not always come through in Dawn of the Dead is that all of us are being made into zombies.  Not by some satellite picking up something in space and then returning to earth, but by good old capitalism.

Freedom

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This year has been marked by small clusters of holidays.  I wrote about Friday the 13th, St. Valentine’s Day, and President’s Day occurring the same weekend back in February.  Then in March, I noted we had a second Friday the 13th, the weekend before St. Patrick’s Day.  Here in June we find another cluster as today is Juneteenth—an important holiday finally recognized—and Sunday is both the summer solstice and Father’s Day.  Now, Father’s Day is always a conflicted day for me.  My father was largely absentee, and an alcoholic when present and accounted for.  For many of my childhood years we didn’t know where he was.  I always have difficulty feeling mad at him, though, because his self-sabotage wasn’t malicious in any way.  He was a man overwhelmed by what life threw at him.  Besides, mothers, it seems to me, give a lot more of themselves than fathers do.  But today’s Juneteenth.

Photo by Zulmaury Saavedra on Unsplash

Those with skin darker than pink folk have a more difficult time in the society we’ve built.  With open racism in the White House the struggle has been set back many years.  One thing I sometimes feel personally, having grown up poor, is that disadvantage of any kind is difficult to overcome.  Who, after all, seeks to make friends with someone who’s poor?  What’s the advantage in that?  Sometimes capitalism seems to be the ultimate evil where even people are commodities to be sold.  Human Resources, we call it.  Human capital.  Human assets.  Meanwhile our economic system has birthed us all a new trillionaire just a few days ago.  Juneteenth is an important reminder.  Human beings are not chattels to be bought and sold.  How people who’d ever read the gospels could allow that, I simply can’t fathom.

These holiday clusters occur now and again, like the alignment of the planets along the ecliptic.  They give us time to pause and ponder.  Are we really going the right direction?  Are we lost and unwilling to admit it?  Deep down, all but sociopaths know that all people deserve fair treatment.  Some people are unable to take care of themselves.  Juneteenth reminds us that simply seeing them as some “other,” some “not me,” and steeling ourselves against their needs is a high moral infraction.  It’s close kin to murder.  We are the ones who built this system.  We have the power to change it.  Juneteenth reminds us that anyone who openly, or even discreetly, believes that one race is better than another has no business telling others what to do.  The longest day is coming, if only we’d use it to consider what we’re doing.

Field Hockey

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Friends recommended We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry.  I’m glad they did.  A woman-empowering novel, it ties together so many important things: what it’s like to grow up as a girl, what it means to trust other people, and the importance of believing in yourself.  My experience of reading it as a man at times made me want to apologize for my sex.  So many guys have trouble reining it in and that leads many women to feeling uncomfortable, or even threatened.  The book’s also a great story of awakening to who you really are.  Set in Danvers, Massachusetts in the late 1980s, it’s the tale of the girl’s field hockey team and their “deal with the devil” to win the state championship after being a team having a reputation for losing.  The eleven players on the team are sketched so wonderfully that you get a good idea of that many distinct protagonists.

There is a tie-in with the Salem Witch Trials—much of which actually played out in Danvers.  Although the assumed implication is that the girls begin winning because they’ve made a pact with the darkness, the story doesn’t give it up that easily.  There’s a subtlety at play here and even if you’ve never been on a sports team, the sense of camaraderie is palpable.  The real magic comes in believing in yourself.  Barry is eloquent about such life and how it can change you during the difficult period of adolescence.  I’m always impressed with adult writers who can capture so well what coming-of-age feels like.  For many of us, I expect, there is a trauma associated with it.  Cultural expectations on young women are burdensome in so many ways.  At the same time this story is so well written that you hesitate to put it down.

While I never participated in high school or collegiate sports—I have no particular gifts in that regard—regular readers may find it difficult to believe that I played on the Nashotah House football team for a couple of years.  Lest you get the wrong idea, the seminary played one annual game of flag football against Seabury-Western Seminary in Chicago, styled as conservative vs. liberals.  I was younger, and in better physical shape than many of my students, so I made a team effort for a couple of years.  Still, the team spirit demonstrated in We Ride Upon Sticks is of an altogether different sort.  Fun and thoughtful at the same time.  It’s the kind of book I’m glad to have pointed out to me.