Predictions?

After the most unpredictable and devastating year in recent memory, predictions seem far too hard and fanciful to undertake.  I obviously did not foresee anything that rocked these past 12 months, nor can I offer any insights for the 12 months to come.  I just hope things are easier, and that whether or not they're easier we'll be easier on ourselves and each other.  In good times and bad, love and grace goes a long way.

In My Feelings

 

The end of the year usually brings a break from work and school, festive thoughts, and maybe a fun trip.  Of course, the year we've gotten through has been unlike any other.  Maybe you're congratulating yourself for surviving it, defiant that your spirits remain unbroken, or driven about making 2021 great.  I'm a little of all those things.  But, in the interest of self-care, I'm also giving myself space to feel all that needs to be felt in measure of all that happened in 2020.

 

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Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "Mobituaries: Great Lives Worth Reliving," by Mo Rocca.

 

One of the trendiest groups was the Macaronis. True, that name sounds pretty ridiculous today, but think what they’ll say in 250 years about terms like “Mac Daddy” or “Glamma.” The Macaronis earned their name from their grand tours of Italy, where they acquired a taste for Italian pasta, and also for the fashions there. These young men wore towering, ornate wigs. Sometimes they would even balance on top of these wigs a little three-cornered hat, called a chapeau bras, placed so high that it could only be reached with the point of a sword. These outlandish updos were literally the height of fashion. Macaronis naturally received their share of mockery in the London press. The word macaroni even became a synonym for “fashionable,” as in, “Those peacock green breeches are very macaroni, Sir Fopling.” If you’ve ever wondered about the seemingly nonsensical lyrics to the song “Yankee Doodle” (“Stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni”), they refer to this kind of macaroni, not the Kraft kind. A Yankee doodle dandy is a badly dressed American fool, who is being mocked for being so clueless and provincial that he puts a feather in his cap for decoration and thinks he has achieved the high style of the chapeau-wearing Macaronis. (Basically those lyrics are throwing some pretty serious nineteenth-century shade.)

She [Shirley Chisolm] made further news when she visited segregationist candidate George Wallace in the hospital after he’d been shot. Chisholm told Wallace that even though she knew she was taking a political risk, “I wouldn’t want what happened to you to happen to anyone.” Wallace broke out in tears.

Minding Our House (and Senate)

 

Here's a link to a post I wrote about two years ago, about the importance of Congress in our nation's political system.  It seems apt to rerun now, given that we have survived two exhausting presidential elections in the past four years and two particularly bitter Supreme Court confirmations in the past two years.  

But "survived" is a passive verb, when in fact we have given time and attention (and in many people's cases, protest energy and/or social media posts and/or financial contributions) to these things.  Which is wonderful, for a democracy requires an active citizenry.

 

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Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife," by Bart Ehrman.

In short, the ideas of the afterlife that so many billions of people in our world have inherited emerged over a long period of time as people struggled with how this world can be fair and how God or the gods can be just. Death itself cannot be the end of the story. Surely all people will receive what they deserve. But this is not what people always thought. It was a view that Jews and Christians came up with over a long period of time as they tried to explain the injustice of this world and the ultimate triumph of good over evil.

There is no place of eternal punishment in any passage of the entire Old Testament. In fact—and this comes as a surprise to many people—nowhere in the entire Hebrew Bible is there any discussion at all of heaven and hell as places of rewards and punishments for those who have died.

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 Here is an excerpt from a book I recently read, "How to Be an Antiracist," by Ibram X. Kendi.

 

The integrationist strategy—the placing of White and non-White bodies in the same spaces—is thought to cultivate away the barbarism of people of color and the racism of White people. The integrationist strategy expects Black bodies to heal in proximity to Whites who haven’t yet stopped fighting them. After enduring slavery’s violence, Frazier and his brethren had enough. They desired to separate, not from Whites but from White racism. Separation is not always segregation. The antiracist desire to separate from racists is different from the segregationist desire to separate from “inferior” Blacks. 

Whenever Black people voluntarily gather among themselves, integrationists do not see spaces of Black solidarity created to separate Black people from racism. They see spaces of White hate. They do not see spaces of cultural solidarity, of solidarity against racism. They see spaces of segregation against White people. Integrationists do not see these spaces as the movement of Black people toward Black people. Integrationists think about them as a movement away from White people. They then equate that movement away from White people with the White segregationist movement away from Black people. Integrationists equate spaces for the survival of Black bodies with spaces for the survival of White supremacy.

 

2020 Books I've Read

Here are my ratings for the books I read in the past 12 months.  In case you've forgotten, the scale goes like this: 1 - pass, 2 - some good some bad, 3 - recommended, 4 - can't stop raving about it, 5 - fundamentally changed my worldview. 

Please weigh in with recommendations.  If you have been following this list over the years, you see an evolution in greater diversity in authors and topics, although still overwhelmingly non-fiction.  I welcome hearing about must-reads.

 

New Years Resolutions

 

 

Since 2011, I’ve posted my New Year’s resolutions at the end of each year.  It’s a good way to do a year-end check-up and see how I did and what I need to recommit to into the New Year.  So without further ado:

1. Body - run 800 miles, swim 80 miles, lift 160 times, bike 800 miles, eat better.

COVID wrecked my exercise routines so many times in so many ways, mostly by shutting down gyms for months on end.  I made up for missing the pool and weight room by discovering my childhood love for biking, which got newly worked into both my morning workouts and my work commute.  Plus I made the most of the months I could swim and lift.  I’m proud to say that I worked out every day but three this year, almost always first thing in the morning.  My workout tallies for 1/1/20-11/30/20: swam 43.7 mi, ran 802 mi, lifted 157 times, biked 1,793 mi.  Alas, I more than wrecked all that with a typical pandemic “diet.”  Let’s hope the tire around my waist isn’t a lasting reminder of 2020.  Grade: B

 

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Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Book of Gutsy Women: Favourite Stories of Courage and Resilience," by Hillary Rodham Clinton and Chelsea Clinton.

In the male-dominated fields of scholarship and television, people worried that the new project wouldn’t be taken seriously with a woman in charge. Though it had been her study and her idea, Joan [Ganz Cooney] had to sit down and write a list of names of men who could be considered for the job. “I was told that if they chose one of them that I would be number two,” she remembers. “And I said, ‘No, you don’t understand. I won’t be number two.’ It was absolutely what I was born to do, and I knew it.” She successfully overcame the skepticism to become the executive director when Sesame Street premiered on PBS on November 10, 1969.

Sesame Street was a hit with kids and parents alike. The newspapers called her “Saint Joan” and said a miracle had occurred for children, who were learning their ABCs and 1-2-3s with the help of catchy songs and characters like Oscar the Grouch. Chelsea especially loved Big Bird as a little girl, and I loved watching her light up when she learned a new word thanks to Sesame Street. 

Of course, even a beloved show like Sesame Street had its detractors. Six months after it premiered, a state commission in Mississippi voted to ban the show from airing on public television. One of the commission members leaked the story to the New York Times, explaining that “some of the members of the commission were very much opposed to the series because ‘it uses a highly integrated cast of children’ ” and that those members felt that Mississippi was not yet ready for it. Joan called their decision “a tragedy for both the white and black children of Mississippi.” After public outcry, Mississippi was forced to reinstate the show after banning it for twenty-two days.