And it will be with you for the rest of your life
Today I was supposed to have a doctor's appointment I'd waited weeks for, but thanks to our clusterfire insurance I had to reschedule it for July. I've spent the afternoon working instead. Have some links, all political. Someday I will get enough breathing room for thoughtful content here again.
1. I cursed Stephen Miller once. I see that I am going to have to do so again. I wish I thought I could get a rabbinic court to invoke cherem. "In Miller's view of the electoral landscape, the president is winning anytime the country is focused on immigration—polls and bad headlines be damned. (This explains why Miller is, according to Politico, leading an effort within the administration to plan additional crackdowns on immigrants in the months leading up to the midterm elections.)"
2. With memory and irony, George Takei weighs in: "At least during the internment, we remained a family, and I credit that alone for keeping the scars of our unjust imprisonment from deepening on my soul."
3. Today is Juneteenth, which any reasonable country would be celebrating instead of putting more human beings in cages. Annette Gordon-Reed writes about Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson and how admitting the complexity of history does not mean shrugging it off : "Sally Hemings's negotiation with Thomas Jefferson, in a place where the law was on her side on the question of freedom, does not drain a single drop from the evil of slavery. Nor does Thomas Jefferson's willingness to participate in this transaction absolve him of the moral crime of holding people in bondage . . . We see what slavery took from others on the mountain when Madison Hemings says that his siblings were 'measurably happy' as children because they knew they would not be slaves all their lives, and because they were always allowed to be with their mother."
4. My mother who does not reach lightly for Holocaust comparisons started making them when she heard that the parents who may never see their children again were told that the children were just being taken for a quick bath. I still feel really weird scrolling down Facebook and seeing a photograph from Lodz. It's one of Henryk Ross'. I saw it in person last July. "Children talking through fence of central prison on Czarnecki Street prior to deportation, 1940–42." That little ghost-hook. Not my dead, but might they have been?
5. Then again, "just a few seconds of being in the way" (courtesy of![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
brigdh) reminds me of a scene from the 1983 miniseries of Herman Wouk's The Winds of War (1971), where being a righteous Gentile means being a petrified minor bureaucrat clinging obstructively to the forms of diplomacy in the middle of the night on the Polish border, so it's not like I'm immune to the parallels myself. But there is Manzanar also, and the reservation schools, and the children who were not Jefferson's. All homegrown. All the more reason not to repeat them. Some traditions should just drop dead.
1. I cursed Stephen Miller once. I see that I am going to have to do so again. I wish I thought I could get a rabbinic court to invoke cherem. "In Miller's view of the electoral landscape, the president is winning anytime the country is focused on immigration—polls and bad headlines be damned. (This explains why Miller is, according to Politico, leading an effort within the administration to plan additional crackdowns on immigrants in the months leading up to the midterm elections.)"
2. With memory and irony, George Takei weighs in: "At least during the internment, we remained a family, and I credit that alone for keeping the scars of our unjust imprisonment from deepening on my soul."
3. Today is Juneteenth, which any reasonable country would be celebrating instead of putting more human beings in cages. Annette Gordon-Reed writes about Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson and how admitting the complexity of history does not mean shrugging it off : "Sally Hemings's negotiation with Thomas Jefferson, in a place where the law was on her side on the question of freedom, does not drain a single drop from the evil of slavery. Nor does Thomas Jefferson's willingness to participate in this transaction absolve him of the moral crime of holding people in bondage . . . We see what slavery took from others on the mountain when Madison Hemings says that his siblings were 'measurably happy' as children because they knew they would not be slaves all their lives, and because they were always allowed to be with their mother."
4. My mother who does not reach lightly for Holocaust comparisons started making them when she heard that the parents who may never see their children again were told that the children were just being taken for a quick bath. I still feel really weird scrolling down Facebook and seeing a photograph from Lodz. It's one of Henryk Ross'. I saw it in person last July. "Children talking through fence of central prison on Czarnecki Street prior to deportation, 1940–42." That little ghost-hook. Not my dead, but might they have been?
5. Then again, "just a few seconds of being in the way" (courtesy of
brigdh) reminds me of a scene from the 1983 miniseries of Herman Wouk's The Winds of War (1971), where being a righteous Gentile means being a petrified minor bureaucrat clinging obstructively to the forms of diplomacy in the middle of the night on the Polish border, so it's not like I'm immune to the parallels myself. But there is Manzanar also, and the reservation schools, and the children who were not Jefferson's. All homegrown. All the more reason not to repeat them. Some traditions should just drop dead.
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Now I wonder if it's something our daughter knows about. I'll have to ask her when she emerges from her room. She's fifteen, so her knowing or not knowing would say something about the local schools.
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I can't remember if I was ever taught about Juneteenth in school. It's possible because I went to an alternative elementary school that did, in retrospect, a surprising amount of Black and Native American history, but I remember encountering it first in books.
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We do not have network TV, but I am pretty sure the internet can provide if we ask it nicely. Thank you for the pointer!
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Amen.
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I would have forgotten about it this year if not for NPR and DW, but this is me; I managed to forget about July the 4th until, well, today.
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You are still a valid data point!
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May you get the breathing space, and the doctor's appointment - and I hope someone can do something about the current terrible situation over there. :-/
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Thank you. None of these things have happened yet, but I would enjoy all of them.
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I would have been shocked but delighted to have heard that they had, but I still wish them for you (and in the political one, for everyone) some point sooner rather than later. <3
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The fact that people can find moments of happiness in the midst of suffering never makes the suffering okay or absolves the perpetrators. Everyone who participates in separating children from their parents at the border should feel the withering power of a curse for what they're doing.
Someone remarked on Twitter that they sure did manage to build tent cities for imprisoning children in faster than they managed to put up shelters for folks in Puerto Rico after Maria. Guess assuaging suffering can't hold a candle to inflicting it. for some people.
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Thank you.
I can't even write about movies in the state I am currently in. I feel that I am doing nothing but existing and I don't think that is very much use to anyone.
Everyone who participates in separating children from their parents at the border should feel the withering power of a curse for what they're doing.
Amen.
I was asking
Someone remarked on Twitter that they sure did manage to build tent cities for imprisoning children in faster than they managed to put up shelters for folks in Puerto Rico after Maria.
I hadn't made the comparison in my head, but I believe it and I am not surprised and I hate that.