First Principles: Do No Harm

Cute dog photo: the look of love.

Here is how we're living these days. Everywhere, in every village across the U.S.

In a public meeting and again in an OpEd to our local weekly newspaper, our neighbor Mr. Freeman felt justified in throwing the partisan term "cancel culture" at those who have asked him and elected officials to stop harming others with their public speech.

I don't know about you, but I'm tired of such divisiveness. I want us to remember that to enter the polis, or public realm, we do so to find common ground amongst our differences, and to be kind toward and compassionate of our imperfect selves.

When we enter the public realm either as elected officials or participating citizens, we are required to be self-aware, to understand how our personal beliefs and the ways we express them cause harm to others, and to vow to reduce and limit that harm.

Participating in the public realm requires intentionality, welcome, listening, generosity, the ability to ask for as well as to give forgiveness, and, most importantly, a conscious understanding of how harm happens and the desire to do no harm. 

There can be no single holders of "truth" in the public realm: as the German-Jewish philosopher of the Holocaust Hannah Arendt noted, "truth" is something we build between each other and our differences.

Those who believe they are holders of a single "truth" are playing god in a way that lacks humility and causes harm to those not like themselves. It is no one's place to judge in a way that holds anyone else in a less equal place.

We are united and graced by the same animating spirit of this world. This shared spirit is the foundation on which our public speech and actions must rest. All humans, regardless of the color of their skin, their gender, or whom they love are sacred and worthy of sacrament and justice.

As a proud and lifelong queer person, I've personally experienced the deep and lasting harm caused by speech that dehumanizes me by saying I am not worthy of certain basic rights. For my survival, I've learned to question whether my and others' humanity is equitably served by those who proudly profess beliefs that discriminate against us.

Mr. Freeman wants the right to proclaim his own "Biblical truth" not just in his church or home but in the public square. Yet this highly personal reading of the Bible judges that I and others are not worthy of the human dignity of equal access to the rights, benefits and sacrament of marriage. This speech, repeated again in Mr. Freeman's OpEd, dehumanizes queer people and causes harm: harm he does not intend, but of which he must become aware.

Dehumanizing Black and Indigenous peoples as "animals" and "savages" unworthy of the rights of literacy, marriage, property ownership, etc. is how U.S. white culture has justified and implemented centuries of genocide, enslavement, and mass incarceration.

Dehumanizing speech includes that some are “sinners” to be saved by others, and leads to bullying, harassment, and sometimes death. Queer people are followed, bullied, beaten up, thrown off bridges, tied to fences. We've been kept from our sick and dying loved ones because we cannot marry. We've been kept from jobs or the health care we need because of how we look or who we love.

The division of church and state structured into our public realm is crucial in a world in which some religions encourage their participants to be the judge and jury over others, rather than to live in the fullness of a grace that unites the living world.

Public officials are asked to resign when the people they represent no longer trust they can uphold the common good.

Simply saying "I'm sorry" for patterns of behavior are not enough for those who have been harmed to believe we will not continue to be harmed. We must hear that the people representing us understand how harm is caused, and clearly state that not only will they discontinue such speech into the future but also evaluate their decisions to be sure they treat everyone equally. 

Requests for resignation could and should prompt opportunities for listening, meaningful dialogue and forgiveness. Unfortunately, too often such calls only generate defensiveness and partisan rhetoric, which in turn limit learning and understanding.

Asking for the resignation of a public official is not "cancelling" or condemning them. It is an action that speaks to the seriousness of the harm, all the past harm, and the potential for future harm; and is made to generate and make visible real understanding of what must be forgiven.

As a practicing Catholic I am fully aware of the serious limitations and imperfections of religious institutions. I am also aware of the power of grace to unite us beyond the individual readings of scripture and actions that are used to divide us.

It seems to me that rather than a single "Biblical truth" we are better served by acting on the larger values embodied by the Christ, Buddha, Allah, and other spiritual teachers.

Love everyone. Actively seek justice and mercy. Ask for forgiveness. Do no harm.

#truth

#religion

#sacraments

#donoharm

Look with the Heart

"One must look with the heart for the eyes are blind."

This is composer Maia Aprahamian's grand finale to her children's opera version of Saint-Exupery's classic novel, "The Little Prince." I hope you had the opportunity to read it in junior high school French class, as did I! This story with its small royalty from a tiny distant star, roses, snake, and endearingly knowing fennec fox is a magical tale that helps us to know there is much more to this world than the grim realities with which we are daily presented.

Bagaduce Music's concert of Maia's music from its archives Thursday night at Edgewood Farm vividly returned Maia's smile and joie de vivre to my heart and mind.

Composer Maia Aprahamian in 2009 in the
Deer Isle-Stonington School.

Her bright blue eyes twinkled as she created a new musical work, glittered in school as she rigorously supported students in crafting lyrics and musical motifs. It was my great pleasure to work with her, accompanying her into our schools for two years during the creation of Opera House Arts' commission of her chamber opera version of Robert McCloskey's island classic, "Burt Dow, Deep Water Man." 

Maia, an active member of the Greek Orthodox Church, exemplified this observation from the writer Julia Cameron:

"We are, each of us, more than we seem, more than the sum of our merely human components. There is a divine spark animating each of us, and that divine spark also animates our art."

It surely animated Maia's art.

Thursday evening's concert of Maia's "Little's" was a presentation of excerpts from three of her full-length works written with and/or for children and their families: The Little Prince, The Little Engine that Could, and The Little Match Girl.

Maia recognized the community power behind each of these three classic tales, from the hard-working optimism of the Little Engine who can do new things not previously tried to the critiques of oppressive adult society painted enchantingly and everlastingly by Saint-Exupery's and Anderson's fables.

A member of Stonington's Whitman family, Maia took back her original Armenian family name of Aprahamian. She, like we as founders of Opera House Arts (OHA), had a strong passion for presenting complex performances to be enjoyed by children alongside the adults in their families; i.e., music and theater and vaudeville and dance complicated enough to be enjoyed by all generations together. Together and with the Whitman family's enduring support, we created the Live for $5 Series at OHA to weekly fulfill this mission and to ensure that children as well as adults had access to the highest quality and most diverse performance forms. I remember the lunch at Lily's Cafe in which we talked through this concept of wanting to give young audiences something greater than the live performances to which they generally had access. Artists such as Avner the Eccentric or the playwright Mike Gorman's absurdist Biffing Mussels or Headlong Dance Theater were just a few of those who have graced the Live for $5 stage. 

Biffing Mussels in Live for $5 on stage at
the Stonington Opera House, featuring
community cast with Tommy Piper and
Melody Bates, seated.

Music can help us carry with us in perpetuity our visceral understanding that we are but tiny specks in a grand universe, the mystery of which only our imaginations can conceive and express through art. When we leave the theater humming, or singing together the final refrain, we have taken that mystery and magic into our hearts where, like the little prince's rose, they must be watered and cared for. For as the fox told the prince, "Anything essential is invisible to the eyes."

Or as Maia wrote, and the audience sang along with Thursday's wonderful singers under the direction of music director Peter Szep in full, four-part harmony to close the concert:

One must look with the heart, for the eyes are blind

One must seek with the heart, for the heart to find

For the eyes of the heart give vision to the reason

And the ears of the heart give music to the mind

One must look with the heart, for the eyes are blind.

Live Long and Prosper: the Power of Performance

Dr. Ruth E. Grauert -- otherwise known to her familiars as Reg -- was a choreographer, lighting designer, production stage manager, dance critic and, with her life partner Frances Reid, founder of Bearnstow, a camp on Parker Pond in Mt. Vernon, Maine.

Reg lived to be 101, passing away just a year ago on May 20, 2020.

You can watch and be inspired by her dancing at age 100 here.

Reg and her legacy bear strong witness to the power of performance in our lives.

I'm sad and embarrassed to admit that, despite our firm commitment to contemporary dance for 17 years at Opera House Arts, we were too busy to experience this place, and her, in Reg's lifetime.

Thanks, however, to an invitation from my Maine performing arts colleague Laura Faure, I had the amazing good fortune to visit Bearnstow a week ago. The camp had finished its sessions for area students in July, and was between workshops for adults with two dancers I much admire: Clair Porter on "Writing and Moving" and K.J. Holmes on "Combining Disciplines for Creative Performance."

Of the 17 people at the camp during my visit, several had been engaged with Bearnstow for many years. Two in particular captured my imagination: a woman, first brought to camp by her mother in the 1970's, on her annual stay with her own two kids; and the great human, dancer, and choreographer Bebe Miller, chair of the Bearnstow board -- who had also grown up there beginning in the late 1950's when her mother was the camp nurse from Red Hook, Brooklyn. 

I found the depth of the connections between these two, their families, and Reg and Bearnstow to be very moving. Like the long lives of the loons that proliferate on the camp's lake, the place's long history creates a rich humous, many layers of smells and vitality and creativity that hum with fertility through the buildings and the paths between them.

The place itself is, as one of the generational attendees noted, remarkable for its stillness. Like many traditional Maine sporting camps, as an example of which it is on the National Register of Historic Places, it is a congregation of small wooden cabins along a densely forested lake shore. From the water, the cabins are barely visible through the spruce woods that, as Bebe remembers, once mixed with many birch, the decaying white-skinned remnants of which line the pathways and litter the forest floor.

In contrast to this long steady stillness of purpose and being, the mainstream White U.S. culture that is my own heritage is so much about change, the "melting pot" that is Whiteness: about letting go of connections to one's past, one's language, and even one's ancestors. I've experienced this phenomenon as an adopted child working to piece together family histories of first generation grandparents and parents. So much is lost; the dirt beneath our feet unnecessarily thin.

But this land's native peoples, and those who were brought here as enslaved labor, know and acknowledge the power of ancestors. We gain depth when we know and love our roots, when we pay tribute to all those who made it possible for us to be here to create the newness we each create. We wouldn't be here without these ancestors and places, and how much more delightful to gratefully know and honor their stories and lives that we may, from the layers of accruing soil, create more complex and meaningful art and lives ourselves?

Reg's long life and the legacy she has left make all this visible -- she indeed lived long and prospered -- for those who wish to see with our hearts as well as our eyes.

Laura, Bebe, Molly, Alison, Peter and others are working to build on and to extend this legacy into the future, so we, too, as well as those who follow us may experience the deep, generous creativity that is Bearnstow Camp.

To learn more about Bearnstow and Reg, check out the Bearnstow Journal. Most recently, Maine journalist Bob Keyes wrote a great article on the camp in the Portland Press Herald.

#dance

#liveperformance

#bearnstow

#mainecamps

ICYMI: data on Republican fiscal policy

 ICYMI, especially my Republican friends and fam: tax cuts and private investment are not the only keys to economic growth. In fact, since Reagan launched his assault in 1980 on government's role in balancing capitalist greed, these types of economic policies have been only the keys to increased deficits -- you know how much of a hole the Reagan, Bush, and Trump administrations left the economy, right? -- and increased inequality, i.e., the rise of the 1%.

The facts are that Biden's American Rescue Plan is doing its job. Not only is the economy booming, with unprecedented job growth in July (unemployment is now at 5.4%), but salaries are 4% higher. This is crucial as we should be ashamed to admit that our nation has been home for too long to many F/T, over-employed workers whose wages do not put them above the poverty line.

The new infrastructure bill -- finally passed, after much yapping and no action during the Trump admin -- is projected to create another 3 million jobs over the next 10 years. Not to mention give us better, more cost-affordable, and more universal high speed internet access, repaired roads and bridges, and more environmentally friendly technologies.

This is what government can and should be doing for us: balancing individual and corporate greed with the common good in order to increase prosperity for all -- just as FDR's and Eisenhower's administrations did during and after the Great Depression and WWII. Unregulated capitalism fails everyone but the 1%. Let's hope an increasing number of Republicans stop being obstructionists and continue to get on board with these facts and sense of common purpose to serve.

#PayAttention

#VoteSmart

#commongood

h/t Heather Cox Richardson for data

Mary of the Fishes, and Family Vacations: Part I

Mary of the Fishes
Eastport, ME 1955

My maternal grandmother Marie Elizabeth Urban Endrich -- known to all as Mary, to me as the Gram who taught me how to read and write when I was three years old -- was born in 1898 on the southwest corner of Tompkins Square Park in the East Village of NYC.

It wasn't the hip village of the musical "Rent" then -- the one in which I came of age as a young adult working at the #Village Voice from 1985 - 1998.

Yet it WAS "La Vie Boheme" quite literally in regard to my great grandparents, Frantisek Urban and Aloisie Herel, who landed (separately, before meeting and marrying two years later) on the Lower East Side, along with thousands of other immigrants from Eastern Europe and beyond, fresh off the boats from Bohemia in 1892.

Mary and her two older brothers, Joseph and Frantisek, Jr., were born in that Avenue A apartment. They grew up speaking Bohemian. Frantisek was a butcher in the city. At some point, between a trip back to Czechoslovakia in 1900 and the birth of their fourth child there, Rudolf, and the 1910 census they relocated to Killingworth, CT and became a farming family on their own small farm.

These photos were taken on a family vacation to #Eastport, #Maine in 1955 and collected into a tiny paper photo album.

Mary and Richard

ALL vacations were family vacations throughout my own growing up: we never went anywhere -- Vermont, Maine, the Catskills -- without my grandmothers, all of us packed into a tiny Scottie travel trailer like so many sardines in a tin can, we children swinging in red cotton hammocks with our noses pressed against the metal ceiling, living our post-WWII best lives.

Mary and Aunt Jody

My uncle Richie, my mother's older brother, and his wife Jody took both his parents with him on many vacations -- such as this one to Eastport, on which my unmarried mother, Mae or more familiarly "Maisie," also accompanied them; as well as all the way across country by car to California a couple of years later, after my grandfather's death. 

A bear greeting my Uncle, Aunt, and Grandmother
on their first trip to Yellowstone 1957.

Richie had been previously engaged to a mystery woman of whom, along with her small terrier, I have photos but no name. She broke his heart after his return from serving at Anzio, Italy in WWII. He then married his first cousin once removed, Johanna "Jody" Herel Harris, the granddaughter of his own grandmother's sister and the third consecutive Johanna in her own family tree.

Mary is 57 in these photos -- three years younger than I am now. This is how I remember her looking: 6' tall and well over 200 pounds, with the broad features of her Slavic ancestry in which you can still see "the old country" as it was repeatedly referred to in our family -- and a bipolar lust for life from which we all benefitted and, at times, ran.

Mary Urban Endrich

On the 56th Anniversary of the Voting Rights Act

 Yesterday, August 6, was the 56th anniversary of the signing of the Voting Rights Act.

As historian Heather Cox Richardson notes, we now stand at yet ANOTHER existential crisis in this country over voting rights, and whether it is the individual states or the federal government who gets to decide and to enforce our Constitution and the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments which extended universal suffrage to our Black citizens.

One doesn't need to be much of a student of history to be aware of how White southerners have fought against Black equality for centuries, often using "states rights" as their justification -- including for the Civil War.

During my lifetime and yours, Black Americans have been bloodied, beaten, and killed for registering to vote, voting at all, or demonstrating for the vote. This is not even to mention being murdered while walking, running, or driving.

One doesn't need to be much of a lawyer or Constitutional scholar to understand that the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments gave the federal government the power to enforce implementation of the rights they made explicit for Black Americans -- because the states had already, in the late 19th century, proven that they could find ways, including gerrymandering, to restrict these rights.

Yet over and over again, conservative White institutions -- most recently the Supreme Court lead by Republican John Roberts in the 2013 Shelby County vs. Holder case, and again this year in Brnovich v. DNC -- have stripped away voting rights and protections that ensure equal access to the ballot for those Whites seek to suppress.

White racism not only lives in the U.S., but continues actively to fight to maintain White power through decisions such as these and through current Republican state efforts to restrict voting rights.

The bottom line White Americans continue to resist is that racism is embedded in White dehumanization of Black people in order to have justified their enslavement -- and now their mass incarceration -- for White economic and social benefit.

The American history some of you don't want to learn or acknowledge is that White people committed genocide against native North American civilizations living here sustainably for more than 12,000 years in order to remove them and take their land; and then tortured, murdered, exploited, oppressed, imprisoned, and continue to discriminate against Black people in order to build the White wealth from which we ALL, rich or poor, as White people benefit.

Yours or mine or even our ancestors may not be the hands that held the whips. And still, we own homes and drive cars and get jobs and receive college loans and experience unrestricted rights thanks to a system that privileges our white skin by disadvantaging others.

Once you learn or acknowledge the reality of American history, you are then morally accountable for doing something.

Here are a few, but hardly all!, ideas for ways you can join me in this effort:

* #learnUShistory

* ensure your children and other family members learn history civics, and media literacy, and that all equally benefit from quality public education

* #stoprepublicans, who as a party are seeking to suppress Voting Rights for Black people and others of color

* donate time and/or $ to ensure everyone can and does vote #GOTV

* vote for policies and programs that provide reparations, even in seemingly small ways, for all that has been stolen from people in the making of this nation. These include tax policies that transfer wealth from the 1% to public services for all. Recognize that the amassing of such wealth does not square with the language in our Declaration of Independence or Constitution for democracy

* #acknowledgewhiteprivilege

* #sharethewealth

* #helptheneedy