My Gritty Grandmother's Rooming House

My grandmother by adoption, Signe, immigrated to New Britain CT from Sweden when she was 18 years old in 1916.

She came to help her sister care for her twin girls -- Eva and Valborg. Her sister passed away, and Signe pretty much raised the girls.

She married a fellow Swedish immigrant, Axel Hjalmer, in 1923 and immediately had my dad, Evert Hjalmer, who followed his dad's footsteps and became a machinist. They lived in industrial New Britain, home of Stanley Tools/Works. Machinists were in high demand

They lived in the same area of New Britain their entire lives, all around Walnut Hill Park and the hospital: Hawkins Street, Arch Street, and finally the house in these photos on Prospect St.

Axel died in 1951. My grandmother supported herself by taking in laundry (she had a wringer washer in the basement) and renting rooms to her Swedish "old men." She herself lived in three rooms on the first floor of this house, sharing her kitchen and bath with the two downstairs roomers (I hated them despite their separate entrances). The three upstairs roomers had their own apartments. She lived independently there until one day when she was 85 she sat down on the end of her couch, had a heart attack, and died on my 22nd birthday.

I loved her dearly. She took me to Sweden with her for a month when I was 13, where I met her sister and brother and cousins.

I've visited her former home twice in the last decade. On my first visit, in 2016, the house as shown here in dark brown with the tree out front still looked much the same as it had while I was growing up.

But this last week when I visited much had changed. At first I thought the house had been torn down, as a new parking lot gapes right next to it where once other houses stood. But it is still there: It has been re-sided and the tree torn down, the tiny front yard paved for parking. Throughout my 60+ years this was always a run-down neighborhood and, unlike many parts of New Britain that have gentrified, it is maintaining and perhaps deepening its scruffy character!

This house meant so much to my grandmother, to her gritty life sustaining herself as a single mother and woman and immigrant. I love that she maintained her pride as a woman home owner by running it as a rooming house, and wish it seemed to be a bit better loved these days. But I am glad it remains.

#changeistheonlyconstant

#loveyourancestors

Finding New Havens for MLK Day 2025

We once understood the word "haven" to mean harbor, or port.

A safe haven. A new haven. A port in the storm.

We've navigated through our share of storms recently, both personally and as communities and as a nation. Storms on every level.

My spouse's recent and unexpected brain surgery, from which she is recovering super well. 

The loss of young people in addition to old in our small, rural community.

The return of our nation to a man who embodies selfish, abusive male values antithetical to the well-being and equity of all people, contradicting our own.

Aren't we always looking for havens? And finding them where we least expect them?

This new year of 2025, our new haven has been literally New Haven, CT, on Quinnipiac land, and Yale-New Haven Hospital.

Since we landed here rather than on our intended vacations, and as someone who grew up 25-50 miles down the coast from here, I've been repeating the joke that I never in my life dreamed of vacationing in New Haven!

Growing up during the 1960's and 1970's on Connecticut's eastern Long Island shore, New Haven was never a place one thought to visit.

All U.S. cities were in decline during this period due to "white flight:" the mass exodus of middle class residents from cities thanks to deindustrialization; poor urban planning including the redlining of neighborhoods and lack of investment; and the continued centering of the car in the heart of American suburbanization, which had begun in the 1940's. 

By 1975, New York City was on the brink of bankruptcy. The gritty, small Connecticut cities to its east, including New Haven, were not in much better shape. The redlining was particularly fierce in New Haven. And in 1970, New Haven played host to a series of prosecutions against the Black Panther Party, and related protests, cementing its infamy.

Yet founded in 1638, New Haven was one of the nation's first planned cities in addition to being one of its first settled colonies.

Like so many colonialist communities, it was established as a theocracy. It's centerpiece, Yale University, was established with funding from the former colonial governor of Madras, with funds from the East India Company.

The city became a hub of industrialization thanks to Eli Whitney, who founded not only the cotton gin but also Connecticut's formidable gun manufacturing economy, earning the state one of its first unfortunate nicknames as "The Arsenal of America." Much of Connecticut's considerable wealth, especially in comparison with other New England states, remains based in the military-industrial complex. New Haven is an archetype of American colonialism.

And a place in no way viewed by my parents as a "haven" for their prowling teenager, who nonetheless escaped westward on I-95 for concerts at Toad's Place and New Haven's famous thin crust apizza. The crime. The deterioration. The immigrants newer than themselves, speaking languages not their own.

How odd, then, to unintentionally return here 50 years later.

How odd indeed the way landscape works its way into our bodies early on, becoming a part of our cells and memories in ways I would not have thought possible.

I left this landscape permanently, after a previous departure, in 1982. Yet the gentle, salt marsh strewn coast criss-crossed by railroad tracks and marinas; the mighty sweep of the lower Connecticut River running through the deciduous hardwood forests; and the familiar suburban pathways and landmarks of my ancestors -- Killingworth, New Britain, Middletown, Deep River, Chester, Old Saybrook -- are etched into my fiber.

And at last, against all odds, New Haven has truly become a "new haven" for us.

And So This is Christmas...

One of my favorite, and absolute, truisms is that the human brain requires a minimum of seven times of hearing / seeing / learning something before we really hear or understand or incorporate it.

A priest I admire and follow recently said that the reason we celebrate Christmas is because we need this annual reminder of the hope for who we can and might best be as humans: loving, peaceful, generous, forgiving children.

Because that is really the story of this night, isn't it? That god is born into each of us, that we can incarnate god in how we choose to be.

Perhaps then it is little wonder that we have buried this simple message -- as clear as a bright star drawing us toward it in the sharp cold of a winter sky -- with so many layers of stuff that it is almost completely obscured to many.

We really do have choices in the face of both the hardships and luxuries we encounter.

The Christmas story, and the Advent readings leading up to it, are just one religion's way to remind us that humans are not a priori violent, greedy, self-centered and vengeful even if those traits are the ones we seem to idolize in those we elect as leaders.

These stories exist in every culture and every religion.

And still they are not enough to keep us from putting the false idols of wealth and power first.

They are not enough to keep us from failing to forgive each other and instead seeking vengeance, hurling not only words and rocks but also policies and missiles.

The proof that we are flawed beings is everywhere. We all experience how difficult it is to make the best choices. How tempting it is to want too much, to step on others in our urgent desire to acquire.

What a challenge it is to serve by being last, rather than always trying to be first.

The proof is inscribed in history and across each of our individual hearts.

Christmas offers the x7 reminder of the yearly hope that we can instead recognize the god-nature in all around us, and choose the god-nature in ourselves.

We can return to that baby in the manger in ourselves, and carry that love, peace, generosity, and forgiveness forward into the new year.

Every year a fresh start -- as long as we can find and hear the stories under all with which we've buried them.

Dorothy Day: Living the Beatitudes for All the People

Yesterday was the great Dorothy Day's birthday.

I wonder what she would be thinking of the state of the U.S. today.

Because many of you won't know who Day was -- she was born in NYC in 1897, two years before my own grandmothers -- she was a journalist and Catholic reformer who co-founded the Catholic Worker newspaper and worker movement.

This movement aimed to unite workers and intellectuals in shared activities from farming to education, as well as starting "houses of hospitality" for the urban poor.

She is up for sainthood and has my vote because of her staunch support for the Catholic "preferential option for the poor" social teaching which prioritizes the needs of the most vulnerable in ethical and political decision making.

During her lifetime, Day protested the Vietnam War and was arrested in 1973 in California while demonstrating support for the United Farm Workers and Cesar Chavez.

This country's "christian" culture, largely founded on Calvinist Protestantism, could probably use an injection of thinking and action like that of Day's, which is grounded more in the Beatitudes than in the Commandments.

Today's U.S. culture and economy has continued to evolve through the "robber barons" of the early 20th century (Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Mellon, etc.) to the tech oligarchs of today (Musk, Bezos, Thiel et. al.).

In channeling this Dorothy, I think we will not be well as a nation until we give up our single-minded focus on the accrual of personal wealth and happiness and focus more on the common good -- in our daily choices, actions, and public policies.

"Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me." (Matthew 25:40)

A necessary saint for our times. Remembering Dorothy Day on her birthday.

Minority Report

The dogs appeared to be fairly alarmed Tuesday evening, no doubt from our energy, and uncharacteristically huddled up together...

I am no stranger to feeling in the minority but this week is a good reminder to us all that it is not a good feeling and therefore one no one should have.

As I arrived home from work yesterday afternoon, two sheriff's deputies SUV's, blue lights and sirens screaming, rocketed down the island past our house. Shortly thereafter, a pickup truck came out of nowhere up to my bumper then raced past, cutting aggressively close to my vehicle.

These are both ordinary events in our rural world. But I am jumpy. It's not grief I feel as much as dread: the feeling you have in waking from sleep that something bad has happened and your life is forever changed.

I went through years of physical harassment and discrimination in my youth for being a queer woman, and have been grateful for the progress we've made that made such experiences not gone but more rare as I've grown older.

Baby dyke at 14 in 1975, in the chair where I 
devoured Jill Johnston's Lesbian Nation.

Yet I can feel that again: that uneasy, insecure sense one has when one is forced to recognize their minority status. The feeling, and oppression, our citizens of color as well as women and queer people have always had and continue to confront. The privileges of my education and skin color have granted me a bit of a pass for the past couple of decades, for which I am grateful.

None of us should ever feel threatened by being in the minority -- including those who "took back" the country with this week's election.

In many ways, it is a "taking back:" a grab for power made ugly by language and action by people who our culture has made to feel insecure -- predominantly white men but others who hope to rise to the top, too. The white European culture on which this continent was colonized as a nation is one of hierarchy, material wealth, and yes, violent extremism. In this way, this election is a "going back" to the rot at the root for which we as a nation, unlike Germany or South Africa, has never gone through truth and reconciliation.

No one should be made to feel less than others, or threatened for who they are by the power of a majority. That's not the point of truth and reconciliation. It's not about blame. It's about mutual, shared understandings.

We don't need power over each other for everyone to have enough if some don't grab more than their share. But turning around this deep, deep culture -- based on the patriarchal accrual of wealth and power at the expense of others -- is proving difficult to evolve.

It is seductive. We all buy into it. We participate.

To think of "education" as some sort of elitism is a tragic component of all of this, yet we have created this problem, too, by putting education financially out of the reach of too many. We all have helped to create this "elite" by not fighting hard enough to ensure everyone has what they need to participate and to succeed.

Only 37.7% of U.S. citizens has a college education. Yet in 2022, the median earnings for those with a bachelor's degree were a shocking 86% higher than those with a high school diploma, and college degrees have been a de facto requirement for those holding public office and making the policies that impact us all.

So I've been part of a minority all along -- just the one holding power.

We need to listen to those who voted to return Trump to office, and seriously consider their reasons without dismissing anyone.

We can do better.

And as Kamala said so beautifully in her concession speech yesterday afternoon at Howard University: the fight for equity and justice for all continues. It's never been a short fight. It's easy to be exhausted by chaos and fear and we need to re-think, re-create, re-gather for the long haul. We all have accountability, we all have responsibility, we all have a part to play, now and every day.

If you missed Kamala's speech, delivered at Howard University because the young people are those who need our greatest concern, you can listen here: https://youtu.be/d9FVB6-7BN0?si=fOHO5Ic1TtvqJQyl

#newblogpost

#seekequity

#EndThePatriarchy

Things Were Not Better Then, Get Out and Vote

From the family archives: me in yellow, my baby brother (we are both adopted), and my two older cousins (with the oldest devil on his knees to make for not too much height discrepancy!) at this time of year in the mid-1960's.

We tend to romanticize our childhoods. The "things were better then" mode of believing.

I became an American Studies major because of my love for what I believed was the promise offered by this country, a belief I held in spite of many political arguments with my Dad, 5+ political assassinations, numerous racial killings, Wounded Knee, Kent State, no Title IX or other equal rights and protections for women and gay people, and one presidential resignation due to criminal activity all occurring during my childhood.

I have always believed in the as-yet unfulfilled promise of a Constitution which might hold many diverse immigrants together under a rule of law, seeking the most benefit for the most people; a promise that one day might offer reparations to the indigenous people from whom our colonizing ancestors stole this land and the African people they enslaved for profit.

I fell in love with FDR and Eleanor because through their belief in investing in people through the common good of government they pulled this nation from the worst economic depression ever, one suffered through by my teen parents and grandparents, a depression created by those who would seek to inflate profits at the expense of others.

Things weren't "better then" no matter how securely some of us were lucky to be held by our families and our privilege.

We have had to struggle for women and people of all colors to be respected and to have equal rights -- and we are still in the middle of those struggles, as this year's election makes all too clear.

We have had to struggle to counter the violence on which the country was founded, a struggle that continues today in the form of regulations to reduce gun violence.

We have had to struggle to ensure everyone has food on their plate, a secure place to live, and equal access to education, struggles that continue to exist today with our public education structures under fire and corporate profiteering. That we have allowed "real estate" to become a bank for too many -- as if any of us can own this planet -- hurting those with the least among us.

Through it all, I am still that American Studies scholar and lover of this nation. But now we are again afflicted by something that has haunted our entire history -- a type of hateful divisiveness and lust for unchecked power that would we have put to bed generations ago.

You can call it human nature. I like to be more precise, and call it white patriarchal colonialist culture, referencing those who are still trying to keep power and riches to themselves at any cost, spewing hate at anyone not meeting their standards for "who is an american."

We are all Americans, and we are all going to vote.

Please do not say you love me and then vote for people who will remove my rights as a woman or a gay person. Please do not say you support my work and then wonder if a woman is strong enough to be our President.

Please vote for the people who want to welcome those in need in ways that make sense for our communities; for those who want to end, not instigate, violence; for those who believe in government by, for, and of the people; for those who show love and respect for all.

These principles are my American heritage, one of which I remain proud.

And because I #votemyvalues, next week I will be voting for the first woman for President of the U.S.

How about you?

The Depressions of Elections

Every presidential election year I fall into the same hole.

What depresses me is not that an offensive, incompetent man has chosen to run for the highest and most important position in our democracy.

They've been doing that for decades and until we tell them to stop, at the ballot box, they will continue.

It's that almost 50% of the public are willing to support such men, their words, and their behaviors.

Help me out here, friends.

Where have we failed as a country so that, for so many, ethical behavior -- right speech and right action, words and actions that show generosity, empathy, and compassion for others -- no longer matters?

As a people, instead of rising toward an ever more inclusive and caring society that spreads prosperity for all, we degrade ourselves and our children.

As a culture, mainstream white america seems to insist on the cheap. We insist cost is all that matters. We pursue money over quality of life. We reduce life to money. In our myopic focus, we are willing to sacrifice each other and the planet to pursue what we feel entitled to. We do not hold life, including the food we eat, sacred. We will eat whatever cheap food to which our bodies have become addicted, no matter how bad it might be for us, no matter how the creation of this fake food itself is killing our planet.

We are struggling with addictions we do not name and for which we do not care. And still, there remain those who are food insecure.

Fewer and fewer of us go to church to lift ourselves above the daily grind, to help us practice putting others before ourselves. And even for some who do go to church, the "prosperity gospel" encourages those people to put themselves and financial gain above others. Catholic Cardinal Timothy Dolan recently sat beside candidate Trump and laughed while he used profanity to demean others. WTF.

Our families have been broken -- not by women's insistence on working and having our own lives, but on men's inability to handle that and on their subsequent absence. Fact: not enough men show up for their children. This is not a single mother problem. It is an absent men problem.

Our schools can't tell the difference between separation of church and state and values-based education. Teachers are like salmon swimming upstream to their deaths from exhaustion, fighting a battle no one of them individually can win.

Our problems in this country are systemic, and cultural. They are deeply rooted in this nation's violent history and the cultures of our progenitors. When we solve our problems, we do it together, not as individuals.

At the end of the day, how can we convince those who are so afraid -- afraid they will lose the little power they have, afraid of those who do not look like them or speak their language, afraid of what real education might bring to the lives of their children and to the world they will then create, afraid of our own accountability for destruction of the planet -- that if we choose, we have an abundance in which we can hold each other, without exceptions, with tenderness, care, protection?

I am and will always vote for those who know that politics, and good government, are about setting models for behavior. The polis is and always has been a common area in the middle where we come together from our different perspectives to jointly solve our problems. And yes, we are all flawed. We all make mistakes. How we handle those mistakes is a big part of leadership.

We can never each get all that we individually want and we need to stop trying because it is those attempts -- based on a belief each of us is deserving to have life exactly as WE want it -- that are killing us, and our planet.

Leadership is a sacred trust: stop defaming it. Stop cheapening it.

Most of all, stop supporting those who do.

End of October rant. Thank you to those who listened!

The Universe's Light is Always Moving

There are many times the universe sheds light on important matters in unexpected ways.

Our bodies are meant to move, my friend Meg Dellenbaugh, a bodywork and movement therapist, always told me. They are machines geared toward movement, with joints and ligaments the pistons and gears and the heart and lung the engine.

They are not meant to sit in front of desks and screens day and night.

Yet this is the culture we built. And then all of us wonder why we are literally "sick and tired."

At the "cancer cathedral" this week for my partner's penultimate treatment, talking to the doc about fatigue.

She repeated something she has said several times: in order to have energy, you need to fill up the tank. And the way you fill up the tank is to move. It is to condition your body. While this also expends energy, it fills up the tank in a way that is absolutely required.

And so it's a Catch-22, my friends: when in pain - move. When tired - move. This is when it is both most difficult and most necessary.

I think, in the way we have built our culture, that most of us need to be re-conditioned! This is just one of the many reasons why our fishermen do not want to give up their way of life. They move all day, living in their bodies on the water. Is it also destructive of these same bodies? It can be. We wear out. But what the hell are we saving ourselves for?

I am so lucky for the dogs, for long walks every day, for a childhood of sports that taught me to love gyms and bikes and movement.

I hope you are, too. Go out and wear your body out today. Use your body up. That's what it's here for.

#bodymechanics
#movementismedicine
#reconditioning

Cross Creek

Just when we think every square acre of Florida has been developed into an active community for people 55 years of age or older -- which includes myself -- I spot a sign for the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Heritage Park and make a dangerous U-Turn in front of a semi so we can visit.

Do you remember the book-worse-than-Bambi, The Yearling? I do, vividly.

The Yearling, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' best seller, was published in 1938 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1939. My mother Mae was 15. My birth mother, Jeanine, would not be born for another three years.

Rawlings lived in and wrote about Florida's "Big Scrub" -- now the Ocala National Forest, which is filled with longleaf pine sandhills, hammocks of evergreen oaks, and all manner of critters that creep, crawl, and roam through four wilderness areas. Outside of these wilderness areas, the forest has been logged but remains "one of North Florida's last-remaining traces of forested land."

Rawlings wrote, "There is no human habitation—there never has been and probably never will be—in the scrub itself...a vast wall, keeping out the timid and the alien."

Although born in Washington, D.C., the college educated journalist Rawlings fell in love with the Big Scrub, purchased 70 acres of land and a modest house, and moved when she was 32, living there full time for 13 years. She died of a cerebral hemorrhage in St. Augustine, Florida, her home with her second husband, when she was only 57. She was by all accounts a tough, strong willed old broad who kept dogs and gamecocks, went hunting and fishing, and, like all writers, preferred long periods of solitude.

Her writing, much like that of downeast Maine's Ruth Moore, has been castigated (mostly by white men a.k.a. "the dominant culture") as "regional," to which Rawlings retorted that people's lives everywhere and of all kinds have larger meanings than "quaintness."

Here's to rural living, rural writing, women writing, and the preservation of the wild places on our planet.

#bigscrub

#ruralflorida

#mywritinglife

Ethical Storytelling, Ethical Living: Give Us More

On Friday, January 12 -- just before the entire nation was again plunged into cruel and damaging winter weather, freezing in the Midwest and flooding here, in the Northeast -- I was honored to participate in a panel discussion on Ethical Storytelling. 

Curious about what role ethical storytelling might play in a country in which the leading Republican candidate for President has been proven to consistently lie? Read on.

The discussion was a grand finale to the University of Southern Maine's 10-day winter residency for the Stonecoast Creative Writing MFA program, serving over 50 MFA candidates. The panel was moderated by author David Anthony Durham, many of whose nine novels generously provide us with Black-centered histories of the Civil War, the colonization of the west, etc.; and in addition to me included Chinese-American queer poet Chen Chen and choreopoet scholar and artist Monica Prince.

Chen Chen

I was privileged to be the old white queer on this esteemed panel.

For all four of us, ethical storytelling invites some sort of active response.

The world is always in need of repair, and our writing serves nothing if it ignores that.

David Anthony Durham

Or, as in a quote from author Sigrid Nunez recently sent to me by my beloved, "And Beckett was right; Eloquence about disaster will not do."

I extrapolated my (shared) philosophy of working to improve performance in everyday life through improving our creative crafts -- a philosophy that arises from the discipline of Performance Studies, and was thus at the heart of our mission at Opera House Arts in Stonington. In short: if we better understand and practice the craft of ethical storytelling, the better citizens we become.

Monica Prince

We tell stories about ourselves and others all the time.

It doesn't have to be gossip to be swapping stories on someone.  And especially in our common realm of politics -- the place to which we bring our differences to create solutions to shared problems, such as climate change -- how can we practice a set of ethics that do no harm?

Because that is indeed my personal definition of ethical storytelling: crafting stories in any form that are not exploitative and do no harm. Stories that do not exploit others' stories; stories that do not exploit your own story; stories that do not exploit strategies, such as gratuitous violence or sex; and perhaps most importantly, stories that do not exploit one's own privilege in attempts to achieve greater fame, wealth, power or control.

As artists throughout the world are aware, perhaps the best way to get to this non-exploitative space is through the craft of listening to one's own voice not in solitude but in the context of others. Of family. Of community.

Honing a craft is a kind of intentionality: we bring our full consciousness to it. What if we considered these four points as we hone our crafts of storytelling, whether on the page or stage or in meetings, classrooms, family discussions?

• Listening 
• Honest response
• Consent
• Accountability

These are actually four practices in the art of improvisation as well -- and really, isn't everything about our lives improvised in response to someone or something else?

The practice of "honest response" exposes my belief that truth and honesty are distinct from each other.

Truth is, as German-Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt so beautifully noted, is created and understood between us. This is why it is so fragile.

Honesty, on the other hand, is the individual practice of creating the truth between us. It has much to do with the intentionality we bring to craft, and a kind of sincerity, an adherence to the facts AS WE KNOW THEM that in turn creates fairness and straightforwardness in our conduct.

And so my four points of ethical storytelling: listen; practice honest response; gain consent; and practice accountability for who you are, what you do, and what your impact is on those around you.

Chen Chen, Monica, and David all amplified these in their own beautiful words as well.

Chen Chen was especially eloquent on the art of deep listening: don't hesitate to check out both of their two poetry volumes. David, who has written a number of historical and fantasy novels, was very interested in how ethical storytelling relates to our actions in the world. And Monica, who practices the art of choreopoetry introduced to the world by Ntozake Shange in her 1975 play, "for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf", caring for each other as we perform is at the heart of the form.

I am very grateful to have had the opportunity to reflect on this vital topic alongside these esteemed colleagues for a group of young writers seeking their MFA's in Creative Writing.

How does ethical storytelling play a role in your own life? #giveusmore

#newblogpost

#ethicalstorytelling

#stonecoast

#stonecoastwriterscenter

#mainewriters

History Has Its Eye on Us -- but WTF is "History"?

Yesterday was the third anniversary of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Congress.

An insurrectionist attempt to overthrow our government, led not by immigrants or wage laborers or formerly enslaved people or foreign terrorists but by the white male President who had just been voted out.

Same guy who almost 50% of the country appears to support for re-election.

I am surprised that this somber "anniversary" was not more well marked -- in the mainstream media, or on social.

As writer and philosopher George Santayana famously wrote, in a quote that bears frequent repetition, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

I worry almost incessantly about our nation's lack of historical education. 

American philosopher and educator John Dewey published Democracy and Education over 100 years ago, in 1916. Yet his thoughts on the critical role of public education in modeling, building and sustaining democratic freedoms remain relevant today. He wrote:

"The superficial explanation is that a government resting upon popular suffrage cannot be successful unless those who elect and who obey their governors are educated. Since a democratic society repudiates the principle of external authority, it must find a substitute in voluntary disposition and interest; these can be created only by education. But there is a deeper explanation. A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience."

We are all equal as learners and learn best together in communities of other interested learners. This is why the U.S. institution of free public education for all -- once unique in the world -- is so entwined with universal suffrage.

If you don't know and you can't learn, your vote is meaningless -- or worse.

With the nation's divisions and acrimony heating up as we careen toward the 2024 election, in few areas is our need to deepen our understandings of the past more critical than in our how we view the institutions and contexts that launched the nation's first -- and we hope only -- Civil War.

Because many of these same dynamics and tensions continue to plague U.S. society.

I was so aware of this in a recent visit to the new International African American Museum in Charleston, SC.

Schools are not the only, nor even, for many, the best learning communities.

Located on Gadsden's Wharf where an estimated 40% of African captives entered this country, this Museum "honors the untold stories of the African American journey at one of our country's most sacred sites:" documenting "a journey that began in Africa centuries ago, and still continues today" -- shaping every aspect of our world.

The Museum surrounds visitors with the African diaspora, immersing you in vivid, side-by-side examples of the ways African cultures are alive in today's U.S. music, art, design, fashion, food, and more. These cultures differ so dramatically from western European cultures that one can sense the tension between them even on the museum floor.

Did you know that white Europeans became the minority population in South Carolina, where the Civil War was launched, as early as 1708?

South Carolina planters' envious duplication of British systems of brutal enslavement to cultivate sugar cane in Barbados created the state's huge reliance on enslaved labor to develop its "Carolina Gold" -- rice -- and thus its enthusiastic participation in the trade of enslaved peoples.

Yet South Carolina's former governor, Nikki Haley, now also a Republican presidential candidate, could not accurately answer a question regarding the causes for the Civil War, nor why her state was the first to secede from the Union.

The story in which the Museum immerses its visitors is one of both triumph AND trauma.

We as white Americans too often don't know or disregard the degree of trauma the enslaved ancestors of today's African-American population endured. And we avert our faces from their continued economic, political, and social oppression. At the same time, we aren't well learned enough about the triumphs of innovation and ingenuity and resistance that helped these same people to survive and to extend the legacy of African cultures into the U.S.

I continue to seek out these voices and experiences in multiple ways. I believe we need to immerse ourselves in understanding the experiences that make up the fierce, jagged mosaic of this nation.

As several of the exhibits noted: despite every effort to annihilate, enslave, and oppress African Americans in the U.S. -- they are STILL HERE. Still determinedly connected to place. Still honoring their ancestors, their ancestry, and the land they have had continuously to fight for.

On the anniversary of January 6, with a Presidential election looming -- I urge you to go, and to take your children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews and students, to the International African American Museum in Charleston. Or to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. Or to read a novel by Jessmyn Ward. Or to watch the award-winning movie, 12 Years A Slave, based on the true story of an African-American man born into freedom who was kidnapped and sold as a slave.

Experience the brutality, the greed, the trauma and denial and triumph on which large parts of U.S. culture -- including Trump's MAGA movement -- are erected.

Educate yourself and others deeply before you vote.

"I think it's important that every institution in this county, every American, take the responsibility of upholding democracy seriously. And everyone needs to be doing everything that they can to ensure that a) Donald Trump does not succeed and b) the MAGA movement is extinguished."

-- Michael Fanone, a Capitol police officer whom the January 6 insurrectionists beat and tasered, causing both a heart attack and traumatic brain injury, quoted in Politico

#january6

#democracy

#africanamericanhistory

#survival

#insurrection

#newblogpost 

Our Great White Whales and the Lighting of the World

It's easy to see why Herman Melville's classic 19th century novel is so widely taught -- even in mostly abbreviated forms for contemporary readers.

The metaphor of the monstrous white whale that is the peg-legged whaling captain's obsession is an allegory on multiple levels for the culture of natural resource extraction and wealth accumulation White male colonizers brought to North America.

The Seaman's Beth-El in New Bedford,
made famous in the 1957 film
Moby Dick, dir. by John Houston

The magnificent mammals remain large in our imaginations, and continue to cause controversy in our waters, where nearly two centuries after the heyday of whaling in 1850 they remain endangered -- and as a culture we continue to play out our guilt and remorse upon their bodies.

I grew up up river from the Mystic Seaport -- home to the whaling ship Charles W. Morgan, the last wooden whaleship in the world -- racing the seine boats used by the harpoon teams. And still, until a recent trip to New Bedford, MA, I never understood the role of the whaling industry in U.S. culture.

Whaling preceded petroleum. It brought "first light" to people for whom the earth's first light was not enough -- unlike North America's east coast indigenous peoples, the Wabanaki and the Wampanoag, who were both named as those who greeted the first light. 

As with petroleum, whale oil made the ship owners wealthy and the whalers themselves not.

As with petroleum, that wealth and the near extinction of a species (sperm whales) was and continues to be fueled by our desire for (literal) "creature comforts."

300,000 whales were hunted by sail in the century roughly spanning the late 1700's to the end of the 19th century. But in the 20th century alone, with the introduction of diesel-powered engines, millions more were killed, with the total estimated at almost 2.9 million by the time international law and treaties ended the international hunts in the 1990's.

Now our nation is scrambling to reverse the damage wrought by the whaling industry.

Now our nation is thinking about ways to slow the damage wrought to our planet by the petroleum industry.

Now we need to think about the ways our demands as consumers for a certain "quality of life" is driving our world to extinction.

New Bedford is just one of many places that can enlighten us.

#newblogpost