Sunday Morning Reflections: How We Make Meaning and Act Upon It

Continuing my ponderings on what we know, how we know it, what it all means and the choices we make as citizens based on this meaning.

Consider these statistics:

• unemployment was 6.3% when Pres Biden took office
• the Congressional Budget Office calculated it would take until the end of 2023 to get to 4.6%
• we hit 4.6% yesterday after adding 531,000 new jobs in October

Markets are man-made. They don't have a life of their own. Government policy steers them and, in the best nations, helps to protect its citizens from being chewed up by the greed of uncontrolled markets.

Thus my favorite quote from the past few days:

“Bold fiscal policy works,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen wrote on Twitter. “A rebound like this was never a foregone conclusion. When our administration took office back in January, there was a real risk that our economy was going to slip into a prolonged recession. Now our recovery is outpacing other wealthy nations’.”

Remember that when Republicans decry interventions such as the American Rescue Plan, the Build Back Better Plan, and vaccine mandates as "socialism" they are really saying: do not redistribute our wealth! We are entitled to being the 2% who control 16x as much wealth is 50% of all Americans!

Worse, Republicans' labeling of government interventions and protections on behalf of 98% of all Americans has racist roots. It began post reconstruction in the south as a way to deny that Black citizens and poor white workers should have the vote and create public services that would benefit them and all. (historical fact h/t Heather Cox Richardson)

The greatest eras of prosperity in this nation were created by Democrat AND Republican presidents in the period spanning FDR to Johnson. This broader-based prosperity was largely the result of government policies and programs.

Don't let the rich folx of any party fool you. Smart government fiscal, treasury, AND legislative policy is what builds prosperity beyond Wall Street (89% of whose stocks are owned by the 10% of wealthiest Americans, BTW). The stock market won't save us. But good government might.

And late breaking news related to this: check out this very cool "Cognitive Bias Codex"! https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Cognitive_bias_codex_en.svg?utm_campaign=Recomendo&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Revue%20newsletter

And this! the economy is getting better, why do we think it is getting worse?! https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/06/upshot/inflation-psychology-economy.html?campaign_id=2&emc=edit_th_20211107&instance_id=44834&nl=todaysheadlines&regi_id=63630&segment_id=73779&user_id=7abe35e910d636e32eee15d3dcaa3063

#protectvotingrights for all today.

#VoteSmart

#knowhistory

#LearnFacts 

The Amazing Life, Legacy, and Inspiration of dee Clarke

On Monday morning November 1, I received a call from a fellow member of the board of SurvivorSpeakUSA. I was in a meeting and the message was merely to call back.

By noon I'd learned that my artistic partner, friend, and mentor dee Clarke, the founder of SurvivorSpeak, had passed away the previous evening.

I have been unable to speak since then. While all life is temporary and I believe death is merely a passage of the soul between different forms -- it is still a blow to the gut when a dear friend and fiercely burning bright star has flown too soon.

As well documented in today's obituary, dee was not only righteous and fierce: she was a person of great great heart. Softness as well as steel.

She moved me, she changed me, she made me feel I had a compatriot in this world. With dee, our belief that we CAN intersect our work as artists and activists meaningfully, with purpose, to continuously make this world better for those with the least among us was made real and tangible.

dee knew in her bones and blood that the lives of BIPOC girls and women are still predominantly invisible to the great chewing engine of white dominant culture. She entered this fray and did not get spit out -- rather, she made a difference to many. Yes, through her legacy of legislation and her amazing personal story and memory-play, THE LAST GIRL: and perhaps most importantly with great kindness and love and caring for the immediate, real, too-often-dismissed needs of individual women and others experiencing poverty, sexual abuse, violence, trafficking, homelessness and mental illness. She worked every day to put the last girls first, so we end the chain of creating forgotten women. We can all join the nonprofit she founded and led, Survivor Speak USA, in putting The Last Girl First.

“She was a person who very powerfully put her love of survivors, of black and brown folks, of poor people into action. She did that more graciously and warmly than anyone I have ever met,” [Cait] Vaughan, [chair of the board of SSUSA] said. “Part of what drew some folks to her was that she was authentically herself. No matter how much she achieved since she became a recovered person and advocate, she was always able to stay very grounded in who her people were and where she came from. She spoke to everyone directly from the heart.”

Exactly one week before she died, we travelled down to Portland to attend, with dee, a wonderful play at Mad Horse Theatre Company. She had accepted my invitation, aligned with our work together on THE LAST GIRL, and while it was challenging for her to get around, with the able support of one of her caretakers, Amanda, we attended. When we got her and her oxygen settled in the front row, I bent over to show her my jacket. It is an old purple suede thing from my days in NYC long ago. Her eyes widened as she touched it. "I wore it for you," I said, referring to the role a shoplifted purple suede holds at the beginning of dee's play. She chuckled. "I like it," she said. And then she looked me right in the eye. "You and I would have been trouble makers together."

Yes, dee, yes. Making good trouble in the best sense of John Lewis's term -- plus some regular old fun and mischief as well. I will keep making trouble in your name. In peace, love, and strength -- fly on, sister. Fly on.

We Need An Education President, Part 1: Equitable Education and the $#%&^! Debt Ceiling

 A "debt ceiling" is exactly that: payments of PAST DEBT. During the four years of the Trump administration, the Republicans increased our national deficit by $7.8 TRILLION dollars. Now they don't want to raise the debt ceiling in order to pay for the debt they created. This has occurred with every Republican administration since Reagan, for 40 years, because you can't cut taxes and increase military spending. That's called "voodoo economics."

Yet people continue to vote for Republican policy that just doesn't make sense, in large part because we have a severe education/class gap in this country and, as many of our predecessors knew, excellent education is the foundation of a thriving democracy. We currently have neither.

We have unfortunately allowed an "excellent education" to be defined by attending college, and then not providing sufficient government support to do so -- thus the education/class gap.

But the truth is an "excellent education" doesn't require college. It does, however, require strong high school education in the foundations of citizenship: critical thinking, media literacy, history, civics, a passion for lifelong learning, creative and practical problem solving -- all of which can and should be taught in high schools.

Yet because we've allowed public education to be dictated by property taxes, we've created a class gap here as well, with students from wealthier districts graduating with more proficiencies than those from poorer districts and, in general, high schools forfeiting their educational mandate to colleges.

We need an education President and educational leadership. Education is the #1 requirement for strong economies, communities, and nations and to end disinformation campaigns and decrease partisanship.

The U.S. legacy is one of militancy: we spend 3.3% of our GDP, more than the total of the 11 next countries including China, Germany, Russia, Great Britain and South Korea, on our military.

It is past time to shift some of this money to where it will make a real difference to our national strength: to teachers, curricula, and equitable primary, secondary, and higher education options for all.

Desdemona, Othello, and the Vigilantes of Texas

The last two days of news from Texas have Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" on many a woman's minds.

First, restrict the vote, in particular to ensure the 3 million unregistered voters of color do not have access to the ballot.

Then pass a law encouraging citizens to turn women and health care providers (and Uber drivers!) in for abortion.

Finally, pass another law allowing same citizens to carry guns without permits.

Can you say "white male vigilantes" are in charge in Texas?!

With deep implications for democracy in the rest of this nation.

"The Handmaid's Tale" is, of course, not the only art work depicting the horrors of patriarchy out-of-control -- or the ways misogyny and racism intersect to maintain white male power structures.

Shakespeare had his eye on these dynamics 400 years ago when he wrote "Othello." Paula Vogel amplified this story and gave it even deeper meaning in her 1993 take on it from the women's perspective, "Desdemona, the story of a handkerchief." Most recently and certainly not least, in 2011 eminent author Toni Morrison took on Desdemona's relationship with the African nurse who raised her.

Opera House Arts in Stonington was therefore rather prescient, really, in booking a double bill of "Othello" and "Desdemona, a play about a handkerchief" as part of their 2021 outdoor/pandemic summer season.

Since "Othello" is read in many a high school English Language Arts class, I hope you are familiar with its story of an embittered, resentful White man, Iago, lying and scheming to bring down his heroic Moorish/Black general, Othello, by falsely enraging his jealousy to the point of murdering his own beloved wife, Desdemona.

From left, Ellis Greer as Desdemona, Imani Youngblood as Bianca,
and Esther Williamson as Emilia in  Opera House Arts' 2021
production of Paula Vogel's "Desdemona, a play
about a handkerchief," directed by Julia Sears.
Photo courtesy Opera House Arts.

It's an all-too-classic story, unfortunately, of how the power struggles between men often lead to domestic and sexual violence and the murder of women.

Vogel, an award-winning playwright, correctly determined 30 years ago that the female characters voices needed to be centered and heard: not only Desdemona's, but her servant Emilia's, wife to Iago; and Bianca's, the courtesan lover of competing soldier Cassio. As the play gives them place and power, I was unsurprised to find that play's white male reviewers pretty much universally loathed it.

Yet what Vogel achieves, with excellent direction at OHA by multidisciplinary feminist theater maker Julia Sears, is a searing, funny, and yes, painful expose of women's experiences, relationships, and conversations, unseen by the male gaze in the kitchens and laundry rooms that remain a far cry away from legislative halls.

Vogel portrays youthful love interest Desdemona (Ellis Greer) as the spoiled and entitled princess she historically most likely was -- but also an entrapped woman seeking rebellion by controlling her own sexuality. She is anchored by her working class servant, Emilia (Esther Williamson), who in Vogel's world is able to well and humorously articulate the patriarchal vise in which all three women find themselves. Williamson is particularly masterful in her delivery of her disgust with Desdemona's class-based entitlement, and her analysis of the danger her lady's behavior is creating for them both. As Bianca, Sears' choice of Imani Youngblood to return to OHA in this small but vital role also opened up live musical opportunities that deepened the overall emotional impact of the production.

Vogel, Sears, and these three women provided, for three weeks of August in the woods of Nervous Nellie's on Deer Isle, a sharp and too hidden window into women's experiences behind the scenes of the male dominant culture -- one we desperately need to experience, understand, and listen to if we hope to fight off the violent, controlling, and armed Texas rangers in their wish to remain ascendant.

#maine

#liveperformance

#shakespeare

#othello

#texas

#desdemona

#paulavogel

#abortionrights

The Many Mysteries of Mary

Mary Urban Endrich holding
Linda Louise Nelson
on her first day home.

I've spent a lot of time lately staring at family photos.

Many of these photos are more than 100 years old, taken at the turn of the 20th century. Some pre-date that and traveled here from Bohemia in the late 19th century, or were taken in New York City studios during that same period as boats landed from Bremen and other European ports.

I've started with my grandmother Mary Urban Endrich whom, as you may remember from previous posts, was of great import to me. My parents built their house next door to hers, on a portion of the 15+ acres of Endrich land purchased by her husband, Richard, in 1919 and which she deeded to them.

She was 63 years old in this photo on the day I was first brought to my adopted home from Catholic Charities. This photo, from October 1961, was taken on the back steps -- forever unfinished -- of the house my parents built.

Mary had a large garden that formed the buffer between our house and hers. In this second photo you can see her standing tall amongst zinnias and sunflowers with our 1950's pink ranch in the background. In addition to the flowers, bouquets of which she sold with my toddler "assistance" from a roadside table along the main route running up the Connecticut River between Old Saybrook and Middletown, where I was born; New Britain, where my dad was from; and Hartford, the state capital, Mary also grew squash, cucumbers, corn and tomatoes which fed us all summer and into the fall.

Mary in her garden, Old Saybrook, CT

I am trying to write the myth of who I am. Birthed by a French speaking, 18-year-old daughter of rural Quebecois immigrants, raised by Swedes and Bohemians.

Mary was my primary Bohemian.

"Send the little girl over!" she'd bellow to my mother in her everyday stage voice across the garden and away I'd go down the small hill and along the mowed path on my stubby legs. Especially after the arrival of my brother, also adopted, when I was two and a half, it seems I was at Mary's every day: learning to read, to write, to play her made up game of Stars with paper, pencils, and a breadcrumb, to explore the attic with her, to problem solve, learning to phone home and unlock the door when she went into one of her "states."

Her father, Frantisek, took work as a butcher in the East Village when they first landed in NYC in 1892 but between 1900 and 1910 he was able to buy a farm in Killingworth, CT, and was thereafter recorded in census documents as a self-employed farmer. Mary came by her gardening honestly. You can see that one of the early photos of her in the collage below is posed with two other girls in a cabbage patch!

I was unaware that cameras were popularly available beginning in 1900 when the first Brownie was invented. Every snapshot taken of us as kids was taken on my Mom's Eastman Kodak Brownie, a far cry in the 1960's from the humble box camera my grandmother's family obviously owned once they got to Connecticut.

A Brownie 2 Camera
circa 1910.

And still. These cardboard box cameras, which churned out photos of my young, beautiful, charismatic, energetic grandmother from age 18 through her marriage at 22, cost around $3, the equivalent of $82 today.

Not bad for farmers.

In addition to their existence, the photos expose a sense of prosperity one no longer assumes belongs to farmers at the beginning of the 20th century. In these photos, Mary is decked out in numerous stylish hats, dresses, and lace. Her brothers in high collars and ties, lace curtains as their backdrop.

Who is this Mary? I never saw her in all these hats, never saw her in anything more than simple farm house dresses. Where did the money come from for the Urban's to "buy the farm"? How did she meet my grandfather, Richard, who on his 1917 WWI draft registration card described himself as a ship fitter and seems to have come to Essex, CT from the Bronx to work at the Dauntless Shipyard? Who, in July of 1919, purchased the 15+ acres on the Essex/Old Saybrook town line on which my mother, aunt, and uncle were born and on which I grew up? They married the next year, on November 24, 1920. Richard was 31, 10 years older than Mary.

Richard was gone, of colon cancer, by the time of my arrival. But my uncle Richie, and several of Richard's siblings, all worked at the Pratt-Reed piano works in Ivoryton. No more shipyards.

The many mysteries continue.

The many mysteries of Mary.