Today is the last day of my daughter Claire's 21-day court-ordered quarantine after returning from fighting Ebola in Sierra Leone. I asked her what she would be doing today. She said, oh, the usual. Looking for something to clean. Playing with the cats. Watching TV. Taking her temperature 12 times a day.
Though she also could also go out for a walk or swing by the grocery store. Uh, yes, these two activities are permitted, as are visitors to Claire in her home, provided she writes down their names, including the nurse from the Chicago Department of Public Health who comes by every day at 8 a.m. to record Claire's temperature and ask her if she's having any symptoms. What Claire may not do for one more day is work, take public transportation or enter any public place except for the supermarket where she could theoretically handle every piece of produce in the bins, including all the bagels, doughnuts and loaves of artesian French bread behind the sliding glass doors if she were so disposed, but don't even get me started on the illogic of it all. Anyway, Claire shared with me some highlights of her stint in quarantine : -The first weekend she was home some friends stopped by and brought her and Miguel a "Quarantine Basket" of wines, pasta, olive oil, and other fine fixings. -She cleaned out every closet, drawer, and shelf in the house and filled a car full of stuff for the Salvation Army. - Several times a day she made the cats work out by enticing them with a shoe string then pulling it around the house. - She sent a care package with books, cards and music to the Partners In Health office in Boston. They told her they would give the package to someone who was flying to Sierra Leone with the hopes that they could get it to the Ebola workers still in Kono, the jungle area where Claire was stationed. - One night her card club came over. When I asked Claire what card game they played she told me they like to play Cards Against Humanity. I didn't ask. - One day she washed every pot, pan, and utensil in the house. Even the clean ones. Willingly. - One day she cleaned out the pantry and threw away a boatload of stuff, including some beans she bought three apartments ago dated "best by April 2011." "The very next day," she told me, "Miguel was cooking and needed some beans and here I'd just thrown some out, do you believe that?!" "But Claire," I said, "those beans were 4 years outdated!" She answered, cryptically,"But do beans ever really expire?" - Last weekend Miguel sent out this invite on Facebook: Impromptu Indiana Jones marathon at the Casa de Quarantine. Come join Claire and I as we sit around in sweats and drink too much rum! Ebola protective gear optional! One guest arrived, which was sufficient to make the evening a success. But then, of course, how could an Indiana Jones Marathon not be a success? - Every morning Claire has to take her temperature in the presence of the visiting public health nurse then every evening she's required to take it again and text it to the Health Department. Yesterday her nurse noted that today would be her last day with Claire. "Then I'll be finished with Ebola," the nurse said, "and it'll be on to measles."
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...Continued from yesterday: So, in the fall of 1971 the University of Dayton Appalachia Club was on the verge of losing its home in Magoffin County when Tom, 21 years old and in his senior year of college, cleaned out his savings from his high school paper route and college jobs and for $2400 bought a house with a barn on 30 acres of land about a mile off the road back in a mountain holler called Burton Fork. True, this house was also a bit of a fixer-upper: ...And the outhouse needed to be rebuilt, but the house did have electricity and a well for water. And more importantly, the Appalachia Club was able to continue its community service work in Magoffin County on weekends during the school year, 45 years later the Appalachia Club is still alive and well at the University of Dayton though the club moved from Burton Fork to a new location probably 20 years ago. After Tom's house and barn had stood abandoned for a few years the local authorities asked his permission to burn down what remained of the buildings. Tom gave them permission to do so. In 2012 a local resident offered Tom $9000 for the land and Tom sold it to him. And that's the end of the story. But in our family room hangs a gift I once gave to Tom. It's a picture I had an artist paint from a photograph of that house and barn that Tom bought when he was 21 years old so that a group of beautiful young people could continue reaching out to their brothers and sisters in need. I matted it myself and I made the frame from a piece of wood.
Last Friday night Tom and I went to "Songs of Struggle," a commemoration of the Civil Rights Movement from 1960-1965 (See yesterday's post). We went with another couple, Kevin and Barb, who were friends of Tom's from college but you know how it goes after you're married, over the years your friends and my friends become our friends, right? Though Kevin and Barb live the next suburb over from us we managed to fall out of contact with them after all our children had grown up and it was only when Barb called out of the blue a few weeks ago that we reconnected. And so we invited them to go with us to "Songs of Struggle". To me it came to mind to invite Barb and Kevin to this particular event because I knew that in their day they, like my husband Tom, were part of the body of idealistic, service-minded young people who, coming of age in the half-generation following the early Civil Rights years, yearned to do some good in the world. Kevin, Barb and Tom found their opportunity while they were students at The University of Dayton in the late 1960's and early 1970's. The three met when they joined a campus service club called the Appalachia Club whose members traveled each weekend by van four hours from Dayton, Ohio to the mountains of Eastern Kentucky. At that time parts of Appalachia were plagued by extreme poverty and isolation. During their weekend trips the members of the Appalachia Club worked through an organization called Programs in Appalachia through Christian Effort, or PACE, rehabbing houses, offering arts and crafts classes for the local children, visiting families and experiencing life in the mountain hollers. Then in 1969 the Appalachia Club struck out on its own and moved from Floyd County to Magoffin County outside the town of Salyersville, Kentucky, and it was then that Tom and Kevin began scoping out the possibility of organizing a program for University of Dayton students to spend the summer volunteering in Magoffin County. The program began coming together when a Salyersville man offered to lend the students two houses he owned - or rather, two wooden structures - set back in an isolated holler called 22 Mile Branch for them to live in. As the UD Spring semester ended in April, in May 1970, a month before the 12 students who'd volunteered for that first summer program were to arrive, Tom and Kevin went down to 22 Mile Branch and spent the month making preparations. They laid groundwork in the surrounding community, set up schedules for the classes to be taught and the jobs to be done and spread the word among the local families. But they spent most of their time at 22 Mile Branch making the two structures they'd be living in habitable, one for the boys, one for the girls. Neither building had plumbing or electricity and there were some structural problems as well. All other water, for sponge baths, hand-washed laundry and cleaning, was pumped by hand from a well. When the group arrived such were their living conditions, but these young people dove into their work with enthusiasm and joy. Barb recalled how, though she herself had grown up with little beyond the basic necessities as one of ten children on a farm in Indiana, she'd never seen anything like the subsistence poverty of families living back in the hollers. "We set up a little pre-school-type experience for the children, fun, easy stuff, arts and crafts, a little reading. Like a little Head Start program. There was nothing like that for them at the time." They also ran a day camp, ...started a little league, and became part of the community. I asked Tom what they did for meals, having no refrigeration.
He told me that they'd received copious contributions of dry and canned goods: soup, peanut butter, crackers, spaghetti and sauce, cereal. He told me that every morning at "O Dark Thirty" he would get up and drive to Chester's, the small grocery store in Salyersville, for bacon, eggs, butter and milk for breakfast. Lunch was usually soup or something else from a can. Then at the end of the day Tom would swing by Chester's again for some meat for dinner. Anything perishable that they didn't use would have to be thrown out after each meal. Sometimes, though, families who had the means would invite the group - all twelve of them - over for a home-cooked meal. And so that first summer went, the UD Appalachia Club and the people of rural Magoffin County, Kentucky giving to and receiving from each other. Tom summed up that summer in one word: "Fantastic!" Once the school year began the UD Appalachia Club continued its weekend trips to Magoffin County and organized two more summer programs there before being told by the owner of the two houses at 22-Mile Branch that the houses would no longer be available for their use. But that wasn't the end of the club's program or its story. To be continued... Last Friday was the eve of the 50-year anniversary of "Bloody Sunday", when Alabama State Troopers brutally attacked with clubs, cattle prods and tear gas a group of several hundred civil rights marchers on a bridge in Selma. And so on Friday night 250 people, some of us black, some white, ... crowded into the sanctuary of the North Baptist Church in the Clintonville neighborhood of Columbus for an evening of commemoration of those who worked, those who suffered, those who triumphed and those who paid with their lives for the cause of freedom and equality. Local folk singer Bill Cohen (see post from 1/20/2015) and singer/songwriter Paisha Thomas teamed up to present a program entitled "Songs of struggle" in which they evoked for us in song the era of the American Civil Rights Movement from 1960 to 1965; a time, in the words of Mr Cohen, "When Blacks and Whites prayed together, sang together, marched together, were beaten together and sometimes were murdered together."
Their voices blending in beautiful harmony while Mr. Cohen accompanied on the guitar, they sang the old songs that the Civil Rights activists used to sing to lift their hearts and empower themselves with courage and a sense of solidarity as they engaged in peaceful protests against injustice and called for equal rights for people of color. We in the audience sang along. The tunes were bright and catchy and the lines repetitive enough that those of us who weren't familiar with the songs were able to quickly catch on. These were songs meant for singing: "Oh, Freedom", "Eyes On The Prize," "If You Miss Me From The Back of the Bus", "We Shall Not Be Moved", "We Shall Overcome", and half-a dozen more. Between the songs old film clips were shown from historic moments in the Civil Rights Movement: the lunch counter sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, the Summer of Freedom, the murder of Medgar Evers, the Birmingham church bombing in which four young girls were killed, the murder of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the Selma to Montgomery marches that were instrumental in the passing of the Voting Rights Act. I believe it must have been both horrifying and amazing for most of us in that church to realize that it was in our own time that these events were taking place; that in our country in our time Southern blacks were by law denied the vote, denied justice, denied the right to use a public water fountain or toilet, sit wherever they wished on a bus, sit down in a restaurant and order a meal, and expect the same basic rights and respect that every human being on this planet is entitled to. That in our country and in our time there was a place where officers of the law had free reign to intimidate, beat, or shoot peaceful citizens; a place where a man could bomb a Black church and kill four little girls and be let off without consequence. I believe it must have been profound for all of us of a certain age sitting in the North Baptist Church to realize, as we sang the songs and watched the images of the past, that the pivotal moments in the great human awakening in our country known in as the Civil Rights Movement all happened in our time. And to realize that, for all the progress made during the Civil Rights era, in our country the work of equal rights for all under the law continues to be in a work progress. Still, as Bill Cohen reminded us at the end of the evening in a quote from Martin Luther King, "The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice". To that I say Amen. Shortly after I posted yesterday's blog on the lure of ISIS for young men and women my daughter Claire sent me the following link: http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/05/politics/isis-virginia-law-enforcement-warning/index.html ...which is a link to a CNN report on a warning that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security sent out to law enforcement agencies throughout the United States regarding the growing number of boys and girls seeking to join ISIS. Apparently many cases are already being tracked by law enforcement officials of young Americans, some as young as 15, communicating with ISIS recruiters over social media. According to the report the motivation for boys is the thrill of being a foreign fighter and for girls, who tend to be younger than the boys, it's the desire to be a jihadi bride. So apparently there are so many lost, alienated, young would-be terrorists out there cruising the internet that the activity has risen to the status of a trend. This pursuit of youthful self-destruction is fed by visually slick videos and enticing electronic messages that lead boys to mistake brutality for heroism and girls to mistake ugliness for beauty. But thankfully, there other girls and boys out there, wonderful young people who clearly do understand the distinction; and a few weeks ago a group of them chose to carry out an act of true heroism and beauty. A group of eight young Norwegian Muslims led by a 17-year-old girl named Hajrad Arshad came up with an idea. In response to a recent rash of Islamic terrorist attacks around Europe including the Charlie Hebdo attack and an attack outside a Copenhagen synagogue, these youngsters decided to organize a Ring of Peace around the Oslo synagogue. The human ring would be a symbolic protection of the synagogue as a repudiation of jihadi violence and extremism and a plea for peace, friendship solidarity between Muslims and Jews. According to Ms. Arshad the group also wanted to take a step towards extinguishing "the prejudice people have against Jews and against Muslims." And so the group approached Ervin Kohn, leader of the Jewish community in Oslo. The idea was welcomed by local Jewish leaders and the plan was Ok'd so long as at least 30 participants showed up. Mr. Kohn told NRK, Norways' state broadcaster, "(If) it only comes to 30, it won't be good, it may seem counter-productive, But if you fill Bergstien (the street where the synagogue is located), it will be very good." And so, in hopes of attracting at least 30 people, Hajrad posted the following message on Facebook: "Islam is to protect our brothers and sisters, regardless of which religion they belong to. Islam is to rise above hate and never sink at the same level as the haters. Islam is to defend each other. Muslims want to show that we deeply deplore all types of Jews hate, and that we are there to support them. We will therefore create a human ring around the synagogue on Saturday 21 February. Encourage everyone to come! " Over 1,000 Muslim showed up. They stood hand in hand with Jews, Christians, and others chanting, "No to anti-semitism, no to Islamophobia." As one young Muslim participant told reporters, "If someone wants to attack the synagogue, they need to step over us first." But no one wanted to break the circle; those who showed up wanted only to make it bigger and more beautiful. As Hajrah Arshad observed, the gathering shows "that Islam is about love and unity." And as Zeeshan Abdullah, another of the co-organizers told the crowd around the synagogue, "We want to demonstrate that Jews and Muslims do not hate each other. We do not want individuals to define what Islam is for the rest of us". Then he added, "There are many more peace-mongers than war mongers." To young people all over the world looking to find themselves in messages from social media and video images, I say watch the youtube video of these young Muslims in action. But then sadly, not everyone is inspired by beauty and heroism. 1. " Norwegian Muslims to form ‘peace ring’ around Oslo synagogue" Fox News, February 18, 2015. 2. "Hundreds join Muslim "ring of peace" at Oslo synagogue", CBS/AP, February 21, 2015. 3. "1,000 join Muslim 'ring of peace' outside Oslo synagogue", Associated Press, February 22, 2015 4. " Law enforcement warning sent about American youth, ISIS" Pamela Brown, CNN, March 5, 2015. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria - ISIS - started off as as a small ultra-extremist, ultra-violent Iraqi splinter of Al Qaeda that Al Qaeda eventually renounced and disowned for its brutality.
When ISIS tried to join a militant rebel group in Syria to fight against President Bashar al-Assad the Syrian rebels basically told ISIS to get out. Which, unfortunately for Syria, Iraq, and the rest of the planet, ISIS has refused to do. Within the past year ISIS has seized and occupied thousands of square miles of Syria and Iraq, claiming that the occupied areas are now part of an Islamic state it calls a caliphate. The people who live in those areas have fallen under the harsh Islamic Sharia law that ISIS brutally enforces on the men, women, and children under its thumb. ISIS has succeeded in its conquests because this group, so abhorent that no other rebel or terrorist group would be associated with it, has young men from all over the world rushing to join its ranks, which have swelled to the point where ISIS currently has 30,000 fighters, 19,000 of them from 90 foreign countries. ISIS has a wildly successful recruiting method, attracting alienated young Muslim men of the electronics and screen generation by means of social media campaigns carried out on Facebook and Twitter. They post high-quality youtube videos of their brutal murders mastered to look like live video games. They distribute fast-paced video games that are fantasy murders. They call to young men to become jihadi fighters, and their message promises adventure, excitement, comaraderie, money, fun and things that are perhaps more enticing: Identity. Manhood. Power. The taste of domination over the subjugated. Less easy to understand is the pull of ISIS on young Muslim women. Besides the three Glasgow school girls recently in the news, dozens of young women from Western countries, teen-aged girls or only slighlty older, middle-class and educated, have run away to Syria to join ISIS. And the trend appears is growing. As with boys, ISIS uses chatty social media messages to attract girls. But what is the pull on these girls? A sense of religious fervor and zealotry? A longing to escape their lives? To somehow find themselves? Are they seeking to be part of what they see as a great cause? Are they desperate to belong? Probably all of the above, but might it not also be that these girls are in search of a great romantic adventure that involves giving themselves over totally to the will of a strong man? The ISIS media campaign promises girls that they will be brides of jihadi fighters. Perhaps it's the word "bride" that has the pull. It sounds romantic. The stuff of a girl's dreams, this particular one being that she will be taken by a strong, brave, powerful man and will become his. She will give up her will, dress in black from head to toe, live for her husband, and be subject to him in body and soul. Perhaps it's a dream of total will-free submission, a psychological twist of the Fifty Shade Shades of Grey fantasy that has held women all over the world spell bound. The boys who flock to ISIS dream of being the conquerors, the girls dream of being the conquered. But what these naive girls who join ISIS are really walking into is a life that condones brutality and oppression, the life endured by desperate women in countries where religion dictates that women are physical property and have no freedom or voice or rights or protection from abuse or mistreatment. Of course there will be some women who will profit from conditions in the Islamic State. The women who will be given positions of power over other women. The women who will be needed to police the women in carrying out the will of the men. But life for most of the women living in the Islamic State will be even more dismally oppressive than life for most of the men, who will take their desperation out on the women. And their right to do so will be the will of God. Even the women will believe it. Last Thursday the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria - ISIS - released a youtube video showing men gleefully destroying the Mosul Museum in northern Iraq. With snappy Arabic music playing in the background they appeared to be having a fine time smashing statues and sculptures, works of art dating back to the ancient Assyrian Empire of King Sennacherib. Bearded and dressed in Islamic garb or clean-shaven and dressed in jeans and tee shirts they knocked statues from their stands and, wielding sledge-hammers and power tools, wiped out within minutes a part of the shared history of human civilization that had been preserved for over 3,000 years. It would have been better if those irreplaceable pieces of life from the past had stayed hidden beneath the earth where archeologists found them until a better moment in human history. Now those pieces are gone forever. Cultural genocide, the act has been called, though the group in the video resembled a pack of out-of-control boys on a wrecking spree. This is a group that murders innocent people in gruesome snuff-style videos then posts them on youtube. Is there any point, then, in asking how they could do the same to priceless art? Except that art, really wonderful beautiful art, transcends people, cultures, and time. It's even been known to transcend war and hatred. Take the story of German General Dietrich von Choltitz, last Nazi commander of occupied Paris during World War II. Though he'd previously carried out the seige and capture of Sevastopol and had allowed the execution of thousands of Russian Jews in that city, when ordered by Hitler to destroy Paris, leave it in rubble, erase it from the face of the earth, von Choltitz found himself unable to carry out the order. Perhaps von Choltitz was moved by the powerful appeal of the mayor of Paris Pierre Charles Tattinger who said to him, "Often it is given a general to destroy, rarely to preserve. Imagine that one day it may be given you to stand on this balcony again, as a tourist, to look once more on these monuments ... and be able to say, 'One day I could have destroyed this, and I preserved it as a gift to humanity.' General, is not that worth all a conqueror's glory?'" ("Dietrich von Choltitz: Saved of Paris From Destruction During World War II", historynet.com, June 12, 2006). And so, though he'd ordered the mining of buildings whose architecture alone were works of art and which held treasure troves of timeless art and literature, he never gave the order to detonate the mines and the most beautiful city on earth was saved for humanity. Because that beautiful city spoke to what little soul von Chotiltz still possessed. The problem with ISIS, then, I suppose, is that neither art nor history speaks to their souls. Nor did the thousands of centuries-old rare books and manuscripts now gone forever after ISIS henchboys burned the Mosul Public Library a few days before they destroyed the museum. Literature, art, history, the worth of human life, none of these things engage the mean souls of the destructive young minions of the leaders of ISIS. It appears that the ISIS minions can only relate, respond, and react to something flashing before them on an i-phone or a video screen. 1. "ISIS Destroys Library In Mosul, Burning Thousands Of Rare Manuscripts, Artifacts", www.inquisitr.com, February 24, 2015. 2. "With Sledgehammer, Islamic State smashes Iraqi History", Isabel Coles and Saif Hameed, ARBIL/BAGHDAD (Reuters) February 26, 2015. 3. "Why is ISIS destroying ancient artifacts in Iraq?" , Jessica Mendoza, The Christian Science Monitor, February 26, 2015. 4. "ISIS Onslaught Overruns Assyrians and Wrecks Art" New York Times, Anne Barnard, February 27, 2015. 5. "Dietrich von Choltitz: Saved of Paris From Destruction During World War II", historynet.com, June 12, 2006. 6. "Dietrich von Choltitz", Wikipedia. |
"Tropical Depression"
by Patti Liszkay Buy it on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BTPN7NYY "Equal And Opposite Reactions"
by Patti Liszkay Buy it on Amazon: http://amzn.to/2xvcgRa or from The Book Loft of German Village, Columbus, Ohio Or check it out at the Columbus Metropolitan Library
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