Category: rants

Not Civilized Yet

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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It seems to me that, in much of the world and certainly in the United States, the prevailing belief is that we are civilized now. If there was something terrible we did in the past — slavery, for example — we weren’t civilized yet. But now we are.

In fact, as someone who has read a lot of western literature over the years, I think that’s been the prevailing belief of at least the upper classes in the west for centuries now. Of course, in most cases they believed they were civilized but most of the other people on this planet were not.

That last point may still be true among some of the ultra wealthy. Certainly the tech bros who are convinced The Matrix is a documentary think they’re civilized and the rest of us aren’t.

(I’d say it was a core belief among white supremacists, except the very idea that white supremacists are civilized is too laughable to even consider.)

As for myself, while I think I have some good ideas that would make us more civilized if they were adopted, I don’t think one person, or even a group of people, with good ideas can really make us civilized if most people are outside of that system.

We can’t be civilized by ourselves.

But the belief that we are now civilized is a strong one. I once suggested on a panel at a science fiction convention that we weren’t civilized yet and everyone else disagreed with me. These were intelligent people who did not dismiss the wrongs of the world as aberrations, but that did not enter into their idea of civilized.

Perhaps they were thinking of electricity and indoor toilets, and even rocket ships and vaccines. But while all these things are good, and can provide a grounding, they are not markers of civilization.

We’re civilized. Sure. People are living on the streets because housing is an investment and a way to make “passive” income instead of a place to live. Police officers kill people for the hell of it and we “reform” the cops by giving them more weapons and money. Politicians make up preposterous “crises” instead of dealing with the ones we have. We invent reasons to start wars.

We can’t even manage a pandemic sanely.

Civilized people would do better than that. Continue reading “Not Civilized Yet”…

Getting Sick

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I got sick a couple of weeks ago. Nothing very serious, as near as I can tell. Not Covid — the symptoms were wrong plus I tested just in case because if it was that, I wanted the antiviral.

Mostly my joints were aching and I felt off and blah, but then I checked my blood pressure one morning and not only was it up, but my resting pulse was way faster than usual.

That scared me enough to go see a doctor (and thankfully I could get in to see someone on Friday afternoon, not something I would ever count on). I recounted my various symptoms and while she offered to refer me to a specialist if I wanted one, in her opinion it wasn’t anything serious and would resolve on its own.

Now in truth, those are pretty much the words I always want to hear from a doctor, especially as I get older. The last thing in the world I want is for a doctor to think it sounds serious and send me for a bunch of tests that will probably just lead to more tests and maybe they’ll find something that isn’t even what I was worried about when I called the doctor.

I mean, I’m OK with medication if it’s clear what I need. But in truth, when I get scared enough to check with doctor, I am really hoping for “it’s nothing to worry about.”

I walk a thin line between “ignore it and it’ll go away” and “what if I miss something that will kill me if I don’t get treatment now?”

I was talking with a doctor friend over the weekend about my experience and she said that it was a tricky line for a doctor, too. You don’t want to dismiss a patient’s experience, but sometimes it does seem that there really isn’t anything that needs to be done.

Interesting from both points of view. There are, of course, many people whose health issues have been dismissed for years. That is another, important issue, but it isn’t mine. Most of the time I know my body well enough to know what kind of help I need — I’ve become a big fan of physical therapy — and I only get nervous when something new happens.

I wasn’t very sick, but I felt lousy for a week. While I often have 24-hour bugs, this is the first time in years when I’ve been sick for days.

It left me with this reaction: Why don’t more people want to avoid getting sick? Continue reading “Getting Sick”…

Easter in 1903 and the importance of listening

personby Gillian Polack
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Hot cross buns are being promoted all over the place right now, which means that Easter looms. I say ‘looms’ because Easter holds an amount of darkness for me. My family mostly doesn’t talk about it, but it is the moment when my family was told by its patriarch to flee. “Children, run!” he said (but in Yiddish).

I think it’s time we talked about this.

My great-great-grandfather was one of the 500 people hurt (with intent, with malice, with much antisemitism) in the Kishinev pogrom. I don’t know what other damage was done to the family. All I know about it was that he was hurt and saw the writing on the wall for Jews in his home town and that he told his children to run.

The anniversary this year is just before Easter. The pogrom was intentionally during Easter. It’s an historical thing in the Christian world, to hurt Jews on Christian festivals. This is why I strongly suggest that those who want Jews to have Christmas trees or eat hot cross buns should not press it if they meet “I don’t do this things”. You may be touching on hurtful ground if you’re talking to someone who still has that memory of the pain. Also, do not ask us, “Do you remember exactly how your family got hurt on Easter/Christmas?” I’m telling you here, about my family. Let the story of how my family fled across the world because it was unsafe to be home, during Easter save other Jews from that question.

The blood libel played a part in the pogrom, but it was a lot more than that. Nearly half of Kishinev was Jewish, so it wasn’t a small minority being hated by the majority. It was literally people saying, “Let us destroy half our neighbours.”

The blood libel was an excuse. False accusations of murder of a Christian child.

As I interpret it, the pogrom was organised with the help of a newspaper and in a somewhat similar way to the January 6 event in the modern US. I’m reliant on translations and everything hurts to read, because my family was damaged. So… I suggest you read about it. I’ll have links shortly, and one of those links leads to a book on the subject. One day I must obtain that book and read it and understand … today is not that day.

Ironically, the first time I heard about the whole linking of Jews to blood thing was during Passover (near Easter, but that year, not quite the same days) when I was in primary school. I’d brought extra unleavened bread into school because some other children like to try things and assuaging curiosity has been, for me, a good way of reducing the antisemitism.

One child shouted at me, “I can’t eat that, it’s got the blood of babies in it.” I tried explaining kashruth because if one understands kashruth then one understands just how offensive the ‘Jews drink the blood of babies’ statement is. It goes against so much of who we are. That didn’t help

The next day, I brought the rest of the box of matzah in and ask the other child to read the ingredients.

“Flour, water, salt.”

“Which of those is babies’ blood?” I asked. She tentatively nibbled a bit and agreed there was no blood in it and lo, for the rest of primary school I was safe from that particular accusation. To replace the blood of babies, the group she mixed in all decided that I had personally killed Jesus. At age nine. They told me so.

Being a science fiction person already, I asked if that meant I invented a time machine. They were flummoxed and refused to let me play with them. I was flummoxed and started dreaming of things I could do with a time machine. This is when I knew for a fact history was going to be part of my future. And that murdering people was not something I wanted to do. Ever.

Anyhow, back to the 1903 pogrom that destroyed my family’s very middle class life in a major city on the other side of the world…

Here’s a summary. I chose this one because the man in the white hat in the top picture, looks very like one of my uncles: https://www.timesofisrael.com/how-a-small-pogrom-in-russia-changed-the-course-of-history/

It was important historically, as this article suggests. Japan had already begun its road into imperialism, but the inefficacy of the Russian leaders in preventing the pogrom led it to think about the rules of war in unexpected ways. To me, this also suggests that Pearl Harbour was part of a pattern: https://besacenter.org/kishinev-pogrom-russia-japan/

Why am I talking about it now? Because I offered to answer questions about antisemitism in a couple of for a now that it’s getting bad again. I want to do my bit to make it hurt less.

This is why.

I am mostly of refugee descent. At the heart of the way I view the world is always being told that I’m an outsider, that I don’t have full human rights, that I don’t belong.

This has taught me that I need to be public about antisemitism. I need to talk with people about it, even if it gives me pain.

If someone says they hurt because of prejudice, listen to them and hear what they’re saying. Then do some homework before explaining things back to them, trying to solve problems, or telling them someone else hurts more. All of today’s post is about the reason just one branch of my family fled. It’s fine to take learning about these things one step at a time. What is not fine is ignoring or explaining back or assuming we are at fault for the bigotry of others.

This whole post was triggered by it being Easter soon, and by someone telling me that I hadn’t factored in other bigotry when I was specifically talking about antisemitism.

It’s one of those years. I’ve had them before, but… they exhaust me on so many levels. Be gentle to anyone from a minority background. Jews are the canary in the bigotry coalmine. If we’re hurting, you can guarantee the bigots are out in force and attacking other people as well. If you can’t think of anything you can do that will help, try listening. Listening and hearing are such big gifts.

Time to Fix the Police

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Maybe twenty years ago, a man who had nowhere to go was sleeping on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. He had duct-taped a knife to his hand.

My memory’s vague on this, but I think he had some trouble with his hands, which was why he used the tape to keep the knife handy. I know why he had a knife: he was living on the street and trying to keep himself safe.

Park police officers came along and woke him up, probably not gently. He jumped up, likely disoriented, knife in hand. He didn’t attack anybody, but he waved the knife.

The cops yelled, “Drop the knife,” but of course, he couldn’t drop it.

So one of them shot him. Killed him. Killed him for nothing more than sleeping in a public place and being prepared to protect himself.

I imagine the cop who shot him was scared that the man might attack him or someone else. I doubt this was a case of a cop killing someone just for the hell of it; it sounded more like the case of a cop who didn’t know what else to do.

The cop had a gun. He’d been trained in the use of a gun. He really didn’t know how to respond with anything but a gun.

Remember the old adage about how to a person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail?

To a cop with a gun, everything looks like an excuse to shoot somebody.

(I wish I thought that last sentence was an exaggeration.)

The reason I remember so much about this story is not because it was unique. It wasn’t unusual even then. I read such stories, get outraged, and then let them slip into the vagaries of memory.

But I remember this one because my Aikido teacher in D.C., the master instructor Mitsugi Saotome, was outraged by what happened. Continue reading “Time to Fix the Police”…

Watching Old Movies and Asking Questions

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I watched The Sting the other night, not for the first time, but for the first time in a long time.

It’s a 50-year-old movie set in 1936, but given the power of the myths and stories that it’s built on, it doesn’t feel particularly dated, unlike a number of other movies that I enjoyed in the 1970s but find unwatchable now.

I always did like Paul Newman/Robert Redford movies, though I tried to watch Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid awhile back and found I couldn’t get into it. I’m not sure why The Sting still works for me and Butch Cassidy doesn’t, since they’re similar stories based on Anglo American mythology. Might just be that I can handle gangster stories better than westerns.

There are some reasonable criticisms of it. Robert Earl Jones (James Earl Jones’s father) plays a magical Negro role — the mentor to Redford’s young white grifter. He is, of course, murdered early on, setting up the reason for the revenge sting.

He and his family and one other guy are the only Black people in the movie, but they are portrayed well and treated with respect by the good guy white people (all grifters). It could have been worse.

Still, this is very much a movie about white men. There are a couple of women in key supporting roles, but this movie does not pass the Bechdel Test. That said, and in spite of the fact that one of those women is a madam as well as Newman’s lover, it doesn’t feel directly misogynist. Women are just mostly irrelevant in this world, even women who themselves are grifters.

I enjoyed myself, but since I wasn’t sitting on the edge of my seat — it’s a movie with a lot of twists and surprises, but I knew what they all were — I found myself thinking a lot about the underlying mythology and the various stories we’ve all been fed that purport to tell us our history.

To start with, this is a story about grifters with a heart of gold. After suffering through a grifter in the White House for four years, I’m not as inclined to believe good things about grifters as I used to be. Continue reading “Watching Old Movies and Asking Questions”…

It Can Happen Here

personby Madeleine Robins
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I used to read–or re-read–Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here every few years. Lewis is one of my guilty pleasures: he’s an astute observer, but can be a crank. His satire can be way over-blown. Like Dorothy Parker, he’s at his worst when he really likes and admires something or someone. But let him loose on hypocrisy or cruelty and he can have the pin-point accuracy of a targeted missile.

Then the 2016 elections happened and I couldn’t read the damned book at all. Haven’t been able to go back to it since. Lewis wrote It Can’t Happen Here after a trip to Europe in the mid-1930s, when fascism was getting its teeth into Germany and looking hungrily around the continent. He came back to the US urgently talking about the danger, and was told “It can’t happen here.” America was too folksy, too smart to fall for demagoguery. Wouldn’t happen. So Lewis did what writers do: he wrote a book where an apparently clownish politician plays on the worst impulses of the citizenry, wields division and prejudice, and gets himself elected President. Then things get really bad, all within the first 100 days of Berzelius Windrip’s election. Yes, concentration camps, ginned up wars with neighboring countries, the wholesale overtaking of not just state education but private colleges to bring them in line with the “corporate” mindset.

Okay, so we’re seven years past 2016, but even without a man in the White House, “It” just keeps rolling. Continue reading “It Can Happen Here”…

My To-Do List

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Every morning my sweetheart asks me “What do you have today?” And every morning it irritates me, because it means — or I take it to mean — “What tasks are you going to do today?”

Many of those tasks are things that must get done but that I don’t particularly want to do, like managing money or cleaning things or making my tech work better. I make lists of those tasks but they’re not really what I’m going to do today.

The real answer to the question of what am I going to do today is think, because thinking is all I ever want or intend to do.

The answer does not change. It is the same every day. I get up, do my morning toiletries, do some physical therapy, feed the cat, and make coffee all with the goal of sitting down to think and maybe write.

My whole goal in life is to have the things I don’t want to do simplified enough that they become routine and don’t take much time so that all I really need to do is think. Continue reading “My To-Do List”…

Militant Pedestrian Rag (Rant)

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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A couple of days before the solstice, I walked to the store about 5:30 in the evening. We’re at 9.5-hour days here, so it was already dark. My partner had found a long string LED (probably designed for wrapping around a bicycle), so I was carrying it to be more visible.

I always walk to the store, which is about 12 blocks away. I go several times a week and space out my shopping so that I don’t carry too much at a time. It’s a way to combine errands with exercise.

When I reach Piedmont Avenue, which is a heavy pedestrian area, I usually cross at a specific crosswalk across from Peet’s Coffee. There’s no light there, but it gets a lot of regular use.

So I get to the intersection, look to my left and see a car slow down and stop for me. I start crossing. Just as I reach the middle of the street and am turning to look right to make sure the cars coming the other direction are also stopping, I hear someone gun a motor.

So I stop and look left as well as right. A car comes barreling around the ones that stopped for the crosswalk, zooms right past me, and makes an immediate turn onto a small residential street.

If I hadn’t stopped, the car would have hit me. If anyone had been in the crosswalk on the other street, it would have hit them, too.

I can’t tell you how glad I am that I got my ears cleaned out the other day so that I heard the engine roar. I also can’t tell you how glad I am that I know to pick up clues like that and act on them even if I’m not sure what’s going on.

I was angry, but I wasn’t hurt (or worse).

This, my dear friends, is why I consider paying attention to be the most important skill in self defense. Because while everyone worries about the bad guy who might jump you, the truth is that accidents are a great deal more common than assaults.

And the same skills that protect you from bad guys protect you from accidents. Continue reading “Militant Pedestrian Rag (Rant)”…

I Did Not Write This in Longhand, But …

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I don’t usually read John McWhorter. Over the years, I’ve seen enough work by him to know I find him annoying, possibly because he strikes me as one of those people who have carved out a career as a contrarian.

But he had a column about whether kids should be taught cursive this week and, given his usual defense of the old-fashioned, I thought this might be one place where he and I aligned.

Nope. Turned out he thinks it’s great that kids aren’t learning cursive anymore. Our ongoing record of disagreement continues, because I do think learning cursive — or, as I call it, longhand — is useful.

Now I should tell you that the only subject I struggled with in elementary school was handwriting. That includes learning to print as well as learning to write longhand.

It’s not that I couldn’t recognize the letters — I was reading before I started school — nor that I didn’t know how to make them.

It’s that the way I made them was always messy. They were readable. They were “right.” But they didn’t look very good.

Longhand was no harder for me than printing, which is to say that I could easily do both, but never do either to my teachers’ satisfaction.

The end result? Judging by my handwriting, you’d assume I was destined to be a doctor. (I wonder if the old joke about doctors’ handwriting still applies in the modern world in which prescriptions are sent electronically.)

My handwriting has not improved with age. At one point in my life, I took an aptitude test in which I discovered that I had multiple aptitudes — an explanation for my multiplicity of interests — except in one area: fine motor coordination.

I test at 5 percentile on fine motor. The funny thing is, I kind of enjoyed the test for that. I was just very, very slow and clumsy at it.

I took typing in summer school when I was in high school and even though I was never a great typist — I am apparently not good at any skill where you are supposed to be very accurate with your fingers — I immediately starting typing everything.

Long before personal computers were a thing, I was writing on a typewriter rather than by hand. I should probably note that I was raised by journalists, and being able not just to type but to write directly on a keyboard was considered a basic skill.

I thought correcting typewriters were a gift of the gods and I got my first computer in 1983 (which is about to be 40 years ago). Typing on something where I could correct my errors and go back and revise without having to retype was the most wonderful thing I could imagine.

I compose almost everything I write by resting my fingers on a keyboard and thinking. (I do not like keyboards that are so responsive that you can’t touch a key without it registering.)

So why, you reasonably ask, do I think it’s good to learn longhand? Continue reading “I Did Not Write This in Longhand, But …”…

Guest Post: Do Women Make Better Leaders

personby Deborah J. Ross
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My older daughter, Sarah, currently a college student, earned praise for her essay on the leadership role of women. With her permission and no small measure of pride, I share it with you.

The assignment was: Some theorists have suggested that the world would be a much better place to live (i.e., fewer conflicts, wars) if women held all the positions of leadership. Do you agree? Why or why not? Do women in positions of power tend to behave in more stereotypically female (caring, nurturing) or male (aggressive, dominant) ways?

Would the world be better off if it was run by women?  This deceptively simple question is best broken down into components: Are individual women better leaders than individual men?  Does the culture of leadership drive women in positions of power to behave in stereotypically male ways?  And, What is the effect when the majority of leaders in the legislative space are female?

The first two sub-questions are related.  Are individual women superior leaders?  Perhaps not, because for every Jacinda Ardern or Angela Merkel there may be a Margaret Thatcher or Marine Le Pen.  Perhaps the character traits expected by the electorate, and the strategies employed by powerful women to attain and defend their status, weeds out individuals who behave in a cooperative, nurturing manner.  It is quite plausible that the culture of power, or the traits demanded of leaders regardless of gender, is so pervasive that the theoretical advantages of female leadership are eliminated.  What does the data show?

A Forbes analysis indicated, and an academic analysis later confirmed, that the countries which fared best during the pandemic were led by women: Germany, Taiwan, New Zealand, Iceland, Finland, Norway and Denmark all took the pandemic seriously and took early steps to safeguard health.  This association has been found to be systematic among a sample of 194 countries (Garikipati & Kambhampati, 2020).  Iceland’s Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir instituted free testing, while Taiwan’s Tsai Ing-wen instituted 124 pandemic-curbing measures early, in January of 2020, and by April were sending face masks abroad.  Their success is punctuated by the expression of traditionally feminine traits: Norway’s Prime Minister Erna Solberg went on live television to reassure children that it was okay to feel scared.  Just try to catch a strong-man leader such as Bolsonaro or Putin doing that! (Wittenberg-Cox, 2020) Continue reading “Guest Post: Do Women Make Better Leaders”…