Stand Up for the Lookout

The hateful rhetoric and violent actions in the US these last few weeks and months disturbs me.  More than that: infuriates, disgusts, frightens me.  

I have Martin Niemoller's quotation* in mind:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— 
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— 
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Except, today, with Trump spewing vile, you could substitute Muslims, Mexicans, African Americans, people with disabilities.  Include the vitriol of his followers and add LGBT folk, women, and more.

I don't talk much about it to the kids, except in the most general terms regarding San Bernardino, Planned Parenthood, even Paris.  They know there is hate and violence; we encourage them to look for the good, for the helpers, as the meme about Mr. Rogers encourages. 

It's hard to have hope.  I'd love to turn away from the news, but somehow I feel called to witness what is going on--I am so fortunate not to deal with violence or hatred directly so I don't want to ignore it just because I can.  Even if I don't think it helps much.

Last week, I saw a swastika painted on a lamppost in a local parking lot.  I was horrified.  So hateful, so close to home.  I talked to the store manager; I called the local police.  I called again.  And I went to the precinct.  And I called the management company of the shopping center.  I posted a lot of it on FB to enlist the help and support of my friends to help me get it painted over.  We had plans to paint it ourselves before the first night of Hanukkah.  I had my minister's cell phone number on speed dial in case we got arrested while vandalizing vandalism!  And in 48 hours, it was gone.  The police must have gotten through to the management company who put on a fresh coat of paint.

But town feels a little tainted for me now, just like the country does, with Trump resurrecting horrific ideas reminiscent of the Holocaust and Japanese internment.  It turns my stomach and so, in my own way, I will not be quiet.  Because, sooner rather than later, I belong to one of the groups that the extremists would wipe off the face of the earth.

How will you stand with me?

-=-=-=-=-

*The origins of this poem first have been traced to a speech given by Niemöller on January 6, 1946, to the representatives of the Confessing Church in Frankfurt. There are numerous versions.

Last Links I Like

For now, anyway.

It's a short but tough list, with Newtown and Hurricane Sandy.

• "What Books are 'Just Right' for the Young Reader?"--Room For Debate, namely they mostly said whatever the child wants to read, which was influential in our letter the kids plow through Potter (NYT)
• Nicholas Kristof, "Looking for Lessons in Newtown"--a refutation of common excuses for those who are anti-gun control
• Teaching meditation to children
• For young survivors of violence, recovery is possible
• Gun ownership as the antithesis of free society
• "Holidays without God"--Room for Debate
• "8 Books to Inspire a Happy Mama", including Momma Zen, The Gift of an Ordinary Day, Peace is Every Step, The Conscious Parent, Talk So Your Children Will Listen, Life is a Verb, Four Word Self Help, and Simple Abudnace
• Everyday stressors and "Possible Thinking"
• "Is There a Toy-Class Divide?"  Yes.
• A book on American minutiae for Russians
• Discovery and the art of being still
• 26 Facts on Finland's education system
• Book review, "Far From the Tree," a compassionate look at difficult parenting
• Simple ways to make your child feel special
• Storms affect children differently than adults
• A wonderful article on Waffle House and weather disasters
• Including the child with special needs

Yes, More Links I Like

From January through March

• One of the best articles about bullying and weight and parents--esp the do's and don'ts list (NYT)
• "A child is a person, not a project," says mom of son who died of Tay-Sachs
• The tsunami survivor who lost her whole family . . . and wrote a book (Guardian)
• High job-satisfaction for teachers? (NYT)
• Table for Two . . .Women (NYT)
• Recipes for Easter breads (NYT)
• An experiment in avoiding chemicals
• "A Letter to Victoria Secret from a Father"
• Jedi religion, performing marriages in Scotland! (BBC)
• The Steubenville Rapists and misplaced sympathy (Guardian)
• More on sleep and weight
• Cookie recipes for Passover
• Turning the edutainment paradigm upside down
• Myths of the Devil's Chord
• Persian foods for Passover
• "When Exercise Stresses You Out"
• "Hands free" summer--unplugged.
• Make-up-less day in Texas high school
• "'Dating' Other Mothers" 
• Make up your own words! (Guardian)
• "Digital Era Redefines Etiquette" and new definitions of impatience 
• "Why Should Married Women Change Their Names?" (Guardian)
• Demolishing Shakespeare's house, history of historic preservation in UK (BBC)
• "The Last Fall" (Karen Maezen Miller)
• Scholars conclude more Holocaust horror than we realized (HuffPost)
• Hot toddy recipe
• Math in gym class (NYT)
• 100 words every high schooler should know
• God, Farmers, and the Super Bowl
• Julia Grant and her slave
• I loved the graphic of the article "Can the Republicans be Saved?", with "GOP Laptop"--a typewriter; "GOP Twitter"--a megaphone!
• An article about historical "second sleep"
• America's most controversial anthropologist and the ethics of studying indigenous peoples
• On the day Latin was critical for breaking news (BBC)
• NSFChildren--"Blizzard Etiquette"
• Frank Bruni op ed on "The Land of the Binge"--food, tv, exercise, politics, everything
• A very entrepreneurial Girl Scout
• Brand naming weather
• "The Top 5 Regrets of the Dying" (Guardian)
• Poetry and cancer
• "3 things your daughter needs from You":  info about her body, respect for her body and its abilities, know she can talk to parents about anything. (HuffPost)--I'd say, sons, too.
• Let them eat King Cake
• The amazing archive of a Holocaust ghetto (BBC)
• An Incredible Journey
• "Eat like a Mennonite"--chem free eating
• Ancient Jewish life in Muslim Empire
• The 7-year walk, following earliest humans (BBC)
• A dying nurse seeks to teach the living
• Downton Abbey a la FB
• After rape . ...on honor and virtue (NYT)
• Frank Bruni on the agonies of each age
• Room for Debate--what the fight over guns is really about (NYT)
• The Hokey Pokey, by Shakespeare
• 
  

Yet More Links I like

From April through June etc . . .

• Parenting and technology--"When I see Josie clutching her grandmother’s Kindle to play Angry Birds for the 10th straight time, or I watch my son stuporously soaking up a cartoon, I’m really seeing myself as a kid — anxious, needy for love but willing to settle for electronic distraction to soothe my nerves or hold tedium at bay. And if experiencing this blast from the past weren’t troubling enough, I also get to confront my current failings as a parent." (NYT)
• A teacher reflects on teaching, upon retirement--"First, accept that meeting the individual learning needs of 110 students every day is simply impossible. No matter how many benchmark tests you administer, how precisely you think you have identified each student’s Achilles heel, how much you love them — you can’t control when they went to bed (or didn’t) the night before; what they ate for breakfast (or didn’t) that morning; whose parent just went to prison or lost a job. Life doesn’t get measured very well on Quia tests, when you get right down to it."
• "I’ve often thought that the single most devastating cyberattack a diabolical and anarchic mind could design would not be on the military or financial sector but simply to simultaneously make every e-mail and text ever sent universally public. It would be like suddenly subtracting the strong nuclear force from the universe; the fabric of society would instantly evaporate, every marriage, friendship and business partnership dissolved. Civilization, which is held together by a fragile web of tactful phrasing, polite omissions and white lies, would collapse in an apocalypse of bitter recriminations and weeping, breakups and fistfights, divorces and bankruptcies, scandals and resignations, blood feuds, litigation, wholesale slaughter in the streets and lingering ill will."  (NYT)
• A fun exploration of regional accents and language usage
• A writer reflects on his son's autism (Guardian)
• Frank Bruni, on the impact of the SCOTUS same-sex marriage ruling (NYT)
• Frank Bruni, on religion and the Boy Scouts (NYT)
• Two blogs on old age and dementia (NYT)
• On analysis of the mysterious Voynich manuscript (BBC)
• Recipe for Mary Todd Lincoln's "Courting Cake"
• An Israeli program to keep Holocaust memories alive (BBC)
• The coffee klatch of death (NYT)
• "Worst End of School Mom Ever" --"We are limping, limping across the finish line, folks. I tapped out somewhere in April and at this point, it is a miracle my kids are still even going to school. I haven’t checked homework folders in three weeks, because, well, I just can’t. Cannot. Can. Not. I can’t look at the homework in the folder. Is there homework in the folder? I don’t even know. Are other moms still looking in the homework folder? I don’t even care."
• Nellie's revenge!  The actress from Little House on the Prairie's success (NYT)
• An experiment on high-density living
• Paul Krugman's op ed "Sympathy for Luddites" on jobs
• On the educational practice of grouping kids by level (NYT)
• A life-saving article, "Drowning Doesn't Look Like Drowning"
• Civil War reenactors' alternate universe (Slate)
• Pareidolia, or seeing faces in inantimate objects (BBC)
• Battling cancer together
• "What Not to Say at the Bedside"
• Baby fat:--"In our weight-obsessed culture, parents may try to restrict a robust child with a hearty appetite because they assume that enjoying food and eating a lot means she will get fat. It doesn’t, and it doesn’t work." (NYT)
• Fat and gut bacterium
• "The Courage of Teachers" in the tornado in OK and elsewhere
• "How American Became a Third World Country" (Guardian)
• Smithsonian gets a slave cabin
• "Is the NRA Un-American"
• Talking with kids about sex --Room for Debate
• Sleep deprivation and education (BBC)
• Antibiotics and back pain
• No rich child left behind
• Is the US inherently violent?  NYT op ed
• Great book list for kids of 1970s and 1980s
• Jane Austen, Game Theorist
• Do you "like" cancer survivors?  Don't.

More Links I Like

More great reads . . . .from July!

• One of my all-time favorites, a must-read for parents or anyone who "compares and despairs"--Glennon Melton's "Quit Eating Your Avocado at Me":  ""I am telling you that I decided right then and there that this mother was feeding her child avocados AT ME. And that also she had matched her child's clothes that morning AT ME. And also that she had likely disciplined her child effectively for years AT ME. And that as icing on her (likely homemade and gluten-free) cake she was enjoying a lovely, peaceful, well-planned, healthy lunch AT ME. I felt judged. I felt like her approach to parenting was maybe developed solely to shine a big old spotlight on my "not good enough" parenting. She was parenting AT ME, I tell you!"
• An argument for Zeus?? (NYT)
• On Jerusalem, the cookbook--I would love to read this (NYT)
• "I do not want my daughter to be nice" I see the point, but I think nice is still ok (NYT)
• A dark expose on assisted living (NYT)
• Beautiful (and not as creepy as it sounds)--a journalist live tweets his mother's last days (Buzzfeed)
• "Can Sewing Change Your Body Image?" (Guardian)
• A modern version of white women and their black cooks, more on Paula Deen (NYT)
• What your bed says about you--just make it! (Karen Maezen Miller)
• Changing definitions of cancer, esp DCIS (NYT)
• "Profiling Obama" navigating racism in America and Trayvon Martin verdict (NYT)
• A modern exploration of an 1852 article on the heat wave (NYT)
• "Hating on Fat People Just Makes Them Fatter" (NPR)
• The Guardian:  100 best non-fiction and 100 best fiction
• Full moon's effects on sleep (BBC)
• A touching missing twin story (NYT)
• On cento verse:  a quilted poem on cancer (NYT)
• Another article on white women and black cooks (NYT)
• "I'm tired of reading to my son, OK?" (NYT)--esp if it was the Bearnstein Bears!
• Famous but misattributed quotes (Toni Bernhard)
• Exploring Islam with children (UU)--a good book recommendation
• Mormons, the Web, and doubt (NYT)
• On Trayvon Martin here and here (NYT op eds by Charles Blow)
• Arthur Miller on the heat  of 1927 and another person on the heat wave of 1953 (NYT) and modern ways to beat the heat (Guardian)
• Alternatives for back pain--or not (NYT)
• Genes and weight (NYT)
• Living with debating death with dignity--a scholar's personal experience (NYT)
• Great PSA video "Am I Suspicious?" by Howard University students
• Jewish history in Rome (NYT)
• On a TED talk where a doctor asks forgiveness of fat patients he blamed (NYT)
• A controversial look at Teach for America
• How not to be intimidated in a doctor's office (Toni Bernhard)
• Brooks and Collins on being old (hilarious!  NYT), responding to Oliver Sacks
• Don't let the kids stay up late! (BBC)
• American Births--so expensive! (NYT)

Links I Like

Some things I've read that resonate . . . (yes, FB friends, these are the links I've shared there.)

• "3 Books Offer a Way to Cut the Cord" (NYT):  "“This is not your computer — I know it has your name on it, but this is my computer (or your school’s computer). I’m your parent, and I reserve the right to see everything that’s going on there. You need to be on the computer in an open place. I have the right to know what your homework assignment is. You can’t be in your room with the door closed. You can’t take it to bed with you. You can’t collapse a screen when I walk by. We have a code of conduct and we expect you to stick with it: Don’t be mean, don’t lie, don’t embarrass other people, don’t pretend to be someone you’re not, don’t go places you’re not allowed to go. Don’t post pictures that Grandma wouldn’t love. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t approve of.” from The Big Disconnect by Catherine Steiner-Adair

• "What Should a 4 Year-Old Know?"  Know they are loved, know they are safe, know they can color outside the lines, etc.  A good list for all ages.

• "Always Go to the Funeral" (NPR):  ""Most days, my real battle is doing good versus doing nothing."

• "For Whites (Like Me):  On White Kids" (HuffPost):  I really liked NutureShock for its discussion of the uselessness of general liberal responses to race such as "everyone is equal" and "we're all the same", mentioned in the article, but like that book was frustrated that the article gave no guidance just responded about "pat answers" being a cop out. I think they'd be a start, though, since as the article mentions white families have such trouble talking about race. We started talking about race directly right after I read NurtureShock, esp because the kids are bi-racial. But those conversations are hard because there's no guidance. I've come up with something along the lines of each person's race is very important to that person and it's important to respect that and learn more and realize how that changes how they experience the world, just like they are proud to be half Chinese and how being immigrants has affected their grandparents. 

• "It Gets Better" on Momastery:  On life after the last child starts school!

• "13 (Better) Questions to Ask Your Child About School":  What was the best thing you did at school?  What didn't you have at school today that you wished  you had?  Who did you sit near in class?  in lunch?  Whose locker is near yours?  Etc etc etc

• "George Saunders's Advice to Graduates" (NYT):  Kindness.  It's all about kindness.  And "failures of kindnesses."

• "How to Fall Forever into the Night Sky" (NPR):  A new way to imagine our place in the universe.

• Frank Bruni on death with dignity (NYT)

• On doctors discriminating against people with mental illness

• On 500 new fairytales discovered in Germany (Guardian)

• Evangelicals do something useful (NYT)

• Interesting history of abortion in American, including colonial times

• Fascinating profile of "The Weather God of Oklahoma" (NYT)

• Sleep loss and weight gain (NYT)

• Hundreds of artexhibition catologues available FREE online!

• "Addicted to Prayer" (NYT):  benefits even for atheists!

• Interesting discussion of the legacy of Jaws (NYT)

• Book Love and finding the lost gems of childhood--"One Book in . . ." (NYT)

• Camping (lack of electric light) resets body clock (BBC)

• Toni Bernhard's "A Not-To-Do List for the Chronically Ill"

• "Evolution punishes mean people" (BBC)

• High heels for kids?  Ugh (NYT)

• ICU PTSD (NYT)

And that's just August.

More Ugh

Sleeping pills.

Statins.

Meat.

All these have been in the news recently.  The news being that they will probably contribute to your failing health and early death.

Studies have shown that sleeping pills like Ambien, Lunesta, and Sonata, even 20 pills a year, can significantly raise the chance that you'll develop cancer and/or die.

Another study shows that statins, drugs like Lipitor, Crestor, and Zocor that help lower cholesterol, raise your risk for Type 2 diabetes and will probably result in 100,000 new statin-induced diabetics.

And meat.  Eating meat raises your chances of heart disease, cancer, and death.  When it's bacon or processed meats, the risk rises up to 20%.

Wow.

Are we doing anything right food and medicine-wise?  It's all relatively dire.