I’m on Bainbridge Island for a short notice, brief family gathering.
I don’t think it’s the travel that has made blogging harder. It’s the general overload of negative stimuli. There’s too much to write. Nothing to write that others haven’t covered more than I can, but still not adequately.
So, my fallback is recent photos. [And since I’m traveling I took my iPad instead of my MacBook and there’s all sorts of little quirks. I mastered most of them last fall when I had the iPad with me in Turkey, but I have to relearn them. Like just now when I clicked to upload photos, it tells me I can’t unless I sign in with my Google account or allow cookie access to proceed. Well, I already did the google account sign in to be able to start blogging. And unlike my laptop where it has a button to allow cookie access, in the iPad it has a button for more information. And the information isn’t helpful. On my laptop I can go to Safari preferences but doing that on the iPad isn’t as straightforward. So probably there won’t be a post tonight. No, let me post this and when I figure out how to get the pictures up, I’ll add them to this.]
I’d add that when I started blogging on Blogspot, it hadn’t yet been bought by google. And Apple shares some of the blame. The stuff I need is there, I know. Just in a different place with a different symbol.
A few minutes later. I googled again on how to unblock cookies. It told me to go to apps and then find Safari.
It was already unblocked. I blocked it and unblocked it again. Back to Blogger, and this time it worked. Grrrrr!
“THESE CHARGES ARE OF A PERSONAL CHARACTER, AND WHILE THEY SEEM TO BE SUSTAINED BY THE RECORD OF THE TRIAL AND THE PAPERS BEFORE ME AND TEND TO SHOW THAT THE TRIAL WAS NOT FAIR. I DO NOT CARE TO DISCUSS THIS FEATURE OF THE CASE ANY FURTHER, BECAUSE IT IS NOT NECESSARY. I AM CONVINCED THAT IT IS CLEARLY MY DUTY TO ACT IN THIS CASE FOR THE REASONS ALREADY GIVEN, AND I, THEREFORE, GRANT AN ABSOLUTE PARDON TO SAMUEL FIELDEN, OSCAR NEEBE AND MICHAEL SCHWAB THIS 26TH DAY OF JUNE, 1890.
JOHN P. ALTGELD,
GOVERNOR OF ILLINOIS”
The Sunday Solidarity book club is reading Fight Like Hell by Kim Kelly. It’s a review of people who fought for the rights of workers in the US since the early 1800s. One section focused on Lucy Parsons and the Haymarket Eight.
“On May 4, 1886, a mass meeting of workers gathered in Chicago’s Haymarket Square to listen to a handful of local anarchists and labor organizers speak in support of workers at the nearby McCormick Reaper Works, who were on strike for an eight-hour workday and had been viciously attacked by police the day before. Among the speakers were Lucy’s husband, Albert, August Spies, and Samuel Fielden, three anarchists who were steadfast advocates for the eight-hour workday movement that had been gathering momentum among the city’s laboring classes. [Albert Parsons spoke]
Fielden was up next, and as he was finishing his speech, police arrived to break up the rally. A bomb was thrown into the path of the advancing phalanx, and the cops began firing wildly into the crowd. In less than five minutes the square was emptied, eleven people were dead, and more than seventy had been injured. Despite the fog of chaos making it nearly impossible to tell who had done what exactly in the melee, Parsons, Spies, Fielden, and fellow anarchists Adolph Fischer, George Engel, Michael Schwab, Oscar Neebe, and Louis Lingg were arrested and tried for conspiracy and murder. There was no firm evidence connecting any of the men to the bombing itself, and as one policeman who’d been present told a reporter, ‘A very large number of the police were wounded by each other’s revolvers.’
”An openly hostile judge and jury, along with the public’s distrust of the defendants’ anarchists politics, sealed their fates. All were declared guilty, with Parsons and Pies among the four sentenced to the gallows.” (Fight Like Hell 61-62)
The book then mentions there’s a memorial for the Haymarket Massacre in Forest Park, Illinois. I have good friends who live in Oak Park, the next suburb over. So I asked them to check out the memorial and send me some pictures for the book club. And that’s one of them above. Thanks Norma and Lewis.
At that Sunday Solidarity meeting after the book club, one of the activities was putting together comfort kits for kids who have had trauma in their lives. There were small blue fabric boxes that we filled with balloons, tiny stuffed animals, colored pencils, small coloring books, a timer, and other goodies.
Although I’ve gotten the photos up, they are not responding to the normal controls to move to the left, center, or right. Below is a picture from the Bear Tooth theater where we saw Argentina defeat Switzerland. That was Saturday, before the meeting on Sunday, but I just can’t move the pictures around predictably so I’ll leave it here.
Tuesday morning we were on a plane in Anchorage, waiting to take off in the rain. Not complaining, rain is good and we were taking off on time for Seattle.
We got to Seattle and took the light rail to the ferry. We were hoping to catch the 3:50pm ferry and we were cutting it a bit tight. But it turned out that both the 3pm and 3:50 ferries had been cancelled and we eventually got the 4:45 ferry.
But because of the two cancelled ferries, the crowd in the terminal had gotten way bigger than normal.
[“A Way With Words”. Metal art by Rob Satterwhite. There’s a phone number, so if you want to buy it, contact me and I’ll get it to you. At $95 it’s a bargain compared to other art works there.]
There was a small art exhibit in the Bainbridge Island library today and I liked the quote of this piece. I think you should be able to read it.
And there’s lots of heather blooming.
And that’s that. One of the most frustrating posting experiences in a long time.
