Innocence Project Ribs, Veggie Pickup, Steller Turns 50

Keeping busy these days.  I'm in the third grade class daily mostly helping one young man catch up on his English but also with other kids too.  Biking in the breaks in the rain.   

Also went to the Alaska Innocence Project's BBQ Rib Cook-off.  This year their invite also mentioned there'd be veggie options too.  The baked beens were great.  

Justice is one of my most cherished values, and the idea of innocent people be locked up, even executed, moves me greatly.  Right now the national Innocence Project is working to prevent an innocent man from being executed. 

"The Missouri Supreme Court has scheduled the execution of Mr. Williams on Sept. 24, for a crime he did not commit."

Even the prosecuting attorney involved has changed his mind.

"The St. Louis County prosecuting attorney reviewed these DNA results and filed a motion to vacate Mr. Williams’ conviction because he believed the DNA results proved by clear and convincing evidence that Mr. Williams did not commit this crime."

Moving on to the execution, when there is serious question, even if not definite proof, of innocence, tells me these people are not serious about justice. 

The BBQ took place at the Alaskan Airmen's Association great building at Lake Hood float plane base.  It's a great location, but the steady rain and cloud cover that evening meant there were very few planes taking off or landing.  And one would hope they might consider a name change soon.  Airmen seems a lot sexist.  I suspect they could find reasonable synonyms, like pilots, flyers, etc.  

Picked up our Thursday veggies from Grow North Farms.  

And Friday afternoon went to the Community part of the Steller Secondary School 50th Anniversary celebration.  Here's one of the students who spoke to the crowd hold the Legislative Proclamation Rep. Alyse Galvin presented the school.  Alyse was involved with Steller a long time as a parent.  (As were we, but not for so long).  I saved this picture in fairly high resolution.  The story is pretty cool, but not sure you can read it.  Among the signatures is Sen. Jesse Kiehl of Juneau, who was a Steller student when my daughter was.  

Here's Rep. Galvin talking to the gathering before making the presentation of the Certificate.  To the side are the student speaker (whose name I didn't catch), the principal Maria Hernandez, and a parent who worked hard to organize the anniversary weekend.  

And here's Bob Reid, one of the original Steller teachers back in 1974, who came up from Texas to participate.  Bob talked about how the school got started and the ideals of creating a school where everyone participated in the decisions on courses, rules, etc.  Students, teachers, administrators, staff, and parents.  And how the vision was to bring the world into the school and involve the students out in the world.  

Bob was also a neighbor of ours before he moved to Texas, so it was great to see him again.  His major claim to fame for me was that he was the host of "Nothing but the Blues" on the then new public radio station KSKA.  

For those who can't read the Legislative Proclamation, here's part of it:

"The self-directed aspect of Steller Secondary School is a big part of what makes Steller so successful, and so unique.  With an emphasis on responsibility to self and to one's community, students, parents, and staff work together through a democratic process to set school policy and procedures.  The school ethic encourages self-advocacy and inquiry:  students are encouraged to participate in collaborative processes to determine what courses should be offered and which events will take place. 

With no bells to call students to class, no advanced placement classes, and no interscholastic sports, students who choose to attend Steller find themselves both appropriately challenged and personally engaged through the opportunity to co-create independent studies and intensives with their instructors and their peers, and to develop self-directive intensives ranging from foreign and domestic travel, sports, carpentry, drama, creative writing, sculpture, and batik, to fun with math and the chemistry of cosmetics.

As part of Stellar's commitment to their motto, "only the educated are free," and their recognition that education of the individual occurs in the context of an interdependent world, the school heavily emphasizes service to community, both through a sustained commitment to service intones community, region, and state, and through a commitment to one another within the school's peer mentoring and leadership opportunities."

I'd note, that while it says "no advanced placement classes, and no interscholastic sports," students are free to arrange those activities at other schools in the district.  My daughter took advanced placement classes at another high school and she took German at the University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA) while she was in high school.  And NBA player Trajan Langdon played basketball for East High School while he was at Steller.  

The school was named after Georg Steller, (from Wikipedia):

"Georg Wilhelm Steller (10 March 1709 – 14 November 1746) was a German-born naturalist and explorer who contributed to the fields of biology, zoology, and ethnography. He participated in the Great Northern Expedition (1733–1743) and his observations of the natural world helped the exploration and documentation of the flora and fauna of the North Pacific region.

Steller pursued studies in theology and medicine before turning his attention to the natural sciences. In 1734, he joined the Russian Academy of Sciences as a physician, eventually being selected to accompany Bering's expedition to the uncharted waters between Siberia and North America. Steller kept detailed records of species and cultures encountered, as well as ocean currents during the journey. . ."

Among the regular visitors to our backyard, the Steller's Jay was named after Georg Steller.  (The photo is from a 2014 post and I wrote then that I did nothing to enhance the color. The light was just right.)

So connecting several threads here, I took Dr. Margritt Engel to the Steller anniversary celebration.  Dr. Engel was my daughter's UAA German teacher while my daughter was at Steller.  But more important, Dr. Engel translated Georg Steller's journals from the expeditions to Siberia and North America.  She brought two with her to give to the school for their library and to arrange for further interaction with the school and scholarship on its namesake.   

A Long And Amazing Life Ended Today

I just learned that Gerda Bernstein passed away peacefully today.  If I've got my dates right, she was just shy of her 101st birthday.  

She was my mother's first cousin and was able to get out of Germany before World War II started.  She was always a presence in my life, though I'd say she knew me longer than I knew her.  My family moved to LA from Chicago when I was still under three. While I see pictures in the photo albums of her in Los Angeles, I don't really remember her from then much.  

My first vivid memory was when I traveled back home from my junior year studying in Germany and stopped for a day in Chicago.  She was a bigger than life person - warm, beautiful, welcoming.  Here's a picture of her wedding I found during this stay in LA .  

Below is from a post I wrote in 2016 when we visited her huge art studio in a warehouse in Chicago.  She was a significant artist.  Much of her work was large installations.  Her website says:

"Gerda Meyer Bernstein is an internationally known Chicago-based artist who addresses thorny global issues. Her previous exhibitions include "Witness & Legacy," a traveling museum exhibition; The Alternative Museum in New York City, The Spertus Museum and Cultural Center in Chicago; "Passages" at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum; and at the New Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin, Germany."

  I have some video from that trip which I thought I'd put up.  I'll try to add it later.  

Then we went to visit a first cousin of my mom's, who is also an artist of some stature - Gerda Bernstein.  We, fortunately, met her at her studio.  My mom's had a lithograph of hers hanging in her house forever and I've seen catalogues of her work.  But since most of her works are large installation pieces, there's nothing like seeing things as they were meant to be seen.  The studio is a small gallery.  Some of the installations are up, but most are represented by photographs.  I want to do more on Gerda, but were busy every day visiting folks so this is just a brief post. 

On the left is view from near the entrance to the studio. 

This piece is called Gaza Tunnel.  It's a reconstruction of the tunnels used to smuggle things into Gaza.  But this tunnel is reimagined to be lined with books and the idea of the transformational power of books. 

Most of her works raise issues of people's suffering in the world.  As I understand it - though I'm not positive - many early works were holocaust related and the focus has taken in other oppressed peoples. 

I'm afraid I was overpowered by the art in the studio.  My initial interest in Gerda is that she's the only person I know of who is still alive who knew my mother when she was a young girl in Germany.  We talked about that a little bit, but the art was too strong to resist. 

Good Bye Vic! Miss You Already

[Fishcher photo from a University webpage
which no longer is working.] 

I believe this is a picture of Vic when he was a delegate at the Alaska Constitutional Convention.  

Like his good friend Lidia Selkregg, he was someone who made everyone he talked to feel special.  

 

 Here's some of what I wrote about Vic's autobiography - To Russia With Love - on his 95th birthday, four years ago. 

"There's something of a Forrest Gump quality to Vic Fischer's life - he lived through many historic moments in the history of the 20th Century, and played important roles in a number of them.  His father was the famous journalist, Louis Fischer, who was married to a Russian writer.  He was born in Berlin in 1924 spent his early years in Berlin and Moscow, escaping from Stalin purges through intervention from Eleanor Roosevelt in 1939."

Many remarkable men and women have made Alaska their home.  None of their lives was more remarkable than Vic's.  

 

Vic at his 95th birthday party in May 2019.

In the legislative halls of Juneau 2010

Vic was at the rally to gather signatures for the Dunleavy recall in 2019.  I'm pretty sure Dunleavy would have been recalled if it hadn't been for COVID.  The organizers got the required 28,000 signatures in two weeks.  That's phenomenal.  So getting the recall petition certified was easy.  But the next round required another petition to get it on the ballot.  And as the group was ready to start the second petition, COVID shut everything down.  No gatherings.  People weren't going places like the library or the DMV where it was easy to get signatures.  And the recall movement died of COVID.

Here's Vic in Juneau talking to Rep. David Gutenberg.  I was blogging the legislature and a question had come up about what was intended in the Alaska Constitution regarding the Boundary Commission.  Vic, who'd been a member of the Constitutional Convention was there and I was able to get his interpretation of what the Constitution intended on that issue.  Unfortunately, that video is a blank on the page, so I can't post it now.  [I saved some videos on Vidler which eventually started charging.  They did help me by sending me all the video I had up there, but it was a complicated process of redoing them all.  I got a number redone and up on YouTube, but not all.  I'm guessing that's what happened to this one.]

But I do have this video of Vic speaking at the "It's Our Oil" rally in 2013.  You can see the whole video (with other speakers) at the original post.

Alaskans have lost one of our greatest statesmen and a great human being..  

John Martin Shot To Death

https://www.adn.com/alaska-news/crime-courts/2023/06/19/shooting-of-man-sleeping-in-south-anchorage-parking-lot-was-unprovoked-attack-prosecutor-says/

Back in 2012 I posted about John Martin's city hall protest 

over homelessness

.   The post included a 

video that is no longer working (it was on Viddler and they cut my account long ago.  Though they did send me the files for my videos.  I redid some on YouTube, but not all of them.  Not sure where that file is anymore.  I mention this simply because this is a danger in an age when people store the photos, videos, and data outside of their control.)  In the video I talked to John and then Mayor Sullivan comes across the street and gives John a cup of coffee and they chat a bit.  

A previous post shows him at the Assembly and I did a brief video at the break. (It too was on Viddler and doesn't seem to be working, though it flashed an image of John just before turning black.  Somewhere I probably have these on a sound card.  When Mac upgraded they switched out of the old iMovie and so those original files are available either.  Beware how you backup your stuff.)

I'd been walking from the bus station to the Redistricting Board meeting and showed up at just the right time.  

I don't know much about John.  He did later attempt to cross the Bering Sea to Russia.  He was a committed advocate for the poor and homeless.  He saw the world from a slightly different angle than most people.  

I don't know why he was shot.  I don't know if he was the target or he was just randomly shot.  I just know we've lost a unique and sensitive member of our community to gun violence.  

Harry Belafonte - Try To Remember

A good man and a great entertainer.  I'll remember.

The Ides of March Is A Good Day To Watch Shakespeare's Julius Caesar

 This cast has some of the biggest names of the day - Marlon Brandon, John Gielgud, James Mason, Deborah Kerr, Greer Garson . . .

From the Internet Archive:

Getting Boosted Does Help, And The Older You Are The More It Helps

As some of you know, I've been monitoring COVID data since March 2020 and posting updates as the State updates their dashboards, which is now weekly on Tuesdays.  Today I speculated that the folks getting sick enough to be hospitalized and to die are likely to skew older and unvaccinated.  And I try not to say such things without back up data on here, so I looked it up.  And it's supported by the data - boosted folks don't get as sick or die as often.  Old folks get sicker and die more.  

I infrequently post the COVID updates in the main part of the blog.  You can see them at the tab on top labeled Alaska COVID-19 Count 3  May 2021 - ???.

So here's today's update (yes, it's Tuesday).  And in the tabbed updates there's also an introduction and some tables where I updated the numbers as they got posted.  Early on it was every day, then three days a week, and now weekly as the state chose to update less frequently.  I began the charts because in the beginning the state didn't put up anything except that day's numbers and you had no way to see if things were getting better or worse.  

Tuesday, March 7, 2023 - Positive tests up 132 from last week's 450, no new deaths reported (doesn't mean there weren't any, just not reported yet), and hospitalizations down from last week's 44 to this week's 35, but this week there's someone on a vent while there hadn't been for several weeks.  Available ICU beds up by four to 33 statewide, but remain at two in Anchorage.  

The takeaway?  COVID is still here.  Most people seem to be less sick, but some get sick enough to be hospitalized.  I haven't dug deeply enough into the state data to know who is still getting hospitalized and who's dying.  Presumably a) those with little or no immunization and those who are older, if we go by national trends.  

From the CDC - you can see the odds of being hospitalized go up by age, and it's starker for deaths.  (This chart is as of Feb 6, 2023)

Here's one from Washington State that shows both hospitalizations and deaths by vaccination status.  Again, those getting boosters were significantly, but not absolutely, better protected from hospitalization and dying.

Obituaries Should Be Published At Least A Year Before People Die

 As I read the obituaries in the Anchorage Daily News, I come across people that I really, really wish I would have known and could have talked to about their apparently incredible lives.  Waiting until they are dead means I've missed the opportunity.  

And this thought was reinforced when I saw this note about Alfred Nobel's premature obituary:

"To prepare for your next cultural activity in Värmland, ask yourself this: what would you do if you read your own (accidental) obituary? In Alfred Nobel’s case, an obituary published by mistake on a French newspaper made him re-examine his whole life. See, the Swedish chemist held 355 different patents and one of them was for the invention of the dynamite. But after a long career producing firearms and weapons for sale, he decided he didn’t want his legacy to be “the merchant of death”. So he funneled all of his considerable fortune to form the Nobel Prize Institute, which awards 'outstanding contributions to humanity'”.

Not only do early obituaries give the living a chance to meet interesting people before they die, but, in Nobel's case, it gave him the opportunity to reflect on his life and legacy.  

There are a number of folks today who might be able to repair some of the damage they've done in the world if faced with their obituaries a year or more before they die. 

And then there are people who might be able to edit what their children write about them.  We could publish an obituary cliche list that people could use to be a bit more authentic.  First obituary cliche entry would be: "he married the love of his life."  

I ran across this excerpt at Culturetrip.tcom while trying to find out more about Värmland, the county where the Story of Gösta Berling takes place, preparation for Monday night's book club meeting. I've put up some quotes from Gösta Berling in the last post.

Inside Man's Final Take On Humanity Is So Wrong

 I don't think there are any serious spoilers here.  Inside Man (on Netflix) is going where it's going, no major surprises.  

At the end,  Stanley Tucci, as Jefferson Grieff, gives a short soliloquy on the theme "We're all murderers given the right situations."

I just want to push back on that belief.  Particularly since it will give lots of already hyped up MAGA folks more justification for violence and murder.  

Is every human being capable of murder under the right conditions?  NO.  What about being capable of killing?  I think more people could kill another under the right conditions, but for many the conditions would have to be extreme indeed.  

From a Chicago Tribune column by Rabbi Marc Gellman:

"In biblical Hebrew, as in English, killing (harag) and murder (ratzah) are two different words with two very different moral connotations, and the commandment uses the Hebrew word ratzah, which means that the proper translation of the commandment from Hebrew into English is, "Thou shalt not murder." The difference is crucial.

Killing is taking a life. Murder is taking a life with no moral justification. Murder is morally wrong, but there is wide moral agreement (not complete agreement) that some forms of killing are morally just. . ."

This is more or less consistent with a number of other writings I saw on the topic.  

But Grieff's take (the Tucci character) is that every person is capable of murder, and the examples in this short Netflix series are not even extreme.  They're more about stupid decisions getting way out of hand.  We've got a beloved (in his community) vicar who apparently loves his wife (and she him) as well as his son.  And then he makes a series of terrible decisions.  

I'm with 

"Anita Singh of The Daily Telegraph [who] said, "Moffat can throw any amount of good lines or clever little plot twists into this show, but it is built on a flaw so fundamental that it's impossible to get past it."[5]"  (from Wikipedia)

Under normal social conditions, a relatively small percent of our population will ever become murders.  Probably a few more might actually kill someone.  I'm not making this up.  The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime says that in 2017, world wide, 6.1 out of 100,000 people were murdered.  

That's less than one percent.  And we know some murderers kill more than one person, so the percentage of murderers is lower than the percentage of people murdered.  I'd note that in the Americas, the rate of murder was almost three times the world average at 17.1 per 100,000.  

In a Zombie Apocalypse?  Probably the percent will go up, if killing Zombies counts as murder, but it would be most likely in self-defense.  

So NO!  Most people are not capable of murder.  They might be capable of killing another human being if circumstances got really extreme.  The circumstances in Inside Man were not extreme and the people involved made really stupid decisions that I doubt the real human beings those characters were meant to portray would have made.  

(Am I saying religious leaders aren't capable of murder?  Not at all.  Many have taken such positions because of the status attached and are capable of such evil actions as promoting laws that ban abortions in all circumstances.  Those aren't real men or women of God.  These are people who want power over other people, over women.  The vicar in the series was not presented as that kind of man of God.)

COVID Is Still Here And Where To Check The New Expiration Date Of Your Home COVID Tests

With vaccinations people are feeling more secure that COVID won't kill them.  I see fewer masks indoors these days.  

The State went from daily reporting to weekday reporting to Monday, Wednesday, Friday, reporting to once a week reporting.  

But people are still dying of COVID, right here in Alaska.  28 new deaths were reported this week. (Although there's a new report each week, deaths seem to get accumulated over a period of time and then are reported in bulk.  These were the first deaths reported since August 24, 2022)

I'm still reporting these every week, but not in the main part of the blog.  They're reported in the Alaska Daily COVID-19 Count 3 tab just below the blog header.

Here's my latest report from that page:

Wednesday, September 14, 2022 - I'm getting this up on Thursday.  People are treating COVID as though it were gone.  To the extent that I even forgot to update this yesterday.  But the numbers are a reminder that this isn't over.  And that people are still dying of COVID, even here in Alaska.  

25 new deaths were reported this week.  These are the first deaths reported in three weeks because, I'm assuming, it takes a while to gather these numbers.  It would be truly shocking if these were all in the last week. It would be useful to know what the vaccination status of those dying was.  They may report that somewhere, but I'm not digging deeper than the main dashboards now.

21 more people were hospitalized in the last week.  Actual number of COVID patients in the hospital reported as 66, up four from last week.  Number of vents is down two to zero.

Number of ICU beds available statewide is 21 (down from 34 last week) and one in Anchorage (down from two.)  I believe this is not a COVID specific number, but includes all ICU beds in the state regardless of illness.  

Even new resident cases are up - 980/950 compared to last week's 879/902.  Ditto for non-resident new cases:  544 new cases, up from 519 last week.  A regular warning on these last numbers - many, if not most, tests are self tests which tend not to be reported, so the reported numbers don't tell the whole story.  

 

COVID Home Test Expiration Extension

Are your at home COVID tests expired?  The FDA has extended expiration dates. My June - Aug 2022 expired home tests are now good to Dec 2022 to February 2023.  Check yours here: https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/coronavirus-covid-19-and-medical-devices/home-otc-covid-19-diagnostic-tests#list

A little ways down it has a list of many different products for home testing. Each has a link to see the updated expiration dates.  That's where you'll find the details.  

Looking For Queen Elizabeth II In Invisible Cities

Queen Elizabeth II from
National Portrait Gallery

The news of Queen Elizabeth II's death comes as I'm reading Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities.  Calvino's book imagines the tales that Marco Polo told Kublai Khan about the cities Polo had visited, many in Khan's empire, many not.  

Polo laments the impossibility of accurately describing these cities.  He raises questions about how to merge the past and the present,  the apparent and the invisible, the body and the soul of the cities he's visited.  Nothing is as it seems, or at least nothing of importance is.  His stories remind me of ethnographer Clifford Gertz' 'thick description".  The stories would suggest  caution taking too seriously the people explaining the meaning of Queen Elizabeth II's passing.

Let me give you an example. I also ask you to slow down.   Calvino wasted no words.  Read each word.  Maybe even read the passage twice.  

"In vain, great-hearted Kublai, shall I attempt to describe Zaira, city of high bastions.  I could tell you how many steps up the streets rising like stairways, and the degree of the arcades' curves, and what kind of zinc scales cover the roofs;  but I already know this would be the same as telling you nothing.  The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past:  the height of a lamppost and the distance from the ground of a hanged usurper's swaying feet;  the line strung from the lamppost to the railing opposite and the festoons that decorate the course of the queen's nuptial procession;  the height of that railing and the leap of the adutererer who climbed over it at dawn;  the tilt of the guttering and a cat's progress along it as he slips into the same window;  the firing range of a gunboat which has suddenly appeared behind the cape and the bomb that destroys the guttering;  the rips in the fish net and the three old men seated on the dock mending nets and telling each other for the hundredth time the story of the gunboat of the usurper, who some say was the queen's illegitimate son, abandoned in his swaddling clothes there on the dock.

As this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands.  A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zaira's past.  The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the blisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls." 

Queen Elizabeth is like a Calvino city.  Her death is not simply the death of one human being. It's a death in a monarchy that goes back more than a millennium.  It's the death of the heir to an empire that ruled much of the world, claiming the riches and labor of the people who were subjects of that ruling royal family.  While Queen Elizabeth II reigned longer than any other monarch in her family, she also reigned over the sharp decline of the empire and of the family's power and scope.  

Henry VIII image Wikipedia

"Queen Elizabeth II is the Church of England chief, officially known as the Supreme Governor, and sits at the helm of a centuries-old British institution established by the monarchy. Its founder was Tudor monarch King Henry VIII, one of the country's most infamous leaders, who created the breakaway institution after turning his back on Catholicism. Centuries later, the Queen has emerged as another landmark ruler who continues to honour the former King's religious practices. But people have questioned whether the two figures who share a throne also share blood.. . 

While there is no direct line between the two, the modern royals have a distant connection to the Tudors.

They owe their existence to Queen Margaret of Scotland, grandmother of Mary Queen of Scots, and King Henry VIII's sister."  (From Express)

 Henry VIII lived from 1491 - 1547. 

What is real and what is imagination?  What is real, but incomplete?  How many Queen Elizabeth IIs are there?  The one seen by her father King George VI?  Her's sister's Elizabeth.  Her husband's.  The views of her children and grandchildren.  There's Gandhi's Queen Elizabeth. Nelson Mandela's? John F. Kennedy's? Churchill's?   Marilyn Monroe's or Elton John's? And every British subject has their own version of the Queen.  

Shakespeare wrote a plays about Henry VIII.  Netflix aired a television series about Elizabeth II.

Where lies the true Elizabeth II?  Nowhere and everywhere would be Calvino's Marco Polo's answer.  

Invisible Cities also includes descriptions of conversations between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo.  
In this excerpt I'm only using Kublai Khan's thoughts.  For perspective, Khan lived from 1215 - 1294.  Calvino wrote about him in the 20th Century.

Kublai Khan from WikePedia

"From the high balustrade of the palace the Great Khan watches his empire grow.  First the line of the boundaries had expanded to embrace conquered territories, but the regiments' advance encountered half-deserted regions, scrubby villages of huts, marshes where the rice refused to sprout, emaciated peoples, dried rivers, reeds.  "My empire has grown too far toward the outside.  It is time,"  the Khan thought, "for it to grow within itself," and he dreamed of pomegranate groves, the fruit so ripe it burst its skin, zebus browning on the spit and dripping fat, veins of metal surfacing in landslips with glistening nuggets.  

Now many seasons of abundance have filled the granaries.  The rivers in flood have borne forests of beams to support the bronze roofs of temples and palaces.  caravans of slaves have shifted mountains of serpentine marble across the continent.  The Great Khan contemplates an empire covered with cities that weight upon the earth and upon mankind, crammed with wealth and traffic overladen with ornaments and offices, complicated with mechanisms and hierarchies, swollen, tense, ponderous.

"The empire is being crushed by its own weight," Kublai thinks, and in his dreams now cities light as kites appear, pierced cities like laces, cities transparent as mosquito netting, cities like leaves' veins, cities lined like a hand's palm, filigree cities to be seen through their opaque and fictitious thickness."

Warnings From Half Of A Yellow Sun

The phrase, "Everything is impossible until it is done" often attributed to Nelson Mandela among others, tells us not to give up hope that we can accomplish something.  It's a positive inspiration for people fighting to elect sensible politicians or to change oppressive laws.  Surely the Supreme Court decision declaring the right to gay marriage is an example of the truth of that quote.  Tattoo it on your brain.  

But I want to look at the possibility of negative events in this post, which might be more aptly said, "Everything is impossible until it isn't."  NOT taking action because we DON'T think something bad can really happen is a problem.  

Below is a short passage from Half Of A Yellow Sun a novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.  

The book portrays the lives of (mostly) upper class, educated Nigerians.  Part I is titled "The Early 60s."  I'm now in Part II:  "The Late Sixties."  I'll briefly point out why I think it is relevant to us today for those who may not see in the passage what I see.

The narrator, in this chapter, speaks from the perspective of Ugwu, an Igbo, who is the houseboy of Odenigbo who teaches at the university in Nsukka. He is also Igbo though he often speaks to Ugwu in English.  Odenigbo is often referred to by Ugwu as Master. Odenigbo hosts weekly afternoon lunches for a small group of faculty - where they have lively discussions about the politics of their newly independent country.  

The gathering in the passage is a little different.  There had been a recent coup and now there are reports on the radio that the Muslim, Hausa-speaking Northerners are starting to attack the Christian Igbo soldiers who they accuse of tribal favoritism and corruption in the newly independent nation of Nigeria.

"Ever since the second coup some weeks ago, when the Igbo soldiers were killed, he had struggled to understand what was happening, read the newspapers more carefully, listened more closely to Master and his guests.  The conversations no longer ended in reassuring  laughter, and the living room often seemed clouded with uncertainties, with unfinished knowledge, as if they knew something would happen and yet did not know what.  None of them would ever had imagined that this would happen, that the announcer on ENBC Radio Enugu would be saying now, as Ugwu straightened the tablecloth, "We have confirmed reports that up to five hundred Igbo people have been killed in Maiduguri."

"Rubbish!" Master shouted.  "Did you hear that?  Did you hear that?"

"Yes, sah,"  Ugwu said.  He hoped the loud noise would not wake Baby up from her siesta.  

"Impossible!" Master said.

"Sah, your soup," Uguw said.

"Five-hundred people killed.  Absolute rubbish!  It can't be true." [emphasis added]

I'd note that in the next chapters the slaughter will get even worse.  

My sense is that most US citizens are still sitting too comfortably in their lives to believe how close we are to the impossible.  Or maybe a little too uncomfortably to believe things could really get even worse.  They are telling people like me not to be alarmists.  Things always work out.  

Well, until they don't.  

In May 2020, Trump said Trump said keeping US deaths to 100,000 would be a ‘very good job.’  Over a million people in the US died of COVID.  Where's the outrage?  Well, the million who died aren't here to complain.  And while their families were affected,  most of us didn't have physical contact with all those dead bodies.  The deaths were spread out geographically.  But let's consider how many people died.  The ten largest cities in the US have populations above 1 million.  

But the next ten, if all those deaths took place in their cities, would have been wiped out!

11	San Jose	California	1,003,120
12	Fort Worth	Texas	958,692
13	Jacksonville	Florida	938,717
14	Charlotte	North Carolina	925,290
15	Columbus	Ohio	921,605
16	Indianapolis	Indiana	892,656
17	San Francisco	California	884,108
18	Seattle	Washington	787,995
19	Denver	Colorado	760,049
20	Washington	District of Columbia	718,355

Source:  https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities

It would have a lot more impact if the deaths had been geographically concentrated in any of these cities.  The whole population would be gone!  Ghost town.  

We still don't comprehend the enormity of the disaster.  And because we refuse to even wear masks, we continue to offer our bodies as breeding ground for the virus.  Even if we have no symptoms, we give the virus a host where rest and mutate into newer and potentially even more deadly variations.

But perhaps the biggest catastrophe waiting to happen is the loss of our democracy.  Women have already had a basic human right ripped away from them.  Now far right legislators are trying to limit their right to interstate travel.  If the Supreme Court next fall cedes all voting decisions to state legislatures, Republican legislatures will gerrymander their states so that only Republicans can win.  They'll change voting laws and procedures so that potential Democratic voters will have a video game worth of obstacles blocking their attempts to vote.  

Armed (unregulated) militias could duplicate the slaughters that Odenigbo can't believe are being reported on the radio.  If you don't believe that you didn't see any footage of January 6.  You don't understand the hate and anger behind the anti-abortion laws.  You fail to consider the 320 million guns owned by US citizens.  You're not paying attention to regular mass shootings - there have already been 48 in the US in July 2022 and today is only July 17!

Some US citizens understood the gravity of things when they watched the January 6 insurrection.  Others while listening to the Congressional Jan 6 hearings.  But most people seem to be incapable of believing a fascist takeover of the United States could really happen.  Their image of the US as the land of democracy and freedom blocks the image of an authoritarian take over.  No government in history has not eventually fallen.  Despite the talk of American exceptionalism, we aren't any different.  

Some people may think that they are law abiding white citizens so they'll be fine. Only bad people have to worry.  

And many might imagine the worst, but can't imagine they have the power to do anything about it.  That's understandable and curable.  

We all need to keep these two quotes visible:

EVERYTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE UNTIL IT IS NOT.  

To remember that losing our democracy is very possible.

EVERYTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE UNTIL IT IS DONE.

To remember that we can work to preserve our democracy and defeat those who want to kill it.  

The most immediate thing you can do is make sure as many people as possible vote blue. Don't believe me?  Stacy Abrams got enough blue voters registered and to the polls in Georgia in 2022 to give its electoral college votes to Biden and to replace two Republican US Senators with Democrats.  She did it by planning and hard work.   There are many organizations working hard to duplicate that kind of work.  In 2020, nearly 2/3 of eligible voters voted.  That was a presidential election year when more people vote.  It was a record high.  But it means that 1/3 of voters did NOT vote.    

You can help find those non-voters and encourage them to vote blue.  Here are some organizations working on that.  

Six Organizations Getting People to Vote and How to Help Them

Fearless Action is a youth led group getting people to vote.

The League of Conservation Voters

Fascist/authoritarian takeover isn't inevitable.  But the fact that majority of the Republicans in the House and Senate won't say that Biden won the election, but instead are denying the insurrection, and are attacking the January 6 investigation, and doing nothing to prevent it from happening in 2024 is not a good sign.  

While the 2022 election is critical to maintaining a democracy, the larger threat looming over the world is Climate Change.  While a growing number of people are convinced that climate change is real, they aren't willing to fight hard to slow it down.  Every day of delay means more extreme climate change impacts and more suffering of all living creatures on the planet.  (Well, there probably will be some creatures who will find a way to thrive in the new earthly reality.)

I'm guessing the title of the book is related to the flag of the short-lived breakaway country of Biafra.