Beads from Week of May 3, 2020 to May 9, 2020
I read twenty five or thirty articles a week. In lockdown I have begun a discipline of capturing their essence, pulling a quote and wondering how they might string together. This morning going over the log for this past week I wondered if I could make a bracelet with beads (quotes) from five articles. Here it is...quotes from article in blue italics. If you would like to know where the beads came from you can read about that on my blog.
David Shribman writing in the Los Angeles Times about America abdicating the leadership position it has held for 75 years lifted up a question posed by the The distinguished Irish columnist and critic Fintan O’Toole, the “Will American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode?”
Tim Egan, who if you follow you know is discovering roots in Ireland and a life affirming Christian faith, used the same quote from Fintan O’Toole after leading with the fact that Ireland is sending aid to Native American tribes struggling against Covid infection in a remarkable act of “Boomerang Generosity” to repay the aid sent by the Choctaw nation in 1847 to Ireland suffering the horror of the “great hunger” supervised by the British.
Tristan Ahtone and Robert Lee lifted up the matter of repaying Native Americans in an article for lands that were taken from them by the Morrill Act and turned into endowments and campuses for land grant colleges and universities. Ahtone and Lee seem to find America extraordinarily unjust. In that judgement I would not concur...but I do think it imperative for contemporary Americans to let go a myth of innocence, purity and God blessedness and as they wrote acknowledge debts that are impossible to repay but unconscionable to ignore.
I pounce whenever I see a Gustavo Arrellano byline. This week in the LA Times he brought us an obituary for a lovely man, Bobbie Lee Verdugo, who as student in 1968 took part in East Los Angeles High school walk out. In mid-life he went back to Cal State LA, received a credential as a social worker and began decades of service as an “elder” a man whose faith and love drew hundreds of demoralized young men into poised and responsible adulthood. At the end of the piece Arrellano offers a quote from Verdugo:
“It’s OK to be angry, but what do you do about it, you know?”
Rebecca Solnit bemoaned the closure of public access to expansive natural vistas precisely when such views are needed to treat the disease of soul that lockdown for fear of a mortal enemy generates. Solnit speaks of a Midwestern woman who “Not long after the 2008 economic crash, told me that part of how she weathered the crisis was by driving to the shore of one of the Great Lakes every day to put her woes in the context of that vastness.”
Putting the beads on a thread…
“Will American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode?”Our Indigenous people are receiving “Boomerang Generosity” in large part because we refuse to acknowledge debts that are impossible to repay but unconscionable to ignore. “It’s OK to be angry, but what do you do about it, you know?” Maybe start by every day putting your woes in the context of vastness.”