Alexei Navalny, Jesus, Martin Luther King Jr., and on

Screen shot from MSNBC, Feb. 16, 2024

We begin the season of Lent with the execution of an innocent man, a man like Jesus, who gave his life for his people.  Say his name: Alexei Navalny.

Both spoke truth to power, and both were executed.

Like Martin Luther King Jr. 

Like Mahatma Gandhi, Jamal Khashoggi, and so many others.

CNN re-aired a documentary about the 2020 poisoning of Navalny by Vladimir Putin.

Here's a timeline of Navalny's recent actions:

Aug. 20, 2020 - Nalvalny is poisoned on a flight within Russia.

Sept. - Nov. 2020 - Team of researchers discovers who participated in the plot-- and that the murder was clearly ordered by Putin.

Dec. 14, 2020 - Researchers disclose plot via many social media platforms.

Dec. 21, 2020 - Researchers play an audiotape of one of poisoning team disclosing the plan while secretly being recorded.

Jan. 17, 2021 - Navalny returns to Russia to continue to challenge Putin's stranglehold on Russia.

Feb. 16, 2024 - Navalny is murdered in a Siberian prison weeks before the next presidential election in 
Russia.

Navalny gave his life to fight Putin's stranglehold on Russia. 

See also:

"Putin saw an existential threat in Navalny" by Nathan Hodge.

"Inside the mind of Vladimir Putin" documentary with host Fareed Zakariah.

Love Israel, Support Peace

We live in a different world since last Saturday, October 7.

Guest essay by Nir Avishai Cohen, NYT

The world mourns--well, some distract themselves with football or the nearing World Series.

The best commentary I've seen is by a major in the reserves for the Israeli Defense Forces, Nir Avishai Cohen in today's New York Times.

But all of us have witnessed yet another instance of willingness to massacre civilians.  This began on a large scale during World War 2 and climaxed with Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Then Putin began it again in Ukraine, and now Hamas has waged war on babies, young adults at a party, elderly people and others not bearing weapons.

In 2018 Major Cohen wrote a book titled Love Israel, Support Palestine.  

"Israel did not do enough to make peace," he writes.  

True and tragic for all.

"Israelis must realize that there is no greater security asset than peace," he concludes in this article.  "The strongest army cannot protect the country the way peace does."

Katharine, talented sister of the Wright Brothers

What a fate--to be the talented sister of two famous brothers! 

Katharine Wright, sister of Orville and Wilbur, is in the news this week because her correspondence with other men of her era was being auctioned by Christie's, the renowned art appraiser and seller.

Katharine Wright Haskell
photo from Wikipedia

Thank you to book and manuscript specialist Heather Pisani for her review of the Katharine's letters and her sketch of the life of this influential woman.  Thanks also to my brother Jim, who sent me this link:

https://www.christies.com/features/Katharine-Wright-Aviations-unsung-heroine-9222-1.aspx

Though Katharine was the youngest of her siblings, her brother Orville was quite dependent on her. She called him "Little Brother." When she finally married at age 51, Orville had a fit and never spoke to her again.

She was essentially the manager of her brother's efforts, their financial affairs, their patent, and their acceptance as the first to achieve flight.

Virginia Woolf wrote about what might have been the outcome if Shakespeare had had a sister as talented in writing plays as he was.

She might have scribbled some pages secretly, wrote Virginia, but she would have been "careful to hide them or set fire to them."  The senior Shakespeares would have tried to force her into marriage with the son of a well-to-do family, but she would have run off to London instead to work in the theatre. 

Only women could be actors in the 1580s, so she would have been laughed out of town, or perhaps seduced and found herself pregnant and desperate and "killed herself one winter's night."

"That, more or less, is how the story would run, I think, if a woman in Shakespeare's day had had Shakespeare's genius," writes Woolf in A Room of One's Own, chapter three.

Katharine Wright fared much better than that.  In 1893 she enrolled at Oberlin College in Ohio, the first college in the US to enroll both women and men.  After three years, however, she took time out to care for Orville when he was seriously ill.

She became a Latin teacher after graduating but stopped that work to manage her brothers' affairs, traveling to France with them to demonstrate flight to European rulers.

Katharine also worked hard for women's suffrage and was successful in making Ohio the fifth state to ratify the 19th Amendment.

After thirty years of service to her brothers and their legacy, she married a fellow Oberlin graduate--but Orville was furious at her for not continuing to pour all her energy into his health and career.  He never spoke to her again. (Katharine had already lost her brother Wilbur to typhoid fever contracted in Europe, just as Virginia had lost her brother Thoby.) 

Though Katharine's life turned out better than Woolf had predicted for Shakespeare's sister, the similarities are striking.

What trials Katharine Wright faced!  

Though largely responsible for her brothers' success and for the recognition they received, she was expected to place their needs ahead of her own and give up her own life for theirs.

Shireen Abu Akleh - Palestinian-American journalist

Shireen Abu Akleh
photo by Al Jezeera Media Network

What's more important, the coronation of King Charles III or the one-year anniversary of the killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh? 

The pageantry of the coronation on May 7 is a fairy tale, a relic of the past.  We all want to live in this fantasy world where princesses ride in coaches, kings are crowned, and the poor are happy.

But May 11, 2023, one year after Israeli soldiers shot Shireen, is a reminder of Palestinian suffering.

She was reporting on the military raid of Israeli soldiers on Jenin, a city in the occupied West Bank of the Jordan River, when she was shot--though clearly identified as press.

A US investigation of her death was opened late in 2022, but it has bogged down.  After all, there's so much investigation of January 6, Donald Trump, and the classified documents still to be done.

A report will be given to some members of Congress soon, but the Biden administration has said it will make "technical edits" to the report before releasing it.

The Israeli newspaper HaAretz notes tension in the US and Israel as the anniversary nears:

Sen. Chris Van Hollen has been perhaps the leading advocate in Congress on Abu Akleh’s behalf over the past 12 months. On Monday, he urged U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken not to edit a new report on Abu Akleh’s death before sharing it with U.S. lawmakers.

No one in Israel has yet been held accountable for Shireen Abu Akleh's death, neither the soldiers nor the government that authorized the brutal raid.  Biden does not want to lose support by taking a strong stand against Netanyahu's oppression of Palestinians.

If we spend an hour or two watching Charles receive his crown, we should devote an equal amount of energy to protesting Shireen's death and the ongoing persecution of Palestinians by the Israeli military.

                  

See also reports of ongoing raids, such as this one last March:

Israeli forces kill four Palestinians in latest Jenin raid

Men are still using the label "witch" to kill women

How is it possible that women are still being killed by men claiming they are witches?

Read this report in the Daily Mail on December 5.

A Boko Haram commander in northern Nigeria claimed that witches caused the deaths of his children.

Women were rounded up.  On November 15, about 26 of them were murdered.

This kind of murder is common enough that a citizens' group in Nigeria has been founded: Advocacy for Alleged Witches (AfAW).  The group called on Nigeria's president to do more to protect women.

On the website SaharaReporters.com, AfAW explains that

accusations happen when people attribute misfortunes to occult or supernatural causes or when people are not satisfied with ordinary, natural, or commonsensical explanations of ailments and deaths.

These murders occurred just two weeks after our American holiday of Halloween, when we dress up ourselves or our children as witches; we display pumpkins and witches in our yards.

Perhaps it's time to stop making fun of a serious problem, both in the present and in history.

Until men around the world stop using superstition to kill women, jokes about witches should be just as off-limits on Halloween as nooses hanging from trees.

To make things worse, some people are using religion to promote ideas about demon possession and witchcraft.  One such person in Nigeria is Helen Ukpabio, "widely accused of causing large-scale harassment and violence against children accused of witchcraft," according to a Wikipedia report.

Dr. Leo Igwe is a founder of AfAW.  His book Saving Child Witches: A Nigerian Perspective was published in 2008.

He writes:

In particular, we need to check the activities of our so called pastors and other self styled men and women of God who use the Bible or Holy books to perpetrate and justify atrocious acts and human right abuses. These religious charlatans continue to act and preach in ways that reinforce the belief in witches and provoke acts of witch accusation, persecution and killing.

Thank you to Andre Berthou in Sevres, France, for calling my attention to this problem.

Defeat Lauren Boebert!

My kids say I'm sexist, that I hate men--but they don't get it.

Projections still favor GOP to take House

I favor women until a woman proves herself against women, against democracy, against loving your neighbor.  Or until a man turns out to be sympatico, a kindred spirit, as many men are.

My commitment to Jesus requires me to vote against a hater and liar, whatever the gender, so I oppose Lauren Boebert in the 2022 election.  I support Adam Frisch.

This week is a nail biter, as last week was.  The Colorado Secretary of State's Office reports today that by Wednesday (or Friday at the latest), the 1,100 remaining votes--military and overseas--will be counted and reported.

Meanwhile Boebert has 50.17 percent of the vote, while Frisch has 49.83 percent, reports Gilbert Ortiz, Pueblo County Clerk and Recorder.

My daughter Marie in San Miguel County voted for Adam Frisch.  She majored in Gender Studies in college and is an ardent feminist.

My mother's cousin Morrison Brown, a Democrat for all of his 89 years, explained to me that Colorado requires a recount if two candidates are separated by .5% or less.  He lives in Cortez, where most of my family voted Democrat, and he refuses to give up hope.

"Colorado has a Blue Ribbon voting system," he continued.  "Every registered voter gets a ballot by mail, and afterward you get a text that says your vote's been counted."

"What really burns my tail is that 3,000 voters didn't vote for either one.  They couldn't stand to vote for Boebert, but they didn't want to vote blue.  If they had voted in this race, Frisch wouldn't be 974 votes short."

Adam Frisch had the lead on election night, Nov. 8, and we all thought he would win.

"Now Jayson Boebert won't be able to ride around on his tractor shooting mailboxes without getting arrested!" shouted my daughter Roz, coming home from her election day's evening shift at Starbucks.  She soothes the nerves of anxious Santa Monica voters with caffeine and sugar.

"Anyone who votes for Boebert isn't the brightest light in the room," commented Morrison.  

Roz, Marie and I all agree with him.   

In Memoriam: Barbara Abercrombie (1939-2022)

 

Barbara Abercrombie with Joe Morganstern
July 11, 2021

Barbara Abercrombie was tiny, 

slim, and graceful, almost always

 

dressed in black and white, 

which accented her white fluff 

of stylishly cut short hair and 

black-framed glasses.

The most memorable thing about Barbara was her million-dollar smile.  She liked happy, insisted that our memoirs not be polemic or despairing.  Even when writing about loss, she balanced grieving with celebrating.   

Born Barbara Louise Mattes on April 6, 1939, in Illinois, she attended Briarcliff College just north of New York City and then did some acting on Broadway and in television.  She married a Naval officer and stockbroker, Gordon E. Abercrombie, in 1964 and had two daughters.  

Barbara wrote five children's books published  1979-2002 after editing a collection of poems for children in 1977.  Her three novels include Good Riddance (Harper, 1979), about a woman whose husband flagrantly betrays her.  

I first met Barbara in spring of 2000, when I took her famous course Courage and Craft I & II, followed by The Art of the Personal Essay that fall.  She was 61 then, kind and encouraging, living in a wonderful home right on the beach in Santa Monica.  In 2007 she made that course accessible to anyone, publishing Courage and Craft: Writing Your Life into Story, followed by A Year of Writing Dangerously in 2012 and Kicking in the Wall in 2013.  

Her warmth and generosity were 

proverbial.  She always invited 

students to her home for the last 

meeting of the class, and later 

she began her Lit Salon, a 

monthly gathering of writers 

and readers at which ten 

people each read a five-minute 

piece.

I studied with other writers for 

fifteen years and then began 

taking Barbara’s advanced seminars in creative nonfiction in 2016.  I noticed that the students in her classes of twelve bonded with each other as well as with her; we became adept at asking questions that would improve the writing and at saying, “Maybe you could make this line into a scene.”

The next to last class she taught was an experiment, a year-long course for advanced students writing memoirs.  We had all published essays of various sorts or done work in screen writing, maybe written a book.

The usual ten-week classes offered by UCLA Extension were a piecemeal approach to the kind of long-term work we were doing.  Barbara designed a curriculum and shepherded us each from haphazard chapters to a complete manuscript worthy of submission to an agent. 

We were a neurotic bunch, anxious about our projects and skeptical that they would ever see the light of day.  Four of us had been taking Barbara’s creative nonfiction classes for years; four had worked with other instructors and were meeting her for the first time—or almost meeting her.  The course began in September, 2020, and Covid-19 transformed it into a Zoom.

Starting with us where we were, lost in pages and pages of our stories, Barbara cheerfully planned out the three quarters, which would end in June, 2021, with a real agent committed to reading our first thirty pages.  It was a great year, but when June came, none of us had completed a presentable first draft. 

Barbara negotiated with the Extension and offered us another three months of her guidance in the fall.  Then in January, 2022, we each submitted our opening pages to an agent but continued working as a group.

In May when she told us that her new cough was lung cancer, it didn’t seem possible that we could lose her in only three months.  

Barbara was irrepressible.  She gleaned friendship from the end of a marriage and remarried at 58.    Though she lost her soulmate after 18 years, she lived to love again.  

Beginning in 1997 she wrote her way out of breast cancer, adding to her own story the poems and quotations of others; the result was Writing Out the Storm: Reading and Writing Your Way through Serious Illness or Injury (2002).  Then, in response to the death of her second husband, Robert V. Adams in 2015, she collected poems and paragraphs for her sixteenth book, The Language of Loss: Poetry and Prose for Grieving and Celebrating the Love of Your Life (2020).  

In her final days she was still a wordsmith, describing her dying as “a blessed slide into not feeling.”  She died in the early hours of August 24, 2022.

We were fortunate to have the opportunity to work with you, Barbara.  Thank you.

GOP Senators who voted NO on gun control

 

A month after 19 kids and 2 teachers were killed in Uvalde, 13 US Senators voted against Senate Bill 2938, the plan to support the gun control bill just passed by the House of Representatives.

The Senate had already removed from the bill a ban on assault-style rifles and a ban on high-capacity magazines, but 13 Senators still couldn't support what was left:

• a background checks on buyers convicted of domestic violence
• a background check on buyers convicted of crimes when they were under 18 yrs. old. 

The bill still passed in the Senate because 50 Democrats, 13 Republicans, and 2 Independents all voted for it.  

33 US Senators voted against it, and 2 did not vote at all.

13 of those 33 anti-safety US Senators are running for re-election this coming November, 2022.

Remember the children and adults murdered in Buffalo, Uvalde, Highland Park, and the Indiana mall.

Remember the names of the 13 US Senators who couldn't even vote for background checks on gun buyers --though the buyers could be potential killers.  

John Boozman - Arkanas

Mike Crapo - Idaho

 Chuck Grassley - Iowa

John Hoeven - North Dakota

Ron Johnson - Wisconsin

John Kennedy - Louisiana

James Lankford - Oklahoma

Mike Lee - Utah

Jerry Moran - Kansas

Rand Paul - Kentucky

Marco Rubio - Florida

Tim Scott - South Carolina

John Thune - South Dakota.

Notice that ALL of these 13 US Senators without compassion are male and Republican.

Notice that out of 24 women US Senators, only 4 voted against the gun control bill (Lummis, Blackburn, Hyde-Smith, and Fischer). Twenty women Senators voted for the bill.

The Republican women Senators who had the courage to vote for these modest gun control laws are:

Joni Ernst (Iowa),  Shelley Moore-Capito (West Virginia),  Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), and Susan Collins (Maine).  Thank you!

Out of 76 men in the US Senate, 29 voted against modest, commonsense gun control laws. 

Thus only 1 out of every 3 male US Senators wants laws to prevent shootings.

Women US Senators are more likely to value human lives more highly than gun rights.

Republican US Senators are less likely to prioritize human lives over gun rights.

The bottom line?

We need more women in the US Senate.  We need fewer Republican men.  

What I'm Celebrating on July 4, 2022

  

In 2022, celebration of the Fourth of July was  difficult.

7 people went to a town parade in Highland Park, Illinois, and were shot dead by a sniper with an assault rifle.

 35 or so others were shot but survived.  Hundreds of others escaped with psychological wounds only.

The rest of us tried to carry on, but how do you enjoy a barbecue or parade or fireworks while your cell phone and television are reporting on the manhunt in Illinois for a killer still on the loose?

Between updates on the parade massacre, we watched newly-released video of the murder of Jayland Walker, a Black man being chased by police in Akron, Ohio, for having a broken taillight. 

To have a happy Fourth this year, you had to be deaf, dumb, and blind. 

Also you had to avoid thinking about the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade.  

You had to block out the latest revelations that ex-president Trump had wrestled with his Secret Service officers in an SUV, demanding to go to the Capitol building and take part in the overthrow of the government.

It wasn't your average lazy, beer-drinking day of illegal fireworks and patriotic platitudes.

But "Still I Rise," as Maya Angelou would say.

On this desperate July 4th, I'm celebrating that Trump is no longer president.  His plot to gain a second term by selling us a bunch of lies failed.

I'm celebrating that the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack has been doing its work for a year now, and the DOJ may even indict Trump for a few of his many crimes.  That's worth cheering about.

I'm rejoicing that we still have a democracy of sorts.  It's not a direct democracy (where the popular vote determines the president), but at least our representatives on Jan. 6, 2021, didn't quite dare to overthrow the election results and ram another four years of  Donald down our throats.  

We're only four years away from celebrating that the Constitution has lasted 250 years.  The Civil War 1861-1865 was not successful in splitting this country into two halves, and the first attempted coup in our history failed in 2021.

The flimsy scheme of replacing a king, lords, and "commoners" with a president, congress, and judiciary has held up, more or less.  That's worth celebrating, even when the Supreme Court is packed with three Trump appointees and seems bent on overturning all decisions since Brown v. Board of Education, which ended racial segregation in public schools.  

Within the guidelines of the Constitution, it's perfectly legal to add several justices to the Supreme Court.  All we need is a Congress and president who will make that happen.

On this July 4th, I'm celebrating that most of us still have the right to vote and have our votes counted fairly.  We don't live in a nation like China or Russia, where elections are a total sham.

It's true that corporations and wealthy men in the USA try to buy our votes with huge financial donations, unleashing television ads that manipulate our fears and our desires.  

It's true that Republicans control most of our state legislatures and are trying to keep poor people, minorities, and working people from voting.  They restrict mail-in voting, limit polling locations, and fight early voting opportunities.  They hope that long lines in bad weather will reduce the number of voters.  In Georgia they made it illegal to give water bottles to people waiting hours to cast their votes.  They use gerrymandering to create districts where Dem voters are outnumbered by GOP voters.

But as of mid-2022, votes still count.  

1)  We each need to vote... all of us.

2)  We also need to defend the voting rights of others as we approach November 8, 2022.

3)  We need to work for local, state, and national candidates who reflect our values.

4)  We need to vote out Republicans who are still claiming that Trump won the 2020 election.  

5)  We need to throw out US Senators who won't vote to ban assault rifles--who value guns more than children's lives.  We need to elect Senators who will eliminate the filibuster and pass legislation to restore our right to make our own decision about an unplanned pregnancy.

Many Black people consider July 4th to be a holiday for White folks only.  Their African ancestors were captured, transported, and held in slavery while White Americans celebrated the day their forefathers had declared independence from Great Britain and started fighting for freedom. For nearly one hundred years, Independence Day was a hypocritical mess.  

In some ways, July 4 still is a day that highlights unequal levels of rights and freedoms based on race.  Kyle J. Howard issued a six-part tweet today pointing out that this year, the historical split-vision still exists.  Most whites are celebrating freedom while Blacks are enraged over the police shooting of Jayland Walker in Akron, Ohio, after a mere traffic stop.  Jayland was denied the most basic of freedoms--life and liberty--after being chased for a broken tail light.  

For the record, I'm not celebrating America's independence from George III today.  

I'm rejoicing that King Donald is no longer our boss, and he may go to jail.  I'm grateful that we still have a democracy and that votes here still count.

So I bought some decorations and began making cupcakes...  John and I are having a party here with friends.

March for Our Lives, Los Angeles 2022

LA's March for Our Lives today filled 10-15 blocks.

Speakers before the march included survivors of mass shootings and people who had lost a parent or friend to gun violence.

Like the march in 2018, today's marches around the nation were student-led, and many of those doing the planning and speaking were high school students.

Four years ago, one month after the mass shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, students led the first March for Our Lives.

After the Buffalo NY and Uvalde TX massacres, students organized another #MarchforOurLives.

Play a slide show of sights and signs from today's march in Los Angeles by clicking on this link:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/LpWe57oweVpzKqBx5

Here are some of my favorite slogans on placards carried by today's marchers:

~~We are not anti-gun, we are pro-life.

~~GOP senators kill children.

~~GOP = Guns Over People, so don't vote GOP.

And of course, the central slogan from four years ago:

~~Protect Kids, Not Guns!

Kids' right to life--to staying alive--is more important than anybody's so-called right to own guns.

The men of 1783 never envisioned rifles that could shoot so fast with so much force and speed that a bullet could decapitate or pulverize a human being.

Ban assault rifles--no citizen has any right to carry this horrific weapon. Only soldiers in the US Armed Forces.

When the marchers go home, the streets of Los Angeles will still cry out against guns.

The benches at many bus stops carry messages about the number of persons killed daily in the US by guns.