Artifacts on the journey

In Joan Didion’s “Where I Was From,” a great read re California and the West, she writes of the 19^th century journey into the promised land, its myths and realities, and notes the precious artifacts, the family relics carried West, then abruptly abandoned along the way, thrown to the side in the rush to climb the Sierra mountains before snowfall, and possible death.

“Women who believed they could keep some token of their mother’s house (the rosewood chest, the flat silver) learned to jettison memory and keep moving.

Sentiment, like grief and dissent, cost time.  A hesitation, a moment spent looking back, and the grail was forfeited.”

Our family made, postwar, a very different journey from our native England – by ocean liner and train rather than oxen and wagon – but we also carried with us artifacts of the life before, relics that, too, are mostly vanished, abandoned or lost somewhere – now just memories kept inside.

That running cup my grandfather won at Wadham College, Oxford; the wood and glass bookshelf he took there; the stuffed alligator he kept above the stair landing in Rottingdean; my “Just William” books, early reading adventures -  all gone, lost, or forgotten gathering dust in a storeroom seldom seen.

In the arc of life, in the long journey, what do we keep?  What is important?  What precious objects remind us of the road traveled?  Who will care about them when our own time is done?

Reading provokes memories, questions……

Trust

Trust.
That's the bedrock of civilization.

And it's a shakier foundation in our own time, with the rise of gun possession and violence, with the pressures of an increasingly global and urbanized economic system, and with the presence everywhere of a growing religious extremism that manifests itself in slaughter.

That's just a morning's two cents worth, but "trust" is what I remember from many years as a television journalist, trust in a community of behavior, trust that during an interview - often outside, exposed, vulnerable, focused on the work and not on the surroundings - we would be safe.
I know the thought must be in the air in newsrooms across the country.

Trust in a level of community behavior is what allows us to walk down a street, attend a ball game, shop in a grocery store, see a film, ride an elevator.

If it erodes, so does a part of the civilization we've known.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/27/us/wdbj7-virginia-journalists-shot-during-live-broadcast.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

Amanda Knox

I hardly know Amanda Knox - we'd chatted briefly once, in Italian, at a cooking class - but as president of the Seattle-Perugia Sister City Association I'd lived a long time with the drama of her incarceration and under the long arc of her journey from guilt to final innocence.

Seven years and more, time that cast a shadow over a friendship between two cities, time that tested Amanda, her family and friends, in unimaginable ways, time that moved, for those who believed in her innocence, glacially, painfully.

She had written a deeply self-probing book, "Waiting To Be Heard," after her return home to Seattle, after an appeals court had found her innocent, but of course that book could not end the story - the highest court in Italy re-instated her guilt, another appeals court confirmed it, leaving her - all of us really - in a lingering state of limbo, waiting for a final ending, this last spring, in that same high court.

We know the outcome - innocent - but I waited for Amanda's word, an epilogue, a new afterword to her narrative of freedom, prison, and freedom again.

Reading it, just moments ago, three things resound and close this long and traumatic journey:

- how perhaps only the person falsely accused can sum so clearly the reasons for innocence

""None of my DNA was found in my friend Meredith Kercher's bedroom, where she was killed.  The only DNA found, other than Meredith's, belonged to the man convicted of her murder, Rudy Guede.  And his DNA was everywhere in the bedroom.

It is, of course, impossible to selectively clean DNA, which is invisible to the naked eye.  We simply could not have cleaned our DNA and left Guede's and Meredith's behind.  Nor was any other trace of me found at the murder scene, not a single fingerprint, footprint, piece of hair, or drop of blood or saliva.  My innocence and Raffaele's was irrefutable."

- the cruel carelessness of those who judge, and never review their reasons

"A couple of students in one of my large lecture classes at UW posted pictures of me online saying they were in class with a murderer."

- Knox's discovery of The Innocence Project at a 2014 conference, the birth of a commitment to help those who are falsely accused, to pay back the countless world of people who believed in her, and made her own freedom possible

".....I have found my purpose:  to help other innocent people be able to shout, as I did, 'I'm free!' "

Remembering the power of a union - -

I read a few lines from John Talton's Sunday column re the decline of organized labor in the workplace:

"Unions once provided a powerful antidote to [worker] abuse. But after decades of union-busting policies and self-destructive behavior, organized labor represented only 6.6 percent of private-sector workers in 2014."

The column - and the grim recent view of Amazon's workplace - sparked memory of a time, years back, when a news director wrote abusive and demeaning notes to a reporter - tearing him down, insulting and mocking him in writing - an apparent attempt to drive him from the newsroom.  It was over the top unbearable.

As the shop steward of the time, I was able to convene a meeting with the news director and upper management to get that unacceptable behavior on the table for a direct discussion.The young man found work a few months later in a less pressured environment, but those abusive notes stopped - the director and station president agreed they were out of line and damaging to the work environment.

It was a small thing in a way - not comparable perhaps to a contract negotiation - but I've always remembered it when I hear the usual negative talking points re organized labor.
Unions, at their best, are about the rights of workers.  At their best, they work with management to create a more productive and humane workplace.  They are only, though, as effective as the belief in them, the faith in them, given by a workforce.

That faith is at its lowest stage now since the beginnings of the labor movement over a century ago.  But if the picture of the Amazon workplace emerging this week is anywhere close to accurate; if it's a plausible window into the workplace of tomorrow, organized labor may soon have its day - again.

Believe it.

A Hillary Moment

My world is inhabited by a number of Hillary skeptics - I'm one of them - but something she said in that encounter with a Black Lives Matter activist made enormous sense, and it goes to the heart of why politics, the best politics, is so important.

Yes, we need protest.
Yes, we need movements.
We need, yes, a shift of hearts and minds.
But at the end - as MLK, Jr, knew so well - politicians must vote, laws must change, systems must adapt.
Or we just talk, again and again.

“I don’t believe you change hearts,” Mrs. Clinton says. “I believe you change laws, you change allocation of resources, you change the way systems operate.”

And on the road to that moment you need a message that resonates, that sells:

".....in politics, if you can’t explain it and you can’t sell it, it stays on the shelf.”

And if it dies on the shelf, all the talk and all the marches won't change the world.
Politics can.

I’m re-imagining Donald Trump as a deranged Pied Piper casting a malevolent spell, luring Republican candidates and voters down a dubious road.

This may seem a good thing to Democrats measuring the political baggage piling up in the Clinton campaign van, but it ought to worry anyone concerned about the sanity of our political discourse.

To wit, channeling Trumpspeak:

- re the estimated 11 million undocumented residents of our country, the Trump – and now add too many other Presidential candidates – “policy” is simply, “They’ve got to go.”  All of them – families, children brought here as youngsters, etc.
- Mexico must pay for wall construction running from California to Texas and beyond – an impenetrable wall on the order, say, of the old Soviet Union wall in Berlin.  A symbol of fear and exclusion.
- the 14th Amendment, one of the fundamental documents of our democratic freedom, must change – especially those words giving citizenship to anyone born in the United States.

To tamper with an amendment that is bedrock to human rights - to suggest its dismantling or fundamental change - ought to be (my two cents) a disqualifier for anyone wanting to become President of us all.

Just a quick look at our legal history will show that the 14th Amendment guarantees of citizenship, due process, and equal protection of the law gave us – to choose three of many – the right to same-sex marriage, the right to equal rather than segregated schools, and the right of women to choose a medically safe termination of an unwanted pregnancy.

The partisan in me wants Trump to keep talking and casting the spell; the other part – the one wanting a civil discourse about things that matter -  is appalled that Trump Talk not only cowers too many other politicians, but that it is swallowed by so many Americans.

Out of Proportion

There was something troubling - my two cents - in the uproar over that disruption of Bernie Sanders in downtown Seattle.
On one side we had plenty of folks annoyed at missing the chance to hear Sanders because the folks who took over the mike were not intent on simply delivering their message - they wanted it to be the only message.
On another we had folks who essentially cheered the rudeness towards Sanders and those who wanted/and waited to hear his message, insisting that Black Lives Matter is the most important message of our time (yes, it is important) and coming close to suggesting (in fact doing so in some cases) than any criticism of the arrogance at the podium was racist.
It was, really, a window in miniature into our current divisive and corrosive politics - and not incidentally one inflated beyond its worth by a media become increasingly an entertainment troubadour.

In counter, let's go to the reliable sanity of Mr. Egan:

"When a noisy intruder, an African-American, jumped to the podium and refused to let Sanders speak, it was widely interpreted as a big problem for the candidate and race relations.
Wrong. The censor with the mouth was, it turns out, a self-described “extremist Christian,” from a family that once backed Sarah Palin. Some members of Black Lives Matter distanced themselves from her.
How did this stunt become a thing among the national press corps? Junk media. Sadly, [our] sugar high goes two ways."
- Tim Egan, NYTimes

Sparks from the page

I love the sparks a book page can set off, conjuring distant memory, moments that suddenly rise as clear as morning.
I'm reading through Tim Egan's "The Good Rain" - that sum of the Northwest soul - on a page where he talks of Justice William O. Douglas:

"....a thin-haired noodle of a man who favored lonely alpine meadows and young wives, was that rare breed from another time, the Renaissance Man of the American West:  lawyer, author, outdoorsman, lover."

And that passage rolled the screen far back to the summer of 1973.  Bill Dorsey, with camera, and myself drove early - perhaps 4am - over the big mountain past Sunrise and down to Goose Prairie to the mountain home of Justice Douglas who, that August 4th morning, was to rule on President Nixon's decision to bomb Cambodia.
Being young - near rookies of journalism - we imagined we might get an advance, an exclusive interview.  Innocents on the road......

So I knocked on that prairie door, unannounced, but beyond a few words with Mrs. Douglas (nee the young Cathy Heffernan) and a glimpse of Douglas himself (scowling a few feet away), we didn't get much more than a shot of the cabin, set in a great meadow east of Mt. Rainier.

We drove, disappointed, on down to the federal courthouse in Yakima where later that same day Douglas ordered an immediate halt to the bombing, setting in motion a momentary Constitutional crisis.
Before we got home, though, the rest of the Supreme Court - voting 8-0 by phone - reversed Douglas, but Bill and I - years later - still remembered that journey as a piece of history traveled - a moment remembered again today by that passage in Tim's book.

So read on - we never quite know where it will lead, or what it may provoke.  That's the wonder of the written word......