Ooga Booga: Great Shakes

Occasionally, someone comes out with an "ooga booga" story or book about the Big One (earthquake) that is to come on the Cascadia Subduction Fault Zone.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't be scared.

The Cascadia Subduction Zone had its last major slip and earthquake at 9 p.m. local time on January 26, 1700. How do we know this so precisely? I’m going to put it down to nosy scientists, God bless them.

When such a quake happens again, we can expect coastal towns to be wiped out by tsunamis, along with destruction caused by the quake itself, and tsunamis will spread up and down the West Coast and across the Pacific Ocean.

It will affect the Salish Sea/Puget Sound to a lesser degree, we hope. We'll feel it.  A computer projection of tsunamis caused by the Cascadia Zone Subduction Fault showed tsunami waves traveling up the Sound, bouncing off of Tacoma, and rebounding to smack into the south ends of Vashon and Maury Islands. Something to think about.

The March 2011 Tohoku Earthquake in Japan was a subduction zone quake. Perhaps you remember the havoc and death caused by that quake and ensuing tsunamis.

The 2004 Boxing Day Quake in Sumatra wiped out many places and people in Indonesia and all along and within the Indian Ocean.

The 1960 Chile/Valdivia Earthquake is estimated to have been a 9.4 – 9.6 in magnitude, the largest recorded earthquake in the 20^th Century.

The second largest, the 1964 Alaska Earthquake, was a magnitude 9.2. Most deaths were caused by the tsunamis created in that quake.

These were all Great Quakes. I have never experienced a Great Quake. I am not looking forward to it.

The 1994 Northridge Earthquake was rated as a 6.7, but it caused a degree of death and destruction in the San Fernando Valley and greater Los Angeles area that was unprecedented and led to many changes in building codes and earthquake precautions.

It doesn’t have to be a Great Quake to be a disaster.

Tectonic plate theory arose during the 1960s - before that there was a whole different geological narrative about how the earth moved and quaked.

The Cascadia Subduction Fault Zone is formed by the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate sliding under the North American plate. Such a little piece of tectonic plate causes so much havoc. There are earthquakes along the fault zone frequently, but we don’t feel them here because they are too far out at sea.

When subducted material gets deep enough, it heats up and becomes magma, and produces the chains of volcanoes we have on the West Coasts of the American continents, and around the Pacific Ring of Fire.

I am reminded in my reading that Mt. Rainier is an active volcano. Sigh. Noted.

I grew up in coastal Central California in the San Andreas Fault zone, where minor earthquakes are common, and I considered them kind of fun. Whee! We’re shaking!

That was before I was in the 6.6 Sylmar Earthquake in Los Angeles in February 1971. It was centered on a fault out in the Simi Valley - not the San Andreas Fault, which is supposed to unleash a Big One, so I was told all my life. That 6.6 Richter Scale quake was plenty strong enough for me - portions of freeways collapsed, gas and water mains broke, there were fires, a brand new hospital in the San Fernando Valley pancaked and killed around 40 people. Part of the Tehachapi Mountains was raised four feet.

Where I was, on a hilltop in Silverlake near downtown LA, it felt like a truck was ramming the house repeatedly. It was scary - I'd never been in an earthquake that big before. It happened at 6 in the morning. I went upstairs and watched the TV news with my landlady. It took a while for all the reporters and news agencies to wake up and get organized. Reporters in the San Fernando Valley were reporting as they ran out of their houses.

I went to work around 8, because this is America, you know, and we don’t skip work for a major earthquake. I worked for an insurance agency on Beverly Boulevard. On the way there I saw landslides on hillside roads, and the building I worked in had cracks in the stairwell. I know that because the elevator was out of service.

There were aftershocks all day, and those continued for months. I got so I knew the Richter rating of each aftershock by feel.

I have learned that that skill does not travel. We had a 6.8 quake here on February 28, 2001, the Nisqually Ash Wednesday Quake. It was centered near Olympia. I was working at a local hardware store at the time, and I thought it was a 5-something quake.  It was long, almost a minute the record says, and it started, and paused, then started again and shook harder. There was surprisingly little damage at the hardware store. We lost some glass lamp chimneys and that was about it. People ran outside, of course, because that’s what people do. You aren’t supposed to run outside. My father’s Uncle Ralph died in an earthquake in Santa Barbara, California, in 1925, when he ran outside and was buried in bricks falling from the building. This is why you are not supposed to run outside.

This is also why I wouldn’t live in a brick house.

But never mind – no bricks hit anyone on Vashon, as far as I know. Some of the older brick buildings around the area did suffer damage, and cars were damaged by falling bricks.

The original Richter Scale has been upgraded for more accurate earthquake measurement, because it was originally designed for earthquakes in Southern California. It was supposed to be an objective measurement, but earthquakes are subjective experiences.

Let's just say that anything over a 6 is getting into major earthquake territory, and you will not enjoy it.  

The 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which had its epicenter in Tomales Bay, north of San Francisco, was traditionally rated as an 8.3 on the Richter scale. In recent years it has been downgraded to a 7.7-7.9 magnitude. A lot of the damage in San Francisco was caused more by the fires after the quake than the quake itself, except, of course, on fill land, which liquified when the quake hit. 

I'm not trying to make it sound nicer than it was by saying its numbers have been lowered. It was as bad as we have heard.

The October 1989 Loma Prieta quake was rated a 6.9, and perhaps you are old enough to remember the damage that caused - a section of the Bay Bridge collapsed, and the double-decker Nimitz Freeway in Oakland pancaked, killing people in their cars. Lots of buildings in San Francisco that had been built on fill land collapsed or sank, and there was fire in the Marina District. 

Santa Cruz and Watsonville were devastated by the quake. Many buildings collapsed or had to be bulldozed and both downtowns had to be rebuilt.

Again, the Loma Prieta Quake was not a San Andreas Fault quake. It was generated by a lesser fault in the San Andreas Zone. The epicenter was in the Nisene Marks Forest, east of Aptos. 

So the 1971 San Fernando Quake (6.6) and the 1989 Loma Prieta Quake (6.9) were big and did a lot of damage and killed people. But they were not Great Quakes. Neither was the Big One.

The 2011 Japan Tohoku Quake was rated a 9.0 to 9.1, the 2004 Aceh Banda Quake a 9.1, and the last Cascadia Subduction Zone Quake in 1700 - well, there was no Richter Scale in 1700, but those were all Great Quakes.  

(see: https://www.king5.com/article/weather/earthquakes/copalis-beach-ghost-forest-cascadia-subduction-zone-earthquake/281-045a5189-de8b-4e25-be36-8271bd4bbfa2)

So, yes, there will be Big Ones, from the Cascadia Subduction Zone and from the San Andreas Fault, and elsewhere, and those quakes will be scary and destructive and deadly.

So someone occasionally says, “Yoo hoo, big earthquake coming. Get prepared.” They are correct.

Big quakes are rare enough that we are lulled into complacency. Be ready. Stock up on drinking water and foods that don’t need to be cooked.

Have I done this preparation?

Oh, heck no. But writing this essay is motivating me to do so. As my mother used to tell us, do as I say, not as I do.

Anecdotes:

In the 1971 Sylmar quake, Dr. Richter, who devised the Richter Scale in 1934, and lived out in the vicinity of Cal Tech in Pasadena, said that his dishes rattled.

In the 1906 San Francisco Quake, springs dried up in Santa Cruz County. My father was born in 1912 and he heard stories from the old timers in Watsonville.

Also in the 1906 Quake – Malvina Reynolds was born in 1900 and her family lived in the Mission District in San Francisco. She told me that the chimney collapsed in their building, and her baby brother, in his crib, disappeared down the hole. Major panic! They found him, sitting on his mattress on a pile of rubble, safe and sound. If he’d been able to talk, he might have said, “Again!”

Books You Might Not Get to Read

Hello, children!

A young friend was reading one of the more obscure Oz books by L. Frank Baum to her son, and she came to a part, a character, which she considered racist. She stopped reading and set the book down.

When she talked about this, it made me reflect on how I was raised. No one ever did not read a book to me because it was racist.

I was at an estate sale here on the island a few years ago and saw a book titled “Little Brown Koko,” and I thought, wow! I had that book when I was little.

The book cover was bright blue, with a colorful picture on the front of Little Brown Koko and his Mammy (think  Aunt Jemima, or Hattie McDaniels in “Gone with the Wind”).

I picked the book up and began reading. Oh! Holy gazoly carp shucks! I could not believe my eyes. These stories were written in the clueless racist void of their time, by a woman named Blanche Seale Hunt. She wrote the Little Brown Koko stories for a radio show that ran through the 1930s until 1941. They were little morality tales for the (white) boys and girls. In my experience raising kids, the Berenstain Bears did a much better job of morality tales, for all boys and girls, as well as non-binary children, but don’t get me started.

Seeing that book 60 years down the road made me realize – again - how children my age and younger were and are raised with the bland acceptance of the racism which is the norm in our society.

That is why we white Americans are so dense about what is racist and what is not, and how hard it is to open our eyes to the things we took for granted in our understanding of life and our society.

If you asked us as children if we were racist, we would probably ask, what’s a racist?

Then we would say, oh, heck no. Don’t be silly.

Long story even longer, L. Frank Baum, who wrote the Oz books, was writing at a time (19th century) when racism was simply the way it was. Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, and then the Union had to win the Civil War to make it stick.

Rick’s Aunt Dodie wanted Rick to uproot the family and move us back to Ohio, where Rick and I and the kids would be close to his mother’s family. She was surprised when he told her he couldn’t move back to Ohio because of the racism there.

“But, Ricky, that’s just the way it is,” she said, and she was correct.

I don’t think Little Brown Koko is coming out in any new printings. Even most white people would understand why not.

Then there are the Uncle Remus stories by Joel Chandler Harris, although I believe the Uncle Remus stories had a much wider circulation and more complex history than Little Brown Koko.

Those stories are based on African folklore that Harris first heard at Turnwold Plantation where he went to work at the age of fourteen. Harris spent his time off in the slave quarters. His background as an outsider - the illegitimate, red-headed son of an Irish immigrant – made him feel more connected and comfortable with the slaves. He absorbed the stories, language, and inflections of the slaves he knew there. Their stories later became the foundation and inspiration for Harris's Tales of Uncle Remus.

Thing is, Uncle Remus is a retired old slave telling stories in slave dialect to the rosy cheeked white children who lived in the big house. Uncle Remus’s stories of Brer Rabbit and the other animals – Brer Fox and Brer Bear - were Joel Chandler Harris’s attempt to preserve the African stories he had heard from the slaves.

His efforts are not appreciated now.

Walt Disney made a film, “The Song of the South,” of the Uncle Remus stories, and published comic books with Brer Rabbit, that wily trickster, which I read when I was a child.

The trickster is a common character in world folklore, but Brer Rabbit does not get much press anymore. Don’t look for “The Song of the South,” to be re-released anytime soon, or for anyone to do a cover of, “Zippity Doo Dah,” either, which is a darn catchy tune.

Times have changed, but based on what I’ve seen, I doubt there will ever be true equality of the races in America - not for a long, long time, anyway. Some people need to look down on other people to feel better about themselves.

I think that those of us who realize that we absorbed racism, and we are carriers, need to change what we can, as we can.

I am not saying that will be easy. We are such well-meaning, clueless people, most of us; but we are responsible for our beliefs and behaviors all the same. Dang, huh?

The Shootings and Other Sad Stories

 

On November 19-20, 2022, a guy went into Club Q in Colorado Springs during a drag show and opened fire. He was tackled and disarmed by a battle vet and a couple of other patrons. Five people were murdered, and nineteen wounded.

While my perception of this shooter is that he’s a bona fide nutjob, a lot of the shootings and other violence to LGBTQ+ people are being fueled by right wing rhetoric these days. They like to say that children are being programmed to be transgender and/or queer, that children are being sexualized by exposure to LGBTQ+ people – drag queens and trannies and queers, oh my - and that families who love and support their trans/queer children are abusive.

The haters call all LGBTQ+ people and Democrats(!) groomers and pedophiles.

What?

I have too many friends and family in the LGBTQ+ community not to speak out against this toxic tripe. (Apologies to cows) As a culture we are beginning to grow up and start to accept people as they are, and these sloth brains are trying to undo it all and take us back to the good old days of destroying lives and killing people. (Apologies to sloths)

Your children will tell you if they are queer, or transgender, or non-binary, or living at any point on the gender or queer spectrums, if they trust you. If your children do not trust you, they may allow you to dwell in the comfort of your delusions until they can get a safe distance away from you. Too many queer children are thrown out when their parents learn the truth about them. 

Staying in the closet is the traditional safe option. Although it is soul-destroying and confusing pretending you are someone other than yourself, billions of people have done so and still do so, to stay alive, to have a home, to avoid being ostracized by their families, their friends, their church.

Now in the last few years it might seem that queer and transgender and non-binary people are coming out all over, which has led some of the fearful to call it a fad, or the hip thing to do, or, in the Right Wing Book of Lies, their abusive parents are forcing them to be transgender, and mutilating them with gender reassignment surgery.

Are queer and nonbinary and transgender people made, not born?

Um, no.

It’s not that there are more transgender and queer people now, or it’s a fad, or parents are forcing their children to be transgender/queer. No. It’s that more people feel like maybe they will not be murdered for being their authentic selves.

The shootings at Club Q and other places would argue that you still might be murdered for being your authentic self. It is certainly a calculated risk. Of course you could be shot because you happen to be sitting anywhere minding your own business when a shooter walks in. You can get shot pretty much anywhere in America these days.

The evolving openness about gender identity and sexual orientation has made some people lose their minds. It is too big a change from what they’ve always been taught and believed.

By the way, it is a cliché that many gay bashers eventually realize that they are gay.

If you feel the need to be violent to people who are gay or transgender: Stop. Just stop. Stop hurting and killing innocent people. Stop repeating vicious lies. Stop ruining or ending lives, including your own.

If you are hetero/cisgender, you have more things in common with transgender and queer and non-binary people than differences. For example, being a good person or being a jackass happens in every human group I’ve run into. (Apologies to jackasses)

Growing up and accepting people as they are, especially yourself, asks a lot of you.

No one asks to be transgender or queer.

It would be good to be left in peace, no matter your gender or orientation, and I believe that is a deeply felt and common human aspiration. It is too bad that we are so violently bad at minding our own business.

Groovy Man, Far Out

 When the Loop folded its tent and crept away last summer, I thought, well, that’s that.

I was recovering from a broken back at the time, and that took up a lot of time and energy. So I blessed the Loop and let it go in peace.

Then word came that the Loop is being resurrected. As long time readers know, I am a big fan of resurrection.

So what is there to write about these days? Politics? Religion? Money?

Or the chores with tiny steps that bog us down like the La Brea tar pits? That’s what I’m up to.

I have started sorting through the gazillion family photos, again.

While going through some old pictures from my dad’s side of the family, I came across a picture of two deceased aunts with one other woman. Someone had written on the back, “1932. Nell, Thelma, Chick”

Thelma and Chick were my father’s sisters. But Nell? Who the heck was Nell?

The picture was taken at my grandparents’ fishing camp at the mouth of Smith River, in California, north of Crescent City and south of the Oregon state line. It is now the Ship Ashore trailer park, restaurant, and motel. You can’t miss it. The ship is right up by Highway 101.

My brother and cousin Charlotte didn’t know who Nell was, but a call to my cousin Jimmy brought enlightenment. Thelma was his mother, and Nell was her bff, he said. Mystery solved. I must admit that I was surprised he said, “bff.” The man is 81. But he has children and grandchildren and does not live under a rock, so.

That is the problem with sorting photos. They are a gateway to riddles and reminiscence. You start thinking about things and people from years ago and being mystified wondering who the people in some of the old photos might be, because so often no one bothered to write names and dates on the back.

Did this sort of thing teach me a lesson, so that I faithfully dated and labeled the backs of all my photos? Hahahahaha. Nope.

I took way too many pictures of my own kids, more than I need and a lot more than they want. I was thinking they’d like to see them after they grew up, but photos are all digital now. Why would you want to load yourself down with hard copies?

We boomers are a dying breed, literally. I wish that didn’t make so many people happy. My generation dropped out of college, hitchhiked around the country, slept with strangers, and used various illegal drugs, although LSD was still legal when it came on the scene, and people really liked it. This made other people panic, and the next thing you know LSD was an illegal substance. Kind of closing the barn door after the horses were hallucinating.

But I digress.

Not all boomers lived the “sex, drugs, and rock & roll” lifestyle. Many stayed in college, got degrees, grew up to take over the running of the country (those who did not die in Vietnam), and brought us to our present state of peace, love, and dope.

Well, dope, anyway.

Considering that we marched for peace, civil rights, and human rights, we boomers didn’t make much progress in the peace, love, and ending racism and sexism areas. Our parents were the Greatest Generation. We were the “Groovy, Man; Far Out,” generation.

We are now relics of fogeydom and probably the last generation that wants to hand down pictures, sets of dishes, silver(plated) eating utensils, and other family heirlooms that our children have no desire to schlep through their lives. Our children and grandchildren have more immediate issues – like trying to make our planet remain habitable for humans – might be too late for that – and trying to keep the nuclear powers from turning humanity into so many radioactive cinders, assuming the wildfires don’t get us first.

I get it. They want to have a future, not cling to the past. Right on, kids. (NB: “Right on” is a slang phrase from the late 60s, usually done with a fist pump, roughly the equivalent of, “You go, girl,” except political. And NB is short for the Italian/Latin “nota bene,” meaning, pay attention, damn it.)

Still, kids, you might enjoy having that picture from 1932 of Chick, Thelma, and Nell, living through the Depression, which, my mother told me, was not a big deal there on the Central Coast of California, especially if you were a farmer. She made a whopping $10 a week at her bookkeeping job, and paid for room and board, and took piano lessons down at the Notre Dame Academy, a Victorian fantasy of a building. But that’s a story for another time.

God Bless Her

 

Life has been overwhelming the last couple of years. My personal experience has been that the isolation brought on by the covid pandemic has made me starved for human interaction, but it is difficult to get out and be with people when you know you might catch covid and die as a result. Yes, I am vaccinated, and boosted. So were both my kids when they got covid, and they are young, but I am old, which makes me vulnerable. I find that fear of death puts a real damper on my enthusiasm for socializing.

Then there is Mr. Putin’s war. I am heartsick, as are millions of people – heartsick that this irrational, pointless aggression is causing the deaths of thousands of people, many of them innocent civilians, and destruction of the Ukrainian homeland, and for what? So Mr. Putin can have the pleasure of waving his little Russian dick around? This is not reason enough to die or kill. But here we are.

Then there are the shootings in America, of which we have a sporadic flurry of awareness, which soon gets superseded by another news cycle or singing competition, so we forget until the next time. Right now the slaughter of innocents in Uvalde, Texas, is uppermost in our minds. Children. Beautiful, innocent children, cut down by another child with an AR-15. What will we do about it? I’m waiting to see.

The January 6 hearings in Congress remind us of the brutality of that day. What we have here in this country is a lot more than a mere division of people, but what may be a terminal illness of the American experiment.

I almost forgot to mention climate change.

Whew.

Life is difficult – an easy day is the exception, not the norm – but this persistent, ongoing high stress and dismay, and the way it keeps piling on top of our regular lives (which are hard enough) is wearing some of us down, adults and children alike.

But now comes Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee. God bless her. She has served seventy years on the throne. She promised to dedicate her life to serving her people, and she has done that.

She grew up with parents who loved her, and for the first ten years of her life did not bear the weight of expecting to become the monarch. Her Uncle David, Edward the VIII, screwed that up, although that may have been a lucky escape for the world, considering his sympathy for Hitler. In Edward’s place we got Bertie, Elizabeth’s father, who became George VI, and when he passed, we got Queen Elizabeth II.

When I say “we,” I mean the whole world, not just Britain. She is the only British monarch I remember. I was born in 1948, and by the time I was aware that there was an England, and she was its queen, her presence was something I took for granted. She has always been there, steady, gracious, non-dramatic, doing her duty, surrounded by people whose lives are all about serving her, protecting her, making sure everything runs smoothly. She is the center of what her family calls The Firm, and all the people who depend on The Firm for their livelihoods.

Many Americans are fascinated by the Queen and her family, including me at times. I got up in the middle of the night to watch Charles and Diana’s wedding. Years later I got up in the middle of the night to watch Diana’s funeral service, with my mouth hanging open as Diana’s brother Charles, Earl Spencer, tore the Royal Family a new one for the way they treated Diana.

The Royals. They distract us, amuse us, outrage us, remind us of a time and a way of life that has been dead and gone for decades. Centuries.

I speculate that many Americans today would prefer to be happy subjects of the crown, with all the questions that would answer, knowing royal rule as familiar and comfortable. It is fun to watch and feel ownership for people who live lives so different than our own. Apparently. When I think of all the political scandals and wars over which QEII has reigned, I am sure that America’s political and imperialistic hijinks would have been usual days at the office for her.

Our story would be so different if there had been no Revolution, although I think that we might have done as most of the rest of the British empire and declared ourselves independent nations by now. I like to think I’d be living in the country of Baja Canada, with its three states, Oregon, California, and something other than Washington, because he was a hero of the Revolution.

Anyway: Queen Elizabeth II. God bless her. She has given seventy devoted, stable, consistent years as Queen. Seventy years of living her life in service to her people, inspiring us and being one stable fact in this unstable world. She will live in history as an example of the best of us.

If we have a history.

And Yet

 

I get a feeling that there is a consensus in the world that we are in deep kimchi. Putin’s troops are devastating Ukraine after their action that was supposed to rush in and take over Ukraine in about three days but did not. Turns out the Ukrainians had other ideas, but still their country is being battered with artillery, bombs, missiles, and I don’t know what all the Russians are lobbing. 

The Russians are aiming for civilians and civilian sites and buildings – apartment houses and other homes, schools, churches, public buildings, some hundreds of years old. Ukrainians and Russian troops are both dying by the double handfuls. Today I heard of Russian troops torturing and killing Ukrainians, even children, one to one.

Putin tosses out threats of using nuclear weapons. Why? Because he is an asshole, that’s why, surrounded by sycophantic assholes, although at this point, I doubt that asshole is a strong enough label.

Picture; the first dandelion of spring in my yard. Many more soon to follow.

You know, Vlad, just because you have the capability to end all human life doesn’t mean you have to do it.

So there’s that end-of-our-favorite-species (us) worry that makes our hearts heavy, but like they say on the infomercials, that’s not all.

Climate change continues to pummel the earth, which is also threatening to our favorite species (us). I have read speculation that homo sapiens (boy, naming ourselves “man the wise” was a fine bit of hubris, wasn’t it?) will no longer be able to sustain life on earth after about 2060, which is awfully soon.

You know – the Neanderthals were so much more successful that we have been, lasting more than 300,000 years, about 200,000 more years than we homo sapiens have been around. Even though we probably caused their demise, and even though most of us have about 2% Neanderthal DNA in our genetic makeup, a fact that tickles me no end, they adapted so much more successfully to life on this planet than we have done. Basically, we wiped them out, and ever since have gone on destroying species, the earth, and each other. I guess that’s a kind of success. We excel at screwing up and bringing death to all living things. Not that I’m bragging. But I digress.

So yeah, Putin is waving his nuclear dick around, and climate change seems to be accelerating faster than anyone expected, and we are experiencing extreme weather: fire storms, volcano eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, avalanches, heat domes, and atmospheric rivers. Rising water levels in the oceans. Melting icecaps. We are reaping what we have sown.

Then there’s Covid. Remember Covid? As of 3:33 pm today, April 5, 2022, 6,177,324 people have died from Covid worldwide, THAT WE KNOW OF, and 1,008,198 of those dead were Americans. This is not a matter for civic pride, that almost one-sixth of the entire human race’s deaths from Covid have been American deaths.

And … the supreme white European male cohort is flailing around trying not to lose control of everyone else. They are like a wounded animal, aren’t they? The closer they get to dying out as a ruling class, the more dangerous they become, the more desperate to put down anyone who isn’t them. They are doomed and they know it, but they are not going quietly. God forbid we should all live in a world that recognizes people for their merits, not their skin color.

Cops still kill black people with impunity. Indigenous women disappear and are never found. We white liberals sit around talking. Ain’t it awful? What can we do? For most of us, living with all the integrity we can muster is the most we can do, and positive action will grow out of that integrity, we hope.

Oh yeah. There is so much crap to fear, so much stress on all of us, and that’s what I mean when I say we are in deep kimchi. This is a real rotting cabbage era of existence.

And yet:

We go on doing the best we can. We recycle plastics. We volunteer with charities and community service organizations, and we donate money. We drive our oil burning cars less, or get electric cars, which have environmental problems of their own but it’s a start. We see the work that needs to be done, and we tackle it. Some of us do, anyway.

People are still getting married, and having babies, and building houses. Planning for retirement. Trying to save Medicare and Social Security for when they get old, if they get old. Some families are making the leap to accepting their children’s authentic selves. That’s a biggie.

We go on living as if we are going to go on living. What other choice do we have? Suicide? That is like throwing a spear into the heart of everyone who loves you, as well as setting a terrible example, and is not an option most people consider.* The world may be a mess, but it’s our mess and we love it and want to go on living in it and trying to clean up the mess so we and our children can go on existing on this beautiful, blessed, dangerous, deadly planet. Is that a testimony to the resilience of human beings? Or is it simply our genetic hard wiring? Beats the heck outta me, but I don’t think it matters why. This is what we do. In the words of a hero of my generation, we keep on trucking.

*If you do consider suicide an option, please call the Suicide Hotline: 800-273-8255. You will have to work your way through choosing options - but don't give up. Keep going. Keep following the prompts until you connect with a live person. Talk to them. 

Let's Ban a Book!

 A school board in Tennessee has banned the graphic novel, Maus, because it would make students “uncomfortable.” It has nudity and bad language.

Well, yeah. So I pulled out my copy of the two-volume set and started reading it again, for the fourth or fifth time. It is an uncomfortable read, but not necessarily so much because of language and nudity.

The nudity is found in piles of dead naked Jews, skeletal bodies of men (Jews were segregated by gender in the camps). So yeah, dead people who were starving before they died, and on some of them you can see their sad little dead penises. I have noticed that male nudity is considered much more shocking than female nudity. Naked women? You betcha! Bring ‘em on! Naked men? That’s obscene! But I digress.

I do not think the language is anything that kids haven’t heard by the time they are ten, or younger. 

The school board did not mention violence, did it? Only nudity and language as the reasons for banning the book. They say nothing, for example, about where a German soldier picks up a child by the legs and smashes his head against a wall, or other atrocities that are mentioned or illustrated, like a kapo grabbing a prisoner’s cap and tossing it and saying, “Go get the cap.” When the prisoner goes to pick up the cap, the kapo shoots him, reports that the prisoner was trying to escape, and is rewarded with a bonus and some time off. The school board didn’t say a word about those things. Nope. Language and nudity. So American.

The Jews and dissidents and those otherwise considered to be unfit to be pure Aryans were imprisoned, tortured, and slaughtered by the millions, then sent up the chimneys or bulldozed into open trenches. In Kiev, the Nazis had the foresight to dig the trench, send the living Jews into the trench and then kill them, saving the step of pushing dead bodies into a trench. The Nazis were nothing if not efficient.

I think the reality of the Holocaust would be a lot more traumatizing to children than mere “nudity and language.” But what the hell do I know?

Come on – the Holocaust was beyond traumatizing. When you read Maus, you cannot deny that it happened, and if your eyes are open you cannot help but draw the parallel with the dehumanization by one group of people in our country of other people.

Reading Maus this time my breath is taken away by the honesty and artistry of the way Art Spiegelman told his tale. The two volumes are such works of art, both visual and written. It took him eight years to write them, or maybe eight years to write the first volume. I’m not sure. But you can see why it took years to write and illustrate his father’s story. He tried to get his father to tell him as many details as possible, and then he illustrated those details.

What it is to be the child of a death camp survivor, or to be a death camp survivor, is such a deep and lasting wound to the body and soul and the universe. I can witness that in Maus, but I am incapable of imagining it. There is nothing in my life that compares. It is a whole other horrible level of atrocity, treating Jews (Blacks, Latinx, Asians) as the feared “other” who must be eradicated.

Which is why students should be able to read Maus. So they can see what they cannot imagine; yes, be traumatized; and, I hope, become determined that the holocaust will never happen again. That is pertinent to present circumstances – the rising tide of anti-Semitism is full of the mindset of “kill all the Jews.” Many of these people have the same attitude toward Jews and black people – they are not human beings.

Of course there have been other mass murders, murderers of innocents – Stalin comes to mind. Pol Pot, in Cambodia. Vladimir Putin is bucking to get into that club. Maybe he already is.

Us, in our undeclared wars.

We are too far down the slippery slope of fascism and racial hatred here. I keep hoping that the kids are all right and will be so fed up with the mess their elders have made of the world that they will turn it around.

So, Maus. My hat is off, once again, to Art Spiegelman, and all the people who made his graphic novel a reality.

The banning of the book has led to a rise in sales of Maus, which makes me happy. So yay for that. Nothing like a good book banning to increase a book’s sales.