I’m so sorry, @oldmom4896.
Brothers Cecil and David Rosenthal, murdered yesterday at the synagogue, had developmental disabilities.
I haven’t posted in ages, but I did want to say something here. My mother arrived in the USA as a stateless refugee on October 27, 1943, 75 years ago yesterday.
She always remembered seeing the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. She understood its meaning, as a Jew who grew up in Berlin and was 10 years old when Hitler came to power, and lost most of her family.
She was helped by HIAS (as her parents had been when they arrived two years earlier), and always empathized with other refugees who came after her.
I’m almost glad she’s not around anymore to see what’s happening. Especially what happened yesterday, on the anniversary of her arrival – a mass murder motivated by hatred of Jews. And of HIAS in particular, specifically because it helps refugees.
There is a lot of info here on things we can do- https://www.splcenter.org/20170814/ten-ways-fight-hate-community-response-guide
Here’s an interesting bit.
May be an outlier, but I’ve been offering up my thoughts and prayers; specifically, to honor those who lost their lives pursuing those actions. If you’re an Atheist, Agnostic, Roman Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, etc., we can respect different ways of dealing with profound heartbreak/universal sadness, right?
Some self-assessment: work on zipping my lips at times and remember these heartbreaks long term.
@oldmom4896 – I’m so sorry for this tremendous heartache.
Of course those are good things. I think though, that as a phrase, those words have in recent times acquired a negative connotation because of the perception that they are often knee-jerk spoken by people in power as a replacement for actually doing anything that might prevent a similar tragedy in the future.
I should have put quotations marks around them in my initial post to signify that, though I think it was mostly read the way I intended.
@NJres, my son is attending the American University of Beirut in Lebanon. He takes all his classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Three or four other days each week, he rides his motorcycle to the refugee camp south of Beirut and moves food, talks to people, and does whatever else he can to help. He has also started teaching a class at the school run by a Christian aid organization. He’s been there since August, 2016. He should graduate in December, 2019. He wants to do some kind of international relief work after that. He doesn’t plan to return to the US permanently.
Oh, I agree with your assessment @garland.
Quite frankly, initially I was hesitant to post and then a bit angered that those words (which have tremendous meaning/defining for many) have been co-opted by some for self-indulgent reasons.
@pilot2012 – Yeah,I was trying to thread a needle, still trying to nail down how this thread can do what I’d like it to do while staying in acceptable parameters. I think I lost some posters because of not being quite precise enough of my intent.
In other words, I was aiming for subversion but got took seriously. Dang it.
@garland your effort is important! How about trying again to describe your intent? I think many of us want to listen and discuss.
@abasket. I think there are ToS reasons that @garland chose to post in what I think is a brilliant way.
Of course - I’ve been here for 11 years so I know about ToS. My point being, perhaps as the thread has come alive perhaps she could reiterate her thoughts - still staying within ToS.
My family and I were Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union, helped by HIAS.
The next day after the shooting I read denigrating comments about Honduran aspiring refugees from other former Soviet Jews.
It’s a sad world we live in.
Over the weekend I saw a Mike Daisey monologue and it just happened to cover the “Civil Rights Movement.” I couldn’t help but see the parallels between then and now.
One piece of information lost over time is that rights for African Americans were opposed by 75% of white Americans. Most opposed privately but a few, like the 16th Street Baptist Church bombers, were mobilized by the rhetoric of the time. Accepting an inevitable change is so difficult for some it leads to irrational violence. When that happens, the 75% goes quiet. One reason I continue to hang out online here is that it is mostly the 25%.
I have to have faith that we will come out of these trying times as a better people and a better country in the end.
I subscribe to the Washington Post online. But I think I’m going to cancel. Why? Because the Post allows very uncivil, unreasoned, nasty, vitriolic language in the comments section. And that ironically in comments sections in articles talking about the incivility and hatred and mob actions.
As for us here on CC, remember that the Political cafe section was closed back when McCain was running for president. We have been using uncivil language for years.
My grandma in her morning message to me said something that has really stuck in my gut all day:
“You know, at 81 years old, I truly thought I’d be living in the best of times.”
@Magnetron I teach a course on the 1960s and one of the things I almost always do is bring in public approval statistics. In the 1960s, during the Loving case, approval for interracial marriages was less than 20%. But less than 10 years before that, the number was much lower at less than 5% approval.
The first thing we have them do at the beginning of the course is interview someone who was alive in the 1960s. We do that because people think of the 60s as this long, long time ago, not realizing (consciously anyway) that their parents were alive and going through these things.
I don’t think WP can moderate all comments, there are just too many. The only way to deal with it would be to follow the example of the Atlantic and disallow all comments. I have mixed feelings about this.
@Tating Tgat seems like throwing the baby out with the bath water. I never read the comments on the WaPo. But I do want to read the paper’s reporting and analysis. Just skip them.
Grrrr…just found out that a friend of mine doesn’t plan to vote next week…he’s traveling (and he’s known about this trip for awhile) and he “doesn’t have time” to early vote this week…and here’s what really has me steaming…he complains non-stop about events in the news. Man, very frustrating to deal with a person who would see himself as very smart yet sees no disconnect with him not engaging (but still complaining). And he even grew up near Squirrel Hill!!!