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Princess Guy, “Seattle’s Most Fabulous Vocal Quartet™,” is an independent vocal group of four guys in tiaras offering unique arrangements of pop, jazz, comedy, Broadway and classical music, including original songs and stories. Founded in 2018 for the purpose of singing myriad song styles for diverse audiences of sung song enthusiasts.
The self-directed collective includes Eric Lane Barnes (baritone), Jeffrey Erickson (tenor), Paul Rosenberg (bass) and Ritchie Wooley (tenor). Roughly 80% a cappella and 100% gay as a gaggle of geese, Princess Guy presents a vast range of music styles emphasizing compelling harmony and unexpected interpretations of pretty much anything we fancy.
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Join your First Hill neighbors for our second annual Brain Health Block Party. From 1-4 p.m. on Wednesday July 10, enjoy a walk through the neighborhood, stopping at activity stations listed below for fun brain-healthy activities such as music, puzzles, creative arts, movement and more. Healthy snacks included! A fun and free event for all ages, with a special invitation to folks age 50+.
Event maps available at each activity station. Start wherever you like, and get your event map stamped as you go. Visit at least three activity stations for a chance to be entered into a drawing for a special brain-health raffle prize! Walking between all 9 stations is about 1 mile.
Ben Hubbard reported from two towns in the occupied West Bank, the Arab-Palestinian community of Tuqu and the Jewish-Israeli settlement of Tekoa.
From the outskirts of his town in the West Bank, the mayor surveyed the rocky hills stretching toward the Dead Sea where Palestinians had long farmed and herded, and pointed out the new features of the landscape.
New guard posts manned by Israeli soldiers. New roads patrolled by Israeli settlers. And, most tellingly, a new metal gate blocking the town’s sole road to those areas, installed and locked by the Israeli army to keep Palestinians out.
“Anyone who goes to the gate, they either arrest him or kill him,” said the mayor, Moussa al-Shaer, of the town of Tuqu.
On the other side of the gate, atop a bald hill in the distance, stood one of the area’s new residents, Abeer Izraeli, a Jewish settler.
“With God’s help, we will stay here a long time,” Mr. Izraeli said.
The West Bank Settlements
The case of the two people on either side of the gate is a particularly clear example of a dynamic playing out across the Israeli-occupied West Bank. As much of the world has focused on the war in Gaza, Jewish settlers miles away in the West Bank have hastened the rate at which they are seizing land previously used by Palestinians, rights groups say.
Dror Etkes, a field researcher with Kerem Navot, an Israeli monitoring group, estimated that since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7 that started the war in Gaza, settlers have taken more than 37,000 acres of land from Palestinians across the West Bank. More than 550 of those acres are near Tuqu, making it the largest such expansion by a single Israeli settlement.
One part of the settlement of Tekoa and, in the background, the Palestinian town of Tuqu.Since its installation in October, a gate has divided the Palestinian inhabitants of Tuqu from land seized by Israeli Jews from the settlement of Tekoa.
The gate is not much to look at — made of orange bars and similar to what one might find on a farm. But Hebrew graffiti on the concrete blocks that hold it up refer to Genesis 21:10, a verse about driving people away.
Since the gate’s installation in October, it has served as a firm divider between the Palestinian Arab inhabitants of Tuqu and the Israeli Jews in the newly expanded settlement of Tekoa.
Map locates the West Bank villages of Tuqu and Tekoa.
Both communities draw their names from where, tradition holds, the biblical prophet Amos was born. In some places, homes in one community sit 500 yards from homes in the other. When the Muslim call to prayer sounds in Tuqu, the Jews in Tekoa hear it, too.
By Anna D. Wilde – in the Harvard Crimson (thanks to Mike C.)
On the evening of Sunday, February 9, 1992, a group of about 40 Black and Jewish students gathered for a tense discussion in a gray-carpeted, well-lit room in the Freshman Union.
Just a few days before, the Harvard Black Students Association had hosted a speech by City University of New York professor Leonard Jeffries, provoking a 400-student protest spearheaded by Harvard-Radcliffe Hillel.
The Union event was the only moment of organized talk in a year marked by silence and insult. The person who made it happen was at the time just a first-year student: Freshman Black Table President Alvin L. Bragg ’95.
Some exchanges were sharp. Jews argued that Jeffries was anti-Semitic and inaccurate in some of his views. A Black student retorted, “If you feel that what Jeffries says is bullshit, then prove to me what he says is bullshit.”
But as moderator, Bragg kept the session from escalating into a verbal brawl, diffusing tension by reminding participants that they were in an open forum, not an official meeting.
“It just amazed me the poise he had, the ability to maintain a lid on a room that could have blown up,” says Michael H. Pine ’95, a Hillel official and friend of Bragg’s who was at the discussion.
The 1992 meeting was typical of Bragg, whom many students credit with a rare ability to reconcile diverse people and clashing views.
In his own term as president of the Black Students Association last year, Bragg was known as a mediator and, according to his predecessor, a “conciliator.” It is not the usual role for the president of the BSA, which through the years has found that only controversial activism forced significant change from the Harvard administration.
Representative Nicole Macri will be at Skyline on Tuesday, June 11 at 7:30 to talk about the accomplishments of the 2024 legislative session. You might want to arrange your dinner reservations on June 11 in order to be able to attend the meeting.
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Seattle is the most literary city in the nation! Get book club ready with new and gently used books at the historic Book Carts in Seneca Plaza. Book prices range from $2-4 each and proceeds go to Friend’s of the Seattle Public Library.
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Buskers
Enjoy live music and support local musicians while you visit the Park.
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Park Services Cart
June – September
Tuesdays & Thursdays: 12-2pm
Wednesdays: 4-6pm
Located in Upper Lawns (lawn space by Pigott Corridor)
Stop by and say ‘hi’ to FPA staff, find out what’s happening in the Park, and stay awhile! On Wednesday evenings we’ll have lawn games, and music to enjoy. This is a chance to get to know FPA staff and to learn more about the unique space that is Freeway Park.
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Volunteer Planting Party
Tuesday, June 25th: 12pm-1:30pm
Located in Seneca Plaza
Help out Seattle Parks and Rec as they prepare the park for Summer!
Freeway Park is over 5 acres of lush plants and trees that need round the clock love and attention. We partner with Seattle Parks & Recreation to provide ways for our community members to get involved while providing a few extra hands to keep the park clean and gorgeous.
Join us on Tuesday, June 25th, from 12pm – 1:30pm for as much time as you can spare! We will have some drinks and snacks! Tools and gloves provided, but bring your own if you can.
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Seattle Chamber Music Society: Summer Festival Concert Truck
Wednesday, June 26th: 11am-12pm
Located in Seneca Plaza
The SCMS Summer Festival returns with the Concert Truck, featuring live music. Free food & drinks will be provided!
________
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The NYT reported a few days ago that the “Museum Workers Walk Out, Describing Exhibit as Aligned With Zionism.” In a May 19 letter, the protesting staff said the “Confronting Hate Together” exhibition damaged community trust and aligned the museum with Zionism. The employees asked that museum leaders “acknowledge the limited perspectives presented in this exhibition. Missing perspectives include those of Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslim communities who are also experiencing an increased amount of violence, scapegoating, and demonization.”
In response there is a petition to reopen the museum as reported in change.org. ” (thanks to Mike C.)
Dear Wing Luke Museum Executive Leadership & Board of Trustees,
We respect Wing Luke Museum’s history of important exhibits, community support, and education. We are grateful for your leadership.
We want to express our admiration for the work that went into creating your exhibit, “Confronting Hate Together,” that explores the hatred that has targeted the Asian, Black, and Jewish communities of Seattle, including the redlining that affected all of these communities together.
By working with the Black Heritage Society of Washington State and the Washington State Jewish Historical Society, you created an exhibit that recognizes the importance of creating space for each of these groups to define their own terms and identities and to describe their own lived experiences.
We are saddened to see that people who are uncomfortable with the exhibit’s acknowledgment of local acts of anti-Jewish hatred have forced its closure. This sets a dangerous precedent.
We know that “Confronting Hate Together” has the power to open a discussion about the ways that we join forces to dismantle these old forms of hatred that still plague us today.
We the undersigned ask you to stay the course, and to re-open “Confronting Hate Together” with its original language intact. We recognize the courage this will require. However, a society that accepts the closure of its cultural institutions in response to discomfort poses a threat to its minorities and democracy for everyone.
We eagerly await the re-opening of “Confronting Hate Together” and the courageous conversations that will follow.
Sincerely,
Your Supporters & Citizens Concerned with Cultural Institutions
Isolation has significant effects on physical health: It increases heart disease risk by 29%, stroke risk by 32% and dementia risk by 50%, according to the Surgeon General’s office. A lack of social connection increases the risk of premature death by more than 60% — the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes per day.
“As somebody who sits in an office that for generations has focused on issues like tobacco and obesity, it made me realize that this issue of loneliness is a public health concern,” Murthy said.
Murthy joined Washington State Secretary of Health Umair Shah for a discussion on social connection and loneliness, part of a state health department speaker series. Here are five key points from the conversation.
1. Modern society has evolved to make us less connected to each other.
For thousands of years, humans lived as hunters and gatherers who formed small groups with people they trusted, Murthy said. They shared food, took care of children together and looked out for one another’s safety.
“We learned to live together and recognized that when we are connected with one another in trusted relationships, we actually do better. We have a much greater likelihood of survival,” he said.
Not all of those elements still exist in our current society, he said. More people feel disconnected from community or don’t feel like they’re a part of others’ lives in meaningful ways.
“We have become, in the grand scheme of human existence, quite lonely and isolated, despite the fact that we live in more densely populated parts of the world and despite the fact that we are connected through our devices and technology,” Murthy said. (continued)
Donald J. Trump, the former president and presumptive 2024 Republican nominee, was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in a case stemming from a payment that silenced a porn star.
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Ed note: This project honor’s Richard Ferry’s late wife, Maude. Please pass the information on to those with creative ideas about improving the care of those afflicted with dementia and those caring for them.
Do you have a groundbreaking idea to improve the lives of those living with dementia and their caregivers? Maude’s Ventures is seeking your vision! The Maude’s Ventures annual grant competition is open now, offering seed funding of up to $50,000 to turn your vision into reality.
Groundbreaking ideas make a difference
Maude’s Ventures is passionate about supporting innovative, scalable, and impactful solutions. By “innovations,” they mean a wide range of creative approaches, including new resources and programs, tech-enabled tools, novel products, and much more.
Whether your concept focuses on improving daily living, enhancing communication, or empowering caregivers, Maude’s Ventures’ inclusive review process ensures your voice is heard. They value submissions from a wide range of applicants, including:
Care providers
Technology developers
Researchers
Health care professionals
Business owners
Simple application process
Don’t let fear of a lengthy application process hold you back. Maude’s Ventures recognizes the importance of getting your idea off the ground quickly. Their application is designed for ease and clarity, requiring only:
A concise two-page proposal outlining your innovative solution
Up to two letters of support from relevant partners, current or past
Don’t miss out!
The application window for the 2024 Maude’s Ventures Grant competition is open now through Monday, August 5. Visit https://maudesventures.org/ to learn more and submit your application.
According to the Seattle times: The Seattle Public Library’s online catalog, e-books, Wi-Fi and public computers have all been taken offline Tuesday, as the agency investigates what it described as a ransomware event.
Thanks to Mary M. – here’s the update
www.spl.org is back online. You can now once again access our Event Calendar, as well as some digital services, such as online versions of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post.
Hoopla is accessible. Please note: If you borrow a Hoopla item that isn’t displaying properly, please try 1) logging out of your account and then log in again, or 2) try deleting and redownloading the Hoopla app.
The Library continues working to securely restore more technology services, such as e-books, computers, Wi-Fi, printing and more. We will update this space as progress is made.
May 28: Announcement to Patrons
Dear patrons,
In the early morning hours of Saturday, May 25 — just one day before we were prepared to take our systems offline to conduct planned maintenance on a server over Memorial Day weekend — the Library became aware of a ransomware event affecting our technology systems.
This disruption began impacting access to staff and public computers, our online catalog and loaning system, e-books and e-audiobooks, in-building Wi-Fi, and our website at www.spl.org.
The Library quickly engaged third-party forensic specialists, contacted law enforcement, and took our systems fully offline to interrupt and better assess the nature and impacts of the event. With our external partners, we continue to investigate the source of this disruption and are working as quickly and diligently as we can to confirm the extent of the impacts and restore full functionality to our systems. Privacy and security of patron and employee information are top priorities.
Until we can ensure the security of these systems, they will remain offline. We do not yet have an estimated time of resolution but will update you here as we are able to bring systems back online.
We are an organization that prides itself on providing you answers, and we are sorry that the information we can share is limited. At this time, securing and restoring our systems is where we are focused. We will update you in this space as we make progress on that work.
We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and understanding as we navigate this difficult situation.
We are still open and lending print books and other physical materials!
Despite these challenges, we intend to keep opening our doors as scheduled to welcome you in. You are invited to enjoy our spaces; check out our physical books, CDs and DVDs (using paper forms); and get your reference and referral questions answered to the best of our ability.
Our hard-working staff, whose jobs have become more challenging without technology access, are ready and able to assist you to check out materials and use our spaces and amenities. Although you cannot currently place holds, you are welcome to pick up holds already on the shelves. (One tip: When you visit, please bring your physical library card or library card number.)
You can find our current open hours schedule on this page.
Please hold on to your materials a little while longer
Because we cannot currently check physical materials back into our catalog, we encourage you to hold onto them a bit longer. The Library does not charge daily late fines for overdue materials. Once we get back online, we will update due dates for materials.
We apologize in advance that wait times will be impacted as we work to manage a backlog of returned and newly delivered items.
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Students from Columbia’s School of Professional Studies attend their graduation ceremony on May 10, 2024, in New York City. The college’s main commencement ceremony was canceled amid pro-Palestinian protests on campus. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago via Getty Images)
The commencement speech you need to hear.
By Robert Parham in The Free Press (thanks to Ed M.). Before joining the McIntire faculty, Professor Parham was head of the cybersecurity academy at the Israeli intelligence corps, and a cybersecurity product manager at Microsoft. He also helped found MUV Interactive, an Israeli Internet-of-Things startup, and is a consultant to several other startups.
If you are graduating from college this year, I suspect you’re not too familiar with George Carlin. So before you become inflamed about the (intentionally) harsh title, let me tell you I plagiarized it from Carlin, who was one of the best American comedians of the last 100 years. His show You Are All Diseased is available on YouTube, and it is so good that I was willing to start by alienating you a bit just to plug it here. You’re welcome. It is especially recommended if you’re in any kind of altered state of mind.
Speaking of states of mind: I’m worried about yours.
Rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide among people your age in the U.S. are skyrocketing. I myself lost a student to suicide a few years ago—an experience I wish on no one. I’m here to tell you that I think it’s partly our (your professors’) fault. We, along with others, have been feeding you a distorted view of the world and your place in it, and I think this has caused a considerable part of the existential angst you all feel.
But I’m not just aiming to point fingers.
I want to lay a vision of the present and future, which I genuinely believe and yet know many of you don’t share. After all, exposing you to unfashionable ideas is a core part of a healthy education. My deeper hope in doing so is to start a conversation on changing this sad state of affairs and to get you on your way to a happy and healthy life. Isn’t that what commencements are all about?
Whenever I speak with my students—I teach at the University of Virginia—they seem deeply pessimistic about the state of the world. We all know the reasons. Climate change is going to kill us all; late-stage capitalism is running amok; inequality is at an all-time high; racism and bigotry are rampant; gender-nonconforming and queer people are under unprecedented attack; economic anxiety has never been worse; AI is coming for our jobs; and on and on and on.
I then pose a simple thought experiment to them: If you were given a time machine that could take you back to any period in the last 12,000 years—since the dawn of civilization—when would you rather live? (continued)
You see, I believe we currently live in the golden age of humanity. Things have never been better for human beings. Yet it seems we have never felt worse about our prospects.
If you’re a woman, go back more than about 100 years and you become property (of your father and, later, your husband), with no voting rights and little protection under the law. If you’re a person with above-average melanin levels, like me, the same (and worse) happens to you. Gender-nonconforming minorities would find the past just as terrible.
Based on every objective measure of well-being—safety, health, wealth—if you are a college student in America today you are better off and wealthier than the king of England was 300 years ago. You have better access to education, entertainment, leisure, and healthcare. You have cleaner water and more abundant food. You have a significantly safer and longer life. And you have access to all of the world’s knowledge, including this piece, in the palm of your hand.
And it’s not just you. Throughout recorded history, the vast majority of humans lived in what we would today define as abject, dehumanizing poverty. Income and wealth inequality were measurably worse than they are today by orders of magnitude. Women died during childbirth at staggering rates. Most humans didn’t survive childhood. And various forms of subjugation and slavery were the norm in nearly all societies. On these and a variety of other objective metrics, humanity has made breathtaking progress in the past 300 years.
Let’s go back to comparing you with the king of England. If you’re anything like my students—I’ve tried that line on them, too—you felt that something was off with that statement. How can it be that you’re better off than the king of England? You certainly don’t feel better off, do you?
We economists call this phenomenon “relative wealth concerns” or “keeping up with the Joneses.” These are just fancy terms to describe a simple psychological fact: we are constantly busy comparing ourselves to our peer group and feel bad when we fall short in that comparison.
Peer group is an essential term in the previous sentence. No one cares that they’re enormously better off than their grandparents; they just care that they’re worse off than Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. You don’t feel wealthy, despite the fact the median human lives on the equivalent of $5,000 per year. Yes, you read that right. Imagine if you lived in the U.S. but spent only $5K a year at current U.S. prices, and you’ve imagined the life of the median human today. Your “peer group” isn’t humanity; it’s social media influencers and billionaires, and you are deeply unsatisfied when comparing your lives to theirs.
You live in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, yet you feel economic anxiety. The late Charlie Munger summarized it succinctly: “The world is not driven by greed. It’s driven by envy.” And in this era of instantaneous communication networks and social media, envy has been put into hyperdrive.
But envy has also been transformed and rebranded. Once a deadly sin, it became a virtue. We call it “fairness” (or sometimes “equity”) now and concentrate our attention on all the ways the world is “unfair.” Mostly the ways that lead to others in our peer group having more than us.
The world is unfair. Deeply so. It’s just that you’re the lucky ones. You won the birth lottery.
In a truly fair world, any dollar you make or spend above $5,000 a year would instead be given to someone else. Maybe a poor Kenyan, or Bangladeshi, or Indian. But that’s not the kind of fairness and equity anyone talking about “fairness” and “equity” around you seeks.
You’ve been lied to. You’ve been told by the media, social networks, and not least your professors, that this fantastic world we live in is evil. Not only that, you’ve been told it’s your fault. You’re too racist, too greedy, too white, too privileged, not sufficiently attuned to the plight of the marginalized. It is not enough to be non-racist, they say; you must be anti-racist. Anything less than that, and you’re complicit in evil. Some of you are better by default due to some accidents of birth; some of you are worse. Small wonder you feel suffocated, anxious, and depressed. Any human, weighed down with this responsibility and guilt, would be just as down. The cognitive dissonance of being told colonialism is evil, American slavery is uniquely evil, that wealth and the markets that enable it are evil, while going to school at a top-tier U.S. institution built on “Monacan land” using slave labor would incapacitate anyone.
The people pushing these ideas may have meant well. I like to give people the benefit of the doubt. But we’ve seen more than enough to know that the outcomes of this worldview are terrible. And yet many of your professors keep reinforcing these harmful lies.
I know that from seven years of teaching juniors at UVA about markets. My first class of the semester is titled “What Is Money?” A deceptively simple question, but simple questions are the most interesting. We discuss the emergence of “barley-backed” money in ancient Sumer; the idea that money is memory of past services rendered; the inherent positive-sum aspect of exchange in free markets, in which by definition both sides to a transaction become better off as a result (why would they both agree to it otherwise?); and the mind-bending idea that when they look around them in the classroom, everything they see, except naked humans, was made by a corporation. To a first approximation, corporations produce all the things and humans consume all the things. And we’re always very rude to them. That seems mighty ungrateful of us.
We also discuss wealth, or the accumulation of money. As a refugee, my family’s “balance sheet” zeroed out in my early life. The money I have today was willingly given to me in exchange for my services, which luckily appear to be in fairly high demand. I taught my students, and they gave me proof commemorating my service to them. I then, of my free will, asked Tesla for the services of a car and passed on some of that proof-of-service to them, to commemorate their service to me. So did many others, with their own hard-earned proof-of-service. We’re better off, Tesla is better off, its employees and suppliers are better off, and so are their employees and suppliers. When my students ask, “Why do Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have so much money?” I answer, “Because we gave it to them, willingly.” They created highly coveted services and managed to secure a teensy fraction of the value they created for other humans.
Without fail, at the end of the class a few students tell me that the content of the course was diametrically opposed to what they had been taught so far. Prior, they had class discussions about the exploitative nature of the market system and its inherent unfairness; the evil and greed of corporations; and the fight of exploited workers against oppressive capitalists.
I point out to them that these paradigms imply a zero-sum world in which wealth can only be created by taking it from others, whereas they live in the positive-sum world of markets, in which wealth is created by exchange. Markets have deposited a magic wand in their hands, which allows them to freeze moments in time, observe what is currently happening in foreign lands, and conjure loved ones for a face-to-face conversation out of thin air. Kings would have given half their kingdom for such a wand, but now anyone can have it for the low, low price of $69.99 per month. Or about five hours of student work. This is how we got wealthy.
They were told that the wealth of men like Musk and Bezos, and, incidentally, theirs, is ill-gotten (despite the fact it was willingly given to them by other humans). That it was somehow taken from its rightful owners, the oppressed, whoever they may at that moment be. And that this oppressor-oppressed mindset applies more widely, to other realms of human interaction. Because of accidents of birth, pigmentation, and privilege, they are oppressing others. Hence they, the oppressors, must yield the floor to the oppressed, as they have already caused “enough harm.”
My students arrive at my class steeped in zero-sum ideas, in which one person’s gain must be another person’s loss, and the only way to get a thing is by “oppressing” it from someone else. Then, they are shocked to hear heretical ideas about a world in which wealth is created, not stolen, and human interactions can be win-win and make all of us immensely well-off. The dissonance is severe, and they’re unsure how to deal with all the shame and guilt accumulated by years of accused “oppression.”
I hence want to close by telling you, the class of 2024: it’s not your fault. You are not evil. Being white / black / privileged / downtrodden / well-educated / illiterate / wealthy / poor / healthy / sickly / cisgendered / non-conforming does not make you bad (or good, for that matter). The sins of your forefathers are not your own. You did nothing wrong by being born. Yes, aiming to improve the state of human affairs is noble, but choosing instead to study, play games, and make out with the cute person you have your eye on does not make you bad. It makes you a normal, healthy human being. And no one seems to bother to tell you that. So there, I said it. You are not subject to the “original sin.” Go forth and have a happy and healthy life. There is still (much) room for progress, but things are currently better than they’ve ever been, and improving fast.
Or as Carlin put it, in his direct way: “Life gets really simple once you cut out all the bullshit they teach you in school.”
Oh, and one last thing: you might wonder why am I saying such heretical things in public. It’s because I committed to it as part of my Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB) goals for the year.
All professors at UVA have a yearly review, covering goals in the all-important fields of teaching and research excellence as well as the recently added “DEIB goals.” The specific DEIB question on my annual review was “Outline your priorities and plans for the coming year, including your specific goals to help foster Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging within the School and within your classroom.”
Here’s what I had to say about that:
Why is this category still here?
I’m one of the most diverse faculty members here (a refugee, veteran, immigrant, person-with-above-average-melanin, and the proud owner of the only mezuzah at McIntire), and I aspire to include all of my students and give them a feeling they belong. Yet, possibly the thing most diverse about me is my opinion in the next point:
Diversity is great, inclusion is amazing, we should all feel like we belong here, but the only interpretation of Equity I’ve had rigorously defined is stock equity in a company. The main meaning of the word I could find seems to be adjacent to equality of outcomes, which I hold to be anti-liberal and deeply misguided.
My DEIB goal for 2024 is to help abolish the DEIB establishment at UVA.
I think I’ve done really well on my DEIB goal for the year with this piece. They’ll probably give me a raise after that, don’t you think? At the very least, no one will accuse me of telling you only what you want to hear. And maybe a few of you will actually heed my advice. If that’s the case, it was all worth it.
QUEENS, NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—In what has become a Memorial Day tradition for him, on Monday Donald J. Trump laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Podiatrist.
Trump made his annual pilgrimage to pay homage to the heroic doctors who issued bogus diagnoses to ensure that their privileged patients never answered the call of duty.
In an emotional tribute, Trump thanked the fallen foot specialists who bravely risked their medical licenses so that others facing military service could be free.
Choking back tears, he said, “They gave everything so people like me could give nothing.”
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Not since Theodore Roosevelt ran against William Howard Taft in 1912 have voters been able to weigh the records of two men who have done the job of president.
The mystery is why Americans have more positive views of Donald J. Trump’s policies than they do of Joe Biden’s.
You and I both know that polls this far before an election are almost worthless. Even on the eve of an election, they’re mostly baloney. (Polling generated by HuffPost on Election Day 2016 concluded that Hillary Clinton had a 98 percent chance of beating Trump.)
Nonetheless, I confess that last week’s polls — The New York Times/Siena poll of seven swing states showing Joe Bidenlosing to Trump due to the economy, the FT/Michigan Ross survey finding voters trust Trump more on the economy than Biden (43 percent to 35 percent), Gallup’s showing that Americans’ confidence in Biden to do the right thing for the economy is among the lowest Gallup has measured for any president since 2001, and a Politico–Morning Consult poll finding Trump and Biden statistically tied on who did more to boost infrastructure — gave me pause.
When this many polls show the same thing, the thing they show deserves attention.
So let me attend to it.
First, I’ll give you the facts. Then I’ll try to explain why the facts aren’t getting through to voters. Finally, what I believe Biden and his allies must do.
Under Trump, the unemployment rate rose by 1.6 percentage points to 6.3 percent. Under Biden, unemployment has remained under 4 percent for the longest stretch in over 50 years. Working-age women are being employed at a record rate, and wages are rising for American workers.
In 2016, candidate Trump campaigned against the trade deficit with China. He called it “theft” and even used the term “rape” to describe it. In 2016, the U.S. goods trade deficit with the China was near $350 billion. In the first three years of the Trump administration (before COVID-19), it worsened, averaging almost $379 billion per year.
Under Biden, America’s trade deficit with China has improved dramatically — falling by $103 billion, or 27 percent, to $279 billion. It’s the lowest bilateral deficit in goods since 2010.
Under Biden, the stock market has soared. On Friday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 40,000 for the first time in history, exceeding the market’s annualized return under Trump.
Tomorrow is Memorial Day, the day Americans have honored since 1868, when we mourn those military personnel who have died in the service of the country—that is, for the rest of us.
For me, one of those people is Beau Bryant.
When we were growing up, we hung out at one particular house where a friend’s mom provided unlimited peanut butter and fluff sandwiches, Uno games, iced tea and lemonade, sympathetic ears, and stories. She talked about Beau, her older brother, in the same way we talked about all our people, and her stories made him part of our world even though he had been killed in World War II 19 years before we were born.
Beau’s real name was Floyston, and he had always stepped in as a father to his three younger sisters when their own father fell short.
When World War II came, Beau was working as a plumber and was helping his mother make ends meet, but in September 1942 he enlisted in the Army Air Corps. He became a staff sergeant in the 322nd Bomber Squadron, 91st Bomb Group, nicknamed “Wray’s Ragged Irregulars” after their commander Colonel Stanley T. Wray. By the time Beau joined, the squadron was training with new B-17s at Dow Army Airfield near Bangor, Maine, and before deploying to England he hitchhiked three hours home so he could see his family once more.
It would be the last time. The 91st Bomb Group was a pioneer bomb group, figuring out tactics for air cover. By May 1943 it was experienced enough to lead the Eighth Air Force as it sought to establish air superiority over Europe. But the 91st did not have adequate fighter support until 1944. It had the greatest casualty rate of any of the heavy bomber squadrons.
Beau was one of the casualties. On August 12, 1943, just a week before his sister turned 18, while he was on a mission, enemy flak cut his oxygen line and he died before the plane could make it back to base. He was buried in Cambridge, England, at the Cambridge American Cemetery and Memorial, the military cemetery for Americans killed in action during WWII. He was twenty years old.
I grew up with Beau’s nephews and nieces, and we made decades of havoc and memories. But Beau’s children weren’t there, and neither he nor they are part of the memories.
Thinking about our untimely dead is hard enough, but I am haunted by the holes those deaths rip forever in the social fabric: the discoveries not made, the problems not solved, the marriages not celebrated, the babies not born.
I know of this man only what his sister told me: that he was a decent fellow who did what he could to support his mother and his sisters. Before he entered the service, he once spent a week’s paycheck on a dress for my friend’s mother so she could go to a dance.
And he gave up not only his life but also his future to protect American democracy against the spread of fascism.
I first wrote about Beau when his sister passed, for it felt to me like another kind of death that, with his sisters now all gone, along with almost all of their friends, soon there would be no one left who even remembered his name.
But something amazing happened after I wrote about him. People started visiting Beau’s grave in England, leaving flowers, and sending me pictures of the cross that bears his name.
So he, and perhaps all he stood for, will not be forgotten after all.
May you have a meaningful Memorial Day.
Posted inUncategorized|Comments Off on Remembering by Heather Cox Richardson
Shortly after his sixty-seventh birthday, Ernesto Chavez retired from his job at a Los Angeles food warehouse. Sara, his wife of forty-five years, told me that he meticulously took his medications for high blood pressure and cholesterol, hoping to enjoy his time with his grandchildren. But one morning in January, 2021, Ernesto burned with fever, his chest heaving as though he were once again lifting heavy boxes. At the hospital, he tested positive for covid-19. His oxygen levels plummeted, and he was quickly intubated. Ten days later, his lungs were failing, his face was bloated from litres of intravenous fluid, and his hands and feet had begun to cool. As his chances of survival waned, I arranged to speak with his family about a subject inseparable from death itself: cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR.
For decades, physicians have debated whether CPR should be offered to people who suffer from the final blows of incurable illness, be it heart failure, advanced cancer, or dementia. Although CPR has become synonymous with medical heroism, nearly eighty-five per cent of those who receive it in a hospital die, their last moments marked by pain and chaos. The pandemic only deepened the risks: every chest compression spewed contagious particles into the air, and intubation, which often follows compressions, exposed doctors to virus-laden saliva. Hospitals in Michigan and Georgia reported that no covid patient survived the procedure. An old question acquired new urgency: Why was CPR a default treatment, even for people as sick as Ernesto?
As a palliative-care physician, I help people with serious, often terminal, illness consider a path forward. During the pandemic, this involved weekly Zoom meetings with each family whose loved one was in the I.C.U. with covid. We discussed how the virus could damage the lungs irreversibly, how we gauged a patient’s condition, and what we would do if, despite being on life support, that patient died. (continued)
Until the final minutes of their commencement ceremony last Thursday, the 1,200 graduates of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth thought they knew what they would remember most about it: the supremely bad weather during the outdoor ceremony, where they sat drenched and shivering in a torrential rainstorm.
Then, as they prepared to collect their diplomas, their commencement speaker, Rob Hale, a billionaire philanthropist from Boston, returned to the dripping podium. He brought along two cash-stuffed duffel bags, he announced, and would hand every graduate $1,000 as they crossed the stage — $500 to keep for themselves, and $500 to give to any good cause.
“My friends and I were looking at each other like, no way,” Ali McKelvey, one of the students, said. “We were like, this has to be a joke.”
It wasn’t. Mr. Hale, the co-founder and chief executive of Granite Telecommunications, ranks as one of the country’s wealthiest people and most generous benefactors. He and his wife, Karen, gave away $1 million every week in 2022, to both well-known and unheard-of causes.
Still, as he told the graduates at UMass Dartmouth, he has never forgotten the experience of losing everything, when the first company he built went bankrupt in the dot-com crash more than 20 years ago.
Since that disaster, he said in an interview this week, he and his wife have found deep joy and satisfaction in giving their money away. In granting college students a chance to experience the same feeling, he said he hoped to light a spark that they will carry with them — even if he had no guarantee that they will honor his request. (He said he believes the vast majority do.)
“If they get to feel that joy themselves, then maybe it becomes something they want to do again, and make part of their own lives,” Mr. Hale, 57, said. “In America and the world, these are times of turmoil, and the more we help each other, the better off we’ll be.”
In the week since a businessman they had never met handed them two damp envelopes onstage — one labeled “GIFT” and the other “GIVE” — the new graduates have packed up dorm rooms, fine-tuned résumés and snapped last campus selfies. They have also pondered where to send what for most will be the largest charitable gift they have ever had the chance to give.
Tony da Costa, a graphic design major who graduated with high honors, considered giving his $500 to a charitable organization but decided instead to hand it over to an acquaintance of his mother, someone he has never met, who is suffering from an illness and struggling to pay bills.
“I felt like giving it to a specific person would feel better,” said Mr. da Costa, 22, who grew up in the town of Dartmouth, on the southern coast of Massachusetts not far from Cape Cod.
Kamryn Kobel, an English major, gave her $500 to the Y.W.C.A. in Worcester, Mass., where she learned to swim as a child, to support its programs for young women and survivors of violence.
Her donation felt like something to be proud of, she said — once it sank in that the envelopes she tucked under her rain poncho contained exactly what Mr. Hale had promised.
“At first, it was like, is there really going to be cash in there?” she said. “And then it was like, oh my God, it’s for real.”
Smaller and less well known than the university’s flagship campus in Amherst, UMass Dartmouth enrolls about 5,500 undergraduates, more than half of them first-generation college students. Eighty percent come from Massachusetts; 80 percent receive financial aid.
It is the fourth Massachusetts college campus in the last four years where Mr. Hale has thrilled graduates with his signature split gift. Each time, he has selected a public school with high concentrations of first-generation and lower-income students who have “worked their tails off to get there,” he said.
Last spring, he distributed the graduation gifts at the Boston campus of UMass, where 66 percent of incoming students identify as people of color.
Last spring at Deerfield Academy, a private high school in western Massachusetts with a more affluent enrollment, he put the focus solely on philanthropy, depositing funds in a school-directed trust so that each graduate could give away $1,000. Mr. Hale, who grew up in nearby Northampton, graduated from Deerfield in 1984 and went on to Connecticut College.
In an interview on Wednesday, he briefly grew emotional describing how one of the UMass Dartmouth graduates had given her $500 to a local group that provides holiday gifts for children in need — a program that had helped her family when she was a child.
“Seeing things like that is very cool,” he said.
Ms. McKelvey, 21, donated her $500 to a women’s shelter in her hometown of Ashland, Mass., west of Boston, inspired by classes she had taken for her interdisciplinary major, health and society, where she learned about the struggles of disadvantaged women.
“I remember sitting in some of those classes and thinking, ‘Someone needs to do something about that,’” she said. “And now I have the opportunity to do something.”
Posted inUncategorized|Comments Off on Their Diplomas Came With Envelopes of Cash, and a Catch
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