After the first and second poets were killed, the third poet wrote a poem.
They shoot at heads
But they do not know
That revolution lives in the heart.
After the third poet was killed, the fourth poet wrote a poem.
Don’t let your blood run cold
Pool your blood for this fight.
After the fourth poet was killed,
his body consumed by fire on May 14,
there was no verse.
At least for a moment.
But poetry remains alive in Myanmar
My sister Jan died July 17, 2019 at 68½ years old. She had early-onset dementia and for the last 5-6 years she remembered little. I shared a version of this essay at Jan’s funeral.
I was very close to Jan in her early years, you see I’m her Irish twin. An Irish twin is a brother or sister who, though not a true twin, was born less than a year apart from a sibling. Jan and I were born 12 days less than a year apart. (Jimmy Fallon introduced me to the concept of Irish twins, he also is one.)
We behaved very much like twins until we started school and they separated us. As is often the case with twins, we had complimentary personalities. She was the bold and assertive twin and I the quiet and shy one. Jan spoke up for me and stuck up for me. If somebody gave her a cookie, a candy or other treat, she would say, “And one for my brother too!”
We had a pet chicken named Mary Ann. She had escaped from the coop but hung around the barn, knowing where to get grain, water, etc. We taught Mary Ann a few very modest tricks, such as walking on a rolling barrel, and fantasized about making her a circus act.
We both learned to drive tractor at the same time. For whatever reason I figured out the technique for backing a wagon into the shed before Jan did, so she decided that she would handle driving the tractor forward and I would handle those situations in which driving in reverse was required.
In both grade and high school, Jan was always one of the cool kids and I was a hopeless nerd. She tried to help me out by getting her friends to talk to me, but I was hopeless. One time she even went so far as to try to teach me some dance steps for an upcoming dance party. I had no rhythm.
In college she majored in Early Childhood Education and I in Agriculture, so we had no classes together, though we both went to UW Madison. We did share a car so we could go home to help on the farm on weekends, so we talked.
After college I joined the Peace Corps. After I’d been in El Salvador about a year, Jan came to visit. We traveled together and talked a lot. It was somewhat of a role reversal because by then I spoke Spanish (at least at survival level) and she didn’t. So I had to speak for her.
Later I helped her look for jobs at English language schools in Costa Rica. I often think that if we’d been successful she might never have become a Madison firefighter. But that became both her profession and her passion!
I miss Jan a lot. We come from a family of nonhuggers and she taught me to hug! We could always talk; for the last 5 years we haven’t been able to, now it’s permanent.
The following excerpts contain memories of Saint Oscar Romero, Archbishop of San Salvador, from the book “Dios Tenía Miedo” by Salvadoran author Vanessa Núñez Handal. English translation by Don Dino.
From Chapter 9, meeting Saint Oscar Romero:
The heat, which at that time of year was unbearable, was not felt inside the chapel of white, geometric beams. We never went to mass there, despite it being close to our house, because Dad said the nuns, who were in-charge of it, were Communists.
Jimena excused herself saying that she would return after Easter vacation, to which the sister responded by nodding her head yes. We tried to leave by the main doorway, but the nun stopped us. She said the participants in the mass were about to enter, so it would be better for us to leave through the sanctuary, from which there was an exit by a narrow doorway behind the tiny altar, above which hung a crucifix with a life-sized body of Christ.
The woman bumped the metal door. A high-pitched voice told us to go ahead.
“I want to make a special appeal to the men of the army.”
I saw him from behind. He was not tall, but actually had a strong face and a husky body.
“Brothers, they are part of our people.”
It appeared to me that he was approaching sixty years old, from the gray hair at his temples and his look of a solemn man.
“No soldier is obliged to obey an order that goes against God’s law.”
Soon I would discover from the newspapers that he was sixty-two years old.
“Nobody is required to obey an immoral law.”
He put on a hat which gave him the look of a Pope.
“… reforms don’t serve any purpose if they are stained with so much blood.”
He turned to look at us. He smiled.
They have come to be told about the Stations of the Cross, explained the nun. She is close to having her first communion, the nun affirmed putting her hand on Jimena’s shoulder.
We greeted him. Jimena kissed his ring. We thanked the sister and Jimena promised to return. We left without hurrying, breathing the air in the street and feeling refreshed. In the trees that bordered the paved road, dozens of cicadas cut through the air with their voices.
From Chapter 37, death and funeral of Saint Oscar Romero:
I look at blurry black and white photos.
His face reminds me of my grandfather. I don’t see any sweetness in the features of his face. It startles me. Dark lines that emerge from his nose and ears, cross his face and neck. It is the same chapel from that previous afternoon and, nevertheless, so very different.
In the image several nuns kneel by his lifeless body. One of them is the nun that told us about the Stations of the Cross.
I read in the text beneath the photo that fifty thousand people accompanied the coffin. A sniper assassinated him with a single shot in the chest. Afterward, they say, the fatal bullet was raffled off among the financiers of the crime.
A bomb explodes. The multitude disperses through nearby streets. Snipers, posted in the closest buildings, open fire. The cathedral is not able to protect them.
From the atrium, the coffin of the martyr looks upon all the dead.
From Chapter 28, Pope John Paul II’s visit to the grave of Saint Oscar Romero:
“San Salvador, March 6, 1983. Pope John Paul II made a one day visit to our country. The streets through which his caravan passed were full of people. The Pontiff made an unplanned detour to Avenida España, for the purpose of visiting the tomb of monsignor Romero in the metropolitan cathedral, in front of which he prayed.”
For the past year or so I've been trying to get a handle on what exactly upsets me so much about President Trump. I’m angry about his incessant name-calling and the way he constantly makes self-serving statements with no regard for the truth. Then anything he doesn’t agree with he labels "fake news."
But is it just his arrogant, self-aggrandizing style that upsets me? No, former Ambassador to Panama and longtime diplomat John Feeley, who recently resigned from his post, nailed it when he wrote in the Washington Post, "My values were not his values." President Trump’s approach to foreign affairs can be summed up in a single phrase: The strong do what they will and the weak do what they must.
The concept of basic human rights does not enter into his thought process at all. Ethics, loyalty and social justice are just pawns in his deal-making game. It’s easier for him to make deals with dictatorships than with democracies because the democratic process is so messy!
So it is that simple, Trump’s values are not my values. The longer he is in office, the more damage he will do to our democracy and the image of our country in the world community.
Trees and houses emerge in front and disappear behind.
The air is heavy and wet.
A vail hanging over the whole world,
revealing its secrets gradually, in its own time.
Life is a walk in the fog.
Red Fox was trailing behind his mate as she stalked a rabbit, when it happened. The rabbit hopped across the black ribbon of asphalt separating one part of the forest from another and the female fox followed. Usually she looked for approaching beasts, but this time she was focused solely on her prey, and failed to see the shiny four-wheeled beast approaching at an impossibly fast speed.
The beast struck her squarely, sending her flying through the air to land on her back in the gravel beside the ribbon of asphalt. Red Fox came to her side and waited for her to rise to her feet again. Perhaps she had just been stunned by the blow from the beast which had continued on its way with no perceptible change in speed or direction.
But there was no movement. The life spirit was gone from his mate, the love of his life. He stood over her body protectively as another of the four-wheeled beasts whizzed by on the asphalt.
They had raised five litters of pups together, all of them healthy. Once they left the den he had only seen one once. It was a male who came into his territory. He gave him a look of recognition, then the obligatory growl to make it clear he would defend his territory. The pup walked away, looking back only once. The pup knew him too, and would not challenge his father.
What would he do next? He had never imagined being without the love of his life. Since they first met and mated they had been partners and parents, always sharing their kills between themselves and with their young. Prey had been plentiful in the woods they chose as their territory. They had lived a good life. What should he do now?
He grabbed her lifeless body by the nape of her neck with his teeth, and dragged it to the center of the black ribbon of asphalt. Releasing her, he stood over her body, as if guarding the remains of his mate, and waited patiently for another of the shiny four-wheeled beasts to come to strike him and send his life spirit to join hers in whatever came after.
I wrote this poem June 22, 1977, while I was living in Costa Rica as a Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV). It is my only attempt to write a poem in Spanish. I wrote it to express my anger and frustration over the killing of a number of campesinos (peasant farmers) during a demonstration in Parque de la Libertad, San Salvador, El Salvador. I was a PCV in El Salvador from October 1974 until November 1976. Prior to the Spanish conquest, the region which is now the country of El Salvador was known as Cuscatlán.
nahuatl? ya no!
Tierra de la Infancia? ya no!
The country with a heart? YA NO!
(pero, sí, tiene corazón.)
Sí, tiene corazón, SÍ TIENE!
Como no va a tener, pues?
Echó sangre en el parque, no es asi?
En ... el ... parque ... de ... la ... LIBERTAD ...
Y en Santa Tecla, en Aguilares, en San Miguel ...
En Tacuba, en ’32,
una generación de hombres ...
(se perdió!)
Se perdió?
Dicen que fueron comunistas,
bajo influencia extranjera,
inflamados en contra sus patrones ...
Se sacrificó
una generación de hombres
fue sacrificada
PERO PARA QUE?
Para la lucha anticomunista?
Pues, por un lado, sí, tal vez,
porque resulta que desde entonces
los militares tomaron el mando acá.
(y son unos fuertes anticomunistas ... según dicen.)
Miren! es que yo fui anticomunista ... vaya!
Así nos enseñaron, pues!
Que el comunismo era la esclavitud.
Pero, Ustedes saben que se ha ido metiendo aquí.
La oposición politica a los militares, pues,
siempre era obra del comunismo
La organización syndical, también!
La Universidad, los intelectuales, los estudiantes (nuestros hijos!)
se han ido infestandose con ideas comunistas de tal manera que ...
han tenido que ...
sacrificarse (perderse)
Se sacrifica
una generación de estudiantes y intelectuales
es sacrificada
PARA QUE?
Para la lucha anticomunista?
Para mantener el orden en la sociedad?
Pues, tal vez, les digo yo
porque es que hasta los sacerdotes son comunistas hoy!
(varios, la mayor parte)
Para mantener el orden más que todo.
Digo yo, pues ...
el ... orden ... economico.
el café, el algodón, el azucar, la ganadería
La gente?
Es que gente siempre se consigue,
y barata!
La mano de obra es el gran recurso que tiene este país.
El gran recurso que tiene el país!
EL GRAN RECURSO!
Es que, patrón, ya no somos anticomunistas
YA NO!
Mire! es que en el parque ... mataron a madres y a niños!
EN ... EL ... PARQUE .. DE ... LA ... LIBERTAD!
Es que ya, todo lo que vale lo llaman comunista!
Seamos comunistas, pero lucharemos
PARA QUE?
Para que nuestros descendientes
tengan los derechos
de seres humanos.
Para la dignidad del pueblo Cuscatleco
El pueblo, sí, tiene corazón!
SÍ TIENE!
Y con su sangre ganará la libertad y la dignidad!
When I first arrived in San Isidro, El Salvador in 1975, it was the dry season and the area bore an uncanny resemblance to a scene from a movie western depicting the southwestern U.S. There were men on horseback with cowboy hats and spurs, and others driving teams of oxen pulling two-wheeled carts. A layer of dust coated everything. As I dismounted my motorcycle, a man in a straw cowboy hat approached me and said, “Don Pedrito was your brother, wasn’t he?”
First, I should explain that, in El Salvador, Don is a title of respect commonly used by rural people, and that Pedrito is an affectionate form of the name Pedro (Spanish version of Peter) such as might be used for a child or young person. So you might translate Don Pedrito as “young Mr. Peter”.
I, of course, had no idea who Don Pedrito was, but during the six months I lived in San Isidro I would learn his story, which I recount here.
Don Pedrito, whose real name was Floyd Miller, arrived in El Salvador on May 4, 1965 as a Mennonite missionary. Ten years later, when I was a Peace Corps volunteer (PCV) there, it was still common practice to assign us foreigners nicknames that were easier to pronounce in Spanish than our original ones. My first name, Dean, was replaced with the nickname Dino. Floyd studied Spanish for six weeks in a town named Sitio Del Niño, and was given Pedro as his Salvadoran nickname. Don Pedrito arrived in San Isidro in mid June of 1965 to teach carpentry to the locals, and presumably save souls. His volunteer service was part of a land reform project in which peasant farmers were given 2 manzana (about 3.5 acre) plots of public land, from the government purchased former hacienda San Juan. With the training of Don Pedrito and others, the farmers built nice solid one-story houses of concrete blocks with wooden framing and corrugated steel roofs.
In November Don Pedrito took a trip to a beach near Metalío on the Pacific coast. Unfortunately, he took a swim at a place where the undertow is especially strong, and drowned in the ocean on November 25, 1965, just a month shy of his twenty-first birthday. The people of San Isidro, and his former students in particular, were distraught over the news of his death. One of his students, a young man, committed suicide.
A single-sheet flyer was printed for Don Pedrito’s funeral. Somebody gave me a copy. They thought I should have it, and I am forever grateful. At the top is a black and white photo of him. Beneath it is printed his real name, age at death and three paragraphs of text in Spanish. Information from the flyer that I haven’t already mentioned here includes the fact that he was born near Hutchinson, Kansas. His parents’ names are Enos and Mary, and he had four brothers and a sister. He belonged to the Center Amish Mennonite Church.
Don Pedrito is buried in San Isidro’s graveyard. Apparently the church and his parents made the decision to leave his remains where he had been working at the time of his death. We can only speculate whether their decision was primarily philosophical or financial. A young boy took me to see the grave. It was the most elaborate one in the small graveyard. The tombstone reads: Floyd "Pedro" Miller, Born: December 25, 1944, Died: November 25, 1965
That would be the end of my story, and I probably would not feel as strongly linked to Don Pedrito as I do, except that in late July of 1975 I completed my study of the peasant farmers of the San Isidro area and was reassigned to work at a demonstration and training farm near Metalío. Another PCV and I lived in a beach house for the ten months I worked there.
That means I was near Metalío, at the beach, on November 25, 1975, the ten-year anniversary of the day Don Pedrito drown. So, of course, I had to tempt fate by going swimming in the Pacific Ocean that day. Actually it was stormy, and the surf was rough, so I didn’t spend a lot of time in the water. On another occasion though, my housemate and I were taken pretty far out by a rip tide on the same beach. We were just strong enough swimmers to make it back to shore, but I doubt that either of us would have had the strength to go back in and save somebody who couldn’t make it on their own! I guess that is what happened to Don Pedrito, a rip tide took him out and there was nobody there to save him.
In Hutchinson, Kansas I doubt that anybody besides his surviving family remembers Floyd Miller. But in San Isidro, El Salvador, the story of Don Pedrito is a legend that will live on for generations. The people in San Isidro who asked me about Don Pedrito were right. He is my brother in every way that is important, and though I never met him, I’ll certainly never forget him!
I found a dead rabbit by the curb. He didn't quite make it across the road. Sorry to see you leave this world so soon. None of us ever knows when we will get clipped by a truck, or felled by cancer.
The morning birds are singing as I dig a hole and place your body in it. A glorious sendoff from this life. I can only hope that my own will be likewise.
Diane Hendricks and I are both citizens of the State of Wisconsin. We each have a single vote in the upcoming elections for president, senator and other public offices. But that is where our similarities end.
I am an enthusiastic supporter of Russ Feingold for U.S. Senator and a less-than-enthusiastic supporter of Hilary Clinton for President. I have given $50 to the Feingold campaign, and was appropriately punished by receiving a seemingly endless stream of emails in my in-box. If anybody (the FBI, wikileaks, Russian hackers) wants my deleted emails they are welcome to them - the vast majority are unopened.
Diane Hendricks, who owns her own company and has a net worth of $5 Billion, supports Ron Johnson for U.S. Senator and Donald Trump for President. Reportedly, she has already spent $4.7 Million on Trump for President TV ads and $2 Million on Johnson for Senator ads.
If you believe money equals speech, as the majority of Supreme Court Justices did when they made the Citizens United ruling, Ms Hendricks is just choosing to exercise her free speech rights more than I am. If, like me, you are more cynical, you might conclude that she is trying to impose her political choices on her fellow citizens of Wisconsin.
If this is not a strong argument for overturning the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling, I don’t know what is!
And then there is the case of the Koch brothers, who don’t even live in Wisconsin, yet are reportedly spending about $1 Million on ads urging that we elect Senator Johnson over former Senator Feingold. Do you call that free speech or legalized pay to play?
running away from home,
cowboy shirts and hobo bundles,
the sledding hill?
Do you remember
forts in the woods,
throwing tomatoes and rotten eggs,
running through fields of corn taller than us?
Do you remember
softball in the driveway,
playing star light, moon light,
swimming in the creek and the pond?
Do you remember
riding the school bus,
teaching newborn calves to drink,
showing calves at the fair?
No, dementia has stolen these and all your memories!
The remembering is left to me.
I feel so alone.
When I was growing up on a small dairy farm in Adams County in the 1950s and 1960s, we got the Milwaukee Journal newspaper every day. With 20-20 hindsight I can now state that it was the golden age of newspapers, but we didn’t realize that at the time.
Everybody’s favorite part of the Journal (as we called it) was the Green Sheet. Mom did the crossword puzzle, and I mostly just looked at the comics, but I also remember the "Slightly Kloss-Eyed" column written by Gerald Kloss. While a few of his columns passed right over my head at the time, most I enjoyed for his off-beat sense of humor and total irreverence when confronting facts and events that others took way too seriously.
Truthfully, there is no way that I can describe his writing that will do it justice. For those who never got a chance to read it in the old Journal Green Sheet, I can only recommend the archives of that great newspaper. But I offer this short poem by Mr. Kloss as a teaser:
“But after 40 years of hirement
Plus 25 more in retirement
I’d like to say my Journal years
Were high in grins and low on tears.”
Gerald Kloss was 91 when he passed away on Thursday, February 4, 2016.
Governor Walker claims that doing away with qualifying exams for State of Wisconsin civil service jobs will speed up hiring. Maybe that is true, although I believe the major reason State positions are hard to fill right now is mostly because Walker and the Republican legislature have significantly cut take-home pay for State jobs, while making them much less secure by essentially doing away with public employee unions. Whether his real intent is to make it even easier to make patronage hires (it was already pretty easy under previous administrations), is a topic for another day.
My first experience with State civil service exams was in 1978. I had recently returned from 3-plus years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Central America, and was looking for a job that would allow me to go back to college. I remember taking a number of different exams, and going to a bunch of interviews. I’d always been a good test-taker, and if I scored in the top five on an exam they were required to interview me for job openings. I remember thinking it was a bit silly to have a written exam for blue-collar jobs that really required very limited reading and writing skills. But it worked to my advantage, so I wasn’t complaining. Also, as anybody who has hired someone for a manual-labor job and then found out that the person was incapable of following written instructions, will tell you, literacy skills should not be under-valued!
I was eventually hired to work third shift as a janitor at the University of Wisconsin (UW) Memorial Union, and a couple of months later I switched to a second shift Building Maintenance Helper (If I could have the job of inventing official titles for State positions, I’d come out of retirement!) job at the UW Hospital and Clinics. The second-shift job allowed me to go back to college at UW Madison, taking math and computer science classes.
I didn’t finish a Masters degree, but acquired enough computer programming skills to get hired. My first programming job was in the private sector and my second in the public sector but out-of-state. Then my life took a detour for several years. I managed a dairy farm after my Dad passed away.
So here is where my story resembles that of the real or made-up one told by Governor Walker. I refer to the supposed short-order cook who was interviewed for a State regulator job due to a high score on a State civil service exam. Unlike the Governor, I don’t see any problem at all with this. In Madison, this short-order cook was probably working on an advanced degree in business or accounting, and would have made a perfectly good regulator, despite having no experience specific to the position!
In my case I was a dairy farm manager who scored high on the State exam for computer professionals (the title was Management Information Specialist). I went to several interviews (again, they had to interview me because I had one of the top five scores) before being hired by a small State agency.
This was the beginning of a 15-year career as a State information technology (IT) professional, followed by 13 years as an instructor in the Information Technology Department at Madison Area Technical College (MATC).
Would I have gotten hired to an entry-level job under a resumé-only system, centralized in the State Department of Administration (DOA)? Given that at the time I was being interviewed for that first IT job, all of the medium to large agencies I interviewed with passed on me, I seriously doubt it.
I offer my experience as food for thought. The last thing our State civil service system needs is more patronage hires, and the exams clearly were one way to counter that. “Were” is the key word here!
Maybe, after all a majority of the court declined to recuse themselves from the case known colloquially as “John Doe II” brought by Wisconsin Club for Growth, a so-called issue advocacy group which had provided major campaign support to each of their most recent election campaigns. And, of course they ruled in favor of the position supported by Club for Growth. If this not corruption, what is?
In laymen’s terms, the court (or at least 4 of its 7 justices) is bought and paid for by special interests and their “dark money”. And their (equally bought and paid for) colleagues in the State legislature have further loosened what pass for campaign finance laws in the State to ensure the dark money keeps flowing in their direction.
What ever happened to clean government in Wisconsin? Fighting Bob LaFollette has to be spinning in his grave! Is there any hope for our State?
Currently, our best hope is that the U.S. Supreme Court will recognize the problem for a democracy posed by justices who accept a ton of dark money from groups which do not even have to report who their donors are, and then feel free to rule in favor of those same groups when they come before the court.
Will the Court which decided that corporations are people and money is speech help us out here? Is the stench here strong enough to shame and embarrass even them?
Only time will tell.
Salvadoran author, Vanessa Núñez Handal, who lives in Guatemala, has written an exceptional book about the civil war in El Salvador. Below is a brief synopsis.
The civil war in El Salvador (1979-1992) was perhaps the last to be labeled by either side as a “cold war” conflict. While the Berlin wall was being torn down, and Mikhail Gorbachev was espousing the policies of glasnost ("openness") and perestroika ("restructuring"), the United States government was providing large amounts of military aid to the repressive government of El Salvador to battle rebels it labeled as communists.
Caught in the middle of this conflict were middle class urban families like that of Natalia, the protagonist of “God Was Afraid”. Natalia looks back upon her childhood during the war, feeling shame that her parents rigidly followed the government’s anti-communist line, while also recognizing that doing anything less likely would have led to either exile or death. The story of Natalia, her family and friends is told as a series of essays about experiences during the war and reflections about it afterward. It is an extraordinary in-their-own-words account of the Salvadoran civil war and the open wounds left by it that may never heal.
I found her book so moving, I wanted to share it with my English speaking friends. So I contacted the author and ended up translating it myself, finishing my first draft in February of 2015. So far we have not found an English-language publisher, but maybe some day!
Five words are not enough.
Seven are just a bit too wordy.
Some six word poems:
Still, despite my best efforts, here.
If moving then shoot else done
Will, he looked up, you help?
Still you but without the memories.
Believe me, trust me, I lied.
Hate is commonplace.
I hate the guy who cut me off in traffic.
Violence is the norm.
The arm that wielded the club now cradles the machine gun.
But the love of humankind, despite our flaws,
which allows a person to forgive the one
who murdered their relative or friend.
That is important.
That is transcendent.
That is extraordinary!
Thank you for helping me to once again believe
that we humans might be worth saving.
(The following story is not based on any facts. It is pure speculation and I sincerely hope it does not come to pass. But I didn’t think Act 10 would be enacted either!)
At their most recent meeting, the Board of Regents has ruled that all faculty and researchers of the University of Wisconsin - Madison departments of Biochemistry, Botany and Zoology shall be laid off, effective immediately. The three departments will be combined to form the new Department of Creation Science. A worldwide search for top-notch Creationist academics to staff the new department is already underway.
The University of Wisconsin Department of Medicine and Public Health and the University Hospital and Clinics have been instructed to lay off all researchers and practitioners involved in embryonic stem cell research or any applications of that research. Researchers investigating or using adult stem cells only may be retained at the discretion of the Department and Hospital.
The following words and phrases will not be used in any future University of Wisconsin publications or other documents, including lecture notes:
evolution
natural selection
embryonic stem cell(s)
climate change
global warming
Existing publications and other documents containing the above words or phrases are required to remove them either electronically or by covering them with permanent magic marker.
The Morgridge Institute and Discovery Center is hereby renamed the Scott Walker Institute for the Dissemination of Creationist Thought, and repurposed to promote Christian values and creationist theory. Staff changes will be made as appropriate for the repurposed center.
Next week the Board will meet to discuss further restructuring of the University System, specifically in the broad areas of the humanities and social sciences.
Note: Several faculty members attending the Board of Regents meeting pointed out that the University of Wisconsin - Madison does not have a Department of Biology. Therefore the Board's resolution to replace the Department of Biology with the Department of Creation Science was altered to the wording shown above.
My sister Jan Jefferson has been diagnosed with Frontotemporal Dementia (her preliminary diagnosis had been early-onset Alzheimer’s). She now lives in a memory care facility in the Madison area because she is no longer able to live by herself.
Unlike the protagonist of the book and movie, “Still Alice”, Jan was never a Harvard professor. Her story is much more blue collar, but equally compelling and equally tragic.
Many Madisonians will remember her as a 25-year Madison firefighter and paramedic. She saved lives, and comforted those she couldn’t save, in their last moments of life. She was part of that first group of women who broke the gender barrier to join the city’s Fire Department.
Prior to that, she earned a degree in early-childhood education from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and taught at a local daycare. Later she worked at the General Motors auto assembly plant in Janesville, and played rugby with the UW-Madison club team.
But I mostly remember her as my cool older sister. The one who took the time to try to teach her nerdy brother to dance in grade school, so that he might be just a little bit cool, or at least less nerdy.
She was a highschool cheerleader - what athletic young women did in the pre-Title Nine days. But her passion was softball. She played on a summer 4-H coed team, and was a better player than most of the boys, including me.
When I joined the Peace Corps, after college, she wrote me letters regularly. This was in the pre-internet, pre-wireless days, and the towns where I was stationed had no phone service. She even visited me in El Salvador, and we spent a month traveling, and enjoying each other’s company.
I have so many great memories of Jan! How many memories of her incredibly active and useful life does she retain? It is impossible to know. She can still recite the lyrics to some old songs. She still loves little children, and animals, and visits from her old firefighter buddies and family.
But the bulk of the remembering, we have to do for her, because her dementia has robbed her of those memories. I’m sad for her and for all of us who know her. Too much of Jan has been taken from us way too soon!
I've been trying to wrap my mind around the political catch phrase "color blindness". I get the basic idea that the phrase suggests, that we should ignore the color of each others' skin (and presumably the corresponding ethnic heritage) in our political dealings. In a utopian world somewhere, it would be that simple to ensure justice and fairness for all.
But in the world of the here and now, it's not that simple. First, how far does this concept extend? Are we also supposed to have "gender blindness", "religion blindness", "gender preference blindness", "disability blindness", "last name blindness", "clothing and jewelry blindness"? If one or more of these extensions strike you as absurd, you are experimenting a bit of the confusion that I experience.
Is the best way to handle diversity to ignore it, pretend we don't notice it, and expect (possibly demand) that others do the same?
We in the USA have always been a diverse bunch. From the Pilgrims, Puritans and Quakers; from the southern plantation owners and northern merchants; from the farmers, fishermen and sailors of our founding times, to the ethnic, cultural and religious diversity of today. Rather than ignore it why not celebrate it? We are the most diverse nation in the world, and should be proud of it!
So let's relegate "color blindness" to describing an unfortunate genetic defect that limits the sufferer's enjoyment of the full spectrum of colors most of us enjoy. And stop the political usage which discourages us from a full appreciation of our glorious diversity.
I’ve always been interested in writing. I even wrote a handful of poems in my pre-computer-geek days. But I never thought I could make a living “just writing” so, shortly after getting married, I went back to school in search of a practical profession.
It wasn’t long before I stumbled upon computer programming, and began a 30-plus year career writing code and being well paid for it. Eventually I even managed to get paid for teaching others to write code!
After retiring from the teaching position, I decided to take up writing again. But wait, had I really ever given it up? No, I’ve merely been writing in different languages (Fortran, C, Perl, PHP) instead of English; and for a different audience (compilers, interpreters and co-workers) instead of the general English-speaking public.
I’ve been writing code prose instead of English prose. I would not say that any of my code has risen to the level of code poetry, but I had no doubt about its existence. This was before I googled “code poetry” and discovered that an entire community and literature by that name exists. One can not question its legitimacy since it has a Wikipedia article, and one can easily find an example on the internet: “Black Perl” by Larry Wall. (Yes, the Larry Wall who created the Perl programming language!)
Still, I believe I will choose to pursue a somewhat larger audience than just compilers, interpreters and the code poetry community. Henceforth the bulk of my prose will be in English (y tal vez Español).
A youngest brother had an oldest brother who was harsh and brutal with him.
The youngest labored under the oldest long and hard, winning neither wealth nor compassion.
The youngest gave one hand to his labor, and the oldest returned no compassion.
Long years later the oldest died, and none grieved more than the youngest.
I can’t yet imagine the death of a brother.
I used to believe that Governor Walker just wanted to take Wisconsin back to a 1950's economy. I was way too optimistic. His current budget proposal and the initiatives of his legislative allies make it clear he wants to go back a lot farther, like pre John L. Lewis, pre Teddy Roosevelt, back to the golden age of monopoly capitalism. We're headed back to the days of coal barons, railroad barons, lumber barons and those unregulated slaughterhouses of "The Jungle".
I address myself in particular to those of you in the labor force who were perfectly OK with Act 10. After all those public employees had it too good, were too smug, etc. State employees are such a convenient whipping boy!
I bet you didn't think "divide and conquer" meant you, did you? Now there are essentially no public employee unions left to help out in the fight against right-to-work. How can you possibly be surprised?
Governor Walker told his wealthy contributors exactly what he planned to do, and now he's doing it. Of course he didn't campaign on what he actually intended to do. As his buddy Scott Fitzgerald is now saying, you don't want to give those about to be conquered any notice. They would then try to defend themselves, and we don't want that!
I could go on... About how the DNR will no longer have scientists who could disagree with those in the employ of the monopoly capitalist and delay letting him do whatever. About how it is much safer for the monopoly capitalist if we get rid of that pesky Wisconsin Idea thing. A limited amount of training is all folks need to work for the monopoly capitalist, and we sure don't want a lot of critical thinking going on.
I could write my State Senator to complain, but my State Senator is Scott Fitzgerald. So it goes.
I sure hope you non-monopoly capitalists who voted for Walker wake up soon, while we still have a right to vote, even with photo-ID.
This reminds me of the infamous Microsoft animated paperclip. It would auto-correct my lowercase to init-caps and then appear on the screen to ask, "Are you writing a letter?" when I was trying to write some SQL code in Word (not having a good programming editor handy) and absolutely did NOT want it to auto-correct anything.
Anyway, it used to be that regardless of where I was in the world, I had access to the US English web page (you know the default one that is just www.yahoo.com). Now the clever Yahoo folks have decided that if their location data tells them that I am connecting from Costa Rica (which I freely admit that I am), I could not possibly really want the US English language site, so they override my selection and give me espanol.yahoo.com . I tried both the Firefox and Chrome browsers. Yup, they've fixed it! No more browsing the US English site from Costa Rica.
And there is not even a visible manifestation that I can direct my anger toward. No animated paperclip, just invisible, anonymous yahooligans busily fixing what wasn't broken. Thanks but no thanks guys!
But ha! I can trick you back, by impersonating either a Canadian (ca.yahoo.com) or a British person (uk.yahoo.com) I can have my Yahoo in English. Though I am left wondering what subtle differences you yahooligans incorporate in the site for the benefit of a Canadian or a Britain that would be different if you were able to treat me as a plain old US English speaker, regardless of my geographic location.
The two were not young and full of passion, nor old and in need of comforting
But within 30 seconds I could observe from the gentle touch of his hand on hers,
and the smiles of satisfaction she returned to him,
That the two were very much at peace with each other and the world.
Is it possible this is enough for some?
Do not conflicting passions or never resting curiosity upset the balance?
Are they Darwins, bold and never resting in intellectual pursuit yet reserved and content in sexual love?
Or have they made peace with all the universe as they understand it …
… living their lives out sans conflict.
Note: The couple I observed, “In Love” was a middle-aged couple that I encountered on the train during one of my many trips between Atiocoyo and San Salvador in 1975.
For the first time, I am translating a book from Spanish to English. How hard could it be? I’m a native English speaker, and I read and speak Spanish pretty well.
The answer is, it’s much harder than I thought. First, it is a book that I think is important enough that English-speaking readers should have access to it. So I am motivated to do the best possible translation, not just to be a bit better than Bing Translator (aka. Bablefish)!
Second, it is an in-their-own-words type of book, so there are plenty of slang and colloquial expressions. Fortunately, the author is Salvadoran, and nearly all of the voices she writes in are also Salvadoran, since I lived in El Salvador for two years and thus know much of the slang. But there’s always expressions I don’t know! I found a very useful online resource at: “Linguee” (http://www.linguee.pe/) When I think a phrase might be slang or a colloquialism, I enter it there. It has already helped me out quite a few times.
Third, you have to be careful about translating into slang and colloquialisms in English too. I’m sure there are some expressions I could use that would leave you scratching your head unless you happen to also be from central Wisconsin and within 10 years of my age! Yet you would like the voice in English to resemble the original Spanish voice, and not that of an academic explaining what the guy said!
I found a good Spanish/English dictionary online at: http://www.wordreference.com I find myself looking up more Spanish words than I would have expected. Even when I know what the word means in English, I often look it up anyway in the hope of finding a synonym that fits the context better.
The book I’m translating could be described as a historical novel, so I find myself trying to get additional information about the historical events mentioned. Wikipedia has proven to be a good resource for this, although I’m somewhat shocked at how much richer and better the description of Latin American history is in the Spanish version of Wikipedia than in the English version. If I ever feel like I don’t have enough to do, I suppose I could work on that!
President Obama is (finally) taking steps to normalize diplomatic relations with Cuba. Why is this a big deal? We have normal diplomatic relations with our World War II enemies Germany and Japan. We have normal diplomatic relations with our Cold War enemies Russia and China.
The problem, of course, is that we have a community of Cuban expatriates in southern Florida who bitterly oppose this move. But frankly, those who oppose it most vehemently, those who actually lost their land or businesses in the Cuban Revolution, are mostly over 70 years old. Their children and grandchildren, and other younger Cuban-Americans do not feel the same way. Most of them would like to be able to exchange visits with their relatives in Cuba.
I worked as a translator at Fort McCoy, WI when some of the Cubans who participated in the Mariel Boatlift were there during the summer of 1980. Because the United States did not have normal diplomatic relations with Cuba, they were considered political refugees. Had they been from any other country in Latin America or the Caribbean, they would have been considered economic migrants, and returned to their country of origin. Not to mention that Fidel Castro would not have been able to send along folks from Cuba’s prisons and mental hospitals.
Our lack of diplomatic relations with Cuba allowed Castro to “play us” in 1980. It made no sense then and it makes even less sense now! What makes sense now is for the United States to position itself to be able to influence the political direction Cuba takes in the post-Castro era. For that we need to have normal political relations with Cuba. That’s the big deal!
Back in the 1990s, when AOL (America Online) was still a significant ISP (Internet Service Provider), I took a job doing phone tech. support for a company I’ll call TelCo in Madison WI. We were sworn to secrecy about who we were providing support for, so hopefully enough time has passed that they won’t come after me.
I didn’t work there very long, in fact I did their two week training and then lasted about two more weeks before I quit ahead of being fired. I don’t remember much about the training, except that the point of emphasis was to get off the phone with a client as quickly as possible. Calls of less than a minute were good; calls of over five minutes were unacceptable. I later learned that if a call went over five minutes your supervisor would come to your desk and glare at you with as angry a look as they could muster, until you hung up, and then chew you out. Fortunately my supervisor Julie was actually a decent person, so it never came to shouting or actual verbal abuse.
My problem with doing tech. support the TelCo way was that I really was interested in solving the client’s problem, whatever it was, and had enough knowledge of personal computer (PC) hardware and software (from previous jobs) to have a shot at fixing many problems presented by the clients. Of course there are those folks who are hopeless as PC users. A story I’ve heard, which is probably more urban legend than truth, is about a user who called tech. support to say the monitor on his desktop PC had gone dark. The techie asks him to check that the monitor is both plugged in to an outlet and connected to his computer. The client responds that he can’t because it is too dark under his desk. The techie then asks if he can turn on a light or use a flashlight to check the cables, and the client responds, “ I could go look for a flashlight, but the power is off here so it’s hard to find your way around!”
I never had a client that clueless, and, frankly, most folks I talked to had legitimate problems – though most had nothing to do with the AOL software. The problem that got me “fired” is a case in point.
JoAnn called to say that her PC was “stuck” at a Microsoft Word error message screen. First names only was another TelCo rule; I’m Dan, by the way. She had turned off and restarted the PC several times and it always booted normally but went right back to the error screen.
Quite coincidentally, due to personal experience, I knew exactly what the problem was and how to fix it (but not in under a minute or even 5 minutes).
An engineer designing IBM desktop PCs had come up with a new feature the company called the Resume feature. When enabled in the BIOS of a PC, this feature allows the user to turn off the computer’s power switch at any time, then turn it back on later and return right back to where they were, with all the applications and documents that had been open, open again to exactly the same application screen and line in any open documents.
Sounds wonderful doesn’t it? The computer stores a record of exactly what applications and documents are open automatically, so you can be doing your budget in an Excel spreadsheet in one window, while working on the next great American novel in another window, and when you’re done for the day you just turn off the power switch, secure in the knowledge that when you flip the switch of that PC tomorrow morning, everything will be right where you left it.
Obviously, this is the scenario the IBM engineer envisioned, and convinced his colleagues to buy in to. Great right? What could possibly go wrong?
Let me tell you. If any one of your open applications or even Windows itself should encounter a fatal error condition, your PC is stuck right there, forever, unless and until you turn off the Resume feature in its BIOS.
So, I talked JoAnn, a competent PC user who didn’t know what a BIOS was, through the fix. You turn off the machine, then turn it back on and immediately hold down the F8 key (sometimes it is F3, but hers was F8). Eventually, you will be taken to a screen labeled B-I-O-S. Using your keypad to navigate (make sure the NUM-LOCK light is on) through the different BIOS screens, find the Resume feature, select it and turn it off! Then navigate to the screen that lets you save your BIOS settings, do the save and exit.
After that the PC booted to the Windows desktop, JoAnn thanked me, and I hung up.
My supervisor, Julie, had showed up at my desk when I was in the middle of explaining what a BIOS was and why JoAnn needed to go there to fix her PC. It took a couple tries with F8 to get into the BIOS, and more time figuring out how to navigate in her BIOS, and changing the Resume setting also took some back and forth. So by the time I hung up, Julie had been standing over me scowling for about 10 minutes.
To her credit, she did not bother to chew me out. She just said, “You’re going to want to resign before next week so you won’t have being fired on your record.” I thanked Julie, finished the night and quit the next day.
Can you poison a well that is dry? Congressional Republicans accuse President Obama of "poisoning the well" because he has (finally) decided to do something unilaterally about the nation's immigration mess.
What are these angry folks going to do about it? It sounds like they plan to do what they have been mostly doing since Obama was first elected, and certainly all they have done since his re-election 2 years ago, obstruct anything Mr. Obama tries to do and, other than that, do a whole lot of nothing!
Since they don't like what the President is doing to try to clean up the immigration mess, why don't they try passing some legislation for a change? I find it hard to believe that the American public will continue to re-elect them to keep doing nothing and blaming the President for it! They don't have Congressional Democrats to blame anymore, since Republicans control both houses.
Here's hoping that I'm wrong, and Congressional Republicans have a big portfolio of legislation ready to introduce as soon as the new session begins. But I'm not holding my breath.
