Category Archives: topical

Haves and Have-nots

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In 2007, the Pew Research Center published a report titled A Nation of “Haves” and “Have-Nots”? The sub-heading reads, “Far more Americans now see their country as sharply divided along economic lines.” In 2023, it appears that this perception hasn’t changed much, especially in the city of Philadelphia. There is so much I love about my city, a city rich in beauty and culture, that also takes pride in its grit and edginess. So when people who live here engage in vandalism and looting, I feel it personally.

After a peaceful protest regarding the dismissal of charges against a Philadelphia police officer’s killing of an individual at a car stop, a social media influencer incited a night of looting in center city Philadelphia and beyond. https://www.inquirer.com/ 

That same night, just before the looting, I was on my way to a theater performance when the busdriver announced that he had to detour because of a protest at City Hall. I made my way to the theater on time and saw a wonderful production. 

Later that night when the Uber driver dropped us off, two blocks away from where Tuesday night’s rampage took place, there was no evidence of it. Once home, I turned on the news and learned 1) the Phillies clinched a place in the playoffs (YAY!) and 2) stores on Walnut Street had been broken into and looters left a path of destruction and disarray. 

Walking my dog along Walnut Street on Wednesday morning, the sidewalk was cleaned up and activity was pretty much back to normal. However, the aftermath was on people’s minds. They peered into the entrance of the Apple Store, usually a wide open glass wall, now curtained off by two large swathes of black and white.  At the pet store on 17th, a young woman customer, who lives across from the Apple Store, said she heard a loud rumbling with yelling; she watched from her window as the looters barreled over Walnut from the Footlocker to the Apple Store. The store clerk said she’d checked the store camera and could see some of it. She talked about the spread of the looting up to Aramingo Avenue near where her godfather lives. When something extraordinary happens, it’s natural to reflect and to want to talk about it. Where was I? What was I doing when? 

Outside of the ransacked stores there were news reporters seeking person-on-the-street reactions. The Lululemon store was dark. Looking closer I saw that clothing was strewn all over the floor and two young black men were posted as sentries sat on the mounds of merchandise. These young men could be around the same age as the looters. I chatted for a bit with my friend’s daughter, a 6ABC news reporter who was stationed outside Lululemon. A passer-by wanted to talk to her but she deflected him deftly. She said this happens all the time. Everybody has an opinion, and I’m sure she knows how to choose whose opinions would be newsworthy.

But, for the most part, all was back to normal: people on their phones rushed to their destinations amidst dog walkers, joggers, gym rats, parents or nannies with strollers, Hare Krishna chanters danced at the northeast corner of Rittenhouse Square and a man with mismatched shoes and socks shouted obscenities at them from across the street. 

I am writing about it in an effort to process and understand why an explosion of destruction often follows the expression of feelings of injustice and loss. In the news and on social media, the looting got more coverage than the protest. Opinions vary widely. Why feel sorry for the Apple Store? But, what about the retail workers losing pay? What a blow to small businesses in the city still trying to recover from the pandemic. It’s not safe anywhere in the city! I’m moving to the suburbs! 

To my mind the most comprehensive well-considered opinion is Larry Platt’s piece in The Citizen. Platt takes a broader view and reminds us that incidents like this are part of a much larger problem.

But let’s widen our lens even further. There’s plenty of evidence . . . that civic disorder is viral in nature. Citizenship is, after all, a social compact. We live together voluntarily, and when messages get sent time and again that our once agreed-upon rules no longer apply, or that they only apply to some, we know what happens: The compact breaks. We get anarchy. We get nihilism. We get streets that feel unsafe, even if crime rates are coming down.

LARRY PLATT
SEP. 29, 2023

To that I will add my opinion. I think the culture of acquiring and accumulating “stuff” that stokes our feelings of status has much to do with it. People want stuff. They want clothing and shoes, computers and phones, jewelry, shiny showy stuff, the stuff that says high social status, smacks of power and respect. Whether it is earned or stolen doesn’t matter. It fills up the feelings of emptiness and staves off feelings of resentment. Maybe, for a little while. The harm is obvious, moreso for the businesses like Nat’s Beauty Supply whose owner saved for years to open and hopes to continue (link to the gofundme). It does nothing for the injustice and grief suffered by those who lose a child, a sibling or a friend to mayhem and gun violence.

Remembering 9/11

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Last night I watched an episode of 60 Minutes that focused on the firefighters in New York City on the day of the awful events that has come to be known as 9/11. Whenever I hear stories of that day, I feel it in my chest; I feel tears welling up. I don’t know anyone who perished or survived. I do remember my own experience of it…where I was, who I spoke to, watching the TV screen in horror. 60 Minutes spotlighted a firefighter who by chance was not sent into the Twin Towers that day, but her close colleague and mentor did go and lost his life. The concern she expressed was that 9/11 would become just a page in a history book. 

Today, my news feed highlights memorial events for 9/11 of 22 years ago. Some facts noted by CBS News:

  • Nearly 3,000 people were killed after four planes were hijacked by attackers from the Al Qaeda terrorist group.
  • Two planes flew into the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers in New York. One plane was flown into the Pentagon. 
  • Another aircraft crashed into an open field in Pennsylvania after passengers fought back — the only plane that didn’t reach its intended destination.

These are some of the facts, cold and stark, that were compiled about that day. But like other momentous events that occurred during my lifetime, JFK’s assassination, the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia in 2003, most everyone who was around that day in the U.S. has their own story. I was at my job at a small private university. I’ve written my story of that day. Even though it’s a very small, relatively personal story, I wanted to set it down in writing as my way of never forgetting, of mourning. 

When I was teaching I always brought the events from 9/11 into the classroom. I felt it was part of my responsibility as a teacher. I’d ask what they knew about that day. Of course, in the early 2000’s, the students I taught were in middle or high school when 9/11 occurred. But by 2020, the first-year college students in my classes were barely toddlers in 2001. The event would have been less immediate for them. Their stories would be different. I felt it was important that they acknowledged not just what happened, but how they understood it, what they made of it. I shared what the poet Lucille Clifton made of that event in her suite of poems written during that week called “september song in 7 days.” Her poems are multi-leveled, from the public to the personal and back. The lesson was also about how events become history. I hoped that the students would see that history is more than just remote facts and dates. I invited them to question everything they’ve learned as “history,” likely presented as fact, may not necessarily be the “truth.” The students were to select one of the poems from the grouping to use as a starting point to write their own “story” in any genre.  

In her piece memorializing Lucille Clifton in the New Yorker, Elizabeth Alexander stated, “No matter how elaborate the words they use, poets strive to tell elemental truths. As Clifton often reminded her acolytes, “truth and facts are two different things.” 

Thunder and lighting and our world
Is another place   no day
Will ever be the same   no blood

Untouched
They know this storm in otherwheres
israel   ireland   palestine
but God has blessed America
we sing

and God has blessed America
to learn that no one   is exempt
the world is one   all fear
is one   all life   all death
all one

Lucille Clifton understood that responsibility to remember and tell the truth.

Labor Day, 2023

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September 4, 2023

I have this thing where I don’t want to make anyone else labor on Labor Day. Of course, that’s impossible. Someone has to be working at hospitals for in-patients and emergencies, at power plants so that the world doesn’t heat up too much or go about their lives by candlelight. Many more of us just gotta work on this holiday. 

This morning I got an early start walking the dog; our front desk manager at the building where I live is working and Z is picking up trash from the sidewalk. On 21st Street people carried their coffees from local cafes, the Center City District cleaner smiled at me as I guided Pepper away from his sidewalk sweeper on the way to Rittenhouse Square. On the way back to my building I passed two young men hauling large, heavy garbage bins out of a restaurant on Sansom Street; they dumped the bins into a truck that I could smell from a block away. An Uber dropped off a guy at the upscale fitness center a little further down the block. Thanks to all of you, especially those who have to lug that smelly heavy stuff!

Anthony Aveni’s Book of the Year (Free Library of Philadelphia) notes that Labor Day is “exclusively American.” The book discusses the holiday’s history, initiated with a union-sponsored parade in New York City on September 5, 1882. According to Aveni, “ten thousand (workers) left their jobs and paraded up Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue from 14th to 42nd Street, ending the day with a picnic, a dance, and fireworks.” That day a union leader gave a spirited speech. Eventually, the holiday was made an official national holiday by Congress in 1894. This year President Biden came to Philly for our city’s Labor Day parade, a celebration not much different from NYC’s in the 19th century.

Aveni’s chapter opens with the Walt Whitman poem, I Hear America Singing, the best tribute for this day and to those who deserve to be recognized:

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,
The wood-cutter’s song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown,
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,
The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

Won’t Back Down

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October 6 would have been my dog Rufus’ birthday. He died in 2015, just a few days before his 11th birthday. I was devastated. After 15 years of being a “dog mom,” I was without. The year before we lost my beloved Rosey, who had been my first dog and who lived with me from when she was just 12 weeks old. When she came into my life I had just turned 45, decidedly single and childless, Rosey became the center of my home life. After lots of love and dedicated training, Rosey was, not only a close companion, she brought joy to many as a therapy dog. Within the next five years, I had acquired two cats and then adopted Rufus, who had been through 3 owners before coming to live with us. But, our little family of humans and pets fell apart from 2014 to 2015 as Rosey, then Rufus, then Serena, the cat, all died within the space of a year.

This date is also significant for other reasons. It falls in the first week of October, which since 1990 has been designated Mental Illness Awareness Week in the US. Just a few months before Rufus died I had decided I would try to forgo the anti-depressant medication that I’d been taking for close to 15 years. I thought that the years of meditation practice would be sufficient to keep my mental health stable. I realized this was a mistake when soon after losing him I had a panic attack at work, literally shaking and crying during a fairly important meeting. I refilled my prescription, doubled down on my commitment to meditating, and adopted another rescue dog, Pepper. Since the rescue group knew very little about Pepper other than that she was around 3 years old and her owner had died, I’ve given her Rufus’ birthday. I came through a difficult year relatively well. Two years later, we are celebrating Rufus and Pepper’s birthday with a quiet weekend.

This year, 2017, this first week of October has seen another horrific scene of mass murder in Las Vegas, the largest in recent American history. Not to mention, the incident has occurred on the heels of two natural disasters that hit the country, hurricanes Harvey and Irma.

Last night Saturday Night Live honored Tom Petty, whose death this same week at 66 of cardiac arrest surprised a generation of music lovers, people inspired by his music. A performance of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers from 1979 was broadcast. Then the newest episode of SNL opened with Jason Aldean, who was on stage in Vegas when the shots rang out, performing Petty’s I Won’t Back Down. A perfect choice.

Well, I won’t back down
No, I won’t back down
You can stand me up at the gates of hell
But I won’t back down

No, I’ll stand my ground
Won’t be turned around
And I’ll keep this world from draggin’ me down
Gonna stand my ground

And I won’t back down
(I won’t back down)
Hey, baby, there ain’t no easy way out
(I won’t back down)
Hey, I will stand my ground
And I won’t back down

Well I know what’s right

I got just one life
In a world that keeps on pushin’ me around

But I’ll stand my ground

And I won’t back down
(I won’t back down)
Hey, baby, there ain’t no easy way out
(I won’t back down)

Another storm, Nate, made landfall in the South. Here, in Glenside, PA, just some rain and clouds. All of this comes to my mind now on this rainy Sunday. I feel like I need to make something of it, though I am not sure what that is.

For now, I can only go about what needs to be done to maintain my ordinary life. Ask Alexa to play music by Tom Petty, while I clean up the kitchen, finish the laundry, grade assignments for my First-Year Seminar, and plan for classes coming up. Take Pepper for a walk later. Brush Diego, the cat. I’m so sad for those who have experienced such disastrous circumstances in the past few weeks. I wish them the courage to stand their ground, to not back down, to know that the human spirit is strong and resilient, there ain’t no easy way out, but a sense of balance can be realized. I so appreciate my little life as it is; it has it’s own ordinary grace. And I won’t back down.