First of all, Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a nice holiday season, that Santa brought you something you wanted, and that you and your families are entering 2025 with good health.
I mentioned in my yearly Christmas letter that I am certain that the 1980 version of myself would have been skeptical of my being able to watch the Times Square celebration from last night, 45 years in the future. Hard to believe that the year 2025 is here, now, a year which seemed so far away in those years of our youth.
I know that many of my recent posts have been negative in tone, I am not shy in my determination that we are in the midst of the decline of our country, perhaps even culture. And, while I certainly recognize that such perceptions are often associated with one's advancing age, that as we approach the end of our lives, we tend to indulge ourselves in rose colored glasses memories, when everything was better, I also can't shake the evidence that there seems to be an insidiousness of how we collectively think and react to events.
Or perhaps, sickness is a better word, sickness in our collective soul. How else can you explain our casual indifference to the fact that the leading cause of death among children under five is gun violence, that we actively supply weapons of war to a country that is slaughtering the civilian population of Gaza, that we are OK with the increase in maternal death that the alleged pro-life anti-abortion laws have created, that we continually punish children for their parents decisions, via the use of razor wire at our southern border or the unwinding of Medicaid benefits for thousands of American children.
I wrote a post called Personal Happiness vs Global Anxiety in August of 2019, link below, in which I discuss the seemingly contradictory feelings of being happy and grateful for one's life and circumstances yet completely unsatisfied with the progress being made across the planet. At its end I embrace that perhaps it is best that there can be millions of people who share such an outlook, as perhaps it is only through personal satisfaction that one can help others, to make a difference.
https://wurdsfromtheburbs.blogspot.com/2019/09/personal-happiness-vs-global-anxiety.html
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Two fascinating articles in the December edition of the Smithsonian magazine. One traced the influence of Matilda Gage on his son-in-law, L Frank Baum in creating the iconic Wizard of Oz story, the other about one family's horrific, yet inspiring experience during the dark days of America's internment of Japanese people during WW2.
As is so often true, I was unaware of Matilda Gage's place in America's history. Her work for women's suffrage and equal rights was as important as the efforts of more famous women in this battle, such as Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Ironic that I would only learn of it through an article about her son-in-law, and his literary accomplishment.
One interesting aspect of the article was a reference to the belief among some scholars that Baum's inspiration for Glinda the Good Witch was his mother-in-law, Matilda who had always encouraged him in his endeavors, and to write stories with moral components, but without being overly sermonizing.
A woman of great energy, great ability to imagine true freedom for her gender and other marginalized demographics, yet a women whose fame is linked inexorably to a man who, while creative with words, was mostly unsuccessful in his pursuits until inspired by his mother-in-law. Makes me wonder if we would even have the Wizard of Oz story and history without Matilda Gage, although it is certain that the women's suffrage movement would have still progressed without L Frank Baum.
The article about the Japanese internment camps was both difficult to read yet also inspiring, as it focused not just on the awful idea of taking people from their homes merely because of their ancestry, but, in this particular case, on a family whose farm was run by their white neighbor while they were interred, so that once released, they had something to come home to after their ordeal.
While this example was the exception to how innocent Japanese people were treated by most Americans at this time, it at least demonstrated that even in the face of such bigotry and hatred, there are people able to act in the right way.
One of the details of this sad time in our history, is that while incarcerated at these camps, many for years, they were still liable to pay their mortgages. The fact that the vast majority of Japanese families were not blessed with a neighbor willing to work their land for them, led to foreclosures and loss of wealth. Like adding insult to injury.
With talk of camps to house the undocumented rampant in the news today, it is shocking to me that yet again, we fail to learn the lessons of history. And that so many people who advocate for such inhumane treatment of people whose only crime was to cross a strip of land so as to enable them to find opportunity and a better future for their children, is even more striking when we remember that America was founded on the free access to a continent that had no borders, that had the original natives of North America treated those first Europeans as we seek to treat those seeking freedom today, America itself would not exist.
I am posting under the title Life for this entry, a topic I use as a catch-all for posts that address topics about life that seem not to be able to be categorized easily, as with political subjects. Here are links to three of them, one each from 2017, 2015 and 2021.
https://wurdsfromtheburbs.blogspot.com/2017/08/reading-and-thinking.html
https://wurdsfromtheburbs.blogspot.com/2015/11/a-white-mans-game.html
https://wurdsfromtheburbs.blogspot.com/2021/11/lies-lies-and-more-lies.html
