Whitey on the Moon

I read a book review.
An anthology of poems.
By African-Americans
Edited by The New Yorker's poetry editor.

I placed the order.
A pre-publication order.
A delayed gratification
For one who aces a marshmallow test!

The doorbell rang.
I saw the brown uniform walking away.
"Thank you" I yelled out
Even though he didn't hear me.

I opened the book
Somewhere to near the middle.
I was blown away
By the poem on the page.

Such issues have always bothered me
Which is why I quit engineering too
Are science and tech so important
To neglect the real needs of the poor?

I have blogged in plenty
About these awful injustices.
Including this about the protest
In advance of the Apollo 11 launch.

"Around 150 Americans,
Mostly black mothers and their children,
Walking with two mule-drawn wagons
through light mist and rolling thunder.

The contrast was dramatic:
mules and rockets, rambling wagons
and a vast sky to be conquered."
The poor Blacks who marched on Cape Kennedy!

We shall overcome
We shall overcome
We shall overcome ...
... some day

Should progress have to occur funeral by funeral?

In 1955:

On this day in 1955, two white men abducted and murdered a 14-year-old Black boy named Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi. To overcome racial inequality, we must confront our history. Share this #racialinjustice https://t.co/i42tiT2xbm

— Equal Justice Initiative (@eji_org) August 28, 2020

In 1963:

Today is the 57th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s historic I Have A Dream speech at the 1963 March on Washington.

Half a century later, against the backdrop of nationwide uprisings demanding racial justice, much of his words still ring true.

Let's revisit them.

— ACLU (@ACLU) August 28, 2020

At that march in 1963, MLK said:

There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, ‘When will you be satisfied?’
We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality.

Police brutality.

Here we are in 2020.  It has been 65 years since Emmett Till's brutal murder.  57 years since MLK's soaring rhetoric.  A couple of days ago, the police shot a black man 7 times in the back. As his kids were watching.

Turns out that this group was always right, though I didn't initially see it that way.

Fuck the police comin' straight from the underground
A young nigga got it bad 'cause I'm brown
And not the other color so police think
They have the authority to kill a minority
Fuck that shit, 'cause I ain't the one
For a punk motherfucker with a badge and a gun

It is beyond my wildest imagination how Blacks continue on with their lives without breaking into riots all over the country.  I have the utmost respect and admiration for how they have controlled their anger.

But, one thing is clear: This white supremacist shit cannot and will not continue for much longer.

Black Lives Matter!



PS: The title of this post is derived from Max Planck's observation that science progresses one funeral at a time.

We cannot go on thinking of ourselves, but only together can we do this

I was working in Calcutta when Pope John Paul II came to town, during his whirlwind tour of the Subcontinent in February 1986.

Of course, I too went to see him and his Popemobile.  He was an important figure for me in two ways: For one, I was coming out of my pinkie years, and I had tremendous respect for the work that he had done in ending communism in Poland and across Europe.  And, as one who was rapidly drifting away from faith, I wanted to understand the role of religion in life.

It is not merely COVID-19 that makes me think about faith and the existential crisis--these have been topics that I often blog about.  Especially during high holy days of (m)any religion.

As I noted in this post in March 2016, during the Holy Week, I use the religious calendar "to think about what it means to be human and what it means to lead a good life.  Atheist I am, but I feel constantly driven, sometimes a tad too intensely, to understand these."

We are now a week away from Good Friday.  A couple of days ago, Pope Francis gave "his extraordinary blessing "urbi et orbi" (to the city and the world) in an empty St. Peter's Square at the Vatican."

Source

In that address, Pope Francis said:

We have realized that we are on the same boat, all of us fragile and disoriented, but at the same time important and needed, all of us called to row together, each of us in need of comforting the other. On this boat… are all of us.

I was immediately reminded of MLK's "we may have come on different ships, but we're all in the same boat now."

The Pope reminds us that "we cannot go on thinking of ourselves, but only together can we do this.":

The storm exposes our vulnerability and uncovers those false and superfluous certainties around which we have constructed our daily schedules, our projects, our habits and priorities. It shows us how we have allowed to become dull and feeble the very things that nourish, sustain and strengthen our lives and our communities. The tempest lays bare all our prepackaged ideas and forgetfulness of what nourishes our people’s souls; all those attempts that anesthetize us with ways of thinking and acting that supposedly “save” us, but instead prove incapable of putting us in touch with our roots and keeping alive the memory of those who have gone before us. We deprive ourselves of the antibodies we need to confront adversity.
In this storm, the façade of those stereotypes with which we camouflaged our egos, always worrying about our image, has fallen away, uncovering once more that (blessed) common belonging, of which we cannot be deprived: our belonging as brothers and sisters.

We're all in the same boat that has sprung a leak.  I hope that COVID-19 will teach the 63 million Americans that we are all in this together, irrespective of our skin tones, our religions, and any other superficiality that demagogues love to use to divide people up.

Here's to a better tomorrow!

(Embedding this song here because of the news that Bill Withers has died.)

"We may have come on different ships, but we’re all in the same boat now."

MLK said that.

MLK was born on January 15th, way back in 1929.  It is strange to think that while there is a feeling of a contemporariness about his life, his centenary is coming up in nine years!

It is beyond my wildest imagination how MLK could have been optimistic during the short years that he lived.  To be that optimistic, even while fully knowing the horrors and horrible people all around, makes him an extraordinary human being--warts and all.

I, on the other hand, in an immensely more comfortable setting in 2020, am always way more pessimistic than MLK could have ever been, it seems like.

As I look around, I don't see people with significant standing encouraging us with "we shall overcome."  They are not reassuring us that the moral arc of the universe does indeed bend towards justice.

"We may have come on different ships, but we’re all in the same boat now."

The first time I listened to MLK's "Mountaintop" speech, and when he built up the "if I had sneezed," it was a combination of tears and joy.  No shame in admitting to it.  The man literally moved me to tears.

I was ready to act on his “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

After listening to his "we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago," I was ready to go and punch a few people, despite my pacifism.

His words, his oration, his cadence, his tone, moved me even though I came to his words decades after he was assassinated.

We're all in the same boat now.  But, heading where?

Warts and all

During the years before the faculty union blacklisted me, I used to engage in conversations with colleagues.  In one of those in-the-hallway chats, an adjunct faculty and I got to talking about imperfections in humans, especially the political leaders who transformed societies for the better.

We talked, in particular, about Gandhi and MLK.  And we both agreed that it does not help anybody by making them saint-like.  Instead, we ought to understand and appreciate them, warts-and-all.  Such an unvarnished image then will help us understand that ordinary mortals like you and me were able to do so much, which will be way more encouraging to the youth than if they thought that one had to be super-human of sorts.

The adjunct's contract was not renewed, and I lost touch with him.

It is not that Gandhi and MLK had moral clarity from day one of their adult lives, and it is not as if they did not err in their daily lives.  Mistakes were in plenty.  Yet, they were able to accomplish what millions of us together will never ever be able to do.

Take Gandhi, for instance.  Most of us are familiar with his years in South Africa, which is when he began to understand white supremacy and, therefore, his own brown-skin standing in the bastard empire.  However, Gandhi in South Africa was not very much different from the white supremacists there, when it came to their views on the "native" Africans.  Gandhi thought less of black Africans, and his struggle was only to elevate the status of Indians like him who were there in the bastard empire, which he was not really fighting against.  As his biographer, grandson, wrote:

After all, Gandhi too was an imperfect human being. ... The imperfect Gandhi was more radical and progressive than most contemporary compatriots.

And by the time he became the Gandhi that we usually think about, he had become way less imperfect.

There is no need to create a false Gandhi here that ignores the real Gandhi since the real Gandhi is himself such a historical exception. And, of course, the fact that the real Gandhi was only remarkable – but not perfect, as per today’s moral standards – is also nothing to be ashamed of.

Over the years, the more I understand the imperfect Gandhi, the more I have walked away from referring to him as a "mahatma."  But, while recognizing imperfections, we ought to know better than to wrongfully equate Gandhi with Churchill, for instance.  Not all imperfect leaders are created alike!

I have always preferred unsanitized biographies of transformative leaders like Gandhi and MLK.  I don't want kids to go through the same kind of shocks that I went through when I learnt much later in life that MLK was no saint.  Had I known earlier that MLK himself said, "You don't need to go out saying Martin Luther King, Jr. is a saint," I would have appreciated him even more.  I would rather that kids understood how much MLK was able to fight white supremacy and taught all of us what it means to be human--through and despite his own personal flaws.

The content of their character

"Couldn't you talk over a glass of wine or something?" asked the guest when I told her that the neighborhood's friendliness broke down after tRump became the GOP nominee three summers ago.

"Nope. For one, I don't drink. And tRump supporters are beyond any reasoning and logic," I replied.

I was not merely ranting.  Instead, I was working with evidence that some of them had even posted, or re-posted, virulent anti-black, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant messages and comments in Facebook, back when I still had an account in that black hole and when I was "friends" with them.  And the ultimate evidence that they, like 63 million voters, willingly elected a horrible human being.

As Jamelle Bouie clearly and succinctly phrased it, there is no such thing as a good tRump voter.

I broke with the neighbors not because we look different, or speak with different accents, but over "the content of their character" that Martin Luther King talked about:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. 

We praise Abe Lincoln not because of his physical appearance.  His character matters to us. We tell--or at least used to tell--kids about Honest Abe.

tRump has proved to be some kind of a Rorschach test on one's character.  And, as Charles Blow recently put it, he is rapidly undoing everything that we teach children about good character:

He is everything we teach our children not to be. In Trump’s world of immorality, the lessons being taught undo all the principles parents struggle to instill.
He is teaching our children that there is no absolute truth, there is “alternative fact.” It’s not what you say, but how you say it and how vociferously you can defend it.
He is teaching little boys that women’s bodies exist as playgrounds for privileged men, and that there is no price to be paid if you are popular enough or rich enough.
He is teaching little girls that if they are ever victims of sexual assault by a popular, wealthy boy and deign to reveal it, they will likely to come under withering verbal assault.
He is teaching our children that the color of one’s skin does indeed supersede the content of one’s character. He is teaching them that there is a skin-color hierarchy in which whiteness is perched on top.
He is teaching the black and brown children that their citizenship and connection to this country is tenuous and fractional, not like white children.
He is teaching them that it is a perfectly normal to separate some children from their parents, put them in cages, and argue that they don’t need soap, or toothbrushes or have the lights turned off so that they can go to sleep.
He is teaching them to never acknowledge an error, that apologies are for suckers, that what’s right is whatever you say it is.

And then think about this: There are kids growing up in the homes of ardent tRump supporters.

The children growing up in enormous portions of American households accept, defend and even applaud Trump’s behavior. What lessons are those children absorbing? What behaviors will be modeled on Trump’s example?

 No glass of wine will ever be able to fix these!

Searching for water on the moon!

By the time I came along, humans walking on the moon had already become a part of school textbooks.  During my teenage years, it was all about the space shuttle.  I recall telling my grandmother that it might just about be possible that, well into my years, I will be able to travel to outer space and come back to earth.  She didn't care for that though!

There was the science and technology aspect that I was fascinated with, yes.  But, I was also troubled by the deprivation and injustice that was all around.  The rebellious teenager ended up not caring about science and technology, and became increasingly worried about the misplaced priorities of a society that was not addressing the fundamental and basic needs of people.

I continue to worry about the misplaced priorities.  More than five years ago, I blogged about the colossal waste that results.  In my post, and in most of my complaints about India's awful resource allocation decisions, my question has always been along the lines of why the fundamental issues--like toilets--don't get the priority they deserve.

Or, consider water.  Chennai, a "city of nearly 10 million — India's sixth largest — has almost run out of water."

Without water we are doomed.

Piped water has run dry in Chennai, the capital of the southern state of Tamil Nadu, and 21 other Indian cities are also facing the specter of “Day Zero,” when municipal water sources are unable to meet demand.
...
Middle- and upper-middle-class people in Chennai are paying twice as much as before the crisis for water from tankers, and they can afford to drill new wells twice as deep as would have been needed 15 years ago. “We are on war footing,” one of my cousins, who lives there, remarked. As with most environmental crises, the poor are affected disproportionately.

As always, it is the poor who suffer the most.

Yet, it is the same old democratic ways of resource allocation--the government of India is getting ready to launch yet another spacecraft to the moon.  Like the previous one, this mission will also search for, among other things, water.  What a tragic irony!

The US, too, is no exception to this rule.  In the context of the 50th anniversary of the first ever human footprints on the lunar surface, think about the US in the 1960s when JFK launched this mission.  Life in the US was brutal for anyone who was not white.  By the time NASA was getting ready for the launching of the Apollo 11 rockets, MLK had been assassinated.  There was injustice all around.  Yet, the government was not investing resources in order to address the injustice.  We were a lot more enthusiastic about spending gazillions to go to the moon.

Which is why there was a protest.  A symbolic one.  But, a protest nonetheless:

They must have been a sight: around 150 Americans, mostly black mothers and their children, walking with two mule-drawn wagons through light mist and rolling thunder. Led by Ralph Abernathy, the caravan arrived at the John F. Kennedy Space Center in advance of the Apollo 11 launch. Unlike many thousands more, however, they hadn’t come in celebration and awe. They came to protest.

The reasons were real.  The protesters were no snowflakes!

The contrast was dramatic: mules and rockets, rambling wagons and a vast sky to be conquered. The S.C.L.C. argued that one-fifth of the American population lived in poverty, without adequate food, shelter and health care, and therefore it was indecent for the nation to spend billions on the dream of spaceflight. Abernathy said, “I am here to demonstrate with poor people in a symbolic way against the tragic and inexcusable gulf that exists between America’s technological abilities and our social injustices.” 

"They exposed the essential tension at the root of the nation."

America’s ambition persistently stopped short of the equality creed, and yet it seemed to always demand a self-effacing patriotism from even the most vulnerable, including the poor folks who marched with Abernathy on Cape Kennedy.

Back in India, the injustices seems insurmountable.  A couple of months ago, during my winter visit with the family, I met a vocal activist.  I asked him how he keeps going. "I am a rabid optimist," he replied.

In writing about the water crisis in Chennai, he writes:

Our dominant economic model, with its blind faith in technology, is doomed.
...
Chennai's struggles with water - be it flooding or scarcity - cannot be addressed unless the city re-examines its values, and how it treats its land and water. 

Injustices cannot be addressed without examining the values behind our collective decision-making.

Yes, celebrate the anniversary of a phenomenal human achievement of going to the moon and returning.  But, let's also pay attention to the injustices all around us.  As MLK noted, “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

We shall overcome ... some day

Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity, which is outraged, in the name of liberty, which is fettered, in the name of the Constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery -- the great sin and shame of America! "I will not equivocate - I will not excuse."

That was Frederick Douglass on the "hypocrisy of American slavery."  Yes, the same Douglass whose "by the rivers of Babylon" prompted me to blog a post a few months ago, and has been the featured post for a while now.

As I re-read that, the following line rattles me even more now in the context of trump's explicit racism and his support even among elected Republicans, leave alone his base!

America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. 

If I were an African-American who traces his roots to slaves, it would have been a challenge for me not to have been violent when I was young.  The injustice is simply beyond my comprehension. Beyond my understanding.  And then to read that the president refers to the continent, from where the slaves were brought, as "shithole"?

With his latest display, Mr. Trump has pulled deeply from the white-racist imagination. “Shithole” refers either to a toilet or the anus. Then again, in Mr. Trump’s mouth, it could mean both. So, let’s get this right. Places like Haiti, El Salvador and African countries are indicative of places where feces are deposited or places from which feces are expelled. Either way, Haitians, Salvadorans and Africans function, in Mr. Trump’s white racist imaginary, as “dirt,” “crap,” that which “stinks,” is “foul” and “nasty,” that which causes us typically to recoil.

That paragraph is not any unhinged rant.  It is from a compelling commentary in the NY Times by George Yancy, who is a professor of philosophy, and who has been a frequent contributor to the philosophy forum at the paper.

How did we get to this moment in 2018?

There were enough Americans who were willing to accept Trump’s racism to elect him. There are enough people in Washington willing to accept Trump’s racism to defend him. Not only is Trump racist, the entire architecture of his support is suffused with that racism. Racism is a fundamental component of the Trump presidency.

63 million Americans, many of whom are Jesus-loving Christians, supported the racist. Including two white (past) commenters here!

Many shades of grey

During the couple of years before the faculty union blacklisted me, I used to engage in conversations with colleagues.  In one of those in-the-hallway chats, an adjunct faculty and I got to talking about imperfections in humans, especially the political leaders who transformed societies for the better.

We talked, in particular, about Gandhi and MLK.  And we both agreed that it does not help anybody by making them saint-like.  Instead, we ought to understand and appreciate them warts-and-all.  Such an unvarnished image then will help us understand that ordinary mortals like you and me were able to do so much, which will be way more encouraging to the youth than if they thought that one had to be super-human of sorts.

The adjunct's contract was not renewed, and I lost touch with him.  I tell ya, anybody who thinks like me doesn't last long.

During the road trip a few weeks ago, we were far, far away from anything and anybody familiar, when I heard a voice.

"Sriram?"

I turned around.  It was a former colleague, who was my lunch-mate during the couple of years he worked at my university.  I warned him in one of our early meetings that if he and I agreed so much, well, he might not last long on his job.  At our final lunch, I reminded him about my warning.  We both laughed.  And now after a decade a random encounter!

Anyway, back to Gandhi and MLK.  It is not that they had moral clarity from day one of their adult lives, and it is not as if they did not err in their daily lives.  Mistakes were in plenty.

Take Gandhi, for instance.  Most of us are familiar with his years in South Africa, which is when we began to understand white supremacy and, therefore, his own brown-skin standing in the bastard empire.  However, Gandhi in South Africa was not very much different from the white supremacists there, when it came to their views on the "native" Africans.  Gandhi thought less of black Africans, and his struggle was only to elevate the status of Indians like him who were there in the bastard empire, which he was not really fighting against.  As his biographer, grandson, wrote:

After all, Gandhi too was an imperfect human being. ... The imperfect Gandhi was more radical and progressive than most contemporary compatriots.

And by the time he became the Gandhi that we usually think about, he had become way less imperfect.

There is no need to create a false Gandhi here that ignores the real Gandhi since the real Gandhi is himself such a historical exception. And, of course, the fact that the real Gandhi was only remarkable – but not perfect, as per today’s moral standards – is also nothing to be ashamed of.

Gandhi was imperfect like the "deeply racist" Thomas Jefferson, about whom I have blogged here. Over the years, the more I understand the imperfect Gandhi, the more I have walked away from referring to him as a "mahatma."  But, while recognizing their imperfections, we ought to know better than to equate Gandhi with Churchill, or Jefferson with Hitler.  I am thankful that, Gandhi and Jefferson, despite their imperfections, worked towards constructing a positive, healthy vision for humanity.  

MLK Day sell-a-bration :)

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Dr. Condi Rice's Jim Crow childhood

This past summer I read Invisible Man and To Kill a Mocking Bird ... it is shocking to realize at every instance that the atrocious treatment of blacks was not that long ago.  It is the same way I feel about the caste-contexts in India.  The whole idea of "untouchables" being so less than human that an accidental brushing against the skin of one would send a brahmin to bathe ... while we are thankfully far removed from those bad days, we still have a long way to go.

Conoleeza Rice speaks of that atrocious past.  I watched her on The Daily Show the other day, and appreciated Jon Stewart for not (mis)using the opportunity to question Rice about her involvement in the decision-making on the wars that are dragging on and on.  Rice's factual and relaxed recollections of her childhood and her parents in the most segregated city were inspiring.  It is incredible that Rice--a global personality now--didn't have a white classmate until she was twelve, and after they moved to Denver ... All political differences aside, her life story is simply marvelous.

In the review of her book by Professor Stephen Carter, over at the Daily Beast, I came across this comment about the usage "African-American":

Rice, by the way, rejects this term, which she thinks too easily lets white Americans off the hook for slavery and Jim Crow, by making the black community seem like any other group of immigrants.

I am with Rice on this one, too.

Will be neat to have Dr. Rice over for dinner with just about four or five people and listen to stories about her childhood, parents, grandparents, the obstacles that she faced as a young black woman ...  ask her about her take on Invisible Man--what her reactions were when she first read it ... I wonder if she likes Indian food :)

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Imam Glenn Beck :)

Michael Kinsley yet again proving that he has not lost his touch despite that awful Parkinson's he has been dealing with humor:

My first thought, when I heard that Glenn Beck was planning a huge rally at the Washington Mall on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s "I Have A Dream" speech at the same site 48 years ago was, "How obnoxious. How offensive. What a jerk!" My second thought was, "Well, he’s got a right to speak in that place on that date, as at almost any other place on any other date. Even jerks are protected by the First Amendment." My third thought was, "Sure, he has the right to have his rally there and then, but shouldn't he have more sensitivity to those for whom this date and this place have special meaning and importance? Couldn't he find some other place or pick some other date for his rally?" My fourth thought was, "Uh oh. This line of reasoning is starting to get uncomfortable."

Suggestions for Glenn Beck's speech :)

Sarah "refudiate" Palin triggered an avalanche of Shakespalinisms.  Now, it is is Glenn Beck's turn as he gets ready to do his crap speech.
However, there is no such comparable creativity on Twitter :(
It can't be the case that the vacation-hating Americans are out for the month ... As Marvin Gaye sang, "what's going on?"
The best that the Daily Beast could do was .... "I have a nightmare"
The Daily Show does "I have a scheme"

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Colbert says that "Besides the date, the location, the march and the threat of assassination, Glenn Beck's rally has nothing to do with Martin Luther King Jr."

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