Al-Jezeera reported this an hour ago (February 19). That’s where the death count in southeast Turkey and the northwest corner of Syria stands today. Two weeks ago, a 7.8 earthquake devastated the area, opening cracks in the earth, taking down buildings and crushing everything below. It looks like 9/11 x 10 with rescue and recovery made even more difficult by a civil war, lack of access, blocked border crossings, snow, and freezing temperatures. Every day the death toll increases, but rescue teams are still uncovering live victims from beneath the piles of rebar and blocks of concrete left in the quake’s aftermath. One million living in UN-supplied tents on the Turkish side. Aid blocked to the Syrian side.
Archive for Ethics – Page 3
I have not so much emulated the birds that musically sing,
I have abandoned myself to flights, broad circles.
The hawk, the seagull, have far more possess’d me than the canary or mockingbird.
I have not felt to warble and trill however sweetly,
I have felt to soar in freedom and in the fullness of power, joy, volition.
Walt Whitman, Old Age Echoes from Leaves of Grass
At end of each year the winter solstice and family birthdays remind me we’re at the end of something and the beginning of something else – a convergence of old and new – things to celebrate and things to ponder. Time to review the passing year and reset for the what’s coming.
The two 4-inch square brass plaques in the photo below are stolpersteine (“stumbling stones” in German). They are embedded in the sidewalk in front of my former apartment at 14 Ruhlaerstrasse in Berlin. Edith and Willy Lindenberg lived there until November 11, 1941 when they were deported to a concentration camp in Minsk (Belarus) and murdered simply because they were Juden (Jewish). The plaques are part of the stolpersteine project created in 1992 by German artist Gunter Deming.
The plaques are to commemorate the victims and remind all who “stumble” across them of the Nazi’s “final solution”– to obliterate all “racially inferior” non-Aryans. They are placed in front of the last known residences of those deported and murdered during the Holocaust. As of 2019 there were more than 75,000 stolpersteine in 1200 locations in Western Europe.
You might recognize her as a type: a neatly dressed, polite, older woman but tentative and out of place in her role as a restaurant server. It may not be fair, but I often slot these women–mostly widows and/or single women–into a category that supplements its limited Social Security by working entry level service jobs. Last night, one served us at the restaurant next door to our Best Western hotel in rural Idaho.
Bonnie, not her real name, might fit this description generally, but our encounter revealed a more disturbing story. This awkward but friendly woman in white jeans and starched pinstripe shirt with glasses hanging from a lanyard started the conversation while busing our outside table overlooking the Snake River. With only a few post-Labor Day stragglers in the restaurant she felt comfortable pausing to talk.
I’ve forgotten what M was reading, but years ago, when we were newly together, I asked her whether she preferred fiction or non-fiction. The answer came quickly, “No question,” she said, “I don’t have time for fiction.” Just the facts, Jack. Since then our tastes and preferences have evolved, but at the time it signaled a startling difference between us.
We were both early readers, but I didn’t hit my stride until I encountered John Steinbeck in high school. M, on the other hand, was a voracious young reader. So were her parents, and they encouraged her. Anything with pages was OK. Kids books, Book of the Month Club selections, historical novels…especially those with a little romance. She was a late bloomer and hid in books. When she did bloom, she used them to hide from me and all the other bloom-snatching high school predators.
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