Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the day Sheriff Jim Clark and his posse beat MLK and 600 non-violent marchers mercilessly in Selma Alabama. Dr. King and his followers were attempting to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge on their way to Montgomery to protest voting rights abuses. The carnage of that day was horrific, but yesterday’s celebration was both joyous and solemn – a reminder of how far we’ve come. MLK was absent but his powerful presence energized President Obama and 70,000 fellow Americans who marched across the bridge to honor his legacy.
Archive for Uncategorized – Page 61
Can I write about aging and relevance without sounding defensive? Maybe not, but I want to give it a try because I think we older Americans are stereotyped, marginalized, neutered, and disenfranchised by the media simply because of our age. It’s a kind of profiling and I bristle when I’m lumped together with a group that has lost its connection to mainstream America. It pisses me off and it should piss you off too.
Except for age, we’re no different from the rest of you. We care about what’s happening in the world. We try to stay as current, productive, concerned, fashionable, and athletic as any other segment of the population. We think it’s important to stay engaged with a cross-section of different ages, issues, and cultures to keep us relevant. My friends are not on the sidelines; they are busy working on cures for Alzheimer’s and cancer, trying to bring sanity to the gun debate, delivering clean water to polluted areas in Africa and Asia, improving services to veterans, helping the poor find jobs, making art or writing about complex issues. That’s what we’ve always done and what we continue to do.
This is not a riddle – and a Single Shot is not intended to bring down The Fat Hen.
Single Shot and The Fat Hen are two new Seattle restaurants, both in out-of-the-way pocket neighborhoods you wouldn’t discover just cruising the streets. It’s a risky bet for both restaurants.You have to know that they’re there and make an effort to find them, but it’s always exciting and satisfying to discover a new restaurant, especially when it seems like a secret. In this case there are two of them hiding in semi-secret micro-neighborhoods.
Ah… Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood buried in snow. It’s so majestic and beautiful – unfortunately, it’s not happening this year. Today, the 12th of February 2015, snow levels at the base and summit are 28” and 39” respectively. The Summit at Snoqualmie near Seattle, which normally has snow well over my head, has 15” and is currently closed. Unbelievable. It’s the worst snow year in my 66 years of skiing.
Last week, honoring reservations we made in December, four of us checked into the Lodge at Timberline on Super Bowl Sunday. As Samuel Johnson said (about second marriages) our ski vacation was a “triumph of hope over experience.” It was raining as we checked in and continued for two days while we watched children playing on the glazed snow through the Lodge’s rain soaked windows.
Appearances can be deceiving – so can revisionist history and films “based on” true stories. This photograph is beautiful, but the beautiful bridge in the photograph was the site of one of the ugliest and most pivotal racial confrontations in American history. This is the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Route 80 where it crosses the Alabama River in Selma.
It is also the primary landscape for Selma, the new film by Ava DuVerney. In 1964 Congress passed the Civil Rights Act banning discrimination in public accommodations and voter registration, but in order to ensure passage it was weak on enforcement and implementation. Meanwhile, the civil rights movement was building a coalition of organizations to bring pressure on Congress to pass a voting rights bill with teeth to enforce those rights. Lyndon Johnson agreed with the movement’s leadership on the need for such a bill, but was concerned that moving that legislation forward would galvanize the Southern Bloc in the Senate and endanger his larger War on Poverty agenda. This is the historical setting for DuVerney’s film as well as two plays by Seattle playwright, Robert Schenkkan, All The Way and The Great Society.
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