Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

People must be seeking out probiotic products because they seem to be everywhere. But how many know what a probiotic is? Don’t put me on that list. (Let me guess: Someone in favor of a biotic?) And now I see a product advertised as a prebiotic. I don’t have a clue.

In the delicious irony department: Bill O’Reilly is furious that the Florida law that allows the removal of books from school libraries, a policy he supports, caused some of his books to be removed from school libraries.

The little white board in the corner of the physical therapy facility asked its question of the week: What year is it in Ethiopia under the Ge’ez calendar? The correct answer, I was told, is 2016. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church calculates a different time for the birth of Jesus than those who created the Gregorian or Julian calendars. Right now that puts Ethiopia eight years behind us, but the Ethiopian New Year comes in September. Then it will be only seven years behind until our New Year’s Day. With the Ge’ez calendar, I learned, there is no need to memorize the childhood poem beginning Thirty days has September. Ethiopia has thirteen months. Twelve are thirty days long. The month of Pagume, the outlier, has five or six days depending on whether it is a leap year. Who knew?

What does it take to get into heaven? If it is not doing harm to others, I believe I stand a chance. If it is how much good is done to others, I am not so sure. If it is the amount of sycophantic praying to an Almighty, I don’t stand a chance.

When Trump was president murders in the U.S. increased at the fastest rate since national statistics began in 1960 even though murder rates did not increase in other countries during the same period. We should be grateful that murder rates without Trump as president are now precipitously declining with rates much lower than in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s.

From now on, whenever I hear that we need armed non-criminals to stop gun violence, I will think of Uvalde.

When I sat down on a bench outside the coffee place to watch the world go by, I immediately saw a shopping cart overloaded with large plastic bags bearing bottles and cans being pushed down the street. This regularly occurring sight is a consequence of two things: New York requires a deposit on bottles and cans of beer, wine, soda and the like. And the New Yorkers I know who have paid the deposit do not return the containers to collect the 5-cent refunds on each container. Instead, we just willingly pay extra for what we buy and feel some very minor righteousness because we place our empties in a recycling can which is (supposed to be) picked up by the city once a week. We recycle and have done our bit for landfills and against litter. Free enterprise steps into this breach. People collect refundable bottles and cans out of those recycling bins and load them into plastic bags on shopping carts, like the one I saw outside the coffee shop. Presumably these go to a redemption center, but I, like my friends, have no idea where the nearest redemption center is. I have read that 64% of the refundables are redeemed in New York state. The 5-cent deposit is the same as it was when the law took effect in 1982, and a higher percentage of bottles and cans were returned back then. Perhaps more would be returned now if the deposit had kept pace with inflation. In any event, many bottles and cans that have exacted a 5-cent deposit are not redeemed, and that means a whole lot of money is not paid back to depositors or the freelance collectors of bottles and cans. Have you ever wondered where the money goes? (I am working on a new song for this age: “Where have all the d’posits gone?”)

Posted on by rjonakait

Education and Tolerance and Discernment

“The highest result of education is tolerance.” Helen Keller.

“Education, properly understood, is that which teaches discernment.” Joseph Roux

Those accused of book bannings are often vilified, but maybe they just have bad public relations. Book banners often say that they are not banning books but only restricting them to appropriate ages. That seems noncontroversial. We can all agree that A Brief History of Time is not appropriate for second graders, at least not any I have ever known. But the parents searching bookshelves are not concerned with the difficulty of the text. Instead, no matter the ease of the prose, they seek to remove books that present certain ideas, observations, opinions, facts, or concepts. This, too, might be something all can agree upon or at least discuss. All topics are not appropriate for all ages. Perhaps we are only differing on the details: When is the suitable time to introduce certain ideas, observations, opinions, facts, and concepts?

However, that is not really what is going on. Those yanking books off shelves only remove books containing certain subjects — ones with ideas, observations, opinions, facts, and concepts that they do not agree with. These books primarily address nonheterosexual relationships and race. Apparently the subject matter touching on these issues is inappropriate no matter what the age of the student. Certain advanced placement courses in high school have been banned even though students taking such courses are mature enough to seek college credit. Indeed, some states have even limited the presentation of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) topics to college students. While these students are assumed to be fully adult, they are, apparently, not mature enough for such topics. Indeed, some states have gone even further and seek to limit these concepts being presented by corporations to their employees.

Even so, I may have something in common with those seeking to hide books. By their actions the censors indicate a belief in the power and significance of books. Why restrict access to a book if you don’t believe it can affect ideas and behavior, thoughts and actions? As an avid reader, I, too, want to believe in the importance and power of books.

But I suspect that the book restrictors act not just with a concern that students will learn “too early” about same sex couples, our history of slavery and continuing racial oppression. The book removers act out of a rigid worldview. There is right, and there is wrong. There is morality, and there is immorality. There is good, and there is evil. There is male, and there is female. The censors fear books because they can cause readers to question such inflexible categories. The censors do not want readers to conclude that the world is nuanced and complex.

This has made me think about Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi. This best seller, published in 2003, is about the author’s experiences during the Iranian revolution of 1979 and its aftermath. The book is interlaced with stories from a book group of seven women reading banned Western literary works led by Professor Nafisi.

Although she writes about works of fiction, what she says often applies to works of history and children’s books. Nafisi says about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, “You don’t read Gatsby to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil.” This, of course, is what some don’t want. Their rigid categories of right and wrong should not be questioned.

Perhaps most worrying for the censors is that books might lead to a sympathy and understanding of those whom the book removers despise and fear. Nafisi writes, “The respect for others, empathy, . . .is the quality that links Austen to Flaubert and James to Nabakov and Bellow.” Children with empathy are a threat. They may reject the rigidity of self-righteous adults. Nafisi writes, “This, I believe, is how the villain in modern fiction is born: a creature without compassion, without empathy.” Elsewhere she says, “Evil in Austen, as in most great fiction, lies in the inability to ‘see’ others, hence to empathize with them.”

The censors wish to stifle the natural curiosity of children, afraid of the possible empathetic results that could lead to questioning the censors’ moral authority. But, as Nafisi says in Reading Lolita, “Humbert [Humbert] was a villain because he lacked curiosity about other people and their lives, even about the person he loved most, Lolita. Humbert, like most dictators, was interested only in his own vision of other people.”

It is not really the specifics of the books that animates the censors’ actions. Instead, their fundamental concern is to prevent challenges to their rigid, authoritarian world view.