ABC Wednesday Archives - Page 64 of 91

K is for Killing

The current debate over gun violence likely will not be ended so easily.

My church, First Presbyterian Church in Albany, NY, is celebrating its 250th anniversary this year. The church donated some artifacts to the Albany Institute of History & Art, itself founded in 1791. The Institute has an exhibit, ongoing through April 17, showing some of the church history over the years.

Some of the church members included John Jay, eventually the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court; Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury; and Aaron Burr, third Vice-President of United States, and the first NOT to go on to become President.

After Burr killed Hamilton in a duel in 1804, the pastor Eliphalet Nott delivered a jeremiad against dueling. As it was a particularly long and significant sermon, it was published by the Dutch Reformed Church in Albany. (I listened to the re-enacted speech a few years ago.) Eliphalet Nott had the remarkable effect of, almost singlehandedly, effectively ending what had been considered an “honorable” way for gentlemen to settle their differences.

The current debate over gun violence likely will not be ended so easily. The solutions seem to be fewer guns on one side, more guns on the other. The latter group clings to the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution: “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” The notion of a militia, to me, seems to be a state-run National Guard.

In any case, here’s a list of murders with firearms (most recent) by country. And here are twelve facts about guns and mass shootings in the United States. Nothing here, I suspect, will change anyone’s mind about the next steps to take. No Eliphalet Nott sermon will save the day anymore.

ABC Wednesday – Round 12

J is for Justice (or the lack of same)

I learned that policemen are my friends.
I learned that justice never ends.
I learned that murderers die for their crimes.
Even if we make a mistake sometimes.

We in the United States like to think of ourselves as a good and JUST people. Like all humans, though, sometimes we fall short. Some examples of the latter, primarily from our JUSTICE system, in recent weeks:

Item: “A recent Department of Justice lawsuit that called the criminalization of school disciplinary offenses as minor as dress code violations so arbitrary and severe as to ‘shock the conscience’ publicized some of the most egregious punishment at Meridian, Mississippi’s schools. But the perpetuation of what is known as the school-to-prison pipeline is not limited to that one city or county, and it’s nothing new, according to a new report by several civil rights organizations. Stories highlighted by the report reveal that school punishment in other Mississippi counties is as bad, if not worse, and exemplify the severity and scope of the problem.

Item: “Why would anyone confess to a crime they did not commit? It happens so often in Chicago, defense attorneys call the city the false confession capital of the United States. Chicago has twice as many documented false confession cases as any city in the country. One reason may be the way police go about questioning suspects. And 60 Minutes has learned the Chicago Police Department is now the subject of a Justice Department investigation into its interrogation practices.”

Item: From this call to repeal the death penalty in the state of Maryland: “Race and class decide which defendants are sentenced to death. Maryland prosecutors pursue death sentences ‘significantly and substantially’ more often for Black defendants accused of killing white victims than for any other offenders. Despite the fact that 76.4% of the state’s homicide victims are Black, every person Maryland has executed since 1978 — and everyone currently on Maryland’s death row — was prosecuted for the death of a white victim.” There is no reason to believe that Maryland is particularly dissimilar from other states in this regard. Glad to see that the death penalty will be abolished in the state.

But the “justice gone wrong” story that I found most surprising is from a few years back. The less I explain, the more effective it will be. Please watch this 60 Minutes Special: Picking Cotton, about Jennifer Thompson and Ronald Cotton’s best-selling story of truth, injustice, and redemption. Here is author John Grisham explaining why he supports innocence projects.

I’m reminded by a still-relevant verse in a song by Tom Paxton from the early 1960s, What Did You Learn In School Today, made popular by Pete Seeger; LISTEN HERE or HERE. The lyrics, appropriate to this post:

What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
I learned that policemen are my friends.
I learned that justice never ends.
I learned that murderers die for their crimes.
Even if we make a mistake sometimes.
That’s what I learned in school today.
That’s what I learned in school.

ABC Wednesday – Round 12

H is for Hello

There are a LOT of songs that start with the word “hello.”

Hello. How are you today?

I’ve been musing a lot about the word hello. The history of the word can be seen read in Wikipedia; basically, a 19th-century creation that Thomas Edison suggested be used in answering the telephone, rather than Alexander Graham Bell’s idea of “ahoy.”

I’m no linguist, but it seems that lots of languages have had a variation of hello for a long time, while others have not. I found this site Say Hello to the World. Some have very similar words: Chinese – ni hao; Hebrew – shalom; Spanish: hola. Others tend to have words more appropriately described as “good day.”

In any case, I was looking for an excuse to list a bunch of songs starting with the word Hello. There are a LOT of them; this is only a sampling, including several that I put on a mixed CD.

The Beatles – Hello Little Girl;
Ricky Nelson – Hello Mary Lou ;
Allan Sherman – Hello Muddah Hello Faddah;
Louis Armstrong – Hello, Dolly!;
Frank Sinatra – Hello, Young Lovers;
Sopwith Camel – Hello, Hello;
Judy Collins – Hello, Hooray;
The Doors – Hello, I Love You;
Todd Rundgren – Hello It’s Me;
Eric Clapton – Hello Old Friend;
Bette Midler – Hello In There;
Oasis – Hello;
Harry Potter Book of Mormon Parody – HELLO;
The Beatles – Hello Goodbye

Someone’s list of Top 10: Songs with lyrics that begin with ‘Hello’, only some of which I used, since I wanted songs with TITLES that begin that way.

ABC Wednesday – Round 12

G is for Gaslighting

“To manipulate events, as Charles Boyer does to Ingrid Bergman to make her think she’s crazy.”

When I was living in Charlotte, NC for a few months in early 1977, I wasn’t particularly thrilled. The city was, in the words of my father “a big old country town”; BTW, it’s gotten much better there, IMO.

One of my few outlets was to go to the main library and read books and magazines, or see movies. One of the films I saw was Gaslight. It was the 1944 US version, not the 1940 UK take; both were based on a 1938 play, Gas Light. The iteration I saw “was directed by George Cukor and starred Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer, Joseph Cotten, and 18-year-old Angela Lansbury in her screen debut.”

Without getting into the particulars of why: “Paula loses a brooch that Gregory had given her, despite its having been stored safely in her handbag. A picture disappears from the walls of the house, and Gregory says that Paula took it, but Paula has no recollection of having done so. Paula also hears footsteps coming from above her, in the sealed attic, and sees the gaslights dim and brighten for no apparent reason. Gregory suggests that these are all figments of Paula’s imagination. Gregory does everything in his power to isolate his wife from other people.” In other words, Gregory is trying to make Paula think she is going crazy, and nearly succeeds.

From these movies, and the play, came the term gaslighting, which “has come to describe a pattern of psychological abuse in which the victim is gradually manipulated into doubting his or her own reality. This can involve physical tactics (such as moving or hiding objects) or emotional ones (such as denying one’s own abusive behavior to a victim.)” I thought it was a nifty term, and have used it regularly since.

I am watching the game show JEOPARDY! which is my wont. Episode #6428, which aired 2012-07-25, in the category “GAS” UP (which means the letters GAS appears in the correct response). The $600 clue: “To manipulate events, as Charles Boyer does to Ingrid Bergman to make her think she’s crazy.” I say “to gaslight”; none of the three contestants even rings in. Then I ask other people. No one seems to know this verb, except for my wife, and she only recognizes it because I’ve used it so much.

So I commit to you the word “gaslighting.” Use it in good health; don’t let it make you go crazy.

ABC Wednesday – Round 12

F is for Family

I was 51 when I had my daughter, only a year younger than my father was when he had his first GRANDCHILD. So who IS this old man with this little kid?

Rose wrote, in response to my post P is for (Helicopter) Parenting, that it was the first time I had written about family. This surprised me, initially, because I’ve gone on about my daughter every month on the 26th of the month, without fail. In fact, it was one of the two purported reasons I STARTED this blog back in 2005, the other being to tell the JEOPARDY! story.

I’ve written about my wife at least twice a year, on our anniversary and her birthday. My late parents I’ve discussed on the anniversaries of their births and deaths, and my sisters on their respective birthdays.

It’s true, though, that I’ve seldom written about them for ABC Wednesday. Here, then, a summary.

My parents both grew up in Binghamton, New York, a small city near the Pennsylvania border. They were both only children, so I have no direct aunts, uncles, or first cousins. Anyone I have called cousins are either my parents’ cousins, or their children. So we have a very small tribe.

My parents met cute, with my father delivering flowers to 13 Maple Street when they were intended for 13 Maple Avenue in Binghamton. Though Trudy initially thought Les was a bit full of himself – probably accurately, from what I’ve been told by others – they ended up getting married on March 12, 1950.

My mother had a miscarriage in April 1951. I always thought that was why my father was a little…distant…when I was born five days shy of their third anniversary. I was named for no one; my father just liked that my initials, ROG spelled out a shortened version of my name.

I found it interesting that when my sister came along in July of 1954, my father named HER for him, Leslie. (This caused me all sorts of complications. People knew my family had a child named Leslie and assumed that it was MY name, and some guys in church called me Little Les, which WAS NOT MY NAME, and to which I refused to respond.) It was also confusing when we’d get phone calls; my father was Les, and my sister became Leslie Ellen.

My sister Marcia was born in May 1958. We all went to school at Daniel Dickinson, staying at my maternal grandma’s house at lunch.

My parents and Marcia moved to Charlotte, NC in 1974. Leslie and I kidnapped my grandmother and brought her to Charlotte by train in January of the next year. She used coal for heat in Binghamton, and going up and down those rickety cellar steps in her mid-70s was not an option. She died in Charlotte on Super Bowl Sunday, 1983, but is buried in Binghamton, less than two blocks from her former home.

My father died of prostate cancer on August 10, 2000, less than 18 months after he arranged the flowers for my marriage to Carol Powell. I’ve long been sad that he never got to meet my daughter Lydia, who was born about three and a half years later.

Once I figured out how to put pictures into Blogger – I READ THE MANUAL and still couldn’t figure it out – I used to put pictures of the Daughter all the time. At some point in the past two years, though, my wife expressed concern about my daughter’s pictures appearing in this blog. It’s for that reason, not my own, that I’ve limited the number of her photographic appearances here.

Frankly, I don’t agree. I thought by having her picture out here it would make her well enough recognizable that she would be LESS likely to…well, whatever scenario the Wife was envisioning.

At the same time, I also thought it was better for ME – some public photographic proof, or at least indication, that she was my daughter, in case the cops ever stopped us. MY paranoia is a function of the fact that I was 51 when I had her, only a year younger than my father was when he had his first GRANDCHILD. So who IS this old man with this little kid?

I remember the utility worker who first asked if she were my granddaughter. I used to be miffed, but now accept the reality.

My mom died, reasonably suddenly, in February 2011. I got an outpouring of caring, from Jaquandor, Arthur, plus many in the ABC Wednesday community. Oddly, it wasn’t a post about my mother’s passing, but a post about going down to visit my mom after her stroke that triggered the comments, which, even as I write this, make me teary-eyed, not just with missing my mom, but of all the support I received at the time.

So there you be: my family. Well, except for my two nieces, Rebecca, Leslie’s daughter, and Alexandria, Marcia’s daughter. Oh, my mom’s three granddaughters are each separated by about a dozen years – Becky, Alex, and Lydia, in that order. Glad Lydia got to meet my mom, and vice versa.

ABC Wednesday – Round 12