Uncategorized – Much That Is Fair

Not Like This.

As a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, I was often assigned to lead instructional sessions and teach courses in a small room in the basement of our School of Public Policy, as the History Department had no real classrooms of our own to use for undergraduate instruction. It was an awkward little space – underground, windowless, with glass near the door to provide a visual connection to the hallway outside. A structural pillar created a dead space in the back, and the thirty or so desks crammed inside were often comically undersized for my students, many of whom towered over me when they came up to ask questions at the end of class. It was a great place for hiding from tornados, the ultimate Midwestern natural disaster. It was also catastrophically unsafe in the event of a mass shooting: with one door in and no windows, anyone inside would be a sitting duck. And with the glass paneling next to the door, it would be almost impossible for anyone to hide.

On Miracles

Hartsdale, New York is home to one of the country’s more eccentric pieces of history: the nation’s oldest, largest, and (in their own words) “most prestigious” pet cemetery. Founded in 1896 when a local doctor gave his friend permission to bury her beloved dog in his apple orchard, it is now the final resting place of thousands of animals, mostly dogs and cats.

I first learned about it as I searched the state for World War memorials: an early memorial in the cemetery, named the War Dog, is dedicated “by dog lovers to man’s most faithful friend, for the valiant services rendered in the World War, 1914 – 1918.” The staggering human cost of World War I often hides the toll it took on animals and on nature, but it too is nearly beyond imagining. After the war, veterans of the Great War estimated a soldier’s life expectancy on the Western Front to be three to six months. The life expectancy of a horse was two weeks.

And They Shall Beat Their Swords into Plowshares

Being as I spend most of my time looking at World War I memorials, I sometimes forget that Veterans Day, for most Americans, is the kind of federal holiday where you have to stop and think about why the library is closed and you aren’t getting any mail. There are still ceremonies if you know where to look for them (usually, at the town war memorials); there are often articles about veterans in the daily newspapers; Google has made a Doodle about it, but it does not command the public attention it once did. In the interwar years, Americans gathered yearly in long parades and large public gatherings to honor the dead of World War I. They did this even though Armistice Day was not made a federal holiday until 1938. In 1954, the holiday was renamed Veterans Day, to honor veterans of all wars.

The Light of Autumn

The light has changed;
middle C is tuned darker now.
And the songs of morning sound over-rehearsed.

This is the light of autumn, not the light of spring.
The light of autumn: You will not be spared.
Louise Glück, “October”

Several weeks ago, exploring Minneapolis’s Lakewood Cemetery on a hunt for war memorials, I stumbled across the grave of a 5-year-old girl.

The Past Still Needs Us

“I want to wander. But the past still needs me.
How could I ever leave?”
– Hua Xi, The Past Still Needs Me

A sentiment I have heard more and more in recent years from confused and weary liberals is the bitter sense that Lincoln made a grave mistake in keeping the Union together. Why bother? Why not let the South just go? I was first asked this question just after the 2016 election, but I get it more these days, both from my students and from folks who would be pretty happy creating a United Republic of the East and West Coasts and calling it a day. Let them have kept their slaves. Let them have their guns and their backward lives. Leave us out of it.

Abandoning the ‘War’ on COVID

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.

Sometime this month or next, the United States will hit a once-unimaginable milestone: one million dead from coronavirus. When that happens, the reaction from many will be muted. Americans are exhausted, most agree, and they are ready to put the pandemic behind them, whether or not the pandemic is done with them. We have hit so many milestones by now that these numbers appear almost meaningless to us. What makes one million more unimaginable than any of the rest of them?

Where Sadness Makes Sense

If you should ever move to Minnesota, the only thing people will ask you about is how you survive the winter. After all, they may not be able to find the state on a map, but they know it’s cold. Is it true that the University of Minnesota’s buildings are all connected via tunnel? (Yes.) How cold does it get? (This winter, I believe the lowest it’s been in Minneapolis is -20˚F. The lowest recorded temperature in Minnesota was -60˚F, recorded in Tower, MN in 1996). Is your coat warm enough? (Yes, I promise). And so on.

Fidelity

On Wednesday, January 6th, 2021, I made the mistake of scheduling an eye exam for mid-afternoon. This meant that just as the rioters were breaking into the Capitol, I was having my eyes dilated, and subsequently lost my ability to see clearly for a few hours. Having heard just enough before I went in to know that something was going on, I tried to look at my phone anyway, before remembering, belatedly, that there are other ways of getting the news and turning on NPR for my walk home instead.

Endurance

Somewhere in the first weeks of the pandemic, a knot settled in my chest. It falls in the middle of my sternum, some physical manifestation of grief and stress and whatever else we have all shouldered these past twenty months. It ebbs and it flows, but it has settled between my ribs and made its home there. In doing so, it has become my most constant companion over the last year and a half, with me through every loss and setback, every step forward.