Tales from the Shark Tank

Miep Gies, the woman who found Anne Frank’s diary and saved it, has died at age 100. She was in her early thirties when the Nazis first came to Holland. Her employer, Otto Frank, had moved his family to Amsterdam to escape the increasing virulence of the Nazi regime in their native Germany. When the Nazis came to the place the Franks had hoped would be a haven, there was no way to run again. So the four of them, plus another small family and a single man – eight people in all – hid for a bit over two years, helped by Miep and her husband Jan and a few others. Even after their arrest, she risked going to the German police and trying to bribe them into letting the Franks go. Her courage was almost incomprehensible from my living room in the safety of 21st century Indiana.

I’ve been trying for the past several hours to think of something appropriate to say about her, something of what she taught simply by the way she lived her life, but there is too much there. That there is light, even in the deepest darkness. The greatness of spirit that an ordinary person is capable of, when the need arises. That heroism isn’t only in the grand gestures, but in the quiet, day in and day out actions of anyone who tries to do what is right even when it could cost them everything. She insisted that she was not a heroine, because, she said, she did not want children to think that it required someone special to do what was right. “Who is a hero?” she asked. “I was not. I was just an ordinary housewife and secretary.”

She was indeed a housewife and secretary, and a mother. But it was in her very “ordinariness”, in being the sort of person everyone knows, that she was most extraordinary.

In what you did, in what you said, in a girl’s writings carefully preserved, in the stories you told and by the example you set, you changed the world, Miep Gies. And in so doing, you blessed us all.

Via the friend-of-a-friend sort of thing, I started reading the blog of a young woman (college age) in Norway.  She mostly blogs in English.  I’ve never asked her why, but if I didn’t know she was from Trondheim, I’d never have guessed.  Her use of English is quirky, but not so much more so than some of my other friends.

She started having some problems and talking about them, and I commented, sometimes telling her about applicable things I’d seen, sometimes asking questions that (she said) made her think rather than simply react, sometimes simply being sympathetic and telling her someone wished her well.  They’re all things I do in the way of listening, just this time it was in writing instead of in person.

Somewhere in the process, I seem to have acquired another fledgling.  She e-mails me now to talk things over that she doesn’t want to post publicly in her blog.  It seems what I have to say matters to her.  We’ve never met in person, but that doesn’t matter to her, or really much to me.  In everything but making her tea and listening in my own living room, it’s exactly like the other fledglings I’ve had.  On the one hand, it feels perfectly normal.  But when I stop to think about it, I find it utterly mind-boggling.

I just had two Purveyors of Religion (aka missionaries) appear at my door.  I was polite; I try always to be polite, even when I consider what they’re doing to be the height (shouldn’t that be depth?) of rudeness.  I told them it was a Jewish household, and when they didn’t take that hint, added one of my favorite Mark Twain quotes on religion.  That confused them, and they left.

People who knock on my door trying to bring me the One True Faith(tm) have always bothered me.  What, all others are counterfeit, like the Canterville Ghost? (If you haven’t read the short story, do so.  It’s fabulous.)  It’s the implicit arrogance of it that I find most disturbing.  I mean really.  To claim that they have the One True Way – and not just “Christianity” but their particular sect and flavor of Christianity requires that they claim that they, and only they, know the mind of the $DEITY.  I’ve always thought the whole point of any deity was to be beyond human, and beyond our comprehension.  We’re mortal, limited in our perceptions and ability to conceptualize; the Creator of the Universe(s) by definition is not.  So how can they, or anyone, say that not only are there a finite number of ways to approach that Infinite, there is only one, and they alone know it?

What unmitigated gall, and they themselves don’t perceive it.  And they think they’re doing me a favor?

I have just read an article that makes me absolutely furious.

In summary, it seems the doctor whose study ignited the scare that the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine might have a correlation with autism falsified his data. Someone went back and looked at the patient records his findings were supposedly based on, and they didn’t match up at all.

For years I’ve sidestepped this controversy, telling people who tried to drag me and my advocacy abilities into the dispute about whether or not to vaccinate, and whether the vaccines might be causing autism, that I would leave that to others; my concern was to figure out what would help our children now, and how to make sure that they got it regardless of their parents’ income or educational level. It didn’t make sense to me, and I didn’t want to be dragged into the arguments. But a lot of parents have swallowed this hook, line and sinker. It feeds into fears of a technology most do not fully understand, and of not doing what is best for our children. And once internalized, that fear doesn’t go away easily. It’s like a virus itself, one for which there is no inoculation. This doctor has played on those fears. The article that started all of this came out 10 years ago, but it will take far longer to undo the damage it’s done. I won’t be surprised if it takes a full generation, and I’m sure it will never disappear entirely. Meanwhile children have been and will continue be put at needless risk of entirely preventable diseases by parents worried that the consequences of prevention will be worse than the diseases themselves.

Articles expire, so the text follows:

The doctor who sparked the scare over the safety of the MMR vaccine for children changed and misreported results in his research, creating the appearance of a possible link with autism, a Sunday Times investigation has found. (emphasis mine)

Confidential medical documents and interviews with witnesses have established that Andrew Wakefield manipulated patients’ data, which triggered fears that the MMR triple vaccine to protect against measles, mumps and rubella was linked to the condition.

The research was published in February 1998 in an article in The Lancet medical journal. It claimed that the families of eight out of 12 children attending a routine clinic at the hospital had blamed MMR for their autism, and said that problems came on within days of the jab. The team also claimed to have discovered a new inflammatory bowel disease underlying the children’s conditions.

However, our investigation, confirmed by evidence presented to the General Medical Council (GMC), reveals that: In most of the 12 cases, the children’s ailments as described in The Lancet were different from their hospital and GP records. Although the research paper claimed that problems came on within days of the jab, in only one case did medical records suggest this was true, and in many of the cases medical concerns had been raised before the children were vaccinated. Hospital pathologists, looking for inflammatory bowel disease, reported in the majority of cases that the gut was normal. This was then reviewed and the Lancet paper showed them as abnormal. Despite involving just a dozen children, the 1998 paper’s impact was extraordinary. After its publication, rates of inoculation fell from 92% to below 80%. Populations acquire “herd immunity” from measles when more than 95% of people have been vaccinated.

Last week official figures showed that 1,348 confirmed cases of measles in England and Wales were reported last year, compared with 56 in 1998. Two children have died of the disease.

With two professors, John Walker-Smith and Simon Murch, Wakefield is defending himself against allegations of serious professional misconduct brought by the GMC. The charges relate to ethical aspects of the project, not its findings. All three men deny any misconduct.

Through his lawyers, Wakefield this weekend denied the issues raised by our investigation, but declined to comment further.
(by Brian Deer, Times Online UK edition, Feb 8, 2009)

As if we hadn’t had enough to worry about.

It was above 50^o F. today, so I took advantage of the relative warmth and sunshine to take a walk. I hoped it would improve the mood, and indeed it did.

But I was not walking quickly, and noticed details I don’t always perceive. A small marsh-willow (non-weeping) had a nest in the fork where three tiny branches met. It was a neat, perfectly woven cup, perhaps two and a half inches in diameter, and I found myself wondering how small a bird must be to occupy such a nest along with her hatchlings. It’s untenanted now, of course, but so well built and anchored that all the winds and storms this winter has presented so far have neither torn nor dislodged it.

A few feet further on I found a young locust. It too had a nest, though not as whole as the first. What intrigued me was that the second nest was braced by a small branch and a thorn long enough that had it not been sharp, it would have qualified as a twig in its own right. The tree itself was part of the bird’s defense, in a way more direct than the usual cloaking leaves. When I was a little girl, I read about thorns being used as pins, but I couldn’t imagine how that worked. The only thorns I’d ever seen were rose or berry thorns, and while those certainly could tear unwary arms, they were too short to fasten anything. But locust thorns make sense. They’re incredibly sharp, easily thin enough to pass through hand-woven fabric, and longer than my quilting pins. Looking at them, I thought that if one drilled a small hole in the flared end that attaches it to the tree, it could serve as quite a serviceable needle as well. I think I’d be more surprised to learn they hadn’t been used so than that they had.

Around the corner, there was an oak in my landlady’s yard. It would have been easy to take the brown bits at the tips of the twigs for a few last leaves the wind had left behind, had they not taken wing in a fluttering whirl. It may be winter, but the tree is still good camouflage for the small brown chirpy birds that brave the cold and snow and wind. Instead of hiding in the leaves, they look very like brown leaves themselves.

And home again, to my boychick on the computer. “Mom, look at this!” It was a picture of a large tornado he’d found on Wikipedia. The things I found outside were smaller and less dramatic. They’ve been there all along. I just wasn’t looking.

A friend of mine forwarded an article on autism research to me.  The article itself, which says that autistic children process sound more slowly than neurotypical children, would be fasicnating even if I didn’t have so personal an interest.  But there was a comment afterwards about what it’s like to be autistic that just stunned me.  The writer, who calls himself “Captain Obvious”, said:

It’s … like trying to discern a current, while standing under a tons/second waterfall: it isn’t so much “scrambled”, as it is “snowing-out one’s ability to perceive/know clearly”.

I have thought for years that my son’s issues arose from a lack of mental “filters”, but this is such an overwhelmingly vivid, visceral description of just what that means.

As the election gets closer, the landscape has been sprouting campaign signs more thickly than goldenrod.  For the most part, I pay them little heed.  I know that their purpose is to increase name recognition, but I prefer to know more of the candidates than simply their names.  A couple of them did catch my eye, though.  One was for a judge, the other for county prosecutor.  The judge, whose name is a long Eastern European tangle of letters beginning “Vj”, has a sign which reads “Tough Name; Tough Judge.”  The one for prosecutor was similar, promising to be “Tough on Crime.”  Pretty typical slogans, for those offices, and clearly what the candidates think the voting public wants to hear.  Maybe so, but it is not what I want to hear.  I’d be happier if the judge, on the same theme, had used something like “Difficult Name: Dedicated to Justice.”  I don’t want a judge to be “tough”; I want them to be fair to all concerned.  I don’t want a prosecutor who seeks convictions at any cost, by any tactics; I want one who believes in justice, understands what “presumed innocent” actually means, and is actually interested in finding out what the truth really is, somewhere between all the various versions. I drove into town last week and took advantage of early voting, so those signs won’t affect my vote now.  But if they had any effect at all, it would be negative.  If popular opinion is to be believed, most people wouldn’t agree with me, but that’s all right.  I have never been “most people”.

There was a plethora of signs in Indianapolis when I was down there as well.  I’m kind of out of that loop already, though I recognized some of the names.  What I found noteworthy there were the lack of signs for the current governor – I haven’t seen any up in this corner of the state either – and the presence of Obama/ Biden signs thickly strewn in neighborhoods where I know that Democrats have been an endangered species in prior years.  I remember voting once and hearing a precinct judge comment that all three of the registered Democrats for the precinct had voted.  I laughed a little at the time, knowing that all three were in one household.  But in that same area, it seems like Obama signs are in every other yard.  It wasn’t like McCain signs were in evidence, either.  I think I saw two in a couple of miles.  Indiana really is split between the candidates this time.  I can’t remember when it wasn’t so solidly Republican that the candidates felt no need to spend more than a minimal amount of money here.  Change indeed.

Today is our son’s 11th birthday.  I got an e-mail recently asking if I could meet with the rabbi in early November, as it’s time for him to begin bar mitzvah training.  This seems incredible to me.  When he was smaller, I figured he’d become a bar mitzvah, but that it would happen a year or two later than is usual.  Most kids start Hebrew School in pre-school, but at that time he was still in therapeutic pre-school, and there was no way he could have handled Hebrew School.  He was still having enough difficulty learning to speak English.  He really wasn’t ready to add an additional stimulus until he was in second grade and nearly eight.  Here the congregation was several orders of maginitude smaller, the teacher worked with autistic kids as her day job, and he did so well that she thought I’d home-schooled him.  (I hadn’t.)  Everyone involved is taking it for granted that of course he will become a bar mitzvah on Shabbat after his thirteenth birthday.  I can’t take it for granted.  I remember when it seemed impossible too clearly, and I am in awe of what he’s accomplshed.  When we first got a diagnosis of autism, a psychologist told me that the only limitations on what he would be able to do would be those we put on him because of our own expectations.  I have worked hard never to say “you can’t”….and he is proving, in ways both small and great, that he can.

He’s had a fabulous birthday.  He asked for and got his very own MP3 player, which he has been listening to much of the day.  He had a cake at Hebrew School, and another in the afternoon for a small birthday party at McDonald’s.  He got toy, books and clothes, and was delighted by all three.  He got to run and play with his friends, and has spent a fair amount of time during the pauses in the day reading interesting statistics to me from some of his new books, and handing me one of the ear-buds for his MP3 player so I could hear a super special song.  We heard him at 3:00 a.m., cheering quietly from his room.  “It’s today!  It’s my birthday!”  That pretty well sums it up.  It’s your birthday, boychick, and you’re the best gift I’ve ever been given.

It’s Erev Rosh Hashonah.  This is the season when Jews are obligated to examine their behavior and their relationships to both their fellow human beings and to the Divine.  Among other things, we look for ways to accomplish tikun olam, the healing of the world that we are commanded to undertake.  We are, indeed, “our brother’s keepers”.

I already had that sort of self-examination in mind when I started reading my usual list of blogs this afternoon.  In them, I found discussions of a thing that evidently happened last Friday.  Someone sprayed a chemical irritant into the room being used to care for the youngest congregants in a house of worship.  A number people were treated for chemical irritation to skin, eyes and throats; some of the children needed oxygen because they’d gotten a lung full of the stuff and were so small that it sent them into shock.  Several mothers and children were taken to the hospital for emergency treatment.  Thankfully, no one was so seriously hurt they had to stay, but the congregants were badly frightened, and with good cause.

It clearly fits any reasonable definition of an act of terror.  It is pure luck that no permanent physical harm was done.  It was totally reprehensible.  Nothing exucses a random attack on a house of worship.  Nothing excuses an attack on innocents, and no victims are more innocent than babies.  But this didn’t happen in Pakistan or Iraq.  It happened at a mosque in Dayton, Ohio, in the middle of United States.

Now, I have heard how “they” all hate “us”, where “they” are Muslims.  I have heard that it is “they” who perpetrate the violence.  I have had friends hurt in cross-border raids in Israel.  But my own observation is that fanatics of any and every stripe perpetrate violence, that it accomplishes nothing save to breed fear and vengeance and further violence, and that when “they” are babies and their mothers, nothing can justify it.  I don’t care who is doing what to whom in Afghanistan, or Kurdistan, or Iran or Iraq.  Babies in child care to allow their mothers to worship in peace here, in this country that is supposed to carry the banner for religious freedom – especially here – should be safe.

I’ve studied religiously-prompted violence, both in the course of learning my own religious history and in college.  It leaves marks not only on those present, but marks on cultures that can last for generations or even millenia.  We still celebrate the failure of a plan for destruction that occurred 2600 years ago.  (Purim, which has been summarized as “they tried to kill us, it failed, let’s eat.)  Kristalnacht did not only mark Jewish culture and memory; it has marked German culture.  This isn’t on anything close to the same scale.  It isn’t institutionalized, is not government sponsored or sanctioned.  But it’s still an act of hate, carried out against those who could not possibly have done harm.  It’s still an act of terrorism, the sort of thing we see reported as occurring in places like Islamabad or Belgrade.

Not here.  Not in America.  We’re better than that.  Except it did, and we’re not.  I am ashamed for my country, for a government that has intentionally fed people’s fear and xenophobia so that someone thought it made sense to attack children.  And I’m thinking that what we need now is to learn to think of those little ones not as “their children”, somehow distinct from “our children” – but of all of them as everyone’s children.

I was cruising e-bay earlier today, seeing how much people were asking for assorted moderately odd items like a small Viking-style utility knife.  I noticed several things, one of which is that as a matter of style, modern Scandinavian knives are pretty hard to distinguish from those made a thousand years ago.  I guess there’s not much point messing with a functional design.  But there was one small knife posted that was mis-labeled, and had no bids.  I thought about it, then clicked “contact seller” and instead of asking a question, told them what they had, and what it would cost new including shipping.  (About $2.00 more than they were asking.)  I got back a “thanks for the information” note.  I don’t know what they’ll do with it, of course, but now they’ve got it.  That’s not the first time I’ve done something like that, either.  I found a sewing tool posted by someone who thought “bodkin” might be the brand name, rather than simply the name of the tool.  So I e-mailed to tell her what it was and what it was used for.  That one added the information to her posting.

I don’t know why I can’t just leave such things alone.  I’m quite certain other people are; I can’t be the only one in the world who knows these things.  I guess when you come right down to it I’m a confirmed, unabashed, unreconstructed busybody.  At least it’s a harmless quirk.  Everyone needs a hobby, right?

“Go West, young man.”

John Soule, a reporter in Indiana, wrote that in 1851; Horace Greeley popularized it. When I read that as a teenager, I thought he was talking about the “west” I was familiar with. I thought of the great plains, and the land rush, and of efforts to break the Prairie that too often broke the humans instead. But as I read further, I realized that wasn’t what he’d been talking about at all. He meant the Old Northwest; places like Indiana and Illinois and Wisconsin, already admitted to statehood but still a frontier in the process of settlement. I never saw it mentioned when we studied Lincoln’s life in school, but Indiana was still a territory when the Lincoln family moved there in 1816; statehood arrived in December of that year. The opportunity that Soule and Greeley saw was that of country that was not yet settled, and had room to grow.

I was thinking about all of that because the lilacs are in full and showy bloom now. They were clearly visible from the road as we went out to dinner the other evening. Some of them were in predictable places: along the west side of houses in a solid hedge as a windbreak, or simply near to a farmhouse, visible through the kitchen window. Even those near to the road were in proximity to something, be it church or property line or cemetery. But some weren’t. I saw huge bushes, nearly trees, standing mostly isolated fairly deep into wooded areas. The thing about lilacs is that other than sending up shoots off the roots of the parent shrub, they don’t self-propagate much at all. The seeds are theoretically fertile, but they don’t sprout easily or often even under ideal conditions, and forest is hardly that. On the other hand, once established a lilac can live for a hundred years or more. There are lilacs in New England planted before the Constitution was ratified, still spreading a bit at a time, grown into great bushes, almost small trees. That means that once upon a time, someone planted those bushes I saw.

In my fascination for history, I’ve read as many of the journals kept by women settling on the frontier as I have been able to find. Often those began with the process of deciding what to take from their homes in the East, giving away the things that could not be easily transported to family and friends, saying goodbye to all that was familiar. And over and over, I would read that a woman had taken a day and dug up daffodils, or June lilies (now we call them day lilies). They collected seeds from their gardens, listing them out. And they potted up things that they treasured, things that symbolized “home” to them, like herbs from their gardens – and lilacs for the dooryard.

So those lilacs that are far from any human structure (other than the road itself) now weren’t always so. Now, for the weeks that they bloom and are clearly visible, they mark the places where those immigrants from more settled regions built their homes or their churches, or perhaps where they buried their dead. I don’t know that I’d see anything if I walked back there; just as fallen trees eventually rot back into the ground they grew from, so do cabins built from them, if not maintained. I’m no archaeologist; I don’t know what to look for, and so would likely not know the signs if I saw them. But whether I could find them or not, the stories are there, as the people were there. And even if all other signs of their presence are gone, the lilacs remain, their blooms an annual reminder of the women who planted them as a tie between the homes they had left and those they hoped to make in this new place.