Tales from the Shark Tank

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.

My husband and I were sitting in the living room when he began to chuckle. When I raised an eyebrow at him, he said he’d just remembered his dad’s summary of Thomas Paine’s resume. “Started a revolution in America. Started a revolution in France. England kicked him out.”

But thinking about that made me wonder. At the time of the American Revolution, England had repealed the Stamp Acts that had started the political rebellion, and while Parliament was insisting that they had the right to use the powers objected to, for the most part they weren’t doing so. I’m not at all sure that the generalized anger at a government perceived to be “out of touch” with the general sentiments of the citizenry would have crystallized into full revolt without a catalyst such as Paine.

We have, in the current administration, a leader as much despised and derided as that earlier George, the third of that name to hold the throne of England. (We also have who is arguably as out of touch with reality, but that’s a discussion for another time.) Like the English monarchs of that earlier time, he considers himself to hold his power as a mark of divine favor. The great difference is that we have a system of government now that holds the promise of a change in leadership on a predetermined schedule. But if there are untoward and unwelcome surprises from this administration, which acts as if, in direct opposition to the founding principals of this country, it should be “a government of men and not of laws”, I wonder if the blogs and other forms of internet dissemination of ideas might serve the same purpose as Mr. Paine’s publications and rhetoric. It seems possible, even plausible. And that is a very scary thought.