Wake up & smell the roses

My heart swells with pride and gratitude to see some of the House Dems sing "We Shall Overcome" with Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) when he was chided like a child for SPEAKING UP against a dangerous president.

Right out of the Revolution playbook:
disrupt!

Thank god, some people got a spine!
I imagine you all saw, but here it is again. Stand up, speak out of order, SING OUT...

_________________

I. "When I'm 64", Day 2

Yesterday came together beautifully!

bink and I went out to the Swedish Institute café for a breakfast of oatmilk lattes and their most excellent cardamom rolls (day 2 of bakery birthday treats--that's it for now), and there we strung the 'You Are Made of Stars' prints.

Beautiful, brave bink!

Emily came after work and hung the prints up on the stupid fence with me. I'd given away so many, I didn't have 100, and it'd take more like 500 to really cover the fence on all 3 sides...
But we had a respectable line of them.

You can see ^ the beautiful mural "Our Lake Street Loves".
Before Covid and the murder of George Floyd a mile away, this was a friendly little pocket park, but everything slid sideways and the City's stupid response was to close it down.
Lack of vision, lack of cohesive action...
Why I prefer to do my individual actions.

Then Emily and I sat in the warm sun by the dumpster in the thrift store parking lot (where the Girlettes had lit the Hannukah apple menorah).

She presented me with the birthday goodies she had scrabbled together in classic Em style:
mismatched birthday candles and clown cupcake-picks stuck in Popeye's biscuits (with honey packet),
and a mini-bottle of Bananas 99 liquor, Em's drink of choice (tastes like those orange Circus Peanuts marshmallow candies):

Could it have been any better?

Not in my book.

II. Which Roses?

Later Marz called to consult about the flow of her paper analyzing Soviet propaganda art--Stalin receiving roses.
It is a joy to see someone working hard at something interesting. Especially if that someone is a tip-top favorite human.

Marz described the poster--this one from 1950, or one like it. She calls it Daddy Loves Roses. (NOT its title.)

I found it here: "Varieties of Totalitarianism", a review of the book Hitler and Stalin: The Tyrants of the Second World War (2021) by Laurence Rees.

"[Hitler & Stalin] were very different," Rees writes.
Hitler, he says, is no mystery:

"We have a good understanding of Hitler. There was not much mystery in his thoughts and actions. He believed in a thoroughly rotten ideology that was deeply inhumane.
He did not keep his thoughts or his plans secret."

But Stalin played it close to his chest, and, as Shalamov said, he "slew innocent people"––even people who were willing and wanting to be his allies. Very odd.

I'm interested in forms of resistance, given our own situation in Mump's USA.
Is there any point to small individual movements, like Germany's White Rose?
I love that the reviewer grants they are, if not politically efficacious, yet they may be "impressive in human terms".
That counts! 

"There was an incipient resistance movement, 'The White Rose,' ineffectual, hopeless, but all the more impressive in human terms.
Intelligent and attractive young human beings believed that it was their moral duty to struggle against the evil acts of their government.
But the 1930s were for most Germans rather good years.
The average German who was 'willing to go along' had little to fear.
...
By contrast, no one was secure in the Soviet Union.
Those closest to Stalin, without a word of protest, watched as their friends and relatives were sent to their deaths.""

I take from this: stand up and sing EARLY.

BELOW: White Rose members Hans Scholl (23-24 years old), Sophie Scholl 21 y.o.), and Christioph Probst in Munich, Germany.
Photo: George Wittenstein / akg-images colorized by FoxTrotte

"On February 18, 1943, brother and sister Hans and Sophie  Scholl were denounced to the Gestapo and arrested for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets in Munich University.

Five days later, after Nazi interrogation, they and Christoph Probst (above) were tried and executed [beheaded by guillotine] for high treason on Hitler’s direct orders.

The Scholls belonged to a group of students, the White Rose, who spoke out against National Socialism and circulated thousands of leaflets telling Germans of their moral duty to resist Hitler and his “atheistic war machine”.
In urgent, pleading messages, copied and mailed to thousands of Germans, the resistance group begged their fellow citizens to rise up.

They also condemned the persecution of Jews in the year when Hitler began to implement the Final Solution – and were among the few [non Jewish people] to speak publicly of the Holocaust while it was taking place." [italics mine]

Photo & text from the article, "How Newman inspired the White Rose resistance in Nazi Germany", www.newmanfriendsinternational.org/en/how-newman-inspired-the-white-rose-resistance-in-nazi-germany
With added info from the Hans & Sophie Scholl page at the Holocaust Historical Society.

III. How to Cultivate Courage?

Yes, how?

The reviewer, Peter Kenez, writes:

We are all fascinated by [WWII] not only because of its importance, but also because it reveals a great deal about our humanity.
It tells us what human beings are capable of and how people have behaved in the most extraordinary circumstances.

There is no comparable event in modern Western history in which people behaved with such inhumanity toward one another,
or on the contrary, demonstrated such great courage.

Even in hopeless circumstances, one's behavior matters--if only to oneself. Shalamov writes that he is proud that in his 17 years in the camps, he never ratted anyone out, never turned anyone in.

In contrast, he said. . .

"31. I learned that world should be divided not into good and bad people but into cowards and non-cowards.
95% of cowards are capable of any meanness, lethal meanness, after light threatening."

––"What I Saw and Learned in the Kolyma Camps"

Yes! I've seen this!
People who profess genuinely good beliefs and who believe in their own goodness, do not necessarily ACT good.

* * * I am always wary when people say,
"But I'm a good person."

Yeah? How d'ya know?

Most people who think they are good have merely been lucky.
It's an easy mistake to make:
when we don't realize we've been lucky,
we think our good life is our doing.

I would not claim to be good or brave––because I have not been tested.
And here's what:
I hope I never have to prove, never find out what I'd do in circumstances such as a concentration camp.

But there are plenty of tests in everyday life.
Not so dramatic, but they make up the fabric of our selves.

I haven't had to be brave (very rarely!),
but maybe I've managed to be a "non-coward".
[Shalamov doesn't divide people into "brave & courageous people vs  cowards", but "cowards and non-cowards".]

Not because I've been brave! but because I've been sneaky wise––(and lucky)––all along, in one sense, to follow my instinct not to play the game.
I have never pursued and always refused "elevation" to a Management position. I saw early on that for most people it led to a degradation of their character.

I remember my first awareness of this:
I was 17 years old, working at the Student Union cafeteria, and a fun and kind coworker was made manager over us.
She became a tool.
She knew it too: she even apologized to me once for turning me in for some minor infringement...
But she'd already done it.

"Not for me", I thought.
I thought (correctly, I'm sure, at least when I was so young) that I wouldn't be able to resist the pressure.
Better not to put myself in the vise.
(I don't know that I'd have been bad--most likely I'd have quit, like I did at the high school.)

Funny thing though:
Management has rarely invited me to join their ranks.
LOL. Imagine that.

But 'sitting it out' is not the answer.
The question remains--
How to engage?

I love Noam Chomsky's answer:
That's for you to figure out for yourself.

IV. What is graceful power?

I had a funny exchange with Big Boss yesterday.
I've mentioned that he sprained his ankle playing basketball a few weeks ago.

Chatting with him, I was saying how I'm not a natural athlete, not like he always was:
When he was a boy, he had to walk to school through enemy gang territory, where he'd get jumped.
"I was pretty good at defending myself," he has said, "so they started to leave me alone. I coulda been a boxer."

I mentioned that story, re his athleticism, and then I said,
"I've never been attacked, but I think if I was, I'd be pretty good at fighting back--or at least, I'd give it my all!"

"I think you would," he said, laughing. "You've got it in you."

LOL. And that's why he sorta doesn't like me! He likes obedient people.

Of course, refusing to play one game doesn't get you out of the Game of Life.
The trick is to become graceful in one's strength--
and that takes some doing.

How???

I guess there're a million ways, and it's for us to find our way.
Some politically minded people disparage solitary actions like prayer and meditation, but I do not.
Not everyone is committee-minded (thank god!).

At any rate, how /bout the House singing in public...?!
That lifts us all up, eh?

_____

This just in:

“Congressional Black Caucus throws support behind Al Green following censure vote”, The Hill, 3/7/25, https://thehill.com/homenews/race-politics/5182628-congressional-black-caucus-al-green/amp/