We’re filling a bag to help families in the program affiliated with the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC). Letter carriers in Iowa City will be picking up bags of non-perishable food items placed beside mailboxes on the second Saturday in May, which is on May 14, 2022 this month. Edward James Olmos is the food drive’s celebrity spokesperson, which gives the title of the movie he played a role in, “Stand and Deliver,” a special meaning in this context.
We drove by Terry Trueblood Recreation Area today and were amazed by the big crowd of people. We found out about the NAMIWalks today because of the signage and people everywhere at the park.
The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) has been around since 1979, and you can read more from the top fundraiser for today’s event, Margalea Warner!
I searched the web for a picture of ambivalence and had a tough time finding one. The featured image comes close. The reason I’m ambivalent is because of a conflict I have about the Iowa Hawkeye football program, which is currently the subject of a lawsuit by former African American players compared to the University of Iowa asking fans to find a new song to accompany the traditional Hawkeye Wave, in which players and fans wave at the kids watching the game from the UI Stead Family Children’s Hospital.
I think it’s a moving gesture. I’d like to formally nominate a new song. But I’m not sure I could call myself a fan, given the conflict between two principles: honoring the families with sick children, and also wanting a just outcome for the former football players suing the Hawkeye football program, alleging that it created a hostile environment.
I dislike bringing this up, mainly because I want to be fair to both sides. On the one hand, the former Hawkeye players and the Hawkeye football program somehow need to find justice. On the other, I really believe families love the Hawkeye Wave, and so do I. I’m very ambivalent.
I even have a song I’d like to formally vote for. It’s “I Lived” by OneRepublic. It was originally dedicated to children with cystic fibrosis and, when the music video was released in 2014, it featured Bryan Warnecke, a 15-year-old showing how he not only lived with, but triumphed over the disease.
I want the best for both sides of this conflict between ideals. I don’t know if I can count myself as a fan of the Hawkeye football program right now.
But speaking as a retired University of Iowa general hospital psychiatric consultant who once served as a colleague to the pulmonology specialists who called me to help care for the emotional and physical health of their patients with cystic fibrosis, a few of whom were living into young adulthood—they are Hawkeyes and so am I.
So, I’m voting informally for “I Lived” because I think it captures the spirit of what the Hawkeye Wave is really all about—kindness, generosity, and hope.
Featured image picture credit Pixabaydotcom.
Update April 24, 2022: I voted formally today for “I Lived” by OneRepublic. You can submit yours here.
The other day, I got to thinking about a previous interest in my early youth in learning to speak Esperanto. I couldn’t stick with it. It’s a constructed language, invented out of Russian, Polish, German, French, and English by a Polish ophthalmologist named Zamenhof in the late 19th century. It was supposed to be a universal second language for international communication. In that sense it was supposed to be the new language of diplomacy, a distinction held for a long time by French, although some would say that English has replaced French as the lingua franca. Don’t ask me why.
Diplomacy is a big thing today, given the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine and other forms of aggression around the world. The art of diplomacy used to include rare skills like respect, restraint, civility and the like, which are in short supply all over the planet.
Esperanto is said to be relatively easy to learn and there’s even a free Google translator available.
I need to give a shout-out to somebody who has given a very even-handed description of the benefits and limitations of Esperanto, Jakub Marian. Although Jakub notes that Esperanto is the most widely spoken constructed language, it’s still spoken by too few people to be recommended as a practical means of communication. Jakub also doubts that it could be the new lingua franca, although there are many who would disagree. Interlingua might be a candidate for that. There’s a Wikipedia article about it, but I can’t read it because it’s in Interlingua.
Moving right along, I might be embarking on one of my famous tangents here, but I noticed from a web search that of my favorite undergraduate college professors, Dr. Jenny Lind Porter-Scott (who died in 2020), was honored in October of 2021 with a poetry reading of her work in Texas.
The Texas Poets’ Corner sponsored A Virtual Evening with Jenny Lind Porter where she was honored by the appearance of Professor Cyrus Cassells, 2021 Poet Laureate of Texas.
Dr. Porter was a benefactor and patron of the Texas Poets’ Corner. In May of 2021, West Texas A&M University (WTAMU) announced a $2.8 million gift from her estate. She was appointed Poet Laureate of Texas, appointed in 1964 by then Governor John Connally. In 1979, she became the only woman to receive the Distinguished Diploma of Honor from Pepperdine University. She’s also in the Texas Women’s Hall of Fame.
She also taught English Literature at an HBCU, Huston-Tillotson University, where I learned a lot from her back in the mid-1970s. She’s a fit person to remember and honor during Women’s History Month.
Why is this relevant to Esperanto? Esperanto translates into “one who hopes.” It suggests hope for a better world, which we all should do if we want the human race to survive. Dr. Porter embodied that.
There has been talk of nuclear weapons and World War III lately, connected with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. A couple of Dr. Porter’s poems in her book, The Lantern of Diogenes and Other Poems, published in 1954, probably speak to this menace, albeit in classical language that might sound a little formal nowadays.
I have an old copy of this volume. A Texas bookseller sold it to me with a handwritten message, which I have kept:
Thanks for your purchase! It’s rare to find a book of this age that when you open the pages it creaks like it is unread. I guess someone liked the way it looked on their bookshelf! Haha. Enjoy the book and Happy New Year.
The two poems in the volume which probably are relevant to the present-day crisis in Ukraine are “Atomic Age 1953″ and ‘Atomic Age 2000.”
The first one sounds like it was written during the early 1950s when there was a lot of anxiety about atomic bombs.
The second one was puzzling to me until I looked at a timeline of the Nuclear Age. It sounds just as full of fear as the first, although it’s set much later in time, in the year 2000, about the time when the dismantling of Russian nuclear weapons was happening. But as time passes, uncertainty grows about the threat of nuclear war.
D-ro Porter skribis ambaŭ pecojn kaj ŝajnas, ke ŝi havis vizion de ĝena estonteco. Ni ne povas lasi ĉi tiun libron sidi nelegita sur la breto. Ni bezonas diplomation, ĉu ĝi estas en la formo de nova lingua franca aŭ simple simpla angla. English translation of Esperanto below:
Dr. Porter wrote both pieces and it seems like she had a vision of a troubling future. We can’t let this book sit unread on the shelf. We need diplomacy, whether it’s in the form of Esperanto, another new lingua franca, or just plain English.
Featured Image picture credit: Pixabaydotcom
I got up at around 3:30 AM this morning, unable to get back to sleep. It was mainly because of the current crisis in Ukraine. Russia has invaded Ukraine. I wonder if many of us will remember where we were and what we were doing when we found out that Russia invaded Ukraine? For us, it was sometime around 9:30 last night. I was listening to the light classical music channel on TV in our living room when Sena came up from downstairs where she had been watching the news and told me about it.
I switched to the TV news and saw two reporters, one based in the U.S. connected as part of the broadcast with another in Kyiv reporting on the shelling of the city. The reporter in Ukraine kept looking back over her shoulder at the city. She seemed distracted and distressed. The other reporter, based in the U.S., asked irritably, “What do the bombs sound like?” as though he were unhappy with her account of what was going on. She replied, just as irritably, “They’re loud!” I think she wanted to also say (as I did in my mind), “They sound like bombs and they’re scary; what do you think bombs sound like?”
I listend to various reporters talk about the attack. One of them commented that President Biden had said there would be no American soldiers actively engaging in combat in Ukraine. If they did, it would be “World War III.”
I thought of the other post I’d written for today. It’s just about a cribbage board in the shape of the state of Iowa that we got from Minnesota the day before yesterday. It came wrapped in a newspaper, probably the whole issue published about a month ago by the Morrison County Record in a town called Little Falls.
We just thought it was unusual that the cribbage board was shipped wrapped in newspaper; usually it’s those Styrofoam packing peanuts or bubble wrap. But this was like getting something from a friend or a family member who used the only thing handy to pack a gift.
I didn’t just toss the newspaper wrapping in the garbage, mainly because I enjoy reading actual printed material including books and newspapers. I was curious about it and so I found the article “In times like these” which I also described in the other post today, which is partly about a cribbage board in the shape of the state of Iowa. The article is a sermon, written by a local clergyman, Tim Sumner.
In it he talks about how difficult things are nowadays, that people are more divisive than he has ever seen. He mentioned the pandemic as a major contributor, but it’s easy to see how it could be applied more broadly now that major world powers seem to be moving toward war to feed what seems to be a hunger for empire-building.
Sumner, in accordance with his role as a clergyman, counsels us to turn to God. In view of the talk of World War III, it’s hard to disagree. Sumner asks, “Can things get worse?” It looks like it can.
I could find a lot of cribbage boards in the shape of single states in America. I could even find one of Middle Earth, believe it or not. But I couldn’t find one in the shape of the whole United States of America. Why?
Sumner writes,
It is “our understanding” that gets in the way. The way we see things is from our perspective. We want things our way. We don’t want to have to go through difficult times. We want life to be easy.
Maybe that’s true. He says trusting God is the way to respond to this. We could do that. And while we’re waiting for God to respond to us, what else could we do?
Go Retire Psychiatrist 