What I read today

A quick update before I head out to take care of cats!

Today’s “I read this so you may want to or you may not, but at least I’m providing you with options” post!

Today in The Tablet: My Mother’s Secret. In this piece, the author describes how on her deathbed, her mother, a famous CIA analyst, told her she did not want her (the daughter) to raise her children Jewish. Upon this horrifying realization, the author went on to interview top members of the CIA and historians to find out what was really going on. A great read.

This in the magazine I write for, Splice today: Caste in Revolt Please keep in mind that I don’t agree with everything I share, I am providing you with information and things to ponder, should you choose. Here’s a quote from this piece:

Excited about this film—I saw it two months before it was released in theaters—I checked out Wilkerson’s books, and began to read Caste. The result was disappointing. Wilkerson—a onetime Washington Post op-ed writer and itinerant journalism professor—discusses how Trump voters represent white people asserting their dominance over non-whites. Perhaps Wilkerson is writing what she needs to for the caste above her that provides her with employment.

She seems clueless that the Trump voters (including black men and Hispanics) are blue-collar and small business people who believe they’re being eradicated by a corporate and governing class that calls them names, smears them, posts dating ads refusing to date them, denies them access to educational credentials (rationing education by race and price and federal student loan formulae) and denies them access to careers unless they have the approved politics and educational credentials. She doesn’t see Trump voters as a suppressed caste in revolt.

But that’s what they are. Their revolt is part of what slowly created individual rights and liberties in Europe—the Peasant’s Revolt, the Glorious Revolution—until the Magna Carta and then the Bill of Rights were written and then Europeans (and others) slowly began to wipe out slavery, which still exists in Africa, just without as big an international market for those enslaved.

Whoa. (It took me a second to remember how to spell that.) That’s a big statement. I would have to say that it does line up with my experience talking with men all over the country though. They are not all Trump voters, but many are extremely confused and disaffected by what the author of this piece describes. Ideological litmus tests at work, lack of opportunities, and the basic assumption that white men, no matter what their background (many are very poor or grew up poor), are to blame for everything. This is the group who are dying the “deaths of despair”: liver disease from over consuming alcohol, drug overdoses and deaths of contaminated drugs, and suicide, often by guns. Yet they are forgotten in the posters that grace my neighborhood that say, “We stand with…” list designated oppressed groups.

I wish there were a much better answer than suicide or voting for someone who is, uh, clearly not quite well. Many of us long for a strong center again, of people who want safe neighborhoods and good education for all. I have lived in a dangerous neighborhood and worked in more dangerous ones, trying to help children who barely have a chance given what they are up against. The epidemic of gun violence is destroying us, and it seems like left and right are too busy worrying about issues that divide.

And this today in The Scroll, on the man who set himself on fire. Read for yourself, I will not venture any commentary on this one.

Meanwhile, the flowers are coming out.