Meanderings, 8 January 2022
Here’s to 2022 being better than 2021!
Photo by Danila Hamsterman on Unsplash
Kris and I have loved watching these eaglets.
The Doom Machine:
Every morning, I wake up and grab my doom machine. My phone is a piece of revolutionary technology that puts the entire world a scroll away, its every pixel an industrial miracle. It’s also a cataclysm-delivery device.
I roll over and click the blue “f” logo to watch older friends and relatives grow angry and entrenched in their politics. I click on Twitter and drown in a torrent of terrible news delivered by shouting messengers. On apps like Citizen, push alerts warn me of violence and petty crimes happening right now in my area, while neighborhood narcs and NIMBYs feud and name-call on Nextdoor.
On the doom machine, feeling helpless and hopeless is easier than ever. Our politics, institutions, and reality itself seem fractured. Perhaps the only salve is to fight on the doom machine over who’s to blame. Inevitably, this makes us feel worse instead of better. So why do we keep doing it? It seems that many of the extremely online are drawn to the doom, and that should make us concerned about the health and future of our public digital spaces….
But the technology is only part of the battle. Think of it in terms of supply and demand. The platforms provide the supply (of fighting, trolling, conspiracies, and junk news), but the people—the lost and the miserable and the left-behind—provide the demand. We can reform Facebook and Twitter while also reckoning with what they reveal about the nation’s mental health. We should examine more urgently the deeper forces—inequality, a weak social safety net, a lack of accountability for unchecked corporate power—that have led us here. And we should interrogate how our broken politics drive people to seek out easy, conspiratorial answers. This is a bigger ask than merely regulating technology platforms, because it implicates our entire country.
When I open my doom machine now, I try, as best I can, to see past the abstraction. I try to remember that the internet is powered by real, live people. It’s a frightening thought. But also, maybe, a hopeful one.
(NewsNation Now) — Sometimes cold comfort is the product of warm hearts.
Heads-up thinking and dogged determination on the part of two Colorado students saved the life of a canine that might otherwise have suffered a cold, cruel and tragic death.
Colorado School of Mines students Bobby White and Josh Trujillo were backcountry skiing in the Berthoud Pass area an hour west of Denver in the Rocky Mountains when they saw a veritable explosion of snow nearby.
Skiing across the off-trail terrain to check it out, they discovered that the dog of another student, Scott Shepherd, had been climbing above the area of the snow explosion and caused an avalanche.
The dog, Apollo, was buried alive.
Eighty years ago this month, the United States competed in the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games in Nazi Germany, with 18 African-American athletes part of the U.S. squad.
Track star Jesse Owens, one of the greatest Olympians of all time, won four gold medals. What the 17 other African-American Olympians did in Berlin, though, has largely been forgotten — and so too has their rough return home to racial segregation.
"Determination! That's what it takes," one of the athletes, John Woodruff, said during a 1996 oral history interview for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. "A lot of fire in the stomach!"
Woodruff won the gold medal in the 800-meter race — and he did it in Adolf Hitler's Germany.
"There was very definitely a special feeling in winning the gold medal and being a black man," Woodruff said. "We destroyed his master-race theory whenever we [started] winning those gold medals."
Cornelius Johnson won the top spot on the medal stand in the high jump. Dave Albritton won silver….
Still, according to University of Mississippi historian Charles Ross, all the athletes represented a generation of pioneers who chiseled away at stereotypes.
"You have to have Jesse Owens and the other 17 African-Americans before you can have John Carlos, [Muhammad] Ali, George Foreman," Ross says.
Ross says the 18 African-American Olympians of 1936 understood that their dreams had to be limited. None of them were invited to the White House, or shook the hand of President Franklin Roosevelt.
Months after Owens returned home, he told a crowd, "The president didn't even send me a telegram."
Some of you hate the church. Some of you love the church and believe that yours is the best! Some of you have been hurt by the church. Some of you have done the hurting.
For many, the church represents intolerance, hatred, and judgmentalism. It is likely quite accurate to say that most of those outside the church will have nothing to do with it.
Some of those who are now outside the church used to be in it! But their pain, their emptiness, the abuse has been too much. They are done with it (to which I say, “I’m sorry. I understand. And I hope that this series of posts will represent a voice for you.”).
Others have chosen to remain on the inside, but are seriously asking: Can I just quit on this church thing? Can’t I just be a good Christ-follower without ever having to set foot in a church again?
The reality is that we have been asking these questions for years now, but it seems that Covid has helped accelerate the process. After all, many haven’t been to a church for almost 2 years now and their faith has been fine—maybe even better. Why, then, should they go back?
I know that many of us want to give up on the church. We want to quit. We believe that we could do more good outside the church than we could inside it!
The problem is: this is not possible.
(NewsNation Now) — Instead of snacks and soda pop, a vending machine at Mosaic Preparatory Academy in East Harlem dispenses children’s books.
Students can earn tokens for being kind and use them to unlock a book from the machine for them to take home.
“When it was installed, the kids were excited,” the Academy’s principal Dr. Lisette Caesar said during an appearance on “Morning in America”.
The kids can earn tokens by picking up trash and helping each other out with homework.
Kids can also earn tokens by saying hello to school safety officers and to the lunchroom staff “because these are people that we don’t normally recognize on a daily basis,” Caesar said.
“We want them to also be kind to everyone in the community because everyone has a role to play within our school community,” Caesar said.
Before the pandemic, Caesar said the kids at her school were reading online all the time.
“We have an online reading platform, they loved it,” she said.
But as the pandemic wore on, school administrators needed to figure out a way to get kids motivated to read again.