The last European survivor of World War I has died at age 111. Harry Patch’s late-life interviews are cautionary. Reading this story, I’m struck by a glaring hole: unmentioned is why nations sent millions to be slaughtered. A close friend of Patch said the veteran stressed two messages: “Remember with gratitude and respect those who served on all sides, (and) settle disputes by discussion, not war.”
Reading about this descent into sexting hell reminds of simpler times. Never thought I’d get nostalgic for mooning, the worst offense involving nakedness from my school days.
One of my younger brothers was suspended for a week from junior high for flashing his bare butt at a girl during phys ed class. He claimed she had mouthed off. My mother, a secretary at the school, was mortified. Long after the transgression she kept carrying on about the “shame of it all.”
If there had been YouTube and cell phones with video cameras, I no doubt could watch the event all these decades later, along with the rest of the world. Then again some things are better consigned to imagination.
The ‘hood has changed after a week of violent crime only a short walk from my Northeast Portland house.
Count them: two stabbings in two gang fights at the Lloyd Center Mall, another gang fight at the Applebee’s restaurant across the street from the mall, a bank robbery, and a gang-related shooting at an Asian restaurant-bar four blocks south of me. The victim survived four gunshot wounds.
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News of the chimpanzee nearly killing a woman in Connecticut delivered a memory. About fifteen years ago, during chitchat before a late-starting meeting, a colleague at a Florida newspaper mentioned that an elderly chimp lived with him. There was an uncomfortable silence. Then this man, friendly but blandly reserved, came to life as I questioned him about his companion.
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The letter made me feel good. Pacific Power reported that our household bought enough renewable energy in 2008 to prevent the release of 19,890 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions into the air. That’s the same as not driving 20,170 miles. We paid $125 more for electricity to participate in the utility’s Blue Sky program. But the letter’s effect soon faded.
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This is akin to shooting fish in a barrel, I suppose. But if you treasure words and how they’re put together, you’ll enjoy Mark Nickolas’ simple but clever idea: use Microsoft Word’s readability tool to compare the language Barack Obama used Monday answering questions at his first presidential press conference versus that of George W. Bush eight years ago.
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A story of redemption and grace starts my morning: 48 years after beating a prominent member of the Civil Rights Movement, a former Ku Klux Klan member apologizes in person with a handshake and hug.
“I tried to block it out of my mind. It kept coming back,” says Elwin Wilson, who attacked John Lewis, now a congressman from Georgia, in the “whites only” area of a Greyhound bus station in Rock Hill, South Carolina.
Wilson, now 72, has been haunted with guilt for years. What sparked him to apologize, not just to Lewis but black residents in Rock Hill? Barack Obama’s election.
