The wonder of technology, the power of connection.

I’m getting ready to turn in after what has been a very full day.

Here’s the post-work agenda.

I talked with Leon Bass, a personal hero and, most recently, memoirist who grew up in Philadelphia, served in the segregated army during World War II, fought in the Battle of the Bulge, witnessed the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp, returned home to become a teacher, became a disciple of non-violence, participated in the March on Washington, and worked for close to 15 years as principal at one of the toughest high schools in the United States.

The publication of Leon’s book was particularly gratifying to me because we had talked about it starting in 1998, one of the first times I met him while working for Facing History.  In it he recounts the events I listed above as well as many more, asking throughout the work, “Is the price too high?”

The price of course is about retaining one’s integrity and acting with courage, even when the inducements to not do so are great indeed.

After Leon, I spoke with Ava Kadishshon Schieber, another 85-year-young sprite, Holocaust survivor and wise spirit.  Ava survived during World War II in her native Serbia by pretending for four years that she was deaf and mute.

Also a writer, poet and artist, she asked with heartfelt concern about my mother-in-law Helen’s condition.

From there, my brother Jon and I spoke via Skype from Haiti, where he is finishing up an assignment with Doctors Without Borders.  In what is just the latest in a series of possible honors, Jon is a finalist for yet another prestigious fellowship.  He’s leaving in about a week for Scotland to deliver his TED talk, and thus needs to wrap up this application by July 7.

To his credit, he’s been working hard on his proposal.  For this fellowship, he has to generate a different and more extensive set of answers than in the initial round.   We are working together to shape and integrate his opening section, the stories he proposes and the reason why this work is necessary now.

It’s slow going at times, and, through Skype, I felt like he was right next door.

I also talked with my honey bunny, Dunreith, who is valiantly (wo)manning the front lines of her mother’s radiation treatments while keeping up with the many demands of her work at Facing History and Ourselves.

Being there for a parent who has an inoperable brain tumor is not easy stuff, and Dunreith’s got lots of strength and an even bigger heart.

Former fourth grade teacher, mentor, friend and blogger Paul Tamburello and I caught up about the various events in our lives since our last conversation.  At times it’s hard for me to believe that it’s been more than 35 years since I was a student in his class at Pierce School.

Arnessa Garrett, our Dart Society vice president and a Louisiana native who now lives in Dallas, called to share an idea she had and that she plans to usher through.

And, finally, I spoke with Margarita Akhvedliani, a fierce, brave and highly accomplished journalist from Georgia and another board member.  We spoke via Skype so that she could avoid ruinous cell phone charges.  As with Jon, even though she was half way around the world, we spoke as if we were sitting next to each other.

This was all after work, so said nothing about working at Hoy with colleagues that hail from Mexico, Spain and Puerto Rico,  and a chance encounter with an acquaintance from Iran.

The ability of technology to bring together from different and overlapping countries and backgrounds and stages of life, all in a single day, is absolutely stunning to me.

I feel enormously fortunate both to live in a time when such connection is no only possible, but easy, and to have the rich web of relationships that support, nurture, witness, challenge and love me.

Thank you.

Honor For All and the March on Washington

UPDATE:  In this thoughtful comment, friend Lynn Ochberg finds the image in this post lacking.

Jeff, I love your passion but please be careful of your notions. A promissory note is different from a check. MLK spoke of the Constitution creating a promissory note promising everyone equal rights, etc. If our vets wrote a blank check, as you suggest, it technically means that the vets are the ones who owe whatever the USA filled into the blank. Your metaphor doesn’t work.
It is the promissory note implied in the Constitution that is owed to the vets: in this case, honor and appropriate care and rehabilitation for all who gave of themselves in military uniforms or as family members of those in uniforms.

ORIGINAL POST:

A pair of paragraphs that often get lost in the annual recounting of Martin Luther King’s iconic “I have a dream” speech talks about the unredeemed promises the country had not kept to its black citizens:

In a sense we have come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.” But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check — a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice. 

Honor for All Rally in Washington, DC

They came from across the country.

Some drove.   Others flew.  Still others rode motorcycles.

But whatever their mode of transportation, all of the people who attended the Honor for All rally today on the Senate side of the U.S. Capitol building shared a common purpose: to make visible the invisible wounds sustained by veterans and their families, and to give honor to all of them for their contributions to the nation.

Organized by Tom Mahany, a clear-eyed, blond haired stone mason and Vietnam veteran from Michigan, the event began right at 10:00 a.m. and continued in a punctual manner throughout the day.

The weather cooperated beautifully, with a few clouds dotting the blue sky and the temperature reaching at most the low 80s.

The crowd was small and many of the chairs unfilled, but Dart Society founder Frank Ochberg, while acknowledging the disappointment, said, “Empty chairs don’t hurt us.  They tell us how far we have to go.”

Mahany opened the presentations by paying tribute to his brother-in-law, who killed himself 20 years ago after waging a 15-year struggle with depression and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

His point, and that of other speakers like Gregg Keesling, whose son also took his life: soldiers who kill themselves after combat should be accorded the same honor and acknowledgment as those who died on the battle field.

Keesling, who sports a reddish pony tail, said he urged his son to get help for the psychological torment he was enduring, but heard the all-too-common refrain that to ask for help is a sign of weakness, not strength.  He took aim at the current practice of the military not sending condolence letters to military families whose loved ones commit suicide.

Honor For All aims to reverse that, and marshaled an impressive array of speakers to present their case.

Brigadier Generals Michael Miller and Richard Thomas spoke about the military’s commitment to helping soldiers dealing with these issues.

Frank spoke about a Vietnam veteran named Terry whose wife Cathy approached him to help her husband.  For 40 years Terry had blamed himself for his friend’s death, finding through his conversations with Frank another way to think about his experience.

Rather than causing his death, Terry, who is deeply religious, started to think about himself as delivering his friend to his Lord.

Terry and Cathy held each other and wept as Frank spoke about them and their story.

Several other speakers addressed the role and impact on the family.

Lucretia Bellamy, whose husband is convalescing at Walter Reed, declared her love for all veterans and her insistence that no one disrespect them.  ”My name is Lucretia Bellamy and I roar with the roar of  a lioness,” she said.

For her part, Kristina Kaufman, spoke about the number of spouses who committed suicide because of the stress caused by being married to their husbands after their return.  She named three of the women who were her friends.  She did so, she said, to give them their dignity.

Politicians’ like Daniel Inouye, a member of the 442 Regimental Combat Team who lost his arm during World War II, sent a message he had delivered to a staff this member at 7:30 a.m. this morning.  Other politicians like Kent Conrad and Andre Carson also emphasized the importance of the cause.

Keynote speakers Jeremiah Workman and Jennifer Crane shared their stories of trying to drown their pain in alcohol and drugs, of losing almost everything, and of finding their way out from the abyss.

For both, a turning point came when they accepted that they had PTSD and a traumatic brain injury and got help.

Representatives from the non-profit sector addressed the crowd, as did trauma survivors and former soldiers turned writers Dario DiBattista.

In the end, Mahany returned and called up his nephew Brian, the son of his brother-in-law.

Now 30, the younger man and his uncle shared a long embrace.

The open expression of emotion and the movement from the invisible wounds that contributed mightily to his father’s death into the physical presence of the son he sired symbolized the hope and promise of the day, and of the movement.

I have not served in the military and will never do so.  I am by temperament and practice someone who believes in non-violence.

Yet the courage of today’s speakers, the catch in their throats, the limp in their walks, and the exquisite tenderness with which two Marine parents, whose son is struggling with these issues, asked Jennifer Crane if they could hug her, brought home to me as never before the valor of the men and women who have, as one speaker said, written a blank check to the country.

They deserve our respect, and they deserve our honor.

Jim Lehrer pledges to join the Dart Society

Meeting iconic newsman Jim Lehrer Friday night was a thrill.

It started with handshakes.  It ended with pumped fists and rounds of hugs.

Five of us Dart Society members met with Jim Lehrer tonight in a meeting coordinated by Frank Ochberg, our founder and guide.

Just in case you’re wondering, that was THE Jim Lehrer.

Pablo Casals, my brother Jon and practice.

Pablo Casals never stopped working hard and trying to get better.

It may be an apocryphal story, and when the late, great cellist Pablo Casals was asked, at age 95, while he still practiced six hours a day, he answered, “Because I believe I am still improving.”

I love it.

 

Learning from Goya’s Still Learning

Goya's Aun Aprendo made a deep impression on me during our family's April visit to Spain.

As readers of this space may remember, Dunreith, Aidan and I spent his spring break in Madrid.

The trip was notable for a number of reasons.

First, Aidan had some kind of pneumonia the entire trip-a factor which added to his general discontent on spending his last weeklong vacation in high school with his parents.

In one of his more memorable lines, when he learned several weeks later that I had caught some bug that had me on my back for 24 hours, he replied, “That sucks. Let me drag you around Spain for a week.”

In case you are keeping score, the tally on that exchange was son, one, father, zero.

Jack Crane’s Father Day Story

In addition to being a friend and fellow Massachusetts native, Jack Crane will always have a distinctive place in my blogging heart.

The reason: he was the first, and thus far the only, person ever to recognize me in person from my picture on the blog.

To be fair, he had a couple of advantages.

To begin, he knew my brother Jon through his daughter Liz, with whom Jon has worked on a number of projects.

Beyond that, Jack and I had spoken on the phone while I was cutting my teeth as a reporter at South Shore Community News.

Still, it was an undeniable thrill on a sunny Saturday morning, when Dunreith and I were walking along the lake and heard an oncoming lanky gentleman exclaim, in essence: “Jeff Kelly Lowenstein! I recognize your picture!”

Beyond feeding my vanity, Jack regularly offers thought-provoking and sensitive comments (One of my favorite Jack chestnuts came in response to a post I wrote about Aidan’s upcoming college visits: “It’s all about the tour guides!”).

The lakefront, and, indeed, the spot near where Dunreith and I first met Jack in person is the site of this touching and typically well-written story that Jack posted as a comment last night about Father’s Day.

I am confident you’ll enjoy it as much as I did:

My daughter and son asked me how I would like to celebrate Father’s Day, knowing I would say just plant me anywhere on the lakefront and I am a happy chap. And so we strolled down to the lakefront after a lovely meal of lox, bagels and plenty of prosciutto! The lakefront being a rather dangerous place, I was escorted by two brave warriors (age 5 and 7), carrying their bows and sponge-tipped arrows, as well as their walkie-talkies in the event of a need for a rapid response rescue.

As is often the case, there was a vigorous volleyball game in process, and the typical guess at the ethnic origins of the participants. This particular game was clearly Middle Eastern of some kind. Iraqi, Turkish, Iranian, or perhaps Gypsies? It was particularly interesting to see two tall, thin young Euro teenage girls leaping five feet in the air at the service line, zipping in mean looking serves to all male opponents. You are not going to see that in Saudi Arabia I whispered to my daughter.

Meanwhile, my warrior escorts had attracted the attention of several other young warriors interested in checking out the arrows and walkie-talkies. I was pleased to see my grandsons managing the recruits with steady hands and nerve: The 5-year-old in charge of communication training and the eldest warrior pointing out the fine art of archery. They occasionally brought in my son, the Uncle, for advise.

My daughter and I continued our ethnic guessing game, as it became more interesting noting the traditional clothes worn by the Mom’s of the young warrior recruits. Finally Liz asked one young girl (maybe 8 years old) where she was from. “Afghanistan,” she says, taking our breath away a bit. ” We can’t go back home because it is not safe there. My Dad’s dad was killed there.”

And so a large Afghani family played volleyball, shot bows and arrows, learned about walkie-talkies, rode bicycles and their little children told stories to affluent americans about their “home.”

It was a good day, and yes, images of kite flying filled my head.

Happy Father’s Day, Fathers!

The minutes in this year’s Father Day are dwindling down, and it’s been a wonderfully full one for me.

The celebration began yesterday, when Aidan, Jon and I went to Manny’s, an authentic New York deli on Roosevelt, ate large, if not massive, quantities meat, and came home to nap.

I did have to work today, and I read during my cruise through Google Reader a piece a father in the grips of Alzheimer’s called “Cherished Moments that Dad will forget,” an article about President Obama’s saying that being a father is his hardest and most rewarding job, a Washington Post column by Joel Achenbach explaining that Father’s Day is the one manufactured holiday he actually enjoys celebrating, and an essay about the environmental legacy we are leaving our children.

Each of these articles caught my attention and reminded me of the day. Treating myself to lunch and a Grande Mocha frappuccino, double blended with whipped cream of course, was fun, too.

But the biggest treat came when I returned home.

Aidan had gone to Dominick’s and bought us a couple of steaks that we threw on the grill, along with a host of red and yellow peppers, asparagus and mushrooms left over from his graduation party. After our Father’s Day feast at Manny’s yesterday, we decided that this summer, his last in our home, will be the summer of grilling.

The air was perfectly clean and clear and the sky was cloudless. We chatted quietly about where his friends are before shooting a few hoops, cooking the food and watching the first episode of Treme, David Simon’s paean to post-Katrina New Orleans.

We didn’t talk much, but enough to know that we both had enjoyed what we saw and were looking forward to sharing the next episode. We called my dad and talked briefly to him before Aidan did battle with the online financial aid information at Tulane.

Dunreith chipped in, as she always does, with photo albums of her brothers, Dad, me and her father Marty.

She felt Marty’s absence today, and I did, too. I remember vividly how good it felt when he and I exchanged well wishes in 2001 on the first Father’s Day after Dunreith and I got eloped. He had been in the role for more than four decades, and was helping me grow into my place with his customary grace and generosity.

Being a father is, as our president said, a hard thing to do, and I am often aware when I am making mistakes of one sort or another.

And there are moments like today, when I remember talking with Marty and thank Helen for having Dunreith and swap greetings with my dad and share a meal with my son, who is a young man I am proud to know and have helped raise, when I feel grateful and gratified in a deep-down way that was hard to imagine and may be harder to explain, but I think other dads will recognize when they read this.

Happy Father’s Day, Fathers. I hope yours was rich with love and joy and connection and laughter.

Twitter’s Eternal Present and (Almost) Non-existent Past

Like many people these days, I love to Tweet.

Or, to be more precise, I love reading other people’s Tweets.

Millions of people around the globe using this form of communication have only amplified its importance. In fact, journalists who specialize in Tweeting and social media in general probably have a more bright and stable career trajectory than those who produce print content in the traditional method used by newspapers for more than a century.

Reasonable people may disagree about the precise role Twitter and other social media played in the Arab Spring that saw a number of regimes toppled and others sustaining heavy body blows, but few would argue with this statement:

The revolution in Egypt feels like it happened a long time ago.

This also has something to do with a little-discussed but highly significant consequence for Twitter-its impact on our perception.

Thanks to Twitter, by the time a basketball game is over, much of the commentary and analysis has already happened. If newspapers used to be “the first draft of history,” now that role has been usurped not only by those people who do not have a press pass, but who are actually experiencing the event in real time. In many instances, and for many people, reading a static and physical description of the same event one witnessed and heard dissected the night before is a part of why the newspaper industry in America has continued its steady decline (It’s a far different scenario in countries like Finland and Japan, but that’s a topic for another post.).

Obviously,absorbing information through Twitter has many advantages, not the least of which is getting real-time information and discussion of what is happening at that very moment. The opening of the number of people in the conversation can lead to fascinating and rich interactions and conversation that brings together people who are not physically in the same place. Thus, when Chicago Bears quarterback Jay Cutler did not go back into the contest against the Green Bay Packers for the right to play in this past season’s Super Bowl, we heard instantly the disapproval voiced by Maurice Jones-Drew. While not a paid analyst, or even a journalist, the running back’s position on the issue held some weight due to his own extensive experience of playing in and with pain.

In earlier years, that some opinion might not have had an audience. Now, thanks to Twitter, his opinion was part of the conversational mix.

Of course, the Egyptian revolution and a the veracity of a surly quarterback’s injury are vastly different topics. Yet I would argue that the advantages that Twitter presents, and the pre-existing context in which it occurs of 24-hour news and commentary through the Internet, have had serious consequences in our understanding of time.

Specifically, they have worked to nearly erase the past.

Because the first draft of history has already written before the event or day has ended, newspapers, which used to be that first version are now cast to some degree in the role of providing perspective on what has just occurred.

People’s hunger or desire to thoroughly explore that which has come before, if it existed before, has been diminished. Indeed, I would argue, that the very idea of what constitutes the past, or its relevance toward today’s events, have both undergone substantial revision, in part due to Twitter.

Consider the recently concluded NBA season. Before LeBron James’ Miami Heat had won a single game in the final series, Scottie Pippen and others were saying that he could be the greatest player to have ever played the game. Now, to be fair, this is a statement that has a certain future trajectory to it. Yet it also seemed stunningly oblivious to the careers of thousands of players who had come before, and whose “bodies of work” James presumably was in a position to surpass.

In a similar vein, Dirk Nowitzki not only, as Scoop Jackson noted, erased a history of ostensible playoff failures by leading his Dallas Mavericks to a championship, he invoked in increasing comparisons to Larry Bird, another blond-haired gunner who played 13 years with a single team.

I’ll cop to my hometown bias in favor of Larry Legend, and I would say that most, if not a very high majority, of serious basketball fans, would deem the comparison ludicrous, especially when offered, like Pippen’s assessment of James, before a single game of the finals had even been played.

This shrunken sense of the past is by no means limited to the world of basketball I so deeply enjoy inhabiting.

Whereas getting back to someone within 24 hours used to be standard professional protocol, now returning a call the next day could leave you out of the 20 other exchanges that had happened since the original communication. Studies about young people’s attention span shows that, too, has gotten smaller.

I know I’m sounding awfully close to a middle-aged crank moaning about an increasingly interconnected and constantly plugged-in world, and that may be true. I also don’t want to romanticize or overstate either the equity of the earlier world or the gains or insights that can come from endlessly pondering the impact of some long-distant battle on today’s social configuration.

And yet I can’t help but be a little worried at the erosion and compression of the past, both because of its connection to today and because of how it can help us understand how we have gotten to the present moment and where we might go together based on that reflection and analysis.

I had planned to end this post with a quip about having to post to Twitter and not remembering when I started this post because it was too long, but instead would like to hear your opinions.

Has Twitter contributed to a lessened sense of history? If true, is that a positive or negative development? Why is this so?

LeBron James= ARod 2.0?

They partied together last October a day after the Yankees lost in the playoffs, so I guess it only makes sense that Alex Rodriguez would come to LeBron James’ defense after his dismal performance in the 2011 NBA Finals.

Asserting that it’s hard to win a championship regardless of how talented one is, A-Ro(i)d added that fans should celebrate James’ skills and remember that he is a wee lad of 26 years.

Whether the often-derided Rodriquez’s point has merit is debatable.

But what is not in doubt is that a strong argument can be made that LeBron is A-Rod 2.0.

Consider the following:

Both have been blessed with otherworldly gifts that they have honed.

Both broke into the league as earnest young “good guys.”

Both left winning teams in a way that left a bitter taste in the original team’s fan base that has lingered for years.

Both eventually joined teams where, despite all their ability, they were considered the second fiddle-a move that ultimately diminished the luster of Rodriguez’s World Series triumph because it was not considered fully legitimate, and that may well do the same for James, should the Heat eventually triumph.

Both had initial periods where they performed at high levels in the playoffs-even with the Finals debacle, James has some of the most gaudy statistics in basketball history, while Rodriguez hit .366 with 4 homers before the Red Sox-Yankees 2004 classic-followed by spectacular possibly career-defining failures.

Both seem at once utterly self-absorbed and narcissistic-qualities that have led to bizarre moments-A-Rod as a half-man/half horse; the piece about LeBron partying in Vegas that was pulled, anyone?-and bewildered by the negative reaction they receive.

The latter is another key similarity.

I wrote yesterday about how LeBron is not Bill Laimbeer, someone who, at least in the sports context, was comfortable being a bully and a villain (Note how I said “being,” rather than “playing a role.”).

But while the actions of both James and Rodriguez have gathered considerable enmity, neither seems at home either in the position Laimbeer filled so willingly, nor, ultimately, in his own skin.

James can take heart in the at least partial redemption his erstwhile partying buddy and current defender earned through his performance in the 2009 playoffs, when his dominant performance played a pivotal role in propelling the Yankees to a World Series victory that earned him his long-coveted ring.

Whether James ultimately arrives at the same destination remains to be seen.

But what is almost certain is that his failures, accentuated by the magnitude of his gifts and his arrogance, will continue to follow him until he does indeed reach the pinnacle by winning a championship.