Thank you Jim, for being the thread of light that stitches us together in appreciation of having something uplifting to move our minds forward today. It’s bleak out here. Perspectives which find ways to tie us, rather than annihilate bonds are medicine.
Currently, I am in the initial stages of a rare cultural partnership that has illuminated simple joy and an understanding that people of very diverse cultures can join hands, letting talents flow together for a common cause, discovering what our human sides have in common. Moro descendants, Muslim men and women, US citizens and veterans, joining forces in a very war torn area of the Philippines where the US still restricts travel, working to retrieve remains from multiple wars, particularly WWII.
The historical knowledge I have gained is quite deep. More, is seeing a Native American Anthropologist from Amsterdam, holding hands with hijab clothed Moro women; big smiles on their faces while trekking through jungle terrain, shoulder to shoulder with war veterans, Filipino Moro historians and others. It gave light to the thoughts that we have common human bonds running deep; inspiring friendships.
Less annihilation
More hand holding
More friendship
Keep reminding us of what matters and what is still available, despite the paucity of this Presidency.
Thank you very much, and for news of your current project. Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s we were frequently in the Philippines, including in Moro areas in Mindanao. It is very encouraging to hear about the connections you are building there.
Thank you for this, James Fallows. When Ali came to Walden in 2015, an astute member of our community who was connected to the Thoreau Society saw it as an opportunity of a lifetime. She rallied the resources to bring him west to Utah before he returned home to Tehran. With that visit he began expanding our vision, and has continued to do so over the last decade through our digital connections. Ali reminds us of the power in our common humanity, of the spiritual or mystical truths that undergird our seeming differences. He teaches us to see deeper wisdom in our own culture and find the commonalities that exist between all cultures. We pray and pray for the safety of his family, and by extension his fellow Iranians--when this is behind us, we will have so much to offer each other. It will be teachers like Ali who are prepared to help us learn to get along.
(My imperfect recollection is that he found Thoreau through Voice of America as a teen, but this will have to be confirmed--his story is worth hearing... He readily recognized in American Transcendentalists a relationship with ancient Persian poets. Love for these commonly held truths and for his fellow beings has guided his work ever since.)
Thank you for the beautiful piece by your friend, Ali. I hope he continues to remain safe and continues to remind us of the connections between Thoreau's thinking and the thinking of the Persian poets.
Inspired by Ali, I would like to add a voice from the past...from a time when the Kennedy Center was still a center for culture, not vulture. Here is Bettye LaVette transmuting The Who's song "Love Reign O'er Me" into something far more powerful. Watch the faces!
Advice: play it loud. I rarely advise this, but this song deserves it. It is supposed to shake us to our foundations.
"Alleluiah" (more often spelled without the 'H') is subtly different in meaning than the similar "Hallelujah," which may be why it creates a more powerful, more purely spiritual, effect. It is not just about emotions, even greatly compassionate ones such as KD Lang expressed, but may stir up emotions, or even make us shake physically. Speaking from experience.
Yes, that Don Henley. In May 2004, a few of us senior executives at The Sharper Image hosted a small dinner for him as he made a pitch to support preservation of Walden Pond. Not sure how that happened; as I strolled over with Sharper's founder, Richard Thalheimer, he asked me who Don Henley was! Richard was the type who swooned over the new iPod but never once said anything about music, or a song, or a singer. Ever heard of The Eagles, I asked; nope. Knowing what he valued, I informed him theirs was the biggest selling album in American history. Now we're just two blocks from the fancy Chinese white-table-cloth restaurant. Upon greeting, Richard shook Don's hand and was rapturous: Wow, the greatest selling album ever! Saved his ass. I asked Don about what led to this dinner; he recounted how he started as an English major at a small Texas college, but ultimately changed his mind and decided to go to L.A. to become a rock star. He remembered the occasion when I first saw The Eagles, a beastly hot day, summer of 1972 in Virginia Beach. (I was stationed there in the Navy.) Eagles were the warmup act for Procol Harum. I told Don my friend and I left after their warmup, I was so taken (and stoned) and never saw the main act. He said Procol Harum were so generous to his group; the Brits were older, some with their wives, and Don shared warm memories of how his elders helped him relax and enjoy the ride. As the dinner moved on, it was clear Don was sincere and thoughtful in his desire to help preserve the legacy of Walden Pond and the little lake itself; it is quite small and could easily be overrun. I have a photo of the occasion. Thankful to Mr. Henley for helping make this very human connection that you so beautifully described.
Tony, thank you. I still have a working email address for DH, and I will send this to him. I think he will really appreciate it. (And Procol Harum! I had not thought of them in a long while, but am glad to be reminded.)
Nothing much to it. The prof is James Giles, a fellow Texan who taught him at North Texas State before he moved on to Northern Illinois. He mentioned somewhere along the line that he'd been invited up to the Pond by Henley when Clinton dedicated the Thoreau Institute. (Jim did say he couldn't understand DH's decision to return to Texas. ;) )
As mentioned above, in a couple of days I will send these supportive comments to Ali by email. I don't know whether he'll still be able to receive them, but some day he will, and I know it will mean a lot.
These are beautiful words from our new friend in Iran. Let us hope he remains safe. His words were not written in vain. They did land upon sympathetic ears here.
Since he has written on the subject of light, it might be useful to recall a remarkable American response to the 911 attacks on our own country: the light sculptures called the Towers of Light.
Imagine: responding to death and destruction not with more of the same, but with shining beacons of light. One of the few things in our recent American history to be truly proud of.
And I find it lovely that the Tribute in Light is turned off at regular intervals to re-orient birds and allow them to fly away from the light, which apparently confuses them. The Tribute is monitored by volunteers who count the birds and notify the production team that the lights need to be turned off for 15 to 20 minutes. I love that this amazing tribute to the victims of 9-11 is also responsive to the needs of migrating and local birds.
I was actually present at the ceremony to turn the lights on for the first time on March 11, 2002, and also on the last night of the installation's original run on April 14. This was very important to me, and I made it my business to be there.
I considered it a near miracle that this thing got done. The opposite of vengeance.
Rising above.
Luckily, enough people recognized the importance of the lights (now called the Tribute in Light, to clarify that they lights are supposed to refer to the people who died, not the buildings, which were iconic only in being very tall and a part of the skyline) to keep them going every year. If they ever get turned off, that will be a very bad sign.
FWIW I did lose a friend from high school, Margaret Quinn, who worked high in Tower One, and never got out. She and her husband, Duane, were very close, and he must have been devastated.
Our leaders need to remember that wars kill real people.
A pilot friend of my brother's was flying his airliner jet on 911 (I think for JetBlue) when he got a message in the cockpit saying that the USA airspace was now closed, and he had to find a place to land, pronto. Chills must have gone done his spine. That had never happened before.
The imaginative cover of the New York Times Magazine which preceded the Tribute was oxygen to the people of New York. One of the best things the paper has ever done.
Its always a good thing to remind ourselves that there are living, thinking human beings on the other side of any war. I was raised in the 50's and 60's, when the USSR was the number one enemy. It wasn't until I watched Phil Donahue's shows in Russia, that I realized the Russian people were very much like all others. Its actually the leaders who go to war, often against the will of their populace. The other realization I have had after watchiing the world and reading history, war doesn't seem to solve any problems. We're still fighting the Civil War, and one could argue, WWI and WWII. Perhaps it all really goes back to the Crusades and then the Spanish Inquisition. Same old tune, very few new notes, other than the escalation of the killing power of our weapons.
On the person-to-person connection front: For a long time (as I wrote frequently, when we lived in China), a saving grace, or buffering factor, in US-Chinese political tensions was that in general, Americans who lived in China **liked** Chinese people (despite the system). Similarly for Chinese people in the US. Despite all the obvious macro-scale differences, the similarities at the person-to-person level were recognizable and strong.
Deb and I saw the same phenomenon time and again in the Our Towns travels. People in Iowa or Ohio or South Dakota might have been worked up into alarm about "the crisis at the border" etc. But generally they liked and respected the immigrants who were actually in their communities — opening restaurants, working in hospitals, of course picking crops, and pressuring their children to do well in school.
Anything that exposes people to more of the human variety of the world is a plus. As you say.
Exposure to real people eats stereotypes. This really shows up with the current generation. I see them all the time. There is so much more mixing between black/white/asian/hispanic kids than ever before. They are no longer very concerned with "color," in fact they joke about it quite openly, in a way that might shock their more "politically-correct" elders.
There is still less openness about money and class than there needs to be. Status counts for more than race now. Status is the new "race."
The towns sort by status/money/advantages.
Maybe the emerging status will be simply about who has the most power.
Kids all listen to the same music, with country trending sharply upwards, although the athletes mostly warm up to hip hop, at least where I live. Kids are ALL are heavily online.
One school took the phones away during school, but since the kids are addicts they tried to use the Chromebooks and computers instead.
Boys and girls in high school keep to their own kind. Girls with girls, boys with boys. Very few take dates of either gender to the prom. They come with their gender groups, but the girls dance with their dates/phones, with which they are constantly filming themselves, while the boys "dance" in a rough manner more akin to rugby, forming scrums and shoving...for fun! One girl came all by herself in a rental Bentley coupe, which came complete with photographer. Getting seen is the key. Showing off is advertising yourself, which is online culture, the primary reference point now. Even in politics.
This is the first digital-only generation. A staff member in an affluent town recently told me that high school kids can't read anything longer than about a paragraph without becoming exhausted from dopamine withdrawal. They must be kept entertained. They read at the middle school level. College will come to mean little, since they mostly can't do college level work. And that's before AI made doing school work obsolete. Of course there will still be a few who can escape this, probably ones with highly educated parents.
I don't think kids can see far ahead into the future. But they can sense that unless they are heavily advantaged, now, no future has been planned for them.
We will be eaten alive by better disciplined nations.
Just came across this article about Thoreau the scientist in The Conversation. I had no idea about this side of Thoreau and thought others might enjoy the article. https://theconversation.com/thoreau-the-scientist-how-environmental-research-informed-walden-and-later-works-281097
Thank you Jim, for being the thread of light that stitches us together in appreciation of having something uplifting to move our minds forward today. It’s bleak out here. Perspectives which find ways to tie us, rather than annihilate bonds are medicine.
Currently, I am in the initial stages of a rare cultural partnership that has illuminated simple joy and an understanding that people of very diverse cultures can join hands, letting talents flow together for a common cause, discovering what our human sides have in common. Moro descendants, Muslim men and women, US citizens and veterans, joining forces in a very war torn area of the Philippines where the US still restricts travel, working to retrieve remains from multiple wars, particularly WWII.
The historical knowledge I have gained is quite deep. More, is seeing a Native American Anthropologist from Amsterdam, holding hands with hijab clothed Moro women; big smiles on their faces while trekking through jungle terrain, shoulder to shoulder with war veterans, Filipino Moro historians and others. It gave light to the thoughts that we have common human bonds running deep; inspiring friendships.
Less annihilation
More hand holding
More friendship
Keep reminding us of what matters and what is still available, despite the paucity of this Presidency.
Thank you very much, and for news of your current project. Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s we were frequently in the Philippines, including in Moro areas in Mindanao. It is very encouraging to hear about the connections you are building there.
Thank you for this, James Fallows. When Ali came to Walden in 2015, an astute member of our community who was connected to the Thoreau Society saw it as an opportunity of a lifetime. She rallied the resources to bring him west to Utah before he returned home to Tehran. With that visit he began expanding our vision, and has continued to do so over the last decade through our digital connections. Ali reminds us of the power in our common humanity, of the spiritual or mystical truths that undergird our seeming differences. He teaches us to see deeper wisdom in our own culture and find the commonalities that exist between all cultures. We pray and pray for the safety of his family, and by extension his fellow Iranians--when this is behind us, we will have so much to offer each other. It will be teachers like Ali who are prepared to help us learn to get along.
(My imperfect recollection is that he found Thoreau through Voice of America as a teen, but this will have to be confirmed--his story is worth hearing... He readily recognized in American Transcendentalists a relationship with ancient Persian poets. Love for these commonly held truths and for his fellow beings has guided his work ever since.)
What a wonderful story. Thank you!
This is beautiful.
Thank you.
I appreciate it, and know Ali will as well. (And his colleagues in the Thoreau-studies world.)
Thank you for the beautiful piece by your friend, Ali. I hope he continues to remain safe and continues to remind us of the connections between Thoreau's thinking and the thinking of the Persian poets.
Thank you. I will collect comments on this post and email them to Ali. (He's not able to read anything other than text messages.)
Where politics fails, culture responds.
Inspired by Ali, I would like to add a voice from the past...from a time when the Kennedy Center was still a center for culture, not vulture. Here is Bettye LaVette transmuting The Who's song "Love Reign O'er Me" into something far more powerful. Watch the faces!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJi6maTueSc
Or how about DC's own Eva Cassidy's soulful "Bridge Over Troubled Water":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHYW0drRwVg
(The Good die young. Like 33.)
Maybe we could swing by Canada for a moment to hear KD Lang's transformation of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah"?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYiMJ2bC65A
"Cold and broken" is an accurate description of the USA right now. Still waiting for its vision of enlightenment.
After 250 years.
Instead, we are working on turning gold into lead.
Those are all magnificent, thank you.
And I left out California's late daughter, Constance Demby, who left us with powerful music like this "Alleluiah," sung by an innocent child:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjXFyg-SgXI
Advice: play it loud. I rarely advise this, but this song deserves it. It is supposed to shake us to our foundations.
"Alleluiah" (more often spelled without the 'H') is subtly different in meaning than the similar "Hallelujah," which may be why it creates a more powerful, more purely spiritual, effect. It is not just about emotions, even greatly compassionate ones such as KD Lang expressed, but may stir up emotions, or even make us shake physically. Speaking from experience.
https://self-instruct.com/difference-between-alleluia-and-hallelujah
When people are starved spiritually, they can act like less than they are. That is our world today.
Yes, that Don Henley. In May 2004, a few of us senior executives at The Sharper Image hosted a small dinner for him as he made a pitch to support preservation of Walden Pond. Not sure how that happened; as I strolled over with Sharper's founder, Richard Thalheimer, he asked me who Don Henley was! Richard was the type who swooned over the new iPod but never once said anything about music, or a song, or a singer. Ever heard of The Eagles, I asked; nope. Knowing what he valued, I informed him theirs was the biggest selling album in American history. Now we're just two blocks from the fancy Chinese white-table-cloth restaurant. Upon greeting, Richard shook Don's hand and was rapturous: Wow, the greatest selling album ever! Saved his ass. I asked Don about what led to this dinner; he recounted how he started as an English major at a small Texas college, but ultimately changed his mind and decided to go to L.A. to become a rock star. He remembered the occasion when I first saw The Eagles, a beastly hot day, summer of 1972 in Virginia Beach. (I was stationed there in the Navy.) Eagles were the warmup act for Procol Harum. I told Don my friend and I left after their warmup, I was so taken (and stoned) and never saw the main act. He said Procol Harum were so generous to his group; the Brits were older, some with their wives, and Don shared warm memories of how his elders helped him relax and enjoy the ride. As the dinner moved on, it was clear Don was sincere and thoughtful in his desire to help preserve the legacy of Walden Pond and the little lake itself; it is quite small and could easily be overrun. I have a photo of the occasion. Thankful to Mr. Henley for helping make this very human connection that you so beautifully described.
Tony, thank you. I still have a working email address for DH, and I will send this to him. I think he will really appreciate it. (And Procol Harum! I had not thought of them in a long while, but am glad to be reminded.)
I know the English prof who introduced him to Thoreau.
And..... ? (Let's hear a little more!)
Nothing much to it. The prof is James Giles, a fellow Texan who taught him at North Texas State before he moved on to Northern Illinois. He mentioned somewhere along the line that he'd been invited up to the Pond by Henley when Clinton dedicated the Thoreau Institute. (Jim did say he couldn't understand DH's decision to return to Texas. ;) )
Thanks!
Beautiful story, thank you. Oh, if I could go back in time to see the Eagles AND Procol Harum (one of my fave bands growing up).
Beautiful and a very important place to start if we’re here to heal ourselves and the planet!
As mentioned above, in a couple of days I will send these supportive comments to Ali by email. I don't know whether he'll still be able to receive them, but some day he will, and I know it will mean a lot.
He has been heard, and appreciated.
Thank You, Ali. You really got us stirred up!
We will remember our kinsman Ali, and hold his light in our hearts. Thank you for sharing his words.
Ali will be grateful for all of these supportive words.
These are beautiful words from our new friend in Iran. Let us hope he remains safe. His words were not written in vain. They did land upon sympathetic ears here.
Since he has written on the subject of light, it might be useful to recall a remarkable American response to the 911 attacks on our own country: the light sculptures called the Towers of Light.
Imagine: responding to death and destruction not with more of the same, but with shining beacons of light. One of the few things in our recent American history to be truly proud of.
Have a look:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PF6u1bj5Q6I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivgTiP55psU
Anybody can turn on a searchlight, but in this darkness we need to find the light of lights within us.
Where else can we find the amazing grace that restoreth our souls?
And I find it lovely that the Tribute in Light is turned off at regular intervals to re-orient birds and allow them to fly away from the light, which apparently confuses them. The Tribute is monitored by volunteers who count the birds and notify the production team that the lights need to be turned off for 15 to 20 minutes. I love that this amazing tribute to the victims of 9-11 is also responsive to the needs of migrating and local birds.
https://nycbirdalliance.org/blog/ensuring-this-year-s-9-11-tribute-in-light-was-safe-for-birds
https://birdsnews.com/bird-deaths-averted-when-9-11-light-show-turned-off/
Proof that there are still people who care.
Wow! I had not paid any attention to that before. (I that rarely in New York overnight.) That is stunning.
I was actually present at the ceremony to turn the lights on for the first time on March 11, 2002, and also on the last night of the installation's original run on April 14. This was very important to me, and I made it my business to be there.
I considered it a near miracle that this thing got done. The opposite of vengeance.
Rising above.
Luckily, enough people recognized the importance of the lights (now called the Tribute in Light, to clarify that they lights are supposed to refer to the people who died, not the buildings, which were iconic only in being very tall and a part of the skyline) to keep them going every year. If they ever get turned off, that will be a very bad sign.
FWIW I did lose a friend from high school, Margaret Quinn, who worked high in Tower One, and never got out. She and her husband, Duane, were very close, and he must have been devastated.
https://voicescenter.org/living-memorial/victim/margaret-quinn-orloske
Our leaders need to remember that wars kill real people.
A pilot friend of my brother's was flying his airliner jet on 911 (I think for JetBlue) when he got a message in the cockpit saying that the USA airspace was now closed, and he had to find a place to land, pronto. Chills must have gone done his spine. That had never happened before.
https://natca.org/community/awards/atc-on-9-11-the-single-greatest-feat-in-all-of-atc-history/
The imaginative cover of the New York Times Magazine which preceded the Tribute was oxygen to the people of New York. One of the best things the paper has ever done.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribute_in_Light
Simplify, simplify, simplify.
Which does not mean send simpletons to negotiate
Your range of expertise and eloquence continue to amaze. Great piece Jim
Bob, you are as ever so gracious. In gratitude and solidarity, Jim
Thank you James. I have been a fan of your clear and inspiring ideas since ‘more like us’ and I hope you and yours live long healthy lives.
Thank you!
Lovely close readings of HDT.
On the close-reading front: I love Ali's assessment of rapt/wrapped, and "sunny" vs "in the sun."
Yes, exactly what I was most thinking of, and that he does it in a second (or third?) language! I'm humbled.
Beautiful, Jim, many thanks
Tom, thank you!
Its always a good thing to remind ourselves that there are living, thinking human beings on the other side of any war. I was raised in the 50's and 60's, when the USSR was the number one enemy. It wasn't until I watched Phil Donahue's shows in Russia, that I realized the Russian people were very much like all others. Its actually the leaders who go to war, often against the will of their populace. The other realization I have had after watchiing the world and reading history, war doesn't seem to solve any problems. We're still fighting the Civil War, and one could argue, WWI and WWII. Perhaps it all really goes back to the Crusades and then the Spanish Inquisition. Same old tune, very few new notes, other than the escalation of the killing power of our weapons.
Yes, agree.
On the person-to-person connection front: For a long time (as I wrote frequently, when we lived in China), a saving grace, or buffering factor, in US-Chinese political tensions was that in general, Americans who lived in China **liked** Chinese people (despite the system). Similarly for Chinese people in the US. Despite all the obvious macro-scale differences, the similarities at the person-to-person level were recognizable and strong.
Deb and I saw the same phenomenon time and again in the Our Towns travels. People in Iowa or Ohio or South Dakota might have been worked up into alarm about "the crisis at the border" etc. But generally they liked and respected the immigrants who were actually in their communities — opening restaurants, working in hospitals, of course picking crops, and pressuring their children to do well in school.
Anything that exposes people to more of the human variety of the world is a plus. As you say.
Exposure to real people eats stereotypes. This really shows up with the current generation. I see them all the time. There is so much more mixing between black/white/asian/hispanic kids than ever before. They are no longer very concerned with "color," in fact they joke about it quite openly, in a way that might shock their more "politically-correct" elders.
There is still less openness about money and class than there needs to be. Status counts for more than race now. Status is the new "race."
The towns sort by status/money/advantages.
Maybe the emerging status will be simply about who has the most power.
Kids all listen to the same music, with country trending sharply upwards, although the athletes mostly warm up to hip hop, at least where I live. Kids are ALL are heavily online.
One school took the phones away during school, but since the kids are addicts they tried to use the Chromebooks and computers instead.
Boys and girls in high school keep to their own kind. Girls with girls, boys with boys. Very few take dates of either gender to the prom. They come with their gender groups, but the girls dance with their dates/phones, with which they are constantly filming themselves, while the boys "dance" in a rough manner more akin to rugby, forming scrums and shoving...for fun! One girl came all by herself in a rental Bentley coupe, which came complete with photographer. Getting seen is the key. Showing off is advertising yourself, which is online culture, the primary reference point now. Even in politics.
This is the first digital-only generation. A staff member in an affluent town recently told me that high school kids can't read anything longer than about a paragraph without becoming exhausted from dopamine withdrawal. They must be kept entertained. They read at the middle school level. College will come to mean little, since they mostly can't do college level work. And that's before AI made doing school work obsolete. Of course there will still be a few who can escape this, probably ones with highly educated parents.
I don't think kids can see far ahead into the future. But they can sense that unless they are heavily advantaged, now, no future has been planned for them.
We will be eaten alive by better disciplined nations.