Shari Della Penna
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"Small acts of kindness can change and humanise our world."
   Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks 1948-2020
   ​Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, 1991-2020
                         Author, Advocate, Advisor

Sweet Land of Liberty

6/25/2019

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In the camp we had a teacher
some days, yes,
some days, no.
Some days I was too ill
with the fever to go.
Some days the teacher couldn’t come
because of the men with guns.

But on the good days,
the teacher might arrive with a piece of chalk
and maybe even a book.
Mostly he would help us
learn English words,
so we would be ready
to leave the camp someday.
    from: Home of the Brave
    written by Katherine Applegate
    Feiwel & Friends/Holtzbrinck, 2007

    In the years surrounding the turn of the last century, hordes of people entered the United States through many ports including Ellis Island, Baltimore, and San Francisco.
    One year ago, (July 10, 2018) I wrote in this space about new rules regarding immigration and the havoc they were bringing. International laws and national laws, long-standing precedents, even civilized behavior have been thrown to the four winds. 
    Trump’s wall-building mania, his executive orders, his policy changes have resulted in confusion, even chaos, in ever widening ripples. Each tweet after tweet thrown out the window of the Oval Office radiates dissension, discord, and devision. 
    In 2017, he tried to block DACA. Federal courts stopped him, so far. 
    In 2018, “zero tolerance” became official. Parents and children were separated at our southern border. A lawsuit prompted a federal judge in San Diego to rule overnight that families must be reunited within 30 days. That would have been August 26, 2018. The government says almost all families have been reunited. No one is really sure. Homeland Security detains the parents, and sometimes deports them. Health and Human Services takes care of the kids, sorta. The fact of family separation is a big, ugly problem. The bigger, uglier problem is the lack of communication between the agencies. I think lots and lots of children are still “lost.” 
    Just this year, 2019, the president tried to cancel Temporary Protected Status for people living in the United States, mainly from countries in the Middle East and Central America. The Secretary of Homeland Security can grant TPS to “eligible foreign born individuals, who are unable to return home safely due to conditions or circumstances preventing their country from adequately handling the return.” https://immigrationforum.org/article/fact-sheet-temporary-protected-status/ In March of this year, The Department of Homeland Security issued a notice in the Federal Register stating that even though the preliminary injunction is in place, people with TPS will be able to retain their status and work permits through January 2, 2020.
    But zero-tolerance continues. A recent tweet stated U.S. immigration agents will soon “begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States.”
    
In April, 2019, acting ICE director Ronald Vitiello and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen were fired. They dared to criticize the policy.
    
Now Mark A. Morgan is acting director of ICE. Kevin K. McAleenan is acting Secretary of Homeland Security. (You can see my take on all the temporary positions held in this administration in my post last month, “Who’s Minding the Store?”)
    
Yesterday’s (June 24, 2019) announced decision to back down for two weeks on that removal process only adds to the confusion. Homeland Security officials have expressed concerns that families could inadvertently become separated as a result.    
​    
People, including families who arrive at the U.S. border, are being depicted as “illegal immigrants.” In reality, crossing an international border for asylum is not illegal and an asylum seeker’s case must be heard, according to U.S. and international law. https://www.rescue.org/article/migrants-asylum-seekers-refugees-and-immigrants-whats-difference 
    It was a different time in a different age in a seemingly different country when my grandparents were lucky and smart enough to leave the dangers of their homes and seek a better life for their descendants. Leaving everything they knew, even the danger, was hard. Traveling was hard. Re-settling and everything that entailed was hard.
    In case you haven’t seen this for a while, Emma Lazarus wrote her famous poem about the Statue of Liberty in 1883. It was cast onto a bronze plaque and mounted inside the pedestal's lower level in 1903, the same year my grandmother was born. She arrived in Baltimore three years later.
             The New Colossus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

    I try to make sure my kids and grandkids understand the difficulties, hardships, and sacrifices my grandparents made, not only for themselves, but for me and my own grandchildren who they only dreamed about.
                                          --stay curious! (and compassionate)
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The 6th Extinction

6/18/2019

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[Waterhouse] wanted to create such perfect models that anyone - a crowd of curious children, England’s leading scientists, even the Queen herself! - could gaze at his dinosaurs and see into the past.
                             from The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins:
                       An Illuminating 
History of Mr. Waterhouse Hawkins,
                       Artist and Lecturer

                                                  written by Barbara Kerley
                                             with drawings by Brian Selznick 
                                           (many of which are based on the
                                           original sketches of Mr. Hawkins)

                                                        Scholastic Press, 2001
                                                               Caldecott Honor

    I don’t remember being mesmerized by any one thing when I was growing up. My girls either.
    But in my work as a children’s librarian, I discovered fascinations with everything from sharks and spiders to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (remember those?). 
    And of course, dinosaurs. I hoped my own grandchildren or at least one or two would get hooked on dinosaurs, but no luck.
    One of the boys loved Thomas The Tank Engine. One was so into mushrooms that he had his own field guide at age three. One knew the names and workings of every construction vehicle, common and obscure.
    Fairies and princesses captured the imagination of both girls like nothing else.
    But no dinosaurs.
    I indulged my own fascination by providing dinosaur storytimes. We made paper-plate stegosauruses, and tyrannous masks and claws. We read lots of books and learned about lots of dinosaurs. I usually ended by (hopefully?) inspiring the kids by telling them that I might be looking at the person who solves the mystery of how and why the dinosaurs all became extinct. Now we have consensus, but then there was still controversy.
    Since time began, scientists have recorded five major mass extinctions. Lots of questions remain, but much has been learned. Actually in all that time, five is a pretty low number. According to https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-timeline-of-the-mass-extinction-events-on-earth.html the big five are:
Ordovician–Silurian Extinction
    About 439 million years ago, the combination of glaciation and the formation of the Appalachian Mountains resulted in falling sea levels. Since the majority of the animal life lived in the ocean, trilobites, brachiopods, and graptolites died off in large numbers. Plant life was left high and dry.
Devonian Extinction, Late
    About 100 million years later, giant land plants are thought to have caused the next extinction. Their deep roots released nutrients changing the composition of the oceans themselves. This resulted in mass amounts of algal blooms and depleted the seas of oxygen and therefore, animal life. Many scientists consider this mass extinction to have taken place over over hundreds of thousands of years. 
Permian–Triassic Extinction
    This extinction event is called “The Great Dying.” About 96% of life perished in a huge volcanic eruption 251 million years ago. It filled the air with carbon dioxide which fed different kinds of bacteria. Large amounts of methane emissions warmed the Earth and the oceans became acidic. Ancient coral species were totally lost.
Triassic–Jurassic Extinction
    Like the other mass extinctions, it is believed that this one was also a gradual phenomenon. The blame has been placed on an asteroid impact, the resulting basalt eruptions, and climate change. Mammals were the dominant species and then they weren’t. Dinosaurs had room and time to flourish. That was about 200 million years ago. Dinosaurs evolved and thrived for 135 million years.
Cretaceous–Paleogene Extinction
    Sixty-five or six million years ago, so the theory goes, a huge asteroid (about six miles in diameter) traveling at 10 to 20 miles per second, smashed into Earth and left a crater 110 miles across, about as wide as the whole state of Delaware is long! The crash was bad. Very bad. The dust it threw off was full of sulfur, which is particularly adept at blocking out sunlight. The dust storm and the resulting “impact winter” snuffed out the sun for so long that plants could not photosynthesize. Then ferns grew almost rampant.
    It took millions of years for life to recover its former level of diversity.

    We may well ask, “What’s next?” 
    Nearly 150 authors from 50 nations worked for three years to compile a report by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. The panel is composed of 132 member nations (find them here: https://www.ipbes.net/members) including the United States. Representatives of each member nation signed off on the findings. Here's the report, released on May 6, 2019,  https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/nature-decline-unprecedented-report/ 
    Overwhelming evidence paints a dire future for our planet. Species loss is speeding up. More than half a million land animals are at great risk of extinction in the coming decades. The oceans are no better off.
    This time, no 6-mile-wide asteroid crashed into earth. No giant plants upset the chemical balance of the soil or water. No new mountain ranges have formed.
    This time, humanity is both perpetrator and victim of our current condition. Maybe it’s human nature to choose convenience over longterm sustainability. Maybe it’s human nature to live in the moment without giving much thought to the long view. Maybe it’s human nature to "make do" in a dangerous situation rather than try to change it for the better.
    It is easy to become overwhelmed, scared stiff. But it only takes one idea, one thought, communicated widely, lived loudly, believed strongly, to head confidently into the future. A bright one. For our kids. And grandkids. And theirs, too.
                                    -— stay curious! (and say no to plastic!!)
    I’m reading The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert. Henry Holt, 2014.    
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DOUBLESPEAK, DOUBLETHINK, Double Scary

6/11/2019

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    “Well, said Mrs. Zuckerman, …it seems to me we have no ordinary spider.”
    “Oh, no, said Zuckerman. “It’s the pig that’s unusual. It says so, right there in the middle of the web.”
    “Maybe so,” said Mrs. Zuckerman. “Just the same, I intend to have a look at that spider.”
                                                      from Charlotte’s Web
                                                      written by E. B. White
                                                illustrated by Garth Williams
                                                          HarperCollins, 1952

    On its 70th anniversary this month, I decided to re-read George Orwell’s 1984. After all, it had been years and years sine I read it the first time. It is more relevant than ever, maybe more relevant than Mr. Orwell even could have imagined.
    At the risk of rehashing old news, remember when the forty-fifth president of the United States was sworn in? He declared that he had the biggest inauguration crowd in history. When asked to explain, his senior advisor, Kellyanne Conway, claimed to have provided the media with “alternative facts.”
    Why is it important that we know how many people attended the inauguration? Well, frankly, it’s not. What is important is that he said it. Then justified his truth with a lie. And people believed him. Incredible! And he keeps doing it!
    Here’s the definition of DOUBLETHINK from Orwell’s 1984:
        
        To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to
     forget any 
fact that has become inconvenient and then,
     when it becomes necessary 
again, to draw it back from
     oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny 
the
     existence of objective reality and all the while to take
     account of the 
reality which one denies—-all this is
     indispensably necessary. (Book II, Ch. 9)


    DOUBLETHINK is holding two opposing ideas in your mind at the same time and accepting both of them. It is selectively forgetting crucial pieces of information to be able to engage in our society, guilt-free. Our president is a genius at it. An evil genius, to be sure, but still.
    An article in last Sunday’s Washington Post (6/9/19) disclosed that White House officials prevented a State Department’s Intelligence Committee from publishing a warning that human-caused climate change could be “possibly catastrophic.” Rod Schoonover, who works in the Office of the Geographer and Global issues, prepared the report. He was ultimately allowed to present an oral report before a House panel. The written report was suppressed.
    According to the article, “White House officials took aim at the document’s scientific citations” referring to NASA and NOAA. And “Trump officials sought to cut several pages of the document on the grounds that its description of climate science did not mesh with the administration’s official stance.” https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/447560-white-house-blocked-state-officials-written-testimony-over-climate​ 
    Trump is trying to challenge the fact that burning fossil fuels is warming our Earth. Scientific facts vs. false perceptions is another example of DOUBLETHINK, for sure. Can even he, himself  believe his own words?
    In 2019, we have Google, Amazon, and Facebook. I admit to using all three. I appreciate their convenience, scope, and efficiency. I know I am giving up my privacy by joining these networks. Yet I still do it.
    I have clicked all the buttons recommended by these Big Three to assure my safety. I want to believe that I can’t be identified by an algorithm, but when I was in Florida and I Google-searched different styles of bathing suits from my own computer, ad after ad showed me bathing suits on sale (and not) in the town I was visiting. It gave me a different visual of the World Wide Web. I was caught. And another confirmation about the lack of privacy in our world.
    And I continue to use all three, still. I’m not sure I can even navigate through 2019 and beyond without a computer. My medical records? My buying habits? My financial information? Yep, yep, and yep, again. Private? Of course not. Safe? Only maybe.
    When we only use what our perception tell us is true and not filter it with common sense, we are prey for DOUBLESPEAKERS. I’ve come up with my own formula. Of course, it’s not really math, but it looks like math: Perception + Common Sense = Reality. 
    I was a children’s librarian in my working life. I am still a children’s librarian at heart. I know among the important messages E. B. White gave us in his delightful book, Charlotte’s Web, is the far-reaching effect one individual, whether spider or human, can have on another. When we open the book we see Fern save Wilber’s life, literally. At the end of the book, Charlotte saves him. On the pages in between, Wilber learns to love his life. He gains self-confidence as he learns to see himself as his friends see him.
    Can a spider really write words in her web that humans notice let alone read? Of course not. That was not the point. The literary term “suspension of disbelief” lets us do exactly that when an author engages us with Story.
    But stories are not life. While we can still discern fact from fiction, we need to define our own reality We need to add common sense to our perceptions.
                                           -—stay curious! (and think clearly)    
    
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Gerry Who?

6/4/2019

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A line is thin. A line is narrow --
curved like a worm, straight as an arrow.
        .   .   .
Yes, a line is fine, but when a line swerves,
when a line bends, watch what can happen . . .
a shape begins!
                            from: When a Line Bends . . . A Shape Begins
                            by Rhonda Gowler Greene
                            Illustrated by James Kaczman
                            Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997

    I like to think my vote counts. After all, that’s what a representative democracy is supposed to provide for its citizens, a meaningful election. While I understand that a majority is necessary, I vote for a representatives who, in turn, will vote in my interest. But what happens when our representatives don’t voice the majority’s opinions? How can that happen anyway?
    In 1812, Elbridge Gerry, governor of Massachusetts, signed a bill that created a partisan district in the Boston area. He drew a line around neighborhoods that were not defined geographically, but included more of “his” people. Because its shape was compared to a mythological salamander, we get Gerry-mander…gerrymander. Here’s a map of MA and a map of his gerrymandered area around Boston. http://redistricting.lls.edu/what.php 
    This re-districting technique caught on quickly. Districts in any particular state can be drawn to include or exclude areas and create politically advantageous voting blocs. The only conditions: the district must be contiguous and the district must not cross state lines. 
    In 1911, Congress ruled that the number of representatives be capped at 435.*
    Because the cap remains at 435 but the population continues to grow, the average Congressional representative now represents well over 700,000 people. Raising the cap comes with its own set of problems. Most involve providing enough room for office spaces and meeting rooms.
    The U.S. Constitution requires a census every 10 years for the express purpose of redistributing Congressional districts. States may gain or lose any number of representatives, based on their current population. But populations do not grow evenly. In the mid-1960s, the Supreme Court decided that a similar number of people should reside in each district.Sometimes an area needs to be re-drawn so a more consistent number of people can be represented. 
    The Census is a population count. Citizenship is not a requirement for inclusion. As a matter of fact, inmates, although most do not have the privilege of a vote, are generally counted in the district where they are housed, not where they lived before. 
    Each state decides who draws the lines.                
    If the district lines are seen to be gerrymandered, that is giving advantage to one group over another, especially if the targeted group is in the minority, the Courts can be called in. That is what is happening now in Ohio and several other states.
    As late as last month, Federal judges in Ohio have declared that Ohio’s map, drawn by Republicans, gives the GOP an unfair advantage. The Supreme Court is reviewing claims of gerrymandering in Maryland and North Carolina. 
    According to Politico.com https://www.politico.com/story/2019/05/03/ohio-redistricting-gerrymandering-1301141 “The high court’s conservative majority signaled during oral arguments that it might be uncomfortable with judicial efforts to rein in partisan gerrymandering.” Michigan, Ohio and several other states with pending legislation concerning gerrymandering will most likely not make any decisions until the Maryland and North Carolina decisions have been handed down.
    Even if the Supreme Court is okay with gerrymandering, I am not. I understand that a direct democracy in a country of 328,868,954 people, https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/us-population/ is impracticably cumbersome. But when I cast a vote for the candidate who I expect will represent the majority of people in my district, I also expect that he or she has a fair shot in receiving a majority of the votes cast. 
    I hope I have not presented an over-simplified summary in my search for understanding this complicated issue. I’m glad gerrymandering is finally getting some of the attention it deserves. We cannot be a true democracy if our elections suppress minority opinions. If we are not heard at the ballot boxes of this country, we need use other means to make our voices heard. Here’s a handy way to find your Representative. https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative 
    Even though my vote might not count the way I think it should, it still matters. 
    *The total membership of the House of Representatives stands at 441. Non-voting members include representatives from the District of Columbia and the U.S. territories of Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa. A non-voting Resident Commissioner, serving a four-year term, represents the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.


                                                -—stay curious! (and be heard)
    
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         I'm a children's writer and poet intent on observing the world and nurturing those I find in my small space .

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