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

(Almost) Hitting Home

8/27/2019

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. . .The sound was big, and sharp enough to make me feel like my brain was gonna pop in my head, enough to make my heart hiccup. But the craziest thing was, I felt like the shot—loudest sound I ever heard—made my legs move even faster. I don’t know if that’s possible, but that’s definitely what it seemed like.
                                                                  from: Ghost
                                                  written by: Jason Reynolds
                                  Atheneum BFYR/Simon & Schuster, 2016

    My girls went to the Jewish Community Center PreSchool. They went to Summer Camp there, too. I volunteered in the PreSchool Library and worked at the Akiva Academy, our private school for grades K-6. 
    Lately, I am a member of our Jewish Community Relations Council and serve on the Social Action Committee. I attend meetings at the Jewish Community Center regularly, participate in programming, and even work out at the gym.
    Last Tuesday my daughter read my blog. She called and said, “Bees, Mom. Really? You could have been killed.” The truth is those were not her exact words, but if I heard her correctly, that’s what she meant. I could only answer, “I’m too close to this one. I can’t process it yet. I don’t know whether to be scared stiff, horrified, or incredibly sad. I guess I’m all of that.”
    She understood. Of course she did. I love her deeply for who she is. She has an incredible amount of common sense, and a practical and loving view of the world.
    Here’s what happened, and what is still unfolding.
    It came to the attention of law enforcement personnel that a self-proclaimed white nationalist intended to go to the Jewish Community Center and start shooting. The right people were notified and did what they needed to do to keep everyone safe. The young man is in jail with a hefty bond. The FBI is considering whether to pursue Federal charges. He may have stay in jail until his trial. He may be released to house arrest if he can make 10% of his $250,000 bail. He will not be allowed to view or post on social media. All firearms will be removed from his home. He pleaded not guilty, but that’s a discussion for another time.
    The man is from New Middletown, Ohio. He may have attended my story hour, although neither his name nor his chilling, smiling police mug shot rings a bell. 
    A recent survey shows that most Americans support Extreme Risk Protection Orders commonly referred to as red flag laws. https://www.apmresearchlab.org/stories/2019/08/19/survey-guns-america-poll-red-flag-erpo-suicide-homicide-mass-shootings-storage They require a person deemed dangerous to himself or others to relinquish his/her gun(s) for a period of time. Seventy-seven percent of the population surveyed agreed with the proposal. They included Republicans, Democrats, men, women, gun-owners, those who don’t own guns, people from all races, religions, economic and educational spectrums.
    So what’s the problem? Our government is supposed to work for us. To do what we want. We tell our representatives how to act, and they act in our interest. Except when they are on vacation and stay on vacation until they are contracted to return.
    I began to wonder if our country was beginning to move onto a common sense path when I heard our president say he is in favor of red flag laws. After all, citizens are being murdered on the streets and in places of worship and in entertainment venues… 
    After an earful from Wayne LaPierre, head of the NRA, the president retracted, saying that guns don’t kill people. . . and we need to help mentally ill people. 
    So much for common sense.
    Some mentally ill people are probably suicidal. Red flag laws will help prevent them from killing themselves. Some mentally ill people are not suicidal. They still deserve to be treated for their affliction the same as a person with a physical affliction.
    That’s not the point. To call mass-murder committed with a firearm the act of a crazy person is just, well, crazy. I don’t have a source for this, but I don’t think all homicidal people are crazy. I think homicidal people are filled with hatred. They act out their hatred on people who don’t share their ethnicity, their sexual orientation, ideas of right and wrong, childrens’ rights, womens’ rights. . . Or their hatred is unfocused, based in fear. 
    Ignoring the hatred and fear will only lead to more violence.
    Last week, in Youngstown, Ohio, a tragedy was averted. All security personnel, law enforcement, and the FBI did their jobs and I will be forever grateful.
                                        -—stay curious! (and compassionate)
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The Bee’s Knees

8/20/2019

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One day [bear] heard a buzz, and in a flash, he ran.
It was time for honey!
Warm, golden, sweet, clear, slowly flowing,
spicy, aromatic, sparkling with sunlight--
“Honey!” just as good as he’d remembered. 
He lapped it up, and licked his paws for a long time.
                                                                from: Honey    
                              written and illustrated by David Ezra Stein
                    Nancy Paulsen Books/ Penguin Random House, 2018

    Good news! I’m not allergic to bees!
    Bad news! I found out.
    Good news! I only got stung once!
    Bad news! It hurt like crazy (for a day and a half!)
    Good news! It was a yellow jacket, not a honey bee. Wait, is that good news or bad news?
    Well, I guess it doesn’t matter.  A yellow jacket did sting me the other day, though. I discovered that yellow jackets are aggressive scavengers, not pollinators. Also, they’re wasps, not bees. So whether it’s good or bad, I started thinking about bees and wasps and yellow jackets. And hornets.
    According to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, “the overwhelming majority of bees and wasps are tiny stingless creatures.” http://wildlife.ohiodnr.gov/portals/wildlife/pdfs/publications/id%20guides/Pub5488_Bees%20and%20Wasps%20of%20Ohio.pdf  
    Well, that was news to me! Except for honeybees, they all blended into something I thought of as sting-y bugs. But I’m not even sure I could tell a honeybee from a wasp. 
    I don’t know if the Pilgrims were troubled by wasps or yellow jackets when they landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620. They knew about honeybees, though. Honeybees arrived on our shores in 1622. They have become so important to our agriculture that many fields, orchards, vineyards, and citrus groves would fail if not for them.
    A bee’s pollination work is purposeful.  
    Over 20,000 species of bees are known to scientists and 4,000 of them live in North America. Two of the most common varieties are honeybees and bumblebees.
    Honeybees are hyper-social. They communicate by performing a complicated dance to tell each other where to find good sources of pollen. Wild honeybees build their hives in hollow logs. They live in colonies of several thousand and survive the winter by storing their excess honey. Their queen lives three or four years.            
    Honeybees can be domesticated. A responsible beekeeper will maintain several hives and “harvest” some honey for market, making sure to leave enough for the bees.
    So it’s kinda like domesticated honeybees pay honey as rent to their beekeepers for the housing and better weather conditions. 
    But, bee colonies are declining. The increased use of pesticides is part of the reason. Malnutrition caused by limited flower diversity is another. Bees are shipped all over the country because beekeepers can get more money from providing pollination services than they ever could be selling honey. If the bees become disorientated, it will lead to stress. It’s hard to make up those complicated dances.
    Most queens are descended from a few hundred breeder queens. This small gene pool leaves the bees susceptible to diseases. Rising global temperatures means that some flowers are blooming before the bees are ready to fly.
    Bumblebees cannot be domesticated, but they are better pollinators. The native bumblebees are more efficient at pollinating than the non-native honeybees the Pilgrims brought, partly because they are bigger and can keep more pollen on their hairier bodies. Partly because they learn fast where to get the pollen, and partly because they don’t make any extra honey. They live in nests with a few hundred friends, but are not honey producers. They eat all they make and only the queen survives the winter. She hibernates underground. 
    Taking honey from bumblebees would deprive them of their food. And they probably would sting. And then they would die.
    Most wasps are scavengers. They prey on stink bugs, flies, grasshoppers, and caterpillars as they find food for their young. They are attracted to rotting fruits and vegetables and meat, too. They love aphids, those pesky little critters that gorge on roses. 
    Many wasp species are particular in their food choice. Those are selected and bred in laboratories. They’re released as natural pest control.
    But wasps are incidental pollinators. They visit flowers for the nectar.  They don’t travel from flower to flower purposefully. They pollinate accidentally as they go.    
    Bees and wasps each have jobs to do, and they work together.
    The bottom line is while a tiny fraction of bees and wasps sting, their value far, far outweighs the pain they inflict. Try telling that to a kid.
    All of us were either terrified, horrified, or panic-stricken when a bee, wasp, yellow jacket or hornet flew into our games of tag, hopscotch, or jump-rope. My mom had the perfect solution. She told us, friends included, that the bees…were afraid of us. If we ran around, they would probably chase us, but if we stood perfectly still, they would think we were statues and sniff around a little and then get bored and fly away. Same for screaming. Screaming frightened them even more. 
    I’m not sure of the science behind Mom’s theory of bee behavior, but it sure helped us stay in control of ourselves. Not a bad lesson at all.
                                                    -—stay curious! (and safe)  
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Small Lives Matter

8/13/2019

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So you know what I think?. . .Why, I think that there must
Be someone on top of that small speck of dust!
Some sort of a creature of very small size,
Too small to be seen by an elephant’s eyes. . .
                                               from Horton Hears a Who
                                      written and illustrated by Dr. Seuss
                                                        Random House, 1954




    Some of my favorite tiny things include the balled up fist of a newborn, sesame seeds, buttercups, stars (I know, those are really very big, but they look small from here!)
    And even though they’ve been studied at least since Leeuwenhoek,    in 1702, I just found out about tardigrades. They’re everywhere and they’re tiny. Laid end to end, it takes about 25 of the largest ones to measure one inch. Like Leeuwenhoek, you’d need a microscope to see one.
    Although they can live almost anywhere, tardigrades prefer the sediment at the bottom of a lakebed. Mostly they suck the juices from algae, lichens and moss. Some species are carnivores, some are even cannibals, but they’re tiny, so they’re not scary even if you could see them.
    They’re hardy, too. They can live at almost absolute zero and can withstand heat over 300 degrees Fahrenheit. They are found from Antarctica to the Equator. They are found as high as the Himalayas and as deep as the Marianas Trench. They can live in stone walls and can survive the vacuum of space. 
    So how do they do it, survive under all those conditions? When their environment is less than ideal (see above), they go into a state called tun, basically a dehydrated ball. They are able to squeeze the water out of their bodies and remain in that dehydrated state for maybe decades. And when they are rehydrated, voila, in a couple of hours they’re back in business.
    Why is this even important? Tardigrades inhabit new, developing environments. They work as a pioneer species to attract other invertebrates and predators to populate that same area.             
    And now tardigrades are on the moon.

    No one thinks they are actually living on the moon, eating and reproducing and frolicking, or doing what they do. They are part of the first installment of the Lunar Library, designed by Arch Mission Foundation. 
    An Israeli lunar explorer, Beresheet, offered to carry the twenty-five disk set to the moon, but crash landed last April with the tardigrades on board. Thousands of tardigrades are presumably still enclosed in their DVD-shaped disk within several ultra-thin layers of nickel. Sandwiched between the layers of nickel are thin layers of epoxy containing the thousands of tardigrades. Scientists are pretty sure, after doing some computer modeling, that these disks are the only things that survived the crash intact.
    So, yes, there are thousands of tardigrades on the moon, but they won’t be doing anything tardigrad-ish any time soon. They are in their tun state, and will in all likelihood stay that way.    
    This first installment of the Lunar Library contains a 30-million-page archive of human history on twenty-five nickel and epoxy disks. According to https://www.universetoday.com/143139/hardy-tardigrades-on-board-israels-beresheet-lander-probably-survived-the-crash/ among the data on these disks is
  • A linguistic key to 5000 languages, with 1.5 billion translations between them.
  • More than 60,000 analog images of pages of books, photographs, illustrations, and documents.
  • A specially designed “Primer” that teaches over a million concepts in pictures and corresponding words across major languages.
   
    The Arch Mission Foundation is a non-profit started in 2015 in California. Their library is a sort of electronic time-capsule built and sent to many locations with the hope of ensuring the survival of a record of life on Earth.

    According to their website ArchMission.org hopes to preserve our earthly civilization for billions of years in an accessible format to be retrieved by those who come after us. They will use any available technology to accomplish their mission.
    Tardigrades were the life-form chosen for the mission because “…they are microscopic, multicellular, and one of the most durable forms of life on planet Earth," said Nova Spivack, co-founder and chairman of the Arch Mission Foundation. (https://www.archmission.org/spaceil)
    I’m thinking about the whole idea. A private company is working across country borders to build, blast off from Earth, and land on the moon, Mars, and orbit the sun. The Lunar Library is designed to preserve the records of our civilization for up to billions of years. The records aim to be a comprehensive Earthly catalog and will be updated periodically to stay current.
    The hardiest known life-form is included. 
    Sounds to me like we won’t be forgotten even if our current Climate Catastrophe claims our planet. That is, if the life-form that comes next can read.
     
                                               -—stay curious! (and think big)
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What is Common Sense, Anyway?

8/6/2019

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After he goes through all the horrible statistics he copied into his notebook, he finishes with a triumphant, “Guns are evil, and that’s why we should take the steps needed to make our society safer and outlaw them completely.”
    “And wouldn’t that be wonderful,” the eight grader starts in, “for all law-abiding citizens to be unarmed and defenseless at the mercy of criminals, who, by the way, don’t follow laws and will have all the guns they want.”
                            from: The Benefits of Being an Octopus
                            written by: Ann Braden
                            Sky Pony Press, 2018

    Two common-sense gun laws stalled in the Senate before the Senators left for their August recess. One is the Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2019, which passed the House this past February in a 240 to 190 vote and placed on the Senate calendar in March. If approved, the legislation would require background checks on all firearm purchases—including those made privately online or at gun shows. But that was five months ago.

    The other, the Enhanced Background Checks Act of 2019. The House passed it in February, too, (228 to 198) but was tabled in the Senate. 
    Over 250 mass shootings in the last year including three mass shootings in the last week (Dayton, Ohio; El Paso; and the Garlic Festival Massacre in Gilroy, California) brought our legislators back early. The original schedule had them returning September 9, but a peek at the Senate calendar shows what business they will take up beginning today, August 6. Those two tabled Acts are not listed. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CCAL-116scal-2019-08-06/pdf/CCAL-116scal-2019-08-06.pdf 
    We Google statistics on mass shootings, we map out locations where they occur, we track gender, age, nationalities of shooters and victims. All those numbers desensitize us, force us lose sight of the actual people, human beings, that are traumatized or killed. 
    Families change in an instant.
    I’ve admitted before that my brother and I, along with the neighbor kids played with toy guns. I like to think we (all) have moved away from that kind of play toward activities that are more co-operative, more sensitive, and more compassionate. I know that’s not true as I move through my day trying to avoid, ignore, divert my attention away from fear while I watch/read/listen to the news. Maybe I’m traumatized, too. Maybe we all are. So what can we do?
    Ignoring the news is not a good answer.
    Staying engaged can become overwhelming.
    Finding a balance between the two is difficult, at best.
    It comes down to common sense, which my mom liked to remind me is not common. The causes of gun violence are many. Too many guns. Too few laws. Too much fear, anger, and frustration. Too much unchecked mental illness.
    The help for mental illness needs to be as accessible as the help for physical illness. Right now it is not. In addition to the stigma placed on mentally ill people from the society at large, our health care system, such as it is, treats mental illnesses differently, when it addresses it at all.
    But fear is not a mental illness. Neither are hatred, anger, or frustration. We need to teach our children (and practice ourselves) self-control, moderation, composure.
    Most Americans don’t want to be at war with each other. But these days, it seems as though we are. We are divided on many issues, including gun ownership.
    Making sure, as best we can, that only responsible people can own guns is common sense. Outlawing automatic and semi-automatic weapons makes sense, too. Prohibiting the modification of guns to make them work faster and deadlier also feels right.    
    In the aftermath of the violent acts or acts of domestic terrorism this week, most politicians are refraining from only offering prayers and thoughts of understanding. 
    At last. 
    At least some are admitting we have a problem. That’s a good first step.
    But the rhetoric about condemning racism, bigotry, and white supremacy needs to be more than rhetoric. The talk about common sense gun laws must lead to action. Laws need to be made and enforced.   
    And the comments of our president? It’s hard for me to trust someone who said yesterday (Monday), “our nation must condemn racism, bigotry, and white supremacy,” when just three months ago at a rally in Panama City Beach, Florida, the he joked when an audience member shouted “shoot them” in response to his (rhetorical?) question: “But how do you stop with those people?” 
    He heard the person's comment, chuckled and said, “only in the Panhandle you can get away with that statement.” 
    What does that even mean except racism, bigotry, and white supremacy are alive and well and living in the White House?
                                               --stay curious! (and tolerant)

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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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