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

Hail Caesar. . .Salad!

11/27/2018

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But Peter, who was very naughty, ran straight away to Mr. McGregor’s garden, and squeezed under the gate!
First he ate some lettuces and some French beans; and then he ate some radishes;
                                             from  The Tale of Peter Rabbit
                                    written and illustrated by Beatrix Potter
                               Originally published by Frederick Warne, 1902

    One of my favorite foods is salad, the more veggies the better. I like all kinds of lettuce, too, except radicchio. And who even heard of arugula until a few years ago?
    Like Mr. McGregor, Farmer Brown (Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type), and Mr. McGreeley (Muncha, Muncha, Muncha), I put out some vegetables in the spring. My garden is the “instant” variety. I don’t start from seeds. I don’t grow very much either, not enough to share with friends and neighbors, and certainly not enough to sell. When I run out of my small crop, I like to buy local when I can. 
    I compost during the year, and enrich my garden soil with transformed kitchen scraps. Although I’m sure I am not increasing my yield, I feel good about the ultimate recycling project. Just trim carrot tops and peel potatoes into a small snap-lidded bucket. Add onion skins, parsley stems, peanut shells, whatever, and empty it once in a while into the bin near the back door. Mother Nature waves her magic wand and after some sun and warm weather, voila: nutrient-rich soil!
    Corporate Farming usually comes with a load of negative connotations. And the largest corporate farm in the world is not even a farm, it is a pharmaceutical company. Farm . . . Pharm, hmmm… Bayer bought Monsanto last April (2018) for $66 billion. (Part of the deal included a combined sell-off of $9 billion worth of assets to preserve competition.) Generally, even if a big corporate farm is owned by a family, the view from the top can get skewed by the bottom line. Big Corporate Farms need to make lots of money to sustain themselves. 
    Farms owned by companies, because of their great size and vast wealth, hold great sway in the market place and in politics. They “influence agricultural education, research, and public policy through funding initiatives and lobbying efforts.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_farming 
    Family Farming, sustainable agriculture, and the local food movement are seen in a much better light. I like to believe that most family farms look to the long view. After all, it takes a whole season to get from kernel to ear. And from seedling to stalk. Several years to get from pit to peach, orange, or pecan. And generations to grow a business.
    The success or failure of a farm be it large or small, owned by a gigantic corporation or by a family who chose to incorporate as a small business, depends on uncontrollable variables. 
    Who knows what the weather will bring? Even though day by day predictions are getting eerily accurate, we’re talking about a whole growing season, months and months. Local and global prices fluctuate. I don’t know what that depends on. Consumer demand is drummed up or down by marketing and convenience. 
    And here we are, back to the lettuces growing in rows and rows, soaking up sun and sucking up nutrients and, well, other stuff. According to the scientists at Purdue University, active e. coli bacteria can thrive in soil around plants. Once it attaches to the plant, say Romaine lettuce, it can live there for about 40 days. So the solution to food-borne e. coli transmitted to people eating contaminated lettuce (or any other veggie) seems simple: a little patience. Wait at least 40 days before harvesting your Romaine. It sounds simple, but that long row of lettuce might not have been planted at the same time. And what about the stray dog, or cows and pigs meandering into a corn or lettuce field? And what about the machine (or person) picking the crop? What was the last thing those wheels (hands) rolled through?
    Growing food is a tricky business. I choose to thank farmers, not blame them. (We’ll save those massive corporate farms for another time.) As of yesterday, the only leafy greens at my grocery store were spinach, kale, and leaf lettuce. 
    So, while the Caesar salad, may be a delicious memory for now, I’m adding kale and spinach to my red leaf lettuce. For me it’s the tomatoes, cukes, and yellow peppers that make the salad anyway. 
                                     -—stay curious (and try something new!)    
    
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A Drop in the Bucket

11/20/2018

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I am Princes Gie Gie.
My Kingdom . . .
the African sky, so wide and so close.
I can almost touch the sharp edges of the stars.
I can tame the wild dogs with my song.
I can make the tall grass sway when I dance.
I can make the wind play hide-and-seek.
But I cannot make the water come closer.
I cannot make the water run clearer.
No matter what I command.
                                                    from The Water Princess
                                                       written by Susan Verde
                                               illustrated by Peter H. Reynolds
                                                      G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2016

    I turn on the tap and water comes out. Every time. Hot and cold. I shower, water my plants, give some to my cats, wash my dishes and clothes, make coffee, brush my teeth, steam my vegetables—whenever I want to.        
    Last week I was lucky enough to hear Sivan Ya’ari, founder and CEO of Innovation: Africa, tell about her work. Life is full of serendipity. Or like some say, surprising co-incidence. That’s how Sivan explains it, anyway.
    When she was looking for her first job, someone suggested talking “to that man over there.” He was looking for someone to work for him, but he told Sivan her English was not good enough. She asked about French, because she lived in France for most of her growing-up years. She had come back to Israel, where she was born, to volunteer in the Army.
    She was talking to the owner of Jordache jeans and French turned out to be just fine. He sent her to Madagascar to oversee quality control for jeans being shipped to the United States. 
    That’s how Sivan got to Africa and found poverty. African poverty. The people, children especially, were in poor health. They had no shoes, no food, no medicine. Sivan investigated. She quickly found out that there was no electricity in the small, remote villages. No refrigeration to keep medicine fresh. 
    Solar energy was being developed in Israel as soon as the country was born. Harnessing the energy of the sun seemed a practical solution to the tension surrounding oil in that part of the world. By 1953, the five-year-old country was producing solar water heaters. By the early 1990s, 90% of homes were using them, saving millions of barrels of oil every year. And the solar panels Israel is producing now are efficient and affordable.
    Sivan asked why the children were not going to school. The nurse at the medical center told her they were too weak. They were sick. Medicine was not available. 
    So Sivan went home, raised a little money for a solar panel and installed it on the medical center for lights and refrigeration. Now medicine was available. But still, the children were not in school. They had to spend too much time looking for water. And the water they found was not clean, or plentiful. Since Sivan made electricity available, she wanted to build a pump house, powered with a couple more solar panels, to bring up the water lying under the feet of every thirsty African person. 
    It is extraordinary to see people discover running water for the first time.
    Sivan’s non-profit works with the governments of many African countries to discover which villages need the most help. That is where Innovation: Africa goes. 
    Local people do the building and the work to keep the water and electricity flowing, everything from maintaining the building and the grid to changing the lightbulbs. And the children go to school.
    Israeli technology provides drip irrigation to grow more crops with less water. 
    People in the villages are healthier, more educated, and financially independent. Sivan says she has learned three things. 
        Sometimes good is not good enough. 
        It doesn’t take much to help people. Only recognizing a problem
                    and looking for a solution.

        The cause of a problem can be its solution. In remote villages in
                    Africa, 
the sun is now working for the people instead
                    of causing drought.

You can find more information about Innovation: Africa and Sivan’s TEDx talk here: https://www.innoafrica.org/team.html 
                                                  -—stay curious! (and grateful)




​
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Aww. . . Shoot!

11/13/2018

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    Not all the Americans had rifles—although a good many did—and of the ones who had rifles not one in a thousand shot as sweet as Byam’s. But they were all, almost to a man, accustomed to living with a gun and their weapons were staggeringly more accurate than those of the British. In fact many of the British soldiers thought there was something unnatural about it, some strange and savage thing that allowed Americans to hit so well.
                                                                 from: The Rifle
                                                               by  Gary Paulsen
                                                             Harcourt Inc., 1995

    Gary Paulsen’s account (in the quote above) of the normalcy of gun ownership goes back to the Revolutionary War. Americans have owned guns before that war and since then. My concern is not about gun ownership, per se. It is not about one interpretation of the Second Amendment to our Constitution or another. My concern is more about keeping all of us, including children, maybe especially children, safe. 

    Before the 1970s, mass shootings were rare. We can all recall many of those that have taken place since. Looking over reports of these crimes, those ending in suicide and those ending in capture of the gunman, (not always one person, and certainly not always a man, young or old) it seems to me that we *can’t* just say the person with the gun is a wackadoodle or nutcase or any other derogatory word for a mentally unwell person that comes to mind. After all, who could pull a trigger with the intention of killing someone (or many someones) but someone who is thinking and acting irrationally? 
    My concern is also not about whether a shooter is rehabilitatable or not. That is most definitely a subject for another time. My concern is more about prevention than anything else. And like most important issues, the answers are both simple and complex. 
    Accidents happen. Once I stepped on a pin I was using to sew a dress for my daughter. I ended up in the ER for a tetanus shot to stop a small infection creeping up my leg in a most ugly and painful way. Kids fall out of trees they climb and break limbs (the tree's and their own). A car moves into your blind spot and suddenly sirens and insurance companies are involved. 
    A kid finds a gun on the top shelf of a closet and is curious. Bang! No one knew it was loaded. His friend is dead.
    Accidents by their very definition are unplanned. Sometimes even unavoidable.
    Some states have taken that matter into their own hands.Twenty-seven states and DC have Child Access Prevention laws. CAP laws take a variety of forms. You can find a description here: https://lawcenter.giffords.org/gun-laws/policy-areas/child-consumer-safety/child-access-prevention/
    Sometimes the shooting is intentional. Some states have taken up that matter, too. 
  • Nineteen states and Washington, DC, require background checks for at least some private gun sales. 
  • Twelve states and Washington, DC have laws that require gun-buyers to apply for permits or licenses.
  • Some states require would-be handgun-buyers to pass safety training. 
  • A study conducted in 2015 found that 75% of Americans (and nearly 60% of gun-owners) support licensing laws. Almost everyone wants broad background checks.
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/03/22/what-works-to-reduce-gun-deaths
    But we need to do more. Right now we have a patchwork of state laws that sometimes reciprocate from one state to another, and sometimes do not. Seems to me that federal law(s) would be more efficient, less confusing, and more enforceable than requiring the states to continue going it alone.
    Sometimes shootings are motivated by fear and hate, or by fear or hate. Sometimes there seems to be no reason but a person’s tenuous hold on reality. Maybe the fuel is the unsettling feeling of not knowing what is real or true or factual. Maybe the fuel is violence in the media. Maybe it is unfocused anger. There are thousands (maybe millions) of maybes. 
    We can not allow mass murder, especially when it is driven by fear and hate and a tenuous grip on what is real, to become our new national normal.
    I have joined Everytown for Gun Safety. In my small way, I’m working for peace and sanity. You can join, too. https://everytown.org 
​
 

                                                   —stay curious (and involved!)


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Go Vote!

11/6/2018

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They drove through Everglades National Park to a place actually called Flamingo. . .
​    But that day the flamingos weren’t there, not even one. My mother took lots of cool pictures of blue herons, white pelicans, cormorants, and even a pair of roseate spoonbills.

                                                                   From: Squirm
                                                                 by Carl Hiaasen
                                                          Alfred A. Knopf, 2018
    Marjory Stoneman Douglas, before the horrible, tragic, senseless Valentine’s Day Massacre that took place at a school named for her, was mostly known for almost single-handedly saving the Everglades from wanton destruction by developers, agriculturists, new settlers, and tourists. But besides her environmental activism, she was a social reformer and a suffragist. She reached many people through her column in the Miami Herald called “The Galley.” She worked there from 1920 to 1923. Here’s what she had to say about women getting the vote.
              If-—For the Women Voters
If you can keep your vote when all about you
    Are throwing theirs away on this and that;
If you can think with politics about you,
    Of major issues that are plain and flat;
If you can see your way through horrid speeches
    And never lose your head on flowery ways--
Then you can vote as well as who wear breeches.
    And you can vote so that the voting pays.
If you can walk through clouds that shout in passion,
    And never leave your reasoning behind;
If you can think, when feeling is the fashion,
    And never trust to luck or go it blind;
If you can keep the welfare of the nation
    Above the gain or glory of a few—-
You’ll make the ballot yet a decoration
    Worthy a voter, and a woman, too.

    That was her column on August 20, 1920. No introduction, no explanation, no fuss. Her advise to women who would be voting for the first time in less than three months: pay attention to the issues of the day, stay focused on reason, and “keep the welfare of the nation above the gain or glory of a few.” 

    That’s it.
    The nineteenth amendment giving women the right to vote passed two days earlier, on August 18, 1920, in time for the Presidential Election in November. Warren G. Harding defeated James M. Cox in a landslide.
    Go vote!
                                                 -—stay curious (and informed!)    

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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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