Tag Archives: History

On My Mind

What makes a man?

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“Alexander Hamilton,” my friend declared after listening through Act Two of the musical, “was not a good man.”

Well. That depends. If we’re judging the measure of a man by his faithfulness to his wife then no, Alexander Hamilton was not a good man. And neither were Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, nor Albert Einstein. All of whom, I would argue, are key figures in building the world we live in today and who did more good than anything else. But to say they were not good men because of marital transgressions seems to unfairly dilute and discolor their legacies as individuals who built a world.

Yet, my friend’s comment leaves me wondering: What makes a man? What makes a woman? More importantly, what makes a good man or woman?

Is a good man one who puts his family or his wife first? To me, that sounds like a good father or a good husband.

Then, what is a good man?

Is a good man someone who puts work, money, and providing before everything else? To me, that sounds like an employee or employer, a breadwinner, a producer.

And I continue to wonder, what is a good man?

Is a good man someone who has ideals, stands for them, writes them, shouts them from the rooftops? That could be an orator. That could be a leader.

It seems to me that all of these characteristics comprise the entirety of a man, just as they also comprise what makes a woman.

So what is it about people who stray, who are unfaithful, who seek a plurality of relationships of varying types and intensities that puts them in the “not good” category?

I wonder about that.

And I wonder about the other categories that we all fall into. I’m an educator, a daughter, a sister, a friend. I’m a runner, a yogi. Once upon a time, I was a dancer, a singer, a girlfriend. Do any of those things make me a “good” woman? What is a good woman? Is a good woman different from a good man?

And so back to, what makes a good man?

I’d argue that we need a social conversation about our goals for the people that we are developing, the people that we are creating. I’d argue that what makes a good man or a good woman can be discussed as simply, what makes a good person? 

We want people who care about other people. We want people who work for sustainable worlds built on justice, happiness, security, and increased well-being for all. We want people who care about those around them and who are willing to put others first and do what is right for the good of the whole. That seems to me less about being a good man or good woman and more about simply being a good human.

What makes a good man? What makes a good woman? That depends on who you ask.

What makes a good human, at least as far as I’m concerned, is the much more important question.

 

Travel Guide

Travel Guide: Washington, DC

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Last week, I spent three days in Washington, DC with the seventh grade students at school. The most difficult part of the trip for me was not knowing any of the students I was chaperoning. It’s hard to manage a group of 60 when I’m constantly trying to describe what I’ve seen or overheard to other colleagues because I don’t know who I’m talking about. For example:

“Three boys with glasses and brown hair are standing in the back of the bus.”
“A tall skinny girl is crying in the hallway.”
“I think two kids were out in the hall after lights out but I don’t know if they go to our school.”

Etc.

But DC itself was fun! The highlight for me was seeing my brother, who is a sophomore (second year, for those not attuned to American school slang) at a university just outside of DC. He joined us for lunch and a trip to the National Archives one afternoon.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. How did our 60 students spend three days in DC? We ate a lot and visited a lot of washrooms, but managed to take in a few cultural sites, too.

Washington, DC is about six hours from New York City by bus, so we left first thing Monday morning. Our first stop upon reaching DC was the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which I cannot recommend enough. It opened in September and it’s quite difficult to get tickets – and I completely understand its popularity. The museum is designed so that visitors begin at the bottom, in the “belly of the boat,” as it was explained to us. From there, visitors work their way up through the darkest hours of African American history in the United States, including the slave trade and the aspects of America that were built on the backs of slaves. The exhibits devoted to the civil rights and Black Power movements were fascinating, too. The museum ends in sun-soaked galleries highlighting achievements in sports, the arts, and politics, as well as a look at how discrimination stills plays a huge, ugly role in American history and culture.

The design reminded me a lot of Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, and the stories run parallel to each other in dark, sad ways. When we “other” the people around us, we lose our collective humanity and we do terrible things to each other. That’s the sorry moral of the story that society has yet to learn.

I truly wish we had time in the museum without students. I could have read every single artifact description, all the names of slave ships etched on the walls, all the names of those sold at auction. Like when visiting Holocaust museums, I felt this pressing need to pay my respects to those who died at the hands of people who didn’t consider them people. I’d love to go back on my own when tickets are easier to get so I can spend more time learning than I was able to on this trip.

That evening, we took a boat cruise on the Potomac and I was completely in my happy place. I love water and boats and it was sunny and the kids, though not the best museum-goers, were excellent DJs.

The next morning started with a visit to the US Capitol, which I don’t remember doing the only other time I was in DC about seven years ago. We had a really interesting tour and learned about the architecture of the building. There’s an awful lot of patriotic symbolism in there! And, no surprise, there were differences in political opinion each step of the way, lately regarding selection and placement of statues, which are gifted by the states but placed by the federal government.

I was responsible for picking up House and Senate passes from our local Congressional representative, which was fun because the Congresswoman’s aide gave me a behind-the-scenes tour of the underground connecting hallways of the Capitol when she brought me back to my group. She told me how the whole underground structure was redesigned after 9/11 to allow safe access from the Capitol to other government buildings across the street.

The House wasn’t in session (what do they do, exactly, aside from pass healthcare bills that will ruin all of us and then promptly exempt themselves from regulations?) but the Senate was! After yet another round of metal detectors, locking up all of our belongings, and still another metal detector, we were let into the gallery overlooking the Senate with strict instructions to remain silent. For a few minutes, all we could see were pages fetching water or sitting around and talking to each other. Senators occasionally entered the chamber and walked through it to one of the three or four doors along each wall. Just as we were about to leave, Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey began to speak. From where I was sitting, all I could see was the cameraperson filming his speech. Without that speck of a visual, he was just a disembodied voice, though one speaking very passionately about healthcare. The strange thing, at least to me, was that he was speaking to an empty chamber. He addressed the presiding officer who was seated on a dais looking out over the Senate desks. A few minutes in, Markey noted Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s entrance to the chamber and gave Schumer the floor. Again, Schumer spoke into a camera in a room empty but for pages, Markey, and the presiding officer. It appears that the senators often watch speeches from the comforts of their offices rather than on the floor. Who knew?! Schumer, too, lambasted the Republican healthcare bill and it was so exciting to hear him. Especially because I know I was not alone among our trip staff in voting for him!

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We lunched in the Sculpture Garden across from the National Archives and that’s where my brother met us. We fed him and he joined us for our exploration of the Archives. As a former student of history, I love old documents. It’s fun to piece stories together and to find accounts that corroborate and contradict each other. I still remember the thrill of finding the source when I was writing my undergrad thesis on the Hitler Youth movement. There are some really amazing memoirs out there by people who were children in Nazi Germany! The National Archives are a lot of fun because they freeze moments in time, moments when key decisions were made that shape the history of this country.

Every school trip to Washington, DC includes visits to the monuments. We started at the Lincoln Memorial . . .

. . . which is where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech . . .

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. . . and provides a great view of the Washington Monument, which we did not visit because it’s closed.

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A lot of the kids were tired after the Lincoln Memorial but about half wanted to see the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and we gladly obliged. The kids know very little about Vietnam and they’re not alone in that. While most students can talk about World War II starting in elementary school, the vast majority of students I’ve taught know nothing about Vietnam until we bring it up in class. And they have a lot of questions. One of my favorite lessons involves Vietnamese textbooks that explain the Vietnam War in very different words than the (*cough*) big name, biased, overly simplistic, corporate, Texas-influenced US textbooks (*cough cough*) use. Having been to the War Remnants Museum (formerly known as the Museum of American War Crimes) in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam since my last visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, I had a different understanding of the pointlessness and devastation of Vietnam. Land was burned, lives were lost, and stories were buried. That’s what shame means, I think. And that’s why the memorial is important. It’s a black expanse of wall that lists names of the fallen, explains nothing, and invites questions for everything. The kids asked those questions and I was glad for the opportunity to answer them.

I was also glad to spend a moment at the Vietnam Women’s Memorial, which I hadn’t seen before.

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The next day, we spent the morning at the Newseum, which was full of flashing headlines about the FBI. As good a time as any to talk about freedom of speech (and the press and religion and assembly and petition)! Now that I’ve lived in Malaysia and Singapore, neither of which have all of those freedoms, I find myself wondering about the merits of such a free society. For instance, freedom of speech in the US led to an acceptance of hate rhetoric, which led to Trump. So I wonder.

Before hitting the road for our drive back to New York, we stopped at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial, which was a nice bookend to the National Museum of African American History and Culture that started the trip. Martin Luther King, Jr. was my professor’s chosen case study for a required college course on rhetoric and argumentative writing, so I am very familiar with King’s life, writing, speeches, and civil rights partners, including the SCLC, SNCC, and the NAACP. It was really powerful to see his words carved into stone, especially because of their implications for our choices and policies today.

One of my coworkers kept laughing at my penchant for taking pictures with my well-traveled Converse and suggested I try one with my hand instead. So I chose to photograph my hand with the word that seemed the most meaningful, the most important, the most pressing.

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At the end of the day, that’s what we’re working for.

Travel Guide

Travel Guide: The Negev

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The Negev is Israel’s desert and my favorite region of the country. I first visited the Negev on my second trip to Israel in 2013, which was the start of my fantasy of living on a kibbutz by the Dead Sea. I’ve slightly modified that dream based on this trip to Israel and now I think I’d prefer to live on a moshav and work with Israeli and Palestinian children on conflict resolution and restorative peace practices. If my next life plan doesn’t work out, there’s always that!

Having fallen in love with the desert in the past made me even more excited to bring students there on our eighth grade Israel trip. We began with four nights in Jerusalem and then drove to the Negev to hike Masada, an ancient fortress where Herod built palaces for himself in the late first century BCE and where Jews hid after the destruction of the Second Temple. We hiked the winding snake path, built by the Romans in 73CE to reach the hiding Jews. Those Jews, known as Zealots, committed suicide rather than be taken by the Romans. Or so the stories tell us!

It was a hot day and the hike was difficult for many students, which tells me that there’s not enough (or proper or effective) physical education in schools and physical activity in general. The staff on our trip, all of which exercise regularly, had little trouble.

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I love pictures of waving flags but there was no wind when we reached the top, so this was the best I could do.

To the sounds of prayer and singing at the top of Masada, I wandered off alone to meditate and take some pictures. I love the desert because of its colors and its desolation. Such emptiness makes me feel close to the sky and reminds me that in the grand scheme of the world and life, I am nothing, not even a speck on the trajectory of evolutionary history. Those feelings remind me that my own problems are easy to solve and really don’t matter very much at all.

Guards accompany large tour groups in Israel and it was so interesting to see the different responses of each guard to our group’s prayers that afternoon. Most Israelis are secular Jews but we had Jews of many kinds in and among our group throughout our two-week trip.

That afternoon, we visited the Dead Sea, the lowest point on Earth. It is receding at a terrifying rate of about one foot per year. I noticed the shrinking size of the Dead Sea, which is actually a lake, upon seeing it for the second time in 2013 as compared to my 2007 trip, and it was even more obvious this time. The hotels that used to sit right on the shore are now a short car ride away.

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Across the Dead Sea is Jordan!
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Salt from the Dead Sea, which gives it its the Hebrew name Yam HaMelach, or Salt Sea

We spent our two nights in the Negev at Kibbutz Mashabei Sadeh, which had really fun and eclectic decor in front of the reception office:

The following morning we visited Makhtesh Ramon, a geological phenomenon that requires a little explanation. Makhtesh Ramon is often translated as “Ramon Crater”, which is inaccurate. A crater is formed by impact, usually from a meteorite. A makhtesh, however, is formed by erosion and geological changes occurring over hundreds of millions of years. Visiting a makhtesh is basically a journey through evolutionary time. The only examples of a makhtesh are found in Israel’s Negev and Egypt’s Sinai peninsula.

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I spent more time at Makhtesh Ramon back in 2013 and took a lot more photos. For your viewing pleasure, and because I love it there, here they are:

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The next morning, we visited an alpaca farm that also raises llamas, camels, donkeys, sheep, and other animals. The owners actually brought the alpacas and llamas to Israel from South America and now have an organic farm where they give tours and sell wool that they make on site.

That afternoon, we hiked Ein Ovdat, a desert canyon. By this point in the trip, we had a number of students ill with a stomach virus and others struggling with dehydration so we didn’t climb the waterfall but that’s supposed to be really beautiful, too.

In addition to hiking Masada, no trip to the Negev is complete without a stop at a Bedouin tent to learn about this group of nomadic people who used to inhabit the desert. In Israel today, 100% of Bedouins live in villages and towns so their desert hospitality tents, complete with dinner, a camel ride, and the option to spend the night, exist only for tourism and education. While camel riding is one of those activities that everyone does when visiting Israel, it is simply the Middle Eastern equivalent of elephant riding, the problems of which I learned about on a trip to Chiang Mai, Thailand about 18 months ago. If elephant riding is animal abuse and needs to be stopped, so does riding camels. And considering one of them bit a student and the rest were stubborn, snorting, and protesting the entire time, I’d say the camels more than agree.

We left the Negev after two nights and I was sorry to say goodbye. The desert is beautiful and I hope you make it there someday, to any desert. I love waterfalls and trees as much as the next person, as my post about the north of Israel will demonstrate, but the desert is special. It’s nothing and everything all at once.