149. Zoom-bombed

Ok, so I am old and sometimes grumpy and can’t keep up with much of electronic technology. But I can be outraged at pornography. Yesterday I had planned to read “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” at noon from the Josephy Center via Zoom. The hacking started just as people were getting on to say hello and Merry Christmas and listen to the story. It was shouts and insults and very explicit video of very young people playing at and having sex.

 

There was pornography before Covid, and political divisiveness, petty crime and homelessness. But once again Covid seems to have upped antes, broadened divisions, and emboldened those who have no use for civil society and a community of wide but healthy differences. Instead of problem solving we get escalation, even exhilaration—at the expense of civility. 

 

Covid has disrupted education and closed businesses—while making others incredibly rich. It’s confused travel plans, distanced relatives, and escalated differences within families and among nations. And it has engendered fatigue among health care workers and uncertainty and distrust among ordinary citizens. 

 

Meanwhile, weather is ripping the country apart, from California fires to Kentucky tornadoes. Climate change deniers have grown silent, but that is no compensation to the lives lost and torn apart with wind and fire. 

 

So, is zoom bombing—I learned the word for it yesterday—the pranks of bored teenagers? Or is it the calculated magnification of the voices of sick people of all ages who can’t find places in this changing, chaotic world? And if it’s that, what can those of us looking for normalcy and compassion do about it?

 

It might be another crazy thought from an old and increasingly grumpy guy, but what sprung to mind yesterday, after the shock of it, is that we need nationwide lessons in community and civility, and that doing away with the military draft not only gave us our longest wars, but further divided a fractioning country.

 

Vietnam ended—in my humble opinion—when the military ran out of poor and brown people and started after the sons of white doctors and lawyers and their PTA and Good Housekeeping moms. I say this because I marched with them, and watched their sons get drafted out of the Peace Corps. 

 

Not everyone has to be a soldier, but every 18 year-old should take a year away from parents’ homes and clean bed pans or build trails in some distant place with others doing the same damned thing. And learn to get along with the others—as soldiers have learned forever that they could.

 

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103. Lion’s Milk

I don’t know why it’s never occurred to me to write about the biggest impact of the pandemic on my life, but today, with a zoom call from Turkey, I’m reminded. My long-ago roommate, now teaching at a university in Ankara, and another Peace Corps friend from the time, who is now in Seattle, spent an hour this morning trading old stories—but mostly catching up on where we, our kids and grandkids are today. How we and our families are coping with the pandemic. Speculating on once again meeting in person in Ankara, Seattle, Portland, or somewhere on the East Coast. 

 

In April of 2020 I was slated to spend ten days in that Ankara university with the American Studies Department, talking about the Nez Perce and other Western Tribes, about the history and cultural lessons I’ve learned from books, notes, and Indian friends over the past 50 years. 

 

I had tickets, and gift copies of Alvin Josephy’s 500 Nations packed and ready to go, notes for talks, and a DVD or two that I might use in telling Turkish college students about another side of American history. Turks—and Germans, the French and others around the world—are sometimes more interested in these chapters in American history than we are. I’d get a chance to explore why.

 

And I would eat lamb kebabs, white cheese, fresh melons, baklava, lentil soup, and the olives that had once tasted bitter but grew sweet in my almost five years in Turkey, 1965-70. 

 

The covid crushed all of that. I was reminded today of how, when covid hit, we summarily changed important plans, how we hunkered down away from friends and family members—and of how we, over the course of a year, have learned new tricks, and can now visit across continents in real time. 

 

Still—the lentil soup I make is not the same as the ones I drank in Turkey (yes, in Turkish we “drink” soup rather than eat it). I can hear faintly, in my mind’s ear, the cries of Ankara street vendors and shared taxi drivers, and see in my mind’s eye the minarets of Istanbul and the shops in the covered bazaar.

 

I’ll maybe dream in Turkish again tonight, the words and pictures in my mind rolling back the 50 years, from a time when three new friends, one Turk and two Americans, discussed our futures over glasses of absinthe, the drink the Turks call raki, or “lion’s milk.”

 

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