All went very well, but I must vent a little about the announcements the Alaska cockpit crew made — actually on my “to” flight a couple of weeks ago as well.  What I really want to hear is, ” Good morning.  This is Captain Tom Swift.  Welcome aboard. We expect a fairly smooth flight today and should arrive at DFW on time.  I will update you along the way. Our cabin crew is there for for your safety and comfort and I ask you to give your attention now to their instructions.”  Instead, both times, I got something like this:  “Hi back there folks.  I’m your first officer Rick, up here with Captain Rocky.  We’ll be scooting you over to DFW today.  You’ll be glad to know that together we have 69 years of experience doing this and at least one of is us is a member of AARP.  Meeting all your needs back there are Tiffany, Kimberly, Ashley, Madison, and Jason — or maybe that was yesterday.  Anyway, have fun and we’ll see you there.”  I’m not kidding!!

I pretty much hate flying.  Always have.  If I can drive, I’ll drive every time.  But I must admit, I like it much better these days.  I love having a reservation, not lugging heavy  “carry-ons” through terminals and then trying to stuff them in the full overheads if there actually turned out to be “space available.”  The mantra in those days was “The price is right.”  I now choose my sure seat online months in advance.  And they’ve got the security business all figured out now so that it mostly runs like clockwork.  They have a place right outside security to empty your water bottle and a place right inside to fill it up again.  Nice dishpans for your laptop and shoes. Folks seem to know to be all ready to put everything in there without holding up the line.

I especially love small airports.  You get let out at the curb, walk in fifty feet to check in.  Go up one flight. Watch your plane arrive

and still have time to take a few pictures of the local ads before walking a little way to your gate.

Nearly all the ads had to do with the booming oil business and I really enjoyed learning as much about that as I could during my visit.  I’m very sorry to tell you that I did not, however, visit this local boy’s childhood home.  A few days ago I came out of the restroom at an ATV salesroom and almost bumped into a life-sized placard of him.  I nearly jumped out of my skin!

Now I am in a much bigger airport and have plenty of time to walk around and get the kinks out before my flight to PDX.  Big airports can be great adventures.  I particularly remember Frankfurt.  Cutting edge.  And an unexpected four-hour wait in Cairo.  Most fascinating people watching I have ever done.   There are some places you can’t drive. Now, I’m just looking to buy a few souvenirs and maybe a smoothie. And look at the nice spot I found to write this.

I’ve had such a great time.  More on that later.

Mother and Joannie and I have been having such a good time sorting through boxfuls of old photos.  

I’ll scan many of them when I get home and will have lots more soldier-boy pictures for later posts.  For now, here are a couple of repeats:

This year, we are especially remembering that Uncle George “stormed the beach” on D-Day almost exactly seventy years ago.

We will visit both his and Daddy’s graves today.

This is Daddy’s footstone,  which incorrectly states his birthdate as 1921.  His age was falsified so he could enlist.  He was just a boy when he was shipped out for the Pacific. He  was really born in 1923, as his headstone correctly states.

We will also visit the grave of family friend Frankie Grammer and do a little work there.  None of her family lives here anymore and we want to do a little sprucing up.

After reading/viewing MM’s comment re. my previous post, I’ve been thinking that perhaps noticing and responding to the many differences in humanity is not necessarily demeaning.

I am presently visiting in a place where everyone — I mean everyone — calls me “ma’am.”   And everyone steps back and patiently holds doors as Mother negotiates her walker. It isn’t intended as ageism but as courtesy.

I’m not sure why I, an elderly white woman, am often delighted by the unique beauty of an African-American child. I suppose that’s wrong.  I want to say to the parents, “What a beautiful child,” but I don’t just in case it might be racist.

Recently, in a class at St. P’s, when we were discussing Mary of Magdala, my sensitivity was raised. The Rev. Shelly, who was guiding our talk, asked what some of the things we know about this Mary are. I mentioned that we now know there are no scriptural references to her having been a harlot. Shelly agreed but changed the word “harlot” to “sexworker.”  The connotations of those two words are significant and I am happy to add the new word to my vocab.

If a police officer asked me to describe the perp of a crime I had witnessed, the things I would have noticed first would be the sex, race, and age of that person. I’m sure, on some level, that makes me a bigot — sexist, racist, ageist.

I know this post needs a concluding sentence, but, at this point, I just don’t have one.  I’m still trying to figure all this out.

I’m just posting this here in toto so that I can read it again myself from time to time.  I read it online in the SJ this morning.  As an old English teacher and historian, I embrace the content of Parker’s article wholeheartedly.  I would welcome the opportunity to observe the reaction of today’s students to the anti-semitism in The Merchant of Venice, the racism in Mark Twain, the misogyny in almost every fairytale, the crux of the trial in To Kill a Mockingbird.  What stimulating writing assignments come to mind!

Today’s vocabulary word:  cissexism

 
Placing warnings on books is ridiculous

WASHINGTON — Just when you thought American higher learning couldn’t get any more ridiculous, along come demands for warning labels on provocative works of literature.

One never knows when a sentence, phrase or word might trigger some buried memory or traumatic experience. Life is a veritable assault on the excessively sensitive, but somehow most of us muddle through. C’est la vie, after all.

But literature, apparently, is fair game for those tortured souls who fear that some -ism or another might leap from a page, causing what exactly? A moment of discomfort? An opportunity to sort through one’s emotional attic? Or, heavens, exposure to an involuntary insight?

Several schools (including Oberlin College, Rutgers University, George Washington University and the University of Michigan) are toiling with these very questions as students have begun requesting “trigger warnings” on books and syllabuses.

“ Warning: This book includes a rape scene ,” for example, would warn rape victims lest they be traumatized by the contents.

Mightn’t students Google a book in advance of reading if they’re so fearful of a psychological crisis? One is surprised that student organizers at these schools would use such a loaded word as “trigger,” given its obvious association with guns.

Without making light of anyone’s ethnicity, race or trauma, especially rape or stress disorder suffered by veterans (another specific group of concern), such precautions are misplaced in an institution of higher learning where one is expected to be intellectually challenged and where one’s psychological challenges are expected to be managed elsewhere.

There are, besides, other ways to inform oneself about a course or literary assignment that might be problematic for whatever reason. Then again, if reading “The Great Gatsby” causes one undue angst owing to its abuse, classism, sexism and whatever-ism, then one might consider that college is not the right place at the right time.

Moreover, part of literary criticism is understanding the historical context of a given work. Thus, when the egregiously offensive N-word appears in the “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” is it too much to ask that readers reflect upon the word’s usage when MarkTwain wrote the book?

Within that understanding is a world of learning, from the history of race to the evolution of language. Instead, we are enslaved to “responsible pedagogical practice,” as one sympathetic faculty member put it. Thus, a draft guide at Oberlin College suggests flagging anything that could “disrupt a student’s learning” or “cause trauma”: “Be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism (transgender discrimination), ableism and other issues of privilege and oppression. Realize that all forms of violence are traumatic, and that your students have lives before and outside your classroom, experiences you may not expect or understand.”

I don’t know about you but I’m presently suffering acute trauma caused by being trapped in a world full of (you say it, not me). What is the -ism that refers to discrimination against relatively sane people who can read “The Merchant of Venice” without a therapist on speed dial? Normalism? But then, this would be offensive to people who are … The mind left free to wander happens upon a vacant building that used to house thousands of volumes. Now a museum, it was once called a library.

Which is to say, a list of books that might be offensive to someone, or cause one to ponder the universe beyond one’s personal experience, would be so long as to make libraries obsolete. Most if not all of Shakespeare and the Greek tragedies would require so many labels they’d look like a Prius in Portland.

Lest I leave anyone unoffended, studying at the adult level, that is, in an institution of higher learning, isn’t supposed to make one feel good — or necessarily bad. It is to make one feel challenged, excited by new ideas, elevated by fresh insights, broadened by others’ perspectives.

Obviously, one should be sensitive but also sensible. We also might expect that professors, guided by their own educations, common sense and goodwill, might mention the potential to find some words or expressions disturbing. But requiring labels on books is the busywork of smallish minds — yet another numbing example of political correctness run amok and the infantilizing of education in the service of overreaching sensitivity.

Kathleen Parker writes for the Washington Post Writers Group