Editing an alt-weekly newspaper in Champaign-Urbana some 20 years ago taught me a ton. I already knew journalism was difficult work. What I didn’t understand was how critical good local journalism is to any community. And how difficult it is to do local community—focused journalism when you’re a local.

When I took the helm,  the paper was widely dismissed as a rag that only published progressive screeds and did irresponsible work (in fact, it had just settled a lawsuit for doing…irresponsible journalism.) It had been blackballed by lots of local advertisers.

It was pretty awful for a long time but we managed to do enough good work, to give the paper a voice, to gain some credibility, and to ultimately break even.

As we did, however, at least some self-described progressives didn’t like it. We’d gone mainstream. And that’s when I learned about something that I came to call “progressive fundamentalism.”

I may have to trot down to Sandmeyer’s and buy a copy.

To wit, an Urbana City Council person (full disclosure, he’s become a close friend) was and is a Mennonite. At the risk of oversimplifying, Mennonites believe in non-violence and are pacifists. Well, part of Urbana’s population aspires to be Berkeley, and some of that population was on the council, too. They pushed to have Urbana officially oppose the brewing invasion of Iraq. (Years earlier, Urbana had declared itself a nuclear-free zone.)

My friend opposed the measure on the grounds that it was meaningless, symbolic only, and more important—not what the city council is charged to do.

Well, he was publicly excoriated as essentially a war monger. It drove him near to tears in public, and it eventually drove him off the council.

That was when I learned that some people who identify as progressives can be as mean, narrow-minded, and nasty as any religious fundamentalist.

So I’ve taken note of the writings of John McWhorter, who is arguing against what he calls “a religion of anti-racism” in a book title “Woke Racism, How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.”

Bear with me now: He fully understands that racism exists, that we need to address inequities, and we need to take tangible steps to help people who need it. It’s that tangible help that he sees as lacking.

McWhorter is a linguist at Columbia University. He also is Black.

Some excerpts from an NPR interview:

This is a religion where instead of it being about your faith in Jesus, it’s about showing that you know that racism exists above all else, including basic compassion. That’s religious.

And then also, the way we talk about white privilege is eerily consonant with the way one talks about original sin. You have it from the beginning, it’s a stain that you’ll never get rid of. You’re supposed to always think about it. It’s there regardless of the condition of your life, and you’re going to die with it. So white privilege becomes the original sin that you’re supposed to live in a kind of atonement for.

—–

It’s funny, I’m grappling with this idea that the response to me is to say “he doesn’t know systemic racism exists.” I think part of it is that that’s a very clumsy term. Yes, I know that those inequities exist. I think that those inequities must be battled. The issue is, what do you do to battle them? And I say, telling people not to be racist or thinking of those inequities as some abstract version of bigotry doesn’t help people who need help.

—-

…we’ve gotten to the point that we’re so focused on what people say and how they say it that we’re paying more attention to that than to the perhaps less glamorous work of getting out on the ground and trying to change society.

We have to think about, say, 50 years ago when people who felt very modern were doing civil rights activism in a real way. It would have looked very peculiar to them that we’re so concerned with what things are called. There was a little of it, but not nearly as much as there is now. It’s because, to an extent, policing language is easier. Civil rights activism is not glamorous in terms of what really creates change. … I want to help people, and I’m very interested in policies that change Black lives. And I’m seeing a distraction from that.

The full NPR interview is here.

While you’re at it, you might also check out his columns in the New York Times (he’s a regular contributor. Here are two:

I’m With Condoleezza Rice About White Guilt

Cultural Appropriation Can Be Beautiful

To me, there’s nothing terribly edgy about his ideas—they make sense.

But I hope you’ll give them a read and judge for yourself.

Seeing Eye dog Luna has been working with me in Chicago for a year-and-a-half now, and somewhere along the way she has picked up a tendency to veer when leading me across certain intersections. We could be, say, on a sidewalk along a busy street with the traffic at our left-hand side going the same direction we are. We get to a busy crossing, I listen to when it sounds safe to cross, I command , “Luna, Forward!” and for her first three or four steps into the street she veers left into that parallel street before curving back into the crosswalk we’re supposed to be walking in.

I contacted the Seeing Eye about this, they asked if Mike could take a video, and after he forwarded that video to the Seeing Eye they called to assure me Luna is not the only guide dog they’ve known to develop this bad habit. “We even have a name for it,” the instructor on the phone told me. “It’s called “arcing’.”

The Seeing Eye is sending instructor Chris Mattoon out tomorrow to spend three days here helping Luna think straight.

Likely he’ll be teaching me a few things, too – I could be inadvertently holding the harness incorrectly at intersections, not facing my shoulders in the right direction before giving the command, delivering my commands too quietly. These dogs pick up on such things.

Longtime Safe & Sound blog readers might recognize Chris Mattoon’s name.

Chris in a photo taken back in 2010 with his own dog Gilda.

Ten years ago he came out to help me decide to retire my third Seeing Eye dog, Harper. In 2011 that heroic Yellow Labrador Retriever saved me from getting hit by a car at a Chicago intersection, and when Harper developed PTSD behaviors afterwards, Chris helped us make the decision to give our hero an early retirement.

From there Chris spent months training Golden/Yellow Labrador Retriever Whitney to become my fourth Seeing Eye dog. I flew to the Seeing Eye in 2012 to spend three weeks working with Chris and Whitney before bringing her home to Chicago. Since then, and especially during the pandemic, Chris has become the Seeing Eye’s main troubleshooter, the trainer they send on house calls to fine-tune the work of people — and dogs — who need a little extra help after graduating from the training program in Morristown, New Jersey.

Please don’t worry that Luna and I are having a terrible time working together! Really, we’re doing very well. We just need some helpful suggestions and reassurance, and I’m grateful the Seeing Eye is sending Chris to provide just that. Cutting this blog post short now to start getting ready for the next three days training — and oh, if you are reading this and are in the memoir-writing class I lead Wednesdays at Admiral-at-the-Lake, don’t fret. Chris is meeting me early this Wednesday morning. We’ll see to it that Luna and I are done in time to lead your afternoon class!

I’ve missed a couple Mondays recently, and for that, I apologize. The first was owed to exhaustion. On October 10 I left for Tarrytown, New York, the start of a weeklong effort to put on…gulp…an in-person conference. The non-profit I work for—Phius—puts on an annual conference and after a virtual shindig last year, we gathered again. We limited it to smaller-than-usual numbers, and I’m happy to report it was an enormous success. But I returned a week later utterly exhausted, like my co-workers.

We had 400 people and 30 exhibitors, and they all behaved. Masks were worn, and the weather cooperated, allowing us to gather outside between sessions and soak up beautiful weather in the Hudson Valley.

We were near Tappan Zee, a three-mile-wide span of the Hudson River. On the evening of the last day of the conference,

The Tappan Zee bridge from our riverside soiree perch (that’s the moon on the right–it was a nice nightL). To see the NYC skyline, we needed  only to swivel our heads left.

we held a ticketed party at a former factory building that had been converted to a bistro. We owned the place that night. And again, the weather was fantastic. We had enough indoor space for all of us, but we mostly were outside on the third-floor deck or at  tables on the shore of the Hudson. To our right was the spectacularly lit Tappan Zee bridge, and to our left was the New York City Skyline.

It was the cherry on top of a luscious sundae.

We made a decision earlier this year to forge ahead. No virtual conference. No Zoom. No virtual rooms or virtual trade shows.

The months and then weeks in advance brought nightmares about what could go wrong. There was good reason to fret. To start, the hotel had lost its affiliation with Hilton in the midst of Covid. And like everyone in the hospitality business, they couldn’t get staff.

Several weeks before the event, the remnants of Hurricane Ida tore through, dropping eight inches of rain in a few hours, and flooding the lower level of the hotel—where we’d intended to hold some breakout sessions.

And of course, the pandemic.

Somehow, we pulled it off. Our constituents are smart and ethical, so we were confident of a high vaccination rate and of thoughtful behavior at the event.

Knock wood, no illness reported thus far.

We have received reports of elation. About the joy of being in the same place at the same time. About richly rewarding and productive serendipitous conversations that can only happen in person. That can’t happen at intentional virtual meetings.

It’s a new world, I get that. And one where we probably should meet less often, fly less, generate fewer emissions, and make the most of technology.

But don’t ever give in to the last couple years becoming the new normal. I’ve never seen such joy and energy as I did in New York.

We need each other, in three dimensions.

With baseball season coming to a close, I asked writers in the class I lead via Zoom to choose a baseball term to use as a title for (and the subject of) an essay. A retired school teacher who was active in her union chose “Strike,” a writer who shoplifted as a kid chose “Caught Stealing,” and many others chose “Safe at home.” Deborah Perry was the only one in class who opted for “Slide,” and I am pleased to introduce her as our Senior Class guest blogger today.

First, some background: Deborah, her two sisters and one brother were all born in America but raised in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) when their parents became missionaries there. Living first at Chikore Mission Station, they later moved to Mt. Selinda Mission Station, a tiny village in the middle of Africa’s southernmost tropical rainforest.

Deborah and her siblings live in different parts of the United States now: Deborah is in Chicago and is a regular in the memoir class I lead here. When we switched to Zoom in 2020, she encouraged her two sisters (one in Maine, the other in Massachusetts) to enroll, too. Lucky for us, they said yes. Now our class gets to hear about life in Rhodesia from three different perspectives every week, and today you Safe & Sound blog readers get to enjoy Deborah’s playful “slide” essay, too.

by Deborah Perry

Laid out in a broad, gentle arc in front of the house, the dirt driveway glistened during a brief interlude from the early morning downpour. The rainy season had begun, and when the rain started up again, globs of deep red African mud erupted from the shimmering puddles like exclamation points.

We loved the rainy season.

Deborah, today’s guest blogger, is on the left.

Following every dry winter season we’d celebrate the forest’s hydration, the warm air washing over us. Soon the long grass at the edge of the driveway would turn bright green and the jacaranda tree in the side yard would burst forth in ridiculously intense purple waves.

But the color of this day was a deep brick red. The morning crept along, rain pummeled the road, mud splattered in all directions, and the four of us children cooped up inside grew weary of the days-long Monopoly game spread out on the dining room table.

Hitching up the hems of the skirts of our dresses and tucking them out of the way into our underpants, we burst out of the house and ran down the driveway. Our bare feet pounded the road until we came to the longest, deepest mud puddle of them all.

One at a time, we hit the edge and catapulted ourselves into a long skid. Over and over, each slide compacted the red clay mud into a firmer and faster surface. Finally, exhausted, we collapsed into a giggling mass, soaked in Africa’s rich, red, clay mud.

Dry winter season activities could be as much fun as the sloppy mud puddles. On some of those dry, cooler winter days we’d spread out face down along the edges of the road, the sun warming our backs as we stared, mesmerized, into the depths of tiny funnel-shaped indentations in the dirt. Hidden at the tip of each conical trap was a patient ant lion, a miniature compact but formidable pincered insect waiting for its next meal to tumble in.

Soon enough, an inattentive ant would lose its footing and begin a frantic scramble, trying to escape up the slippery-sided slope. Tiny grains of cascading sand would send a signal that lunch was on its way. The intrepid ant lion would start throwing bits of sand up the sides, exacerbating the sliding sand and ensuring the ant would lose its footing and slip down to the bottom, where it would unceremoniously become lunch.

On other sunny winter days, we’d grab a bucket of water and start digging in the dry, crumbly clay along the edge of the driveway to build curvy roads for our Dinky trucks and cars to travel along. The miniature mud and twig villages inhabited by imaginary families came next, complete with lawns made of soft green moss. Lorries and delivery trucks careened down tiny roads, around curves, screeching to a halt in front of ramshackle abodes. We’d sometimes carve a hole near a hovel so it would have its own swimming pool, slicking down the bottom until it was smooth enough to hold water.

That dirt road, our driveway, was our playground, and while I can not claim to be “mwana wevhu” – a child of the African soil — I do feel a deep connection to the African dirt.

Last night we attended a celebration of the wedding anniversary of two people who’d been legally married for 30 years but spiritually married for longer.

There were lots of people. Who behaved mask-wise. And people who knew they could trust they were in a safe space. You know what I mean.

We met this anniversary pair serendipitously years ago. And the arc of their lives more or less traced the arc of mine and Beth’s. They’d met at U of I. The four of us had worked at the same places. Just a few years apart. (Beth and I are older. Damn.)

They both gave toasts. They were both great. I was struck by one passage. A preface:  “I’d had girlfriends in high school, but I reached the stage where I thought, “What’s the point?” He went on to explain that you’d start dating, with the idea in the back of your mind that this isn’t going to go anywhere.

He explained that they worked together, and before they were lovers/partners whatever you want to call it, they were friends.

I was immediately clued into why we are friends. I met Beth in a journalism class. We got to know each other with no goals or agendas. We stayed in touch, and we were ourselves. By the time we reconnected, I had decided it would be OK if I never had a life partner.

And that’s part of how we got to where we are.

So, to our dear friends, thanks for that celebration, for being our friends, and here’s to many more years.