sucked in

I’m a little worried about this bog. The semester’s about to start and I just created a blog for my job (check it out: CESatBMCC); I might need to take a break from Fledgling so that I can wear my professor hat all the time. Then again, do I ever really take it off? I’m sure topics will come up that I can’t fully address on the work blog. This weekend I feel like I’ve been swept away…Hurricane Irene was pretty much what I expected—more of a tropical storm that didn’t really disturb my life in any significant way (thanks to everyone who checked on me just the same!). Woke up this morning and the rain had already stopped and the wind was blowing gently enough for the windows to be reopened. I didn’t lose power and I have food in the house but with the entire NYC transit system shut down, there isn’t anywhere to go. So I’m doing what I usually do on a Sunday afternoon: daydreaming, writing, and watching PBS. A friend asked if I would be getting cable now that I’m working full-time; I’d like to get BBC America (no, not to watch Idris Elba) but it’s hard to imagine anything on cable really competing with the programming on PBS. Global Voices is one of my favorite shows and they’ve got a great fall line-up. I just watched the tail end of a film about Robert Kennedy’s visit to South Africa in 1966 (RFK in the Land of Apartheid). He concluded his visit with a speech at the University of Witwatersrand and these lines jumped out at me:

There are those who say that the game is not worth the candle – that Africa is too primitive to develop, that its peoples are not ready for freedom and self-government, that violence and chaos are unchangeable. But those who say these things should look to the history of every part and parcel of the human race. It was not the black man of Africa who invented and used poison gas or the atomic bomb, who sent six million men and women and children to the gas ovens, and used their bodies as fertilizer. Hitler and Stalin and Tojo were not black men of Africa. And it was not the black men of Africa who bombed and obliterated Rotterdam and Shanghai and Dresden and Hiroshima.

Genocide is not foreign to Africa, of course, but in that moment and in that space, it was incredibly powerful to have a white man speak those words. I want to warn my students away from racial chauvinism but there are moments when the comparisons are necessary. Anyway, my head’s full of other things but maybe I’ll try turning to the new novel. I’m incorporating current events like the earthquake and tsunami in Japan and the massacre in Oslo. And now Irene will have a place in the story as well…

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