What would Marjory do?

Marjory Stoneman Douglas lived to be 108 years old, and she never stopped fighting for justice--for minorities, for women, for children, for the land itself. In her 90s she appeared in a hearing where she was the lone voice opposing a plan to drain a portion of the Everglades in Dade County, and when she was booed, she reportedly responded, "Can't you boo any louder than that?"

"Look, I'm an old lady," she said. "I've been here since eight o'clock. It's now eleven. I've got all night, and I'm used to the heat." She persisted--and the county commissioners cancelled their plan to drain the wetland.

In her youth she fought for women's right to vote and later she worked to provide safe drinking water to residents of Miami's segregated slums. She fought to improve conditions for Florida's migrant workers and to provide them legal services, and she fought to earn her voice as a writer in the predominantly male world of journalism.

But her most sustained and intense fight was her decades-long campaign to protect south Florida's waterways, especially the Everglades, from overdevelopment, drainage, and pollution. In her 1947 book The Everglades: River of Grass, she elegantly portrays the wonders of the massive wetlands that had long been viewed as a barrier to development. Where others saw a virulent swamp, Douglas saw beauty:

The miracle of light pours over the green and brown expanse of saw grass and of water, shining and slowly moving, the grass and water that is the meaning and the central fact of the Everglades. It is a river of grass.

Her research for River of Grass led her to look beneath the surface, to consider the peculiar geology of south Florida, the interdependence of fragile species in the wetland's unique ecosystems, and the natural cycles of rain and drought that could transform lush green growth into kindling:

The saw-grass stands drying to old gold and rustling faintly, ready, if there is a spark anywhere, to burst into those boiling red flames which crackle even at a great distance like a vast frying pan, giving off rolling clouds of heavy cream-colored smoke, shadowed with mauve by day and by night mile-high pillars of roily tangerine and orange light. The fires move crackling outward as the winds blow them, black widening rings where slow embers burn and smolder down into the fibrous masses of the thousand-year-old peat.

Then the spring rains put out the fires with their light moving tread, like the tread of the running deer, and the year of rainy season and of dry season has made its round again.

In River of Grass, the Everglades emerges as a character in itself, a misunderstood but fascinating entity with a complex history and an uncertain future. Douglas was among the first to proclaim that the destruction of the Everglades by drainage or pollution would be a disaster for the state as a whole, to see the health of wetlands as a harbinger for the health of the nation. "The Everglades is a test," she once said. "If we pass it, we may get to keep the planet."

Marjory Stoneman Douglas lived 108 years but, thankfully, not long enough to see a school carrying her name polluted by senseless violence and bloodshed. She saw environmentalism as a practical way to care for the weakest among us, claiming that providing clean water and clean air demonstrates our love and concern for children and those marginalized by poverty or other problems. When we love the land, we love our children, and if we fail to pass that test, our children bear the wounds of our neglect.

Today we face another kind of test: can we develop a sensible, workable plan to keep the most lethal weapons out of the hands of murderers? If we can't pass this test, we don't deserve to keep the planet.

As I hear more painful details about the shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, I mourn for the families and I mourn for the victims and I mourn for a culture that can't find a way to make these shootings stop, but I also mourn for Marjory. She doesn't deserve this, I tell myself, and neither do we.
 

Paris rising

"What I saw first of all," recalls James Thurber in "The First Time I saw Paris," "was one outflung hand of France as cold and limp as a dead man's." 

This was November 13, 1918, and young Thurber had made a difficult sea journey to serve as a code clerk at the Paris Peace Conference. He continues: "I know now that French towns don't die, that France has the durability of history itself, but I was only twenty-three then, and seasick, and I had never been so far from Ohio before." 

His first sight on land was a line of "desolate men, a detachment of German prisoners being marched along a street, in mechanical step, without expression in their eyes, like men coming from no past and moving toward no future." Soon, though Thurber and his fellow code clerks arrived in Paris, "the veritable capital city of Beginning." The city was coming back to life after the long, bloody slog through the War to End War, and Paris "was costumed like a wide-screen Technicolor operetta, the uniforms of a score of nations forming a king of restless, out-of-step finale." 

All was not revelry and joy, however; Thurber took a tour through battlefields with a friend searching for souvenirs and cemeteries: 

In our trek through the battlefields, with the smell of death still in the air, the ruined and shattered country scarred with ammunition dumps and crashed planes, we came upon the small temporary cemeteries arranged by the Graves Registration Service, each with a small American flag, such as the children of Paris waved at President Wilson, nailed to a post and faded by the rain and wintry weather. In one of these cemeteries my companion, a Tennessee youth, only a little taller than five feet, began singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" with his hat over his heart, and went on singing it in a sudden downpour of rain, for the anthem, once started, must be finished.

Thurber's visit occurred nearly 100 years ago, when France lay scarred and wounded but still capable of resurrection. A visit that began with a vision of death had been transformed into a celebration of life and hope:

Paris, City of Light and of occasional Darkness, sometimes in the winter rain seeming wrought of monolithic stones, and then, in the early days of its wondrous and special pearly light, appearing to float in mid-air like a mirage city in the Empire of Imagination, fragile and magical, has had many a premature requiem sung for the repose of its soul by nervous writers or gloomy historians who believe it is dying or dead and can never rise again. Paris, nonetheless, goes right on rising out of war, ultimatum, occupation, domestic upheaval, cabinet crises, international tension, and dark prophecy, as it has been in the habit of doing since its residents first saw the menacing glitter of Roman shields many centuries ago.

 Of course, Thurber arrived in Paris at the end of something awful; what would he write today in the midst of a very different kind of conflict? I don't know, but I hold on to his image of a city that goes right on rising--despite the forces that would try in vain to hold it down.

Words, not bombs

I heard on the radio last night that whoever set off the bombs at the Boston Marathon was "trying to send a message," but unless the message is "I am a homicidal maniac," bombs are a particularly ineffective rhetorical method. (That's why we don't teach bomb construction in composition classes.)

So many ways to send a message: letters, books, tweets, music, manifestos. The Donald Barthelme story "The Balloon" portrays a man who deploys an ambiguous message--a gigantic red balloon--onto which observers project their own meanings, which differ from the private meaning intended by the balloon's author. But no human beings were harmed in the deployment of this balloon.

What sort of message might a bomb convey? News analysts suggested a number of motivations: maybe the bomber has a grievance against the Boston Marathon or athletes, or maybe the bomber hates Americans (on Patriot Day!) or hates paying taxes (on income tax day!). Anyone who wants to protest paying taxes ought to revisit Thoreau,who never threw any bombs but whose message about civil disobedience remains clear and compelling. If the "machine of government" produces injustice, says Thoreau, the citizen has three choices: wait for the machine to wear out; consider whether "the remedy would be worse than the evil"; or "Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine."

Thoreau was willing to throw his body into the gears of the machine, sacrificing his own comfort for his cause; he didn't drag his neighbors to jail with him or inscribe a painful message on the bodies of random strangers. That's why Thoreau's message still earns our attention even if we disagree. The bomber who hides behind technology to toss strangers' bodies into the machine may in fact be trying to send a message, but the only message listeners will remember is one of horror and hatred and incomprehensible evil.

Need to send a message? Words work better than bombs, cost less, and last forever, as Robinson Jeffers reminds us in "To the Stone-Cutters":

For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.

More holes in the security blanket

This morning's Columbus Dispatch reports that three men have been charged with selling fake training certificates to allow 613 people to get permits to carry concealed guns. " 'You don't see these (cases) too often,' " said Franklin County Sheriff Zach Scott, but somehow I don't find that too comforting.

On the bright side, the 613 fake certificates are just a tiny proportion of the 18,294 concealed-carry permits issued in Franklin County since 2004, and what are the odds that you, personally, will run into one of those 613 untrained gun-carriers? 

I don't know what I find more alarming: the fact that more than 18,000 people in Columbus, Ohio find it necessary to carry concealed guns or the fact that one of the miscreants charged in the scam is a security officer for the Franklin County Court. Would you trust your personal security to someone willing to sell a fake gun-training certificate for $200?

If the people charged with protecting us can't be trusted to uphold the law, no wonder so many people feel the need to protect themselves by carrying guns.

Struggling for speech

After yesterday's tragedy it seems somehow callous to talk to students about commas, but that's what I'm doing today. I harbor no hope that correct use of commas will reduce the level of senseless violence in our world, nor do I believe that mastering the rules of comma usage will dissuade a deranged student from murdering his classmates. But what else can I tell them? "Thou shalt not kill" has already been said a few times, and those seriously considering mass murder tend to be unresponsive to the message.

If I could say one thing to all my students today it would be this: phone home. Call your mom, dad, sibs, friends, and love each other up. And ask for help when you need it; use words, not weapons.

It's not much, but at this point it's the best I can do.

What went wrong?

I spent my lunch hour at a local restaurant laughing and joking with colleagues and speculating about controversial issues on the agenda at this afternoon's faculty meeting, but then we came back to campus and saw the news from Virginia. No one is laughing now. Those faculty meeting agenda items that were so fascinating at lunch suddenly seem irrelevant.

Education ought to equip students to rely on reason rather than reaching for a gun. What went wrong?