Red went back to work today. Dr. Fariello said no running or intense exertion until the end of the week. She said I could bring him into the pasture. I took him out this afternoon – he was pretty sick earlier this week, a fever of 106 – and he went into his focused crouched. I let him do one outrun, and also took him briefly to the Mansion today, just to say hello.
Many of the residents read the blog and they were worried about him. So it was just light work for him today, I did what I was told. Red is on the mend, not quite himself, but eating well and eager to get to the sheep. Come and see. This is the second video taken with the new Iphone X.
Great news. Our friend the Rev. Dahn Gandell, who works with refugee kids in Rochester, N.Y., is coming to Pompanuck Farm the last few days of December, and she is bring some refugee children from Burma with her. They also play soccer.
The RISSE soccer team has a lot of kids from Burma, and Ali (from RISSE, the refugee and immigrant center in Albany) is eager for the two groups to meet. Ali says they intend to wear their new uniforms (above), we’ll see if a game came be conjured up.
The kids have called themselves the Bedlam Farm Warriors, not something I asked for. it is kind of cool.
i’m going to Albany tomorrow to meet with Ari and the soccer team. I’m also meeting with Mawulidi Diodone Majaliwa, I wrote about him a couple of months ago, he is a carver from the Congo who was forced to leave all of his tools behind.
You may recall the Army Of Good raised money to buy him some new tools, and we went out into the woods and helped him pick out some wood. He’s bringing some of his first carvings to our meeting at RISSE tomorrow. They will be for sale.
I hope to offer them on my blog and/or Maria’s blog this week in time for Christmas. This is exciting, you have given him the tools to honor the work his grandfather taught him, work he thought was lost to him.
I’ve also talked with Ali about helping the soccer team ice-stake on some Saturdays this winter at a n rink outside of Albany. It will cost about $7 a child, and I’m bringing a check for the first visit. It will cost roughly $100 to get the team to the rink, depending on how many come.
Thanks to the members of the Army Of Good for contacting Ali about sending Ukelele’s for each of the kids, that could be wild. Also a check to pay for additional indoor soccer tournament fees this winter.
I am trying to focus our help on keeping the kids together and busy and active during an upstate New York winter, the first for some of them.
Most come from single parent homes, and there is little money or transportation for them. Few of the families have cards, Ali is working with me to make sure they have healthy and fun things to do. He is their lifetime to the outside world, and few of them have seen snow or sub-zero temperatures.
In the hard part of winter, they will be stuck in apartments, I will work with Ali to get them out and with their friends. The federal subsidies that were available to them and their families are disappearing rapidly. They will need help. This is a major focus for me in the coming months, it will not take a lot of money to get them to movies, skating, practicing indoors, some outings.
I’ll keep you posted on all of these activities. This is sacred work for me, the true soul of America.
We’ve send them to see Spiderman, paid for birthday parties, soccer uniforms. I’d like to get them to some other movies. I hope, with your help, to keep supporting them through the winter, and then again when soccer season cranks up.
This is so important, to see them together is to see how much they love and support one another. Their lives would be harsh and lonely with this connection. Ali, my brother, is a saint. He calls me a savior, but he is the one reaching out to these kids.
I want to keep helping him.
The December meeting with the children from Burma will also be important to them, they rarely get to see other refugee children from outside RISSE, they are already excited about it.
If you wish to contribute you can send a check to my post office box. P.O. Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816, or via Paypal, [email protected]. We have about $1,500 in the Mansion/Refugee Fund, thank you. It was getting low there for a bit. Please mark your payments or checks to Refugee Fund or The Mansion, or both.
All donations go into a separate account, overseen by a bookkeeper an an account. Every penny goes where it is supposed to go.
This is not big sky country, there are hills, even mountains all around. Our farm has some big sky around it, and photographers love big sky. Today, the sky was gorgeous, sun popping in and out of the clouds. I got there just in time, the sun drops out of the sky these days like a cannonball.
I call them the Good Witches, when they meet, there is often laughter, tears, honesty. I am never there, and Maria rarely discusses what they talk about. But she values them, andI often see a white light around them when they are together, they meet religiously and weekly at the Round House Cafe for lunch.
I think it’s a coven.
It is always meaningful to watch them, there is so much trust and support, it is visible to me. Today, I had lunch with my friend Scott at the cafe – men don’t generally make or keep friends like this, but Scott and I get together when we can.
We were on the other side of the cafe, maybe 20 yards away, but I could feel their presence. All that was missing was a hissing fire.
During lunch, I sent Maria some suggestive – okay – dirty Emoji’s from my new Iphone X.
Is this what they mean by groundbreaking technology? She showed them to the other witches and there was much laughter from the table, I could hear it and feel it across the room..
By contemporary standards, my Emojis are not very dirty, I could put any of them up on the blog without much embarrassment, especially these days.
I tend to the prudish side, but Maria has awakened some other sides.
I love the new animated Emoji’s on the X, they use Artificial Intelligence to scan my face and incorporate my voice and facial features into the Emojis on the phone. Maria cracks up when she sees them.
And I am careful where they go.
I once sent a very romantic text message for Maria to our snow plow man by mistake, he took it very well. I admit that by contemporary stands, they are not worth exposure on Twitter. One day, I’ll share them, I do think they are kind of funny.
The Good Witches are important to Maria, and I think also to Athena and Mandy, the other witches. I do think they have magical powers – they can open and close doors from a distance, numb bees and yellow jackets and move dishes and plates.
Unlike most men, they value friendship highly and place it above some other things in their life. They rarely miss their gatherings. Men, say psychologists, often put friendship far behind work and other obligations. That has often been true of me.
They do give off a kind of white light when they are together. The witches are committed to these gathers, they have, over time, come to trust one another. Maria looks forward to seeing them, telling them what is happening in her life, what bothers or frightens her.
I think they are two of the very few people to whom she tells things she doesn’t or can’t tell me, and that is important I think, every one needs someone outside of their inner lives that the can speak openly to.
We have very few secrets from one another, but secrets are important, it is healthy to have some. Maria and I have both had difficulties with our biological families, in our town we have found a true community.
I think the witches are like family to Maria, like sisters. She says they fight, talk, cry and share with one another. That’s what a really family is, I think. They can quarrel and have difficult moments, they work through it.
Our families couldn’t do those things. We just couldn’t really talk to each other. I think, in some ways, the Mansion has become my family, the refugees as well. We just care for each other.
It feels good to me to see the witches, there is a warm and open feeling about them that you can see across the room.
When I can, I send cookies over to them, they love sweets.
“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me.” – Immanuel Kant.
Like almost everyone else, I woke up this morning to news of racist re-tweets by the President, which is no longer unusual, and somewhat more surprising news that Matt Lauer, the popular co-host of the Today Show, had been fired for as yet undisclosed incidents of sexual harassment.
I guess that is no longer shocking either.
The Today Show makes hundreds of millions of dollars for NBC, and for them to fire Lauer this quickly and angrily tells us the complaints must be especially serious. Another God falls off the ledge and breaks into a thousand pieces, right before our eyes.
The New York Times has been working on this story for weeks. The powerful and often gifted and much-loved men are falling like dominoes.
The story is in my head, something important is happening.
It isn’t as if I didn’t know women are commonly harassed in America, you have to be living in a cave or an old white Republican man not to know that.
But I am truly shaken by the depth and ugliness of it. Women are not surprised by the depth and ugliness of it.
I was a journalist once, and also the Executive Producer of the CBS Morning News.
I am also a man with a wonderful wife, many female friends, a daughter and a granddaughter.
I was born Jewish, and am further startled by the number of Jewish men (including Lauer) in entertainment and media and politics – some of whom I know – who have done unconscionable things to women.
But really, said a friend, that’s just because there are a lot of Jews in Hollywood and media.
Yes, I said, they are still Jewish. I have never been a devout Jew, but have always admired the ethical and compassionate underpinnings of the faith. Judaism is deeply imbued with moral reflection. It is an an old faith, much talk of righteousness and empathy, a chosen people. I guess nobody is morally superior to anyone else, no one can judge anyone else.
I don’t think for a second that men of other faiths don’t harass or abuse women but still, this is a puzzle for me.
Some of the media harassers I know – of all faiths – always seemed profoundly ethical and compassionate to me in their work, so I am trying to sort out some eternal philosophical questions – is it possible for good people to do bad things? Is it possible for bad people to do good things?
Does a monster live inside all of us? Am I allowed to still care for these men?
Yes, yes, and yes. And yes.
Moral conduct, wrote Hannah Arendt, the brilliant moral philosopher, seems to depend primarily upon the intercourse of man with himself. He must not contradict himself by making an exception in his own favor – the core of harassment – he must not place himself in a position in which he would have to despise himself.
That is the true price of harassment, if the apologies of these men are to be believed. I believe them when they say they despise themselves. The price for women is much higher.
Morally speaking, says Arendt, self-respect should be enough not only to enable a person to tell right from wrong, but also to do right and avoid wrong.
It seems one of the lessons from these revelations is that you can’t tell someone to be moral, the desire to be moral must come from conversations we all have with ourselves. It’s an internal, not an external decision. I see now that nobody is all good or all bad.
I have these conversation every day of my life, especially in recent years, after my awakening. I have no desire to do a single that will cause me to disrespect or despise myself. I am not saint, I know that morality comes from inside of me, and my own dialogue.
I bristle when so many women tell me that men have no idea this kind of behavior is wrong. That is not true. I knew it was wrong. My bosses knew it was wrong. My colleagues and friends knew it was wrong.
Forcing your self in a weaker and younger person is so clearly and profoundly wrong, harassment is a breakdown of consciousness and morality. The most generous interpretation I can give it is that power corrodes and corrupts. And that’s still no excuse. There are some things the moral man simply will not do.
There are different parts to all of us, some are visible, some are hidden.
Understanding this may be helpful for us to understand as we sort though this enduring brutality and cruelty.
“I am willing to accept humility,” wrote Arendt, “because I have always believed that no one can know himself, for no one appears to himself as he appears to others. Only poor Narcissus will let himself be deluded by how own reflected image…”
No good or healthy man can get any kind of pleasure out of hurting other people, yet the modern story of men is that so many of them hurt people all of the time. Domination and brutality seem genetic sometimes. History tell us there is always a reckoning in one way or the other. A horrible price to pay for moments of cruelty and dominance.
We are all searching for moral men. We need them right now.
Without men, there would be no war, harassment would be almost unheard of, jails would be empty, violent crime would be shocking, deaths by gunshot rare. And see what the angry men in Washington are doing to our country.
People are not black and white, this or that. We lose touch with the reality of life every time we forget that. We set ourselves up to be stunned and bewildered by what is ubiquitous.
The Puritans have left their mark on the earth, after all, we are taught to see people as one thing or another, all good, all evil, nothing in between.
But the truth is, people have many hues, not just black or white. And they can’t be lectured to a moral place..
I admit I have sometimes wondered, often with irony, what is missing in me as a man, that it never crossed my mind to masturbate in front of any other human, including my wife. So many admirable and successful men seem to think it is okay to do that. The women wanted it, they say. They are sorry if they hurt anybody.
Really? Or are they sorry they were caught?
W.H. Auden wrote this poem about men;
“Private faces in public places
Are wiser and nicer
Than public faces in private places.”
It seems this poem was prescient.
I can’t really cut it as a powerful man.
I never once wandered around in my bathrobe with my penis hanging out in front of young employees at business meetings or anywhere else. The idea is literally disgusting to me, I can hardly even imagine how women feel exposed to that.
The idea of sticking my tongue in a strange person’s mouth, male or female, is also unfathomable to me, not arousing or sexual in any way. Grabbing someone’s ass would terrify and repel me. What on earth is happening inside the souls of these men?
I guess some men are aroused and warped by power and money, as has long been suspected. The charge comes not from sex from bending someone less powerful to your will. Love is never coerced.
And other men are simply broken, ignorant or schizophrenic. They can be one thing in their work, another in their living rooms and behind closed doors. They are hypocrites, the lowest form of life.
There is nothing sexual about forcing myself on someone, especially someone young and vulnerable. Love is just the opposite, and love is what arouses me, not abuse or harassment. I guess that makes me freakish – less of a man – to some.
But more of a man to me. I do not despite myself.
No wonder I have never really been all that comfortable around men.
I see that the real heroes here – the only heroes – are the women who overcome their fear and misplaced shame to speak out.
I have often written and long believed that men, unchecked, are busy destroying the world. When I write that, I am mostly greeted by yawns. What else is new?
Just look at Washington or Kim Jong Un or Duerte or the other strongmen and dictators of the world or the almost all male corporatists and politicians bent on ravaging the earth for gold or the billionaire cannibals in Washington who know the truth but real but run and hide for political reasons.
I’m getting older, this fight will ultimately be won or lost when I am gone, it is, in some way, for the young to decide. And for the women to decide.
So I am touched on many levels, even though I feel this is a story for women to define, not bewildered men. Maria and I have been talking about it every morning, these stories have been hurtful and disturbing to her, she is sometimes furious about them.
I am sometimes sick to my stomach.
“All words like Peace and Love,
All sane affirmative speech,
Had been soiled, profaned, debased
To a horrid mechanical screech.”a- W.H. Auden, “We Too Had Known Golden Hours.”
