Michelle Obama made news in the best possible way this week as she shone at the Obama Presidential Library opening, giving a speech that earned absolute raves. Once a queen, always a queen.
Hi, all, and happy Sunday!
Also, of course, happy Father’s Day to all who are fathers, step-fathers, play a fatherly role, or have a father they love. I hope you have a truly special day.
AND happy belated Juneteenth! I took the day off and I hope you did, too.
It’s been another nutty week, and next one won’t be any saner, so let’s take a few minutes to enjoy, absorb, and really revel in some good news from over the last seven days. As usual, there was more of it than you might have thought.
You work so hard. You trudge on in your resistance efforts, day in and day out, regardless of how hopeful (or hopeless) you feel. You are the reason we will, eventually, right this ship.
This weekly list is your reward, your reminder of possibilities, and your recompense. You’ve earned it. Enjoy.
5 days ago · 397 likes · 79 comments · Lady Libertie
Celebrate This!
A federal judge ordered the Kennedy Center to make a plan for staying open.
Adrienne White won her State Senate race in Georgia’s Senate district 7, blocking Republicans from building their supermajority.
The Obama library opened and the celebration was, from what I’ve seen, just spectacular. Among other things, the tan suits were out in full force.
A Fulton County judge threw out a conspiracy-fueled lawsuitseeking to open Georgia's election-night operations center — where votes are received and published — to far-right observers.
Trump’s reflecting pool has not only re-filled with algae, but the bottom is now peeling up. So much winning!
Stephen Colbert’s ‘Peanuts’ gag on the Late Show finale did, indeed, mean CBS had to pay a fine to Lee Mendelson Film Productions. They, in turn, donated the money to World Central Kitchen.
The Trump administration has reversed its decision to dismantle a $368M deep-sea observation system following an outcry from lawmakers and ocean experts.
A federal judge ruled that Idaho cannot immediately enforce its new law criminalizing the use of certain restrooms that do not match an individual’s sex at birth.
French Polynesia made a major move for marine conservation. The government announced it will protect 200,000 square miles of ocean, more than twice the size of Michigan (or roughly the area of France).
On Sunday night, people came together for Rise Up, Sing Out at more than 1500 watch parties in all 50 states, with hundreds of thousands more watching from home.
Governor Andy Beshear posthumously pardoned 43 individuals who were wrongfully imprisoned for helping enslaved people escape to freedom, signing the executive order Monday ahead of Juneteenth.
All detainees from "Alligator Alcatraz" have been transferred out of the Florida Everglades facility.
Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court found that “skill game” machines, the slot machine-like gambling devices commonly seen in gas stations, convenience stores, and bars, are indeed slot machines and therefore illegal outside of casinos.
The biggest wind farm in the U.S. began operation in New Mexico. SunZia’s 916 turbines will supply enough power for one million homes, mostly in California and Arizona.
ICE plans to sell or give away most of the 11 warehouses it bought to detain migrants, reversing course on a signature initiative.
More than 100 Stanford University graduates walked out during Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s commencement address, chanting ‘Free Palestine,’ in protest over Project Nimbus, the company’s cloud contract with the Israeli government.
Artist Sheryl Crow spoke out eloquently about the UFC fight on the White House lawn.
Citizens Bank took some hits last week for their continued financing of private prison giants CoreCivic and GEO Group: As part of the Not with Our Money, Citizens! campaign, Greater Boston Interfaith Organization (GBIO) withdrew an additional $2 million in response to Citizens’ reneging on their promise to meet.
Also, the City Council of Jersey City, the second-largest city in New Jersey, voted unanimously in favor of a resolution urging the city not to place taxpayers’ money with a bank that is “continuing to finance and profit from the detention of immigrants.” They have already started the process of withdrawing approximately $265 million from Citizens.
Bella Bautista made Georgia state history by securing the Democratic nomination for House District 14 and, in so doing, becoming the first openly transgender woman to win a primary in Georgia.
DHS announced it is giving up on its plan to turn a warehouse in Social Circle, GA into a 10,000 bed ICE detention facility. This after the very red town’s citizens fought back vigorously (as did their two US Senators)! Bravo!
The European Union’s 27 member countries voted in favor of opening the first cluster of accession negotiations with Ukraine and Moldova. This, after Hungary, under new leadership, dropped its longtime opposition! Yay!
New data suggest the Atlantic’s vital circulation may withstand climate warming better than feared.
Residents of Milford, MI showed up to oppose the renewal of Flock Safety cameras in their town. The board unanimously voted to cancel one contract for 5 cameras. The other contract comes up for a vote in August, and citizens are organizing against that one, too.
Watch This!
If by some miracle you haven’t seen Mayor Mamdani’s speech about the Knicks’ victory, you absolutely must. Even if you don’t know Knicks history well (I don’t) the second half of the speech will floor you.
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In a recent conversation with my poetic physicist friend Alan Lightman, sparring over whether the creative spirit can be usefully divided into complementary arts and science (Alan’s view) or whether these are simply different side doors to our ongoing yearning to bridge matter and mystery in order to make meaning (my view), I was reminded of a forgotten speech by one of the most original minds and brightest spirits of the past century.
On Valentine’s Day 1971, a year after the publication of her classic Centering, the poet and potter M.C. Richards (July 13, 1916–September 10, 1999) was invited to speak at an arts festival in Maine. Going “from horticulture to alchemy to the history of consciousness, with a few poems sprinkled in, and relying heavily on paradox,” the address she delivered, later included in The Crossing Point: Selected Talks and Writings (public library), is one of the most honest, imaginative, and articulate investigations of creativity I have encountered — a bold defiance of the fracturing of culture anchored in the passionate insistence that “the center is everywhere,” that it is “made up of differences, uniquenesses, in a tissue of relationships, interactions, interpenetrations.”
Mary Caroline Richards at Black Mountain College (Getty Research Institute. Photographer unknown.)
At the center of her cosmogony of creativity are the connections between the life of the individual human being and the life of the universe; between the inner invisible realm, which she calls “the force,” and the outer visible realm of its manifestation, which she calls the “the flower”; between the different fields of study and work through which we explore these realms. She writes:
Artists are sometimes particularly attuned to these connections, scientists too, mystics too… There may be a message in this way of working. Maybe that’s what a subject is, a gathering of ideas as set in motion by a central impulse. Like a magnetic field. Start the field going, and elements begin to swarm. By what logic? By attraction. By resonance. Maybe that’s what relevance is: the feeling of attraction and resonance between ideas and people.
This feeling, Richard observes, is what we call creativity — the mystery to which we try to give shape in matter — and it begins not in the mind but in the heart. She considers the force by which the cabbage flowers:
Cabbage… grows a big heart. Out of this heart come leaves. As the leaves grow, the heart grows. The cabbage gets its leaves from the inside, where there aren’t any. Cabbages grow from the inside, from the heart. And by growing they create their hearts.
A neurophysiologist from Yale says that brains too are created in this way: from un-brain forces. He says that the human brain is created by thinking, that ideas and values create chemical reactions in tissue. Like a cabbage, somehow the physical form grows from an invisible realm.
This invisible realm must be a powerfully creative region. It furnishes us not only with cabbages and brains, but with our scientific hypotheses, religious experiences, and works of art.
With the recognition that works of art begin with “a feeling for things, a feeling which is a way of knowing about things,” she adds:
We tend to call any undertaking an art when it seems to be drawing upon the fullness of inner feeling and upon careful regard for physical expression. To live and to work in the world mindful of the processes which are necessary to infuse matter with soul forces, to use techniques on behalf of living forms, is a great art.
In this sense, she observes, living itself is an art — the art of connection. Just as Erich Fromm was formulating the ideas that would become The Art of Being, Richards writes:
Life is best understood and practiced as an art, the way that art is understood and practiced. We rely on inspiration, feeling for materials, knowledge of how to put things together well, patience, physical strength and awareness that we are part of a process which we don’t know much about yet but which we live within and are sustained by. The verbal arts we practice, or visual arts, or graphic arts, or theater arts, or musical arts, or liberal arts, are part of something. They are not the whole story. And they are interconnected at the center with all the other parts.
1573 painting by the Portuguese artist Francisco de Holanda, a student of Michelangelo’s. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
Pulsating beneath this interconnected totality is the essence of all creative work. While the young Jane Goodall was contemplating the indivisibility of art and science, Richards considers what creativity in all its forms asks of us and what it gives us:
Total concentration, total focus, enjoyment, discovery, inner effort, creating something, feeling secure in the process yet not knowing or demanding to know how it will come out. Many of the things we do may have this quality. Take gardening, for example, or making lab experiments, or working out a new equation, or cooking supper, or having a child, or teaching a class, or running a college, or praying, or going for a walk, or getting married, or dying.
This feeling of generative not-knowing — something the artist Ann Hamilton so beautifully articulated a generation after Richards — is also our best path to knowledge, integral to the creative process of science:
When we live in the spirit of science, we live in a quality of inquiry, of wonder. We put one foot in front of the other, standing firmly balanced on the earth, finding our way on. Each step is both an answer and a question. We both know and don’t know what we are doing… We need to learn to hear the yes in the no; the no in the yes. To hear what is not said. To see what is not visible.
Today is Juneteenth, also known as “Freedom Day” or “Emancipation Day.” It’s a holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. It was on this date in 1865 that Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas, to spread the word that slavery had been abolished. Of course, the Emancipation Proclamation had gone into effect some two and a half years earlier, in January 1863; most Confederate states ignored it until they were forced to free their slaves by advancing Union troops.
From the balcony of Galveston’s Ashton Villa, General Gordon read the contents of General Order Number Three: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”
Galveston’s former slaves celebrated that day, and formal Juneteenth festivities were held in other parts of Texas on the first anniversary. Celebrations of the holiday have waxed and waned over the years; today, Juneteenth is celebrated in communities all over the country, and as of April 2012, it’s officially recognized as a holiday by the governments of 42 of the United States. Observances often include a reading of the Emancipation Proclamation and performances of traditional African-American music, dancing, and literature.
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"Free at last" said Dr. King.
I still weep when I sing "We Shall Overcome Someday."
Equality is a long way away. Civil Rights is still a very active issue for Blacks, and with ICE for all people of color as well as nationality.
So to celebrate freedom is a bit hopeful, yet sadness is still underlying it all.
President Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act 1964
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed by the United States Senate on this date. It’s often viewed as the most important United States civil rights legislation since the Reconstruction, and it prohibited discrimination based on race, color, religion, or national origin in employment, voting, and the use of public facilities. It was first proposed in 1963 by President Kennedy, but failed to pass. Lyndon Johnson put forward a more robust version the following year, but it had faced a long battle in Congress, including a 57-day filibuster organized by Richard B. Russell. Eventually, the Senate voted to end the filibuster and passed the act, with a 71-29 vote. -----------------------
The mainstream narrative of Juneteenth is built on a benevolent myth: that General Gordon Granger stood on a balcony in Galveston, read General Order No. 3, and Texas enslavers immediately followed the law, peacefully freeing 250,000 enslaved people. This completely erases the high stakes and the military reality.
Texas was the last stronghold of the illegal slave empire. Enslavers had been hiding tens of thousands of Black people from the Emancipation Proclamation for two years, believing they were untouched by the war.
Freedom did not arrive as a friendly announcement. It was enforced through a ruthless military occupation. When Granger landed, a massive percentage of his occupying force was made up of thousands of heavily armed men from the United States Colored Troops (USCT). Texas enslavers did not surrender because they heard a speech. They surrendered because thousands of Black Union soldiers seized control of the city, aimed heavy weapons at their homes, and forcing the system to collapse on June 19th 1865
Artists are sometimes particularly attuned to these connections, scientists too, mystics too… There may be a message in this way of working. Maybe that’s what a subject is, a gathering of ideas as set in motion by a central impulse. Like a magnetic field. Start the field going, and elements begin to swarm. By what logic? By attraction. By resonance. Maybe that’s what relevance is: the feeling of attraction and resonance between ideas and people.
