What is a nation? How we answer the question ripples out to our borders, north, south, west, east and influences immigration and border policy.

If what unites a nation is the idea that we are an outstanding liberal democracy ruled by the majority with rights for minorities, as Paul D. Miller asserts in “The Religion of American Greatness”, then our nation can create a humane and fair border policy. . Indeed, if the nation’s binding history is our liberal democracy, then a fair and firm immigration and border policy might be a much higher priority.

But if what makes the United States exceptional is not our extraordinary success in democracy, but rather a cultural identity, then our immigration policy will treat any foreigner as suspect until they are fully assimilated. It is based on the fear that “we will lose who we are if our culture changes too much,” which Miller considers nationalism, a dangerous ideology that operates on authoritarianism and breeds resistance. Taken to its logical extreme, this suggests that America should depend on the “cultivated habits of the English gentleman of the 18th century” to survive, Miller writes.

But this column isn’t about Miller’s thoughts on nationality. Rather, it’s related to “The Line Becomes a River” by Francisco Cantu, a memoir about his years as a border patrol agent in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Cantu’s book is the next selection for the LWVMC’s Well-Read Citizens Brigade, whose next discussion will take place on December 7.

Even though “The Line Becomes a River” came out over four years ago, it’s worth reading (or re-reading). Cantu’s book balances her personal experiences with a multitude of outside voices. His story invites readers to struggle with him, because we often say that our immigration and border policy needs to be reformed. His book provides first-hand accounts to help us ask the necessary questions about how to control our borders.

The US Border Patrol is subject to the winds (or whims) of political change. Within the force and the American public, the debate is implicitly framed as one of the tough law-and-order solutions over “overly compassionate” policies. (Or worse, the misnomer of “open border” policies.) Indeed, as Cantu’s account reveals, border agents themselves and the immigrants they detain are subject to swings in brutality and compassion.

Cantu entered Border Patrol with an unusual “why”. A 23-year-old who studied international relations in Washington, he returned to Arizona and told his skeptical mother, “I’m tired of reading about the border in books. Half-American, half-Mexican, he wondered about the tension between the two cultures and the ever-present threat of death along the border. “I’ll never understand it until I get close to it,” he told his mother, a retired ranger.

“What does it mean to be good at it?” He wondered during training when he realizes he is a good agent. He notes that what is “good at it” has different meanings. It “depends on who you are, depends on what kind of agent you are, what kind of agent you want to become”. He writes when he arrived at deserted camps, the border residents having fled the agents. He and other officers cut up water bottles, threw backpacks and food on the ground, stomped on them and urinated, then set the remains on fire. Being good at his job was learned behavior and meant accepting things he knew were wrong and inhuman.

Cantu struggles with the moral wound the job creates, something he learned from Iraqi veterans who testified that it slowly set in in the years after leaving the battlefield, “when a person has time to reflect on a traumatic experience”.

Cantu’s memoir invites readers into his mental wrangling and also allows us to reflect and discuss. Like many of us, Cantu carries multiple ethnic backgrounds, and his book implicitly asks us to remember America’s founding ideology: the liberal values ​​of the democratic republic.

Behind the debate lie implicit philosophies that contradict each other. A political solution seems to imply that American greatness is based on having a dominant cultural identity, something Anglo-Christian. Another asks what the great American democratic experiment has proven about sustaining an ethnically and intellectually diverse regime? As we citizens wait for a titanic deadlocked Congress to reform border and immigration policy, what is imperative for us? After all, we live in a country where government is by the people, for the people. Everyone.

Everyone is invited to join the Well-Read Citizens Brigade discussion at 7:30 p.m. at the Backstep Brewery on December 7.

The League of Women Voters, a nonpartisan, multidisciplinary organization, encourages informed and active participation in government, works to increase public understanding of key political issues, and influences public policy through education and advocacy. All men and women are welcome to join the LWV where practical work to safeguard democracy leads to civic improvement. For more information, visit the website www.lwvmontcoin.org or the League of Women Voters of Montgomery County, IN Facebook page.

Gratitude should be more than just counting the blessings. It finds its true meaning in our ability to invoke this gratitude in the face of loss.

This year has given us many opportunities to test that ability.

Hundreds of years ago, harsh conditions along with sickness and hardship shaped and defined Thanksgiving, and like our ancestors, there should be gratitude in simply surviving as we mourn for our friends and family too. who did not. My friend, David Allen Nichols passed away recently. I try to follow my own advice.

I met David in 2004 when he was finishing a book detailing President Dwight Eisenhower’s little-known work promoting civil rights.

David told me that Ike knowingly refused to appoint segregationists to the federal bench. That anticipating Brown v. Topeka Board of Education before the Supreme Court, he named Earl Warren Chief Justice, pro-integration. That he sent troops to Little Rock to enforce Brown.

His book inspired my series of columns suggesting Wichita rename its airport to Eisenhower. This happened in 2014 after a brief public campaign by two radio celebrities. When one of them contacted me, I told them about David, who legitimized the effort.

David has consistently displayed a kind of humility and grace so common in the past but stifling in today’s selfie narcissism. He earned two master’s degrees and a doctorate, operated like a true Renaissance man, as his obituary said, but you would never know.

As his pastor Reverend Charles McKinzie said beautifully at David’s funeral in his home town of Winfield, after a conversation with David, David would leave knowing all about you while you would stand there realizing you almost don’t know nothing from him.

And there was a lot to know. David became a nationally recognized expert on the Eisenhower presidency.

His books, in addition to “A Matter of Justice: Eisenhower and the Beginning of the Civil Rights Revolution,” include “Eisenhower 1956: The President’s Year of Crisis” and Ike and “McCarthy: Dwight Eisenhower’s Secret Campaign Against Joseph McCarthy.”

He was a music teacher at school. He was playing the violin. He had served as a lay minister. He taught economics at Southwestern College where he chaired the university’s business program, overseeing the fundraising office during a major fundraising campaign. He spent 11 years as the school’s academic dean.

This loss is so great because he gave so much.

I found Grace, David’s wife, after the service. She gave me a long hug and then grabbed my hands and told me that every time she and David left Wichita they would see the Eisenhower airport exit sign and think of me. She said it meant a lot to them.

Well, he meant a lot to me and to most everyone who knew him. I will miss our conversations.

Reflecting on David’s life and counting the blessings of his friendship will be much easier.

He left me and his friends and family to mourn this loss, with so much to hold on to.

Mark McCormick was previously editor of the Journal.

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Egyptian activist Alaa Abdel Fattah, pictured at his home in Cairo in 2019, is serving a five-year prison sentence – Copyright AFP/File Aleksey Filippov

Jailed British-Egyptian activist Alaa Abdel Fattah’s health has “severely deteriorated”, his sister said on Thursday after the first family visit since he ended a seven-month long hunger strike.

In a post on Twitter, Mona Seif said the news of the visit was “disturbing”.

“Alaa has deteriorated badly over the past two weeks, but at least they got to see him, and he needed to see the family so badly,” she wrote.

After seven months of consuming what his family said was “100 calories a day”, Abdel Fattah escalated his strike to all food, then water on November 6 to coincide with the start of the UN summit on the COP27 climate in Egypt.

In a letter delivered to his family on Tuesday, but dated Monday, he said he had ended the strike.

Thursday was the first time the activist’s mother, Laila Soueif, was allowed to visit him in nearly a month, after prison authorities repeatedly denied her access last week.

The family did not release more information about the visit or Abdel Fattah’s status, but “will share full details later,” Seif added.

The pro-democracy blogger is currently serving a five-year sentence for ‘spreading false news’ by sharing another user’s Facebook post about police brutality.

In his short letter on Monday, he did not detail the reasons for his decision to end the strike, but asked his mother to “bring a cake” to Thursday’s visit.

“I want to celebrate my birthday with you,” wrote the activist, who turns 41 on Friday.

His family – who feared the authorities would “feed-fed” him and feared he would die behind bars – have raised questions about how the decision was made.

The dissident’s aunt, novelist Ahdaf Soueif, wrote on Twitter on Tuesday: “So what happened inside? What was negotiated?

“Alaa had no idea how big the support was around her,” she continued.

Egypt’s turn to host the UN climate summit in the resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh comes to an end this week, with Abdel Fattah continuing to grab global headlines as an example of what rights groups call Egypt’s human rights record “appalling”.

World leaders have raised his case in bilateral meetings with President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi.

Several speakers at the top ended with the words “You Have Not Been Defeated Yet” – the title of Abdel Fattah’s book. It has become a rallying cry for activists, both at climate talks and online, demanding climate justice and human rights.

Rights groups estimate that Cairo holds around 60,000 political prisoners, many in brutal conditions and overcrowded cells.

The box office came alive with the long-awaited release of “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.”

Marvel’s sequel grossed $180 million in ticket sales from more than 4,396 theaters in the U.S. and Canada, according to The Walt Disney Co. estimates on Sunday, making it the second-biggest opening ever. year behind “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness”. .” Overseas, it grossed an additional $150 million from 50 territories, bringing its worldwide total to $330 million.

“Wakanda Forever” was eagerly awaited by audiences and exhibitors alike, which has been going through a slow period at the box office since the end of the summer movie season and there were fewer big-budget blockbusters in the pipeline. The film got off to a mighty start a little stronger than even the first film with an $84 million opening day, including $28 million from Thursday previews.

“Some were hoping for maybe $200 million like the first movie, but it’s solid,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Comscore. “It’s the type of film that cinemas really need to attract audiences.”

The first film opened to $202 million in February 2018 and has grossed over $1.4 billion worldwide, making it one of the highest-grossing films of all time and a cultural phenomenon. . A sequel was inevitable and development began soon after with the return of director Ryan Coogler, but that all changed after the unexpected death of Chadwick Boseman in August 2020. “Wakanda Forever” instead became The Death of King T. ‘Challa / Boseman’s Black Panther, and the grieving kingdom he left behind. Returning cast members include Angela Bassett, Lupita Nyong’o, Letitia Wright, Winston Duke, and Danai Gurira, who face a new foe in Tenoch Huerta’s Namor. The film would also face more complications, including Wright’s injury and some setbacks related to COVID-19. In total, it cost $250 million, not including marketing and promotion.

AP movie screenwriter Jake Coyle wrote in his review that “‘Wakanda Forever’ is too long, a bit heavy, and somehow mystifyingly heads to a climax on a barge in the middle of the Atlantic. But the mastery Coogler’s fluid of mixing intimacy and spectacle remains captivating.

It currently holds 84% ​​on Rotten Tomatoes and, as is often the case with comic book movies, viewership scores are even higher.

Superhero movies have done well during the pandemic, but none have yet reached the heights of “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” which opened to $260.1 million in December 2021. Other big releases include “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” ($187.4 million in May), “Thor: Love and Thunder” ($144.2 million in July) and “The Batman” ( $134 million in March).

“Wakanda Forever” is the first film to open more than $100 million since “Thor” in July, which has been difficult for exhibitors already dealing with a schedule that has about 30% fewer wide releases than a normal year.

Holdbacks populated the rest of the top five, as no film dared to launch nationally against a Marvel juggernaut. Second place went to DC superhero “Black Adam,” with $8.6 million, bringing his domestic total to $151.1 million. “Ticket to Paradise” landed in third place, weekend four, with $6.1 million. Julia Roberts and George Clooney’s romantic comedy has grossed nearly $150 million worldwide. “Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile” and “Smile” rounded out the top five with $3.2 million and $2.3 million, respectively.

Some awards hopefuls have struggled in their expansions lately, but Searchlight Pictures’ “The Banshees of Inisherin,” starring Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, feels like an exception. Martin McDonagh’s film expanded to 960 theaters in its fourth weekend and earned No. 7 on the charts with $1.7 million, bringing its total to $5.8 million.

“It’s been a very interesting post-summer period for theaters, with some gems doing well like ‘Ticket to Paradise’ and ‘Smile’,” Dergarabedian said. “But movie theaters can’t survive on non-blockbuster style movies. The industry needs more.

After “Black Panther”, the next blockbuster on the program is “Avatar: The Way of Water”, which will arrive on December 16.

The weekend wasn’t completely without more high profile releases. Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical drama “The Fabelmans” debuted at four theaters in New York and Los Angeles with $160,000. Universal and Amblin will release the film in more theaters in the coming weeks to build excitement around the likely Oscar contender. Michelle Williams and Paul Dano play the parents of Spielberg’s replacement, Sammy Fabelman, who falls in love with movies and movies as his parents’ marriage crumbles.

“It will be an interesting holiday season,” Dergarabedian said. “I think a lot of dramas and indie films will have their time to shine in the next couple of months.”

Estimated Friday-Sunday ticket sales at US and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore. Final national figures will be released on Monday.

1. “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” $180 million.

2. “Black Adam,” $8.6 million.

3. “Ticket to Paradise,” $6.1 million.

4. “Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile,” $3.2 million.

5. “Smile,” $2.3 million.

6. “Prey for the Devil,” $2 million.

7. “The Banshees of Inisherin,” $1.7 million.

8. “One Piece Film Red,” $1.4 million.

9. “Up to”, $618,000.

10. “Yashoda”, $380,000.

—-

Follow AP Film Writer Lindsey Bahr on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ldbahr.

Lindsey Bahr, Associated Press

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August 31, 1954 – November 1, 2022.

Kathy Costa escaped her failing body on All Saints’ Day and is now spinning among the stars, finally freed from the constraints of gravity. As a girl she danced her “moonlight sonata” in the living room before bed, as an adult she brought the same exuberance to everything she did.

Kathy had an indomitable spirit that is not easily forgotten. She was a voracious reader and a proud member of the Mary Toddies Book Club, her shelves and desk filled with books whose diverse subjects and authors reflected the many facets of her great personality. She was an accomplished and creative gardener, embraced new adventures and threw eclectic parties that brought together family and a wide range of friends; some new, many for life.

Kathy was a natural salesperson. She started her career at WMAY and quickly moved to WTAX Radio in Springfield. She then joined her father’s team at Precision Products to become National Sales Manager. After that, she held various sales positions in Springfield.

Kathy was deeply influenced by the intellectual and pioneering spirit of her maternal grandmother Kate, whose quick wit and green thumb she greatly admired. She will be remembered for many things, including her garden and the flower arrangements she made of it, for her huge Christmas trees and her decorating style. But Kathy will be remembered above all for her generosity and devotion to her family and many friends, as well as for her Roman Catholic faith.

Kathy was born to Rosemary (Gauer) and James Costa on August 31, 1954 in Springfield, IL. She is a graduate of Sacred Heart Academy and St. Mary’s College, Notre Dame, IN.

Kathy was predeceased by her brother James J Costa, her brother-in-law Douglas Garofalo and her mother Rosemary Gauer Costa.

She is survived by her father James W. Costa, her partner Marty O’Brien, her daughter Angela Kelver (Bryan) Hall, her granddaughters Chloe, Stella and Vivian Hall, her sisters Carol (Richard) Kolhauser, Christine Garofalo and Sandy (Scott Marshall) Costa, and her nieces Kimberly (Benjamin) Lakin and Katherine Rose (Alexis DiGregorio) Thurston.

A memorial mass will be held at Christ the King Church on November 17 at 10:00 a.m., visitation at the church from 9:00 a.m. to 9:45 a.m. In lieu of flowers, please consider a donation in Kathy’s name to Médecins Sans Frontières or the Human Rights Campaign.

In his 1933 novel “The Oppermanns” Lion Feuchtwanger did what all great writers do: he captured the specific to reveal the universal.

The book represents a double tragedy, fictional and real, as the author is strangely prescient in his description of a Jewish family in Germany. It’s a tough read because we know what’s going to happen in the world beyond fiction. A nation will succumb to hatred and millions will perish as a result.

The Oppermanns can be seen, in retrospect, as a warning, a siren alerting the country – and the world – to the evil within them. Some listened, but many others did not. The death camps emerged, and the victims multiplied: men, women and children, their bodies piled up in the fields in front of Auschwitz and Belzec and Treblinka and…

America is not Nazi Germany, and a second Holocaust is not imminent. But the rhetoric of 2022 bears a chilling resemblance to the rhetoric of 1934. Despicable words lead to despicable deeds. Anti-Semitic attacks are on the rise and must be condemned at every turn.

We have heard despicable words recently. When celebrities utter these comments, it adds poison to an already toxic environment. It corrodes our national spirit, legitimizing in the spirit certain attitudes that have no legitimacy in a just and benevolent society.

Kanye West, the rapper who calls himself Ye, may be a gifted artist, but talent is no shield against the malignity that can rot a person’s soul. Ye, who sported a “White Lives Matter” T-shirt at a recent fashion show, tweeted that he would go “death idiot 3” about the Jewish people — a nasty comment that sparked a rally in which white supremacists hung a banner on a freeway overpass in Los Angeles: “Kanye is right about the Jews.”

Unlike Germany’s response of 1933, the reaction here was swift, fair and decisive, especially among the business community. The companies associated with West – Adidas, Balenciaga, CAA and MRC – let him go, although we’d say it took too long. West claimed to have lost $2 billion in one day.

“We cannot support any content that amplifies its platform,” CAA and RCN leaders wrote in a joint memo.

Before West unleashed his tirade against Jews, former President Donald Trump said American Jews “better pull yourself together” a comment that critics decried as condescending and anti-Semitic.

“No president has done more for Israel than me,” Trump, who has a daughter who converted to Judaism and Jewish grandchildren, posted on his media platform, Truth Social. “Surprisingly enough, however, our wonderful evangelicals appreciate this much more than people of the Jewish faith, especially those who live in the United States”

In another incident, Brooklyn Nets star Kyrie Irving promoted “Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America”, an anti-Semitic film based on the book of the same title.

“The Brooklyn Nets strongly condemn and have zero tolerance for the promotion of any form of hate speech,” the team tweeted.

Each incident occurred against the backdrop of rising anti-Semitism. The Anti-Defamation League reported 2,717 anti-Semitic incidents in 2021, three years after 11 people died at a Pittsburgh synagogue; this figure represents a 34% increase over the previous year.

“Jews were beaten and brutalized in broad daylight, say, in the middle of Times Square or Los Angeles or the Strip in Las Vegas, where people who simply identified as Jews were assaulted and attacked,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt told PBS. “It was new.”

When anti-Semitic incidents occur, the whole community must react forcefully.

In a 1933 review of “The Oppermanns” the New York Times said it was targeting both Germany and “the outside world”.

“It’s…carrying the message, ‘Wake up! The barbarians are upon us!’”

Almost 90 years later, Joshua Cohen expressed a similar sentiment in The New York Times.

“His example (of Feuchtwanger) shows that art can challenge power, so to speak, ‘powerfully’, and yet have no political effect”, he wrote.

Anti-Semitism does not germinate from a single seed; it is sown and nurtured across communities and across nations.

Yes, 2022 is not 1933. But the real tragedy of “The Oppermanns” is that it may be as relevant today as it was then.

— San Antonio Express News

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The election is in a few days. Most people have already voted by mail, so we’re sitting here in anticipation, our fate yet to be determined. The partisan divide is huge. Republican extremists claim that Democrats are all Satan-worshipping pedophiles. Democratic extremists claim that Republicans are all bigoted, money-loving religious fascists. The growing climate crisis doesn’t care.

As a progressive Democrat, I view right-wing attacks as external projections of their own unresolved issues. My Trump-addicted nephew, with deep unresolved rage issues, quickly descends into personal attacks, claiming the libs are all “haters”. Sexually suppressed “religious” leaders focus on sexual problems in others, then appear in the news as sexual predators themselves. Where in the Bible does Christ support hatred, abuse, or murder? Most of those who demonize modern immigrants are descended from immigrants who enslaved millions and exterminated Native Americans.

I live with a baseball fan, and as we watched postseason games, Republican scare-pushing ads popped up regularly, paid for by Citizens for Sanity, a Trump-aligned group based in Florida. The Republican Supreme Court authorized unlimited black money to fund this type of campaign.

The choice has always been between love and fear, between cooperation and competition, between inclusion and exclusion. It feels like everything is going crescendo because we are only treating the symptoms, not the root cause. As I have said many times before, humanity is being challenged to awaken from the illusion of separation.

I recently started reading “Braiding Sweetgrass”, by Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Native American botany professor. This marvelous book bridges the reductionism of orthodox science and the experience of unity fundamental to all Aboriginal cultures.

She points out that English, the dominant language of the planet, is made up of 70% of nouns, which are objects, against verbs, which are active. Werner Heisenberg said that “our experience of the world is structured by the questions we ask”. As an English speaker, my whole linguistic perspective is structured to objectify everything, rather than to experience it as active forms of life. Imagine your mother being treated like an object, turned into spare parts and sold in the market for private profit. It’s the western way of looking at the natural planet, just resources to be extracted. However, a unity perspective sees the Earth as a living being, nurturing all life with a myriad of gifts, not earned, but given.

For humans, the most immediate supply is the oxygen we need every few seconds. This is an ongoing gift of plants and algae to everyone, which we never paid for, just take it for granted. Because we never recognize or appreciate this as a gift, we mindlessly destroy springs, kill forests and poison oceans, as we race for increased tax profits.

Kimmerer describes the Thanksgiving address, which begins each school day at his local Indian school. All students participate in this expression of thanksgiving, listing the gifts offered by the natural world that benefit humanity. For each gift mentioned, the response is “we’re of one mind”, creating a collective awareness of gratitude. This contrasts with our dominant culture rooted in law.

In a recent “What Could Possible Go Right” interview with Joanna Macy by Vicki Robins, Macy describes how she is reacting to the increasing destruction of the planet. “My first word to anyone would be, don’t be afraid of your grief, grief, or rage. Cherish them. They come from your benevolence. When you’re not afraid of it, if you learn to cherish it as binding you to this beautiful planet, then it will nurture within you a fierce clarity for what can be done and be done by you alone.So you are going to find in your will to be here, great love. When you stand in this gratitude for being alive in this world, and then when you take the next step in articulating your pain for the world that was given and felt, then that grounds you.

Live in the present and start your day with gratitude. The sequel becomes not only manageable, but punctuated with moments of joy and wonder. The choices we make shape our experience.

Update from last week: The direct line to enroll in Ukiah’s 100% Renewable Energy Program is 707-463-6747, ask for Lori.

Crispin B. Hollinshead lives in Ukiah. This article and previous articles can be found at cbhollinshead.blogspot.com.

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November 03, 2022 • 51 minutes ago • 3 minute read • Join the conversation

Content of the article

Winterkill – the latest book by Brantford author Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch – draws eerie parallels to the current war in Ukraine despite being written before the invasion of Russia in February.

Content of the article

“I just finished the final cut at the time of the invasion,” Skrypuch said, noting that she started the book in 2020 and finished it in June 2021.

“It was like everything I wrote here, you read it and it’s like reading the news. It’s really upsetting.

The award-winning Ukrainian-Canadian author writes about war from a youth’s perspective.

Winterkill is set during the Holodomor, a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine that killed millions between 1932 and 1933. Canada recognizes it as genocide.

Skrypuch noted that this famine was the result of then Soviet Premier Josef Stalin embarking on a five-year plan to modernize his country.

“It was really a ploy to take all the grain away from the Ukrainians, seal the borders and wait for the Ukrainians to die,” she said. “If they tried to run away, they were shot.

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“Does this sort of thing sound unfamiliar to you?”

Skrypuch said it was difficult to determine how many millions of people died during the Holodomor because census takers were shot and American, Canadian and British journalists got corrupted and published lies.

“When you’re writing about something as massive as this for a young audience, you have to have input.”

She said that the central character of Winterkill is Alice, the daughter of a machinist at the Massey-Harris farm equipment factory. She travels to Ukraine with her father, who wants to help with industrialization.

Skrypuch said Alice got caught up in the Young Pioneer movement and Communism and ended up being used to help with the grain harvest.

“She thought she would be welcome and thought she was doing good,” she said. “There are so many parallels with Russian soldiers now who thought they were liberating the country (Ukraine).”

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She said it was difficult to decide whether to write about the Holodomor after articles she wrote on the subject decades ago resulted in hate mail and death threats.

The author has stated that it was difficult for him to write about the Second World War, the setting of many of his books. And Winterkill deals with the death of children because they are denied food.

“I thought it was an untouchable subject, but with the support of this publisher (Scholastic Inc. in the United States), I felt I could do it.

“This is the right book to publish at this time. A lot of schools use it for that reason because it’s a doorway for people to understand what’s happening on the news right now.

Skrypuch said readers of Winterkill will understand that the current war in Ukraine is not an aberration, but rather the way Russian governments have operated for centuries.

Content of the article

She said she writes books for younger audiences – usually mid-levels – telling them stories they’ve never heard before, sparking an interest in reading and building empathy. at the same time.

“I have so many kids who write to me and say they hate reading until they read Making Bombs for Hitler, by far my best-selling book,” she shared. “They say, ‘Once I read this book, I read everything else you wrote, and then I moved on to other authors.’

“Isn’t it beautiful?

Skrypuch will launch Winterkill at the downtown branch of the Brantford Public Library on November 24 at 6 p.m. Copies of the book will be available.

The book is available at Green Heron Books in downtown Paris.

bethompson@postmedia.com

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NEW YORK (AP) — Kissing without permission. Putting down a parent in front of children struggling with divorce. Privilege displayed. Being a bad listener or, worse, a terrible loser.

The world and all of its interactional black holes would probably have Emily Post spitting her tea. The great lady of all manners died in 1960, but two of her descendants have revised her advice book for the 21st century to mark the centenary of the first edition.

“I especially think it’s really easy to paint etiquette and manners as tools of elitism, tools of secrecy, tools of exclusion,” said Lizzie Post, the great-great-grand- daughter of Emily and co-author of the latest “Emily Post’s Etiquette”.

“And when they’re used that way, and they certainly can be, they’re effectively unnecessary. But when we use etiquette and manners as a tool for self-reflection and awareness of others, I think we’re really going to have a chance to make the world a better place,” she said.

As incivility has taken an even stronger hold on the culture, the newfangled book encourages patience and humility to talk about difficult topics. This, he notes, requires “getting comfortable with the idea that your brilliant remark might go unsaid.” The book also pleads for grace in defeat and a “good excuse,” avoiding the word “if” to neutralize effort, or “but” to dig your hole deeper.

Emily published her first version of the book under a different title in 1922 after making a name for herself as a novelist and travel writer. It’s been refreshed over the decades, but the 20th edition released in October is a complete update.

There’s plenty of advice on setting tables, dressing for different occasions, and basic courtesies on things like gifts, tips, and greetings. But Lizzie Post and her cousin and co-author, Daniel Post Senning, tackled far more crucial questions. They did it partly by crowdsourcing, including ideas from callers to their Awesome Etiquette podcast.

And they did it amid a pandemic and the #MeToo movement, both recognized in topics like optional handshakes, or asking for permission to kiss or kiss each other on the cheek.

“The hug is such an intimate gesture that, for some, an unwanted one can feel like a violation,” the new book notes in part. “When someone isn’t asking, pushing for one, or even forcing it, they’re communicating that because they think it’s okay, they’re pressing their body against someone else’s. Depending on how it’s done, it can turn into sexual harassment or assault.

Not exactly groundbreaking, unless it’s written as Emily Post.

Emily herself was born into East Coast privilege, having grown up in Baltimore and New York. His father was a prominent architect for the wealthy, who designed the Tony enclave of Tuxedo Park, New York, and his mother was the daughter of a coal baron.

Emily met her husband, Edward, at a Fifth Avenue ball. There was a scandal involving his romantic alliances with choristers and actresses, resulting in an announced divorce in 1906, according to a biographer and reports from the time. Those around her tried to protect her privacy after that, and her descendants have wise words for friends and family today offering sympathy in divorces and separations.

“Avoid trying to push or suggest the right decision to a friend,” the Posts write in the new book. “It is especially important to be careful what you say around children whose parents are separated or going through a divorce. There is no need to encourage the news or make negative comments.

The book touches on other losses often left unaddressed in Emily’s time, such as grieving a miscarriage.

“You definitely want to avoid saying things like ‘Next time it will happen’ or ‘It just wasn’t your time,'” the book advises.

During her travels, Emily learned more about the lives of people outside her social background. In 1922, she wrote in the first chapter of the first edition of the book, what was then called “the best society” was not a group born into great wealth or status, but a group composed of “gentle “who take care of each other.

“The best society,” she writes, “is not at all like a court with a particular queen or king, nor confined to any particular place or group, but might best be described as unlimited brotherhood. which extends over the whole surface of the globe, whose members are invariably people of culture and knowledge of the world, who have not only perfect manners, but a perfect manner.

His descendants embrace privilege in this way: “Privilege can be and look like many different things, but in conversation it mostly comes across as a lack of awareness that you have benefited in a way that others have not. maybe not.”

Modern pronoun mannerisms are also discussed in the new book, as a way to show “basic support, respect and courtesy”.

“You might think someone’s pronouns are pretty easy to tell just by looking at them, but the reality is that’s not always the case,” the Posts write. “If you don’t know someone’s pronouns, and you need to know them to make an introduction, it’s polite to ask, ‘Joan, what pronouns do you use?’ Note that you don’t ask which pronouns Joan “prefers” – an unfortunately common construction for this question.

Emily was 87 when she died. Ironically, Lizzie Post said in an interview, “The older she got, the less she liked participating in society. … She felt, I think, a lot of autonomy and a lot of power and a lot of agency just being able to stay home and not be a big deal.

Expanding his empire all the time with other etiquette books.

As an only child, Emily was a “daddy’s girl”, said Lizzie, and the loss of her father in 1903 was a blow. Other tragedies followed. His mother was killed in a car accident in 1909. One of his two sons, Bruce, grew up to be an architect like his father, but died aged 32 of appendicitis while working together on a house in Martha’s Vineyard. This is where she spent the summer as she continued to write new books and produce editions of her etiquette bible.

With her surviving son, Ned, she founded the Emily Post Institute in 1946, and the family still runs it today.

In print, Emily has become “more inclusive over the years,” Lizzie said. Emily’s label became more based on education and merit than ideology and socioeconomic status, she said.

For this, Lizzie said: “I am happy.”

___

Follow Leanne Italy on Twitter at http://twitter.com/italy

Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

We’ve had the luxury for decades of laughing at people on the street being interviewed by late-night comedians who couldn’t answer questions like, “Who was the Queen of England?” or “In which country would you find the Panama Canal?” or “how many moons does the earth have?”

We laughed because we saw these people as outliers, oddities, eccentrics. A small group of people who did not represent the rest of us, who could recite the preamble, who knew the three branches of government, who knew that the Douglas in the Lincoln-Douglass debates was not Frederick.

But we can no longer afford this luxury. This lack of basic civic knowledge should concern us, especially now, when our democracy faces challenges that we would have considered unthinkable 10 years ago. Civic knowledge binds us and our past carelessness here costs us dearly.

In 2009, Joshua Cooper Ramo wrote the book “The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World’s Constant Unrest Surprises Us and What We Can Do About It”. In the book, he discusses the possibilities created as once secure ideas and institutions crumble.

More than a decade later, we seem to have entered a new era of the unthinkable with all its challenges.

Who would have ever thought that we would see mobs of people who consider themselves patriots attacking the US Capitol, attacking the police, ransacking offices and leaving feces in the hallways?

Who would have ever thought that a sitting president would help organize such an event?

Who would have ever thought there would be an appetite for the kind of bottom-up anti-democracy moving through state legislatures, including ours here in Kansas, like the continued reduction in voting rights.

It’s as if we’ve forgotten the fundamentals of who we’ve always claimed to be:

• The frequent debasement of our electoral system as unreliable or rigged;
• Attempts to ban unflattering books and portions of our history;
• The deception and shipment of asylum seekers from southern border states to so-called northern liberal enclaves.

But instead of overreacting, we should consider how flawed our democracy has always been.

When the Constitution was ratified, only about 7% of the country’s population could vote. At the time, only wealthy, landowning white men could vote. Others consider our democracy to be only 57 years old – dating back to the 1965 Voting Rights Act which allowed full participation in voting.

The late educator, psychologist and Egyptologist Asa Hilliard encouraged people to free their minds and return to the source. That’s what we should be doing. We all need to reintroduce ourselves to our founding documents. We should study more, learn more, share more.

Basically, democracy should mean belonging. It should mean that everyone counts. There is a social contract that binds individuals to the collective and the collective to individuals.

If we better understood our founding documents, we would more consistently resist the list of undemocratic behaviors that do the opposite. We would stop excluding people and banishing them to lower levels of citizenship.

Until we do, the joke is on us.

Mark McCormick was previously editor of the Journal.

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