Ryan Byrd’s Ramblings

Thomas Wentworth Higginson, minister, author, militant abolitionist, and soldier, was a literary mentor to Emily Dickinson and was key in the effort to publish her works after her death. He also wrote awesome letters, something many English teachers see as a dying art. Here, below, is a scorcher he penned to William Jennings Bryan upon reading racist comments by Bryan in the newspaper The Commoner:

I have yours of November 23 and perhaps it justifies me in writing to you with a frankness which I might not have otherwise regarded as proper. You asked me to assist in finding efficient agents for The Commoner, excuse me if I reply that although I headed your electoral ticket in the state during the last presidential election I never could have done it had you taken the position assumed of November 1st in regarded to what you call the “social equality question”. In this number [in] the paper you take a position that appears to me utterly retrograde and medieval and wholly inconsistent with your general attitude.

You also show in your way of arguing either ignorance or indifference in respect to American history when you say that no man or party has advocated social equality between the white man and the black man. The simple fact is that no man concerned in the great antislavery movement in its early days ever advocated anything else. In my own case from the first time I had house of my own in 1847 a fugitive slave always had a refuge there and was treated as a social equal. And when in the year 1857 I raised immigrant parties and accompanied them into your state in Kansas it was always under the same fiat.

It’s humiliating to me to think that a newspaper calling itself democratic in a region must [sic] made free should take such an attitude as you now assume. It is my opinion an essential part of democracy that social distinction should be merely individual not racial. Character is character, education education. What social gradations exist should be based on these and these alone and even these should be effaced as rapidly as possible. What are you or what am I that we should undertake to advocate any social law that should place us above men like Frederick Douglas or Booker Washington.

No point which The Commoner advocates so important as this and whatever its other merits it seems to me so utterly in the wrong that I have no wish to subscribe for it myself or to have it sent me and can only wish if it holds to this attitude that it may be discontinued.

(transcribed by me from today’s Diane Rehm show on Brenda Wineapple (Higginson’s biographer))

Yahoo finance has an interesting article on perspectives which poor people share. I’m guilty of a few (many?) of them. How about you? Here is a sampling of some of those bad habits and beliefs:

• You care what your car looks like — it’s transportation, not a way to impress people
• You don’t do what you enjoy — if you hate your job, you’ll spend $ relieving the stress it generates
• You don’t like to learn — a college degree doesn’t mean learning is over; rich people keep learning
• You buy things you don’t use use — America is a nation of wasteful spenders; personal storage companies are a one of the fastest growing segments of our economy
• Your house is too big — a large house leads to increased debt payments, taxes, upkeep, etc.

I first recognized the immense value of earplugs during my initial year at college when my roommate would stay up late playing his electric guitar and I had to get up at 5:00 AM for the Army ROTC. Popping in those foam bits let me sleep through hours of his poorly executed chords. As I began to travel more, I found that, on an airplane, earplugs cut the ambient, rumbling noises of peasant class even better than Bose sound canceling headphones. And then there was studying in the library– even though I’d pick the rarely used map section in the catacombs of the Harold B. Lee library, and I would sit in a study carrel, having a pair of earplugs was still essential to removing all distraction.

If you’ve ever taken a test in the infamous BYU testing center, you’ll agree that four hundred students test-taking (and praying) can be quite cacophonous– sneezing, sniffling, soul-searching, coughing, paper rustling, erasing– all of that is easily blocked with earplugs.

And then we have firearms. The first thing you’ll notice about shooting guns is that they are very, very loud. Ear protection is not only advised, it’s essential to keeping your hearing.

What else? Well, if you happen to enjoy sleeping and if you have awesome roommates who stay up very late blasting World of Warcraft (a game I have grown to despise, BTW), then earplugs and a white noise generator can be your best companions!

Thank you my friend the earplug! Reusable several times (more if you wash them (just drop in washing machine)) and portable — store them in a small plastic bag or container in your pocket for ready access. They’re handy, cheap and amazingly functional. Get some today!

In my continual attempt to fill your minds with interesting, yet ultimately useless knowledge, I present some brief musings on anglo-franco linguistic relations. When an English speaker learns a foreign language, particularly a romance language, they’ll quickly notice a number of words that look a like in both languages. There are a few types of these. The first, translingual cognates, like night and nacht, are words that look and mean the same because they are derived from a common ancestor.

Then you have false friends (or faux amis) , which are pairs of words in two languages or that look and/or sound

similar, but differ in meaning, and are not derived from the same word. And then we have false cognates (like the Chinese baba and Persian baba).

False friends are particularly insidious, and can get you in the most trouble. LDS missionaries who have served foreign missions often have funny stories about faux amis (in Spanish, “embarazar” means “to get pregnant”, not “to be embarrassed”, for example).

And then we have window displays. In the United States, to indicate a discount, it’s common to write “sale” on the window. The word sale in French means dirty. On the other hand, in France, to indicate a slashing of prices, you might write “solde” in your window. And solde without the e, obviously means the merchandise has already been bought. Confusing, right?

I was bored recently, so I bought a house. Then I rented a 25 foot moving van and loaded it to the ceiling (with the help of the amazing Tavish) with 29 years of stuff I hadn’t gotten around to throwing away yet.

Obviously, as soon as I moved in everything broke: AC, Electrical, Plumbing, etc. Consequently, I’ve been busy patching, repairing, tweaking, mowing, weed-wacking, spraying, installing, furnishing, unpacking, decorating, fighting the wasps, irrigating, and sorting through boxes. Thank you to all those who have helped with these tasks!

Oh, the house had an aging wooden swing set in the back yard (which I promptly tore down and made a roman solider from…)

The military charges that back in 2002, a certain Mohammed Jawad tried to kill two of our soldiers in Afghanistan by throwing a grenade at them. Mohammed, 16 years old, was captured and flown to the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Mohammed has been locked up in solitary confinement since that time, not yet charged with any crime. (Nor has he been provided, until recently, access to counsel or any recourse to challenge his detention.)

No doubt, the gallant administrators and soldiers at Guantanamo (once our executive branch suspended habeas corpus and article three of the Geneva Conventions for the detainees) found it amusing to engage in alternative interrogation tactics while attempting to garner intel from this terrorist kingpin.

Did Mohammed Jawad throw that grenade? Probably. It is a war over there, after all. The salient point is that he was only a kid and if he was attacking us, we should have shot him then. Or, at least, captured him, interrogated him and then tried him for murder. Holding him without end should not have been an option. Is there any actionable intelligence that can be gathered from a teenage combatant who has already spent many years alone in prison?

Let me be clear, unlike the ACLU, I do not bristle at these words from the president, “As a matter of policy the United States Armed Forces shall continue to treat detainees humanely, and to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva.” It is obvious that there are some very bad people who wish the US much harm. Because of that, I do not argue that there is never a case for the use of less-humane treatment to extract vital, timely intelligence. However an acknowledgment that such situations might conceivably exist is not the same as a wholesale torture permission slip. Those incidents ought to be the of the extremely rare, ticking-bomb variety.

Enter Maj. J. R. David Frakt, Jawad’s newly military-appointed attorney. Frakt’s closing argument (June 19th, 2008) in favor of dismissal of Mohammad Jawad’s case contains some well crafted arguments. Here is an excerpt:

America is a nation founded on a reverence for the rule of law. We should never forget that when we take an oath to enlist or be commissioned as an officer in the United States Armed Forces, we do not swear to defend the United States, we swear “to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” The Oath of Office for the President contains similar words: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Tragically, under the undeniably heavy pressure to defend Americans from terrorist attack, some of our military and civilian leaders lost sight of their obligation to defend the Constitution as well.

Under the Constitution all men are created equal, and all are entitled to be treated with dignity. No one is ‘”undeserving” of humane treatment. It is an unmistakable lesson of history that when one group of people starts to see another group of people as “other” or as “different,” as “undeserving” as “inferior,” ill-treatment inevitably follows. In the Global War on Terror generally and in the detention camps of Guantanamo especially, the detainees were seen as “terrorists,” as “the worst of the worst” something less than human, and were treated accordingly. After six and a half years, we now know the truth about the detainees at Guantanamo: some of them are terrorists, some of them are foot soldiers, and some of them were just innocent people, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the detainees at Guantanamo have one thing in common “with each other, and with us” they are all human beings, and they are all worthy of humane treatment. We should also never forget that no one in Guantanamo has been convicted of a single crime and that even in these deeply flawed military commissions, they are entitled to a presumption of innocence…

February 7, 2002. America lost a little of its greatness that day. We lost our position as the world’s leading defender of human rights, as the champion of justice and fairness and the rule of law. But it is a testament to the continuing greatness of this nation, that I, a lowly Air Force Reserve Major, can stand here before you today, with the world watching, without fear of retribution, retaliation or reprisal, and speak truth to power. I can call a spade a spade, and I can call torture, torture.

Today, Your Honor, you have an opportunity to restore a bit of America’s lost luster, to bring back some small measure of the greatness that was lost on Feb 7, 2002, to set us back on a path that leads to an America which once again stands at the forefront of the community of nations in the arena of human rights.

Sadly, this military commission has no power to do anything to the enablers of torture … All you can do is to try to send a message, a clear and unmistakable message that the U.S. really doesn’t torture, and when we do, we own up to it, and we try to make it right.

I have provided you with legal authority for the proposition that you have the power to dismiss these charges. I can’t stand before you and say that you are legally required to do so. But I can say that that it is a moral imperative to do so, and I ask that you do so.

Please know that I don’t wish to cast aspersions on our patriotic festivities– to the contrary– I’m convinced that this great country is what she is today, in part, because of a persistent willingness to face and resolve the issues which confront her. It is through candid, honest and intelligent dialog that change can be effected. Far from a liberal cynic, I am very proud to be American.

Click for the full text of Major David Frakt’s closing arguments.

The response from the last three monthly photo rambling posts was good: March Photo Ramblings, April Photo Ramblings and May Photo Ramblings, so here are a few random pics from this month, or at least from the first half of the month.

Can you guess which picture is my favorite?

• Advertising Vs Reality – A Product Comparison Project
• Belgian Students Break Mento-and-Coke World Record
• Make Your Own Fonts, In a Web Browser
• Spy video car

Besides being a naturalist, geologist, and troublemaker, Charles Darwin (1809-1882) was also a prolific letter writer. He exchanged over 14,500 letters with nearly 2000 people during his lifetime — with people like the geologist Charles Lyell, the botanists Asa Gray and Joseph Dalton Hooker, the zoologist Thomas Henry Huxley and the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace.

Not content with just letters, Darwin also jotted down his thoughts in notebooks. From those writings he published the Journal Of Researches (1839), The Descent Of Man (1871), The Zoology Of The Voyage Of HMS Beagle (1838-43) and the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th editions of the Origin Of Species.

Cambridge University has digitized some 50,000 pages of text of notes and letters and books from Darwin and made them all available online. At this very moment, you could be downloading the text of the Origin of Species.

Among all these scribblings, exists a small scrap of paper upon which Charles listed his pros and cons of getting married. The year was 1838 and Charles, 29, already back from his five year world voyage on the Beagle, was contemplating marriage to his cousin Emma Wedgwood, an attractive woman nine months his senior. Fiercely logical, Charles produced a cost-benefit analysis of the situation. He divided the paper into two columns, ‘œMarry’? on the left, and ‘œNot Marry’? on the right and this is what he wrote:

Marry

• Children (if it Please God)
• Constant companion (and friend in old age) who will feel interested in one
• Object to be beloved and played with. Better than a dog anyhow
• Home, & someone to take care of house
• Charms of music and female chit-chat
• These things good for one’s health– but terrible loss of time
• … it is intolerable to think of spending one’s whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working, and nothing after all. No, no, won’t do
• Imagine living all one’s day solitary in smoky dirty London House
• Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire and books and music perhaps
• Compare this vision with the dingy reality of Great Marlboro Street, London

Not Marry

• Freedom to go where one liked
• Choice of Society and little of it
• Conversation of clever men at clubs
• Not forced to visit relatives and bend in every trifle
• Expense and anxiety of children
• Perhaps quarreling
• Loss of Time
• Cannot read in the evenings
• Fatness and idleness
• Anxiety and responsibility
• Less money for books etc.
• If many children forced to gain one’s bread (But then it is very bad for one’s health to work too much)
• Perhaps my wife won’t like London; then the sentence is banishment and degradation into indolent, idle fool

He studied the list before concluding, “Marry, Marry, Marry Q.E.D.” Less money for books, fatness and idleness and loss of time notwithstanding, Darwin proposed to Emma and they were married a year later.

That’s the question I asked Dr. Stephen Covey tonight. His answer, given with a big smile, “being married to my wife, Sandra.” Then he paused, his expression quickly changing, “She is having back surgery this Wednesday, will you include her in your prayers?” I assured him I would.

I chatted briefly with Covey after a talk he gave on “Six Events: The Restoration Model For Solving Life’s Problems.” He spoke about four basic human needs (Live, Love, Learn and Leave a Legacy), reminded us that life is short and provided two questions for conflict resolution:
Q. Would you be willing to search for a solution that is better than what either of us has proposed?
Q. Would you be willing to agree to a simple ground rule? No one can make his or her point until they have restated the other person’s point to his or her satisfaction.

The A/V guy was not having a good day and the video projector for Covey’s presentation refused to function properly. Still, Covey had all of his slides memorized and was able to recite them effortlessly. That’s pretty impressive. Strong work Dr. C.