Mainers
I approach almost everything geographically, and so I've read about the recent shootings in Maine wondering if there was any possible connection with what I already know about the place. I'll explain but also give it away a little: chances are very unlikely that any of the victims or shooters are related to any of my people. But it's not absolutely certain, and in fact one reason they
left there was that it was hard to turn around without bumping into someone you were related to. Here is the story.
It starts in Boston, in about 1806, when a man with six children died of alcohol-related something, leaving his wife alone, hungry, and cold. One possible solution to her was to send one son up to live with his aunt, his father's sister, who had married a farmer in Androscoggin County near Livermore Falls. The boy was about six at the time. He didn't have a ride all the way to the farm, but was dropped off at the intersection and walked the last four or five miles, as a six year-old, alone. He would always remember that.
His aunt, however, was true to her word, and raised him as her own, until he was a strong young kid able to enter the militia and come back to have a farm of his own. His aunt was Catherine Walker, and the step-father who raised him, James A. Walker. They were known in the local church but I was not very well able to track down what happened to either of them, where they ended up, or where or when they died.
Coming back from the militia, young Joseph, my great great grandfather, married a woman named Mary Turner and had three children almost before he figured out what else to do. His good friend Joseph Turner, Mary's older brother, had married and then remarried when his first wife had died. But Mary and Joseph Turner's father, Ebenezer, was hot on the idea of moving the whole operation out to Illinois.
Father-in-law Ebenezer was somewhat of a visionary. He had heard that Illinois had good soil, unlike Maine, and you could grow almost anything there. In Maine, people had noticed the rocky, difficult soil and of course the long, hard, winters. Livermore Falls was in a relatively fertile area but still overall no exception; some fruit grew there, but not enough. Families in their puritan traditions were large and the people didn't have enough room to expand into; to the north it was a wall of forest all the way to Quebec. And everyone was related to everyone; their children would eventually have no one to marry.
Joseph and Mary could see this, and it helped them form a plan, ultimately, to equip a wagon for the long ride out to Illinois. It would take several good horses and really solid wagon with a stove in it, and a big chair for Mother Turner, covered for the harsh weather even though it would be summer when they left. Joseph was good at the carpentry things; he'd run saws, and had spent time hauling huge timbers down to the coast, so he knew horses and wagons and building. His friend Joseph Turner encouraged him. All the Turners would be going, and some neighbors. It would be a wagon train.
In fact other people had the same idea. In 1830, a number of Mainers went to Illinois and other states as part of one of the larger internal migration movements in American history. Among the Mainers who moved to Illinois at that time was Elijah Lovejoy, who would set up a press in Alton, and Asa Turner, a cousin of Joseph and Mary who was somewhat of a firebrand preacher. Mainers and New Hampshirites were leaving New England regularly for the long trek across the National Road and into southern and western Illinois. It would take about 50 or 60 days of hard traveling. It would be slightly longer for them, since they'd stop in Boston to see Joseph's mother, and to see Turner relatives in Dedham.
When they left Livermore Falls, their wagons all decked out for the long trip, the town came out to wish them well. They lost a dog before they'd gone twenty miles, and they had to stop to reorganize in Lewiston. But soon they made it and were on their way. When they landed in Quincy, Illinois, it was November of one of the coldest winters ever, and six percent of Quincy had already been taken by cholera. But that's another story.
Back in Maine, relatives farmed the rocky soil as they always had. Some Turners and no doubt Walkers were left behind. Young James Walker Leverett, the youngest boy but the middle of the three children who made the journey, would always remember not only his few early years in Androscoggin County, but also his big journey, and walking much of the way.
Two of the victims of the shooting were Walkers; one owned the bar. But that's all I know, and I have absolutely no way to find or connect Walkers to James A. Walker of 1810, 213 years ago. Even then there were Walkers all over the place and no real way to figure out who was born of whom. Genealogy is a tricky and slippery art with names like Walker, and I, being a Leverett, am spoiled to a much easier line to figure out from.
We have the memory of the Walkers, though, and that comes from James Walker's name, and the fact that he was named after his adopted grandfather. May they rest in peace.
You want to see a Holocaust?
A Holocaust is when thousands of innocent, women and children, are killed. Starved, burned by chemicals, brutalized, and killed. You don't have to have numbers like six million, a half-million or million will work, and it tends to have a racial/ethic edge to it - for whatever reason, these people have been considered animals or inhuman by the powerful.
Yes, some Palestinians raped your women. Some may have beheaded babies, kidnapped grandmothers, all of that. Some even put it on video to increase the humiliation.
Let me repeat. If you're going to kill, gas and starve half a million, that's a Holocaust.
The world will watch and judge Israel's response. Is there
anything that justifies a Holocaust? I understand anger, and revenge, and the sense of being violated, I'm not arguing with that. I'm just saying that in the history of Holocausts, you're going right near the top of the list here. Armenia, maybe that counts. Native Americans in the USA, OK.
Get some perspective. Figure out where you want to be in history. You are probably strong enough to kill most of the two million over a period of a few weeks. Most of them will be women, children, innocents. Many are dead already. Most are innocent - "You deserve it" is not really part of the equation.
It's hard to be pro-prisoner
I sympathized with the Palestinian, jailed up as they were in the Gaza strip, totally controlled and locked down by Israel.
But what that attack reminded me most of was a prison break. Desperate, violent people striking out and killing whoever they can get their hands on, with no regard for human life, kidnapping, etc. "Desperate" is the key word.
Did they think this would ultimately help the people of Gaza? Did they think they would get the world's sympathy when they attacked like that? They'll get sympathy like we'd give prisoners sympathy, namely, not much, and only when it's all contained again. Meanwhile thousands will die, Israeli and Palestinian alike. I guess one thing that can be said is that it's not advisable to attend raves in southern Israel.
Gaza is now without electricity; all economic aid will be choked too. The Palestinian people, who actually had an economic revival going, are now back at square one with squalor that they can only thank Hamas for. Did Hamas plan in such a way that they thought they would win, and get freedom, and eliminate Israel?
I don't think so.
archived weblogs
Here is a problem I've encountered with trying to save weblogs from the old days.
This one:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130420210206/http://violentdeer.blogspot.com/
is now only available by web archive (wayback machine). Somehow the scammers have taken the URL, so that when you try to go to violentdeer.blogspot.com, you get spam. When you find it on the wayback machine, you get what it was: a very interesting weblog set up for and by international students.
Another one,
http://eap2walmart.blogspot.com, has a project I'm very proud of, where students literally explored both sides of the issue of a new Walmart appearing between Carbondale and Murphysboro (nothing
new about it these days, I'm sure). It was an excellent project and deserves to be saved.
But I can't find any log-in information - no email, no password, no nothing. It too will probably be scooped up by the spammers if the site goes dead as Google promises - nobody logs in, nobody uses it, etc. I am still looking for email and login for this one. I don't want it to die.
If it does, thank God for the Wayback Archive.
Labels: cesl, internet, weblogs, writing
An elusive Mideast peace
The new war in Israel and Gaza reminds me that I hate to even think about this situation, but that I
do have a plan for peace that I'm mulling over, or at least working on.
I hate to think about it because I have enough Jewish relatives that I feel personally attacked as all Jews do, and feel the heinous sting of an invasion into Israel personally and can't help but take the Israeli side. On the other hand, I feel that Israel has been such a bully for so long, bulldozing over Palestinian homes etc., that they surely knew it would come to this. I have a hard time defending Palestinians who invade a military line, of a country that supplies their power no less, and takes prisoners and hostages back to Gaza. But I have a hard time defending much of what Israel has been doing for years, too. They're both guilty.
So here's my plan. Way back in the 1950's they had the only successful Israeli-Palestinian Peace accord ever (forgive a little exaggeration or factual innacuracy - it's a good story). The Americans invited both the Israelis and the Palestinians to a castle in Spain or somewhere, and when they got there, they served them ham. That's right,
ham. It was before the days when anyone had a clue about such things. Well, of course, the Israelis and the Palestinians were horrified, and couldn't eat the ham; it's against both of their religions. But, mad at the Americans and having that in common, they struck a peace deal which was known as the only one for many years.
It's kind of an interesting story, and I don't remember exactly where I heard it, so I can't vouch for its accuracy. But I like it as a story and feel that it holds a basic kernel of something that can be used to establish a real peace. We have to find something odious that both of them can hate together.
My original version of a solution was to move the UN to Jerusalem. I still stand behind that one, although I have no earthly concept of how it would be implemented. It would cost millions, obviously, but would put a barrier between the cultures and give them both something to hate. My children would point out that it would remind them of meetings that I'd hold when they became unruly fighting with each other. Under the boring repression of a meeting they would be come united, quickly, and make a deal so that they could go back to their free life of irresponsible play. Nothing like boring process to make you appreciate the value of working together to both get what you want.
What Palestinians want is their own state, not strangled or politically controlled from teh outside. At this point they will be lucky to come out of this with any state at all, but a West Bank full of Gaza refugees will still need a diplomatic solution that the whole world can live with somehow. The sooner the better.
weblog museum
A threat by Google has spurred me to action. Briefly, they have warned me that weblog accounts not logged into will eventually be deleted. Fair enough. I sat on that warning for a few months but cannot sit on it any longer.
I set up a lot of accounts. Often, I would set up a new email and set of weblogs for every new teaching assignment I had. Why not? It wasn't especially lying to have weblogs on their own accounts, since often I was teaching students how to log onto them and post things themselves. Sometimes of course students would mistakes and start their own weblog when they were trying to post on one. Or, rename the entire system with their own name (this apparently happened to the CESL student account, after I was no longer in charge).
The idea would be to gather as many of these accounts as I can find, and preserve them in such a way that they can be enjoyed and consumed as part of a larger display of weblogs being used in education. There are a few that were used for other purposes and of course, I may want to preserve those as well but possibly in another venue. The ones used for education alone - most for ESL students communicating to each other and about ideas that they've found in the U.S. - are extensive; there are many, used in a wide variety of ways. And I haven't really even found half of them.
I'm on my way, though. If you look at the big picture there are several things to keep in mind: 1) weblogs offer a unique, public way of presenting information; 2) they were extremely useful in teaching ESL in that they were like a public forum yet not heavily trafficked; in other words, students could
feel like they were putting themselves out in the public square, yet not get the damage that a true public square would do; and 3) we are really talking about the early days of weblogs, when they first arrived on the scene and were being used for all kinds of purposes. This kind of "early days" era capture is, as in the case of automobiles and all kinds of other things, fascinating to people who study such things, and fascinating in its own right just because it was early. People
will look back and wonder what the early days of linking, posting, writing, etc. was like. Weblogs themselves may fade into oblivion or get cornered into a unique slice of the public communications picture. But if they survive their early history will always be of interest.
Labels: cesl, internet, weblogs
