Here’s the opposite story, though. With apologies because I don’t have the book in front of me, so I may get some details wrong, but I read this “Irena’s Children“ by
Tilar J. Mazzeo.
Irena lived in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation, and dedicated her life to rescuing Jewish children from the Ghetto, and her story is complicated in a lot of ways but - well, this story isn’t actually about Irena, per se.
It’s about a bus driver.
It’s about a day when she’s traveling across town by bus with a very young Jewish child, and partway to their destination the child looks up and asks a question - in Yiddish. and the whole bus goes quiet, because everyone knows what that means. And Irena thinks, okay, we’re going to die here today.
And she’s running through her options - all of them bad - and suddenly the bus stops, and the bus driver announces that there’s been a mechanical failure and the bus needs to return to the depot immediately. Everyone off, please.
And she stands and goes to get off the bus and the driver says - not you two. Sit down. So she sits down as everyone else leaves, because, well, what else is she going to do? the options are all still bad, at this point.
and when the bus is empty the bus driver says,
“Where do you need to go?”
And then he drives them as close to their destination as he can, and lets them off, and drives away. And Irena lives, and the kid lives, and they never cross paths again.
So a janitor got three people killed, and a bus driver saved two lives - not to mention all the other lives indirectly saved because Irena was able to continue her work.
I think about that almost every day now, to be honest.
We can’t all be Irena. I couldn’t be Irena. She was in a unique place with very specific skills and connections that let her do what she did. I am just one mentally ill librarian. I can’t be her. But - I can be the bus driver. Or I could be the janitor. Because it doesn’t matter what your job is. It doesn’t matter who you are. In a world like this, every single one of us has the opportunity to do massive harm or massive good. We can save lives or end them.
And that’s scary. but it’s also very comforting? at least for me. Because at the end of the day it means this: no matter of how small and helpless and unimportant you feel, you’re never powerless in the face of great evil.
You can choose to be the bus driver.
I have another story from the Holocaust.
Two, actually.
One is long, and one is brief.
The first story is about my grandfather.
He was a slave in a Krups munitions factory in a Nazi concentration camp in Częstochowa, Poland.
He was also a smuggler. If I did not have multiple corroborating witnesses to the sheer ludicrious balls that he had, I would dismiss the stories as exaggeration. But he was a food smuggler–he would buy some kind of sugar from the Polish day workers coming into the factory, make candy out of them, sell the candy back to the workers at a profit, and buy food with the proceeds–which he then proceeded to share with the other slaves, free of charge. Without him, they would have starved to death, but an extra hundred calories a day made a difference enough to keep them alive.
But that’s not the story.
The story is what happened in Spring of 1945.
My grandfather could hear the guns of the Russian Army off in the distance, and he and the other captives in the camp figured that they would be liberated any day now.
And then a truck packed full with preteen Jewish children who had just been captured comes into the work camp instead of the extermination camp up the road. Because the Nazis were so fixated on their hatred of Jews that they diverted war resources to hunting us down even as they were losing.
So it’s pandemonium. They’re unloading the truck of the kids, the guards are yelling at the driver, the kids are milling about not knowing what’s going on…
And my grandfather sees one boy who looked a little older, a little more mature, and figured that this one he can save. It’s just a few days until the Russians arrive, after all.
So he tells the boy to come with him.
And the rest… got loaded back onto the truck and off they went to the gas chambers.
But it wasn’t a couple of days.
It was six weeks.
Stalin personally ordered the Army to slow their advance and told the Polish Resistance to rise up, and that the Russians would support them with food and weapons.
So they rose up… and were slaughtered. Because they got nothing from the Russians. Stalin knew that anyone who would be resisting the Nazis would be resisting him next, and it was an elegant way to weaken Poland before he took it.
Meanwhile, my grandfather is hiding a fourteen year old boy in a NAZI CONCENTRATION CAMP.
The risks they took to hide him… they would hold him up over empty shoes sewn to long pants at the evening roll call so that he would look taller. They smuggled food to him… If they had been caught… I have nightmares of what would have been done to them.
Finally, one night, they are all locked in their barracks as the Nazis evacuated the camp and the Russians were coming in, with the Nazis using the camp for cover for their escape.
And in the chaos…
My grandfather lost track of the boy.
Twenty-two years later, he tells this story to my father when my father is 12, and has demanded to know something, be told something concrete.
So he doesn’t know what happened to the boy. Did he live? Did he die? Did he find his mother and sisters?
He doesn’t know.
Six months later, my grandmother is planning my father’s bar mitzvah. Not as a religious obligation, but as a 200 foot tall flaming middle finger to the Third Reich. You are gone, and WE ARE STILL HERE.
So she plugs into what my father called the “Camp Network”–the trombonist in the band was on a death march with an uncle, the florist was in a work camp with a friend, etc. And she’s asking, “I need a photographer, who is good?”
“You want Joe Brown, up in Queens,” she’s told.
So she invites him down to talk terms at their house in Brooklyn, which is quite a haul in NYC.
And the first question one Holocaust survivor asks another is, “Where were you?” Because maybe you know someone, maybe you can tell what happened.
“I was in Częstochowa,” he says.
“You were in Częstochowa? My husband Teddy was in Częstochowa!”
“I didn’t know a Teddy Baum.”
“Oh, everyone knew Teddy.”
“I didn’t know a Teddy Baum!”
“When he gets home, you’ll see. Everyone there knew Teddy.” Because he was smuggling in the food that kept them all alive.
So the thing is, you live in the US for 20 years, you forget that your name was not “Teddy Baum” but “Tuvyas Bumps.”
And when my grandfather got home from work…
…sitting there at his kitchen table…
…was the boy he had saved.
…
(I’m not crying…)
That’s the first story.
The second story is that of my grandfather’s brother.
It is short.
He collaborated with the Nazis to save his own skin. He let my grandfather’s first wife and son starve to death in the ghetto and informed on people who tried to escape or resist. My grandfather said that “Good people went up the chimney and he stayed behind.”
Two brothers.
One saved over a hundred lives.
The other betrayed his own flesh and blood to save his own skin.
Your choices define you.
Whoever destroys a single life is considered by Scripture to have destroyed the whole world, and whoever saves a single life is considered by Scripture to have saved the whole world.–
Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5
Thread from Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez on her experience in a hospital in Cuba
okay total aside, but a lot of leftists get really, really mad at me when i say that a fundamental part of any communist movement must be the elimination of the division of labour. they mock me with “what, do you want us all taking turns being doctors?”
no, you fucking morons. i want us to live in a society where medical knowledge isn’t treated as secret unknowable lore that gatekeeps access to the care and resources we need to survive.
the reason we have so much bullshit medical psudeoscience is our society has a vested interest in making medical knowledge seem like impossible magic that only our greatest super-geniuses can hope to understand, but as both a trans person and a person who has helped a loved one with a chronic illness, getting care in these situations more often than not involved sitting down in front of a disinterested doctor and realizing with slow horror that we know more about our condition than they do, yet they decide what is best for us.
and if they notice you notice they’re out of their depths, there’s a good chance they will withhold care you need to punish you
the solution is the demystification and democratization of knowledge. yes, we have dedicated medical experts, because having specialists is important in realms of complex knowledge, but the death of the division of labour means the death of the idea that a field of human labour is the exclusive propertyof a caste of specialists.
it means exactly this; invite the community to be involved! teach those who are curious openly and eagerly so they don’t go looking for answers from grifters! get everyone involved! treat medicine as a journey a community takes together, not a missive from on high. and that goes for everything. treat science this way, treat education this way, treat life and all the work we do to sustain it as a beautiful shared journey instead of capitalism’s pay-as-you-go haunted house
After our golden retriever died, our giant tuxedo cat became my hiking partner back in the woods. He was a better birder than the dog and would even point.
I’ve been becoming allergic to “Christianity”–the word gets thrown around, loudly and often, by all the very worst people in the world. They make a show of praying, loudly exclaim how much they love Jesus, and then vote to strip hungry children of food, shrug off near daily mass shootings because guns are more important than people, legislate hatred, bigotry…
It’s nice to see an actual Christian who knows what it is all supposed to be about.
It shouldn’t be much of a struggle if you’re taking in a kitten. There will certainly be an adjustment, but many cats do perfectly fine. Be sure your kitten has plenty of enrichment to keep his mind and body active; enrichment is fairly common for dogs, but there seems to be a lag with it catching on as a common best practice for cats. Places to jump, tunnels to climb through, puzzle feeders, toys, scratching posts…all great stuff.
I have taken 3 adult barn cats and turned them into house cats. Granted, they were all older. Thomas was very old, and he passed a little more than a year after I brought him home, but that year was spent happily sleeping on soft beds in a warm house. He never once asked to go outside, though he did like to sit in the window during warm weather. Two of the 3 I have now were barn cats. Stache never looked back; she hated being a barn cat and has also never asked to go outside. Maverick does sometimes act like he misses it, but he's got warm laps, the best food, lots of toys (he WILL catch the red dot someday!), and seems quite content 95% of the time.
Meanwhile, I don't have to worry about them getting hit by a car, getting grabbed by a coyote, catching the bird flu (or any other disease), or killing all the killdeer and meadowlark babies!
On November 7, 2024, Denmark used a racist, culturally biased “parenting competency” test to remove a 2 hour old baby, Zammi, from her loving indigenous Greenlandic Inuit mother, Keira, because her native language, which uses minute facial expressions to communicate, will not be able to “[prepare] the child for the social expectations and codes that are necessary to navigate in Danish society.” This test had been recommended not to be used at the federal level before this happened but certain municipalities, including the one this happened in, chose to continue to use it regardless. Not only is this blatantly racist but also violates multiple declarations and conventions that Denmark has signed that protect the rights of indigenous people.
Please sign this petition to help Keira to get her baby back.
Hey, it’s really important for Keira to get 50,000 signatures on this petition before her court date in early April 2025. Please sign if you haven’t already to help a mother and a people stand up to colonialism and for indigenous rights.
If you got a message in your Google Chrome that Ublock Origin is no longer supported (and several other extensions focused on privacy and not having stealth miners running in your browser):
don’t fall for it.
Go to the manage extensions page and just turn it back on. It’s still supported. They just turned it off and hoped you’d fall for the wording and uninstall without a fight.
Books aren’t just texts, they have their own histories, being cherished, creased and stained by the hands of many owners as they move across nations and the centuries.
One way people have marked their ownership of books is with a bookplate, often designed to match their own identities and personalities. What would your bookplate include?
While thousands more are scattered throughout our historic book collections. Over the last few years our collections teams have identified over 800 unique bookplates in our early printed book collection.
[1: In a library before an oversized book, surreally stands an ostrich who seems to be admiring the bookshelf behind him. The bookplate of a Ralph Straus. EPB/B/30092
2: A yellow spotted snake slithers across an open book in this modernist bookplate of Vladimir Zapletal. EPB/B/37667
3: A beautiful wood panelled room with leaded windows and piles of books on the window sill. This is the bookplate of Fritz Ponsonby, veteran of the Boer and First World War. Below is inscribed his wise motto “Reading maketh a full man”. EPB/B/58946
4:. A nude man in a circle of light is labelled “Sol” and is orbited by the planetary symbols. This strange, esoteric bookplate is of chemistry historian Dr Ernst Darmstaedter, hundreds of whose books now live in our bookstacks.
5: Dragons flit around the crest ofThomas Philip Earl de Grey of Wrest Park (not that Early Grey). EPB/B/4572
6: Three men, one reads in a study, another looks to the heavens and another sows the fields. “Art is man’s nature, nature of God’s art”. EPB/B/58939
7: A cloaked figure, looking like they just stepped out of The Traitors, guards the bookplate of New York Congressman Jacob Sloat Fassett. EPB/F/2284
8: A library, orchids and plankton, there’s a lot going on on the bookplate of American marine zoologist Charles Atwood Kofoid. EPB/D/28525
9: A monk scribbles away and a printer operates the printing press in J Eliot Hodgkin’s bookprint inspired by the bookmakers of the past. EPB/B/31799
10: The complex bookplate of Fairfax of Cameron with lion and unicorn rearing up against an armourial crest. EPB/B/19921]
Elon Musk attacked democracy defender and superstar court lawyer Marc Elias as “undermining civilization,” taunting him by asking if he suffered “generational trauma.”
Elias’s response was brilliant and worth amplifying:
Mr. Musk,
You recently criticized me and another prominent lawyer fighting for the rule of law and democracy in the United States. I am used to being attacked for my work, particularly on the platform you own and dominate.
I used to be a regular on Twitter, where I amassed over 900,000 followers — all organic except for the right-wing bots who seemed to grow in number. Like many others, I stopped regularly posting on the site because, under your stewardship, it became a hellscape of hate and misinformation.
I also used to buy your cars — first a Model X and then a Model S — back when you spoke optimistically about solving the climate crisis. My family no longer owns any of your cars and never will.
But this is not the reason I am writing. You don’t know me. You have no idea whether I have suffered trauma and if I have, how it has manifested. And it’s none of your business.
However, I will address your last point about generational trauma. I am Jewish, though many on your site simply call me “a jew.” Honestly, it’s often worse than that, but I’m sure you get the point. There was a time when Twitter would remove antisemitic posts, but under your leadership, tolerating the world’s oldest hatred now seems to be a permissible part of your “free speech” agenda.
Like many Jewish families, mine came to America because of trauma. They were fleeing persecution in the Pale of Settlement — the only area in the Russian Empire where Jews were legally allowed to reside. Even there, life was difficult — often traumatic. My family, like others, lived in a shtetl and was poor. Worse, pogroms were common — violent riots in which Jews were beaten, killed and expelled from their villages.
By the time my family fled, life in the Pale had become all but impossible for Jews. Tsar Nicholas II’s government spread anti-Jewish propaganda that encouraged Russians to attack and steal from Jews in their communities. My great-grandfather was fortunate to leave when he did. Those who stayed faced even worse circumstances when Hitler’s army later invaded.
That is the generational trauma I carry. The trauma of being treated as “other” by countrymen you once thought were your friends. The trauma of being scapegoated by authoritarian leaders. The trauma of fleeing while millions of others were systematically murdered. The trauma of watching powerful men treat it all as a joke — or worse.
As an immigrant yourself, you can no doubt sympathize with what it means to leave behind your country, extended family, friends and neighbors to come to the United States. Of course, you probably had more than 86 rubles in your pocket. You probably didn’t ride for nine days in the bottom of a ship or have your surname changed by immigration officials. Here is the ship manifest showing that my family did. Aron, age three, was my grandfather.
[see image in comments]
As new immigrants, life wasn’t easy. My family lived in cramped housing without hot water. They worked menial jobs — the kind immigrants still perform today.
Some may look down on those immigrants — the ones without fancy degrees — but my family was proud to work and grateful that the United States took them in. They found support within their Jewish community and a political home in the Democratic Party.
I became a lawyer to give back to the country that gave my family a chance. I specialize in representing Democratic campaigns because I believe in the party. I litigate voting rights cases because the right to vote is the bedrock of our democracy. I speak out about free and fair elections because they are under threat.
Now let me address the real crux of your post.
You are very rich and very powerful. You have thrown in with Donald Trump. Whether it is because you think you can control him or because you share his authoritarian vision, I do not know. I do not care.
Together, you and he are dismantling our government, undermining the rule of law and harming the most vulnerable in our society. I am just a lawyer. I do not have your wealth or your platform. I do not control the vast power of the federal government, nor do I have millions of adherents at my disposal to harass and intimidate my opponents. I may even carry generational trauma.
But you need to know this about me. I am the great-grandson of a man who led his family out of the shtetl to a strange land in search of a better life. I am the grandson of the three-year-old boy on that journey. As you know, my English name is Marc, but my Hebrew name is Elhanan (אֶלְחָנָן) — after the great warrior in David’s army who slew a powerful giant.
I will use every tool at my disposal to protect this country from Trump. I will litigate to defend voting rights until there are no cases left to bring. I will speak out against authoritarianism until my last breath.
I will not back down. I will not bow or scrape. I will never obey.
A painter in Los Angeles kept missing
his exit for the I-5 on the 110 highway,
so he did his research, climbed up the
overhead sign, and changed it himself
without anyone noticing.
This is Richard Ankrom. He couldn’t find his damn exit, cuz it wasn’t properly labelled.
So he took life by the balls, like any self-respecting Californian would do, and used his sign-painting expertise to fix it himself.
He called it ‘guerilla public service.’ Even got himself an outfit to look official. It worked, obvi.
Caltrans investigated, but the sign was actually up to code. They left it there for 8 years before they made an updated sign.
What I really like about this is that the containers all have prominent labels with a camera pointing directly at them, but it’s still called a double-blind trial because the researcher isn’t present and the bear can’t read
I found out during our department DEI committee meeting today that the major federal granting agencies (e.g., NSF, NIH) now have “lists of banned words” that, if found, can cause your grant application to basically go into the shredder.
Among the words the government really hates is “transition” (because RaDiCal GenDEr IdEolOGiEs!). Our committee members are all chemists. If you want to study liquid-vapor phase transitions, you’re screwed. Transition states in a chemical reaction? Nope.
I’m a mass spectrometrist. My little corner of the analytical chemistryverse uses a technique called “multiple reaction monitoring”, where your instrument is simultaneously monitoring a precursor ion and a certain fragment. That specific-combination-of-ions is called a transition.
…I literally can’t even talk about fucking mass spectrometry.
But hey, some trans girl in Iowa can’t play badminton anymore! Victory! Yeah! Cheaper eggs! Make America Great Again!
In my sector meetings are happening with psychological researchers about how to apply for grants studying autism and ADHD without using the word neurodiversity because it has “diversity” in. Elon musks Ctrl + F method of government everyone.
I worked at a community museum run out of a historic freight house, next to the train tracks and historic station and engines and other cars. We hosted model train enthusiasts to set up a display every month. Pretty sure the only NT visitors were the confused people trying to buy train tickets.
Some lady brought her teen semi verbal son in all the time. He’d flap and vocalize and jump up and down. He’d run to the door and watch from the railing rocking back and forth so incredibly excited when we told him the train was on its way (you could hear the whistle as it passed the crossing before ours). He was in fucking love.
Some lady from out of town had the nerve to try and ask me to kick the kid and mom out bc he was disrupting her visit. The look on the mom’s face like “oh no, not from here, not from here too” made me so fucking mad. I agreed that someone was disrupting other visitors, and asked the karen to leave. She threw a fit. I was like “You’re harassing a regular visitor on the basis of disability. Please leave the premises.”
Karen left. I started writing an email explaining to my boss ahead of the inevitable complaint. The mom came up and was like “thank you for making this a place my kid can be happy and himself” and I’m like “ma'am this is a train musuem. If we didn’t have autistic visitors we wouldn’t have visitors.”
Same. The temptation to start replying to comments remarking upon the surprising number of neurodivergent people on tumblr with “ma'am, this is a map store” is remarkably strong
Some individuals with AD/HD, especially without hyperactivity, have an activation problem as described by Thomas Brown, Ph.D. in his article AD/HD without Hyperactivity (1993). Rather than a deficit of attention, this means that individuals can’t deploy attention, direct it, or put it in the right place at the right time. He explains that adults who do not have hyperactivity often have severe difficulty activating enough to start a task and sustaining the energy to complete it. This is especially true for low-interest activities. Often it means that they can’t think of what to do so they might not be able to act at all, or, as Kate Kelly and Peggy Ramundo say in You Mean I’m Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?!, they might experience a “paralysis of will” (pg. 65). “The clothes from my trip—a month ago—are just still lying in a heap in the suitcase.” “I spend a lot of time in bed watching TV but my mind isn’t watching TV. I’m thinking about what I should be doing, but I don’t have the energy to do it.”
- Sari Solden, Women With Attention-Deficit Disorder
fun thing about herding and/or generally neurotic breeds: they are really good at following rules you have instituted, but they will also make their own Dog Rules they will follow stringently whether or not you like it
despite never being reprimanded for getting sick if my dog throws up she will ‘tattle’ on herself and run over to me, show me the throw up, then hide and start shaking uncontrollably. nobody taught her to do this. she has decided that throwing up is a punishable offense until the end of time
my dog has decided that it’s solely on her shoulders to ensure there is peace in my house…if the cats fight she stands between them to ‘break it up’ and/or herds them away, if my rats have an argument she goes to the cage door and barks until they stop. not sure why she has decided she must carry the weight of the world but she has
