My mother was an immigrant, the vast majority of boys in my school had parents or grandparents who were immigrants or names that reflected origins outside the UK as it stood then.
I read Robert Winder’s book, Bloody Foreigners, when it was first released and I have re-read much of it over the past 6 months, here’s what the Sunday Times said about it:
The story of the way Britain has been settled and influenced by foreign people and ideas is as old as the land itself. In this original, important and inspiring book, Robert Winder tells of the remarkable migrations that have founded and defined a nation.
‘Our aristocracy was created by a Frenchman, William the Conqueror, who also created our medieval architecture, our greatest artistic glory. Our royal family is German, our language a bizarre confection of Latin, Saxon and, latterly, Indian and American. Our shops and banks were created by Jews. We did not stand alone against Hitler; the empire stood beside us. And our food is, of course, anything but British . . . Winder has a thousand stories to tell and he tells them well’ Sunday Times.
“Music, when done right, is undeniable. It doesn’t matter what the critics say, it doesn’t matter what you believed yesterday, it doesn’t matter what your friends have to say, you’re immediately infected, the sound just makes you feel good, puts a smile on your face, makes you glad to be alive.”
“Are you a born writer? Were you put on earth to be a painter, a scientist, an apostle of peace? In the end the question can only be answered by action.
Do it or don’t do it.
It may help to think of it this way. If you were meant to cure cancer or write a symphony or crack cold fusion and you don’t do it, you not only hurt yourself, even destroy yourself,. You hurt your children. You hurt me. You hurt the planet.
You shame the angels who watch over you and you spite the Almighty, who created you and only you with your unique gifts, for the sole purpose of nudging the human race one millimetre farther along its path back to God.
Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It’s a gift to the world and every being in it. Don’t cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you’ve got.”
This photograph of Iesha L Evans, a nurse from New York, facing the police in Baton Rouge in July this year, was inspiring and thought provoking.
Inspiring, because, like many, I would love to think that I might have her courage and dignity, but I doubt I would.
Thought provoking, because when I read of and watched the protests in the USA in the 1960s before and after the death of Martin Luther King Jr. I hoped that events like this would be considered history by the time I was in my 60s.
I was wrong. It seems that the pendulum is swinging away from my beliefs. I hope that I am wrong about that too.
In the meantime look at Iesha and take courage from her example.
“Every which way, Trump is exploiting the faulty mechanisms in people’s minds. It feels like we are in a world where, to me, some meaningful part of the electorate is beyond reasoning with – beyond fact, anti-science. All the mental faculties that lead to human progress, they are opposed to.”
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I haven’t written much for a while, not because I haven’t got much to say, far from it.
I started 2016 full of good intentions with the idea of writing a blog post every day for a month then two months or perhaps a year. I soon realised that writing for its own sake or because I had said that I would was both arrogant and futile. The backlash of that of course is the temptation to be so self-critical that you never write anything at all. So with the exception of the Monday Morning Quotes which are done in advance, there has been much silence from ReesAcres.
Is it because I was tired of reading the me, me, me, selfie-writing of so many Blogs, Ezines and Facebook posts? Not really, I’m used to that, it’s the world where we live. “Those who can do, those who can’t take endless pictures of themselves as their form of self actualisation”, someone muttered to me recently as we looked at yet another meaningless Facebook posting.
The results of the US election did leave me despairing, and the early machinations of the President to be have done nothing to quieten my feelings. Trump came close on the heels of the vileness of the reaction to the Brexit vote in the UK where, although I am neither a citizen nor a resident of the UK, I do pay taxes and own a home but had no right to vote in the referendum. The sheer unpleasantness of both these campaigns and the total lack of grace shown by the victors left me despairing.
As ever it can take on or three small things to spur you back into action.
This piece by John Naughton in the Observer, Respect’ is a two-edged sword, helped set me rolling again, his final paragraph is worth repeating, “Yep. So if the UK government invites Trump on a State Visit and he expects ‘respect’, then he should be treated with the same disrespect that we would have shown to Idi Amin or any other tyrant. And nobody should be surprised if Princes William and Harry refused to meet a man who once boasted that he could have “nailed” (i.e. screwed) their late mother.”
2. From reestheskin, indirectly came a link to this interview with Alan Kay on Power of Simplicity https://youtu.be/NdSD07U5uBs 50 minutes well spent.
3. Finally this from The Lefsetz letter, a posting called “Now”. Bob Lefsetz writes mainly about music and contemporary America, outspoken and verbose he irritates me frequently but he also pushes me to think and have an opinion. It starts, ”
We went to school for twenty years to make our parents proud.
Now they’re stealing Medicare, what’s happening for crying out loud.
We thought the rich were bluebloods who inherited their wares.
Now we find the rich earned it and think they deserve it and create the jobs and know better than you and me, whose crime is we just don’t have enough money.
And our kids know the Beatles but believe in Beyonce, even more Jay Z, because when it comes to entertainment the African-Americans are king, but behind their backs everybody sneers, saying they’re not entitled to a thing.
And Mr. Jones knew nothing about Dylan, but now Mr. Sulzberger knows nothing about Trump, meanwhile life goes on all around us.
Save the planet? Save yourself! That’s what George Carlin said, after he told us not to bother voting, because the owners of this country weren’t gonna let us in. And despite the disadvantaged no-future blue collars electing a businessman President, they’re not gonna have a seat at the table. The Cabinet says just to trust them. But we’ve learned to sleep with one eye open.
And everything seems the same yet it’s different. We’ve got the same spouse, the same car, the same house. But institutions are no longer to be trusted, facts are irrelevant and only money matters. After TV. Would the President-to-be be without TV?
“This year 6 US citizens won Nobel prizes. And every one of them was an immigrant. Every one of them.”
The Incisal Edge 