It's Rainin' Here; Stornin' on the Deep Blue Sea

DUKES FANS:

“Wasn’t That A Mighty Storm…Blew All the People Away”….

   The above line is from Tom Rush’s version of Galveston, one of the first songs I ever heard about a flood outside of the church songs about Noah. I was very moved by this song when I first heard it in the mid -60’s, and it stirred my interest in songs about storms and floods. There have, of course, always been floods, so there have always been songs about the pain, grief, fear, and destruction that accompany these events. Along with Galveston, a great number of them refer to famous storms and floods from the 20^th century. John Lee Hooker’s Storming on the Deep Blue Sea, Stevie Ray Vaughn’s, Flooding Down in Texas, Randy Newman’s, Louisiana, and Memphis Minnie’s, When the Levee Breaks are just a few that speak to some of the legendary floods that hit the Gulf areas and the Mississippi River in the last century. It does seem, though, as if we have had a steady number of such epic storms in the 21^st century already, and it seems as if they are getting larger, more destructive and more frequent. In the first quarter of this century we have already had several storms whose one-word names bring up images from television and the web of people on rooftops, destroyed buildings and vehicles, people trapped and floating in cars, children being carried into and out of rowboats, and people of all ages and colors fleeing relentless and madly rushing waters. Charley, Harvey, Superstorm Sandy, Katrina, Maria and now Florence: These names conjure images and memories of people, maybe some of our own relatives and acquaintances, being faced with the unbelievable force of nature fully unfurled. (Maria and Katrina, for example, have the third and 6^th highest death totals of all storms in US history). More and even larger storms are expected to come in the next few years. And we seem far from ready.

   It seems as if these storms are unleashing more and more of their destructive forces on those least able to endure and survive them. Poor folk and people of color have been especially hard hit, and the neighborhoods where these people live are often the last to get outside help and money. A full year after the devastation Maria wrought on Puerto Rico, for example, a quarter of a million people on the island are still without power, thousands are still living in “temporary’ shelters, and thousands of folks go hungry every day. Much of downtown New Orleans has been restored or rebuilt in the wake of 2005’s Katrina, but the predominantly poor and African-American Lower Ninth Ward of the city has, by comparison, seen little of the money from government agencies and private investors to help it rebuild. FEMA, the national Federal Emergency Management Agency, received a lot of criticism for its role in New Orleans, but it still had a smaller budget and work force devoted to relief in Puerto Rico than in either Florida or Texas hit by Harvey. Maria was much stronger than Harvey, and Puerto Rico sustained more severe damage than either state. Still it got the short end of the Federal stick. And there has been little change in that.

 Local groups and food banks have done the lion’s share of the recovery, relief, medical and rebuilding work in many of the area’s hit by these storms, and they need help. These are the people that are on the ground delivering emergency health care, food, and shelter. The AARP foundation is one reputable charity that directs money to some of these groups, and 100% of the money donated gets matched and goes to the groups doing this work on the ground. To donate, one can go here:

 https://foundation.aarp.org/site/Donation2;jsessionid=00000000.app211a?df_id=15906&mfc_pref=T&15906.donation=form1&s_src=FDNwebsite&s_subsrc=disaster_recovery&NONCE_TOKEN=88CACDFEC1ECD0834E1AA30CEF1ADC2C .

 The people of Puerto Rico can use help as well, and Americares is still involved in helping establishing health services there:

https://www.americares.org/en/what-we-do/emergency-programs/ep-hurricanes2017/        

And if you want to support the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans?

https://lowernine.org/

I thank you in advance for being willing to support and give money to these trustworthy and reliable groups who have been in involved in disaster relief and disaster aid for years. I believe that ordinary citizens like us have to step up and help wherever and whenever disaster strikes; it is our responsibility as citizens of both this country and of the world. If not us, then who? If we do not do this, then who will?  We cannot leave it to government agencies; it is too vital a need. Others need us. Thank you!

REGISTER AND VOTE

 Speaking of citizenship, there are mid-term elections nationwide this November, and if you are not registered to vote in either PA, NJ, or DE registration deadlines are fast approaching. October 9 is the last day one can register to vote in PA, October 13 is the deadline for DE, and October 16 is the deadline for New Jersey. Mid-term elections generally do not have a large turnout, but hopefully it will be very different this November. Many people are concerned about actions and inaction by both our national and state governments, and participating in elections is one way to effect change. Many members of the US House of Representatives and the US Senate are up for re-election, and it is your chance to have a real say on the national stage. Important state government offices are also on the ballot this November, including governors, state legislators, attorneys general, treasurers, and other important offices. Your vote can go a long way in determining what happens in the nation and the states in the next few years. So please register and show up in November to vote. It is the very least one can do as a citizen. And if you have any questions about voting and/or the election in your state, go to the website of the League of Women Voters for your state. Thanks.

        

                                                          

The Dukes on YouTube
    We have posted a few videos on YouTube. Please log in, view our videos, and leave a comment or two. Tell your friends to view us and post comments as well. Thanks:

                         Dukes Live Playlist:
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RI54KvkZqzE&list=PLo-hWFEcnLljRskT6uHR-eOL09HEdQsRP

LIVES THAT INSPIRE

HISTORY AND LIVES THAT INSPIRE AND CHALLENGE

I love reading and I love history. That combination of things brings me regularly in contact with some very fascinating and moving biographies about some complex and extraordinary people. I love looking deeper into the lives of people who affected big changes in the world; that just fascinates and intrigues me. Some of them may be well known figures-political leaders, artists, writers, musicians and more. Some of them are people I just stumble across whiles searching something else (in looking up some things about WWII a few years ago, for example, I stumbled across the story of magician Jasper Maskelyne, who used his powers of deception and illusion to help Britain counter Nazi air power in the latter three years of the war.) People and their stories are of great interest to me, and I am glad there are so many excellent and compelling biographies to read. It is one of my favorite genres of writing.

We are often given brief snapshots of famous people in their political and social lives, but we rarely get beyond a few well-known events. I like to get beyond the known events and get more into the stories behind them. These can be things in a given person’s life that led to some of those known achievements and explain the motivations behind the actions they took. Or they can be things that raise more questions than they answer-contradictions that can give us a more nuanced look at somethings we thought we understood. I loved Robert Caro’s multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson precisely for those reasons. Johnson was one of the most complicated men ever to be President, and he was full of contradictions that Caro fully explored. Caro looked at the impact Johnson’s poor white upbringing in rural Texas during the Great Depression had on him with its contradictory ideas about wealth, race, color and what “success” meant. Caro also looked at how Johnson both resented and built a powerful political machine in the state that catapulted him to power and the US Senate. And he looked at how the architect of the “Great Society” and signer of the Voting Rights Act only won Senate election in the 1940’s because he campaigned in a more overtly racist manner than his opponent.

Likewise, Taylor Branch’s volumes on the life of Dr. Martin Luther King got into much more than the “I Have A Dream Speech” and his role in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. It looked not only into his school and college experiences, but also at family dynamics, class and color prejudice and struggles within the Black community, and the role relatively unknown people such as E.D. Nixon and Jo Ann Robinson played in getting the boycott started and then fooling King into getting involved and ultimately leading it. It is an absolutely wonderful 3 volume biography that illuminates the man and the times in a real and through way.

I am mentioning those books because I am currently reading a biography about a person I knew a little bit about, and I recently read an excerpt from a new biography I plan on reading about someone else I knew a little about. Dr. Benjamin Rush is the subject of the new biography I will read. I knew Rush first as the doctor who gave some medical advice and training to Lewis and Clark before their epic trek exploring the Louisiana Purchase territory, as one of the early staff at Pennsylvania Hospital, as an abolitionist, and as one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. What the excerpt also revealed was that Rush, often called “America’s Hippocrates,” was one of the first medical people in the country to recognize alcoholism as a contributor to many physical and mental illnesses and diseases he was seeing in many of his patients. He spent time analyzing the condition and trying come up with ways to teat it. He was also the first to try what we now call “talk and listening therapy” in dealing with people who had severe mental problems, as opposed to locking them up and charging people money to watch the “lunatics” in cages. Clearly, he was ahead of his time in some very important ways, and I look forward to reading the book and learning even more about him.

LIThe book I am reading now is The Road to Dawn a thoroughly researched and well-written look at Josiah Henson, the man who I knew as the inspiration for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and a runaway slave who made it to Canada. I had read some excerpts from his published autobiography years ago, which was one of the many slave narratives published in the mid 1800’s as the battle to end slavery raged across the country. This book goes into much more detail about his life both during and after slavery, including his complicated and contradictory relationships with two of his owners, the surprisingly intense and nasty conflicts between Methodists and Baptists over which group should play the leading role in the abolitionist movement in general and in Josiah’s 500 person settlement in Ontario for runaway slaves very specifically, questions about how involved should white people be in a movement to help Black people build active lives for themselves, and much, much more.

I am in awe at how Josiah, who spent 40 years in slavery, spent just as much time establishing a town, teaching runaways the basics of finance and building a business, traveling the world to get help for his town and business, and attempting to start an industrial arts school for blacks years before Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute. It is almost too amazing to be true, and I cannot put the book down. It already has me making a list of things, people, events and issues I want to look at in greater detail. There is also a documentary about Josiah, and I will look at that once I finish the book. What a great find for me! I am excited and moved and amazed-all the things a great book can do for a person-yet again.

So I will continue to explore the lives of people, some famous and some not and gain insight into them and into the world at the time in which these folks lived. New learnings, new insights, new discoveries; they keep coming, and I love it.

WEBSITES YOU MAY WANT TO VISIT:

Josiah Henson: https://josiahhenson.com/about/

Benjamin Rush: http://www2.philly.com/philly/opinion/commentary/philadelphias-other-benjamin-founding-father-benjamin-rushs-lasting-legacy-commentary-20180831.html

Jasper Maskelyne: https://www.magictricks.com/war-magician.html

Taylor Branch: http://taylorbranch.com/

Robert Caro: http://www.robertcaro.com/

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