My third quarter project in history asks students to do something like this extraordinary mural. Here you have two panels: one in Iraq, the other from a nearby park. How do you reconcile the two? How do these lives intersect? How do they connect? Can one exist without the other? Can we deny one and not the other?
I finished Meghan Daum’s book The Problem with Everything yesterday. One of her major points was that we stop trying to deal with complicated issues via social media. To stop, to think, to reflect, to talk, to deliberate instead of trying to capture things in 140 characters.
I think this response to the 1619 Project represents what should happen. There’s heat and pushback to any major project. So write about it. Then wait and read a thoughtful response.
Here’s another overview from The Atlantic.
We read These Truths and I’m glad we did. I’m wondering if next year I might start the year with the 1619 project. And I’m wondering how I might use this debate as an endpoint for my These Truths project.
I was thinking a lot about this article as I was walking.
But the truth is that the longer I have lived, and the shorter my future, the less pursuing I have done. Some of this may come from a peculiarly Irish positive pessimism — be happy, things will get worse — more of it from the history of disappointment all artists know and the rest from a remnant Catholic guilt that says you don’t deserve happiness anyway. The point is, in my case, happiness seemed a thing that could not be pursued, only realized and chosen.
This is the ending of the article:
“I mean, what do you do to be happy?”
The question was a novelty to him and he considered it from all sides before answering.
“When I want a holiday,” he said at last, “I go over the road as far as the meadow. I go in there, take off my jacket, and lay down on it. I watch the world turning for a bit, with me still in it.”
He smiled then, and held me in his blue Atlantic eyes, full of the ordinary wisdom of a well-lived life, a wisdom that saw the many failings of the world but our still breathing and dreaming in it, and with a conclusive nod that defeated all arguments said, “That’s happiness.”
“There is no Negro problem. The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough, to live up to their own constitution.”
Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018), 360.
Her source: William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York: Norton, 1991), 371.
“There is no impeachment problem. The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough, to live up to their own constitution.”
Photos coming — had camera with me in walk to Esposito’s
Thirty-four mile week. Not bad.
