Endless Knots

An Easter prayer for Tibet by Jeff Stamps

My husband, Jeff Stamps, a long-time student of world affairs, politics, and Buddhism, wrote this piece, which I hope you will read.

An Easter prayer for the Tibetan people
and their spiritual leader
By Jeff Stamps

This Easter, my prayer is for the Tibetan people everywhere and for their spiritual and temporal leader, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama.

This global spiritual force, with his inclusive religious mantra, is an intensely-trained monk from the distant nomadic steppes of Shangri-La, the “roof of the world.” He also runs a government-in-exile from a generously-provided sanctuary in India.

The Nobel Peace Prize apostle of non-violence, the Dalai Lama is the Gandhi of our time, albeit with more spiritual depth but fewer political skills. Since his exile, he has held the same “middle way” view: cultural autonomy for Tibet, but not political independence. Today, he struggles with both the oppression of his people by the Chinese and with the now-unconstrained frustration of Tibetan youth demanding independence. Among all of us who love Tibet for whatever reasons, we share a deep sense that time for the Dalai Lama’s “middle way” and Tibet’s very survival is running out.

By “Tibet” surviving, I mean Tibetans as an ethnic group with roots deep into pre-history, a people treated as racially inferior (“barbarians”), as a coherent religious group of Tibetan Buddhists, and as a national group of several millennia standing. For the Dalai Lama’s strategy of non-violence to work, the world must find ways to help Tibet and China find a path that provides Tibetans the cultural and local autonomy they require within the Chinese federal system of governance.

There are four reasons the world should care about the Tibetan uprising at this time: (1) the preservation of an ancient and abiding culture; (2) respect for a very old spiritual tradition; (3) the act of genocide; and (4) concern for the environment.

Monique: "It wasn't supposed to turn out this way"

My friend Monique Doyle Spencer has another doozie in today's Boston Globe, Working women, where did we go so wrong?

When my kids were little, my "sister" Judy came to visit. Sister is in quotes because by birth neither of us legally has a sister, which both of us regretted, so after about 20 years of friendship, we adopted each other. Judy was sitting at the kitchen table and I was cooking food to take to my mother in the nursing home (situated one good cry's worth away). I don't remember all the details anymore - but the weekly cooking was only one responsibility (my mother hated the food there so...). I was working full-time, the girls were perhaps 5 and 7 (no further explanation needed), Jeff and I had a looming book deadline, and on and on and on. "You never take anything away," she said. "You just keep adding things."

This is what Monique's piece is about. There are too many pieces for the puzzle yet we keep jamming more in. Thanks, Monique, as always:

IT'S ALMOST the end of National Women's Month and I have a big confession: I think we women ruined the workplace.

Ouch. I don't want to feel that way, but take a look. Once upon a time, when a woman took a professional job, she worked a 60-hour week on average. Her boss was a man and she thought she had to prove herself. She didn't make any more money than the guys who worked 45-hour weeks. She thought this was the glass ceiling, so she started working 65 hours instead. Still, she made no more money. She did, however, get promoted to head of her department. She was the lowest-paid department head in history, so she worked even harder.

Here's the honest truth: Her boss didn't even know what she made. He didn't care, either. She never felt secure enough to negotiate her own raise, so she waited for somebody to notice. They never did. So the extra $10,000 a year that would have made a world of difference to her family never came home. It stayed at the company where it meant absolutely nothing to anybody...

        Monique Doyle Spencer is author of "The Courage Muscle: A Chicken's Guide to Living with Breast Cancer."

Tibet, March, 2008

The terrible events in Tibet of the past few days have me thinking about our Tibetan friends and reflecting on the times we've spent at lectures with the Dalai Lama (HHDL, to his people). I think I've said before here (and certainly in my writing and to my friends) that when it comes to matters of spiritual practice, I tend, like my eating habits, toward omnivorism. If a body of belief espouses peace and justice and taking care of others, I'm in. And, if it is sound psychology, I'm not only in but climbing the stairs. Having spent two weeks in sessions with the Dalai Lama over the past 25 years, I feel confident saying that he is a profound psychologist. His attention to empathy and his call to work toward the happiness of "all sentient beings" resonates.

Like many others who've been concerned about the future of Tibet, my heart is breaking: two friends have received first-hand reports, which are excruciating to read, and the news this morning that the Dalai Lama, an unwavering believer in nonviolence, is willing to step down as the political leader of Tibet if that would contribute to the violence coming to an end, make me want to...you know, I don't know what it makes me want to do but it's a lot more than sit here and post to my blog.

Some years ago, my husband and I noticed a banner outside an art gallery in Meredith, New Hampshire: "Tibetan Children's Art Exhibit." There we found the most amazing collection of paintings by children who had fled Tibet without their parents (they send them out in hopes of a better life) and resettled in the north of India at Tibetan Children's Village. We looked at the many paintings on the walls and in the many drawers and listened to the story of how these paintings came about. To deal with the trauma they experience during their dangerous journeys across the Himalayas, these kids are offered art lessons once they arrive in India. Art as therapy. We decided almost without discussion to purchase two pieces, this one, "Life is a Dream," and the one at the end of this post.

We chose "Life is a Dream" because we liked it and because it was painted by a young boy, T. Lobsang, who is completely deaf. My hubby was born on this very date 64 years ago with a 60% hearing loss in both ears. Enough said. Beneath the painting, which hangs in our living room, is the small plaque that was on the gallery wall, explaining more about this talented young man.

 

We also chose a second painting, White Tara, the female Buddha associated with compassion and long life, because it was painted by the children's art teacher, Sonam Choephel. The original, which this photo can't possibly reflect due to my limited photographic skill, is exquisite and hangs in our dining room. It's especially meaningful because some years ago, Sonam Tsering, the father of our friend Phuni Meston, came to our house for dinner and said prayers in front of it. Sonam, a Tibetan nomad who fled his country after the Chinese occupation and lived for many years in India before joining his daughter and son-in-law here in Boston, passed on in 2005. I think of him every time I walk through the dining room.

White Tara by Sonam Choephel

Jon and the General

Remember Frontier 6, the blogger who said that soldiers should be allowed to blog and post to YouTube? Well, now he's made his first appearance on Comedy Central. Last night, Lt. Gen. Bill Caldwell, recently the face of the military to the press in Iraq and now head of the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, was the guest on The Daily Show. Caldwell was there to talk about the new field manual for the Army, which I mentioned here and in a piece for The Standard called "The social general." Jon Stewart was his inimitable self, kidding Caldwell about the dry prose and the very thought that a soldier would pick up the field manual in the heat of battle. Caldwell held his own, explaining that its purpose was for training, not the quick look-up while in combat, and that it contains a different view of the soldier's role than has been prescribed before. Caldwell's best moment in the interview came when he talked about the true multi-tasking that soldiers have to do now - building a road one moment, taking sniper fire the next.  His appearance on The Daily Show is part of the Army's campaign to market the new manual and its revolutionary contents, which say that diplomacy and nation-building must be held up as equal to "offensive and defensive operations." You can see it for yourself.

Thanks, BostonNow

The February 22, '08 print version of BostonNow pulled two quotes from blog posts here, running them across the banner on pages 3 and 6. The first is from my Internet access woes of two weeks ago; the other is about the weather. The paper/site obviously (BostonNow) has a Boston focus so, blogger-friends, if you want them to pick up your stuff, write about Boston.

The social general

My article," The social general," on the Army's new field manual and the general responsible for it in today's The Standard, as per my prior post, "Let Soldiers Blog, Post to YouTube."

You read it here first (sort of)

It's official. Endless Knots has its, er, my, eye on what's truly happening. Just a week ago, we, er, I, reported on Gen Bill Caldwell's essay calling for the Army to encourage the use of social media. Now my inside sources (note source) reveal the next step in the campaign: Michael Gordon's front page story in The New York Times where Caldwell is releasing "a new operations manual that elevates the mission of stabilizing war-torn nations, making it equal in importance to defeating adversaries on the battlefield."

Copenhagen by Michael Frayn

Tivoli Garden, Copenhagen, 3 June 2005, ducks talking to Danes

Copenhagen, the play by Michael Frayn, got a long Louise Kennedy review in today's Boston Globe. I've been waiting since we saw it this past Wednesday.

A.R.T. in Cambridge, Mass., which is staging the play until Feb 3, is a stunning space - you walk in on the stage floor, seating stadium style on sides, and "in front," the many tiers that face the set. In this case, being seated on the side seemed an advantage. The play requires thinking from many perspectives and having to watch from an oblique vantage is conceptually fitting.

"The set:" Three large oval light tracks arced at odd angles to one another circle the ceiling. "Electrons" whip around at various intervals, flick on at different times during the performance. Mirrors along the back wall are the stage design; the set comprises three chairs that the characters move around the stage. That's it.

Characters: Three - 1. Niels Bohr (Will LeBow), the Danish physicist who proposed "complementarity," the principle that says, in essence, you can't have black without white - in physics, his theory is connected with waves and particles - one can't exist without the other; 2. Margrethe Bohr (Karen MacDonald), wife of same, mother of six sons (one of whose deaths provides a refrain in the play), typist of manuscripts, and  the character who translates physics into English - and humanity - on the stage; and 3. Werner Heisenberg (John Kuntz), the German physicist whose name precedes "uncertainty principle," meaning that once you start studying something, your intervention so changes what you're studying that it's not the same thing as when you started.

Plot: In 1941, Heisenberg arrives in Copenhagen for a meeting with Bohr. "Why did you come to Copenhagen?" Margrethe repeats this line many times in the play. It's the central question that allows the characters to reflect on their lives (when the play opens they're all dead; everything is a flashback), explore physics, argue about collaborating with the Nazis, hint at the nuclear bomb projects underway in both Germany and the US, mourn, walk away, come back, and love one another - even as they all have different memories of how those discussions transpired.

The characters play their parts in relationship to one another and comment to the audience, the work of narration passing among them as they discuss ethics, science, families, politics, the Nazis, love, skiing, Norway, walking, babies, anti-semitism, Einstein, drowning, each with its complement, each uncertain.

Powerful, powerful. Complementarity has been a big topic in our house since hubby Jeff used it as one of two core principles (the other was level structure) underlying "human systems theory" in his dissertation. Thus, the play picked up a lot of threads we've talked about.

I kept wishing I had the script in my lap as the ideas are heady, worth thinking about at a slower pace. An editor friend whom we went with said she wished she could have had at the script - would have removed a third of the lines she said. I can understand this. The sheer complexity of the material might be easier to comprehend if the acts were shorter. In one sense, it's a really long lecture about the most abstract of ideas.

Last point, bloggers: Those involved are keeping a blog about the production. "Heisenberg" (who signs his posts "johnny kuntz") is posting about his part, what it's like to rehearse, and such, very interesting. And today, Nick Peterson (thanks for inviting us, Nick) posts an email they received from Heisenberg's son Jochen Heisenberg, professor of physics at the University of New Hampshire (Jeff's alma mater), who apparently attended the same performance we did:

Thank you indeed for the wonderful experience of seeing this different Copenhagen€ performance. As you know, we have been guests at a number of performances since the NY opening in 2000, and I have had the burdensome opportunity to become a participant in those symposia that dealt with the controversy arising out of this play.

What was so refreshing this time was the fact that the play was allowed to be a drama on many levels and that the one-dimensional, contentious aspects did not dominate the many-layered personal story.

Roland on "the overlooked issues of 2007"

The Boston Globe asked a handful of its columnists to write a few words about the ignored stories of the past year. Here's Roland Merullo's, whose work we've featured a time or two here.

To my mind, poverty in the richest country on earth was the most underreported story of 2007, as it has been for many years now.

It should have been on the front page of every newspaper once a week. Every day, we should hear radio and TV news announcers reminding us that some 35 million people live below the poverty line; that 10 million Americans - 3 million of them children - experience hunger.

We should flip through the cable channels and find preachers exhorting the people in their stadium-sized churches, "Help them! Share with them!" Political figures should be making pickup-truck tours of the dirt roads of New England, where families live behind plastic-covered windows in temperatures that drop to minus-20 degrees.

But we've come to accept it somehow, as if there is nothing we can do or say, as if it's too much of a disgrace even to read about.

Roland Merullo's latest novel is "Breakfast with Buddha."

Updates: A nice review of Breakfast with Buddha in the Dec 21, 2007, Seattle Times, and for the third week running, that same funny tome is "New & Recommended" in the Sunday Boston Globe Book Review section.

The Capitol at night

Thanks to the Brookings Institution, I was part of a private tour of the US Capitol today, led by former US Congressman Jim Moody, who represented Wisconsin's 5th district for a decade. I don't know how the average person could arrange to have Rep. Moody provide a tour but, if you can figure it out (naturally, you're not average because none of my readers are), try to make it happen. I took the obligatory seventh grade tour of Washington as part of my junior high marching band (little known fact: I played the French horn) but I never before today had visited The Capitol.

Rep. Moody loves the building and the institution and I love enthusiastic people so, all in all, a wonderful tour. He advised us to keep our eyes on the ceilings, the mouldings, and the floors as the architecture and the decor change throughout the mammoth structure, built in stages beginning in 1793.

He pointed out statues--including those of Jeannette Rankin (the first woman to serve in Congress--she was from Montana, a Republican and a pacifist), Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, among many, many others. He took us into the chamber of the House of Representatives where we sat in the gallery watching about two dozen lonely congresspeople discussing something indistinct while checking their Blackberries. I only heard one representative speak: "My four-year-old goes online..." she said before mentioning something about predators. I guess they were debating some kind of legislation protecting kids...but what did she say? FOUR YEAR OLDS ONLINE????????

From there we walked and walked, admiring murals, listening to extraordinary acoustics, catching glimpses through the window of the Washington Monument as the sun was setting, into the Rotunda, into the Republican Leader's Suite, where a wood fire was burning in one of the Capitol's six working fireplaces, past Rep. Dennis Hastert who was walking, head down, with some aides, past Senator Dorgan from North Dakota, then down some stairs, and suddenly we were in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Room, standing behind chairs set at brass nameplates: Mr. Obama, Mrs. Boxer, Mr. Biden...the place where this Senate committee sits and discusses matters of life and death. It all felt so very close, so very immediate and I wished they were there in their seats so I could ask a few questions.

It was dark when we left the building, The Capitol lit, glowing against the black sky. For a moment, despite all the terrors and uncertainties and mess that is politics, it felt as if there was something solid and lasting.

"Carolyn got in the way"

What must be written isn't accompanied by the time it deserves. I need a couple of hours to capture Carolyn Goodman's memorial service, which took place Sun, Oct 7, 2007, while it's still fresh. But life is breaking the speed limit at the moment and, having gone to three memorial services in the past ten days, I'm a bit spent. That said, given the others who attended this one--historians, journalists (see Jerry Mitchell's article here, and her extraordinary friends--I know there will be a good public record of a unique memorial for this one-of-a-kind icon of courage, forgiveness, and sophistication, who will forever be known as the mother of Andrew Goodman, one of the three civil rights workers murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi in 1964.

Thus, quick notes:

I had left an hour for the subway from Brooklyn to the Upper West Side but the proper train from my stop was not running. At 3:15, I was still waiting for the train I had to take two stations in the wrong direction to get on the right one. The service was to start at 4, but I'd only made it to Lower Manhattan by then. So it was that I was nearly 20 minutes late but just in time for Carolyn's son David's introduction to the first speaker: NY City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. I'd already missed her grandson Ivan's sounding of the ram's horn, her son Jonathan's reciting of Kaddish, Clarissa Sinceno-Taylor's Amazing Grace solo, and the first video of Carolyn's biography.

There were four or five hundred people in the mahogany auditorium of Ethical Culture Society when I arrived; I took a seat just a few rows from the front, on the left hand side.

By the time the Mayor was finished, I'd managed to get out paper and pen. "Carolyn got in the way," Congressman John Lewis said just after coming to the podium with a standing ovation. "She made necessary trouble." He said the three slain civil rights workers (Carolyn's son Andy, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney) "should be called the Founding Fathers of the New America;" and that, despite all, Carolyn "never demonstrated one bit of bitterness," a theme that others echoed. Others being WNBC correspondent Gabe Pressman (after first citing the bad wars, civil rights, he said, was a "good war"); Ben Chaney, the younger brother of James; Sarah Siegel and Allison Marie Nichols, college students whose lives were turned around by meeting Carolyn; NY Times columnist Bob Herbert ("she seemed almost magical"); NY1 reporter Budd Mishkin, who wore the shirt Carolyn always asked him to wear; and his brother, the attorney Doug Mishkin, whom she'd asked to sing "Carry on, my sweet survivor" at her memorial service, which he did; and, here I need to break paragraphs to highlight the powerful speaker...

Dick Molpus, former Secretary of State in Mississippi, who met Carolyn 25 years after the three young men's murders, and the first public official to apologize to their mothers, who also asked two key newsmen to stand: Neshoba (Miss) Democrat editor and publisher, Stanley Dearman, and reporter Jerry Mitchell of The (Jackson, Miss) Clarion-Ledger, "who relentlessly stayed on top of the case," ultimately leading to the conviction of Edgar Ray Killen, who finally went to jail 41 years after masterminding the murders.

And so it went through another dozen speakers: two colleagues from the board of Symphony Space; two from public radio station WBAI (one of whom joked that Carolyn decided that "Heaven clearly needs work" and that "it will be a better place when she's done"; Regina Solano of PACE, a mental health program for mothers of young children that Carolyn founded and ran for many years; Eli Lee, who worked for her at the Andrew Goodman Foundation; Rabbi Bruce Cohen of Interns for Peace, whose board she chaired; her niece, Dr. Cathey Eisner Falvo, and...

The final speaker,  Harry Belafonte, who said, "Carolyn Goodman's name will live forever."

The three-hour event ended with a singalong led by VOCE and Friends, gospel singers from Riverside Church, including the signature melody of the civil rights movement, "We Shall Overcome."

As Mr. Belafonte said, "We are fortunate that she lived so long. Hers was the work of noble warriors." Indeed, Carolyn. I was lucky to have met you when I was young and, like those who spoke, have been inspired by your example.

PS:  Thank you, David, for organizing and graciously conducting this remarkable tribute to your mother and for including me in the dinner that followed.

Facebookers learn F2F 101

I suppose this was inevitable. The Sept 17, 2007, New Yorker has  a piece with the canny title, "Icebreaker Dept: Social Studies," by Michael Schulman, about a New York University dean having to explain face-to-face (F2F) to incoming students who only know how to have friends on Facebook.

The peril in getting to know classmates on the computer is that incoming undergraduates may forget how to do so in real life. That was the thinking behind “Facebook in the Flesh,” a seminar held during N.Y.U.’s freshman orientation. “Meeting new people face-to-face can be . . . intimidating,” a brochure read. “This fun, interactive workshop will get everyone talking as we build social networks in person.” The session took place at the Kimmel Center—it was scheduled at the same time as “Dude, Where’s My Class?”—and drew about thirty-five students, who spent the initial minutes sitting side by side in uncomfortable silence. Eventually, two girls struck up a conversation and realized, to their delight, that they were both from Long Island. (“Suffolk County?” “Me, too!”)

“Here’s what in-person networking is,” David Schachter, an assistant dean, began. “It’s face-to-face. It’s brief. It works best when there’s virtually nothing at stake except a few minutes of someone else’s time. And it’s social. It happens in the same space.”

Schachter went on to describe the benefits of live interaction...

Carolyn Goodman: "one of the most decent people..."

Bob Herbert's NY Times column of Sept 25, 2007, mentions Carolyn Goodman (I need to make a category for her - meanwhile, posts here or here or here or here):

Dr. Carolyn Goodman, a woman I was privileged to call a friend, died last month at the age of 91. She was the mother of Andrew Goodman, one of the three young civil rights activists shot to death by rabid racists near Philadelphia, Miss., in 1964.

Dr. Goodman, one of the most decent people I have ever known, carried the ache of that loss with her every day of her life.

Carolyn's memorial service is Sunday, October 7, 2007, at 4:00 PM at New York Society for Ethical Culture, 64th Street and Central Park West, New York, NY.

If you're attending, please send an email to melbrady at optonline dot net

 

Predicting ethnic violence

Can we predict where ethnic and/or cultural violence will next break out? Our friend, Yaneer Bar-Yam, a complexity scientist and founder of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), is co-author of Global Pattern Formation and Ethic/Cultural Violence in the Sept 14, 2007, issue of Science, the pub of AAAS. The abstract of the article by Yaneer, May Lim, and Richard Metzler reads:

Violence arises at boundaries between regions that are not sufficiently well defined. We model cultural differentiation as a separation of groups whose members prefer similar neighbors, with a characteristic group size at which violence occurs. Application of this model to the area of the former Yygoslavia and to India accurately predicts the locations of reported conflict. This model also points to imposed mixing or boundary clarification as mechanisms for promoting peace.

And you can listen to Yaneer's Science podcast about the article here. Congrats to Yaneer!

NECSI is hosting the week-long International Conference on Complex Systems (Oct 28-Nov 2). We're among the keynoters for the special day on networks.

 

Memorial service for Carolyn Goodman, October 7, 2007

Carolyn Goodman's memorial service takes place Sunday, October 7, 2007, at 4:00 PM at New York Society for Ethical Culture, 64th Street and Central Park West, New York, NY. Please send an email to melbrady at optonline dot net if you're attending.

I've done a number of posts here about Carolyn's remarkable life and career. Click on Obits in the Categories list to the right or click here or here or here, for the original post on her son, Andrew, and the remarkable and, in retrospect, extraordinarily sad postcard he sent from Mississippi on the day he was murdered in 1964. As mentioned, Carolyn's youngest son, David, was a classmate of mine at Antioch.

Wikipedia entry on Carolyn Goodman here.

IT spending as percentage of revenue?

Does it make sense to key IT spending directly to revenue? An email from a colleague spotlights perhaps unanticipated consequences of this policy: No more telecommuting. Despite the fact that a large majority of the company's employees (2:1) work most directly with people in distant locations. Now this global IT company is requiring everyone to come into work. Got it? You drive into an office to work with people oceans away. Costs more to support IT from people's homes than from central locations? I don't get this.

Dinner with Sophia Bracy Harris

We had the pleasure last night of having dinner here at our house with our dear friend, Sophia Bracy Harris, co-founder and executive director of FOCAL (Federation of Child Care Centers of Alabama). For the past couple of decades, Sophia, a MacArthur Genius award recipient, has provided women with the skills to rise out of poverty. By-products: children with access to quality day-care while their parents can work. Over the years, Sophia's organization has developed programs that build community, dissolve racism, and develop leadership in both adults and teens.

As a young high school student in the segregated US South, Sophia was  one of the first children to integrate Alabama schools. Her family's home was firebombed.

We met Sophia in 1991 when she joined the Calvert Social Investment Fund Advisory Council, where we'd been members for a decade. I was immediately impressed with Sophia as a systems thinker and a calm presence in contentious conversations, which we had a few of over the years at the Advisory Council (which, to its members' disappointment, was disbanded in 2006).

When Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in 2005, the first person I thought of was Sophia. Many of her FOCAL clients live in areas still devastated by the hurricane. With Reed Montague, a talented staff person at Calvert, I helped mount a fund drive for FOCAL's Katrina Fund. A fair amount (never enough) money poured in quickly, providing insurance deductibles and the like for those with lives irreparably altered by Katrina.

FOCAL celebrates its 35th anniversary this year. Family, friends, and colleagues: please click here.

And, enjoy this. Tania Burger, who serves as Organization Developer for FOCAL, brought dinner to our house (the best of guests), so delicious that Pasta Lover asked Tania to share the recipe:

Carolyn Goodman remembrance on NPR today

There will be a clip remembering Carolyn today on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Listen if you see this in time. Otherwise, click to hear.Very nice, personal reminiscence from Margot Adler, who knew Carolyn for many years, and captures her spirit and the experience of walking into her apartment.

One more piece worth reading, an interview with Carolyn in Jewish Currents from 2005, shortly after the trial that convicted one of those responsible for the murder of her son and two others.

More on Carolyn Goodman

The obits for "Dr G," as Carolyn Goodman's son, David, called her, are coming in from around the world. Click through this gallery of photos from the Jackson (Miss) Clarion Ledger. The photos begin with this one taken June 17, 2005, showing Dr G leaving the Neshoba County Court House in Philadelphia, Miss., with David. She was there to testify in the murder trial of Ku Klux Klansman Edgar Ray Killen, accused in the 1964 killings of her son, Andy, and two other civil rights workers (Michael Schwerner and James Chaney). Then read this obit by Jerry Mitchell, who kept this story alive for a very long time. Read more here about Mitchell's tireless investigative reporting that "has unearthed documents, cajoled suspects and witnesses, and quietly pursued evidence in the nation's notorious killings from the civil rights era."

At the trial, Dr. G read the postcard that Andy mailed from Mississippi on the day he was killed.

Killen was convicted of "orchestrating the killings," Mitchell writes, on the 41st anniversary of the young men's murders June 21, 1964, and is serving sixty years in prison for manslaughter.

Mitchell's personal understanding of Dr G comes through in his piece, reflected in the quote he chose from her son:

Goodman’s son, David, said today: “Besides being my mother, my mentor and spiritual guide, she taught me the precious value of human dignity and the importance of speaking up and acting whenever your own, your family’s or other people’s dignities and civil rights are denied.”

Other obits: Washington Post, The Guardian...just google.

Graveside service tomorrow (Sunday) in New York; memorial service to follow in the fall.

Dr. Carolyn Goodman - Oct 6, 1915-Aug 17, 2007

A few hours ago, I received this email from my friend of forty years, David Goodman:

My mother left this stage at 1:18 AM this morning and is now with my father and brother Andrew and others on the next level. I am sure she is having a fine time.

Complete obit in New York Times, Aug 18, 2007

Readers of this blog may remember my post of June 21, where I included, with his permission, the extraordinary postcard that David gave me in May when I had dinner with Carolyn Drucker Goodman (his mother) at her apartment on New York's Upper West Side. At nearly 92, she remained extraordinarily dignified, surrounded by the memorabilia of an historic life and the good taste of a sophisticated intellectual who'd lived in the city and known fascinating people.

Carolyn Goodman, as in the mother of Andrew Goodman, as in Goodman-Schwerner-and-Chaney, the three young civil rights workers murdered in Mississippi in 1964, here with the other two mothers at Andy's funeral.

David's light touch in reporting his mother's death is emblematic of her spirit. She carried herself with rare dignity and grace along avenues where others would have been crawling on the pavement begging. I don't know how anyone survives their child's death, no less brutal murder by the Ku Klux Klan, but she did, while maintaining a complex and influential career as a psychologist (assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Albert Einstein Medical School among other honors-see the jump page for her entire resume and list of publications) and maintaining a lifelong dedication to the Andrew Goodman Foundation that she and her husband started in 1966.

From the moment I met Carolyn in 1969, I wanted to be like her. It was just months after her husband had died suddenly of a stroke, barely five years after her son's murder. ("Andy's death killed him," David once told me.) She was 54 and, at 22, I was overcome with admiration at the composure of this absolutely gorgeous woman, who'd lost her child and husband in such rapid sequence. I was struck also with her beautiful skin (milk baths were the secret, David said).

Many times since, when I've felt overwhelmed by the cards on my table, I've thought of Carolyn, her just continuing, never wallowing, just continuing, positively, without complaint or fury, just continuing.

In 2002, I was honored to present her with the Champions of Freedom Award from Freedom House, here in Boston. She was nearly 88 at the time, still very beautiful, warm, and articulate about the choices she'd made in her life.

So tonight I've lit a very special candle, given to me by Sylvia, my Antioch college roommate, about the time we both met David. Today is Sylvia's 60th birthday and she too was with me for our last dinner with Carolyn on May 18, 2007.

Bono's Africa, Part II

Wait, there's more. A bit stunned that I'm flogging Vanity Fair's July '07 issue again, I read on and have to relay this: There are also worthy reads on Jeffrey Sach's approach to economic development in Uganda, the effective use of anti-retrovirals, and a music festival in the Sahara, snapshots of 20-some inspiring leaders a la Mandela and the Ivory Coast Soccer Team, and ... because it is, in the end, Vanity Fair, Tina Brown on Princess Diana's "love that got away."

Bono edits Africa, July '07 Vanity Fair

I was going to wait to blog this great primer on Africa until I finished the whole issue but that would be selfish.

Oprah's on the cover whispering to George Clooney: “The children of mothers who have a primary education are 40 percent more likely to reach the age of five.”

Annie Leibovitz’s photo essay of celebs having “a conversation about Africa” is superb: Don Cheadle to Barack Obama to Muhammad Ali to Queen Rania of Jordan to Bono to Condoleeza Rice to George Bush to Desmond Tutu to Brad Pitt to … Madonna…Warren Buffet to the Gates to Oprah…and finally back to Don Cheadle. I’d like to see these photos in person; slide show is here.

There’s a short essay on science (we’re all out of Africa), “Generation Kenya,” on the confusions of a young nation, by Bingyavanga Wainana, writer-in-residence at Union College in upstate New York, Sebastian Junger (A Perfect Storm, etc) on oil, China, and Darfur, and “The Continental Shelf,” a superb roundup on Africa’s premier writers by Elissa Schappell and Rob Spillman. Among the superstars is Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who just won the Orange Prize for Half of a Yellow Sun.

Zoetropers remember her: she workshopped there too.

Hello from Hanoi

Many people dislike Instant Messenger, find it intrusive, wish it had never been invented. Not me.

1. I have the luxury of working in a small organization so even if everyone interrupts me at once, it's quite manageable;

2. I don't have many other people on my buddy list (perhaps I'm unpopular, after all); and

3. It allows me to be in touch with my kids.

Such was the situation night before last when my traveling daughter's name came up with a big hello!

--How's Cambodia? I said, their last known whereabouts.

--We're in Hanoi and why don't we do a video ichat?

Which we did for the next two hours, with near-perfect reception, talking from our chicken coop to a hotel in Hanoi with faultless high-speed internet service, absolutely free, cheaper than Skype even.

Hanoi.

I couldn't get over it.

--Imagine, I said, 30 years from now, your child contacting you from Baghdad, then appearing as a hologram in front of you.

Remembering Andrew Goodman

"Dear Mom and Dad," the postcard reads. "I have arrived safely in Meridian Mississippi. This is a wonderful town and the weather is fine. I wish you were here. The people in this city are wonderful and our reception was very good. All my love, Andy." Dated June 21, 1964, Meridian, Miss, 4-cent postage. That night, Andy, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney, all civil rights workers, were murdered in Philadelphia, Miss.

Click on postcard to enlarge it.

David Goodman, Andy's younger brother and my classmate at Antioch College, recently gave me a copy of Andy's postcard, written the day he died. I keep it on my desk to honor him and to remind me of their mother, Dr. Carolyn Goodman, a buoyant spirit and hard working psychologist, at 92, still beautiful and kind.