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Brown Paper Bag Experiences

We have all been subject to “Brown Paper Bag Experiences” when others evaluate us not by our inner selves — but by our outward appearances — and many times they wrongly judge us by jumping to incorrect conclusions. In my article, Coercing Faith, Gordon Davidescu posted this Brown Bag comment:

I think the best analogy (or at least the one I just came up with now) is this: Say you see a person walking down the street with a brown paper bag in his hand. Given New York’s liquor laws you know that he has some sort of alcoholic beverage inside. However, you don’t know if that alcoholic beverage is a beer or wine, or even a wine cooler – unless it is taken out of the bag. Converting is sort of like removing the bottle from the bag. Being Jewish means you have a Jewish Soul – but not everyone with a Jewish Soul hidden in their paper bag realizes that they are Jewish until they take it out of the bag – converting, that is.

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Dithering the Color Line with Violence

As we celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. day in the United States, MLKingwe are faced with the questions of antiquity that have bothered and constrained humankind: Do we still judge people by color?

Do we still prefer violence over getting along with each other and the world?

It is possible in any way to reclaim our tainted and lost humanity?

I wish those in the churches and the mosques and the community living rooms and the religious leaders would stand up to the politicians and say, “Don’t go to war in God’s name.

Don’t ask for our prayers to cover your bloodshed.

Don’t seek our religious protection for your unholy political wars.

Don’t ask for our faith votes in the polling place. Leave religion out of your killing fields.”

That kind of religious rebellion against the politicians would remove the brush cover from political fanatics who pretend they are doing God’s work in the fields of war by killing those who are of darker skin and lesser opportunity than those wielding the staff and the cross.

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Seeing Angels in Saint Patricks Cathedral

Is it possible to see Angels on earth? I believe it is — no matter what your faith or systems of beliefs hold — and I’ll tell you why. After John Cardinal O’Connor died of brain cancer in New York City in 2000, Janna and I found ourselves outside Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. We saw a snaking line of mourners outside the beautiful and towering French Gothic church at Madison and 50th-51st.

Saint Patricks Cathedral

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Blind Discrimination: Paper Money Feels the Same

Yesterday, in a watershed moment in the history of the disabled, U.S. District Judge James Robertston finally instructed the United States Treasury to find a way for the Blind to discriminate between paper money denominations.

Twenty

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Shackling the Young to Free the Old

Garrison Keillor wrote a moving article called America Eats Its Young and his words are especially sharp today on Labor Day in the United States where we celebrate the working person before the real work of the Fall takes us over:

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Deaf Holocaust: Finding the Executioner’s Hand

Few people know over 13,000 Deaf people — andDeaf Holocaust not just the Jewish Deaf — were killed by the Nazis in the late 1930’s.

Not only were the Deaf the first to find the executioner’s hand under Fascism, they were also viewed as inferior “useless eaters” by the ruling party.

Since the Deaf were unable to communicate in the Germanic mother tongue they were not heard or understood by the majority and fell prey to early graves.

The BBC has a wonderful companion website to help us always remember the Deaf who died. Here are three incredible blocks of quotes from the amazing show:

EducationErna Young who was sterilised as a young girl — estimated that some 17,000 deaf people were sterilised between 1933 and 1945 – the youngest was only 9 years old. Given that there was no national register of deaf or disabled people in Germany, many were given over to the authorities by teachers of the deaf – the very people trusted with their care and support. Some Nazi educationalists even began to question the right of deaf children to be educated at all, believing the education of the ‘inferior’ to be wasteful.

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Gordon Dahlquist as the Two Million Dollar Man

In the early 1990’s Gordon Dahlquist was one of my Columbia University coursemates in the MFA Playwriting program.

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