My grandmother’s friend Mrs. Moyse disapproved of daylight savings time. We should stick to God’s own good time, she told me in all sincerity. Blasphemous or not, this Sunday morning my household reset all our clocks that didn’t magically reset themselves.

What is time, anyway? Time flows, time flies, time’s a-wasting. We spend it, save it, use it, run out of it. We’re pressed for time or have time on our hands. Is it divine will, human invention, practical resource, or a fundamental of physics?

Einstein wrote in a letter, “For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubborn illusion.” I'm happy to treat time as a fourth dimension, letting me denote a when as well as a where. When I try to follow Einstein deeper into relativity and the warping of spacetime, alas, I can’t wrap my head around it. Believe me, I’ve tried. The distinction between past and future seems as real to me as between the distinction between above and below, right and left, or behind and in front of.

If time is meaningful only in our minds, isn’t the same true of much else we consider real? Beauty, truth, justice, hope, even meaning itself? Take sentient life out of the picture and what remains but the interactions of matter and energy, space and—maybe—time? I’ll keep trying (and likely failing) to grasp the physics of it. Meanwhile, I’ll continue to reset the clocks twice a year. I doubt God objects.

Image: Christophe Carreau, Spacetime Curvature, European Space Agency, 2015.

I dropped the kids at school and drove away toward the office. Halfway down a residential street, the car stalled, blocking traffic. My first impulse—to panic—wasn’t going to help. Mobile phones hadn’t yet spread beyond traveling salesmen and organized crime. I took a deep breath, rang the nearest doorbell, and asked to use the telephone.

My work those days involved sending dentists and doctors to volunteer in refugee camps in Southeast Asia. Waiting in the car for the tow truck, I imagined talking with one of the boat people from South Vietnam. They’d fled their country by sea. They’d survived storms and pirates. In my mind, I tried to explain why it was so terrible that my car wouldn’t start.

Such mind games aren’t denial. They’re more like reframing, with a twist. I could have just told myself it’s going to be all right, the garage will help me, by next week it won’t matter. Instead, my imagined comparison of a stranded driver to a desperate refugee was so ludicrous as to be comic. Once you’ve done all you can and the next step is to wait, laughter is a great antidote to stress.

Image: Photo by J. Balla Photography on Unsplash. 

It’s jigsaw puzzle season again. My latest depicts the biblical Tower of Babel, left unfinished when people stopped understanding each other because their one language splintered into many (Genesis 11:1-9).

By coincidence, I’ve also been following a course on the history of Eastern Europe, one of the most linguistically diverse regions I know. Its many tongues fall into whole different language families: Baltic, Slavic, Germanic, Romance, Indo-Aryan, Finno-Ugric, Turkic, and more. Borders are continually changing or being challenged, sometimes in the name of national sovereignty (think Yugoslavia), sometimes for the benefit of neighboring empires (think Ukraine).

I can’t help wondering if the United States is suffering a Tower of Babel period today. We claim one English language, but the meanings of words are splintering. Liberal: To some, it’s openness to new ideas; to others, it’s repudiation of traditional norms. Security: To some, it means protection by armed defenders; to others, it means keeping one’s life and data private. Freedom: To some, you’re allowed to do as you please; to others, you don’t suffer discrimination or threats. Patriotism: To some, you love your country enough to try to improve it; to others, you love your country too much to accept any criticism.

Small wonder we can’t understand each other enough to build something together.

           America! America!
          God mend thine every flaw
          Confirm thy soul in self-control
          Thy liberty in law!
               - Katherine Lee Bates, “America the Beautiful,” verse 2

In my grade school years in West Virginia, we didn’t ask whether “Presidents Day” needed an apostrophe. We celebrated Lincoln’s birthday on Feb. 12 and Washington’s on Feb. 22. We practiced patriotism in other ways all year. Each school day began with the Lord's Prayer, the Pledge of Allegiance, and a patriotic song. We learned only the first verse of each song, so we got no clue that America might have flaws. God was integral to patriotism in Cold War rivalry with the godless Russians. “Under God” got added to the Pledge of Allegiance to emphasize the point.

Back to that apostrophe: It depends on the state and the style guide. Federally, no such holiday name exists to raise that question. Washington’s birthday became a federal holiday in 1885 and was moved to the third Monday of February starting in 1971. Its formal name remains Washington’s Birthday, even though it never lands on Feb. 22. Third Mondays must fall in the range from the 15th to the 21st of every month, every year.

“Presidents Day” became popular usage and an official state holiday in many states. Some insert an apostrophe before or after the “s.” Using no apostrophe is also common.* Depending who you ask, the day honors both Washington and Lincoln, or all U.S. presidents, or the office of the presidency. Wisconsin, where I live now, doesn’t recognize a February holiday at all.

* This treats Presidents as not possessive but descriptive, comparable to Labor Day or Veterans Day.

​Image: The 48-star flag of my childhood. Photo by Bret Lama on Unsplash.

Career professionals are leaving the Justice Department in droves. They’re finding it impossible both to follow orders and to do the jobs they were hired to do.

Probably without meaning to, the Founders wrote this tension into the Constitution. They vested executive power in one person, the president. Perhaps they didn’t realize how much room for interpretation would lie in carrying out the laws, or how many departments and agencies it would require. Maybe they didn’t foresee how politicized the office was bound to become.

The only limits to presidential discretion were those specified in the Constitution and those Congress wrote into laws. Two years after a disgruntled job seeker assassinated President Garfield in 1881, Congress passed the Civil Service Act to replace political patronage with employment based on merit. The Supreme Court in 1935 affirmed that Congress could limit the president’s authority to fire independent agency heads (a ruling now under dispute).

The Watergate scandal underscored the dilemma of federal attorneys trying to serve two masters. Unwritten norms say the president sets policy and priorities but does not try to influence individual cases. When norms fail, judicial independence goes by the wayside. Legal ethics leave some attorneys little choice but to disobey or resign.

Image: Poster for Growl Theatre, Brisbane, performance of “The Servant of Two Masters” by Carlo Goldoni, 1746. 

Blame Sen. Robert Taft and Rep. Fred Hartley. Or thank them, if you prefer. Either way, their work helps explain why organizers in Minneapolis last week could call theirs the first general strike in the United States in eighty years. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 restricted union activity and made classic general strikes illegal.

Strikes began as a tool of the labor movement in the 1800s. Sometimes strikers in one industry were joined by others, either in sympathy or in pursuit of shared political goals. Philadelphia claims credit for the nation’s first general strike, held in 1835 to demand a ten-hour working day. It began in textile mills and spread to unions throughout the city. By the end of 1835 the ten-hour working day was largely standard across the U.S.

A wave of strikes broke out nationwide after World War I. In Seattle in 1919, over 60,000 members of various unions took part in a five-day work stoppage to support the city’s shipyard workers. The general strike collapsed in the face of corporate interests and fears of Communism. In an even bigger strike wave in 1946, the largest began in Oakland CA department stores. Women who had worked factory jobs during World War II were now reduced to retail clerks with low pay and few protections. More than 100,000 workers from multiple industries came out in support, shutting Oakland down for two days. Backlash brought the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947.

Eighty years after the Oakland general strike, how is Minneapolis different? It targets federal action, not employers. Its organization is grassroots. The Museum of Protest says labor unions are “navigating legal constraints through strategic ambiguity.” In sub-zero temperatures, what law forbids closing schools for safety or suggesting workers call in sick?

​Image: Seattle Union Record, February 3, 1919.

Leif the Lucky (Ingri & Edgar P. d’Aulaire, 1941) was a treasure of my grade school years. My mother encouraged books set long ago or far away, and this was both. Besides, I liked the cover. Leif’s father, the Viking Erik the Red, sailed west from Norway and Iceland to an icy coast he called “Greenland” to attracted settlers. Leif later sailed on to North America, five hundred years before Columbus.

A modern true adventure story rekindled my fascination with Greenland. Rescue Below Zero (Ian Mackersey, 1954) recounts how an airplane, sent to drop supplies to a British research mission in the middle of the icecap, crashed into packed snow over 8,000 feet of ice. The crew survived but the plane would never fly again.

They were in radio contact with Thule Air Base, 480 miles away. Rescue by airlift should be straightforward, I thought. Not so. Helicopters could not fly that far and back. Planes that dropped supplies by parachute were not designed to land on snow and ice, much less take off again. To get enough lift at high altitude, they needed to be as light as possible. That meant carrying just enough fuel to make the round trip, leaving no room for error.

​No spoilers here. To me, Greenland remains a land of mystery and suspense. 

A college friend long ago told me she’d been trying to think of somebody normal. “Oh, Anne in fourth grade!” my friend said. “Anne was entirely normal.”

I think of that when I hear complaints, “Crazy weather! It never used to be like this.” Hot, cold, wet, dry, snowy, snowless: to hear folks talk, it’s never within the norm. Don’t get me wrong; I believe in climate change, but that's about long-term trends, not day-to-day variation. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter is set during the very real “hard winter” of 1880-81. I built gigantic snow castles one winter as a child and got stuck in an April blizzard in 1975. Which years didn’t set a record of some sort, one day or another? There’s little so normal as abnormal weather.

When my doctor says, “entirely normal,” she means “common and no cause for concern.” A statistician’s “normal” involves the distribution of probabilities along a bell-shaped curve. Often, though, labeling normal or abnormal reflects the binary thinking that evolved to help us survive. It enables snap judgments like “safe or unsafe?” when there’s no time for nuance. Most of life is more nuanced than binary. That includes weather, people, and more. Variation is entirely normal.

Image: Photo by Artem Beliaikin on Unsplash.

Revolution. Invasion. Coup d’état. Countless governments have been changed by force over the centuries. It’s called regime change when an external power ousts one government and replaces it with another. The wishes of the target population don’t matter; what counts is the interest of the intervening power. It doesn’t always turn out well.

Honduras, 1911: control of resources. Americans developed a taste for bananas. Honduras had the climate and soil to grow them. The U.S.-based United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) acquired land and built infrastructure to make the economy completely dependent on bananas for export. In 1911, U.S. Marines helped install a Honduran president willing to take orders from United Fruit. The American author O. Henry coined the term “banana republic” with Honduras in mind.

Iran, 1953: superpower rivalry. The Cold War pitted Western capitalism against Soviet-style state control. After the elected parliament of Iran voted to nationalize the country’s oil industry, Britain and the U.S. collaborated to orchestrate a coup. The pro-Western monarch Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi promoted economic growth, squelched dissent, and controlled elections for the next quarter century. Islamist militants overthrew him in 1979.

Iraq, 2003: national security. After a U.S.-led coalition thwarted an Iraqi conquest of neighboring Kuwait in 1991, some regretted letting Iraqi President Saddam Hussein stay in charge. Fears grew that he was abetting terrorists and stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. Al-Qaeda’s attack on the World Trade Center in New York on Sept. 11, 2001, added a sense of urgency. With Congressional authorization, the U.S. and a few allies invaded Iraq. Saddam was captured and executed. In the power vacuum left by the 2003 invasion, U.S. troops fought and died in Iraq for eight more years. No weapons of mass destruction or links to al-Qaeda were ever found.

Other examples abound. It is easier to eject an old regime than to establish an effective new one.

Image: Photo by @mhrezaa on Unsplash.

We’ve turned the page to a whole new year. We dive back into the familiar schedule of tasks, meetings, and social activities, plus any unfinished business we couldn’t squeeze into December. The fresh calendar is already packed with hopes and opportunities. We resolve to throw ourselves into new ambitions for self-improvement or saving the world.

Three quarters of New Year’s resolutions fail within the first week. Nature suggests a reason.

Plants and animals slow down to conserve resources through the winter. Tree roots preserve essential functions underground, while branches overhead wait for spring. Many animals withdraw into sleeplike states of hibernation and torpor to save energy. Our prehistoric ancestors, too, evolved to pace themselves to the season. Instead of pushing ahead, what would happen if we let ourselves curl up with a hot drink, cozy covers, and a book, movie, or jigsaw puzzle?

I don’t know the answer. Some of us might find joy and comfort. Some might sink deeper into seasonal affective disorder. And some might strive to find a balance that feeds both body and spirit.

Image: Photo by Lucas George Wendt on Unsplash.