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. 

Decades ago, I equated competence with knowing how to do things. It embarrassed me that I wasn’t sure I could change a tire in a pinch, even though I’d been shown. I’d never lived alone but didn't doubt my ability to do so.

My first “aha” came when my ten-year-old called me at work to say the toilet was overflowing. An hour away, I couldn’t run home to fix it. Instead, I told him to get the building maintenance number from the basement door and phone for help. By the time I got home, the plumbing was repaired and the mess cleaned up. Proud of my son for handling the problem so competently, I realized what mattered wasn’t whether he could fix the toilet, but whether he could get it fixed.

Fast forward to life in Wisconsin. My husband was out of town when half the power in the house went out. The electric company located the underground outage beneath our rear deck. They couldn’t do the repair until we removed all or part of the deck to provide access. I couldn’t possibly decide anything till my husband got home, I told them. Though it was true—neither of us would tear up the deck without consulting the other—it felt like playing the role of a simpering little wifey, helpless without her man.

I have the same sensation of playing a role when I carry a walking stick to board a plane. Everyone lets me jump the line. Seatmates lift my bag into the overhead compartment. I don’t need the stick to fly, but standing long or walking far is harder without it. So why this almost mischievous feeling that I’m getting away with something?

Perhaps it’s a mismatch between my strong, independent self-image and my actual present self. Now more than ever, I am blessed by the kindness of strangers. I watch for ways I can pass that blessing on. None of us are helpless while we help one another.

Image: Photo by Denny Müller on Unsplash.

The spelling “Xmas” pushes buttons. Many decry it as commercial secularization of a religious holiday. A few enjoy it for the same reason. History tells a different story. The first letter of the Greek word for “Christ,” X was a shorthand for “Christ” at least as early as the year 1100. “Xmas” came into use in England by the 1700s if not before. Though I usually write Christmas in full, it’s from taste, not principle. Nor do I fret about commercialism debasing the holiday. Never mind ads, malls, and sales. I relish Christmas for its lights, music, stories, human connections, and many cherished memories.

In my childhood, my father and brother would carry home a spruce tree from a nearby lot. We set it in a bucket and wedged grapefruit-sized rocks around it till it stood up straight. Ornaments culminated in a homemade star on top and tinsel icicles on the branches. (Remember icicles?) Though we’d open gifts the next morning, it’s Christmas Eve that lingers in my memory: carols by the piano, the Christmas Story with illustrations from the Museum of Modern Art, and the beloved poem “King John’s Christmas” by A. A. Milne.

My year in Ethiopia began in the fall. In December, with only a footlocker to sit on yet and no suitable trees for miles around, my mate and I hung stylized aluminum foil branches on the wall. We baked cookies and rode a gari cart—a kind of horse-drawn taxi—to bring batches to neighbors and friends. At almost the last minute, the Post Exchange surprised us with real pines, shipped from Germany around the tip of Africa and up the Red Sea. (The Suez Canal was closed at the time.) We stood a pine in our almost-empty living room and decorated it with more cookies. Next day we woke to a thick column of ants marching between wall and tree trunk, toting away all the cookie crumbs they could carry.

Later I joined a choir in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago. Many winters we sang carols in the community: to nursing facility patients in their rooms, to customers in Broadway Street bars, or to retirement home residents in their common room. In the bars, we took donations to support the Broadway Night Ministry; men who’d been drinking proved especially generous. Caroling in the retirement home gave us a glimpse of old Lakeview back when it was the heart of Chicago’s German community. At “Silent Night,” our listeners sang along with the words they’d known since childhood: “Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht . . .” Their eyes filled with tears of joy at the ghosts of Christmas past.

Image: Photo by Chad Madden on Unsplash.