Under the baobab: When light from the past helps us illuminate the present
Happy Hanukkah. Shalom aleichem.
Congrats to Penn State interim football coach Terry Smith and the rest of the football team for becoming bowl eligible by defeating Rutgers in their house. The team concluded a topsy-turvy season at six and six. One speculation is that we will play in the Pinstripe Bowl in NYC on Dec. 27. Between offense, defense and special teams, the Nittany Lions garnered 18 All-Big Ten selections including offense: Kaytron Allen, Olaivavega Ioane, Nick Dawkins, Khalil Dinkins, Nolan Rucci, Drew Shelton and Nicholas Singleton.
Both the men’s and women’s basketball teams enter Big Ten league play with only one pre-season loss. On Friday, the NCAA reigning champion women’s volleyball team began their tournament against the University of South Florida in Austin.
On Tuesday, the Center for the Performing Arts at Penn State presented “An Evening with Neil deGrasse Tyson, An Astrophysicist Goes to the Movies” to a sold-out audience at Eisenhower Auditorium. For over two hours Tyson entertained and informed the crowd with a review of the science that our favorite movies got wrong, combined with some of the stuff they got right.
Beyond Happy Valley
Dec. 1 was World AIDS Day. Before COVID, AIDS killed millions of people around the world. It was particularly devastating to Americans who were theater and music performers. We mourned and buried family members, friends, colleagues. President George W. Bush was particularly generous in his support of those victimized. We were in South Africa when he provided over $1 billion to the continent for AIDS relief.
Dec. 1 also marked the 70th anniversary of Rosa Parks’ arrest and the beginning of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, led by a relatively unknown minister, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Sometimes, light from the past can help us illuminate the present. My generation grew up in the post-war 1950s. A new reality was emerging. The Cold War had begun to clinch its icy fist around our lives. The atomic age had begun to rise from the ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The promise of a peaceful future faded as we crouched frightened under our school desk awaiting Armageddon. The world was divided between the good guys and bad guys. We, the USA, were the good guys. We had helped save the world from German, Italian and Japanese fascism. Our own homegrown fascism in the form of McCarthyism first flowered then floundered. Civil rights and equality for all was on the rise.
For us ‘50s kids, American culture was often portrayed in Hollywood movies, particularly war movies. I remember one. American sailors were thrashing around in the water after having their ship sunk by a German U-Boat. The submarine surfaced and instead of putting out lifeboats for the drowning sailors they opened fire on the helpless Americans. It was a really terrible bad guy move. As I recall, the German military folk were punished for their acts against humanity and decency, both in that movie and at the postwar trials in Nuremberg. The defense “I was only following orders” did not absolve the Nazis of responsibility for their abominations.
Time has moved on. We are no longer the people in the water. Our government has devolved into acting like the U-Boat crew firing on the “enemy.” We are the people in whose name these atrocities are being committed. We offer another repudiated excuse, “I didn’t know what was going on.” Courageous members of the press, members of the political opposition, unions, clergy, humanitarian activists, have been trying to tell us what’s happening. Are we listening?
The resistance continues: Candles for Peace on Monday at the Allen Street Gates, Thompson Tuesdays at the Congressman’s Bellefonte Office.
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”- attributed to Edmund Burke.
Charles Dumas is a lifelong political activist, a professor emeritus from Penn State, and was the Democratic Party’s nominee for the U.S. Congress in 2012. He is a Lions Paw honoree. He lives in State College with his wife and partner of over 50 years.