Happy Mid-Autumn Festival

It doesn't feel like mid-autumn (more like mid-summer to me), but that's what it's called. Anyway, I was browsing the internet and found that Chicago's moon festival/mid-autumn festival was happening, so Patrick and I took the commuter rail up north to check it out. Here are the notable bits, in the order that I observed them:

A) The web advertised the festival's features as "supercool mooncake" and "one frickin' giant moon."

1) Almost no one there was Chinese, apart from some of the performers and booth-workers. I guess the festival wasn't in Chinatown.

2) On stage, there were two girls engaged in a sword fight set to a loud, traditional Chinese song--techno remix.

3) The spring rolls and potstickers were kinda mushy.

4) We were only around for the last half hour, but we caught the grand finale: teenage lion-dancers, doing their thing first to a brief burst of cymbals and drums, then to the stereo accompaniment of "Lose Control" by Missy Elliot and Ciara. They ended with Mariah Carey's "Shake It Off" (though they didn't dance to that last song quite as vigorously).

5) There was no mooncake. Supercool or not. None, period.

If you could make your expectations of this event as low as possible, then add in a few random quirks, you would probably have a pretty good idea of what it was like. We only caught the last half hour, so maybe it was partly our fault. Anyway, we had a good time people-watching and walking by the lake by the light of the full harvest moon.

I didn't get any good moon festival pictures, so I did a web search for some. Couldn't find any. This led me to a Google Image Search for "san francisco," which turned up this awesome photograph from the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition, which took place in SF. It struck me that although I know all this stuff about Chicago's Columbian Exposition, I've never even heard of the Panama Pacific International, and I have no idea where this "Tower of Jewels," as it was called, stood in its day. The only structure that survives is the dome-thing at the Palace of Fine Arts. (Is the dome itself the Palace? If not, what is? See, this is the extent of my ignorance.) Pretty amazing.

The Latest

I'd like to leave my earlier post, with all the nice pictures, at the top of the heap for longer. You'll just have to scroll down for it, I guess, because ish just keeps on happening.

Patrick remarks that in a smaller community, the whole community would share the job of taking in a family that had fallen on some hard times. But we live in an atomized society without much sense of community, where the assumption is pretty much that institutions bear the responsibility for the welfare of those in need.

If we were to attempt to take in Darrell and Matthew on our own, we would not find the support we would in a small town; we would be on our own. So for our own sake, we have to get them to take advantage of the services being provided by churches, the government, etc.; we can provide some assistance in the interim, but in the long term, we cannot assume that responsibility.

I think this is a very nice way to ease my conscience. But it still leaves a lot of unanswered questions. For example: today, Patrick and I went to Target and spent over a hundred dollars on odds and ends: an electronic toothbrush that his dentist recommended (he has sensitive gums and other dental issues), slippers because the hardwood floors are hurting his feet, granola bars on sale, toothpaste, socks. Nothing extravagant. But also nothing that was absolutely necessary. We spent that money without thinking too much of it--but what would it take for us to be willing to hand that money over to someone more needy?

How much do you have to do before you've fulfilled your moral obligation? The way I see it, everyone has to figure out her own answer to this question, and I have yet to do so. At this point, I don't think I would alter my lifestyle; I wouldn't move to a smaller, cheaper apartment to be able to donate more money, for example, nor would I accept having people move in with me. But I do have a lot of disposable income. What percentage of that ought I be willing to part with rather than save?

And then the real question seems to be about so much more than money, which in the end is an easy sacrifice. Easier than time, easier than privacy, easier than a million other things which may or may not add up to make more of a difference. (Is it naive of me, does it reveal my class privilege that I can be equivocal about this? Is money really it, if that's what you don't have?) But so when do you say, "Look, I can't drive you there," or "No, I'm sorry, but you can't stay." When have you made enough of a sacrifice to feel unburdened? Does it make a difference who the other party is? Should it make a difference?

Patrick contributes a comment, something about rational views and religious views, the rational values being equality and justice and the religious ones being love, loving others above oneself. I can't really see where either of these align with what I am actually willing to do enough to suggest some kind of brightline standard.

Matthew was ringing our bell at a little past midnight last night. We were asleep, and unfamiliar with the bell's sound besides (I guess it works now!), so it took us a while to figure out what was going on. His granddad hadn't come back from the church meeting he went to, and Matthew was locked out and needed a place to sleep.

Before he left this morning (we gave him a ride back to 66th on our way to Target), he folded the sheets we'd put on the futon for him. That was nice.

The Limits of My Generosity

are pretty narrow.

Yesterday Patrick found a grandfather and grandson (the younger is 33) who've come up here from Mississippi in the wake of the hurricane. Their house was destroyed, and now they're staying in an apartment building owned by a pastor they have a connection with. (Darrell is a pastor, himself--though Darrell isn't his real name.) Since the building needs renovation and is currently vacant, they are staying free of charge, but they don't know how long this arrangement will last.

To my surprise, Darrell and Matthew were over when I got home from work this afternoon. It was clear enough that for Darrell, at least, it's difficult to feel, act, or be dependent on charity. Anyway, after much persuading, Darrell accepted Patrick's offer of a ride, and Patrick spent the next two hours driving around the South Side while I stayed home and graded quizzes. Traffic in Chicago really sucks.

I'd been thinking of listing our apartment on the Stanford Alumni list as a potential refuge for a single person displaced by the hurricane (I feel a little odd about the name Katrina, as though a hurricane is anything like a human being), but now I'm pretty sure I won't. I'd forgotten how particular I am about things. It raised flags of varying colors for me when I went to the bathroom after Matthew's shower and the soap was at the bottom of the bath tub, my wash cloth was draped on the edge of the sink (even though Patrick had given Matthew a clean one to use), and the toilet brush was knocked over. What's more, they had called saying they were hungry, then they left the spaghetti that Patrick cooked for us all half-eaten. We ended up throwing their leftovers away.

Patrick's comment is something about how when you try to do good things for people, you can't go around wishing that the people were different. I guess this is sort of akin to the argument that if you give money to a guy on the street, you have no right to tell him what to use it for and what not to (although opening your home to someone is pretty different from just giving away money). Anyway, this all seems to reflect on my awareness that I love humanity in general, just not any specific humans.

I don't mean to speak badly of a demographic, and I hope no one will take this account as a sign that the refugees of the hurricane (I understand that "refugee" is not an approved term because of the negative connotations relating to refugees in other countries. My response: What the heck is that supposed to mean about refugees in other countries???) don't deserve aid. I don't even mean to speak badly of Darrell and Matthew; on some levels that I'm aware of and others that I'm not, their actions are not rude or unjustified. On the contrary, I mean to illustrate my own limitations, to wonder whether my standards are absurd or hypocritical, to stop taking for granted a few of the things which I do.

The trouble with trying to get past these limitations is that it's easy to end up in a missionary phase where you'll do anything for anyone as long as you're convinced that you're better than they are. One benefit about teaching middle school: it is wholly appropriate to treat the students like children, because that's what they are. And as such, I can accept all kinds of immaturity, meanness, apparent stupidity, and silliness from them without judging them.

I walked downstairs to do laundry and ran into another new resident in our apartment complex. Turns out he's from Irvine but hates SoCal (perfect) and fraternities (also perfect). I said that Patrick and I had been living in Palo Alto, and he immediately mentioned Stanford and a few things he's heard about it from friends who've gone there (like the fact that there's no life off campus). Then somebody he'd been waiting for came by and he left and said "See ya later."

This brings to mind a thought I'd been having: I've run into a couple of people who I really didn't expect to see here, didn't know they were in the Chi at all, but then on the street, in the grocery store, whatever, there they are. But maybe it's not really a small world after all at all. More likely, it seems, is that the stratum of people that most individuals associate with is narrow, and everyone in your same stratum goes to the same places you go and knows the same sort of people you know.

I don't know what this is supposed to suggest. I'm just feeling very stratified, I guess. Not quite disconnected or isolated, but stratified.

About Town

We've been taking weekends to wander around Chicago some more. Here you see the Water Tower, one of the few buildings to survive the Great Fire of 1871. We spent the evening on the Hancock Building's 94th-floor observation deck, then got ice cream at the Ghiradelli on the corner. I'm renewing my love of opulent window-shopping on the Magnificent Mile. I actually had a dream about going to the mall with Patrick and looking at iridescent dresses with huge skirts.




Buckingham Fountain
at night. The largest illuminated fountain in the world, supposedly. The lights change colors quite spectacularly, but this picture came out
the best.




Patrick's dad was here last weekend. We wandered around Evanston (visiting Patrick's great-grandfather's house), Millenium Park (free concert by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra), and the Chicago Cultural Center, which used to house Chicago's main public library. It features two magnificent glass domes, one by Tiffany and this one by Millet. The light on the floor is not sunlight shining through the windows, but artificial light shining through tiles in the floor. The overall effect is quite beautiful.




We went on one of those architectural boat tours of the Chicago River, too. Then we wandered around downtown, past the most beautiful Bloomingdale's in the world. It was built in 1912 in Islamic Revival style for the Ancient Arabic Order of Nobles of the Mystic Shrine. Now it's Bloomies Furnishings and Housewares or something. Anyway, we found this LEGO man in another mall nearby. He has a chicken (LEGO also, of course) on his head and a busted Lego egg on his shoulder. But look at his face! Have you ever seen such humanity!?!

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Comments, II

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Outrage

is so lukewarm. It is devastating, devastating to see photographs of the Gulf coast, to hear on the radio the calls in to call-in shows from people in New Orleans who can't find their families ... Surreal to imagine swimming out of a second-story window ... Horrifying to imagine being trapped without even a window to swim out of ...

It is shocking that there was NO organized response for such a long time. Infuriating that all levels of government but especially the federal have been so extremely incompetent, and now this scandal. Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu, quoted by Kevin Drum on his blog at the Washington Monthly:

"I understand that the U.S. Forest Service had water-tanker aircraft available to help douse the fires raging on our riverfront, but FEMA has yet to accept the aid. When Amtrak offered trains to evacuate significant numbers of victims — far more efficiently than buses — FEMA again dragged its feet. Offers of medicine, communications equipment and other desperately needed items continue to flow in, only to be ignored by the agency.

"But perhaps the greatest disappointment stands at the breached 17th Street levee. Touring this critical site yesterday with the President, I saw what I believed to be a real and significant effort to get a handle on a major cause of this catastrophe. Flying over this critical spot again this morning, less than 24 hours later, it became apparent that yesterday we witnessed a hastily prepared stage set for a Presidential photo opportunity; and the desperately needed resources we saw were this morning reduced to a single, lonely piece of equipment. The good and decent people of southeast Louisiana and the Gulf Coast — black and white, rich and poor, young and old — deserve far better from their national government."

A Dutch news agency on the event: "ZDF News reported that the president's visit was a completely staged event. Their crew witnessed how the open air food distribution point Bush visited in front of the cameras was torn down immediately after the president and the herd of 'news people' had left and that others which were allegedly being set up were abandoned at the same time."

What can be said?

What can be said?

I am so angry with everyone. With the American people for electing this man again, with the media for their incompetent reporting on this administration and its agendas, allowing us to believe that it is less sinister, less incompetent than it is--The media is the new opiate of the masses, convincing us that there are two sides to every issue, so we may as well choose one that's easier to believe; shattering the world until it is so big that there is no impact we can have upon it, yet so small that it fails to contain people who exist for more than twenty seconds. I am angry, too, with the future which I fear will do nothing, nothing in response to the evidence that institutional racism is alive and well in this country, nothing in response to the poverty that clearly continues to exist in this First of the nations of the First World. I am angry that writing a check is a gesture with such little meaning to me, because it is all I feel I can do. (Well, make the check bigger, I suppose!)

Panelists on the News Hour (with Jim Lehrer) commented that they gained a new appreciation for Rudy Giuliani in seeing what the lack of him amounted to in the aftermath of the hurricane. It made me remember that it does make a difference, after all, that it's not all one mess of government-is-evil-at-worst-and- incompetent-at-best (there's a book I've been meaning to read about the effects of various administrations' economic policies, showing that they do have tremendously different impacts on people's lives). It made me wonder what qualities are really important to have in a leader, and whether our system of choosing leaders--at least at the presidential level--gives us much hope of finding people with those qualities. Or if we'll keep ending up with cardboard cutouts and ideologues, maybe getting lucky once in every fifty or a hundred years.

All of these thoughts lead to more thoughts, but I will truncate the process here. I need to plan for next week's classes. There's been some talk of incorporating discussions of Katrina and efforts toward relief in our curriculum, but I haven't had any brilliant ideas yet. "OK, so if the water is 20 feet high, and one pump can pump X gallons per hour, but there's no electricity to run the pumps, how many hours will it take to get all the water out?" Or "Here, kids, read this article about FEMA. I want you to underline all the reasons that the Bush administration is bad." (They're already very anti-Bush. For our reading campaign, I suggested that they take someone else's perspective and write about why reading might be important to that person; to give them some ideas, I suggested a grandma, a five-year-old, or the President of the USA. One girl actually wrote as Barbara Bush, and in her paragraph, which did describe the joys of reading, she managed to squeeze in some insults about her son ...)

Lukewarm, lukewarm. It must be, or life is impossible; if outrage were always red as blood, there would be no function for me in life. I would always be turning to the next thing, always emotionally exhausted, never good for much ... This is why people like Romeo Dalliere, Iris Chang try to kill themselves. Yet lukewarm is so ... argh. I have to pee.