GOP Blames Biden for Baltimore Bridge Collapse & Only 7 Countries Have Clean Air
SC and SCOTUS Deny 30k Black Voters a Voice, Social Media Misinformation About Birth Control is Dangerous, Grace Kelly Sings and Plays Sax
What I’m Discussing Today:
Kareem’s Daily Quote: I’m going all literary today with a quote from Stephen Crane’s classic short story, “The Open Boat.” Hang in there, I think it’ll be worth it.
South Carolina to use congressional map deemed unconstitutional: South Carolina Republicans drew a man to exclude 30,000 Black voters from representation. SCOTUS is letting them.
Only seven countries meet WHO air quality standards, research finds: Seven million people a year die from air pollution. Meanwhile, many in the GOP want to get rid of the EPA and air pollution regulations. True Patriots.
Republicans put forth unfounded and sometimes racist theories on bridge collapse: Did I miss something? Was President Biden piloting the ship that crashed into the bridge? No tragedy is too great for sleazy politicians to exploit.
Kareem’s Video Break: I feel like I got my daily steps in just watching this video.
Wife of Judge on Mifepristone Case was Paid by Anti-Abortion Group: First, Clarence Thomas degrades our trust in the judicial system by accepting lavish gifts. Now this judge gives that trust a swift kick in the crotch.
Women are getting off birth control amid misinformation explosion: The consequences of allowing sites to spew misinformation is dangerous and deadly. We can stop it.
Louis Gossett Jr., ‘An Officer and a Gentleman’ Oscar Winner, Dies at 87: A great actor who shone in every scene he was in. I miss him already.
Grace Kelly Sings and Plays Saxophone: This jazz prodigy is a phenomenal sax player who makes music fun.
Kareem’s Daily Quote
When night came, the white waves rolled back and forth in the moonlight, and the wind brought the sound of the great sea’s voice to the men on the shore. And they felt that they could then understand.
Stephen Crane, “The Open Boat”
These final words of Stephen Crane’s famous short story “The Open Boat” have haunted me since I first read them when I was a teenager. What did the “great sea’s voice” tell them that they “finally” understood? What mysteries were revealed?
First, some context. Stephen Crane (1871-1900) is famous for his classic novel of the Civil War The Red Badge of Courage. “The Open Boat” is based on his 1897 experience of being stranded at sea for 30 hours after the ship he was traveling on sank off the coast of Florida. Crane and three other men, including an oiler (his job was to oil the machinery on the ship) named Billie, who drowned when their lifeboat overturned, end up in a lifeboat together. Crane, a journalist, wrote a news account of the shipwreck which was widely read and praised. That same year, he wrote “The Open Boat,” his fictional account of the same incident.
The story follows most of the facts of the incident. A ship sinks, and four men try to make it to shore in a lifeboat, they decide to swim for shore, and Billie drowns while the others survive. So, why write a fictional version when he’d already written a popular non-fiction account? Because whatever the great sea was saying couldn’t be conveyed in a news story. News articles are about facts, fiction is about insight into what those facts mean. It’s about Truth.
The four men who head for shore are not equal. The correspondent (basically Crane) is young but he is not knowledgeable about the sea, the captain is knowledgeable about the sea but he’s wounded, the cook is knowledgeable about the sea but he’s heavy and out of shape. Only Billie is knowledgeable about the sea and is also strong. By all logic, Billie has the best chance of survival—yet he is the only one who dies.
In the end, the survivors stand on the shore and finally understand what the sea has told them: Nature doesn’t care about them or their logic. It is capricious, it is whimsical, and no individual, no species matters more than any other. Nature is a process and we are nothing more to that process than socks in a tumbling dryer.
Crane died of tuberculosis at the age of 28, so his ill health might have influenced his philosophy as much as the shipwreck. Those looking for fairness and justice in an indifferent universe will be disappointed. Some will find that message disturbing, but Crane and I find it freeing. Rather than look to the stars to bring fairness and justice to humanity, we need to rely on each other because life is an open boat exposing us to the whims of Nature. But we are in that boat together. And what we do in that boat is who we really are.