Tag Archives: New Year

Layered Allegiances

Posted on December 30, 2023 | Leave a comment

It’s nearly the end of 2023, a time for looking back and for looking ahead. I’m grateful to have made it through another year with most of my faculties intact. I’m blessed to have a warm, supportive network of family and friends. Over the holidays, I’ve managed to spend some extended family time in person and to avoid an excess of media. I’ve (mostly) avoided discussing politics, but still have heard the word “polarization” more times than I care to count.

I like to think that many of us, despite all the rhetoric and doom-saying, are more centrist than otherwise, with overlapping multi-layered allegiances—to family, to work group, to neighborhood, to profession, to age-mates, to craft groups. To varying degrees, many of us also affiliate with politically oriented groups at various levels. I think it does us a disservice to try to reduce anyone to a single level of allegiance, politically or otherwise.

Nonetheless, our current “in between” media environment, an evolving mix of broadcast, print, and internet-driven content, is surfeited with polling that purports to pigeonhole us by political allegiance and/or some aspect of our demographics. I could make a bonfire with all the pieces of campaign literature I’ve received warning of the end of the world if “the other side” wins. Though checking boxes on surveys may relieve a few of my frustrations, it does little to create or reinforce connections. Indulging my anger may feel righteous for a time, but it likewise does little toward solving problems. Nuanced discussions and concerted actions are needed and seem in short supply.

Many years ago, I applied to the United States Peace Corps. Once accepted, I was offered a two-year assignment with a United Nations agency, providing technical assistance in an economically struggling country. Over the course of the recruitment process, I was asked to affirm my allegiance both to the U.S. government and to the principles of the U.N. This was at a time during the 1980’s when there was serious talk of cutting off U.S. support for many international organizations. (Echoes of the same tendency are again current.)

I crossed my fingers that there would not be a serious conflict between the stated purposes of the U.S. and those of the U.N. I wondered where my allegiance would lie if such a breach occurred. Luckily, it was a choice I did not have to make. I think my assignment helped persuade some of my in-country coworkers that there was more to Americans than bellicosity or arrogance. The work done by our multi-national staff made a small but positive impact on the lives of the mostly peasant families we interacted with. Once my assignment was over and I returned to the U.S., I bought two flags—a U.S. flag and an “earth flag,” showing our blue-green planet as viewed from space. On holidays, I gladly flew both. (An image of the earth flag is on Wikimedia Commons as File:Earth flag PD.jpg)

Unless our lives have been exceptionally tranquil, we’ve sometimes been faced with potentially conflicting allegiances. What seems dangerous to me about our current era is that much of our public sphere seems intent on collapsing the many overlapping layers of allegiances of healthy societies into strictly “us versus them” categories.

I draw some solace from a recent experience of our soccer playing granddaughter. The school league in which she plays consists of several smallish secondary schools. At a recent game, the opposing team was short a couple of players at the start of play. It would have been perfectly acceptable, per the league’s rules, for our granddaughter’s team to claim a win by forfeit. Instead, our granddaughter and another player with friends on both teams added a layer of soccer jersey and played for the “opposing” team until enough of their players arrived to complete the rest of the game “normally.” I doubt anyone kept very close track of who “won.”

So here’s a wish that your 2024 will be multi-layered and nourishing, that you’ll have chances to experience some of the “win-win” results that can come from recognizing how multi-faceted and interconnected all of us are.

On Sending (and Receiving) Holiday Cards and Letters

Posted on January 8, 2023 | Leave a comment

In the small Maryland town where I grew up in the 1950’s and 60’s, sending and receiving postal holiday cards was an important part of holiday tradition. Dad and Mom participated by taking an annual posed picture of us kids and then making numerous copies in Dad’s basic home photo lab, stinking up our house for days. They’d either include a holiday greeting in the photo itself or add a brief caption to each copy.

Then they’d stuff envelopes, write out addresses, and affix stamps by hand to send to family, neighbors, friends, and business contacts. Our parents’ lives back then were too busy for lengthy missives. However, we sometimes received cards with long enclosed letters from friends and family far away. In our house, one entire hallway was devoted to an arrangement of the most colorful cards, dozens and dozens of them, usually patterned into the shape of a stylized tree. After I started a family of my own, I continued the holiday card tradition.

By now, the postal holiday card and letter are fast becoming outmoded. Email can be a lot quicker and just as informative. All the same, I’m loathe to give up the older tradition. Stationery and gift shops still stock boxes of holiday cards. The U.S. Postal Service still collects and distributes mail.

Those of us who write holiday letters in whatever medium tend to brag a bit. We also tend to play down any difficult parts of the year just ended. I find pleasure in sitting down to compose a physical page (never more, rarely less) of highlights of the year just ending. It’s heavy on the celebrations and on the achievements of the younger generations.

This year I got a late start sending out holiday cards and letters because of holiday travel, visiting family members on the other coast whose pictures I hoped to include. Now I’m back home. Relevant trip pictures have been transferred from cell phone to computer. I’ve started my annual ritual of card and letter composition and distribution.

Tools for preparing and mailing holiday cards and letters have gotten somewhat more convenient since my parents’ days. My desktop printer will crank out appropriate adhesive mailing labels in sheets of thirty labels each. The printer can also produce multiple copies of letter text and interspersed images in either black and while or color. My word processing software, with some wrangling, will position pictures where I want them in the overall design. Most envelopes have peel off adhesive strips so they no longer require licking. Most stamps are also self-adhesive.

The process of writing out each card and sticking labels on an appropriate envelope helps me bring to mind each recipient in turn. I remember how they are special to me. I briefly reweave some of the tapestry of our friendships. It’s disappointing when a card gets returned with “no forwarding address”—I’ve lost track of yet another tie to my past. Even worse are the cards returned with regretful notes letting me know the intended recipient has died. Each year, the prior year’s card mailing list gets winnowed by at least a few names. As best I can, I focus on the good of the lives that have ended. In this era when age segregation has increased, I try to include younger friends and to broaden the age range of new friends beyond just my own cohort. Otherwise, my holiday card list would gradually dwindle to nothingness.

Our current house has little hall space. The number of postal cards we receive has diminished. The ones we still get will fit easily on our mantelpiece and along the top shelf of the smallest bookcase. I cherish them, fewer though they may be. In these shortest days of the year, they remind me both of the longer span of lives well lived and of the beauty of lives newly started. They reconnect us, something most of us can use after much pandemic-related isolation.

Happy holidays to you and yours! A belated Happy Hanukah, Merry Christmas, Happy Kwanzaa, Happy (Solar) New Year! Happy Upcoming (Lunar) Year of the Rabbit! Whatever your media of choice, may you continue to send and receive holiday greetings!

Still Subtle and Various and Human

Posted on December 31, 2016 | Leave a comment

Still Subtle and Various and Human… —by Jinny Batterson

The year 2016 has provided quite a roller coaster ride, especially in U.S. politics. Now that the year is nearly done, I’m trying to be more philosophical about this year’s largely negative political campaigns and their outcomes. While trying to avoid stereotyping anyone as a typical voter in any contest, I did pay attention to one exit polling result: the lopsidedly large majority of those who cast their vote for president as a way of fostering change.

What gives me some hope for positive change is that recent conversations I’ve been having with family, friends and acquaintances of various political persuasions have been getting deeper without getting rancorous. My sample size is small. However, among those with whom I’ve gingerly broached the subject of American politics, what stands out are the variations in both motivations and reactions. I’ve not found consensus. Nevertheless, the opinions I’ve heard are more subtle and more nuanced than much of what I read and hear in the media, neither entirely elated nor entirely despairing, but somewhere in between.

Though in theory I’m now part of the older, wiser generation, I find myself wishing that my parents’ “greatest generation” were still around in large enough numbers to impart wisdom and to exert more influence on our media mix. The views of some live on in their writings. I like some of the lesser-known volumes authored by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Though her early life was sheltered and privileged, she came to maturity as global politics darkened during the 1930’s. After the kidnapping and murder of their eldest child in New Jersey in 1932, she and her aviator husband Charles Lindbergh for several years sought solace and privacy in England By 1939, Anne was back in the U.S., tending a growing household while struggling with her husband’s strong isolationist opinions, viewing events in Europe with increasing alarm. Parts of her journals from the period were published much later, in 1980, as War Without and Within. I found the lead-in to her entry for September 2, 1939 especially compelling:

“The Germans are steaming ahead into Poland; all negotiations are off. Even the news becomes not diplomatic but military, not subtle and various and human but clear and cold and metallic.”

Tomorrow we’ll start 2017 with a fair number of possible problems and threats on our horizons. We will also have various experiences, opinions, and expertise with which to cope with them. Some choices will seem stark; others may be difficult. Still, we have the capacity in coping with lots of our issues to recall that we as Americans, and as citizens of the world, can be subtle and various and human, if only we choose to do so.