Author Archives: Claire Murray

What Does Dignity Have to Do with It?

6 Replies

When I think of Civil Rights, my mind immediately goes to voting rights, the 15th Amendment* and the Voting Rights Bill of 1965.** I remember how people marched, protested and died to push President Johnson, Congress and their congressmen and senators to pass this bill. In other words, I think of the past. This has all been discussed and litigated and it’s over.

 

In the last few years I’ve been unpleasantly surprised to find out that I’ve been wrong. Voting rights are not in the past, they are now. It’s a fight that’s still going on.

 

Today I attended a lecture titled “Bringing Dignity Back to Voting in the Robert’s Court”. The speaker was Ellen D. Katz. She is a Law Professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Her expertise is writing about and teaching election law, civil rights and their remedies, as well as equal protection.

 

While she was being introduced I focused on the word dignity. It’s not a word we often use. What is it really? I like this definition: Dignity is “the state or quality of being worthy of honor or respect”.***

 

Dr. Katz’s point was that dignity is intrinsic to the right to vote. It’s a central component because being disenfranchised is humiliating and degrading. It is the opposite of being worthy of honor or respect.

 

Professor Katz gave a number of examples from history:

 

  1. There was Carter Glass who introduced the Poll Tax in Virginia in 1902. He said its purpose was to discriminate so as to eliminate every Negro voter that it could. He felt Black Suffrage needed to be blocked because it bestowed dignity on African-American men.

 

  1. Then there were the opponents of Women’s Suffrage. Many of them said that enfranchising women would decrease the dignity of men and therefore should be opposed.

 

  1. In 1965, President Johnson, speaking in support of the Voting Rights Act, said to Congress, “I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy…”.

 

John Roberts became Chief Justice in September, 2005. From then to now there have been massive cutbacks in the reach of the Voting Rights Act. For example, in Crawford v. Merion County, Justice John Paul Stevens upheld Indiana’s Voter I.D. Law while at the same time acknowledging that 43% of Indiana citizens at that time did not have proper Voter I.D.s and thus would lose their right to vote. He also noted that there had never been a case of voter fraud in Indiana–ever. The Voter I.D. law was a remedy for a problem that did not exist. But more importantly, by disenfranchising almost half of Indiana voters he took away their dignity as citizens.

 

In 2014 there were a series of lower court decisions that spoke of Voter I.D. laws as being problematic. At the time the Supreme Court stayed these decisions. This meant it ruled to halt further legal process in these trials or other legal proceeding.****

 

Two years passed and things changed dramatically. In 2016, lower court after lower court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs. One of the best known cases is that of 94 year old Rosanell Eaton of North Carolina.*****She had been voting since 1942 when she’d had to ride a mule to town. Once there, she had to pass a Literacy Test before she was allowed to vote. But the new 2013 North Carolina Voter I.D. law disenfranchised her because her birth certificate said Rosanell Eaton and her Driver’s License said Rosanell Johnson Eaton. This whole experience took away her dignity.

 

In order to keep her right to vote, this 94 year old woman, who had voted in every election since 1942, had to make 11 trips to various government agencies. To do this, she had to travel over 200 miles. At 94, it was very difficult and expensive for her as well as humilating. After all, she had voted in every election since 1942.

 

At the time, over 300,000 other citizens of North Carolina did not have the correct Voter I.D. and the majority of them were African-American. How many of them wouldn’t be able to do this? This law was taking away their dignity as citizens.

 

The Fourth Circuit Court in Richmond found the North Carolina law unconstitutional and said that North Carolina had acted with “intentional racial discrimination” and “surgical precision” to deny voters the ability to vote “without hindrance”.

 

So what’s dignity got to do with it? Because you’re a citizen you have a right to vote. When, because of your color or sex, you’re denied this right, you don’t feel worthy of honor and respect. You feel humiliated and degraded. You realize you’re being told you’re not as good as those other people who are citizens just like you, but they’re entitled to vote.

 

That’s what dignity has to do with it!

 

*The 15th Amendment to the Constitution granted African American men the right to vote by declaring that the “right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

https://www.google.com/#q=what+is+the+15th+amendment

 

**Voting Rights Act – Black History – HISTORY.com The Voting Rights Act, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson (1908-73) on August 6, 1965, aimed to overcome legal barriers at the state and local levels that prevented African Americans from exercising their right to vote under the 15th Amendment (1870) to the Constitution of the United States.

www.history.com/topics/black-history/voting-rights-act

 

*** https://www.google.com/#q=+of+dignity

 

****Stay of Proceedings – Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stay_of_proceedings

 

***** https://www.thenation.com/article/the-92-year-old-civil-rights-pioneer-who-is-now-challenging-north-carolinas-voter-id-law/

Bonjour Montreal

2 Replies

Thursday, the first week in October, we flew to Montreal, Canada. I had only been there briefly once before so I was looking forward to seeing it again. We planned our visit so we’d have two days on our own before joining a Road Scholar cruise to Quebec, the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, Bar Harbor, Maine, Boston, New York City, Charleston, South Carolina and ending in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It was a little over two weeks of seeing new things, meeting new people and, best of all, no cooking!

I’ve always enjoyed being given a menu at each meal, whether on land or sea, and asked to order whatever I feel like eating.

Our hotel was in Vieux Montreal (Old Montreal) which was nice. Once we walked out the door, we were in the old city. The streets were all narrow and paved with cobblestones because they were built first and cars came along second. Two and three story walk up buildings rose straight toward the sky from the high narrow sidewalks. The buildings seemed to be literally squeezed into place.

montreal%202We spent our first afternoon walking around to get an overview of the area. We ate dinner outside at a restaurant on Place Jacques Cartier. The weather was chilly by our standards but everyone, tourists and locals alike, was eating outside because this was the last weekend many of these restaurants would be open. The tourist season would end on Sunday. I thought that was a bit early but everyone we talked to said it had been this way for many years.

Unlike the narrow streets we had walked on to get there, Place Jacques Cartier was a very wide avenue lined with restaurants on both sides. In the center was a large grey cobblestone area filled with small tourist kiosks and street musicians.

The street musicians were very good so we picked a restaurant where we could sit outside and hear them while we ate. We quickly noticed that other people had the same idea. Every time the musicians would finish a piece, everyone in the surrounding restaurants would clap.

The sky gradually turned dark, the breeze picked up, a little rain began to fall and our street musicians packed up and left. We finished our meal, had our last sip of wine, zipped up our jackets and strolled back to the hotel having enjoyed our first lovely night in Montreal.

OMG

1 Reply

Have you ever had “Writer’s Block”? I have it all the time and I hate it! I’m sitting in front of the computer getting ready to write. My fingers hover over the keys.

 

Ready! Set! Go!

 

Ugh?

 

What am I going to write about? What can I say that anyone, yes anyone, would want to read?

 

I gained inspiration the last time I went to the Deadwood Writers’ Group. My friend Barbara brought this picture:img_0155

 

“OMG! Where is that kid when I need him? The last time I had a problem with my computer, I phoned Apple. After waiting 18 minutes on hold, someone picked up.

 

“Let me connect you to the person who handles that,” he said.

 

I put the phone on speaker and started answering my email. 20 minutes later and still no one had picked up. I checked my phone. It was still on speaker.

 

I went back to answering my email. A few more minutes passed. I noticed something. What was it?

 

OMG! Silence.

 

I’d been disconnected. My phone said I’d been on hold 25 minutes just to be disconnected. No!

 

Where is that kid? He may be young but I bet he knows what to do!!!

Being Mortal*

5 Replies

bein-mortalHave you read Being Mortal by Atul Gawande yet? It’s a very interesting book on several levels. Being a writer, I learned from seeing him make his points through telling stories. He told stories about his patients, himself, and his family. It gave the book an intimate feel, like this could be happening to me or someone I know. If not now, maybe some time in the future?

 

From a psychological point of view, I could see that he wants to help people. He thinks that if he’s able to get you, his readers, think these things through now, when you’re healthy, then you’ll have the time you need. You’ll be able to reflect and come up with what you personally want in order to have your very best day each day that you have left.

 

I expected the book to be depressing. After all, it’s about the end of life. And, considering no one has ever come back from the other side, a lot of people don’t like to think about this, especially me.

 

But what drew me in was the strain of kindness, compassion, and hope that runs throughout the book, chapter after chapter. I could see that he wanted to prepare his readers to get the information we’d need to make decisions that would give each of us the best possible life right up to the very end.

 

He talks about how doctors are trained to save lives but not how to share bad information, tell patients their disease is terminal or help them make end of life decisions.

 

Over and over he makes the point, that when the doctor says, “We have this new treatment. I think it’ll help you,” the doctor is thinking one or two years. But the patient is thinking 10 or 20. This is a huge misunderstanding.

 

Usually the patient never asks, “How much time will this treatment give me?” and “How much of that time will be good time, i.e. time where I’m awake, alert and my pain is controlled enough so that I can enjoy spending it with my family and friends?”

 

Frankly, the doctor is relieved. He or she is not prepared, even in the last weeks, to say, “This disease is terminal. You have at most a few weeks or months, not all of them good. You might want to think about what’s important to you, something you’d like to do or say to the people close to you.”

 

He tells horror stories of doctors, right up until the very end, knowing the patient will probably not survive more than a week or two, offering new treatments. Why? Because doctors are uncomfortable saying things like, “This disease is terminal.” “There is no treatment today that can cure you.” “The most we can do is make you comfortable.”

 

My takeaway from this book is, after the doctor has explained all possible relevant treatments to fight the disease, three questions the patient or the patient’s family need to ask when someone is critically ill. They are:

 

  1. When you think about the research and your patients who have undergone these treatments, for each treatment you talked about, what is the longest time any of them got?

 

  1. How much of that time was “good time”, i.e. time where the person was awake, alert, and their pain controlled to the point that they could enjoy their day?

 

  1. If you did nothing heroic, instead just controlled the pain and treated the disease to slow it down, how much “good time” would you have?

 

I think the answers to these questions would be far more valuable in helping each of us decide what we want to do than just starting another new treatment.

 

 

*Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande, Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2014.

The Book of Kells

10 Replies

 

Have you ever seen the Book of Kells? I did, last month when I was in Ireland. The original book, actually 340 folios, written around 800 CE, is at Trinity College in Dublin. It has its own very impressive exhibit, located on the first floor in a specially climate controlled, dimly lit room.

 

The Book of Kells is magnificent! Each page is beautifully decorated. Three different artists illustrated the book while four principal monks copied the text, which sometimes included decorating the letters themselves. It contains copies of the four gospels that were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

 

No one is sure if the Book of Kells was created entirely at the monastery in Iona, an island off the coast of Scotland, or the one at Kells in County Meath, Ireland or both. In those days the two monasteries were organized as one community, even though they were far apart.

 

Today the Book of Kells is part of a very elaborate exhibit and no cameras are allowed because it is so old.

 

On their website, Trinity College says,

The manuscript’s celebrity derives largely from the impact of its lavish

decoration, the extent and artistry of which is incomparable. Abstract

decoration and images of plant, animal and human ornament punctuate

the text with the aim of glorifying Jesus’ life and message, and keeping

his attributes and symbols constantly in the eye of the reader.*

 

I think you will agree when you look at this picture:

tapestry**

I was getting ready to exit the exhibit and go outside when I saw a well-worn staircase to my left. Several people were walking upstairs. I was curious. What’s up there?

 

I slowly climbed the staircase to the second floor and entered a square room with people milling around. But it was the room beyond that took my breath away. It was very long and narrow. I don’t remember ever seeing another one like it. It had shelves of books from floor to ceiling on both sides. I’ve never been in a room with so many books! There were over 200,000 in all. I smiled when I found out the name of this room: The Long Room.

 

The bookshelves on both sides of the room were broken up into a series of alcoves. Marking the boundary of each alcove was the bust of a famous author on a tall pedestal. As a budding author, I couldn’t resist having my picture taken with one of them.

 

If you’re having a hard time telling which one is me, I’m the one with my feet on the ground.

Claire

* Book of Kells, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland:

https://www.tcd.ie/Library/manuscripts/book-of-kells.php

 

** Wikipedia, Book of Kells, Folio 32 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KellsFol032vChristEnthroned.jpg