Thought That Came Unbidden

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The District of Columbia celebrated Emancipation Day yesterday marking the 143rd anniversary of the day slaves in Washington were freed by President Lincoln, a day that came nearly nine months before Lincoln issued the much more well-known Empancipation Proclamation. But how well-known is this document really?

If you’re from the U.S. and you’re like me, you probably have a vague recollection of studying the U.S. Civil War in junior high or in high school. You’ve got a vague idea that “Lincoln freed the slaves.” If you’re like me, you’d be wrong.

Depending upon who you ask, the Empancipation Proclamation is either Lincoln’s most famous or second most famous document, and while most people have a vague idea of what it did, they don’t know the truth. See, the dirty little secret about this piece of American history is that Lincoln didn’t really free “the slaves.” The Emancipation Proclamation only applied to slaves held in rebellious states.

Yes, you read that right: only slaves held in states that were part of the Confederacy, which means if you were a slave in say Massachusetts or Maryland your situation didn’t change despite Mr. Lincoln’s grand, sweeping, historically mis-remembered gesture.

So what’s the point of all these words? I guess I’m just wary of taking things — even things that are 142 years old — at face value in these days of media scandals and constant spin.

It’s not enough any more to cry “question authority.” No, it’s rapidly becoming “question everything.”

Learn more:
Text and analysis of the Emancipation Proclamation

Two very separate and distinct trains of thought today.

Lunch time…

I walked over to the university to have lunch with my aunt today. The weather was warm enough, mid-60sF, to be luxurious after a weird, funky winter. More importantly, though, the sun was out, warming concrete, grass, and flesh alike with its rays.

The student center has a bunch of pic-nic tables, the kind where the benches are attached to the square table at the base, out in front and there’s enough lawn that, yes, there were four guys in a big, loose circle throwing a Frisbee back and forth. Guys were running around in shorts and flip-flops and girls were showing a lot more skin than we’ve seen in a while in this latitude.

And there she was, lying on a bench, her head propped on her bag, sunglasses definitively covering her eyes, a girl I suddenly wanted to kiss.

I have no idea who she is; I don’t know her name, or anything else about her other than what I perceived in a glance, but there was something in the way she lay there, in the stillness of her, in the way she gave herself up to the sun, in way the gap between the bottom of her shirt and the edge of her jeans, low across her hips, and the wide, brown-leather belt she wore looked that made me want to be the one to kiss that soft skin, to rub my cheek against her belly, to make her blind with pleasure.

She wasn’t particularly beautiful or striking but there was something compelling about her.

It’s not as if hers is the first 20-something slice of firm belly I’ve ever seen. It’s not as if she was attainable even if I were in a position to attain her. So why her? Why at that moment that reaction?

Hours later, at the grocery store…

Dryer sheets. They’re a luxury item, right? Maslow’s hierarchy of needs never mentions dryer sheets. Nevertheless, I’m standing in line for them in the midst of late-afternoon shoppers, largely retired couples in which most of the wives look none too happy about having a companion on the weekly shopping trip.

The woman in front of me is buying her groceries with WIC vouchers and the trainee cashier is having issues ringing up a package of sliced cheese. Since WIC can only be used for certain food items you have to tell the cashier up front that you’ll be using vouchers even before any one of your items is rung up, and the deus in machina kept telling the cashier that this particular item was not allowed.

And as I stood there with my one item, waiting, tired and run down from a long, ridiculous week at work all I could think was “I buy that cheese every week.” The woman checking out didn’t seem too perturbed about not being able to get the cheese, and I could have easily bought it for her — after all, if I have the money for dryer sheets I have the money for cheese, even if it’s someone else’s cheese, right?

But then I thought that maybe even the offer wouldn’t be welcomed. So what is it that separates charity from condescension? The motivation of the gesturer? The need of the person receiving the gesture?

When she was done I bought my dryer sheets and went home still without answers to any of the day’s questions.

Engineers should be forced to use every single thing they design in a real world setting for at least 6 weeks before a product is put on the market. Take small home appliances, for example.

We got a new coffee maker at work this week, mostly because our old one was not only a POS but also because it was broken enough to warrant replacing. The new coffee maker is nice, even if I haven’t figured out how it only gets 6 cups of brewed coffee out of 12 cups of water (WTF?) but it’s got a couple of flaws.

First off, the power cord is only four feet long. Normally four feet would be enough but not in the kitchen at work where most of the outlets are retrofit. Secondly, the plug itself, the actual physical piece that goes into the socket, sticks out from the outlet about two inches (5.08cm). This thing is freaking huge.

What bugs me is that this appliance’s design assumes you won’t have to put a piece of furniture in front of an outlet, that you’ll have scads and loads of space to devote just to the electrical feeding of this one appliance. I give us maybe a month before we’ve broken one of the prongs off the plug because someone’s run into it and pulled it sideways out of the wall or it’s been banged by the refrigerator door.

Now, why wouldn’t you design every single appliance with flat plug that hugs the wall thereby making easier for real people in less than perfect homes to actually use the damn appliances?

Yes, I know, the company doesn’t care if you buy the product and take it straight to the trashcan without ever opening the box; they just want your money. But it makes me wonder, why do we call it “common” sense, again?

Whether you want to call it the Three-Fold Law or karma, I firmly believe that there are consequences for everything you do. Kindness and generosity tend to beget good fortune. The reverse, however, doesn’t always seem to be true; often, the bastards, the people who step on others and commit random acts of assholishness, seem to get ahead. See, the problem with the three-fold law or with karma is that often you don’t get to watch the person who did you wrong get his or her just desserts.

In today’s paper there was an article about a woman I know personally. I don’t have much fondness for her not only because she cheated me out of payment for my professional services and had the audacity to try to make me feel guilty for calling her on it but also because she treated me incredibly badly at a time when she knew I was personally and professionally vulnerable. The article in today’s paper was about a play this woman has written that is being staged here in DC. It’s a play about her recovery from what is described in the article as a “vicious assault” and how it derailed her life and career for at least five years.

Cook and serve karma. Not quite instant payback but it’s not often you get to see someone’s shitty behavior boomerang on them.

The thing of it is, I don’t feel better. It seems like too much, like too big a price based on just the things she did to me.

On the other hand, despite her huge “community of friends” and all the people who helped her recover from her ordeal, I doubt I’m the only person she ever fucked over.

So given that…why don’t I feel better knowing that sometimes, every now and then, you do get to see the going around coming around?