Sri Lanka

The horrific attacks on hundreds of churchgoers this Easter Sunday in Sri Lanka has prompted some much-needed examination of the persecution of Christian minorities around the world, as well as some timely self-reflection on the Left's relative quiescence -- if not silence -- on their plight as a human rights issue. Instead of playing into narratives that exaggerate the reach and ideological coherence of the threat of "global jihadism," the New York Times ran a thoughtful piece Sunday that framed these attacks within the context of threats to religious minorities in the region generally, and called attention to the parallels between the violence Christians face and the oppression of other religious groups.

Across South and Southeast Asia, the piece argues, religious minorities face a shared threat in the form of rising ethnic nationalism, chauvinism, and majoritarianism from the dominant religious community in each state. Thus, a Christian living under Hindutva ideology in Modi's India or the official doctrines of political Islam in Indonesia or Bangladesh has as much in common with a Muslim in today's Buddhist-dominated Burma or the Han ethno-state of contemporary China as they do with their co-religionists in Christian-majority countries. It is a point, of course, that could be extended to the whole world.

This is Also Just to Say

I had a box of Ritz I wanted kept.

Upon a morn in Seoul I found it torn.

Who did this crime while I and England slept?

My sister - she had left the crumbs forlorn;

With not a note - unlike in Williams’ poem.

I gathered up the final bag, with grief.

Our mother asked if I would bear it home.

A quote from Wordsworth came to my relief.

I thought that yes, somehow I’ll have to find

Some joy in what remains – and never mind

That 'strength' - not joy - I learned - was the true line

(I looked it up); the sense still seems quite fine.

And as with crackers, so with trips and time

All things must end - and world itself, some say

By entropy or chewing up divine

Will pass or whither like the state - away.
Perhaps the ancient oracles were right.
Such ends come just like a 'thief in the night'.

Dr. Death: A Review

As we've discussed before on this blog, I have a doctor fantasy. And it doesn't seem to be going away either, no matter how hard I try to convince myself of its patent absurdity. I keep hoping that if I make fun of myself enough for my own implausible new-found aspiration, I will stamp it out, but it actually seems to thrive under ridicule, like a flower soaking up rain and sunshine. After all, it is precisely because it is ridiculous and unlikely that it exerts its inexorable charm.

The process goes something like this. My brain -- plus everyone I know -- tells me: "Josh, never in 29 years of living have you displayed the slightest aptitude, interest, passion for, or knowledge of the field of medicine." True. And I have not exactly gained any of those things either, since this perverse fancy suddenly blossomed within me last year. So why does it appeal?

Burnt-Out Cases

Back in January, there was a Buzzfeed article about millennials being the "burn-out generation" that everyone read. It discussed, among other now-famous things, the difficulty most millennials seem to face in learning how to "adult." You know, things like paying taxes, cleaning up after oneself, returning emails, and the other mundane tasks that are inescapable in life.

Like every other member of the vast totality of internet users that one means by "everyone," I found the article independently - through browsing. And then I became convinced that it had been written just for me. Yes! This is so my life! I thought. I too am burnt out - burnt to ash! Later that day someone else in the office shared the article around. "This is so my life," she said. Within a week or so, I was hearing it dissected on a podcast. So it goes.

Miller, Steinbeck, and Immigration Enforcement

This past week began with Trump announcing that he is going to terminate humanitarian aid to Central America, and it ended with the largest single workplace raid on undocumented workers in a decade -- awakening shades of the Postville raids.

In this as in other ghastly situations we face as a nation, we are often too quick to assume they are unprecedented, and that the writers of the past will have little direct light to shed upon them. I have been reading these past two weeks, however, two works by our Great American Authors that provide more insight than one might expect on our present historical moment. 

Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge (1955) and Steinbeck's The Winter of Our Discontent (1960) are both products of the American mid-century; other than that, they would seem at first glance to have little in common, and to belong to very different milieux. Miller's play is set among longshoremen on the New York docks and depicts the consequences of an incestuous obsession within a working-class Italian family in Brooklyn. Steinbeck's novel -- his last -- describes the social rise and moral decline of a Yankee WASP living in Long Island.