Wyzga On Words

What We Will Miss With The Demise Of Written Letters. UVA Captures The Civil War Online.

I was going through a cardboard box the other day. It's one of many on the top shelf of a closet in my home.  It holds written notes and letters that date back 40 years.  Opening envelopes, visiting places and people, and reading long departed handwriting is more than a comfort.  The written word sets a moment in time.  I am reminded of who I was when, what I thought was important, who colored my life, and so on.

On February 20 2011, my friend and colleague Stephanie West Allen blogged about the importance of letter writing: Notes and letters - Long may they live!

She followed up that post with another on April 11, 2011, Writing Letters to the Future.

Ours are not frivolous gestures.  Or a nod to a quaint notion.  I wonder who will recall us, say 150 years from now just as we are able to recall the lives of those who lived life during the Civil War. 

Life During Wartime recounts the efforts of

"A team at U.Va.'s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library has been posting on "150 Years Ago Today," an online blog started in 2009 that features transcribed Civil War letters and diaries. Now that the nation is in the midst of the Civil War sesquicentennial, which runs until 2015, there's renewed interest in the bloody conflict. And reading the words of the participants themselves provides a new, more intimate level of understanding.

Accessible from the Special Collections home page and fully searchable by name or date, the blog features correspondence by such Confederate notables as Robert E. Lee and Gen. Elisha F. "Bull" Paxton, who briefly commanded the Stonewall Brigade. But it also includes the words of the everyday people who shouldered muskets on the battlefield, suffered deprivations on the homefront and struggled to grasp the equality promised them in the Declaration of Independence. By posting these primary source documents online, the Special Collections Library is presenting the war's daily triumphs and tragedies to the world.

This enormous project started fairly simply. "Twelve years ago, Mary Roy Edwards volunteered to start transcribing our Civil War letters and diaries," says Ann Southwell (Grad '73), a Special Collections' manuscript cataloger who heads the effort. "After a while we decided we should put them up on a blog. Then we got the idea that we could do the entire war day by day." Edwards, the wife of former U.Va. architecture professor Charles R. Edwards, eventually transliterated more than 3,000 pages from the items at Special Collections. Another volunteer, John P. Mann IV, has been diligently working on letters written by Col. Edward T. Warren of the 10th Virginia Infantry. Southwell herself works on the project every evening after work."

As you are drawn into the entries that recount the lives of those who lived life during wartime, one thing is striking: not much has changed when we go to war.  What matters most is still faith, family, friends, and the girls we left behind.

My hope is that as more of us read about the terrors and losses of war, we may shed some of our "rock logic' that makes Us right and Them wrong. Perhaps we can adopt a more fluid frame of mind that allows for more commonality, understanding and grace under fire.

The article reports on the interest generated in other countries:

"Nonetheless, the blog is attracting attention—it's received more than 20,000 hits as of early May. "We're getting a lot of hits from people in Russia, Ukraine and India," says Southwell. "I hope they're not using these letters to learn English!"" 

I hope we and they are using the letters to learn peace in our time.

 

Punishing Protest: What Is Happening To Confront Non-Violent Civil Disobedience?

   

For those who are considering taking part in non-violent protest, eschew protest, defend protestors, and all the rest of us who live in these United States, if you missed this eye-opening discussion click on the title following to listen to the audio of the one-hour discussion hosted by ORION Magazine:

Punishing Protest: Patrick Shea and Heidi Boghosian Discuss Law and Civil Disobedience

February 23, 2012

Summary: What is the justice system for? Activists from the Occupy movement to climate justice camps are regularly made examples of by courts while bank and oil company executives avoid prosecution for real crimes. During Orion's latest live web event, Patrick Shea, a lawyer who defended climate justice activist Tim DeChristopher (see "What Love Looks Like" in the January/February 2012 issue of Orion), and Heidi Boghosian, director of the National Lawyers Guild, discussed what activists engaging in nonviolent protest can expect from the justice system.

Speaking The Truth Is A Revolutionary Act. What Is The Truth?

 

Ahead of me on the freeway is a beater of a car with a bumper sticker: "In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act."

I should know the source but I am forced to Google it.  Of course!  George Orwell. 

A slightly different version comes up: “During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.”  George Orwell

I am curious about the differences between the two quotes.  Language should be neither lax nor sloppy but precise.  On the one hand the quote refers to a singular time of universal deceit; and on the other it refers to many times.  Are we then encouraged to tell the truth once?  As in pick your battles carefully?  Or are we being prepared that there will be multiple occasions of universal deceit for which we must be prepared to speak up?

Looking around it appears that universal deceit is universal time after time.

And then there is the difference between telling the truth "is" versus "becomes" a revolutionary act. What makes telling the truth a revolutionary act?  If it is not a revolutionary act to begin with, how does it become one?  What brings it to life?  What is the genesis?

Finally, what truth is being told?

This sounds like a discussion question from law school when a professor asked, "What is justice?"  Lawyers, among others, often plead for justice for their clients.  Is it the same for both? 

I don't have the answers.  I don't even have all the questions.  I'm just saying that if we are to pay attention to what we want and ask for, what is it we want?  How do we define it?  How will we know it when we see it? 

Back to Orwell who is credited with the quote in his book, Nineteen Eighty-Four.  1984 - it seems quaint. 

What has changed in the several decades?  Is Orwell still relevant?  Is truth?  What about the revolutionary act of telling the truth? 

Paul McMullan, a former deputy features editor at Rupert Murdoch's now-defunct News of the World tabloid, testifying at a judicial inquiry into cell-phone hacking claimed, “Phone hacking is a perfectly acceptable tool, given the sacrifices we make, if all we’re trying to do is get to the truth,” Mr. McMullan said, asking whether “we really want to live in a world where the only people who can do the hacking are MI5 and MI6.”

No, he said, we do not."

According to McMullan, Julian Assange, and a host of other sources telling the truth is not as simple as a bumper sticker might make it appear; although it made me think.  I wonder if everything is fair game now.

Be Careful What You Say, Where You Say It , and How You Say It.

Federal prosecutors have their legal knickers in a knot over a 79-year-old retired chemistry professor who spends part of his day standing outside a United States Courthouse in Manhattan, holding a "Jury Info" sign and handing out brochures to passers-by.  What could he be fomenting that federal prosecutors would indict him for jury tampering?

Benjamin Weiser writing in the NYTimes, "Brief Details Jury Nullification Against Julian Hecklin," says there are two sides to the story. 

What's "jury nullification"?  Excerpt:

"...jury nullification, the controversial view that if jurors disagree with a law, they may ignore their oaths to follow it and may acquit a defendant who violated it."

On the one hand federal prosecutors believe that Mr. Hecklin has violating the law against jury tampering by handing out brochures on the subject to folks who pass by the courthouse, some of whom might be jurors or prospective jurors.  Here's their argument.  Excerpt.

"But now prosecutors are offering their first detailed explanation for why they charged Mr. Heicklen, arguing in a brief that his “advocacy of jury nullification, directed as it is to jurors, would be both criminal and without Constitutional protections no matter where it occurred.”

“His speech is not protected by the First Amendment,” prosecutors wrote.

“No legal system could long survive,” they added, “if it gave every individual the option of disregarding with impunity any law which by his personal standard was judged morally untenable.”"

The defense claims that Mr. Hecklin is exercising his First Amendment rights of free speech.  Excerpt.

"Christopher Dunn, associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said: “The government is dangerously wrong in claiming it can criminalize sidewalk advocacy supporting jury nullification. Other than the extremely limited situations in which someone seeks to influence a known juror in a case, jury nullification advocacy is squarely protected by the First Amendment.”"

 Here's where it gets sticky.  Apparently there were those who saw enough of a threat in Mr. Hecklin and his pamphleting that he was targeted by an undercover.  Excerpt.

"Lawyers assisting him (officially, he is acting as his own lawyer) wrote in a motion to dismiss that prosecutors were seeking “to imprison a man for disseminating a lawful message about a subject in which he has an honest and deeply held belief.”

The lawyers, Sabrina Shroff and Steven M. Statsinger, said the prosecution of Mr. Heicklen would only draw attention to the nullification issue and would “surely convert more to the cause than poor Mr. Heicklen ever could on his own.”

But a prosecutor, Rebecca Mermelstein, wrote in the government brief that Mr. Heicklen’s courthouse appearances, his “Jury Info” sign, his writings, and statements he made to an undercover agent posing as a passer-by showed his “intent to target prospective jurors in particular.”

“I’m not telling you to find anybody not guilty,” she quoted Mr. Heicklen telling the agent in a secretly recorded conversation.

“But,” he added, “if there is a law you think is wrong then you should do that.”"

What do you think?  Old crank with too much time on his hands?  Defender of our freedoms?  What about all the so-called "truths" that are being spewed by the media as election campaigns are ratcheting up to be some of the most base, mean-spirited and misleading on record?  How do we know what is truth and what is fiction?  And all this in the shadow of barricades being erected in Tahir Square - a world away in so many ways.

My position is to let people decide for themselves.  They do anyway.