LESSON OF THE SNOW FLAKE

 

I want to share with you the lesson of a snowflake. Individually it is the lightest, most delicate, fragile thing in the world. It takes over 22,000 snowflakes to add up to one pound snow. A cubic foot of snow can weigh over 62 pounds. But 10 inches of fluffy snow floating down to cover an acre of ground weighs over a ton. 

And if you keep piling up snowflakes for something over 18 million years -  which has happened in Greenland - you get rivers of ice. The largest island in the world is home to 53 glaciers.  Winter after winter, century after century, for perhaps one million years, the gentle, ethereal fresh snow compresses the older snow beneath it, until 50 feet below the surface it becomes solid ice, and 2 miles down it crushes the water molecules so their oxygen-hydrogen bonds lock together in long bands, making glacial ice sharp blue and hard enough to cut steel and crush human lives.

The fastest of Greenland's “tortoise rivers” , the Jacobshaven glacier begins 300 miles from the western coast, at a 50 mile arc of 11,000 foot high snow ridges, 42,471 square miles of compressed snow flakes, fed by 118 inches of new snowflakes in an average year. The base of this 2 mile thick ice machine is lubricated by a thin sheen of melt water against the bedrock, allowing the glacier to be squeezed like toothpaste from a tube, rushing 40 miles to the coast at 70 – 110 feet a day toward the 3 mile wide Jacobshaven Fjord.

As late as 1983 the ice did not stop when it reached the water. Marine biologist Richard Brown could write, “The tongue of ice grows into a long, floating slab, anchored only by the hinge of ice at its landward end. But the hinge becomes more and more precarious as the ice pushes farther out and the tides begin to work on it, up and down, twice a day. The cracks...soon become crevasses....at last... the deepest crevasse breaks through with a roar which echoes off the sides of the fjord like a mountain in labor. 

"The slab crashes off the face of the glacier, scattering seabirds as it goes. A surge of water, three feet high, runs ahead of it and batters its way along the walls of the fjord. The ice berg is launched.”

It is called “calving”, and the 36 mile long fjord is jammed with thousands of newly born bergs, big and small, that scrape against the edges and bottom of the inlet. With the arrival of autumn, the air atop the ice sheet “...comes rushing down the fjord in a hurricane wind....(and) the bergs begin to move...until they are drifting almost as fast as a man can walk....grinding, jostling past the little port of Jackobshaven (above)  and out into the sea at last.”

Each year western Greenland produces 25- 40,000 icebergs, averaging 5-11 million tons each. Sunlight melts the surface, while the colder sea water protects the body of the berg. The berg becomes unbalanced, top heavy and repeatedly rolls over, offering a fresh face for the sun to attack. The bottom of Baffin Bay is coated with gravel and rocks scrapped off the hidden mountains of Greenland and dropped from rolling bergs like pennies slipping through a hole in your pocket. A few hundred of these islands of fresh water ice in a salted sea make it through the Davis Strait and into the North Atlantic, to be shepherded south by the Labrador current.

The particular berg that is the subject of our story, has battled storms and seas that would have destroyed anything made by humans. But now, on a moonless night, the berg is approaching a border. The ocean has gone calm and placid. The air, at the very center of a high pressure area, has gone still as well, the pressure so high there is no fog. Close to the water surface a faint obscuring mist has gathered, held down by warmer air sent north from the gulf of Mexico.

Approximately 380 miles south-south east of Cape Race, Newfoundland, in a meandering, swirling collision, the cold southbound Labrador water overrides the northbound warmer - up to 68 degrees Fahrenheit warmer – Caribbean air, heated by the approaching Gulf Stream current. And then, out of the still dark, flickering lights appear over the horizon, and quickly grow brighter and steadier. An object is approaching. It is dwarfed by the 2 million remaining tons of the berg, 200 feet long and looming 140 feet above the water line, including perhaps 1,000 feet below the surface. 

A human witness, on board the approaching object says it resembles “the Rock of Gibraltar”. The human object was less than a thousand feet long, and sits just over 100 feet above the water. But is moving so quickly, pushing 52,000 tons of sea water aside as it plows through the water at 20 knots – 23 miles an hour -  in a most unnatural straight line, on a collision course with the berg..

Abruptly, the object begins to emit noises, first clanging and then shrieks. The tenor of its thrashing changes. At last it begins to swing away from the ice, slowly, as if distracted by a voice faintly heard. But it is not enough. The berg feels the shudder of contact. But the human forged metal is no match for the glacier ice, compacted over a thousand years by hundreds of millions of tons of compressing snowflakes. The metal bends ever so slightly. A chunk of ice snaps off the surface of the berg, and shatters on to the deck of the Mer Majesties' Royal Mail Ship Titanic.

“The iceberg rocks a little from the force of the impact, spins a little, and keeps on drifting southward, changed only by a smear of red and black paint along one of its sides.”  The Titanic stops not far from the collision, and begins to make new sounds, and shed small pieces of itself. Then, within four hours, the Titanic is swallowed by the sea.

At dawn the next morning, another, even smaller object, approaches the berg. She is the R.M.S. Carpathia, soon to be joined by other similar objects. And for a few days the berg is surrounded by small human made structures. On one of these is the Russian-East Asiatic Steam Ship Birma, First Officer Alfred Nielsen takes a photograph of the iceberg (above), one of only three confirmed and mutually supportive photographs of the iceberg with a red streak across her flank, and thus blamed for the loss of the R.M.S. Titanic. Then, one by one the ships move away. And for a time the berg and the detritus of the collision float together,  southward in a warming Labrador current.

Eventually, this berg crosses the border, “...a boundary between the cold, gray world of ice and seabirds and the warm blue one of flying fish and Sargasso weed. The sea on the other side is (41 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer, in a matter yards.”. As Richard Brown would later write, “The ice berg goes no further south than...300 miles north of Bermuda, and then it is nothing.”

The particular iceberg held responsible for sinking RMS Titanic, and drowning 1,500 human souls, was unusual. Of the 25,000 to 40,000 icebergs calved by the west Greenland glaciers each year, few make it into the North Atlantic. At least 1,000 icebergs crossed through the Davis Strait between 1909 and  1912. 

That number was not equaled again until 7 years later - 1929 -  which saw 1,300 North Atlantic icebergs. It was not 15 years later - 1945 -  that number was equaled again. But 22 year after that - 1972 -  saw 1,500, and just 10 years after that, in 1982,  the glaciers of western Greenland produced 1,300.  Just 2 years later, - in 1984 - there were 2,200 sited, 1,000 again one year later, and 1,900 12 years later - in 1997. 

The very next year - 1998 -  there were 1,300 icebergs. A decade later there were another 1,000 Atlantic icebergs and over 1,200 in 2009.  The glaciers of Greenland have been calving bergs at increasing rates. The iceberg that “sank the Titanic” was an early warning of what humans were doing to the planet we depend upon for our breathable air and drinkable water.

The Jacobshaven glacier has been in full retreat since 1850. And still we have refused to listen to its warnings.  Since 2003, the Greenland ice sheet has lost 10 billion tons of ice - each and every year. The Jacobshaven glacier has lost another 15 feet of thickness every year.

And since 2010 -  the ice river has retreated another 3 miles up the fjord.  Once back on land, there will be no more icebergs from the Jacobshaven glacier, only a flood of fresh water. No longer will the ocean have to wait while the icebergs melt before their fresh water dilutes it's surrounding salty liquid. 

It is a tipping point, as if the berg was getting ready to roll over for the last time. After that, things speed up.

It will be a moment even a United States Senator, holding a February snowball in his hand, will not be able to deny.  

The lesson of the snowflake is that small things eventually add up to very big things.  But, if you wait until the big thing is visible and obvious, it is usually too late to change course, to avoid the fatal collision.

- 30 -

Note: All quotes from "Voyage of the Iceberg", the story of the iceberg that sank the Titanic"

By Richard Brown.  1983. James Lorimer and Company, Toronto,  Canad

TILL THE COWS COME HOME

 

I admit that eventually we must all bow to the will of genetics, even if we aren’t cattle. And when you come up against a human family like the Smith’s of Glastonbury, Connecticut, any argument of nature verses nurture seems almost pointless. Zephaniah Hollister Smith graduated an ordained minister from Yale, but he gave it up because he did not believe in mixing prophets with profits. Allegedly he excommunicated his entire Methodist congregation, and they returned the favor. Swinging to the other extreme Zephaniah then became a financially successful lawyer. 

His wife, Hannah Hadassah Hickock Smith was a linguist, a mathematician and a poet -  all the more amazing an achievement since she lived in the second half of the 18th century when women were little more than chattel. The couple shared a fascination for astronomy, a passion for the abolition of slavery... and five girls.

 First there was Laurilla Aleroyia Smith, born in 1785, who painted portraits in her own studio just down Main Street from the family home at 1625 Main. . She also taught French in nearby Hartford, and taught both Art and French at Emma Willard's School in Troy, N.Y.

Then there was Hancy Zephina Smith, born in 1787. She was of a mechanical mind. She built her own boat, and invented a machine to shoe horses.  She was also a devout abolitionist. She died of whooping cough in 1871.  

Then there was Cyrinthia Scretuia Smith, born in 1788 with a green thumb. She raised fruit trees, grapes, strawberries, and grafted her own varieties of apple trees. In her free time she was also a scholar of Latin and Greek literature. But the real revolutionaries were the two youngest girls.

They told an amazing story about Julia Evelina Smith (born in 1792.) While trapped during a long stage trip with the Chancellor of Yale College and a professor, “Miss” Julia felt insulted when the two men began an animated conversation in French, ignoring her completely. After listening for several minutes, Julia spoke up, saying “Excusez-moi, mais je comprends le français.” Without an acknowledgement of her presence, the two men immediately shifted their discussion to Latin, whereupon Julia interrupted again; “Excuse mihi , EGO quoque narro Latin.” The intellectuals were appalled at the continued interruption and shifted to Greek, and Julia responded with “Και κατανοώ επίσης ελληνική". Finally the Chancellor spoke to the lady directly, demanding, “Who the devil are you!?”

She was a singular woman.  She taught Euclidian Geometry at Emma Willard's School for women during the 1820's. And Julia also spoke and wrote in Hebrew, and had been conducting her own study of both the Old and the New Testaments. 

You see, in December of 1843 many of Smith's neighbors had expected the world to end, and Julia taught herself ancient Hebrew and Greek so she could read the bible in it's original languages, so she could figure out for herself why doomsday had not decended.

The  youngest sister, Abby Adassah Smith (above. born in 1797) was the quietest of the five, and much to everyone’s surprise (including herself) was perhaps the best public speaker of all. It seems a pity to point out that none of men in the area seemed to have been bright enough to garner any of the ladies’ interests in marriage,  

It also seems a pity that of this entire family, all of them independently financially successful, intellectually powerful and culturally sophisticated, only the father, Zephaniah, was politically empowered. And when he died, on 1 February, 1836, the richest, best educated family in central Connecticut, was no longer allowed to cast a single vote in elections.  

This oddity lay simmering beneath the surface until November of 1873. By now most of the members of the Smith family had gone on to meet their maker - and probably correct him on few items. 

That left only Julia,  now aged 82, and Abby,  now aged 77, remaining to carry the Smith genetic code. 

It was then that the male officials of Glastonbury made the decision to raise the property tax assessment on the Smith farm (above)  by $100. The sisters would have no trouble meeting the obligation, but the increase bothered Abby, and she looked into it. 

What Abby Smith discovered was that in the entire town, only three properties had suffered the reassessment; the Smith farm, and the properties of two widows. Not a single male property owner had been reassessed. 

Abby was so incensed,  she wrote a speech, which she delivered at the next town meeting.  She said, “…here, where liberty is so highly extolled and glorified by every man... one half of the inhabitants…are ruled over by the other half...All we ask of the town, is not to rule over them as they rule over us, but to be on an equality with them.”

Well, the male citizens at the meeting responded to Abby's speech in the same way the Yale Chancellor and professor had responded to Julia. They ignored the little lady. So, the sisters decided more radical action was required. 

They publicly announced that until they received representation (the right to vote), they would no longer submit to any additional taxation. Oh, they paid their property taxes each year, and promptly, but they refused to pay the $100 reassessment.  

In response the tax collector, Mr. George C. Andrews, seized seven milk cows from the Smith farm. The bovines were almost pets of the Smith sisters -  named, Jessie, Daisy, Proxy, Minnie, Bessie, Whitey, and Lily. The cows were valued well beyond the $101.39 additional tax bill. So the determined sisters dispatched an agent to buy the beloved pets at auction, paying far in excess of the tax bill to save four of them. The remaining three were sold at auction, although I doubt they proved to be worth the price since none of the cows were willing to be milked unless Julia was present.

Meantime, the Springfield Massachusetts Republican newspaper reprinted Abby’s speech, and it was picked up and reprinted in newspapers nationwide. The story was even repeated in Europe. It was, wrote one newspaper, “A fit centennial celebration to the Boston Tea Party.”

In April Abby was denied time to speak again at the next town meeting. So she climbed on board a wagon (above) out side and delivered her remarks from there, this time heard about equally by men and women. When tax time came around again, the sisters still refused to pay the additional assessment. 

This time Mr. Andrews seized 15 acres of Smith pasture, worth about $2,000. And this time he moved the location of the auction at the last minute, so the sisters could not even buy back their own land. The valuable property was bought by a male neighbor for less than $80.  

In response the sisters sued Mr. Andrews in local court,  and they won. The court ordered the property (and the cows) returned to the sisters, and fined Mr. Andrews $10. The city appealed, and the case began the tortuous climb through the courts. In the midst of this trial, Julia married 86 year old Amos Parker of New Hampshire. She was the only one of the five sisters to ever marry.  I'm sure the city fathers of  Glastonbury were expecting the ladies would die before their case reached the state supreme Court, but the ladies had good genes, and they were still breathing in November of 1876, when the high court handed them a total victory. The city could either grant their right to vote or pay for the seized property.  The city finally accepted it had been beaten by two very smart lady spinsters and paid up, to avoid letting women suffrage.  

Julia wrote an account of their adventure, “Abby Smith and her Cows”, published in 1877. That made the sisters famous, and they spoke at suffragette meetings, until Julia’s (below, left) death in 1878.  

Abby (above, right)  followed her in 1886. But women still could not vote in Connecticut until the 19th Amendment to the National Constitution was officially passed, in August of 1920. The Smith family home was finally made a National Historical Landmark, but not until 1974. 

The story of  Julia and Abby Smith, and their cows, ought to be considered by members of the modern Republican Party. who would seek to deny citizens the right to directly influence their government. But along with that right comes the obligation to support the government, which wealthy conservatives currently also deny.  You can deny the connection between those two elements of democracy until the cows come home.  But, as these two brilliant women pointed out, both the right and the obligation are essential to any future of America.  You can advocate the destruction of the political system for only so long, because if you succeed in destroying it, you lose everything.

- 30 -

ORIGINAL SIN, Chapter Seven

Lee Atwater's infamous Willie Horton campaign ads got Geroge Herbert Walker Bush elected 43^rd President of the United States in November of 1988, winning 426 electoral votes over Micheal Dukasus's 111 electoral votes. However the popular vote was much closer, with Bush winning by only 8.5 million out of the 91 million cast. But it was enough to be spun as a landslide. Lee Atwater was rewarded by making him Republican National Chairman. He could now the stamp of his personality on the entire party. And he began doing that immediately.

Y'all don't quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger". By 1968, you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you...So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and...cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites....So, any way you look at it, race is coming on the back-burner.”

Lee Atwater

Atwater's first target was the new Democratic Speaker of the House, Tom Foley from the state of Washington. He had voted for the Voting Civil Rights Act of 1965 and Civil Rights Act of 1968, the bill making Martin Luther King's junior's birthday a federal holiday, and he help override President Reagan's veto of the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1987.

The very day Foley was sworn in as Speaker, the RNC released a memo written by Communications director Mark Goodin and Minority Whip Newt Gingrich. It was vintage Atwater, and was titled, “Tom Foley: Out of the Liberal Closet”. The memo compared Foley's voting record with that of Congressman Barney Frank, who was openly gay. Of course, as both men were Democrats, it would have been shocking if their voting records had been in conflict.

When challenged by the press Atwater insisted the memo was factually accurate”, but the the party leadership condemned the gay bashing of an old colleague, even if he was a Democrat. Senator Bob Dole called the the memo “garbage”, and the press corps refused to repeat is homophobic hints. Realizing Lee had gone too far, President Bush forced Atwater to fire Goodin. But as he had his entire life, Atwater gave ground grudgingly. 

“I’ve always thought running for office is a bunch of bullshit. Being in a office is even more bullshit. It really is bullshit,” he wrote. “I’m proud of the fact that I understand how much BS it is.”

Lee Atwater

Then on 5 March, 1990, Atwater collapsed at a fundraising breakfast and suffered a seizure. A CatScan discovered a grade 3 astrocytoma brain tumor. Despite aggressive treatment, including experimental radiation implants, the boy wonder was left paralyzed on his left side and in sever pain, with the cancer having spread. Still he would not resign as chairman of the RNC.

Soon afterward, Lee was visited by the ninety year old conservative Jesuit Priest Father John Hardon,  According to Hardon, “I introduced myself and then began the shortest instruction in the faith that I have ever given.” The instruction in Catholicism was, in total, about ten hours, over two days, provided to a very sick man. But Father Hardon also added, “every minute that I was in Lee’s room, there was someone from the Republican Party. So Lee was never left alone with me.” Hardon also said, “...it was very clear that he was in what I would call protective custody.” His keepers were, the Republican party, and one is left to wonder if they feared this conversion might be real, leading to even a semi-public confession.

Aware that he was dying, Lee Atwater began to write letters of apology to many of his victims, and others visited him in the Washington D.C. hospital where they gave him comfort by accepting his words. But he spent most of the last year of his life confined there.  But he did not resign from the RNC until January of 1991.  Father Hardin insists Lee converted to Catholicism, and was presented with a bible. Atwater died on March 29, 1991. He was 40 years old. However Lee Atwater's funeral service was held in a Protestant Church, and he was buried in a Protestant graveyard.

After Atwater's death, Bush White House Communications director Ed Rollins (above) told Mary Matalin, who ran the RNC for the year Atwater was in the hospital, how much comfort Lee had drawn from the bible he received from Father Hardon's organization. But Matalin responded, “Ed, when they were cleaning up his things afterwards, the bible was still wrapped in cellophane and had never been taken out of the package.”

Since his own death, Father Hardin, is being groomed for sainthood, despite his being disciplined for allowing a priest who molested children being given access to even more children. For that moral failure the Jesuits forbid Hardon from teaching at any Jesuit institutions. Father Hardon referred to this punishment as his “white martyrdom.”

Almost every acolyte of Lee Atwater moved on to support Donald Trump in all three of his runs for President. Roger Stone (above, center), who learned hatred and manipulation at Atwater's feet, described his teacher this way, " “We both knew he believed in nothing....I had the feeling that he sold his soul to the devil, and the devil took it."  Another student, Tucker Eskew said that after Lee, "Resentment became the future of the Republican Party."

And whatever damage that Trump does to the American political and moral soul, should be laid at the cold dead feet of Lee Atwater and those who invited him to enter their house.

- 30 -