#RazomforUkraine Volunteer Sergiy Blednov

 

Sergiy Blednov restocking 

the combat medical kit assembly line

Sergiy Blednov was one of the first people I met at #RazomforUkraine when I started volunteering in March.  I noticed him right away because he was carrying heavy boxes of supplies to refill the assembly line where we made combat medical kits for soldiers and larger backpacks for medics. 

During the first days I volunteered I was part of a group that was unwrapping thousands of tourniquets for the assembly line. 

The assembly line at #RazomforUkraine. 

To the right in the foreground is Olena Blyednova, Sergiy's wife.

On the third Saturday I worked, there were more than 20 volunteers and the boxes on the three assembly lines emptied fast. I had learned where most things were stored over the previous two weeks. When Sergiy went to another part of the warehouse, I started refilling boxes.  When Sergiy came back, he saw me filling a box and said, "You are taking my job."

I said, "No, I am Sergiy two. Ya Sergiy Dva!"

He caught the joke right tossed it back, "Sergiy two, or Sergiy too?"  

"Takosh i dva!" I said getting near the limits of my ability to speak Ukrainian, "too and two."

From then on Sergiy and I both filled boxes.  And made many jokes.   

Sergiy and his wife and daughter emigrated to America in 2016.  His son followed in 2019. Before coming to America Sergiy worked in aircraft manufacturing in Kharkiv.  He later worked in software and programming. He now works for a software company based in Arizona which allows him to volunteer with Razom in the morning then go to work in the afternoon when the day begins in California.  

In three weeks I hope to return to volunteering with Razom. Sadly, it seems volunteers will still be needed to make medical kits for Ukraine. 

Many Dimensions of Parenting in a Podcast and in my Life

One of my sons is in a rehab program in Minneapolis. The arrangements were made by one of my daughters who has been caring for him since last August.  Before that another daughter was taking him in at her house sometimes for weeks at a time trying to help him find work and to live independently.

Having six kids, three adopted and three the other way, is complicated.  I began the journey of parenting confident that nature and nurture were about 50/50 influences in a child's life. Over the past 30 years, I came to believe children pop out about 90 percent who they are. Parents, siblings, environment and passing comets are the other 10 percent.  

In a recent episode of her podcast "Honestly," soon-to-be-first-time-parent Bari Weiss assembled a panel of authors who recently published very different books on parenting.  I did not agree with everything they said, but I did not disagree with everything they said--which is my default setting with modern parenting experts.  Here is the panel:

I especially liked Doucleff and the whole idea of a village raising kids. It's a great discussion.  Here's a link or you can subscribe to Honestly wherever you get podcasts. 

Unlike many parents I know, I went into parenting knowing I would get a lot wrong. But the compensation for the over-confidence I started with has been how much the six kids who call me Dad have helped each other (and helped me) through difficult periods of life.  

Okay. Maybe the nature/nurture split is 80/20.

Science Diplomacy Conference in Paris at La Maison de la Chimie

 

Maison de la Chimie, Paris

On June 13 and 14, I attended a conference on science and diplomacy in Paris at the Maison de la Chimie.  The two-day conference had been organized long before Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24.  The title of the conference:

Diplomatic Studies of Science: The Interplay of Science, Technology, and International Affairs after the Second World War

Most of the conference was the unchanged from its planned format in 2020, but the public panel on the first evening was about how governments and international scientific organizations in most of the world acted within 48 hours to exclude Russian researchers from international collaboration.  

The six panelists had a variety of views about what could be done and could not be done now that Russia invaded a neighbor.  One of the panelists, Joachim Hornegger, a university president in Germany, can help Ukrainian students at his school, but not Russian students. He said many of the Russian students say they are against the war and do not want to return to Russia, but by law he cannot provide any assistance.

John Krige, a professor emeritus at Georgia Institute of Technology and author of ten books on science diplomacy, said Russia was completely in the wrong to invade Ukraine and even the issue of collaborating with individual scientists who say they are against the war is difficult: support for Putin among Russians in science and technology increased after Putin seized Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine in 2014.  Other Russians in science and technology emigrated after the seizure of Crimea.

The conference was part of an annual series since 1998 by the Science History Institute of Philadelphia called the Gordon Cain Conference.  I worked at the Institute from 2002-2015 so I attended several of the Cain conferences. Some of them were among the best history of science presentations I have ever heard. I am going to write separately about a few of these conferences. I will also write more about other participants I met and talks I heard at this year's conference.

In two weeks I hope to be in Warsaw, Poland, volunteering at the main train station to help feed the hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  Since March I have been volunteering with #RazomforUkraine in New Jersey making combat first aid kits for the Ukrainian Army.  Going to this conference and hearing how sanctions affect research and policy around the world gave me another dimension of how the Russian invasion of Ukraine is causing suffering everywhere. 

Civil Rights Baby: My Story of Race, Sports, and Breaking Barriers in American Journalism by Nita Wiggins. Book 21 of 2022

Civil Rights Baby: My Story of Race, Sports, and 

Breaking Barriers in American Journalism by Nita Wiggins

Nita Wiggins was born in Georgia just at the time People of Color in America became truly equal under the law--the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Her book Civil Rights Baby is the story of her life in an America that took a big step closer to fulfilling the promise of the Declaration of Independence of equality for all. 

Throughout her childhood, Nita is an earnest high-achieving student with a goal of becoming a journalist, specifically reporting on sports in Dallas and about the Dallas Cowboys.  Her path to Dallas through Georgia and West Virginia was not easy, but Wiggins tells a tale of achievement and growth, until her dream is realized in 1999 and she arrives at KDFW in Dallas--a reporter and weekend anchor covering the Dallas Cowboys.

At this point in the book, the trouble begins and the villains become vivid.  The latter half of the book is her fight against bosses and colleagues who undermine her and throw obstacles in her path.  

But in the end, her story takes a turn that I could not imagine in an American TV sports reporter. As part of her work in Dallas, she covers Texas-native Lance Armstrong during the years he dominated the Tour de France. Wiggins falls in love with France and Paris and becomes proficient in French. When KDFW ends her contract, Wiggins went to Paris, applied for and landed a job as a professor of journalism at  l'Ecole Superieure de Journalisme de Paris.

Since 2009 she has been teaching journalism in Paris and doing other consulting work.

The book is full of stories of her interviewing luminaries of the sporting world, including Muhammed Ali, Evander Holyfield, stars of Dallas Cowboys from her era and from the past, some of the greats of NASCAR, and many others.  

Early in her career, Wiggins interviewed Rosa Parks. The book ends with a lovely play on words that a city needs parks to be peaceful. Paris has enough parks, Wiggins says, Dallas does not have enough: "Dallas also need Parks--enough people with the tenacity to change the system as Rosa Parks had done." 

---------

Two previous posts about meeting Nita at my favorite bookstore in Paris, the Red Wheelbarrow,  and talking NASCAR at lunch.

First twenty books of 2022:

Lecture's on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

Ukrainian in Paris Talks About Her Family

 

I walked around a corner onto Boulevard St. Germain and saw a sign saying that the little park behind the fence had been part of a refugee for Ukrainians since 1937.  The official name is Square Tarass Chevtchenko (see below) it is also called "L'angle" or "the corner." 

The sign on fence (above) says

The corner of Blvd. Saint-Germain and and rue des Saints-Peres is known by its proximite to the Greco-Catholic Ukrainian cathedral and Tarass Chevtchenko Square has become since the second half of the 20th Century a place of important ,meetings in the immigration of Ukrainians to France. Dispossessed of the rights, their identities, their land by foreign powers, the Ukrainians emigrated to France in dozens of thousands where their work has created and incontestable heritage of their social, cultural, economic and political history.

Inside the park, I talked to a woman with her son waiting to go into the Church next door.  She told me that she had moved to France more than a decade ago with her son. She was from Bucha. Two months ago she was able to get her mother to Paris, but her father is still in Bucha.  She is hoping to get her father out of Ukraine. I am not using her name because she wants to remain anonymous for the safety of her father.

Statue of Tarass Chevtchenko

Entrance of the Cathedral

-----------------

Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko (Ukrainian: Тарас Григорович Шевченко; 9 March 1814 – 10 March 1861), also known as Kobzar Taras, or simply Kobzar (a kobzar is a bard in Ukrainian culture), was a Ukrainian poet, writer, artist, public and political figure, folklorist and ethnographer. His literary heritage is regarded to be the foundation of modern Ukrainian literature and, to a large extent, the modern Ukrainian language though it is different from the language of his poems. Shevchenko is also known for his many masterpieces as a painter and an illustrator.

He was a fellow of the Imperial Academy of Arts. Though he had never been the member of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, in 1847 Shevchenko was politically convicted for explicitly promoting the independence of Ukraine, writing poems in the Ukrainian language, and ridiculing members of the Russian Imperial House. Contrary to the members of the society who did not understand that their activity led to the idea of the independent Ukraine, according to the secret police, he was the champion of independence.

Rome-ing The World, from Kansas, to Iraq, to Kosovo, to the Eternal City

 

Melanie Sanders Meier

The last time I saw Melanie Sanders Meier in person was in 2009 when we were both deployed to Camp Adder, Iraq.  She was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Kansas Army National Guard and was working as an Inspector General on the sprawling air base in southern Iraq.  

This morning we had coffee together in Trastavere, Rome, where she has been a college student since 2015. She messaged me on Facebook on yesterday to say she lived in Rome. It turned out to be not far from where I was staying.  

I knew that after she returned from Iraq (her second deployment) she ran for the Kansas state legislature where she served until 2014.  She then left politics and deployed again, this time to the staff of K4, the peacekeeping force in Kosovo.  She was assigned to be second assistant to the commander who was Italian. In fact, all of the twenty people working in her section were Italian except her.  She loved working with the Italian command staff.

At the end of the deployment, she found that she could use the GI Bill benefits she earned from post-9/11 deployments to go to college in Trastevere.  With the housing benefit from the GI Bill and low tuition, she was able to live comfortably in Rome. Next month she will finally complete the communication degree she has been working on since 2015 at the American University in Rome, and in no rush to finish.  

It will be a bachelors degree which she can add to another bachelors degree and two masters degrees. Melanie attended the Command and General Staff College and completed a masters degree in Strategic Studies at the US Army War College in 2015. She worked on the courses at night in Kosovo. 

She may stay in Rome. Melanie has considered Tunisia among possible places to live; she has never lived in Africa. We talked about Spain as a place many American and British expats live. America is not on the list of places where she wants to live. 

Melanie plans to travel Europe after graduation.  It's what college kids do.......

Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt: Book 20 of 2022

This book is on my list because it was the subject of the Virtual Reading Group at the Hannah Arendt Center for politics and Humanities at Bard College.  I had tried reading Kant's philosophy and made the 200-year-old joke, "I just Kant......."

But Hannah Arendt writing about Kant is a lot more interesting, at least to me, than the writings of the reclusive German philosopher himself.  This book is a sort of stand in for what should have been Book 3 of The Life of the Mind, which the VRG read earlier this year. 

Arendt wrote Book 1, Thinking, and Book 2, Willing, in the years preceding her death on Thursday, 4 December 1975. On the preceding Sunday, 30 November, she put a sheet of paper in her typewriter and wrote Judging. She also wrote two epigraphs.  

The Life of the Mind was published posthumously in 1977. Since her death, Arendt scholars have wondered what would be in the final book.  Judging was clearly very important to Arendt, especially in the context of politics.  I would love to have read Book 3. The things she wrote about judging were lucid and delightful.  In a 1971 lecture she discussed the difference between thinking and judging: 

The faculty of judging particulars (as Kant discovered it), the ability to say, "this is wrong," "this is beautiful," etc.,is not the same as the faculty of thinking. Thinking deals with invisibles, with representations of things that are absent; judging always concerns particulars and things close at hand. But the two are interrelated in a way similar to the way consciousness and conscience are interconnected.  If thinking, the two-in-one soundless dialogue, actualizes the difference within our identity as given in consciousness and thereby results in conscience as its by-product, then judging, the by-product of the liberating effect of thinking, realizes thinking, makes it manifest in the world of appearances, where I am never alone and always much too busy to be able to think.  the manifestation of the wind of thought is no knowledge; it is the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly. And indeed this may prevent catastrophes, at least for myself, in the rare moments when the chips are down.

The third book of The Life of the Mind would have been brilliant.

First nineteen books of 2022:

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen