Jack's Cache

My dad, Jack, was part of the Greatest Generation, aka the O.G. Antifa. 

Jack was drafted into the Army Air Corps in 1943. He was finally accepted after being denied a couple times over a minor medical issue.  He served in the 351st Bomb Group of the Mighty Eighth Army Air Force through the end of World War II. 

A dozen years ago I came into the possession of Jack's cache of letters home to his mother and his older sister. They've sat on my closet shelf, waiting for me to share them, and I decided now is the time. I hope that my activity on this blog project, Little Sister Resister, will diminish come January 20, 2021, and I can devote more time to this project.

One of my major regrets in life was not recording or writing down Jack's stories about being a ball-turret gunner on the belly of a B-17 over Germany. He didn't speak of his experiences for many years, and then a fountain of stories spilled forth. He died in 2002, and his stories died with him. But his letters home remain, and though he was not able to tell about his air attack missions in his letters, they give us a snapshot into the life of an airman. 

My idea for this blog is to share his actual letters, along with giving some context with regard to his and his family's life as well as to the war itself. 

We'll start with his letters in 1942, when 19-year-old Jack was working as a welder in the shipyards of Bremerton, Washington. From there, Jack will get his basic training at a few bases in the western United States before shipping overseas for combat. 

One note about the letters: the letters are still in their envelopes, and I've arranged them in chronological order according to their postmark. It may not always be in chronological order as to when he wrote them, but most likely in the order that my grandma and Auntie Bo would've received them. I'm transcribing every letter, as Jack's handwriting is really hard to read. I'll transcribe him with his spelling and punctuation. 

Thanks for taking this journey with me!  

May I introduce Jack's Cache. Here are his first letters home. 

“Deeds, Not Words”

“Deeds, Not Words” - Emmeline Pankhurst, British suffragette

100 years of votes for women!

Today is the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote in the United States. Yup. 144 years after the creation of the union, it was finally decided that women have a voice. 

This year is THE most momentous vote in our nation's history, and we must not squander the right for which our sisters were beaten, tortured, and jailed as they fought for us 100 years ago. This year is extra special because we have a historic ticket. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris!

It is imperative to get out the vote in these precarious days. COVID risks and the destruction of the post office add extra dimensions, but it is not impossible to get out the vote. Every citizen must act to help rid our country of the orange menace. I implore you to pledge not only to vote, but to do one thing that will help one another vote.

Here are some ideas.

• Contact your local elections officials and volunteer at the polls. I filled out my application today. Traditionally filled by retired folks, there will be fewer able to safely work the polling places. If you are able and willing, the election needs you! Search here for your local election office. My application was simple. Here is the Santa Barbara County election website. Please consider volunteering.

• Donate to help residents vote across the country. Black people are still disenfranchised in many areas. Stacey Abrams's group Fair Fight is helping to get out the vote in Georgia and other voter-suppressed areas. Other organizations fight for voter rights. Donate or volunteer to:
• Spread the Vote
• Brennon Center for Justice
• Let America Vote
• Common Cause

• Write postcards to encourage people in swing sates to vote. I took part in Tom Steyer's postcard campaign in 2018. Sign up at Postcards for Swing States or Postcards to Voters. (Note: I didn't completely vet these organizations, but I signed up for both! The New York Times did a piece on the Postcards to Voters group. Here is a piece from The Hill about Postcards for Swing States.)

• If you are not a writer, maybe phone banking is for you! You can volunteer for a specific candidate, or look for a general phone banking group, like:
• Swingleft.org
• Indivisible.org
• Joe Biden's campaign 

• Help people register! Volunteer with Rock the Vote or The League of Women Voters. Post information about registering to vote.

• Help people vote! Spread information about voting methods and polling places on social media. I learned today that polling places will be fewer in my county but open for four days, October 31-November 3! Spread the word about dropping off ballots at local elections offices rather than using the postal service. Get guidance on voting during this pandemic. Learn and share about BallotTrax, a tool that can track ballots! Here is California's BallotTrax. Provide rides to neighbors to the polls, to the post office, or to the elections office. 

Most of all, bring people along with you. Be enthusiastic and vocal about voting. 

“The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.” - Ida B. Wells, American suffragette

Let's on turn the light in the voting booth and light this mother up! 

Votes by women.....for women!

Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.

What, as they say, the actual fuck is going on? 

The President* of the United States, the most powerful man on the planet, went on TV to brag about his performance on a dementia screening, to not one, but two TV news reporters. 

Here he talking to Chris Wallace on FAUX News.

Here he is in the second one with FAUX News's on-air physician, Dr. Marc Siegel. (Full interview here)

Oh my god. pic.twitter.com/hP3h20Oxuc

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) July 23, 2020

I wrote about this screening, the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, or MoCA, right after his physical where the Whitewash House physcian, Dr. Ronny Jackson, administered the test. It's in my post, Thinking: The talking of the soul with itself. I had some concerns then about the valid administration of the screening.

And here we are, eighteen months later, and he is bragging about "acing" the test. Why? To somehow smear Joe Biden's cognitive abilities? Ummm.... 

It seems ridiculous to address this seriously, but at the risk of normalizing or legitimizing what he said, I feel it's my professional duty to clarify some things, and then I'll go on to addressing it non-seriously.

Again, this is a screening device to screen for cognitive decline. That's all it is. It is a 10-minute snapshot of a few cognitive abilities: 

• visuospatial (path making; drawing)
• naming (naming three common animals from line drawings)
• delayed recall (recalling 5 words after about 5 minute distracted delay)
• attention (immediately repeating 5 numbers in order; immediately repeating 3 numbers in reverse; indicating when a certain letter is heard in a list of letters; serial subtraction)
• language (repeating sentences exactly [10-12 words]; naming as many of words as possible that begin with a given letter of the alphabet in one minute) 
• abstraction (telling how two items are alike)
• orientation (date, day, place)

A normal score for a person with a high school education is ≥ 26/30. 

So, the lies/misrepresentations/confabulations/problems with SCROTUS's diatribe:

• In the interview, he says the examiner goes back to the memory question "Ten minutes, fifteen, twenty minutes later" (and later) "twenty, twenty-five minutes later" for the delayed recall. Nope, it's at most 5 minutes. The entire screening takes about 10 minutes. 

• He insisted that you get "extra points" for recalling the words in order. Nope. You don't get a score at all for the training portion (repeating the words immediately twice) and there are no bonus points. In fact, the instructions are to tell the patient, "It doesn’t matter in what order you say them."

• Not only are there no bonus points for recalling those five words in order, you can recall just one of them and still score in the "normal" range on the test. 

• He insisted "the last five questions are the hardest." Well, if you don't know the date or where you are, that may be true. And it's probably very true for him. 

• There aren't 35 questions. There are 30 points total, but the items aren't 1:1 points-wise.

It's a screening for cognitive dysfunction. It's not a memory test. It's not an intelligence test. It's not a general knowledge test. It's not the SAT. It's not a citizenship test. It's not a psychology test. It's not a test of fitness to perform the duties of president of the United States. All of those he would fail. 

And now, some hilarity to mock the buffoon that thinks that passing a test that a fifth grader could pass.

The absolutely brilliant, amazing, hilarious Sarah Cooper

The Lincoln Project continues their scathing ads and videos

pic.twitter.com/3kh81WYNTu

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) July 24, 2020

Stephen Colbert's brilliance shines:

And the memes!

As a professional using this instrument, I'm worried that its validity has been compromised with all of the publicity. I like the screener, but there are others to use until people forget about this one. But I doubt anybody will forget "Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV." (5 points)

GISH 2020

 For the past three years, I've participated in the annual GISH event. It's a week of wacky fun, creativity, caring, and charity. I've been lucky enough to land on an amazing team, led by team captain Sister Resister Anne. 

The week-long event challenges team members to create, make, bake, find, perform, ... all kinds of tasks.

Because the event is positive and full o' love, among the over 200 tasks there are several items that focus on social issues and are progressive in nature. Because politics is my thang, I was happy to undertake many of those items. I thought it fitting to share them here. 

Item #102. Give Sarah Cooper a run for her money lip-syncing Trump or any other politician you think deserves this presidential treatment.

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Last year, there was a challenge to create a PSA for stroke awareness using the tune for "Head and Shoulders Knees and Toes." So, in homage to that task, I chose the same tune for this year's song challenge. Plus the tune is easy. :-)

Item #105. Write and sing an original protest song about police brutality, and the racist foundations of the United States' criminal justice system. 

I can't sing, so this is way outside my comfort zone! But it's important, so I did it!

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This item challenged GISHers to re-create a vintage suffragette poster with a face from today:

Item #48.  This year marks the 100th Anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment in the United States. We've made a lot of progress since then, but women represent only 25% of the US Senate and 23% of the House of Representatives, so we still have a long way to go. Find a female candidate you support and update a women's suffrage poster so that instead of being about obtaining the right TO vote for women, it's about getting votes FOR women — specifically, your candidate. Post the vintage poster and your update on social media, tagging the candidate and @sheshouldrun. Then, submit both the original poster and your updated version as a side-by-side image with the link to your social media post. (Do not submit a screenshot of your post — we want your original artwork.) - Inspired by Jrosebud. #kamalaharris #kamalaforvp #SheShouldRun 

I was pretty proud of this. I sketched it free-hand in the waning minutes of the hunt. 

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Makin' us learn: 

Item #256. Civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis recently passed away. At his funeral, former President Obama read his eulogy, and Former Presidents Clinton and Bush also made remarks. Listen to all three memorial speeches, then write a single paragraph about commonalities between the three speeches.

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Our team was set to the task of doing a virtual demonstration:

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Speaking of social justice, I did my first-ever crayon drip painting!

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And we made a fundraiser for this year's cause. Please donate if you can! This cause works toward equitable justice for all. Check it out here. 

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I guess this one is political. As a Speech-Language Pathologist, this resonated with me. so I grabbed it. (FYI the video had to be no more than 14 seconds long)

Item # 121: Not that we have a strong opinion on the topic, but to be a casual English language grammar prescriptivist is to be complicit and prideful in systems that, by nature, devalue cultural and colloquial flexibility in the use of language (lookin' at you, AAVE) by maintaining that only those selective demographics who have dominated the academy, or been deemed valuable by the academy, have the license to create language to suit their communicative needs — Big Academia only affords the grace of words to the voices of a specific demographic (generally, in the West, the well-educated, affluent and predominantly white members of society). Perform a mic-dropping slam poem highlighting the value of eschewing prescriptivism and embracing dynamic, evolving forms and dialects of grammar. You may not USE any language variance that's currently in use (like AAVE) to do this item as it may be appropriative or racially or technically insensitive, depending on the speaker… instead, you must perform it in academic English. Hypocritical? Yup.

Thanks for coming along on my GISH journey!