Decatur, IL

Greenfell Bike Trail

65:33 run + 2:30 kick

It was a long, cold winter. We had a temporary pause in work travel. My trip schedule for this year is smaller, so there will be fewer opportunities to run and to write. I will do my best to run as often as possible. Right now my body is sore from returning to running after a period of inactivity. It was not excited at all about driving 5.7 miles from the hotel with the loose window and wobbly toilet to run for an hour on an asphalt trail. Fortunately, excitement is not a prerequisite for this activity.

Without the travel, I fall further behind in my podcast consumption. I now assess potential unsubscriptions with regularity. Planet Money is the most recent fatality. I no longer find economics interesting. This is also going to cut back my For Later shelf at the library by 10-12 books.

Phoebe Reads a Mystery will never be cut. I’m still listening to Jane Eyre. Just found out Mr. Rochester has a hidden wife. Just finished Season 1 of Old Gods of Appalachia. Brilliant storytelling. Still working my way through the This American Life archive. I listened to five this week, the first one from September 14, 2001. Very interesting to relive what was being broadcast on NPR in the days, weeks, and months after 9/11.

One story from one of these episodes was about a European immigrant who returned to Europe immediately after World War II and interviewed Holocaust survivors. He was the first person known to have done so. The term “Holocaust” was not even in use yet. He interviewed approximately 100 people, and the recordings were housed in a university library in Chicago for four decades before someone found them and listened to them.

The interviewer spoke seven languages. The last interview he did was with a woman who described leaving her infant baby for a Catholic couple to retrieve and take to a Catholic orphanage. For some reason there could not be a direct hand-off, and since it was winter, she worried that the baby might have died before she was retrieved. The interview is in Yiddish, but the woman’s pain is transparent.

The thought of a child suffering or being harmed creates fear in me. We’ve had some extreme weather recently, and when I hear about a tornado or a flood or some other natural event beyond our control, what scares me is what happens to a child caught in something like that. Many adults cannot be trusted to protect a child in such a situation, and if even they could be trusted, the situation might overwhelm their ability to do so.

But what happened to this infant in Poland in 1939 is a world and a lifetime away, and the atrocities that happened then are beyond possibility now, right? (Spoiler alert: stay tuned, they’re not.) The difference between reading or hearing about something terrible happening to a child, and actually seeing it or being part of it is dramatic. And if the terrible thing is only implied, the difference is even greater. Can the human mind endure, every time it hears such a story, feeling anything close to the fear and anguish that woman felt when she left her infant on a doorstep in the snow, and every waking moment thereafter? We would crumble into dust if we couldn’t preserve the distance.

On March 1, the US military fired a missile into a girls school in Iran. For those responsible for the act and for this war, I wish they could feel the fear, pain, and anguish felt by every person killed, injured, or affected by the atrocity. Not only could the teachers not protect those girls (as they are so often expected to do against the worst of evils), not only could the first responders not protect those girls, not only could the parents not protect those girls, but the “leaders” of the world could not protect them. In fact, some of those “leaders” murdered them.

Did you vote for T&*#p? Their blood is on your hands as well. It was incompetence, you say? I have worked at American businesses for 45 years — I’ve seen incompetence. If it was error, there has to be another word for it. That word is not big enough to describe shipping something to the wrong address AND murdering schoolgirls.

Is there any job more important than protecting children from harm? Is anyone exempt from that responsibility? Is there anyone less deserving of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness than someone who would perpetrate harm to a child? No, no, and no.