Hull House Quotes

In the unceasing ebb and flow of justice and oppression we must all dig channels as best we may, that at the propitious moment somewhat of the swelling tide may be conducted to the barren places of life.

Jane Addams, writing about her Twenty Years at Hull House, said, “People did not want to hear about simple things. They wanted to hear about great things—simply told.

Perhaps nothing is so fraught with significance as the human hand, this oldest tool with which man has dug his way from savagery, and with which he is constantly groping forward.

In his own way each man must struggle, lest the moral law become a far-off abstraction utterly separated from his active life.

But even as she gave thanks, she knew that the rain was not enough. She wanted a storm – thunder, wind, a deluge. She wanted it to crash through Ketterdam’s pleasure houses, lifting roofs and tearing doors off their hinges. She wanted it to raise the seas, take hold of every slaving ship, shatter their masts, and smash their hulls against unforgiving shores. I want to call that storm, she thought. And four million kruge might be enough to do it. Enough for her own ship – something small and fierce and laden with firepower. Something like her. She would hunt the slavers and their buyers. They would learn to fear her, and they would know her by her name. The heart is an arrow. It demands aim to land true. She clung to the wall, but it was purpose she grasped at long last, and that carried her upwards. She was not a lynx or a spider or even the Wraith. She was Inej Ghafa, and her future was waiting above.

It was not until years afterward that I came upon Tolstoy’s phrase “the snare of preparation,” which he insists we spread before the feet of young people, hopelessly entangling them in a curious inactivity at the very period of life when they are longing to construct the world anew and to conform it to their own ideals.

Sometimes, when he was lying in bed, a single word like ‘fear’ or ‘infinity’ flicked the roof off the house and sucked him into the night, past the stars that had been bent into bears and ploughs, and into a pure darkness where everything was annihilated except the feeling of annihilation. As the little capsule of his intelligence disintegrated, he went on feeling its burning edges, its fragmenting hull, and when the capsule flew apart he was the bits flying apart, and when the bits turned into atoms he was the flying apart itself, growing stronger instead of fading, like an evil energy defying the running out of everything and feeding on waste, and soon enough the whole of space was a waste-fuelled rush and there was no place in it for a human mind; but there he was, still feeling.

Alex stood guiltily in the middle of the kitchen, waiting for someone to chastise her, maybe even the house. But this was not the mansion on Orange with its hopeful creaks and disapproving sighs. Darlington had been the life of this place, and without him the house felt huge and empty, a shipwreck hull.

It is easy to become the dupe of a deferred purpose, of the promise the future can never keep, and I had fallen into the meanest type of self-deception in making myself believe that all this was in preparation for great things to come.

Things that have happened to me that have generated more sympathy than depression Having tinnitus. Scalding my hand on an oven, and having to have my hand in a strange ointment-filled glove for a week. Accidentally setting my leg on fire. Losing a job. Breaking a toe. Being in debt. Having a river flood our nice new house, causing ten thousand pounds’ worth of damage. Bad Amazon reviews. Getting the norovirus. Having to be circumcised when I was eleven. Lower-back pain. Having a blackboard fall on me. Irritable bowel syndrome. Being a street away from a terrorist attack. Eczema. Living in Hull in January. Relationship break-ups. Working in a cabbage-packing warehouse. Working in media sales (okay, that came close). Consuming a poisoned prawn. Three-day migraines.

Morgon of Hed met the High One's harpist one autumn day when the trade-ships docked at Tol for the season's exchange of goods. A small boy caught sight of the round-hulled ships with their billowing sails striped red and blue and green, picking their way among the tiny fishing boats in the distance, and ran up the coast from Tol to Akren, the house of Morgon, Prince of Hed. There he disrupted an argument, gave his message, and sat down at the long, nearly deserted tables to forage whatever was left of breakfast. The Prince of Hed, who was recovering slowly from the effects of loading two carts of beer for trading the evening before, ran a reddened eye over the tables and shouted for his sister.

Yesterday I noticed a scent of bark outside that I had not smelled in years. While the bark lingered in my nose, flushing out ancient tree houses and campfires and games of tag and capture the flag, I noticed that the birds seemed to be singing louder than usual and the leaves on the trees looked more pronounced, almost exaggerated in their lush clarity.

Jane Addams, the urban reformer who founded Chicago’s Hull House, wrote, “Never before in civilization have such numbers of young girls been suddenly released from the protection of the home and permitted to walk unattended upon the city streets and to work under alien roofs.” The women sought work as typewriters, stenographers, seamstresses, and weavers. The men who hired them were for the most part moral citizens intent on efficiency and profit. But not always. On March 30, 1890, an officer of the First National Bank placed a warning in the help-wanted section of the Chicago Tribune, to inform female stenographers of “our growing conviction that no thoroughly honorable business-man who is this side of dotage ever advertises for a lady stenographer who is a blonde, is good-looking, is quite alone in the city, or will transmit her photograph. All such advertisements upon their face bear the marks of vulgarity, nor do we regard it safe for any lady to answer such unseemly utterances.” The

First-century discipleship was expressed as a servant-master relationship (see Matthew 10:24). Once accepted as a disciple, a young man started as a talmidh, or beginner, who sat in the back of the room and could not speak. Then he became a distinguished student, who took an independent line in his approach or questioning. At the next level, he became a disciple-associate, who sat immediately behind the rabbi during prayer time. Finally he achieved the highest level, a disciple of the wise, and was recognized as the intellectual equal of his rabbi.'" 2. Memorizing the teacher's words: Oral tradition provided the basic way of studying. Disciples learned the teacher's words verbatim to pass along to the next person. Often disciples learned as many as four interpretations of each major passage in the Torah. 3. Learning the teacher's way of ministry: A disciple learned how his teacher kept God's commands, including how he practiced the Sabbath, fasted, prayed, and said blessings in ceremonial situations. He would also learn his rabbi's teaching methods and the many traditions his master followed. 4. Imitating the teacher's life and character: Jesus said that when a disciple is fully taught, he "will be like his teacher" (Luke 6:40). The highest calling of a disciple was to imitate his teacher. Paul called on Timothy to follow his example (see 2 Timothy 3:10-14), and he didn't hesitate to call on all believers to do the same (see 1 Corinthians 4:14-16; 1 1:1; Philippians 4:9). One story in ancient tradition tells of a rabbinical student so devoted to his teacher that he hid in the teacher's bedchamber to discover the mentor's sexual technique. To be sure, this is a bit extreme, yet it demonstrates the level of commitment required to be a disciple. 5. Raising up their own disciples: When a disciple finished his training, he was expected to reproduce what he'd learned by finding and training his own apprentices. He would start his own school and call it after his name, such as the House of Hillel.

Barrett opened the door and stepped into the large, spacious corner office of Cordell Hull, the U.S. secretary of state. “What’s the matter, Bill?” Hull asked, looking up from the stack of papers on his large oak desk. “Looks like you’ve seen a ghost.” “It’s the Czechs, sir,” Barrett said. “What about them?” “Hitler’s forces just crossed their border.” Hull was aghast. “Germany has invaded Czechoslovakia?” “I’m afraid so, sir.” “This is confirmed?” Barrett nodded. “Very well,” Hull said. “Get the White House on the line. I need to see the president.

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939 WASHINGTON, D.C. The Nazis invaded Poland on a Friday. At 2:50 a.m., President Roosevelt was awakened at the White House residence by a phone call from William Bullitt, the U.S. ambassador in Paris, with news that German planes were bombing Warsaw and that German panzer divisions had punctured the borders. “Well, Bill, it’s come at last,” the president said. “God help us all.” A few hours later, the president met in the Oval Office with Secretary Hull, Undersecretary Sumner Welles, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, and Harry Hopkins, the commerce secretary and one of Roosevelt’s closest confidants. William Barrett, Hull’s senior advisor, sat in on the meeting to take notes.

Another episode startled Trump’s advisers on the Asia trip. As the president and his entourage embarked on the journey, they stopped in Hawaii on November 3 to break up the long flight and allow Air Force One to refuel. White House aides arranged for the president and first lady to make a somber pilgrimage so many of their predecessors had made: to visit Pearl Harbor and honor the twenty-three hundred American sailors, soldiers, and marines who lost their lives there. The first couple was set to take a private tour of the USS Arizona Memorial, which sits just off the coast of Honolulu and straddles the hull of the battleship that sank into the Pacific during the Japanese surprise bombing attack in 1941. As a passenger boat ferried the Trumps to the stark white memorial, the president pulled Kelly aside for a quiet consult. “Hey, John, what’s this all about? What’s this a tour of?” Trump asked his chief of staff. Kelly was momentarily stunned. Trump had heard the phrase “Pearl Harbor” and appeared to understand that he was visiting the scene of a historic battle, but he did not seem to know much else. Kelly explained to him that the stealth Japanese attack here had devastated the U.S. Pacific Fleet and prompted the country’s entrance into World War II, eventually leading the United States to drop atom bombs on Japan. If Trump had learned about “a date which will live in infamy” in school, it hadn’t really pierced his consciousness or stuck with him. “He was at times dangerously uninformed,” said one senior former adviser. Trump’s lack of basic historical knowledge surprised some foreign leaders as well. When he met with President Emmanuel Macron of France at the United Nations back in September 2017, Trump complimented him on the spectacular Bastille Day military parade they had attended together that summer in Paris. Trump said he did not realize until seeing the parade that France had had such a rich history of military conquest. He told Macron something along the lines of “You know, I really didn’t know, but the French have won a lot of battles. I didn’t know.” A senior European official observed, “He’s totally ignorant of everything. But he doesn’t care. He’s not interested.” Tillerson developed a polite and self-effacing way to manage the gaps in Trump’s knowledge. If he saw the president was completely lost in the conversation with a foreign leader, other advisers noticed, the secretary of state would step in to ask a question. As Tillerson lodged his question, he would reframe the topic by explaining some of the basics at issue, giving Trump a little time to think. Over time, the president developed a tell that he would use to get out of a sticky conversation in which a world leader mentioned a topic that was totally foreign or unrecognizable to him. He would turn to McMaster, Tillerson

We are now shocked at the current spate of alphabetic scandals — IRS, AP, NSA, VA. But why are we surprised, given that Obama never told the truth about his relationships with the old terrorist Bill Ayers and former PLO ad hoc spokesman Rashid Khalidi, or about the creepy land deal with the crook Tony Rezko? If the Obama White House demonized the Tea Party as tea-baggers, or compared the Republican House opposition to terrorists and arsonists, why should we be astonished, given how he was elected to the U.S. Senate? Quite mysteriously, his primary opponent, Blair Hull, and his general-election opponent, Jack Ryan, both of whom were favored to win, had their confidential divorce records leaked. Their campaigns subsequently imploded.

In the German and French pensions, which twenty-five years ago were crowded with American mothers and their daughters who had crossed the seas in search of culture, one often found the mother making real connection with the life about her, using her inadequate German with great fluency, gaily measuring the enormous sheets or exchanging recipes with the German Hausfrau, visiting impartially the nearest kindergarten and market, making an atmosphere of her own, hearty and genuine as far as it went, in the house and on the street. On the other hand, her daughter was critical and uncertain of her linguistic acquirements, and only at ease when in the familiar receptive attitude afforded by the art gallery and the opera house. In the latter she was swayed and moved, appreciative of the power and charm of the music, intelligent as to the legend and poetry of the plot, finding use for her trained and developed powers as she sat "being cultivated" in the familiar atmosphere of he classroom which had, as it were, become sublimated and romanticized.

Se declaraba «filosóficamente convencida de la futilidad de la oposición activa, y creía que la agresión y el mal solo pueden vencerse con el bien, y no vale la pena oponerse a ello». La pobreza, la enfermedad y la explotación eran un reto para la sociedad en su conjunto y el reto debería solucionarse mediante fórmulas de reconciliación, antes de que condujeran a conflictos que pudieran desgarrar la propia sociedad. Describía el Evangelio como «un símbolo expansivo de fraternidad, un vínculo de paz, un bendito lugar donde la unidad del espíritu podía reivindicar el derecho a superar todas las diferencias».[26] Sin embargo, su encuentro con Tolstói fue decepcionante. El escritor prestó poca atención a su descripción de Hull House, al tiempo que «miraba con desconfianza las mangas de mi vestido de viaje». La cantidad de tela que tenían sus mangas, dijo Tolstói, era suficiente para vestir a un montón de niñas. ¿No era eso «un muro que separaba a la gente»? Y cuando supo que tenía una granja en Illinois, ¿no se podía considerar una de aquellas «señoras rentistas»? Sugirió que Jane Addams sería más útil «poniéndose a cultivar sus tierras» que añadiendo al mundo otra ciudad superpoblada. Las acusaciones eran injustas, pero aquello afectó a Jane hasta el punto que, cuando regresó a Chicago, decidió pasar dos horas diarias en la lechería. Lo intentó, pero fracasó. No era la mejor manera de aprovechar su tiempo.[27] Esta pequeña anécdota revela por qué no podía ser una verdadera seguidora de Tolstói.

Among other jobs that we did, my brother Bill and I were shoe shine boys in Jersey City and Hoboken during the World War II years. We went from tavern to tavern shining shoes for ten cents and hopefully a generous tip. The Hoboken waterfront bristled with starkly looming, grey hulled Liberty ships. Secured to the piers facing River Street, they brandished their ominous cannons towards what I thought was City Hall. An unappreciated highlight was when I shined Frank Sinatra’s shoes at a restaurant on Washington Street, just west from the Clam Broth House. There was no doubt but that Hoboken was an exciting place during those years. Years later I met Frank at Jilly's saloon, a lounge on West 52d Street in Manhattan, for a few drinks and a little fun around town. Even though I was an adult by then, he still called me “kid!” It was obvious that Frank Sinatra enjoyed friendly relations with Mafia notables such as Carlo Gambino, “Joe Fish” Fischetti and Sam Giancana. Meyer Lansky was said to have been a friend of Sinatra’s parents in Hoboken. During this time Sinatra spoke in awe about Bugsy Siegel and was in an AP syndicated photograph, seen in many newspapers, with Tommy “Fatso” Marson, Don Carlo Gambino 'The Godfather', and Jimmy 'The Weasel, Fratianno. Little wonder that the Federal Bureau of Investigation kept their eye on Sinatra for almost 50 years. A memo in FBI files revealed that Sinatra felt that he could be of use to them. However, it is difficult to believe that Sinatra would have become an FBI informer, better known as a “rat.” It was in May of 1998 when Sinatra, being treated at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles told his wife Barbara, “I’m losing.” Frank Sinatra died on May 14th at 82 years of age. It is alleged that he was buried with the wedding ring from his ex-wife, Mia Farrow, which she slid unnoticed into his suit pocket during his “viewing.” Aside from his perceived personal and public image, Frank Sinatra’s music will shape his enduring legacy for decades to come. His 100th birthday was celebrated at the Hollywood Bowl on Wednesday, July 22, 2015. Somehow Frank will never age and his music will never fade….

I recall that in planning my first European journey I had soberly hoped in two years to trace the entire pattern of human excellence as we passed from one country to another, in the shrines popular affection had consecrated to the saints, in the frequented statues erected to heroes, and in the "worn blasonry of funeral brasses" - an illustration that when we are young we all long for those mountaintops upon which we may soberly stand and dream of our own ephemeral and uncertain attempts at righteousness.

The Napoli was a rangy, powerful craft with graceful lines and was the pride of Tony’s life. The boat moved slowly out into the waters of Barmet Bay and then gathered speed as it headed toward the ocean. “Rough water,” Frank remarked as breaking swells hit the hull. Salt spray dashed over the bow of the Napoli as it plunged on through the white-caps. Bayport soon became a speck nestled at the curve of the horseshoe-shaped body of water. Reaching the ocean, Tony turned north. The boys could see the white line of the shore road rising and falling along the coast. Soon they passed the Kane farm. Two miles farther on they came within sight of the cliff upon which the Pollitt house stood. It looked stark and forbidding above the rocks, its roof and chimneys silhouetted against the sky.

Ceola’s part of Sebring felt like a separate town. Time slowed and the heat was worse. Ceola and her husband, Clarence, lived in a tiny turquoise house with no telephone. It was on the corner, across from an orange grove and the town dump. Chickens roamed the streets.

Scotty lived down the street in a white stucco house that sparkled in the sunshine. He rode a green ten-speed and was missing part of his right hand from a Fourth of July mishap with an M80.

The aluminum windows in our house were defenseless against the cold, but our warmth was beside the point. It was the oranges that had to be kept warm.

When you buy a boat, check the hull; when you buy a house, locate the view; when you enter a relationship, connection, connection, connection.

Today, community service is sometimes used as a patch to cover over inarticulateness about the inner life. Not long ago, I asked the head of a prestigious prep school how her institution teaches its students about character. She answered by telling me how many hours of community service the students do. That is to say, when I asked her about something internal, she answered by talking about something external. Her assumption seemed to be that if you go off and tutor poor children, that makes you a good person yourself. And so it goes. Many people today have deep moral and altruistic yearnings, but, lacking a moral vocabulary, they tend to convert moral questions into resource allocation questions. How can I serve the greatest number? How can I have impact? Or, worst of all: How can I use my beautiful self to help out those less fortunate than I? The atmosphere at Hull House was quite different. The people who organized the place had a specific theory about how to build character, equally for those serving the poor and for the poor themselves. Addams, like many of her contemporaries, dedicated her life to serving the needy, while being deeply suspicious of compassion. She was suspicious of its shapelessness, the way compassionate people tended to ooze out sentiment on the poor to no practical effect. She also rejected the self-regarding taint of the emotion, which allowed the rich to feel good about themselves because they were doing community service. “Benevolence is the twin of pride,” Nathaniel Hawthorne had written. Addams had no tolerance for any pose that might put the server above those being served. As with all successful aid organizations, she wanted her workers

Side-Wheelers were built following the time sail ships were popular. It was a time when engineers experimented with various ways to transfer the thrust of steam engines to useful ways of propelling vessels through water. Side-Wheelers are a subspecies of paddleboats that were popular for a time, until it was determined that they were actually dangerous in heavy seas. Paddle steamers have a paddle wheel on each side of the ship’s hull making the vessel vulnerable to wave action coming in from abeam. If the seas were heavy enough the upper paddles could actually push water in the opposite direction from the ships heading, although the upper reach of the paddles were usually encased in a wooden housing. If the vessel rolled far enough the paddles or blades on one side or the other could come completely out of the water, thereby losing the necessary resistance. It was dangerous at best and was most frequently used on river boats. One of the best examples of a side-wheeler lost at sea was the sidewheel steamer Portland owned by the Eastern Steamship Company. It was 7 p.m. on Nov. 26, 1898 when Capt. Hollis Blanchard, convinced that he could outrun an oncoming storm and make it back to Portland in the morning left Boston. The 219-foot vessel had 120 passengers and 60 crew members including the night watchman, Griffin S. Reed of Portland. That night, hurricane-force winds and 40-foot seas blew up as blinding snow from two storms hit simultaneously and ravaged the New England coast. The Portland must been swamped by the violent sea just a few hours later. Although a ship’s whistle was heard on Cape Cod giving a distress signal of four short blasts, nothing could be seen through the heavy snow. Later that night bodies started washing ashore, late that night however. Many of the victims of the gale were laid to rest in the Portland Evergreen Cemetery. Griffin Reed’s body was never recovered however a stone has been placed in the cemetery in his memory. A total of about 400 New Englanders died in this storm still known as “The Portland Gale.” A hundred and fifty vessels, including the Portland sank in this ferocious storm leaving no survivors. In 2002, divers finally located the Portland in 500 feet of water. From her location, Highland Light, on Cape Cod, bears 175 degrees true at a distance of 4.5 miles.

The - pan-ic - " he began but got no further, for Gloria's hand swung around swiftly and caught him in the cheek. At this he all at once let go of her, and she fell to the floor, her shoulder hitting the table a glancing blow in transit... Then the room seemed full of men and smoke. There was Tana in his white coat reeling about supported by Maury. Into his flute he was blowing a weird blend of sound that was known, cried Anthony, as the Japanese train song. Joe Hull had found a box of candles and was juggling them, yelling "One down!" every time he missed, and Dick was dancing by himself in a fascinated whirl around and about the room. It appeared to her that everything in the room was staggering in a grotesque fourth-dimensional gyrations through intersecting planes of hazy blue. Outside the storm had come up amazingly - the lulls within were filled with the scrape of the tall bushes against the house and the roaring of the rain on the tin roof of the kitchen.

The vastness of the house lent the sense of being confined. Ethan felt like it was a huge galleon, its cargo the piled, stacked, stuffed, heaped riches, the intricate, rarefied, exquisite treasure of people who would be like gods, riding out some flood with all the riches of their court, like in the history books Mr. Diamond had taught, the boat laden, low in the water under weight of gold and precious stones and armor and boxes and baskets and chests and bureaus and vaults and iron safes crammed with jewels and rings and pendants and sacrificial silver daggers and stone altars and bills of sale for continents and oceans and nations and human beings, even the moon, and the sunlight reflecting off it, in languages he could not read and it was all to his humiliation and he needed fresh air, to be outside because it was as if Bridget led him belowdecks, as if he could hear cross timbers flexing and bracing bolts shooting into their staples behind him and the ocean squeezing the hull more tightly and feel himself heading toward the deepest, narrowest, tightest, most airless space where he would be shackled and forced to lie on his side and pant for breath and alternately roast and freeze and rub against the raw planking until his skin began to strip away and the moans of all the other souls crammed into the ship became louder than the thundering sea as the ship thudded through a portless eternity.

through the hull. The ship burst like a rotten pumpkin, and the engine exploded. The images in the northern doorway were even worse. Hazel saw Leo, unconscious—or dead—falling through the clouds. She saw Frank staggering alone down a dark tunnel, clutching his arm, his shirt soaked in blood. And Hazel saw herself in a vast cavern filled with strands of light like a luminous web. She was struggling to break through while, in the distance, Percy and Annabeth lay sprawled and unmoving at the foot of two black-and-silver metal doors. “Choices,” said Hecate. “You stand at the crossroads, Hazel Levesque. And I am the goddess of crossroads.” The ground rumbled at Hazel’s feet. She looked down and saw the glint of silver coins…thousands of old Roman denarii breaking the surface all around her, as if the entire hilltop was coming to a boil. She’d been so agitated by the visions in the doorways that she must have summoned every bit of silver in the surrounding countryside. “The past is close to the surface in this place,” Hecate said. “In ancient times, two great Roman roads met here. News was exchanged. Markets were held. Friends met, and enemies fought. Entire armies had to choose a direction. Crossroads are always places of decision.” “Like…like Janus.” Hazel remembered the shrine of Janus on Temple Hill back at Camp Jupiter. Demigods would go there

The motors of the Flying Express diminished to a low purr and the hull sank gradually until it hit the water, moving forward in the manner of an ordinary boat. Through the loudspeaker boomed the voice of the pilot: “Ladies and gentlemen, we are about to dock at Providence! Watch your step going ashore.” The Hardys and their friends filed onto the dock, and walked up into the quaint town with its gray-shingled houses. Souvenir shops and seafood restaurants lined the main street. Tourists milled around and mingled with the denizens of the Cape Cutlass artists’ colony—good-looking girls in slacks with wind-blown hair and suntanned men wearing beards and sandals.

Alexander, Gretchen Beetner, Lou Berney, Terri Bischoff, Susanna Calkins, Hilary Davidson, Matthew FitzSimmons, Andrew Grant, Alex Grecian, Chris Holm, Katrina Niidas Holm, Rob Hart, Linda Joffe Hull, Dana Kaye, Elizabeth Little, Jess Lourey, Jamie Mason, Nadine Nettmann, Mike McCrary, Catriona McPherson, Lauren O’Brien, Lori Rader-Day, Johnny Shaw, Jay Shepherd, Victoria Thompson, Ashley Weaver, James Ziskin.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to get my hands on some fucking gourds and arrange them in a horn-shaped basket on my dining room table. That shit is going to look so seasonal. I’m about to head up to the attic right now to find that wicker fucker, dust it off, and jam it with an insanely ornate assortment of shellacked vegetables. When my guests come over it’s gonna be like, BLAMMO! Check out my shellacked decorative vegetables, assholes. Guess what season it is—fucking fall. There’s a nip in the air and my house is full of mutant fucking squash. I may even throw some multi-colored leaves into the mix, all haphazard like a crisp October breeze just blew through and fucked that shit up. Then I’m going to get to work on making a beautiful fucking gourd necklace for myself. People are going to be like, “Aren’t those gourds straining your neck?” And I’m just going to thread another gourd onto my necklace without breaking their gaze and quietly reply, “It’s fall, fuckfaces. You’re either ready to reap this freaky-assed harvest or you’re not.” Carving orange pumpkins sounds like a pretty fitting way to ring in the season. You know what else does? Performing an all-gourd reenactment of an episode of Diff’rent Strokes—specifically the one when Arnold and Dudley experience a disturbing brush with sexual molestation. Well, this shit just got real, didn’t it? Felonies and gourds have one very important commonality: they’re both extremely fucking real. Sorry if that’s upsetting, but I’m not doing you any favors by shielding you from this anymore. The next thing I’m going to do is carve one of the longer gourds into a perfect replica of the Mayflower as a shout-out to our Pilgrim forefathers. Then I’m going to do lines of blow off its hull with a hooker. Why? Because it’s not summer, it’s not winter, and it’s not spring. Grab a calendar and pull your fucking heads out of your asses; it’s fall, fuckers. Have you ever been in an Italian deli with salamis hanging from their ceiling? Well, then you’re going to fucking love my house. Just look where you’re walking or you’ll get KO’d by the gauntlet of misshapen, zucchini-descendant bastards swinging from above. And when you do, you’re going to hear a very loud, very stereotypical Italian laugh coming from me. Consider yourself warned. For now, all I plan to do is to throw on a flannel shirt, some tattered overalls, and a floppy fucking hat and stand in the middle of a cornfield for a few days. The first crow that tries to land on me is going to get his avian ass bitch-slapped all the way back to summer. Welcome to autumn, fuckheads!

When your chicks first arrive, prepare a special place for them in the hen house. Depending on how many chicks you have, this can be a large cardboard box or a set of boards to partition the hen house floor. Cover the floor with least 1 inch (2.5 centimeters) of wood shavings, rice hulls, sand, or straw. Don’t use cedar shavings, fine sawdust, or treated wood chips. Cover the floor with newspapers the first day so the chicks will eat the feed and not the litter.

Japanese paranoia stemmed partly from xenophobia rooted in racism. This combination wasn’t peculiar to Japan, as the Nazis were demonstrating in Germany. In the United States, the 1924 Exclusion Act remained in force, prohibiting all immigration from Asia. Some Western states didn’t think the Exclusion Act went far enough, because it hadn’t gotten rid of the Japanese who had immigrated before the United States slammed the door. Xenophobes argued that these immigrants were now breeding more Japanese, who were recognized, outrageously, as American citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment. Farmers in California and Arizona were especially hostile. Even before the Exclusion Act, these states had passed Alien Land Laws severely restricting the property rights of Japanese. Then in 1934 a group of farmers in Arizona’s Salt River Valley began agitating to kick Japanese farmers out, alleging that they had flooded into the region and were depriving farmland from deserving whites who were already hurting from the Depression. They also demanded that white landowners stop leasing acreage to Japanese farmers. The white farmers and their supporters held rallies and parades, blaring their message of exclusion. In the fall of that year, night riders began a campaign of terrorism. They dynamited irrigation canals used by Japanese farmers and threw dynamite bombs at their homes and barns. The leaders of the Japanese community tried to point out that only 700 Japanese lived in the valley and most had been there for more than twenty years. Three hundred fifty of them were American citizens, and only 125 worked in agriculture, mostly for American farmers. Facts made no impression on the white farmers’ racist resentments. Some local officials exploited the bigotry for political gain. The Japanese government protested all this. Hull didn’t want a few farmers to cause an international incident and pushed the governor of Arizona to fix the problem. The governor blamed the terrorism on communist agitators. Dynamite bombs continued to explode on Japanese farms through the fall of 1934. The local and state police maintained a perfect record—not a single arrest. In early February 1935 the Arizona legislature began considering a bill that would forbid Japanese immigrants from owning or leasing land. If they managed to grow anything, it could be confiscated. Any white farmer who leased to a Japanese would be abetting a crime. (Japan had similar laws against foreigners owning farmland.) American leaders and newspapers quickly condemned the proposed law as shameful, but farmers in Arizona remained enthusiastic. Japanese papers covered the controversy as well. One fascist group, wearing uniforms featuring skulls and waving a big skull flag, protested several times at the US embassy in Tokyo. Patriotic societies began pressuring Hirota to stand up for Japan’s honor. He and Japan’s representatives in Washington asked the American government to do something. Arizona politicians got word that if the bill passed, millions of dollars in New Deal money might go elsewhere. Nevertheless, on March 19 the Arizona senate passed the bill. On March 21 the state house of representatives, inspired more by fears of evaporating federal aid than by racial tolerance, let the bill die. The incident left a bad taste all around.

As he started the engine and pulled out on to Downchurch Road, strains of Rod Stewart drifted from the open window of the house, and he pictured Karen swaying to the music behind the hull-shaped bar, drunk and alone, the zip on her onesie fighting a losing battle.

I had confidence that although life itself might contain many difficulties, the period of mere passive receptivity had come to an end, and I had at last finished with the ever-lasting "preparation for life," however prepared I might be. It was not until years afterward that I came upon Tolstoy's phrase "the snare of preparation," which he insists we spread before the feet of young people, hopelessly entangling them in a curious inactivity at the very period of life when they are longing to construct the world anew and to conform it to their own ideals.

But stranger than any episode was the fact itself that neither the convict, his wife, nor his godfather for a moment considered him a criminal. He had merely gotten excited over cards and had stabbed his adversary with a knife. "Why should a man who took his luck badly be kept forever from the sun?" was their reiterated inquiry.

Multiculturalism, or whatever you call it, didn’t begin in the 1980s, though we sometimes behave as if it did. Hull-House reminds us that ethnic, racial and cultural diversity is, in fact, our theater’s foundation. Diversity was, simply, our field’s originating premise.

. . . hearing their death before the actual impact reverberates through the hull—and there never really had been time for lifeboats . . .

What a coincidence it was for me to see the SS African Moon in Dar-es-Salaam! After leaving Farrell Lines I thought that I would never get back to Kenya but here I was. It was just like home coming when I came aboard and saw Eddie the first mate. Everything was just as I left it three years before so as we celebrated our reunion over a cup of coffee. Although I hadn’t planned it, I suddenly got an idea. This would be a once in a lifetime opportunity to bring something worthwhile back to The United States. So, I asked Eddie if he could bring something big back to New York for me. “What might that be” he asked suspecting that I was up to no good. “No, it’s not narcotics, it’s a dug out native canoe.” I replied. “Well, I won’t have room in any of the holds but we can lash it down on deck. “Good I’ll have it to you within an hour!” I left and found someone who was willing to sell his dug-out to me and deliver it to the Meteor for under fifty dollars, which at the time was a lot of money but the price included the delivery charge. My, newly acquired well used dug out canoe, was the last thing that crossed the fish plates of the African Moon. Talking to Eddie we watched as the crew professionally lashed it down just forward of the #1 hatch. Shortly thereafter the African Moon backed down and headed out into the Indian Ocean. As for the rest of the story… When the Moon returned, I picked up the dug-out dockside in Brooklyn. With a little help I got it into my pick-up and brought it to my father’s house in Jersey City.  Later without my knowing, it he drilled holes into its hull and decided that it would make a good planter. It didn’t take long for the dirt in it to cause the rot to set in. Within months my canoe was destroyed, however I still have the paddles which sadly but reminiscently serve as a decoration in my Florida home.

In the German and French pensions, which twenty-five years ago were crowded with American mothers and their daughters who had crossed the seas in search of culture, one often found the mother making real connection with the life about her, using her inadequate German with great fluency, gaily measuring the enormous sheets or exchanging recipes with the German Hausfrau, visiting impartially the nearest kindergarten and market, making an atmosphere of her own, hearty and genuine as far as it went, in the house and on the street. On the other hand, her daughter was critical and uncertain of her linguistic acquirements, and only at ease when in the familiar receptive attitude afforded by the art gallery and opera house. In the latter she was swayed and moved, appreciative of the power and charm of the music, intelligent as to the legend and poetry of the plot, finding use for her trained and developed powers as she sat "being cultivated" in the familiar atmosphere of the classroom which had, as it were, become sublimated and romanticized. I remember a happy busy mother who, complacent with the knowledge that her daughter daily devoted four hours to her music, looked up from her knitting to say, "If I had had your opportunities when I was young, my dear, I should have been a very happy girl. I always had musical talent, but such training as I had, foolish little songs and waltzes and not time for half an hour's practice a day." The mother did not dream of the sting her words left and that the sensitive girl appreciated only too well that her opportunities were fine and unusual, but she also knew that in spite of some facility and much good teaching she had no genuine talent and never would fulfill the expectations of her friends. She looked back upon her mother's girlhood with positive envy because it was so full of happy industry and extenuating obstacles, with undisturbed opportunity to believe that her talents were unusual. The girl looked wistfully at her mother, but had not the courage to cry out what was in her heart: "I might believe I had unusual talent if I did not know what good music was; I might enjoy half an hour's practice a day if I were busy and happy the rest of the time. You do not know what life means when all the difficulties are removed! I am simply smothered and sickened with advantages. It is like eating a sweet dessert the first thing in the morning.

They were brought across an ocean, chained in the hulls of 350-ton vessels. In the southern part of the United States, they were made to labor in the vast agricultural plantations. They made do without surnames and lived in dirt-floor cabins. They labored without pay. They were bought and sold and traded for money and gold and diamonds and molasses and horses and cows. They were fed the barest of subsistence diets. When they tried to escape, they were tracked down by men on horseback. They existed as an appendage to the body of society. They had no moral personality and no moral status in civic or church law . . . After 200-odd years, as a political expediency, they were granted freedom from being the property of other men. During the next hundred years they were disenfranchised, their houses were burned, they were hung from trees, forced into separate and inferior houses, schools and public facilities. They were granted status in law and denied it in practice.18

The Great Cloud of Witnesses The writer of Hebrews wrote about the active pursuit of a faith that embraces discipleship: Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart. (Hebrews 12:1-3) The writer earlier created a list of heroes of the faith from the Old Testament era (see Hebrews 11:4-38): By faith Abel offered a proper sacrifice. By faith Noah built an ark. By faith Abraham packed up his family and moved. By faith Joseph ran from evil. By faith Moses chose a life of self-denial, confronted Pharaoh, and led the people through the Red Sea. By faith Joshua led the people around Jericho's walls. By faith Gideon showed courage in his obedience even though he was afraid. Samson, David, and Samuel-the world wasn't worthy of them. These are our great cloud of witnesses; they taught us faith. Notice that with their actions, they showed us what it means to believe. What kind of disciples is the gospel meant to create naturally? The answer is people like these, whose faith embraced following their Lord. Without this kind of faith demonstrated by obedience, can a person really please God (see Hebrews 11:6)? The lesson here is clear: Faith that doesn't result in action isn't faith, but something less. The apostle James, the half-brother of Jesus, wrote, "What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? ... In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead" (James 2:14,17). Jesus, "the author and perfecter of our faith" (Hebrews 12:2), taught James about faith. He demonstrated it by obeying in spite of the shame and suffering he faced and endured on the cross. In fact, Jesus' own words about faith couldn't be clearer: "Why do you call me, `Lord, Lord,' and do not do what I say? I will show you what he is like who comes to me and hears my words and puts them into practice. He is like a man building a house, who dug down deep and laid the foundation on rock. When a flood came, the torrent struck that house but could not shake it, because it was well built. But the one who hears my words and does not put them into practice is like a man who built a house on the ground without a foundation. The moment the torrent struck that house, it collapsed and its destruction was complete." (Luke 6:46-49)

Florence Kelley was a legendary reformer who trained at Hull House with Jane Addams and had earned a law degree. Having once been appointed as a public inspector in Illinois, she was also a moving spirit behind the recent founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics.