Maus I and II have a lot of horrifying images. They depict a series of conversations author Art Spiegelman had with his parents about their experience in Auschwitz. Jews (represented as mice) are gassed, hung, shot, rounded up, and displaced. None of this was deemed too much for schoolchildren.

If we take the school board at face value, they were focused on a single panel that depicted Spiegelman’s mother, as a mouse, being found after she committed suicide by slitting her wrists in a bathtub. This was not an erotic scene. The author was depicting his mother, dead at her own hands.

All of the violence was ok. The problem for the school board was that there was a nude mouse representing a woman in a bathtub. There was no issue with the fact that she was dead. There was no issue with the fact that she was driven to suicide. There was no need to protect schoolchildren from that. The issue was that she was a nude mouse in a bathtub. A stand-in for what one might imagine would be a nude woman.

The firm ground on which the school board is standing is that they expect us to accept as granted that a woman without clothing is more damaging to children than all the horrors of a concentration camp. We can’t continue to let that assumption go unchallanged.

/As a coda, I want to thank my excellent high-school English teacher, Ms. Orbison, for understanding that the best way to tend to my education was to present material that I found challenging rather than to protect me from the world. It was in her class that I first ran into Maus.

No Dr. King quote could capture his work with sanitation workers demanding simple human dignity, his call to faith from the Birmingham Jail, or his call to action from everything he did.

No quote of his could convey the reality that while we’ve given him a federal holiday, we’re still fighting for equal access to the ballot box.

He was the martyr that gave Congress the shocked motivation to pass the Civil Rights act. 58 years later, Congressional Democrats hope his memory can push voting protections through the filibuster. We’re still fighting for equal access.

Today, we lost Clyde Bellecourt, the Thunder Before the Storm. He was one of the greats. A co-founder of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and organizer of the Wounded Knee occupation, he founded AIM in 1968 in Minneapolis to address police violence against Native Americans. AIM spans the US and Canada and has made great strides, yet 54 years later, the Minneapolis Police Department is the poster child for violence against minorities. We’re still fighting police violence.

You are going to see a lot of memes this weekend. The memes will show Dr. King or Clyde Bellecourt either in a heroic pose in front of a crowd or a pensive pose in soft lighting. It’s safer that way, they can be presented as the scholars speaking wisdom from the past, rather than the leaders of fights that are still very much with us today.

The lens pedestal sat on a cushion of liquid mercury, allowing tons of glass and metal almost frictionless motion. The rotation of the lens was based on a clockwork that only needed to be wound every two hours by the lighthouse keepers.

The lighthouse is a miracle of architecture, engineering, optics, and (if you count the foghorn) acoustics. It was designed, built, implemented, and lit within 5 years, including the time it took to source specialized material from halfway across the world.

Rember this whenever someone tells you that government can’t work. It can work when it’s allowed to.

My wife, son, and I stayed with my parents for three weeks. The need for social distancing meant that we saw very few other people, while the realities of the pandemic meant we could do so while still working from home. According to my employer, home is not a piece of geography, but the end of a VPN from my office. That can be Sitka as easily as it is Eagle River.

So, I spent three weeks with my wife in the town that raised me, watching my son discover the geography I discovered 40 years ago. And for those three weeks, for the first time since College, Sitka was home again. The piece of geography was finally connected to my peace of mind.

Of course, the creek has a name, has had one for a long time. However, the placeholder name is the one on the maps, and therefore the one in the big typeface.

Every Easter reveals something new to me about my faith. This year, my thoughts keep going to Judas Iscariot.

The role of Judas has always caused me some trouble. He had his role to play. Matthew made it clear that it was part of God’s plan foretold by the prophets, and John 13:27-28 has Jesus almost giving Judas his blessing, saying, “What you are about to do, do quickly.” Why, then, do things go so horribly badly for Judas after the deed is done when he is acting within God’s plan?* Many theologians far better versed than I have made the argument that IF Judas is damned, it’s not for his betrayal, which was part of God’s plan. It was for what happened afterward. There are more issues than just the betrayal.

I think that it’s important to reflect on how Jesus was betrayed. Jesus told Judas to do what he needed to do. He stilled the swords of his followers when they tried to keep him from being captured. He led himself into the arms of the Romans. Yet he had time to ask of Judas, “Judas, is it with a kiss that you are betraying the Son of Man?” Luke 22:48

The betrayal had to happen, but it did not have to happen with a kiss. I think it’s this corruption of an act of love that may have changed things for Judas. It was that corruption that set Judas apart from what he was meant to do.

The actions of Thursday set the chain that lead to Sunday, but Christ was still in control. Christ could have shown Jesus to literally anyone in the world, so it’s significant to look at who Christ appeared to. He did not appear to his most vocal followers. They were hiding and distancing themselves from the Christ, fearing the law.

Jesus revealed himself to two women who were not looking for a miracle or payment but were looking to respect the man, Jesus. They did not fear being associated with him. They brought oils to anoint his body. An act of human decency and kindness made bold by their willingness to perform it for an enemy of the State.

It was to them that Christ showed the miracle. They were rewarded far beyond the disciples who would trade on their public closeness to Jesus.

This has been a tough week to watch the news. Politicians continue to trade on their alleged closeness to Christ while corrupting his message of love. And to my friends, many of whom have been poorly treated by the Christian Church, I can only say this:

It’s not to politicians the Christ revealed himself. It’s not to his disciples or to the people who publicly identified with him when the politics of doing so were good.

It was to two women who risked what little they had to be kind to a friend that the Christ revealed the miracle. Many use my religion to harm you, my friends, but not a single person has the authority to use my faith to do so.

He has risen, indeed.

Hallelujah

At the Interpretive Center at Totem Park, I learned about the fights between the Russians and Tlingit, but in a kitchen with a November gale keeping us kids indoors, I learned about the Kake wars between the Tlingit and the US Navy.

I learned about Dr. King’s “I Have A Dream” speech in civics classes, but In a back room of my church, I learned about the Pullman Porters covertly connecting POC nationwide while the FBI was shutting down labor newspapers.

I saw the Rodney King riots on every cable news program. It was around a campfire with a bunch of Wobblies that I learned about the MOVE bombing, where the City of Philadelphia bombed a house to dislocate MOVE activists and ended up burning down 65 houses in the process.

It was not until the age of the internet that I learned about the burning of the Douglass Indian Village (now part of Juneau) in 1962 to make way for a harbor. It’s this last piece that gives me hope. Not only is the Douglas Indian Village story online, but so is the MOVE bombing, the organizing work of the Pullman Porters, and the Kake Wars in Southeast Alaska.

The long memory is the most radical idea in America. The ability for us to look at the official history, and ask “What else should we know?” As more of this history is collected and made available, it becomes an easier question to answer by the day, even if it is often terrible.

For years, we have shut down newspapers for telling unpopular parts of history. The House Un-American Activities Committee make it de facto government policy to economically destroy people who would tell those unpopular parts of history. That’s all changing.

For once, we are looking to a time when our stories are NOT being canceled. It’s gonna be a bumpy ride.

Lest we get too complacent, less than 20 years later, Douglass Indian Village was raised to make way for a new harbor. Its inhabitants were in fish camp, their material possessions raized along with their homes.

This year, Tuluksak lost its water supply. They were supplied with water by volunteers for 3 weeks before the State got around to an official disaster declaration.

In the debate leading up to the passage of the act, Elizabeth Peratovich stated that “No law will eliminate crimes, but at least you, as legislators, can assert to the world that you recognize the evil of the present situation and speak of your intent to help us overcome discrimination.”

We obviously still have a long way to go.

As we traveled, she was a curious and insightful partner, helping me see the world through a different set of eyes.

As I produced, she was a solid member of my team, reliable and steady. She provided craft services for 400 people, even when it involved taking more abuse than she should have from our cast and crew. Even when my disorganization let her down, she came back and came through.

As a new father, she gave me tools to calm down an upset infant. She helped me understand what he did not have the language to tell me.

But I’ll miss her most as a friend. Whitty, whimsical, serious, and always willing to remain friends after she called me out on something.

Every year when we close out our fair, we do so knowing that we will not see someone at our next opening. Somehow, I never expected the person we would not see to be you, Ellen. God bless, and safe home.

2020 did not come out of the blue. It’s is the result of 40 years of repeating Ragen’s line, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.'” There has been a 40-year systematic erosion of the idea that a professional government could or even should be able to see us through a crisis.

It’s lead to disasters of policy such as the Flint water crisis, still not solved and still just the tip of the iceberg when you look at our potable water infrastructure nationwide. It lead to response disasters like our ability to help after Hurricanes Katrina and Reta, with rebuilding set to take decades longer than it should.

And, it’s lead to 2020, our disastrous response to the pandemic and our misguided response to the resulting economic crisis. Forty years of dismantling monolithic pension systems and privatizing government jobs for cheaper labor, and distrust in Unions lead to a lack of financial resilience in the middle class. The rise of the gig economy in a political system that abhors regulation or umbrella programs such as single-payer health saw us enter a pandemic with health insurance an expensive luxury.

2020 is the year that all that changed. Even with the dysfunction and missed opportunities to mitigate damage, people turn to the government to be part of the solution. There is no debate about whether the government should send out pandemic relief checks; the discussion is how much, and how much longer we should extend Unemployment Benefits. Medicaid enrolment has grown by just over 9% without any serious pushback.

Our elections this year were a marvel of engagement, even against a backdrop of incredibly cynical attempts at disenfranchisement. Massive voter turnout propelled new office-holders that are renewing the idea of responsive government. After the election, Los Angelis, long a byword for ‘tough policing,’ is now a laboratory for criminal justice reform. Responding to public demands for more police oversight, Minneapolis has shifted $8 million from direct police funding to violence prevention and mental health crisis response teams.

People are engaged in government, in the idea of what government should be, in a way they have not been in a long time. Once sacred concepts of what government should (or should not) fund are open to discussion.

2020 is the darkness of the womb. Rumors of our demise have been greatly exaggerated. The Great Experiment that is America is reawakening with new levels of civic engagement. We’ve seen 40 years of progress, even as our faith in the government has eroded. The ADA, the ACA, anti-hate crime legislation, anti-sexual discrimination legislation, the fall of DOMA and DADT, all of this can give birth to a more representative government. The elections of 2020 have seen this start to become a reality.

It’s been a rough year. Not everyone in my family made it through. My old neighborhood in Minneapolis burned, and some of my favorite businesses in Anchorage closed. I still end this year with a greater sense of optimism for my country than I’ve felt in a long time. I’m used to the people feeling that the government should be better. Now, I genuinely think that people think that the government CAN be better.

2021 will bring us flowers. We planted their bulbs in 2020.