MLK, X Heritage and Schiller's Ode to Joy

Because it's such a great set of sound bites, I suspect that many of us most remember Dr. Martin Luther King from his "I have a dream" speech — a speech in which he dreams that one day, "little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers".

While it's an ideal that still bears repeating, Dr. King is not the first to have considered the idea. In 1808, Friedrich Schiller wrote the words that were transformed by Ludwig van Beethoven into the first-ever symphony that employed a chorus, his Ninth ("Ode to Joy"). Referring to some future Elysium, Schiller writes "Alle Menschen werden Brüder" — all men shall be brothers. Yitzhak Peretz further expands this in his Yiddish lyric, my first exposure to Beethoven's tune, starting out with the line "Alle mentschen zaynen brider — broyne, gele, schvartze, vaysse". Rather than hoping for brotherhood in some Utopic future, he affirmatively states that we are brothers, right now, regardless of the color of our skin ("brown, yellow, black, white"). Thinking of the rainbow of my multicultural neighborhood, our store's customers, and the general area in which I live, restricting Dr. King's dream to just two extremes of skin tone seems... constrictive.

I started creating a field of generic (featureless) faces of different skin tones and hair colors, and even a couple of "covered" faces to honor the Muslims in our local community...

Further, in today's times, when our sense of gender has expanded beyond the binary, I tried adding a few faces with hairstyles that could be either male or female.

Then, finally, I added in Schiller's and Peretz's words (Yiddish is traditionally written in a variant of the Hebrew alphabet).

In checking the correct German and Yiddish spellings, I learned that some time later in his life, Peretz and others looked at his words more sarcastically than literally — though my Yiddish teacher emphasized to our post-détente class their Jewish Socialist origins. Meanwhile, I spent much of late January with an "Ode to Joy" earworm.

A design with this variety of colors lends itself well to using up vinyl scraps for the faces' hairstyles and hijabs, using paper templates to help with placement. Conversely, it does require a somewhat neutral background so as not to clash with those colors. I set my template to light gray to better visualize my layout, and after playing around with a number of colors decided that would be the correct background for my design.

Having missed Black Heritage Month and Hispanic Heritage Month, I was going to put this design away for next year. But in light of today's Black Lives Matter protests, I'm not waiting. It's not just people whose names might be "Brown" or "Hightower" (stereotypically African-American surnames) that matter: it's people whose (stereotypical) names might be Sanchez, Diaz, Rodriguez, Marcos; Chang, Wang, Li; Singh, Patel, Choudry; Farouk, Mohammed, Abdullah; Redcloud, Silverbird... and even people whose last names might be MacDiarmaid, van Gerwen, Santelli, or Rosenberg...

Coronavirus Fatigue

I don't need to mention that life has turned upside-down for many of us this year. Social isolation (excuse me, social distancing), masking to "protect others" (at the expense of one's own health), and "sheltering in place" (again, at the expense of one's own health) have become by-words for all, and a new sort of social shaming has arisen...

Like many on the personal-liberty end of the spectrum, I've been of the belief that while the worst of the disease is serious, our sociopolitical reaction to it is overblown, and we're putting our individual and community economic health at risk. We've been using a "portmanteau" (a word made up of two other words combined) to describe the current sociopoliticaleconomic situation: a panicdemic.

Welcome to the PANICdemic

While we have been fortunate in that the government stimuli have afforded us (at least for the month my sister and I were furloughed by our retail jobs) more money than we were making working (which we had to give up to return to our jobs), we realize that $600/week is chicken feed for those making a "living wage" or better (middle class in New Jersey starts at about $100k annual gross income), and most small business owners are losing everything they own — including their homes and businesses — because of shut-down and shelter-in-place orders. In short, many are

I think this describes most of us during the panicdemic

The variety of patriotic "Red, White & Blue" t-shirts we're selling this year strike an extremely off note as our constitutionally-guaranteed freedoms have been trampled upon by state and local officials in the name of "flattening the curve", "stopping the spread", writing "small business" stimuli such that they can only benefit "essential" big-box stores and "too big to fail" retailers (i.e., Amazon and  Walmart). In short, we have become the

I think this describes us better at this point in time than the National Anthem

 Since moving into a "masks required by law" environment, I have found that face coverings restrict my air intake (I swear one of these days I'm likely to aspirate my mask and suffocate!) and, because I have to SHOUT to be heard as as ||whisper||, dampening the mask with those droplets we're supposed to be not spreading, attracting and holding those airborne viruses we're supposed to be avoiding. I'm not alone in my dislike of mandatory facial coverings (especially when outdoors, at home — even in the public spaces of the multi-family dwelling in which we live, or at a reasonable distance from others), and therefore, I propose a bit of a throwback to the Clinton era:

Thankfully, our LGBTQIA+ community can serve openly now

I have a few other "Don't Mask/Won't Tell" designs, but they haven't made it onto T-shirts yet.

On the bright side of things, my sister's hairdresser is expecting her first child any day now. I had wanted to make an Infusible Ink onesie for her amidst some of the other things my sister wants to give, but was falling shy on inspiration. Amongst all this lockdown-fatigue creativity, it finally hit me:

I hope the baby never has to remember the panicdemic, the social distancing, the mandatory masking (are babies fussing over not recognizing parents in facial coverings like they do when parents don/doff spectacles?), or the economic devastation these illnesses are causing, and that she lives — like Moses — to 120 (or as long as she wishes to and is able to!) in good physical and mental health.