In the spirit of being alliterative, here’s my Three Beautiful Things Thursday entry:

1. A family of four kittens lives in my neighborhood and Mama has been walking them through the top level of our window well, much to the frustration of Jeremiah. (I think she’s teaching them that if they get caught by people, they’ll end up in “kitty jail” like my cats seem to be.) Shortly after midnight, one straggled behind a bit and couldn’t figure out where Mama had disappeared to. I went outside to see if she was okay. She was a long haired tiger. So little, so cute, so loud! It hid under a bush after I stepped away, and Mama must have come back for it because we didn’t hear a peep after that.

2. There is nothing like the soft warmth of a polar fleece blanket on a chilly morning. The past few mornings have been chilly in the Burrow (it may have something to do with that open window in the living room, but I refuse to let go of the fresh air it brings). So it feels extra nice to wiggle my toes under the covers and have them encounter a snuggly blanket instead of the cold reality rising will eventually bring.

3. We have a monthly meeting that generally convenes at Ben’s Chili Bowl, a D.C. institution. We don’t visit other than that, but we’ve been going monthly for 18 months or so. One of the men behind the counter, David, knows us by sight and always stops us as we walk in. “I was asking them if you were coming,” he teased last night when we came in a few minutes late. We don’t have to stand in line anymore — he knows what we want. We just have to catch his eye and he puts food on for us. Certainly, it’s not a place where everybody knows our name, but one person does, and he’s always glad to see us. And we’re always glad to see him.

In the summer of 1955, a 14-year-old Chicago boy went down to Mississippi to visit family. He didn’t return alive.

Emmett Till was tortured and then killed by a mob, purportedly for whistling at a white woman clerk in a store. The woman’s husband and his half-brother were arrested, acquitted by an all-white jury, and then confessed in a magazine article to the heinous crime. Because of double-jeopardy (and a complicit judicial system that seems unwilling to have found subsequent, alternative charges), the two men remained unpunished.

My guess is that Emmett Till’s story was, although sad and horrifying, not particularly remarkable. But he did have a remarkable mother, Mamie, who went to court to get her son’s corpse back from Mississippi authorities, smashed open the casket herself with a hammer when the funeral director refused to go against a police order not to open the padlocked box, and then demanded an open casket funeral for her son. The images are stark and moving. I cannot imagine remaining unchanged after seeing them.

Yesterday, the FBI announced their plan to exhume Till’s body from its grave site in Chicago and conduct an autopsy. They believe that Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam (both now dead) had 14 accomplices, six of whom still may be alive and who could still be prosecuted under Mississippi state law.

Bob Dylan wrote “The Death of Emmett Till” in 1963. It ends:

“But if all of us folks that thinks alike, if we gave all we could give,
We could make this great land of ours a greater place to live.”

May we finally show some greatness in this case and convict those who perpetrated the crimes.

Because I work in the health literacy field, I have to come to hear a vast number of conspiracy theories about the medical field, particularly from low-income and minority audiences. Even as recently as January, an NIH study showed a large number of African Americans believe that HIV and AIDS are a government plot to kill off large numbers of minorities and that a cure is being withheld from the public solely for that reason.

Looking back through history, incidents — Tuskegee, when the government decided not to treat the syphillis infections of African American men, and orphans being deliberately infected with malaria or hepatitis, among others — indicate that this mistrust had its origins in fact.

And it is easy to see how that mistrust could be perpetuated when you see that even if you account for education and income, minorities still lag their white counterparts in access to quality healthcare and treatment for illnesses, particuarly chronic ones.

But I hadn’t really believed that there was reason for these communities to continue with the mistrust. I was under the illusion that I merely had to battle the specters of history in order to help turn the tide. Little did I realize that I have to fight current events.

Apparently, I was wrong. “Researchers Tested AIDS Drugs on Children” — foster children in SIX states, to be specific — without their receiving the independent monitors who are supposed to advocate on the kids’ behalf. They’re the ones who are supposed to make sure that the kids are protected from reasonable risk.

“Several studies that enlisted foster children reported patients suffered side effects such as rashes, vomiting and sharp drops in infection-fighting blood cells as they tested antiretroviral drugs to suppress AIDS or other medicines to treat secondary infections.

“In one study, researchers reported a “disturbing” higher death rate among children who took higher doses of a drug. That study was unable to determine a safe and effective dosage.”

These aren’t backwoods hicks we’re dealing with. This is the NIH — the National Institutes of Health — providing the funding! These are illustrious, respected hospitals — including Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, Chicago’s Children’s Memorial Hospital, and Johns Hopkins University.

And these weren’t your right-before-public-release treatments that have been tested up the wazoo. These were Phase I and Phase II studies — the stages of the clinical trial where a drug’s BASIC SAFETY is tested.

And what a surprise. While children did actually get access to first-rate researchers, often the treatments were dangerous, and, periodically, lethal. Some kids had to be taken off the treatments because of “serious toxicity.” Others — nearly all infants — experienced major drops in white blood cells — the one thing AIDS drugs aren’t supposed to mess with!!!

Thanks, NIH, for just making my job a whole lot harder.

Thank goodness we don’t want to take a stand or anything…:
“Gays in D.C. May Not File Jointly.”

Especially when you learn that today is Pete Seeger’s 86th birthday?

Him: Protest singer, labor organizer, environmentalist, educator, world music champion, humanitarian. Activist, writer, idealist.

His songs: “Turn, Turn, Turn.” “All Mixed Up.” “If I Had a Hammer.” “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” “Guantanamera.” “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy.” “We Shall Overcome.”

I had the great fortune to hear Pete sing just days after September 11th. He had been scheduled to come to Wesleyan that week for a series honoring folk and protest music (I will call it folk music, even if the organizers — and Pete himself — refused to) and he made the trip during a week when reasonable people were cancelling events left and right.

But what Pete realized (as did the sell-out crowd at Crowell) was that in the aftermath of tremendous tragedy and confusion and of loss and anger that we needed to come together even more than ever.

A spry fellow, he sang a few songs. But the majority he made us sing, darting up and down the aisles of the theater to hand out lyrics sheets and song books.

If you believe that music can heal wounds and change the world, then Pete is one of the most powerful healers out there. His legacy is unequaled.

SAILING DOWN MY GOLDEN RIVER

Sailing down my golden river
Sun and water all my own
Yet I was never alone.
Sun and water, old life-givers
I’ll have them where’er I roam
And I was not far from home.

Sunlight glancing on the water
Life and death are all my own
And I was never alone.
Life to raise my sons and daughters
Golden sparkles in the foam
And I was not far from home.

Sailing down this winding highway
Travellers from near and far
Yet I was never alone.
Exploring all the little by-ways
Sighting all the distant stars
Yet I was not far from home.

Sailing down my golden river
Sun and water all my own
Yet I was never alone.
Sun and water, old life-givers
I’ll have them where’er I roam
And I was not far from home.

Monday afternoon was made much more exciting for my coworkers and me as I was packing up a 17-box shipment to send out to a library. I was shifting boxes around to find the one I needed when suddenly I saw a giant cockroach.

(I should clarify: The Giant Burrowing Cockroach, found primarily in Australia, and the Giant Cockroach (known in Latin as Blaberus giganteus for the sound you make when you see a humungous bug scamper through your cupboards) can grow to be about 3.5 inches. This cockroach was not that big and was giant only by my terms, not by scientific naming standards. It was probably only 2 inches long. But when you’re dealing with cockroaches, really that’s big enough.)

When we first moved down to D.C., Rudi and I would periodically see cockroaches as the cats chased them around the apartment. Normally, we try to rescue bugs the cats want to play with, but I have learned to just let them kill the roaches. They don’t eat them, so I don’t see the problem. Particularly since we now only see a dead cockroach once every six months or so. Apparently word has gotten out in the cockroach community to avoid The Burrow.

But I digress.

So I loudly said, “Ewww! A giant cockroach!” which brought my two neighbors from their desks to help me out. Sarah volunteered to kill it. I, having planned to just let the bug go back into hiding, agreed to let her.

(Just for the record, I will kill cockroaches if I am the only one at home. I just prefer not to have to…)

Betty, Sarah, and I threw boxes to the left and right as the bug tried to make its escape. You almost felt sorry for it. It couldn’t help the fact that its box home had been dragged back from an off-site storage location and was rudely being rattled every time I went looking for a new box. (This is only true in retrospect. At the time, I was just thinking, “Ewww! A giant cockroach! Make it go away!”) But cockroaches are notorious multipliers, and no one wants to see 40 cockroaches running around our floor — least of all me.

After we jokingly suggested we should phone the senior manager in charge (who had been highlighted in an email as the person to contact in the event of a problem), Sarah came to the rescue — mercifully and quickly ending the life of the cockroach with a swift club from her clog. She was the hero of the afternoon. And the adrenaline rush from the escapade was enough to make that final hour just fly by for all of us.