Life on the Gulf is hard. Follow your nose past the shiny hotels and condos that block up the view and look at the rest of the world. The ground is flat, the air is heavy and the heat will knock you stupid two-thirds of the year. The highways are lined with billboards advertising pain doctors, tourist traps and attorneys promising high settlements and cheap divorces. The scrub grows high and thick here. The trees you see are either young matchsticks with impossibly high trunks or old, gnarled things that have survived too many hurricanes to die. The people aren’t much different. For generations, they’ve lived by the Gulf, a few in financial comfort but most of them eaking out a living on hard work, low wages and luck that runs thin on the ground. They hold jobs without benefits, without paid vacation and without too much of a future. The life here already made these folks resourceful, tenacious, colorful and tough but right now life’s even harder than usual. The BP oil spill took a look at Gulf life and punched it right in the gut. Tom Cooper knows this and put the story of these folks in his…
Google remembered the liberation of Auschwitz today. For those who grew up in the latter half of the twentieth century, Auschwitz is the edge of a remembered nightmare, a disaster our parents and grandparents witnessed and passed in their memories to us. My mother saw the newsreels of the liberation as a child and the images haunted her forever but some of my friends were even closer to the tragedy. One college friend’s great-aunt was a survivor of the camps and when I met the lady, I marveled that this happy cookie-jar of a woman had faced such evil and still lived so joyfully, dancing with a tattooed number on her arm. Another friend was the child of camp survivors who married after the liberation and their tenacity and PTSD were visible in her character. Auschwitz left a lifetime of suffering and long memories in its wake and those of us not directly affected have been trying to grasp the motives and magnitude of the Holocaust ever since. This is the role more and more of the world has moved into over the last seventy years and it’s a role William Styron talked about in his novel, Sophie’s Choice. Styron…