We are, after all, social creatures. We are meant to be connected, to share space in communion. Losing that for an indefinite period of time fractures us.
I will not tell you what to think of that statement. But I will hold you here to think about it. We cannot look away.
Did they have planetary mnemonics in the 17th Century? Were people taught silly sentences like “My very excellent monarch journeys southward?” as an aid in remembering the order of the then-known six planets of the Milky Way galaxy?
There are not enough minutes in this show for me to share all of my thoughts about my brother James. It would take months for me to document all of the moments, conversations, and events which have shaped my life in ways large and small. Thankfully, Community Radio is not really about me. It’s a show we create together, and I have the benefit of relying on the rest of this community to assemble an episode about James.
That’s the cool thing about science, how nothing is discovered in isolation. The work builds upon prior work, and will generate additional ideas, hypotheses, experiments. Thus it was on February 27, 1940 that two scientists – working off others’ assumption that there existed a long-lived isotope of carbon – were able to synthesize it.
Every day, hundreds of thousands of human beings perform a choreographed dance that brings a little bit of paper – a wedding invitation, a letter of condolences, a birthday card – from one part of the country to another. And in a world where so much is fleeting, the focus on physical connection is an achievement worth celebrating.
This is Black History Month, and the stories we should tell are about the human beings who worked together in a variety of spaces and formats to resist dehumanization, subjugation, violence and evil. It is that collaboration I want us to focus on.
I’m originally from a part of the country that usually gets a tolerable amount of snow each winter. My life was rarely troubled by large snowfalls. And when big storms came, they brought days off from school. For someone whose responsibilities could be counted on one hand, snow typically made my days more joyful.
It’s been a while since I’ve taken the train to New York or Boston from home. It is a trip I made relatively often as a child, thanks in large part to my dad’s employment with Amtrak.
On January 23, 2020, the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 pandemic to be a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. And here we are, two years later, still dealing with the pandemic. I don’t need to explain what we’ve lived through to anybody who is listening today. But should this episode of Community Radio be heard by anyone in the future unaware of what it felt like to live through this, let me briefly share a few thoughts.