The Advocate

( Attribution )   "Your life has been one long thread of hurt. Now, what will you mend with that thread?" — Paraphrase of @sagescrittore Sorry for the delay in posting! Take note and take care.

Signal boosting to amplify this incredible opportunity: "My name is Nguyen Pham, and earlier this year, I created the Mensa Foundation's first-ever Progress Pride Scholarship to lift and center marginalized students at the intersection of BIPOC and LGBTQ.   The Progress Pride Scholarship has just officially launched, and I'm spreading the word to drum up interest in the application.  Up for grabs are two $10k college scholarships -- the Foundation's largest scholarship awards ever -- for those who identify as BIPOC and LGBTQ and who have a demonstrated record of positive service to the BIPOC and LGBTQ communities.   An essay is all that's required up front, due January 15, 2022.  Open to all U.S. university students.  Awardee(s) will be selected in early 2022 and will then need to furnish a résumé/CV.   To help with promotion, I've assembled an info page at https://progresspride.org/ as well as an e-flier, included below and attached as a forwardable image....

A recent article from Shaila Dewan at the NY Times lays out some compelling complexities of nuance around policing, reimagining public safety, and the true costs of both. Rather than summarize, I have embedded the poignant points below. For the TL;DR version, the basic finding is that sometimes police can potentially help a little bit, but the costs are far more than the cheaper and greater gains from funding communities instead of more cops, and it's better from a moral and ethical standpoint. "With shootings and homicides surging in many cities, calls to redirect money to policing are rising. But evidence that hiring more officers is the best way to reduce crime is mixed: Beefing up a police force can help, but the effects are modest and far from certain. Those who study the question say any declines in crime have to be weighed against the downsides of adding more police officers, including negative interactions with the public, police violence and further erosion of public...

(Golden Tears, by Annie Marie Zimmerman) "There is a sacredness in tears. They are not a mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition and of unspeakable love." — Washington Irving

In perhaps one of the most glaring examples of hypocrisy, the people who have sworn an oath to protect and serve refuse to comply with it whenever it hurts their feelings. Indeed, the history of cops' resistance to following the very rules they're charged with enforcing is infamous . But since the COVID-19 pandemic, these temper tantrums have highlighted how truly dangerous they are, from refusing mask mandates to protesting against vaccination requirements that demonstrably increase public health and safety. This is even happening here in San Leandro as the police officers' union utilizes scare tactics to pressure the city council and the city manager away from enacting mandates to protect people from COVID-19, including the very officers themselves! (More officers died from COVID-19 this year and last year than anything else.) Read this story from NBC News by Matthew Guariglia, historian of race, policing and state power, for a particularly illuminating perspective on ...

( Maya and the Three poster ) "If it is to be, it is up to me." — William Johnsen. Take note and take care.

(Broken Fingaz, a Jewish mural with Yiddish lettering, Warsaw, Poland, circa 2014) This is my last post in this series, and there's a good reason for that. In Judaism, letters also have a numerical value. Aleph is 1, Bet is 2, etc. The letter Chet is 8 and the letter Yud is 10, giving us the number 18 and the word "chai" for life. 18 plus 18 is 36, which is known as a "double chai." It's an auspicious and lucky number, the perfect way to complete this. Over the course of my various posts, I've highlighted the following: Middot: Hebrew for values, personal characteristics, traits, or virtues, but literally means measure or norms. Tikkun middot is personal self-growth through this process of cultivating moral traits. See the 48 list . Mitzvah: a commandment, one of 613 mitzvot, but also generally means a good deed with a focus on actions over thoughts or intentions. Hashkafa: the Hebrew term for worldview and guiding philosophy, your ideology. It's a p...