Notes from my Knapsack 10-1-20

Notes from my Knapsack 10-1-20

Jeff Gill

 

It's debatable

___


Presidential debates have come to Ohio, and will continue, including a vice-presidential debate, through October.

 

You may be aware that there's an election in November, early in month. Time is running out to get registered if you aren't (Oct. 5 deadline), or you can start now to plan for early voting in Newark in a few days from now, if you are already registered and prefer to skip the Election Day ceremonials (Nov. 3, just to be clear).

 

Having done a little debate in school, I have to admit to a general level of bafflement at what we call debating for presidential candidates. I could call it Kabuki theatre, but that would be equally unfair to Japanese culture.

 

Debate as a competitive form involves knowledge of subject matter and the ability to directly refute or override your opponent's arguments. Famously, you have to be ready to argue either side of a subject, with the skill being honed your ability break down the case pro- or con- into its constituent elements, and work with them convincingly in complete sentences.

 

Presidential debates have two opponents facing each other (sometimes three in the recent past), but there the comparison breaks down. Moderators are pretty actively engaged themselves, and their role as I think of them is to state the proposition under review, and to haul the debaters back on topic if they wander off too far into the weeds. A more traditional debate form would have the moderator say "George Washington said in his Farewell Address: 'The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connexion as possible.' Given that instruction, our proposition tonight is that the United States should have minimal foreign entanglements. Mr. Trump, winning the coin toss, you will argue for the resolution; Mr. Biden, you will argue against it."

 

Instead we have a moderator or moderators saying things like "Do you think our foreign policy is heading in the right direction?" which is so open ended as to leave the moderator nothing to moderate. How do you say you're off-topic if you've defined the topic so broadly?

 

And perhaps a traditional debate would not serve us so well in the process of determining who would make a better Chief Executive. I can't help thinking that we could do better than the so-called "presidential debate" format, though. Some suggest a cage match, which just gets you the strongest and meanest, so that's a no for me; other athletic competitions have been proposed, a lower-impact ninja warrior course, but I don't see that sorting mechanism getting us a better occupant of the White House.

 

I'd be interested in some sort of listening competition. Have the two of them sit and hear at the same time a series of presentations, both personal and factual in nature, and then give them a test on what they just heard. That's the sort of head-to-head competition that might help us in seeing who is really more ready for the office.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been debating all sorts of things recently, too often with himself. Tell him what arguments convince you at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

 

 

Faith Works 9-26-20

Faith Works 9-26-20

Jeff Gill

 

Not a column for the squeamish

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Since my father's death and the family decisions we've had to make in the last six months, I've had quite a few inquiries come in by email and social media asking "what have you learned?"

 

In the process of dealing with a death, a relocation for my mother, and the myriad adjustments of selling a long-standing family home, I have to admit I think I've learned a few things. Some of it I may need to rest and reflect on a little while longer, but there are some simple practical lessons that are already baked through and ready to serve up.

 

One big one, and frankly the aspect of this that is what people have been asking me about the most, is your stuff. Yes, you. Your stuff.

 

Oh, not my stuff, you say. As a matter of fact, I don't have stuff. I have antiques and keepsakes and memorabilia and valued possessions, but I don't have "stuff," okay?

 

(This is where I put the content warning. If you are unbearably sensitive about your possessions, or have had a recent loss yourself and are struggling with their belongings, you may not want to read the rest of this. It won't be fun to read, and isn't a delight to say on my part either.)

 

Folks, everything you have in your house, all those antiques and keepsakes and memorabilia and valued possessions, is . . . okay, let's start with the basic theological simple fact: you can't take it with you, there's nothing we own that is forever, and we are at best stewards for a time of whatever that china or silver or furniture is. If it's really of any value in an earthly sense, then it probably existed before you were born, and will perhaps be around after you are gone, so we are simply caretakers, that's all.

 

Except it likely isn't as valuable as you think it is. Sorry, but while I'm not an appraiser or antiques expert, the overwhelming majority of stuff that people think is valuable is just stuff. Beanie Baby collections, much loved dining room tables, framed items on the wall that have been there long enough to discolor the wall behind it: not as valuable as you think it is.

 

Does our stuff have value? Yes, but it's the value we put on those objects, and when we die, my friends, that value dies with us. Perhaps there are some others somewhere who share those values, so a box of genealogy files which has a street value of ZERO may have a lasting value to another family member, where that china cabinet or collectible set of china figures in it is probably of a measurable value to a person who shares your tastes . . . but how much time and money (and they are two sides of a single coin) will it take to find that person? Putting it in a storage unit until you can find that person who shares your sense of value over some stuff is almost invariably a bad investment, unless you own the locker rental contract.

 

And – this is the really hard part, friends – most of your stuff is going to be gone through after your death by people who are pressed for time, whose backs are tired, who have been lifting things out of drawers and hauling stuff off of the backs of shelves and piling it all on tables and sofas, and they will be making myriad fast decisions, perhaps with tears in their eyes, but the knowledge of the end of the month, the closing at the end of the week, or the new tenant coming tomorrow pressing them to make hard decisions quickly. Not the decisions you would make, nor the priorities you would think they might, because by the time they get to the stuff they'd really like to stop and think about, the light is fading, the truck is waiting ('it's a rental, dear, we have to have it back by 8 am"), and all the time they spent on the closets and cabinets means the drawer of treasures is now a rushed dumpout of choices for what fit into the last few corners of bins not already filled, "and I can't get any more in my car, sorry."

 

So if you still have the eyes to see and the time to spend and the energy to devote to it, if you have objects or items you want to pass along securely to the next generation, you have to do it now. Yourself. I'll say more about this next week.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been involved in cleaning out a remarkable number of closets in three locations in the last six months. Tell him what gets you to sift and sort at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

 

 

Faith Works 9-19-20

Faith Works 9-19-20

Jeff Gill

 

A special day, lasting lessons

___

 

September 19 has been a day I always called my dad.

 

It's neither his birthday nor mine, but he was a history buff and passed that love along to his eldest.

 

In 1777, the first phase of the Battle of Saratoga was fought in the American Revolution, and in 1862, the Battle of Antietam in the Civil War. In our shared genealogical work for the Gill family in America, it appears that our first Gill ancestor to come here from Leeds, England departed the lines of the British Army on September 19, 1777 and joined the Continentals, was granted American citizenship in York, Pennsylvania a few weeks later and served as a soldier long enough to be granted land later on in central Pennsylvania.

 

From that land grant John Gill married a young Scots woman, and their grandson William enlisted in the 53^rd Pennsylvania Infantry, serving in the Seven Days campaign before Richmond, and ending up in the center of the lines attacking the Sunken Road just west of Sharpsburg, Maryland above Antietam Creek, again on Sept. 19 in 1862.

 

So we usually talked on this day, and sorted out our mutual lines of inquiry in family history. It was a tradition of sorts. And as many of you know, I'll not be calling him this year, since six months and a week ago he died.

 

Truth be told, I've not spent much time in that half year working on genealogy. What I have done is sift and sort Dad's files (yes, paper files) and materials, and moved them from Texas where they wintered and where he died, and now from our family home of the last fifty-seven years in Indiana. There was an organization of sorts to the folders and binders and stacks, some of which I could figure out, and much of which I'll have to reconstruct as I unpack and process it all.

 

Meanwhile, I've inherited other strings which, when pulled, snarl into additional stacks of Kern and Walton and Newlin and other family histories. Diplomas and yearbooks and certificates and programs and memorabilia from a century and more; a 1922 football team with my maternal grandfather in the back row, World War I postcards from a great-uncle whose memorabilia came into Dad's hands, and now mine, along with a framed picture and doughboy helmet.

 

And my mother, who now lives with my sister, whose vision isn't what it was (and who repeats much, and is confused often), views carefully in her mind's eye all the furniture that cannot follow her, and checks on where each piece goes, because for her every pie safe and china cabinet is a genealogical document as important as Dad's paperwork, if not more so, or at least more substantial. (Trust me, that furniture is more substantial than even boxes of old paperwork.) There is a story to every item, and connections to her mother or father or their people back into farmsteads and locations across downstate Illinois.

 

People have asked me since early in this process what I've learning from it all, and what I would tell others who eye family homes warily, thinking about their own day of reckoning by way of packing and moving someone else's stuff. And there are probably a dozen constructive columns I could write on the subject, but I'm going to parcel this out in a few pieces, if somewhat compressed, over the next few weeks.

 

But it starts with these two observations. First, and this was a passion of Dad's for many, many years to family and friends and occasionally complete strangers – put names on pictures NOW. Don't wait until later. It's amazing how quickly you forget who that person in the back row is, how even blood kin names slip away. Digital images simply make this all the more imperative: find a way to attach names to pictures, and do so, immediately. September 19 might be a good day to declare "National Put Names on Pictures Day" and I do so declare it.

 

The other is to celebrate a similar practice, one which has brought me many happy tears. When in doubt, write a note and leave it behind. Because you never know, you know? There's a sermon or two on that, but I mean in terms of those you leave behind. I think Dad heard footsteps coming up behind him, because his 2019 notes have been found everywhere. Dates on masking tape, sticky notes on switchboxes, interspersed scrawls among printouts. And every one has been a gift, and an inheritance even to small things. When in doubt, write it out.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in Licking County; he's working on unpacking after much packing. Tell him how you sort out stuff at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Notes from my Knapsack 9-17-20

Notes from my Knapsack 9-17-20

Jeff Gill

 

Leadership and lying

___

It's difficult to get a clear read on this, but I strongly suspect that, when I was a kid, if someone said "all Presidents lie" there would be a great deal of pushback.

 

Kennedy was recently buried under an eternal flame at Arlington, and LBJ had just started asking McNamara what his options were in Vietnam, and Nixon was a semi-disgraced former vice-president. Ike was retired in Gettysburg, and Harry to Independence, but Johnson went to him for the signing of the legislation that created Medicare.

 

I learned when our family stopped with Grandma Gill at the Hoover birthplace in Iowa that, to my surprise, she appreciated him to the point of tears; I'd only heard him mocked as a failure, but she remembered his relief work in the Mississippi Valley and overseas, and honored the man. FDR was on the dime, and in our hearts as the one who taught us that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself.

 

Things changed quickly into the 1970s, and now "Vietnam and Watergate" is a phrase synonymous with loss of faith in leadership and government. Institutional trust came apart in many ways after Nixon left office and Saigon fell. It's of no small personal interest to people like myself that organized religious bodies, Scouting registration, and many other non-profit fellowship groups saw a peak in the early to mid-Seventies that has only declined in numbers and involvement since that date.

 

Putnam's "Bowling Alone" dissects this in detail, and hints at the reality that it wasn't just the Watergate tapes or the Pentagon Papers that triggered our national withdrawal from trust and commitment, but trends that go back farther, which ask us to dig deeper. I've spent most of my professional life delving into those questions, and wish I had better answers, or at least ones which fit into five hundred words, but I do not.

 

Yet I doubt I'd get much debate if I said today "all Presidents lie." Ford pardoned Nixon and said a number of things about why and how he came to that decision which I trust he privately regretted; Carter said to America "I will not lie to you" and then found in the Iran hostage crisis and as Desert One played out that it was easier said than done. Reagan and Iran-Contra set loose a tangled web of non-truths and evasions which only deepened skepticism on all sides, tripping up Bush I and setting the table for Bush II, with Clinton in between arguably not gaining a reputation for honest speech, whatever you thought he meant by "is."

 

As to Obama and Trump, in our era of hyper-polarization, you don't need me to poke the rough beast slouching through our politics today. Look back farther, and now historical studies tell us about presidential lies and misrepresentations from slave-owning scribes of equality to apostles of normalcy with mistresses in the White House hallways. Wherever you come down politically, we all think presidents lie, and what's more, there's nothing to be done about it.

 

Which is, in my opinion, our deeper dilemma. What would a truly transparent presidency look like? Can executive authority be wielded with absolute honesty? Should we ask for full disclosure of everything, always, from the Oval Office? And if not, why not, and when? We know what Colonel Jessup thinks about the subject, but what's our answer? I don't think we've had this conversation, and it's overdue.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in Licking County; he really has no opinion worth sharing about the hat you're not wearing or how those pants really fit you, but your baby is indeed beautiful. Tell him how you handle the truth at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 9-12-20

Faith Works 9-12-20

Jeff Gill

 

Foreign countries right nearby

___

"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."

L.P. Hartley's line in "The Go-Between" has been reused in many forms since he wrote that in 1953.

 

Today, February 2020 feels like a foreign country.

 

So much has changed, and is still changing, that we all have to take into account, faith communities included. Schools and shopping are perhaps more common experiences of dislocation, but church life is right behind them.

 

I had intended to write about that this week, but another distant yet nearby circumstance has nudged its way into my present thoughts. Brad Lepper wrote a column about a subject he and I have been researching, discussing (even debating at times!), and publishing on for decades now. We have done presentations together at Denison University and at Sunwatch Village in Dayton, separately in various historical museums and archaeological societies all over Ohio and occasionally beyond. We've met bus tours and camera crews, all the while still adding to our store of data and length of a timeline whose length is itself nearly bookish in print.

 

The Newark Holy Stones are a mystery even to how many there are, since the various pieces and parts are a matter of some dispute even among those who still argue for their authenticity. The one clear point agreed to by all is that there are two primary artifacts, found in the ground with Hebrew letters carved into stone, both found in 1860 if months and miles apart, but both in Licking County.

 

Some supporters of Hebrew language users in a prehistoric period of central Ohio are willing to cast aside the first found, the so-called "Keystone" which was the only Holy Stone actually found in Newark (and outside of the city limits at that time). The contemporary nature of the typeface style characters inscribed on a sort of over-sized plumb-bob has led quite a few to agree that it is relatively modern in manufacture, but the later "Decalogue" stone, found in the fall of 1860 at the bottom of a stone mound that once towered over Somerset Road east of Buckeye Lake, is the one most often cited as proof of Israelite involvement in the construction of the Newark Earthworks.

 

With the profile of Moses on one side, and the Ten Commandments carved in a snaking path weaving around all sides of the round-topped stone object, the "Decalogue" object has a certain mystical appeal. For reasons of typography and paleography and patterns of error, it's as clear that the second Holy Stone has a modern origin as the Keystone. They are bound by qualities of discovery and manufacture that make them one, so that a flaw in either discredits both.

 

But as Brad pointed out last week, some sincere questioners have asked "if these are hoaxes, why would someone put so much effort into them?" The two-piece stone box for the latter Holy Stone, and other carved objects likely found with them, all indicate a serious amount of work. "Why?" is a fair question.

 

This is where a minister and an archaeologist have a common interest, in asking questions about "why" human beings do something, but not on our own commonly accepted terms. "Why" today is not always the "why" of a previous century or era. The question of the human quest for "why" has certain common features through time, but you miss the deeper issues if you assume people have always thought pretty much the way you would.

 

One aspect of the adventure Brad and I have taken on, along with occasionally scrambling through multifloral rose vines on hilltops, or sifting archives from Harvard to that foreign land of Michigan, is to try to put ourselves into the distant country of 1859. It's the Licking County of 1859, so many names and locations are the same, but the thinking is just similar enough to trip you up.

 

And the painful realization we came to was that the essential humanity of all racial and ethnic communities was denied, even here where slavery held no sway. Whether Caucasian or African or Native American Indian, there were and are those who would affirm we are one in origin, in rights, in hopes; and there still are, though less than there were, those who see sharp divides between peoples, and a lower origin, fewer rights, no hopes.

 

To erase that divide, if you thought you could do it with a fabricated artifact, would be worth a great deal of effort. They were wrong to do it, but we have come to understand better the "why" that drove them on the verge of civil warfare to do so.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in Licking County; he owes Brad more writing than this short column. Tell him how the past looks to you at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.