The dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution, is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes. History teems with instances of truth put down by persecution. If not suppressed forever, it may be thrown back for centuries.
I’ve launched a brand-new column at That’s Not Current! Inspired lately and excited about revisiting her career, here’s “Ricci Rich,” a deep dive into the filmography of Christina Ricci. In this first installment, I take a look back at Wes Craven’s much-maligned Cursed, examining its troubled production, parallels to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, themes of predatory masculinity and sexually transmitted lycanthropy and more. Check it out!
What
looks like a red butterfly in space is in reality a nursery for hundreds of
baby stars, revealed in this infrared image from our Spitzer Space
Telescope. Officially named Westerhout 40 (W40), the butterfly is a nebula — a
giant cloud of gas and dust in space where new stars may form. The butterfly’s
two “wings” are giant bubbles of hot, interstellar gas blowing from
the hottest, most massive stars in this region.
Besides
being beautiful, W40 exemplifies how the formation of stars results in the
destruction of the very clouds that helped create them. Inside giant clouds of
gas and dust in space, the force of gravity pulls material together into dense
clumps. Sometimes these clumps reach a critical density that allows stars to
form at their cores. Radiation and winds coming from the most massive stars in
those clouds — combined with the material spewed into space when those stars
eventually explode — sometimes form bubbles like those in W40. But these
processes also disperse the gas and dust, breaking up dense clumps and reducing
or halting new star formation.
In his closing remarks, Taoiseach Varadkar stunned and elated those present with the announcement that Ireland is starting a scholarship program for young Choctaws to study in Ireland.
“…. in early November 1845, many American papers reported that “a failure of the Irish potato crop”—on which around a third of the country relied—was “now too painfully certain,” with “a famine among the Irish people … apprehended.” Later that year, the Southern Patriot reported, “There is now no part of the country that is not visited by the blight” and “the loss is tremendous….But when Major William Armstrong, an American “Choctaw agent” who represented their interests while implementing U.S. policy, approached them for money in 1847, writes the historian Turtle Bunbury, “he must have experienced mixed emotions.” These were people with very little to give, who had been pressured to cede 11 million acres of their land. Many would still have been grieving the family members they had lost along the Trail of Tears: Though the treaty had been signed 17 years earlier, Choctaw people were still making their way to Oklahoma, arriving at their final destination disheveled, filthy, and exhausted.
“Many would have been destitute or ill,” writes historian Anelise Hanson Shrout in the Journal of the Early Republic. “Most would have experienced enormous financial, emotional, and demographic damage as a result of removal. It is difficult to imagine a people less well-positioned to act philanthropically.” Still, Armstrong took out a circular, produced by the “Memphis committee” for Irish relief, and read it aloud to a crowd of some white settlers—“agents, missionaries, traders”—and a large number of Choctaw Native Americans.
Exactly what happened in that meeting is lost to time. But the assembled group managed to put together $170—well over $5,000 in today’s money. Most of this sum came from the Choctaw people. “It was an amazing gesture,” Judy Allen, then-editor of the Choctaw newspaper Bishinik, told the American-Statesman Capitol on the 150th anniversary of the gift. “By today’s standards, it might be a million dollars ($1M US).” Bunbury explains it thus: “It is assumed that the Choctaw contributed because they felt immense empathy for the Irish situation, having experienced such similar pain during the Trail of Tears a little over a decade earlier.”
[….] Over the last 170 years, the Irish have remembered this sudden gesture of generosity from distant strangers. Just before St. Patrick’s Day 2018, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar announced an Irish scholarship program for Choctaw youth. As the BBC reported, Varadkar addressed the Choctaw Nation in Oklahoma. “A few years ago, on a visit to Ireland, a representative of the Choctaw Nation called your support for us ‘a sacred memory’,” he said. “It is that and more. It is a sacred bond, which has joined our peoples together for all time. Your act of kindness has never been, and never will be, forgotten in Ireland.”
Generations ago, a group of people who had little to give gave what they could in hopes of saving others.
Today, the generations they helped save give not only their thanks, but a hope for new generations.
These peoples are a show of what humanity is at its finest and we should be humbled by both the Choctaw Nation’s display of compassion and Ireland’s show of gratitude. We would all be better humans if we follow their examples.
This blog is mostly so I can vent my feelings and share my interests. Other than that, I am nothing special.
If you don't like Left Wing political thought and philosophy, all things related to horror, the supernatural, the grotesque, guns or the strange, then get the fuck out. I just warned you.
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