Culture

A Prisoner’s Anniversary: ‘Ignite the Light’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

At heart, it is a love story. Love of truth. Love of fairness, of justice. The love of a young couple with young children. Love is optimism, you see. Love can build a world that has truth and fairness in it.

Building a family is perhaps the most optimistic act possible; fighting for a better country and world demands vigilance in the name of that optimism.

One year ago today a young writer, activist, husband, and dad was given a court’s sentence: 10 years in prison and 1000 lashes with a cane or a whip, to be delivered in a public square in sets of 50 each Friday until the 1000 have been delivered. So far one set of 50 was meted out, on January 9. He has been in a small prison cell for almost 1100 days now, 1077 today if my count is correct.

A great many activists have been writing, blogging, making phone calls, standing outside embassies each Friday—a great many are standing outside embassies today in honor of the sad anniversary—asking powerful people to speak to other powerful people to right what they feel is a great wrong. It is a love story, but the ending still appears to be far, far distant.
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No Bullies. No Drama. Only Comedies on TV

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The comments territory under any YouTube video is an unlighted playground with shards of glass for sliding boards and a ball-pit full of barbed wire. There is no “thumbs-down” or dislike button available on Facebook, for obvious reasons. Comments are certainly allowed, and often the prevailing rhetorical mode is insult and injury.

Twitter may as well be one big dislike button sometimes. Not in my experience so far, except for two or three times. Each one of these is etched in my co-dependent memory, however.

When I started publishing on WordPress a year an a half ago, I wondered: What will it be like to have my work exposed to a comments section?
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The Greatest Story Never Told

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.”—James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.

Boswell’s “Life of Johnson” was published in 1791, a little more than six years after Johnson’s death. It is not a biography as readers may think of a biography: the recounting of incidents from a life of action. The poet W.H. Auden said that writers are “makers, not doers” and thus he, Auden, was not going to write his memoirs. We need biographies of the doers in order to learn what was happening behind the scenes, how close the men of action came to disaster and saved their (and sometimes, our) day, he suggested. Johnson’s life was the life of a man of letters, a life spent writing plays, compiling the first major English dictionary, compiling an edition of Shakespeare’s plays, writing weekly columns on every topic his extraordinary mind could entertain. He was a maker.
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