Getting By

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I never fooled myself into believing that I was indispensable, but did I have to prove it so often to the world at large?

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There is a phrase one hears in recovery circles: “Pulling a geographic.” While sharing their stories about the past and the inebriated life, many addicts and alcoholics learn that they have done similar things, like move across the country because they thought that a change would do them good.

One of the things that many of us did, many times, when we were trying to exert control over life was run from it. Move. Sometimes across town and sometimes cross-country. There was nothing so bad it couldn’t be fixed without filling out a change-of-address card.
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Today in History: May 18

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

At 8:32:17 a.m. PDT on May 18, 1980, an earthquake took place directly under Mount St. Helens, the only non-dormant volcano in the lower 48 states. It shook off the entire north face of the mountain. This was and remains the largest landslide in recorded history.

As the top of the mountain slid off, the molten rock and steam inside the volcano was exposed to cooler air; when this happened, the mountain exploded and a column of ash rose 80,000 feet in the air (about 15 miles) and mudslides reached 50 miles away. Because the volcano had started to become seismically active about two months before, a vast area around the mountain had been evacuated. Fifty-seven people perished nonetheless.
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Shawkan’s Journey Through Injustice

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The delays are growing shorter. The latest delay in photographer Mahmoud Abu Zeid’s journey through Egypt’s justice system was announced today: four days. The start of his trial has once again been re-scheduled, this time from today to May 21. This is the sixth delay since the end of 2015.

Egypt has been much in the news lately, so a delay in one case of injustice may not attract the attention it deserves. It was confirmed today that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry will be in Cairo tomorrow for talks with Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. It also comes after two courts sentenced 152 people to between two and five years in prison on Sunday for participating in peaceful protests last month. They were not convicted of vague charges like “inciting violence,” though that was in the mix; they were all found guilty of protesting, something that has been illegal in Egypt since 2013.

That news has taken much of the attention away from the story of one photographer, Mahmoud Abu Zeid, known professionally as Shawkan. But it may predict some possible outcomes for Shawkan, none of them happy. President al-Sisi’s government is willing to find people guilty of peaceful protest, and it now has the apparatus in place to handle large numbers of defendants, which is what a government confronts its justice system with when it makes mass arrests at protests a standard practice, a policy. Both circumstances will come to bear on Shawkan’s story and it may be why this latest delay is for only four days.

Shawkan was arrested more than 1000 days ago while covering a protest that was not peaceful, that was a part of the vast demonstrations that one could say were a part of the ongoing Arab Spring movement. He is one of more than 700 co-defendants awaiting the start of his trial.
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