We’re one week into February, the only month that can fluctuate in length, but even with that quirk it’s always the shortest. I would believe it if you told me that’s why it was chosen for Black History Month, although the real purpose was to include the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, both happening this week. Meanwhile, Trump is using the occasion to post racist memes that he refuses to apologize for.
Lately I’m finding some psychological reprieve in the total and complete acceptance of who he is. When you already know the depths of his depravity and immorality, when you know that he will never change, when you know that the cruelty and corruption is the point, then you can, at the very least, stop the spike of adrenaline that is caused by each of his chaotic and hateful actions. There is no tipping point he hasn’t already crossed, no further transgression that will finally warrant accountability, no revealing document that whisks him out of our lives. This acceptance is not a form of endorsement, but a tactic to avoid having our emotions hijacked, so we can think more clearly.
We don’t need to find another smoking gun; they’ve been fired over and over again. What matters now is the breadth of the American populous that is fed up, the number of people who care more about rejecting fascism than party affiliation, the scale of citizens who are ready to use both their voting and economic power to stand up for humanity and democracy.
I don’t know. I really don’t. I’m here in the middle of the North Atlantic, trying to make sense of my own life while the world keeps spiraling off-axis. All I have for this week is the firmer realization that the tipping point will never be something he does, it’s something we do. The question I keep asking myself this week — how can we shift from hope to cope?
hope (verb): want something to happen or be the case
cope (verb): deal effectively with something difficult
I went to a talk this week at the Nordic House by Katti Frederiksen, a linguist and writer from Greenland. It drew a large crowd, which I think was influenced by the increased attention and interest that Greenland has attracted geopolitically.
Some interesting things I learned from her talk:
- In recent years, Inuit in Greenland have built stronger relationships with Inuit communities in Canada and Alaska. The youth in particular are more interested in strengthening bonds with indigenous communities worldwide, including Hawaii and Australia, than in connecting with Danish or even West Nordic countries (i.e. Iceland, Faroe Islands).
- Connecting in-person with trans-Arctic Inuit is difficult because there are no direct flights. For example, to visit an Inuit community in Alaska she had to make four hops: Nuuk to Reykjavík to Seattle to Anchorage to the final destination in northern Alaska.
- She also talked about the importance of Inuit influencers, and how Canadian Inuit have influenced Greenlanders through social media. There are some popular Greenlandic influencers, like Q’s Greenland.
- In Greenland, the traditional Inuit language has been well preserved but many aspects of their culture (dress, music, food) have been eroded. She said that in Canada the opposite has happened, where the language is often lost but other cultural traditions remain strong. In this way, Greenlanders are re-learning about traditional practices from Inuit in Canada.
- In terms of language, all education, government, and private sector work tends to be conducted in Danish. English is pervasive because of the Internet.
- Greenlandic has distinct dialects by region: western, eastern, and northern. Traditionally, these communities did not mix much because it’s so difficult to travel. However, a big divergence with east Greenlandic is not just because of distance, but because Christian missionaries did not arrive there until much later. In the shamanic religious traditions, which remained prevalent for longer in the east, certain words were not allowed to be spoken in reference to the dead. This required communities there to invent many new words, which caused the eastern dialectic to diverge.
Speaking of Greenland, one of my photographs from the protest at the Greenlandic embassy from a couple of weeks ago was published in the print edition of the Reykjavík Grapevine this week (the one on the left).
This week was the Winter Lights Festival in Reykjavík, which involves projected light shows throughout the downtown area as well as concerts and other events. On Friday was Museum Night, where 36 museums were free and open from 6-11pm. I took advantage to visit some museums I hadn’t been to yet, including Whales of Iceland and the Reykjavík Maritime Museum. The latter is particularly well done and highly recommended.
Along with lighting up Hallgrímskirkja, there were a series of concerts inside dubbed HyperOrgel in which musicians utilized the MIDI interface on the church’s massive organ to create computer-controlled organ performances. This means that they could create their own interfaces for interacting with the organ, including shadow play in front of a projection and waving a wand. It also allowed for using other instruments to control the organ, or example a recorder and a theremin. I kept thinking that it was the musical equivalent of miraculin, the taste modifier in miracle fruit that subverts your expectations by causing sour foods to taste sweet.
