Farewell to a Queen

 

Obituary: Marion Rogers

Dateline: Clifton Park, New York

Mary Ellen “Marion” Rogers, 90, of Garden Drive passed away peacefully at her home on Thursday, May 26 after a prolonged battle with Alzheimer’s disease. She was brave and resolute to the end. 

Marion was born in Brooklyn, N.Y. on Dec. 29, 1931, and was the daughter of the late William and Mary (Carney) Nally and beloved wife of the late Joseph F. Rogers, who died on Nov. 10, 2006. She was a graduate of Resurrection R.C. Grammar School and St. Brendan’s High School in Brooklyn.  

After retiring, Marion and her husband were the owners of Marion’s Rings and Things in Clifton Park, which gave them the opportunity to travel the East Coast and enjoy Irish Fests from New York to Florida for well over a decade. They took great pleasure in the adventure and all the friendships they made along the way. 

Marion sang in the choir at both St. Edward the Confessor Church in Clifton Park and Resurrection Roman Catholic Church in Brooklyn. She loved working in her yard and gardening with her dear friends and neighbors, Mark and Maureen Skinner. At various times she volunteered for WMHT on their fundraising phone bank, cooked in the soup kitchen for St. Edward’s, volunteered for the Red Cross Blood Drive, and worked as a school bus monitor for Shenendehowa Central Schools, among other things. 

She is the devoted mother of Kevin J. Rogers and Mary Ellen (Brian) Moshier; sister of William (Connie) Nally and Evelyn (Joseph) Barker and the late Richard (the late Ann) Nally and Robert (Lois) Nally; grandmother of Melissa (Michael) Surprenant, Carolyn Moshier, Mary-Elizabeth Moshier and Jessica Moshier; great-grandmother of Marvin Peavy III and Chloe Surprenant; also survived by numerous nieces and nephews. She was much loved and admired by all. 

Marion will be honored with a Celebration of Life in both Clifton Park and Brooklyn at a later date. In lieu of flowers the family requests donations to the Alzheimer’s Association and The Community Hospice of Albany, N.Y., whose care and support were boundless in her final days.  

Her final arrangements were made by the family through the Gordon C. Emerick Funeral Home, 1550 Rt. 9 Clifton Park, NY 12065, 518-371-5454. 

For online condolences, please visit Gordoncemerickfuneralhome.com

Gordon C. Emerick Funeral Home

1550 Route 9

Clifton Park, New York 12065

518-371-5454

The Welcome Mat

Back on Nov. 20 I posted a blog on the Modern Whig Party website discussing President Obama's executive action on immigration. As you can imagine, the reaction was swift and passionate on both sides of the issue.

But one comment in particular caught my attention, probably because I heard it several times, mostly from people opposed to the president's action. "Your grandparents came to this country legally," they said. "So did mine. If they could do it then, people can do it now."

While it's true my grandparents emigrated from Ireland "legally," that doesn't tell the whole story. All four of them came to this country before 1921 (although it turns out my father's mother was actually born in the Bronx and had returned to Ireland as an infant, and apparently didn't know it). But in their time, there was virtually no such thing as an "illegal immigrant" -- unless you came from China. People were just "immigrants."

Image courtesy Scholastic.com

When my grandfather on my mother's side arrived at Ellis Island, he was asked a set of 29 questions ("Are you an anarchist?") and given a physical. Once he passed -- you couldn't have a communicable disease, a mental illness or permanent defect or disability -- he paid a $3 customs fee, his papers were stamped and he was sent on his way. The whole process took a couple hours.

All that changed in 1921, when the first broad quotas were instituted in the face of the "Red Scare" -- the fear communists would export their revolution from Europe to the United States. But the other shoe really dropped in 1924 with the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act, which limited the immigration of Eastern Europeans, Southern Europeans and Jews to 3 percent of their total U.S. population as of the census of 1890, severely restricted the immigration of Africans, and barred entry to Arabs, Asians and people from India.

The rationale behind the Act is staggering to our modern sensibilities: charitably, it can be called xenophobia. Realistically, and more accurately, it was rabid racial and religious prejudice. By using the 1890 census as the benchmark, Congress made it almost impossible for European Jews to emigrate to the United States, which was the idea all along. Other Europeans suddenly faced unprecedented, and daunting, barriers. And still other ethnic groups -- most notably Asians -- were singled out and barred by name.

In our modern era, the serious debate over what to do about undocumented immigrants usually revolves around more sensible issues: access to taxpayer-funded social services and public education, the impact of immigration on the labor market and the wider economy, and whatever threats some undocumented immigrants might pose to national security either through criminal activity (mostly drug related) or ties to terrorist organizations. All of those are legitimate issues and should -- indeed, must -- be addressed.

Yet some politicians insist on pushing the image of people wading across the Rio Grande as the sole "face of immigration." While no one could possibly doubt the 300,000 people or so who cross back and forth annually in just that way, or the many millions of Mexicans living here now without proper documentation, focusing exclusively on that one facet of the issue ignores some other important dimensions. One is the large number of immigrants who came to this country with a valid visa and simply stayed after it expired. Another is the reality of the many undocumented immigrants, regardless of their countries of origin, who have been here so long they've started and raised families; their children are native-born American citizens whose parents are subject to deportation. A third are the large number of businesses, especially in high-tech, who rely on a global supply of talent but who find it increasingly challenging to navigate the visa rules and keep their foreign employees here.

All of those issues cry for comprehensive and effective immigration reform. That means legislation. But to craft something fair, effective and humane, our representatives need to objectively judge current circumstances for what they are and refrain from using the kind of inflammatory rhetoric guaranteed to cloud the issue. The statistics on immigration are the place to start, and the facts are there for those who care to look.

Image courtesy Scholastic.com

About 59 percent of the estimated 11.5 million unauthorized immigrants currently in the country are indeed from Mexico. For most people, thanks in large part to Washington's heated dialogue, the debate on immigration is all about them and the issue starts and ends there. But according to a 2011 Department of Homeland Security study, a further 1.3 million are from Asia, 800,000 from South America, 300,000 from Europe (including maybe as many as 250,000 from Ireland) and the rest from other parts of the world. The only difference among these groups are their respective nations of origin; otherwise, the "illegal" from Mexico is no different than one from Mumbai, or Madrid, or Montevideo, or Montreal.  

Had any of them come in my grandparents' day, no one would have asked whether they were allowed to be here or not. People simply came. From the end of the Civil War to the time Grandpa got off the boat, the immigrant population in the United States hovered between about 13 and 15 percent of the general population -- a little higher than it is today.

Now, of course, it's a very different story. My grandparents barely avoided the growing opposition to immigration which culminated in the quotas of the 1920s. Shortly after they got here coming to America became, for many, a crime. Unfortunately, the same combination of racism, nativism, economic pressure and xenophobia which led Congress to pass the Johnson-Reed Act back then is still hovering over the debate, like a dark, acrid cloud of smoke, threatening to pollute the discussion with something other than the kind of rational, pragmatic analysis the problem, and the solution, require. Before we congratulate ourselves on our ancestors' ability to come to this country "legally" we should first acknowledge how much easier it was for them -- then consider the reasons why so many of those who came after have been so unwelcome.

Kevin J. Rogers is a freelance journalist based in Clifton Park, N.Y. He is the former Director of Policy Research and national vice-chair of The Modern Whig Party of America. Opinions expressed in this blog are his own.

A cold, dark silent day

A standard grave is about eight feet long, three feet wide and six feet deep. One able bodied man with a shovel can dig one in about three hours, if the ground is soft enough. If the ground is frozen or rocky, or the gravesite near a tree, it can take longer.

For the graves of Nathan Pozner, 6, and his schoolmate Jack Pinto, also 6, the first of the victims of the massacre in Newtown to be laid to rest, it surely took less time than that. Their coffins were much smaller than those of the six adults who died with them will be. The digging should not have taken long at all.

Not long, that is, if the people charged with the thankless task were able to do it without stopping. But I imagine it was something they struggled to do in the time allotted. It's hard to work at a normal pace when you're crying, and it's hard not to cry when you're digging a grave for a murdered 6-year-old, especially when you know there are going to be 19 more just like it, for kids just like them, and even more especially when you know there are six bigger ones to do for the women who died trying to save them.

I'm sure whoever drew the duty found themselves stopping quite a bit.

And then of course there are the final two, of a mother murdered in her bed, shot in the face by a son bent on killing still more and then adding his own name to his list of victims. In that, if in nothing else, Adam Lanza was a complete success.

We may never have an answer for why he did the unthinkable, why someone would choose to slaughter an entire classroom full of little kids with a high power assault rifle, and we surely will never understand it. The only thing we can be sure of is a simple fact: mass shootings have happened in this country with a frightening frequency, they're happening more often than ever before, and we desperately need to make them stop.

Accomplishing that goal isn't going to be easy. There are conflicting rights at issue, and causes we cannot agree on, and whenever that's the case in this country the most extreme, most strident voices also become the loudest and most shrill. It's easy to get distracted from reasonable, common sense solutions when the most unreasonable people, with little sense at all, are driving the debate.

So we as a nation can't let them. We cannot silence them, nor should we want to. But it's time to ignore them and send them back to the fringes of our political spectrum. Let them bray. Let them howl. Let them spew. Let them fight each other while the rest of us stop listening and get to work on trying to prevent an atrocity like this from ever happening again. Let's block them out and give them their own cold, dark silent day. It's a far better fate, after all, than lowering another tiny casket into a cold, dark silent grave.  

A force for good

This past year has been amazing. There have been so many changes, most of them positive, some of them not, but all of them contributing to a paradigm shift in my life, a transformation, really. On this Thanksgiving Day I have much to be thankful for.

But gratitude alone can be insufficient. Action is required, and as I look forward to the next year (it's early, I know, but it's good to get ahead of things) I can't help but think feeling good is not good enough. Doing good is where it's at.

But what does "doing good" mean? For most of us, it means providing for our families and taking care of our friends. Those are the central things in life, of course, and the first priority for anyone. Each of us has to look at our own face in the mirror every day, and it's hard to like what you see when you feel like you've let the people closest to you down.

There's more to life than just our immediate circle, though. There's a wider world, and each of us has our place in it. It's not always easy to find what that place is; it can sometimes take a while to figure it out. Maybe even a lifetime.

In my case, it's been an unfolding process. I guess that's probably true for most people--the old saw "life is a journey, not a destination" is true. And the steps along the way can often limit the destinations you have the opportunity to reach. Each of us has lost dreams, frustrated ambitions, challenges we were unable to overcome. Failure is a part of life, as much as success is. The question is not whether things will ever be perfect; life never is. The only question is how we can make it better.

A good start is to take an honest inventory of ourselves. I've been doing that for the past couple months, as I've been trying to heal from a pretty significant health situation which clobbered me for a bit right at the start of the Fall. (I'm fine now, for the record.) A little introspection now and then is a good thing, as long as it doesn't become a habit.

I won't bore you with the details, except to say in the midst of my navel gazing I realized it's better to pick your head up and look around than stare into that mirror too much. Get going. Reach out. Find ways to contribute to your community and your society. It doesn't have to be anything dramatic, or even self-sacrificing. Being productive is enough, if that's all you really want to do. The important thing is to make each day count for something, and to remember each of us, by virtue of living in a free society, gets to choose our own mission.

My mission starts with what I'm doing now: writing. This blog has been laying fallow for quite some time. I decided last night to start cultivating it again. I have quite a few other venues in which I can make my voice heard, and I'll be hitting those as often as humanly possible, too. I hope you find what I have to say informative, interesting and entertaining. (There has to be room for fun, too.)

But more than that, I hope each of my readers understands I do what I do as a matter of public service, first. As a certified news junkie I spend a lot of time checking out what's going on. As a journalist it's my job to share what I find out with you. A central canon of the profession is the notion democracy builds itself. That's only possible when the citizenry is well-informed.

Simply chronicling the living history of our times may not be enough, though. A further step might be required, something more direct, and I have a pretty good idea what that will be. In the meantime I'll be working very hard to blend the different strands I've found lying about into one seamless tapestry, one that allows me to be a force for good. And I hope each of those who share in my journey will find the story useful in their own quest.

A very Happy Thanksgiving to you all.

First Line/Last Line

This is apropos of nothing, but I thought I'd post it anyway. It was written in response to an assignment on another site; we were given the first line and the last line, and the rest was up to our imagination. This was my entry:

He was running the vacuum cleaner when the phone rang. It was a big vacuum cleaner, one of those Shop Vac jobs, meant for industrial use in some plant where hazardous spills were common, or in a garage or machine shop where there were always metal shavings and bits of scrap scattered around on concrete floors, and it was loud. And of course the game was on, college hoops (it was almost Tournament Time and things were really heating up), turned way up; between the screaming of the vacuum and the screaming of the announcers he didn’t hear the phone for the first dozen rings or so. Or rather he heard it but it didn’t really register. Then suddenly the ringing was in his head, and he shut the vacuum cleaner off and picked up the phone.


“Hello?”

“Hey.”

That voice. Just like that. Just like always, quiet, serene, inviting, with just that timbre, that undercurrent that hinted at desire and sex and intimacy and desire again, the subdued enthusiasm still there, restrained, elegant, but there like the lights of a Broadway marquee on a dimmer switch, just waiting for someone to push the button to the top. He almost dropped the phone.

“Hey,” he replied. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” she said. “I was just thinking of you. It’s been awhile.”

“Yeah, it has.” Great. Just thinking of you. Like a doll you used to play with when you were a little girl, then lost somewhere, you don’t remember how, and forgot about, then suddenly remembered because you missed it for some stupid reason. Great. “What have you been up to?”

"Work, mostly. And Mom is sick again.”

“Is she? Bad?”

“Pretty bad. She’s been in the hospital a couple times the last few months, and now she’s on oxygen at home.”

“That sucks.”

And just like that they were talking again, just like they always had, about the mundane things of life at first, and some of the not-so-mundane, and then music, and movies, never sports, the cats (both had died, just weeks apart), the peccadilloes of various friends from their former circle (it’s amazing how quickly a circle can fall apart when one link in the chain breaks), some politics, more music and movies, and of course books. Two hours. He had muted the television as soon as he knew it was her, telling himself that he’d watch with one eye while she was talking–it was the Biggest Game of the Year, so far–but after a couple seconds he wasn’t really watching anymore, and not really thinking about it, although he left the TV on anyway, finding comfort in the light, and besides, he did manage to sneak a peek or two when the conversation waned, but for some reason he forgot immediately what he had seen. They talked just like they always had, casually, familiar, about just about everything, two people who genuinely liked each other, and they laughed quite a bit. The inside jokes were still there, the little things only they would know, and he found himself growing warm as he heard them. It really had been a very good time.

“Listen,” she said, “I gotta work in the morning and it’s getting late.”

“Me, too.”

“Ummm … listen, maybe … ”

“No, not right now, anyway.” He was surprised at how firm his voice was. “Please. Listen, it’s just not something I want to even get into right now.”

“I know, you told me once you never read old newspapers, either, remember? When we were talking about your other ex-girlfriends. I never thought that would apply to me.“ She was laughing. He was grateful. He laughed too.

“Me neither. But it’s got to be that way. At least for now. You understand.”

“I do.”

They were quiet for a second, then stumbled through their I-gotta-goes and talk-to-ya-soons, laughing a little, finally saying see ya, and they hung up. He went to the kitchen and picked out his biggest rocks glass and filled it with ice and four fingers of Scotch. He was surprised his hand wasn’t shaking. He was surprised he wasn’t sad. He was surprised he wasn’t angry. He was surprised how he remembered everything, everything, like a movie he’d seen a hundred times, every line memorized, every shot, every shading, he could play it back in his head at will, everything that is except the bad part, the ending that was supposed to be happy, but someone hadn’t gotten the word, and the Director had flubbed it just when it all looked so perfect. He couldn’t remember the ending at all, no matter how hard he tried, nor the parts leading up to it, when the story was waning, and taken a wrong turn, and everything had just gone to pieces. He tried, but he just couldn’t see it. The Scotch, he thought, would help, and as he poured his second one he could hear the little voice in his head warming up, the one he trusted, the one that had told him to end it in the first place, because it had all gotten so bad, and no one was happy, not him, not her, and he waited to hear, even though he knew already what the voice was going to say. When it spoke, finally, halfway through the third drink, it was as he thought. He would never go back there again.

Just an old-fashioned love song.

Last night I was coerced by my houseguest into watching "The Bachelor" on ABC. I'm not entirely unfamiliar with the show--I was once coerced by a girlfriend into watching an episode, so I pretty much knew what to expect--but I have to admit that last night's season-ending extravaganza was a bit more over-the-top than I expected. One cannot help but wonder how much of this nonsense is real and how much of it is staged, since for me, and for most of the rest of the relatively normal people on the street, it's hard to comprehend how anyone can be so smart and successful as the participants in this show purportedly are, and so stupid and shallow at the same time. (I lean very heavily to the "staged" side of the equation.) But at the same time one has to wonder how such a pile of dreck as this show not only made it to the air, but found an audience over several seasons as well, and even managed to spin off another highly successful version covering the other side of the equation, "The Bachelorette". Who is watching this garbage?

A word about my guest: she is far from dumb. In fact, she emigrated to this country from Eastern Europe four years ago and has already mastered English to a degree that I can only hope my nieces will someday achieve. (That's a story for another time.) She studied law in her home country, and as much as she enjoys pop culture as much as any other girl her age, she also keeps a close eye on the national and international news, and has a distinct, mature, and insightful perspective on the world. She's no dingbat. And she is fully aware of the absurdity of this program, and the tactic of dragging things out that the producers use to such effect in keeping their viewership enthralled until the next brace of commercials. There are no secrets here. So when I asked her why she liked the show, I expected a good, solid answer, one that would make things clear to me, and she didn't disappoint:

"Because he's really cute."

Okay. That settles that.

Clearly, there's nothing wrong with a little harmless fun on the Boob Tube. There is a long tradition of matchmaking shows on television, and for the most part they've been mildly entertaining and, at times, pretty humorous. But I have to say I found nothing funny or entertaining in last night's show. The Bachelor, Jason, had to choose between the two finalists, Melissa, a 25-year-old sales rep from Dallas, and Molly, a 24-year-old department store buyer from Grand Rapids. Both girls were attractive, witty, and smart (begging the question why they had to be on the show in the first place), and Jason was himself the standard picture of success: handsome, well-off, and a young single dad (the current bad-boy imprimatur for Really Good Guys). In the end, after a heart-wrenching (blech!) heart-to-heart with the devastated Molly, Jason chose Melissa. The strings swelled, rose petals fell from the sky, and the sun suddenly shone a little brighter. For the happy couple, of course; Molly was left to talk to the camera through her tears--from the back seat of a stretch limousine, on her way to the airport, of course.

But this season, there was a twist. About six weeks after the Final Episode there is a follow-up, called "After the Rose", when the "contestants" are brought back together to discuss their experience on the show and reveal their "plans for the future". Normally, there is a studio audience present to witness this exercise in emotional self-immolation, but this time the show was taped without an audience. We were told it was to protect the emotions of the players in this tawdry little drama, because Jason had a surprise: he had fallen out of love with Melissa (already?) and wanted another chance with Molly, his true "soul-mate". And in the grand tradition of The Bachelor--let's face it, the show is designed to break twenty-four hearts for us so that we may glory in the triumph of the twenty-fifth--he was going to do it right there on this last episode.

How generous of the producers to shield poor Melissa in her grief and humiliation from a studio audience of a couple hundred--while broadcasting this train wreck to millions, in prime time.

In the event, it was all one could have hoped for. Jason was brought out first to spew some pop psychology and a few mea culpas, and then we broke for commercial. Then Melissa was brought out to suffer her lashes, and, like the good, down-to-earth Texas girl she is, got seriously pissed off before breaking down in tears and rushing away. And then we broke for commercial. Molly was then brought out to discuss her feelings, and the host asked her, facetiously, what she would do if Jason asked for her back. "I've dreamt about that every night," she said. Then we broke for commercial. Finally Jason was brought out to sit next to Molly, spew some more bilge about his soul and whatnot, and ask Molly for a second chance.

Oh, the drama.

During the next commercial break--the long one--I turned to my houseguest and said something to the effect of "Molly would turn him down flat if she had any self-respect at all." "Self-respect has nothing to do with it," she replied. Bingo. I told you she was smart.

Needless to say, Molly, after some hemming and hawing, decided that everyone deserves a second chance, even a deeply emotionally confused idiot like Jason, and the newly-minted Happy Couple pranced off the stage together, arms around each other, laughing all the way to the bank. At least one would hope so. Because this is one marriage that is clearly a business deal, and should it ever actually come off there's going to have to be plenty of money involved somewhere down the line.

Now, I have no illusions that there is any "reality" involved in this reality show. It's a set-up of course, and the acting, at least on Jason's part, wasn't good enough to cover up that fact. (I have the feeling that Melissa was in fact the genuine article, and wasn't in on the plot. But that's just a feeling.) And anyone with half a brain knows that this show is designed to produce revenue, not happy marriages, so these kinds of shenanigans shouldn't come as a shock to anyone. (Except, perhaps, sweet Melissa, which would mean, of course, that she was way too nice to be in on this disaster in the first place.) The troubling thing is the way the show commoditizes love for the viewership: it's something to be acquired, a product like the latest gizmo being advertised between the tears, and the competition to get it is fierce. There can be only one winner on this particular Love's Battlefield, and she gets the prize, Jason, who, on paper, looks like quite the catch. The other poor losers, the ones not deemed worthy enough to live the fairy tale life with this made-for-TV prince, get a limo ride and a story to tell their friends. (And some money, too, I'm sure. No girl is going to run the risk of being humiliated like this for free.) What the viewers get is something even more ignominious: a roadmap to acquire love rather than find it, a strategy for building that which should grow on its own. And the chance to feel pity for someone who has gotten it even worse than they, when it seemed like they had the chance to get it all--and that, of course, is really the point of the show: it's not about the Fairy Tale of the Prince and the Princess, because that's a story we've all heard since childhood, and no one past their adolescence believes it anyway, at least not the way it's told. It's about the tears along the way.

There is a final episode next week, when we get yet more follow-up on Life after The Bachelor. I don't know what they're going to have for us--whether, for instance, Jason and Molly are making their plans or have cashed their checks and gone their separate ways--and I won't be watching. One night of this every few years is more than enough for me, thank you very much. But I do hope that at least a few of the girls who were trampled along the way have come away from the experience with a new and deeper understanding of love--that it isn't something to have and lose, but rather something to feel, deep inside, where the soul is supposed to be. Maybe at least a couple of them have come to that understanding, and have opened their eyes, and found someone who isn't the perfect match "on paper", but rather "in here". Maybe at least a couple of them have the chance to really be happy. Especially Melissa. She seemed so sweet.

The Maiden Voyage

Well, here I am. I have officially joined the blogosphere. And if you're wondering what took me so long, the truth is I have no idea. Maybe I just spent a little too much of my free time on social networking; maybe I just wrote myself out on professional work and didn't have enough left over to share with the world for free. But I don't think either of those answers really count for much. The truth of the matter is that I simply wasn't "there" yet--but I'm There now.

And where, you may ask, is There? Especially since you've been gone all this time without actually leaving? All joking aside, I think that's the key: it took me until now to embrace all the implications of our New Media Age--or at least some of them, the ones that have attached themselves to my particular part of the shore as the rest have continued on down the stream--and now that I've taken them and made them mine, I want to talk about them. It's really as simple as that. (Well, maybe not so simple. But it's a start.) Most of what I write and post here will involve those aspects of ourselves and our society which revolve around communication. And since, as Camus pointed out, we are a conversation, I suspect I'll have a lot to say. I hope you find it as interesting in the reception as it is in the broadcast.

One final note in this quick introduction: I've chosen "The Basement Notes" as the name of my blog as a conscious nod (and wink, too) at both Bob Dylan and the Band (for an album I have always loved) and Dostoyevsky (who, I should mention, was nodding and winking through Notes from Underground all along). Much of what our friend Fyodor had to say about the human condition in that short novel--one of my favorites--had to do with the failures and shortcomings of the rational mind, the fear of love and intimacy, and the marriage of self-contempt with oversensitivity, both in the individual and in society as a whole. These issues have never been more profound nor more central to the natural human quest for authenticity than they are today, and they form the framework of my thinking, as well as informing that thinking with what I hope is an adequate dose of compassion and recognition of the truth in its deepest and most universal forms. We live in a time of remarkable challenge and remarkable opportunity, as all people throughout history ever have. But I can think of no other time when the challenges and opportunities have each had such a powerful sense of finality. We are at some kind of crossroads, one that can lead to doom and despair on the one hand, or evolution and achievement on the other. Which path we choose will depend on how we see it, and how we see it will depend on how we say it. So I guess it's now the time because the time is now, and I'm here because we're There. For real.