Sunday reflections.

Here are a few things that have struck me this week. 

First of all, the other evening we went to a get-together of people who had been and/or still were members of the NUT in Oldham. This was because the NUT has merged - no, the organisers of the shindig advised us, not merged but amalgamated - with the Association of Teachers and Lecturers to form a new organisation, the National Education Union. The Oldham NUT was disappearing after 144 years in existence.

There were not as many people there as we expected but we saw some old friends. In fact we sat together, some of the oldest in the room, a little group of us wanting to point out to others that we had been a pressure group within the union in our time. Mostly we just sat and listened to the speeches, ate the food from the buffet and chatted.

To commemorate the passing of the Oldham branch, a little book had been produced: a bit of history and some photos. We found very few photos of our era though. We were not really surprised. Back in the 1970s we were too busy doing to keep a photographic record of ourselves. Mobile phones did not exist and we certainly didn't carry cameras around with us all the time. How things have changed!

Then, yesterday in the local co-op I saw a young mother with her twin daughters, pretty little things of around two years old, dressed in matching outfits, with matching flowery raincoats and topped with matching blond hair pulled up into matching topknots on their matching heads. They seemed very well behaved. Their names, I discovered were Rosabella - a perfectly fine name for a little girl even though a tiny bit too Disney-princess-ish for my liking - and Ocean.

Ocean! What kind of name is that? Yes, I know that one of the Phoenix clan is called River. And I have come across a number of girls called Summer. Equally silly names in my opinion! I imagine Ocean, when she is old enough to comment about such things, turning to her parents and asking why her sister has a fairly normal, if rather soppy, name but she is called after a geographical feature!! The mind boggles!

And finally, today I read about Ta-Nehisi Coates, writer of a book called "We Were Eight Years in Power: an American Tragedy". He is a young black man who grew up in Baltimore. He says that Donald Trump is a white supremacist, something few people are prepared to say out loud. He compares those who voted for Trump, not all of them white supremacists by any means, with Germans who, while not believing that Jews were an evil that needed to be eradicated, turned a blind eye to what was going on. Or the French who, again not believing in the basic philosophy of Nazism, let their Jews be deported. Turning a blind eye to evil legitimises it, he maintains.

He says at one point in an interview for the Observer, "I had very little interaction with white people as a kid". This was in Baltimore, a city with over 600,000 inhabitants. We tend to think about people in small places, here as well as in the USA, not having much contact with people of a different ethnicity to their own but somehow we expect city life to be more diverse, or at least I do.

But then, as I have said many times before, America is more foreign than we expect it to be. One example is the recent ruling about employers nor having to provide free contraception as part of the health insurance for their workers. This is the 21st century after all. I find it quite disturbing that an administration that criticises fundamentalists from other religions panders to the beliefs of what are essentially Christian fundamentalists.

How do these things happen?