It’s that time of year: When the weather in Chicago fluctuates madly–80 degrees one day and 40 degrees the next. Shorts and tank tops are quickly pulled out from that box under the bed and worn to the beach, only to be put away when it snows twenty-four hours later. It’s also the time when most people decide to pull their bike out of storage or the garage or that street sign where it has been locked since October. (For those of you who have been biking all winter, I salute you. This piece still may have some tips for you, though.)

A few weeks ago, I rode my bike for the first time this year. I’m one of those obnoxious bikers who always wears a helmet, and bothers her friends to do the same, uses hand-signals while turning, and doesn’t blow through stop signs without first slowing way down to check for traffic and pedestrians. I’ve also been doored (when a driver opens their door into the bike lane, hitting a biker), flipped off my bike, skidded out when an asshole in a sedan turned without signaling, and generally been knocked about. Yet I still hop on my bike regularly, for transportation and exercise, and feel safe doing so. Let’s talk about what’s keeping me safe: three rules that apply to everyone, anywhere, and a fourth that’s slightly more Chicago-specific.

Get a helmet (even if you only ride in trails)

The first thing, the obvious thing, the thing everyone has told you all your life and I’m going to tell you once again, is to wear a helmet. PLEASE WEAR A HELMET! Your head is full of delightfully squishy and fragile brains, encased by a solid-but-not-invincible layer of bone. Helmets are usually boring (although they don’t have to be) but they are literally the only thing between your head and going splat on the pavement.

Most people don’t wear helmets properly. “Properly,” in this case, means “tighter than you think, and tilted to cover your forehead.” If you have the straps buckled but they’re flapping around down by your chest, the helmet won’t give you its full protection if you get hit by a car. Likewise, if you wear it tilted way back, the helmet is not able to do its job. This is from KidsHealth.org, but applies to adults, too:

Your bike helmet should fit you properly. You don’t want it too small or too big. Never wear a hat under your bike helmet. If you’re unsure if your helmet fits you well, ask someone at a bike store.

Once you have the right helmet, you need to wear it the right way so it will protect you. It should be worn level and cover your forehead. Don’t tip it back so your forehead is showing. The straps should always be fastened. If the straps are flying, it’s likely to fall off your head when you need it most. Make sure the straps are adjusted so they’re snug enough that you can’t pull or twist the helmet around on your head.

Take care of your bike helmet and don’t throw it around. That could damage the helmet and it won’t protect you as well when you really need it. If you do fall down and put your helmet to the test, be sure to get a new one. They don’t work as well after a major crash.

If you get into an accident or your helmet gets dropped from that cool rooftop party you had and lands on the pavement, GET A NEW HELMET! Helmets are designed to survive a single impact, not a bunch over and over. Pretty please with gumdrops on top, get a helmet.

For those who grew up in Evanston in the 80s and 90s, you may remember “bike helmet guy.” This was a man who walked around downtown Evanston with clear cognitive and physical disabilities. He’d talk to anyone on their bike, and explain that he hadn’t been born with disabilities, but had gotten them after a bike accident where he–you guessed it–wasn’t wearing his helmet. “Oh, Rebecca,” you say, “but I’m a good biker! I only bike on trails and don’t need a helmet!” Bullshit. You can be distracted and flip off your bike. Someone else can be distracted and run out into your bike or crash into it or an escaped polar bear from Lincoln Park Zoo could swipe at your bike with her giant claws and send you flying into hard, unforgiving pavement. Please, pretty please with delicious ice cream and sprinkles on top, get a helmet.

Be Seen

Now that I took longer than anticipated to talk about helmets, I’m going to assume you either have one now, or are uncaring of your personal safety that you’re ready to go skydiving without a parachute. Either way, the next step to bike safety is to be seen. In the daytime, this just means stay conscious of your surroundings. It also means don’t bike on the sidewalk, unless it’s specifically meant for bikes. Biking on the sidewalks means pedestrians aren’t prepared for you, and cars won’t always be expecting fast bikes in the crosswalks.

Night biking requires a bit more effort. Bike lights can be found pretty cheap on Amazon – skip the latte for a few days and get a bike light. Ideally, you should have a bike light in the front and the back, but at the very least get one for the back. This helps drivers who can’t see you from behind. Headlights are still important, though, particularly for drivers pulling out of dark driveways or at intersections. If you’re biking where there aren’t good street lights, you may also want to invest in some reflective gear or lights for your spokes. This helps drivers coming at a right angle see you.

General Biking Rules

The next step to biking safe is also one that applies wherever you’re biking. In short, BIKE ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE ROAD OR TRAIL. A lot of people don’t like this rule. “I’d rather see incoming traffic,” they say. Lets do some math. If you’re biking with traffic, the speed at which a car would hit you from behind is effectively their speed minus your speed. (MATH!)  So if you’re on Clark biking at 15 MPH and are hit from behind by a car going 30 MPH, you’ve effectively been hit at 15MPH (30-15=15). If you’re going the other direction, the speeds are combined, so you’re effectively hit by an oncoming car at 45MPH. (30+15=45.) Which would you prefer?

You should also bike in the right lane for the same reason all cars go in the same direction: it gives cars more time to see you, and a better chance at avoiding you.

Most people don’t use hand signals, but I’d still recommend checking them out. The most important is the left turn, which is simply extending your left arm straight out in the direction of the turn. This lets cars, bikes, and pedestrians know to expect the turn, and to watch out for you crossing traffic. At big intersections, a hand signal could mean the different between a car hitting you or slowing down to avoid you. Likewise, traffic rules apply to you too! Lights, stop signs, one-way streets,  a lot of bikers (myself included, far too often) view these rules as optional. But please make a conscious choice about when to ignore them, and consider the peril you put yourself in when you do.

Where to Bike in Chicago 

This last tip can be summarized as “know where you’re biking.” Before venturing out into bike nirvana, it’s worth investigating your options for getting from Point A to Point B. Chicago has lots of bike lanes, but not all of them are (in my opinion) well thought out.

To start, avoid big, congested streets which don’t explicitly have a bike lane. I worry for people I see biking on Ashland or Michigan, because there isn’t enough room for them and cars are moving so much faster, relative to the bike’s speed.

There are some nice bike maps of Chicago, both in print and online. Chicagoland Bike Maps has a comprehensive list of the Chicagoland area, all available for download. The City of Chicago also has a mediocre-but-functional bike map online. The problem with these is they don’t always align with reality. For example, the Chicago bike map lists Clark as having “recommended bike lanes” (those biker graphics on the pavement with the arrows, but without a demarcated bike lane). This means you should be able to bike on Clark safely, but I’d much prefer to bike a block east, on Glenwood. Glenwood is also listed as a recommended bike lane, but if you didn’t know the neighborhood you might not know that one was better or safer than the other.

Which is to say that you should do some research before venturing into an unknown neighborhood. Or, at the very least, think about your route ahead of time: Which streets are busy? Any one-way streets I need to think about? Am I close enough to the lakefront to take the lake trail? On the topic of the lakefront trail, it’s awesome. It’s beautiful. It’s shared. Don’t bike in the middle of the trail, or swerve back and forth, or be one of those obnoxious bikers that everyone hates. Just don’t.

Also keep in mind using the El and CTA busses for your bike. Busses have no restrictions on when you can load your bike, but the El restricts bike carrying during rush hour. (Boo!) This is a nice way to bike somewhere and then take the CTA home, or the other way ’round.

You should be ready to stay safe, but let’s review:

• Please, please, please get a helmet
• Be seen
• Be a respectful and courteous biker
• Know where you’re biking

NOW GO FORTH AND BIKE!

Other resources:

• City of Chicago’s bike safety page
• BicycleSafe.com

I love This American Life (TAL). I love it as an NPR fan, I love it as a Chicagoan, I love it as a storyteller and strong believer in the power of the spoken word. That’s my bias, and I don’t apologize for it. But it means I’ve been following the TAL retraction of their Mike Daisey piece with particular attentiveness. Briefly, TAL did a show consisting of an excerpt of Mike Daisey’s one-man show, “The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.” In it, Daisey discussed his trip to China, interviews with workers, and how utterly horrible the conditions were for Chinese workers. It was an extremely emotional and blunt piece about the unseen price of American electronics.

Oh, and a lot of it wasn’t true.

I want to give TAL a huge amount of credit for their retraction, and the way they handled it. They didn’t beat around the bush and they didn’t offer justifications. They apologized, showed where they went wrong, and explained how they’ll be doing better in the future, all in an extremely open and forthright fashion. It made me proud to be a donor to TAL’s parent station, WBEZ, and raised my respect for the work that they do. But I don’t want to use this post simply to sing NPR’s praises, or highlight how awesome TAL is. I want to use it to discuss “theatre” and “truth,” two things Mike Daisey brought up quite a bit in his followup interview as part of TAL’s retraction of his original piece.

The transcript of TAL’s retraction episode is up online (pdf warning). Here’s an excerpt:

Rob Schmitz: Does it matter if the things you’ve said in this play are untrue?

 Mike Daisey: Yeah I think the truth always matters, truth is tremendously important. I don’t live in a subjective universe where everything is up for grabs. I really do believe that stories should be subordinate to the truth.

Rob Schmitz: Then in parts of this why didn’t you tell the truth?

Mike Daisey: Everything that’s in this monologue is built out of the trip I took and time I spent on the ground. So I don’t know that I would accept that interpretation. I don’t know that I would agree with that. (Emphasis added)

And later,

Mike Daisey: Yes [those things happened]. And I stand by it [the larger piece] as a theatrical work. I stand by how it makes people see and care about the situation that’s happening there. I stand by it in the theater. And I regret, deeply, that it was put into this context on your show.

 Ira Glass: Are you going to change the way that you label this in the theater, so that the audience in the theater knows that this isn’t strictly speaking a work of truth but in fact what they’re seeing really is a work of fiction that has some true elements in it.

Mike Daisey: Well, I don’t know that I would say in a theatrical context that it [the show] isn’t true. I believe that when I perform it in a theatrical context in the theater that when people hear the story in those terms that we have different languages for what the truth means. (Emphasis added)

I’ve thought a lot about balancing truth and entertainment in theatre. There have been moments when I’ve said, “OK, this slight modification will make what I’m saying more relatable.” There have also been times when I’ve said, “This sequence of events is a bit confusing, but it’s important here for me to share what actually happened.” I don’t know what that line is, when something crosses from truth into fiction. I try to offer lots of time for discussion around my shows, and be easily accessible after, so that people can ask questions and continue the conversation. But I also feel I have a responsibility to – when presenting first person “this happened to me” accounts – tell what actually happened!

There can be a difference between “emotional truth” and “literal truth.” Otherwise we wouldn’t have similes and metaphors. But that wasn’t what Daisey was discussing. He was dealing in facts and figures, in individuals who he (supposedly) met with, ate with, talked with. Daisey also wasn’t simply telling his own story, he was putting words into the mouths of others. That seems to cross a pretty explicit line, and I don’t think he should get a pass for draping the piece as “theatre.” I also don’t like the way Daisey conducts himself on his blog. He is absolutely right, in that his fuckups shouldn’t blind people to the legitimate problems in Chinese factories. He’s also right that what he did was not journalism, and should be held to a different standard. But if that’s his only regret, I feel sorry for him. Sorry for not seeing the difference between telling your own story and telling someone else’s story, and the latter has much higher responsibilities than the former. Sorry for not understanding the disconnect between his praise of the truth and failure to provide it. Sorry that he has, by saying there is such a thing as “theatrical truth,” given himself a pass on living up to any sort of truth at all.

From Derek Powazek:

There’s a reason that journalists are trained not to do this, and it’s not just highfalutin professional ethics. It’s far more practical: If you lie to get the story, it throws the entire story into doubt. Tell the audience you’re a liar and they stop believing you. Or, at least, they should.

Not the kind of race I mean

I was recently having a conversation with a number of artistic peers, discussing the impact of our personal and community histories on our art and artistic process. I don’t remember who the question was raised by, but the group consisted of a mix of racial/ethnic/gender/sexual identities, making for good conversation.

In general we all agreed that our various personal and community histories – of religion, race, ethnicity, language, geography, class, sexuality, gender, and so on and on and on and on – played a factor in how we approached creating art. While it was a great conversation, and fodder for more discussion, I’m less interested in that than in something which happened after.

During the conversation, I said, “It’s been interesting going from presenting as part of a strong, privileged group – white, heterosexual, male – to an oppressed group: queer, trans, female.  I try to both be conscious of and artistically honor that oppression while being aware of the privilege I still do posses.”

Then, while giving someone a ride home – who identifies as black, female, lesbian – she turned to me and said, “Your comment really surprised me, since I don’t think of you as white.”

What?

She continued saying that my olive complexion doesn’t meet her idea of ‘white’ness. And it’s true. At various points, I’ve been thought to be Hispanic, American Indian, India-subcontinent-Indian, Pacific Islander, Italian, Arab, and – most humorously – ‘ethnic looking.’ (I shit you not. By a photographer wanting diversity in a high school photo shoot. She didn’t intend for me to hear.) My mom jokes that, when she came back from summer vacation when I was young and we spent every day at the beach, the (very dark-skinned) custodian at her school would come up to her and say “You could be my daughter!” I’m not too pasty even in the dead of winter.

But not white?

The friend who said all this felt that, in some ways, the more old-school way of looking at race was more accurate. Race, she said, is more of a subdivision of culture and geography than a huge lumping together of sort-of-similar skin tones. So, she concluded, Jewish people weren’t white.

There is certainly historical precedence for her opinion: “among those not considered white at some points in American history have been: the Irish, Germans, Jews, Italians, Spaniards, white Hispanics, Slavs, and Greeks.” But she didn’t mean that I wasn’t white in  racist way, as a justification for discrimination, just in an observational way.

It reminded me of a story I heard at a storytelling conference. A black woman was talking about her experience as a voter’s rights activist in Chicago in the 1960s. She apparently pissed off the the wrong people in the Chicago machine and  so her dad said she had to leave Chicago for a little while: white people were out to get her. He was going to send her to Israel to stay with some friends, because “Jews aint white.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about all this for the past week, particularly as I just finished the excellent book Constantine’s Sword, which covers the 2,000 year relationship between Judaism and the Catholic Church. Hopefully that’ll be the subject of another post one of these days.

But back to race. Googling “are jews white” doesn’t offer much help. An interesting take on genetic information. An essay from Majority Rights, a site which “discusses various issues related to the preservation of Western culture and the ethnic genetic interests (EGI) of people of European ancestry.” I do, however, like “Jews and the Problem of Whiteness,” which discusses community relations between Jewish and Black populations through the lens of race. From that essay:

As Lerner points out, Jewish whiteness “is the privilege to renounce one’s Judaism. By and large the way to get into this system is to take off your kippah, cut off your beard, hide your fringes; in other words, to reject your entire cultural and religious humanity.” I seek to empathize, here, as my previous discussion of the sociological passing of blacks should indicate. Nonetheless, the Jewish option to be white, however difficult, has been exercised widely.

That’s a good summary of why the idea of my not being white kind of surprised me. The history of Jewish oppression is absolutely a history of racism, of othering, of bigotry. It shares lots with the racism which impacts people of color. But I have at least somewhat adequate passing privilege (how I hate that term!) as white. Part of that, admittedly, has to do with geography: how I’m perceived as white versus Jewish would probably be different in different parts of the country, and of the world. My mom and my brother have both talked about living in smaller communities where their Judaism was strange or exotic. My dad has told me about going to civil rights marches in Chicago’s northern suburbs, where families had signs on the lawn reading “No dogs, blacks, or Jews.”

It seems like the ‘whiteness’ of Jews depends on perspective. That makes me remember a page from my high school year book. The editors had surveyed students from different Chicago-area high schools and asked them what they thought of Evanston, a very diverse community, and its high school, which has a huge range of student academic achievement. Everyone north of Evanston (generally more wealthy suburbs) saw Evanston as “ghetto” and dangerous. Everyone south (generally less wealthy, in Chicago proper) saw Evanston as rich, white, privileged.

The idea of racial identity changing with geography is fascinating to me. That, growing up in Chicago, I’m white. Growing up in Generic Small Town, I might not have been perceived as white. Or identified my own race as something other than white. And how much identity depends on other people, as a reference for ones self.

I’ll leave you with this chart:

– First, simply put, what advice do you have for students interested in writing about sex or social issues that fall within the sex, sexual health or gender realms?

– What are the keys to uncovering or brainstorming related story ideas??

– Something a student asked me the other day that I wanted to get your take on… Are there any sexual clichés, topic areas or tired story narratives that you look out for and immediately kill or attempt to spin fresh?

– What has been a particularly memorable moment for you as a journalist– during your student or professional days?  A few lessons learned? 

He’s also dropping me from 6mg/day to 4 of estradiol. His thought is that my estrogen (~4,500, literally an order of magnitude higher than it should be) coupled with my testosterone (a reasonably low 12) means that A) I can afford to drop estrogen more without impacting my testosterone levels, body hair, mood, etc, and B) dropping estrogen might actually help with my anxiety and depression.

This isn’t new info, but he also gave me a temporary perscrption of klonopin, a much stronger anti-anxiety medication. The idea is that I’ll use that to keep me sane for the next week or two, until the reduced estradiol and increased lexapro kicked in.

Fingers crossed, cuz what I’m experiencing right now fucking sucks.

In fact, I’d say part of what has been so stressful and unpleasant about the last week has been being so aware of being so ‘off.’ My brain isn’t working as quickly as it should be, I’m not as able to think straight as I normally am, I’m overall feeling fuzzy and it takes a large amount of effort to really bring my consciousness to focus on a task. Since all of those are important things to me, their (temporary) loss is getting to me, above and beyond the actual symptoms, into a really awful feedback loop: stress -> realization of stress -> more stress, and so on.

(For the record, I do think this discussion and disagreement is newsworthy, I just think it’s really poor reporting to reprint a biased self-written press release supporting a specific position. So I’m not opposed to the Sacramento Bee reporting something,  just on how they chose to report.)

Lets define apartheid first. According to the International Criminal Court (according to Wikipedia…)  apartheid is defined as a crime against humanity:

committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.

Admittedly, lots of countries haven’t signed on to the document with this definition, because they aren’t members of the International Criminal Court: the US, Canada, and most of Western Europe. Likewise, a definition created in the 1970s was not signed onto by the US and others. The US Ambassador  at the time said, “[W]e cannot…accept that apartheid can in this manner be made a crime against humanity. Crimes against humanity are so grave in nature that they must be meticulously elaborated and strictly construed under existing international law…”

But whether or not there’s an agreed upon legal definition, I think that definition – of systematic oppression by one racial group, over another, with the purpose of maintaining the former’s regime – seems generally agreed upon. (Though feel free to disagree in the comments.) But is Israel committing acts of apartheid against the Palestinians?

From Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QuAIA, and obviously a biased source, but I need to start somewhere):

Israel is a country founded on the idea of different rights for different people, based on race. The first difference is that Jews, wherever they live, have the right to “return” to Israel, but the Palestinians who were expelled from their homes in 1948 do not have this right; in fact, they are explicitly denied Israeli citizenship, and denied the right to return to their homes. This is racist.

The second form of apartheid is the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, which denies Palestinians living on those territories full political rights, even while Israelis living there have full political rights in Israel. (The political rights of citizens of the Palestinian Authority, like the rights of apartheid South Africa’s bantustans, are empty and of no effect.) The apartheid wall, which cuts Palestinian communities off from each other and creates tiny Palestinian enclaves; the hundreds of checkpoints Palestinians have to cross to travel their own land; and the different access to highways, water, and land accorded to Jews and non-Jews are all forms of apartheid. Gaza is an open-air prison whose inhabitants live in constant misery because of the illegal Israeli siege.

The third form of apartheid is in the different treatment of Palestinians inside Israel proper. While Jews hold Jewish nationality, so-called “Israeli Arabs” have a separate category of citizenship – Israeli citizenship. Palestinian communities in Israel proper are consistently underserviced by government in relation to the rest of population, and because most Palestinians refuse to serve in the occupation army, they are denied many educational and employment opportunities. (Emphasis added)

My limited understanding of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is that all three claims are true. That said, it’s really hard to go from action to intent; that is, I agree with QuAIA’s analysis of Israel’s actions, but I’m hesitant to go the step further and say those actions are specifically carried out with the intent of subjugating Palestinians, something which seems to be necessary to move from “acting like an asshole” to “imposing an apartheid regime.”

For those who are interested, Wikipedia has a fascinating list of folks who support calling Israel’s actions apartheid (including the UN, Jimmy Carter, and others) as well as arguments criticizing the analogy.

What really pisses me off, though, is how Michael Lucas and others equate “criticism of Israel” with “antisemitism,” something that causes me no end of frustration. Being critical of Israel – even saying straight out “Israel is stupid and should be dissolved, because religious states are inherently problematic” – is not antisemitism! Antisemitism is specifically anti-Judaism, and Judaism and the State of Israel should not be viewed as equivalent.

So there.

The QuAIA FAQ also has a really interesting answer to “Do you support Israel’s right to exist?”

It’s hard to answer this question without making clear what exactly it means. For example, when apartheid ended in South Africa, did South Africa cease to exist? Or did only apartheid South Africa cease to exist? Did apartheid South Africa have a right to exist? Does Canada have the right to exist? Do states, in general, have the right to exist? Or is this a right that only people and peoples have?

It is a strange and specious wording, superficially plausible, that originates with and is used by defenders of apartheid Israel to frame the debate in a tendentious way. The phrasing does not come from any left-wing group that criticizes Israel on the basis of human rights, justice, and equality. The question is, does Israel recognize the Palestinians’ right to exist as a people? The answer reflected in Israel’s every deed on the ground seems to be NO.

We support any solution in which all citizens — Jewish, Arab, Christian, Muslim, or otherwise — have full legal and political equality in a secular democracy, and in which Palestinians have the right to return to their homes. We do not support any state in which different people have different rights based on their race or religion. That is why we are called “Queers against Israeli Apartheid”. (Bold added, italics from the original)

I love this answer, and it’s honestly never one that occurred to me before: States shouldn’t have rights, people should. (QuAIA also talks about whether or not being anti-Israel is antisemitic. Check out their thoughts on that, too.)

In the end, I’m hesitant to say “Yes, Israel is engaging in apartheid.” I’d want more evidence of ideological racism (like what existed in South Africa). From what I can see right now, Israel is absolutely engaging in really apartheid-like actions, but – giving them the benefit of the doubt – those actions may be performed under honest (if misguided) beliefs of security and safety.

At the same time, the way this discussion has been taking place makes me even more skeptical of Israel’s claim of a moral high ground.

And I was pretty skeptical already.

Picking on Israel went really well for the aggressors...

Following my last post, I’ve been trying to do some research to figure out why Obama’s urging to use the 1967 Israel borders as a starting point was a bad thing, and why it pissed off Israel (and a bunch of other folks). Here’s what I’ve been able to figure out.

In 1967, Israel was attacked (again…) by Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in the Six Day War, so called because that’s how long it took for Israel to kick everyone else’s ass and over double its territory. That’s right: Israel was invaded and ended up with more land than it started with. Specifically, Israel ended up with the Sinai Peninsula (since returned to Egypt), the Gaza Strip (which Israel has already pretty much withdrawn from), the West Bank (which Israel has also basically said they’re wiling to part with, even though Jewish settlers keep making new settlements), East Jerusalem (which Israel is most emphatically not willing to part with and no one seriously expects them to), and the Golan Heights (which is, as far as I can tell, the biggest point of contention concerning the 1967 borders). For more info, check out Wikipedia’s page on Israeli-occupied territory.

But even the use of the word “borders” is making some people upset. Someone on Twitter sent me this link, which talks about how the map to the right describes armistice lines following the 1967 Six Day War, not mutually agreed upon borders of a cohesive, internationally recognized and legit state. And, apparently, the pre-1967 borders/lines/whatever were really just the result of the cessation of hostilities in 1948, when soldiers (mostly) stopped shooting at each other for the next two decades. (Noticing a pattern here?)

As far as I can find, the outrage over Obama’s comments, from right wing US politicians as well as Israel, is pretty much manufactured. This has been the US’s official position for the last 20+ years, and shouldn’t have surprised anyone. But is it a good position? That, not surprisingly, is much more difficult to determine.

From what I can tell, a big part of the problem is that Obama didn’t really push for a tit-for-tat exchange. That is, he suggested Israel give up the land it acquired in 1967, without pushing for the Palestinians to give up the right of return. Basically, Palestinians want the ability for those who were either forced from their land or fled during conflicts to be able to come back and/or receive financial reparations. Some additionally want for descendants of said refugees to have the same rights. In total, that’d make for between one and four million Palestinians (very vague estimates) who could claim the right of return. Lots of folks are saying “Fine, Israel needs to give up some significant chunks of territory, but not without the Palestinians renouncing the right of return. Obama didn’t call for the Palestinians to do so, and thus screwed the pooch.”

I’m extraordinarily conflicted on the legitimacy of the Right of Return. On the one hand, if the Palestinians were driven out by Israel, that’s pretty bogus. On the other hand, Israel has (reasonably) said “Hey, we didn’t drive them out, our neighbors started attacking us! If the Palestinians fled in 1948, or 1967, or 1972, the blame can be placed squarely on the shoulders of the Arab nations who militarily invaded us.”

At the same time, the borders themselves (or armistice lines, chalk hopscotch courts, or whatever) or seem to be a sticking point, since Israel claimed in the late 1960s that

“We have openly said that the map will never again be the same as on June 4, 1967. For us, this is a matter of security and of principles. The June map is for us equivalent to insecurity and danger. I do not exaggerate when I say that it has for us something of a memory of Auschwitz. We shudder when we think of what would have awaited us in the circumstances of June, 1967, if we had been defeated; with Syrians on the mountain and we in the valley, with the Jordanian army in sight of the sea, with the Egyptians who hold our throat in their hands in Gaza. This is a situation which will never be repeated in history.”- Abba Eban, Israeli Statesman, in Der Spiegel, November 5, 1969 (Emphasis added)

Right, but you weren’t defeated. And then you weren’t defeated again in the 1970s Yom Kippur War. While talking about the memory of Auschwitz made sense in the 60s, I honestly thing that discussion (which people still bring up today) sounds much weaker 50 years later.

Meanwhile, the Israel has almost withdrawn from the Golan Heights in the past, until a disagreement over ~100 meters (really about whether Syria would get access to the freshwater Sea of Galilee) caused things to break down.

Oh, and lots of well-thought-of Israelis support the 1967 borders! So there isn’t some 100% universal agreement, even in Israel.

At the end of the day, it does seem like Obama committed a faux pas by calling for Israel to make concessions without saying the Palestinians would have to do the same. That said, Israel could have responded by saying “We’ll talk 1967 borders when Palestine talks about giving up the Right of Return.”

Instead, everyone jumped on Obama for being unreasonable, instead of acknowledging that, yes Virginia, Israel will need to make some concessions if it actually wants to move forward on a peace deal.

It was awesome.

About eight miles of walking, running, jogging, and HIDING!

The premise is that you – as a ‘runner’ – are trying to get from the starting point to the end point, stopping at checkpoints along the way to get a piece of paper stamped to prove you’ve been there. As a runner, you have a blue ribbon on your arm. Chasers, wearing red ribbons, are scattered throughout the playing area, and if you’re caught by a chaser you have to give them your blue ribbon (as a trophy of sorts) and put on a red ribbon. Then you become a chaser, too.

The event covered all of the north-east side of Chicago, and Annie came up with a map of our route. We went at least eight miles total, and you weren’t allowed to use cars, taxis, or bikes. You could use public transit, but ran the risk of chasers catching you; being on transit was safe (as were train stations) but waiting for the bus was a risky proposition.

We made it to three of the six check-point, and were caught between #3 and #4, right around where the map says “N Broadway.” (For those of you familiar with Chicago, we were caught right outside the Dominicks on Broadway just south of Granville.)

After being caught, we wandered around trying to catch more folks. Annie and Eric (the guy who caught Annie and who we teamed up with as chasers) each caught a few people but I, alas, did not.

Nevertheless, and in spite of the exhaustion and pain on Sunday and Monday, it was totally worth it. TONS of fun, and highly recommended to similarly ridiculous folks.

From Lifehacker, some office yoga:

From Life on Michigan Avenue, 29 Ways to Stay Creative. I’m a fan of “Carry a notebook everywhere,” “Don’t give up,” and “Allow yourself to make mistakes.”

And another Lifehacker link, Top Ten Ways to Get Your Creative Juices Flowing. I need to do so much more of number four…