Celebrating Red Cross Month at the Capitol
March marks American Red Cross Month
Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz joined the American Red Cross of Connecticut and Rhode Island at the Capitol on Tuesday to honor their hard work and highlight the woman that started it all — Clara Barton.
Barton founded the Red Cross in 1881. She was a self-taught nurse who helped many through her life, including Civil War soldiers who she brought food, supplies and clothing.
'She also was given permission to volunteer services and supplies to the battlefield and to the field hospitals. She was quickly dubbed the angel of the battlefield,' Bysiewicz said.
Red Cross helps millions of people each year through disaster relief, blood donations and more. You can find out how to help on redcross.org.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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Los Angeles Times
17 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
Jim Crow meets ICE at ‘Alligator Alcatraz'
A few years ago I came across a profoundly unnerving historical photo: A lineup of terrified, naked Black babies cowered over the title 'Alligator Bait.' As it turned out, the idea of Black babies being used as alligator bait was a beloved trope dating back to the antebellum South, though it didn't really take off until after the Civil War. The image I saw was created in 1897, just one year after Plessy vs. Ferguson established 'separate but equal' as the foundational doublespeak of segregation. With formerly enslaved people striking out and settling their own homesteads, the prevailing stereotypes deployed to justify violence against Black people were forced to evolve. We were no longer simple and primitive, in desperate need of the civilizing stewardship of white Christian slave owners. After emancipation, we became dangerous, lazy and worthless. Worth less, in fact, than the chickens more commonly used to bait alligators. White Floridians in particular so fell in love with the concept of alligators hungry for Black babies that it birthed an entire industry. Visitors to the Sunshine State could purchase souvenir postcards featuring illustrations of googly-eyed alligators chasing crying Black children. There was a popular brand of licorice called 'Little African,' with packaging that featured a cartoon alligator tugging playfully at a Black infant's rag diaper. The tagline read: 'A Dainty Morsel.' Anglers could buy fishing lures molded in the shape of a Black baby protruding from an alligator's mouth. You get the idea. When I first learned of all this, naturally, I was unmoored. I was also surprised that I'd never heard of the alligator bait slur. Why doesn't it sit alongside the minstrel, the mammy and the golliwog in our cultural memory of racist archetypes? Did it cross some unspoken line with the vulgarity of its violence? Perhaps this particular dog whistle was a tad too audible? Or was it the plausible deniability? Did people (including historians) wave it away because babies were never 'really' used as alligator bait? It's true that beyond the cultural ephemera — which includes songs (such as the ragtime tune 'Mammy's Little Alligator Bait') and mechanical alligator toys that swallow Black babies whole, over and over again — there are apparently no surviving records of Black babies sacrificed in this way. No autopsy reports, no court records proving that anyone was apprehended and convicted of said crime. But of course, why would there be? The thing I found so unnerving about the alligator bait phenomenon wasn't its literal veracity. There's no question human beings are capable of that and far worse. Without a doubt, 'civilized' people could find satisfaction — or comfort, or justice, or opportunity — in the violent slaughter of babies. Donald Trump's recently posted AI clip 'Trump Gaza,' which suggests the real world annihilation of Palestinians will give way to luxury beachfront resorts, is a shining example. The thing that haunted me about alligator bait was the glee with which the idea was embraced. It was funny. Cute. Harmless. Can't you take a joke? Now here we are, 100 years after 'Mammy's Little Alligator Bait,' and the bigots are once again using cartoon alligators to meme-ify racial violence, this time against immigrants. Just like the title 'Alligator Bait,' the Florida detention center name 'Alligator Alcatraz' serves multiple ends: It provokes sadistic yuks. It mocks. It threatens. But most crucially, it dehumanizes. 'Alligator Bait' suggests that Black people are worthless. By evoking the country's most infamous prison, 'Alligator Alcatraz' frames the conversation as one about keeping Americans safe. It suggests the people imprisoned there are not vulnerable and defenseless men and women; anyone sent to 'Alligator Alcatraz' must be a criminal of the worst sort. Unworthy of basic human rights. Fully deserving of every indignity inflicted upon them. 'Alligator Alcatraz' cloaks cruelty in bureaucratic euphemism. It's doublespeak, masking an agenda to galvanize a bloodthirsty base and make state violence sound reasonable, even necessary. It has nothing to do with keeping Americans safe. Oft-cited studies from Stanford, the Libertarian Cato Institute, the New York Times and others have shown conclusively that immigrants, those here legally and illegally, are significantly less likely to commit violent crimes than their U.S.-born neighbors. If those behind 'Alligator Alcatraz' cared at all about keeping Americans safe, they wouldn't have just pushed a budget bill that obliterates our access to healthcare, environmental protection and food safety. If they actually cherished the rule of law, they would not deny immigrants their constitutionally guaranteed right to due process. If they were truly concerned about crime, there wouldn't be a felon in the White House. As souvenir shops and Etsy stores flood with 'Alligator Alcatraz' merch, it's worth noting that none of it is played for horror. Like the cutesy alligator bait merchandise before it, these aren't monster-movie creatures with blazing eyes and razor-sharp, blood-dripping teeth. The 'Alligator Alcatraz' storefront is cartoon gators slyly winking at us from under red baseball caps: It's just a joke, and you're in on it. And it's exactly this cheeky, palatable, available-in-child-sizes commodification that exposes the true horror for those it targets: There will be no empathy, no change of heart, no seeing of the light. Dear immigrants of America: Your pain is our amusement. The thing I keep wondering is, would this cheekiness even be possible if everyone knew the alligator bait history, the nastiness of which was buried so deep that 'Gator bait' chants echoed through the University of Florida stadium until 2020? Would they still chuckle if they saw the century-old postcards circulated by people who 'just didn't know any better'? My cynical side says: Yeah, probably. But my strategic side reminds me: If history truly didn't matter, it wouldn't be continuously minimized, rewritten, whitewashed. There's truth in the old idiom: Knowledge is power. Anyone trying to keep knowledge from you, whether by banning books, gutting classrooms, denying identities or burying facts, is only trying to disempower you. That's why history, as painful as it often is, matters. Remembering the horror of alligator bait isn't about dwelling on the grotesque. It's about recognizing how cruelty gets coded into culture. 'Alligator Alcatraz' is proof that alligator bait never went away. It didn't evolve or get slicker. It's the same old, tired cruelty, rebranded and aimed at a new target. The goal is exactly the same: to manufacture consent for suffering and ensure the most vulnerable among us know where they stand — as props, as bait, as punchlines. And no joke is more vulgar than one mocking the pain of your neighbors, whether they were born in this country or not. Ezra Claytan Daniels is a screenwriter and graphic novelist whose upcoming horror graphic novel, 'Mama Came Callin',' confronts the legacy of the alligator bait trope.
Boston Globe
20 hours ago
- Boston Globe
She was the bard of loneliness — who thrived on human connection
Having never read her letters before, despite my enduring fandom — it was Dickinson's wry humor that first turned me on to poetry — what struck me was how committed she was to the virtue of human fellowship, even as she pursued her famously solitary art. It wasn't just birds and irony that saved her from despair. It was the love she had for her family, friends, and fellow citizens. Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up 'Love is its own rescue,' she wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the writer and abolitionist — not a line you'd expect from a poet who encrypts her pain and longing into frosty hymns and riddles, and whose poems are some of the best descriptions of loneliness available. Yet there she is, year after year, mailing birthday messages, valentines, and kudos, sometimes enclosing pressed flowers or clutches of rowan tied with ribbon. She wrote letters consoling friends on the deaths of their young children. She mourned the loss of her Massachusetts neighbors during the Civil War. She seemed to believe that our caring for others constitutes the only paradise we should ever expect. In a letter to Elizabeth Holland in 1877, she asked: 'Is not the distinction, of Affection, almost Realm enough?' She wanted to be alone but to be known too I discovered Emily Dickinson when I was 16. That summer, I was visiting my grandmother in Ripon, Wis., home of Ripon College and birthplace of Abraham Lincoln's (and Samuel Bowles's) Republican Party in 1854. Dickinson's 'Complete Poems' was 700 pages long — a daunting but worthy reading project for a shy aspiring writer who was drawn more to literature than to the politics of his country. It was a wonderful, haunting experience. I liked her dark, obsessive mind, her wicked sense of humor. But it was the fierce longing her poems exuded that kept me reading into the night. 'It might be lonelier / Without the Loneliness,' she writes in a poem from 1862. Elsewhere, she calls loneliness 'an Omen in the Bone' and 'the Horror not to be surveyed.' By 16, I had accepted the fact that I liked spending time by myself. And I found that poetry, like prayer, was a socially acceptable if quirky use of solitude. Writing was also a consolation for my frequent inability to communicate to family or friends exactly what I was feeling. Dickinson had this problem, too. Why else would she write a thousand poems and leave them all behind in a drawer? In Dickinson's letters, one can glean the artist's core paradox of desiring personal privacy and social recognition. I'd felt this paradox myself while cooped up in my dorm room writing poems I would never share. Was I going to be a hermit? Would the horror of loneliness swallow me up? Was the urge to write poetry a blessing or a symptom? What would a therapist say? In 'Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development,' the psychoanalyst Otto Rank makes a useful distinction between the neurotic and the artist, both of whom resist the crowd and run the risk of loneliness. A neurotic, he says, is a person whose neglected creative urges become corrosive to the self. An artist turns them into art. I didn't know how lonely I was in my 20s until I reached my 30s. After college, I gave up writing in order to find a proper career, which meant that I became one of Otto Rank's neurotics. It took me a long time to revive my creative urges — to borrow the bleak Freudian term — and part of the process involved reading Emily Dickinson's poems again. This time, it was clear to me she was writing about depression. 'There's a certain Slant of light, / Winter Afternoons – / That oppresses, like the Heft / Of Cathedral Tunes.' There is indeed. And Pfizer could have used these lines for the opening of a Zoloft ad: 'I felt a funeral in my brain.' 'I heard a fly buzz when I died.' 'Because I could not stop for Death— / He kindly stopped for me.' These are the poems that helped establish Dickinson's reputation as a sly gothic eminence, her distressed meters and slant rhymes striking a fatally minor chord. And it's true that she often 'thought of the Grave,' as she puts it, apologetically, in one of her early letters. But Emily Dickinson died of heart failure, not suicide. This fact was very important to me, and also — not to be macabre — a little bit surprising. She was always so at odds with herself, after all, gnawing at psychic wounds or diving back into the wreck, as the poet Adrienne Rich would say. The question is, what sustained her? I think it was other people. To read Dickinson's letters is to witness just how deeply embedded she was in the social world of her day, despite her famous reclusiveness. With editors, she was coy, ironic, and self-mythologizing. 'You ask of my Companions,' she writes to Higginson during their first exchange. 'Hills — Sir — and the Sundown.' But she also wrote long, gossipy letters to her brother, Austin, when he was away, and she corresponded frequently with the far more adventurous writer Helen Hunt Jackson, who scolded Dickinson for her reticence. Her notes to prominent religious men, including Edward Everett Hale and the Rev. Charles Wadsworth, crackle with wit and genuine theological curiosity. And of course, this latest volume of her correspondence also includes her hundreds of 'letter-poems,' many of which she sent to Susan Gilbert, her friend and sister-in-law, for amusement and commentary. ('Is this frostier?' she asks Gilbert when sending a newly revised draft.) Her humor never flags. At age 50, she wrote: 'We have had two hurricanes within as many hours, one of which came near enough to untie my apron.' She sends honey to a friend with this note: 'Lest any bee should boast.' Still, that longing one feels in her poems gusted through her entire life. 'There is an aching void in my heart which I am convinced the world never can fill,' she writes to her friend Abiah Root at the age of 16, half in response to a religious revival sweeping through her hometown of Amherst. She's pleased for those who were saved by God, but she herself demurs. The whole idea of Eternity, she writes, appears 'dreadful' to her. She assumes that she is 'wicked.' And yet she consistently honors her friends' belief in the Christian afterlife. Heaven was an abstraction, but the people she loved were real to her, and letter-writing offered her a way to remain in communion with them, to express her otherwise wholly Christian kindness and devotion. 'A Letter is a joy of Earth,' she wrote in 1885, less than a year before her death. 'It is denied the Gods.' Elsewhere, she compares a letter to 'immortality.' It was in the realm of her mind where she and her friends could coexist forever. As the late scholar and Harvard professor Helen Vendler puts it: 'The thought that on the Last Day she would be reunited with those she had loved was so moving to Dickinson that she wrote some of her most gripping poems about that imagined reunion.' She made her friends immortal One reason Dickinson's correspondence seems heroic to me is that there are 30,000 unread emails in my inbox. Many of these are spam, but a truly unacceptable percentage of them are not. I am so behind on email that I fantasize about changing my name and creating a new email address to achieve the illusion of a fresh start. My grandmother wasn't like this. She wrote and received letters all the time. She was active in her community — the college, the church, the golf course. She played gin rummy once a week. She babysat the kid next door. She helped me join a baseball team so that I could stand in center field and sniff my glove while mulling over Emily Dickinson's imagery. In contrast, I find social life mysteriously exhausting. Especially the digital version. I just cannot seem to keep up with all the requests, notifications, invitations to follow, and so on. Part of my struggle has to do with a garden-variety case of the blues. But if Emily Dickinson, whose blue periods often lasted for weeks at a time, could remember to wish her cousin a happy birthday, why can't I? One possible answer is that there's something wrong with me. Maybe I never recovered from my early preference for solitude. Maybe I, too, have an 'aching void' in my heart that the world can never fill. Or maybe — this is my most recent hypothesis — we all do. In her 1963 essay 'On the Sense of Loneliness,' the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein argues that loneliness results from the ego's desire for wholeness, what she calls 'an unattainable perfect internal state.' Poetry is one way of pursuing that unattainable state. Perhaps that's why Dickinson wrote the same poem again and again with slight variations. She never achieved wholeness. 'Full and permanent integration is never possible,' Klein writes, 'for some polarity between the life and death instincts always persists.' I think that's what I responded to in Dickinson — that 'polarity,' the tension between a desire for connection and an equally strong desire for isolation. I wonder, because I'm a teacher now, what that tension feels like to young people today, who report being lonelier and more depressed than ever. There are thousands of mental health and wellness apps for teens, including a growing number of AI chatbots designed to teach coping skills or simply offer companionship (the psychologist Paul Bloom calls this ' Recently, I've begun to consider assigning Dickinson's letters instead. At the very least, they model how to weather a bout of depression without forgetting to send buttercups to neighbors for the centennial. More important, they demonstrate that community is the work of imagination to a surprising degree. The author Marilynne Robinson makes this point in one of her essays. 'Community,' she writes, 'consists very largely of imaginative love for people we do not know or whom we know very slightly.' In that same essay, she refers to this love as the 'essence and genius' of democracy. To overcome our loneliness, we do not need to join a church or a bowling league, as Robert Putnam suggests in his landmark book on civic decay, 'Bowling Alone . ' But we do need to find ways to exercise compassion. Compassion feels in short supply these days, and it's tempting to blame our digital culture for exacerbating our epidemic of loneliness. But Kristen Radtke, author of 'Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness, ' is skeptical of the claim that the internet is the primary cause of social isolation. People made this claim about the telephone and the radio, too. Yet there is clearly something unique about 'the portal,' as Patricia Lockwood calls the internet in 'No One Is Talking About This,' her novel about the absurdity of life on social media. 'Why did the portal feel so private,' the narrator asks at one point, 'when you only entered it when you needed to be everywhere?' In an interview, Lockwood confessed that what attracted her to Twitter was the chance to become 'a spirit in a void.' A Dickinsonian sentiment, and maybe a universal one. But the lesson of Dickinson's letters is that she wasn't just a spirit in a void. 'I know I love my friends,' she writes to Louisa and Frances Norcross in 1873, adding: ''tis love for them that sets the blister in my throat, many a time of day.' These bonds were important to Dickinson, especially in seasons of grief. Wherever else her friends had gone, they lived on in her memory, a verifiable afterlife, and remained eternal companions. As she writes in a letter to Mary Hills: 'To be remembered is next to being loved, and to be loved is heaven.'
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
How you can cope — or help others — when disasters strike
At least 135 people, including 37 children, died in the Texas floods over the July 4 holiday weekend. All told, the US sustained 403 weather and climate disasters from 1980–2024, where overall damages and costs reached or exceeded $1 billion. And in the first half of 2025, we experienced 15 separate billion-dollar weather disasters, including tornadoes, hail, wind, and flash flooding from severe thunderstorms. Learn more: How much does flood insurance cost in every state? Earl Johnson wrote a new book about how to cope when those disasters hit home: Finding Comfort During Hard Times: A Guide to Healing after Disaster, Violence, and Other Community Trauma. At the American Red Cross national headquarters, Johnson's responsibilities included preparedness and response to every domestic mass fatality incident since the weeks after 9/11, including transportation incidents, natural disasters, and criminal acts. Here are edited excerpts of our conversation: Kerry Hannon: What was the experience of aiding in a disaster that made this work become your mission? Earl Johnson: 9/11 changed everybody's lives. I moved from lower Manhattan to Arlington, Va., on Sept. 9, 2001. I was in the backyard, and I heard the plane hit the Pentagon. I had training as a hospital chaplain and it kicked in. All of my skills and everything were transferable to a disaster. Hurricane Katrina was my other seminal event. I was with the Red Cross, and we were tasked to open a thousand shelters for a thousand people each in the next 24 hours. It wasn't just a Red Cross response. It wasn't just a federal response. It was everybody, all hands on deck. And we were a team. With the Texas Hill country flooding disaster on our minds, what's the best action for someone to take if you want to give, but you can't be there in person? The temptation for many people is to drop everything and go help the victims. And that's the wrong thing to do unless you have specialized training and also an invitation to go with an official group. The best thing you can do, if you can afford it, is to contribute — give money, but don't give stuff. A lot of times that will just inundate a community. The best thing is to stay, pray, and pay. If you have a specific charity, great. Many people contribute to a faith-based charity or the American Red Cross or Salvation Army. Donations do make a difference, and you are doing something. Sign up for the Mind Your Money weekly newsletter By subscribing, you are agreeing to Yahoo's Terms and Privacy Policy Is this something that you recommend for those who might be retired and have time to volunteer on-site? Yes. But don't wait until the disaster happens. Get your disaster training because there are unique aspects of disasters, and you need to be trained for a specific function whether it be shelter management or mass care feeding. Retirees offer a pool of expertise. How would someone get that training? Well, I'm prejudiced. I love the Red Cross. I spent 10 years responding to disasters with them. They have an excellent volunteer program and training. Why is it so important for everyone to have some sort of a disaster plan in place for their community, home, and business? We never know when there is going to be a catastrophic event. But we have to go on living, and we have to live fully and freely without that kind of anxiety. Making a disaster plan is not only good business, it's also common sense — because that's another way of not only taking care of yourself and your family, it's also taking care of your customers and your business. For example, you should have a "go bag" of things to take with you with a flashlight and solar radio, for example. Build a rainy day emergency fund. Have a disaster communications plan in case there's a blackout or the landlines go down. You write in your book about being on the alert for entrepreneurs and predators and other people coming into a community under the guise of offering help. How do we guard ourselves from being taken advantage of? It's the second wave of the disaster. Good, kindhearted people respond, but also entrepreneurs and predators who want to take advantage of the vulnerable. Do a background check. Check with a local Better Business Bureau, the police department, the Red Cross, local media, and others in your community to find out if they have heard of this group, or were aware that this group has descended upon the community and are going door-to- door offering roof repairs or whatever. A lot of people get victimized because they're already vulnerable, because the emotional and spiritual aspects of disasters are so traumatic. If you are in the disaster zone, you already are vulnerable and you want help and you want assistance. Don't sign anything until they have been checked out. What's the first thing to ask yourself before you head off to a disaster zone to lend a hand? You can't imagine how many people drop everything, get in their car with a couple bags of ice and a couple dozen sandwiches, and drive a thousand miles to help. When I am screening potential volunteers, I would always ask them why they want to respond, so stop and first ask yourself that question. Who's going to take care of your family and pets if you are gone? Do you have two to three weeks that you can donate? You also need to be willing to be managed. You can't be the big hotshot coming down to do your part. You need to take about small disasters? Unemployment can be a disaster for people. Elaborate. There are thousands of everyday disasters. There are house fires, divorce, homelessness, mental health issues, and yes, unemployment. Nothing is more violent and traumatic than unemployment. One day your identity as your job or your vocation that you've contributed so much to is gone. You need to start with considering what gives you hope. What is your source of hope and meaning? Make a fearless personal assessment of your strengths and weaknesses. Take that personal inventory, especially because you're devastated when you lose your job. You have to say, wait a minute, I was employed. I have skills, I have learning, and it does have value, and I have made a difference. Talk to people and go deeper and ask them what are the good things they notice about you? What are the things they see that you do well? What's your biggest takeaway from the book for readers? Comfort is essential. Preparedness is caring and taking care of one another. It is a huge gift not only to come in and help people to rebuild their home, but also to be a good neighbor and to be a good listener. You may not have physical things that people need, but you have a good ear, and you can support one another. Disasters are not only physical. They're also emotional and spiritual. For more information on how you can help, check out the Red Cross and FEMA sites. Kerry Hannon is a Senior Columnist at Yahoo Finance. She is a career and retirement strategist and the author of 14 books, including the forthcoming "Retirement Bites: A Gen X Guide to Securing Your Financial Future," "In Control at 50+: How to Succeed in the New World of Work," and "Never Too Old to Get Rich." Follow her on Bluesky. Sign up for the Mind Your Money newsletter Sign in to access your portfolio
