Coronavirus and me

Several years ago the newspapers were full of some sordid scandal and I announced to my husband that I was not going to read another word about it.  Instead (I made this part up on the fly in mid-rant...)  I was going to read every word written about ... Ebola.  And I followed through on both promises.  Since then I have become quite the aficionada of epidemics, Ebola or otherwise.

So I have been following the coronavirus story closely, and especially when it hit the two big cruise ships, because I also love cruise ships.  I knew I had a tie to the Westerdam, the ship that was finally allowed to offload its passengers in Cambodia, because it's the identical twin to Zuiderdam, the Holland-America ship that we have sailed on three times in the last couple of years.  But silly me, it took a long time before I realized my even stronger tie to the Diamond Princess.

In 2015 I took a tour to Japan that was mostly on board a Princess Line ship, and when Diamond Princess was first quarantined in Yokohama Harbor a couple of weeks ago, I wondered offhand whether that was our ship.  But I didn't get around to researching that question until this afternoon, at which point I found, in my folder of photos from that tour, this one of our ship at a pier:

And here, one of our lifeboats:

Yes!  that's the death ship!  (As of this afternoon two of the passengers have died of the virus, and more than 600 passengers and crew are infected.) 

In case you're wondering what it would be like to be quarantined on a cruise ship for two weeks, here's what our cabin looked like:

There was a spacious closet and bathroom:

And a balcony, with the same view of Yokohama Harbor that the luckier quarantined folks had.  A good argument for upgrading to a balcony cabin: if you ever get stuck on a death ship you can at least get some fresh air.

We're on the mailing list for the cruise lines we've sailed with in the past, and every day we get a new message begging us to sign up for another voyage.  They've lowered the deposit to $25, are offering free internet, free drinks, and practically free base fares.  Despite my ghoulish slurping up of every word written about coronavirus, I'm really tempted to sign up for another cruise -- nothing is so exciting as being on a ship as it leaves the dock and sails away to somewhere else....

A good deed

I struck up a conversation with a friend at a party Friday night and she told me how she goes to the Greyhound bus station several mornings a week to see if any asylum seekers are on their way from Texas to New York or Chicago.  Yes, there are still a few people being admitted to the U.S. with asylum claims, and put on buses to go somewhere and wait for their hearing date.  And a network of saints on earth has spring up to help these unfortunate migrants on their journey, much as the Underground Railroad helped an earlier generation of migrants.

The buses come up from Texas and stop in Memphis, but since that stop occurs at 4 a.m., nobody meets the bus and there's nobody to call ahead and tell the Louisville people what to expect.  So my friend or somebody from her network is there every day to see if anyone needs help.  Some days there are no seekers on the bus, some days there are three or four.  The morning of our conversation, my friend met a young couple and their 2-month-old baby.

The buses stop here for 40 minutes, time for the greeters give out water and sandwiches (there is no food service at the Louisville bus station, or anywhere in its neighborhood).  They try to have warm gloves and caps on hand, since most of the migrants are not equipped for cold weather.  If more help is needed, somebody will pass the word to the network in Cincinnati; the couple with the baby didn't have coats but probably the good people two hours up the road were able to find some.

I asked my friend if they have a lot of babies come through, because I happen to own a lot of new baby afghans that I would like to give away.  I like to crochet while watching TV or talking with visitors, and a couple of years ago I went on an orgy of using up piles and piles of yarn that were occupying drawers and boxes and bags in every corner of the house.  She said that would be wonderful, because it's often cold on the bus.

So yesterday I hauled out my bags and tubs of afghans -- and realized that in my usual slapdash construction approach, they all had thread ends hanging out where I had started, stopped, or changed yarn in the middle. 

I spent two hours watching a movie on TV and weaving thread ends in with a big-eye needle, and got five afghans ready to deliver at a meeting this afternoon.  I think there are eight more in the TV room waiting to be finished, and I hope I can do that before too long.

This made me feel really good.  Yes, this project clears out at least one cubic yard of stuff that I am thrilled to divest.  But it also allows me to demonstrate in a very small way that although our government may be cruel and hostile to the tired and poor people at our borders, many of us ordinary citizens welcome them through the golden door.

Some thoughts about yearbooks

I don't ordinarily write about public affairs in this blog but last week's hoohah (and who knows?  maybe this week's too...) about yearbook photos gave me a lot to think about.  I suppose most first reactions to the story that the governor of Virginia posted a blackface photo on his yearbook page include "how could he have been so insensitive and stupid?"  From that point, many people moved on to excuses -- "yes, it was insensitive and stupid but he was very young" and/or "yes,  it was insensitive and stupid but consider the time and place."  And then the thought process swung back to "yes, he was young but not all that young -- for heaven's sake, he was already a college graduate."

My parents lived in Virginia for three decades, including the period during which the future governor was attending college and medical school, and my many months of visiting over the years lead me to give points to the "consider the time and place" excuse.  Virginia has traditionally been fanatically proud of its Confederate past and racial attitudes among those white people who consider themselves the spiritual descendants of Robert E. Lee are still what most of the rest of us would call unenlightened.

My personal take on Northam is that we should give him a pass.  It takes time and and exposure to other kinds of people for young people to realize that the way they have been brought up is wrong, and maturity and backbone for them to decide to change.  I don't think a 25-year-old should necessarily be condemned for not having fully completed that process.

But enough about blackface.  I want to talk about yearbooks.

Having spent my entire work life in the field of communication, I am always thinking about the role of communication and the media in public affairs.  And I am thinking about the particular role of the yearbook in so many recent occasions of public embarrassment.  The Virginia Senate Majority Leader also has a yearbook in his past to be ashamed of -- this guy was the college yearbook editor (at the same Confederacy-worshiping college that the guv attended) and blithely passed along many blackface and Klan photos to be printed on students' individual pages.  And have we already forgotten Brett Kavanaugh, now on the Supreme Court, whose high school yearbook page was full of smart-ass references to drinking and sex?

I know a thing or two about yearbooks, having been editor of mine in college, and when I hear about these embarrassing pages from the past I have to wonder why they happened.  Obviously they happen because kids are stupid and insensitive and have no thought of how something might survive to mortify them decades in the future.  But they also happen because grownups enable and encourage the kids to act stupid.

Each of those yearbooks was funded and sponsored by a school and to some degree supervised by a school employee.  Why did the grownups sign off on a format that brings out the worst in kids and has so much potential for future backfire?  Print the kids' senior photos, OK, but don't let them write their own copy.

The good news is that old-yearbook-embarrassment-syndrome (OYES -- what a great acronym!) is probably on its way out.  Many colleges are simply discontinuing their yearbooks; who needs them when there is so much digital info available on websites.  Many others are eliminating the popularity polls that so often constitute bullying (how would you like to be named Fastest Girl or Most Conceited?).  And today's teenagers don't have to use the yearbook to publish their stupid and insensitive thoughts and deeds to the world -- they can do it just fine all by themselves via social media and sexting, 24/7, no waiting, no charge.

Parents and onlookers might wish that these opportunities weren't so easy, that some grownup mediator or automatic ten-second delay might help protect young people from themselves, but then again, look what happened in the past when the grownup mediators were asleep at the switch.

Flag time

Long-time readers of my blog know that I am a flag junkie -- I love the flag, I love photographing the flag, I love making quilts using the flag both as visual motif and as metaphor.  If you love the flag in all of its roles, you can check out my past posts here.

Two years ago I was feeling frissons of dismay about what was happening in the country as the presidential election approached.  I made three flag quilts to express different nuances of that dismay.  And I will confess that I was pissed off that none of them was juried into Quilt National, because I thought they were far stronger works than the quilts I have had accepted into that show in the past, and because I thought that artists who spoke out against the sorry state of American democracy should be given as wide latitude as possible to have their work shown.

Fading -- 59 x 99"

Today I'm feeling dismay again -- or perhaps I should say yet.  It was brought very close to home last week when a guy with a gun attempted to enter a black church, and when nobody answered his knock on the door, went down the street to a grocery store and murdered two black shoppers.  This is a grocery store, a few miles down the road from my house, where I have shopped many times.  A couple of days later, another guy with a gun shot up a synagogue in Pittsburgh, in a neighborhood where I have walked and shopped and eaten and driven through.

What dismays me today?  Let me count the ways --

The fact that we have almost as many guns in this country as people (except a huge proportion of those guns are owned by a relatively small proportion of people).  The fact that so few politicians have the guts to stand up to the NRA, although the great majority of people in the U.S. want stronger gun regulation.  The fact that our president throws gasoline on the flames of white male resentment every time he opens his mouth, ranting against immigrants, Muslims, people of color, women, anybody with the slightest deviation from standard sexual identity.  The fact that he trashes and insults our allies, the democracies of the world, while expressing his love for dictators and bullies such as Kim, Erdogan, Duterte, Putin.  The fact that the Republican party goes along with every outrageous word out of the president's mouth.  The fact that so many avowed Christians have decided that they love a thrice-married, perpetually lying, self-confessed sexual assaulter because they think the ends justify the means and this is the way to ban abortion.

Flagging -- 98 x 54"

My parents, along with their entire families from the day they immigrated, were Republicans.  They were decent people, as were most of the people in that party.  The Republican party used to pride itself on its commitment to principles.  When Nixon hit the fan, it was because his fellow Republicans, dismayed at the revelation that he had lied and obstructed justice, announced they could not support him.

I do not see that commitment to principles any more in the Republican party.  Instead I see previously decent people who have decided to sit down with the devil, perhaps uneasily but boy, are their butts firmly attached to their chairs!  They have sold their souls to the NRA, to the big money PACs, to the pharmaceutical and gambling and oil lobbyists.  They have pinned their election strategies on keeping as many potential Democratic voters as possible from registering and voting.

More Equal then Others -- 82 x 97"

My only hope is that we're having an election next week.  And although our constitutional system is deliberately rigged to favor the voters in small states and dilute the votes of those in large states -- in other words, most of the people in the country -- I still have hope that decency will prevail.  If we miss this chance, we may not have another.

Hugs in the workplace

I've been out of the workplace for 17 years now so I can't tell you whether innocuous hugging is more or less prevalent than in the previous century.  But I have been annoyed by all the guys who have piteously protested that yes, all those predators were disgusting, but how about all us nice guys who just like to hug?  For instance, a letter to the editor in this morning's New York Times:

"We as a society are exhibiting mass hysteria... The political correctness demanded by current public opinion throws out the baby with the bathwater.  We don't want to go so far as to discourage any hug or embrace to show caring and warmth."

I've been talking about this with my husband and son, and my position is that hugs are so rarely appropriate in the workplace that you can practically count the occasions on your fingers.  For the edification of all you nice guys who just like to hug, here's my easy guide.  You might want to print it up on a little card and keep it in your wallet, just in case you wonder if a hug is OK.

It's OK at your co-worker's retirement party.  OK when your team has just won the election or the million-dollar contract. Probably OK after somebody has shot up or burned down your office and you're all huddled on the sidewalk in dismay.  OK when your co-worker returns from the hospital, or prison, or three years in Ethiopia.  Maybe when your co-worker has just gotten a call that her mother died.  OK on occasion if the two of you are engaged or married (to one another).

But not to say good morning or good night.  Not when the hug initiator is the boss or superior of the hug recipient.  Not when the recipient's work clothes are skimpy or suggestive, or when the recipient is standing on a ladder.  Not when you're the only two people in the room, and especially not if the door is locked.

Just remember this, guys: if you want to show caring and warmth, give her a raise.

Think about this...

Lyndon Johnson once said, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket.  Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

-- referenced in "White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America" by Nancy Isenberg (a great read, although long and a bit scholarly) 

Guidance for the new president

Isaac's kindergarten class was asked to write a letter to the president-elect.  Tell me anybody of either party who couldn't agree with this wish list:

I want the president to make donuts free.  AND... give 5,000 CATS to me!

ISAAC

Fake news -- the euphemism

In the field of communication, my profession, we have seen several instances of technology upsetting the apple cart.  In some ways these technological advances were GOOD because they took production out of the hands of specialists and enabled more widespread use.  In other ways they were BAD because the specialists were the ones who previously provided quality control.

So look at the invention of movable type in Europe. Gutenberg figured out how to print cheap multiple copies of books and pamphlets; if you wanted a Bible, now no need to hire an army of monk/scribes to write it out by hand.  All over Europe printers sprang up, ready to produce their own versions of the Bible or devotionals or theological commentaries.  But that meant the church no longer controlled the dissemination of scripture and theology, and the next thing you know, printing enabled the Reformation and Christianity was forever fragmented.

In my lifetime, the personal computer led to the development of what was termed desktop publishing.  Instead of sending your employee newsletter or your advertising flyers or your wedding invitations to the printer for typesetting, you bought a clunky computer, taught yourself or your secretary to use it, and cranked out your own type.  And you SAVED MONEY!  Whatever you produced and pasted down, the printer would print.  Of course, since your secretary didn't know beans about typography or readability or printing quality, many of these works looked like crap.  We saw the proliferation of ugly fonts, unreadable gray-on-black layouts, type set in curves, and other kinky practices that no self-respecting professional typesetter would ever allow clients to commit.

A few years later, the development of digital photography allowed anybody off the street to buy a camera and produce print-ready pictures, no need for expensive film or messy darkroom processing.  And you SAVED MONEY!  So instead of hiring a photographer to shoot your employee retirement banquets or fundraising galas or family Christmas portraits, you handed the camera to your secretary or propped it up on the mantel, hit the delay button and raced to get yourself back in the picture.  As a result, we got blurry photos showing too much background and too little of the subjects, plants growing out of people's heads, guests lined up grimly like watchers at Stalin's May Day parades, boring grip-and-grin shots.  Not to mention sexting and selfies.

Arguably these two latest technological revolutions have not threatened the foundations of civilization.  So what if employee newsletters and wedding invitations have that clunky, crappy do-it-yourself look?  So what if there were typographical errors?  So what if a lot of professional photographers and typesetters were put out of business?

But that leads me to another revolution that is far more disturbing if you care about civilization and democracy: the supplanting of professional journalism by social media and other content-churning internet providers.  If you see a bunch of buses parked near downtown, and you later hear that people were protesting against Trump, you do a fast google search to "discover" that no conferences were being held, so obviously the buses brought the protesters.  Then you whip out your phone and tweet same, and next thing you know, it goes viral and maybe a million people read and pass along a blatant untruth.  (The google search failed to reveal a software conference with 13,000 participants; the hapless tweeter later said "I'm also a very busy businessman and I don't have time to fact-check everything that I put out there.")

"Fake news" is the euphemism being used to describe the lies carelessly or deliberately disseminated through social media and low-end "news" purveyors these days; Obama was born in Kenya or Hillary Clinton led a ring of child molesters.  The quality control provided by professional reporters and editors is disappearing, not just from the free-for-all of Facebook "news" but from formerly good local newspapers who have fired their editors and required their reporters to practice 24/7 you-see-it-you-post-it babble without sufficient investigation.  (And they SAVED MONEY!)

Perhaps in some cases this is GOOD.  The wide availability of cellphone video has exposed lots of police brutality and fueled useful grassroots movements of many kinds.  But on balance I think it's BAD -- terribly BAD -- that a huge proportion of Americans cannot distinguish between facts and lies, that the "news" driving our public policy and voting decisions may have been manufactured by teenagers in Macedonia or manipulated by the Russian government.  And worse yet, a huge proportion of Americans, including some at the very highest levels of our incoming government, seem to believe that facts are irrelevant and lies are OK.

If there is no such thing as truth, there can be no functioning democracy.  As a former journalist and a current and passionate small-D democrat, I am in despair.

Post-election ironies

It's ironic that the U.S. Constitution, which should definitely be on the list of the top 10 accomplishments of human history, is simultaneously a beacon of hope and optimism and an embodiment of profound distrust of government and our fellow citizens.  On the one hand, we're the longest-running constitutional republic in the history of the world, our constitution has been used as a model for many newer governments, and under its auspices the U.S. has become the greatest world power.

On the other hand, the constitution sets up an intricate web of separated powers, because the founders were terrified of "tyranny," whatever that means, and saw it as a potential danger in any system where power is concentrated in one place.  So we have power separated vertically, with certain functions delegated to the federal government, others reserved to the states.  We also have power separated horizontally, divided among the three branches of government, with the executive, legislative and judicial each checking the others in an elaborate game of rock, paper, scissors.  The executive can veto laws, the judiciary can rule laws unconstitutional, the executive appoints the judges, the legislative must approve the appointments, the legislative holds the purse strings, etc. etc. etc.

We refuse to trust any single part of the system, an attitude of suspicion that was understandable in light of the oppression and violation of rights that the founders felt from the British Crown in our colonial days.  What is less understandable is that the founders also were deeply suspicious of the people.  If you read The Federalist Papers, the essays urging adoption of the proposed constitution, you keep tripping over discussions of how the populace will be easily inflamed and incited and how we needed mechanisms to make sure that popular voice would be tempered by cooler and smarter heads (read, guys like the founders: elitists, members of the establishment).

Yes, the House of Representatives would be elected every two years, perhaps sweeping hotheads into office, but the Senate would be a counterbalance.  Senators serve for six years, and were not elected by the people until 1913.  (Before that, they were chosen by state legislatures; split up that power!)  And most important, the electoral college was set up as an insulator between the people and the presidency.  The people voted, but their votes didn't count except to choose electors in each state who would actually choose the president.  And the electoral votes were apportioned in a way that gave considerably more clout to the smaller states (small states didn't trust large states; too many of those pesky people).

So fast forward, and although Hillary Clinton received at least a million votes more than Donald Trump, he will become president, courtesy of the electoral college.  Just like Al Gore received half a million more votes than George Bush in 2000, but Bush became president, courtesy of the electoral college, with an assist from the Supreme Court.  Ah, those checks and balances!

I find it ironic that Trump's campaign, which was built so heavily on distrust of the governmental system and its perceived elitism, succeeded solely because of the elitism of our governmental system. And that Trump supporters who professed to want dramatic change voted in exactly the same Congress they had before.

Much like the U.K. with its Brexit vote, I suspect that the U.S. is going to be awash in buyer's remorse in the not-too-distant future.  I suspect a lot of people who voted for third-party candidates "because Trump and Clinton are both rotten" are coming to realize that their votes mattered anyway, and not in the way they intended.  I suspect a lot of voters who held their noses and voted for Trump because they wanted an anti-abortion justice on the Supreme Court will realize that's only a tiny bit of what they bargained for and is going to be delivered. I suspect a lot of Republicans who figured the party would come through and keep Trump in check will have second thoughts as more and more mildly or wildly unqualified people are named to his team.  And I suspect a lot of people who didn't bother to vote at all may start regretting that laziness or carelessness.

Found this fortune in my cookie today.  I guess we'll be learning a lot about character in the years ahead.

Good deed for the day

Maybe there are two kinds of people -- those whose tastes stay relatively unchanged over time, and those who move on as they get older.  I know I fall into the latter group in many areas, such as art and food, but in the former group in others such as politics, tableware and my husband.

Lots of potential topics for discussion there, but today I want to talk about tableware.

When I got my first job, fresh out of graduate school, my mother helped me go down to the department store and buy some decent dishes and silverware for my new kitchen.  I went with plain -- plain white dishes, plain stainless steel silverware.  When I got married four years later, my mother wisely advised me to get a lot more of both.  And 42 years later guess what -- I still love both patterns!

Over the years I have augmented the silverware to replace the pieces that disappeared or got eaten in the garbage disposal or kidnapped by aliens, because the pattern remains in stock (Paul Revere stainless, by Oneida).  But my dishes (Corning Centura Coupe) were discontinued decades ago.  I knew that there are companies that buy up old china and silver at garage and estate sales, and even had visited one such outfit, Replacements Ltd. in Greensboro NC.  But I didn't know exactly how many dishes I needed to fill out my supply, so I put off ordering.

Until this weekend.

I read in the New York Times on Saturday that the owner of Replacements Ltd. was the only business leader in North Carolina to put his company in opposition to the constitutional amendment prohibiting same-sex marriage.  That amendment passed by a huge margin earlier this month, proving that North Carolina's conservative social mores trump its business friendliness.  The story pointed out that many business leaders opposed the amendment personally but were afraid to do much to help defeat it.

After Replacements Ltd. donated $250,000 to the campaign to defeat the marriage inequality amendment, many of its customers mounted a boycott and the company is suffering financially.

After reading the story, I decided it was high time that I buy some new dinner plates.  I wasn't able to find my pattern by browsing the company website, so I sent an email -- and got a response on Sunday afternoon of a long weekend, which seems like a tipoff of good customer service.  And then I ordered 10 new plates, which will allow me to serve 18 people on big plates and almost 40 guests at a big party if half the guests eat from the smaller luncheon plates.

I'm considering this purchase a two-fer -- a long-overdue kitchen improvement, plus a political contribution to a courageous businessman who did the right thing even though it hurt.  If you have broken some dishes or lost some silverware over the years and never gotten around to buying new ones, perhaps you would like to do the same.

Quilts for Japan -- I don't think so

They're at it again -- the sympathetic and caring people who want to do something for Japan in the wake of its earthquake.  As surely as night is followed by day, disaster is followed by people wanting to send quilts to the survivors.  I wrote about this last year when the quake hit Haiti, but obviously enough people don't read my blog and do what I tell them.

Could there be a more inefficient way to provide help and solace to people whose lives have been turned upside down than for each of us to put a quilt in a box and send it across the ocean?  Well, maybe to put a quilt in a box and send it to somebody in Ohio, who will then unpack all the little boxes and get all the quilts across the ocean in a big box.  That's being suggested on the Quiltart list this week.

But wait, there is an even more inefficient way!  This morning's Quiltart list brings the suggestion that you send canned food, and a can opener, in an express mail box (postage $12.95) to a US soldier stationed in northern Japan, who will hand deliver the box to a shelter.

A brief Google foray reveals a variety of opinions on how one should respond if faced by the desire to help Japan.  One school of thought repeats my favorite mantra: if you want to get help to people fast, send money to an organization that's there already and knows how to provide disaster relief.  I always used to love the Red Cross, but became disillusioned at its misuse of money donated after 9/11 (they used the money for other purposes) and its flawed responses in New Orleans and Haiti.  Now I favor smaller groups with more focus, such as Doctors Without Borders.

Another school of thought is that Japan is a very rich nation with a highly developed sense of community responsibility, more able to take care of itself than practically any other country on the earth, and perhaps we should direct our charitable activities toward places that need it more.  Haiti is still a mess.  And of course, there are plenty of people right here in the U.S. who need help, especially since Congress seems hellbent on throwing more and more unfortunates off the train.

Yet another school of thought is that it's a bad idea to earmark your donation for a specific place, no matter what organization.  You should simply support their efforts and thus enable them to respond immediately to what happens.  For instance, Doctors Without Borders was on the ground right in Japan right after the quake simply because they had resources already.  Had they been required to wait for "Japan" money to roll in, they'd still be staging up somewhere waiting for a plane.

I'm splitting the difference.  We give to Doctors Without Borders every year, but I'm waiting to see what happens in Japan before committing to any new donations.  And I'm sure as heck not going to send a quilt or a can of beans.

Quilts for Haiti -- I don't think so

This morning somebody on a quilt/art email list wanted to know whether anybody was collecting quilts to send to Haiti. I couldn’t help but groan – here we go again!

Every time there's a disaster the knee-jerk reaction of many folks is to send stuff. Remember after Katrina people were loading trucks with bottled water and the old T-shirts straight off their own backs and god knows what all kinds of other stuff for New Orleans? We might also recall how most of those shipments did not reach actual victims, or at least not until much, much later. (Part of that was due to government incompetence, but part was due to the very nature of ad hoc relief.)

Quilters seem to take this knee-jerk reaction to another level -- sending not just stuff, but handmade stuff.

I think that in planning our response to disasters we need to make distinctions between things that are needed and things that are emotionally pleasing. Immediate needs are far better satisfied by relief organizations that can buy in bulk and have established distribution channels.

Just run down a fast mental checklist – Do they need warm bedding in Haiti (it’s a tropical climate)? If so, do they need quilts, as opposed to fleece blankets or other warmer, more durable coverings? If so, do thousands of people have a nice (but not too nice) quilt sitting around that they would be willing to put in the mail today? If so, can you imagine a more inefficient form of getting the quilts to actual people? Relief agencies who can buy blankets by the container-load can certainly provide ten or a hundred times more blankets for the money than we can individually, and get them there overnight.

In the later aftermath of disaster sometimes people benefit from the emotional payoffs of handmade stuff. For instance, it may be nice for a bereaved/bereft person to get warm vibes from a connection to the individual who made a quilt. It may be even nicer for a bereft person to get an individual gift that incorporates the victim's own story -- as, for instance, the souvenir quilts made of clothing from 9/11 victims, or Operation Kid Comfort, which makes quilts for children depicting their soldier-parents in Iraq or Afghanistan.

But more frequently, I suspect, the lovingly handmade and donated quilt is appreciated no more, and maybe less, than the mass-produced fleece blanket. I also suspect the major benefits of such gifts go to the givers, not the recipients.

I am too young to remember World War 2 but I have read how the famous collection drives where people donated their bacon fat and other household wastes "to the war effort" were actually shams -- they didn't need the bacon fat but the shared sacrifice and enhanced patriotism of such activities were good for people and good for the country. That's fine -- I think shared sacrifice is something the US needs a lot more of these days -- but don't you feel kind of lied-to and patronized by such approaches?

Anyhow, if you want to feel all warm and fuzzy right this minute, send money to an organization with a good reputation for disaster relief, a low percentage of donations diverted to overhead, and a presence on the ground in Haiti. I did that this morning via Lutheran World Relief and I feel fuzzier than if I went down to my studio to make a quilt.