Echoes of the Crossroads

The following post was mostly written on the train there and back, with some updates after I uploaded the photos and had some time to add them in.

So, after I made it onto the Empire Builder (in spite of my best efforts), the actual trip to Williston went fairly smoothly.

Now, as I wrote in the original post, I booked a coach trip in both directions. The cost of buying a sleeper, even the cheaper Roomette, is more than three times the price, and more than on Anna's gift card. But, during the pandemic, Amtrak introduced something called BidUp. In order to encourage more riders to book sleeper rooms that would otherwise go empty, they invited coach passengers to submit a "bid" for a roomette or a sleeper, and it could be lower than the regular price. At the height of the pandemic, takes abounded of Amtrak travels being able to submit double-digit bids (the catch is that the bid comes on top of what you already paid for a coach ticket, so it's not quite as much of a bargain as it may seem, but still - savings!)

As the pandemic subsided, pulling off that trick got harder. But when I went to Meadville, Pennsylvania last May, the bid worked. I tried again this time for the Chicago-to-Willison trip, not expecting to get anything – especially since I set the bid even lower. But, to my surprise, it worked.

The trick seems to be to use it when booking tickets for less traveled destinations.

Now, around this time last year, I had a full-time job and enough money that I didn't have to second-guess it too much. In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have done it in the first place. I had the money - I still have savings - but it was not the wisest way to spend them. But what's done is done - and I consoled myself that, thanks to the Double Points promotion currently in effect, this will translate into quite a few Amtrak points, which would put me so much closer to having enough Amtrak points to pay for a Chicago-New York or Chicago-Washington D.C. round trip (I currently have enough points to go one way, but not quite enough to go back).

( The Sleeper Car experience )

Cross-posted from Livejournal

This coming Friday, April 12, I will take Amtrak to Williston, North Dakota. The plan is basically to make it a weekend trip. If there are no delays (which is always a big if with Amtrak), the Empire Builder will arrive at Williston the following day, a little before noon. I’ll then catch the Chicago-bound Empire Builder at 7:21 PM, and it will return to the city the following afternoon.

Now, many of you are wondering why I’d do something like that. I’m not visiting friends, it’s not a work thing, and I’m not even doing research for my novel. Which is fair.

I first started toying with the motion last fall, when things at work got difficult. I wanted to take an Amtrak train for a day trip, just to disconnect from everything for a weekend. As long-time readers of my blog know, the two-story Superliner train sets usually come with lounge cars that have big windows and nice window-facing chairs. It’s the best way to see your surrounding while traveling by Amtrak, bar none.

Crossposted from Livejournal

Over the past few months, Chicago has been dealing with waves of migrants from Central and South American countries, many of them bused in by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. The African-American backlash to the  proposal to set up shelters in majority-Black Woodlawn and, more recently, majority-Black South Shore has been covered extensively on the news, but the migrants have been arriving in the Austin  community area as well.

My last three phones

As some of the people reading know, I had a flip phone (a Kyocera DuraXTP, to be precise) until late December 2021.

I was, and still am, on a family phone plan. When the rest of my family switched to smartphones, I went with a flip phone because smartphones were much more expensive and I was poor. But after a while, as cheap(er) smartphones became available, it became sort of a combination of wanting to see just how long I can survive with a flip phone in an increasingly smartphone-orientated world, being leery of just how easy it is to get drawn into social media/internet when you have a browser in your pocket. And, in recent years, I also grew leery of participating in the certain aspects of smartphone-centric world. For example, rideshare platforms like Uber and Lyft are built on labor exploitation and investor subsidies, and I could neatly avoid all the moral quandaries that come with using apps by having a phone that didn’t support them. I liked having my transit passes on physical cards and buying (or printing out) physical tickets. And, like I said, I just didn’t like the thought of being connected to the Internet all the time. It may seem counter-intuitive, given that I’m a journalist, but I appreciated the fact that, when took the ‘L’ train, the lack of onboard wi-fi forced me to disconnect and gave me a respite from work concerns, even if for less than an hour.

Now, in a bit that’s going to be a recurring motif in this post, I should mention that my mom got less and less amused by my choice the longer this went on. She would never go so far as to tell me to get a smartphone already, in those exact words, but she made her displeasure known. In 2018, when my phone screen suddenly stopped working and I had to get a new phone, I was almost resigned to getting a smartphone. But my mom kept gloating how I would “finally be joining the 21^st century,” and I ended up getting a flip phone out of sheer spite. Which is how I got the Kyocera.

Today, Russian State Duma changed the penal code to increase penalties for conscripts dodging draft, put in penalties for willingly surrendering to the enemy and reviving Soviet-era penalties against “marauding” (while also adding what would count as extenuating circumstances, which includes participating in the armed conflicts). And there are also supposed to be referenda on joining the Russian Federation in separatist-controlled parts of Donesk and Luhansk oblasti (the self-proclaimed People’s Republics), as well as the Ukrainian territories Russia occupied since the start of the war. The logic seems to be that, if Ukraine continues its advance, they would be attacking Russian territories, which would justify putting the country on war footing and partial mobilization. (As many people, including some pro-war commentators, have pointed out, the Russian Federation simply doesn’t have the infrastructure and the personal for the full-scale, World War II style national mobilization – then again, I can’t entirely rule out the Russian government trying it anyway).

The whole thing is flimsy as hell – but again, so is a lot of the spin coming out of Russian state media.

Last week started out on an ominous note and just kept on getting worse.

First, there were bombs sent to former government officials and CNN. It was unnerving, to be sure, especially when bombs kept on coming, but bomber Cesar Sayoc was apprehended, and at least none of the bombs actually went off.

Then, Gregory Alan Bush killed two African-American senior citizens who just happened to be walking around in Kroger grocery store Louisville, Kentucky. It was an awful thing, especially since they were shot simply because they happened to be in the wrong place and the “wrong” color. But at least the shooter didn’t get into a church. It could have been worse.

But then, on Saturday morning, Robert Bowers shot up the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh's Squirrel Hill neighborhood, killing 11 and wounding seven. And the only sliver of a silver lining there is that the police stopped him before he could kill more.

David Shribman, the executive editor of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the city’s biggest newspaper, lives in Squirrel Hill. The column he wrote later that day is worth reading in its entirety, but I wanted to highlight one section on particular.

You could hear it in the sirens that broke the stillness of the morning and shattered the serenity of the Saturday routines at the cleaners, at the shoe store, at the hotcake house. No need, of course, in a place like this to identify the name of the cleaners, the shoe store, the hotcake house. Everyone knows them, just as they know the names of almost everyone along Forbes Avenue at any time of the day.

And precisely because everyone knows everyone around here — the one immutable Squirrel Hill truth that is at once irritating and comforting -- the news that raced down the street as noon approached Saturday was about a rare stranger in this peaceful place: dread.

Dread that someone you knew was in morning prayers marking the beginning of a baby’s new life.

Dread that the police officers who sped to the scene — truly there were scores of them, almost as if it were a police funeral, for it was clear that soon there could be one — were in danger.

Dread, too, that our country, our city, our neighborhood, our lives have come to this, and that this has come home.

Even before Sayoc was tracked down and apprehended, there was talk about how Trump’s rhetoric – not just the not-so-coded nationalism and xenophobia, but his tendency to try to paint his opponents as an enemy that must be stopped – contributed to it. Revelations that Sayoc was, among other things, a huge Trump fan, only added fuel to the fire.

Even back on Saturday, I’ve seen some right-wing online commentators saying some variation of “what about James Hodgkinson?” And it has been pointed out that Bowers felt that Trump wasn’t right-wing enough. But while there has been some extreme rhetoric on the further left side of the spectrum, none of it came from United State’s chief executive. And even though Bowers thought Trump was a traitor, his murder spree was prompted by a conspiracy theory about a “caravan'” of Central American asylum seekers – the very procession Trump spent the decrying as a mob full of criminals and terrorists

Trump may decry antisemitism, but his rhetoric recycles some antisemetic tropes. And this, along with his views on non-European immigrants, Muslims and foreign powers in general makes it easy for white nationalists and actual Nazis to glom on to him. And even if Trump learned that showing sympathy toward them doesn’t play well politically, he chafes at having to be more civil (even when it makes political sense).

Sayok and Bowers both had run-ins with the law. There is always a chance they could have done something similarly awful even without Trump. But it’s clear that the president’s rhetoric at least helped to nudge them in that direction.

Like I said, Trump loathes to hold back, and he has never shown any willingness to admit mistakes. While he isn’t entirely incapable of learning from them, it’s not something he’s terribly good at. So don’t expect Trump to learn anything from them.

And, unfortunately, I would not be terribly surprised if something like this happens again.

Scene from October 28 candlelight vigil for the victims of the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting

As for me…I may not be a Jew, but my grandfather was, and so were many members of my extended family. As I’ve said before, over the past few years, as so many of them passed away, I’ve been more conscious of this than ever. So… It would have been tragic either way, but because of this heritage, it felt more personal.

I hope that this is the worst isn’t going to get.

I hope.