POINT RICHMOND - The documentary film 4.1 Miles didn't win an Oscar at the Academy Awards Sunday night, but Point Richmond writer Toula Slacotos says it's one of most compelling films she has seen.
(To view the 21-minute documentary, click here: 4.1 Miles.)
Slacotos says that the film documents the refugee crisis in Greece and how overwhelmed the nation is. "Refugees are stranded in Greece as other European countries have closed their borders," she says. "Greece is in a economic depression due to austerity measures imposed on the country since 2010 and doesn't have the resources or infrastructure to help the refugees. They receive little assistance from the EU or other international organizations." Slacotos will be going to Greece this summer and plans on volunteering at a refugee camp. She has promised to keep in touch with The Point to let the community here know how it might help.
What follows is a story from the New York Times
by writer/filmmaker Daphne Matziaraki about the making of the film
When I returned home to Greece last fall to make a film about the refugee crisis, I discovered a situation I had never imagined possible. The turquoise sea that surrounds the beautiful Greek island of Lesbos, just 4.1 miles from the Turkish coast, is these days a deadly gantlet, choked with terrified adults and small children on flimsy, dangerous boats. I had never seen people escaping war before, and neither had the island’s residents. I couldn’t believe there was no support for these families to safely escape whatever conflict had caused them to flee. The scene was haunting.
Regardless of the hardship Greeks have endured from the financial crisis, for a long time my home country has by and large been a peaceful, safe and easy place to live. But now Greece is facing a new crisis, one that threatens to undo years of stability, as we struggle to absorb the thousands of desperate migrants who pour across our borders every day. A peak of nearly 5,000 entered Greece each day last year, mainly fleeing conflicts in the Middle East
The Greek Coast Guard, especially when I was there, has been completely unprepared to deal with the constant flow of rescues necessary to save refugees from drowning as they attempt to cross to Europe from Turkey. When I was there filming, Lesbos had about 40 local coast guard officers, who before the refugee crisis generally spent their time conducting routine border patrols. Most didn’t have CPR training. Their vessels didn’t have thermal cameras or any equipment necessary for tremendous emergencies.
Suddenly, the crew was charged with keeping the small bit of water they patrolled from becoming a mass grave. Each day, thousands of refugees crossed the water on tiny, dangerous inflatable rafts. Most of the passengers, sometimes including whoever was operating the boat, had never seen the sea. Often a motor would stall and passengers would be stranded for hours, floating tenuously on a cold, volatile sea. Or the bottom of a dinghy would simply tear away and all the passengers would be cast into the water. The coast guard felt completely abandoned, they told me, as if the world had left them to handle a huge humanitarian crisis — or allow thousands to drown offshore.
I followed a coast guard captain for three weeks as he pulled family after family, child after child, from the ocean and saved their lives. All the ones in this film were shot on a single day, October 28, 2015. Two additional rescues happened that same day but were not included.
The problem is far from over. Many of the refugees come from Syria, where Russia is intensifying bombings that are killing thousands of civilians and devastating Syrian cities. The United States is planning to respond. According to the Greek Coast Guard, thousands of families with children are lining up along Turkish shores to make the unsafe crossing to Greece.
In making this film, I was struck by the fine lines that separate us, the moments when our paths cross fleetingly, and we look at one another for the first time and sometimes for the last. This film shows that crucial moment between life and death, where regardless of political beliefs, fears or preparation, some people will go beyond themselves to save a stranger.
And it raises questions about our collective responsibility — the choices we all make for ourselves, and for others. We don’t all confront the refugee crisis with the same immediacy as the coast guard captain portrayed here. But as our world becomes more interconnected, and more violent, we do all face a choice — would we act as he does, to save the life of stranger? Or would we turn away?
EDITOR'S NOTE: The following column appeared first in the Feb. 24, 2017 issue of the Finger Lakes Times in Geneva, NY.
ICE in the U.S. melting pot
By Michael J. Fitzgerald
Finger Lakes Times columnist
When social media went wild two weeks
ago with tales of supposed raids being conducted by the federal Immigration and
Customs Enforcement agency, the public’s reaction went beyond just concern for
illegal immigrants.
It invoked a just-below-the-surface
fear that agents from ICE — the menacing acronym for the agency — could bang on
any door, anywhere, anytime unfettered by procedures and protocols we expect
from normal community police.
Even a cursory reading of the
policies and procedures of ICE and its agents reminds us ICE is not a U.S.
version of some Eastern European-style secret police — the kind made famous in
legions of spy movies.
But coming in the wake of our newly
inaugurated president’s executive order banning residents of seven largely
Muslim nations from entering the U.S. — and inflammatory calls by him for a
Muslim registry — the rumor stoked fears and easily gained traction.
The images of ordinary citizens being
swept up accidentally in some ICE-orchestrated roundup were too easy for people
to envision.
ICE is a branch of U.S. Homeland
Security and has a well-defined role in enforcing the panoply of U.S.
immigration and customs laws. But ICE’s most-visible public face in recent news
reports has been that of dark-jacketed agents taking suspected illegal
immigrants into custody, sometimes in less-than-cordial encounters.
It was that image that helped ignite
the erroneous — and near-viral — social media reports that claimed ICE agents
were conducting raids on farms in the Finger Lakes, while putting up
roadblocks, checking people’s identification papers and making arrests in other
parts of the nation.
Official ICE statements about the
rumors were not particularly reassuring.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, an ICE
spokesman said the agency does not do roadblocks to randomly check
identifications and citizenship status.
The reason?
The agency currently doesn’t have
enough officers to do so — not a particularly reassuring explanation.
That sobering thought suggests it
might be a good idea to have official identification close enough to flash if
challenged by ICE — or any law enforcement — in today’s highly charged
atmosphere about immigration and citizenship.
The concerns about the ICE raids
(which turned out to be false) came barely two weeks before the 75th
anniversary of the internment of nearly 120,000 Japanese-Americans during World
War II.
The parallels between the order of
then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and incumbent President Donald Trump’s
order aimed at residents of seven Muslim nations were cited frequently in fiery
and often heartbreaking speeches about the shameful Japanese internment.
The executive order of our new
president brings to mind George Santayana’s famous quote: “Those who do not
remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
One of the greatest ironies about
current anti-immigrant statements voiced by a minority of U.S. citizens is that
these feelings are often more prevalent in regions of the U.S. that are
homogenously Caucasian.
Parts of the country that have seen
their population swell with people from a cornucopia of nations appear to
embrace the diversity, not repel it.
The notable exceptions have been in
areas where too many newly arrived immigrants have moved in too quickly,
overwhelming their new communities with the need for housing, schools and, of
course, meaningful work.
But even then, as immigrants settle
in, the cross-cultural benefits for everyone eventually calm the waters.
Once the United States prided itself
on being a “melting pot” of races and religions, a nation of shared values held
together by faith in the U.S. Constitution.
We were a nation of faith in people
and each other, not fear.
If we take a moment to reflect that
we are all a nation of immigrants, perhaps we can get back to that and be less
worried.
But carry your identification until
this phase of our history is well behind us.
Fitzgerald worked
for six newspapers as a writer and editor as well as a correspondent for
several news services. He splits his time between Valois, NY and Pt. Richmond,
Calif. You can email him at Michael.Fitzgeraldfltcolumnist@gmail.com and
visit his website at michaeljfitzgerald.blogspot.com.
(EDITOR'S NOTE: This column first appeared in the Friday, Feb. 10, 2017 edition of the Finger Lakes Times in Geneva, NY.)
By Michael J. Fitzgerald, FLT
columnist
The Academy-Award nominated film
“Hidden Figures” combines a dizzying array of historical, cultural, scientific
and emotional truths, all of which indicate this movie will be a classic.
On its simplest level, “Hidden
Figures” is the tale of three black women working for NASA at the dawn of the
space age.
They were human computers, manually
doing mathematical computations in the years immediately following the former
Soviet Union’s launching of the Sputnik satellite, an event that touched off
the national panic that prompted the famous Space Race between the two nations.
Envision a world filled with pencils,
slide rules, electric adding machines (with paper-tape printouts) and
chalk-covered blackboards.
America also was in the grip of a
racial segregation that seems so surreal in 2017 viewers audibly gasp at some
scenes in the movie.
Equal gasps are elicited by scenes of
the three black women interacting with NASA engineers in an entirely white-male
environment, just as the first IBM computer is being delivered.
The black women computers in the film
did their computations in shabby office space a half-mile from the main
engineering hub. The sheer volume of aeronautical calculations for the space
program required NASA to hire women of color for their math skills. It was the
desperation of a new science and a new industry that opened jobs and
opportunities to people who otherwise would not have been hired.
But it’s obvious early on that these
women had a lot more to offer than NASA was asking or considered them capable
of, even as the agency watched helplessly as the Soviets beat the U.S. into
space, launching Yuri Gagarin to be the first man in space.
That’s one of the easier-to-spot
“hidden” elements from the film title — talent hidden in plain sight,
camouflaged by racial and gender bias.
It was unfathomable for men in that
era to think women of color could be as smart (or demonstrably smarter) than
Ivy League-trained engineers. NASA couldn’t see beyond skirts or skin color,
despite the women’s demonstrated skills at doing longhand computations.
These women were double-checking the
math of the white male engineers, rooting out the engineers’ errors.
The film’s central message — one that
should resonate in the Finger Lakes and everywhere else — is about opening eyes and minds to
recognize talent and leadership. Around much of Seneca Lake, talent, leadership
ability and ideas are often discounted — not on the basis of race but on
politics.
The error is the same.
Good suggestions are far too often
dumped on the idea trash heap because they come from someone associated with
the wrong political party or philosophy.
At the south end of Seneca Lake
geography factors in, too.
The opinions of anyone residing
outside of Schuyler County’s narrow boundaries — particularly if that person
comes from Ithaca — are rejected, often fiercely disparaged by residents and
members of the county legislature.
Male-dominated town boards, city
councils and legislatures still frequently discount views of female members,
even though it’s 2017.
“Hidden Figures” should probably be
required viewing for all these groups.
There’s a faint echo of the 1982
Steven Spielberg film “E.T.” in “Hidden Figures.” In “E.T.” a handful of mostly
pre-teenagers outwit their parents, the federal government, and anyone else in
authority to save a cuddly, earth-stranded alien from the government’s
clutches.
The message? A band of plucky, clever
kids can outwit adults anytime.
“Hidden Figures” delivers clever
mathematical and social outwitting, too.
But these events are true, detailed
in a 2016 non-fiction book written by Margot Lee Shetterly.
The women in “Hidden Figures” didn’t
have to outwit NASA, they just had to convince the agency to see what was right
in front it.
Them.
A timely reminder for all of us.
Fitzgerald worked
for six newspapers as a writer and editor as well as a correspondent for
several news services. He splits his time between Valois, NY and Pt. Richmond,
Calif. You can email him at Michael.Fitzgeraldfltcolumnist@gmail.com and
visit his website at michaeljfitzgerald.blogspot.com.
The following column appeared Friday in the Finger Lakes Times newspaper in Geneva, NY
____________________________
Government by edict = chaos
By Michael J. Fitzgerald, FLT columnist
Even the most die-hard Trump fans are having trouble
keeping up with the blizzard of executive orders, commands, edicts and
late-night tweets coming from the new president.
It looks like he’s trying to fulfill all of his campaign
promises in the first few weeks. Then retire to Trump Tower or perhaps go build
a golf course somewhere.
Media outlets have detailed out the national
roller-coaster ride of the past two weeks: the startling, ill-thought-out order
to ban Muslims, the on-again, off-again meeting with Mexico’s president and
disturbing changes to the National Security Agency.
Fitzgerald
There are plenty of other examples.
It’s government by edict. And it’s predictably causing
unnecessary governmental, political and judicial chaos.
These bursts of government-by-decree also add to the dread
that the Electoral College and a minority of voters have put a virtual dictator
in office, one that acts unilaterally and often erratically on a daily basis.
It should not come as a surprise.
The nation installed a self-proclaimed, ultra-wealthy
businessman at its helm, someone used to barking orders and having them obeyed
by subordinates without question.
The new president was never schooled in the art of
compromise or even consultation. All the normal rules of governing — like
asking experts for advice — are pretty much thrown out the window.
And in the case of the experts currently being installed
in positions of federal responsibility at all levels, many are clearly
sycophants who are certainly not going to challenge the boss, no matter how
off-the-wall an idea he espouses or tweets.
The nation has had presidents with business backgrounds
before — Herbert Hoover comes to mind immediately. But in the case of Donald
Trump, we have a president who reports only to himself and perhaps family
members. In his decades of business dealings, he has never been beholden to
shareholders, boards of directors or other interested parties who might ask
pesky questions about business operations.
Like casino bankruptcies.
But the United States isn’t a privately held family
business. It’s a democracy.
And if you want to apply the business model to national
governance, then we are all shareholders in this enterprise, a going, growing
concern since 1789.
We all have a huge stake in this nation/company. Our
future — even our lives — depend on it.
But the buck is about to stop with Congress.
The burden for protecting our huge stake falls largely on
the U.S. Congress to exercise its authority under the U.S. Constitution, part
of the three-way system of checks and balances that any junior high school
student should be able to recite on demand.
Ditto that for the judiciary branch — the U.S. Supreme
Court.
The president’s edicts are only as powerful as these other
two branches of government allow them to be, evidenced already by court rulings
declaring Trump’s ban on Muslims illegal, pending a thorough legal vetting that
should have been conducted prior to last weekend’s immigration nightmare.
But a bigger part of the burden falls on Congress.
Although Republican members of the House and Senate are
generally either cheerleaders (or silent) about Trump’s first two weeks of
pronouncements, they had better get ready to exercise their power to sensibly
control the current government-by-chaos.
Finger Lakes GOP Congressman Tom Reed has a particularly
crucial role as a member of the House Ways and Means Committee. That committee
looks at health care, trade, tax policy — and Social Security.
Reed has made plenty of promises to citizens in town hall
meetings since 2010 about protecting veterans, retirees, Social Security
recipients and people on Medicare.
It remains to be seen if he has enough courage to fulfill
his promises if a presidential edict takes a swipe at lowering — or wiping out
— any or all of these benefits.
Fitzgerald worked for six newspapers
as a writer and editor as well as a correspondent for several news services. He
splits his time between Valois, NY and Pt. Richmond, Calif. You can email him
at Michael.Fitzgeraldfltcolumnist@gmail.com and
visit his website at michaeljfitzgerald.blogspot.com.
"Refugees are stranded in Greece as other European countries have closed their borders," she says. "Greece is in a economic depression due to austerity measures imposed on the country since 2010 and doesn't have the resources or infrastructure to help the refugees. They receive little assistance from the EU or other international organizations."
