Dear Mr. Spock,... (1968)

Dear Mr. Spock,
I am not very good at writing letters so I will make this short. I know that you are half Vulcan and half human and you have suffered because of this. My mother is Negro and my father is white and I am told this makes me a half-breed. In some ways I am persecuted even more than the Negro. The Negroes don't like me because I don't look like them. The white kids don't like me because I don't exactly look like one of them either. I guess I'll never have any friends.
F. C.
Los Angeles, Calif.

Leonard Nimoy's reply:

As you may know, only Spock's mother was human. His father was Vulcan. Spock grew up among Vulcan children and, because he was different, he had to face the problem of not being accepted. This is because people, especially young people it seems, and Vulcans, too, tend to form into groups, kind of like wolf packs. They often demand that you be just like them or you will  not be accepted. And the Vulcans were no different than humans are when it comes to prejudice.
Most of the Vulcan kids didn't like Spock because he was half human. So they wouldn't include him in all the things they did. He was very lonely and no one understood him. and Spock was heartbroken because he wasn't popular. But it was only the need for popularity that was ruining his happiness. The question was: which was more important, being 'popular' with the pack who might turn against him at any minute or being true to himself?
It takes a great deal of courage to turn your back on popularity and to go out on your own. Although inside you're not really like the members of the pack, it's still frightening to decide to leave them, because as long as you're popular, you at least have someone to hang around with. But if you do leave, then you may end up alone.
Now, there's a little voice inside each of us that tells us when we're not being true to ourselves. We should listen to this voice. Often we try to talk ourselves into believing our actions are good-'it's ok to pick on that person' we say because it may make us popular for awhile with the pack.
But usually there is no good reason for picking on anyone. He's only bullied or turned away because of his background, because of the way he looks or talks or thinks. It's always only because he's different - not worth less personally than anyone else.
Spock learned he could save himself from letting prejudice get him down. He could do this by really understanding himself and knowing his own value as a person. He found he was equal to anyone who might try to put him down-equal in his own unique way.
You can do this too, if you realize the difference between popularity and true greatness. It has been said 'popularity' is merely the crumbs of greatness.
When you think of people who are truly great and who have improved the world, you can see that they are people who have realized they didn't need popularity because they knew they had something special to offer the world, no matter how small that offering seemed. And they offered it and it was accepted with peace and love. It's all in having the patience to find out what you yourself have to offer the world that's really uniquely yours.
So-the answer to the whole problem, the answer that Spock found when he had to make his big decision, in in overcoming the need to be popular. It's in choosing your own personal goal and going after it and forgetting what the others are saying. If you do this, then the ones who accept people for the right reasons-for their true worth-will find you and like you.
So Spock said to himself: 'OK, I'm not Vulcan, so the Vulcans don't want me. My blood isn't pure red Earth blood. It's green. And my ears-well, it's obvious I'm not pure human. So they won't want me either. I must do for myself and not worry about what others think of me who don't really know me.
Spock decided he would live up to his own personal value and uniqueness. he'd do whatever made him feel best about himself. He decided to listen to that little voice inside him and not to the people around him.
He replaced the idea of wanting to be liked with the idea of becoming accomplished. Instead of being interested in being popular, he became interested in being intelligent. And isntead of wanting to be powerful, he became intersted in being useful.
He said to himself: 'Not everyone will like me. But there will be those who will accept me just for what I am. I will develop myself to such a point of excellence, intelligence and brilliance that I can see through any problem and deal with any crisis. I will become such a master of my own abilities and career that there will be a place for me. People of all races will need me and not be able to do without me. And that's just what he did. And when I see him standing there on the bridge of the Enterprise, facing danger and life-and-death problems so cooly and with so much intelligence, I'm sure he made the right decision.

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- text via
- photograph via

Are you making plans for your wife's death? (1983)

After hours of office work, could you face hours of housework?
Could you be an executive by day and a chambermaid by night?
Could you afford £2.000 a year for a family cook?
Who'll play nursemaid if the kids fall ill?



Come on now, own up. The thought hasn't so much as crossed your mind, has it?
All along, you've blithely assumed that you'll be the first to go.
That your wife will be the one  who will need the financial looking-after.
That yours is the life that should be insured, not hers.
Noble and worthy sentiments indeed. But, if we may say so, short sighted ones, too.
There's no guaranteeing that your wife will outlive you.
(According to statistics, little more than a 60% chance in fact).
So have you ever thought what would happen to you if the unthinkable happened to her?
Not in the dim distant future.
But tomorrow, Friday, 24th June 1983? Could you cope?
On the purely practical front, think of the cooking, the washing, the hours of housework that you'd have to put in. More importantly, there's the children to consider.
Could you ever devote the sort of time to them they need and deserve?
The nightly bedtime stories? Helping them out with their maths homework? Teaching them what's what in the big wide world?
Heaven knows, you'd need help. Lots of it.
And like everything else nowadays, that sort of help doesn't come cheap.
According to a recent survey, the average mother of three ploughs through eighty hours of housework a week.
Eighty hours, mind.
At £2.50 an hour, that comes to a staggering £10,400 a year. Where on earth are you going to get hold of that sort of money?
Well, you could start at the bottom right hand corner of this page.
For as little as £15.00 a month, Albany Life can provide cover worth over £50,000 tax free:
If you prefer, we can even draw up a combined 'Husband and Wife' policy that pays out in the event of either of you dying.
If you'd like to discuss things further with us, post off the coupon straight away.
Planning for a wife's death may be no pleasant matter for a husband.
But for a father, it's a very necessary duty.

Albany Life Assurance Company Limited, incorporated on 25 March 1974, was a UK subsidiary of MetLife and sold to rival Canada Life in the 1990s (via and via).

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image via

Post No 500: A big thank you to all subscribers and a little tribute to my beloved 500

Posting number 500, a wonderful opportunity to thank you all for your interest in diversity and its intersection with arts, business, music, urban planning, Star Trek, ... Thank you so much for commenting, for subscribing, for passing by. I do hope that you will find the next 500 postings as interesting as the past ones. Grazie tante!



And here the original Fiat 500 advertisement (via):



Special thanks to my 500 for the inspiration and to Paperwalker for the "slight modification" of the vintage Cinquecento advertisement.

IKEA & 25m2 Syria

IKEA, the Norwegian Red Cross and advertising agency POL teamed up to create the awareness campaign "25m2 Syria". Inside an IKEA store in Slependen, Norway, a full-size Syrian home was recreated. The 25m2 home is a replica of Dana's home, a woman who lives there with her family of nine. What looks like the usual IKEA posters of product descriptions are posters with stories of Syrians, the "price tags" call visitors to act (via).



“When we had to flee to this area to find safety, we did not have enough money to rent a better place. We have no money to buy mattresses and blankets, or clothes for the children.”
Rana

Spock, the Outsider

"For years, he was about the closest viewers could get to a multiracial role model on American TV."
Robert Ito

"Hands down, the most popular reason that people connect to Spock is that he makes them feel like it's O.K. to be an Other. It's O.K. to be outside the mainstream."
Adam Nimoy



Spock's most attractive trait is not his brain, not his ears. It is his outsider status resulting from having a Vulcan father and a human mother. As Nimoy's son puts it, 99% of the people he asked what they liked about Spock said "the fact that he's an outsider".

Spock needs to choose his (Vulcan) logical or (human) emotional self in different situations. There is hardly an integration of the two selves. According to Teresa Williams-León (California State University), this is "an interesting way of looking at how biracial people have had to suppress aspects of themselves, or one part of themselves."

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- Ito, R. (2016) Outsider Appeal of Spock. The New York Times International Weekly, Der Standard, 24 October 2016, p. 4
- photograph via

World Urbanism Day

The international organisation for "World Urbanism Day" or "World Town Planning Day" was founded by Carlos Maria della Paolera (1890-1960), professor at University of Buenos Aires, in 1949 aiming to advance both public and professional interest in planning, to promote the role of planning in creating livable communities. The day is celebrated in more than 30 countries on 8th of November each year (via).



This year, there is no theme. In 2014, the theme was "Equality in the Cities - Making Cities Socially Cohesive" (see abstracts).

::: World Town Planning Day Online Conference 2016: LINK




photographs by Lee Friedlander (New York City, 1963, 1963, 1966) via and via and via

Jeans & Ageism

"Why can’t we get used to the idea that someone can be an “old woman” and also a person who is interested in style?"
Senior Planet

According to a survey of 2.000 people carried out in Britain, the average age when men and women should stop wearing jeans is 53.



"It's surprising to see our research reveals that many people think jeans are the reserve of the younger generation, suggesting that we should all put denim back on the shelf at the age of 53."
Catherine Woolfe, Marketing Director at CollectPlus

"Denim is such a universal material and with so many different styles available it's a timeless look that people of all ages can pull off."
Catherine Woolfe, Marketing Director at CollectPlus

"What rubbish. I am 75 and will continue to wear jeans as long as I can get them on. I look great in them as do all my friends, skinny or ample. The whole point of jeans is that they fade, and adapt themselves to your shape."
Sarah Carter

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photograph of Marlon Brando via

Are you hearing?

Video by Sheena McFeely and ASL Nook (more)

Born this day: James Edward Orange

Rev. James Edward Orange (1942-2008) was a pastor, a leading civil rights activist, and assistant to Martin Luther King, in fact, King's "staunchest and most courageious lieutenants". In his freedom struggle, he was arrested more than 100 times. There was even fear he would by lynched. The convert to non-violence endured nine severe beatings without responding with violence.
In his teens, James E. Orange started working full-time with Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In 1965, he was already in charge of civil rights actions (via).



"Rumors had gotten out that I was supposed to be lynched in jail."
James E. Orange

When rumours of his lynching spread, civil rights activists organised a march to support him. The marchers clashed with Alabama state troopers and Jimmie Lee Jackson (1938-1965) was shot in the stomach by James Bonard Fowler (1933-2015). He died eight days later. The anger about Jimmie Lee Jackson's death led Martin Luther King to organise the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march (via).

"The children’s demonstrations in Birmingham had transformed James Orange from hulking high school drifter to precocious minister of nonviolence."
Taylor Branch



Orange played an important role in the emergence of the movement in the US southern states, was active in the "children's crusade", the "poor people's camaign" and was at least indirectly responsible for the intervention that led to the 1965 Voting Rights Act (via).


Photograph: James E. Orange (left) carries Martin Luther King's coffin.

In 1968, Orange went to Memphis with King to support the strike. He was there when King was murdered on the balcony of the Lorraine motel (via).

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Photographs via and via and (last one by Lisl Steiner) via

"Desperate Crossing"

"In the cloudless early hours of July 27 (2015), two tiny fishing boats drifted across the Mediterranean Sea. Crammed aboard were 733 would-be migrants, including 59 children under the age of 5. Most were from the impoverished and despotically ruled northeast African nation of Eritrea.

They carried with them only biscuits and some plastic bottles of water, and few of them knew how to swim. None wore life jackets. They had pushed off from the Libyan shore at about midnight, along with a third boat that was now missing. Their destination was the Italian island of Sicily, 300 miles away.



Most of the migrants had no idea how long their journey might last, though a few had been told by their smugglers that they could expect to reach Italy in six to eight hours. In reality, at the boats’ current speed, such a voyage would take at least six days, long past the point when almost all those onboard would have perished from dehydration or exposure. For the crossing, the migrants paid an average of $1,500. (...)

By far the most perilous route is the Libya-Italy sea crossing, where more than 2,500 people have perished since March (referring to March 2015, as of September 2015). In the worst incident, in late April, a grotesquely overladen fishing trawler capsized and sank within sight of a rescue ship; of the estimated 800 migrants aboard, only 28 were saved. Largely in response to that tragedy, a handful of rescue vessels - notably those operated by the medical-relief organization Médecins Sans Frontières (M.S.F.) - now patrol the waters off Libya in hopes of intercepting the boats.



For those attempting this crossing, the perils begin long before they get on the boats. The very lawlessness that has made Libya a smugglers’ haven also means the migrants are prey to the rival criminal bands and tribal militias that now roam the nation. Many of those on the fishing boats had their personal Libyan horror stories: rape, torture, kidnappings that ended only when their families back home wired whatever money was left to cover their ransom. In their desperation to escape, even the risk of dying at sea seemed a better alternative. (...)



It had been six hours since the migrants first set off. Food and water were running out, and soon the situation grew even worse. From down in the hold came cries that the boat was beginning to leak.

At 9 a.m., the migrants saw a ship in the distance and began to wave their arms frantically. An hour later, a small rigid-hulled inflatable boat, or RIB, approached. It made a series of slow passes around the two fishing boats for 20 minutes while a man onboard used a bullhorn to address the migrants in English and Arabic. Stay calm, he said. You are about to be rescued.

The RIB had been launched from the Bourbon Argos, a retrofitted offshore supply ship chartered by M.S.F., which rushed to the area after receiving a distress call about the fishing boats. (...)

When the fishing boats were fully evacuated, crew members from the Argos removed the boats’ engines and spray-painted messages on the decks saying that a rescue had been conducted. Cast adrift, the boats would later be destroyed by patrolling European naval vessels to prevent smugglers from reusing them.



Safely onboard the Argos, the migrants hung their wet clothes to dry, drank fresh water and ate high-protein biscuits. In the afternoon, an M.S.F. staff member delivered some welcome news through a bullhorn: The missing third boat had been found, and its passengers, most of whom were also Eritrean, were now on a different rescue vessel. The report brought joyful embraces and a scattering of applause among those on the deck of the Argos. That evening, a Christian priest led the crowd in an exuberant two-hour service.

The rescue was a success, but it also pointed to the increasingly perverse symbiotic relationship that has developed among migrants, smugglers and saviors. (...)"



"Desperate Crossing": photography and video by Paolo Pellegrin, text (excerpts taken) by Scott Anderson, published on 3rd September in the New York Times (see)

Image below: Each circle represents an incident, sized by number dead or missing in the central Mediterranean from January 2014 to September 2015.



photographs via and via and via and via and via and via