Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/07/03/us-silver-dollar-coin-design-c.html
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I can barely look at it without tearing up. What a great way to honor her.
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This would be a touching tribute, if her life hadn’t been so recklessly thrown away. It’s hard for me to find honor in such a shameful incident.
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The only money they put women on in the U.S. is the dollar coins that nobody likes or uses. What happened to our Tubman $20 bill?
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I was 11 and deep into all things NASA when we lost the Challenger; it broke my heart and still hurts to think of.
This coin is an honor long overdue, but I’m glad to see it.
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⊥rump killed it. Or, more correctly, a ⊥rump appointee (Mnuchin) killed it.
⊥rump specifically mentioned, as a candidate, that he felt the $2 bill might be a good choice to bear Tubman’s likeness, per the article above.
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I think for anyone in elementary school watching that live it’s one of those memories they’ll never forget… it was such a gut wrenching thing to see. The Challenger disaster was a key moment in our childhood even if you missed it happening on live TV.
I did not see it live in class as my great grandmother had just passed away and we were out of school for her funeral.
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If Trump had simply taken no position on the Tubman $20 bill replacing the Jackson $20 bill and let the change happen as previously scheduled he could have claimed it as a win for his record on U.S. race relations. Tubman was a gun-toting, freedom-loving badass who would have been broadly aligned with the Republican party of her day, so with the right kind of historical obfuscation the GOP could have even claimed her as one of their own.
But of course he had to default to the racist position, even though taking the non-racist position would have required him to do literally nothing.
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Hey, I like the Sacajawea coin, for a bunch of reasons, but especially because back in the before days I could throw a handful of gold (colored) coins on the bar and demand a drink.
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A tragedy
caused by a travesty of the first modern fascist president
commemorated during our endurance of the present fascist president.
Ooof. If you are of a certain age - right in the feels.
I still have my Weekly Reader about the Challenger accident.
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You could try a stamp for a DIY solution:
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I remember that day like it was yesterday. A little piece of the goodness of the world died that day.
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I felt the same way about the Challenger disaster. I watched it live, and was shocked. As nightmare fuel it was preceded by The Day After, which shook up the sense of safety and security for many children. After reading feedback from Dr. Sally Ride, who worked on commissions to investigate the Challenger and Columbia accidents, I won’t watch any mission involving people in transit or EVAs real-time.
There’s been so much televised tragedy since then: 9/11, collateral damage from various wars against terrorism, and videos capturing harassment, acts of inhumanity, and/or death. It makes me wonder how children today (and their parents) deal with it.
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Being on the west coast I didn’t see it live but I was in 4th grade at the time if I recall correctly and for the entire day my class watched the TV coverage. Over and over I saw the shuttle explode and those astronauts eventually die (to this day there’s still no consensus on what actually killed them or when they died, but they were alive after the explosion).
It was pretty traumatizing but at the same time seeing it over and over again also paradoxically managed to desensitize me in some strange way to the scale of the tragedy. That makes me feel like shit.
Then to later find out the entire thing could have been avoided if some bean counters at NASA just listened to the experts - that’s enraging.
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I think it’s probably true for lots of gen xers…
You’re right about televised tragedy now. I think lots of people shield their kids from the worst of it on TV and we (as in the US) are less likely to broadcast the bloodiest stuff that our foreign policy is responsible for (unlike, according to my friends there, media in the ME, that will regularly broadcast deaths). I think we tend to have the spectacle of the violence (buildings blowing up, drone video of such, etc), but not the actual human cost of that.
But as for the trauma, that’s a good question, since despite our broadcast media not putting the worst stuff up, the internet allows people to access this stuff uncensored. I think maybe traditional broadcast media is starting to put up these videos more often. And of course, we could ask that question of kids who grow up in places with higher levels of police violence aimed at their communities, whose parents have less access to means to shield their kids.
I do think we live in a time where people are concerned about the psychological impact of trauma in the long term on children. It’s at least a conversation we’re having. Where as I think in the past, more children were probably more likely to encounter violence in daily life (often at the hands of their parents) and it was just considered normal?
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This is why I hope to see more funding taken from the military and police. It could be spent on educators/education, social workers, and community programs to help children have a better chance to thrive. There are many threats to the young, the poor, and those without power or privilege - but at least they are more visible today.
The tech we think will be helpful can sometimes turn out to be another source of societal problems. Another example is abusers and violent groups using it to connect or escalate their behavior. Still, if those targeted continue to use it for documenting and reporting the people causing them harm, maybe we’ll have better law enforcement and less injustice in the future. The risk of exposure could become a greater deterrent for violent and abusive people, too.
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Me too. It’s the moral thing to do.
Agreed. I’d argue that anything produced by an injustice society will itself perpetuate that injustice.
That’s the hope and it has done that, too. But we ultimately have to transform our society into a more just one to expect an outcome of justice for all. We have those ideals baked into our founding documents, but they need to be made meaningful.
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That was my mother. I was in school at the time so I didn’t see it, but she watched the launch as it happened. After that, she never watched another live launch or landing. She couldn’t.
My school made an announcement over the P.A., but it didn’t feel real to me until later. I was in the upstairs hallway, the radio broadcasting the news report. In the background, you could hear the sobs of her students, crying.
That’s when it hit me. I started crying too.
I don’t think I’ll ever forget that.
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