Category: Archives

It’s The End Of The World As We Know It

Hiroshima Atomic Bombing Aftermath

There’s a funny skit on the Don’t Crush That Dwarf album by Firesign Theatre in which two tv news anchors banter about the apocalypse.  “Last year, Patty, you and the viewers will be interested in noting that the world ended.”  To which his partner replies, “As we know it, Hugh!”

This is kind of what’s happened to us.  The world, as we knew it, has ended and now we’re in a new world, feeling less than brave, and facing all four Horseman of the Apocalypse at the same time.  For people who’ve been living in the virtual world for most of the last two decades, waking up and discovering that the real world that we were counting on is going, going, gone, the whole flaming mess we’re in must seem like a bridge too far.  How could we have gotten to this?

I’ll leave you to puzzle that out on your own while we move on to the more existential discussion of what should be doing with ourselves while the world finishes collapsing. If this really is the end of the world, how do we justify continuing to waste our time on business as usual?  Don’t we want to do something better with our lives, both individually and collectively, than what we’re doing now?  This assumes that you don’t love what we’re doing now.  If you do, you’re fine — carry on.

This thought came to me while I was preparing to switch gears once again to taxes and I thought, here they’re talking about nuclear war on NPR, and I’m about to spend an hour or more finding out why the PayPal account is out $28.  Does that $28 even matter given the enormity of the problems that face us “out there,” and what our lives are likely to be like in the coming days, weeks, months?

Assuming we get through this geothermal nuclear war scare, and I certainly hope we do, the fact still remains that we live on a planet amongst people, ourselves included, who still see war — the murder and destruction of people and cities for political reasons — as a viable and even desirable option, depending on how much we hate (or fear) our enemy.

Why do we even believe in war anymore?  Haven’t we gotten beyond that with our AI and our Internet and our supreme intellectual superiority over all things?  How can intellectually superior people still think that blowing things up and killing people is a worthy endeavor that we have to keep doing?

War is one horseman we could do without and we have the ability and the means to do so.  If we could put personal gain and our emotions aside (which we can), we could let go of things that aren’t helping anyone, and embrace other views that serve us better.  For instance, people could negotiate fair terms with each other and avoid war.  We could do that.  But we’d need to let go of our hatred first, which will be difficult not because we can’t but because we don’t want to.  For whatever reason.  But all said and done, it is within our power to end war.

Ending war would give us more money to do other things, and this would enable us to work to solve other pressing issues, such as disease (the pandemic which is not really over even though we say it is), famine (our farming methods are killing us and the planet but we don’t care), climate change (whose effects are already proving disastrous), and poverty (which negatively affects not only the sufferers but society at large).

We could survive the 21st century with some form of ecosystem and culture intact, but we won’t be able to do it with the values we have now or the tools we’re using.  We need to stop choosing and following leaders who have these old, outworn, and completely counterproductive values.  We need to define for ourselves what the new values will be, and be honest with ourselves that if they don’t include peace, love, compassion, mutual aid, joy, fairness, and equality, then we can forget about it.  We’ll still be in the old world of war, hatred, selfishness, greed, anger, unhappiness, unfairness, and inequality.  And we all know where that leads — straight to where we are now, or to reiterate my opening salvo, “the end of the world.”

Do we want that?  I don’t.  And yet everything we do continues to support this bankrupt “dominant paradigm.” There has to be a better way, but until we find it, we’ll all keep marching on — to work, to war, off into the sunset.

We’re led by by our leaders to believe that we, people of Earth, are powerless to solve our problems.   We’re not.  We just don’t want to yet.  We’re not prepared to sacrifice any aspect of the present for a better future, even if the present sucks!  Maybe it’s just a matter of the devil you know, but if we don’t get over it, we’re going to run into a new devil and this one will be merciless.

In closing, I will prove my point about the present state of human values.  You will know where yours are by just how crazy my next sentence sounds to you: The old world may be ending but we can make a better world for all of us by adopting values that serve the entire planet and working toward goals that benefit us all.  See how easy it is?  Let’s just hope that we come to this realization before there’s nothing left to save but piles of ashes, corpses, and debris.

Autumnal Rites – September 24, 2021

We got the predicted rain last night.  Sometime after midnight, in the darkest hours of the night, the rain began to pour.  It was hard not to notice.  Even the cat was intrigued, opening the curtains to look out despite the fact that it was several hours before dawn.

Dark as it was then, it is now as bright.  The sun came out after noon and the sky cleared to a pale, well-washed blue.  A light breeze ruffles the ever more golden leaves.  Autumn is here.

And why wouldn’t it be?  In the last five days, we’ve had the harvest moon, the Autumnal Equinox, Mabon, and the first day of fall.  There’s nothing left now but the harvest feast, which we will celebrate on Saturday in accordance with our own traditions.

For city people, harvest is an idea, but in the country, people still actually do harvest.  It’s real and necessary.  Many people who aren’t even farmers do it — put things up, use them up, or put them by.  Outside, the animals and insects harvest — the squirrels unleashing random bomblets of nuts out of the walnut tree, the bees and butterflies grazing the last of the summer flowers.

Harvest comes early in the fall, and it’s easy to feel celebratory as the season begins.  But Autumn as a whole is another matter, stretching on as it does into late December. For many in the European tradition, Autumn is regarded as a melancholy time, a time of death and mourning, as well as rejuvenating rest.  It isn’t too surprising that people of the northern hemisphere would think that, since our cold season is long. For us, the pretty colors are the carrot to get us to go along with what comes next — the bare trees and grey skies.

Looking for an alternate view, I stumbled on the poets of China.  Chinese poetry about autumn is refreshing because there’s so much more emphasis on the beauty of the season and less on its implications. Poets gaze and dream and appreciate the mellow afternoons, the sharp blue skies, and even the autumn rains.  They get drunk under the harvest moon.  Sometimes they write poetry.

Outside my room, across a road, and down a steep bank is a river.  Even if I hadn’t been aware of last night’s rain, I would have known it from the rush of water racing past me on its way to the sea.

Autumn’s element is water. Its secret power is change. Our choice is whether or not to jump in and enjoy the ride.

 

 

 

Saving the Seas – Time to Rethink Our Attitude Toward the Oceans

Dead Dolphins on Faroe Island

For a while now, we’ve been getting depressing reports about mass beachings of sea animals, especially mammals such as dolphins and whales.  These sad stories come and go, and each time there’s a sense of futility — how can we, as individuals, do anything to solve the problems of the whales and the oceans.  Sure, we could donate to another charity, but how is that really going to solve the problem?  Probably it isn’t.  

A more immediate remedy would be to find out what we’re doing to cause these animals to commit suicide in the first place, and then stop doing it.  

To that end, I decided to watch a Netflix documentary about the state of the world’s oceans, controversially entitled “Seaspiracy.”  This documentary filled me in on some cold hard reality about fishing practices, pollution, destruction of habitat, and the out and out brutality of fishermen “harvesting” and culling fish, even warm blooded creatures like dolphins and porpoises. Yes, you will see Flipper being hacked to death with large knives. (Ok, not Flipper but creatures much like her.  Just a warning that this film shows a lot of blood, and is not for children or sensitive adults.) 

So I watched this film and it was depressing, as you might imagine.  And no, it did not give you the warm fuzzies about the fishing industry.  In fact, the first thought I had after watching this film was: I can’t continue to eat fish.  It just seemed abundantly clear that it’s morally wrong for me to eat seafood right now, much as I love it.  And it isn’t just an ethical issue.  Since the oceans are polluted, so are the fish.  We’re eating a scary assortment of unhealthy minerals including mercury and arsenic in larger fish like salmon and tuna.  Farmed fish tend to be unhealthy as well, but for different, more gruesome reasons.  

There are an array of facts associated with this film (see https://www.seaspiracy.org/facts).  Put together, they comprise an argument that is hard to argue with.  It’s not about future risk — it’s about horrible things happening now.  There are Catch-22s all over the place.  We could just ignore the problem, but since a healthy functioning ocean is necessary to climate balance, and our climate is already dangerously unbalanced, we would be quite foolish to continue the status quo.  

Here’s just one example of a dangerous imbalance (recently reported but not in the film) and it has to do with an ocean current that’s near and dear to us — the Gulf Stream.  As the salinity of the Gulf Stream decreases due to glacial melting, it becomes more and more disorganized and unstable.  It’s already unstable now and could, if we continue down the path we’re on, cease to operate altogether, leaving some regions in the cold and others in permanent drought.  To top it off, there is an excellent chance of drastic coastal flooding throughout much of this area.

We could stop the march to catastrophe by radically reducing fossil fuel use, and that might keep the Atlantic coastlines livable… As for seafood, mitigating global warming won’t address the overfished, overexploited oceans. To do that, you need to shrink the fishing industry, which is protected in many places with subsidies. Since I care about ocean and wildlife, I’m choosing not to eat fish.  If enough of us did this, it might give the so-called “fisheries” a chance to recover from decades of gluttony. 

Choices.  That’s what people always say.  It means, “You caused this problem yourself, so make better choices and you’ll stop having the problem.”  I think we’re at one of those annoying crossroads now with regard to our oceans and the aquatic life they support.  The distress level in the seas is high, and we owe it to ourselves to find out why and do what we can to rectify it.

Photo credit: Erik Christensen, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

On Futility: The Story of a Moth

Moth on Window

I was sitting in the window the other day looking out into yet another summer shower when I noticed a moth flapping around between the inner pane and the outer storm window.  As is typical for moths trapped in such situations, this one had flown all the way to the top of the window casing where it was beating itself against every surface trying to get out.  I felt for it but couldn’t figure out a way to get at it to effect a bug rescue.  As I pondered its dilemma, it occurred to me that the general tendency of most flying insects when trapped between window panes is exactly the wrong one for escaping that situation.  They always fly up where there is no way for me to open the window and let them out.

So after telling the moth “Go down… go down…..” to no avail, I turned the incident into a self-teaching moment, to wit:  if you find yourself beating your head against a wall without success, it might be good to try another approach — even the opposite approach — since the one you’re using clearly isn’t working and may never work.

Just as I thought that, the moth suddenly dropped from the top of the window frame to the bottom where the inner window was open wide enough for it to fly in.  It immediately flew into my chest and then bounced off where it settled onto the wall by my side as if to say, “Ok, I came down — now what?”  Despite my amazement, I quickly opened the screen at the bottom and in the twinkling of an eye, the moth flew out and vanished into the early evening sky.  

Although unexpected, in that moths don’t usually heed my instructions no matter how fervently I issue them, I took the incident to be confirmation of my earlier conclusion.  If at first and for a long while after you don’t succeed, try something different.  It might be just what’s needed to break the impasse and allow you to escape the confinement of your problem.

So, thank you, moth, for your instructive predicament.  I’m glad it worked out for both of us!

 

Photo credit: Holger Casselmann, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Why We Still Need Hemingway

You ask, why would a “girl” be interested in reading Ernest Hemingway, sexist bastard that he is.  Don’t patronize us girls.  We know who he is.  We know that there are others like him, just as sexist, right here in 2021.  It does not hurt for us to be reminded.  And anyway, we don’t need to like everything about a guy to like some things about him.

Hemingway is as much the subject of his fiction as he is of his life.  He portrays the manly man, the tough, craggy guy who can get through the worst life can throw at you and come out the other side, not as a hero but as a survivor.

In our politically correct, namby-pamby world, we’re all supposed to speak jargony newspeak or pablum.  But life isn’t like the modern studies department at your university.  Life is rougher than that, a lot rougher.

Sometimes even us girls need examples of people who can get through it without crumbling, who can take our hits and still get up the next morning, aching and cold but alive!  Do you get it?  Alive.  Not pretty, wounded even, full of piss and vinegar and gallows humor, but still kicking, breathing, and willing to try again.

Hemingway is the guy who won’t give up, who can’t give up, until of course, he does.  And on that day, he goes by his own hand on his own terms.

We postmoderns thinks we’re above life, the shitty side of life, the impossible side, the side where quite literally things are blowing up around us.  We think we can live our clean, perfect lives and think clean, perfect thoughts and do nothing but good in this sanitized and sterile world.  

Wrong! Wait til the flood hits you, the war, the disease, the catastrophic job loss, what have you, and then check your thoughts and language and see how perfect you are then.  Ever think how good it feels, not all the time but on very awful, special occasions, to say fuck it and NOT be polite?

Hemingway shows that even if you are a fallible human being in ways that might offend others, you can still survive, and in fact, the very things that make you offensive may also be the factors that enable you to stay on your feet.  Survival takes more than using the right pronouns or pronouncing “Latino” correctly.  Once you reach a certain point, survival is primal, rules be damned.

As students of life, not just literature, we need Hemingway, and most of us are grown-up enough to know how to use him.  

That’s all I got to say.  And I’m a girl.  

How To Unify The Country

When divisions reign between the people, and there are sides, and each side hates the other, things can get very heated.  Consider the old truism that the worst feuds are family feuds.  Well, here in America, we used to be Americans but now we’re Good Americans and Bad Americans, and, if news media is any indication, we despise each other.  Moreover, we have had four straight years of this hatred.  I lived through the entire 1960s, but even during that similarly divided time, I never feared for the Republic.  Today, people are evoking the Civil War as a comparable period. 

Now cynics know that America’s current division does not have to lead to civil strife.  Our hatred for each other could be united into hatred for a third party somewhere else — a Russia, for instance, which Americans are accustomed to hating from at least the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, if not before.

What are we talking about here?  War, pure and simple.  Wars have a unifying effect on the populace.  It’s simpler to hate a foreign enemy, exciting even, and there aren’t the moral issues you have to deal with when hating your neighbors.  For whatever reason, people tend to fall for it.  By people, I mean the press and a significant number of the nation’s citizens.  There’s an added benefit for presidents, in the form of another truism:  “You can’t criticize the president during wartime.”  That was the story they told us with George W. Bush, and it worked!

Using war as a diversion to pacify the people is not a new device.  While reading about 16th century essayist Michel de Montaigne, I ran across a surprising example of the unifying effect of a common enemy on a warring populace.  Essentially, the France of his day was immersed in a brutal and bloody civil war between the Catholics and the Protestants, filled with massacres and torture and all the rest.  It was the definition of internecine strife, and there seemed to be no stopping it.  The people warred on for the better part of 30 years.  

So what finally ended the killing?  Why, a foreign enemy, of course.

Henri IV, a strong king in contrast to the weak monarchs who had preceded him, took the throne of France, after which he promptly started a war with Spain who had been funding an insurgency in parts of France.  It was a brilliant move.  The Spanish didn’t mind since fighting wars was about all they did in Europe then.  Meanwhile, the citizenry were forced to shift their attention to the war effort, as all the men were drafted into the military.  With the men out fighting the Spanish, there was no one left to commit atrocities at home, and the civil war that had consumed the country for more than a generation quickly ended.

That makes it all seem very tidy, but really, it must have been horrible to live in the 1500s.  They had their own pandemic (the Plague), extreme division between people, major economic hardship, and weak leadership at the top. Oh wait, that could be today…   

Returning to the point, the past is tidy, but the present is always uncertain.  While there’s no indication that Biden is going to start a foreign war, we shouldn’t be surprised if he does.  After all, his banner is Unity.  

A View From The Undecided Left

Obama-Trump-Biden-Jan 20 2017

By all means, vote Trump out of office, but don’t be fooled into thinking that because we’ve got a Democrat back in the white house, everything will be all better.  It won’t be.  Not only will Covid-19 still be with us, but all the social, economic, climate, and other problems as well.  I will refrain from commenting further, except to say: People love to talk about “holding their feet to the fire” but let’s face it, we never do it.  If past administrations are any indication, many of us will make excuses for them.   Read More

Fire Next Time — The BLM Protests of 2020

Black Lives Matter 2020

We were in Brooklyn visiting family when the Ferguson protests broke out after the police shooting of unarmed black teen Michael Brown.  We watched the protests via live stream and felt then that surely something must come of this.  

Black Lives Matter was born out of that historical moment, but despite lots of lawn signs, the killings continued.  A year later in Baltimore with the killing of Freddie Gray, the protests were again sudden and youth-driven.  Again we watched, and again we thought, this time, there would be a change.  But no, the black mayor of Baltimore called them thugs (and lost her job) but the police involved were all exonerated. Read More

The Unspoken Ideology

Originally posted: August 28, 2006

White people really are better. We just are: we’re smarter, better educated, and better looking. We know more — so much more than all the other races of people on the planet that we have to be like parents to them. We know what’s best for them, and because they don’t have our wealth of wealth and knowledge (which is evidence in itself that they are inferior to us), we have to take care of them. And we know best how to take care of them — they should be grateful to us, after all, for the many things we’ve done to help them live better lives under our vastly superior, modern American system.

There is a cross we have to bear: people around the world are troublesome, and when they get out of line, it’s up to us Americans to get in there and restore order. We don’t want to have to go blow up these people, but they force us to with their bad behavior and idolatrous religions and irregular forms of government.

Read More

How Humans Deal With Plagues – Quarantine Is Normal

Bell Telephone - Flu Quarantine

As the debate between the Stay Safers and the Open Uppers continues, it seems a better time than most to take a look at what people have done in the past during times of plague and pandemic. Not surprisingly, they did pretty much the same things we’re doing now. Although they knew nothing of pathogens, the instincts of our forebears were to stay away from the plague in every way possible.

Here is a list of reactions that are typical of people dealing with a major pandemic:

  • Fear and panic
  • Clean up
  • Run away
  • Restrict inbound travel
  • Quarantine the infected
  • Practice social isolation
  • Practice social distancing
  • Break quarantine
  • Commit crime
  • Pray

These strategies are repeated during all the various plagues from the Black Death in the 1300s through the 1919 flu epidemic and beyond. This is what the human race has had in its pandemic-fighting toolbox then and now.

Drawing from just one example, Florence in the mid 14th century, it’s possible to find most if not all of these practices in play. Boccaccio gives a detailed account in the introductory chapter of The Decameron, a book set in Florence, Italy during the plague year of 1348. Then as now, the plague came “from the East,” carried along trade routes until, making truth of rumor, it landed in Florence in the Spring.

The Florentines had been through this before, and they immediately began cleaning their city, getting rid of as much “filth” as they could to eliminate potential breeding grounds for disease. Travel restrictions went into effect — mostly on incoming ships — to prevent the plague from washing ashore.

To no avail. The disease struck with a vengeance and soon people were dying in the streets. Naturally, quarantines were imposed on any person or household struck by the disease. The word quarantine has its origin during the Black Death, and refers to the 40 days that they believed necessary to disinfect a person who had come in contact with the disease.

Among the healthy, there were several camps: the ones who ran away, the ones who stayed home, and the ones who carried on as (or somewhat more than) usual.

Among those who fled the plague were the wealthy nobles who left the city en masse to wait out the pestilence in their countryside villas. Needless to say, they carried some amount of contagion with them. The tale-tellers of The Decameron are among this group.

The second group was composed of those who tried to stay safe by staying home and hiding from the plague. Boccaccio says it got them too, sometimes whole families living in one house.

The third group included those who felt that since we’re all doomed anyway, we may as well have the best time we can while we’re here. Their motto might have been “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” 

It also bears mentioning that at least some small proportion of the citizens went to church and prayed, although there seem to have been no formal services. Even then, long before we knew about the causes of infectious disease, we knew about infection.

During today’s pandemic crisis, we have all the personality types represented, and even one more — the live free or die, back to work, business as usual people. This one did not exist in pre-capitalist, feudal Florence.

So to recap, when it comes to government responses, imposing quarantines and averting incoming traffic was typical. In some places, they had guards posted around the city walls as well. The goal, at least in the beginning, was to keep the disease out. Once it was in, the goal was to keep it from spreading. On an individual level, people sought to avoid catching it by running away or hiding at home. Some people partied like it was 1348. You know what they say. It takes all kinds.

Be that as it may, modern people are doing the same things today that we did in olden times, including the wearing of masks — mask wearing by plague doctors began in the 1600s when the earliest forms of PPE were invented. Then as now, no one really wants to get sick and die.

So as much as the Open Uppers want their freedom and as understandable as that is, they’re incorrect if they think there’s anything unusual or strange about trying to stop the transmission of a major epidemic. We’re just doing the same things we always do. As to whether the disease is serious enough to warrant the draconian efforts governments are taking to prevent it, that’s something we’re likely to find out once “lockdown” ends in enough places.