Category: The Biden Years

Stories written when Joe Biden was president

Memos to Self

Thomas Stothard Memoranda-Yale Center for British Art

Recently, I cleared out my pockets for pieces of paper scribbled on by me, and sorted through them with the intention of removing intellectual clutter from my life.  What was so important, I wondered, about these thoughts, that I wrote them down and carried them around, possibly for weeks, even after I could no longer remember what any of them were.  So I pulled them out and read them — a mixed bag of random pensées*, of no particular importance except perhaps to record what I was thinking about in the month of June 2024.  

“Language and thought—a country needs to speak the same language to have unity.”

My thinking here was that if the language we speak reflects how we think, and how we think reflects who we are as a people, then a country in which people speak one or several different languages without sharing any one language in common is going to have trouble getting along.  This failure to get along arises from our inability to understand each other in the most literal sense—what you say to me sounds like gibberish, and vice versa.  If you expand this to the figurative sense, forget about it.  We’re lost.

“Is it propaganda if it’s true?”

Modern people are much more savvy to the idea of propaganda than we used to be.  Maybe the Internet opened our eyes.  But what if a known source of propaganda puts out a story designed to support a particular viewpoint, and let’s say also that the story turns out to be true.  Is it still propaganda?  I’m going to say yes, because propaganda is at least partially defined by intent.  If the intention is to deceive or manipulate, then it’s propaganda, pure and simple.  Its trueness doesn’t change the fact that the wielder of the story did so with dishonest intent. Nor however does the fact that it’s propaganda make it false.  This is an important distinction.

“Geopolitically speaking, all the places where we got the borders wrong are going to get fixed.”

Around the world, European powers have redrawn borders and created nations, often with little regard for the custom or desires of the local inhabitants.  Eastern Europe has a particularly rich history of shifting borders, first as the long borderland between Russia and Europe, later as individual territories under the various empires that once ruled that part of the world.  They’ve undergone a great many changes over the centuries, so many that one wonders if a region so much in contest and in flux can ever be stable.  

Nevertheless, there are borders that are still being fixed to this day.  This is not going to stop happening until all the people who speak the same languages live in the same countries.  See “language and thought” above.

“America’s goal is global hegemony.  It accomplishes this goal by means of regime change.  The name of this game is ‘Let’s You and Him Fight**.’”

America’s method of obtaining regime change is by proxy, or to put it another way, by provoking war between America’s target and a convenient antagonist willing to fight a war in America’s stead.   And while this methodology doesn’t produce much in the way of stable democracies, it’s ace at achieving regime change, which is really all we care about — as long as a “friendly” government is installed in its place. 

“Good people are obliged to show they care; worrying is an obligation.”

I don’t agree with this position.  It’s a huge waste of emotional energy and accomplishes nothing. But from a social standpoint, it’s considered bad form not to worry about the things that others worry about.  And so we wrap ourselves in worry in order to fit in.

“If nothing matters, then there’s nothing to worry about.”

This is true, but most good people won’t agree that nothing matters. In fact, we’re expected to believe that everything matters greatly, which necessitates worry.  See above.

“Express yourself through writing.  Write for the future.”

Once interpersonal communication becomes impossible, you have only one resort if you need to express your thoughts — and let’s face it, we all need to express ourselves from time to time.  That last resort is writing.  As for your intended audience, it’s clearly not your contemporaries.  They wouldn’t understand, and for all you know, you might be tossed into a dungeon somewhere for expressing unsanctioned views.  Your audience is now limited to either yourself or some future reader who isn’t obsessed with who’s going to win the presidency. You are nevertheless assisted by the fact that having no living audience to please, you can say whatever you want — provided it’s true to you.  You may feel lonely writing anonymously for no one, but remember that Voltaire spent the better part of his life in exile, and we still remember him today.  (He did not give up writing or society, however.  Maybe Voltaire is a bad example…)

That’s it for the latest crop of notes. I’m now able to throw out a half dozen small sheets of paper and the semi-cryptic notes they contain, while the thoughts themselves are preserved and extended, if not into eternity, at least for the near future, which is ample for my purposes. As for the one sheet of notes I did not include, it was a rambling two paragraphs on AI, the topic de jour for sure. Not that it matters.  I’ll have plenty of time to think about that in the future, although by then, AI will no doubt have rendered thinking obsolete. 

* One of the sheets of paper contains a sketched arrangement of three pansies, under which is written the word, Pansies. I hereby dedicate it to André Breton.

** “Let’s You And Him Fight” is actually one of the “games people play” from the 1964 book of the same name by psychiatrist Eric Berne. Giving snappy names to his games is part of the reason the book was so popular.

Can’t We Just Get Along? A Lesson the Past

Henri of Navarre - Jacob Bunel, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

One of the more fascinating personages of times past was Henry of Navarre, a ne’er-do-well and free thinker who became king of the French during the religious wars of the 1500s.  It was right after the Reformation, and society was rather tense, as seemed always to be the case when religious reformation broke out. The Protestants hated the Catholics. The Catholics hated the Protestants.  This was nothing new, but in France, the hatred was so intense that people killed each other by the thousands for over 30 years.

It should be noted that, religion aside, everyone involved was French, everyone spoke the French language, everyone ate baguettes, but if you believed in the wrong number of sacraments or had ornaments in your churches, you were bad, pure and simple — so bad, in fact, that you needed to be tortured and killed.

Henry of Navarre was a Protestant. For a while, then he became a Catholic.  For another while, then he got excommunicated twice and became a Protestant again.  And finally, just to put the proverbial icing on the cake, he converted back to Catholicism.  He called his last conversion a small price to pay to keep Catholic Paris happy in the new tolerant France that he intended to govern.

All this was accomplished, albeit slowly, through the enacting of the Treaty of Nantes, which flawed though it was, did permit Protestants some degree of religious freedom in France.  With this feat, decades of assault and battery, murder and bloodshed, came more or less to an end. And while the former combatants never got to peaceful coexistence, they were able to manage in a segregated fashion which was as good as could be expected in 16th century France.

There may be ideas worth dying for, but Henry didn’t think religion was one of them.  Which is why it’s rather ironic that he met his end at the hands of someone who did.  In 1610, some dozen years after establishing peace in the realm, he was fatally stabbed by a Catholic monk who was angry with Henry for not being sufficiently intolerant of Huguenots.

And so it goes.  More than 400 years later, our mutual hatred is just as great, although now it’s for political rather than purely religious reasons.  If there is any lesson to be learned it is this: beware of ideology.  It can never be appeased.

Image credit:  Jacob Bunel, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

STEM and Real Life Kids, or, Can You Legislate STEM Aptitude?

US Navy STEM Students

We modern Americans believe that anything we can say can be so.  In other words, if we can think of something, we can make it happen. But is this always true?

Of course not, else I wouldn’t be writing this sentence. Just because you want something to happen and try really hard to make it happen, doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.  A case in point is legislating STEM in education — the hyper emphasis on the information modalities of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. We think we can make more of this if we just teach it hard enough to enough children.

If this were true, it would stand to reason that kids would get better and better scores on standardized tests, particularly math scores.  But they don’t. (https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/13158/chapter/3)  Surprise, surprise, right?  But crazy as this sounds, many people actually are surprised when kids “score poorly” on standardized tests, not taking into account the fact that we’re testing them for skills that many of them cannot fully learn because — their talents lie elsewhere.

This is true for the majority of people, whose aptitudes may include language, logic, history, education, communication, psychology, music, art, writing, and much more.  They are the 90%.

Taken together, the percentage of the population achieving high performance in STEM fields is less than 10%, mostly male.  Let’s make a crashingly huge assumption that a  measly ten percent of people have a basic aptitude for the subject areas in which all of our children are expected to excel.  If you consider that only 30% or so of students meet national proficiency standards (a lower bar than excellence), it becomes clear that most kids are probably not cut out for careers in STEM.  Promoters of STEM like to say that kids can be made to score well in STEM whether they have an aptitude for those subjects or not, but that has not actually been proven true in the real world.

Consequently, today’s curriculum priorities give kids with skills other than STEM about a 10% chance of success in our education system, because unless they happen to be one of the 10% of kids with strong math skills as well, they’re going to fail by the standards our society is testing for.

Never mind that a student has broad interests, writes well, has excellent reading comprehension, understands basic psychological principles, and is able to understand and communicate information to others, just for instance.  Those skills are not in demand — only science, technology, engineering, and math really matter, or so the latest propaganda would have us believe.

Thus, if you’ve been wondering why STEM makes you uneasy when you think about education policy — assuming that sometimes you think about education policy — then here is your potential answer: the same rough number of students who were good at STEM subjects before STEM education will be good at STEM after all students are forced to study STEM.  Increasing excellence in STEM is possible but only by a tiny incremental amount.  Most people will continue to have, at best, a passing understanding of STEM, while losing out on the positive side of education, which is learning subjects you’re interested in and have an aptitude for. Meanwhile, you risk giving low self esteem to a whole generation of people, who have the misfortune to be good at the wrong things according to early 21st century standards.

What should we do then?  The short answer is, rethink STEM, which is an admirable set of disciplines, but not for everyone, pure and simple.  Nor are STEM subjects best just because fewer people excel at them.  All areas of knowledge are valuable and should be valued.

With that in mind, we could create more educational tracks, instead of just one.  For instance, there should be a language/humanities track.  There’s  STEM light, for kids who aren’t going to go on to research science or engineering.  There’s your arts program.  And there’s your hands-on program for trades and business.  You might want more programs in your imaginary education curriculum, but the basic take-away from all this is that people are diverse and have diverse skill sets.  Our public school curriculum needs to acknowledge this for the good of our students and our society as a whole.

Oh, and one more thing — when they show images of girls joyously playing STEM games, constructing complicated LEGO contraptions, and looking like cute, smart, little scientists, that’s mostly just propaganda.  In all my years as a girl, in the company of other girls, including girls who were “good at math,” we didn’t do much STEM stuff in our free time.  Among my friends, we were much more likely to play a game (tag, dodgeball) or hang around talking, than to engage in science. Some of my friends who were good at math even played with dolls.  In my case, I liked to make things (arts, crafts) and I liked to study nature (rocks and minerals, insects, butterflies and moths, pond life….)  None of these subjects get much play in today’s STEM programs.  They aren’t techie enough.

So there you are, a ramble through STEM education and the real children on which it is inflicted.  Bottom line: we are what we are.  We can pretend otherwise, but that wouldn’t be very scientific of us, would it?

Originally written: Nov 2023

Photo credit: U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Chad Runge, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Truth and The Text: Taking Borges Out of Turn

Jorge Luis Borges, 1965 - Adolf Hoffmeister

I read Borges’ story “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote,” but not in chronological fashion.  I’m tempted to say “not in the fashion the author intended,” but there’s no way to know that.  But I can say, unequivocally, that I “read around” in it before reading it properly, and spent the majority of my time on page 53 of the Grove Press edition⁠1, in which Borges quotes Cervantes and Menard as follows:

“…truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future.”

I was impressed with this quotation but confused as to how the two seemingly identical quotes differed.  I read the Cervantes version again.  Then the Menard version.  They still seemed the same.  Had I missed something?  I read them side by side.  The same, truly and indisputably identical.  And yet I read on the same page that there are “vivid” contrasts in style and content between Menard’s version and Cervantes’.

It wasn’t until I skipped back a page that I found the solution to the puzzle: “The text of Cervantes and that of Menard are verbally identical,” Borges writes, making this a Borgesian joke unlikely to be encountered since most people start at the beginning of a story and read toward the end…

 The joke more often encountered is the narrator’s conclusion that the two texts are identical “but the second is infinitely richer.” Ha! this is funny because it’s impossible, we say.  But of course, in the world of ficciones, we are wrong.

The meaning of a text changes depending on the context assumed by the reader.  If the reader thinks (as Borges suggests) that The Imitation of Christ⁠2 was written by James Joyce, they are likely to interpret it differently than if the reader thinks it was written by Céline.  Borges calls this “a new technique…of reading,” involving “deliberate anachronism and erroneous attributions” to create a “renovation” of the original.  

Which is more important, then, the truth or the text?  Perhaps it depends on the text.

anImage_2.tiff

1 Of the collection Ficciones

2 In fact, it was written by Thomas á Kempis sometime before 1440.

 

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

Unraveling Ratner’s Star From The Inside Out – quotations and an excerpt

Quotations

“His mind blunted by the cybernating drone in the distance, he leaned toward the console and put his head on his arms just as he’d done so many times first grade during the two-minute rest period every afternoon, nicks in the wooden desk, sleep pulling, chalk trails in the air.  From a series of three dreams had evolved a life fulfilled in mathematics and philosophy. The dreams occurred within a single night.  The first two concerned the terror of nature not understood and the last of them harbored a poem that pointed a way to the tasks of science. The world was comprehensible, a plane of equations, all knowledge able to be wielded, all nature controllable.”

…

“‘We can discover the truth or falsehood of our own final designs only if we teach ourselves to think as a single planetary mind.  This is the purpose of Field Experiment Number One.’”

…

“‘Consider science itself.  It used to be thought that the work of science would be completed in the very near future. This was, oh, the seventeenth century.  It was just a matter of time before all knowledge was integrated and made available, all the inmost secrets pried open.  This notion persisted for well over two hundred years.  But the thing continues to expand.  It grows and grows…’”

– Don DeLillo, Ratner’s Star, p. 64-65 (Billy and then LoQuadro)

An Excerpt

There are only two characters in the novel Ratner’s Star smarter than Billy and they are both on the far side of the borderland to what we call madness.  There be dragons.  Endor was the last man tasked to solve the alien message.  He fails, and because he failed, he leaves the community of Field Experiment Number One, and moves into a hole of his own creation which he digs by the hour with the hook end of a clothes hanger.  He can tell you about science…

Endor hasn’t completely abandoned his scientific roots, but he has started to butt up against things he doesn’t understand.  And this fucks up his ability to carry on doing what he has always done, which is to do science, to use science to solve problems, explain things, come to conclusions.  The alien transmission evaded his understanding.  There was no math he knew that would unpack it.  And so he went to live in a hole where he ate insect larva and dug himself deeper and ever deeper into the earth.

We will return to Endor but it is worth noting now that he is a thorough-going materialist.  It should also be noted that the primary literary allusion for the name Endor is the biblical Witch of Endor from the Old Testament Book of Samuel.  In the book, the king Saul hires the Witch of Endor to summon the dead prophet Samuel to read his future.  She does and predicts that he and his three sons will all be killed in a battle with the Phillistines.  And so they are, which introduces Philistinism—the quality of having no appreciation or understanding of culture or the arts. Although it’s a cultural reference twice removed, it seems applicable to Endor and the scientific culture that to which he belongs, and indeed , must belong else he loses his very sanity.  What does this say about the scientific view of logic that to admit the existence of anything outside of science is to negate the mind itself, the methodology of reason, the rules of logic, and the ability to engage in rational thinking.  But science is absolutist, a jealous god that will have no other god before it (nor suffer a witch to live).

Another Quote

“‘Mathematics is the only avant-garde remaining in the whole province of art.  It’s pure art, lad.  Art and science.  Art, science, and language.  Art as much as the art we once called art. ‘“

– Don DeLillo, Ratner’s Star, p.85, (Endor)

Use of quotations from DeLillo’s novel Ratner’s Star constitute fair use in this context– the analysis of a work of art.

Truth and/in the Narrative Age

Modern people, journalists and government people especially, like to talk about events in terms of “the narrative,” as if the real world events they’re describing are elements of fiction and not accumulations of fact.  For a while now, this has disturbed me.  Shouldn’t such people, possessors of the public trust and the duty of honestly informing the people, be telling the simple truth about things that verifiably happened and not “constructing a narrative” about them?  Because to my mind, constructing a narrative is not the same as providing a truthful account of something, nor is it consistent with the intention of fully informing one’s auditor.  It’s not that at all.  Rather, shaping the narrative is one systematic and insidious step removed from “spin.”  Meanwhile, spin is at least honest about its intentions which are to mislead, even to lie (almost).  A constructed narrative is not.

But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself.  First, there is the factual telling of a real-world incident or situation.  This is what we expect from government officials and their journalists (naively, of course). 

Then there is the self-serving use of language to tell the same story in such a way that the listener gets the impression that the narrator wants them to get, even though that impression is not true. An honest government with honest motives would not need to construct narratives.  This should tell us something about the quality of information fed to us by spokespeople and media.  But maybe I’m still not making myself clear.

Example:  A country (let’s call them The Enemy) invades another country (The Proxy) after years of manipulation and tinkering on the part of a third nation which would like to take out The Enemy by having the proxy country fight them in a war.  This third country (let’s call them The Instigator) tells people that The Enemy has wantonly invaded the The Proxy without any provocation at all in order to fulfill its goal of world domination.  Many if not most people, hearing this narrative, believe it to be true, despite any stubborn facts to the contrary.  But in the current instance, the only part of the narrative that is strictly true is that The Enemy has invaded The Proxy.  The rest is spin: language employed to convey the false impression that The Enemy is solely at fault for a state of affairs that was largely set in motion, not by The Enemy but by The Instigator.

If we actually cared, we would have a problem with people in positions of public trust “shaping the narrative”–by so doing, the truth gets drowned in waves of false allegation, and we the people who listen uncritically to these narratives are misled, perhaps because we want to be, but misled all the same.  Like it or not, we accept lies and half-truths as truth.  

For a long time, this has gone on.  People love to tell stories; embellishing the truth is a time honored tradition of tall tale tellers from the fireside hearth to the halls of Congress.  But when we create names for this phenomenon which make it plain that we know the stories we’re telling ourselves are lies, and then use those lies to justify very dangerous and damaging real-world actions (such as wars and slander), yea, when we speak of constructed narratives as though they were true accounts of real events composed of indisputable facts, then we are miles past the use of fiction for entertainment (as in the art of creative writing) and well into the territory of self-serving mendacity.

Although no one really knows why this is so⁠1, we do know that lies are harmful and the truth is good.  It’s just that unless one’s actions are motivated by a desire to do good, telling the truth can be hard and painful. Hence we lie, or as we say today, spin.

In the case of government officials and so-called politicians, we do this as a matter of course—it’s what we do, our modus operandi, our standard operating procedure.  Constructing the narrative in this context has no other purpose than to mislead and consequently, to elicit a desired response from the people who believe us.  It’s consciously taking the facts as we know them and twisting them with other facts or convincingly-worded half-truths, and telling a different story—one that’s in line with our interests, not those of the people we purport to serve.  The established practice of spin is manipulative and frankly rotten, and we shouldn’t tolerate it, much less make up innocuous sounding labels for it like “shaping the narrative,” as though we were just rounding off a few rough edges, although, in fact, that’s just what we are doing—the omitting the inconvenient facts that tell the real story, the whole story, the truth and nothing but the truth.

But then, people don’t naturally tend to be truth-tellers.  Here in America, we need to be made to swear on a Bible (an obsolete sacred book) under penalty of law that we will tell the truth before we will do so reliably.  And even then, we might not, the Ten Commandments be damned. So when someone talks about the narrative, beware.  This is not an honest rendering of fact.  On the contrary–you are being lied to.

anImage_8.tiff

1 So: a needle pulling thread… conjunction meaning (in this case) “the case” or (to translate, “why this is the case” or “why this is true.”

A Baltic Sea Whodunnit

This week, some “state actor” still unknown but widely suspected to be backed by the United States, blew up the Nord Stream pipelines from Russia to Germany, both Nord Stream 1, which had been in service until this summer, and Nord Stream 2, which the US blocked Germany from using prior to the start of the Ukraine war this winter. 

The United States has long opposed the very existence of these pipelines and has made it quite clear that it doesn’t want anyone, especially not European countries, buying oil and gas from Russia.  

Oddly enough, America’s spokespeople are staying mum on the matter now that the much hated pipelines are out of commission.  They haven’t even blamed Russia for it, although this is probably because they’d be laughed off the world stage if they did.  

Poland’s former foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorsky was a bit more forthcoming.  “Thank you, USA,” he tweeted the next day,  posting a link to a video clip from back in February in which President Joe Biden all but threatened to destroy Nord Stream 2.  The clip is quite extraordinary actually.  Biden said then, “If Russia invades… then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”  When the reporter asked how he would do that considering that the pipelines are “in Germany’s control,” Biden doubled down as he so often does and concluded, “I promise you, we can do it.”  

So the United States promised to destroy the pipeline (“there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2”), and then it happened, and yet we are expected to believe that it wasn’t the United States who did it?  Surely the world is not so gullible as all that.  Except in the EU where it’s apparently in their interest to be gullible, at least when the US is doing the talking. According to the logic of one German politician quoted in the Guardian, a NATO ally would not have carried out the attack for fear of “political backlash,” hence it had to be the Russians.  Such a brilliant surmise–and evidence free, too!

We will probably never be allowed to know for sure whodunnit, for the obvious reason that were the truth known, there might be some “political backlash” on both sides of the Atlantic, and naturally, we can’t have that.  But the fact is, if the US did do it, then they’re responsible for a huge act of sabotage against their own ally, without apparent notice or any kind of compensation.  And that is almost certainly a crime under someone’s rule of law, even if the United States doesn’t feel compelled to abide by it.

Pondering Global Chaos

I’m trying to figure out how to be happy and content in a world intent on self destruction.  I could just ignore it as many people do, but that’s not me.  I have to worry about things, know about them, think about them, and try to make sense of it all.  But of course I can’t because it’s my own country engaged in these self-destructive acts, and that bothers me.  So while George Clinton might be right when he says, “We do this—this is what we do,” I still find it hard to accept.

What I find even more disturbing is that it seems as though our own country, America, is very much behind the world’s lemming-like race toward the cliff’s edge.  Although our leaders seem thoroughly open in their power-mongering and prevarication, the rest of the world, or at least that white-skinned portion residing in Europe and the Anglosphere, have opted to believe our propaganda, falling into line no matter how absurd the justification.  What does America have on these people anyway?  do they really believe this nonsense, or are they just hypnotized by our swaggering self-confidence? If so, that’s a bit dispiriting too.

In any event, no matter how you slice it, it looks like global chaos out there with more on the way. The facts on the ground all point in that direction, and strangely enough, there’s no dispute whatsoever about that part of the story–all the world’s governments seem to agree that things are bad and getting worse.  The only difference between them and me is that I would like to do something to stop it, whilst they, the world leaders, seem hell-bent on blaming someone (usually Russia) and keeping the destruction going.  Although they would tell you that they do this out of principle, I draw the line at principles whose end result is to bring the greatest harm to the greatest number.

It’s all quite disturbing, and while I fret about it almost every day, stilll I get up, drink tea, meditate, read, work, plan meals, worry, contemplate my vague future, buy seeds, grow flowers, fret about the neighbors, shop online, eat cake, wash clothes, light candles, and yes, ponder the end of the world.  But really, what other choice do I have? The world will go its own way, regardless of common sense or my own personal views to the contrary. It’s nothing less than the way of things, always and evermore…

 

Photo credit – Wikipedia Commons, public domain

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.