Category: The Biden Years

Stories written when Joe Biden was president

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.