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 18 Apr 2008 @ 10:02
The puzzled ones, the Americans, go through their lives
Buying what they are told to buy,
Pursuing their love affairs with the automobile,
Baseball and football, romance and beauty,
Enthusiastic as trained seals, going into debt, struggling —
True believers in liberty, and also security,
And of course sex — cheating on each other
For the most part only a little, mostly avoiding violence
Except at a vast blue distance, as between bombsight and earth,
Or on the violent screen, which they adore.
Those who are not Americans think Americans are happy
Because they are so filthy rich, but not so.
They are mostly puzzled and at a loss
As if someone pulled the floor out from under them,
They'd like to believe in God, or something, and they do try.
You can see it in their white faces at the supermarket and the gas station
— Not the immigrant faces, they know what they want,
Not the blacks, whose faces are hurt and proud —
The white faces, lipsticked, shaven, we do try
To keep smiling, for when we're smiling, the whole world
Smiles with us, but we feel we've lost
That loving feeling. Clouds ride by above us,
Rivers flow, toilets work, traffic lights work, barring floods, fires
And earthquakes, houses and streets appear stable
So what is it, this moon-shaped blankness?
What the hell is it? America is perplexed.
We would fix it if we knew what was broken.
---"Fix" by Alicia Suskin Ostriker, from No Heaven. © University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005.
America is so concerned about Big Oil! The owners at Big Coal like it that way. They do their mining in the light of day now, but still they're most comfortable working in the dark. Underground movements...where no one can see. Why be concerned about coal? Isn't that some old issue from the 19th century...that just kind of went away? Like the locomotive? Like that big old pile in everybody's basement, dumped loudly through a little window from the coal truck, well into the 1940s? Gone away...like the coal companies abandoning the little towns, full of worker families, all across the hills of Appalachia? Take a look at this~~~
[link]
Yeah so? Electricity? The fossil fuel burned for electricity generation is coal. "Electricity Generation." I like that. We're the Electricity Generation, but how many of us think of coal as our plug-in connector? Jeff Goodell didn't. He grew up in Silicon Valley, he told us in Athens Wednesday night, and never saw a lump of coal until he was 30 years old. Nobody in Silicon Valley thought coal was behind the screens of these computers. He lives in New York now and tells us no one in New York thinks of West Virginia mountains when they flip a switch. The trouble is, as we've learned at Ohio University during its tremendous presentations this Earth Week, coal releases twice as much carbon into the atmosphere when it's burned than anything else. But I thought everything everybody's heard lately is about Clean Coal. What's going on here? More >
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 2 Feb 2008 @ 12:59
"This series of maps shows how much the landscape of the eastern United States changed between 1650 and 1992. The maps depict canopy height, the height of the tallest continuous layer of vegetation. In 1650, before colonization, most of the eastern United States was covered in tall forest, shown in dark blue-green. During the next 200 years, the forest disappeared, particularly in New England, the mid-Atlantic, and parts of the Midwest. By 1920, the tall forest was entirely gone, replaced by cities and farms. During the latter half of the twentieth century, the forest began to regrow, but the overall canopy remained much shorter than it had been before 1650. The images are based on a reconstruction of land cover made from records ranging from 1850 census data to modern satellite measurements." [link]
If one could understand a flower as it has its being in God---this would be a higher thing than the whole world!
---Meister Eckhart
A root is a flower that disdains fame.
---Kahlil Gibran
The sound of water says what I think.
---Chuang-Tzu
Are there too many of us? If the world's population of humans has doubled within just a portion of my lifetime, is it cause for alarm? Will God provide? Will Nature take its toll? If great masses die---and continue to die...and are predicted to die, do I shrug in hiding or subconsciously with the thought "There are too many anyway"? Do rich men plot war, famine and drought to eliminate dangerous overpopulation? Who dies? Who lives? Who decides? Does money decide?
Surely I'm not alone in finding discussion of every major problem we face in this country and in this world eventually boils to how many of us there are. George Monbiot wondered in The Guardian on Tuesday why we don't talk about this, and a great flurry of comments has followed. "I cannot avoid the subject any longer. Almost every day I receive a clutch of emails about it, asking the same question. A frightening new report has just pushed it up the political agenda: for the first time the World Food Programme is struggling to find the supplies it needs for emergency famine relief. So why, like most environmentalists, won't I mention the p-word? According to its most vociferous proponents (Paul and Anne Ehrlich), population is 'our number one environmental problem'. But most greens will not discuss it." [link]
In my opinion, we're silent because it's a moral question. And there's been silence for 50 years...except for occasional explosions about abortion and birth control. Laws are passed and opposed with vigor, but no resolution in the mind of the world. Take it from me, who works in public schools, a great war has been waged in the US over what to teach kids about sex and how. Without much opposition the people who teach sex in the classrooms, and during Bush with federal threats of funding cuts to enforce the morality, have frightened students with huge slides of sexually transmitted diseases. They've referred to a few fertilized cells in a woman's body as a "baby," and they refer to that woman as Mother. They've shown figures from textbooks on an overhead projector that could grow into anything from a stringbean to a gorilla, and they've said, "I know it doesn't look like a person, but that's a baby just like you and me."
Young American adults in their 20s were taught since grade school that if you're pregnant but not ready to parent for the rest of your life, you have it anyway and put it up for adoption. No mention has been made of terminating the pregnancy...and under Bush, again, with threats about funding. My daughter, who is 16, was taught "sex education," and one year in middle school in 3 different classes in a single semester, and not once was she told about birth control...except wait until you're married. How many movies came out this year, and very good ones, about pregnancy and having the baby anyway? And that's in the United States. What do young people learn in Kenya, in Iran? More >
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 20 Nov 2007 @ 02:23
The timpanist plays upon a living being. The stars are bursting with their messages: Turn to a child for the star's announcement.
---Robert Aitken
Greed is the basic cause of misery. Free yourself of greed, and the mountains, rivers, and earth do not block the light of your eyes.
---She-Hsien
To enter one's own self, it is necessary to go armed to the teeth.
---Paul Valery
Why 2015? That is the year, dictated by consensus of the 2500 scientists whose work created the UN report on global warming, when further growth of carbon emissions on this planet must cease. Within 35 years from that date, carbon dioxide and other atmospheric polluting gases must be reduced by 50 to 85 percent to avoid killing as many as a quarter of the species on Earth. [link] This was the announcement on Saturday, when the final portion of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) study was released to the public by this group that already has won the Nobel Prize.
I try to be a patient man. I waited Sunday and I waited today. I expected lead items in newspapers and broadcasts in this country. Well...let's say I hoped for them. Certainly it is the case elsewhere in the world, where concern is at the forefront. One of the good things about Google News is you can see what makes news in the various nations of the world...and what that news is. At the moment you have to type "global warming" into Search to find anything about these stark pronouncements.
We have people campaigning for President right now. The New York Times reported today that in Iowa, a sixth-grader asked Mrs. Clinton if she had any views on global warming. The paper went on to consider whether the question had been planted in the student's mind. There was no mention of what the candidate replied. [link] Have we all gone mad?
Recently it has been the pattern in this country for a person elected (or otherwise achieving the office of) President to serve 2 terms or 8 years. If that continues, whoever ends up President in 2008 still may be there in 2015. Do any of these candidates have a plan for such an incredible challenge? Next month---that's NEXT month---President Bush will lead the United States delegation to the United Nations Conference on climate change in Bali. Last year around this time that man announced he was pretty sure global warming wasn't caused by anything consumers in the free market might be doing...like burning coal or oil. US News & World Report asked this morning Do we HAVE to have this guy representing us? [link]
I listened pretty hard to my world today to see or hear if anyone seemed concerned about the IPCC report or global warming. It's going to be in the mid to upper 60s tomorrow and probably for Thanksgiving. People did remark on that...and sorta smile and shake heads. Ten years ago Dana and I were proud to go out to the garden and kick some snow off a little kale that was left to serve our smoked oysters on for Thanksgiving dinner. The other day people were telling me the crocuses and daffodils they planted in September are coming up already. What will it take to crash through all this denial? More >
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 6 Aug 2007 @ 11:40
In the scent of plum blossoms,
Ah! the sun appears---
the mountain path.
---Basho
When we have seen Reality, there is not a grain of dust which has not a sublime meaning.
---J. Vanderleeuw
It is like archers. If they start out competing, they'll never become marksmen. It is only long after practice, with no thought of winning or losing, that they can hit the target. Same with the study of the Way. If even a single thought of winning or losing appears, you will be chained by winning and losing.
---Ying-An
The painting is called The Indian Prisoner, created by William Gilbert Gaul, 1899.
In one of the first essays I ever attempted online, I mentioned how I happened to come in contact with the famous folk music collector, Alan Lomax. I said at one point he called me "puritanical" and how stung I was by the remark. [link] It still bothers me, but I've soothed myself somewhat with the balmy knowledge that he knew of my New England education---and I was aware of how he felt about New England. I've also tried---and been forced by reality---to ease up on the rigidity of my views of 30 years ago.
I'm glad that at the time I did not begin a range war with Alan, since Texas always was home to him. I doubt any Texans have been called puritanical (unless one happened to be born and educated in New England before relocating----hmmmm) but we do know something about justice in the Wild West. Whether or not the scores of Westerns I saw at the Saturday afternoon matinees gave me an accurate history, I've grown up thinking resentments are a particular weakness in the American fabric. I think we tend to be a people that transfers our problems rather than inventories them in order to change. We go to workshops that teach us to transform failures into opportunities for growth and expansion. We spin.
When I came to Southeast Ohio, I learned that until recently spanking students with big wooden paddles was legal and routine. At first I thought they were joking. No teacher ever laid a hand on me in New York, and I couldn't conceive of it. One time in Lincoln Junior High a science teacher made a kid stand in the corner on his head for a while, but that's the worst I saw. When I worked among people here, who didn't necessarily go beyond the local high school education, I was similarly amazed when they spoke of "beating" their kids, specifically the boys I guess. I didn't think it was my place to ask for details, but I thought maybe again this was a term for strict discipline but not actual physical pain. "Beating their butt" is common parlance around here among many parents.
I've been feeling that during my lifetime the American character has changed markedly and the rest of the world is noticing. Maybe we all were mistaken, having been mislead by World War II propaganda---as Clint Eastwood hints in his film Flags Of Our Fathers. We were the fun-loving Yanks liberating Europe with dollars and chewing gum. If we never were that actually---or even if we were---do others feel we now are vengeful opportunists, motivated essentially by getting more for me and mine? Do we care if injustice is done to others in our name? Do we listen intently to testimonies of people released from our "detention centers" about what was done to them for years---or don't we want to hear about it? Have we gone off the deep end and become cruel?
I've worried about this and tried to deal with it personally, convince myself the behaviors I endure everyday by others driving cars are just momentary. The aggression will fade away when the war on terror is won and we all return to normal. But maybe it's something more permanent, a trend not so easily reversed.
And so it was this morning I came upon an article in the Boston Review. Well, maybe Boston is the best place to review an oppressive morality! The title is simply Why Are There So Many Americans In Prison?, and was compiled by Glenn C. Loury who is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences in the department of economics at Brown University. A 2002 Carnegie Scholar, he brings very recent statistics to bear on how Americans are using punishment to solve problems. More >
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 5 May 2007 @ 10:44
Without the bitterest cold that penetrates to the very bone, how can plum blossoms send forth their fragrance to the whole world?
---Basho
Each something is a celebration of the nothing that supports it.
---John Cage
The horse's mind
Blends
So swiftly
Into the hay's mind.
---Fazil Husnu Daglarca
All the artwork is by Richard Ross.
Something like 60 years ago I spent some summertime at YMCA Camp Onyahsa on Lake Chautauqua. It was only several miles from Mom and Dad in Jamestown, New York, but I didn't thrive in the situation. The highlight of the whole experience were a couple nature hikes with a young man named Bob Sundell. The boys all called him "Bugs." He had an intensity about what you could see in Nature and how to look that was contagious. Even other boys who weren't into this whole camping thing that much were completely involved with this guy when he showed up. Off we'd go...and immediately there was a snake or a hawk---"It's a Cooper's hawk!" yelled Harold Smith, who later had to wear a ball and chain in the cafeteria because he kept trying to escape...but "Bugs" said, "Hey, that's great!" when he knew that hawk, and Harold was proud. Or there was a flash in the underbrush...so fast I didn't see what it was: a bright blur. "A redstart," "Bugs" whispered...but it was gone and hiding.
Redstarts became my favorite bird and I always wanted to see another one, even though I hadn't really seen the first one. Maybe it was "Bugs'" influence and the way he engaged us little boys. I don't think I ever saw Bob Sundell again although I often thought to look him up when I was back in my hometown. I think he's lived in Western New York all his life, teaching at a community college there and prominent with the Roger Tory Peterson Institute Ornothological Club (Peterson was from Jamestown too) and the local Audubon Society...especially the annual bird count.
The other day, down by the main creek of 3 that run through our woods, I saw another redstart. My second. It's been 60 years! I suppose if I had really gone out and looked in the meantime---made a project of it---I could have seen a bunch by now. But I don't seem to interact with Nature that way. I'm more an alert-and-see-what-pops-up sort of guy. It may be those 2 redstarts are bookends of my life, and I'd be content with that.
I never minded when neocons snarled "treehugger" at the way I feel about Nature. They've called me a lot of things in the past 40 years, but I think hugging trees is a wonderful experience. I much prefer it to knocking down every one I see. A couple weeks ago I threw a father and son off my land because they'd brought in their 4-wheelers. I did it with so much rage I frightened myself. I don't mind hunters---as long as they let me know---but I find those recreation vehicles obscene today. When I look at my neighbors and how they interact with Nature, I feel doomed. What should I do?
And how much time do we have? Which brings me to the dire task at hand. Before today, there's always been a sense of joy or sharing or work-to-do when I've recommended information to people I know. But now I feel more like it's duty to report this. The June issue of Mother Jones magazine carries a cover story by their environmental reporter Julia Whitty. That cover is here illustrated, and the little card next to that specimen reads "Homo sapiens: -Large brain, opposable thumbs, -Primary cause of Sixth Great Extinction". After the warming and climate change, this is next and more biologists are telling us this everyday. The entire article is online and I believe was picked up by The Independent in the UK, but it's always good to support magazines at the newsstand. I'll warn you Julia begins with a graphic description of death by dehydration...but we need to know how fast it happens and after a certain point no matter how much water they give you, it won't help. More >
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