On a nominee for all of us:

It’s a bizarre irony that in this age of political correctness, tolerance and supposed acceptance, the latest excuse for why we can’t have a black president is that the candidate is a member of the elite. They used to tell us that black people were too dumb or backward to even vote, never mind run for office. Black people were portrayed as dirty, poorly dressed, slang-spewing monkeys. Now we’re presented with a guy whose intelligence can’t be denied, and he’s too smart?

The idea that Barack Obama is an elite who is out of touch with what real Americans face is a non-starter. (Compared to Dubya, who is seen as an everyman, despite the silver spoon in his mouth since birth, only because he sticks his foot in beside it constantly??) The fact that this is the only objection offered is proof that those who oppose a non-white president are fresh out of arguments. (I’m not sure it’s even possible to be black and elite in America. Blacks who have amassed wealth or been educated are just not entitled in the same way as white elites—but that’s another post.)

I’ve been quiet till now. We do need to be careful about this issue of race in America-- we are most certainly not past it. I have to say that it has been my experience that biracial people have a special ability to transcend race and understand it at the same time. My dad—who is looking down from up there somewhere smiling in giddy disbelief tonight-- made sure I understood, despite my lily white skin, the challenges of being black in our society. But he also lived his life in mainstream America and he did pretty damn well despite having to work twice as hard as any white person to get half as far. That taught me more than any bitter words he could have uttered-- though he uttered quite a few.

The next generation in mixed families—Barack and I—have a somewhat different perspective. The clothes and the degrees and the positions of power have come a little easier to us thanks to those who have come before. We haven’t forgotten the pain of our fathers (and mothers) but perhaps since its not our own, we can see it, give it its proper weight, and also manage to look past it to see the pain that defines and shapes the experience of others. Because we can "pass" in both worlds, we can see the racism and also know (and even love) the people behind it: the fears, the misconceptions, as well as the commonalities. That’s what Barack was talking about in his speech a while back.

Barack Obama looks at the same battlefield as the Reverend Wright and he refuses to take sides, ignore the problem or surrender to the difficult task of working it out.

Our nominee is mixed. It’s not his only feature, but it’s not something I think we should ignore because I believe it’s the reason he might actually—finally—offer Americans of all races, colors and creeds reconciliation.

(Dare we hope that he’ll offer the same to America the world actor and its enemies?)

We’re ready. Let’s elect a president for all of us.

On tilting at Windmills:

Every once in a while, sitting in traffic or looking out the window of a tall building, I have a moment where I involuntarily step back and look at the world and see it literally swarming with cars. It’s at these moments that I become pessimistic and I say to myself and whoever will listen, “we’re doomed.” And though I think we probably are, I believe we owe it to the Earth that has sustained us to at least try to change.

I know how hard it is. I try—I recycle my toothbrushes (Preserve brand) and use paper produce bags (or none) for just a couple of examples--but because of my situation I find I have to drive my car. It takes several buses to get to my son’s daycare and I have nowhere to store a bike.

But we need to try harder. We need to start making wholesale changes. We need to use tax breaks and subsidies and market forces to push people and corporations to change.

Cars are a major problem-- for me and for everyone. We’ve got the technology to make cars more efficient, but more efficient hybrid cars remain more expensive and hard to get. The government should be putting its research dollars and brains into this rather than into landing on Mars. Large scale production of biofuels is wreaking havoc on our food system. Maybe they’re not the answer (or maybe we need to change the focus of the food system—corn sweetners and soy are ruining our health anyway). I think we need to look not just at how to continue driving as we always have, but at ways to restructure our communities to make long distance travel an occasional indulgence, rather than a daily necessity.

Eating locally would also cut down on emissions generated by the transport of food. This would probably mean curtailing sprawl (maybe even taking back already developed land) to make room for farms. Finally, a justifiable use of eminent domain.

The silver lining in the ridiculously high gas prices we’ve been experiencing (we’re finally beginning to catch up to the rest of the world—it’s been $6+ in Turkey for years) is that people are starting to reduce their use. They’re buying smaller cars and taking the bus more. The gas tax holiday that’s been proposed will only help undo the positive work high prices have done and won’t help consumers much anyway. Let’s make sure policies make sense and don’t just pander to desperate consumers who often can’t see beyond their next paycheck. Government is supposed to help us take the long view not let us avoid facing reality.

The considerable power of the sun, water and wind remain largely untapped. Massachusetts has been tied up in the controversy over putting a windmill farm off Cape Cod for years. I don’t really understand the controversy. There are several large turbines in the marshes outside Atlantic City, where I grew up, and the birds don’t seem to mind at all. People like them too. Don Quixote was right: they are a bit like giants—though these are beneficent ones. Once again, I think the government needs to take a stand against wealthy interests on the Cape who don’t want their view “spoiled.”

Maybe we are tilting at windmills but, paradoxically, policies that let us build a few more windmills might give us a fighting chance.

On trees: not for human consumption

I was driving down American Legion Highway in Boston a few months ago when I was suddenly assaulted by the sun where it hadn’t shone before. I knew immediately something was different and it wasn’t long before I realized that some of the venerable old trees that made that highway a parkway were gone. The road had been under construction for some time (one of those blue pet projects signs boasted “renovations” were being done and credited the Mayor and other officials), but I had not known taking trees was in the plan. I considered calling the city to complain but decided that in this era of greening they couldn’t be planning to take them all. It just wouldn’t make sense.

Day after day more of the 30 or 40 year-old trees disappeared. It was too late to call the city. There was no going back.

That’s the thing about trees. What’s taken half a century to grow can be cut down in half an hour.

They came through after the last frost and popped in a bunch of spindly new saplings (planted them too close together, I’m pretty sure). I’m glad that tree-lined is still a goal, but little tiny trees are in all ways inferior to mature trees. They provide no shade, less in the way of cooling effects due to water content, less carbon abatement, less beauty. And with global overheating, it’s harder to get a young tree to survive its youth. I almost lost the Heritage River birch I planted in our yard last year; it was quite a bit more established than the new highway trees and I had just one to worry about. The city is notorious for planting truckloads of trees and then neglecting them in their hour of drought. Then they come through with another truck and pull out the casualties.

In our consumer culture, new is always ideal. If we aren’t buying new cars, new furniture, new clothes, our economy will suffer (and we might fall out of fashion—God forbid). Economists and our own elected officials are unabashed about encouraging us to buy more junk we’ll soon throw away (See the Story of Stuff in last December’s post). They’ve even arranged this year for us to get checks meant expressly to be wasted on purchases that will stimulate the economy before ending up in a landfill.

But when it comes to trees, old—or at least middle aged-- is the epitome of fashion.

If we’re not too busy renovating, redesigning and renewing, accumulating stuff to replace too soon, we might leave a few trees, and we might realize that the very best has grown up around us all on its own. We need only enjoy the shade.

On Israel, one state of denial:

This week, Bush is in Israel to celebrate Israel’s 60 years of existence and, without irony, America’s 60 years (minus 11 minutes) as its unwavering champion.

How is it consistent with our—or at least Bush’s-- value of promoting liberty throughout the world to support unconditionally the state of Israel, despite human rights abuses as egregious as bulldozing houses, checkpoints and walls to restrict and contain innocent people, the taking and retaking of land, government without representation, 40 years of occupation? I am not immune to the horror that was The Holocaust but isn’t the Palestinians’ Naqba (catastrophe) a similar atrocity?—albeit grinding, relentless and innocuous rather than brief, diabolical and mind-blowing in scale. A religious minority is systematically forced from its land, deprived of basic rights, targeted for all kinds of brutal, invasive and humiliating treatment and killed indiscriminately while the aggressors justify their actions with self-serving illogic.

I don’t see how Bush or anyone else can justify continuing blind support of the Israeli state at all, but this is especially difficult while that very support makes enemies of a great many people in the world-- and rightly so. Some may call Muslims who are desperate and angry about the treatment of the Palestinians fundamentalist crazies. They may decry some Palestinians’ efforts to change the intractable situation in which they find themselves as terrorism. I ask you, is there any other alternative for an oppressed people without a state and an army? What could they do to protect and defend themselves that would be considered legal by the state of Israel and by the world? Further, if our own revolution had not succeeded, wouldn’t the rebels we now call patriots have been labeled terrorists by history?

Once again an American President is claiming he will solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by the end of his term. If it is ever to be resolved, Americans must take off the blinders we wear where Israel is concerned. It is not anti-Semitic to call Israel on its transgressions. In fact, enabling Israel to continue to pursue its policy of oppression is as detrimental to its democracy as our new policy of preemptive war is to ours.

Those who claim to be working to prevent another holocaust are fond of quoting George Santayana: “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” I would ask them to step back, look at the plight of the Palestinians, and read those very words again.

The Story of Stuff - Ch.1: Introduction

There's not much more to say. See my previous posts: On throwing it all away and On how our stuff owns us and check out www.storyofstuff.com.

On the progress of disease:

I came across an article in Time recently: “Why Breast Cancer is spreading Around the World,” by Kathleen Kingsbury (Time, October 15, 2007) “Plus: A Guide to the Latest Treatments,” the cover package promised.

From the data presented in the article, it is clear that breast cancer rates have risen along with the adoption of western lifestyles and diets in developing countries, yet with a bizarre sense of arrogance, the article focuses on the deprivation of the women of these countries because they don’t have access to modern medicine and equipment. Oh, those poor women who don’t have our advances! Ironically, they didn’t have cancer that needed treatment until they assumed our “advances”: processed food and high-stress but sedentary lives.

Though it supposedly sets out to reveal truths, science often has a dizzying ability to obscure them instead. The researchers who were consulted for this article apparently reported that the reason for the skyrocketing rates of breast cancer in developing countries is that improved public health allows women to live long enough to be susceptible to breast cancer. Several of the women described in the article are 40!

Aren’t the scientists, doctors and even journalists here missing something that is exceedingly obvious? If we could let go for just a minute of our manifest destiny to be the smartest and best, we might see the incredible opportunity here to turn back the clock on this modern disease. Rather than modern medicine for a disease brought on by modern life, isn’t it possible that the cure for all of us lies in a return to the traditional practices and diets that allowed people in undeveloped areas of the world good health before they began following our example?

On slowing down:

In a world where the U.S. mail is now compared to a snail rather than a pony, a dial up modem-- which can bring information from all over the world in a matter of minutes-- is considered intolerably slow, and where slow is defined unflatteringly as:

apathetic, crawling, creeping, dawdling, delaying, deliberate, dilatory, disinclined, dreamy, drowsy, easy, gradual, heavy, idle, imperceptible, inactive, indolent, inert, lackadaisical, laggard, lagging, lazy, leaden, leisurely, lethargic, listless, loitering, measured, moderate, negligent, passive, phlegmatic, plodding, ponderous, postponing, procrastinating, quiet, reluctant, remiss, slack, sleepy, slothful, slow-moving, sluggish, snaillike, stagnant, supine, tardy, torpid, tortoiselike,

it’s easy to forget what’s so good about slow.


All kinds of clichés and pop songs point out the wisdom of taking things slowly at least some of the time:

Take time to smell the flowers.

Slow and steady wins the race.

Slow down. You move to fast. Got to make the moment last…


Truth is:

Slow food tastes better and is usually better for you than fast food.

Hypermiling (coasting and slow acceleration) saves gas and the planet.

Relationships which have developed slowly often seem to last longer.


But if conventional wisdom and anecdotal evidence isn’t enough to convince you to slow down, maybe scientific evidence that slow is better for your health will do it.

According to the American Institute of Stress, 75 - 90 percent of doctor visits stem from stress. Though itself somewhat intangible, stress causes various undeniably real physical reactions:

• “heart rate and blood pressure soar to increase the flow of blood to the brain to improve decision making,

• blood sugar rises to furnish more fuel for energy as the result of the breakdown of glycogen, fat and protein stores,

• blood is shunted away from the gut, where it is not immediately needed for purposes of digestion, to the large muscles of the arms and legs to provide more strength in combat, or greater speed in getting away from a scene of potential peril,

• clotting occurs more quickly to prevent blood loss from lacerations or internal hemorrhage.

These and myriad other immediate and automatic responses have been exquisitely honed over the lengthy course of human evolution as life saving measures to facilitate primitive man's ability to deal with physical challenges. However, the nature of stress for modern man is not an occasional confrontation with a saber-toothed tiger or a hostile warrior but rather a host of emotional threats like getting stuck in traffic and fights with customers, co-workers, or family members, that often occur several times a day. Unfortunately, our bodies still react with these same, archaic fight or flight responses that are now not only not useful but potentially damaging and deadly. Repeatedly invoked, it is not hard to see how they can contribute to hypertension, strokes, heart attacks, diabetes, ulcers, neck or low back pain and other "Diseases of Civilization".” American Institute of Stress http://www.stress.org/americas.htm

“In conditions of stress, our adrenal glands must work very hard to create numerous hormones that regulate the blood sugar and help the body heal.” What Causes Heart Attacks by Tom Cowan, Wise Traditions, Fall 2007. If the adrenal glands are worn out by chronic stress or repeated episodic stress, they can’t do this essential work.

Slow. Because the tortoise beat the hare (who had a stress-related heart attack). Best of all, the tortoise got to smell the flowers along the way.

www.slowdownnow.org
www.slowfoodusa.org