Reflections – Page 16 – Brimmings: up from the well

Technology and the shrinking of community

I just read Frank Somerville’s recent post (July 3) on Facebook. For the record, he’s the nightly news anchor on KTVU in Oakland, CA. I don’t live anywhere near the West Coast, so I don’t get to watch him, but Somerville keeps a page on Facebook that I read daily for its keen insights, sensitivity, and passion for social justice. Thank goodness he’s out there and how I wish there were more people like him, concerned about doing the right thing.

I say this because, quite frankly, I’m damned tired of running into people on a daily basis who, just the opposite, are full of themselves in their thoughtlessness towards others, and making matters worse, frequently mean and calculatingly offensive. Unfortunately, the downside of technology can be the marginalization of community, despite a plethora of social media.

Somerville laments how many people use the Internet to get back at others. Case in point, a waitress posting the $69 dining bill of former Oakland Raider Warren Sapp, who hadn’t left her a tip. Clearly, she sought to embarrass and humiliate Sapp, who later said that he didn’t like the service and her calling him and his friends boys. I know that I’ve done the same thing as Sapp on rare occasions. Tipping is a way of saying thank you and, likewise, an incentive to serve the public well. In Europe, you don’t generally tip, since a service charge is included, and, believe me, the service can get pretty lousy.

Meanness, unfortunately, runs amuck on the Internet due to the anonymity it provides for angry types low on self-image seeking compensation. I remember Edgar Allen Poe writing in his goose-bumpy short story, “The Cask of Amontillado,” of that most perfect kind of vengeance that allows its perpetrator impunity, or escape from accountability.

I often see Poe’s maxim raise its ugly head in reader comments, especially in discussion forums, and of course, par excellence, Twitter and Facebook. I find myself aghast, not only at the repugnant foreclosure of other viewpoints, but the sheer cowardice it masks, latent with resentment and a need to enhance self by controlling others or turning them into punching bags. Sadly, there have been instances where such verbal pugilism has taken on fatal consequences.

More often, I see the pervasive fallout of anonymity virtually daily when, like Somerville (more below), I’m driving, motorists who think rules are for other people–deliberately running traffic lights, stop signs, or not yielding right of way, or pulling out in front of you, or not signaling, or slowing traffic to a snail’s pace while on their cell phone or texting in public mastabatory self-indulgence.

My wife came home the other day, telling me of a woman who turned in front of her at a three way stop. She gave her the horn, getting the one finger salute in return. I’ve counseled her to not let such ilk spoil her day. You also just don’t know who you’re up against. Stats tell us an estimated 1500 die in road rage incidents every year. Anyway, I sometimes think there really is a bit of karma going around and that the chickens ultimately come home to roost.

Somerville ends his blog with his account of a guy with a mounted camera on his dash who comes up behind him “for no apparent reason” as he is on his way to work. Turns out, he can’t get rid of him. Pulling over, the guy draws along side of him, and Somerville, not wanting the incident to escalate, calmly asks, “What are you doing?, only to have the guy grin and keep videotaping him. Speeding off, Somerville finally loses him.

Hey, so creepy! You just never know what kind of oddball that anonymity may confront you with next.

–rj

Why some writers succeed and others don’t

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you do, but people will never forget how you made them feel (Maya Angelou).

I like to read and I read omnivorously, whether fiction or non-fiction. I marvel at the talent and effort that lies behind all good writing, the courage of writers to pursue their craft, given the minuscule few who get published, or receive pecuniary recompense, or the public’s accolades.

I marvel at their discipline in fending off that great tempter, procrastination, for writing well doesn’t come easily and what’s tedious we most always avoid.

And then there is the ephemerality of all success that mocks their efforts, that no matter how well crafted, compelling, or discerning, that best part of a writer’s self, succumbs, inevitably, to a world busy with its own pursuits, forgotten, no longer in print, to be given away, or tossed out.

I was reminded of this when I downloaded a Gutenberg ebook freebie from more than fifty years ago with its reading recommendations of many authors I’d never heard of, though I have graduate degrees in English and taught for forty years at the college level. The list of recommended classics in our schools today is, likewise, considerably different from those I pursued, studied and taught across the years. Taste changes, fame fades, and life moves on.

Writers, nonetheless, pursue their craft against all odds and sucking sweets elsewhere for varied reasons, foremost to find acceptance and, in that best of all possible worlds, the convergence, like two mighty streams, of avocation and vocation.

Whatever, successful fiction writers must be good at seduction, alluring us with suspense, well-crafted plot embedded with conflict, intriguing characters, good dialog, an accessible style; nonfiction writers must also prove themselves good at seduction, appealing to reader interests, their quest for information and know-how, their need to feel smart. Writing is all about closing the deal. Giving readers what they want.

As readers, we like cosying up. We like being wooed.

Successful writers know this!

–rj

Maleficent: a must see movie!

“No society treats its women as well as its men.”
UN Development Programme, 1997)

There’s a new movie I’m wanting to see. It’s called Maleficent and stars Angelina Jolie.

It’s timely because it’s really about rape, which has now entered into virtually every fabric of American life, including our schools. On our higher college campuses, one out of five coeds will be raped.

Time Magazine in its recent cover issue on the subject, mentions that the University of Montana (Missoula) has averaged 80 rapes annually over the last two years. It isn’t unique: even the Ivy League schools have a high incident rate–that is, of reported rapes, twenty percent of them related to alcohol. Some experts speculate that most campus rape goes unreported.

Across the nation, the same 20% figure prevails, with 80% of rape victims below age 25, according to The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, done in 2010, and made public last year. Stalking, now abetted by smart technology, is even more widespread, or five times the number of rapes.

But let’s get down to bedrock: The survey estimated that 1.27 million American women were raped–or one woman every 29 seconds–and 5.1 million stalked–a fall out rate of one woman every 7 seconds.

Rape is so much a part of our national fabric that it’s found its way into a Walt Disney film in a grim version of Sleeping Beauty. In the eponymous film, Maleficent is a fairy initially enjoying unlimited aerial freedom in a forest setting (i.e, archetypal rendering of situational danger), who falls in love with Stefan, a human being, who betrays her.

Rape, in the film’s metaphorical version, is transposed into Stefan’s drugging Maleficent so that he can take her wings back to the king of humans. In this age of ambien, pervasive alcohol, and PT141 on the horizon, sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

In a cogent review, http://huff.to/1lbymvh, Hayley Krischer writes that “Maleficent is a commentary on current male and female relationships. It’s a commentary on rape culture. And much more, it’s a story that allows a woman to recover. It gives her agency. It gives her power. It allows her to reclaim the story. And this is something that can’t be ignored.”

Sadly, clipping a woman’s wings is what many men do, with rape its ultimate manifestation, taking away their ability to be fully themselves, free to pursue their dreams, able to soar above the nets of male malice, discrimination, exploitation and often betrayal. (Krischer reminds us that 70% percent of rapes are committed by someone the woman knows.)

While many gains have been made with the rise of feminism in the 1960s, the rape culture is still with us, and even more, of men who still try to clip a women’s wings through unequal pay, feminization of poverty, career barriers, sexual harassment, verbal abuse, and physical violence.

In a culture still dominated by testosterone driven men I doubt this sad scenario will ever fully vanish, but at least a film like Maleficent can give women awareness and its articulation, empowering them to keep their wings intact.

–rj

Christina Rossetti’s “After Death”: Her unction to the living

I have always liked the poetry of Christina Rossetti, Victorian England’s foremost female poet. Poetry ran in her genes. Her maternal grandfather had been a poet and translator; and, of course, so was her more famous brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who also excelled at art.

I like to think of her in conjunction with the American poet, Emily Dickinson, our most prominent woman poet; in fact, they share the same birth year, (1830). Both suffered losses in love and never married.

Both were raised in devoutly religious homes. Dickinson’s grandfather was prominent in founding Amherst College, initially a school to train ministers. Rossetti’s mother was an evangelical. Both wrote a cerebral poetry of ardent sensitivity to life around them.

But there are differences, too. Religiously, Dickinson proved rebellious; at times, even skeptical.

On the other hand, Rossetti’s poetry is replete in piety. Still, thematically both poets seem often preoccupied with retreat and mortality. Strikingly, several of their poems feature a persona speaking from the grave.

Here is a poem I’ve always liked and taught in my literature classes for many years. Maybe you will like it too:

After Death

The curtains were half drawn, the floor was swept
And strewn with rushes, rosemary and may
Lay thick upon the bed on which I lay,
Where thro’ the lattice ivy-shadows crept.
He leaned above me, thinking that I slept
And could not hear him; but I heard him say:
“Poor child, poor child”: and as he turned away
Came a deep silence, and I knew he wept.
He did not touch the shroud, or raise the fold
That hid my face, or take my hand in his,
Or ruffle the smooth pillows for my head:
He did not love me living but once dead
He pitied me; and very sweet it is
To know he still is warm tho’ I am cold.

ANALYSIS

In this poem, a deceased person reminisces her funeral. She recalls the man she loved, filled with pity, gazing at her corpse and weeping.

But there is disillusionment on the persona’s part: her friend did “not touch the shroud, or raise the fold/That hid my face, or take my hand in his,/or ruffle the smooth pillows for my head.” In short, he exhibited no commitment, even in the context of death. (It’s not what he does, but what he omits to do that matters here.) At best, his response proves ambiguous and we are left unsure his grief manifests love, for grief is not necessarily synonymous with love. We only know from the persona’s perspective that he “did not love me living.”

Ironically, the persona’s anguish eclipses that of the mourner, for what she yearned for in life was love and not the pity that comes from her death.

The poem’s last lines are saved from self-pity in their matter-of-factness: “He pitied me; and very sweet it is/To know he still is warm though I am cold.”

But the poem with its subtle “I am cold” also returns us to the theme of death and its inexorable alienation from life with which the poem opens. And even more: it hints at the persona’s repressed anguish in the close–“He still is warm though I am cold,” sparing these lines from their seeming sardonic, or derisive, tone. The truth she reaches for is that he did not make use of the opportunity to love her while she lived.

While pity may speak for the mourner’s potentiality for love, death has foreclosed on its possibility.

Mortality’s unction is that we fervently love while we can in this brief parenthesis of light.

–rj

A lingering malice that kills

To be happy in life comes down to feeling good about yourself. It isn’t about money, popularity, power, or other commonly assumed indicators of success. In fact, these may actually be forms of over compensation, masking our sense of unworthiness or inferiority.

Unfortunately, most of us think we have to earn our self respect by proving ourselves worthy in ways others will approve. Consequently, we allow others to become monitors of ourselves and miss living authentic lives. We are what we think about ourselves.

Where does it all begin, this failing to accept ourselves? Clearly, much of it comes from our childhood experiences, or the voices of the past, as these lay the foundation for self-esteem and the confidence it fosters–our ability to view others as friends, not rivals; colleagues, not conspirators; ourselves as lovable, attractive, and admired; not difficult to like, be around, or embarrassing.

Surprisingly, these voices often find their sources in the “friendly fire” of parents, teachers, siblings, and even playmates, who label us as unworthy through physical abuse, verbal assault, neglect, abandonment, and the social apartheid of cliques.

As a consequence, it’s been estimated that nearly 50% of us suffer from anxiety in its myriad forms–worry, panic, dread, phobias and defensive rituals. Unsure of ourselves, we relive our childhood trauma whenever we encounter people or circumstances echoing the voices of our past, or what we’ve assumed to be true about ourselves. The past colors our perceptions, often resulting in a paranoia that we aren’t liked, are being talked about, even plotted against.

Ironically, our negative attitude may turn our suspicions into reality, driving away the very people whose friendship can reassure us that we have worth. We can’t chance our being rejected yet again.

I’m struck with how many of those who get caught up in violence, frequently mass shootings, are unable to handle perceived rejection and, accordingly, act out. The recent killings of six young people in Santa Barbara by Elliot Rodger, age 22, can be added to a lengthy list. The focus of his anger shows the pattern–he aimed to get even with the women who had rejected him and the men they chose instead.

I’m aware that it can be argued that a good deal of such violent outbursts stems from mental illness. What normal person could possibly do such things? The fact is, they do, and what constitutes mental illness is often shrouded in legal ambiguity with court appointed experts often unable to agree. The vast majority of those with mental illness do not commit such acts anyway, and every day people we often live or work with often do.

Unfortunately, a good many of us are passive-aggressive, hiding our inner turbulence, only to have it spring like a panther into the open, suddenly, surprisingly, and vehemently. “But he seemed so quiet, always said hello, and sometimes offered help.”

By the way, you can find a good deal of what I call “angst poetry” online. Take this poem, for example. Appropriately, it’s titled “Rejection.”

What are we so afraid of?
Afraid of wanting, but not being wanted
Afraid of feeling, but not being felt
Afraid of asking and being denied

We all need love–and some of us, because of our childhood ghosts, require it even more.

–rj

Convincing meteorologists that climate change is real

You can see from the above photo the challenge our president faces in convincing, of all people, our meteorologists, that climate change isn’t simply cyclic, but ongoing, posing devastating consequences for America, with no region spared. Further, we humans are its driving force.

The National Climate Assessment came out yesterday, only to be immediately dismissed as “alarmist” by–imagine my surprise–Mitch McConnell (R-Ky). Guess he must think the same about the recently released UN Panel’s 40 volume plus study conducted by leading climate scientists. I’m reminded as a former prof of Victorian lit just what it must have been like for Darwin in the outpouring of public vitriol that followed upon his perceived tampering with hallowed establishment assumptions. By the way, I never cease to be amazed at the gall of politicians assuming equal footing with reputable scientists.

But it isn’t just the Republicans we have to worry about in Washington when it comes to taking climate change seriously and initiating immediate steps to at least mitigate its effects. You see this most pointedly when it comes to the Keystone XL project. Presently there’s a bipartisan effort to get a two-thirds majority in the Senate in favor of the project, assuring veto proof passage. So far, 11 Democrats have shown willingness to join 45 Republicans in such a move, with one Democrat optimistic of getting several more.

As always, it’s the old song-and-dance scenario of jobs, when the fact is that if we were to put environment on a war-footing we’d have universal employment in harnessing the forces to slow global warming. Solar energy has considerable promise, for example, and is already a key component in countries like Denmark. Instead of constructing pipelines with their potential for spills–and sabotage–we’d do better in shoring up our coast lines.

How wonderful it would be to see Republicans and Democrats give priority to long term public welfare rather than short term corporate interests and their reelection prospects. (Once again, a good point for term limits. If it exists for the Presidency, why not for Congress?)

As for the meteorologists, a George Mason University survey in 2010 showed only 19% of them accepted human activity as the primary contributor to global warming. Some deny climate change period! (http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/BAMS-D-13-00091.1 ) While good at short term forecasting, they fall considerably short at the long term. Public icons, they can be given to a narcissism of overreach. Unfortunately, 62% of us trust our TV weather forecasters more than we do climate scientists!

The greatest proofs of climate change lie not simply in natural catastrophes, but in their ever increasingly frequency. We have computer models for that!

above

–rj

Climate Change: Can we win the fight?

We just celebrated Earth Day on April 22, an annual fête of huge importance for those of us wanting to increase the public’s awareness of the challenge of climate change, and our substantial human contribution to it, and ways we might fight it.

It’s an important time for us in another way, too, as this yearly outpouring of Green advocacy transcending borders buoys up our enthusiasm, telling us we’re not alone in our caring. After all, sometimes it seems that we’re on this great big mountain we impulsively thought we could climb; so rituals of solidarity like Earth Day give us pause to catch our breath, reassess, and press on to our worthy goal of a humanity in harmony with nature as one species among others, each necessary to all. Just maybe we can pull this thing off. Anyway, good to dream big rather than live small.

The truth is that so much more needs to be done and that we’ve been moving at a snail’s pace in making climate change a palpable issue for the public. I saw this demonstrated all too clearly in the presidential debates in 2012, or just 18 months ago, with not a single question directed to environmental matters raised by debate moderators.

If the press can seemingly have no feel for the greatest issue ever to menace us with its destructive pay-load should we evade addressing it, then how much less can we expect the public to grasp what’s at stake? As is, individual lifestyle changes like driving less, getting rid of plastic, cutting back on electricity in our homes aren’t going to do the trick. We need more than bandages to treat the Earth’s hemorrhaging.

Now consider that a recent poll suggests that 37% of Americans don’t even believe in climate change. There exist also a good many, perhaps even more, who look at climate change as simply cyclic and that, just maybe, it might even right itself. Of course that view gets us off the hook and we can conduct business as usual.

Just recently the United Nations released the findings of its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a careful study by credentialed scientists encompassing some 40 volumes. Insiders say they toned down some of their language and projections so as not to unduly frighten, though their findings still emerge as deeply sobering, with none of us escaping vulnerability to what surely are predictions on an apocalyptic scale. In all honesty, I haven’t noticed any work-up by media or any concerted effort by members of Congress to hold hearings on the report and what we might do to save the day. Like many of you, I grow weary–and wary–of their feckless accommodations to corporate interests.

What’s vital is that we impact the political process, as happened with the Vietnam War, ultimately culminating in LBJ’s decision not to pursue reelection. It started with just a few protesters, then took hold and proved unstoppable. Unfortunately, I don’t see anything like this breaking out. I think this is because many of our projections for climate change impacting us lie still in the future, whereas flag covered body bags coming into Dover AFB were a daily, tangible occurrence, which the media ultimately caught up with when it perceived a muscular protest movement, packing a punch, that wasn’t going to go away.

On the other hand, if we haven’t been able to muster cadres of protestors against our Iraq and Afghanistan incursions with their costly toll in life and wounded for a dubious cause, how much less likely for an environmental movement devoid of blood and gore? And that’s what makes climate warming so horrendously insidious, or like some invisible killer we know is out there, but don’t know where he is, or when he’ll strike, or how.

Perhaps our young people will again show us the way as they did with Vietnam by way of their fossil fuel divestment sit-ins sweeping our college campuses, some 300 as I write, with several success stories, including Harvard with its $32 billion endowment. If it’s wrong to destroy our planet, it follows we shouldn’t be seeking to profit from those who do. I wrote earlier of the Vietnam days when students rallied to make a difference. All of us: unions, retirees, teachers, tech workers, etc., might do well to follow their lead in choosing our retirement portfolios more discriminately.

But divestment has its limitations, too. While it was practiced widely in the 70’s and 80’s to pressure South Africa’s apartheid regime, the invariable result was that other investors stepped in. It’s true value lay in shaping public discourse, and I venture this holds true with this present endeavor.

Still, I question the wisdom of painting with a broad brush the fossil fuel industry as some kind of axis of evil. We need energy. Are our students willing to follow through and divest themselves of their cars and their electricity and take on an Amish likeness? We would do better to focus on the coal sector, our greatest polluter.

I still like our president–articulate in his efforts to assure health care access, social and economic equality, tax, immigration and drug sentencing reform. So far, he’s championed alternative energy efforts, sought restrictions on coal burning power plants, held out against the Keystone XL project, endorsed alternative energy efforts.

As for Keystone, he needs our support even as we must sustain, and grow our protests, to keep a fire under his feet. When I think of Keystone and the big money behind it–think Koch brothers–I get nauseous: the obscenity of it, given the perils of climate change; the stench of it, given its association with pet coke; the callowness of it, given its destruction of farmland, water aquifers, and wildlife habitat.

The President will presumably make his decision after this fall’s elections, but faces immense pressure, even in his own party. It isn’t a given he’ll opt for courage over pragmatism. In the end, it’s important we all get to the polls and endorse environmentally friendly candidates such as the courageous Gary Peters (D-MI), who hopes to succeed retiring senator Carl Levin (D-MI). Peters has come out against Keystone, provoking the Koch brothers to contribute substantially to his Republican opponent, who now leads in campaign funding. Peters is our leading spokesperson on pet coke. (By the way, you can access online the Sierra Club’s political endorsements, which include Peters.)

If it came down to, say, an errant asteroid making its way to befuddle our planet as once happened, plunging the world into a rebirth of its pre-evolutionary darkness, then you can bet your life we’d all get off our bottoms and fight the good fight. Well, think of that asteroid as climate change.

–rj

Peter Matthiessen: Homegoing

We lost a great writer, Peter Matthiessen, this past weekend. A co-founder of the renowned Paris Review and author of thirty-three books, both fiction and non-fiction, his supreme subject was Nature and, sadly, Man’s pervasive impact upon it:

Species appear, and left behind by a changing earth, they disappear forever, and there is a certain solace in the inexorable. But until man, the highest predator, evolved, the process of extinction was a slow one. No species but man, so far as is known, unaided by circumstance or climactic change, has ever extinguished another. (Wilderness in America [1959]).

Along with other environmentalists, I mourn his loss since his death silences a powerful voice of advocacy for what remains.

I think of the great writers of Nature who have borne sensitive witness to the fragile cocoon of Nature that includes ourselves that I have read across the years, works both of poetry and prose that have refined my sensitivity, shaped my priorities, and taught me awareness of the transience of all living things. All of them have been my teachers.

In poetry, I think of Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Hopkins, Dickinson, Frost, Jeffers, for example; as for prose–Thoreau, followed by Muir, Carson, Wilson, Dillard, McKibben and, of course, the most prodigious–Matthiessen.

Of all the books Matthiessen wrote, two stand out to me in particular as robust reads: Shadow Country, a novel featuring a desperado gunned down by his own neighbors in the lawless Everglades wilderness of the nineteenth century; the other, Snow Leopard, a non-fictional account of Matthiessen’s search for the elusive snow leopard in the Himalayas. More than a travel adventure, it depicts the author’s spiritual journey. As stimulating as it is beautiful, lucid in its prose and stunning in its imagery, it may just be one of the finest books to treat both Nature and the Soul ever written and deserves many re-readings.

Both Shadow Country and Snow Leopard won National Book Awards, our country’s most prestigious literary prize. (Matthiessen is the only writer to receive multiple National Book Awards.)

Matthiessen was not your ordinary person. A former CIA spy, son of a well-to-do family, initially conservative in his politics, he ultimately moved to the Left, championing American Indians, Cesar Chavez and exploited migrants, opposed the Vietnam War (bravely refusing to pay taxes) and, of course, became a committed environmentalist.

A deeply spiritual man, he embraced Buddhism following the death of his second wife in 1972, ultimately becoming a Buddhist priest. Snow Leopard reflects a Zen ambience throughout and its acceptance of the Now as the only true consolation we have in a transitory cosmos.

Though he fought ardently for conserving nature, he was troubled by the exponential excesses wrought by anthropocentric interests. As he would lament, “I can hardly point to a victory that we ever won as conservationists that hasn’t been overturned.”

Not all was lost, however:

…we won some, too — there were long-lasting victories. And if nothing else, we stalled — stalled them off, the developers and exploiters.

All of us Greens will miss him, and yet there remains the fervent advocacy of his many books championing justice; respect for other species and their habitat; the simple life lived mindfully, free from material desire; the valuing of each other.

There couldn’t have been a finer man.

–rj

The UN Panel Report on Global Warming: Is anyone Listening?

If you’ve been keeping up with news about the environment, you’re perhaps aware of this week’s biggest news event, not the elusive search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, or the status quo of Ukraine, or the achieved pinnacle of 7 million enrollees under the Affordable Health Care Act, but the dismal impact studies just completed of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. At least this is as it should be, though you’d never know it, given the paucity of TV coverage of the Panel’s exhaustive findings (32 volumes summarized in 49 pages).

Turns out that yesterday’s coverage of the Panel’s released findings by news cable giants CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News was virtually absent, according to media monitoring service, TV Eyes, scanning Monday’s coverage between 6 a.m. and noon: CNN, 40 seconds; MSNBC, 20 seconds; and no surprise, Fox News’s total silence.

Only new comer Al Jazeera America zeroed in on the report, featuring an in depth analysis of the substantial effects of global warming on Bangladesh, which has been battling rising sea levels.

One of the Panel’s projections deals with emerging migrant hoards seeking refuge in other countries. I didn’t see Al Jazeera’s footage, but I’m aware that India is feverishly building a wall to stem the influx of Bangladesh refugees. (By the way, if you like your news unbiased, al Jazeera is your best bet.)

This sad scenario of media indifference mirrors the largely disturbing absence of the American public’s concern with the issue of global warming, humanity’s greatest threat to its survival since its inauguration into the nuclear age in 1945 and the subsequent threat of nuclear proliferation.

For many, it comes down to jobs vs. environment, or the prioritizing of entitlement interests when the fact is that poverty is likely to grow, not diminish, and affect even the richer nations as global warming’s exponential effects take hold in the guise of drought, record heat waves, forest fires, fierce storms, reduced food production, disease and social violence. Global warming’s incipient effects are already impacting plants and animals and acidifying the oceans with deadly consequences for marine life.

Humans are the primary instigators of global warming, with carbon emissions continuing to rise, and China, the U. S., and India leading the way. Here in my state of Kentucky with its coal slave mentality, the state government has just cut annual coal mine inspections down from 6 to 4. Sadly, I live in a state where many cars sport specialized plates, bearing “Friends of Coal,” and power companies wage incessant scare propaganda equating coal reduction with rising energy costs and job reduction instead of implementing focused research on clean coal technology. As I write, a Kentucky coal ash plant has been caught by hidden camera dumping coal ash into the Ohio River and is being sued by the Sierra Club and Land Justice.

Again, Kentucky isn’t alone, but part of a mind-sweep that embraces America. For example, initiatives to promote recycling by outlawing plastic bags are continually defeated even in more friendly environmental places like Seattle. (I have to confess I feel conspicuous, a seemingly rare upstart, when carrying my cloth bags into Krogers.)

In drought plagued California, swimming pools still adorn Malibu, ball parks sport well manicured grass, and golf courses like Pebble Beach and Cypress Point Club nurture their resplendent greens, even as farmers curtail their crops and California’s biggest cash crop of almond and walnut groves lie in dusty peril.

Golf interests say water consumption amounts to only 1% of California’s total, but omit a plethora of other environmental burdens like fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides, which contribute to contamination of groundwater aquifers and surface waters.

This may seem off the subject, but there’s a new movie in town, Noah, that’s been drawing crowds, grossing $42 million in its initial weekend viewing. I bring it up because in my youthful days of religiosity I remember it took the biblical Noah a year to build the ark and round up the selected progeny of animals (although it escapes me as to what happened to the plants, since there’s no clear indication of their inclusion, though all the animals taken in were herbivores).

Anyway, the guy must have seemed some kind of crazy. After all, the earth, nourished by mist, hadn’t ever experienced rain before. The gospel of Luke (17:25-27, KJV) makes analogy to Noah and his time, saying

As it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be also in the days of the son of man. They did eat, they drank, they married wives, they were given in marriage, until the day Noah entered into the ark, and the flood came, and destroyed them all.

Looks like Hollywood missed a golden opportunity of transforming an ancient saga of environmental survival into a film of contemporary relevance.

–rj

Susan Sarandon Gets It: Authentic Living

“I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. I’ve been dreaming of my parents every day,” says Wang Zheng, a 31-year old engineer whose parents were aboard missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, now into its third week with still no positive yields as to its fate.

Ironically, new reports of possible debris 1500 miles off the coast of Western Australia aren’t offering the languishing families and friends the solace they seek–that their loved ones may still be alive, despite its sheer unlikelihood. As humans, hope is often all we can muster up against life’s irrational swells that confront, often adversely, randomly, and without closure, our daily quest for denominated happiness via health, work, food on our tables, and loved ones to share our good luck with on our return at day’s end.

Emily Dickinson said it well about the fervency of hope in her typically simple, yet elegant, observance,

Hope is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops at all.

Of course, it’s good to have hope in life, since without it we’d find each other mutually insufferable, depressed cranks weighed down by hurt, anger, and resentment. I’m thinking just now of the biblical Job whose troubles were only made worse by his judgmental friends, devoid of empathy, callous to his personal suffering.

What prolongs our suffering, however, comes from our need to impose control, especially when it comes to life’s volatility, and thus hope may not really be what we need to shore us up. All of life is laced with the temporal, or ending, a serial repertoire of good-byes. In the vast aeons of Nature, even the mountains are born and die, our own existence as a species hardly a wink up against’s Nature’s several billion year legacy of genesis, maturation and decline. For most of us, coming to terms with our own mortality is our ultimate existential dilemma. and the stuff of poetry, say like Keats (e.g., “When I have fears that I may cease to be”).

The Buddha had it right: “All suffering is born of desire.” Our primary desire is often for permanence when the truth is that impermanence embraces everything. Again, we don’t like to say good bye. I knew this first hand as a child, preferring to make myself scarce rather than seeing loved ones off.

We spare ourselves considerable grief when we grasp this fundamental truth, an observation shared in universal creeds and philosophic rumination, affirmed by science. We can’t retain our youth; we forfeit our friends, sometimes our mates; we change our jobs and often our locales; we lose our parents; we see our children move out and sometimes far away; and, of course, we always must contend with that random press on human intent and happiness via cosmic intervention such as accident or natural disaster.

In all of this, it’s our human disposition to wander between past and future and thus miss out on what we do have–life in the Now–and living mindfully in its effulgence rather than hedonistically, which inevitably comes up short.

I was just reading about Susan Sarandon, whom I’ve long admired for not only her film achievement, but her compassion for those denied social justice. In her personal life, she mirrors the wisdom of seizing the day, or maximizing our present. Asked why she dissolved her 23-year relationship with Tim Robbins, with whom she had two children, she said that it came after performing in Ionesco’s Exit the King on Broadway, which deals with confronting mortality: “You can’t do a meditation on death and stay in a situation that’s not authentic” (Meg Grant, AARP Magazine, Feb/Mar 2014).

I also like her punchline simple formula for everyday happiness: “It’s the simple things. Good food. Good friends. Sunsets and sunrises. With age, you gain maybe not wisdom, but at least a bigger picture” (Grant).

Me, I call that wisdom: authentic living in the present. After all, the Now is all we really have, given the ephemerality of life’s myriad textures. Living it meaningfully–which is to say, mindfully–enables us to find freedom over circumstance and, with it, greater happiness

–rj

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