Beyond Identity Politics: The Case for Economic Unity

Two weeks to go until America decides!

I’m with those who believe Kamala Harris will win. Even so, America will remain deeply divided, unless the grievances of America’s working class, transcending race and ethnicity, are addressed.

Healing lies in abandoning the separation of the political and the economic.

While minority rights matter, they musn’t be set against the economic rights of all Americans to a fair share. Otherwise, we reap continuing resentment, social fissure, and exploitation.

What matters isn’t who you are, or where you’re from, but what you believe. Identity politics conversely promote discord.

Unions have shown us the way, promoting shared economic interests transcending identity factions of Left and Right.

Achieving class unity, America secures a vibrant future, true to its promise of shared equality in the pursuit of happiness.

As distinguished economist Robert Reich rightly observes, unless the new administration enlarges the economic franchise, “future demagogues like Vance will almost surely exploit the same bitterness for their own selfish ends.”

“The strongest defense we have against a future of Trumpist fascism is a large and growing middle class comprised of people who, although they may have supported Trump, come to feel they have a stake in America.”

—rj

Julia Thurman: Crafting Worlds with Words

The writers I admire most never use a careless word. Their sentences are unimprovable —Judith Thurman, A Left-Handed Woman.

There exist those books we scarce can put down, riveting us with suspense, prose eloquence, and resonance of human experience.

Others, we struggle with, bored or chagrined by their non-relevance or absurdities. The usual counsel is to jettison them quickly.

Had I done so with Julia Thurman’s A Left-Handed Woman, a book largely focused on fashion couture, playground of wealthy indulgence, I’d have lost out immensely.

Collectively, Thurman’s adroitly articulated 39 essays, gathered mostly from fifty years of writing for The New Yorker, transcend her primary fashion genre, yielding portraitures mostly of heroic women finding autonomy in a patriarchal milieu, leading to my admiration for Thurman, awe at her salient intelligence, fine-tuned to meticulous observation and set-apart brilliance in prose mastery.

As Henry Finder, one of her editors at The New Yorker observes, “She’s not happy with a paragraph until it sings.”

Thurman’s acumen is indisputable, having achieved numerous awards that include a National Book Award for Non-fiction for her biography, Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Writer (1983), inspiring the hit movie, Out of Africa.

Her Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette (1999), earned a finalist National Award for Nonfiction.

She is a recipient of the Ordre des Artes et Lettres by the French government for her contributions to French literature.

A Left-Handed Woman has won PEN’s award for essay excellence .

Nothing surprises me about Thurman. Is there anything she misses in her myriad subject matter teeming with wide-ranging vignettes on not only fashion designers such as Sara Berman, Isabel Toledo, Elsa Schiaparelli , Miuccia Prada Guo Pei and Ann Lowe, but disparate entities like Margaret Fuller, Emily Dickinson, Elena Ferrante, Lee Miller, Eva Zeisel, Amelia Earhart, Isa Genzken, Greta Stern, Alison Bechdel, Laura Elizabeth Ingalls Wilder, Rachel Cusk, Yasmina Reza, Vladimir and Vera Nabokov, and even Helen Gurley Brown and Cleopatra, among still others, their successes and, yes, the not infrequent intrusions of fate cascading fame and fortune to their doom.

While men do appear in her essays, they’re a distinct minority, sometimes perversely objectifying women as ancillaries of male prerogative:

Conversely, she writes of women, “I scoured literature for exceptions, and there were some. But nearly all of them had achieved distinction at a price their male counterparts didn’t have to pay. In that respect, one might say they were all left-handed: they defied the message they were not right.”

My favorite essays come toward the book’s close, featuring Simone de Beauvoir and in a surprising thematic shift, Thurman’s memoir of cave exploration, torch in hand, accompanying renowned French anthropologists at ancient Dordogne cave painting sites, Chauvet and Niaux.

I believe Thurman is right in crediting de Beauvoir with the genesis of the modern feminist movement with her seminal The Second Sex. As for her revels exploring caves and pedaling across French landscape, it’s truly a tour de force.

One last thing: Thurman is a self-taught fluent speaker of two languages beyond her native English that include French and Italian, highly engaged as she is in French and Italian literary and artistic culture.

She also achieved reading fluency in Danish as prerequisite to her research on Isak Dinesen.

Favorite passages:

“What we bring with us—embedded in our flesh and bugging it; embedded in art and animating it—is the mystery of how we become who we are.”

“There’s a hidden cavity in every story, a recess of meaning, and it’s often blocked by the rubble of your own false starts, or by an accretion of received ideas left behind by others. That updraft of freshness is typically an emotion you’ve buried.”

“The transcendence of shame is a prominent theme in the narrative of women’s lives. The shame of violation; the shame of appetite; the shame of anger; the shame of being unloved; the shame of otherness; the shame, perhaps above all, of drive.”

“Most of the time, a piece of prose lies on the page bristling with cleverness, yet inert, until I hit upon the precise sequence of words—the spell, if you like—that brings it to life. At that moment, language recovers its archaic power to free a trapped spirit.”

“She could love and desire intensely, but rarely at the same moment, and she could think and feel deeply, but not often in the same sentence.”

—rjoly

America’s Fossil Fuel Addiction: A Call for Change

As another storm, Milton, churns its way in the Gulf toward FL, Americans continue their love affair with fossil fuels, reluctant to embrace habit change and the inconvenience it imposes. One of our candidates for the nation’s highest office, with PA in mind, now preaches fracking; the other wants to roll back all climate change regulation.

China puts us to shame, last year installing 57% of all new solar plants around the world.

Likewise, Singapore, its people on board, plans to be zero emissions free by 2050.

As is, expect more storms, more heat, more fires, more drought, more ecosystems on which our survival depends, compromised or destroyed. A recent Lancet Countdown analysis (2023) reports that 80% of the 86 governments assessed were subsidizing fossil fuels, providing a collective $400bn in 2019.

We are addicted, myopic about the myriad consequences of fossil fuel dependency we relegate to a remote future.

Presently, there’s not a single Earth System that doesn’t face collapse.

We need to be on a war footing, the environment our highest priority, if we’re to avoid apocalyptic scenarios like that of Appalachia emerging a salient headline of our daily lives.

If we stubbornly resist taking action to mitigate the situation, the ecological balance — a product of millions of years of evolution that sustains life on Earth — may soon collapse, leading to our eventual extinction.

—rjoly

Ruth Stone: The Poetic Genius of Resilience and Reflection

I’ve been writing poetry or whatever it is since I was five or six years old, and I couldn’t stop, I never could stop. I don’t know why I did it.… It was like a stream that went along beside me, you know, my life went along here, and I got married and had three kids and did all the things you have to do, and all along the time this stream was going along. And I really didn’t know what it was saying. It just talked to me, and I wrote it down. So I can’t even take much credit for it.” — Ruth Stone

The late Ruth Stone’s poetry gives me goosebumps. It’s that good —observant, conversational, intimate, punctuated with humor, resonating life in all its undulations.

It’s Saturday afternoon. I lie here on my bed, going through Stone’s poems as the world pursues its daily tasks. Quietness is my paradise, allowing space to reflect on essentials that matter. Stone’s poetry does that well.

Ruth Stone (1915-2011) didn’t have it easy. A mother of three children, her husband committed suicide, plunging her into abject poverty. Her poetry prowess, however, earned her a piecemeal income through itinerant, short term teaching assignments at universities across America.

Between teaching gigs, she’d return to her home in Goshen, Vermont, crafting new poems and short stories, her talent earning her two Guggenheim awards.

Academy recognition came late. In 2002, she won the National Book Award for Poetry at age 87 (2002).

What puzzles me is that she remains widely unknown. Her poetry, abundant in robust metaphor, drawn from science and nature, stands on its own, defiant of imitation.

Stone saw life in all its teeming distillations, especially in regard to aging, about which she could be merciless.

Her death came in 2011 at age 96.

Her humble home in Goshen, soul of her prodigious output (13 books), has been designated a historical landmark and become a retreat for literary studies. Her informal grave is nearby.

Below, the Ruth Stone poem that fulfills Emily Dickinson observation on what makes for a good poem: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry…Is there any other way?” ( L342a, 1870):

“Always on the Train”

Writing poems about writing poems
is like rolling bales of hay in Texas.
Nothing but the horizon to stop you.

But consider the railroad’s edge of metal trash;
bird perches, miles of telephone wires.
What is so innocent as grazing cattle?
If you think about it, it turns into words.

Trash is so cheerful; flying up
like grasshoppers in front of the reaper.
The dust devil whirls it aloft; bronze candy wrappers,
squares of clear plastic–windows on a house of air.

Below the weedy edge in last year’s mat,
red and silver beer cans.
In bits blown equally everywhere,
the gaiety of flying paper
and the black high flung patterns of flocking birds.

—rj

School Safety and SROs: Examining the Aftermath of Apalachee High School Shooting

Again, another school shooting: two teachers and two students killed; another eight, including a teacher, wounded at Apalachee High School in Winder, GA.

So far this year, 45 shootings have occurred, but this is the worst.

You may remember that after the George Floyd killing by police (2020), a groundswell of anti-police rhetoric occurred, with calls to defund police and remove school resource officers (SROs). Subsequently, police budgets were slashed and 50 school districts across the country removed SROs from their schools.

A year before George Floyd, 2019 presidential candidate Kamela Harris told a college audience, “What we need to do about … demilitarizing our schools and taking police officers out of schools. We need to deal with the reality and speak the truth about the inequities around school discipline. Where in particular, Black and Brown boys are being expelled and or suspended as young as, I’ve seen, as young as in elementary school” (Interview, Benedict College, Columbia, SC.).

Some studies had argued that SROs resulted in a disproportionate number of minority students suspended or arrested, leading to greater recidivism.

In all fairness, Harris has walked back several of her earlier policy positions: decriminalizing illegal immigration, banning oil fracking, and eliminating private health insurance. The public deserves to know her present stance on SROs.

By the way, her Veep choice, Tim Waltz, known to be progressive, signed into Minnesota law (March 14, 2024), a bipartisan bill allowing SRO specified disciplinary protocol that includes prone restraint.

CNN reports that the shooting at Apalachee High School stopped when an unnamed SRO confronted the alleged fourteen year odd assailant, ordering him to get down on the floor (September 5, 2024).

Hopefully, his heroism will not go unnoticed.

–rj

Sending the Wrong Signal: The Obamas

We have an economy that is out of balance. It’s one in which most of the people in this room have benefited enormously over the last decade — and I include myself in that group. But it is an economy that has left millions of Americans behind” (Obama, political.com).

It’s the DNC, August 20, 2024: A crestfallen Michelle Obama, dressed in a belted, sleeveless, navy blue pant suit costing $3000 plus, shares lessons she’s learned from her family legacy, her audience, mesmerized and adoring:

…they were suspicious of folks who took more than they needed. They understood that it wasn’t enough for their kids to thrive if everyone else wanted around us was drowning.

Her words trigger flashback, a former president, his trademark poise and eloquence, exhorting the wealthy to give back.

As she speaks, millions of Americans struggle daily with making ends meet. Thirty-eight percent of Gen Zers, born since 1997, think themselves less secure than their parents at the same point, their living expenses ceasingly escalating (cnbc.com)—groceries, housing, transportation, clothing, their jobs tentative or inadequately remunerated. Even with a college degree, obtained at considerable debt, the American dream eludes their quest.

In a CNN poll conducted earlier this year, 71% of Americans rated the economy “poor”; another 38%, “very poor.”

Millennials (born 1981-1996), find themselves burdened with crushing debt, subjecting them to losing it all if another financial crisis occurs like that of 2008.

Since 2022, house prices alone have mushroomed 20 to 30% and interest rates jumped from 3% to nearly 8%. It’s become cheaper to rent than own.

Having children is a luxury (“What Broke the American Dream,” CNN, 2024).

The tab for childcare at a day care center runs an average $800-$900 monthly per child (care.com).

A family’s outlay for a health insurance policy reimbursing 70% of medical expenses averages $3,682 as of August, 2024 (kff.org).

While Michelle speaks, 132,232 homeless seek nightly shelter in NYC, 45, 745 of them children (June, 2024; coalition forthehomeless.com).

They’re the lucky ones. Thousands more sleep in subways, in parks, on the streets, or in cars.

Across America, you see them on city street corners with their cardboard signs, begging help.

As for racial demographics, 52% of heads of households in NYC shelters are disproportionately black; 32% hispanic (coalition for the homeless).

In 2021, an estimated 300,000 of all races and ethnicities in NY state lived doubled up with relatives and friends.

HUD reports an estimated 653,100 people across America are homeless, up 12% since 2022. Their numbers include not only the mentally ill and drug addicts, but the unemployed and underemployed.

Those numbers include 200,000 veterans, suffering post-traumatic stress from conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, sleeping nightly on city streets (National Coalition for Homeless Veterans).

All too often, we’ve this tendency to compartmentalize: it’s them, not us.

Truth be told, millions of Americans are separated from homelessness by a thin thread of tentative circumstance in a market economy where jobs can vanish in an inkling amid economic flux.

Meanwhile, the Obamas have financially estranged themselves from the the middle class they claim ro champion, their estimated net worth between $70 and $135 million, and climbing (NY Post, September 26, 2024).

Why shouldn’t the Obamas, having decried greed on many occasions, not be scrutinized, their feet held to the fire?

Let’s take a closer look.

After leaving the White House, the Obamas purchased a home in D. C.’s plush Kalorama neighborhood of diplomats, the wealthy, and the famous, for $8.1 million (2017). At 8,200 sq. feet, it features 8 bedrooms and 9 1/2 bathrooms. They’ve since made extensive revisions, adding a pool and a brick wall surrounding the property. Parking is available for ten cars.

Not long after (2020), they purchased a 29.3 acre property on exclusive Martha’s Vineyard with pristine water views and a dedicated pathway to the ocean beach. At 6,892 sq. feet, it has 7 bedrooms and 8 bathrooms and special design features. Cost: $11.5 million.

In 2000, the Obamas purchased a residence in Kenwood, a suburb adjacent to Chicago, featuring six bedrooms and six baths for a modest $1.65 million. They lived there from 2004-2008, or until Barack Obama became president. Frequented by tourists and blocked off, the Obamas are seldom there.

In 2015 Obama’s close friend, financier Marty Nesbitt, purchased a three acre Oahu property for the Obamas in a proxy deal for $8.7 million. Its $15 million dollar mansion, formerly home to Magnum PI TV series, has been leveled to accommodate something more grandiose, a compound consisting of three homes, one of them presumably for Secret Service. 

It hasn’t hasn’t been without controversy. Despite state and county laws protecting the coastal environment against the intrusion of sea walls, believed to inhibit beach migration inward, loopholes were exploited and exemptions granted to build a 70 foot seawall.

Obama, the environmental president, is keeping silent, deferring any comments to Nesbitt’s office.

Setting the record straight, the Ivy League Obamas have never been absent from privilege, victims of white bias or corporate exclusion—or bluntly, unemployed.

While a Senator, Barack and Michelle collectively earned $1.6 million.

As President, he made $400,000 along with a $50,000 expense account, a $100,000 tax free travel account, and $19,000 entertainment account (afrotech.com).

In retirement, former presidents receive $1 million in travel expenses yearly; their spouses, $500,000 (ntu.org).

There’s also a generous allowance for office space and staff.

According to Business Insider, Obama garnered $15.6 million in book royalties from 2005-2016.

He presently receives a $246,424 pension, indexed to inflation (National Tax Union Foundation).

With more than five years in Federal office, medical care at the nation’s best hospitals, is free, unlike for millions of retired Americans paying up to $200 monthly for Medicare that excludes vision, hearing and dental benefits and makes it necessary for seniors to fill in the gaps for deductibles and copays with supplemental insurance and a drug plan.

Their social security is likely to be taxed.

Longterm care for a dehabilitating illness or injury is out-of-reach for most middle class Americans, averaging $35,000 to $108,000 annually (National Council on Aging).

Since leaving the White House, Obama reportedly received $850,000 for two speeches and $2 million for three talks in 2017.

In 2018, the Obamas entered into an estimated $50 million production deal with Netflix.

Business Insider estimates the Obamas will ultimately earn $250 million in post White House earnings for books, speeches, tours, and movie productions.

As for Michelle, last year saw her walk away with $750,000 for a one hour speech in Germany before the Bits and Pretzels forum in Munich associated with the annual Oktoberfest (NY Post, September 26, 2024).

Her normal speaking fee starts at $200,000. Barack commands a minimal $400,000, matching Joe Biden’s annual presidential salary in every speech.

For her memoir, Becoming (2018), Michelle received a $65 million advance.

In Becoming, Michelle wrote, “When you’re president of the United States, words matter.” They do, but doing matters more.

Exemplary leadership seeks not its own gain, but the welfare of the many. It sets precedent for a new politics that eschews platitude, the ethereal, and the partisan. Centering on doing, it knows its limits. Simplicity and restraint govern its personal conduct in daily life. In its moral construct, it sets an example that inspires and achieves a democratic altruism transcending the factional.

On the other hand, economic advisor and Huffington columnist Zachary Carter writes, “Obama isn’t running for office again, but his sellout sends even uglier signals to the electorate.”

As for the Democratic Party, dominated by managers, venture capitalists, Hollywood and media celebs, it can no longer boast being the party of Franklin D. Roosevelt: “The test of our progress is not whether we add to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have so little.”

–rj

 

The Positives of a Reading List

Being an avid reader, I’m fond of booklists from those in the know as to their verdict on the best out there. Every New Year’s Day, I post my own favorites for the ensuing year, as much for myself as for others, as a way of disciplining my reading.

With booklists in mind, I couldn’t resist getting Swiss researcher Chiareto Calò’s well-received book, The Library of Humanity: The Most Influential Books. Besides, at just $1.99, how could I go wrong?

Calò lists 300 books, fiction and non-fiction, poetry and plays, across several continents and timelines, including our own.

I like how he succinctly previews each selection with a page or two, giving readers more than a mere listing.

But mind you, he surprisingly lapses in omitting writers like Cicero, Heraclitus, George Eliot and works like Goethe’s Faust.

He also makes some selections I think might be questioned.

Still, he makes up for such lapses, with inclusion of important works most of us have probably missed, to which I plead guilty and fervently hope to make amends.

For example, though I knew of the Epic of Gilgamesh, pre-dating Homer by 1500 years, I had never read it.

At least until yesterday, coming away dazzled by the splendor of its poetic rendering of the human journey.

And I’ve yet to read the Vedas, Hesiod’s Theogony, Aeschylus’ Oresteia, or that great Indian epic, The Ramayana. And so it goes.

But as I said, I mean to mend my ways.

Next stop, ancient Egypt and the Story of Sinuhe.

–rj

Freedom’s Warrior: Timothy Snyder


Chances are you don’t know who Timothy Snyder is, though all who love a free Ukraine should. Snyder is an esteemed centrist Yale historian, graduate of Brown University (B.A.) and the University of Oxford (D. Phil).

Snyder specializes in central and eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and the Holocaust. Fluent in English, German, Polish, and Ukrainian, he reads in ten languages.

He’s also a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Science in Vienna. Prolific, Snyder has authored sixteen books to date, translated into forty languages, with a forthcoming book to be published in September, 2024.

Raised by Quaker parents in Ohio with leftist leanings, there’s a moral insistence conveyed in unadorned prose throughout his many books. In his classes, he uses no notes and with ease can blend Plato, Hegel, DuBois, and polymath René Girard to make his point (Baird, The Guardian, March 23, 2023).

His international awards are numerous. They include Carnegie and Guggenheim fellowships and Hannah Arendt Award for Political Thought. He was a Marshall scholarship student at Oxford.

I hadn’t anticipated an ardent defense of Ukraine, buttressed from someone at Yale, but there he was, Timothy Snyder, forthright, unapologetic, in his op-ed appearance in the New York Times:

“As in the 1930s, democracy is in retreat around the world and fascists have moved to make war on their neighbors. If Russia wins in Ukraine, it won’t be just the destruction of a democracy by force, though that is bad enough. It will be a demoralization for democracies everywhere. Even before the war, Russia’s friends — Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orban, Tucker Carlson — were the enemies of democracy. Fascist battlefield victories would confirm that might makes right, that reason is for the losers, that democracies must fail” (NYT, May 19, 2022).

I’ve been following Snyder ever since.

Snyder has his detractors, of course, some regarding him more as a pundit, offering personal opinion in the guise of expertise. For a good summation, and counterpointing (see LA Review of Books, Unshared History, Oct. 16, 2012).

His Marxist critics principally object to his inclusion of Russia as fascist under Putin, as they like to reserve the term for their right wing opponents. Historically, fascism was a term used by the Soviets to denounce Nazis and other factions opposed to its dictates.

Snyder answers that “People disagree, often vehemently, over what constitutes fascism. But today’s Russia meets most of the criteria that scholars tend to apply. It has a cult around a single leader, Vladimir Putin. It has a cult of the dead, organized around World War II. It has a myth of a past golden age of imperial greatness, to be restored by a war of healing violence — the murderous war on Ukraine” (NYT, May 19, 2022).

If you’re curious about Snyder’s political biases, he endorsed Biden in 2020 and in a Guardian interview, shared, “I vote Democrat!” He sees Trump as an autocrat appealing to popular prejudices inimical to American democracy’s survival. Trump’s policies are about making White people feel comfortable.

Snyder’s immediate concern, however, is the war in Ukraine, about to enter its third year, pitting a David against a Goliath, pitiless and unpausing in attacks on Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure in a crucial struggle presently overshadowed by events in Gaza.

To his credit, Snyder has tried valiantly to keep the Ukrainian conflict center-stage: “If Ukraine does not win, we can expect decades of darkness” (NYT, May 19, 2022).

Hospitals, churches, shopping centers, apartment dwellings, it’s all fair game to Putin, whose aim is to inflict maximum terror, destroy food supplies, disrupt the electricity grid, and deny water resources to a nation he regards as historically integral to the Russian empire.

Much of Putin’s onslaught comes from not only cruise missiles, but thousands of drones, many of them supplied by North Korea and Iran.

The Biden administration and its NATO allies have been slow to respond. Patriot defense batteries are just now arriving, antiquated, and short of the seven President Zelensky says Ukraine needs to ward off the daily aerial assaults.

In contrast, Israel has 32 up-to-date batteries proven highly effective against Iran’s massive missile and drone response of April 14, 2024 (Defense Express, April 15, 2024).

If Ukrainian skies are safer now, it’s because Timothy Snyder stepped in, not the White House, raising $2,300,000 for Safe Skies, a program allowing Ukraine to install thousands of sensors throughout eight Ukrainian regions.

Safe Skies provides an early-warning alert and rapid response to drones and cruise missiles: “I visited one of the sites and saw some of the technology at work, as well as the impressive cooperation between the Ministry of Digital Transformation and the armed forces,” Snyder said (The Free Press, Substack, August 17, 2024).

Donations were largely individual worldwide, with a few corporations also contributing.

We nearly lost Snyder in 2019 when, feeling ill, he resorted to ER in New Haven, spending seventeen hours there, before being diagnosed with a baseball-sized tumor in his liver along with sepsis. Snyder would subsequently spend the next three months in five hospitals.

But you don’t mess with Snyder, who kept notes on his hospital sojourn, the later basis of a scathing indictment of American healthcare: Our Malady:
Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary.

Thankfully, he’s still with us, a boon for freedom lovers everywhere,

–rjoly

The Lights Are Flashing Red

Famed entomologist E. O. Wilson passed into infinity in December, 2021.
He was 92.

I came upon him late in my life, but not too late for him to have left me with a reverence for his boundless intellect, inveterate inquisitiveness, and fervent championing of our fellow creatures, mostly outside human ken, myriad species vital to Man’s survival, yet victims of humanity’s arrogant trespass.

Recently, an extended research project, launched by the World Wildlife Fund, revealed that of the 32,000 species it analyzed, 69% of them are in decline. Shockingly, 2.5% of mammals, fish, reptiles, birds and amphibians have gone extinct just since 1970 (World Wildlife Report).

While species extinction surely is an integral fact of our 4.5 billion old planet’s history, the salient evidence of natural selection favoring those able to adapt to largely inveterate climate distillations, several near-Earth object (NEOs) visitations, volcanic acidification of oceans and acid rain, impacting land chemistry, their repetition has become marginalized by evolution’s new arbiter of destiny, homo sapiens.

“The message is clear and the lights are flashing red,” says WWF International’s Director General Marco Lambertini, one of the report’s authors.

Climate change threatens the next massive die-off, witnessed in every day record breaking temperatures, accelerating violent storms, rising sea levels, droughts, and massive fires.

Meanwhile, we continue to pour heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. All of this affects habitat, destroying the intricate ecological web that sustains us.

It doesn’t make for breaking news headlines, but should, that the Arctic
is warming four times faster than the rest of our planet, threatening the demise of the jet stream, resulting in still more climate instability.

We live our lives addicted to trivia, fingers in our ears, indifferent to the existential challenge that poses our extinction. It seems a human predilection to forfeit the future for indulgence in the ephemeral present. Rome burns while Nero plays his fiddle.

Thus far, efforts to mitigate climate change and restore balance have failed to achieve their targets. We even have a candidate running for the presidency who’s pledged to roll back environmental regulations.

Not to be outdone, we have President Biden’s recent approval of the Willow Project (March 1923), allowing ConocoPhillip’s massive oil drilling rights on Alaska’s North Slope in the National Petroleum Reserve, despite his campaign promise he’d prohibit drilling on public lands (The Willow Project).

We knew where Trump stood, but we trusted Biden, whose administration has also approved the auctioning off of 73 million acres of waters in the Gulf of Mexico to offshore oil and gas drilling interests, encompassing an area twice the size of the Willow Project (Common Dreams).

Universal human-induced loss of forest, wetlands, and ecosystems hastens the trajectory of apocalyptic consequence for future generations.

Meanwhile, beleaguered polar bears attempt to adapt, but aren’t succeeding. Given the melting ice, they cannot access their traditional foods, resulting in their numbers declining 30% since 1980 (Polar bear decline).

Penguins haven’t fared any better, their numbers declining up to 10% (Penguins declining).

Truth be known, we’re approaching a tipping point at which the ecosystem collapses.

E. O. Wilson rightly faulted humans for earth’s crisis: “Deeming ourselves rulers of the biosphere and its supreme achievement, we believe ourselves entitled to do anything to the rest of life we wish. Here on Earth our name is Power” (Half-Earth: our Planet’s Fight for Life).

Each species is its own miracle. By the century’s end, most of today’s faltering species will be gone:

No birdsong to greet the new day,
No crickets rubbing their wings;
An absence of croaking frogs at the pond,
Zinging dragonflies but memory.
Amid parched landscape, a wounding silence.

–rjoly

Discovering Ourselves Through Writing

What to write about, or finding your subject matter, doesn’t come easily.

Some writers respond to prompts to get them started.

Most writers probably get started out of a chance remark thrown their way in casual conversation or through stimuli in something they’ve read, or a keen interest, say in health research or climate change, that drives their protocol.

Political writers with an agenda find an especially easy route, simply reacting to adversary axioms they view as detrimental to public welfare. They’re never out of material, the spring never running dry in a media era of incessant scrutiny.

Popular author Tim Cotton just throws a sentence out there, not knowing where he’s headed: “What you don’t know about me, and won’t care, is that everything I write starts with a random sentence, typed onto a screen with no idea where I am going.”

Probing deeper, however, you’ll find this may be misleading. Cotton doesn’t simply post an initial sentence without an underlying coterie of everyday happenings—a visit with his aging father, the dream residue of an afternoon nap, the challenge of what to keep or toss, etc.

The key is to be mindful and present in the ordinary, and Cotton does this better than most of us. I suspect he jots down incipient observations he can expand upon later. Like many writers, he may keep a journal.

No matter how the writing venture begins, it has its mysterious aspects that all of us know very well. I remember a fellow graduate seminar student telling me that my writing exhibited a different person from the one of daily conversation.

That doesn’t surprise me. However I begin writing, I tunnel into a buried mineshaft of a separate self, perhaps akin to what Jung called the Shadow, surfacing in the writing act like a Yellowstone geyser bursting from subterranean depths.

Occasionally, I’ll bump into something I wrote several years ago and come away, Did I write that?

The poet Coleridge famously ascribed his Kubla Khan poem to an afternoon opium induced nap. On the other hand, Harvard scholar John Livingston Lowes pointed out Coleridge’s possible myriad reading sources in The Road to Xanadu.

In short, the depth psychologists Freud and Jung were right: We file our experiences, even the most trivial, at the unconscious level, lying dormant, only to spill suddenly into awareness, triggered by associative stimuli.

And so Tim Cotton is also right. However you start, your writing will reveal unknown vistas, revelatory of a much wiser Self than that quotidian persona we publicly assume.

Cotton inspired this post. I simply typed the first sentence, not knowing what I’d say. I had no notes, did not google, etc. That concealed self, automatic writing psychic enthusiasts might call it, filled out the blank.

Our minds are a file cabinet of our human experience, waiting retrieval. Writing may prove laborious, but think of what you miss when you don’t bother to write—the confluence of your life’s journey and its meaning; above all, your linkage with wider humanity, fostering understanding and empathy.

A journey of serpentine twists, leading to unanticipated trajectories, you never really know where you’ll end up.

–rj