The Fountain of Youth: We are all Ponce de Leon

medical-symbol1As a 12-year old Florida school boy, I was introduced early to the 16th century Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon, whom legend says came to Florida in quest of the Fountain of Youth.  Drink or bathe in its waters and you could be young again.  A story-line like this isn’t unique, finding its replay in myth and legend throughout the world. 

Its insistence  doesn’t surprise us at all, since it mirrors our consummate dream to stay young, not for its own sake, but because we associate youth with beauty, vigor, and libido, or from another angle, the absence of chronic ills like coronary disease, cancer, arthritis, and God only knows what, that often define our later years.  All the parts are new and they work well and at 25 we may sometimes think ourselves immortal.  We dream not just ordinary dreams, but visionary ones that say I can and I will.

Sooner or later, we are all Ponce de Leon, clutching to “the splendors in the grass” (Wordsworth).  Our ads promulgate our folly with promised effulgences of youth’s attributes, abolishing gray, dissolving winkles, restoring passion.

But even medicine itself increasingly wanders into the Ponce de Leon camp these days, some doctors proffering we may soon banish the ills of our human sojourn, advancing our life span dramatically into the 100 year range what with the promise of genetics making individualized therapies possible, perhaps a pill as it were targeting your specific ill, say cancer.

This is pretty much the message of Dr. David Agus’ fascinating The End of Illness, sort of what we do now at the car shop or electronics outlet, plugging into a computer that in seconds spits out solution.  He tells the story of 44-year old Bill Weir, host of ABC’s Nightline, who volunteered to go live, or cameras rolling in prime time, as the newest medical technology imputed his medical data at USC University Hospital.

It was the whole works, including not only blood tests and CT scans, but DNA analysis to assess his hereditary risk for illnesses such as heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease, colon cancer and about 32 other disease scenarios.  A CT uncovered substantial calcium build-up in Weir’s coronary arteries, narrowing his arteries and portending a possible heart attack in the next several years.  He had seemed a very healthy man until testing found him out.

The point is that we can increasingly predict and find impending diseases, and employing  intervention therapy, reduce if not eliminate, their threat.  Because of the high expense, sounds to me like you want to make sure you and your loved ones have the best possible medical coverage.  In the end, prevention may well be less costly than treating a patient with cancer, heart disease or diabetes.

Here I agree with those in Agus’ camp.  Take those prescribed pills, undergo the recommended testings, etc.  Consider pancreatic cancer, for example, a disease that takes no prisoners and recently killed actor Patrick Swayze, astronaut Sally Ride, and Apple’s Steve Jobs.  It’s an insidious illness that manifests its symptoms when it’s usually too late.  Still, you can undergo an annual complete abdominal ultrasound, MRI, or CT and gain a chance to nip the culprit in the bud.

But do I think medicine in the next 25 years will largely eliminate illness?  I will only say I think the jury’s still out on this one, though I’m doubtful. There is the expense; human inertia; new diseases in an increasingly global village appearing, impervious to our best antibiotics and the lengthy interval in developing new ones.  Even Agus contradicts his own optimism in predicting the inevitability of a pandemic:

The swine flu scare that occurred in 2009 will someday be dwarfed by a real epidemic that will spread rapidly through virgin immune systems and kill millions in its path (as happened, for example, in the flu epidemic of 1918, when an estimated 50 million to 100 million people died) (p. 277).

And I think the title of his book extravagant.  It may spawn sales, but little else, for fragile beings that we are, fraught with mortality, we share the fate of all living creatures, governed in the end by entropy.  We will never arrest illness completely, though we may at times lessen its impacting, and even its timing, by employing health enhancing strategies that will also lend quality to our lives.

At present, the American medical establishment is in breakdown mode.  While heart disease has shown a decrease, cancer continues to plague us.  Apart from disease, our doctors kill up to 200,000 patients yearly by way of medical mistakes; 50 million of us have no insurance; 25 million of us are underinsured.  Meanwhile, our unhealthy lifestyle continues to menace both our health and our wallets.  We have more diabetics than ever, for example.  Many of us are just plain fat.

I’d like to continue this subject in a later post and tell you things you can do specifically to help safeguard the health of yourself and loved ones, though I can’t promise you centenarian status.  Only 1 in 20,000 achieves that!

–rj

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Confessions of a reluctant vegan

Food for Life distributes food on an internati...

I never thought I’d give-up meat.   Up to my mid fifties, I ate meat at virtually every meal, starting out with bacon and eggs in the morning; baloney sandwiches or a Big Mac for lunch; chicken or hamburger paddy at night.  Once a week I’d treat myself to a bucket of KFC chicken.  A steak was the right choice for special nights out.

Then it happened.  Karen shared an article she had just read in our local newspaper on the horrors of the turkey industry.  I’ll spare you the details, but it was pretty awful.

Both Karen and I then decided on switching to a veggie diet, though still including animal products such as eggs and cheese.  We made that decision the night before Thanksgiving Day, 1996, and we’ve been vegetarians now for close to 17-years and never looked back.

People choose vegetarianism for any of several reasons such as reducing weight, lowering heart risk, and promoting the environment.  We chose vegetarianism for ethical reasons, believing it wrong to inflict suffering on any sentient creature.  As the saying goes, always remember that the meat you eat once had a face.

The vegetarian diet, once you get past the meat cravings, is actually pretty good.  Sometimes it’s even too easy, what with all the veggie substitutes out there there for turkey, ham,  chicken and the like.  I can make a pasta dish complete with soy meatballs and fool people every time.  I can also fashion you a sumptuous veggie chili that tastes every bit like the original.  By the way, becoming a vegetarian doesn’t necessarily translate into a better diet than the ASD if you just gorge on junk foods like chips and sweets.

Transitioning to a vegan diet, however, has been a real challenge.  I chose to go this way about 15 months ago when a routine blood test showed my glucose at 108, meaning I was pre-diabetic.  It’s in this stage that you can make lifestyle changes that can prevent or delay the onset of diabetes.  I also found out I had high insulin resistance, meaning the insulin that the pancreas pumps out to handle blood sugar was having difficulty entering my cells, where it does its work.

I had to do two things in a hurry:  refine my diet even more by eliminating virtually all highly concentrated sugar foods such as soda, which I drank daily; candy, and baked goods.  I also needed to avoid refined, or processed, food products with their white flour, fructose, corn syrup and high sodium that are probably, along with meat and dairy, instigators of many of our health ills like obesity, coronary disease and, possibly, cancer.

I needed to eliminate foods having cholesterol content as well, which meant giving up cheese, one of my favorite foods.  Fatty foods clog the mitochondria, or cell gateways through which insulin accesses the cells, and obviously don’t do the arteries any good either.

Now I may surprise you when I say I don’t like going vegan–no more kitsch, or cheese, or morning fried eggs with buttered toast, or even pizza.  No more lovely potato salad.   No more sumptuous chocolate bars, cheese cake, apple pie.  Not even fruit juice.

It seems a diet made for hell, not heaven.  Frozen vegetables and mountains of lettuce just don’t cut it for me.  It’s like I’m turning into some kind of bunny.  It may have been ok for Gandhi, but hey, I’m not Gandhi.  Mexicans may love their beans, but day after day, it gets old for me.

What really makes things worse is that I’ve always been a slender guy not needing to lose weight.  On this diet over the past year, however, I’ve shed 15 pounds and have to cram nuts to steady my weight.  Weight loss may be great for most diabetics, who tend to be overweight, but not for yours truly.

At times I’m strongly tempted to compromise and resume the vegetarian diet, but then I remember it didn’t do anything for my insulin resistance, except maybe to encourage it.  Doing vegan, however, combined with aerobic exercise 5 times a week, I’ve cut my insulin resistance nearly in half, dropped my fasting glucose below 100, and have begun to transition from small LDL-p particles to the safer, large LDL-p particles.  Trigylcerides and bad cholesterol are way down;  HDL, the good cholesterol, is up sharply.  I think that’s where the second life style change kicks in.  You can’t just eat nutritionally dense foods.  You have to exercise vigorously 5 times a week for 30 minutes.  Even better, add resistance exercise 2 to 3 times a week.

But back to veganism.  Maybe it’s like being a baby again and Mama’s stand-by:  “Now eat up your veggies.  This bite’s for Mama.  This one for Papa.  This one for….

To put it frankly, I wish there were an easier, more appetizing route to good health.  But then again, all the studies that count show that diet matters and that a plant saturated diet does best for fostering good health.  The soundest dietary advice I ever got was put so simply by nutrition expert Michael Pollan in his fine book, In Defense of Food:  “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”  Though it isn’t easy, my own experience confirms its wisdom.

–rj

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A great talent: Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts

fermorI’m always eager for a good read and get ecstatic when I find one.  There are so many possibilities out there that I try to choose wisely, usually from several sources such as NPR, The Times Literary Supplement, and my favorite with its nearly 200 reprints of notable works, The New York Review of Books.

The latter is the source for my newest read, Patrick Leigh Fermor’s standout travel saga, A Time of Gifts (1977).  I’m embarrassed at missing out on Fermor these many years, liking travel narratives as I do, but then that’s why I keep the NYRB close-by.

Fermor was just an amazing guy in explorer Sir Richard Burton mold, fiercely independent, assertive and bold; linguistically gifted, courageous and cunning.  Joining the Irish Guards In World War II, he fought in Greece and served with a guerrilla unit on the isle of Crete, where he disguised himself as a shepherd for 18 months, living in mountain caves, while successfully master-minding the abduction of a German general.  He was knighted in 1994, for his service to literature and promotion of British-Greek relations.

In A Time of Gifts, Fermor begins his recall years later (age 62), of his three year walk across Europe to Constantinople as a 19-year with little more than a backpack in 1933. He actually only gets half-way by the close, and so there’s a sequel, Between the Woods and the Water, but even then, you don’t get to the Bosphorus.  It little matters, for what we have is splendid, as we follow this young man hobnobbing with rich and poor, gypsies and priests, occasionally sleeping in ancient monasteries.  His account of Germany in 1933, which saw Hitler becoming Chancellor, fascinates.  On one occasion, he strays into a beer hall filled with Nazis.

What attracted me to A Time of Gifts amid a plethora of can’t go wrong choices were multiple reviewer comments on Fermor’s stylistic talent, one reviewer likening him to Sir Thomas Browne as the best of the best prose masters across the several centuries. As a former teacher of English for some forty years, I’m an aficionado of style, or the mastery of the cadence of the English sentence.  Talented writers know the weave of sentences spun into art, exemplary in the literary world, especially in the 19th century in the likes of Newman, Ruskin, and Pater.

Of course, I’ve only begun A Time of Gifts, but his writing already excites me with its prowess, not only in its trenchant rhythms, but through its sensory capacity for total awareness.  To possess such talent for minutiae down to a grain of sand like this would make Flaubert (le mot juste) proud.  Let me try out a passage on you:

The gables of the Rhine-quays were gliding past and, as we gathered speed and sailed under one of these spans of the first bridge, the lamps of Cologne all went on simultaneously. In a flash the fading city soared out of the dark and expanded in a geometrical infinity of electric bulbs. Diminishing skeletons of yellow dots leaped into being along the banks and joined hands across the flood in a sequence of lamp-strung bridges. Cologne was sliding astern. The spires were the last of the city to survive  and as they too began to dwindle, a dark red sun dropped through bars of amber into a vague Abendland that rolled glimmering away towards the Ardennes.

Informed mastery like this, housed in rhythmic sentences acute with colorful detail, sets Fermor apart as one of our greatest travel writers since John Ruskin.

You can read more about him in Artemis Cooper’s magnificent biography (2012).  Having full access to his papers, she tells us that Fermor left behind a completed draft that gets him to Constantinople and that it will be published soon.

Despite losing some of his sight and hearing, he remained active almost up to the day of his death at age 96 in 2011.

In a book he had been reading, he wrote:  “Love to all and kindness to all friends, and thank you for a life of great happiness.”  Now that’s an epitaph we can only envy.

–rj

The Fading of the American Dream: a Tale of Two Nations

You may have seen this morning’s AP report on growing poverty in America.:

Four out of 5 U. S, adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.

I found the report disturbing, but not unexpected, as I’ve done a lot of reading on the subject over the last several years.  Things aren’t going well for us these days on so many fronts, but foremost, economically.  This isn’t the America I grew-up in.  Nothing is perfect, but I think of that world of the early 60s as just maybe our high water mark.

Take crime, for example: In 1963, there were only 18 arrests for drugs per 100,000 people.  Our jails held far fewer people, but if you were convicted, you went to jail.  We still had a lot of work to do when it came to civil rights and feminism was just coming into its genesis, but they were underway with their promise of inclusion into full citizenship.  The Cold War was almost palpable, and while none of us would wish its return,  ironically it may have fueled our energy,  propelling us into space.

What makes things hard to swallow in difficult times like these, however, is the growing gap between rich and poor.  What may surprise you is that, in sheer numbers, Whites are the majority poor, confirmed by the government’s own data, with 76% of Whites likely to experience economic insecurity (job-loss,  or a year or more of dependence on government aid, or income 15% below the poverty line) by age 60.  White-mother headed homes now equal those among Blacks.  Overall, the number of poor in America stands at a staggering 46.2 million. Things are still difficult for minorities, but the biggest jump in poverty is among Whites.

In contrast, the well-off are doing better than ever, with 1% possessing 50% of the nation’s wealth.  Since 1993, this 1% has seen a 58% increase in that wealth.  Following the downturn of 2008, it has experienced 93% of the income gains.  We are, in short, in danger of becoming two nations, or of those few who have, and have it abundantly, and the many who barely make ends meet, or are without work, or in danger of losing their work.

Increasingly, this confers not only economic disparity, but cultural dislocation in education, politics, and even social and intellectual values.  It decides where you live, the schools your children attend, and even your personal well-being, as poverty is the primary instigator of crime.  In this rare moment of American social history, many Whites now find themselves in the same realm of exclusion from opportunity as minorities.  When it comes to Affirmative Action, it strikes me that the new poverty calls for a redefining of its premises, or the consideration of economic disadvantage and not soley race.

Certainly, we live in a changing world where a global economy has shrunk the market for our domestic exports and we’ve experienced a sharp decline in our manufacturing base as a consequence.  When I grew up, you could reasonably expect to land a job with a steel mill, auto manufacturer, or in a coal mine for good wages, pensions, and the like, if you didn’t go to college.

Another factor exacerbating inequality is living in an information age that posits a market value on sophisticated skills that are often bred in a nurturing context of means, family stability, the right schools and colleges, and the cultivation of a network of those with influence.   We’re talking then about a wholly different lifestyle for those with means.

Like most of our family members, my father was a leather worker.  We weren’t well-off, but we had sufficient to make our way in a world without food stamps.  With the loss of domestic shoe manufacturing to other countries, it’s a world now relegated to the back recesses of memory.  I’ll not give you a litany of lost industries from textiles to furniture, for example, and their contribution to the retreating American dream.

Nobody puts the American economic malaise better than the New Yorker‘s George Packer in his must read, The Unwinding (2013):

If you were born around 1960 or afterward, you have spent your adult life in the vertigo of that unwinding. You watched structures that had been in place before your birth collapse like pillars of salt across the vast visible landscape—the farms of the Carolina Piedmont, the factories of the Mahoning Valley, Florida subdivisions, California schools.”

Lately the President has returned to emphasizing economic issues.  He envisions creating “a ladder of opportunity for all.” He wants to shrink the income gap.  I don’t doubt his sincerity, but is this simply a euphemism for government throwing more money at the problem, or perhaps an innuendo of Marxism with its inherent penchant to restructure the classes?

Money bailouts haven’t helped us before, though it did save the auto industry and the banks.  On the other hand, Libertarians favor deregulation.  Last time I looked, it got us into trouble and we’re still trying to right our balance following the Great Recession of 2008.  Some think focusing on equal opportunity rather than income redistribution is the ticket.  Good arguments can be had both ways.

But the President is surely right about closing the income gap, however it’s done, and most of us everyday folks are probably in lock-step with his goal, though we may differ as to method.   As Charles Murphy points out in his trenchant Coming Apart, we are witnessing America’s increasing bifurcation into two classes, rich and poor:  “…the divergence into these separate classes, if it continues, will end what has made America America.”  Murphy’s thesis is that America is being torn apart, not by race, but by class, and I agree.

The sad thing is, nobody really knows what to do.  In the meantime, what can be worse than to lose faith in your own future?

–rj

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Happy Days are here again: and the banks roll on

obama

If you’ve been watching the headlines on the economic front, you may have seen the news about record bank profits in the first quarter of the year to the tune of $40.3 billion, an all time high.  In fact, profits surged 15.8% over the same quarter a year ago. This marks the 14th straight quarter of bank gains. In short, the bailed out banks (you and I paid for that), are making money hand-over-fist.  Not so, mainstream America.

Meanwhile, in the past 12 months, scandal- ridden JP Morgan has garnered $24.4 billion in net profit, evidencing once again that banks could evade laws with impunity.  The precedent, after all, had been the release of the 2000 page examiner’s report on Lehman Brothers in 2010,  suggesting fraud had brought about its bankruptcy, yet nothing was done.

You’d never have expected hand-outs from the Obama administration, given their campaign pledges to look out for us po’folk and their left of center politics.  Their hand-outs, not loans, to banks and other fiscal institutions, are shockingly in the trillions, with $85 billion dished out every month from the Federal Reserve.

But then again, we can better understand the forces in play when we look at the cohorts Obama gathered about himself:  Jacob Lew, former Citigroup executive, appointed deputy secretary of state, with a cool $900,000 bonus in his pocket from Citigroup;  Mark Patterson, Goldman Sachs lobbyist, made chief of staff at the Treasury, despite a ban on lobbyists;  Timothy Geithner, who became the architect of the bailouts, appointed as Treasury secretary, even after it was discovered he hadn’t fully paid his taxes;  Larry Summers, who authored many of the pro-bank policies of the nineties, recruited as a mainstay economic advisor; and Rahm Emmanuel, appointed Chief of Staff, after gleaning $16.5 million as a Chicago investment banker in just 30 months in-between government jobs. All of them Democrats.  All of them with dirty hands.  

At the present moment, Larry Summers is being touted as the next Federal Reserve Chairman, replacing the retiring Ben Bernanke.  A long time Goldman Sachs executive and trader, he played a primary role in deregulating Wall Street in the Clinton administration.

So far, and probably never will happen, not a single bank or CEO has been brought to account for their criminal mismanagement of the people’s money, leading to the 2008 meltdown and consequent suffering for millions of Americans. Their suffering continues.

Now you would think from the President’s major address on the economy this month that happy days are here again for you and me, what with his boast of 7.2 million new jobs created in the business sector in the last four years.  But politicians do prevaricate, and it’s up to you and me to hold their feet to the fire.  Fact is, long term unemployment is at its highest level since the Great Depression, and of the newly minted jobs, most are low wage (often in the service sector), temporary, or part-time.

Curiously, nowhere did the President mention the plight of Detroit facing bankruptcy and the possible erosion of pension and health benefits for the city’s workers, including police and fire personnel.

To give him his due, he did allude to the growing income disparity between the rich and the majority of Americans:

Even though our businesses are creating new jobs and have broken record profits, nearly all the income gains of the past ten years have continued to flow to the top 1 percent. The average CEO has gotten a raise of nearly 40 percent since 2009, but the average American earns less than he or she did in 1999. And companies continue to hold back on hiring those who have been out of work for some time.

But how did this happen?  He didn’t mention government’s largesse to the wealthy through bank bail outs, corporate tax breaks, and reduced wages for autoworkers.  In the first two years of the President’s tenure, or after the downturn of 2008, the richest one percent enjoyed an 11% increase in income, unlike the rest of Americans whose incomes declined.

Again, nobody’s been minding the store.  In 2011, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee  noted Wall Street’s culpability just prior to the 2008 market collapse as “a financial snakepit rife with greed, conflicts of interest and wrongdoing.”

While it may appear that things are humming along nicely, the banks booming, the real estate market up, stocks at their peak, the reality is that more than 3 million of us can’t find work.  Those who do, work for less, often part-time.  Many, particularly those 50 and over, may never work again.  Black youth unemployment is currently at 42 %.

Several million Americans have been foreclosed upon by the banks, losing their biggest investment stake and, sometimes, a whole lot more.  Many others owe the banks for houses purchased at inflated prices, now worth considerably less.

But the banks roll on, too big to take on, as Attorney General Eric Holder recently let slip. What’s more, their lobbyist legions do their work well, busy button-holing members of Congress.  It’s a game of money, always has been, money spelling influence.  It’s America, you know.

This just  in:  The President remains committed to slashing Medicare by $400 billion and Social Security by $130 billion in his projected 2014 budget.  (In 2008, candidate Obama had pledged, reiterated by Biden in 2012, that he wouldn’t cut Social Security.)  Apparently, the bankers are a privileged class; the people, expendable to the exigencies  of  power and influence.

-rj

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My favorite speeches

Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of the Unite...

I’ve always liked a good speech.  If you asked me to make a list of favorite speeches I’d be hard pressed.  In fact, what I’d worry about most was leaving out some real gems simply because of memory lapse or not having been exposed to them.  It’s complicated, too, because there are countless good speeches to be had across the years, even centuries, like Socrates’ defense before the Athenean court.

Probably the best way to go about it would be to catalogue speeches by genre; for example, political, social, and historical, though the categories might occasionally overlap.  I think of “Washington’s Farewell Address,”  despite it’s now quaint formalism, one of the standout American speeches in our history with its warning of the dangers of political parties turning into self-centered warring factions.  A historical classic, it surely falls under the political canopy as well like Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address.”

By the way, commencement addresses offer a rich source of substantive speeches before limited audiences.  I think of Steve Job’s address to the Stanford student body (2006) as the finest of its kind with its counsel on living in the context of mortality.

But what makes for a great speech?  I’d offer things like appropriateness, wisdom, counsel, candor, caring, inspiration and eloquence.  The best speeches not only inform and persuade, they move us to take action.  I think of Martin Luther’s King’s “I Have a Dream” speech (1963) as such a speech, perhaps rivaling Lincoln’s”Gettysburg Address” in its moving majesty.

As Americans, I think many of us would include Patrick Henry’s “Give me Liberty or Give me Death” (1775) and John F. Kennedy’s “Inaugural Address” as among the foremost of American speeches as well.

If you pinned me down, however, to a list of five personal favorites, I’d complain about how unfair you are.  Still, with apologies to the likes of Socrates, Cicero, Frederick Douglas, Susan B. Anthony, and even Patrick Henry and Kennedy, I’d offer the following personal favorites:

  1.  Lincoln:  “Gettysburg Address”
  2.  King:  “I Have a Dream”
  3.  Churchill:  “We Will Fight on the Beaches” (1940)
  4.  Washington:   “Farewell Address”
  5.  MacArthur:  “West Point Address”

I think of Winston Churchill, a Renaissance man living in the Twentieth Century, as the finest orator I’ve come upon with his ebullient, yet disciplined pathos as in “We Will Fight On the Beaches” (1940).  I think, too, of “Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat” and “This was their Finest Hour” as speeches transcending any I’ve encountered.

I included General Douglas MacArthur here as a supreme orator.  The rhythmic cadence and rich metaphor of his farewell West Point Address to the Corps”(1962), delivered while in his eighties and without notes,  still moves me:

The shadows are lengthening for me. The twilight is here. My days of old have vanished. They have gone glimmering through the dreams of things that were. Their memory is one of wondrous beauty, watered by tears and coaxed and caressed by the smiles of yesterday. I listen then, but with thirsty ear, for the witching melody of faint bugles blowing reveille, of far drums beating the long roll. In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield. But in the evening of my memory always I come back to West Point. Always there echoes and re-echoes: Duty, Honor, Country.

I should mention as a kind of postscript, my liking for the compassion and eloquence typifying President Obama’s speeches.  It hasn’t anything to do with politics.  Not since Ronald Reagan “the great communicator,” has any President done it so well.

Before I leave off, there’s one speech, this by Eisenhower, that didn’t make my list, since  you squeezed me down to five picks.  It’s the speech in which he warned of “the military-industrial complex.”  Often quoted, Eisenhower had originally drafted “the military-industrial-congressional complex,” but then blinked.  No longer idealists, we now know the dismal reality of vested Congressional pecuniary self-interests in shaping today’s Realpolitik.   Had he kept it in, wow!

–rj

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The George Zimmerman aftermath and my gut feelings

zimmerman

The trial of George Zimmerman ended on Saturday with the jury’s verdict of acquittal, based on reasonable doubt.  I had thought that surely with the late allowance of manslaughter consideration, Zimmerman would be convicted.  In my mind, along with many others, he was clearly engaged in profiling.  Florida’s Stand Your Ground law seemed inappropriate in a circumstance in which the defendant provoked the confrontation by pursuing the subject, ignoring the dispatcher’s counsel to let the police handle it.  How hard is that?  Besides, it was a specially appointed state prosecutor who found him culpable.

The entire incident with its racial undertones made me almost nauseous.   The panel pile-ups on MSNBC with its inveterate ideologues that rival, if not often outdo, Fox’s often castigated commitment to slant the truth, proved disturbing.  I changed the channel quickly when it promised Rev. Al Sharpton would appear following the break.  I’ve been long aware of his track history of imposing guilt simply based on race, only to be proven wrong.  Make no mistake.  Sharpton is no Mandela.

I have also disliked media’s repeated references to Zimmerman as a “white Hispanic” (by the way, false), serving only to fan the flames. It’s the race thing again, ironic since racism has been a primary plaintiff argument in alleging the defendant engaged in profiling.

I’m likewise appalled by the aftermath attacks on the jury, composed of six women, five of them White, though I think  an equal mix would have been better.  Talk about profiling?  What hypocrisy!

At the same time, I found the defense insensitive to the social history of Blacks, which informs so much of their suspicion they can’t find justice in White dominated courts.  In its close before the jury, it had the gall to quote slave-owning Thomas Jefferson, who we now know sexually exploited them.

There are no winners here. Trayvon Martin, a 17-year old, returning from a convenience store where he had bought candy and a soft drink, is dead.

Zimmerman, who will now have to always be looking over his shoulder, will need to go into hiding.

Fortunately, at least I hope, the jury’s identities are being protected.  They had a courage all their own in not being stampeded into judgment, though I think manslaughter was a legitimate option.  Mistakes were made on both sides.  Testimony often got cancelled out in the stream of many witnesses.  An honest jury doesn’t convict when there’s reasonable doubt.  The prosecution needed to prove its case.  It did not.  We can never know what really happened; only that it shouldn’t have happened.

The best way to honor Trayvon is to respond peaceably, though not passively.  As I write, the Department of Justice has announced it’s looking into whether civil right violations have occurred.

I had thought we had come along way in healing our racial wounds, but the trial with its undertones was like ripping off the scab.  We’ve still much work to do.

I’m concerned about much of racism’s breeding ground: abject poverty with its legacy of drugs, gangs, drive-by shootings; its fostering feelings of abandonment and exclusion; the harboring of resentment against the Man; in turn, the counter-resistance of Whites feeling themselves besieged,  often suspicious, reacting to symptoms rather than sources. In it ugliest vein, it leads to the often repeated American scenario of the White community thinking that Blacks must be sometimes killed or locked-up to keep their communities  safe.

Reconciliation must be our pursuit and it begins with understanding the Black malaise and its history.  Fellow Americans,  they are my brothers and sisters.  They are family.

–rj

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Two sides of a coin: conservative politics and militant Islam

I think all of us would like to take our yesterdays back, correct our missteps and, with the lucidity afforded by hindsight, retake the high ground.  In fact, our nostalgia for what’s past defines the tragedy of our present, manifesting itself in the emergence in the last 50-years of two primary forces, political and religious, warring on the present in the guise of conservatism.

Ironically, their genesis began at about the same time, with the return of Ayatollah Khomeini to Iran (1979) and the political ascendancy of Britain’s Margaret Thatcher and America’s Ronald Reagan.  Most revolutions soften, or give way to human inertia, or to inherent entropy that characterizes Natural Law as with the collapse of the Soviet hegemony and the transition of Mao’s China into a market economy.

In America, the vestiges of the past are prominent in the rise of Tea Party and neo-conservative Republicans advocating reduced government in a slashing of taxes, sealing our borders, deregulating the market place, and a bent toward imperialism in foreign policy.  It too has a religious scent in its hostility to gays, embrace of creationism in the classroom, and strident opposition to abortion and death with dignity legislation.  While it has no Sharia law it can impose, it finds its corollary in pursuing legislative edict.  It hasn’t any qualms about imposing its views on others.

Thankfully, in most places, it can’t muster a majority, although evangelicals and catholics turned out in record numbers to oppose Obama (78% and 67% respectively) in last November’s election.  Unfortunately, this faction has seized the reins of the party of Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, driving its agenda, making it easy to forget that it was a Republican president, Richard Nixon, who founded the Occupational Safety  & Health Administration, and the Food and Drug Administration.  It’s conceivable that even Reagan couldn’t muster the Republican nomination were he running today.

As for conservative religion, militant Islam has replaced communism as the new global threat, with tension and violence often in play, not only in the Middle East, but universally:  Africa (Nigeria, Mali, Egypt, Sudan, Somalia); Asia (Sri Lanka, Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia, India).  Terrorism has been its weapon of choice, with bombings and assassinations even in Britain, France and the Netherlands.

As for my own America, I had placed my bet on our legacy of assimilation to keep us safe from the tribalism of places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq where it isn’t sufficient to make Jihad against the Infidel, but Sunni and Shiite must slaughter one another.  I have been wrong, as scarcely a day passes that I don’t hear of immigrant Muslim youth conspiring violence here at home.  While their numbers are few, their threat is palpable, as witness the Boston’s Patriot’s Day bombings and the Ft. Hood massacre by a member of our own armed forces.

But I’m also aware of media hype and its distorting perspective and its conflict with my own experience.  I studied in France in 1985.  My dearest friends, all of them, we’re Muslim.  They came from Morocco, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Palestine.  They rejoiced in finding a rare American supporting the right of Palestinians to a homeland.  “C’est historique,” one of them delightfully said.

Not once did the subject of religion intrude.  Humanity and justice were our priorities, melting away creed and origin.  I have memories here at home of Muslim immigrants in my classes.  Again, the same: an abounding rapport and absence of religion’s strictures.

In short, Muslims, the vast majority, abhor the violence of a fundamentalist segment that does injury to Islam, “the religion of peace.”  Let me offer the following:

As American Muslims and scholars of Islam, we wish to restate our conviction that peace and justice constitute the basic principles of the Muslim faith.  We wish again to state unequivocally that neither the al-Qaeda organization nor Usama bin Laden represents Islam or reflects Muslim beliefs and practice. Rather, groups like al-Qaeda have misused and abused Islam in order to fit their own radical and indeed anti-Islamic agenda.  Usama bin Laden and al-Qaeda’s actions are criminal, misguided and counter to the true teachings of Islam (Statement Rejecting Terrorism, 57 leaders of North American Islamic organizations, September 9, 2002),

The truth is that conservative politics and religion are forces latent with danger when employing divisive appeals to self-interest rather than the collective good or utilizing scape-goating, straw-men methodologies designed to manipulate and secure power.  Such modalities, on the increase, mark a return to the volatile past with its animosities fostered by fear.

Politics should be about human community and addressing its needs; religion, about abandoning the barriers of distrust for the balm of love.

The earmarks of an unhealthy conservatism, whether political or religious, is one of parochial or ethnocentric interest, fueled by distrust and unthinking servility to the past, adumbrated by insecurity posed by change.

Sometimes I want to throw my arms up in despair.  I muse on how better a world devoid of the heat of political and religious passions; but as a devotee of the Enlightenment with its predication on Reason as the future’s arbitrator of a better world, I retain faith we can do better to reduce the disparity between entrenched custom and social amelioration.

I also know that the way of progress is sometimes in feet, not miles, and that injustices like slavery weren’t conquered quickly.  I believe there exists a resident Good in most people that will ultimately prevail.

In the interval, conserving those best values of the past while embracing the promise of the future’s kinder, more tolerant dispensation to humanity, is the proper synthesis for abounding peace and good will.

–rj

Wal-Mart: an anatomy of a colossus

walmart

You see them everywhere now, spreading like a fungus, invasive, unstoppable, a contagion blighting main street America.  What we used to call downtown is a pale shade of what once gave vitality and lent identity to our cities and towns, now reduced to a town hall, a few restaurants, maybe a police station, a bank or two, perhaps a post office and a motley of lawyer offices.

While the rise of the shopping mall, geared to a modern, mobile consumer, has played a significant role in emptying our town centers, the rise of box stores has accentuated the trend, with Wal-Mart foremost among them.

In the U.S., Wal-Mart is our largest retail employer, with 1.2 million workers; worldwide, more than 2 million.  It’s also the richest, with 2012 sales of $444 billion.  Each week, an estimated 200 million visit a Wal-Mart, at last count, some 10,700 stores located in 69 countries.  There are also ten web sites internationally for those finding it more convenient to shop at home.

Wal-Mart has its vociferous critics who malign its resistance to unions, poverty scrapping wages, marginal health benefits, and harsh impacting of local commerce.  Defending itself, Wal-Mart takes pride in pledging $2 billion through 2015 to combat hunger in America.  It gave 17 million to needy Gulf communities in the aftermath of Katrina.

Wal-Mart claims it’s done much to help small farmers by its increasing emphasis on local produce with $1 billion in purchases.  In countries such as Brazil, it has confined its meat sources to those farms not engaging in deforestation.

It has pioneered in garnering healthier foodstuffs in a commitment to reduce sodium by 25%% and added sugar by 10% and the elimination of transfats over the next two years at no price increase.  Last February, it introduced “It’s Great For You icons” to suggest healthier food items.  Along the same lines, it has contributed $26 million to programs promoting better nutrition.

In the sustainability area, Wal-Mart is a leader in transitioning to solar for 5 to 20% of the energy needs of its stores.  Last week, it announced immediate solar implementation for ten of its stores in Maryland.

But much of what Wal-Mart does is all about public relations, or polishing its image, a shellac concealing inequities.  Were it done for its own sake, or from compassion, or a sense of social need, such altruism would doubtless be received warmly.  It continues, however,  to advance itself by marginalizing worker wages and benefits.

In 2002, there were the revelations in Mexico, where bribery was used to purchase land sites and contracts. Initially, Bentonville, AR headquarters hushed up the scandal, only to sense media’s gaining on them and the fact of declining stock value.  Its response, as nearly always with Wal-Mart, was damage control.  Appointing its own investigators, it ultimately sent its findings back to the very authorities in Mexico tainted by the scandal, resulting in exoneration of the accused.

There is also no denying Wal-Mart has been fiercely anti-union.  In Canada, for example, it closed a store just after it had been unionized.  In late 2012, organized union boycotts were staged against Wal-Mart on Black Friday, though few “associates,” about 50 nationwide, took part and consumers virtually nil.  In fairness, unions were a principal factor behind the collapse of Hostess Brands following last November’s strike and have often exacerbated costs elsewhere in a marketplace keenly sensitive to foreign competition.  In Kentucky, where I live, Toyota workers have repeatedly turned down unionization by large pluralities.  My point is that when employees are treated well they have little relish for unions.  The lack of participation by Wal-Mart employees smacks of fear of reprisal, given their meager earnings yet need for income.

In those industries represented by unions, businesses in general have responded to decreased profitability by increasingly resorting to contract labor, reduced hours, reduction in workers hired, layoffs, elimination of stores and factories, or by simply packing-up and leaving the U. S.  Hostess Brands, makers of Twinkies I grew up on,  had already been struggling with indebtedness and sagging profits, and yet one of its several union called a fatal strike.  But it’s one thing to work for Toyota that treats workers like family and quite another working for parsimonious Wal-Mart, which has increasingly been turning to the same cost limiting measures.

It may come as a surprise, but nearly a third of Wal-Mart’s hires come from heavily unionized grocery stores and fast food enterprises that actually paid their workers less in wages and benefits than Wal-Mart.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average pay of a Wal-Mart associate is $21,744 (2012) compared with $20,200 for grocery store workers.  The anomaly is that Wal-Mart prospers while retailers like Montgomery Ward have bellied-up, and chains like JC Penney and Sears may be about to follow.  It seems obvious consumers have been voting with their feet.  Sam Walton’s philosophy was to sell cheap and reap volume.  He seems to have gotten  the message, but for self-advantage rather than entering into the ethics good stewardship of wealth demands.

Turnover at Wal-Mart is high, with half of hires quitting after only a year. Still, it’s less than the 65% average in the retail industry at large, which merely demonstrates worker discontent is intrinsic in a market place defined by low wages and marginal benefits generally.

Recent headlines have focused on alleged discrimination against women in areas of  pay and promotion with several class action suits underway.  Though two-thirds of Wal-Mart’s workers are women, only a third are in management.  Wal-Mart’s argument is that the statistical disparity doesn’t reflect context, with many women preferring part-time employment or lacking in prerequisite skills.  Pay and promotion are decided by local stores anyway, not Bentonville.  In a 2011 High Court decision, the Court ruled by a 5-4 vote in Wal-Mart’s favor, based on local determination rather than national policy.  To Wal-Mart’s credit, two years ago it launched a support program to assist women in acquiring management skills.

Walmart has also been taken to task for relying on imports, especially from China, resulting in decimation of the manufacturing sector.  For me, this is reliable criticism, though I would argue America’s manufacturing exodus had begun before Wal-Mart’s emergence as a retail colossus.  I also ask, Where is this not happening and how likely its rebirth?  Still, Wal-Mart has pedaled foreign goods with unabated alacrity from the outset in consort with low wages to maximize profitability.

I started out with the given of the decimated local community; it’s a fact, much of it caused by Wal-Mart, but not solely.  What about Lowes and Home Depot, Best Buy and Macy’s among a plethora of entrepreneurial empires that have increasingly homogenized America’s look and short circuited the mom & pop stores of our childhood?  Will they also go away?

But there’s a good side, too.  Consider Vermont.  I’d gladly live there if it weren’t so cold and costly.  Vermont has only four Wal-Marts!  This comes about largely through small town pressure to maintain community cohesiveness.  Yet in Burlington, Vermont’s largest city, you’ll find the same crowded Wal-Mart aisles as anywhere else.  What’s more, it’s proved a spinoff as an anchor for other chain stores like Lowe’s.  Nonetheless, it comes at a price and I remember popular writer Bill Bryson commenting on his adopted Hanover, NH town how much he enjoyed the intactness of the town  center not yet impacted by suburban malls.

In today’s troubled economy, at least more than a million Americans have found work at Wal-Mart unlike many millions more who want to work and are open to even lower paying jobs, but cannot.  But this speaks to me of desperation and not free, and first, choice. Personally, I don’t like to shop at Wal-Mart’s and avoid doing so in favor of cleaner, less-crowded aisles; that special intimacy I find at my local drug store where they know me by name; foods that somehow look fresher and less picked-over.

I do sometimes think the Wal-Mart criticism, at times justified, borders on an unceasing venom fostered by some of my fellow Progressives yearning to restore us to a pristine world, which I doubt ever existed except in the weave of human myth, proving again Idealism’s too frequent folly in pursuing a salient, but unhelpful, simplicity. Bottom line, Wal-Mart is not some rude renegade in the business commune. They’re simply the largest and thus most visible target and hardly the sole sinner.

I suspect my fellows resent as I do the oligarchy of the rich, particularly when its comes to the money pinching Sam Walton who became America’s first billionaire, $2.8 billion, in the mid 80s.  Even then, parsimony came easily to Sam, who had a vogue for $5.00 haircuts and never left a tip.  He made sure his family, Helen and the four children, were  well-provided for, however, bequeathing a net worth of $23 billion.  Six of the surviving Walton offspring ultimately had as much money as the bottom 30% of Americans.  But money talks.  In 1992, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bush and his wife, who came to Bentonville for the occasion.

I’m chagrined at the $23 million executive salary paid to Wal-Mart CEO Michael Duke this year.  According to the Huffington Post, at an average pay of $12.67 an hour, it would take 785 years for an “associate” to earn Duke’s one year salary.  But maybe this is an unfair gripe or poor sense of what makes for injustice,  After all, Apple’s Tim Cook gets just under $400 million per annum, exhibiting capitalism’s vulgarity at its worst.

What I also fervently dislike about Wal-Mart is its intrusion into virtually every nook and cranny, not just textiles and food.  Not only do they sell gas, they now feature inside banks, subway and McDonalds outlets.  Medicine is currently all the rage, having begun with optometric services.  Now Walmart wants to be your physician, too, with thousands of clinics offering an array of services.

But I’m being unfair again, since Wal-Mart currently lags behind CVC and Walgreens in this market dash to offer such services.  But my insistent defiance leads to my confessing I now shop at a Kroger superstore for our groceries, another box store in other words, where I can also buy furniture, kitchen utensils, even jewelry.  New Yorker writer George Packer eloquently captures my mood in his acute analysis of America’s fall from grace (Unwinding [2013]) in writing of fellow resistant types:

… in parts of the country that were getting richer, on the coasts and in some big cities, many consumers regarded Wal-Mart and its vast aisles full of crappy, if not dangerous, Chinese-made goods with horror, and instead purchased their shoes and meat in expensive boutiques as if overpaying might inoculate them against the spread of cheapness, while stores like Macy’s, the bastions of a former middle-class economy, faded out, and America began to look once more like the country Mr. Sam had grown up in.

Like it or not, we’re all caught in the net. Wal-Mart has coalesced with the landscape, ubiquitous and with many imitators.  We can never, no matter what we do, get quite free again.  We can never go home again.

–rj

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Declining bee numbers: we know not what we do

bees

 “The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy,
a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great
speed, but at its end lies disaster” (Rachel Carson)

 It was ecologist Rachel Carson who put environmental awareness on the radar screen with her sobering classic, Silent Spring (1962), drawing the attention of President John F. Kennedy in its precise detailing of the havoc posed by toxic spraying on wildlife and ultimate danger to ourselves:  “It is ironic to think that man might determine his own future by something so seemingly trivial as the choice of an insect spray.”

Decades later, we seem to have tossed her warning aside.  For example, there was the recent killing of thousands of bumblebees in Wilsonville, OR.  Man-made, it shouldn’t have occurred.  Investigation showed that flowering trees adjacent to a Target store had been sprayed with the pesticide, Dinoteferan (trade name Safari) to control aphids.  It isn’t supposed to be applied to flowering trees.  According to the Xerces Society for Invertebrae Conservation, the incident is being taken seriously and the trees will be covered with nets next year to prevent access to bumblebees and other pollinators.  I ask, Why spray at all?  If you don’t like getting the sticky aphid residue on your car, then don’t park under a tree.

Perhaps the worst of spray induced bee killing occurred on September 11, 2011, when an estimated 12 million bees died within 24-hours following aerial spraying to combat mosquitos in Brevard County, Florida.  Again, is it worth it?

As is, the plight of bees is worldwide, threatening our food supply.  Since 2005, Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) has wreaked havoc on bees, largely through the  widespread use of neonicotinoids.  In the U.S., genetically produced corn is sprayed with neonicotinoids, with residues found even in adjacent fields.  Two recent studies show possible effects on short and long term bee memory, resulting in bees not returning to their hives, the tell-tale sign of CCD.

In Europe, neonicotinoids have now been recently banned for two years by the European Union to stem a decline in bee colonies.  We know they are devastating to amphibians and bat populations as well, which have also experienced sharp population declines.

The plight of honey bees goes beyond spraying, however, with extensive mite and viral infestation occurring.  As of yet, we haven’t found a remedy.

I know people who are horrified of bees and will resort to canned sprays.  Me, I’m a gardener and I’ve put countless hours in my garden working side-by- side with bees without consequence.  I respect them and give them room.  I know their preferred hours as busy laborers as well.

I confess I used to resort to sprays often, especially to control fungus and summer’s ubiquitous Japanese beetles in my rose garden.  I know better now and use nothing more than soaps, if anything at all.  I am considering replacing my roses with more tolerant, bee friendly plants like hydrangeas.

Spraying can kill birds as well as bees, by the way, and long term, increases the risk of cancer in human beings.  As is, nearly all of us have toxic residues from years of exposure to chemical substances, many of them sprays.  Again, Carson has warned us that we continue at our own peril: “A Who’s Who of pesticides is therefore of concern to us all. If we are going to live so intimately with these chemicals eating and drinking them, taking them into the very marrow of our bones – we had better know something about their nature and their power.”

But back to bees per se.  What would a world without them be like?  Last week, my wife and I were in northern California, driving through vast groves of almond trees adjacent to both sides of the highway, neatly geometric phalanxes of greenery stretching as far as the eye can see.  Sadly, their vastness may fade into memory like the omnipresent American elm of my New England boyhood that graced our commons.  These almond orchids, spread across 800,000 acres, are in trouble.  Dependent on bees for pollination, last winter saw a decline of up to 50% in hives.

To keep things going, these groves require up to 1.6 million domestic bees annually, resulting in emergency importing of bees.  With bee declines elsewhere, the future is problematical.  Almonds are critical to California’s troubled economy, constituting its largest agricultural export, and its demise would be devastating.

Worldwide, some 100 crops require insect pollination.  Given the earth’s burgeoning population, fewer bees could mean famine for many and inflated food prices.  Meanwhile, in the U.S., neonicotinoids continue to be used widely, particularly on vegetable and fruit crops.  Ironically, they were developed as a safer alternative to pesticides like DDT.  Unfortunately, their danger goes beyond spraying, since they’re systemic, or incorporated into the growing plant.

Like global warming, the threat of declining insect pollinators may seem benign, or far off in its consequences, lulling us into denial or indifference.  The reality is that, again like global warming, the effects of declining bee populations are exponentially happening now.  Incidents like those in Oregon and Florida only make matter worse.  We are intricately linked with all earth’s creatures and their demise hastens our own.

–rj

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