made this one long ago

just learning to use the new old blog

Originally posted on December 17, 2014.

Night homes…person lairs

A while ago I found myself, as we drove down the roads here in rural Maine, thinking about people and their homes. Somehow, these nights, watching the houses along the road, I realized how connected we are to all the other animals: how similar are our activities and purposes, I realize how similar our houses are to the dens of animals, how all of us in the animal kingdom, humans included, find ways to protect ourselves a bit from the elements. Our houses are like fox’s dens, like beaver homes, like nests, like burrows.

When I think about this, I realize how misguided it is for us to imagine that we are anything but members of the whole animal kingdom, one of many, a part of the whole.

Lately, I find myself looking at another aspect of all this. I see the lit up windows as we pass the houses. I make some quick and uninformed guess about what’s going on. Inside the window, a lamp, a plant, the vague silhouette of the inhabitant of the house, doing something I know nothing about: often one window lit up in an otherwise darkened house. It somehow seems a little lonely. Each person is going about his business inside of each solitary house. One can only guess what that person is doing or why. I see little bits of movement and then we drive on and drive by the next house, where someone else is doing something that may or may not be similar.

Somehow this seems like a metaphor about the whole human condition. We see little bits of each other. We only partially understand one another. We reveal little bits of ourselves. Little hints, just the lit up windows reveal little hints about the goings on in the houses, offer me incomplete and subjective guesses about the nature of other people. We are forever driving past each other in the dark and only partially and incompletely understanding one another.

Originally posted on October 1, 2014.

My email is flooded with requests for money from the Democrats. It’s hard to say no, but I’m trying. Yes I know the Republicans are much much worse, but 100 % of the senators of both parties supported the recent massacres on Gaza. Then I was just about to bend and I read in yahoo news that Obama was making a special case in Syria. though he promised not to bomb civilians and especially children during the newest bombing camapign, he’s making an exception for Syria. I guess it’s okay to kill Syrian children. How sad and discouraging it has all become.

Originally posted on March 25, 2013.

Lately our country has replaced our traditional forms of military action – invasions, occupations and aerial bombing from planes flown by pilots – with unmanned aircraft, known as drones. Soldiers can pick a target from the safety of some base here in the USA, send out a drone to bomb the target, and go home for dinner; nobody in the U.S. risks injury or feels the victims’ pain.

People who favor this kind of warfare say that the “job” can get done without endangering U.S. personnel. Maybe it costs less, too.

People who oppose drone warfare say that it makes it too easy to wage war without suffering any of the consequences, including witnessing the carnage. They also say that we are making a mockery of international law when we bomb countries with which we’re not at war. I agree.

But there’s another issue that keeps cropping up: What if some internet hacker managed to penetrate the code? What if someone (just one person!) managed to intercept one of these drones and send it back where it came from? What if they managed to “do unto us as we have done unto them”? What will happen then? What new weapon will we develop to keep ourselves “safer” than they are?

It seems to me that we’re entering dangerous new territory. All of this happening without little knowledge on the part of the public, much less our approval. It seems that it makes our country look less and less like a democracy.

Originally posted on February 10, 2013.

Something keeps bothering me about the discussions about the budget deficit, the national debt and the need for austerity. People say that we need to cut services, cut taxes and shrink the government. What bothers me is that these people make a comparison with a single family. The idea is that families all have to balance their budgets, so therefore the government should do the same thing.

But I wonder, do families really balance their budgets without debt and credit?
 If we need a car to get to work or just to go shopping, many of us borrow money. If we refuse to borrow money, and can’t get to work, our economic wellbeing suffers. Is it sound economic policy for our family to do without the car and therefore not get to work? If our roof is leaking, we may have to borrow money to fix it. We try to live within out means, but if a child gets sick, we do whatever needs to be done to help to heal her. If need be, we borrow money. Our kids are more important to us.

At the same time, we realize that we shouldn’t take on great debt for extravagant 
or useless projects. In my view, the good uses of out national wealth include, maintaining the infrastructure, educating our children, providing medical care for all, preparing for global climate change and making the changes needed to lessen it’s impact, keeping our national postal system and our public transportation system, supporting the arts…….etc etc. What seems wasteful to me is conducting unnecessary wars, spending billions of dollars on our elections, lining the pockets of the very rich by dipping into the pockets of the poor and the working people.

Originally posted on December 31, 2012.

Waiting in the checkout line in the supermarket yesterday, I was watching the young couples, men and women, checking out. They seemed so ernest and so uncertain. It was as if they weren’t sure they were doing it right. I was thinking that it seemed almost like a rite of initiation into adulthood on America…learning to shop….learning their part in capitalist ritual….doing their part to keep it all going. It made me a little sad. They all looked so ripe and beautiful, ready for something more grand than mere shopping.

Meanwhile, the oldtimers seemed glad to be out and to have escaped from their loneliness. It seemed like this might be the closest thing to a social gathering. They dawdled. They compared the products….read the labels… partly wise shopping, but also maybe partly an escape from their isolated lives. Is that too bleak a view of American life? I’m not sure.

Originally posted on August 20, 2012.

Someone posted a story on facebook about a member of the tea party who had gotten into some legal trouble. Above the story he wrote as a comment “another tea-bag in HOT WATER..” It seemed to me that was a natural slogan.

Then we went to Skowhegan for our weekly Bridges for Peace vigil. (…that is, if it’s still a vigil even though it isn’t silent.)
Anyway we were the first ones there and I was thinking about slogans. I was thinking that I wanted to make a new sign to carry. I was thinking about the characteristics of a good sign…..of a good slogan. It had to be succinct. Cars are driving across the bridge. We are standing there, over the river. The cars can’t slow down to read a sign because the cars behind them will be held up. So one has to find a way to say it with a few large words that are easy to read from afar in a few seconds. We have to invent clever advertisements for peace. A tanker truck drove by that was filled with liquid Carbon Dioxide.

One of the reasons why so many people drive around in such nice cars, one of the reasons they can afford to do it is that there is so much cheap oil. Even when the price goes up, even when it’s hurting people, it’s still cheap enough to allow everyone to drive around. One of the reasons why public transportation isn’t financially feasible is that we’re still getting drunk on cheap oil.

But we’re all like addicts. We rob and pillage to satisfy our addiction. We go to war to maintain our supply of oil. We drill in ever and ever more precarious places to get our fix. We watch our planet heating up more and more but do nothing, like some junkie whose family is being destroyed but who can’t stop. We turn food into fuel while people starve, to get our fix. And yes, we drive to town to stand on the bridge for peace.

There’s some cycle here. We stand on the bridge to protest the war waged to keep the oil, but we have to tailor our message so that passing cars can read it on the fly. We need to invent slogans.

Something else happened there too. I’m not sure why I think it’s pertinent, but I do. Our friend Lisa pointed out to me that there were drops of blood on the sidewalk. Somehow we got into a Nancy Drew mode. We followed the trail of drops of blood down the sidewalk of the bridge, onto the main street sidewalk, up to the crosswalk (where there were a bunch of drops) across the street on the crosswalk, and onto the sidewalk on the other side of the street.
All the way, every few feet there was another drop of blood. The line of drops was weaving back and forth. In front to the bar, there were a whole lot of drops and some broken glass. Obviously it was the place where something happened that caused someone injury.

I guess it seemed as if the desolation that caused people to get too drunk and to want to fight instead of singing and dancing was in some way strongly connected to our bleak addiction to oil.

So what should the new sign say?

Addicted to Oil
or the original
No Blood for Oil
or
Any good ideas?

Originally posted on June 26, 2012.

Man oh man…it just keeps raining and raining. I’ve never seen such giant slugs.The basil in the garden is yellow and the lettuce kind of rotted.  Someone told me last year that there was something about the slow destruction of the gulf stream that was causing more rain in New England. Storms are somehow getting stalled here.

Meanwhile a guy was visiting here the other day from Holland who said that they had never had such a cold winter. The gulf stream has been keeping Europe warmer than one might expect given that the 45th parallel runs through central Maine and through Italy. (And it goes through Korea, if I remember newscasts from the Korean War right. )

Anyway, I’m going to stop saying anything about global warming and talk instead about climate change.