Category Archives: Politics

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Politics

The Environment Political

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Imbolc                                                Waning Wild Moon

Bounced out of bed this morning at 9:30 am.  Yesterday’s early morning and late night at the capitol had taken its toll.  I’m awake now though.  My Latin for Chapter 7 is done, this is 3rd declension nouns.  I’ve already received one of two books of readings that Greg, our tutor, feels will move us forward faster in regard to translation.

Lobbying in this political environment is tough for the natural environment.  Jobs and deficits rule the world of the legislature; the natural world, or at least the world outside of the built world, intrudes like a beloved relative dropping by for an unexpected visit.

This session we can set the table for issues of future years, defend against certain potential harms and hope to pass some needed but relatively non-controversial legislation like complete streets (involved all potential users of transportation equally, not privileging motorized vehicles), extension of the open-bottle laws to off highway vehicles, promote economic development tools that promote green jobs and encourage retention of the state’s moratorium against building nuclear energy plants.

At some point the winds will become more favorable and we’ll be able to tack instead of run before the wind, as we’re doing now.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Politics

Our Democracy At Work

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Imbolc                                   Waning Wild Moon

It’s late and I don’t want to get into too much detail, but I just came back from the capitol.  The event was a hearing on the proposed sulfide mining operation in northern Minnesota called Northmet or Polymet.  Like most hearings it went on too long and heard too much from too many people, but the depth and resonance of the environmental communities testimony made me proud to be there as part of it.

This issue is not going to go away because sulfide mining represents a real and ongoing threat to fragile wetlands, forests and watersheds, threatening to add mercury and other heavy metals, poisoning the very processes nature created to purify water and adding pollutants upstream from the Lake Superior watershed.

This one needs people on horses carrying red banners, trumpets blaring, and a town crier saying Beware, Beware, Beware.

Commentary on the news, Politics

Shopping

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Imbolc                                            Waning Wild Moon

Watched The Hurt Locker.  It comes to mind this morning because Saturday is grocery shopping here at chez Ellis/Olson.  After spending a full rotation in Iraq as a fearless and emotionally committed bomb tech, the lead character rotates back to the mainland. The scene that takes us back to the states with him opens with him pushing a grocery cart down a frozen foods aisle.

The shift from the sandy, hot precincts of Iraq to a modern US grocery store jars on several levels.   The first is visual.  The glass is clean, the chrome gleaming, the banks of freezers stretching out quite a distance.  The second is aural, no bombs going off, no screaming civilians, no rumbling trucks, no blare of heavy metal music.  The third is the juxtaposition of this  bomb-suit wearing, in danger of dying, hard-drinking, rock and roll blasting, Staff Sergeant William James with the ordered gleam of American food retailing.

His wife comes by with his son, “Get some cereal and I’ll meet you at the checkout.”

He leaves frozen foods and goes into the cereal aisle.  Told to get some cereal he confronts another well-ordered aisle, this one with boxes upon boxes of varied types of grains made into breakfast food.  His confusion and inability to make a decision contrast sharply with his demeanor in the war zone where life becomes stripped down and, though often life or death, the decisions are more straight forward and apparently easier to make.

I have a very mild sense of this every time I go to a grocery store.  It comes from traveling in 3rd world countries and seeing the chaotic, but often much more interesting mercados and street merchandising there mixed in with the desperate poverty that makes the range of choice available to us enough to cause the kind of confusion and lack of decisiveness expressed by Staff Sergeant William James in the Hurt Locker.

Politics, Sport

Bald Guys Are Athletic, too.

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Imbolc                                            Waxing Wild Moon

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.” – Albert Einstein

I don’t know who this guy is and I don’t care.  I just love the fact that there is a bald athlete competing in the games.  This guy gives me hope.  2014 here I come.

The games don’t last forever, do they?  Or does it just seem like it?  Some of these sports I enjoy, but two full weeks of reruns?  Geez.

The quote by Einstein is one of my favorites.  I have it on a t-shirt that a different sized me used to wear a lot.  When you think about it, knowledge is useless without imagination.  I mean, what would you do with all those climate statistics if you couldn’t drive the conservatives crazy with them by imagining a cooked planet?

Lets hope the Democrats in Congress grow some balls and pass some health care legislation.  Pull private health insurance out of the cold dead hands of the right wing nut jobs and stick it where it belongs.  C’mon.  Use your imagination.

Politics

Political Action: It’s Personal.

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Imbolc                                              New Moon (Wild)

Politics.   Sigh. I feel bad for all those bright young things who worked their butts off for Obama and instead ended up with a President.  To be political is to be cynical.  All of us who move outside the coziness of home and into the political fray will confront a sobering realization:  change is slow and change that isn’t usually wrecks something in the process.

Not only that.  The change that is possible at any given time has little to do with the righteousness of the cause, the clarity of the facts and the obvious path to a particular solution.  The reason?  All things happen within a context and nothing, let me repeat that, nothing transcends context.  Consider early efforts against Jim Crow legislation.  Look at the long protest against the Vietnam War.  The twisty, tortuous path of health care reform.  Political financing.  Matters related to a woman’s right to choose an abortion.

Climate change is the issue of the current moment that I would nominate as most likely to transcend.  Has it?  No.  Lobbyists muddy the water with false research.  A few loud conservative voices make it seem as if the questions are still in debate, when they are not.  The long curve of climate change effects makes change now difficult.  Not to mention health care reform is in the pipeline. We may fail on climate change because this mix of factors makes us dither until New York is underwater and the south a burnt over district.  Time will tell.

Why not give up then?  If change is unpredictable, then why give any effort at all?  So many people drop out because their first taste of politics or their first taste of issue advocacy ends in failure.  Or, worse, ends in a success that does not produce the results imagined.

Here are three reasons for staying on the ancientrail of political life.

1. Change does happen. It may be slow and off point for a long time, but we no longer have slaves or Jim Crow laws.  A woman’s right to choose an abortion has remained steady in spite of considerable agitation.  Gays and lesbian can be married in several states now.  The Vietnam war is over.  If many activists had not stayed engaged, then none of these long term victories would have happened.

2. To give up gives the victory away. If Martin Luther King and his generation of civil rights workers had decided the work had cost them too much, or the probability of success was too low, we would not have an African-American president or burgeoning African-American middle class.  If the folks in the Sierra Club Northstar Chapter had backed off in their support of the Boundary Waters because the opposition was too strong, there would be motorboats now where thousands, hundreds of thousands canoe quietly.

3. If not you, who?  If not now, when? Politics is personal.  We have, in a democratic society, a gift of political engagement that matters.  It matters, though, only if you engage.  This is a question of authenticity, of being the person you are and can be.  At this level success or failure does not matter.  What does matter is that you listened to  your own heart; and when it said, here I stand, you stood up.

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Politics

Vitriol Set Aside

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Imbolc                                               New Moon (Wild)

I wrote a vitriolic piece on sulfide mining that the better angels of my nature said to set side for a bit and let it cool off.  Let me just say this:  if there is an issue in our time comparable to the Boundary Waters struggle of the mid-70’s, this is it.  While climate change is, admittedly, the uber issue of our time, in terms of local environmental politics, the question of sulfide mining and its nasty  side affects looms over all else.  I’m opposed to it, at least until they can demonstrate a safe  technique.

Birthday phone call from cyber mage Bill Schmidt.  Bill and I share a philosophical and theological education and a similar journey, one you might call, Leaving the Hermeneutical Circle.  That is, we have both stepped outside the tradition of interpreting Jewish and Christian scripture and tradition as pointing to a reality beyond themselves.  Neither one of us has a missionary sensibility like say, Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris, in fact, we both appreciate the need for folks to make their own way in these matters.  Still, it’s nice to have a friend who understands the  ancientrail.

Great Work, Politics

Mr. Ellis Goes to the Capitol

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Imbolc                         Waning Cold Moon

I spent the morning at the capitol.  Justin and I visited Frank Hornstein and Kathy Bigham.  These are meet and greet sessions where we talk to legislators on committees important to our legislation.  It does put a different spin on lobbying per se, but the general problem–big money talks–remains.

Figuring out where to park at the legislature is always an interesting process.  This time I chose a lot across from the old Supreme Court building.  By some fickle finger of fate the #1 slot was open, right by the entrance.  I grabbed it.  Only problem with this lot is you only have 3 hours, then you have to come back physically and renew.  Oh, second problem, you have to have a lot of quarters:  $4.50 worth for 3 hours.  I  stocked up on quarters before I left.

Justin and I used the lengthy system of tunnels to get from the Capitol to SOB and then onto the DOT building where we had lunch in their cafeteria.  When I first moved to Minnesota, I thought it was very funny that they had tunnels.  Now that I’ve been here almost 40 years, I wonder why we don’t have more.

I like being in the thick of things again.  It energizes me and gives me at least one place where I can help make a difference.

Aging, Politics, Weather +Climate

The lustre of mid-day

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Winter                                             Full Cold Moon

The full cold moon now has -5 temps under its light.  When there’s snow on the ground and a full moon in the sky, I always think of Twas’ The Night Before Christmas:  And the moon on the new fallen snow gave a lustre of midday to objects below.  Writing that reminded me of a performance I gave of that poem with our high school concert band in the background.  Scared me to death and I didn’t like it.  Acting I loved, but performing to music–not at all.

I surprised my 3 year old granddaughter last week with the news that Grandpa did modern dance in college, performing in front of an audience several times.  My mind says yes I did, my body insists it could never have done that.  It was fun.

Obama.  Our government.  I have known for decades now, as have many of my contemporaries that our system of government broke down long ago.  There are many reasons:  money, lobbyists, an archaic method of representing voters wishes, an apathetic citizenry, the practice of the big lie.  In the past I subscribed to the idea of radical change, a dramatic overhaul of our system, one that would replace it with, say, democratic socialism or a scheme in which the whole of Amerika broke down into smaller regional states.

With the passing years I have lost my faith in radical change in two ways.  One, I doubt the chance of creating it.  Two, and more fundamentally, I’m not convinced that my radical change would not morph into something terrible, perhaps in a different way, but still terrible.  I suppose this could lead to despair or reasoned apathy, but I’m not cut from that cloth.  In a bad situation you use the tools you have and  work for the best change you can expect.

It may be that within the remaining years of my lifetime that  the stars will align  and dramatic change will be possible.  I doubt it, but it could happen.  If it does, I’m there.  Even so, I’m not sanguine about a better world.

This world, this one world, the only world we have must always be enough and not even close to enough.  We must live in it as if it is enough; we must work for it as if it’s not even close.

Aging, Humanities, Letters, Politics

Tires, Novels, Latin

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Winter                                       Waxing Cold Moon

A productive day.  Moved forward on the novel.  Removed the tire, took it in to Carlson, discovered it would require a new tire.   Over to the pharmacy to pick up meds.  Pharmacist recommended 40 mg pills instead of 20’s.  Cuts our co-pay in half for an expensive med.  Lipitor.  Good deal.  The kind of things that will help us once we’re both on medicare.

Finished up the translation section of the Latin chapter.  We’ll see, but it seemed straightforward to me.  Fun.

Work out and tonight at 7:00 pm the first Legcom conference call.    Rock and roll.

Politics, Sport, Weather +Climate

America the society is in fine shape! America the polity most certainly is not.

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Winter                                   Waxing Cold Moon

OK.  The Cold Moon has finally risen on its namesake air temps.  8 this morning.  It’s a clear day after a small snowfall yesterday.

If I were to put my finger on one thing to account for the Viking’s loss Sunday, discounting the six turnovers, it would be the 12 men in the huddle call that put them out of field goal range with 28 seconds left.  That’s a coach thing.  In spite of a spectacular job of recruiting personnel, we have the best overall players at many positions–8 Vikes in the ProBowl–the on the field decision making by coaches still leaves something to be desired.  I don’t know what it is, but it seems apparent.

The Democrats need to grow some cojones and pass healthcare reform.  Whining because you’ve lost a super majority makes no sense.  They still have an 18 vote majority.  Use it or deserve to lose it.  We need leadership and decision making, not caviling and cajoling.

I read a very interesting analysis of our political system a few days back that jolted me.  Printed in the Atlantic it shows our system has big  problems, based largely on the shift of populations since the early days of the colonies:

How America Can Rise Again

“We are now 200-plus years past Jefferson’s wish for permanent revolution and nearly 30 past Olson’s warning, with that much more buildup of systemic plaque—and of structural distortions, too. When the U.S. Senate was created, the most populous state, Virginia, had 10 times as many people as the least populous, Delaware. Giving them the same two votes in the Senate was part of the intricate compromise over regional, economic, and slave-state/free-state interests that went into the Constitution. Now the most populous state, California, has 69 times as many people as the least populous, Wyoming, yet they have the same two votes in the Senate. A similarly inflexible business organization would still have a major Whale Oil Division; a military unit would be mainly fusiliers and cavalry. No one would propose such a system in a constitution written today, but without a revolution, it’s unchangeable. Similarly, since it takes 60 votes in the Senate to break a filibuster on controversial legislation, 41 votes is in effect a blocking minority. States that together hold about 12 percent of the U.S. population can provide that many Senate votes. This converts the Senate from the “saucer” George Washington called it, in which scalding ideas from the more temperamental House might “cool,” into a deep freeze and a dead weight.

The Senate’s then-famous “Gang of Six,” which controlled crucial aspects of last year’s proposed health-care legislation, came from states that together held about 3 percent of the total U.S. population; 97 percent of the public lives in states not included in that group. (Just to round this out, more than half of all Americans live in the 10 most populous states—which together account for 20 of the Senate’s 100 votes.) “The Senate is full of ‘rotten boroughs,'” said James Galbraith, of the University of Texas, referring to the underpopulated constituencies in Parliament before the British reforms of 1832. “We’d be better off with a House of Lords.”

The decades-long bipartisan conspiracy to gerrymander both state and federal electoral districts doesn’t help. More and more legislative seats are “safe” for one party or the other; fewer and fewer politicians have any reason to appeal to the center or to the other side. In a National Affairs article, “Who Killed California?,” Troy Senik pointed out that 153 state or federal positions in California were at stake in the 2004 election. Not a single one changed party. This was an early and extreme illustration of a national trend…

I started out this process uncertain; I ended up convinced. America the society is in fine shape! America the polity most certainly is not. Over the past half century, both parties have helped cause this predicament—Democrats by unintentionally giving governmental efforts a bad name in the 1960s and ’70s, Republicans by deliberately doing so from the Reagan era onward. At the moment, Republicans are objectively the more nihilistic, equating public anger with the sentiment that “their” America has been taken away and defining both political and substantive success as stopping the administration’s plans. As a partisan tactic, this could make sense; for the country, it’s one more sign of dysfunction, and of the near-impossibility of addressing problems that require truly public efforts to solve.”