Samhain                                                                    Thanksgiving Moon

Despair and fear crown the pronouncements of GOP candidates about ISIS. Watch mosques. Don’t let in any refugees. Make all Muslims wear an identifying marker. Yes, it’s easy from the left to see these notions as simply stupid, xenophobic canards, but they mean more than that.

At least I think they do. When I listen, I hear people who fear for the stability of their lives. People whose current situation seems so fragile that difference could make it shatter. The economy has consistently displaced the working class, leaving with them no job options that can support a family.

Veterans come home from fighting our misadventures in the Middle East, veterans whose personal origins are most likely working class or even lower on the socioeconomic scale, and find no work. The hawks who wanted them to stave off the coming tide of this group or that group want more money for defense but not for the defenders, especially the defenders now out in the work world after their military duty is over.

The flag wavers, the stars and bars loyalists, signal not so much love of country, but fear of missed or fading opportunity. We’ve created a unique, even Alice down the rabbit hole world where those whose lives are being ruined by the oligarchic 1% pin the blame on people fleeing the very same radical terrorists they want to eliminate.

It’s easy for a Ben Carson or a Donald Trump or a Ted Cruz to ignite the flame of discontent among these Americans. The lesson for those of us not taken in by these poseurs is that the anguish in this country is real. Life in the U.S. has been tainted by decades of war, by trickle up economics, by blindness to the history of this almost 100% immigrant nation.

These dark currents in our common life will not find resolution soon. We (the left) need to convince the Trump, Carson, Cruz voters that we do in fact care as much about them as we do about the Syrian refugees and the struggles of just folks in the Middle East. This sounds like a subtle difference, but it’s not. There is no choice, either us or them. No, we must use that very word, we, to include Americans and victims of terrorists worldwide. Life does not present us with only one option or the other. We can choose both.

And we must.

Mabon                                                                 Moon of the First Snow

The cold war. Hard to imagine explaining this to someone who didn’t experience it.

That Sputnik, for example, was not just or even primarily a first satellite in space, but instead a dire political statement of the advanced Soviet state.

That there was an iron curtain that separated eastern Europe from western Europe, a series of checkpoints and border controls that kept folks in as much as it kept folks out.

That the possible advance of communism became a convenient tool for paranoid patriots, just as muslim terror is today. That once the Soviet Union strode across the world as China has begun to do today.

That Kremlinology referred to the arcane practice of reading the intentions of the politburo from esoteric sources like economic reports, propaganda, and spy gathered intelligence. That the wave of spy movies and books had their roots in the post-WW II struggle between the advocates of communism and those of capitalism (not democracy).

That we put missile silos in the prairie and mountain states of Colorado, Arizona, Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, Nebraska, and Montana seeding the earth with the most poisonous and powerful weapons ever imagined. That we did it to create a balance of terror which was seen as rational policy. And, even stranger, that it seemed to work.

Movies like Dr. Strangelove, Fail Safe, On the Beach gave creative expression to the unspeakable angst of a world living under the threat of annihilation, not from an exploding sun, not from climate catastrophe, but from decisions made by politicians. This angst, symbolized by the odd notion of fall-out shelters, is perhaps the most difficult aspect of the cold war to convey. It created an atmosphere in which children feared the future and adults worked with an atomic cloud not far from their consciousness.

A great deal has been done in popular literature and media  to explain Hitler and the nazis, the holocaust; but, there is little comparable work around the cold war. This is a mistake and one those of us who lived through it are responsible for rectifying. Why a mistake? Because at an emotional level it is so close in tone to the Bush/Osama Bin Laden created fear of terrorism. The cold war shows the ultimate futility and extraordinary cost of using fear as a primary definer for foreign policy. And, we are already far down the same road in our so-called war on terror.

Lughnasa                                                                    Labor Day Moon

When a worker with a high school education, maybe less, gets hired by an international corporation, the imbalance of power is obvious. It may be less obvious, but no less true if that new employee is a college graduate. What is the imbalance of power? It is the individual against the collected wealth and authority structure of corporate America.

When a Procter & Gamble or Ford or General Electric decides to take action against an individual unless that individual has a union on their side, they will not get a fair hearing. Even if corporate structures were not captive to greed and oligarchic interests, which they are, the imbalance of power would still exist. With greed and class placed on the fulcrum as well, an individual is powerless.

When an individual in the employee of a large corporation wants a raise, better health benefits, improved vacation leave, their opportunity to win the conversation comes at the bargaining table, negotiating from collective power rather than depending on the kindness of middle management.

Labor Day celebrates both workers and their unions. As a child, the UAW (United Auto Workers) made a huge impression on me. The parents of my friends were members of the UAW. More than once I saw them, through their union, fight General Motors, Chrysler, Ford and win. Many, perhaps most, of these parents were recent immigrants from the hills of Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky. Most had less than a high school education, but they earned middle class wages with good health care, retirement packages, vacation and sick leave. I saw first hand the benefits of union membership.

Decades later I’m still convinced of the power and necessity of unions. Support them, if you can. Goodwill is not enough.