Samain Thanksgiving Moon
Because: 500 Drone Lightshow!
The Cattail Trick
Samain Thanksgiving Moon
Cattails. Seen them all my life. Used them as decorations. Never knew that if you press gently on the cats tail, the seeds surge out in a July 4th snake way. It’s amazing. If you haven’t experienced it, try it. Take a cattail, a mature one, and disturb the brown outer covering. You don’t have to use much force, about as much as required to get a fingernail into an orange skin, probably less. Kate discovered this after we harvested cattails for fall decor.
When the grandkids came up on Friday, I showed them the “cattail trick.” They loved it. So much so that they got Jon to take them out cattail hunting the next day.
Considering Possible Next Steps
Samain Thanksgiving Moon
We are not yet in the Trump era. Not yet. Not until January 20th. That doesn’t mean he’s not already stirring the waters. Nope. Just that he doesn’t have his hands on the levers of power right now. But, he will.
What to do? Here’s an e-mail I sent to Rabbi Jamie Arnold. I share it because I think the more we consider how to respond, the better organized we get right now, before Trump’s small hands start to twirl the nuclear codes, the better chance we stand of staving off the worst and perhaps creating space for some real advances.
Rabbi Jamie,
As I see it, they are three broad areas for action that will be necessary, not optional, over the next four years. I’m putting them in what seem like a logical order to me.
1. Climate Change As Kevin Trenberth pointed out in his excellent presentation, we are in a critical time for climate action. There are goals we must reach as a planet by 2050 and by 2100 in order to keep the earth habitable for humans. I believe, with Thomas Berry from his fine little book, The Great Work: Our Way into the Future, that our generation’s great work is creating a sustainable presence for human beings on this planet.
2. Economic Justice I believe that the root problem exposed in this election is the hollowing out of the working class. I grew up in a small eastern Indiana town where my friend’s and classmate’s fathers worked for General Motors. Without a high school education it was possible to earn a living wage, a wage sufficient for a house, a car, advanced education for the kids, healthcare and vacations. By 1974 my vibrant home town had plywood on its main street shop windows. People closed the drapes and left town in the dead of night, unable to pay their mortgages and face their neighbors. Those good union jobs were gone. The people who held those jobs and their children voted Trump in this election.
This is a bill that is long past due. And, it affects working class people of color as well as white working class folks. These are the non-college educated folks whose lives look bleak from within their communities. Solutions to this problem are known, just not emphasized any more. They include creating affordable housing, passing substantial unemployment benefits, providing job transition education especially when whole industries collapse (think coal mining right now), making sure that health care is available to all.
This is a particularly poignant issue for those of us with a college education or beyond. We have let working class pain go untended for years while we focused on identity politics, environmental politics, immigration and LGBT rights. All of that work, successful in many cases, was important. It’s just that while we were working on those issues we let the economic future of working class families dim, then go out.
3. Defense Another emphasis might be on rapid reaction teams that can respond to gay bashing, race baiting, rape culture and general disregard for those who are other. These teams must be ready to defend recent hard won victories like samesex marriage, the organizing of Black Lives Matter, the coalescing of women’s groups against the pussy-grabber in chief. But in my opinion this is a time for defense on these issues.
The safety-pin idea seems congruent with this action area.
I’m not imagining here what Beth Evergreen’s response to these issues could be, might be. I’m still too new to the area, two years, to have the kind of political knowledge and connections I had in Minnesota. But, I know there are local, county, state, national and international dimensions to all three of these areas. Discerning what those are and how Beth Evergreen might work on them is, to me, the next step.
Gifts.
Samain Thanksgiving Moon
Too much fun not to share.
Two Foci Needed Now
Samain Thanksgiving Moon
As the sky begins to brighten over Black Mountain, this spinning Earth reminds me that after night comes the day. The gradual ratcheting down of temperature reminds me that spring follows the fallow time. The spiral nature of the days and months as they peel away from yesterday yet follow the path of the Great Wheel as they do, reminds me that mother earth preaches patience. Wait, and the season will change. Wait, and dark will become light. It is the message of the Tao. Follow the watercourse way.
It is sound counsel. No good thing lasts forever, neither does any bad thing. We could just wait and history will turn the tide against the Donald and his band of wreckers and exploders. Yet.
Not the way I’m made, however. As I said in an earlier post, I’m more of a take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them sort of guy. It’s still early days in this sea and the waters have only begun to roil. The seas will get worse, heavier, more dangerous. It will be tempting to recruit fingers for every dike, to follow every insult with a counter move.
That would be a mistake. We have to choose which dikes must be defended. Must be. I think it’s possible to make those decisions and, if we concentrate our resources, to win some real victories. Won’t happen if we are in reactive mode all the time.
As a preliminary thought, I have two foci to recommend for our attention. This may change as circumstances arise, but right now they seem the most urgent to me.
Two articles in today’s NYT set them up. Bernie Sanders: Where Do the Democrats Go From Here and Trump’s Climate Contrarian Myron Ebell Takes on the EPA.
These two foci have very different implications, but share a these must happen now exigency.
Foci 1 Climate Change
This is a long term survivability issue for the human race. Unfortunately, the time frame for action to alter climate warming’s long term trajectory is now. Between 2016 and 2050 drastic reductions in carbon emissions must take place. Even more drastic ones by 2100. Without efforts more ambitious than the recent Paris Accords the human race will suffer for millennia and this planet may become too hot for us. Literally. And Trump has just appointed a climate change skeptic to head the EPA.
Foci 2 Economic Justice
This is a short term survivability issue for our nation. Democrats used to have economic justice as a key rationale for the party. Unions. Affordable Housing. Unemployment benefits. Job retraining. Financial and health resources for the elderly, the disabled and the poor. Restraints on the financial sector. Support for local economic development. Infrastructure maintenance.
More than any single cause this election laid bare the casual disregard both parties have given to these issues over the last 30 to 40 years. Clinton’s third-way moved the party farther from these bedrock issues. Obama tried, but after his first two years, the GOP became the party of obstruction, the party of no.
The narrower focus within Economic Justice must be jobs, healthcare, housing and good education for the working class. Many of the fissures in our common life root themselves in hopelessness borne of economic dislocation. Creating a solid working class for all, people of color and non-college educated whites alike, will soothe some of the most fractious.
No, I’m not saying that we ignore the very real dangers posed by racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, homophobic, cisgendered bigotry. I’m saying that there are two policy areas that rise to the top of a political program for the near term future, say through 2075.
Yes, another emphasis must be on rapid reaction teams that can respond to gay bashing, race baiting, rape culture and general disregard for those who are other. These teams must be ready to defend recent hard won victories like samesex marriage, the organizing of Black Lives Matter, the coalescing of women’s groups against the pussy-grabber in chief. But in my opinion this is a time for defense on these issues.
Again IMHO the policy focus for the next few years should be: climate change and economic justice.
An Ally? Wear A Safety Pin.
Samain Thanksgiving Moon
Why I’ll be wearing a safety pin when I go out. From now on.
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A safe person to sit next to on a bus, walk next to on a street, even have a conversation with.
miss pommery 1926 I quite like the idea of just putting a safety pin, empty of anything else, on your coat. A literal SAFETY pin!
Earthquake Coming
Samain Thanksgiving Moon
Darkness has begun to settle on Shadow Mountain. Black Mountain takes out the sun at around 4 pm now and at 5 pm, the current time, evening is ready to shift over to night.
The cultural earthquakes from Tuesday’s election results have only registered as tremors so far, but the big one is not far off. When will it come? I don’t know. I suspect after the inauguration. A police shooting here. A gay bashing there. A couple of rapes. Perhaps targeted violence against African-Americans. Maybe the National Guard sweeping aside the protesters at Standing Rock.
Those happenings will crystallize out of the solution of public anger and fear a rock hard resistance. And it will be the state against its most vulnerable citizens. Unfortunately, not a new problem. As Saul Alinsky said, the action is in the reaction. How far the call and response of bigotry will spread, how large will be the congregation that ultimately says amen is not yet known. These times are perilous, more perilous than any I have known.
When Reagan came to power, I traveled to Washington, D.C. with the Minnesota AFL-CIO. We went by bus, playing poker and drinking beer (not me, but everyone else), singing labor songs. When we got to D.C., we marched. Reagan, Reagan he’s no good, send him back to Hollywood. Reagan broke PATCO, the union of air traffic controllers and ushered in an anti-union environment that even after Bill Clinton and Barack Obama remains a national disgrace.
It was a combination of union busting, international trade deals and robots that created the rust belt and the dismal future of non-college educated folks in general and whites in particular. We have just felt the first profound shock of those choices. When people lose faith in the structures of power, they do what they can to create new ones, hopefully, they believe, better than the old one. The abandonment of the former working class by liberals and conservatives alike makes our time bereft of powerful allies for them. They’ve hoped, and voted for that hope, that somehow a billionaire who resides on the Upper East Side of New York City will do for them what others haven’t. From within their world it may have seemed like a bet worth making.
(Someone should make a map of the cultural fault lines in the U.S.)
This fault line within American culture has only begun to shift. It has not yet slipped, not yet allowed its full constrained force loose on our common life. Trump’s election is not that earthquake. It will follow in his wake as he takes pussy-grabbing and race-baiting to the home of the country’s first African-American president. Ironically, his predecessor.
That fault will slip. It may not come when the insults to the poor and people of color and the LGBT community mount, but it will surely come when the left behind in the white working class realize that Trump is not their friend, but an archetype of their oppressor. When that awareness dawns, head for the bunkers.
Complicit
Samain Thanksgiving Moon
Time to admit our complicity in this mess. While is there no doubt that crotch grabbing racist xenophobes have had their say, while there is no doubt that know-nothings have seized control of levers they do not understand, while there is no doubt that license has just been given to violent police actions and violent action against whoever is the other, we cannot turn aside from our implication in this disaster.
We? Yes, you, the college educated. Yes, you, the climate change activist. Yes, you, the LGBT champion. Yes, you, the Black Lives Matter protesters. And, yes, even you, the brave folks of Standing Rock.
What? We have allowed identity based politics and the politics of climate change to blind us to the real, often more urgent demands of economic justice. It’s irony so thick it would require an obsidian blade to cut. Oddly enough what we just experienced was class warfare waged from within the very camp of those who have made such a struggle necessary. That is, the party of capitalism, of big business, of Citizen’s United nominated a man for president who claimed the mantle of working class champion. And, due to their own flaws and fears, working class non-college educated white folks followed him.
Trump reminds me of the pied-piper, offering a fun-filled, immigrant-bashing, race-baiting, pussy-grabbing jaunt out of town to a good place, a place with green grass and blue skies, a place filled with winning and winning and lots of guns. Only there is no such place. It’s really more of the same distractions the 1% have used for years, the American political equivalent of 77 virgins. Hear, strap on this Trump pin and help him blow up America. What’s that? A job? Oh, sure. Look, over here! Someone coming to take your guns and the job you might have had if we hadn’t just moved our company overseas.
How are we complicit? First, they came for the unions. And we did nothing. Then, they came for good-paying working class jobs. And we did nothing. Next, they let an antiquated educational system churn out high-school diplomas so worthless they were of no use in hunting for and finding work. And we did nothing. When the banks came for their homes, we stood by and did nothing. When the floods and the hurricanes and the droughts and the wildfires created disproportionate damage to working class folks, we stood by and did nothing. Even the one place where we did do something, Obamacare, it was so flawed that it may well collapse.
We have, as a culture, and as an educated and moneyed elite, ignored fundamental political matters. Each family needs a way to provide for itself, to have a home, food, a decent education, health care. When these key components of life are made difficult or impossible to obtain, a political price will eventually be paid. That note just came due.
Economic justice, an egalitarian distribution of the fruits of our common life, is central to a just and fair politics. It cuts across race, gender, sexual preference, ethnic origin. By allowing the perversions of capitalism to gut whole demographics, we, the moneyed and educated elite, have let our own comfort trump effective policy for the working class.
The good news here is that the way out of this political swamp, Drain the Trumpian Swamp!, is known. All it requires is political will. We need solid unemployment benefits, training in crafts and skills, support for retraining as soon as jobs are lost (see coal mining, for example), real healthcare access, support for unions, affordable housing and higher taxes on the 1% to fund all this. This is the program that can unite people of color with working class whites.
Let’s get to work.
This Explains a Lot
Samain Thanksgiving Moon
An American Original. A Prophet
Samain Thanksgiving Moon
