In the wake of the latest corporate hypocrisy--BP asking for "patience" in dealing with the oil spill when they had no patience at all when we asked about possible environmental impacts--I am now as angry as the rest of the country. I want heads to roll, particularly those of the people I hold responsible.
So who do I hold responsible? Whoever argued for no regulations on corporate behavior should hang their heads in shame and go home. Whoever argued for trickle down economics (the money never trickled--it just stuck to the upper echelons), should go home. Whoever pandered to Americans by saying they deserved all the world's oil and were willing to send our troops to ensure its supply should go home. Whoever says "Oil spills happen" should go home--they don't happen, they are caused. Whoever said "Drill, Baby, Drill" should go home and drink an oil cocktail, because that's what the world's wildlife and people will be dinking.
This oil spill is a worldwide tragedy with the capability to end life as we know it. If you think I exaggerate, look at the gulf stream and how it flows into currents around the world.
Whoever said that making money was the American way and the government should get out of the way and go home. We human beings are greedy and we need regulations. Even the Bible has rules for living that basically say hands off your neighbor's property. You can imagine why those rules were needed even thousands of years ago--and there wasn't a government to blame then.
Look, you idiots, look at what your policies have brought us to. Look at the homes that have been lost. Look at the livelihoods gone. Look at the damage to the environment--all in the name of capitalist freedom. Who will you blame when the land is a desert from lack of water, when we are dying from the cancers caused by the chemicals around us, when the seas are dead, when the animals are gone, when wars are fought over food? Will unregulated exploitation of the land and corporate "freedom" seem so admirable then?
And now, you idiots, you have the temerity to want to put back into power those people with the same philosophies that got us into this mess, including a Louisiana congressman who wants to limit BP's libability for the spill. Are you insane? Are you so blinded by your team Tea-Party or Team-Conservative that you can't see the damage and you just want to win so badly that you don't give a damn if we destroy the planet?
Why do you insist on claiming that America is the bastion of self-made people? No one is self-made unless they never attended public school or state universities, never benefited from medical advances made possible by state support, never consulted doctors trained at public institutions, never called on the police for protection, never called the fire department, never demanded the government jail scammers and criminals. All you so-called self-made people are the first to bleat when something goes wrong that you think the government should fix so your miserable lives continue the same.
Well--let me be the first to issue a call for the planet. It's my home. Your idelogy and who is "right" matters not a damn to me. As far as I am concerned all religions and political parties can go over a cliff. If oil is the big problem,let's reinstate gas rationing. None of us has a god-given right to fly when we feel like it or to drive large cars across town. But doing so will mean that we--we who complain when the price of gas goes up over $4 when the rest of the world pays that for a litre--we will have to admit we serve the world and not the other way round.
I am not a conservative. I am not a liberal. I am not a member of either or any political party. I couldn't care less. I am a pragmatist and a realist. But I will say this: I will vote for anyone who has a shred of decency, is practical, and has the intelligence to look far ahead. I, for one, am not prepared to commit environmental suicide so some one can have gas to drive to the beach.
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
No Country for Old Women
William Butler Yeats had it right: there are places and times not for--in his case--old men, but also for old women as well. One of these is a wedding. I'm just back from attending a wedding in Washington state. It was held outdoors in a beautiful setting, the weather was perfect, the bride right out of the pages of a magazine, and everything well organized and happy.
Why then, one might ask, do I say I didn't feel I belonged? Let me answer that by stating my (new) philosophy of weddings. Weddings, I have concluded, are for the young.
Note that I talk of weddings, not of marriages. Marriages are the union of two people. Weddings are the elaborate, expensive celebrations written about in bridal magazines, planned to the last degree often by a new profession called wedding consultant.
Marriages can be held in a judge's offices with at most a corsage for the bride and maybe a carnation for the groom. Weddings are held in romantic locales, require $2000and up dresses plus formals for the groom and his attendants, flower arrangements that carry out a color scheme repeated by the cake, and several thousand dollars' worth of elaborate photography that inevitably includes a picture of a champagne bottle nestled among an invitation and the bride's shoes.
Marriages may be celebrated by a retreat to a local restaurant or someone's back yard. In the UK, it may be a retreat to the local pub. Weddings, on the other hand, require catering and an orchestra.
Finally, marriages cross every age barrier. Weddings, on the other hand, and as I said before are for the young by their very nature. The hours before the ceremony are taken up with false eyelashes, zippers, nylons, and frantic straightening of bows and curls. This is when relatively normal young women turn into bridezillas fully convinced that the least flaw will ruin whatever future life awaits them. I speak in generalities here because, happily, the bride did not make this transformation. She was, indeed, the wonderful young woman she has always been.
But even given the fact I wasn't needed much in the way of curls and nylons and was free to take long walks on the beach, I still felt out of place. The reason was the nature of the exuberance of youth. I had little in common with the young friends of the bride and groom, nor they with me. It didn't help that I beat a hasty retreat when, overtired and overstimulated, the children of the guests expressed their frustrations in the normal way: crying inconsolably at the disruption in their lives.
I now know I am old because I remember my own child doing the same--only way back then I was young myself. I admit it--I have become a Yeatsian old person, and a screaming child makes my ears ring and my heart rate rise. Any illusion I may have had before this wedding, any self-congratulatory estimate of my bearing my age well, dissipated as I made a hasty retreat rather than bend down to console the little one. I have never felt my age quite so much before, nor in some respects my own redundancy.
Yeats talked about the generations teeming and the young in one another's arms as a sort of scary reality. We who are older must recognize they are the future, and we who have had our day must bend before them. I made my contribution to the world--hopefully, I did some good. But it is theirs now, and I yield it gratefully to them.
I hope the world will understand if next time I just send a check.
Why then, one might ask, do I say I didn't feel I belonged? Let me answer that by stating my (new) philosophy of weddings. Weddings, I have concluded, are for the young.
Note that I talk of weddings, not of marriages. Marriages are the union of two people. Weddings are the elaborate, expensive celebrations written about in bridal magazines, planned to the last degree often by a new profession called wedding consultant.
Marriages can be held in a judge's offices with at most a corsage for the bride and maybe a carnation for the groom. Weddings are held in romantic locales, require $2000and up dresses plus formals for the groom and his attendants, flower arrangements that carry out a color scheme repeated by the cake, and several thousand dollars' worth of elaborate photography that inevitably includes a picture of a champagne bottle nestled among an invitation and the bride's shoes.
Marriages may be celebrated by a retreat to a local restaurant or someone's back yard. In the UK, it may be a retreat to the local pub. Weddings, on the other hand, require catering and an orchestra.
Finally, marriages cross every age barrier. Weddings, on the other hand, and as I said before are for the young by their very nature. The hours before the ceremony are taken up with false eyelashes, zippers, nylons, and frantic straightening of bows and curls. This is when relatively normal young women turn into bridezillas fully convinced that the least flaw will ruin whatever future life awaits them. I speak in generalities here because, happily, the bride did not make this transformation. She was, indeed, the wonderful young woman she has always been.
But even given the fact I wasn't needed much in the way of curls and nylons and was free to take long walks on the beach, I still felt out of place. The reason was the nature of the exuberance of youth. I had little in common with the young friends of the bride and groom, nor they with me. It didn't help that I beat a hasty retreat when, overtired and overstimulated, the children of the guests expressed their frustrations in the normal way: crying inconsolably at the disruption in their lives.
I now know I am old because I remember my own child doing the same--only way back then I was young myself. I admit it--I have become a Yeatsian old person, and a screaming child makes my ears ring and my heart rate rise. Any illusion I may have had before this wedding, any self-congratulatory estimate of my bearing my age well, dissipated as I made a hasty retreat rather than bend down to console the little one. I have never felt my age quite so much before, nor in some respects my own redundancy.
Yeats talked about the generations teeming and the young in one another's arms as a sort of scary reality. We who are older must recognize they are the future, and we who have had our day must bend before them. I made my contribution to the world--hopefully, I did some good. But it is theirs now, and I yield it gratefully to them.
I hope the world will understand if next time I just send a check.
Friday, May 7, 2010
Kent State
The recent coverage of the anniversary of the Kent State shootings has aroused a series of long-dormant feelings for me. When I heard the informative coverage on Public Radio (providing a lot of information that was new to me), I realized that I had not thought about those events for years. It is strange that this should be so, as the shootings affected me deeply and changed forever my political outlook.
I was a faculty member at the University of Hawaii at the time, teaching freshman English and politically independent but leaning more conservative. After that day, I joined those opposing the war, developed a mistrust of political leadership that survives to this day, turned away from the Republican/Conservative philosophy, and confirmed an absolute horror of what I call primary certitude, the ugly tendency to form opinions without benefit of facts and then inflict them on other people.
There had been protests against the war on the University of Hawaii campus, the major one involving the take-over of the university’s administration building, where I was to have my own office many years later. The sit-in was composed of a mixture of students and faculty who camped out on the second floor for several days. There were later removed and arrested, although the charges were dropped. We were so naïve, that a couple of young faculty members went down to bail out a colleague and found that bail could not be paid by a check. Cash only, please.
When the news came of the shootings at Kent State, I was horrified and remember saying, “My God, they’re killing their children.” I was thinking of the older generation who were supporting the war and all the politicians who called those protesting the war unpatriotic, communist, criminals, and worse. These were the people who, upon hearing that the national guard had opened fire on unarmed students, said too bad they didn’t shoot them all. The world split into a generational divide at that moment: there were people out there whose hatred of those who didn’t agree with them could erupt at any moment into violence. That day, the world became less safe, and comfortable assurances about tolerance and community evaporated with the smoke of the rifles turned on the students, all the more tragic since one of those killed was an ROTC student just walking to class and not even part of the protest. That could have been me.
These days, these same people of primary certitude have found new targets: illegal immigrants, homosexuals, poor people, abortions. The hate and passion directed to the long-haired hippies that erupted that day into killing has not gone away. It has merely found other outlets and leaves me wondering why the US needs scapegoats. Is it a driving need for conformity in a country that claims to be tolerant? Is it an unconscious need for authority? Is it the self-righteousness of certain religious sects? Is it the reinforced ignorance of narrow education that despises anything different? All I know is that historically, this country has tended to express differences in raw language designed to incite and vilify.
I have the same concern now that I did when I heard of the shootings. Unless we can learn from what Kent State has to teach us, we will be doomed by our own hate speech and Kent States can happen again.
I was a faculty member at the University of Hawaii at the time, teaching freshman English and politically independent but leaning more conservative. After that day, I joined those opposing the war, developed a mistrust of political leadership that survives to this day, turned away from the Republican/Conservative philosophy, and confirmed an absolute horror of what I call primary certitude, the ugly tendency to form opinions without benefit of facts and then inflict them on other people.
There had been protests against the war on the University of Hawaii campus, the major one involving the take-over of the university’s administration building, where I was to have my own office many years later. The sit-in was composed of a mixture of students and faculty who camped out on the second floor for several days. There were later removed and arrested, although the charges were dropped. We were so naïve, that a couple of young faculty members went down to bail out a colleague and found that bail could not be paid by a check. Cash only, please.
When the news came of the shootings at Kent State, I was horrified and remember saying, “My God, they’re killing their children.” I was thinking of the older generation who were supporting the war and all the politicians who called those protesting the war unpatriotic, communist, criminals, and worse. These were the people who, upon hearing that the national guard had opened fire on unarmed students, said too bad they didn’t shoot them all. The world split into a generational divide at that moment: there were people out there whose hatred of those who didn’t agree with them could erupt at any moment into violence. That day, the world became less safe, and comfortable assurances about tolerance and community evaporated with the smoke of the rifles turned on the students, all the more tragic since one of those killed was an ROTC student just walking to class and not even part of the protest. That could have been me.
These days, these same people of primary certitude have found new targets: illegal immigrants, homosexuals, poor people, abortions. The hate and passion directed to the long-haired hippies that erupted that day into killing has not gone away. It has merely found other outlets and leaves me wondering why the US needs scapegoats. Is it a driving need for conformity in a country that claims to be tolerant? Is it an unconscious need for authority? Is it the self-righteousness of certain religious sects? Is it the reinforced ignorance of narrow education that despises anything different? All I know is that historically, this country has tended to express differences in raw language designed to incite and vilify.
I have the same concern now that I did when I heard of the shootings. Unless we can learn from what Kent State has to teach us, we will be doomed by our own hate speech and Kent States can happen again.
Saturday, May 1, 2010
Schools Teach, Churches Preach
As anyone who knows me can tell you, I have a mostly hate relationship with organized religion, that is if you can call it a relationship at all. I avoid it like the plague. Through a combination of circumstances, mostly wanting to support Sid in his grandfatherly role, I agreed to go with him while his grandson participated in a geography bee. The boy attends a Christian school, so I had a partial idea that I might hear some remnants of religion, but thereby hangs a tale as they say.
As an educator, university professor, and renaissance scholar, my expectations tend to be national. I was expecting a Geography bee conducted under the auspices of an organization such as National Geographic, whose Washington DC offices I once visited to thank them personally for their grant in support of my conference on perceiving nature, held in Honolulu in 1985. In this assumption, I was completely wrong.
The geography bee, if one might call it that, turned out to be sponsored by a geography council supported by an association of Christian schools. Are you with me so far? The occasion opened with prayers in the main church, followed by prayers by various persons in the rooms assigned to various grade levels. I was already feeling something akin to a consumer going to a store and being treated to bait and switch.
The bee itself contained such “geographical questions” as which river Christ was baptized in, which city’s walls came tumbling down at the sound of a trumpet, and the name of the hill upon which the crucifixion took place. To be perfectly fair, many of the other questions sounded more geographic, but those prior were standouts in what I came to call (privately of course) The Sunday School bee. To do well in this bee, one needed to know the general place settings of the Old Testament. So much for the national competitions that these children will face as young adults. I highly doubt that National Geographic would ask only one question about Europe, and so many about Israel and the Holy Land.
But such is the way of religion. And such is the way when religion controls the school setting and the curriculum. I’m reminded of the song Che sings to Evita in the eponymous musical. “Get them while they’re young, Evita” he sings to her as she gathers children around her. I’m sure that the parents are happy with the setting or they wouldn’t have sent him there. The teachers seem like nice people, in the way of missionaries, which is just what they are.
I felt like a curmudgeon looking at all these good people, but also thinking how many years will it take for these kids to be deprogrammed to become the scientists and thinkers we need in this country. They’ll have to adapt once they get to college. Unless, of course, their parents send them to any of the evangelical universities around.
Schools teach; religions preach. I wish people would get clear on the difference.
As an educator, university professor, and renaissance scholar, my expectations tend to be national. I was expecting a Geography bee conducted under the auspices of an organization such as National Geographic, whose Washington DC offices I once visited to thank them personally for their grant in support of my conference on perceiving nature, held in Honolulu in 1985. In this assumption, I was completely wrong.
The geography bee, if one might call it that, turned out to be sponsored by a geography council supported by an association of Christian schools. Are you with me so far? The occasion opened with prayers in the main church, followed by prayers by various persons in the rooms assigned to various grade levels. I was already feeling something akin to a consumer going to a store and being treated to bait and switch.
The bee itself contained such “geographical questions” as which river Christ was baptized in, which city’s walls came tumbling down at the sound of a trumpet, and the name of the hill upon which the crucifixion took place. To be perfectly fair, many of the other questions sounded more geographic, but those prior were standouts in what I came to call (privately of course) The Sunday School bee. To do well in this bee, one needed to know the general place settings of the Old Testament. So much for the national competitions that these children will face as young adults. I highly doubt that National Geographic would ask only one question about Europe, and so many about Israel and the Holy Land.
But such is the way of religion. And such is the way when religion controls the school setting and the curriculum. I’m reminded of the song Che sings to Evita in the eponymous musical. “Get them while they’re young, Evita” he sings to her as she gathers children around her. I’m sure that the parents are happy with the setting or they wouldn’t have sent him there. The teachers seem like nice people, in the way of missionaries, which is just what they are.
I felt like a curmudgeon looking at all these good people, but also thinking how many years will it take for these kids to be deprogrammed to become the scientists and thinkers we need in this country. They’ll have to adapt once they get to college. Unless, of course, their parents send them to any of the evangelical universities around.
Schools teach; religions preach. I wish people would get clear on the difference.
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