Political Popcorn; Obama Butters

The timing of Senator Olympia Snowe's announcement has created high drama in Maine's political scene. Blogs around Maine have been popping over night, given the collision of Republican Snowe's announcement with Maine's election timetable. It's likely Maine will see a three-way race for the seat.

Sen. Snowe sent out an email around dinner time yesterday saying she wouldn't run for another term. The deadline for filing papers to run in the primary here is March 15. Filing requires presenting 2,000 valid signatures.

(Sheepscot, Photo By Jan)

The Senator's timing makes it just about impossible for an upstart to run for her seat - candidates normally spend months building an organization, raising funds, and gathering signatures. The only people likely to file papers in two weeks are those with enough personal funds to purchase the services of a commercial signature gathering infrastructure and top-flite political operatives. Or, those who already have those campaign elements in place - in other words, incumbents.

However the deadline for filing to run in the general election - not a party's primary - is June 1st. Thus an independent could still have enough time to create a campaign.

It's difficult to see a strong candidate emerging in enough time on the Republican side, not that the Republican bloggers would agree. So far, our Tea Party governor, whose name I don't mention in this blog, says he's not interested in Snowe's seat.

There are a number of Democrats who could mount strong candidacies, not the least of which are our two sitting Congresspeople. One school of thought favors northern Congressman Mike Michaud, on the grounds he would add votes from the more conservative north, while liberal southern Democrats would vote for him as the best hope to turn the seat Democratic. Michaud is a conservative Democrat, and has a strong campaign structure in place.

First District Congresswoman Chellie Pingree has personal money and a top-notch campaign staff; the reasoning goes, she'd be strong in any race given the increasing shift of political power in Maine to the more liberal and populous south. If Con. Pingree won, some can't resist speculating that her daughter, former Speaker of the Maine House Hannah Pingree, would run for her mom's seat. A progressive dynasty!

Given Maine's political history and the low esteem with which many people here hold traditional political parties, there's room in the middle for an independent. Such a person would be free from the March 15 deadline.

Independent Eliot Cutler, who lost narrowly to our present tea bag governor, has already been working on a third party effort. He has access to operatives and money, and name recognition. There's also been a lot of speculation about former governor Angus King, a very popular guy who was not affiliated with either party, although he tended to support Republicans.

(Photo By Jan)

Cong. Pingree would be the dream candidate: an adept politician, genuinely progressive. She can and should win. The next several days will be a especially lively in Maine politics.

Meanwhile, Pres. Obama is buttering up liberal critics. You may recall the outrage over radical abridgments of civil liberties in the Defense Appropriation bill signed into law by the President at the very end of 2011. The Administration has now issued guidelines that exempt almost all Americans from being dragged into military courts. You can see a summary of the guidelines here:

http://jnslp.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/ndaa-fact-sheet-final.pdf

The guidelines don't change the basic structure of the bill, which still bleeds our civilian legal system over into the military realm. Even so, the guidelines are an important constructive step by the President, and maybe even an indication that he's paying better attention to the more progressive voices in our country.

Taking It Slow

Thirty years ago the organization I worked for started a program to preserve hardy and thrifty farm animals that were fast becoming extinct. I hired a self-described Michigan farm boy named Hans Peter Jorgensen to run the program. HP is a man a many talents - wood worker, artist, sculptor, and the only person I know who as a boy could play the piano holding an orange in each hand.

The Pasture, ca. 1986, With My Daughter Julia

One chilly rainy day soon after being hired, HP stopped by my office and asked if I could join him outside for a moment. Muffled in our rain gear, we stood at the edge of our biggest pasture. "Just look at that," HP said. I looked, and saw absolutely nothing, just an empty field and a few scrubby bushes. Ever optimistic, he went on, "Yes, as you can see, we have a real problem with drainage here."

Peter went on to describe hoof rot and other maladies that befall livestock standing  in water all day. I asked what we could do about it, and Peter said not to worry, he could do most of the work himself although there'd be a budget impact if he had to hire a guy with a big tractor to make a swale. When I asked how long it would take, he said nine months to a year. I was astonished - a year to dig a few ditches? No, he told me, a year to look at the pasture, and decide what to do.

I had cut my teeth running programs in war zones around the world for the Quakers. I had achieved success in no small part because of my ability or willingness to make momentous decisions very fast - often immediately after receiving a message from my field staff. As a person who took pride in express lane decision-making, I was astonished that this guy was telling me he needed a year to decide about digging some water channels.

I went back to my office, first to look up the word "swale," and then to think about how such an obviously smart and talented person could be so inconceivably slow. Peter had told me he was new to that land and that climate. He needed to learn how the weather and plants and soil and animals all worked over time, so he'd make the right decision about how to address the drainage. He needed to learn how parts of the environment interacted, before he acted.

That morning in the pasture is a pivotal memory for me, one I think about often here on the salt marsh. One lesson of course is that while rapid decision-making is a useful skill - as every person with a driver's license knows - it's more important to learn how to match the pace of the decision-making to the demands of the decision.

But what sticks with me every day as I look out over the green, brown, tan and silver marsh, is Peter's lesson about seeing the same piece of land over time. The salt marsh along the Dyer River changes literally minute by minute during the day. But it also changes over the months, the seasons, and even the centuries. I've learned to see where the two bridges - one over the Dyer, one over the Sheepscot - have altered the marsh, and how chemical run-off over a long period of time can kill the tiny snails that are central to the food web and the formation of the peat that supports it. And ultimately, how the marsh wasn't always here and some day won't be.

Dusty D and HP Jorgensen

The final moral from my pasture moment with Peter is I now know that while swift decision making has been an important tool in my life, the choices I've made that I value most - choices of love, commitment, and community - are the result of  careful reflection, completed without haste. It's HP's gift to me from long ago, one that I enjoy every day as the tide on the marsh ebbs and flows.

Matters of Principle

Psychologists say that human beings are hard-wired to recognize or create patterns in the world around them. Presented with six objects, we're asked to identify the one that doesn't belong - perhaps this measures our thinking ability. Presented with six statements from a political candidate, one of which is different, we - or the political punditocracy - will snap our attention to the anomaly. Is this a change of heart or a flip-flop?

Photo By Jan

Political fights are portrayed as differences in principle: for example, do you favor big government or small government? But political campaigns are also purely tactical operations: the idea is to gain enough votes to win, otherwise what you believe won't matter much. An ancient and perhaps universal tension in all political campaigns is between the need to employ tactics that will win, while remaining true to principles.

As voters, we join this kind of thinking. I've been blogging about Citizens United as the latest in degradation of our political system by corporations and the extremely wealthy. I've been pleased to see President Obama criticizing Citizens United and calling for campaign finance reform - even as he opted out of public financing in 2008. Now he has changed his mind and will accept Super PAC funding, and the millions have started to flow.

Will I yell "hypocrite!" and vote for Ralph Nader? No. I'll shake my head and say, I need to vote for this guy, even though he is violating his principles and mine by favoring - as is often the case - tactics over ideals.

The Republicans have their own version of this. They spout lofty civics class rhetoric about our precious democratic institutions. Because they know that some groups of people are too liberal to vote Republican, they energetically work on voter suppression to reduce those kinds people's participation in the democratic process. Around the US, Republicans work on restricting college student voting, same day registration, and get out the vote drives. They work against the system they claim to value, in the name of winning. I'm pretty sure that like me, my Republican friends will continue to vote for their favored candidates, choosing tactics over principles.

Photo By Jan

This class of hypocrisy is not limited to elections. The Afghans rioting and murdering foreigners because their religious book was burned include many from the Taliban - who destroyed the 6th Century Buddha statues at Bamiyan. And I wonder how many of the Americans suggesting that burning the Koran is no big deal have vigorously supported flag burning legislation. And so the circle of inconsistency and hypocrisy goes on.

I don't know anyone who is so pure as to not have moments of contradiction - and such a perfect person might not be all that much fun to be around. Hearing that as a boy HH The Dalai Lama used to shoot at birds with a BB gun and collect model warships is somehow reassuring, even endearing.

For most of us, the reason we have principles is to provide goals - end points - towards which we direct our lives, not exact templates that control every moment. In politics, we apply the same logic to politicians as we do to ourselves - we try to balance ideals with practicalities. The trick here is to think through our principles well enough to find the bright shining line that limns our voting behavior, the place past which we will not go.

As voters we need to express ourselves very clearly on bedrock principles. President Obama's tactical advisors work hard to identify the positions that will cause people to sit out the election. To the extent that progressive people indicate we'll vote for President Obama no matter what he does, we'll find our already small voices drowned in the hubbub of compromise and outright hypocrisy.

Cultural Memory and the Greek Debt

I detect a wry note from American commentators talking about the European debt crisis. After being sneered at by “sophisticated” Europeans during our housing bubble and Bush economic collapse, now we see the Blahnicks on the other foot - and we’re loving it.

The crisis of the decade-old Euro was inevitable, due to compromises made to achieve agreement among the founding countries. The crisis is also rooted in national stereotypes. My daughter Julia lives in a Greek area of Queens, New York. Her 60-year-old hair stylist Tina grew up in Athens, and she summaries the Greek point of view succinctly:

“Greece, to Europe, is like a child without a birth certificate.”

Geese Discussing the Euro (Photo by Jan)

This description renders victim and victimizer in one phrase. Julia reports that anger in her neighborhood is largely pointed at Germany, cast as it often is, as the greedy heavy. Raised by post-Holocaust Jews, I’m a fellow traveler in this prejudice.

Before I get to the subject of Greek debt and cultural memory, I want to summarize what I’ve been able to learn about the Euro-crisis:

• The wealthy countries were accurately cast as greedy and callous.
• The poorer countries were accurately portrayed as profligate spendthrifts.
• While it’s fair to say that Greece has been temporarily bailed out, it’s equally true that the bailout is really a structured default designed to benefit Germany and the other donor countries, not Greece.
• It’s also accurate to say that US shadenfreude is misplaced, since our debilitated economy is intertwined with Europe’s: if they fail, so will we. 

The attention being given to the messy Euro-squabble, instead of the usual image of elegant, sophisticated cooperation, shows the power of cultural memory over history. My son Sammy has been talking with me about cultural memory, a term from archeology attributed – you can’t make this stuff up – to a German named Assman. Cultural memory is the remembrance passed on through generations. It enables the transmission of culture directly through families and communities, instead of via history. Specialists create history; it’s the conversion of memory into a structured version of events.

At its worst, cultural memory creates prejudice and hatred. The horrific series of wars in the Balkans after the collapse of Yugoslavia, long predicted, were based partly on 500-year-old cultural memories. My upbringing in the immediate aftermath of the holocaust focused on the suffering of the Jews and the monstrosity of the Germans. A lot of cultural memory is more benign, allowing us to pass on traditions and rituals that create a deep connection to a chain of people stretching into the future from the past. We locate ourselves in the story of our people, and it feels good.

The positive and negative possibilities of cultural memory are reflected in ethnic humor. When I lived in Laos I learned a bit of their extensive library of ethnic aspersions, some based on the rich possibilities of puns in a tonal language. Dung beetles that roll little balls of water buffalo poop around, were called “Cambodians” by smiling Laotians. By changing an inflection, the phrase “Thai silk” became “Thai pubic hair.” A phrase that sounds wonderful in Laotian, applied to people like me, translates as “watermelon-nosed foreigner.” The Laotians reserved some of the most colorful ethnic humor to describe themselves, using language I can’t repeat here.

Sam’s perceptive questions about cultural memory and the spectacle in the Euro Zone point us towards a pivotal human tension between unity and diversity. The Euro crisis brings to mind what I’ve learned from a friend who’s a leader in the movement towards a single global currency seeking to address the exploitation built into today’s diverse fiscal system. And the shattered unity of Yugoslavia produced not diversity but unimaginable suffering.

Sheepscot Diversity (Photo By Jan)

The natural world teaches us that diversity equates with resilience and new growth. Monocultures lead to vulnerability, producing catastrophes like the Irish potato famine. The core of our being is our DNA, which is an astonishing system for reliably creating a single person from two diverse biologies.

Using the blunt instruments of cultural memory – fear and propaganda – the Republican candidates play to prejudices that mobilize people. Then they’re faced with the contradictory task of appealing to a much wider group in the general election. They stumble around paying great sums to consultants to help them voice bigotry and appeals to consensus out of both sides of their mouths.

Many of us swim in an ocean of cyber information that magnifies the problem of maintaining functional unity while preserving diversity. I read many blogs, Twitter feeds and Facebook postings. The overwhelming majority reflects my values and politics. I never watch Fox News and rarely scan conservative bastions like the Wall Street Journal or The Economist. So my predispositions are reinforced more than they’re challenged.

I think we can learn from the European’s struggle to achieve modern functional unity in a framework of ancient cultural diversity. The Euro can be exploited like any currency, whether it’s a mess of national monetary systems or a single regional currency like the Euro. In either case, those with greater power will be tempted to dominate weaker players, and the victims of this exploitation will harbor grudges that can and will be passed on through the generations.

In the long run, I feel more secure in the creative, sustaining power of diversity rather than the potential equity and security offered by unity. While so many problems are created by our differences, the best solutions also arise out of divergent thinking and an embrace of our own rich heritage. The Greek drachma won’t reappear any time soon, but since both the rich countries and the poor ones of the Euro Zone are deeply unhappy with their unified currency, I think we’re going to see a steady stream of changes that better reflect the region’s mixture of cultures and histories. The Euro will only survive to the extent that it respects and supports the disparate cultures that are spending it.

Cinnamon Rolls

The Mekong River

In the early 70’s, an American acquaintance invited me to visit him in the Vietnamese village where he worked for a different relief agency from the one that employed me. I was eager to go, because his work was way up in the mountains, while the Quaker efforts I directed were in the thickly populated coastal plain. His village was entirely surrounded by territory controlled by the “other side,” existing in a circle only a couple of miles across, defended by American soldiers.

I couldn‘t drive or take a bus, so I booked a flight on the CIA airline, Air America. In the contemporary US, we know the CIA mostly as a mythical beast: you read about it in paperbacks or see sleek agents dong impossible things in movies. Outside of the US, in an active war, the CIA wasn’t all that hard to find. It was ordinary to meet a guy in a short-sleeved sport shirt in a bar who would have no trouble saying he worked for “The Agency,” “The Company,” or just the CIA. Those of us who worked for the Quakers tried hard to dress in ways that would distinguish us from the spooks – frequently the only other Americans around who weren’t in uniform. My beard dates from those days.

So the CIA had an airline, with tickets and schedules. You could book a seat like on any other airline. On the day of my trip I got a ride from the coastal city of Quang Ngai north 50 miles to the huge US airbase at Da Nang, to catch my flight.

The flight was – conspiracy buffs rejoice – in a black helicopter. The crew of three were dressed identically, in black flight suits, tall black leather boots, even black gloves and black helmets with one-way bubble face plates and throat mikes. The only skin showing were two patches of pink cheek. These guys looked like giant insects. Each wore a big Ka-Bar knife around his leg, a side arm holstered at his belt, and the pilot and co-pilot had automatic rifles clamped between their seats. I was able to intuit that this was not TWA.

The third member of the crew helped me onto the aircraft as the engines were speeding up. Trying to be friendly, I asked him how long he had been a stewardess. In what seemed like a split second, his helmet was inches from my face, his thick knife pressing against the front of my throat. In the silence, all I could see was my own distorted reflection in his face bubble. Finally I said, “My mistake.” After a pause, he backed away, exchanged a look with his colleagues, and we took off.

Flying low and slow over a war like the one in Viet Nam gives an idea of what years of bombing will do. Bomb craters are round; rice paddies tend to be rectangular. In contested areas the two are juxtaposed, the countryside looks crazy, like it can’t make up its mind. The tip-off to bombed buildings is that they have no roof. Roads are cratered, and there are few bridges, since both sides target that kind of infrastructure from the very start.

Cruising over the war feels abstract. The Quaker rehab center attached to the provincial hospital in Quang Ngai immersed us in the suffering of individual people who had been blown up, shot, burned, paralyzed. At the retail scale, the war is indelible, whereas the extensive laying waste of countryside is awful to see, but kind of theoretical: suffering summarized.

At one point there was an exchange in their mics between my steward friend and the flight crew. The chopper plunged low over a little village in the hills, the crewman slid the side door open, kicked a cardboard box towards the edge and began tossing handfuls of pamphlets into the air. I was witnessing psychological warfare.

My friend met our flight once we landed in a little cleared area way up in the chilly, misty mountains. He said since the village was under the control of the US military, we should check in with the commanding officer first. The man I met – I don’t recall his rank – was right out of central casting, a handsome, younger John Wayne in fatigues. Evidently he had been told that I worked for the Quakers, since after I said hello, he sat coolly staring at me for a moment, and then said,

“I’d rather have a daughter who was a whore than a son who was a pacifist.”

There was another silence, then my friend motioned me to the door.

As we stepped outside, a line of artillery started up – I imagine it had been stopped for the chopper’s arrival. While I was well accustomed to small artillery like mortars, this was my first close-up exposure to long-range howitzers. These were really big guns, some 75 mm, a few the 105’s that throw 35 pound shells for miles. The sound they made was like nothing I have experienced – as much a feeling under the skin as a sound heard in the ears. The displacement of the air caused by the exit of the shells was a slap in the face and a push in the chest. The ground seemed to jump up with each outgoing shell, then the air pressed at me – I walked like a drunk.

My guide spaced his tour narration to fall between the explosions of outgoing fire, but with my fingers in my ears and the ringing in between blasts, I didn’t understand most of what he said. I was amazed at little kids playing calmly in front of shabby houses, as if the world wasn’t exploding every minute or two.

Finally we walked over a little hill right up to the edge of Army control, and waited along the side of the red dirt road. My friend was in the village mostly to “work with Montagnards,” the colonial name for native people of the region. The natives were the only people able to pass from one side of the war to the other. They lived on the side controlled by the communist insurgency, and walked over the US-controlled side to sell stove pipe-sized rolls of cinnamon bark.

The tribal people were striking. I saw only men, who wore shirts but no pants, they had hoop earrings, and most puffed furiously on big hand-rolled cigars. Some carried crossbows, others had long hooked machetes for cutting the bark. All ignored us, and while I snapped a few good pictures, the one here is the only one I’ve been able to find after 40 years – you can see the cigar in his left hand, and his cool goatee, while the lack of a roll of cinnamon probably means he was on his way out of town. The child in the photo is Vietnamese – the difference in skin color, dress and demeanor are obvious.

In retrospect, my host must have been in some relationship with the CIA. He was probably sharing intelligence, if not doing much more. I don’t remember even thinking about this until much later.

Except for soldiers and a relative handful of others, most Americans don’t directly experience war. Our isolation probably makes it easier for politicians to sell us on foolish ventures. While I wasn’t in fact a pacifist, I hated the war in Viet Nam. I had lots of exposure to maimed children and unimaginable suffering on a wide scale, and in that trip I was able to witness the futility of applying enormous amounts of power to relatively helpless people who are defending their families and their land. I’ll never forget the cosmic-scale power of those guns, and the grim, dusty men who fired them.

Subsequent to my visit, the village was overrun. My friend survived and moved to another town. The remaining American soldiers were airlifted out, but not the commander I had met. He was found dead, his throat slit.

Spoiled Whiny White Boys and GOTV

If you caught some of last autumn's posts, you may recall my ill-mannered term for libertarians, those SWWBs. I'm unhappy with those folks because they're like a person who instead of fixing his broken car insists the solution is for everyone to stay home. They systematically work to weaken the social structures that undergird human society. And they provide shelter for some of the worst antisemitic, racist, misogynist, Birch Society rejects.

Today's Backyard Birds By Jan

One of my beefs with the "shrink the government" crowd is how lazy they are. If parts of the government don't work right, fix them. Reform is harder to do than abolition. But when you throw the baby out with the bath water, you're left with no water - and no baby.

Speaking of throwing babies, what about the Right's increasing attention (again) to controlling reproduction? Let's look at who we're talking about. Overall, the Democratic majority in our country has been thwarted by the decades-long triumvirate of

• Fiscal Conservatives (servants of big business and big finance)
• Social Conservatives (the dictatorial religious right)
• Libertarians (government is always the problem, never a solution)

This winter we're seeing the beginning of the end to this coalition. The best reflection of the change is in the weird alliance between Ron Paul and Mitt Romney. Both assail the social conservatives, neither mounts a significant attack on the other.

Libertarians and the religious right have always had a flimsy alliance. Libertarians/Birchers like Ron Paul want to reduce government to just a few functions that they've decided are worthy, while eliminating the laws and social functions that don't interest SWWBs all that much.

This philosophy of government atrophy über alles, imported from Austria, is in direct conflict with the social conservatives who want increased government power that forces others to submit to their religion. The religious right wants laws requiring women to have sonograms before an abortion, or restrict access to birth control, and a whole long list of other determinations about how people use their bodies in sex, marriage, and child bearing. They also want their views on education, evolution, climate change and other topics imposed on the majority.

In the Republican primaries this time around, we've witnessed a subterranean tension rising to the surface, as Paul and Romney have consistently supported each other to weaken the religious zealots.

The media love to characterize Romney's luke-warm reception in his own party as emanating from his personal flaws, and there's data to support this. But another reason for Republican Romney hatred is the growing antipathy of the religious right for the other two members of the Republican coalition.

The religious right has substantial electoral power because its troops are well organized, and because those troops are already conditioned to pony up for causes they're told are important. To the extent that the religious dogmatists stay away from electoral politics when it fails to measure up to their exacting standards, this can make for substantial differences in outcome. Even Romney's very conservative LDS religion fails to mollify many on the religious right who require lock-step adherence to their own quirky version of Christianity.

Since I think it's true that elections these days turn on the preferences of the undecided middle, we should think about how all this Republican drama plays out with that group.

As a baby I was suckled on milk and left-wing politics, I've never heard of anyone in my extended gene pool ever once voting Republican. But nowadays, the tradition of consistent political leanings, along with party affiliation, is by every measure steadily weakening. While the polarizing tendencies of modern politics tend to shrink the political middle, the lack of interest in party or even ideological affiliation makes it expand.

The demographics of the political middle are skewing away from the white skinned, white haired middle class. Some young people, having not yet outgrown adolescent rebellion, drift towards Ron Paul. Overall, however, the middle political group is less tolerant of the religious right's promotion of homophobia, overt misogyny, marriage restrictions, and medieval versions of science. Some numbers of them will vote Republican anyway, and some who are uncomfortable with Romney will likely sit out the fall election along with their religious zealot cousins.

Many others will find a home with President Obama.

We're in an extremely volatile year. If the structured default being arranged for Greece doesn't hold up in the short term, the recovering US economy could plummet again. If war with Iran starts this spring, gasoline hits $5 a gallon, or any of a number of other complex unknowns rears up, the President's reelection could be in jeopardy.

We only have to endure another month of winter, but we're going to be subjected to many more months of campaigning. From this still early vantage point, the Fall's election holds out increasing reasons for hope by progressives like me, but I've never felt the situation to be as fluid, dominated by a such powerful list of unknowns, as it is in 2012.

I'm planning on watching an extremely close race. Democrats are going to have to get under-represented demographic groups out to vote in very large numbers, and mobilize marginal voters whose political support may turn on rejection of alternatives more than support of the Democrats.

I have quite a number of complaints about Mr. Obama. I'm putting that list aside now to work hard for his re-election, and then after the celebrations are over in November, I'll happily turn attention back to fracking, the corrupt financial sector, DOMA, imperial foreign policy, and corporate domination of elections.

More than ever before, 2012 is the Year of GOTV, Get Out The Vote.

Regularly Scheduled Programming

This morning's post was the end of the series on the spraying incident 20 years ago. I've been receiving wonderful feedback - no one agreed with everything I said, no one expressed total dissent either. That's perfect. My buddy in the high hills of Mexico brought in some new readers with his Facebook recommendations.

Tomorrow you'll find another post with more criticism of libertarians and the election. Saturday is a story of a CIA operative holding a knife to my throat.

Some people have been missing my local reports. The pictures with this post were taken - from the dry safety of my living room - of the marsh this morning. As you can see, the rain and warmth are melting the snow and the marsh is looking more like a bog. You can smell the mud and decomposing plant material - on its way to becoming peat. I have a feeling we're in for a fierce mosquito season this year.

You can see from their alert posture that the geese have been having a face off with Jimmy and Norby through the window. Everyone acts brave as long as there's glass in between them. In a real fight, my money would be on the geese.

I'm going to be interviewed this afternoon by a reporter for the local paper to talk about our fundraising success. Team Sheepscot was the state's top money raiser for the Muscular Dystrophy Association walk in Auburn on February 11th. The good outcome was due to the team walking in honor of Mary, who received good help from the MDA during her long illness.

Risky Business - Part 4

This post ends the series, thanks for being patient, if you have been.

This week I've been wondering how my wife and I came to be poisoned, and what might be done about it. It would be reasonable to think, if the need to change our social decision making system is so clear, why haven't we done it?

Colossus the Cat Notices the Levitating Dog on the Deck

A few months ago, I posted an homage to the people who invented modern activism, the Nestle Boycott. Those visionaries had two important insights. First, they forced an enormous corporation into contention on their terms. Accustomed to using defensive tools created by and therefore favorable to huge corporations, Nestle was beaten when it faced a scale and a scope of activism it didn't understand until it was too late.

Second, the Boycott used Nestle's advantage - its ubiquity - as a tool to defeat it. Essentially, before the Internet existed, the Boycott invented transnational activism. By systematically creating boycott groups around the world, they confronted the company wherever it was on the globe - which was almost everywhere. Today's "Twitter revolutions" are the Nestle Boycott's grandchildren.

I have great respect for the many health, environmental and justice organizations around the world that work within the existing framework of science and law created by companies and their governments. Those activists go to court, work on and in regulatory agencies, and engage in endless individual fights to protect us all. I send them what support I can, and I wish them success because they are doing vital work. We need them.

I do believe, however, that today's version of the Nestle Boycott - the next wave of activism - is rising out of the Occupy movement, not from established social change groups. The Occupiers are everywhere and they are nowhere. Using an image from my incessant googling of neuromuscular diseases, it's like the powerful entities we wish to change don't have receptor sites for new activism like the Occupiers - who lack lawyers, budgets, offices, incorporation, and tax exemption. They are in many senses, out of reach.

While the new activists lack concrete edifices, they have a great ability to connect large numbers of people instantly, continually, and wherever it suits them. Their power to mobilize is only just being realized. The media, literally owned by the objects of the Occupier's attention, bends to the wind blown by the new activists, seemingly oblivious to the absurdity of enabling their opposition.

Jimmy Loves the Old Media

Another fruitful area for making change is found by consulting the long list of very large scale, seemingly indeterminate problems. Our society focuses best on sharply-defined issues like regulation of pesticides or changing how schools are funded. Those kinds of issues are hard for reformers to deal with, because the regulatory and legal framework are rigged in favor of those who profit from the problems.

But other kinds of more complex social issues that float on a different level may favor activists over the 1%. For example, some problems come to mind like:

• Punishing teachers and their students for society's failures in education and eradication of poverty
• Misusing the sharp tools of science and engineering as blunt instruments of societal regulation
• The destruction of our country's political legitimacy by corporate funding
• The collapse of an independent press 
• The accelerating impoverishment of our population
• The decline of affordable higher education

You could make your own list, there is no shortage of multi-sided, deeply rooted societal predicaments. While each of these problems has corporate and government stakeholders, big and complex issues diffuse companies and governments in the same way that ordinary people have been fragmented when trying to address "traditional" social problems like agricultural pollution or school vouchers.

Multidisciplinary, amorphous issues spread out over time and space fit our emerging model of dispersed activism - we are well matched in scale and scope. Do you need some educators, poverty experts, economists and child development psychologists to work together immediately to create a model of authentic educational reform? While we are doing this, using low-cost available tools, corporate and government departments are stuck dithering, sending memos to each other and squabbling over turf. Dispersed multi-level activism is perfectly suited to deal with dispersed multi-level problems.

I don't think we know yet how contemporary activism is going to develop and play out. In the meantime, it's a serious mistake to encounter government and company power, then play on their terms, and roll over. Outrage over corporate funded government corruption, disgust with failed education, scapegoating of a rotating list of vulnerable people, rising ill health, and declining quality of life are mighty engines to drive social change on an increasingly large and lasting scale. Activist diversity is slowly but increasingly equating less with weakness, more with strength.

Do I have a prescription? You bet, an easy one, in two parts.

First, when the time comes: act. Opportunities are steadily springing up. Where and how and for what reason you act is for you to figure out. In a growing movement for people's ownership of their own lives, there will be continual chances to do something, opportunities to latch on to some small problem -  or even some big issue.

Over time, changing the world for the better is getting easier. No doubt it will sometimes seem impossible, and we'll occasionally feel terribly discouraged. But overall, I'm fully expecting success while having a good time. Fixing things is fun; working with others to make things better feels great. You will find optimism by not predicting your future success according to the failed and co-opted ideas of the past, but from from the emerging energy, the new concepts, and the wellsprings of hope that are appearing all around us.

Finally, do not ever give up. My dying wife wrote her last blog post 36 hours before she died. She never gave up. If she could do that - so sick, unable to breathe, paralyzed - I can.

We can.

Risky Business - Part 3

This is the third post of the series, the first two are just below.

There are a number of things we can set as goals, if we want to address the problems of people, not the problems of companies and their client governments. The prevailing mechanisms to address grievances through the legal process may not work well for individuals or groups of people - so we need other approaches to our problems. Here are three.

You undoubtedly know the phrase, "informed consent." In the story in the first installment of this posting, no one consented to the orchard spraying. Yet the water, air, wildlife - and people - around the orchard bore the actual cost of the pesticide shortcut. Believe me, I have found a great deal of information in the last 10 years about certain kinds of agricultural chemicals that act on human nervous systems. However much I may have learned, it does me no good if I live within a society where a citizen can be poisoned as sure as if someone had slipped arsenic into her food - with no consequences at all to the poisoner. Information without power - in this case, a mechanism to say yes or no - isn't worth much to me.

I take powerful medicines because of my myasthenia gravis. Some carry risks of trouble down the line, others produce side effects. My doctors tell me about the drugs and what is known about what they do - good and bad. I then decide what I will let into my body. This is unlike what happened to Mary 22 years ago - that incident lacked both information and consent.

In addition to what I'm told by my doctors, I consult "Dr. Google" regularly as do so many other people. And there are many clusters of people, even for a rare and obscure disease like mine, who combine their experiences over the Internet to validate and debunk claims put forth by vested interests. These discussions are not "scientific." Yet they can provide important and even life-saving information to help people decide what to do.

Goal Number One for me, then, is informed consent: a right to know, arising from the involvement of all stakeholders. No anonymous poisoning allowed.

Second, I'd like us to abandon the misuse of marketplace rhetoric as a means of social decision-making. In our corporation-oriented economy, we're frequently told, let the marketplace decide, the "invisible hand" will act, supply and demand will determine the cost. The problem is, this is nonsense if used to decide public health policy. The orchard owner figured out that spraying organophosphates would cost him less than hiring more laborers to care for the trees. A great deal of American agriculture in the past 75 years has made the switch from employing people to spreading chemicals as the primary method to care for the soil, water and plants.

Defining this move as "cheaper" is only possible if we turn a blind eye to the huge externalized cost of the shortcut chemical. Therefore, we're not consulted about the use of the chemical - and we're also forced pay for the lion's share of it. While some people try, I don't want to put a dollar value on the environmental destruction caused by organophosphates, nor on my wife's indescribable suffering, her death, the traumatizing of an entire extended family. I never even started to add up the actual dollar cost of her illness - the direct medical costs and the draining of our life savings.

I have a slightly better handle on my own illness, because I've learned a few things since my wife's ALS. In my case, in the half year since diagnosis, treatment and surgery and medicines have probably run about half a million dollars. For example, each time I drive on down to the regional hospital for a few hours infusing a helpful medicine into my arm, it costs $23,000. Who pays for that? Everyone does.

Leaving aside the long list of intangibles and just counting the direct medical costs associated with two people's illnesses, it would have been far cheaper to have cultivated those apples without the substitution of chemicals for labor. Maybe we need a new bumper sticker, "Organic Saves Lives." We don't do a true accounting of the cost of spreading toxics into the world around us.

Norby Views the Morning Sun

So I'm suggesting first informed consent, and second, true cost accounting, as important goals in addressing our unjust and dysfunctional way of deciding risks and benefits.

A third idea is to adopt a cautious version of the precautionary principle. For me, this can be summed up by saying, "When in doubt - don't." If we have informed consent and if we have true cost accounting, we have tools to help make better decisions about risk and benefit. When those tools don't do enough for us, we need to hover our foot on the brake pedal.

There are probably a number of cases in which it's worth taking a risk because a threat is great, or the risk seems low in relationship to the benefit. The problem is, our system of decision making about these instances is inadequate. The people who decide risks and benefits often bear the least of the consequences. The much larger group of people who will live with the aftermath aren't given a say in what happens, or the information they're given is so skewed, it makes informed consent a joke.

There are already functioning systems for deciding risks and benefits for individuals, for example in choosing our food or medicines. Our laws and regulations covering pesticides and other introduced substances don't incorporate adequate informed consent, true cost accounting, or the precautionary principle. Our legal and political system is rigged against these kinds of protections working on a wide scale.

Yesterday's post described how a single person can decide to spread dangerous chemicals in his community because he's operating in a society that won't allocate responsibility to him for destruction and death that happens to other people. What I've noted today is he can spray his toxics without having to tell anyone about it or get their consent to assume the risk, and he only runs the risk of being stopped if harm can be proved - after the fact, not if it is predicted in advance.

There are reasons for hope. Tomorrow's post will end this series with what that means.

Risky Business - Part 2

Today's post is a continuation of yesterday's, below.

The second question we were looking at yesterday was, how do you know the incident 20 years before Mary's death caused the tragedy? There are a few responses to this question. The first - I promise this won't hurt a bit - requires a brief detour into the wonderful world of epistemology.

Epistemology is the study of how we know what we know, often divided into the study of belief, knowledge, and truth. Each of us has an epistemological map in our head, but unless you're a philosophy student or the odd clergy person, you probably don't think about how you know what you know.

Currently, our western culture uses an epistemology that emanates substantially from science. Science describes with great precision what constitutes knowing something: how to separate knowledge from belief, and how to figure out what are facts. This is a robust epistemology, leading to the computers we're all using to read this right now, or the powerful medicines I take every few hours that keep me alive.

A science-based epistemology works well. Problems develop when we apply it willy nilly, outside of science - using it automatically to understand other kinds of questions. When the Bible says, "I know my Redeemer lives," is the word "know" used in the sense meant by modern day science? If you say, "I love you," is this a fact exactly like "water freezes at 32 degrees?" When I told Mary that I loved her, I felt the concrete reality of that statement much more clearly than the abstract rule about water I learned in Spring Garden School as a child.

Norby Contemplates Eternally Unreachable Avian Life

Scientific, rationalist epistemologies are especially dicey in complicated subjects with lots of gray areas, like morality and ethics. As a result, we often shrink those complex systems into simplified codes with less ambiguity - for example, the legal system. The legal system is to morality what a sketch is to an oil painting.

All epistemologies have hidden values, resulting in pre-made decisions about what's real and what things should be ignored. My doctor pays attention to the release of acetylcholine in my nerve cells; he'd probably ignore an overabundance of Bad Wind that might be the conclusion of a doctor in Shanghai examining the same patient.

Getting back to figuring out what caused my family's disaster, let's start by noticing that much of modern Western epistemology is based on cause and effect. I kick the ball, it flies forward. The modern Western world accepts the belief that actions inevitably lead to results we can predict and describe. With the rise of quantum mechanics, cause and effect is beginning to be challenged by science itself. But for most of us, cause and effect is the bedrock of how we understand the world around us.

People ask, how do you know that the incident you're describing caused what happened? The words in italics reflect underlying epistemological choices. That way of understanding the world is part of our culture that defines and allocates power.

We live in a society with structures of power based on a particular epistemology: responsibility is determined by establishing cause and effect, through a series of rules. This system creates the world of science, and the political world that creates corporations and funding and markets, with regulations and laws to keep it all neat and tidy.

I'm getting into what may seem like a digression into epistemology because it's so difficult to see our own ways of framing the world from inside our own heads. Our conventions about evidence, proof and responsibility reflect cultural values about science that are not universal. That's why some foreigners sometimes appear to behave strangely: they live with different frameworks of reality. For example, Bernard Lewis, in his interesting book "The Political Language of Islam," points out that Westerners seek the most powerful people "at the top." Islam expresses its organization of the world in a different way: it sees power in the center.

In the world defined by corporatized science and law, I can't possibly know what caused my wife's death, because law and science can only ever give me a crude sketch of the rich oil painting that was my wife and what happened to her. I can't know what happened if I think only in terms of the science and the companies that created the organophosphate, operating within a science-based epistemology.

I don't want to just roll over and say, oh well, we can't ever know what happened, so I'll move on - it was just one of those things. But I'm not out of luck, because there are alternative ways to understand what happened to my family, and what happens to millions of poisoned and maimed people around the world.

That is the subject of Part 3, coming tomorrow morning.

Risky Business - Part 1

One fine spring day in 1990, my wife Mary set out in her Taurus station wagon on the long drive southwards to her seminary in Berkeley, CA. The road climbed out of the valley where we lived and twisted through an apple orchard. Just as she was coming around one of the sharp bends, a farm worker on a tractor, towing a big spray rig, reached the end of his row and turned the tractor around to head in. Because the car windows were open, the spray hit Mary full in the face, drenching her. She immediately felt sick and a burning sensation, so she turned around and headed home.

I met her at the house and helped her into the shower. She was dripping pesticide. I scrubbed at her for 20 minutes, we both were soaked in the pungent stuff. Fifteen years later, she was diagnosed with ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease, a disease that invariably leads to death by gradual killing of certain nerves - including the ones that enable breathing. She died here on the salt marsh on October 26, 2010.

Last summer, I spent 11 days in intensive care in two different hospitals because among other things, I had lost 80% of my ability to breathe. I was diagnosed with myasthenia gravis at the beginning of August, although like Mary, I had had the illness for years before it was correctly labeled. This neuromuscular disease causes problems with nerves firing. Like ALS it isn't curable, but due to medications created during my lifetime, the rate of mortality has fallen from 70% to the low single digits. Among other things, I asked the neurologist who figured out what was wrong with me what the odds were of two unrelated people having these two illnesses at the same time. He quickly said, "Astronomical." I said, what could have caused it? His second one-word answer leads us to today's post: "Organophosphates."

When people I know hear this story, they often express one of two reactions. The first is a fierce anger. People say, find that orchard owner, find that farm worker who broke the law by not turning off the sprayer at row's end. Sue them straight to hell.

An Ice 'Shroom on the Marsh, 2/19/12

The second reaction is a gentle skepticism. People want to know - how can you be sure the incident you describe is what caused this tragedy? Where's the proof, the science?

About the first. I sometimes picture the man who killed my wife. Probably, a quiet, deliberately-moving guy from northern Mexico with a dirty white straw cowboy hat. Maybe right now he's sitting in his home village playing in the sun with his grandchildren, certainly oblivious to the horror his carelessness caused. Or maybe he is long dead from constant exposure to the poisons he sprayed for his employers.

Even if I could find any of this out, and I can't, I'm acquainted with the corrosive effects of hatred. My family - and I - have suffered enough at the hands of this chemical, this employer, this farm worker. So I try as in so many things in my life to emulate Mary. Her attitude about this story was, in her phrase, to "not go there." She put her attention to her life, her family, her work.

In struggling with the sometimes overwhelming desire to engage in my own personal witch hunt, I've started to learn the difference between revenge and justice. And between a addressing a personal wrong and social change. This is an on-going piece of work - some days are better than others.

Tomorrow, I'll be addressing the next item, how I can know that the spraying in the orchard was the cause.

The Redemptive Power of Spring

As I write this, slabs of ice - some the size of ping pong tables - are cruising by very fast on the inrushing tide. Some sport lazy gulls hitching a ride upstream. There are snowy patches on the ground in spite of our on-going thaw, and the entire marsh is wearing its winter brown and tan.

Today's Photos by Jan

Right on cue, I'm having my first major spring pangs. I remember starting the hunt for spring even when we lived in mild Northern California - at this time of year the wild mustard would turn fields brilliant flickering yellow. Around here the signs are different. Near the door of the hardware store, the maple sugaring supplies are helpfully set out in cartons with the tops cut off. In the little inlet in front of my house, drakes and ducks are doing - well, let's call it the mallard cha-cha. Nonstop. Even without the spring time change, the sky is light now by the time Maine Public Radio switches from the pompous thunderings of the BBC to friendly local weather and news at 6 AM. The marsh bird population is changing - new visitors are stopping by.

Many of us think if we talk  about warm weather now we'll invite punishment, and indeed around here snow in early April isn't that uncommon. I love the quiet precision of our black and white Maine winter, but that doesn't create an aversion to spring. The coming smell of wet earth, the sound of rioting birds on the marsh and the astonishing palette of greens along the river are intoxicating.

The chaotic explosion of new life in spring feels like a redemption from winter. Redemption can mean a recovery or reclaiming, and also an absolution or forgiveness. Most religious and spiritual traditions celebrate some form of redemption. I remember sitting on the grass on a spring day many years ago with a Navajo friend who told me, "Your job as a person is remembrance and recovery." Incarnation in the Hinduism and Buddhism, and important features in most other religions incorporate the hope of forgiveness and second chance. The possibility of change is never forsaken, even in the harshest puritan-tainted forms of Christianity - a religion that raises redemption to a central tenet.

Redemption is tied to the act of forgiveness, a putting aside of blame and hate. I make elaborate mental pictures of the men in shirts and ties or wearing lab coats, who carefully planned the dispersal of chemicals that killed my wife, maimed me, and forever traumatized my children. I think about a man closing the lid on a bomb that will go on a bus and blast children into pain and death. I think about lovers in the glare of a late night kitchen argument, drowning in a torrent of irretrievable wounding words.

Terrible acts are hard to forgive. The most difficult are our own. I lie awake thinking of harsh words spoken years ago to one of my kids, or the face of a person I fired. Most of all, I picture the last years of my wife's life - what could I have done to better ease her suffering, was there something I never found in all those years of frantic googling that might have saved her? On dark winter days I might be more inclined to forgive Shell Oil than myself.

Spring is the season of redemption. If we open our eyes, we see that a second chance is inexorable. The explosion of buds and birds happens around us no matter what we do - or what we have done. Enough of the ducklings will survive the foxes to populate the marsh, and enough of them will die to feed the fox kits playing on the grass by the bridge.

Spring doesn't reward virtue. All life is renewed. No one judges the willow buds or the eagles or for that matter, the dreadful horseflies who find me so delicious. Unstoppable spring spreads forgiveness and second chances everywhere. Immersing ourselves in the restarting of life all around us, we can remember, and we can recover. We can forgive.