Two years later...a plunge into the present moment

So, where are we now? Nearer collapse. That's the first point. We were there 2 years ago when I pretty much stopped writing. The death of my oldest sister in 2019 morphed into the pandemic that began at the end of that year, and here we are almost 2 years later. I couldn't write during the pandemic. A lot of writers had that reaction.

Staring into a darkness, a big ending right out there in front of us, growing closer and closer, inexorably - that's what it felt like at times. It was the "45" years, the years of the Orange Man. We were headed for political collapse, watching incompetent power-mongers, racists and misogynists, making a mess of things, unraveling the political system and Constitutional order for the helluva it, for revenge against the progress of BIPOC people and women who threatened their power (which was built in part upon racism and misogyny) after all the years of struggle for rights expansion. Corruption, substanceless braggadocio stomping around the White House (or the golf course), a frail, extremely narcissistic, volatile ego, attracting others of the same ilk - it was sad and dangerous. And we are reaping the whirlwind now and will for years to come.

Credit: NPR.org

All happening in a world falling apart from ecological unraveling and cultural failures all around the world, a time when what we need is the best of humans, not the worst.

It was hard to sit here and write any damn thing. And then I received a cancer diagnosis. It all fit together in ways hard to describe. My body, my spirit, following the path of diminishment and decline in a diminishing, declining world.

I never thought it meant I would never write again. It meant I would be a very different person when I began again.

The pause was not total. I blogged monthly for a while at the Center for New Creation website, but that ended as I moved on from it after 15 years. I have poems started or nearly finished as they roll themselves out of whatever that space is where they originate. They need attention, but they are there, waiting for me. My discipline when it comes to editing a poem is just terrible. They are born, I file them away as drafts, and there they linger as I return to the prose. They may never see the light of day, but the practice of writing poems has made me a better writer.

Meanwhile, in this atmosphere of a world falling apart (and nothing we can do to stop it), the acceptance of that entails a lot of letting go, and that letting go is quite freeing, if also painful. The desire to "fix" the world is still there in this aging social justice advocate, but this one can't be fixed. It can only collapse, and the real question before us now is how we will live through it and what kind of world will emerge from that. 

Credit: Margaret Swedish - Athabasca River, Alberta

If nothing else, this precipice moment tells the writer that there is no use holding back anymore. Nothing to lose, right? Write it all, fully, honestly - what you see, what you know after decades on this planet, what the precipice looks like as we all draw nearer. None of us can "save" the world anymore, so we may as well tell the truth about it from the various vantage points of our lives. And we need to tell that truth as vulnerable, scared, gentle humans so that the words can be of service to others, rather than judgment that just pushes people away, or the resentment and rage that become violence and hate. There is a bad time coming and we need to learn how to live through it and keep a modicum of decency, generosity, and compassion as values we treasure.

We look back on our lives, those of us who have been around a while, and perhaps ask what it is we can gather up to mine for wisdom. There is a lot of material for me. I grew up with extreme racism here in Milwaukee, and later the Vietnam War and the great cultural upheavals of the 60s and 70s. At CU in Boulder, I was involved in campus ministry, which in those days involved solidarity with farmworkers struggling to form a union, and visiting young men, boys really (average age 15-24), in a federal prison for first offenders near Denver, including several conscientious objectors avoiding the draft out of conscience, and peace marches and teargas, and later living among street people at a soup kitchen in Montreal, and after that, 25 years in Washington DC, most of that in a national office animating and resourcing a faith-based solidarity movement with liberation struggles in Central America. Back in my hometown of Milwaukee, I am engaged with an urban farm, which raises community as well as food, a practical hands-on path of community survival and enrichment, and have turned to a sangha and Buddhist practice as an anchor for my spiritual journey (though I am still very fond of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, despite what religion has done to them).  

The building here I first lived when I moved to Montreal

That sounds like an interesting life and it has been, and it is chock full of things I never thought I would do, but did, and some of it was painful and traumatic, and some of it was rich beyond measure. In other words, I have some material to work with, yes? I'm 72 now (hard to believe, it's not what I thought 72 would be when I was a kid, when all those aging aunts and uncles came by for a visit) and, as I mentioned, I have a very unusual cancer that is being checked with a monthly injection that keeps it where it is for hopefully a good long while. I have no doubt that the increase in this cancer in the population, and so many others, is because my body is contaminated with beaucoup carcinogens no matter how healthy I have tried to live. 

We all have microplastics in us now, and PFAS "forever" chemicals (a family of toxic chemicals pervasive now everywhere and in everything), and more than half of people alive in this country will get cancer, and that is a pandemic quite unique to us. You'd think that would change things, but instead of deciding to get the toxins out of the environment, it just started a cancer industry where more billions are being made by investors in the private health market. Clever, capitalism, don't you think?

Well, the reckoning is here and more people know that than are willing to admit it or say it out loud. We just cannot imagine a life without the capitalist industrial growth economy. We can't, even though we've had it for so brief a time in human history. One thing capitalism has understood perfectly is precisely how addictive our brains are, the evolution of intelligence, wisdom, and ethics being far behind that of the technology where it can offer stuff online and have it delivered to our porches.

That's the world that's ending, collapsing now, having made us sick, having poisoned our world, having made us quite incapable of stopping that which is bringing us so much harm.

Honduras: children displaced by palm oil plantation

I've seen too much of what it has cost us, this economic growth culture - in the streets of Montreal, in the federal prison in Colorado where we celebrated the 15th birthday of a Mexican boy who crossed the border carrying weed (and could not speak a word of English), in the bombed villages and encampments of displaced populations during El Salvador's civil war, in the simple houses of workers in the sweatshops of Mexico and Honduras, in neighborhoods back home here in Milwaukee with conditions as bad as some of the poorest countries I visited, or in the Diné and Cree communities along the Athabasca River in Alberta where the tar sands industry has bulldozed their forests, contaminated their waters, and ruined a whole culture's way of life. I learned that the U.S. teaches people in other countries how to torture and how to destroy villages to save them. I learned that all this affluence and consumerism the culture so enjoys requires this brutality in order for us to have them. No way around that bit of moral truth either.

And since I started focusing on the ecological crises we are falling into now without hope of avoiding them any longer, I also learned that we will fell entire forests, dig up, mine, and destroy millions of square miles of precious lands and water all over the world for the same reason - to have the benefits and the comforts and conveniences that industrialism has brought us.

There, you see? I start writing and it comes like waves washing over the present moment, drowning us in our history of colonialism, empire, and rapacious industrialism. This is what I was afraid of, that if I started I couldn't stop. I would have to look at it all again. All of it. Hold nothing back. Trust me, that is a frightful space in which to live. Fortunately, while I don't have a lot of company in that space, especially here in my hometown, I do have company. There are others I know bravely walking into that space to ask - what do we have to offer now from our passion and skills, our compassion and sorrowful solidarity, that can be of service in such a world?

Credit: Cheri Johnson

I have my garden plot in our urban farm with 90 or so others, gardeners as diverse as what we grow, and before the pandemic I took my trusty laptop and PowerPoint to all sorts of communities to talk about the conditions of life on the planet and what needs to end - as well as what needs to be begun - and I have my words. And now I want to offer them again. We'll see what emerges. I hope you will be with me on this journey. It needs company. In order to build the Beloved Community amid the chaos, fear, and violence of our time, we need to start actually living it.

Finally, words are not meant to be cast off into a vacuum. Every writer wants a conversation, feedback, solidarity. As I move along this path now, thoughtful responses are welcome. With the world as it is right now, sharing wisdom is more necessary than ever.

~ Margaret Swedish

swedishmargaret2@gmail.com

The death of manufacturing and the death of a neighborhood

Everyone who cares about the city of Milwaukee ought to read this entire article from yesterday's front page:

Where city factories, and now babies, die


There is something so very wrong here, even more than what these journalists penetrate as they describe what the death of manufacturing has to do with the shocking levels of poverty, deaths of babies, and abandonment of whole neighborhoods.

Just one rotting factory at the 30th St. Industrial Corridor.

This story is about the 30th Street Industrial Corridor, a stretch of toxic wasteland that I had the opportunity to briefly tour in September with the Interfaith Conference of Greater Milwaukee. There have been other studies and articles written about the link between poverty and the crash of this neighborhood - due in large part to the moving of manufacturing out of the U.S. as corporations chased growing cheap labor pools in other countries.

But for me one of the most shocking things was the abandonment of these workers who once built and assembled the things that we used, that created the base of a broad middle-class. Racism had a lot to do with this, as we all know but hardly ever say out loud (it needs to be said out loud). The tax money of the middle and upper-middle classes poured out of the city as the affluent moved out to suburbs and exurbs. We failed to see the connections between the two, mostly because we didn't want to, and we certainly failed the moral test of the mutual responsibility that comes from living in this world and in a particular community.

For me, one of the shockers was that all these manufacturing companies could just close up and disappear with no sense of responsibility for what they were leaving behind. As our tour guide said, some of them left in the middle of the night - a way to avoid scrutiny and outcry. Left behind were not only abandoned workers and their families, but also a toxic contaminated mess, land so polluted that the city can't even make plans to reclaim this area without having to remove hundreds of thousands of tons of contaminated soil off the top (the guy said 2-3 FEET covers much of the area) and old seeping waste tanks buried underground.

This is among the aspects of capitalism that reveals its voraciousness, selfishness, and greed - that these companies felt and feel no responsibility about leaving in a responsible way - taking their factories apart and cleaning up the mess on their way out. No care for the humans; no care for the land and community.

It's a lot like Walmart and other big box stores. They come; they go; they leave their big box store and paved over land behind for someone else to worry about.

It is not time to rebuild the manufacturing economy of the post- World War II era. It is time to build a new economy altogether, one that puts the well-being of our communities at its heart, one that promotes the health and happiness of the people who live in these neighborhoods, one that does not tear at the fabric of the human community but binds us together.

Repubs continue war on the poor

Wisconsin Repubs continue their assault on the poor, assigning them more blame for their fate and more responsibility for carrying the burden of our fiscal challenges.

It fits very nicely with the Ayn Rand approach to life as exemplified by Paul Ryan - the superior shall rule over all others at their expense - or the crass power grab of those making off with our economy, the corporate state personified in people like the Koch brothers, the CEOs of big manufacturing firms (Bucyrus, Harley Davidson, Kohler, Mercury Marine, Georgia-Pacific, Harley-Davidson, etc.), and the bastions of the nation's ideological right, Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, Americans for Prosperity, Club for Growth, Karl Rove's American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, Murdoch and Fox faux-news, and then their minions that do their bidding.

Photo: Margaret Swedish

Of course, there is a lot of crossover among all these folks. Government is for the rich, or to free the rich to become richer. By their belief system, the poor are just slackers, laggards or lazy, responsible for their own fate. Of course, any black kid growing up in the inner city with lousy schools and fragile families torn apart by the daily struggle for survival facing racism all around and the expectation of failure should be able to be just as successful as the multi-billionaire Kochs, right?

Okay, once more we have news that reveals as clearly as ever the moral bankruptcy of this Repub class - the new GOP assault on the already woeful W-2 program. At a time of high unemployment, growing poverty, the demise of the middle class, slashing of wages and benefits even if you have a job - the Repubs are preparing to implement measures to shrink W-2 client roles.

Well, if you read this blog, you probably read the paper, so here's the story for all the gory details.

We are becoming a cruel society, cold, heartless. The worst in us is rising to the top now - all these latent attitudes of racism and derision towards those for whom life is a struggle. It is easier to defend your privilege if you demonize those who pay the price for it. Meanwhile, politicians representing your defense and your scapegoating make policy right out of those attitudes and make them popular on Fox or Charlie Sykes and Rush Limbaugh shows.  Feeding the worst in us, that's the politics of the right these days.

The big headline, of course, had to do with the expansion of the school voucher program: income level raised, vouchers that can be used to go anywhere, even if that means public money for religious education (good people disagree on that question, of course), even if that means tax-payer money to families that can afford to pay for private schools. Because the intention here is clear: step-by-step, the rightist Repubs are bent on undermining and eventually throwing public education under the bus (well, except that the buses won't be running in and out of poor neighborhoods anymore either).

Look, MPS is a mess, lacking vision and a clear sense of mission, lacking effective leadership, lacking the zeal required to address the poverty and racism, and the structural issues, that ensure that many Milwaukee kids get a mediocre-at-best education. And the whole national approach is a mess, focused as it is on standardized testing and competition and race to the top b.s. and preparing kids to compete in the global economy and blah, blah, blah... But abandoning public education as a basic right for all kids is not the path toward revolutionizing a woeful, failing system being strangled by bureaucracy and politicization, and collapsing under the weight of long-neglected realities of social injustice and economic disparities.

Here's a truth about capitalism, a sort of economics 101. Capitalism requires a poor class; it requires a certain level of unemployment. It is part of its unjust structural nature. This belief that everyone has a chance to succeed if they just work hard enough contradicts capitalism itself since, if everyone did that, it would be the end of the system. Can we all be Koch brothers or Scott Walker? Who then would do the dirty work in their factories, or cut Walker's lawn, or be the security people that have to sit outside his house all day keeping him safe? And who in the world would want to go into the office buildings overnight to clean the toilets of the CEOs and their staffs?

Because of this basic truth of the structural injustice in the system, different societies make different decisions about how to compensate - or not - for that injustice. We deride Western European countries for their broad, generous social safety nets, but you don't see more affluent people out in the streets about the high taxes they pay for their superior publicly financed health care systems or public schools or generous unemployment benefits - because they all know that these programs benefit everyone in the end in part by creating a certain stability in the society. Gaps between rich and poor may still be wide, but nothing like here where the gap is widening as the corporate right and their minions no longer want their lavish wealth to be taxed to ease the burdens of this great injustice.

Look what happened to the centrist Barack Obama when he dared to once use the phrase "spread the wealth." Accused of being a socialist (as if that is the worst thing you can call anyone), some of his right-wing evangelical opponents might take a moment to read the Gospel of Luke.

Photo: Margaret Swedish

We have arrived at the mean season, very, very mean. Nasty. Ugly. The rich are turning on the poor and selfish individualism is being made our state religion. Politics is now being dominated by those who don't think a society's people need care for one another, see the connections between one person's or one community's suffering and the enrichment of someone else - though these connections are obvious, and become more obvious with each measure passed in our state legislature this year.

What bothers me is that I just don't see any real effective pushback. I mean, a lot of angry people got arrested at the Capitol yesterday disrupting the vote on the voucher stuff, but where is the discourse that really speaks to the growing selfishness and isolation of the wealthy? Where is the discourse on the economy that puts what is happening in its real context? Where is the counter to this philosophy of rugged individualism that is pervasive and represents nothing real in this world?

Because none of us - not a single one of us - is an isolated individual, and everything we do has cause and effect. And right now, the things being done in Madison will certainly have effect - they will deepen the suffering all around us, further deteriorate the quality of life in our state, widen the chasms among us, and make for one difficult future in this beautiful state.

It's disheartening. To see politicians appealing to the worst in us, to see the ugly discourse rise to the surface like this - it's disheartening. Hard to win back what you lose. We have to start thinking about how we are going to live here in a fundamentally new way. Those of us who care about these things have got to come together in a broader and deeper solidarity with a different vision to guide us than the one guiding the Repubs in Madison right now.