Do our words protect us from what we need to see?

Some of our spiritual sages, philosophers, psychologists, poets, and artists will tell us that the minute we use words here in the West, we go right into our heads. We start "thinking," we start analyzing, we start breaking experience down into pieces of what we can handle, what we can get our heads around.

What that can also do is protect us, a way to step back from what we need to hear in other ways - with our bodies, our spirits, the living communities of beings around us who do not speak our language, who do not speak "words," but communicate in sounds and resonances and energies that humans were once more capable of "hearing," or better, "sensing." Part of that was survival instinct, knowing which sounds - rustling noises in the tall grasses and woods, for example - might indicate an approaching predator, or the first low sounds of a coming storm, a shift in the wind or the air pressure that says, seek cover.

Meanwhile, during the unraveling...

What did we do? What are we doing? What are we creating?

Because create we must.

Yesterday I saw an intimate version of Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya" at an invitation-only performance at the Actors Studio in Manhattan. The great Estelle Parsons directed, welcomed us, spoke after and invited her actors' input in a post-performance talk-back. I mean, if you love theater...

I had read the play during a semester course on 19th century Russian literature back in my university days in Boulder CO, but had never seen it performed. I have long been attracted to the darkness and despair in a lot of Russian lit, though I cannot tell you why. I'm neither dark nor despairing. But I think I always picked up something that feels a deeply rooted part of the human angst - the struggle with meaninglessness, the psycho-spiritual version of entropy, the darkness that lies at the heart of Christianity with its body-loathing, belief in the power of some outside Devil always ready to draw us into the filth of the world, judgment and a wrathful God.

Threshold or Precipice

A bit of a thrill ride, isn't it - the circumstances that lead to that headline?

Because we don't know which one it is. We don't know if we are on the verge of a major breakthrough or a complete collapse. I don't know if we have lived in such an unpredictable time, at least not since World War II.

I feel the uncertainty. Many, many do. Many feel it without knowing what it is they feel, and that, too is scary, makes the times even more unpredictable, because people don't always act rationally when they are both afraid and not clear about what it is they fear exactly. Easy to project onto "the other," then. Easy for the moment to sink into chaos and more violence.

Also to seek simple solutions and a savior, a strongman, to make their world coherent again.

We are sinking into a period of incoherence.

Inaugural poem - the poet was the significance

It's hard to write a poem for a president's inauguration. Poetry may not work all that well in this setting. Expectations are high - including the expectations for patriotic praise, nationalistic uplift, inspiration, reaching a mass audience.

So there's lots of critique of Richard Blanco's poem. Some of the lines were lovely, lyrical. 

My face, your face, millions of faces in morning's mirrors,
each one yawning to life, crescendoing into our day:

Sen. Johnson wants freedom - for private business, not for you and me

Really, this CPAC gathering is a good thing to avoid if you want to keep your food down. Lots of rightist egos trying to out-conservative each other. Our new Sen. Johnson made his debut going on about 'freedom' and how government is bad, bad, bad, and how we ought to gut every kind of government program that assists those left on the margins of the economy, but give people like him lots of tax breaks.

He says that liberals are fostering entitlement and dependency. I think of stuff like Social Security. I pay into it all my life, how then is it an entitlement? It is actually a well-funded trust that gives me back in my retirement years something of what I paid into it.  I'm not 'entitled:' it's my own money! But by this language they try to wrest SS from the public sector in an attempt to get it into the hands of financial/investment institutions like Goldman Sachs - and we see how well that went - pensions replaced by 401ks that went bust in the great financial meltdown of 2008. Wouldn't you rather have a pension? Who do you want in control of your future savings?

Johnson also earned some fame during his campaign by expressing his disdain for climate science. I love that - when non-scientists with a personal stake in the outcome of research criticize decades worth of studies by real scientists. Anyway, he says the globe is probably warming because of solar activity.


Important to note that his company, the one that makes him a millionaire, is a plastics and polyester manufacturing company, called Pacur LLC. Of course, plastics and polyester use lots of oil. So you can imagine that Johnson would not favor things like carbon taxes or ending tax-payer subsidies to oil companies. That would raise his costs of doing business. Better for his company to debunk climate change science.

Well, there are fewer and fewer jobs in the future of a planet approaching a climate tipping point that will result in catastrophic economic disruptions and collapses. Wise it would be for us to create jobs by planning for a future that moves us off fossil fuels, corn ethanol, and other ecologically damaging industries that are altering the chemical makeup of the atmosphere and biosphere.

We have a hard time learning this lesson, that freedom for business is not the same as freedom for people - like those who work for these companies, or folks trying to create a decent life for themselves and their families. The role of government is not to create the environment for unfettered business, it's to help keep the economic rules fair for everyone, not just CEOs. We have to stop confusing 'open for business' with protecting the well-being of workers, youth, those living in poverty, our elderly relying on the SS into which they paid all their lives. One businessman's 'freedom' can become someone else's unemployment, lower wages, lack of health insurance, environmental damage, and more.

Anyway, Johnson asserted that he wanted to make the Obama agenda disappear. Well, Senator, just a reminder - that's not how democracy works. You don't just get your way.

Electing climate change skeptics as climate changes

Just as climate science becomes more and more irrefutable and precise, this state managed to put a confessed climate change skeptic into the Senate, and more than a few into various state and federal offices. This morning, the impacts of climate change on this state are on the front page of the Journal Sentinel.  A new study shows that temperatures across the state will rise by 6-7 degrees Fahrenheit by the middle of the century. The economic impacts will be huge and very disruptive.

Of course, they are reporting on actual scientific studies rather than politics or the economics of industrial growth, so who will we believe? Indications are not favorable to science.

How did we ever manage to create a culture in which scientific knowledge would he held in such doubt? What happened to us? What happened to the era in which I grew up, and in my case in Catholic schools with nuns who really cared about whether or not we learned, an era of such wonder and horror, from the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo missions to the nuclear bomb? Where is the Hubble Space Telescope's vast fan base - and was there ever a more wonderful scientific instrument than this marvel - when it comes to asserting the primacy of knowledge and careful research over politics and the corporate bottom line?

Cladophora algae bloom, Lk. Michigan beach

Many of us do not want to believe that the individual things we do, the choices we make, are actually weighted with something as large as climate change or the breakdown of key ecosystems, threatening our very survival. It is interesting to me that we rage on and on about how fiscal deficits threaten the future of our children but get all upset when science suggests a far greater threat to their future than anything on the fiscal or economic agenda.

A deep-seated culture of leave-me-alone, I'm-not-responsible-for-anyone-else, individualism has not served us well. And it is certainly not preparing us for the future - not a far off future, but imminent, the middle age of our children growing up today - that is described in the study by UW-Madison scientists.

Problem is, once the experience of climate chaos becomes overwhelmingly obvious, washing over the arguments of the skeptics, it will be too late to avoid catastrophe. We will be adapting under great duress. If you think jobs and a future economy are being threatened by those who want to address climate change and other extreme environmental threats, wait till you see what happens to our employment prospects as this climate scenario unfolds.

We need a politics that matches the real world of this planet, not the ideologues whose only program is to cut taxes. Okay, and then what?

Photo credit: Milwaukee Riverkeeper