A collective challenge: Eco-anxiety is not a mental health problem

A recent letter-to-the-editor that NYT did not print. Oh, well. It still has a home here on In and Out.

Editor, The New York Times

 

A recent article (“That Feeling of Doom? It’s Called Eco-Anxiety,” NYT, Sept. 17) advanced a theory of “eco-anxiety,” a new concern for mental health professionals, and a new area of investigation for journalists and pollsters. Widespread fear that more severe environmental changes are coming makes sense.

 

And while treatment for individuals suffering from any form of anxiety and, even, despair, also makes sense, the only cure ultimately is collective action. Human activity is the root cause of climate change and cascading environmental catastrophes. And environmental scientists tell us that this has been happening for millennia. But the acceleration of these changes over the last two centuries is largely the result of a process that has created global corporations with nearly absolute authority over how resources will be distributed and consumed. A direct effect of this process has been the conversion of the vast majority of people into either disempowered consumers or dehumanized objects.

 

This phenomenon is the cause of eco-anxiety. Can we fix this? Develop and deploy strategies and innovations that can mitigate the climate harm coming our way? Perhaps. Success is not guaranteed.

 

But the individual experiences of anxiety that people are suffering from now would certainly be reduced by participation in a mass movement that aimed to eliminate racial and economic inequity. History tells us that such movements never achieve all their goals. But when they come close, they make a lasting difference and are often described as revolutionary. 

 

 

 

Stephen Markley’s book, The Deluge

A history of our frightening future

 

The Deluge is both a fine novel and a frightening and convincing history of our future. At almost 900 pages long, the book is unlikely to reach the full audience that ought to absorb the lessons about climate change, climate-driven catastrophes, and climate activism that Markley is trying to convey. And the book could use a table of contents that would demonstrate up front both The Deluge's time and geographical sweep, and it's obsession with detailing a wide sample of the heat waves, droughts, dust storms, floods, wildfires, famines, political confrontations, climate denialism, capitalist opportunism, totalitarian actors, craven capitulations, terrorist attacks and grassroots activism that will dominate the next decade and a half of life in the United States and around the world.

 

There can be no succinct summary of The Deluge, but on page 639, in one character's attempt to capture what life had been like and why no one had been able to predict, in full, all that they had experienced, there's this:

 

"Little did we know the self-reinforcing crisis of our climate, our economy, and our democracy would begin to spiral and whiplash like the arms of a gathering cyclone."

 

The destruction and loss of life that dominate the news cycle in this book, and will materialize in similar forms in our own lives in the years to come, are horrifying. The destruction and loss of life as the book proceeds, and as we navigate our own future, will relentlessly and persistently bend the arc of the universe in the world of The Deluge, and in our own parallel universe, in unpredictable ways. And those "ways"will create conditions that some significant number of us will not survive, regardless of the extent of our personal privilege.

 

The Deluge is full of engaging and generally well-defined characters. But one colossus of a character stands astride them all. Kate Morris, both an obsessive-compulsive truth teller, and a devious hero with little interest in playing nice, seems like an amalgam of dozens of charismatic and relentless activists that dot the history of American resistance to power; take your pick of figures like, say, John Brown, Sojourner Truth, Emma Goldman, Ida B. Wells, Martin Luther King, Jr., Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm, Wilma Mankiller, or make your own list. Kate Morris stands on the shoulders of all those heroes that came before her and goes as hard and moves the needle as far as any of them were able to do. Kate is the founder of a wildly successful organization, the Fierce Blue Flame, that fights the giant fossil fuel corporations and all their lobbyists and political servants, to a virtual standstill. It is with the description of her musings on page 459, that I realized that I had better begin writing:

 

"Instead, she couldn't stop thinking of how the blood had roared in her ears as that armored vehicle rolled toward her, how the adrenaline felt like it might lift her off her feet and send her hurtling like a mortar round into its hull. Shock them, fuck them, grind them to the bone. Be fearless. Be Achilles, be Roland, be Joan of Arc. Have a mental disease. Follow your clit. Drive across the Dakotas and watch a storm sear the horizon, recognize herself in its peals of wind and each crack of lightning, her true fellow travelers. Don't change, don't learn, don't fall, don't flinch. All she'd ever feel was sorry for people who didn't know what it was to want something more from their own life. Conjure a tempest, spew rage from the heart, and make them stare into this city of Cassiterite dark she'd made with nothing but her ravaged voice."

 

All of Markley's true, live heroes have weaknesses. In some cases, staggering weaknesses that few could expect to survive through the decades of political, economic and climate storm und drang. But on page 634-635, there's this soliloquy from Keeper:

 

"'I've done so many awful, awful things. Horrible things, man. I've--I've hurt people. People I don't even know or couldn't even find again to tell 'em I'm sorry. Tell' em I'm sorry. Tell 'em what I did was evil. How am I supposed to believe God can forgive me? That'd just be me wishing there was a way I could even get forgiven.' Your voice cracks and you swallow this lump of grief yet again. The next words come out in a snarl. 'We were in Georgia and Florida after the hurricane. That big one, Rose. And in one of these collapsed buildings, we hear this baby crying somewhere down in the rubble. Of course, no one really wants to get down into that shit, but I do it. I go. And it takes me forever. I'm crawling down into this hole, crawling on my belly, and there's slime everywhere, and it smells like shit. But finally the hole opens up into this little space. Freezing water up to my thighs. No sign of the parents, but I could smell them, somewhere nearby. But there was this little girl still in her crib because this one room didn't collapse, and she's shrieking and shrieking, so I go over to her and pick her up, and then ...' Your voice cracks again and you let a small sob escape. 'As soon as I pick her up, she stops crying. Just goes totally silent. And she's staring at me with these huge brown eyes, looking so scared, and I swear to God when I picked her up...'

 

“Now you can't help yourself. You start crying and it's embarrassing, how you're powerless to control your own hurt. Your hands come out in front of you like you're still cradling her.

 

“'I swear to God, when I held her in my arms, it felt like she was my own daughter.'

 

“Tears fall from your cheeks to the snow, and when you dare glance up, you're surprised to see the reverend is also crying.

 

“'I carried her out and handed her off. I'll never know what happened to her.'"

 

Nearing the end of the book, one particularly cranky research scientist, who has been warning for decades about the severity of the coming climate catastrophe, finds himself afflicted with a metastasizing cancer that has escaped treatment because his own role in forcing climate legislation through Congress in one of the most dysfunctional moments in American government history means that he has no time to set aside for the medical procedures that will prolong his life. But he does have a final opportunity to share with a friend his feelings about his wife's death from cancer some twenty years earlier.

 

"'When I lost my wife,' said Tony, 'I decided that grief is actually always there. It's like it lives in you, dormant. Until somebody goes. And that person dying, it just wakes you up to it. Makes you aware of it. But it's always been there (page 830).'"

 

That moment comes just over 50 pages from the end. But it suddenly felt to me that I was hearing the author, Stephen Markley, expressing his own feelings through Tony. Feeling grief. Endless grief encountered in the course of writing this book and knowing how much suffering of all kinds lay ahead. 

 

But here's the thing, in Markley's book the activists never give up. And they are, by and large generous and stalwart and, most importantly, strategically and tactically agile. In The Deluge the struggle between the people and the power may take an unfamiliar form, but don't be deceived. The struggle for climate justice and more is the same old struggle. And the future always hangs in the balance.

In the time that we have left, pt. 2

 What work marks the early stages of a developing movement? Who does it? Are we already in the early stages? Whose work will history acknowledge?

How much or how little time should I spend figuring where exactly would I locate myself in the early history of this movement? Nowhere, probably. I've been in the peanut gallery for most of my adult life, doing whatever seemed most urgent at any given time. I certainly haven't been a thought leader in the nascent movement I wish to see gathering momentum. I haven't been an organizer or an activist. There were quite a few years when I mostly contented myself with emptying, then recycling beer bottles.

In any case, to calculate anyone's exact location in the multi-dimensional map of global movements begins, I suspect, with admitting that there has never before been a truly global movement. Unless, maybe, one supposes that the agricultural revolution was just such a movement. You know, the Agricultural Revolution, some 60-70,000 years ago? The one that made most of us farmers and pushed hunter-gatherers to the margins? Not a true movement, really. No hive brain at work there, either. But certainly an almost simultaneous global transformation. And, we would have to note that it's impossible to assess anyone's role in a transformation that began in prehistory, before there existed a single historian, or, even, a footprint thereof. Absent any model for assessing where anything actually starts or who started it, we probably need to begin developing some arbitrary criteria so that we can begin making a list of whoever might have made an early, and critical, contribution.

It's easy to imagine a reader arriving at this point in this post saying to themselves, or out loud to the universe, "what the hell are we talking about?" So, let's backtrack. This post is part two of an inquiry that began with yesterday's post. It is headed "in the time that we have left" because the earth is in jeopardy and almost all of the responsibility for that belongs to humans. We have so much to account for and no time for an accounting. The earth, the biosphere, the mass of all that lives and breathes and swims and flies and crawls is shrinking. The walls are closing in on us. If we and all the bio organisms around us are to survive what's coming in any remotely familiar form, we must become virtually unrecognizable to ourselves. We need to devolve.

And only a nearly universal consensus about the urgent need for human devolution will get the job done. So, again, what's the best next question? There must be nearly an infinity of possible answers to that question and I simply do not have the skill and ability to get to anything like a comprehensive answer to that question. Who does?

But I do keeping asking myself this question? Who are the pioneers who have/are/will catalyzing the movement in question? If there is already a list, who or what is on it? Again, a comprehensive answer would be one hell of a long list. But I say that no matter who qualifies for that list, one person who beyond any doubt belongs on that list is Octavia Butler. 

In the time that we have left...

How would a culture arrive at a decision to devolve? What would that mean? Surely, people would not devolve individually. We are not talking about returning to our evolutionary origins. Devolution, whatever that might turn out to be, would have to be a collective process, one that a whole society would agree to undertake, like, say, returning to human social groupings more typical of the period before the industrial revolution, or of the period before the agricultural revolution.

And why, in the world, would a people decide to devolve? It's not that the decision to devolve and getting there would happen very quickly. It might take generations. Or longer. How would a culture even arrive at a consensus understanding of what it would mean to devolve? How would that culture, our culture, ever be able to develop and implement a process that properly assessed the pros and cons of devolution?

These questions are not mere hypotheticals. It is possible to argue in favor of at least one substantial benefit that would arise from cultural devolution; the benefit that would accumulate (to whomever or to whatever) from the human species devolving from our/its/the current state of voraciously consuming more resources than our planet will ever, can ever, replenish, to becoming a species that lives more lightly in and on our shared biosphere.

How fraught would that process be? How troubled, and dangerous and unrewarding and potentially unrewarded, would the process of changing from existing collectively as a lunatic behemoth in constant struggle with our planetary home to becoming a species fully and productively adapted to an ecological niche in harmony with all other bio organisms and with the visible and invisible forces constantly working to build and level and bury and rebuild the world on which we travel endlessly through the galaxy? How troubled, and dangerous and unrewarding and likely unrewarded would that process of devolution be?

Can we put aside, for a moment, the obvious notion that such an outcome is not actually possible? How would the process begin? How many different people would have to arrive separately at the conclusion that our species must devolve if everything we love is to be saved? How many people would have to arrive individually at the conclusion that we must devolve in order to create a critical mass of such people, a collection of such individuals sufficient to so that they would occur often enough in the larger population to recognize each other and begin to coalesce as a movement advocating for and taking the first steps toward cultural devolution?

Ignite a global movement? Organized in what or whose interest? Gathering power from what source? From the suffering of people who would not survive to the moment when such an enlightened state is realized? Power gathered from the suffering, sucked from the lives of individuals who would be consumed in. the building of such a movement? How would a movement that aimed to protect all that we love calculate the sum of separate sufferings? How would a nascent movement arrive at the conclusion that the benefits from devolution would add up to far more than the sum of the sufferings incurred along the way? How would the movement decide that the collective moral injury suffered along the way to the utopian goal was an affordable cost?

How would such an infant movement quantify the possibility of failure, of incurring all the costs that must be paid along the way to never arriving at the proposed outcome? Of continuing the chase, no matter how long it took, fueled by the agonies of an infinity of humans who would necessarily suffer precisely because we never relented in our pursuit of a phantasm?

The Time Is Now: White Supremacy and Climate Change

As winter approaches, it is clear that Joe Biden will be our next president. But a remarkable number of people, led by our current president, are still arguing with the evidence and our political divisions threaten to fuel a rocky and unproductive, if not outright dangerous, transition from one administration to another. We, Americans, whoever we voted for, are almost universally suspicious of and alienated from most of the partisans who disagree with us.

 

But the truth is, we’ve been living in that divided country for quite a long time.  Arguably that estrangement began developing with the Vietnam War and Watergate, but it has additional roots in political controversies that followed. The Reagan-era and a partisanship that waged war on both the safety net and on imaginary “welfare queens” accelerated our discontents. So did Iran-Contra and US-subsidized mercenary warfare in Central America. The divide grew larger with the misogyny of both Bill Clinton and his political opponents, the appointment of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, the bipartisan expansion of the carceral state, and “the end of big government.” The excesses of the Trump administration and the failure to manage the pandemic merely added new material to the top of the mountain between us.

 

With each decade since the victories of the Civil Rights movement, the divisions have gotten wider and more obvious until this moment in time when it is next to impossible to identify a political figure with the ability to bridge the chasm across which some of us stare at each other with stunned incomprehension, if not with pure loathing. Regardless of what other detail we might add to our list of divisive issues and events, the energy that powers our divisions is rooted in the racism and white supremacy, the misogyny and machismo, and the homophobia and xenophobia that have been a part of our history since the first Europeans invaded the Western hemisphere.

 

 

The struggle ahead

 

But today is the day after, in the most fundamental sense. Everything we have to say about what we think our country is, and how it became what it is now, surely matters. But it is only at dawn on the day after that we can begin to do something about making the United States what we want it to be.

 

That work should begin with ourselves as individuals, with accepting that recent events may be discouraging, that recent defeats may have blunted our faith in what we can accomplish both individually and collectively. But we must begin by recognizing that whatever it is that lies in our individual capacity to achieve, our collective mental health depends on affirming our belief in what is possible for us to achieve together.

 

We must take on the small myriad challenges directly before us. We have to rebuild our communities, our cities and our states, and we must do so while also focusing on the challenges that loom the largest. And of all the very large challenges, the ones that threaten us all and that will get far worse in the absence of unity, climate change is the most severe, the one that will track us all down, wherever we are, and teach us that the old fantasies of the good life are pipe dreams and distractions. There is no express train to ride to a better life, no flight path to safety.

 

 

The urgent work of managing climate change

 

The exact date of the beginning of the climate crisis that the world and that the United States are living with now will be a matter of historical debate for some time to come, perhaps for generations. At some future time, the when, how, and why of the crisis itself will be the basis for a whole new field of historical study.

 

Regardless, climate change is upon us full blown. The continuing effects on less-developed countries as coastlines are submerged, as once arable land turns to desert, and as tens of millions of climate refugees continue their forced migrations, will get much worse. And the politics of our time threaten to  grow even more tumultuous than they already are.

 

So far, the vast wealth of the United States and its residents has empowered many of us to ignore climate change. Polling responses make clear that as much as half the adult population have somehow been able to ignore the starkest proofs that the climate crisis is upon us. Five years ago, Republican Senator James Inhofe brought a snowball into a Senate session as a way of demonstrating his complete rejection of any evidence supporting the claim that the world is getting warmer, like, for instance, the fact that the year before, 2014, was at the time, the hottest on record. But the climate emergencies, like enormous forest fires and devastating and frequent hurricanes keep accumulating.

 

Small-scale climate migrations are already occurring. People in the hundreds of thousands who have been repeatedly displaced by coastal flooding or forest fires these past few years are finally deciding not to rebuild their homes and not to return to devastated communities. Indeed, one recent report estimated that more than one million US residents moved from environmentally unstable areas in 2018. And we know beyond any doubt that flooding, droughts, tornadoes, hurricanes, heat emergencies, and more will get more frequent, more sustained and more destructive.

 

The hundreds and thousands making decisions to leave areas where they have lived for decades, if not generations, will most often be making the cheapest and most convenient changes they can. But southern Californians moving to Arizona or Nevada will be moving from fires to frying pans, moving to areas where climate crisis in the form of droughts and heat emergencies will get much worse; those effects on ecologically fragile environments multiplied by population pressures increased by their own new arrival.

 

Northern Californians and Oregonians are also beginning their own migration, trickling further north along the Pacific Coast to places where drought, flooding and forest fires will also get worse. Perhaps, long-term, they will all end up in British Columbia, where, hopefully, a far-sighted Canadian government will move forward in the next decade or two to put in place the kind of infrastructure that will mitigate the worst effects of climate change in the Northwest.

 

Miami, FL, regarded by many climate scientists as the most endangered coastal city in the world, will be the eventual source of a significant stream of climate refugees, a stream that will be further swollen by tributaries of refugees moving north from other Florida communities. The wealthiest of those refugees may not seem like climate refugees, at all. Their wealth will allow them to move further up the coast to Georgia and the Carolinas as they wish, maintaining their high-maintenance quality of life as they go, creating new and photogenic spreads for magazines and TV shows highlighting the lives of the rich and famous.

 

But the poor and middle-income families living in threatened areas will find themselves forced to move, their property devalued, their resources exhausted by multiple emergencies. And because no one can predict the if and when and where the migrations can and should stop, it is past time for all of us to begin preparing to live lives that will be consistently more challenging than many Americans have ever been forced to live. It is time to begin recognizing that we are about to become a nation of migrants on a scale not previously reached by earlier migrations.

 

 

 

Ending white supremacy is key

 

The claim that the lives we will be living will be more difficult for many of us than our lives before the escalating climate crisis needs qualification; it is important to note that for African Americans who have always had to negotiate life in a white supremacist country, hardship and challenge will not be a new experience. That people of color and the poor will bear the burdens of global climate change sooner and more extensively than the wealthy and more securely situated is not news.

 

White supremacy, itself, is the scaffolding for all the arguments that divide working people and the poor against each other, dramatically reducing the effectiveness of their political mobilizations. This leaves our collective fate in the hands of the very people who profit from our social divisions. It is also the basis for arguing that the first step toward managing climate change should begin with a multi-racial and multi-generational movement to dismantle white supremacy.

 

It can be done, with enormous difficulty, of course, but demography may finally be on the side of such a movement. After all, Gen Z is the largest and most diverse generational cohort in US history. And though no generation is ever a cohesive whole, it seems obvious that a significant fraction of that cohort is far past fed-up with the status quo, and already mobilized in pursuit of sweeping change.

 

In her recently published book, Caste, The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson tells the story of the African American slave who may have been the first American to introduce the notion of vaccination as a means to controlling an epidemic.

 

“Cotton Mather was a Puritan minister and lay scientist in Boston and had come into possession of an African man named Onesimus. The enslaved African told of a procedure he had undergone back in his homeland that had protected him from [smallpox]. People in West Africa had discovered that they could fend off contagions by inoculating themselves with a specimen of fluid from an infected person. Mather was intrigued by the idea Onesimus described. He researched it, and decided to call it ‘variolation.’ It would become the precursor to immunization and ‘the Holy Grail of smallpox prevention for Western doctors and scientists,’ wrote the medical ethicist and author Harriet A. Washington.”

 

Wilkerson’s account details the outrage with which Bostonians greeted Mather’s attempts to promote inoculation as cure for the smallpox epidemic that raged in Boston in 1721. “They feared it could spread smallpox all the more,” she writes, “and they also wanted nothing to do with a practice that had come from Africa and had been suggested by an African slave.”

 

But Onesimus’ suggestion was a cure. One in seven Bostonians died from smallpox, but out of 240 people who were inoculated by a single local doctor who believed in “variolation,” only one in 40 died. The otherwise disastrous consequences of the smallpox outbreak in Boston, Wilkerson notes, was the absolute consequence of a caste system built on the notion that those at the top are inherently superior, those on the bottom are inherently inferior, and, by definition, are incapable of the intellectual brilliance necessary to advance development and solve social problems. “The investment in the established hierarchy runs sufficiently deep [in the United States],” Wilkerson concludes, “that people in the dominant caste have historically been willing to forgo conveniences to themselves to keep the fruits of citizenship within their own caste.”

 

That point ought to be among the most important arguments for dismantling white supremacy. Climate change has been creeping up on us all since the Industrial Revolution; it has been gathering mass and velocity at an accelerating rate since the middle of the last century, and it has become the most global of emergencies in the history of humankind. We cannot begin to manage that emergency in a society that throws people away from birth, that denies opportunity for human talent to develop, and that continues to foster inequalities of every description. We need to mobilize and fully employ every human talent that manifests itself in time to turn us toward a sustainable future.

 

 

A few proposals for action

 

The failure of presidential leadership over the last four years underscores the argument that the exclusive leadership of wealthy, white males is a recipe for disaster. We have waited far too long to open the way to the leadership of women and people of color. We are moving forward now in a nation that cannot depend on the leadership (or celebrity) of the newly elected president. We can hope that he will be a competent steward in a period of epic social and political transition, but the heroes of the effort to transform our world, with roots in previously excluded communities, are already stepping forward everywhere.

 

So, if the challenge is to dismantle white supremacy on the way to building an effective nationwide movement to address climate change, how do we do it? Where do we begin?

 

Building on the success of the electoral defeat of Donald Trump by a record-setting voter turnout seems like one of the more obvious places to start. Register more voters. Register millions more voters. Choose Stacey Abrams to lead the Democratic National Committee and to organize the largest and most effective voter registration effort in American history. This will accomplish two things. It will continue to build a multi-racial coalition capable of advancing an electoral and legislative attack on white supremacy. And it will acknowledge the leadership and accomplishments of an African American woman who has already directed the effort to turn Georgia, a deep-south red state, purple.

 

Here in Chicago, we need to act directly and relentlessly to confront developers and political leaders who have persuaded themselves that downtown and upscale and high-rise office and housing developments serve the interests of the city’s residents. In fact, not only do such subsidized developments fail to serve the interests of the vast majority of city residents, they fail to acknowledge the role that African American and Latinx labor has played in creating wealth in the city. Indeed, the continuing denial of educational, housing and career opportunities for people of color has forced minorities to compete for low-wage and dangerous jobs that expropriate the wealth generated by their own efforts (and exposes them disproportionately to health risks and to environmental toxins). The solution for Chicago begins with prioritizing development in the south and west sides of the city and in requiring all development projects to employ workforces that reflect the city’s actual population.

 

On an even more local level, we need to recognize that our homes and our neighborhoods are not ready to weather climate change. We should be retrofitting to make housing community-wide as energy efficient as possible. Moreover, we must advance green-energy development in the form of small-scale solar installations, green roofs, wind-powered generators, and neighborhood-based energy co-ops. Housing and building codes should be changed to guarantee that both developers and landlords play an appropriate role in improving energy efficiency.

 

While we are initiating and moving forward locally and globally, we should recognize that the two Senate runoff races in Georgia represent an opportunity to dethrone Mitch McConnell and to begin building a Senate that will not stand in the way of progressive legislation. To do so will be a sustained, multi-step effort. Long-term, it will mean electing senators who bring a more profound understanding of class and race issues to the work of legislating, but we must not neglect the immediate opportunity to elect two Democratic senators from Georgia. We have only two months—the runoff elections will be held January 5—to mobilize a Mississippi Summer-type intervention in Georgia aimed at electing Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff to the Senate. Winning either seat will be a challenge, but the urgent task is to win both. It’s time for the most energetic and adventurous among us to head to Georgia for an adrenaline-fueled election campaign that must end in a critically important victory.

 

And while volunteers head to Georgia, the demands for local action, including confronting police violence and misconduct, and building up anti-violence networks in our neighborhoods remain a priority. So, too, are organizing efforts that build capacity in Chicago neighborhoods and address continuing needs like hunger, made worse by the pandemic.

 

One nonprofit in Chicago, Just Roots, began development and operation of a community farm on 45^th Street in the Bronzeville neighborhood. In just three years, the Legends South Farm has distributed 20,000 pounds of produce grown at the farm and provided 1,000 hours of education and training for community farmers. Just Roots, in partnership with St. James Catholic Church, also established a second community farm this past summer at 29^th and Wabash. This model for community self-help could be replicated many places across Chicago with support from the city; another political challenge that local activists could take on.

 

The possibilities for action, for projects that will promote the changes we desperately require, are nearly infinite. Every individual, every family, every neighborhood, every community can work up a list of the possibilities. There will be dissenters, people who will not share in the tasks ahead; some will even stand in the way. But obstacles are not enemies. We must focus relentlessly on building a movement capable of flowing over or around whatever is in the way. 

 

 

Implacable forces have been building the world to come

 

The pandemic, itself an outcome of globalization and climate change, has taught us a lesson about traditional expectations and the pace of social, environmental and existential change. We live now in a world in which it is no longer reasonable to assume that tomorrow will be essentially the same as today. That means, in general, that everything about our personal lives, our families, our neighborhoods, and our communities, needs to be carefully reexamined. If we as a country are to dismantle white supremacy, manage and mitigate climate change, and successfully adjust to a new world in which our old assumptions about life trajectories are merely baggage we will have to discard, we are going to need to reeducate, retrain and reimagine ourselves. That will be very hard work. Mistakes are inevitable. We must get started now.

Covidicah

and

The Message of the Miracle of the Mayonnaise Jar

It was the time of Covid, in the year 2020. The land was quiet. Too quiet for some and, yet, too loud for others. The landscapes without people were eerily beautiful, but also apocalyptically depopulated.

For several decades before Covid, the country’s leadership was, shall we say, below average. And even the presidents who showed some real ability to lead were unable to unite us all and often proceeded timidly, when they needed to be brave. But the particular president serving in office at the time of Covid was even unable to surpass the low bar set by his predecessors.

He was a buffoon some said. A fat head, said others. More serious minded folks,called him a white supremacist, or a misogynist, or both. Some who were less serious, or fatalistic about the chances of the country surviving Covid, made fun. His hands, they said, loudly and repeatedly, were very small—baby hands. And he had a little, tiny dick, they would say, though history is mostly agnostic about the size of his penis.

So, okay, then. Enough about that. I just didn’t feel like this would be good, full, truthy story, if I didn’t mention the diverse speculations about the president’s tackle. Little tackle. Tacklette. Whatever.

We can say that then, as now, there were other centers of power, and some of them had more influence than others. There was one center of power that was like a fox ranch, or something like it. The foxes on that ranch were big supporters of the otherwise helpless—did I say, helpless?—I mean, hapless president. The foxes on the ranch were big supporters of the hapless president. Some of the foxes were sleek and blond and talked nonsense, but you wouldn’t have expected foxes to be fountains of wisdom, would you?

Regardless, it does appear that fox babble was a big source of ideas for the hapless president. That was never going to turn out all right and, let me tell you, history shows that under the president’s leadership, shit did hit the fan, the air, the water, everything.

To make matters worse, there was a constitutional assembly, called the House of Elitists (or something—history is vague on the name), which was led by another woodland animal; the morose, turtle-faced Mitch, who had a deep and strategic objection to democratic process and a fondness for incompetent judges. Turtle-faced Mitch, it is reported, ended up in the soup.

It was definitely a no-good, very bad time. In our city, the zip codes that suffered the worst violence, also recorded the most deaths from the virus. The same zip codes also had the largest air-polluting railyards, the highest number of industrial air-polluters, the most kids suffering from asthma, and the fewest number of people with health insurance. The whole country hit the deep do-do lottery jackpot.

Local and regional governments didn’t invest much in public trans, creating vast profit opportunities for private trans. The same ideological indifference to the idea that we could all succeed together that characterized policies that crippled public health and public trans plagued public education. The opportunities for individuals to profit off of the kinds of needs that we now enshrine in our code of human rights (our Code of Human Rights) made a hash of public education. We were throwing away lives and achievements and whole communities of skills and talents with which we could have built (and, eventually, would build) the Beloved Community.

As if all of this was not bad enough, the earth itself was heating up—I mean like in giant, biblical degrees. And the policy response to this—well, let’s say it wasn’t science-based.

People hoarded, which is to say, they bought extra amounts of things they didn’t need. Especially in the early phase of the pandemic. This was no surprise. In an environment when many people didn’t have work, and many jobs were dangerous, and the good things in life seemed so unachievable, people were scared.

They were afraid to get sick and suffer and, maybe, die. So they took care of themselves by buying more than they needed of things that were available and seemed affordable. Now, we know, of course, that they didn’t need so much stuff. And they bought some of that stuff in quantities that were sufficient to ensure that their families wouldn’t run out of whatever they hoarded for generations.

That’s why we own so many pencils. Somebody, your great-grandfather, maybe, hoarded pencils. They were cheap, I’m sure; available, I’m certain; and he liked pencils, I’m guessing; so, our family is never, ever going to run out of pencils.

That’s what happened down the block with Ms. Alice’s family, I think. Someone thought that having a lot of plastic forks around would be a comfort—I know, go figure—so now she owns thousands of plastic forks. That’s why she’s always going, “Here. Have some plastic forks.”

Some people even hoarded toilet paper, which they used for wiping their butts. A lot, I guess. That bit of hoarding makes a little more sense because, as we know, everybody poops.

Unfortunately, the toilet paper hoarding apparently caused widespread inconvenience, or emotional distress, maybe. Eventually, people realized that there was enough for everybody and started sharing their toilet paper. That’s when people started saying that, “Solidarity is the path to and the purpose of the surplus,” which eventually became the third and, I think, most important meaning of our greeting, “Salaam.”

At any rate, people started mobilizing. That’s what happens when people start realizing that change is in the air, and that they have the power to shape that change. They mobilized to kick the scary and notorious Orangish Man out of the People’s House.

And though we seem to have lost interest in the exact identity of the Orangish Man, we do know that they voted him out of office. And after he was out of the way, they started voting pretty much nonstop for things they did want. They voted for universal health care. And for decent housing for all. And for good, green jobs.

They voted and voted and voted. They voted money out of voting. Boy, did they vote. They voted good public schools until public schools were where everyone wanted to go to school. That project took a long time. A lot of voting.

Eventually, they were all, hell, let’s just vote socialism and be done with it. But here’s the thing. You’re never done with it. Democracy is not perfectible. Notwithstanding the attitude of the old-school, uber-powerful, lifetime-appointed judges favored by the Orangish Man and Turtle-faced Mitch, democracy changes as the people will it to change.

And how do they express their will? They vote and vote and vote. They even voted that forever after we, all of us, must vote to heal the least of us, heal the body politic, heal the air and water, heal the earth, our mother, heal our mother who was here before Covid and has been here ever since and will always be here and will always love us. We vote to love our mother back.

So that’s what this holiday is really about, to remind us to vote to love the earth back. That’s why at this holiday celebration, around this community table, we tell about the Covid miracle of the mayonnaise jar that held only enough mayonnaise for a single turkey sandwich, but miraculously lasted to make enough turkey sandwiches with fresh lettuce and mayo to feed every hungry person that lived here before the Beloved Community and would live on to be a part of that new understanding of ourselves.

So, there’s the Covid Miracle of the Mayonnaise. And the Message of the Covid Miracle of the Mayonnaise is this: We heal what we can and deepen our understanding of that which we cannot heal. And we pledge to each other that down the road we will try to heal that which we cannot heal now.

And now we close this Covid night with the recitation of the Four Covidicah statements:

 “Solidarity is the path to and the purpose of the surplus.

“The social surplus belongs to the people.

“The anti-social surplus was the way of things before Covid.

“The surplus is the path to and the purpose of solidarity.”

Amen

Toni Morrison will endure

The whites didn’t bear speaking on. Everybody knew.

I’m a seventy-two-year-old straight white male, born into an upper middle-class Jewish household. I dropped out of college in 1966 and spent at least the next three decades recklessly squandering some of the advantages my array of privileges created for me and discovering the multitude of ways that those same privileges nevertheless would manifest to rescue me. Would I have escaped quite as many fraught situations relatively unscathed if I had been gay or female or of color? Probably not, but it’s a certainty that I have not earned all the do-overs that life has granted me.

Regardless, over the years it has become increasingly clear to me that however impossible it might be to evade my white-skin privilege, I need to find productive ways to reckon with it, to understand it, and to use it, wherever and whenever possible, for good. Ultimately, that means to me that I should learn how to be an anti-racist, to stand forthrightly against the white supremacist culture of our country.

A variety of life experiences, including my friendships and work relationships with black folks (see most especially my tribute to Phyllis Hall, her son Perry, and the rest of her family in "The Spirit of Phyllis Hall"), the energizing effects of the moral and political courage of leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, and numerous lessons learned from writers like Richard Wright (Black Boy, Native Son)Manning Marable (How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America), Bryan Stephenson (Just Mercy), bell hooks, Edward Baptist (The Half Has Never Been Told), Isabel Wilkerson (The Warmth of Other Suns), James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Tupac Shakur, Langston Hughes, June Jordan, Amari Baraka, Roxane Gay, poet Brian Gilmore, Colson Whitehead, Toni Morrison and many others, have been instrumental in leading me to the conclusion that standing aside from the struggle against white supremacy would be the ultimate in privileged behavior; and, also, because our collective lives, impoverished by a society that absolutely refuses to recognize the humanity of people of color as equal in every way to that of “white” people, white supremacy injures us all. It deprives us of the full range of achievement and invention that would enhance every aspect of our lives together, and sentences us to shared fear, anxiety and misery. In such a world—in this world—anti-racism and active opposition to white supremacy is a fundamental first step in getting to a truly just society. I will go even further than that to say that I don’t believe that our country can right itself, can address other truly urgent problems, like climate change and disastrously underfunded public education, without also dismantling white supremacy.

I don’t know when I first discovered Toni Morrison, but it was probably around 1971 or 1972 when I came across a paperback copy of The Bluest Eye, Morrison’s first novel. I have since read three or four other books by Morrison, both The Bluest Eyeand Belovedmore than once. Most recently, just before Morrison died, I’d begun rereading Belovedfor the third time, in the process coming full on the understanding, maybe for the first time, that straight, white males were not the audience that Morrison had in mind when she sat down to write. In fact, this time around I felt like a spectator —a voyeur, perhaps— watching while Morrison told a wise and important story for the benefit of all her beautiful babies, her African American readers, who would have both an instinctive grasp of the story she told, and would move on from the story with a richer understanding of the weaknesses and strengths, of the trials and burdens and transcendent beauty of black folks, in the land of white supremacy and African American dauntlessness.

I cannot say how the United States gets from where we are now, with a president whose banalities, crudities and cruelties are so deeply rooted in racism and privilege, to a place where our biggest gifts—our multiculturalism, our collective creativity, inventiveness and profound sense of community, and our fundamental human desire to do good—define a United States where equal justice prevails, but I am certain that it would help for us to read more Toni Morrison.

I submit the following quotations from Belovedfor the benefit of those who need to be enticed to pick up one of Morrison’s books and read through to the end. I further submit that Morrison’s work is certain to lead most readers to the inevitable conclusion that four centuries of travail have equipped black folks to lead the way to that place where equal justice prevails; a lesson that white folks need to learn over and over again if we are to reach the promised land.

Passages from Toni Morrison’s Beloved:

Paul D “…recognized the careful enunciation of letters by those, like himself, who could not read but had memorized the letters of their name. He was about to ask her who her people were but thought better of it. A young colored woman who was drifting was drifting from ruin. He had been in Rochester four years ago and seen five women arriving with fourteen female children. All their men—brothers, uncles, fathers, husbands, sons—had been picked off one by one by one. They had a single piece of paper directing them to a preacher on DeVore Street. The war had been over four or five years then, but nobody white or black seemed to know it. Odd clusters and strays of Negroes wandered the backroads and cow paths from Schenectady to Jackson. Dazed but insistent, they searched each other out for word of a cousin, an aunt, a friend who once said, ‘Call on me. Anytime you get near Chicago, just call on me.’ Some of them were running from family that could not support them, some to family; some were running from dead crops, dead kin, life threats, and took-over land. Boys younger than Buglar and Howard; configurations and blends of families of women and children, while elsewhere, solitary, hunted and hunting for, were men, men, men. Forbidden public transportation, chased by debt and filthy ‘talking sheets,’ they followed secondary routes, scanned the horizon for signs and counted heavily on each other. Silent, except for social courtesies, when they met one another they neither described nor asked about the sorrow that drove them from one place to another. The whites didn’t bear speaking on. Everybody knew.”

 Pg. 52-53

“This girl Beloved, homeless and without people, beat all, though he couldn’t say exactly why, considering the colored people he had run into during the last twenty years. During, before and after the War he had seen Negroes so stunned, or hungry, or tired, or bereft it was a wonder they recalled or said anything. Who, like him, had hidden in caves and fought owls for food; stole from pigs; who, like him, slept in trees in the day and walked by night; who, like him, had buried themselves in slop and jumped in wells to avoid regulators, raiders, patrollers, veterans, hill men, posses and merrymakers. Once he met a Negro about fourteen years old who lived by himself in the woods and said he couldn’t remember living anywhere else. He saw a witless colored woman jailed and hanged for stealing ducks she believed were her own babies.

            “Move. Walk. Run. Hide. Steal and move on. Only once had it been possible for him to stay in one spot—with a woman, or a family—for longer than a few months. That once was almost two years with a weaver lady in Delaware, the meanest place for Negroes he had ever seen outside Pulaski County, Kentucky, and of course the prison camp in Georgia.

            “From all those Negroes, Beloved was different. Her shining, her new shoes. It bothered him. Maybe it was just the fact that he didn’t bother her. Or it could be timing. She had appeared and been taken in on the very day Sethe and he had patched up their quarrel, gone out in public and had a right good time—like a family. Denver had come around, so to speak; Sethe was laughing; he had a promise of steady work, 124 was cleared from spirits. It had begun to look like a life. And damn! a water-drinking woman fell sick, got took in, healed, and hadn’t moved a peg since.

            “He wanted her out, but Sethe had let her in and he couldn’t put her out of a house that wasn’t his. It was one thing to beat up a ghost, quite another to throw a helpless colored girl out in territory infected by the Klan. Desperately thirsty for black blood, without which it could not live, the dragon swam the Ohio at will.”

Pg. 66

“I did it. I got us all out. Without Halle too. Up till then it was the only thing I ever did on my own. Decided. And it came off right, like it was supposed to. We was here. Each and every one of my babies and me too. I birthed them and I got em out and it wasn’t no accident. I did that. I had help, of course, lots of that, but still it was me doing it; me saying, Go on, and Now. Me having to look out. Me using my own head. But it was more than that. It was a kind of selfishness I never knew nothing about before. It felt good. Good and right. I was big, Paul D, and deep and wide and when I stretched out my arms all my children could get in between. I was that wide. Look like I loved em more after I got here. Or maybe I couldn’t love em proper in Kentucky because they wasn’t mine to love. But when I got here, when I jumped down off that wagon—there wasn’t nobody in the world I couldn’t love if I wanted to. You know what I mean?”

“Paul D did not answer because she didn’t expect or want him to, but he did know what she meant. Listening to the doves in Alfred, Georgia, and having neither the right nor the permission to enjoy it because in that place, mist, doves, sunlight, copper, dirt, moon—everything belonged to the men who had the guns. Little men, some of them, big men too, each one of whom he could snap like a twig if wanted to. Men who knew their manhood lay in their guns and were not even embarrassed by the knowledge that without gunshot fox would laugh at them. And these “men” who made even vixen laugh could, if you let them, stop you from hearing doves or loving moonlight. So you protected yourself and loved small. Picked the tiniest stars out of the sky to own; layed down with head twisted in order to see the loved one over the rim of the trench before you slept. Stole shy glances between the trees at chain-up. Grass blades, salamanders, spiders, woodpeckers, beetles, a kingdom of ants. Anything bigger wouldn’t do. A woman, a child, a brother—a big love like that would split you wide open in Alfred, Georgia. He knew exactly what she meant; to get to a place where you could love anything you chose—not need permission for desire—well now, that was freedom.”

Pg. 163

“When the women assembled outside 124, Sethe was breaking a lump of ice into chunks. She dropped the ice pick into her apron pocket to scoop the pieces into a basin of water. When the music entered the window she was wringing a cool cloth to put on Beloved’s forehead. Beloved, sweating profusely, was sprawled on the bed in the keeping room, a salt rock in her hand. Both women heard it at the same time and both lifted their heads. As the voices grew louder, Beloved sat up, licking the salt and went into the bigger room. Sethe and she exchanged glances and started toward the window. They saw Denver sitting on the steps and beyond her, where the yard met the road, they saw the rapt faces of thirty neighborhood women. Some had their eyes closed; others looked at the hot, cloudless sky. Sethe opened the door and reached for Beloved’s hand. Together they stood in the doorway. For Sethe it was as though the Clearing had come to her with all its heat and simmering leaves, where the voices of women searched for the right combination, the key, the code, the sound that broke the back of words. Building voice upon voice until they found it, and when they did it was a wave of sound wide enough to sound deep water and knock the pods off chestnut trees. It broke over Sethe and she trembled like the baptized in its wash.

“The singing women recognized Sethe at once and surprised themselves by their absence of fear when they saw what stood next to her. The devil-child was clever, they thought. And beautiful. It had taken the shape of a pregnant woman, naked and smiling in the heat of the afternoon sun. Thunderblack and glistening, she stood on long straight legs, her belly big and tight. Vines of hair twisted all over her head. Jesus. Her smile was dazzling.

“Sethe feels her eyes burn and it may have been to keep them clear that she looks up. The sky is blue and clear. Not one touch of death in the definite green of the leaves. It is when she lowers her eyes to look again at the loving faces before her that she sees him. Guiding the mare, slowing down, his black hat wide-brimmed enough to hide his face but not his purpose. He is coming into her yard and he is coming for her best thing. She hears wings. Little hummingbirds stick needle beaks right through her headcloth into her hair and beat their wings. And if she thinks anything, it is no. No, no. Nonono. She flies. The ice pick is not in her hand, it is her hand.

“Standing alone on the porch, Beloved is smiling. But now her hand is empty. Sethe is running from her, running, and she feels the emptiness in the hand Sethe has been holding. Now she is running into the faces of the people out there, joining them and leaving Beloved behind. Alone. Again. Then Denver, running too. Away from here to the pile of people out there. They make a hill. A hill of black people, falling. And above them all, rising from his place with a whip in his hand, the man without skin, looking. He is looking at her.

Pg. 261-262

Job one for white progressives: Engage other white folks about racism

A recent study exploring the effect of race-based political messages on white subjects showed that a certain subset of whites, "liberals with higher levels of racial resentment," were particularly responsive to both racially explicit and implicit attacks on government social programs. The story, headlined "Why Some White Liberals Will Probably Vote For Donald Trump," ran on the Huffington Post website earlier this month,

Reporter Arthur Delaney noted that the study's authors, sociologists Rachel Wetts and Robb Willer,
"offered a few theories about why [racially coded] welfare rhetoric would move white liberals more than conservatives. One is simply that conservatives are so familiar with welfare-bashing from Republican officeholders that they can't be swayed any further," he wrote.

"Another is that liberals may be uniquely vulnerable to this rhetoric because they are afraid to talk about racial inequality. Watts and Willer noted that 'strong norms of colorblindness in liberal political culture mean negative outcomes among black Americans as a group are rarely discussed.'"

Clearly, it would be rash to reach any number of conclusions based on a  single academic study, which itself cannot be fairly assessed without knowledge of the kind of details that a news report cannot easily include or evaluate. Still, another statement in the article provides a jumping off point for considering where white progressives should focus their activism. "...strong norms of colorblindness in liberal political culture mean [that] negative outcomes among black Americans as a group are rarely discussed," Delaney wrote, quoting Watts and Willer.

That suggests to me that white folks who consider themselves allies of African Americans have a particular responsibility to engage other whites who may have "higher levels of racial resentment" in discussions of the history, the social and cultural impact, and the continuing significance of 400 years of racism in the United States.

This is necessary for a number of reasons. In 2016, Donald Trump won 46 electoral votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that had twice previously been won by Barack Obama. Trump won those three states by less than 90,000 total votes, giving him 306 electoral votes to Hillary Clinton's 232. There are all sorts of ways to parse that outcome, including the notion that far lower 2016 turnouts of African American voters in Philadelphia, Detroit, Flint and Milwaukee compared to the two previous Obama campaigns may by themselves account for Hillary Clinton's defeat.

But the combination of white Obama voters who defected to Trump, or who voted Green or Libertarian, or who simply sat out the election because their distaste for Clinton obscured their grasp of the damage a Trump victory would, could, and did do, very likely were also enough to swing the three critical states away from Clinton. Looking ahead to the presidential election in 2020, it seems reasonable to conclude that increasing African American turnout and effectively mobilizing estranged white liberals are key to denying Trump a second-term.

In a country that is increasingly polarized and seems almost ungovernable, addressing the general white refusal to understand the full impact of slavery, of the collapse of reconstruction, of Jim Crow, night riders, lynch mobs, mass incarceration, disinvestment and 400 years of economic exploitation is a central task, now and into the future. Whatever one believes to be the most urgent policy questions facing our country, our government and ourselves, it is clear that our collective political dysfunction stands in the way of effective government action on any number of priorities, including climate change, economic inequality, public education, the right to organize, mass incarceration, abortion rights and so much else.

I would argue that racism and white privilege are the very root of that dysfunction. If that is so, and, if for that particularly critical subset of white liberals who can be moved by racist dogwhistles avoiding discussion of race issues is both bad habit and unfortunate priority, than white progressives who are willing to promote discussions of race with other white folks can play a critical role in the effort to restore functionality to our political life.

African Americans cannot play that role with whites. Nor should they. As a practical matter, African Americans already deal with white racism 24/7. They are isolated by it, defined by it, under attack by it, undermined by it and stereotyped by it. Nevertheless, productivity, inspiration and genius are part of the heritage and the contemporary experience of African Americans individually and in community. Eliminating white obstacles to the dissemination of African American social and cultural influence, and the enhanced quality of life that would follow, ought to provide further motivation for white progressives.

We know, or can guess, how much better life could be in the United States if the obstacles to full creative participation in our culture were eliminated for all. Racism alone has probably wasted more work, more talent, more genius than any other single factor. Had we found a way to continue the work of reconstruction after the Civil War, to restore stolen wealth, to create a world characterized by equal justice and equal opportunity, our current political challenges would almost certainly feel far less urgent. That is the world we could come to live in, but getting there may depend very much on the efforts of white progressives to lead in opening the discussion of racism and white supremacy within our own communities.

This will be hard and will take persistence, human kindness, and an unrelenting focus on the world still to win. But we must keep our eyes on that prize.

The Windup Girl

Florida governor Rick Scott probably won't read Paolo Bacigalupi's novel. But he should.

I let this fragment of a review linger incomplete, while Marrianne lent out our copy of the book (with my consent). I find that the notes I pencilled in the margins to be the basis for whatever else I might write about The Windup Girl are gone for now, perhaps for always. Is a piece half-done worth the trouble of reading it?

Probably. After all, it's probably less than 400 words. Who's going to pretend that they haven't ever before wasted the time it would take to read 400 words?

So Florida, the state likeliest to suffer most from rising sea levels caused by climate change, has, under the dubious leadership of Republican governor Rick Scott, developed a de facto policy that scrubs the use of terms like "climate change" and "global warming" from documents produced by state employees and contractors. Such a policy moves Scott to the very front rank of climate-change deniers and, given Florida's particular vulnerability, would likely make Scott a candidate for some kind of Darwin award if he wasn't also past his peak period of reproductive activity.

Scott probably isn't planning to read Paolo Bacigalupi's book, The Windup Girl, but it probably wouldn't make a whole lot of difference if he did. After all, one arrives at the end of the book considering the possibility that a variety of factors, including climate change, have already narrowed the global path to the point that we can stop worrying about Florida, which is bound to become swamp, and start worrying about our own skins, which are likely to sweat copiously and fry quickly for extended periods on both sides of high noon.

In Bacigalupi's dystopic world, most of us in the West are pretty much in the same boat as Floridians. The exceptions are likely to be chemists and geneticists and engineers working for global corporations that own seed copyrights, possess the firepower to enforce and exploit those copyrights, and do not let ethical considerations weasel their way into strategic plans. But the catastrophes that The Windup Girl imagines, predictions of a world less than, say, 50 years away, do not seem (with a few exceptions) like events from which we will run screaming, but more like moments we will watch like frogs in a hot tub, unaware that the temperature of the water is rising toward the boiling point.

Of course, some of us already recognize that the temperature is rising and some of us do what we can to address that developing problem. But Bacigalupi's point seems to be that whatever it is we are doing, it's not enough. And though some few of us will survive, sign on with one of those global corporations with the reach and power of government, or find a remote, little tub where the water is cooler, those survivors will find that the regret that they did not do enough is a crushing weight on what life they have left. The difference between their regrets, however, and the regrets of humans who are simply aging out and passing on, will be the difference between dying in the full knowledge that one has failed a most important moral challenge and dying ignorant of one's failure.

Why doesn't Obama call for more stimulus?

Make the Republicans say "no"

Barack Obama's big win in November could have been a springboard for moving American political dialogue to the left. Arguably, it has done that, at least a little bit. Of course, Sandy Hook and Hurricane Sandy have had a role in that, too.

After all, state legislatures and Congress are seriously considering tighter restrictions on guns (Maryland, for example), state legislatures are advancing action on climate change over right-wing objections (Kansas, for example), and six Republican governors are going ahead with a Medicaid expansion they had previously opposed.

But Obama's decision to focus on potential damage caused by the sequester misses an opportunity to push political dialogue even further to the left. And, as Robert Reich argues in a column carried by the Huffington Post, focusing on the damage isn't effective tactically, either.

However real that damage might be, it probably won't be obvious to most Americans, Reich says. "Moreover, the blame game can be played both ways, and Republicans are adept at slinging mud," he wrote.

Instead, Obama should "...directly rebut the two big lies that fuel the Republican assault," Reich writes. "The first big lie is austerity economics--the claim that the budget deficit is the nation's biggest economic problem now, responsible for the anemic recovery.

"The second big lie is trickle-down economics--the claim that we get more jobs and more growth if corporations and the rich have more money because their the job creators, and job growth would be hurt if their taxes were hiked."

Reich's piece doesn't outline what Obama should be offering in opposition to austerity and trickle-down economics, but he's right that swapping accusations over the sequester helps Republicans avoid the debate over how much damage right-wing economic policy has caused over the past three decades, and especially since the collapse of the housing market dumped the country into a recession that caused job losses from which we still have not recovered. That recovery should remain the priority for national economic policy and President Obama is in the best position to make that argument.

He could begin by reviewing the work of the Center for Economic Policy and Research (CEPR), still the best source for a full look at the high price of deficit reduction at this time and what additional stimulus might accomplish. And, if the president needs to look at new ways of generating revenue, he should study CEPR's carefully documented argument for a financial transaction tax.

A bill in the Senate calls for the imposition of just such a tax. A press release from CEPR summarizes the benefits of the tax.

"The Harkin-DeFazio bill provides a way to raise a substantial amount of revenue while at the same time making our financial markets more efficient."

"The modest tax would discourage an enormous amount of short-term trading while having almost no impact on the ability of markets to finance productive investment. The cost of the tax would be born almost entirely by the financial industry, since for most investors the money saved as a result of lower trading volume will offset the higher cost of trades.

"At a time when Congress and the President are looking to cut Social Security, Medicare, and other essential programs, the idea of getting $40 billion a year from taxing speculation in the financial industry looks very attractive."

Wouldn't that move the debate in a progressive direction?

Letters from the Earth

(Actually not a reference to climate change, however much I may have been beating that horse of late.)

Mark Twain's Letters from the Earth is the title story in a collection of writings published posthumously. The letters are the Archangel Satan's side of a correspondence with his brethren, Gabriel and Michael.

As Twain's version of the story goes, Satan routinely gets on God's last nerve. And, with apparent regularity, Satan gets suspended, i.e., banished from heaven for varying lengths of time. One of Satan's banishments follows on the heels (in celestial time) of one of God's most baffling experiments, the creation of animals, in general, and humans, in particular. The fact that they are all found on Earth and no place else is part of the experiment. After all, God doesn't know what the outcome of the experiment will be, so why risk contaminating the universe? (This, of course, raises another question, how to measure the extent of contamination, if any.)

Anyway, Gabriel and Michael and Satan can't puzzle out quite why God has done such a ridiculous thing and, ordinarily, would confine themselves to heavenly inquiry, navel-gazing and the like. But Satan figures that since he has to wander through space, cold and dark as it is, until his current suspension ends, he may as well visit Earth and see how the experiment is coming along. Letters from the Earth lays out his observations about humans.

"This is a strange place, an extraordinary place, and interesting. There is nothing resembling it at home. The people are all insane, the animals are all insane, the earth is insane, Nature itself is insane," Satan writes in the first letter.

"Man is a marvelous curiosity. When he is at his very very best he is a sort of low-grade nickel-plated angel; at his worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and at all time he is a sarcasm. Yet he blandly and in all sincerity calls himself the 'noblest work of God'," continues Satan. "This is the truth I am telling you."

And, indeed, Satan's story does seem fact-based. There is more, lots more, but you'll have to find the Letters someplace and read them. In general, Twain always had an easier time spotting the pretensions and pontifications of faith. He was also inclined to minimize the apparent benefits, but not the power of religion, organized or otherwise. That is why Letters from the Earth wasn't published during Twain's lifetime. The book probably would have been banned, and Twain almost certainly wounded financially.

And speaking of banned, if you followed (or follow) the link to the Wikipedia entry for the book, you might encounter a link there to Dan Savage, who actually wrote a stage adaptation of Letters. When Marrianne and I were co-publishers of The Dayton Voice, we carried Savage's wickedly funny and very gay friendly advice column, "Savage Love." Occasional columns and other bits by Savage have almost certainly gotten the publications they were in banned from time to time, but that would also be a measure of their real value.

The Postman's advice for activists,

"It's getting better all the time..."

The stars seem to be lining up in favor of progressive change.

Barack Obama's reelection, never a real goal to the disorganized Left, is nevertheless a good deal better than the alternative. Into the bargain, Obama seems willing to continue the populist push that was a key element of his victory. The Tea Party insurgency appears spent, posing a much bigger threat to Republicans than to the rest of us. Democrats of all kinds have apparent electoral advantages, like a superior national campaign apparatus and an increasingly diverse electorate, that should make it easier to move them toward peace and justice and sustainability; or, easier to imagine them moving that way, anyhow.

Further, the Republicans seem bent on turning the 2014 elections into another referendum on which party isn't the lunatic party--a bad choice of political terrain. Marco Rubio sounds like Mitt when he says opportunity "is not bestowed on us by the federal government," as though someone else out there is saying so.

A Republican filibuster, faux or no, aimed at blocking Obama's appointment of Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense merely threw the President another fat pitch he could muscle over the fence.
"It's just unfortunate that this kind of politics intrudes at a time when I'm still presiding over a war in Afghanistan and I need a secretary of defense who is coordinating with our allies," Obama said. Ka-boom.

And the sequester? Everybody really ought to find some kind of cover soon. Republicans are clearly organizing a circular firing squad on that one. Which brings us to another GOP gift to Democrats, the increasing likelihood that they will oppose every single proposal for more gun control.

The overall impression here is that the Republicans aim to engineer one of the few instances when a party lost a mid-term election to a sitting president. And the first party to lose a Congressional election to an incumbent in his second term.

Activists for peace and justice and sustainability are mobilized.

How many examples are necessary to prove that point? Here's three:

The time to change national policy on addressing climate change is now. Senators Barbara Boxer and Bernie Sanders have introduced comprehensive legislation on climate change. The largest ever public demonstration on the issue will happen in DC on Sunday.

At the invitation of Chicago anti-violence activists, President Obama will address the problem of gun violence in Chicago today.

 Immigration reform, fueled primarily by the efforts of Latinos and their allies is on the Congressional agenda.

There are plenty of other examples, but the point is that the national political space opening on the left is larger than it has been since Civil Rights and Medicare. This is an opportunity for a progressive movement that does not confine itself to electoral politics, but does not separate itself, either. There is a an electoral path to peace and justice opening up here.

In that spirit, a few ideas to keep in mind:

1. The diversity of our movement, demographically, stylistically and strategically, is our strength.

2. Climate change may be the uber issue, but people deserve to live in communities that affirm their lives, nurture them, teach them and protect them. All other human rights and social issues still matter.

3. Playing nicely with Democrats is a good thing, not an immoral compromise. We believe in change, we organize for change, we vote for change. Sometimes, yes, we vote for the lesser evil. If not, we relinquish the field to the one-percent.

4. Some people are going to say that the right says one thing, the left says another--it's just politics. Dismiss such oversimplification. Say, with Hannah Arendt, that the truth about the reality that surrounds us can be investigated and discerned. Tell them the battle ahead is for their future, also. Sitting it out is not a moral choice.

5. In the post-apocalyptic world of The Postman, getting the mail service reorganized, connecting isolated communities, seems like a good first step. But for the young mail carriers, a 21st century Pony Express, really, the going gets hard some of the time. The Postman (Kevin Costner) has to inspire them, which he does, with the news that the United States government, under President Richard Starkey, has been reestablished in Minneapolis.

"Things are getting better. They're getting better all the time," the Postman reports.