Wrapping up Climate Action Week with "what-ifs?"

Last week was a week designated for taking action regarding the Climate Crisis our planet faces. Of course, only one week out of the year is 51-weeks-short of what we could be doing, and I believe, should be doing.

I started the week by writing to two Orange Village officials about the environmental impact of a supposedly “green” housing development going up not far from our home. One wrote back, the other promises a phone call this week.

In the middle of the week I wrote to our Ohio U.S. Senators regarding climate. Senator Portman hasn’t responded (he probably will), and Senator Brown sent me a very comprehensive email stating his position.

Our main project this week was to eat locally-grown and produced vegetable-based meals. Perhaps you saw the post about that. As the week ended, I think we fulfilled that commitment quite well, and I don’t feel any worse off for it. I confess that it’s a bit of a challenge to think about where we go now food-wise, given our attention to planet-healthier eating options for a whole week. As I indicated in my original post, these are not entirely foreign practices for us, but maybe we’ve at least moved the marker a little closer to a truly sustainable diet.

Posting bogs about these acts is also part of my action. I realize my readership is extremely small, so I don’t expect to have much impact. I am not generally comfortable with participation in mass demonstrations, even though I know they can be very important. So if I write something that perhaps increases the awareness of one or two persons, that’s a least a small contribution.

I end this Climate Action week with a cluster of “what-if” questions that keep rattling around in my mind. I will try to state them as clearly as I can:

“What if we as a human race began to do all the things the scientists tell us we must do to counter the more drastic effects of climate change, and then discovered that the climate would have stabilized even if we had not done them? Are not climate-positive actions good for and beneficial to us without regard to their impact on our planet? Is doing the right thing for the sake of our planet’s future also doing the right thing for us as individuals and as societies?”

Do those questions make sense? Are they worth considering? I plan to keep working on them.

Thanks for reading.

How we eat

During this Climate Action Week, Maxine and I are doing a little something new. We've been inspired to do this by the report a couple of weeks ago regarding food and the climate/environment.

We are making an effort to eat locally-grown and produced food, and we are not eating meat.

When you live in Ohio, eating locally-grown food is much easier in September than it is in February. We belong to a food-buying club/co-op that provides us a bag full of fresh fruits and vegetables each week from May through October. I think being more intentional than we usually are about eating local during this week is helping us see how challenging it can be even when it is relative easy to do it.

At this point, we do not think we will give up all meat permanently. Maybe we should. There are many good reasons to do so. But to the extent that we do eat meat, we want to eat meat that is from animals raised as humanely and sustainably as possible. (I tried to write "slaughtered/harvested humanely," but that's a tough stretch.)

The environmental/climate implications of changing how we eat are profound. The major way we do agriculture, which could indeed "feed the world" if it were done justly, is extremely destructive to the natural environment, and contributes to the increasing rate of global climate change. Clearly, the billions of people now on planet Earth are not about to feed themselves year-round the way our agrarian ancestors did, so becoming more efficient and sustainable in the mass production and distribution of food should be a high priority for us and for the agricultural industry.

Maxine and I do not think these changes in our diet will prove to be permanent changes, although we have, in fact, been moving in these directions for many years. We think these are good moves for us and for the environment.

Nor do not believe what we are doing this week deserves any particular praise. It is more for our own awareness than for anything else. But I share it because it might get someone else to think about their own food habits. Perhaps you'd like to comment with your thoughts on the matter. I'd be grateful.

Have we given up on goodness?

Sometimes I think that when it becomes just too challenging to be "good," we revert to being "bad." That when doing "the right thing" gets really tough, we wallow in doing "the wrong thing."

That's what seems to have happened to our beloved nation, as well as throughout the world.

We–the USA–were, for years, proud to be the land where people could come when they had no other options. We celebrated any steps we took to overcome our legacy of institutional slavery and racism. We believed everyone deserved a fair shot at succeeding financially and socially. We counted on open and peaceful elections, and on our free, even if not always absolutely fair, press. Women felt, I believe, increasing power to determine their own destinies.

Courts could be counted on, at least some of the time, to side with the individual, particularly if their rights were being limited by practices and laws beyond their control. Our nation claimed to want to lead the world into new experiences of freedom and liberty.

We knew that compromise was essential to the survival of democracy, and treated our political adversaries with at least enough respect to give compromise a chance. We held that the minority always deserved to be heard and responded to, and that elected officials represented geographical areas inhabited by people of all kinds, not just their own partisans within that area.

We held that politeness and even grace should be the basis of almost any relationship.

In the last couple of decades or so many of us decided that all of this national "goodness" was too hard to pull off. It was not worth the effort. We began to doubt our own ability to be the nation we liked to say we were. Enough of us who had been trying to be that kind of citizen quit trying, which allowed those who never believed in such ideals anyway to step out of the shadows and into the light. Social media and the internet created breathing room for the worst of our doubts and fears, and continues to pump oxygen into them.

What will it take to restore our determination to be our best ethical selves in the the most just possible USA? What kind of leaders will successfully challenge us to go for "goodness" again?

Not those who shout and chastise and blame, or who refuse any compromise (except, when it serves their purposes, compromise with truth), or who lecture us as if we were ignorant. It will take quiet-spoken, thoughtful, and patient Americans who are willing to listen to all voices as well as to take responsibility for the decisions they finally make to get us to where we need to be, to where I honestly believe most of us truly want to be.

Enough, already!

Please, spare me any more jokes and Facebook memes about Sharpies!

The tendency of both President Trump and the press to blow something way of proportion has been demonstrated once again.

The president could have admitted he was wrong–blaming his "mistake" on bad information received from an underling–and that would of mercifully been the end of it. But he never makes mistakes, as he has told us so often, and he never, ever will admit to a mistake, as we have seen just as often.

The press–particularly organizations like CNN and USA Today–could have chalked it up as another awkward Trump misstatement, and let it go at that, but they continue to beat their drums about it. And the more they talk about it, the more he pushes back about it. Who knows how many words have been written about the presidential Sharpie?

There are, of course, serious issues behind all of this hoop-la.

For starters, President Trump, unlike most more-ordinary human beings, is never wrong. In order to prove he is right when he has been found to be wrong, he is willing to twist any agency of the government he can get his hands on participate in his mistake. That's a problem because it makes him sound like every self-obsessed dictator in human history.

But it's a problem for the press as well. Focusing endless attention on a relatively small matter, the press mostly ignores the major damage being done at the same time by a government bureaucracy accountable to no on but President Trump and his tweeted whims. This distraction from what really matters, from what is really eating away at our national psyche and health, is no doubt well-planned.

Which leads all this being our–the American peoples'– problem. The more we are chew on the silly and the ultimately inconsequential, the less likely it is that we will recognize the deadly poisons which government of, by, and for the people is being fed every day by the Trump administration and a Republican Party that has lost its way.

Thanks for reading. Now, please put your Sharpies away.

Monsters, then and now...

The Cleveland Museum of Art currently has special exhibition called, "Medieval Monsters: Terrors, Aliens, Wonders." It's a fascinating look into how depictions of fantastical monsters were used in medieval Europe to bolster claims of political and religious power, to define adversaries, and more. The description below at the entrance to the section on Aliens stuck me as being very relevant to our times. Made-up images (and words) still shape our perception of others, filling in the many blank spaces of what we do not know. What if we just tried to learn about others, instead of "monsterizing" them?

I highly recommend the exhibition. And if you feel that you need a break after you see it, pull yourself back together in the "African gathering place" in the Atrium. You will be glad you did...and it's all free!  

Truth is what I say it is

I am pretty sure that when Pontius Pilate responded to Jesus’s assertions about “truth” by asking “What is truth?” he was not at all interested in anyone’s answer to that question other than his own.

Pilate the politician was only invested in “truth” as he saw it, framed it, pictured it, promoted it. Truth was his “truth.” It was the world as he saw it, life as he lived it, reality as he wanted to try to shape it.

What is truth? Truth is me, because truth is what I say it is.

The what is truth? question has never been more important, nor more in contention, than it is today. Truth-discovery has never been easy, but the rise of the internet has made the process many times more difficult than ever before. Everyone’s opinion seems to have equal weight with everyone else’s opinion because that opinion, no matter how bizarre, can be shared instantly with everyone else. It’s all out there to see and to read and to share again, and the more it’s shared the more like truth that opinion seems to be. We have all participated in this practice. And numbed by the constant flow of information through commercially-driven sources of “news,” the less likely it is that the receivers of information will feel they have the ability or the responsibility to discern truth from falsehood.

I write the above in reaction to President Trump’s re-tweeting of a tweet by a known conspiracy-enabler claiming that Hillary Clinton had something to do with Jeffery Epstein’s death. Apparently there is not a shred of evidence for this charge. But that didn’t stop the President of the United States from sending it out “over his signature” to the world, but particularly to his loyal followers who will no doubt take it as true because it comes from him (truth is me, because truth is what I say it is) and send it on to others.

Donald Trump rocketed to political prominence by trying to convince the world that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States. (Not true, as he later half-heartedly admitted.) As a candidate for President he cast doubt on the integrity of our elections before he was elected (ironic, yes?). Almost daily he gnaws away at the credibility of our news sources when he doesn’t like what they say about him (even Fox has not escaped his ire), at the credibility of science when its conclusions are not convenient for him, at the credibility of our courts when they don’t side with him, at the credibility of our constitutional checks and balances when they stand in his way, at the credibility of our allies when they want to do things differently than he wants to, even at the credibility of his own advisors when they have ideas other than his own. No truth but his “truth” matters because he himself is all that matters.

What is truth? Truth is me, because truth is what I say it is.

Conspiracies? You like conspiraracies? Here's one for you: A small group of highly-placed people is working together to undermine our republic by challenging the credibility of our most basic institutions. They know, as sure as they know the sun will rise tomorrow, that if they are successful the day will come when in the public’s mind there will only be one source of truth: the Tweets of Trump.

Frightening.

If I were the President of the United States, and had to spend a day in Air Force One traveling to Ohio and then to Texas in order to visit the victims of two mass shootings, I wonder what I’d be feeling and thinking as I flew 30,000 feet plus over this blessed land, home to 325,000,000 human beings…

I like to think I’d be feeling deepest sorrow as I reflected on each life forever changed by bone-shattering bullets.

I like to think I’d get outside of myself long enough to demonstrate genuine compassion for and understanding of others.

I like to think I’d be asking what more I could do, in my position, to keep these atrocities from happening, and that I’d be reviewing all of my assumptions about what works and what doesn’t work so I could re-examine them in the days to come.

I like to think I’d be asking my advisors to come up with creative and doable ideas–ideas that a majority of Americans would likely support–to limit gun violence.

I like to think I would set wheels in motion to again allow the Centers for Disease Control to track and study gun violence so action and legislation can be based on real information.

I like to think I’d reflect on the epidemic of violence of all kinds in our society, and determine at least to use my voice to speak against it.

I like to think I’d ask myself what I could say and do to lower tensions between Americans so we can have reasonable and respectful debates about how to reduce the likelihood that we will kill one another.

I like to think I’d listen respectfully to those who respectfully speak their differences with me, and let those who seem to me to be doing nothing more than shouting in order to get attention to carry on…at least for today. Tomorrow, I like to think I’d think, will be soon enough for me (and for my staff) to shout back at them.

I like to think that because I genuinely want to focus on those who are suffering, I’d let reports of my visit stand on their own. I like to think I do not have to constantly write my own reviews, that I can let who I am speak for itself.

I like to think I’d be quiet and sit in silence for long periods of time as we flew from here to there, maybe staring out my window upon the land we all love. Maybe I’d pray–I like to think that I would–for victims, families, first responders, communities, the USA…and for myself.

That’s at least the start of what I like to think I’d think and feel in my time in the air–above it all, yet immersed in it all.