Lives Filled with Integrity and Love

To those who read this blog somewhat regularly, I am sorry that I have not been posting as often as I was just a month ago. When Democrats and Republicans rushed the fracking bill through the Illinois legislature—and Governor Quinn quickly signed it—I have to admit to a feeling of deep sadness. That the media obediently reported how strict the regulatory provisions of this new law were to be—even though activists in Illinois and other states already suffering the effects of fracking described in detail how the new Illinois law offered the oil and gas industry the same generous terms it was enjoying in other parts of the country—that apparent cooperation between legislators and the press made the fracking law’s passage doubly depressing. So, yes, I succumbed and didn’t write for a while.

Illinois is a strange and contradictory state. And I feel I can write that as I’ve lived for extended periods in several other states in this union.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that Illinois legislators are so agreeable to the idea of fracking. After all, Illinois also agreed to ‘host’ more nuclear reactors within its borders than any other state. In fact, Illinois has earned the dubious distinction of being the place where nuclear power and the nuclear bomb cast its first dangerous glow. The University of Chicago claims that honor, as well as the—in my opinion—deeply troubling distinction of developing within its Economics Department a theory that has been a plague to so many countries, namely the Chicago School of Economics with its magical thinking approach to capitalism, and the accompanying misery it has brought to populations in Latin America, Africa and, most recently, Europe. Oh, and it's doing its best to bring the strongest brew of theories to the U.S. The major players in Illinois aspire to make money, lots of it, and are not shy about wagering the health and welfare of its land and people in order to enrich the coffers of a few.

But this state can also be profoundly beautiful. This summer, for example, is one of the best summers we have had for many years: enough sun and warmth for the gardens to flourish, plentiful rains, and days that are warm but not punishing. This spring my rosebushes were laden with blooms. Trees that I thought, last year, were dead, leafed out this spring and are doing very well. And the season’s harvest is already bountiful. Today I harvested ten cups of red and black raspberries. I will make jam tomorrow. A few days ago I cut ten cups of greens. Tomatoes are already setting fruit, and yesterday I harvested the first baby eggplant. Today all our windows are open and the wind rushing in slow swells through the trees fills the air with a swish like waves at the beach. When I lived in California, I eventually tired of days and days of sunshine. My dreams eventually were drenched in dreams of Illinois rain, and memories of the sound of wind in the trees. Those dreams tugged at me until I came home.

I have to work with others who love this state if we hope to safeguard its health and beauty. I remain very sad about passage of the fracking law, but I am resuming the struggle.

In trying to understand how many people can feel disenfranchised by their country’s political and economic systems and yet find ways, at first very small, to express their unhappiness, I have turned to the writings of Vaclav Havel, Czechoslovakia’s playwright and president, who chronicled his country’s slow transformation from what he called a post-totalitarian state to something beyond. Havel’s Open Letters suggest in several places that there are parallels to be found between the struggle of the Czechoslovakian people and the attempts by the 99% in the U.S. to make a multi-national corporate system accountable to its people’s lives more than to the system’s goals. I encourage anyone reading this blog to pick up the writings of Vaclav Havel. He foresaw and lived to see his country transformed. As I pick up again the work on the fracking issue, I will keep Havel’s words in mind.

From “On Evasive Thinking”

We live in a time of struggle between two ways of thinking: thinking evasively and thinking to the point. Between half-baked thinking and consistent thinking. We live in a time when reality is in conflict with platitude, when a fact is in conflict with an a priori interpretation of it, when common sense is in conflict with a distorted rationality. It is a time of conflict between theory that plays fast and loose with practice, and theory that learns from practice. . .

From “Dear Dr. Húsak”

In other words, life may be subjected to a prolonged and thorough process of violation, enfeeblement, and anesthesia. Yet, in the end, it cannot be permanently halted. Albeit quietly, covertly, and slowly, it nevertheless goes on. Though it be estranged from itself a thousand times, it always manages in some way to recuperate; however violently ravished, it always survives, in the end, the power which ravished it. It cannot be otherwise, in view of the profoundly ambivalent nature of every “entropic” authority, which can only suppress life if there is life to suppress and so, in the last resort, depends for its own existence on life, whereas life in no way depends on it.

For those who read this blog, I thank you for the choices you make to bring truth into the world, and to foster lives filled with integrity and love.