My Uncle Gunshot

One Christmas, my Uncle Herbert came to visit us. Sweeping in from Detroit, he parked a beautiful Chevy in our driveway, and sailed through the front door laden with presents for everybody. Bounding into the living room, chomping on a fat cigar that belched smoke in his wake, he barked a happy greeting to his brother, threw the packages on our couch, and wrapped his arms around my mom as he said, “Now, where are the meatballs!” My mom waved away the cigar smoke, laughed and pointed to the sideboard where no fewer than twenty-five Swedish delicacies were waiting for the man we affectionately called Uncle Gunshot.

My uncle earned his name the hard way. But that will become plain later, and he had no regrets about the choices he made that led to his surprising moniker. What you need to know first is that Uncle Herbert loved America. Most of all he loved living in Detroit. “The greatest city in the world,” he called it. Given how he got there, I can understand why.

Before Sweden adopted a more humane approach to government, in the 1950’s for example, living in small-town Sweden could be a stultifying experience. Now, please keep in mind that I am reporting here. These are the characterizations shared with me by my father who, you may remember from another post, left Sweden because it was not the greatest place for him to grow up.

Anyway, my Uncle Evert was dad’s older brother. And he was a bit at loose ends as he left school. Not the best student, he didn’t seem to settle into a job. Instead, he was most famous for running with a pack of boys who very effectively stole apples from other people’s apple trees, and performed similar acts of mischief when they felt necessary. To cope with my Uncle Evert, one of the more recidivist pranksters, the little town’s leaders met and decided they would take up a collection to send Evert to America. They cast about for a town that would fit his exuberant personality, one where a Swede they knew would be willing to sponsor him, and finally decided to send him to Detroit. They thought of it as a punishment. For Evert it proved to be the exact opposite.

You see, Uncle Evert later told me that he got into so much trouble back in Sweden because the culture there had already written him off. A boy from a poor family with not the best grades in school, Evert just wasn’t able to compete for one of the few scarce jobs the city dangled in front of its young men. You see, it’s not just America that tolerates a high unemployment rate in order to enable business owners to employ only the most prized workers. So Evert had directed his initiative in a manner that pleased him and frustrated the city elders.

Uncle Evert was blessed to arrive in Detroit at the height of its glory. The city was booming. Evert marveled at its city thoroughfares laid out like the spokes of a wheel. When my dad drove to visit my uncle the first time, Evert said, “Just follow any major artery. They’ll all take you to the city’s center. I’ll meet you downtown.” Detroit was pulsing with the success of its auto plants, with its parts plants, with its manufacturers of all kinds. Evert quickly decided on a career as a house painter and helped all the working class and middle class folks who wanted to make their homes and apartment buildings shine with the city’s success.

But it wasn’t Detroit’s economic prosperity that Evert loved. He was to remain in the city even when times got very tough indeed. No, what Evert loved were the city’s people. As a boy who’d known only Caucasian Swedes, and pretty conservative ones at that, Evert loved all the races and nationalities that flocked to Detroit. He said this rich and complicated culture was what made Detroit so amazing. The crazy quilt that was Detroit kept Evert happily fascinated for the rest of his life. Even after he earned his nickname.

One evening on his way home from work, he saw an elderly woman get her purse snatched. Ignoring the warning shouts of his friends, Evert sprinted after the young man and ripped the purse out of his hands. Unfortunately, the purse-snatcher had a pistol, which he shot at Evert and then ran away. Evert ended up in the hospital, luckily with only a flesh wound, but his nickname stuck forever. Uncle Gunshot just laughed about his adventure. “The city was having a tough time when that happened,” he said. Then he added more soberly, “That guy just wanted to eat. But so did that woman. And she didn’t have a pistol. I couldn’t just leave her there.”

Uncle Gunshot passed away over a decade ago. He never left Detroit. He never lost his love for the place, though he experienced its steady decline. I am glad that he didn’t read the news this morning.

Today’s U.S. newspapers report the city of Detroit has filed for bankruptcy. The metropolis cannot handle its $18 billion debt. Approximately 38 cents of every city dollar goes toward loan interest payments. If Detroit hadn’t declared bankruptcy, the percentage of its money devoted to interest was expected to rise to 65 cents per dollar in just four years. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-0719-detroit-bankruptcy-20130719,0,7289375.story?page=2.

Ever wonder what it would be like to struggle in a failing European country like Greece or Spain? Just move to Detroit. While what some call third-world conditions have existed in pockets of U.S. cities for decades—remember the slums of the 60’s and the race riots that swept the nation?--we have ignored these neighborhoods of misery until we now have entire U.S. cities that are being thrown away. Stockton, CA. San Bernardino, CA. And now Detroit.

But wait. It’s not the entire city that’s being thrown away. Thanks to supply-chain economics, corporations with the means have reduced expenses and increased profits by moving overseas to cheaper labor markets, or have out-sourced significant percentages of their component manufacturing to overseas factories, thereby cutting the cost of their products. So some corporations have escaped Detroit’s fate. Got to love those economic concepts. They’re so good at masking the reality of suffering that accompanies such business approaches.

And the banks. Let’s not forget the banks. Somehow, even when people are losing their homes. Even when people have no work and don’t know how they are going to feed their families. Even when entire cities fail, somehow the banks always get the first repayments on debt. Just like cancer that feeds and grows without limit until its host is dead, banks demand their payments even when they know they are destroying the very communities that have made them profitable for generations. And our government and its laws support them in this sickness. That’s what happens when profit trumps life.

In 2010 the University of Chicago hosted a seminar called Global Capitalisms Old and New, which my university was kind enough to send me to. http://mfs.uchicago.edu/?/archive/global-warming-copy. Described as a few days that would be devoted to a reexamination of capitalism’s pro’s and con’s, it turned out to be far more of a paean for the largely understandable and laudable path that capitalism has taken over the last few hundred years. Especially hard to swallow was a talk presented by a political science professor, Gary Herrigel, who studies supply chain economics. (For one of his recent articles with Jonathan Zeitlin see "Inter-Firm Relations in Global Manufacturing: Disintegrated Production and Its Globalization" http://translearn.aalto.fi/Final%20conference%20material/Esitykset/Herrigel%20and%20Zeitlin%20paper%20for%20%20Morgan%20Whitleyn%20ed.pdf.) His presentation made reasonable the decisions of corporations to “out-source” all or part of its manufacturing to overseas locations where low wages were the norm. His argument was that by taking advantage of such markets, a reduced but still profitable corporation could remain viable in the U.S. where its designers, innovators and high-end employees would continue to have jobs. However, Professor Herrigel also admitted that as overseas employees learned to be effective workers, they would demand higher salaries at which time the corporations would have to relocate to a more undeveloped part of the world in order to retain its salary cost advantage. Again, notice how the concepts disguise the misery that follows in the wake of these strategies.

At the end of his talk, I raised my hand to ask this question, “What is going to happen when there are no more undeveloped parts of the world for corporations to exploit?” After attempting to deflect my question, he finally responded, “Well, I plan to be retired by then.” And then he gave a little laugh. He estimated that supply-chain economics as currently practiced had about twenty years left. Yes, I have had a seat in the room with University of Chicago scholars of capitalism and still feel my skin crawl from the experience. This man’s laughter suggested he had never known what it was to be poor. And never mind that supply chain economics fails entirely to factor in how dwindling oil supplies will affect this misery-invoking approach to business. By the time this strategy cottons to the reality of peak oil, its participating corporations will have wasted inordinate resources building plant after plant, training and discarding workers in multiple countries like so many plastic Nerf guns, and laying waste to environments around the globe at a time when all our resources should be utilized with an eye to a very different kind of resource future. But again, short-term profits trump long-range planning. Profit for a few and immediate misery for many are more important than low returns, happier people, and a healthier planet.

At times I wonder if there is indeed a divine evil at work here. Who came up with these ideas and why have the great majority of us agreed to participate in this madness for so long? Only a select few ever profit from this insanity. As Uncle Gunshot said to me, “He just wanted to eat.” Isn’t that true of us all?

If you want to experience for yourself the past glory and present challenges of Detroit, check out Detroitopia, an excellent documentary directed and produced by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady. http://www.detropiathefilm.com/credits.html. Uncle Gunshot would have debated endlessly with his friends the questions raised by this documentary. Most of all he would have loved that many in the documentary are still committed to the city. As Washington, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), a Detroit resident, has said, “I know deep in my heart that the people of Detroit will face this latest challenge with the same determination that we have always shown." http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-0719-detroit-bankruptcy-20130719,0,7289375.story?page=1.

Business as usual now includes throwing whole U.S. cities away? What the hell. When are we really going to start redesigning the way we do things in this country?

Resist Being Branded

In 2012 debate raged about how U.S. cattle were going to be identified. Traditionalists who wanted a permanent mark on their cattle insisted that only by branding a beast’s flesh could ownership of an animal be safely maintained. A California rancher puts it this way, “I don’t brand my cattle to just brand them for fun,” he said. “I’m not doing it just to burn an animal. I’m doing it because it’s a permanent mark of identification. It’s scarred into the hide, and it’s there forever.” The U.S. Department of Agriculture and those who manufacture the tags, argue that ear tags were a more efficient and less painful way to identify an animal’s rancher. An owner of a California livestock market summs up the usefulness of ear-tags as, “I raised this animal, it came from my place and I identified it, so if there is a problem you can trace it back to me and I stand behind it.” http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/us/ear-tagging-proposal-may-mean-fewer-branded-cattle.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. Cattle are raised for profit. Establishing who owns the animal is integral to reaping that profit.

Wouldn’t it be great if branding remained a tool used only to identify animals?

This preamble is, perhaps, a weird way to begin an essay that attempts to decide what political point of view best fits with my beliefs and values. Scrolling through my email and surveying my notes on a variety of articles, though, I realized that groups ‘out there’ were very invested in determining what brand I was going to wear. What social cause was I going to most passionately fight for? With what political party would I identify myself? What is my favorite store, shoe, or town, for that matter? To what church do I ‘belong’? Am I a Marxist, socialist, capitalist, or a democrat, with a small [d]? And once an entity ‘out there’ became convinced that it knew me, what strategy would it pursue to guarantee that I would spend some of my money in its name? Yes, folks, affiliating with ‘brands’ like these is very much about the bottom line.

Check your closet. What objects do you own with brands on them, logos visible when you wear, carry, or drive the product? What sports team do you support? Do you have one of its caps, or water bottles, or tote bags? What whiskey do you drink? Do you have a little warm-up jacket with the manufacturer’s logo on the front? What school does your son or daughter attend? Do you have the window or bumper sticker? If you own and display these objects, you’ve been branded just as sure as a rancher’s steer. And you’ve been branded, in part, to improve an entity’s economic advantage in the marketplace.

But, see, with the last sentence above it would seem that someone could brand me as anti-capitalist. And, yes, much of what I write on this blog falls within that mindset. I’m not much enamored with business as so often practiced today. But to accept the label of anti-capitalist would mean other aspects of how I think and believe would be excluded. For example, I relish creativity and personal initiative. I would not want to be stuck within a system that sacrificed those human qualities to someone’s idea of the greater social good. And yet I don’t want the greater social good to be sacrificed to the great god of profit either.

So who am I? What am I? Can I celebrate and further clarify the complexity of what I believe even as I resist the incredible number of groups, businesses, organizations, political parties—I need not go on here—that would like to stick me in a slot and count on my yearly contribution?

Here’s an example to be more specific about all of this. For years, I was a supporter of public radio. But then I started looking carefully at the list of corporate sponsors to my local radio station. As that list grew, it seemed to me that the hard-hitting questions of its local reporters began to get a little less hard, if you get my meaning. When a story was written not long ago about a little demonstration held at the local chamber of commerce it seemed to me the public radio reporter was a bit biased in his coverage of the story. So now I support that radio station a little less, and my opinion of that radio station has become somewhat qualified.

Here’s another example. My parents became members of the Democratic Party after immigrating to this country. I, in turn, embraced the Democratic Party when I became old enough to vote. But this year, because of the lackluster performance of elected Democrats for some years now and because our Democratic President Obama seems to have become adept at saying what I want to hear while doing the opposite of what I hope he will do, I am no longer a Democrat—and have told the party so. So what ‘am I’ now? I know for damn sure that I’m not a Republican. Whew! At least I know that, though I can imagine voting for a Republican who voiced and stood by ideas that I thought were important. But I’m not ready to become a card-carrying socialist either. Reading Vaclav Havel, I understand better how industrialized socialism is something that would wither my soul. All of these political labels come with historical baggage and an approach to today’s problems that seems determined to ignore large chunks of reality in order to prove that the party’s ‘way’ is the one and only approach to take. We need to decide on courses of action with our eyes wide open and all possible information being considered.

I’m just not buying the whole political party thing anymore. I’ll have to carefully look at each candidate who runs, but blanket support of a political party is no longer part of my repertoire. I am rejecting all of those brands. And, honestly, if the candidates all keep sliding into the mediocre middle I may just stop voting because to vote would be to prop up a sham system. I can imagine a situation when not voting might become more important than showing up at the polls.

So what is important to me? What do I think would be useful for the problems our town, or state/country/world faces? I think I can sum it up this way.

When I play poker, I get very annoyed if I find out that someone is holding secret cards that s/he’s slipping into a hand in order to win. I hate that. I think life, like a card game, is somewhat at the mercy of chance. One of the ways to lessen that nasty aspect of reality is to make sure that everyone at a table agrees on the rules, that everyone at the table at least starts the game with the same number of cards, that everybody sitting in the chairs must play by the same rules or be held to account for it. So I guess I’m in favor of finding ways to level the playing field for a whole lot of people. Right now we have a few people who regularly slip good cards into their hands, and that stinks.

Another thing I really dislike is when people treat words like the stuff kids call Playdough. When I taught English and theatre classes, I emphasized how ‘plastic’ words were. I encouraged my students to read entire entries in the Oxford English Dictionary so they could appreciate how many nuances of meaning there are for a word like “love”, and how human understanding of the word has developed over time. I encouraged them to appreciate the very personal images conjured up in their minds when they heard a word like “war” or “mother” or “sky,” images from their own experience that completely personalized aspects of those words. But somewhere around the time when scholars started arguing that there was no intrinsic or root connection between the sound of a word or its letters and what it meant—around that time politicians and advertising executives got wind of the idea and they ran with it big time. Today, words aren’t just plastic. They are able to suggest one meaning but are so stretchable that the word’s opposite meaning is also part of the (hidden) message. They are simply bytes of 010101 that can be used to project an image even as the speaker’s actions demonstrate the exact opposite point of view. And here I’m speaking of, sadly, President Obama, who announced with great pride and energy new emission standards for vehicles even though he must have known that the new standards to be announced were going to be weaker than EPA standards announced (and withdrawn due to industry pressure) about three months earlier. And I’m speaking of, yes I know I’m going to use the word again, some corporations that pay ungodly amounts to develop glossy brochures touting their environmental responsibility even as they dump toxic messes into the air, land or water. I believe it would help us all if people were a lot more ‘conservative’ with their use of language, and if they would say what they mean and stand by what they say, or admit to making a mistake and take steps to remedy the situation. 

You know, before we had so much paper, people made contracts with their words and shook hands (before witnesses) to seal the deal. To go back on one's word meant a person was soon out of business. Our world could use a little more of that attitude.

A few years back when I started this blog my hope was to encourage anyone out there who was reading it to explore what s/he believed, to take action based on those beliefs, and to fearlessly admit when an idea turned out to be completely unworkable and to start down a new path. I remain convinced that we need every idea on the table right now, and that it is absolute foolishness to assume a group or individual—that by hook or by crook, or through an advantage of birth, experience, intelligence or sheer luck—has risen to the top of the current social heap has the answer to all our problems. “Danger! Danger, Will Robinson!” is all I can say to that sort of willingness to trust. “Question everything,” is a far preferable motto. I hope you preserve, foster, and grow your sense of personal power and self-esteem. I hope you ask an unending number of questions.

There is no one answer. There are many answers.

There is no one best system. There are many systems, and some are suitable in certain locations and in certain circumstances, while they would be deadly for others. If people living in a certain location were able to design their system, that would probably be very effective--much more effective than having a single person do so. And no matter what system we come up with for a particular location it is unlikely to be useful for all time. Systems need reinventing because situations change, no?

There are a few realities such a creative approach to human life cannot get around, however.

WE ALL need protection from those elements hard on our skins, a place to live, water to drink, and air to breathe.

WE ALL need food to eat.

WE ALL need a sense of self-worth, whether that comes through helping others, or helping ourselves, or a combination of the two.

WE ALL deserve the same rights to a fair set of rules governing all the lives in our community, not different sets of rules for a privileged group, and another for the less privileged.

WE ALL may enjoy a little profit now and then, but life is more important than profit (and don’t read into this one that I’m a Right to Life supporter. I firmly believe in a woman’s right to choose what happens to and within her body).

WE ALL live on this planet and its resources are finite, and we live in relation to all the other life forms on the planet, whether we understand exactly how that is true or not.

So what do those statements above make me? I’ve got it. I think I’m an earthling. And as I’ve heard at the movies, “There are many paths, grasshopper.”

Our Government Insists That It Has It All Under Control—That’s What Worries Me . . .

1)    Present at Buchenwald, Arthur L. Johnson recalled a bitter and shocking memory “…all these people who claimed they didn’t know anything about it…and [they were] just 10 or 15 miles from Weimar.” Staff Sergeant Whiteway of the 99^thInfantry Division noted that according to them “no [German] ever saw a concentration camp or an atrocity.”

2)    Combat Surgeon Brendan Phibbs heard German after German plead, “nie gemurtet, nie gemurtet, we never suspected.” Staff Sergeant Powell traveled across the German countryside and regularly heard civilians announce that they were, of course, anti-fascists and then disclaim any knowledge of the camps.

“What Did Most Germans Know About the Nazi Concentration Camp System?” http://phdast7.hubpages.com/hub/What-Did-Average-germans-Know-Concentration-Camps Accessed 7-7-13.

Not long ago, this topic resurfaced in the American press. People are still debating exactly what the Germans did or did not know about the Nazis. Will we ever know the truth about this? What amazes me even more is the list of questionable to atrocious actions attributed to the present U.S. government—and yet life goes on in this country as if not much is happening. U.S. citizens cannot pretend not to know what is unfolding in our country—cell phone cameras, the internet, and whistleblowers have seen to that. But the government seems unabashed by the disapproval of so many of its citizens regarding the questionable, terrifying, or disgusting actions of those in power.

Guantanamo is still perched down there off the coast of Florida. Just today the media described our government’s intention to force-feed Guantanamo prisoners even on days when their religious beliefs call for them to fast. I am ashamed of this prison and the acts that have happened there. Many Americans continue to express strong opposition to this place, and yet the President of the United States seems unable or unwilling to end the nightmare.

Just a couple of days ago our government misled the governments of several European nations and forced the Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s plane to land so that a search for the dissident Edward Snowden could be conducted. This desperate act followed attempts to keep President Morales of Bolivia from granting asylum to Snowden. Would our country react with only words of indignation, as President Morales did, if our president’s plane had been forced to the ground? By what right does the taking of such a liberty occur? If our government wishes to convince U.S. citizens that Snowden’s revelations have somehow put American soldiers or secret operatives at risk, let the government make its case to the American people. Too many strange events have been happening in the country for citizens to simply accept the government’s claim that Snowden has created peril. And I can’t help but notice that the government has no detailed response to the information Snowden released and that he claimed demonstrates the illegal activities of our government. Instead, the government diverts attention from the substance of what Snowden provided and focuses on what seems a desperate attempt to lock the man away inside the U.S.

Another whistleblower, Bradley Manning, is about to present his defense in a military court. Media analysis suggests that the government’s case has been unconvincing. Meanwhile, the American people are not being assured that Manning’s torture at the hands of the U.S. military is at an end, and no explanations are being provided about the manner in which Manning has been detained. Was it really necessary to keep him naked? Was it necessary to attempt to break him by leaving him in a cell that is cold, or constantly lit? Governments, including ours, may have newer ways to make an accused’s life hell, but our prisons and the horrible prison conditions of the 19^th century do not seem so far apart. Charles Dickens wrote more than A Christmas Carol. He would have been writing about the travesty that our justice system has become.

My list could grow much longer, but what I don’t want to ignore are the inequities within the U.S. that we have suffered for a long time and that seem unlikely to be addressed any time soon. Here I’m referring to the failure of states and the federal government to fund public schools and the constant slide of government policy toward charter schools and private schools. I guess those in power hope to keep the American people poorly educated, except for a wealthy few who are able to afford the very best educations. I’m also referring to the country’s chronic unemployment and under-employment, or the nation’s abysmal minimum wage standard, or the country’s inability to put in place the same national health care coverage for its citizens that almost every other so-called industrialized country has managed to provide for its people. I mention here our country’s inability to support renewable energy and public transportation to the same extent—at least—that it is propping up the oil and gas industry. Even though the industry itself admits oil and gas is a finite resource. Even though the International Energy Association has reported that the planet MUST turn from fossil fuels if the catastrophic effects of climate change are to be avoided.  And I’m talking about a government that believes shoring up financial institutions that are now contributing nothing to our economic recovery matters more than supporting Americans who were unscrupulously counseled by realtors and bankers into buying homes they could not afford.

I began this blog by describing some of the things my husband and I experienced during what came to be called the 500-year flood of Grand Forks, North Dakota. I will end what I admit is a bit of a rant with a few more details about that flood.

When my husband and I drove back into Grand Forks after having been evacuated for two weeks, we approached the city from the east, driving first through the devastation of East Grand Forks, Minnesota, and then crossing the downtown bridge over the Red River. We saw the Grand Forks downtown with several buildings gutted by fire, and flood damage in some cases up to the second floor of buildings. We drove into our neighborhood and saw all that the Red’s waters had brought to the town. But when we pulled into our driveway, our next-door neighbor was already there. We worked that day, he in his house, we in ours, to pump out our basements, and pile destroyed property at the curb. The next day we were joined by other neighbors. We began sharing what we had with each other. Everything from generators to submersible pumps, coats, food, bandages and bottles of water. And after many days, some of us felt great happiness when we were able to spend the night in our own homes rather than driving two hours out of town to the only motel room we’d found in the area. Our little portable lights shone out on the block as if to say, “We are back and we are not beaten.” We continued to help each other, organizing to get new electric boxes installed, the utilities turned back on after we’d managed to have new furnaces put in. And though we stared out our front windows at an ugly mountain of trash that covered the berms up and down the block to a height of ten feet, and as deep below, we knew that the clean-up had been our doing.

Many writers are describing what people should be doing to safeguard themselves during these unprecedented times. And the suggestions are very helpful. I would add to those lists, though, just one more important idea:

1.     Get to know your neighbors, if you don’t already know them. Try to anticipate how you might help each other if times become difficult. Talk to each other as openly as you can about the strange things our government is doing in our name. Share information with each other, and share your sources. I believe you will learn, as my husband and I did, that your neighbors are amazing, fascinating people with all sorts of talents and abilities you never guessed they possessed. And especially talk with people with whom you may disagree. You’ll learn the most from them.

U.S. citizens hold within them the potential to turn around a country that has gone astray.