"Good Food"

Hard to know how to write this. Immigrants to the U.S. are not supposed to tell stories like mine. At least that's what I've been told. But all I can write is what I have known.

Imagine November 1964 in Chicago, a dry afternoon with a steely sky overhead and jets of a cold, wet wind worming their way under your stocking cap and into your ears. See Montrose Avenue on the north side, its broad sidewalks cracked with age. And then look down the block and see where I am straggling up the street. Behind me comes my mother, a little silk kerchief tied under her chin. Each of her hands is occupied. My sister Lena grasps mom’s left hand even as both of mom’s hands push a little stroller in which my sister Anna rides. The stroller shudders and jolts over the cracked walk, but Anna doesn’t seem to mind.

We’re out shopping. Ahead of us about a block down the street sits the neighborhood market where mom will buy groceries for tonight’s supper. But before we can get there, we walk past a set of red neon letters flashing away. “Good Food,” the sign announces. The restaurant window is streaked with dirt. It’s impossible to tell if the café curtains were once very white or a buttercup yellow. On this afternoon in 1964 the fabric in the window seems unable to choose between grayish white and dust. The closer we get to the restaurant window, the stronger the smell of old grease becomes.

I turn to my mother, point at the sign, and ask, “What does the sign mean?” 

She answers, “God mat.” 

My eyebrows shoot up. “In there?” I say.

“Oh, this is what they do in America,” mom says. “They use words to tell you what they want to be true. It is called advertising. We would never eat in there.” As she talks, she expertly avoids an especially big crack in the sidewalk, sparing Anna a good jounce.

“Why would a restaurant that looked so dirty put a flashing red sign in its window that promised good food? Wouldn’t anybody walking by see how scary the place looks and laugh?” The whole set-up was clearly inexplicable to my 8-year-old brain.

In Swedish my mom replies, “In America there are people who pay more attention to the words than to what they actually see or hear or smell. Or taste. I don’t really understand it, but they do.”

“So people eat in there?”

“I think they do,” mom says. “It’s open,” she says with a shrug. And by that time we have made it past the café.

Of all the ways Chicago was different than the beautiful little town of Laholm where my family and I lived for a while, this memory of the neon sign contains within it the essence of what made me most sad about living in America. Often Americans offered me lofty words when all I wanted was the smell of good food and clean curtains in the window. In public school the teachers extolled the virtues of democracy even as they clearly treated different races and different ethnicities of children with differing degrees of harshness. Over and over again I heard Americans speak with pride about the great values of their country even as I saw terrible inequalities within its communities, inequalities that those with more seemed content to leave in place even when many in their town were going without.

I started to understand the realities of Chicago by walking its streets. We lived in a neighborhood called Ravenswood. It was said that there were more races and nationalities in our little neighborhood than in any other part of the city. At least this is what I heard while living there in the 1960’s. And I was one of the kids whose parents were from another country.

When we moved into our Chicago apartment after living in Sweden for about eighteen months, I had become more comfortable with Swedish than with English. It’s a complicated story that I’ve alluded to in other blog posts, but my parents emigrated to America in the 1950’s only to return to Sweden in the 1960’s, a move that proved unsustainable, and so they immigrated permanently to America after only a short attempt to resettle in the country where they were born.

Realizing Chicago was now my home, I tried to reconstitute my ability to speak English. I struggled to figure out how to make friends in the city school where I heard so many languages. And—perhaps one of the reasons I came to teach dialects to theatre majors many years later—I listened in fascination to all the ways that different groups of Americans pronounced the same English words.

One little girl who seemed as shy as me seemed to make every word she said sound like a soft song that slid from consonant to consonant with a flow of vowels in between. After a few weeks I learned that Debbie was originally from Appalachia. The Chicago born and bred kids said she spoke English with a southern accent. To my ear the way Debbie sang her words sounded a lot like the way my dad’s friend, Thomas, spoke his Swedish. Thomas was from a province in Sweden called Skåne and he could drawl and growl out his words with a drama and sense of laughter that made me want him to tell stories forever.

But though I tried to get Debbie to talk with me a little bit at school, she’d give me a smile and a word or two, but that was about it. She said she couldn’t come to my house to play after school and that I couldn’t come to hers. The other kids in our third-grade class avoided her, or seemed to look right through her. I didn’t know why. Sure her clothes weren’t as new as some of the other girls’, but she was kind to kids and seemed to like school and books, like me.

So I came up with a plan. I would hand-deliver a birthday invitation to Debbie’s apartment. Then she’d have to see that I really wanted to be her friend.

Now to understand this next part of the story, I have to explain that both of my parents came from very rural communities. They grew up walking everywhere, and from a young age they made their way to friends’ houses, or to a local shop, all on their own. Sweden when they were growing up was a very safe place for kids to explore. They had never known anything else. When we moved to Chicago, I was allowed to move about our Chicago neighborhood on my own at a pretty young age, which is why I managed to get permission from my mother to hand-deliver Debbie’s birthday invitation on my own.

“How far are you going?” my mom asked me, worried a little that she didn’t know exactly where I was headed.

“Just two blocks, mom. It’s just two blocks,” I answered with the impatience of a ten-year-old anticipating an adventure.

And so mom said, “O.K., but if you’re not back in fifteen minutes, I’m coming after you.” I shot out the front door before she could change her mind.

Debbie had given me a rough idea where she lived. I had the street and the apartment building number, but I’d actually never been to that block before. I set off on a warm and sunny October afternoon, invitation in hand, but nothing would have prepared me for what I found.

Chicago remains a city where a block of buildings inhabited by people with the means to keep them in decent repair will be located right next to a city block where unscrupulous landlords put no money at all into their buildings and yet see fit to charge tenants city prices for rent. Our family lived on a block where people were, as it was said then, keeping up. Homes were pretty much taken care of, and lots of yards had a few flowers in the front. But when I turned onto Debbie’s block I immediately felt how the entire environment was different for the people who lived there. For one thing, all the large, old trees had been chopped down and at the end of the summer and autumn the front yards were a uniform dried brown as grass starved of water went dormant. Lots of the buildings had broken windows. Some of the apartment buildings had no door protecting the building’s vestibule. I saw young kids looking out windows on the second floor that had no screens. Everywhere I looked I saw peeling paint on the buildings and broken glass on the sidewalks. I had crossed some sort of a line and felt it instantly.

But I was a stubborn cuss at that age, still am, so I kept walking until I found the brown brick apartment building with Debbie’s number on it. I looked up at it and thought I understood why I couldn’t play at her house. I thought I understood why she seemed so uncomfortable in front of the girls at school who wore those cute pleated skirts and the socks with lace at the ankles. Debbie’s building was missing entire windows in places. The front door hung from one hinge. There was no grass in the front yard, just dirt.

I didn’t know what apartment she lived in, so I just called out her name in the hope that she would hear and see me. I called and called until someone stuck a head out a window and gave me a look and I decided it was time for me to go home. If Debbie heard me, she gave no sign.

I never got to give Debbie that invitation. She avoided me at school for the next few days and then, mysteriously, disappeared. I never saw her again.

So now, at the age of 57, I think about Debbie every time I hear someone brag—and there’s really no other word for it—about how great our country is. I think about that little girl trying to get along in the public school having come from that apartment building every morning, and knowing that’s where she was going when school got out. How in the world was she to be expected to manage well at school with that kind of environment for her home? And at school both teachers and students looked at the edges of her, almost as if they were hoping she would just go away, which is exactly what she did. Perhaps her family was temporarily living with relatives in Chicago until the mom or dad could find some work. Perhaps she disappeared because the family moved on in pursuit of that next job. I will never know.

I do know that  gross differences in how people live in our country have yet to be addressed. These inequities are everywhere, but the country seems fixated on the neon signs that proclaim how lucky we are to live here. Some communities may offer breakfast, lunch and a snack to kids at school who need that, but those kids need more than school meals five days a week. In some parts of the country the gulf between those who struggle and those who don't is worse than it has ever been. Those who are part of the 1% have little chance to meet someone like Debbie and, even if they did, they might attribute her unfortunate circumstances to the sloth of her parents. The Puritan work ethic is alive and well in the U.S. today.

Now I could have done a little research and cited pundit after pundit, statistic after statistic, to document the iniquitous economic system of countries such as the United States of America that still believe capitalism just needs to be free in order to make us all happy. But I’m a writer setting down what I know, and what I have experienced first hand. Here’s hoping that my little story furthers the discussion of a punishing economic system that we could change, if we shared a common commitment to do so. In my opinion, an economic system that leaves so many struggling or suffering is not a success.

And Debbie, I wish I had been able to deliver that invitation. I wonder what became of you.

Healing Ritual in a Community Garden

Healing Ritual in a Community Garden*

This part of the play, Ecology Rituals, needs to happen in a community garden. It doesn’t matter if that garden sits on city land, or land donated by a major corporation, or land that was once an ugly and dangerous empty city lot now converted by local residents into an oasis of green. Any community garden where strangers come together to nurture plants for beauty or for sustenance will do perfectly.

The play will happen best if the garden is in full swing with lots of garden plants and the ubiquitous weeds.

Let the audience range freely around the perimeter of the garden, until that part of the action where they are invited to join in the ceremony. Then some of them will find their way onto the little paths winding between the small plots of land.

Time of day is not so important for this part of the play, though it would be more pleasant if the action happened in the gentle hours of morning or on a cool day that threatens rain, or in the late afternoon when the scorching of summer’s sun has abated somewhat.

There are both men and women in this part of the play, of all ages. And children. And animals if you can get gentle ones, dogs or cats, pet birds, rabbits, snakes, bring them all as long as they don’t threaten the garden. Invite audience members to bring their gentle pets to the performance, too.

The gardeners approach from all directions. There are nine or more of them. They are singing:

Follow me

To a place of hopefulness;

Follow me

To a place of peace

Follow me

To a plot of land

Where all battles cease;

Come and take my hand.

Carry water

To the thirsty garden;

Carry water

To the growing crop;

Carry water

To a bit of heaven

Where all conflicts stop;

Lift the water up.

At the end of the second stanza, all the gardeners stand at the perimeter of the garden. They look over the little sections of tended land as if taking in all that has happened there since the last time they brought water. Then they set down their buckets and watering cans, and turn their backs on the garden as they speak to those who have come to watch and listen. As they speak, they may run, dance, tumble, or twirl through and about those who are there to witness them.

When I step into the garden, I leave behind hatred of all those who do not think as I do.

I leave behind my terror at not knowing how to decide where truth lies.

I forget about fighting when I come here.

I shake off anxiety about what is coming next when I walk these paths.

When I come here, I strip away my need for riches.

As I get close to this place, burdens I’ve taken on drop from my shoulders.

I’m not lonely here.

I’m not angry here.

I never hurry when I’m here.

As one, the gardeners turn toward the garden. As one they step inside its boundary. As one they sigh, “Aaaahhhh!” as their feet touch a garden path.

Each in his or her own way, they tilt their watering cans and buckets and begin to lovingly drench the soil of one little corner of this garden. They move slowly as they pour the water, humming and then letting their voices build into a communal song of joy. When they cross paths with someone else they water each other’s feet or hands or heads and bodies, returning to a watering of the land as they pass by them. There is a water source nearby for them to refill their watering cans and buckets.  The song reaches its richest and strongest point when the garden is thoroughly wet, and they all have gathered in the center of the garden to finish the song.

            This little place is precious,

            Standing here out in the open,

            Reaching up toward the sun

            So bravely, so bravely.

            What grows here is luscious,

            Beans and corn, basil and peppers,

            Lettuce and tomatoes

            Delicious, delicious.

            Bring this land some water,

            Cool and fresh, clean and healing,

            Carried by loving hands

            To nurture this place.

As the song finishes, others have appeared at the edge of the garden with all sorts of pails and urns and bowls and pitchers—all full of water. Or advance ads and the theatre box office could have invited audience members to bring their own little watering cans that they can fill with water at the performance site. For those who have not brought their own containers, facilitators bring these containers to the audience, inviting them to take one and go into the garden to water the place for themselves. As the audience members begin to make their way into the garden and to pour their water onto the plants and flowers, the gardeners standing in the center break into a new song.

            I do not know you,

            We have never met,

            I don’t know your politics,

            Or your religion yet.

            Who are your parents,

            Where do you live,

            What work do you do,

            You know, I don’t give

            A damn! You heard me!

            Why should I care about

            Labels like that;

            I want instead to shout

            You saw the beauty here,

            You brought the water,

            You were drawn here,

            Son or daughter,

            Stepped inside

            And lifted up

            A pitcher of life

            A loving cup

            A hope

            A wish

            A dream . . .

            Of healing.

The gardeners in the center go to the plants and harvest whatever is in season. They give the food they have gathered to members of the audience as they exit the garden and the playing area. They improvise a chant as they leave.

*This is an open-source document. Please feel free to quote, use, perform this as you feel called to do. The lyrics are still in need of music. Source attribution is unimportant. But that includes you, too. . . Give it away. Give it all away.

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.”