same old ritual

I've always thought that at its heart war is a means of ritual sacrifice:  killing off a representative number of our strongest young people to pacify the Gods and ensure the continued survival and prosperity of society.  Ancient Mayans threw their strongest and most beautiful youth into a cenote; we send them off to foreign countries.  The manufactured reasons may change (Islamic terrorism, communism, clash of civilizations), but the result is always the same. I was born ten years after the end of World War II, the only war I can think of with any legitimate justification and where victory produced visible and long lasting, if far from perfect. results.  In most cases, the rationalizations for war are muddy and the outcome muddier still. Now when people tell me they are "going to Vietnam" they're going on vacation!  This is why 58,000 Americans and countless Vietnamese died? (and remember, we "lost" the war).  So multinational corporations can ply their trade and Americans can take bike tours and cooking classes?  Doesn't it strike you as bizarre?

in the heat of war, all the governmental rationalizations for why we are fighting becomes irrelevant.  They kill us; we kill them.  Revenge becomes the primary motivation.

Last week, a twenty five year old soldier from Madras, Oregon was killed in a particularly brutal manner.  I commend his father for his bravery–in the midst of his grief, he did not fall into a media trap and blather the usual platitudes about his son dying to protect our freedoms and fight the evil enemy.  Instead he noted that his son's killing might have been in retaliation for equally brutal killings committed by American servicemen.

this young man had worked as a construction worker since his graduation from high school He was partying a little too hard and looking for direction in his life.  He looked to the ARmy to prove his strength and bravery, to provide discipline, to give him an opportunity to be part of something larger than himself.  The sacrifical ritual  plays to these universal and admirable desires.  I am sure his parents would like his sacrifice to have some meaning, to have him be something more than a bit player in an endless cycle of revenge.  They would like to rationalize, fly that flag, tie that yellow ribbon and feel better.  But I bet when they wake up in the middle of the night, they can't.

if you tour the remnants of an ancient civilization, say Mayan, Greek, or Roman, you know they have a bloody history.  Millions of people have died in the shadow of these structures and whatever causes they fought for have been long forgotten.  But the structures still stand.  Some of the languages they wrote are still spoken.  Their plays, their music, their philosophy, their architecture–that's what lasts.  That's what matters.

Let your sons and daughters build houses.  Let them write a book or play the guitar.  Let them have children and grandchildren.  Don't let them sacrifice their lives for nothing..

summer solstice

summer solstice always makes me feel a little sad, because it means all the wonderful light has reached its apex and the days are going to be getting shorter from now on. But on a practical level, summer solstice means the beginning of summer.  In our household we are celebrating the summer with a whole week of unstructured time!  No appointments, meetings, school, camp….nothing but the sunny day.  That doesn't mean there's nothing to do–to the contrary, I inevitably overload myself with projects and find myself running short of time to do them all.  Having time to take a breath enables me to remember all these things I've planned to do for months (years?) and haven't got around to doing.  But its so delightful to schedule these activities on my own time, to let my six year old son sleep late and not rush out anywhere.

It's also delightful to watch all the flowers burst into bloom and see the tomatoes and squash grow so fast that the expansion of their cells is almost audible.  To go to our first zoo concert and dance in the summer evenings.  To sit out on the patio.  To blow bubbles and drink mojitos. To wear tank tops and bathing suits. Welcome summer!  The country fair is only two weeks away.

Flight 93

The film Flight 93 dropped off the commercial radar almost as fast as it dropped from the sky.  It's not surprising.  The directors of this consumaately professional re-enactment resisted any temptation towards Hollywood sentimentalization.  Flight 93 is not entertainment.  It's more akin to ripping a scab off a wound.

I watched this film and images of the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 came flooding back.  The initial call from my husband to turn on the TV, that two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center.  Standing with an arm around my teenage son as we dumbly watched smoke pouring out of the towers.  And in the background of all the horror, the surreally beautiful September day.  When my husband called to tell me that the first tower had collapsed, I stared out our solarium window at the sun-drenched grass and flowers.  If we humans blew ourselves up today, I remember myself thinking, the sun would rise just as beautifully the next day, and bestow its blessings on beings more deserving of inhabiting the earth.

For a few hours that morning, really for a few days after that, the normal chattering narrative of life felt suspended.  We were close to that apocalyptic terror moment that all of us born into the atomic age grew up with in the back of our heads.  That time when the wailing air siren wouldn't be a test.  Sept. 11 wasn't like other televised tragedies in my lifetime, like President Kennedy's assassination.  There was a lesser degree of separation here.  WE used to live in New YOrk; lots of our family still did.  My husband used to work a block from the World Trade Center, and had attended meetings in the building countless times.  Forty four residents of our former hometown of Roslyn were killed in the attacks.  And as for Flight 93, I can't count the number of times my husbad left me and my young children in the early hours of the morning and boarded a plane.

For a few days it seemed questionable that normal life would resume.  But no more attacks came, and for those of us not directly impacted by the attacks, slowly it did.  We did not live in New York anymore.  We lived in Portland, Oregon.

That fall, I kept reading articles about victims of the attacks, maybe in an unconscious attempt to keep everything raw and fresh.  I read the little biographies off all the victims, how this one liked gourmet cheese, how that one played tennis, how this one planned to quit work the following year and buy a villa in Italy.  I read an article by a man who described driving through the streets of Manhasset the day after the attack to find his son's best friend wandering aimlessly through the streets.  His father had been killed.  I read about the fifty widows of Cantor Fitzgerald employees who were pregnant at the time.  With both these articles, I found myself bursting into tears.  It could have been me, I couldn't help thinking.  It couldn't have been my family.

But it wasn't.

I watched Flight 93 and found myself wondering what I would do if I was in the passenger's place, and hoping I would have been one of the people ramming the snack cart into the terrorist's chest.  As for the helpless wives on the receiving end of their husband's phone calls, I know which one I would have been:  the one exclaiming "this can't happen!  I won't let it happen!  We can work it out!"  Never mind that her power to influence the course of events was equivalent to her power to alter the orbit of the Earth.

President Bush has made a travesty of September 11, using the events of that day to justify warrantless spying, torture, and pointless wars.  In doing so he has obscured the shattering personal tragedy at the heart of it all.,  For the Sept. 11 families, their loved ones will never come back.  And the people who orchestrated their murder (who exactly those people are, their motivation and their nationality, remains an open question) still run free.

google dennis kucinich

Back in the heady days of 2004, when defeating the idiot George Bush seemed like a believable possibility, I worked for Dennis Kucinich’s presidential campaign.  At that time I subscribed to a google service that alerted me to whenever his name came up in the news.

I still subscribe to this service, but confess that I usually delete the alerts without reading them.  They come twice a day, and the election is long over.  Yet something about yesterday’s alert caught my eye, and I found myself reading about Kucinich in the foreign press:  an Italian paper, and some British publication out of South Korea.  Apparently Kucinich made a long speech in the House (as well as issuing a written communication to Bush and Rumsfeld), accusing the Pentagon of sponsoring El Salvador style death squads in Iraq.  You know all those headlines about fifty Iraqis found dead in a gravel pit?  It might not all be the doings of “insurgents”.  Some of those “insurgents” could be the US military.

A US congressman makes a shocking, yet well supported accusation.  It doesn’t make the ORegonian.  It doesn’t even make the NEW york Times.  I have to read about it in an Italian paper.  What other news never makes the paper,not to speak of the TV news?  As the writer in the Korean paper put it:  “America is asleep and dark forces are destroying the democracy of this republic”.

Google Dennis Kucinich.  Check it out.

why I hate cell phones

It seems to appall people from the East Coast the most, my aversion to cell phones.  Talking to them, you'd think that for the entire pre cell phone era of human history, communication was virtually impossible. The fact we haven't bought our 21 year old son a phone (even though he has amazingly cheap land line phone service at his college) strikes them as tantamount to child abuse.

Granted, cell phones are a helpful little invention. With the demise of the public phone they are becoming, to a limited degree, a necessity. They are reassuring to carry around in case of emergency, and handy when you need to let someone know you're running late or hopelessly lost looking for their house.  For people like my twentysomething daughters, who live in shared houses and move frequently, they are a replacement for traditional land lines.  I'm sure they have made the lives of people who work out of their cars–salespeople and repairmen, for example–much more efficient.

But I doubt that most of the people I see yakking on their phones as they speed through a stop sign or cross the street without looking are repairmen or salespeople.  Nor are they putting the final touches on a multimillion dollar deal or negotiating a hostage release.  More likely, they're ordering a pizza. But they're doing it with the sense of importance and urgency imparted by a cell phone.  They're way too busy to order that pizza at home.

A lot of parents give their children, many as young as elemenary school, cell phones for communication and "communication". and safety reason.  This strikes me as well meaning but generally silly.    can't a family communicate in the morning, in person, about their plans for the day?  Where is a ten year old supposed to go, unsupervised and not in walking distance of a land line phone?  (hi, Mom.  I'm now at the playground.)  For teenagers, the cell phones are pretty useful for hunting up where the current party is at, in the car and away from parental supervision.  Or for taking pictures of tests with the photo feature (popular at my kids high school) for the use of students in later period classes.  OR for just wasting a lot of time and money.  Certainly many generations of children have grown up successfully without this device.

On a societal level, I don't like the way cell phones make a public space into a private one.  Obviously people yakking on a cell phone as they speed around a corner or walk obliviously across the street are a safety hazard.  But even in safer situations its unsettling to see people so competely unaware of their surroundings.  There's the guy ahead of me in the aisles at Trader Joes, who carried on a twenty minute conversation while tossing groceries in his cart.  Except sometimes he'd become overinvolved in his conversation and block the aisle.  Or how about the three people I saw sharing a table at a restaurant, all engaged in separate conversations on their cell phones?  Or the people at the airport who you think are schizophrenic until you see they're having intense conversations about market penetration and sales growth with a headset.

Personally, I hate cell phones because they make me constantly available, constantly interruptable.  I don't always want to be reachable. I want to concentrate on my task of the moment, whether it be important or trivial. If i'm in the grocery store, I don't want to talk to the plumber.  If I'm changing lanes on the highway, I don't want to chat with my mother on the East Coast.  If I'm in the garden weeding the vegetable beds, I don't want to discuss the school auction.  I prefer make the time, at home, in front of my archaic land line phone, in proximity to my appointment book (yep, I don't have a blackberry either)  to give all these callers the attention they need and deserve.

So, thanks, I'll stick with my cheapo plan that allows me enough minutes to make calls when I absolutely need to.  I'll lend my cell phone to my college age son when he is home.  And I still haven't figured out how to work the voice mail. Sorry.

big bad organics?

I guess when Wal Mart gets involved, everybody starts listening.  Wal Mart's announcement that they will start stocking organic foods has spawned a profusion of articles in the mainstream press about organics.  You'd think this would be a positive development, maybe even something you could call a victory, but it has a lot of folks in the organic foods community worried.

Is this concern valid?

There's a tendency in the countercultural community to view anything that suceeds financially as a sellout.  Witness the attacks against Starbucks, or the protest in Eugene about a Whole Foods opening downtown.  Yet both of these companies are responsible corporate citizens who employ a lot of people and treat those employees well.  While a Starbuck's outlet may not have the quirky energy of the locally owned coffeehouse down the street, and while its coffee may not be as fine as some shade grown fair trade microroast, its still a pleasant place that serves quality coffee. Every time I visit the East Coast I am desperately grateful to encounter a Starbucks.  While Whole Foods may not support local vendors to the extent of a small grocery or co-op, they still bring organics to a wide range of the population who would not have the opportunity otherwise.  The same can be said for conventional grocers such as Safeway or even (gag) Wal-Mart.

Granted, lettuce shouldn't be grown in monoculture and shipped 1500 miles before sale.  But given that it is, isn't it a big improvement that this lettuce is no longersprayed with pesticides, and that countless gallons of pesticide and chemical fertilizer residue are no longer running off into our groundwater?  I think so.  Is it good that the concept of "organic" is finally entering the mainstream consciousness?  I think so.

The biggest concern posed by big business's entry into the organic field is that they will attempt to weaken organic standards, using them as a marketing device rather than a true change in practice.  This is a real danger, and regulatory battles already being fought in Congress.   Another concern, that "big organics" will  Tjere will always be a market for local, artisan products. 

The hard truth is that the next move–the switch from "organic" to "sustainable"–rests not with business, but with the consumer.  Big and organic may be compatible, but big and sustainable are not.  To eat sustainably, Americans are going to have to restructure how they eat and to some exent how they live their lives.

We are accustomed to shopping at the supermarket and finding whatever kind of food we fancy at whatever time of year.  To produce those big gleaming bags of mixed greens in the middle of the winter, to supply them reliably to giant supermarket chains, requires giant  monoculture farms and refrigerated shipping trucks.  Eating sustainably meands doing without that lettuce in the winter (unless you live in Florida or Southern California) and substituting winter greens like collards and kale.  Eating sustainably means accepting crop failures.  It means that what you eat for dinner will be decided by what's available in the market, not by the recipe you just looked up on Epicurious.

Eating sustainably means you can't necessarily stock up for the week.  You might need to shop more frequently, as Europeans do.  Delicacies from other parts of the country or world might become occasional treats.

This doesn't seem like much of deprivation when you live in a place like the Pacific Northwest, with its healthy farms and fertile soil. But in the overbuilt Northeast, which can neither grow its own food nor process its own waste, the conversion to sustainability will be far more difficult.  It will require significant adjustments in zoning, urban planning, and economic philosophy–and quite a long period of hardship while the adjustment is taking place.  In cold regions like the upper Midwest, where the growing season is so short, eating healthily and totally sustainainably may be incompatible goals.

We–understandably–want things to be easy.  We want the foolish choices of the past hundred years to be reversed by comfortable consumer choices (iceberg lettuce or a bag of Earthbound Farm greens?; polyester or cotton: SUV or hybrid?).

Unfortunately its not going to be that simple.  But in the meantime, if Wal Mart wants to sell organic lettuce, more power to them.