Green New Deal

Our human culture, as many have characterized it, is like a cancer growing across the planet. More than one person has claimed that the only viable solution to the human condition might be a giant meteor or other calamity. I have heard from many that they no longer like people, or that humanity is, pardon their language, fucked. I don't believe any of these positions, but do recognize the reasons some would be led to them. Some people call our current time period post-capitalist society, some prefer the term Anthropocene, the geologically significant period in which human desecration of the geophysical world will remain evident to whatever species comes next It is true that our human-made footprint will remain for many millions of years hence. however, there are even more people calling for a Green New Deal.

Implementing such a plan may require more human cooperation and more humanitarian effort than has ever been amassed or wielded during any prior period of human history. This may not even seem possible to a population privileged enough that they have never had to accept responsibility for anything. Especially for the ruling class, the oligarchs who currently run our governments, every element of the Green New Deal sounds like naive pipe dreams or utter lunacy. Interestingly enough, it is perhaps the most pragmatic policy to come down the pike since the last New Deal, FDR's (Franklin Delano Roosevelt's) groundbreaking suite of legislation that codified such systems as Unemployment Compensation, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. There was a veritable alphabet soup of new agencies and departments under this legislation that not only employed those deemed unemployable by the richest men among us, but that led to transformative changes the likes of which our nation had never seen before and sadly, have never seen since. However, both logic and a broad perspective informed the New Deal and the same is true for the Green New Deal.

Spending an afternoon planting trees, our hands helped to transform this plot from a wind swept, inhospitable hilltop to a rich bio-diverse haven for people and wildlife. In the Green New Deal, a little goes a long way. Love always wins over fear.

Another great document that helps set ground rules for exactly what is needed at this time is the Earth Charter. (earthcharter.org) The real insane, naive pipe dream is the one harbored by the wealthiest men on the planet. The one that leads them to believe that they are better suited to run things than the rest of us. Right now, in early 2019, there are twenty-six men who own as much wealth as half the population. Income and wealth disparity is exponentially greater now than at any prior time in human history. Ironically, the impoverished are often more hospitable to strangers than those who can afford to feed everyone, but decide not to. In her groundbreaking and terrifying work, Diet for a Small Planet, Francis Moore Lappe' dug deep, long before the age of computers to find in 1970 that 1/7 of the entire human population was at risk for starvation. That number has stayed the same to the present day. In spite of the massive wealth poured into technology, food science, refrigeration, and transportation systems, heck the entire Green Revolution that brought western food production techniques to the impoverished around the globe, we still have about 1/7 of the world at risk of starvation. as we have all come to understand, insanity is trying the same thing over and over but expecting a different outcome. what we need are qualitative changes that have not been tried yet.

Those who have read my blog closely understand that in my opinion, each and every problem can be distilled down to the essential question, will we love? or will we fear? We have only ever been able to choose one. Albert Einstein wrote, "You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." 
 The two are mutually exclusive. The same is true of love and fear. At this juncture, we are faced with the chance, as every preceding generation has been, to let go of our fear. Hoping for a meteor or praying for Armageddon are definitely on the fear side of the decision-making chart. When we list the good things and bad things that might come about because of any decision, we typically choose the side of that chart, or decision tree where the good outcomes outweigh the bad ones. However, "just business" and business as usual both present our human population with more bad outcomes than good results, so why do we continue to tell people who are hurting that they need to suck it up and stop complaining? In a word, Calvinism, the idea that mostly brown people, but also poor people from around the world make bad decisions and that their poverty is their own fault; punishment for being immoral. We may know that this is a lie, but the wealthy, who own our media continue to tell us the same lie and it is hard to find someone who is not contaminated with the idea.

We need to accept the fact that basic human rights include debt-free healthcare and education access to healthy air and water, as well as healthy soil upon which to grow our food. Until we get those things straight, we will continue to subsidize the richest men on the planet. Until we admit that each and every human being deserves food, shelter, community and love, we will continue to inappropriately value those with more cash at their disposal. Until we stop the commodification of people through "human resource" departments and meaningless "service" jobs that only serve the ultra-wealthy, we are doomed to keep making the same mistakes. One tragic symptom of our failure is that the average student debt in the U.S. of A. is $37,172.00 that represents a twenty thousand dollar increase in just the last thirteen years. My first home cost less than that. Thirty-five years ago, my total student debt was $1,050. Even so, the money grubbing loan sharks who were flocking around education at the time were quick to add their interest and penalties for late payments, thinking not of how the educated make better decisions or the good to our society that could come from the education, just what it would be able to purchase once they got their hands on my money. The story has been the same for generations, but we can tell a different story is we choose to.

I Hate Wasting Time

When I have my time wasted, am responsible for wasting time, or the time of others, it really chaps my ass. I wish that our leaders felt the same about us. For many, that seems their sole purpose. I know some will say that even paying attention to politics is a waste of time and for them, I have got to respectfully disagree, although that in itself may be wasting my time. I will try to keep this brief.

Last week I saw a photo of a Mexican politician who had climbed to the top of the new border fence between our nation and his. From the photo I was able to see that the vertical members of the fence are railroad rail on approximately one foot centers. It confused me when I began to think of how many of those giant steel rails would be needed for the nearly two thousand mile border. 5,280 pieces per mile times 2K equals 10,560K pieces thirty six feet long. The finished fence is to be thirty feet tall and extend six feet under ground to discourage shallow tunnels. So, we multiply again, the number of rails times the length and get 38,160K feet. Finally, we get to divide this immense number to get miles from feet, we divide by 5,280 and the result, for the number of miles of rail we would need to cut down to make this fence would be 7, 227 miles. More than enough to run an entirely new set of rails completely across our nation.

Wasting any more time on this disgrace, or a single dollar on this boondoggle is crippling our ability to do things that need to be doing. This post itself has wasted twenty minutes of my life, perhaps less of yours, but only if we continue to do nothing but talk about the traitor in the White House. I have finally settled on a name for the Terrorist-in-charge, it is Deceitful Traitor. My neighbor, who is far more conservative than I, calls him Phake Phony Phraud! whenever he hears the guy's name, he jumps up and down chanting "Phake Phony Phraud! Phake Phony Phraud!" At least he gets his lymph pumping, that is always a good thing.

I wrote a whole post on it years ago about how I used to sell pins, to turn any garment into a political statement and for years while I sold them, the best selling one was always the "Kill Your TV" Perhaps now we not only need to kill the piece of furniture that pumped us full of lies and hate, but our devices too. We all know the folks who wear Alexa or Siri on their wrists, research shows that people, on average check their "smartphones" multiple times per hour. Isn't that a waste of time?

 

Welcome Back!

I needed that! The last year, I had a self-imposed restriction on myself. I did no writing on my blogs. In the past, I had heard that attaining readership was based on regularity of posts. However, when I began I also had no idea how long writing my posts would take. In a completely arbitrary way, my mind seized on the idea of seven posts per month. In September of 2009, there was no way that I could have imagined writing 666 posts in nine years. In hindsight, it was hugely taxing. Some of the posts took weeks to put together and even the shorter ones may have taken several hours to write also taking many more hours, sometimes weeks of introspection and study to be able to write. In short, I may only do a post a week, now that I am back from a full year off. Perhaps I will ave better stories, more interesting insights and more relevant topics to muse over. Sadly, some of what had to be said before has still not been listened to, but I will refrain, as much as practicable from preaching to the choir.

This is a graph I made recently to understand the relative threat of different things that do happen. As you can see, the single pink line is deaths by terrorist, which include mass shootings. The Pink White and Blue line is gandgun deaths and the Yellow line is automobile deaths. Please note, the 55MPH national speed limit was in effect until just before the graph starts, November 1995. Sad day. At speeds over 55MPH, more fuel is required to break through the air and fuel mileage drops, about ten percent for every ten miles per hour. At 70 MPH, fuel efficiency suffers by fifteen percent. A 35MPG car at 55MPH for example, would only get 29.75MPG at the higher speed. That's fifteen percent more dollars being spent on fuel to go the same distance as well.
Additionally, and this is the thing I want every one of my readers to understand, the quality of your life, having taken the extra few minutes along your commute, will arrive calm and rested, not hyper and stressed. When experienced, those extra moments will be appreciated more and more. It also allows you to never feel that rush of adrenaline when you see a cop. I care about you. Every ten miles per hour slower you go, you reduce the chances of death in a crash by half. So, for slowing down fifteen miles per hour, you are 150% more likely to live if there is a crash. Or, you could say it backward, you are one and a half times more likely to die if you are involved in a crash at seventy MPH than if you had been going 55MPH. Scary numbers when you begin to understand them. Sharing this is part of my undying compassion for all people. If not one more person passed away in a crash, humanity could feel more noble.
When I was young, my mother took up with an auto mechanic who loved to race foreign cars. He drove like a crazed maniac on the track, but always drove courteously and according to the laws when on public thoroughfares. When driving, he said, it is like a game and when everyone comes home alive, we all win!

I could belabor this post with tons of things I have had a chance to think and feel during my year without words, but they exceed the ability of words to grapple with. As is said in the movie True Grit, I would need to spill the banks of English.