Urban Farmers’ Crops Go From Vacant Lot to Market

Denniston Wilks grows produce for sale in East New York, Brooklyn.

IN the shadows of the elevated tracks toward the end of the No. 3 line in East New York, Brooklyn, with an April chill still in the air, Denniston and Marlene Wilks gently pulled clusters of slender green shoots from the earth, revealing a blush of tiny red shallots at the base.

“Dennis used to keep them big, and people didn’t buy them,” Mrs. Wilks said. “They love to buy scallions.”

Growing up in rural Jamaica, the Wilkses helped their families raise crops like sugar cane, coffee and yams, and take them to market. Now, in Brooklyn, they are farmers once again, catering to their neighbors’ tastes: for scallions, for bitter melons like those from the West Indies and East Asia and for cilantro for Latin-American dinner tables.

“We never dreamed of it,” said Mr. Wilks, nor did his relatives in Jamaica. “They are totally astonished when you tell them that you farm and go to the market.”

For years, New Yorkers have grown basil, tomatoes and greens in window boxes, backyard plots and community gardens. But more and more New Yorkers like the Wilkses are raising fruits and vegetables, and not just to feed their families but to sell to people on their block.

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Dharma in the Dirt

MUIR BEACH, Calif.

AS a proudly Birkenstocked Zen gardener, Wendy Johnson can mindfully muster up affection for many of the earth’s species, with the possible exception of persimmon-devouring gophers.

But poison hemlock holds a special place in her heart.

Without the presence of this pernicious carrot look-alike, a potent vertigo-inducing poison that when ingested can cause death, she reasons, her garden would be all cloying lilac- and lily-scented perfection — boring, in short. The innocent-looking malevolent weed, which she allows to flourish for its capacity to draw rich minerals from the soil for compost, “gives the garden its punch,” she said, “snapping me back to my senses.”

Like her beloved hemlock, Ms. Johnson has deep taproots in California. Her own garden, bordered by a mountain creek with a view of the Pacific Ocean, lies down the road from the Green Gulch Farm Zen Center, where she helped pioneer the concept of organic gardening in the United States. Now the farm’s unofficial gardener emeritus, she lived at Green Gulch for 25 years, marrying, raising her two children and growing produce for Greens Restaurant, which was founded by the Center in 1979.

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Evidence is accumulating that the Chinese regime orchestrated violence in Lhasa in order to discredit the peaceful protests of Buddhist monks.

According to the Dalai Lama’s Chinese translator, Ngawang Nyendra, a witness reported that a Chinese policeman in Lhasa disguised himself as a Tibetan and joined the protesters holding a knife in his hand. This witness also recognized the man from BBC news footage and news photos provided by China.

A Chinese woman from Thailand (who prefers that her name not be used) was studying in Lhasa when the protests broke out in March. As one of her friends is a policeman, she visited him at the local police station quite often and got to know other policemen there.

(Photo: The upper portion shows the uncropped photo distributed to news media by the Chinese Embassy, with a Chinese policeman in disguise holding a knife;
The lower portion, the edited version of the same scene distributed by the Chinese Embassy after the man’s identity was revealed at a rally in Darmasala/ from the Epochtimes website.

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Nominated for the TISP award this month is George W. Bush, who called on the Chinese to “exercise restraint” in Tibet and meet with HH the Dalai Lama to discuss Tibetan autonomy within China.  The story below alleges that the current unrest in Tibet has been stirred up by the CIA to embarass China on the eve of the Olympics.  While that may not be true, it is pretty certain that the CIA funded the Tibetan resistance for 20 years, not out of any great love for Buddhism and Tibetan culture, but simply to harass the Commies.  Officially, that aid ended in 1974, but unofficially, who knows?  Then again, claims that HHDL has “closely co-operated” with the CIA for 50 years may be greatly exaggerated….I’d like to hear the Tibetan side of the story, as the Asia Times definitely slants towards China….hey, if you’re a small country that’s been overrun by a much larger one and you’re largely getting ignored, you take help where you can get it…

It is certainly peculiar to have GWB and the CIA on my side in a dispute.  Just goes to show that the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend, eh?

Tibet, the ‘great game’ and the CIA
By Richard M Bennett

Given the historical context of the unrest in Tibet, there is reason to believe Beijing was caught on the hop with the recent demonstrations for the simple reason that their planning took place outside of Tibet and that the direction of the protesters is similarly in the hands of anti-Chinese organizers safely out of reach in Nepal and northern India.

Similarly, the funding and overall control of the unrest has also been linked to Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, and by inference to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) because of his close cooperation with US intelligence for over 50 years.

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and this piece suggests that China’s policy of waiting ’till HHDL dies so they don’t have to deal with the Tibet issue may backfire on them:

Cracks emerge in ‘Dalai Lama clique’
By Law Siu-lan

The symbolic Olympic flame for the 2008 Beijing Summer Games, lit in Athens on March 24, arrived in Beijing on March 31. The traditional torch relay will soon travel to the rooftop of the world - Mount Everest - and Lhasa, capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region, where anti-China protests by Tibetans took place early last month.

China has accused the “Dalai Lama clique” of attempting to sabotage the Olympic torch relay. The Dalai Lama immediately dismissed the charge. As a matter of fact, Tibetans in exile have split into various factions, and there are allegedly segments of radical youths that are plotting to sabotage the Beijing Olympics. Beijing, however, indiscriminately categorizes them all as under the “Dalai clique”, a classification that could only lead Beijing into misjudgments. 

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Mark Morford puts some much-needed juju on China:

I hope it all comes crashing down on their heads.

Is that wrong? Is it ill-minded and somehow unfair to wish that the Chinese government’s notorious record of human rights abuses and absolutely horrid treatment of Tibet be exposed to the world — and the Chinese people themselves — to the point where it is shamed and humiliated and perhaps even forced by unprecedented international scrutiny to upheave its oppressive ways and improve conditions and even (heaven forfend) honor religious and political freedom within its borders? No, I do not think it is.

***

But somehow, among all the thousands of reporters and news agencies and bloggers covering the games, a handful might have the nerve to sneak outside the carefully guarded press boxes and Olympic stadiums and find a way to report on the real atrocities, the real abuses, and beam them to the astonished world like never before. Can we hope for that? Let the games begin.

David Loy will be speaking at Vanderbilt next month.

Healing Ecology: A New Spiritual Perspective on the Challenge of Consumerism

a CSRC Howard Harrod Lecture featuring David Loy,
Besl Family Professor of Ethics, Religion and Society at Xavier University

here’s a quote from an interview  with Dr. Loy:

It helps us to understand the particular kinds of ways that we are stuck today. There is a Zen phrase, ”bound by ropes of our own making,” which means, trapped by our own ways of thinking. Our dukkha isn’t just something individual. Dukkha is also collective, culturally conditioned suffering, which has a lot to do with our cultural institutions. If there’s such a thing as collective dukkha, then there’s such a thing as collective lack, and collective understanding of that lack. Buddhism emphasizes delusion, and there’s also collective delusion–for example, myths about what America is and what it means to be American.

An important point about lack is that it’s unavoidable. It’s the nature of lack that you’re going to have to deal with it one way or the other. Historically, people have usually dealt with lack in religious terms, referring to some other reality. But if you doubt any spiritual reality, if you are a secular person living in what you understand as a secular world, then you’re going to have to objectify and cope with your lack right here and now, which is why consumerism is so addictive. The promise of consumerism is that something you buy or consume is going to fill up your sense of lack. But it’s also the nature of consumerism that nothing ever can. Consumerism never makes you happy. Yet, it’s always promising to make you happy. It’s always the next thing that’s going to make you happy. That’s one example of a collective bind that we’ve gotten ourselves into.

Lack can also help us understand war and our response to terrorism since September 11th. Psychologically, war, despite all its horrors, is a comforting, familiar way for us to project our collective sense of lack onto somebody else. So, for example, we might come to believe al-Qaida is the cause of our lack, they are our problem, because, hey, they are trying to kill us! This involves a lot of anxiety, obviously, but we also feel a sense of relief that we can now understand what the problem with our lives is and how to deal with it. To keep lack from gnawing at our core, we objectify it: the problem is those terrorists over there, and if we eliminate them, we eliminate our sense of lack, and then we will be okay. Part of the tragedy with that projection, of course, is that it’s a false promise, just as with consumerism. If you kill those guys, you don?t solve the basic problem. There’s always going to be some other enemy, somebody else who starts to threaten us, because, insofar as we’re thinking in that way, we have to keep finding or creating new enemies, just like we have to keep finding new things to consume.

I recently reread Turtle Island,  Gary Snyder’s 1975 Pulitzer-prize winning  book of poems and essays. Many of the poems are simple, short (but reflective) nature snap-shots, like this one, entitled, ”Pine Tree Tops”

in the blue night

frost haze, the sky glows

with the moon

pine tree tops

bend snow-blue, fade

into sky, frost, starlight,

the creak of boots.

rabbit tracks, deer tracks,

what do we know.

But Snyder also turns his Zen-trained eye to the wider world situation, as in this poem,”The Call of the Wild:”

The heavy old man in his bed at night

Hears the Coyote singing

in the back meadow.

All the years he ranched and mined and logged.

A Catholic,

A native Californian.

and the Coyotes howl in his

Eightieth year.

He will call the Government

Trapper

Who uses iron leg-traps on Coyotes,

Tomorrow.

My sons will lose this

Music they have just started

To love.

***

The ex acid-heads from the cities

Converted to Guru or Swami,

Do penance with shiny

Dopey eyes, and quit eating meat.

In the forests of North America,

The land of Coyote and Eagle,

They dream of India, of

forever blissful sexless highs.

And sleep in oil-heated

Geodesic domes, that

Were stuck like warts

in the woods.

And the Coyote singing

is shut away

for they fear

the call

of the wild.

And they sold their virgin cedar trees,

the tallest trees in miles,

To a logger

Who told them

”Trees are full of bugs.”

The Government finally decided

To wage the war all-out. Defeat

is Un-American.

And they took to the air,

Their women beside them

in bouffant hairdos

putting nail polish on the

gunship cannon-buttons.

And they never came down,

for they found,

the ground

is pro-Communist. And dirty.

And the insects side with the Viet Cong.

So they bomb and they bomb

Day after day, across the planet

blinding sparrows

breaking the ear-drums of owls

splintering trunks of cherries

twining and looping

deer intestines

in the shaken, dusty, rocks.

All these Americans up in special cities in the sky

Dumping poisons and explosives

Across Asia first,

And next North America,

A war against earth.

When it’s done there’ll be

no place

A Coyote could hide

envoy

I would like to say

Coyote is forever

Inside you.

But it’s not true.

Snyder wrote these poems in the early seventies, when I was in my early twenties and he was in his early forties. It was a heady time. We in the counterculture were all elated with the optimism of youth; we equated starting our revolution with winning it. Snyder, at what now seems like a tender age, was one of our elders and mentors. With his twelve years in a Zen monastery, his love of wilderness and high country, and his prescient sense of the importance of deeply inhabiting a place, he pointed me and many of my co-conspirators to important practices and doctrines, to the importance of the long haul. One of his most prophetic poems in Turtle Island is the title poem from the section called, ”For the Children:”

The rising hills, the slopes,

of statistics

lie before us.

the steep climb

of everything, going up,

up, as we all

go down.

In the next century

or the one beyond that,

they say,

are valleys, pastures,

we can meet there in peace

if we make it.

To climb these coming crests

one word to you, to

you and your children:

stay together

learn the flowers

go light

I cry every time I read that. It brings together so much, and takes such a long perspective. It’s just the kind of grounding we need as the madness of a world gone wrong rises to a fever pitch all around us. ”We can meet there in peace/if we make it.”

But for me, the most impressive, most prophetic part of Turtle Island is a twelve-page prose section at the back of the book, written in 1969 and entitled ”Four Changes.” Like Martin Luther’s theses nailed to a church door, this slim manifesto is the foundation of a vast spectrum of political, social, and spiritual action that has come into being since. Very little of what Snyder proposes and predicts misses the mark, although he himself calls it “far from perfect and in some parts already outdated” in his 1974 introduction to it. His warning about the danger of ”a plutonium economy” is truer than ever now, as the Bush junta seeks to slip billions of dollars of subsidies for new nuclear power plants into alternate energy legislation.

The four changes he calls for are in the realms of population, pollution, consumption, and transformation, and each is divided into sections addressing large-scale political action, local community action, and ”our own heads,” which addresses the ways in which we as individuals help create obstacles to the better world we can envision in our clearest moments.

”Population” states that, although humanity is only a part of the web of life, we are now an inordinately large part of it—and this was in 1969, when the world population was nearly half of what it is now. Due to the intransigence of many governments and religious institutions, and despite the Chinese government’s strenuous efforts to limit the Chinese birth rate (one of the few qualifiedly good things it has done, in my opinion), there has effectively been no progress on this issue. I think this is in large part because the only option third world people have to insure that they will be cared for in their old age is to have as many children as they can, in hopes that at least one of them will be in a position to help them when the time comes. Governments, by and large, have shown no interest in ameliorating this situation, because it would involve taking money away from those who have it and giving it to those who don’t, and that is, as the Democrats are quick to say, a political impossibility. So, at this point, it’s starting to look like the human population of the planet will be limited by war, starvation, and pandemic, which will do little to slow what many biologists are now calling a planetary extinction event on the order of the disappearance of the dinosaurs. Will we humans ultimately be consumed by the wave of extinction we have unleashed? To the extent that they are capable of considering the question, I think the other species with which we share this rare spot in the universe wouldn’t mind if we did. We have ignored Snyder’s prescription at our own peril. We are going to have to work hard to re-establish ourselves as worthwhile neighbors on this small blue planet.

Much of Snyder’s section on pollution deals with DDT, use of which has largely been eliminated, although plenty of other chemicals have taken its place in the rush to foul our only nest. What Snyder says in the subheading ”our own heads” is worth repeating, because it looks at the attitude behind widespread pesticide use, not one specific chemical: ”there is something in Western culture that wants to totally wipe out creepy-crawlies, and feels repugnance for toadstools and snakes. This is fear of one’s own deepest natural inner-self wilderness areas, and the answer is: relax. Relax around bugs, snakes, and your own hairy dreams….” Truly, there can be no revolution in the world without a revolution in our own minds and hearts.

In the consumption section, he keys in on our overdependence on oil and overuse of water, decades before peak oil and drying continents became large-scale causes of concern. ”(M)ankind has become a locust-like blight on the planet,” he says, ”that will leave a bare cupboard for its own children—all the while in a kind of Addict’s Dream of affluence, comfort, eternal progress—using the great achievements of science to produce software and swill.” (Wow—I hadn’t even heard of ‘’software” in 1969!)

To combat this, he proposes, at the macro-level, that economics needs to be seen as a minor branch of ecology, that the criminal waste of war must be shown for what it is and ended. At the community level, he calls for sharing and creating, whether it’s skills or garden produce or clothing, for breaking the habit of unnecessary possessions, which leads to the internal work: ”To live lightly on the earth, to be aware and alive, to be free of egotism, to be in contact with plants and animals, starts with simple concrete acts. The inner principle is the insight that we are inter-dependent energy fields of great wisdom and compassion—expressed in each person as a superb mind, a handsome and complex body, and the almost magical capacity of language. To these potentials and capacities, ‘owning things’ can add nothing of authenticity. ‘Clad in the sky, with the earth for a pillow.”’

The fourth change is ”transformation,” regarding which Snyder says, ”We have it within our deepest powers not only to change our ’selves’ but to change our culture. If man is to remain on earth he must transform the five-millenia-long urbanizing civilization tradition into a new ecologically-sensitive harmony-oriented wild-minded scientific-spiritual culture….What we envision is….a basic cultural outlook and social organization that inhibits power and property seeking while encouraging exploration and challenge in things like music, meditation, mathematics, mountaineering, magic, and all other authentic ways of being-in-the-world. Women totally free and equal. A new kind of family—responsible, but more festive and relaxed—is implicit.”

In the midst of this soaring vision, he inserted a 1974 footnote: ”More concretely, no transformation without our feet on the ground. Stewardship means, for most of us, find your place on the planet, dig in, and take responsibility from there—the tiresome but tangible work of school boards, county supervisors, local foresters—local politics. Even while holding in mind the largest scale of potential change. Get a sense of workable territory, learn about it, and start acting point by point. On all levels from national to local the need to move toward steady state economy—equilibrium, dynamic balance, inner-growth stressed—must be taught. Maturity/diversity/climax/creativity.”

There it is, Green Party politics in a nutshell. It’s not just about light bulbs, folks!! It’s amazing to reread a book I loved in my youth and realize that I have been living its directives ever since, along with many others, albeit, alas, not quite enough eco-lovers to actually change the direction of the country, yet. Hey, we have been saying this stuff for forty years now, constantly getting blown off and derided by the corporatists, while they dig all of us, including themselves, deeper into a mass grave. Can you hear me now?

Snyder finishes by addressing the possibility that the human experiment will come to naught with some classic Zen: ”Our own heads is where it starts. Knowing that we are the first human beings in history to have so much of man’s culture and previous experience available to our study, and being free enough of the weight of traditional cultures to seek out a larger identity; the first members of a civilized society since the Neolithic to wish to look clearly into the eyes of the wild and see our own self-hood, our family, there. We have these advantages to set off the obvious disadvantages of being as screwed up as we are—which gives us a fair chance to penetrate some of the riddles of ourselves and the universe, and to go beyond the idea of ‘man’s survival’ or ’survival of the biosphere’ and to draw our strength from the realization that at the heart of things is some kind of serene and ecstatic process which is beyond qualities and beyond birth and death. ‘No need to survive!’ ‘In the fires that destroy the universe at the end of the kalpa, what survives?’–’The iron tree blooms in the void!’

”Knowing that nothing need be done, is where we begin to move from.”

It’s all here in these twelve pages, fractally unfoldable into whole worlds of endeavor, garnished with the reminder that ”nothing needs to be done.” So, from that place of detachment, friends, let us draw inspiration from our elegant elder Gary Snyder and do all that we can, in a spirit of love, joy, and compassion. It’s the Green way.

music: Indigo Girls, “Wood Song”

Back when Steve Martin did stand up, he liked to talk about taking drugs—hey, it was the seventies, everything was cool, y’know?. “I took this amazing pill last night,” he would say. “It really bleeped me up—it’s called A PLACEBO!”

Fast forward about twenty-five years, to 2002, and Dr. Helen S. Mayberg starts doing research on “the placebo effect” at Emory University. Dr. Mayberg was twenty years old in 1976, and grew up in California. I suspect she dug Steve Martin back in the day.

What Dr. Mayberg found out was that taking placebos does, in fact, alter brain chemistry. Yes, that’s right—placebos can bleep you up! (Though I have to say, I’ve bought a few that didn’t!) But, I digress–if you take a sugar pill that you think is going to make you feel better, there’s a good chance that your brain chemistry will, obligingly, rearrange itself so that you feel better. This shook the foundation of modern neuropharmacology, which had assumed that the adult brain was a steady-state soup that could only be altered by pouring chemicals into it. Dr. Mayberg went on to do a study that showed that engaging depressed individuals in what is called “cognitive therapy,” in which they learn to think their way out of their depressions, is just as effective as medication for many people—and causes changes in brain chemistry that are, in fact, the opposite of the changes induced by medication. Her description of the difference is that medication changes the brain from the bottom up, while therapy changes the brain from the top down. As I understand it, this means that the changes induced by cognitive therapy are permanent, while the changes induced by drug therapy evaporate when an individual stops taking his or her, as they say, “meds.” Meanwhile….

His Holiness the Dalai Lama has long been eager to study Buddhist meditation practices with the tools of modern science, hoping to transform traditional religious practices into secular forms that will benefit people without obliging them to study Sanskrit. He has been fortunate to find many researchers eager to help him out. One center for this activity has been the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior, at the University of Wisconsin, where Dr. Richard Davidson has found powerful differences between the brains of long-term monks and novice meditators. But many of the differences are differences of degree—the meditators have discovered how to turn on their compassion and problem-solving centers to an unparalleled degree, while novices have just begun to stir these abilities. As with Dr. Mayberg’s work on cognitive therapy, this proves that the way we think does change our brains—positive thinking creates a positive feedback loop that improves functioning, while negative thinking creates negative feedback that…well, you get the picture.

This has enormous implications not just for the treatment of so-called “mental illness,” but for all of us. For the “mentally ill,” it shows that our current, “pill for every ill” way of thinking is just what many patients’ rights groups have claimed it is—a way for the drug companies to sell more pills, not a way that actually benefits those who are suffering. What it suggests to me is that, rather than creating a nation on prescription drugs, we could identify people who would make good cognitive therapy counselors and get them trained up and working with the so-called mentally ill (many of whom only see a “therapist” to get their prescriptions renewed). This would create a community network that in and of itself would be beneficial, not just for the human contacts it would create but because the counselors’ wages would circulate in the community, while drug money goes out to pharmaceutical companies and doesn’t come back.

I believe such community mental health networks would also benefit from the legalization of two classes of drugs now outlawed—marijuana and psychedelics. Marijuana has the effect of loosening habitual neural patterns in the brain (note to my serious readers: the link above does not reference this specific claim—my deadline got in the way of tracking it down, but I know it’s out there, and when I find it, I’ll link it in.) , and, with proper guidance, can be very helpful in changing self-defeating habit patterns. And psychedelic therapy, of course, had a very promising beginning before being shut down, in part by pharmaceutical companies who were averse to pills that they might only have to give a patient once. It’s the repeat business that makes stockholders happy, you know!

That’s the “mental illness” side of the benefits from this research. Now for the “mental wellness.” The meditation studies demonstrate that our brains will grow if we exercise them. There are exercise programs available that will increase our compassion, creativity, mental flexibility, and many other positive qualities, just as there are physical exercise programs—from yoga to aerobics to weight training—that will increase our physical flexibility, endurance, and strength. Members of the network of mental health counselors that I have proposed should be well grounded in these mental exercises, and should be available for wellness counseling as well as illness counseling. Healthy people take aerobics and yoga classes and work out in gyms—we should have the same emphasis on mental discipline, as well, and this broad foundation of mental and physical training should be at the heart of a national health system.

This is a very different emphasis from the proposals floated by most Democrats, let alone Republicans—their major concern seems to be making sure that the insurance and medical/pharmaceutical establishments stay healthy, not the public. That’s what’s politically possible for the two major parties, who are largely supported by these bloated business empires. Sooner or later, they will have to realize that the health and insurance establishment is to the body politic as cancer is to the human body, and that there is no way to make America healthy other than a little surgery. There is such a thing as beneficial corporate downsizing, y’know?

music: Taj Mahal—Giant Step

Ethicist Peter Singer read the UN’s Millenium Development Plan, which calls for an additional fifty to seventy-five billion dollars a year in order to halve world poverty and hunger and offer an education to every child in the world, among other things. This plan has been stalled out for lack of funding—the US finds it’s more important to take that kind of money and burn it in Iraq, just for openers. We could end world poverty, but we’re too busy fighting the poor. We could end our dependence on fossil fuels, but we’re too busy making sure we’ve got all the fossil fuels we can glom. But, I digress…. Dr. Singer did a little math, and found that raising the tax rates for the wealthiest Americans so that they paid the same ten to thirty-five percent of gross that the rest of us have to give up —leaving them ninety to sixty-five percent of their breathtakingly high annual income–would generate…over four hundred billion dollars a year. Enough to fund the UN anti-poverty program about seven times over. Noblesse oblige, anyone?

Such a change would do more to end terrorism in the world than burning money and bodies in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it doesn’t even propose cutting off money to the military/industrial blackmail complex. We could pay those people to sit around and do nothing and we’d all be better off. My old friend and teacher Stephen Gaskin has been saying since the seventies that “there’s plenty to go around,” but nobody believed him. Kudos to Mr. Singer for actually doing the math. Now all it’s gonna take is some political will.

Somebody in the DOE did some math and figured out that there’s enough off-peak power going unused in the US electric grid to substitute plug-in electric vehicles for about eighty-five percent of the gas burners on our highways today. That’s a good news/bad news situation all by itself—it means that our current, disgusting level of urban sprawl just might be sustainable—but the air would be cleaner, especially as more electricity comes from the sun and the wind. Meanwhile, it would encourage the continued strip mine rape of the central Appalachians and encourage the ghouls who are pushing nuclear power. This old curmudgeon would like to see America radically restructured, not just staying the course in electric cars.

I think that one of the most peculiar assumptions of our society is the assumption that everyone who wants full economic citizenship must own a car. Think about that, especially as real wages continue to fall (raising the minimum wage is unlikely to do much for the rest of us) and the “American dream” becomes ever more unattainable for ever more of us, for ever more.

But, just in case you think we’ve got it bad over here, consider the Chinese occupation of Tibet, which continues its genocidal course. The railway into Lhasa is now open, bringing thousands of tourists (and potentially thousands of troops), although it will take much more than passenger fares for the line to show a profit; current projections are that the tracks will sink into Tibet’s melting permafrost before the line pays for itself. Meanwhile, the Chinese are forcing Tibetans to demolish their homesteads and move into Chinese-designed dwellings that do not incorporate room for the livestock that are a necessary component of Tibetan household economies, impoverishing the Tibetans and forcing them into the unsustainable, import-everything, Chinese mode of dwelling on the Tibetan plateau. These are the people we’re trusting with our manufacturing capacity, although they are devious and amoral enough to make all but the most hard-hearted US corporations seem like the very picture of benevolence. What does this bode for how they will treat us when it comes time to call in our massive, mounting debt to them?

The Chinese have adopted our western religion of economics and turned it on us. Cheap is everything, graceful is nothing, and they are better at being ruthless than we are.

I think that one of the things we can do about the macro-economic quicksand we are trapped in, i.e., our declining purchasing power, is to spend our money very carefully, and give as little of it as we can to the vampiric multinational corporations that have gotten so very good at sucking our blood. Buy gasoline, if you must, from Citgo and give your money to Hugo Chavez, not Exxon-Mobil. Buy “consumer goods” from friendly neighborhood yard sales (and get to know your neighbors) and from thrift stores—and if you can’t find it locally, there’s all those virtual yard sales on the internet: eBay, Craig’s list, free- and cheap-cycle. More and more of us taking these steps (hell, our financial circumstances are forcing us, so we might as well!) will begin to starve the Walmarts of the world and their Chinese vampire cohorts. Do you really need cable TV? Haven’t you got something better to do with your time? Tell Comcast to get lost! Learn to work in metal or wood or clay, learn to spin and weave and sew. Learn to garden and cook, for chrissake! Learn to play an instrument and sing and tell stories! Learn to listen to other peoples’ stories! Creating post-consumerist, post-oil, post-corporate, post-industrial culture is a collective enterprise that is being created by you and you and you and me and the network of people we see every day. Let’s get to work and enjoy ourselves!

music: Adrienne Young, “Plow to the End of the Row”

This next bit is a little complicated to explain, but bear with me.

If you own your own home, but don’t have much income or other assets, and quote/unquote “need” nursing home care at the end of your life, Tenncare will pay for it, but then they are entitled to sell your home to recover their expenses. In a way, it sounds reasonable, but it seems less reasonable when we examine its actual effects and its impact on Tenncare’s overall nursing home expenditures. When we start to look at the “need” for nursing home care and consider what this says about our society, this provision starts to look like another case of the rich getting richer while the poor get poorer.

First, the numbers. Tennessee, in combination with the federal government, spent 994 million dollars on nursing home care last year. This covered about 24,000 people out of the approximately 33,000 in nursing homes in the state last year. Nursing home care costs an average of about $46,000 a year per person in Tennessee.

How much was recovered by sale of the assets of deceased nursing home patients?

Fourteen million dollars. About one and one-half percent of the total. If you figure that each home was worth about $140,000, that’s a hundred homes. A hundred lower-class family homes. A hundred families in which the older generation passed away, leaving nothing much but memories, ’cause the government took the old homestead. What a trade—a family’s center knocked out to cover point zero-one-four percent of a government bureaucracy’s bloated budget—and that budget is funded in part by the taxes that family paid. Shouldn’t they be getting something for their money? This is a prime example of government policies contributing to the erosion of the middle class in America—but it’s not just a government policy.

More math: thirty-three thousand people at forty-six thousand dollars a year each comes to about a billion and a half dollars. That’s the budget of the nursing-home industry in this state, and as long as lobbying is legal they will be working to keep that money going into their pockets, even though home care has consistently been shown to be better for most older peoples’ health, happiness, and longevity—not to mention their pocketbooks. Home care costs about half of what nursing home care costs.

I know about this from personal experience. My mother used to live far away from me, and, as she grew older and her health and ability to care for herself deteriorated, she needed to stay in nursing homes occasionally. She was fortunate enough to be able to afford an upper-level nursing home, but when I and my family visited her there, we found it impersonal, shabby, and depressing—and it was one of the “nice” ones.

When her condition deteriorated to the point that she needed constant care, we figured out how to build a place for her adjacent to my son’s home, and arranged for her care among family members and close friends. She is taken care of by people she knows, loves, and trusts—for a fraction of what it would cost us to hire strangers in an institution.

But we are among the lucky few in this country– because my mother has a pension that’s actually sufficient to cover her care at our informal, not-coverable-by-insurance level, because I and my friends have the kind of flexibility in our lives that allows us to work with her, and because we get along well enough as a family to figure these things out. I am painfully aware of my rare good fortune, but I think it shouldn’t be so rare.

The focus of government policy on elder care should be on keeping people with their families and in their homes to the greatest extent possible. This should focus on psychological and emotional issues as well as economics, and should be coupled with a deeper change of attitude: we need to abandon the materialistic view that everyone must be kept alive as long as possible regardless of the cost and quality of life that result. It is OK to die when you’re old. The bulk of medical expenses and interventions in a person’s life come when they are dying; it would be easier on them, us, and the economy to shift the paradigm into recognition that death is a graceful part of life, not a desperate battle to the finish. I’m not specifically talking about assisted suicide or euthanasia here, just putting natural death on the same footing as natural birth. If we can get millions of people to crave artificially sweetened, carbonated, caffeinated liquids that don’t quench their thirst, we ought to be able to put an idea like “easy death” across.

This is pretty radical. It’s a long way from the economics of elder care, in a way, but then again, when I say it’s radical, I mean it’s a view that encompasses the root of the situation. That’s what we Greens are about—rethinking the fundamental assumptions of our dysfunctional society. Old age, sickness, and death are inevitable—so what’s the intelligent way to treat them?

music:  James McMurtry, “Hands Like Rain“

My evangelical Christian mother-in-law recently invited me and my wife to go see “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” with her. Although I’ve read C.S. Lewis’ entire series several times (including reading it as a bedtime story to my children), I had been reluctant to go see the movie version, largely because so much has been made of it as a “Christian” movie, and because I didn’t want my visualizations of Narnia distorted by Disney Studios.

I didn’t have to worry. The movie is not preachy, and it is a feast for the eyes. But I’m not getting into a movie review from here, I’m getting into C.S. Lewis’ essential message, and what it meant to me when I first encountered Narnia, in a remote cabin in the mountains of California in the winter of 1969. I was visiting friends there, out beyond the power grid, where gravel roads tailed off into two-tracks that tailed off into saplings. It was the first time I had ever been so far away from civilization. As my surroundings sunk in on me, I was surprised and delighted with how overwhelmingly right it all felt. This was the way to live.

That night we sat down to read their young children a bedtime story. It was “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” and it was the first time I had ever heard of C.S. Lewis. My friends and I found the book so entrancing that, children sleeping in our laps, we continued to read the book out loud to each other, finally finishing in the wee small hours of the night. The book had connected with our deepest longings, a message down through time that we were not alone, need not fear the outcome of the struggle that endangered us then and still does today—our vision of a relaxed, pastoral, reverent, and magical world was eloquently shared in C.S. Lewis’ vision. At a deeper level, the psycho-spiritual evolution of his four young protagonists was an inspiration to us in our struggles with our own personal shortcomings.

Seeing the movie reminded me of that ecstatic weekend in the California pines. That weekend, with my friends and C.S. Lewis, I was granted a vision of the world and my role in it, and over thirty-five years later it remains one of my defining moments.

I went on to absorb as much C.S. Lewis as I could find, fiction and nonfiction, in the years after that.  Although I became a Buddhist, not a Christian, I have never lost my appreciation for him. Seeing “The Chronicles of Narnia” on the big screen caused me to revisit the lessons I had learned from him. Here are some quotes I found. Ollie North likes this guy? He must not have read far enough.

In one essay, Lewis wrote: “Christianity, with its claims in one way personal and in the other way ecumenical and both ways antithetical to omnicompetent government, must always in fact . . . be treated as an enemy [by the State]. Like learning, like the family, like any ancient and liberal profession, like the common law, it gives the individual a standing ground against the State.”

So much for the Christian right claiming Lewis, eh?

In his adult science-fiction story That Hideous Strength, Lewis shared his vision of the modern world: “However far you went you would find the machines, the crowded cities, the empty thrones, the false writings, the barren books: men maddened with false promises and soured with true miseries, worshipping the iron works of their own hands, cut off from Earth their mother and the Father in Heaven. You might go East so far that East became West and returned to Britain across the great ocean, but even so you would not have come out anywhere into the light. The shadow of one dark wing is over all.” That’s what Lewis said, about the darkness that has enveloped this planet, the darkness I like to refer to as “the religion of economics”–the notion that whatever makes the most money is best, and whoever makes the most money is most worthy.

In another essay, Lewis could easily have been speaking to the current political situation in America when he wrote (using a small “d”):

“I am a democrat… I am a democrat because I believe that no man or group of men is good enough to be trusted with uncontrolled power over others. And the higher the pretentions of such power, the more dangerous I think it both to the rulers and to the subjects. Hence Theocracy is the worst of all governments. If we must have a tyrant a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point be sated; and since he dimly knows he is doing wrong he may possibly repent.

“But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations. And since Theocracy is the worst, the nearer any government approaches Theocracy the worse it will be. A metaphysic, held by the rulers with the force of a religion, is a bad sign. It forbids them like the inquisitor, to admit any grain of truth or good in their opponents, it abrogates the ordinary rules of morality, and it gives a seemingly high, super-personal sanction to all the passions by which, like other men, the rulers will frequently be actuated. In a word, it forbids wholesome doubt.”

How could Lewis know that 43 years after his death, the United States would have a leader who believes he is appointed by God? And, as if speaking to the Bush junta’s plans to invade our privacy through the wonders of technology, Lewis wrote:

“The question… has become… whether we can discover any way of submitting to the worldwide paternalism of a technocracy without losing all personal privacy and independence. Is there any possibility of getting the super Welfare State’s honey and avoiding the sting? Let us make no mistake about the sting. … To live his own life in his own way, to call his house his castle, to enjoy the fruits of his own labour, to educate his children as his conscience directs, to save for their prosperity after his death–these are wishes deeply ingrained in … civilised man.” (from Is Progress Possible? Willing Slaves of the Welfare State”)

Lewis’ perspective on politics was to approach it by focusing on underlying principles, not short-term results. He is not left wing, he is not right wing. He is Green. I’m claiming him. And I’m grateful to be reminded of the inspiration at the heart of my politics. May I never forget where I’m coming from.

music:  Joan Baez, “Satisfied Mind”

Comments

Rock on, Bro.
Posted by sirensongs on 02/13/2006 12:08:22 PM