Author: connie

One day in one of my InterPlay classes, a fellow student said, “If you ask me, the problem is there are too many people.”

Well, maybe. But which people are the “too many”? Is it the poor of Africa or South America? Their actual population numbers are high, but their carbon footprint on the earth is very small. They are not the ones causing global warming. If left to live life the way they have always lived it, they live more than sustainably.

It’s those of us in the industrial nations who are living way beyond sustainably. We are causing the problem, we are denying the problem, but we are not the ones dying. Drought has been a problem in Northern Africa for a long time. We barely notice except to be surprised when boatloads of people who are trying to escape the drought die on the Mediterranean. We can’t be bothered to see the connection between the rise of groups like the Boko Haram and the exploitation of the natural resources of Africa by the multi-national corporations. Really, Africa is the step-child of the earth. We have allowed terrible destruction of the people and the environment without a blink of the eye.

Now in some parts of India the temperatures have risen to about 120 degrees. Thousands have died.  Who are these thousands? The elderly, the homeless, people who work outside. The poor. The innocents.

How do we change this? How do find a way not to feel helpless (and therefore frozen in action) faced with the power of the multi-nationals?

Our approach must be multi-faceted.

1. We have politics, of course. We must continue to back progressive candidates, sign petitions, etc.
2. We must get out and organize against drilling in the Artic, fracking anywhere, for the rights of human beings being exploited, poisoned, pushed into the oceans, everywhere.
3. We must rise up for alternative energy sources.
4. We must insist on regulations for multi-national corporations and not allow trade agreements like the TPP that would undermine our ability make these changes.
5. And, we must curb our own excesses. We must go off the grid.  Stop funding the big corporations by refusing to buy from them.
   1. Begin with clothes. Let’s stop supporting slave labor in poverty stricken nations. It’s not easy to find the things we need without going to the big box stores, but there are lots of good used clothing stores. Search for fair trade on the internet and you’ll find some surprising things! Email companies that have things you’d like to buy and ask them who makes their clothes, how are they treated?
   2. Buy locally produced food.
   3. My husband and I haven’t gone solar yet.  We don’t have the money, and suspect our old house doesn’t have the structure for it, but maybe we can cooperate with our neighbors to bring solar to our neighborhood.

And more, and more.  How about adding your ideas and “finds” in the comments?

Wrung Out

I feel wrung out.  First a balcony collapses here in Berkeley killing six young people – five from Ireland – and injuring seven more. In my town – a building approved by my city. The full inspection information is not in, but the suggestion is that the balcony was full of dry rot.  This was a fairly new building – luxury apartments.  Full of students. Might this be a case of corporate malfeasance – someone taking a shortcut to amass more profit?

And then almost immediately after comes the news of Charleston. A boy the same age as the young people on the balcony murders nine people, accusing them – some women – one 88 years old – of “raping our women.” A young man infused with hate who thinks what he has done is morally correct..

Should I have been so surprised by either of these things? The roots of both are in our “profit first” society. Chattel slavery is the epitome of “profit first.” Kidnap innocent people, load them like logs on a ship to come to the “new” world, where sixty million of them died before even making it to the slave market. Sixty million! We’re horrified by the six million Jews killed in Nazi Germany.  Why are we not horrified by the sixty million thrown overboard like chaff? The ones who survived were beaten if they did not work hard enough to bring in the cotton; they were bred like cattle and their children – an extra profit beyond the profit from their work – were sold.

For some reason many people in this country think we are beyond all that – our ugly past is past.  But I believe it is our refusal to recognize our guilt, to acknowledge the horror of what our country did that leads to the kind of act that happened at Mother Emmanuel Church Wednesday night. Rather than recognize our own racism, rather than owning our past and working to make amends for it, we blame the victim. “It happened because something is wrong with them. They rape our women.” Or, “they’re lazy, welfare cheats,” “criminals”.  We make up stories about the people we’ve hurt, who we don’t want to face, and then go on hurting and hurting and hurting them.

Some of these stories are being propagated by pundits on the so called news presented by the corporate media and seeping into the impressionable brains of young people like the murderer, Dylann Roof. Why? Where is the profit in promoting racism?

Divide and conquer is certainly part of the strategy.  We cannot unite to make sure we have safe working conditions, safe emissions from factories, safe drinking water, safe food to eat if we are busy blaming our problems on black people. It’s a sleight of hand.  While one hand is stealing our commons, polluting our land and water, sending jobs overseas, etc., etc., etc., the other is pointing at “those folks” (black people, immigrants, and more) suggesting that it’s all “their” fault.

It’s time to open our eyes.  It’s time for reconciliation, for studying our true history, for recognizing that our country’s history has not been all goodness and light.  It’s time to see each other in all our complexities, good and bad. It’s time to embrace each other and care – really care.

I can’t believe it’s been three years since I posted on this blog! Many things have happened in the world since then, some good, some bad.

(If you don’t want to read the following partial list of the bad, skip to the next paragraph!)

• Global warming has progressed faster than we expected. Huge cyclones have devastated the Philippines. Indians are dying by the thousands from 120 degree temperatures. Glaciers are melting.  Some of the climate change refugees are now from our own Alaska and Texas.
• Shell oil, having caused havoc in the Gulf, is preparing to go to the Arctic and bring destruction there.
• Extremists in Africa have kidnapped and raped, sometimes killed, thousands of women.
• Refugees pushed out by the powers that be in Burma (Myanmar) are floating in boats in the Indian     Ocean, pushed back into the sea by some countries they go to seeking refuge.
• Refugees from drought and civil war in Africa are drowning in the Mediterranean.
• In 2011 we were excited by the Egyptian revolution and since then it has come full circle back to the original repressive regime.
• American elections have been weird, to say the least.
• Our “liberal” president – who has done many good things – is promoting a trade agreement that will help corporations undermine our safety legislation, is intimately involved in sending drones to murder our perceived enemies, is locking up whistle blowers at unprecedented rates…

We might think that the world is cycling into destruction.  And it might be, but…

• Los Angeles just voted in a $15 minimum raise.
• The Black Lives Matter organization – created out of murder and despair – is bringing the rampant racism in our country to the forefront.  Many, many white people who did not believe racism still existed now can see the truth.  This is bringing reform to the police and justice systems, we hope.
• Every so often one of the many petitions we sign fighting a particular oppression sends out an email saying, “We won!”
• An organization in Seattle has built their own alternative energy platform floating next to the one Shell plans to send to the Arctic. Several local political entities are making it difficult for Shell to dock it’s platforms in Seattle.
•  Idle No More, an organization of indigenous peoples founded in Canada, has organized huge protests against Shell in Seattle, surrounding the platform in kayaks.  They feel that Native American treaty rights might be the last stand to stopping environmental disaster.
• People are organizing around many issues. I get email about demonstrations occurring about this or that need for change happening several times a week.  Many of them represent a coalition of organizations.
• More and more people are turning to alternative news sources, recognizing that news sources owned by large corporations are distorting the news, leaving out important information, sometimes even lying.
• We have a candidate for president who is truly totally unconnected to global corporations – a real Progressive.  Hurray, Bernie Sanders!

Some small wins, some big wins. We are beginning to understand that all these different problems are interrelated, forming coalitions to attack them. People are beginning to sit up and say, “We can do better than this.”

We can!

 

(An interlude before we go on discussing constant change):

One of my readers commented on the use of the term “dark” to describe “dark energy” in my last blog.

The term “dark energy” is a scientific one, not my own term.  We can see “light energy” so the energy we cannot see must be “dark energy”.  Scientists’ mathematical calculations say it’s there even though we can’t see it.  There is nothing negative about dark energy.  It is neither good nor bad.  It just is.

However, I am disturbed at the suggestion that darkness might imply evil.  Darkness as a symbol of evil has been used allegorically a lot, but this use has had some very bad consequences.  Much of the racism in this country is enhanced by this false allegory.  Are dark people evil?  No.  Is night evil?  Is winter evil?  No.  These are very important parts of the natural cycle of life on this earth.

I once wrote a song on this subject.  The words are:

In the dark of winter
the bulbs and the seeds
lay deep in the nurturing earth.
It’s a time of renewal,
a time of sleep
awaiting the promise of birth.

In the dark of night
we go to our beds
gather new strength in our dreams.
Its a time of rest,
a time to sleep
awaiting the sun’s morning streams.

In the dark of her womb
she carries her babe
who grows in life every day.
It’s a time of growth,
of nurturing hopefor our children will show us the way.

Come new life
come out of the dark
rise to the promise of spring
Come new life
come out of the warmth
see what the new life will bring.

Awaken my soul
come out of the dark
rise to the promise of  dawn.
Awaken my soul
come out of the warmth
see how the day is reborn.

Nurturing darkness is where we are renewed.  It is the silence, where, if we listen, new ideas, aha moments come dropping in.  It seems to me, if  “dark energy” is indeed the connecting force between us (and, again, I leave this idea to my Don’t Know Mind), it is well named.

Next week:  Back to finding an anchor in this constant change!  Or “Don’t fence me in!”

My book, Dancing the Deep Hum, goes into this concept of dark energy in a touch more detail.  You can learn more about the book and my other writings at www.deephum.com.  You can purchase Dancing the Deep Hum online at Lulu.com, Amazon, or Powells, or order it from your local bookstore.

Hello blogging friends,

It’s been a long time since I ‘ve posted to this blog, but I’ve been very busy writing a new poem, setting it as a blues song, and then struggling with recording it myself. I’ve included the song and the words below, and I do hope if any of you are singers, and find yourself interested in singing this song, you will contact me!

The song, Disposable People (in a Disposable World), was written after the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen last December. Since then things have gotten drastically worse. We have incredibly disastrous floods in Pakistan, India, and China, a killing heat wave in Russia, drought in Niger (and many other places), to list only a few. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area we’ve had the coldest summer since 1972. In other places it’s been much hotter than usual. In Greenland, a huge chunk of glacier has fallen into the sea, threatening the sea lanes. This fall meteorologists have predicted a very bad hurricane season because the water temperatures are much higher.

And yet, the United States, the country that contributes the most to global warming, still refuses to sign the Kyoto Protocol. Instead, our government has made attempts to get other countries like Ecuador and Bolivia to sign on to the US’s own much reduced agreement (that effectively sabotaged the Copenhagen conference) by threatening to curtail aid to those countries. (The President of Ecuador responded by refusing to be either threatened or bribed, and offering instead, to pay the US the same amount of money if they would sign the Kyoto Protocol!)

In the past when I’ve started feeling helpless faced with global warming, war, and the self-destructive greed of humans, I’ve always thought about the smallness of the earth in the vastness of the universe as a kind of solace – a concept you will hear in the song. But the other day my friend Amy said to me, “But we don’t know what effect the death of the earth will have on the universe. It might be like the flap of a butterfly’s wings….” No solace left.

Click the link below to hear the song. Also wanted to let you know that my book, Dancing the Deep Hum, is on sale on my website only for $12 (rather than $18 on Amazon, etc.).  To find out more go to www.deephum.com .

Song:  Disposable Peo 8 10 10 mix_2

The words are below.

Disposable People
(in a Throwaway World)
Dedicated to the memory of Andrea Lewis of KPFA

Planets dance around their orbits
Comets fly through space
Stars explode with shattering flame
Born anew they wax and wane
It’s all relative they say
Even if the earth dies,
Melting away ‘til it’s dry,
Stars will be alive.

And yet, and yet, I cannot reconcile
The life of one small child.

When rainfall drops
by forty percent in Darfur
Drought and famine lead to massacre.
Add the minerals for I-Pods,
Blackberries and more
Bringing more conflict and civil war.
Disposable people in a throw away world.

Collateral damage is the word we use.
Death of innocents in war.
But there is another war we wage
Where collateral damage is the rage.
War for profits for the few.
It’s all related, don’t you know?
Buying stuff, selling stuff, takes a toll.
What we’ve sold is our soul.

We’ve sold our soul.

And yet, and yet,I really don’t want to see
The death of the Maldives.
Thirty-nine nations,
Island nations
Swept away by the sea.

It’s all related, don’t you know?
Buying stuff, selling stuff, takes a toll.
What we’ve sold is our soul.
We’ve sold our soul.

Eleven thousand people live in Tuvalu.
No major industry.
Little carbon pollution.
Living the way we all should.
What did they ever do?
But the seas wash higher,
The seas grow warmer,
Cyclones grow fiercer
Every year.
It won’t be long
Before they disappear,
Like Lohachara,
Gone now.
Lohachara,
Lohachara
Musical sound.
Lohachara has drowned.

Planets dance around their orbits
Comets fly through space
Stars explode with shattering flame
Born anew they wax and wane
It’s all relative they say
Even if the earth dies,
Melting away ‘til it’s dry,
Stars will be alive.
We’ve sold our soul.