Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

Chavruta

My son Joshua and I gather in a weekly chavruta. The word is Hebrew or Aramaic, and literally means fellowship or group of fellows, and is a traditional rabbinic approach to Talmudic study in which a small group of students meets to analyze, discuss and debate a shared text. Joshua and I meet online, as he lives in New York State and I in northern California. Our chavruta is devoted each week to the work of one poet, and we've sometimes spent several weeks if our imagination is particularly taken by the work of a given poet, as it was most recently by the writing of Emily Dickinson. 

I wanted to speak here of our hour this morning. We had agreed to focus on the poetry of one of our favorites, Jane Hirshfield. We chose her work because Joshua had read, and proposed that we discuss together this morning, a wonderful interview of Hirshfield by Ezra Klein of The New York Times, on March 3, 2023. Klein is known as a skillful and insightful writer and podcaster, and this interview Klein entitled "The Poet Jane Hirshfield Invites Us to Embrace Habits of Deep Noticing and Attention⸺and Observe the Beauty that Unfolds."

Klein begins their discussion by introducing Hirshfield to his listeners: "She's the author of many collections of poetry, including her most recent "Ledger," which is probably the book of poetry I've gifted to others most often. She's also the author of two very beautiful books of essays on poetry and how it works and the poetic mind. And if you are intimidated by poetry, I really recommend these, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World. 

I'll end this brief discussion with the first poem of Jane Hirshfield that Ezra Klein asked her to recite during the interview. It is a 2014 poem illustrative of Hirshfield's increasing attention in her work to the climate crisis.

 

Let Them Not Say

 

Let them not say:    We did not see it.

We saw.

 

Let them not say:     We did not hear it.

We heard.

 

Let them not say:     They did not taste it.

We ate. We trembled.

 

Let them not say:     It was not spoken, not written.

We spoke,

We witnessed with voices and hands.

 

Let them not say:     They did nothing.

We did not-enough.

 

Let them say, as they must say something:

 

A kerosene beauty.

It burned

 

Let them say we warmed ourselves by it,

read by its light, praised

and it burned.

 

 

 

 

 

 

How Bad Is It?

How Bad Is It?

 

by Bill McKibben

September 8, 2022

 

I got a phone call last night, from a person I admire as much as anyone I know; she’s spent her life working, with great effectiveness, for a wide variety of progressive causes. I turn to her for guidance on dozens of questions. But last night she was turning to me, and with a simple, despairing question: “is it just all over for the climate?” 

She’d been reading stories from the past week about the truly horrific flooding in Pakistan (watch this video, please—it’s the single best depiction I’ve seen of what the crisis feels like, and though it’s on CNN, the most mainstream of media, it does not shy away for a second from talking about the blame that falls on the global north for the climate crisis, and the need for reparations), and about the giant Thwaites glacier in the Antarctic retreating twice as fast as scientists had thought, and about a new study showing that even if we stopped emitting carbon now melting ice on Greenland would produce almost a foot of sea level rise. 

I heard from one of the co-authors of that study, Jason Box, a few days later. He sent me photos of a spot where we’d camped on the Greenland ice sheet a few years ago; he’d been back there over the weekend, he said, when his team had to decamp fast because an unprecedented melt was underway. September 1 is supposed to mark the end of the melt season on Greenland, but all of a sudden temperatures were soaring—above freezing even at the very summit of the ice sheet, which is almost always safely below zero. “While rushing down the ice sheet, we felt surprisingly warm pulses of air on our faces, like the Chinook winds I remember from Colorado,” he wrote. As a result of the anomalous warm weather, the Washington Post reported, As a result, “tens of billions of tons of ice were lost — an event that could further Greenland’s already significant contributions to rising sea levels.” As another researcher explained, “Greenland’s ice margin can’t tolerate the conditions that are becoming increasingly common for it. This event is typical of those destabilizing conditions.”

So. There’s an ongoing, sometimes acrid, debate in climate circles about ‘doomism’ versus ‘hopium,’ which I have no desire to join. (As usual, count me with Rebecca Solnit, who spends her time highlighting the fights we are winning: that seems to me entirely useful, because it motivates). I've been fighting this battle for so many years now that sometimes the largest-scale questions don’t even occur to me; but they occur to others, obviously, and they deserve answers. Given events like those of the past few weeks (I haven’t even mentioned what may be the most prolonged heatwave in human history that hit China this summer, nor the current raging heat in the American west) it is a fair question to ask: are we reaching the point where events are so far out of control that our efforts to stem the tide are pointless? 

So let me just lay out my own sense, in case it’s helpful to anyone else

1. We are not getting out of this crisis unscathed, or anything like it. It’s been many years since “stopping global warming” was on the menu. We’ve raised the temperature a degree celsius already, and that’s way too much because—well, see above. A degree is a mess
2. It will get worse. Even if we do everything right at this point, there’s enough momentum in the system to take us near two degrees; that’s going to be far far worse. Not just twice as bad—damage increases exponentially, not linearly, as we head past various tipping points.
3. If we don’t do everything right, that “near to two degrees” will actually be nearer three degrees Celsius, which is five or six degrees Fahrenheit, which is a world where civilizations won’t be able to function in the ways we’re used to them functioning. That civilizational breakdown—a political and human phenomenon, not a scientific one—could come sooner; we don’t know where the civilizational red lines are, only that we’re close. 
4. Which means: despair is not an option yet, at least if it’s that kind of despair that leads to inaction. But desperationis an option—indeed, it’s required. We have to move hard and fast.
5. The most obvious place we have to move is the energy transition. Physics means we have to go fast; economics means going fast will focus for now on sun, wind, and batteries because they are cheap and available. The fossil fuel industry, desperate to maintain its business model, is in the way; they must be fought.
6. But we also have to shore up civilizations in all the other ways we can imagine, especially by sharing resources and technologies. Our systems are too brittle now; places like Pakistan just lack the resilience to deal with a crisis they did not create. Global solidarity is not kindness; on a small world it’s a survival strategy. 

I did not tell my friend: drop everything else you’re doing and work only on climate. But I did tell her: all our other dramas now play out on the stage of climate change. For the forseeable future—for as long as our lives last—the rapid rise of the temperature on the planet of our origin is the overriding human story.

In other climate and energy news:

+Today’s the day: big demonstration in DC trying to stop the dirty side deal that Joe Manchin is trying to extort from Congress. He wants a pipeline for his buddies; there’s no reason to give it to him. Livestream here; follow @powhr_coalition and @ThirdActVa on Twitter as the day progresses. At the American Prospect, David Dayen is optimistic we can win this fight. Oh, and that pipeline Manchin wants to build? The pipe has been sitting out in the weather for years now, corroding. If you want more background, including on the reasons that blue state residents actually have some power in this fight for once, here’s an interview I did yesterday with the remarkable Jim Braude and Margery Eagan on that effervescent radio show, Boston Public.

+You know that thing Herschel Walker said about trees? Bay area arborist (and superb activist) Joe Lamb provides a mighty riposte from a few branches up. 

+Too often the media has turned AOC into a caricature, but this profile from GQ reminds us once again that she’s a remarkably supple political thinker. 

“This generational tension has existed among virtually every single social movement in American history, in labor, in suffrage, in civil rights, in marriage equality,” the congresswoman said. “And it is a tension between history and the present moment. It’s a tension between inside and outside. It’s a tension between what we can learn and what we don’t know. Any sort of criticism of the Democratic Party is immediately cast as helping the right or ‘You’re disrespectful’ or ‘Don’t you know everything that these people have done?’ And we do, but we are also allowed to learn from the outcomes of those victories and the unique dynamics of the present moment, to also say that we have to change tack and we can’t just do the same thing for 30 years.

+Who’d a thunk it? The electric utility industry gleefully joined their fossil fuel brethren in the devastating climate denial campaigns, as this new study makes painfully clear. 

Before 1980, electric utilities' messaging was generally in line with the scientific understanding of climate change. However, from 1990 to 2000, utility organizations founded and funded front groups that promoted climate doubt and denial. After 2000, these front groups were largely shut down, and utility organizations shifted to arguing for delayed action on climate change, by highlighting the responsibility of other sectors and promoting actions other than cleaning up the electricity system.

+Excellent news: The batteries in electric cars are lasting far longer than predicted (or warrantied). Most outlive the cars they’re in, with plenty of life left to be used as backup storage in big solar arrays. “At the end of the vehicle’s life—15 or 20 years down the road—you take the battery out of the car, and it’s still healthy, with perhaps 60 or 70% of usable charge,” one expert explained.

+Americans are continuing to move to the hottest, driest places. This will make the inevitable counter-migration all the more intense when it comes. 

+From Hannah Laga Abram, a great account of an under-appreciated aspect of the climate crisis: what happens when heavy rains fall on land scarred by fresh forest fires? (Floods and slides, since there’s nothing to hold the water back)

The last two months forced brothers Zack and Marck Romero to become professional weathermen. 

From the moment the rain starts falling in the mountains — and it's fallen almost daily — they know it will take the flood between 45 and 48 minutes to reach their creekside land in this small town near Las Vegas.

First, they hear a roaring. Then, for two to three hours, their driveway transforms into a churn of dark water and tangled debris. No one can get in or out. When the water level drops enough, the brothers attach a chain with a tire on the end to their tractor and drag it through the creek bed to clear out the culvert in preparation for the next day’s deluge.

+Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency, has a very-worth-the-read column in the Financial Times on the planet’s current energy woes post Putin’s invasion. Money graf:

I talk to energy policymakers all the time and none of them complains about relying too much on clean energy. On the contrary, they wish they had more. They regret not moving faster to build solar and wind plants, to improve the energy efficiency of buildings and vehicles, or to extend the lifetime of nuclear plants. More low-carbon energy would have helped ease the crisis — and a faster transition from fossil fuels towards clean energy represents the best way out of it.

+Odd Canadian philosopher (and hugely influential social media presence) Jordan Peterson turns out to be a climate denier too. Why is this always a part of the package?

+To understand how we got so deep into the climate crisis without acting, it’s worthwhile understanding just how dysfunctional the economics profession was in the early days of the fight. A great account in the New York Times points out that the most widely used model from the beginning was drawing criticism for underestimating the havoc that climate change would wreak. Like other models, it has been revised several times, but it still relies on broad assumptions and places less value on harm to future generations than it places on harm to those today. It also doesn’t fully incorporate the risk of less likely but substantially worse trajectories of warming. 

+Farmers are getting much better at working around solar panels.

+Abrahm Lustgarten at Pro Publica interviews Jay Famiglietti, the executive director of the Global Institute for Water Security, about water in the west. He’s not hopeful.

I don’t think we’re talking about sustainability. I think we’re talking about managed depletion. Because it’s impossible to keep growing the food that we grow in California. It’s agriculture that uses most of the groundwater. The math just isn’t there to have sustainable groundwater management. If you think of sustainability as input equals output — don’t withdraw more than is being replenished on an annual basis — that’s impossible in most of California.

 

The Democrats Finally Deliver

 

The Democrats Finally Deliver

 

The Senate’s passage of a sweeping, if imperfect, climate-change-and-health-care bill is a landmark moment in U.S. policymaking.

John Cassidy
The New Yorker
August 8, 2022

When Joe Biden departs on Wednesday for a vacation on Kiawah Island, South Carolina, he will have reasons to be cheerful. Last Friday, the Labor Department reported that employers created more than half a million jobs in July, confirming that Biden was right when he said the economy isn’t in recession. The House of Representative looks set to pass the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 later this week; Senate Democrats voted the legislation through over the weekend, and it includes parts of the President’s Build Back Better policy agenda.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the new legislation, which provides extensive tax breaks for clean energy and authorizes Medicare to negotiate the prices of certain prescription drugs, is that it survived at all. Just a month ago, when Senator Joe Manchin told Chuck Schumer, the Senate Majority Leader, that he wouldn’t support the bill, it seemed dead. Thanks to Manchin’s change of mind and Schumer’s cat-herding, the bill was resurrected and rushed through the Senate before the summer recess, a feat that prompted at least one Democratic senator—Brian Schatz, of Hawaii—to shed tears.

Going into the midterms, Biden and the Democrats will also be able to tout other legislative accomplishments. In June, Congress passed the first gun-control bill in thirty years, which tightened background checks for young buyers and provided incentives for states to expand “red flag” laws that allow the authorities, with the approval of a judge, to disarm dangerous individuals. In the past couple of weeks, two more bills have been passed. The CHIPS Act provides more than fifty billion dollars to encourage the manufacture of semiconductor chips in the United States. A new veterans’ bill creates an entitlement program for veterans who may have been exposed to toxic waste from fires on military bases known as “burn pits.”

Taken together, these pieces of legislation should put to bed the notion that Biden and the Democrats can’t get anything done, and they also demonstrate that his election pledge to pursue bipartisan initiatives wasn’t an empty one. Despite the hyper-partisanship in Washington, three of the four bills gained some Republican support. And Senate Democrats, after months of disarray, held together and passed the Inflation Reduction Act on a party-line vote of fifty-one to fifty using the reconciliation process. “I was one of the folks who was first in supporting now President Biden when he was candidate Biden and I think he’s done good things for our country,” the Delaware Senator Chris Coons told ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos on Sunday. “I think he’s got a strong record of accomplishments to run on.”

The Inflation Reduction Act—so-named to placate Manchin—contains the biggest effort to tackle climate change that the U.S. government has taken. Right now, thanks largely to the retirement of coal-fired electricity plants, the country is on track to reduce its carbon emissions by about thirty per cent by 2030, compared to 2005. By providing about $370 billion in tax credits over ten years for solar and wind producers, as well as for the purchase of electric vehicles, the new bill will increase the emissions reduction to about forty per cent, according to several expert analyses.

Although hitting that figure would fall short of the White House’s initial target of a carbon reduction of fifty per cent, it would represent a historic move in the right direction. In addition, the bill should boost employment in the clean-energy and clean-manufacturing sectors, which are already attracting significant private investment. How big a boost? A study, from the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, says that the new legislation bill would create more than nine million jobs in this sector over the next ten years.

Another important element of the bill is that it would empower Medicare to use its heft to negotiate lower prescription-drug prices. Other public health-care systems, such as the United Kingdom’s National Health Service, have long haggled over the prices that they pay pharmaceutical companies. In this country, the Big Pharma lobby has managed to maintain a system in which drug companies can largely dictate their own prices. At last, Congress has challenged this cozy arrangement, albeit in a modest way. The new legislation would cover ten drugs starting in 2026. As critics have pointed out, that’s not very many. But it seems likely that this number will expand once the general principle is accepted.

The legislation also places an annual cap on prescription-drug outlays for people covered by Medicare. In this way and others, it reflects some long-standing progressive priorities. “The best that can be said of the bill is that it represents a significant reorientation of policy in a number of areas,” Felicia Wong, the president of the liberal Roosevelt Institute, told me. “It starts things in the direction we need to be going.” As additional examples, Wong cited the eighty-billion-dollar boost to the I.R.S. budget, which is designed to enable the agency to go after wealthy tax dodgers more effectively; and the taxing of stock buybacks, which is intended to incentivize corporations to invest in capital equipment and research rather than boosting their stock prices.

Wong also emphasized that the new spending bill doesn’t go far enough—a point that is indisputable. For all the worthwhile things it contains, many others got left out of Biden’s original agenda. A short list incudes the enhanced child income-tax credit, which dramatically reduced child poverty before being phased out last year; paid leave; guaranteed pre-school for four-year-olds and expanded child care; a reversal of the high-income tax cuts in Trump’s 2017 tax bill; and an end to the carried-interest loophole for private equity and hedge funds, which represents another indefensible blemish on the tax code.

The common theme is that efforts to tackle pressing social problems and rising inequality got left out. Unlike private-equity tycoons, poor and working-class families don’t have the entire Republican Party, platoons of highly-paid lobbyists, and a certain Democratic senator from Arizona looking out for their interests. Unlike green-energy producers and manufacturers of electric vehicles, they aren’t making hefty investments that need tax breaks to succeed in shifting the economy away from fossil fuels. As often before, their needs will have to wait.

That’s more an endemic failing of the American political system, and a fifty-fifty Senate, than of this particular piece of legislation. In making a serious commitment to green energy, the enactment of the bill would be a landmark moment in U.S. policymaking. In demonstrating that this generation of Democrats can pass major legislation unaided, it would upend the previous narrative of a faltering Biden Administration. Relative to where things stood a couple of months ago, the change seems momentous. ♦

Congress looks set to finally pass historic climate legislation

August 8, 2022 issue of The New Yorker:

Congress Looks Set to Finally Pass Historic  

Climate Legislation

 

The bill, now supported by Joe Manchin, reflects the growing strength of the environmental movement, but also the lingering influence of the fossil-fuel industry.

 

By Bill McKibben

July 31, 2022

The longest-maintained temperature readings of any location on earth are in the Midlands of England. A monthly tally began in 1659, and the daily record dates back to 1772. One can imagine mutton-chopped clerics and ruddy-faced retired colonels, in the centuries since, tromping out to take those readings; some days it was hot and some days it was cold, but, until last month, the highest daily mean ever measured there was 25.2 degrees Celsius, or about 77.4 degrees Fahrenheit, in August of 2020. Then, on July 19th, as an epic heat wave swept across the British Isles, the mark was reset at 28.1 Celsius, or 82.6 Fahrenheit. If that hadn’t happened, topping the previous high by a full 5.2 degrees Fahrenheit would have seemed statistically impossible. The fact that it did happen is frightening—a sign of a world coming unstuck.

But, more happily, a different sort of record fell last week—the thirty-four-year stretch that saw no major legislative action on the climate in the U.S. Congress. It began in 1988, when the NASA scientist James Hansen informed the Senate of what was then called the “greenhouse effect,” and it appears to have come to a close last Wednesday, when Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, finally agreed to President Joe Biden’s big budget reconciliation package. The bill contains hundreds of billions of dollars in tax credits and grants for the transition to solar and wind power, electric vehicles, efficient home heating, and more. The package—the remains of what started out as the Green New Deal, before slimming down to Build Back Better, and, now, the Inflation Reduction Act—looked dead last month, when Manchin flatly rejected parts of it, including the climate protections.

The pushback was severe, however—among other things, the President suggested that he might declare a “climate emergency” and enact what measures he could by himself. Now, assuming that the Democrats stand together, as early as next week we could see an end to that long legislative drought. The bill penalizes oil and gas companies that fail to cut methane emissions, but it doesn’t actually pressure energy utilities to abandon coal and gas. (Manchin vetoed that provision, the Clean Electricity Performance Program, last year.) Still, analysts say that it would cut emissions to forty percent below 2005 levels by the end of the decade.

Taken as a whole, the bill is a triumph. It would be the most ambitious climate package ever passed in the U.S., and would allow the country to resume a credible role as an environmental leader.

Yet it reflects not just the growing strength of the climate movement but also the lingering power of the fossil-fuel industry, containing provisions such as one stating that, for the next decade, no offshore wind lease can be sold unless an offshore oil and gas lease of a certain size has been sold during the previous year. The political trade-off is worth it, in carbon terms, but there’s no denying that it will set a problematic example around the world.

Last week, the Democratic Republic of the Congo announced that it hopes to become “the new destination for oil investments,” and scheduled an auction of oil and gas leases in its vast rain forest, including parts of the biologically diverse Virunga National Park, a sanctuary for endangered mountain gorillas. The government also aims to allow drilling in the nation’s extensive peatlands, which are an effective storehouse for carbon; in fact, they hold as much carbon as the entire world emits in three years.

Opening the region up to drilling wouldn’t just add fuel to the fire—it would shut off a hose that fights the flames. Still, in addition to doing whatever is possible to dissuade the D.R.C. from allowing that, it’s worth viewing the announcement as a trolling of other nations, such as this one, that continue to think they have a right to expand fossil-fuel production. Tosi Mpanu-Mpanu, Congo’s longtime climate representative, has been at every big global climate meeting since 2007, so he no doubt knew exactly how much controversy he’d unleash when he told a reporter from the Times last week that his country’s priority is to generate revenue to fight poverty—“not to save the planet.”

It seems likely that the D.R.C.’s goal may be to sweeten a multiyear agreement that it entered into last November, at the Glasgow climate conference, to protect the rain forest, in return for five hundred million dollars in international investments. (The oil beneath the forest is doubtless worth far more.) If so, the gambit is a powerful one, because few countries have the moral standing to tell Congo off. In April, for instance, Canada announced plans to allow drilling in a basin off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador that could access three hundred million barrels of oil. The Biden Administration itself last month signaled support for the Trump-era Willow project, on Alaska’s North Slope, which could produce six hundred million barrels of oil. As scientists pointed out in a letter to the Secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland, the project would be a “carbon bomb” of enormous proportion.

What’s the difference between the D.R.C. and the United States or Canada? For one thing, the gross domestic product per capita in the D.R.C. is less than six hundred dollars, versus sixty-nine thousand dollars in the U.S., and fifty-two thousand in Canada. For another, the average resident of the U.S. emits some fifteen metric tons of carbon dioxide a year, while the average Congolese emits about 0.03 metric tons. In other words, the average American is responsible for about five hundred times more climate damage than the average Congolese is.

The right response, then, is to provide the climate aid that the Global North has long promised to the Global South but has not delivered in full. In the case of Congo, that means helping develop, as safely and benignly as possible, the mining of cobalt, which is used in batteries that are crucial to clean-energy technology. But we must also prevent new fossil-fuel boondoggles of our own. It’s possible that the reconciliation package has exhausted Washington’s energy to tackle the climate crisis for the time being, but politicians aren’t the only players. When the Trump Administration rushed to auction off parts of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for drilling, no major oil companies submitted bids, in part because environmental campaigners made the project too toxic for them and for their potential financiers. Civil society will need to continue stepping up in the years to come, because, if countries keep digging up their oil and gas, every record broken will likely be a baleful one. ♦

For the Third Time in Three Decades, Congress Punts on Serious Climate Legislation

For the Third Time in Three Decades, Congress Punts on Serious Climate Legislation

Joe Manchin tanks Congress’s big chance to cut the heat.

By Bill McKibben

The New Yorker

Saturday, July 16, 2022

NASA just declared that this June has tied with that of 2020 for the hottest we have ever measured. At the moment, forecasters are predicting that, on Monday, the United Kingdom, which maintains the longest instrumental record of temperature in the world, may see the hottest day that nation has ever recorded.

This was the backdrop to the news on Thursday that Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, won’t support climate legislation, bringing to an apparent end his long and excruciating flirtation with Joe Biden over the climate portions of the Build Back Better bill, the President’s ambitious economic package, which contained the most sweeping climate measures ever to reach the Senate floor. To provide the even more excruciating context: this is the third time in the past thirty years that Congress has balked at serious climate legislation.

In July, 1997, the Senate voted 95–0 (led by another West Virginia Democrat, Robert Byrd) to pass a resolution stating that the United States should not be a signatory to what became the Kyoto Protocol, arguing that it asked too much of this nation and too little of developing countries. Vice-President Al Gore came back from the Kyoto Climate Change Conference that December with a treaty, but President Bill Clinton didn’t even bother sending it to the Senate, knowing that it would be rejected, and other attempts to pass climate legislation never reached the floor.

In 2009, “cap-and-trade” legislation passed the House by a narrow margin—more than forty Democrats joined Republicans in siding with the fossil-fuel industry. The bill limped to the Senate, where John Kerry, of Massachusetts, and Barbara Boxer, of California, could not find a Republican co-sponsor. They didn’t even bring the bill up for a vote, knowing that it would lose; private whip counts at the time indicated that they would be lucky to get forty votes.

And now this failure, which is all the more painful for having been so close to success. The Democratic Party, pushed hard by young activists in the Sunrise Movement, rallied behind Build Back Better, passing it through the House with almost no dissenting votes among the Democrats (a good thing, given the narrow margins that the Party currently enjoys there). That reflected a deep Party-wide consensus; during the 2020 Presidential primaries, climate change was a top priority for Democrats, and Biden used it skillfully on the way to winning the White House. His closing ads in the general-election campaign included ones about climate; his stance helped bring him wide (and crucial) support from young voters.

Manchin didn’t do Biden the favor of saying no up front. Instead, he got the President to strip the sticks from the bill (the clean-energy pricing plan that would have forced utilities toward clean energy) and then he nibbled away at the carrots. He used the hope of his vote to get the more fossil-fuel-friendly Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passed, and he used the fear of his rejection to keep Biden from invoking executive authority to block federal oil leases and pipelines. Although the sentiments of Senator Kyrsten Sinema, of Arizona, are always hard to read, it appears that there was a solid forty-nine-vote bloc for the climate actions in the bill. But forty-nine gets you precisely nothing.

So now we’ve struck out three times. The country that historically has put more carbon in the atmosphere than any other, and whose scientists played the lead role in figuring out the climate crisis, has refused to do anything about it. Our Congress—the place where, in 1988, Jim Hansen sounded the first truly public alarm about global warming—has never passed major climate legislation. The most distressed person in all this might be John Kerry, who is now the President’s global climate envoy. He’s been using the prospect of serious American action to try to rouse the rest of the world to action, and without that card in the deck he’s left mostly with jokers. (You think that Xi Jinping isn’t fully aware of what Joe Manchin just did?)

But there are plenty of other people mourning, too. The policy analysts who have spent the past two years recasting the legislation every time Manchin made another demand, only to see their work be for nought. The engineers and entrepreneurs who were counting on the infusion of money from the bill (a tiny fraction of the subsidies that have been extended over the decades to fossil fuel) to jump-start the rapid transition to renewable energy. The young people who have to live in what geologists may someday dub the Manchinian epoch. There is no chance now that the U.S. can meet even the modest targets for emissions reduction that Biden had promised for this decade, and hence the temperature will rise far higher than it must. Most of the bad decisions that politicians make are forgotten in the fullness of time—there have been Manchins before, and there will be Manchins again. But this Manchin, in 2022, will never be forgotten, not as long as humans are grappling with the most fundamental challenge we’ve ever faced. ♦

 

America is Killing Itself

The following is an excellent short summary from The Guardian of the catastrophic and virtually unique toll of gun possession and misuse in the United States.

This week’s mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, was one of more than 3,500 mass shootings since the Sandy Hook shooting a decade ago. It was America’s 215th in 2022 alone. It came as the nation still reeled from another massacre, this one targeting Black Americans, in Buffalo, New York, just a week prior.

The horror of 21 people, including 19 small children, being killed in their classroom is hard to grasp, but for one former firearms executive, it’s not a surprise. Ryan Busse, who spent his career in the industry and now advocates for gun control, published a powerful op-ed in the Guardian arguing that contrary to a familiar refrain, America is not broken – it’s working as intended.

“The truth is that Americans now live within an escalating system of radicalized gun tragedy that is working exactly as expected,” Busse writes. He argues that the profit motives of the industry, along with the extremist rhetoric of the National Rifle Association, has fueled a warped incentive structure that rewards “conspiracy-mongering, racism and fear campaigns” while spitting out voices like his that call for responsible policies. Whatever it takes to sell more guns.

Republicans remain in thrall to the NRA and call for more weapons after mass shootings – even though the presence of armed police didn’t stop the Uvalde shooter – and typically block even the mildest gun control measures. In an explainer we just published, the Guardian’s Alvin Chang and Andrew Witherspoon visualize the debate around gun control in the last decade – how it intensifies in the aftermath of the mass shootings that penetrate the national conversation, and quickly recedes after efforts at legislation die in the Senate.
 

As a global organization, we pay attention to the pulse in other countries, and I found this roundup of what international publications wrote about Uvalde incredibly insightful for the mirror it holds up to a uniquely American tragedy.

“If there is still an American exceptionalism, it is to tolerate its schools being regularly transformed into shooting ranges, sticky with blood,” reads an editorial in LeMonde. “America is killing itself, and the Republican party is looking elsewhere.” El Pais notes that the US has 4% of the world’s population, but almost half its pistols and rifles. “It’s a recurring drama, to which America’s lawmakers seem unwilling to put an end – even though they could.”

But no matter how ritualized mass killing in America is, and no matter how hopeless efforts at reform seem, we are not desensitized. We will continue to report relentlessly on the communities most impacted by gun violence, and not only after a mass shooting, through our long-running Guns and lies series. We’ll explore why places like Canada that also have relatively high rates of gun ownership don’t see these kinds of tragedies, and how parents in the US talk to their children about them. And we’ll track fresh efforts at reform even when they feel doomed. Politics are never static, and we won’t stop imagining a different future.

 

Martin Luther King: Beyond Vietnam—A Time to Break Silence

I am posting below the text of a speech Martin Luther King gave at Riverside Church in New York City, on April 4, 1967, a speech that became famous at the time but is largely forgotten now, 55 years later. He called it "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence." I was there on that occasion, and its text sends shivers down my spine as it did then.

As you read, note especially the enlargement of his focus halfway through, in the paragraph beginning "The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit." His values and the issues he addressed on that occasion are as important now as they were then. On the holiday next Monday, we legitimately celebrate Martin Luther King as a civil rights leader. He was that, of course, and his message — "beyond Vietnam" — as this talk makes clear, reveals a man who addresses us today as deeply as it did 55 years ago. 

The US had joined the Vietnam War, bombing the Ho Chi Minh Trail and North Vietnam, sending troops who were fighting, killing and being killed. I would have been drafted, but was exempt because I was married and had a child. (If I had been eligible for the draft we would have gone to live in Canada. I don't believe Deb and I talked about that, as my exemption was palpably clear to me.) You know that at the time of King's speech, beginning with my work for The RAND Corporation a little earlier in the 60s and extending into the focus of The Christopher Reynolds Foundation's grantmaking, I'd been writing about US policy in Vietnam and was a student of love, peace, and their antitheses. 

One of my mentors, the historian Henry Steele Commager, was at King's speech, as was Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, another of my heroes. I was teaching at Hampshire College and was an active member of the organization — Clergy and Laymen [today we would say laity] Concerned About Vietnam — that brought King on that occasion to Riverside Church.

It was an extraordinarily moving act of truth telling. I remember it vividly, and thought it would interest you these many years later. I didn't know until recently that the text had been preserved and had become publicly available.

 

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Beyond Vietnam — A Time to Break Silence

 

Delivered 4 April 1967, Riverside Church, New York City

 

Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen:

I need not pause to say how very delighted I am to be here tonight, and how very delighted I am to see you expressing your concern about the issues that will be discussed tonight by turning out in such large numbers. I also want to say that I consider it a great honor to share this program with Dr. Bennett, Dr. Commager, and Rabbi Heschel, and some of the distinguished leaders and personalities of our nation. And of course it’s always good to come back to Riverside Church. Over the last eight years, I have had the privilege of preaching here almost every year in that period, and it is always a rich and rewarding experience to come to this great church and this great pulpit.

I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join you in this meeting because I'm in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam. The recent statements of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart, and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: "A time comes when silence is betrayal." And that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.

The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexing as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.

And some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation's history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movements and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.

Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: "Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King?" "Why are you joining the voices of dissent?" "Peace and civil rights don't mix," they say. "Aren't you hurting the cause of your people," they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.

In the light of such tragic misunderstanding, I deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly, and I trust concisely, why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church -- the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate -- leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.

I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia. Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they must play in the successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reasons to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides.

Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the National Liberation Front, but rather to my fellow Americans.

Since I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So, I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. And so we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. And so we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

For those who ask the question, "Aren't you a civil rights leader?" and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save the soul of America." We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself until the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath --
America will be!

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be — are — are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.

As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1954;¹ and I cannot forget that the Nobel Peace Prize was also a commission, a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for "the brotherhood of man." This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I'm speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men -- for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the One who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the Vietcong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this One? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?

And finally, as I try to explain for you and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to this place I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood, and because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially for his suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them.

This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls "enemy," for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the ideologies of the Liberation Front, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries.

They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1954 -- in 1945 rather -- after a combined French and Japanese occupation and before the communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony. Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not ready for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination and a government that had been established not by China -- for whom the Vietnamese have no great love -- but by clearly indigenous forces that included some communists. For the peasants this new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.

For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam. Before the end of the war we were meeting eighty percent of the French war costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of their reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will. Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at recolonization.

After the French were defeated, it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva Agreement. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators, our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly rooted out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords, and refused even to discuss reunification with the North. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by United States' influence and then by increasing numbers of United States troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem's methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictators seemed to offer no real change, especially in terms of their need for land and peace.

The only change came from America, as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and received the regular promises of peace and democracy and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs.

So they go, primarily women and children and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.

What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?

We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing -- in the crushing of the nation's only non-Communist revolutionary political force, the unified Buddhist Church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men.

Now there is little left to build on, save bitterness. Soon, the only solid -- solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call "fortified hamlets." The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these. Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These, too, are our brothers.

Perhaps a more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National Liberation Front, that strangely anonymous group we call "VC" or "communists"? What must they think of the United States of America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem, which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the South? What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of "aggression from the North" as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings, even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts.

How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than twenty-five percent communist, and yet insist on giving them the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam, and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel government will not have a part? They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them, the only party in real touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant. Is our nation planning to build on political myth again, and then shore it up upon the power of new violence?

Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.

So, too, with Hanoi. In the North, where our bombs now pummel the land, and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western words, and especially their distrust of American intentions now. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the French Commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness of the colonial armies. It was they who led a second struggle against French domination at tremendous costs, and then were persuaded to give up the land they controlled between the thirteenth and seventeenth parallel as a temporary measure at Geneva. After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which could have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed again. When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered.

Also, it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence of American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been the initial military breach of the Geneva Agreement concerning foreign troops. They remind us that they did not begin to send troops in large numbers and even supplies into the South until American forces had moved into the tens of thousands.

Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has surely heard the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the North. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor, weak nation more than eight hundred -- rather, eight thousand miles away from its shores.

At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called "enemy," I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor.

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak of the -- for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.

This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words, and I quote:

Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom, and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism.

If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately, the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horrible, clumsy, and deadly game we have decided to play. The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways. In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war.

I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do [immediately] to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish conflict:

Number one: End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.

Number two: Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation.

Three: Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our interference in Laos.

Four: Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and any future Vietnam government.

Five: Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva Agreement.

Part of our ongoing -- Part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new regime which included the Liberation Front. Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. We must provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in this country, if necessary. Meanwhile -- Meanwhile, we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must continue to raise our voices and our lives if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative method of protest possible.

As we counsel young men concerning military service, we must clarify for them our nation's role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. I am pleased to say that this is a path now chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover, I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.

Now there is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter that struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing.

The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality...and if we ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing "clergy and laymen concerned" committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala -- Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end, unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy.

And so, such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.

In 1957, a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years, we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which has now justified the presence of U.S. military advisors in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why American napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru.

It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin...we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and, through their misguided passions, urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not engage in a negative anticommunism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity, and injustice, which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. "The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light."² We in the West must support these revolutions.

It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch antirevolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has a revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores, and thereby speed the day when "every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain."³

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.

This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing -- embracing and unconditional love for all mankind. This oft misunderstood, this oft misinterpreted concept, so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate -- ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John: "Let us love one another, for love is God. And every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love." "If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us."⁴ Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day.

We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. And history is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says:

Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word.

We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood -- it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, "Too late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on."

We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message -- of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.

As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently stated:

Once to every man and nation comes a moment to decide,
In the strife of truth and Falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God’s new Messiah offering each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever ‘twixt that darkness and that light.
Though the cause of evil prosper, yet ‘tis truth alone is strong
Though her portions be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

And if we will only make the right choice, we will be able to transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of peace. If we will make the right choice, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. If we will but make the right choice, we will be able to speed up the day, all over America and all over the world, when "justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream."⁵

 __________________________________

¹ King stated "1954." That year was notable for the Civil Rights Movement in the USSC's  Brown v. Board of  Education ruling. However, given the statement's discursive thrust, King may have meant to say "1964" -- the year he won the Nobel Peace Prize. Alternatively, as noted by Steve Goldberg, King may have identified 1954's "burden of responsibility" as the year he became a minister.

² Isaiah 9:2/Matthew 4:16

³ Isaiah 40:4

⁴ 1 John 4:7-8, 12

⁵ Amos 5:24

The Greatest Danger — Joanna Macy

 

The Greatest Danger

by Joanna Macy

Yes! Magazine

 

From https://www.joannamacy.net:

Joanna Macy, Ph.D., author and teacher, is a scholar of Buddhism, systems thinking, and deep ecology. A respected voice in movements for peace, justice and ecology, she interweaves her scholarship with learnings from six decades of activism. 

Her wide-ranging work addresses psychological and spiritual issues of the nuclear age, the cultivation of ecological awareness, and the fruitful resonance between Buddhist thought and postmodern science. The many dimensions of this work are explored in her thirteen books, which include three volumes of poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke with translation and commentary.

As the root teacher of The Work That Reconnects, Joanna has created a ground-breaking framework for personal and social change, as well as a powerful workshop methodology for its application.

Based in Berkeley, California, close to her children and grandchildren, Joanna has spent many years in other lands and cultures, viewing movements for social change and exploring their roots in religious thought and practice.

 

How do we live with the fact that we are destroying our world? What do we make of the loss of glaciers, the melting Arctic, island nations swamped by the sea, widening deserts, and drying farmlands?

Because of social taboos, despair at the state of our world and fear for our future are rarely acknowledged. The suppression of despair, like that of any deep recurring response, contributes to the numbing of the psyche. Expressions of anguish or outrage are muted, deadened as if a nerve had been cut. This refusal to feel impoverishes our emotional and sensory life. Flowers are dimmer and less fragrant, our loves less ecstatic. We create diversions for ourselves as individuals and as nations, in the fights we pick, the aims we pursue, and the stuff we buy.

Of all the dangers we face, from climate chaos to permanent war, none is so great as this deadening of our response. For psychic numbing impedes our capacity to process and respond to information. The energy expended in pushing down despair is diverted from more crucial uses, depleting the resilience and imagination needed for fresh visions and strategies.

Zen poet Thich Nhat Hanh was asked, “what do we most need to do to save our world?” His answer was this: “What we most need to do is to hear within us the sounds of the Earth crying.”

 

Cracking the Shell

How do we confront what we scarcely dare to think? How do we face our grief, fear, and rage without “going to pieces?”

It is good to realize that falling apart is not such a bad thing. Indeed, it is as essential to transformation as the cracking of outgrown shells. Anxieties and doubts can be healthy and creative, not only for the person, but for the society, because they permit new and original approaches to reality.

What disintegrates in periods of rapid transformation is not the self, but its defenses and assumptions. Self-protection restricts vision and movement like a suit of armor, making it harder to adapt. Going to pieces, however uncomfortable, can open us up to new perceptions, new data, and new responses.

Speaking the truth of our anguish for the world brings down the walls between us, drawing us into deep solidarity. That solidarity is all the more real for the uncertainty we face.

In our culture, despair is feared and resisted because it represents a loss of control. We’re ashamed of it and dodge it by demanding instant solutions to problems. We seek the quick fix. This cultural habit obscures our perceptions and fosters a dangerous innocence of the real world.

Acknowledging despair, on the other hand, involves nothing more mysterious than telling the truth about what we see and know and feel is happening to our world. When corporate-controlled media keep the public in the dark, and power-holders manipulate events to create a climate of fear and obedience, truth-telling is like oxygen. It enlivens and returns us to health and vigor.

 

Belonging to All Life

Sharing what is in our heart brings a welcome shift in identity, as we recognize that the anger, grief, and fear we feel for our world are not reducible to concerns for our individual welfare or even survival. Our concerns are far larger than our own private needs and wants. Pain for the world—the outrage and the sorrow—breaks us open to a larger sense of who we are. It is a doorway to the realization of our mutual belonging in the web of life.

Many of us fear that confrontation with despair will bring loneliness and isolation. On the contrary, in letting go of old defenses, we find truer community. And in community, we learn to trust our inner responses to our world—and find our power.

You are not alone! We are part of a vast, global movement: the epochal transition from empire to Earth community. This is the Great Turning. And the excitement, the alarm, even the overwhelm we feel, are all part of our waking up to this collective adventure.

As in any true adventure, there is risk and uncertainty. Our corporate economy is destroying both itself and the natural world. Its effect on living systems is what David Korten calls the Great Unraveling. It is happening at the same time as the Great Turning, and we cannot know which way the story will end.

 

Great Uncertainty

Let’s drop the notion that we can manage our planet for our own comfort and profit—or even that we can now be its ultimate redeemers. It is a delusion. Let’s accept, in its place, the radical uncertainty of our time, even the uncertainty of survival.

In primal societies, adolescents go through rites of passage, where confronting their own mortality is a gateway to maturity. In analogous ways, climate change calls us to recognize our own mortality as a species. With the gift of uncertainty, we can grow up and accept the rights and responsibility of planetary adulthood. Then we know fully that we belong, inextricably, to the web of life, and we can serve it, and let its strength flow through us.

Uncertainty, when accepted, sheds a bright light on the power of intention. Intention is what you can count on: not the outcome, but the motivation you bring, the vision you hold, the compass setting you choose to follow. Our intention and resolve can save us from getting lost in grief.

During a recent visit to Kentucky, I learned what is happening to the landscape and culture of Appalachia: how coal companies use dynamite to pulverize everything above the underground seams of coal; how bulldozers and dragline machines 20-stories high push away the “overburden” of woodlands and top soil, filling the valleys. I saw how activists there are held steady by sheer intention. Though the nation seems oblivious to this tragedy, these men and women persist in the vision that Appalachia can, in part, be saved and that future generations may know slopes of sweet gum, sassafras, magnolia, the stirrings of bobcat and coon, and, in the hollows, the music of fiddle and fresh flowing streams. They seem to know—and, when we let down our guard, we too know—that we are living parts of the living body of Earth.

This is the gift of the Great Turning. When we open our eyes to what is happening, even when it breaks our hearts, we discover our true size; for our heart, when it breaks open, can hold the whole universe. We discover how speaking the truth of our anguish for the world brings down the walls between us, drawing us into deep solidarity. That solidarity, with our neighbors and all that lives, is all the more real for the uncertainty we face.

When we stop distracting ourselves by trying to figure the chances of success or failure, our minds and hearts are liberated into the present moment. This moment then becomes alive, charged with possibilities, as we realize how lucky we are to be alive now, to take part in this planetary adventure.

 

---

The River of Silence

Thanks to my dear friend Al Braidwood for sharing with me the wisdom of some Buddhist remarks about death, following a few personal recollections of my own.

I was eleven when I first encountered death, that of my father. Early one morning at our home in Berkeley my mother received a telephone call. When I heard the tone of her voice — only a few words as she listened — I knew she was hearing an important message. Minutes later she came to my room — I was still in bed — to tell me what she had learned. I can't remember my feelings in response. I didn't go to school that day. My mother asked a grownup friend of hers, a man I didn't know, to come to my room — to see, I suppose, if I wanted to speak about my father's death. To a stranger? To anyone? Not for many years.

My mother came to understand. She wrote several months later, "Johnny still hasn't reached the stage where he talks naturally and normally about his father... [W]e can never be quite sure of what goes on deep inside a child, and Johnny has been almost completely 'bottled up' about his father since he died....So all I can do at present, it seems to me, is to bring John [my father was also John] into our conversations whenever it seems natural and easy, hoping that before long, whatever bothers him about his father's death will come out in the open and can be talked out."

It was not "before long." I wrote 27 years later, after my mother also had died, "Until very recently I lived with the experience of my father's death so powerfully marked in my consciousness that, in effect, there was no room for his life."

I returned to school the following day. Given my father's public prominence, and the fact of his suicide, the newspapers featured his death conspicuously. My teacher told me she was sorry. I said, "That's OK," as if I wanted to comfort her. For years I had no words to express my feelings. No tears. The impact of his death lived deeply inside.

I had an after-school job, delivering a shopping newspaper to what felt like an endless number of people's front yards. I remember two things in the weeks following my father's death.

First, and only once, at the end of that paper route, I imagined I was walking and talking with God. My family was not religious. (My grandmother Eleanor was, profoundly so, but that is another story I've told elsewhere.) We did not go to church. When I was younger we lived outside of Phoenix — our last home when my family was whole, before my father left us — and my parents came to stand in my room at my bedtime to listen to me say my prayers. My prayers. To my knowledge my family had no prayers. I heard none from my mother or father or from my older sister and brother, or anyone else. I do recall telling my parents on one of those occasions when they listened to my prayers, that I was scared of one of the phrases: "If I should die before I wake / I pray the Lord my soul to take." I was frightened and didn't understand. My father gave me another line, a substitute: "Guard and keep me through the night / and wake me with the morning light." I lost my fear of the Lord, and was grateful to my father for his gift. But I remembered, still remember, both forms of those lines. After he left us my father came for visits with me and took me for some summer trips to dude ranches, but my memories of those visits were dark:

• the dented left front fender of a maroon Ford sedan he drove
• holding and firing his .45 caliber pistol, at his instruction
• a tarantula
• standing on a stump surrounded by hungry pigs
• a wire strung across a horse trail at neck height
• a dark human figure in our room at night (likely my father, but I was too scared to cry out)

I wrote above that there were two things I remembered in the weeks following my father's death. The second was also about that beast of a paper route. Not long after my walk and talk with God, I realized that the big bundles of shopping news were delivered next to a large hedge, large enough to hide a satisfying number of bundles. They were junk, I imagined; no one would miss them. Of course, I was wrong. One day a representative of the shopping news came to my and my mother's front door. I lost my job, and had to drive with him to remove all the wet bundles from the hedge. At least he drove me home. I'm sure my mother chastised me; I certainly recall feeling humiliated. 

Thankfully, the memory of walking and talking with God remained, still remains. I don't recall what we said in our conversation. I don't think that was the point. The walking together endures.

 

Here are the Buddhist remarks: 

The River of Silence

Zenju Earthlyn Manuel

Death, whether our own or others, can be a powerful gateway to complete tenderness. The confrontation with the impermanence of all things is perhaps the widest gate to liberation from suffering. Facing death or dealing with death, our sight becomes clear. “Priorities and omissions are etched in a merciless light,” as Audre Lorde wrote. Given the sheer quantity of death around us, why not use this merciless light to better see who we are?

 

When I was thirty-nine years old it was I who received the call that my father had died in the hospital. I had long known with my childhood intuition that it would be I who would tell my mother. That Sunday I drove together with my sisters to the church where our family had worshipped with migrants from Texas and Louisiana for more than forty years. Mom was coming down the long cascading steps when I ran to meet her. She knew by the look on my face that Dad had died. Ten years later my mother would be diagnosed with a brain tumor and take the great leap into death herself. When my parents died I came to learn that despite the fact that everything appeared the same the day after as it did the day before, death, in fact, changed everything and everyone. Death widens the river’s mouth, loosens our relentless grasp on life, and delivers us closer to the ultimate silence on this earth.

 

I came to see that the great matter of death is not great because it’s scary but because it is profound in its immense capacity to arouse a loving nature within us. It brings our attention to birth as an entrance into belonging. No one should be denied this belonging, regardless of their race, sexuality, or gender. Proximity to death provides an experience by which we can see our profound lives, not as defined by vocations and careers, but as an experience of being awake.

 

Death seals a formidable interrelationship between all beings and all things. All things arise and cease; all beings are born and die. In death we come to know the spirit within us all. When death arrives it reminds us, like nothing else in life, that we are completely interdependent with each other. When a life is lost, we lose. When, in the wake of catastrophes caused by war or weather, many are found dead in the aftermath, we see ourselves in the dead. We tremble as we connect with each other in the face of such loss.

 

Perhaps we can be less afraid of our differences when we realize that this merciless light of death shines upon us while we live. Perhaps we can awaken to the flow of “the river of silence” (as prophet Kahlil Gibran called death), as it courses through the vast continuum of life. This doesn’t mean that we won’t tremble in the presence of our fears of one another, but that we will be more present with our trembling, more awake to the truth that underlies our fears.

Powerful hacking tool used to target journalists, activists worldwide: from The Guardian 7.20.21

A major Guardian investigation has found that authoritarian governments around the world are using a powerful surveillance tool to hack the phones of political opponents, prompting a global backlash and anxiety over the international spyware market.

As the whistleblower Edward Snowden tweeted on Sunday: “Stop what you’re doing and read this. This leak is going to be the story of the year.

The Guardian this week is publishing stories exposing the widespread use of Pegasus, a powerful spying tool sold to governments by NSO Group, an Israeli surveillance firm selling its spyware with the permission – and possible help – of the Israeli government. Working with a consortium of 16 other media organizations from around the world, our journalists examined a leaked list of 50,000 phone numbers believed to be slated for surveillance by NSO’s clients. The list was shared with us by Forbidden Stories, a Paris-based non-profit media organisation, and Amnesty International, who initially had access to the leaked list. 

There aren’t a lot of outlets in the world that are capable of leading this kind of project. From the first Wikileaks disclosures to Snowden's revelations and Cambridge Analytica, the Guardian has earned its stripes when it comes to sensitively verifying, curating and editing  massive leaks on some of the most sensitive information that powerful people don’t want published. 

What the journalists found within this trove of information is that there are grave threats globally to privacy, democracy and journalism. In India, the main opposition figure to Prime Minister Narendra Modi was selected as a potential target, along with dozens of politicians, journalists, activists and government critics. In Mexico, at least 50 people close to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador – including his wife, children and doctor – were among 15,000 potential targets. The daughter of Paul Rusesabagina, the imprisoned Rwandan activist, was repeatedly targeted. 

The project is a feat of investigative and collaborative journalism that saw dozens of reporters, with disparate reporting styles and conventions, working together in secret. New forms of communications were established; phones were banished from the proximity of discussions. Interviews and other reporting were shared across the network. 

The stakes of the story can’t be overstated. A powerful, largely unregulated technology is finding its way into the hands of abusive governments happy to use it against people they believe are standing in their way: human rights activists and lawyers, journalists and citizens speaking out. 

But they’re not the only ones at risk. NSO Group is manipulating vulnerabilities in technology we all use, including in the most up-to-date Apple phones. “Law-abiding people ... are not immune from unwarranted surveillance,” Paul Lewis, the Guardian’s head of investigations, wrote in a commentary to kick off the project. “And western countries do not have a monopoly on the most invasive surveillance technologies. We’re entering a new surveillance era, and unless protections are put in place, none of us are safe.”

It’s thanks to your support that we can dedicate the resources required to do this work. The crux of this story – that authoritarian figures worldwide ruthlessly target their opponents, from activists to journalists – affects every aspect of our work, from the safety of our sources to our reporters themselves. Despite the risks, we’re not going to shy away from it – and that’s in no small part thanks to you. 

Our climate change turning point is right here, right now

Our climate change turning point is right here, right now

Rebecca Solnit

 

People are dying. Aquatic animals are baking in their shells. Fruit is being cooked on the tree. It’s time to act.

Mon 12 Jul 2021

Human beings crave clarity, immediacy, landmark events. We seek turning points, because our minds are good at recognizing the specific – this time, this place, this sudden event, this tangible change. This is why we were never very good, most of us, at comprehending climate change in the first place. The climate was an overarching, underlying condition of our lives and planet, and the change was incremental and intricate and hard to recognize if you weren’t keeping track of this species or that temperature record. Climate catastrophe is a slow shattering of the stable patterns that governed the weather, the seasons, the species and migrations, all the beautifully orchestrated systems of the holocene era we exited when we manufactured the anthropocene through a couple of centuries of increasingly wanton greenhouse gas emissions and forest destruction.

This spring, when I saw the shockingly low water of Lake Powell, I thought that maybe this summer would be a turning point. At least for the engineering that turned the southwest’s Colorado River into a sort of plumbing system for human use, with two huge dams that turned stretches of a mighty river into vast pools of stagnant water dubbed Lake Powell, on the eastern Utah/Arizona border, and Lake Mead, in southernmost Nevada. It’s been clear for years that the overconfident planners of the 1950s failed to anticipate that, while they tinkered with the river, industrial civilization was also tinkering with the systems that fed it.

The water they counted on is not there. Lake Powell is at about a third of its capacity this year, and thanks to a brutal drought there was no great spring runoff to replenish it. That’s if “drought” is even the right word for something that might be the new normal, not an exception. The US Bureau of Reclamation is overdue to make a declaration that there is not enough water for two huge desert reservoirs and likely give up on Powell to save Lake Mead.

I got to see the drought up close when I spent a week in June floating down the Green River, the Colorado River’s largest tributary. The skies of southern Utah were full of smoke from the Pack Creek wildfire that had been burning since June 9 near Moab, scorching thousands of acres of desert and forest and incinerating the ranch buildings and archives of the legendary river guide and environmentalist Ken Slight (fictionalized as Seldom Seen Slim in Edward Abbey’s novel The Monkey Wrench Gang), now 91. Climate chaos destroys the past as well as the future. As of July 6, the fire is still burning.

It wasn’t just the huge plume of smoke that filled us with dread about the adventure to come; the weather forecast of daily temperatures reaching 106 F made living out of doors for a week seem daunting. Water level in the river was far lower than normal and due to drop a lot more; the temperature on our rafts and kayaks just above the water was tolerable – but as soon as you walked any distance from the river’s edge, the heat came at you as though you’d opened an oven door.

We saw an unusual amount of wildlife on the trip too – mustangs, bighorn sheep, a lean black bear and her two cubs pacing the river’s edge – but any sense of wonder was tempered by the likelihood that thirst had driven them down from the drought-scorched stretches beyond the river. We need a new word for that feeling for nature that is love and wonder mingled with dread and sorrow, for when we see those things that are still beautiful, still powerful, but struggling under the burden of our mistakes.

Then came the heat dome over the Northwest, a story that didn’t appear to make the top headlines of many media outlets as it was happening. Much of the early coverage showed people in fountains and sprinklers as though this was just another hot day, rather than something sending people to hospitals in droves, killing hundreds (and likely well over a thousand) in Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, devastating wildlife, crops, and domestic animals, setting up the conditions for wildfires, and breaking infrastructure designed for the holocene, not the anthropocene. It signified something much larger even than a crisis impacting a vast expanse of the continent: increasingly wild variations from the norm with increasing devastation that can and will happen anywhere. It seemed to get less coverage than the collapse of part of a single building in Florida.

A building collapsing is an ideal specimen of news, sudden and specific in time and place, and in the case of this one on the Florida coast, easy for the media to cover as a spectacle with straightforward causes and consequences. A crisis spread across three states and two Canadian provinces, with many kinds of impact, including untallied deaths, was in many ways its antithesis. There was a case to be made that climate change – in the form of rising saltwater intrusion – was a factor in the Florida building’s collapse, but climate change was far more dramatically present in the Pacific Northwest’s heat records being broken day after day and the consequences of that heat. In Canada the previous highest temperature was broken by eight degrees Fahrenheit, a big lurch into the dangerous new conditions human beings have made, and then most of the town in which that record was set burned down.

Later news stories focused on one aspect or another of the heat dome. A marine biologist at the University of British Columbia reported that the heat wave may have killed more than a billion seashore animals living on the coast of the Pacific Northwest. Lightning strikes in BC, generated by the heat, soared to unprecedented levels – inciting, by one account, 136 forest fires. The heat wave cooked fruit on the trees. It was a catastrophe with many aspects and impacts, as diffuse as it was intense. The sheer scale and impact were underplayed, along with the implications.

Political turning points are as manmade as climate catastrophe: we could have chosen to make turning points out of the western wildfires of the past four years – notably the incineration of the town of Paradise and more than 130 of its residents in 2018, but also last year’s California wildfires that included five of the six largest fires in state history. It could include the deluge that soaked Detroit with more than six inches of rain in a few hours last month or the ice storm in Texas earlier this year or catastrophic flooding in Houston (with 40 inches of rain in three days) and Nebraska in 2019 or the point at which the once-mythical Northwest Passage became real because of summer ice melt in the Arctic or the 118-degree weather in Siberia this summer or the meltwater pouring off the Greenland ice sheet.

A turning point is often something you individually or collectively choose, when you find the status quo unacceptable, when you turn yourself and your goals around. George Floyd’s murder was a turning point for racial justice in the US. Those who have been paying attention, those with expertise or imagination, found their turning points for the climate crisis years and decades back. For some it was Hurricane Sandy or their own home burning down or the permafrost of the far north turning to mush or the IPCC report in 2018 saying we had a decade to do what the planet needs of us. Greta Thunberg had her turning point, and so did the indigenous women leading the Line 3 pipeline protests.

Summarizing the leaked contents of a forthcoming IPCC report, the Agence France-Presse reports: “Climate change will fundamentally reshape life on Earth in the coming decades, even if humans can tame planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions […] Species extinction, more widespread disease, unliveable heat, ecosystem collapse, cities menaced by rising seas – these and other devastating climate impacts are accelerating and bound to become painfully obvious before a child born today turns 30. The choices societies make now will determine whether our species thrives or simply survives as the 21st century unfolds…”

The phrase “the choices societies make” is a clear demand for a turning point, a turning away from fossil fuel and toward protection of the ecosystems that protect us.

Every week I temper the terrible news from catastrophes such as wildfires and from scientists measuring the chaos by trying to put them in the context of positive technological milestones and legislative shifts and their consequences. You could call each of them a turning point: The point last week at which Oregon passed the bill setting the most aggressive clean electricity standards in the US, 100% clean by 2040. The point at which Scotland began getting more electricity from renewables than it could use. The point at which New York State banned fracking. The Paris Climate Treaty in 2015. Of course, as with the climate itself, many of the changes were incremental: the stunning drop in cost and rise in efficiency of solar panels over the past four decades, the myriad solar and wind farms that have been installed worldwide.

The rise in public engagement with the climate crisis is harder to measure. It’s definitely growing, both as an increasingly powerful movement and as a matter of individual consciousness. Yet something about the scale and danger of the crisis still seems to challenge human psychology. Along with the fossil fuel industry, our own habits of mind are something we must overcome.

• Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is also the author of Men Explain Things to Me and The Mother of All Questions. Her most recent book is Recollections of My Nonexistence.

Layli Long Soldier's poems

Layli Long Soldier's poems are a treasure.

Her first book, Whereas (2017), won the National Books Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry. It is a response to the U.S. government's official apology to Native peoples in 2009. That apology, writes Krista Tippett in On Being, "was done so quietly, with no ceremony, that it was practically a secret." Krista continues, "Layli Long Soldier is a writer, a mother, a citizen of the United States, and a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation. She has a way of opening up her life, and American life, that inspires self-searching and tenderness." She lives in Santa Fe.

John Freeman wrote of Whereas in The Los Angeles Times: "Writers who live between two languages face an extra challenge in their role as lexicographers of metaphor. They must create a mythology through language that acts like double-pane glass. As in, they must correct for the distortion of the words they are translating from one language to another...Layli Long Soldier manages this double-ness with the precision of a master glassblower."

She illustrates that quality in her experience as a young mother and her realization that she must speak to her child in Diné, the Lakota language: "Whereas her birth signaled the responsibility as mother to teach what it is to be Lakota therein the question: What did I know about being Lakota? Signaled panic, blood rush my embarrassment. What did I know of our language but pieces? Would I teach her to be pieces? Until a friend comforted, Don't worry, you and your daughter will learn together. Today she stood sunlight on her shoulders lean and straight to share a song in Diné, her father's language. To sing she motions simultaneously with her hands; I watch her be in multiple musics."

 

The title poem of Whereas is a sequence—poem and prose poem:

 

WHEREAS a string-bean blue-eyed man leans back into a swig of beer work-weary lips at the dark bottle keeping cool in short sleeves and khakis he enters the discussion;

Whereas his wrist loose at the bottleneck to come across as candid “Well at least there was an Apology that’s all I can say” he offers to the circle each of them scholarly;

Whereas under starlight the fireflies wink across East Coast grass and me I sit there painful in my silence glued to a bench in the midst of the American casual;

Whereas a subtle electricity in that low purple light I felt their eyes on my face gauging a reaction and someone’s discomfort leaks out in a well-stated “Hmmm”;

Whereas like a bird darting from an oncoming semi my mind races to the Apology’s assertion “While the establishment of permanent European settlements in North America did stir conflict with nearby Indian tribes, peaceful and mutually beneficial interactions also took place”;

Whereas I cross my arms and raise a curled hand to my mouth as if thinking as if  taking it in I allow a static quiet then choose to stand up excusing myself  I leave them to unease;

Whereas I drive down the road replaying the get-together how the man and his beer bottle stated their piece and I reel at what I could have said or done better;

Whereas I could’ve but didn’t broach the subject of “genocide” the absence of this term from the Apology and its rephrasing as “conflict” for example;

Whereas since the moment had passed I accept what’s done and the knife of my conscience pierces with bone-clean self-honesty;

Whereas in a stirred conflict between settlers and an Indian that night in a circle;

Whereas I struggle to confess that I didn’t want to explain anything;

Whereas truthfully I wished most to kick the legs of that man’s chair out from under him;

Whereas to watch him fall backward legs flailing beer stench across his chest;

Whereas I pictured it happening in cinematic slow-motion delightful;

Whereas the curled hand I raised to my mouth was a sign of indecision;

Whereas I could’ve done it but I didn’t;

Whereas I can admit this also took place, yes, at least;

WHEREAS we ride to the airport in a van they swivel their necks and shoulders around to speak to me sugar and lilt in their voices something like nurses their nursely kindness through my hair then engage me as comrades in a fight together. Well what we want to know one lady asks is why they don’t have schools there? Her outrage empathy her furrowed brow. There are schools there I reply. Grade schools high schools colleges. But why aren’t there any stores there? There are stores there. Grocery stores convenience stores trading posts whatever what-have-you I explain but it’s here I recognize the break. It’s here we roll along the pavement into hills of conversation we share a ride we share a country but live in alternate nations and here I must tell them what they don’t know or, should I? Should I is the moment to seize and before I know it I say Well you know Native people as in tribes as in “people” living over there are people with their own nations each with its own government and flag they rise to their own national songs and sing in their own languages, even. And by there I mean here all around us I remind them. Drifting in side-glances to whirring trees through the van windows then back to me they dig in they unearth the golden question My God how come we were never taught this in our schools? The concern and furrow. But God the slowing wheels and we lurch forward in the van’s downshift and brake. Together we reach a full-stop. Trapped in a helix of traffic we’re late for check-in security flights our shoulders flex forward into panicked outward gazes nerves and fingers cradle our wristwatches so to answer their question now would be untimely because to really speak to it ever is, untimely. But there Comrades there Nurses. I will remember the swing of your gold earrings. There your perfume around me as a fresh blanket. There you checked my pulse kindly. There the boundary of bedside manners;

WHEREAS a woman I know says she watched a news program a reporter detailed the fire a house in which five children burned perhaps their father too she doesn’t recall exactly but remembers the camera on the mother’s face the mother’s blubbering her hiccuping and wail she leans to me she says she never knew then in those times that year this country the northern state she grew up in she was so young you see she’d never seen it before nobody talked about them she means Indians she tells me and so on and so on but that moment in front of the TV she says was like opening a box left at her door opening to see the thing inside whereas to say she learned through that mother’s face can you believe it and I let her finish wanting someone to say it but she hated saying it or so she said admitting how she never knew until then they could feel;

WHEREAS the word whereas means it being the case that, or considering that, or while on the contrary; is a qualifying or introductory statement, a conjunction, a connector. Whereas sets the table. The cloth. The saltshakers and plates. Whereas calls me to the table because Whereas precedes and invites. I have come now. I’m seated across from a Whereas smile. Under pressure of formalities, I fidget I shake my legs. I’m not one for these smiles, Whereas I have spent my life in unholding. What do you mean by unholding? Whereas asks and since Whereas rarely asks, I am moved to respond, Whereas, I have learned to exist and exist without your formality, saltshakers, plates, cloth. Without the slightest conjunctions to connect me. Without an exchange of questions, without the courtesy of answers. This has become mine, this unholding. Whereas, with or without the setup, I can see the dish being served. Whereas let us bow our heads in prayer now, just enough to eat;

 

Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss

Here is a description of Christian Wiman's short book, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer. Wiman's essay, "Love Bade Me Welcome" is reprinted below. 

Christian Wiman is a poet and editor of Poetry magazine. He was born in West Texas in 1966. He graduated from Washington and Lee University, and has published two books of poetry as well as an eloquent and widely admired collection of reflections on the relation of poetry and religious faith, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer.

The novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson, author of Housekeeping and Gilead, wrote that Wiman's poetry and scholarship "have a purifying urgency that is rare in this world. This puts him at the very source of theology, and enables him to say new things in timeless language, so that the reader's surprise and assent are one and the same."

In 2012 Christian Wiman joined the Yale Divinity School Institute of Sacred Music as a senior lecturer in religion and literature.

Wiman's essay "Love Bade Me Welcome," was widely reprinted on the internet and evoked much response from readers. It first appeared in Wiman's book, Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet (Copper Canyon Press, 2007).

 

In his preface to My Bright Abyss, Wiman writes of "Love Bade Me Welcome:"

"It was about despair: losing the ability to write, falling in love, receiving a diagnosis of an incurable cancer, having my heart ripped apart by what, slowly and in spite of all my modern secular instincts, I learned to call God. It was my entire existence crammed into eight pages. The essay detailed a radical change in my life, and then it seemed—or the reaction seemed—to demand a further one."

A further such radical change, which in turn gave birth to the deeply insightful and thoughtful book, My Bright Abyss.

The title of Wiman's essay is drawn from George Herbert's poem, "Love:"

Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack'd anything.

'A guest,' I answer'd, 'worthy to be here:'
Love said, 'You shall be he.'
'I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
I cannot look on Thee.'
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
'Who made the eyes but I?'

'Truth, Lord; but I have marr'd them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.'
'And know you not,' says Love, 'Who bore the blame?'
'My dear, then I will serve.'
'You must sit down,' says Love, 'and taste my meat.'
So I did sit and eat.

Here is Wiman's essay, "Love Made Me Welcome":

Though I was raised in a very religious household, until about a year ago I hadn't been to church in any serious way in more than 20 years. It would be inaccurate to say that I have been indifferent to God in all that time. If I look back on the things I have written in the past two decades, it's clear to me not only how thoroughly the forms and language of Christianity have shaped my imagination, but also how deep and persistent my existential anxiety has been. I don't know whether this is all attributable to the century into which I was born, some genetic glitch, or a late reverberation of the Fall of Man. What I do know is that I have not been at ease in this world.

Poetry, for me, has always been bound up with this unease, fueled by contingency toward forms that will transcend it, as involved with silence as it is with sound. I don't have much sympathy for the Arnoldian notion of poetry replacing religion. It seems not simply quaint but dangerous to make that assumption, even implicitly, perhaps especially implicitly. I do think, though, that poetry is how religious feeling has survived in me. Partly this is because I have at times experienced in the writing of a poem some access to a power that feels greater than I am, and it seems reductive, even somehow a deep betrayal, to attribute that power merely to the unconscious or to the dynamism of language itself. But also, if I look back on the poems I've written in the past two decades, it almost seems as if the one constant is God. Or, rather, His absence.

There is a passage in the writings of Simone Weil that has long been important to me. In the passage, Weil describes two prisoners who are in solitary confinement next to each other. Between them is a stone wall. Over a period of time — and I think we have to imagine it as a very long time — they find a way to communicate using taps and scratches. The wall is what separates them, but it is also the only means they have of communicating. "It is the same with us and God," she says. "Every separation is a link."

It's probably obvious why this metaphor would appeal to me. If you never quite feel at home in your life, if being conscious means primarily being conscious of your own separation from the world and from divinity (and perhaps any sentient person after modernism has to feel these things) then any idea or image that can translate that depletion into energy, those absences into presences, is going to be powerful. And then there are those taps and scratches: what are they but language, and if language is the way we communicate with the divine, well, what kind of language is more refined and transcendent than poetry? You could almost embrace this vision of life — if, that is, there was any actual life to embrace: Weil's image for the human condition is a person in solitary confinement. There is real hope in the image, but still, in human terms, it is a bare and lonely hope.

It has taken three events, each shattering in its way, for me to recognize both the full beauty, and the final insufficiency, of Weil's image. The events are radically different, but so closely linked in time, and so inextricable from one another in their consequences, that there is an uncanny feeling of unity to them. There is definitely some wisdom in learning to see our moments of necessity and glory and tragedy not as disparate experiences but as facets of the single experience that is a life. The pity, at least for some of us, is that we cannot truly have this knowledge of life, can only feel it as some sort of abstract "wisdom," until we come very close to death.

First, necessity: four years ago, after making poetry the central purpose of my life for almost two decades, I stopped writing. Partly this was a conscious decision. I told myself that I had exhausted one way of writing, and I do think there was truth in that. The deeper truth, though, is that I myself was exhausted. To believe that being conscious means primarily being conscious of loss, to find life authentic only in the apprehension of death, is to pitch your tent at the edge of an abyss, "and when you gaze long into the abyss," Nietzsche says, "the abyss also gazes into you." I blinked.

On another level, though, the decision to stop writing wasn't mine. Whatever connection I had long experienced between word and world, whatever charge in the former I had relied on to let me feel the latter, went dead. Did I give up poetry, or was it taken from me? I'm not sure, and in any event the effect was the same: I stumbled through the months, even thrived in some ways. Indeed — and there is something almost diabolical about this common phenomenon — it sometimes seemed like my career in poetry began to flourish just as poetry died in me. I finally found a reliable publisher for my work (the work I'd written earlier, I mean), moved into a good teaching job, and then quickly left that for the editorship of Poetry. But there wasn't a scrap of excitement in any of this for me. It felt like I was watching a movie of my life rather than living it, an old silent movie, no color, no sound, no one in the audience but me.

Then I fell in love. I say it suddenly, and there was certainly an element of radical intrusion and transformation to it, but the sense I have is of color slowly aching into things, the world coming brilliantly, abradingly alive. I remember tiny Albert's Café on Elm Street in Chicago where we first met, a pastry case like a Pollock in the corner of my eye, sunlight suddenly more itself on an empty plate, a piece of silver. I think of walking together along Lake Michigan a couple of months later talking about a particular poem of Dickinson's ("A loss of something ever felt I"), clouds finding and failing to keep one form after another, the lake booming its blue into everything; of lying in bed in my highrise apartment downtown watching the little blazes in the distance that were the planes at Midway, so numerous and endless that all those safe departures and homecomings seemed a kind of secular miracle. We usually think of falling in love as being possessed by another person, and like anyone else I was completely consumed and did some daffy things. But it also felt, for the first time in my life, like I was being fully possessed by being itself. "Joy is the overflowing consciousness of reality," Weil writes, and that's what I had, a joy that was at once so overflowing that it enlarged existence, and yet so rooted in actual things that, again for the first time, that's what I began to feel: rootedness.

I don't mean to suggest that all my old anxieties were gone. There were still no poems, and this ate at me constantly. There was still no God, and the closer I came to reality, the more I longed for divinity — or, more accurately perhaps, the more divinity seemed so obviously a part of reality. I wasn't alone in this: we began to say a kind of prayer before our evening meals — jokingly at first, awkwardly, but then with intensifying seriousness and deliberation, trying to name each thing that we were thankful for, and in so doing, praise the thing we could not name. On most Sundays we would even briefly entertain — again, half-jokingly, — the idea of going to church. The very morning after we got engaged, in fact, we paused for a long time outside a church on Michigan Avenue. The service was just about to start, organ music pouring out of the wide open doors into the late May sun, and we stood there holding each other and debating whether or not to walk inside. In the end it was I who resisted.

I wish I could slow things down at this point, could linger a bit in those months after our marriage. I wish I could feel again that blissful sense of immediacy and expansiveness at once, when every moment implied another, and the future suddenly seemed to offer some counterbalance to the solitary fever I had lived in for so long. I think most writers live at some strange adjacency to experience, that they feel life most intensely in their recreation of it. For once, for me, this wasn't the case. I could not possibly have been paying closer attention to those days. Which is why I was caught so off-guard.

I got the news that I was sick on the afternoon of my 39th birthday. It took a bit of time, travel, and a series of wretched tests to get the specific diagnosis, but by then the main blow had been delivered, and that main blow is what matters. I have an incurable cancer in my blood. The disease is as rare as it is mysterious, killing some people quickly and sparing others for decades, afflicting some with all manner of miseries and disabilities and leaving others relatively healthy until the end. Of all the doctors I have seen, not one has been willing to venture even a vague prognosis.

Conventional wisdom says that tragedy will cause either extreme closeness or estrangement in a couple. We'd been married less than a year when we got the news of the cancer. It stands to reason we should have been especially vulnerable to such a blow, and in some ways love did make things much worse. If I had gotten the diagnosis some years earlier — and it seems weirdly providential that I didn't, since I had symptoms and went to several doctors about them — I'm not sure I would have reacted very strongly. It would have seemed a fatalistic confirmation of everything I had always thought about existence, and my response, I think, would have been equally fatalistic. It would have been the bearable oblivion of despair, not the unbearable, and therefore galvanizing, pain of particular grief. In those early days after the diagnosis, when we mostly just sat on the couch and cried, I alone was dying, but we were mourning very much together. And what we were mourning was not my death, exactly, but the death of the life we had imagined with each other.

Then one morning we found ourselves going to church. Found ourselves. That's exactly what it felt like, in both senses of the phrase, as if some impulse in each of us had finally been catalyzed into action, so that we were casting aside the Sunday paper and moving toward the door with barely a word between us; and as if, once inside the church, we were discovering exactly where and who we were meant to be. That first service was excruciating, in that it seemed to tear all wounds wide open, and it was profoundly comforting, in that it seemed to offer the only possible balm. What I remember of that Sunday, though, and of the Sundays that immediately followed, is less the services themselves than the walks we took afterwards, and less the specifics of the conversations we had about God, always about God, than the moments of silent, and what felt like sacred, attentiveness those conversations led to: an iron sky and the lake so calm it seemed thickened; the El blasting past with its rain of sparks and brief, lost faces; the broad leaves and white blooms of a catalpa on our street, Grace Street, and under the tree a seethe of something that was just barely still a bird, quick with life beyond its own.

I was brought up with the poisonous notion that you had to renounce love of the earth in order to receive the love of God. My experience has been just the opposite: a love of the earth and existence so overflowing that it implied, or included, or even absolutely demanded, God. Love did not deliver me from the earth, but into it. And by some miracle I do not find that this experience is crushed or even lessened by the knowledge that, in all likelihood, I will be leaving the earth sooner than I had thought. Quite the contrary, I find life thriving in me, and not in an aestheticizing Death-is-the-mother-of-beauty sort of way either, for what extreme grief has given me is the very thing it seemed at first to obliterate: a sense of life beyond the moment, a sense of hope. This is not simply hope for my own life, though I do have that. It is not a hope for heaven or any sort of explainable afterlife, unless by those things one means simply the ghost of wholeness that our inborn sense of brokenness creates and sustains, some ultimate love that our truest temporal ones goad us toward. This I do believe in, and by this I live, in what the apostle Paul called "hope toward God."

"It is necessary to have had a revelation of reality through joy," Weil writes, "in order to find reality through suffering." This is certainly true to my own experience. I was not wrong all those years to believe that suffering is at the very center of our existence, and that there can be no untranquilized life that does not fully confront this fact. The mistake lay in thinking grief the means of confrontation, rather than love. To come to this realization is not to be suddenly "at ease in the world." I don't really think it's possible for humans to be at the same time conscious and comfortable. Though we may be moved by nature to thoughts of grace, though art can tease our minds toward eternity and love's abundance make us dream a love that does not end, these intuitions come only through the earth, and the earth we know only in passing, and only by passing. I would qualify Weil's statement somewhat, then, by saying that reality, be it of this world or another, is not something one finds and then retains for good. It must be newly discovered daily, and newly lost.

So now I bow my head and try to pray in the mornings, not because I don't doubt the reality of what I have experienced, but because I do, and with an intensity that, because to once feel the presence of God is to feel His absence all the more acutely, is actually more anguishing and difficult than any "existential anxiety" I have ever known. I go to church on Sundays, not to dispel this doubt but to expend its energy, because faith is not a state of mind but an action in the world, a movement toward the world. How charged this one hour of the week is for me, and how I cherish it, though not one whit more than the hours I have with my wife, with friends, or in solitude, trying to learn how to inhabit time so completely that there might be no distinction between life and belief, attention and devotion. And out of all these efforts at faith and love, out of my own inevitable failures at both, I have begun to write poems again. But the language I have now to call on God is not only language, and the wall on which I make my taps and scratches is no longer a cell but this whole prodigal and all too perishable world in which I find myself, very much alive, and not at all alone. As I approach the first anniversary of my diagnosis, as I approach whatever pain is ahead of me, I am trying to get as close to this wall as possible. And I am listening with all I am.

 

"If You Would Go Out on a Limb for Us, It Might Just Save Our Lives" - Nicholas Kristof, NYT 5/29/21

[I'm sending this column of Nicholas Kristof from today's New York Times to family and close friends, although I know most of you read the Times and that you have probably read Kristof's column. Many of you know of my high regard for his recognized humane perspectives, including two Pulitzer Prizes for his work on (and from) China and Darfur. So for those of you who may have missed it, or might read it again (a practice I'm grateful to have learned early, and find of even greater value as an elder). 

[The first thing that struck me was its length: about two-thirds longer than a typical opinion piece, his own or others'. The second tip was that he writes from Yamhill, Oregon, the town in which he was raised and to which he often returns, especially, as I recall, when his writing turns to subjects about which he cares most deeply.

[The pandemic is thankfully in recess for most (not all) of us here in the U.S., which means it's time for us to begin to assess its impact, as well as to recognize that elsewhere in this beleaguered world of ours it continues to take a terrible toll (India, Argentina, Brazil...) 

[That assessment is what Kristof is doing here, with particular attention to longtime friends, old neighbors, friends of friends and friends of neighbors. He knows it's not likely to be an easy read, but he is fundamentally a hopeful person, and there is hope in what follows. There must be hope, as well as love — the two speak, for him, for us, as twins that sustain our lives, our ways of living truly.]

___________________________

‘If You Would Go Out on a Limb for Us, It Might Just Save Our Lives’

May 29, 2021

 

 

Credit...Matt Black/Magnum Photos

 

By Nicholas Kristof

YAMHILL, Ore. — As more vaccinated Americans emerge, blinking, to survey our post-apocalyptic world, it’s becoming increasingly clear that many of our fellow citizens may never fully recover — even if they didn’t actually contract the coronavirus.

That’s because quite apart from the direct effects of the virus, the pandemic has aggravated mental illness, domestic violence, addiction and childhood trauma in ways that may reverberate for decades.

My friends who started out prosperous have ridden out the storm in vacation homes and seen their investments soar. Here in rural Oregon where I grew up, my friends who were already down and out are mostly struggling, homeless or even dead, and there is similar anguish across a broad swath of the United States.

That’s why President Biden’s proposals to invest in families and working-class Americans are so important. Just as we acted forcefully to address the virus, we should also move decisively to address America’s persistent pandemic of despair, addiction and educational failure.

Two of my friends overdosed on heroin during the pandemic, and the girlfriend of one is now self-medicating with meth and is wanted by the law. One of my homeless friends died; another, newly homeless, begs me for money; his mother pleads for me to refuse for fear he will use it to buy drugs and again overdose.

A social worker in Oregon told me of a vulnerable family recently devastated:

A 9-year-old girl and her 11-year-old sister already were facing challenges before the virus arrived, for their mom was wrestling with drug addiction and no longer much in their lives. But their dad was trying hard to fill that void, and they were getting by.

Then the father lost his restaurant job early in the pandemic, so he was home with the kids as they grappled with remote schooling. With the financial stress and constant time together, they got on one another’s nerves. He wanted to be a good dad, but he drank too much and couldn’t always control his anger or cope with life’s strains.

Then one day this spring the dad spent an excruciating hour stuck on hold while calling the state employment office; he finally slammed the phone down in frustration. The kids were hungry — perhaps a bit whiny — and demanded lunch, so he started to make them something. He was also tipsy, and he got into a heated argument with his children about their mother.

At that point, he lost it. He placed his hands around his 11-year-old’s neck and began to strangle her. The younger daughter rushed to her sister’s rescue, and the father hit them both while shouting curses that he didn’t mean.

“I’m done with you!” the father yelled to his children. “I don’t want to see you anymore.”

The kids ran to the house of a neighbor, who called 911. They have no broken bones, but they won’t easily forget the trauma of being attacked by their dad — he had been their responsible parent! — or their ache and fear as they were placed in a shelter pending the outcome of a criminal investigation.

The father is remorseful and blames the alcohol. It’s a tragedy for the entire family, and if it hadn’t been for the coronavirus, he would have been at work, the children would have been at school, and he wouldn’t have had that frustrating phone call.

While children in rich families were being tutored individually at home, this family was imploding.

That is what the virus did: It seized upon America’s inequality and hugely magnified it.

*

This indirect toll of the virus can’t yet be calculated. But the pain spans all regions of the country, urban and rural areas alike, reverberating in myriad complicated ways: A teenage girl cuts herself, frazzled parents exchange blows, a boy is shot as murder rates rise.

The clearest secondary effect is an increase in drug use, for the number of Americans dying from overdoses set another record, an estimated 91,000 for the 12 months ending in October.

That’s because in-person counseling and support groups were suspended, because many people felt more anxious and stressed and because so many Americans feel isolated and lonely. So they self-medicate.

Across the country, there’s growing concern about fentanyl overdoses arising from the isolation. The Beaverton school district near here warned recently that “we’ve lost several students to fentanyl-related poisonings.”

Alcohol kills even more Americans than drug overdoses do, and sales figures and surveys suggest that problem drinking has risen significantly during the pandemic.

Suicide is more complicated. It’s too early to have solid data, but preliminary figures indicate that suicide fell 5 percent in 2020, and the organization Crisis Text Line reported fewer inquiries mentioning suicide. Conversely, visits to emergency rooms because of children’s mental health crises increased during the pandemic. Young people seem hit particularly hard, with one survey finding that more than a quarter said they “seriously considered suicide in the past 30 days.” By comparison, in 2018, 11 percent said they seriously considered suicide at some point in the previous year.

Part of the divergence by wealth and class is simply that stress has risen among those who are hungry or at risk of losing homes. David Blanchflower, an economist at Dartmouth, noted that 18 million Americans sometimes or often don’t have enough to eat, according to census data. More than 11 million are behind on rent or mortgage payments.

Significant increases in domestic violence have been reported during the pandemic, partly linked to increased drinking at home.

Child abuse is more difficult to gauge. Most experts I talked to believe that physical abuse (though perhaps not sexual abuse) has increased along with addiction and stress, but this view isn’t universal. In any case, the cancellation of in-person instruction has meant that abuse of children is less visible and they have fewer opportunities to confide in an adult to get help.

“In this pandemic we’re all isolated, so kids haven’t had that connection with that safe neighbor or the Sunday school teacher,” said Russell Mark, who runs a shelter for abused children, Juliette’s House, in McMinnville, Ore. “So kids have no place to turn.”

“We have a huge number of walking wounded,” he added.

School closures also mean something very basic: Many disadvantaged kids aren’t learning. One study warned that three million children in the United States have missed all formal education, remote or in-person, for a year.

“Some kids we just lose,” Melissa Rysemus, the principal of Interagency Academy, an alternative school in Seattle, told me. During more than a year of remote instruction, only about half of the school’s children attended classes, and some of them didn’t turn on their cameras.

Two of Rysemus’s students were killed during the pandemic, one shot by a boyfriend and one shot in his doorway for unknown reasons.

One way to assess the impact on children is to count “adverse childhood experiences,” or ACEs. These can be a parent beating or regularly swearing at a child or partner, or parents divorcing or abusing drugs or alcohol. Many children have one ACE, but those who have several are more likely as adults to suffer from cancer, heart disease and other ailments, as well as to abuse drugs, miss work or even kill themselves.

Several child experts told me that the pandemic has been an ACE machine, with more domestic violence, drug abuse and turmoil in homes, in addition to about 40,000 children losing a parent to Covid-19 itself. Given what we know about ACEs, today’s traumatized children may suffer increased risks for decades to come, and some may transmit the disadvantage to the next generation.

*

I’ve been worrying during this pandemic about an old friend of mine, whom I’ll call Dell. He’s smart and charming, but his grandfather was an alcoholic, and his father — a wonderful friend of mine — abused drugs and alcohol until his death six years ago. Dell started using drugs at 12, burglarizing homes to support his habit, but then three years ago, he turned over a new leaf.

Dell was a star of a recovery program, got a job, avoided drugs for more than two years and was a fantastic dad to his two children. My wife and I told him about research on the importance of talking to infants, and he began speaking to his kids constantly.

In February 2020 on the eve of the pandemic, I saw him and his new wife, and he told me he had been promoted to be a manager. We embraced and celebrated: He was going to be the one to break the cycle! His kids would thrive!

Then Covid-19 arrived, and he no longer could attend support meetings and no longer had to take urine tests — “no support and no accountability,” as his mother put it. Dell received some wrenching personal news and coped by shooting heroin. He overdosed, and the hospital barely brought him back to life.

Dell returned to drugs, and his baby soon had to get medical treatment for somehow ingesting meth when his parents were high. In quick succession, Dell lost his job, lost the baby to foster care, lost his apartment and gave up his other son to be raised by others.

A good man who loved his children and had been doing so well had seen his life collapse and was now living in his car with his new wife. His baby is now being put up for adoption.

“Life is bleak and I did it to myself,” he texted me recently. “Living in a 1996 Honda Civic and not seeing my kids because I don’t have a roof is the worst.” He asked me to help by investing in a scheme he had devised to house people in shipping containers.

“If you would go out on a limb for us,” he said, “it might just save our lives.”

I was heartsick, but Dell’s mother, who herself has been drug-free for six years, begged me not to give him money or anything that he could sell; she fears that the proceeds would go to drugs that would kill him. The best hope to save his life, she said wretchedly, is for him to be arrested and go through detox.

“I’ve never seen him this bad,” his mother told me.

*

This column may seem like a depressing read, but the truth is that while people relapse into addiction, they also, miraculously, pull themselves out — with help.

Years ago in Nashville I met Shelia Simpkins, who was trafficked into prostitution at the age of 6. She spent many years enslaved by violent pimps, struggling with addiction and repeatedly getting arrested but finally left with the help of a program called Thistle Farms. She earned a B.A. and helped countless other women start over.

Since the pandemic began, Simpkins completed her master’s in social work at Tennessee State University and was recently appointed head of residential services for Thistle Farms and to the board of the National Trafficking Sheltered Alliance. She exemplifies the grit, resilience and potential that are deeply woven into the human fabric.

The toll of the pandemic should underscore the importance of Biden’s three-part proposal to invest in America and Americans. The coronavirus has interacted with half a century of inequality, despair and family dysfunction to shatter those who were already fragile. We should fight back with vaccines and P.P.E., yes, but also with policies to address the underlying inequality of opportunity.

No set of policies can solve all the problems, but Biden’s three-part proposal would invest heavily in left-behind Americans and give needy children a hand up.

The blunt truth is that it is difficult to heal adults like Dell who have wrestled with addiction for many years and have limited education or job experience. The best time to have helped Dell was when he was 3, or perhaps 13, not now that he is an adult raising his own children. As an adage attributed, perhaps incorrectly, to Frederick Douglass puts it, “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”

Biden’s child tax credits could reduce America’s staggering rates of child poverty by about half. High-quality pre-K would be a lifeline for children in chaotic homes. Child care would make it easier for parents to hold jobs. Bandwidth-for-all would allow families access to the internet. Free community college would lead to better jobs and stronger families. Investments in health care would make it easier for parents to get drug treatment and mental health support.

Melissa Teague was the longtime girlfriend of an old neighbor of mine, Keylan Knapp, a good man who died of a heroin overdose as the pandemic began. Melissa’s father also abused drugs, and she has herself been wrestling with addiction since she was 13, when she was prescribed painkillers for migraines.

“Now it’s kind of a way of living,” she told me.

Keylan and Melissa, 2018.Credit...Nicholas Kristof

Sweet and shy, Melissa has served prison sentences for drug-related offenses, and she also suffers from anxiety. Keylan’s death complicated everything, for she (wrongly) blamed herself. “I miss him so much,” she lamented. “Every day seems to get harder.”

“I had to take an anxiety pill to call you,” she added. Because of her anxiety, she said, she missed a court appearance and is wanted by the police.

Melissa adores her 14-year-old son, and her foremost goal is to see him flourish and avoid the minefields that now represent her life.

“I’m tired of drugs killing everyone I love,” she said.

That’s how I feel, too. The pandemic has shown more than ever that we inhabit two Americas, but finally this year we have a fighting chance to adopt policies that can help those left behind — especially children. As we end the coronavirus pandemic, we also have a chance to tackle the pandemic of despair and inequality that holds back so many Americans.

Melissa is trying to be upbeat. “I just keep reminding myself that God is working behind the scenes, even though I may not see anything good,” she mused. She promised me that she wouldn’t overdose, and the next day she summoned the courage to attend a Narcotics Anonymous meeting.

She was feeling hope, knowing that there is a better path forward. We as a nation just have to take it.

 

Two Short Essays on Raoul Peck's extraordinary new documentary film series: "Exterminate All The Brutes"

1. NEW DOCUMENTARY “EXTERMINATE ALL THE BRUTES” WAS 500 YEARS OF GENOCIDE IN THE MAKING

The fact that Raoul Peck’s new HBO film on white supremacy exists shows that something profound about the world is changing.

Jon Schwarz
The Intercept
May 2, 2021

 

IN THE FINAL episode of Raoul Peck’s HBO documentary, “Exterminate All the Brutes,” Peck says in a voice-over, “The very existence of this film is a miracle.”

That is 100 percent true. Before this moment in history, it would have been impossible to imagine that one of the world’s largest corporations — AT&T, owner of HBO, with a current market cap of $220 billion — would have funded and broadcast a film like this. The fact that it somehow squeezed through the cracks and onto our TVs and laptop screens demonstrates that something profound about the world is changing. Decades, centuries of people fighting and dying were required both to widen the cracks and mold someone like Peck, the right human at the right time, to step through.

“Exterminate All the Brutes” is a sprawling disquisition — four episodes, each an hour long — into the invention and consequences of 500 years of “white” supremacy, presented via a high-gloss pastiche of old footage, newly filmed dramatizations, and clips from Hollywood movies. “White” needs scare quotes because the film makes clear that whiteness is not something that exists in reality — like, say, the moon — that is right there whether we believe in it or not. Instead, it’s something imaginary that we’ve somehow all agreed on, like pieces of paper having value.

These two made-up concepts meet in the $100 bill via the man on its face, Benjamin Franklin. In 1751, Franklin wrote an essay that makes clear that anyone can be classified as “white” or read out of the white race, depending on the needs of the moment.

Franklin was desperate to keep the British colonies “white,” but by white, he didn’t mean European. For Franklin, only the English and Saxons counted. Germans, Swedes, Russians, and the French were hilariously “swarthy,” and thus “will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.”

At the same time, as the miniseries illustrates, the English were colonizing Ireland and demoting its nearly translucent inhabitants to nonwhite. A famous British clergyman named Charles Kingsley, extremely liberal by the standards of the day, wrote home from a trip to Sligo that the people somehow had skin “as white as ours” but nevertheless were subhuman “chimpanzees.” In the U.S., the Irish were the standard by which nonwhiteness was measured, to the extent that African Americans were sometimes referred to as “smoked Irish.”

Of course, America eventually promoted the Irish to white, on the condition that they would be team players. Across the world in South Africa, the apartheid regime decided that Japanese immigrants were loyal enough to be “honorary whites.” The sorting process can even be seen in real time in a 1949 Atlantic article by a friend of Franklin D. Roosevelt about his trip to the newly born Israel. The country, he explained, could be useful as “the best guarantee” for Western interests in the area. Jewish people, who had previously been “moth-eaten” and “grease-spotted,” now possessed “physical beauty, healthy vitality, politeness, good nature” and were comparable to Thomas Jefferson. Arab people were in the way but “about as dangerous as so many North American Indians,” and therefore nonwhite and “foul, diseased, smelling, rotting, and pullulating with vermin.”

Peck may be only the filmmaker who would want to take on this gigantic subject and then manage to present it as is, simultaneously terrifying and preposterous. Born in Haiti — i.e., the western half of Hispaniola, the island where Columbus landed in the “New” World — Peck has lived all over the planet and has a humanistic sympathy for all people, both at their best and their absolute worst. He’s made several dozen films, many documentaries, and was nominated for an Oscar in 2017 for “I Am Not Your Negro,” about James Baldwin.

At the outset, Peck says, “This is a story, not a contribution to historical research,” and he knows what he’s doing as a storyteller. Every minute of the miniseries has startling moments that examine the story of Europe’s colonization of the world from the other end of the gun — or, by this point, the other end of a Predator drone’s AN/AAS-52 Multi-Spectral Targeting System. Manifest Destiny, the White Man’s Burden, France’s Mission civilisatrice, Spain’s Misión civilizadora, Portugal’s Missão civilizadora — all are reframed so they can be seen as the code words they were.

Peck also does a masterful job excavating how this idea was birthed. It wasn’t that Europeans decided that they were superior to the rest of the world’s people and therefore had to conquer them. It was the other way around: The rest of the world had the land and gold that Europe coveted, and so, over hundreds of years, Europeans developed a jerry-rigged justification for how stealing it all was okay and indeed praiseworthy.

“Exterminate All the Brutes” borrows its title from a famous line in “Heart of Darkness,” the 1899 novel by Joseph Conrad about the colonizing of Congo. (Moviegoers may be more familiar with “Apocalypse Now,” an adaptation of the book with the location switched to Vietnam.) At one point, the narrator, Marlow, explains why there had to be some kind of reason for the rapine and plunder:

It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale … the conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretense but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea — something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to …

A report by the upriver colonial agent and mass murderer Mr. Kurtz makes clear what this means in practice. Kurtz begins by declaring, “By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,” and quickly degenerates into an exhortation to “exterminate all the brutes!”

This was not some oversimplification written to make a tendentious point but instead an exact depiction of reality, then and now. Trent Lott, the Senate minority leader at the start of the Iraq War in 2003, initially asked for prayers for the U.S. military “as they engage in an intense but noble battle … We went in there to free those people.” Six months later he mused, “If we have to, we just mow the whole place down, see what happens.”

The series jumps around in time to examine a seemingly endless number of genocides — some that may be hazily remembered today, many that are totally forgotten. But Peck’s purpose is not just to make a list of atrocities. Rather, he is arguing a case that culminates in the film’s exceedingly disturbing last 20 minutes.

The Holocaust, Peck shows, was not an inexplicable outburst of madness, unconnected to the rest of history. It was instead the logical culmination of the ideology of European colonialism and white supremacy. “When what had been done in the heart of darkness was repeated in the heart of Europe, no one wished to recognize what everyone knew,” he says. “Auschwitz is the modern industrial application of established extermination methods.”

That’s where “Exterminate All the Brutes” leaves us. It does not offer any solutions or false hope. In fact, after watching it, it’s hard not to consider that whiteness is a demonic whirlwind that may end by destroying everyone — starting with its traditional victims but eventually engulfing people who thought that their whiteness would protect them and are in for a big surprise.

On the other hand, there is the miracle of the documentary’s existence. That by itself means that deep tectonic plates are shifting in the world’s consciousness. It’s not impossible that this film will someday be considered a key part of a long, complex, messy reckoning that will see whiteness relegated to humanity’s Museum of Terrible Ideas. If people have a future, it will be one in which tourists come and gape in horror that anyone ever thought this awful concept made sense.

 

2. FROM "DEMOCRACY NOW":  RAOUL PECK – INTERVIEWED BY AMY GOODMAN AND NERMEEN SHAIKH FOLLOWING PECK'S 4-PART SERIES "EXTERMINATE ALL THE BRUTES"

A new four-part documentary series, “Exterminate All the Brutes,” delves deeply into the legacy of European colonialism from the Americas to Africa. It has been described as an unflinching narrative of genocide and exploitation, beginning with the colonizing of Indigenous land that is now called the United States. The documentary series seeks to counter “the type of lies, the type of propaganda, the type of abuse, that we have been subject to all of these years,” says director and Haitian-born filmmaker Raoul Peck. “We have the means to tell the real story, and that’s exactly what I decided to do,” Peck says. “Everything is on the table, has been on the table for a long time, except that it was in little bits everywhere. … We lost the wider perspective.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Republican lawmakers are continuing their attack on schools for teaching students about the true history of the United States, from the genocide of Native Americans to the legacy of slavery. Last week, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell wrote a letter to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona criticizing what he described as the department’s promotion of revisionist history, including The New York Times 1619 Project, which reexamined the pivotal role slavery played in the founding of the United States. In his letter, McConnell wrote, quote, “Americans never decided our children should be taught that our country is inherently evil,” he said.

New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, who created the 1619 Project, responded by saying, quote, “Republicans across the U.S. are pushing laws to mandate 'patriotic' education & to prohibit the teaching of the #1619Project and about the nation’s racist past.”

Well, today, we spend the hour looking at an epic new series that delves deeply into the legacy of European colonialism from the Americas to Africa. The documentary is titled Exterminate All the Brutes. It’s directed by the Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck. It’s been described as an unflinching narrative of genocide and exploitation, beginning with the colonizing of Indigenous American land. This is the documentary’s trailer.

RAOUL PECK: Here is the story we have been told. In Columbus’s travel journal, they were discovered. But there is no such thing as alternative facts. There is something we need to talk about, three words that summarize the whole history of humanity: civilization, colonization, extermination. This is the origin of the ideology of white supremacy. This is me in the middle, and I just want to understand: Why do I bring myself into this story? Because I am an immigrant from a [bleep] hole country. Neutrality is not an option.

It’s time to own up to a basic truth, a story of survival and violence. We know now what their task truly is: Exterminate All the Brutes. It’s not knowledge we lack. You already know enough. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know. Who are we? What if, from the beginning, the story was told the wrong way? The nightmare is buried deep in our consciousness, so deep that we do not recognize it. And over the centuries, we lost all bearings, because the past has a future we never expect.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s the trailer for the HBO documentary series "Exterminate All the Brutes," which is available on HBO and HBO Max. Time mmagazine said the series, quote, “may well be the most politically radical and intellectually challenging work of nonfiction ever made for television.”
We’re joined by the Oscar-nominated Raoul Peck, who joins us from France. He was born in Haiti, grew up in the Democratic Republic of the Congo after his parents fled the Duvalier dictatorship. His past films include "I Am Not Your Negro" about James Baldwin, "Lumumba" about the Congolese prime minister, the founding leader of Congo, Patrice Lumumba, and "The Young Karl Marx."

Raoul Peck, it’s great to have you back on Democracy Now! This is an epic masterpiece, this four one-hour documentary series. Can you talk about how you went from I Am Not Your Negro, which was the story of James Baldwin, to creating this masterpiece?

RAOUL PECK: Well, basically, after "I Am Not Your Negro," I went throughout the world with the film. I was fortunate to be able to see how the film was received in many different places. And one of the common threads through that was the type of reaction that you just mentioned, like Senate Leader Mitch McConnell. You know, this denial is somehow a sign that they feel that they are entrenched now, they are attacked. There is great fear about some sort of civilization going overboard.

And for me, it’s a symbol that the type of lies, the type of propaganda, the type of abuse that we have been subject to for during all these years. I am old enough to have heard many other people, like Rick Santorum, Mitch McConnell and many others throughout the years. The only difference now is that we have the means to counter them. We have the means to tell the real story.

And that’s exactly what I decided to do, to, once and for all, put everything on the table without any semblance of holding back my punches. Everything is on the table, have been on the table for a long time, except that it was in little bits everywhere, because science, sociology, anthropology, etc., politics, have been cut up in little pieces, so we lost the wider perspective. And the film does exactly that, to bring us to the core story, to have the whole matrix of the last 700 years of basically Eurocentric ideology and narrative.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Raoul Peck, in providing this broader historical context, you trace the origins of contemporary modern forms of biological racism to the Spanish Inquisition and the so-called purity of blood statutes — that is, limpieza de sangre —

RAOUL PECK: Exactly.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: — that was a means of distinguishing old Christians from conversos — that is, Jews but also Moors — from the pure blood of Christians. These laws, you say, are the antecedents of the ideology of white supremacy. For the first time in the world, the idea of race based on blood was enshrined into law. So, how should we understand the continuities between the purity of blood statutes and the forms of racist violence we witness today? Because the entire argument of this truly magnificent work is that the past is not really past. It is, as you say, the past has a future that we can’t anticipate.

RAOUL PECK: Well, the thing is that we are accustomed to not see history as a continuity, as you say. And we came from a very specific history. And we are not some sort of tribalist tribe that came out of nowhere. Today’s civilization is basically embedded in the capitalistic societies. And that story started around the 10th and 11th century with the first accumulation of riches, accompanied by killing and exiling of Jews, killing Muslims, trying to go all the way to Jerusalem. And those first Crusades were able to create a lot of — or not create, to basically extract a lot of riches that allows the monarchy to be able to finance trips to discovering new roads to the East.

And the accident, which it was, of the so-called discovery of the new continent was not something they planned. And when it happened, they basically created a totally new concept, which is the concept of discovery. And from that day on, you know, you could just go somewhere, put a flag, deploy military flags and say, “This is mine,” no matter who was on that land before.

And I remind you that at the time of Columbus, there were basically 100 million people on both continents in America. So, you can imagine what it meant. Within a hundred years, more than 90% of them were totally annihilated. So, it’s a very specific moment in the history of the modern world. For the U.S., it seems like it’s the beginning of a new world, but it’s not. It’s a continuity of a lot of action that have been the source of European civilization, basically.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to a clip from "Exterminate All the Brutes," where you explain settler colonialism.

RAOUL PECK: From the beginning, the extension of the United States from sea to shining sea was the intention and design of the country’s founders. Free land was a magnet that attracted European settlers. This particular form of colonialism is called settler colonialism. But as a system, it requires violence. It requires the elimination of the Natives and their replacement by European settlers.

AMY GOODMAN: And this is another clip from your series, "Exterminate All the Brutes." In this dramatized scene, a white man, played by the actor Josh Hartnett, engages in a standoff with a Native American woman leader.

GEN. THOMAS SIDNEY JESUP: [played by Josh Hartnett] "I do not want to spill Seminole blood, kill Seminole children, Seminole women. Give us back the American property you stole from our good fellowman planters and settlers, and I will let you move to the Injun territory the U.S. government has provided for your people." ABBY OSCEOLA: [played by Caisa Ankarsparre] "You call human beings your property?" GEN. THOMAS SIDNEY JESUP: "They’re slaves." ABBY OSCEOLA: "You steal land. You steal life. You steal humans. What kind of species are you?"

AMY GOODMAN: So, we were listening to Abby Osceola, or the woman who plays her, of the Seminole Nation. You say her story goes deep into the history of this continent. Talk about who she is and why you choose to center her and the Seminole Nation in the first part of your series, including their solidarity with enslaved Africans.

RAOUL PECK: Well, the whole vision of the film is based in changing totally the point of view of who is telling the story. And in particular, because this story not only center from Europe but also center in the bottom or in the middle of the United States of America, I had to start the film from that particular point of view of this woman who is the head of her tribe, of her nation.

And basically, you know, the Seminole have been one of the rare tribes who were never really — who did not really obey to the enforcement of leaving their territories. And they were called the Invisible Tribe for a reason. So, it was important for me to start it from a point of resistance, from a point of an individual, of a woman. And watching this invader basically telling her to leave her land and to deliver the slaves that were — and, of course, you know, that’s a story that is not really well known, that a lot of slaves who escaped were welcomed by Seminoles and other tribes. And I wanted to start with that symbolic moment of resistance and also of solidarity, and from there, deploy the whole rest of the story.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Raoul, that is in one of the forms of continuity that you point to. The story of Native Americans is absolutely critical. And the erasure of this genocidal history, in particular in the United States, is evidenced, as you show, in the perverse use of Native American names and designations for military weapons, from Black Hawk to Apache, as well as military operations, the most recent and proximate of which was the May 2011 operation named Geronimo to assassinate Osama bin Laden. So, could you talk a little bit more about that, the way in which Native American history has been distorted, if not entirely erased, and the uses to which it’s been put in contemporary U.S. politics?

RAOUL PECK: Well, it’s clear that — and you see that throughout the film through different type of device or type of stories, level of stories in the film, is how everything is somehow connected. You know, the history of the Native American, which is, for me, the core story, whether it has been pushed out and erased sometimes or told the wrong way, it’s like a phantom. It’s already there. You can’t get rid of it. There are so many skeletons in those boxes, that they come up. And they are more and more coming out.

And it’s ironic that the very powerful U.S. Army, who was basically at its core created not only to fight the British at the beginning, but after independence was basically used to kill Indians and to keep slaves, Black slaves, on the plantations. So, basically, the U.S. Army, at the beginning, was the militia, you know? So, this story continues. It’s basically a story of 200 years, which is — in the whole history of humankind is nothing. So, as long — you can try to repress that story, but it’s coming out there. You know, as long as there will be Native American or there will be Black life, they will continue to tell that story. There is no escape from it.

And that’s why what I was saying at the beginning — you know, when you see people like Rick Santorum saying that, “Well, when we came, there was nobody on this land” — what did you do with the 100 million people? You have to explain that. So, it’s really — it becomes more and more absurd that Republican leadership at that level are capable of such ignorance. You know, it’s mind-bending. So, for me, it’s just the logic of the whole story. And that’s what we try to explain and to tell in this story of Exterminate All the Brutes. And I really — my objective is really to make sure that that kind of ignorance cannot be voiced anymore.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Raoul, another possible form of repression, another idea that has been repressed, is something that Sven Lindqvist, in his extraordinary book Exterminate All the Brutes, from which your film substantially draws, he shows how closely intertwined the idea of progress is with racism and even genocide. And in the film, you explain Darwin’s central, if unintended, role in providing scientific validation for racial prejudice and hierarchies with his notion of natural selection, saying in fact that genocide came to be regarded as the inevitable byproduct of progress. You show in the film, as well, the iconic late 19th century painting by John Gast titled American Progress. But, of course, this idea of progress remains central to the way in which global society and American society are organized. What alternatives do you see to this ideology, and where do you see it, if at all, taking shape?

RAOUL PECK: Well, it’s a very complicated question to answer. And I don’t really go by that way in assessing what the future will be or what are the solutions. I think any solution will first have to start with the real story. We need to sit down around the same table and agree on the diagnostic. We have to agree on the genocide. We have to agree in the whole line of history that’s been going on for more than 700 years. Otherwise, there is no conversation possible. So, I am not, and we are not, if I can speak for many others, it’s not about revenge. It’s not about — you know, it’s about let’s see the world as it is and let’s name all the things that happened and bring us to what the world is today. That’s what it is about. It’s not about showing how culprit you are or not. It’s about acknowledging the past and the present, because they are strongly connected.

So, for me, it’s the same thing as democracy. As long as we accept democracy as our mode of communication, if we want to come out of that situation, it’s implied that we have to sit down and have a real conversation, an honest conversation. But, unfortunately, we see that the dominant narrative is not ready for that. They are totally the back on the wall and can’t let go of their huge inequality that is actually in those last 30, 40 years that have never been as extreme as it is.

And January 6th is also another sign of a democracy which is in dire situation, you know, that this country which had been seen as the forefront of democracy and justice was able to attack the very center of that democracy. So, the confusion is just huge. And it’s difficult for me to acknowledge any type of solution. I think the solution should come from us, from all of us, and a collective decision. That’s the only vision I can have.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to another clip, from the second episode in the series, where Raoul Peck — he is the narrator of this series — explains what happened after Columbus arrived in what is now Haiti, where Raoul Peck was born.

RAOUL PECK: Instead of the bustling ports of the East Indies, Columbus came upon a tropical paradise populated by the Taíno people, what is now Haiti. Then, from the Iberian Peninsula came merchants, mercenaries, criminals and peasants. They seized the land and property of Indigenous peoples and declared the territories to be extensions of the Spanish and Portuguese states. These acts were confirmed by the monarchies and endorsed by the papal authority of the Roman Catholic Church. That’s more or less the official story. And through that official story, a new vision of the world was created: the doctrine of discovery.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s a clip from "Exterminate All the Brutes," the 18th century, known as the Age of Revolutions. But we often associate this time with the American Revolution or the French Revolution, not the Haitian Revolution, which was led by Black slaves, the first country in the Western Hemisphere to be born of a slave uprising — you say, Raoul Peck, the only revolution that materialized the idea of enlightenment, freedom, fraternity and equality for all. You know, Haiti becomes a republic, and the U.S. Congress would not recognize it for decades, fearful that the fact that Haiti was born of a slave uprising would inspire the enslaved people of the United States to rise up, as well. Can you talk about the erasure of the Haitian Revolution, your own country, Haiti, its significance for you, and how the U.S. dealt with Haiti all of these years?

RAOUL PECK: Well, you know, the best words for this is what Michel-Rolph Trouillot have written about silencing the past. It was key for the U.S. and all the other European powers to silence the Haitian Revolution, because it was, in their eyes, worse than Cuba in the ’50s. We were under a strict embargo, because all of them had economy that still relied on slavery. And Haiti was the worst example they could have. And Haiti was also beating them in terms of their own ideology of enlightenment, because Haiti, the first constitution of Haiti, basically stated that any man or woman or person who set foot on the island is a free person. And none of the other revolutions dared go so far, because they were totally involved in slavery and were profiting from it. So there was no way that the Haitian Revolution could be accepted.

So, when people say that America is the first democratic country in the Western Hemisphere, it’s not. It’s Haiti. And the story continue until today. You know, we have a history of being attacked, of being invaded, of many of our leaders come to power with the acceptance of the U.S. government. And it continue until today. Basically, the last two presidents we had came into power thanks to the support of the U.S. government. So, we have, unfortunately, a long story of abuse from the United States and also of resistance, because one thing that we can say is that the Haitian people were always — whether it take 30 years, five years or two years, they always make sure that they can get rid of those corrupt leaders.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: I want to ask about one of the critical issues, Raoul, that you raise in the last part of the film, a critical question. You talk about your own experience living in Berlin, where you lived for 15 years and were also a film student, where you made a film on a Nazi torture compound. You say when you were there that you thought a lot about how a country that’s produced some of humanity’s best philosophers, scientists and artists also operated one of the most devastating, scientifically run and engineered killing machines. Now, many people have reflected on this question and the seeming contradiction in this fact by concluding that the Holocaust was some kind of historical aberration. In other words, that it stands very much outside the history of the Enlightenment and the ideas of humanism and universalism on which it apparently stands. But your film seems to suggest — even as this is raised as a question, your film suggests that other conclusions could be drawn. Could you talk a little bit about that?

RAOUL PECK: Well, it’s nothing new. In fact, there are many scholars that have worked on that specific question for the last 50, 60 years. And, of course, there is resistance to say that the Holocaust was a very special moment in the life of Western civilization. But it’s not. It’s a continuity of a wheel of genocide, a wheel of eliminate people that are deemed inferior. The structure of genocide are always the same.

You know, the person who invented the word “genocide,” Raphael Lemkin, in 1943 — we went to the New York Public Library, and in that library, in his file, there is a list of something around 42 previous genocides before the Holocaust. And he include in it, of course, the genocide against the Native American people. So, trying to make any type of genocide special, I think, is a really not correct way of seeing the history of humankind. They all copied from each other.

They are all, of course, specific. You know, you can’t directly compare the genocide in Rwanda with the genocide in Cambodia and with the Holocaust. They have different ideological reason. They have different historical reason. They have different people involved. But as the structure, as the system of genocide, they all obey the same pattern of first pinning down a special category of person, of people, and then start saying that we are superior to them, and they are insect. And as soon as you come to the point where they are animals or they are savages or they are insect, you are allowed to kill them. And that’s the excuse that was always needed for every imperialist, for every conqueror, in order to eliminate whoever was in the land they wanted to conquer. So, it’s similar. It has been similar throughout the history of humankind. And it became more specific within the concept of the capitalistic society, because then it was also linked to profit. It was also linked to make bigger territories in order to exploit large communities. So, I have had that discussion many years ago, back ago, including in Germany.

But today, I think we should move past that, what I would call the confrontation between who got the biggest pain. Do we put slavery confronted to the Holocaust or the Rwandis’ pain? You know, it’s not about that. We are all from the same human family. It’s not about who has suffered more. I think we have to acknowledge every piece of history that happened on this planet, and we have to give responses to them. And we have to explain why they happened, because it’s the only way that eventually we can prevent them to happen again and again.

AMY GOODMAN: And we want to talk more about that after this last clip from the series "Exterminate All the Brutes."

RAOUL PECK: Trading human beings, what sick mind thought of this first? Brought by force and pushed to death — slavery, or the trade, as they they referred to it euphemistically, a state-sponsored genocide. What does this say about the civilized world?

AMY GOODMAN: So, if you could talk more about what this does say, and going back to the beginning, talking about genocide, the term coined by Raphael Lemkin, colonization, as well as civilization, and how you find hope today in the discussions, if this is all acknowledged, though you’re saying just acknowledging this is not enough?

RAOUL PECK: Yes, of course. But acknowledging it is a big step. And that’s what I wanted to say before, is that even for me as a filmmaker, telling that story, it took a lot of thinking in order to tell a story where for the first time you tell the story of the genocide of Native Americans, and then you tell the story of slavery, and then you tell also one of the major extermination story, which is the Holocaust. And for the first time, I think, at least on film, you can see the connections between them.

And for me, it’s a huge step. You know, it’s taking all those atrocity in a different context. And for me, it can only be the beginning of a wider conversation, instead of each part keeping their own malheur, keeping their own death, their own pain, and sometimes being used against each other, you know? And that’s a device that has been used for many, many years. And for me, the film is also a step to break that separate narrative. There is not many different stories. There is one historical knowledge. And we need to access it.

And to your question, that’s the leitmotif in the series, you know? We already know enough. The problem is, what do we do with that knowledge? Because everything I say in the film, everything that Sven Lindqvist tells the story about, or Michel-Rolph Trouillot, or Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, those are fact. Those are highly competent scholars who spent their life documenting the horror. And my use of their work, with them, was exactly that, to force the conversation to a more sovereign type of discussion and to push aside the blurring of history, push aside the ignorance that still reign in the discussion.

And, you know, I am not going to name them again, the two politicians I named, but I think a population are more and more interested in learning where they come from. You know, there is a reason why everybody now wants to have their DNA analyzed, because there is some sort of feeling of connection, you know? And it’s our job as filmmakers and U.S. journalists, as well, to lay that in plain sight. And then we can say, “OK, what do we do with this?” You know?

NERMEEN SHAIKH: That’s exactly — we just have a minute. What do we do with this? Your film begins and ends with the same line that Sven Lindqvist says again and again: “It’s not knowledge that we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and draw the conclusions.” How does your film and the work of these other authors enable that courage?

RAOUL PECK: You know, I was primarily educated by Jesuits. And one thing is, maybe from that, that I believed in the notion of knowledge. I believe in the notion of learning the truth. And the film, for me, is the first step. And my wish is that every school, every university is able to watch the film and have discussion around it, because you cannot go further if you don’t know your own history, whatever the side you are on. But you need to know. And it’s not about accusing you of anything. It’s about facing your reality, because you can’t understand what’s going on. You can’t understand why policemen are still killing Black kids and Black men and Black women in this country, if you don’t know where it comes from. You know?

And it’s unfortunate. You know, we are in a time where we have huge instruments for communication and huge instrument for learning. You can go on the internet and learn about everything. But we lack a very condensed matrix of those histories that we have been built by. And each one of us needs to do our homework; otherwise, I don’t see any nonviolent outcome out of this.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, you’ve given us a remarkable assignment and an epic work to watch for all. Raoul Peck, acclaimed Haitian-born filmmaker, director of the new HBO four-part documentary series "Exterminate All the Brutes." Visit democracynow.org to watch our 2018 interview with Raoul about his films "The Young Marx" and "I Am Not Your Negro" about James Baldwin.

 

Biden's Great Economic Rebalancing

[There is some overlap between John Cassidy's assessment of President Biden's transformative policy proposals and the account of those proposals by Nicholas Kristof published in The New York Times two days ago. That is as it should be, as we are contemplating a major reconception of American governance. Biden seeks to strengthen the very foundations of our democracy. Both commentators agree that "like F.D.R. in the nineteen-thirties, (Biden is) looking to rebalance and preserve a capitalist economy that has been going askew for decades, reclaiming a vision of shared prosperity" that we have lost." The need for such change is palpable. The circumstances of 2021 differ from those of 1933, but only enhance the need for such rebalancing. The legacy of Trump—the emptying of substantive dialogue with the impoverished remnant of the Republican party—is a dismaying parallel, but all the more reason to mobilize popular support for Biden's initiatives.]

John Cassidy

The New Yorker, May 3, 2021

According to some commentators, President Joe Biden is turning out to be a quiet revolutionary. After he laid out his sweeping agenda to a joint session of Congress last week, reports described it as an epoch-shifting effort to reset the terms of American political economy, much as Ronald Reagan did in the nineteen-eighties (albeit in the opposite direction). Delivering the Republican rebuttal, Senator Tim Scott, of South Carolina, dismissed Biden’s ideas as a “liberal wish list of big-government waste.” For his part, Biden claimed that his American Jobs Plan, which calls for increased federal spending on transportation, green energy, and scientific research and development, would create “millions of good-paying jobs, jobs Americans can raise a family on.” Biden’s American Families Plan, he said, would provide affordable child care to low-to-middle income families, and also up to twelve weeks of paid medical leave, two years of free community college, and expanded child tax credits that would put seventy-two hundred dollars per year “directly into the pockets” of families with two children.

The estimated price tag for Biden’s two policy initiatives is $4.1 trillion—$2.3 trillion for the American Jobs Plan and $1.8 trillion for the American Families Plan. To help cover this cost, the federal government would levy substantially higher taxes on corporations and the highest earners, including raising the federal tax rate on capital gains, which is currently at twenty per cent, to as high as 43.4 per cent—a level not seen since the nineteen-twenties. (“Socialism,” Chris Christie spluttered.) This and other measures that Biden is proposing, such as building a national network of electric-vehicle chargers and distributing child tax credits as monthly cash payments for poor families, are truly novel and potentially transformative.

But the notion of Amtrak Joe as a policy revolutionary is still a stretch—to my mind, at least. In many ways, his approach is a reactive one. It’s been evident for years that something is seriously out of whack in the American economy, a problem highlighted by the election of the populist charlatan Donald Trump and exacerbated by the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic. Biden isn’t channelling his inner—and long-hidden—socialist. Like F.D.R. in the nineteen-thirties, he’s looking to rebalance and preserve a capitalist economy that has been going askew for decades, reclaiming a vision of shared prosperity that has got lost.

In 1995, more than a quarter century ago, I published a piece in The New Yorker that ran under the headline “Who Killed the Middle Class?” It was hardly a pathbreaking question. Even then, wage stagnation, rising inequality, and a fixation on cutting taxes and balancing the budget deficit were well-established trends. Among the sources I relied on was “The State of Working America,” a data-rich annual report that was, and still is, published by the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank in Washington, D.C. The economist Jared Bernstein, one of the authors of the report, went on to work for Biden in the Obama Administration, and has now joined the Biden Administration, as a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

On Friday afternoon, I spoke with Bernstein and asked him about the Administration’s economic agenda, the reactions it has engendered, and whether Biden is a revolutionary or a rebalancer. “The President, in his speech, said that America is on the move again,” Bernstein said. “That resonates with me more than big revolutionary talk—in the sense of keeping our heads down and trying to craft, legislate, and implement a policy agenda that meets the moment. The President has been very clear that that agenda isn’t small—it doesn’t nibble at the edges. In many respects, it is fundamental, and the depths of the investments are historic.” But Bernstein preferred to characterize this as rebalancing rather than as revolution, especially in areas “where things have grown unacceptably unequal, racial equity has been deeply insufficient, and where critical investments in public goods and human capital have gone wanting for decades.”

The most obvious example is America’s physical infrastructure, which has suffered from chronic underinvestment. In 2017, according to the Congressional Budget Office, federal, state, and local governments spent about 2.3 per cent of gross domestic product on highways, mass transit, aviation, and water infrastructure. That was the lowest level in decades. And, in the past ten years, over-all spending on infrastructure by federal, state, and local governments actually declined by $9.9 billion in inflation-adjusted terms, according to the Brookings Institution.

Federal spending has also fallen short in supporting scientific research and innovation. Biden is proposing to devote another hundred and eighty billion dollars to this area. If Congress enacted this request in full, Bernstein pointed out, it would merely take us back to the late nineteen-sixties in terms of spending relative to the size of the economy. “There was a period in this country when private-sector productivity growth was very much fuelled by public investments in innovative discoveries,” he said. “We need to bring that back.” On the tax side, Biden is looking to reverse many policy changes that have, over the years, benefitted the very wealthy, including, most recently, the Trump tax cuts of 2017. After that legislation slashed the corporate tax rate from thirty-five per cent to twenty-one per cent, cut marginal income-tax rates, and changed the tax treatment of unincorporated businesses owned by rich individuals, federal receipts totalled just sixteen per cent of G.D.P. in 2019—a very low figure historically for an economy that was operating at, or close to, full employment. “The Trump tax cut broke the essential linkage between over-all economic growth and revenue flows to the Treasury,” Bernstein said. “We are trying to rebuild that linkage.”

Biden is also going back to the future in his efforts to strengthen labor unions, which have seen their membership rolls fall sharply. Fifty years ago, when the gains from economic growth were more widely shared, close to thirty per cent of the labor force was unionized. In 2020, the figure was just over six per cent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Labor “unions built the middle class,” Biden said in his speech, and he called on Congress to pass legislation making it easier for them to organize in the workplace.

It bears reëmphasizing that, in some parts of his agenda, Biden goes well beyond history. His plan to combat climate change falls into this category. So do his proposals for universal child-support payments, guaranteed paid leave, affordable day care and elder care, free community college, and his efforts to tackle long-standing racial inequities. In assessing the over-all cost, it’s important to look past the headline figure—a seemingly staggering four trillion dollars—which applies to the entire cost over ten years. On an annual basis, implementing both Biden’s jobs plan and his family plan would cost about four hundred and ten billion dollars. That’s equivalent to roughly 1.9 per cent of G.D.P., which currently stands at $22.05 trillion, according to the Commerce Department. Permanently increasing annual federal spending by less than two per cent of G.D.P. would represent a break with recent economic history, to be sure, but it would hardly be unprecedented. Chances are that Congress will trim Biden’s ambitions, anyway.

Where his agenda isn’t devoted to righting past wrongs, it is largely concerned with filling in glaring gaps that have never been addressed. “On the whole, Mr. Biden’s safety-net proposals are sensible,” The Economist, hardly a bastion of left-wing radicalism, commented. “America is one of the few developed countries that lacks paid family or medical leave. Preschool is only haphazardly accessible. Increasingly, many decent-paying jobs require some sort of college degree.” Ignoring these facts, some conservatives have accused Biden of trying to transform the U.S. into a European cradle-to-grave welfare state—a charge that Bernstein quickly dismissed. “We are trying to figure out how we can help lower-income and middle-income Americans get good jobs, realize their potential, and participate in a resilient recovery that isn’t decimated because we have failed to account for the risk of climate change and failed to protect people from the risks of living in a complex global economy,” he said. “We can have a couple of great quarters—we could even have a couple of great years. But if inequality is still raging, if racial equity is not being addressed, if clean energy and clean water are not being addressed, then we are not doing the work that the President has set out for us.”

 

Pope Francis: A Crisis Reveals What Is In Our Hearts

Pope Francis: A Crisis Reveals What Is in Our Hearts

To come out of this pandemic better than we went in, we must let ourselves be touched by others’ pain.

By Pope Francis

 The New York Times, Nov. 26, 2020

In this past year of change, my mind and heart have overflowed with people. People I think of and pray for, and sometimes cry with, people with names and faces, people who died without saying goodbye to those they loved, families in difficulty, even going hungry, because there’s no work.

Sometimes, when you think globally, you can be paralyzed: There are so many places of apparently ceaseless conflict; there’s so much suffering and need. I find it helps to focus on concrete situations: You see faces looking for life and love in the reality of each person, of each people. You see hope written in the story of every nation, glorious because it’s a story of daily struggle, of lives broken in self-sacrifice. So rather than overwhelm you, it invites you to ponder and to respond with hope.

These are moments in life that can be ripe for change and conversion. Each of us has had our own “stoppage,” or if we haven’t yet, we will someday: illness, the failure of a marriage or a business, some great disappointment or betrayal. As in the Covid-19 lockdown, those moments generate a tension, a crisis that reveals what is in our hearts.

In every personal “Covid,” so to speak, in every “stoppage,” what is revealed is what needs to change: our lack of internal freedom, the idols we have been serving, the ideologies we have tried to live by, the relationships we have neglected.

When I got really sick at the age of 21, I had my first experience of limit, of pain and loneliness. It changed the way I saw life. For months, I didn’t know who I was or whether I would live or die. The doctors had no idea whether I’d make it either. I remember hugging my mother and saying, “Just tell me if I’m going to die.” I was in the second year of training for the priesthood in the diocesan seminary of Buenos Aires.

I remember the date: Aug. 13, 1957. I got taken to a hospital by a prefect who realized mine was not the kind of flu you treat with aspirin. Straightaway they took a liter and a half of water out of my lungs, and I remained there fighting for my life. The following November they operated to take out the upper right lobe of one of the lungs. I have some sense of how people with Covid-19 feel as they struggle to breathe on a ventilator.

I remember especially two nurses from this time. One was the senior ward matron, a Dominican sister who had been a teacher in Athens before being sent to Buenos Aires. I learned later that following the first examination by the doctor, after he left she told the nurses to double the dose of medication he had prescribed — basically penicillin and streptomycin — because she knew from experience I was dying. Sister Cornelia Caraglio saved my life. Because of her regular contact with sick people, she understood better than the doctor what they needed, and she had the courage to act on her knowledge.

Another nurse, Micaela, did the same when I was in intense pain, secretly prescribing me extra doses of painkillers outside my due times. Cornelia and Micaela are in heaven now, but I’ll always owe them so much. They fought for me to the end, until my eventual recovery. They taught me what it is to use science but also to know when to go beyond it to meet particular needs. And the serious illness I lived through taught me to depend on the goodness and wisdom of others.

This theme of helping others has stayed with me these past months. In lockdown I’ve often gone in prayer to those who sought all means to save the lives of others. So many of the nurses, doctors and caregivers paid that price of love, together with priests, and religious and ordinary people whose vocations were service. We return their love by grieving for them and honoring them.

Whether or not they were conscious of it, their choice testified to a belief: that it is better to live a shorter life serving others than a longer one resisting that call. That’s why, in many countries, people stood at their windows or on their doorsteps to applaud them in gratitude and awe. They are the saints next door, who have awakened something important in our hearts, making credible once more what we desire to instill by our preaching.

They are the antibodies to the virus of indifference. They remind us that our lives are a gift and we grow by giving of ourselves, not preserving ourselves but losing ourselves in service.

With some exceptions, governments have made great efforts to put the well-being of their people first, acting decisively to protect health and to save lives. The exceptions have been some governments that shrugged off the painful evidence of mounting deaths, with inevitable, grievous consequences. But most governments acted responsibly, imposing strict measures to contain the outbreak.

Yet some groups protested, refusing to keep their distance, marching against travel restrictions — as if measures that governments must impose for the good of their people constitute some kind of political assault on autonomy or personal freedom! Looking to the common good is much more than the sum of what is good for individuals. It means having a regard for all citizens and seeking to respond effectively to the needs of the least fortunate.

It is all too easy for some to take an idea — in this case, for example, personal freedom — and turn it into an ideology, creating a prism through which they judge everything.

The coronavirus crisis may seem special because it affects most of humankind. But it is special only in how visible it is. There are a thousand other crises that are just as dire, but are just far enough from some of us that we can act as if they don’t exist. Think, for example, of the wars scattered across different parts of the world; of the production and trade in weapons; of the hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing poverty, hunger and lack of opportunity; of climate change. These tragedies may seem distant from us, as part of the daily news that, sadly, fails to move us to change our agendas and priorities. But like the Covid-19 crisis, they affect the whole of humanity.

Look at us now: We put on face masks to protect ourselves and others from a virus we can’t see. But what about all those other unseen viruses we need to protect ourselves from? How will we deal with the hidden pandemics of this world, the pandemics of hunger and violence and climate change?

If we are to come out of this crisis less selfish than when we went in, we have to let ourselves be touched by others’ pain. There’s a line in Friedrich Hölderlin’s “Hyperion” that speaks to me, about how the danger that threatens in a crisis is never total; there’s always a way out: “Where the danger is, also grows the saving power.” That’s the genius in the human story: There’s always a way to escape destruction. Where humankind has to act is precisely there, in the threat itself; that’s where the door opens.

This is a moment to dream big, to rethink our priorities — what we value, what we want, what we seek — and to commit to act in our daily life on what we have dreamed of.

God asks us to dare to create something new. We cannot return to the false securities of the political and economic systems we had before the crisis. We need economies that give to all access to the fruits of creation, to the basic needs of life: to land, lodging and labor. We need a politics that can integrate and dialogue with the poor, the excluded and the vulnerable, that gives people a say in the decisions that affect their lives. We need to slow down, take stock and design better ways of living together on this earth.

The pandemic has exposed the paradox that while we are more connected, we are also more divided. Feverish consumerism breaks the bonds of belonging. It causes us to focus on our self-preservation and makes us anxious. Our fears are exacerbated and exploited by a certain kind of populist politics that seeks power over society. It is hard to build a culture of encounter, in which we meet as people with a shared dignity, within a throwaway culture that regards the well-being of the elderly, the unemployed, the disabled and the unborn as peripheral to our own well-being.

To come out of this crisis better, we have to recover the knowledge that as a people we have a shared destination. The pandemic has reminded us that no one is saved alone. What ties us to one another is what we commonly call solidarity. Solidarity is more than acts of generosity, important as they are; it is the call to embrace the reality that we are bound by bonds of reciprocity. On this solid foundation we can build a better, different, human future.

 

Entering the Bardo, by Joanna Macy

Entering the Bardo

by Joanna Macy

Emergence Magazine

In this short essay published in Emergence Magazine, eco-philosopher and Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy introduces us to the bardo—the Tibetan Buddhist concept of a gap between worlds where transition is possible.  As the pandemic reveals ongoing collapse and holds a mirror to our collective ills, she writes, we have the opportunity to step into a space of reimagining.

We are in a space without a map.  With the likelihood of economic collapse and climate catastrophe looming, it feels like we are on shifting ground, where old habits and old scenarios no longer apply.  In Tibetan Buddhism, such a space or gap between known worlds is called a bardo.  It is frightening. It is also a place of potential transformation.

As you enter the bardo, there facing you is the Buddha Akshobhya.  His element is Water.  He is holding a mirror, for his gift is Mirror Wisdom, reflecting everything just as it is.  And the teaching of Akshobhya’s mirror is this:  Do not look away. Do not avert your gaze. Do not turn aside.  This teaching clearly calls for radical attention and total acceptance.

For the last forty years, I’ve been growing a form of experiential group work called The Work That Reconnects.  It is a framework for personal and social change in the face of overwhelming crises—a way of transforming despair and apathy into collaborative action. Like the Mirror Wisdom of Akshobhya, the Work That Reconnects helps people tell the truth about what they see and feel is happening to our world.  It also helps them find the motivation, tools, and resources for taking part in our collective self-healing.

When we come together for this work, at the outset we discern three stories or versions of reality that are shaping our world so that we can see them more clearly and choose which one we want to get behind. The first narrative we identify is “Business as Usual,” by which we mean the growth economy, or global corporate capitalism.  We hear this marching order from virtually every voice in government, publicly traded corporations, the military, and corporate-controlled media.

The second is called “The Great Unraveling”: an ongoing collapse of living structures. This is what happens when ecological, biological, and social systems are commodified through an industrial growth society or “business as usual” framework.  I like the term “unraveling,” because systems don’t just fall over dead, they fray, progressively losing their coherence, integrity, and memory.

The third story is the central adventure of our time: the transition to a life-sustaining society. The magnitude and scope of this transition—which is well underway when we know where to look—is comparable to the agricultural revolution some ten thousand years ago and the industrial revolution a few centuries back.  Contemporary social thinkers have various names for it, such as the ecological or sustainability revolution; in the Work That Reconnects we call it the Great Turning.

Simply put, our aim with this process of naming and deep recognition of what is happening to our world is to survive the first two stories and to keep bringing more and more people and resources into the third story.  Through this work, we can choose to align with business as usual, the unraveling of living systems, or the creation of a life-sustaining society.

Over the last couple of years, a number of us involved in this work have recognized that, given the pace of the Great Unraveling, we are heading toward economic and, indeed, civilizational collapse.  Our thinking was aided by the Deep Adaptation work of Jem Bendell, which seeks to prepare for—and live with—societal breakdown.  I would also like to acknowledge the earlier contributions in French-speaking Europe of Pablo Servigne and Raphael Stevens—whose prescient work focuses on collapse and transition and is only just now coming out in English.

Since the present world economy has been unable to cut greenhouse gas emissions by even the slightest fraction of a degree, it now seems obvious that we cannot avoid climate catastrophe.   Many of us had assumed that the Great Turning could forestall such disintegration, but now we have come to recognize the Great Turning as a process and a commitment to help us survive the breakdown of the industrialized growth economy. The motivation and skills we gain by engaging in the Work That Reconnects provide the guidance, solidarity, and trust needed to make our way through this inevitable breakdown.

There are many dimensions to this work that address the psychological and spiritual issues of the time, and I have found a fruitful resonance between Buddhist thought and postmodern science: much of the Work That Reconnects has been informed by Buddhist teachings. I now think of the Great Turning as somewhat like bodhicitta, the intention to serve all beings. This is the mind state of the bodhisattva—the being who, in their great compassion, delays nirvana in order to address the world’s suffering.  I remember my Tibetan teachers telling me that bodhicitta is like a flame in the heart, and often I can feel it there.

It can seem pretty clear now who is holding up Akshobhya’s mirror—it is COVID-19. The coronavirus has come upon us fast. We knew nothing of it just a short while ago.  First it made us pause so we could take in what the mirror is reflecting.  We’ve been so busy and distracted in our different versions of the rat race that we haven’t been able to pay attention to our actual situation.  We had to cease our rushing about in order to see who, what, and where we are.

COVID-19 reminds us that apocalypse—in its ancient meaning—connotes revelation and unveiling. And what has it unveiled?   A pandemic so contagious that it immediately revealed our failed health care system and our utter interdependence. The need to prioritize the collective nature of our well-being dramatically rose to the surface, especially within our country, which is the most hyper-individualized country in the world.  As Malcolm X put it, “When we change the ‘I’ for the ‘We,’ even Illness becomes Wellness.”

The patterns of contagion then cast a spotlight on what we most need to see: nursing homes, where old people are warehoused; the meatpacking industry, so dangerous to the crowded workers, so cruel to the animals, so costly to the climate;  prisons, where millions are locked away, now becoming petri dishes of contamination; the fault lines of racial inequality in our society, now laid bare in the pandemic’s disproportionate impacts on Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities.  Sixty percent of the cases are African-American—thanks to pre-existing conditions fostered by inequities in health care and environmental racism.

On top of that, the killing of George Floyd has not only revealed the racism and brutality of our police culture, but aroused unparalleled protests, sweeping the country and calling for the defunding and even abolition of police departments and unions.

Globally as well as in the US, many of us are discovering a new solidarity in our determination to move beyond the sick racism we’ve inherited.  In this Uprising, I am inspired by the courage, creativity, and perseverance of those engaging in public demonstrations, who are influencing many civil servants to take action—members of city councils, agencies, and even police departments.  It is no wonder that the bardo represents a place where the unknown, even the inconceivable, can happen and where we who enter are profoundly changed thereby.

When we dare to face the cruel social and ecological realities we have been accustomed to, courage is born and powers within us are liberated to reimagine and even, perhaps one day, rebuild a world.

Do not look away. Do not avert your gaze. Do not turn aside.

 

Two Poems by Rumi: Reminders of friends

Rumi's poems have for more years than I can remember been sources of inspiration and guidance in nourishing the crafts of life and offering inspiration and guidance in how to live it more fully, more closely to what I have come to know as sacred. Naturally over the years I have been drawn to others who have found similar companionship in Rumi. Seldom, though, has that experience come as richly and from more than one source at once. I feel blessed that such is now one of those instances.

The first is a book given to me by a friend. Carol Saysette brought it yesterday to my door, saying she had helped modestly in the book's publication, and so purchased a few copies for her own friends. I only glancingly know its author, but the book is entitled Julie Taylor's Best Loved Poems. Julie Taylor's life and my own have drawn nearer to one another because we have been grateful fellow members of the Community Congregational Church on the top of Rock Hill Road in Tiburon, California. I didn't know until I began reading Julie's best loved poems that in her preface she gathered the poems partly in thanks to her friends in that church, "who have been so supportive in my lifetime challenge, living with Parkinson's Disease." 

Accompanying that acknowledgement and a photo of Julie taken some years ago, are these prefatory lines from an essay of Mary Oliver: "Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. Yes indeed."

The second source is a dear friend and fellow member of the community in which I have made my own home for the last nearly eight years. I came to know life in community only in those years, my eighth decade; but that is another story.

The friend of whom I speak is Al Braidwood, also a member of that same Community Congregational Church, but whom I've come to know more as a fellow resident of The Redwoods, the living place he and I have known since arriving here at roughly the same time. Al and I gather frequently, sometimes with others, sometimes just with each other, to enjoy and learn from each other's company. This morning Al wrote to me and some of our other close friends,

"Rumi," Al wrote, "is a 13th century Persian poet with a prophetic cast of mind.  He dresses experiences with words.  He makes it easier for us to understand matters of the heart, the mind, and the soul.  Some people underestimate spirituality or see it as a trend, but as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said:  'We are not human beings having a spiritual experience.  Actually, we are spiritual beings having a human experience.'  Rumi explores that truth in his poems.  We don’t just live in the spiritual realm, but we are the spiritual realm."

 

 

 

Since Al is the more recent source I evoke, and because the poem he offered today is one with which I have lived most gratefully, I will begin this small collection with the Rumi poem that has affected me most deeply:

 

 

THE NEW NARRATIVE

 

"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about

Ideas, language, even the phrase 'each other' 

doesn’t make any sense.

 

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.

Don’t go back to sleep.

You must ask for what you really want.

Don’t go back to sleep.

People are going back and forth across the doorsill

where the two worlds touch.

The door is round and open.

Don’t go back to sleep.”

 

 

 

 

 

I don't know whether Rumi himself titled his poems, but the lines with which I have longest lived and been most moved by in this poem are those the poet repeats: "Don't go back to sleep." Awakeness and sleep are literal and metaphoric: Treasure the consciousness you have sought and been given. Literally, of course, we know sleep and wakefulness, but we should never neglect our consciousness, nor shall we fail to learn from it. So, "Don't go back to sleep."

 

 

To turn to Julie Taylor's favorite poems, she includes this lovely one from Rumi (in Colin Barks's translation):

 

 

 

 

THIS BEING HUMAN IS A GUEST HOUSE

 

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

some momentary awareness comes

as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,

who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture,

still, treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out

for some delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,

meet them at the door laughing and

invite them in. Be grateful for whatever

comes because each has been sent

as a guide from beyond.

 

 

A father, a son, and the evolution of masculinity

I want to share with readers of Reckonings two photos of father and son, Joe and Hunter Biden, in the context of excerpts from a current New Yorker article by Liz Plank on changing views of masculinity in the US. Here's a bit from Liz Plank's article:

"President Donald Trump and his allies have tried a series of increasingly desperate tactics to derail former Vice President Joe Biden's campaign momentum. As these would-be October surprises fall flat, Trump surrogates appear to have reverted to the oldest tool in their political arsenal: attacking Biden's masculinity.

On Wednesday, John Cardillo, a host on Newsmax, a Trump-aligned media network, tweeted out a photo of Biden holding his son Hunter and kissing him on the cheek. "Does this look like an appropriate father/son interaction to you?" Cardillo asked.

"While Cardillo isn't an official Trump surrogate, his attacks are very much in line with Trump's incessant bullying of his opponent's masculinity. From mocking him for the size of his masks to simply calling him physically weak, Trump hasn't been subtle. Many male voters have taken notice. Because like many other institutions in America, fatherhood is changing. Men want to be able to express their love for other men, especially their sons. And they want to be able to do this without being called weak. To deny them this ability isn't just old-fashioned; it perpetuates a toxic societal cycle that can have dangerous consequences for young men and boys.

"Make no mistake: The presidential election will be a referendum on masculinity. And there is no better example of the contrasting attitudes of these two men than their behavior as fathers. While Trump believes that men who change their children's diapers are "acting like the wife," Biden took on every single one of his first wife's responsibilities (and far more) when she suddenly died in a car accident along with their daughter. While Trump is known for reportedly calling his son dumb, Biden publicly lauded his son Beau — calling him a better politician than he could ever be — after Beau passed away from brain cancer.

"Even when Trump tried to rattle Biden during the first presidential debate by calling his son Hunter a cocaine addict, Biden's unconditional and warm paternal response turned one of the ugliest moments in presidential debate history into a heartwarming one. "My son, like a lot of people ... had a drug problem," Biden said. "He's fixed it. He's worked on it. And I'm proud of him. I'm proud of my son.

...................

"I've spent the past few years speaking to men around the country. And what I've learned is that a lot of guys are yearning for permission to connect with others — male and female — and are eager for a gender revolution that sets them free to reveal vulnerability, affection and intimacy without their manhood's being scrutinized or questioned.

"I want to live in a world where boys are hugged more, not less. Especially during one of the darkest years in this nation's history. America needs a big warm hug and — and it needs a president man enough to do it."

........................

Adam reminded us that last Tuesday evening at 7pm was our last Boettiger family gathering on Zoom before the 2020 election, arguably the most consequential in American history. There was lots to talk about other than the election, and different perspectives about the election, but I send this to you because Liz Plank has other interesting things to say in that article, particularly about Trump's public comments about his daughters:

"Perhaps nothing else typifies Trump's questionable approach to fatherhood more than the way he treats his daughters. From openly flirting with and inappropriately touching his grown daughter Ivanka or speculating about the future breast size of his daughter Tiffany when she was but a toddler, Trump has objectified his children in strange and sometimes creepy ways. And Trump doesn't just want to talk about his daughters' bodies — he wants to take credit for them. When Ivanka was only 22, Trump told Howard Stern that she had 'got the best body,' and he bragged about the money she made modeling. 'You know who's one of the great beauties of the world, according to everybody? And I helped create her. Ivanka.' No wonder Ivanka Trump left fathers out of her parental leave policy proposal in 2016. It's not clear she ever had one.

"While we have always expected moms to be nurturing and physically affectionate, we're beginning to expect the same kind of emotional involvement and empathetic parenting from men. Fathers are still more likely to sing to their daughters and roughhouse with their sons, but all of this is changing rapidly. According to the Pew Research Center, fathers are spending far more time with their kids than in 1965. Fathers are also much more likely than mothers to report feeling like they don't see their kids enough. Men are growing up to become very different from their own fathers. A study by Dove Men+Care in 2015 suggested that the vast majority of men (86 percent, to be exact) believe masculinity means something different to them from what it meant to their fathers. But only 7 percent of the men surveyed said the guys they see on TV and in movies reflect their own attitudes toward masculinity."