Climate Change? Never heard of it.

 

It’s the time of year when we shift seasonal gears. Change clothes, get used to shorter days, etc. but this year Mother Nature has a bad case of dementia. Nothing is normal. Sweltering, deadly heat in France, where they don’t believe air conditioning will help, a dried up Lake Mead revealing sunken boats and mafia victims, and floods in Japan carrying away whole towns.

What the hell? It must be climate change, that quaint unassuming term someone back in the Reagan administration coined to replace “global warming” which sounded, you know, serious. Or as I like to call it environmental collapse.

How did we get here? Let’s travel back to the age of enlightenment when science was the new vibe. We loved running around labeling everything in nature and thanks to people like Rene DeCarte, Newton and Galileo we bought into the concept that the world was a lifeless machine we could take apart, figure out how it works and improve on it. Control nature, make it our bitch. Boy did we ever.

So here we are five hundred years later and in denial like a drug addict in a bad relationship trying to distance ourselves from the whole mess by insisting we didn’t cause, accelerate or otherwise enable this current state with our gluttonous, wasteful, destructive behavior like cutting down forests in the Amazon, dumping tons of plastic in the oceans and using fossil fuels as if there was no other way to produce electricity and, and—cars.

No wonder we got a crazy billionaire dreaming of going to Mars, maybe he’ll stay there and leave us alone.

The whole thing is depressing so I think I’ll just have a BBQ and beer in the back yard-- in November--in my shorts.

Cassandra Speaks-again

Back in April I wrote this series of predications during a moment of psychic clarity ( I think). Some of it I didn’t understand or waited to see if they came true. I deliberately used play on words, puns and allegory to be less obvious and give it poetry. I think I got some of it right.

Wheat grows strong against the cold wind,

to numbers never seen before, reverse the tide.

The scythe is dull, but the harvest is sharp.

This is about the mid terms. Wheat refers to the citizens voting and the result. The dull scythe is the Republican campaign against the sharp democratic rebuke.

Janus endows himself while madness, confusion consumes him.

 Anger builds with each blow of the horn, blood flows from the mouth.

The false name removed from the theatre signals the end.

Janus is Trump and describes his current mental state. The false name removed from the theatre is Trump’s name on the Kennedy Center.

See the lake empty, when the crescent moon rises,

the Shepherd’s crook broken when the Satyr has his fill,

the Mill stone cracks, No name leaves without a trace.

See the lake is a play on Mar a Lago and Trump leaving, so look to the moon for the time of month. The crescent might also refer to Iran. The shepherd’s crook is leadership and The Mill stone is Miller (get it?). No name is Christy Noeme and she’s gone now

Get Action

An election once again brings up the faulty notion that if “our side” wins, they will wave their magic wands and fix things. Whew, thank God. Well, no. I have been saying this for years – to no avail-- politics is NOT a football game. It’s not “our team is better than your team--nyah.” Democracy is messy and contentious, that’s what happens when you have many voices. It requires all members of Congress to make compromises to get anything done.

This may come as a surprise, but not all Democrats are liberal and not all Republicans are staunch conservatives. The recent raid or IIhan Omar is a good example. Many democrats did not sign a letter of protest of an investigation against her. 

Ultimately, it must be the people who are served not the government. We know how large and complex it has become. Too many agencies have created a vast unworkable bureaucracy. There has always been some measure of corruption, that happens with any business involving large sums of money and ego but now we are witness to vast, overt greed happening because the corrupt know they can get away with it. How? Division. Divide the people, divide the courts, divide a political party.

The machinery of government is so unwieldy that those elected, soon discover there’s no way to fix it. The best one can do is toe the party narrative to stay in power for money and health care benefits, you know, what we the people don’t have. Meanwhile the population feels powerless to enact any change and become complacent. When we elect officals, we must demand they include us in the welfare of the state.

Instead of scolding farmers who voted Republican then betrayed them, we must offer sympathy and aide because they are ones who put food on your table not a venture capitalist. We must be proactive and directly confront elected civil servants who have failed to preserve the country. That means calling or writing directly to your state representative or senator. That means protest, that means advocating for affordable living, universal health care (the US ranks below Costa Rica). That means working to improve education to the benefit of everyone. The lists goes on.

Show up at council meetings and raise your voice. Learn about and demand our constitutional rights be respected. That means eliminating ICE which is clearly engaged in illegal practices. That means repealing Citizens United, an Orwellian term that allows for obscene amounts of money to manipulate elections.

Don’t just vote, sit back and expect everything to be alright cause our team won this time, woo hoo. Demand they do the work they promised, demand they help everyone not just their cronies or their bank accounts.

Get action.

 

Here's to the Goils

Everyone should have some kind of clan to feel connected and several years ago me, my friends form Kindtree Mary-Minn and Eileen used o get together once a month to have a drink and bs about life.

Another friend of mine started a group for older women to look out for each other called The Bag ladies of the World (BLOWS). In a homage to that, I started calling the three of us “Goils” as a rebuke to grown women being referred to as girls. Eileen passed away but the gatherings grew to include more ladies who lunch, mostly from Kindtree.

I never had a real support group until later in life and so far it’s been a good excuse to get away from the house, have a drink and talk to someone.

Women have always formed kinship with other women to meet whether at the local well, doing laundry in the river or making a quilt. It’s a way to trade information, catch up on neighborhood news and health issues. It’s important in modern times, more than ever to keep those connections, they come in handy for survival of disasters personal and communal. We are social creatures and a phone or email is not the same as living interactions. Make a note gals and-- guys especially-- it’s good health to have a group you can share with and have a good time.

Here’s to The Goils.

Quote of the day

 Some things never change. . . don't even get him started on the music.

"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."

                                                                                    --Socrates