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Time and the swelling tide

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I was just out walking in the town I live in.  An unseasonably nice day, warm and breezy, like the best days of early fall.  Then it hit me: my generation may very well be the last to experience habitable climates on most of Earth.

It is almost certainly too late to adopt enough changes to avoid disaster.  As for our social preoccupations, they are vexing, for sure, but not nearly on an order of magnitude comparable to environmental issues.  No matter how our current crises play out, how sordid or how sublime our responses to the xenophobia raging across the planet, it will all take its place in history, alongside all the ages, dark, golden, or forgotten.

If there still is history.  If the effluent we keep pumping into the air leaves us with a future, let alone history.

In a way, it’s a self-correcting problem.  Either we correct our course, which seems increasingly unlikely, or we render our planet inhospitable.  In either case, our cultures will change, and our sheer numbers will decrease, in the former case by intelligent design, in the latter by brute force.  The earth will return to its inanthropic cycles, none the worse for wear, to whatever state counts as normal.

We are far too young a species to grasp what that is.  Earth has passed through phases as diverse as completely covered with ice, an atmosphere poisonous to virtually any life, and desiccation more severe and universal than anything since we crawled out from our ancestral apes into the brave new world.  Through most of it, life had yet to occur, much less evolve, and even when it had, it clung tenuously to existence.  At least five times since it’s emergence, life has been almost wiped out.  Even our own species was squeezed through a fine and narrow filter some 60,000 years ago, when genetics point to a breeding population of Homo sapiens of less than 2,000.  Some scholars speculate that it was during this period that our evolving intelligence was given a swift kick to accelerate it, in response to the demographic crisis.

Given how that is turning out, I’m not very optimistic.  I hope I’m wrong.

Courage, America, s’il vous plait

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At this writing, the governors of 24 states, all but one of them Republican, have announced they will block the settlement of refugees in their states. It seems clear they don’t have the authority to do that under the constitution they are always on about revering, but it makes for political fodder in a year leading up to a major election. Conservatives contrast themselves from liberals by claiming they respect loyalty and duty above all. Such generalizations mean nothing if you can change the particulars any time a risk is involved.

I don’t generally bandy about words like courage and cowardice; God knows I’ve fallen short too many times in the past. But the bar for the settlement of refugees seems low enough even for someone like me. Yes, there is some risk involved, but relatively little. Only one of the attackers in Paris was identified as a possible refugee, the rest were either French or Belgian citizens. Even that one case is far from clear. The fact that the Syrian passport survived the suicide bomber’s destruction suggests it was meant to be found. French police are looking at the validity of the passport as a result.

In spite of your favorite movie or video game, courage is not a matter of acting without fear; it is acting in spite of fear, because a greater good will result. Surely we Americans, so proud of our toughness, can accept the small risk involved with the settlement of refugees from the very people we are so afraid of.

Actually, it would be comforting, in a weird way, to think all of these governors were simply cowards, but I think their real motivation lies in the realm of politics. The Republican party’s lifeblood is fear. They miss no opportunity to exploit it to their advantage, and this latest move falls right into place alongside their rhetoric about Mexican immigrants. This, to me, is far more despicable than mere cowardice, over which one may have little control.

I’ll keep this short. Do you remember all those veterans you were falling all over yourselves to thank last week? Well, this is your opportunity to step up and accept a small amount of risk, and show what you’re made of. That will make all that gratitude so much more meaningful; it won’t look so much like you were just glad to be off the hook for courage.

How red meat is like … red meat

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I go through long periods when I just can’t seem to finish anything: poetry, fiction, essays, it doesn’t matter. I work at it. I take notes, jot down ideas, begin paragraphs, sit in coffee shops streaming my consciousness. No matter how promising it looks, or, in desperation, how passable, I just can’t seem to pull the trigger. It’s a log jam (I won’t use the more obvious metaphor, although, as you’ll see, it’s more appropriate).

Then something comes along that just pushes the rest of it through willy-nilly.

For the last couple of days, the news has been all over social media that WHO has declared red meat to be “probably” carcinogenic. Vegan friends are beside themselves crowing, rubbing our faces in it with a vicious glee. There is nothing more likely to raise the hackles of the normal person.

Sometimes, though, it’s better to let sleeping hackles lie. The rest of us might experience that rare motivation to check things out for ourselves, rather than believe the first meme that comes along.

First of all, WHO has also declared the night shift to be probably carcinogenic. It’s not exactly an exclusive category. It’s just a statement of statistical fact; no attempt is made to judge how much of a danger it really represents

In the case of red meat, it seems that daily consumption of more than 100 grams is correlated to a 25% or so (the figures vary, depending on what you’re reading) increase in the incidence of colorectal cancer. “Yikes!” you might say. But what does this actually mean?

For some reason, WHO appears to have conflated processed meats with red meat for this study, so it’s difficult to assess either category by itself. It also appears to have ignored other lifestyle factors, but let’s go with what we’ve got.

The incidence of colorectal cancer in the general population is about .04%. Eating red meat raises your chances to a whopping .05%; that’s right, an increase of .01%.

Friends, you are more likely to die driving to the grocery store to buy the red meat than you are from eating it.

Damned PC!

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Tired of all the political correctness? Hey, me too! Here’s a list of the rules of political correctness from when I was young.

• If you’re black, always defer to a white person
• If you’re female, always defer to a male
• If you’re a white male, always show your superiority by using the words nigger, chink, spic, pollack, and sheeny every chance you get
• Remember, when a woman says no, she means yes
• If someone uses a racial slur, a good-natured laugh and hearty agreement are the best responses
• Always laugh at jokes at the expense of minorities or women
• Never show an interest in shop class if you’re a girl
• Never show an interest in home ec if you’re a boy
• If you’re male, love sports. or at least pretend to
• If you’re female, wear clothes that emphasize your sexy bits, and give in to rape graciously
• If you’re an overweight college girl, be grateful when a frat boy takes you to an “ugly date” party
• If you’re male, always remember, no matter how ugly or disgusting you are, you get to pass judgment on the appearance of any female

Well, that’s just a few; there were many more. Bet you’re surprised that we’ve been fighting PC much longer than you suspected!

The art of surrender

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Surrender has gotten a bad name, mostly because people misuse it grammatically. Try this:

Find a comfortable place to sit, with the lights turned down low. Close your eyes. Think of everything that irritates you, intimidates you, even infuriates you. Bring it all clearly to mind. Visualize it as sharply as you can. Then, surrender.

Not to anyone or anything. Don’t surrender to your enemies, or to your friends. Not to your thoughts or fears, your desires or misgivings.  Don’t surrender to life, the universe, fate, or Jesus. That’s the intransitive use of the word. Surrender transitively.

Surrender your resistance, to life, to pain, to joy, to temptation, to yourself. Just let go. You will find a stubbornness; surrender that, too. You will find skepticism and credulity; let them both go.

You might think that by surrendering resistance to, say, temptation, you will be giving in to it. Instead, if you really surrender, you’re more likely to find any particular temptation suddenly less appealing. You might find that the pain you’ve been resisting vanishes.

Try it. Then keep trying it.