Sunday, September 25, 2011

POEM - Bones

Not sure why, but tonight I’m thinking
About bones
Bones buried deep in Central Africa,
Eastern Europe,
Bones between the Tigris and the Euphrates
Bones in the highlands of Vietnam
And the Mississippi Delta
Bones beneath the Vatican
Bones thirty feet below bustling avenues
Stacked in orderly rows in the catacombs
Of Paris
Mounds of femurs and ulnas, metatarsals and tibias
Bones with stories, bones with secrets
Bones blessed, bones cursed
Broken bones, misplaced bones, mismatched bones
Infant bones
Bones with memories of war and famine
Pogroms and purges
Revolutions and riots
Bones from the earth, of the earth
Bones yet to be discovered

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Lessons from a Monarch (Butterfly)

I watch a monarch butterfly float over our deck in the sunshine; it flutters and weaves, circles a purple flower and lights for a moment before taking flight again.

The light is lovely this afternoon, here on the Platinum coast of California, the American Riviera. The morning marine layer burned off early and now it’s a postcard day, a day tailor-made for tourists. I wonder where the tourists get the money to travel, which leads me to wonder how residents of this glorious city make the nut every month. What do they do or own that pulls in the big sums needed? Unemployment is high in California – higher than the official numbers suggest – but here the beat goes on as if the economy is humming.

If well off residents of the American Riviera have taken a hit, they manage to disguise the fact with relative ease.

It’s less easy for the working poor, but then everything is less easy for the poor.

When the monarch returns for another pass at the flowers, I ponder my fate if my job were to suddenly disappear. I have no illusions that it can’t happen to me because it can; no job is safe today. In less than a minute I have created – in my head -- a doomsday scenario full of desperation and degradation. In a blink my family and I are on the street, another charity case, another casualty, another statistical entry in a government database. Homeless. Destitute. Doomed.

It’s not class warfare when the wealthy and well-connected rig the political system to rob working people and the poor – it’s only class warfare when workers and the poor push back, speak up, make demands; then the rich mobilize talking heads and pliable journalists and the airwaves fill with slogans: “We can’t create jobs by taxing the producers.” “Tax cuts are the answer. Slash tax rates and jobs will appear, like mushrooms.” The truth makes no difference – it’s the slogan that matters, the crisp sound bite, easily and often repeated.

The news I read argues that more and more middle-class folks are losing their grip on the ladder and falling into the abyss where the American Dream becomes a nightmare. These are the stories that never make Good Morning America or the CBS Evening News – stories about a generation destined to fare worse than the one before.

All this from watching a butterfly? All this from pondering how people make the monthly nut? Shouldn’t I be thinking of something else on this sun-splashed day? Why can’t I understand that tax cuts for the rich mean jobs for the poor? It’s so simple. Wealth equates to virtue. The eye of the needle is a hindrance no more.

In flight the monarch appears to be playing, like a child on a playground, floating one way for a while, then abruptly altering course as the mood strikes. Happy butterfly. The reality, of course, is that the butterfly isn’t here for leisure or fun: it’s programmed to lay its eggs and die. Every egg doesn’t produce a caterpillar, and every caterpillar doesn’t become a butterfly. The monarch fights for life and continuance like every other species.

The monarch dwells here and now, and maybe that is all I can learn from watching it dance across my deck.

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

A Day to Forget?

I’ve never believed or felt that the horrible events of September 11, 2001 changed the world: what happened that day changed our perception of the world, and our perception gave birth to a mentality that has ensnared our country in a trap beyond Osama bin Laden’s wildest dreams.

I never bought George W. Bush’s assertion that 9/11 happened because Muslim terrorists hated “our freedoms”; my reading of history and geopolitics told me that the policies of the United States angered some Muslims to the point of fanaticism.

I don’t personally know anyone who died or was directly affected by 9/11. I can imagine, however incompletely, the sense of shock and loss; I can imagine the fear and grief; on an intellectual level I can understand the desire for revenge. If my wife or child had died in one of the towers that day, if I had lost a friend or colleague, a brother or sister, I’m sure my feelings about 9/11 would be different.

As it is, when I think about 9/11 I tend to focus on the American response to what was essentially a crime – diabolical to be sure -- but still a crime. Instead of engaging the world’s police resources to solve the crime, we launched a war in Afghanistan that at first succeeded and then became a failure; Bush and Cheney, along with a craven Congress (and let’s not forget our disgraced national media), compounded that error by abruptly invading Iraq on the flimsiest of pretenses. Thousands of innocent people died in these invasions; hundreds are still dying.

Iraq is a fragile and corrupt state and Afghanistan is even worse.

In between the wars, our hysterical political leadership behaved according to the script penned by Osama bin Laden and enacted the Patriot Act – a monumental assault on the civil liberties that set America apart from other nations.

The Patriot Act and the Department of Homeland Security it spawned still frighten me more than a hundred Osama bin Laden’s.

And while I appreciate the heroism of policemen and firefighters and EMT’s, and respect the bravery and compassion of ordinary people suddenly caught in an extraordinary event, I find endless memorials to them unsettling, in the same way I find endless references to our “brave men and women in uniform” unsettling. In my case, repetition of this message distracts and detracts. Yes, some members of our armed forces are brave and heroic and believe that what they’re doing protects America, but to hang the hero label on all of them is like saying that all public school teachers love kids.

We can’t let 9/11 go even after a decade of war and mourning, a decade of looking over our shoulder and around corners for humorless men in turbans, a decade of security scans and pat downs and warning messages boomed over loudspeakers, a decade of cowboy rhetoric.

We can’t forget and we can’t heal. We’ve locked ourselves into a war that can’t be won or brought to a close. And if we are any safer today than we were on 9/10/01, it’s only marginally so.

Monday, September 05, 2011

Hard Labor

The official unemployment in California is 12%. 14 million people are estimated to be out of work nationwide. The “real” unemployment rate is much higher. Job growth in August was flat.

Private sector labor unions are weaker this Labor Day than last, continuing their long decline, and public employee unions and their members have sustained fierce attack from Republican governors bent on solving fiscal emergencies by pushing government workers into the wage cellar with their private sector brothers and sisters.

Happy Labor Day.

After wasting the summer bickering about deficits and austerity, the political class has finally acknowledged the one issue that Americans actually care about: jobs.

And not the low-wage, no benefits, part-time jobs that Rick Perry boasts of creating thousands of in Texas – Americans want real jobs at living wages that will allow them to buy what they need, send their kids to college, see the doctor without needing to take out a second mortgage, and maybe even salt a little money away for their golden years.

President Obama will make a big policy speech about jobs this week though we’d be wise not to get our hopes up; Obama will hit the right notes as he always does, but action will not follow his rhetoric, and in any case the austerity mandarins of the GOP will immediately crow that we cannot afford to extend unemployment benefits or launch a second stimulus package. For a few days, maybe a week, the subject of jobs will sit front and center on the media stage and then be replaced by the usual economic reporting: the ups and downs of the stock market, whether or not investors are feeling confident or cautious, and how much dough CEO’s are taking home.

Most Americans are unaware of how much blood was spilled by labor activists to put a more humane face on American capitalism. Sweatshops, child labor, sixteen-hour shifts and dangerous working conditions were once the norm; workers were expendable, tossed aside when used up. No paid vacations, sick time, pension plans or overtime pay was offered until working people, men and women, took to the streets to demand a fair share and a seat at the table. This required guts and courage and determination and organization, a willingness to be bloodied today and come back for more tomorrow, to never back down, no matter how ruthless and hostile the mine and factory owners were.

Grit of that kind has disappeared.

I see them at 5:30 in the morning when I’m on my way to the gym. On foot or pedaling rickety bicycles, they carry backpacks and wear hooded sweatshirts as they make their way to jobs that I imagine are physically demanding, unpleasant and low paying. They are Hispanic or Latino, legal immigrants, maybe a few undocumented immigrants among them, here to work and make better lives for themselves and their families. That desire is immutable, crosses generations and cultures, motivates people to cross oceans, deserts and militarized borders; motivates people to make long commutes on crowded freeways; motivates people to get out of bed day after day.

Desire for something better lies at the heart of the American Dream. Work hard, play by the rules, take care of your family, and don’t expect something for nothing, and you can make a decent life for yourself. The implied promise of America, drilled into generations, and then slowly eroded by the failed ideology of free trade agreements, union busting, tax cuts on top of tax cuts, and corporate takeover of the political system.

14 million people unemployed. Millions more underemployed. Untold thousands who have given up all hope of ever working again.

Happy Labor Day, America.