The Global Frontier

Years ago I drove my son Daniel to play ice hockey in Toms River, New Jersey. It was there I first encountered the famous “hockey parent” – grown-ups clanging cowbells and unleashing barrages of epithets at the other team. By the second period both sets of parents were howling insults across the rink. Daniel was eleven. Dan Fagin presents the town in a different light. Toms River, A Story of Science and Salvation is a parable of big industry running roughshod over a small American community. In 1949 Ciba, the giant Swiss chemical company, bought 1350 acres of forest and farmland in Toms River and built a dye manufacturing plant. “Dye manufacture had always been a waste-intensive business,” writes Fagin, noting that “the dye would leave Toms River, but the waste would stay.” At first Ciba buried its waste on the property, which became an early Superfund site. Later the company dumped directly into the river, and when that was thoroughly polluted, Ciba built a pipeline from the plant straight to the ocean. When parents raised alarms about a childhood cancer cluster, the company strong-armed local officials, threatened to relocate its jobs, claimed its chemicals were trade secrets, and emitted black smoke only at night.

Eventually, the company left New Jersey for the lower wages and more relaxed regulations in the South, and ultimately for Asia, where China “is now the largest producer and consumer of the world’s most heavily used toxic chemicals.” The dye, the jobs, the pollution had left, but the waste stayed in Toms River.

My Blog and Us

This is my 302^nd post on a blog I began on January 2, 2012. It seems a good time to take stock and to look ahead. I started with eleven readers and now have 197 “registered subscribers,” so it’s fair to say I have not become a virtual rock star. But that's not my goal now, even if maybe it was when I began. In fact, if I had had a clue about branding and marketing, I probably wouldn’t be as proud of what “Perspectives” is . . . and what it might yet become. Nor would I would feel the same connection to its readers. My goals are (1) to use my own experiences to connect our personal lives to larger issues and (2) to offer some small thought that might make you look at the world a little differently, or even just to laugh, with me or at me. The blog is neither a journal nor an editorial; it is simply a shared reflection. Now I want to take it out into the world more, to explore new places and listen to other voices, and to share them with you.

My plan is to write two or three posts a week instead of five. Don’t worry, they will be just as short and shallow as ever. There just won't be as many, for I do know that the main virtue of this blog is its brevity. I love this journey. I have learned so much, and I am grateful for your companionship.

The Other Explosion

The tragedy in Boston has so saturated the news that the explosion in West, Texas, two days later, has become almost a sidebar. Yet the blast that destroyed the West Chemical and Fertilizer Co. killed 14 people (so far) and injured about 200, in a town of 2,700. The detonation of 540,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate (which Tim McVeigh used in Oklahoma City) registered 2.1 on the Richter scale and sent a mushroom cloud into the sky. There are important differences between the two events. One was carefully planned; the other an accident. One activated our worst fears of terrorists bringing war to America’s streets; the other involved the second-largest employer in a small town. One featured a deadly chase through suburban neighborhoods; the other leveled the community. One was premeditated murder; the other was the result of negligence. What they had in common was the extraordinary outpouring of compassion and courage at the scene. In West, almost all of those who died were volunteer first responders.

For its victims, terror comes in many guises – homegrown, imported and corporate, to name three. Preliminary investigation indicates that the Texas plant was storing much more ammonium nitrate than the company acknowledged, and federal regulators cited five “serious” violations when they last inspected the plant. They fined it $30. That was in 1985. Corporations bring jobs to a community, and “jobs” has become the great mantra of American politics. But as we have seen in Love Canal, in Toms River, and now in West, Texas, we need to pay attention to more than the economics.

Battle Royal

Kings Midas and Canute are alive and living in the Hamptons. Midas, as you may remember from your studies of ancient Greece, was offered one wish as a result of an act of kindness, and he asked that whatever he touched be turned to gold. His wish was granted (an outcome which current Greek politicians are desperately trying to replicate), and he went merrily around his palace showing off. . . until he tried to kiss his daughter. Canute, who ruled Denmark, Norway and England a millennium ago, sought to teach his fawning courtiers about the limits of human power by ordering his throne brought to the beach, where he commanded the waves to stop. They didn’t.

Canute offered his lesson on the beach of Southampton in Hampshire, England. It is a lesson lost on the modern plutocrats of Southampton, Long Island. A recent article in The New York Times tells the stories of billionaires building huge fortifications to protect their beachfront mansions from the next Hurricane Sandy. It is a modern fable of hubris, as hedge fund managers seek to impose their wills on nature with little understanding about how nature operates and less regard for the impact of their actions on others. The erosion of the public beaches being caused by the heroic battles to save their vacation homes is just collateral damage. Their insistence on the primacy of their private property rights over those of the public square is yet one more example of the tragedy of the commons.

Patriots Day

I cannot, and do not want to, compete with the events now unfolding in suburban Boston. Today is the original Patriots Day, when the American Revolution began in Lexington and Concord with what Ralph Waldo Emerson called “the shot heard round the world.” It is also the day in 1995 that Timothy McVeigh blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, and it is the day the siege at Waco ended. May the killing stop.

One Powerful Man

With 54 of 100 senators voting in favor, and strong popular support in the country, Senate Bill 649 was defeated yesterday. The Safe Communities, Safe Schools Act of 2013, a compromise offered by NRA members Joe Manchin (D) of West Virginia and Patrick Toomey (R) of Pennsylvania, would have required background checks for online and gun show sales only. But the National Rifle Association, which once supported such checks, threw its money and muscle into the fight, as Wayne LaPierre, its executive vice president, has emerged from the carnage in Newtown as one of the most powerful men in America. We have come a long way since 2000, when a single Supreme Court vote gave George Bush the mandate to invade Iraq. Yesterday, a majority of senators could not pass a bill. Much is being made of the partisan nature of the vote: only four Democrats voted no and four Republicans voted yes. But consider this: according to a recent study, the ten states with the most gun violence are: (10) Georgia; (9) Arkansas; (8) Missouri; (7) New Mexico; (6) South Carolina; (5) Mississippi; (4) Arizona; (3) Alabama; (2) Alaska; (1) Louisiana. In those ten states, 15 senators (75%) voted against SB 649, including two of the four Democrats, Mark Begich of Alaska and Mark Pryor of Arkansas. The only Republican to vote yes was John McCain.

Note the absence from the list of all those big urban states, which are actually curbing gun violence in their cities. Meanwhile, the most gun-violent states want no checks. Sometimes you reap what you sow.

“We Lost Our Compass”

“I had not recognized the depths of torture in some cases. We lost our compass.” James Jones, co-chair, Task Force on Detainee Treatment. Almost a half century ago, when I was stationed in Europe, I asked a Dutch friend how she had learned her flawless English. She told me that, after the Allied liberation of her country, all Dutch schools taught English from kindergarten on. “We loved everything American,” she said. Our subsequent efforts at liberation haven’t gone as well. The images of hands desperately grabbing at helicopters lifting off from the embassy in Saigon in 1975 remain vivid, and they have been updated in Afghanistan by stories of interpreters who cannot get exit visas and fear for their lives and the lives of their families. Are we to think that Vietnamese, Iraqis and Afghans are less able to understand their own liberation than Europeans were? Or has something changed in how we wage war?

After World War II, the United States pushed for the prosecution of Nazi officials for war crimes, including torture, at Nuremburg. According to the bipartisan report on detainee treatment released yesterday, “it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture,” which was approved by the president. Our actions, it concluded, were both unjustified and ineffective. Above all, they violated our values. “The United States has a historic and unique character,” said Asa Hutchinson, task force co-chair and undersecretary for Homeland Security in the Bush Administration, “and part of that character is that we do not torture.” Unfortunately, according to his own report, we do.

Boston

I have no insights into Boston’s tragedy, but it brought to mind something my son Jake said to me on Saturday: “Sometimes I think we are running our evolutionary course, just like all other species do.” We were talking about environmental issues – global warming, massive extraction of resources, poisoning the air and water, 7 billion people increasing exponentially – but how we treat the earth is inextricably tied to how we treat each other. Yesterday brought a horrific reminder that some people treat humans as callously as nature, and when the terror strikes so close, we must realize that we can no longer try only to insulate ourselves from it. The world seems a bleaker place this morning. Three people dead, including an eight-year-old boy, others suddenly without legs, a day of celebration defiled. And yet for the rest of us, “life goes on,” a phrase that evokes the resilience of the human race. But it can’t go on like this forever, and we are the only ones who can change it. And if we do not, if we run our evolutionary course and vanish from the earth, who will care? Certainly the earth won’t. It will miss us no more than it misses the dinosaurs, and undoubtedly less since we do so much more damage to it. This is not about saving the earth. It is about saving ourselves. On the day after three tragic deaths, we need to affirm life.

Spring

Yesterday wasn’t technically the first day of spring, but it felt like it. As I set off for my weekend battle with the vines that are strangling trees along a small stream, the sky was clear and light blue, the sun warm, and a northwest breeze kept the humidity in check. Absorbed in my work, my arms bleeding from the thorns of the multiflora rose, I suddenly heard the stream beside me. It has been there all along, of course, but I hadn’t been paying much attention. Now, as the water moved through a shallow riffle, I became so struck by the sounds it made that I sat down and listened, watching it flow over glistening stones. I’m not much of a naturalist, but what little I know I have learned from unexpected moments such as these, when the sounds and colors of the natural world gently push themselves into my consciousness. I worry that we are increasingly moving our efforts to understand this world indoors, particularly for children. For reasons that range from the price of insurance to focusing on test scores, schools don’t send their students much into nature anymore, and we have replaced real experiences with computer models and simulations. There are people sounding the alarm on this, particularly David Orr and Richard Louv, whose book, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder, tells a story in its title. We can learn a lot from our computers, but we can’t learn to love an abstraction. And if we don’t love the natural world, we won’t take care of it.

Nukes

I know this isn’t a good time to joke about nuclear packages, but Anthony Weiner is back in the news. The eponymous former Brooklyn Congressman is thinking of running for mayor of New York, which is what he was doing in 2011 when his campaign was derailed by the viral photograph of his crotch. The tasteful self-portrait was taken by the congressman himself, who then absent-mindedly tweeted it to 45,000 people. Weiner’s claim that the photo depicted someone else was difficult to verify absent a line-up, but his story quickly unraveled, and he resigned from Congress on June 21, 2011. Now he is back with a large campaign war chest, a supportive wife, young child, and an 8,000+-word profile coming out in The New York Times Magazine.

On the other nuclear front, former Vice President Dick Cheney yesterday told Congressional Republicans that “we’re in deep doo doo” with regard to North Korea, indicating that, while Denis Rodman’s recent visit to the gulag state has done little for international relations, it has certainly lowered the bar for diplomatic language. According to CNN, Cheney said that Kim Jong Un “is unpredictable and doesn't share the United States’ worldview,” which has also been said about Dick Cheney.

Meanwhile, NPR was reporting that South Koreans were calmly going about their lives, ignoring the “playground bully” and telling the world to call his bluff, which is unfortunately one thing that really makes bullies mad.

I apologize for the late post. The server was apparently hacked and down for the entire day. My daughter, Annie, called to make sure I wasn’t dead. This post will be Thursday/Friday’s.

Big City Blues

America has long loathed its big cities. At least since Thomas Jefferson’s vision of sturdy yeoman farmers as the backbone of the nation (never mind that Jefferson owned hundreds of slaves), we have looked on our cities as places of filth and disease, low morals and high crime. So obviously, those places where Americans are most fearful are our big cities. Or not. On a list of the 10 cities where people feel least safe, published by 24/7 Wall Street, New York cannot be found, nor Chicago, Los Angeles nor any of America’s largest cities. Instead, we find Beaumont, Texas; Rockford, Illinois; Yakima, Washington; Stockton, California. The average population is 385,555, and only Memphis has more than a million people. Forbes list of the most murderous cities is less surprising: Washington, New Orleans, Detroit are on it. But even here, the average population is 561,546, and only Philadelphia exceeds a million.

We have too long overlooked the roles our large cities play. They are centers of art and culture, commerce and education. For immigrants, the small-town restless and artists, they are destinations, places of opportunity and personal independence. “City air makes men free” went the old adage, and serfs could actually claim their freedom in medieval cities. And cities are not just composed of millions of rootless people. They are characterized by communities, both of interest and ethnicity. Dynamic cities do not fail; stagnant cities do – and it is in our smaller and declining cities, where opportunity has disappeared and communities have eroded, that fear rules the streets.

The Iron Lady and the Teflon Cowboy

"What we are now doing to the world, by degrading the land surfaces, by polluting the waters and by adding greenhouse gases to the air at an unprecedented rate – all this is new in the experience of the earth. It is mankind and his activities that are changing the environment of our planet in damaging and dangerous ways" (Margaret Thatcher, Nov. 8, 1989). There was much to dislike about Margaret Thatcher, but she was no Ronald Reagan, the national leader with whom she will be eternally coupled. She was one of the first major politicians to grasp the damage that humans were doing to he earth; he assured us that “trees cause more pollution than automobiles do.” Nor did Thatcher’s England bear much resemblance to Reagan’s America. While both countries suffered from the global economic affliction dubbed “stagflation,” Britain, in the 1980s, had become a sluggish place whose sclerotic labor movement and clubby conservatives both seemed to be forever looking backward.

The short-term benefits of liberalizing the economy were clear and necessary, but the long-term price of a philosophy that ignored the poor and blamed the victim, that undermined both the safety net and the social contract, has proved as divisive in England as it has in America. In the wake of Thatcher and Reagan, we have become heedless societies, increasingly unconcerned about creating an inclusive community.

And climate change? Thatcher recanted in 2003. An Oxford-trained chemist, she did not dispute the science. She was upset the issue had become a rallying point for liberals.

Lessig and Pell

When Haven Pell stopped by my house a month or so ago, we had not seen each other in 50 years. We had become friends at the age of four, and one year for his birthday, Haven’s mother took us to the Howdy Doody show in New York, where we sat in the legendary Peanut Gallery. We met again this winter because Haven had discovered that we were both “sunset” bloggers, who were interested in thinking about and sharing what we had observed over the years. Our perspectives and our politics are different, but we both believe that something has gone seriously wrong in Washington, and we want, not just to point out the obvious, but to work for change. It is how we try to avoid self-indulgence. Last night Haven’s blog showed up in my inbox. It was short, because we are conscious that our “free” posts demand your valuable time, and we don’t want to abuse it. So he just urged readers to watch Lawrence Lessig’s TED talk on the financing of federal politics. I beg you to do the same. Here is where this country’s growing wealth disparity, the Citizens United case, and feckless career politicians combine to threaten our republic.

PS If the links don't show up above, cut and paste this: http://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_the_republic_we_must_reclaim.htm

Haven's link is www.libertypell.com

Stumble of the Week

A once-regular feature returns. • Honor. America’s continues to stumble at Guantanamo Bay, where people disappear, seemingly forever, into a place that violates our most basic principles. A hunger strike expanded this week to dozens of inmates, although the only people who seem to notice are the ones who already detest us.

• Language. Newt Gingrich and his Orwellian bombast are back, talking about gay marriage and the “tyranny of secularism.” In the new speak of the far right, the efforts of people to participate fully in American society are deemed a threat to the beliefs and institutions of those who disagree with them. Asserting your place in the communal fabric is, apparently, not justice, but tyranny.

• Education. The indictment this week of 35 teachers and administrators in the Atlanta school system illustrated, as if we needed another demonstration, that the lowest people on the educational totem pole are the children. Mimicking hedge funds and investment banks, the Atlanta system doled out huge bonuses to those who made their numbers. They made their numbers by cheating – by erasing their students’ wrong answers on the standardized state tests and checking the right boxes. One principal even wore gloves so as not to leave fingerprints. What these people did was wrong, but it was abetted by a system that – from No Child Left Behind to all the reforms it has spawned – is obsessed with quantifiable results, has little use for true learning and treats children like assembly-line products.

Bully Boys

Kim Jong-un’s creepy behavior has now been traced to his brief stint on the Rutgers Basketball Team under Coach Mick Rice, who was fired yesterday, after a video showed him kicking his players, throwing balls in their faces, and screaming homophobic slurs. One of his regular targets, it turns out, was the 5-foot, ¼-inch dictator, whom Rice derisively dubbed “Little Queen.” Kim demanded to play power forward, but Rice told him to “get your G**ky ass over with the point guards,” suggesting he run through the forwards’ legs. Kim couldn’t dribble, and he only passed the ball to his bodyguard. But his threats to shoot were taken so seriously that the other point guards quit the team. Rice rode him mercilessly. “Kim,” he sneered. “That’s a girl’s name. Is it short for Kimberly?” And from then on, his name was “Kimberly,” even though he has a long list of official nicknames that include Outstanding Leader, Great Successor, Brilliant Comrade, Young General, Young Master and Lil Kim (!).

North Korean propaganda insists that Kim went to Rutgers, not to play basketball, but to “learn bullying at one of the best places for that,” and it’s no coincidence that he is threatening nuclear war on the eve of the Final Four, college basketball’s biggest weekend, nor that he has hired Denis Rodman to coach his 2016 Olympic team.

Breaking News: American rapper Lil’ Kim (“Hard Core,” “The Naked Truth”) is suing Kim Jong-un for identity theft.

Now and Then

I was walking yesterday on a trail called “Main Road,” which is a good indication of its degree of difficulty, when I tripped on a small root and fell on my face. I got up, cursed myself for being old and clumsy, and walked on. I realized that I walk inside my head, lost in my thoughts and unaware of my surroundings and the dangers they hold. So I made a Zen-like effort to pay attention to the world around me. It was a cold and beautiful day, more like fall than spring. The trees were still bare, and little was blooming except skunk cabbage along the stream. About 15 minutes later, absorbed now in the nature's beauty, I went down again. Lying there, I wondered, “How do you fully experience the place you are in and still keep moving?” This is an especially poignant question for the elderly, who are in no particular hurry to get where we know we are going, even as time speeds us along the way. Perhaps this is what drove Albert Einstein to his ideas of relativity, in which space and time fuse into one. In a letter to the family of a friend who had died, Einstein wrote, “for us physicists (sic) believe the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one." If only he’d left out the last phrase.

Stockman’s Screed

David Stockman, the aging boy wonder who was Ronald Reagan’s budget director at 34, wrote a 2700-word op-ed piece in Sunday’s New York Times. Its bottom line was “get out of the markets and hide out in cash.” Stockman takes us on quite a journey to get to this simple point. He tells a tawdry story, peopled with many scoundrels and few heroes, an eight-decade morality play of government excess, corporate greed, entitlement explosion, political cowardice and intellectual dishonesty, in which the losers are the 99% of Americans, and especially the poor, while the winners, at least for now, are the greedy manipulators of finance and their bi-partisan henchmen in Congress, the oval office and, above all, the Federal Reserve Bank. It’s a relentless, depressing march to Armageddon – one that is actually part of a long American tradition of populist anger that stretches from the Whiskey Rebellion to the Tea Party. Sometimes the issues change: in the 1890s the insurgents wanted cheap money; Stockman (and the Doctors Paul) want a return to the gold standard. Its twin villains are Washington and Wall Street. Its solutions are less clear: “These policies have brought America to an end-stage metastasis,” writes Stockman. “The way out would be so radical it can’t happen.”

From a curmudgeonly conservative, this is a disquietingly bi-partisan indictment. Stockman challenges the core policies of both parties, and his analysis of a country whose answer to everything is, as George Bush urged, to “go shopping” is too insightful to be dismissed.

April Digression

“We do not inherit the world from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children,” David Brower famously said. Or did he? I googled. Some attribute the quote to Moses Henry Cass, an Australian Minister for the Environment; others to Helen Caldicott, the anti-nuclear advocate. Chief Seattle, as always, has strong support. Brower was delighted to get credit for something he didn’t remember saying: “I searched my unorganized files to find out when I could have said those words. I stumbled upon the answer in the pages of an interview that had taken place in a North Carolina bar so noisy, I could only marvel that I was heard at all. Possibly, I didn’t remember saying it because by then they had me on my third martini.”

I thought of the quote when I was walking recently through East Marlborough Township’s wastewater-treatment field. It’s a beautiful spot, marred only by the hundreds of spigots that periodically spray the people’s private waters onto their common ground. Some criticize the field’s current use, but to me it seems preferable to another suburban subdivision – and far better than the old practice of sending sewage into the stream. Not long ago, a scientist told me that every municipality that releases its “clean” wastewater into a stream should have to put its drinking-water intake pipe just downstream from its wastewater discharge pipe. I don’t own this field, but I consider the hours of peace it has given me an inheritance, and I hope future generations will see its beauty, and not think of it only as the place the community deposits its wastes.

Good Grief

I have never really understood Good Friday, beginning with what’s so good about it. Today is the lowest point on the Christian calendar, the day a charismatic young man, recently come back from the wilderness where he had turned down Satan’s transparently better offers, was nailed to a cross. Over the intervening 2,000 years Christians have killed a great many Jews in retribution, so it obviously hasn’t been a good day for everyone. Crucifixion was a not uncommon and excruciatingly slow way to die (remember the scene with the crucified slaves from Spartacus?), and it has both horrified and baffled me since I was a child. I spent five years in a church school, where these were not incidental questions, and I have listened since to ministers and radio preachers say that Christ died for me, for us, for our sins. This doesn’t get me very far, and when I press for more, I'm told that the crucifixion is the sign of God’s love for mankind. I remember that sacrificing your child had also come up with Abraham and Isaac, and as the father of four, it never sat very well with me.

As I grow older I am learning, slowly, to take responsibility for my own sins, which isn’t nearly as easy as blaming someone else. But it seems so indispensable to my self-understanding that I’m reluctant to farm it out. Perhaps, Jesus is the image of each of us accepting ourselves and our lives, as painful as that can be. Just no nails, please.

John Wesley Powell

Sixty years ago Wallace Stegner published Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West. It’s a wonderful book about an extraordinary man, a one-armed Civil War veteran who became the first to navigate the Grand Canyon by boat, a journey so terrifying that three of his small crew took off at Separation Canyon, climbed the Colorado’s steep walls and were never seen again. Powell went on to a long career as an explorer and government agent. He was a staunch critic of the national obsession to overdevelop the west, arguing that its water resources couldn’t sustain the massive agriculture he foresaw. He pushed the novel idea of creating political boundaries based on natural watersheds. Stegner reprinted a rainfall map that shows why: east of the 100^th meridian the country has plenty of rain; west to the Rockies it is mostly desert. But governments and homesteaders ignored Powell’s warnings. Embracing the widely held and thoroughly debunked theory that “rain follows the plow,” they made the Great Plains bloom –nowhere more so than Nebraska, which became one of America’s most productive agricultural states. What it lacked in rainfall, it made up by finding itself atop the huge Ogallala aquifer and its seemingly endless water.

But Powell’s vision of a west of small farms, animal grazing and land protection has proved prescient. According to a recent study, Nebraska has become the driest state in America, all of it in the grip of severe drought, which caused last year’s wheat production to decline by 18%.