Give up and put your clothes back on

 Here in New Hampshire we have reached the time of year when the house is never warm, but the weather isn't cold enough to justify running the heat. This will fade directly into the time of year when the house is never warm, even with the heat on. Glorious summer had its chance, and decided mostly to skip us this year. I'm not sure where it did show up, but it didn't book a long stay in New England.

In a typical year, May is full of promise and June is full of disappointments. Daylight doesn't automatically mean sunshine. Without sunshine, the relative warmth doesn't bake into your pasty, pale body in shorts and a tee shirt to compensate for the months you've waited. But then July seems to flip a switch. The heat lamp comes on and you can forget the other three-quarters of the year, two-thirds of it with leafless trees. If we're lucky, we get cool nights for sleeping and just hot enough days to enjoy the lakes and mountains. That's the image that everyone carries, anyway. Even before the climate really started to skid out of control, driven by people drunk with power and money, New England's weather had a well earned reputation for variability. You can't always get what you want, even if you're sure you remember it that way.

This summer was an endless June. Frequent rain, some of it so heavy that it caused destructive flooding, gave way only briefly to sunny days before the next batch of clouds arrived. We didn't see more than a moment of excessive heat, but nighttime temperatures were warm, and dew points high. We waited through what seemed like unending tepid gooeyness for brief visits of drier warmth. And now it's over. Daylight slips below twelve hours, soon to plunge faster and faster toward its low point three months away. The sun's angle drops to a stabbing glare when it shows at all.

If we lived in the tropics, the length of day wouldn't vary and the sun would always arc high overhead. A friend who lived in Ecuador for a couple of years said that you could choose your temperatures by changing your elevation. But forget the short, light nights of summer in more northerly latitudes. Forget long twilights, too. So we ride around the millions of miles of orbit ahead of us to get to our next shot at the light and warmth we hope for.

Every season has its attractions. I see people getting excited for autumn's cooler temperatures, bright foliage, and signature flavors. Some are also planning happily for the best of winter, that other highly weather dependent season. Another casualty of climate change, winter could easily turn out to be cold, dark, wet, and nothing more. In that case, there's always hot beverages and baked goods. But just the right  amount of usable snow for a couple or three months would be better for the economy and the scenery. And you'd still have hot beverages and baked goods. So go find the appropriate layers to wear for the moment and face the future.

Remembering 9-11 22 years later

 On 9-11-2001, Americans were stunned and highly offended when, after decades of meddling in other countries and destabilizing them with impunity for our own gain, someone had finally succeeded in attacking and destabilizing ours.

September 11th was a day of horror and heroism, when the few Americans suddenly thrust into the jaws of history met certain death with a sense of duty and service to their fellow citizens, while the rest of us had to watch helplessly. The passengers on Flight 93 and the first responders in New York engaged directly. No doubt the military and intelligence services were busy, but without concrete action they could take. The wider audience could only devour what news we could get, and wonder what would be next.

The recollection of great national unity is a myth. On September 12th I walked into my favorite coffee shop to find people shouting at each other over what country to bomb first. Anyone vaguely resembling a Muslim had a target on them. The culture of xenophobia got a surge of nutrients on which it still feeds.

In many ways, 9-11-01 brought us 11-8-2016. Predictably, we had our chance to be thoughtful and measured in our response, and ran off shooting instead. The architects of the attack knew this about us. While just under 3,000 people died in the attacks themselves, the death toll resulting worldwide is in the millions. Someone needed to die for what “they” had done to us, and it almost didn’t matter who.

Suicide bombers are not noble and heroic. They represent a sickness in the human psyche that comes out not just in spectacular events like 9-11, but in every sad and maddening murder suicide, whether it’s in a small apartment and barely makes the evening news, or a school or shopping mall or house of worship that triggers thoughts and prayers from sanctimonious politicians who intend to do nothing more.

It was never too soon to look inward and reflect on what the 9-11 attacks could tell us about our position and influence in the world, and it’s not too late, although it is too late for the casualties of our long wars since then. We learn to fit ourselves together in the finite space of this planet or we destroy it all in the battle for dominance.

A Dose of Strangers

As dusk settles on a day I've spent indoors, I get restless, looking out the windows at the darkening forest, even if I've spent the day doing useful or creative things. I recall the convenience of living in my grubbiest apartment, nicknamed The Slum, in the Eastport section of Annapolis. It's the only time I feel the faintest twinge of dissatisfaction at living surrounded by nature.

There was a shopping center, my bank, and a post office within a block or two. My commute to work was a five-minute bike ride or a fifteen-minute walk to a poorly paid factory job in a sail loft. I could get home from work in minutes.

Knee trouble had knocked me out of bike racing in the spring that year, so I didn't have the distraction of thinking that I needed to train. That freed up a lot of time. Juggling a couple of unsuccessful love affairs chewed up a few weekends at either end of the summer, but once I got bounced from those I had my evenings and weekends to myself.

My roommate was a racing buddy who had lured me into splitting the rent after his own previous cohab had taken him for a few hundred dollars and departed. Then, during the winter, he moved in with a woman in another apartment complex, where they could actually afford to pay for heat, so my solitude deepened with winter's advancing chill. We had made a pact never to turn on the electric baseboards, and I held to it. I was getting into winter camping anyway.

The living room was furnished with a few shabby pieces and several bicycles. My roomie left his bikes because his new girlfriend didn't have room in her cozy dwelling. The place was poorly lit after dark, the off-white paint of the living room walls horizontally striped in dashes made by the Velox handlebar plugs of four bikes that rested against them. The floor was dark wood. The ceilings were fairly high, although the architecture of the buildings was boxlike and uninspired. It was a great place to go out from, in search of light, life, and possible companionship.

Companionship is a distant ship, a welcome sight when it first comes over the horizon, but menacing in its anonymity as it draws closer. What flag is that? Who looks over the rail as faces become more distinct? The idea seemed nice. Why spoil it with actual experience? I could easily walk to the center of town, to enjoy the bustle of other people's lives while they obligingly showed no interest in mine. I might go to the infant Ram's Head Tavern, when it was a basement dive offering a galaxy of unusual imported and domestic beers, or I might just walk and walk, sitting for a time on different benches, laying out the map of the city based on all that I could hear.

I'd started the practice of walking to town right after college, when I returned to Annapolis after graduation. Annapolis was both familiar and unfamiliar, because of the way my family had come and gone from it over and over during my father's Coast Guard career. I walked from West Annapolis at that point, a bit farther, but a pretty walk, between the Naval Academy and St. John's College campuses, or, often, across the St. John's campus. During firefly season, the walks were enchanted by millions of tiny lights. It was on those walks that I started laying out the sound map, realizing how much of the area I could place spatially from any point.

I would log miles on my evening walks, without thinking about it. Walking is a great way to stimulate creativity and relaxation. Driving facilitates sloth, which can be mistaken for relaxation, but walking provides rhythm, exercise, and flow through the scenery. So does biking, but walking is often a better choice. Especially during the times when I was spending most of my time on the latest draft of my bad novel, or other creative efforts that kept me in a chair for hours, the ability to redeem the day with an evening walk was not only a great amenity, the walk itself was an opportunity to observe other lives and fit these snippets into current or future works. I called it a dose of strangers.

I do have a few dear friends, some of whom I might actually hear from occasionally. I didn't have anything against meeting people, I'm just not very good at it. So, playing to my strengths, I was content to observe, tending to any close passage with a courteous nod and a smile. I did try to kindle something with the young woman who worked the evening shift in a cool bookstore on Main Street, but she deflected the advance. That was still something to file away for possible fictional use, as was everything in those days. I would go home and write for hours before nodding off. Then the alarm would pull me up to crawl from the deep seaweed of fatigue in search of coffee and whatever the day had in store.

In my childhood, my father would go for drives after supper. Like a favorite dog, I would be invited along a lot of the time. But after the gasoline shortages of the 1970s made it obvious to me that petroleum was not something to squander, I wasn't going to drive aimlessly even if I had a car. So here I am now, with a choice between groping in the forest among creatures adapted not only to function but to prey in the dark, or to walk along the road, where hotrodders like to manufacture rubber smoke, and drinkers fling their empties, their driving precision not to be trusted. I don't want to be a lone figure in the headlights even if the oncoming or overtaking motorist is totally sober and sedate. This is doubly true of biking. The advantage of the city was that I could see and be seen without being unusual. And at the time Annapolis had little street crime. There was little to fear.

Hiking is grand. I love to hike. But my night vision was never great, and now it's worse, so I'm reluctant to bumble into a bear or accidentally drop kick a skunk while I'm fumbling around in the dark. And even though I know that coyotes are an asset and don't habitually attack humans, when they sing out nearby it still makes my hair stand up. I'm not going for a walk in the dark. I'll have to come up with something else. Or, as usual, peck idly at this or that until I notice that it's almost midnight and I should have gone to bed hours before.

Kids today...

 Skimming an article online from NPR, about two middle school girls who have a podcast about what it's like to be a middle schooler today, one thing stood out: active shooter drills.

When I was in the middle school years, the Vietnam War and racial tension stressed the country. As a military dependent, I knew a lot of kids who worried about losing a father. Outside of that circle, with the draft in full operation, I knew kids who worried about losing a brother. Hanging over all of this was the threat of nuclear war. None of us as young children had any idea what might trigger it, but we all knew that it would be much more abrupt and far reaching than the start of any other war in human history. But it was abstract. When a kid lost a family member to the war in Southeast Asia, it was on the other side of the world. Their loss was real, but the carnage took place off stage.

For the past thirty years or so, school children have had to prepare more and more for the carnage to erupt in the middle of their lives. With gun laws that are not only lax but openly supportive of the rights of the homicidal, the United States is a breeding ground for grievance murderers. Most of it happens piecemeal, in domestic violence or street crime. Applying the logic used around air crashes, you never hear about the thousands of schools that go year after year without a mass shooting. You only hear about the spectacular disasters. We're just supposed to accept the possibility. Could happen. Probably won't. And hey: your odds of survival are way better in a school shooting than in an airliner crash. Do your drills and keep your wits about you if the shooting actually starts. You fall to the level of your training, kids!

Mass shootings are not limited to schools, of course. Any public gathering could become a target range for some heavily armed, sad, angry person ready to let it rip. They might or might not be suicidal themselves. Often they have no intention of surviving, or at least don't expect to.

Death hovered near us in other ways in the 1960s and '70s. Schoolmates might lose a parent to cancer or a car crash. We might even lose a schoolmate to cancer or a car crash. One kid I knew drowned in a swimming pool. Those still apply today. The unlikely but far from impossible threat of a nuclear fireball (I spent a lot of school years near DC) has been replaced by the fairly unlikely but too-often repeated scenario of a mass murderer dropping by, in addition to the daily hazards. Does it make it harder or easier to take that you might be chopped to pieces by little bits of flying lead while a nearby friend manages to evade it? It's not even combat. You're being hunted by a wasteful killer with nothing but blood lust.

In the meantime, you have to worry about whether you look sufficiently fashionable to avoid ridicule, and hope that you don't do anything that will get you plastered all over the internet for decades of unanswerable humiliation. And an older generation grumbles constantly about your flaws.

A town too small to be good

Nationally and at the state level, some of the bad actors of politics and government are facing some consequences for verifiable and legally actionable corruption, as opposed to just batting away rumors and accusations in the shouting match that has kept us from enacting the sound, progressive policies that might actually create and maintain a pleasantly livable world for the children and grandchildren of those who decided to reproduce from the 1980s onward.

Little rays of hope shine into the gloom of the future. Will high profile criminals and traitors actually be indicted, tried, and convicted? Stay tuned. Will we actually start to deal with the climate crisis? Will we finally get an actual system of universal health care based on patient outcomes rather than corporate income? Will we go back to trying to accept each other's peculiarities rather than trying to eradicate them? Will we rein in rampant gun violence? Will we shine a light on corruption and waste where it actually occurs, rather than scapegoating social programs? It could happen. The US government and many state governments have strong enough constitutions and agencies to be able to enforce higher standards if the right people have the political will.

Some states are going the opposite way. The factions that have seized power are determined to hold it regardless of the naive notion of citizen government. But even there, a determined political opposition can maneuver against authoritarian takeover. They might even succeed. And states are big enough to attract national media attention. There are a lot of eyes on the big battles that define who we are as a nation.

Meanwhile, way down at the small town level, it's hard to find out what's going on. Here in New Hampshire, the state does little oversight of town governments. The smaller the town, the less money they have, and the less attention they attract. If corruption becomes the norm, no one will stop it if it becomes normalized. Cronyism, incompetent officials, revenge enforcement can go on unchecked because no one cares.

Correction: a minority of residents and voters cares, but small New England towns are direct democracies. Funny, that, because the conservative residents sneeringly tell you that "we live in a republic, not a democracy," and then go vote directly at town meeting on every issue, with absolutely no filter of elected representatives. Democracy, baby. In fact, it's damn near communistic. We all get together and decide how much money we need, compare it to how much money we actually have or can get, and figure out a budget.

You'd think it would be quite transparent, but town meeting is once a year. After that the select board and whatever professional town management you've scraped up the money for will be free to act autonomously, even exceeding budgeted amounts when a need is immediate. Sure, citizens can go to weekly select board meetings, but you have little leverage between elections. There is no debate among a regularly meeting body of legislators. The select board is all executive branch, with no checks and balances.

The winner of any election at this level is the person that gets the most votes. It is a pure popularity contest, like Prom King and Queen. If the majority of voters who show up prefers someone unqualified, or perhaps two or three of them in the course of a couple of elections, that's who will be running your town and setting your tax rate. It's a recipe for bad roads, environmental degradation, graft, and waste.

The American belief in the homespun common sense of country folk is generally complete bullshit. The same kinds of people tend to seek power at any level: the ones who see something in it for themselves and their friends. Where progressives try to broaden the basis of prosperity and acceptance to include more categories of minority, conservatives look out for their own people; the good people; the normal people; their kin and friends. And rural people are generally conservative.

It makes sense. People live closer to the real processes of survival in rural areas. They're more likely to have raised the animals that they later eat, or to have hunted a wild one, killed it, and prepared it for consumption. They raise crops, build and fix their own dwellings. The ones without generational wealth really do live close to that image of self reliance, insofar as anyone is self reliant. We all have to trade our skills or lend a hand, or get a hand, from time to time. A life like that makes a person calculate the cost and benefit of most actions. Unfortunately, at a governmental level -- even a dinky one like a town of a few hundred people without a true town center -- their calculations can lead to false economy, or to a few (thousand) bucks of town revenue going to a favored partner in an untraceable transaction.

It's not really untraceable. It's just that there is no real oversight unless enough townsfolk pay enough attention all the time, and still manage to overcome the loyalties of the close-knit group that benefits the most from keeping things vague and "good enough." In tiny towns, elections can come down to a single vote. Who are you going to complain to? First you have to untangle what happened. Then you have to make a case to have it investigated. At any level, your neighbors and your notoriously parsimonious state government will do their own cost benefit analysis and decide whether it's worth imperiling their own uneasy peace with neighbors or expending public funds to root out this one example of the kind of fiscal shenanigans that are probably found wherever you care to look.

I've lived here through an era of bad roads, no land use ordinances, and a really disgusting town trash dump. I saw it improve gradually. Now it's on the way down again. There's no one to tell, when even the rural news media know whose side they're on. The average citizen is just trying to earn a living and rest up from one work day to the next. We don't have time or resources to ride herd constantly on our public officials. I guess we're just really lucky that all of our town bridges are fairly new now, and none of the spans are very long. As for the rest of the roads, get ready for a bumpy ride. And don't be surprised at anything that gets built next door to you.

A Celebration of Death

People around me keep getting Covid. Business has been bad enough that I have not had to deal with crowds of people, so I haven't been overrun by hordes of mouth breathers, but I can't avoid all contact.

Recent sufferers all report rapid onset of symptoms from a very mild feeling of fatigue similar to what some of us feel much of the time anyway.

Since basically no one masks anymore, you have to decide whether to look like a freak. Meanwhile, we get even less information about the current symptoms and severity of the disease than we did at its height, when we got a fair amount more, but nowhere near enough. The response was forced to be 80 percent political and 20 percent scientific, so we did not have comprehensive data gathering and analysis to help us get the best understanding we could.

When everything shut down in March, 2020, we thought that our little bike shop was going to cease operation immediately, and maybe never return. Ours is a genuine small business, Forget fewer than 500 employees. We have fewer than five. But then we were declared essential, and a whole bunch of people suddenly wanted bikes that weren't there. So, then they wanted their old bikes refurbished. We were very busy, although we could hardly get basic repair parts, and certainly saw almost no new bikes. We relied on decades of experience and ingenuity to meet the demand.

The management took the pandemic seriously. We masked, put in air filters, put up barriers, and reconfigured service counters to control air flow and reduce contact with people. We imposed our protocols on customers, and lost a few as a result. I do not know how they fared against the disease itself, because we haven't seen them again. At least not so far. Sometimes people drift back in after years of nursing a grudge or just not needing our services.

Outside our windows we could see two establishments that did nothing to reduce risks. One was a church that ended up generating a cluster of infections. The other was a little sandwich shop. I was struck by the party atmosphere among the mingling, hugging, unmasked gatherings that I saw. On social media, this joyful defiance was even stronger. The advocates for normalcy at all costs seemed eager for the deaths that would come, some with a suicidal enthusiasm. The firm foundation of all of this was a bedrock of self-centeredness. The advocates of contagion held that the risk was fine because they themselves were fine with it. Anyone who wanted or needed to deal with them was forced to go out on that limb with them.

Now we're all out on the limb. The few who mask protect themselves and others, but masks are generally more protective of others, by filtering the breath of the wearer. In a sea of the maskless, the lonely mask is a leaky life raft.

We have incomplete information because most home tests go unreported. Even at the height of scrutiny we had incomplete information, and its distribution was hampered by political pressure. I get a general sense that most infections are much less severe, especially among vaccinated or previously infected people, but we still don't know about hidden or long-term effects of this new disease. It's also become a game of sorts, trying to deny the virus the victory of inflicting illness. By extension, the opponent is also anyone who has courted the disease and acted as its agent.

The problem is that the mask is not a secret weapon. You're putting it right out there, as plain as the filter on your face. In a public-contact business, that first impression influences everything that follows, as surely as ripping a loud fart, or choosing to wear politically provocative apparel. The mask is politically provocative apparel. Because it was made into a divisive issue from the beginning, it has had a stigma that only the mandates could overcome. Anyone who felt the need could say that they were wearing the mask because they were forced to. The rest of us could wear it without comment. It was the default, and naked faces were the outliers.

Masking helps reduce all infectious disease, but it's inconvenient and weird. It's isolating because it is an admission of concern and of possible contagion. It's more isolating when only one person in 30 or 50 is doing it. More people like to blend in than stand out. It's more comfortable to think that you can choose when and how to attract attention. This is a further burden on the decision whether to mask.

Once you get sick, you're sick. You can't dial it back. You're going to take that ride. It's automated. You don't know how long the track is or exactly how it is shaped. Either get out of the queue or prepare to get launched. You don't even know for certain if the restraints will keep you in your seat. Sure, life is full of uncertainties. You have to decide whether you'd like to add a few more and share them with a captive audience.

The stickiness of racism

 Someone posted a picture of Brazil nuts online the other day, as a test of racism, asking whether anyone used a certain term for them. Someone else I know posted a puzzled comment, because she didn't know the term. I, unfortunately, did. I knew right away what the original post was getting at.

I didn't grow up using the term. I was at least in my late 20s before I heard it. But it wedged itself into the jumble of other unnecessarily race-based terminology that had been common and socially acceptable among the people at whom it would never be leveled. A whole bunch of people who disapproved of lynching and would never burn a cross, who might even consider themselves color-blind in their egalitarianism would still chuckle at stereotyping jokes, and allow as how a much more flagrant racist was "entitled to their opinion."

With the expansion of civil rights came a wave of victim blaming that has helped keep racism viable for decades after the advances of the 1960s. "You can vote and go to the good schools now! It's all on you to catch up!" Black people in the media provided highly visible success stories, as well as wry commentary on the white world. Maybe the Black population really was sorting itself out according to its own desires, and we could all joke about our foibles.

Speaking of jokes, have you heard the one about the two Black guys who were told to lie down on top of a load of trash in a truck so it wouldn't blow out on the way to the dump? If you've heard it, it probably just auto-completed in your mind, whether you want it to or not. If you haven't heard it, you have to decide for yourself whether to accept it into your life. It's actually more of a redneck joke than a Black joke, but the punch line has the two rednecks who see the truck using the n-word, and it has the two Black guys in a job where they could be ordered to lie on top of a load of trash.

How about the joke about Black kids learning the alphabet? Or a commonly used derogatory term for improvised construction or mechanical assembly, which, in New England, might be referred to by the more laudatory "Yankee ingenuity?" Or a racist descriptive for an unhealthy selection of food and beverage from processed foods and soda pop as the morning meal?

My record on discarding and resisting these is scuffed and dented from collisions with their use. My transition has lasted since the 1970s. Prior to that I managed to be oblivious enough to the whole situation, as a dumb schoolkid in a lot of places where there simply wasn't much Black population -- sometimes none -- that it hadn't really come up. As soon as I did know about it, I approved of Black liberation in my little juvenile mind, and never changed that stance, no matter how ineptly I lived it. Meanwhile, the culture around me shifted away from blatant suppression and direct violence while it dished up plenty of separated equality, and terms of differentiation. Less visible to the white majority behind the public facade of Black advancement, separation and calculated inequality hollowed out the gains and kept racism thriving.

Guilt and fear drive white supremacy. They know damn well that this country owes a debt it can hardly repay, to the Black people who labored and the indigenous people who were shoved into undesirable corners, subject to extermination whenever they were deemed too inconvenient, so that the mythic greatness of America might rise. White labor was abused and exploited as well. That has contributed to poor white people resisting acknowledgement of the Black and indigenous claims for compensation, because the poor whites know that the rich will find a way to duck the bill and hand it off to people who can't afford to hire lawyers and buy judges and elected officials. Only through voting solidarity do we have the slightest chance of gaining leverage on government. It seems simple, but the concessions it will require from people who have prospered under the existing conditions almost guarantee that it will never happen.

Prove me wrong. The way will involve a few intermediate steps, but we never get anywhere if we don't all share the vision of where we need to end up.

More likely we go down in chaos and blood, because the defenders of the old ways are wedded to violence and willing to destroy everything if they can no longer control it. I don't prefer that, but I'd be remiss if I did not acknowledge it. It probably won't be the "race war" that some of them yearn for. We are at work on too many methods to destroy ourselves: environmental degradation, nationalist and religious militancy, criminal oligarchy, all of these actively erode the general welfare and domestic tranquility.

Knowing all of this, I still deal with the ugly crowd of racist epithets that pop into my mind whenever I see a Black person. These are terms that I never used in aggression, and never wanted to. They were just in the air, all around, and soaked in the same way repeated song lyrics do, as popular tunes go from Top 40 to Oldies, and never go away.

I often wonder what my thinking would be like if I had never been exposed to racism. What would my own brain come up with if it had not been loaded with terms and attitudes reflecting centuries of prejudice? I was probably in first grade when I started to learn that it was a big deal to see a Black person in a position of some authority and power. Instead of just other kids and adults in different skin tones, there was apparently a reason to differentiate, and I needed to have an opinion about that. On top of the basic academic stuff I had to absorb, and all of the other routine human aspects of growing up, I had to figure out the powers and responsibilities of inherited privilege, without feeling particularly privileged.

Not feeling particularly privileged, struggling white people push back hard and quickly against the concept. Racial identity was created by white people. It would have gone away if white people had been ready to accept Black people as fully equal fellow citizens back in the 1860s. Heck, I bet women still wouldn't have the vote if Black men had been given equal and unchallenged voting rights back then. Sexism crosses all color barriers. I'm not saying it's a good thing, but it's for damn sure a thing. When you imagine all the power that white people would have lost by granting full liberation to Blacks, think about what might have been gained in other precious realms of prejudice.

Lots of blood has been shed and lives have been destroyed trying to convince white men to lighten up. And maybe humans in general are so pig-headed that busting heads really was the only way to move forward. White men might -- for a very limited time -- have represented the least of all evils in our halting evolution into a truly enlightened species. But the iron fist always holds on for too long when a better way emerges. The fingers grip externally and in the mind, and need to be pried loose and melted down.