The Magic Words

Live = Free. Live - Free = Die.

Listening to a dope-growing pig farmer at a public hearing about wetland buffers last night, I realized that the phrase "Live free or die" effectively nullifies all environmental protection.

If you subscribe to The Code, any restriction on your freedom, by anyone, for any reason, calls for your armed resistance. If you fail to remove the restriction, by logic you must die. Even self restraint counts as unacceptable tyranny. It might set a precedent for a standard of behavior less than free. At the first urge to show self restraint, the true believer should commit suicide. Anything less will dilute the purity of everyone else's freedom.

Obviously, any concern for your neighbors, descendants, other species, aesthetics, or any factor other than the fulfillment of your immediate and ongoing desires makes you less than free. The true believer that we must Live Free or Die has an obligation to destroy the environment that supports all life, since death is the alternative to living free. We must live free to the hilt, to the bitter end, or it won't have been worth living at all.

The supporters of living free or dying have made it an unofficial governing document. It's four blunt one-syllable words. It's easy to remember and it sounds so tough!

In the rest of his discourse, the pig farmer basically said that he was too stupid to understand the proposed ordinance, so it was wrong. It is clear that the speech centers of the brain are nearly the last thing to be destroyed by decades of drug use.

This same pig farmer walked into my yard when I moved here in 1989 and told me he was the local dope grower, so if I wanted any smoke I should look him up.

"The cops know all about me and they don't do nothin'," he said. "So it's perfectly fine."

About four years later, some friends moved in about a quarter-mile away, just across the river. The pig farmer appeared as if by magic, walking right into their house. He repeated the same welcome-wagon message.

I hadn't seen him in years. I thought he might be dead. Only from the neck up, it would appear.

He left, daring anyone to come change his lifestyle in his swampy lair down a mud road.

In the same meeting we spent an hour and a half on one definition because a dyslexic was wrangling over homonyms. Of all the crap I had brought regarding the science of wetland buffers, the one thing I needed was my big, fat dictionary.

You want to know why nothing gets done by the government? By the time everyone is finished arguing the problem has either gotten too big to be fixed, in which case it becomes "an engine of the economy," or gone away on its own. Gone away doesn't necessarily mean it got better. Maybe whoever you were trying to save had already died. Maybe the problem mutated into a different problem.

Sullen people sulked over their bad real estate investments as if the rest of us owed them something for their stupidity. We let them speak. Their supporters growled their tough slogan. They sneered at government, the big and bad. No individual here is any more responsible than average for the collective bad choices made in America from the mid 1970s onward, but we're all paying the price. We have to be absurdly careful going forward because we were so greedily careless when we should have been starting to adjust our behavior while the problems were smaller.

People made bad decisions in other parts of the world, but America, self-styled leader of the "free" world, owed that world a better example. Instead we chose vanity and an escalating standard of self indulgence.

I subscribe to no religion. I am afraid of most of them. I don't moralize as someone who believes we should dress in somber clothes and deprive ourselves of fun. I just believe in doing a personal environmental and social impact statement on that fun. Hedonism is absolutely fine as long as it's sustainable.

Environmental standards are meant to put helpful limits around development. People who just want to plunge ahead without restraint won't view those standards as helpful, but those are exactly the people from whom the standards will protect the rest of us.

I get lonely when the sun goes down

I thought my old laptop was spazzing out as I worked on the minutes from the last Conservation Commission meeting. Text kept highlighting itself, the cursor was jumping around. Then I realized that the cat on my lap had a paw on the touch pad.

I get lonely when the sun goes down. I was making up a song about that, kind of a nice one to start with, but it deteriorated, the way my compositions so often do. Perhaps the cat was responding to the soulful blues-y tone of my lament when she clambered onto my lap beside the computer and started her accidental editing.

She has left me to my work. I should get it done.

Political Vitriol

The recent shooting spree in Tucson has brought attention to the ugly rhetoric in American politics as if it was a recent thing.

A Republican I know, a man in his 80s, has told me more than once that a woman he worked with in 1963 made no secret how pleased she was when John Kennedy was shot.

In a nation founded on a war of independence from its colonial parent and then advanced with systematic genocide against the indigenous people of North America, violence is part of our fundamental makeup. A large chunk of this nation insisted it was their right to enslave persons of African descent they had imported and bred for servitude, until the issue came to a head in the 1860s and the nation fought a long, bloody war over it. Once the official war was over, the subjugation of those African Americans continued, even as the country returned to its westward expansion at the expense of the aboriginals.

When cattlemen and sheep herders had a conflict, guns were drawn. When labor got uppity and demanded concessions from the privileged management class, goons beat them into submission. Examples abound of force crushing reason throughout our nation's history. Those are only the recent chapters in the history of our species.

Evolution moves very slowly. In every generation, more and more people do see that humans need to move on to more intellectual, less brutal forms of conflict resolution. A more cooperative society emerges, excruciatingly gradually. Attempts to force a revolutionary change of mind and heart always meet intractable opposition. Will we destroy ourselves before understanding becomes widespread? I probably will not live to find out. Visionaries envision, but grunts continue to obstruct. People who think that killing somebody actually proves something keep doing their thing, making the actual task of governing more difficult than it already is.

Why private health insurance can't help but fail

An advertisement for United Health Care on television last night stated that they can provide high quality service because of their size. In other words, their group is large enough to buffer inevitable losses, should they be forced into actually paying a claim. They take in enough in premiums to pay their executives and managers, and the legions of telephone operators health insurance companies place between the customer and customer satisfaction, i.e. medical services actually reimbursed by the company.

If you believe the advertisement, all is well with the health insurance titan. As a corporation competing in the marketplace, it has gathered many customers. One can safely assume these customers have been gathered from United Health Care's competitors. Those competitors are therefore smaller, less able to withstand the stresses of being in business, and less able to offer tempting premiums (relatively speaking) in the health insurance field.

By the principles of business competition, these weaker players must fail or consolidate. Unless some artificial external force, like regulation, steps in to prevent United Health Care and the other players from duking it out everywhere in the country, market forces will prevail.

By the principles we've been told guide the level of premiums, the biggest company should be able to provide the best coverage. Let's ignore for a moment the temporary and misleading "introductory offers" a smaller company might use to gather customers who will later pay for their folly with a sharp spike in their costs. Just judging a company's value on the basis of size, the best health insurance company would have a nationwide monopoly and a group that includes every living soul. In short, it would be universal. But just when you think the socialists have maneuvered the free marketers into checkmate, remember two things: monopolies get broken up (at least according to legal technicality, if you're thinking of the oil and drug cartels), and private businesses will push for the most profit they can squeeze from the industry in which they operate. If that industry has no real competition, everybody has to fork out whatever the company demands. Introduce a competitor and you make smaller groups, pushing premiums up on the basis of the increased risk.

One giant group, insured by a non-profit entity, is the only approach that will control costs and cover everyone fairly. That's never going to happen in this country. I just wanted to remind y'all what you will be missing and why.

Ain't freedom grand?

One of the paradoxes of American freedom is that no one needs to feel a sense of national responsibility. As long as we can hire an army and make a little fuss over them, no one else needs to do a thing except for themselves. The fact that almost anyone with a choice chooses not to serve their country in that way should tell us all something about the desirability of continuing with conflict as a model of interaction. So far, that message has been lost. We continue to dare each other to back up our positions with brawn. This great nation boils down to my great country club. Who let all these poor people breed? Didn't anybody tell them that if they won't work for nothing we won't employ them?

The problems are always somebody else's fault. The fact that some of the finger pointing has merit makes it even more complex and contentious.

The only hope the middle class might have had in the face of this is that the producers need consumers. But as the manufacturers build up poorer nations by sending factories over there, they also create customers. Those new consumers, nearer where the goods are produced, have a little less money than the residents of former industrial nations in decline, but the manufacturers will save a bundle on shipping.

Durable change is always evolutionary, not revolutionary. A cataclysm may alter things in the geological world, but human nature remains human nature. In years, perhaps decades, the developing nations will have caught up to the previously developed ones. Only then might we deal with the inequities between labor and management. But even that remains questionable. Several factors could keep the debate from proceeding. To name but a few:

1. Industrial development in less advanced countries could finish destroying the climate balance that makes life itself possible.

2. Some jackass could start a bigger war than has been fashionable recently. Wars are great economic engines, but when the environment is already delicately balanced the impact of major destruction could tip thing over the edge even more quickly than careless industrialism. Idiots trying to preserve the status of a nation in decline might be willing to make an "all or nothing, live free or die" effort to put their faction back on top or go down gloriously in the attempt. Similarly, idiots in one of the countries that was never great and has no industrial future might feel like detonating whatever they can get their hands on.

3. Governments in the formerly great world powers could crumble before their form of social stratification has had a chance to spread uniformly around the globe. If communication and transportation degrade, local customs and superstitions will regain their former power to promote xenophobia. English is the language of aviation. It didn't need to be English, but that's how it worked out. If the spread of one language falters, everyone who is interested has to pick up another one, should a single candidate emerge from the ruckus. Will it remain widespread if people don't do a lot of flying? We're not that far from xenophobia as it is. Take away the ability of people to mix and mingle and we're right back to eating or enslaving strangers who crawl ashore from shipwrecks. The cute ones we might have sex with first.

Because everything you do makes a difference, but nothing you do matters, future generations (if any) will simply deal with whatever reality they inherit. If we go back to the level of the 17th Century, that's what the kids will breed in. That's the ultimate truth: if anyone is left to eat and screw, that's what they'll do. The rest is just ornamentation. No one planned in the long term to get us where we are. We're here because of a combination of short term goals and philosophies intended to be observed without end. That's not a long-term development plan.

No one explained this adequately when I was growing up. I doubt if too many people thought in these terms. I was taught short term planning and lifetime philosophies. Short term includes a whole human life span. Some people like to dwell on how brief that is (tick tock), but seldom go beyond the impact that has on retirement planning or how much time we get to spend hanging out with our friends and loved ones -- short term aspects again. Humans make a big deal out of themselves when, in geological terms, they're just a passing itch on the surface of the globe. This planet doesn't need us. Only we need us.

As far as national responsibility goes, we're better off without too insular a sense of national unity and purpose. Unfortunately, as national identity shifted to a particular flag waving above personal gain, we've been slow to accept the concept of the individual human living on the human planet and needing to take care of it. Too many of us have no sense of ownership or stewardship, depending on your inclination. Those who fear one-world government see only that. They recoil in revulsion from anything that looks like global leadership. And they are right to do so. Why should one-world government work any better than the many examples of messed up national, regional and local government? But we're stuck with each other. We'd better figure out how to balance all our competing wants before we are no longer able to meet our needs.

Evolution grinds slowly. It tends to hinge on physical characteristics. Species success depends entirely on creating future generations. We've got that down. Now we deal with the trickier problem of intellectual evolution. Signs of it are obvious. So are signs of resistance to it. The mere fact of an individual's existence and breeding readiness mean nothing to the future survival and prosperity of an idea. The idea needs minds in which to flourish. So humans, always cooking up something, keep experimenting. Because so much is theoretical, we argue and argue while physical effects of previous decisions continue to accumulate.

The 2010 election in a nutshell: "I got tired of waiting for your computer to download an important update, so I hit it with a rock."

November 2: The Groundhog Day of politics

I predict that no matter which party controls Congress at the end of today's voting (and any necessary recounts) we will see no improvement for at least two years --if then.

If the Democrats retain control, the Republicans will continue to obstruct them. As shown in the sabotage of the health care bill, even if something big does pass, it will be so mangled as to be completely useless.

If the Republicans win, they will do as little as possible to make things better to make sure the Obama administration does not get any credit for turning things around. The financiers of the Republican Party can weather considerable hard times to squeeze the majority of voters and get them to blame the wrong people, as usual, for their difficulties.

Once the Republicans assure themselves both Congress and the White House they can return to strip mining the country as they so happily did under George Bush. They have put themselves against government for so long that they no longer know how to run one for the good of an entire nation.

The vocal factions that want even smaller government will make sure that the debate includes lots of pistol-wearing and head stomping.

Don't like my prediction? Prove me wrong.