Hope: our next step

Frankly, I don't want that version of America to survive -- the America of chain stores, and muscle cars, and grown men obsessed with video games, drugs, and pornography, and women decorated like cannibals, and the vast, crushing purposelessness of it all. I have no doubt we're heading into a convulsion that will wring much of this junk and dross into the backwaters of history. We're capable of being something better than this, of putting our time on earth to better use, including a more respectful treatment of the land we inhabit. This year and the next will be the years of letting go, and out of that we'll commence a re-becoming.

James Howard Kunstler

AC-CENT-TCHU-ATE

You've got to accentuate the positive
Eliminate the negative
Latch on to the affirmative
Don't mess with Mister In-Between

* * *

Sometimes a book comes along at just the right moment.

For me, today's book is Food Not Lawns: How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden And Your Neighborhood into a Community.

I spent yesterday complaining about happy-happy talk--but now I finally get what my partner David was trying to explain to me after he read my post.

He kept saying that stating things in the positive made it possible to move toward what you want to build. And I kept saying that the difference between saying you don't want to hurt something versus you do want to help it doesn't make any difference in how one decides to act.

So he goes to work and Son and I sit on the couch to read next to each other.

I pick up Heather Flores's book and just roll my eyes one (last) time as I start this quote: "Much of the work [done by activists] was about stopping something--logging, mining, violence, et cetera--and not much seemed to focus on starting real alternatives."

Yes, yes, whatever--I think. "But we must respond to the crises of logging, mining, violence, et cetera. That is what often produces true change!" I want to whine at the author.

But then, I got it, understood what she was saying. I sat up. My eye-rolling suddenly stopped and I heard Melinda telling me to stop complaining and start finding solutions.

Yes--that is it! One must define the problem, often in the negative, and then try to move forward with it. Not abandon it and not ignore it--but solve it. Sometimes the solution to changing the world is working hard to stop something. That is a positive step all by itself.

If one gets too stalled, either in the negatives or the positives, one cannot make a difference. You can cry all day, you can whistle Dixie--or you can actually work (even if it is just on ideas). As Flores says in her book, "Dreams of industrial collapse became prayers for communities feeding and healing themselves."

* * *

So I'm all for accentuating the positives of the future--but in crafting that future, we absolutely can't "eliminate the negative" as Disney would have it in the song.

We cannot abandon our efforts for positive change. But building that better future happens not through dreams or hope alone. It happens because of analysis of the past and present, analysis of plans. It happens because of hard work in the dirt, because sweat and mosquitoes don't stop you. (Hrumph. They stopped me today.) Dreams only become reality when we get past the simplicity of both the positives AND the negatives and on with the real building of what we want and need, as individuals and as a community.

So just call me Mister In-Between.

Now

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a study of Depression-era tenant farmers, was a much-praised book with text by James Agee and photographs by Walker Evans. Agee and Evans, hired by the federal government's "New Deal" programs, spent a couple of months living with three different sharecropping families in the South. Evans captured their struggles against deep poverty in his stark photography, and Agee combined detailed research with a poet's pen. One of the most powerful things about the book is its portrayal of desperately poor people as proud, noble, and strong. It is a complicated thing to tread the line between paternalistic pity and the recognition of dignity in the face of great hardship.

* * *

Perhaps the most famous photograph of the Depression era was taken by Dorothea Lange.

This photograph shows Florence Owens Thompson and her children in February or March of 1936 in Nipomo, California. Lange was concluding a month of photographing migratory farm labor for the Resettlement Administration (part of FDR's New Deal). In 1960, the photographer recalled her experience:

I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it. (From: Popular Photography, Feb. 1960).

There are a handful of other portraits of this "Migrant Mother," including this one, one of my favorites. Here, the mother seems so self-reliant:



You can learn more about Florence Owens Thompson and her family at this site.

* * *

Lange took many other very powerful photographs during the depression. Her work, paid for by the federal government, helped those who held political office see what was happening to the nation.














* * *

I recently read a wonderful introduction to the Great Depression: Victoria Sherrow's Hardship and Hope, written for readers in the seventh grade and up. It is a great place to start even if you're an adult, if you want a very succinct readable account.

In some ways following in the footsteps of such giants as Agee, Walker, and Lange, the author of this short book seeks to show that the survivors of the tragedy of the Depression years were strong and dignified.

She also points out some positive aspects of the lean years: families and communities had to rely on each other and on their own creativity. People relied on telling stories, singing songs, playing sports themselves, or playing cards. Children created rolling toys from scrap lumber and discarded roller-skate wheels or dolls from cardboard and old cut-up magazines. A few marbles, a dime, or an orange could be an appreciated birthday gift. How many children would be satisfied that way today?

The book ends on a relatively happy note suggesting that much of what caused the Great Depression would be unlikely to happen today. One of her concluding remarks is that "the distribution of wealth has changed in America although there are still enormous gaps between rich and poor. No longer is 40 percent of the nation's wealth held by only 5 percent of all Americans."

* * *

Her confident statement surprised me. After an improvement in the wealth distribution numbers after World War II, the country had a fairly sharp increase in wealth inequality dating back to 1975 or 1976.


By 1998:

The top one percent owned 38 percent of all wealth.

The top five percent owned 59 percent,

and the top 20% owned 80% of the country's wealth.

And in 1997, ONE MAN (Bill Gates) was worth more alone than the combined assets of the bottom 40 million Americans (roughly the bottom 15% at the time).


In other words, there is substantially more inequality now (or at least in 1998) than there was at the time of the Great Depression.

Hope, part one

Light is just beginning to break. I look out the study window through the early post-snow fog at the large house across the street, home to the young daughter of a Jewish American mother and a Muslim Palestinian father. One tiny strand of decorative white lights twists around the banister of the stairs that go to their front door.

I almost cry. The lights seemed so futile, so ineffective against the almost-impenetrable grey morning cold.

And as I sit at my desk, the sun begins to climb. The fog starts to dissipate. And in no time, it seems, everything is suddenly bright and clear: morning.

So many cultures celebrate light in the darkness of winter. We have Solstice, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Diwali... Often in December I'm just so bombarded with artificial corporate happiness that I can't get the message that all those decorations are supposed to convey.

But this quiet morning with Son still asleep, the meaning of letting our little light shine--shine even when it seems totally overpowered by the depths of the darkness-- comes through to me. Sometimes we need to believe that our own flicker can help light the day. And today I do.

* * *

Son's Snow Labyrinth:

Questioning

The Tell-Tale Heart commented (to my post yesterday reviewing Al Gore's 2007 book, The Assault on Reason):

"Are you/we in a place where the only books that appeal to us simply reinforce how bleak the outlook for the future is (or that it is even worse than we thought)? ...Given Al's main points, if you were his editor or sounding board, where would you have encouraged him to take the conclusion?"

Good questions, and questions that have been on my mind a lot. (Hey--his ability to alternate between brilliance and reading my mind is why I married him....)

* * *

Let me begin with a fairly convenient truth: I just wrote a nonfiction book about a very bleak subject. When my cowriter and I sat down to write the conclusion, it hit me straight in the face that the book's conclusion needed to be in some way redemptive. We didn't exactly have to write a happy ending, but we couldn't leave readers with the unspeakable horror of the story without ending on a note that made it all seem like something other than an incitement to severe depression. We tried and we tried to figure out that redemptive ending. What we came up with--which personally I think only partially works--is a call for us as a society to try to come to grips with the difficulties of both our past and present, and a plea that we take this understanding forward to craft our politics and our activism.

I say this is a convenient truth because the experience of struggling at the end of a story of misery to make it into something moving--even radicalizing--for readers is something I share with Gore. And the funny thing is that he tries out the exact same tactic that I used--and he does it far, far better than I ever could--although he does not end the book with it. When he uses this rhetoric, his words are powerful and inspiring:

"...This is a moral moment. This is not ultimately about any scientific debate or political dialogue. Ultimately, it is about who we are as human beings and whether or not we have the capacity to transcend our own limitations and rise to this new occasion. It is about whether or not we can see with our hearts, as well as our heads, the unprecedented response that is now called for; whether or not we can--in Lincoln's phrase--disenthrall ourselves, shed the illusions that have been our accomplices in ignoring the warnings that have been clearly given, and to hear clearly the ones that are being given now.

"...We are now at a true fork in the road. And in order to take the right path, we must choose the right values and adopt the right perspective. This is the time for those who see and understand and care and are willing to work to say, 'This time the warnings will not be ignored. This time we will prepare. This time we will rise to the occasion. And we will prevail."

* * *

Am I so convinced the future is bleak that I cannot hear hope--no, not hope but CERTAINTY--that we will make it together through the valley of the shadow?

No--but my own hope and my own commitment to the future is too fragile to be brushed aside in the end as less important to the future of justice than some new way to show video on television.

Triple Crisis

This past weekend I attended a teach-in on the "Triple Crisis" currently facing the world. "Triple Crisis" refers to the combination of climate change, peak oil (the end of cheap energy), and global resource depletion (including species extinction). In upcoming posts, I'll talk in more detail about all three--especially the last two, often not addressed in our popular press.

The line-up of speakers were unbelievable (at least for nerds like me): Bill McKibben, Frances Moore Lappe, Vandana Shiva, David Korten, Richard Heinberg, Wes Jackson, Carl Pope, Betsy Taylor, Megan Quinn, and many, many others.



This is the first time specialists in all three areas have come together for a major meeting like this. During the teach-in, all three crises were understood to be one large interconnected problem, deriving from the same causes (massive use of fossil fuels and the Earth's resources) and therefore able to be addressed in similar ways. One of the central approaches is the concept of "powering down"--or learning to live with far less energy, and far lower consumption of materials, than we currently use. One way of doing this is by moving to an increasingly local society. In the future I'll write more about this concept and how we and others are trying to address this answer.

I was especially pleased to see people address one of my pet concerns. So often, people who consider themselves environmentalists decide that the way to save the world is through purchasing more stuff. I'm very much part of this group myself, so please don't think I'm sitting on high judging everyone else. "Oh, let's go out and BuyBuyBuy all those hip new green products! Don't we need a Prius, and organic bamboo sheets, and new sustainably-forested-wood kitchen cabinets?" But overconsumption is what got us into this mess. We can't find our way out just by encouraging a new-and-improved kind of shopping. Check out this disturbingly hilarious video which makes this point with tongue firmly in cheek.

There were many academic disagreements at the conference, frustrations about the fact that no clear direction has emerged, and of course much rallying of the troops. We all left with a energy and enthusiasm for the fight--but also something I think too many of us have felt had abandoned us:

HOPE.