Litigation Nation

I’m no attorney, so don’t know the ins and outs of liability and legal culpability, but the issue of litigation has been on my mind.  When people forget how to communicate with one another and how to educate themselves away from mistakes before they happen, they are left being part of a reactionary, near-sighted culture.  That culture has nothing to keep people in line, no rites or accepted ways of avoiding dispute, other than, of course, the threat of legal proceedings.  Our nation is so enamored with the threat, or fear of litigation that we go to extreme measures to avoid disputes, write books of fine print for everything from rubber duckys to coffee makers.  Regulations written in the government are dissertations, including repetitious terms and conditions, every term defined ad nausea not because the common person cannot understand it, but because the fear of misinterpretation is such that millions of dollars are wasted on words and appendices and subparts to rules, rather than the fundamental implementation of good laws meant to improve the lives of people.  Don’t get me wrong, I see the need for warnings of choke hazards on toys, and defining the word ‘substantial’ or ‘large’ to avoid misuse of tax dollars, but I fear that law and fear of legal recourse drives many of the things people do, rather than reason and fundamental necessity. 

Just a few weeks ago, an 8-year-old was suspended from school for playing cops and robbers, depicting a gun with his finger and thumb like many of us did hundreds of times when we were younger.  I understand the underlying implications of guns in school, and recent violence, but the actions of school officials were rash and illogical, traumatizing a young child for actions all too normal.  In other places, students can’t run at recess for fear of getting hurt, and some parties are afraid of litigation just by association, because, unless it is expressly spelled out, a third party can be held liable if they are affiliated with the offender.  This epidemic stifles growth, slows economic reform that is sorely needed, and basically creates a distraction from all of the things that we could be spending our time on.  I know plenty of good, hard-working lawyers, some of whom are courtroom lawyers, so I’m not accusing them of creating this disease, but I wonder what people would do if litigation were not an option.  What would create the perfect storm of pressure so that people started talking again, face-to-face, working through issues, instead of just paying others to.  Call me a Polyanna, but I’m going to keep hoping that we can get back to that place somehow, someday.  

Capricorn

Every season brings with it new sights and smells, nostalgic feelings, hope or despair, and anticipation or regret.  I used to owe my loyalty only to summer, the cool river swims on hot July days and the sweep of dense fescue or tall alfalfa in August.  'The hotter the better,' was my mantra.  As I get older, though, I've gotten so that I love the smell of every season, the crunch of leaves and ripe fruit in the fall, with its colorful apple orchards and pumpkin patches, and the bite of winter, the fresh snow that seems to clean the slate, and naked trees, resting their sap from a long season.  I love spring when ice sickles drip away and xylem and phloem fill with life, and when young fawns rest in the new blades of young grass and weeds, ears flicking just above the fray.  I guess you'd say I'm a temperate latitude sort of guy.  Maybe some of you can relate, having grown up expecting these seasonal shifts in flora and fauna, climate and comaraderie.  I think that looking back on work in the tropics, seasonal shifts was one of the big things that I missed.  I expected to miss family and friends, and the security of home, but I had never thought that I would miss the dependable coolness of winter, and the release and anticipation of summertime.  Days were long, and the sun hung just as high almost all year long, and my Virginia body was out of sorts.  I admire some peoples' ability to move from place to place, relentlessly adapting and finding new exciting places and experiences, but I wonder if it is natural.  It is courageous to go out and adapt to new seasons, mixing summer with winter and fall with spring, diving into new valleys and swimming new currents, but, in the end, our seasons will call us back home, and we will live only one truth.

As with all of life, I revel in the newness of Spring, the Fullness of summer, the harvest of Autumn, and the rest of Wintertime.  Satisfaction with all seasons of life is underrated, and nevertheless, essential.

The New Opiates

The other day I went to the community, the church, the family where I grew up and helped make apple butter.  Our congregation in Montezuma, Virginia makes apple butter in order to raise funds for various church activities and once a year, we round up all of the big copper kettles and wide-mouthed mason jars from church members.  Then, on a fall Saturday, a bunch of us stand around in a smoky haze stirring with great big wooden poles.  (They're long so you're not standing right beside the hot fire that one delegated congregant stokes continuously for hours while the hot apples and spice get more and more viscous.)

I traded off stirring duty with many members of our church, sweet ladies and good ol' men that I grew up looking to for the way to talk and be and serve and smile.  A couple hours into the day, though, I looked around, objectively, wondering where all of my cohort had gone.  I grew up playing basketball and pick-up football on evenings with many young boys at that same park where we were stirring the apple butter.  Where did my whole generation go?  Why were they not stirring apple butter and laughing with the elders of the church too?  Several explanations come to mind.  Although some of my old friends have moved to other churches, other congregations close to jobs or family, and some of the others are busy with new families, this isn't true for most of them. Most of my old friends don't go to church, don't have a hometown or a community that they are part of.

I'm no different, don't get me wrong.  I'm as flaky as the next guy, as undependable a churchgoer as anyone else.  I've got plenty of friends and colleagues who disdain organized religion for all of the ills it has caused in the world.  Many other friends mock the absurdity of religion in the face of scientific knowledge.  And still others just never went as children so therefore will never start going to church.  It's always a net loss with church.  It's hard to get new people, but you're sure to lose some.

But, there, as I stirred apple butter, I looked at what we're losing as a culture.  It's not about God, per se, and it's not necessarily about morality, but rather, church is about a unit, a heritage or a greater purpose to be a part of.  (God and morality can come later.)  But, to begin with, it's a group to identify with, and with a large group, there's a lot of security and potential learning and dialogue that can happen.  These days, we group so exclusively along party or interest lines, we don't have much richness or diversity.

Karl Marx said that religion is the opiate of the people.  Maybe it used to be, but religion has been overrun and the opiate has moved on to be either T.V. or technology, or sports, or media.  Whatever it is, the opiate is certainly no longer religion.  I think that Religion was big, and in the vacuum of the human population and the human mind, it became overwhelmingly powerful, dictating purpose, morals, and laws, and so people mock it now because of the injustices that it wrought.  We, as a culture, have thrown the baby out with the bathwater, and lost the beneficial parts of religion due to some unfortunate side effects of mindless religion run a muck.  I think I'm particularly tuned into this element of our modern culture since I'm in an urban area where religion is almost contemptable in some circles.

Maybe our Facebook and twitter communities can somehow, someday take the place of the richness of communities around houses of worship, but I have not seen how this element will play out.  It seems more likely that someday we'll have to explain in e-books how apple butter got made, and how people communicated efficiently enough to all gather on a Saturday, despite preseason games, and work together to make a product for a non-profit organization to continue working as a whole to learn how to live more peacefully, simply, and together.  

Happy North American Genocide Day

I just wanted to take this opportunity to wish everyone a wonderful Columbus Day, 2013.  As if it won't be enchanted enough with all of the political wrangling going on in Washington, D.C., we have arrived at another 2nd Monday in October when we can pause and reflect on the exploits of a truly ambitious, brave, and daring, albeit not-so-nice man.  It's not that I don't appreciate the significance of America's discovery and the change that it brought to civilization and the trajectory of the entire world, but I just feel that Columbus might not belong in among other national holidays such as President's Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas.  Just seems like we might have some more respectable people and events to honor, that's all.  Let's take a quick look at Columbus.

Christopher Columbus, or Cristoforo Colombo was an Italian voyager who set sail to locate an accessible trade route to the East Indies essentially under contract from the Catholic Monarchs of Spain.  Columbus was a businessman, renowned as ambitious and energetic.  He wasn't entirely literate or even mathematically inclined either.  The greatest free maybe-factually-accurate news source in the world, Wikipedia, puts it this way, when describing his reasoning for the voyage and his expectations of finding the East Indies so handily:

"Where Columbus did differ from the view accepted by scholars in his day was in his estimate of the westward distance from Europe to Asia. Columbus's ideas in this regard were based on three factors: his low estimate of the size of the Earth, his high estimate of the size of the Eurasian landmass, and his belief that Japan and other inhabited islands lay far to the east of the coast of China.^{[citation needed]} In all three of these issues Columbus was both wrong and at odds with the scholarly consensus of his day"

It's not that Columbus miscalculated, was overly naive, or even that he was wrong that gets me.  It's that he was wrong in every possible way, and he was too arrogant to listen to anyone else.  This guy was totally full of himself.  

Well, we all know the bulk of the story, and how Columbus landed in mezzoamerica. (He wasn't the first explorer to find the continent even, but was following Leif Ericson's conquest by nearly 500 years)  Until his death, and after untold numbers of people told him where he had landed, Columbus insisted on calling the place where he had landed the East Indies, and the inhabitants Indians, indignant and proud.  Columbus embarked upon 4 long voyages of these new lands, claiming every island, straight, and harbor for the Spanish Crown.  He then was appointed governor of Hispaniola for almost 20 years thereafter.  

During his governorship, it was estimated that Columbus and his raiding henchmen reduced populations of millions to just thousands in mines and pits, starving and squeezing every drop of energy from their bodies.  A woman accused Columbus of a lowly birth to be paraded naked in dusty streets with her tongue cut out.  Men who filched meager rations of corn had ears and noses cut off and they were sold into slavery.  Columbus' ruthless ways were renowned, and along with abject mutilation and starvation, Columbus and his troops brought debilitating disease and despair to once proud civilizations.  In the end, even the Spanish crown got tired of Columbus because he couldn't get along with any of the other governors of the new lands, and fired him from the job.  

Thousands upon thousands of children died under Columbus' rule, either from starvation because their mothers couldn't produce milk, or because of harsh treatment, or even because, in their desperation, some parents would kill their children to save them the agony of such a life.  In 14 years, an estimated 3,000,000 native inhabitants were killed by Columbus, which was staggering to the very persons visiting from Europe to see the progress of the new land.  Put into perspective, Columbus, with about 300 men and rudimentary, primitive weapons, did at least half as much killing as Hitler and his death camps and thousands of soldiers in WWII.  It is virtually unbelievable.  Along with their brutality, Columbus and his men brought Smallpox and Syphilis.  And in the end, we have only estimates, but can never be sure of the extent of this brutality that Columbus imposed upon his 'new world.'  

I'm just saying, seems we should think of a better namesake for this Holiday that falls on the second Monday in October, that's all. 

America's Idiotic Instar

Today, I got an forwarded column from a good friend that espoused a viewpoint he knew I didn't have.  The piece provided a backdrop of a welfare society that vilifies conservatives and reactionaries while embracing naive values of an uninformed, irresponsible electorate.  I've hyperlinked the column so that you can decide for yourselves what you think of it, but I thought that I would post part of my response below  in order to provide a background for my feelings on the issue, since it got me thinking.

We shy away from the real reasons for an uninformed electorate, and that's the fact that we have technology, T.V. and media blaring around us all the time, so the electorate is both stupid with a short attention span for that which would have been common knowledge in the past, plus, there are so many perspectives and spins out there, that we have no idea what's going on.  Whether it's Romney, Obama, Bush, or Clinton, we've got a 1% group of connected cronies running this place.  It's not a Republican or Democratic issue, it's just the bullshit that having a big democracy leads to once you're at this point.  If we had a french revolution moment in America where tables were really turned and financial systems really broke down, most would see it as a sign that our morals had fallen apart and we had failed as a nation, but why not see this fracturing and the eventual dissolution as an instar during our continued growth as a nation?  In other words, maybe these tough changes have to take place, this fracturing, in order for the nation to continue to progress.


This time in America puzzles me, because I don't have much to compare it to.  I'm a 31-year-old who just knows what he reads and hears on the news, and unlike all of those my age on the news that feel they have the answers, I thought it prudent to ask around.  So, I have been asking those around me at work this week to see if the fractures and problems that are going on are just the way it's always been.  I've talked to conservative and democratic federal workers who saw everyone from Kennedy to Bush come and go, who experienced the last government shutdown, who have felt democratic and republican budget impacts, and have pretty broad, even-handed views on the topic.  All of them said that things are different this time.  The lack of new appropriations and the intransigent electorate are different than before.  "In the past," one co-worker said to me, "we would listen to Walter Cronkite at night on the news, and that was the perspective, whether right or wrong.  Nowadays, there are so many perspectives and pundits and special interests that the electorate doesn't know which way to go."  Still another senior member of the staff at my office said that the shutdown of 1996 was just the beginning of a long period of polarized electorates.  "What's worse," continued my colleague, "is that gerrymandering is worse now than ever and politicians are so safe in their districts that they don't have as much incentive to change or compromise" as they used to.  

Maybe the current actions of a minority of the minority are a tiny peek into the type of change that we have to be willing to sacrifice for.  To change the spending and taxing and prioritizing that goes on in the US, we have to take big risks to change the establishment and cause change, but it's clear to me, and I'm sure to many of you, that it shouldn't be done as an ultimatum.  I think that at the core of this mess is the lack of trust between politicians.  The speaker doesn't trust that the president will negotiate and give in to tough spending and revenue changes if he gives up the bargaining chips in his hand, nomatter how dangerous the endgame.  Likewise, the senate majority has the same mistrust of others.  Whether the mistrust is based in reality or not, it is there, and causes the gridlock we see tearing down the institution.  All the while, Tweets, posts, and pundits continue the game, seeking fame and fortune over feduciary foresight.  

On the Warpath

Hey, anybody catch the Double Header between the Crackers and Negroes last night? See the highlights from the Kike-Chinks game on sportscenter? Wouldn't that seem weird? Incredibly offensive, I'd say. So offensive that I get that butt-puckered, oh geez sensation just writing those epithets to pose the hypothetical. But we don't feel that sort of defensive welling-up when we're cheering the Redskins or Indians or Chiefs on. Ask somebody at a game sometime if they think any of those names are offensive and I wonder if they'll just laugh it off, pretend as if they're just ingrained, the way things are in our curious little country. Let's try to see why we don't question these teams en masse, and what they all might have in common that we so easily can disparage them openly.

 Well, a quick internet search brings us to the oracle of all internet wisdom, Wikipedia, which lists out the myriad sports teams that use offensive or racially-identifying words in their team names. The vast majority, almost all of these names infact, are derived from indigenous peoples that are vastly underrepresented in the general populations, and most of which also, have been decimated by war and political obliteration, (such is the case with the continental American teams.)

 Now, some people would say, and do, that these are proud, identifying names for groups that enjoy the attention, and any reasonable person can see that there is no way that we could know that, and little chance there's ever been a discussion with those groups affected. Still others would say that the names are identifiers only, and have no associated value that would put the afflicted groups into a particular light. However, what would be the point of just listing groups of people on helmets and jerseys without some implied value statement about them? No one has Grackles and Cowbirds as team names just to list out passerine species, but we have vibrant cardinals, fierce blue jays or gorgeous cardinals, each with their implied worth and value. Such, I believe, is the case with Florida Seminoles and Canyon Comanches, and many of the other tribes and peoples that are archived not in libraries or their homelands, but on bleachers and scoreboards. It's a travesty to the peoples that have been obliterated from our collective conscience and from ancestral lands. 

Native American writer Sherman Alexie often jokes that he went to an all-white high school where the only other Native American was the team mascot. He also is aghast at the mainstream's perpetuation of stereotypes with The Lone Ranger , a movie recently released where Johnny Depp does his best to assimilate no native culture into his portrayal of Tonto. The whole issue raises a concern for me that our society has moved so far in the past 50 years, (not far enough) to become an inclusive, racially and socially integrated culture, but we have left these indigenous peoples so far out of our viewfinder that the mention of something so rudimentary as changing sports teams names is laughable. It causes me to wonder if we are not truly the integrated culture we'd like to claim, but merely a squeaky wheel culture that adapts when it has to, but for a culture that is so small, so effectively exterminated as native peoples, we turn away and leave them to their vices, forgotten.

america's cup, roosevelt field mall, mike glennon, metro north, paul oliver

Down at the PawPaw Patch

For the past couple of weeks, I've been working and traveling around hiking and biking with Buddy as always, seeing family and friends, but a lot of my attention has been devoted to..wait for it...the largest endemic fruit in North America. It's the fruit that resembles a custard-like banana and looks like a pale, ovoid cucumber. I try to stay on task, keeping up with the important, 'necessary' things in life, but this time of year, especially when I'm walking through a protected area such as a State or National Park, and stumble upon a PawPaw patch, all reason flies out the window, and I immediately look for a bag-type receptacle and start shaking trees. My justification as a fellow preservationist and would-be protector of the woods? Well, the deer will eat them anyways, and there's an overabundance of deer, so really, I'm culling an overpopulated herd, therefore saving the government money. I know, I know, but it works for me, just enough reason to remove the guilt. The PawPaw or Asimina triloba is a wonderful fruit that grows over a large swath of the East Coast and is under-appreciated. It's the king of Appalachian foraging fruits, and you'll have to get to the fruit before the deer do. These fruits have more nutritional value than many foods that we commonly associate with health foods. They contain tons of antioxidants and bioactive compounds that are not well understood, but which will have potential utility in pharmaceuticals upon further study. Ask around and you'll find that a majority of the population doesn't know PawPaws exist, and many more don't understand their incredible nutritional value. In a highly populated area of the tidewater region such as this (I'm currently living in Northern Virginia outside of D.C.) I'm glad that more people don't know about the fruit. More PawPaws for me, I say. It seems that we are so fixed on all the new, chic things out there, foods from different lands and cultures, that we forget some of the real gems that naturally abound here. I'm a niche guy, and I'm also into all of the incredible mushrooms that we have in our Appalachian Mountains. There are all sorts of great things here, wild leeks termed ramps, which have been causing long-term bad breath for hundreds of years in rural towns during harvest season, and ginseng, sassafras, black birch, teaberry, and all sorts of other edible and medicinal fruits of the land. We're not special really, because every natural place in the world has its edible and medicinal wild foods, it's just that it seems important to know the harvestable bounty in your specific area. Maybe I'm just weird about this, but it seems so primitive and essential to know what is around you, to know the flowers and trees and fruits that are part of your home, your place in the world. There's so much to learn right around us, so much to discover and appreciate. I suppose that goes for much of life, and a necessary satisfaction we should all shoot for. Why is it that we are so myopically entrenched in the buildings and man-made structures around us, creating new synthetic compounds on a daily basis, when our forests go unmanaged and untended, and we haven't even unleashed the mysterious potential in the compounds of the natural world? Once again, we see that balance is vital in all things. Wow, really off topic. Back to PawPaws. Word to the wise, if you desire to make PawPaw jam, prepare for a long ordeal, complete with stickiness all over a tiny apartment kitchen, your dog licking at seeds that pop out of your hand when you're squeezing the juice from them, and finally, prepare for the jam not to set right because, first of all, you 'eyeball' relentlessly although you should know better by now, and you're left telling co-workers that you have some non-viscous marmalade for them to try. Long story short, I really like PawPaws. So, if you or an attractive unattached female friend is in the Northern Virginia area and seeks a day of PawPaw picking, I'm game for the next week or two, or until every single tree is picked clean.