Pride in the Wake of Typhoon Yolanda

I remember vividly the night of August 23rd 2009, the first night I spent in the Philippines.  My cohort and I were staying at a resort in Manila, and while the scent of roasting coconut and the acrid musky aromas of my own sweat mixed with relentless tropical heat wafted through a room that had the constant backdrop of roosters crowing and the ching ching of pedicabs on the streets below, I was terrified of the 2 years that awaited me. 

Two days later, after lots of talking and anxiety, I stood in a group of 21 that had been chosen to work in the Visayas.  My wife and I, along with another couple, would be working on the island of Leyte, and I would finally discover, after some training on Leyte, that my home for 2 hard years would be The Municipality of Babatngon.

The people of Babatngon didn't come across as the easy going Filipinos everybody talked about.  They didn't automatically welcome us in to their homes, sharing coke and crackers in cool concrete parlors as we had come to expect, but rather they often shut their doors to Selena and I, and conspicuously wouldn't invite us to fiestas and parties, when we had taken for granted that they would.  Many times, I got into arguments with my coworker Grace who was headstrong and conniving, not feeble and pleasant, as I had assumed these people would be.  Although I was expecting open arms and welcoming smiles for the noble work I had set out to do, my presence was met with skepticism and reproach, and it troubled me for the first months of my Peace Corps service.

One day, when I had worked to get provincial leaders to come to the Village Center, the Barangay Hall, the men I had organized didn't show up, said they were sick, sent children to tell me they weren't coming.  I sat for hours waiting for someone to show, and nothing.  I was sweaty, tired, and hungry, and got on my bike to leave when I saw two 'officers' of my group staggering down the street, drunk, smiling at me, laughing at me.

Some of my first posts from my time in Babatngon mention projects that had been wasted, supplies and donations from foreign governments seemingly squandered, and my own efforts sometimes discarded and disrespected.    I didn't know what to do, where to turn, and how to help these people who I felt didn't want me there in the first place.  Day after day, month after month I worked to understand how to provide assistance, do the 'Peace Corps thing' and 'make' life better for these folks.

One day, I don't know what happened, but it dawned upon me like the first rain after scorching drought that it was pride.  These people of Babatngon, despite all odds, despite hunger, poverty, dehumanizing disregard, had pride.  They weren't about to let a cocky white couple come into their town and 'save' them.  They weren't going to grow seaweed just because I thought it would be good, nor were they going to start saving tomato seeds because somebody told them to, and they weren't going to welcome complete strangers in, give them the shirts off their backs, make themselves vulnerable, in order to appease the precious foreigners.  When I realized this, my distress and disdain turned to a certain respect, affection for the men and women with whom I was sent to work.

The rest of my service was not easy by any means, but I developed a bond with the Fishermen that I had been sent to serve.  I worked alongside them, tying bamboo and learning how they worked with their hands, and trusted them to do the work they needed to do.  I brought in the money, we'd buy supplies, and their sweat, tears, and pride brought projects together.  It took a lot, but they did it.  Often, when I talk to other volunteers, I can't help but think that my work was something more than theirs.  Not because I worked harder, or put in more hours, sang more songs with kids or drank more tuba with the old men, but because I had gotten past their firewall of pride.  Some of my friends wore their communities like a top hat, but I wore mine like a fire brand, burnt into tender skin. 

Typhoon Yolanda struck the Philippines with a fierceness seldom seen before on Earth.  In its path lay Samar, Guiuan, Leyte, and Biliran, but at its eye, the very heart of the storm, lay Babatngon.  The Babatngon District 1 Fisherfolks Association is comprised of 30 great friends, their wonderful spouses who cut my hair and painted my toenails, and their children who handed me their homework and smiled as they recited Newton's laws in Earth Science class.  Since communication is down, I have no way to know what sort of destruction is there, but the only report that I could find, an article about Barangay Uban, where a faithful priest and his congregation huddled from the storm, mentions 16 bodies that had already washed ashore in the wake of the storm.  These could be my friends, caught on the ocean, fishing to feed their families, just to eat.  My village, the people that taught me their way of life, lifted me up when I was down in those last months, their houses feebly sit over the water on 5-inch diameter poles, and I can only imagine the destruction that is there.  Houses made of bamboo, nipa, and cogon wouldn't have stood a chance against storm surge that Yolanda brought.  My friends, who carried pesos worth of rice home in coke bottles and relished the treat of skyflakes and sprite are sitting in the squalor of squalor tonight, eating who knows what, fearing the hunger that tomorrow will bring. Imagine just living to eat, having to work to merely survive.

If you would like to give money for relief efforts, here are some good suggestions. 

If you know me, you know that I disdain technology, but now, this is when we can put it to use, so, please, text friends, repost this blog to all of those useless social networking sites, or contact aid organizations to find out how you can help to get these people back on their feet.  That's all they need, is to get back on their feet, after that, the Babatngonanons will take care of themselves. 

Less of The Green Stuff

Among the myriad of issues associated with the economic downturn, we’ve seen increased unemployment, or underemployment, as well as decreased borrowing capacity, decreased spending, and wage freezes and slackening in both the public and private sectors.  A side effect of the global recession that isn’t mentioned often is the environmental toll it is taking.  Specifically, environmental policy initiatives have been, and are more like to be discarded or underfunded when there are so many other areas of need in our dynamic global market.   Additionally, some extensive studies have shown that public sentiment just isn’t there for environmental issues during an economic downturn like it is during boom years.   Economic incentives for new, more efficient technology are less popular right now, while sustainability is regarded as a luxury rather than necessity.

Right here in Virginia, our Governor, a friend recently pointed out, is issuing a surcharge for all hybrids, a tax, you might say, in order to compensate for lost tax revenue that comes with lowered consumption of gas.  Isn’t that a little backwards?  The $64 charge on all hybrids, if compensating for an average 100 gallons saved with hybrids, is a gross over-charge, by the way.  For the math to work, gas would have to cost around $18 dollars a gallon, but hey, details, details.  Good work McDonnell, way to effectively get rid of nearly all of your progressive support in the State.   On the larger political scale, the Federal one, if you will, a friend recently summed the issue of environmental regulation and incentive policies well by saying:

“If there is a chance that funding an agency’s program to combat the destruction or degradation of the natural resources of the world can actually save or create wealth in the future, then would it not be wise to run a deficit now in light of the fact that it will create a much larger revenue increase (compared to the up-front cost) in the future?  It is always politically difficult to sell the notion of delayed profits, but no successful company on earth operates without this type of investing process, and it is ridiculous to expect the federal government to bypass these types of long range opportunities as well.”

One of the big bad
 bureaucrats causing mayhem

Delayed profits are a hard sell for sure, whether they be investment of time and money into a reformed tax code, an overhaul of the Medicare system, or environmental regulation,  they can’t get easy traction in the global economy, especially when the economy is sluggish to begin with. 

Amidst the bad stuff, the decreased positive public sentiment towards environmental efforts, lowered regulations on corporate polluters, and lost incentives that help drive environmental change, are there any environmental benefits to the economic downturn?  Well, I think it would be nice to show the sunny side of things at the end of a depressing post like this one, so I’ll leave you with some anticipated fringe benefits to the environment of a sluggish economy:

Benefit #1:  Decreased Waste - Decreased consumption of goods directly produces less waste, and, although that means fewer jobs and harder times for some, it means less land consumed with garbage and the resulting pollution.

Benefit #2:  Cultural Benefits including increased self-sufficiency, as well as less emphasis on travel, and more appreciation of recreational activities such as fishing and hunting. 

Benefit #3:  Decreased greenhouse gas emissions – Delays in building new coal fired power plants, and decreased industrial production has caused an incredible decrease in ambient carbon dioxide levels.

RIP Facebook!!  (That's what's trending)

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.