I Hope It Breaks My Heart

In October, the flames of Northern California Fire Season danced around the edges of my neighborhood and Ron and I remained on evacuation warning for five days with our electricity turned off by PG&E. During that time, many people contacted us by text and email to see if we were safe. We didn’t get the emails until the power came back on because we had no internet service. I soon found myself trying to formulate my thoughts and feelings into words to describe how I met the moment.

When we received the evacuation warning, we loaded our cars with many of our most precious possessions, prepared to leave. Having done this exercise when placed on evacuation warning for a day the year before, I was able to pack up and load my car in under an hour. I keep a thoughtfully compiled list of what to take so I don’t forget anything in my haste. I walked through the house and said my goodbyes as best as possible to the many things we would leave behind that would burn up if it came to that. In the end, it's just "stuff," isn’t it? Stuff I like, but just stuff. My home is wherever Ron is. I can love him in any bed. We laughed at ourselves because once we had the cars loaded, we had no idea where we would go. The highways were closed in most directions and a large swathe of the county was on evacuation warning with the power shut off. We could have driven North to look for a hotel, I suppose, but I would first have to find a small-animal emergency shelter because I would not get far listening to the yowling of two elderly cats who seem to think that a pleasant ride in the car is a form of torture from one of the circles of hell. Fortunately, we never had to evacuate.

Those five days with no power were actually quite lovely. At night I could see many more stars without the city lights to dim them. We usually see plenty of stars in this rural area, but it was even more dramatic with the lights of the town snuffed. Usually people don’t come out in the street to interact with one another much in our neighborhood, so it was a treat to have neighbors hang out in the street together chatting, joking, and sharing the news updates. With no internet, I took a break from the chaos and horror of current events. I did some writing using my laptop’s battery backup. I cut fabric for a quilting project, to sew later when the power came back on. We turned on our backup generator for a few hours every day to warm the house, recharge the phones and laptops, and take hot showers (we have an on-demand electric hot water heater). I went for walks. We did word puzzles together and played cards. We read by candlelight in bed and, well, one thing led to another because, after all, we were in bed together. Old people look younger by candlelight. (I wonder if there will be a baby boomlet in NorCal nine months from the power outage.) The house was silent without the background buzz of electrical current and humming appliances that we generally tune out but never free ourselves from. It was a peaceful five days.

I suppose the eventual collapse of systems due to the climate emergency will take us back to a simpler and more basic way of life. It will be a more dangerous way of life and will require far more physical labor. Perhaps that will be a good thing. Good for some, not so good for others. Good for those healthy, fit, skilled, and resourceful. The permanent loss of electricity and failure of established systems would kill my husband, who is vulnerable because of his compromised health. He can’t maintain his body temperature in the cold weather and he’s an insulin-dependent Type I. So I can’t truly wish for systems to begin breaking down, although I confess that a part of me would welcome that. I have even had my moments in which I felt relief at the possibility of having all our stuff burn up. Just as wildfire cleans out the forest, it cleans out the accumulation of people’s stuff, taking us back to fundamentals. At this stage of my life, I’m moving toward unloading my possessions, a lifetime collection of beautiful things, so that I don’t have so much to maintain and also so my children don’t have so much to wade through when I’m gone. It’s challenging to do this in an ecologically sound manner while tempted to just cart it off to the landfill.

I often recall that my people walked away from dire situations in countries persecuting Jews with not much more than the Sabbath candlesticks. They didn’t just start over with no possessions, they often started over with no money, no resources, no knowledge of the language, and no viable profession. In a wildfire two years ago that destroyed his house, a friend of mine lost the tefillin (a ritual Jewish prayer object) brought to America by his grandfather fleeing Eastern Europe. The tefillin was one of the only things brought out from complete loss by my friend’s grandfather. It was not only an instrument of prayer, but a beloved object of everyday use for the man who brought it over from the old country. Irreplaceable. I found myself putting simple objects of everyday use into my car, such as a quilt I made and my well-seasoned, ancient, cast-iron, deep-dish frying pan (which I then had to fish back out of the car that evening to cook dinner).

In some ways, I have been preparing emotionally for the climate emergency ever since I was a child. I was aware of many of the dangers and issues long before most people had any inkling. My mother told me that when I was ten years old (I don’t remember this), I went door-to-door in our neighborhood in upstate New York to warn the neighbors that acid rain would fall over the Great Lakes if we didn’t stop polluting the air with gases such as carbon dioxide. The year was 1964. I have rehearsed for environmental collapse in my head my whole life. I wrote a sci-fi novel about it that I can’t get published. One literary agent told me she found the book too depressing. Seriously? I suppose it’s easier to pretend this isn’t happening. My point is that I have been hyper-aware about climate degradation for a long time. Once a week the trucks come through my neighborhood to collect my trash, recycling, and compost bins left at the street for pickup. One of my greatest pleasures is lying in bed in the early morning on waste collection day and listening to the garbage trucks clatter through. It comforts me to hear evidence that the systems are still working. I give thanks for the garbage pickup every week. I have done this for decades, in several different houses. Bill Watterson (creator of the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon) says:  “Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.”

I read a recent article in the New York Times about coping with “climate grief.” Those of us cognizant of the climate emergency must struggle with the weight of what we have lost and what we stand to lose as our planet tumbles toward the inability to sustain human life and the lives of a vast number of exquisite non-human species as well. But life has always been about loss, hasn’t it? That’s why we cherish it so. When I realized that my loss of hearing in the high ranges had finally robbed me of the ability to hear birdsong, I had to accept the loss and move on. And that was such a small thing compared to, say, the death of a person I have loved. The death of a person, while no small thing ever (in Senegal they say, “when an old person dies, a library burns down”), is a small thing compared to, say, the drowning of all the islands of the Maldives. Or the disappearance of the coral reefs, the loss of the rainforests, the death of a species. All whales. All orange trees. All elephants. All algae.

I still have faith that personal action makes a difference, however small, so I take many actions to show the love for Earth, to preserve the climate. For instance, I drive an electric car. I try to appreciate and cherish the treasures in my daily life:  a delicious bowl of soup, spectacular oak tree, splendid sunset, evening of conversation with friends, reading to my grandson, tending my garden, laughing and cooking with my children, kissing my husband. I count my blessings often. I also have faith in the younger generations coming up. I believe that the young ones will rise to the challenge of figuring out solutions. They will create, invent, innovate, transform. They will accept our losses and move forward into the unknown, making it up as they go. They are resilient and brilliant. They will shine. Today looks vastly different from 1920, which looks vastly different from 1820. Who would have imagined? I refuse to believe that human endeavor ends with us. I have faith that an unimaginably different 2120 landscape will come into view, and I have faith that it will contain at least a few righteous humans who have not burned up, starved, drowned, or become illiterate.

Life is ever precarious, balancing on a razor’s edge. Seeing what I saw about the coming climate chaos at a remarkably tender young age, I have lived my life with passion and gratitude. Now, selfishly, I pray that in spite of the danger, violence, and destruction that engulfs the world, my own blessed life continues to be so full of joy, bringing me continued gifts and wonders, that it breaks my heart to leave it in the end.

Counted as a Member of Jewish Community

An encounter at synagogue a few weeks ago during the Yom Kippur evening service called Kol Nidre gave me pause. That evening, about halfway through the service, a strange man entered the synagogue and took a seat at the back. There was nothing about him to cause alarm; however, I belong to a small and intimate rural congregation where I know everyone and I didn’t know him. He came in late in the service and did not wear a prayer shawl or yarmulke. A couple of years ago, I surely would not have taken any notice. However now, in the current climate of hatred and blatant anti-Semitism, my thoughts went a different way.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reports that hate crimes against Jews more than doubled in 2018 from the previous year. Hate crimes in California increased by 21%. Here, in California, Nazi graffiti is not categorized as a hate crime. So spraying a swastika on a synagogue is not a hate crime, just vandalism. I find this appalling. FBI data shows that Jewish people and institutions are the most frequently targeted religious group for hate crimes nationwide, accounting for 58% of religious-based hate-crime incidents. Muslims are the second most frequent target, at 18.6%. (Source:  CBS News, 2018.) Anti-Semitic incidents constitute half of all hate crimes in New York City. In 2018, there were four times as many hate crimes against Jews in New York City than against African Americans (New York Times, 2018), even though Jews make up 13% of the population of New York and blacks make up 24%. Black Lives Matter, and my people also can’t breathe. I do not cite these statistics to compare suffering but rather to point out that while anti-Semitism is widespread it often remains invisible in public spaces where discourse on racism occurs.

As a product of history, with family who died in the Holocaust, and living in this historical time of continued oppression, unleashed with greater fury under this government, I looked at the stranger in my midst that Kol Nidre evening and instead of feeling a wave of welcome, I felt a wave of terror. I imagined him drawing a gun and firing on my community. I looked around at the familiar faces of those I have known these many years, those for whom I have great affection and affinity, and imagined bullet-ridden bleeding bodies. My heart thrashed loudly in my throat. I considered where to run, where to hide, and whether I should drop to the floor and act dead. What was I thinking? I was thinking that I and my community are in danger. We are vulnerable, hunted, viewed by many as the source of all evil, just as much now as we were hundreds of years ago during deeply ignorant times. We continue to live in ignorant times. The myth of blood libel is alive and well.

Embraced in the sacred space of prayer, I calmed my mind and slowed my madly beating heart. I convinced myself that the stranger was simply a fellow Jew, away from home on a holiday, who had found a local synagogue and come for Kol Nidre. That was more plausible. That was the truth. The next morning, during Yom Kippur services, the rabbi invited congregants up for an aliyah. This is the honor of reading from the Torah or standing at the altar while it is open. For this particular aliyah, she invited anyone who wished to stand up and be counted as a member of a community. I went. I wanted to stand before the open Torah to be counted as a member of my Jewish community. As I stood, it occurred to me that standing up as a Jew is an act of defiance. It is an act of courage, and always has been. I take a risk openly and proudly declaring myself a Jew. My ancestors took this risk. Some of them died for it. I hope I don’t.

As I stood at the open Torah, I also had another thought. This one brought me great joy and great comfort. It was the opposite of my fear of the stranger the previous evening. I reflected on the beautiful way that a Jew can enter a synagogue anywhere in the world and be welcomed, as I should have welcomed the strange man at Kol Nidre, and would have if I hadn’t let my imagination run wild. When my father was presenting at a math conference in Berlin a few years ago, and it was the weekend of my grandfather’s yahrzeit (anniversary of his death), he found a synagogue near his hotel and walked over there for Sabbath services so he could say Kaddish for his father. The moment he came through the door, congregants warmly welcomed him. The rabbi gave him an aliyah. In 1983, my parents moved to Tennessee from the town in upstate New York where they had lived for more than 30 years and raised me and my brothers. My father had taken a teaching position at the University of TN in Knoxville. They joined a synagogue immediately. After only a few short weeks in Knoxville, my mother was diagnosed with a life-threatening illness. I was expecting a baby soon, and could not go to her. The Jewish community (that my parents had only just joined) mobilized. They took terrific care of my parents through the ordeal, which my mother survived. One woman in particular ensured that my parents were looked after, with meals brought to the house and people checking in to help out. This woman became a dear and continuing friend to my mother in all the years that followed. A Jew can walk into a synagogue anywhere in the world.

Last year I met a young man, a stranger among us, at our synagogue. He came to Sabbath services one evening with his girlfriend, who is not Jewish. He is a Sephardic Jew from Paris. He had met his girlfriend in Taiwan when they were both enrolled in a summer language intensive to learn Mandarin. The girlfriend is now in her senior year at the City of 10,000 Buddhas Dharma Realm College. I befriended these two remarkable young people, and my husband and I have enjoyed many an evening of dinner and conversation in their company. In the spring, they landed in a problem situation with housing and so we took them in to stay at our house for a little while. Soon after, the young man was forced to return to France. But they remain very much together as a couple, and she has been to see him in Paris, and will go again soon. His girlfriend told me recently that when he told her he was going to call me when they had their difficulty with housing, she asked if that would be OK and he replied, “of course, we’re fellow Jews, I know she’ll offer to help.” Of course. This young man and his parents will travel here in May for her graduation, and we have offered to host a party for her at our house. Last week I had an email from him in which he said that he has told his parents all about me and my husband, and that his mother wants to meet “the Jewish mother who took such good care of another Jewish mother’s Jewish son.” A Jew can walk into a synagogue anywhere in the world.

On the one hand, I have a greater fear of the stranger than in times past, and on the other hand, I retain my affinity with my fellow Jews whether I know them personally or not. For that matter, I retain my desire to welcome the stranger, any stranger (Jewish or not) in my midst. Therefore I vow to work harder to conquer my fear so that I can continue to openly welcome the stranger. I must resist, and not allow the oppressor to change my heart. A Jew can walk into a synagogue anywhere in the world. My people. I wish to stand up and be counted as a member of the Jewish community. Defiant. Courageous. Fearless. Not easy. I am blessed to have been born a Jew.

Season for Change

It has taken me a long time to reconcile myself with the fact that I did not become the great and famous writer I had planned to become when in my youth. In recent weeks, after swearing off social media, I find that I do not have the means by which to even vaguely deceive myself into thinking that my thoughts or words are of much consequence. Leaving social media has had a greater impact on my life than I had imagined it would. The psychology of the thing is insidiously misleading. Social media enables people to embrace the false perception that they are doing something in the world and that they are significant, when in fact they are not. Posting a link to a petition on Facebook is not the same as going to a demonstration to add to the numbers, writing postcards to congressional representatives, raising one’s voice, trading in a gas-guzzling car for an electric vehicle, eating vegan, engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience, or crossing the ocean in a solar racing yacht to demand that world leaders answer for the sin of failing to act to save the planet for future generations. It is not the same as actually doing something. It is nothing. I knew that. Now I feel it deep down. Social media gives people the false idea that the things they say on it have some kind of weight in the world.

It’s no crime to want to make a difference in the world. I think everyone yearns for that in ways great and small. We all want to leave a mark to show that we passed this way. We want to be remembered, to matter. But the hard truth is that precious few of us are all that significant. When I die, I will be mourned and remembered by my circle of friends and family, and not beyond. Then life will go on. I have never made the high level of sacrifice or risked all for the grand gesture necessary to have a largescale impact. I have not earned it. Posting my thoughts on Facebook does not make me immortal. In fact, when systems collapse, the internet will disappear. None of the trails we have left in cyberspace will remain. I understand the impulse. People fear obscurity. We fear the forgetting of it. The forgetting of ourselves. Disappearance. We fear the finality of death. This is what philosophers often refer to as “the human condition.” It is the poignant truth of our human lives; the grief we feel at every loss of life. Fortunately, we have joy to balance it out. If not for the joy, and the loss of it, then death would not bother us so much. Joy does not reside in a handheld device, however. It’s outside the window, beyond the borders of the screen, in the green, breathing, scented, sensual world.

Having recently crossed the threshold of 65 years on miraculous Earth, I have come to a place where I am at peace with how small I am. I only regret that it seems to be paralyzing me from determinedly pursuing publication of the many words I have already written from back when I still clung to the dream of being heard. I do wish I could publish my unpublished books and that my words might matter to others and ease, enlighten, and delight them on their journey. As it stands, my words have mostly only eased my own journey. I have hoped to use my gift as a wordsmith to benefit other travelers on the planet. I gather from what people have told me that a few of my words have done so from time to time, which is truly a fine thing and lifts my heart.

At this time, though, I find myself in the midst of a season of change. The changes are various and the details of them too close to the bone to share yet. I am trying to step into these changes gracefully, wisely, and bravely. A time of change is cause for sorrow over what is lost, but it is also cause for the glad excitement of new beginnings. How many times have I gone dashing headlong into the unknown to make a change in my life? I have always had a healthy sense of adventure and a willingness to shake things up, to take a chance. This attribute has usually served me well. My greatest leaps of faith have yielded great rewards. Honestly, at a fundamental level, getting married, having children, switching professions, or moving to a new community all require huge leaps of faith, which ordinary people like myself navigate all the time. So perhaps I am not that unusual in terms of taking chances, such as falling in love with a man from a culture dramatically different from my own or shooting the moon and moving from Berkeley to a 40-acre forest in a rural community to raise my children. Those who know me well can come to their own conclusions based on the trajectory of my life. Nowadays people like to broadcast the details of their life transitions on social media, as if that gives them greater import. It does not. But neither does it diminish the courage it takes to make those changes in the real world. Because there are no guarantees.

For the first time, I feel the shadow of old age approaching, with all that goes along with that. As a result, I believe that the time has come to make certain changes to my lifestyle, my thinking, my expectations, my priorities. What better time to contemplate such moves than this week, at the Jewish High Holidays? Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. One of the three pillars of the Jewish High Holidays is teshuvah, translated as “turning” or “changing.” In the context of the holidays, it refers to recognizing wrong actions and wrong directions in our lives and making a commitment to change, redirect. It is not enough to recognize our transgressions and atone for them. We are also charged with making a commitment to prevent them from happening again. This requires making changes in ourselves and our way of acting in the world. It requires personal growth, and thus teshuvah also refers to the overall process of transformation. More than a mere New Year’s resolution, it is a tectonic shift in being and a start in taking the small steps required to change, one after the other, one foot and then the next. It is a time for starting out on a path that leads to a new place. I have turned these thoughts over in my mind the way I might turn a precious stone over in my hands, and I have begun to embrace coming changes in my life. Some of these changes are a choice I make while others will happen whether I wish them to or not.

I lift a glass to courage as I contemplate the daring future. I am ever grateful to have my husband at my side, steady as always, and the blessing of my children and grandson to remind me of how fortunate I have been in my life so far. May my luck hold. May I make good decisions. May tragedy pass over, leaving my house untouched. I wish for a long life so full of joy that it breaks my heart to leave it in the end. And I wish all this for you too, friend, fellow traveler, whoever you are who continues to read my words. May you be inscribed in the Book of Life for a good and sweet year.

Getting Lost Is No Fun

When did it become fashionable to demonize GPS devices and navigation assistance? I have recently seen articles equating the use of GPS with burying one’s face in a smart phone 24/7 instead of connecting with in-the-flesh people, with living a virtual life playing electronic games all day while the actual sun is sparkling on the actual river, or with practicing Satanic rituals in the basement. I have read that GPS does everything from shrinking brain function, to impairing perception of the three-dimensional realm, to aggravating insomnia, to undermining the upkeep of street signs, to causing dementia, to resulting in an obsession with cheese. Even one of my most beloved writers, Rebecca Solnit, believes that GPS has a detrimental impact on our perception of the physical world. She writes that “getting lost and then finding your way out of the terra incognita” is a valuable experience. Sorry, Rebecca, I disagree. Getting lost is no fun. I have struggled all my life with having no sense of direction, and I can attest to the fact that it is a disability and GPS is assistive technology that has greatly improved my life. Without GPS, I would still be wandering around in the basement trying to escape Satan.

I have gotten lost in the women’s restroom in Macy’s and had to be escorted to the proper exit door (by a six-year-old who saw me open the door to the mop closet). I have entered maze-like apartment complexes and had to be extricated by Search and Rescue. I have gotten my car stuck in the mud in the woods in the middle of the night while driving down a creek bed, all-the-while thinking I was on Highway 101 (why aren’t there any other cars on this road?). I have set out to attend a company meeting at a retreat site in the Castro Valley and wound up at a shopping mall in Stockton. I have spent hours driving in circles, hours trying to find the right path back out of a forest, hours trying to assemble a combination of landmarks into some organized pattern. I have arrived late for special events, or sometimes not at all. I have tried my hardest to translate the lines on a map to an understanding of the real web of roads in front of my car. I can’t process “turn South.” Does that mean right or left? I left my sundial in the mop closet. Solnit may romanticize “attentive wandering” (as she calls it) all she likes, but when she finishes with that she can find her way home. I, on the other hand, have to attentive wander my ass into a motel for the night only to resume hunting for the trail of crumbs back to my house in the morning.

I was so incapable of “following my nose” that if we got a bit turned around while traveling, my husband would ask me which way I thought we should go so he could then go in the diametrical opposite direction of what seemed right to me because he could count on my sense of direction to be the complete opposite of the right way, literally 180 degrees off. He could depend on my internal compass to be that consistently busted. I had supremely dysfunctional magnetic energy.

Enter the advent of Mapquest. When it first arrived on the scene, I swooned. I fell in love. Mapquest was my co-pilot. I slept with Mapquest printouts under my pillow. When I had to go somewhere unfamiliar, I would run out a Mapquest with specific directions about where and when to turn and whether right or left. As long as I did not stray from the Mapquest, I could suddenly find my way anywhere. It was like riding a magic carpet. Mapquest was the truth and the truth set me free. Solnit writes: “When people are told which way to turn, it relieves them of the need to create their own routes and remember them. They pay less attention to their surroundings.” That’s simply not how it works for someone with no sense of direction. I wanted Mapquest to tell me which way to turn. I pay such close attention to my surroundings that every street looks like the one I should turn on. Before Mapquest, when I made a decision about my route, I would panic the minute I followed it. What if I had headed the wrong way? It was as if someone told me to turn at the Starbuck’s; seriously, which one?

I was still marveling over Mapquest when my husband bought me a Tom-Tom. It was the quintessential device for the directionally impaired. I fell in love all over again. With my Tom-Tom, I could find my way even if I went completely off-course. Once I set it to my destination, then it would take me there from anywhere. I could find my way from my house to the Taj Mahal if necessary. Suddenly, the world was my oyster, as they say. Meanwhile, out on an unmarked trail in the Sierras, the anti-GPS movement was gaining traction. Neuroscientist Véronique Bohbot declared her research indicates that “when we get lost, it activates the hippocampus, it gets us completely out of the habit mode.” She claims that getting lost is a good thing and that by finding our way without the use of a GPS requires us to use spatial-memory strategies that increase the amount of gray matter in the hippocampus. Stimulating the hippocampus in this way prevents cognitive impairment and dementia. For me, finding my way without GPS, the best case scenario would be that I would make lots of gray matter and therefore remember what my house looks like (no dementia) but I would have no idea how to get there (directional impairment). I would basically retain the cognitive ability to understand that I needed to attentively wander my ass into a motel for the night yet again. But wow, look how much gray matter I made! 

Neuroscientists report that brain behavior changes when people rely on turn-by-turn directions. They consider this a negative thing, and warn that we lose some aspect of brain function when we don’t use our built-in spatial-memory and navigation strategies. But what about someone who was born without a built-in navigation system? What about someone wired to perceive a road sign as a trick question. Honestly, I am not the only directionally impaired person on the planet. I’m not even the only one in my family. It’s a genetic trait. My first cousin, my nephew, and my daughter share it with me, and all of us are eternally grateful for GPS. I assure you that we are painfully aware of our surroundings. We simply don’t recognize them. People use their cell phones nowadays to navigate, while I continue my love affair with my Tom-Tom, which works fine for me. I don’t want a Smart Phone, for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that I don’t want the government to know where I am every second of every minute of every day.

In the past couple of years, however, I have noticed some interesting transformations happening with my ability to find my way. A few years ago, I started learning American Sign Language (ASL), and learning this visual language is changing my brain. I have evolved a distinctly improved sense of direction. Crazy, huh? I’m not perfect, but I’m better than I used to be for sure. (Oliver Sacks wrote about how learning a visual language reprograms the brain in his book Seeing Voices.) Using a visual language has awakened a dormant spatial realm of cognition in my brain. To my shock and delight, I find myself more often knowing exactly which way to turn. Communicating visually has helped me find where I am in the universe. Before I started learning ASL, it didn’t matter how many times I went to a place, I was still liable to totally forget how to find it. Now I tend to better remember what turns I took, the landmarks, how far everything is from everything else. (Hey, I’ve been here before!) Even so, I completely identify with others who have no sense of direction. Unless you have experienced this, you really have no idea how life-changing GPS can be. Go ahead and turn yours off and commune with the world you wander into, but I’m keeping my GPS turned on and arriving at my destination, thank you very much.

Solnit (whom I admire and usually agree with) can rhapsodize about how wandering lost leads us to “knowing places, which is one of the most rewarding things there is” and that “being oriented is a geographical-spiritual necessity for some of us.” She can encourage everyone to turn off their GPS and follow their nose, but she lives in a parallel universe to those of us who lack the ability to conjure spatial-memory strategies or geographically correct mindsets that allow us to figure out how to get from A to B. For us, being oriented is not a spiritual necessity but a practical challenge to overcome. Please help me out of the mop closet and point me toward the exit.

We must recognize that each one of us lives inside our own reality, which we create from the tools given to us, which include our individual brain functioning. Our individual perception defines our world. So let’s be careful about making generalizations about what is good or bad for people’s brains. My brain needs GPS. So don’t tell me that I’m not living my best life because I use GPS. I would rather find my way with GPS than get lost and engage with the world that turns up in front of me when I have no idea where I am or how to get where I need to go. That’s a horrible feeling. GPS helps me live my best life. It prevents me from spending so much of it in “attentive wanderment,” which does not sound like a productive activity to me. For me, getting lost is no fun.

Dark Psychic Forces of Social Media

Give me the strength to resist the pull of dark psychic forces attempting to suck me under using the deadly whirlpool of Facebook. I feel like Dorothy spinning in the tornado. Will my house land on a wicked witch? If so, can I have her striped socks? I did not realize how addicted to Facebook I had become until I stopped using it. I originally created an account to promote my books and my blog. That disappeared in the rearview long ago. Over time, I have become increasingly seduced by the Facebook experience. The platform was first created as a resource for connectivity, which is my favorite thing about it. If only it could have stopped at that and not devolved into the nefarious mechanism for global destruction it has become. You may wonder what changed for me. What changed is that I watched the exposé The Great Hack (available for streaming on Netflix), which is quite the eye-opener. It is a testimony to the power of art to change our lives that this documentary made a measureable difference in mine. It is also a testimony to the power of social-media-driven manipulative advertising that authoritarian, repressive, unethical, climate-emergency-denying governments are on the rise around the world.

Facebook have I loved. I loved that it made me laugh. I loved that it lifted me up with beautiful images. I loved that it gave me a window into the lives of others. I loved the things I learned (while carefully navigating false information). I loved that it kept me in communication with friends around the world whom I would otherwise rarely connect with, certainly not on a daily basis. Many friends I will never see again in person in this life, but we continued to touch each other’s lives in virtual space. I felt empowered to share my political views and censor what I wished to read by hitting the delete button. I instigated a few political actions with my words. I felt heartened to discover like-minded souls. I enjoyed more than a few extraordinary Facebook connectivity experiences. But I was ignoring the seamy underside. All this time, Facebook has been collecting personal data on people, mine included, and selling it in the open marketplace where it can be and is used without our consent for unethical purposes. All my Facebook loves do not outweigh the abuse of data made possible by this platform, which has caused the actual (not virtual) loss, pain, and death of people resulting from the amoral calculated manipulation of targeted advertising. Or the misuse of data that has resulted in power shifts away from recognizing and addressing the climate emergency now upon us because it interferes with the profits of a few unconcerned individuals. I’m taking the children, the cats, the books, my EV, and my cast iron skillet, and I’m divorcing Facebook.

I confess that at first I found The Great Hack somewhat confusing. I couldn’t understand what was going on or why key players made the choices they did. I couldn’t connect the dots and figure out how access to people’s data made it possible to throw an election. Until I had my aha moment. It was all about the advertising. Duh. It was about targeted manipulation. I was partly confused because I had never seen the advertising Cambridge Analytica used to influence people that was shown in the film and I didn’t even get what some of it was meant to do. I have never seen any of that advertising. I never saw it because I am not what Cambridge Analytica categorizes as a “persuadable.” I was probably not targeted because I was profiled as someone unlikely to be swayed by advertising. But others are. Others are prey. And the predators went for blood. It was Vance Packard’s “Hidden Persuaders” (can you believe his book was published in 1957?) on steroids and powered by the technology of the 21^st century as a tool of the dark psychic forces, a weapon of mass destruction.

Cambridge Analytica is what happens when children are raised to be smart but not raised to be ethical. These individuals don’t even understand why they should try to be good, or why goodness matters. Plainly stated, they cannot distinguish right from wrong. So Alexander Nix and his team (including Brittany Kaiser) did the immoral, disastrous things that they did just to see if they could actually succeed at them. The extreme consequences for individual, real, breathing, living people did not enter into it. The Cambridge Analytica interference in the election in Trinidad, where they ran a targeted advertising campaign to convince young people not to vote, is a case in point. Only someone with no morals would take pride in convincing young people to self-disenfranchise. The election in Trinidad was so close, that keeping that one segment (specifically black youth) from the polls made a difference. A calculated effort to impact the election through manipulation of a vulnerable population worked. Cambridge Analytica busts open the champagne while Trinidad goes down in flames and takes the future of a whole Trinidadian generation with it. Interference in the Brexit referendum did the same for the younger generation in Britain. The devastating 2016 election in the U.S. came down to 77,744 votes in PA, WI, and MI. That’s a tiny number of “persuadables,” and well within the realm of impact of Cambridge Analytica’s targeted advertising to paint Hillary as “crooked” to enough people who would believe. (Cambridge Analytica invented “lock her up.”) I would bet that the smart-but-unethical wonks at Cambridge Analytica viewed the whole maneuver as if they were playing a video game. It was Ender’s Game. They considered it a virtual exercise, only to see it manifested in the real world. Their interference in the 2016 election has thrown my country down in flames. Quite literally for me, because I live in California at ground zero for the climate emergency, at ground zero for wildfires.

Before watching The Great Hack, I wondered why people would vote for candidates and initiatives that would clearly bring them to grief. Why vote for a candidate who did not have your best interests at heart? It never made sense to me. How could these people be so stupid? Don’t they understand why they can’t afford the medication they need? Why they lost their house? Why they can’t afford to send their children to college? Why their food is poisoned, their planet deteriorating, the future for their grandchildren robbed? Why would a hard-working, regular Joe support a tax law that reduces taxes for a few super-rich people and does nothing to ease his struggle? Why would he oppose legislation to provide him and his family with affordable healthcare? This used to befuddle me. But now I see. Targeted advertising has done its job and convinced people to believe the message tailored to them, specifically, to trap them in false thinking. They’re not stupid. They’re just human and they’re being conscientiously misled by those who would profit. They’re being duped. And that can happen to anyone targeted with the right kind of messaging. It could happen to me. It probably has.

I would like to believe that I have used Facebook responsibly. I think I have used it for what it was intended, which is connectivity. I would like to pretend that I have protected myself from advertising and the misuse of my personal information by remaining vigilant about patrolling my borders, blocking the unwanted, checking the right privacy boxes. But I probably have not protected myself, or those with whom I am in contact on Facebook. I have no idea what “data points” are circulating in cyberspace about me or how they are being used to hurt me or influence me or others. It’s too late to recall them. It’s too late for a lot of things. But one thing I can do is choose not to engage with Facebook. I can choose not to participate. I am not suggesting that you do the same, and I do not judge. I’m just stating what I’m doing.

I am leaving my account open for now, for the same purpose that I originally created it, which is to share my writing and direct people to my blog (and because I have no other way to contact many people with whom I want to stay in touch). So I am not ready to close my account, but perhaps I will eventually, even though it will not help me recall the data points on myself that have already escaped. I am still sorting out what I think about all this and how I want to act on what I know. But these thoughts are mine, they do not originate in an algorithm run on me used to influence my choices. I will resist the whispers of the hidden persuaders lurking in the dark psychic sludge.

Liberation

I wore my New El Salvador Today T-shirt from the 1980s to the “Lights for Liberty” demonstration in front of the courthouse in my little hometown on Friday evening. Who remembers the beginning of the Sanctuary Movement in the 1980s? Can you believe we’re still protesting this same old mess? If you don’t want to read all my words, then please cut to the chase and read the last paragraph where I provide some direct actions you can take to protest the imprisonment of children under deplorable conditions at the detention centers.

In the 1980s, my synagogue in Berkeley belonged to the East Bay Sanctuary Covenant of Faith-based Communities. We harbored Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees, connected them with services, and supported them with supplies and inclusion in community activities. What I learned from them is that these refugees are fleeing untenable living situations in countries destroyed by US foreign policy and US corporations. The Salvadoran torturers in the prisons during the era of the death squads under Duarte were trained in torture techniques by the U.S. military. The United Fruit Company seized pretty much all the land in Guatemala and by now they have ruined it so that there’s precious little arable land in Guatemala. Basically people can’t grow food there. They’re starving. They’re fleeing land that can’t support human life.

As a Jew, I come from a people with a long history of fleeing for our lives. We became refugees 70 years after the birth of Christ, when the Romans tossed the Jews out of our homeland and we went into exile until 1948 when Israel was born. Most of us still live in the Diaspora since we have chosen not to move to Israel. The Jews were expelled from England in 1290, France in 1306, and Spain in 1492. Jews were legally prohibited from living in Spain until 1973, when the 1492 law was officially overturned. We all know what happened in Germany, where simply throwing us out of the country would have been kind compared to what actually happened. Not many countries have welcomed us wandering Jews. We have been homeless, migrant, seeking asylum, fleeing persecution, and often one step ahead of extermination for around two thousand years. There’s a joke in the Jewish community that the explanation for every Jewish holiday is “They tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat.”

FDR turned away hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees seeking asylum during the Holocaust, despite the fact that Eleanor kicked and screamed about it. Jewish immigration was restricted then, as it is now for the refugees at the Southern border, as a direct result of the Immigration Act of 1924, which is still in force, and which limits the number of immigrants allowed entry into the U.S. each year through a national origins quota. FDR could have accepted more Jewish refugees through an executive order, but he chose not to do so. I find that interesting since nowadays there’s an executive order about some type of national emergency or other every week. Usually a national emergency fabricated to begin with by the executive. In 1939, FDR and the  American public didn’t know what was happening in the extermination camps. They didn’t know the full horror until the camps were liberated at the end of the war, and then it was too late.

What we learn from this is that when people say they can’t survive in their country and they are fleeing for their lives, we need to believe them. When they come to the U.S. seeking asylum, when they say the violence in their home country is intolerable, we need to believe them. When they leave their home, which they love, and go into exile, to wander for the rest of their lives, when they leave their community, when they jeopardize the health and safety of their children because they see no future for them in their homeland, when they risk having their family separated, we need to believe that they are desperate and need help. When they say that the conditions in their homeland are horrific, untenable. We need to believe them.

As a Jew, I agree that these detention centers at the southern border are concentration camps. What else could they possibly be? I imagine that many of you have at one time or another asked yourself, as I have, “What would I have done if I had lived in Nazi Germany?” Well now we find that out. A Jewish group of protestors arrested outside a detention center in New Jersey a couple of week ago carried signs saying “Never again is now.” I confess that I am disappointed in myself for not doing more. I should be standing outside a detention center full of children in Clint, Texas bearing witness to this national horror, expressing my outrage until these children are freed. I should chain myself to a fence and get carted off to jail. But I’m not willing to give up my familiar life where I live, here in paradise, to take that kind of stand. I need to keep working to keep my house and my comfortable lifestyle. I’m definitely not willing to eat prison food. In my defense, I’m also not silent and not compliant. I stood at the courthouse on Friday evening. I spoke to those gathered. I can and will do something. We can all do something. And even if it may seem like that something doesn’t make a difference, we should do it. Because it might actually make a difference.

Here is a case in point.

A year ago in June I demonstrated at the Richmond Detention Center during the Families Belong Together Action. I chose to demonstrate at a detention facility because I wanted to stand outside a prison where ICE detainees were locked up. The only detention center in the SF Bay Area at that time was in Richmond. The demo at the Richmond Detention Center that day was organized by the Jewish community. It was a fairly small demo, with about 1,000 people, in an out-of-the way location. But something extraordinary happened last June at the Richmond Detention Center. After the demo, the official in charge of the facility spoke with the Alameda County Sheriff. He said that the protest had been stressful for his staff because it was dangerously distracting and because everyone working at the facility knew they did not have the resources to ensure the safety of the people in the crowd that turned up. They could not support continued protests at that facility. The result of that conversation was that the Alameda County Sheriff terminated the county’s contract with ICE and gave ICE six weeks to remove all the ICE detainees from that center. There were 200 adult detainees there. When the sheriff cancelled the contract, ICE told him that it would be detrimental to the detainees because they would have to move them further away from their families. I call bullshit on that. The only reason these asylum seekers were detained in the first place is because they couldn’t post bail. What kind of crazy person sets bail for asylum seekers?! If ICE would eliminate their bail, they could release them on their own recognizance until their asylum hearing. I’m telling this story because I feel like I actually made a difference by protesting there. For one, ICE got its hand slapped by Alameda County and the detention center was effectively shut down. For two, the detainees inside the facility were able to hear us outside during the demo. It was impossible to insulate them from the sound. They heard our words and our songs and they knew we were there, supporting them. My point is that you never know if what you do will make a difference. So do whatever you can.

On that note I want to give you some ideas about things to do to protest the child abuse being committed, the trauma being perpetrated on immigrant children by the predator in chief and his ghastly regime. Number one, contact congressional representatives. Call, write, and email them nonstop. I often call after hours and leave a message. I call my own representatives as well as Republican senators all over the country to express my outrage. These contacts are logged and tracked. Number two, donate money (even if it’s not much) to organizations working for family reunification. My favorite one at the moment is ImmigrantFamilies Together. This organization focuses on reuniting parents and children. One of the most important things you can do to help families get back together is donate to organizations raising bail funds for parents. That’s one of the main things Immigrant Families Together does. They raise bail funds, get parents out of jail, locate their children, provide transportation if necessary, and bring the parents and children together. Every dollar you donate to them is used to find children and put them back into the arms of their mothers. Finally, number three is a project I cooked up. I call it my toothbrush project. I’m mailing toothbrushes to the detention center in Clint, Texas (which is the one that has been in the news lately for abusing the children held there). I’m spreading the word about this project and asking other people to do likewise. Please help me flood the detention center at Clint with toothbrushes. Here is the address:

US Customs and Border Protection

13400 Alameda Ave.

Clint, TX   79836

The predator in chief spent $1.2 million dollars on that military display on the Mall in Washington last week, but he claims he doesn’t have the money to feed the children he has put in cages in Clint, Texas. He says he can’t afford to buy these children toothbrushes, soap, or three square meals a day, and yet he could afford those tanks. So I’m sending toothbrushes. They are quite affordable. I want to shame the authorities. To bear witness. To show them that the whole world is watching. To express my outrage.

This is me suggesting actions people can take at Lights for Liberty on Friday.

 (Photos by Ron Reed.)

EV, Earth, and Me

My big news:  I bought an electric vehicle (EV). Now I feel so self-righteous that you might want to cross to the other side of the street if you see me approaching. I drive an all-electric, plug-in 2017 Nissan LEAF. I’m so smug that you would think I had built a fully functioning windmill in my garage out of rebar, old magazines, and coconuts. If I could get the car into my bed, I’d sleep with it. This purchase goes deep. It reflects my lifelong effort to preserve and protect miraculous Planet Earth. As early as the age of nine, I went door-to-door on my street to warn my neighbors that Acid Rain would fall over the Great Lakes if we didn’t change our polluting ways. No ways were changed. Acid Rain fell. I wonder if the neighbors remembered my warning. Perhaps they were not even aware of the arrival of Acid Rain, not “woke.” I learned at a young age that prophets of doom rarely get invited in for milk and cookies.

Remember when we drove our glass, paper, and plastic (conscientiously separated) to the recycling center? I felt self-righteous in those days for taking the time to wash out my peanut butter jars. There’s a family story about one time when my younger son cracked a bone in his leg playing soccer and on the way to the ER I stopped at the recycling center to dispose of the fermenting, smelly bottles so they wouldn’t bake in the sun in my car in the hospital parking lot. My son accused me of having my priorities twisted, and never let me forget that I recycled before taking him for X-rays. (However, we did not have to drive home later in a car that smelled like a brewery dumpster.) Remember when we switched our incandescent lightbulbs to fluorescents for the sake of the environment? Good times. How simple it was before we learned so much more about the extent of the damage and the enormity of the task ahead if we hope to survive here. We clung to the reassuring belief that recycling the peanut butter jars and switching out the light bulbs would save us. Now that communities are burning up, flooding, blowing away, and collapsing under biblical weather events, the true gravity of the situation has descended. Whole countries have lost the ability to grow food, because they have no healthy arable soil. People are dying. If you are “woke” then you are probably traumatized by a growing understanding of what we’re up against. We have to do so much more than we at first imagined. We must let sleeping fossils lie. Leave the fossil fuels in the ground (as Greta Thunberg says).

This week when the cashier at the natural foods store asked me how I am, I had a new answer ready. “I’m self-righteous because I bought an EV.” His eyes widened. “Like a hybrid?” he asked with satisfying admiration. “Nope. All-electric plug-in that uses no gas whatsoever.” More admiration. Ha! I’ll take it. We generally feel like we can’t make a dent in something as enormous as pending planetary collapse. But we can and we must. After buying my EV, I believe this even more than ever. So I want to share some actions I have taken to show the love for Planet Earth and pass along an inhabitable ecosystem to the young folks. I hope by sharing I will give you some ideas about things you can do too.

Energy. I am fortunate to have a local provider, called Sonoma Clean Power, that provides electricity for my house from 100% geothermal energy. No dinosaurs were harmed in the making of my electricity. Sonoma Clean Power is brought to my region through something called Community Choice Aggregation (CCA), which allows local governments to produce their own energy and deliver it through existing power systems. Before Sonoma Clean Power arrived, I bought my electricity through Arcadia Power. If you buy your energy through Arcadia, then your power company must offset all your energy usage with green energy sources. It’s the next best thing to having a true green energy source coming directly to your home. Arcadia serves communities nationwide so you can look on their website to see if it’s available in your area and sign up for it if you like. I swear, if I could wrap my head around physics, I really would build my own windmill. Alas, in the absence of mathematical or scientific aptitude, I’m grateful for CCA. I have an electric on-demand water heater, but I have a gas stove (run on propane). I do have alternative cooking methods with my electric convection oven and one countertop conduction burner recently purchased. In the past I have avoided cooking on electric because I burn everything, but conduction cooking is similar to cooking on gas. I can cook vegetables OK on it. But I tried frying an egg once and burnt it, which must be a message from Planet Earth telling me to stick to a vegan diet. Do you think my conduction burner is channeling the voice of Planet Earth? Maybe I could make some money off that, kind of like seeing the Virgin Mary on my shower curtain.

Transportation. (Did I mention that I bought an EV?!) My EV is perfect for local transportation. I don’t travel out of the area much. I have to put on shoes and comb my hair for that kind of travel. With 100 miles on a charge, my EV will get me anywhere I need to go in the everyday. For long distance driving, I still have my trusty, beloved 2006 Honda Fit, which gets pretty good gas mileage for a fossil eater. Further travel, such as on an airplane, produces massive carbon emissions, and should be used sparingly. So I have cut back on air travel. Although, I must fly to Portland a few times each year to see my grandson. Being a grandmother is a tough job but someone has to do it. My point is that everyone has room to rethink their transportation and travel to reduce carbon emissions. By-the-way, because my EV is charged at home, it is technically run on geothermal since that’s my energy source to charge it. Pretty cool.

Food. This topic has many aspects:  eating, buying, growing, supporting sustainable agriculture, etc. We may not like it, but meat and cheese production is killing the planet so humans should basically go vegan. All the justifications and excuses won’t change the facts. How ironic that our prehistoric ancestors mostly hunted meat for sustenance. Sorry all you paleo dieters, but it’s time to move on beyond Paleolithic. I have tried to convince myself that cheese is not as damaging to the environment as meat because basically I worship in the temple of cheese. Unfortunately, cheese is indeed a problem. God grant me the serenity to accept a meal without cheese, the courage to step slowly away from the cheese, and the wisdom to recognize the fundamental difference between soy-cheese (oxymoron) products and the real deal. For the sake of my grandson and the other children growing up under the specter of climate change, I do my level best to eat mostly vegan. I’m already vegetarian, so that helps. I became vegetarian nearly 50 years ago after reading Diet for a Small Planet. At that time, becoming vegetarian was radical. When I declined the meat loaf, a lot of people thought it meant I was a Communist. I didn’t know any vegetarians. I never imagined that, five decades later, I would move toward vegan. It’s still tough being a visionary. No one invites you in for milk and cookies when you don’t drink milk. A lot of people get their kicks out of making fun of vegans. I do not find this amusing as someone “woke” who is trying to do my part to save the planet. People who eat meat are having their carbon offset by vegans. Be grateful. I have to confess, though, that I still buy chicken and fish for my cat, because you can’t realistically keep a cat alive on hummus.

Another thing that helps is to buy local food as much as possible. I read labels to see where food came from and I shop at the Farmer’s Market. I buy all organic food to support organic farming and consequently sustainable agriculture. As consumer demand for organic food increases, the industry follows by producing more organic food. Trust me on this, you can make change with your fork. I grow some food in my yard. It’s not enough to sustain me, but it’s something. Also, my half-acre yard offsets my carbon footprint because I planted lots of trees and I cultivate healthy soil. Trees, plants, and healthy soil make excellent carbon sinks. The healthier an ecosystem, the more carbon it sequesters. My flowering plants feed birds, bees, butterflies, ladybugs, and other environmentally important insects. Unfortunately, everything loves a healthy garden, so I feed a lot of critters that show up without a bona fide invitation. The wild turkeys wreak havoc; mostly by sitting in my fruit trees for a munch and breaking the upper branches with their weight. Don’t turkeys want to save the planet? What is wrong with them? If you’re struggling to eat vegan, let me suggest that you make an exception for wild turkey meat. This is where gun control gets tricky (but no one can convince me that an automatic weapon is needed to kill a turkey).

Materials. I saw a cartoon in which a man asked a vendor for a plastic bag for a fish he was buying and the vendor replied, “It’s already inside.” Materials choices, especially reducing plastics, poses one of the most frustrating challenges to living a cleaner lifestyle. Why do we need all this packaging? There must be a future Nobel prizewinner out there who can figure out how to breed a wild turkey that craves and digests plastic. Raise your hand if you want to pursue this idea. I try to avoid adding more plastic bags to my household. I buy 100% plant-based storage bags, even though I know they won’t break down in anaerobic landfill. At least they will die some version of an organic death sooner than plastic. I buy many items in bulk and bring my own reused containers to the store for things like nuts and nut butters, honey, flour. So I’m back to washing out the peanut butter jar. I bring reusable cloth produce bags to the store and the Farmer’s Market. I make my own hummus to avoid the plastic tubs that go with store-bought hummus (and because homemade hummus is delicious, despite the opinion of my cat).

Now that I have an electric car, I can go for days, probably weeks, in the warm months (half the year) without using any fossil fuels. But I still have a carbon footprint, particularly in the winter when I use propane to heat the house. I can’t afford to convert the house to a clean heating system and I’m averse to freezing so, yeah, not as sanctimonious as all that, huh? I don’t think my healthy backyard soil sequesters enough carbon to offset my airplane flights to see my children and grandson. But I have found an interesting option for offsetting my carbon footprint. I can pay to offset some of my carbon emissions through the United Nations Carbon Offset Platform. If you want to offset some of your carbon footprint, then check it out. It’s a very cool way to move toward being personally carbon neutral by supporting terrific global projects that protect the environment while really helping people in their everyday lives.

Now that I drive an EV, I feel light. I feel less overwhelmed by the enormity of climate change. Each time I drive my EV past a gas station, I feel empowered. I also feel chastened by the reminder that we have choices and we can take action. “Just do it” is more than a sneaker slogan, my friends. I took the plunge. I just did it. We still have choices. Let’s make good ones. Save the fossils.

(Photo by Ron Reed)

Open Letter to a Discouraged Youth

My dear young friend, I have had you in my thoughts and in my heart lately. Your mom told me you take antidepressant medication and that some days you can’t get out of bed. I have trouble getting out of bed some days myself, but mostly because of my worn-out back. At least your body still works, so you should enjoy that and not take it for granted. But that’s probably not a pep talk you want to hear today. Today the world is unkind, chaotic, horrifyingly violent, and teetering on the verge of cataclysmic disaster. Us stupid humans appear to be going down the drain, and it looks like we will take quite a few other species (far more magnificent than ourselves) down the drain with us. You must wonder how we got here, why so few grownups have been sufficiently alarmed to take action over the years, what diabolical stories the profiteers tell themselves to justify their continued greed in the face of planetary destruction, and where to look for a shred of hope. I would like to think that you can still find comfort in humor, because it’s a powerful weapon to ward off the demons. While I generally use humor liberally, I find your state of mind quite unfunny.

Humans have made an impressive mess of things, haven’t we? I don’t believe in a god-entity in the typical Judeo-Christian biblical sense so I have no divinity to blame for the present state of the world, which is too bad, because I would welcome the opportunity to roast a divine being for allowing people to selfishly cling to practices that damage the environment, such as eating meat, driving gas-guzzling vehicles, and voting for a climate-change-denying white supremacist for president, when that god could just as easily strike these idiots with lightning for such infractions. Perhaps it’s just as well, because if such a divinity existed, then it’s quite possible that I could be struck by lightning for heating my house with propane gas, flying an airplane to Oregon to see my grandson, eating cheese, or putting collards into a plastic bag at the grocery store.

You have likely heard plenty of arguments cajoling you to appreciate the good things in life, of which there are many to raise your spirits. Obviously your spirits are not raised enough by those good things, not even by the small miracles of daily life, to convince you to get out of bed in the morning. Consider distracting yourself from despair by choosing some small productive thing to do to help save the planet or to make life better for a few people, and then just do that thing rather than letting despondency paralyze you and render you inert. That’s what I do. I don’t believe that what I do makes much difference in the larger scheme of things. After all, I’m less than a dot on a dot of a planet in a dot of a galaxy in a vast universe. From that perspective, I don’t know why I bother to do anything. Pass the dark chocolate. But it makes me feel better to do something positive rather than dwelling on the overwhelming realities of environmental collapse and human suffering. Look at Greta Thunberg, who started out from a place of despair (she says she couldn’t get out of bed in the morning) and moved on to skipping school every Friday to register her fury by standing outside the Swedish parliament building. Just when you think you can’t make a difference, life takes a surprising turn. She became a worldwide phenomenon and was handed a microphone so she could scold world leaders for their astonishing inaction on climate issues and other crimes against future generations. Go Greta. You don’t have to be Greta, but I think that doing something toward the good will improve your mood.

Honestly, I feel you. I do. When I was a teenager like you, I belonged to a club at school called PYE (Protect Your Environment). Our club had about four members. None of my peers were worried about the environment back then. Perhaps we were all more worried about nuclear holocaust. We grew up in the shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, doing nuclear bomb drills by hiding under our desks. I wondered if I would grow up, if an apocalyptic catastrophe would do us all in before I graduated from high school. The year was 1969. No one recycled. No one in suburbia had a clue what composting was about. We had no concept of organic food or what it meant to eat clean vegetables. Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring came out in 1962 so the effect of toxins in our environment was just dawning on us. I was one of the very few teenagers worried about our climate and the future of Earth. And yet I grew up, was not blown to bits, went to college, made a career for myself, married, and had children. I boycotted dirty companies. I wrote, and I marched, and I even went to jail once for doing nonviolent civil disobedience – not that those things made any significant difference. After the 2016 election, I could not get out of bed in the morning just like you. I became sick to my stomach, literally. It was not a healthy way for losing weight, although it worked. I had a pretty clear picture of the grim future about to slam into us under this predatory, greedy, ignorant, self-obsessed, illiterate president and his cronies. How could I have let down my guard for eight years under Obama? I feel so foolish, in retrospect, for thinking things would be OK, and for thus relaxing my grip. I know the bloody, gruesome, shameful historical foundation of this country. I know history does not go away. I know people want to carry on in their lives and not make the difficult changes and hard choices necessary to protect the environment. Yet I danced in the street with a tambourine on the night of Obama’s inauguration. The future I dared to imagine on that night has vanished.

I wish I could tell you that it gets better as you get older, but that’s not the case. Coping with your youthful depression is good practice for what’s to come in a few decades. Think of it as a rehearsal. You can use it to develop your personal, workable coping mechanisms. With age, you will not only have to contend with global horrors of mind-boggling magnitude and scope, but also with the everyday small-scale personal tragedies of your own intimate circle. Plant roses. You will need their mysterious beauty and heavenly fragrance. Did you know that every rose bush has its own scent but humans can’t discern the subtle differences? People must all smell the same to roses.

Take my week this week. Just one week. A microcosmic example of the macrocosmic mixed bag dished out by the universe. I’ll start with the bad news. A friend was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer (this is the third friend diagnosed with pancreatic cancer this year). I attended a memorial for a genius-inventor friend who slowly lost his brilliant mind to early onset Alzheimer’s over the course of ten years and finally died a few weeks ago. My diabetic husband had a scary low-blood-sugar episode, which happens from time to time to remind us of our fragility. (I accused him of periodically staging a near-death experience so that I won’t take him for granted.) Two mass shootings occurred. A cyclone pummeled India, upturning the lives of 100 million people. The Palestinians and Israelis shot rockets at each other again. Plastic is still choking the ocean and strangling sea life, although this is nothing new this week, it has been on my mind. I also had good news. A dear friend and his wife had the film (called “Crip Camp”) they are making about growing up disabled and about the disability rights movement picked up by the Obamas as one of their Higher Ground Productions film projects. I think my friends will eventually meet the Obamas, so I told them to invite them to our house for Thanksgiving. (Which we will still be having if god continues not to exist and thus we are not struck by lightning for roasting a turkey even though meat production is killing the planet.) The 20-something son of a childhood friend was hired as the western regional representative for the Association of State Democratic Committees (operating under the Democratic National Committee). I have known him since he was a toddler, and now he is an astonishing mover and shaker for one so young. I plan to drop everything and go work on his campaign one day when he’s old enough to run for office. My roses started blooming. Country House, a locally born, bred, and owned horse, won the Kentucky Derby. My father walks 10,000 steps a day at age 90. My grandson asked me to sing with him on screen chat (no one ever asks me to sing). I landed a grant for a super organization to provide mental health services to traumatized children and youth, so if you want to move to Santa Barbara, my dear, then I know where you can find terrific therapeutic services. You would be near the ocean, which is still gorgeous because the plastic and dead whales are not visible from the beach. The ocean even produces delicious seaweed, which I love to eat. That’s a glimpse into one week in the life of an old lady (with so much else left out, of course). My point is that every minute of every day of every year holds in it grief, loss, tragedy, comedy, joy, delight, wonder, you name it. What you hold onto and what you let go of depends on your choices minute by minute. Negative or positive? It’s a choice.

Are you still reading me? I want to give you something to help you carry on, to help you hold onto the positive and make a joyous life for yourself. I want to give you words that will help you get out of bed in the morning. I want to do this even though the truth is that the world is a mess, has been a mess for quite some time. Things will get more difficult, more frightening, more challenging, more depressing. World leaders are not hearing Greta and powerful corporations will not quit putting profit first. I want to give you hope where there is little basis for hope. So here are three thoughts for you to consider. First, humans are resilient and adaptable creatures with the potential to change. As the ground moves under our feet, people will create and invent. They will have epiphanies. Young people will shine with brilliance, and will meet many of the challenges that seem insurmountable. Second, our miraculous planet – so breathtakingly magnificent in so many ways that ancient people decided only a god could have created such a glorious place – has not disappeared. We have lost much, and will lose more in the coming months and years, but not all is lost. Plus, we make new discoveries about the natural world every day. Everyday marvels surround us, such as the fact that every rose has its own fragrance. Third, humans have the potential to do extraordinary things together. We can, and do, connect with other humans with whom we have the good fortune to share this time in history. Locally, within a personal circle, we have the embrace of our friends and family. Globally, we have heroic people visible on a larger stage to inspire us, such as Greta, Malala, the Parkland students, William Kamkwamba, AOC, and the many, many others at work to heal, preserve, and improve the world. The Obamas have not abandoned us. They continue to promote positive change and support people implementing visionary initiatives around the globe. Here’s the takeaway:  find your small special task, your niche, your passion, and step into that space to do whatever you can with your talents and your genius to make a difference. Sometimes something that seems like a small difference winds up making a big difference (such as Greta’s Fridays at the parliament). Then go to bed at night feeling that you did something worth doing and wake up in the morning feeling energized to go out and do more.

What broke my heart on election night 2016, what breaks my heart still, is my grief for the loss of your future, my grandson’s future, and the future of generations to come. But lately I don’t feel the same depth of despair. Recently I have read some interesting science fiction and other types of visionary writing that have altered my perspective. While we have gone beyond the tipping point to take things back to a familiar equilibrium, that does not mean that the future is dead. It means the future will look very different. These days, with great curiosity, I have started to wonder what it will look like. I wonder what young people will discover, invent, create, and transform. I wonder, with surprising, unexpected optimism, what “terrible beauty” (thank you, Yeats) is about to be born.

That’s all I have for you. Does it help? Because I’m depending on you. What gives me hope? You do, my dear young friend. You do.

Taxes, Money, and Thoreau Envy

After reluctantly (understatement), verging on nauseously, paying a stupefying amount of taxes this week to a government run by a snake-oil salesman with a zero approval rating from me, I have money on my mind. Have you noticed that there is apparently a law of nature about money that when you are especially struggling to make ends meet, and an unexpected expense from one area of your life bombards you, that you suddenly experience a landslide of unexpected expenses from other areas of your life as well? Expensive calamities attract one another and arrive in herds. Costly events must cast some kind of vibe out to the universe or generate an expensive-catastrophe pheromone or something. 

It seems that whenever I am at the point of turning out my pockets and finding only fluff, I get blindsided by some crazy expense, and then, simultaneously, my car breaks down and my cat gets sick. When I was pregnant with my second child, and anxious about how to budget for my maternity leave from work, I must have put that come-take-all-my-money vibe out to the universe. We went to a restaurant for dinner one evening, and when we returned, the neighbors descended on us. While we were gone, my 14-year-old cat was hit by a car. (He loved to go outside and was street savvy, but he couldn’t see very well or move very fast anymore.) The neighbors took my unfortunate fellow to a 24-hour vet clinic, where the staff tried to revive him, to the tune of hundreds of dollars, before he gave up the ghost. Do you have any idea how much it costs to have someone perform CPR on a cat? I loved that cat, but I had one child and another on the way, so I was extremely preoccupied with caring for little people at the time, and frankly would have preferred the cat to have had the decency to stage a budget demise. I did love that cat, and I wanted his ashes to bury ceremonially under my apricot tree, so I asked for them to cremate him, an additional expense.

This story continues. A few days later, I was driving to the vet to pick up my cat’s ashes and fork over my food money for the family for that month for services rendered, when the clutch went out in my standard transmission Honda hatchback. I coasted to a safe stop on the side of the street and walked (still eight months’ pregnant) to a nearby friend’s house to call my husband to come get me. This was back in that prehistoric time before cell phones, which we can all dimly remember if we have taken our gingko. It was cheaper to replace the clutch than to buy a new car, but the new clutch would cost the equivalent of two months’ food for our family. In parts alone. Because my husband actually did the work himself using the How to Fix Your Own Honda book, which was a thing back then, before computerized cars. Any mechanically inclined person could actually figure out how to repair their own car using one of those DIY car repair books. Having worked for four years as a machinist in the Navy, and with an excellent ability to solve puzzles, Ron could understand these books. (“It’s easy, you just follow the directions,” he said. Then gently pointed out that I was holding the book upside down.) Car repair used to be a good argument in favor of co-habiting with an engineering-type creature. Nowadays, with everything computerized, ordinary mortals having no specialized training cannot repair a car using a book. However, it does seem that certain mortals can, nowadays, fix a computer problem using self-taught skills and a smart phone. Therefore, I am still co-habiting with an engineering-type creature. Instead of inventing a self-driving car, I think the auto geniuses should invent a self-repairing car. But where was I? Oh yes, I was out of food money and expecting a baby. It was the best of times and it was the worst of times.

On another occasion, a few years ago, just when my car needed a full new set of tires and brake shoes, the vet informed me (on an annual office visit) that both of my cats needed to have their teeth cleaned. Cleaning cats’ teeth requires a general anesthetic and runs hundreds of dollars per cat. Once again the cats and the car had it in for me. At least I wasn’t pregnant. In fact, all the children had left home by then so fewer mouths to feed. But it was a year in which I learned the repercussions of a basic law of economics:  when you earn more money you owe more taxes. What is up with that? Why do I even bother to try to earn more money in the first place? My tax therapist, AKA accountant, tells me earning more money is a good thing. He studied economics in college for six years so he should know, but I still have my doubts. And why can’t I write off the cost of having the cats’ teeth cleaned as a medical expense? The system is rigged.

The other day I realized that nearly half of my income goes to the combined cost of taxes, insurance, and interest on my mortgage. I pay an awful lot of money for invisible commodities. I might just as well be buying rocks lying around on the moon. This makes me want to give up on this century and go live in a cabin in the woods at Walden Pond like Henry David Thoreau. When did life get so complicated? And when did complicated get so expensive? And when did life insurance get so hard to understand? My life insurance agent says that if I live to be 100 that my policy will disappear. So I have to die before I turn 95 for my children to get all the money I put into it. I don’t need this kind of pressure. The stress could kill me.

I want a time machine to take me back before insurance was invented, but, for obvious reasons, after the dark chocolate bar was invented. A fictitious time I guess, because, according to the internet (which eerily knows everything), insurance was invented in the 1760s and the chocolate bar wasn’t invented until 1847. That’s just so wrong. And spending the lion’s share of my income on virtual stuff is also. But then, money itself is virtual. So maybe I would enjoy living in a time without it. I might get my wish on that if climate chaos causes a full systems collapse. But I don’t want to give away the plot of my next novel. Let me say, for the record, that I regret paying my taxes. After having righteously been a war tax resister for many years in the last century, in times when I had precious little income for the government to plunder, I feel ashamed to pay up now, when I have hit my stride and actually earn something more substantial.

Not long after the 2016 election, I reread Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience,” which is his reflection on spending one night in jail in 1846 for refusing to pay his poll tax in protest against the American invasion and occupation of Mexico in the Mexican-American War and the institution of slavery (in particular the expansion of slavery into the Southwest). In truth, the poll tax was a more localized tax that was not used to pay for any federal shenanigans, but Thoreau was apparently a bit fuzzy on how all that worked. He stood on principle. Much to his chagrin, his aunt paid his poll tax and he was released in less than 24 hours. How ironic that I dearly wish I could withhold my income tax 173 years later for similar reasons – to protest the military, the nonsense at the Mexican border, and the institutionalized racism in this country. I never went to jail for refusing to pay my taxes. (The government eventually absconded with my back taxes by forcibly seizing the money from my bank accounts.) I did go to jail once in protest against nuclear weapons, and I spent three days in Santa Rita Jail, and I have written about that experience. I want to point out that I spent more time in jail than Thoreau. Plus I was handcuffed (he was not, the bum). He managed to turn one night in jail into a 173-year bestseller and all I got was a T-shirt. (Seriously, I have a Livermore Action Group T-shirt that says “Santa Rita Peace Camp.”) If Thoreau could get published writing about one night in jail, you would think I could get published writing about three days there. But I can’t seem to catch a break. What’s more, the food at Santa Rita was dreadful, and Thoreau got oatmeal for breakfast. Is there no justice? 

Thoreau's cabin in the woods on Walden Pond.