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.