Year-end letter - 2014
El Castillo
Santa Fe, New Mexico
Year-end Letter December 2014
Dear Friend,
I am writing most of this letter well ahead of time, because on September 20, David and I are leaving on our longest trip together, ever. We are headed to Australia (first time) and we don’t return until December 4. Assuming we return in one piece, I will bring it up-to-date when we return, and try to get it out to you at the roughly usual time. The main things I’ll need to leave out until we get back are any musings on the national elections, and the Australia trip itself.
READINGS
A fascinating article I read in the June 2014, issue of The Atlantic was titled The Case for Reparations, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, which is available online, and which I have linked the title to. What was fascinating for me was that I have always thought that despite the long, brutal history of slavery in this country, which in many ways gives the lie to our sweeping concepts of universal human rights and our history of “exceptionalism,” making financial reparations for 300+ years of slavery and for the semi-feudal and Jim Crow eras that followed, was absolutely unthinkable and impractical. First, the article lays out in a particularly powerful way the experiences of specific black people beginning in our life-time, and second does a kind of thinking aloud, asking some trenchant questions to force the reader to at least think about reparations. Towards the end it explores the back-story of how reparations were implemented by West Germany after World War II to atone for the crimes of the Nazi-era towards the Jews and how Israel, initially opposed to the idea, eventually accepted it. This being a “real world” example, it opens up one’s mind to the idea that reparations for our terrible, terrible history of racial oppression is at least worth exploring. At the very least, it was a fascinating thought experiment. Interestingly, I just learned that the writer will be the featured speaker on our own Lannan Foundation’s literary series, speaking here in April 2015.
Related to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ piece, and very powerful also, was listening to the audio book version of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, on our road trip earlier this year (see below under TRAVELS). This book, published a few years back, has had an enormous impact in seeing the so-called War on Drugs in an entirely different and far darker light. The basic thesis is that since approximately 1980 (the start of you know who’s Administration) the drug war has had a horrendous impact on poor communities of color, and particularly on young black men and to a slightly lesser extent, young Hispanic men (and to an almost equally horrific extent, their families). Alexander, a civil rights lawyer by profession, is quiet, low key but completely devastating as she shows how, brick by brick, a structure was built – through police raids, court decisions, and taking away essential rights and benefits that allowed those incarcerated (or even charged with a crime) from ever having a chance to usefully re-enter society (taking away voting rights, food stamps, rent-subsidized housing, opportunity to get a decent job, and on and on) so that, effectively (and she is very convincing) we have a “new Jim Crow” with plausible cover to deflect the notion that any of this was ever designed with race in mind. If you ever needed to be convinced that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights only applies to some of us, this is the book to read (and even we – the “us” - seem to be losing basic constitutional rights!). What the author makes clear is not only how unjust what is going on is, the traffic waste of countless lives, but how different we are from almost any other civilized nation. She spins the web, chapter by chapter, and you can almost feel yourself suffocating as you enter, empathetically, into the trap that so many poor people of color, fundamentally good people, get caught in.
Another book I read that I found fascinating was Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. This book deals with the fascinating question of why it is that certain parts of the world became “advanced civilizations” – namely, the West and China, and other parts seemed to remain perpetually “backward.” Deep down I suspect many of us from the advanced Western nations carry within us, even if we do not wish to acknowledge it, a subconscious sense of superiority – not of our innate gifts as human beings, but of being part of a civilization that got it right. What Diamond does is systematically look at the many factors that contribute to a “primitive” society becoming what we consider an advanced society. It becomes strikingly clear that the factors are largely outside of any human agency, but relate to a whole series of natural causes that make it almost certain that some parts of the world would reach a more complex level than others. And he also demonstrates how very resourceful are peoples who did not have these natural gifts yet learned to adapt in the most extraordinary ways to the harsh environments they found themselves in. Virtually every page of this book provides new insights.
AS LIFE GOES ON
Amidst those who have left the world each year, there are sometimes one or two individuals who loom large in a very personal way. One such person, who died in early 2014, was Pete Seeger. He was part of my youth and growing up and I remember seeing him sing as a student at Cornell in the late 1950’s. I own countless recordings of his, I bought his wonderful children’s album Abiyoyo, for my daughter when she was a little girl. He was always singing out for just causes, and some years back I went to see a documentary about his life that deepened my respect for his contributions as a human being to making this world a better place. I take such a death very personally because I realize what makes people feel old is that gradually those larger-than-life personalities who defined the world they inhabited keep leaving it.
Another similar loss was Jean Redpath, the finest singer of Scottish folk songs I have ever heard. She was a national icon in Scotland, but also well known in the U.S. One of her great projects, which she only got partway through, was to record all the songs of Robert Burns – I have 7 of her albums of Robert Burns songs on LP! I first heard her on a wonderful radio program I listened to regularly in Washington, DC, and was thrilled when she sang at a small club in Bethesda, Maryland, just outside the city limits. It gave me a real sense of loss to learn she had died.
And then there were such timeless beauties as Lauren Bacall – somehow one thought they would always be there for us – endlessly beautiful and seductive, part of our eternal memory of glamour. Ah me!
As a result, our inner sense of the youth who lives inside us and connects us to more and more people who are no longer here makes it hard to resist the feeling that we ourselves are part of a world that is no longer the here and now. I saw this happen in the generation that preceded me and I am finally understanding what it felt like for those who came before me. It creeps up on you and before you know it, you feel a bit like a dinosaur, even though still part of this world. The people who now define and shape our world are not people we relate to anymore.
Closer to home, while this has mainly not been a year of losing friends with one salient exception – a friend of many years standing was lost to the ravages of cancer - several dear and special people I know well have certainly had their serious medical challenges and have provided me – each in his or her own way – with useful lessons on how to deal with life-threatening challenges and still move forward with quiet dignity and courage.
TRAVELS
Some might say that 2014 was the year I was out-of-control when it came to travel, but judged just by the trips themselves, I must say, it was a fabulous year. I was away a good 50% of the year.
In January David and I went to New York to see the New York City Ballet’s winter season, an international drawings show, and catch some other wonderful cultural events (when is New York every less than wonderful?) As everyone knows – many all too well – it was bitter cold and snowy when we were there, and one unforgettable experience was walking the entire length of the High Line (that sections that have opened so far) on the day New York got 10 inches of snow, which created some wonderful effects, even as my feet gradually froze.
The BIG trip, the so-called “Trip of a Lifetime” began at the end of January and went to the beginning of March. I went on an Antarctic adventure cruise that began in Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world, on Tierra del Fuego (the part belonging to Argentina). The actual cruise was 23 days, and went first to the Falkland Islands, then South Georgia Island, and finally the South Shetland Islands and much of the Antarctic Peninsula, crossing the Antarctic Circle. I was on the Sea Adventurer, a small ship leased by Quark Expeditions, a company that does only polar trips (both north and south polar regions). Everything about the conduct of the trip was A-1 – the ship, the food, the cabins, and most importantly, the naturalists, guides, and crew, from the captain on down. We had many opportunities to hike, including, for those who wanted them, some quite demanding treks.
I had dreamed of such a trip for countless years, and one day, finally decided to JUST DO IT. (You actually need to reserve a good 18 months in advance). Most memorable was the wildlife – sea birds, whales, many species of seals, and 7 of the 8 species of south polar penguins. South Georgia Island, an autonomous territory (with the Falkland Islands) of Great Britain, is a wildlife wonderland (in addition, its natural beauty is spectacular) and the government is a world leader in environmental protection. The trip was totally fabulous, but what I take away most is the complete sense of other-worldliness of being in the Antarctic – we never saw another ship, but did meet a few researchers at several of the still active stations. Other than that, it felt like we had the whole continent to ourselves. The colors of the sky, the ice, and the waters are what make this a trip unlike any other I have ever been on, a sense of going to an utterly faraway planet. All past travels were incapable of preparing me for such a unique experience.
Since I had never been there, on the way home from the Antarctic, I stopped for 5 days in Buenos Aires, which despite my having lived in Brazil 35 years ago, I never visited (it was a very bad time in Argentina back then). I had a wonderful time, as Buenos Aires is a handsome city to walk around (and to eat out in). It is not a city I feel I need to rush back to, but I am glad I got to know it a bit.
In April I went on my annual spring camping trip with a good friend (we also do a fall trip every year – we’ve been following this pattern for at least 5 years). This year’s spring choice was Oak Creek Canyon just north of Sedona, Arizona, and then on to the Chiricahua and Dragoon Mountains in southeastern Arizona. The famous Apache Indian chief, Cochise, hung out in the Dragoon Mountains, at a place now called Cochise Stronghold, and it is a beautiful, spare, remote place where we were able to get up close and personal with acorn woodpeckers. Our timing was good because Oak Creek Canyon experienced a devastating wildfire a few weeks after we camped and hiked there.
In mid-May, David and I left on a long road trip of 5 weeks plus and 6,400 miles, covering a big circle around the eastern 2/3 of the U.S. and a bit into Canada. The trip was mainly to see many friends and family members, but also included a few opportunities to visit some places we’d had on our list for a while – the new Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, the addition to the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth (for me, the most beautiful 20th century building in America), and some Shakespeare plays in Stratford, Ontario. The visits all went well and it was a great opportunity to catch up with many friends and family members we don’t see often enough.
Shortly after returning in late June, we went up to Crested Butte, Colorado, an almost annual event, but with the added element, this year, that I became a full-fledged leader for the Crested Butte Wildflower Festival. I probably have mentioned before that Crested Butte calls itself the Wildflower Capital of Colorado, and the name is well earned. The town is an old miner’s settlement that has been beautiful preserved, though not in amber. Good friends from the East Coast joined us and we rented a lovely cabin in the mountains and forest a bit outside of Crested Butte. The wildflower events I led went splendidly well and I am definitely keen to be a leader again next summer.
In August I went up to Seattle to meet friends who live there and are amongst the vanishing few in my age cohort who still backpack. Backpacking was the main event – we did a 7-day trip in the Goat Rocks Wilderness of the Southern Cascades (Washington State). This hiking was somewhat less challenging than our 8-day backpack in the Glacier Peak Wilderness, North Cascades, last summer, but no less beautiful. In fact, unlike last summer, we had 7 perfect days and as this trip was somewhat earlier in the season, the wildflower displays – particularly the alpine meadows - were incomparable. Most of our hiking in this wilderness was on the famous Pacific Crest Trail, so we met many “through” and “section” hikers, most, but not all, in their 20’s and 30’s, doing 25-30 miles a day (unimaginable to me!). But hey, both this year and last, I was the oldest person encountered, which has me almost singing, I’m Still Here (ah yes, and we lost Elaine Stritch this year too!). But there were some amazing people just a year or two younger than me who were taking on far more demanding challenges than I was. Still, to be up in that gorgeous mountain country, camping out and carrying a heavy pack is an experience I am so glad I don’t have to give up yet.
Continuing my camping tradition, the friend I went camping and hiking with in Arizona, did a short trip with me up to the Colorado Springs area (Pike’s Peak, Garden of the Gods, Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument) just so I did not break the tradition of a fall damping trip, but we shortened due to my upcoming departure for Australia.
Our big trip to Australia is now over, the longest trip David and I have ever taken together. We left Santa Fe on September 20 and did not get home until December 4. This sounds like a lot of time, but believe me, for a continent the size of Australia, it represented a “quick” circuit of some of the major highlights, and it involved excluding all of the gigantic state of Western Australia. But we visited all the major cities – Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane – spent almost 2 weeks in Tasmania, snorkeled in the outer portion of the Great Barrier Reef, visited Uluru (Ayer’s Rock) and other iconic places in “The Red Center,” slowly drove The Great Ocean Road, visited a number of the most famous wine regions, explored the Blue Mountains, and swam on the popular beaches of northern New South Wales and the Gold Coast of Queensland. Much of the time we camped and prepared our own food, which is a whole different experience in itself. The trip was an overwhelming experience, with extremes of weather and many stimulating encounters with Australians. We learned a great deal about a country we never knew all that much about.
While it is too soon to get our arms around this larger than life experience, what perhaps was the most significant aspect of our trip was the insight we gained on Australian life, society, and culture – we came away impressed by the kind of country Australia has become, a place very enviable in our eyes as offering its citizens a good way of life. We could not help contrasting the direction Australian society is heading in compared to the increasingly depressing trends we see in the U.S.
As I have for some past trips, I will be preparing a “trip report” (as will David) in which I try to put together the impressions we came away with. While a certain amount of the report will be about what we saw and how it impressed us, I found myself, the longer we were on the trip and the more we observed and learned, reflecting on how I experienced Australian society, particularly the public realm, and making many comparisons with life in the U.S. It was an unexpected aspect of our trip, and in many ways troubling in terms of what I see as the directions we are going in in the U.S. Stay tuned!
OTHER ACTIVITIES
David continues to do his annual Enduring American Popular Song club performance and fundraiser in the early spring of each year. This year’s performance was particularly successful because the proceeds went to the Santa Fe Botanical Garden (I’m on the Board of the Garden). The Botanical Garden did a great job of publicizing the event and the turn-out reflected this. One additional nice development is that Footlight.com, a Web site featuring interesting CDs and DVDs devoted to jazz and shows, created a “best of “ CD collection of David’s songs from his recorded series of Forgotten Songs from Broadway and Hollywood. If you want to see the page with its very nice description of the album just go to http://www.footlight.com/product.cfm?product_id=40250 - from this page you can order a copy, if you wish. We have a copy of the CD produced by Footlight, and it is a very professional job.
My activities keep me quite busy. I have cataloged most of the art books in the collection of the Santa Fe Art Institute, but by no means is that the end of the story. The database and what is actually on the shelf are quite discrepant. It would be good to instill in the patrons a better sense of their own responsibility now that the collection is shaping up into a real library. And ultimately, it would be my goal to get the catalog up on the Web site of the Institute.
I worked with my ESL (English as a Second Language) student into early May, but after that, I was traveling so much that it seemed only fair to give him a chance to work with someone else. And his real focus became passing his U.S. citizenship exam, and he successfully did that this summer. I developed a real rapport with him – he was a classic example of a fellow who hadn’t always made good decisions in his earlier life, but got his act together, and really worked hard, harder than most of us, to make a good life for himself and his family. With little time to study, he did his best and I was so glad when he passed his exam.
A very exciting development this year was graduating to being a full event leader at the Crested Butte Wildflower Festival (Colorado), which takes place for a week right after the July Fourth holiday. This year I was the front (that is, main) leader on a series of fairly easy walks, and I shadowed some more experienced leaders for several more demanding wildflower hikes. I am excited to take on more next summer. The only frustration is that the Festival occurs at the very same time as the Santa Fe International Folk Art Market, where I have been a Block Captain for many years. As much as I love Folk Art Market, leading wildflower hikes is a more demanding challenge, so I hope to continue for a few more years. Connected to this, I continued to lead Sunday morning guided natural history walks in Hyde State Park, up the Ski Basin road from Santa Fe. I am still able to get myself and my 31-year old Trek bicycle up there without stopping, which is quite a work-out, as the road goes up 1500 feet. I keep asking myself – when will the year arrive when I can’t do this anymore? So far, so good!
I continue to give numerous narrated travel/photo programs at El Castillo, where I live, and at The Travel Bug, our local travel book/map store. And I was just signed up for a Wednesday morning series at the First Presbyterian Church for shortly after my return from Australia. I am pleased that these seem quite popular and get good turn-outs.
Being on the Board of Directors of the Santa Fe Botanical Garden has turned out to be a fairly demanding activity. There are regular board meetings, special retreats, and the meetings of the two committees I am on, the Art Committee and the Education Committee (of which I am chair). And then Board members are always on the look-out to bring in new members, get existing members to give more, talk to local businesses and countless other organizations to ensure the continuing health of the organization. But it is a good challenge for me and has pushed me more deeply into community involvement.
My great personal gardening love continues to be the Resident Garden I created out of a wasteland and have developed over a 6-year period at the back of El Castillo. This spring the bulb display hit critical mass, providing immense joy to all residents who went by (and many made a point of finding an excuse to include it in their route.) Many of the perennials have now become firmly established and provide a changing display of bloom as spring transitions to summer and then on to fall. I spend a good part of my free time reading at the garden as it has become a tranquil oasis filled with birdlife, butterflies, and other small creatures.
STATE OF THE NATION AND THE WORLD
This is the part you can skip if you are riding a wave of year-end good cheer or not likely to find my views congenial. Though this is, in principle, a “holiday” letter, when I think about the state of the world and the nation since January 1, 2014, it is not, I think, a pretty picture. On the international scene there is the chaos and horror that largely seems the denouement of the Arab Spring. Libya has descended into a swamp of brutal anarchy, Syria is now consumed in an unfathomable and interminable internal war mixed up with broader terrorist movements, and the Pandora’s Box that George W. Bush opened in Iraq is truly coming to haunt us. The invasion of Iraq is a classic example of unleashing unpredictable forces that no one could have specifically foreseen, but it was not difficult to imagine, for those steeped in 20th century Middle East history, that uncontrollable forces would very likely be unleashed and we would be left holding a tiger by the tail. The Ebola virus outbreak may be one indication of other microbial forces lurking to bring us down. And the news on the climate change front portends losses to the wondrousness of our world that will be hard to mentally accept but which we will have no choice but to face up to. Often I think I don’t want to be around when the full impact of these losses accumulates beyond anything we are prepared to deal with. Not to mention the catastrophic weather events and rapid climate alterations that have already arrived, with worse in store for us.
On the national scene, there is almost nothing that cheers me up, and I write this before the November elections. [Brief post-election addendum: Thank goodness we were away for the final run-up to the elections and Election Day. The results are beyond depressing in ensuring all the terrible trends of recent years will only intensify.] The political divisions in this country seem beyond reconciliation – in the Congress, in state houses, even in municipalities and boards of education. When I was a young man Democrats and Republicans were friends and could discuss politics, because the disagreements were ones of degree, not matters of black and white or alternate universes. It seems incredible that that approach remained true until only a few decades ago, but the acceleration of division in the last 20 years has been unprecedented, I think.
This has all been compounded during the present Administration by the determination of Republicans to oppose the President, regardless of what the issue is. As I stated last year, while it is never explicit, of course, I am firmly convinced, as are many others, that racism is a significant component. It is difficult to understand how so many proposals from the President that build on ideas originally put forth by Republicans (albeit, some years back) are now met with an absolute wall of opposition. No matter the issue, the stance is one of complete “scorched earth” refusal.
While I don’t consider myself a radical old leftie, but someone who would have been called, into the 1970’s, center left, I guess I now might be called radical left, though I certainly don’t feel that I am. To me the Republican Party, with the rarest of exceptions, seems to encompass a level of willed stupidity, meanness, greed, ugliness, anti-scientific and anti-environmental viewpoints such as to convince me that these people must know better but have dark reasons for pushing what they seem to espouse. But if so, why are they behaving so terribly? Facts mean nothing. The national interest is of no account. This being the case, and given that most economic and social analysis seem to prove that Republican nostrums will worsen an already terrible income inequality, it means a bleak future for an increasing percentage of Americans, and will result in levels of needless harshness for countless struggling people, I simply am unable to understand how the Republicans made the gains they did (out-of-touch liberal that I am)! But considering the extreme, unbalanced redistricting of recent years, the restricting of voting rights (is this what democracies do?), and the obscene role of money, much undisclosed, in controlling not only elections but legislative action, it is not surprising that having a representative democracy is becoming a dream of a distant past. With judges increasingly running for elections and needing to spend huge amounts of money campaigning, the hope of an independent judiciary uninfluenced by the same forces that are undermining legislative bodies is fading, and when it is gone, there will be no counterforce to protect the powerless. All this only increases voter apathy – just what the dark forces want.
Related to the extreme political dysfunction at most levels of government, it pained me deeply to watch the Ken Burns documentary, The Roosevelts: An Intimate History. Particularly the episodes that dealt with FDR and his response to the Depression and then the onset of World War II and our entrance into it, the sense of leadership – of being the man the country needed for those times – was such an extreme contrast with our present time, that I could not stop tearing up to think of how different the two periods are. We always have the hope that the leader will come along who is commensurate with what the times demand, but sadly, that is an adult fairy tale.
One of the two issues I think about more than any other is the impact of climate change on the future of our world. All forecasts are catastrophic and encompass the end of the world our predecessors and we have known, in all its rich beauty and diversity. While it is heartening to read of a few positive steps, when one realizes that the amount of CO2 put into the air is growing steadily greater than ever before, it is clear that we are on a Doomsday course.
The other issue that dominates much of my thinking is the role of work (and concomitantly Income inequality) and in general, what the workplace is like for the average American. For one thing, I am aware, as are many in my age bracket, that we grew up in a golden post-World War II world where prosperity was quite widespread, good jobs were available for anyone who wanted one regardless of educational level (provided you weren’t black, Hispanic, American Indian, etc.), where workers got health insurance coverage and guaranteed pensions. All that is gone. I have seen no analysis that convinces me that there is any kind of prospect of good jobs (living wages) for most Americans. I hope there is a way out of the extreme inequality we are experiencing, but when one looks at both global trends and political dysfunction, the future looks grim for all too many American families.
The surveillance state only grows stronger, I fear. The protections of the Fourth Amendment limiting searches are disappearing. An independent, investigative press performing for an informed public is endangered, just when we need it more than ever. Tweets of 140 characters just don’t replace years-long investigative reports, and our attention spans may be getting too short to focus on what we need to pay attention to in order to enjoy our way of life.
The Affordable Care Act, for all its complexities, interestingly, seems to be having a positive impact on a number of facets of our broken health care system, but we have a long way to go to get where most advanced countries were by 1950. Women’s reproductive freedom is in great danger. Unfair racial disparities remain enormous. Immigration reform is badly needed but seems hopelessly far off, and far too many workers are treated like disposable widgets. The only social area where movement seems to be in a positive direction, strangely enough, is gay rights. How odd!
So I continue in that strange kind of limbo where the country and the world at large seem terrible, and yet at a personal level, life is quite good. A beautiful day is still a beautiful day, a good cup of coffee to start off the morning continues to be special, and most of all, I have the love of my life – now my husband – by my side, my most interesting friend and my constant companion. One of those mysteries I cannot fathom but remain immensely grateful for.
I hope you can review your own life and say something along the same lines. Love,
Ken