El Castillo
Santa Fe, New Mexico
Year-end Letter December 2013
Dear Friend,
With each year of age, it seems the year goes by even faster. While I can’t believe the end of another year is rolling around, this has been a year when many thoughts have weighed on me as I probe the meaning of my own life and try to understand the world around me (an effort that seems to become increasingly difficult.
READINGS
I relate to the world and to the major issues of the day and what it is to be alive as a human being through the books I read. I never have the opportunity to come even close to reading but a fraction of what I would like to, but almost everything I do read is rewarding. The one time I am able to really read books is when we travel, as I cannot take all the newspapers and magazines that pile up, especially as we always try to fly, however long the trip, with carry-on luggage only. In that regard, this was the year that taking only a Kindle Paperwhite on trips became our new standard (both David and I have one). It is lightweight, takes up no room, and we can load as many books on it as we like. By sharing an account we can move books across our Kindles. Most practical, with its internal lighting system, we can read on Third World buses at night, in a backpacker tent on a rugged mountain trip, or walking in France, carrying a small pack limited to essentials only. I will mention a few highlights of the year’s reading.
In anticipation of my trip to Antarctica (January 31 – March 1, 2014), friends lent me a copy of Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Journey by Alfred Lansing. This is an absolutely spellbinding story of Ernest Shackleton, who sailed to the Antarctica in the early 20th century to attempt to reach the South Pole. His ship, the Endurance, became frozen in the ice soon after reaching Antarctic waters, and before too long, was crushed by the pressure of the ice. He led his crew hundreds of miles across the most difficult terrain under the most abominable conditions, until they reached a tiny offshore island (this took several years). From there, he left most of the crew behind, and with a few carefully chosen members, sailed in a hand rigged 22-foot boat 800 miles across the Drake Passage, the roughest waters in the world, to reach South Georgia Island, and after going over unknown, unmapped mountainous terrain with steep drop-offs, reached a small whaling station. Boats set out to rescue the remaining crew (the great majority) left behind on the tiny island. After a multi-year experience, not one person died, and only one crewmember lost a leg to gangrene from frostbite. If ever there is a story of what great leadership is all about, Shackleton encapsulates it in its manifold qualities. Once one starts the book, it can’t be put down. When it was written, in 1959, quite a number of the crewmembers were alive and could be interviewed.
I read several books that focus on the less fortunate. Very powerful is Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, the story of one resourceful boy’s struggle for survival in a Mumbai slum near the international airport. The title refers to a billboard advertising floor tiles for upscale homes on the broad boulevard going in to the airport. This is a true and contemporary story, both horrifying for the squalor and human cruelty that surrounds this boy – both from family, neighbors, and friends as well as strangers – but also moments of survival and thriving under the most adverse conditions. There is no happy ending. It is what it is, but no one in my circle, at least, has ever faced conditions so awful as this young man and so many others like him do, both here in the USA and abroad.
Quite different, but equally fascinating reading was Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity by Andrew Solomon. The title is derived from the well-known expression, “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” i.e., children resemble their parents, both genetically and in the way their personality develops. This huge book focuses on children who did fall “far from the tree” for genetic reasons and for reasons that have to do with the unknowable mysteries of life. Interestingly, Andrew Solomon, the author, who writes beautifully and articulately, is gay, and that is not even a category he explores, it has become so mainstream compared to what he is exploring. Some of the conditions he does cover, each in its own chapter, are the deaf, dwarfs (this is a politically correct term), Down’s syndrome, autism, children born as the result of rape by strangers, children who are psychopaths, and transgender children. Each chapter explores the complex responses and efforts of both parents and such children, and there are no pat answers, since the way parents and children have managed their lives with each other and the rest of the world are all across the spectrum, and Solomon presents all possibilities with amazing objectivity. The book begins with a superb introduction about his relationship to his parents as he discovered he was gay. It ends with a chapter on his relationship to his son, as he is a gay man who is married to his partner as a result of living in New York State. Besides all the fascinating stories about how people relate to one another in a various ways was that this was a book about the mystery of being a human being. I often wondered, reading it, if I could have appreciated it the same way were I fifty years younger at the time of reading it.
Two books of personal exploration were Wild by Cheryl Strayed, which achieved great popularity. As a result of numerous family traumas, she made an impulsive decision to walk a major stretch of the Pacific Crest Trail, never having backpacked before, and this is the story of her personal growth as a result. Many dislike the book – as a backpacker myself I found it quite engaging. Another book of personal discovery was God’s Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine, by Victoria Sweet. The author is a doctor who somehow wound up at the last almshouse in America, Laguna Honda Hospital in San Francisco. “God’s Hotel” is the English translation for Hôtel Dieu, the old French word for a hospice run (usually) by nuns to take care of the sick, the infirm, the old, and almost always sad human beings of virtually no means. She connects the practices at Laguna Honda with the principles developed by Hildegard of Bingen, the nun many of us know for her divine music, but who also practiced medicine in the 1200’s and wrote some important books on the human body and how to make it well. Sweet discovers how much of Hildegard’s concepts are still applicable though almost totally ignored by modern medicine. Laguna Honda was about the one place in the country that the approach of fragmented, high speed, cost/benefit medicine had bypassed, and Sweet discovers how off-course much of modern medicine is, though she knows her standard Western medicine extremely well. Over a four-year period, she walks the entire pilgrimage route from France to Santiago de Compostela, and this gives her many additional insights into what is involved in human well-being. A quite fascinating, and actually very touching book.
I began the year’s reading with the fourth volume in Robert Caro’s magnificent biography of Lyndon B. Johnson. Called The Passage of Power, it is the penultimate volume in The Years of Lyndon B. Johnson. I had previously read Volume 2, Master of the Senate. Altogether, this is one of the greatest studies of how power is used, for better or worse, and represents a fascinating benchmark against which to measure Barack Obama. It covers LBJ as Vice President (he was systematically humiliated and kept in the dark), and then through the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the first 7 weeks of his Presidency, when he brilliantly emerged from the need to preserve the dead leader’s memory and fully took the reigns of power. In short order, major legislation that Kennedy could not get through Congress became the law of the land. This was the first major book I read on my Kindle Paperwhite, and I read it in Myanmar. A fascinating experience, to read such an American story in such a strange land!
Perhaps the most important magazine article I read in the course of the entire year was Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills are Killing Us, by Steven Brill in the March 4, 2013, issue of Time Magazine. I am not a subscriber to Time, but after learning about it (interviews on Charlie Rose’s TV program and the Diane Rehm radio show), we got hold of a copy. For the first time since it began publishing, Time Magazine devoted one entire issue to one long article, and despite all I thought I knew about our dysfunctional health care system (“system” has got to be the most ridiculous word to describe what we have), this piece, by “following the money” really takes you all the way through our non-free enterprise, non-competitive process, so you understand why we are the most expensive system in the world with mediocre results compared to the rest of the developed world. I came away very discouraged: nothing is likely to change, and to the extent that the “system” spins completely out of cost control, the “fixes” are likely to be all the wrong ones and hurt the population at large, not the key players who are profiting obscenely. We’ve gone so far down the path we are already on that it seems virtually impossible to backtrack and go down a different path, one more like every other advanced country in the world. As with other huge problem areas in our national life (dealing with guns is one, massive incarceration is another), there seems no way back from the deep hole we have dug. The numerous problems we are experiencing with the Affordable Care Act right now have to do with our complex, fragmented approach, though I happen to think the Act is a major step in the right direction. More of my musings the national scene further on in this letter.
AGING AND THE FRAGILITY OF LIFE
Now that I am 71, I realize that if I died right now, few would say ‘his life was cut short.” I do now regularly read the obituaries in the New York Times, and our local paper, and it doesn’t take long to realize that many people’s lives were shorter than mine, although of course a good life is not measured simply by years. There are people who accomplish more and contribute more at 35 years of age than 10 people who live to 100 combined! But still, you begin to realize that each day additional you are graced with is a stroke of good fortune. I don’t sit around actually feeling grateful, but what I most try to do is savor life through the small things – a beautiful flower, a gorgeous brilliant day, a piece of fruit better than I have ever tasted before, a heady glass of wine.
Living in a retirement community, as we do, not only is the death of those around you a regular occurrence, but perhaps even more unsettling is watching an acquaintance with a fine mind go mentally downhill and slip – sometimes quite fast – into dementia. If I could find a way to take charge in such circumstances, I would not want to continue living once serious dementia came upon me – but by the time that happened, I would no longer be able to exercise the necessary control and I would be forced to continue “living”!
It is hard to ignore that there are an awful lot of people who don’t ever enjoy a smidgen of the little pleasures of life that I do. There are people who live in hopeless day-to-day misery, compounded by human cruelty, natural disasters, extreme illness and disease. I have not earned any merit to deserve the better life I have. Such a realization presents many confusions. I do try to always keep in mind that I am extraordinarily fortunate in so many ways – good parents, good education, good health, a loving partner, decent health care, a roof over my head. Why is this so for me but not for so many others? I really cannot explain it but it is on my mind very frequently. Just being exposed to the daily news makes you constantly aware.
TRAVELS
Although we have been traveling a lot since I retired, 2013 broke all the records. David and I did a lot of joint traveling, but I did quite a bit on my own as well, and I suspect my total time away from home was near 40%.
In what has become a tradition, we try to pick an interesting warm place to visit in mid-winter (generally January). For 2013, we went to Myanmar, formerly known as Burma. I’ve been wanting to visit this country for a long, long time, but was troubled about touring the country during the period of the military dictatorship, a narrow-minded, corrupt, and isolationist group. But in December 2011, the new head general started liberalizing the country and making the first halting openings towards democratic governance. At that moment, I decided the time had come, and we planned a trip then for January 2013. One can only visit for a maximum of 28 days (your visa cannot be renewed for a longer stay), but with our train trip to Los Angeles and back (and some days having fun in L.A.) it was a 5-week trip and a fascinating one. The country is changing rapidly, and it seems almost everyone had the same idea as me. There is a shortage of hotel rooms (especially at the budget/backpacker level) to meet the steep increase in foreign visitors and you really have to secure rooms in advance. Traveling around can still be quite primitive, but the sights are spectacular, if you are interested in a country totally steeped in Buddhism and Buddhist religious architecture and lifeways. Sadly, since our return, there has been some very troubling religious violence, largely fomented by a nationalistic religious wing amongst Buddhists who have perpetrated vicious attacks on the Muslim minority (about 10% of the population). This is a really unfortunate outcome of the loosening of dictatorial control. We have seen similar things happening in the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, to take just a few recent examples.
In March, David and I did a road trip to the southern California desert, primarily Palm Springs, to which I had never been before, though David knew it well in the 50’s and 60’s. We stayed at a marvelous motel in the center of town, restored to its 1950’s style glory. For me the most wonderful thing about Palm Springs is its wealth of mid-century California modern architecture. It is an absolute treasure trove. There are serious tours of the wealth of architectural gems (mostly residential). Then each spring and fall a friend and I have been doing a camping / hiking trip to somewhere interesting in the West. This April it was Zion National Park, with a visit to the Goblin Valley at the edge of San Rafael Swell in south central Utah, ending in the Valley of the Gods in the southeast corner of Utah, a little known but spectacular place where you can pull your car over wherever someone has camped before and just set up your camp – usually totally away from others. We did a lot of hiking in Zion, which got some late winter weather, but all the same, we understood why this is one of our premiere national parks (even though I’d been there a number of times previously
We did a major trip in May/June, an in-depth exploration of just one region of France, Languedoc-Roussillon, which is in the southwest, a narrow slice along the Mediterranean Sea, beginning just west of Provence and curving around to the Spanish border, including the eastern portion of the Pyrenees. This trip was structured around a continuation of our wonderful trip to the Dordogne region in 2011, when we did a series of multi-day walks on some of France’s major walking paths, known as the Grandes Randonées (GRs). We had developed a bit of a fascination about the Cathars, a heretical movement of Christianity in the Middle Ages (roughly 1100 – 1300) that dominated southwestern France. In many ways, the Cathars (also known as the Albigensians) were very ahead of their time and had progressive ideas about the role of women, sex, Jews, and much else. The Papacy found them intolerable, and allying with the French kings, over many decades, had the “heretics” mercilessly destroyed. But the traces of the Cathars, the spectacular fortresses on sheer limestone promontories, the wild gorges, the high peaks of the Pyrenees, make this a fascinating region historically, as well as scenically. In the 1980’s, responding to interest, the French created an almost 200-mile walking path known as Le Sentier Cathar (The Cathar Way), and it was our goal to walk a major portion of this path through the foothills of the Pyrenees. The last two weeks of May, which was the two-week portion of our trip when we did the walking turned out to be the coldest, wettest late spring in southern Europe in decades, so the walking was a bit of challenge. All the same, the scenery was spectacular, the remnants of the Cathars mind-boggling, and we were there at the perfect time for one of the best wildflower regions in Europe, especially for wild orchids. We also rented a car for a week to explore some of the more remote villages of the region. Another week we had a bus pass to go up and down the Têt Valley of Pyrenées-Orientales (Roussillon) below the high peaks, which is not a heavily visited area but fascinating. This area is particularly rich in Romanesque period abbeys and monasteries perched high in the mountains – scenically, historically, and architecturally, they are incomparable. The rest of the time, we visited some of the interesting cities of the region – Montpelier, Nimes, Carcassonne, Narbonne, Perpignan, as well as coastal villages near the Spanish border.
David and I made two trips to Colorado, involving camping and hiking, but also a bit of culture and natural history. In early July, we spent a week in Crested Butte, one of our favorite summer places, which we keep returning to year after year. This year there was a specific purpose: I was being mentored by various leaders participating in the week-long Crested Butte Wildflower Festival, so that I could be a future leader. Crested Butte is called the Wildflower Capital of Colorado, and lives up to its name. I have an abiding interest in Western wildflowers, and the feedback from my stint was highly positive, so I am being scheduled for the summer of 2014 as a full-fledged leader. The Festival lasts 7 days, and has 20 – 30 separate events going on each day. In early August, we spent a week in Vail, home to a top-notch International Dance Festival, bringing some of the finest companies and dancers in the U.S. The programs were wonderful, and we also did a lot of demanding hiking and camped part of the time, as Vail is in the midst of some of the most spectacular Rocky Mountains country. (Vail itself looks like Disneyland on steroids.)
Then I was gone for 3 weeks from late August to mid-September, visiting friends in Seattle. We actually spent relatively little time at their nice old home in an established Seattle neighborhood, because we were doing so many outdoor trips. We did a two-day pelagic seabird trip out into the Pacific, we stayed for four days at their lovely off-the-grid cabin on the east side of the North Cascades, and most excitingly, we did a demanding 8-day backpacking trip in the Glacier Peak Wilderness of the North Cascades. These friends, a few years younger than me, are among the very few I have who still backpack, and I was willing to go all the way to the Pacific Northwest to have another opportunity (who knows how many more?). They selected a loop they promised was perhaps the most beautiful in Washington state, and I can say, without exaggeration, as demanding as it was (I began with a 50-lb. pack) it was easily the most spectacular mountain trip in the continental U.S. I’ve ever made. Every day was magnificent, and a wonderful extra was that we were there when the wild blueberries (and huckleberries) were ripe and we literally gorged on them – far superior to the commercial berries one gets in the supermarket.
After a brief September hiking/camping with the friend I do a spring and fall trip every year (this time to Curecanti National Recreation Area and Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park in Colorado), David and I went on the last of the year’s major trips – renting an apartment for a month in Florence. I call this trip “Enchanted October” because it was a dream come true, beyond our wildest hopes. Interestingly, it had been over four decades that he and I had last been to Florence (before we ever knew each other). As often as we go to Italy, we had resisted Florence – it seemed the one place in Italy that every American tourist wanted to go to and we sort of dismissed it as simply a tourist ant heap. We were wrong. Our stay could not have been more perfect. We had a small, nicely furnished apartment right on the Arno, directly across the river from the Uffizi Gallery. We could shop for food, have a nice breakfast every morning (including fresh-squeezed orange juice – what a treat!), and a place to take a break occasionally at midday. After a lifetime of art tourism, finally returning to Florence felt like hitting the jackpot – its concentration of great art over a 300-year period representing in many ways the most significant developmental period in the West gave us an opportunity to indulge that was a luxury beyond imagining. We never felt rushed, we had time to return and re-visit favorites, and to explore countless out-of-the-way churches, refectories, chapels and the like which while little known house some of the finest art anywhere. Each day ended with us swooning over seeing more great work in one day than we normally see in a year, and then the next day would be just as fabulous, and the next day after that. It was sublime! Besides great art there are the wonderful fine crafts (leather, perfumes, inlaid stone), the superb food, and street after street where every step of the way brings new delights and surprises. And the weather was perfect. It really was one of our best trips ever.
We are already well into planning our 2014 trips, leading off with one I am doing on my own, to the Falkland Islands, South Georgia Island and most of the Antarctica Peninsula. I’ve wanted to go to Antarctica for a long, long time and finally decided to “just do it.” Stay tuned. And needless to say, we have many other travel adventures planned for 2014.
OTHER ACTIVITIES
David put on his wonderful Enduring American Popular Song program in April – this was the 8th year of this popular production that he does with another singer and an instrumental jazz backup. The performance is at a popular club/restaurant on a Sunday afternoon, and he does it as a fundraiser for one or another of our many arts organizations. This year was one of his most successful renditions. How many more years he will do it is uncertain, but he is already working on the 2014 production.
Meanwhile, I continue with a number of volunteer activities. I have continued to be an ESL Tutor (English as a Second Language), which is challenging given my insane travel schedule. After assisting in an evening classroom setting in the spring, I have just taken on the one-on-one tutoring of a man who came from Mexico 23 years ago and is taking citizenship classes, but still needs to improve his language skills. A major new responsibility was joining the Board of Directors of the Santa Fe Botanical Garden. This is a challenging new experience for me. The organization opened the first phase of a major in-town garden (ultimately there will be two more components) and it has already been wildly successful and gotten much notice, even nationally. It has transformed the Botanical Garden from a quiet little operation to a major player in the community, so the role and responsibilities of the Board are increasing commensurately.
There are a number of other volunteer activities that are once a year – Block Captain at the wonderful International Folk Art Market, and ushering for Santa Fe ProMusica. I’ve been doing a great number of travel/photo programs in two venues – at El Castillo where we live and at our local travel bookstore. At both they seem to be very popular as many people love to travel vicariously I continued to lead a series of summer natural history walks at a local state park that proved more popular than ever. As previously alluded to, a very exciting development is becoming a leader for events at future Crested Butte (Colorado) Wildflower Festivals. The common theme in all this is enjoying sharing knowledge and interacting with others
I put on two more trips with a local non-profit that introduces visitors to the culture and natural history of New Mexico. This year we led a tour to Taos focused on the painters who moved there in the early 20th century. A second trip was built around the Feast Day at Santa Ana Pueblo, just north of Albuquerque – the old part of the pueblo, like Brigadoon, opens to outsiders just once a year for magnificent dances and related festivities.
Maintaining and expanding the Resident Garden at El Castillo also absorbs a great deal of my time, but has been very satisfying. It is an endless challenge, just keeping it going and improving it, especially as drought in the Southwest becomes an issue of ever greater concern. This fall El Castillo took out a large, but rotting tree, and the tree company, needless to say, was not terribly mindful of my garden and trampled all over it. But more sun will penetrate in the future, creating some new opportunities. This year, I put in fall-blooming crocuses for the first time, and we had quite a nice show in November, not a month one normally gets a lot of flower-pleasure. I am also working with a resident who is a wonderful artist creating beautiful sculptures of salvage and natural materials (driftwood, interesting stones) with plans to place one or more of his works in the garden area.
STATE OF THE NATION AND THE WORLD
Ah, the state of the nation and the world. This weighs on me more heavily with each passing year. First, there is the realization of how many terrible things are going on and one feels so helpless about having no influence on any of it. What can one do about Syria? Even more difficult, what should one do if one could do something? There are no obvious answers. There is the increasing pace of natural disasters, almost certainly connected, even if in unclear ways, with climate change. At least there are some folks who do give generously of themselves to make their small contribution to ameliorating the terrible consequences of these events. Injustice and bad governance in Egypt, widespread mistreatment of women and the poor in India, ethnic and religious conflict in regions and countries too numerous to name, sexual slavery. Perhaps it has always been as bad but in earlier eras, the dissemination of news and information was limited, at best, and we just didn’t know how bad things could be.
Seen in that context, there is a lot to be thankful for in the U.S. I am extremely troubled by the present state of affairs in the U.S., but if there is one freedom we have in abundance and that I consider absolutely vital for preserving our way of life, it is freedom of speech and the related freedom of the press (understood in the widest context of all public media). And in this aspect, I think we are more robust, and healthier, even with unlimited NSA surveillance, than almost anywhere else. I am also continually impressed with the spirit of innovation and enterprise, which permeates virtually every aspect of life in the U.S., from technology to the arts. And I think we do much better at accepting differences amongst people (e.g., absorption of immigrants) than most other countries.
That said, I have been appalled over the course of the year by what I have witnessed. I never dreamed we would experience the level of political dysfunction we have descended to. We no longer seem to be able to deal with any significant matters of national concern, be it infrastructure repair, health care, poverty and joblessness, immigration reform, loss of privacy and widespread surveillance, prison reform, reduction of fossil fuels and energy efficiency, environmental health. The country seems to be drifting, stumbling from one crisis to another with no real fixes to tackle these issues in the works. It can’t go on like this forever.
I am absolutely convinced that a major unstated factor is deep-seated, but not out in the open, racism related to President Obama. The desire to destroy him and everything he does, at all costs, to misrepresent him as a radical Socialist, goes so beyond attacks on any previous president in my lifetime, that knowing how much racism lingers on in this country, it is clear to me that this is a significant element. And so many segments of the population are being hurt, simply to score points.
Obviously, the reform of health care has been messy and disruptive, and to a degree, perhaps needlessly so. But I think one must keep in mind that we have had a dysfunctional “non-system” for a long time, and any attempt to make fundamental change is not going to be a pretty picture. How one gets from A to B and especially with the Right determined to disrupt and destroy all health reform attempts, with nothing to replace it (since they maintain, against all the data that we have the best health care system in the world!) is beyond me. Do we need to reach the point of such total collapse – financial, social, and psychological – that we are ready to do something to move to where all other civilized nations went decades ago?. A time of severe crisis is rarely the time to make wise decisions on how best to go forward!
I am coming to the conclusion that a large percent of Americans will no longer ever find decent work. We presently see corporations making record profits without any need to hire or pay better wages. They can now blithely ignore the enormous social consequences of large numbers of Americans who can no longer find work or earn a living wage. I do not see any future in which we have an economy that can offer the kind of jobs for most Americans to live “the American dream.” With automation and globalization, there just are not that many decent jobs anymore. Our economy can offer some low wage / low benefit work, but no one can lead an acceptable life that way. And there will be consequences – we can go quite a while in this kind of unjust manner, but we cannot go on forever this way. Widespread discontent has brought down many earlier societies.
The two greatest factors impeding meaningful change and reform are – to my mind – first, the role of money in election campaigns and lobbying, and second, the increasing effectiveness of voter suppression, so that our electoral system is less and less representative of what most people need and want to improve their lot. And I see nothing happening that will change that. In fact, with our present Supreme Court, the inequalities by which the very rich and the big corporations continue to exert their influence are ever more favored, makes righting the present wrongs substantially more difficult.
Though thoroughly American, I sometimes feel completely puzzled by my own country. Not only am I mystified by the widespread fanaticism that owning guns is the absolute sine qua non of freedom, but I am horrified by it. I have no passion to eliminate gun ownership per se, but the elevation of the Second Amendment above all others defies any understanding on my part. (And I will never agree that the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Amendment, whose language says something very different to me, was correct). Even the most minimal common sense limitations – limitations we place on everything else from free speech to privacy to driving a car (a potentially lethal weapon) – is seen by many as an intolerable infringement on their freedom. Gun ownership with no restraints seems to take precedence before the values of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Our obsession with guns is reflected in our murder and injury statistics that are multiple times worse than in other industrial nations.
I also don’t understand this passion for the death penalty. I am as stunned as the next person by vicious, brutal murders and they should be punished. But my own thinking has evolved along the lines of citizens of every other civilized nation that it is not the role of the state to murder people, that we do not stoop to the level of a vicious murderer. Besides, the unfairness of whom the death penalty is, and is not, meted out to, is manifestly discriminatory. There is a belief that a victim’s family and friends achieve “closure” when they watch a criminal murdered by the state and yet all the data indicate it doesn’t work that way. And life without parole should be used extremely sparingly, which it is not – I do believe in redemption. (And how many people die who were actually innocent, a frightening thought?) We are, supposedly, a Christian or at least a religious nation, but in some ways we are extremely hardhearted.
What exacerbates my sensibilities about the national situation in these times of extreme inequality is that with so much suffering, laws are proposed and often passed that direct even more to the powerful few and compound the misery of our vast numbers of the poor. I believe it a fundamental human right to not go hungry and to have access to basic health care. The spending priorities of any decent society should be to ensure this bare minimum for every citizen. And yet one reads endless heartbreaking stories of families – of children – going without food because their food stamp allocations keep getting cut (and the Right wants far more radical cuts while it increases farm subsidy giveaways to obscene heights for agribusiness corporations!). Likewise, the minimum wage has fallen so far behind its historical level that numerous working people have to get food stamps and other forms of “welfare..” If it were up to the Right, there would not be any minimum wage at all! When it comes to sickness and health, there are countless stories of people suffering with the most dreadful illnesses – cancer, kidney failure – who do not dare seek assistance except at virtually the point of death when most of the damage has been done. With such lopsided wealth by the few as hasn’t been seen in any of our lifetimes (none of us were during the Gilded Age of the 1890’s), how is it ever permissible, ever “Christian” to see such widespread suffering and go out of our way to make it even worse? If anyone can explain that to me, please take a stab at it. If we are one country, it means that at some minimal level, we take care of each other.
This ties in with global data trends. Recently a report by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) came out listing average life spans for developed countries. The U.S. is now 26th and is below the international average, a dramatic change from 1970. The report looks at what may account for this parlous situation, and in the case of the U.S. it is the enormous number of people who do not have health insurance and our highly fragmented system. It is just one of many data points that demonstrate that our “system” is broken.
It is hard to look back on this year and not be deeply discouraged by what we are seeing in the halls of Congress. Having reached the age I have, and being reasonably well informed over the course of my life, I can make comparisons between “then” and “now” and it is easy to say I haven’t seen a level of cynical stupidity, of blind know-nothingness, that remotely rivals what is going on now. What I see is a substantial subset of the political class who act like utter barbarians, only interested in destroying and tearing down, approaching almost all of our serious problems as if there is only one way to deal with them: carry out a scorched earth policy. Deep down it reflects a fundamental refusal to face up to the fact that our world and society has changed enormously and we must adapt to those changes.
We are definitely losing credibility on the world stage, but of even greater significance to me is the unnecessary harm we are causing so many fellow citizens. Just when I think things cannot get any worse on the national stage, I am proven wrong, and they do get worse. I dread to think what 2014 will bring.
All this makes me realize, as a retiree whose working life was encompassed by a narrow window of shared prosperity, that those who follow me will never have it so good (at least not for the foreseeable future). I don’t consider I was some kind of brilliant working person who deserves what I am fortunate to have. But in my day, you did not have to be superman (or woman) to do ok. I look with great sadness at today’s landscape of so many highly qualified people becoming long-term unemployed with no prospects for even a minimally decent life, scraping by from moment to moment, never knowing when they will land on the street. I do not like the kind of country we are evolving into.
The one exception to so many troubling trends, amazingly enough, is the dramatic positive developments regarding full acceptance of gay people. The ending of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and now the mind-boggling progress on marriage equality have been truly breathtaking and gratifying. I am hopeful that before much longer, all state laws and constitutional amendments banning marriage equality will be found to be unconstitutional. Amazingly enough, there is a very good chance that the New Mexico Supreme Court, based on two cases it is about to rule on, will find denying marriage licenses to same-sex couples unconstitutional. They are already being issued in the 8 most populous counties, but it will be reassuring to know it is guaranteed under the state Constitution, and ultimately the U.S. Constitution. So, with marriage licenses being issued by Santa Fe County, David and I made a big decision, and got our marriage license. As of December 3, we are officially married after being together almost 29 years! Hooray!
Internationally, the biggest issue is climate change and its impact on virtually every aspect of human existence on the planet. The evidence keeps mounting, with alarming rapidity, that the impacts of climate change will affect in even the subtlest ways all life on earth and the future prospects of humankind. Of course, if one chooses to not pay attention to any of this, one can continue to live one’s life, blinkered, but for anyone who takes even a modest interest in the future of our common home, there is lots to worry about. The most obvious impact is the growing frequency of very extreme weather events. But there are many others. Rising ocean levels for one. The likely extinction of many plant and animal species for another, entailing not just the loss of nature’s astounding diversity, but impacts on useful plant and animal products essential for human welfare. Food shortages for yet another. Serious analysts see all this as a major national security issue, but so far, obviously, we have not found a way, as a nation and as a global community, o take this seriously enough to do something meaningful about it.
In part this is all a matter of great concern to me, because at the level of simple wonder at the miracle of life, its diversity and the absolute will of all living creatures to survive, I discover at this very moment that we are on the brink of seeing so much of it destroyed. My sense of the spiritual is closely tied in with the beauty, the myriad forms, and the rugged persistence of all life on Earth. There is so much to marvel at and we may witness much of it, in the years ahead, disappear. What an incalculable loss!
Late in the year the world lost one of the great figures of the 20th century, Nelson Mandela. If there is a cause for moments of optimism, it is in considering his life. I am awestruck at a man who was locked away for so long and could rise above anger and vengeance to embrace his oppressors and lead a nation into a new era. He created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to deal with the crimes of apartheid, and while it did not come close to solving all the pain left behind (what could have?) was perhaps the best way to get beyond an awful past. While a real human being, with real failings, he had such exceptional qualities as to make us realize that for all the tragedy and sadness in this world, there is real good also as embodied in individuals such as him..
Leaving all these ruminations behind, I confess that the past year has been wonderfully good to me. So, as I closed my letter last year, I will say, again, take the time to hear the birds, enjoy a good cup of coffee, dream of spring and new life, stare in wonder at the deep blue sky above and the twinkling stars at night, be stirred to your core by a great work of art or literature, in short, savor each moment of an all too-fleeting life. On this note I will close. Be well, have a great 2014, accept and pass on love,
Ken