Sour grapes feed a Summer of our discontent

We have not yet reached a level of savagery described by Terry Tempest Williams in her Finding Beauty in a Broken World, but give us another week or two with events such as occurred in Charlottesville, VA this past weekend, and we could become contenders with the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda a generation or so ago.

The Mni'sota River has been blessed with a Nibi Walk

Photo by J. Harrington

It's not as if this country doesn't have a long-standing history of class warfare, racial and ethnic discrimination, and broken treaties. I am, at the moment, thinking of John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath and Winter of Our Discontent. Steinbeck's writings earned the Nobel prize for literature in 1962. I recall, more than many other works, reading several of his as I studied (many, many years ago) for my college degree as an English major. I still get chills every time I see or hear Tom Joad's "I'll Be There" speech :

Then I’ll be all aroun’ in the dark. I’ll be ever’where — wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. If Casy knowed, why, I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’ — I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build — why, I’ll be there.

 How much better a nation would we be if we truly believed, as the late Senator Paul Wellstone tried to teach us, that "We all do better when we all do better." Inter- and intra-tribal or class wars might have made a bit of sense before we arrived at the Anthropocene Age. When humans were dominated by Nature, seeing control of natural resources as a zero sum game might have made a little sense. Since we now are in the process of making earth uninhabitable for future generations, and the United States has most recently elected a "Denier-In-Chief," since our world population numbers have skyrocketed in a relatively short period of time, we have reached a point from which we need to create win-win strategies to create a better world, because we aren't going to be able to create a bigger world in time to save ourselves. I think, if we learn to work together and give it everything we've got, we can Imagine how do do that. Whatever we have to change to get there, it's very probably worth it if we consider the alternative. So, we don't try to save the pollinators first, we learn how to work together by saving the pollinators; by jointly creating environmental justice; by collectively cleaning up the messes our parents and grandparents and their parents made, instead of passing more of the same down to our children's children.

The St. Louis River has been blessed with a Nibi Walk

Photo by J. Harrington

If you'd like examples of how we can successfully go about this, look no further than here or here. Even Steinbeck had to mature into a great writer. America cannot become a great country if it's citizens are less than great, can it? It's past time for us (and US) to grow up.

The Tradition

Jericho Brown

Aster. Nasturtium. Delphinium. We thought
Fingers in dirt meant it was our dirt, learning
Names in heat, in elements classical
Philosophers said could change us. Star Gazer. 
Foxglove. Summer seemed to bloom against the will
Of the sun, which news reports claimed flamed hotter
On this planet than when our dead fathers
Wiped sweat from their necks. Cosmos. Baby’s Breath. 
Men like me and my brothers filmed what we
Planted for proof we existed before
Too late, sped the video to see blossoms
Brought in seconds, colors you expect in poems
Where the world ends, everything cut down.
John Crawford. Eric Garner. Mike Brown.

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