Apple season, take a bite from the tree?

The sun's supposed to come out later this afternoon. We've taken advantage of a cloudy, damp morning to start trying a recipe for cinnamon-apple flatbread. The dough has almost finished its first rise and the apples (Haralsons) have been chunked and softened. (Next time we'll give them less time in the microwave or make sure the chunks are more uniform in size. They're wildly variable in degrees of softening.) So, for an otherwise "meh" day in October, we are in the process of enjoying several of our favorite things: local foods, baking sourdough, apples, and eventually, eating. We'll let you know how it turns out.

does an apple fall far from the tree?

Photo by J. Harrington

While waiting for the dough to finish rising, we returned to rereading the last chapter of Limits to Growth: The Thirty-Year Update. All of a sudden, a strategy being followed by our Republican Overlords in Washington and Moscow was made clear with one sentence. We'll try to explain.

There are five tools listed as very helpful (essential?) during a transition to sustainability: visioning, networking, truth-telling, learning, and loving. Many of us, in many places in the U.S. and elsewhere, are well on our way to using these tools effectively. Perhaps not enough, but we've been progressing. But then, we (re)found a key sentence in the section on the truth-telling tool. "A system cannot function well if its information streams are corrupted by lies." We're just going to leave that there and let you think about it in light of what's been coming out of Washington, D.C. since late January of this year.

Do you believe our system of governance is supposed to be a democratic system? Did the founders create a three branch system of government, with each branch being co-equal to the others? Are we now in a time when all three branches are largely under the control of a single ideology, one which places personal (corporations are people) profit ahead of party and patriotism? Are we getting honest information about what our elected representatives are trying to do for to us? Our list of questions can keep growing but we think the point has been made.

We also realize that your answers to some of these questions may differ from ours, but we ask you to consider whether you and I both are indeed seeing signs of an effort not just to head our democracy in a different direction, but to undermine our very system of democratic governance by showering us in untruths, in lies! Is our democracy being corrupted by lying politicians, those we elected and trusted to govern in our best collective, democratic interests?

If what's going on these days were an effort to foster a return to a more self reliant society in which we can rely on each other, would so many lies be necessary? If, the current administration's purpose is to create an autocracy, further an oligarchy, what better than to create a non-system, one in which we're constantly unsure of who we can trust? Please think, very, very hard, about these questions and even harder about your answers. Each of us has to decide about these concerns each and every day between now and Tuesday, November 6, 2018. That's when we have to make some even greater decisions. Perhaps we've been frustrated by divided government, but, in our democracy, divided government may be the best we can hope for until our on very human natures improve. Unless, of course, you think a totalitarian state will be better for your descendants.

A Short History of the Apple

Dorianne Laux, 1952

The crunch is the thing, a certain joy in crashing through
living tissue, a memory of Neanderthal days.
   —Edward Bunyard, The Anatomy of Dessert, 1929


Teeth at the skin. Anticipation.
Then flesh. Grain on the tongue.
Eve’s knees ground in the dirt
of paradise. Newton watching
gravity happen. The history
of apples in each starry core,
every papery chamber’s bright
bitter seed. Woody stem
an infant tree. William Tell
and his lucky arrow. Orchards
of the Fertile Crescent. Bushels.
Fire blight. Scab and powdery mildew.
Cedar apple rust. The apple endures.
Born of the wild rose, of crab ancestors.
The first pip raised in Kazakhstan.
Snow White with poison on her lips.
The buried blades of Halloween.
Budding and grafting. John Chapman
in his tin pot hat. Oh Westward
Expansion. Apple pie. American
as. Hard cider. Winter banana.
Melt-in-the-mouth made sweet
by hives of Britain’s honeybees:
white man’s flies. O eat. O eat.

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