Thursday, January 6, 2022

Time to rename Homo sapiens Homo saps?

Take a look around the North Country. Trees, except most conifers, are bare. There are few signs of life in the woods and fields. Temperatures and windchills are consistently well below zero℉. There are few, if any, signs that life will return over the next several months. But it will, as it  has for thousands of years.

January, North Country
January, North Country
Photo by J. Harrington

Now, take a look a Washington, D.C. and compare it today with one year ago. There are a few signs of intelligence in the House and Senate. Not enough to relax about our governance, not even enough to get excited about. And here we are in an election year in which the party that  doesn’t hold the White House is usually expected to do better in an :”off year election.” (As if every  election didn’t make it an off year.)

During the past several years we have seen ineptness and incompetence, approaching malfeasance, in response to the global COVID pandemic. The string of inadequate global responses to our climate breakdown by all levels of government extends back even further. It’s as if we only believe in “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die” is a self-fulfilling prophecy about which we can do little. We dishonor our heritage by failing to act on the premise that we can do much to create the future in which we  will live. Where was the effective outrage when the Supreme Court was stacked by Republican ideologues? Where is it today as they continue to perpetrate their big lie and their many lesser ones, aided and abetted by news media in the thrall of "both sides-ism.”

The  Better Half has a phrase I’m finding  myself increasingly forced to accept and follow. "Sometimes all we can do is choose the least worst alternative.” I hate that option but, given a two-party system comprised of Democrats and Republicans, that seems to be the option  available to US, more’s the pity.

More and more pundits are coming forward with observations that our democracy is in serious  trouble of various depths. So far, none of the ones I’ve read have offered much in the way of a recommended solution other than “watch out!” I’ll go out n a limb and offer this list as a way to get started:

  • Vote all Blue in 2022
  • Hold the bastards accountable
  • Primary anyone you don’t feel represents your best you
  • Never, ever, vote for a politician that relies on disinformation
  • Hold the bastards accountable.
  • Never support a DINO
  • Put your time and money where your interests lie
Art Cullen, bless his heart, has a great editorial in yesterday’s Storm Lake Times: Hope for democracy has to be more than just sentimentality. I absolutely agree with his premise although I find his “action” to be necessary but,  perhaps, insufficient. Here it is.
Shared experience leading to shared prosperity and faith in your neighbor seemed to be the Iowa way. A shared predicate of informed self-governance was our foundation. That conclusion cleared up my nagging headache: We know how to do it, because we have. That has to be something more than an old man’s sentimentality; at least it serves as a comfort against the cold.

One other thing we should all think more about: are we trying to save a democracy or a corporatocracy? If the latter ("corporations are persons,” “money is speech”), perhaps we should let it die. Is that  the  real issue we’re facing?


Election Year

 - 1968-

The last ghostly patch of snow slips away—

with it—winter’s peaceful abandon melts 
into a memory, and you remember the mire 
of muck just outside your kitchen window 
is the garden you’ve struggled and promised 
to keep. Jeans dyed black by years of dirt, 
you step into the ache of your boots again, 
clear dead spoils, trowel the soil for new life. 

The sun shifts on the horizon, lights up 
the dewed spider webs like chandeliers. 
Clouds begin sailing in, cargoed with rain 
loud enough to rouse the flowers into 
a race for color: the rouged tulips clash 
with the noble lilies flaunting their petals 
at the brazen puffs of allium, the mauve 
tongues of the iris gossip sweet-nothings 
into the wind, trembling frail petunias. 

Mornings over coffee, news of the world, 
you catch the magic act of hummingbirds— 
appearing, disappearing—the eye tricked 
into seeing how the garden flowers thrive 
in shared soil, drink from the same rainfall, 
governed by one sun, yet grow divided 
in their beds where they’ve laid for years. 
In the ruts between bands of color, ragweed 
poke their dastard heads, dandelions cough 
their poison seeds, and thistles like daggers 
draw their spiny leaves and take hold.

The garden loses ground, calls you to duty 
again: with worn gloves molded by the toll 
of your toil, and armed with sheers, you tear 
into the weeds, snip head-bowed blooms, 
prop their struggling stems. Butterfly wings 
wink at you, hinting it’s all a ruse, as you rest 
on your deck proud of your calloused palms 
and pained knees, trusting all you’ve done 
is true enough to keep the garden abloom.

But overnight, a vine you’ve never battled 
creeps out of the dark furrows, scales 
the long necks of the sunflowers, chokes 
every black-eyed Susan, and coils around 
the peonies, beheading them all. You snap 
apart its greedy tendrils, cast your hands 
back into the dirt, pull at its ruthless roots. 
Still, it returns with equal fury and claim: 
the red poppies scream, the blue asters 
gasp for air, strangled in its vile clasp 
that lives by killing everything it touches.

The sun’s eye closes behind mountains, but 
you lose sleep tonight, uncertain if the garden 
is meant to inevitably survive or die, or if 
it matters—one way or the other—with or 
without you. Maybe it’s not just the garden 
you worry about, but something we call hope 
pitted against despair, something we can only 
speak of by speaking to ourselves about flowers, 
weeds, and hummingbirds; spiders, vines, and 
a garden tended under a constitution of stars 
we must believe in, splayed across our sky. 



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Please be kind to each other while you can.

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