As we were saying...

Today's windy and cloudy weather feels threatening, sort of like the regime in Washington, D.C. I've been trying to track events and developments fairly closely during this past week and I've ended up with more take-aways on what NOT to do than what to do. I'm taking that as an opportunity to claim it's time to remember the parable of the babies in the river. [check it out, we'll wait right here]

There's also the quote from Ursula Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness: “Almost everything carried to its logical extreme becomes either depressing or carcinogenic.” I believe we've reached the logical extreme end of capitalistic oligarchy as exemplified by the current crew in D.C. To borrow a dictum from my time as a planner: "More of the same never solved a problem." And who was it that claimed "Life must be lived forward but can only be understood backwards"?

"We the People"  No Kings 10/18/2025

We aren't, I believe, likely to get ourselves out of the mess we're in by trying to return to anything like an old normal. The old normal was too extractive and, as we all know, "there are no jobs on a dead planet" and "there is no planet B." We need a transformative change so our society is no longer primarily dependent on growth and GDP as indicators of success. Let me once again share one of my all time favorite quotations from a 1968 speech by Robert F Kennedy:

Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

It is, I believe, time for us to head upstream and see who's throwing the babies in the river and stop them. This is neither an original nor a new idea. Wendell Berry writes of a similar approach in today's poem (if you allow for a certaain stretch of poetic license).

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

by Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

Listen to carrion -- put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as Women do not go cheap
for power, please Women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

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