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The night before last, after Quaker Quest, my dreams took an unpleasant turn. I was applying for a full-time job in a construction warehouse. The hiring agent was telling me all the requirements of the job: 8 am to 8 pm every Friday and Saturday, different shifts assigned by the supervisor on weekdays with no notice. Mandatory overtime. Heavy lifting. Half an hour for lunch. Ask permission to go to the bathroom. Late twice and you're fired. It was like many jobs I'd applied for and held briefly when I was much younger, and it promised to be hell. Even in the dream, I was asking myself, "Why am I doing this?"
In real life, I'm working part-time with benefits and between me and Denise we're just covering our expenses, but we have some flexibility about how we spend our time and volunteer. It's a good arrangement, though it doesn't allow for lots of travel and extravagant entertainment. If both our jobs hold up during the bad economic times, we're MORE THAN OK.
When I woke up, I was making coffee when Denise came down and asked if we could schedule a visit to our daughter in Michigan to see her new house. In the course of an emotional discussion, I told her of my dream, and she immediately recognized that it fit our daughter's situation more closely than ours. Maybe even though she has a full-time job with benefits that looks good in theory, she is suffering just what I dreaded in the dream. Just like my younger self, to paraphrase Dylan, she probably has a "headful of ideas that are driving her insane.." and has to scrub the floor instead.
I don't know why, in good times or bad, Americans put up with this kind of thing. Tags: dreams, wage-slavery
Current Music: Tim O'Brien - Maggie's Farm | Powered by Last.fm
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A study reported on by two University of Toronto researchers suggests that while hearing news about an organic or environmentally-friendly product may lead consumers to act more altruistically, actually purchasing them is associated with more subsequent cheating and stealing and environmental bad-behavior than the purchase of conventional products. Based on two experiments and a survey of recent literature on the subject, Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong conclude "...that virtuous acts can license subsequent asocial and unethical behaviors". They say.".. our studies suggest that social and ethical acts may contribute to a more general sense of moral self than previously thought, licensing socially undesirable behaviors in distant domains." I interpret this as meaning that if I buy a green product, I subconsciously do a mental calculation that says I've built up moral credit and can "spend" it on some form of self-indulgence or cheating at a later time, including increasing my carbon footprint or otherwise polluting. At best, each green purchase includes an added incentive to laziness; at worst, it encourages environmental "sins". Georges Monbiot, writing in the Guardian has read the study and concludes that plain old fashioned guilt-tripping may do more actual environmental good than the feel-good approach used in much green marketing. He thinks, and I have to agree, that collective action through government (or possibly mass civil disobedience) is necessary, and that consumer choice by itself will not have a net positive effect on CO2 emmissions or related sustainability issues. My radio station requires me to give "public service announcements" (PSAs) every hour, and most of the ones available in the studio are provided by industry groups promoting their pet nonprofit projects in order to boost their public image or their bottom line. The environmental messages tend to urge us to buy efficient lightbulbs, recycle plastic, buy new more-efficient cars, etc. If all this consumerism is worse than useless, and if what is really needed is concerted efforts to force government action, we would have to write and record the PSAs ourselves, because the well-funded industry lobbies have no intention of getting that message out. Maybe I should produce some... hmmm. Tags: co2, green marketing, morality, public service announcements
Current Music: John Kirkpatrick - George Fox - John Kirkpatrick | Powered by Last.fm
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 My cousin Paul Dayton of San Diego and his nephew Peter from Colorado visited briefly and helped me sort out some of the bins of old papers from the attic. We found some of my mother's original notes and transcriptions from her Yaqui Myths and Legends project in the 1930's and some evidence Paul wants to use to prove that my father's theory about the "Old Whaling Culture" was correct (there is apparently some unbelievably mean "debunking" being done these days, in which young archaeologists are calling him a liar, and Paul, having been present at some of the discoveries in question was looking for evidence to counter this). We also found a lot of other stuff, including [my mother] Bets's diary from April to June 1946, which is sort of a "prequel" to the McKenzie River diary I have been transcribing elsewhere in this LiveJournal blog. Some of this will be sposted in coming days/weeks, but to start off with, here is a photo of Dad (J. Louis Giddings) seated by a pile of mammoth bones, probably taken in 1949 in the vicinity of Cape Denbeigh, Alaska. I guess that makes him a mammoth hunter, since he was hunting for the remains of the mammoths and their human killers a few millenia after they died. Tags: alaska, archaeology, family photos
Current Music: Josephine Foster - Trust In The Unexpected | Powered by Last.fm
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The BBC recently published an article entitled What Happened to Global Warming?The article discusses the paradoxical fact the 1998, not last year, was the warmest year on record. The article attributes this fact to the complexity of the earth's climatic system, in which some long-term cycles in solar radiation and oceanic circulation are leading to cooling while other long-term trends (including CO2 pollution) are leading to heating. Meteorology is complex, but emphasizing these countervailing trends in the mass media at this time in history is potentially very harmful, because most of us are not climate scientists and there is a powerful political/economic interest group trying to convince us that global warming is not happening or is not caused by human actions and therefore should not be combatted by reducing the burning of CO2-emitting fuels. All the article really says is that there are countervailing trends, and that for a couple of decades the undeniable warming trends may ( may, not will) be masked by them. The vast majority of the world's scientists now agree that the carbon-dioxide content of the earth's atmosphere is steadily increasing, year after year, that the human emission of CO2 is the dominant cause of the increase ( the increase, not all of it), and that dramatic effects are already being felt. There is agreement that a 4 degree celsius (seven plus degree fahrenheit) increase in global temperatures can be expected by 2060, and that the effects of this will mean the loss of most glaciers and the flooding of many densely-populated coastal regions, not to mention changes in meteorological patterns that humans have depended on for centuries. The United States Congress and the nations that will gather in Copenhagen must not use this kind of popular science reporting to delay urgently-needed action on climate change. I urge us all to read the valuable and inspiring messages coming from all over the world at 350.0rgand to remember to take the advice of the coal and oil barons with considerably more than a grain of salt. Let's get the Earth's carbon burden back below 350 parts per million before this powerful trend becomes irreversible. Tags: 350.org, blogactionday, global warming
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 On Saturday night, Denise and I joined a large (for New Hampshire) crowd at the American Friends Service Committe's New Hampshire Celebration of Youth Activism. It was an inspiring event and, with the help of Steve Diamond of WSCA., I obtained recordings of all the speakers. The theme of the gathering was that young activists can and do make a difference, and to prove the point, the Committee invited Claudette Colvin, a 70-year-old woman who, as a teenaged high school student changed the world by taking a courageous spontaneous action to end Jim Crow segregation on the bus system of Montgomery, Alabama. You may say, "...but that was Rosa Parks, not some kid named Claudette Colvin. I've never heard of her before." Rosa Parks' action in refusing to give up her seat on a public bus to a white person was anything but spontaneous. Parks was a practical activist who planned her action months in advance in collaboration with lots of other committed adults. Claudette, on the other hand, was a black high-school student who had been studying history and understood first-hand the twin weights of Jim Crow segregation and patriarchy that black girls faced every day in the US South in the 1950s. Hers was a split-second decision to defy the establishment alone. She said she felt the weight of Sojourner Truth pushing down on one shoulder and Harriet Tubman pushing down on the other, keeping her in that seat when a young white woman approached to take it. Along with Colvin, Phillip Hoose, author of a powerful biography of Colvin, had been invited to introduce her and give some of the background. I recommend listening to both these talks. I have posted them at communications.uml.edu/connections/ , where you can listen to and/or download all the audio from the conference. In this blog, I also want to talk about my subconscious reaction to the talk. I dreamed that Colvin had attended the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where I work, and that I had been asked to drive her to the airport. In the dream, I was driving her in a large black car which she had once owned. and while we rode together, she carried on an amazing conversation (which I have forgotten unfortunately) that left me with the impression that she was one of the great artists, thinkers and poets of our time, even though only a few friends knew her and shared discourse with her. I think my right brain was trying to tell me that this encounter was important - that it must not be forgotten. My impression in the dream was that she had gone on to be a scholar Reading from Hoose's book the following day, I learned that she had worked as a nurse's aide in New York City until she retired. The reason her name did not become prominent in history books was seemingly that, shortly after her civil disobedience, she became pregnant by a light-skinned black man who did not marry her. The pregnancy and the light-skinned baby made her a kind of "kryptonite" to the civil rights movement leaders, who were exceedingly concerned with appearing unimpeachably pure. She did later sign on, at the urging of those same leaders, as a plaintiff in the court case that ultimately led to desegregation of all bus systems in the US. ________ A related post is at www.the-savvy-sista.com/2009/02/before-rosa-parks-there-was-claudette.html________ PS, I can also highly recommend Hoose's thoughtful, funny book for young people on the subject of violence and oppression Hey Little AntTags: civl rights, claudette colvin, feminism, nonviolence, phillip hoose
Current Music: Angi West - home in heaven | Powered by Last.fm
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