bedlamfarm

The Wonderful Graduation Book For Bishop Maginn

Mon, 01 Jun 2020 23:06:52 GMT

I want to thank Connie Brooks of Battenkill Books here in Cambridge for recommending the perfect graduation book for the Bishop Maginn High School seniors.

If you know anyone graduating from anything, I can’t recommend this book highly enough. It’s called “Navigate Your Stars,” by National Book Award Winner Jesmyn Ward, who delivered a stirring speech at Tulane University’s commencement about the value of hard work and the importance of respect for oneself and others.

The speech is the inspiration for the book.

I’ve purchased a copy of the book for each of Bishop Maginn’s 37 graduates and I am honored to have been asked to sign each one.

Here is just one excerpt from this inspiring book about empowerment and encouragement:

Many people walk easily into success, she said, “but for many others, this doesn’t happen. For many others, success comes after thousands of hours of work, and lucky breaks, and study and heartbreak, and loss and wandering.

As an adult, I learned this: persist, work hard, face rejection, and weather the setbacks work hard, face rejection, and weather the setbacks until you meet a gatekeeper who will open a door for you.

Sometimes, you are twenty when you stumble upon an open doorway, sometimes you are thirty. Sometimes you are forty, or fifty, or sixty. I remembered this when I felt like giving up when I thought I’d pack all my notebooks and stories into plastic bags and put them away, when I thought I would resign them to the recycling bin.

And I remembered this new lesson I’d learned about persistence and success when I looked again at my parents, my uncles, and aunts, all the people in my small, rural, black community who persisted, even with the promise of less on the horizon. I looked at them and all the old disdain for their lives I’d harbored dissolved, and it turned to understanding. I understood what it meant to do the best you can with what you’ve been given.”

Amen, Jesmyn.

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Gift Cards: Activation Mystery/Two Families Are Very Sick

Mon, 01 Jun 2020 22:27:24 GMT

We could use some help.

As if they hadn’t been through enough – driven from their homes, family members murdered, in a strange country increasingly hostile to them, pushed out of their school, caught in a Pandemic, fighting for graduation, and now, their city in the grip of protests and looters, stores in their neighborhoods trashed, windows broken and two of the families diagnosed last week with the coronavirus, both families under quarantine.

Albany has had some rough nights.

(Note. Five $100 gift cards one of you was kind enough to buy have not been activated and the families who have them can’t use them. The cards have this inscription on them: “to someone wonderful, life is still full of wonder, may your family be safe, may you know I think of you with love.“

It would be a tragic waste if this beautiful message and $500 worth of food were to go to waste.

As I’ve mentioned, purchases of gift cards worth more than $300 need to be activated via an e-mail sent to the buyer a couple of days after purchase. I hope this message reaches you, we could use those cards.)

We could also use some support for these two families, one of them includes a very sick Bishop Maginn High School student, struggling with the coronavirus.

There is some violence and looting in the refugee neighborhoods, a number of stores where the students worked part-time have been burned or vandalized. They are not only under quarantine, their neighborhoods are under curfew.

We could use some more gift cards to get us through the next few weeks, these families just can’t catch a break. You can see and buy the gift cards here.

They need to be sent to my farm, Jon Katz, 2502 State Route 22, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816, as the school is still closed and gift cards have to be sent to private residences.

Please remember, if you do buy more than $300 worth of gift cards, they need to be activated via e-mail a few days after purchase. Some of the family adults should be able to go back to work soon, assuming the looting and disturbances ease.

If you don’t care to purchase the gift cards online, you can send me the amount you wish to spend via Paypal, jon@bedlamfarm.com, or by mail, Jon Katz same address as above or Post Office Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816.

The families are really in a nightmare not of their making. You have made all the difference. Thanks for your help.

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New Glasses, Color On Top, Color On Bottom

Mon, 01 Jun 2020 21:37:12 GMT

My new blue glasses arrived today, my first online glass purchase. I like them. The fashion icon now has color at the top and at the bottom.

Maria pointed out that I wear blue all the time, but I’ve never had blue glasses before, and they fit perfectly, are comfortable and cost half the usual cost of glasses.

It’s neat to bring some color to the extremities while keeping the farmer look in the middle. I’m liking this fashion stuff. Maria took this photo, she loves taking pictures of me through the maple trees.

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The Compassionate Life: Making America Kind Again

Mon, 01 Jun 2020 18:47:23 GMT

I got an especially ugly and specific death threat this morning and then watched videos of people protesting and some other people burning and stealing things.

Then I saw our President say that all of this looting and rage was the fault of unnamed radical left organizations and weak Democratic mayors, and my heart did sink a bit.

I don’t have it in me to hold anybody in judgment right now, the air is heavy with it.

There are times when hope and faith are drained, and there is nothing left but rage and hopelessness. Times when the fire just has to burn itself out.

I’ll leave the experience or judging to others; there is never any shortage of judges among the humans.

Mary Shelley warned us. Don’t create what you can’t control.

But then, after a few minutes of feeling unsettled, I had a better idea than being angry.

I went to my bookshelf.

I found a slender green volume called A Spirituality Of Caregiving, by Henri Nouwen, and read the chapter called The Call: Compassion And Caregiving, and like magic, I started to feel some joy again.

In the book, Nouwen wrote about how Christ commanded his followers to be compassionate, “just as your father is compassionate.” In our world, I see an awful lot of Christians who quote Jesus all the time but don’t seem compassionate to me.

He called it the Call To Compassion or the Compassionate Life.

I believe one of the greatest gifts I have received in life was my sudden ability to enter into solidarity with those who suffer – especially the extremely elderly and the battered but not broken refugees.

I sometimes could do it as a reporter, but over time, reporters, like cops, grow hard and cold shells to protect themselves from what they see. Joy fades. That’s one reason I went to book writing. I could do that alone.

When I look at my own curious life and times of my greatest suffering, I found the most comfort came from people who told me they could not take my pain away or solve my problems but instead promised me that they would not leave me alone or abandon me but stay with me as long as I needed them and as they could.

When there is a real trouble, I learned, most people run away.

These past few years – this year especially – call me to the Compassionate Life. It is not noble; it is quite selfish. It is where I go to find joy. And respite.

There is a lot of grief, pain, and disappointment in all of our lives, but what a remarkable thing it is when we don’t have to live our misery and suffering alone.

That is the real gift of compassion.

Compassion is among the most difficult of emotions because it requires us to the place where others are weak, vulnerable, lonely, and broken.

This was not my first or most spontaneous response to suffering. What I wanted most was to do away with pain and suffering by running away from it or finding a quick, even superficial cure.

But most genuine joy came to me when I discovered my ability – unknown to me for almost all of my life – to enter into solidarity with those who suffer.

To do this, I had to contend with judgment, mine, and fear.

Compassion is incompatible with judgment and cannot exist alongside it. Judgment creates distance and distinction – just look at our country today – which some often prevents us from being with anyone who is suffering.

Matthew called him “Jesus the compassionate, and wrote: “He is compassion in the flesh. He pities the pitiful and the helpless and the hurting.” Where has this message – which electrified the world centuries ago – gone?

And why have so many Christians abandoned the idea, and almost literally turned to the dark side?

I am not a Christian or a believer in Jesus, the son of God, but I have learned from him. I learned about compassion first by getting to know the extreme and largely forgotten people in extreme elder care.

I learned this again by getting close to refugee families; people often reduced to ruin and helplessness by the savagery of human beings. Their suffering is overpowering, they never lose their capacity for joy.

At first, I didn’t think I could do it. It was too painful, too real, too close.

But then, I found I could connect with these people just by showing up, by caring. I could ease their burdens, reduce their pain, soften their terror. All I had to do was to be me and be there.

When this happened, I felt a great joy, unlike any other joy I had felt, except when I first saw my daughter open her eyes after birth, or at my wedding to Maria.

It was genuinely true, compassion brings joy, anger, and judgment and fear kill joy. I saw that happening on the news this morning.

Wrath and judgment sunk out all the color and the light, and bring the darkness and the hurt. I had to hold Henri Nouwen’s hand to get back.

I’ve never known a caregiver, as hard as that is to be, who did not speak of feeling joy when they were able to help.

I am very grateful to be able to say that of myself.

These are cold and hard days. I choose the Compassionate Life

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The Mighty Hunter

Mon, 01 Jun 2020 15:23:46 GMT

Bud is a mighty hunter, at least when it comes to chipmunks. He caught one last week and has been sitting by the fence staring at the stone foundations every since.

He is patient and determined. He can be a cuddle-bug at night by the fire, but is tough and unrelenting when it comes to rodents and chipmunks. Boston Terriers were bred to catch rats in Boston more than a century ago.

Do not be fooled by this sweet and soulful face. Bud is a little killing machine.

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On Sale: The Coronavirus Housewife Magnets

Mon, 01 Jun 2020 14:59:58 GMT

Maria’s Coronavirus Housewife Magnets are on sale on her Etsy Page this morning, they cost $7 each plus $1 shipping for one or more magnets.

They were originally created for her ongoing CoronaKimono, her daily record in thread drawings of life during the Pandemic.

Lots of women wrote her to say the lockdowns and school closings were making them into housewives again, so that’s what the magnets say: “The Coronavirus is making women into housewives again.”

Because men still make more money than women, many women have had to curtail their work to homes school or take care of their children.

The magnets, which are 5″ tall (larger than usual) struck a nerve.

You can see and purchase the magnets here.

If you don’t care to use the Etsy page, you can e-mail Maria at maria@fullmoonfiberart.com

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"I Belong To Me,” Maria In Residence

Sun, 31 May 2020 21:26:50 GMT

Maria is entering her second full week as an Artist in Residence, the first-ever at Bedlam Farm.

I very much enjoy watching her expand and explore her creativity. She has been figuring out how to work with collage, one of the first accomplishments of her residence.

This is the first one. It’s called “I Belong To Me.”

She says she is not finished with it yet and is not thinking of selling it, at least now. I am not unbiased when it comes to her work, but she just dazzles me with her talent and courage and drive.

I think this is an amazing work, every time I look at it, I see something new.

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One Man’s Truth: It’s Not Enough To Hate Trump Now

Sun, 31 May 2020 21:19:26 GMT

(Politics changed this weekend, some dramatic new realities to consider on both sides, especially for people who call themselves Democrats or progressives. Hating Trump or replacing him with someone else is not enough any longer if it ever was.)

Between Friday and today, the 2020 presidential campaign changed, and radically. The Democratic Party has taken for granted that their supporters – especially their African American supporters – would support anyone who wasn’t President Trump.

For me, it is not a time to despair over the brutal collision between a Pandemic and rioting all over the country. What a year, and it’s not half over.

It’s a time to pause and wonder about what is coming next, and how we all will to deal with it. This is the story of this moment in our political history, a historic campaign that hasn’t even started yet.

I will be authentic, as I try to be, and point out this is a fascinating time to be an American, let alone someone writing about it. It is painful to look at the news every day; it is also hypnotic.

I’ve argued before that hating President Trump accomplishes nothing. This awful week proves it; the campaign will challenge people who want a more decent and honest and humane America to do some heavy thinking.

Self-serving offerings of the usual moral superiority aren’t going to cut it.

If people of compassion and empathy wish to see a kinder America emerge, then they need to support something more concrete than trashing Donald Trump on Facebook and Twitter.

They need something bolder than texting and standing on street corners calling for peace or persuading ourselves and each other that we are not racist.

For one thing, African-Americans aren’t buying it any longer. For another, I’m not sure it’s even true.

The George Floyd video has challenged me to look more deeply into myself and be honest about what I see when it comes to race. It makes me queasy about my smug assumptions about myself.

The violence and bloodshed over the weekend are heartbreaking.

Protesters and black leaders have said their goal is no longer simply to replace President Trump but to change the bloody and heartbreaking history of race in America.

It has always been unfair in my mind to dump all of this on the police, who are caught in the middle of a dreadful social crisis that is so much larger than them and has existed for 400 years.

It is much easier to throw police officers in jail than to lock up the people who have enabled this system and keep it going, or to hold them accountable.

The President, as is his tendency, is trying to have it all.

He has suggested shooting looters and promised the mostly black protesters outside of the White House that they would encounter “vicious dogs” and power weapons if they tried to bridge the White House gates.

His sleaziness and dishonesty are actually getting to be boring, they are so predictable.

This is yet another example of the President’s broken instincts when it comes to the right thing to say or do to human beings he is sworn to serve and protect in times of trouble.

Either he doesn’t know that Southern sheriffs sicked “vicious” dogs on civil rights demonstrators for years (A), or he knows and doesn’t care (B), or he is (C) tossing some raw meat to his hungry followers, they call it “dog-whistles.”

I’ll take C.

He loves to tip-toe right up to outright bigotry, then dances away and claim ignorance. What me? His credibility is about as big as my bank account.

The President has also called up George Floyd’s family, called them “terrific people,” and tweeted that his MAGA supporters “all love the black people.”

Once again, he’d fled the field and blown yet another opportunity to lead and calm unnerved people. And to be more popular. We don’t need to keep beating this drum. He’s way over his head.

When the reality TV show runs into actual reality – Pandemics, cities burning – he can’t handle it, and he has no support team around him that can. He just never knows what to say, and every time he opens his mouth, he sounds like Elmer Fudd on crazy glue.

Some leaders rise to the moment. He falls every single time.

Like the mayor of Atlanta suggested yesterday, he just needs to stop talking. And I need to grow hair.

Joe Biden and the so-called “progressive” wing of the party has a challenging task.

African-Americans are a critical element of support for the Democratic Party.

They are losing faith and hope in the country their ancestors never sought to live in.

They didn’t turn out in high numbers for Hilary Clinton; many political people believe that cost her the election. More and more, many blacks just don’t think voting will make a difference.

From the despairing African-America perspective, the progressive movement and the Democratic Party have done little for them but talk and mouth cliches and platitudes.

Every white person I know has told me at one point or another that they are not racist. I’ve said it myself.

But there is a staggering disconnect there. We are no longer the best judges of ourselves. Look what a mess we have made.

If people in any dominant or privileged position are not racists, then how come all these black kids are dead for no apparent reason other than that they are terrified of the police, and the police are terrified of them?

How come so many black men are in jail? How come so many have been shot and killed for no reason?

Gail posted this message on my blog the other night in the middle of all this chaos:

“One thing, though, we should never refer to Donald J. Trump as just President Trump — but always and in every reference, all of us from private citizens to print and on-air journalists, need to call him by his real title as Impeached President Donald Trump.”

No, Gail, that will not be my thing, that is not what I need to do. I don’t believe that is what anybody needs to do.

Donald Trump is a duly-elected President; he deserves respect for that title. And what will this do to make one black man safer, or bring George Floyd back to life, or keep one police officer at home with his family rather than in jail for murder?

Another “progressive” called me a racist and a creature of white privilege for suggesting that rural Americans suffer as much or more than African-Americans? Let’s do our part to divide the country too!

Is this really what we need to be talking about? Is this what will bring the country together again?

Is this really what will alter the economic, employment, criminal justice, and gun violence and other issues that have engulfed so many black peoples in America?

Joe Biden has some serious decisions to make. He personifies the Democratic ethos when it comes to race: use black Americans when you need their votes, ignore them the rest of the time.

Even Barack Obama, like so many of his predecessors, did the same thing. He explained lamely that he didn’t want to be seen as the “black” President.

Depriving Trump of his rightful title will not endanger his re-election in any way.

Nor will it improve the lives of black Americans, who are not only outraged over a long and horrifying fate of questionable police shootings of their sons but who are bearing the economic and disproportionate burden of the coronavirus while the country rushes to re-open.

In many cases, theirs are the first jobs to go, and the last to come back.

The virus is killing so many of their mothers, fathers, and grandparents, and the government is telling them the worst is over.

And soon, say the doctors and economists, they will also bear the burden of a wounded economy, black people are among the most economically vulnerable to a recession or depression.

Real estate analysts estimate that millions of African American families will soon be evicted from their apartments and homes.

The question isn’t why people are burning buildings down and looting, but why they didn’t do it sooner and aren’t doing it more?

Captain America Biden is a decent and good-hearted man, but he also typifies the underside of the Captain American idea, America’s dark secret.

Lots of blacks have voted for lots of Democrats, including him.

But that doesn’t seem to have changed anything of substance for young black men and women in America.

To many blacks, he is the very face of a system that enabled racism and suppression for centuries, and that never was designed to serve them in the first place.

Here it is, 2020, coming on two centuries since emancipation, and communities all over the country are still fighting to remove the statues of men who risked their lives and shed and honor to defend slavery.

The country has never acknowledged the horror of slavery, or its devastating effect on black people, we never speak of our enthusiastic promotion of it long after most civilized countries outlawed it.

We have yet to come to terms with it in any meaningful or authentic way.

I can simply not imagine a young white jogger run down in the street and getting butchered by private citizens in their pick-ups, or white, middle-aged men getting kneed in the neck for 10 minutes while begging for help.

I hope I will never destroy another person’s property, but I’m not sure what I would do if that were my daughter or father or brother in that video.

I was a police reporter in New York, Atlantic City, Washington, and Philadelphia, and I respected and befriended many of the police officers I worked with. I found them to be, for the most part, honest, decent, hard-working family men.

They reveled in doing good and risked their lives again and again to help others. I still believe that is true.

When there were issues of brutality relating to incidents I had not seen, I tended to believe their versions of things. I rode around with police officers every night for years and never witnessed an act of brutality, let alone murder, even though I knew they happened.

I do not believe that the simple truth behind all of these shootings is that those police officers on the news got up in the morning and put on their uniforms and set out to murder young black men.

Life is rarely that black-and-white. Yet murder happens, again and again, and again. And it’s police officers doing the killing.

It almost doesn’t matter at this point. When it comes to African-Americans, the criminal justice system does not work for them. Policing has become a tragic and intolerable failure in their communities.

The changes being called for transcend the police, something the corporate media doesn’t like to mention.

The Democratic Party has been running from that issue for years, and so have many of the progressives who are so obsessed with Donald Trump that they have not bothered to understand his rise and popularity.

The sometimes over-the-top hatred of President Trump is a roadblock and a detriment to change. It’s a wall, not a path or solution.

What will unseat him are specific and comprehensible plans to make the country kinder and better.

Things like affordable and available health care, wealth equality, daycare, and more equitable distribution of wealth.

They are all things that people want and that the President opposes.

I worked for excellent newspapers, and I was told again and again that we didn’t write stories about African-Americans and violence, the code used was “no.2’s” or “blues.’ Stories about “no. 2’s,” or “blues” did not get into the papers, the theory being that violence happened to black people all of the time. Thus it was not news.

I did protest those policies, mostly because I lobbied for my stories, not because of racial justice.

“They shoot each other all the time,” one City Editor told me, “it’s just not news.”

I did not recognize then what I realize now, that this policy was part of a vast, historic and still unacknowledged system of oppression that dated to the birth of our country, and did not recognize our slaves and their descendants as equal human beings.

During the Philadelphia riots in 1968, which I covered, a black minister told me that “racism wasn’t an offshoot of the American Revolution, it was the point.”

He also saved my life when rioters tried to burn my car with me inside.

Racism was, in many ways, the foundation of our country. The people who supported slavery wrote our Constitution and built our system of government.

I am not African-American, but I am wary of people telling me they are not racist. Racism bubbles up all around us, from joggers butchered like deer to a terrified woman in Central Park threatening an African-American bird watcher.

I am not going to sit here and tell anybody I am not a racist, how could I possibly know any more? And I’m not into confessionals, I am responsible for my life.

How could I claim purity in the face of so much undeniable and heartbreaking evidence?

I got the shock of a lifetime when I started seeing one video after another showing police officers shooting black men in the back, shooting them 16 times while they lay bleeding on the street, shooting them in backyards, as they clutched their cell phones, or had police put their feet on their necks while they lay suffocating.

This brutality is no longer an argument. It is a truth that challenges our humanity.

I wonder how many police version of events I believed when I should have challenged and investigated them? But I’m not writing out of guilt or self-redemption. I was a good reporter; I did the best I could and knew.

For all that, I am in a minority when I say that there are many signs of progress. The officer involved was fired almost instantly and indicted for third-degree murder three days.

That is very different than the way these kinds of cases have always been handled.

Police chiefs all over the country supported the protesters and denounced the way the police officers treated Mr. Floyd. Progress matters.

Things are different. But I’m not the one who needs convincing.

I am not African-American, and I did not and do not live in fear of the police, I don’t need to practice non-threatening opening of the glove box for my registration, or to make sure to keep my hands on the wheel.

I did not even think of teaching my daughter how to keep from getting shot if she was pulled over, and the very thought that she could be shot and killed when she went out to buy some ice cream stuns me to the core.

But all things are political, especially in an election year in 2020

The political environment changed this weekend, as hundreds of fires still burn all over the country. The political system, already overburned, just got another message, a problematic but shattering reality to deal with.

And there is still the genuine possibility that the Pandemic will return in force sometime this fall or winter. That is terrible news for President Trump. He has backed into yet another awful corner, two dismal leadership failures in a row.

In his usual cowardly Friday night way, he pulled the United States out of the World Health Organization, even as the American Medical Association begged him not to do it in the middle of an ongoing Pandemic, and warned it would cost American lives. Another distraction, another place to hide.

He will be the father of a third Pandemic if it comes. Who holds leaders accountable when they cause people to die?

Biden will now have to give particular thought to his vice-presidential pick. If he has any gumption left in that aging body, he will consider Tracy Abrams from Georgia or someone like her for vice-president.

That would send a compelling message to black and white America that things just might change and scare the wits out of Donald Trump. Criticism from women undoes him every time.

In any case, Mr. Biden has to move past soothing platitudes and persuade people that he has healthy new ideas around for changing the racial paradigm. What is happening now is unacceptable and will tear us farther and farther apart.

The country needs a leader.

As for President Trump, he is showing us yet again that he is a weak leader for a country reeling from an unprecedented Pandemic and a wrenching explosion in racial pain and anger.

Nothing about this makes me any less hopeful about our future.

Once again, we are awakened, challenged to take on difficult but essential tasks. Once again, everyone is paying attention and beginning to see what the stakes are. Four more years of this is a powerful incentive to get people to vote.

As I have mentioned every time I’ve written about politics, this crisis, along with the Pandemic, is far more complex and urgent than Donald Trump’s willingness or ability to deal with it.

He will fall the way demagogues always fall, by his own sword. And over time, we will end up a better, kinder, people and country.

As Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandi proved so convincingly (the odds against them were much greater than the odds against Joe Biden), compassion and empathy and non-violence have shown the most powerful weapon there is for affecting significant social and political change.

Hatred is for losers and the short-sighted. It’s the cheap and easy way.

I can’t promise to live long enough to see my country, which has been so good to me, come together, but as a betting man, I would put some money on it happening.

I bet we will make America kind again, that is something to live for.

The post One Man’s Truth: It’s Not Enough To Hate Trump Now appeared first on Bedlam Farm.

Robin. A Living Time Machine

Sun, 31 May 2020 00:01:11 GMT

I am growing older, but I not aware of it too often.

Once in a while, I look in the mirror and wonder who the man is standing in my bathroom. I really have no sense of changing, apart from my heart or the rest of my body reminding me from time to time.

But every time I see a photograph of my granddaughter Robin, I am startled. She is moving so quickly, growing up so rapidly.

The grandfather thing sometimes puzzles and stymies me, perhaps one reason it is so powerful an experience for so many people is that times move rapidly and we are very much aware of it.

I want to love my own life more than anything else, even a granddaughter.

Robin is going to be four this summer, and today, she borrowed her mother’s straw hat. She doesn’t seem like a little kid anymore, it is startling to watch this from a distance.

I suppose if you see people often, their evolution isn’t so apparent. I haven’t seen Robin face to face in a long time, and since she lives in Brooklyn, it might be longer still.

We have no plans to see one another anytime soon, and we have no idea when that will change.

But this photo gave me pause. I can see the woman Robin is becoming, not just the cute little kid we all have followed here. I guess that means I am older still.

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Dogs Only Know One Word, They Say It All The Time..

Sat, 30 May 2020 22:32:07 GMT

I heard the most wonderful – and I think, true – observation about dogs on the radio the other day. I don’t remember who said it or where, but I thought it was one of the funniest and wisest things I had ever heard about dogs.

The man, I think he was a biologist of some sort, said that dogs understood a number of human words, but they only know or speak one single word themselves.

I was eager to hear what he thought this word was, and when he said what it was, I almost had to pull over to the side of the road, it was so wise and true and funny that I had to clap my hands and smile.

He said the one word that dogs know is “Hey!”

And, he said, they say it all the time, over and over again. When I came home, I watched Fate and Bud and Zinnia closely for awhile.

I could just hear them speaking. When they want a treat, they rush over to me, and all should “Hey!,” when they want to go out, they run to the door and shout “Hey!,” when they are chasing a ball or coming in to eat or chasing each other around the yard, I can now see – even hear – them shouting “Hey!” to one another.

And no doubt, when they see another dog running or walking in the woods, they definitely shout “Hey!,” as in “what are you doing in my woods?”

Hey, I’ve got the ball. Hey, there’s another dog across the street. Hey!, there’s a chipmunk in the woodpile, Hey!, Jon and Maria have come home, and most important of all, Hey!, we want to eat.

Zinnia came rushing out of the muddy swamp this afternoon, she said “Hey!,” look at me, I’m a mess.

It’s the only word they know and the only word they need.

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Next, Solar Power! Coming To Consciousness

Sat, 30 May 2020 22:20:08 GMT

I was slow to focus on climate change and the environment.

I always believed climate change was real – you can’t live on a farm and not see it happening – and I did the simple things I was recycling and planting trees.

But I didn’t really get that I had to go much deeper into my life before I could begin to come to terms with it and make any kind of difference.

A nasty and strident ideologue jarred me awake by writing snarky and self-righteous messages about Mother Earth, and I read Pope Francis’s powerful encyclical on the subject.

The earth is our sister, he wrote, and she is bleeding.

As a regular reader of the Kabbalah, I was touched by God’s passion for protecting Mother Earth (Shekinah too) and by his warnings that he would leave us to our own self-destructive devices if we didn’t preserve and protect the wonderful world he had (allegedly) created for us.

If I were a deeply religious person, I might think that was already happening.

I’m also getting older and maybe my perspective is deepening. I embrace change, I don’t hide from it.

This year, I decided I would live this moral obligation more, and not just talk about it. I am a conservative person in many ways.

I am wary of extremes, I stay away from the left and the right, I like to live and walk in the middle.

So I stopped buying plastic bottles and started drinking out of aluminum and recyclable water bottles. I use them over and again myself.

When my 11-year-old car started breaking down, I took advantage of the Pandemic and bought a small hybrid SUS, which I love very much.

Getting 41 miles to the gallon not only saves money, it can help the planet.

Today, an even bigger step towards environmental ethics and responsibility. Contractors came to set up the platform for our new solar panels, which are coming in just under two weeks.

About 80 percent of our electricity will come from these panels, and most of the year, I’ll get no electric bill at all.

If the panels draw more power than we need, as they usually do, they will automatically be shared with my neighbors, whose electric bills will go down.

I like this new way of thinking. I am giving a lot more thought to what I buy, what I eat, what everything I buy is made of, how it is packaged.

I have a long way to go, and I will get there perhaps more slowly and thoughtfully than some would wish me to do.

Maria is totally supportive of this move, she has already gone farther than I have.

Together, we will do a lot more. I’m proud and excited to have this panel, it is right out there in the pasture for everyone to see.

Maybe it will spawn some other solar panels. Thanks for sharing this with me, and for your encouragement.

The post Next, Solar Power! Coming To Consciousness appeared first on Bedlam Farm.

Solar Foundation Takes Shape

Sat, 30 May 2020 14:13:04 GMT

The solar foundation is taking shape, John and his crew are drilling support poles into the South Pasture. I think they’ll be here much of the day. In a week or two, crews will come to install our solar panels.

The electric company says we will probably have no electric bills to pay until October. The house will draw energy from the panels, but the electric grid will still provide backup it’s rainy or too cloudy and the solar energy isn’t enough.

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Solar Power. Construction Begins

Sat, 30 May 2020 12:56:22 GMT

When I first raised the idea of going solar to Maria, we talked about and we both thought it a bad idea, especially now. Our bank account is lean and hungry, there is a Pandemic out there, and the economy is bleeding.

Then a solar salesman gave me the details.

We were pleasantly surprised – even shocked – by the deal. Between reduced electric costs – down 100 percent some months – and a small loan from a credit union, we didn’t need to put any money down.

More than $10,000 in federal and state tax credits made it even easier than we thought. It’s a good time for solar if you are interested.

And the solar will pay for itself every month of the year. Beyond that, I can continue my (our) deepening commitment to do something for the earth besides just walk on it.

So the first phase is today, John showed up to plant poles and pipes for the foundation, the panels are coming in a couple of weeks. It’s a little scary for me, but it also feels hopeful.

It’s odd, but the Pandemic does have it’s opportunities, as creepy as that is to say. I am leasing a new Toyota Rav 4 (my car started falling apart, it was eleven years old) for $300 a month, and it gets 41 miles to the gallon.

The deal was so favorable to the buyer that I was also able to purchase a hybrid automobile, and my gasoline costs are about 60 percent lower than before.

It’s strange, but both of these steps will save money and help the planet. I think I am just beginning to learn about life.

I am learning that it is possible to spend money but also save money in the process if you pay attention and bide your time. Thanks for coming along on this journey with me.

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Flo Loves My New Tiger Socks

Sat, 30 May 2020 12:36:13 GMT

The minute Flo saw my new tiger socks, she came right over to rub her chin against my shoes. Flo is a little tiger herself, it’s a natural match.

It is a gorgeous day at Bedlam Farm, an exciting day. I am guilty to think of our farm on a day when there is so much anger and hurt and ugliness in the country.

The first crews arrived today to dig the foundation for our solar panels, which are coming on June 10. When the Pandemic struck, we thought of canceling the solar plan.

We decided to be hopeful and move ahead, and we don’t regret it. The idea is to keep grounded, hopeful, and forward-looking. I’m mindful of all the pain around me, but I won’t let it consume my life.

My socks get me smiling in the morning, and my new blue glasses are on the way. Color on top, color on the bottom, the same dull guy in the middle.

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Graduation Caps For Bishop Maginn Seniors

Sat, 30 May 2020 01:23:53 GMT

I was very happy to get the 37 Bishop Maginn graduation caps for seniors that I ordered a few weeks ago. They look great, “Bishop Maginn Class of 2020,” and “Go Griffins,” the school’s team name.

Tomorrow, I’ll ship them off to Sue Silverstein, whose dining room is filling up with gift bag momentoes – key chains, lapel pins, baby candy jars, customized pens – for the graduates.

They will have a ceremony in mid to late summer, it will be in the Albany Cathedral. These kids have suffered greatly this year, and in many ways. They lost their graduation year, but the ceremony will give them a chance to get some of that back.

They will also have some tokens of their Bishop Maginn experience to keep or wear. They love the school very much, they will be happy to honor it in any way.

Thanks so much for your support, I am very proud to be helping to give them the graduation they deserve in an American high school! It really makes muy heart sing and I hope it lifts yours.

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One Man’s Truth: Into The Racial Whirlwind

Sat, 30 May 2020 01:14:55 GMT

(I’ve decided to name my political columns “One Man’s Truth,” a nod to my all-time favorite columnist, E.B. White, who also wrote from a farm. We all have our truth, and yours is as good as mine, but right now, mine is having a moment. I want to try to capture what is essential and offer some perspective that is calm and hopefully grounding. My last column was called Make America Kind Again.)

The important political news this week is heartbreaking and comes from Minneapolis, a bastion of white progressivism trapped in yet another horrible racial tragedy.

The awful death of George Floyd brings America’s tragic and long-standing struggle with race to the forefront of a presidential campaign that was until recently all about infections, money, and masks.

Next to the still-unfolding Pandemic and the still murky economic reckoning to come, the explosion in Minnesota will change the tone and tenor of the campaign and snap us all out of our Pandemic haze.

The coronavirus and its cast of characters – Dr. Fauci, Andrew Cuomo – is receding. Maybe it will return; perhaps it won’t.

Trump won the great battle to Re-Open America. People are sick of being locked down, and as the virus moves to attack mostly poor and older adults, they are not willing to sacrifice much more to stop it.

But rather than focus on this emerging victory, Trump has once again mired himself in so many divisive and controversial and peripheral issues that his prospects suddenly look worse than ever. No one ever thought being shameless was such a potent political strategy.

Once again, he chose to blow his slow gain in popularity by stupidly threatening to kill off Twitter, his lifeline to the “Left Behind,” and by making an offensive and racially charged threat to shoot looters, threatens to make the rioting even more violent than it is.

When the looting starts, the shooting begins. It’s a whole new way to be president. I will be honest about it, I will miss him when he is gone.

Out in the Rose Garden, Trump discovered a few minutes of humility and took another whack at empathy, he did his daily rain dance, his rope-a-dope. Well, he didn’t know where the quote came from or what it implied, he just heard it somewhere.

Floyd’s death was inexcusable, unforgivable, an awful thing. The looters were dishonoring the memory of a great man. If he hadn’t died in that awful way, you got the feeling Trump would have asked him to the White House for dinner.

Trump seems to be toying with this empathy thing, and ever game, he gave it a shot – he called Floyd’s family, he said, they are “terrific people.” But he just can’t do it. He’s about as empathetic as a window mannequin in a department store window.

But he couldn’t mask the gaffe, it was right up there with the bleach.

Trump just made all of black America into an army on the march for Joe Biden. Biden called George’s family too.

The killing of George Floyd and the shocking video and the subsequent riots created a significant opportunity for the two candidates to begin to let rhetoric- weary citizens get to know them.

If Biden is just starting to present himself to voters, Trump is wearing them out. He is running out of time to change his public persona, the election will be here in a blink.

Once again, Trump blew an opportunity to rise above himself and offer concern and healing. Once again, he declined the chance to be positive and expand his following and managed to be crude and divisive at the most sensitive time. His comments were dangerous and disturbing, especially in the middle of another tragedy.

Biden was all over this story, and in a smart way. He is coming out of his chrysalis.

He presented himself as the healer and conciliator, the soother, and the warrior for social justice.

He seemed genuinely moved by the shooting.

Maybe he learned this from Barack Obama; nobody did grieving and empathy better.

Biden is beginning to make the very charged argument that Trump is killing people – with his irresponsible medical advice, his handling of the Pandemic, his jeering at masks, his eagerness to shoot looters, and his winks at white supremacists and vigilantes.

There is also his insistence on cramming tens of thousands of people into a stadium in North Carolina in the midst of a pandemic. He wants a big crowd, his aides say, and it it kills some of them to be there, well, at least they didn’t die as sissies.

Lots of Trump’s shocking lurches into offense and outrage are smart; the one about Minneapolis is not. There are only so many angry old white men in America; they are very much the past, not the future, or even the present.

Trump is desperate to keep African Americans and other minorities from voting too quickly, as in mail ballots.

So why enrage them by threatening to kill their children? They will find a way to vote.

People’s hearts went out to Floyd and his family, not to Target. That video was a gut punch, the kind that sticks. Issues relating to African-Americans and the police are not going away.

They require the most sensitive handling. Our president is turning out to be as sensitive as a buffalo in a tea parlor.

On TV, Biden’s empathy was genuine; it seems to be natural to him. Still, he also seemed to grasp the political opportunity: an enraged and aroused Africa American electorate has only one place to go in this election year. It ain’t to the Republican Party.

Trump’s threat to send troops into Minneapolis to shoot young African-Americans (he was channeling a notoriously racist Miami Police Chief from decades ago), some of whom were looting stores, cannot possibly help him.

The people who want to shoot looters already love Trump. The middle of the road fence-sitters and the elderly and young people and moderates and women in the suburbs are moving steadily away from him. They seem to want a kinder America again.

You might think he would want to soften his act just a little bit right now. But it only gets uglier and angrier by the day. He was nasty at the podium, nasty in the Rose Garden, nasty on Twitter.

Nothing wears people down more than nasty, day in and day out. Ronald Reagan understood that, when a reporter asked him an ugly question, he would smile and wave and keep walking. Nobody even heard the question.

People never saw him frown. No matter what was happening, it was always morning in America.

By and large, people aren’t looking to hang out every day for years with a nasty old man.

This evil ranting will not help; most people would like to have their normal lives back – on many levels.

Trump does not know how to be normal. He is Lord Chaos, mired in the battles of a different time. Put Obama in jail, investigate Biden, fire the Inspector Generals.

But 100,000 people have died from the coronavirus. Well, Joe Scarborough is a murderer and I need to play some golf. Without a mask. Take that, you wussies of the radical left, real men don’t wear masks or show any kind of weakness.

Captain America, on the other hand, is the prince of normal. He breathes it. He wears a mask. He even remembers to talk about the veterans on Memorial Day.

So there it is, the scene is set for the election, everybody with an obvious choice to make, few gray or blurry lines. This is clearly what Trump thinks people want.

I think it’s just the opposite of what he thinks.

Trump has provoked a great political awakening in America, especially among women and the young and minorities and suburbanites, and perhaps, even the elderly.

For the first time in years, Democrats hate an opponent more than they hate each other. That is historic in itself, and Donald Trump did it.

That’s why Biden is threatening Trump is almost every state in the country without making a single campaign appearance for months.

More and more, I’m starting to think that all Biden has to do nothing (or maybe he needs to dance with Stacy Abrams, with whom he appeared at a church service in Selma, Alabama in April. That would be a pretty sensational choice right about now.)

Amid the whirlwind, an eerie calm.

A President who campaigns like a tornado that never stops knocking things down, and a challenger who campaigns like Mr. Rogers sitting in his sweater, unfailingly friendly, calm, making sure all the kids feel safe and loved.

The whole western world is praying for the man in the sweater, listening quietly in the basement to his record player.

I wish Biden were younger and more exciting, but I have to confess he is growing on me. He seems comfortable with himself, unlike his opponent. He’s not afraid to make a mistake or to take a hit in silence.

I have little sympathy for Twitter, which has poked the dragon big-time, and which dug itself one of the deepest holes in the history of media. Like the monster told Dr. Frankenstein, you made me, you are responsible for me.

In my dreams, Twitter and Facebook eat Google and then one another. They are all much too big, much too powerful, much too out of control.

Aside from looking things up online, the world would probably be a better place.

I would not want to be Twitter trying to explain why Trump’s mad rantings online are now suddenly unacceptable.

How do you suddenly care about truth and decency when you have undermined and diminished both for years?

Every day, just before the evening news, Trump drops another bomb, and the media rushes to bite. Obama, a criminal, so is Joe Biden and his son, worse than Hilary. Lock them up.

I think of many of my readers as suffering through their own cultural London, so many bombs raining down on them it is both numbing and frightening. But this isn’t the apocalypse; it just feels like it sometimes.

He and Joe Biden share a remarkable trait – shit just slides right off of them. Trump’s followers will always seem him as a brave and unappreciated hero and victim, voters will never buy Biden as a crook who ought to get locked up.

Biden is beginning to respond to Trump daily now, you may have noticed – he criticized him sharply for his provocative tweets about Minneapolis – and the media, ever eager for a wrestling match, is beginning to pay a lot of attention to him.

Biden also has the gift of being woefully underestimated, often seen as a doddering old man who can’t utter a single comprehensible sentence. When he called Trump a “fool’ on Memorial Day for not wearing a mask, cheers went up all across the blogosphere, he suddenly was cheered like he was JFK.

The Democratic Party finally has a national leader to counter him every day. Nancy Pelosi looks very tired, holding down that fort by herself. Don’t underestimate old folks, they can be wily and stubborn.

The media love nothing more than a fight; now, they have their sporting event. Trump can be challenged directly, every day, by an opponent with some microphones around him.

The enemy for Trump is the same – hubris.

Since he believes he is smarter than everyone else and listens to no one, he has begun to make the same mistake again and again – from those rambling and demented briefings at the White House to those angry and disjointed briefings in the Rose Garden, to his increasingly over-the-top tweets.

Day after day, he closes doors, slams them in voter’s faces; he keeps chipping away at his dwindling chances to gain support.

As the country enters summer, people are paying more and more attention to the campaign. What they are getting is the 2016 campaign.

But Biden is a lot more popular than Hilary Clinton and has a much more unified party behind him. And let’s be honest, he seems a lot nicer than Hilary.

Trump feels out of control to me, he’s lost his joyously erratic mojo.

Right now, Biden is reading the mood of the country much more skillfully than President Trump, who seems to have only one speed: red hot crazy, offensive and divisive.

I’m not sure that even his most rabid followers can stand four more years of this.

This is a campaign for the brave and the grounded, but following it will be like living right underneath an elevated subway line.

I’m glad my columns have a name.

The post One Man’s Truth: Into The Racial Whirlwind appeared first on Bedlam Farm.

Leadership And Dogs

Fri, 29 May 2020 15:59:30 GMT

Someone referred me to a Facebook page where a dog trainer was advising a woman with an aggressive and dominant puppy to piss in the dog’s food to curb his aggression.

It might sound extreme, he said, but it’s just a dog, it’s what they understand.

Even by the shallow standards of social media, this was a first for me. God bless vets, I thought. I’ve never known a dog who would understand that.

If the dog won’t eat the food, he added, just let him go hungry, he said, he will eventually give in.

In so doing, he would become more submissive. This, of course, is why I get snippy about social media vets who dispense lots of advice, but little wisdom. All morning, I thought of those poor dogs trying to eat urine-soaked food. Maybe the trainer should try it, so he can be less aggressive to dogs.

I get my advice from vets, they went to school for six years, owe tons of loan money, and invariably love animals – why else would you do it?

The peeing advice just seemed plain stupid to me, as well as cruel. To treat a dog like that is to surrender your authority, not establish it, and make the dog even more fearful, confused, and defensive.

That is the failure to train, not training.

Training is, at heart, a spiritual experience, not only about obedience or domination.

It is about establishing a healthy and clear and loving communication with a dog. Training is the language you use to talk to the dog and help him, or her understand how to live in an alien world.

Training is how our world makes sense to the dog, and gives him or her away to navigate it. I always remember that a good dog is a dog that doesn’t behave like a dog, and a bad dog is a dog that does behave like a dog. It isn’t easy for them.

I see my role as a dog owner as being about leadership and stewardship; I am the leader of the pack, not the boss of the dog, or the toughest dog. There’s a big difference.

There is a substantial mental proponent to asserting authority over a dog.

First, you have to mean it and project conviction and authority. That’s when I visualize, I picture what it is I want to happen.

Dogs are master readers of human emotions; if you think of your dog as abused and piteous and too fragile to be made to behave, you are doomed from the start.

If you think you can frighten or bully the dog into behaving (or piss your way to dominance), you have also set yourself up to fail.

I establish my leadership in many ways without pissing on their kibble.

Food is essential to dogs; it is the pathway to talking with them.

Before I put the food bowl down, I ask my dogs to sit and stay and wait. I do not ever let them rush out of the door ahead of me. I ask them to sit and stay until I release them with the command “okay” or “let’s go.”

One command is better, but I use two or three. They obey them all.

In general, I assert leadership by asking for something before the dogs get anything – a ride, a walk, a treat. My dogs get nothing for free; they are rewarded for everything they do that I ask them to do (I use small and healthy treats for reinforcement.)

Half the time, I don’t offer treats, I mix it up to keep them focused. Gifts become less frequent as the dogs mature.

I do not allow rough playing or barking or ball chasing in the house.

Dogs exist in part to please us, they will become the dogs we need if we let them.

If any of my dogs get excited, I toss a marrow bone into the crate and let them cool down. They love to go in their crates; there is always something good waiting for them.

But I need for my office and house to be peaceful, it is where I work.

Crates are an essential training tool, especially for excitable or aroused dogs; they are another way of asserting gentle and indirect – but enforced – authority. I am serious about commands.

I never give a command I can’t enforce, and when I give it, I don’t quit until the dog does it.

Commands have to mean something, or the dog will become what I call a “multiple choice dog,” they choose which commands they want to obey. It’s hard to go back and change that.

I use treats the way seal trainers do in aquariums – the constant promise of reward until the behavior becomes so rote treats become less necessary or not necessary at all.

I always try to give my dogs a chance to succeed, not fail, and although I frequently lose my temper and shout, I am mostly gentle and consistent.

My dogs know I love them and won’t hurt them, they don’t pay much attention to my outbursts, as when they eat donkey or sheep droppings.

Like Maria, they are not unduly moved by my moods.

But I need to be self-aware. Before any commands, I stop and think. Am I calm? Clear? Patient? Training out not to be tense or angry. I don’t need to tell the dog I am the boss, like any good leader, I just need to be clear and consistent.

If I’m in a bad mood, I don’t train my dogs.

Dogs hate confusion and uncertainty; they are renowned creatures of habit, they don’t want any trouble, they just want to eat, sleep, run, sniff, and know what is expected of them. They are creatures of habit, lovers of tradition. They will happily do the same thing at the same time every day of their lives, providing they get what they need – food, exercise, work, and love.

Puppies need to play; it is a huge part of their learning and socialization experience. Dog playgroups can be very helpful for that. Adult dogs are usually practicing hunting and killing when they play. I throw balls and such once or twice a day and always outside.

I avoid dog playgroups. It’s a good way for dogs to get aroused, sick, or bitten, and an excellent opportunity to meet neurotic and over-protective pet owners.

Sorry. I know there are excellent playgroups. I just don’t like them or see the need for them, especially in the country. The ones I’ve seen in New York City tend to horrify me.

Since my dogs don’t eat or play or go outside without permission and are asked to sit, lie down, stay or wait five or six times a day, they come to see me as their leader. I am also the source of good things – food, rides, walks, treats.

I usually walk Zinnia and/or Fate in the woods once a day. That tires them out and gives them a chance to smell interesting things and eat revolting things and throw them up later.

We have lots of fun together, I am always overjoyed to see them, and they are delighted to see me.

When a dog is trained, he or she is calm and safe and proper training is perhaps the best way to bond with your dog, and for the two of you to understand and trust one another.

Once a year or so, when the dogs get crazy or loud, I do what I call “the bear,” I road and stand over them and act like a big bear. Their eyes go wide, and they look at each other. But I get the feeling I have established my authority.

This is what I do when a dog blows me off or ignores my command. Nothing, for several minutes. Then I try again.

If I am distracted or pressured, or very busy, I yell. That works do. But it should be rare. My dogs know me well enough to know I will never hurt them. Puppies sometimes are not that secure. Trust comes before training.

Stewardship is a different thing than leadership. The dog benefits from it but doesn’t need to be trained for it.

I am responsible for the dogs and their well being.

My job is to see that they are fed, loved, sheltered, and healthy, never in unnecessary pain. I am always their advocate; it is my job to see that their lives are not prolonged out of my selfishness or self-interest.

I see my life with my dogs as a contract.

I will take good care of them and show them how to live safely in the world and peacefully with us. My dogs have never chewed anything other than their toys, quickly become housebroken, are quiet in the house, and my office.

I don’t believe in unconditional love.

My love for dogs is not a given; it isn’t automatic. I have to earn their love; they need to earn mine. They have the right to be loved, fed, trained, exercised, and sheltered. To go to the vet when they are sick, and to eat healthy food recommended by my vet.

In return, I ask that they respect my time, my work, and our home. I ask that they do what I ask them to do, and I insist that they never harm a human or another dog. Those are conditions; my love is not unconditional.

A dog that harms other dogs or people cannot be my dog. When my very beloved border collie Orson bit three people in one day, one of them a child on the neck, my love turned to responsibility.

He could not function safely in the world. A platoon of doctors and me failed.

Dogs need time and space to be dogs.

They can be crazy and playful outside, but our house is a quiet working space, and mostly, they respect that. When they don’t, they get time in their crates to meditate and settle.

They appreciate their crates and often go into them to rest. Dogs are den animals; they love small and enclosed spaces.

People who think crates are cruel are depriving themselves and their dogs of a great way to settle, feel safe, and control training. Dogs in crates to not wreck property, get in fights, grab food off of counters.

If you think your dog is a small and vulnerable child, you will never have or know the pleasures of a well-trained animal, one with whom you can live in love and harmony.

So that’s my idea of leadership. Everyone does it differently. There is more than one way to do it. Every human is different; every dog is different; every environment is different; every litter experience is different; every house is different.

Unfortunately, there are so many inbred and poorly bred dogs circulating now, almost ever dog is a crapshoot. It is so important to choose carefully and not let anyone else tell you how to get a dog.

That is one reason I went to such lengths to find an exceptionally ethical and diligent breeder for Zinnia. Her excellent breeding shines through every day.

And I lucked out with Bud, a rescue dog from Arkansas, a loving and feisty character.

But I never tell anyone else how to get a dog, or that there is only one way to get a dog. What a useless excuse for advice. I write this piece because lunatics – like the one who pees in dog food – run amok online.

I insist on being my guru, I don’t need $30 books from Cesar Milan or want them.

I wish the same for you.

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Flo At The Bathroom Winow

Fri, 29 May 2020 13:52:05 GMT

When I step out of the shower in the morning, there is usually a cat in the window, watching me and keeping me company.

Flo is the cat who broke through my indifference to cats, she simply seduced me, patiently and persistently, for two years before I gave in.

Over the years, Flo and I have deepened our relationship.

When the wind blows the curtain open, I see she is keeping an eye on me, keeping me company, her mailbox with a pillow – her favorite resting spot – is just outside the bathroom window.

When I went outside a few minutes later, I found the remains of a chipmunk, most of which she had eaten. I love the fine line cats maintain between ferocity and affection.

Flo keeps an eye on me.

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Will Everything Change? I Think Not…

Fri, 29 May 2020 02:21:49 GMT

If you learn anything as a reporter, it’s to be wary of apocalyptic predictions.

I think journalists are pretty good at reporting what’s happening now, but they tend to lose their heads and perspective when it comes to preparing us for the future.

You might have noticed, as I have, we are prepared for very few of the really big things that happen to us, and that when there is trouble, there is a nation of academics, book writers, pundits, scientists and various “experts” lying in wait to get on TV and predict the end of something – like life as we know it.

In just the past few days, I’ve seen a score of interviews, articles, think tank gnomes predicting unimaginable change at every stage and level of life, even as the past few weeks have reminded us that the future always surprises us, it has never yet happened as we were told it would happen.

As a reporter, I learned that apocalyptic and alarming predictions and breathless warnings bring good ratings, good profits, much panic, book sales, and hand-wringing.

It seems to be human nature to anticipate the worst. Nobody would bother to watch TV if they said everything was fine.

Most of the time, nobody pays any attention to these breathless prophets and gurus. When there is a great tragedy, they come rushing out of the darkness like bats awakened in caves.

Some of them make good sense, but you may notice that the best scientists are very careful not to tell us they know the future.

Nobody predicted Mr. Trump would be president, many people predicted at least two million Americans could die at the hands of Pandemic. Governor Andrew Cuomo has said a hundred times that nobody predicted what would happen accurately because nobody knew what would happen.

Remember all the hysteria about China? New Yorkers got the virus from Europeans, says the governors. Nobody knew, nobody could have known.

We were all walking in the dark.

I read just yesterday that most colleges would go out of business, restaurants as we know them would vanish, cities would empty out, nobody would go to work in offices again, movie theaters would close, Broadway and all theater would disappear, cities would be abandoned in droves and go bankrupt, we’d never see our doctors again, schools would go virtual, and we would be wearing masks for the rest of our lives.

I don’t believe most of those things will happen, at least not for forever.

The coronavirus was serious enough, it doesn’t need to be dramatized and made into a Dystopian nightmare. Sometime within the next year or so, somebody will produce and market a vaccine, and while a lot of things will change, a lot of things will stay the same.

Once people are no longer frightened of getting sick, they will quickly return to normal life.

In fact, much of life will return to normal. We will love the things we have always loved, and do the things we have always done. With some important new twists.

What makes more sense to me is that the Pandemic will accelerate a lot of changes in business and retailing and health care that were already in great flux.

Young people will want to go to college and be with other young people away from their parents so they can have sex, have fun, and prepare for the adult world. Colleges will still be ready to take their money.

Does anybody think all those gorgeous dorms at Yale and Harvard and thousand other schools will just be torn down and abandoned because mostly old people and poor people are sick? This is America.

Yes, malls are in trouble, they have been in trouble for years. And marketers know that demise of big, brick-and-mortar department stores has been coming for years and will pave the way for countless new, creative, and idiosyncratic businesses we haven’t even dreamed of.

They had decades to change, few of them did.

Online shopping is the future for many products and has been for some years. The Pandemic has sped that along, for sure Amazon, Target, Google, Apple, and Walmart can’t count the money fast enough. Amazon is hiring 250,000 new workers.

The Pandemic has been good to them.

People will want to go out to eat because take-out and always eating and cooking at home is boring. Most people will still want to go to offices to know their bosses and co-workers and get out of their homes and into the world, meet clients and associates, see different things.

Kids will go back to school because they will want to, and more importantly because their parents will insist on it. So will the teachers’ unions and desperate mothers, who have been pressed back into double duty as workers and housewives.

For all the chatter about the virtual classroom, I haven’t heard a word about who will be taking care of all of those kids while they are at home? Nobody will, they will be back in school, as they have been for centuries. A teacher/friend told me that one benefit will be that sick children can still go on Zoom and get their lessons.

“But otherwise,” she said, “it will be pretty much the same once a vaccine comes.”

Video conferencing makes sense for some doctors in some situations. But not in all situations. Seeing people in person is also considered essential for practicing good and intuitive medicine.

Nobody wants to live their lives in a room looking at iPhone photos or Zoom screams. You can’t heal wounds or do surgery or tell brutal truths on cellphones.

Humans have never wanted to live in that way.

Even the happiest couples I know would go bonkers at the thought of never leaving their homes spouses seven days a week. I would and I love my wife dearly.

Most suburbs and heartland towns are just not as interesting as cities, don’t offer much to do, have little good health care or shopping, that’s why people fled them in the first place.

There is perhaps some truth to all of these hyper-ventilated predictions.

But perspective is critical in situations like this, and media is a double-edged sword. It will inform you and drive you mad at the same time. Politicians are generally useless when it comes to the future. It is not something (unlike fund-raising) that they need to know.

I’d remember this:

Nobody ever got on TV predicting that everything will be the same.

No cable news channel ever made money by denying the imminent collapse of our democracy or of Western Civilization.

No politician ever gained votes by saying nothing needed to be done urgently.

Our culture is Dystopian by nature and culture, it is not known for being calm, reassuring, or even remotely accurate.

Not a single national journalist predicted the rise of Donald Trump. And here they all are four years later, unabashed or humbled, and assuring us every single thing in our lives will change.

I’ll be honest. I have no idea what the future will be like, I would bet a lot on the notion that our lives will change a lot less than we are being told it will change.

My own experiences tell me this – that everything will change is not true, or even remotely true. The fact that it is perhaps true to some degree true in some instances is not especially dramatic or transformative. Dystopia makes for better novels and movies than predictions.

If you live in rural America right now, or in many cities, you just learned once again to be careful of predictions. Experts sometimes have to spout worst-case scenarios just to get people’s attention away from their cellphones and Facebook scribblings.

They probably saved a lot of lives that way, by warning of the worst and preparing for it. I don’t begrudge them that. But enough is enough. The future will take care of itself, it doesn’t need us to try and foresee it at the moment..

I believe the governors did the right thing by shutting us down, they had no real idea what was happening either. But it’s worth remembering that almost nothing that happened as a result of the coronavirus was what we were told was going to happen.

I see no reason why the future will be much different. In a year or two, I believe me and my wife and daughter and granddaughter will be living in and looking at a world that will be quite recognizable to us.

I read in the Kabbalah recently that God told one of the angels that when he finally gets sick and tired of humans and decides to bring life on the earth to an and, there will be no wise men around to predict it.

Nobody, he said, will see it coming.

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A Lonely Petunia And Faith

Fri, 29 May 2020 01:14:32 GMT

Two weeks ago, I asked our mason to come and repair the back porch steps, he replaced some crumbling concrete. I asked him to embed my faith stone into the concrete, hopefully as a gift for future generations.

Yesterday, a petunia was bumped out of a hanging flower arrangement and fell to the concrete floor.

I moved it over and put it next to the faith stone, I thought it would make a nice still life photograph. It was posed, the flower didn’t fall right on the stone.

But somehow, I thought the two went together.

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