Supporting our troops

I stopped writing on this blog for awhile because my sense of outrage had become dulled. This bit of news just sharpened it:

Imagine you’re on your third posting to Iraq, patrolling the dangerous streets, probably suffering from post traumatic stress syndrome, and you’re dealing with another all-too-common American middle-class problem. While you’ve been risking your life to make the Middle East safe for the oil companies, back home in Iowa the bank is preparing to foreclose on your house and throw your family onto the streets. Bloomberg News—not exactly a left-wing sort of outfit—reports today that foreclosures around military bases in the U.S. are four times higher than the national average.

In other news, Carly Fiorina, McCain’s financial adviser, is calling for more tax cuts for the wealthy to get the economy back on track.

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The People’s Republic of Ann Arbor

We boarded the train (yes, train) in Carbondale on a sunny Friday morning, headed for Chicago. There we’d lay over for five hours, awaiting our connecting train to Ann Arbor. The Chicago part of our journey was interesting, but it’s the Ann Arbor part that matters. Late at night, we pulled into “A2,” tired and questioning whether we’d ever take a train again.

We had two reasons to visit Ann Arbor. Our friends Gail and George moved there last year after a valiant effort as urban pioneers trying to bring Detroit back to life. It was a bigger challenge than they realized, so they decided to move to a gentle, nurturing city where life would be less difficult and more rewarding. The other reason is that my boss, Nancy D., had just moved there also, and a visit offered me an opportunity to work face to face with her for at least a day. In this age of telecommuting, a face to face session with your boss can be all too rare.

I expected to like it, but I wasn’t prepared to be as charmed as I was by Ann Arbor.

There are certain cities where liberal values prevail. The most prominent are places like Boston and San Francisco, but there’s a second tier that in some ways offers more hope. In the Midwest, where I’m from, those cities are places like Bloomington, Indiana, Madison, Wisconsin, and Ann Arbor, Michigan. They’re small enough that the liberal agenda completely takes over and changes their fabric.

What do you find in a liberal-agenda city like Ann Arbor? First off, a thriving inner city. A bustling downtown chock full of restaurants and retail stores, coffee shops, hot-dog stands, libraries and post offices, galleries and bars. Public schools that people support and that work. Public transportation, parks and libraries and other amenities for the people. Efforts to conserve energy like solar panels and bio-diesel fuel for buses.

Ann Arbor has all of these and more. It is clear this place didn’t just come to life last year, but has been nurtured and supported for decades. It’s what happens when people treat civic life as important, and don’t retreat into gated communities to keep the riff-raff at bay.

As the national economy heads into uncharted and frightening territory, the Ann Arbor city council is preparing to make it easier for residents to put food on the table. They’re working on an ordinance to allow city-dwellers to raise poultry in their backyards. To that I say “cock-a-doodle-doo!”

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The winter that just won’t go away

I’m the first to admit it: I suffer from SAD—seasonal affective disorder. No matter how I try to psych myself up for it, winter just pisses me off. The years I lived in California didn’t help much: I got used to things such as the crocuses blooming right after New Year’s Day. Now that I’m back in the Midwest, I find myself thinking, “there are places where they don’t put up with this shit.”

Winter has dragged on here in Southernmost Illinois this year. The weather reports say tomorrow is going to be 50 degrees, and the next morning you wake up to gray skies, more snow, maybe another ice storm, a drizzly rain, and the ground stays white. White with tired old snow, crusty, marred by yellow spots where the dogs have pissed, fallen branches—a truly dismal sight.

But I do take comfort in this. Maybe global warming isn’t as bad as we thought. There are those who say this means it’ll be OK.

I hope so.

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Forgetting to be green

We’ve stopped buying water in plastic bottles, even though our tap water is not exactly of the highest quality. Still, when we filter it in the Brita pitcher, some of the Mississippi mud taste goes away. (It was Mark Twain who described the water in this region quite well: “It’s too thick to drink, and too thin to plow.”)

We thought we were being green by saving up the endless stream of plastic bags from the grocery store in a nifty IKEA plastic bag holder, and bringing them back to the store from time to time, placing them into the Trex collection box, where they’ll be made into vinyl decking planks. But the whole notion of their manufacturing source—petroleum—made me want to stop using them entirely.

So, we acquired a number of canvas bags for shopping. Now it’s just a matter of getting into the habit of remembering to bring them to the store. That’s a several step process: placing them by the front door after emptying the groceries, taking them out to the car so they’ll be there when I arrive at the store, and remembering to bring them in with me when I go shopping.

I’m starting to get into these habits after many years of walking into stores bagless, but it’s not easy to do. More than once I get into the store, pull out the shopping cart, and realize I don’t have my canvas bags with me. So I go back to the car and get them—that is if I’ve remembered to put them in the car in the first place.

If this seems like a stupid post, I’m writing it kind of like when one ties a string around their finger to remember something. It may activate a few brain cells and help me make this a habit.

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What you don’t want, throw out

I’m such a sappy-hearted Midwesterner that most weekends I listen to A Prairie Home Companion twice: once on Saturday night, and again late Sunday morning. Garrison Keillor’s voice has a calming effect on my nerves, though I hate his singing.

His writing is also wonderful because it conjures up rich images that link me to my own past. When he writes about his uncles, taciturn and with very little to say at the family reunions, he could be writing about my now-long-gone uncles too. In his latest column, “The Old Scout,” he riffs on cleaning house, and he ties it to our upcoming election. The last paragraph resonates:

I think of when I was in college and owned about three cardboard boxes of stuff and a corduroy sportcoat and six pairs of jeans and a Webster's Third Unabridged and an Underwood typewriter. I can't be that guy again, but sometimes when life is too much, you want to walk out the front door and leave it all behind and start over. That's how I feel about this election. The White House is a vacuum. The man is a mistake on two legs, a national wrong turn. Stop the car and turn around.

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on the fence

I hoped it wouldn’t come to this: a moment for Democrats to seize, paralyzed by a 50/50 split in sympathies. The vitriol spewed by both the Obama and Hillary camps has surprised and saddened me.

I understand and support womens’ longing for a female president. Feminine values are sorely needed in the way we shape this world. Maybe we’d have less war, and more caring at home—though forgive me if I’m stereotyping women with that statement. Yet someone’s gender cannot be the defining reason they should be president.

Why does Hillary get to be a feminist champion? Her 35-year claim on experience was mostly played out in her role as someone’s wife—an enabling wife for that matter. I am a man, and I am a feminist. This does not fit my understanding of feminism.

I proudly support our Illinois senator. He opposed the Iraq War from the beginning, when doing so was unpopular. He does not take money from PACs. He inspires. And 43% of the electorate has not gone on record that they would never vote for him. That part of the population does not oppose Hillary because she’s a woman. They oppose her because for some reason, they don’t like or trust her.

For those who are on the fence, I offer links to two videocasts. The first is from Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig.

The other, you may have seen. It’s the famous Yes We Can song.

My final argument is this: Hillary has taken Barack’s slogan, “yes we can,” and perverted it into “yes she can.” That begs the question: is it about her or us?

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Welcome to New Hooverville

“Over the last six months, more than 250 homeless people have pitched tents near the Ontario airport, creating a burgeoning shantytown that sprawls across vacant lots and spills into side streets.” This from an article in today’s Los Angeles Times. It’s a new kind of “suburban sprawl.”

In the Great Depression, these places were called Hoovervilles. When I began a search for an image to go with this post I discovered there must have been hundreds, or even thousands of these shantytowns. There were images from all over. Cincinnati, Grand Forks, Brooklyn, DC, Seattle. It’s clear that they became an inevitable fact of life, and now they’re back. Little surprise: when you squeeze blood from the turnip that used to be called “the Middle Class” people become desperate, and they either die or must live out their shattered lives somewhere.

“Residents live in donated tents with mattresses. They light fires in barrels or grills to stay warm. High winds can topple the portable toilets, spilling their contents. Inside one, someone scrawled "God Hates Us All" in black marker.”

Just as we did with the homelessness problem that crept up on us in the 1980s and 90s, I bet Americans will come to accept these new shantytowns as a natural part of the landscape. Only I hope they won’t call them Hoovervilles. It’s time for a new name. How about “Bushboroughs?” It has a classier tone, I guess to reflect the fact that these shanties won’t be built of old packing crates, but rather high-tech nylon tents from North Face. And now they have porta-potties and social services. We’ve come a long way.

“Tents now cover several large dirt lots on both sides of Cucamonga Avenue. Side streets are lined with battered vans and recreational vehicles. Dogs run wild. A 6-month-old was recently found living in a tent with his mother. Authorities said they would provide better shelter for all mothers with children they find.”


In my travels in Mexico and Costa Rica, I have been appalled when I noticed similar patched-together settlements on the edges of cities and towns. Seeing people living in huts made of tarpaper, odd bits of wood and plastic is gut-wrenching. I know such places can be found in India, Brazil, throughout Africa, and in other desperately poor countries. God help us, it’s now official: this new “Gilded Age” has made us just like the third world.

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