What should matter?

Our health is directly related to the healthy environment we live in.

Lives, both visible and invisible, signal their presence, with rustles, screeches, scurrying, pecking, while we walk about in meditation, marveling at the different shades of green we never knew existed, and thousands of intricacies revealing in front of us.

This is not a fearful place anymore. This is a healing place; a place that lets us breath fresh air, calms our nerves, relaxes your stand. And when we hear or see an animal in a distressed mode, we feel compelled to stop, attend to it, look for ways to heal and remedy the situation, and might even take the step of removing that being to a place where it has a chance of life.

This has always been our habitat. That hurt animal, that could have been us, we think.

Something about our shared experience is still remembered, how we camouflaged  for millenia, first with covers made from skins of others, with paste and juices and mud and feathers so not to stand out as you do today in your red poncho. For millenia we learned  to blend in in this habitat that might recognize us as prey, skin and bone, but prey never the less.

That was our inheritance, our gene pool, our destiny. No birth control needed if in our entire lives our coital adventures ended up with just a few gestation events, and only one offspring ended up growing to maturity when by chance, among friendly tribes, someone else took turns watching the child at night while you dozed off.

How did we develop our intelligence and not our empathy? How did we learn to solve problems like building solid shelters, design clothing that protect us from all weather, build devices that can help us communicate our status to the world as this very computer I'm writing on, and still feel as though what matters is to take care of number one?  Even when we were prey on a regular basis, we took care of our tribe, we looked out for the benefit of everyone involved, and made room at our table for the stranger passing by. None of our discoveries or inventions would have occurred without global communication and assistance.

Did we miss an evolutionary cycle?
Are we still fighting our deepest fears in the deep recesses of our memory?

As elders of our tribe, we need to speak out for those whose voice might be silenced, and speak truth to power at all times. After all, we have the biggest memories; we have the deepest responsibilities to leave the world better than we found it.

Yes, indeed, Black Lives Matter.
Yes, indeed, where there is callousness and discrimination, and violence, we are sowing seeds of our own destruction.

Every now and then, my whole shrinks...

This is a water meter, one of two at our place. This one registers the consumption of water for outdoor use, an amount that regularly gets subtracted from the main register on a monthly basis. Imagine all this happening here on the coast in Oregon, where it rains 70-80 inches a year and ducks and beavers are our sports mascots.  Even in Oregon, we parse water consumption. Our vegetable gardening and all our pots are on drip irrigation. Our tiny lawn  goes dormant in the summer, most summers. We live on a lake; but the lake water cannot be used for irrigation because fish and other aquatic lives need a certain level of purity and a certain level of flow for their well being.

What if our well being was metered? What if we carried a device that told us exactly how well we felt all the time? What if human lives at all levels, regardless of position or function or wealth, what if each human was guaranteed a basic level of sustenance and protection from harm, from injury, both physical and emotional?

The last few weeks have brought me face to face with a strange feeling I get every now and then. The feeling that I don't belong to this land the way the natives do. As an immigrant, my sense of belonging is right under the surface, exposed now and then whenever the politics of the day question my status, my origin, my accent-tinged way of speaking.

Perhaps too many of us have skated around this problem, this sense of not quite deserving to be in this land, this sense of unease with all the rhetoric bantered about, and never quite finding the words to address the problem. I can only imagine how big the uneasiness for those Americans who were born here, and for no other reason than their color, their economic status, their ethnicity or their religion, their sexual orientation have been relegated to a life of less importance, a life that needs constant adaptation and metering, adding this or that to belong to the bigger society.

I can vouch in a tiny way for what it feels like to have that second meter with you all the time. It tells you, that no matter how much you succeed, how important you may feel certain days, you better remember that you are being monitored for your worthiness, watched for any careless display of your "otherness" among the bigger society. You are, after all, not the real thing.

What are you worth?

To recreate/reconstruct this scene, one can easily add up the number of pieces, the age, the pattern, the quality of each element, and with just a few click of the calculator one can add up the total worth of this table scape. (Provided these items can still be purchased!)

But what about your life?
What about the life of any person?
How do you calculate its worth?

Actors and performers demand more money based on what their agents/representatives are able to negotiate for them. If they are well known, they can demand more money. The more talented, more wanted, more popular, these too will more money.

It turns out that you, yourself, have to calculate that worth at any particular time in your life and then figure out how to convince others that the amount is accurate. As a young college graduate going out for your first interview, you were just happy to get that first job, probably at any amount someone was willing to pay you. Later, if you found out that someone in the same job, hired at the same time was offered more than you were for the same skills and background and responsibilities, how would you handle that?

What if your boss told you that the other person needed the money more than you did?

What if your boss told you that you were lucky to have the job in the first place, and the reasons he gave you were reasons that had nothing to do with the job you were doing, or the qualities and qualifications you had.

That's what happened to me. Two of us, from the same graduating class, got teaching jobs in the same school. After I found out that he was being paid more than me and I confronted our boss about it, the answer was: Well, he's a man; and a man has more responsibilities than a woman.

If you don't know anyone who lost a job, got paid less, or was not promoted because of being a woman, or a minority, or not pretty enough, or thin enough, or pregnant-yes, I lost a job because I was pregnant and that condition was not acceptable for teachers in that state, at that time-how do you reconcile this fact with your sense of fairness and justice?

Ask yourself, have I ever been discriminated against?
If yes, how did you feel?
What did you do?

Who watches out for you?

Life is an uphill climb. Sometimes the path is well traveled, easy to follow. and most people have friends and relatives who have dropped hints and tips on how and what to do on such path.

Once you retire, once you drop out  of the rat race, you also drop out of the circle of friends who watched out for your interests.  Your colleagues knew what you did, what everyone did, how work progressed with your help, how everyone leaned on each other to be safe and to be productive.  You probably had a union that spoke to your bosses on behalf of all people working in that field.

You all looked out for each other.  Engineers, scientists, professors and longshoremen are all represented by a union board, people who study work conditions and protect the safety and the interests of the workers. 

If you are as old as I am, you probably started to work at a place that had no union.

I remember my first job, a teacher at a Catholic school staffed mostly by nuns, and very few lay folks like me.  We, the lay folks were known to be temporary. We would get married in a year of two, so everyone assumed, and then our husbands would watch out for us. 

No need to worry our pretty heads.

Women, especially, were seen as temporary workers, waiting to become mothers in residence.
If we complained, we were fired on the spot.  If we received unwanted attention for any reason the management deemed improper, we were fired.  If we remained quiet and submissive, we continued to work and be tolerated.

I remember well when the first union was formed in Los Angeles Unified School District. The District refused to negotiate and allow unions. We didn't want to strike. We needed our jobs.  Many older women didn't want to join the union. Too rowdy and rough, unprofessional, they thought.  If you do a good job, they kept saying, you will get a raise.

Women, especially, have found themselves discriminated, and held back.
Women should be worried if unions and legal contracts are exterminated.
Equal pay for equal work is still being discussed today.




There is a great deal of financial instability in our land at this time. And this time, we are thrashing the wrong people, the ones who had nothing to do with our instability.  We should be looking at the big corporations who have enjoyed a great deal of tax cuts and who have supported the election of people who will continue to fire at the foot soldiers, the workers in the field, those folks who have worked by the rule of law, who have not shared in the great wealth these corporations have set aside.

Ouch!

Ask yourself, who is watching out for you, the worker, the retiree, the senior who is on fixed income, on a pension that took a lifetime to earn?