Vote for Joe

The other night I was reading an article in this magazine about the dramatic warming going on in the Arctic. In fact, at this rate, scientists posit that by the year 2036, there will be no summer sea ice up there anymore. There’s a “canary in the coal mine” for planet extinction. Yet, instead of pouring all our energy (in a reverse sort of way) into curbing greenhouse gas emissions, countries are jockeying for position to mine minerals, oil and fish up there, as the thawing opens up these possibilities. What’s more, troop presence (American, Canadian, Russian…) is increasing up there as well, as a new ‘Cold War’ — in a not so cold place anymore — is taking shape. Our administration, on the other hand, would stand down from all this, while putting a tremendous amount of focus on cutting back energy demand, going to alternative energy, and so on. Just for one: To extract fossil fuels from up there, burn more, and speed up the planet’s extinction at the expense of future generations, is absolutely nuts — both common sense wise and spiritually.

For a newspaper series, I recently interviewed a local naturalist who has a Masters Degree in Environmental Science from the University of Iowa. She said with temperatures warming, this is pushing migratory birds farther and farther north each year. You know, you have to wonder if at some point they’re just going to run out of “north”? What’s more, during a talk several years ago, I heard an environmentalist say that after all the trees are gone, all the birds are gone… next is: all of us.

I just today wrote a newspaper article about this man who grew up not more than 15 miles south of here in the small town of Alger, Ohio. According to a Pittsburgh newspaper at the time he was playing, Raymond Brown could have played in the Major Leagues, if he had been allowed to. He wasn’t. What’s more, when he finished playing, he moved back to Dayton, Ohio, where he worked at a “biscuit company” for seven years before he died. His tombstone initially said nothing about baseball. However, after he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, the Dayton Daily News did a series of stories on him. Subsequently, an ad hoc citizens group did fundraising to get him a “fitting tombstone” with information about his baseball playing.

I just did a newspaper story about an Eagle Scout who, for his “Community Service Project,” raised $1,500 and, along with some other Troop members, put in six really nice statues of saints on the grounds around a local Catholic church. Each statue is accompanied with a small plaque capsulizing, in three short sentences, the particular saints ethos, if you will. For example: “St. Isadore is the patron saint of farmers and farm workers. He communed with God while walking behind his plow. An ordinary life can lead to holiness.” Or in my vernacular, St. Isadore was kinda/sorta a rural “average Joe” saint. And, frankly, this otherwise “average” Eagle Scout kid has a leg up on this ordinary sainthood thing as well.

I was doing some foreign relations research with this book last night. I was reading, specifically, about a 26-year bloody civil war in Sri Lanka. But I wasn’t looking at it in an isolated sense, but rather as it being emblematic of a template that has been playing out over and over, in various ways, worldwide, because of the modern phenomenon of “globalization.” The British colonized Sri Lanka in the early 1900s, primarily because they found the upland areas suitable for lucrative growing of coffee, tea and rubber plants. In turn, this greed fueled the importing of large numbers of Tamil workers from southern India. These people were turned into “indentured servants (read: slaves).” And they quickly became about 10% of the population in Sri Lanka. Time passed. In 1948, Colonial Sri Lanka ended. But the Tamil were now discriminated against by the majority Sinhalese government. This included several mass killings/genocide of the Tamil. The Tamil, in turn, formed a rebel group to fight the government. As mentioned at the outset, the civil war lasted 26 years, and as of 2009 there is a tenuous peace. Now here’s the kicker, and how it relates to, say, the U.S. We don’t go in and forcibly colonize these smaller, poorer countries, and plant a flag. No, we ‘plant’ corporations. We then pay sweatshop wages (read: slave labor). And the corporations work behind the scenes to pay governments for favorable tax rates, access to natural resources, and so on. We just don’t call it colonization. We call it doing business in a global market economy. This, in turn, continues to perpetuate poverty loops in these countries, continued class tensions, and a constellation of other sociological problems.