View from the Mountain

Covid-19 Has Brought Changes We Did Not Seek

Raymond's Gut, Crystal Coast, NC

We live in one of the most beautiful corners of the US, North Carolina's Crystal Coast and if you look at the numbers, so far we have done very well during this pandemic. Our county of almost sixty-nine thousand has counted thirty-five cases of the virus and three deaths according the North Carolina May 19, COVID-19 dashboard.

Still, the COVID-19 crisis has undermined my optimism, broken some of my connections with others, and altered my view of our country. All that has happened and the crisis is far from over. In spite of the advice to stay home, the last couple of weekends we have seen the first significant wave of beach people with license plates from New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Georgia, and even Florida. We also know that we have plenty of North Carolina visitors and likely most of them come from some of our state's own hot spots. Things could get much worse in our coastal paradise.

I feel like the pandemic is peeling away layers of my psyche like the layers of an onion. My family's life has been defined by seeing the possibilities of a better future and taking the calculated risks to get there. Optimism has been part of my being for as long as I can remember. That spirit is in danger. I no longer can make sense of the calculations needed to be safe much less to get to the next stage of our life which for us is to move closer to our grandchildren.

The seriousness of this event is reinforced by our family history. My mother lost her mother in the influenza pandemic of 1918. She started cooking for her six siblings at the age of nine. I heard my mother's stories, including how she met those challenges and went on to a better life. As a single mother she worked to give me the opportunity to be the first of her family to graduate from college. She died in 2004 at the age of ninety-three and six months. She never forgot how to overcome adversity and to trust in a better future. She went to her grave believing that hard work, education and determination are always rewarded. I am not so sure any more.

Living on the coast, the threat of disaster sometimes hangs over our heads for weeks at a time. COVID-19 is different. We have faced many storms and like always, even today in the midst of the coronavirus crisis, remain prepared for the next one. However, maps that help us understand, prepare, and sometimes even escape hurricanes do not work for COVID-19. They show us only that there is little chance of escape because the virus is virtually everywhere.

The inland metro areas that so often have welcomed us with open arms during a fierce storm are hotbeds of the pandemic. Areas even more rural than us like the mountains do not want anyone from the outside. Some rural areas with agricultural processing plants have seen explosive virus numbers.

Those of us who have lived on the coast through the likes of Irene, Sandy, and Florence know how to calculate the odds of whether we should stay or flee. Those skills are useless when trying to figure out when is it safe to go to the grocery or drug stores.

Beyond shaking my optimism, COVID-19 because of its highly infectious nature has broken our connection with others. While it is unlikely those who welcomed us when we evacuated for Florence would turn us away if we needed to run from the virus, I would not ask them to shoulder the risk of taking us into their homes. Some of them have more underlying conditions than we do.

This pandemic has also broken some of the strong bonds we have with neighbors. We are in our early seventies but one of our longstanding habits is to invite our widowed neighbor for dinner once or twice a week. He will turn eighty-nine this summer. The stories of his amazing life, his songs, his passion for life and his company are greatly missed during these times. We see him but it is different than spending three or four hours a week with him and a bottle of wine. Just as we miss him, we also miss our grandchildren. This is the first spring in eleven years that they have missed their spring beach trip. This epidemic has stolen precious memories that we could have made and which will likely never be replaced.

Finally and even more troubling than everything else, I miss my country which during much of my life has been a consistent leader for the world in time of crisis. Not only are we absent from the world's stage, our leadership is actively trying to disrupt a coordinated response by defunding the WHO and trying to blame others for our failures.

I struggle to understand how the country that was the leader of the free world has become the object of pity from much of the world. That such a significant portion of country has become accustomed to denying science and facts is heartbreaking. That the oval office, the place where the buck always stopped in past times of crisis, has become a farce and sideshow in an attempt to stay in power and destroy our republic with the knowing support of a significant portion of our population is an embarrassment.

Many people will survive COVID19, but I am not sure that our form of government will. Those that do not survive will more likely fall in easily defined categories that our government has abandoned. The poor or older people trapped in assisted living homes have little hope of rescue. Those working in minimum wage jobs, both white and people of color are really on their own. No one will be testing their co-workers every day like in the White House. Those workers on the front lines of this pandemic risk their lives so people with more money can stay safe in their cocoons.

It is a dark time and the only brightness for us and many of my social media followers are the adventures of four feral kittens that we rescued from the marsh a couple of weeks ago. Their progress in learning how to socialize with humans has been much more uplifting than watching armed protesters demand that we ignore scientific advice and put their lives and the lives of others at risk. It appears it is easier to teach two different species to live together than it is for those of us who believe in science to change the minds of those who want to ignore it and put all our lives at risk.

A Loss of Innocence

Raymond's Gut behind our NC home

When an event sears your soul and strips away a layer of your innocence, you never forget. Early on I remember standing in line for polio vaccinations but somehow we knew the scientists would save us. During those early elementary years, we gathered in hallways or hid under desks in drills for the atomic age, but we had real leaders that cared about the country in those days and they kept the atomic threat under control.  Then the assassinations of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King took away the last vestiges of my childhood. I had already been pulled from my home and shipped off to military school in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which seemed to be on the far side of the world though it was just on the other side of the Appalachian Mountains.

To see our president gunned down fundamentally changed my view of the world. I will never forget taking a taxi to the Chattanooga airport to see LBJ speak from the steps of an airplane. Over the years my innocence got peeled away like onion layers by war and other crises but then I fell in love with Canada's Maritimes.

I fell hard because it was so much like my childhood in rural North Carolina. Life in the fifties was built on trust. We came home from school, played football, baseball or even put shotguns on our shoulders and went hunting. We camped with our scout troop or fished on the weekends. My mother, my only parent during those years, was involved in my life but no one was always watching us. For the most part, we were on our own.  We ranged far and wide and no one seemed to care as long as we showed up for dinner and didn't break any bones. Even if we got sick, doctors still made house calls in those days.

Military school was very different.  Everything had boundaries imposed by someone else. College was the exact opposite. The only boundaries were the ones that I gave myself.  Eight years' absence from a rural life made me grow weary of cities, their strange night light, and the never-ending crowds. So when I met Nova Scotia, it was close to love at first sight just like with my wife.

I still remember my first night in a tent by myself on the shore of the Bay of Fundy. I grilled steak over driftwood and listened to the waves crash on the rocky shore not far from my tent. It was magical and it was as close to paradise as you could get unless you drove through the actual town of Paradise which was halfway between Bridgetown and Lawrencetown where we often shopped at the Beaver Fruit Cooperative. You could get a bag of grain for the cattle along with your groceries.

On those drives, through the Annapolis Valley, we would stop at produce stands operating on the honor system with just boxes for your money. Life on the North Mountain of the Annapolis Valley was not perfect but it brought you close to the land and the sea. You had to let other people in your life or you would not survive.

Nova Scotia, New Brunswick where we farmed for ten years, and Halifax where we lived for a few years after farming became anchors of my psyche.  While I might have idealized the places in my memories, my stories about the closeness of the Tay Creek community where we had our farm were all true.  People were always willing to lend a hand even to the point of digging a neighbor's grave. The keys remained in the switch of our unlocked farm pickup for seven or eight years. Halifax was as friendly a city as I could ever imagine. There was no gun violence.

I never felt unsafe anywhere in Nova Scotia or New Brunswick even walking a half a mile to the barn through the woods in the middle of the night.

Fast forward to the spring of 2020.  In the last few months, even grocery stores have become unsafe.  We wash our hands all the time.  We have stopped having our neighbor over for our weekly dinners with him.  We stand farther from friends when we meet them while walking.  It is a strange existence staying at home and rarely venturing beyond the neighborhood. It might well be our future for a long time.

While I knew that the Maritimes were also under many of the same restrictions because of the coronavirus, in my mind like a childhood friend who remains frozen at ten years old because you have not seen them for sixty years, the Maritimes was still the same safe place.  Now with the mass shooting in Nova Scotia, I am forced to admit that even the tiny villages of Nova Scotia are no longer safe from the peculiar modern disease of mass shootings. I knew that even before this the government was allowing asbestos waste to be stored on the North Mountain behind our old home but there was always the hope that they might come to their senses and stop.

With the Nova Scotia mass shooting and COVID19 crisis, I am forced to admit that as an adult there is really nowhere to run. There are no safe places left for those of us with modest means. We have to stand and join the fight against this disease and the mass shootings with the only tools left, science, political will, patience, and intelligence. There are people out there who care only for their strange ideologies that scorn truth while valuing power and wealth over human life.  We cannot let them win or we are all finished.  This might be the last great opportunity to take our government and lives back so there can still be safe places in the world for the rest of us that haven't been given over to viruses and the powerful.

I am just sorry that the children of today might never have the chance to build a fort in the woods, go to school without worrying about being shot, or wander after school without a care in the world.

Survival is Future Focused

Great Egrets seem to spend all their time focused on catching a meal, grooming, or enjoying a sunny or perhaps at least a sheltered perch. They don't seem to mind wading around in cold water. They typically avoid confrontation but they can be very territorial and I have seen one or two stand up to the much more aggressive Great Blue Herons.  I don't know that Great Egrets think about the past, but I do know that they have a good memory for places. Our Great Egret buddy, Frank 29X, from Canada has flown down from his northern marshes to the Crystal Coast for eight straight years.

We, humans, live a much different life than Great Egrets but the ones of us who maintain relative mental balance have a streak of hopefulness in us.  It is easy to get weighed down by the news.  Climate change could bring the end of the world and a massive sea-level rise.  Our spineless GOP senate has just given the menace that is our leader a green light for whatever behavior he feels like between now and the next election. Far too many people are killed by far too many guns. The suicide rate among veterans and farmers is appalling.  Many people are just one medical incident away from bankruptcy. Corporations seemed to have rigged the tax system in their favor.  Birds are dying and our corporate-friendly government seems bent on doing away with all environmental regulations while attempting to dismantle protections for federal lands.

It would be easy to have a vision of the future that is flaming rivers, toxic drinking water, firestorms like Australia and an authoritarian government with miles of wall attempting to stave off the future.

The reality will likely be different. The demographics of our country are changing. The demographics are not changing in favor of the white nationalists and the party that sees them as "some very good people."  We know what a nearly scandal-free government looks like. We had eight years of it under our first black president.  The children growing up today are growing up in a much more diverse world much like Halifax, Nova Scotia where we lived for a few years.

I have told the story many times about moving to Columbia, Maryland where our young son heard someone refer to a lady as black and turned to ask us what did "black" mean?  We might not get there in America in my lifetime but I wouldn't write off the possibility.  I have grandchildren that will need guidance and help to succeed. I plan to be around for them.  I fully expect to help them develop their critical thinking skills.

I also hope to teach them to be unafraid to take the heat for their beliefs. We have far too many people who are unwilling to admit their mistakes much less shoulder the responsibility of what they did. Certainly, we should hold responsible those senators who refused to honor their oath of office and stuck their heads in the sand during the sham impeachment trial of our foul-mouthed leader.

I grew up during a time when we could debate opinions without getting personal. I sent a list of questions to a no-one-could-be-right-but-me opinion writer. I hoped to understand why he believed things that do not pass the test as facts. His comment was that I lived in a different reality. Certainly, I do not live in the fever-induced-conspiracy swamp of Fox News. I think this quote from Forbes about covers it.

There's a lot that goes on in the world that doesn't easily fit the Fox template. There are important stories that don't make anyone angry, prove liberals are evil or otherwise carry an emotional punch. Fox viewers get less of them. Fox News is like an all-you-can-eat buffet, serving up red meat. A more balanced diet might be healthier in the long run.

I try to eat a balanced diet of healthy food but I do fall off the wagon especially for bacon and potato chips.  Enjoying a balanced news diet is much easier and I never fall off that wagon and listen to the junk news that comes out of Fox.

Not all government is bad. That pretty much disqualifies me as a Fox viewer.  Not all taxes are bad and the government helping people who are less fortunate is a good thing that will benefit us all.  Those are the second and third strikes that make me an unlikely Fox News viewer.

The government is a giant pendulum. Likely our current difficulties are a result of the great progress we made under Barack Obama. There are people to whom the thought of a black president or a woman as president are as threatening as flaming rivers are to me. 

We have to hope that our current mess will energize people to vote.  Those of us who believe our future depends on a fair country that continues to build on the strength and intelligence of current and past immigrants instead of walling ourselves off from the world and the future cannot let fear, hatred, and xenophobia driven by the policies of the current administration define our future.

We have to build a world where everyone counts no matter how humble their backgrounds are. Each person, not just the rich and well-connected, deserves a chance to succeed and thrive. That has been the imperfect promise of America for hundreds of years.  We will continue to strive to get closer to that promise and we will never let it die.

We can still have a country that respects borders and the law without making life miserable for so many. We just need better people running our country.

 

A Fourth of July Message for 2019

I posted this yesterday to my friends. The message resonated well with many people so it has now made it to my soapbox for all.

I love my country of birth, but having lived in two countries, I also feel great pride when I hear "Oh Canada." Having visited many countries, I feel great respect for a number of them and understand that there are other paths to happiness besides just ours.

Today the Fourth of July, I salute the vision of our country's founders and hope that we can live up to their thoughts and ideals which have helped us evolve to a better but far from perfect place. We will eventually emerge from this nightmare of children caged along our borders.

Any student of our battle for independence will attest to our founding fathers great fear of standing armies. Changing times have resulted in the need for a professional US military.  There is little doubt that we have the best armed forces in the world but why brag about it?

Our founding fathers would be appalled at a Four of July celebration of military power. There is a big difference between honoring those who have served in the defense of freedom and celebrating military power.

Celebrating military power is no more a part of the American tradition than separating children from their parents and holding them in intolerable conditions. We will overcome this at the ballot box.

Happy Fourth of July!

The real danger to our society

When you you look up the definition for society, you will find two.  I am alarmed that some people have trouble figuring out the difference between the two when they are tasked with governing a society.

noun

1. The aggregate of people living together in a more or less ordered community.
synonyms: the community, the public, the general public, the people, the population

2. An organization or club formed for a particular purpose or activity.
synonyms: association, club, group, band, circle, fellowship, body, guild, college, lodge, order, fraternity, confraternity, brotherhood, sisterhood, sorority, league, federation, union, alliance

We elect people to govern us - our society.  Our governments establish rules or laws and through the courts, police, fines and other mechanisms collect money (taxes, fees) and enforce rules and laws. As Americans, Canadians, or others, we often live multi-jurisdictional lives.  There are federal, state, county, city and sometimes even more local authorities who to a greater or lesser extent govern our lives.

The problem we face at many levels is the people providing our governance have lost sight of focusing benefits equitably towards the whole of the community that elected them.

What gnaws at my soul is the undeniable fact many of the people governing us are looking out more for the people in their circle of friends than they are for the good of the greater community. The first thought that comes to my mind is a bunch of rich politicians passing a tax cut which benefits almost exclusively corporate donors and people who make more money than they know how to spend.  The tax cut has blown up the deficit and fueled an orgy of stock buybacks but few others have gotten anything more than hollow words about a tax cut.

While you may or may not agree with my interpretation of the tax cuts, the same thought process leads us to two sets of rules- one for the insiders and another for the rest of us. A few years ago, I had the misfortune of watching a tainted HOA election that led to board operating behind closed doors for months. They had barely been elected when they started breaking by-laws. Within a month they had illegally given some lot owners passes on dues that were owed.  It took a lot of work to cleanse this board's behavior and establish new rules so that theoretically it would not happen again.

This insider-outsider problem runs deep in our society. Most people who have worked in corporations know that how you are treated often depends more on who you know than how well you do your job. I have long argued for a new social contract between workers and corporations. In corporations this lack of understanding of the bigger picture often manifests itself in CEOs and their inside circle of friends walking away with most of the benefits and money.  It is little different from government giving tax breaks to their rich friends and denying health care benefits because they cannot imagine any of their friends not having work-provided health care benefits. Maybe they should talk to the ever increasing army of contractors who have no benefits because companies do not have to provide them.

The same stuff happens at the local level, it is just not as apparent. When stuff happens behind closed doors, it is usually happening because the benefits of actions taken are targeted to a group smaller than the true greater society that actually should be the real focus of the benefits. It is unfortunate that bad behavior is often cloaked in language that appears to make it look good at first glance.

Some companies and governments have actually taken the wolf in a sheep's clothing metaphor to a level that is almost an art form. Many might remember Apple's "Think Different" advertising campaign. I recently saw one of the old posters that celebrated people who thought different and made a difference. You would be excused from drawing the incorrect conclusion that Apple as a company celebrated employees who thought different. The irony was that nothing could have been farther from the truth.  Steve Jobs tolerated no dissent.  If an employee stepped across the sometimes invisible boundaries, they were quickly shown the door. Apple's excessive secrecy was not the only example of Steve's iron rule.  As a director, I was often tasked with presenting to high-level customers after Steve's product introductions. I also had to answer their questions even though the only information I had was what I had gleaned during the same presentation that Steve had just given to them. Sure there were boxes of literature with more information to be handed out but they were stamped with notices that you could be fired if they were opened before Steve's presentation was over. Then there was Steve's even more ridiculous policy of telling a few chosen customers (Friends of Steve) more information about unannounced products than Apple employees were ever told.

While you might argue that Apple has gone on to be a tremendously successful company, I would argue that Apple is a mere money machine today, mining the pockets of loyal customers who have seen prices rise precipitously and innovation drop off a cliff.  A whole generation of innovators and leaders were driven from Apple because of Steve's malignant management practices and excessive secrecy. You will find those employees at high levels in many companies.

From government and corporations to your local society, secrecy and the willingness to have two sets of rules, one for the insiders and another for the rest of us is the rot that eats away at the ties that bind us.

No one should be above the laws or the rules that have been established to keep our society more or less ordered. Favoritism, selective enforcement of rules and declaring the rules don't apply to me have no place in a society that is supposedly functioning for the good of everyone.  Claiming ignorance of the rules as justification for breaking them is the worst kind of self-delusion for government of any level. If you don't understand the rules and aren't willing to abide by them yourself, how can you expect anyone to have respect for you or abide by your rules.

Rules and laws were not developed to be convenient and optional for leaders. They were developed to help keep society functioning.  Rules and laws broken by leaders eat away at the credibility of the leaders. Surely it is apparent that leaders breaking rules makes it seem okay for others to ignore rules.

If we have learned nothing else in the last few years, it is that talk is cheap and more of a distraction than a promise that will be fulfilled. Transparency, government for the good of us all, and working to bring us all together are far too often hollow words that mask secret agendas designed more for the benefit of a group of buddies than to build a real community.  

What really matters is a deep abiding respect for all people, especially the ones you are tasked with governing or leading. The first step to good governance or leadership is following and respecting the rules.  Changing rules and traditions for a friend or colleague is a slippery slope than benefits few people and harms the greater good. Treating everyone fairly is the cornerstone of good governance and corporate life. Favoritism is a cancer that is hard to root out.  The personal agenda that comes with favoritism is at odds with the common good and will destroy a community or a company.

While you can leave a company, it is much harder to leave a community. If for no other reason than that, we should be ever vigilant to make sure government at all levels can be counted on to follow the rules and treat everyone fairly.