It's the whether

Yesterday was Kansas’ birthday.
Kansas – the snow globe state.
Don’t like what you see,
shake it, flip it upside down.
The day before it was 74,
today it’s freezing and dropping,
snow on the ground this morning,
sunshine expected by afternoon.
But at least it was windy all three days.

Now Kansas has always had erratic weather
It’s normal to be abnormal.
But now, even the natives like me,
are getting restless.
If it’s still January,
and if the calendar is telling the truth,
and we are inclined to doubt things
not specified in the Bible,
then what will it be like in August?

While it’s true,
that drought isn’t new,
it hasn't rained like it should
for quite some time,
and we grow wheat and other things
that become food here in Kansas.

On the bright side,
or the dim,
most of us here in Kansas,
like people all over, really,
but perhaps more so here,
believe what we want to believe.

If we want to believe we’ll go to heaven
when we die, we do.
If we don’t want to believe our great uncle,
to the power of twenty or forty or whatever,
was not a monkey, we don’t.
And when it comes to the climate changing,
more than we’d like it to,
I mean more than we’re used to,
I mean more than we used to joke about it
going from April Fool’s Day weather one day back to January the next,
slip sliding to North Dakota before heading back to Kansas …
Well, you get my freezing drizzle.

I don’t mind the variability in the weather,
in fact I sort of prefer it, within reason.
I have a problem with the inconsistency
in reasoning.

Believing in things, or not, that haven’t, probably can’t be,
established, is one thing.
I will find out, I suppose,
or not, when I die.

Not that I like that idea very much,
but it seems pretty well established that everyone,
even Kansans, die.
Of course taxes for education,
and other normally responsible government functions,
more than half of us don’t seem to believe in anymore.

I think it has to do with bundling, like with your cable bill,
and perhaps its true that watching too much TV will rot
your brain:
God and Not-evolution, and Not-abortion,
and Not-taxes, and Not-listening to anyone
who sounds like they have the wrong kind of education -
all get bundled together,
and people simply,
and I mean, without thinking about it very much,
go to one party or the other.

And I don’t know that either party
has a monopoly on all the good ideas
or right thinking in general,
although, like most people, I like to believe that
I am the exception, that I’m not overly swayed by my peers,
I just prefer to hang around with people who think and believe
the way I do.

But about the weather, which used to be a safe subject to talk about,
what do you think?
I really don’t want to believe it will possibly get as crazy as some scientists,
who have spent their lives either becoming more informed or more misinformed,
not like the rest of us, more or less haphazardly, but with observable and repeatable methods, which they call science, and significant deliberation, have speculated.

But who can follow all of that? Besides, nobody really knows the future. Not even farmers know if their wheat will make a crop this year.

As for the sun coming up in the morning - which that old shake-n-bake Copernicus may have established to his own satisfaction a few hundred years ago isn’t quite so, but not even a science-lover like me will say: well, the spherical Earth will rotate on its axis so that the state of Kansas is once again in a direct line to receive the sun’s rays.

I’d like to believe that most of us are not stupid, but almost all of us are indeed slow – perhaps as slow as a lumbering brontosaurus - to believe things we’d rather not believe.

What reason have we given ourselves as a species that we will act before the consequences of bad thinking become evident? Lincoln freed the slaves. LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act. And, yes, an African-American is now president. But Martin Luther King Jr’s. dream is still merely a dream for many. And all of this was accomplished, such as it is, with much kicking and screaming and dragging of feet by people who didn’t believe in equality, or at least not enough to do something about it, or at the very least,  to just get out of the way.

So about the weather – this climate change thing? Are we going to keep flipping the coin, flipping the globe, and wait and see? The scientists are putting the odds at about 97 to 3 that not making some significant changes will result in changes for the planet that human beings won’t be happy about.

Many of the more unpleasant, and speculative, changes - in the sense that nobody can precisely predict the weather from one day to next fifty years from now – are indeed ahead of us. In Kansas, it’s something of a challenge to call the weather in real time. So I suppose, many of us will be somewhere over the rainbow by whenever.

But are you kids good with that? With this democracy game, the way it’s being played, old and dying people are at the table. But then, again, I’ve seen some of you whippersnappers doing your skateboarding things without a helmet or driving while texting.

What are the chances enough of us will think carefully and make up our minds and vote to do something that might do something about this weather? My unscientific prediction for the human species doing the right thing is about 97 to 3, against.

Game’s not over yet.

Rule of thumb

Corporations don’t care.

A few people live with high integrity, a strong sense of responsibility to other people and the planet, and with joy when possible and perseverance when it’s hard, and always with humility and gratitude. They take satisfaction in being merely and fully human.

Most of us live somewhere in between. We mostly live in servitude to corporations who seduce us with a shiny array of objects, most we don’t need, and many even still which won’t give us true satisfaction. We think we are free to choose, but it is only between choices created by the corporation to appeal to our baser qualities. We have been bought off by the ability to buy ten orange plastic throw-away razors for a buck, 24/7. And we pay with our buck for a few shaves and also everything else the corporation did wrong in the processes of making those cheap razors to offer us that bargain. And then we’re left with waste we don’t know what to do with.

Every dollar we spend is a vote: for soulless corporate economics, or alternatively  for workers we know, or at least people who know the people who care about doing quality work with integrity and responsibility. Ideally we would recognize that we always choose between corporations or a more face to face economy.

The world is a complex place and far from ideal. We will make compromises because we will sometimes want some things more than we want what we should believe in. Somebody will eventually get what we pay for.

It will probably almost always cost us more in dollars buy goods and services that are made the right way, at a fair wage – looking at the whole picture - than the stuff Walmart and Amazon  and Chase Bank would sell us that they don’t even care about except that someone with money in their pocket will buy it.

We humans have tendencies to be greedy and short-sighted. Corporations are designed to take advantage of that for the benefit of the very few. And even those top few aren’t in control of their own destiny. The Corporation will carelessly bring the whole planet down on all of us, powerful and servant alike, for the sake of a higher quarterly dollar profit.

There’s no point beating our breasts. We can only work to be free. To live better tomorrow than we did today.

Wendel Berry wrote to me more than twenty years ago:

The important thing is to be willing to be troubled by these questions. I can’t figure out how not to need some things I deplore, so I certainly understand your dilemma. My own intention is to “Progress” as little as possible and to do all I can to keep my money from going into corporate pockets. This is one of my amusements.”