When: Saturday, October 27.  10-11:00 a.m.

Where: Rochester Public Market (East Main St. entrance).

 Letter from United for Peace & Justice:

Dear activists, colleagues and friends,

It has been over 4 and a half years since the invasion of Iraq. 3,835 U.S. soldiers and over 1 million Iraqi citizens have lost their lives. U.S. taxpayers have spent over $600 billion on this war with no end in sight.

This Saturday, October 27th, you can take a stand. United for Peace and Justice is coordinating over 150 peace groups across the country for demonstrations in 11 cities.

Boston, Chicago, Jonesborough Tennessee, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York City, Orlando, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, and Seattle.

There are also events in Fairbanks, Tucson, San Diego, Santa Barbara, Denver, Kapaa Hawaii, Des Moines, Smithfield NC, and Oklahoma City.  AND NOW ROCHESTER….

We made a video to help get the word out. Watch it here and recruit your friends to come:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcJG8gyn3c4&eurl=http://bravenewfilms.org/blog/16736-october-27th-mobilization-to-end-the-war?play=1&utm_source=rgemail

Please come! Four years ago this month we documented the lies that led us into this war in “Uncovered: The War on Iraq,” and last year we took on the mercenaries, cost-plus contracts, Blackwater and Halliburton in “Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers.” Both of these stories are now widely known in the broader media thanks to your efforts in screening the films and organizing with them.This new video is about getting people into the streets and DOING SOMETHING.

See you on Saturday!

Robert Greenwald, Jim Miller, and the Brave New Foundation team.

Link to United for Peace & Justice site.

Categories: Political Animal
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Not that I’ve got anything against the grass. In fact, I love the grass, though there are things I love more, such as trees. Trees, bees, and pygmy goats, though the latter also cause me some discomfort, not of themselves – for it is they being so of themselves that I love them so; no, they rankle me simply because they are bred. Because somewhere down behind the long line of manmade goat clans is the Ur-Goat, the wild goat, the goat windward side of evolution’s raw wind, free as the wind, which we have tamed and put on our plates, more or less.

Such is the grass: refined, groomed, spoiled and whipped into shape by man’s hungry hand. Trouble is, his is a hunger augmented by too much mind, intellect the inadvertent tool of selfsame evolutionary wind, hapless and aimless, whose only rule is “forward,” also construed as “survive,” a.k.a. “eat.” First, scattered weeds that bear somewhat edible seed (especially if chewed long, or ground, or roasted) are turned to a noble cause like quinoa. Then wheat. Then someone decides the whole damn field looks pretty from a distance, like a kingdom, and reduces the herb to a carpet called a lawn, complete with fertilizer and ornaments in the shapes of slaves. It’s even brought inside and stuffed in a vase, with dead daisies.

This is where I come in, I and my hate. My hate of mowing, of the lawnmower, the weedwacker, the rake, the whole damn concept. I’ve never had anything against a field of green wheat sprouts, whole stalks, green or dried and standing head full of seeds, of fruit. In fact, I find it preferable. I think it should remain tall and a field.

If a practical reason not to have one’s house surrounded by a border of short-haired grasses is to keep the mice and chipmunks and other lovers of warm spaces behind the clapboards at bay, there’s something in that. A house itself is an artificial statement against the wild, so one must have a boundary, and it’s in keeping with nature’s law to let the rodents fight harder for their own stolen turf.

The poor bound the house with dirt which they sweep. If that’s not so appealing in mudtime, there are alternatives, like a cat. But even grass, I might say, in such a case is fine, if only it were kept under control. I mean not the height, but breadth. Something one could trim with a push-mower, or lamb. But not these vast savannahs of an acre or more that these other country folks adore.

I inherited my patch, my plantation of grass, so perhaps it’s not entirely my fault. Just the part just around the house would be enough, small and broken as it is by beds of lilac and periwinkle, lavender, rose, and viburnum. Hybrids all.

It’s not really that I have so much against all the works of man, but some are so absurd it would make me laugh, if it weren’t for the darker fact behind the grin. That beyond the ruff of Kentucky Rye around the house proper, there’s a half-acre lawn my grandfather had planted to make a field for his many grandsons and tommish grandgirls to play football on. Solely for that kindness I’ve been consigned to a weekly sentence of an extra hour’s mowing. And to accomplish that, I’m killing my mother, the living planet.

It used to be worse, in a way, for the four years when I still stubbornly held to the walk-behind self-propelled mower. Worse for me, since the whole job took three hours. Three hours a week less of life to live. Worse for the air and birds and global climate that I finally gave up some of my principles and invested in a riding mower. Urged on by my wife. I suppose it was the sensible thing to do, since now it only takes me seventy minutes to do the whole job. But I would rather have let the one-time football field go to seed, let the vermin revel in their restored acre.

So tonight I ride the ridiculous machine, a slave to culture and romantic love, spewing toxins and carbons into the evening air, all the while well aware the planet is already destined for trouble beyond its capacity to repair (if one considers homeostasis to be a willful force). My guilt weighs on me as heavily as the turf I roll over, blades lopping, engine howling.

The thing about guilt is that very weight. If I have somewhere that spare ounce of ambition that would allow me to live my principles without compromise, guilt is the blanket that snuffs it, as if it were a small fire set in a patch of straw. The blanket, though flammable itself (flammable, because like all functions of memory, it derives from passion, however dulled by fear) – the blanket baffles sufficient oxygen from the mouth of the fire. The flame dies down. Dead.

In other words, guilt does little to move one towards one’s desire; although it has the best intentions, it’s one of the quicker killers out there.

Still, like any evil, it’s not necessary that it prevail, and rising against its putrid stench, and against the idiocy of the lawn, is a light like morning sun, a face on the horizon in the form of a student of mine. Let’s just call him “Jake A.” This is a kid who I’d known barely a month last year when suddenly he was cadging my classroom once a week after school to hold his own student peace group. This is not what you think: another one of those ephemeral well-intentioned band of bleeding-heart freaks out to replay the Sixties with their manifestoes and tie-die t-shirts. Well, maybe some of them are, but this one student in particular, this Jake, has a fire in him that, well, he’s the kind of kid you say you wish you had a million of. But in this case, you really mean it. His depth of conviction and his ability to organize people is admirable for any living human, much less a seventeen year-old one. It puts me to shame. Which is, of course, another way of saying it puts me to guilt. But that’s my doing, I’m pretty sure, not Jake’s. Oh, occasionally he does give me that “I’m so disappointed look” when I say I can’t go to the rally in the city because I have too many papers to grade. The underlying question is, “What can your essays matter, when the world is burning?” But the question is out there, without so much weight, just out there, hanging. It’s I who can choose to take it on or not. Taking it on as a gauntlet is a different kind of weight than taking it on as a yoke; it has a heft, rather than a stranglehold.

But most of the time I tend to push that radiant, earnest apparition out of sight all together, grinding my teeth in ire as I bump along on my riding mower. Still, that promise is out there, that beamy face, offering me a way out of my misery. I don’t think either of us thinks my planting the lawn to the carbon-sucking sycamore is necessarily going to save the world. But it might save my soul.

And as for the grass, if it had a mind, it would mind either.  But for mammals, shade is preferable to hate.

Categories: Political Animal
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Waiting for the Bus

Today I want to complain about moms and dads who drive their kids from the house to the end of the driveway to wait for the bus in the morning. No shit. I see this every day when I drive to work. I’m a teacher and I live 25 miles from the school where I teach, and I take back roads for the first half of the commute, so I get to see a good variety of houses and neighborhoods on my way. I wouldn’t say these cases are the majority, or numerous, or even frequent, but they are regular enough that I have to take notice, and my sense is that their numbers are increasing.

My first question is, of course, What the hell?

Before I slice these people up, I want to try to understand what might be legitimate about their practice. First of all, it’s possible that in the winter, on a morning when all the kids and their teachers are praying for a snow day, because there are a few flakes falling, or the temperature was below zero at five a.m. and the wind chill has knocked that down ten or twenty degrees more, that mom or dad would be truly concerned about their kid and sit with them in their mobile shelter with the motor running to keep them from getting frostbite on their fingers which would make doing math problems and writing compositions difficult. I was going to include to keep their hair from freezing, as I remember mine doing after sports on winter afternoons as I walked home from the gym, but then I realized most of these kids are blow-drying their hair.

But that doesn’t explain the other 170 or days of the school year. This past spring I drive by, and there they are, sealed up on a blessedly balmy morning, the sun rising behind their tinted windows, exhaust placidly streaming out of the tailpipe. This image leads me to my second forgiving supposition: that mom or dad and junior are sharing a few moments together, talking about the day ahead or just past, or about grandma’s upcoming operation, or the reason for fog, or any number of other intimacies that I have found have transpired between my step-son and me when both of us were sitting facing forward looking at the world through the filter of a car windshield.

But in that case, I think, why not have that conversation standing on the good earth, and be able to include in the experience the twittering of birds, the breeze on your cheeks, the changing light, and – if you love machines that much – the sound of cars, mine and others, whizzing by on their ways to work?

Maybe mom or dad is on the way to work, and so is just taking the opportunity to warm up the car and spend a few precious moments with her or his child? But often enough I’ve seen the bus come and, as I’m waiting for the child to board and the stop sign attached to the side of the yellow hulk to fold back and the red lights to stop flashing, the parental vehicle – usually an SUV or at least a minivan – back down the driveway towards the garage, there to shut itself down and the parent to slide back into the warm cave of the home.

In many cases these homes are newly built on what was just a few years ago active farm land. In some cases the driveway between the road and garage is long, sometimes very long: ranging from a hundred yards to a quarter mile. These are no doubt people who have fled the dangers and noise of the city to build their 3,800 square foot dream home in the country amid the wonders of nature (beyond their five acre lawns the teeming goldenrod and sumac, the woodchucks and starlings), so they can expend fossils fuels at the rate of a gallon a week to drive their kids down to the road to wait for the bus. Meanwhile, to keep their kids from joining the growing epidemic of obesity, they shuttle them off to the soccer league after school, then swing by the local supermarket to pick up some frozen oven-fried chicken, a quart of coleslaw, and a couple of two-liter Cokes to shovel in at the kitchen counter that suffices for a dining table as they hurry off to do homework or catch the rerun of Survivor.

Unfortunately, when the global warming-spawned floods arrive, they won’t come to their front lawns, which are well-above sea-level. If the drought comes they won’t be affected, because the county recently ran a water line out to their house so they wouldn’t have to depend on a well anymore. (They didn’t run the line specifically for their sakes, but as side effect of construction out to the little town on the edge of the county where the new landfill sits, a deal the town council, though not its constituents, thought was a bargain; a serendipitous bonus of the new water line is that it will be handy for future housing developments which, oddly enough, benefit friends of the county Water Authority board.) If Lake Ontario dried up, they might be in some trouble, but that isn’t likely to happen in our lifetimes.

And, if, as predicted, this particular region becomes wetter than it already is (and grayer, which many already complain about), there will certainly be no shortage of water, and they can rely on their sump pump to keep the basement dry, and advanced artificial playing surfaces to keep the soccer fields playable. If things get too uncomfortable, they can always move.

Though, Where to? would be the question. The deserts of the west are due to become dryer, and all the rain we’re expected to get here won’t help that – though there are plans afoot to pipe some of Ontario’s water out west, or even ship it to our friends in Saudi Arabia in exchange for, you guessed it, oil to keep mom’s and dad’s motors purring.

Can they make a driveway long enough or a window glass tinted enough to escape all those contingencies?

July 5, 2007

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