A Brief History of Worry in Post-War America

I was born during the darkest year of World War II, 1943 — but fortunately, at that time, I was too young to worry about it.  My parents were plenty worried in my place, but doing their best for the war effort.

When I was a kid, I worried that the Russians would fly over (I lived just outside NYC) and bomb us — or later, just send their missiles to do the job.  I didn’t know whether to be more worried that I would die right away (living close to what even then was called ground zero) or that I would be condemned to a lingering death from radiation poisoning.

After Kennedy was elected, the cultural and political world changed.  Yes, the Cuban missile crisis was very scary, but at last all the gray men talking in monotones and with frozen faces and no humor who had seemed to populate the government and who had talked constantly about the missile gap and the Red Menace weren’t there any more, at least not up front and not nearly so much.  At least for a little while.  

Then, during the early days of ramping up the Vietnam war, I had faith that the government would not do anything that wasn’t right.  Would they?  Eventually, I found out more and more about what was going on there, less from mainstream media than from activist groups and alternative publications. As we got deeper in, I worried about  the draft that threatened my young husband and myself.  He had first a college deferment, then we went into the Peace Corps, and, six months after our tour of service was over, his next birthday took him out of the most active pool of potential draftees. 

By this time, I had noticed a pattern: I was waiting for the world (at least as I knew it) to end, one way or another. As soon as one world-ending threat went past, there was sure to be another.  I was right to have been worried: the work of the worrier never ceases.  And sure enough: first the book The Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, then the first Earth Day, and a new term, ecology. The Earth itself was under threat!  Lots of worries.  

But look: we did get a law passed against the use of DDT. So maybe, our government wouldn’t permit people to do such destructive things; polluters would be made to stop polluting and to clean up the mess they had made — wouldn’t they?  

Then people began warning us that the supply of petroleum, while still large at that time, was finite, and a huge source of pollution — check out the ‘smog’ in LA. They said if we kept on increasing its use instead of looking for alternatives, we would run out, and sooner than we thought.  Some good worry there.  

Somehow, the alternatives never appeared, and more and more cars on more and more roads just used more and more of it. More worry.  But smog seemed to be something that happened in Los Angeles, where they had all the cars and freeways, and ‘inversions.’  Can it spread elsewhere?  Worry.  

By the early 1950s, England had gone off soft coal for household heating and eliminated their deadly ‘London particulars.’ But could we find ways to solve our own problem?  Lots of good worry.  

A little later: a hole in the ozone layer.  But look, we’ve banned CFC’s.  Will that be enough?  No. Lots of worry.

Then, more recently, our retirement accounts were changed into investment accounts with tax incentives for employees (401k et al.) and accounting benefits for our employers, and thus we were turned loose to ‘manage’ our retirement investments ourselves, usually by picking one or another mutual fund or combination — with someone getting a commission for brokerage or financial services all along the way.  What did we know about choosing funds?  Most of us, not much. Were the rosy predictions of investment counselors correct? I worried, while I hoped for the best.  

After all, our government wouldn’t let companies really put our retirements at risk, or mislead us about these things, would they? Lots of room for worry.

And, all along, my mother had been telling me that some moneygrubbers had been trying to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act, practically from the day it was passed.  That was the legislation set up during the Great Depression to keep separate banking, investment, and insurance functions, the mixing of which had set up the conditions for the Great Depression itself. Glass-Steagall’s purpose was to save us from ourselves, or rather from the groups of ourselves trying to play faster and looser with money.  She died before the act was repealed, but she had told me they would keep after it until they finally tore it down (they did).  At which point, she assured me, all the bad stuff she had already lived through — she had been born in 1919 — would happen again.  Lots to worry about there. 

Our government wouldn’t really let that happen again, despite rescinding Glass-Steagall — would they?

Ahem.  Just clearing my throat.

The past is prologue, as they say. This week, I’m worried about the possibility of an entire meltdown of the world financial, banking and money situation. (Nothing small-time about my worrying.) Will our President get it right, find a way to get through this without entirely uprooting our entire society, rule of law, nationhood and all? People are telling other people to buy gold. (That assumes you have a certain amount of money right now to buy it with, of course.) 

Perhaps they are right — I wouldn’t know — but think about the realities of that for a minute.  Even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t know how or where to go about buying gold, what form it would take (coins? bars? dust?), where I would keep it if I had it (home, and hold ‘em off with a shotgun? dont think so.  In a vault somewhere with someone else holding ‘em off? don’t think so.  And how would I get in to get at mine if I needed some? Piece of paper?  sounds to me like we’re on our way back to paper money in a different form). Electronic money, like paper money, has some key advantages: lightweight portability. How would I carry gold around, so as to buy (say) a gallon of milk? Star Trek’s Ferenghis may have seen it coming: that’ll be two bars of gold-pressed latinum. Break out the gold-weighing scales. Yikes.

Before you just laugh this whole thing off as the nervous cogitations of a lifelong worrywort, consider this: at no time have my worries been totally unrealistic. Nor have the situations causing me to worry ever really disappeared; they have just been piled on top of each other. Check it out:

Those Russian planes or missiles might actually have come over, back then. It was considered likely by many, to the extent of calling for first strikes (all the characters in the movie Dr. Strangelove were recognizable at the time, if not as individuals, then as frequently seen types:  a very scary thought.   They are still recognizable, floating around among the ‘powers that be’ today:  an even scarier thought).  Nuclear weapons have proliferated over the years and the threat has not gone away — aren’t we fighting a war in Iraq over Weapons of Mass Destruction that aren’t even there?  and we’re still mired it it — but as we saw, hijacked commercial airliners loaded with jet fuel and momentum did amazing amounts of damage on 9/11, and would have done more except for Flight 93′s brave passengers.

And the earth really is in terrible imminent danger — more danger than ever before — of being destroyed by the carelessness and greed of humans, and all life with it.  

You may say that worry is pointless, but the situations are very real.

And the short term greed and the pursuit of money to the exclusion of all else by some few really has threatened the lives and well-being of the rest of us, who are just trying to get along peacefully and support ourselves and our families, and the crunch they’ve brought us has made our daily lives difficult or (in some cases) impossible, through unavailable jobs and health care, and through closing businesses and home foreclosures, and much else.  Worried?  Oh, I think so.

And now, it’s being pointed out that one possible outcome of failing to find a solution to the financial crisis those greedy people brought on could mean the end of civilization itself, including of our nation.  Dissolution and separation, regionalism or even full chaos at every level, from the local to the national to the international, the result of a total meltdown and freezing of the world financial system…  Barter?  Gold?  Having to defend your vegetable garden, even your house, against all comers? Yikes. Talk about worried.

The government wouldn’t let that happen — would it? 

Maybe President Obama is going to end up being our next Lincoln after all: a tall slim smart man coming out of Illinois whose main job is going to be finding a way to keep the United States just that: united. One nation.  Still here.  Continuing to exist. Part of a world community of nations.  On an Earth that we may (but only may) be able to pull back from the brink of climaticide if we act quickly, deftly, and seriously enough.  Nation and world wounded, in critical condition, but recovering, gaining strength all the time.

I can only hope so.  

And excuse me while I continue to worry.

It’s Been Far Too Long

This morning, thanks to diarist greendem on DailyKos, I watched Pete Seeger, along with Pete’s grandson and Bruce Springsteen, lead the crowd at the Lincoln Memorial on Sunday in singing “This Land is Your Land.”  Pete fed the crowd the words, as he has done so many times before, and the crowd and the choir sang along.

I had listened to Pete and to the Weavers as I was growing up in the late 40′s and the early 50′s.  At one point, their music was “top of the pops” — Goodnight Irene, to name just one, got lots of airplay on commercial AM radio stations.  I love Pete Seeger, as a musician and as a human being, for what he has done to help this country and its great land.

Over the years, I began to think that in my younger days I had heard and sung “This Land is Your Land”  maybe one or two too many times. Familiarity bred undeserved boredom, alas. Of course, the version I knew was the “pretty” one about the natural wonders of this country — not to be undervalued — but after a while, it was easy to think of it as “that old song.”  

I also didn’t realize there were “other” verses to the song. (H’mm.  Pause for thought.)

But it’s been a long, long time since the days when I heard that song.  And, since those years, President Kennedy, Dr. King, and Senator Bobby Kennedy were assassinated; the cold war got colder and then backed off gradually; life got harder and harder in this country for working people, with very few reversals in the trend. Above all, the country didn’t feel like mine at all, but as though its governing powers moved on, without regard to what citizens and voters wanted; and the old songs had been heard no more, at least not on mainstream media. 

Pete Seeger has never stopped doing what he believes in — check here for details — and I remember well his successful campaign to get the Hudson River cleaned up, when I still lived in the Northeast.  He doesn’t seem to have forgotten how this land is his land, too, and has taken many citizen actions in its support, not least continuing to play his music everywhere and as often as he can.

I hadn’t watched the celebration program on Sunday, so when I saw greendem’s diary post this morning, I sat down with my headphones on to listen to Pete and the others sing with the crowd, introduced by Bruce Springsteen.  I thought not much more about it than that, a chance to see the great Pete again, a personal hero in action, still going strong.

And to my amazement, partway through, I found myself in tears. Not out of nostalgia. No, for the first time in way too long, with Obama’s inauguration imminent, after so many, many years, I actually felt that this land was once again my land, too.  Thank you, Barack Obama, candidate, and thank you Howard Dean, for your 50-state strategy, and thank you, DailyKos, for your help organizing support for candidates and getting out the vote, and keeping the facts, the polls, and the news coming, and thanks to the voters of America who voted for Barack Obama, so that we can have a President Obama being sworn in tomorrow, one who’s willing to listen and who can act with brains, savvy, grace and despatch — and a huge popular mandate! And thank you, Pete Seeger, for convincing me once more, after a very long dry spell, of the truth penned by Woody Guthrie, that this land is my land, too.  It’s been a long, long time, too long, since I felt that way.

Earth Impact Factor

 

I think what would be really helpful would be an Earth Impact Factor.  

 

We already have a wind-chill factor, routinely provided along with temperature, humidity and other weather information, which takes into account the effect of the wind on how cold we are likely to feel outdoors, and therefore alerts us as to what we should wear if we go out in the weather. 

 

We have energy-saver information on appliances such as refrigerators and water heaters, rating how energy-efficient they are in terms of power costs.

 

We have mandated labels on food products, indicating ingredients and serving size, and enumerating weights and percentages of nutritional elements along with their percentage of a standard daily caloric intake.  That makes it possible for a careful consumer to understand better just what is being consumed, and estimate its impact on one’s diet.

 

An Earth Impact Factor would alert us to the environmental impact/recovery cost of using a particular product.  What are we to make of the contradictory claims about the new lower-power bulbs?  Using the bulbs takes less power than the older tungsten type to produce the same or nearly the same brightness.  The new bulbs are more expensive than the old, but last longer than ordinary tungsten ones.  The new bulbs contain mercury, and there is some question about how to dispose of them safely; they also contain many more parts than the older ones, and some claim they are more difficult to recycle.  When a new-type bulb burns out, how should one dispose of it? And what happens if one is smashed accidentally?  Is it safe to handle the shards?  To use a vacuum cleaner to pick them up?  (For a discussion of these and other points, see the article “Low Energy Bulb Disposal Warning.”)  Knowing the true cost of all this, and having it expressed as a number or a range or a series of numbers (e.g., 5 on consumer price, 7 on longevity, 2 on disposability and recovery of parts, or some such) and being able to compare to a similar set of figures for the older type would be really helpful.

  

Why bother?  Because right now, everyone is carrying on pretty much as usual, with only minor changes from what has become our usual practices over the years.  We’re now starting to recycle as well as dump (at least, we hope all that stuff that goes out in the ‘recycle’ bin is really recycled).  We’re starting to see (at last!) more fuel-efficient cars.  But does all this mean more than just making ourselves feel better by arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic? We’ll never know till we start getting better facts about how we live and what it’s costing us: the Earth.

 

We have no real way of telling on a daily basis what the actual impact is, on the environment, on resource use, etc., of the things we use and the things we do.  Without some kind of standard being set up and applied to things we buy, we will likely never know until too late.

 

So I address this to some smart people out there, whoever you are, sitting around wondering what can or should be done to help us dig out of the mess we’re putting ourselves into every day:  information can leverage power.  Figure out what costs and impacts to include in such a factor, and how to calculate it for specific types of products, and how to get the info to consumers (labeling? web sites using Java? create an Institute for standard Earth Impact Factor assignments)?  What about it?  Who’s up for the task?

Night Watch

I’ve discovered something really nifty: my picture window really is a picture as well as a window — i.e., the view in it is changing in many ways, all the time, a kind of passing show. Not just seasonal changes, but changes of day and night, for instance. Dusk and dawn have turned into amazing, wonderful pageants. I have a large window in a larger room, so the view through the window differs greatly, depending where you’re sitting to look out.

My view is near, but not right on, a street that’s fairly busy (but not completely hectic) with car and the occasional bus traffic — no heavy trucks, though, nothing more than a delivery van now and then. I’m far enough away that neither noise nor odor are factors, yet near enough to see the street past a yard and through trees and shrubs, and past the end of a smaller, very quiet street. The picture in the window is present and yet distant, here and yet there, ever-changing, always of interest.

My cats know a good thing when they see one; they love to have the curtains open and sit in front of the window and look out. The window is really three large sections of a well-sealed sliding door installation, so they can sit on the nice warm rug while looking out. They look out when it’s dark and when it’s light, unless they are engaged in napping, grooming, or some other cat activity. In the summer, when the sun beats down onto the south-facing window and both sets of curtains are closed against it, the cats turn to other windows in the house, each with different but only slightly more lmited views — or they decide it’s time to catch some rays and sit between the curtain and the window in the sun, letting their backs toast while they curl up with eyes and paws away from the light.

My favorites, though, are the dawn and dusk transitions. The two vertical frames around the door, some nearby trees, and three relatively distant streetlights form strong verticals against the angled horizontals of the streets and the paths of the cars. As dusk falls, evening departures from the airport on the other side of the city rise over the trees that screen the opposite side of the busier street, slowly, blinking, like fireflies. White headlights and red taillights assume greater importance as the sunlight wanes. The cars come in bunches, brought together by traffic lights far enough away from me that I notice only this artifact of their working.

More light fades, and the streetlights come on. There’s a small orangy one on my side street, and two not-much-larger whitey-purple ones with overtones of green on the busier street. But they are all far enough away that none of them overwhelms the feeling of calm darkening beauty that is overtaking the scene. The larger streetlights cast small pools of light downward as well as glowing themselves, but the light is not strong enough to dispel the dusk, merely to mark spots here and there for those travelling through it.

And now the darkness is nearly complete, the airplanes have stopped rising (look, there’s one now; perhaps that is the last for the evening). The cars move through in smaller, occasional little groups, the time between them increasing. A little longer and we are down to only two or three cars at a time, then to one now and again at long intervals. Finally it is fully dark, and seeing the lights of such a single car, when one appears, is an event as showy as fireworks.

This whole transition has not taken long, as humans consider how long is long when they think of time passing. Depending on the time of year, day changes to night at different times of day. When days are shorter, bursts of cars continue through the dark longer, because the end of the workday is already dark and homeward bound traffic is at its peak. When days are longer, most of the rush has already taken place before the sun is near the horizon and the change to darkness has become perceptible.

The whole thing is beautiful, calm, quiet. Sitting through it gives time for reflection, or no reflection, just watching, a way to clear the mind of thoughts and just be for a while.

I can’t begin to tell you how good that feels, and how much I look forward to enjoying it every single day.

Pleasures of the Day

It’s not quite 11 am yet, and I’ve already had some significant pleasures today. First, I stopped at the public library in my town, a well-equipped suburban library with excellent collections and helpful staff. It is both independent of and cooperative with the nearby much larger city library, and I benefitted from the arrangement by calling in my interlibrary loan photocopy requests the day before. I went in to the Reference Department, received my big-city photocopy, and made my locally-held journal photocopy, in a pleasant, well-stocked reference room complete with wi-fi and quietly declaring itself a game-free zone.

I walked out of there helped, and valued, and validated, and with a good idea of where I could go to work quietly on my computer with a much wider range of reference tools than I have here at home.

Second pleasure: Mineolas. Mineolas are a cross between tangerines and grapefruits and are juicy, sweet enough and yet not insipid, peel easily (like a tangerine), and have no seeds. How do they do that?

Anyway, mineolas are delicious, and only available about this time of year, from now through March or so. Yum. As soon as I had refrigerated the perishables, I had two mineolas. Great stuff. Maybe I’ll go have another right now!

OK, update from later: Asiago bread with cream cheese and coarsely ground pepper. Also sneaky Pete treat: Asiago bread with cream cheese and real marmalade made with bitter oranges, just a little. Grows on you.

Autumn Nocturne

I’m sitting at my living room window, that looks out onto the side lawn, a sea of an amazing varieties of greens, varied only here and there by browns and tans of ground and a small patio. At this point everything is wet, as it has been raining very lightly all day long. It’s not a drnching rain; squirrels and chipmunks have been running around. it’s the first real day of fall this year, regardless of what the almanac says.

All the leaves I can see are that deep, darkish green that deciduous leaves attain by the ent of their season, just before they turn. As I woke up and looked out this morning, I said to myself that if I looked really closely, near where the maple leaves brush the top of the wall, and in the heart of the tulip tree, I could see the impulse to turn. And sure enough, in the tulip tree, when I looked more closely, it was not just an impulse. There were six lemon-yellow leaves right above the heart of the tree.

Right now it’s a lingering twilight, but I can’t bring myself to close the curtains, although it’s dim enough that I’ve turned on a light here and there inside the house — but not where the light would interfere with the glorious scenic twilight outside my windows. The light is really starting to go quite fast now, and the color and life is slowly draining away from the scene, but it’s been, in its own quiet, sumptuous way so richly beautiful that even at the end of the day there’s a tremendous amount of vibrant color. What an absolutely glorious day!

Today has had two of my favorite things: the feel of autumn, and a very mild rain. This has meant that the light of the whole day, until right now as it fades, has been pretty steadily of one brightness, and also directionless behind the thick cloudcover. The day has felt, while it lasted, eternal, in its own inevitably temporal way, because the usual changes of light direction and intensity — and my usual coping strategies of opening and closing curtains or windows to moderate and block out the summer heat — did not apply today. It’s not the raininess or cloudiness that makes it autumn — we have days like that in full summer, too — it’s a difference in the light itself, somehow, and the cloudiness of today made it visible. It didn’t get lost in the brightness of a southern exposure on a sunny day.

First real day of fall. Autumn melancholy. How bittersweet it is, a subtle, sophisticated flavor, an acquired taste.