Allocating for the Essentials

One of the most fascinating things to have emerged from the Coronavirus crisis is the distinction between "essential" and "non-essential" work. Distinguishing between the two has been a fascinating exercise that America as a society has not taken on since WWII, and it shows.

Americans have become somewhat used to coexisting with a dangerous virus, but the shutdowns that began with California and New York prompted some valuable insights: some elements of society can't be shut down. Everyone has to eat. Most Americans get their food from supermarkets. Those are clearly essential. Everyone is going to drink water and poop, so water utilities are essential.

After that it gets a little more complicated to parse out what really is essential and what isn't. Supermarkets get their food from farms (yes there are intermediate steps but no I don't care to list them out). Given the agricultural sector's reliance on undocumented migrant labor, this creates the jarring reality of labeling the same immigrants that are often scapegoated for America's ills as essential. Highly uncomfortable, if you ask me. Electric and gas utilities are essential as well - for now.

One can go on and on, but the point is that labels now exist. Some of us are essential and some of us are not.

I remember when I was a resident advisor in college, a boss had us complete an exercise where we were asked to list our top ten priorities in life and also the top ten activities we spent the most time on. If they didn't line up, he encouraged us to reevaluate how we were spending our time. I'm willing to overlook our other disagreements on what my particular responsibilities as an RA were for that gem of an exercise.

Because of the coronavirus, we have been reminded what is essential and what is not. But we have not yet re-allocated our resources to reflect this new awareness. The non-essential workers who tap their keyboards (myself included) frequently make more than the essential workers who feed and clean up for human society.

Now is the time to have discussions about how to direct resources back to the essential laborers that support our society. Those resources will include capital but also decision-making authority. Some of it will have to end up in undocumented laborers, as well. I don't know what this process will look like, but if we continue to funnel resources away from essential workers, I predict an unpleasant future. Removing the supports of a building always ends poorly for the building.

Intentional Cruelty with a Side of Ignorance

Another Fourth of July in a country that continues to take every chance to insult the ghosts that haunt it. President Trump decided to give his remarks on stolen land in the Black Hills. The federal government installed an enormous sound system at the site and regularly blares patriotic music to drown out the sounds of the hills. This year, someone in event planning chose to play the tune "Garryowen," an obscure Irish drinking song that has not recently cracked the top 40.

This song has been played before in the Black Hills. It was the battle song for Custer's 7th Cavalry. A favorite of Custer's, it was played many times, notably to signal the attack before he massacred women and children. There's plenty of information on the usage of the song here that I don't want to repeat, but one thing I will note is that the descendants of the 7th cavalry and the Cheyenne agreed to retire the song and never play it again.

This Trump administration is spiteful in its racism and informed by history. Pulling an obscure and retired song from the annals of history to play at a celebration of America is a malicious act. This is an America that hasn't given up on its dream of slaughtering Native American women and children (one that is mostly content to simply let them be slaughtered these days) and will unearth ancient symbols to reveal its intent to the initiated.

Spiteful and racist? Yes. Also stupid. I won't listen to this haunted song, but it's easy enough to pull up the song's history on Wikipedia and elsewhere. Who would have guessed the chorus:

Instead of spa, we'll drink brown ale
And pay the reckoning on the nail;
No man for debt shall go to jail
From Garryowen in glory.

We'll beat the bailiffs out of fun,
We'll make the mayor and sheriffs run
We are the boys no man dares dun*
If he regards a whole skin.
*v. to make repeated and insistent demands upon, especially for the payment of a debt.

Friends, you heard it here first. The Trump administration condones not paying debts, making mayors and sherriffs run, and never going to jail. Act accordingly.

Wiping Bad Graffiti Clean

If you have the owner's permission and cover a wall with high school representations of your junk, you can call it a mural. It stays there as long as the owner desires.

If you don't have the owner's permission and you paint something so great that zombie Michelangelo looks at it and calls it the Seventeenth Chapel*, it's graffiti. The owner can wipe that masterpiece off with paint thinner tomorrow.
*I know.

Sorry, I don't make the rules. When it comes to forming distinctions between public art and graffiti, as long as we hold private property dear, the only distinction between the two is whether or not the owner says it's allowed.

Which brings me to the biggest lump of sculptural-graffiti I know of: Mount Rushmore. In a spirit of full disclosure, I should add that I've been. I found it very unsettling, and the din of American flag music didn't drown out what I can only describe as the palpable energy of the place. I also took a picture shortly after the days when face-swap was what the cool kids were doing and left with this result:

Faces like this don't belong on these mountains. It's bad.

To be clear, my face doesn't belong on the mountain. But then again, none of the four faces up there do. They are graffiti art, and the land's owners are entitled to remove them. Those owners are the Sioux Nation of Indians.

I don't say this to be provocative: the land on which Mount Rushmore rests legally belongs to the Lakota people. This is not about whether or not the land is sacred, because that is not what I as a white person can talk about. This is strictly about whether or not this land belongs to White people, because I keep hearing how important the value of private property is to my White brothers and sisters. 

Land ownership requires contracts; as the United States of America expanded into North America, the Federal government entered into binding treaties with the people who lived here. Those are the legal contracts that govern land ownership in this country; trace a deed back long enough and it needs to come from a treaty in which the federal government "legally" took ownership of what is now known as the USA. Maybe we purchased the deed from another European power recovering from the Napoleonic wars, for example, but those deeds came with their own previous treaties that were transferred.

The land on which Mount Rushmore was carved are subject to the Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1868, a treaty signed between the Sioux People and the US government. The US and tribal representatives agreed that this land was to be given to the Lakota. Of course, this treaty was signed before the word got out that there was gold in the hills, so gold prospectors quickly began violating the agreement and then demanding the protection of the US Army when they were met with resistance.

Imagine if a burglar were to come into your house and start going through your valuables. You can try to chase the burglar out or kill them, but if you do, the burglar will call the police, who will come fight you! That is exactly what happened, and while the Sioux managed to rid the earth of General Custer, they eventually lost the war and the US government annexed the land (unilaterally, no treaty) in 1877.

Now, suppose you see a man walk up to a car at a red light, smash the window, pull the driver out of the seat, get in, make a U-turn, roll down the window as he pulls up next to you and asks "Hey, wanna buy this car? $5 or a another gallon of PCP and it's yours!" Even though you and he may agree to the transaction, that car is not legally yours, no matter if the PCP (or $5) exchanged hands! That's my understanding of the law, and it comes with the disclaimer that I'm no lawyer but it makes sense to me.

In real life, if you steal land, it doesn't matter who you give permission to do what, that is not your permission to give. Sure, maybe whoever that weirdo guy who thought blowing up rocks to make them look like humans was connected to the klan, but that doesn't make a difference to me. I want to know if he had the owner's permission.

Also of note here, the fact that this is stolen land isn't even contested. In 1980, the supreme court ruled that yes, the land is Sioux, and they are entitled to compensation for it - but twist, they have refused the millions and just want the land back.

Expect to hear more of this - as the president highlights the tensions surrounding this land for the fourth of July, I expect to see this compared to the movement to tear down statues of confederate heros, but don't be fooled: these are separate issues. How America chooses to remember its own history on public land ceded to the US government is its own problem. The only resolution to this illegal graffiti is to give the original owners the rights to the land back.

Bountygate is the Gig Economy

Our political contestants rolled the wheel of scandal again this week and turned up "Bounty-gate," the most recent scandal to launch the nation into a frenzy of tweets, media coverage, outrage and total inactivity. If you have been successfully hiding under a rock for the past week, A) I'm jealous, and B) to catch you up, the whole premise is that Russia likely offered a bounty on American soldiers. Politicians on both sides of the metaphorical aisle are now very, very upset that the US troops occupying a foreign country might be targets of intentional violence.

You who thought comedy is dead are wrong - this entire situation is peak American comedy. Let's unravel.

First, we have a standing Army. America literally has an entire group citizens (and non-citizens who want to become citizens if Uncle Sam isn't feeling racist this administration) who we arm with the most deadly weapons ever developed in human history and send across the globe. Granted, their compensation isn't tied to killing citizens of other countries, but that doesn't stop them from doing so.

Second, we are Americans, and we believe in the free market (so I'm told). It's great that we want to provide a regular salary (and housing) to active members of our military,  GI benefits like free college after troops leave the military intact or a wide array of mismanaged health care options to our damaged veterans, but please, not every country can afford such employee benefits. If other countries want to transform their incentive structure into a pay-for-performance model, that just mean that American ideals and business models have proliferated across the globe. Perhaps Uber could provide the notification and payment system to lower the bounty program's administrative costs.

Furthermore, for a country that prides itself on its own willingness to fight, this is silly. Paying people to fight is just the business of war, and anyone can do it at any time because there's always someone who will fight for cash (even if many chose to do this for free - dirty communists). Ancient Greece fell apart because of the Peloponnesian War, a 30 year struggle between Athens and Sparta that had something to do with empire building. While Greeks were fighting, Persia was busy supplying mercenaries to whichever side was losing - a great tactic to weaken their enemy by getting the war to drag on indefinitely. It worked. Who are we to begrudge the Russians for learning from history? At least America has the moral high-ground, correct?

No. We also use mercenaries. Remember Blackwater? Personally, I think that's a great name for an amoral group of for-profit killers. It sounds so nefarious!*. America relied heavily on their services to  protect critical personnel, paying them hefty sums to make sure American diplomats and our preferred Iraqis stayed safe. Given how cheap ammunition is and how significant the bonuses were, Blackwater interpreted their own incentive structure correctly and relied on a "shoot first, only ask questions if there's an investigation after the fact and try to give misleading answers" approach. You'd think that this would have landed them in hot water after they massacred civilians, but no, all that happened is the founder's sister landed a sweet gig as the Secretary of Education and Erik Prince whispers into Trump's ear from behind the throne.
*Probably why they changed the name to "Academi," which sounds like a college chapter of young Republican chodes.

America can't even pretend that this sort of behavior is something we would never stoop to. We've offered bounties - oh yes. Multiple times in our country's history, states offered bounties on Native American scalps. In 1863, Minnesota offered a bounty of $200 to civilians who brought in Dakota scalps. In 1851, the liberal bastion state of California offered a bounty to kill the Native tribes, worried that they threatened to stem the flow of gold out of the state.The state armed militias and let them wander off to clear the land. California spent $1.7 million (in 1850s dollars!!!) to murder 16,000 Natives. Very normal, non-genocidal behavior.

It didn't stop there. This is hopefully not new knowledge to you, but meat used to be free in America. Estimates of historical populations of bison range from 30 to 60 million (compare that to today's intensive production of cattle which is approximately 95 million head, but the environmental cost of that increase is astronomical, and also you need to pay for them). Rather than allow a free source of protein to continue to exist, the US government offered a bounty on bison. Brave Civil War hero Ulysses S. Grant considered the elimination of bison a solution to the "Indian Problem." The military offered a bounty on the skulls.It worked, and the people who relied on these magnificent animals were starved into submission.

American Exceptionalism (in cruelty)

Which brings us back to today, when empty bodies inside suit jackets with decorative silk nooses wrapped around their necks feign outrage over other counties offering bounties on our innocent soldiers.

Cry me a river that restores this land to its former glory.

Slicing Through the Budget with Occam's Razor

Ah summer. The birds are back, the bees are back, the birds and the bees are back - life thrives. Even New York City is in the middle of its annual mating dance where council members, the Mayor and his jester (technically the same position in this administration) waggle their arms at each other and discuss how to get rid of taxpayer dollars left over from the Macy's explosion party. Truly, love is in the air.

Today, my community garden received a request. This year's ritual has attracted a new competitor, a group of tax-payers/city-employees/ "protestors" (the plebescite? Can I use that word?) have occupied the space outside City Hall and are demanding at least $1 billion reduction in Police funding (yes, please!). While staying on site, these people are generating food scraps and reached out to the garden to ask if we could accept their compost. Because we are not the City of New York and still understand that composting is an essential service that can be done safely and while maintaining social distance, the answer is yes, we can, but we also have concerns about their ability to sort food before delivery.

As some background, one of the challenges of implementing any sort of organics collection program is educaitng the people who use the service as to what can and cannot go into the collection bin. Some of you may have heard of places that don't compost meat and dairy; others may be used to tossing everything into a bin that is picked up and taken to a facility that can break down that material. Being on the smaller side, our garden requires that anyone who sends us their food scraps keep meat and dairy out of the bins.

Technically, someone could still can send us things that we can't compost, but if they do, we need to go through it and pick it out by hand. Today I picked out an aluminum can from our compost collection site (editors note: aluminum is not recyclable).  That said, the Occupy City Hall group schedules regular lessons to educate the crowd on a variety of subject matters; it wouldn't be hard create a quick lesson and explain how we process compost and why and then arrange a service to pick up from the site and process at our garden.

Which leads me to my next question: Why is New York City so laughably bad at anything involving community building? I mean, really, we're terrible at it. We have a great library for research, yes, but not so much for organizing. Branch libraries scramble for funding. Community gardens struggle to maintain their space as developers eye their lots. After thinking about it for a bit, I'm starting to suspect no one powerful in New York City really wants strong communities.

Real estate developers don't; tightly networked communities can organize against new development that doesn't serve existing needs in the community. Bad for business. Organize too much and communities might start discussing the fact that 25% percent of New Yorkers skipped their rent in May - if it's 1 out of 4 people who aren't paying rent, why not make it 1 out of 3? Bad for management companies. Organize too much and vacant lots that are being held while real estate companies wait for property to appreciate might start turning into used parks. Bad all around. 

I suppose there are other forces in New York City, but I'll let you stretch your imagination to ask yourself if they would be in support of stronger, more self-sufficient communities.

Self sufficiency is dangerous, but fear not, New York City is far from there. We import our food. We export our sewage sludge for landfills. We borrow renewable energy from Hydropower upstate or in Canada, and what we can't import there, we borrow in the form of carbon that we will ask future generations to pay off. We depend on a network of others who provide us with our needs, and hoo-boy do those others make bank off our city. Which is only fair, given New York's role in extracting the nation's wealth to funnel into its own real estate industry and back to government.

Am I proposing a conspiracy theory* in which the power dealers of New York City sit around each year and discuss how to keep more sufficient communities from forming?
*alternate vocabulary = "coherent explanation"  

Yes. But it doesn't look all that bad. It looks like regular city government, chugging along and spending money on programs that don't have the support of the communities in which they exist. I hope I'm wrong. I hope this city realizes that investing in communities saves resources in the long term as the needs of the communities decrease. Compost is a great example because it's so simple - a community that composts has the ability to produce more of its food, reducing the costs of inputs, and reduces its waste, reducing the costs of landfills. For the price of one functioning outreach program, we save money. I chose to speak about compost because it's what I know, but I don't think we're in a unique situation; other community based programs can likely share similar examples.

Hopefully, new voices asking for these changes will get what they want. It seems simpler, to me. Maybe we can ask Occam what he would do.

Play it Again, Sam [For the Plants]

The feel good viral post of the week seems to be the Barcelona Opera House reopening for a quartet playing to a packed symphony hall... packed with plants! It's so charming that it's impossible not to love. The musicians clad in black, the lush reds and golds of the architecture peeking out behind massive green fronds occupying every seat make for a beautiful series of photographs that acknowledge how different the world has become since covid began to turn off various switches connected to our society. These musicians have spent lifetimes training to play beautiful music, each performance requiring countless hours of human striving before it drifts into the ears of their audience in normal circumstances; these days washing over plants.

I, too, make noises for my houseplants. I speak to them when I water them, asking how they are feeling while I gently feel their leaves to gauge their thirst. I see no reason to think they don't hear everything I  say, even if I doubt they care about any of the contents of the conversations I have. Like many houseplant owners, I am convinced that my green friends appreciate the nice things I try to do for them.

How odd that the photos of the Barcelona symphony didn't move me. For reasons then unknown, I reacted to the photos with complete indifference, and to be honest, I didn't even click them to get a closer look. Fortunately, either the universe is ordered or coincidences can be happy. Today, a musician friend posted a recording of the frogs in her backyard.

Do you remember the last time you heard frogs? Aren't they wildly unpredictable and magical sounding, even when you think you know what to expect?  I remember one time I was on a walk around a golf course and a chorus of the strangest miniature organs turned on in surround sound. That same year, I had been going to a church to hear Bach's organ works played regularly. Please do not ask me to choose which I preferred. I rarely hear frogs where I live now; how sad to know my home was certainly once a lush wetland filled with the peeps, urps and rorks of the amphibian chorus.

In search of a conclusion for this article, I looked at the photos. This time, I realized I have a new emotion, the result of the reflection that comes from sharing my thoughts.

I see excitement in the plants, and I share that emotion. What a magnificent and novel gesture this is for western society, to perform our art for plants! I see plants in the audience that acknowledge that humans are ready to try to please them. Iit is time for institutions such as opera houses to ask "what would the plants like?"And I think those plants thought our music was lovely, but I doubt it replaces the music to which they are attuned.

Think again about the music of frogs and insects and birds. Plants once had that ringing in their [whatever passes for plant] ears every evening. We once had that, too. I wish I had it, still. Do you?

We can have it again. The plants certainly will - they will be here long after we erase ourselves from this planet. You and I might not - unless we try very hard to bring the frogs back to where we live.

Remember this - all of those frog sounds you hear are no different than most human songs.The music of frogs is a chorus of frog love songs. Some things never change.

Fireworks for the People

Ah yes, explosions. We all kind of love them (unless you're a dog, asleep, safety conscious, averse to loud noises in general, favor creativity that doesn't involve destruction, etc) enough to go "oooo" and "aaaah" once or twice a year, depending on how warm New Year's Eve is.

Or do we? With so many things to worry about, you'd think we would be ignoring the occasional decorative kaboom, but the news in New York has been awash in fireworks these days.

First, the city fell apart. The budget exploded! As offices shut down and tax revenue plummeted, the city's budget went "poof" in a gaggle of news reports. Vital services were shut down - composting halted, for one - and yet, our leader-in-name-only Bill DeBlasio announced just a month into the shutdown that we had no reason to fear, for the fourth of July festivities would take place as planned! That's right - in a time when the city was hemorrhaging money, the mayor had the fearless vision to just blow some more money up in the sky. You are just a quick google away from finding how much one of these shows might cost, but I'm not going to do all your research for you. Maybe several million dollars worth? But who cares, explosions, right?

New York City got the message! While it's still illegal to throw explosives at cop cars and law enforcement will bring the brunt of the entire legal system to bear on anyone who tries a productive explosion, explosions in the sky are largely ignored!  And as fun as they are, fireworks you can buy will not harm a police car, so it really seems not to bother the police at all (if it did, they would simply run over some pedestrians).

 

And so, New Yorkers hopped into their cars (I assume?), drove to Pennsylvania where you can buy anything, and filled the trunks with explosives before returning to the city to set them all off. Even in my quiet neighborhood I hear the odd pop at the odd hour (kudos to the fellow who stayed up til 4:40 am to blow his load into the sky this morning).

Being New Yorkers, a fair number of us are doing our duty to preserve our reputation and complain about the seemingly random explosions now common in the city. Some even got in cars and drove around the upper east side (close to the home of mystic visionary DeBlasio) and honked their horns, which studies prove is the best way to demonstrate that you understand the optimum usage of cars in this city.

Most recently, in what I can only assume is a cruel joke, DeBlasio announced that the Macy's fireworks wouldn't take place the way that they have in the past (from expensive barges) but rather, from covert locations, unannounced, over the course of a week. That's right - you never know when the sky above your head will combust into fire sprinkles, but instead of some teens who haven't had social interaction for the past few months, it will be a massive retailer setting them off! Good thing the city can still funnel money to those guys.

The truly astonishing thing about this is how clearly this shows how if you want to do something wildly unpopular, the easiest way to do it is to become a corporation. Quite frankly, I don't care about the fireworks one way or another. My pyromania has evolved through several steps from when I was a child and burned leaves with a magnifying glass. In my teenage years, sure, I longed after strings of firecrackers and would try to time them so that I could chuck them into rivers like miniature depth charges. In college I was arrested with a potato cannon (dear employers - all charges were dismissed, because this is not against the law. Also, the police confiscated it, never gave it back, and I guarantee it is in Long Island being used at least once a year). These days, I hope to metaphorically burn our consumer society to the ground, which does not require or benefit from fireworks. But I have spent the past week listening to the mayor promise to crack down on rowdy New Yorkers blowing things up, and now that same deranged tall man who lives in Gracie Mansion is explaining that Macy's is allowed to run amok in the city and blow things up - AND THE CITY WILL PAY THEM.

The only consolation for those of us whose heads are still reeling from the whiplash of this cognitive dissonance is that the NYPD have also stopped caring about cracking down on fireworks because they will not lift a finger to help DeBlasio any more, and who can blame them?

Fortunately, I have a solution to propose for the honest, law abiding citizens of this city: Macy's will blow things up unnanounced and get paid for it. If they are allowed to do so, the citizens of New York should be allowed to take advantage of unannounced sales at Macy's of up to 100% off for up to the full cost of the firework display. No need to have the discount applied at the checkout lane - just walk on out. It seems only fair.