It’s after midnight in America. Well, in my part of it anyway. Woke up for the necessaries and then didn’t drift back to sleep. Sometimes chasing the mental rabbits down their holes leads to the same underground thought-tunnels, though. The hobbit-forming thoughts. Missing community never lived in, except in the mind and dreams — leads me to think of the loving celebrations and family meals I’ve had in the past. Forgive me for missing those family and friends who shared the first-ever readings of Tolkien’s creations in the U.S.A. We were not alone, and now there are millions of us. Reading the big books without seeing any big movies first shaped us in elemental ways.
I think we identified with the hobbits — people loving food and drink, parties and gossip, and enjoying sharing word of a touch of scandal that wasn’t TOO scandalous — all unfolding and intertwining and entertaining us in the middle of a community that had existed for generations. Even as we may have aspired to be Aragorn, or Galadriel — or Gandalf — in the grand globe-spanning adventures, we knew we would like being hobbits, sleeping in our safe, comfy burrows in our small towns, towns nestled in farmlands and vineyards. We were not too far from misty mountains we didn’t need to visit, but could view over the trees, and having waterways and roads that went to foreign places, down which goods and news would come to us.
For generations, the books said, they had lived thus in relative peace and sufficiency. There was no homeless-hobbit problem in the first part of the tales. We could feel that they honored their elders, and gave appropriate attention to the ill. If fate orphaned any child there would have been rescue by the town. They rallied for each other in emergencies like fires, or floods.
For my generation, there was a back-to-the-land movement flowing out of the Vietnam War and the urban riots, the assassinations and deprivations of the 1960s, when there was briefly an official attempt by a US President (Lyndon Johnson) at leading the US to become a Great Society. Even Dick Nixon did not try to undo that. Dick went further in so many areas, especially giving us the Environmental Protection Agency.
Along with looking for idyllic living along less-traveled roads, being responsible for our own food, we looked for communities to dwell in, at least mentally. The 1950s Bohemians and beatniks offered some unbuttoned thoughts to get lost in. We had new young elders, too, folk musicians among them. We could sing the songs without buying a lot of stuff, though in the 1960s guitar sales must have quintupled. Flute sales, too. Peter, Paul and Mary, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Buffy Sainte Marie, so many others, gave us our first round of truly powerful folk songs. Now we are out of the habit of asking, “Where have all the flowers gone?” It is our question to ask again. Now Bob Dylan’s most searing song bites anew — we all owe a fresh listen and sharing of “Masters of War” in 2022, when fresh climate catastrophes all over the globe have us looking at those who have “thrown the worst fear that can ever be hurled — fear to bring children into the world.
And that’s the thing — we have entered the era of great grieving. Just as there have never been so many people living on this planet, never have so many faced so much potential suffering and death in such large numbers. This time, our oceans will not protect us from the death that rains from the skies — it won’t be bombs, it will be massively flooding actual rains. Too much rain in some places, far too little in others.
In this era of great grieving, many will be hugely uncertain what to do. We need sharing and caring, without regard to politics. The Catholic Workers and Food Not Bombs feed everyone who comes to the table, until they run out of food. Wavy Gravy and his cohort modeled what could be done, bringing the food and medicine to the celebrations out in the woods. I like to think World Central Kitchen may have picked up a psychic spark and some ideas from those old bus riding gypsies bringing the bread to the masses. There are a lot of other groups like these, they sprout in the right conditions, like mushrooms on decaying matter. A lot of America is in decay.
Look into Stephen Gaskin and The Farm, so many hippies sharing a joint, a tab or a ‘shroom, and blooming new consciousness and new consciences, sharing rides and sharing a lot of loving. Girls had orgasms that their mothers would never have admitted to. Guys stopped cutting their hair short and resisted being forced to do it. Girls stopped wearing bras specifically as a cultural, political and social statement.
The weight of American institutions came crashing down against the nonconformity wherever it could. What the governments couldn’t legislate away, the corporations co-opted, moneytized, mass-produced and used ever more sophisticated advertising to sell back to us. We were tempted to purchase nostalgia for the hippie life we could never actually afford to live in, except rarely and briefly for some. Remember when San Francisco had a Summer of Love? Remember when Greenwich Village was full of folk musicians who shared apartments in rent-controlled buildings? Remember when intentional communities and co-op stores found the ways opening up, founded themselves, found ads and sustenance through the Whole Earth Catalog, out there in Rural America?
But this is the era of the Great Grieving, in this is the start of our summer of 2022. For all of us, this is the time when we learn that new variants are sliding past the defenses of vaccinations and prior infections and will sicken millions of us this year, many falling ill all over again, in this as yet unended pandemic. There are so many calamities. Sure it is worse to be in Ukraine in this kind of heat with war and the pandemic there. Why exactly are our tax dollars more needed there than here, where over millions of households have COVID losses to address? The anxiety, tiredness and sadness are palpable. “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold,” William Butler Yeats wrote prophetically. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. ...”
Never in our lives, or the lives of our children, or the lifetimes of our grandchildren, will the parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere fall enough to undo what humanity has now done. The fateful number is a monthly average of over 420 ppm. We are now dwelling in an atmosphere Earth has not had for us in literally millions of years. It Is Getting Hot In Here. Nina Simone said it, “… I run to the sea, It was boilin’, all on that day.”
The time has come for Organized Sorrow, public grieving, the seeking of communal comfort (as pandemic rules may allow, of course). Get together and ask your elected leaders, your representatives and commissioners, what their plans are for the sharing of resources are? Will their plans and policies change when calamity truly comes for where you live? When too few young adults really qualify for or want to be police or jailers? When working in the fields or on a roof too far into an afternoon can be a death sentence from the heat? And here in the American South, when there are too few people seeking to be professional public school teachers, or healthcare workers, or CNAs to keep open our overwhelmed nursing homes, full of the elders America doesn’t honor? What if our young don’t want to graduate into debt and struggle all their lives to start families? Shouldn’t we as a nation offer all the birth control free as possible, so that at least loving will offer solace without unintended consequences, unintended new people? Shouldn’t that be backed up with a very libertarian ideal system, where any woman can go to her doctor for a private, safe, legal abortion as long as the doctor determines that the pregnancy is still in fetus form? Shouldn’t we tell our young that war isn’t video games, real civilians disproportionately suffer and die overseas from decisions made in America, so our young don’t decide to become the last generation of drone pilots before the artificial intelligences take over the flying and targeting. And I refuse to believe any mother raises a child hoping he or she would become a Guantanamo prison guard, working in a place that Amnesty International and so many nations condemn as massively violating human rights.
Democrats offer us more hope — at least they will support federal funds to address problems, while Republicans are still trying to squeeze the last dollar for their campaigns out of those who are squeezing the last dollars out of us. Stacy Abrams may be a saint, but she is actually up against those who build the big guns and launch the Hellfire missiles from our drones overseas, those who profit from making gasoline ever more expensive even as they labor to persuade millions of us to buy pickup trucks, those who want insulin and so many medicines too damn expensive. Why are we allowing TV ads for pickup trucks?! Why aren’t there affordable electric cars? Same reason new houses don’t all come with home batteries and solar energy panels. It requires changing our systems, which requires changing our thinking.
Me, I like Indivisible, and I always complete it - “with Liberty and Justice for all.” All our leaders need to be asked about the facts of petroleum pollution, “particulate matter” in the air, our neural networks under chemical siege for profits. Now we know, there is no “away” to throw anything into, not if it will end up in our water, our food, our air. These gas appliances are crippling our kids, these snorting highway beasts are making so many adults sicken as they age, and literally shorten our lives.
Resist, and now I’m including all of us — resist extinction for yourself and your offspring. Hell, rebel against it, get going with your own version of Extinction Rebellion. Resist owing money to the faceless rentiers and profiteers of our insufficiently regulated allegedly capitalist society. Demand public dollars only purchase electric vehicles. Demand our power grids include more local nodes that can be selfsufficient with their own solar and batteries.
Join a union, or start your own work association. Get your stuff at unionized shops. Go to parties with music with messages. Listen to Beau. Listen to Stacy. Listen to Robin Kimmerer. Listen to Dr. Carolyn Orr. Listen to John Oliver and Michael Moore. Ask the tough questions in the high places, and go there with friends when you do. Talk with your neighbors about how hot it is, how dreadful particulate matter in the air is, whether smoke, smoke, exhaust, your gas stove. Fret out loud about how bad the next storms may be, and wonder out loud about what we can do to prepare.
Share wisdom, whenever you find some of it.