Talking to your picture

Stumps

My neighbor is cutting trees: beech and birch and cedar, spruce and tamarack and ash. It's decimated back there. At first I believed in the sustainability of Maine's forestry initiatives, that the state didn't allow clear-cutting on the scale I've seen in Alabama. But as it wears on, day by day, the endless drone of the chainsaw, a crunch like bone as another tree collapses, the whine of the skitter sullying my Aroostook County quiet, I feel like I'm about to collapse, too.

I'm aware of my hypocrisy. I burn cedar all winter in the wood stove, for heat, and I feel especially hypocritical about it now when it's a bare forty degrees outside and there's a full moon—and still I burn the wood. I don't want to burn diesel in the furnace, I don't want to smell petroleum roasting in my house. I also don't want to start a big fire for little ole me.

But I'm cold. I'm still a hothouse flower, a cutting of jasmine from tropical shores. So I burn the wood that my neighbor next door cuts, if only in a figurative sense—I burn the cast-off wood from the lumber mill the next road over. I don't know where he's taking the trees he's cut that border my road, what he's doing with their carcasses, but there's a good chance I'll end up burning their cast-off ends, too.

I believe in well-managed forests, in biomass energy as one of the few solutions to the carbon crisis, but when it's happening right next to me, when the trees that are feet away from my walking path, are turning into nothing but barren, shuddering corpses... I find it difficult to stomach. Not to be melodramatic or anything. My desk is made from wood. My house, table, chairs. It's just the view of it up close that's so painful, that makes me want to swear off the stuff altogether.

Don’t be sad when it’s time to say good night

Arms

As you may know, if anyone has been following along since I left California, I have encountered a fair share of bad luck, thus assembling a backlog of posts and photographs and energy. I may be back to almost normal now, after a week of prednisone. I did fork over the forty bucks for my pictures, thanks to the financial assistance of some kind familial members. I just couldn’t lose them, and it is nice to know that my family believes in me a bit. At $40 for 200 pictures, that’s twenty cents a piece. Would I have taken fewer pictures or more if I had known?

My steroids have been giving me lots of energy, hence my mass quantities of posts and photograph uploads in the last however many days. I also stayed up until four o’clock in the morning yesterday, finally compiling the first draft of the first five chapters of my novel, a goal I’ve had since January. It may not seem that important, but it was a huge thing for me. I’m considering making it a real goal to finish an entire first draft by the end of summer.

The clinic was an interesting experience, a brush with what works and what doesn’t work with health care in our country. I may have mentioned before how my sister’s public health class studied TennCare (Medicaid in Tennessee) as a case study of everything that’s wrong with our medical system. As someone living well below the poverty level, I applied earlier this year for TennCare and was turned down. The reason being? I’m not pregnant. So if I go down to the corner bar and get knocked up, I get health insurance, but if I make responsible birth-control choices, I don't? How does that make any kind of sense?

I spent about five hours over the course of two days in the waiting room, being shuffled from one nurse to the other. My fellow patients were mainly Chicano families and single, teenaged moms—there for pre- and post-natal visits and breastfeeding classes and check-ups and vitamins. I brought the book that I’ve been reading: David Dark’s The Sacredness of Questioning Everything, and I felt vague guilt about whipping it out. I was the only person reading anything in the waiting room, and it made me feel this odd cognitive disconnect. How is it right for me to have spent all of these financial resources on an expensive Christian education, only to avail myself of services destined for the less privileged? Is it wrong for me to feel guilt about using them? How legitimate are my goals, if they leave me floating at the lowest of income levels?

That being said, the County Department of Health did a great job. They couldn’t get me a visit with a doctor, but found a way for me to sneak in under their female wellness program, which gave the nurse practitioner an opportunity to prescribe generic drugs. And now I’m almost better! So the system worked, and worked well, and I am able to pay the fair price asked. It ended up being exactly what I needed when I needed it: access to an educated caregiver and to drugs, at a cost that made sense.

If I had a full-time job and benefits, access to the same level of care would have cost hundreds of dollars. How is that rational? All I needed was a simple consultation and prescription, not countless tests and follow-up visits and reams of staff paid $30 an hour with millions of dollars of malpractice insurance. There has to be a way to figure out how to pay for what we actually get, and not to keep paying into this nebulous system that perpetuates itself without creating anything of real value, not even true health.

Fingers of smooth mastery

Snow-covered oaks. No, there's not still snow. Did I mention that my camera ate my best pictures?

Yesterday I feel like maybe I wasn't clear enough, at least when I spoke about dominant western culture. I was trying to explore the complex concept of collective guilt. I don't own slaves, I've never owned slaves, but I still believe my race bears responsibility in the larger context of history.

I feel the same way as an American. I don't agree with Osama bin Laden, but I see his point. I always have. If he believes that our empire is not just corrupt, but truly evil, then his war against us is just. We are all equally culpable. There are no innocent bystanders. As the Apostle Paul said, "There is no one righteous. No, not one."

The United States still uses 25% of the world's fossil fuels, for 5% of the world's population. How is that right by anyone's standards? And why? Why is it like that? I don't see how even the most ardent of American capitalist libertarians can justify it. They can say, "life isn't fair," which while true, doesn't answer the larger question. The reason why is because of generation upon generation of injustice. We may be all born equal, but we are not all born with equal opportunities.

Which brings up one of the many things I don't get about the whole health-care debate. What the Republicans are saying is that people who are born into poverty don't deserve the same treatment options as people who are born into wealth. If that's what they really believe, then fine. I just wish they would say it out loud.

And I understand the rage that people of the underclasses feel at that kind of injustice. I can't understand it really, not how it feels from inside, but I've seen horrible, horrible things in the cities of Manila, Calcutta, Bangkok, Dhaka, and in the outlying provinces of their countries. I feel occasional despair at the lack of options for someone of my nationality, education, social class, and with my career goals. I can only imagine how it must feel for someone without my advantages, but with a wife and hungry children.

I can understand how that rage can manifest itself as theft, violence, and even rape. Especially if we accept that rape is an act of violence, an act of war, as it’s being used in Congo, and not a sexual act at all. At a certain point, if people feel powerless enough, they will find any way they can to take violent action against the people they believe are perpetrators. My point being that crime, especially in developing countries, often isn't aimed at the victims of the crime. It's aimed at us, white Americans, imperialists and post-imperialists, colonialists and post-colonialists. It's impotent rage aimed at the climate that continues to shift in such a way as to imperil even further the livelihood of the poorest countries. All while it enriches the richest countries, making their land and crops more fertile as they warm.

I felt it in the Bahamas. Bahamians make their living from tourism, and especially in the islands closer to Florida, I could feel anger simmering under the surface. Americans come over and spend their money, fill their million-dollar boats with hundreds of gallons of gas, stock their freezers with conch and lobster and fifty-year-old grouper. We heard stories of the harbors that had been completely emptied by scuba-tank-wearing American divers, harbors that before had kept their population-bearing stock because of the natural limitations of unassisted diving. That’s just a quick snapshot of our attitude towards one neighboring country, but that's what we're systematically doing worldwide. As Bono said, "See the tuna fleets clearing the seas out..."

I'm not saying violence is a valid, or even an effective, response. Reading my book about the French Revolution certainly proved that point. Almost every step of the French Revolution was initiated by poor women who couldn't afford bread for their children, and were furious about the ridiculous wealth flaunted in their faces. But what happened every step of the way? A new group of rich people took power, and the poor continued to starve.

We're the aristocrats now, with our SUVs and our 2000-square-foot houses, and our continued cycle of consumption and waste. We've just distanced ourselves from our underclass, so they can't rise up among us and cut off our heads. We still keep slaves--they're just on the other side of the world. In some ways, our current economic crisis is just an indicator of the larger global problem of inequity. What have we been living on all these years? Other people’s money.

If our underclass united against us, if they channeled their rage into something other than random violence, they'd be able to bring down our tottering empire, no problem. Things could get a lot more apocalyptic than they are already.

He’ll stop the next war

Sophia looks to heaven

My current source of stress is an article I’m writing about American perceptions of poverty. I’m having a really hard time with it. I don’t know how much I have to say about poverty. I do believe that after growing up in the vast, dirty necropolises of Bangkok and Manila that I have a better conception of what global poverty really means than the average American. I believe that much of my angst and uncertainty and depression, and that of my brother and sister and fellow missionary kids, is due to having experienced the reality of suffering around the world. I also believe that almost all Americans don’t want to hear about it.

We learn this lesson young, as missionary kids. We learn to stifle our knowledge, to stuff it down, to become chameleons, able to adapt to the culture we’re surrounded by and ignore all of our previous knowledge. We learn that American kids don’t want to hear about Thai kids. We learn that Thai kids don’t want to know what America is like, don’t want to hear us brag about all of the fancy stuff we’ve seen. We learn that the lines that separate the poor from the rich are very distinct, and we learn that we’re on one side of the line in one country and another in the other.

I didn’t choose this topic. It was chosen for me, by an editor. I’m realizing why many writers have problems being given assignments. While the subject is close to my heart, it’s almost too close--so close that I have a tough time writing objective sentences. Poverty IS suffering. Poverty is what’s wrong with the world. And poverty is our fault. Poverty is MY fault. I also know those are not helpful ways to think about it, and that, in order to deal with poverty, I have to put those facts out of my mind.

The fact is: no one wants to hear about it. No one wants to hear about those whose suffering is worse than their own. No one wants to hear about things that they can do nothing about. What does it help to feel the pain of the poor more deeply? I don’t know.