It’s a beautiful day…
A beautiful day, with only strong spring breezes delivering pollen from the trees. Their leaves have grown, so that there is shade where before harsh winter light ruled, and bright green leaves whose nearly full bloom are like young people, about to dive into adulthood. Leaves who have almost reached their full size. Trees merit using “who”, and so do their leaves. These plants nurture us and keep us alive. Demean them at your peril. Our separation from the natural world is not sustainable.
The sky is alternately blue, with the clear strong gaze of full spring pulled away from winter’s death. The child’s picture book fluffy white clouds are hoisted on the windy dance that moves the new grasses and leaves. Then the sky becomes menacing with the grey and white of hovering storm clouds, possibility of rain, rendering the wind cooler, calming the passion of growth and the dance of the birds now building nests or nurturing young. Nature has its own dance of checks and balances. Unbridled power is not given to anything, or to anyone.
The leaves have not turned over though – the old time adage taught once upon a time, a way to foretell imminent rain. Does someone still teach that? And to whom?
This morning, there was a man thatching the roof of one of the old buildings in town. Cars kept driving past. That anyone in America still knew this art was a surprise. What was the story of the person perched on the ladder, working on the ridge, weaving together the roof? He had neat little lemon beige bundles of straw stacked on the impossibly green grass next to the building, which dated from the 1600s. History is echo and theory – but rarely written by the cut hands of the craftspeople who decorated our lives. Another article, floating around the internet, said that color was no longer a feature of our visual, artistic, and everyday selves. The thatch was a reminder of that – texture, color, intricacy – as opposed to the tar paper and asphalt tiles of the modern day roof. Once I was partly responsible for removing a slate roof and replacing it with these noxious, neutral tiles. The errors made while aspiring to be adult are the worst.
Some may remember the show “This Old House” when it first started out. It retrieved lost knowledge of how the old wooden houses were built, and taught people not to destroy everything with modern methods, to appreciate the old skills, the newspapers and wool used for insulation. Not everything modern was an improvement. There was a time when center chimneys were pulled down for modern renovations, wide board floors from ancient huge trees, the same ones that that produced the lumber for ships and masts, and were instead ripped up for linoleum. Walls of plaster were replaced with ugly knotted wood panels or worse, asbestos boards, covered up and painted over.
Today, a young person, having noticed that my car didn’t have a locking gas cap, asked in all seriousness, why anyone wouldn’t have just included that in the features of the car. They thought the locking gas cap started in 2007. I said – because you didn’t need them. I thought it had started way before then, and yes, the 1970s seems to have been the first widespread use of these items due to shortages. But yin and yang. You need locks when a situation has been created that makes scarcity the norm. Scarcity is now commonplace, risk is commonplace, fear misplaced.
The 1970s. When there was the advertisement showing a native american man crying as white americans drove by in their cars and threw the remains of their fast food meals at his feet, destroying a land, polluting it, rather than caring for it. Now the current government plans to sell these lands. Stolen first, now stolen again. Selling this patrimony to the highest bidder.
Long ago, I swam in waterfalls a few miles from where I lived, and the water was clear and extremely cold – a native spring. I was horrified to find years later that the name of the spring had been given to the condos built on the hill above the rock pool. It’s unlikely that the water is as clear, or if the pool even exists. With the long weekends coming up, American holidays, I had thought about staying in that area, revisiting old locations and personal history, but a search for places to stay showed that the prices had jumped to an extent that made it unfeasible, at least for me. The town by the railroad, that was once ignored, now had Comfort Inns, unaffordable and also ugly. The sheep farms nearby and bed and breakfasts run by the well-meaning and well-heeled were booked, while those with more amenities were even more unaffordable.
What else will we forget?
Dog sitting meant that protesting this week was limited to driving past and honking, while the dog smiled encouragement at the group, tail wagging, curious. How small they looked, the protestors, even going past slowly, the hand-written signs and people barely distinguishable from each other, except for one woman in the Handmaid’s Tale costume. They banged the cowbell and yelled. That was me, on the roadside, most other weeks, grateful for recognition and support. Me in my car, my waving and honking, had soon left them behind, to navigate junctions and parking. How much easier it was for anyone who didn’t care or didn’t wish to notice, to forget they had ever driven past.
What else will we forget?
I read about Jeff Bezos and his girlfriend, and their enormous sailing yacht at the Cannes Film Festival. Despite looking as though she had been injected with every artificial filler available, she will be honored for her work for the environment. The article did note the irony, seeing as the yacht alone emitted carbon equivalent to a small town or city, I don’t recall which. These dinners honoring the wealthy for being wealthy – of course they have always existed. Did the men and women look like aliens? Skin stretched taut, nails like talons, the trend for “glass skin” making dolls out of humans. Dolls who expressed their contentment, demonstrating that adversity was unthinkable while wearing haute couture. Possibly.
What else will we forget?
The news cycle now is designed to focus on the irrelevant, and steer us away from any remembering. To keep all these conflicting stories intact, we need to be schizophrenic. Yesterday’s terrorist is today’s young, powerful man. Yesterday’s high official is today’s danger, guilty of being critical of the current government, requiring visits from the government police.
What else will we forget?
Maybe, as with dementia sufferers, we will all blandly smile and not recognize who we are smiling at. Few of us will have a book written about it which captures attention. Taking money away from those in need? Dull. Lobbyists and publishers with money to make? Sexy. Exciting. Column inches are scarce. Headlines limited. A book written in the 1930s spoke of the phenomenon of buying time. Airtime. Radio, the invention that now permitted a message going to the masses. Now – a white supremacist buying a social media platform. Updates merely cosmetic.
What else will we forget?
I read a satirical piece only two or three days ago. Now it is gone from all search engines. It must be somewhere. It used thousand dollar caviar and dinner parties and decisions over which exotic holiday to take as a backdrop to people saying that of course they would protest, at some point. Of course they would. Why can’t I find it? I’m beginning to doubt myself. I’m sure that’s not a coincidence.
What else will we forget?
Do you remember what you did last week? Yesterday? Remember when the papers were filled with long COVID stories, loss of memory and physical weakness? Now the Secretary of Health swims with sewage, thinks vitamins can cure measles, and wants to ban certain drugs. The current leader thinks another devilish signature on a meaningless piece of paper framed by what was once a menu cover at a steak house will ensure that suddenly prices will change. Like the tariffs, so important, so important that it matters little whether they are up or down, larger or smaller, postponed or not. The UK is falling into this trap as well. Foreign students will be discouraged from coming while the money they spend on tuition will cover expenditures elsewhere in higher education. Tariffs will bring back manufacturing and coal mining, because Americans will have to not buy things from overseas. Tariff as tax on things we can no longer buy. Zero as a percentage of zero. Someone failed math. The rest of us lost interest in mid-paragraph. Did you?
What else will we forget?
That people didn’t used to be overweight to the degree they are now. That fertility rates and sperm counts were higher. Meanwhile the pharma companies sell injections to stop fatness and Georgia keeps a dead woman alive so that her baby may live. Where is the woman arrested for having a miscarriage? Is she still in jail? The news has moved on. The man sent to El Salvador – the many men, many with children. The child, American citizen, stage 4 cancer, deported with his mother. Where are they? Will we ever know, or more importantly, will enough people care so that an editor who is having dinner with a group of bankers, perhaps to congratulate themselves on the amount of money they control, will tell some journalist, eager to please, believing in the system, that the story is now worth following?
What else will we forget?
Rachel Carson. There are the charismatic trailblazers who drew attention to nature. Jane Goodall. Paul Watson, stopping whalers, arrested, forgotten, released. David Attenborough. He has turned his attention to the seas, and a headline noted that we were now seeing his angry and political self. He now has turned 99. There was a sweet set of photos of a boy who drew and colored 99 animals for his birthday. The boy’s house looked very nice. It’s never the children’s fault, but did anyone ask if his education and upbringing and money available made this possible, or even brought him to the attention of the BBC? Rachel Carson. Repeat her name, saving the eagles and pointing out the dangers of DDT until whatever was killing soil and animals killed her as well. A family business in Boston was in danger of going under – they dug clams in polluted waters near Boston, then sent them to a facility in Newburyport, 40 miles north approximately, to be put through clean salt water. They protested the closing of the facility. No one protested the pollution, or the knock on effect on the somewhat cleaner waters to the north. Roundup banned, unbanned, rebanned. Lobbyists fighting for the right of chemical companies to make money while humans die. Spring – the season of green lawns, some with the tell-tale yellow notices stuck in the grass warning away children and pets. Money spent on a verdant space that will kill you if you roll in it. The current government is planning to roll back 31 EPA standards on water, air, emissions and harmful chemicals. The estimate is an additional 200K deaths as a result. They are suspending the milk and other dairy products quality testing program. There is no rationale for this that includes concern for the health and welfare of human beings. Where is the Rachel Carson of today?
What else will we forget?
Maybe we will forget when the Hunger Games was a book, not a pitch by the current Secretary of Homeland Security to use asylum seekers as contestants in a game show. Make money off everything, evaporate compassion. People used to watch executions, they’ll say. Tickets go on sale at 10am.
What else will we forget?
Luckily, AI will remind us, now a permanent feature at the top of all our searches, in its rewritten fabric of memory, what we are to remember. The fantastic irony that the hero of 1984, Winston Smith, has had his job taken away from him in these newspeak times. AI will rewrite history – no need for humans.
What else will we forget?
That we are currently ruled by people who pretend to be offended and threatened by the number 86 but have no issue with the number 88.
We will forget everything they want us to forget, unless we pay attention to everything, especially the beautiful days.
