Category: Living in Society

Politics mostly social commentary.

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Living in Society

Plans for 2022

Book queue for 2022.

As long as my eyesight holds, I will continue to read books. As a newly minted septuagenarian I’ve had a discussion of eye deterioration with my ophthalmologist multiple times. When Mother’s eyesight began to fail, she converted to audio books and that’s where I’ll likely go when I can’t read anymore. For now, though, with some adjustment there is plenty to read.

About half the projected reading for 2022 was chosen when I didn’t get to a book in 2021. Going through my stacks would fill out the other half, although I have to leave room for books published in the new year. Now that I am motivated, and my vision passes muster at the eye doctor’s office, I’m enjoying reading.

I have plans besides reading books.

The time between our wedding anniversary and New Year’s Day has been traditional for reflection and consideration. This year ideas are settling without much action. To make every day count, I need a good idea of where I’m bound. First impressions are not enough by which to plan. When ideas come to mind, they ruminate. If they are any good, they persist.

I know the formats for writing in 2022. The next steps are determining topics, then schedule. That’s a lot of what occupies these quiet holidays. Rather than set goals, I’m leaving the mind open until the next project comes to me. It might be today, or maybe in the next couple of months. I know it will arrive and await patiently.

The sun rose on walkabout. Winter skies have been colorful at dawn and dusk. Around the perimeter of our property, deer and other animal tracks are frozen in the snow. It was a busy place the last 24 hours, and it shows after a snowfall. It is cold enough I won’t exercise outdoors today.

That leaves me reading, writing and working on indoors projects. It is a good life, one worth living. The rest before the storm 2022 is expected to be.

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Milestones

Looking Forward

The author at age five weeks with my baptismal sponsors, Aunt Winnie and Uncle Bill.

Today I am officially a septuagenarian. Deep in memories of the previous 70 years, on this day, my birthday, I’m looking forward.

Blessed with good health, I can see 80 from here. 90 is too far ahead for clarity. The goal is to make the best use of my time before shuffling off this mortal coil.

I have no profound thoughts or statements upon turning 70. It is another day to accomplish things. I may accomplish taking a nap after lunch. Priorities change with age.

Yesterday, for the third year in a row, this blog passed 12,000 views. While I’m not running a major outlet here, I am grateful to everyone who finds me and spends time reading what I wrote.

My best wishes for the next ten years. There is so much to do before the final curtain call.

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Living in Society

List of Things — 2021

A vegan Christmas dinner, 2021.

The year began with the Jan. 6 attempt by President Trump and his supporters to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Those events confronted us with the possibility the work of our founders, to create a society built on new foundations contrary to a monarchy, may fail. It was a sobering realization, even if insurrection leaders were pathetically unskilled at insurrection. After Biden was sworn in, he got to work and the economy came roaring back. We are not out of the woods yet.

On my Christmas morning walkabout the air was quiet and still. Scarcely a sound besides birds. Normal background noise of traffic on surrounding highways was silent. Ambient temperatures were in the forties and winds calm. It was a peaceful time to be with family.

Because of the coronavirus pandemic we did not travel to be with our child at Christmas this year. We joined their festivities via video conference and met some new friends. I’m not sure who came up with the idea yet it was a good one.

We spent the morning sleeping in and doing individual things around the house. After noon we joined in the kitchen to make our vegan Christmas feast. According to the scale this morning I lost one pound overnight. There will be leftovers all week.

As year’s end approaches taking stock is important. Here is a list of the most significant events of the year:

  • Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection.
  • Coronavirus pandemic entered its second calendar year and persisted.
  • Served as president of the home owners association and secretary of the sewer district.
  • Wrote at least 1,000 words of my autobiography per day through April.
  • Worked at Sundog Farm in the spring.
  • Twice served as a Climate Reality Leadership Corps mentor.
  • Helped Jon Green get elected as a Johnson County Supervisor.
  • Donated excess garden produce to the local food pantry.
  • Trip to Boone, Iowa to visit my sister-in-law.
  • Trip to Orlando, Florida to help our child move to Illinois.
  • Covered Blog for Iowa editor’s summer time off.
  • Walked in the Coralville Independence Day parade.
  • Two family trips to visit our child in their new apartment. They visited us, too.
  • Became a single automobile family.
  • Worked through a manganese contamination at the community well.
  • Tooth extraction #14. Decided to leave the gap.
  • Covered the Solon School Board election on this blog.
  • Wrote a series of posts about carbon capture and sequestration for Blog for Iowa.
  • Grew net worth by seven percent.
  • Read 54 books.
  • Successfully increased garden production.

Time passes quickly these days. We grasp today, only to soon let it go into the drift of society. Luckily, with some focus, I got a few things done in 2021.

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Living in Society

Retro Post – Christmas Morning

Christmas coffee mug.

(First posted on Dec. 25, 2007, during the first year I wrote a blog. Lightly edited because I couldn’t stand some of my previous usage).

The meaning of Christmas is derived from my remembrance of priests at Holy Family Catholic Church in Davenport genuflecting while reading John 1:14 “And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us…”

There are many translations of this verse and the idea that an omniscient God would take human form remains a compelling idea. In order for our lives to have meaning, we should live them as Jesus did, through acts in human society.

If Jesus was the incarnate God, we are something less.

If the meaning of Christmas can be found in John 1:14, how should that affect us with our imperfections?

My Christmas story is about the coffee cup that we keep in our bins of Christmas decorations. It was a gift from my spouse and printed in the glaze are five reindeer around a typewriter consulting on a message. The reindeer at the keyboard has a red nose, and must be Rudolf. On the other side of the mug are misspelled the words “Merry Christmas,” presumably typed by Rudolf. At some point I chipped the cup and each year we discuss whether we should get rid of it because of the chip. I have always said no, although I should probably let go. The chipped cup with the animals trying to put a message into human language using human technology has become part of our Christmas tradition. Because it is so similar to the meaning of Christmas, I have trouble letting go of it. We have always ended up keeping the cup and I am using it now to hold the coffee I made this morning.

We humans can use some coffee on Christmas morning, and we need to put it in something.

Merry Christmas reader!

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Living in Society

Christmas Eve – 2021

Earthrise by Bill Anders, Dec. 24, 1968

Best wishes to readers for end of year holidays.

In our house, it is Christmas Eve, although there is a string of notable days running from mid-December through January. I enjoy those Christmas seasons when I can stay home without pressure from work or other social obligations. During the coronavirus pandemic, it makes sense to avoid exposure to others, although the isolation is only partly mitigated by modern communications technology.

Leaving home can be a traumatic experience. When I left home in 1970 to attend university I didn’t understand there would be no permanent return to my home town. When our child left Iowa in 2007 there was also a lack of understanding of how the change would affect us. We do the best we can during holidays, whether child or parent. The veil of our illusions wears thin at the end of the year.

On Christmas Eve my tradition is to review this photo taken by Bill Anders during Apollo 8. It changed my life, and those of many others, to see Earth suspended in space, alone and vulnerable. Some say it sparked the environmental movement. The problem is the environmental movement and society more generally have been doing a poor job of mitigating the worse effects of the climate crisis. The coming week before New Year’s Day is projected to be the warmest December week in recorded history for North America. It is a cause for concern for us all.

For Christmas Eve dinner there will be cornbread and chili, followed by settling in to a long night. We did not decorate the house for the holiday and haven’t the last few years. If we have guests during a future holiday season I expect we will get the boxes out from under the stairway, reminisce about the decorations and how we came to have them, and put them up. Not this year, though.

It is a time for letting go the frustrations and tensions 2021 created within and among us. The year began with an attempt to overturn the results of the November 2020 U.S. presidential election. It is ending with a robust economic recovery that could only have happened with the leadership of President Biden and his administration. It was a year of the yinyang of being American.

As we prepare for a winter, delayed by a warming planet, it’s time to consider the future and actually do things to bring peace on Earth. That we will is my Christmas Eve wish.

However you celebrate year’s end, I wish you health and happiness as we prepare to enter the new year.

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Living in Society

Another Derecho

Sun shining through clouds the afternoon of the Dec. 15, 2021 derecho.

While Wednesday’s extreme weather manifested as a blustery thunderstorm in Big Grove, meteorologists have since categorized the multi-state storm as a derecho. It was nowhere as severe as the Aug. 10, 2020 derecho. (Update: The National Weather Service said it confirmed 43 tornadoes on Dec. 15, 2021. On Jan. 7, 2022 the number was revised to 61).

The good news is with generator and fuel standing by, and gallon jugs of bottled drinking water stored downstairs, we are ready. Practice makes perfect, as they say.

I spent 30 minutes chatting with a registered Republican, small business owner, and FOX News watcher this week. Things went well. We had plenty in common. The challenge is turning points of commonality into votes for progressive ideas. When push comes to shove, abortion is the dominant wolf in the pack. It is a firewall against political persuasion because if raised, the chat stops right there. People who oppose a woman’s right to choose raise the issue early in political conversations.

I have no choice but to interact with Republicans. They are and have been a part of our community since we lived here. During election cycles when I’ve had access to the voter rolls, I looked for the Democrats and increasingly they are in a minority where I live. I’m not complaining, just saying.

On a Zoom meeting with Iowa gubernatorial candidate Deidre DeJear last night, I asked what we should be doing to organize between now and the June primary. The response, somewhat predictably, was we should sign up to work on her campaign. It was her event, so I’m okay with that. A challenge remains unaddressed, though.

Democrats have three U.S. Senate candidates, two for governor, an unknown Democrat for the First Congressional District, and no declared candidate for either my state senator or state representative. There is a lot of work ahead if we want to elect more Democrats.

There is a case to be made the party primary election should be eliminated in favor of selecting candidates at a convention. It sounds undemocratic yet we could pick our people soon after the February precinct caucus rather than wait until June. That would give us four additional organizing months. We need every one of those in the current environment.

Back in the ancient days when megafauna roamed Earth, during the run up to the 2020 Democratic precinct caucuses, Iowa’s system failed to produce a clear winner in the presidential race. Instead results were delayed, the winner barely won the delegate count, and a loser asked for a recanvass of selected precincts. It wasn’t much better in 2016 when Hillary Clinton bested Bernie Sanders by a few delegates. There is no perfect system yet we can do better than the Iowa caucuses.

What I do, talking to Republican neighbors, is part of the political process yet I don’t see how it dovetails into the broader, state-wide politics. Politicians should concentrate on counting votes, yet there are endless conversations in all settings going on every day. These local conversations matter more than the vote-counting of politicians. They are valid and useful if sometimes frustrating. Often people who are different in political views put their best foot forward to get along in society. That may be all we have together. Democrats have yet to define our values in a way that resonates outside our clan.

I’m glad to have survived my second derecho. Now if I can survive our politics. That would be the rainbow at the end of a storm.

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Reviews

Top 2021 Book Picks

I beat my 2021 goal and read 54 books this year. I also developed a process to give prime time, early each day, to reading 25 or more pages. Either book reading is important in our lives or it isn’t, I reasoned. So I read books, almost daily. Book reading is an important part of any writer’s life. Here are those I found most useful and memorable.

Poetry: I re-read A Coney Island of the Mind after Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s passing on Feb. 22, 2021. An important part of my high school reading, it held up well. In addition, I read books of poetry by Amanda Gorman (The Hill We Climb), Gabriela Marie Milton (Passions: Love Poems and Other Writings), Charles Wright (A Short History of the Shadow: Poems), Gary Snyder (Turtle Island), and bell hooks (Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place). I read the memoir of poet laureate of the United States Joy Harjo, Poet Warrior.

Current Affairs: Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future by Elizabeth Kolbert stands out in this category. Her writing is compelling and this book is relevant now. Other current affairs books I’d recommend are Persist by Elizabeth Warren, Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains by Lucas Bessire, The Decarbonization Imperative: Transforming the Global Economy by 2050 by Michael Lenox and Rebecca Duff, The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet by Michael E. Mann, and Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change by George Marshall.

Other Favorites:

Wilding: Returning Nature to a Farm by Isabella Tree
Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald
Turning Pointe by Chloe Angyal
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
Poles in Minnesota by John Radzilowski
What I Mean by Joan Didion

Check out my Goodreads profile for the complete 2021 list by clicking here.

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Reviews

Book Review: Birds in the Morning, Frogs at Night

I met Maureen McCue, who just published a memoir Birds in the Morning, Frogs at Night: Sharing Life Along the Road, when we were both on the Johnson County Board of Health in 2006.

As soon as McCue arrived to become the board’s physician, she drove us to become quite busy both with required tasks like replacing the director, and voluntary initiatives like educating other county boards of health in the effects of coal-fired power plants on human health. Given our shared history, I didn’t know what to expect when the memoir was released earlier this year.

While much in the book is familiar, the author’s interpretation of events is fresh. The road in the title, along which life is shared, was the same one I drove many times to get to their home: all without incident or specific inspiration. I recall when the bridge was out and had to take the long way around. It was a road, a conveyance. Or was it? The central assertion of the book is it was more than that, a metaphor for a path forward from environmental degradation.

It is a book worth reading for a couple of reasons.

McCue creates a sense of place that is hers alone and explains its risks and rewards. We see life along her road with all its wonder and tragedy. There are a number of Grade B roads in the county, yet she made hers special by describing animal and plant life along with changing weather in which she found herself. She attempted to connect it to the broader world she experienced in international travel as a physician. One experiences the sense of place in the writing. That alone is enough to make Birds in the Morning, Frogs at Night worth reading.

Life along the road includes their adopted son Michael who has special needs, or as McCue put it, “The diagnosis according to specialists that day was ‘mild to moderate’ mental retardation.” Over the years I spent time with Michael. He is a unique person and a familiar face around the county. While I feel I know Michael well, it is unclear what, if anything he remembers of me when I approach him to engage. McCue’s narrative about caring for Michael is compelling and an engaging read for people with special needs children.

When professors and instructors leave university many have written books. Stow Persons’ The University of Iowa in the Twentieth Century, D.C. Spriesterbach’s The Way it Was: The University of Iowa 1964 – 1989, and others come to mind. I asked McCue about this retirement, book-writing phenomenon. She answered, “I’ve asked myself the same question, but it’s not so much about writing after retirement, it’s more like having the time and will to get it published — this book and it’s parts were weaving there way out of me over a long time.  Writing happens whenever, but following it to the publisher takes a different kind of mind set and time line facilitated by retirement.”

There is an obvious comparison between Birds in the Morning, Frogs at Night: Sharing Life Along the Road and Cornelia F. Mutel’s 2016 book A Sugar Creek Chronicle: Observing Climate Change from a Midwestern Woodland. McCue and Mutel are friends and share many elements in their lives, McCue said. I wouldn’t want to pick between them so I advise reading both.

Birds in the Morning, Frogs at Night: Sharing Life Along the Road is published by Ice Cube Press. Find it by clicking here.

~ First posted on Bleeding Heartland on Dec. 11, 2021.

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Living in Society

Seventy Years

The lake is beginning to freeze.

At seventy years life looks different… going forward, I mean.

There’s no changing anything that was done. We revisit the past partly for discivery, and to put new spin on it. That’s human nature and it is okay, yet not always good. Despite our revisions, we possess an outlook toward understanding who we are now in context of the past.

Things are clarifying while working on my autobiography. I don’t believe my whole story has been told so I keep at it. Even when it is finished and out there, I expect few will read it. The story is to help our child understand who I was if they have interest. They have separate memories to nurture.

What are the things that made a difference in my life? There are not that many.

  • I was born to a family that valued my presence.
  • Despite familial value, I was injured and hospitalized at age three due to an easily preventable home safety hazard.
  • Father died in an industrial accident when I was 17 years old.
  • The company where father worked awarded me a college scholarship that paid most of my expenses.
  • For 12 weeks I traveled in Europe after college graduation.
  • After the Vietnam War, I enlisted in the military and lived in West Germany for three years.
  • Married in 1982.
  • Started a career in transportation and logistics that lasted 25 years, as well as into my last paid job.
  • A child was born in 1985.
  • Moved to Indiana and then back to Iowa.
  • Had financial means to retire from transportation at age 57.
  • Experienced extreme weather and the coronavirus pandemic.

My birthday is later this month yet I wanted to gain perspective by making this list. The next ten years, should I be so lucky, will be a time of contributing to society while at the same time receding from view so others can step forward. I don’t know that any major milestones lie ahead yet I’m confident I will do useful things with my remaining time.

It has been a life with its troubles. It has been a life well lived.

Categories
Work Life

Consumer Boycott

Classic family breakfast

Yesterday’s news was workers at Kellogg’s cereal plant in Memphis, and at plants in three other cities, rejected the company’s terms during contract negotiations. In response, the company posted this statement on its website:

The prolonged work stoppage has left us no choice but to hire permanent replacement employees in positions vacated by striking workers.

Kellogg’s website.

Long-time readers of this blog may know my beliefs about unions are complex. I’ve been on all sides of the negotiating table, from being a union employee or part of a business unit that attempted to organize a union, to being part of management of union employees or business units that attempted to organize. In my work recruiting truck drivers I once crossed an unrelated picket line in Flint, Michigan to do my work. Nonetheless, in 2021 I am sympathetic to unions, private sector unions particularly. When people called for a boycott of Kellogg’s consumer products, I wanted to help.

A challenge I have is that of the hundreds of products Kellogg’s produces and sells, only two in one brand, MorningStar Farms®, are something we regularly buy. We will stop purchasing them immediately, although there is enough already in the freezer to last for a long strike. There are plenty of other protein sources in our vegetarian diet. Kellogg’s and others in the distribution chain will lose about $20 per month in revenue from our household.

The trouble for striking workers is the company is within its rights to hire replacement workers. Whatever outrage people are able to muster, it doesn’t matter to the company’s desire to continue using their investment in these plants to produce products. For the most part, consumers are not paying attention to this labor dispute and their consumption patterns are expected to persist.

Part of the reason for a lack of attention from consumers is since the 1970s U.S. cereal sales have declined as consumers choose more protein-based breakfast options or skipped an early morning meal completely. In our household, if we buy cereal for breakfast, it is organic steel cut oats which does not come from one of the major cereal manufacturers. I typically eat oatmeal during winter. Striking workers have additional problems to face than whether or not to accept Kellogg’s contract.

Our family boycotted grapes when Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta called for it in the 1960s. That strike of farm workers over working conditions went on for five years. The Kellogg’s strike was called in October, with a decision to hire replacement workers this week, indicating how quickly the company is willing and able to move.

Kellogg’s operates a global supply chain in which many parts are unseen by a local plant worker. The company could easily shift cereal production to Mexico as others have done. From a global perspective this would be a minor adjustment in the supply chain.

The teeth have been removed from boycotts of consumer products. While admittedly unusual in my shopping patterns, during most trips to the store I don’t go down the aisles where Kellogg’s products are sold. As a result of the coronavirus pandemic, many people don’t browse the way they did previously while shopping. They get what they know specifically, except for in the produce department where a shopper must pay attention to quality. This behavior has implications for workers at Kellogg’s and other processed food manufacturers.

Our small outpost of support for striking Kellogg’s workers will continue as long as the strike lasts. If the company does hire replacement workers, we can move on and not purchase any of their products again. We’ll miss our recipe crumbles, yet not that much.

Editor’s Note: News the strike with Kellogg’s ended reached us Dec. 21, 2021. Happy Holidays to all.