Category: Social Commentary

Historical category no longer used.

Protect Environment; Stop Nuclear Weapons

Post author By Paul Deaton
Post date September 24, 2016

Paul Deaton

(Editor’s Note: When this guest column ran in the Cedar Rapids Gazette on Wednesday, Sept. 21, its abstract nature became real as heavy precipitation events pummeled Butler County and other parts of northeastern Iowa, disrupting lives there and downstream. Living in an environment where rain damages crops instead of nurturing them; where rivers jump their banks, close schools and displace people; and where Cedar Rapids must protect the city from record amounts of floodwater multiple times in eight years, something’s wrong. We must take action that includes electing a government that will address the causes of global warming and nuclear proliferation, not just deal with the actuality we have created).

Protect environment; stop nuclear weapons
By Paul Deaton
Guest column for the Cedar Rapids Gazette Sept. 21, 2016.
Reprinted with permission of the author

If we accept the premise articulated by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, that we are stronger together, there is a lot in society requiring our collective attention.

There are no lone wolves in human society, although a number of people want to get away from the pack. Can we blame them? Being stronger together is a fundamental characteristic of Homo Sapiens. It’s what we do as a species.

What should we be working on?

It is hard to avoid the primacy of following the golden rule. We should be applying the golden rule, better than we have been, to everything we already do. This is basic.

Two other issues call for our attention, the threat of nuclear weapons, and mitigating the effects of climate change.

Today, on very short notice, nuclear powers can unleash a holocaust ending life as we know it. Nuclear war is not talked about much in the 21st Century; however the threat is as real today as it was when President Truman authorized the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings. The United States should take the lead in eliminating nuclear weapons. We need a transformational change in our nuclear policy that recognizes these weapons are the gravest threat to our security and must be banned and abolished.

We are wrecking our environment and should stop. Just 90 companies are to blame for most climate change, taking carbon out of the ground and putting it in the atmosphere, geographer Richard Heede said. If that’s the case, the move to eliminate fossil fuel use can’t come quick enough. These companies should be targeted for regulation by governments. Companies say they are not to blame for the demand from billions of consumers that drives fossil fuel use. Technologies exist to eliminate fossil fuels, and we should adopt them with haste. One purpose of government is to act as a voice for people who have no voice. Regulating business to protect our lives in the environment would serve that purpose.

After the 2016 election these issues will remain. The first can gain wide support easily. It is time the other two gain parity.

~ Paul Deaton retired from CRST Logistics in 2009.

Tags climate change, environment, Sustainability, The Climate Reality Project

Living in Society Social Commentary Work Life

August Is No Recess When Working Poor

Post author By Paul Deaton
Post date August 25, 2016

School is out for Iowans who work yet remain on the margins of society.

There is no recess from the constant demand to secure basic needs of food, shelter and clothing. The add-on expenses of transportation, health care, interest on loans, and servicing addictions? It’s a question of what gets priority each week.

Last summer I wrote about two issues: how work is not valued adequately and how compensation is a murky endeavor at best. There is a third: the resilience of people who work and are poor.

This August I work four jobs writing, in retail, and on two farms. After a 25-year career in transportation and logistics, our family balance sheet looks better than most of my low-wage peers. I can afford the experience. I’m one of the few workers who keeps a balance sheet because most live paycheck to paycheck sustaining their lives with inadequate income. I don’t see how people can make it, but they do.

I’m cautious when writing about peers because my narrative is grounded in real people with lives. It is important to show respect and maintain their privacy. I won’t write about anyone with whom I am currently working unless they already are a public figure. That rules out most everyone.

A significant number of my peers are aged 14 through 18 and live at home with parents or grandparents. Their money is spent on personal expenses and they are full of confidence and hope — enough so to be inspiring. There are also spouses and significant others where the partner works a big job with benefits and their low wage income adds to the household. There are the “special people” whose stories are so different they garner attention easily.

The person living in a car with her dog, boarding her horse with a co-worker while figuring out what to do next; the woman in an abusive relationship attempting to hide bruises with makeup; the man who has trouble standing for a shift on a concrete floor yet tolerates it because he needs the income; the small-time loan shark recently arrived from Chicago who heard from friends there are jobs and cheap living in the Cedar Rapids – Iowa City corridor. These stories capture the imagination, but in my view are too “special.” I’d rather write about plain folk like myself. My takeaway is no one who works for low wages has given up and that too is inspiring.

Many of us have lives where there is more to do than time allows. We have to set priorities. Approaching Medicare age it is hard for me to keep up with everything while working fours jobs. I don’t. Mowing the lawn falls to the bottom of the list and the long grass becomes habitat for birds and small animals. The garden is producing with abundance and I struggle to preserve enough of it for winter before it goes to compost. I have trouble staying awake on my daily drive across the lakes to work in Coralville. My challenges aren’t unique. The thing is I’ve worked a big job with benefits and wouldn’t go back for anything.

Once a person accepts the decency of most people, and what we share in interests, working poor are no longer a cipher or story for journalists and social scientists. They are one of us, more than we acknowledge.

If August is no recess, life is still pretty good because there are people who behave as if the amount of money we make is less important than seeking ways to help each other get along. That is as good as it gets.

~ Written for Blog for Iowa

Living in Society Social Commentary

Opioids: A Conjured Crisis

Post author By Paul Deaton
Post date August 23, 2016

U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack

Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack scolded the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine about opioid abuse on Friday.

The institution is not doing enough to train its soon-to-be health professionals on an opioid abuse epidemic that claims thousands of lives a year nationally, Vilsack said, according to the Cedar Rapids Gazette.

The university just got the word about its role in the opioid abuse epidemic last week. According to the article,

After Vilsack’s remarks, UI Health Care medical affairs vice president and dean of the medical college Jean Robillard told The Gazette the institution does plan to make changes in the way it teaches med students about prescribing opioids. He said the UI received information on it from the White House earlier this week.

Vilsack oversees the White House Rural Council, established by executive order on June 9, 2011 by President Obama. Opioid abuse is on a long list of maladies that impact rural communities. It is one issue among many the council hopes to address.

News media and politicians have made much of opioid abuse. Facts suggest at 28,648 (2014) annual deaths related to opioids — including heroin, hydrocodone and oxycodone — abuse is not a leading cause of death in the United States. It’s not even among the Centers for Disease Control’s top ten causes of death, with heart disease, cancer, chronic lower respiratory disease, unintentional injuries and stroke being much more prevalent.

What gives?

Fanning the embers of opioid abuse into a raging wildfire serves the interests of Big Pharma and its minions in the U.S. Congress. The opioid epidemic represents another opportunity for corporations to mold government in a way that serves their interests.

We’ve seen this before with methamphetamine abuse. Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town by Nick Reding makes the case that it’s less a drug’s addictive propensity than a combination of economic policy, government complicity with Big Pharma, and corporate policies that are behind the degradation of rural communities like Oelwein, Iowa, the subject of his book.

The short version is when meth had its fiery burn into the media atmosphere, corporations used it as an opportunity to control importation of key ingredients to a profitable cold medicine in a way that led to many small-scale meth lab busts in Iowa, and the rise of methamphetamine trade among Mexican drug cartels. The opportunity regarding opioids may be a little different, but why wouldn’t Big Pharma want another bite from the apple?

It is ironic that Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign, part of the “war on drugs,” was window dressing to her husband’s economic policies that drove the underlying causes of abuse and addiction, not only in small towns, but throughout the country.

People suffer from many types of addiction and neither government nor the insurance companies that drive health care are doing much to address them. Opioid abuse is an issue, yet the bigger issue is related to the growing divide between the richest Americans and the rest of us, corporate influence in government, and a K-12 education system that inadequately prepares children to sustain themselves in a society where corporations have the upper hand.

Opioids? Schmopioids! Let’s have a conversation about appropriate school curricula, something Vilsack addressed Friday in a weird, special interest kind of way.

~ Written for Blog for Iowa

Tags politics, Sustainability

Kitchen Garden Living in Society Social Commentary

High Summer Harvest

Post author By Paul Deaton
Post date July 16, 2016

Cherry tomatoes, Fairy Tale eggplant, green beans and a pickling cucumber harvested July 16, 2016

Photographs of kale can only be interesting for so long.

The leafy green and purple leaves are producing in abundance — so much so I pick only what is needed, removing imperfect leaves from the plants to the compost heap.

Seven kale leaves stand in a jar of water on the counter to keep them fresh and ready to use.

If summer were only about kale, this one would be an unmitigated success.

Something else is going on.

This week I conversed with a group of twenty-somethings about the new application for smart phones, Pokémon Go. It was the most animated they had ever been. I asserted the application represented the beginning of the zombie apocalypse. They didn’t dispute it. One had already tried the game and moved on to something else. Apparently there are not that many Pokémon to find in rural Iowa.

The continuous stream of violence manifest its latest event Thursday with a terrorist attack in Nice, France. More than eighty people were killed and as many as 300 injured as a lone driver drove a large truck through a crowd gathered to view a Bastille Day fireworks display. The terrorist made it two kilometers before he was shot dead by law enforcement. French President Francois Hollande seeks to extend the existing state of emergency put in place after the November 2015 attacks in Paris.

In American political news, the Republican top of the ticket is set with Indiana Governor Mike Pence named presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump’s running mate. The less said about this pair the better. Suffice it that I disagree with them on just about everything. The national political conventions are imminent, with the Republicans this week and Democrats the following. Something unexpected might happen at either convention.

In a strange turn of events, twice failed U.S. Senate candidate Tom Fiegen made a post on Facebook that blogger Laura Belin re-posted:

Belin makes sense if Fiegen, not so much. The episode represents further coarsening of Iowa politics. Fiegen likening an effort to persuade him on his presidential vote to sexual advances is plain weird. I know I wouldn’t want to get in the back seat with him on a dark gravel road. Whatever virtue he may have had vaporized after he quit being his own person and hitched his campaign wagon to Bernie Sanders. His current, post being a Democrat, rants serve as an example of how low politics has gotten. I know my mother said if you don’t have something nice to say about someone, don’t say anything, but Fiegen lives in our house district and may foment more ill will. I hope not.

Lastly, this week Deadhorse, Alaska set a record high for any Arctic Ocean location. Is it climate change? How could it not be.

At least for now there is plenty to eat and fewer photographs of cruciferous vegetables.

Tags kale, Kitchen Garden, local food, politics

Home Life Living in Society Social Commentary

Processing Vegetables Before Independence Day

Post author By Paul Deaton
Post date July 4, 2016

It takes longer to process vegetables from the garden than it does to harvest them.

That means a lot of summer spent in the kitchen.

I focus on each job — sorting kale leaves, parboiling and freezing green beans, cutting turnips for storage — yet the mind wanders along paths hidden in a day’s activities.

We opened the house and listened to birds at the feeder. From time to time we watched as rabbit, squirrel, chipmunk, and a variety of birds sought seeds. The weather was perfect for anything and my choice was to preserve some of the harvest for later in the year.

Birds scattered when I opened the screen door and cast sunflower seeds in the grass. Eventually they returned to forage for them. It is a predictable behavior that encourages their proximity and my seed-buying. That’s not what was on my mind as I made pesto, bagged kale leaves and prepared luncheon of vegetable soup served on rice.

We live in a violent world and acceptance of such violence is part of who we are.

The list of recent bombings and killings is long, getting longer: Orlando, Florida; Istanbul, Turkey; Quetta, Pakistan; Baghdad, Iraq; Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. These violent and regrettable incidents in the last month may seem bad, and are. What is worse is the long history of genocide embedded in our civilization. The ability to tolerate genocide is a passive crime and a forgotten legacy.

The web site United to End Genocide lists our recent genocides: Armenia (1915), the Holocaust (1933), Cambodia (1975), Rwanda (1990), Bosnia (1995), and Darfur (2003). The passing this weekend of Elie Wiesel reminds us of the need to remember humanity’s crimes and do something to prevent them going forward. For Wiesel, and for many, this process begins by telling the story.

Immaculée Ilibagiza’s memoir, Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust, tells a story of how personal genocide is to those involved. She recounts specific incidents of machete killings too graphic to repeat. Her purpose is similar to that of other holocaust survivors.

“I believe that our lives are interconnected,” Ilibagiza wrote. “that we’re meant to learn from one another’s experiences. I wrote this book hoping that others may benefit from my story.”

The history of genocide against the first people in the Americas is under-recognized and little discussed. The common story is of colonial conflict, disease, specific atrocities and policies of discrimination, according to United to End Genocide. Last week an ailing and imprisoned Leonard Peltier released a letter in which he told a different story.

As the First Peoples of Turtle Island, we live with daily reminders of the centuries of efforts to terminate our nations, eliminate our cultures, and destroy our relatives and families. To this day, everywhere we go there are reminders — souvenirs and monuments of the near extermination of a glorious population of Indigenous Peoples. Native Peoples as mascots, the disproportionately high incarceration of our relatives, the appropriation of our culture, the never-ending efforts to take even more of Native Peoples’ land, and the poisoning of that land all serve as reminders of our history as survivors of a massive genocide. We live with this trauma every day. We breathe, eat and drink it. We pass it on to our children. And we struggle to overcome it.

Today the United States celebrates the signing of a declaration of independence from England with parades, barbecue, family gatherings, food, fireworks, music, travel and intoxication. The opportunity for such revelry came at a high cost.

With each cut of the knife and batch of green beans placed in the freezer I focus on the task at hand. Partly to make something that wasn’t here, and partly to forget the stains on the soul of American society.

I’m processing a lot more than vegetables.

Tags homelife, Sustainability

Home Life Living in Society Social Commentary

Weekend Reckoning

Post author By Paul Deaton
Post date June 26, 2016

Supper was a leftover jar of bean soup, sage and cheddar biscuits, and apple crisp from last year’s crop.

It was delicious… an apple joke.

I set my alarm for 4 p.m. to begin two hours of cooking. I also wanted to hear Garrison Keillor’s radio show from Tanglewood. He’s retiring in July.

Keillor lucked into radio.

“Through a series of coincidences, I lucked onto this show, for which I had no aptitude to speak of, sort of like a kid in Port-au-Prince who’s never seen ice becoming captain of the Haitian Olympic hockey team,” Keillor wrote in an email sent Saturday afternoon. “I was never in theater, never sang in public, but I had grown up at the end of the radio era so I had some ideas about how it might sound. I was a plodder, but persistent.”

So did I luck into a pattern of preparing Saturday dinner with A Prairie Home Companion in the background. All of my other favorite Saturday shows on public radio are gone – likely as a result of budget cuts. Soon Keillor will be gone too. New times require new patterns and I’m okay with that.

Saturday’s harvest included a head of cauliflower, carrots, turnips, an onion, two bunches of celery, and lots of kale for the kitchen and to give to library employees. The herb garden is coming along. I didn’t pick basil but will need to soon.

Planting included an acorn squash seedling and some dill, both given to me by a library worker. The Swiss chard seedlings went into the ground, as did some more jalapeno peppers. I planted lettuce where the carrots grew. The overnight thunderstorm provided needed rain.

Turk's Turban Squash Plant — Turk’s Turban Squash Plant

The harvest was shortly after sunrise. I was out in time to see dew around the edges of the Turk’s Turban heirloom squash plant leaves. It’s as if the leaf was a large moisture collection device, and the drops waiting to get big enough to roll to the ground and provide moisture to the roots. Summer Saturday harvest is becoming one of my favorite times.

After lunch I organized and cleaned the garage, which is to say I put things away, swept the floor and laundered the rags. I decided to leave the bagging attachment on the John Deere for another pass at collecting garden mulch. It’s debatable whether more is needed. It can always be composted if not used.

It’s been a couple of tough weeks in the news, making it difficult to process what’s happened in society. The murders at Pulse Orlando kicked off a series of news cycles that have been enervating at best, at worst a beginning of the end of society as we know it.

There’s a lot to write about. The futile efforts of the U.S. Congress to call attention to gun violence and do something about it, the referendum in Great Britain about whether to leave the European Union, a slate of Supreme Court decision announcements, the peace agreement between the FARC rebels and the Colombian government, and more.

What caught my attention midst the swirl of current events was yesterday’s 140th anniversary of Custer’s last stand during the battle of Little Bighorn in southeastern Montana. During a visit to the battlefield it occurred to me Custer was a fool. The idea the Seventh U.S. Cavalry Regiment could prevail in that open terrain was ridiculous.

Little Big Horn was part of a genocide that began shortly after arrival of Europeans in the west. It found it’s last practical expression 14 years later in 1890 on the Pine Ridge Reservation at Wounded Knee. Leonard Peltier’s case notwithstanding, our war with native populations in the Americas is finished.

The removal of cultures is in many ways the history of the country. We removed native populations, trees and wildlife and called it “settling.” Surveyors laid out a pattern of land use that enabled us to settle the prairie and forget what once was here. Oak-hickory forests, tall grasses and bison as far as human eyes could see have been relegated to special heritage sites. It’s not all been good but it is what we live with.

As rain falls, reminding me to clean the gutters, it’s hard to miss the need to engage in society outside a surveyed lot in Big Grove. To sustain a single life requires engagement in everything around us and many things that no longer are here. At least that’s how I cope with American violence and sustain the will to do something more about it.

Tags homelife, Kitchen Garden, Sustainability, Writing

Kitchen Garden Living in Society Social Commentary Work Life

Father’s Day Weekend

Post author By Paul Deaton
Post date June 19, 2016

A benefit of an American lifestyle is having the occasional weekend off.

Yet the weekend is more French than American — le weekend!

In June 1977, over two weekends, I was in France with a French infantry marine unit. Those days imprinted the meaning of “weekend” on me even if I don’t get to weekend very often.

My guide for the exchange officer experience was an infantry marine platoon leader stationed on the Atlantic coast in Vannes. The unit was on alert to deploy to Djibouti, which had recently declared its independence from France. If there was trouble in the transition, the unit would head there.

Upon arrival at the train station I was driven straight to the officer’s club. I drank too many pastis before attending a reception in my honor — no one told me about the reception until several pastis had passed my lips. The non-commissioned officers lined up one aperitif after another in front of me with glee. Too drunk to be embarrassed, when someone mentioned the reception, I decided to leave the remaining drinks on the table, sober up, and listen and learn about the culture.

At the reception I practiced my French and mustered a dim comment about the Concorde, which was still new. The alcohol drove out my vocabulary so it was the best I could do.

In homes and apartments I briefly lived as French do. There was a continuous series of meals and events tied together with a notion of forgetting about work for a while. Weekends continue to be French in Big Grove, although with much less alcohol and no drunkenness. God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world.

Last Saturday of Spring Harvest - kale, peas, carrots, celery, oregano, basil and spring onions. — Last Saturday of Spring Harvest – kale, peas, carrots, celery, oregano, basil and spring onions.

The garden is in, harvest begun and work remains to be done this Father’s Day weekend.

Weekends at home are a way to avoid expenses as I navigate from semi-retirement to full retirement in a few years. There is no extra money to drive into the county seat for “shopping,” nor is there adequate clothing in the closet to attend any galas to which I may be invited. Working at home avoids expense.

Saturday was the first of many harvests from the vegetable garden. Untold hours were devoted to planting, cultivation and now harvest of kale, celery, carrots, peas, spring onions, basil and oregano. It was exciting.

One of my outlets for excess produce has been workers at the public library. I prepared shares of onions, kale, oregano and basil in a cooler and drove them into town. One of the library workers gave me an acorn squash seedling for which I will find room.

Next I went to the grocery store where a neighbor and I talked for ten minutes about beer selections. He didn’t carry the union-made Pabst Blue Ribbon that would have been my first choice, nor did he have made in Canada Labatt’s Blue which would have been my second. Partly as political commentary I settled for a six-pack of a Mexican mass produced brand. Upon return home I iced three of them and two cans of Royal Crown Cola in the cooler.

The garden entered the summer phase and it’s time to break loose the broccoli.

Last year the broccoli crop was a failure. I decided to protect the seedlings with chicken wire a
nd they survived initial growth. It’s time to take the chicken wire off the individual plants and create a close fence that will keep deer from jumping in and allow the plants to spread their leaves. I scoped it out on Saturday and hope to free the broccoli later this morning.

Harvest is unfinished until the produce is washed, distributed and processed. In a kitchen garden like ours that means cleaning, storage and cooking which takes more time than one might expect.

For dinner I made peas and carrots, and kale-black bean-vegetable soup poured over brown rice made with a jar of home made tomato juice. By the end of Saturday I was very tired.

I took a course in African American Studies while in graduate school.

Kale - Black Bean Soup on Brown Rice — Kale – Black Bean Soup on Brown Rice

The late Jonathan Walton made the case that slaves were likely too tired to do much organizing after working a shift on Southern plantations. I learned a lot about the literature of slavery and its narratives because of Walton. I wasn’t sure what to make of his assertion, other than that slaves were people just as we are.

I yawned during class from time to time and Walton called me on it, inquiring about my condition… was the subject matter too tedious? Had I been up late the previous night? I tried to stay awake. It was a dry topic.

Everyone has an opinion about slavery. For the most part, people don’t directly favor it. It is a stain on our public consciousness that has not been removed, nor likely will be in my lifetime. I’m not sure what exactly that means in 21st Century America.

The term “wage-slave” is popular today, especially among people ascendant from low-paying work. Forced labor continues to exist unawares, notably through labor trafficking. Neither is the same thing the peculiar institution was.

Modern life has us removed from the actuality of things like neighboring, sharing and slavery and we are the less for it. This Father’s Day Weekend I plan to commune with what is actual — what is real. By doing so sustain our lives in a turbulent world.

Tags cooking, Kitchen Garden, local food, Sustainability, worklife