The World Is Too Much With Us

March 3, 2012

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon …

Abandoned house after passing storm

- William Wordsworth

A chance remark by a newscaster on the PBS News Hour last night, quoting the first phrase of Wordsworth’s poem, “The world is too much with us,” sent me scurrying to the internet to look up the entire poem.  I hadn’t read Wordsworth in years, finding a lot of his poetry a bit too lyrical for my taste, but over those years, that quoted phrase from the poem had stuck in my mind for some reason and I was curious to see why.

Even though he wrote the poem in 1806, as I read through the first stanza, quoted above, it seemed as though Wordsworth had had a prophetic glimpse into our own time some two hundred years later.

I suppose that’s the power of poetry, that something written at another time can suddenly grab us with forgotten words and cause us to say, “Yes.  That says what I’m feeling, exactly.”

The world is too much with us.  From the constant pressures of getting and spending, designed  more to save the world financial system than to save the ordinary person drowning in the debt, to the mad scramble toward another middle east war (designed not to save us from a nuclear Iran, but to save us from the loss of the dollar as the world oil currency in an Iranian borst,) we have laid waste our power and ordinary mortals are crushed by the struggles.

From giant corporate food farms irrigated with a dwindling water supply and monstrous corporate animal farms housing our meat supply in its own waste, to giant machines slashing the dead earth and gobbling its dwindling resources for one more round of getting and spending, little we see in nature that is ours. We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon.

Nature has tried to warn us of our bad bargain, from the mass dying of bees and bats, the explosions of giant hog farms and increasing transmission of animal to human diseases, to melting glaciers and sea ice and increasing outbreaks of wildfires, drought, hurricanes and tornadoes.

Yet, as Wordsworth says later in the poem, For this, for everything, we are out of tune. It moves us not–Great God!  For all of this, besotted by the acquisition of things, we can’t see what we have lost and continue to lose in that sordid boon.

I sit here at my computer listening to a cardinal call outside the window.  The jonquils bloom along the fence and the henbit has begun its annual riot.  I’ve ordered new seeds and it’s time to trim the grape vines.  Soon I’ll need to turn the soil and get the early vegetables in the ground.  With the warm winter we’ve had, I’m no longer sure I’ll get the timing right.  I have no innate sense of this, these days.  But I hope, if I listen to and watch what’s going on around me, I will find a way to adjust to what we have now put out of tune.

At least I find that nature still moves me; the acts of sowing and reaping still excite me; I still see much in nature that is ours.  And, as happens this time every year, I find I must go out and be in nature once again.

Especially when the world is too much with me, late and soon.

I Love Downton Abbey

February 25, 2012

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There.  I’ve said it and, (for all you doomer purists, who turn up your noses at TV watching,) I’m glad.  Yes, some of it is high-class British soap opera. So what?  The drama takes place in a fascinating period of our mutual history with good writing and acting, interesting and believable characters and it deals with historical events – World War I and the Spanish Flu in these first two seasons – that changed both the aristocracy and the servant class in Britain and the world they lived in, forever.

As a history buff and someone who has tried my hand at historical fiction, I appreciate a well-written story that portrays that history through the eyes of not only history makers, but of those ordinary people who lived or died by the choices of those movers and shakers.  Downton Abbey does this as well as and perhaps better than most of the historical fiction (and no small part of the historical “fact”) I’ve read and seen portrayed through the years.

But it did something else for me, as good historical fiction based on lives lived during the time, often does.  It reminded me of my own family history and of the fact that we are all part of an interwoven web of events as old as mankind.

My living room walls have several small collections of family pictures – my son and stepson, their children, my brothers and sisters, my parents, their parents and grandparents.  They serve to anchor memories of those who were or still are in my life and add flesh and bones to those I knew only through stories passed on to me by family members.

One is a picture of my paternal great-grandmother, white hair drawn back in a bun, wearing a long black dress and a white half-apron.  She appears to be in her late seventies, perhaps early eighties, and is flanked by her two daughters and her six sons and stepsons – one of whom is my paternal grandfather, Samuel Reeves.  She lived through the Civil War, I assume in northwestern Arkansas (since according to land records, members of the family bought property there in 1845 and 1848) with its bloody cross border battles between the northern and southern armies.  My smattering of Cherokee blood comes from a marriage somewhere along that branch of the family.

There’s also a picture of Grandpa Sam and Grandma Laura, taken – I believe- on one of their wedding anniversaries.  They left northwestern Arkansas shortly after they married and moved to southern Oklahoma in a covered farm wagon while Oklahoma was still Indian Territory.  They worked leased farms there, where they raised twelve children – one of whom was my father.  Twice their homes burned down and after one of those times, my grandfather left my grandmother and the younger children with his mother while he went to New Mexico to work in the silver mines until he had enough money to start over again.

A picture of my maternal great grandmother, Elizabeth “Libby” Glenn Schleicher, hangs there, too.  A formidable woman, to hear my mother tell it, she was a member of the Ohio Glenns (though of which branch I’m not sure) that gave us the American astronaut, John Glenn.  I have no picture of Great-grandpa Schleicher, but I have seen a picture of him in the restaurant they owned back in Ohio at the turn of the last century.

Nor do I have a picture of his mother, Rosina Kruger Schleicher, who followed her husband, Johann, to America in the early 1850s with their three young children – one of whom was a baby.  They came from Bavaria during the revolutions that swept Germany and much of Europe in 1848.  She and the children came by steerage and landed at Castle Garden in New Jersey after her husband had found a job.  My mother told me that, during the trip, the baby died of a fever that had spread through steerage.  After they wrapped him and brought him up on deck for burial at sea, he suddenly began to cry – whether from the brisk sea air or the hand of God, I can’t say.  That baby grew up to become my great grandfather.  Whether the story is factual or apocryphal I don’t know, but it has become a part of my family history and, thus, a tiny piece of the history of the times.

A small portrait of my maternal grandmother, Edith Schleicher Jordan, also hangs there.  Three years old, dressed to the nines in a heavy suit and bonnet, she looks for all the world like someone’s dour baby doll standing against the chair back.  She married Clinton Jordan, a young Ohio lawyer and, later, the owner of a construction company.  They moved to Oklahoma when my mother was a child and lived through World War I and the Spanish flu pandemic, the dust bowl and the Great Depression.  The home he built for them there still stands – at least it did when my brothers and I took Mom back to see it a few years before she died.

I have no photo of my maternal grandfather, but I do have three sketches – of him, my grandmother and my mom – that Mom did when she was pregnant with my older brother.  Grandpa Jordan was Scots-Irish, a large man and, in the sketch, looking rather formidable, himself.  He lost the construction company and his law practice in the Great Depression and, one Sunday in 1941, while my mother and grandmother were at church, committed suicide.  What part those losses played in his death, no one knows for sure.

My grandmother lived into her seventies, though pictures taken in her late fifties, as I remember her from my childhood, show the beginnings of the Parkinsonism that eventually took her life.  She had begun a career as a concert violinist, which she gave up, of course, when she married my grandfather.  She was no longer able to play the violin by the time I was a child, but I do remember her whistling Schumann’s “Trammerai” one evening in our kitchen while she washed dishes.  Apparently she had been a life-long whistler because my mom said that Grandpa used to say to her, when he caught her whistling, “Remember, Edith, a whistling woman and a crowing hen come to no good end.”

A copy of my parent’s wedding picture hangs there, as do later pictures of each of them.  Born in 1909 and 1910, their lives spanned both world wars, the Spanish flu pandemic and the Great Depression.  I’ve mentioned some of their trials and tribulations during the Depression and World War II on this blog, so I won’t repeat them here.

The stories connected with these people are many and do me proud, I think, as the recipient of both their histories and their genes.  They ground me in my own life and remind me of both the frailties and the strengths we humans possess when pressed to the mat by life.

You have such a history, too, full of people both ordinary and extraordinary.  And if you are, as I have been, lucky enough to have a storyteller or two in your family to remind you of these people, take another look at the treasures they have given you.

We live in times that may yet prove to be as difficult and world changing as that period portrayed in Downton Abbey.   Knowing history is a good thing.  That knowledge reminds us that humanity has been down these roads before, many times.  But, knowing our own history is priceless.  It reminds us that our own ancestors survived such times, leaving us lessons to use and pass on to those who will follow us into their own history.

That’s why I love Downton Abbey.

The Free Exercise of Religion and Freedom of Choice

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February 18, 2012

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof …”  First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America

Such simple words.  Congress can’t pass a law that establishes a religion for the people of this country – not your religion; not my religion.  Nor can Congress pass a law that prohibits us from freely exercising our religions.  That seems pretty straight-forward.  Congress should basically stay out of our religious lives.

Of course, they do not.   Congress involves itself in the business of religion all the time.  If religion involves itself in providing food, shelter or other non-spiritual services to people, whether those people are congregants or not, religious businesses are (with a few exceptions) subject to laws that make sure that food is safe, that shelter actually shelters and so forth.

As far as the actual practice of religious beliefs, (again, with a few notable exceptions) Congress is required by that First Amendment clause to stay out of it.

But, what happens when laws regarding the business of religion conflict with the practice of religious beliefs?  Such a conflict arose this past week in the brouhaha over whether Catholic business institutions such as colleges had to meet the new health care requirements of offering contraception coverage to female employees, both Catholic and non-Catholic, in their insurance polices.  The religious leaders say violates the free exercise of their religious belief that the use of contraception is a sin.

Or, when people, out of religious conviction, try to push through laws that limit the secular rights of others who do not share their religious convictions?  Such conflicts are ongoing across the country as laws now being pressed in several states to limit a woman’s secular right to an abortion within the context of Roe v. Wade or prevent a gay couple’s equal right to marry under the Constitution’s equal rights clause.

We all, of course, Christian and non-Christian, live in a country designed by the founding fathers as a secular state in order that one group could not use the various parts of government to press its particular religious beliefs on everyone else to the detriment of their beliefs.  Eventually these issues will be settled in court, (at no small cost to the presenting and defending groups alike).

This is as it should be in a secular society that respects the rights of all of its citizens.  Freedom of religion does mean freedom from religion, as unthinkable as that may be to some people of religion.  Because you have no real freedom of your religious views if you have no freedom from mine when our views are in conflict.  I have no more right to demand, under penalty of law, that you live your life according to my atheistic beliefs than you do to demand the opposite.  Not if we are going to preserve a free society based on equal rights and freedom of choice.

In a free society, we wrestle with our beliefs, especially our religious beliefs.  Otherwise, belief degenerates into ideology and dogma that allows no space for others to have freedom of choice in their beliefs.

Since I do not believe God exists, I cannot say that life is sacred (blessed by God).  I can say that it is endlessly fascinating, mysterious and worthy of care on our part.  Nor can I say that even humans – let alone other life forms – have an “inherent” right to life.  When animals are not healthy enough to carry a fetus to term or the fetus is too damaged, animals spontaneously abort – human animals do too.  About 15-25% of human pregnancies end in miscarriage.

When I look around and see the misery of war, hunger, economic dislocation, disease or abuse that so many of humanity’s children are born into, I can’t in good conscience demand that every woman bring every pregnancy to term for the sake of someone else’s religious beliefs.  Being a woman, I have to trust that most women will make the right choice for both themselves and that yet unborn life inside as to whether or not to carry it to term.  It is not my choice to make for someone else.  I certainly can’t say that it should be the choice of a group of men, who will never be pregnant themselves, based on their religious beliefs.

For those of you who believe it’s the church’s responsibility to alleviate that suffering and therefore it is no excuse for a woman to have that right, I would only say that that the church has been around for thousands of years with no real change in the basic misery level that I can see.

Nor do I feel qualified, as a straight woman who lived through her own bad marriage and divorce, to deny a gay or lesbian couple the right to marry based on someone else’s religious beliefs.  Especially since, in this country at least, the granting of a right to marry is the prerogative of the state through licensing – even in religious marriages.  Only the “blessing” of a marriage through a religious ceremony is granted to the church in our society.  And our Constitution guarantees equal rights to all of its citizens.  I can only believe that among consenting adults that applies to marriage, whether you are gay or straight.

Christians who long for the state to make law according to the dictates of their religious beliefs need to think through the consequences of such a desire. Once that foot is in the door, so to speak, you will have to live with it for a long time – just as those who live in countries that are ruled by other religions’ laws.  What if it were not your particular sect of Christianity that won the lottery?  What if the Mormons took over and did away with your morning coffee or tea?  What if the Baptists took over and everyone had to be dunked instead of sprinkled?

What if it wasn’t even Christianity that won the lottery? If the Muslims won it, would they respect your communion wine or would the Orthodox Jews allow you your pork chops and morning bacon?

Yes, these are rather silly examples.  But there are “Christian” sects out there who advocate for Old Testament law – including the stoning of adulterers and gays, for example.  Are you willing to live with the consequences of their winning the lottery?

The world is in flux right now.  The American Empire is having to retrench on many fronts.  So much of what happens next will depend on whether the world can maintain the delicate dance of globalization and world finance as energy supplies increasingly rely on harder to get, more expensive and, therefore, less efficient energy sources.

In times of turmoil, especially economic turmoil like we are still in now, people of power – whether religious, political or economic – are not above using that turmoil to grab more power, nor are they above using the other two to advance their own.  We all will have to wrestle with whether we are dragged along in the power play, blindly clinging to a sclerotic dogma or whether in spite of faith in our own belief system, we are willing to allow others the right to choose their way for themselves.  Neither freedom of religion nor freedom of choice will survive otherwise.

Plumbing and Other Things in a Complex Society

February 11, 2012

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The basic wiring of a house is not a mystery to me.  I can look around my home and picture, in my head, how the wiring runs along the ceilings and walls.  I’ve even done a few minor electrical repairs through the years without electrocuting myself.  (Yes, I remembered to flip the circuit breaker before starting.)  Part of that may be because I helped my ex-husband frame in our ex-house and watched him wire the place after we’d closed it in.

Not so, with the plumbing.  By then, we’d divorced and I’d taken an apartment in Springfield to go back to school.  Therefore, I missed the plumbing lessons.  Yes, I can close the shut-off valves and drain the tap long enough to change a ring, washer or faucet. In my lifetime, I’ve even removed a toilet bowl, changed the wax seal and managed to get all the parts back together and working.  However, how all the pipes that connect those appliances to the water main are laid out between here and there remains shrouded in mystery.  I cannot picture it in my mind.  Nor, with my bad balance, can I get down the narrow stairs that run under the first floor to the converted root cellar (with no light) where many of those pipes and my hot water heater dwell in darkness.   I do have a big book of house repairs that purports to show the basic layout in a simple drawing, but I have found that each house I’ve lived in over the years is unique and I was never sure if the widget on my pipes really corresponded to the widget (or even the pipe) in the diagram.

Because of this, I’m left to the mercy, not so much of the plumber sent out as to the mercy of the home warranty company who sends him out.

I became cognizant of this once again this week when trying to report a couple of what I imagined were simple plumbing problems.  The dishwasher in the downstairs apartment had quit filling up and the man who put the wi-fi wiring in for the new tenant said there was a small amount of standing water in the cellar and we might have a leak somewhere.  In my mind, the dishwasher problem was simply a matter of unplugging the water line that led from under the sink to the dishwasher and, though I could not plumb the depths of a leak somewhere in the basement, I felt sure a competent plumber could handle both.

Having become a landlady a couple of months ago, when my son and his fiancé moved in together, I dutifully called my warranty company.  After a few minutes of trying to explain the problem to a machine with a long list of one-word options in terms a little more complex than “dishwasher” and “leak”,  the machine informed me a plumber and an appliance technician would call to schedule their appointments and the fees would be $X per call.  I tried to ask for an operator to speak with.  Alas, the machine did not understand.

Next, I tried to cancel the service orders and go to their online site, where I could at least ask for a plumber and put down a more complex reason for the order – in hope that the computer would recognize, both jobs could be done by the same person.  Silly me.  Not only did the computer not recognize that, it informed me that it could not put my orders through, since the orders had already been placed by phone and to please call the same number I had just called. (Clever computer.)

Back to the phone I went.  When the mystery machine coughed up the option, “status of order,” I took that option with little hope that it would make a difference.  To my surprise, a very pleasant human being answered and after explaining the two problems and that they could probably both be tackled by the same plumber, she told me – with much sympathy – that they simply couldn’t allow that.  The dishwasher repair had to be done by a licensed appliance technician.  I then explained that I really didn’t have the cash on hand to pay two separate service fees and asked if she would cancel the dishwasher repair until I got my check next month.  She agreed and said that they would be happy to try and work with me on the dishwasher repair later.  By that time, I was – quite honestly – afraid to ask what “try and work with you” might mean.  I thanked her and hung up to await a call from the plumber to let me know when he would be out.

That evening, when he had said he would, he came; he saw; he conquered.   He fixed a couple of things in the downstairs bathroom the tenant had mentioned, went to the basement and found that a part in the small pump that drew moisture out of the air had frozen up and its collector had begun to run over, said he would be back the next day with the replacement part and returned the next day to fix it.  Easy peasy.   I paid him the service fee, thanked him and that was that.

This morning, after a night when the temperature dropped to seven degrees, I woke to find neither I nor the tenant had hot water.  Imagining that a mystery pipe  somewhere in that dark cellar – that somehow branched off to the two separate water heaters – had frozen, I picked up the phone once again and began the journey of calling my warranty company  to ask for a plumber.  Of course, it  was not that simple …

There are moments, at times like this, I honestly wonder whether collapse could possibly be more daunting than the task of calling for a plumber in our complex society.

Sacrificial Lambs

February 4, 2012

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Europe’s economy is in the crapper.  The American economy barely has its nose above the edge. The prospect of war with Iran dances along the rim, ready to flush both – and perhaps the entire global economy – down the toilet.  Scientists now tell us the deadly winter occurring in Europe is due to the melting Arctic sea ice and that the gut-wrenching drought in Texas will go on for another year or two.  The world continues its dance along the bumpy plateau of peak oil.  Saudi Arabia assures that world that it can increase its output of oil, currently at 9.something mbd, by another 2.something mbd if a war with Iran should send Iran’s oil output down the crapper, even though it hasn’t been able to do so for any of the other disasters that befell the world last year.  And  One Million Moms, sponsored by the conservative Christian group, American Family Association, tried to force J.C. Penney to dissolve its partnership with Ellen De Generes, as their national spokeswoman, because she is gay.  (To Penney’s credit, they are refusing.)

Looking at that odd juxtaposition of news this week, it occurred to me that, in our grief over the impending death of Business As Usual, we have sidestepped moving on from bargaining  to acceptance by taking a turn back toward bargaining’s ancient stepsister, the sacrificing of lambs, (or in the case of those million moms, lesbians,) to whatever gods we feel need appeasing so that BAU might live.

And it’s not just conservative Christians that are busy whetting the knives; that sacrificial craving is everywhere.  Among Movers and Shakers, the Fed and the TBTF banks here have sacrificed several million homeowners and small businesses to the gods of financial stability.  The ECB is busy trying to wrestle Greece and the other PIIGS onto the stone slab for another bout of bloodletting in hopes of appeasing those same gods. The giant corporations have drained the life blood from Gaia and offered it to the gods of commerce in hopes of one more orgy of profits.  Conservative leaders everywhere are sure that if they can just cut the hearts out of a few more poor people and offer a few more tax breaks to the wealthy and big corps, the god of fiscal health will be oh, so pleased.  While the Liberals would rather cut the hearts out of the wealthy and the big corps (except, of course, for donors) and offer the tax breaks to the poor in appeasement.  The DHS, along with its spineless allies in Congress and the White House, has offered up the Bill of Rights to the pyre in hopes of satisfying the gods of security.  The Defense Department and the Commander in Chief seem willing to sacrifice anyone, from individual citizens it deems terrorists to whole nations it sees as not acting in our national interests, to the gods of empire.

And we, the People?  We – Religious or Non; Black, Brown or White; Democrats, Republicans or Independents;  literate or illiterate; OWS or TeaPartiers; doomer or sheeple – have been so busy trying to shove each other into the conflagration in hopes that the gods of chaos will pass us by, we’ve failed to notice that Business As Usual just expired and all our bloody sacrifices have appeased the gods not one whit.

And So It Goes

January 28, 2012

Image by matt.hintsa via Flickr

 

Well, glancing over the news this week, I could tell you that the EU has decided to help punish Iran with an oil embargo, to be instituted over the next six months so as to avoid punishing themselves by abruptly discontinuing their oil supply.  Or, that Iran appears to have kindly offered to help them along by simply banning the sale of oil to the EU starting next week. (Oh, SNAP!)  And that Iran will open talks with the UN nuclear inspectors tomorrow in an attempt to show that they are not in fact working on a nuclear arms program even though the US, Israel and the EU already know that and have said as much.  Or that all this falderal is probably more about regime change and the hope that we can slip in a Western-friendly government that will privatize Iranian oil for the benefit of Big Oil (and, of course, the rest of mankind.)

 

I could mention the cautious rejoicing brought about by 2.8 percent growth in our moribund economy in the last quarter of 2011, though that was the quarter that contained our annual Christmas buying spree.  And that we have already seen an uptick in unemployment claims from the loss of those temporary pre-Christmas retail jobs. Or that, in spite of last quarter’s growth, the Fed is still worried about the sustainability of that growth throughout the next couple of years.

 

I could discuss our Energy Information Agency’s new happy-happy forecast for growing US energy production over the next eight years that doesn’t really discuss the problem of decreasing energy returned on the energy invested to produce it.  Or that this will likely continue as a drag on the economy and mean continued high  costs to we ordinary consumers of energy.

 

I could toss into the discussion pot the news that the World Health Organization is increasingly concerned about the growth in the number of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and the growing possibility of an epidemic of antibiotic-resistant diseases with continued overuse of antibiotics by physicians and farmers.  Or that oceanographers and environmentalists are worried that massive over fishing of our oceans is pushing some species of food fish to the brink of extinction.  And that in a string of strange environmental happenings over the last few years, this has been a weirdly warm January for much of the country.

 

I could even throw some levity into the mix by noting that, if elected President, Newt Gingrich would like to send us back to the moon and John McCain would like to start the project by sending Newt there first.

 

I could write a blog post discussing any or all of these, but I won’t.  I won’t because on this sunny January day, I find I just don’t give a damn.  Those in power either will or won’t embargo Iran into an actual shooting war; will or won’t get the economy cranking; will or won’t find a way to maintain this high energy economy on higher-cost, lower-value energy; will or won’t find a way to destroy us and the environment we depend on; will or won’t continue the political circus until the whole rootin’ tootin’ shootin’ match collapses of sheer exhaustion.  There is little I can do to influence them one way or the other at this point.

 

On the other hand, over the next month I can finish planning my spring garden, buy what seeds I need and start my transplants.  I can continue to winnow down the list of small repairs around the house – inside until spring, outside after that.  I can make sure I maintain my pantry and find ways to keep abreast of and engaged in what’s happening in my neighborhood through the rest of this strange winter.

 

By next week, February will have blown in – perhaps cold, with snow and ice; perhaps unseasonably warm, with floods and tornadoes.  Maybe by then, war will have started. Maybe Europe will have collapsed.  Maybe some new environmental catastrophe will have befallen mankind; maybe we will have turned some unexpected corner back toward sanity.  I will or won’t have survived these vagaries to talk about it.  If so, maybe by next week I will give a damn again.  Maybe not.

 

And so it goes.

 

Gifting, Paying Forward and Other Ideas for the New Economy

January 21, 2012

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Looking through the news this week, I see that the stock market here is up, growth in China is slowing, Greece may or may not be on the verge of making a deal on its debt and the World Bank is warning of another worldwide economic downturn worse than that of 2008 if the developed nations do not get their fiscal houses in order.  Depending on which economic thinker you read, this may mean governments doubling down on austerity measures, adding more monetary stimulation to their various economies or, perhaps, both at the same time.  Who knows?

In the meantime, our oil-dependant world continues to pay more for less in energy as the easily accessible, high EROEI fossil fuels go the way of the dinosaurs and we become more dependent on the expensive, dirtier, harder to access dregs from deep water, arctic waters, oil sands, shale and mountain top removal for our oil, gas and coal.

In complexity theory, complex systems that lose energy become more chaotic around the edges of the system until they reach a tipping point in which they suddenly revert to a lower energy state.  If they lose enough energy, the final state is collapse.

In  much of the developed world, our economies have already devolved from a production based state to a debt-based state.  In our current global financial system, the illusion of growth is maintained by debt and interest.  But we have already begun to see what happens in this state as the flow of energy into the system tightens and decreases.  Governments, financial institutions and ordinary people become increasingly unable to maintain even the interest on their debts, the lower state become ever more unstable at the edges and must devolve to yet a lower energy state or collapse.

So, while the movers and shakers continue the futile task of trying to maintain this complex world financial system in a world of diminishing energy input, what are the rest of us to do as the world economy continues downward?

I don’t know.  Greater minds than mine don’t know, (though few of them will admit that.)

Right now, some are saving rather than going into debt, some are simply walking away from that debt and, for those whose lives are caught up in the chaos at the edges, we seem to have devolved to a state of increasing dependence on both governmental and non-governmental social safety nets.  But, if we cannot find a way to introduce more energy into the system, this lower energy state, too, will begin to fray around the edges.

If we keep expending our decreasing energy on new ways to maintain the high energy system, the next tipping point may well be collapse.  But if we can nudge the unstable state toward increasingly lower energy states, we may well find a state of low energy that will be relatively stable as far as maintaining an acceptable level of quality of life.

As I tried to point out last week, we can’t do this without letting go of our illusions and ideologies about what constitutes an acceptable quality of life.  If we can’t disabuse ourselves of the religious, political or financial notions that the only acceptable way is “my way or the highway” and work together in spite of our own particular beliefs, the resulting chaos will only push us toward final collapse.  I don’t think this is something our institutions can do for us any longer.  I think we will have to do it for ourselves.  We will have to find ways to put in place our own safety nets that give each other breathing room as we make a way for ourselves in each devolution of the economy.

There are all kinds of examples of this, both current and historical.  I started thinking about this again when a friend posted about her brother and his girlfriend this week. They started their own business in this fragile economy, without going into debt and paying exhorbitant interest and are now “paying forward” the act of kindness that made it possible. http://madisonwest.channel3000.com/photo-gallery/business/64433-local-cupcake-business-pays-recent-success-forward?page=31

This, of course, started with an act of “gifting”.  The original storeowner gifted them with the space to start their business within his own store.   The gift which, rather than being repaid, is then passed on to the next person.

I posted an article in the Community section of this blog about time banks – the idea of “depositing” time spent helping a neighbor or community member with a task which earns you an equal amount of time from any other member of the “bank” who can offer a service you need.

Gifting in the form of food, supplies and shelter for those who have lost everything can be passed along as those people begin to recover.  Leaving a gleaning during harvest, pot latches (or the modern day equivalent of community pot lucks) have a long and honorable history in moneyless  or low “income” societies.  In the past, community activities involving equipment in short supply or requiring a lot of time if done individually – barn or house raisings, canning and quilting bees, for example – were common neighborhood activities.

Sociologists and psychologists say that we can keep only six or seven items in our short-term memory at one time and that we do best in groups of no more than 100 to 150.  As I’ve said before, even the largest cities seem to organize themselves in smaller neighborhoods along these needs.

This global, oil based economy will change – either by devolution or collapse – as fossil fuel energy becomes more scarce and expensive.  The Old Order seems too set upon preserving business as usual to make the necessary changes, but we can make changes individually and within our own neighborhoods that will increase our chances of surviving the periods of chaos as the system comes down.  It’s the one act of gifting we can and should give ourselves.