I urge both my readers to read this article by Van Jones, author and activist.  I believe we are at a genuine crossroads in America — a cliché, but accurate in this case.

Your country needs you now, in whatever way you can help, to keep some more of the first-world infrastructure that we take for granted, the infrastructure that sustains us and allows us to get on the with the rest of our lives.  What do I mean?  We take for granted, nowadays, that a job means 40 hours a week; anything over that is overtime (whether you find yourself paid extra for it or not); workers expect vacations, sick time, timely paychecks with appropriate deductions and contributions, reasonable breaks, safe working conditions, freedom from exploitation in ordinary employment, and much more — all won for us over many decades by unions able to take collective action.

If you care at all about what is happening in Wisconsin right now, and I hope you do, read this article.  Then think carefully about what you may be willing to do — whether it’s gather on statehouse steps or Twitter, Facebook, or just talk it up, or perhaps donate to organizations such as MoveOn.org or Democracy For America, or an organization of your choice — or perhaps pray hard, if you are moved to do so.

First world, third world.  What makes the difference?  It’s much less a matter of geography than you may think.  Sure, you can spot lots of first world countries geographically: the U.S., the European Union, the British Commonwealth countries, Japan, several others.  But that’s far from all there is to it.

In practical terms, in the first world, things work, and there is a reasonable expectation that they will continue to do so (hence our impatience when they occasionally or, sometimes, routinely, don’t).  When you flip on the light switch, the light comes on.  The refrigerator, plugged in, keeps your food in cold storage around the clock (assuming you’ve paid the bill).  Sometimes,of course, extraordinary things happen that can disrupt our lives: major hurricanes and tornadoes, strokes of lightning, trees falling on the roof, record snowfall or freezes taking down wires and trees, breaking water mains that freeze and cause car crashes — but by and large, things work, and work as we expect them to.

Why is that?  Because an infrastructure — don’t you love that word and its overuse — has been built up over the years: electrical power grids, natural gas pipelines, interstate highway systems, railways and public transit, subways and buses, local shopping malls, systems of building codes and inspectors to enforce them, and licensing of skilled craftspeople (electricians, plumbers, and others) whose licenses depend on their working according to the established codes.  Also: fire and police and paramedics, systems of public education through university level educating and training a workforce, public libraries (often woefully underused but nearly irreplaceable once gone), private versions of schools and libraries, a scientific community (now world-wide), a huge number of companies and businesses, large and small, that offer employment in their attempts to generate a profit. Also: broadcast and cable networks, wireless networks for phones and computers, satellites for communication, weather, observation and GPS.  Also: safe municipal and regional water systems, sanitary sewage treatment, farming and agriculture, food picking and processing (canning, freezing, boxing up, packing for shipment), trucking and distribution (there are those interstate highways again), gas and oil refinement and distribution.  And I’m sure you could think of more, many more.

None of these things work absolutely perfectly.  Some of them could be much improved.  Accidents and delays happen, and much worse. But our expectation is always that the infrastructure is and will be in place, and, in the first world, that it will work.  It works so well we don’t even think about it…

…until one day it doesn’t work, through accident, carelessness, neglect, or greed: those massive layoffs and cutbacks leading to job loss and, too often, foreclosure, sometimes even homelessness, or severe or chronic illness draining all family money: we’ve seen too much of it in the last decade.  Or a toxic spill or leak covers acres or square miles of land or of water.  Or, on a lesser scale, the local water company has to lay new pipe or repair a major leak, and the water’s off for a day, or several days in a row, while they do it. Or the local electrical substation is hit by lightning and lights (and refrigerators) go out over a large area.  The price of infrastructure is eternal upkeep and fast recovery.

In the third world, this expectation of things working, and the ability to take them for granted and get on with the rest of your life, is stood on its head.  Everything is ad hoc. The business of the day, every day, is survival. Life is much more of a do-it-yourself project down to the smallest degree. You may have to build your own house or shelter from whatever materials you can find, make, trade for, or (if you must) buy from whoever is selling or leaving them behind. Perhaps you can generate or share with someone else, or a nearby power line. You may have to find and haul your own water.  If you are lucky, there is a pump somewhere within reasonable walking distance: grab your can or pail and get started.

The infrastructure the first world has come to expect is what is missing.

Why don’t the third world countries have infrastructures of the type seen in the first world?  In practical terms, it takes a very long time and work and, over time, significant amounts of money to build up infrastructure.  The interstate highway system here  didn’t get built until after WWII. Roads had to be extended to reach new towns and developments, with intersections, overpasses, tunnels, cloverleafs, even (sigh) roundabouts. The railroads were built in the 19th century.  Systems of growing food and moving it to market have always had to be in place, locally at first, extending and developing over time and taking advantage of new transportation opportunities (rail, rivers, highways, etc.) as they became available.  Hubs of activity sprang up (Chicago as butcher to the world, with ranchers driving their cattle to railheads where they could be taken there — what would Western movies have done without the cattle drive and the rustlers?).  The United States has slowly been building and consolidating its infrastructure since it was founded; Europe and other parts of the world have been doing so far longer.  (Americans who visit London notice that all the buildings there are stone or brick, thanks to lessons learned in the Great Fire, and as they come back to this country by air after a week there they see all the wooden frame houses and buildings here that, to their London-accustomed eyes, now look as though they were put up yesterday and may blow down in a high wind tomorrow.)

My point is, it all has to be put in place over many years, with huge amounts of money paid out to get it done, for all that time. Whether it’s private money or public money, it takes a lot of money. Younger, third world countries trying to catch up in a few years to a process that has been going on for centuries elsewhere is a little like someone saying they plan to be a millionaire by the time they are forty — but announcing that  goal when they are already 38 years old.  It can be done, and I hope for success, but it’s not easy to do, and may take longer than anyone wants it to.  As I understand it, the undeveloped countries with natural resources are selling them off to developed countries, many of them, to raise the money to develop their countries.  And many countries already have development projects and plans underway —and have for some time — that are well on their way to achieving their goals.

I have purposely avoided talking about history or politics (always wise) or even, gasp, economics in any detail. I make no mention of colonization, exploitation, racism, religious or ethnic intolerance, civil wars, killings and assassinations — why should I?  These are all things that have happened in my own country.  But I have lived in the third world as a Peace Corps volunteer (long ago and far away) and I have lived the rest of my life in the first world, so I know at least a little of both.

I can only hope that we find a way for everyone to live peaceably and safely and well, and save our over-populated and over-exploited planet Earth as we do, for the benefit of ourselves and our children and grandchildren — and their chldren, too.

Randy Murray sent me this link on the possible library closings in Oxford, England, U.K. Some counties in the U.S. are also considering closings or turning them over to companies who want to run them for profit, so don’t think this may not be an event of interest.

If you are a user of a public library, or a reader of books from any source, especially since the recent economic unpleasantness, you will definitely want to read about what happened when the citizens of Oxford, England held a meeting protesting library cuts, and author Philip Pullman, a local resident and the author of many books, including one made into the movie The Golden Compass, spoke at that meeting. Here is his speech. Readers and town budgeters both, take heed.

The BBC news site reminded me that Friday, the 28th of January 2011 was the 25th anniversary of the Challenger disaster.  I could hardly believe, math to one side, that it had been 25 years.

The Challenger disaster was for me and many people I knew not only the national tragedy everyone felt that day, and long afterwards — it was certainly all of that — but it marked another moment.  Our friend had been a huge fan of the space program, going down to the Cape to watch liftoffs, talking up the program, educating his students and teachers in the schools in NYC where he was a loved and respected elementary school princlpal.

A loved and respected principal? Isn’t that an oxymoron? But a high school friend of mine and I went to visit his school in Harlem at his invitation, and saw his Pied Piper-like way with the students and children.  He took us around to classrooms in the school, not interrupting them, but having us look in through the glass, and letting us hear the sound of a good classroom: a kind of quiet murmur where students worked on projects, not unruly uproar and not stony silence. He was incredibly happy and proud that there was a teacher, Christa MacAuliffe, on the shuttle.

His witty comments about the life all around him were practically a running commentary that his friends looked forward to hearing; he exercised the same Pied Piper kind of friendly magnetism on us that he did on his school pupils.  His words were never unkind, never at the expense of others.

That commentary stopped forever as he watched the Challenger liftoff turn into a disaster.

A close friend of mine, who also knew our friend and his family, said to me last night as I spoke to him of that double disaster, and taking nothing from the Challenger tragedy itself, now so long ago, ”Whenever I hear of the Challenger disaster I think of him as one of the team on that flight.”

Well put.  And so now do I.

If you follow each of these links, in this order, you’ll get the big picture:

The first link  is from the American Museum of Natural History.

The second link is from the SLOAN digital sky survey.

The third link is a somewhat different SLOAN digital sky release — an important step in understanding the view.

The fourth link is to a news story on BBC.

The fifth link is to the Eighth Data Release (DR8) web site.

Great stuff, in every sense.

If ever we could stand to take a good long look at ourselves, a clear and undistorted one, at where we are as a country, it’s right now.

1.  With freedom comes responsibility.

2.  Comparison with the past can give context. How does real terrorism begin?   This entire linked article is first-rate, but the part beginning below the box is to me the most important information.  The article was written in 2009, but the analysis remains top-notch.

3.  There’s nothing better than a bracing dose of cold, clear facts.  Are the two sides ‘just as bad’ as each other? No way. Want proof, facts, evidence? Here’s some good, complete, in-depth research and fact-finding.  Melissa McEwan lays it out for you.

4. Can speech that does not quite tell anyone to do anything violent, but does everything else to get a target in the public eye, still be responsible for causing the harm that follows from it? Read this article.

5. The Supreme Court decision of June 26, 2008, may well have marked the beginning of a great many incidents, of which this is only the latest. Check this lengthy list.

I learned a lot from these posts; I hope both my readers will do so, too.

Hendrik Hertzberg’s piece in the January 10, 2011 issue of The New Yorker on the upcoming opportunity for changing the filibuster rules in the Senate is far more important than it may sound to ears tired of a lot of political mishmash.

As Hertzberg explains,

It is taken for granted that without the support of sixty of the hundred senators, the number needed to invoke “cloture,” nothing emerges from the Senate alive. The minority can’t quite rule, exactly, but it can, and does, use the rules to ruin.

And just in case you missed them as they went by, Hertzberg enumerates what would have happened in the absence of filibuster and its cousin “holds” in the two years just past.

Read this article: it’s informative and fascinating.  And, at last,  something is actually happening in the Senate to remove the roadblocks.  We can only hope.

Despite all the brouhaha about the President’s deal to get tax cut extensions and unemployment benefit extensions — both great things and much needed in themselves — odds are you may not have heard that the deal also involves accepting cuts in the Social Security payroll tax.  This is a foot in the door for opponents of Social Security, one they’ve been trying to get for a long time.

Before you decide it doesn’t matter to you, ask yourself: just how are those market-based investments doing these days? Do you like your savings account interest rate?  Have you got a rich relative ready to leave it all to you?  Are you planning to win the lottery?  Or perhaps you’re already well enough off that you don’t really worry about it.

If you cynically don’t believe it will be there for you by the time you need it,  or just don’t care enough to see that it will, then you’re in danger of creating your own self-fulfilling prophecy.   Before this, opponents of Social Security have never made any headway in their attempts to get rid of it, because with all their arguments, plans, and schemes, the senior citizens and others who receive it — 47,038,486 as of 2003 — and those who don’t but have parents and family depending on it have formed a huge block of public opinion that cannot be budged.  Social Security is needed.  It’s used.

And it doesn’t add a single dime to the national debt, ever, as Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont  assures us.  Here’s Bernie, in an email to his supporters:

… One of the most underreported parts of this deal is a cut to the Social Security payroll tax. In just one year, over $120 billion of revenue will be cut from Social Security under the President’s compromise plan, weakening the program and virtually guaranteeing benefit cuts in the future.

Make no mistake about it. Social Security has not added one dime to the national debt and this cut will only embolden Republican attempts to privatize the program and increase the age of retirement. Social Security is a vital safety net for all Americans and a cornerstone of our commitment to protect the middle class.

We are not alone in standing against this compromise. Republicans are holding the middle class hostage and the American people know it. I come from a small state and last week my office received thousands of phone calls on this issue, with over 95% of them in opposition to this deal.

Yes, there is something you can do now to protect Social Security at no cost to you or to the nation.

Bernie is collecting signatures on a petition.  Go to www.DemocracyForAmerica.com/NoDeal and sign the petition.  Optionally, you may wish to donate to the effort — but you don’t have to, in order to sign and be counted.

Social Security is an absolutely necessary, hard-won safety net.  There is no other in this country — as we are finding out in the current financial climate, despite all our investments, savings, lottery tickets, crossed fingers, longer working hours, stagnant salaries (if we have jobs at all), etc.

Whether you sign or not, watch Bernie’s Senate floor speech (a 13-minute video on that “No Deal” page) as he lays it out.  I guarantee, some of the facts he cites will astonish you.

For more in-depth background, watch the first twelve minutes of Bernie’s 8½ hour speech in the Senate.  His point over and over is what the deal will cost ordinary Americans — including giving a foot in the door to opponents of Social Security, Medicare, and much else.  You can see his speech here.

Prefer print? Read his main points here: Mother Jones: Filibernie’s Greatest Hits.

Read.  Sign.  Or not.  But don’t say Bernie didn’t warn you.

 

Here’s my advice for this election: everybody vote, especially Democrats.  Why so?  Because the tendency will be for Democrats either to sit back and not worry about things, assuming the status quo will hold (Bzzzt!  But thank you for playing) or to be disappointed that things aren’t better yet (another Bzzt!)

You have to keep your eye on the ball.  Let me direct your attention to the ball: it was the Republicans, especially under Bush’s presidency, who got us into this financial mess, and who have kept the President and the House and Senate from doing more than they have done (which considering the level of opposition, is quite a bit, and has been under-publicized).

So: let’s NOT hand the ball back to the people who did this to us.  They will not make it better. How do I know? It was their ideas of ‘fiscal responsibility’ that got us into the huge mess our economy, and that of many nations of the world, are in. That’s how.

So, please, and especially if you don’t like the idea of having done to us all over again what was done to us before, make sure you know which are the rascals before you vote them out. Then vote the real rascals out. Let the administration and the Congress do the job you elected them to do in 2008.

One helping of bad economy is enough, thanks, no matter what they call it. Don’t give anyone a chance of serving you another.

That’s the message.

For those who want more detail and some good links, backing up what I’ve said, read on:

The big meltdown took place Sept. 15, 2008, seven weeks before election day.  Bush was still President, and John McCain had said that very day, as pointed out by Hendrik Hertzberg in his editorial in The New Yorker that “the fundamentals of our economy are strong.”

We all know how that worked out.

Obama hadn’t yet been elected, and when he was, neither he nor any president-elect could have done anything about public policy or government actions until he was inaugurated as President in January of the following year.

Then he did do a lot — he hadn’t wasted his preparation time, so he was ready to go right away.  But alas, the Republicans — despite barely being a minority — were not ready to cooperate or compromise in any way.  Read about it here:

“I still remember going over to the Republican caucus to meet with them and present our ideas, and to solicit ideas from them before we presented the final package. And on the way over, the caucus essentially released a statement that said, “We’re going to all vote ‘No’ as a caucus.” And this was before we’d even had the conversation.” — President Obama

The President went on to describe the tactics the Republicans used.  They were

“…trying to gum up the works, based on the assumption that given the scope and size of the recovery, the economy probably wouldn’t be very good, even in 2010, and that they were better off being able to assign the blame to us than work with us to try to solve the problem.”

The Democrats and the Administration have not been credited very widely with the accomplishments that were rightly theirs, as Hertzberg tells us:

“…few know that the Democrats had their filibuster-proof majority—sixty votes, not all of them reliable—for just seven of the Obama Administration’s twenty-one months. Under the circumstances, the record is impressive: a health-care program that will cover twenty million of the uninsured while restraining costs; partial reform of the financial industry; the rescue of the American auto industry, saving a million jobs; and a fiscal stimulus—$814 billion of tax cuts, infrastructure projects, and help for states and cities—without which, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, today’s unemployment rate would be pushing twelve per cent.”

Eventually, the President said to Jann Wenner,

“we were able to wear them down, so that we were able to finally get really important laws passed, some of which haven’t gotten a lot of attention — the credit-card reform bill, or the anti-tobacco legislation, or preventing housing and mortgage fraud. We’d be able to pick off two or three Republicans who wanted to do the right thing.”

Thinking clearly about the election?  Good idea.

Voting in the election? Better idea.

Handing the country back to the people who did it to us in the first place? Bad idea.

The Royal Society of Arts, working with several other worthy groups, has produced this wonderful and informative piece.  Watch and learn.

Here are some links that get behind all the furor and footage and down to the heart of the Deepwater Horizon disaster and some of its implications.

First, a terrific graphic that, by itself, explains much about the Deepwater Horizon (thanks to Randy Murray for bringing it to my attention).

Once you’ve seen that graphic, you can see for yourself the truth of “If it’s too deep to fix, it’s too deep to drill,” as Katrina vanden Heuvel recently put it in The Nation.

She goes on to say,

What Obama really needs to do isn’t get mad at BP; he needs to get even on behalf of the American people—especially the workers who lost their lives, those injured, and the Gulf Coast residents who will be hugely impacted by this disaster for years to come, if not generations.  He must seize this crisis as a transformative moment to lay out a new and sane energy policy—one that will protect environmental and public health, create jobs and break our addiction to fossil fuels.  If he has the political will and courage ( the emotion this nation needs most right now), the legislation just introduced by Senator Bernie Sanders is a good starting point.

And Bernie Sanders has taken a leading role in actively getting bills and measures out there on this matter.  Bernie explains what he’s doing about the situation here.

Now let’s look elsewhere for a comparison of national efforts. According to Evan Osnos’s article in The New Yorker, China’s already doing a lot toward developing green energy sources, and has been doing so since the mid-80′s.  They have made alternative energy development a national priority, in some ways, perhaps, not unlike the massive and directed effort that went into the Moon-landing project of the 1960′s in this country.

As Osnos points out, China is pulling ahead of us in developing such energies:

In 2006, Chinese leaders redoubled their commitment to new energy technology; they boosted funding for research and set targets for installing wind turbines, solar panels, hydroelectric dams, and other renewable sources of energy that were higher than goals in the United States. China doubled its wind-power capacity that year, then doubled it again the next year, and the year after. The country had virtually no solar industry in 2003; five years later, it was manufacturing more solar cells than any other country, winning customers from foreign companies that had invented the technology in the first place. As President Hu Jintao, a political heir of Deng Xiaoping, put it in October of this year, China must “seize preëmptive opportunities in the new round of the global energy revolution.”

While, by contrast, we seem to be doing not nearly as much.  As Spiderman’s uncle reminded him, with power comes responsibility.  This applies in many directions: corporate responsibility, government enforcement of laws and regulations, research and development of alternative energy sources, transportation vehicles that can use the alternative energy sources, citizen conservation efforts to buy and use the alternative vehicles, lightbulbs, and other devices, renewable ways to power the grid, even a newer and better distribution system, and all the jobs — at all levels — that all that entails.

More from Osnos’s article:

David Sandalow, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of Energy for Policy and International Affairs, has been to China five times in five months. He told me, “China’s investment in clean energy is extraordinary.” For America, he added, the implication is clear: “Unless the U.S. makes investments, we are not competitive in the clean-tech sector in the years and decades to come.”

To me, this looks as though China is on the bus of the alternative energy revolution, working to meet its own clean energy needs and also to become a key player — the leader in some areas, apparently — selling solutions to the rest of the world.

And it seems that the Deepwater Horizon disaster may well be the horrifying event that finally brings our own attention around to the idea that there is in fact an alternative energy bus that one can be on — must be on.  It’s not only the safest and most profitable future, it means there may be a future — of the entire planet.

Or, of course, we can always just ignore the bus, miss the bus, and and go back to disasters-as-usual.

Since, as the article Ten Things You Can Do to Shrink Your Carbon Footprint tells us, consumers represent 70 percent of US economic activity, individuals can in fact make a difference by demanding green products and reducing fossil fuel consumption.

Even if you’re already eco-conscious, this is a useful checklist to see how well you’re doing, and what else you could do.

I’ve read elsewhere that individual actions don’t help much, since it’s not individuals who cause most of the carbon use, but I believe that not only is it better to do something rather than nothing, but 70 % of U.S. economic activity is a lot of economic activity, and the more we each do the best we can to reduce our carbon footprints, the better off all of us will be… and corporations and others causing carbon emissions will want to keep us buying and consuming their products, so change outside the individual sphere will become not only possible but necessary to continued corporate and other growth, and the effects will spread beyond mere consumerism. Or so I see it.

Whether you agree or not, these are 10 points to check and consider, and act on as much as you can.

James K. Galbraith, the noted economist, explains why a big deficit-reduction program, like the ones probably soon to be proposed, would destroy the economy two years into the Great Crisis.  Why is the deficit being attacked? What’s the argument really all about?  What are the real dangers, if any, in a huge deficit?

He sets out the basics of the situation:

… there are two ways to get the increase in total spending that we call “economic growth.” One way is for government to spend. The other is for banks to lend. … that’s basically all there is. Governments and banks are the two entities with the power to create something from nothing….

For ordinary people, public budget deficits, despite their bad reputation, are much better than private loans. Deficits put money in private pockets. Private households get more cash.They own that cash free and clear, and they can spend it as they like. If they wish, they can also convert it into interest-earning government bonds or they can repay their debts. This is called an increase in “net financial wealth.” Ordinary people benefit, but there is nothing in it for banks.

And this, in the simplest terms, explains the deficit phobia of Wall Street, the corporate media and the right-wing economists. Bankers don’t like budget deficits because they compete with bank loans as a source of growth. When a bank makes a loan, cash balances in private hands also go up. But now the cash is not owned free and clear. There is a contractual obligation to pay interest and to repay principal. If the enterprise defaults, there may be an asset left over—a house or factory or company— that will then become the property of the bank. It’s easy to see why bankers love private credit but hate public deficits.

The article, titled  In Defense of Deficits,  is not lengthy, and it is very clear, and it is essential reading for an understanding of deficits, why they are a positive good for ordinary people, why the supposed dangers being attributed to them are not so, and why a major assault on deficits from banks, corporate media, and various spokespersons is on the way.

Knowledge is power.  If you want to empower yourself by understanding this situation, read this article.  For hard-copy enthusiasts, it appears in the 22 March 2010 issue of The Nation, pp. 22-24.

Once a month, the “Ten Things” page, originated by writer Walter Mosley, appears in The Nation.

This month, it’s Ten Things You Can Do To Improve Your Healthcare.

And, like the other “Ten Things” columns, worth reading.  In the online version, a list of links and related books appears that expand and extend the information contained in the column.

I urge you to read this one and follow the suggestions you find potentially helpful — and look at some of the links and books of interest to you.

One of the most hopeful signs I’ve seen in a long time is a popular movement, a good and positive one, that seems to be catching on.

It’s a good sign, of course, to see any positive popular movement; it’s been a while.

But this one has the possibility not only of helping those who participate, but of helping all of us.

Read about it here.  Food for thought.

Hey, look, a little positive prognosis!  Stand back, give it air, don’t step on it…  Mark Morford’s New Year’s column talks about the coming decade, and guess what, there’s a surprising amount of genuine, reality-based, good news.  Read it and enjoy!

James Surowiecki offers one of the clearest analyses I’ve read so far of where we stand with the health care bill.  No tumult, no shouting, just clear point after clear point.

He says that, given the terms of the bills so far passed, we could do just fine without insurance companies — and makes his case for saying so.  He points out the excellent and money-saving track record of Medicare, one at odds with the generally accepted idea that if something is run by the government, it must be wasteful.

Nevertheless, he also makes his case for why the bill being crafted — which includes insurance companies — should be passed.

Read his informative piece here.

Now that the New Year has come in — watch a video of celebrations from around the world here — we find ourselves still on course for climate disaster.   The BBC has a roundup of world press opinion on the recent Copenhagen summit.  This quote from a Guardian article puts the situation in focus:

“The progress on financial assistance over the fortnight is welcome, but with much of the money earmarked for climate adaptation, the global community is left resembling an alcoholic who has decided to save up for a liver transplant rather than give up drink,” it said.

People everywhere hoped for more and better from the leaders in Copenhagen. A sign seen during the Copenhagen meeting attempted to remind those at the conference of an apparently overlooked perspective:

There Is No Planet B

Now that the Big Day is past for another year — just barely — it is time to ask again, Why do we put ourselves — and each other — through these annual bouts of holiday madness?  Whether you’re a participant in Christmas holidays or not, you end up caught in the seasonal madness surrounding it: unbelievably crowded highways, sidewalks, stores, malls, and parking lots; people jostling and pushing to get through the press any way they can to get that whatever-it-is they absolutely MUST have RIGHT NOW, sometimes literally killing each other (remember Black Friday of 2008?) to get to sales, specials, or just the nearest place they can get to to plunk down their money or credit cards and take away the swag they think they want. And over all is poured the hideous sounds of Christmas music, heard way too many times for way too many years.  Why do we do it?  I think it has to do with a kind of addiction, and a set (personal to each participant) of invidious expectations.

What expectations are those? you may ask.  It’s a little easier to see if you think of the holiday season and all that goes with it as a kind of addiction — at least a psychological dependence. Holiday madness (as I think of it) behaves like an addiction or dependence to this extent: rather than engaging in all this chasing around and preparation as a pleasure, after a while (i.e., real soon) it is engaged in merely to avoid pain.  What pain?  The pain of disappointing your expectations of everyone else’s expectations — and being criticized for it.

Instead of giving gifts that give pleasure, now you feel that everyone involved in your group is owed gifts — fellow workers in ‘Secret Santa’ drawings or visiting relatives, who have found elaborate ways to show that they don’t really expect them, but it would be nice to find one under the tree anyhow, so there’s a certain pressure to have one (or more) there.  Worst of all, for those who have lost jobs or houses or who are struggling merely to earn enough to feed their families, is a crushing feeling of failure because the expectations of family and kids for gifts and dinners are not being met.  Even if they understand and are coping very well, you still feel bad, a clue to exactly where these expectations reside.

Or there are those external criticisms of the family feast, if there is one, in which frenzied preparers, most often women like Mom, Sis, Gram, and Auntie, but not always, are trying to take care of way too many and varied taste preferences (dressing with onions, dressing without onions; giblet gravy, non-giblet gravy; unjellied cranberry relish, jellied cranberry sauce; vegetarian relatives, emphatically non-vegetarian relatives; and on and on). The price of failure, or even of deviation from the expected?  Many and loud criticisms, complaints, and the ongoing feud of “Why can’t you make it the way my mother used to?” even when it is Mom’s recipe (with perhaps even Mom herself as the cook) that has been faithfully followed.  And Mom herself may be one of the loudest complainers, glowering down at the other end of the table, or else helping out in the kitchen, the only one who may be able to get complainers to pipe down.

No wonder you see expectations-maddened shoppers driving around in a frenzy, often in annoyingly large and gas-guzzling SUVs, who are ready to roll over or push aside anyone they consider to be in their way (i.e., in front of them on the road, even though moving well with traffic) or zipping around parking lots in search of the perfect/any parking space, running down pedestrians that move too slowly and aceing out other drivers wherever they can, trying to find that key ingredient, last-minute present, cope with yet another holiday arrival, and get it all done before you have to meet the plane, or find a place for the arrivals to park the rental car…

In Katha Pollitt’s December 16 2009 column, she reminds us of economist Joel Waldfogel’s claim that

Christmas presents are a waste of money because most people don’t really like what you give them. So the heck with them–bake some cookies for the folks on your list, because everyone likes cookies, and give generously to any or all of the great groups below.

With all that in mind, I’d like to close with a greeting from the #3 group in Pollitt’s list and their much-needed effort to defend the separation of church and state in our constituton: Reason’s Greetings!

The BBC web site has put up a slide show of brilliant and moving watercolor paintings by Matthew Cook, a British soldier in the Afghan war.  The images are of the world around him there: glimpses of a soldier’s life, towns and neighborhoods, and much else.  The pictures show the bright light and activities all around him in many moods.

Drawings in India ink and watercolor paintings can be accomplished with few and small tools — even the box of colors need not be large, it’s portability one reason the medium has thrived over centuries.

Cook’s watercolors are stunning, and beautiful, and tremendously accomplished.

The artist has his own web site, with a gallery of more works.

Sometimes, nothing is more real and immediate than a little fine art.