Episteme

On the 11th of this month, I was going to meet with a leftist group that still supports last year's unsuccessful presidential candidate, so my mind was on getting there on time. I am always late so that is a big challenge for me. I wasn't really thinking about the 6th anniversary of 9/11 at all, but it was unavoidable, even outside of the US. In the taxi on the way to the meeting, a Mexican radio correspondent in New York was commenting on the atmosphere there, and I remembered what it was like for me when I watched the second tower fall from the viewpoint of a tall apartment building on the Upper East Side. It didn't look real at all when the tower seemed to turn into a column of dust, then nothing but empty sky.

The strange thing for me, though, even if my memory of that day is still strong, of when New York was turned upside down and the air smelled like burnt metal, is that we still enshrine it when thousands are dying senselessly in Iraq. I like the radio and I watch TV for the quickest news, but I can't stand the endless repetition of what happened that day because I think that unconsciously it makes us feel better about the people we are killing now.

I think that, similarly, the coverage of the Iranian president's visit to the United Nations and his speech at Columbia University is important, and that criticizing his human rights abuses is good, but are we really in a position to do that credibly? And isn't it, unconsciously or not, just a way for us to pass the buck on human rights abuses and justify a possible future invasion of Iran?

I love CNN World, but I think that the idea of "Keeping Ahmedinejad Honest" is a little simplistic and more than slightly silly. Why don't we keep Bush honest before Ahmedinejad? Should we really be in the business of judging the leaders of developing countries that we barely understand, just because they commit their atrocities within their national boundaries and we like to commit them far away? Isn't criticizing him just a way for us to justify our behavior abroad, past and future, as well as a way to ease our own guilt about what has become a runaway presidency? I like to think of CNN World as a channel for sophisticated viewers but I couldn't help feeling that it was pulling the wool over my eyes.

I'm all for saying it like it is. Lamenting the injustice of 9/11 and criticizing despots is all fine and good, but let's get our own house in order first. Let's take responsibility for the effect we are having in the world. In that way, we can keep ourselves more honest.

Posted by Kim at 12:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Out of my fitfulness emerges something a little closer to calm, nothing overly dramatic or pining death omens or whatever such nonsense. I spent part of the long weekend in Desolation Wilderness, the kind of place where you need a permit to go backpacking, the kind of place where you lay on a granite slab lake side and see the Milky Way. While I was doing that, I thought of a recent New Yorker article, which you can read in PDF form, about how light pollution has ruined the night sky almost every where and the darkest place in the United States is in Utah. It's about a lot more than that, but laying on the granite slab Sunday night looking at all the constellations, stars, and Milky Way, it was a perfect scene except for all the planes that flew overhead all night long. Staying at Lake of the Woods means you are under a busy flight path.

Why I was concerned about bears when I could hear the faint rumblings of Highway 50 in the distance? I needed to be in the woods and the setting and the experience were perfect in every other way, but how hard is it to avoid the sounds of engines these days? Where can I go and not feel like I am in a backyard?

My boyfriend and I talked about the theological implications of extraterrestrial life (it was more like I talked at him about this and he politely listened) and all the silly things one talks about in the blackness of night under a sheet of stars. What ruined the calm, mild summer night was those damn planes and their flashing lights, low flying presence over the peaks going somewhere not nearly as important as where I was trying to go.

But the air was still fresh and fragrant and the water cold and sweet. Those disturbances could be forgiven because I had little choice and time to go elsewhere.

I only feel more motivated to go into deeper wilderness and hope not to see or hear another human for weeks. Isn't that the last great hope for the United States -- the fact that we have open space and mountains and valleys and great places in nature that few bother to go?

David Owen in The New Yorker answered:

"In Galileo’s time, nighttime skies all over the world would have merited the darkest Bortle ranking, Class 1. Today, the sky above New York City is Class 9, at the other extreme of the scale, and American suburban skies are typically Class 5, 6, or 7. The very darkest places in the continental United States today are almost never darker than Class 2, and are increasingly threatened. For someone standing on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon on a moonless night, the brightest feature of the sky is not the Milky Way but the glow of Las Vegas, a hundred and seventy-five miles away. To see skies truly comparable to those which Galileo knew, you would have to travel to such places as the Australian outback and the mountains of Peru. And civilization’s assault on the stars has consequences far beyond its impact on astronomers. Excessive, poorly designed outdoor lighting wastes electricity, imperils human health and safety, disturbs natural habitats, and, increasingly, deprives many of us of a direct relationship with the nighttime sky, which throughout human history has been a powerful source of reflection, inspiration, discovery, and plain old jaw-dropping wonder."

It just seems like everything about modern life - living far from work, the necessity of driving, corn syrup-sweetened foods, industrialized agriculture, video games - are poorly suited to our evolution. We were never meant to drive a car to McDonald's, order 5,000 calories, drive home and eat it in front of the TV or Xbox. This just isn't what nature intended when humans branched off from primates millions of years ago. And all those advances are also what make the world so small that it's nearly impossible to go deep enough into the woods and hear only the wind in the pine boughs and the sound of your heart.

Posted by Dawn at 03:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)