Arte De Timo

Category: Social Studies

This category explores the greater social world, by asking questions, making observations, and digging up some facts and philosophies about society.

  • Vegetarianism – Notes

    Since I started writing these posts on vegetarianism, I have been asked again “why [am I] a vegetarian,” asked if I “am still a vegetarian,” asked for advice about diets because I am an “expert,” agreed with, disagreed with, and generally been put at the center of some weird conversations about meat and food. I suppose that is why I write, to stir up some “food for thought” as one of my friends likes to say.

    After all these posts on food and being a vegetarian you may be wondering where I am getting all this (Or simply that I am a hack, egotistically trying to make a big deal out of my latest lifestyle choice.) In my writings, you may also notice the lack of citations. It’s on purpose. I don’t link out too much in my writing anymore, because it has become a narrative. I write stories that dip in and out of logic and reason, facts and opinion, and are meant to pull you, my reader, along with my musings. That is not to say I am writing fiction, or am pulling your leg though. I just like to build a world where an idea can be stretched out for all its worth without being destroyed in a debate. Parallel thinking if you will. It’s more entertaining and informative that way.

    Much of my thinking on food comes from a combination of media, observation, and experience. I think that can be a pretty powerful combination even if it doesn’t live up to scientific standards, or classification as art. This is a place of Arte de Timo after all. (Look on the About page.)

    Here are some of my pivotal “sources” for my writing, and things I recommend.

    Media – Books I have read other books and lots of specific articles online, but the following are the big philosophical ones.

    1. The first book I read about food was Coming Home to Eat. The book deals with eating locally and thinking about where food comes from. The author took the idea of locality to the extreme by conducted an experiment where he only ate food from within 100 miles of his house in Tuscan for a whole year. The book taught me two things: 1. Think more about food, then act more on food. 2. Experimenting on yourself is fun and rewarding.

    2. No conversation about food these days can start without bringing up Michael Pollen. Omnivores Dilemma and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto changed my way of thinking about food, as they have for millions of others. I learned to be skeptical, persistent and in depth in my eating choices. Food is a hugely complex topic that reaches everything in life. To figure food out, I have to study, and test myself. What are those chemicals? Why am I scared of them? Is organic really better?

    3. The latest book that has blown my mind has been Wendel Berry’s Bringing it to the Table. This guy has been thinking and writing about food for 40 years, and he’s nailed it since the beginning. Most alternative/sustainable food ideas stem from him. Michael Pollen even admits that Berry is the original. This book paints an amazing and complete picture of farming and food, and where it all went wrong. Berry’s arguments are vivid and enchanting. We know how to live better, and it ain’t through “bigger, faster, cheaper!”

    Media – Movies I’m going to just list the best of them here.
    1. Forks over Knives
    2. Fresh
    3. The Future of Food
    4. Ingredients
    5. Broken Limbs
    6. Food Inc.
    7. King Corn

    Observation
    This will seem obnoxious, but hey, that hasn’t stopped me before, but I actually watch people eat, all the time. I pay attention to the reactions people have to their food. Admittedly, judgments do surface once in a while, but that isn’t the important part, so I try not to let that get in the way of seeing what’s going on. Watching people of all ages respond, for example, to salty foods and sugary foods is very telling of their overall eating habits. So are the vegetables on a person’s plate, and how they are eaten. These observations are along the lines of how we use and see manners at the table. “Please” and “thank you,” napkins and elbows, cookies and chips really do show off how considerate and civil we are.

    In addition to watching others, I also feel and think about what I am doing in comparison to others. I can’t know what others are feeling when they eat, but if I eat similar foods and a build up a few different perspectives on what that food does to a person physically and emotionally, I can start to form a profile of food and people. For example, in my observations, people who like hot dogs often don’t like to eat vegetables, presumably because they lack the intense sensations that the salts and refined sugars in the hot dogs provide. Whereas, someone like me who eats a lot of fruits and vegetables finds sugary things like hot dogs, cake and generic purple jelly unappetizing and quite unpleasant.

    Experience
    This is a big topic for me, but I’ll give you the key points. Two years ago I got a letter from my doctor recommending that I join a study called E-LITE. The idea of the study was to determine what life tools are required to get people to change enough to improve medical health outcomes. They divided the participants into three groups. The first got some money, were told to lose weight, and left on their own to figure it out. The second, my group, was brought in for a 3 hour session, given a scale, pedometer, DVD’s and a regiment on how to count calories and record our activities. The third group was given all the same things but were also given access to personal trainers, and brought in for personal health sessions on a regular basis. In addition to all this, the participants were tested for weight and girth, plus our blood chemistry tested every few months.

    I lost 15 pounds and got in shape in the first three months, plus I had the tools, both technically and skill-wise, I needed to keep the pounds off and monitor my activity. The cool part is that I also had detailed records of my blood chemistry to go along with all the other records I had for weight, physical activity and food. I could experiment!

    What I learned was that the general advice given out by doctors about lessening health risks is pretty much right; nothing much more, and not much less. What I mean is that, is that as far as blood chemistry goes and the risks we can infer from them, getting the numbers into medically healthy ranges is usually as simple as losing weight and exercising. Not a very complicated recipe, but one that gets clouded because of all the lifestyle drugs and trendy diets out there. Reduce your intake by 3500 Kcal and you will lose a pound of weight. Once I realized all this it was a matter of planning how much to lose per week, eating to my numbers, doing a lot more exorcize, and tracking the decline of my infer-able health risks like diabetes.

    Since I could track my blood chemistry through the study, I could test which behaviors were most important in my body. For example, I found that weight and then exercise controlled my blood sugar. As my weight went down so did my fasting blood sugar. As I got in shape and exorcized, so did my long term blood sugar level. Exercise! Exercise! Exercise!

    An interesting result about vegetarianism was that since my decision lined up with a blood drawn, I could see how it affected in my body. The result was that it controlled my cholesterol somewhat. Since I became a vegetarian, my totals have gone down quite a bit (maybe 20%), though my HDL/LDL ratio’s are off because I also became out of shape in that time.

    In the two years I also experienced a lot of ups and downs that were directly related to my eating. I had mood swings when I didn’t eat enough over the course of a day, and my elbows hurt if I was going low on calories for too many days in a row. I have done a lot of little tests involving salads and fruit, wheat flour vs. corn, caffeine or not, and generally how to balance hunger vs. healthiness. Together with my commitment to farmer’s market foods, gardening, and cooking and canning fresh foods, I think I have built up some good experiences with how to eat really well, maintain energy and health, and address many of the social concerns I have with food production. Answers? Maybe not, but experiences, I do have.

    A great example of this knowledge comes from two restaurants I’ve eaten at lately. The first was an organic bistro in Paso Robles called Thomas Hill Organics. The other is a South Indian place here in Santa Clara called Dasaprakash South Indian. The first was a new place, I think. We obviously have never been there, but the place also seemed like it just opened. There were too many servers, and they were all a bit excited and nervous. Without getting into a lot of detail, the food was good enough, but my vegan pizza just didn’t fill me up. It wasn’t that it was too small, but the sprinkling of lentils and thin crust felt like the cooks had no experience actually being vegan or vegetarian. It gave me the impression they cooked it for a steoreotype that in their head about who vegans are.

    It was a meal that followed the letter of the law of veganism, but lacked any sense of meality. The rest of the menu had steaks and salmon, etc. so vegetarian food wasn’t the focus. It felt like they were aware that their clients might be vegan or vegetarian, and so provide several options, but were also going to punish any vegans or vegetarians by making us/them order several items and glasses of wine to actually feel like a meal was had. It was uninspired to say the least.

    Compare that to the vegetarian Indian restaurant, and everything about a vegetarian meal changes. That Indian meal made me feel like a king. It was fiery, complex and rich. We ordered three combo type platters and at the end of it all my stomach was screaming at me both because I ate a lot and because it was so confused about the ten thousand flavors I had just eaten. Both meals were comparable in price, service and portions. I was equally hungry going into both, and would say I like pizza and Indian food equally, so the difference was the experience of the meal making. The Indian restaurant wasn’t strictly traditional (we got served what was basically Mexican salsa on one of the plates), but it made sense because it had thousands of years of experience behind it. The organic vegetarian French bistro food was…, well, new.

    Is a vegetarian diet right for you? After getting this far, my hope is that the answer isn’t simply “yes” or “no,” but maybe something with more nuance. Maybe the time isn’t right for you, or your lifestyle doesn’t give you the extra time to prepare better meals everyday. Or, you do so much exercise and have so little time to cook, that high calorie meats are where you have to be right now. My hope is that you will want to study your food a little bit, make some observations about how it affects you, then build up some new experiences with what it could be for you at this point in your life.

    As some men realize, Polish sausages for dinner every night may have been tolerable in college, but will definitely cause problems after thirty. Look forward to changing your diet. It’s good for you, and you might just be better for it.

  • Vegetarianism – Part 3

    To open this part, I have to admit defeat, and I have to confess that my vegetarianism was giving me problems even as I wrote part 2.

    I didn’t fail because I gave in to eating meat, though as I am sure many vegetarians do I did eat meat products several times by accident to my knowledge. I’ll explain that later. I failed, because I didn’t provide my body with what it needed.

    As I wrote before, and as you know, humans store energy as fat, and we have a gene that makes us want to store as much fat as possible. It is the underlying biological mechanism with obesity, in fact. Another less known part of our biology is that our bodies also store a lot of minerals and nutrients in our bones. It is part of being omnivores, and red-blooded I suppose. Our biological development was one of scarcity and surplus, so we evolved to be able to go for long periods with little food, and/or poor quality food. This storage capacity is hard to monitor and can run out, though.

    I still have plenty of fat stores, to be be clear, but my nutrient reserves are gone, and I have become very sensitive to my immediate diet. I made it through the holiday season simply avoiding meat and eating everything else because of these mineral reserves. But, I didn’t make it through the last couple of months of travels and events very well, though.

    On a week-long trip last month, I did well to eat healthy and maintained a vegetarian diet, but I didn’t have access to what I normally eat at home, like Tempeh, Tofu, Ezekiel bread, and most importantly, my fortified breakfast cereal. Travel is already draining, so when I started getting a little more tired than usual I didn’t notice. And when I got sick to my stomach two days after getting back, I figured it was food poisoning, or a bug I caught. Both of these seemed plausible, since I was exposed to some sort of stomach bug, and I did eat a piece of questionable pizza, but what caused it isn’t the important part. What should have been a day or two of discomfort was a week of battling off sickness.

    Anemia is a dangerous thing. I got lucky and figured it out before it spiraled out of control. Iron is a tricky and complex agent in our bodies, as I learned, because it is used in the digestive system along with every other major system. When I didn’t have enough, it cause a digestive impairment that made it hard to uptake the iron I was missing, hence the potential for a dangerous spiral.

    What made all the pieces fall in to place was a trusty vegetarian beet salad. Beets have a wonderful side effect of showing me clearly (or maybe that is not clearly) whether I’m getting enough iron or not. Called Beeturia, (I kid you not) the condition color codes a certain bodily function, and makes it easy to know what’s going in my digestive tract. Once I realized the problem, and could eat properly at home, I recovered. But, it took a while, and it was pretty bad for a couple of days.

    That was a failure. Under normal conditions I shouldn’t have been so sick, nor lost all those days. And, it wasn’t isolated. I just got back from another trip of only four days, and I have still needed to recover even if I haven’t been sick. On this trip I caused a lot of trouble trying to eat properly, but apparently still didn’t get it right. My host graciously cooked up some amazing vegetarian food (grilled nopales being the most memorable among them,) also stirring up some resentment and complaints from the natives, so-to-speak. Upon my return, I felt the need to stock up on certain foods again. It is discouraging that it took so little to drain me.

    Obviously, limiting choice of diet is a struggle, and eating while traveling always puts a strain on my body, whether it is eating too much junk, just over eating, or simply stressing about what and where to eat. My recent trips were short and easy, though. Everyone (host-wise anyway) accepted my decisions about food and was very gracious. On future trips I can’t and shouldn’t count on good graces. I will have defeated many of the social reasons for being a vegetarian, if I become hard nosed, and truly start behaving as if I am different and better than everyone else (even if I am thinking it!).

    Much of why I ultimately became a vegetarian revolves around that fact that I eat out of the house a lot. When I go out I have very little control over the quality and kind of food I eat, but being a vegetarian actually takes a lot of that back psychologically and socially. If I set hard lines about what I am going to eat based on my beliefs, it actually becomes easier to make choices while at restaurants or on trips. It is the same sort of effect that a diet (in the “Atkins diet” sense) has. If the choice is already made, I don’t have to be as strong willed with the menu in front of me. Convoluted and weak minded, yes, but it can work.

    When I stock up my fridge and pantry at home I can do it with local, organic, food, or I can buy properly raised animal products from places where I have a direct line to the producers. This lets me just eat, and enjoy it, which is a very important part of who I am as a person. Food is as much about social connections and intellectual structures as it is about nutrients and biological sustenance. So, in that sense, my home is very food-peaceful. Out of the house is a whole different story, strewn with many of the problems I brought up in the other parts (1 and 2), and as such, requires careful decisions and thought, often involving conflicting motivations and politics. That eats into my enjoyment, and I like food and eating too much to play those games. But, low and behold, vegetarianism brought up a whole other more direct set of issues to deal with.

    I recognize that becoming a vegetarian when I enjoy eating so much is a strange decision that may even seem self-deprecating, but it is consistent with my beliefs. Ultimately eating is a circular act. It is an ingestive private phenomena that also projects my beliefs out into society, and it is a momentary occurrence within life-long habits and traditions. I can’t isolate one side of the equation from the other for the sake of ease. Eating is about how I am living my life; not just in my mind, or just in my body, but in its totality. Knowing thine-self is no easy task, and never ebbs. I change, and how I know myself changes, so too must my eating. That is my point in all this.

    My decision to not eat meat wasn’t a life long commitment. I am not, and don’t expect to be married to any one source of nutrition. Adapting tot eh local foods is how my ancestors lived, and so shall I. I don’t know when or where I will make the choice to eat meat again, but it will come eventually. As my life goes on, I am going to make decisions that are personal, emotional, and reasoned about what I eat, and I will enjoy that process. I find it absolutely amazing and exhilarating that I can get so much pleasure and satisfaction out of something I do several times a day, and every single day. Why would I give up any of that to a “strict” diet? Vegetarianism is just another way of exploring more foods and responses to foods. It is a way of satisfying my tastes and pleasures in food.

  • “A Persistent Drip” – 4 years ago

    From 4 years ago. How time flies, and mountains remain. Zen wisdom is difficult:

    I’ve been in a philosophical mood lately; probably because of the approaching life events, and other big tides, but my trains of thought seem to be manifesting themselves in grand ways.

    What I have been working on in those passing moments is the idea of water dripping on stone. It has come up often here, and its a pretty obvious statement that water is the single most powerful element on earth. It’s our life giver. It is the mountain killer. It is the bearer of news, and conveyor of knowledge. According to zen wisdom, if you want to move mountains, you give it some water, and a little time.

    I have this metaphorical image stuck in my head of a drop of water hitting a stone, and over time the stone melts away. Its a strong image, one that can focus me in an unusual way. It is a direct symbol for changing ones existence. If I am to change anything, I cannot expect it to do so in my favor, all at once. It takes an action at a time to move my course in life. We try to go around, or turn the other way, but there are times when we must face the mountains before us, and work to diminish them a drop at a time.

    I have been extending the metaphor to the state of affairs of humanity, in a way that can provide me, and maybe someone out there, some guidance. We face some big boulders in our path. We all face them together, and they are all linked, because we are all linked. The environment and its degradation is directly tied to our activities, and our invented economies. Our health is tied to the environment, and the products we consume. We live on our collective culture of extracting resources, so how do we become sustainable? How do we beat the beast of shortsightedness, and transient rationale? We see it on the roads when people dart in, and out, burning our spirits, and our fuels, for what? to gain a few seconds and a few extra yards? We see it in the huge footprints we cast, and the competitive and wasteful way in which we live. So how can we expect our whole society to change if our fellow humans can not go through a day without adding to the problems we face. We are all responsible all the way up and down the line. But where do we have he ability to change it?

    The power of a drop.

    There is no one thing we can do, or even a list of things. It takes drop after drop after drop, until there is a torrent of motion against our mountainous problems.

    1. We need political drops: I vote in every election. Obvious. But I try to add some voter power in between too. I am on emailing lists of a few groups that do the political, and legal fighting we need. I belong to the Sierra Club, Union of Concerned Scientists, Environmental Defense, One, and MoveOn, and have participated in petitions by River Watch, the Nature Conservancy, The Earth Day Network and a whole host of others. I also get emails, and have responded to the major Democratic presidential candidates, and party. I add my drop to each on those campaigns that I think will do the most good. Does it do a lot of good? Not a lot, but when I read about a Bush appointee usurping the law or acting as if the country is a corporate playground every day, I know that one of these groups has probably hired a lawyer, and is suing to stop it. I lend them my support in small amounts, but often and for a long time. The point about politics, is that it changes, and its complicated. Looking through this list, you can say I am concerned with people and the planet, which is a good thing, but my political leanings aren’t set in stone. Stones are the obstacle. Remember that!

    2. We need economic drops: I don’t have a lot of dollar votes to work with in this category, but I try to stay informed and do business locally or with companies that are doing things a little better than others. Its not democratic by a long shot to think that how you spend your dollars is enough to guide markets or corporate decisions. I hate the argument that “well if you don’t like the company or the way they act, don’t buy from them.” I posted about it before, but it has always irked me. So what does that mean, that the only people who count are the Gateses, Whinfries, Packards,… and Bushes, because they have more $ votes than most of the rest of us put together? It would be naive to think that even the collective purchases of a huge fraction of people would have much effect on the people who own everything (and I mean the government too.) Boycotting companies, and buying local does make me feel better, though, and more importantly, if I am thinking about every single purchase I am making in terms of health, community, and environment, I am being reminded of my responsibility to the earth, my children, and neighbors, and that goes a long way to getting me to add my drops to the bucket. Plus, 9 times out of 10 when I buy something from the people growing, or making the product I am getting a better product. You want to participate in tinkle down economics, fine, be a dope, but I prefer to be a part of the trickle of economics against the plutocratic mountain.

    3. We need doing drops: It is “we”; that means you do things, and I do things. Hang your close on a line instead of using a machine once in a while. Walk instead of drive. Compost, and reuse. Don’t buy new when you can use what you have, or buy used. All this hurts the economic status quo, but that’s what we want, right? A change. What it means is that you have to learn how to do more things for yourself instead of depending on the cheap shit you get from the marts. Learn how to fix that broken lamp instead of buying a new one. You just may feel a little more satisfied in life when you accomplish something real. It works; you would be surprised. The solutions to our problems won’t come packaged up, won’t be able to buy them somewhere.

    Sorry to say it, but a Prius and CFL’s won’t help us all that much in long term. The government can’t fix things either, in so much as they don’t do the work they legislate. They can, and should stop the old ways, so we don’t die in our own tinkle, but they can’t produce what will replace it. Being interconnected doesn’t mean we have to be interdependent, and thus interned. Interconnection means we have to willingly share our lives on teh planet.

    The last point is that our priorities should be set properly. We have leaned from the Baby Boomers, that “me first” gets us a bitchy, depressing, and boringly unoriginal culture, full of apes more interested in getting $$ and comfort than anything else. So what is important? I think I have written over and over again, that if we put our priorities in order, we won’t be so stressed about competing over everything. Environment, family, health, and education all add to life. However you want to quantify the idols you worship, the alternatives produce better societies, period.

    Go out and imagine the drops of water slowing working away at our problems. The drops of water, that when combined, make a river, and then a sea. And imagine that sea rising, and falling as waves on the shore. They are part of the same. You are part of it all, and it is good, and you are strong, even against the stones that lie in your way.

    For me, today was cloth instead of disposable. You?

  • Vegetarianism – Part 1


    I didn’t think I would have to explain my choice to be a vegetarian living in California, but over the last several months, I have actually been confronted several times about it. And oddly, I had little defense in those moments. I didn’t responded well, partly, because I hadn’t sorted out all my own reasons yet, (which is actually fairly odd for me,) and the questions blindsided me each time they came up.

    In those moments of confrontation, I responded by being polite, and giving easy answers, “I’ve never really liked meat anyway,” and “It’s cheaper not buying meet,” and the good ‘ole, “I just want to see if I can do it.” It all felt pretty lame. Not only was I being questioned and judged by people who should know better, and really shouldn’t be judging me, but I didn’t even put up a fight.

    What I wanted to say when some people asked, “So why are you a vegetarian? Human’s have always eaten meat!” was “BECAUSE IT MAKES ME BETTER THAN YOU!” And they wouldn’t have just been fightin’ words either. Sure, there are people who, for various considerations need to eat meat, and plenty of people who just don’t have the educational or informational resources to make any decisions about it, but for the most part, being a vegetarian makes me better than meat-eaters.

    Let me explain! The reasoning is actually a fairly simple ethical principal. If a person knows what they are doing is wrong, and they continue to do it, they are complicit in the wrong doing. Doing right is better than doing wrong. Furthermore, the judgment of right and wrong needn’t be determined by anyone other than the one doing “it” in the first place. The rights and wrongs don’t need to line up. The argument is about whether a person is trying to do right instead of wrong.

    Setting one’s own boundary and then passing it results from weakness, or some sort of compulsive disorder. I am not passing judgement, these are just the logical consequences. Furthermore, if a disorder is recognized in the self, and nothing is done about it, again, what can I conclude? Anyway, that’s not the point, since all of that lies outside the general argument I am making.

    Going back to food, I claim that it is almost impossible to be a food consumer in this country and not know about the health, social, and environmental problems associated with the contemporary packaged nutrition we call “food.” Let me list some in case you haven’t caught on yet. These products: have too many chemical additives, too much unnatural sugar, modified fats, modified charbs, too many calories, are made with GMO’s, are produced using horrible toxins, take too much energy and water to produce, produced with ultra low wages and unsafe working conditions, are inhumane, are backed by corrupted officials, use ingredients that are unstudied, rely on monopolies and other unethical business practices, decrease biodiversity, are draining the natural fertility of the land, are generating super pests, lead to unhealthy populations, cause cancer in field and packaging workers, are shipped too many miles, spread plant, animal and human diseases, squeeze farmers out of reliable incomes and livelihoods, and are generally just bad for our health, communities, nation, and planet. Those are just a few, but again it doesn’t matter for the argument to work. For my claim to be valid only a small set of problems needs to be accepted.

    What I am getting at is that the modern nutrient system which alludes itself to be food production fails on ethical and moral grounds. It treats people poorly, animals even worse, and the earth like an open pit mine to be exploited for all its worth and then left dead. All the world’s human moral compasses consider those things wrong. It is not loving, accepting, steward-like, or abiding to God’s/god’s/gods’/Gaia’s laws. If you eat food or any food-like product that has been produced immorally, YOU are complicit in that immorality, right?

    At least that is the challenge of human morality. If it is not that clear cut, at least it SHOULD be a struggle. Being “good,” whatever that means, is a struggle, because human nature compels us against our will into what we exactly consider inhuman behavior. Ethics and morality are our inherent traits that allow us to determine who we are. We are not a sum of instincts alone, but choosing beings who can determine which instincts to fulfill. Accepting behaviors because they are in “our nature” isn’t valid, because ethics and morality are also in our nature.

    Our instincts drive us for blood, but when it is wrong, we are obliged to deny those instincts.

    Okay, did you follow any of that? If not, don’t worry, in the next part I’ll take a different tack. I will discuss the meat of the issue, meat in human culture, and our biology. The ethics plays itself out pretty easily when we start to consider actual food.

  • Flea Market Negatives

    Flea Market finds. Two sorta interesting negatives in a box of old family photos. Neat little view of an other time, even  if it’s not the most breathtaking treasure.

  • More Perspective

    Sometimes I forget that my perspective has changed over the years, and I forget to check where I am. My son does a great job reminding me to do that.

  • MLK, OBL, and a piece called “Night and Dark”


    I painting this diptic over ten years ago when I was just out of undergrad. I had had a hidden life as an oil painter during my science studies, and these were two of the only four I completed after school. Eventually, I got around to showing these as a grad student in a show called “Scholarship Denied” with a few of my graduate school friends. The title of the show is a long story, but it was an excuse to show these old works. I ended up writing a companion text to go along with the paintings. It had never occurred to me to write anything before the show, but I realized that I needed to write this in order to finish the work. Here is that text:

    When you come to the realization that everything you have done in your life, and seemingly everything that you will ever do, has only contributed to the world’s suffering and deterioration, how will you choose to live out the rest of your life?

    Atonement?

    Reclusion?

    Delusion?

    Western society, includina an increasingly globalized East, is entering an era where we will collectively and individually be forced to answer this question. The last several decades have provided us a resource surplus that has let us live in a delusional state. Our delussions have obscured the approaching dark age that will be caused by the mutually amplifying factors of resource exploitation and over population. While in this state of delusion, our societies have dissolved any sense of forward-thought, or inter-generational planning. We have maintained an antiquated and ineffective infrastructure, shed tranditions of stewardship, and unlearned our writen history.

    Seeing what is, and what will be may let us predict our fate, but in each passing night, an impending darkness increasingly envelops us.

    The paintings and writing pose a question about which path to travel when the light fails. The paintings were made just prior to September 11, 2001, and the writing after. I now find it eery how this question has played itself out in so many other ways since I painted them.

    On September 11, OBL, in his view, struck back at an empire who had its dirty hands all over the Middle East, and one that was all too complacent in its wealth and entertainment. He gave us a choice about the future we would make for ourselves in the face of our own vulnerability. We had a choice between a reeling darkness, or one of a painful, yet passing night. Our country’s extreme ignorance of our own involvement in the Arab world, coupled with an over-confidence in our vengeful strength, made us choose a violent darkness, which still over-shadows us now.

    On this day, we celebrate another visionary, MLK, who gave us another choice over 40 years ago to move out of darkness and through a passing night. I wonder about the paths we have traveled since I painted “Dark and Night.” As we lashed out at the world after September 11, 2001, we turned on ourselves, eroding our civil liberties, relinquishing parts of our democracy, and turning over immense executive power to the president. As we sought to battle this shadowy “evil” in the world, we stepped into the darkness our selves. Once there, it spread over us.

    Ten years later, the middle east has moved closer to democracy, and we have moved further away from it. We have witnessed the rise of anger as our unifying thread in this country. This anger has manifest itself on the political right, as the Tea party, and the political left as the Occupy movement. In the waning years of the Lost Decade we have seen protests on our streets that haven’t been as large since the days of MLK. But those protests have not been about a rise out of racist darkness, though. Ironically, they have been about just stopping the free fall into the darkness of oppression and fear.

    From Wisconsin to Tar Sands, to Occupy, these protests have been about stopping a further slide toward domination and exploitation. Where the civil rights movements were about the advancement of people, and progressive ideals, our protests have been about anger over lost control.

    MLK had a dream that we would all be treated equally, and live with dignity and respect. It seems, sadly, that we chased after the first by giving up the later. Finally, ending up with neither. Yes, we, US Americans, are all equal in some ways. We are all equal under an increasingly less democratic and more authoritarian state. We are all on the verge of losing our homes, our livelihoods, and our public safety net. We are all equally threatened by pollution, global warming and natural disasters. We all can equally expect to live less healthy and shorter lives. We have become the huddled masses that we called out for all those 200 years ago, except we aren’t huddled now. We are angry, resentful, overstimulated, distracted, consumers who are moving too fast to know we are in the dark.

    The last decade has shown us that we do indeed sink together. When a night was all that approached, we chose a fire in the darkness. It has shown us that we aren’t individuals enough to avoid our collective fate. (Unless, of course, we have become uber-rich, but that may just be an illusion in the end.) In ten years, we have become a mass of small chirping creatures in the shadows, fighting over scraps.

    We need to close our eyes to feel a dawn, but when we choose to build a fire, a twilight always burns.

    And on that note, have a great holiday.

  • Post-Economic

    It’s occurred to me that one of the big problems we face is that we as a country and increasingly the world can only make decisions based on an economic model. Economic models are horribly flawed, and economists would tell us that basing everything on them would be a mistake. So why then do we judge everything in terms of an investment or monetary value? The government should be in debt, that’s all it can do is spend money, and in a time when there is not much to go around the government will have to spend more. Education? It’s not an investment, so much as a goal into itself. Educated people make better citizens, partners, lovers, and brothers.

    So I wonder what a post-economic model would be. This is not the same as a philanthropic endeavor, because that is still termed in economic ways. Why does giving always revolve around those without the money, and therefore considered to be in need. I know plenty of people that need a lot of emotional and psychological help who have plenty of money. If there were to be a non-profit to help those people, it would get laughed out of town.

    Anyway, just a thought. Maybe I’ll expand on this as time goes.

  • To Steal

    In Kite Runner the main character has a conversation with his father where he explains that all sins can be reduced to one; do not steal. Murder is stealing a life. Blasphemy is stealing god’s holiness. Gluttony; stealing from those in need, etc. It seems reasonable enough, but the precursory idea to stealing is ownership. So if every wrong boils down to stealing, then every relationship that is wrongable boils down to ownership.

    The idea of an ownership society is a mainstay of capitalism. The resounding speech in the movie  Wall Street (the original) was about an ownership society. One of Bush’s quiet campaign speeches to his big donors was about the benefits of an ownership based society. It is reasonable to say now that we live in an ownership society. Conservative forces have succeeded in boiling all public relationships down to ownership, and hence equivalent capital value.

    I have heard a lot of questions lately in the various institutions in which I partake, about how we can get out from under the large foot of capitalism, which exists only to grow. The problem being that growth is exponential and needs endlessly more resources to sustain. The questions seem to stem from the realization that the resources for growth have run out.

    When I ponder the question, my mind swirls around to Native American Indian practices of ownerless societies. We all learn about the great purchases of the 1800’s from the American Indians, and many of us even learn about the truth that the American Indians didn’t have a concept of ownership. In essence, the land was stolen, but only in the frame that the land could be owned.

    But land was only the relivant example of ownerlessness. In a society without ownership, all that dictated possession was use and non use. Some of us still get glimpses of what this is like. If you live in a big family who is very close, and/or maybe of African or Latin decent, then everything in the house is communally owned. I’ve felt it a little, and I have to say it is a little unnerving feeling like there is no privacy (an ownership of space and experience,) or security in keeping my things,  but in the end of the day, if all is done well, this borrow-at-will lifestyle has no impact on comfort or privacy.

    The benefits of ownerlessness seem to unfold out of very deep value systems. If we all possessed items based on use, nothing would be left idle. We would need less resources. Taking/trading/possessing  things would be founded in relationships, not rules of ownership. Mobility would increase. Indebtedness would disappear. Many of our urban stresses would fade.

    This is all a Utopian ideal of course, and a romantic notion of Native American Indians, particularly since we know that different Native groups were always in a state of war over resources. People are people after all. There is something to be learned though.

    The big underlying ideas is the sense of relationship, both to others who might possess a thing and to the thing itself.

    If possession is a negotiation then we would be forced to empathize with each other and be communocentric. If I want to use something, I would have to think about who else might have to use it, and what impact it would have on my community; something that is COMPLETELY disappearing from our shift to total capitalism.

    If we only think about ourselves and none of the consequences of our use of resources and capital, then even laws become a matter of incentives. (If breaking the law is a bigger benefit that obeying, then we will break the law.) This point, as we all might know, has settled in as the founding value of American life. And if laws are negotiable, then so is ownership. And, without security of ownership, as capitalistic economic theory states, then social systems can not function and grow. Capitalism seems to fail on its own motivations.

    So the questions are valid; how do we get out from under a system that is self destructing by its own tenets of self interest and ownership?  Oppressive enforcement of ownership laws? Escalating violent struggles for resources? Ownerlessness? Empathy?

  • On Conservation and consumption

    There is a reason why we need to make conservation a legislative matter and why free market solutions don’t work to lower waste and overuse. That reason has to do with  how conservation and consumption work. The two are quantitatively different, even though qualitatively they are similar. Conservation and consumption behave in inverse ways. Not to mention all the incentives of our economic system directed toward more consumption.

    Here is my description of this issue, and I think it makes sense. The range of consumption per capita is quite large in this country. I would say that range may be as large as a factor of 50, and not in the fractions as it might seem. Lets take my new neighborhood for example. My family consists of 2.25 people and we use about 5 units of water which is about what a single person uses, we drive a Prius, and a small pickup and don’t put many miles or our vehicles. We compost and recycle most of our household waste.  Nearly every electronics product we have is energy star rated, and we don’t use anything other than our computers (mostly laptops) for any length of time on most days… OK you get the picture, we are near bottom of energy/resource usage.

    Our neighbors are on the other extreme for the same demographics of course (this means we are only looking at middle class home owners, not the very rich, or the poor.) They are 3.75 people I would say (parents, adult child and teenager.) They have 3 vehicles, two of which are SUV’s, a house more than double the size of ours, a garbage can more than double ours, AC unit  (which runs in the winter sometimes!), massive entertainment system in their garage that gets used heavily every day, etc.

    So if you start to add things up, you start to see that they use double and triple what we do instead of the 3.75/2.25 ratio that you might expect. What I am saying, is that family culture and individual lifestyle, because of the consumerist freedom we share, can allow people of similar means to have wildly different impact on our greater society and environment through resource usage.

    If we need people to use less in order to save ourselves, common sense and market incentives won’t get people to change. We must be faced by unwavering certainty of an outcome, whether it be fines and jail time for breaking the law, or  an unwavering core value that is backed by drastic consequence (i.e belief in the wrath of God, or understanding of climate science, or a vindictive relative, etc.). Humans have to be forced to change, like any other animal on the planet.