Who will be first?

On day 30 of the 36-day Army-McCarthy Hearings in June, 1954, attorney Joseph Nye Welch finally had enough.  “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never gauged your cruelty or your recklessness...Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

I look at the cultural landscape of this great country during this very difficult period of deep recession, high unemployment, massive state and federal deficits, religious and ethnic mistrust, global warming, and polarizing media, and have to ask—“Have we left no sense of decency?”

Decency means many things in this context.  It means possessing a concern for others, a balanced sense of morality, a basic understanding of fairness, an ability to accept blame when it is deserved and offer forgiveness where it is warranted.  Above all else, it means doing the right thing at the right time for the right reasons.

It feels as if our nation has lost its collective sense of decency.  We still fight two wars on the opposite side of the globe. Our Supreme Court considers corporations to be individual people.  We bail out incomprehensibly wealthy “people” who work in the financial industries (whose primary purpose is to collect transaction fees from the buying and selling of shares as opposed to producing anything of tangible value) and yet slam our working class union members including our public servants and school teachers.  Even worse, we elect political leaders whose best idea for solving our problems is to reduce Government’s capacity for serving the public so much that it fails completely.

Almost every day I read an article or have a conversation in the State House about the latest "indecent" proposal to cut programs and services from those most in need.  I see well-intentioned people try to make decisions about what to spend public money on based only on how much those services cost, not also on what benefit they offer.   I see teachers required to teach larger and larger groups of students; to serve as social service agents or as parental proxies to the point where I have to believe that we’re not actually teaching our children, we are simply stabling them until they’re old enough to make decisions for themselves.  And what kind of decisions can we expect from them?  I don’t think anyone contemplating this question needs a high school diploma to come up with the answer.

My wonderful niece, one of the most “decent” people I know, is a junior in college, majoring in local food production and management.  She recently told her mother (my sister) that she doesn’t expect to have children.  It’s not that she doesn’t like children or can’t have them.  She just can’t, in good conscience, bring them into the world that she will, in less than two years, have to face herself.  How depressing is that from a young woman who just turned 21?

So who is going to be first? 

Who is going to challenge corporate America and tell it that the real social contract lies in the old French concept of noblesse oblige: that those who have the means must take care of those less fortunate?

Who is going to point out the folly of fighting two foreign wars and paying for them by borrowing money from Asia, in effect saddling our grand-children and great-grand-children with crippling debt or worse, the humiliation of defaulting?

Who is going to explain to elected officials that their job is to lead and to govern, not follow the dictates of the latest opinion poll?

Who is going to explain to the public that too little government results not in less regulation but actual anarchy?

Who is going to explain that the “poverty line” is actually two or three times higher than policy-makers and economists say it is.

Who is going to remind our elected officials that their professional and moral obligation is to maximize revenues just as much as it is to reduce expenses?

Who is going to convince the electorate that returning to the tax structure of the 1990s is going to have virtually no impact on 98% of them, and that the remaining 2% can certainly afford the marginal increase?

Speaking of the wealthy, who is going to ask them what it's like, really, living in a gated community?

Who is going to tell the media that Sarah and Christine and Paul and Rush and their ilk are suitable for Entertainment Tonight, E!, or Comedy Central but, frankly, not so much for CNN, MSNBC, FN or any of the broadcast news programs?

Who is going to be the first one to stand up and tell the proverbial emperor (is it Rush or Glenn?) that he has no clothes; that he is lying to himself and to us? 

Who is going to say enough already?

Vermont, it seems. 

Are we ready?

HEART AND SOUL

A few evenings ago I succeeded in traumatizing my children for the second time in less than a week. First we watched a PBS documentary about the latest theories on global warming. By the time my kids are my age, the seas will have risen 25 meters, their Grammy’s house, like the rest of Florida, will be under water, and the resulting dislocation of the hundreds of millions of souls who live less than 50 feet above sea level world-wide will have paralyzed the economic and social structures of our planet.

Then, several nights later, we watched another PBS documentary, this time on the global disappearance of honeybees. No one really knows why, but last year one-third the total population of nature’s “pollinating army” literally disappeared. This phenomenon, known as colony collapse disorder, is apparently the result of a combination of pesticides, starvation, and disease. What was traumatic was learning that, while most grains (corn, rice and wheat) are wind-pollinated, virtually all fruits and vegetables, including nuts are pollinated by honeybees. As the narrator put it, without bees we might all have to learn how to subsist on gruel.

For my kids, that last comment was the kicker. Having been cast this past summer in a local theater production of “Oliver,” subsisting on gruel was the scariest thing anyone could have said.

By way of comforting my kids, I tried to think of how best to put this information in perspective. I thought about buying the best ten acres of arable land and having fun learning with them how to defend it against all comers during what will surely be a brisk period of Armageddon. But none of us wants to leave Montpelier, and none of us likes guns. Then I thought of ignoring the problem and hoping I die before being held accountable. But where does that leave the kids? Then I thought as a family perhaps we should join some radical “earth first” movement. But that won’t work because life has taught me that radical attempts to “fix” large problems often create newer, more complex ones. Finally, I thought of a very neo-conservative solution and decided to join the American Family Association’s effort to remove all public funding from PBS since they’re the reason my kids are now so miserable. You heard me. Kill the messenger.

Okay, so none of the options was particularly attractive.

In between viewing documentaries one and two, I attended a three-day conference in Burlington sponsored by the Orton Family Foundation on community planning, and among many important sessions and conversations with caring, intelligent people, a desire was expressed to capture the essence of and motivation behind the Community Heart and Soul Planning movement. By the end of the conference a manifesto of sorts had been drafted and was circulated for signature among the 300 plus participants.

The first paragraph of the Declaration of Heart and Soul Community Planning reads as follows:

“We the undersigned believe that every community must explore and express what makes it special—its Heart & Soul elements—and with specificity describe those tangible and intangible elements that if lost would fundamentally change the character of their place (emphasis mine). Once articulated and acknowledged, community Heart & Soul serves as the “Bill of Rights and Responsibilities” for citizens as they make decisions about the future.”

The declaration goes on to lay out several guiding principles for what community Heart and Soul stands for, all of which speak to such things as core values, social capital, and a positive vision for the future.

Now it might sound suspiciously like I am advocating for the radical “earth first” fix. That may, in the end be true. But I prefer to call it what it is…embracing the Heart and Soul movement by taking a page out of the Honeybee Playbook.

Honeybees basically do one thing…and do it well. They collect pollen, return to the hive, drop off their pollen load, do a little dance to communicate where the best pickings are, and return for more pollen. They repeat this cycle many times a day, every day until they die. On the occasions that the hive is attacked (by a bear, say), they throw themselves into the fray with a vengeance until the marauder is driven away—sometimes at the cost of the hive, but usually at the cost of several large honeycombs and a few hundred bees.

The Heart and Soul movement gives us humans a way to model this bee-havior. It requires us (the worker bees) to determine, within our own communities (the hive), what we care about. We do our best to provide for our community (collect pollen); to protect it from its enemies (bears); and to make sure that all that is good (the honey) gets passed on to feed future generations who repeat this cycle. [It should be pointed out—with amusement I hope—that male bees do practically nothing except, when necessary, fertilize the queen. Any socio-political lesson to be learned from this, of course, I leave to the imagination of the reader!]

I certainly have no comforting answer for my children about the global problems facing us in the coming fifty or 100 years. But I can help them, teach them, and set an example for them about how to do what’s best for our own community from within.

I think, ultimately, that is what will be our salvation. Each of us, in our own way, will turn to what we each know to be important within our own communities whether “Community” is defined as a place, a region, or people bound by common practice. We must learn how to place a value on that which is important, nurture it, protect it from external attacks, and by doing so, allow it to survive into the future.

Bees don’t think about global politics. They don’t think about moral issues or economic interdependencies. They basically do one thing, and in doing it, set in motion a chain of events that, among other things, results in the food chain at the top of which we sit. We have to imitate their behavior and bind it to the tenets of Heart and Soul community planning with intention, determination, and integrity. We can do this. We must. One person, one community, one hive at a time.

STAND UP FOR FALL

A few years ago, Ellen McCulloch-Lovell, President of Marlboro College, told a group of arts presenters that it was likely going to be the artist community who first finds the courage to ask the difficult questions about the state of our world. As I recall, she was referring to the conflicts in the Middle East and Southern Asia. But drilling for oil in the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge—an environmental issue if there ever was one—was also big back then as was the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) education act and the National Endowment for the Arts’ (NEA) budget.

I have no problem sharing my negative opinions about NCLB and my positive opinions about the NEA because those things directly impact the arts. But until now, I have felt it inappropriate to share my opinions about global economic and political issues. What has changed?

Vermont’s foliage, that’s what.

For years my wife and I have looked forward to September; kids back at school, crisp mornings, warm afternoons, great hiking, and of course, the foliage. Almost nothing beats September in Vermont—except possibly October. For the last couple of years however, we have noticed that the colors haven’t been as vibrant as they once were.

At first, I thought it was yet another symptom of middle age—the rods (or is it the cones?) on my retina must not be as responsive as they once were, surely. Perhaps my own increasingly faulty memory has imbued past fall seasons with far more resplendent chromatic displays than they deserved.

This year, however, I finally have to come clean. I am a musician by training, but as the Executive Director of the Vermont Arts Council I am viewed by many as a spokesperson for all the arts. But the artist in me has to admit, at long last, that the colors are bad; dull, brown, and crispy.

What is going on?

Last week the Times Argus wrote an article on a leaf fungus called Anthracnose, a blight that evidently has been around for ages. This year is supposedly “good” in that Anthracnose levels are far lower this year than in recent years. Okay. I’ll accept that on its face, but if Anthracnose is the culprit, why are the leaves worse this year than ever? Could it be something else? Acid rain? Warm temperatures? All of the above?

The obvious threats to our environment and our collective reluctance to call crispy-fried foliage by its true name—a nightmare—has at last awakened the sleeping beast in me. Now it is my turn to enter into this fray because if I don’t, I will not be able to stare at myself in the mirror every colorless morning for the remainder of this pathetic fall season.

I am not a scientist. I am not even a native Vermonter. But I am somewhat observant, and I listen to my friends who are sugarmakers. I hear their stories of dying sugar maple trees. I see the evidence myself—there is one on my block that can’t be more than 30 years old (shouldn’t they live to be 150?). I’m really not trying to make a political statement here, after all dying maple trees and dusky brown leaves have been creeping up on us for at least a generation and impact all of us, regardless of whether we vote red or blue (or orange or yellow).

Are we going to have to wait until the oceans are lapping at the steps of the Metropolitan Museum or drowning the Old North Church before the masses wake up and do something? It doesn’t matter whether it was Shakespeare or some other playwright who made the phrase “sound the alarums” famous. We just have to get busy and start sounding them…

The environmental decay, of which this fall’s foliage is but a symptom, affects us all—regardless of your position on global warming. Al Gore and Bill McKibben are not the issue. Your own senses are. Trust them.

It doesn’t take a lot of courage to stand up for fall. If you’re like me, you’ll do it because you miss the colors.