Behind Glass

Kohi, Hai

Like any other ape in any other zoo, he knew the glass was there but didn’t understand why.

Or did he?

Glass was considered more humane than bars, but bars allowed at least the chance of touch. Glass didn’t even let scent through. It was colder, harder, and more thorough a cruelty than bars in the totality of its ability to separate.

Maybe that was the point. Keeping worlds apart prevented overlap.

Voyeurism trumped experience. They’d rather watch than smell, hear, and possibly be touched by the animals they kept, these humanoid primates.

Bars connote prisons. Glass is a window, a TV or computer screen, a form of separation so common it’s hardly noticed. It is reacted to only when it breaks.

Like any other ape in any other zoo, then, he was kept in a separated world by those who imposed windows.

He looked so sad, that mountain gorilla. His son did somersaults, swung from a rope, and rushed the glass, delighting in startling the ones in clothes who watched him. The father, though, was inconsolable.

He moved, disgusted by the gazes, before I could finish sketching him. Following, I found him in a low area, huddled into a corner, hugging himself. His head was down, face sad, lower lip drooping. It was a caricature of abject sorrow and regret.

I imagined him remembering the open forest.

His wife came to him. Sat beside him. Touched his shoulder. He gently but firmly brushed her away. She moved about ten feet from him, found a piece of grass, and took it over. Shyly, she laid it at his feet.

He harumphed and ignored it.

She moved to an opposite corner and watched him, sad on his behalf, compassionate and unable to help.

I finished my sketch and left, unable to stand any more because I knew exactly how they felt.

/// /// ///

Rain Dance

Kohi, Hai

Now comes word that the Amazon basin is, after two years of drought, turning brown. The Amazon watershed is drying up, and with it the river itself. It’s fifteen feet down in some places, reduced to a trickle, and lessening by the minute. It has withdrawn from many if its tributaries, leaving them to wither in the merciless heat of global warming.

The jungle that provided the watershed is, without rainfall, unable to last for long. The thin soil that rain forest grows in needs those root systems to keep it all in place. Once the foliage is gone, nothing holds the soil back if it ever does rain again. It’ll wash away, clog channels, and devastate any slim chance of bouncing back.

And let’s not think about the oxygen the Amazon rain forest provides. If we lose that single rain forest, we may not survive. There may be such a chain reaction that breathing will become impossible for most of us.

We’ve already compromised the oceans. Huge dead spots, where nothing grows or swims or lives, exist now, thanks to pollution, climate change, and drift net fishing. This may not seem so bad until we recall plankton provides oxygen, too. Again, we’re choking ourselves out of air to breathe.

Earth doesn’t care. Gaia is both aerobic and anaerobic. If a new epoch means changing the oxygen/nitrogen mix, so be it.

Air breathers like us won’t much like it, though. We’ll die off. Oh, sure, there will be tiny enclaves of ultra-rich, armed to the chin survivalists who’ll bunker down and try to live on synthesized oxygen, but how realistic is that? Buried space capsules are not my idea of grand survival.

And even they will find it impossible to cope with entropy’s gradual decay of their equipment, because there won’t be an industrial infrastructure to support replacements, spare parts, or even raw materials.

Maybe we had our chance and ignored it, in our frenzy to own the biggest SUV on the block. Maybe the time for taking action got passed up as we instead insisted on freeing more carbon by burning more fuel to make this, that, or the other plastic toy. Maybe we don’t deserve to go on much longer, as a species, considering how we’ve squandered the gift of paradise granted us by birth.

Then again, maybe, as we slowly turn blue and gasp, we’ll wake up to the things we can do to slow our decline. We could, for instance, stop the suicidal madness of consumerism simply by stopping our buying frenzy.

Boycott the corporate mentality that places imaginary profit above survival.

Ignore the scare tactics, fear factors, and pressures applied by advertisers and governments alike, and live kindly with each other.

Share things. Make sure everyone you know has what they need.

Cling together, instead of pushing everyone different away.

John Lennon once sang “Imagine” in a sad tone that let us all know he didn’t really think we could ever do those simple things.

We could prove him wrong, and embrace a world without all the things that are currently strangling us.

We could live a rain dance of hope instead of choking on the dust of our failed cynicism.

Spreading What?

Kohi, Hai

Spreading democracy, they cry, those for whom jingoism substitutes for thought. We must spread democracy.

Let’s examine that notion.

Can democracy be spread? Forced down people’s throats by war, by violence, by intimidation? Can it be forced at all?

Does not democracy, by definition, mean the people of a given nation take the governing unto themselves, on their own? How can “regime change” foster democracy?

A change of regime is simply switching out one set of rulers for another. That’s not democracy. Forcing a voter to choose between two approved candidates is not democracy, either; what have the people decided?

Democracy must arise naturally, or it’s not democracy. If forced, it becomes just another regime change, one with confusing games, contradictory stances, and no real choice.

Imagine if the founding fathers had been forced into democracy by another nation. Rather than breaking from an unfair monarchy, USA would have been forced to choose between two candidates approved by some bully. Vote, or else. Your choices are laid out for you, just pick one.

Look what forced democracy resulted in when Hammas was elected by Palestine. A false choice was emotionalized into what amounts to capitulation to terrorism.

And the punishments resulting from that go on, as Israel pounds, hammers, and otherwise throws its tantrums as far, now, as Lebanon, another democracy we promised, not so long ago, to support, and another democracy we have abandoned to war’s profitable expedience.

We the people, remember that phrase? Democracy is most elegantly defined as government of, by, and for the people. That means it must be of the people, arise from them. It must be conducted by the people, or duly elected representatives. And it must be for the people, not for multinational corporate profits, geopolitical power grabs, or a zero-sum obsession with making the other guy lose so one can gain.

Democracy can be encouraged. It can be supported. It can be fostered, helped along, and applauded.

It cannot be spread like a virus, much less like a rapist spreading a venereal disease.

It cannot be forced upon populations like another form of tyranny or control.

So we see that the very notion of spreading democracy is flawed logic, or cynical jingoism, used to excuse the violent smash-and-grab crime of war.

Anyone using the phrase “spreading democracy” is spreading only lies. Truth would be much more helpful, all around.

Maybe next time we’ll examine the notion of a war on this or that abstract, such as terrorism.

Who'd Want THAT?

Kohi, Hai

Do you have a vague feeling of dread these days? A faintly cold sensation on the back of your neck that almost makes you shiver?

It’s the fear in the air.

Fear mongers are responsible for a lot of it, but not all. On top of Rumsfeld’s wars and Cheney’s mushroom clouds another layer of fear is overlaid. It’s not from local news telling us it’s gone too far, it’s out of control, and we’re at risk, either; that cheap attention-seeking formula has numbed us long since. No, it’s a layer we’ve laminated onto ourselves, and it comes from little voices in the backs of our heads.

Those voices whisper things like, Do you really believe three buildings miraculously came straight down because two of them were hit by airplanes? Those voices say things like, If there are interment camps, your chances of ending up in one are pretty good. They insinuate that this collective reality we’ve all decided to accept is bogus, and dangerous. Those voices tell us bluntly, if very quietly, that we’ve deceived ourselves and we’re now walking a tightrope over a flaming pit.

Meanwhile, we pretend it’s a sidewalk and we’re eating ice-cream, safe and protected.

That’s the source of creeping fears, of nightmares waking us in cold sweats, and of the trepidations we feel every time we blank out mentally in order to use our credit card, every time we ignore the calories in that burger, every time we light up or snort or oop down a pill, prescribed or not; we know better. Knowing better means we’re watching ourselves, from a perch in the back of our minds, as we daydream and wish ourselves into a deathtrap of one kind or another.

You’d think being oblivious to facts would be something evolution would have rid us of, long ago. Surely daydreaming morons who walked off cliffs, or into a predator’s maw, weren’t the best bets for reproducing. Leaders with heads full of visions, blinded by their own ego-trips, would have tended to get more people killed than not, so why would they be perpetuated?

And yet, here we are.

Poe’s Imp of the Perverse comes to mind. Or de Maupassant’s Horla, perhaps. Evil unseen beings who feed on our fear and despair, keeping us doing the very things that hurt us most.

You see? Even that is a dodge into fantasy, a daydream that explains only our own need to blame anyone and anything but ourselves.

Being factual and responsible for one’s own actions doesn’t seem so hard a thing, but none of us ever do it. If we did, it might spread, and soon there’d be no dread, no fear, no war or violence or self-inflicted pain.

Who’d want THAT?

Will We Abide?

Kohi, Hai

Will We Abide?

A heat wave is bringing to the midwest American wilderness temperatures today that may reach 110 degrees, with a heat index, due to humidity, of well over 120 degrees.

Meanwhile, the terms World War Three and World War Four are being bandied about by the fear- and war-mongers, probably as a prelude to going nuclear in their planned attacks on Syria and Iran. That'd be the only way they'd have a chance of "winning", although surely applying win-loss assessments to such madness is an exercise in absurdity.

On a smaller scale, people who live in an apartment building in Omaha complained their AC had gone off, and the one window unit they'd been subsisting on, in a common room, had burned out. How they'll survive, I don't know, but surely some will die, if they aren't taken to air-conditioned places for the duration of this heat wave.

When we lived in Germany, we had ten days of temperatures that reached or exceeded 100 degrees, and air-conditioning isn't common there. It's so far north, they simply rarely need it. Even their cars don't have AC as standard equipment. Many died during the heat wave. We lived in a German house and took refuge in the basement, which was cool enough to make it survivable.

Our minor troubles will be looked back at fondly, once genuine global warming kicks in. We'll long for 120 degrees, and we'll also be telling our kids or grandkids about amazing things called Seasons. Yes, Virginia, there was a Fall and Winter Season here, once.

To the heat we can add drought. The destruction by pollution and evaporation of our water, and the draining of our aquifers, means that increasingly larger numbers of people will have no water to drink, and no clean water to use in any fashion. Desertification will hollow the USA soon, only to be followed by a potential inland sea, if the ice caps melt fast enough.

Things are changing, folks, and those of us alive today are not mutated to survive the changes at all well. Going underground might help, but only if there's water to drink and put on crops -- and not if there is an inland sea above us. Going underground will work only for limited numbers, too. Willing to bet you'll be one of the chosen?

Arresting, meaning stopping, corporate mentality is one of the first measures we'd need to take, in order to have even a hope of reversing things, or at least staving them off a bit.

Go see the superb, sobering film AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH. It should be required viewing for all school kids, and it ought to be shown free on TV to everyone. Perhaps it shall be soon. It brings home the simple point that, if we haven't already reached it, then we're rapidly approaching a point of no return, when runaway greenhouse effects and other aspects of global warming will snowball, to use an odd metaphor, and overwhelm us.

So long, civilization. So long, humanoid primates.

Earth abides, as the saying goes. (Excellent book, too; Earth Abides, by George R. Stewart; read it soon.)

Will we?

Kohi, Hai

Kohi, Hai

Please visit my website at www.genestewart.com for more information about me and my work.

A Memory of Trains

Standing beside my grandfather made me feel taller. I was five the time Gramps took me to the train yard. In my bib overalls and plaid flannel shirt, I looked a lot like the other engineers my grandfather talked to, and, feeling taller, I felt like one of them.

We stood, at first, in an office with bare wood floors the color of spilled oil. A calendar with a lady in bright red underwear hung on the wall. She had dark hair, bangs, and a surprised expression. I thought she seemed nice.

Out the grimy windows I saw engines moving strings of coal cars onto and off of sidings. They moved slowly, like whales on land. I couldn’t stop wondering how they could control such big, powerful machines.

After awhile, my grandfather, holding my hand tightly, led me out onto the tracks themselves. We moved among the big engines and coal cars, some rusted, others painted black so recently that I could smell the fumes. They swayed past us like drunken nightmares.

We found another engineer and Gramps began talking, both men using their hands and having to shout now and then when a loud machine moved by.

I watched the trains. I'd never been to the train yard and had never dreamed I could stand with the trains, surrounded by tracks, and not be crushed. I saw how the steel bent under the weight as a train rolled over a track. I watched the ties, which were splintery logs of wood, pressed down into the ground when a train moved over them.

I couldn’t get enough of trains.

When asked if I wanted to get up into one of the engines, I said yes with an almost proprietary air. My grandfather’s strong hands grabbed me around the middle and lifted me up to the bottom step. I pulled himself up and stood beside my grandfather’s friend, another big man.

When Gramps had joined us, we all stood for a moment on the throbbing bridge, surrounded by heavy metal that hissed, and purred, and seemed alive.

“Here, push this, just a little.”

It was a lever, and I reached up to push it, excited to be trusted with some of the mysterious machinery of the engine.

The lever was hard to move, but I pushed harder and it slipped forward perhaps half an inch.

The pitch of the engine's purr rose a throb or two, and the huge thing we stood in moved forward, ever so slowly.

I had made that huge metal beast do something.

I stood there, excited beyond words, and peed my pants.

I didn’t even know I'd done it until my grandfather swept me up and carried me off the train, laughing with his friend. As yellow drops fell off the tip of my Buster Browns, I felt neither embarrassment nor shame, neither surprise nor delight. I was too stunned by the power I'd touched.

By the power I had, for that instant, commanded.

/// /// ///


Writer Edward Abbey once said, "The sneakiest form of literary subtlety, in a corrupt society, is to speak the plain truth. The critics will not understand you; the public will not believe you; your fellow writers will shake their heads."