Margotlog: Taking a Long View

Margotlog: Taking a Long View

     Sometimes it helps to stand up, leave the house, and drive south to Red Wing with a good friend at the wheel. Red Wing, named for an Native American chief, is a Minnesota town nestled among three natural beings: two bluffs (one with a memento to Prince on its granite side) and a mighty river, aka, the Mississippi. From Soren's Bluff, Mary, my driver friend, pointed out a sharp curve in the river. "Hard for long barges to navigate," she said. Mary should know: she and her husband own a houseboat moored at a local marina. While she was cleaning the boat, I stood on the dock and stared a two, curved-roof barges, pushed by tug boats. River traffic.

     Since coming home, I've been sitting quietly eating homemade veggie soup with limes to keep it from going bad, and letting two publications nudge my thoughts around some stiff curves.The first is an article in The Nation* distinguishing between the actual workers for racial justice and those who make noise about it, aka the media makers. Creating a true movement depends on people getting to know and trust one another, which can't happen via 140 characters, aka the scope of a Twitter. For various reasons including having my Facebook page hacked about five years ago, I don't participate in social media, except for this blog. Instead I write letters, talk on the phone, email friends, strangers, even organizations. All of this invites plenty of mental exhaustion. It helps to get away and let mental and social activity slow to one other person.

     I've been concerned for a while about the dangers of unbroken screen time. Watching young people walk down the street, their heads bent over a hand-held device, makes me wonder what happens to them when they reach a curb and keep going. Smash-ups? Inattention to dying trees, hungry children, flaming buildings?
Hearing that Donald Trump's ignorant, inflammatory comments are often met with fierce delight also feeds my notion that we've been co-opted by quick, down-and-dirty media. We've lost the ability to look both ways.

Reading over my cooling soup, I noted that the National Resource Defense Council is taking some huge forest-wreckers to court. Canada has one of the world's most extensive old-growth forests. Such forests are hugely important as sequesters of carbon, not to mention homes to thousands of living things from microbes to toads to migrating birds to bears, and caribou. Decimating these forests with roads and logging not only would permanently damage these benefits, but alter another that's becoming more crucial with increasing climate change--the protection and cleansing of water.

     As our human range extends, it's possible to understand that our needs are not merely met at the local level. They can be potentially stymied by what happens thousands of miles away. We've always lived on a globe, but we haven't always had the power to create havoc on such a scale, nor to recognize that there are some streets we should never cross.

     Just to see what happens, tomorrow I'm going to wear a blindfold and walk five houses down my block. Since I walk this way almost every day, I should know the terrain quite well. But I imagine my ears will become extraordinarily alert. I'll nudge only one foot forward at a time. I'll stand still every few paces and listen to make sure some neighbor isn't backing a car out the driveway and potentially across my path. What I actually own will shrink. I'll become like the brother and sister dogs who were recently brought to a local Animal Humane Society. When well-meaning workers separated them, one dog began shaking violently. Only when a veterinarian examined him, did she discover the dog was blind and had been depending on his sister for all his cues. Luckily, the dogs were reunited. We depend on so much in our world.

* "Black Lives Matter: What Comes After the Hastag? by Dani McClain, The Nation, May 9/16, 2016.