Clouds of Pollen in the Spring

"The awareness is spreading like clouds of pollen in the spring."

That was a comment I made on a progressive website about the worldwide demonstrations, street protests, and rallies celebrating this year's Earth Day.

I must confess that until two weeks ago I had a highly prejudiced understanding and appreciation of pollen.  I associated it with red, runny noses, puffy, squinting eyes, an annual epidemic of misery among a sizeable chunk of the population.  This limited and highly negative view was shaped by thousands of ads for over-the-counter remedies which had been embedded in my brain, probably from my first days of watching TV as a child.

Of course, a little basic biology is a powerful corrective.  We find that pollen is the delivery mechanism of male sperm cells for plants.  Pollination is about reproduction.  It's how vast landscapes are turned into breathtaking fields of flowering plants, a floral explosion that here in Japan transforms the whole country into a beautiful garden stretching sea to sea.

My awakening, however, did not come from a text book.  It came -- as is quite common these days -- from my lovely and truly brilliant Japanese wife.

 

Masumi and I were on our way to an outdoor market in a nearby town.  It was at the peak of the cherry blossom season.  Cherry blossoms here are not confined to parks or community malls.  Tens of thousands of cherry blossom trees line roads, rivers, canals, and crisscross fields of rice and other crop plantings.  It's absolutely spectacular.

However, I mentioned casually to her that is seemed a little hazy that day.  We're downwind from the China mainland, which hosts many coal-fed power plants, heavy-industry factories, and the like, so I just assumed it was the usual dust and smoke blowing our way from our Chinese neighbor.

"No, that's pollen," explained Masumi.  She directed my gaze to the face of a forested mountain we were passing.  There was a huge puff of what appeared to be smoke, but not really the color of smoke, or the way smoke looks rising from burning debris.  No, it was a cloud of pollen, which was being released in that section of the forest, I assume from the floral undergrowth beneath the trees.
Thus began my quick education and new respect for pollen.  That cloud was the promise for the continuing regeneration of the awe-inspiring bouquet we and others across Japan were now enjoying.

Okay.  I believe in balanced reporting.  So let me explore the other side of this story.

Some folks are allergic to pollen.  Those ads for over-the-counter remedies turn their misery into cold, hard cash for the manufacturers of these palliatives.  Point taken.

 

But there are others who don't have this excuse.  These are folks who choose to seal themselves up in an artificial cocoon, stare at flat-panel displays, thus have no idea about clouds of pollen, pollination, flowers, or anything that doesn't conflate with living under artificial light, being captive of a hermetically sealed environment; no concept of a reality which doesn't adhere to and reify the rules of commerce and commodification of everything.  This is the model embraced by an economy-fixated society, which exclusively views humans as components of monetary mechanisms, consequently only values them as producers and/or consumers. 

I would surmise the notion of beauty for such champions of greed is skyrocketing returns on investments and a bulging portfolio of winning stocks.  I seriously doubt either of those has much of a fragrance though I may have on occasion heard someone say: "That person smells of money."
For these individuals, flowers are "beautiful" depending on how marketable they are and what sort of profits they produce.  With no sense of irony, they would deem the distress of those allergy sufferers as an opportunity to turn a profit.  The more misery these folks have to endure, the better the prospects for some fat returns on pharmaceutical stocks.

We're told that this is the new way to look at the world.  Those old valuations -- meaning just the basic use of our senses, and gauging the world around us by the joy and delight we feel in our hearts -- are passé, and have been replaced by the new tools of capitalism, the free market, and the now dominant neoliberal paradigm.

Yet, the Earth day protests and celebrations convincingly offered a very different message.  That message was loud and unambiguous.  Treating the Earth as a factory for man-made goods, narrowing the contribution of human beings to merely producing and consuming those goods, subjecting everything from happiness and love to the value of a human life, only to the metrics of economic worth, reducing all of the potential for human creativity, ingenuity, compassion, nobility, vision, altruism, excellence, and achievement, to mere numbers on a spread sheet, is suffocating the human race, exterminating the human family, eviscerating the human spirit, and destroying the planet.

I've made my choice.  It took me a while to come around.

I'll take my chances with the clouds of pollen.


[ This originated at the author's personal website . . . http://jdrachel.com ]



Clouds of Pollen in the Spring

Compassion Is The Fashion

 

Compassion is the love muscle of caring.

But a lot of the muscle flexing I see going on these days is more like body
building than world building. It looks great and makes the "flexer" feel
darn good about him or herself, but other than putting on an impressive
show, it doesn't get much done. And it actually may do some real harm.

Look at all of the crocodile tears over the disappearance of Malaysian Flight 370.

Granted that this is a tragic, highly unexpected event. Whether pilot error,
pilot meltdown, mechanical failure, a vibrational burp in the harmonic
spectrum, or some hairline gash in the condom of the space-time continuum, 
it happened and represents a tragic loss for the families of the passengers.

But shit happens. None of us caused it. None of us can bring back to life the 
victims of this bizarre malfunction. None of us particularly needs this reminder 
that the world we live in, even those things we so fastidiously design and 
meticulously create, are not and never will be perfect. Certainly none of us 
can even do anything to prevent it from happening again. We have no idea 
even what happened.

So why themedia drama and obsessive news reports? And why the disproportionate
and OCD level of attention to a fluke, affecting 239 people who 99.9999%
of us didn't and will never know?

Well . . . we do know why the media gave this particular event so much attention. 
Yes, if it bleeds it leads. But now since the spurting of blood is down to a trickle, 
we find the story consignedto the "back pages" of the 24/7 cyber river of pseudo 
news and hand-wringing, gut-wrenching, love-muscle flexing. And like the switch
man at the local railway yard, we can send our trail of tears down another track. 
The Compassion Express is off to some brand new destination of manufactured grief.

During the unfolding of the Malaysian airliner crisis though, we really cared. 
We really felt for those victims __ the dead and their surviving relatives and friends. 
It really felt good to care about others. It really showed what a good space we were in. 
It really let those families know what a big concerned family the 7 billion of us are 
here on Earth.

Really?

Did anyonecheck with the families to see if they really wanted all that
attention? Did we forget about something called "privacy" or "solitary
mourning"? Do we actually think that mass, anonymous sharing of their
grief made any of those poor, sorrowful individuals feel any better? Did
anyone stop to think it might actually make them feel worse? Maybe a
big group hug from millions of television voyeurs wasn't such a great
idea?

During the sanctions imposed on Iraq for their invasion of Kuwait, lasting  
for twelve years from 1991 until 2003 when Saddam Hussein was finally 
toppled by the U.S. invasion, it is estimated that over 500,000 children died 
of malnutrition and lack of medical supplies and proper health care.

Articles reporting this horrible tragedy startedon the back pages and 
stayed there, or they disappeared entirely. There certainly was no outpouring 
of shared grief for the millions of Iraqi casualties resulting from our insidious 
foreign policies, including the death of over a half million children. 
No crocodile tears were shed outside of some very dedicated, truly caring 
on-the-ground aid organizations who saw first-hand the genocidal results 
of our cruel punishment of innocent civilians.

But there should have been.

What's the difference between Flight 370 and sanctions on Iraq?

While we had nothing to do with the vanishing of Malaysian Flight 370, 
we were directly responsible for the death of those innocent children. It 
was our government perpetrating this horror. We could have stopped it. 
We can  and should stopthings like this from ever happening again, because 
each one of us is implicitly involved. As citizens of a democracy, we are directly 
and personally responsible for the policies and actions that come out of our
often misguided representatives in Washington.

And when we murder 500,000 innocent children, that's something to cry about.

Unlike disappearing jetliners, it's something we could have done something about.

There is something we could do about right now.
 
Something we should and must do. That's ending the illegal, immoral,
and self-sabotaging murder of innocents with drones. It's estimated that  
just during the Obama presidency 2400 individuals have been killed by these 
impersonal weapons of our errant, self-defeating foreign policy. Estimates 
which run as high as 37% say many are completely innocent people, having 
absolutely no interest or role in terrorist activities against the U.S. or its allies, 
mere victims of our paranoid and extralegal campaign of assassinating militants. 
Often these folks were just attending weddings or other family events. 
A lot of the dead again are children.

The harsh truth is that we are all complicit in these murders. It's our government. 
It's our trigger-happy Congress and President who perpetuate this carnage.  
This is something we should be crying about.

Crying and yelling and screaming.

Do you feel it?



[ This originated at the author's personal web page . . . http://jdrachel.com ]