In February of this year, David Dosa published a full account of his experience with Oscar the Cat in the nursing home where he lived. Oscar has now accompanied 50 patients to the other side; twice the total at the time Dr Dosa first wrote of this extraordinary animal in a 2007 article in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Here is an excerpt from that article:
A Day in the Life of Oscar the Cat
David M. Dosa, M.D., M.P.H.
N Engl J Med 2007; 357:328-329July 26, 2007
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp078108
Oscar the Cat awakens from his nap, opening a single eye to survey his kingdom. From atop the desk in the doctor's charting area, the cat peers down the two wings of the nursing home's advanced dementia unit. All quiet on the western and eastern fronts. Slowly, he rises and extravagantly stretches his 2-year-old frame, first backward and then forward. He sits up and considers his next move.
In the distance, a resident approaches. It is Mrs. P., who has been living on the dementia unit's third floor for 3 years now. She has long forgotten her family, even though they visit her almost daily. Moderately disheveled after eating her lunch, half of which she now wears on her shirt, Mrs. P. is taking one of her many aimless strolls to nowhere. She glides toward Oscar, pushing her walker and muttering to herself with complete disregard for her surroundings. Perturbed, Oscar watches her carefully and, as she walks by, lets out a gentle hiss, a rattlesnake-like warning that says "leave me alone." She passes him without a glance and continues down the hallway. Oscar is relieved. It is not yet Mrs. P.'s time, and he wants nothing to do with her.
Oscar jumps down off the desk, relieved to be once more alone and in control of his domain. He takes a few moments to drink from his water bowl and grab a quick bite. Satisfied, he enjoys another stretch and sets out on his rounds. Oscar decides to head down the west wing first, along the way sidestepping Mr. S., who is slumped over on a couch in the hallway. With lips slightly pursed, he snores peacefully- perhaps blissfully unaware of where he is now living. Oscar continues down the hallway until he reaches its end and Room 310. The door is closed, so Oscar sits and waits. He has important business here.
Twenty-five minutes later, the door finally opens, and out walks a nurse's aide carrying dirty linens. "Hello, Oscar," she says. "Are you going inside?" Oscar lets her pass, then makes his way into the room, where there are two people. Lying in a corner bed and facing the wall, Mrs. T. is asleep in a fetal position. Her body is thin and wasted from the breast cancer that has been eating away at her organs. She is mildly jaundiced and has not spoken in several days. Sitting next to her is her daughter, who glances up from her novel to warmly greet the visitor. "Hello, Oscar. How are you today?"
Oscar takes no notice of the woman and leaps up onto the bed. He surveys Mrs. T. She is clearly in the terminal phase of illness, and her breathing is labored. Oscar's examination is interrupted by a nurse, who walks in to ask the daughter whether Mrs. T. is uncomfortable and needs more morphine. The daughter shakes her head, and the nurse retreats. Oscar returns to his work. He sniffs the air, gives Mrs. T. one final look, then jumps off the bed and quickly leaves the room. Not today.
Making his way back up the hallway, Oscar arrives at Room 313. The door is open, and he proceeds inside. Mrs. K. is resting peacefully in her bed, her breathing steady but shallow. She is surrounded by photographs of her grandchildren and one from her wedding day. Despite these keepsakes, she is alone. Oscar jumps onto her bed and again sniffs the air. He pauses to consider the situation, and then turns around twice before curling up beside Mrs. K.
One hour passes. Oscar waits. A nurse walks into the room to check on her patient. She pauses to note Oscar's presence. Concerned, she hurriedly leaves the room and returns to her desk. She grabs Mrs. K.'s chart off the medical-records rack and begins to make phone calls.
Within a half hour the family starts to arrive. Chairs are brought into the room, where the relatives begin their vigil. The priest is called to deliver last rites. And still, Oscar has not budged, instead purring and gently nuzzling Mrs. K. A young grandson asks his mother, "What is the cat doing here?" The mother, fighting back tears, tells him, "He is here to help Grandma get to heaven." Thirty minutes later, Mrs. K. takes her last earthly breath. With this, Oscar sits up, looks around, then departs the room so quietly that the grieving family barely notices.
from: A Day in the Life of Oscar the Cat
David M. Dosa, M.D., M.P.H.
N Engl J Med 2007; 357:328-329July 26, 2007
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp078108
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Some excerpts from the online chat with Chris Hedges 7/21/10
Peter from Ontario:
"Hi Chris, thanks for your inspiration. Could you outline concretely how we might go about turning things around?"
Chris Hedges:
"We have to stop believing that we can effect change through established political or social organizations or electoral politics, and I think that still remains a huge hurdle for us people who in the end, through accommodation of fear and very clever advertising, are herded like sheep into a dysfunctional system, which is how so many people who should have known better voted for Obama. The environmental crisis that we're about to face will be even more catastrophic than the economic one, and we have to, on a personal level, reconsider how we relate to the society at large and to the ecosystem. We have both personal and social decisions to make. At this point most people are not willing to make those choices or take those steps."
Reader question from Terry:
"If you could put a single book on the topic of global warming (or ecology in general) into the hands of everyone on the planet with the knowledge that everyone would read it cover to cover, what title would you pick?"
Chris Hedges:
"Either any of the books by Lovelock or the new book by Clive Hamilton 'Requiem for a Species'."
Comment From Jason:
"I listened to your chat with Derrick Jensen and I guess my question is the question he asked, what do we do, the average person that is? Join Greenpeace, run for political office, start a farm in the country and live completely off the grid, hide in the woods and weather the storm? I feel like nothing anybody says or does, no form of action, can stop the machine we call civilization from destroying humanity and world along with it."
Chris Hedges:
"Well the coup d'etat is over, and they won. We lost. And now we have to learn to cope with it. It is very clear that the engines of corporatism and globalization are going to kill the ecosystem, no matter how many dead zones are created in the Gulf of Mexico or protests organized. We are going to have to make some very serious decisions about acts that dispute a system that in theological terms is a system of death and exploitation. And yet even then, it's probably too late. If you read closely the science on global warming- even if we stop emissions, global warming will accelerate because of what has already been emitted. I think we have to begin to prepare for collapse and if you want to survive, that's going to mean access to a local food source.
"So, in the end I'm with Camus, I don't think we're going to fool ourselves into thinking we can make a change. It's all hijacked, the political system, financial system. . . hijacked military complex, it's hijacked, even all of our social and educational systems. I've taught at places like Princeton and they all function like corporations. We've allowed these corporations to snuff out all voices of sanity and decency. . . and we listen to this garbage and we watch it. And I include Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow- as bad as the right wing, they are all playing the same wing, nobody is addressing the institutional methods that are strangling us. I don't care if its from the left or right, it all acts as diversion to keep us in a state of self delusion."
Comment From Alias:
"What does the fact that Bolivian peasants were able to roll-back the government's plan to privatize the water supply while we here can only sit back and ask people like yourself and Chomsky 'What can I do?' say about us?"
Chris Hedges:
"Well as a culture, we've been rendered captive to electronic hallucinations that have dis-empowered us. One of the most pernicious elements of the electronic age is that it destroys the cohesion of real communities. People retreat into virtual communities, you can walk down the street where I live in Princeton at night and see that sort of glow of monitors that keep people inside their homes. . . and in a future civilization people will be living in cells called hives that essentially sever them from their neighbors."
Question from Richard Nixon:
"Chris in your recent article you wrote 'Why continue to obey the laws and dictates of our executioners?' Can you expand on this a little. I took this as laws made need to be broken to get decent climate change reform."
Chris Hedges:
"Well it's very clear that the people who control the power systems have no interest in power change reforms because it would mean their extinction. So those of us who care about effecting change have to find mechanisms outside of the political structure, which Henry Thoreau wrote about in Civil Disobedience where he analyzed an individual's relation to the state and the moral questions of whether human beings should obey laws when they are immoral- or, in this case, self destructive. And I think that the questions that Thoreau asks are ones that we have to ask and I think we have to follow in Thoreau's footsteps where he writes about what he calls the machine. Thoreau writes about how many people around him are opposed to slavery and the war, but rather than expressing their opinions they sit around and do nothing about it. He said they hesitate, regret, sometimes petition, but nothing that actually has an effect."
Comment From Peter from Ontario:
"I'm a bit cynical about the idea of uprooting the powerful institutions that have created this mess. I realize this is throwing you a softball, but don't you think anyone that tries to rebel will be squashed like a bug? I mean, I look around at my family and neighbors, and see people that have been indoctrinated by the same message, 'focus on yourself right now and don't worry about anything that will happen later on'. Whenever I share your column with family and friends, they always give the same response - quit trying to wreck the good times for the rest of us and get a real job."
Chris Hedges:
"Well America has produced a country of people who've never had to grow up. They live in this illusion that reality is not an impediment to what they desire . . . they can have everything they want, they just have to dig deep within themselves, grasp that they are truly exceptional or believe that Jesus that can produce miracles. Its a form of magical thinking that is fed to us from the media to the corporations, from Oprah to Hollywood to Corporatism to the Christian right, and it has created a society where we are captivated by illusion, an illusion about who we are and where we're going and that's a very common characteristic among dying civilizations that lack the emotional fortitude to grasp that their world is are crumbling around them, so they retreat into the magical. If you read Cicero, Joseph Roth, or Freud, they saw very clearly, both the disintegration and the capacity of people around them to accept it. The danger is when you remain in a state of illusion, you essentially perpetuate an infantilism that leaves you unprepared- physiologically, intellectually and emotionally- for collapse, and when collapse comes, you react like children, you search for a savior, a demagogue, someone who promises vengeance, moral renewal and fantastic visions of a new glory.
"Its an old old story and we are not immune to the cycles of human history. The Greeks did not believe in a linear time, they believed that societies had a period of growth, maturation and decay and I think the Greeks are right. So when your family doesn't want to hear, they are retreating into the far more comforting arena of illusions that are provided for them by corporate entities that seek to keep us ignorant and dis-empowered and stop us from fighting back.
"And will they crush us like bugs? Probably. but that doesn't mean we shouldn't resist. Resistance is a moral imperative. The problem with the left is that it was seduced by the practical and that is what killed it as a moral force. We have a commitment to non-historical values, justice, liberty, protection of life, love, which are of course deemed by the world to be impractical; but which keep alive that possibility of another way of being and another form of community. At this point I think we have to look at the middle ages and the monastic communities that kept alive learning, humanities, and life in a time of darkness so that these great contributions of human history are not lost. And that becomes a battle worth fighting because as we enter an age of barbarism, the snuffing out of these great forces of humanism will be tragic for the human race. I think we have to focus much of our energy on trying to protect these non-historical forces, these commitments to [moral] values, and that's going to entail rebellion and perhaps even great personal risk. But I think it is worth doing, not because we can create a structure that can disarm corporatism, but because we can at least protect those virtues that permit people to live in ways that they are not slaves."
From the online chat with Chris Hedges July 21, 2010 hosted at TruthDig.com
Here is a July 12 audio discussion at TruthDig with Chris Hedges and Derrick Jensen, on what can be done about this situation:
"Hi Chris, thanks for your inspiration. Could you outline concretely how we might go about turning things around?"
Chris Hedges:
"We have to stop believing that we can effect change through established political or social organizations or electoral politics, and I think that still remains a huge hurdle for us people who in the end, through accommodation of fear and very clever advertising, are herded like sheep into a dysfunctional system, which is how so many people who should have known better voted for Obama. The environmental crisis that we're about to face will be even more catastrophic than the economic one, and we have to, on a personal level, reconsider how we relate to the society at large and to the ecosystem. We have both personal and social decisions to make. At this point most people are not willing to make those choices or take those steps."
Reader question from Terry:
"If you could put a single book on the topic of global warming (or ecology in general) into the hands of everyone on the planet with the knowledge that everyone would read it cover to cover, what title would you pick?"
Chris Hedges:
"Either any of the books by Lovelock or the new book by Clive Hamilton 'Requiem for a Species'."
Comment From Jason:
"I listened to your chat with Derrick Jensen and I guess my question is the question he asked, what do we do, the average person that is? Join Greenpeace, run for political office, start a farm in the country and live completely off the grid, hide in the woods and weather the storm? I feel like nothing anybody says or does, no form of action, can stop the machine we call civilization from destroying humanity and world along with it."
Chris Hedges:
"Well the coup d'etat is over, and they won. We lost. And now we have to learn to cope with it. It is very clear that the engines of corporatism and globalization are going to kill the ecosystem, no matter how many dead zones are created in the Gulf of Mexico or protests organized. We are going to have to make some very serious decisions about acts that dispute a system that in theological terms is a system of death and exploitation. And yet even then, it's probably too late. If you read closely the science on global warming- even if we stop emissions, global warming will accelerate because of what has already been emitted. I think we have to begin to prepare for collapse and if you want to survive, that's going to mean access to a local food source.
"So, in the end I'm with Camus, I don't think we're going to fool ourselves into thinking we can make a change. It's all hijacked, the political system, financial system. . . hijacked military complex, it's hijacked, even all of our social and educational systems. I've taught at places like Princeton and they all function like corporations. We've allowed these corporations to snuff out all voices of sanity and decency. . . and we listen to this garbage and we watch it. And I include Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow- as bad as the right wing, they are all playing the same wing, nobody is addressing the institutional methods that are strangling us. I don't care if its from the left or right, it all acts as diversion to keep us in a state of self delusion."
Comment From Alias:
"What does the fact that Bolivian peasants were able to roll-back the government's plan to privatize the water supply while we here can only sit back and ask people like yourself and Chomsky 'What can I do?' say about us?"
Chris Hedges:
"Well as a culture, we've been rendered captive to electronic hallucinations that have dis-empowered us. One of the most pernicious elements of the electronic age is that it destroys the cohesion of real communities. People retreat into virtual communities, you can walk down the street where I live in Princeton at night and see that sort of glow of monitors that keep people inside their homes. . . and in a future civilization people will be living in cells called hives that essentially sever them from their neighbors."
Question from Richard Nixon:
"Chris in your recent article you wrote 'Why continue to obey the laws and dictates of our executioners?' Can you expand on this a little. I took this as laws made need to be broken to get decent climate change reform."
Chris Hedges:
"Well it's very clear that the people who control the power systems have no interest in power change reforms because it would mean their extinction. So those of us who care about effecting change have to find mechanisms outside of the political structure, which Henry Thoreau wrote about in Civil Disobedience where he analyzed an individual's relation to the state and the moral questions of whether human beings should obey laws when they are immoral- or, in this case, self destructive. And I think that the questions that Thoreau asks are ones that we have to ask and I think we have to follow in Thoreau's footsteps where he writes about what he calls the machine. Thoreau writes about how many people around him are opposed to slavery and the war, but rather than expressing their opinions they sit around and do nothing about it. He said they hesitate, regret, sometimes petition, but nothing that actually has an effect."
Comment From Peter from Ontario:
"I'm a bit cynical about the idea of uprooting the powerful institutions that have created this mess. I realize this is throwing you a softball, but don't you think anyone that tries to rebel will be squashed like a bug? I mean, I look around at my family and neighbors, and see people that have been indoctrinated by the same message, 'focus on yourself right now and don't worry about anything that will happen later on'. Whenever I share your column with family and friends, they always give the same response - quit trying to wreck the good times for the rest of us and get a real job."
Chris Hedges:
"Well America has produced a country of people who've never had to grow up. They live in this illusion that reality is not an impediment to what they desire . . . they can have everything they want, they just have to dig deep within themselves, grasp that they are truly exceptional or believe that Jesus that can produce miracles. Its a form of magical thinking that is fed to us from the media to the corporations, from Oprah to Hollywood to Corporatism to the Christian right, and it has created a society where we are captivated by illusion, an illusion about who we are and where we're going and that's a very common characteristic among dying civilizations that lack the emotional fortitude to grasp that their world is are crumbling around them, so they retreat into the magical. If you read Cicero, Joseph Roth, or Freud, they saw very clearly, both the disintegration and the capacity of people around them to accept it. The danger is when you remain in a state of illusion, you essentially perpetuate an infantilism that leaves you unprepared- physiologically, intellectually and emotionally- for collapse, and when collapse comes, you react like children, you search for a savior, a demagogue, someone who promises vengeance, moral renewal and fantastic visions of a new glory.
"Its an old old story and we are not immune to the cycles of human history. The Greeks did not believe in a linear time, they believed that societies had a period of growth, maturation and decay and I think the Greeks are right. So when your family doesn't want to hear, they are retreating into the far more comforting arena of illusions that are provided for them by corporate entities that seek to keep us ignorant and dis-empowered and stop us from fighting back.
"And will they crush us like bugs? Probably. but that doesn't mean we shouldn't resist. Resistance is a moral imperative. The problem with the left is that it was seduced by the practical and that is what killed it as a moral force. We have a commitment to non-historical values, justice, liberty, protection of life, love, which are of course deemed by the world to be impractical; but which keep alive that possibility of another way of being and another form of community. At this point I think we have to look at the middle ages and the monastic communities that kept alive learning, humanities, and life in a time of darkness so that these great contributions of human history are not lost. And that becomes a battle worth fighting because as we enter an age of barbarism, the snuffing out of these great forces of humanism will be tragic for the human race. I think we have to focus much of our energy on trying to protect these non-historical forces, these commitments to [moral] values, and that's going to entail rebellion and perhaps even great personal risk. But I think it is worth doing, not because we can create a structure that can disarm corporatism, but because we can at least protect those virtues that permit people to live in ways that they are not slaves."
From the online chat with Chris Hedges July 21, 2010 hosted at TruthDig.com
Here is a July 12 audio discussion at TruthDig with Chris Hedges and Derrick Jensen, on what can be done about this situation:
Monday, July 19, 2010
Chris Hedges: Calling All Future-Eaters
excerpts from Hedges' "Calling All Future-Eaters" published July 19 at TruthDig:
". . . now we sit passive and dumb as corporations and the leaders of industrialized nations ensure that climate change will accelerate to levels that could mean the extinction of our species. Homo sapiens, as the biologist Tim Flannery points out, are the "future-eaters."
. . .
"In the past when civilizations went belly up through greed, mismanagement and the exhaustion of natural resources, human beings migrated somewhere else to pillage anew. But this time the game is over. There is nowhere else to go. The industrialized nations spent the last century seizing half the planet and dominating most of the other half. We giddily exhausted our natural capital, especially fossil fuel, to engage in an orgy of consumption and waste that poisoned the Earth and attacked the ecosystem on which human life depends. It was quite a party if you were a member of the industrialized elite. But it was pretty stupid.
. . .
"Collapse this time around will be global. We will disintegrate together. And there is no way out. The 10,000-year experiment of settled life is about to come to a crashing halt. And humankind, which thought it was given dominion over the Earth and all living things, will be taught a painful lesson in the necessity of balance, restraint and humility.
. . .
"We view ourselves as rational creatures. But is it rational to wait like sheep in a pen as oil and natural gas companies, coal companies, chemical industries, plastics manufacturers, the automotive industry, arms manufacturers and the leaders of the industrial world, as they did in Copenhagen, take us to mass extinction? It is too late to prevent profound climate change. But why add fuel to the fire? Why allow our ruling elite, driven by the lust for profits, to accelerate the death spiral? Why continue to obey the laws and dictates of our executioners?
. . .
"The news is grim. The accelerating disintegration of Arctic Sea ice means that summer ice will probably disappear within the next decade. The open water will absorb more solar radiation, significantly increasing the rate of global warming. The Siberian permafrost will disappear, sending up plumes of methane gas from underground. The Greenland ice sheet and the Himalayan-Tibetan glaciers will melt. Jay Zwally, a NASA climate scientist, declared in December 2007: "The Arctic is often cited as the canary in the coal mine for climate warming. Now, as a sign of climate warming, the canary has died. It is time to start getting out of the coal mines."
. . .
"We face a terrible political truth. Those who hold power will not act with the urgency required to protect human life and the ecosystem. Decisions about the fate of the planet and human civilization are in the hands of moral and intellectual trolls such as BP’s Tony Hayward. These political and corporate masters are driven by a craven desire to accumulate wealth at the expense of human life.
. . .
"The leaders of these corporations now determine our fate. They are not endowed with human decency or compassion. Yet their lobbyists make the laws. Their public relations firms craft the propaganda and trivia pumped out through systems of mass communication. Their money determines elections. Their greed turns workers into global serfs and our planet into a wasteland.
. . .
"As climate change advances, we will face a choice between obeying the rules put in place by corporations or rebellion. Those who work human beings to death in overcrowded factories in China and turn the Gulf of Mexico into a dead zone are the enemy. They serve systems of death. They cannot be reformed or trusted.
The climate crisis is a political crisis. We will either defy the corporate elite, which will mean civil disobedience, a rejection of traditional politics for a new radicalism and the systematic breaking of laws, or see ourselves consumed. Time is not on our side. The longer we wait, the more assured our destruction becomes. The future, if we remain passive, will be wrested from us by events. Our moral obligation is not to structures of power, but life."
-Chris Hedges, excerpted from "Calling All Future-Eaters", published at TruthDig.
Join an online Q&A with Chris Hedges about this column Wednesday July 21 at 12 noon MST.
Chris Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute, was a foreign correspondent for the New York Times for 15 years, and has worked for the Christian Science Monitor and National Public Radio. Hedges was part of the team of reporters at The New York Times awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the paper’s coverage of global terrorism. He also received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism in 2002. The Los Angeles Press Club honored Hedges’ original columns in Truthdig by naming the author the Online Journalist of the Year in 2009, and granted him the Best Online Column award in 2010 for his Truthdig essay "One Day We’ll All Be Terrorists."
He has taught at Columbia University, New York University and Princeton University. He currently teaches inmates at a correctional facility in New Jersey. He has written nine books, including "Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle" (2009), "I Don’t Believe in Atheists" (2008) and the best-selling "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America" (2008). His book "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning" (2003) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.
Hedges holds a B.A. in English literature from Colgate University and a Master of Divinity degree from Harvard University. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley, Calif. Hedges speaks Arabic, French and Spanish and knows ancient Greek and Latin. In addition to writing a weekly original column for Truthdig, he has also written for Harper’s Magazine, The New Statesman, The New York Review of Books, Adbusters, Granta and Foreign Affairs.
". . . now we sit passive and dumb as corporations and the leaders of industrialized nations ensure that climate change will accelerate to levels that could mean the extinction of our species. Homo sapiens, as the biologist Tim Flannery points out, are the "future-eaters."
. . .
"In the past when civilizations went belly up through greed, mismanagement and the exhaustion of natural resources, human beings migrated somewhere else to pillage anew. But this time the game is over. There is nowhere else to go. The industrialized nations spent the last century seizing half the planet and dominating most of the other half. We giddily exhausted our natural capital, especially fossil fuel, to engage in an orgy of consumption and waste that poisoned the Earth and attacked the ecosystem on which human life depends. It was quite a party if you were a member of the industrialized elite. But it was pretty stupid.
. . .
"Collapse this time around will be global. We will disintegrate together. And there is no way out. The 10,000-year experiment of settled life is about to come to a crashing halt. And humankind, which thought it was given dominion over the Earth and all living things, will be taught a painful lesson in the necessity of balance, restraint and humility.
. . .
"We view ourselves as rational creatures. But is it rational to wait like sheep in a pen as oil and natural gas companies, coal companies, chemical industries, plastics manufacturers, the automotive industry, arms manufacturers and the leaders of the industrial world, as they did in Copenhagen, take us to mass extinction? It is too late to prevent profound climate change. But why add fuel to the fire? Why allow our ruling elite, driven by the lust for profits, to accelerate the death spiral? Why continue to obey the laws and dictates of our executioners?
. . .
"The news is grim. The accelerating disintegration of Arctic Sea ice means that summer ice will probably disappear within the next decade. The open water will absorb more solar radiation, significantly increasing the rate of global warming. The Siberian permafrost will disappear, sending up plumes of methane gas from underground. The Greenland ice sheet and the Himalayan-Tibetan glaciers will melt. Jay Zwally, a NASA climate scientist, declared in December 2007: "The Arctic is often cited as the canary in the coal mine for climate warming. Now, as a sign of climate warming, the canary has died. It is time to start getting out of the coal mines."
. . .
"We face a terrible political truth. Those who hold power will not act with the urgency required to protect human life and the ecosystem. Decisions about the fate of the planet and human civilization are in the hands of moral and intellectual trolls such as BP’s Tony Hayward. These political and corporate masters are driven by a craven desire to accumulate wealth at the expense of human life.
. . .
"The leaders of these corporations now determine our fate. They are not endowed with human decency or compassion. Yet their lobbyists make the laws. Their public relations firms craft the propaganda and trivia pumped out through systems of mass communication. Their money determines elections. Their greed turns workers into global serfs and our planet into a wasteland.
. . .
"As climate change advances, we will face a choice between obeying the rules put in place by corporations or rebellion. Those who work human beings to death in overcrowded factories in China and turn the Gulf of Mexico into a dead zone are the enemy. They serve systems of death. They cannot be reformed or trusted.
The climate crisis is a political crisis. We will either defy the corporate elite, which will mean civil disobedience, a rejection of traditional politics for a new radicalism and the systematic breaking of laws, or see ourselves consumed. Time is not on our side. The longer we wait, the more assured our destruction becomes. The future, if we remain passive, will be wrested from us by events. Our moral obligation is not to structures of power, but life."
-Chris Hedges, excerpted from "Calling All Future-Eaters", published at TruthDig.
Join an online Q&A with Chris Hedges about this column Wednesday July 21 at 12 noon MST.
He has taught at Columbia University, New York University and Princeton University. He currently teaches inmates at a correctional facility in New Jersey. He has written nine books, including "Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle" (2009), "I Don’t Believe in Atheists" (2008) and the best-selling "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America" (2008). His book "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning" (2003) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.
Hedges holds a B.A. in English literature from Colgate University and a Master of Divinity degree from Harvard University. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley, Calif. Hedges speaks Arabic, French and Spanish and knows ancient Greek and Latin. In addition to writing a weekly original column for Truthdig, he has also written for Harper’s Magazine, The New Statesman, The New York Review of Books, Adbusters, Granta and Foreign Affairs.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Interview With Poet Jorie Graham
Graham: Sometimes I feel I am living an extended farewell, where my eventual disappearance, my mortal nature, normally a deep human concern, has been washed away by my fear for the deeper mortality- the extinction- of other species, and of the natural world itself. I cannot look at the world hard enough. My love for it has never been so directed. I can take nothing for granted. Creation astonishes me where it used to just delight me.
In many ways this book is an attempt to describe to a future people what is was like to have water, to have seasons, to know what blossoming was and a daybreak where one did not fear the sun, or a heavy wind where one did not fear its' going too far, beyond normal. What is normal, I have kept wondering. Where is the tipping point? Where does the positive feedback loop set in? Where is the point of no return? How are we going to be as people then? What is an ethical compass for when scarcity sets in? How does one retain one's humanity under those circumstances or does one become inevitably barbaric in the defense of one's tribe? Where does one draw the line- what is a line under those circumstances- and which side of the line will one be on?
And what is art for then? What is dreaming for? What is the imagination supposed to do with its capacity to imagine the end? Is the imagination of the unimaginable possible, and, perhaps, as I have come to believe, might it be one of the most central roles the human gift of imagination is being called upon to enact? Perhaps if we use it to summon the imagination of where we are headed- what that will feel like- what it will feel like to look back at this juncture- maybe we will wake up in time? I have written it in order to make myself not only understand-we all seem to understand- but to actually feel (and thus physically believe) what we have and what we are losing- and furthermore what devastatingly much more of creation we are going to be losing.
. . .
Wengen: This collection feels as if it ties the connection between the past and the unknown future into a state of teetering present- yet you weave hope throughout. Would you consider yourself a hopeful person? Do you have faith in the future?
Graham: In the short run I cannot but hope, I wouldn't have written this if I were hopeless. I think artists have a large responsibility at present- that of awakening the imagination of a deep future. If humans have to be asked to make sacrifices for people they do not even know will be alive- sacrifices the results of which will not be evident, if at all, except four or five generations hence, then we are going to have to help awaken an imagination of that deep future, in order that people feel connected to it in their willingness to act. After all people are going to be asked to radically alter their lives- for their whole lives- in order that their kind and their world might remain. I happen to feel one can reawaken that sensation of an unimaginably far off horizon. We are so collapsed-down now into a buzzing noisy here-and-now, an era of instant gratification, decimated attention-span, that it is going to take some work to help people see in their mind's eye that far off horizon many generations beyond their own time, a time towards which they are going to have to try to take a leap of faith- and a leap which involves deep sacrifice at that. But I wouldn't be making the effort to answer you in this way, at length, or to write such a book, if I did not believe we still had that chance. A real chance. And that art could be in service of that goal.
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read the full interview at Poets.org
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Jorie Graham was born in New York City in 1950, the daughter of a journalist and a sculptor. She was raised in Rome, Italy and educated in French schools. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris before attending New York University as an undergraduate, where she studied filmmaking. She received an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa.
Graham is the author of numerous collections of poetry, most recently Sea Change (Ecco, 2008), Never (2002), Swarm (2000), and The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
About her work, James Longenbach wrote in the New York Times: "For 30 years Jorie Graham has engaged the whole human contraption- intellectual, global, domestic, apocalyptic- rather than the narrow emotional slice of it most often reserved for poems. She thinks of the poet not as a recorder but as a constructor of experience. Like Rilke or Yeats, she imagines the hermetic poet as a public figure, someone who addresses the most urgent philosophical and political issues of the time simply by writing poems."
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
July 13 Update: Oil Disaster in the Gulf
An informative update on the Gulf disaster from McClatchy Bureau's Mark Seibel. A 'dramatic moment' is in progress. The previous cap, which collected 20-30% of the oil and gas flow, will be removed, allowing 100% flow until a new cap is put in place in several days which can capture potentially all of the oil flow. The risk here is that the pressure building inside the capped well may cause eruptions through the bore walls into the intermediate sub-surface strata- which may later destabilize, allowing potentially widespread and uncontrollable further leakage.
Monday, July 5, 2010
The State of the World
Maude Barlow, head of The Council of Canadians, founder of the Blue Planet Project, gives an assessment of the true state of the world at Massey Hall in Toronto, during the G20 confab.
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