Pink Sauerkraut

Merlot Variety of Napa red cabbage, regular green cabbage, carrots, garlic and ginger sauerkraut! YUM!! Good luck finding this at the grocery store!

Last spring, the weather was unsettled, and my seedlings were started late, because I was traveling overseas for all of January. But, I still managed to grow enough tomatoes, peppers, cukes, parsley, garlic and nasturtiums, among other things, to put away around 200 servings of frozen veggies to be Vita-mixed into a private blend V-8, V-9 or V-12!

Note the funny nose on the salad tomato. That’s fairly common with this early variety. I can’t remember if it’s a Sub-Arctic Plenty or an Oregon Spring. The purple onion is a Welsh Bunching variety that I cut the seed head off to allow it to form a larger bulb. I bought a packet probably 20 years ago and still have them. There’s a beefsteak tomato in the back, and a light green Armenian cuke, which grows with fancy scallops. They are delicious and stay tender even when ridiculously big. Like 2-3 feet long and 4 inches in diameter. The striped cukes were new for me last summer. Delicious and tender, but like many of my cukes the last few years, they are getting killed off by a fungus or virus. Along with the garlic, the beets did GREAT. I really liked the first time for me Red Cloud variety. Very uniform and clean.

The cabbage crop, the second most important after all the juice ingredients, was pitiful. The heads were not solid and I ran out of time in the fall. The two year old neighborhood “Kraut Party” was delayed when the usual participants got CoVid and then RSV. But come January, I figured I would make a small batch of kraut with the Chinese (Napa) cabbage that had been quietly reposing in the produce drawer of my fridge. Since this was a solitary effort, I put in more garlic and ginger than my friend would have wanted, along with the Suzuko variety Napa cabbage and carrots. I didn’t get a photo, but it tasted pretty good. I was surprised at how the unique Napa cabbage flavor was brightened, even with the strong overtones of garlic and ginger, delicious all together, with the extra garlic and ginger intended as anti-inflammatory to heal the after effects of the RSV.

After transferring the green / white Napa kraut to a smaller jar, I decided to try, despite my neighbor’s warning not to mix red and white / green cabbage in the same batch, to do just that. I used the Merlot variety Napa cabbage, and a small regular green cabbage head, along with what would probably be considered an excessive amount of garlic and ginger, as well as carrots. I did not know what to expect for a color, but certainly I was not expecting PINK!

Half gallon Ball Canning Jar at Left. A nice serving of fiber and probiotics at right. My arthritic hand was tired after slicing the Napa cabbage, so I chopped the green cabbage in the Vita-mix, as coarse as I could, but that was still pretty fine.

Since I cut out almost all the sugar in my diet after coming home from the hospital, I found myself really enjoying the flavor of the kraut for my bedtime snack. So once this batch was done, I got out the last of my cabbages, both small red heads, and made the last batch from last summer’s harvest. After two weeks, I put this garlic and ginger heavy batch in the fridge yesterday. Yet to be tasted.

The garden is a wonderful place and wonderful activity. I actually had a good year for fruit. First time the tart cherries produced enough / the birds left them for me that I could make juice. It was delicious. The cherries are technically tart, but are pretty sweet. The batch shown was about half of the harvest. Not huge, but it’s just me. So much better than buying the stuff at the grocery store. My Canadice red seedless grapes were also quite productive and I made and canned some juice from them too.

And then, at the end of the summer, there were quite a few Monarch Butterflies that came to get nectar from the Echinacae flowers.

This appears to be a female Monarch.
It was a good season for the coleus plants, too.

Mushroom Memoir

I joined the Brownie Troop at Oakview Elementary School in Silver Spring, Maryland, in 1965. The troop was full, but the Girl Scout Troop needed leaders, and they told my mom that they would let me join if she volunteered. I don’t remember much about the Brownie activities. I do recall the day an older kid leaving detention, for an infraction unknown to me, set the couch in the teacher’s lounge on fire during our Brownie meeting, and I do remember being one of only two girls who were crying about it. Half the school burned down from that little lit cigarette butt. I also remember wearing the Brownie uniform, and I kept the little gold Brownie pin for many years.

In fact, the little gold pin (not real gold!) was only recently stolen, when someone broke into my house, left my old laptop and took the jewelry box. I live, and have lived, in a rural area for 34 years now. They didn’t have to break the wood frame of the door, but they did. The basement door is left unlocked. But that would have been too easy. Of course, the cops didn’t care, even though it was one of a series of recent B&E’s.

Of course, the size lumber that was used to build the house in the 1840’s no longer exists. My neighbor Wayne had the brilliant idea of flipping the board around its vertical axis, so the damaged portion would be hidden in the wall. That facilitated and sped up the repair.

Anyway, back to the Girl Scouts. My mother kept on being a troop Leader when I graduated to the Junior Girl Scouts in 4th Grade. Pretty much everyone disliked her. She had a short fuse. Perhaps due to lead poisoning. She grew up in Fairmont, West Virginia. After the Flint (Michigan) Water Crisis (due to lead contamination), a large group of scholars got together for a research project, and they showed that local murder rates in the early part of the 20th Century were very closely correlated with the distance of the town from a lead smelter. Lead, at that time, was the material of choice for all the snazzy new municipal water system pipes. It didn’t rust like steel. Richer municipalities, along with those closer to the lead smelters, used lead pipes. Flint was wealthy at the time. A center of manufacturing.

Back to my mom. Perhaps adding to her lack of patience were her bad teeth. She had a lot of mercury based amalgam fillings. My sister didn’t want to hear my theory of our mother’s temper’s relationship to her fillings, but I think the fillings and the lead pipes in Fairmont probably had a significant effect. I didn’t know her father, who died before I was born, but nobody else in the family ever seemed to have such a temper. Anyway, she was a tough woman, but the Girl Scout Troop did a lot of exciting outdoor activities when she was the leader. We did many overnight camping trips. Way more than most troops. People are always complicated.

Adding to my early exposure to nature, at some time even before joining the Girl Scouts, my parents had decided that we should do family camping. No trailer for them. After the first trial with rented equipment, we had a giant canvas tent that would sleep 8, for the four of us and the miniature poodle. We visited the Shenandoah National Forest on our early trips, and my parents kept the top of the Styrofoam “ice-chest” with the bear fang punctures for many years, as a souvenir of one of the most exciting nights of our lives. The dog was terrified. It made a good story. See, I am still telling it 60 years later!

All that goes to say that, at an early age, I was, despite growing up in suburbia, introduced to nature. My first gardening adventure was growing radishes at age 4. They turned out very spicy. My mother served them as the “bitter herb” for the Passover Seder. The years that I have not had a garden are very few. A couple of summers when I was in college. A couple of years when I lived overseas.

When I had a chance, I moved to a rural area. I live on a forty acre plot, with a hundred by hundred foot fenced area for a garden and small orchard. For the last 5 years or so, I have been growing tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, parsley, radishes, garlic, nasturtiums, and various other things, to make “veggie juice smoothie packs.” I try to have a home grown juice smoothie every morning for breakfast. My goal is 225 juice packs in the freezer for the winter and spring.

The garden is a big part of why it’s painful for me to contemplate moving away. Losing the chance to see a dark night sky is another big reason. Looking up and the stars, and thinking about how people have been looking at some of the same groups of stars that we call constellations for as long as 30,000 years is just amazing to me. Way back then, Deneb, the swan goddess’s tail, was the pole star. Myths and archeological finds (Gobeckli Tepe) from the ancient near east and Europe hint at the religious traditions of that time. Before I moved out to the country, I knew the Big Dipper and Cassiopeia (the giant double-u). I don’t really remember even understanding the mythological significance of Orion, and his dog, Sirius. The whole calendar of the ancient Egyptians was based on the appearance of Sirius after it had spent time below the horizon. During the Geminid meteor showers last week, it was very clear and the date was close to the new moon, so very dark. Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, was sparkling white, green and red. I feel sorry for city dwellers.

But, as much as I love working in the garden, being in the garden, eating my own produce, ugly heirloom tomatoes and all, and taking a few minutes on clear nights to ponder the stars, there’s something even more special about hunting for wild mushrooms in the woods at the back of the property. On occasion, on my way to the back of the property, I have found Dryad’s Saddles, edible if young enough, in the grass, or sprouting from a tree, or giant puffballs along the south-eastern edge of the property. Neither are very tasty, but they are edible and so a decent consolation prize. But the tastiest prizes are in the back, with the big oaks and maples and other, mostly deciduous, trees.

Learning to recognize and get brave enough to eat chicken-of-the-woods, hens-of-the-woods, shrimp-of-the-woods, green quilted Russulas, black trumpets, white and yellow oysters, red chanterelles, entolomas, and a VERY few morels, while avoiding eating Jack-O-Lanterns, red Russulas, Destroying Angels, “Little Brown Mushrooms,” and Angels Wings…. Now that’s a skill. Because I have taught myself, and have never yet gotten sick. As “they” say, “There are old mushroom hunters, and bold mushroom hunters, but there are no old, bold mushroom hunters!”

Most of the people in my neighborhood learned to find morels when they were kids. Nobody where I grew up hunted mushrooms. Or at least I do not recall, even among the Girl Scouts or Boy Scouts in my social circles, anyone who hunted and ate wild mushrooms. And even my current neighbors are surprised to discover that when I say I hunt mushrooms, I do not mean “only morels.”

It has definitely been challenging to learn to understand the jargon of mycology. One of my early finds was a whole clump of giant white, funnel-shaped mushrooms at the edge of a water-logged area near the tree that I was convinced for years was an elm, but I now think is a beech. I looked through all my books and could not find anything remotely resembling these beautiful, snow-white, 8 – 10 inch high, 5- 6 inch diameter fungi. Any one would have made a meal! Some months later, I finally “grokked” that the cap shape descriptions in the books were not random. “Oh it might be flat, it might be convex.” No. The point was that they always go through a sequence, usually from convex, to flat, to concave. So the reason that those shrooms looked the way they did was because they were at the end of the cycle of maturity of the “fruiting body,” and the caps had turned inside out. Usually, the pictured examples of mushrooms in guide books are sooner after they pop up.

The aspiring shroom hunter needs to learn all the vocabulary associated with the way the gills, or other “fertile” surface is connected, or not, to the stem; the vocabulary to describe the shape of the stems; and the vocabulary used to describe the habits of the particular species, such as “gregarious,” or “solitary,” or “clustered.” The aspiring mycologist needs to know the difference between gilled shrooms, and shrooms with pores. For the pored shrooms, are they boletes, or are they polypores? Numerous older books say no polypores (which include Dryad’s Saddles, Chickens, and Hens) are poisonous, but newer books don’t want to be that BOLD!!!! Too many people have taken up this hobby. The experts want people to be sure that they have identified the exact species before cooking and consuming it.

Way too many people, IMO, are willing to eat a shroom that someone in a Reddit forum or some software says is ok. This is insane. Ok, there are a FEW mushrooms that are recognizable, just by looking at the cap shape and coloration. But the software apps that act like they can identify a mushroom from the view of the cap are completely ridiculous. Ok, for pure curiosity, fine. But not to eat. Period. Stay cowardly.

A lot of my finds go in the compost, mostly unidentified. For the first time, I found what I was pretty sure were blewits this fall, but after checking in all of my books and a few reliable on-line sites, I wasn’t sure if a) they were blewits or b) blewits are always safe to eat. I was excited when I identified “Woman on a Motorcycle.” I didn’t eat it, but I was highly confident that I knew what it was.

Maybe it would be ok to die of mushroom poisoning, since that supposedly was how the Buddha finally entered Nirvana. But, the symptoms of organ failure that the Amanitas and other really deadly shrooms cause are not reportedly fun to live through. One of my engineer colleagues told me about mistaking Jack-O-Lanterns for chanterelles. He does not care to repeat the experience. My plan is to continue to be a cowardly mushroom hunter.

As I age, and my joints creak, and I don’t move so fast, and I still have to work for a living, I wonder if it even makes sense for me to keep living out in the country, where it’s so hard to find people to help with the garden and mowing the lawn, etc. But then I realize that if I move to the city or the suburbs, I will sit on my rear end even more of the time, instead of getting out in the fresh air and growing and hunting my own produce, and admiring the same stars that all the famous and forgotten people since antiquity, and even before antiquity, have viewed.

Joyous Just Passed Solstice, Merry Christmas if you celebrate, and happy New Year. I’m not terribly optimistic that 2024 will be an improvement over 2023. The world seems to be falling apart. But some people manage to find joy anyway.

Wax On, Wax Off!

Perhaps the most memorable part of the original 1984 Karate Kid movie for me was the scene when the Kid, Daniel, first shows up to his new teacher’s home for a lesson in self-defense, and makes a sacred pact to to obey, no questions asked, in exchange for being taught karate. Pat Morita, as the teacher, hands Daniel a sponge to wash his collection of “Detroit” cars. Daniel is then is told to wax them, as well. Morita demonstrates the hand and arm motions to put the wax on the car, and then wipe it off. Wax on, Wax off. “Don’t forget to breathe!” I love this scene.

Of course, later we find out that the “wax on, wax off” motion is identical to a basic karate move used to block and attack. The Karate Kid learns karate by repeated practice performed doing what he considers menial work.

Way back when, students learned to write by practicing writing. With a thick pencil, then later, a thinner pencil, and eventually, a pen. By repeating the motions, we learned to write legibly, and without having to think too hard about how to make each letter.

anonymous ethnic tutor helping little multiracial students with task in classroom
Photo by Katerina Holmes on Pexels.com

Piano students have to practice scales and guitar students have to practice chords. That’s just the way it is. Acquiring a skill requires practice.

Learning how to safely forage for edible mushrooms requires knowing the difference between decurrent, attached and free gills, and gregarious and solitary growth habits, as well as how to make and interpret a spore print, among many other characteristics, to identify the spore colors. It scares the crap out of me when people show some software a picture to get an ID.

Green Russula, an edible choice mushroom that I was afraid to eat as I was not sure I had correctly identified it at the time.

It also, as I finally figured out, requires being able to interpret the descriptions of the changing shapes of the caps, often from convex to flat to concave, as the mushroom ages. I drove myself nuts looking through five mushroom books trying to identify a giant white mushroom with a large concave, almost funnel shaped, cap. I finally found it in one of the books. As my studies continued, I learned that this mushroom had been misidentified and argued about by experts for decades. In any case, the convex shape wasn’t what finally helped with the ID. The convex shape was simply because these stunning, large white mushrooms were well into the spore spreading segment of their lifecycle. The convex shape seemed distinctive to me, because this is generally not the time when people capture images for identification guides. They generally capture the photos when the shrooms are young and fresh and colorful and convex. This is only one aspect of why it’s generally not recommended to teach yourself mushroom foraging. I did take to heart the adage that there are old mushroom hunters, and bold mushroom hunters, but no old, bold mushroom hunters.

Learning has to start with small skills, and mastery of the basics allows us to gain greater skills. This goes for such tasks generally characterized as “Thinking” as well as playing a musical instrument, swimming competitively, or practicing medicine, repairing cars, or gardening. As the practitioner acquires more basic knowledge of the objects and practices associated with a “body of knowledge,” it’s possible to be more creative with those data and skills, and accomplish more and more. The knowledge builds on and feeds itself.

What is going to happen to humanity if we don’t learn how to learn?

This is the scariest thing for me about SALAMI, or Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences, a more accurate description of what we call AI, or artificial intelligence.

Note that SALAMI and Bologna might be related.

It’s pretty ridiculous to call machine learning intelligence. Intelligence requires conscious awareness, and compassion. It must be grounded in empathy, resulting from awareness of the pains and fears and longings that all humans, most animals, and perhaps even plants, are subject to. It’s part of being alive.

Objectivity is scary, as well as having been proven mathematically and philosophically to be non-existent. I don’t want someone to give me objective advice. I want advice that’s RIGHT for ME! Part of wisdom is knowing how to GIVE advice that’s right for the person seeking the advice!

A professor at a large, accredited university recently told me that many of his current students truly think that they don’t need to know anything other than how to look something up on Google. They believe they will be able to Google their way through their engineering careers. He told me that the students would not want to read a long text book, that many of them don’t buy the short textbook he requires now. I replied that I was not going to pander to ignoramuses. The movie Idiocracy was hilarious, but it’s scary to contemplate the fact that that’s where we’re headed.

We need to wake up, and smell the roses and the coffee, or all we will have left to smell is shit.

pink carnation flower and pink rose flower in clear glass vase beside mug of coffee
Photo by Lisa Fotios on Pexels.com

OR

HERE WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A PHOTO OF SOME MANURE. BUT NONE OF THE IMAGE SERVICES ASSOCIATED WITH MY CURRENT SOFTWARES SHOW A SINGLE PHOTO OF A FARMER SHOVELING MANURE. ALL THE FARM PHOTOS ARE OF CUTE ANIMALS OR BEAUTIFUL GRAINS, FRUITS, ETC. 

WHY THIS CENSORSHIP ABOUT SHIT?????

This is the skatole molecule, according to Wikipedia, it’s what makes shit smell like shit. The Wiki article also shows a small image of human “poo” alongside a shot of elephant “POO.” Hmm, looks like precursors to ammonia and methane in there.

By Dschanz – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4834135

Earth is My Home

Feeling solid, stable, beneath my feet,

some say the earth spins and soars in the void.

Here, near the Great Lakes, I have made my home

near Erie and St. Claire, then Michigan.

Dirt and rock and salted water, with a

thin layer of air. Iron at the core.

This is where home is.

Home is here on Earth.

Cities dot the surface of the land

while arbitrary lines and squiggles define

nations and states, forcing allegiance on

heterogeneous populations.

It’s a lost cause these days.

Earth is now home.

March of the Papery Traces

Note the small hole is the leaf third from the lower left corner. Photo from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula somewhere in the east.

They stood up and brushed the bits of damp twigs and moss off of the seat of their jeans. They lifted the forest green backpack to their left shoulder, then wriggled their right arm into the other strap. There were no papery traces of these events. Only unreliable neuronal traces. This was way before the days of the selfie stick. Way before the days of the ubiquitous cell phone camera. Way before the possibility of becoming the person whose soul lived inside their body. Way, way, way before the days of hormone blocking therapy. In fact, even for them, it was hard to think back to that scene without naming self as he.

Mom probably thought that the solo trip would reinforce the manly aspects of Marco’s personality. Were that true, mom’s idea failed. Miserably. That was the weekend when Marco became March. Not Marsha. March. From then on, only March would do.

From the Mid-Michigan Word Gatherers Prompt: Papery Traces 14APR22

Several members of the group said they liked this piece. Many of them are newer members who don’t recall my early flash fiction and who don’t care for the Knomo Choicius stories. :>(

They challenged me to write the novel. I offer this to anyone who wants to keep going with it. Acknowledge this link, please.

But maybe I will keep going a little bit. Here’s the beginning of the next chapter…

Some say that Jesus was not a man, but the ultimate androgynous being. That Jesus truly understood the human condition, in its fullness. At 17, March wasn’t sure about all the suffering stuff. But the idea of androgynous wisdom? That was worth investigating.

100th Anniversary of the END of World War I- Reprise

Please click below to hear the audio Recording of the actual sermon. Note content is an elaboration of some of the points made below.

Today is November 11, 2018.

It is the hundredth anniversary of the end of the first World War.

Some wars, as the Hindu’s great scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, tells us, are justified. Sun Tzu of China also wrote a book held in longstanding honor that explains how to determine when war is justified. Sun Tsu’s classic, The Art of War, is still used today for its advice on how to gain a speedy end to any war that is justified.

We in the West have our own traditions justifying war. The Trojan War between the Achaeans (predecessors of the culture occupying what we now call Greece) was fought due to a pact between rich landowners to defend whichever of them took the most beautiful woman of the times as a wife, from anyone who tried to take her away. The Hebrew Bible documents many wars fought at the direction of God’s commands to cleanse the Promised Land of its supposedly sinful occupants.

At that time, people were led to believe that they were doing good by helping their God to annihilate offending peoples. I personally have a hard time deciding if this seems morally superior or inferior to the idea of preventing Helen from leaving her short, fat, ugly Achaean (Greek) husband and going off with the handsome Prince of Troy. I am also struggling to come to a conclusion about whether ethnic cleansing is superior or inferior as a supposedly legitimate cause of war, compared to one fought over the refusal of a king to return his cousin’s domain after the allotted time had elapsed since the dice gambling match forced him to go into a 13 year exile.

Are all of these reasons morally inferior or superior to the ones that Americans have used in recent times? (Securing our supply of oil? Liberating Afghan women from those who were forcing them to give up their right to education and liberty to walk about in town? Destroying what turned out to be non-existent weapons of mass destruction?)

Apparently, back in the Bronze age, in what we now call the Middle East, wars fought to perform ethnic cleansing were considered good deeds. The episodes of what today would be called ethnic cleansing, or genocide, were thought to endear the people to their god. Because of this, Israelite editors of the Bible made up the story of their ancestors’ destruction of the great city of Jericho. Historians and archeologists seem quite certain that the city of Jericho was already a pile of ruins at the time of the Israelites occupation of Canaan. But it was important to tell the story of the destruction of every resident of Jericho- man, woman (except the certified virgins of child bearing age), child, even the livestock. Important to remind God of the obedience of the people, and important to remind the Israelites of their fierce warrior natures.

Now, before you, dear reader, accuse me of being NEGATIVE, wallowing in the horrific deeds and attitudes of the past, I want to say that THE FACT that we now find these deeds HORRIFIC gives me some hope for future progress. As the great Rabbi Hillel said, what is hateful to you, do not do to others.

Sure, it’s great to give charity, and to smile as you go about your daily business. But destruction is so much swifter than construction, that you could be loving and kind 364 days a year, and on that one day of destruction, ruin more than you built. Perhaps that is likely if we try to suppress our negative aspects, rather than bringing them into the light of day to figure out how we can move beyond them.

So first, let’s avoid destruction of the beautiful, the useful, and the spiritually uplifting.

How much progress have we made in the last 3 or 4 thousand years?

The kings of Assyria and Babylon used to have their scribes count the enemy hands in the piles that the warriors made, so they could brag to their god of how many enemies his army had eradicated. Most of the armies of the day only killed men and children, sparing all women of child bearing age, and taking the livestock. Women were spared as the men of the day had an incorrect belief that THEY carried the complete genetic seeds of their offspring, and the females were merely incubators.

Getting back to more modern times, World War I resulted in 10 million civilian deaths and 6 million military personnel deaths. Another 20 million were injured. In the heat of the battle, many soldiers had been brainwashed as to the necessity of continuing to kill until the moment of cease-fire at 11 am on 11/11/1918. The last soldier was killed at 10:58 am. This was almost six hours after the announcement of the cease-fire. The combatant had become so filled with hatred that they did not want to waste a chance for a little more glory on the battlefield, a few more enemies killed.

But, as a result of this bloody, horrible war, many people did start to undertake organization building for the purposes of reducing the pain, suffering, and losses of war. Some people also worked to reduce the likelihood of war.

As we look back in history on this hundredth anniversary of the end of World War I, we can’t celebrate the end of war. We can’t even celebrate the end of the desire for war. But we do have some progress to report. We have the knowledge of the Buddhist prayer that all beings be happy, and more importantly that all beings have the causes of happiness. Again, I’d like to suggest that we not pray for the currently unrealistic end to war, which would leave many people in untenable conditions. Rather, I pray for an end to the causes of war.

What are the causes of war? I am not a historian, so probably no historian would take my opinion into account. However, I think that injustice is the biggest. I will claim that I’m not the first to think along the lines of social structures contributing to war. Matthew O. Jackson and Massimo Morelli wrote (in 2007) an article called “Political Bias and War,” in the American Economic Review, 97 (4): 1353-1373. I haven’t read it because I don’t want to pay for the article at this point. From another article by these authors, which I found in its entirety, they apparently make the case that PEOPLE LIKE to CHOOSE those with belligerent tendencies as leaders to negotiate for them. They also provide information that led me to understand that in hierarchical societies (all human societies), the LEADERS actually tend to benefit from war more than the citizens. Let’s think about the rich Americans who benefit from selling arms. They are not the ones being shot at on the battlefields! Be that as it may, these two historians see war most frequently resulting from bargaining failures. To me, bargaining failures is a “HOW wars start” factor, while injustice is a “WHY wars start” factor.

If peace and justice prevailed everywhere on the face of the earth, and people LOVED peace and justice, I think that there would be a lower driving force for wars.

But injustice is the hardest thing to eradicate. Or perhaps I should say that the manifestations of injustice are very difficult to eradicate. When we start to try to disentangle a single strand of injustice, we find ourselves pulling on one end of what seems like an infinite spider web.

Two years ago I studied the Flint Water Crisis, in order to prepare a presentation for an engineering conference. The “ROOT CAUSE” of the children’s lead poisoning was eventually found by the American Civil Liberties Union to be a failure of democracy. Of course with any big failure, there are multiple points of view. From another vantage point, the Flint problem was economic in nature. The city had been a thriving center of manufacturing, but the losses of the automotive industry had left it as the home of one of the most poverty stricken populations in the country. But defining the situation in those terms is philosophically defeatist. It implies that poor people don’t have a right to safe drinking water. Or it leaves poor people waiting for charity.

Calling the situation a failure of democracy leads to more immediately actionable plans. The control of the government of Flint has now been returned to its elected mayor from the State appointed emergency manager, who took control after the bankruptcy of the city. Several years on, there are still a lot of lead pipes in Flint, and some people are still relying on bottled water to drink, although it’s been safe to wash even babies in the water for some time now.

There are still ongoing lawsuits over the actions taken by the officials appointed by the State, who abused their authority and ignored safety warnings from the employees of the water department. Some of these former authorities are facing criminal charges. (Feel free to contact me for a copy of my slide show or paper on the subject.)

Should all humans have safe drinking water? Is that a matter of justice? Lead in drinking water has been shown to cause irreversible brain damage in infants and young children. The brain damage leads to a higher incidence of behavioral problems, and even murder rates. (My previously mentioned paper has references to a scholarly article on this issue.) Of course “normal” people don’t want violent, brain damaged people in their neighborhoods.

What about toilets? Should all humans have toilets?

And education? Should all humans have access to basic education? Should they learn how to read, do arithmetic, and practice basic hygiene?

Are these issues of justice?

If we are able to envision a world of both peace and justice, we bring it closer to reality. Jesus’ teachings encouraged his followers to enter the Kingdom of Heaven within. Yet, as we leave the Halloween season, and approach the Thanksgiving Season, overshadowed as it now is in the American Retail environment, by a frenzy of Christmas capitalism, let’s rejoice that Christians have not totally given up the idea of the Old Testament prophet, that one day there would be Peace on Earth.

If all of us spread the word that our chances of Peace on Earth coming sooner will be improved once we start praying for an end to the CAUSES of war, we will be doing a small part to making it happen.

Spring Is Here

Even though we just got more snow, the birds announce that the season is changing. These views were from my back window. There were at least 20 robins hopping around for hours. There were some sparrows who later joined them, and then a crow started strutting around!

And a hawk circled

over the snow spotted ground

then flew off, northward.

And the rain having

melted the snow,

the robins party, party big.

I do not know if Spoonbills are migratory, and this photo is from March of 2020 in Assam, India. They are pretty amazing birds! These two were courting.