Nature Telling Us Time's Running Out

The land is shrouded inn a ash-laden haze: a winter evening filled with gloom and foreboding. Scene from an English countryside, perhaps, where “The Hounds of the Baskervilles” is about to unfold.

Only it is not. This is San Jose in Northern California. The clock says it’s 9 in the morning, but the sun lies hidden behind wildfire smoke so thick that stepping outside poses serious breathing problems. Earlier, in the predawn sky where Venus used to glow brightly, I saw a pale tangerine planet barely able to hold its own.

Wildfires are on a tear in Western United States. Idyllic, pastoral towns are aflame and burnt out. People and trees are being uprooted at a scale never seen before. The ravaged, desolate landscape tells tales of nature’s sound and fury signifying everything.

In California, hundreds of freakish lightnings, utterly unanticipated by meteorologists - so much for our hubris of predicting and controlling the weather, far less the climate - started the terrifying fires, carried relentlessly forward, backward and sideways by hot winds that devoured everything in its way. We suffered long periods of blackouts but that was nothing compared to those who lost everything - homes, possessions. No accurate counting of lives lost is yet possible, but it will be tragic when the final tally is in, each death diminishing us all.

This, on top of the killer pandemic that has so far claimed more than 200,000 American lives. Misfortunes, as the saying goes, never comes singly.

The worst nightmare, of course, is the malevolent president who denies climate change, who calls those who made the ultimate sacrifice for America “losers” and “suckers.” Americans must surely know by now the existential threat this president poses to America and its values, to its standing in the world. We hope  this grievous wrong will be righted in the November 3^rd election this year.

For now, though, we must turn our attention to nature. It is telling us that time is fast running out. Burning fossil fuels to sustain our "quality of life" is unsustainable. Droughts, wildfires, hurricanes, famines, even civil wars are only another climate catastrophe away.

Yet we also know that given half a chance, nature will spring back. But for that to happen, we need a quantum leap in our thinking about consumption, development, and all the quotidian things we do that needs to be suffused with an awareness of their impact on the environment. Impractical? The alternate is fiery death.

In the air opaque with wildfire smoke and without birdsong, I risk a walk along the wooded trail that works its magic every time I am on it. Giant eucalyptus and pine trees stand like ghosts just a few feet away from me, hardly visible.

And then I see it and I stand rooted to the earth. A bluebird is resting on a pine cone, calm and poised. An ineffable sense of hope surges in me. Give me a chance, a small, tiny chance, nature seems to be saying, and I will make the air breathable, the water potable, and the birds transcendent again. 

Barack Obama's Challenging Race Speech

Barack Obama's speech today on race and religion was among the most powerful and poignant speeches ever. The words were stirring, evocative, and served as a call to action on the race front in America.

We often forget that it took the United States many years after the civil war to rid itself of the evil of slavery. “And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part -- through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk -- to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time."

He addressed those who thought that he was where he was not by dint of his merit but as a result of affirmative action. At the same time, he rejected Reverend Wright’s racist remarks, repudiating his racism while harboring no hatred for the man. “On one end of the spectrum, we've heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it's based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap. On the other end, we've heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation, that rightly offend white and black alike …

“The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country -- a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black, Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know -- what we have seen -- is that America can change. That is the true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope -- the audacity to hope -- for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.”

He was blunt about the effects of racism in our society. “Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven't fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today's black and white students.”

Obama is, however, not one to give in to despair and cynicism. “But I have asserted a firm conviction -- a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people -- that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union. For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances -- for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs -- to the larger aspirations of all Americans -- the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man who's been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family. And it means taking full responsibility for our own lives -- by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.”

With this speech, I believe Barack Obama has convinced a majority of undecided Americans that he is the best candidate to be the next president of the United States. His words of hope, change, action, accountability and responsibility struck a deep chord with people from all walks of life and will prove to be decisive in the November election.

Also today, the Wall Street Journal carried an article by Shelby Steele called "The Obama Bargain" in which he suggests that Obama has used his race as a "bargain." As a bargainer, Obama makes "the subliminal promise to whites not to shame them with America's history of racism, on the condition that they will not hold the bargainer's race against him. And whites love this bargain - and feel affection for the bargainer - because it gives them innocence in a society where whites live under constant threat of being stigmatized as racist. So the bargainer presents himself as an opportunity (in italics) for whites to experience racial innocence."

This is a conspiracy theory of the most subtle kind. Mr. Steele should read Obama's speech in full (… we've heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it's based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap …) and recognize that his thesis is not merely untenable, it is downright disingenuous.

Barack Obama is not bargaining for anything. His sight is set on a higher plane. He is telling us that together, we are more than the sum of our creed and color. He is calling for a reconciliation grounded in our common hopes and aspirations. It is the surest way to end racism in our country as we march toward a “more perfect union.”