Katrina Poem

This week is the 5 years anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, one of the deadliest hurricane's in our country's histoy. Over 1,800 people lost their lives, and tens of thousands more lost their homes and livelihoods. While the hurricane itself was a natural disaster, the devastation was a manmade disaster. If we insist on placing people in a hurricane-prone place below sea level and yet refuse to build up the levees to the safety standards required--especially as global warming threatens to make these storms stronger--we have no right rebuilding.

I was living in the Washington D.C. area when the events of Hurricane Katrina unfolded. Our workplace watched the coverage on the television. Only a few months later, Congress passed a budget bill that deeply cut into services offered to our impoverished citizens--including the victims of Hurricane Katrina. This occurred off the radar. I wrote about it on my blogspace on Etalkinghead, and it was subsequently picked up for publication by Z Magazine...

Anyway, this past June, I wrote a poem about Katrina, and I thought it would be appropriate to post it here, as a more powerful way to honor those who suffered through (and/or succumbed to) the storm, rather than summon up an op-ed style soapbox. So, here it is:

Katrina, my mind still stops at the sight of your dilapidated doorways, the mold you have enmeshed between scores of floor boards & wall boards, speckled onto ceilings
And encrusted between the bone and marrow of America...
Mementos left in the wake of your wrath.

For what caused you to rain down such rage during the dog-eared days of August's end, there are many theories that range
From Climate change,
To conflicted ocean currents,
To God's reckoning against a town too much taken with
Beads, bare breasts and bourbon.

But I offer it was an invitation misinterpreted as irony:
Lean levees stacked together like playing cards, no stronger than starched sheets, beyond which lay poor black folk you could pummel,
while budget-cutting politicians strummed air-guitar elsewhere, and fat-cat casino owners flew to higher ground.

Or was it the wasted wetlands that caught your eye,
that you knew would fail to suck up the vast volume of your venom,
so dessicated were they from our willing degradation?

And I remeber the pictures, pictures of people:
sun-baked, sweat-streaked people...
parched children clinging to the the tendrils of their mothers' tattered tank tops--no food or formula to calm their collective colic...
near-catatonic elderly to week to speak or blink...
sharing the street corners with dead bodies draped in makeshift sheets, while on another road dead bloated bodies floated facedown in rising waters.

A few weeks later I learned that most of the animal shelters in the area planned ahead and transported their non-human charges safely out of state before the storm set down...while we stuffed our own citizens into a stadium like sardines into a can, or cattled being penned for slaughter...

The buses came only after the casualties, as did our own regret.
But still, we call them refugees, as though this country never knew them.

And five years later, I still can't make sense of you,
and wonder what sadistic, cosmic kin you must keep
that would now allow oil to seep up on the same shores,
swallowing up life like some horror movie blob,
ravaging resurrecting towns till
they're deemed nothing more than living rot.

New Format Proposal and Why We Need to Start Getting Personal

I was thinking it's time to actually adapt a format for the blog. Right now, I am mostly picking a topic every week or so I care about. I still think it would be good to offer a long-form essay on specific issues I care to wax polemic about, but I think what I also would like is to offer a fly-by commentary on the week in the news. This blog is about sustainability, social justice and scraping by as a scribe. So I think offering a bit about each piece every week would work well.

One of the most harrowing pieces of news that came through the pipeline this week, was that old-style coal plants are expanding. That's right, the sooty smoke-stack, cancer-causing coal plants that huff black smoke. Coal is the dirtiest of all the types of energy we use, it is the worst for our health. In addition to packing the biggest climate change punch due to it containing the highest level of carbon dioxide as compared to oil or natural gas, coal is also chock-full of toxic heavy metals like mercury. Oh yeah, and the way we get most of that is by blowing the head off mountains, not only raping ancient and beautiful lanscapes, massacring fish and birds, but even destroying communities. The people in the small towns scattered across the Appalachian region (where mountain-removal, also known as "MTR," is occuring) experience increased risk of diseases like cancer, bronchitis and Crohn's disease--as do their children. Or, sometimes a child is crushed to death in his bed by a stray boulder--in this case his name was Jeremy Davidson. This seems to make us all mad, doesn't it? Maybe our eyes even well up with tears, or we tremble...but what do we do then? Where is that sense of empatheic injustice that runs so deep we can actually make the effort to stand up and walk over to our local town hall meeting?

Seriously, if the Tea Party movement folks can be prompted by paranoid fears of Obama being a non-native Muslim to shuffle over to town halls and picket outside the politician's office and upset elections--what in God's name is wrong with those of us on the other side who supposedly care about things like MTR and climate change that we simply sit still and spit out some sad words? Seriously, what is wrong with us? Words are useless without an audience--and not just of your close-knit sympathizers. We so-called socially concerned environmentalists should take a lesson from the Tea Party. And I am putting out a challenge to my fellow people in Massachusetts: if you haven't at least called Tea Party darling Scott Brown's office to complain about his horrid positions on clean energy, climate change, poverty relief, and even gay rights--you're part of the blame for his policies going national. Maybe a small part, but an important part nonetheless...and one that is on equal ground with those who propelled him to his position of power.

Other news this week was that climate refugees
are becoming more and more of a reality as record floods hit Pakistan and Moscow suffers from unprecedented heat waves and related fores fires. Also, of course, there were continuing reports of BP covering up how much oil is still saturating the Gulf.

It's easy to tune these things out. I understand it because I do it myself sometimes. Unfortunately, these things don't go away. Not only that, they will find their way to us one day, and wreak havoc in our own small worlds in ways we can only imagine. Which is why we need to start understanding the importance of the personal--no amount of my blogging here, or tweeting, or posting on Facebook, is going to supplant the need for people calling their Congress people or visiting their offices if they want change. Otherwise, we are just as much a part of the problem as those who elect backwards-looking politicians who spread prejudice and preach with money. And when the worst of our inaction comes to claim us, AND our children, make no mistake that we are just as much to blame.

Wake Up!

So, anyone who has been keeping up with my blog knows how I felt about the cap-and-trade bill that was being considered by Congress. I thought it was a sell-out bill, gorged on massive subsidies for the industries that helped mess up our climate in the first place.

The bill, like so many when they are first introduced into Congress, began with good intentions and had teeth to it. But living in the boderline corporatocracy that we do, the industry eventually got their claws into it and compromised the bill till it was nothing but a faint shadow of its former self. And yet, even with all of that compromising and pandering, even with all the watering down, Congress still couldn't even muster the balls to pass it.

If that sounds crude, then so be it. I am 31 years-old and I am furious that my future and that of younger generations is being decided by a bunch of impotent older men with dollar signs for eyes. That whether or not I will live in a world with a hospitable climate for my species, is being ruled by corporate whim and a kowtowing Congress. Most of all, I am angry at some of the mainstream environmental groups, for cheerleading this tepid bill in the first place, despite its contradiction of the basic science of climate change, despite it being against everything they themselves stand for.

Instructing environmental studies classes as a graduate student, the underclassmen I taught would come up to me after class, or email me. They would tell me how scared they are for their own future, how angry they are at older people for making this mess, how heavy weight on their backs. The sad part was, these were good kids making sound choices. Most of them didn't drive, many were vegetarians, a lot of them lived very low-waste lives.

There is a problem here, and both sides of the issue are to blame. The naysayers like to say that we who care about the world want to go back to the cave, clothed in animal hides. The other side acts as though we can hocus pocus the gloom away through some fuzzy promise of a green-collar workforce, and that we can keep up our current consumption, as long as we buy "green." Neither is true. If we want to truly rise to this challenge, we will have to make huge changes to our society, we have to stop growing and become a steady state. We have to rethink everything even down to what we eat. But no, we don't have to live in caves, unless we really want to catalyze catastrophic climate change. Then we might have to whether we want to or not.

Bill McKibben wrote a great op-ed in the Huffington Post last week. He said it's time to get angry and raise our voices about climate change. We've tried to play politely, but look: any major issue that has ever been addressed in history--civil rights, women's rights, the first environmental movements--was done so because of the sweat, tears, and even blood of those willing to put themselves out there to provoke the paradigm shift needed to host the change. Perhaps our computers have made us complacent, and we think we can Tweet or Facebook our way to a new tomorrow. These may be useful tools, but they can't replace live voices and hands demanding change. So, PLEASE, if you care about this issue (meaning, if you care about surviving or maintaining a planet for those who come after us, both human and animal)--DO SOMETHING SOLID. Write your Congress people, visit their office, write a handwritten letter, boycott certain corporations that are counterproductive to the effort, speak to others even if you worry you'll alienate them.

As a writer, I hate saying this, but words are not enough--unless there are voices attached to them, and bodies, and unless there are more than one. People who care about this issue are scared of coming across as fear-mongering, or angry, but I argue we need to be afraid and we need to be angry. Our futures are being usurped by us--if past generations had our attitude, we'd still have slaves, women would still be confined to the kitchen, and many, many species would have left this world long ago.

Mr. McKibben ended on this note: "We’re not going to get the Senate to act next week, or maybe even next year. It took a decade after the Montgomery bus boycott to get the Voting Rights Act. But if there hadn’t been a movement, then the Voting Rights Act would have passed in… never. We may need to get arrested. We definitely need art, and music, and disciplined, nonviolent, but very real anger".

So, again, I challenge my fellow artists to come out of the woodworks, to make music and compose poetry that resonates with this issue. Otherwise, we may in fact be bringing on a bleak future deprived of the very things we live for...do it as much to fight for the survival of art, as for the survival of our own living, breathing bodies. Do it so that art, as well as wildlife and humanity itself, can endure!