The Blank Page
Photo credit: A winter scene at sunset, Howard Lisnoff
I never found a blank page a problem, even before that page appeared on a computer screen. Paper and pen were originals.
This morning, a quiet Sunday morning in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts, I read the international and national press along with emails and Facebook posts. The “Word of the Day” was “fecund,” which means fertile, and I rejoice when the Word of the Day is one I know. To write, a person needs to read quite a lot, and I favor the social sciences over fiction. I do read fiction, but much less than nonfiction.
As my website clearly states, I am a person on the political, economic, and social left and have been since the Vietnam era when I came of age along with the baby boomer generation. A small number of my generation, but a critical mass, became antiwar. Many, however, including people I hung out with, became careerists. That was and is a great disappointment to me, and when careerism became the driving force in my best friend’s life, I was shaken.
Speaking of war, it has become disheartening how militarism has grown in the US and across much of the rest of the world since the terror attacks on September 11, 2001. I had just come from swimming at the local YMCA and was relaxing at a favorite surfing spot in Point Judith, Rhode Island, when the awful news hit. It took George W. Bush’s regime change war in Iraq to bring back the peace movement after the attacks of 2001. Tragically, the search for terrorists, which could have ended soon after the onset of the war in Afghanistan, became part of the endless wars that had been going on for some time. William Blum* wrote a great, but tedious book about US open and secret wars following the end of World War II that continue to today. Martin Luther King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech* was accurate in naming militarism, materialism, and racism as the three albatrosses weighing down the US. Racism today finds a home in the anti-immigrant mayhem in the US. Certainly, criminals need not have been allowed entry to the US, but the masses of immigrants in the US are hardworking. Donald Trump is the lightning rod for the far right, including its radical religious fundamentalists, and as he and his administration have largely ended democracy in the US, anti-immigrant actions serve as fodder for his Make America Great Again base and allow him to dismantle hundreds of years of republican democracy. Democrats have assisted in that anti-democratic push over decades, moving away from the high ideals of the New Deal. The Middle East, with its genocide in the Gaza Strip, is one example of the militarism and kowtowing to the merchants of war that has enabled the military-industrial complex to become the unchecked behemoths that they are today.
As someone who is rooted in environmentalism, watching the environment collapse is perhaps the worst result of profit at any price. Days of endless heat, wildfires, and rainstorms like a rainforest deluge the globe. I think we are at the tipping point of rising temperatures and rising seas and cataclysmic weather driven by climate destruction.
For a primer on the document that launched the New Left, I favor “The Port Huron Statement,” whose primary author was the late Tom Hayden*.