Winter challenge

British Gas has just announced a 40% increase in the cost of gas for heating and cooking, effective immediately.  A similar price increase is in process for winter heating oil, so Peter and I have set out to reduce our use of heating fuel by 40%.  That, at least, will keep our winter heating costs constant, and might reduce our carbon foot print a little to boot.

I’ve tripled or quadrupled our loft insulation from 4 inches to between 12 and 16 inches, and installed thermal blinds on all the windows in the house.  Today I identified a stove for the fireplace that will burn either wood or coal, and at least heat our living room at relatively low cost.  I’m sort of enjoying the challenge.

My sister phoned today and said she imagined I found growing old to be a drag.  I said, on the contrary.  This is quite possibly one of the happiest periods of my life.  I do appreciate that I’m still in good mental and physical health, so the worst is yet to come.  But right now I’m enjoying the feeling that what I should be doing with my life is fairly inward.  Whatever contribution I may or may not have been made for others in my earlier years, now is no longer that time.  It’s time to step back and give room to others.  Maybe at long last the time has come for the practice of meditation at six am every morning that Maryknoll tried so hard to instill in our activist hearts so long ago. 

Well, meditation maybe.  But not six a.m.  Not even with coffee.

Only an economist

My nephew John is currently in India where he is working with a team studying the effects of microfinance.  Microfinance represents small loans – sometimes very small loans – given to the poor, often to help them set up a business.  A woman might be given $100, for instance, to buy a mobile phone.  This might be the only phone in the village where she lives, so she is able to rent it to others to make calls, while they themselves are able to use it to start or enhance their own business activities. 

Finding out under what conditions microfinancing is effective requires some understanding of the culture, and in this pursuit John is now playing soccer regularly in the local neighbourhood.  It’s the monsoon season, so this really means playing soccer in a field of mud, but it’s a popular neighborhood activity, in which almost everyone seems to join in.  Taxi drivers will park their taxis and join in with school boys and shopkeepers.  The unique Indian contribution to this game is that it is played without shoes.  Players are either barefoot or wearing socks.  This levels the playing field so that people who do not own shoes or who cannot afford to submit them to a regular mud bath can play on equal footing with the more well-off.  Without this rule, a player with shoes, or even worse, with cleats in his boots would never be out-played by the barefoot.

Along with this approach to learning the culture, a group of the researchers also regularly go out to dinner together, when they play “credit card roulette.  ,” It works as follows:  at the end of the dinner, everyone gives the waiter his or her credit card, and the waiter is asked to pick one randomly.  The person whose card is picked pays for everyone.  The next time, that card is not included in the pack. 

My nephew is studying for his Ph.D. in economics.  He’s a brilliant numbers man, which I suppose explains the credit card roulette.  I think it’s the muddy soccer field though, that’s going to make him an outstanding success.

A problem of religious coercion

I grew up during the cold war between America and Russia, and was taught that the worst thing about Communism was that people were persecuted for practicing their religion.  The possibility that a lack of freedom in general and overbearing state control of almost everything of any importance might be economically ineffective didn’t compare with the essential evil of forbidding people to believe in God and attend the church of their choice.

Once Russian Communism fell, I thought it was pretty much agreed everywhere in the world except for countries like China and Cuba still governed by Communist regimes that freedom of religious choice was a basic individual right, not a state choice.  It was something of a shock to realize recently that this is probably not even a majority opinion.  It is not just in Afghanistan where a man was sentenced to death by the current government (the one set up with American approval to establish democracy there) because he was found in possession of a Bible.  He managed to escape to Italy, but cases like his are not rare.  Many Muslim courts have ruled that someone born a Muslim cannot change religions.

This is not radically different from the Catholic view except that Catholics are no longer backed universally by their governments, and so cannot enforce adherence to the Catholic Faith by law.  Still, for Catholics, once you are baptized a Catholic, it is permanent.  Catholics cannot become “non-Catholics,” again.  They can only be “lapsed Catholics,” or “non-practicing Catholics.”

There are many many things I dislike intensely about many things done by the American government.  But I am grateful beyond words that I am free to choose to believe or not believe according to my own lights.  I think this is an essential human right as profound as the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

This is why I struggle so hard against intolerance.  In myself, and others.  I don’t think it is all right for religious bigots to believe that they are right and anyone who doesn’t agree with them is on the way to hell.  I think this attitude is both crippling and arrogant, and leaves the Righteous Believer poorer.  I believe their attitudes also do a lot of damage throughout the world. 

And so I do not benevolently tolerate their intolerance.  I do not think those who think that it is only they who possess the truth have a right to impose their views on others.  To put it in unvarnished terms, I believe intolerant zealotry – religious or political – is a plague, and it threatens the survival of the human species as fully as environmental change.

Driving in the right direction

Almost exactly a century ago this week, Henry Ford launched the first car priced to be affordable by people on aveage incomes.

I wonder if Ford had even an inkling of how the entire world was going to be transformed as a result.  No wonder Yogi Berra said he rarely made predictions – especially about the future. 

Speaking of cars, gas (as in petrol) consumption has dropped as of April, 2008 for seven consecutive months in the U.S.  That’s got to be good news, doesn’t it?

Moving cyber-house

Some time ago I got the idea that it would ultimately save a lot of hassle, not to mention friends, if I got an email address for life.  Something like Hotmail or Googlemail that is independent of any particular server, so that I wouldn’t have to contact every person, organization, account, and merchant with whom I wanted to keep in touch should I want or need to move or change ISPs.

Well, it might have been a brilliant idea, but I don’t recommend it for the feint-hearted.  I would rank it second only to moving house on the Stressful Events table.  First there must have been fifty names in my email address book I don’t recognize.  Are these old friends with new names?  Or has a failing memory actually forgotten old friends with the same names?   Are they secretaries or merchants or names that belong to someone else’s list of friends to whom I had at some time or other “Replied to All”?  Then there are the people I do know and love to whom emails were returned as “undeliverable.”  And the innumerable accounts and sellers who use my email as my user name.

I’ve been working on this for several days now, and can only hope that any time between now and my death I do not need to do this again.  Still, I am in fear and trembling that I’m eliminating somebody really important. 

Fortunately, my mother is no longer alive, so at least I’ve not crossed her off the list inappropriately.

An English take on Obama

According to the polls, 72% of the Germans would vote for Obama rather than McCain.  I suspect the percentages aren’t too wildly different in  much of Europe, including  Great Britain.  The British, however, are not given to enthusiasms.  We listened to Obama’s speech to several hundred thousand in Berlin two days ago.  While I immersed myself in a warm glow reminiscent of JFK and anti-Vietnam protests and civil rights marches, my husband muttered “Yes, buts” like ”how is he going to accomplish that?” or “what does that mean,” or “Congress isn’t going to cooperate on that.” 

In my sober moments I know that Obama cannot possibly live up to the heights some people are expecting of him.  The world is real, for one thing.  And his followers often want contradictory things or believe in impossibilities.  But I think America, and the world, needs to believe in our best selves again, to hope that something besides the most basic instincts of survival can motivate us.  I think just making this clarion call of hope to a cynical, weary, battered world has a great value.  McCain doesn’t do that.  Obama does.

But while some of us are taking all of this terribly terribly seriously, the English humor adds a saving spice to the deadly earnestness of the converted.  Gerard Baker, a columnist for the London Times, has been covering Obama’s European tour.  He ended the column with Obama’s visit to London from France today to meet with Tony Blair (breakfast), the Prime Minister Gordon Brown (whose party suffered a stunning bi-election defeat on Thursday), and David Cameron (the currently wildly-popular Tory leader hoping to win the next general election):   

On the Seventh Day he walked across the Channel of the Angles to the ancient land of the hooligans. There he was welcomed with open arms by the once great prophet Blair and his successor, Gordon the Leper, and his successor, David the Golden One.

And suddenly, with the men appeared the archangel Gabriel and the whole host of the heavenly choir, ranks of cherubim and seraphim, all praising God and singing: “Yes, We Can.”  

For the whole column see (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/gerard_baker/article4392846.ece)

The intolerance of the supremely tolerant

The commenter to my July 18th post exploring the existence or otherwise of God suggests that in her experience, many of us fear not knowing or being able to control what is going to happen to us.  And so sometimes we decide that somebody – the medical profession, the government, the church, science, – or God – at least has things under control.  It’s too scary to believe that maybe nobody is around at all to keep us and the universe from descending into havoc.

But as I look at both myself and at society in general, the need for control doesn’t seem to be the only reason why we sometimes so desperately seek certainty, and why we are so threatened by people or events that suggest we might be wrong.  Academic faculties, for instance, are routinely fraught with opposing factions taking different scientific views.  And these factions are not friendly respectful disputes.  More often than not, the opposing sides despise each other, convinced that their opponents are arrogant cretins.  In my own time, a faculty member was arrested on the streets of New York City for threatening another faculty member with a gun.  I know of another professor who was terrorized with his family in his home by a fellow professor who came night after night, banging on the door or setting off the burglar alarm. 

Arguments exist in the political arena among socialists and communists, Democrats and Republicans, those for and those against the war, those marching for civil rights, those who believe in the death penalty, and those who don’t.  The appropriate roles of men and women can bring about literally murderous apoplexy against those who violate the given dictates of the culture.  I’m not talking about mere disagreements here or different preferences.  I’m talking about deep divisions over issues that can divide families, friends, and entire countries into camps that can barely speak to each other.  We even kill each other.  What is it about some things that touch us so deeply?

Along with the fear of losing control, I think some issues touch on our identity, our sense of who we are.  When  we are threatened, we throw up the barricades.  We have sensitivities about different topics, but almost all of us have our vulnerable spots

Many of us think of ourselves as tolerant liberals, but we are all, I am convinced, capable of this defensive intolerance under some conditions.  I was well into my late middle age before I realized this includes me.  That was when I began to examine which issues or people were red rags for me, what made me want to slam the door in the face of anybody who was too selfish or stupid or neurotic to see what I thought was so obvious.   A family members who preached a fundamentalist religious doctrine was at the top of my list.  I didn’t see a red flag, but my entire sky turned red.

I have profoundly changed my mind now about not talking to people who draw this response from me.  When I feel this intense irritation, I’ve discovered more than once that the intolerance is as much in me as in them.  Why, for instance, should someone not ask, in all reasonableness, what is wrong with a judge in an American court displaying the ten commandments on his wall?  Why should someone not suggest that homosexuality or abortion or capital punishment might be wrong?  Why shouldn’t someone believe passionately in a personal God who sent his son to redeem the world?  If I can’t explain my position clearly and calmly, then there is something missing in my own thinking not just theirs.

And besides that, I have often changed my mind when people have bothered to explain why they think the way they do.  Sometimes it has taken years, but I have remembered.

Not the anniversary I remember

Peter and I celebrated our 33rd wedding anniversary today with a long languid dinner in Cambridge.  It’s not the day we were married in London 33 years ago that I remember as our real anniversary, though. 

The real day of commitment was on Valentine’s Day several years earlier when we’d agreed to live together.  He’d signed out of the hotel where he’d been living, and arrived with his suitcase at the apartment where I was already living.  He came in, we shared a drink together, and I began to change my mind.  Worst of all, I began to change my mind out loud.  For several hours I ended up sitting under the kitchen table thinking, while Peter sat in the living room with a bottle of scotch.  Eventually, he came into the kitchen and said he was going back to the hotel.  By that time, I’d decided that my wobble was a horrible mistake and asked him not to go.  He agreed to stay the night.

He never left.  Which is one of the best things that have happened in my life. 

Not that the next 35 years were uninterrupted bliss.  No marriage is.  But as my father’s second wife used to say in that wonderfully wry voice of hers “If you always agree about everything, there’s an extra person in that marriage.”  Peter and I do not have an extra person in our marriage. 

But we don’t have one too many either.

Gardening basics

I’ve spent a good deal of our sunny weather for the last two weeks in the garden.  I’ve pulled up handfuls of errant weeds, apologized to the box tree for transplanting it with such disregard, and distributed six bags of bark mulch in the hope that, like a gentle covering of snow, it may cast a forgiving blanket over the imperfections beneath.

I’ve always thought my philosophy of gardening is pretty liberal.  Casual, some might say.  Okay, I say to a plant, if you’re happy there, I’m happy with your being there.  With this approach, you might think I’d be quite good at presiding over a garden of weeds – dandelions entwined with bind weed, buttercups dancing amidst the nettles and poison ivy.

But I realized today as I pulled up another handful of ivy invading from the property next door that I am not an unconstrained capitalist after all.  There do have to be some rules, and some of the more tender, gentle, reticent residents of my garden must be protected, by force if necessary, from being devoured by bullies.

Still, however much I might plan and plant, it’s the plants that decide if they are going to like where I’ve put them, whether they will prosper and flower, or whether they will sulk and wither and even die. 

Gardening – like everything else involving some other living being beside myself – is a negotiated settlement

Wait ’til Bob comes

I was using our circular saw this afternoon to make some small fence repairs when it suddenly stopped working.  I tested the plug, which was still firmly seated, so I switched outlets.  That also had no effect, so after jiggling a few wires with the hope that I might reconnect a loose wire, I declared the saw dead.  We bought it in Spain close to 20 years ago, so there was little chance of taking it back to the seller with a demand for a new one, and I use it rarely these days.  So I decided to trash it, and should I ever need another one, to worry about getting a new one then.

I told Peter what had happened and what I was going to do, and he said “Why not wait ’til Bob comes;  he’ll know how to fix it.”  Bob is my younger brother who has visited us perhaps ten times in the last twenty years, during which time he has repaired, hammered, sawed, built, put down or put up book cases, closets, insulation, guttering, clocks, brackets, hooks, tiles, showers, and lights.  Often I would get up in the morning and discovered that he had made himself a cup of coffee and set about fixing something or other that needed doing.  He is multi-talented, and almost limitlessly generous in sharing his skills. 

One of his friends suggested giving him a t-shirt reading “If it ain’t broken, what fun is it?”

So when Bob comes to visit, the great temptation is to save up those niggling problems I can’t solve.  He’s flying in for a six-day stay in two weeks, and I’ve already got a switch on my vacuum cleaner that is broken, and a wall cupboard that needs to be removed from the wall where it keeps hitting us.  Well, we actually hit it, but it’s the cupboard’s fault, so it will have to go. 

Fortunately, the circular saw will not be on the list.  Not because it’s in the trash, but because when the electricity was turned back on, it started to work again.