Kittens, Rex Tillerson, and Pipelines

(I took this picture years ago. Now I know what I was saving it for.)

    

For arguments sake, let’s say that a white man named Tex Rillerson had spent his career climbing up the corporate ladder of a company that makes stuffed kitten dolls. He was very good at his job and during his tenure at Kitty Dolls, the country became deeply reliant on his company’s product—to the point that most Americans, regardless of political leaning, would find it difficult to function on a daily basis without their Kitty Doll.

All of which points to Tillerson’s talents as a business person, which does require a certain amount of political ruthlessness to make money by abetting a culture’s crippling dependency on a particular product.

However, a talent with toy kittens—no matter how popular and necessary they are to the functioning of the country’s economy—does not necessarily translate into a solid grounding in the sort of international diplomacy and big-picture cooperation that I would expect of a Secretary of State.

Particularly if, say, there were large international supply chains that could get the raw materials for even more kitty dolls to the private companies that could then make up the alluringly necessary-for-life-in-the-United-States product, and make a healthy profit from the sale of these kittens. To set up the new supply line, there is a bit of international agreement that has to occur—and this would involve the Secretary of State, who in this scenario, has a lifetime of loyalty to the stuffed kitten industry.

It is hard for me to imagine that our friend Tex Rillerson would be able to exercise the sort of dispassionate diplomacy that could properly and thoroughly examine all the ins and outs of this new supply line of raw material for his former industry. In the long and short run, it would be very hard to be critically impartial and unbiased, and those ties to the stuffed kitten toy industry—or to any industry that the Secretary of State would expect to encounter regularly in our globalized world—makes me extremely leery of career businessmen and women in positions of high authority and power in our democracy.

Pretend with me that Rillerson’s stuffed kittens—indeed the entire stuffed kitten doll industry— turns out to be hugely polluting, that the dolls emit a miasma that alters the chemistry of the atmosphere, that the supply lines for their raw materials are extremely fragile, those raw materials are a hazard to drinking water when they leak out, and that, the CEO of Kitty Dolls knew for years that his toys were this destructive to both his customers and the planet and Rillerson helped to shush up the truth about his Kitty Dolls because he was more interested in making money than in anything resembling care for people other than himself and his company.

And then, let’s just go ahead and stop pretending and recognize that Rex Tillerson was the CEO of Exxon Mobil, and that his company has known about the correlation between their industry and product and climate change for years, and he is now slated to be at the helm of a department that will have a strong hand in the building of oil pipelines, including both the Keystone XL pipeline that felt like a battle won, and the Dakota Access Pipeline that feels like the most nightmarish conglomeration of all that is most shameful in America’s past and present.

The American people are—myself included—too reliant on fossil fuels. We are addicted, our culture has structured itself to feed and foster this addiction, and we are not so slowly irreparably damaging out planet and ourselves through this reliance. We need leaders—on every level—who will help us recover from this affliction, rather than leaders who will further enable our disease. We need Secretaries of State, of Energy, of Education and all the rest who look beyond the bottom line. A country is not a business, a country is full of people who are trying to do the best they can, a country needs leaders who will help lift everyone up, not just their friends and business associates.

The Dakota Access Pipeline represents all that is worst about the United States past and present. A multinational fossil fuel company is trampling on the sovereign rites of a Native American tribal nation. The Federal government is now backing a private business’s right to a profit above the rights of a people who have been on this continent longer than any white people’s ancestors and have been treated horribly since some illegal immigrants showed up from Europe in the 1400s.

With Keystone—a battle I foolishly thought was won, not realizing that nothing is safe or sacred—it is the same belief that a company’s profit is the ultimate goodness in this world. Certainly, companies provide jobs, and people need jobs, but not, I believe, at the expense of all other concerns. There are other jobs, there are other ways of being, and there are other leaders to be had than those who put their own private business interests and networks before all other things in this world.

Call your Senators and Congresspeople, frequently. Get your news from sources your grandparents would recognize. And do whatever you can to keep weaning yourself off fossil fuels—our reliance gives those in power too much power, and they are not worthy of us. If Rex Tillerson had really sold stuffed kitten dolls—even if he was a steely-eyed industrial genius—he would not be in the running for Secretary of State. Because he sold fossil fuels, he is powerful. If we reduce our reliance on his industry, we reduce his industry’s destructive power and influence. 

How It Happened, What Happens Now

I do not excuse or explain Donald Trump's vitriol, ignorance, violent misogyny, terrifying stances on racism and immigration, or climate denial. He is a nightmare to every tenet of my belief in what a leader of this nation ought to be and do and say. However, I dislike when people speak against his supporters as if all are the same. Here is what I think happened in a lot of hearts and minds, although I am horrified that personal fear came out stronger than any other priority in the voting booths of America:


According to the news and reports and commentary I’ve seen today, Donald Trump won the election because he tapped into the deep frustration and anger of citizens who have had their expectations of their own lives and identities severely shaken up in the past few decades, and got these people to take a chance on him, because the status quo hasn’t helped a lot of people in a long time. 

My sister gently pointed out that these people, who chose a very different president than who she or I wanted, are really not so separate from us, from me. Not in the “we’re all humans, we’re all Americans” sort of way, but in the feeling of having been baited and switched between preparing for and living adult life. I’m not of the political storybook about this—there are no generations of me, relying on the local industry for a guaranteed job at a living wage to buy a house, raise a family, send my children to something better.

Instead, I was raised in the middle class, somewhere on the fringes. I went off to college with a solid student loan debt. It was naïve to borrow so much to go to the school that felt right, rather than the school that was priced right, but this wasn’t a part of the conversation in the late 1990s—you borrowed money to go to college, and your college education would give you the enhanced job opportunities to pay that debt off, within a decade or so of graduation. That, at least, was the deal I understood. There was no talk—with my parents, with the school, with the loan officers—that it might be prudent to pursue studies in fields with more economic potential. I was part of the generation that was told: “do what you love and the money will follow!”

So I did. I studied Environmental Studies. I spent my summers working in summer camps, and then at one of the largest and oldest environmental groups in the country. Although I wasn’t pursuing the straight and narrow path towards immediate student loan repayment, I was still in the field. After graduation, I struggled to find work that both paid my student loan, life expenses, and bore some connection to my education and training. Nothing really bit, and I wasn’t one of the twenty-somethings who know what they want to do and where they want to be, so I wandered a bit—partly because I was sure that somewhere out there, a job that fit my education and paid my loans existed.

I believed that because it was the story I’d grown up with.

Eventually, I decided to attend graduate school because on enough occasions, I’d been passed over for jobs for someone with a graduate degree. Not only was I interested in the material and of continuing to study, it seemed like a better job market would open up.

Again, in hindsight, none of this makes much sense, and I feel like I’ve been duped by a system that favors wealthier people. The thought that only rich people can afford to passionately study something that may never make them any money but is fascinating and beautiful fills me with a white hot fury. That education is, more and more, a means to an income and not a marriage between income, interest, and opportunity is equally maddening.

But, I fell for it. I fell for the idea that education improves prospects, that it is worth the interest rates of student loans, to be able to find a discipline that improves your understanding of how to be in the world and provides employable skills.

And, now that I’ve finished graduate school, I’ve often found myself in the bizarre donut hole of being “too educated” for some jobs, while not having enough “hands on” experience because I went back to school. Meanwhile, the student loans really don’t care if you are working in the field you’re educated in—they just want their money back, which is fair. But there is a distinct sense of failure, personal and systemic, in that I have yet to earn a full-time, year-round, living wage within the field of my degrees.

It’s been twelve years since I graduated from college, six since I got my Masters degree. The economy has gone up and down, and the availability of environmental jobs is closely tied to both the economy and politics. I also have some geographic and family limitations that keep me in the highly populated Northeast. So, yes, of course, I have brought some of this lack of job security on myself through poor choices, bad luck, and the errors of being a human with multiple priorities.

But, some of the reason that I am thirty-four, deep in student debt, unlikely to purchase a home, or save wisely for retirement for a very long time, is because the system I believed in, the system I bought into with my financial and professional future, this system no longer exists. Because of my parents and my degrees, I am not counted as a Detroit autoworker, a Berlin papermill worker, a Rust Belt or Blue Collar anything. All the same, I know very well the exhaustion and fury and frustration that things have shifted, that you are not living the life you were groomed for, that the rules changed while you were mid-play. And I have to think that this is the rage and fear and discontent that Trump tapped into, because it is a potent fuel.

The feeling that what you have been educated to give the world is not wanted, will not feed you, that is one of the worst I know. And I can understand how, for someone with a different worldview, friends, library and social media feed, the answer to this deep sense of identity betrayal would be the loud angry rich white man who looks like Presidents have almost always looked, and says he’ll fix everything.

Other than what connection my personal employment and identity struggles give me to fellow citizens who I might be tempted to further disregard in a liberal fear-fury panic—I find myself today not caring about that as much. Of course, I want to do the work that I want to do in the world, but more than that, I want to keep the country safe for everyone—all colors and faiths and genders. I want healthcare to be affordable. I want there to be jobs that people want to do, that pay enough that the economy doesn’t crumble. I want climate change to be addressed on a personal and policy level, across the world. I want sexual harassment and discrimination to end. I want marriage to be available for anyone who wants it. I want everyone to have the time to enjoy sunrises and sunsets.

And all of that wanting doesn’t go away, regardless of who is in the White House, in Congress, in my local government offices. And if the wanting doesn’t go away, neither does the burning call to action—on all levels—to build the world the way we want it to be.

I believe we can do this, uphill though progress will be. It begins with understanding, and this is my hope of that start. Because I don't know what else to do. Giving up on America isn't an option.

Standing Rock

(Image from JustSeeds.org)

I’m not in Standing Rock, North Dakota. I’m not planting my feet on the ground that contains my ancestors, placing my flesh and blood between the land and our culture’s insatiable lust for oil and the incomprehensible power of profit. I haven’t been arrested, held in a jail cell or a dog kennel. I haven’t screamed at the law enforcement of collected states and departments and representatives of governments and corporations.

And I have been wondering why I’m not there. I know these things matter. I do not want oil to spill into any landscape, upon the bones of any ancestors, into the waterways of the living, into the endocrine systems of the unborn generations. I do not want the dangerous patterns of our consumptive lives to continue unchecked, unchanged. I want the sovereignty and dignity of Native peoples—in North Dakota and across the globe—to be upheld and broadened, not beaten down further and ignored yet again. Colonialism, white supremacy and capitalism—all of these forces have pushed peoples out of homelands and towards the marginal land and seascapes that are now most at risk from the climate change brought about by lifestyles less grounded and intentional that many that were displaced. I don’t treasure an image of indigenous peoples as noble savages—that lack of nuance and excess of Romanticisms covers up far more interesting realities and prevents humans from seeing each other with empathy, and as the hot messes of contradictions we all are. However, I do believe that there are societies that have much more sustainable values than the majority white, post-Industrial Western Capitalist one that destroys landscapes to find the oil that, when burnt in power plants and refineries and gas tanks, destroys the air, the water, the seasons, the planet.

I’m still here in New England, though, not in the Dakotas. I daydream about these actions, these times of solidarity when bodies come together to block pipelines and trucks, but I never go. I stay here because I need to pay my rent, feed my dog, repay my student loans, tend to my family, because my life is here and I feel enough binding me here that I can’t imagine going without creating more, or maybe just different, burdens. Am I just making lazy and selfish excuses to stay comfortable? Do I not believe enough? I wonder these things in the middle of the night sometimes. If I really cared so passionately about climate change, about being in solidarity with a cause I believe in, wouldn’t I be there, linking arms and marching and standing and holding firm despite the consequences, rather than going to the grocery store or making mundane appointments for my car inspection or looking at the container ships come into port and knowing that their oily effluent is mingling in the sea with my father’s remains, and I am standing on the beach, throwing a tennis ball for my dog.

If I really wanted the present and the future to be brighter, better, cleaner and kinder than the patterns of the past, shouldn’t I, shouldn’t we all, be out on parade and picket lines?

I don’t know. It simply isn’t practical—if everyone is arrested, who bails us all out, makes soup for everyone, takes care of the young and the elderly, installs solar panels, plants gardens, negotiates climate and human rights agreements. I admire those who are putting their lives on hold and on the line to stop pollution from crossing national boundaries and poisoning the land and water and sanctity of the place. Similarly, I admire the people who labor through zoning board meetings, who figure out how to live off the grid, who temper their egos enough to carpool or take an inconvenient bus, who raise kind children who love vegetables, who run for office with integrity and practical idealism, everyone who does the thousand quieter jobs that transitioning away from fossil fuels truly require.

And it is not the same to do this small work. I was sitting in my apartment, prepping for a job interview by researching grant writing and best practices for sustainability in higher education, while watching friends on Facebook check in at Standing Rock. And I wanted us all to be there, for real. To be all together, fists high and smiles wide, walking into the fray and saying, firmly, that this dirty way with pipelines and trampling lives and beliefs for profit and out of a lack of imagination of how to implement a cleaner world will no longer be. I wanted the drama and the Romance and the certain solidarity of such direct action.

Because doing the quiet necessary work is hard. Not in the way that having red raw marks on your wrists from zip-tie handcuffs or being violently intimidated or beaten by law enforcement or being a civil disobedience felon or living in a protest camp is hard—and I do believe those are hard things that people chose to do—but because you have to get up every day and find a balance of practical action while navigating life.  It is hard, it is not glamorous—movie stars and Bill McKibben and Terry Tempest Williams and Wendell Berry are not going to join you in signing up for a CSA or doing an energy audit of your home or going to a meeting of the water board—but it is perhaps as vitally important.

Which is what I’ll keep telling myself, as I do what work of the world as I can in Maine, while it remains Facebook official that I’m in North Dakota.