Twelve Years

Twelve years ago, I went to Biloxi, because I was at loose ends, because my parents bought my plane ticket, because them sending me was something they could do to help in Katrina’s aftermath. I worked with Hands On Disaster Relief (now All Hands Volunteers), the sort of outfit in its early years that asked only “do you have your shots, and do you want someone to meet you at the airport or bus station?”

My friend Serena had found this group, she went down a week before I did and met me at the airport. Other friends—Nina, Josh, Lydia, Kate, Carrie, Beth, Laura, Will, Vee—came too, or we met and made friends with each other as the raggedy bunch of recent college grads we were. I don’t remember it all, perfectly.

What I do remember is the knot of horror and rage that left me feeling like I was going to cry or vomit most of the time. I’m a white girl from New Hampshire with an expensive education. I spent most of my time in the mountains. I was not prepared for all of the destruction, for shaking hands with the people who had been left behind or stayed behind or just got back to Biloxi after the storm. I was not prepared for reality.

I came out of all of that, after a few months, with a puppy. Carrie had fallen in love with him at the animal shelter, but whatever home she’d thought to give him to had fallen through. And then when it was time for me to go, the puppy was on the edge of just being a spoiled feral pet of Hurricane Camp, so I adopted him. It wasn’t anything official—I just happened to be the one to take him to the vet, and I happened to write my name down as “owner.” I named him Noah, for the flood. They told me naming him Noaa would have been too much, even for me.

I kept that little guy, and I loved him. And for almost twelve years, he was my constant companion. He went with me across the country six times, saw me through two shattering heartbreaks and some minor heartaches, came with me to grad school, hiked where I hiked, swam where I swam, was where I was, for all that time. When my father died, I regularly cried into Noah’s fur like the world had ended. It has been a roller coaster of a decade, and Noah was there for all of it. We were the most secure daily fixtures in each other’s lives through all the changes I dragged us through, the adventures I sought, the troubles that hit. Until my poor sweet Pet came down with dementia, became uncomfortable, inconsolable, in his own skin and I had to let him go—two months ago now—snuggled in my and my sister’s arms, loved until the last moment he knew and beyond.

As the rain falls and the water rises in Texas, I feel as if no time has passed. Because the news is the same, the pictures are the same, the devastation is the same, the goodwill of neighbors, the kindness of strangers, the imbecility of the leaders, the ovine shock of the rest of the country…all of this is the same. My dog has lived a full life and died, and we—the people—have still not addressed the root causes of why these storms are so devastating.

The climate is changing, and we are changing it. The people we elect to leadership positions are not leading. These storms are not the wrath of God, are not natural—unless you might, as I could be convinced, think that these storms are the divine wrath of the forces of nature rising up against the species that has wrecked and ravaged our way through the world since we first discovered fire.

Storms are more frequent and with heavier loads of water because the planet is warming. The planet is warming because the emissions from making cars go, planes fly, smartphones charge and plastics ubiquitous and life too convenient are thickening the atmosphere and trapping air closer to the planet. We are thickening the air, insulating our planet from the necessary cool of the rest of the universe. And so, in our little chemical hothouse, the warmth begets moisture, the moisture begets storms with greater wallop than ever.

What is stopping us from stopping these things? In part, we are simply a lazy, selfish and unimaginative people. We think such things as Katrina, as Sandy, as Harvey will never happen to us, personally. It’s easier to think that. It’s easier to turn off the imagination, the voice that says “what if…” Horror of our own is incomprehensible, surreal. But, as my friend Mary, reporting from Charlottesville last week said “the thing to say is ‘it’s so surreal’ but that is an utter disservice to the reality that this all is.”

I don’t care if mass flooding and destruction is never going to happen to me. I’d rather it doesn’t, but it’s going to happen and keep happening to others, and there is nothing special about me that is going to make a storm pass me by. Anyone’s reality could easily be my own, if the tides turn, if the weather shifts. When.

If you did know that a storm was about to destroy your life, but could be soothed by taking a bus or putting up solar panels or air-drying your clothes, would you make those changes? Can you go without, can you live smaller, simpler? Could you use electronics less, more wisely? Are you willing to donate not your blood or money to relief efforts, but to make structural changes in your life that will cut the emissions that are increasing the severity of storms?

And then there are our politicians and industrialists. The policy makers seem hamstrung by industries that make money while Rome burns and floods, because they are. Our president cares more for his t.v. ratings than for staffing the agencies that oversee disaster response, never mind his abysmal decisions on loosening regulations on industries that will further increase the cloud envelope around the planet. But, much as I despise Trump, he is not solely responsible for this storm, personally. The fault is with all people who have power and refuse to act responsibly with it. All people. Anyone who makes a choice has power, that is the sort of power that needs to shift, that is the power we all have.

Twelve years. That is the difference between a first grader and a high school senior. That is a lifetime. I simply cannot accept that so little has happened on a large scale when so much happened in the small space between myself and the little dog who came out of the flood with me.

Lastly, a nice man I met in Biloxi, standing outside what had been his house, said that in disasters, people should donate socks and underwear. He could cope with a lot of the troubles, but being able to wear clean underpants just makes a person feel more human. This is the scale that horror happens at. Send underwear. Thank you.

Three Branches in Mud Time

Robert Frost, with an incongruous tool of unity, but he's a poet so it'll make sense somehow.
image from poemshape.wordpress.com

Taylor Family lore is that Dad lulled my sisters and I to sleep as babies by explaining the tripartite system of Federal government. There is something to the idea of imagining us as fussy babies being swaddled up and held by a mustachioed man in a flannel shirt, talking about the differences between the Judicial, Executive and Legislative branches of government, rather than cooing about good-night moons and Pat the Bunnies.

The nuances, of course, were lost on our young minds, but when the system of checks and balances, of the interconnecting functions of a working system of government are some of your bedtime stories, you grow up believing in justice, compromise, and the possibility of good governance. Thanks to Dad’s reverence for the system—and irreverence for many of the players—and Mom’s practical liberalism, my sisters and I all lean towards common sense, fairness, and Socialism. (That is, unless anyone is offering any of us the Executive Queenship.)

Given my history, beliefs and hopes, I found myself in the strange position of running through the roster of GOP candidates to see if there was anyone, anyone, I could vote for in the State Primary this Tuesday. I want a bland but unifying candidate. I want someone who is a unifier, a compromiser, a person who understands give and take, and gets things done. I want a boring moderate, a kind person. I do not need to agree on all their talking points, I care more about how they work—if they work, that they work well with others, for others—than what they brashly promise they will do.

I am a Feminist, I am an Environmentalist, I am a Socialist. I want universal healthcare, I want freedom from religious persecution, I want global equity, I want a clean planet and an educated, engaged fulfilled workforce. I want world peace and the right to be left alone. I want taxes raised and people employed to fix our nations infrastructure. I want abortion to be safe, legal, rare, and paid for by universal single-payer healthcare. I want biologically and emotionally grounded sex-education available to everyone. I want gun use regulated. I want poverty eliminated. I want the stigma of addiction erased so people aren’t to death embarrassed about needing medical help for this condition. I want comprehensive action on climate change. I want us as citizens to stop being such sandy-eyed ostriches about the ways in which our own daily lives, actions, and insulating choices feed the evils of the world.

But, more than anything, I want a government that works, that unites the people, represents our best selves to the world, and takes care of those who are struggling. And for that, I want not a fiery passionate presidential candidate who can rally a base, rock the vote, or rattle the establishment.

I want an adult.

And not just one adult. I want 546 adults: one in the White House, nine at the Supreme Court, a hundred in the Senate, 535 in the House of Representatives, and one Vice-President as a security measure.

Further, I’d like this team of people to do their jobs.

Which is to work together to govern these United States. There are certain responsibilities of each branch of government, things that they can and cannot do, things that they can only do with the permission of other branches.

Being the middle of three sisters, my role was not exactly a peacemaker. I did not mediate between disagreements with a distant sanctity. Keeping peace and good enough relations with a tripartite of sisters is more a mutual dance of calculating compromise, a sororial Machiavellianism. I ate Hannah’s peas so we could all go out for ice cream—if those peas didn’t leave her plate, I wasn’t getting ice cream either. There is sort of a running score card of who needs to get her own way today, and who needs to get her only pair of clean underpants stuck in the freezer on the last day of vacation. The system breaks down when one person takes up all the airtime with tantrums or tyrannical blindness or selfish dramatics. The system functions beautifully on empathy, compromise, and fairness.

Right now, our government is broken. With an even number of Supreme Court Justices, that branch is wounded, unable to play its full part in fleshing out the laws that do change people’s lives, that I non-denominationally pray will pull the arc of history ever more and quickly towards justice.

And then we have the President, who is in his final months in office and, while he hasn’t governed with the spark and fire of his 2008 campaign, has done many things I support. But, that is me, a liberal Socialist from New England with a Masters degree and a fundamental belief in the human necessity of racial justice. The fact remains that it is difficult, has been difficult, for President Obama to accomplish much in part because of the intense opposition of the Republican controlled Congress. I hate to think that some of this opposition is racially, rather than merely politically motivated, but I think so nonetheless. Regardless, we are at a point where the Executive Branch is shorn of the office’s potential.

Meanwhile, the men and women in Congress are so deadlocked that I suspect a bill to rescue kittens from trees would die on the floor. Meanwhile, people are dying of gun violence, disease, post-war trauma, and health problems relating to pollution, and Congress seems as if all it does is point fingers across the aisle and at the White House and at the Supreme Court and yell that it is all their fault, they started it, those horrible Wall Street bankers or Muslims or Women or Christian Fundamentalists or Liberals or Conservatives or Blacks or Whites or Media Elite or Immigrants or The Patriarchy or Welfare Dependents or Unions or Abortionists or Jews or LGBTQs or Multinational Corporations or anyone on Earth who is not me and my little tribe. We are blameless, we are the saviors, and we will yell the loudest and drum up the most support and then we will have political clout and when we get to Washington, we’ll change everything!

Thus, the Legislative Branch yells itself into disfunction.

As for these angry candidates who promise to change everything, unless we are going to have a major political coup—which is unlikely given inherent inability within our geography to gather enough True Believers of any cause to logistically coordinate an effective overthrow—then I find it difficult to put my faith in anyone’s word about fomenting political change based on personal ideology and rhetoric.

Nothing will change if we keep electing people who yell more than listen, who would rather commit seppuku than compromise, who either do not know the checks and balances and responsibilities and limits and realities of the offices they seek, or are flagrant liars. A President cannot—without the cooperation of at least one other branch—build a wall, underwrite college, fund healthcare, stop cancer, go back to the moon, eliminate ISIS, obliterate racism, screen all borders for people of a single and beautiful faith, create jobs, fix dangerous infrastructure, stop climate change, or purify the waters of our country.

Voting, participating in the political system is not an ala carte burrito where you personally get to select and approve all the ingredients. Unless you are running for Dictator of your own country, you will not love everything about a candidate. You can vote for a person who you disagree with on some issues. You can vote for a person who you think, given the realities of the role, would make a good president even if you don’t want to get a beer with them—odds are, you won’t be having a beer with the President. You can vote for a person who’s tie or pantsuit or social media presence or race or gender you aren’t comfortable with—the person and their abilities to listen and  compromise, balance and unify are what matter.

Along with the U.S. Government 101, we Taylor babies were tucked in at night with a healthy dose of Robert Frost. One of my mother’s favorites is from Two Tramps in Mud Time, which contains this line: My object in living is to unite.

I will vote for anyone and everyone who lives by those words.