the dharma of my life by John Martin

In Nov 2012 Barak Obama won a second term as president despite the state of the economy, which had been in a funk ever since his first term. Not long after the new year I retired, a bit early due to unsuccessful efforts on my part in finding full time work, and because a feeling that it may be beneficial to start collecting social security before the government realizes it has over promised and starts cutting back on benefits. Seventeen trillion dollars in debt and counting does not seem to scare the politicians in Washington, which only scares me more.

        

 My career was in manufacturing. It was work I enjoyed, working with people to complete a common goal. I use to tell the employees that someone who is really good at self-motivation and accomplishing things on his own is called an artist, but most of us need the support and structure of a group to be productive. I had a short paragraph on my office wall for years. It was from a book by E.F. Schumacher’s, “Good Work”:

 “ Traditional wisdom teaches that the function of work is at heart threefold:(1) to give a person a chance to utilize and develop his faculties; (2) to enable him to overcome his inborn egocentricity by joining other people in a common task; and (3) to bring forth the goods and services needed by all of us for a decent existence.”

 My last place of employment was in a company that supplied the auto industry. The auto companies have a tight hold on the processes and practices of their suppliers, so a lot of the skill and creativity has been replaced by an increasingly detailed cookbook. 

     

 Presently unemployed, I am free to do what? Question authority? I have known my whole life that the world is not quite what it pretends to be. We have built a society that lives on the edge, a society that needs massive amounts of fossil fuels to sustain itself, and there have been cracks showing up for a while.  Supplies coming out of the Middle East though plentiful and, by some accounting practices, cheap, still require vast investments both on land and sea to remain secure. The resources we need to keep this going are getting harder to find, and by resources I referring to young people, money, and the political will to kill and be killed.

        

 In many ways the systems we rely on are starting to fail.  The food we eat is less nutritious than the food of just a couple of generations ago.  All the vegetables we see in the market have been developed to contain more sugar and in the process have lost a lot of the nutrients that the original varieties contained. Vegetables are bred to pack well or tolerate shipping better, but are not bred to be healthier; the effect is food that looks good but provides less nutrition. As populations grow they are putting increased pressure on all the natural systems we need for survival. The oceans are less productive as fisheries are over fished and the chemistry of the ocean is becoming more acidic as carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is absorbed. The trends are going the wrong way and the trends tell the story of where we are headed. There is less farmland each year not more, and less topsoil. The bugs are getting more resilient; requiring more poisons be put into the soil to maintain our agriculture. We drive more miles, spread out in suburban sprawls further and further from the city centers, and use more oil. Unless and until all these trends reverse and head the other way we are headed for a general breakdown. How the collapse starts and how it spreads is a very interesting area for speculation. But one insight I’ve had is that it will not happen everywhere at once. Some societies and some locations are more vulnerable than others. Of course, at the same time, we are becoming more interdependent as the industrial model of life spreads over the globe.  None of this is new and many of us have lived with a sense of dread from expectations that we are seeing the end of a way of life. How do we justify passing this on to our children and grandchildren? The arguments have been either “It can’t possibly be this bad”, or “someone will find a new energy source or way of growing food”, that will allow us to continue traveling down this path of mechanical and electronic evolution. All of these rationales for doing nothing are wrong.

      

 I was born on November 6^th, 1950, midcentury - it has always made figuring my age easy. It also centered me in a certain way. I went from a timeless childhood in the fifties, my memories being of running on the grass at eight thinking life could get no better, playing on a Little League team in town, pitching a no hitter once, getting perfect attendance awards at the Sunday school each year, to an explosive, liberating, painful, and confusing teenage years in the sixties. The American society I was born into still held petty prejudices about religion, race, and sexuality that would mostly fall away with the election of John Kennedy the first Catholic to be a U.S. president. His death, followed by the killings of Malcom X, Martin Luther King (whose death I heard about on the radio and remembering thinking what have these bastards done) , and Robert Kennedy made the decade of the sixties a painful time to come of age. I learned of John Kennedy’s death upon leaving my grammar school as a group of us were walking over to the dance lessons (fox trot, waltzes, and cha-cha-cha) that a lot of the eight graders took in the Methodist church hall. Someone, I don’t remember who, told us that Kennedy had been killed. My reaction was not one of fear or disgust, my father was very much against him, but my mother was crying when I got home that afternoon. However, as the decade went on and I went from a 13 year old to a 20 year old, the impacts of the endless assassinations helped to form both mine and my generation’s distrust and disgust of authority. By the middle of the sixties we had become angry with the comfortable society our parents had tried to create in the suburbs. A society that had left out black families, whose rights to the American dream just seemed so self-evident to us, but not our parents.

   

 In the early years of the seventies the dollar still had a lot of value and jobs were plentiful. I saved enough to travel to Morocco. In Marrakesh a young man came up and said, “You Americans are all rich.” I said, ‘“No that’s not true. “ He asked, “Can you get a job when you want one?” I said, “Yes.”  “You are rich” he said. It was a lesson that stayed with me. America had opportunities that were not universal. I remember coming back to New York after 3 months of travel in Europe and Northern Africa and thinking how much brighter, faster, and noisier, the “Wild West” it was compared to where I had been. 

    

 While I was in Europe, President Nixon took the U.S. dollar off the gold standard. We would watch the exchange rate change every day as the value of our dollars declined. The hippy/youth lifestyle that the 20 somethings were cultivating started to unravel as the value of the dollar started a steady decline. The need for a steady income became more and more apparent, and at the same time children began to arrive as they are apt to do, who required stability not previously considered. So off to work we went. But the research coming out of the universities was revealing that our society was not sustainable. The book “Limits to Growth” demonstrated why the American way of life would crash in the early decades of the 21^st century. We knew this, but tried our best to forget all we had learned. We used cloth bags for our shopping; we recycled glass, and felt good about the cleaner water and air the country had committed itself to after the first Earth Day. However, all along the way the carbon released by burning fossil fuels continued to build up in the atmosphere; by 2013 it reached 400 ppm.

       Collapse time is indeed coming closer. Some say half the country will be dead in 5 years. Lately I’ve feared that the old people will feel compelled to hold die–ins, where groups take the“Kool-Aid” together to take the pressure off the young who will have to use all their energy and wits to find ways to sustain both themselves and their children.  New England, my home, has water and woods so it will have some cushion it can call upon. Small dams on its many rivers may keep some electricity available. But will there be any social organization to make it happen? The rural areas may have a better chance of reestablishing some steady state, but those communities are less stable and more prone to depression and violence now. Eric Fromm a social psychologist writing in “A revolution of Hope” believed some form of monastic life is what will be needed to pull us thru a very dark time. Life without our technologies will be difficult if not near impossible for us. Currently in existence are examples of a new and necessary way of life. The Amish have cultivated a rural lifestyle much less dependent on the high energy tools we have become so reliant on. And a movement called permaculture has developed farming techniques that replace the impact of commercial monoculture by integrating perennials into landscapes where the food becomes available without the need of the yearly planting and plowing that disturbs the topsoil. Mulch piles, wood lots, outhouses, canning vegetables and walking are not that far back in our collective past, but are now very far from our collective experiences. When the need for a new survival strategy becomes overwhelming it will be because of systems that we currently rely on are failing. Economic news is about creating monopolies, by bringing a new idea to the market, or improving on some established product, or illegally by any number of ways to stifle legitimate competition. Some people and corporations will make a lot of money, but real shortages are not reported on the business pages of a newspaper, because starvation and death is not a business story, it is a front page story.

 It may be that the time needed to move away from an unsustainable material culture and to develop a new model of sustainability may, in the end, not be available. The collapse of our economic systems will come about through sharp rises in the cost of necessary commodities such as oil or fertilizers or electricity. The day will come when the banks don’t open or you can’t buy gas for your car or the food in the refrigerator is spoiling because the electricity has been out for a few days. However, that wakeup call will come too late for most of us to make the necessary changes.

      The American people are tired and are no longer motivated by the myths that made us proud of our past. Once we lost our sense that America was a special place, we became vulnerable to a group of politicians who believe that their personal ambitions are the more important than their constitutional responsibilities. That is why the public outrage surrounding the current administration scandals are met with such a total lack of remorse by those in power. They believe that the checks and balances are outdated and the elites have the power to run things unconstrained by the conventions of an earlier time. In the past, I think such arrogance would have been countered by the leaders of our society reminding the people of the principles both written and unwritten that represent our traditions. The political class has failed the country since the sixties when the unsustainability of our society started to be understood.

The assassinations of a Martin Luther King changed the civil rights movement from one demanding inclusion of the black community into the American mainstream to one that began to look for a separate identity. The current anger in the black community in some sense stems from the fact that the black society has developed a counter culture that the white society does not understand. When blacks embrace gangster lifestyles then blame white society for being fearful, are they not getting the response they are looking for?  The same can be said for biker gangs and any other lifestyle that at its roots is a reaction against the white middle class way of life. This fracturing of our society means that we can get no consensus on how to deal with any of the challenges facing us. Do we build more pipelines to move oil and gas around the country or do we develop a different way to use space that reduces our needs for carbon fuels? After the political killings and a costly foolish war in Vietnam we had the Reagan years where all the efforts to adapt to the new insights into the interrelationships that had become the environmental movement, were dropped by an older president who was focused on the past and not the future. “We have no problems. Nothing needs to be done”. He removed from the White House roof the solar hot water system that President Carter had installed to make his point. So go to work and make money. These became wasted years, as no programs were put into place to prepare the country for the coming shortages predicted by researchers using more complex computer modeling to predict an alarming future with greater precision and detail.

      After Reagan, the cold warrior, President Bush used American troops to reinstall a king to the throne in Kuwait. Not only did we fight a war that was not ours to fight but we did it for pay; the first and only time I’m aware of that U.S. soldiers were used as mercenaries. The Saudis were too weak to counter Saddam Hussein, but they had oil and the U.S. felt it was in our interest to keep the oil flowing. Reagan had spent his time in office and our money on weapons so when war broke out we were ready to fight. If the time and money had been used to decouple the U.S. from overseas oil, we would have had more options than we do now. But when the first President Bush used American troops to put a Kuwaiti King back on his throne, he broke with the revolutionary ideals that helped define our sense of ourselves. The war brought Americans to the Saudi Kingdom where women are still not allowed to drive. But U.S. female soldiers were allowed to drive jeeps in the kingdom which was seen by some religious hardliners as a terrible affront to Islam. In no small way that affront led to the attacks on 9/11 a decade later.

           

 After the first Bush, the Clintons grabbed the spot light. We thought they would bring us all together but instead Bill and Hillary proved to be cynics who had looked behind the curtain and no longer believed in anything higher than personal gain and power. That administration’s credibility ended with sexual scandals involving a president abusing his power to seduce a young female intern. When Al Gore, who had been the Vice President under Clinton for 8 years, ran for the presidency in 2000 we again had someone looking to the future and seeing a need to adjust to the steadily increasing carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. Sadly, Gore had accomplished nothing to move the country forward while he was Clinton’s vice-president, and this destroyed his credibility as a leader.

 And so another Bush took office, and then came 9/11. The failures to deal with energy policies in the past left us in a difficult situation where we needed to respond to an attack but really had no plan of how to do so. Going to war in the Middle East, became an investment with no return. Treasure spent and lives lost, but we as a people are no closer to a sustainable future than we were when it started. Now don’t get me wrong, we needed to defend ourselves after 9/11 but a more targeted approach would have been quicker and a whole lot cheaper. We spent years looking for Osama Bin Laden when the Saudi’s secret police could have found him in an afternoon if we had only asked them in an appropriate way. What that could have been, would have depended on how much pressure the Saudis would have had to feel before giving Bin Laden up. His family members are still powerful members of the ruling monarchy.

In Iraq the second Bush had a vision of democracy in the heart of the Middle East. This might have been a noble goal, but it was merely one of many alleged reasons for his preemptive war.  President Obama pulled out of Iraq after years of war and left Iraq to slip back into a civil war that Bush’s surge had tamped down. Obama wants to disengage from the Middle East which at this point may well be all we can or should do. But again with no plan for how the citizens of America secure the promises of peace and prosperity in this changing economic environment.

        We will still need oil but burning that oil will continue to change the climate and threaten the food supply.  So without any plans from the federal government what can and should the people do for themselves? As the price of basic needs (food, water, gasoline, health care, heat) gets more expensive   other more discretionary expenses will diminish; fewer dinners out, less travel, those sorts of things. A weaker less dynamic economy does not mean an end of a comfortable lifestyle, it could mean a better, albeit slower way of life. Relationships with family, friends, and neighbors would take on greater emphasis as paid services are replaced with cooperative help. We could see and are beginning to see the country look again to small farming as a meaningful endeavor. I would call this a return to community and it is happening all over the country, but there will be an even greater need to turn to family and friends as the current fossil fuel economy and infrastructure are no longer feasible. 

    Our current efforts at Green Energy have a high tech gee whiz aspect that does not offer the best return on investment. Buckminster Fuller coined the phrase “doing more with less” to explain and make conscious what had been happening as mechanical culture over the centuries became more efficient. He believed that we must become aware of this trend and stimulate the rate of progress. His book “Utopia or Oblivion” was a challenge to face up to the world’s needs by ending world poverty with a “design science revolution”. However, “doing more with less” is not as easy as it sounds unless you are “doing away with”. Most of what is sold to us as solutions, like electric cars that require more energy and heavy metals to build, and run on electricity generated by burning coal, are just shifting and hiding the problem. Another example of a solution that was not thought through was the use of corn to make ethanol. With current farming practices requiring more energy invested to grow and harvest corn than it yields, there is no net energy increase. Society would be better off not growing the corn in the first place and saving that energy. We need to get much better at analyzing and understanding our energy usage. Simple third world solutions may be better for what is shaping up to be hard times as the current society shifts into a lower gear.

    

  One infrastructure investment that might prove to be very important in the future would be a redesign of the railroads. One of the lessons I’ve learned during years working in manufacturing is that most problems can be traced to the initial engineering. That is certainly true with our railroad system. The wheel base is to narrow, and that has a lot of further implications for the design. A wider wheel base, something not possible when President Lincoln set the gauge for the U.S. rails over a century ago, would allow for even greater speeds, safety and energy efficiency. Greater speed and safety because a wider wheelbase would make trains much more stable on curves. Because of the narrow base, rail cars are designed to be heavy to keep then on the tracks. With a wider base, the cars themselves could be lighter improving the energy efficiency of the overall system. It would take decades to rebuild the rails, but a reengineered reinvigorated rail system may be the only affordable way to transport long distances in the near future as the cost of fuel continues to rise.

   

 Today the federal government is in gridlock as the parties who believe in debt, battle the parties who don’t. That there are still people who would want to spend trillions of dollars to keep up the current society rather than begin the necessary scaling back that the resource shortages will impose on us sooner or later anyhow, is surprising. And yet the federal government has just instituted a new health insurance program that will surely cost huge sums of dollars and disrupt one sixth of the economy in unforeseen ways. The intent may be noble but without an overriding plan to deal with the changes that are sure to come as resources become scarce, starting something this big seems a lot like whistling in the dark, a denial of simple math, and math is not a strong suit for most politicians, many of whom are in Washington solely for the purpose of enriching themselves.  

       The role out of the new federal health care plan has been a mess. The software is poorly designed, but the problems go much deeper. Businesses run on profit, and competition for profit drives innovation and efficiencies. Heath care insurance has been regulated at the state level, the effect of which guaranties the businesses a fixed return, thereby providing a disincentive to compete by improving the service over a competitor. This is a fairly common understanding, but leaving the market to itself does not offer politicians at the state or federal level, an easy way to demonstrate their concern for the little guy, or to insure adequate donations for their next election. Politicians who think that they are working for social justice, and who believe that the money that mysteriously finds its way into their reelection accounts as “God given” are frauds. Who are they really working for? They are selling what they know people want to believe, but I’m sure most also know in the long run they are changing nothing as we rush closer to a day of reckoning, not because of social injustices but because of resource depletion.

  

 Since my birth in 1950, there have been a number of moments when the world turned and we found ourselves wondering what happened. When President Nixon took the country off of the gold standard he started a slow decline in the value of the U.S. dollar that still continues to this day. When President Carter told the country that we took pictures of the space shuttle and counted the tiles so we knew the astronauts on Apollo 13 would be safe to reenter the atmosphere, people around the world said “You took a picture and counted the tiles?” When the first space shuttle landed on the airfield in California and hit the mark on the ground, people said, “You dropped a plane from space and hit a mark on the ground, maybe those ICBMs really will land where you aim them.” I think that American technological feats helped to end the Cold War.

When John F. Kennedy was elected, the release of a daily press briefing pushed the presidency into the forefront of our daily thoughts in a way that President Eisenhower did not try to occupy. That insertion of the media into our heads has continued to speed up over the intervening years. The electronic media has evolved into  24/7 chatter, while at the same time the level of clarity in the political discussions presented has devolved to a point where neither side argues with truth, but instead uses what is called “spin”, which is a polite way of saying they tell a half truth that leaves an inaccurate impression. If you have the truth on your side of the argument, would you not use it to make your strongest case? The use of spin indicates to me that the political class now believes “we cannot handle the truth” so now they knowingly lie.

       

 Now we are debating (after the fact) what the government’s role in keeping us safe should be and, to accomplish that goal, whether it is necessary to we give up all our rights to privacy.  Benjamin Franklin wrote “those who would give up freedom for security deserve neither.” This seems to be the chosen direction of policy makers.

  The current debate about illegal immigrants illustrates a prevailing acceptance of people as capital. Many politicians want to give a second class status to undocumented workers so they can be taxed without representation. Reagan virtually gave engraved invitations to 1.5 million immigrants to press his neo-liberal agenda. Then a grateful President and the one percent granted them amnesty. The erosion of the middle class, median wages flat for four decades, and the death of private and public sector unions is the continuing legacy of Reaganomics.

 Politicians like most Americans do not know our history nor do they any longer believe in the truths I thought we all understood for what it meant to be a citizen. These truths are important because they have essential to defining who we are. Those who would give illegal immigrants a second class status offend me at a gut level, it is un-American. We need to come to some resolution on immigration soon. As the social structures around the world disintegrate, many more will see the U.S. as the answer to their family’s needs. But if we are collapsing as a nation from resource depletion, oil shortages, and fear, how should we respond to the desperation of others?

To throw open the borders and end the concept of citizenship which we are now told is the only compassionate response does not seem to me to be true to our heritage or to really help the world in the long run, as the “last best chance” fails along with everyone else due to overpopulation, pollution, and disease. The world needs a drastic decline in population. We are now 7 billion and adding 82 million more people each year. It has long been estimated that the carrying capacity of our planet is about 2.5 billion. The needed decrease in population will only come about sanely if the world adopts a one child policy like the Chinese felt compelled to do. The Pope needs to confess to the world that the Church’s teachings are wrong on birth control and pray for forgiveness.

     

Where does this leave us? I think we need to pull our friends and families closer. Plant more gardens, share the food, plant more trees, can the fruit. Find local suppliers for the basics in life, and local may mean a radius not more than 20 miles. As Odysseus’s father Laertes says in Homer’s Odyssey “in bad times tend to the trees”. What will bring humanity through these times will be respect for the earth, love for our fellow man, and a humility that understands answers are not to be found in our heads as much as in our hearts. We must be willing to let some of what we consider progress slip away and be content with a slower, greener lifestyle that may bring us back a century or two. I think the horse and buggies used in the Amish communities may well be what replaces the high tech self-driving cars that Google will be selling in a year or two. We will need space to farm, and time for this next era to develop. None of this is a given and it may end very badly for us. It is a challenge worthy of heroes. How do we in America become natives to this land, “Turtle Island”? How do we educate our children and grandchildren for this lower energy future? How do we keep joy in our hearts and not succumb to sadness and depression as the world we were born into disappears? I will end with a prayer “Give us this day our daily faith, but deliver us dear Lord from belief”.     

John Martin 6/11/14