Published in the Low Down’s Valley Voices, June 14, 2023.
“Guilt not acted on just festers and eventually metastasizes into toxic defensiveness. But guilt, like anger, can be channeled into positive action. Guilt can be like a hunger pang for the nourishment of a more whole world, where the needs of everything alive are provided for.”
How the pandemic unmoored me from my lefty politics and set me adrift.
“The last few years have certainly stirred the pot. While in some senses polarization has seemed to increase, the neat boundaries between left and right have also blurred. Leftish natural living hippies suspicious of vaccines have made common cause with gun-toting libertarians suspicious of anything coming from the government. Dreadlocked digital nomads invested in Bitcoin support Trump because he wants to weaken the state. Environmentalists angry at how the rich and powerful are destroying nature get lost down the QAnon rabbit hole. In Europe, populist political parties, such as Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, combine traditional right-wing antipathy to immigration with a strengthening of the welfare state. My journey is just a less extreme version of this same intermingling.”
How the pandemic unmoored me from my lefty politics and set me adrift.
“The mainstream press, being at war against all things Trump, naturally had to take a hard line on this new war against covid. To oppose mandates around masks, vaccines, and lockdowns became heresy. To even question these core tenets was an irresponsible misuse of one’s mouthpiece as a journalist. What if it caused the masses to question things, and that led to non-compliance, and that led to more deaths? Self-reinforcing group-think spread from newsrooms to the general population and back again.”
How can you see yourself, or humans in general, benefitting the natural world? How can we give back to the living order in some form of reciprocity for all the gifts of life it has bestowed upon us?
A meditation on achieving liberation from the limits posed by inflation.
“As long as we have an economy where rising wages and spending creates inflation that can only be fought by suppressing wages and spending, we will be stuck in this trap. We need to re-envision collective provision – what we call the economy – from an old story in which some need to suffer in order for others to succeed, to one where individual and collective well-being are one and the same.”
A meditation on my 10-year-old’s newfound love of screens.
“It’s safe to say screens have become his new passion, his mind turning to them and what they offer whenever he has nothing else to occupy him. When he used to get bored, it wouldn’t take long before he found something interesting to throw himself into. Now, he seems unable to think of anything to do in idle moments other than to turn on a screen.”
Originally written for the Wandering Wakefield blog, this is a dive into my very different life of 15 years ago.
“So having now realized that I’m probably not going to be able to do more than help save the world just a little bit, I am much more willing to accept that life is largely about the other side of the equation: savouring the world. And here I can relearn from my early-thirties self: work less, take long walks with friends more. Turn off your phone and go outside. If we just followed that simple advice, a whole lot of psychologists would need to find other work.”
Published for Earth Day in the April 20, 2022 edition of the Low Down to Hull and Back News.
“If you put us on a giant scale – all 7.9 billion of us – we would still only add up to 0.01 percent of the weight of everything alive.”
A look at the trucker protest, vaccine hesitancy, and the majority’s reaction against it.
“For most of our society, science is our only religion, and vaccination is its holy rite. We bare our arms and offer ourselves to science, taking its creation into our very blood in a way few other technologies penetrate. Thus we prove our faith. Those who refuse this rite are treated like heretics. How could they possibly refuse something so mundane as a needle, and yet so beneficial to society as a vaccine?”
