Direct Democracy At Its Finest?

A Facebook screenshot. I know, it's tiny; here are some of the groups:

"Soldiers are not heroes."
"Remove the group 'Soldiers are not heroes.'"
"Petition to remove "Petition to remove 'Soldiers are not heroes' " group. "

And also, in ALL CAPS,

"Anyone in the "Soldiers are not Heroes" group are ignorant [unprintables]."
"'Soldiers are not heroe's' is Dis-Respective"

I could make a cheap point about grammar and spelling, but what really intrigues me here is the profusion.

How did Facebook end up with five different groups declaring that soldiers are not heroes, in the first place? Was it a single person who kept creating different groups in some kind of confusion about what had or had not already been accomplished? Friends? Strangers, all coincidentally up to the same thing?

And then, four different groups petitioning for the removal of the original groups... one very offended party? Four different ones? And the person asking for the removal of the groups asking for the removal of the other groups.... one of the original groups' creators? Someone else entirely?

If you're reading this, you may object that Facebook has no connection to "the real world." But it turns out to be one tool for communicating with other people, alongside email and flyers in your mailbox and the good old telephone, all of which have superseded smoke signals and the Pony Express.

It's messy and it's often mundane, but it's also an interesting laboratory for the dissemination and exchange of ideas. There are a lot of people out there on Facebook muttering to themselves, and a few standing on soap-boxes and hollering, and somehow in the cacophony, people manage to hear and be heard.

Earth Day 41

Earth Day is nearly upon us again, and I'm feeling discouraged.

Starbucks will give you a free cup of coffee if you wander into any of their locations today with your reusable cup. At the time of this writing, 2,792 members of Facebook have joined "B Kind 2 Earth Day." At Earth Day Network, you can pledge an "Act of Green" to help save the planet -- by not buying bottled water, or turning off faucets, or switching to compact-fluorescent light bulbs.

Meanwhile, since the first Earth Day in 1970, US homes have expanded from 1400 square feet to a peak of more than 2500 square feet in 2007, with a slight drop since then. Meanwhile, we've bought more and more cars: in 1970, Americans collectively owned 89 million cars; in 2008, the figure was 137 million. Climate change is picking up speed.

I'm also discouraged about my own ability to reduce reliance on my car. I've done okay on the little things, like packing my own lunch rather than eating take-out to cut down on plastic; I've made the switch to bar shampoo, instead of the stuff in the plastic bottle. But after a semester of regular train travel, I've gone back to driving more.

In other words, the little corrections we've been inspired to make every year for Earth Day do almost nothing to counteract the forces that push ever-increasing consumption. We need to get serious, all of us, about reducing consumption in big ways.

That doesn't mean (just) buying "greener" alternatives of all the stuff we're already buying. It means eating lower on the food chain and wasting less food. It means buying a whole lot less of everything, making what we already have work until it wears out and can no longer be repaired, owning less stuff overall so that we can fit ourselves and our stuff back into smaller homes.

It also means drastically decreasing the amount that we drive -- and that, in turn, requires major structural changes in the way we live. So it also means political action at the local level to make neighborhoods amenable to walking and biking, and at state and federal levels to encourage the construction of more and better mass transit.

The Department of Transportation is asking for $128 billion in the 2012 budget. The vast majority of this will go toward highways; a mere $8 billion is allocated to rails, yet state governments are rejecting even this expenditure, seeking to divert funds instead to additional highway projects.

As the feminists said back in the 70s, the personal is the political. We need to be committed, personally and politically, to change at multiple and major levels. The little stuff isn't enough.

Dayenu!

Vegetarian, gluten-free seder. Somehow we managed it:
The orange on the seder plate comes in for a lot of interpretations: women in the rabbinate, gays in Judaism. In our case, it filled in for a beet, which we didn't have in the house, and which vegetarians have been known to put on the seder plate in place of a shankbone.

Last year, I made some mock-matzah out of almond flour and coconut oil. This year, papadums from the Indian store on 28th Street.

Do Nothing for Two Minutes

Kdiddy at Moxiebird brought me to this website, which tells the viewer to listen to the waves and do nothing for two minutes.My sound was off. I listened to a truck backing up, and the wind gusting outside, and the dog wandering around the apartment.

After a few seconds, I found myself relaxing. Breathing. Letting go of the tensions of the day. All this is good. After my two minutes were up, I turned the sound on, and now I get to hear the waves in the background as I type this. If I listen carefully, I can hear a distant gull -- or maybe that's outside my actual windows, not inside the computerized ones.

TechCrunch sez the site is the brainchild of Alex Tew, who thinks social networking is changing the way our brains are wired. (Yep, I'm suspicious -- I wondered if the web site was spending two minutes erasing my hard drive or stealing all my passwords, so I went out and did some looking around.)

I like the site, I really do. I like the idea of taking a two-minute meditative pause out of the non-stop frenzy. But at the same time, I find the idea of simulated sea to be distinctly odd. What do you think?

Unplug Challenge

I used to turn off the machine every Friday evening and leave it off until Saturday afternoon, but in the frenzy of overwork that was the end of Fall semester, I lost track of that practice.

In early March, I decided to go along with some Treehuggers who were unplugging all electronic devices, following the suggestions laid out in the Sabbath Manifesto about taking a weekly day of rest from the hurry of the week.

I still have a dumb phone, we have no TV reception in the house, and I seldom listen to radio or watch videos, so for me what that essentially means is turning off the computer. I've kept at it each week, shutting down before Shabbat dinner and keeping the machine off until after lunch on Saturday.

That first time, I actually felt a little unmoored. (I'm a little embarrassed to admit this: It should have been easy to pick up a book or a magazine.) For the next few weeks, it continued to feel a little odd.

But with time, it's starting to feel great to get untethered: no news, no FaceBook, no email, no KenKen for around 20 hours each week. And it's making it easier for me to shut the machine off in the evening and go to bed, too.

I'm in the midst of another end-of-semester frenzy, but when that calms, I'm going to push the unplugged time frame until sundown, and then try to keep it that way.

In Memoriam

It's Poem in Your Pocket Day, as I learned from Magpie. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is out of fashion now among the Literati, but he was the first poet I got to know, because he's from Maine, whence my father hails, and he wrote a poem about some of my distant ancestors.

I'm tempted to post "An April Day," because it describes the lovely sunny weather we've had today. Yet my mood is bleak on this fair day, so instead, in memory of a colleague who left this world far too soon, I give you this:

A Nameless Grave

"A soldier of the Union mustered out,"
Is the inscription on an unknown grave
At Newport News, beside the salt-sea wave,
Nameless and dateless; sentinel or scout
Shot down in skirmish, or disastrous rout
Of battle, when the loud artillery drave
Its iron wedges through the ranks of brave
And doomed battalions, storming the redoubt.
Thou unknown hero sleeping by the sea
In thy forgotten grave! with secret shame
I feel my pulses beat, my forehead burn,
When I remember thou hast given for me
All that thou hadst, thy life, thy very name,
And I can give thee nothing in return.

"Green" Printer Ink

I ran out of toner for my laser printer the other day. I'd already made the cartridge last as long as possible by taking it out and shaking it to redistribute the toner a few times, but finally it was really and completely empty.

So I was ready to go off to Staples to buy a new one, but The Mate insisted on buying instead from Cartridge World. He wasn't sure if they had them in stock, or if we'd have to wait while the old ones were refilled, and I have to say I wasn't very well-behaved about it all. I didn't want to wait while he made phone calls to get more information, and I didn't want to take any responsibility for doing any of that leg-work myself, and I got crankier and crankier about not being able to print stuff out.

Today he called them. Turns out not only are they open on Sunday, and there's a location not too far from us in the West Village, but they have refilled cartridges for both our printers in stock. And he went off and bought us two refilled cartridges, and dropped off our old ones for recycling.

The box is printed with a request that users return it to the store and the admonition, "Reusing is the highest form of environmental responsibility. Inside the box, the foil bag with the cartridge in it is likewise marked "DO NOT CUT OR TEAR! Zip Top Bag. Recyclable." Huh.

So ... yeah. I'm impressed with The Mate and with Cartridge World, and a little ashamed about being so unenlightened about my printer ink purchase. (If environmental responsibility doesn't do it for you, how about significant savings?)