Whose measure of a man? Part II

I had what was probably the best example of manhood from a guy who was—I thought as a kid growing up—not very manly.

My stepfather didn’t have the physique of a man who would easily intimidate; he wasn’t built like my “real” father, the pumped-up physical specimen who spawned me but little else. He looked like a New Jersey Italian teddy bear who loved to pass out cigars and pour a good drink when the occasion called for it.

He was the Mediterranean Buddha with a bulbous nose and big belly. He didn’t have a fighter’s body or disposition; but he had a lot of fight in him, and he was pretty good about knowing when to use it, without resorting to fisticuffs.

His most manly asset, though, was his fierce devotion to mom, which counts for a lot in my book. That made him as big a man as any I’ve seen in my life. He took on the role of husband and father where most men might have fled in the other direction.

He assumed the full weight and responsibility of father for children who were not his own, including major expenses such as making sure our teeth were properly straightened.

“There’s my new pickup truck,” he teased when friends came over, and he’d point at me, asking me to smile so they could see my new braces. “Show them my new truck.”

He’d have to wait a few more years before he finally got the truck he’d always wanted but in the meantime he took care of pressing family matters, making sure we all had what we needed first.

My biological father, meanwhile, deserted us when I was four; he didn’t put any time or effort into getting to know me, or my brother. He paid us no attention. He was a ghost in my life, a non-person essentially whose only historical significance to me was that of sperm donor. As a young boy, I’d ask mom what happened to him.

“You’re better off without him,” she’d say. At first, I’d get mad at her for saying such things; I didn’t believe her. How could I be better off without the man who was supposed to be my father? A boy doesn’t understand these things. He assumes that by rights the man who made birth a possibility would also take an interest in his own children.

After a while, though, I figured she was right, that he probably didn’t care, and that indeed I was better off without him, so I forgot about him, except for the one random visit he made to our home when I was about 10 to discuss visitation arrangements with mom and my new dad.

That was the last time I ever saw him. I heard from him once more when I was in high school and he sent copies of the New World Translation of the Bible favored by Jehovah’s Witnesses to me and my brother.

I took my brother outside with our copies of the “bible,” and showed him how we would appreciate the gifts by placing them in the gutter and then I set them on fire. As we watched the thin pages of the bibles crinkle into twisted ash, my grandmother pulled up beside the curb to park her car. She sat staring over the steering wheel, horrified.

“What are you doing?” she demanded as she got out of the car.

“Oh, hi grandma, don’t worry; it’s nothing, just burning those fake bibles Jim sent us.”

I’d gotten to calling him Jim because that’s what mom had always called him, never “your father,” whenever she talked about him, which was rare.

 The strange thing was I hadn’t thought twice about burning those books, and didn’t realize the real horror of it until I saw grandma’s face when she drove up. No one in the family valued books more than she did, coming from a family of educators; her mother and aunt both had schools named after them.

For me, it was a kind of purgation.

I wanted to be rid of those books, and the false religion, and the show of some kind of weak Christian love from a man who didn’t want to be a father to his children.

Not long after I was married, I thought of seeking him out, to ask him personally why he hadn’t taken an interest in his two sons, but it was too late. He died when I was 23. He was 45, and had started at least two more families besides the one he started with us.

At that point, it didn’t matter much whether we “hit” it off or got on well. I was more interested in finding out what sort of man he was, whether there were patterns and habits of mind that I might have inherited and whether there was anything about which I should be concerned.

But any such opportunity was crushed when mom spoke up casually one afternoon as she and my wife relaxed at the dining table drinking tea and coffee. I was cutting an apple by the sink. “Oh, by the way, Jim died.”

I didn’t expect it to trouble me the way it did. I didn’t shed any tears, but I was troubled and left feeling vacant by the news. My wife graciously walked over and put her arm around me. I must have felt like a sack of potatoes.

I might not have picked my stepfather as the “ideal” model of a man for a young kid looking for a strong father figure, which is what I wanted. I would have picked someone like my biological father, whose pictures mom kept showed a man with a powerful, muscular build. My one earliest memory of him, in fact, is of him putting his fist through the bathroom wall.

I learned quickly, however, that my stepfather cared with the kind of devotion that shows real backbone. He made a lot of sacrifices, and paid us a lot of attention.

He was our protector, even without the intimidating manly presence a young boy might want in a father.

I’d seen him fearlessly go after people who wronged him or who showed the slightest disrespect, people, for example, who parked their cars in the handicap zone he’d had the city paint on the curb nearest the front door so that grandma could get to her car without trouble.

He run out, no matter whom it was, and he’d confront the offenders, directing them away from the painted curb. Even the scary looking guys complied.

“Dad, you gotta be careful these days,” I said once during a visit to the old neighborhood, “there are a lot of gang bangers passing through the area now.”

“I don’t care,” he said, “they don’t belong there.”

I seldom heard whatever he said to people as they rummaged through his trash; but he’d shoosh! them away too and off they’d go.

“I don’t want people digging through my trash or my recycle,” he’d say, sitting back down into his chair to read the morning newspaper. “I pay money for the city to come pick those up. If they want to dig through the trash, let them go to the dump.” §

Whose measure of a man? Part I

Mom says, “We were lucky to have found dad.”

She’s right. My biological father, whom I never knew, left home when I was 4 years old. I remained fatherless until mom re-married four years later, hooking up with a New Jersey Italian she met through her sister.

He took us on—mom, my brother and me— as if we were his own. He quickly laid down the law, setting boundaries and establishing family as the end of all things.

As mom says, I was lucky to have been taken under his wing, flawed as he might have been, and through him I learned the measure of a man, enough so that I grew fond of him, loved him, and eventually started calling him “dad.”

For sure, he wasn’t perfect, he couldn’t fix his own car to save his life, yet one of his favorite things to say was that he was like Buddha, perfect in all ways, never to be crossed or taken lightly, and wise beyond reason. My job, he was fond of reminding me, was to “listen.” He even had the belly of a Buddha, which he sported and caressed without embarrassment or apology.

He loved food and he loved women but most of all he loved mom.

Women seemed to love him too, even though he didn’t appear to have Adonis DNA, or the blood of a tiger. To the contrary, he was like, as he sometimes would say, the Pillsbury® Doughboy, soft and cuddly and always available for a squeeze.

It amazed me how the ladies seemed to relax and laugh more when he talked to them. He teased them and they teased back, playful banter and innuendo that made even my young adult cheeks blush. Mom could just as easily roll her eyes as participate in such discussions, which were not her forte.

Nonetheless, dad was fiercely devoted to her; he defended and protected her in ways that are only now becoming clear to me as I watch her adjust to widowed life after nearly 45 years of marriage. She seemed to have fewer cares then, he wouldn’t allow her to become anxious or worked up and made sure her needs were well met.

They were a good team: She took care of him in the old-fashioned way of preparing meals and keeping him well-fed while he protected her the best he could from need or harm.

I seldom heard dad argue with mom; their arguments, he’d say, were no one’s business but their own. That’s why, when they needed to discuss something that might get heated, they took their personal business behind closed doors.

My own spats with him were few but memorable.

During a rough patch, when as a union man he feared there might be a labor strike, and that he would no longer be able to support his adopted family, he enjoyed a cocktail more than usual, but otherwise kept his temper and rarely flared, even when things were really tough.

One night, though, we got into an argument. I was 17 and wanted to go out with friends who were driving down to the beach for a party. My parents said, “No.”

I got angry and started mouthing off to dad. He backed me against the wall and put his hands around my throat. He’d had enough of my teenage rudeness, back talk—which he hated—and foolish attempts to be more independent.

“Take your hands off me,” I said, “or I’ll fight back.”

That didn’t seem to scare him and he kept me pinned against the wall. I could smell his breath and see the frustration in his face.

“You’ve been drinking, haven’t you?” I said.

Immediately, he let go. It was the first time he’d ever done anything like that. I think it shocked us both. I stormed out of the house that night and walked the streets until my anger subsided, but it took years, I think, for us to fully recover, and for me to grow out of my boyish ways.

Less than one year after my first and only physical confrontation with my father, however, my parents told me, “We’ve decided that you’re old enough now to pay the consequences for your own decisions. We’re not going to tell you what do to any more.”

Finally, I thought, “I’m a man.” §

Angry white people

I always find it amusing, if not sad and a little trite, when someone claims, “I’m not a racist.”

It’s usually followed by the qualifier “but…” and then a list of complaints about a particular ethnic group.

I recently received an email that’s making the rounds, subject line “Buchanan to Obama,” in which the conservative political commentator Pat Buchanan presumably wants to have a “two-way” dialog about race.

Fair enough, you might say, until you get into the heart of his message; which has the same “I’m not a racist but…” ring to it that seems to be making polite rounds in conversational and email circles these days.

Before we get to the “Buchanan to Obama” message, however, there’s a note at the beginning, from someone, probably an angry white person—it’s never clear where or how this “not a racist” message originated—which says: “Finally............It is Said Publicly.    I have never seen the white side explained better! Pat Buchanan had the guts to say it. It is about time.”

Never mind that the introductory note is riddled with errors in composition more common to grade school spellers than to those who think critically and ask questions about where they’re getting their information.

Never mind that it’s clear from the beginning that this is the “white side” of the story that is seldom told out of fear of being politically incorrect.

Never mind the little squiggly American flag, waving at the top of the message indicating that patriots will not want to miss this important word from an angry white person.

The note alone is usually the first thing that causes me to press the delete button on these electronic circulars, which do more to diminish rather than promote democratic thinking, dialog and debate.

If you haven’t noticed, lately, the quality of public discourse in the U.S. seems to have gone into a steep decline. I don’t expect it to get better any time soon, not when we can hurl more than a hundred million-dollar Tomahawk missiles exploding into the North African desert while handing out pink slips to thousands of teachers across the nation. (The late comedian George Carlin pointed out not so long ago, the United States doesn’t bomb white people, only brown people.)

Perhaps I romanticize the notion too much, that we could give more of our public time and attention to ideas and conversations that actually improve our lives rather than degrade them. I find few things more degrading than racism (or even the hint of it, as in “I’m not a racist but…”), and lack of education.

I get these well-meaning e-circulars from friends and family, attached with the email addresses of previous senders, who then forward them to others and on it goes, until they get to me. I usually trash them but sometimes, out of curiosity, I have to check them out.

When I find one that is utterly or even partially false, I’ll send the correct information to all whose names appear in the previous forwards.

This one, as it turns out, is for real, and is taken from a passage of one of Buchanan’s syndicated columns. In “A Brief for Whitey,” published March 21, 2008, Buchanan argues that whites cannot be blamed for high rates of crime and illegitimacy in the black community, that whites should not be held responsible for problems they did not create.

“Is white America really responsible for the fact that the crime and incarceration rates for African-Americans are seven times those of white America?” he asks. “Is it really white America’s fault that illegitimacy in the African-American community has hit 70 percent and the black dropout rate from high schools in some cities has reached 50 percent?”

In fact, the overriding message is that blacks in America should be more grateful for all that whites have done for them. And this is the central message of the e-circular.

“First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks,” says Buchanan. “It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.”

Here’s where I have the most trouble with Buchanan’s and other angry white people’s thinking. What does Buchanan really know about “levels of freedom and prosperity” experienced by blacks?

Yes, Christian salvation brought to life some of our nation’s best activist churches, mostly black, during the Civil Rights movement, but Christians, especially U.S. Christians, have also been known for less charitable acts of righteousness, like slavery.

The worst part, I guess, is the subtle justification of bringing 600,000 slaves to the colonies so that we could cultivate and groom them, through several hundred years of brutality and servitude, into free and prosperous citizens of a freedom-loving state.

“We hear the grievances,” he says, but “where’s the gratitude?”

Yeah, where’s the gratitude? Thanks for Jim Crow, and segregation, and thanks for economic inequities that never make it into the mainstream conversation about race in America, but thanks most of all for a country that knows very little about racism.

Let’s not get into the racial issues of why statistics for crime and incarceration are “higher” among blacks than whites. Let’s not weigh the odds of how 300 years of brutality against people of color have become embedded into our national psyche and value system.

Let’s stay focused on the importance of being earnest and saying, “Thank you, America. Thank you for uprooting my ancestors so that I could be born in a free country to enjoy this nation’s endless opportunities and great prosperity, to have avoided the perils of the backwards jungles of Africa.”

That’s the message of Pat Buchanan try as he might to couch it in the vernacular of “angry white guy is tired reverse discrimination,” where blacks are given “unfair” advantage over whites through affirmative action or other entitlements.

What’s not said, however, is that without these programs, which may indeed have spent their usefulness, blacks would still be fighting (as some still are) for the right to vote, let alone attend the university of their choice.

“OK,” concludes the nameless angry white person who originally sent out this important message, “will you pass it on? YES. I did but will you? Because I’m for a better America. Sorry. I am Not racist, Not violent, Just not silent anymore.”

NO. I don’t think so. I won’t pass it on, because I’m also for a better America, and I too refuse to be silent. §

Police harassment and intimidation in SLO County

Yesterday, I received some friendly advice that it’s better to “lay low” than put myself on the radar of local law enforcement.

My friend had heard me complain on the radio last week that the recent Narcotics Task Force arrests of more than a dozen medical marijuana distributors lacked the force of law, and was intended merely as harassment and intimidation.

Local law enforcement has made it clear that medical marijuana, which is legal in this state, won’t be tolerated in San Luis Obispo County.

Talk show host Dave Congalton at 920 KVEC asked me to come on the air because I’d spoken out in the past when the sheriff’s department overreached its authority by setting up and taking down Charles C. Lynch for operating a medical marijuana dispensary in Morro Bay.

Lynch was later sentenced to one year and one day in federal prison, much to the distress of 9^th U.S. District Court Judge George Wu who sentenced Lynch. Federal law gave Wu little choice, the judge said, but to send Lynch to prison.

The Justice Department, even after newly appointed U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced it would back off from marijuana cases, was fierce in its prosecution of Lynch, demanding that he serve a minimum five-year sentence.

The judge thought better of it.

It was clear that Lynch had committed no real crime against the community. He wasn’t the big drug lord that the government tried to make him out to be. He was dispensing large quantities of “medical” marijuana, to be sure, but, unfortunately, federal law and the U.S. court system refuse to recognize “medical” as a legitimate claim. The term “medical,” in fact, was ruled out as a means of defense in Lynch’s case. Lynch became another victim to the War on Drugs.

Lynch, who now must submit to regular and random drug tests, recently declared bankruptcy, and remains free pending the appeal of his case.

Sadly, Lynch’s cross with the law seemed fueled not so much by federal agents as by local Sheriff Patrick Hedges, who acted more as sheriff provocateur than sheriff protector, and made known to residents that he would not tolerate the sale and use of medical marijuana, even though voters had already made it legal, and California’s then-Attorney General Jerry Brown had provided the necessary legal guidelines on the issue.

They weren’t the clearest guidelines but the intent was clear: Medical marijuana, within certain parameters, is legal and should be protected in the state of California.

Meanwhile, the sheriff’s department and the Narcotics Task Force, whose job it is, I presume, to enforce local community laws and standards, have continued to ignore those guidelines. Instead, they enforce their own interpretation of the law—as federal operatives, in a sense—not as it’s written, which is to serve and protect the interests of law-abiding citizens, including those who sell, distribute and use medical marijuana in the state of California.

Sadder still is that, as a result of overzealous law enforcement, Lynch’s life as a businessman and homeowner, has been completely wrecked: He lost a thriving business that had been welcomed and supported by the City of Morro Bay, he filed bankruptcy and faces losing his home. To what end?

Whose interests were being protected and served?

His life will never be the same; and neither will those children be the same, who watched recently in terror as armored police burst into their home, forced everyone at gunpoint to the ground and needlessly hauled their parents off to jail. The parents were later released after the district attorney dropped the charges.

The message? Don’t mess with the “cowboys,” as they’re called, who make up the San Luis Obispo County Narcotics Task Force.

Unfortunately, what the NTF is doing—without oversight from the pubic or any other local agency as far as we know—is not law enforcement; it’s intimidation and harassment. It won’t pass muster in the California legal system, and it’s a terrible waste of precious resources.

It’s also bad for business, bad for the local community, and makes the cops look like renegades.

My friend is probably correct in suggesting that I keep my mouth shut, which seems to be the consensus among many who live here in San Luis Obispo County: Don’t cross the law; keep your mouth shut. People here are afraid to speak out. That in itself ought tell us something about the sort of “law enforcement” we have here.

Why should anyone but actual criminals be afraid of cops?

I’m not against law enforcement. I’m against law enforcement that uses terror to bring down non-violent suspects such as medical marijuana growers, distributors and users.

Frankly, I don’t want to be on anyone’s radar. Like most people, I’d rather be left alone. But I refuse to “lay low” when law abiding-citizens are being unjustly harassed and thrown into jail.

That alone ought to send shivers down the spines of anyone who cares about their safety. Any time the police can break down your door with hardly a second’s notice in the middle of the night and throw you around in your own home, you’re not safe.

I detest the pervasive use of SWAT tactics—designed to overwhelm and subdue violent criminals—to arrest distributors and users of marijuana, medical or not, who have no violent criminal past and who, if they were stoners, would be the least likely to resist.

Too much can go wrong, as it did recently in Utah when police got a warrant to raid a home using SWAT methods on the fear that the suspects inside might respond with gunfire.

A guest, unbeknown to the police, was sleeping in one of the rooms, and responded to the pre-dawn raid by grabbing a golf club to fend off the intruders. He was gunned down and died on the spot, not an uncommon occurrence in the endless, costly and useless War on Drugs.

It’s only a matter of time, so long as local law enforcement continues to imprudently apprehend medical marijuana providers and patients, before someone is seriously hurt or killed.

More tragic still is that those who were targeted by local law enforcement in the recent raids weren’t even violating the law. They were, again by most news accounts, in compliance with California laws that regulate the use of medical marijuana.

The district attorney has already dropped charges against three of the people who were arrested. Likely as not, any charges that do stick and go before a judge will also be dropped. In any event, a court case from these arrests ought to be welcomed as an opportunity to show how out of line local police have been.

Recently a judge in Montana couldn’t even seat jury because potential jurors said they would refuse to convict someone for possessing a few buds of marijuana. The defendant faced felony charges of “criminal distribution of dangerous drugs.”

The judge in the case was confounded by the citizen revolt and said he’d never seen anything like it before. Be sure to witness more such citizen revolts if police continue to cross the legal line of enforcement.

If the tone of Congalton’s frustrated listeners who called the station and complained of being unfairly targeted for growing and distributing medical marijuana is any indication, courts in this county will also have a tough time finding citizens who support the NTF’s local war on drugs.

I don’t know much about the Narcotics Task Force, a state-mandated agency supported through the participation of local police departments; I don’t know where its budget comes from, or who oversees its operations. I do know they’re members of our community, they’re “out there,” spending countless hours spying on and attempting to entrap legal medical marijuana distributors and customers. It’s a terrible waste of time, money and energy, which could be better spent preventing real crimes.

We also know that without the support of our local lawmen, the NTF would cease to function.

Too often I hear people say, “What can you do? The cops will do whatever they want.”

Only if we let them, only if through silence and complacency we turn our backs and “lay low” to avoid getting into the crosshairs of police who don’t respect the law. As long as no one speaks out, lawmen will continue to harass and intimidate law-abiding citizens whenever they please simply because they don’t agree with the laws we’ve enacted with our votes.

That’s not law enforcement; it’s harassment and intimidation. §

For the sake of argument

I drove straight to Jim’s place, hoping to put to rest any doubts or hard feelings that might remain between us.

We’d had a failure of communication—our first—a few days earlier. He got angry when I challenged him about Sarah Palin, whom he admires: “Do you really think she’s qualified to be president?” I asked. It’s the same question he’d asked me two years ago about Barack Obama.

He snapped, thrust his truck into reverse and started to pull away, grumbling something, before he stopped momentarily, stuck his head out of the cab and yelled, “You tell that Steven character to pay his rent on time or I’ll just turn the water off!” He backed out of earshot, furious, and drove away.

He’d come out to check on me, as is his custom, to see if there was anything I needed, to talk about water use in the two-acre blueberry enclosure my friend, Steven, rents from him to house, feed and water 1,500 thriving plants. I know Steven is responsible and would get current as soon as possible—if he had gotten behind, which isn’t so rare in these tight economic times.

I got the feeling that Jim had been harboring other resentments and had simply had enough, and burst out in anger. I didn’t take it personally; I’d never seen him act this way before, not since I started tending the blueberries nearly three years ago. Our conversations have always remained civil, even when it includes politics, on which we seldom agree. I never thought he’d get upset over me asking him about Sarah Palin.

The drive up to the farmhouse winds through Jim’s well-tended orchards and can be treacherous on some corners if you’re not paying attention, dropping off suddenly into a ditch or clump of trees. It’s about a half-mile or so past the packinghouse, workers’ quarters, and the blueberry enclosure. I seldom drive up that way unless absolutely necessary.

I thought about just going straight to the enclosure, set my worries aside and let Jim settle. In time, our differences would abate. But I’ve seen how things left unattended can quickly turn sour, how one seemingly “simple” misunderstanding can turn best friends into bitter rivals or enemies, and make families into unbearable hornets’ nests.

Believe me, I know.

My brother, for example, hasn’t spoken to me, my mother, or anyone else in the family for nearly 20 years; maybe more, I’ve lost count. He’s refused to make peace, not enough even to send flowers or a word of condolence when mom suffered the loss of her husband of 45 years, a stepfather who treated us like his own sons.

His refusal to settle with our stepfather before he died made no sense, and his icy unwillingness to send a note of sorrow to our mother felt needlessly harsh and mean. I wanted to lash out and make him suffer the way I had seen our mother suffer over the many years he’d stopped talking to her. I felt the cold drowning force of bitterness trying to choke down my own grief. “He’s such an asshole!” I said. “How could he not even send flowers?”

It all began with what was an apparently “simple” misunderstanding, not unlike the one I’d just experienced with Jim, when a word or statement is misconstrued, and if left unattended, breaks the bonds of friendship or tears rifts into sacred family connections.

It’s unfortunate because many people pay a heavy price for these hardened feelings, which only become harder to break as the years pass.

I like Jim and didn’t want him to think that I meant any disrespect, didn’t want our misunderstanding to grow into something worse. We may live on opposite ends of the political spectrum but I don’t want it to become an obstacle to friendship.

I’m impatient with things hanging in air, with uncertainty, especially when it comes to friends and people of close acquaintance. It drives my roommate crazy that I want to “fix” things right away.

“I can’t settle things as quickly as you would like,” she argues.

I would rather have gone straight to the field and waited for another day to make amends with Jim, I would rather have gotten busy with work and forgotten about our differences, imagined or real, but I knew that wouldn’t work. I needed to make peace.

I kept thinking about the New Testament admonition of Jesus, who tells his followers that if anyone has anything against them, a complaint or a grudge, it’s better to go and make peace with that person first before going to the altar, the place of worship, to meet with God. Make peace with your brother first, he says, then go and worship.

I haven’t been to church in a long, long time. The blueberry field has been my sanctuary, a more welcome refuge than most—a place of quiet, with few distractions, and opportunities to find clarity. It’s like going to my own place of worship, where every day, in the silence of the vast open sky and surrounding hills, I encounter something much larger than myself, something that makes me glad to be alive.

I could feel some of that slipping quietly away as the days passed without a word from Jim. I was sure that he had taken offense and probably didn’t quite know how to say so. I was sure that the longer I lingered without going to him and straightening things out, the more likely a rift would form, potentially ruining a good thing.

“How hard can it be to make peace?” I asked myself on the drive up to his home. I’d never really thought about it out loud until now, the cost of making peace, the courage it takes to face another who may have a grudge or other legitimate complaint and attempt to make things right. It’s not as easy as it sounds. “How could anyone who wants to make peace get hurt?”

I decided to run up to Jim’s place to see if he was there and tell him, “Hey, I hope there aren’t any hard feelings between us, Jim.”

Usually, when we talk politics, Jim’s good-natured and keeps his sense of humor. He’s never lost his composure. Our differences are not unlike those of other Americans divided by politics; he listens to Rush Limbaugh while driving his truck around the farm. I can’t tolerate Rush for long, not before I begin to think what an enormous misinformed blowhard he is.

On one occasion, Jim drove up in his truck, blasting the radio with Rush Limbaugh’s churlish voice, which he listens to every day on local KVEC. He turned down the radio, popped his head out the window, as if waiting for a sound, and yelled, “What! You’re not listening to Rush?”

He knows I don’t care for Rush. “I don’t have a radio, Jim. I just listen to yours as you drive around the farm,” I shouted back.

Thankfully, Rush is on for only a short time in the morning, and Jim also occasionally likes to listen to the Rolling Stones or other early rock n’ roller’s from his days as a ‘60s rebel. Mostly, though, the farm is quiet, unless the tractors are running close by or the packinghouse is busy.

Jim drives busily up and down the farm’s dirt roads, monitoring his orchards, watering systems, or charging the batteries of a tractor, taking care of problems before they happen—if he can get to them in time. He’s busy and industrious, often getting into scrapes such as rolling his truck on its side while trying to move a fallen tree.

I have a great deal of respect for Jim. He’s been good to me, a complete farming neophyte rescued from the ravages of journalism. He’s gotten me out of jams when the irrigation has sprung leaks, or he’s brought tools I didn’t have on hand, and has offered advice on weed control and other farming matters.

Despite our political differences, he’s been a good friend.

Jim likes to share his story of attending the original Woodstock, where he subsequently met up with some hippie organic farmers and got hooked on a lifetime of farming. Along the way, with nearly 200 acres to tend and a family to support, however, he’s changed a lot of his ideas, including how to farm.

“The whole organic thing’s a sham,” he said once. “Well, maybe not entirely,” he added, “I know a few organic farmers who are doing OK. But how many of the people you know who eat organic are actually environmentally responsible? Don’t they all drive cars? Fly in airplanes?”

He’s been farming for more than 35 years, and he’s meticulous, keeps the machinery running smoothly, takes care of breakdowns as they happen, and doesn’t rely on factory mechanics to do it for him for hundreds or even thousands of dollars. He does it himself.

He likes to get things done and doesn’t have patience for people who don’t pull their share of the load. “I get up at 5:30 every morning because I’ve got things to do,” he complained recently. “I don’t sit around and wait for things to happen.”

When I finally caught up to Jim, he wasn’t at the house but down by the enclosure, pounding on a wall in the washroom of the workers’ quarters with heavy mallet. “This is how I work out my frustrations,” he said, after I told him I hoped he wasn’t offended by anything I’d said the other day, and that I didn’t want politics to become an issue between us.

“Yeah, that’s all right,” he offered. “I got a little excited. I’ve had a lot going on.”

A tenant had failed to pay rent since August, he added. The tenant has pleaded for time, telling Jim he’s working on a re-build of a car he plans to sell, and he just needs a little time. “Well, it’s been over three months, he hasn’t sold his car and I haven’t seen a penny.”

It was this and a few other things, like the cancellation of a big order and a family emergency, Jim said, that set him off the other day when he drove away.

“Still,” he added, “I don’t know what the big deal is about Sarah Palin. She’s just as qualified as anybody to run for president. I think she’d make a great president.”

I kept silent, saving that argument for a more appropriate time, biting my tongue to keep from pointing out that Sarah would hardly make a great president if she couldn’t complete her first term as governor. This wasn’t the time for debate, which will come soon enough, but for mending, and making peace. §

Who loves war?

America loves war.

It struck me most plainly tonight when the waitress asked if I’d like a plastic bag in which to take home some chili.

I mentioned that L.A. had recently come down hard on plastic bags, which was probably a good thing, the waitress said.

“Yeah, you’re right,” I replied, “there are a lot of things we could do without, or if we have to have them, we could at least find a way to make them so that they have less impact on the environment and use up less energy.”

It started a discussion on how our dependence on petroleum reaches into virtually every aspect of our lives: plastics, personal care, travel, commerce, housing, credit cards, you name it.

“We can do better,” the waitress said. “We have the ingenuity to tap into renewable energies, create jobs, and build things that won’t destroy the environment or kill us.”

“Then we wouldn’t have to send our armies and navies overseas to secure a resource that is clearly limited and won’t last forever.”

“Jeez,” she said, “did you have to go there?”

It’s hard not to go there, to where American taxpayers’ dollars are being wasted on mayhem and murder, when we could be spending our resources in more creative and less wasteful ways.

It’s hard to fathom why, when so many Americans languish without jobs, and education, mass transit and other delivery systems in the U.S. are in such shambles, we are spending so much money to conduct an endless war overseas.

But we’re a culture steeped in death and war. We love to battle, which we promote everywhere, in film, games, toys, at the mall, on university campuses. The U.S. war machine permeates our whole culture.

We love grace under pressure, gallantry, machismo, the rule of law, integrity, a sense of duty, commitment, the willingness to rise above, stand alone, face the enemy, and fight for love of country.

We’re a warrior culture, however, with an ethos based less on the glories we publicly espouse—the carefully selected words we use to promote selfish interests—and more on an indignant—steeped in hubris—sense of entitlement, the idea that we can have it all, anything we want. Everyone else be damned!

Take nothing away from the brave soldiers who fight our wars, although I know many who think the whole military enterprise is a complete sham.

George Carlin, who knew his time was short, spoke bitterly in the final season of his life about war and those who participate in it: “If you’re dumb enough to join, you deserve to die,” he said.

I don’t go that far but I understand what Mr. Carlin must have been feeling. He’d seen enough of the waste of war to know there’s plenty of sham in it.

And who, after living through a series of conflicts and wars doesn’t begin to see it for themselves? Who does it really benefit? Who gets rich off of war?

The men and women who go to war for us are not to be blamed for its stupidity.

The problem arises from a lifestyle the rest of the world has only dreamed about, a lifestyle of extravagance and excess that we have come to expect and demand, and will have to change, if we want to avoid the inevitable demise that comes to a culture driven by the violent ethos of war.

America built so much of its wealth, and its lifestyle, on oil and now, as oil reserves become more scarce and more dangerous to extract, we go to even more drastic measures to ensure its continued flow.

We send our armies and navies overseas not to fight terrorism so much as to secure our one and only—but increasingly less—reliable energy source. From the perspective of empire, it makes perfect sense. Secure the cheapest energy available so we can continue to enjoy our “lifestyle,” which is held up before us as a sacrosanct, non-negotiable entitlement. Few of us really know what it means, however, beyond getting what we want.

But from another perspective, one that doesn’t necessarily include war, it doesn’t make sense at all to spend hundreds of billions of dollars each year to feed a machine that destroys rather than builds; that poisons, maims, and kills rather than feeds, heals and creates life.

Sen. John McCain recently suggested that U.S. military spending could be trimmed by $100 billion. Imagine what could be done if we put $100 billion into education or healthcare or alternative and renewable energies. I’ve been called simplistic for arguing this point, even from those who agree that endless war will end badly.

But it doesn’t require much imagination to see the possibilities of limiting overseas adventures, which rob our national treasury of resources that could go into long-term innovations that will help reduce our dependencies on cheap oil.

I’m not a pacifist but I do know that most wars are stupid and unnecessary. They ruin rather than create prosperity. At some point, it becomes more imperative to build and renew, to innovate and create industries that will move the nation forward than to try sustaining an economy based on cheap oil and war.

“What’s holding us back?” the waitress asked. “We all know that eventually we’ll have to consume less, innovate and create new industries that aren’t based on oil.”

“I don’t know,” I said, “no one I know is holding us back. Ours is an economy literally built on dinosaurs.”

“Well, the people at the top, the people in Congress, sure haven’t done much to move us forward.”

“You got that right,” I said. §

I'm ready for that change, Mr. President

Editor's Note: A fuller, more recent version of this story was published as the cover article in the October 2010 edition of Cold Type, an online magazine with "Writing worth reading from around the world."

As I write this, a collection agency is leaving another annoying, threatening message on the answering machine.

The voice is petulant, measured and all business.

I’ve just walked back into the house to make a call of my own after starting up my work truck—a 30-year-old beast that backfires and sputters—and finding the gas tank too close to empty to go anywhere but to a gas station.

I’m literally running on empty. Unfortunately, I don’t have any money to buy gas.

Once the publisher of a literary magazine, I now work as a farm laborer and love being outdoors and away from the crowds, but I don’t earn enough money to cover my basic expenses, nothing in my pockets, and nothing in the bank.

So I came back into the house to call my girlfriend. I need at least $10. That will get me enough gas to drive to the farm where I can put in a few hours and earn some much-needed income. I know, it’s pathetic, but what are my options?

I’ve been looking for work since the economy crashed two years ago. I’m one of the “long-termed unemployed,” those who don’t receive welfare payments and who no longer count in official unemployment figures.

I struggle to collect my thoughts but, even with the voice machine turned down, I can still hear the annoying bottom feeder trying to get money out of me.

“I’ll leave my number with you one more time in case it wasn’t clear…”

Oh, it’s clear, all right. They call six times a day. How could it not be clear? Our only recourse, given we can’t afford debt relief services, or even to file for bankruptcy, is to ignore them.

The bottom fell out of the American Dream and all we do now is hope we can pay the rent. We’re cutting way back on everything, even things we need to stay afloat—like gasoline.

Ironic, that gas has become the symbol of my worst poverty ever. Gas has always meant going places, getting things done, getting to work on time. Now, I have barely enough quarters to put a gallon in my tank.

I’ve been poor most of my life, but never like this, not to the point where I can’t buy gas to get to work.

As the nation reels from economic woes unlike anything since the Great Depression, we’re finally beginning to realize that the American empire’s attempt to control the world’s oil reserves has had a devastating impact at home.

Cheap oil isn’t cheap any more.

But neither are cell phones and phone lines, which we canceled. Whittling our expenditures hasn’t hurt so much as the grinding, demoralizing effect of not having enough money to cover our basic needs.

I’m almost certain that my circumstances are caused as much by forces beyond my control as they are by failures of character. Still, it’s hard not to feel like a loser when every day six of the 10 messages on our message machine are from collection agencies.

I heard of one collector who, when informed that his potential victim was already holding down two jobs, barked: “Well, get a third job!”

If only it were that easy.

My only consolation on days like this comes from knowing I’m not alone. I’m not alone in my poverty, my anger over government handouts to corrupt bankers, or my frustration over the lack of jobs.

Few people I know have money to spend, their savings are quickly disappearing, and they’re living on less, much less.

Numbers indicating the bleak outlook on the economy keep appearing in the news but they don’t really mean that much to me. They don’t move me in any particular way other than to say, “See, it’s the economy.” But the numbers don’t tell the real story of how so many millions of Americans are struggling.

“Unemployment rose a fraction last month to 9.6 percent,” says one recent report. Tens of thousand of jobs have been created but not enough to sustain a healthy “recovery.”

Meanwhile, bankruptcies and loan defaults continue to plague us as bankers, recently padded with taxpayer dollars, refuse to renegotiate troubled loans and mortgages.

Some prognosticators say we’ll never be the same; wages will never be as high as they once were, homes never as expensive, and banks never as loose with their money. It will be at least 10 years before we can expect a recovery.

Until then, economists say, we’re in for even leaner times, worse than what has already passed. I shudder to think about it. The unrest at home seems to be mirrored throughout the neighborhood and beyond. So many people appear, like me, unsettled, angry, and financially depleted.

The lack of a vision that upholds the interests of all Americans will do that. So will endless war and a failure of leadership. Our current president won office through the promise of change and a real hope for the future.

Sadly, I find myself echoing Sarah Palin: “How’s that hopey changey stuff workin’ for ya?”

What I’ve seen so far doesn’t inspire much hope: The middle-class in America, what’s left of it, has fallen on hard times, malcontents have hit the streets, complaining of socialists and Muslims, and religious nuts threaten to burn holy books, while the government throws billions of dollars down the drain to fight the longest war in our nation’s history.

All of the precious resources we’ve wasted on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I’m certain, have contributed to the failure of our economy—the billions of dollars that might have been spent on projects at home have surely depleted the national treasury, as did the massive bailout of the banks.

And what have we gained from it all? Where are the jobs? Where’s the money for small businesses? What’s happened to education and the infrastructures that enable fluid commerce and industry? What, really, were the benefits of two wars and the largest cash delivery in history?

Now, it seems, we stand at a precipice, where we vainly await the long, slow and elusive but hoped-for recovery. After two years, however, I’m tired of living so close to the edge of disaster.

I’m ready for that change, Mr. President.

Like millions of other Americans grappling with the demoralizing impact of poverty, I continue to hope for the best. I hope that, somehow, things will get better. Meanwhile, I’ve set my sights on lesser dreams. I’m scaling back and learning to live with less.

My girlfriend arrives in time to hear the fourth collections call of the day. She hands me $10 and a few dollar bills. “Will that be OK?” she asks.

“Fine,” I say, “I just need enough to get to work.”

As usual, we ignore the petulant caller leaving another annoying message on the machine. The collection agencies, obnoxious as they are, don’t scare us. They’re the least of our worries. §