Mourning our Co+op - and Dreaming of a New One

Requiescat in pace, Mountain View Market Co+op (1975-2020). We’ll miss you!

Often we’re fighting various internal and external battles. Battles to be slender or build muscle or be more mindful in everyday life; battles to avoid letting the worst of our “culture” (fast food, television, greed, racism, hyperpartisanship) poison us in one way or another. Efforts to be a healthier person help us become a healthier community.

In several such battles, I leaned on the Co+Op, where I could conveniently buy local, healthy food from friendly people. I often bicycled there; and if I drove, I didn’t waste much gas. We also saved bucks by buying in bulk – ordering non-perishable items in large quantities.

The Co+Op, along with the Farmers Market and Toucan, helped me maintain a healthy lifestyle. We buy the Solbergs’ local honey. Frequently my breakfast is local raw milk on local granola with local strawberries, plus Co+Op blueberries.

We lunch on salads and vegetables, mixing what we grow with what our great local farmers grow – often adding tasty Co+Op to-go items. Local honey is not only beautiful and tasty, but can help folks who live here deal with allergies. Everything’s fresher and tastier; I can ask local growers about pesticide use; and we haven’t wasted a bunch of precious energy moving food from farm to city and thence to here. Too, my few dollars go into the local economy, not to an endless chain of distant middlefolks. 

I’ll also miss the great soups, and running into old friends, including state legislators conferring, or hunched over their laptops.

The Co+Op was special, and not just for its convenience and healthy food. The Co+Op was owned and overseen by us, its members. Major decisions got made by the community, not by distant and faceless corporate executives. Not all of those local decisions were prudent, unfortunately; but what killed the Co+Op was that otherwise good and thoughtful people found it more convenient to buy their groceries from the big box stores.

Cooperatives adhere to these basic rules: voluntary and open membership; democratic member control, with each member having one vote; autonomy and independence; concern for community; and education, training and information.

A corporation’s basic rule is to maximize shareholder profit. We’re under huge pressure to get all our food, drink, and medicine from a few huge international corporations that don’t give a damn about us and have proven quite ready to gyp us when possible and poison us for an extra penny on each $10 bill. They have economic power and flood our airwaves with powerful advertising. If locally grown or made items don’t help the bottom line, you won’t find it at the chain. At the Co+op, you could ask questions and even order “off the menu.” Co+Op workers worked for US.

I like local. Coffee’s at Milagro or Beck’s, not Starbucks. I buy books from Coas, baked goods and breakfasts at Nessa’s, and huevos rancheros at Nopalito, or Habañero’s. For hardware, I look first at Hayden’s.

One Co+op member said, “This is the best store there ever was. I'm grateful I could be a part of it. I'm fortunate my parents cared about this place and bought their kids lifetime memberships when I was five. This place has helped define who I am."

Maybe RIP is the wrong phrase. “Vivat Phoenix?” Many of us are determined that a newer, slimmer Co+Op will emerge from the ashes of 2020.

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[The above column appeared this morning, Sunday, 29 November 2020, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, as well as on the newspaper's website and KRWG’s website. A related radio commentary will air during the week on KRWG (90.7) and KTAL-LP. (101.5 – http://www.lccommunityradio.org/), and will be available on demand on KRWG’s site. ]

[I’m obviously mourning the Co+Op; and offering condolences to the folks who knew and loved the place a lot longer than I, and who made it what it was. (I was still here when it was founded, but doubt I was particularly thoughtful about my food in those days.)  My wife and I joined even before we returned here to live. (Well, I returned. She had visited here with me, and delighted to move here.) I do hope that we can start something like it in the foreseeable future. A simpler place, with more emphasis on bulk-buying, but at least with a cafe again and a meeting-room folks can use for community meetings, readings, book clubs, and what-not. Unfortunately, I’m no businessman.]

Thanksgiving in a Time of Cholera

Thanksgiving is Thursday. Even in pandemic times, there’s much to be grateful for.

My relationship with Thanksgiving has varied. Of course I loved it as a kid. We enjoyed family gatherings with aunts, uncles, and cousins who lived elsewhere.

What lingers in memory as the Platonic ideal of “Thanksgiving” is a national magazine’s 1953 cover, a Rockwellish painting of my immediate family, plus several neighbors and strangers to make it look more festive. The artist painted it from a photograph he had taken of us in a neighbor’s beautiful old-fashioned dining room. In the foreground, as the family says grace, I’m slyly reaching with one hand to steal an olive and my father’s right hand is extended to warn me that he’ll slap me if I do. (I was young enough to complain to the artist, “But I don’t like olives!”)

In maybe 1956, we watched the Macy’s Parade. The only place open for Thanksgiving Dinner was the Horn & Hardart Automat, delighting us kids, though not Mother. Outside, a ragged man was sleeping one off. Mother bought a wrapped turkey sandwich and left it beside him.

Other Thanksgivings had their own magic; but the story about the pilgrims thanking the Indians seemed less moving as I learned more about how whites treated the tribes.

Later, I cared little about Thanksgiving, and liked being alone. Sometimes someone would invite me, convinced that being alone on Thanksgiving was terrible.

On Thanksgiving 1974, Las Cruces Mayor Bob Munson and his wife, Diana, invited me – and I had a great time. 

 I’ve spent some Thanksgivings in countries that knew little of it. In 1984, traveling on Thanksgiving in 1984, I saw in the Korea Times two photos whose proximity made an eloquent statement: a starving Ethiopian mother-and-child and a chubby two-year-old awaiting Thanksgiving turkey in Paradise, PA.

The happiest Thanksgiving was the November I met my wife.

More recently we’ve spent Thanksgivings in the home of a poet and an artist, with their family and mutual friends. Everyone contributes. One young man makes irresistible apple pies. Between the main meal and consuming those pies, with ice cream, we walk along the river, gabbing and tossing a football. Not this year. Zoom can’t match that pie!

All of which is to urge everyone: DON’T DO IT!

Please celebrate your wonderful circle of family and friends by helping increase the odds they’ll be around next Thanksgiving. Many people plan to attend Thanksgiving gatherings with at least ten people. At a 10-person gathering one has a 40% chance of running into someone who’s COVID-19-positive. It’s nearer 15% in some coastal cities, 60% in Chicago, and nearly 90% in El Paso. Doña Ana County? 93%!

Masks, staying outdoors, and seating different households separately could decrease the probability of infection. But as we get more festive, perhaps with alcohol, inhibitions weaken. (A lot of babies get conceived that way!) Masks could start feeling silly.

If your family or friends eschew masks, your odds of celebrating Christmas in quarantine or an overtaxed hospital go way up. Tuesday New Mexico’s record 2,112 new cases was hundreds higher than the previous record; then on Thursday, we counted 3,675! A 12-year-old New Mexican died last week. Our county took 77 days to record 20 deaths, 21 days to go from 60-80, then six to reach 100.

Anyway, Happy Thanksgiving! We’ve a lot to be grateful for. Let’s keep it that way.

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[The above column appeared this morning, Sunday, 22 November 2020, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, as well as on the newspaper's website on the newspaper’s website and KRWG’s website. A related radio commentary will air during the week on KRWG and KTAL-LP.] (http://www.lccommunityradio.org/), and will be available on demand on KRWG’s site. ]

[Somewhere around, I have the magazine with our ideal “Thanksgiving” on the cover. It’s such a perfect vision of the early 1950’s. Wish I knew exactly where it is - but I also have to insert a clarification here: limited to 570 words, I used the phrase, "

a Rockwellish painting" meaning to invoke a famous style but make clear that the artist was not Norman Rockwell himself.  A couple of friends
assumed our family was in the Rockwell painting on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, or asked me if we were.  No.  Ours was something like Family Circle or Modern Family or something.  And it could have been 1952, maybe even 1954.  I assume my friends were referring to Rockwell's 1943 Freedom from Want, one of his famous Four Freedoms paintings made before I was born, although he also had a Saturday Evening Post cover, Saying Grace, in which a mother

and son (inspired by Mennonites a friend had seen praying in a restaurant) are praying, observed by others sharing their table in the crowded restaurant.]  The artist who painted us was a fellow resident of Croton-on-Hudson, a friend or acquaintance; and he posed us with the others as sort of a Platonic ideal of Thanksgiving, but added the very Rockwellish touch of having me (with my right hand still up by my face, as if praying) reach with my left hand for an olive, while my father has silently stretched our his right arm in a menacing way.)]

[ Glancing at this morning’s Sun-News on line confirmed that Las Crucens are suffering and that hospitals are overtaxed. Hospitals reported they were at capacity a while ago, and numbers of cases then spiked dramatically. I’ve inserted a screen-grab of that page below, and here’s a link to Bethany Freudenthal's story on the hospital situation here.]

[I know that some believe perhaps we make too much of the virus, and should simply shoot for herd immunity. The vast majority of scientists, and perhaps all virologists, disagree with that approach. I’m no scientist, but how many people would we have to kill off, and how many medical folks would be dead or hurt by the virus, before we reached that goal? What no one who refuses to wear a mask has yet managed to explain to me is why the minor inconvenience of a mask outweighs the risk of doing harm to many others? Seems to me, even if it isn’t 100% clear that widespread use of masks decrease spread of COVID-19 in a community (as so many studies and the great weight of scientific opinion indicate), why not bear that small inconvenience on the chance that it could save a life?]

Maximilian Sunflower Seeds Make a Great Thanksgiving Dinner If You're a Goldfinch

Note: the Rockwell images above are thanks to Wikipedia. 

 

Trump Whines about Election Loss while People Die

 The nation is on COVID-19 red alert and our national leadership has gone AWOL.

The nation and our state are seeing such a spike that hospitals are overtaxed. New Mexico set daily new case records of 1,287 (Friday), 1,418 (Monday), and 1,753 Thursday. Doña Ana County took 77 days to go from 1 death to 20, 21 days to go from 60 to 80, and six days to go from 80 to 100 DEATHS. New Mexico had 182 deaths in the past two weeks, 143% of the 75 during the previous two. The nation recorded a million new cases the first ten days of November, and infection rates are still rising.

Meanwhile, the President is playing golf and tweeting angrily about imaginary election fraud. The VP, nominal head of the coronavirus task force, is also searching for some shred of evidence of fraud.

What we’re seeing on Trump’s way out the door illustrates perfectly who he is.

He’s so emotionally devastated by his clear and public loss that he can’t function, or show his face. (He’s also tired of shouting “You’re fired!” at the virus.) He lost by five million votes and probably 306-232 in the electoral college, and he’s responding by like a child kicking and screaming – a Trumpish twitter tantrum.

It’s not just embarrassing. He’s doing real harm. He fired his Defense Secretary, with two months left, sending adversaries a message of vulnerability and impeding the transition to the Biden Administration.

Good government experts and both political parties agree that a smooth transition is essential, given the size and complexity of our government and the issues facing it, but Trump’s refused. “It’s my football, so I get to make the rules!” No release of information or transition funds to the President-Elect. (Biden is working hard anyway, but a real leader would share information, while perhaps stating that he was not thereby accepting the unofficial voting totals.) U.S. Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) has threatened to step in if Biden doesn’t start receiving Presidential briefings.

Trump’s allies fear he may even release classified information, or go on a firing spree, just to feel powerful.

For four years, while Trump’s acted like a spoiled child, defenders have said he’s helping the economy and protecting unborn children and our borders. Just what is he doing for us now? This unnecessary foot-dragging and name-calling can’t help our national security (or fighting the virus) – and has nearly zero chance of changing the result in any state, let alone the several he’d need to catch Biden.

Republican leaders seem too intimidated to retain any principles. Senators are asking mutual friends to congratulate President-Elect Biden for them, and apologizing for not doing so publicly. After years of telling his opponents to swallow their “feelings” and live with it, Trump wants everyone to stop everything and cater to his feelings about losing.

I regret writing about Trump yet again. However, it seems useful to stress – lest he try again to capitalize on people’s anger – this graceless, futile behavior. Overturning elections is what dictators do. If Trump were a bit smarter, or had weakened our country a little more beforehand, he might have succeeded. It’ll take Biden, and future presidents, much hard work to repair the damage to our democracy.

Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Trump golfs and whines while Americans die. If you care about our country, it’s time to mask up and move on.

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[The above column appeared this morning, Sunday, 15 November 2020, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, as well as on the newspaper's website and KRWG’s website. A related radio commentary will air during the week on KRWG and KTAL-LP.] (http://www.lccommunityradio.org/), and will be available on demand on KRWG’s site. ]

[We’re locking down again. If everyone would wear masks, resist the temptation to gather, maintain appropriate distances, and wash hands, we’d blunt this spike. By now it should be obvious to all concerned that this thing is serious. I’d hope even folks who disbelieve the science or dislike the Governor, or think mask-wearing is unmanly or disloyal to Mr. Trump would start wearing the damned things just out of civic responsibility, state pride, or as a way to have their counties open for more business faster. It’s in everyone’s interest to wear the masks. And if the prevailing scientific view is wrong about masks, it can’t be wrong about impeding virus transmission by staying away from each other except when necessary. (I’ll

maximilian sunflower seeds - delicious!

admit that this morning, Sunday, I’ll try to get in a last day of pickleball for awhile, though masked, and that on Thanksgiving we’ll gather with just two other people, outdoors, at an appropriate distance from each other. I’ll also go to the radio station (weekly) and occasionally (subject to shifting NM Supreme Court rules) to court, where almost all the defendants appear by phone/video. But journalism is classed as “essential,” and there are no unnecessary human beings in either place. But I’m always masked.

We’ve seen this virus tear apart families of all classes and political persuasions, and that’s damned painful.]

[Biden apparently has 306 electoral votes.  In 2016, that was a "landslide," as Mr. Trump bragged. Since I sent this column in to the Sun-News, Trump has acknowledged in a Tweet that Biden got more votes, but asserted that that’s only because the election was rigged by “Radical Left Dems.” He’s railing against the folks counting the votes (a Republican Secretary of State in Georgia, for example) and the company that made the voting machines. A Republican election official in Pennsylvania received death threats from Trumpists. It’s an embarrassing mess.

I’m betting Trump departs from custom and does not attend the Inauguration. By contrast, someone has dug up the concession speech George W. Bush had prepared in 2000 but ultimately did not have to deliver because of Supreme Court intervention in Florida’s recount. He offered his congratulations to “my adversary who is no longer my adversary, but is President of the United States.”]

 

We've Chosen a Better Direction, but We're Still in Plenty of Trouble

 

My last pre-election column ended by predicting that we would “stumble out of the woods in the right direction.” Mr. Biden has won the popular vote by well over 4 million votes. Apparently he’ll garner between 275 and 306 electoral votes. Donald Trump’s threats and whining are a fleeting national embarrassment.

I hoped we’d “begin to deal like grownups with a host of serious problem,” adding, “If nothing else, losing Mr. Trump will make everything so much quieter!” Already I doubt the former, and my faith in the latter is wobbling.

We’re well rid of Trump, but we still have Mitch McConnell. Political discourse remains exceptionally rancorous; and we’re awash in a sea of irrational disinformation. A Republican Senate will prevent much progress, and might bar judicial appointments for four years.

But let’s zoom out from partisan politics. I wish we could each spend a day alone in Chaco Canyon, strolling through silent, sunlit remains of a complex society. Our far more complex society is so specialized that we can’t understand our son’s or neighbor’s work.

For centuries, folks have longed for the simpler, slower, steadier past. In the U.S., many envision the simpler nation of farmers and artisans we were in 1776. We produced much of what we needed and our shoes were made by a man we knew and trusted and who depended on us for eggs or wagon wheels, and a web of family, community, and church, supported us. But to stay independent, and improve our lives, we developed an increasingly complex society.

Complexity solves problems, but creates others. If our meat doesn’t come from my brother-in-law’s farm, butchered by our neighbor, but from distant farms through Chicago capitalists to me, someone (government) must ensure all those folks treat that meat carefully. If industries add methane or mercury to our air or water, someone must regulate that.

But a specialized society dependent complex systems is vulnerable, as this pandemic has reminded us. What would we do if we lost power or the Internet for a substantial period, or if a volcanic eruption or dust from a meteor’s impact blocked the sun’s rays for months?

History is littered with complex societies that failed. Modern global interconnectedness means any economic failure is global.

If COVID-19 were slightly deadlier and had a slightly higher R-naught, we’d be suffering even more seriously. When rising seas flood our cities (and millions are fleeing Bangladesh and other low-lying lands), and New Mexico’s land is no long arable, where do we go? People left Chaco Canyon and started again elsewhere. Now, there are others living anywhere we might go.

I agree with the young socialists and the older Trumpists that our government is highly imperfect. I regret this pandemic, although chance has sparing me (so far) significant suffering. I too long for a simpler and greener time, with less noise.

The smaller, simpler government the U.S. started with wouldn’t fit us any better than the pants we wore at age ten.

The answer is not to hide our heads in the sand. The answer to COVID-19 is not to abandon science. (COVID-21 could be worse.) Nor was the answer turning our government over to a narcissistic con artist.

Many Trump voters are angry about real problems; but they’ve been sold some dubious explanations.

Part of the answer is to think critically, and communicate as if our survival depends on it. It does!

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[The above column appeared this morning, Sunday, 8 November 2020, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, as well as on the newspaper's website the newspaper’s website and KRWG's site. A related radio commentary will air during the week on KRWG and KTAL-LP.] (http://www.lccommunityradio.org/), and will be available on demand on KRWG’s site. ]

[I just watched a clip of Van Jones's tears and words. He starts by saying it’s easier to be a parent this morning, and to tell your son character matters, and as he continues he’s wiping away tears. What he’s saying and how powerfully he’s feeling it make an eloquent statement, probably an image that all should share and that should stay with us down through history.]

[Still, we have huge problems to confront; and though Biden’s Administration will confront them more squarely, sensibly, and creatively, with more interest in real solutions in the national interest than Mr. Trump ever mustered, I’m pessimistic. The problems are damned hard; and on many, such as global warming, that should not be political, the almost certain Republican Senate majority will be an anchor around our neck. Mitch McConnell seems to be one of the most purely self-interested public figures this side of Donald Trump, and he’s a whole lot cagier.]

[Too, our system has deeply alienated many people of all political points-of-view. We need to reach out, in a variety of ways. There’s a lot to do.]

Finally! Can We Jettison this Clown? - Then Repair our Democracy?

 Tuesday is a huge fork in the road.

We might continue this self-destructive experiment with a “president” who cares nothing for law, ethics, tolerance, democracy, or honor (including honorable military service). He ignores the nation’s interest, if it conflicts at all with his.

Most Republican leaders have jettisoned ethics, convictions, and independence to cater to his whims. Somewhat understandably. He’s attacked his own appointees for letting some vestige of ethics impede their slavish obedience. Think Attorney-General Senator Jeff Sessions, first U.S. Senator to endorse Trump in 2016, who had to recuse himself from pretending to investigate his boss. Trump insulted him repeatedly, then fired him.

Sessions’s eventual replacement, far-right William Barr, has lied repeatedly for Trump. By misleadingly “summarizing” the Mueller Report before it was made public, Barr conned people into believing it “whitewashed” Trump; Barr tried to have the U.S. Justice Department defend Mr. Trump in a personal lawsuit by a woman Trump allegedly raped; and federal prosecutors, in an unprecedented move, tried to un-convict Trumpist Michael Flynn, who had pled guilty to perjury. Now Trump wants Barr to investigate Biden. Investigating political adversaries to help the Leader is for dictatorships. It’s not done here. So far, Barr hasn’t done it. Despite all Barr’s dishonest actions to help Trump, Trump is publicly scolding him like a misbehaving dog.

But Mr. Trump is a distraction from the very real issues we face.

The pandemic is one. As we experience record numbers of COVID-19 infections, far beyond what we’d seen, Trump is proclaiming we’re past it. His science officer recently listed “ending the pandemic” as one of Trump’s top accomplishments. The U.S. suffers infections and deaths at a disproportionate rate, as 4% of the world population experiencing more than 20% of the world’s pandemic dead. Trump offers no colorable explanation for our poor record. His poor record.

We’re already seeing global warming’s effects. Ask the military how it’s tryuing to adjust. In Florida, Iowa, and a few other spots, even Republicans are deeply concerned. We’re past being able to prevent warming, but can try to mitigate the damage. Doing so, while balancing that urgent work with economic and other problems, will require creative solutions and bipartisan political will. Trump thinks warming is another hoax.

Maintaining our best possible position among the world’s nations is another significant but complex issue. The increased international respect that Barack Obama brought us is gone, but this problem isn’t just Trump. We’ve been the preeminent nation since World War II; in my youth we were 6% of the world’s population and had about 60% of its goods. That would have changed under any leadership. The problem has been to maintain the best position we can, remaining an influential world leader. But we can and should be one of the most influential nations. That work can resume after Trump, but was never going to be simple.

Political differences (larger or smaller government, how much to protect consumers or the environment) aside, Trump and his Republican enablers threaten our democracy. Of all the traditional safeguards – separation of powers, Supreme Court, FBI, the congressionally-created Inspectors General, the free press, the State Department, objective government scientists, the rule of law – can you name one Trump hasn’t attacked and significantly weakened?

I believe we will stumble out of the woods in the right direction. I believe we will choose decency, fairness, and competence. But I’ll be sweating it out.

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[The above column appeared this morning, Sunday, 1 November 2020, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, as well as on the newspaper’s website and KRWG’s website. A related radio commentary will air during the week on KRWG and KTRAL-LP (http://www.lccommunityradio.org/), and will be available on demand on KRWG’s site. ]

[We should never imagine that Trump is our sole problem; and I share concerns that, Trump or no Trump, our democracy is not as fair or democratic as so many believe it to be; but Trump’s weakening of the safeguards our parents depended on, and his inability or unwillingness to recognize boundaries created by law, ethics, or common humanity, are extreme and dangerous, particularly when so many aid and abet him. I recommend the book How Democracies Die, which is not about Mr. Trump and rarely if ever mentions him; and a recent piece, to which I’ve lost the URL, looks at the last four years through the eyes of a national security export whose career has involved examining other countries’ governments’ levels of actual democracy. She runs through all the standard red flags – the leader’s lack of respect for law, the subservience to him of other officials, and several others she would normally review in assessing a country, and concludes that if she saw conduct similar to Trump’s in some other country she’d report that democracy was in trouble there.]