149. Zoom-bombed

Ok, so I am old and sometimes grumpy and can’t keep up with much of electronic technology. But I can be outraged at pornography. Yesterday I had planned to read “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” at noon from the Josephy Center via Zoom. The hacking started just as people were getting on to say hello and Merry Christmas and listen to the story. It was shouts and insults and very explicit video of very young people playing at and having sex.

 

There was pornography before Covid, and political divisiveness, petty crime and homelessness. But once again Covid seems to have upped antes, broadened divisions, and emboldened those who have no use for civil society and a community of wide but healthy differences. Instead of problem solving we get escalation, even exhilaration—at the expense of civility. 

 

Covid has disrupted education and closed businesses—while making others incredibly rich. It’s confused travel plans, distanced relatives, and escalated differences within families and among nations. And it has engendered fatigue among health care workers and uncertainty and distrust among ordinary citizens. 

 

Meanwhile, weather is ripping the country apart, from California fires to Kentucky tornadoes. Climate change deniers have grown silent, but that is no compensation to the lives lost and torn apart with wind and fire. 

 

So, is zoom bombing—I learned the word for it yesterday—the pranks of bored teenagers? Or is it the calculated magnification of the voices of sick people of all ages who can’t find places in this changing, chaotic world? And if it’s that, what can those of us looking for normalcy and compassion do about it?

 

It might be another crazy thought from an old and increasingly grumpy guy, but what sprung to mind yesterday, after the shock of it, is that we need nationwide lessons in community and civility, and that doing away with the military draft not only gave us our longest wars, but further divided a fractioning country.

 

Vietnam ended—in my humble opinion—when the military ran out of poor and brown people and started after the sons of white doctors and lawyers and their PTA and Good Housekeeping moms. I say this because I marched with them, and watched their sons get drafted out of the Peace Corps. 

 

Not everyone has to be a soldier, but every 18 year-old should take a year away from parents’ homes and clean bed pans or build trails in some distant place with others doing the same damned thing. And learn to get along with the others—as soldiers have learned forever that they could.

 

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117. Pandemic, Heat, Smoke

This morning the Wallowa Valley is under a layer of smoke. It’s hard to tell whether the smoke is from Northern California, Southern Oregon, or closer Washington and Idaho fires. It follows weeks of surreal summer temperatures, over 100 degrees in June, in the upper 80s and 90s ever since. Little rain; only a brief lightning storm that ignited fires in Joseph Creek on our side of the border and across the Snake River in Idaho. 

The heat has made Wallowa Lake the warmest it’s been in my 50 years here, good for swimming, but scary for fish. Because the rivers, streams, and the ocean shores are also too warm, starfish and shellfish are dying on the coast, and salmon are threatened everywhere. 

A couple of years ago, a friend caught a tagged salmon on the Imnaha and was able to trace its journey up the Columbia as far as the Deschutes, where it found the main stem temperatures too warm and darted up that other river to cool. Weeks later it made its journey back to the Columbia and swam past four Snake River dams to the Imnaha. That’s a small miracle, but one unlikely to be repeated often enough to save a run. 

Fish don’t get their oxygen from the air, but the four-leggeds, two-leggeds, and the birds do. Dogs and people here are complaining. Like they complained about the heat; like they complained about Covid-19 and/or government-imposed restrictions. 

We’ve mostly forgotten about Covid—even the weeks of mask-wearing and fear. My fear is that we’ll forget about this heat and smoke come fall, chalk it up to an abnormal year—records are meant to be broken—or maybe it was that weird el nino current—and go about our business 

We’ll plan new vacations now with travel restrictions lifted; we’ll build more houses in the trees, and we’ll get new air conditioners. 

Or will Napa Valley people move north en masse? Will the broader public embrace the vaccines, build better health care and child care systems, and look for safer places and ways to build their houses?

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114. And the World Goes on....

Las Vegas, short on water, is imposing a ban on “useless grass.” Brown lawns and alternative plant-scaping are popular in rainy Portland. John Wesley Powell said—over 100 years ago—that most of the West was dry and unfit for agriculture. He thought that much of the West should be left to “barbarous” Indians, who could make their way in it. Powell, like many men of science in his day, was racist; he divided the world’s peoples into the savage, the barbarous, and the civilized. His views on land-use hold up better than his views on race and culture. 

Drought conditions continue to plague the West, CO2 levels in the atmosphere are rising, global temperatures making the same upward ride, and we are bracing for another big wildfire season. 

Meanwhile, economies are “opening,” the local restaurants are full, and the license plates on Main Street in Joseph say North Carolina, Alaska, and Texas as well as the familiar Idaho and Washington. 

House prices in our state and county continue to rise with the temperature. There are large new houses on the hill outside of Enterprise; it’s been platted for years, but the urban-suburban flight seems to have ignited development now. There is also a new housing development of over forty lots at the edge of Joseph. 

Covid-19 itself, morphing and mutating as it reaches the farthest corners of the globe, is still here. Like water flowing downhill, Covid follows paths towards human density and poverty There are talks and plans about getting vaccine to these global hot spots, but it’s a daunting task; there are so many of them in Central and South America, in India, Malaysia. Some of the smaller countries that had escaped the first waves with strict practices of distancing masking, and isolating have opened up to economics—and the Covid. 

In our own country the vaccine deniers and resisters are still with us. And although the numbers of infections and deaths continue a downward trend, the disease is still here, and still mutating. Are the continuing Covid deaths totally or largely among the unvaccinated? I’ve not seen any statistics on that. 

Unfortunately, even if statistics showed that the vaccinated are not getting sick and not dying, while much higher numbers of the unvaccinated are, it would probably move into more rancor. 

We remain stubbornly divided. 

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