A Travesty by the Department of Justice

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Department of Justice has chosen to green light the Bayer-Monsanto merger despite widespread opposition from farmers and other stakeholders across the country. The news comes after the delivery of more than 1 million public comments opposing the merger.  A recent survey of farmers found that 93% of farmers are against the merger. After the merger, only four companies will control the vast majority of seeds and agrochemicals, threatening farmers, consumers and the environment.

A Poem and Prayer

God of Creation
There at the start
Before the beginning of time
With no point of reference
You spoke to the dark
And fleshed out the wonder of light
And as you speak
A hundred million galaxies are born
In the vapour of your breath
The planets form
If the stars were made to worship
So will I
I can see your heart in everything you've made
Every burning star
A signal of fire and grace
If creation sings your praises
So will I

Florida lumber industry

Back in the late 1800's and early 1900's, I believe the state of Florida was exploited by several industries for its resources. One resource in particular was lumber. Companies set up towns all over Florida for living quarters for their workers and built a saw mill around it. Once the lumber was depleted in an area, usually a span of 10 years or so, the company moved the town and mill where the resource was plentiful. One such lumber town was known as Sumica, an acronym for the French Company Societe Universelle Commerce de Mines Industrie et Agriculture. Some remains still exist at Sumica - the concrete structures that apparently supported tools of the sawmill.

2nd Visit

My 2nd visit to the Giddens Cemetery, also in Hernando County, in the Withlacoochee State Forest. An attempt has been made to locate the Giddens homestead, but no cultural remains have ever been found.

Nature

"A margin of life is developed by Nature for all living things - including man. All life forms obey Nature's demands - except man, who has found ways of ignoring them."
- Eugene M. Poirot

Climate Change

Climate change is negatively affecting every aspect of our world … including the Winter Olympics. A recent study found that of 21 former Winter Olympic cities, nine of them — that’s almost half — may be too warm to support the winter games 30 years from now.

Boomers

I am one of the seventy-six million babies born in the United States between 1946 and 1964, a Baby Boomer, the generation once called the pig in the python, the bulge in the snake, not the first generation to be tagged as a generation, as the “Lost Generation” and the “Silent Generation” preceded us, but perhaps the first generation to be aware of ourselves as a generation. 

We are also the “Me Generation”, privileged as other generations had not been, raised in post-war affluence with a sense of our generational superiority to the sleepy repressed stiffs littering the world and workplace, keenly aware of ourselves as the new generation. Thus, the “generation gap” emerging at the end of the 1960’s as we believed ourselves the champions of social awareness and humanitarian progress battling the useless vestiges of antequated, social conventions and convictions.

 

We had a moment, somewhere between Watts and Detroit and Newark and Nixon’s resignation, when we might have made a difference. For all of our pride in our highly evolved sensibilities and sensitivities, we became a lost generation ourselves, a hedonistic, self-serving bulge, taking up space, distracted by pleasure.

We became the generation that did not recognize itself. What happened, we wonder? Weren’t we the generation that would change the world?

Look around. I’m afraid we did.

We believed in progress, that every subsequent age would continue to flourish as ours had done, but we did not hold the opportunities given to us in trust for those who came next. We liked the idea of an increasingly comfortable world so much that we wallowed in it without securing the future. We knew the environment was fragile. We knew natural resources were limited. We knew that cities built in the desert would need water. We knew garbage had to end up somewhere. We knew people lived in poverty and violence. We knew the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. We knew we were 

distracting ourselves with mindless pleasures. We knew that schools had become warehouses. We knew that children went to bed hungry.

We made a lot of noise in the 1960’s, but what remains? John Steinbeck wrote of the dignity shown by hard-working people of good will; the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. broke the silence of the Silent Generation with words that took us to the mountain. Where is our voice now? We once heard Dylan, but now, perhaps hear Stephen King spinning dark tales of fun house world and stalking killer clowns.

We are perched now on a thin branch at the top of a tall tree. The eldest of us are now seniors, seventy years old, retired, hoping that in these “golden” days, seventy-five is the new fifty.

I’m pretty sure it isn’t, but life isn’t over yet for many of us. Maybe there’s time enough to circle back and put a few things right, plant a few trees to provide shade for children we will never know. We’re outnumbered now, finally; Millennial’s are the current bulge, and our python is looking flatter with every passing year.