Day 3

When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was "Superweasel". It was published the year I was born, 1974, when the environmental movement was taking off. The story is about a kid, Alvin Fernald, who's given an assignment by his teacher to come up with an idea to help the environment. Other kids are collecting newspapers for recycling and cleaning up vacant lots, but Alvin decides to become an environmental super hero, Superweasel, who takes on the city's biggest polluters. He dams a small river that a large factory is dumping waste into so that it backs up into the factory and causes the plant to shut down. He also, with the help of his best friend and his little sister, throws dead fish killed by the chemicals into the swimming pool of the company's owner. On another night, he climbs the smokestack of a manufacturer across town and blocks it so that smoke pours below, sending workers fleeing for fresh air. This continues and at the end of the book, he hangs up his costume, fish have come back to the river, and he gets an A on his report as the teacher is the only one who figures out his identity.

I can remember wishing I could do something like this. The adventure and the secrecy and going against the machine of the rich and powerful, but all for something so clearly important. I have a feeling a lot of kids my age felt the same. Then they grew up, and there's still a huge animosity toward being responsible toward the environment, and it seems like an environmental super hero is in order. But when they act on these things, suddenly there's a new name for Superweasel: Eco-terrorist.

I was speaking with someone the other day and they were saying something about the 'New Green Movement'. I thought to myself, it's been around as long as I have. Superweasel, The Lorax by Dr. Suess, the crying Indian commercial (who actually was an Italian immigrant who adopted a Native American persona early in his acting career). It's marketing. The green movement didn't start in most people's minds until they were able to label it, wrap it up, and sell it. Before it was only something to teach little kids in funny stories that of course aren't real. It's cute to protect the trees and the rivers and the animals, until you're old enough to understand that there is money to be made in their destruction.

When I was in grad school, I worked on my Father-in-law's farm to make money through the summer, and once a neighbor gave me this advice: "If you ever find an endangered animal or plant on your farm, kill it right then and there, because if the EPA finds out, it'll ruin your life." The fact that a small town family farmer has this attitude is proof we've failed in the moral dilemma Jimmy Carter warned us of in his Malaise Speech. It reads as if it was given in Denver a few days ago. As if, thirty years later, this is new stuff to us. Will we take a moral and responsible stand on how we do business and operate government and take care of the environment, or will we simply become a nation of consumers filling up the void of our lives with stuff? I guess you have the answer now, Mr. Carter.

But even with the 'new awareness' of all things green, the marketing whizzes and the spin doctors have tapped into this and are profiting beautifully. Here in Oregon, the Toyota Prius has become a symbol of that green consumerism. Never mind the issue of battery disposal. Never mind that the carbon footprint used in making those new cars is larger than the energy saved while driving it. It's an outward show that you care and are willing to spend money for the cause. It shows that when faced with a dire situation, our answer is to buy more stuff. It's a way to ease our consciences. Seven years ago, after 9-11, our answer to Al-qaeda was to buy things. Travel. Buy new cars. Spend your money in a vigilant act of patriotism. If there was an alien invasion, the ad agencies would have us running to the stores in droves.

Even on my most optimistic days, it seems hopeless. It makes me long for childhood, when keeping the air and the water clean and the trees green seemed like something as obvious as breathing, something outside the reach of profit margins and marketing. A time when waste was something you were admonished for instead of rewarded. When the heroes were Jimmy Carter and Superweasel. It's a good thing I still have my copy of that book from when I was a kid, because even if I wanted to buy it new in a modern show of support for environmental literature, it's out of print.

Day 1

I guess it's fitting that I'm starting this on a Wednesday as I was born on a Wednesday. The children's rhyme says that Wednesday's child is full of woe. I'm sure there are lots of people out there born on hump day that claim this isn't true, that it's prejudice against mid-week births. But I read it and tend to say, yeah, it's not far off. Even on my happiest of days, and there are many, there's an underlying melancholy beneath it all. My youngest son, Connor, was born on a Wednesday. He seems happy, though he's a loner and prefers to play by himself in the backyard, imagining some other world, talking to himself in hushed tones. He also has a brutal temper that appears from nothing in a split second. It's like looking in a mirror.

I was thinking about another children's rhyme the other day when I saw four crows in the street in front of our house. The one about counting blackbirds to see what their meaning is: one for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy, five for silver, six for gold, seven for a story that's never been told. Seven seems the most romantic, but you never see seven crows together. Mostly it's one. I had two Irish friends in grad school, Shane and Niamh, and one night at a party, standing under a covered porch in a downpour, they told me that in Ireland when you see a crow you always start looking for another one so that it becomes something other than sorrow. When we saw the crows in our street, my oldest son, Cormac, asked what four birds meant, so I went through the rhyme and said, four for a boy. He replied, "It's me. I'm the boy." I said, "Well, it could be Connor, or even me. I'm a boy." But he said calm and confident, "No dad. It's me." He was born on a Tuesday. Full of grace.