It amazes and saddens me to watch the frenzy whipped up over Muslims, mosques, burkas, and all things Islamic in our (Western) world today. The worlds fastest growing religion seems poised to "take over the world," one country at a time. Commentators here in the US and Canada monger fear and hate, pointing to the least significant thing, making it a cause to rally against.
We still call to mind images of 9/11, ten years after the event. Does no one remember this war when the first battles were fought, the bombing of Berlin night club and Rome airport? Does PO2 Steadman, one of the first casualties, not deserve a place of honor in this war? And the bombing of the Marines in Beirut, and answer to our bombing Libya from the sea?
The current world situation has little to do with religion, and everything to do with power. Islamic conservatives also happen to be in power in several countries, and they are, as counties do, trying to extend their influence in trade and governance over their neighbors. We do it, thought force of arms; that is our way. They do it through subversive methods, involving patriots and zealots into a cause they manufacture to be religious; that is their way. The story is the same, written by a different hand, that is all.
Should we be in Iraq? Unreservedly, no. That war was a simple, open grab for another people's lands and ways. We had no idea as to what we were getting into, or what we were going to do once we get their.
Should we be in Afghanistan? Much more complicated. This is when the enemy has it's roots, and in a modern world, borders are vanishing in spite of dieing efforts of some to shore them up. The future is borderless. If culture, trade, and finance becomes truly global, then borders will be meaningless lines on maps, ignored by people and money. But for now, we know where the bad guys are, we just can't root him out.
Realize that in all cases where two antagonists meet in conflict, even if one is wholly victorious over the other, just meeting in the contest changes all parties. Even all the while, as we try the Islamic zealots, the meeting of cultures is changing Islam. If we can get over our moral cowardice, and meet the issues head-on, we will find a people changed from those we first met at Beirut, and Libya, and finally 9/11. Maybe we should try talking a little before we continue the shooting.
Monday, August 9, 2010
Time, redux
My recuperation in Canada is now over. I must return to the world of the working this week, a long trip of several days drive, then almost immediately into the the workplace fire. Am I ready?
A little more than two months ago I was a slab of meat on a hospital bed, unable to move my legs, and scared to death. Today I can walk and move about, mostly without the use of a cane if in the house. I have been able to stay the whole day without having a nap, another improvement. Yet I still don't sleep through the night, medication be damned.
I have worries that maybe it is time to "pull the plug," to change to a more sedentary lifestyle, one that allows for naps and daysleep, and moving about only if I feel up to it. Maybe retirement is the answer after all.
I feel there is more to give. I love teaching, and want to continue to do so. The youth of my community are reaching out for roll models, for teachers that understand and want to lead them, not yell at them. I have an intense sense of self-reward form watching the young people in my classes grow, even over just the one year I have them, and I feel privileged to be in some small way connected to their lives.
I go back into it with a profound feeling of sadness that I do not think I will be able to handle the pressures and give-and-take of everyday work. What then? I fear.
I fear that life is changing me, changing around me, and I have no control. All the things I was warned about years ago when I got this wound originally, after 20 years, are all coming true. I thought I had beaten the Beast, that I was leading a normal, fruitful life after all. Then, it comes back to me, changing me, beating me after all.
I tell my students that sometimes things happen over which we have no control. Prepare for life, I tell them, and meet it head on. Now it is time to take some of my own advise.
Crow.
A little more than two months ago I was a slab of meat on a hospital bed, unable to move my legs, and scared to death. Today I can walk and move about, mostly without the use of a cane if in the house. I have been able to stay the whole day without having a nap, another improvement. Yet I still don't sleep through the night, medication be damned.
I have worries that maybe it is time to "pull the plug," to change to a more sedentary lifestyle, one that allows for naps and daysleep, and moving about only if I feel up to it. Maybe retirement is the answer after all.
I feel there is more to give. I love teaching, and want to continue to do so. The youth of my community are reaching out for roll models, for teachers that understand and want to lead them, not yell at them. I have an intense sense of self-reward form watching the young people in my classes grow, even over just the one year I have them, and I feel privileged to be in some small way connected to their lives.
I go back into it with a profound feeling of sadness that I do not think I will be able to handle the pressures and give-and-take of everyday work. What then? I fear.
I fear that life is changing me, changing around me, and I have no control. All the things I was warned about years ago when I got this wound originally, after 20 years, are all coming true. I thought I had beaten the Beast, that I was leading a normal, fruitful life after all. Then, it comes back to me, changing me, beating me after all.
I tell my students that sometimes things happen over which we have no control. Prepare for life, I tell them, and meet it head on. Now it is time to take some of my own advise.
Crow.
Sunday, August 1, 2010
Sudbury Saturday Night
We spent the week in Sudbury, Ontario, the site of what remains the richest combined nickel and copper deposits in the world, along with platinum, gold, gallium, and one of the world's only supplies of rhodium. We toured one of the older mines, which has been modernized to show how mines are run today, which was something just this side of profound.
The tunnels were chiseled out of hard granite and gneiss, with wire mess holding up the walls, and electric light showing the way. There was water dripping constantly, and we walked in shallow puddles of it throughout the tour. I suddenly got a real appreciation for water removal in mines!
We also got to sit in a rescue station for a few minutes... quite eerie, and when the guide turned off the lights to give the visitors a feel for how dark it is several hundred feet under the surface, I was back on the boat in a flash. The lights were off only seconds, but I had already gone through my emergency drill for the sub in my mind, and knew what my next move was when they came back on. Some things leave the body, but never leave the mind.
Most profound of the whole trip is that all this geology for the region, the nickel bearing ores, the igneous and metamorphic rock in the middle of a sedamentary formation with no volcanoes, is all from a meteor strike about 2 billion years ago that hit with enough violence to change the rock in the earth for a 200-300 km radius, and to simultaneously deposit huge amounts of metals. The nickel, copper, platinum, and especially the rhodium, are all star-stuff, all from "out there."
Exploration in the "Old Days" relied on the good eye of a trained geologist, and a lot of luck. Now they have sonar, underground radar, and computers. Today, a full 100 years after the first mine was begun, the Sudbury nickel deposit has been mapped, and it is a lens of material that has not even been started to be mined yet! They haven't even gotten to the really good purity stuff, according to models of the ground. Wow. Wow.
What they DID learn in the 100 years of nickel mining here is that the thinks men do can and will change the Earth. The smelting process liberates a tremendous amount of sulfur dioxide, and that along with other waste gases and metals actually stained the rocks here black over the years. You can tell a development from after 1976 (when they began to use stacks, and to remove SO2) from before, because the rocks, especially large boulders that are uncovered, are grey. Some have a characteristic line on them where the dirt was.
Sudbury also stank. There is an old song about miners cutting loose, "Sudbury Saturday Night," which is local folklore about the only people that would live here: miners, their reluctant families that couldn't live elsewhere, and the camp followers that usually follow a large group of foolhardy, hard-working men. My SO remembers trying to eat a meal in Sudbury and not being able to eat the food for the smell. Slag heaps were everywhere, and since stacks didn't exist, the smoke from the smelter just rolled over the town. Sudbury became all but a dead mining camp.
They learned form that disaster: the SO2 is removed from the effluent as much as possible now, and sold as another revenue stream. All effluent is put out of tall stacks, away from people, and the one slag heap is carefully cultivated as it cools into a specific shape to be built on. Older heaps were covered and capped, and now have housing and parks, and the town of New Sudbury built on their remains.
And the mining continues, unfortunately fatalities also continue. A miner died two years ago in the mine, and the company and government were completing an inquiry as we were leaving. I don't know that mines will ever be completely safe, but I think the one we saw is much safer than those past.
In a final moment, I went rock hunting, and found a listed gneiss deposit on the Ontario geological tour that was an outcropping of the meteor strike, age listed as 1.85 billion years old. I picked up rocks that were a quarter of the age of the Earth itself.
Which brought home to me: the Earth does not need Man. The Earth does not really care what the temperature is, or how much SO2 or NOx is in the atmosphere. The Earth will survive just fine with or without these things, because the Earth is a ball of rock. Man is the one that requires oxygenated air to breathe, and water in a certain pH range in order to survive. It is Man that should be aware of the conditions in the environment he finds himself, irregardless of who or what causes the conditions. If there is global warming, then Man must do something if he wishes to continue on the Earth, it doesn't matter what is causing the warming. If there is too much SO2 in the atmosphere, then Man must do something to reduce it if he wishes to see many more summers, no matter where the SO2 is coming from.
And if making money is to take precedence over survival of our kind, then just pass a law saying you can print money on your computer and everyone will make money all the time. Then we can stand together in the sun until it roasts our skins and grows tumors all about us. "There is no damage from the Sun!" we will say bravely, waving our money at each other. "The Sun is just a plot, no one can keep me from making money!"
One day the Earth will stop being our Mother, and will support us no longer, and the Sun will bleach our bones. And all our money will only last about 16 months, far less than the damage we have done that killed us.
Crow
The tunnels were chiseled out of hard granite and gneiss, with wire mess holding up the walls, and electric light showing the way. There was water dripping constantly, and we walked in shallow puddles of it throughout the tour. I suddenly got a real appreciation for water removal in mines!
We also got to sit in a rescue station for a few minutes... quite eerie, and when the guide turned off the lights to give the visitors a feel for how dark it is several hundred feet under the surface, I was back on the boat in a flash. The lights were off only seconds, but I had already gone through my emergency drill for the sub in my mind, and knew what my next move was when they came back on. Some things leave the body, but never leave the mind.
Most profound of the whole trip is that all this geology for the region, the nickel bearing ores, the igneous and metamorphic rock in the middle of a sedamentary formation with no volcanoes, is all from a meteor strike about 2 billion years ago that hit with enough violence to change the rock in the earth for a 200-300 km radius, and to simultaneously deposit huge amounts of metals. The nickel, copper, platinum, and especially the rhodium, are all star-stuff, all from "out there."
Exploration in the "Old Days" relied on the good eye of a trained geologist, and a lot of luck. Now they have sonar, underground radar, and computers. Today, a full 100 years after the first mine was begun, the Sudbury nickel deposit has been mapped, and it is a lens of material that has not even been started to be mined yet! They haven't even gotten to the really good purity stuff, according to models of the ground. Wow. Wow.
What they DID learn in the 100 years of nickel mining here is that the thinks men do can and will change the Earth. The smelting process liberates a tremendous amount of sulfur dioxide, and that along with other waste gases and metals actually stained the rocks here black over the years. You can tell a development from after 1976 (when they began to use stacks, and to remove SO2) from before, because the rocks, especially large boulders that are uncovered, are grey. Some have a characteristic line on them where the dirt was.
Sudbury also stank. There is an old song about miners cutting loose, "Sudbury Saturday Night," which is local folklore about the only people that would live here: miners, their reluctant families that couldn't live elsewhere, and the camp followers that usually follow a large group of foolhardy, hard-working men. My SO remembers trying to eat a meal in Sudbury and not being able to eat the food for the smell. Slag heaps were everywhere, and since stacks didn't exist, the smoke from the smelter just rolled over the town. Sudbury became all but a dead mining camp.
They learned form that disaster: the SO2 is removed from the effluent as much as possible now, and sold as another revenue stream. All effluent is put out of tall stacks, away from people, and the one slag heap is carefully cultivated as it cools into a specific shape to be built on. Older heaps were covered and capped, and now have housing and parks, and the town of New Sudbury built on their remains.
And the mining continues, unfortunately fatalities also continue. A miner died two years ago in the mine, and the company and government were completing an inquiry as we were leaving. I don't know that mines will ever be completely safe, but I think the one we saw is much safer than those past.
In a final moment, I went rock hunting, and found a listed gneiss deposit on the Ontario geological tour that was an outcropping of the meteor strike, age listed as 1.85 billion years old. I picked up rocks that were a quarter of the age of the Earth itself.
Which brought home to me: the Earth does not need Man. The Earth does not really care what the temperature is, or how much SO2 or NOx is in the atmosphere. The Earth will survive just fine with or without these things, because the Earth is a ball of rock. Man is the one that requires oxygenated air to breathe, and water in a certain pH range in order to survive. It is Man that should be aware of the conditions in the environment he finds himself, irregardless of who or what causes the conditions. If there is global warming, then Man must do something if he wishes to continue on the Earth, it doesn't matter what is causing the warming. If there is too much SO2 in the atmosphere, then Man must do something to reduce it if he wishes to see many more summers, no matter where the SO2 is coming from.
And if making money is to take precedence over survival of our kind, then just pass a law saying you can print money on your computer and everyone will make money all the time. Then we can stand together in the sun until it roasts our skins and grows tumors all about us. "There is no damage from the Sun!" we will say bravely, waving our money at each other. "The Sun is just a plot, no one can keep me from making money!"
One day the Earth will stop being our Mother, and will support us no longer, and the Sun will bleach our bones. And all our money will only last about 16 months, far less than the damage we have done that killed us.
Crow
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