Monthly Archives: January 2010

Rainy season

Thanks to El Niño, we’re getting a string of winter storms this week: high winds, cloudbursts, lightning, threats of flooding. The San José Mercury News reported at midnight last night that “effects [of yesterday’s storm] on the Peninsula were mostly minor, but widespread.”

I woke up yesterday to find that power had gone off briefly last night. The commute from San Mateo to Palo Alto was long and slow. It was raining lightly when I left San Mateo, just hard enough to run the windshield wipers. In Belmont and Redwood City, there was no rain but the announcer on the radio said there was heavy rain in the Mid-Peninsula. Within five minutes, I had driven into a cloudburst: the windshield wipers could not keep up with the rain even at the fastest setting; lightning lit up the sky; the road was an inch deep in water; and with the exception of a few idiots who chose to risk hydroplaning, traffic crawled along at 30 miles an hour. South of University Avenue in Palo Alto, the rain stopped.

I’d guess we got well over an inch of rain in the morning, most of it in a few heavy downpours. In the middle of the day, we saw the sun for a brief moment before dark clouds rolled in over the coastal range and let loose another heavy shower which turned the church’s rose garden into a two-inch deep pool of water. The rain has tapered off now, but the weather service predicts that a low pressure system will move into our area over the weekend, bringing “substantial rainfall, and with the ground already saturated hydro problems are possible.” That means more creek flooding is expected.

I wouldn’t wish flooding on anyone — but speaking as a New England expatriate, I’d rather have El Niño flooding than ice storms, blizzards, and hurricanes.

Holding one’s nose

My sister Jean sent a link to an interesting map that tries to explain why Martha Coakley lost to Scott Brown.

For me, the most important piece of information is that Democrats stayed home, while independents turned out in force. If I were still living in Massachusetts, I would have had had to hold my nose in order to vote for Coakley. Her law-and-order rhetoric sounded like she was getting paid by the prison lobby. She’s quixotically stubborn at times, so that even after Hillary Clinton released delegates to vote for Obama, Coakley refused to vote for him. While Coakley claims to support equality (broadly construed), including marriage equality, I never saw that she was much of an advocate for people who were poor or economically disadvantaged. While I could stomach her as attorney general (and yes, I voted for her in that post), I did not see here someone who would fill Ted Kennedy’s role as an advocate in the U.S. Senate for those who are poor and oppressed; indeed, she seemed no better than Scott Brown. Given those comparisons, I’m not entirely surprised that Massachusetts Democrats stayed home.

As a religious and spiritual progressive, I’m finding it more and more difficult to distinguish between political liberals and political conservatives. Both political stances seem like shallow ideologies motivated solely by party unity and retention of power, rather than humane political philosophies concerned with making life better for all people. U.S. politics seems to be driven in large part by fairly unimportant wedge issues — abortion, gun ownership, same-sex marriage, testing in schools — rather than by truly important issues like feeding the hungry, caring for children, preventing usury and exploitation of the poor. In those few areas where U.S. politics currently concerns itself with substantial issues — health care, war — the big issues are so narrowed down that they are almost meaningless.

I better stop ranting now, before my blood pressure goes up too much. As ideologues, neither Coakley nor Brown deserved to win; neither one would bother much with the real problems. And so we will continue to not feed the hungry, and not help the suffering, and not be peacemakers; and the last shall not be first because those who are first plan to stay right where they are.

Corrected 21 January, thanks to Philocrites. See comments below.

Sex, food, and giving money away

Last Sunday, we took up a collection for Haiti relief work here in the Palo Alto church; next Sunday is the formal beginning of the annual canvass, or fundraising drive. In the midst of all this, a member of the church happened to send me a column by Nicholas Kristoffy titled “Our Basic Human Pleasures: Food, Sex, and Giving.” Kristoffy writes:

“Brain scans by neuroscientists confirm that altruism carries its own rewards. A team including Dr. Jorge Moll of the National Institutes of Health found that when a research subject was encouraged to think of giving money to a charity, parts of the brain lit up that are normally associated with selfish pleasures like eating or sex.”

I’d argue that sex is not a selfish pleasure (at least, not when it involves another person). Nevertheless, giving money does feel awfully good to me — better than food, maybe not quite as good as sex. Actually, this might be a good rebuttal to the whole doctrine of original sin — if helping others makes us feel so good, doesn’t that mean we are essentially good?

Thanks to Dick D. for sending me the column.

The new pests

Mr. Crankypants just came back from a stroll through downtown San Mateo, where, to his surprise, he saw a few smokers standing outside a bar. You hardly ever see smokers any more, and now that they are a strictly controlled species, Mr. Crankypants feels an odd sort of affection for them, especially when they are out standing in a drizzle. Remember when smokers used to blow smoke right in your face? Only those of us who are middle-aged, or who are from South Carolina, have seen people blowing smoke in the faces of others and getting away with it.

The aggressive smokers who used to blow smoke smoke in your face have been controlled, but now another invasive pest comes along to fill that ecological niche — the oblivious cell phone user. The National Safety Council says oblivious cell phone users cause at least 1.6 million traffic accidents a year, but Mr. Crankypants is talking about something less deadly. He is talking about the stupid man talking loudly on a cell phone while standing right in front of the potato chips who does not move. He is talking about the stupid woman pushing a stroller while mumbling into a cell phone and dragging a toddler (faster than the toddler can comfortably walk) who almost hits a passerby in the shins with the toddler. He is talking about the stupid man riding a bicycle while talking on a cell phone who blows through a stop sign, swerves around a car that stopped just in time, almost picks off a pedestrian in a crosswalk, and blithely keep on peddling and talking.

Like you, Mr. Crankypants is, of course, perfect, and never talks on his cell phone when he is walking on a crowded sidewalk, or while the cashier is totaling up his groceries, or while he is picking up his dog’s poop, or when he is in a one-on-one meeting with someone. A good long-term solution for the oblivious cell phone users is neutering; that will eventually put an end to their species (that, and traffic fatalities), but in the mean time Mr. C. is uncertain how to control these noxious pests.

Haiti relief donations

If you want to donate to relief work in Haiti following the earthquake, here are two ideas:

— The blog of the American Red Cross Web site says: “You can donate $10 to Haiti relief by texting ‘Haiti’ to 90999…. We have received more than $3 million as of 9 a.m. EST – through a third party mobile fundraising effort to support our relief efforts in Haiti. 100% of the funds will go to support the Red Cross relief efforts in Haiti.” Thanks, Cilla, for pointing this out on a PCD email list.

— The Unitarian Universalist Association Web site tells how to give through the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (UUSC): “January 13, 2010. In the wake of devastation wrought by the earthquake which struck the island of Haiti on January 12, 2010, the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (UUSC) and the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) are launching a joint relief effort to bring aid to the impoverished island nation.” Direct contributions can be made at the UUSC’s secure donation site.

If you know of other good organizations providing relief in Haiti, please list them in the comments.

General Assembly is “dramatically broken”

There’s a new article up on uuworld.org titled “Big Changes Proposed for General Assembly.” General Assembly is the annual gathering of U.S. Unitarian Universalists, ostensibly held to transact the business of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA). In October the UUA Board of Trustees commissioned a report to study whether General Assembly actually provides the setting for democratic decision-making it is supposed to provide. The short answer from the report: “GA is not really democratic,” and in fact provides “faux democracy and unaccountable representation.”

The UUA Board of Trustees will hear and discuss this report at its current meeting, which begins today and runs through Sunday. Will the Board of Trustees act on this report? If they don’t, I hope former UUA Moderator Denny Davidoff carries out a threat she made at the 2009 General Assembly, when she said, “We should get serious about governing ourselves democratically, or I will move in 2010 that we rescind the fifth principle [of the principles and purpose of the UUA Bylaws, calling for democratic process] until we can prove we are democratically represented.”

In the mean time, the 2010 General Assembly Committee has scheduled only business meetings on Saturday and Sunday of this year’s General Assembly. No doubt this will annoy some who see General Assembly as one big social event, but perhaps it will keep the focus of General Assembly where it should be, to wit, on doing the business of the UUA.

(sub)urban ag

Carol and I were talking tonight about urban agriculture. She has a friend who teaches landscape design, and this friend is trying to promote fanciful urban agriculture like hydroponically grown plants on the sides of sky scrapers. This seemed a waste of time to both of us; why not farm the many empty lots that exist in some cities? Carol went further than that, saying that we don’t need urban agriculture so much as we need suburban agriculture: farms, not in the city, but close to the city; farms which fill in the spaces left by suburban sprawl. She was trying to explain this to her friend, the landscape designer. She knows he likes catchy phrases, so she told him, “We need growscapes instead of sprawlscapes.” We both laughed at her catchphrase. Yet funny as it is, I’d like it if we replaced suburban lawns front yards with suburban farming.

And if you ever see “Growscapes, Not Sprawlscapes!” on a bumper sticker in the future, remember that Carol was the one who coined the phrase.