Eleanor Arnason's Blog, page 38

Auks

This all started with this photo from a facebook post by Icelandic Weather Report:
It turns out that island in the distance is Eldey, where great auks had their last nesting ground. I checked Eldey in Wikipedia and found this:

The island formerly supported a large population of Great Auk after they moved there from Geirfuglasker following a volcanic eruption in 1830. When the colony was discovered in 1835, nearly fifty birds were counted. Museums, desiring the skins of the auk for preservation and display, quickly began collecting birds from the colony. The last pair, found incubating an egg, were killed there in July 1844, with Jón Brandsson and Sigurður Ísleifsson strangling the adults and Ketill Ketilsson smashing the egg with his boot.

Then I wrote on facebook:

I have a dim memory that this pair of birds was collected for the American Museum of Natural History, but I may be wrong. I wonder if we have enough genetic material to bring these animals back? It would not be easy. It would require a mother from a related species, and they are all considerably smaller. Worth a try, though. Along with mammoths and quaggas and the giant ground sloth... Dodos ought to be possible, though again the problem is the mother, as it is with the giant ground sloth... Moas?

I could write an Icelandic troll story. It turns out that trolls are still raising giant auks somewhere in the middle of Iceland, where no one goes, or maybe inside a cliff above the ocean... I wonder if they have to take the auks out swimming to keep them happy?

So one moonlit night an Icelander sees trolls wading out into the ocean, with auks on strings so they can't get away. But they can still frolic in the waves...

Most likely I won't write this story. I have six stories plus a novel to finish. But the same summer cabin fever that makes me so restless makes me want to start new writing.

Summer Cabin Fever

The temp was in the 90s yesterday and the high today is predicted to be 95. After that, temps will begin to fall.

I ran errands yesterday. Most of the time, I was inside, but I had to go out to move from building to building. Weather like this -- sunny and almost cloudless with a temp in the 90s -- makes me rapidly queasy. I plan to spend today inside doing tasks I have been avoiding.

During most of my life, work gave structure to my days. Since I got laid off (four years ago now) I have put together an alternative structure, so I don't simply float through the rest of my life. The structure is not anything dramatic: meetings with friends, exercise at the Y, my writing groups. But it allows me to feel something is getting done.

Appointments for yesterday and today fell through. That, combined with the heat, makes me feel frustrated. It's summer cabin fever.

I told Patrick yesterday I was bored and wanted to do something exciting. We could hop a plane to Iceland, I suppose. But it would be hard to get seats, I expect, and I have dental work and a convention coming up and no extra money.

I am suddenly reminded of the Shel Silverstein book that tells kids there is no Oz, but maybe someday you can go to Detroit...

Patrick just told me it's close to 90 in Duluth, so driving there is not an option...

Flowers

The flowers I bought at the Farmers Market made Patrick's allergies kick up. I think it was the lilies in the bouquet, though it might be the sunflower. I moved them into my room, where they sit on the window ledge and look lovely.

He doesn't seem to react to daisies or chrysanthemums. So I have left the bouquet of green poms (which are apparently a daisy relative) in the living room. Next time I go to the Market I will look for bouquets without lilies or sunflowers. Zinneas might be okay, and they are wonderfully bright.

Guns

One final remark and I will leave the Zimmerman case. It is now possible to carry concealed guns in all fifty states.

It's a long, long time ago now, but I lived in Central Brooklyn and Inner City Detroit when both were not safe. The way you survive in a rough neighborhood is to pay attention and exercise ordinary common sense. Guns are a lot less useful than alertness and street smarts.

That is one point. The other is, crime -- except for white collar crime practiced by bankers and politicians -- has been falling in the US for years. The paranoid fear of one's neighbors is just that -- paranoia and craziness. In many cases, it is about racism as well as irrational fear. The US is changing, and a lot of white people cannot handle this fact. Their fear of the future diffuses into a fear of almost everything, but especially people of color, and more especially young men of color.

There is no good reason to carry a handgun, unless it's required by your job. There is no reason to own any gun, unless you need it for sport; and sport should not include hunting other humans.

I am really, really tired of the NRA and frightened white people. I realized that frightened people come in all colors. But I think a large part of the power of the NRA is white fear.

There is more than one reason for this fear. People's lives are getting worse. Pay has been level or falling for decades now. The cost of health care is way up, and many people no longer get health care through their jobs. The cost of education is ridiculous. Jobs are unstable. Unions, which used to be some protection for workers and which helped keep wages up, even for non-union workers, cover only 11% of the work force now. The government is clearly run for the benefit of the rich, who appear to be looting the economy, rather than building anything useful. What lies ahead? More poverty. More instability. Environmental degradation. Global warming.

People of color have always had to deal with hard times and prejudice. But there was a period, for several decades after World War Two, when life was pretty good for white working guys. That period has ended.

It is rational to be afraid, but the problem is not people of color or women or gays; and it cannot be solved by guns.

The answer, as union activists have told us for decades, is to organize -- at the work place and in the neighborhood and city and state. Handguns are not any help in this situation. It is crazy to fear the other ordinary people who face hard times like you and should be your allies.

More on the Zimmerman Case

In reply to a comment on the previous post: how could George Zimmerman be said to have provoked a fight?

He went after Trayvon Martin, instead of staying put as the police told him. We don't know what happened then, because we have only one witness, Zimmerman, who cannot be called neutral.

I'd say that Zimmerman, by ignoring the police, showed himself to be either a vigilante or a fool. I can imagine him scaring or angering Trayvon Martin. Then, when Martin tried to defend himself, Zimmerman could have become frightened and shot him.

I don't think it's likely that Martin would have started a fight out of nowhere. But I certainly can imagine him confronting a man who was following him in the dark. I have been followed down dark streets. It's threatening. A woman or an older man would most likely look for help. A young man -- a teenager -- might well confront.

There are other possible scenarios. But we don't know what happened. All we know is -- it happened because George Zimmerman had a gun and did not listen to the police.

I notice that one big city newspaper after another has expressed unhappiness with the Zimmerman verdict. The general feeling is, people should not stalked and killed because they are black and male and wear a hoodie.

The case happened in a society where there is too much gun violence and too much racism, and where a significant part of the population is tired of guns and racism. When you look at responses to the case, you need to remember this.

George Zimmerman

I've now read several articles that say the Zimmerman decision was correct, given law and the facts of the case. Apparently the state has to disprove self defense, and if there is only one witness, the shooter, this is hard to do. Also you can apparently start a fight, then decide your life is in danger and use deadly force and this is legitimate self-defense. Scott Lemieux, who writes for the blog Lawyers, Guns and Money, says that the law needs to be rethought, given all the people carrying guns. The people I have read all say that the decision may be correct, but this is no way changes the fact that it's a lot harder for people of color to get justice in this country.

It seems intuitively wrong that an armed man can stalk an unarmed teenager and kill him, and this is not even manslaughter. But that is apparently the law. It seems obvious to me that killing has become too easy.

Farmers Market

What is wrong with me? The Farmers Market opens at the beginning of May, and I just made my first trip of the year, two and a half months later. I have missed the asparagus and the spring spinach, of course. The market is now full of swiss chard, collard greens, huge green heaps of kale, huge red heaps of tomatoes, yellow zucchini as large as my forearm, cucumbers...

I got bread with asiago cheese baked into it, swiss chard, small zucchinis and a mixed bouquet heavy on the zinnias.

And one sunflower. I love sunflowers, but they make Patrick's allergies flare up. One should be okay.

And now, free of extra charge, William Blake's great sunflower poem:

Ah, Sunflower! weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the sun,
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the traveller’s journey is done;

Where the youth pined away with desire
And the pale virgin shrouded in snow
Arise from their graves, and aspire
Where my Sunflower wishes to go.

Wages

This is from Dean Baker's wonderful blog on economics Beat The Press:

The Washington Post had a piece noting the rapid growth of automobile production in Mexico that raised the possibility that it would come at the expense of production in the United States. The piece points out that the auto companies now hire new workers in the United States at wages between $14 and $18 an hour.

It is worth noting that if the minimum wage had kept pace with productivity growth over the last 45 years it would be almost $17.00 an hour today. This means that newly hired workers would in many cases be working for less than a productivity indexed minimum wage. The minimum wage had largely tracked productivity growth in the three decades from 1938 to 1968. (The unemployment rate in the last 1960s was less than 4.0 percent.)

The bolding is mine. $17 a hour is $36,360, not a huge amount, not enough to maintain a household in the Twin Cities. According to the Jobs Now Coalition, a single parent with one child needs to make about $39,000 a year to make basic expenses in the Twin Cities. (A large amount of this is child care, which runs about $8,000 a year in the Metro Area according to Jobs Now. If we had publicly funded childcare, this small family could get by on a bit over $30,000 a year.)

This calculation assumes that the employer provides health care. Many employers do not. If the worker has to buy his or her family's health care, the cost of living in the Metro Area rises to over $45,000 a year.

Even though $17 an hour would not be adequate, it is a lot more than many workers with children are getting now.

So we either need a much higher federal minimum wage (it is now $7.25 an hour) or we need national health care or both. If we had national health care, Medicare for all, then a new federal minimum wage of $19.25 an hour would be adequate. If we had Medicare for all and state funded child care, then we could make do with a federal minimum wage of about $14.50, double what it is now.

I have no idea how working people get by.

Flowers

The milkweed is blooming, along with crown vetch, mullein, big purple thistles, chicory and a lot of yellow flowers I don't recognize. They might be yellow sweet clover, but I don't think so. It's hard to identify flowers while traveling 60 miles an hour on a freeway. I have the same problem with birds. Crows and pigeons are easy, as are the red tailed hawks that sit on freeway light posts. Impossible to miss the egrets and great blue herons that fly over occasionally. But the little birds are too fast and small. I can't figure out what they are.

Patrick and I made it to Uncle Hugo's for a copy of the July Locus, which has a positive review of Big Mama Stories by Gary Wolfe. Then a couple more errands, then home.

So far Big Mama Stories has gotten three reviews, two in Locus, one at Tor.com. All three are positive. Two of them compare me to Italo Calvino. I'll take that comparison.

Dental Work

I had a busy -- for me -- day yesterday: an exercise class in the morning, then a visit to the dentist in the afternoon and finally a meeting of the Wyrdsmiths writing group in the evening. The exercise class was enjoyable, and the Wyrdsmiths were really fine. But the dentist told me I need two crowns. My share, after my dental insurance pays its part, will be $2,100. This is disturbing.

I'm retired, which means very little money is coming in. I do have some retirement savings, but interest rates are so low right now that they generate almost no income. Certificates of deposit pay under one percent. That's less than inflation. I am actually losing money on my savings.

People my age are advised to stay out of the stock market, because we don't have the time to ride out ups and downs. We might need our money at a point that the market is low. In addition, I think the stock market is a bubble right now. Europe and the US are in recessions/depressions, and the gigantic Chinese economy is slowing down. There is no good reason for stocks to be up, except that the rich need a place to put their money. A bubble market is going to crash sooner or later.

In any case, my savings (such as they are) are producing almost no revenue. I have a small amount of money coming in from writing, but it isn't much. So I am looking at a large outlay when there in no compensating income. It is not a pleasant experience.

I do have the money to pay for the dental work. Many retired people have no savings. Company pension plans have mostly vanished, except for public employees, which is one reason the rightwing hates public employees. 401(k) plans and IRAs have not worked. Most people have not been able to save enough to matter. According to the blog Zero Hedge, the average amount in retirement accounts in 2012 was $77,300. This is not enough to pay for a retirement. Even with Medicare, one illness can wipe this out. Large numbers of American workers don't make enough to save anything, and many save very little -- or have to withdraw from their 401(k)s to pay for emergencies such as unemployment or illness.

So retirees are dependent on Social Security, which averages about $1,200 a month. Congress and the president keep trying to find ways to cut this inadequate amount. Imagine if I did not have savings. The dental work would be equal to two months income.

Social Security payments need to go up, not down; and Medicare should cover dental work; and Medicare should be extended to the entire population. There are various ways to pay for higher SS payments. Right now the SS tax (FICA) is capped at $106,800. Income above that is not taxed. Removing the cap would bring in extra money. (Remember that a huge amount of our national income goes to people making more than $100,000.) Or the FICA tax rate could be slightly increased, which would also bring in more money. Or increased Social Security payments could be funded out of general revenues.

Increasing Social Security would put more money into the economy and thus increase tax revenues. Expanding Medicare would mean that money now spent in our bloated and overpriced Medical-Industrial Complex could go into the rest of the economy, creating new jobs and producing more tax revenue.

The final reason to expand Social Security and Medicare is -- it's humane. Most Americans will live 15 years or more after the official retirement age of 65. (Though there are counties in the US where the life expectancy is lower than third world countries.) As it stands now, many of them will spend this time at the edge of poverty, always worried and often afraid. Their children, who have their own financial problems, will struggle to help Mom and Dad. Or cut Mom and Dad adrift.