My little image-making effort. First is in today's edition; the second will be tomorrow's editorial. I ghost write local editorials so my column with the photo and byline shows up only on Mondays and Thursdays. Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays are ST editorials.

Suddenly, from behind the rim of the moon, in long, slow-motion moments of immense majesty, there emerges a sparkling blue and white jewel, a light, delicate sky blue sphere laced with slowly swirling veils of white, rising gradually like a small pearl in a thick sea of black mystery. It takes more than a moment to fully realize this is Earth . . . home.

The earthrise photo became the central mythological symbol of promise and hope surrounding my early adulthood. Apollo 8 took the picture and shared it with a world at the time enmeshed in the Vietnam War, but the Earth (photo enhanced by Apollo II) becoming my mother widened my lines of allegiances!

On this Mother’s day (across the International dateline), I am a few decades late in recognizing the damage we have inflicted on Mama Gaia. Feeling sorry for the neglect will not restore her health, regardless of how resilient we consider her to be, but realizing that our humanity is tied to a breathing organism treated heretofore as "lifeless", it matters; it makes us realize that we can decide to fend for our survival as humans in the context of an organism kept alive and healthy.

We are children of evolution. My head has gotten bigger as we focus existence more on the complexity of the cerebrum and its cortex more than we do on the cerebellum and the medulla oblongata; on thoughts more than feelings and senses, on cognition with words, pictures and numbers more than impulse and intuition with gestures and explosions, nor do we even pay heed to what we experience in sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. Ours has been a culture that perennially asks: How does that make you feel?

Big Bird on Sesame Street went before the Bird Supreme Court to test a bird law on “ losers’ weepers, finders’ keepers” when his abode in his absence was taken over by another bird and claimed it. The Court adhering to the cold letter of the law decided on the letter of the law but was asked by Big Bird how they “felt” on the matter if they were in his shoes, shifting the discourse from cognition to intuition.

I brook no ill against reason and logic as operational principles until they become masters of societal behavior rather than servants to decision-making processes. E.g., many deny the reality of climate change, even in high government offices.

I traveled in the last five years across plains, rivers, landscapes and mountains, of Inner Mongolia and Dong Bei, Sichuan and Chiang Jiang, Canada’s Banff, CA’s Bay Area and Chicago’s windy city, Honolulu’s skyline and Manila’s smog, and the lagoon shores of Saipan, and I know of the erratic nature of weather being the rule more than the exception. Friends of the US northeast to Texas' Southwest attest that mother Gaia shows symptoms of midlife crisis.

The awareness of climate change is really not the issue but the impingement of the reality on our behavior and our active acknowledgment of it. As simple as discarding plastic wrappers that take 10k years to decompose alerts us on our propensity worldwide to throw away as if someone is assigned to pick after our droppings and make it evaporate. I picked up a discarded milk carton at the flagpole of the American Memorial Park the other day.

In China, someone is assigned to tidy up every square foot of public space. On the way to the airport one snowy early morning this March, a lady swept her assigned 100 meters on an elevated highway on the winter cold with the white stuff still on the ground.

We are a throwaway society. My mother did the reverse. She recycled. The only problem was that her neighbors thought she was the designated recycler of their discards. So her room in Honolulu was always full of "junk”.

Saving planet Earth is a favored shibboleth. The earthrise photo is a favored image; saving it is an outlook accompanying prints in various languages. Whether we are doing something to keep it healthy and clean is another matter. That is more than just keeping the country club lawn mowed, and the golf course putting greens trimmed. Beautify CNMI goes beyond just picking up people’s trash along the lagoon shores.

Systemic degradation of the planet abounds in private and public practice for the sake of the quick green buck. World investments just hit gold in Pinoy mines! Mercury on the riverbeds will increase. Effluents feed the algae in our lagoon. The indigene community is sidestepped on the burial grounds’ sanctity at the proposed casino site currently under construction in Garapan.

We've harped on the short-term preoccupation of Keystone XL pipes for Alberta tar sands. We frack shale, burn coal, damn waters upsetting ecological balance, and desperate souls of a slowly dying fossil fuel trade funds lobbies, written up in the press where the media practices journalism.

At the recent White House correspondents’ dinner where it is traditional for the President to roast journalist and vice-versa, Obama revealed that he is often asked what was in his bucket list. Obama named a list and responded with “Buck it!” Parental permission advised if googling the term!

Moviegoers will recall a Rob Reiner movie titled The Bucket List with two terminally ill men on a road trip to do their wish list before they kick the bucket! “Bucket list” meant those things we hold dear and would do everything within our powers to perform before we keel over!

The “buck it” phrase is reminiscent of Harry Truman who displayed a sign on his desk clearly defining the line of responsibility. “The buck stops here,” it said. He made final decisions, one of which occurred three months after he assumed the top WH office and let loose the power of uranium fission and plutonium implosion over the skies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Oswald C. Brewster, an engineer who helped separate the uranium isotope changed his mind about the bomb after Germany’s defeat. He wrote Truman: “This thing must not be permitted on earth. We must not be the most hated and feared people on earth, however good our intent may be.”

Brewster’s lone voice in the wilderness proved prescient on this side of the nuclear arms race. We may not be the most feared people on earth but being the most hated, even by Pinoys who languished on Uncle Sam’s benevolent ministration, is close.

It is to underscore decision making in the American understanding is based on “We, the people”, and if formal structures of governance no longer reflect the will “of the people, by the people and for the people”, and the exercise of voting on elections too lengthy between intervals, a recourse to a Parliament of the Street accommodates warm bodies on the front lines. Either method is very red-white-and-blue.

FDR died a good 70 years ago in 1945, and third VP Missouri farmer Harry Truman ascended into an unfamiliar role. FDR was such a decisive figure that Garner, his VP for the first two terms, turned against him when FDR acceded to a third term, getting indecisive liberal Henry Wallace as VP.

This is neither to glorify FDR and/or Harry Truman. It is to remember that popular referendum do not always hold water, e.g., the vote against casinos in Saipan. Nor decimating the turtle eggs and the tutut on Tinian and Pagan per the EIS’ design a decision popular choice will unmake. The EIS hearings are genial to local opinions but uniformed personnel will exercise the “buck stops here” option, regardless of local sentiments.

-----Original Message-----
From: via OE <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net>
To: oe <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net>
Sent: Mon, May 11, 2015 3:50 am
Subject: OE Digest, Vol 38, Issue 7

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Today's Topics:

   1. What a Time to be Alive (Richard via
OE)
   2. Re: [Dialogue] What a Time to be Alive (Ken Fisher via OE)
   3. Re:
What a Time to be Alive (James Wiegel via OE)
   4. Re: [Dialogue] What a Time
to be Alive (Randy Williams via OE)
   5. Re: [Dialogue]  What a Time to be
Alive (James Wiegel via
OE)


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