The Eagle and the Fox

This is my favorite of Aesop’s Fables. I posted it on this blog almost ten years ago. It suggests the relationship between the United States and the Middle East over the last fifty years. It seems more appropriate than ever.

An Eagle and a Fox became close friends and decided to share a home. The Eagle built her nest in the uppermost branches of a tall tree, while the Fox crept into a hole at its foot, where she raised her young. Not long after, the Eagle, needing food for her own offspring, swooped down, seized one of the Fox’s cubs, and carried it back to her nest. The Eagle did not fear retribution because of her lofty dwelling, but the Fox snatched a torch from a nearby altar and set the tree on fire. The helpless Eaglets were roasted in their nest and fell down dead at the bottom of the tree, where the Fox gobbled them up in sight of their mother.

The tyrant may not fear the tears of the oppressed, but he is never safe from their vengeance.

Whistling

If you were a soldier ordered to commit a war crime,
would you risk court martial and disobey?

If you were a government employee seeing official corruption,
would you risk your career to expose it?

If you were a witness to the rape of a child,
would you risk a beating to stop it?

If you were a bystander watching police beating a black man,
would you risk arrest to capture it on video?

If you saw political extremists stealing your democracy,
would you risk the disapproval of your neighbors to resist it?

Weapons “R” Us

Weapons are a big deal to U.S. weapon manufacturers—a $40 billion annual big deal. They have come up with a business strategy that other manufacturers can only dream about.

The elegant part of their strategy is they get paid to develop new products by their customers who then buy the products from them. Their customers then handle a major part of the sales process including training sales people, making sales calls and structuring deals. And here’s the kicker–they get a third party to pick up the tab for all of it. You and me.

Here’s how it works. We pay the U.S. military to create wish lists of toys and submit their lists to Congress, who we also pay. Weapons manufacturers then hire ex-military officers who were trained on our dime as sales people and lobbyists to help get Congress to approve the budget for those toys.

When the budgets are approved and contracts awarded, the manufacturers and their sub-contractors are paid to develop the prototypes. The cost is mostly irrelevant, because the specs usually change during development, requiring supplemental budgets. We pay for all of this with our taxes.

Once the weapons are developed, we pay for manufacturing them. Our politicians help sell these weapons to other countries and facilitate the terms of the contracts. The Pentagon helps these prospective customers develop their own wish lists, negotiates the deals and arranges payment. From the President on down, U.S. government officials including Senators and Congressmen make sales trips abroad in behalf of the weapons manufacturers. In some cases, the State Department supplies the financing through foreign aid. All of these people are paid by us.

To reward all these public officials, the weapons industry locates manufacturing facilities in as many states as possible, creating an industry that is “too big to fail” because we’re all complicit.

But there’s more. Their products actually create the market for more sales. As weapons land in the hands of foreign armies, tension and volatility develops between nations. This volatility leads to fear, confrontation and too often war, all of which feeds the need for more weapons. It’s perpetual motion marketing.

Weapons manufacturers are parasites that eat their young. They profit from fear, xenophobia, war, terrorism, genocide and death and have convinced us to pay for it.

The blood is on our hands too. We pay without even complaining.

Zero tolerance

A black hole conceived by politically

motivated school officials and
overzealous police officers
sucks our children into a
vortex that spirals
downward into a
justice system
focused on
punishment
rather than
learning.

Have we forgotten that humans learn by trial and error?

1935 Buick

Right after WWII, my mother drove a big, black, well-used 1935 Buick sedan. It was the first car I remember. It had long sweeping front fenders and four heavy doors that closed with a resounding thunk. The front doors were hinged at the front, but the back doors were hinged at the back and opened from the front. They were called suicide doors, I guess because it would be suicide to open them when the car was moving.



A chrome goddess graced the top of the radiator surround with her arms extended behind her, her back gracefully arched, and her breasts thrust shamelessly forward. Beneath her was a winged shield with Buick written in ornate script. On either side of the grill was a large teardrop-shaped headlamp.



The seats were covered with musty gray mohair that scratched the backs of my arms and legs on a hot summer day. A plaid wool blanket was folded over a blanket rope across the back of the front seat, and cloth-covered straps hung just behind the rear doors to assist passenger egress.

The spare tire was mounted at the rear in a metal cover between two graceful, nickel-plated tail lamps. While not the top-of-the-line model, it was still a big car.

My first recollections of the Buick were driving with my mother to go grocery shopping in Nashua at the First National Store on Main Street. She sometimes left us in the car while she shopped, which was safe and acceptable in the 1940s. My four year-old brother and I stood by the open rear windows and called out to passersby on the sidewalk until my mother came out with a bag-boy carrying her groceries.

If we behaved, she took Pine Hill Road back to Hollis and stopped at the airport so we could watch planes take off and land. There were boxy yellow Piper Cubs, a tiny Ercoupe and our favorite, a sleek maroon Stinson.

But the best times in the old Buick came after it was retired to the field next to our driveway. Then it became ours.

I remember sitting behind the wheel, my feet unable to reach the pedals, turning switches on the dash as I pretended to chauffer my sister and her friends. Or sitting on the roof with my legs hanging in front of the windshield urging an imaginary team of horses away from stagecoach bandits. It was a six year-old boy’s delight except when the summer sun was high and the faded black paint got so hot we couldn’t climb on the car without getting burned.

Then one day, a man came in a tow truck. My brother and I called him names as he hoisted the front wheels of our car off the ground and hauled it away. We never saw the Buick again.

First cutting

The farmer’s pregnant wife
steers the chugging John Deere tractor
along the windrows in the midday sun.
The clattering green bailer gathers
the fragrant hay and gives birth
to neatly tied bales.

My American dream

In my American dream,
there are no secret prisons
no government-sanctioned torture
no religious intolerance
no racial discrimination
no police brutality
no hungry children
no homeless families
no imperialistic wars
and no second-class citizens.

What’s in yours?

Fear of Education?

We believe in public education in the United States, so we support it with our tax dollars.

In spite of that commitment, we seem afraid to let our young people learn too much. We teach them to read but not be literate. We sanitize history. We censor literature. We restrict science education. We seem intent on stifling our children’s’ curiosity and creativity, rather than encouraging it.

We give lip service to preparing them to reach their potential, but we end up preparing them only for corporate drudgery and consumerism. Instead of teaching them to self-manage, we train them to be managed by others.

Educating young people for a rapidly changing world can no longer be a one-size-fits-all training program based on today’s reality. Technology and globalization are creating a very different world in which our youth will compete.

To be truly prepared, they must have an understanding of the economic, political and social forces that shape the world. They must be aware of the media that shape their consciousness. They must be inquisitive and think for themselves. They must be able to recognize change and then adapt to it.

To solve global problems, our youth must be able to visualize beyond the confines of their own experience. They must have the knowledge and confidence to challenge the ruling elite, ideological extremists and xenophobic nationalists. They must truly understand history to avoid repeating it.

Critical thinking is not learned from a standardized curriculum. It requires curricula that address what it means to be critical citizens and teaches the skills to participate in sustainable democracy. Our young people will need the tools for civic engagement and self-management if we want them to remain free.

Helping our youth become critically engaged citizens is the goal of public education in a democracy.

Choices

As citizens of a democracy, we have choices.

We can remain ignorant and trust our government to protect us from political and corporate profiteers, swindlers, hucksters and liars; or we can inform ourselves about the issues and get involved in making changes.

We can allow the military/industrial complex to grow rich by selling weapons of mass destruction that allow extremist politicians to further their imperialist ambitions; or we can insist that money be spent making a more peaceful, stable world for our children and grandchildren.

We can allow our schools to be starved by corporate warmongers, our media to be controlled by corporate interests, and our elections to be manipulated by corporate lobbyists; or we can take back control of our country.

Informed choices in a democracy are vital for its survival.

Applesauce

During the summer between my junior and senior years in college, I had a job working for a Hollis native. Peter Bell had a six-yard dump truck and a 20-foot box truck that he contracted out to local businesses. Both were fairly new, and Peter kept them in good working order. I was proud to drive trucks that were better than many other truckers with whom I worked.

Peter had a twinkle in his eye and a contagious smile. He was an unmerciful tease but a good boss. Since he was often gone when I arrived at his house in the morning, Peter gave me instructions for the following day in a phone call each evening.

I might have to go to a job site in the dump truck or to one of the apple storage facilities in the area with the box truck. I liked the variety and the fact that Peter trusted me to work without supervision.

Driving the dump truck usually meant hauling gravel, sand or some other aggregate from a local quarry to a work site over and over again. There were often several other truckers working the same job. As a large loader or power shovel loaded one truck, the rest would wait in line for their turn.

At one pit, the shovel operator expected each driver to watch his rear view mirror for a hand signal that the truck was full. You had to watch closely because the signal was a just quick lift of his hand from the control levers. If you missed it, you’d be reminded by a bump from the huge shovel bucket against the back of your truck. It only happened once, after which I remembered to be alert.

Then, I’d pull up to the scales if the material was sold by weight or drive directly to the work site if it was sold by the yard. After dumping the load at the work site, I’d retrace my route back to the pit. This would be repeated for the duration of the job.

Driving the box truck was much more interesting and varied. Peter had contracts with several apple packing and storage facilities in nearby Ayer, Massachusetts. Back then, apples were shipped and stored in one-bushel crates rather than today’s large bulk bins. The season started with delivering empty apple crates from the packing plants to various orchards in central Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire.

At the packing plant, I loaded up the truck with about 600 crates and got instructions on where to deliver them. I could manage four or five trips a day depending on the distance to the orchard. Deliveries often took me on scenic back roads to beautiful hilltop orchards. I enjoyed the work.

Once the apples began to ripen, I drove to the orchards to pick up the fruit. Loading the truck with bushel crates of apples was hard work. The apples were rolled into the back of the truck on roller runs where I had to quickly stack the heavy crates to keep up. I had to lift, turn and stack crate after crate until the truck was loaded with 350 to 400 bushels of apples. Then I drove the truck back to the packing plant where I unloaded.

As the season heightened, the truck traffic at the packing plants increased. I often had to wait for two or three trucks to unload before a space at the loading dock opened up. Most of the drivers helped each other unload to keep things moving.

I remember one driver in particular—a large one-armed man who drove an ancient Brockway flatbed truck. I don’t know how he lost his right arm, but he could unload and stack full apple crates almost as fast with one arm as I could with two. He could also drive, shift and double-clutch that old truck with his left arm as well. I don’t remember his name, but he was friendly to this skinny college kid.

One afternoon in September, I drove up to an orchard in Ashby, Massachusetts to pick up a load of Macintosh apples slated for gas storage. The farmer was particularly proud of his fruit and cautioned me to handle them with care. I drove his precious cargo back to Ayer and got in the queue to unload. Several trucks pulled in behind me until there was a long line.

At this storage facility, I had to stack the crates on pallets—36 bushels per pallet. A forklift took the pallets out of the back of the truck and carried them into the storage cellar.

I finished loading the last pallet and walked to the cab of my truck to be ready to pull away from the dock. When I felt the weight lift off the truck, I put the truck in gear and pulled away. At that moment, the forklift operator decided to set the pallet back down to straighten it on the forks. The pallet fell between the truck and the loading dock spilling all thirty-six bushels of apples. The apples rolled out into the street and down the hill to the main street.

It was about five o’clock in the afternoon and the commuter traffic was heavy. In minutes, there was a huge puddle of applesauce in the street. I was extremely embarrassed as I picked up the broken apple crates.

When I got back to Peter’s house, he had already heard about my blunder. His insurance covered the loss, but I suffered much good-natured teasing by Peter and the workers at that storage facility. Every time I went there, I could count on being asked if I had applesauce on board.