Category Archives: religion

The Wonders of Social Media: Driving 2,000 miles to meet someone from Home

religion,

 

I got an email from Pauline Friesen an old friend from Steinbach that I have lost track of. I don’t know why we lost track of her and her husband Wes. It just happened. Thanks to modern social media–Facebook in this case–we have reconnected. We agreed to meet at their home in Mesa. We drove about 2,000 miles to meet friends from Steinbach that we really have not seen in about 45 years. Sometimes life is very strange.

He has learned everything about his pool. He is self-taught (with the help of Professor Google and online Pool School) but he did it. He is now an expert on swimming pools. He gained that expertise so he could handle any problem (almost) he encountered. If I had heroes, he would be my hero.

Wes actually is incredibly smart and wise, not least because of his choice of a partner. Pauline is a lovely and gracious person. It was fantastic to get together with these friends again. Thanks to social media we were lucky to reconnect. There are some good things about social media to go along with the many bad things.

Sometimes life is stranger than you can even imagine.

San Tan Valley Arizona: I am not St. Jerome

religion,

 

I am not like St. Jerome. He was one of the earliest Roman saints. He believed that heaven would not be perfect unless the saved could see the sinners roasting in hell. Since God was all powerful he would make sure the good guys get to see the bad guys paying for their sins. This is an incredibly nasty sense of heaven and hell, but he was made a saint.

Some travellers from the north are like that. As soon as they get here they check to see what the temperatures are like back home. The colder the better they feel. They feel gleeful thinking about their friends suffering back home.

You will be happy to learn, we are not like that.

Hereford Texas to San Tan Valley Arizona: The arc of the Moral universe is long

religion,

Today we wondered when we woke up, if we could make it all the way to our rented home in San Tan Valley. We were both sceptical that we could do it, but we got up early and headed out. Our practice is to leave after first light (this is easy) and to stop before dark. Many of our friends travel with much more diligence. We are slackers. We meander.

At first Sarah (the GPS) was asleep again. She just does not like the cold. Like us. But Chris made a spectacular discovery. She pulled out a small disk from the GPS and warmed it up in her warm hands. Sarah sprung to life! There was as much rejoicing in our car as there was in heaven when the prodigal son returned. We made a radical decision. We said Sarah could pick the route. Let the GPS select the fastest route. That is precisely what we did. And it worked.

It did not take long and Sarah led us right back to Interstate 40. Sadly, we missed Cadillac Ranch as a result. We stopped for gas where I saw a green T-shirt with a John Deer Tractor emblazoned on it and the simple words: “John Beer.” Can you get more profound than that?

On the way we continued to listen to NPR. They had some kind of a New Year’s Eve show. It was very interesting. They played a small part of a famous speech by Martin Luther King.  We listened to the speech and marvelled at King’s abilities as an orator. His images were compelling. His cadences were hypnotic. His phrasing slow, letting his words sink into the hearts and minds of the hearers. His message was riveting. Even though King knew there was no direct path to freedom. He knew the road was crooked. There were turns and cutbacks that only a meanderer could traverse. I don’t know if there could have been a better way to launch a New Year. What a great thing to hear on a New Year’s Day in Texas!

Here is part of that speech (I apologize for not getting every word right as the recoding was not as clear as it could be):

I must confess my friends, the road ahead will not always be smooth. There will still be rotten places of frustration, meandering points of bewilderment (that hit home for me the meander!) There will be inevitable setbacks. There will be those moments when the buoyancy of hope will be transformed into the fatigue of despair. Our dreams will sometimes be shattered, and our ethereal hopes blasted. We may again with tear drenched eyes have to stand beside the burial of some courageous civil rights worker whose life will be snuffed out by the dastardly acts of bloodthirsty mobs, but difficult and painful as it is, we must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future and as we continue our charted course we may gain some consolation in those great words so nobly left by that great black bard who was also a freedom fighter of yesterday, James Weldon Johnson:

Stony the road we trod. Better the chastening rod we cast felt in the days when hope unborn had died. Yet with a steady beat our weary feet come to the place for which our fathers sigh, we  have come over the way that with our tears has been watered. We have come treading our pass through the blood of the slaughtered out from the gloomy past, till now we stand at last where the bright gleam of our bright star is cast.”

Let this affirmation be our ringing cry, it will give us the courage to face the uncertainties of the future. It will give our tired feet new strength as we continue our forward stride toward the city of freedom. When our days become dreary with low hovering clouds of despair when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights let us remember there is a creative force in this world working to pull down the giant mountains of evil. A power that is able to make a way out of no way, that can transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice. Let us realize that William Cullen Bryant is right, “truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again.” Let us go out realizing that the Bible is right, ‘Be not deceived.’ God is not lost. Whatsoever a man soweth, that, he shall also reap. This is our hope for the future with this faith we will be able to sing in some not distant tomorrow with a cosmic past we have overcome; we have overcome; deep in my heart I did believe we would overcome.”

I actually listened to the speech again courtesy of YouTube. Sometimes I love technology. Martin Luther King like all of us fell short of perfection, but  he was a truly great man.  I could not help comparing his speech to tweets I have read about the current occupant of the Whitehouse. The comparison is shocking. King spoke without belittling anyone. He did not attack anyone. He did not brag about himself. He did not spew out ill thought out political Pablum. He just spoke to encourage  people to continue the good fight no matter what the obstacles, no matter what backward steps they have to take. He knew the road to justice was not straight and true. But the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice. He believed that. I want to believe that.

We also listened to CBC radio by virtue of some new technology–a CBC app. We could listen to highlights streamed to our car speaker. It was fantastic. The discussion of modern work was extremely interesting. I loved the quote from Bertrand Russell the hero of my youth (and old age too come to think about it): “The end of civilization is to fill leisure time intelligently.”

At Holbrook Arizona, Sarah told us to turn south and we obediently complied. The roads were in excellent shape. Chris put on my fantastic playlist of songs–the best ever playlist. We listened to 3 hours of wonderful music.

The only problem was the winding mountain road at night. As long as it was light it was all right, but it got dark before we were done. In our eagerness to make it all the way to San Tan Valley we forgot about this winding road. That gave us more stress than we liked. Old people don’t need stress.

We arrived in San Tan Valley Arizona about 8 p.m. tired and stressed out but happy. I did not take long to crash.

 

 

Fargo North Dakota to Belleville Kansas: Spiritual Vigilantes

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         Today there was no meandering for the meanderer. What a pity. We decided we wanted to get as far south as we could in one day. That meant bearing down and not getting off course. Getting off course is what I do best. This was hard. It was not the way we like to travel, but we thought it was necessary.

It was fiercely cold over night. We woke up and temperatures were about -31°F. I think it had been colder during the night. I had plugged the car in for the first time ever. In the morning the GPS was frozen solid. Nothing could wake Sarah from her icy tomb. We thought she was dead. We were very sad. We need that GPS and had not brought a spare portable GPS. We would have to navigate on our own.

Today we drove across the Great Plains of North America. Many consider this a boring drive. Not I. In fact, I consider a comment about this being boring to be a comment on the shortcomings of the viewer, not the plains. First of all, you cannot appreciate the plains by driving through them at 100 kph (or more) as we did today. The beauty of the prairies is subtle. It requires discernment. It demands attention. The prairies, unlike the mountains for example, are not “in your face.”.

The Great Plains or prairies is one of the most stressed ecosystems on the planet and also among the least protected. It is not protected for two reasons, in my opinion. First of all, because the plains have a subtle beauty people are not as inclined about getting involved in their protection. That is why the nature organization I belong to is called Native Orchid Conservation and not Liverwort Conservation. The great beauties–whether human or botanical–get all the attention. That is a pity.

Added to that, humans see the plains as their own. They have taken them over to such an extent that they are entirely part of the human landscape. Very little of the prairies have not been disturbed. It seems to many humans that we can do with the prairies whatever we want.

As a result of these two factors the plains just don’t the respect that they ought to get. That is unfortunate, not just for the plains, but for us too. 50% of North America’s ducks are produced in the Prairie Pothole Region. It has been estimated that 100 million ducks live in this region. And many of these birds are in trouble. The problem is not just lost of wetlands, thought that is a big problem here, but the problem is severely compounded by the degradation of the what still remains. If wetlands don’t contain grass there is no place for birds to nest. That is  also a huge problem.

The Plains changed dramatically when people started tapping into the Ogallala Aquifer. The Ogallala Aquifer is a shallow water table aquifer that is surrounded by silt, clay and gravel located beneath the Great Plains in the United States. It is one of the world’s largest aquifers and underlies an area of approximately 174,00 in portions of 8 states (South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Texas). It took us the better part of 2 days to drive through it at 75 mph.

  • If spread across the U.S. the aquifer would cover all 50 states with 1.5 feet of water
  • If drained, it would take more than 6,000 years to refill naturally
  • More than 90 percent of the water pumped is used to irrigate crops
  • $20 billion a year in food and fibre depend on the aquifer[1]

The most important fact of course is that the aquifer would take 6,000 years to replenish if it were drained as some fear we are now doing.

The water that permeates the buried gravel is mostly from the vanished rivers. It has been down there for at least three million years, percolating slowly in a saturated gravel bed that varies from more than 1,000 feet thick in the North to a few feet in the Southwest.

Industrial-scale extraction of the aquifer did not begin until after World War II. Diesel-powered pumps replaced windmills, increasing output from a few gallons a minute to hundreds. Over the next 20 years the High Plains turned from brown to green. The number of irrigation wells in West Texas alone exploded from 1,166 in 1937 to more than 66,000 in 1971. By 1977 one of the poorest farming regions in the country had been transformed into one of the wealthiest, raising much of the nation’s agricultural exports and fattening 40 percent of its grain-fed beef.

As Jane Braxton Little joined out, “the miracle of new pumping technology was taking its toll below the prairie. By 1980 water levels had dropped by an average of nearly 10 feet throughout the region. In the central and southern parts of the High Plains some declines exceeded 100 feet. Concerned public officials turned to the U.S. Geological Survey, which has studied the aquifer since the early 1900s. As Jane Braxton Little said, “It was found that in some places farmers were withdrawing four to six feet a year, while nature was putting back half an inch. In 1975 the overdraft equalled the flow of the Colorado River. Today the Ogallala Aquifer is being depleted at an annual volume equivalent to 18 Colorado Rivers. Although precipitation and river systems are recharging a few parts of the northern aquifer, in most places nature cannot keep up with human demands

As William Finnegan pointed out, “In the United States, the Ogallala Aquifer, which reaches from Texas to South Dakota and is indispensable to farming on the Great Plains, is being drained eight times faster than it can naturally recharge.” In southern Kansas, 180 miles west of Wichita, is one of the High Plains areas hardest hit by the aquifer’s decline. Groundwater level has dropped 150 feet or more, forcing many farmers to abandon their wells. The cause is obvious, says Mark Rude, executive director of the Southwest Kansas Groundwater Management District: overuse. With a liquid treasure below their feet and a global market eager for their products, farmers here and across the region have made a Faustian bargain—giving up long-term conservation for short-term gain. To capitalize on economic opportunities, landowners are knowingly “mining” a finite resource.[2]

None of this is pretty. All of this is dangerous.

I was surprised to learn that between 2001 and 2008, a mere 7 years, 32% of the cumulative depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer occurred. I was also surprised to learn that in addition to agriculture, 2 major sources of depletion were the oil and gas industry and coal industry–all industries that the current President is doing to much to prop up while so much of the world believes we should be cutting back. Trump wants to make things worse!

As we drove along Interstate 29 into South Dakota I saw an old building I had seen 3 times before.   Each time I wanted to photograph it, but noticed it too late to stop on the Interstate. Today it happened.

 

I love old buildings. Old buildings bring to life a philosophy that arose in Japan called Wabi-Sabi. I will post a separate blog about this interesting Japanese philosophy.

After driving all day without meandering we arrived in Belleville Kansas. We checked in to a modest inn and proceeded direct to a local dining establishment. It was a classic small town Midwest restaurant on a Saturday night. All the men wore cowboy hats or John Deer caps or facsimiles. We enjoyed a good sold meal of hamburger steak and curly fries for me, while Chris had mashed potatoes and gravy. It was simple American fare. It was good. It did not hurt that I had a Busch Light Beer to go with the meal. They even served opossum pie. I feared this was what it was. I asked the waitress and she explained there  were no opossums in the pie. It was chocolate cream and pecans. It actually sounded good, but my heart was set on coconut pie. Later I regretted this. Even though the pie was great how many times will I have a chance to eat opossum pie?

There was a treat waiting for us in our hotel–a book called Spiritual Vigilantes. I kid you not–vigilantes! The book claimed to tell the truth behind the attempted destruction of God’s law in America. It asserted that the Christian Church is in the midst of “extreme spiritual warfare with its members being taught lies with every word of false doctrine.” It added, “the left will not stop until their mission to remove any evidence that God exists in the United States is completely removed.” Is this where religious freedom has led us?

[1] Jane Braxton Little, “The Ogallala Aquifer: Saving a Vital U.S.” Scientific American, March 2009

[2] Jane Braxton Little, “The Ogallala Aquifer: Saving a Vital U.S.” Scientific American, March 2009