Sunday, September 30, 2012

Karma Waits Decades for an Opportunity


After ten years as a homeowner I finally got around to cleaning out the shed yesterday.  Some of the junk I pulled out of the shed belonged to the previous owner of the house.  I put these items - a barbecue grill and an office chair - on the curb for the metal scavengers who troll the neighborhood.  I also set out my son's old tricycle.

My wife woke me at a quarter of six this morning to tell me that the items I had put on the curb were in the middle of the street.  I went outside to put them back.  The barbecue grill had been tipped over and pieces of charcoal were in the street.  I ran over some of them when I moved my car to block the items.  I wanted to make it harder for the vandals to do it again.

When I got back inside my wife told me that she had been in the bathroom and could hear something being dragged and a girl laughing.  My wife shook her head and wondered why anyone would do something like that.

"It's Karma."  I told her.

"Oh God, John.  What did you do?"  She asked.

I told her about my visit to my uncle's dairy farm in Wisconsin in the late summer of 1976 or 1977.  I was about fifteen or sixteen.  My cousin, my uncle's oldest son, was a month younger than I.  One night my cousin and I went out after dark.  The corn in the field was getting tall.  We uprooted several stalks of corn and stood them up in a line across the county road that ran along the cornfield.  We saw the headlights of a car when we had the cornstalks lined up across one lane.

We headed for the ditch and waited.  The car came to a stop and the driver started yelling and cursing in case whoever pulled the prank was still within earshot.  We stayed quiet as long as we could, but when the guy continued to yell and curse we both broke out laughing and had to run through the cornfield for the house.

That was one of the biggest laughs of my laugh.  It took almost 40 years for me to pay for it.  Karma takes its own sweet time.

Saturday, September 15, 2012

Heading for Higher Ground


Several months after the tsunami of 2004 I read about a man who survived it.  He remembered that his elders told him that if he ever saw the tide go out much farther than he had ever seen, to head to high ground.  He yelled "Run!" and got everyone in his village to safety.

The man was a leader of some of the hunter-gatherer people on the Andoman islands off the coast of Thailand.  They live what most of us would consider a primitive lifestyle.  Yet, this man and his people survived the tsunami while people with cell phones and instant access to weather information perished under the waves.

Since I read the article about the man who survived the tsunami I have often been unimpressed with news about advances in technology.  I read another article before that about how farmers who could recite the most weather proverbs are the most successful farmers.  I am not saying that we should get rid of our cell phones, but sometimes our own memories may be more helpful to our survival than gadgets.

One machine that we would be better off without is the automobile.  We built a dangerous transportation system on the need for everyone to have their own car.  Our need for powerful and impressive-looking automobiles and our juvenile desire to drive them at high speeds has led us into an addiction to oil that has made us warlike.  Humans die so that people in the United States can pretend that interstate highways are NASCAR courses.  We constantly put toxic gases into the air.

TV ads for CSX Railroad claim that they haul a ton of freight almost 500 miles on one gallon of fuel.  Why do we waste so much fuel hauling passengers and freight in cars and trucks?  Because of our ridiculous car culture and snobbery.  We think of ourselves as failures if we do not own a car, and we do not want to have to associate with lowlifes found on buses and trains.  The cost of this car culture is immense.

Telecommuting may someday relieve our need for expensive gasoline, but we need to stop thinking of our automobiles as extensions of ourselves or a form of self expression.  Trains and bicycles make more sense than cars.  Our need for exercise and socialization may help us to survive better than cars.