Doris “Granny D” Haddock died peacefully today in her Dublin, New Hampshire family home at 7:18 p.m. Tuesday, March 9, 2010. She was 100 years old. Born in 1910 in Laconia, New Hampshire, she attended Emerson College and lived through two world wars and the Great Depression. She was an activist for her community and for her country, remaining active until the return of chronic respiratory problems four days ago.

I only met Doris once briefly when she visited San Luis Obispo in connection with the Cal Poly Preface Reading Program but she touched me permanently.  As I seek ways to adapt to growing old in a world that feels easy to abandon, her love of life, her pride in her past, her urgent concern with the future, her fighting spirit, and her refusal to give up in spite of disappointment, provide me with guidance and inspiration.  What a sad irony it is that during her last few months, the Supreme Court handed down a decision that, for the time being at least, reverses so much of what she worked for. Finally now she gets a break from that relentless struggle.  Or perhaps, somewhere, her spirit still is on the march.

Two freshman student responses to Granny D’s visit to Cal Poly in 2004

Go Granny Go!

When I got to Cal Poly this fall, I soon learned that not too many people actually read the shared reading book, Granny D., You’re Never Too Old to Raise a Little Hell.  Furthermore, those who did read it did not really like it.  I was surprised because I loved reading the book!  I love to travel and have been to most of the states of our country, so I loved hearing about her adventures in the different states.  In addition, I have gotten really into politics over the summer, and I have loved forming my political identity and views.  Doris “Granny D” Haddock is very inspirational, and she demonstrates what a difference one person can make.

I have looked forward to hearing Granny D. speak since I read just a few pages of the book.  I was very excited to finally have the opportunity last Friday night when Granny D. gave her speech entitled “I am in the Example Business.”  She is an engaging speaker, and it was delightful to hear her.  I liked how her speech started regarding writing a cheaper and shorter book, although I was not one of the students with an “independence streak” (at least as far as this book goes).  I liked how she drew us in with her stories of New England autumns, which I remember vividly from the year I lived in Massachusetts.  Additionally, I loved all the “political stuff” and her stories of life in New Hampshire.  My favorite part of her speech was when she said, “We cannot move the world toward our wisdom and love so long as we permit political systems that run on greed and fear instead of love and ideas.”  At the end of the speaking, I enjoyed the question and answer time.  For example, her sticker that said “Vote Dammit!” and when Dennis Burke told her that a question was “regarding Iraq.”  Throughout her speech, I loved to applaud her and give her standing ovations.

Attending Granny D’s speech was one of the most enjoyable things I have done at Cal Poly.  It was motivational, and I felt “the hero inside my heart.”  Granny D. is one of my heroes, and she is what this country is all about!

Granny D

When I found out Granny D was coming to speak at Cal Poly, I was excited but did not think it would be worth my time. Looking back to the event and reflecting on what she said, I am extremely glad that I decided to attend! As in her book, her speech was filled with inspiration, politics, life lessons, biographical anecdotes, and of course humor. Her opening statement “Had I known that 3,000 of you would be forced to buy and read my book instead of enjoying your summer, I certainly would have written a cheaper and shorter book” had the crowd roaring with laughter. That statement was a perfect example to explain her personality. She is a person who loves life and has made her mark in the world and will continue to do so in the United States Senate if she gets elected.

I enjoyed learning about life in her small hometown of Peterborough, New
Hampshire. Her description of autumn made me want to become a “Leaf Peeper”! Peterborough seems to have a lot in common with San Luis Obispo and through the examples she gave, it made me want to get involved here in my new hometown and find out about local issues since I am a citizen. The fact that a play was written about the town struggles showed what a tight- knit community Peterborough is and how it is good that people don’t take things too seriously in the end. There has to be a sense of humor to get through life and not let differences divide one another. That message was strong throughout her talk.

It was nice that the forum was opened for questions. It was good to hear about local issues and hear what Granny D had to say. She is a person who knows her stuff and is not afraid to tell you. She has and will continue to fight for what she believes in until she gets what she knows is right. The United States Senate is a good move for Granny. She will be a strong influence and I believe a good influence to the senators. She will make changes for the better. Granny D will make America better and keep its ideals alive and on track.

My notes in preparation for the discussion of Granny D, during the 2004 Preface Program at Cal Poly
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Notes in preparation for a discussion of the book by David Orr, published 2009, at the Sustainability Book Club at Cal Poly.

David Orr is one of my gurus, but the first time I read this book I was disappointed by its repetitiousness, vagueness, lack of sequential structure or sustained, fully supported and defended claims, and its preaching to the choir, who have already heard most of this many times.  The central points were hardly controversial or new for us, but still unacceptable to the great majority of citizens who are looking more than ever at short term rescues or pleasures. For that reason the urgency and insistence of the tone seemed irritating and disrespectful of the audience. Compared to his last book, Design on the Edge, which contained a fascinating autobiographical narrative and a detailed account of the remarkable history of the building he was responsible for planning, designing and financing at Oberlin College, this book felt vague, uninspired, and sentimental. What does it mean after all to insist that what we should do is “deepen our humanity.” (202)

I also found it sadly dated.  Though filled with topical references to the impending Obama adminstration, the events of the fifteen months since his inauguration made many of the proposals about transforming governance and launching a revolution in Washington seem painfully overoptimistic.

Nevertheless I decided to give it another try, either to be able to articulate specifically what I found wrong with the book or to give it a more sympathetic and engaged reading.

First, I confirmed what I suspected about the book’s process of composition.  Most of the material here was previously published in the form of essays that Orr writes for the journal Conservation Biology and others.  Many of these can be found at the website, http://www.davidworr.com/index.html.  That accounted for and in a way justified the sense that each chapter recovered much of the same territory and started from scratch rather than building on what preceded.  Viewed from this perspective, each chapter had the coherence and scope of his remarkable speeches, such as the one I heard at the organizing conference for Focus the Nation in Las Vegas.  And even when general points were repeated, Orr seemed in each essay to summon up different examples and sources.

A second reading also revealed an overall structure of chapters that moved forward from beginning to middle and end despite the backtracking.  Preface and Introduction both state the predicament and his solutions. We are facing what has been called a long emergency or a bottleneck, a worldwide period of crisis brought on by the environmental degradation and climate change that misguided human impacts have produced over the last 200 years. The way out will be long and arduous, and only possible with strong, transformative leadership, primarily in the presidency but also at all levels of government and society.  Leaders have three leading tasks: move the citizenry out of a state of denial to a recognition of the dangers, develop energy policies that reverse our dependence on carbon and promote renewables, and foster a deepening of public morality emphasizing fairness, compassion, nonviolence and a sense of purpose and reverence for nature grounded in appreciation and gratitude. These three mandates are reaffirmed throughout the book.

The three chapters of section I, Politics and Governance, assert that Government is the only agency strong enough to effectively address the emergency but that government needs to be transformed. Chapter 1, Governance, asserts that the challenges of mitigating and adapting to climate change and its associated catastrophes can be faced by reversing the trend toward unregulated corporate power, trivialized and ineffective journalism, excessive consumerism and rule by lobbyists.  This can be done by redistributing wealth and privilege, publicly funding elections, smartening land use and agricultural policy, guaranteeing universal access to communication media and promoting small community autonomy.  But first government itself must be transformed from its present corrupt and dysfunctional state to a just, effective and elevating one. This will have to be accomplished through a mechanism like a new Constitutional Convention and the establishment of a new consensus.

Chapter 2 is a meditation on democracy, the form of government most likely to succeed despite its faults, the failures of its alternatives, like natural capitalism, and unregulated free-market capitalism, and the proposal of a legal, constitutional framework for instituting the kinds of social transformation needed to address climate change based on the new idea of the legal standing of future generations. Chapter 3, Leadership in the Long Emergency, compares today’s crisis with those faced by Lincoln and Roosevelt, and concludes that Obama can learn leadership lessons from both his great predecessors, which include the necessity of understanding and framing those crises both as legal-constitutional issues requiring preservation of law and tradition and as moral issues requiring deep personal insight and unshaken commitment. Orr repeats the laundry list of reforms mentioned earlier that Obama needs to accomplish.  Chapter 4, Leadership, defines true leadership, like that of those predecessors, as the capacity to energize and give direction to the populace.

Part II, Connections, is transitional in the overall structure of the book, but provides a sample of some of Orr’s strongest qualities as a writer, manifested when he lets a more imaginative, associative principle guide his design.  Chapter 5, The Carbon Connection, juxtaposes two powerful narrative descriptions: nature’s devastation of humans in New Orleans by Katrina, presumably caused by climate change, and humans’ devastation of nature in Coal Companies’ mountaintop removal, causing climate change. This is connected to Chapter 6, The Spirit of Connection, which explores spiritual and religious perspectives on Climate Change, differentiating the apocalyptic fundamentalism that both affirms and brings it on with the subjective experiences of wonder, reverence and gratitude for the gift of life that provide meaning and hope for those struggling to protect it.

Part III, Farther Horizons, contains three chapters overlapping earlier chapters and one another in content.  Chapter 7, Milennial Hope, lists factors blocking us from taking the steps necessary to confront and deal with the coming crisis and solutions, psychological, political, and spiritual, concluding with a story of Gandhian non-violence displayed by Amish toward a mass murderer who shot a number of their children. Chapter 8, Hope at the End of our Tether, expands the emphasis on anti-militarism, Gandhian Satyagraha and other Gandhian principles like anti-materialism—shift from wealth to happiness—social justice, and localism.

The final chapter, The Upshot: What is to be Done? echoes both Aldo Leopold and Lenin, verbally in the titles of two of their well known works, and thematically in calling for the creation of a community that includes natural beings and systems and in calling for a total revolution to be initiated by a vanguard of leaders, giving direction and energy to an awakened populace. The first section covers the same ground as the preceding chapters, but the chapter and section ends with a powerful vision of a desireable outcome from the long emergency only ten years in the future, imagined in his home town of Oberlin Ohio, where the  programs he has set in motion as an activist and educator have run their course.  The vision is startlingly similar to the kinds of programs and visions activists at Cal Poly and in San Luis Obispo County have dedicated themselves. More than anything in this book, these few pages (212-215) provide some of the grounds for hope that present conditions don’t encourage in regard to most of the books larger recommendations.

“Postscript: A Disclosure” is vintage Orr.  It’s a recollection of the  extraordinarily hot summer of 1980 when he and his brother worked like slaves on a farm in Arkansas, as the temperature reached 111 degrees and stayed there. It was then that he became interested in climate change.  He says he felt it viscerally, the memory recorded in his body.  That’s why it’s presented as a disclosure.  But the impact of that memory, I’m afraid is unlikely to be felt until the rest of us consistently experience such nasty conditions, and by then it’s likely to be too late.

Taking issue:

• “leadership”—is Obama like Lincoln and Roosevelt, sticking to the moral vision, keeping legal and constitutional integrity at the fore, reaching the people?
• Seemed so at inauguration, but less so now, largely because of loss of confidence resultant from bailouts and compromises, failure to seize the opportunity with courage—e.g. Copenhagen
• The long emergency—less perceivable now than in 2006, when much of this was written and when Katrina and An Inconvenient Truth and IPCC and oil spike converged to shake people up.
• Non-violence, Satyagraha—true, and a manifestation of deeper humanity, but turmoil is less likely to bring it to the fore, especially when the rulers and perpetrators are becoming more brazen
• Coupling peace, justice and sustainability has advantages but also makes any progress seem hopeless, because it will leave so much undone.

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Dear Chancellor Reed:

At the advice of your office, I am submitting some input on the search for the successor of Warren Baker as President of Cal Poly University San Luis Obispo.

I have taught here since 1988 and am recipient of the University’s Distinguished Teaching Award, the College of Liberal Arts Outstanding Scholarship Award and the CSU Systemwide Quality Improvement Award.

During his tenure President Baker has led Cal Poly to become one of the country’s preeminent Polytechnic Universities. I believe the primary mandate of his successor should be to transform Cal Poly into one of the country’s leaders in Education for Sustainability—the long-term approach to integrated solutions of economic, social and environmental problems.

It is crucial that the Trustees Committee for the Selection of the President incorporate terms in the job description and advertisement that call for successful experience in leading such institutional transformation and that they make promise in advancing sustainability an important criterion for final selection.

Doing so would serve the interests of Cal Poly’s students, who seek employment in emerging fields, of the institution, which needs more cross-disciplinary collaboration in teaching and research, and of the larger community, whose health and welfare depend upon the next generations’ commitment to addressing these problems effectively. (see  http://presidentsclimatecommitment.org/documents/Leading_Profound_Change_ExecSum_final7-28-09.pdf)

In support of this opinion, I refer you to the University Sustainability Learning Objectives recently adopted by Cal Poly’s Academic Senate and ratified by President Baker:

Cal Poly defines sustainability as the ability of the natural and social systems to survive and thrive together to meet current and future needs. In order to consider sustainability when making reasoned decisions, all graduating students should be able to:
•    Define and apply sustainability principles within their academic programs
•    Explain how natural, economic, and social systems interact to foster or prevent sustainability
•    Analyze and explain local, national, and global sustainability using a multidisciplinary approach
•    Consider sustainability principles while developing personal and professional values

It also bears mention that the “Top Ten Best College Presidents” selected by Time Magazine in November 2009 are all Sustainability Champions. (http://www.aashe.org/blog/top-ten-college-presidents-also-sustainability-champions)

In recent years Cal Poly faculty and students have collaboratively demonstrated initiative and talent in developing major sustainability projects in and out of class—e.g. the Solar Decathlon (http://www.solardecathlon.calpoly.edu/mainpage.html),
Focus the Nation (http://focusthenationslo.wordpress.com/about-focus-the-nation/), the Sustainable Agriculture Resource Consortium (http://www.sarc.calpoly.edu/), the Business of Green Media Conference (http://www.californiagreensolutions.com/cgi-bin/gt/tpl.h,content=2983) —and Facilities Departments have moved forward in conserving money and resources, thereby teaching by example (http://www.afd.calpoly.edu/facilities/sustainability.asp). What is now urgently needed is creative, daring and seasoned leadership at the top to articulate the vision and summon the resources to strengthen this focus.

Dear Professor S Marx

RQ has received a review copy of English Mercuries: Soldier Poets in the Age of Shakespeare by Adam McKeown (Vanderbilt University Press). Would you agree to write a 700 word review due no later than February 10th?

Renaissance Society of America
365 Fifth Avenue, 5400
New York, NY 10016

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This book’s scholarly subject is literary works about war produced between 1551 and 1632 by English writers who fashioned themselves both soldiers and poets. Three introductory chapters frame that subject: an account of the author’s experience as an English professor and Marine Lieutenant Colonel deployed in Djibouti during 2006, where questions raised in a class he taught on Shakespeare’s Henry V generated the project, a discussion of an 18th-century pamphlet pretending to collect eyewitness accounts of 16th century warfare, and a description of similarities between the conditions of expeditionary forces under the command of Elizabeth 1 and George Bush 2. The whole book addresses what the author calls a “glaring omission”(11) by voicing perspectives of veterans then and now about war and militarism.

McKeown analyzes texts dealing with military activity during  Elizabeth’s regime. “Age of Shakespeare” in the subtitle alludes to a sentimental characterization of Early Modern England he challenges and to responses to Henry V that begin and end the book.  His readings undermine the hawkish propaganda usually associated with military writings and critique policies leading to the “calamity” of expeditionary war.  Instead, they emphasize the paradoxical, nuanced and invariably tormented experience of soldiers in battle, on deployment or returning home.

In Thomas Churchyard’s 1575 account of  The Siege of Leith, McKeown finds both a critique of the military strategy that fruitlessly sacrificed many lives and disdain for the diplomacy that eventually brought peace yet discredited the sacrifices of those who fought.

Contrasting George Gascoigne’s 1576 The Spoil of Antwerp with Alarum for London,  an anonymous 1602 play based upon it,  McKeown finds the earlier soldier’s account of the English mission in the Netherlands better informed and more judicious than the later adaptation, which converts it into anti-Spanish propaganda.

John Donne’s utterances on the subject “ask their readers to see war as both a testing ground for personal and national valor and a destructive force that ravages human pride and renders whole countries bare, peace both an Eden on earth and a state of gnawing restlessness and internal anxiety.”(19) McKeown states that the purpose of these emblematic paradoxes is to stimulate spiritual awakening, but he finds their source in Donne’s harrowing military experiences in the Cadiz and Azores expeditions.

McKeown juxtaposes John Harington’s popular translation of Ariosto’s war-glorifying Orlando Furioso with his reports on the disastrous Irish campaign for which he volunteered and with his complaints of ingratitude by “the country that scorned him when he came home.”(20)

The book concludes with an affirmation of martial virtue in Ben Jonson’s The New Inn and The Magnetic Lady, where the playwright presents exemplary veteran soldiers who, during the revival of English militarism after the death of King James, warn “Caroline England of its moral and physical unfitness to get involved in foreign war.”(20)

McKeown’s third chapter, “English Mercuries,” begins by presenting a document about heroic soldiers that lionizes Elizabethan military achievements. At the end of a long paragraph he reveals that it is an 18th century hoax often quoted to support 19th century English militarist propaganda.  “Mercury” signifies reporter, as in the names of newspapers, and “English Mercuries” is used by the chorus in HenryV (2.0.7) to describe the king’s recruits. The term appears in emblems and a familiar motto signifying the Renaissance ideal of soldier-scholar: Tam Marti quam Mercurio. But Mercury also represents a liar and thief, alluding to the unreliability of both Chorus and King, as witnessed by the play’s cynical other voices. McKeown restores the term’s honorific meaning in reference to his real soldier-poets.

McKeown’s paradoxical method is prominent in the introductory chapter, entitled “Ecole Lemonier” after the “forward antiterrorism base” in Djibouti U.S. forces shared with the French Foreign Legion.  Here, McKeown tells us, he taught Henry V to fellow marines who wanted to know if Shakespeare ever served. He describes this class to reporters and to NPR listeners he addressed in a commentary as neither “the story of one sensitive intellectual’s attempt to create a meaningful experience in a war otherwise without meaning” nor that of “a patriot who risked the censure of an elitist and hypocritical academy to serve his country and give Shakespeare back to the regulars guys fighting the war.”(12) Rather he claims, “it was a real war story by real soldier about other real soldiers fighting in a real war.”

The book concludes by repudiating the perennial use of Henry V to promote military adventurism. In the self-portrait on the back cover, the author wears no uniform, but his black t-shirt, shaved head and fierce smile convey the message, “Semper Fi.” Speaking both for and as one of the English Mercuries, he characterizes soldiers as “morally strong people…who are not stooges of the state or servants of its whims…They are above all products of political violence and witnesses to how people come to terms with political violence not as an idea but as an action they must commit or endure.” McKeown provides valuable insight to outsiders about what military people for five hundred years have thought about their profession.  But in this age of a volunteer army, I still fail to understand his meaning of  “must.”

A few ideas for the future of San Luis Obispo City Agricultural Development at Calle Joaquin

A.    This project has many potential benefits

1. It can produce healthy nourishing food for local consumption with minimal energy and water consumption.  The soil is excellent, the water is on site, the market is nearby.
2. It can provide both a learning experience and employment for farmers, a valuable profession in decline for 50 years but now beginning to revive.
3. It can serve as site for education about local history and sustainable food systems and for recreation.
4. It can serve as a wildlife preserve for butterflies, birds and beneficial soil organisms.
5. It can contribute to the worldwide movement for sustainable agriculture, healthy eating, and stronger local communities.
6. It can bring fame, fortune and foundation support to the City of San Luis Obispo.
7. It can provide retraining and employment for people who need it as agricultural and hospitality service workers.

B.    The site has many advantages:

1. Proximity to commercial and residential areas and a huge volume of freeway traffic that will allow for easy publicity of successful development, assuming that poisons are not used.
2. Proximity to Laguna Lake Park, which already attracts recreational uses which could be linked—e.g. hiking and equestrian trails, wildlife habitat, views of mountains and valley
3. A varied set of present uses and resources that fit well together for potential development, e.g.
4. Historic barn and farmhouse—for education center and livestock facilities to be used by public and 4H, Cal Poly Ag Education program, local schools
5. Creek and tributary riparian areas—for pleasant landscape and riparian uses
6. Heritage Eucalpytus grove for wildlife habitat and park
7. Enough class one soil for a variety of sustainable agriculture uses, including leasing to local farmers or coops, e.g. New Frontiers, Cal Poly Organic Farm, Central Coast Ag Coop, community allotment gardens, Non-profits like Growing Grounds

C.    Priorities

1. I believe making a significant portion of this land financially viable as source of local food production is highest priority. Potential for longer term leasing, easy access to water and distribution outlets and a history of successful cultivation could allow for both profitability and a pricing structure making access to organic produce, including perhaps poultry, dairy and eggs, available to lower income customers.  Linkage with local Food Stamp and Food Bank and School Lunch programs could be encouraged.
2. Education is a second priority.  The present existence of Ag Education programs in County schools and at Cal Poly promises extensive use of this potential.
3. Recreation and tourism.  Places like Fairview Farms, Avila Barn, the original Knott’s Berry Farm, demonstrate the potential in this area.

Waking up at dawn under an orange full moon above Savary in pure silence. Since we arrived, day before yesterday, smoke from the fires on Vancouver Island has hidden the mountains that normally create the beautiful horizon line.

Before the children and grandchildren arrive, there is time to read and a wealth of comfortable chairs and couches at Knoll House for the purpose. I’m halfway through a book that I bought on impulse at Powell’s in Portland on the way up here because I’d heard about it from several quarters: The World Without Us.  It places many of the events that cause me anxiety in a framework that both magnifies their horror and reduces their pain by turning them into enthralling catastrophe narratives. If humans were gone from New York and the pumps that keep the underground city from flooding stopped working, the water would fill the subways and rust the foundation piers of the skyscrapers.  Within a few decades the whole thing would have collapsed into a landscape of rubble covered with forest. Elephant herds would multiply in Africa, restoring jungle to grassland. Untended corrosion in the chemical plants along the Texas Louisiana coast would cause explosions and toxic spills that  eventually would be cleaned up by bacteria evolved to do the job.

Its good to be reading this in B.C. where keeping back the bush requires continuing human effort without which cars and homes and cleared land can be seen succumbing to the engulfing monster of natural reclamation—as heartless and inexorable in its way as loggers and bulldozers chewing up the woods.  Where Joe and I felled a dozen fifty-foot jackpines threatening the house last summer, the opening is now filled with brambles and dandelion-like weeds I started cutting yesterday. I can hardly wait to fire up the chainsaw to clear windfalls blocking the trails I’ve carved over the years.  Imagining the relatively short interval required to neutralize the growing impacts of humans on mother earth serves as an antidote to my fear that what Bill McKibben predicted 20 years ago as the End of Nature will soon be upon us.

An Address to Focus the Nation II Cal Poly
February 5 2009

The words of Bob Dylan’s 1964 anthem, “The Times They Are A Changin’” have never rung truer than during the last few years of apocalyptic uncertainty, threat, and promise. It’s been a period of sudden collapse–from the Twin Towers and the Global financial system to species diversity and climate stability–and of miraculous growth—from the Internet and biological research to community organizations and acceptance of diversity.

Change, when you’re in the middle of it, is mysterious, lacking adequate name or narrative. The package isn’t labeled, the story is still unfolding. In the sixties, before the words “hippy,” and “counterculture” were coined, we referred to our transformations of consciousness simply as “the Movement.” The positive change going on today remains unnamed. In his latest book, Blessed Unrest, Paul Hawken calls it “the largest social movement in all of human history.” He claims “noone saw it coming.”

But Hawken is one of the visionaries who have seen what’s coming and have provided it with various names and stories. His earlier books, The Ecology of Commerce, and Natural Capitalism, envisioned the present as one of “Restorative Economy” and “A Second Industrial Revolution.” E. J. Dionne calls it “The Revival of Civil Society,” Thomas Berry, “The Great Work,” David Korten, “The Great Turning.” I’m calling it the Sustainability movement.

One way to make sense of this movement is to place it in historical context.  As I look back at my own story, I remember childhood in the nineteen forties and fifties governed by postwar, coldwar, economic expansion, consumerism, suburbanization, homogenizing TV, and patriarchy. The sixties and seventies rejected all that in favor of peace, community living, spirituality and ecology. The eighties and nineties reacted again, privileging individualism, greed, branding and technology over nature. The new millennium took those tendencies to an extreme and then reversed direction toward where we are now.

Such a pattern of oscillations was characterized by Friedrich Hegel as thesis-antithesis-synthesis. He believed history was driven by the progress of the collective spirit of humanity expressed in science, art, and philosophy. Changes in ideas were then manifested as material progress in technology, economics and politics. Karl Marx famously turned the pattern on its head, claiming that economic arrangements, particularly the flow of financial capital, provided the base that determined the rest, which he called superstructure.

This dialectical pattern can apply today. The movement we call Sustainability seems to synthesize the sometimes unrealistic idealism of the sixties and seventies with the shrewd yet often short-sighted materialism that followed. Sustainability is grounded in science and deals with resources, technology and business, but it’s also grounded in consciousness and deals with morality, aesthetics, and religion. Its trinity of values—Environment, Equity, Economy—can be emblematized not as base and superstructure, but rather as a triangular recycling moebius.

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I woke up this morning with a cough, stomachache, headache and sore back.  No appointments today except babysitting, and I wanted to see the inauguration.   Jan needed the day to prepare for the long city council meeting tonight.  I decided to stay in bed watching on our snowy, cable-less TV as long as possible.  Claire got here with Lucas during the oath of office.  The baby was happy to sit next to me with his two Thomas train cars, though he kept looking at me anxiously when I cried, before, during and after the speech.

Obama carries the public pain of these last eight years along with the historical pain of African-Americans on light and supple shoulders.  The evocations of Martin Luther King and Lincoln mix with those of Michael Jordan. His language is exquisite. His sternness and smiles overpower me like my father’s when I was two.

What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility – a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.

I believe every word of this. But I only feel that satisfaction sometimes, because I know how hard it is to give my all, and I cant always do it.

Last night I finished work on a speech for the Focus the Nation Teach-In on February 5. To juxtapose it with the President’s utterance today is  hybris.  But at various moments while I watched and wept this morning, pieces of it came into my mind and made me both ashamed and proud.