https://dexterchapin.substack.com
Stepping stones form a pattern, or not. Stepping stones lead somewhere, or not. These stepping stones will be about cultural resilience, education, and thrivancy via General Systems Theory and Natural History. I am fascinated by questions of how we know and what we know. I always look for patterns. Long-term, these posts are explorations of patterns that maybe I see locally, nationally, culturally, socially, and environmentally.
https://dexterchapin.substack.co
These are a series of posts about rewilding. There five posts.
Nature Abhors a Vacuum, a short reflection on writing about Trump
“Nature abhors a vacuum” is a statement with a long and storied history starting with Aristotle. Any empty space is ephemeral and quickly filled. It doesn’t even have to be empty, just emptier. With a lightning bolt, the air is super-heated, expands, leaves lots of semi-empty, and then collapses back to refill. That’s the thunderclap, everything else are just echoes.
It is easy to create a partially empty space and create a partial vacuum. Consider a vacuum cleaner, or a mine tunnel. It may be easy to create a minimal degree of vacuum, but as the vacuum increases, the costs to create and maintain it start to rise exponentially.1,2
“An empty suit,” is a person who is a metaphorical vacuum, i.e., trump. Think of the decades, efforts, and resources spent to create and maintain his more than just minimal vacuum. His emptiness leaks badly and is always quickly refilled by the last emotion, person, idea, or fantasy he entertains. Given who he is and who surrounds him, none of that which pours in is healthy, beautiful, moral, positive, or even intelligent.
Trying to keep track of what trump spews out from today’s partial filling is the almost perfect definition of doom-scrolling. Doom-scrolling is expensive in mental, social, and physical health.3,4 I wonder if anybody can do it and maintain equanimity. I cannot.5
To turn the metaphor upside down, the existence and presence of trump has been the opposite of a vacuum. His presence on the World stage has been a black hole, so packed, so dense, so gravitational that he has threatened to suck the life out of me. There has been little room for anything but trump.
I started this Substack with the idea that the posts were stepping stones where the stepping stones form a pattern, or not, lead somewhere, or not, and are about cultural resilience via General Systems Theory and Natural History. Since the election, I have been focused on the black-hole.
I’m done. It is just too destructive. I cannot keep up. Each day is worse than yesterday, but I cannot turn my back. I will be out walking on May Day. I will be out there every next time. It is important to be there, to be counted, and to act as often as possible. It is equally important for me to make room for curiosity, imagination, beauty, perhaps awe, and certainly wonder.
Kathleen Dean Moore wrote, “Each of us has the power to make our life into a work of art that expresses our deepest values. Don’t ask, Will my acts save the world? Maybe they won’t. But ask, Are my actions consistent with what I most deeply believe is right and good?…
And here is the paradox of hope: that as we move beyond empty optimism and choose to live the lives we believe in, hope becomes transformed into something else entirely. It becomes stubborn, defiant courage. It becomes principled clarity. And when courageous-hearted, clear-minded people find one another, it becomes a powerful creative force for social change.”6
It is time to refocus on the World that is connected, vibrant, growing, changing, and moving, ever so slowly, towards the rewilding of both the planet and you, me, us, and them. Trump will be gone, sooner rather than later. The damage will remain. It is time to start making good on a promise to leave it better than I found it.
I have no idea what that means but I will be actively trying to find out.7
1) Does a pure vacuum exist inside atomic orbitals? The electron is both particle and wave travelling at high speed over a short, probabilistic path and therefore essentially everywhere at once. If you could be inside an Oxygen atom, it would be very exciting dodging all those bits coming at you essentially simultaneously.
2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high_vacuum
3) https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/doomscrolling-dangers
4) https://psychologyfor.com/the-impact-of-doomscrolling-on-mental-health/
5) After the election, I developed a series of real, measurable, visible symptoms linked to metastatic cancer. I went through a cavalcade of tests. All of which were negative. It became clear I was psychosomatically responding to the election.
6) Kathleen Dean Moore, Great Tide Rising, (Counterpoint, 2016) 318.
7) I will have to talk about trump et al periodically. They are planetary-level toxics and cannot be ignored but their half-life is measured in months if not days.
Rethinking Environmental Science – Rewilding Post #1
Environmental Science (ES) is the systematic study of the interactions between the physical, chemical, and biological components of the environment. It is driven by the urgent need to find solutions to problems such as pollution, climate change, deforestation, and resource depletion. It is an interdisciplinary application of Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Geology, Statistics, and the sociocultural disciplines.1
ES is a very big bucket and keeps getting bigger as we develop the technology to learn more and more. I’ve spent about 50 years teaching K-12 the breadth of ES primarily focused on Ecology, and more recently on sustainable systems. During that time, I watched, learned from, and admired the intelligence, creativity and inventiveness of those leading the ES efforts. What I taught at the end was very much more Detailed, Expansive, and Integrated than what I could teach at the beginning.
ES is driven by the need to find solutions to a range of issues from local, i.e. control beaver dams, to major global issues, i.e. the climate catastrophe. The mid-range issues often generate the most heat. Two U.S. examples;
The first is about the Mississippi and the Atchafalaya rivers.2,3,4 Left alone, the Atchafalaya River would capture the Mississippi and divert the channel away from New Orleans. The Army Corp of Engineers has spent decades and billions to prevent and control the diversion. The effort teeters on the edge of failure and has resulted in major unforeseen side effects.2
The second is the Alaska fisheries. “The state’s pollock, salmon, halibut, cod, and crab, are among the largest and best-managed fisheries in the world.”5 However, the industry is in decline and faces challenges from the climate catastrophe, the collapse of salmon runs, increased costs, and international politics.
These are the kinds of issues ES deals with but often fails. It often trips over what might be called species-specific hubris6. ES has been, and is, primarily about control, mitigation and benefit for humans. Essentially, a wall has been built between us and the nonhuman “those”. ES is free to mess about in their lives, but we do not have to change.
If we want to run livestock on a range, we are allowed to just kill the wolves. There are far more effective, non-lethal alternatives that lower the livestock loss. The nonlethal controls led to 3.5 times fewer dead livestock—just 0.02% of the total population8 but only 10% of Idaho ranches use them while killing more wolves than any other state.9 We’re too busy to do anything but shoot.10
In essence, as it is being used today, most of ES is being called upon to determine the kind or amount of subsidy those on the nonhuman side of the wall will pay to maintain the behavior on the human side. This is a hierarchical view of the world. Humans are at the top. A long way down are the valuable plants (food and lumber, etc.), animals (livestock, recreational prey, fish, etc.), and valuable physical resources, followed by those elements that are not obviously valuable; at the very bottom, the physical environment.
ES tends to move the benefits up the hierarchy and move costs down. The inevitable result will be bankruptcy. The results might be delayed by efforts proposed by ES on our part, but the final result is impoverishment of the environment. The wolf is the poster-child for this effect. Extirpation of wolves decimates a broad swath of the environment. What wolves do for the diversity and health of the environment is the stuff of legend.11,12
The example of the wolf demonstrates that humankind, blinded by hubris13, is on an accelerating path to Armageddon. We cannot bankrupt the Earth Systems and expect to survive. The solutions are to bust down the wall between us and them, to recognize that the World is flat, not a hierarchy, to restore Natural History as a way of knowing, and to open our eyes to the wisdom14 of Mother Nature, the all-time resilience champion. In short, we must start telling very different stories about where fit and how we live.
1) https://enviroliteracy.org/what-is-the-definition-of-environmental-science/ This is a nice introduction to Environmental Science but it is also a good example of arrogance in drawing a distinction between Science and Study.
2) https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/news/feature-articles/tale-two-rivers
3) https://www2.tulane.edu/~bfleury/envirobio/enviroweb/FloodControl.htm
4) https://mississippiriverdelta.org/a-tale-of-two-basins-why-one-is-thriving-while-the-other-is-dying/
5) https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/alaskas-fisheries-and-those-who-depend-them-are-sea-troublesT
6) I say species-specific but that is not completely fair. Probably a more accurate description would be American, white, male, capitalist, hubris.
7) https://www.clearwaterinnovation.org/post/the-californian-delta-smelt-controversy
9) https://www.livingwithwolves.org/non-lethal-deterrents/
10) Is this the place to point out that folks like the Maasai have been raising cattle in the midst of metaphorical wolves-on-steroids, hyenas, leopards and lions?
11) https://www.yellowstonepark.com/things-to-do/wildlife/wolf-reintroduction-changes-ecosystem/
12) https://www.animalsaroundtheglobe.com/the-wolves-of-yellowstone-a-comeback-story-1-321151/
13) The incredibly stupidity of the scavenger oligarchs is manifest in their behavior and expressed goals. They simply cannot survive their dreams. If the peasants die, the kings are doomed. https://thehistoryjar.com/2024/03/28/power-and-the-people-revolting-peasants/
14) https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-modern-brain/201910/how-dose-vitamin-n
P.S. If you have gotten this far in the notes, this is the new ES that we need. This is not sufficient but absolutely necessary. https://shorturl.at/NJabS
Rewilding, an initial description– Rewilding Post #2
As we look around, it does not take much convincing to see the World is in dire straits. Everywhere we look, we can see accelerating damage to the environmental services we, and every other life-form, depend on. We are not blind, at least many of us are not, so we attempt to mitigate and ameliorate the damage using Environmental Science.
The prognosis for success doing what we have been doing is poor1. We need to do something different and one possible different approach is “Rewilding.” A concept introduced in the 1990s consisting of cores, carnivores (keystone species), and corridors with minimal human management or interference.
The cores would be large chunks of land such as wilderness areas, and national parks. The carnivores would be grizzlies, wolves, and cougars. The keystones would be such as bison, salmon, and beavers. The corridors connecting the cores help prevent genetic exhaustion and bottlenecks. The reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone serves as a partial proof of concept but lacking corridors2.
Rewilding comes in two basic packages.
-Passive rewilding is simply leaving an area to restore itself through a natural process of succession. A stunning example of this process is the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, most of which was denuded and intensively farmed for about a century. This is basically a “leave it be” process. During the pandemic shut down, wildlife started to rewild cities and towns3,4. The no-go zone around Chernobyl and the no-man’s land between N and S Korea are blossoming rewilding wilderness areas.
-Active rewilding involves removal of human artifacts, removal of invasive species, and the translocation or reintroduction of keystone species. This is a more designed process. The prairie bison are examples2. Trophic rewilding, focuses on the reintroduction of apex predators and leaving the rest to work itself out. Again, the Yellowstone wolves are a good example.
In either case, the goal is to restore an area to “wildness” but what is that precisely? It is unlikely that we can return many places to some pristine state of wildness. We cannot bring back the passenger pigeon. Will the Everglades ever be python-free? And wildness must adapt to climate change.
Is wildness defined as a self-sustaining, self-creating, dynamically balanced environment with little or no human management? If so, how much management is allowable?
Can an area be “wild” if it is managed with the goals of maintaining the ecosystem services defined as provisioning, regulating, cultural, and supporting?5
Does rewilding always require a big project? Can you rewild a suburban or urban neighborhood or park?
Rather than restoration, can reorganization and substitution create a functional wildness that fulfills the ecosystem services and enhances cultural services?
I guess the appropriate response to these questions is that rewilding is a direction to take rather than a specific process, goal, or outcome, but there are commonalities found in every effort.
-Rewilding increases biodiversity, not always in a predicted or expected manner. A core part of rewilding is that once started, Nature is the architect, not humans.
-Increased biodiversity mitigates the Climate Catastrophe by inherently increasing carbon sequestration, increasing water absorption and availability,6 and enhancing the ecosystem services of regulation and support often beneficial in terms of reduced flooding, pollution, and fire impact.
-Rewilding as a fantasy is always wildly positive. Rewilding on the ground often requires persuasion about a range of issues including, but not limited to, loss of cropland, fear of large carnivores, uncertainty about final outcomes, and loss of local control.
-The primary cost of rewilding is space, an increasingly rare, commodified resource in a competitive world.
-Anecdotally, it seems that rewilding is often an economic boon for locations and areas that might not otherwise thrive with benefits in the form of increased tourism, recreational opportunities, and positive affect.
A plurality of us, perhaps a majority, value access to Nature, biodiversity, and environmental resilience7. Rewilding supports those values in many ways. Not the least of which is just the term “rewilding” feeds our imaginations in a manner that “Environmental Science” never can.
With rewilding, our imaginations can create new stories. Stories where humans are in connection with the World rather than dominant and distant. Stories where we recognize the complexity and uncertainty of the networks that allow us to thrive as pares-inter-pares.
We, as Americans and as world citizens, are in desperate need for a sociocultural, philosophical, moral, and natural rewilding. I leave with a quote that launches the next rewilding post.
“Of all the world’s creatures, perhaps those in the greatest need of rewilding are our children. The collapse of children’s engagement with nature has been even faster than the collapse of the natural world. In the turning of one generation, the outdoor life in which many of us were immersed has gone.”
— George Monbiot, instance unknown
1) https://dexterchapin.substack.com/p/rethinking-environmental-science
2) Corridors are crucial, even when dealing with large areas. https://www.npca.org/advocacy/37-isle-royale-a-unique-island-for-wildlife and https://americanprairie.org/rewilding/ or https://shorturl.at/NJabS
3) https://allthatsinteresting.com/covid-19-animals-reclaiming-earth
- https://matadornetwork.com/read/lockdown-cities-animals-taking-vacant-streets/
5) https://earth.org/what-are-ecosystem-services/
6) https://www.wri.org/insights/landscape-restoration-winning-strategy-warmer-world
7) https://natureofamericans.org/findings/valuing-nature
8) Neither the felon, nor his cabinet, nor the scavenger oligarchs have the horsepower to understand the complexity and uncertainty of the World. If that is an arrogant statement, so be it. With our policies and elections, we move the Earth towards Armageddon.
Rewild the Child – Rewilding Post #3
It is time to take Nature seriously as a resource for learning – particularly for students not effectively reached by traditional instruction.3
A long time ago, long enough that it was a different world, at the start of the school day, a kid walked into my office with a rifle and a bomb. Looking at him, it took about a nanosecond to figure that the rifle was a prop and not a tool, and the bomb might remove fingers but not much else. The whole incident lasted one or two minutes and it was done.
We sat and talked while we waited for his parents to show up. That took a while, so we covered a lot of ground. He really wasn’t dangerous, but he was spending too much time in the classroom. He needed an out, from the classroom, home, and town. It took the rest of the day, but he was accepted into a hybrid program of classes and experiential fieldwork in the National Forests. Two years later, he graduated into a full-ride to a four-year college.
This story demonstrates that kids, nearly all kids, need Nature as much as they need a school desk.
The research from the last twenty or thirty years is simply overwhelming. It is better documented than the climate catastrophe. Students learning in a natural environment perform better in reading, mathematics, science, and social studies. Exposure to the natural environment can lower the effects of mental health issues that can make it difficult to pay attention in the classroom and such exposure gets apathetic students excited about learning4. It doesn’t take much Nature to make a difference. Landscapes of mowed grass and parking lots are associated with poorer student performance, whereas landscapes composed primarily of trees and shrubs are correlated with favorable academic performance5. Learning outside the classroom contributes significantly to raising standards and improving pupils’ personal, social and emotional development6.
It doesn’t have to be all that wild. It needs to be immediate, real, and uncertain. A high school sophomore swarms up a six-story challenge tower belayed by a teacher. The way down is to step off the top and be lowered on belay. She is lowered. She belays the teacher up the tower. Teacher gets ready to be lowered. She panics and yells, No! The teacher says yes and steps into space. By the time they reach the ground, she is in tears and says that is the first time anybody trusted her. She changes from a hellion to graduating with honors. That’s a whole lot of learning.
Classrooms have their place, but more and more, American kids are isolated, away from Nature, cocooned in a human-constructed, artificial, limited, digital reality lacking autopoiesis, complexity and high uncertainty. We are in fact mistreating our kids and we pay a price for it. The child suicide rate has been increasing dramatically for decades. We have created a society where kids think killing themselves is better than living. Why?7
The list of how and why we got here is long, ugly, and enraging,8 but here we are9. What do we do now? A great many good-hearted, smart people have been working on the issue for the last quarter century, and some even longer.
Outward Bound and the National Outdoor Leadership School (aka NOLS) are perhaps the senior, Cadillac programs with scholarships but spendy. Both have a wide range of programs in terms of length, ages served, and financial support.
For K-12, it has almost become a cliché for many, perhaps most, schools to shoehorn a number of trips, expeditions, internships, and field trips into their curric ula. There is a smaller number of schools for whom the rewilding of kids is the core of their programs. And there are the explicitly therapeutic programs, some of which are flat-out wonderful and some of which are just dangerous.
Some programs take students far, far away. Some take them to a city park. Chicago has 70,000 acres available for being rewilded. Detroit is rewilding about 40 square miles. Even Los Angeles is rewilding 11 miles of its channelized River.10
From the city’s inner core to the farthest out high plains, opportunities for rewilding kids exist. The evidence is overwhelming. It is worth doing, and not doing it has a very high cost in lives, futures, and thrivancy. Rewilding requires imagination. Rewilding requires understanding. Rewilding requires time. Most importantly, rewilding requires a generosity of spirit. All of these are endangered species at the state level. All of these have gone extinct at the federal level in the last 100 days.
Even now, a 100 days later, America has a huge impact globally both on the present and the future. It is not an overstatement, to help offset the damage we have caused, are causing, and will cause, we must rewild the child. It is the hope for our collective future.
1) https://dexterchapin.substack.com/p/rethinking-environmental-science
2) https://dexterchapin.substack.com/p/rewilding-an-initial-description
3) https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-04108-2_3
5) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envpol.2018.10.053
6) https://dera.ioe.ac.uk/id/eprint/9253/
7) https://dexterchapin.substack.com/p/children-an-indicator-species
8) It would take more than a single book but Chapin, Clemson ISBN13:
9781648899485 (ISBN10: 164889948X) is a start.
9) Equating a test score with education while reducing support puts the kids, and teachers, in a vice, crushing individual growth, joy, wonder, and time.
Awe is your Friend -Rewilding Post #4
Every now and then, somebody comes up with an idea that is intuitively correct and applicable almost everywhere. Locard’s Exchange Principle is one of those ideas. Locard (1877-1966) was the ‘Sherlock Holmes of Lyon, France’.1 His guiding principle was that every criminal leaves something behind and takes away something, or “Every contact, leaves a trace.”
Locard was talking about physical traces of things left and things taken. Jumping to an entirely different arena, Robert Fuller argues that an individual’s development of a self is dependent on contact. “Selves depend on input from other selves to take form and to do anything. Deprived of inputs from others, selves are stillborn”.2
Both Locard and Fuller suggest that every social, parasocial, and spiritual contact, connection, interaction, and response will leave a trace of gain and loss. Some traces are beneficial, some bruises or scars, and some are suppurating sores.
If the self is created by contact with others, are those traces who you are? Is your self simply an accretion of all those traces? Can traces be denied, lost, forgotten, modified, or otherwise done away with? To answer those questions completely would require a bookshelf.
But the short answer to the last question is “yes” if we are awestruck.
Anger, fear, joy, or any other emotion may change us. Awe will change us. “Fleeting and rare, experiences of awe can change the course of a life in profound and permanent ways.”3
Awe can be defined as “being in the presence of something vast and mysterious that transcends your current understanding of the world.”4 There are almost unlimited sources of awe, but the two most common sources seem to be human behavior and Nature.
Awe always has two dimensions: vastness and accommodation.3 Vastness may be the Grand Canyon or an individual’s extraordinary courage in the face of an all-consuming physical, mental, and spiritual danger. Vastness simply means greater than you have ever imagined or experienced.
Accommodation means your conception of the world needs to shift or expand to make sense of this new experience. What you thought you knew, understood, or expected turns out to be inadequate. If your effort at accommodation fails, there is often a resultant terror. If it succeeds, there is the possibility of enlightenment, and/or a sudden connection to God or Nature.
Psychologically, the experience of vastness and accomodation tends to reduce the centrality and importance of self. Awe reduces self-focus, promotes social connection, and fosters prosocial actions by encouraging a “small self.”5 The result is more connectivity, sharing, and support of others resulting in greater generosity, humility, and spirituality, along with an increased positive affect, including life satisfaction, increased exploration, and a decrease in materialism6.
If you and I stand for the first time at the very edge of the Grand Canyon, and you look across to the other side, you may experience a mind-blowing physical vastness demanding accommodation. I may look down and experience a mind-blowing terror-inducing vastness demanding accommodation. We both experience awe. We will travel different routes, but we are likely to experience the same sorts of small-self outcomes. The experience of awe triggers the building of a new self, a healthier self, a less ego-centric self, and a more positive, confident, less wounded self.
Awe, no matter the form, no matter the source, is a healing friend. You cannot have too much.7,8 Nature is a primary source of awe and therein is the primary argument for rewilding. We need all the awe we can get. You, me, us, and them all need awe if we are to work in concert to prevent Armageddon.
Rewild the empty lot. Rewild the city park, the National Park, the public lands, and make sure that we, especially the kids, get the opportunity to experience awe. We, the awestruck, must overcome the awe-starved politicians, scavenger oligarchs, and social predators at every level. Awe is your friend. Mine too.
1) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8544144/
2) https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/somebodies-and-nobodies/201501/new-default-self
3) Keltner, D., & Haidt, J. (2003). Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion. Cognition and Emotion, 17(2), 297–314. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699930302297
4) https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/whats_the_most_common_source_of_awe
5) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32955293/
6) https://ggsc.berkeley.edu/images/uploads/GGSC-JTF_White_Paper-Awe_FINAL.pdf
7) https://www.self.com/story/health-benefits-of-awe
8) https://connect.mayoclinic.org/blog/take-charge-healthy-aging/newsfeed-post/the-power-of-awe/
trump, Compare/Contrast with the Afghans– Rewilding Post #5
A little over a month ago, I wrote that I could not focus on and write about trump. Everything he did, and everything I could write about him was, and is, toxic to morale and psychological well-being. Instead, I decided to write about an escape hatch leading us away from Armageddon. That escape hatch is rewilding, good for the globe, good for humans, good for our fellow-travelers, and a stairway out of the psycho-socio-cultural Slough of Despond.
I wrote about what rewilding was. What it looked like, why it was good for kids, and how it could be an important primary source of awe for both kids and adults4.
Awe has two dimensions, vastness and accommodation. Psychologically, the experience of vastness and accommodation tends to reduce the centrality and importance of self. Awe reduces self-focus, promotes social connection, and fosters prosocial actions by encouraging a “small self.”1 The result is more connectivity, sharing, and support of others resulting in greater generosity, humility, and spirituality, along with an increased positive affect, including life satisfaction, increased exploration, and a decrease in materialism.
Writing about rewilding as a source of awe reminded me of things I once knew, and it allowed me to recall, re-experience, and describe two awe-inspiring events. After four posts, I felt more positive, hopeful, and confident in the possibilities of a beneficial future.
And then, trump struck again, over-the-top evil personified. He is the poster child for everything that can go wrong in the psychological, social, moral, and spiritual development of a human being, to the point that he absolutely refutes the rule, “If it walks like a duck, sounds like a duck, it is a duck”.
This is cadet bone-spurs, the thing who cruised teen-age dressing rooms, was besties with Jeffery Epstein, was called a rapist by a judge, stiffed contractors, was associated with the mob, and was adjudicated a felon 34 times, and is very possibly guilty of treason. This is a con artist whose oath, signature, or word is worth less than the sheet of paper it is on. My dog is reputed to be as smart as a 2-year-old and housebroken. That puts her ahead of trump. He believes, as only the truly stupid do, he is the smartest person in the room, any room, any time.
Awe has the capacity to rebuild and heal the bruised, injured, damaged self. The experience of awe triggers the building of a new, healthier, less ego-centric self, and a more positive, confident, and less wounded self.2 It is obvious trump has never, ever, experienced awe. However, he himself is awe inspiring, His deficits and evilness are vast and I, personally, have no ability to accommodate their vastness. What I thought I knew, what I thought I understood, what I expected is inadequate. If accommodation fails, there is a potential for terror, and, for me, trump has become the ultimate American terrorist.
I am on the very fringe of a group of Afghan families, all here legally. Does “legally” still have any meaning? I have spent time with them, eaten dinner with them, and heard parts of their stories of war, loss, chaos, and diaspora. They have a vast courage, fortitude, character, value, smarts, knowledge, and trustworthiness. It is difficult to accommodate their accomplishments, their abilities, or their value to the ongoing story of America. These people are awe inspiring.
Trump has decided that Afghans do not belong in America, and he is getting ready to deport them. He wants to replace them with Afrikaners. I am so angry I could spit. How have we allowed this? How have we allowed an outright terrorist free run of the place? How have we allowed Congress to sink into ineptitude along with the Supreme Court. Why have we allowed them to be bought and sold on the open market by the scavenger oligarchs?
Forget the questions. What do we do now?
Here is an idea. https://www.nokings.org/?SQF_SOURCE=50501
Again, stealing from my betters, here is the most important question you can ask as you go to bed tonight, Have you fought dictatorship today?
The time is now. The place is here. You, me, us, and them, all need to be able to answer “yes” every day. To steal yet another’s line, “We must keep chipping away at the wall”3. Never forget Jericho.
1) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32955293/
2) https://dexterchapin.substack.com/p/awe-is-your-friend-rewilding-post
3) I do not know who said it. Heard in overhearing a post by a friend.