Excellent points, Tom, and so much here. I want to focus on water.
I grew up in Tucson, which relies on groundwater. When my grandmother was born in 1901, the Santa Cruz and Rillito Rivers still ran much of the year and shallow wells near town could reach potable water at modest depths.
The name Tucson comes from the Native word for "spring at the foot of the black mountain." My father, living in my grandmother's 1898 territorial house surrounded by a half-acre of lawn, was appalled at a 2200.00 water bill. Letting the lawn die was out of the question, because the huge trees relied on the lawn to stay alive, so he was stuck with the bad decisions of the 1890s colonial mindset (along with the giant windows that my great-grandmother Henrietta Herring Franklin had insisted upon).
Dad checked the statutes and found he could in fact drill his own well. After the initial outlay of several thousand dollars, he would be free from that egregious bill every month.
Wasn't he surprised when he drilled down hundreds of feet into the greatly depleted aquifer and still pulled water so silty it needed extensive filtration to even be usable. The well driller advised him to go deeper because the water table was going to keep dropping until it was gone.
Tucson is one of the largest cities in North America that still lives almost entirely on groundwater, drawing everything it serves from the aquifer beneath its feet even as levels and quality decline.
Meanwhile Las Vegas, watching Lake Mead drop toward historic lows, is learning what it means to hitch a whole metropolis to the visible end of the Colorado, just as the Ogallala states are learning what it means to have spent a continent‑sized, mostly invisible reservoir that does not come back on any human timescale.
When the taps are turned and the faucets spout dust, we’ll see the wealthy siphon and store the remaining water while the poor are left to die of thirst, because that is how scarcity has always been managed in the American West.
When the Ogallala is sucked dry (as the data centers accelerate this like the end of a double-black diamond ski run, America;s High Plains breadbasket will start to go the way it did in the 1930s). Wells fail, fields go dry, and a region built on temporary bounty discovers that the aquifer it treated like a bottomless cistern will take thousands of years to refill. Your moniker will be even more appropriate, except this time there is no California to which you can escape.
I've been reading about the Ogalla Aquifer since I read Centennial in the late 70s. That's what sparked my interest in water issues in the West.
I've never been able to keep my mouth shut about anything I see as unfair or wrong. It never made me unpopular with my employers right up to the end when I was downsized for being too old, too highly paid, and too mouthy. And I don't regret a fucking bit of it. And I haven't changed. Better to die on your feet than live on your knees. My Dad was at Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge. I can't let him down now.
It occurs to me that people who choose not to read contemplative essays such as this one are also putting up the sign.
Because it’s incremental, this process of building agency within us. We are not all at the same place. Some have been living in it longer, some just beginning to put down roots. The words of others ease us into uncomfortable realization, inspire us to consider the shape of this moment and place, to take measure of our response to it, and to begin jumping the low walls and see where that brings us. Still safe, probably. But at least there is movement out. That’s a start. We all need to start where we are. To look both within and without, and see things that cannot be unseen.
My oldest living child lives in Minneapolis, three blocks from where Renee Goode was murdered. My youngest son lives in Chicago and works at a pediatric hospital and his partner is an ER doc. Both of them (and employees, families and patients) have been harassed and intimidated at work and in their neighborhoods by ICE. The snatches and drivebys continue though a little more sneaky. When I shared this and the abduction of a little boy and his dad without constitutional projection with my Representative's staffer, he asked with a smirk are they citizens? He refused to answer about the oath she took as a member of the military. Yeh I'm one of the dogs who cant respond any more.
I referenced you, Tom, the first time you talked about the sign in the window. (was it in "The briefing room"?) My reference was in episode 14 of my 6th season podcasting, the theme was "self-censorship" and the reference was to the sign placed by the passive agent who hopes to go unnoticed, wants to get on with their life.
More recently, though, I've discovered another sign being put up. It's not the sign that says "I'm doing what is expected of me, please don't hurt me!" It is, instead, a sign of distraction.
I firmly believe that if voter turnout is in numbers above 80% in both the upcoming midterm and the later presidential elections then the simple arithmetic of majority vs. minority (1/2>1/3) will bring about the first changes necessary to slow down or halt the damage being done both in the US and across the world (because everyone seems to copy the US! Argh!). I believe that this is where all USAers should be placing their attention: getting the largest voter turnout possible in both of these elections so that some semblance of "fairness" can begin to leak into the flawed, damaged process USAers call "democracy".
And yet, I see what I'll call the "disaster signs" everywhere. Instead of seeing calls to register to vote, calls to check your registration, calls to get the mail-in votes in the mail box early, calls to actually vote, to show up at the polling place, I'm seeing repetitive stuff about someone "important" (and that's up for debate) falling asleep during a cabinet meeting or losing his cool at a reporter or just being his grumpy, angry, demented, evil, twisted self, as if we need to be reminded of that.
Or we see the scandalous behavior of others who are either in power or wanting to become power. Or we see people raging about this program being cut, these people starving because that money has been re-channeled, those people dying because those medicines are no longer available because that man has brain rot, but he's the one in charge. None of this is surprising, we've been bombarded with it for ten years now. It's distraction.
That ballroom, that arch, that promenade, that gilded horse, that name slapped hurriedly onto the facade of that arts center, that Oval Office Decorating Horror, that "smart phone", that odd, lighted, arched construction in the back yard, that big hole over there to the east, all of these are signs in the window too. They are hung in the window by thinking people being distracted from just about the only thing they are going to be able to do to get some valid change going.
"Protest!" I hear some call out. That is also a sign in the window. The only time that protesting has worked has been when there was someone who actually cared, enough people who actually cared, to respond to the protest. That doesn't seem to be the case right now, not enough people in "power" care. Hundreds of thousands of people marching down a city street certainly sells news cycles, but those hundreds of thousands of people need to be doing the other civic action: voting. You've got a right to moan against the government. You don't have the right to stop at the moaning. You've got the responsibility to exercise your vote (if you have it). (Oh, that "you" is rhetorical, I'm not talking to anyone in particular here! ha!)
Anyway, there is that "disaster sign", that "sign of righteous outrage", signs that are valid, but which should not be plastered over the currently more important sign that reads "Get The Vote Out.... Eighty Plus Percent Turnout will Turn 'Them' Out!" or the other that says "Check your voter registration now!" or "Register to vote and bring a friend along to register as well" or "1/2 > 1/3", or if you prefer "50% is greater than 33%".
Thanks for the read, Tom, and the chance to point out other types of signs in the shop windows.
I lived in Mitchell and Scottsbluff in the late sixties. I saw the ruin of the family farms, the feed lots creating beef out of cows, Hiram Scott College bringing drugs to the town along with irresponsible rich boys avoiding the draft. It was collapsing into itself.
Powerful. I grew up in Kansas and have been quietly worrying about the groundwater in Western Kansas for years. Thank you for your words - and here's to hot coffee. Make a fresh cup!
Yet another brilliantly written piece, neighbor. I rue what will happen once the Ogallala is gone. And so happy to read you spoke up in the meeting when others were afraid to. Those are the same kind of folks who won't stand up for anything or anybody - especially themselves. When the water runs out and their mouths are so dry they can't speak maybe some of them will wish they had spoken up like you did.
I've been thinking about moral injury lately. How to tell the story, who the audience could be, who would be damaged by hearing accounts of an oppressor's grief and horror and who they were and what they'd been willing to do. It seems important to talk about having a change of heart, but it occurs to me that underneath the glee of watching the US implode is a very real pain from people who've been systematically abused by Empire. I can understand someone who points a finger at Trump supporters and yells that they get what they deserve.
I was a military brat and a military spouse. It's complicated to talk about patriotism now. Not just good, not just bad. Complicated. I've stayed quiet about my own experiences and change of heart for a long time, but it feels vital to speak up now. Not to everyone, I'm not trying to make the world witness my grief like it doesn't cost them anything. But to people who are coming to understand how they've been used and manipulated to lord over others and destroy entire countries' way of life in the name of American exceptionalism.
Your writings set an example of communicating a moral turn. I noticed it when you wrote about your cousin the rancher, who voted for Trump and is dealing with South American beef prices and struggling to stay afloat.
It's tough to have the conversations with each other in the US about who we are and who we can become, who we were and what we no longer want to be. Tougher still because the US is an attention hog and wants to center itself in every conversation around the globe. Moral injury is tough to speak of in any circumstance, but even more so when the people who may hear you are precisely the ones who are trying to survive the wreckage that you caused.
What strikes me is that you're wrestling with a question most people spend their lives avoiding: how do you tell the truth about a change of heart without making yourself the hero of the story?
The people living in the wreckage of American power don't need another American explaining their pain to them. They know it already. The challenge is finding a way to speak honestly about what we believed, what we participated in, and what it cost, without demanding sympathy for our awakening.
I think that's why moral injury is so difficult to talk about. It's not just grief. It's grief tangled up with responsibility.
The stories we were given about patriotism, service, and American exceptionalism weren't handed out equally, and neither were the consequences. Some people paid for those stories with their lives. Others paid with their conscience.
What matters to me is not whether someone arrives late to the truth. What matters is whether they are willing to tell the truth once they get there.
Not because it earns forgiveness. Not because it undoes the damage.
Because the lie survives when nobody is willing to admit they once believed it.
That’s what’s got me ready to talk, finally, the possibility of a lie that perpetuates because the people who believed it are too ashamed to admit they did.
I feel like there are ways to tell a story without seeking absolution, approval, or forgiveness. But I also feel like it’s a bumpy road to get there.
Worth traveling, but a new kind of vulnerability to prepare ourselves for.
Oof. I knew of Seligman's experiments with dogs. I wasn't aware of Maier's re-framing of his findings. And while I guess I'm aware of the malign forces driving algorithms, news feeds, and the like, much of the time I'm doing the equivalent of putting my fingers in my ears and singing la-la-la in an attempt to block out that knowledge and pretend to myself that what's happening isn't actually happening.
It's not easy to live with. So thank you for your piece, Tom, and for reminding me of something else I also knew, which is that "agency is what has to be learned" that sometimes we need to roll up our sleeves and get on with the unsung, unglamorous work of refusing to be managed. They push. We push back because we have to. And on we go.
Hi Tom. I will only add to the water discussion, that nature is making adjustments. Nothing is more in evidence of that than the re-blossoming natural state of the desert before Lake Powell engulfed it. The terms you describe and those signs in the windows designed to stifle thought, have been disturbing to me for years. Thanks for the clarity on that. And thank you for reminding us how that must be overcome.
I've done both. Put the sign up and not put the sign up. They both have consequences. The trick is, knowing if can you live with the consequence. But you won't know that till it happens.
You say he is trying the destroy the machinery of collective life. That killed me. How you find words for how I feel, that I can not. Thanks again.
Tom, thank you. I continue to say each of us is important and essential to restore our lives, our Democracy, our country. Speak up. Act. Vote every election. Now is not the time for complacency or excuses. What you did that day added to the texture and quality of the fabric of your life. We are all wiser, richer and braver because of you.
I've played both sides too. Tom. I've swallowed my words, silenced myself and walked away to be later steeped in the betrayal (to myself and to the situation) because in the moment, I'd weighed the cost and opted out of speaking the truth.
I've left scorched earth behind me now and then too. Costly, but ultimately easier to live with. Better to be angry than sad. Sad is paralyzing, in anger, there is movement. And the only way out is through.
This is yet another essay that should be educating our young. On so many levels.
Excellent points, Tom, and so much here. I want to focus on water.
I grew up in Tucson, which relies on groundwater. When my grandmother was born in 1901, the Santa Cruz and Rillito Rivers still ran much of the year and shallow wells near town could reach potable water at modest depths.
The name Tucson comes from the Native word for "spring at the foot of the black mountain." My father, living in my grandmother's 1898 territorial house surrounded by a half-acre of lawn, was appalled at a 2200.00 water bill. Letting the lawn die was out of the question, because the huge trees relied on the lawn to stay alive, so he was stuck with the bad decisions of the 1890s colonial mindset (along with the giant windows that my great-grandmother Henrietta Herring Franklin had insisted upon).
Dad checked the statutes and found he could in fact drill his own well. After the initial outlay of several thousand dollars, he would be free from that egregious bill every month.
Wasn't he surprised when he drilled down hundreds of feet into the greatly depleted aquifer and still pulled water so silty it needed extensive filtration to even be usable. The well driller advised him to go deeper because the water table was going to keep dropping until it was gone.
Tucson is one of the largest cities in North America that still lives almost entirely on groundwater, drawing everything it serves from the aquifer beneath its feet even as levels and quality decline.
Meanwhile Las Vegas, watching Lake Mead drop toward historic lows, is learning what it means to hitch a whole metropolis to the visible end of the Colorado, just as the Ogallala states are learning what it means to have spent a continent‑sized, mostly invisible reservoir that does not come back on any human timescale.
When the taps are turned and the faucets spout dust, we’ll see the wealthy siphon and store the remaining water while the poor are left to die of thirst, because that is how scarcity has always been managed in the American West.
When the Ogallala is sucked dry (as the data centers accelerate this like the end of a double-black diamond ski run, America;s High Plains breadbasket will start to go the way it did in the 1930s). Wells fail, fields go dry, and a region built on temporary bounty discovers that the aquifer it treated like a bottomless cistern will take thousands of years to refill. Your moniker will be even more appropriate, except this time there is no California to which you can escape.
But don't worry. The billionaires will be fine.
Whiskey's for drinking, water's for fighting over.
I've been reading about the Ogalla Aquifer since I read Centennial in the late 70s. That's what sparked my interest in water issues in the West.
I've never been able to keep my mouth shut about anything I see as unfair or wrong. It never made me unpopular with my employers right up to the end when I was downsized for being too old, too highly paid, and too mouthy. And I don't regret a fucking bit of it. And I haven't changed. Better to die on your feet than live on your knees. My Dad was at Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge. I can't let him down now.
Sharing with my subscribers tomorrow.
This says it all, everything that is happening and what we must do now. Thank you, Tom.
You are so welcome!!
It occurs to me that people who choose not to read contemplative essays such as this one are also putting up the sign.
Because it’s incremental, this process of building agency within us. We are not all at the same place. Some have been living in it longer, some just beginning to put down roots. The words of others ease us into uncomfortable realization, inspire us to consider the shape of this moment and place, to take measure of our response to it, and to begin jumping the low walls and see where that brings us. Still safe, probably. But at least there is movement out. That’s a start. We all need to start where we are. To look both within and without, and see things that cannot be unseen.
My oldest living child lives in Minneapolis, three blocks from where Renee Goode was murdered. My youngest son lives in Chicago and works at a pediatric hospital and his partner is an ER doc. Both of them (and employees, families and patients) have been harassed and intimidated at work and in their neighborhoods by ICE. The snatches and drivebys continue though a little more sneaky. When I shared this and the abduction of a little boy and his dad without constitutional projection with my Representative's staffer, he asked with a smirk are they citizens? He refused to answer about the oath she took as a member of the military. Yeh I'm one of the dogs who cant respond any more.
I referenced you, Tom, the first time you talked about the sign in the window. (was it in "The briefing room"?) My reference was in episode 14 of my 6th season podcasting, the theme was "self-censorship" and the reference was to the sign placed by the passive agent who hopes to go unnoticed, wants to get on with their life.
More recently, though, I've discovered another sign being put up. It's not the sign that says "I'm doing what is expected of me, please don't hurt me!" It is, instead, a sign of distraction.
I firmly believe that if voter turnout is in numbers above 80% in both the upcoming midterm and the later presidential elections then the simple arithmetic of majority vs. minority (1/2>1/3) will bring about the first changes necessary to slow down or halt the damage being done both in the US and across the world (because everyone seems to copy the US! Argh!). I believe that this is where all USAers should be placing their attention: getting the largest voter turnout possible in both of these elections so that some semblance of "fairness" can begin to leak into the flawed, damaged process USAers call "democracy".
And yet, I see what I'll call the "disaster signs" everywhere. Instead of seeing calls to register to vote, calls to check your registration, calls to get the mail-in votes in the mail box early, calls to actually vote, to show up at the polling place, I'm seeing repetitive stuff about someone "important" (and that's up for debate) falling asleep during a cabinet meeting or losing his cool at a reporter or just being his grumpy, angry, demented, evil, twisted self, as if we need to be reminded of that.
Or we see the scandalous behavior of others who are either in power or wanting to become power. Or we see people raging about this program being cut, these people starving because that money has been re-channeled, those people dying because those medicines are no longer available because that man has brain rot, but he's the one in charge. None of this is surprising, we've been bombarded with it for ten years now. It's distraction.
That ballroom, that arch, that promenade, that gilded horse, that name slapped hurriedly onto the facade of that arts center, that Oval Office Decorating Horror, that "smart phone", that odd, lighted, arched construction in the back yard, that big hole over there to the east, all of these are signs in the window too. They are hung in the window by thinking people being distracted from just about the only thing they are going to be able to do to get some valid change going.
"Protest!" I hear some call out. That is also a sign in the window. The only time that protesting has worked has been when there was someone who actually cared, enough people who actually cared, to respond to the protest. That doesn't seem to be the case right now, not enough people in "power" care. Hundreds of thousands of people marching down a city street certainly sells news cycles, but those hundreds of thousands of people need to be doing the other civic action: voting. You've got a right to moan against the government. You don't have the right to stop at the moaning. You've got the responsibility to exercise your vote (if you have it). (Oh, that "you" is rhetorical, I'm not talking to anyone in particular here! ha!)
Anyway, there is that "disaster sign", that "sign of righteous outrage", signs that are valid, but which should not be plastered over the currently more important sign that reads "Get The Vote Out.... Eighty Plus Percent Turnout will Turn 'Them' Out!" or the other that says "Check your voter registration now!" or "Register to vote and bring a friend along to register as well" or "1/2 > 1/3", or if you prefer "50% is greater than 33%".
Thanks for the read, Tom, and the chance to point out other types of signs in the shop windows.
Cheers,
revel.
I lived in Mitchell and Scottsbluff in the late sixties. I saw the ruin of the family farms, the feed lots creating beef out of cows, Hiram Scott College bringing drugs to the town along with irresponsible rich boys avoiding the draft. It was collapsing into itself.
Powerful. I grew up in Kansas and have been quietly worrying about the groundwater in Western Kansas for years. Thank you for your words - and here's to hot coffee. Make a fresh cup!
Thank you for reading and your support!!
Yet another brilliantly written piece, neighbor. I rue what will happen once the Ogallala is gone. And so happy to read you spoke up in the meeting when others were afraid to. Those are the same kind of folks who won't stand up for anything or anybody - especially themselves. When the water runs out and their mouths are so dry they can't speak maybe some of them will wish they had spoken up like you did.
Laura, thanks for reading
I've been thinking about moral injury lately. How to tell the story, who the audience could be, who would be damaged by hearing accounts of an oppressor's grief and horror and who they were and what they'd been willing to do. It seems important to talk about having a change of heart, but it occurs to me that underneath the glee of watching the US implode is a very real pain from people who've been systematically abused by Empire. I can understand someone who points a finger at Trump supporters and yells that they get what they deserve.
I was a military brat and a military spouse. It's complicated to talk about patriotism now. Not just good, not just bad. Complicated. I've stayed quiet about my own experiences and change of heart for a long time, but it feels vital to speak up now. Not to everyone, I'm not trying to make the world witness my grief like it doesn't cost them anything. But to people who are coming to understand how they've been used and manipulated to lord over others and destroy entire countries' way of life in the name of American exceptionalism.
Your writings set an example of communicating a moral turn. I noticed it when you wrote about your cousin the rancher, who voted for Trump and is dealing with South American beef prices and struggling to stay afloat.
It's tough to have the conversations with each other in the US about who we are and who we can become, who we were and what we no longer want to be. Tougher still because the US is an attention hog and wants to center itself in every conversation around the globe. Moral injury is tough to speak of in any circumstance, but even more so when the people who may hear you are precisely the ones who are trying to survive the wreckage that you caused.
What strikes me is that you're wrestling with a question most people spend their lives avoiding: how do you tell the truth about a change of heart without making yourself the hero of the story?
The people living in the wreckage of American power don't need another American explaining their pain to them. They know it already. The challenge is finding a way to speak honestly about what we believed, what we participated in, and what it cost, without demanding sympathy for our awakening.
I think that's why moral injury is so difficult to talk about. It's not just grief. It's grief tangled up with responsibility.
The stories we were given about patriotism, service, and American exceptionalism weren't handed out equally, and neither were the consequences. Some people paid for those stories with their lives. Others paid with their conscience.
What matters to me is not whether someone arrives late to the truth. What matters is whether they are willing to tell the truth once they get there.
Not because it earns forgiveness. Not because it undoes the damage.
Because the lie survives when nobody is willing to admit they once believed it.
That’s what’s got me ready to talk, finally, the possibility of a lie that perpetuates because the people who believed it are too ashamed to admit they did.
I feel like there are ways to tell a story without seeking absolution, approval, or forgiveness. But I also feel like it’s a bumpy road to get there.
Worth traveling, but a new kind of vulnerability to prepare ourselves for.
Oof. I knew of Seligman's experiments with dogs. I wasn't aware of Maier's re-framing of his findings. And while I guess I'm aware of the malign forces driving algorithms, news feeds, and the like, much of the time I'm doing the equivalent of putting my fingers in my ears and singing la-la-la in an attempt to block out that knowledge and pretend to myself that what's happening isn't actually happening.
It's not easy to live with. So thank you for your piece, Tom, and for reminding me of something else I also knew, which is that "agency is what has to be learned" that sometimes we need to roll up our sleeves and get on with the unsung, unglamorous work of refusing to be managed. They push. We push back because we have to. And on we go.
Hi Tom. I will only add to the water discussion, that nature is making adjustments. Nothing is more in evidence of that than the re-blossoming natural state of the desert before Lake Powell engulfed it. The terms you describe and those signs in the windows designed to stifle thought, have been disturbing to me for years. Thanks for the clarity on that. And thank you for reminding us how that must be overcome.
I've done both. Put the sign up and not put the sign up. They both have consequences. The trick is, knowing if can you live with the consequence. But you won't know that till it happens.
You say he is trying the destroy the machinery of collective life. That killed me. How you find words for how I feel, that I can not. Thanks again.
Tom, thank you. I continue to say each of us is important and essential to restore our lives, our Democracy, our country. Speak up. Act. Vote every election. Now is not the time for complacency or excuses. What you did that day added to the texture and quality of the fabric of your life. We are all wiser, richer and braver because of you.
Thank you!!
I've played both sides too. Tom. I've swallowed my words, silenced myself and walked away to be later steeped in the betrayal (to myself and to the situation) because in the moment, I'd weighed the cost and opted out of speaking the truth.
I've left scorched earth behind me now and then too. Costly, but ultimately easier to live with. Better to be angry than sad. Sad is paralyzing, in anger, there is movement. And the only way out is through.
This is yet another essay that should be educating our young. On so many levels.
Thank you for this.
Thank You Tom