The Unwitting Environmentalist

Maybe he didn’t intend it, but President Trump, at least in one respect, is doing the planet a great big favor. One giant side effect of the Iran war is the attention being brought to that country’s stranglehold on oil and other important commodities largely caused by geography: the Strait of Hormuz. It’s not fair, perhaps, that the Iran regime should have control over 20 percent of the world’s daily oil supply, but so far, it does.

The most immediate effect of the war is the increase in the price of oil and its knock-on effect on gasoline prices here in the US and many other countries, resulting in inflation and great economic hardship. But some may be smiling.

One of them might be your neighbor down the street who owns a Tesla, the same car on which, earlier this year, he had a bumper sticker apologizing for owning it because it came from Elon Musk, who at the time was using his famous chainsaw on government agencies. But now, your neighbor can’t control his smile, because he doesn’t have to buy gas for $6 a gallon. Meanwhile, we guzzlers have to cut down on our driving because we simply can’t afford it. Let’s see: less driving. That means, not only less traffic congestion, but less air pollution, right?

I have a friend (not a neighbor) who has solar panels on his house and a battery system to store energy. At night, he charges his Tesla up, then drives it around the next day. It has been quite a while since he has purchased one drop of gasoline. Does any of this sound attractive?

Let’s be clear: oil isn’t going away anytime soon. If it weren’t for all those dead dinosaurs, we might not have the civilization we enjoy now, so we can’t blame ourselves   too much for putting it to use. It’s still needed for many other things, like plastics.

But shouldn’t we continue thinking about alternatives? We don’t until we’re in pain. Some may remember the pain we suffered in the 1970s, when many of us waited in line to get a few gallons of the limited supply at our local gas station. Well, it happened then, and it may be starting to happen now in some other Western countries. But do you think maybe there’s a chance it might happen once more in the future?

Rare earths may be the next commodity we get into a fist fight over. But wouldn’t it get us ahead in life to find our own sources or at least maintain relationships with others who may have what we need? It would be nice if we could all just get along.

 

 

 

 

When Our Heroes Fail Us

The New York Times story detailing the sexual abuses attributed to the late United Farm Workers union founder Cesar Chavez has shocked all of us. One of the victims, union co-founder Dolores Huerta, has confirmed what Chavez did to her 50 years ago. She kept silent about it, she said, because she was worried about damaging the farmworker movement Chavez launched.

Many have already decided to remove his name from schools and streets, hide his statues, and cancel celebrations in his honor, even changing the name of the holiday created for him.

But can these revelations diminish Cesar Chavez's accomplishment? In the civil rights field, he did for Latino farmworkers what Martin Luther King Jr. did for blacks: made them and their plight visible. The creation of the United Farm Workers union liberated many from exploitation and put the issue on the map for the whole country, not just California. Should his crimes constitute grounds for erasing him from consciousness?

This Jekyll and Hyde dynamic is not new. Thomas Jefferson, one of our most revered Founding Fathers, is also known for fathering children with a female slave. But it doesn't change the foundations of our country. Remember Christopher Columbus? He may have "sailed the ocean blue in 14-hundred-and-92," but most states have renamed his holiday because he oppressed indigenous people when he got here. We admire the work of artists and performers until we learn about their bad habits, extreme political views, or even criminal activity. But it doesn't change one stroke of their painting nor one frame of film in the movie that won them an Oscar.

I've often said that when you put a statue of someone up in the town square, it had better come with interchangeable parts so that when your hero falls out of favor, you can easily replace them on the pedestal with someone else.

I'm not calling for anyone to forgive Cesar Chavez. What he did, as reported, to women and young girls is unforgivable. But we can't erase history, and many of our leaders have already been trying to do just that for other reasons, long before these New York Times revelations came out.

The other message here, though, is that as a civil rights issue, the women's liberation movement is far from over. If the Epstein story hasn't made that point, maybe the Chavez story will.

As for March 31st, Cesar Chavez's birthday and still officially a holiday here in California, it may be renamed Farmworkers Day. I prefer Campesinos Day, using the Spanish word for farmworkers, which at least preserves the spirit of what this man did for tem.

 

Rolling the Dice

 

President Trump and Israel’s leadership have taken the bold step of launching a full-scale attack on Iran with the apparent goal of regime change. There’s no question that the current regime has been a “bad actor” in the Middle East, and the US seems to have longstanding grounds for this move in response to the hostage-taking of Americans back in 1979 and the subsequent spread of terrorism. But will it work, and what constitutes “working?”

 

It would be lovely if this turns into a Persian Spring, with the Iranian military laying down its arms, democratic leaders quickly assuming power, and Iran becoming a nation of 92 million happy campers with minimal casualties among them. But this is the Middle East.

The current war, or whatever you call it, is not our first regime-change play in Iran. In the 1950s, the country briefly tried democracy, but the US and Britain found the government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh too lefty, especially after Iran’s nationalization of oil. The CIA and MI6 engineered a coup and restored the Shah’s monarchy. Many Iranians resented the intervention for a long time, and the revolution of 1979 installed the current theocratic regime and resulted in the taking of US hostages. It’s my own theory that if President Jimmy Carter’s helicopter hostage-rescue effort had succeeded, he would easily have been re-elected. But it didn’t, and his administration was forced to negotiate the unfreezing of Iranian assets. The hostages were freed, but only when President Reagan took office.

When did war actually “work?” World War II. All the bases were touched. Congress formally declared war against the Axis powers when the President asked for it, and after years of hard fighting, with not just bombing but troops on the ground, and a huge loss of life, the conflict ended with the formal surrender of Germany in May of 1945, then Japan in September. Democracy followed, but with the US and other countries running former enemy nations for a while to fix what had been broken. Their populations were mostly compliant.

But that was then. If the Trump-Netanyahu gambit were in the plot of a TV series, it might have a nice neat ending. But we are only a little way into the first episode, and it seems a sure bet that this series is not going to be a short one, and there could be much pain added to the script before it’s over.

If you will allow me a little metaphor mix here, these two leaders have deployed a powerful drug to destroy what they consider a cancer, and they may succeed at that. But the after-effects remain mostly unknown. The dice are still rolling, and who knows when they will stop?