Pedaling Princples Chapter Nine – Crossing State Lines, Pay Toll

Posted on 02/04/2012 by paulefallon

Illinois Route 14 heads east out of Crossville, a rigging town with the noxious air of energy about it.  The gently rolling fields of corn are punctuated by oil wells. The road flattens into a straight stretch of tall treed, low lying swamp on either side as it approaches theWabash.  A small toll booth rests on a rise of the road just before the bridge.  Two women sat there; they appeared to be mother and daughter.  There was no traffic, so we were inclined to talk.  “We get about 800 cars a day” the older woman explained when I inquired about the demand on the bridge.

I paid my quarter (yes, there is a listed toll for bicycles) and I rode over the bridge; the worst stretch of pavement on my entire trip.  Still it beat going six miles north to cross the river at Interstate 64, and farm equipment that is not allowed on the Interstate can cross at this bridge.

Turns out the bridge is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, mostly due to its connection to New Harmony, IN.  It was built in 1930 by a consortium out of Carmi,IL without any federal funds, hence the toll.  Apparently it does a little better than break even, which made me think the job of toll collector was not a lucrative one.  Sometime soon the road surface will need to be repaved; the bridge has also been declared structurally insufficient, whatever profit there is from tolls will not cover the millions of dollars in necessary repairs, so the bridge faces a future of mothballing or an infusion of public funds. Whatever the future holds, there is some value to the fact that for over seventy years the bridge has paid its own way.

I like tolls.  I don’t like to pay them any more then the next guy, but I like the direct connection they create between a public amenity and those who use it.  The most transparent way to correlate the cost and benefit of any social good is to assign a price to it, and tolls do that well.  They are not perfect; I would have paid more than a quarter to cross that bridge.  Still, the bridge commission got a quarter from me for a half mile stretch of lousy pavement, while I paid nothing to directly compensate for my use of the other 3,000 miles of roads I traversed.

The more that government can ascribe tolls (user fees) to amenities that are quantifiable, the better understanding we have between a service and its cost.  Ideally, the fees in aggregate equal the cost of delivering the service.  What differentiates a toll from another tax is that the citizen can choose whether to pay the toll and access the service, or not.

Besides directly paying for specific services, tolls can be a tool to adjust demand. Far away from the banks of the Wabash, drivers who want to bring their automobiles into Central London must pay a toll.  This has little to do with the actual cost of maintaining the paved streets in London, it is to control traffic in the city.  Therefore the toll serves a dual purpose; reducing the number of cars in London while generating revenue to the government.

Sales taxes, which are rampant in theUnited States and can be assessed at the state, county, or city levels, are sometimes like tolls, but not always.  Where sales taxes are set only on ‘optional’ items, like luxury goods or meals in restaurants, they are similar to tolls.  Specialty taxes on cigarettes and alcohol and hotel rooms are targeted sales taxes that generate revenue from people who are buying something that, presumably, they can do without.  The particulars get muddy; smokers are often addicted so they do not perceive cigarettes as optional and hotel taxes extract revenue from visitors who have no voice in the local government, but the concept is valid.  However, where sales taxes are applied across all purchased items, they do not function like tolls because people do not have an option to avoid them.  As long as bread is a necessity in life, a sales tax on bread is a pure tax.

The reason why tolls are good as a direct alignment between cost and benefit is exactly why people do not like them. We like to think that we live in this country for free and hate being nickeled and dimed by taxes at every turn.

Before the Interstate highway system was built, many states had limited access expressways with tolls to offset their construction and operation.  When the Interstate system was proposed to create a complete network of highways, it is unfortunate that tolls were not integrated into the entire system.  They could have been used not only to build the highways but to maintain them as well. Fifty plus years later we have massive infrastructure problems and are strapped for resources to fix them.  In Oklahoma, where I lived for many years, the network of toll roads is probably the most extensive in the country, but people in the mostly rural state like having major highways even if the traffic volume does not justify the cost.  They are willing to pay tolls for the convenience of four lane highways between small cities and towns.  In every case there is the option of a parallel two lane route, but most people choose to pay the toll.

My quarter over the Wabash was money well spent.  If there had been other tolls along the way, I would have paid willingly.

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Lean Thinking Comes to Haiti

Posted on 02/03/2012 by paulefallon

One of the more peculiar paradoxes of my life is that I spend two weeks every month in the Unites States, where much of my work deals with Lean process improvement, and two weeks in Haiti, where the concept process improvement is as foreign as, well, me.  So I found great joy today in introducing ‘continuous improvement’ to our BLB orphanage project by creating a small template to ‘mistake proof’ the repetitive process of installing reinforcing in our floor slab.

There is over 50,000 feet of #5 reinforcing bars in the floor slab of the orphanage. The slab is going to be 9” thick with the bars running north/south and east/west in the top and bottom of the slab.  The challenge is to keep the bars as far apart as possible for strength yet provide 1” of clearance on the bottom and the top for concrete cover – exposed bars rust and weaken the slab.

The crews are used to doing one thing completely, then the next, then the next (batching).  They started to place the north/south reinforcing across the entire building but we asked them to finish a test area with all the reinforcing in place, tied off, at the right height, and ready for the concrete pour.  This was a challenge to communicate but eventually they completed one room.

The variance was great; some top bars were too low, others too high, some too close to the face of the slab.  I took out my tape measure and began explaining in pigeon Creole the different dimensions required but it was hopeless.  There are too many variables in placing reinforcement and they all relate to a phantom plane, the top of the slab, that no one can see.  That’s when Lean thinking popped into my head – make it visual, make it mistake proof.

After the crews had gone, Gama and I cut some plywood into a simple template that the workers could slip into the rebar top and bottom.  The template provides a clear line at the top and bottom of slab for visual reference, and shows exactly where the rebar needs to nest.  The rough cut we made out of plywood was not quite right, so I refined its proportions at actual scale on a piece of paper and the next morning the carpentry crew cut one out.  We took it to where the rebar crew was placing and tying reinforcing (go to Gemba) and it worked well, so one carpenter spent the morning building seven more. Every member of the rebar crew got one, as did I, mister quality control.

It took the workers a while to get used to the jig.  First they tried to muscle it into place.  Then they realized that the point was not to force fit the rebar.  I checked in every hour or so and in mid-afternoon, as four of them were finishing up the second room, they smiled up at me and shouted, “Good! Good!”  Leon, the crew boss, sturcxk the pose for this photo, showing off his new work saving device.

Rebar Jig

Leon and his new tool

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Concrete Night

Posted on 02/02/2012 by paulefallon

I am sitting at a picnic table under a bare bulb in the middle of Mission of Hope.  It is 6:45 pm, which in Haiti means it is black as midnight.  I will try to describe the scene, but it is so bizarre I will fall short

Mission of Hope is a walled site along the highway, 100 feet wide by 200 feet deep, but not actually a rectangle.  The site slopes up to the south.  At present the entire center is excavated deep for the new building.  Narrow paths wind up each side of excavation, to reach the toilet stalls that line one side or the storage buildings that line the other.  The storage buildings are the only ones that survived the earthquake intact; plywood sheds have been added to their roofs where the children attend school until the new building is complete.  The paths are as little as three feet wide with a vertical drop of over ten feet in some places.  During the day children scamper along the treacherous paths and through the construction site, the girls in pleated skirts with lace epaulets on their anklet socks, the boys in blue slacks with homemade belts cinched around their thin waists.  The site would give OSHA apoplexy.

The students are gone now, but there are still dozens of children milling around.  To my right, towards the highway, the site is relatively flat.  There is a wood and metal roofed lean-to that serves as the church these days.  Right now there is choir of young girls singing praise, swaying and clapping.  Next to that is a temporary wood framed building that acts as the office until the new school is complete.  Dinner for the missionaries sits in there on a folding table, pots of rice and beans and fresh baked bread that has a smoky anise taste to it; sickly sweet juice I only drink as dessert.  Behind me a local woman is cooking for the workers in a gigantic pot on an outdoor charcoal stove.  No one is eating though; there is too much action to my left.

Fifty or sixty people fill the construction area, most of them young Haitian men, a few blans like me to guide the process.  I was hard at it all day but once night swept down active construction felt unsafe for me.  I pulled rank as the oldest blan and will sit out the rest of the night.  The big concrete mixer churns; there is a quintet of guys loading buckets of sand, another quartet shoveling in buckets of gravel and cement.  Each group forms a brigade and flings the five gallon buckets from the piles of sand or gravel towards the mixer.  They chant as they toss, which creates an odd duet with the girls’ choir.

At the other end of the rotating machine is a bin about six feet square that accepts the mixed concrete.  One tall man in hip boots stands in the green concrete and shovels it into waiting buckets with the grace of a dancer.  There are eight, maybe ten laborers who hoist buckets of concrete to their shoulder and snake through the excavation to the back wall.  We are pouring a section of wall three feet high by fifty-six long with seven pilasters that will serve to hold back the hill when the rains come and the earth shakes.  It is about 16 cubic yards of concrete.  In the States it would be an easy day’s pour for a crew of six or eight.  Here it is a major undertaking.

We started before six this morning, at first light. First everyone was in a prayer circle; then we broke into crews.  I worked with two Haitians most of the day cutting and bending several hundred pieces of rebar into different shapes. Two crews of agile climbers mounted the walls and installed the reinforcing, using metal twist ties to connect the bars, extending them upward to connect to future pours.  Another crew removed the forms form the lower section of concrete, oiled them, repaired them, and reinstalled them at the higher level.

The last step is pouring the concrete itself, dumped from buckets held overhead on a ladder and then vibrated into compaction.  We will transport close to a thousand buckets of concrete to fill the forms.  Right now the rebar guys are gone, the reinforcing is in place and the final formwork is being pounded to fit.  The mixer is rumbling, the temporary lights are burning, and the vibrator is humming against the dark.  It is a very noisy place.

________________________________________

I just took a break in the action while the power went off.  Twice.  In between a gaggle of young boys stormed my computer.  They hung on to me as I showed each of them how to type their name on a keyboard.  They loved watching the letters appear on the screen.  Three and four year olds in the States know how to use keyboards, iPads, all range of technology, but here a laptop is exotic and they are not familiar with a mouse or a click or a space bar.  After they typed their own names they prompted me to type and  just stared at my fingers gliding over the keys.

________________________________

Ten p.m.  The concrete pour is finished.  The workers are eating piles of rice and beans and soft drinks from the wheelbarrow full that Travis the electrician bought for all.  Lex makes a speech of appreciation for the hard work, and then sharpens his voice to make sure everyone cleans up; the site will be full of children again tomorrow.  After all the workers have left, the blans congregate in the office for a design meeting.  Some key construction people are heading back to the States tomorrow and we have to coordinate the patchwork of materials and schedules to continue progress.  We leave after midnight, tired but content in a job well done.

Concrete batching area

Pouring the concrete into formwork

 

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Searching for Ourselves in Great Books

Posted on 01/28/2012 by paulefallon

Every year, as an exercise in discipline and self-improvement and to gain some of the liberal arts education I lacked as an MIT tool, I read a great book.  Not something defined as great by the whims of popular culture, but made great by standing the test of time.  My selection has to be long, it has to be dense, and it has to be uniformly considered a classic.  No pain, no gain.  I usually coax a few others to join the effort in order to increase the chance of success.

I do not always succeed; four hundred pages of Don Quixote’s adventures were quite enough.  I have been known to relax what constitutes reading; I resorted to an audio version of Moby Dick to plough through those endless analytics of the whale.  Still, I usually enjoy the books; I would not have discovered the 1300 page beauty of Les Miserables without this rigor, and I always feel satisfied, if no smarter, when I am finished.

This year I am tackling The Brothers Karamazov, along with two voracious reader friends of mine. Our goal is to discuss it all by mid-March.  I am only a hundred pages in and like the Russian winter, it is a long slog.  So far I like the action, when there is any; the descriptions are fine, and I can glaze over the crazy long names without ever really articulating them.  The tough parts are the speeches, but of course the speeches are the whole point of Russian novels.  Each character represents some larger truth, and the truths do battle through their words.

The other night, only at page 60, I was wondering how I could possibly endure the entire book, when in the middle of the chapter ‘A Lady of Little Faith’ Dostoevsky, through the voice of Father Zossima, introduces the concept of ‘active love’, a love expressed through our actions towards others as opposed to our interactions with them.  As a person who discovered early in life that I far prefer to work on behalf of people than with them, this idea resonated.  My attention perked further as the wise Father Zossima launched into a parable of the doctor who admits, ”The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular”.  The doctor draws a humorous line that correlates how much time he  spends with an individual, with how much he comes to detest him.

I don’t recall ever seeing in print a perspective that so closely matches my own.  I love mankind much more then any specific man.  I have wonderful friends whom I think of as ‘two hour’ people; folks I like to have dinner with on a regular basis.  We catch up, we socialize, but I never think of spending an entire day with them.  Go away on a vacation with someone?  A recipe for certain torture as our middle aged neuroses bang against each other with increasing velocity.  I travel through life alone, loving mankind through a filter, whether it be movement (on a bicycle trip) or language and culture (in Haiti).  I am fascinated by human beings, our similarities, our differences and our idiosyncrasies, but I am not too inclined to want to know any single person too well.

Needless to say it feels anti-social, even a bit creepy in a world that heralds the virtue of having a mate, to admit no interest in bonding with another individual. That is probably why, though I can trace the seeds these sentiments to childhood, I have never actually announced them before, and certainly never written them down.

Now that Dostoevsky has spoken so directly to me, I am paying closer attention.  I will get to know the brothers Karamazov well, through the comfortable filter of the printed page.  Great books are great because of how they capture the universal experience of man.  We read them seeking insight into our nature. Yet what we really seek in every word, is to find ourselves, our own reflection, among the vast universe spun by these incredible stories.

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Pedaling Principles Chapter Eight – Illinois: Clean Government Wanted

Posted on 01/28/2012 by paulefallon

I left Cape Girardeau early and crossed the Mississippi with the dawn. The Illinois side is low lying land, swampy and lush.  No more than two miles into the state I saw a large stenciled sign in front of a prominent house. Here we go again, I thought, more proclamations.  But this sign was different from those in Missouri; a sign dense with data rather than protestations of Truth.

Alexander Country Voters

Stop Voter Fraud

Demand Voter List Purge

The sign listed tallies by town of the voter list, with a total of 13,635 registered voters in the county in 2008.  Only problem, there were a mere 7.914 people in Alexandria Country per the 2009 population estimate.  Oops!

My Illinois state map was littered with unidentified grey roads. I took a gamble on one from Reynoldville to Jonesboro that proved to be one of the most beautiful rides of my journey, around a lake, through a towering forest, rolling out into fields of thick corn, tight to the road, taller than me on either side.  As I rode through miles of corn I thought about the voter sign.  I could have been appalled at the facts and figures, but I knew that the Land of Lincoln is also the home of political boss Richard J. Daley, as well as Rob Blagojevich, George Ryan, Dan Walker and Otto Kerner; four governors of the past fifty years who were convicted of crimes committed in office.  Illinois holds a proud place in the history of corruption, and though it is conceivable that the disproportion between living citizens and registered voters in Alexandria County can be accounted for logically, it is doubtful.

Instead of being appalled by the corruption implied by the sign, I was buoyed by its very presence; by the fact that a person in this country can obtain such information; advertise it along the road, and live to tell the tale.  In fact, that sign may do more than just tell the tale, it may actually affect change.

There is no place for corruption in the government that Abraham Lincoln declared ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’.  But human nature and lofty ideals do not always align, and from Watergate to Whitewater, the tendency for the palms of power to crave grease is universal. Our freedom of expression, a core value guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, gave this Alexandria County resident the ability to express his or her outrage without retribution.  That expression is our mightiest weapon against corruption.  The only countries who can claim no corruption are pure dictatorships; they simply don’t allow the term.  Among countries with democratic leanings, we fare middling.  The United States ranks twenty-second on the Perceptions of Corruption Index compiled by Transparency International; higher than Mexico or Chile, but not as squeaky clean as Denmark.   Not surprisingly, there is a positive correlation between countries with highly educated, informed and involved citizenry and lower corruption.

I was thinking about those nearly 5,000 unaccounted voters in Alexandria County as I rolled into Breakfast in Jonesboro, a lively little town with a square of restaurants, banks and shops around a ceremonial center.  The third Lincoln-Douglas debate of 1858 took place here, and judging from the intelligent discussion swirling around the café as I ate the world’s best ever pancakes, the spirit of debate still thrives in Jonesboro.  The discussion was not about the blatant corruption indicated by the voter rolls of AlexandriaCounty.  Rather it addressed a more basic issue of representative government – that our government has lost touch with its people.  Over eggs and coffee and pancakes guys in plaid shirts and jeans discussed the merits of the Afghanistan intervention, the effect of the recent US bond downgrade on the stock market, and the current recession (which is still in full havoc as far as every American residing beyond DC or Wall Street is concerned). The discussion was more balanced and thoughtful than TV sound bites offer, and more civil than our elected officials can manage. Proof of the benefits derived from a good breakfast.  What was most interesting about the discussion was not the particular points of view on major issues, which appeared full spectrum, so much as the consistent expression that DC is disconnected from Jonesboro.  Why does none of the pinch felt in Middle America appear to puncture the Beltway?  Why do government employees make more money, on average, than their private sector counterparts?  Why are their benefits not being put on the negotiating table same as private sector employees?  Why do we have to contribute to social security while they have a hodgepodge of elective options?  The perception is that the Federal Government has donned a cloak of privilege, and there is enough beef to back it up to gnaw at the citizens of Jonesboro. These are not corruptive acts per se, they are all made legal by the beneficiaries of the government’s largesse, but they thumb their nose at the private citizen and create a schism between the governing and the governed.  Everyone in Jonesboro knows that ‘they’ are the suits in DC; ‘we’ are the folks in Illinois.  ‘Us’ is not a term uttered in the conversation.

One of the biggest challenges we face today is to renew the bond between the general populace and our government.  To achieve our guiding principle of a government ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’ will require effort from both sides to get beyond thinking of the situation as two sided.  We have to focus on clarity of information between the public/private sector, educate citizens about how our government is designed to work and identify mutual interests.

We are awash in myths about the endless perks claimed by lazy government workers and the paltry proceeds garnered in the private sector.  Both views are littered with partial truths.  In order to work towards clarity, we have to untangle the myths about government compensation and the salary swings of private sector workers.  We need to compare them in relative equanimity to make sound comparisons.  Once we have solid data about the economic differences / similarities between public and private sector workers, we must disseminate this information widely so that people in both camps are knowledgeable about the entire spectrum of the work force.

The issue of understanding how our government works runs deeper.  Over the past few decades there has been a steady decline in the formal education in the purpose and functioning of government.  My two children went through 13 years of public education without a single course in Civics; their knowledge of the Constitution, the branches of government and how to create legislation is based only on what their parents taught them.  Those of us of a certain age can recall deadly dull lessons in how to pass legislation.  Civics classes don’t need to be dull, but they do need to occur.  Although our elected officials would never admit it, an uninformed citizenry is exactly what full time politicians, parties in power, and entrenched government workers want.  Uninformed citizens are easier to manipulate; all the better if the mechanisms of government are deemed so complicated that ‘the government’ will handle it. The more the government feels removed from the everyday lives of its citizens, the easier to foment misinformation and apathy; the breeding grounds of corruption.  Clean government requires accurate information and well-informed citizens.

Another avenue to cleaner government, and one which Americans are loathe to do, is to learn from other countries who do it better and emulate their success.  We are good at responding to corruption with legal recourse, but we are terrible at anticipating what might go wrong and preventing it from happening in the first place.  This creates a vicious circle for corrupt action.  An unethical situation emerges, we identify and address it, it morphs into an unanticipated variant, we fix that, it morphs again, over and over. The cycle will never stop so long as humans are ingenuous, which is why we add so many more laws than we ever delete.  Still, it would do us good to learn from countries that do it better; we might actually catch some corruption before it occurs. 

Cleaner, more transparent government starts by simplifying government processes and making them applicable across the board.  If the government requires we pay social security, or Medicaid tax, or income tax, or any other premium for the privilege of being an American – then everyone needs to be in.  No exceptions. A trickle of exemptions soon becomes a flood gate.  If something is important enough to fix into law, it is good enough to apply to everyone.

Finally, a way to create a true bond between the private sector workers and their public sector counterparts would be to have the public sector’s economic health tied to that of the private sector.  If a recession hits and private workers have to get by on less, lose some of their retirement, or suffer other setbacks, isn’t it possible that the same could occur to their public counterparts?  Correspondingly, all economic boats should rise in a swelling economic time. It would be difficult to determine a fair equation for how this might occur, but right now there is no equation and we are experiencing a widening gap between the economic vitality of each sector that is not only unfair, it is poisoning the respect of each sector for the other.  It may sound outlandish, but if the economic wellbeing of the public sector were tied to the success of the private sector, the two major workforces of our economy would have complementary motivations.  That could only be an improvement over the mistrust that persists today.  There are many ways we can create success targets of the citizenry’s connection to their government.  The easiest start would be to measure levels of participation.  If we can mount campaigns to discourage smoking and drug abuse, why can’t we have campaigns to increase voter registration and voter turnout?  The ‘political’ answer is that such drives might work to the advantage of one party over the other, even though the overall health of our Republic would be improved.  Any individual will prefer a government where she has more influence than somebody else, but no one wants the government where he has less influence.  We have to realize that our collective health is dependent on equal opportunities of participation.  That means an equally informed and motivated electorate. Where is the model Civics curriculum required of all students, and how is it incorporated into the tests many states require as students’ progress through their education? 

Incumbents have no incentives to support any of these initiatives – the people who already vote put them in office, why risk adding others to the mix; and the more ignorant the population, the more easily they can be lead.  Regardless what challengers claim during campaigns, as soon as they arrive in DC they become incumbents and their interests instantly shift.  When it comes to an active, informed electorate, the needs of the individual politician will never align with the needs of our country as a whole.  Yet that is precisely the direction we need to move.  Any steps we can take to encourage alignment and understanding between the government and the governed are steps towards healing the breach between us.

My time in Illinoiswas all too short, just over twenty-four hours, yet I was fortunate enough to have breakfast at another great café the next morning, this time in Carmi, near the Indiana border. The conversation swirling around the tables was remarkably similar to the previous days’ discourse in Jonesboro; not complaints, or calls for less government, but a plea for government that is accountable and responsible.

I sat there, a Massachusetts guy in cycling shorts (who the media would label as ‘liberal’) surrounded by oversize guys with flat accents in jeans (who would be stereotyped as ‘conservative’) yet our shared concerns overshadowed our differences on every issue.  It is too easy to say that our country has become too big and too diverse, to have a government that reflects the individual citizens.  The differences among the population of our original thirteen states, farmer, merchant, slaveholder, loyalist, and separatist, were easily as great as our differences today, yet we came together, identified our common good and moved forward.  We can still do that, but not until the commonalities of our public / private sectors come to the fore over the myths and inequities.  Then the blue jean guys and the spandex guys in the Illinois cafes, and the millions of others like us all across the country, can think of it as ‘our’ government once again.

 

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Deep Yoga

Posted on 01/21/2012 by paulefallon

On the morning after Christmas I found myself cheek flat on the pavement eyes straight up the yellow line of the road, the blacktop stretching out of focus beyond my peripheral view.  A pick-up truck eased to a stop before me. “Are you alright?” It was a Danny Boyle movie moment, a camera angle on the world that is feasible but clearly wrong. 

My front tire had slipped away from me as I cycled across a bridge near my house, proving that the sign ‘Bridge freezes before roadway’ represents truth.  I considered the man’s question, responded that I was alright, pulled myself up, checked the bike and proceeded to yoga class.  My chest ached, I suspected a cracked rib, but nothing else seemed awry and since I believe yoga can only help any ailment, off I went.

I was sore in class but the heat and the stretches felt good.  I left limber.  I woke stiff the next morning, and flew off to Haiti for twelve days. By my third or fourth day in the tropical heat all pain had subsided.  I thought I was fine.

I returned to yoga almost two weeks later.  As I extended my arms over my head and swayed into my first half moon, the muscle over my rib screamed out in vengeance.  Two weeks after the fall, the pain flashed back strong as the moment I hit the pavement.  It barked at me furiously throughout the entire class.

Since then I have attended yoga every day and endured the trial of repair.  I can do most all the poses, though slowly, with a deliberation that sharpens my concentration.  The hardest position is the easiest one, sabasana, because lowering and raising the torso is excruciating. I cannot do the sit-ups.  Every day I have a larger range of motion, but what is odd is that I had a week or more of no pain and then, wham, reentry to yoga threw me back.

It is an odd coincidence that my painful yoga emerged the same day that The New York Times Magazine published William Broad’s article “All Bent Out of Shape, The Problem with Yoga.” (January 8, 2012).  Reading the article does not scare me off yoga; Bikram involves no inversion postures and stresses each person moving at their own pace.  Still, a guy I practice with regularly tore his meniscus doing Bikram and needed an operation, and I have to ask myself, is the recurrence of my cracked rib pain due to the benefits of yoga working my damaged muscles more deeply, or did the yoga actually exacerbate my injury?

I choose to believe the former.  The benefits I have witnessed in my health since adopting a regular yoga practice are amazing.  I am trim, my lung capacity is amazing, I am flexible, my mental health is the best ever (and that has been one rocky road).  I cracked a rib and without yoga my body compensated in three days. I did not even realize how I restricted my movements to ease the pain.  But yoga does not allow cheating.  You do each posture the best you can to a threshold of moderate pain.  Having a cracked rib becomes a diagnostic exercise, understanding how the muscles around the rib play into so many postures our bodies can assume.

It may be weeks or months before I overcome the ill effects from my encounter with the bridge on Huron Avenue.  It would be easier to stop going to yoga and let my body find shortcuts out of pain.  But I believe in the yoga, in deep yoga, as my path to a healthier body as well as a clearer mind.  So I will continue, carefully, cautiously, to practice my yoga, cognizant of the damage the bridge did to my body, but not acquiescing to it.

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Pedaling Principles Chapter Seven – Missouri, Moralilty on a Lawn Sign

Posted on 01/21/2012 by paulefallon

By the time I got to Neosho, MO early on a Saturday evening I was hot and tired and in need of a good shower.  There are a cluster of hotels where US 60 and US 71 intersect, so I picked one, but it had no rooms.  I tried another, and a third.  The desk clerk at the last told me that Neosho was fully booked due to the Christian Convention in town for the weekend.  She suggested Springfield, but 65 miles is a day’s journey for me, not an hour’s drive.  I thanked the clerk, went outside, and spotted a city park a half mile or so up the road.  I knew my decision not to make advance reservations might land me homeless one night, but I wasn’t thrilled about it so early in my trip.  Opposite the park I uncovered an old motel tucked against some trees.  They had one room left, which I took with gratitude, though it was immediately apparent why it was the last unclaimed room in Neosho.

Welcome to southern Missouri, where a Christian Convention can wipe out a city’s hotels. Missouri is a large and diverse state; I spent five days traversing the southern tier from Neosho to Cape Girardeau, a land of small farms and deep woods, the upper reaches of the Ozarks.  It was the poorest expanse of the United States I visited, though not nearly so poor as I feared.  Yes, I passed shacks with teetering porches and rusted trailers and carcasses of ancient trucks and snarling dogs that made me pump my legs double time, but most people live in modest brick ranches.  There is a tendency in this part of Missouri to use your yard as an extension of your house.  Some people may simply not have enough room indoors for that recliner chair or jukebox or baby swing that they stow on the lawn, while others might have wanted to show off that they own a freezer chest and a ping pong table.  It is not a tidy landscape; it is an assertive one. 

The people I met reminded me of their yards.  They do not display the toothy smile and cheerful greeting ubiquitous in Oklahoma.  They eyed me carefully, as if deciding whether to sic their dog on me, and I kept a measured distance in kind, being wary of dogs.  Once we got passed the initial once over, however, the Missourians I met were matter-of-fact and straightforward, with firm opinions and strong convictions.  They displayed no subterfuge or gaminess; they simply embodied their own motto as citizens of the ‘Show Me’ state.

Convictions and yards merged in the bounty of signs I saw on my travels through Missouri.  Billboards, marquees, lawn signs, painted boards nailed to trees, whatever belief a person felt dear seemed worthy of a sign.  Most signs proclaimed the moral issues of our day; abortion, marriage, prayer in school, taxpayer discontent, and the United Nations.  By and large, the signs love our troops, hate our government, cherish all babies, deplore gays, exalt cowboys, and praise the Lord.  Every church has a marquee banner sign upon which they proclaim scripture passages or catchy phrases.  I particularly liked “He who rises with the Son does not get burned,” on a blistering summer day.

There is an entire series of signs near Van Buren that states ‘MoDOT Sucks’, MoDOT being the Missouri Department of Transportation.  This seemed peculiar to me, as US 60 is a new and very smooth four lane highway.  But apparently there are victims of the acquisition / construction process who have posted billboards to take their beef directly to the people.

My favorite signs were the white real estate signs planted on front yards just inside the curb with black stenciled bible verses, a different verse on each side.  They even have the superscript attachment, where one usually finds the realtors name and number, but these proclaim “Ye Do Err, Not Knowing the Scriptures.”  The signs are ubiquitous around Piedmont and reinforce the impression that this is one very well Bible-read Christian community.

After days of passing so many proclamations I was fascinated by what all these signs meant.  The yard sign culture in Massachusetts, limited to political candidates and referendum questions, lacks imagination when compared with the flurry of opinions staked in Missouri. What is singular about the culture of southern Missouri that fosters signs on all manner of religious and social issues?  First, I realized, the people planting these signs are not expressing opinions.  They are announcing Truth.  The signs are not points of discussion; they are fact, at least from the perspective of the sign owner.  As fact, they are a public service message, giving the Truth, for free, to anyone passing by, many of whom, like me, are in sore need of the Truth.  The sign planters do not think abortion and gay marriage and the United Nations are bad; they know it.  They know it with the certainly of faith rather than the mere aggregation of knowledge acquired.  One of the most prevalent words in the yard signs and church marquees of southern Missouri is ‘righteous’.  A person must feel righteous about his convictions to root them so firmly in his front yard.

If we were grappling with the guiding principles of the Southern Baptist Church or the National Right to Life or any group whose existence is defined by accepting a set of beliefs as Truth, then the convictions of Missouri yard signs, or their counter beliefs, would be valid.  However, when addressing the guiding principles of the United States of America, we need to understand that what is Truth for one subset of the population may not be Truth for all.  A big nation needs some overarching Truths, such as everyone being entitled to equal rights under the law, but in the big polyglot of ideas that is our country we sometimes have multiple Truths.  Multiple Truths may be an easy to swallow for a secular humanist or a Unitarian, but if your faith has revealed a singular Truth to you, then, by definition, other points of view cannot also be Truth.  The idea of multiple Truths is unacceptable, you plant your heals, or your yard sign, and proclaim your unyielding position.

This is how we treat the major social issues facing our country, as unyielding positions.  Arguments are expressed from the perspective of faith-based, singular truths instead of acknowledging the realty of multiple truths.  People can rant that this is a Christian country all they want, but it is not.  It is country founded upon freedom of religion, and Christians are the dominant sect at this time.  Politicians and talk show hosts know that if they repeat an opinion long enough and hard enough it will take on the gloss of truth and the underlying precepts, our guiding principles, will get muddy.  Certain segments of our media make this pronouncement over and over, so much so that many people think of the United States as a Christian country.  But I repeat; it is not.  It is country founded upon freedom of religion, and Christians are the dominant sect at this time. I would have to repeat that statement thousands of times to get anywhere near countering the ‘Christian nation’ message of southern Missouri, where the notion is purposely repeated over and over in an attempt to wear away our founding truth and replace it with one more to the liking of a subset of our citizens.  There is a term for this; it is called propaganda.

The key to working through challenging social issues is to remember the underlying precept that guiding principles lead to a solution that maximizes benefits to many while minimizing individual harm.  Since social issues are the policies we put in force to reflect our collective view of individual behavior, the key driver of any discussion about social issues is not how well it reflects the majority view, but how well it protects the minority from harm.  To explore how this works I want to use two examples, the first is what I consider a mature social issue, abortion; we have been discussing it for decades.  The second is a relatively new social issue, gay marriage.

Although I will wind up with no allies taking this position, I believe that our current policies regarding abortion are actually a good reflection of our guiding principle of ‘life liberty and the pursuit of happiness,’ though how we got here was not through a particularly cooperative process.  Abortion is an action that involves only one woman and one fetus.  At present, we do not extend the rights of citizenship to fetuses in early gestation, and we allow a woman to choose to abort her fetus. But we place restrictions. These restrictions, waiting periods, counseling, gestation limits, make it difficult for the woman to have an abortion.  There is a balance in our current condition; we ensure the individual freedom of the woman to choose, but acknowledge that abortion is not a trivial undertaking; it should be done only with a deep understanding of its consequences.  People who believe that abortion is wrong are never compelled to have one; but that does not give them the right to force their belief on others.  Their Truth is accurate for them, but not applied to all.

We are not nearly as far along in our discussion of gay marriage as we are of abortion, though today we approach the debate with the same rancor. It may take decades, but eventually gay marriage will evolve in much the same way that abortion has, with or without a Supreme Court ruling. Gay marriage will be available to citizens in more and more states, but it will not be available in some religious denominations.  If we convened a convention to apply a straightforward application of ‘life liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ to gay marriage, the issue could be decided in a weekend.  Gay marriage is not burdened by the truly thorny issue of defining a fetus.  It allows same gender citizens who want to get married to do so.  It allows them to pursue their own happiness and it never impinges on anyone else. The connection between being married and having children and raising families is mute in our society.  Many married people do not have children, many unmarried people do.  Marriage is a choice with certain societal benefits and obligations.  People who want that designation should be able to achieve it.  Eventually we will acknowledge gay marriage as a civil right without religious connotation but if we get there through the same sparring we have done with abortion, we will wind up poorer for it because we will have missed the opportunity for substantive debate and perhaps even mutual understanding.

 If we were able to have reasoned debate about gay marriage, we would uncover two compelling ideas.  First, gay marriage actually helps us clarify the difference between civil and religious recognition.  Heterosexual marriage is indistinguishable in its religious and civil components.  A couple can be married in a church or at City Hall.  Same difference in the eyes of the State.  Those who like the idea that we are a Christian nation will not welcome this discussion as they continually sow confusion about the proper separation of church and state to support their beliefs.  Second, we would have to acknowledge that gay people are raising a good number of children these days.  Study after study shows, and conservative religions support, that intact nuclear families provide the best environment for raising children.  Even if we don’t believe in gay marriage for the sake of the gays, maybe we should support it for the sake of the children.

As I rode across southern Missouri I alternated between cycling on US 60, a wide and safe highway where the Ozarks had been contoured to high speeds, and state roads 14, 76 and 34, that climbed and dipped over and over.  The narrow roads were much more interesting, the signs closer to the road.  The more proclamations hit me in the face, the more I realized that they were about something deeper than faith-based truths.  They were a different way of thinking about wealth.

We use the terms wealth and affluence almost exclusively in terms of money.  If a person with a lot of money has a nice lawn with professional landscaping, maybe a fountain or even a piece of sculpture we don’t consider that proselytizing, though they are making a statement about their beliefs.  When a devout Christian displays a biblical passage we do consider it proselytizing, though it is also a statement of their beliefs.  The person with money is just more subtle in her advertising.  Most people in America consider having money a good thing.  We may begrudge the super-rich or people whose wealth comes without effort, but by and large we applaud people who have accumulated money through honest means.  We certainly find no virtue in poverty.  Even if we have not achieved wealth ourselves, we don’t begrudge it to others and so a conspicuous, affluent landscape is usually appreciated as a gesture of beauty rather than a social divider. The person of faith is more direct. He does not adorn his yard with symbols; he spells his message out in black on white. 

This made me wonder if perhaps religious faith isn’t also a sort of wealth, different from money but equal.  After all, each provides a sense of security and identity.  The more I considered this and the more I pedaled, the more I pondered a third kind of wealth, intellectual wealth, which bestows similar benefits to those preoccupied with the machinations of the brain.  Three kinds of wealth, the bread of the belly, the bread of the spirit, and the bread of the mind.

In the U.S. there is a positive correlation between money and education, and an inverse correlation between money/education and evangelical Christians, who tend to be poorer and less educated than other segments of our population.  This train of thought helped me empathize with the sign planters.  They may not have as many trappings of this world to show as those with money and degrees, but they have a bigger share invested in how they envision the next world.  Do they put more stake in the next world because this one has given them short shrift, or does their faith in the next world leave them unconcerned with earthly success?  Chicken and egg questions abound.

Of the three forms of wealth I thought about, I personally lean in the direction of intellectual wealth; I have an assortment of degrees, and consider my biggest asset what lies between my ears.  I have never understood people who clamor for money in its own right, but have always been fascinated by people who are motivated by the world beyond this one, however they define it.  Some people preoccupied by the next realm, particularly of Eastern persuasion, possess an unerring calm and resignation about this world.  They are just passing through.  While others who proclaim a special connection with heaven, particularly evangelical Christians and other proselytizing religions, take intense interest in this world.  Their success in the afterlife is tied to their performance in this one.  I have always appreciated the benefits that a deep faith can offer a person but have never understood the drive to convert others to the same point of view.  If a faith is meaningful, abiding and deep, why does it need company?  That is the crux of all social issues in this country, people who feel compelled to apply their personal beliefs over others.   After riding through the evangelical neighborhood of southern Missourif or five days, none of the signs I saw converted me to any religion, but I had enhanced respect and appreciation for the messengers.

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Shopping for Sweet Scents

Posted on 01/15/2012 by paulefallon

This Christmas my daughter asked for Chanel Number 5 perfume, an atlas, and soaps from a store called Lush.  The list pretty much bookends the journey of personal exploration a twenty-two year old woman travels through in search of her true self.  I decided to do Lush and the atlas for Christmas and Chanel for her birthday in early January.  The result was one of the most enjoyable shopping experiences of my life, followed by one that proves department stores have outlived their purpose on this planet.

It so happens that the Lush store in Harvard Square is just below my yoga studio.  I had seen their too perfectly hand scripted signs for the past two years and knew it was one of those oxymoron’s of the retail world – a chain masquerading as a counter cultural happening. I’d passed it hundreds of times, unable to avoid the savory, eccentric smell that permeates the lobby and stairway leading to the hot room. 

On the Saturday before Christmas I leave yoga and stop by Lush.   Immediately I know this is the kind of store a dad needs to know about – the stuff is certifiably cool yet much too expensive for a recent college graduate slumming as a waitress to afford on her own.  Almost anything I buy here will be welcome; I don’t have to worry about sizes or colors, and none of it has to be returned.  I am greeted by a chubby girl ripe with the spirit of the season.  I expose myself as the perfect customer, telling her my daughter likes Lush and I am open to Marti’s suggestions.

Marti rolls up her sleeves, literally, relishing the opportunity I present.  “Here is a bath bubble”.  She tosses a tennis ball sized circle of talc-y pink in the air.  She dips the edge in a bowl of still water and spreads the wetness across her exposed forearm.  “See how it bubbles?  Here, smell.”  She holds her forearm up to my nose with such chivalric flair I am inclined to take her hand, bow, and kiss it. Instead, I sniff.  “Cinnamon, infused with Vodka”, Marti pronounces.  I can’t smell a thing, at least nothing different than the overwhelming scent of the entire store.  But I want to seem cool so I say that’s nice.  “This one is licorice,” she swabs her other arm and lifts it to my snoz.  After trying to discern holly berry with mint I admit to not being able to differentiate the options.  “Oh here”, she smiles, “let me cleanse your palate”, and holds a small tin of charcoal to my nose.  Apparently, charcoal is the sorbet of the aroma world.  It is all rather silly but great fun and I leave with a nice holiday gift box of hand cut cleansers and a slab of candy cane soap cut from a swirling red and white block.  If it ever gets misplaced in the kitchen, someone will surely cut it up as cheese.

Lush is an all organic, anti animal testing, feel good about your groove shopping experience.  Everything is up and up, including the tab.  I could have bought a hundred of bars of Irish Spring at Costco for less than the price of two packages from Lush, but buying them wouldn’t have been half so much fun.  Besides, Abby was thrilled with her soap.

Hoping for the same exuberance I head to Colonial Drug, a Harvard Square landmark known for its extensive selection of perfume.  “Do you have Chanel Number 5?”  I feel stupid even asking the question.  A store that carries so many perfumes will certainly carry the world’s most famous fragrance.  “No we don’t”, the gaunt man behind the counter looks sad.  “They only sell through department stores.  You’ll have to go to Macy’s.”

Macy’s?  I haven’t been in a department store in at least five years.  Who goes to them anymore? More expensive than Target, less fun than Lush, department stores exist in a nether world that offers neither the appeal of uniqueness nor thrift.  I hop on my bike and pedal to Macy’s in downtown Boston.  I stand at the Chanel counter, right inside the main door. An Italian woman with a half inch of make-up is rouging the cheeks of a potential customer.  During a break in the make-over she tosses a glance my way.  “May I help you?” “I would like Chanel Number 5.”  She puts down her brushes.  “We have small or standard.”  She makes no reference to price.  “Standard.”  I want the classic bottle.  She unlocks a case, stoops into it, stands up empty handed.  “We are all out of standard.” I am standing at a prominent display right beside the main door to the world’s largest store.  “How can you be out of Chanel Number 5?”  She shrugs.  “We sell a lot.”  She turns away, back to the woman to apply another layer of make-up.  No offer to find it at another store, no expression of being sorry, not even enough energy to give me attitude. 

I start to ride home Chanelless when I remember there is a Lord and Taylor in Back Bay.  If Macy’s is unusual for me, Lord and Taylor is downright alien.  Still, I cycle over to the pristine brick box and escalate up to the perfumery.  Another big Chanel display, this one unattended.  “Hello”, I call out to no one in particular.  “Hello!”  A thin woman all in black with European allure and long blonde hair wafts in my direction. “I am looking for Chanel Number 5.”  “Over here.” She wafts away.  The perfume is not actually kept at the display. “How much for the standard size?” “ One hundred fifteen dollars.”  I am not price shopping, but it is nice to know what something will cost.

The model cum sales clerk pulls a huge ring of keys from the register and fiddles with the lock on the display case.  It will not open.  Not the first time, or the second, or the third.   Her brunette Euro double arrives and tries a bunch of keys, to no avail.  How many mannequins with a pulse does it take to open a Chanel case?  Apparently, more than two.  The women do not speak to me during their trial. I imagine them working at Lush, rolling up their black silk sleeves and swabbing their twiggy thin arms with the newest January scent.  “Here, smell yellow snow.”  Actually, I cannot imagine it.  Later, much later, they jiggle one key enough to pry open the case.  They swipe my credit card, offer me a shopping bag, but I decline, putting the small expensive box in my bicycle saddlebag.  We view each other with the mutual understanding that we inhabit different universes and with any luck, will never cross paths again.

When is the next time I will go into a Department store?  When hell freezes over, which, considering current global warming trends, is a long time away.

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Pedaling Principles Chapter Six – Oklahoma, Energy for the Taking

Posted on 01/15/2012 by paulefallon

The ride south from Dodge City, KS to Woodward, OK is one hundred and ten miles, a long and lonely haul on a hot, hot Saturday in late July. I was most thankful to the caring waitresses at Shorty’s Café in Buffalo, OK, who drew me in like a lost child when I arrived for lunch, filled my water bottles and chilled them while I ate smothered barbeque, fried okra, an immense cinnamon bun, and mason jars full of ice water and diet Coke.  I left Shorty’s around 2 pm with four liters of water that stayed cool for less than ten minutes, but I was energized for the final thirty-four miles to Woodward.

On the first rise out of Buffalo I saw them; slender masts with spinning turbines facing south; a row of windmills more daunting than anything Don Quixote ever conjured.  They disappeared in a hollow then reappeared, taller.  As I got closer I realized there were two rows, no three, in a long line which, according to my map, was the ridge of the North Canadian River.  The road dipped and curved around the gnarly plain, the turbines shifted in perspective but continued to grow. I figured I was about two miles away from them.  Wrong.  Two miles later they were larger but I was still far from their base.  Five miles further and still I had not achieved them.  There must have been thirty or forty in all, each row a different height.  The shortest windmills were closest to the river, the middle stood beyond, and the giant ones held the rear, the direction of my approach.  They stood immense and yet I still could not see where they met the ground.  The blades whirred ahead of me, blurring together, spinning apart.  In Kansas I had read Santa Fe Trailmarkers of how the eternal prairie wind had driven people mad.  These turbines just made me dizzy.  I pedaled and pedaled but their base was still out of sight.  Finally, more than twelve miles from when they first came into view, I came abreast of the turbines.  The tallest were hundreds of feet tall. higher than any I have ever seen. The door to enter their base appeared munchkin.  They stretched away from the road on either side of the ridge, miles across.  I stopped and photographed them, again and again, but could not capture in a single frame the delicate ballet of energy they played against each other or how completely they dominated the entire ridge.

Once the turbines were behind me I slogged out my last twenty miles into Woodward.  I rolled into the first motel I saw, got a quiet room in the back, showered and hit the sack, too exhausted for supper. I didn’t think about turbines again.  The next morning I pedaled out of town early to get a jump on the heat.  There is no traffic at 6:30 am on a Sunday in a state where church attendance, if not exactly a law, is certainly an expectation.  I made great time on a new paved stretch of Route 3 that gently roller coasted through the plains.  I did not stop until 9:00 when, at the crest of a hill, I leaned my bike against a signpost, took out my water, and scanned the horizon.  I looked behind and there they were, those ubiquitous turbines, plain as Truth against the morning sky; a good fifty miles away.

Oklahoma is not a state inclined towards tradition or sentiment; it is pragmatic about land.  We gave the land to the Indians, and then decided we wanted it back.  We didn’t parcel the Indians off to reservations; we mingled together.  We found oil and drilled for it and decided we didn’t want to mingle the surface bounty with the bounty beneath it, so we separated title of the land above and the minerals below into separate entities.  Land titles and mineral rights in Oklahoma are a unique labyrinth. The oil has been good, but it is thinning; America still needs energy and Oklahoma has wind to spare, so up go the turbines.

As a resident of Massachusetts, where the debate over the Cape Wind proposal to construct turbines in Vineyard Sound has dragged on for years, I am disappointed by my states’ inability to take responsibility for at least some of our energy consumption.  In comparison, Oklahoma built five wind farms within five years in the early 2000’s, moving from a zero wind position to sixth in the nation with capacity to fuel 175,000 homes in that short time.  A new farm in construction, developed in conjunction with the University of Oklahoma; will provide all the university’s energy needs.  The regulatory processes in Oklahoma are pro-energy and there are tax breaks for wind development.  I am pretty sure that the owner of the farm where I took my break, fifty miles from the turbines, was not consulted for her opinion on the turbine’s impact on her property values.  In Oklahoma, if there is something useful in the land, or under it, or above it, then you take it.

For me, there are two questions posed by the Centennial Wind Farm above Woodward.  Does it add or detract from the landscape, and is it a good energy investment.  The first is a question of aesthetics, and I expect that just as many people will find the array of spinning blades gracing the top of the ridge a pleasure to view as will those who side with leaving the ridge bare.  After all, this is a state where we leave derricks on the Capitol lawn as sculpture long after they the wells are drilled and dry.  The second is a question of math, and where the wind is consistent and strong, the math adds up favorably.  There are other issues of note, such as the noise and wildlife disturbance, but these are corollary issues that we can address as the technology matures.

Perhaps the biggest benefit of wind farms, even beyond the math, is that they satisfy the most urgent problem in our energy situation because they produce energy right here in theUnited States.  Energy produced by these turbines is energy we do not have to buy from another country. That is a virtue that supersedes economic analysis, because our reliance on imported energy hinders our country in so many ways.  Neither our energy policy nor our national defense nor our foreign relations will be sound until we cowboy up to and use our natural, technological, and human resources to become energy self-sufficient.  Our ability to interface with other countries in a straightforward and principled manner will be compromised until the United States becomes energy independent.

There are two ways to be energy independent.  The conservation method, in which we use  no more energy than we can produce ourselves, and the production method, in which we create new energy capacity through extraction (oil, gas, coal), generation (hydro and nuclear) or renewable technologies (wind, solar, hydrogen).  Any successful strategy will require a large dose of both, since we currently import about 65% of our oil and we are not likely to either cut our consumption alone or expand our production alone to make up that difference.

The relevant guiding principle that drives our need to be energy independent is the Preamble of the Constitution, “in order to form a more perfect Union.”  Our Union is compromised by being dependent on so much energy that we do not control. The baseline issue of our energy policy is not about drilling in the Arctic or installing turbines in Vineyard Sound or restricting incandescent light bulbs or giving tax breaks to hybrid cars.  The baseline issue is to decide that that we will be energy independent.  There are private interests (large oil companies, defense contracting firms) who presently benefit from the military-energy alignment, but our national interest must trump those profit motivated concerns.  As we shift from an imported energy model to a self-sufficient model, there will be profitable opportunities for those firms to participate in our shifted focus.  Once we decide we are going to balance our energy equation, there will be a boom of economic activity in this country, both in conservation and production, as we spend energy dollars here instead of flowing them overseas. 

It is true that Sadam Hussein was a virulent dictator who did not deserve to govern Iraq.  But he is hardly the only one in the world. Yet, he was the one we invaded and overthrew, in no small part because of the instability he posed to our thirst for Middle East oil. The destruction and lives lost, American, British, and Iraqi, cannot be justified in the name of oil.  We will never know how an energy independentAmericamight have responded to the curse of Sadam Hussein.  But we do know that we cannot deal with all the parties in the Middle East in a consistent and principled manner as long as we depend on them for the lifeblood of our economy.

If we can take that first step, to declare that we will be energy independent and work together towards that goal, the rest is negotiation.  If we apply a guiding principle methodology to steer the negotiation, we will establish success targets required for an energy consumption / production mix that can make us independent and then apply a cost-benefit analysis to optimize that mix; the point where we meet our target with maximum satisfaction and minimum pain.  Today we have the allusion of satisfying our energy thirst with minimal pain because we do not factor in the tremendous cost that our import dependent energy system places on affairs of State and national security. 

We will need to be innovative in our approach, incorporating both centralized and local solutions, providing incentives to guide behaviors that are energy positive, and introducing both short and long term solutions. A short term idea to spark production might be to set up incentives for individual domestic and commercial wind/solar projects that feed the grid, while a long term solution might be to develop viable hydrogen cells to power vehicles. A short term conservation idea might be to tax gasoline at a level that represents the true cost of building and maintaining our incredible road system.  Long term conservation ideas would be to transfer to point of use hot water heaters in homes and to set realistic but firm zero net energy usage for new buildings.

Many issues will be contentious, especially strategies that involve invasive land use, such as opening new areas for oil drilling or natural gas exploration or constructing wind farms.  It is difficult to assess potential environmental damage from system failures in advance, but as we know from the Valdez and Deepwater Horizon disasters, failures occur and when they do, the cost is far more than prudent prevention.  The way to safeguard against disaster is to get as many points of view as possible in the same boat.  If we must expand drilling, then we must expand oversight, and perhaps the oversight needs to be done by advocates for the environment, rather than petroleum company functionaries.  There will be dozens of ways to make it succeed, as long as we understand that we are working together towards the goal of energy independence.

This will cost money, you say, money we don’t have. We have spent over a trillion dollars waging war in Afghanistan and Iraq.  That was money we did not have, money we borrowed against the ballooning national debt, yet we spent it willingly without knowing the final tab or having any defined measure of success in advance.  It was money we spent to protect our way of life without admitting that we have no right to claim a way of life that depends on our extracting the resources of others.  We have enough oil and gas and coal and hydro and nuclear and sun and wind and hydrogen on our own turf to meet a comfortable level of consumption if we apply our brainpower to make the technology work. We have enough compassion to develop sensible energy conservation measures without crippling our cherished way of life.  The cost of our foreign dominated energy system is draining us.  Let’s spend the money to make the system our own.

After spending a few days with family and friends in Oklahoma City, I cycled along old US 66, which Oklahoma has turned into a movable shrine to the golden age of the automobile.  I visited the interpretive center in Chandler where I watched Route 66 videos from bucket seats, went to the motorcycle museum in Warwick, the Tepee Park in Fiyol, and the Packard showcase in Afton.  Everything stressed pushing the pedal down and keeping the speed up.  This makes sense in a state that has always felt more comfortable creating energy over extolling conservation.  But US 66 is no longer an official highway, and the landmarks that defined the Mother Road are dwindling pieces of the past.  These days, cars heading to Tulsa or on to Missouri use Interstate 44, leaving Historic 66 to a scattering of local traffic, motorcycle caravans, and the guy on the bike.  Which I must admit proved to be an energy efficient vacation; no foreign oil was required and I spent hours upon hours along the open road developing pretty nice legs and spinning ideas.

 

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Twin Tales of Darkness

Posted on 01/08/2012 by paulefallon

Haiti is not nearly so dark as it used to be.  The electrical grid in Grand Goave, which ran maybe four to six hours per day during the year after the earthquake, now operates about twenty hours a day and sometimes provides power for a week or more without a blackout.  Off gird locales still depend on generators, but fuel is more plentiful than it was, so the generators run longer; and the fuel is purer, so generators break down less often.  A year ago the generator at the mission house ran a few hours each morning and evening, if it ran at all.  We shut it down by eight, and by nine everyone was asleep.  This trip the generator ran all night, lights burned and air conditioners hummed.  Then on Wednesday night it broke down, leaving us in the dark.

I love the dark. I love how our other senses rise to our aid when our overreliance on sight is compromised.  I love how I ease my way along the path from my room, across the veranda, down the steps and through the chaucoun to the beach, guided by the faint glow of the starry night, the aroma of dinner’s rice and beans and the steady pound of the surf.  In light I speed down the stairs, but in dark I engage each tread and monitor the pressure in my hands and feet to make sure I always bear two points of weight.  Darkness heightens my consciousness, so I do not trip.

I slept well when the generator blew.  Instead of the external rumble of the generator and the steady beat of the air conditioner’s breeze (Gama loves air conditioning), the sounds of the night filled our room; the sea, the random dog bark, the roosters that crow too early in the morning, and the church bells that peal moments before our 5:00 am alarm sounds. Without competition from the generator, the pageant of nightly sounds filled our ears and induced solid slumber.

Darkness is a wonderful luxury, but when work presses and we lose the race to complete it under the Caribbean sun, we yearn for light’s extension.  Thursday was my last day of work and after the crew left at four o’clock we had a long list of To Do’s to review on site and then update on our computers.  By 5:30 the shack was dim and the single overhead fluorescent burned out.  Gama sent Franky, his guy Friday, to get another bulb on his moto while I propped a flashlight over my keyboard.  Franky returned and inserted the new bulb but nothing happened. 

Now it was completely dark and the flashlight wavered.  Gama called one of the electricians who came right over (we should get such responsive repairmen in the States).  The tradesman brought a temporary light that gave us all a warm glow.  Gama and I typed away while the electrician climbed on the table where we worked and fiddled with the socket above.  He intermittently turned off the main power switch and we each worked as best we could under the guidance of Franky pointing the flashlight here and there.  Gama began to sing.  I could have been upset, or at least annoyed, but instead I felt a flush of giddiness, hunting and pecking in the darkness. The situation was unthinkable in theUS, and if it occurred it likely would have welled into anger, but inHaitiit just added to the zany sense of adventure.

Ultimately the socket was fine. The replacement bulb had broken as Franky’s moto jostled up the hill.  The electrician returned everything to its original condition took his light and left us in the dark.  Gama and I completed our work by flashlight, sent out our final emails, turned off the generator and headed home.

Darkness may induce soothing calm or thwart efficiency, but in a world where so many of us are accustomed to light on demand, darkness thrust upon us brings new appreciation for not only the dark, but also for the light.

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