Law for Sustainability, Purpose and Context
"Pardon," Thomas Nast, Harper's Weekly Magazine, August 5, 1865, detail," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/44392. Original caption: Columbia: “Shall I trust these men”.
When, before, did we feel that some people were not just voting for a different approach to living together in a democratic republic, but for the ending of that system of cooperative self-government? When, before, did we hear fellow Americans speaking of Civil War? Before the Civil War.
For those who work or even just wish for environmental salvation, ensuring we don’t elect a man who would end the independence of the agencies created to enhance justice, environmental and public health, fair working conditions, basic rights, etc., is a task requiring putting everything else aside.
But how do we act? Deep confusion reigns: we are fighting a new kind of battle – on the field of meaning. It seems that some sentences are heard in very different ways by different people. For example, any sentence containing the words “immigrants” or “Democrat” can trigger anger, fear or anxiety on the part of those not sure these things aren’t immediate and serious threats. Then there is everyone else who lives in the real world and wishes to grapple sensibly with the problems that face us all directly, here and now. These require working together, a clear view of the world, faith that most other people are generally good even if some are a serious problem, and respect for individuals that forbids prejudging them by association.
This presents a new level of difficulty for environmental citizens to master, and there is not much time. But we can still work to increase the chances that the world will evolve responsibility, rather than continue to become brittle and fragile, as Our Thing – the self-governing mechanism bequeathed to us by a magnificently unfolding societal maturation, an enlightenment growing towards justice – is taken over.
When FEMA can’t have a meeting about to help victims of Hurricane Helene without people thinking it’s about stealing their land for lithium we see how good the devilish propagandists have gotten, how quickly they can poison the well. The music played at Trump’s rallies hypnotically backs up his trance-like musings. The listeners look dazed. How do we break the spell?
A learned friend recently lent me a translation[i] of The Sandman, by E.T.A Hoffman, published in 1817. In it, advice is provided concerning how not to yield to a “dark and hostile power which traitorously fixes a thread in our hearts” to draw us “by means of it along a dangerous road to ruin”.
“So long as we have sufficient firmness, fortified by cheerfulness, to always acknowledge foreign influences for what they really are, whilst we quietly pursue the path pointed out to us by both inclination and calling, then this mysterious power perishes in its futile struggles to attain the form which is to be the reflected image of ourselves.”
For those who work or even just wish for environmental salvation, ensuring we don’t elect a man who would end the independence of the agencies created to enhance justice, environmental and public health, fair working conditions, basic rights, etc., is a task requiring putting everything else aside.
But how do we act? Deep confusion reigns: we are fighting a new kind of battle – on the field of meaning. It seems that some sentences are heard in very different ways by different people. For example, any sentence containing the words “immigrants” or “Democrat” can trigger anger, fear or anxiety on the part of those not sure these things aren’t immediate and serious threats. Then there is everyone else who lives in the real world and wishes to grapple sensibly with the problems that face us all directly, here and now. These require working together, a clear view of the world, faith that most other people are generally good even if some are a serious problem, and respect for individuals that forbids prejudging them by association.
This presents a new level of difficulty for environmental citizens to master, and there is not much time. But we can still work to increase the chances that the world will evolve responsibility, rather than continue to become brittle and fragile, as Our Thing – the self-governing mechanism bequeathed to us by a magnificently unfolding societal maturation, an enlightenment growing towards justice – is taken over.
When FEMA can’t have a meeting about to help victims of Hurricane Helene without people thinking it’s about stealing their land for lithium we see how good the devilish propagandists have gotten, how quickly they can poison the well. The music played at Trump’s rallies hypnotically backs up his trance-like musings. The listeners look dazed. How do we break the spell?
A learned friend recently lent me a translation[i] of The Sandman, by E.T.A Hoffman, published in 1817. In it, advice is provided concerning how not to yield to a “dark and hostile power which traitorously fixes a thread in our hearts” to draw us “by means of it along a dangerous road to ruin”.
“So long as we have sufficient firmness, fortified by cheerfulness, to always acknowledge foreign influences for what they really are, whilst we quietly pursue the path pointed out to us by both inclination and calling, then this mysterious power perishes in its futile struggles to attain the form which is to be the reflected image of ourselves.”
Firmness fortified by cheerfulness is not far off from Kamala Harris, the law enforcement official, bringing joy. But that level of positivity is shadowed by Trump’s destructive energy relentlessly threatening. It bounces in and off the reflection he builds in many minds of their own desires. How can we remind these captured souls that they have more in common with the rest of us and that their interests lie with the original and modern ideas of democracy?
How do we remind them that the very point of democracy is to find consensus rather than to battle like ancient warriors, and to prevent takeovers of something that belongs to all of us, by felons and the gangs and bandwagons that join them? Somehow we need to convince them to be respectful towards us, to have some trust in us, but the spell that makes us look demonic is strong, and we must speak with simple clarity, in ways that resonate with things everyone cares about, to ring through. Our goals of saving, maintaining, and improving our shared systems for living on this earth, arguably the most urgent in history, will be furthered if we can do this, for success depends on saving American democracy first.
The very people voting for him and thinking it is an act of patriotism think they are having a chance for a government that reflects their needs. But it is a bogus move – they are being trumped out of their deepest hopes, and that endangers all of our hopes. So reaching them is a good thing to try.
Can we reach them with a catchy tune - the “Harris Waltz”? (Vote for the real thing, not for the false). Could it hurt to spread slogans like Don’t Make America Ugly, Vote Democratic for All People? I like DMAU (“Dee Mow”).
We can’t just recite facts. Time is short. We have to engage with the belief systems of those who have fallen into the fallacious, who have been snared by the specious, who have disengaged with reality and taken up false beliefs.
We can say, well, the task is simple: explain economics to them, that the inflation you blame on Biden was mostly caused by Trump’s artificial pumping up of the economy and his failure to deal with COVID, as well as many other things beyond the President’s power. Trump’s disruption of everyone was certainly contributive as well as his failure to do anything worthwhile. We can show them the charts that show Democratic Administrations saved economies that the Republicans had blown up. But better – imagine we are not the ones showing them, that we have gotten out of the way, and they come upon these facts themselves.
Imagine if somehow they can come to see, without being distracted by the images of us (their supposed enemies, all nonTrumpers are radical leftist crazies) how the fossil fuel, chemical, religious right, and other concentrations of manipulative billions of dollars have pumped lies into the information environment in order to hold off those who would protect the people from the liars’ unfairness, who would help us keep our rightful share in this our common heritage, to see those who are truly harming us all and how they are causing harm, betraying the gift of nature, for money.
If they hate the intellectuals because they think the intellectuals think they’re better than other people, then it must be emotionally satisfying to vote against them. But if you don’t see how the money elite has its hands on things then you get to go home feeling you’ve stood up for yourself but with only the pennies they allow you.
If people are voting with middle school fear and jealousy, middle school – all levels – also contained experiences in which one found out that the people who you thought were thinking they were better than you, actually weren’t, and friendships were made. Alone each new friendship won’t save the world, but remember that flower that the long-haired hippie protestor put in the barrel of a gun at a VietNam war protest? It helped. It was just a little thing to do, but “Little Things Can Mean A Lot”.[ii]
With pictures from Edward Steichen’s 1955 Family of Man photography exhibit at the NY Museum of Modern Art, celebrating the “universal aspects of the human experience” popping up we can read out a stirring rendition of the Preamble:
We the People of the United States
in Order to form a more perfect Union,
establish Justice,
insure domestic Tranquility,
provide for the common defence,
promote the general Welfare,
and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,
do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Maybe some will get it. Be reminded. Maybe they will hear these words, and understand this means we need a government to keep us free from that which threatens us, and the freedom of the businesses that don’t like regulation, that’s not really the original intent of the founders – this is.
Mocking those who have swallowed lies can make them pull that MAGA hat down even tighter. We want them to disengage from the false dream in which they are battling with us – and have internal recognitions in which they realize they are wearing a hat that broadcasts that they are a member of a herd that is being nudged over a cliff, and they tear it off their head themselves and throw it down on the ground.
How does such a thing happen? They say it is their love for America that makes them vote for the great traitor who would tear down our Capitol and our whole system and our treaties that make us safer. Environmental citizens have a far better case for loving America or anything. We all love America and if we can join in a love for America then there is a possibility, but they must be helped to see the facts for themselves. The rightwing insanity machine obscures us. We have to appear as people first or they won’t hear what we say.
They are holding very shabby cards in a game in which someone else always holds the trump card. There have to be ways for that to become visible. I think of Toto pulling aside the curtain of the great and magnificent Oz working the controls of his image machine, the camera still running at the end of Face in the Crowd, revealing how the candidate actually holds the people he says he loves in great disrespect. Sorry to spoil these endings but this is important: if we can get them to look at the cards they are holding maybe we can affect their play, and some will fold, and some will not have the will to continue to bluff, or to bet on the bluff.
The facts speak loudly when they are seen. This biggest political delusive phenomena since McCarthyism and that era are connected in the unattractive figure of Roy Cohn, representing the simple sociopathic principle of extreme selfishness and bald bold assertion, counterpunching, delaying, as he advised Joseph McCarthy, Trump, the Mafia, any figures malignant enough to adopt that strategy for existing within society. The turning back of the clock to when women and minorities were subdued, the ugliness of this speaks. The trumpeting of the idea of deporting the unwanted, this is an ugly America that we have seen before and repudiated. The insulting who cares about you, to other countries, that is an ugly face to give the world, especially when we have taken so much, our military bases everywhere.
The mocking, the vindictive, the resentful, the angry, the people feeling justified in releasing their anger, demanding they get their way, and convincing themselves that they are patriotic: I imagine arranging for mirrors so that they see themselves. A lot of people don’t want to be ugly.
How do we remind them that the very point of democracy is to find consensus rather than to battle like ancient warriors, and to prevent takeovers of something that belongs to all of us, by felons and the gangs and bandwagons that join them? Somehow we need to convince them to be respectful towards us, to have some trust in us, but the spell that makes us look demonic is strong, and we must speak with simple clarity, in ways that resonate with things everyone cares about, to ring through. Our goals of saving, maintaining, and improving our shared systems for living on this earth, arguably the most urgent in history, will be furthered if we can do this, for success depends on saving American democracy first.
The very people voting for him and thinking it is an act of patriotism think they are having a chance for a government that reflects their needs. But it is a bogus move – they are being trumped out of their deepest hopes, and that endangers all of our hopes. So reaching them is a good thing to try.
Can we reach them with a catchy tune - the “Harris Waltz”? (Vote for the real thing, not for the false). Could it hurt to spread slogans like Don’t Make America Ugly, Vote Democratic for All People? I like DMAU (“Dee Mow”).
We can’t just recite facts. Time is short. We have to engage with the belief systems of those who have fallen into the fallacious, who have been snared by the specious, who have disengaged with reality and taken up false beliefs.
We can say, well, the task is simple: explain economics to them, that the inflation you blame on Biden was mostly caused by Trump’s artificial pumping up of the economy and his failure to deal with COVID, as well as many other things beyond the President’s power. Trump’s disruption of everyone was certainly contributive as well as his failure to do anything worthwhile. We can show them the charts that show Democratic Administrations saved economies that the Republicans had blown up. But better – imagine we are not the ones showing them, that we have gotten out of the way, and they come upon these facts themselves.
Imagine if somehow they can come to see, without being distracted by the images of us (their supposed enemies, all nonTrumpers are radical leftist crazies) how the fossil fuel, chemical, religious right, and other concentrations of manipulative billions of dollars have pumped lies into the information environment in order to hold off those who would protect the people from the liars’ unfairness, who would help us keep our rightful share in this our common heritage, to see those who are truly harming us all and how they are causing harm, betraying the gift of nature, for money.
If they hate the intellectuals because they think the intellectuals think they’re better than other people, then it must be emotionally satisfying to vote against them. But if you don’t see how the money elite has its hands on things then you get to go home feeling you’ve stood up for yourself but with only the pennies they allow you.
If people are voting with middle school fear and jealousy, middle school – all levels – also contained experiences in which one found out that the people who you thought were thinking they were better than you, actually weren’t, and friendships were made. Alone each new friendship won’t save the world, but remember that flower that the long-haired hippie protestor put in the barrel of a gun at a VietNam war protest? It helped. It was just a little thing to do, but “Little Things Can Mean A Lot”.[ii]
With pictures from Edward Steichen’s 1955 Family of Man photography exhibit at the NY Museum of Modern Art, celebrating the “universal aspects of the human experience” popping up we can read out a stirring rendition of the Preamble:
We the People of the United States
in Order to form a more perfect Union,
establish Justice,
insure domestic Tranquility,
provide for the common defence,
promote the general Welfare,
and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,
do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Maybe some will get it. Be reminded. Maybe they will hear these words, and understand this means we need a government to keep us free from that which threatens us, and the freedom of the businesses that don’t like regulation, that’s not really the original intent of the founders – this is.
Mocking those who have swallowed lies can make them pull that MAGA hat down even tighter. We want them to disengage from the false dream in which they are battling with us – and have internal recognitions in which they realize they are wearing a hat that broadcasts that they are a member of a herd that is being nudged over a cliff, and they tear it off their head themselves and throw it down on the ground.
How does such a thing happen? They say it is their love for America that makes them vote for the great traitor who would tear down our Capitol and our whole system and our treaties that make us safer. Environmental citizens have a far better case for loving America or anything. We all love America and if we can join in a love for America then there is a possibility, but they must be helped to see the facts for themselves. The rightwing insanity machine obscures us. We have to appear as people first or they won’t hear what we say.
They are holding very shabby cards in a game in which someone else always holds the trump card. There have to be ways for that to become visible. I think of Toto pulling aside the curtain of the great and magnificent Oz working the controls of his image machine, the camera still running at the end of Face in the Crowd, revealing how the candidate actually holds the people he says he loves in great disrespect. Sorry to spoil these endings but this is important: if we can get them to look at the cards they are holding maybe we can affect their play, and some will fold, and some will not have the will to continue to bluff, or to bet on the bluff.
The facts speak loudly when they are seen. This biggest political delusive phenomena since McCarthyism and that era are connected in the unattractive figure of Roy Cohn, representing the simple sociopathic principle of extreme selfishness and bald bold assertion, counterpunching, delaying, as he advised Joseph McCarthy, Trump, the Mafia, any figures malignant enough to adopt that strategy for existing within society. The turning back of the clock to when women and minorities were subdued, the ugliness of this speaks. The trumpeting of the idea of deporting the unwanted, this is an ugly America that we have seen before and repudiated. The insulting who cares about you, to other countries, that is an ugly face to give the world, especially when we have taken so much, our military bases everywhere.
The mocking, the vindictive, the resentful, the angry, the people feeling justified in releasing their anger, demanding they get their way, and convincing themselves that they are patriotic: I imagine arranging for mirrors so that they see themselves. A lot of people don’t want to be ugly.
Lady Bird Johnson encouraged us all to think about the beauty of this country.
She didn’t just mean planting flowers by roadways. Her work with Stewart Udall helped infuse the Johnson Administration with extensive environmental initiatives. The delegates to her 1965 White House Conference on Natural Beauty called for a focus on what we now call environmental justice. They urged that
“…the beautification projects be undertaken particularly in blighted areas, in order to develop the spirit and the leadership which are vital to alleviating racial tension, poverty and the tragedies of dejected youth,” and that “natural beauty be further emphasized as a focal point of rural area development, of poverty programs and of urban renewal.”[iii]
If this discussion of beauty leaves you distracted, for example because you are confused about how to love America, (because while it has been great in many ways it has been so awful in so many ways and is right now ready to spend $1.7 trillion on modernizing a horrific nuclear arsenal that threatens too much[iv]), and because it has so failed in maintaining civic education that there are so many people ready to trash the gifts of our ancestors, the greatest social experiment in history; think of how we, citizens loyal to the idea of citizenship, belonging to this place together, have the freedom to create the America we would love to have. It’s not whether America lived up to our hopes, before. It’s whether we can get things going in the direction we want, and that’s something to love.
We could Bring Back Beautification[v]. Meanwhile, we can all be virtual members of Beautifiers Anonymous by picking up trash in public lands as we take walks to clear our minds so we can be effective in this effort. Defense against the dark arts besetting us will require use of every tool we have and the creation of many new ones. Conjuring up the image of America the Beauty, such as the merciful Columbia who let the South back in, but had her eye on those selfish gentlemen, this is a good spell. Maybe it can release some, maybe win some. All we have to do is execute this and similar plans – there’s still time.
[i] J.T. Bealby, 2010, Bilingual Library.
[ii] Saying of the League of Women Voters and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts concerning household hazardous waste – buying fewer hazardous products, putting none in the ordinary trash – in the 1980’s.
[iii] “A National Beautification Campaign Revitalized Communities in the ’60s and Could Again Today: Natural beauty can unite the nation.” John de Graaf, Truthout, January 1, 2018. https://truthout.org/articles/a-national-beautification-campaign-revitalized-communities-in-the-60-and-could-again-today/.
[iv] “The Price”, W.J. Hennigan, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/10/10/opinion/nuclear-weapons-us-price.html.
[v] “Though the word beautification makes the concept sound merely cosmetic, it involves much more: clean water, clean air, clean roadsides, safe waste disposal and preservation of valued old landmarks as well as great parks and wilderness areas. To me…beautification means our total concern for the physical and human quality we pass on to our children and the future.” Lady Bird Johnson. https://www.nps.gov/articles/lady-bird-johnson-beautification-cultural-landscapes.htm.
She didn’t just mean planting flowers by roadways. Her work with Stewart Udall helped infuse the Johnson Administration with extensive environmental initiatives. The delegates to her 1965 White House Conference on Natural Beauty called for a focus on what we now call environmental justice. They urged that
“…the beautification projects be undertaken particularly in blighted areas, in order to develop the spirit and the leadership which are vital to alleviating racial tension, poverty and the tragedies of dejected youth,” and that “natural beauty be further emphasized as a focal point of rural area development, of poverty programs and of urban renewal.”[iii]
If this discussion of beauty leaves you distracted, for example because you are confused about how to love America, (because while it has been great in many ways it has been so awful in so many ways and is right now ready to spend $1.7 trillion on modernizing a horrific nuclear arsenal that threatens too much[iv]), and because it has so failed in maintaining civic education that there are so many people ready to trash the gifts of our ancestors, the greatest social experiment in history; think of how we, citizens loyal to the idea of citizenship, belonging to this place together, have the freedom to create the America we would love to have. It’s not whether America lived up to our hopes, before. It’s whether we can get things going in the direction we want, and that’s something to love.
We could Bring Back Beautification[v]. Meanwhile, we can all be virtual members of Beautifiers Anonymous by picking up trash in public lands as we take walks to clear our minds so we can be effective in this effort. Defense against the dark arts besetting us will require use of every tool we have and the creation of many new ones. Conjuring up the image of America the Beauty, such as the merciful Columbia who let the South back in, but had her eye on those selfish gentlemen, this is a good spell. Maybe it can release some, maybe win some. All we have to do is execute this and similar plans – there’s still time.
[i] J.T. Bealby, 2010, Bilingual Library.
[ii] Saying of the League of Women Voters and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts concerning household hazardous waste – buying fewer hazardous products, putting none in the ordinary trash – in the 1980’s.
[iii] “A National Beautification Campaign Revitalized Communities in the ’60s and Could Again Today: Natural beauty can unite the nation.” John de Graaf, Truthout, January 1, 2018. https://truthout.org/articles/a-national-beautification-campaign-revitalized-communities-in-the-60-and-could-again-today/.
[iv] “The Price”, W.J. Hennigan, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/10/10/opinion/nuclear-weapons-us-price.html.
[v] “Though the word beautification makes the concept sound merely cosmetic, it involves much more: clean water, clean air, clean roadsides, safe waste disposal and preservation of valued old landmarks as well as great parks and wilderness areas. To me…beautification means our total concern for the physical and human quality we pass on to our children and the future.” Lady Bird Johnson. https://www.nps.gov/articles/lady-bird-johnson-beautification-cultural-landscapes.htm.
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