America and The Old Man and the Sea

My fingers caress a well-aged copy of the novel The Old Man and the Sea. I thumb to the first page. 

“He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf of Mexico and he had gone eighty-four days without taking a fish,” read the first words of Ernest Hemingway’s 1952 masterpiece. 

Those first words are so simple and honest, as are the 26.967 words that follow to describe an old fisherman’s battle with a huge fish, and with life. 

Millions of other words have been written about the novel’s meaning and its messages. 

But today the novel has, for me, new meaning and a new message.

A quick recall of the novel’s story line: Santiago, the old fisherman, has gone to sea 84 days without catching a fish. On the 85^th, he catches his dream – an 18-foot-long marlin. Food for an entire village. 

Santiago plays the fish with his hands, gripping the fishing line and tightening and slackening the tension as needed. If he ties the line to the boat the fish will snap it and escape. Holding the line leaves his hands bloody and his body exhausted. 

He fights the fish for hours, then wins the battle. He ties the fish body against the side of his skiff and sets course for home. 

Then the sharks come. By the time he reaches the beach, the sharks have reduced the fish to a skeleton. Santiago fought to secure his dream, but lost it to the sharks. 

As I reread this remarkable story, I see it much differently than I did many years ago. I now see Santiago as the American people; the great fish is the American dream rooted in a Declaration of Independence proclaiming everyone is created equal with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. 

Many fought to secure that dream, but it is being lost. Sharks are consuming it. 

Once the world’s most powerful and most promising nation, the United States has become yet another country of confused people unable to overcome increasingly difficult problems. 

Racism, supposedly banished by civil war 160 years ago, remains a significant feature of U.S. life. White supremacy and other far right-wing philosophies gain prominence instead of being buried once and for all. 

The U.S. has become a country of anger, loud shouting and self pity.  A country of fortified zones sealed off by armed forces and fences. The White House, a symbol of government for the people, by the people, is cordoned off by two miles of fencing. 

More serious is a loss of morality. That is evidenced in the Covid pandemic, which Americans have allowed to run rampant, infecting more than 12 million people and killing more than 250,000 people in less than nine months. 

A stunning example of vanishing morality is seen in a lightly-reported study of what is happening in U.S. jails and prisons during the pandemic. 

By last week almost 200,000 jailed Americans had tested positive for Covid. Last week alone almost 14,000 new cases were reported in U.S. prisons and jails, an eight-per-cent increase over the previous week. 

The statistics were gathered by The Marshall Project, a non-profit news organization covering criminal justice, and the Associated Press. 

The Covid-19 case rate for U.S. prisoners is believed to be five to six times higher than the overall U.S. population case rate. That is because of jail crowding, less access to medical attention and disinterest. 

It is also a manifestation of a trend to jail more blacks and more poor people and to care less for them because they are considered criminals deserving less than society’s ‘decent’ folks. 

This is not the America my grandfather and his family left when the Great Cloquet, Minnesota fire burned them out many decades ago. It is not the America that his ancestors helped to build when they arrived from England in the early 1600s. 

Can that America be restored? 

The Old Man and the Sea offers some hope. 

“Man is not meant for defeat," Santiago tells himself after the sharks attack his marlin. "A man can be destroyed but not defeated." 

The America my family knew is being destroyed, but will the spirit of the American people be defeated? 

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When Trust is Lost

From Shaman’s Rock
By Jim Poling Sr.

It seems that you can’t trust anyone or anything these days. And, that has become a serious, but much overlooked problem for our so-called civilized society.

A recent Pew Research Centre survey showed that only 20 per cent of adults in the United States trust the federal government to do the right thing. The survey shows Americans also have a declining trust in each other.

Some people blame declining trust on the Trump presidency, but it predates all the lies, misinformation, disinformation and deceptions of that administration.

In Canada, trust in government actually has risen dramatically this year. One survey, from the Edelman public relations firm, showed that 70 per cent of Canadians surveyed trust government during the pandemic.

The survey showed that 73 per cent of respondents agreed with government decisions to restrict people’s movements during the pandemic.

Polls often show that only 50 per cent of Canadians trust the institution of government and its decisions.

As recently as last year an Edelman survey showed government ranked last among four institutional categories – the others being business, media, and non-government organizations. The pandemic put government firmly in first place.

“. . . Clearly, our political leaders are doing something right in fighting this pandemic,” said Lisa Kimmel, head of Edelman’s Canadian operations.

No matter what the polls show about trust and the pandemic, I believe most of us would say we Canadians have seen a general decline in trust, much like the Americans have.

Declining trust actually could, and probably is already, allowing the pandemic to spread more.

“Citizens expect democratic governments to be responsive to their health concerns,” says Orkun Saja, co-author of a European bank study that says young adults who endure a pandemic tend to be more distrustful of governments for the rest of their lives.

“And where the public sector response is not sufficient to head off the epidemic, they revise their views in unfavourable ways.”

The really bad news is that the pandemic likely will leave us with many psychological scars, including the declining lack of trust, for a long time to come.

The pandemic and the ensuing recession likely will see us all unwilling to resume previous spending and savings patterns. Experience with one recession makes people very sensitive to the possibility of another.

An overall decline in trust is becoming a serious concern for some people.
One of those is Pete Buttigieg, former mayor of South Bend, Indiana and unsuccessful candidate to become the Democratic presidential hopeful.

Buttigieg has just released a new book titled Trust. America’s Best Chance. Buttigieg is not only a good speaker, he’s a pretty good writer.

He writes that a General Social Survey has revealed that between 1972 and 2012 the percentage of people who say that most people can be trusted fell from 46 per cent to 32 per cent.

That, of course, was even before the Trump era.

He says that this decline in trust is not part of some natural ebb and flow, but a dramatic change over a specific period.

“It amounts to a genuine and historic emergency . . . . And the better we can understand the toxic roots of this crisis, the better chance we have if addressing it.”

I agree with Buttigieg on this because the opposite of trust is distrust, which really is a club we use in self-defence.

We must have high levels of trust to have healthy, functioning societies.

One of the recent studies on the decline of trust has an interesting quote from Mark Schmitt, director of New America’s Political Reform Program: “Poor performance leads to deeper distrust, in turn leaving government in the hands of those with the least respect for it.”

But the best quote on trust comes from Ernest Hemingway: “The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”

Anyone who has been burned in the past is not likely to put full stock in that quote.

As Ronald Reagan, U.S. president and movie star, once said: “Trust but verify.”

And, from Joseph Stalin, the Russian dictator: “I trust no one, not even myself.”

Well he didn’t exactly run a healthy, functioning society. And trust is indispensable for that. 

Read From Shaman’s Rock: www.mindentimes.ca/columns

Trees that say when autumn is done

From Shaman’s Rock

By Jim Poling Sr.

Still six weeks to go before the calendar says that autumn is over. But the calendar doesn’t have to click over to Dec. 21 to tell me that. 

Tamaracks, non-conformists in our northern forests, tell me when fall is done. When their soft green needles turn golden yellow, then light brown, I know that the last, tough resistors to winter have accepted that change is here.

Also known as larch, the tamarack is the toughest tree in the forest, in my humble opinion. Some might vote for the oak, but oaks grow tall and heavy and often lean toward the sun, leaving them susceptible to wind damage.

The tamarack is a trim, small to medium tree growing to a height of 10 to 20 metres, smaller the farther north they appear. It has a slim, conical figure with a narrow trunk. 

The most unusual thing about tamaracks is that they are what you might call biracial. They are both deciduous - broad-leaf trees that shed their leaves annually - and coniferous, commonly called evergreens.

The tamarack is an evergreen, except when it’s not. It is not late in the fall when its needles turn color and fall, leaving the tree dark gray and barren, in sharp contrast to its neighbouring evergreens. 

Some other evergreens do drop their needles, but gradually and not so noticeably. White pine, for instance, shed some needles every two or three years, while spruce do it every three to five years,

Although it is different - an oddball among evergreens - the tamarack lives free of the harassment humans often suffer if they tend to be different. It is not mocked or called ugly names. It is not prohibited from occupying spaces or doing things that other evergreens do.

Tamarack is classified as a softwood, as other evergreens are, but it is probably the hardest, and most useful, of the softwoods. It is strong and long-lasting, yet flexible in thin strips.

The indigenous people were quick to figure that out, using flexible but durable tamarack strips for snowshoe frames. They also used tamarack wood, roots and twigs in building canoes and toboggans.

The Cree used tamarack twigs in making goose decoys, a practice that has become an art form. 

The tree also was an important source of medicine for indigenous people. They used its inner and outer bark to treat everything from wounds, frostbite and hemorrhoids to colds, arthritis and various aches and pains.

They passed all that knowledge along to European settlers who made significant use of the rot-resistant wood. The newcomers used tamarack poles as fence posts, railroad ties and to build corduroy roads.

It also was used tamarack wood in horse stables because it resisted abrasion and kicking damage.

It never was, and still isn’t, a major commercial timber species. It is harvested mainly as pulpwood, which is used to make paper, cardboard and various types of fibreboard. It also is used for poles, posts and general rough lumber.

Tamaracks also are well used by wildlife. Birds love the small seeds found inside the tree’s cones. So do squirrels and mice. Porcupines love the bark.

Tamaracks are not easily distinguishable during the summer. They hang out with black spruce and other evergreens and you have to get close enough to see their narrow trunks and the slender and short needles that grow in soft clusters of 15 to 20.

They are more identifiable, if you look closely, in early spring. Bright new needles appear in blue-green clusters that deepen in colour as summer progresses. The tamaracks also provide other spring beauty when their tiny, egg-shaped cones, retained throughout the winter, appear yellow and reddish or maroon.

But the tamaracks really come into their own in autumn, offering late season elegance when other leaves have fallen or have turned a wrinkled brown. They provide us a last touch of nature’s beauty in a bleakness about to be overcome by winter’s whiteness.

That golden elegance has been fading fast in the last few days. But it’s been wonderful to have as a finale to what has been a pretty fine year for fall colours.

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