Standing Up to the "Outbreak of Hate"

“Stop it!” President-elect Donald Trump, Jr. said directly into the camera, when Sixty Minutes’ Leslie Stahl informed him that some of his supporters were harassing people of color.

Some bullies didn’t get the message.

“An outbreak of hate” is what the Southern Poverty Law Center calls the poisonous wave of post-election racist incidents occurring around the country.  

At Baylor University, Black student Natasha Nkhama was bumped and shoved by a white man while she was on her way to class.   “No  n*****s allowed on the sidewalk!” he exclaimed, and then, “I’m just making America great again!” 

In Florida, a gay man was pulled from his car and beaten.   His attackers said, “Our new president says we can kill all you f*****s now.”

A Muslim business owner in California received an all-caps letter, telling him, “DONALD TRUMP WILL KICK ALL OF YOUR A***S BACK WHERE YOU CAME FROM.”

The Center recorded over 867 such cases in the 10 days following the election, including 23 incidents against Trump supporters.    The full report is available at splcenter.org, along with a second report on the heartbreaking fear and intimidation on the rise in our nation’s schools. 

This toxic spill washed up even at my beloved Washburn University of Topeka, a diverse and intellectually stimulating community where I was privileged to teach for 20 years, retiring in 2010.   Shortly after the election I began hearing from former colleagues and students that current students of color were being subjected to cat-calls as they walked across campus.   “Build the wall” had been chalked on the sidewalk outside the International House.    A student in one of the residence halls heard a chant:  “Kill all Muslims; kill all Blacks.   We wanna take our country back.”   I was able to speak personally with this student.   He told me,  “I am part of the LGBT community.   I suppose we’re next!”   

This is a dark cloud indeed.  If there is a silver lining, it is that anti-bullying forces are energized and mobilizing.   

At Baylor, the President of the University and hundreds of Baylor students of all ethnicities gathered in solidarity with Natasha Nkhama as she walked to class.  Arm in arm with Black and white students, she led a march of multitudes openly standing against racist bullying. 

At Topeka High School, two Hispanic students organized a unity march to the Capitol joined by hundreds of their fellow students, as well as numerous faculty and administrators.

At Washburn, faculty and staff published a joint letter re-committing the University to inclusion.   “We will not abide acts of bigotry, intimidation, or violence in our community,” it said.   Meanwhile, a Washburn rap song previously recorded by a multiethnic group of students, expressing unity and struggle, resurfaced and went viral.  The You Tube version of the song is entitled “What Is an Ichabod? Purificatus non Consumptus.”    The racism-repudiating song outmatches hate with powerful creativity. 

That same creativity is popping up all over the country, sometimes in the form of home-made signs.  One of my favorites is the red-white-and-blue sign held up by 53-year-old Justin Normand of Dallas, outside a mosque in Irving, Texas.   His sign said,

“You belong.   Stay strong.  Be Blessed.  We Are One America.”  His sign went viral, proving that one individual can make a difference. 

Another appeared in Denver, Colorado, where a Jewish youth group held a rally against racist bullying.   I had to chuckle at one of their signs, which said simply, “Oy Vey--No KKK!”

However, here in Kansas some officials shy away from taking a stand.  They mistake hate incidents and the reaction to them as just more Trump vs. Clinton controversy.  They forbid the wearing of safety pins, as if a symbol of safety for all were a partisan expression, belonging to just one side.   They act as if even noticing the bullying, let alone speaking out against it, would anger Trump supporters.    

If I were a Trump supporter, I would be infuriated by that response.  Decency is not a political “side,” and no one persuasion has a monopoly on it.    

Officials’ timidity rests on a false syllogism. 

Yes, many perpetrators appear to have been inspired by Trump’s rhetoric.  But even if it were proven that a majority of these bullies are Trump supporters, it would not follow—at all—that a majority of Trump supporters are bullies!!    The bullies are few in number and only loom large when the rest of us—Republican, Democrat, independent--are silent.  The perpetrators are in the hundreds—thousands at most—but we citizens are in the millions.   Bullies can only prevail if we look the other way.

The country may be divided in many ways, but we make a terrible mistake if we assume it is  divided on bullying. 

A dear friend, a Republican voter with whom I have had many a heated political discussion over the years, immediately spoke out publicly when he read in CJ-Online about the hate incidents at Washburn.  He said:

This type of heinous behavior is unacceptable!   It's not enough to just report about the individuals who are doing this. They must be confronted….If we look the other way and do nothing, we are sending the wrong message to these hateful individuals.

He and I don’t agree about politics.  But we agree about harassment.

President-elect Trump’s appointments, particularly of Jeff Sessions and Steve Bannon, may raise doubts about whether Trump really wants racist bullying to "stop"—or whether he wants to elevate it to the highest levels.  

But it’s not up to him to determine what kind of country we are going to have. 

It’s up to us! 

There is a core of decency in the majority of us, no matter how we voted.  We must never lose faith in each other.  We must publicly expand that core, into our bedrock, our common ground.  

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This essay appeared first in the Junction City Daily Union on Dec. 7, 2016, A4.

Exuberant August, 2016: Can Plants Share Emotions with Human Beings?

August 2016:
Big Bluestem bloomed prolifically
in the Creek Field. 

With humble gratitude, I think back on the month just past, the month I shall always remember as “exuberant August.”

Has there ever been an August with so much precipitation spread out so evenly into so many gentle, light warm rains?

The result in our Creek Field was Jack-and-the-beanstalk-type growth.  

The clumps of Eastern Gamagrass were ten feet wide; the Switch Grass was ten feet tall.   The Whole-leaf Rosinweeds and Sawtooth Sunflowers were even taller.   Their bright yellow flowers said good-bye to earth and reached for the sky.   

The plants had so much energy it spilled over to me.  Every time I was near them I felt exhilarated!  

Exuberance--it was an emotion inextricable from either the plants or me.  We shared it!

But plants don’t have a nervous system.  Surely they didn’t really share an emotion with me?

Let me go into some background information and then return to that question.

Since 2013, we have been working to restore a native plant community to our Creek Field, 30 acres of  bottomground along McDowell Creek.  

Cup Plant (Silphium perfoliatum)
volunteered near the creek.

Some bottomland prairie species, such as Bee Balm and Spiderwort, also grow in the uplands.   But others absolutely require a low, moist site.   These are the ones made scarce in the Flint Hills by the almost universal plowing of bottomground once the settlers arrived in the 19^thcentury.    Several of those species bloomed in our Creek Field this August.   One of them—the hauntingly beautiful Blue Vervain—had been in our seed mix.   Another was a volunteer--Cup Plant--so named for the vessel formed where its leaves merge at the stem.   This August, all of its “cups” held water!  

Moisture-loving plants such as American Germander doubled and tripled the size of their patches, while early blooming species, like Canada Milkvetch and Echinacea, set seed in July but bloomed again in August.

This profusion of plant life spilled over into an abundance of animals.   

The Creek Field filled up with hummingbirds, quail, goldfinches, Indigo Buntings, and Dickcissels.   At dusk, hummingbirds were replaced by hummingbird moths, while overhead, dragonflies, barn swallows, and nighthawks filled the air.    

Euphoria sepulcralis, Dark Flower Scarab
on a Tall Thistle
in the Creek Field.  August 2016.

Some of the insects I found on August flowers were old friends, such as the drunken Euphoria Beetle, always at his pollen-bottle, deep in a thistle-flower; or the just-emerged Monarch butterflies, not a tatter in their wings, drinking deeply of August nectar.   

A Geometrid Emerald Moth,
(Family Geometrinae)
on a Tall Thistle leaf,
Creek Field, August 2016.
Thanks to Eva Zurek & bugguide.net
for the identification!

Others were new to me, such as the gorgeous moths I slowly came to know only through the help of cameras, computers, generous entomologists, and bugguide.net.   

Bush Cicada (Tibicen dorsata)
Creek Field, August 2016

As night fell, coyotes and Barred Owls would begin to call but could scarcely be heard through the almost impenetrable wall of sound put up by katydids’ trills and cicadas’ screams.  Raucous August!

All of this made me feel exhilarated--but not as if the feeling came from within.   It felt as if the emotion were already in the field, and I simply went into it.  As I walked into the field, I walked into the feeling.

I know that sounds New Agey.  How can the human emotion of exuberance arise from a non-human assemblage of life?

But I don’t want to deny the experience just because it sounds wifty, or raises a question for which I have no lock-down, end-of-discussion answer.

What happens if we frame the question within a context of existing knowledge?

Let’s take it step by step:  An exuberant person is a high-spirited person.   But the root of the word has to do with external reality, not with internal feelings.  The Latin root “uber” means fertility, abundance, growth.  Add the prefix “ex,” and it means lavish fertility, super-abundance, phenomenal growth—like our Creek Field this past August. 

 It makes sense that the ancient meaning eventually gave birth to the modern:  Lavish fertility of the land meant humans would survive and thrive—a spirit-lifter, if ever there was one.     Exuberant land meant exuberant people.

So the Creek Field imparted its exuberance to me through ancient associations that became hard-wired in the human brain?

Perhaps.  But could there be additional explanations?

Plants communicate with their environment through the production and release of chemicals.    As Michael Pollan writes, “Plants speak in a chemical vocabulary.”   Wildflowers swaying in the wind are not just a lovely spectacle; they are also emitters of what Pollan calls  “chemical chatter.” 

We don’t have ears to hear this chatter.  

But maybe we aren’t as deaf as all that.  

Among the chemicals plants produce are two that function in mammals as neurotransmitters and mood-regulators—serotonin and dopamine. 

Could we be more attuned to plants’ messenger molecules than we realize?  Do we have capacities we have yet to develop?

Botantist Robin Wall Kimmerer thinks so.   “Listening in wild places, we are audience to a conversation in a language not out own,” she writes.  She believes we humans were once fluent in that language and that we can become fluent once again.

In her book  Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, Kimmerer explores human-plant relationships by comparing the experimental method of Western science with the nature-learning of her Potawatomi culture.   In addition to mutual confirmations, the comparison reveals differences.    Western science asks about a plant,  “What are its parts?  How does it work?”    Indigenous wisdom, based in a tradition of sacred reciprocity, converses with a plant, asking, “What can you teach us?”

When Kimmerer started college, she found that the science curriculum would never address her most basic question, the one that led her to biology in the first place:   “I wanted to know why we love the world, why the most ordinary scrap of meadow can rock us back on our heels in awe.”

That’s not too different from my question:  What is this exuberance that is both out there in the  Creek Field and in here, in my head and heart? 

Scientists, some of whom are at this moment setting up experiments to test entomologist E. O. Wilson’s “biophilia hypothesis” (which posits humans’ innate affinity for non-human life), will certainly help with the answer.

But all of us can help:  When among plants, we can ask freely and listen deeply.       

We can pay attention, with open hearts.

A modified version of this essay was published in the Junction City Daily Unionon September 16, 2016.  

If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home Now!

“I used to hunt pheasant and quail.   Now I hunt invasive plants,” our neighbor said to me over the fence that divides our properties.  “I keep an eye out for them everywhere.  It’s sort of an obsession.”

Like my husband and me, our neighbor makes it a priority to preserve and restore tall grass prairie, though he manages thousands of acres, while we manage only hundreds.

 “I know exactly what you mean,” I answered.  “I’ve been spending every day this spring pulling crown vetch out of our creek buffer, making sure it doesn’t get started in the prairie restoration in our Creek Field.    And the odd thing is, I enjoy it—can’t wait to get to it.    I rush through my chores in the morning so I can get back to the crown vetch.  ‘Obsession’ is a good word for it!”

Both of us shook our heads, a bit mystified.  

“Obsession” is a word from the lexicon of abnormal psychology, implying something “wrong” about our concern. 

“Well,” I went on, a bit defensively.  “Isn’t it insane for our society to blithely push other species of plants and animals into oblivion?  We’re losing between 49 and 383 species a day.   If that’s the norm, I’ll take abnormal! “

My neighbor smiled.  “We’re fighting crazy with crazy!” he concluded.

Crazy might be part of it. 

In this age of extinctions, invasive species are often the executioner’s axe. 

Here in the Flint Hills, introduced non-native weeds such as crown vetch, musk thistle, sericea lespedeza, and the Old World bluestems have the capacity to out-compete native plants.  If uncontrolled, they can replace the polyculture of the prairie with monocultures of themselves.

Often deliberately introduced by “experts,” invasive species are one of many ways techno-industrial society is destroying the very biodiversity we humans, too, need to survive.

Who’s to say that the suicidal insanity of a society cannot produce within the psyches of certain individuals an equal and opposite reaction?   Who’s to say it doesn’t take monomania to fight monocultures?

But as I thought about it later, I realized that there was more to the lure of the vetch-patch than a simple psychological recoil.

The fact is, my muscles exult while digging crown vetch, and my spirit sings! 

An excerpt from my April diary:

I crawl on hands and knees into a plum thicket, freeing my clothes where they catch on the thorns, squirming awkwardly toward the tell-tale circle of green where new vetch leaves are springing up.  The aroma of just-blooming plums fills the air.  I settle into the most comfortable position I can find on the ground next to the bright green invaders.  With my trowel I dig down under the leaves, reach in with my hand and feel for the rhizomes and roots.  Sometimes one pull brings up several of the plant’s ropy arms, which in turn lead to others, each with their own sprouts, so that dragging out the network can clear a large area, all at once.   Other times, the leaves spring up from the hard knot of a woody swelling at the surface of the soil.  This is the ”caudex,” an enlargement of the stem from which new shoots radiate outward, like the head of a mop.   “Crown” supposedly refers to the shape of the blossom, but I think of this woody knot as the crown of crown vetch, the center of power.   Sometimes the caudex is difficult to dislodge, and then I snip off the top part and apply a drop of stump killer, one that leaves no after-action in the soil.   

The delicate aroma of plums rises and falls with the sweet spring breeze.   Behind me, several hawks and a pair of coyotes are hunting in the just-burned Creek Field.  Very close, audible but not visible, are song sparrows, Harris sparrows, a kingfisher, a great blue heron, Carolina wrens, and barred owls.  Huge billowy clouds float overhead. 

I am buoyed up by this beauty but I do not focus on it.   I do not need to.   It is ubiquitous and abundant, the context itself for the trance I am in, the tunnel vision (literally) with which I concentrate on my belowground work.  

I dig and pull until it is too dark to see and my arthritic hands can no longer hold the trowel.   Sticking to my task is my offering to the loveliness of the twilight and the just-emerging stars.     Beauty is the altar on which I lay the offering of my rash-covered arms, my scratched face, the bruises on my arms and legs.

The techno-industrial society that destroys biodiversity reduces the richness of our physical lives as well.   Too many of us are sedentary, awash in blue light, and addicted to the “Likes” in our cyber-life.    

Meanwhile, we’ve been told that “wilderness” is out there somewhere, protected in national parks.   We are to take only photos, leave only footprints.   This view that humans, in order not to mar nature, must barely touch it had its role in the setting aside of our great national parks. 

But as a guide for how we humans should live on this earth it is harmful and delusionary.

Wherever we live, we are citizens of a land community—air, soil, water, flora, fauna—whether we know it or not.    By driving a car, turning on a computer, eating corn flakes we interact powerfully with nature.   We are complicit in the very society that is creating mass extinctions, whether we want to be or not.   But we are not helpless pawns.   We can also push back the other way.  We can plant polycultures of native plants—in our yards, schools, roadsides, and parks.  We can use our technical knowledge and political power to preserve and restore the ecosystems where we live. 

Our muscles know the land community is home, and deep inside, our spirits know it, too. 

One day the norms of our society will return home, too.    Then some of us won’t seem so crazy!

(This essay was first published in the Junction City Daily Union on July 2, 2016.)

We Are Molecules on the Move!

WE ARE MOLECULES ON THE MOVE!

  --Margy Stewart

I have often heard people say that they don’t want to learn more about birds or wildflowers because they “just want to enjoy nature.”    They say that counting wing bars or petals or learning species’ names will rob Nature of her magic.    

It’s as if they fear that Nature is a humbug, like the Wizard of Oz: If they look too closely, the illusion of grandeur will disappear.  There will be only a little man behind a curtain, with no magic powers.

But the more I learn about my many-footed, winged, and rooted neighbors, the more mysterious my world becomes.     The more I know, the more I wonder—not just about the natural world but about myself as a human being and my place on earth.

Two incidents from this past summer in particular come to mind:

It is mid-July.  I watch a wheel bug stalk a cucumber beetle on the blossom of a compass plant.   I marvel that the beetle doesn’t fly or crawl away.     The wheel bug gets closer and closer, then grabs its prey with its muscular front legs.   The beetle is already dead or in a death-like state, for there is not a wave of antenna or twitch of leg.    The wheel bug begins to feed, his proboscis piercing the beetle’s thorax just behind the head.   

The back of my neck tingles.    The sun sets while the wheel bug pulls nourishment into his own body from the beetle’s innards.    The meal goes on and on.    Night falls.    I take a picture of the wheel bug and beetle locked together.   It is dark, so I have to use the flash.    The photo shows dots of light reflected in the beetle’s eyes. 

I can’t help but identify with both prey and predator.

The beetle’s death is one of trillions taking place on this patch of prairie in this stretch of time.   Death is one of the elements here, like earth or air.   There is nothing more common.   Nothing to see here!     But when I contemplate my own mortality, my death seems remarkable, extraordinary, in fact, impossible! 

How can I wrap my mind around the end of my mind?     

Predation is a mind-bender, too.   No matter how kind we try to be, we humans have to kill to live.    We are herbivores, carnivores, omnivores.    I can feel gratitude for my meals, but I can’t feel guiltless toward the plants and animals whose lives I’ve shortened or distorted so that my life could be longer or more full. 

But watching the wheel bug feed on the beetle my perspective changes.    It’s as if everything is in motion.  I no longer think of links in the food chain as separate entities.  Plant, plant-feeder, meat-eater appear as swirls in flowing currents of energy.   I imagine channels all lit up and buzzing, shimmering with change.  

Is individuality even real? 

Wheel bug does not exist without Beetle, nor Beetle without Flower.  We humans do not exist without oxygen or water or food-plants or food-animals. 

We are relationships more than we are separate individuals.

But just because individuality is not self-standing, it doesn’t mean that individuality is non-existent.

We are all biological individuals, like bumps on a road, no two alike.   

The bumps do exist.  But so does the road.

We are particle and wave. 

That dynamism, that shape-changing at the heart of Life—I like to think about it.   It helps to reconcile me to my mortality and my omnivory.  

I too am molecules on the move!

The second incident:  It is the end of August.   My husband shows me that swamp milkweed is blooming in one of our wetlands!  I am thrilled, as this is a first for this species on our property.   Swamp milkweed is a beautiful native plant with gorgeous deep-pink flowers and a great source of nectar for late-season butterflies.

While watching the monarchs flutter from plant to plant, I notice how many other insects make use of this milkweed, too.   One of them is a large iridescent beetle whose front end I never see because its head is always buried in a blossom, slurping up pollen.      

It is clearly a flower beetle, but of what species? 

Euphoria sepulcralis on Asclepias incarnata

With help from my naturalist friends and confirmation from bugguide.net, I learn that my beetle is Dark Flower Beetle, aka Euphoria sepulcralis.   It is one of the scarab beetles, which puts it instantly in the realm of lore and myth.   Poe’s “Gold Bug” was a scarab, the sign of a lost treasure, but also a death’s- head, the mark of death.   In addition, the sacred beetle of the ancient Egyptians was a scarab, in fact, a dung-beetle.   

Remarkable:  The beetle eats dung and yet incarnates the divine!

But it should not surprise us too much.   Vultures eat carrion and they are sacred in many cultures. 

Somehow, in the spiritual vision of many peoples, lowly, repulsive waste appears simultaneously as holy, creative power! 

Similarly, the very names of my beetle fuse opposites together:     “Dark” with “Flower,”  “Euphoria (wild joy)” with “sepulcralis” (of the sepulchre or tomb).

The bloom of darkness, the wild joy of death--these are paradoxes.  And just as it did for the ancient Egyptians, paradox characterizes the mystical, logic-transcending visions of all religions—dead but alive, poor but rich, buried but risen, last but first—opposites that can’t both be true but that in a higher reality are both true.  

Paradox is mystery.

Thus have human cultures in all places and all times reached for what is beyond comprehension.

Therefore, as I get to know my humble beetle, I am reminded that knowledge always points beyond itself—and that euphoria is somehow involved.

That’s what encounters with the natural world are for me:   Knowledge growing, mystery deepening—my own wild joy!

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This essay first appeared in the Junction City, Ks. Daily Union,  Sat., Jan. 9, 2016, 2C.

 http://www.prairieheritage.org/we_are_molecules_on_the_move.cfm