A Thank You Letter to Ukiah

                                                                                   written 8 September, 2024

                                                                             published 15 September, 2024

  

            I have moved a great deal in my life, but have lived in the City of Ukiah longer than anywhere else.  As a resident, I thank every City employee, including the City Council, department heads, administrative staff, and all the workers with boots on the ground.  "We The People" own and operate the essential systems of life, which provide water, sewage treatment, electricity, and roads.  

            Ukiah is blessed with a natural underground lake as a result of our geographic location.  Our water system draws from this source, storing, treating and delivering potable water throughout the City, with enough extra to offer to other communities in the county, as needed.  Constant repairs and upgrades ensure reliable delivery, and long-term planning keeps the system expanding ahead of needs. 

            Our sewage system has multi-level, state of the art treatment, and now, with the grant funded purple pipe project, recycles more than 3/4 of that water for City parks and local agricultural, among the first in the state, maximizing the use of this precious, finite resource.  

            The electrical department, publicly owned for over a century, consistently delivers reliable power, at half the cost anywhere else in the region.  System improvements are ongoing, steadily increasing operational reliability.

            Our city roads are being upgraded with grant funding, replacing essential aging infrastructure, and turning a former business highway into a lovely community thoroughfare.  Despite being disruptive in the short term, which have been managed to a minimum, it satisfies goals that will pay off for decades.

            The planning department has allowed Ukiah to be one of a handful of communities in the state who exceed mandated housing goals, preserving planning rights lost to all the other cities.  

            The City Council unanimously passed a Climate Emergency Resolution, recognizing the growing climate crisis.  A Climate Resiliency Officer has been hired to coordinate actions by all the City departments to work efficiently toward preserving a habitable planet.  This function is rare for a city the size of Ukiah.  However, we are a viable test bed, with all the issues facing larger communities, but on a more personal scale, making changes more possible.  What we accomplish here will be a model applicable everywhere.

            All this has been done with limited staff and budget, leveraging state and federal grant opportunities.  You have collectively created a living example of a functional socialist community, where the benefits of the system accrue to everyone.  With public ownership of water, sewage treatment, electricity, and roads, prices reflect the actual cost of operations and staffing, with the "profit" returned to every citizen as reliable, high quality service.  

            It is important to notice, and honor, the good work that is already happening.  People appreciate being appreciated.  Therefore, I want to acknowledge, and express my deepest thanks.  

Deficits

                                                                                   written 1 September, 2024

                                                                               published 8 September, 2024

 

            When the "outgoing" is greater than the "incoming", a deficit arises.  In political discussion, this usually refers to the US fiscal deficit, which has risen from $5.7T in 2000, to $35.3T today.  Bush the younger spent $4.3T on the "war on terror" in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Obama spent $9.6T bailing out the economy after banks crashed housing.  Trump spent $8.1T on tax cuts for the wealthy.  Biden spent $7.6T keeping the economy out of depression during the COVID pandemic.  Republicans spent on wars and billionaires, and Democrats spent on keeping the economy alive, both parties showing their core concerns.

            The deficit is large and growing, with real economic consequences, but it is really only a fiction.  Money is a concept, of value only by virtue of collective social agreement.  As a concept, money can be conjured into existence.  When money is deposited into a bank, the bank can then loan out 10 times as much, created on nothing more than "trust".  These days, most money has no physical existence, living only as electronic data.  The 8 percent that is "hard" currency has little physical value of its own.  

            While the fiscal deficit draws most attention, especially during campaign years, other deficits have greater real-life impact, and unlike money, solutions can't be created out of nothing.

            The US loses topsoil 5 times faster than it is being created, for a net deficit of 58B tons over the last 160 years.  Healthy topsoil has 200B organisms per cubic foot, essential for plant nutrition and water retention.  As this living system degrades, and the soil erodes, growing food becomes more difficult and expensive, and what is grown has declining nutritional value.  Yet commercial farming focuses on making money to service their debts, which takes priority over restoring topsoil.

            Another deficit is ground water, which provides drinking water for half the US population, and 50B gallons a day for agriculture.  Ground water aquafer recharge rates vary, some as slow as thousands of years.  As population and agriculture production increases, using bigger pumps on deeper wells, larger ground water deficits occur, and land subsides as much as 5 inches per year in some areas.  The changing climate has affected rainfall patterns, bringing flooding and droughts, making ground water extraction more critical and precarious.

            All physical systems begin to deteriorate as soon as they are constructed, demanding periodic servicing to identify problems and make needed repairs.  This is an ongoing expense, which is often deferred due to budget limitations, or desires to appear more "profitable", creating a physical deficit that grows with time.  The long-term consequences can be disastrous and expensive. 

            The US has over 90,000 dams, with an average age of 60 years.  Engineering and seismic designs have progressed enormously in that time period, so what seemed "good design" at the time is now more questionable.  Add in the consequence of "deferred maintenance", and over 2,000 are in poor condition, endangering life if they fail, requiring over $80B to repair.  As rainfall becomes more extreme, the stress on these dams increases.

            The US has over 600,000 bridges, with 40 percent over 50 years old.  Due to age and neglect, 46,000 are structurally deficient and in "poor" condition, yet they carry almost 180 million vehicles a day.  Mitigation will cost over $100B, and the current rate of repair is half what is required, resulting in increasing risk over time.

            This is just a partial list of real-world deficits that affect our social wellbeing.  These problems stem from the growing focus on maximizing "profit" over every other concern.  For instance, stock buybacks are on the rise, which benefit the shareholders, but reduces the capacity of the industry to maintain their infrastructure or modernize their operations.  As wealth accrues disproportionally to the very wealthy, who then use their political clout to reduce their taxes, cities and states are under increased budget pressures to defer essential planning and maintenance.

             The common factor is lack of whole systems planning and the belief in exclusive gain.  Making money by ignoring the consequences, and getting "someone else" to pay the cleanup cost, is considered "good business".  Our culture honors those who accumulate more than everyone else, but complains when things fall apart, which happens because the world is totally connected.  This is a deep societal dysfunction, with thousands of years of history.  Change may seem slow, but it is inevitable, because the alternative is collapse.

The Unity Challenge

                                                                                       written 25 August, 2024

                                                                                published 1 September, 2024

  

            The text of "Course In Miracles" speaks from the perspective that the root of all human dysfunction is the belief in separation, because it is in conflict with a world that is fundamentally unified and whole.  Aldous Huxley found that every spiritual tradition on the planet has some form of the Golden Rule, consistent with unity reality.  In addition, quantum mechanics supports unified material reality, and the resulting transformative technologies validates that.

            Unity is a challenge because it presumes reality without limits, where everything is included, the definition of infinity.  Unity transcends physical manifestation, in the same way national borders are experienced as irrelevant when Earth is viewed from the moon.  

            But like all concepts, living the experience of unity is the important part, where the real work lies.  For thousands of years, our cultures and economies have focused on material differentiation, with attendant chronic suffering, overlooking the foundation that binds reality and gives it purpose.  So, we have lifetimes of patterning to overcome.  

            It is important to differentiate between spirituality, which is any internal investigation of a transcendent reality, and religion, which is an organization, usually defining a specific structure for the transcendent.  Throughout history, religions, which can be of help with spirituality, have repeatedly been co-opted, succumbing to the egos of men who strive for economic power and social domination for their organization.  They insinuate themselves between the individual and unity, limiting and defining what a transcendent reality is, rather than helping expand each person's experience.

            By drawing dogmatic lines, defining what is "acceptable" and "unacceptable".  some parts of reality are excluded, and the whole idea of unity is denied, the root of all evil.  The excised parts then become the objects of hate, or fear, furthering the nature of the divide, giving self-righteous justification for misogyny, racism, nationalism, and classism.  

            The worst offenders are those most caught up in orthodoxy and fundamentalism.  They worship a little god.  These are the people who hate deviation from their organizationally approved dogma, and will kill in the name of their deity to insure religious "purity".  

            However, every spiritual tradition has mystics, who understand all words are concepts, which can only be metaphors at best, and that any concept is incomplete.  Mystics are open to learning from all traditions, and most especially from the living of life.  

            At the individual level, when the line is drawn at the self or the body, everyone and everything "outside" is something to fear as a "predator", or something to dominate as "prey".  Internal self-worth is then determined by external forms like clothes, cultural beauty standards, and material possessions, leading to life-long acquisition of things.  But things never really fulfill for long, because the yearning is for the internal experience of the connected unity, which nothing "external" can ever satisfy.

            Embracing inclusive reality demands complete social and economic reconsideration.  For example, every meal I eat, something has to die that I might live.  In unity, we are connected, so I need to have gratitude for their contribution to my life, and assure that their lives have dignity and respect, as I expect that for myself.  In a unity awareness, every person involved in growing, processing, preparing, and delivering the food must thrive if any of us thrive.  Since all life depends on the health of the planet we share, respect for the entire planet is essential for the survival of any of us.  

            The root of suffering is being at war with a fact.  The contrast between a unity awareness and our existing society is profound, which explains why suffering is endemic.  Our economy has extreme wealth disparity, where a few people have billions, while millions lack essentials to survival, such as clean water, nutritious food, adequate shelter, and access to health care.  Our society is extremely polarized, with each side convinced the other is an "existential threat" to our way of life, and some are willing to resort to violence to assert their perspective.  Yet unity requires understanding that all these folks are connected, demanding a response different from fear or attack.

            This election, we are faced with two clear alternatives.  The GOP preaches fear, division, and retribution, the traditional consequences of the illusion of separation.  The Democrats preach working together for the benefit of all.  Without a doubt, there is plenty to complain about with the Democrats, but they are moving toward a unity reality.