Time to Stop Ordering, Buying and Eating Tuna

There comes a time, and that time is past due now, when we, people of the united countries of the earth HAVE to see the big picture and recognize that INDUSTRIAL forms of FISHING have the capacity to and ARE indeed depleting species of sea life.

Blue Fin Tuna are in threat of extinction. Reports say 2012 - is that three years from now - one of the most popular fishes for sushi and seafood - is liable to be depleted from the oceans.

Would you care to? Would you be willing to? Can you agree to stop eating tuna? To stop eating sushi made from fish that are over-fished.

Can our appetites be kept at bay long enough to allow for a rebuilding of Tuna populations?

It's time for us to stop ordering Tuna sandwiches, stop buying cans of Tuna, start writing the tuna producers and distributers and ask that they help rebuild the tuna population.

It's time.

Watch this BBC video and see other videos related to that.

Homeowners' Association Bylaws

One of the consequences of a down economy is that people return to thinking about self-sufficiency. Can I grow my own vegetables, or more of them? Can I store more water? Could I have chickens for eggs? What about putting up solar power panels on the roof?

Reading the bylaws of the homeowners association of the new development I live in, I saw that vegetable gardens are disallowed, chickens are not legal, and it is not OK to have solar power panels on the roof?

Americans are so interested in appearances, that in this time of very serious economic downturns and unbelievable loss of jobs, we are tied by rules made to make our neighborhoods prettier than functional.

It's a stark reminder that no matter how developed we are, we're never out of risk of needing to survive on more of our own resources. And perhaps we should never give up some core self-sustaining practices for the safety and well-being of all of us.

so how bad will it get, and how can we help

A large development across the street from where I live has left half a dozen houses unfinished and two condominium buildings incomplete, one with plastic flapping in the wind and water soaked wood. Two thirds of the area is un-built, abandoned, like a no man's land. It is a stark reminder that even though Target is filled with shoppers, and Carrabas filled its parking lot on Friday night in Apex, all is not well; these are not normal times.

Where there's not enough money to pay the bills, what do you do? When the only work you can get is minimum wage, and that doesn't cover the rent and electricity and car payment and gas and food and clothes, what do you do?

If you're single it's one thing, but if you have kids, or are taking care of someone who is not fully able to take care of themselves, it's a desperate situation.

I go through it in my mind. What if we were the IBM workers who were laid off last week? What if both of us lost our jobs and couldn't find new ones, except maybe for minimum wage, which in no way would cover income of $100,000 a year from two white collar jobs? What would we you do with all our possessions? Do we give them to friends to hold? Do we put them in storage and hope we'll have enough income to pay for that every month? Do we have family we can go live with? Maybe friends we could stay with, or maybe not.

It's almost like a war, or being a refugee, losing work, then a home, then possessions, then maybe transporation, a safe neighborhood... And it dawns on me how many people don't earn enough money, can't afford to live in a safe neighborhood, don't own a car. There are many many people in America who aren't getting by.

In my as of yet privileged world, we still have our house and cars and food. But how many months without a job are we from losing the house?Is it one, three, five, eight, ten? That may not be enough time even to get a job paying anywhere near what supported the house and cars.

People are helping each other out. At least some. I hear of little stories of good deeds. Doing work for free. Paying a bill for someone. Bringing extra groceries. Letting someone stay in their house.

I have heard that people are living in tent cities in several places in the US. I know the shelters in the Triangle area are regularly filled up - no extra room.

I'm perplexed that some people don't care that living people, human beings, in our own town, our own state, our own country (our own world?), don't have shelter, don't have enough food, don't have basic medical care. I've heard otherwise very intelligent, sensitive people say, that's not their problem, they wash their hands.

But it does come around to be their problem. It comes around with drug and substance abuse addiction often to medicate the pain and the shame. It hits random families when an impaired driver crashes into their car and takes lives. It hits our safety because people are driven to steal and fight for money to get the next high - the addiction of some of these substances is like a demon, possessing people.

The suffering of others is our problem, because none of us know when it could be us who is left without a home, without family, without a place to stay, without enough money to eat, without viable transportation, without work. If you've never been down and out, you may think you're immune from getting down and out, but it does happen.

People say how will we pay for it? People will take advantage of the support. As President Clinton said in a recent address at NC State, we need people who can solve the HOW. We need people who can turn their good intentions into live solutions that resolve problems, make people's lives better, help support life. He did say more than ever people are stepping up with new solutions, but he challenged us all to ask ourselves, what is the solution that we can bring into this world.

Tonight as I'm tired and reviewing my week, have I done enough? I haven't earned my keep - made only $100 this week, but I did cook and some cleaning. I volunteered on a crisis line for people facing family violence. I donated shoes from a friend to a thrift store. I offered support to a friend who had a really rough day. I did unpaid resesarch for a team of people I am collaborating with. I spent 8 hours with a friend helping get their story out in print. I donated a free therapeutic massage. I spent 90 minutes on the phone with a new friend brainstorming about possible marketing ideas. I called someone I met on inSide828 and discussed their job search and new business ideas. I emailed relevant material I found on the internet to a group of people who are exploring online businesses. I worked ten hours on another manuscript for someone else. I reviewed two chapters for yet another writer. And I ended my week with another golo post. Is there more I could do? Better, different, wiser? For this week, this is how it was.

Here's to your week, to staying encouraged, to lending a hand to someone who's down on their luck, to enjoying the rebirth of Spring yet again.

lobsters, crabs, shrimp: crustaceans feel pain

Years ago when cooking Chinese food I was asked to prepare lobsters. Told to boil water, skewer the lobster and then drop it in.

All of that was repulsive to me. I tried to do it, under instructions, and was so freaked out about it I left the poor live lobster on the counter and left the room.

The Chinese custom is to buy fish live when you can as it is fresher. But dropping a living creature into boiling water is hideous, even if hundreds of thousands if not millions of people do it with crabs, shrimp and other sea food. Anyone who has done it should know that they try to get out.

For more information, read this story that just showed up on Yahoo: Boiling Mad: Crabs Feel Pain.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20090327/sc_livescience/boilingmadcrabsfeelpain

As you can tell, the suffering of living creatures and human beings concerns me. I've been waiting for news of this, even if it seems one hardly has to inject acid into living creatures to determine if they feel pain.

Strange Times

It's a strange time for our civilization. The glory of modern convenience, dependent upon electricity and gas. A roaring period when property values soared funding all kinds of purchases. US shipped jobs overseas, to give greater profits to executives and keep stock prices strong.

The fraud that's being exposed, similar to that in the 80s when mergers and acquisitions gave huge wealth to the buyers and left employees without pensions and jobs.

America's elected a man who dares to stand up and speak about fairness, about what is right, about giving people a fighting chance.

Every week the news gets worse. The total number of people without jobs increases thousands at a time. How bad can it get? How bad will it get? What level of conservation do we need to practice? 

More questions than answers these days. Many more questions.

Granmother Mary Wore a Bed Jacket

Granmere was my step grandmother. She wrote my grandfather after her classmate, Susan had died, and they became friends, and then more, and he invited her to be his wife and come be the head of his household in beautiful victorian Cambridge Massachusetts.

At night she wore a pink bed jacket, which she had trimmed with lace on the outside, nice buttons, and with ribbon at the waist, so it would last longer with the washings.

Between her room and my grandfather's room there was a secret closet, with a door between which they could travel with no one knowing.

Every room in the house had a fireplace. This was a beautiful home with a grand wood staircase and three floors and a basement.

Everything would unravel after my father died, leaving his four children the trunks of his father, and those who came before. A thick 6 inch wide leather bible. Army clothes and badges and patches. Swords and citations. Pictures known and unknown. All this history, come down, with us having no time to look at it.

Grandmere had perfumes in her closet that had a mirror above drawers. She had the perfumes displayed. She had a silver trimmed comb and a silver backed mirror, and a big beautiful diamond ring.

Grandmere would change into her bed clothes in the evening after she put away the dinner's dishes. I could go in to watch Loveboat with her. She would dose. Then I would kiss her goodnight and turn off the light.

I got to stay in my grandfather's room, in his bed for 8 months in 1976, when I was 18.

Grandmere wore a pink bed jacket at night while she sat up in bed and darned clothes, fixed a button, read or watched her tiny TV.

I would pull the oh so small wooden rocking chair with the odd lime green pillow she had made for it, over to her bedside to watch with her.

Granmere is the only person I ever knew to wear a bed jacket; a pretty pink bed jacket which she had made just as she liked.

She died sometime in the 1990s. She wanted nothing to do with her family. She wanted to be gone. And so with my last call to her she said, do not call anymore. And she had a way of being stern. My father's older brother's ex-wife, the first daughter in law in the family, was a nurse and came down from New Hampshire to help care for her. I, once so close, was far away in Maryland, having left Massachusetts in 1994, when my divorce was final, and when I learned my father would be nearby in Maryland for six months before leaving again.

Those six months would be the last six months of my father's life, and I was there for that. In being close to my father, I was no longer near my grandmere.

Tonight, 15 years later, in 2008, yet farther away from Massachsetts, in North Carolina, I felt chilly and wanted to put on a bed jacket, which I don't have, and I remembered her, my granmere, how she wore one every night over her nightgown.

Planet in Peril

I wonder why I feel anxious, not at ease. And part of it is the economy, there is such a huge shift in the works, that it is very hard for many people.

But also, because we're seeing how much our human appetites are putting the balance of the earth in peril.

Wild salmon are at risk of extinction - yet we want their meat because it is healthier than farmed salmon. But only the farmed salmon is sustainable, if also polluting and a terrible life for fish. (I know, where do we draw the line... we have to live.)

Tonight on Planet in Peril, they show the tremendous volume of sharks fin collected at sea for the Chinese markets. At one time it was the food of the emperors. Now there are billions of people who would be happy to eat it.

These shows open up our understanding of world trends and dynamics. And every risk that is occurring has some economic reason driving it. Diamonds. Oil. Sharks fins. Whales. Pearls. Chilean Sea Bass. Gasoline. Coal. New products. Ivory. Bears' body fluid.

With awareness, every thing we do has consequences. The food we eat. The things we buy. The activities we take part in. The gas we use in our car. The electricity in our homes. The web of interconnectivity is beyond nameable.

We had bought a new house because the extra price gave us everything new, so it wouldn't cost us a lot in repairs. But now that the temperature is cold outside, the heating is on all the time. And so I get that whatever insulation we have, it isn't enough to keep heat in in the winter. We didn't buy an energy rated house, though we would have liked to, but it wasn't offered for this house. So the tradeoffs are hard ones. We wanted space, space to do our different activities and room for guests, and so we made a less energy efficient choice.

That's just one aspect of our lives.

There's always been something to be afraid of. World Wars. Economics. Communism. Muslim Extremism. Terrorism. As some resolve themselves, others raise their heads.

In our time now it's the economy, energy, climate which is throwing off the balance of the weather patterns and life that has adapted to it, animal extinction, ...

I know, you don't want to read about this, just like I don't want to know about it. But the old adage that what we don't know won't hurt us, couldn't be farther from the truth.

Knowledge increases the possibility of wise choices.