Someone Give That Girl A Soapbox

Tuesday, August 29, 2006 - Aboard the Hurtigruten

I have been in Norway just seventy-two hours – long enough to decide this is the most beautiful country I have ever seen and I’ve barely seen anything. How do you describe a country this beautiful? These are the moments I wish I was a painter instead of a writer. For two hours I rode slack-jawed on the bus, flipping right then left then backwards in the back row - which thank goodness I had to myself - astounded by the blues. A rainbow of blues I have never seen before. Never imagined before. Deep, vibrant, full, pure. The water, the sky, the mist, even some of the clouds are all stunningly different shades of blue. The water ranges from the lightest turquoise to a blue so midnight it almost seems like oil glistening in the sunlight. But the blue-blue, the blue that makes up the water of the fjords, that is the most breathtaking blue you can imagine. Deeper than the purist lapis in the most beautiful Renaissance paintings of the Madonna’s robes. I have never seen anything like it by man or by nature. A photo could do it no more justice than these words, though I tried on both accounts.

Who fed us the plate of crow that said we can’t make a difference?

When I was thirteen I trained as an ice-skater in Colorado Springs. I remember walking to the rink at five o’clock in the morning, the air crystal clear in the dawning sunlight around me. I remember hiking Cheyenne Mountain and looking out over the Springs below and on off into the distance for hundreds of miles. Air was transparent, the sky vivid, the sun reflective, all in a clarity so perfect, it was unnoticeable. I have looked for that crystal clarity all my adult life - across the Grand Canyon, through the hills and valleys of the Blue Ridge Parkway, upon the waters of both the Pacific and the Atlantic ocean, and in numerous forests, mountains, rivers and lakes between them. The only place I ever saw it again was once in Charlotte, the day after a hurricane blew through the east coast. The hurricane did no damage, it just swept through leaving behind crystal clear air. I have pouted in Italy, stomped my feet in Spain, complained even in Switzerland that there is something in the air, a haze that doesn’t belong there, that wasn’t always there. People look at me like I’m crazy (actually they do that a lot). It is the weather pattern, they say, or the way it has always been, or even that there is no haze, when it is clear (excuse the pun) before their eyes. But I remember what clear air looks like and what I have seen around me for three decades isn’t the air I remember from my days as a girl. I began to think I had created a memory better than the reality; that it was a world seen through wide-eyed youth when everything seems simple and beautiful and clear. Until I came to Norway.

This is the air I remember. This is how far I remember you could see on a clear day. This is what our world looks like. How can we turn blind eyes to what we are doing to this world we are blessed with? I guess because they are filled with smog. I’m not an activist sort – I often believe activists are fed and feed propaganda like every other political faction. But one bus, one train, and one boat ride through Norway and it is suddenly crystal clear to me in a very literal way that we are destroying our world with pollution. That before long beautiful views will be as dull as our produce has become in America. Americans rave about the food in Italy because we have tasted commercialized, processed, pesticide infested, inbred crap for so long we have forgotten what real food tastes like. It is happening with our skies, we are looking through skies so filled with pollution we have forgotten what clean air looks like and that it used to cover this land. In Norway it still exists. Now. How long will it last?

What do we do to reverse this trend? Who is responsible? The government sure as hell isn’t going to take responsibility. Corporations are and should be here to make money. Capitalism works well because it is driven by greed. Greed is quite simply the marriage of the two basic motivating forces of man – fear and desire. People are given a place in the system, more or less, based on their personal levels of desire and fear. Enough desire can overcome the worst of obstacles. Enough fear can overcome the best of advantages. Change is the underpinning of capitalism and humanity’s greatest resource. Hope, is born of change. Communism doesn’t work because without change, there is no hope. Without hope, life dies like leaves without sunshine. Greed has to be the fulcrum to capitalism – that is the only way it works. Logic, societal interest, fairness – none of these things can hold up a human system. Marx proved that. There is too much subjectivity to these concepts. I believe in corporate responsibility - it is the corporation’s responsibility to make money. It is OUR responsibility to make it unprofitable to make money in a societally destructive way.

Everything starts and ends with us, individually. It is what you get up and do every day as an individual that shapes our world – not corporate policy, not government policy. Our tomatoes suck quite simply because something more than quality, namely convenience, became what we as consumers demanded. Our air is worse with every passing day because it is more important to us to drive our cars to work everyday than force the existence of other options. .

Who fed us the plate of crow that said we can’t make a difference? More importantly, why did we buy it lock, stock, and barrel? The things that individual men have done alone or in a collective force are the only things that have ever changed ANYTHING. Einstein, the American Revolution, Ghandi, Mother Teresa, the people of Berlin and countless countries that one by one, hand in hand dismantled communistic control. Our government didn’t win the cold war, individual people stopped it. These are the things that change the world – men, not corporations and not even governments. Why has our country succumbed to the idea that we don’t make a difference? Our votes, our choices, our dollars. Look at the people around you. Listen to their conversations. We believe we are helpless in the tide of events, pointless in the tide of history.

The greatest difference I see between Americans and the people of all these countries is we live in a permanent state of fear and stress so every-present it is as unnoticeable as the absence of clear air. Fear is born of the inability to control - it is born of insignificance, of powerlessness. Stress is born of a constant sense of not being enough. Both are the natural byproducts of a people who believe they have no power and, therefore, no responsibility. We look at each other over Martinis in deep conversations fueled by controlled press and declare, “Well, what could I really do anyway?” A lot. You can change the world. I hope you do before you lose the chance to ever see a land as beautiful as this.