I’m thinking these days that bears may be on to something… Hibernation. The older I get, the more appealing that idea becomes. There’s always Florida, or innumerable other year-round warm places, but I’m looking for the best way to live in the environment I’ve come to love – a place of cycles and changes – of greening summers and frozen winters.

So here I still am, once again, probably more than halfway through what really hasn’t been a “bad” New England winter. As was the case last year, we seem to have gotten our big snows around Hallowe’en. But, that aside, as always in a place like here, the days get shorter until they hardly seem to matter at all, and nights now begin in what used to be the middle of the afternoon. And it’s cold – everything from “chilly” to, “Damn! It’s freezing out there!”

I am not a winter sports person. I do not look forward to layering on the thermal underwear and puffy jacket, strapping on special footwear, and well-waxed extensions to that footwear, and swooping down anything. (I am actually quite concerned about the possibility that I may accidentally “swoop down” my own front steps.) I made my last snow angel probably more than forty years ago. I find looking at snow-covered evergreens quite lovely, and so is the sight of the red flashing light on top of the snowplow grinding its way down my street. My idea of a Perfect Winter Day includes (1) Not having to leave the house; (2) A big fire in the woodstove; (3) Something delicious simmering away in the slow cooker all day long; and (4) A really good book and/or a functioning computer.

Given these facts, I find the idea of hibernating – say, from December 1 through March 31 of any given calendar year – more and more attractive. Just hunker down and rest, in a warm and quiet place. Prepare for it. Eat a lot. Acquire the required stores of fat (something I seem to be inclined to do, anyway). Then go lie down where we won’t be disturbed, and hibernate until Spring is just around the corner once more – that great awakening, that seemingly-always-miraculous reappearance of life and growth, that annual natural rebirth – and become a quickened part of everything, once again. And we’d be ready for it… Because we have rested, and have lain quiet and dormant. We will awaken refreshed, full of energy – hungry, eager, and ready to go, to take our places, fully alive, in the Universe. Maybe some serious stretching and limbering would be needed when we reawaken, but that seems a small price to pay, in my opinion.

Might we be wise to take a lesson from the bear, from the badger, some frogs, hedgehogs, and even some moths? (I do realize that they do not “choose” to do this, but “bear” with me, for the sake of my narrative…) Do we really need to be “awake” twelve to fourteen hours a day, or more, all year ’round? Mightn’t eight months of that be enough for us…? And good for the planet, as well?

And some of the advantages of a period of human dormancy for four months a year…?

No shoveling or car scraping. No broken bones from falling on ice. Trillions of dollars saved on the production and consumption of fossil fuels. (That alone would probably bring the rate of global warming to a more reasonable pace.) No forced joviality at holiday gatherings with family members we don’t even like the rest of the year. No New Year’s Day hangovers – and no obligation to make those pesky resolutions, since we will awaken well past the date most of us have forgotten about them, anyway. Turkeys could look forward to living out their natural years, and our children would not be trained to believe that the sole purpose and reward of good behavior is getting their hands on the latest electronic device.

Human hibernation would offer a regular annual hiatus, of significant duration, from all our conflicts, our agendas, wars, politics, needless consumption, planetary destruction, our relentless depletion of natural resources, personal bad habits and animosities, ideological extremism, the blathering of pundits, the stock market, brutal competition, and all the general havoc we humans wreak daily on the planet that continues to do its best to support and nourish us, no matter what.

Frankly, I think the Universe would welcome an annual respite from us and our activities.

I still have a few questions: Would we dream? Would we need to get up to pee every six weeks or so? Would we continue to age as we hibernate? Would it matter? What things might we forget? What might we remember…?

The older I get, the more the Universe apparently insists that I understand the potency of dormancy, of Darkness, and the inevitability and value of it. We are foolish to fear it; the Universe invites us to welcome it. All birth, and rebirths, come from the Darkness, and it is the place to which we inevitably return. Even as it is the unavoidable destiny of all living things, it is also the source of all our beginnings.

This is the wisdom of bears.

Carol/Gato

Because we can’t have both.

The elections are over – mercifully, and millions of dollars later – and one side won most of everything. We have shown ourselves able to speak, after all, as a nation of diversity, and of some responsibility, some generosity, some compassion, and some good sense. And we voted by the millions, as the democracy we are, and were always intended to be.

And, although that is over, the fear mongering is likely not. It will continue – because it works. Democracy and fear are incompatible; they cannot coexist. The mongerers know this fact very well. Democracy functions only when citizens are reasonably fed, housed, educated, informed, productive, confident, and relatively unbowed by fear and want. Frightened people do not make wise decisions, even about their own welfare; often they can make no decisions whatsoever, and will do just what they are told to do, because they are terrified. When we are afraid, we feel powerless – whether we actually are, or not. This is just how most of us are: Human.

If you want to control people, do everything you can to keep them ignorant, poor, and deathly afraid, as much of the time as possible. THIS is the real reason the oligarchs want to gut government assistance for education, nutrition, welfare, job training, medical care, and other social programs. It has nothing to do with “fiscal responsibility”, or “reducing the deficit”, or “reducing the burden on our children and grandchildren”… And has everything to do with keeping as much of the populace as possible in a state of hungering malleability and civil impotence.

The chronically poor have real and legitimate fears: Legitimately afraid they won’t have enough to eat, because they so often don’t. Afraid they will have nowhere to live. Afraid of what will happen to them if they get sick or hurt. Afraid someone else will take what little they do have. Afraid their children will have no chance to live in conditions other than those in which they struggled to grow up. Afraid they are powerless. Afraid their lives mean nothing. (If this election did one thing, I think it did much to convince hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people that they have more power than they knew…)

But how to instill this kind of fear into the “average”, middle class, or even well off, members of our society…? The people who’ve pretty much been feeling they’re basically okay? That’s the ongoing challenge of the One Percent. They’ve got a few ideas, and they almost worked this time. At least almost half of us are apparently willing to give those ideas another try.

A natural disaster, or an incomprehensible act of terrorism, can be a bonanza here… 9-11. Katrina, Aurora, the BP Gulf oil spill, Sandy… In these situations, everyone is reduced to a state of near-equivalent deprivation and fear, at least temporarily. (Read Naomi Klein’s excellent 2008 book, The Shock Doctrine/The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, for an impressive summary of this kind of “opportunity.” She was on to something, even then.) Barring the availability of either of these kinds of events, the most common, and historically effective, tactic is to Invent An Enemy – an Other – and make it very clear that the Other is a real, imminent, and pernicious threat, about to destroy the very fabric of our society, starting by aggressively assaulting everything in which you believe. Nothing has to be rational or proven about the Other; it just has to be presented as an ominous danger, to you, personally. If that gay couple next door is allowed to marry, what’s to stop YOUR children from wanting to do the same, no matter how you feel about it? If that woman who was raped can get an abortion, what’s to stop the Other from making you have one, too? If that lay-about moocher on the other side of town, who probably wasn’t even born here, is given food stamps and a break on community college tuition, who knows what she’ll be asking for next – and how much of that will come out of your pocket? And – good lord – what if the Other insists that you’ll have to register that third AK-47 you’re planning to buy at the upcoming gun show? Keep the veiled innuendos great, and difficult to disprove. Provide plenty of “documentation,” even if you have to resort to recirculating six-year-old pieces of satire you found on the web, as new and factual. Just repost them, again and again, to as many people as possible, with the subject title, “IF YOU CARE ABOUT AMERICA, YOU MUST READ THIS!!!!!!!!!” Truth is for wimps. It’s the goal that matters. And that goal is to engender fear.

Make sure these dangers are kept continuously in the forefront of public consciousness. (It helps to have a good bundle of newspapers and other media outlets under your control for this – but all that takes is cash.) Intone ceaselessly that things are even worse than anyone can imagine, and that the threat has never been greater. Never allow the legitimacy of the danger to be questioned. Make sure that as many people as possible feel PERSONALLY threatened by the behavior of people they don’t even know, at all times, even if – and perhaps especially if – their personal lives are, in fact, not really threatened at all.

The threat of the Other flourishes in either a genuine, or simply perceived, culture of deprivation, oppression, and terror. Democracy, on the other hand, can thrive only in a society of confidence, adequacy, personal empowerment, and the assurance that there is truly “enough” for everyone – a society in which we are confident that we will be given help when we need it, and can give help to others when they do.

The truth is, there really IS – or could be – enough for all, but not as long as some of us insist that it is our “right” to live obscenely at the top, and others of us can be abandoned to live abjectly at the bottom, where we are deemed to deserve to be. It is highly unlikely that the One Percent will abdicate quietly, election or no election, and there is no reason to expect them to do so. Even they are well aware that their tool box is emptying rapidly… But the Fear Hammer is still in there, and I think we’ll still be seeing a lot of it. It’s about all they have left.

So… We have a choice: Democracy or Fear… But we can’t have both. Pick one. And pick wisely.

Carol

No picture this time, friends. Bear with me! I had vowed that I would avoid “politics” here, which was kind of crazy on my part, because that’s just what I’ve been obsessed with for as long as you may have been, and tomorrow we may start to get some idea of where we’re going. (Sandy left me, and much of the East Coast, with very few communication outlets for at least six days and, for many, more days to come. And many of our fellow citizens have lost much more than their ability to communicate…)

Our country is changing. The world is changing. We will either accommodate ourselves to these changes, and work with them, or we will become the newest “Third World Nation”… A nation whose laws are drawn to benefit multi-national companies, and their shareholders; whose land is raped for their profits, and not ours; run by a government who fears and loathes at least half of its citizens, and considers them (us) to be slackers and ne’er-do-wells; a country where a small minority of wealthy people live in walled compounds, surrounded by an angry, hungry, and uneducated populace, many of them armed and dangerous; a country whose government works to legally impose its “values” on the majority of its citizens. This is not the America I’ve ever had in mind, and certainly not the one I’d like to leave for my granddaughter.

These things are the absolute antithesis of what the founders of this great nation had in mind. The great premise of “America” has always been that we are a nation of citizens, not servants of some corporate entity. We are not here to create profits solely for others; we are here to benefit ourselves, and our fellow citizens, and our descendants, and we expect our government to reflect our wishes. Does anyone remember the British crown and its East India Company – the original “multi-national,” whose strangling grip our founders refused to endure? It strikes me as incredibly ironic that our current Tea Party, apparently so in support of letting Big Business escape the chains of “regulation,” is named after an event that was about exactly the opposite. THAT event was about our refusal to have our lives run by a corporation, its CEO, and its shareholders, to our own detriment.

So, IMHO, we don’t need a CEO for President. We need someone who understands that we are part of a global nation, as well as our own; someone who knows that we are one nation among many, and no more, and no less, exceptional than any other; who understands both our strengths and our weaknesses; who understands the strengths and weaknesses of other nations; and who is aware of our common humanity. In short, we need four more years of the President we have now – Barack Hussein Obama… Because he represents the nation we are, and the nation we were always meant to be.