April 9, 2006

• If you spit in the ocean…

  …are you just pissing into the wind?

  What impact does a drop in a bucket have?

  It’s issues such at that with which I have had to contend, and that I have had to transcend, for as long as I can remember.

  “A drop in a bucket,” was my mother’s favorite phrase for something
  insignificant.  She used it to justify small wasteful or destructive acts, and to
  discourage protests such as consumer boycotts.  Having noticed how
  quickly our bathroom sink with the leaky faucet would overflow if I put
  in the plug, I had, I thought, sufficient cause to ignore Mama’s
  attempts to mininmize the impact of each drop in the proverbial bucket.

  In the 1960s, I was one of many young people dressed in recycled
  clothing who raised our voices in anti-war protests.  When our
  troops withdrew from Vietnam, not understanding politics and not being
  privy to the halls of power, many of us thought we had succeded. 
  Ever fewer and fewer of us continued wearing patched recycled clothes,
  eating organic produce, diapering our babies in rags, and riding
  bicycles, in an attempt to save the oceans and the earth.

  We knew what we were doing then, even though our elders perceived it as
  nothing more than drug-crazed rebellion.  Oh, yes, it was all of
  that:  rebellious and often fueled by drugs, but it was
  more.  It was an idealistic attempt to retard or reverse the damage that
  farsighted people such as Jacques Cousteau and Rachel Carson had told
  us would eventually make the planet unfit for life.  We agreed amongst
  ourselves that a worthy cause was worth some right action even if that
  was not the easy way.

  The line between right and wrong is no longer as clear to me as it used
  to be.  I have become intimately acquainted with the law of
  unintended consequences.  I have also reached the conclusion that
  “right action,” whatever that may be, does not need a worthy cause to
  make it right.  These days I am inclined to do what feels right,
  even if there is no perceptible effect for it to be the cause of.  I am losing my attachment to results.

  I’m not headed anywhere with this idea right now, but I may revisit it,
  revise it, review it or expand on it at some later date.  It’s
  just something that popped into my mind recently.

  Here’s another idea that came to me when I heard someone (in a song, I think) suggest that something was, “not meant to be.”

  If you really mean it, then it is meant to be.

  The lead story in today’s Anchorage Daily News is a grabber:

  Two generations ago, students in Nanwalek had
  to lick the schoolhouse floor when they spoke Sugt’stun like their
  parents. Now the village’s last fluent speakers are asking the school’s
  help to save their dying Native language.

  Nanwalek parents and elders want the Kenai
  Peninsula Borough School District to make Sugt’stun part of their core
  curriculum, with academic credit for a high school course. Nanwalek
  even has a certified teacher eager to teach the language, which is
  spoken statewide by fewer than 100 people, most of them elderly.

  “Kenai Peninsula is the Sugpiaq homeland. We
  are the last band of survivors of the Sugpiaq people,” former bilingual
  aide Sally Ash told the School Board last week. “We consider it an
  insult that we have no say about how our village school is run.”

  But school officials — citing budget cuts,
  new federal rules and Nanwalek’s low achievement test scores — say
  they have to concentrate on basic offerings like English and math.
  Earlier this winter, they suggested Nanwalek’s students who want a
  language credit take an online Spanish course instead.

  more at adn.com

  

  • 6:13 pm
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