Author Archives: carbam

The Boiling Point

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black lives matter

(Source: Morrison, Matthew. Pinterest. “Innocent People Killed by Police”.2020.)

The thing about the recent Black Lives Matter protests, is that this isn’t just about the recent death of George Floyd, or even just the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. This is bigger than that. World systems thinking prompts us to consider the pieces of the puzzle surrounding the murders of innocent black Americans. Black lives have been oppressed the entire duration of their time in this country, and were enslaved for most of the last three and a half centuries, and even now they are treated only a modicum better than they historically had been. The Black Lives Matter movement is about how historically banks wouldn’t lend to Blacks, and they couldn’t own homes in certain areas, and even now, a young Black boy walking home with Skittles is an offense punishable by death. THAT is why we rally, not because one more person died at the hands of police brutality in this country. Like systems theory, racism is not a collection of separate events, but rather a sum of its history.

Right now, at this point in history, we are at a potential boiling point, where we have the proper amount of anger and people with time on their hands to make this a pivotal point in our political state, and in history. People are home, due to the coronavirus pandemic, and on their phones all day, seeing the police take innocent Black lives, except this time, we have an evil president who citizens are already upset with for dropping the ball on the pandemic response team, and properly handling the coronavirus pandemic so that the lives lost to Coronavirus can also start declining. With the anger towards Trump, and the attention to what is happening in the nation, made easier by the technological age, we are uniting for a common cause, and are not backing down, even a week after George Floyd’s death. With all of this anger, at the exact time, and with the exact circumstances we had, we are also seeing separate movements coming out of this, with Pride month just around the corner, and other races uniting for the betterment of race relations in this country, we are seeing a world hurting and coming together, at a time where we’ve been so far apart for so long.

On the Behalf of All Americans, I Am Sorry

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I have known for a long time that Americans are part of the problem when it comes to global climate change. I can remember a time when my own family burned plastic, trash, tires, and gasoline. Until now, I was unaware that Americans put out nearly four times as much carbon dioxide as we would be budgeted, per the IPCC’s carbon dioxide reduction plans. We Americans are polluting our planet with our habits, and we seemingly don’t care to change, and for that I am ashamed to be an American.

When we backed out of the Paris Accord, under the Trump Administration, I was again, ashamed to be an American.

When I think of all of the damage we do to the world, I never think about who we’re really hurting. The damage feels local, the spring comes sooner every year, and hotter than the last, driving up to big cities, we can see where the smog settles in a thick brownish-gray haze. But even though we’re seeing these changes due to human activity around our own homes, we’re devastating lives for people in third world countries, who face what we refer to as the triple inequality. For that, I apologize.

Perhaps with COVID-19, and the stay at home order, more people will realize what human activity does to our environment. We’ve seen dolphins return to Italy due to the earth being able to heal in the absence of humans polluting it. We’ve seen better air quality and the lack of that haze when we drive into the city. Perhaps this turbulent time can be the final push we need to change our ways, as the link to new diseases emerging and climate change seems to be as clear as ever. Perhaps we can be hopeful that Americans will see the change we can bring, if we just modify our lives a little, and our future generations will see that the earth is worth saving through seeing the small changes that have already began happening in our absence.

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We Are Told Not to Cry Over Spilled Milk!

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(Source: Jena, Bikram. OdishaTV. “Coronavirus Lockdown Impact: Odisha Dairy Farmers Dump Milk on Road”. 2020)

A few summers ago, I took a job at a well known grocery store chain, and at the end of each work day, we would log all the food waste and dispose of it. I would frequently hold the produce I was logging out of our stock (Quantity Marked Out of Stock- what we called “Q-MOS”-ing), and would ponder what good the food could do if it were able to be donated, or consumed after we logged it out of our inventory. Most of the time, the food hadn’t been recalled, or expired food, it had just been returned, or found outside of the refrigerated section. I would hang my head in dismay, pounding each code into the ten key pad, and I would lament at the amount of food we were WASTING, that was sorely needed elsewhere. Perhaps even locally!

Cranney Farms in Idaho is giving about about 2 million potatoes so they don't go to waste.

(Source: Ibrahimji, Alisha. CNN. “An Idaho Farm Is Giving Away 2 Million Potatoes Because Coronavirus Has Hurt Demand”. 2020)

Flash forward to today, where amid the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, we are seeing farmers cursed with abundant produce, that they are not able to sell due to the global pandemic. Potato farmers are donating their excess, that would ordinarily be used for French fries in restaurants, and instead losing hundreds and thousands of dollars worth of revenue. If the pandemic keeps up, people WILL lose their farms to coronavirus. Similarly, Because people are unable to sell their goods at this time, they cannot afford the feed for their livestock, and consequently, have been protesting by dumping their milk. Worldwide, we are experiencing shortages and disruptions in the food and agriculture industry. Farmers need fair compensation for their lost revenue, and loss of livelihood during this pandemic, and we need to protect our food workers at every step of the process from farm to fork so that we can prevent famine and economic depression.