Change of pace

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The Hammock

We walk judiciously along the jetty,

Careful not to stray to the edge

Lest in the darkness we fall

And join the sleeping crabs and the seaweed,

Inching toward the beach.

At the jetty’s end there is a shelter

A sanctuary for those seeking solitude,

Watching the ocean in its many moods.

And there, beneath the simple, palm-frond roof,

A hammock.

Developed by the Arawaks to avoid scorpions and insects

The hammock morphed through shipboard use

And jungle exploration to become

Linked in the mind with lazy days and dozing.

Here there is no one to disturb us,

No one to walk the jetty, pass the time of night.

We collapse into the enfolding arms of the hammock,

Alone and at one with the universe.

In the half-waned moonlight

We can spot the Plough, or Dipper,

Standing forth in the far north-east.

And turning round, the North Star, too,

Seen low among the palm trees by the shore.

The air is crystal clear.  A million points of light blur into the melé.

This is the Milky way.

Only a man-made satellite above gleams bright and steady

And stays there always as the Earth turns.

Out in the ocean before us the lights of buoys and passage markers

Wink and glimmer in the darkness,

Where the sea’s horizon is lost in clouds of night.

And ships too, bound for the Gulf of Mexico,

Brazil and Venezuela, skirt the refs and sandy shoals.

A gentle breeze blows from the east

But otherwise all is warm and deliciously sub-tropical.

We are alone with the bright, white moon and the wide ocean,

Insignificant in the vast scale of things.

As we swing gently in the wind

We become entwined.

( Robert Hanrott, Islamorada, 2011)

 

 

Entering the country

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“The Trump administration is reportedly considering  blocking US citizens and permanent residents from re-entering the US if an official “reasonably” believes they could have Covid-19.

Once upon a time, an American passport let you cross borders with ease – now it makes you persona non grata around the world. Not only are most Americans banned from Europe, but they may also no longer even be guaranteed entrance to their own home”. (Arwa Mahdaw, The Guardian).

My comment: “Reasonably believes”?  How can you ban bona fide citizens from re- entering the country on a personal hunch?  By all means test them at the airport and make sure they self-isolate until the test results are available, but this looks like another excuse for for banning people to whom you take an instant dislike, such as Black or Brown people, Muslims or people with dimples for all I know.

Please excuse the morbid personal note, but were my wife and I to go to London we would be required to be quarantined for two weeks the other end.  I could deal with that, except for the nine hours in a plane with strangers and the dodgy taxi ride the other end.  But even if we took the risk, could we get home again?

We have decided that Epicurean peace of mind requires us to stay where we are.  For how long?  A year more? The grand children will have forgotten what we look like, but we are no good to them in a mortuary.

Live like we used to before Covid 19?

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 British government ministers speak frequently about ”it” and how they are striving to bring “it” back.  But survey by Britain Thinks found that only 12% of people want to live their lives “exactly as ‘it’ was before” the advent of Covid 19.

Only  6% of Britons want the same type of economy as they had before the pandemic, and only 9% want to return to “normal”, which means surviving an existential crisis of the environment, to mention just one threat.  Recently TV carried pictures of columns of smoke rising in the Arctic.    (Guardian Weekly, 31 July 2020, George Monbiot).

My comment:  How do they, the British government,  propose to restore the old order having left the EU, quite probably without a fair agreement and with the reputation of Britain and its government in tatters?  How do they expect the population to be content while selling the best bits of the National Health Service to huge US corporations? What is the future of an offshore island that cannot compete with the growing power of China by itself?  How are they going to thrive when their closest ally (the USA) is no longer reliable?  I could go on, but won’t.  These people are snake-oil merchants, selling to the gullible, and living in the 19th Century.  Poor grandchildren, literally poor.

Polar bears

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By the end of the century, polar bears will have largely disappeared from the Arctic, a study published in Nature suggests. The authors examined the possible impact on the bears of two climate change scenarios: a “business-as-usual” one, in which greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise at their present rate; and a second in which they are moderately mitigated. In the former case, they found that most polar bears would begin to experience “reproductive failure” by the 2040s, and that by 2100 only one population would remain – in Canada’s Queen Elizabeth Islands. The outcome of the other scenario was only slightly less bleak, with most populations predicted to experience reproductive failure by 2080.

Unable to find all the sustenance they need on land, polar bears do much of their hunting on sea ice, preying on seals after staking out their breathing holes. The gradual disappearance of sea ice is already affecting some of the more southerly located polar bear populations: a 2014 study found that in eastern Alaska and western Canada, one population had declined by 40%.

My comment: But those with a dubious agenda are still denying climate change!  Who will they blame when the impending disaster becomes too obvious to ignore? Not themselves, you can be sure.  Poor polar bears!

The chaos and displacement started before the virus appeared

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A total of 50.8 million people around the world were recorded as internally displaced in 2019, forced from their homes by conflict and disaster. This is the highest number ever, and 10 million more than in 2018. The figures come from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) in Norway.

The most displacements were recorded in sub-Saharan Africa amid violence in the Sahel and conflict in Somalia and South Sudan. Natural disasters in south and east Asia and the Pacific also displaced millions. Alexandra Bilak, the IDMC director, said it was too early to assess the full impact of coronavirus on efforts to address displacement. “A recession, of course is going to have an impact on the generosity of donor governments,” she said. “It’s going to be a really bad situation for everybody”.   (reported 4 months ago in The Guardian 28 April 2020)

We cannot, in August,  get an adequate handle on the spreading virus in the US, or help those Americans losing their homes and their jobs (disproportionately in the Black community).  So  it is unlikely that the US is going to concerned about Africa.   And now the news is full of reports about the ennui and exasperation of those stuck at home, probably for months more.  When all this is over we will wake up to the even worse disaster in Africa and other developing areas.  We cannot be immune to the results, including the growing violence. Peace of mind becomes increasingly fragile.