by Paul Haeder / February 18th, 2021
If I were asked what I want to accomplish as a writer, I would say it’s to contribute to the literature of hope. Barry Lopez,
A passing. A death. Moving on. Back to earth. A new journey.
He filled the air with lyrical words and ideas grafted to our role as writers and people living inside and with our natural world. He was steadfast in his role as a naturalist of sorts, but through and through he was a word conjurer.
He came to me when I was young, inside his book about wolves. I was in Arizona jumping the skeletons of saguaros with my 360cc Bultaco and learning the art of passage: working with ministers and laypersons helping Central Americans cross that political line between USA and Mexico.
by Paul Haeder / January 10th, 2021
The number of gun sales in Oregon by Christmas Day, 2020, was a whopping 4,000,000. The year before, an anemic 300,000.
It is the law of the gun. Guns in jets, guns in bombers, guns in schools, guns here on the streets, in Salem, at the Capital, guns in
Grand Theft Auto V, guns in purses, guns in boudoirs, guns in locker-rooms, guns in nurseries, guns in churches, guns in cars, guns in drones, guns guns guns.
Dalton Trumbo, quote from
Johnny Got His Gun :
An equation: 40,000 dead young men = 3,000 tons of bone and flesh, 124,000 pounds of brain matter, 50,000 gallons of blood, 1,840,000 years of life that will never be lived, 100,000 children that will never be born (the last we can afford: there are too many starving children in the world already)….
plenty of pollution, predation, precarity
You’ve heard all of this before. Here, another aside tying into this screed: So, just a few days ago, I braved the gales along the Oregon Coast. King tides. Days of rain. The beaches were full of logs, and the rivers coming from Highway 101 were a few feet deep and 20 feet across.
All my outdoor and military training went out the window – instead of getting my hiking boots wet, I opted to climb a log jam in lashing rain. Climb and climb, until, yep, not a senior moment, but a slip on a huge log jammed cedar. Bam. I did a backward fall, like a swan dive in reverse, and, yep, a perfectly large limb, pointing straight up, ready for my right side.
You can fool most of the people most of the time. P. T. Barnum.
by Paul Haeder / December 24th, 2020
Someone said, “If you don’t have something nice to say about someone, don’t say anything.”
Oh, the idiocy of America!!
Shit-dog, this country, now, and going back when I was in my teens (13 when my family moved us from Paris, France, to Arizona – of all places), well, lying, cheating, achy-breaky heart, don’t you know, thieving, scamming, and, well, bombing (military and economic), that’s what it is, but you won’t get that from those lying cheating bullshitting PR-spinning, pass-the-hat, money-loving politicians on both sides of the manure pile.
by Paul Haeder / December 14th, 2020
It’s an unprecedented coalition of business networks that have come together to raise our ambition. Not just to help our individual CEOs succeed, we’ll do that for sure. But to actually bring their voices together to help shift culture. So that the pushback on the BRT [Business Roundtable] from different business publications or other people within the business community lessens. So there’s less of a headwind culturally for this type of leadership. Jay Coen Gilbert, co-founder of B Lab and B Corporations [Source]
[These are not good people, and if anyone thinks otherwise, then, well, War is Peace, Truth is Lies, Hate is Love!]