The Inevitable Osmosis

(First, many thanks to commenters.  I apologize for being slow in posting comments.  I had a gnarly homework assignment to finish, on top of working nearly full time.  Sleep will taste really good tonight...)

Let me start this post with a slightly loopy analogy.  And as we begin, we must define two terms.  Osmosis (as defined by Wikipedia and others is "the spontaneous net movement of solvent molecules through a semi-permeable membrane into a region of higher solute concentration, in the direction that tends to equalize the solute concentrations of the two sides...Osmotic pressure is defined as the external pressure required to be applied so that there is no net movement of solvent across the membrane."  Let's unpack that definition a little.  Take a glass jar, and divide it into two halves by inserting a watertight semi-permeable membrane down the middle.  Fill one half of the jar with pure water, and the other half with salty water, and wait a while.  What you will eventually see is that the liquid level in the pure half of the jar has gone down and the liquid level in the salty half of the jar has gone up.

Osmosis illustration courtesy of OpenStax College, Anatomy and Physiology.

What you've just witnessed is osmosis.  You started with two liquids, one a pure solvent (water in this case), and one comprised of that same solvent in which a high concentration of impurities was dissolved.  The molecules of the solvent were small enough to flow through the molecular "holes" in the semi-permeable membrane, and they did so, diluting the concentrated salt solution as they flowed into it.  The process continued until the mass of diluted solution grew to an extent that it was able to exert a force on the membrane equal to the osmotic pressure, at which point the flow of water from the pure to the salty side of the jar stopped.  Note that the salt ions could not flow from the salty side to the pure side of the membrane, because they could not fit through the molecular "holes" in the membrane.  Osmosis happens spontaneously whenever there is a pure solvent separated by a semi-permeable membrane from some of that same solvent in which impurities have been dissolved.  When the net concentration of impurities in a solution is equal on either side of a semi-permeable barrier, there is no net natural tendency for osmosis to take place.  Lastly, it takes the input of energy (usually applied through a pump) to use reverse osmosis to extract a pure solvent from a solution in which impurities have been dissolved or suspended.

So it is with nations.  In a world in which everyone had equal access to natural resources and everyone enjoyed the same standard of material wealth, there would be no large-scale tendency for people to emigrate.  After all, if you had everything you needed right where you were, what would be the point of moving?  But alas, that's not the world in which we live.  Quite apart from the situations of wealth or scarcity caused by the vagaries of nature (drought, famine caused by crop failure, bumper crops caused by very good weather, etc.), there is the little matter of our fallen human tendency to rob each other.  Some people are better and more ambitious robbers than others, and some of these people become heads of nations which become really good at robbing other nations.  Thus we see the ever-increasing concentration of wealth in these robber nations and the ever-increasing impoverishment of those nations which are their victims.

This leads to a situation not unlike that which exists in our osmosis jar: a huge concentration of solute on one side of a semi-permeable membrane and a large body of pure solvent on the other side.  Except that in this case, we have a huge concentration of wealth on one side of a national border and a huge mass of people who have been "purified" of their possessions on the other side.  In this respect, the robber nations serve as "reverse osmosis" devices whose components consist of armies to rob other nations with, and border guards and fences and walls to keep those whom they have robbed on the outside.  Of course, all this machinery requires energy and other inputs, because the natural tendency is for good old-fashioned osmosis to occur: if you concentrate all the world's best precious things in the hands of a few nations and leave the rest of the world to either starve or try to find a few crumbs by emigrating to the "favored" nations, you can't grumble if a few of the rest of the world's citizens show up at your doorstep.

The picture of osmosis has thus helped me to see the rise of far-right ultra-nationalist movements in the United States and Europe from a different perspective.  And that can be helpful, just as looking at another planet through lenses designed to filter or transmit certain frequencies of light can help us to see things we might have missed if we had viewed the planet through visible light only.  I've been looking at the behavior of nations through the lens of narcissism lately.  Let's try out a different lens tonight.

So we have a bunch of ultra-nationalists and proto-fascists who have become rather well-known lately.  In Europe, there is the Golden Dawn party of Greece, there is UKIP in Britain, and there is the National Front in France, not to mention the Ukraine or the many Eastern European countries which have taken a hard right ultra-nationalist turn recently.  And then there's the Republican Party in the United States, and its Presidential frontrunner Donald Trump.  And I'm wondering how it is that those who might in any way have been called "left" or "left-leaning" in any of these nations have been totally eviscerated so that the only "alternative" we have to what some call "the extreme center" is a bunch of people who want to insist that they and their nations are All That And A Bag Of Chips, and that the rest of the world can go to blazes.  And all this bluster and bravado is being built on a history and tradition of having made a home stuffed full of precious things at the expense of the rest of the world. 

Note: Some of these people try to base their nationalism on their interpretation of Christianity.  But the Good Book states clearly in both the Old and New Testaments that the Lord's chosen people are to be hospitable to strangers, and are forbidden from oppressing the stranger, the orphan or the widow.  Now I know that there's not really any such thing as a "Christian nation" in the world, and that expecting nations to model this kind of hospitality is sort of like trying to teach pigs to fly - it wastes your time and annoys the pigs.  But at the least, the nations who consider themselves "special" and "precious" could leave off robbing other nations, don't you think?

And the robbery is what enabled these special nations to make their nations a home of all precious things.  But now, on the far side of Hubbert's peak, not only with regard to shortages of easily extracted oil, but with regard to a host of other natural resources, those precious things are being threatened.  And the machinery of reverse osmosis (or, robbery) is being strained to breaking.  The rise of fascist ultra-nationalism may well be the fearful response on the part of some very wealthy people and their mouthpieces in politics and the media to that breaking, and to the increasing likelihood that they will be forced to share their stash of precious things with the people from whom those things were forcibly taken.

One last thing.  There has been a lot of demonization of the Syrian refugees and others who are fleeing from the destruction of their countries which was engineered by the U.S. and its allies.

Drowned refugee child on a beach in Libya.  Image courtesy of U.S. Uncut.

One of the latest accusations against these refugees is that they organized a mass rape of "pure," "innocent" European women in the city of Cologne on New Year's Eve.  At first, I was inclined to believe the accusations, but now that it has been reported how systematically the attacks were planned and executed (for instance, the attackers supposedly coordinated their attacks by means of social media like Facebook and Twitter), the story is starting to stink - and I'm not the only one who notices the smell.  Why use attacks like this to seek to demonize and implicate refugees and aliens?  I think the answer is not just narcissism (although it is certainly that), but that there is a much more practical reason.  If you build your nation by robbing other nations, and the people of the nations you robbed emigrate to your nation and become citizens, they may have strong objections to you embarking on future robbery sprees.  Racist uber-nationalism is the perfect ideology for a nation that wants to exalt itself by conquering and plundering other peoples.  (That, by the way, explains a lot of European history and culture.)  Pulling such shenanigans is a lot harder to do when you are the head of a multicultural nation.  Also, excluding others from your stash of loot leaves more of that loot for you to enjoy.

The eventual end of robber empires is that they themselves get robbed, or their machinery of reverse osmosis breaks.  For instance, the reverse osmosis pump consisting of armies to rob other nations starts to cost more than it takes in, and the semi-permeable membrane consisting of border guards, walls, and barbed-wire fences becomes too expensive to maintain on a large scale.  Then everyone gets poor more or less equally, including the citizens of the formerly "special", "precious" robber empire.  Once that happens, there's no further point in fascist ultra-nationalism, is there?

Small-Scale Ambassadors

To those who have recently joined this blog, my apologies for not posting much lately. I have once again become very busy, working part-time at an engineering firm, teaching an engineering class at a local college, and enrolling in a college class myself.

The college class in which I am enrolled provides the theme for this week's post, which is a continuation of my recent posts on the role that immigrant communities can play in helping Americans form resilient neighborhoods in the face of economic contraction and collapse. There is much to be learned from communities of recent immigrants and of immigrants who have managed to maintain their culture in the face of the prevailing pressure to become “Americanized.” But how shall we thoroughly Americanized, native-born U.S. citizens learn from our immigrant fellow people unless we expand our horizons and learn to go out to immigrant communities right here in the U.S.A.?

One big part of that outreach consists of learning the languages of other nations and cultures. This summer, after the summer teaching session ended and before I realized that I would be teaching this fall, I decided that I was going to do something fun for myself and I signed up for a college-level introductory Russian class. I saw this as a means of facilitating communication between myself and the many Russian families in my neighborhood, along with their children, some of whom come to my house on a regular basis.

The class for which I originally signed up was to be a simple, community education-oriented introduction to Russian language and culture. It was canceled due to lack of enrollment, so I gave up on the idea, somewhat relieved because by then I found out that I myself would be teaching engineering. And then...through a strange set of circumstances, I found myself being invited to audit a for-credit Russian class for people on a degree track in languages. I must have been crazy for doing so, but I accepted the invitation. Now my time is quite fully occupied. The class is very nearly a full-immersion experience in which the teacher speaks mainly in Russian and where anyone caught speaking English is likely to be gently admonished with “По-Руский, Пожалуйста!”

This class has gotten me thinking. Many people are now writing about the need to form resilient neighborhoods composed of self-sufficient people who are disconnecting themselves from our major societal systems which are now in the process of breaking down. Some are now even starting to add their voices to the discussion of the value of learning from immigrant communities. Yet most writers seem to have missed the very obvious community-building step of learning other languages. Many of our attempts to build resilient communities are taking place and will continue to take place within urban areas that have by now become quite ethnically diverse and multicultural. Moreover, the rise of multi-ethnic communities is no longer limited to urban areas.

The need for knowledge of other languages is obvious to those “boots on the ground” in the neighborhoods I frequent, as I observed in a couple of conversations I had this week, one with a Russian high school student who is a friend of mine and who is taking Spanish, and another with a friend of mine from church who understands the realities behind our collapsing economy and who is actively pursuing steps of sustainable living. To those who want to take steps toward building resilient neighborhoods in the places where they live, one bit of advice I'd give is to learn at least one other language (and preferably two if you can manage it).

My (Somewhat) Walkable, (Somewhat) Russian Neighborhood

I'd like to begin this post with a greeting: “Привет!” Or, for those who want something more formal, “Здравствуйте.” (I think I said that right...)

In the waning months of 2007, I relocated to Portland from Southern California. Guided by information I had gleaned from Jules Dervaes and the Path to Freedom Urban Homestead project,I looked for smaller, cheaper houses with large yards. I found such a house, a Korean War-era home in what seemed to be a very ordinary neighborhood, with a big back yard and a price low enough that I could easily and quickly pay it off.

During that winter, I also bought a copy of Reinventing Collapse, a book by Dmitry Orlov. For those who are not familiar with the book, Orlov was something of an eyewitness to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and he postulated that similarities between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. meant that the U.S. is likely to experience its own collapse in the near future. However, key differences between the former Soviet Union and the United States meant that a collapse which was difficult but survivable for the Soviets would prove to be much harder on Americans. I found myself agreeing with most of what Mr. Orlov wrote, yet I found some of his suggestions for adaptation a bit hard to swallow. I resolved that if I ever met any Russians who had experienced the collapse, I would check their version of the story against Orlov's.

A few months later, I started noticing that when I was out doing yardwork at certain times on Saturdays, I could see large groups of well-dressed people walking down the streets near my home. Some of these groups were families, led by men wearing leather jackets if they were young, or suits if they were older, with wives wearing what I would call “Sunday” dresses and occasional scarves on their heads, and leading quiet, serious-faced children behind them. I guessed that they were foreigners, and occasionally I waved at them. I was pretty sure they were Slavic, and one day on a hunch, I said “Добрый день” to an older man as he was walking by. He burst into a broad grin and returned the greeting, then started talking excitedly to me. I very quickly ran out of words, and he saw that he had over-taxed me.

From that time I became intrigued by these people. Who exactly were they, I wondered, and where did they all walk to on Saturdays? Several Saturdays later, I was going somewhere on my bike and I ran across a young group of these walkers. I greeted them in Russian, and they returned the greeting, and then I asked them in English where they were all going. “To church,” an eleven or twelve-year-old boy said. “Do you want to come?” “Well,” I replied, “I've got an errand to run...” “You should come some time,” he said. “You're welcome to visit.” And with that he and his friends kept walking.

Eventually I did visit a few of their Saturday services, which were all conducted in Russian, and consisted of three or four Russian men from the congregation delivering sermons of short to medium length, interspersed with Psalm-singing, and ending with a time of prayer. I had to rely entirely on an interpreter in order to understand anything, and at first I wound up with a different interpreter every time I went. But eventually I befriended one of the volunteer translators, a young married man with a dry sense of humor.

I loaned him a copy of Reinventing Collapse, and as he slowly made his way through it, I asked him from time to time what he thought. He confessed that he probably wouldn't be much help in confirming any of the statements about the Soviet Union in the book, as he was very young when he came to the United States, and didn't remember much of Russia. But he had some very interesting observations about how his community fit into our local area, and the ways in which Russian young men and women come to terms with American culture. Through him I have made the acquaintance, and in some cases, the friendship, of a few Russian families and their children.

In talking to them all, certain things became evident. First, as to their church, they all believe in keeping a literal Sabbath once a week. For them, this Sabbath is Saturday. The devoted members among them believe that Sabbath-keeping means giving a rest not only to oneself but also to the gadgets one normally uses, including automobiles. Thus they don't drive on Saturdays, and they walk to church. Now I am not a member of their church, nor do I subscribe to everything they believe, but I do see that this view of theirs has led to the formation of geographically tight, closely connected sub-communities of people – communities such as the people I see walking to church every Saturday. Maintaining physical connectedness in a neighborhood of such people is not difficult.

Secondly, the culture of their church combines with the culture of their native lands to produce a definite separation from mainstream Americanism. There are at least some of their number who do not own a television set, and among the rest, there is a strong tendency to create opportunities for face-to-face, participatory activities like weeknight volleyball and soccer leagues that leave no time for passively sitting in front of a TV. A big contributor to the separation from Americanism is the fact that Russian is the primary language spoken in many of their households, and those who can afford it often send their children to a special Russian school after regular public school in order to learn to read and write in Russian.

Thirdly, there are those Russian customs which they maintain apart from religion, customs which are characteristic of a people who have had to make do for themselves to a much greater extent than most Americans have experienced. I remember talking to two Russian boys about summer vacation, and what they were doing with themselves while school was out. They began describing to me their adventures in building a chicken coop and getting baby chicks; then they told me about the cat, the dog and the pigeons they also have, as well as their very large food garden and the two dozen or so fruit trees in their yard. (It was enough to make any would-be urban homesteader drool...) A few days later, I questioned their mom about these things, and told her how her family's lifestyle wasn't quite the typical “American” experience, and she said, “I don't understand Americans. In my country, we don't throw anything away, and we don't buy special food for the dog. The dog eats the scraps that the people don't eat.”

Speaking of chickens, my neighborhood is not near the trendy downtown of Portland, with its base of yuppies who are “discovering” the joys of sustainable living, including chicken-keeping. In my neighborhood, most native-born Americans still think that chicken-keeping is something of an oddity. But they do know of certain families who keep chickens, and these families just happen to be...Russian! Within the church community I have been describing, there is also at least one very competent bee-keeper. And within that church community, the Russian heritage of self-sufficiency is somewhat amplified by a religiously motivated distrust of certain aspects of Americanism.

Now note this: most of these people have never heard of Peak Oil or the Transition Towns movement, nor are they familiar with the writings of some of the deep thinkers and heavyweights who write about our present economic collapse. Yet many of them have a common-sense awareness that these times will require us to live differently, and their common culture has led them quite independently to adopt a resilient living arrangement. Thus they have:

• a close-knit, walkable community

• a heritage of practices of self-sufficiency

• and a cultural identity which is their own, and which can't be commercially redefined away from them.

They already know things that so many in the English-speaking world are “discovering” (or more accurately, “re-discovering”). This is true also of other Slavic and Eastern European sub-communities in the United States. I think especially of the aspect of maintaining one's culture in the midst of a larger culture that seeks to dissolve everything else in order to extract maximal wealth from all that it dissolves, and I think of a Romanian man I know who has a large family, and who will not allow a television in his house. Instead, he has paid for instruments and music lessons for all his children, and they regularly get together on weekends for jam sessions. I have never visited his church, but I'd like to go some day and see how well it has resisted “Americanization.”

I also think of how, when gas prices were first starting to spike from 2005 to 2007, there were yuppie writers on “sustainability” fretting over whether mainstream America would “discover” alternatives to driving, like bicycle commuting. It seemed like they were waiting for the day when the streets would be full of pale-skinned Anglo people in lycra riding pannier-laden recumbents to work. But in 2007, it began to dawn on me that a large number of people had already discovered bicycle commuting (or more accurately, had never forgotten it). They were the Mexican laborers whom I saw at 5:30 in the morning riding the streets with me on their older Magna bicycles, yet they never made it onto the radar of the “sustainability” writers. (The Mexicans also knew about buses long before the mainstream began to "rediscover" mass transit in 2008.)

I don't wish to disparage the efforts of mainstream Americans to “discover” sustainable living and to create resilient communities. But I think as time passes, many of these people will find that they are “discovering” things that immigrant communities already knew long ago.

In my next post on this subject, I will discuss a particular group of people who are trying to break out from the American mainstream. There is no shortage of people who are trying to do this, but there are elements of the stories of the people I will write about that I think you all will find to be quite relevant. (And if you read the Energy Bulletin website this next week, you might find writers trying to second-guess what I will say... ;) Stay tuned, or to put it another way, Watch This Space.

The Polyculture of Resilient Neighborhoods

I've been “out-of-pocket” for the last several weeks. This has been mainly due to my part-time teaching position as an adjunct at a local college. But now that finals have been administered and grades have been given, I have a bit of time to breathe and think.

One of the themes that was in the back of my mind is the subject of people, families and communities whose choices have positioned them for maximum survivability in this present time of resource depletion and economic collapse – even though they made their choices for entirely different reasons at the time those choices were made. I've recently met or read about a few such people and families, and have noted those elements of survivability in their lives which they chose for cultural or religious reasons, without necessarily thinking beforehand of the application of those elements to hard times. One characteristic of all these people is their separateness from the prevailing American culture. Over the next few posts, I'd like to explore the cultural roots (both religious and secular) of that separation, how it has made these people resistant to assimilation in present American culture, and lessons we can learn from these people as we seek to form resilient neighborhoods and communities in the face of ongoing economic collapse.

I'll state at the outset my hypothesis that the most resilient neighborhoods in the United States will turn out to be composed of a number of heterogeneous cultures whose members maintain certain key cultural distinctions while learning from members of differing cultures. The members of the component cultures of such neighborhoods will engage in reaching out to members of differing cultures within their neighborhoods, forming a common, somewhat weakly binding meta-culture of common courtesy and customs within which the component cultures exist as distinct entities. Within the over-arching meta-culture, there will be opportunities for cross-pollination between the members of the component cultures, with results that are hopefully beneficial to all.

On the other hand, neighborhoods (and larger entities such as cities, counties and states) which are predominantly monocultural will probably tend to be less resilient. If the predominant monoculture is that of present-day commercial America, these neighborhoods will likely be far less resilient.

Why is a polyculture more resilient than a monoculture in the face of changing times and hardships? Examples of the answer to that question can be seen in the realms of biology, ecology and computational networks. Regarding computing, it's no secret that Microsoft Windows is at present the main operating system used by computers in the United States (although Linux distributions are chipping away at this dominance). It's also no secret that the vast majority of computers in the world use processor chips made by Intel. And it's no secret that, as stated in Wikipedia, “all [such] computers have the same vulnerabilities, and like agricultural monocultures, are subject to catastrophic failure in the event of a successful attack.” That's why antivirus companies like McAfee and Norton have a brisk business, and it is also why Windows can be such a royal pain to use. Polycultural computing is inherently more resistant to damage and attacks from viruses; thus it is more resilient.

When speaking of culture as applied to human communities, I am thinking of the dictionary definition: “the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a...group...the set of shared attitudes, values, goals and practices that characterizes a company...” (Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Ninth Edition). What can be said of present-day American culture? (By the way, this applies, more or less, to the entire English-speaking world.)

It is first of all a culture of consumption and consumerism. People are trained from an early age to base their identity on the quantities and types of things they own. The definition of who is “normal” and how much is “enough” is left up to advertisers, marketers and growth capitalists who are forever “moving the goal-posts” in order to promote ever-increasing consumption. Cultural norms are routinely redefined so that what was “cool” five minutes ago is no longer cool. This produces an ever-present restlessness, an ever-accelerating struggle to “keep up with the times,” and an ever-increasing outlay of cash for those things that will make a person fit in with those who are “with it.”

This culture acts as a “universal solvent” in that it puts pressure on those who don't fit in or who haven't been assimilated into it. Recent immigrants and their children are judged on whether they have been properly “Americanized”; if their children lag behind in this process, they are deemed to be somehow “unhealthy.” “What?! He doesn't have an i-Phone?? You're isolating him; that's not good for his socialization!” As a universal solvent, mass American culture gradually strips away all competing cultural identities and distinctions. (An example of this: I was riding the MAX a few weeks ago when I saw four Asian teens getting on at one of the stops. Their accents were unmistakable, and marked them clearly as foreign-born, yet they were each wearing baggy shorts at least three sizes too big for them, along with oversized T-shirts that hadn't been washed in a few days and bling jewelry and sideways baseball hats with flat brims, and they were all cussing and swearing like homeboys – even down to the rhythm of the cuss words. Mighty strange...)

It's no surprise that the mass-produced culture of American consumerism should be hostile to all other cultures, since the existence of these other entities poses a threat to the growth of the profits of the masters of American culture. But there are other maladaptive cultures which are distinctively American and which seek to make themselves a dominant monoculture to the exclusion of all other cultures in America. I am thinking specifically of certain tendencies and ways of thinking embodied in the Tea-baggers and the more hard-core members of the Republican Party, who seem to want to create a pure white-bread version of the United States centered on some sort of Southern Baptist/Pentecostal/Revived Confederate-Antebellum culture in which members of other races and non-English speaking members of any other culture are either wiped out or subjugated.

There are two ways in which this thinking is expressed. First, there are those who through political action are seeking to “take back America for God!!!” – at least, for the God of their own imaginations, who seems to have promised them everlasting material prosperity which they would never be required to share with anyone else. Second, there are those who correctly see that the prospects for “taking America back” don't look very good; therefore they have chosen to buy gold, guns, baked beans and land, and to form militias to combat the waiting hordes of savage zombies who will arrive when their version of the Apocalypse kicks off.

In my opinion, elements of this second kind of thinking can be seen in the Life After the Oil Crash website of Matt Savinar. When I was first learning about Peak Oil in 2007, I used to read his site a lot, but over the last year, I've lost my taste for the some of the adaptive strategies he seems to espouse, as I think they are actually maladptive from a social and moral standpoint. We can't all run off to the hills. If we all try, many of us will find that our mutually exclusive claims to the best mountain hideaways are being extinguished via 30-06 or 5.56 mm ball ammunition. For that matter, those who try to purge America's various neighborhoods and communities of all cultural inputs and presences which they deem to be “un-American” will only make a destroyed mess. After all, those who are being “purged” will rightly object to such treatment, and they may object quite effectively.

How then should we view the existence of multiple distinct cultures in our neighborhoods? First, we who have been thoroughly Americanized should recognize that we have many things to learn from those who haven't been. Those who come from countries where life was harder and poorer have much to teach us about adaptive strategies for our own upcoming times of hardship and poverty. The biggest thing we can learn from them is the cultivation of a healthy, realistic state of mind – something which is lacking among many people who are “Americanized.” I am thinking of my neighborhood, which not only contains native-born Americans, but which also has large Russian and Hispanic populations, along with Asians and people from various African nations. Over the next few posts I will explore some of the lessons I have discovered in talking with these people (many of whom refuse to “fit into” American culture entirely) as well as telling the stories of some Americans who have begun to withdraw themselves from some of the worst and most corrosive elements of American culture. I also have a technology-related interview I am trying to line up. Stay tuned...

For more on this subject, check out the following:

• Immigration in America: Becoming Americanized : NPR

• Becoming Americanized can be depressing | ZDNet

Tea And Xenophobia

Somehow or other, this past week I ran across a short essay by James Howard Kunstler, a social critic whom I have mentioned a couple of times on this blog. He is the author of the Long Emergency, a book I read in 2007 concerning Peak Oil and its likely societal impacts. Anyway, the title of the essay I read this past week was, “My Tea Party.”

The essay made a few good points, but it also contained two errors, one quite serious. The first error is a technical, factual error. Kunstler takes great pains to badmouth radical Christian fundamentalism, and I am sure he would hold up examples such as Sarah Palin and Pat Robertson. However, this is not quite accurate. Genuine, orthodox, by-the-Good-Book Christianity bears very little resemblance to the materialistic, jingoistic, greedy, violent, hyper-patriotic religion that is American evangelicalism. There are many Scriptures I could quote to prove this point, especially from the New Testament, but I won't take the time in this post. (Feel free to check out some of my other writings.)

I have to say, however, that this error of Kunstler's doesn't bother me all that much. For too long, too many of us who have called ourselves Christian have tolerated a freak show, to put it bluntly. We should have all risen up long ago and excommunicated the Republican Party, the moneychangers who have infiltrated our worship, and a number of key figures in the American Religious Right. Maybe it's not too late for that...

His other error bothers me much more, for it is a moral error with serious societal consequences. Kunstler writes, “My tea party would reduce legal immigration to a tiny trickle and get serious about enforcing sanctions against people who are here without permission...The truth is that neither party really wants to do anything about the extraordinary influx of Mexican nationals because they want to pander to a growing segment of Hispanic voters (or secondarily want to maintain the pool of cheap labor for US businesses). My party does not believe in unbounded multi-culturalism.” And, “My party views the global population overshoot problem as a condition that requires a more rigorous defense of US territory, sovereign resources, and even whatever remains of American common culture.”

There are several problems with that line of thinking. First, it undermines the whole concept of the American society as a society of immigrants who have chosen a common new identity that transcends the original cultures from which we came. That concept is what was taught to me in countless hours of grade-school civics classes, and it is the concept embodied in the present form of the Constitution. If being American is no longer defined as the acceptance of this new common identity, then who gets to define what an “American” is? Whose culture shall we all adopt? And shall we then eradicate all other cultures and expressions of other cultures in this nation?

The problem is that over the last ten years, one dominant group has tried to force its own culture and the culture of its ancestors on every other group in American society (not to mention the world), while doing its best to stamp out any expressions of genuinely different cultures. These other cultures have a lot to offer, and we can learn a lot from them. People from other cultures, especially those found in lower-income countries, have a lot to teach us native-born “Americans” concerning how to be happy and not neurotic when confronted with having to live on less.

We might also ask why Mexicans are coming to the United States. It's not like they're coming here to steal jobs from architects, engineers, investment bankers, brain surgeons or college professors. No, rather, they are taking some of the dirtiest (in some cases, most dangerous) and least respected jobs in the United States – from meat packers to day laborers to gardening/landscaping workers to nannies to house cleaners. (In fact, I recently got a flyer in the mail from an outfit called the “Cleaning Authority.” The front of the flyer shows a picture of a blond, blue-eyed dad reading a bedtime story to a blond, blue-eyed child, with a caption that says “Life's too short to clean your own house.” On another page is a picture of a Hispanic woman dressed in a Cleaning Authority uniform, and holding a vacuum cleaner.)

As has been true in the past, it is still true today that many Mexicans and other Hispanic people are coming here to take jobs that no American wants, jobs that pay so poorly that often two or more families are forced to share a cheap apartment or small house. Why do they do it? Could it be that what they have in their home country – what they have left behind – is far worse? The honest answer in many cases is “Yes!” And why is this? Could it be because of predatory “free market” capitalism as practiced and pushed by the wealthy citizens of the United States and other First World nations, the policies that destabilize and rob ordinary citizens of Third World nations while trashing their homeland?

Certainly we see this in Europe and the African continent. European nations have instituted Draconian crackdowns on illegal immigration from Africa – even as these nations continue to plunder Africa while polluting it. Think of things like European factory fishing vessels despoiling African coast fisheries, or the many oil spills caused by the activities of Royal Dutch Shell in the Niger Delta. When we look at Mexico (and much of the Caribbean and South America), we can see the same things being done to the citizens of those lands by the United States. What, for instance, has the Deepwater Horizon blowout done to Mexican coastal cities and villages? You probably won't hear many people in U.S. mainstream media asking this question. And where do the Mexican drug cartels get their money from? And who gets to keep most of the wealth now being generated by American-owned or multinational factories and assembly plants now operating in Mexico?

It goes back to this: The United States – five percent of the world's population – gets to consume 40 percent of the world's oil, and a huge fraction of the rest of the world's resources. We've got an excess of prima donnas, muscle trucks and cars, gigantic houses, fat people, lame pursuits and stuff – “mountains, oh, mountains of things” – and so few people in this country ask how things got to be this way. Too many Americans seem genuinely surprised and distressed at the thought that maybe disadvantaged people from disadvantaged lands might want a few crumbs of our bounty. The Mexicans have no trouble grasping climate change – anthropogenic climate change caused largely by the refusal of the First World to give up its conspicuous consumption. See, for instance, “Bad News Blues (the Writing on the Wall)” from Aimee's blog, New To Farm Life, or “Hispanic Health” from Baylor University. What do you think they will do as we continue to make their land unlivable? What would you do?

“Population overshoot” is a convenient code phrase used by some to communicate the idea that our societal problems are the result of too many people on the earth – especially the “ignorant people from other cultures who don't look like us,” rather than the result of excessive consumption on our part. But if many who are now afraid of immigrants want to reduce immigration to this country, they should start by consuming a lot less. That will remove the profit motive from those who are now making a killing by robbing other countries to enrich the United States.

In the meantime, I think it's wise for people who want to build resilient neighborhoods to realize that multiculturalism is here to stay, in one form or another. Forward-thinking people who live in mixed ethnic neighborhoods would do well to learn something of the languages and cultures of their fellow residents, and to begin to make friends and build bridges among them. Go with the flow - learn to be flexible and open to others. Or, as the Good Book says, “Blessed are the peacemakers.”