How to lower your carbon emissions while traveling

TRAVELERS TEND TO THINK of the world as something worth preserving, which forces them to confront a problem: Travel can actually be pretty damaging to the environment. A lot of forms of travel have high carbon emissions, and a lot of tourist activities do significant damage to the sites being visited.

There are plenty of things you can do, of course. There’s the famous “Take only photos, leave only footprints,” mantra, there’s ecotourism, and there’s political involvement. But on a more personal level, how should you travel if you want to travel with the lowest possible carbon emissions?

The obvious answer is to travel by your own power. This could mean walking, biking, kayaking, paddleboating, skateboarding, scootering, or pretty much any other form of travel that doesn’t involve an engine. You could sail, or you could put together a skiff like Huck Finn and only visit places that are downriver. In a lot of cases, like international travel, these aren’t practical. Here’s how to travel with the lowest carbon emissions possible while still using an engine.

How to get there greener

Back in 2008, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) put together a guide titled Getting There Greener. It basically took apart each mode of travel and calculated its total carbon emissions over certain distances. The answer isn’t as cut-and-dry as you might suspect — there are three main factors you need to consider when you’re calculating total carbon emissions for your trip.

The first is the distance you’re traveling, as some options become more efficient and more reasonable over longer distances. For example, planes tend to be big carbon emitters. But if you’re traveling a distance of a thousand miles, the plane is going to be running for about two hours while a car could be running for 15 to 20.

The second thing you have to consider is how many people are traveling with you. If you’re traveling in a car and you have two people instead of one, you’ve already cut your collective carbon emissions in half. If you’re traveling on a plane, you’re splitting those emissions with anywhere from a few dozen to a few hundred other people. But if you’re in first class, you’re taking up more space on that plane — space that could seat another passenger.

The worst modes of travel

Unsurprisingly, the worst mode of travel is first-class airplane travel. This is because of the high emissions of the plane and because of the space you’re taking up. That said, if you’re traveling on your own and are traveling more than 500 miles, the worst way to travel is by SUV. SUVs are huge polluters, but this doesn’t mean that in some situations they aren’t a viable option — if you’ve got a family of four or more, an SUV comes in the middle of the pack for efficiency.

But flying first class is always a mistake, and is never recommended by the UCS. If you can, book your trip on an all-economy flight, and fly direct whenever possible. If you have to make a connection, still try and travel in as straight a line as possible.

For one person going long distances, even the average car is a big polluter. Back during World War II, US propaganda attempted to convince Americans to carpool to save on fuel. The famous tagline was “WHEN YOU DRIVE ALONE, YOU DRIVE WITH HITLER!” A little heavy-handed, yeah, but now we could just as easily say, “WHEN YOU DRIVE ALONE, YOU DRIVE WITH MASS EXTINCTION!”

In short: When it comes to cars, carpool whenever you can.

The best modes of travel

It turns out there’s a single answer to this in literally every scenario: If you can’t bike where you’re going, take a motor coach. Every time. This is especially good news for budget travelers, because in the absence of a solid public transportation system in America, we’ve seen an influx of budget bus companies like Megabus and BoltBus. These are not only some of the cheapest modes of travel, but they’re universally the best. And, hey, free wifi!

The reason is that, while buses use a lot of gas, you’re usually splitting it with a couple dozen people, and that dilutes the emissions more than any other form of travel. So take the Megabus if you can.

If buses aren’t your thing, the next best option is usually to take the train. Trains have way more in the way of carbon emissions than motor coaches, but they also split them among hundreds of passengers. The Northeast United States is the best place to take trains because there’s more of them here, and many run on electricity rather than diesel.

If you’re traveling with a family of four, though, it turns out the second-best mode of travel is actually taking a road trip in a typical car, and if there’s just one or two of you traveling, and you’re going a long distance, the second-best way is to fly economy.

A few more tips

The UCS did a full chart of travel modes by rank. They also provided some useful tips as well. If you’re traveling by car, for example, try to travel when there’s little or no traffic, as traffic increases your emissions. And obviously, if you travel with a hybrid, an electric car, or at least a car with very high fuel efficiency, you’ll be doing a lot to lower that carbon footprint.

Do your research before traveling. You can still see the world and keep your carbon footprint to a minimum.

This article was originally published on the Matador Network. Photo:Thorsten Koch

5 ways to be a greener traveler

1. Travel slow.

The slow travel movement was started somewhat separately from just trying to reduce environmental impact. It was initially an attempt by travelers to more fully immerse themselves in the places they were traveling by spending more time in a place and allowing themselves to get to know the people and culture, rather than flying in, ticking items off a tourist to-do list, and then flying out. But as it turns out, slow travel is pretty compatible with ecotourism.

By moving slowly and intentionally, you’re likely to spend less time on forms of transport that emit a lot of pollution and greenhouse gases. You may even choose to bike or walk from place to place, if you have light enough luggage. And ultimately, human-powered means of travel are the most environmentally friendly ways of getting around.

2. Know the traveler’s hierarchy of carbon emissions.

If you have to travel in a way that leaves a carbon footprint, try to keep it as small as possible. The Union of Concerned Scientists put together a handy guide for the best way of doing that, and while the best method of getting from place to place changes depending on the number of people you’re traveling with and the distance you’re going, there are some basic rules you can follow.

First, the worst way to travel is almost always by airplane in first class. You’re taking up a lot of space on that plane, and the plane is spewing a lot of bad stuff into the atmosphere. Second, the best way to travel in pretty much all of the scenarios is to take a motor coach. Yes, buses have carbon emissions, but you’re sharing those emissions with dozens of other people. Third, if you have to drive, carpool, and always drive in the most fuel-efficient cars possible. Check out the other tips and travel methods here.

3. “Take only photos, leave only footprints.”

This aphorism changes depending on what you’re doing — for scuba divers, it’s “Take only photos, leave only bubbles” — but the basic sentiment remains the same. The rule is usually geared towards people taking part in outdoor activities, and basically means, “Hey asshole, don’t leave your plastic water bottle in the woods in Yellowstone.” But it can just as easily apply in cities. You should still try to recycle as much as possible, and you should still never litter.

4. Use water like there’s a finite amount of it.

Peak water is a thing, and it turns out those of us living in the developed world use a lot of it unnecessarily. It’s estimated that the minimum amount of water needed for drinking, cooking, bathing, and sanitation per person per day is 13 gallons. The average person in the US uses between 65 and 78 gallons. Honestly, this is an average you should try to work down a bit in your daily life even if you’re nottraveling, but it’s important to remember while traveling, too, especially if you’re in a country that struggles with water scarcity.

Most of the ways of doing this are fairly simple. Follow the “If it’s yellow, let it mellow” rule in your hotel or hostel, make sure the hotel doesn’t wash your towel every day, turn off the water in the shower when you’re not rinsing off, turn off the water while you brush your teeth, and so on. For more tips on how to conserve when you travel, check out this post at The Frog Blog.

5. Do your research before you leave.

If you’re planning a short trip or an excursion, make sure you read up on the places you’re going ahead of time. Does that dive shop take care of the local reefs? Is that hotel a known polluter? Is there a way I can give back to the community I’m visiting while I’m there?

Keep in mind that just because something claims to be “ecotourism” doesn’t mean it’s actually helping the environment. Ecotourism is still a niche of tourism, and some less scrupulous tour operators will use the label to pull in well-meaning tourists. You should also keep in mind that many of the ecosystems you travel to may be quite fragile, and that your desire to “get out into nature” and having a low impact on the environment around you may not coincide.

For example, if you were to travel to a national park, you may want to leave the trail to get away from any trace of humankind. But there may be an environmental reason the trail goes through one section of the park and not the other. Know the rules and then follow them when you go.

This article was first published on the Matador Network. Photo:Kyle

Meet the woman who swims with Great White Sharks

GREAT WHITE SHARKS are on the brink of extinction, and Ocean Ramsey is doing something about it: She’s swimming with them. Ramsey, a professional scuba instructor, marine biologist, conservationist, model, surfer, and free diver — I definitely just got winded typing out that resume — has been bringing attention to the plight of great whites and other sharks by getting out of her shark cage and swimming with them.

This culminated recently with an incredible video Ramsey shot with a GoPro:

She has now swum with 32 different shark species, including the great white, and she says she’s doing it to try and dispel the myth that sharks are “killing machines,” a myth that has been lazily propagated by the media and pop culture ever since the movie Jaws.

“In truth,” she writes on her website, WaterInspired.com, “sharks are intelligent, calculated and generally very cautious about approaching humans. More importantly, sharks play a vital role in maintaining a healthy ocean ecosystem. Many people are unaware that sharks are being over-fished to the point of extinction. As the Senegalese environmentalist Baba Dioum said, ‘In the end people will only protect what they love, and only love what they understand…’”

Photo: Ocean Ramsey

Great whites are apex predators, which means they’re at the top of their food chain and have virtually no natural predators of their own. Apex predators are absolutely crucial to the stability of their environment.

For example, when Yellowstone National Park recently reintroduced wolves — the habitat’s natural apex predator — into the wild, the effects were astonishing: Not only did it bring some measure of balance back to the ecosystem, but it increased biodiversity, helped trees grow taller, and even changed the course of the rivers.

So it follows that the loss of apex predators such as wolves or great white sharks can be absolutely catastrophic to their environment. But that doesn’t stop us from killing them in absolutely staggering numbers — somewhere between 23 million and 200 million sharks a year are killed in the senseless and inhumane act of finning, where fishermen catch a shark, cut off its fin for shark fin soup, and then just dump the animal back into the ocean to die.

Which species, again, is the killing machine?

Photo: Ocean Ramsey

Sharks kill an average 11 humans per year, while we kill around 11,417 sharks per hour. “There are estimated to be less than 400 white sharks in the North Pacific and less than 3,500 great white sharks left worldwide,” Ramsey writes.

“More than eighteen million people die from starvation and 1.2 million from car accidents. Crocodiles kill more than 2,500 people per year, and even they are protected in many areas. The world offers little to no protection for sharks. Sharks are vital to the oceans and planet. They need and deserve to be protected.”

Photo: Ocean Ramsey

This isn’t to say you should go for a swim the next time you see a shark, as Ramsey explains: “I’m not advising that people go out and just jump into the water with white sharks or tigers or other large species, just as I wouldn’t recommend jumping into a yard with a strange dog. Sharks do need to be respected as wild animals and appreciated for their role as top predators in the ocean ecosystem.

“My shark experiences have all been positive in part because, while I know sharks are not mindless man-eaters, I simultaneously have respect for their capabilities, a lot of experience interacting with animals and reading body language, behavior, and I am comfortable with my own water abilities while also trusting my dive partner.”

Photo: Ocean Ramsey

If you’d like to help in this cause, first: Don’t eat shark fin soup in your travels. It’s brutal and unsustainable. Second, Ocean Ramsey’s site has provided a ton of awesome petitions you can sign to help, and a bunch of projects and charities you can donate to.

This article was originally published on the Matador Network.

6 ways to be a better global citizen in 2014

ONE OF THE side effects of international travel is that you lose the luxury of thinking of yourself only as the citizen of your hometown or country. Unless you cloister yourself in a walled resort, you’re going to come into contact with citizens of other countries and places, and you’re suddenly going to realize how closely your lives are linked — your politics, your economies, your environment.

Becoming a good global citizen is a difficult thing to do, and it can be incredibly overwhelming if you’re confronting your place in the world for the first time. Here are some easy things you can do in 2014 to make yourself a better global citizen.

1. Learn about the stuff you buy.

Look, for the time being, we live in a capitalist’s world. We’re not getting rid of consumerism and rapacious free markets any time soon. But as a relatively affluent member of a relatively affluent country, you have the ability to buy your food, clothes, and gadgets not because they are cheap, but because they are ethical. Of course, it’s insanely difficult to be a totally ethical consumer: Should I eat meat? How do I find locally made gym shoes? Does the company that makes my Extra Virgin Olive Oil actively campaign against gay rights? Does my bubble tea company pay its employees a living wage?

And so on. There are some things you just can’t buy ethically, and to some extent, you’re probably going to fail in your effort to be a conscious consumer. But here’s one hugely positive step you can take: Get out your smartphone — yes, the one made with conflict minerals — and download the Buycott app. Buycott allows you to join user-created campaigns that you believe in, like “Campaign for Ecological Responsibility” or “Say No to Monsanto” or “Equality for LGBTQ.” Next, take your phone into your pantry, closet, or fridge and start scanning your products’ barcodes. Buycott will tell you — based on your campaigns — which of your products are ethically made, and which aren’t.

You may not be able to buy everything ethically, but you can certainly start.

2. Travel sustainably.

Unfortunately, travel can leave a pretty huge carbon footprint if you’re not careful. So how can you get from Point A to Point B without poisoning the lungs of your great-great grandchildren? If you have the time, try traveling by bike, or walking, or kayaking, or sailing, but if you need to be moving a little faster than that, check this out: The Union of Concerned Scientists put together a guide a few years back for traveling green. Turns out, the best way is one of the cheapest: Take a motor coach. You can see the best travel methods ranked here (they depend on the number of people you’re traveling with and the distance you’re going), but the worst ways to travel are to fly first class or drive in an SUV.

There are a ton of other ways to travel more sustainably. National Geographic has a set of tips, as does Conservation.org. The basic rule, though, is to just do your research, and don’t be a dick.

3. Volunteer locally.

The popular maxim is “Think Globally, Act Locally.” If you’re trying to help make a better world, the best place to start is in your own little corner. One way to do that is to volunteer. If you’re at all like me, you always mean to but never quite get around to it. Here are a few resources to help you get over that hurdle.

The first is VolunteerMatch. Punch in your location, your email, and the causes you’re interested in, and each week they’ll send you a newsletter with opportunities nearby that you can sign up for. Another similar site is Idealist.org, which can do the same but with jobs as well as volunteer opportunities.

4. Donate, but donate smart.

Philanthropy is important to being a good global citizen, but it’s far from the most important thing you can do, and is also one of the most fraught decisions you can make. You may have read the excellent Three Cups of Tea a few years back, about an American named Greg Mortenson who built schools for girls in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It was an awesome story, so naturally a ton of people rushed to donate to Mortenson’s charity, the Central Asia Institute. Problem was, a lot of Mortenson’s story was a lie, and his charity was horribly managed. So if you donated money, it likely wasn’t going towards building those schools.

How can you know which charity to trust? Fortunately, there are a number of sites that do this work for us. The first is The Life You Can Save, an organization founded by philosopher Peter Singer that’s focused on giving your charity money the most bang for its buck. Very few charities meet their very high standards, but they hope to add to their list over time.

Another site to check out is Zidisha, a microlending site. You’ve probably by now heard of Kiva, the more famous microlending site that allows you to lend money to causes and small businesses around the developing world. Zidisha is similar but cuts out intermediary institutions, making it more of a peer-to-peer website than Kiva. Zidisha also has a much lower interest rate for borrowers, which is important for those that worry that microlending simply puts the borrowers into serious debt. Kiva, on the other hand, has a slightly higher repayment rate. Since this is, in fact, lending and not giving, you could theoretically use the same $25 over and over again endlessly, and support countless small businesses in the developing world.

For a full breakdown of the differences between Kiva and Zidisha, check out this article.

5. Read everything you possibly can.

This sounds simple, but one of the best ways to engage with your world is to read everything you possibly can. If you aren’t a big reader, start listening to podcasts. If you’re a more visual person, start watching the news. If you aren’t a big TV person, try comics journalism. Seriously — it’s a thing, and it’s incredible.

The point is that, to a critical reader — a reader who’s skeptical of the source and its bias and engages with the material instead of accepting it — nothing is harmful. Not even bullshit-heavy conservative mouthpieces like Fox News. And this isn’t even limited to nonfiction — there’s no shortage of thought-provoking fictional material out there. The goal, with your reading, is to get yourself thinking in different ways and to be more engaged in the world around you. To find new stuff, check out Goodreads, TasteKid, and Shelfari.

6. Get involved in politics.

Volunteering is great, but at the end of the day a lot of the problems with the world are systemic, and volunteering is usually focused on a more personal level. Fortunately, most of the people reading this page right now are probably in democratic countries, where there are plenty of avenues to legally make a difference in the political system.

Getting involved in politics can mean any number of things (and don’t believe the assholes who tell you democracy ends at the voting booth, and that if you don’t vote, you don’t have the right to complain). The quickest way is to start letting your representative know what you think about the issues that are important to you. If you’re in America, here’s a tool to find your Congressperson’s Twitter account. Here’s how to find their email. Trust me — someone’s at least gonna glance at your missive.

If you don’t like your representative, campaign for their rival. The New Organizing Institute is a great organization with a ton of awesome resources designed to help you organize for political campaigns. You can also, on a lower level, give to campaigns you approve of. It may sound boring, but politicians do operate on money, and they do need your money just as much as they need your time.

Finally, if you belong more to the “We Shall Overcome” crowd, Lifehacker put together a great guide on how to safely protest, the law blog LegalFish did a piece on how to legally protest, and the Economist explains why, if you’re going to break the law protesting, you should do it peacefully.

This article was originally published on the Matador Network. Photo: Stallkerl

Why I don't take photos when I travel

THE MOTHER GIRAFFE reached to the top of the tree, pulled off a leafy branch, and then bent down to give it to her child. We sat dead silent in the armored Jeep about 40 yards away. I had “The Circle of Life” playing in my head, and was trying desperately hard to not burst out with “NAAAAAAAAAHHHHH SEVENYAAAAAAH! NABABEECHEEBABABA!” and thus prove myself the biggest asshole on the safari.

I was saved this embarrassment by the woman who leaned over to the driver and said, “Um, excuse me? Can we move along? We’ve already seen a bunch of giraffes.” The Jeep started, the giraffe ambled off, and we drove on in search of more interesting wildlife.

South African safaris involve less meaningless animal killing than they did in Hemingway’s day, but they are still basically the same: You are driven around the reserve by knowledgeable guides, who lead you to all of the places the animals like to hang out, and then when you see them, you shoot them. The only difference is it’s a camera doing the shooting. They even have held on to the tradition of hunting the fabled “Big Five,” the five animals that were traditionally the toughest to hunt and kill (the lion, the elephant, the black rhino, the cape buffalo, and the leopard), and are now, for whatever reason, the most exciting to see. A trip isn’t complete if you haven’t seen the “Big Five.”

I had been in South Africa’s Kruger National Park for about three days, and while I told myself I was there to witness nature’s majesty or some other weak shit, I was really there to pollute my Facebook feed with pictures of the “Big Five,” thus making my friends at home (the ones who hadn’t sunk 17 grand into an around-the-world study-abroad program) insanely jealous. The trip had been a wild success. I was getting so many likes.

So when the woman asked if we could move on from the giraffe, my first thought was, “Yeah, fuck this shit, I’ve got three hours of safari left and I still haven’t seen a leopard.” Four out of five was ridiculous. It simply would not do.

Then, an image popped into my head: the heads of a lion, an elephant, a rhino, and a cape buffalo mounted on my wall, with an empty mahogany plaque just beyond them. A brass plate on the empty plaque read, “Leopard,” and I sat across the room in a smoking jacket and a monocle, lamenting my failure to obtain the final trophy.

“Hoo boy,” I thought. “That’s not okay.” I tucked my camera in my bag and didn’t pull it back out for the rest of my visit.

My desire for souvenirs, trophies, and general documentation that I am an interesting person has long gotten in the way of actual travel for me. As a kid, I collected rocks, keychains, bottle openers, and t-shirts so I could show off my vacations to friends. When my parents bought me a camera, the souvenirs became photos. The problem was that photos required much more of my attention during the traveling itself, and I found that when I got home, the images in the photo had replaced the images in my memory. Photography allowed me to experience travel later, and not be present to it now.

Now, when I travel, I only take pictures when my parents’ emails become excessively hostile about the lack of photographic proof of my travels. I write instead. It’s impossible to write about something you’re distracted from. It’s why the literature on the experience of tying your shoes is so pathetically thin. When I started writing, my traveling instantly got better. My stories instantly got better. My memories became clearer. I no longer had the false memory of the photograph to fall back on.

Good photographers, of course, are fully present on their travels. They notice small details, and that’s what makes their photos so damn good. But most travel photographers are more along the lines of the parents in that atrocious Nokia Lumia commercial, which shows them fighting over getting the best smartphone view of their child’s recital, instead of just watching their kid perform like a decent fucking parent.

If you’re a good photographer, by all means, keep taking pictures. I need something to fuel my nostalgia addiction when I’m trapped in my cubicle at work. But if you’re not a great photographer, put down the camera. Enjoy the giraffe.

This article was originally published on the Matador Network. Photo: Rohit Gawaikar

Living on "the worst street in London" in the shadow of the Ripper

About a year before I moved to London, I read Alan Moore’s graphic novel, From Hell, a fictionalized account of the Jack the Ripper killings in Victorian England.  The book was probably one of the most stunning works of fiction I’d ever come into contact with.  At times a left-wing conspiracy theory implicating Queen Victoria and the Freemasons in the murders, at times times a rumination on the century that followed the Whitechapel Murders, and at times a depiction of the history contained in the stones of London, I finished it and found that it had given me nightmares – a thing I hadn’t experienced in over a decade.

Then, around a month after I finished the book, as I was planning to move to London to get my master’s from the LSE, I was offered a room in Lilian Knowles House, a graduate student dormitory in the East End of London.

Lilian Knowles House sits on Crispin Street. Running perpendicular to Crispin street is an unnamed alley.  This alley – where you see the Parking sign and the Dallas News – used to be Dorset Street, which was widely known as “The Worst Street in London,” and inspired Jack London to write his book People of the Abyss.

The little indentation in the roof of that building would be approximately where Miller’s Court used to be, which was the site of the final Jack the Ripper murder – that of Mary Jane Kelly (whose throat was cut and then, since the Ripper had some privacy, was chopped to pieces).

Miller’s Court is gone, but the Providence Row Night Refuge and Convent – a place where Mary Jane Kelly once worked and many men, women, and children stayed a night when they had nowhere else to go – still exists.  Now it’s a dorm for the London School of Economics, called Lilian Knowles.

The door that used to be the women’s entrance…

Via

…had become my kitchen window.

Via

Some of us were mildly excited to live on such an infamous street, and the guy who put together the Facebook group for our building dubbed us “The Rippers.”  Then we moved in and found that “Ripper Tours” were walked passed our kitchen window every single day.  The tourists would stand there and take pictures of the “Women” sign, which happened to be just above my stove.

So every day around dinner time, a campily dressed, top-hatted tour guide would stop beneath our kitchen window and say, “Back in Jack’s day, this was where the poorest of the poor used to live.  Now, it’s student housing.  Some things never change.”

“Haha!” the crowd would say.

“I should’ve worn fucking pants into the kitchen,” I would say.

I never took the Ripper tour myself, which was maybe an oversight, but I had other things to do, like study and drink.  I’ve also never been the morbid type.  Even Law & Order is a bit much for me.  Like, I’m into horror as long as it’s the campfire kind, and not the “hey, look at this lady who was chopped into a billion pieces.”

I left London almost a year ago, and in a bizarre fit of nostalgia a couple weeks ago, I bought From Hell for my graphic novel collection (12 books and counting!) in the hope that at some point, I would glimpse the Providence Row Night Refuge, or at least see it mentioned in the appendices.  It wasn’t, though there were a few times I thought I saw what could possibly have been the fence along the front of it.

One of my favorite parts about living in London was that it felt like history was in every stone.  “Oh, Oscar Wilde used to hang out at this pub,” or  “This is where Karl Marx used to drink,” or  “Jack the Ripper stalked his victims in the Ten Bells,”  (Most of British history involves pubs).  But the neighborhood I was living in was not the same neighborhood it had been 125 years before I arrived.  It has become posh and gentrified, no longer a street renowned for it’s near-constant murders and bar fights.  Around when I was leaving Keira Knightley was  moving into the neighborhood.  Just a few decades earlier, she wouldn’t have gone there for fear of being mugged.

We’ve become detached from our history.  It has been sanitized and cleaned up in nearly every regard.  In Britain, it’s a place where we can tour the sites of horrific murders and feel a pang of nostalgia.

In the U.S., we view people like Robert E. Lee and Thomas Jefferson as heroes, and we are willing to ignore their mistakes.  We gloss over slavery, the American Indian genocide, or our current exploitation of immigrants and sweatshop workers across the world, and say – constantly, incessantly, abhorrently – on the floors of Congress that we are the “greatest nation on earth.”

Americans don’t even like to remember their history.  I can’t trace my family much further back than my grandparents.  The idea is that we’re here now, and that’s all that matters.  But there are consequences to not being able to recall a time before the automobile.  There are consequences to history being that clean.

You can’t clean up Jack the Ripper.

During the Mary Kelly murder scene in From Hell, as Jack the Ripper is tearing apart her corpse, he starts to hallucinate.  He suddenly finds himself transported to an office in the 1980’s, and as he looks around at the people around him, he says:

Your days were born in blood and fires, whereof in you I may not see the meanest spark!

Your past is pain and iron!

Know yourselves!

With all your shimmering numbers and your lights, think not to be inured to history. Its black root succours you. It is INSIDE you. Are you asleep to it, that cannot feel its breath upon your neck, nor see what soaks in its cuffs?

See me! Wake up and look upon me! I am come among amongst you. I am with you always!

Victory in Europe: Can a war be just?

Today was Victory in Europe Day, or VE Day, which is when the Allied forces finally defeated the Germans in World War II.  I spent my day, rather fittingly, touring the beaches of Normandy, where the Allied invasion of France – the one that resulted, ultimately, in the defeat of the Nazis – began.

I have the same basic feelings about war as I have about getting my asshole waxed.  I don’t really want the experience, but I want to see what it feels like afterwards.  I usually think of myself as a lovable coward, but it’s hard to know what I’m really like in extreme situations because I generally go out of my way to avoid them.

But today, I stood at the edge of the tide on Omaha Beach.  The beach is shallow, so while at high tide, the waterline is up by the dunes, at low tide, it’s several hundred yards out.  That space is flat and featureless, and on the hills above, you can see the cement remains of gun pillboxes pointing down at the beach.  Those pillboxes would be a very good place to shoot little pieces of hot metal out of in a menacing manner.

Standing at the edge of the tide, I thought, “Yup, I’m a coward.”  Throughout the day, me and my Dad would trade facts we knew about D-Day, and the rest of my family and I had long discussions about the nature of war, whether a war could be just, and where, possibly, they might sell good cheese sandwiches.

Part of me wished that, while I was standing on the beach, I could slip through a wormhole and onto that beachhead nearly 70 years ago, under (and possibly on) fire.  I’d like to see if I would shit my pants.  I’m pretty sure I would, even allowing for a moment of orientation after my time travel.

I’ve thought excessively about war, and about what causes I’d be willing to fight and die for.  I would not be willing to fight and die blindly for my country, as the title of my blog might suggest.  I do have a lifelong love of supporting underdogs, though, so I can see myself as being quite amenable to fighting fascists to the death.  Whether I could do so without soiling my pants is another matter.

Another thing I noticed about Normandy was that most of the American graves were crosses, except for the few with the Star of David.  There weren’t any other types of graves, which I’d assume accounted for the general lack of Muslims in the armed forces at the time, but I was expecting a few non-crosses, non-stars for the nonbelievers.  There HAD to be some killed at Normandy.  If it were only Christians and Jews killed in World War II, if all the atheists got off the hook, I would think it would sow a bit more doubt into the hearts of the believers.

My point is that the assumption that they died for their country – as the memorials all said – seemed a bit presumptuous.  I wouldn’t die for my country, but I’d fight with it if it were fighting fascists thugs, if I believed it was going to do the fight right.  And why wouldn’t that earn me my own type of tombstone?

Normandy is beautiful, for those who are thinking of coming.  If you go with your family, you can talk about war one moment and then giggle about how your little sister actually says “Hiccup” when she hiccups, and how your Mom, despite the fact that she is over half a century old, still cannot even think of the word “fart” without laughing.

It’s pleasant.

Happy Victory in Europe day, everyone.  Here’s to the memory of the people who fought for reasons we know nothing about.  Here’s to the memory of the people who died for reasons we know even less about.  Here’s to fighting fascists.

“What shall we drink to, sir?”

“Down with Hitler.”

“All the way down, sir.”

A very political diagram about miracle babies that went off the rails

I've always been annoyed when people call babies "miracles." Not because I'm anti-baby, but because I think we should maybe push our standards a little higher for what we consider "miracles." So I decided to make a Venn Diagram about it. But this is when I was really obsessed with Battlestar Galactica... so it kinda went off the rails.

Apparently, I was a big fan of every-word capitalization at the time, too.