THIS HAS BEEN one of the worst years of my life. First the terrible decline and death of a close family member who I shared in the care of, my own health problems - right now it's just seasonal allergies, I hope. The alcoholism of some of my closest younger relatives has brought back the alcohol caused deaths of even closer relatives.
As bad as any of that, the terrible maple decline has hit my area all of a sudden, after a normal looking spring all of the large number of sugar maples around where I live, where I grew up are dying. I would be surprised if there are any alive in five years. It's impossible for me to imagine life without the trees I've seen almost every day my entire life and sugar maples being taken out of the forest canopy that I've lived with.
During my lifetime I've seen the elms die, the chestnuts, hemlocks, beech trees, and ashes, now the sugar maples. I doubt that the local extinction of tree species is over. The cost of global warming and the fetish of free trade is destroying the New England forests, the incalculable mere economic loss through the idiocy of economic ideology and political and, especially, legal corruption is enormous. We don't consider that cost to all of us for the profits of the millionaires and, more so, billionaires. They and their academic and lawyerly prostitutes, and more so, those in the goddamned "free press" have cost us too much to allow all of this to continue. They'll strip the Earth and it still won't be enough for them and the liars of the free press.
The spiritual cost is as real as it is indefinable.
That's why I more or less took this past week off. I've been in mourning but I think it's immoral for me to wallow in that, I'd rather fight and die doing that than give in. I hope Milton Friedman is rotting in hell, and I'm a universalist.
