It seems oddly appropriate that today, Labor Day, I have decided to talk about phenology. That being, of course, the study of seasonal change. It includes global warming, climate change and our current bleak situation and unsatisfactory efforts as stewards of the plant Earth.
I will confess at this stage in today’s narrative that I live on an island. I live very close to the water. I can step outside of what the author calls my dooryard, skip a couple of dozen steps down a gentle embankment and comb the beach. I do this often. That is the good new, the not-so-good is that on the other side of the Port Orchard Bay, is a military base, specifically a Naval Undersea Warfare Center at Keyport. Combining the study of penology with a US Navy facility tasked with underwater demolition one has to ask:
WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?
On Tuesday as I went about my self-assigned banal duties of preventative maintenance (a skill I developed working on a US Naval Facility), I started to hear odd noises. In the summer I keep the red french doors leading to the deck, and then Puget Sound, as wide open as their rusty hinges will allow. On most days I listen to the peaceful gulls, the occasional grey heron, ducks, geese and eaglets. All singing a delightful melody to the accompaniment of the wind keeping perfect time pushing waves onto the rocky shore like a drum machine. Motor boats signal red right returning as a light show and last week the fog was replaced with smoke. It is altogether fantastic. The odd noises were from helicopters and emergency marine vessels, aka Zodiacs. Seems that a WWII era marine mine had mysteriously drifted into the channel, floating with intimidating yellow antennas, carrying what seemed like 70 years of seaweed and barnacles. To say that the shit was hitting the fan would be an insult to one of our most natural bodily functions.
The Navy’s official response was, of course, vanilla, bland and full of traditional weasel wording and PR doublespeak. Something about the mine being ‘lost’ during a 2005 exercise and definitely NOT from the days when we guarded these strategic waterways from the Japanese subs send to kill us. I later learned that the scuttlebutt at the base suggested that the exercise’s budget allowed for the commencement of the drill, but not for the clean up.
And hence the completion of the full circle.
I will spare you (today) my very left-leaning dovish ideologies of war, the war machine, the military industrial complex and the global damage they do. You know as well as I that it isn’t about freedom, peace or democracy anymore. You know what it means when we (The US) says that we have and maintain presences on foreign soil to protect our overseas investments? You know what translates into. You know what that means.
It means that it is OK to misplace mines, lose lives and as the latest audit shows, abuse 21 TRILLION dollars.
It also means that Labor Day, a day originally celebrated as a victory and a way to honor the backbone that made America, is now a joke on us. The people that Ike warned us about are killing us as collateral damage right alongside and along with our environment, for profit.
Oh well, on the bright side, the federal minimum wage is $7.75 per hour.
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