Musings: Departmentalized

Koko and I stepped out this morning into a world filled with the sounds of surf roaring in the distance, birds warbling, tweeting and chirping and the steady plop, plop of spent rain drops falling from leaf to leaf.

Walking down the road, in a landscape washed clean by another night of rain, we rounded a bend and Makaleha came into view, three waterfalls coursing down her face. Waialeale, unfortunately, had none, and her cloud-shrouded summit appeared to be a boiling cauldron, salmon-colored, swirling.

The sun rose and the clouds gradually shifted and lifted, causing the mountain to go through a shape shift that held me mesmerized as her craggy slopes turned golden, then green, and her flat top appeared as numerous jagged peaks. Can there be anything more beautiful than a dawn unveiling of Waialeale?

As usual, there’s a lot of crap and human drama going down in the world, but in the good news department is the partial lunar eclipse that starts late tonight and continues on into tomorrow morning. It’s worth staying up — or in my case, getting up — to check out the show.

Moving on to the WTF are we doing to the planet — and ourselves in the process — department, there’s this story on the toxic load now being carried by sperm whales. Five years of research billed as the most comprehensive report ever conducted on ocean pollutants shows the whales have alarmingly high levels of cadmium, aluminum, chromium, lead, silver, mercury and titanium.

"The entire ocean life is just loaded with a series of contaminants, most of which have been released by human beings," [Ocean Alliance founder Roger] Payne said in an interview on the sidelines of the International Whaling Commission's annual meeting.

The consequences of the metals could be horrific for both whale and man, he said.

"I don't see any future for whale species except extinction," Payne said. "This is not on anybody's radar, no government's radar anywhere, and I think it should be."

Sperm whales, like us, are at the top of the food chain. We’re also being loaded up with heavy metals, even if we aren’t eating fish, and a number of physicians I’ve spoken with say heavy metal bioaccumulation, which wreaks havoc on the nervous, digestive and immune systems, is at the core of many chronic health problems people are suffering from today.

Moving on to the “fight the power” department, we’ve got Canada spending at least $1 billion on security alone for this weekend's G8/G20 meetings. Doesn’t it strike you that something is seriously wrong when they’re trotting out 19,000 security personnel armed with water and noise cannons, as well as the usual guns, to protect 20 world leaders as they plot ways to continue the domination of their destructive imperialistic, capitalistic, materialistic system?

I guess it’s because, as this video so vividly points out, “they few, we many.”

Segueing over to the growing military/police state department, the U.S. is stepping up its use of unmanned Predator drones — typically used to kill people by remote control in Pakistan and Afghanistan — here at home. Plans call for adding another two to the Mexican border at Texas and, what struck me as interesting, “nearby areas in the Gulf of Mexico.” Do you suppose Homeland Security dmight be worried about the prospect of civil unrest as the fallout from the oil spew is increasingly felt by humans?

As Time magazine noted:

[Suicide victim William Allen] Kruse may be the first casualty of the oil spill itself, but he is not likely to be the last as the accident continues to affect the bodies and psyches of Gulf Coast residents. "These are people in a serious crisis," says Dr. Irwin Redlener, president of the Children's Health Fund and director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University. "They're at ground zero of a catastrophe."

Continuing on to the callous and unfeeling department, the well-paid, fully insured, perk-laden members of Congress continue to bicker over legislation aimed at extending unemployment benefits. Meanwhile, more than 1.2 million people out of work for more than six months are being left to twist in the wind, wondering how they're going to keep food in their stomachs, a roof over their heads.

But hey, no worries, Uncle Sam is hiring. In just a few months of on-line training, the unemployed could be working for Homeland Security.

Or, minus any training, putting their lives and health on the line cleaning up BP’s mess in the Gulf.

Or maybe they might just start to understand what’s fueling the resistance in Toronto.

Another world is possible.....