Honor

     What a word, that.  It's everywhere, if you think about it: love, honor, and obey; his honor; medal of honor.  And yet, today's world seems to be taking more and more luster away from that word's meaning.  Think of how many times you've heard that introduction in Washington: ...the honorable blah-blah.  Really?  Be it a president or a Congressional rep or a justice, how much weight do you put into that "honor" part these days, especially when little qualification is needed for each position.  Basically one has to ask, what makes a politician "honorable?"  Or an ambassador.  Or a cabinet posting?  One only has to read through today's donor/loyal appointees and wonder, what makes them qualified.  And while earlier posts have brought up the topic of coroners and morticians (which is how Dr. Vincent di Maio made his living, so to speak), ghostwriter Ron Franscell noted that little to no training is required to be a coroner either, with many cities and rural areas often just electing their local sheriff or whoever chooses to run for that position (often the local mortician, who also has little to no medical training because only certain states require morticians to be licensed, so said in the book by Vincent Di Maio on being sort of a celebrity mortician (Michael Jackson, Trevon Williams, among others).  On the other hand, you do need extensive education to be certified as a medical examiner where all that education often gets you a starting salary of just $75 an hour in most states (hospitals will often pay those same examiners $325 per hour as a starting salary).  So ask yourself, after all that medical school and debt, would you rather work for the state or for a hospital?  Or just skip all that and become a coroner?  Please honor my grandmother's wishes, might be prefaced with the question, how qualified are you for doing this?  Is there no justice?  Maybe become a politician instead?...

     So, that was all a trick opening because while I did want to talk about justice, this was really about justices, as in becoming a judge.  What would you think is required for that, as in how trained must you be to actually decide what may be the rest of a life for the person in front of you?  Basically, a judge needs to have 5 years experience of practicing law, or a bit more in some states, and well...that's it.  That's all that's basically needed to sit high atop a bench and decide who will get custody of the kids in a divorce, who will get a disputed inheritance if the will looks a bit dodgy, if you'll go to prison even if you were just sitting in the car and had no idea that your friends had beat up some dude on the street.  Domestic violence training, or mental health training?  What about child or juvenile psychiatric training?  Uh, nope.  In many states, a governor (or president) simply appoints a judge, followed by a brief Q&A by some legislative folk and, done deal (or in some cases, voters need to check a box on a ballot).  Now step up onto the bench. Okay, it's often a bit more involved but basically, that is the requirement.  Curiously enough though, newly-appointed judges have mixed feelings about this as well. That was how retired judge Ledoris Cordell described her "intro" into residing as a judge, not knowing that there were shops that sell only judges' robes (different for men and women), and that small claims court (think Judge Judy reruns, since she's retired) has no lawyers and no jury (just a judge and the two plaintiffs).  Judges, like doctors, do have to do a rotation through the different parts of a court as well, experiencing a bit of criminal court as well as juvenile court, and have to deal with occasional mental issues such as deciding if you should be committed because someone (and their "expert" doctor) feels that you are off your rocker; or if your marriage should be voided because you're almost 80 and she's only 23 (and perhaps you are not leaving your kids anything in the will).  Cordell pointed out that judges tend to know "the law," but learning the nuances of an issue can be a bit more difficult, especially since most of their experience has come from being an attorney in front of a judge, whether as a prosecutor or a defense attorney (or an ambulance chaser).  But surprise, a judge must marry you for free since it's considered part of their "duty" (unless it happens to be on a weekend which is when a judge can charge you a fee).  But seriously, what about when someone really wants to commit you? (yes, asylums still exist)  As Cordell noted: Today, every state and the federal government have involuntary civil commitment laws with specific rules that govern when a person...is temporarily detained or in some cases confined or "conserved" for lengthy stays in locked psychiatric facilities.  And Cordell notes that in such mental health decisions, there once again are no juries...it is all up to the judge (who Cordell again notes, needs no mental health background training).   Quiz for you: is there a difference between being sent to jail and being sent to prison?; can attorneys ask for a completely new jury without cause?; is there such a thing as an executrix?; and do 97% of criminal prosecutions end without a trial?  The answer is yes to all of the above, and more.  But again, all that was yet another trick opening (dang attorneys...you can almost hear the bailiff yelling "order in the court"). 

     So, the wedding (what??).  One thing my wife and I tend to do is to peek at a video of our wedding every ten years or so, long enough to have us look back at who was or wasn't there (it was held in our backyard).  Our wedding was a grand affair said many of those who attended, or at least those still around.  It was casual and open, an all you could eat charcoal-grilled affair from a local restaurant, one which charged us just $900 for endless rounds of grilled ribeyes and chicken breasts, salad, bread, tableware, and their young staff to serve as much as the 80 attendees wanted (we provided beer, wine and champagne).  No tents, catering, or fancy invites (we made our one-sided invitations at a copy shop).  We were young(er) and broke but our guests seemed quite happy. TMI.  But when you peek back at anything after a few decades, one thing you tend to notice is just how many people are no longer living.  On this occasion, as I watched that video again, what else I happened to notice was all the people I had neglected during our gala: my parents and aunts, an old girlfriend and her family (who were once my heartfelt second family), my grade school and middle school friends (yes grade school!).  It is one of my regrets that I had clustered not around the people who knew me the longest and who actually shaped my life, but rather those from work, people I would see over and over in the coming years.  Neuroscientist Lisa Genova wrote that 97% of the memory of our experiences fade away over time.  Had I not seen that video again, I probably wouldn't have thought that I had done anything wrong.  But I did, that is, I did watch that video.  What I did not do was to do the honorable thing, which was to visit with those who likely loved me the most.  And yet, I think anything viewed decades later --your wedding day, perhaps even your life-- becomes a distant blur that sometimes points out those less than honorable decisions, things you would have done differently if you could go back, decisions you would have changed.  But as Don Henley sang: You better put it all behind you, 'cause life goes on...

     But there's another mother we may not be honoring, our planet.  Mother Earth.  Wrote Jason Dove Mark in his book, The Earth Said Remember Me: Daniel Pauly has said, "We transform the world but we don't remember it -- we adjust our baseline to the new level, and we don't recall what was there."  When memory fails, perspective falters.  If we mistake a grassy meadow empty of birds and bugs for a place bursting with life, it's because we lack a long enough frame of reference with which to understand what happened there.  "At the end, you want to 'sustain' miserable leftovers," Pauly warns.  Amnesia accommodates us to loss.  Over time, that accommodation can lead to acceptance -- which is the gateway to apathy.  We go from shock to shrug and then shrug to indifference.  And indifference is one of the worst things that could happen at this moment in time, this hinge of history, when the fate of Earth hangs, truly, in the balance.  Indifference is the gallows where collective action goes to die.  If we are to have any chance at protecting what remains of the living world, success will rest on our abilility to hold amnesia at bay.  To make any lasting progress in the efforts to repair, renew, revive, and rewild the planet, we'll have to relearn how to remember.

     This year, and for the first time, I blended a batch of pre-mixed wildflower and pollinator seeds into my soil beds on the side of our house.  I tend to just buy the already blooming potted flowers since my luck with "starting with seeds" is close to zero.  Bottom line, I didn't have many expectations, especially since these packets were on clearance at my local grocery store.  But bloom they did, flowers I was not expecting nor had any knowledge about, flowers I would not have "bought" on my own (I had already thrown out the bags which had all the info on them).  And bees, bugs, butterflies all arrived in droves, as in nearly 10x the normal number that those "store bought" flowers attract.  "Let them go to seed," I remember the packets saying, and suddenly birds were clinging to the dried pods, plucking out seeds I couldn't even see.  Soon I moved to my sidewalk strip, trimming the sides but leaving the grassy center alone, giving it a "mohawk hairstyle" look (yes, neighbors did ask), and the grass in the center grew and grew and went to seed, and birds began appearing there.  Perhaps more interesting, the strip now needed less and less water.  Around me, my neighbors cut their lawns to golf-course grade, applied fertilizer, and watered what seemed constantly.  All of that came to a screeching halt on my end (although we've never used fertilizer, once reading that it stops pollinators from visiting).  I had watched the Earth take care of itself.

    Continued author Mark: The passenger pigeon, the chestnut tree, and bison by the million once defined the American landscape, but they're long gone -- and by now that's seemingly how it's always been.  The absence just feels normal.  Think about how difficult it can be to recall exactly what the farm country looked like before the sprawling suburbs shoveled it under.  Baby boomers remember that they paved paradise and put up a parking lot; their Gen Z grandkids have only ever known the parking lot...what was at first freakish becomes, over time, tediously familiar.  Weather that we might once have considered strange and scary soon slips into the stream of grinding routine.  The "new normal" becomes simply normal -- until it winds up old hat...And as "normal" becomes an anachronism, so does "extreme."  We risk getting used to extremes --the heat domes, the droughts, the brutal rainstorms-- because we'll come to think of them as unexceptional.  Eventually, "record-breaking" sounds like a broken record...More than half of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions have occurred in just the last thirty-five years.  The hottest year on record was 2024, beating out the runner-up, which was 2023 [WHO reported that 2023-2025 were the three hottest years recorded].  Half --HALF-- of all plastics ever made have been produced just since 2000.  In my lifetime, some three billion birds have disappeared from North America.  Globally, the population numbers of wild species have collapsed by roughly 70 percent since I was born half a century ago.  Between 2010 and 2019 alone, at least 160 species were wiped off the planet forever.  Among them were the Pinta Island tortoise, the lesser stick-nest rat, the Bermuda hawk.  Once annihilated, they were largely unmourned.  Forgetting marks the final stage of extinction.

Early clear cutting in Olympic National Forest

      Test your own adaptations about how quickly what once shocked you now seems almost normal: Ukraine, Gaza, Covid, gas prices, clear cutting the Amazon, affordable care, interest rates, Somalia.  Wait, Somalia?  Turns out that Somalia just doesn't seem newsworthy these days (did it ever?) unless the news mentions all those refugees "invading" the shores of countries.  Yet behind the scenes (and largely unreported), the US continues to bomb Somalia.  Wrote the LRB: Over the past twenty months, the US has launched airstrikes in Somalia using MQ-9 Reaper drones and sometimes manned aircraft at an average rate of more than twice a week...the current air campaign is larger than at any time during the war on terror.  In his eight years as president, Obama ordered 48 airstrikes on Somalia.  During Trump’s first term there were 219.  Biden ordered 51.  Since the start of Trump’s second term in 2025 there have already been more than two hundred.  In addition (and again largely unreported) STAT reported that those losing their health benefits: ...include refugees of war, asylees who fled persecution, victims of sex trafficking, and interpreters who risked their lives assisting U.S. service members in Afghanistan.  All of them reside in the U.S. with federal government permission (emphasis mine since all the above with benefits are legal immigrants).  And I was touched by another story in the London Review about a former employee and worker at Yosemite who actually grew up in Yosemite Valley, who saw an exhibition sign in Washington, DC which read, "It's very sad today.  There are no more Yosemite Indians."  When he questioned one of the officials about the sign, he was told, "It's very sad but whatever's out there is true."  To which he replied, "Well, I hate to disturb you, but I am a Yosemite Indian, and we're here on business for our tribe."  (side note: the famed Ahwahnee Hotel in the park is named after the local Ahwahnechee tribe in the valley).  Extinction: how quickly we can create it, and how quickly we can forget it.  While the frog in boiling water is a myth that simply won't go away, we may soon be picturing ourselves slowly heating up and not realizing it's too late to escape...

      One more: Tiananmen Square.  Who can forget the scene of the single protester standing bravely in front of a parade of tanks, forcing the entire procession to stop.  This was in 1989.  How would you picture visiting the site today?  Here's how an experienced reporter who was based there in that period but who was expelled and only now returned, wrote about it: Toward the end of my stay, my wife and I decided to visit Tiananmen Square, which I had last visited on the night when soldiers attacked in June 1989.  Today, the vast square in front of the Forbidden City, repaved since my previous visit, has become a by-appointment-only dead zone, full of Chinese tourists monitored by security guards and cameras.  All visitors are carefully screened before entry.  We had to apply for permission via WeChat, a Chinese messaging app.  Once approved, we waited in line for two hours, showing our passports and computer-generated permission notification at three separate checkpoints with airport-style security.  At the final check, a guard fretted that a pen carried by my wife might contain red ink, which is prohibited.  The guard didn’t say why, but during the 1989 student protests several people hurled red paint at a famous portrait of Mao that faces the square.  A supervisor finally let us through after an underling tested the pen and saw its ink was brown.  Now out of China, I often wonder: How can it be that a proud, nuclear-armed world power is scared of red ink?  Or see if this sounds predictive: Acts of sudden, extreme violence have become routine, and law enforcement is a matter for vigilante bands.  Air travel and news media are things of the past.  Refugees pile onto boats bound for Europe, ‘the lost continent’, but ‘no one ever comes back from there to say whether they found it or not.’  Yet all along the seafront, waiters serve coffee and croissants to weekenders watching the sunrise.  Around midday, retirees emerge from their mansion flats to have amiable arguments about Henry VIII and the Battle of Britain.  At night, music blares out of neon-fronted bars.  Nobody makes much effort to understand or even acknowledge the changes that have occurred.  ‘It had been a long time since anyone could make sense of anything.’  It's science fiction, or a review thereof which appeared in the London Review...but then, it may be (or become) the scenario just around the corner...

    As we turn more and more to our screens and not only head, but stay indoors, we miss what is happening to all the species outdoors, wrote author Dove.  It may be time for us to not so much remember the past, but to simply not forget, to not let those memories become part of that vast 97% wasteland that grows dimmer with each passing year.  Our world is changing and our population continues to grow, which means we humans will "need" ever more other things to make way: species, forests, hillsides, rivers.  And as they give way, we move our memory timeline.  And before long, what once was, is gone, not only from the landscape but from our memory as even those who do remember vanish as well, taking their memories with them.  As author Mark noted above, "Forgetting marks the final stage of extinction."  But let's hope that one thing that doesn't fade away is love and compassion, caring and courage, help and honor...for everyone.  As one graphic artist wrote in the book, I Won't Pretend These Missiles Are Stars: In the end, we have only one request: Remember us, remember Iran, and speak loudly about it.  We can let the Earth heal, and in the process, let ourselves heal.  Wrote Reinhold Niebuhr: Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.  Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith.  Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love.  No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own standpoint.  Therefore we must be saved by that final form of love, which is forgiveness.

     So, your honor, after all has been said and done, might I recommend taking the time to read an uplifting first-time novel by Allen Levi, an author who appears to have led a full-life, yet has more life to both come and give.  His character Theo is an unassuming 86-year old stranger who arrives in a small town and notices dozens of portraits on display in a coffee shop.  Before long, he realizes that each portrait is of someone in the town, so he thus begins his quest to purchase them and "return" them to each person as a gift, hoping that in doing so he has a chance to hear a bit of their life story.  The people range from a sidewalk busker to a man whose daughter lies seriously injured in a hospital, to a homeless woman who many in the town consider a bit crazy.  But regardless of the person or their circumstance, each "interview" ends with Theo telling them, genuinely, "It's been an honor."  It got me thinking about that -- how seldom we say that to anyone, as if still recognizing that the phrase should be reserved only for those truly deserving.  And when you are the one receiving that rare closing phrase, you tend to feel that genuineness.  We also seldom hear someone being described as a gentleman, as if that word has been cast aside as well to an earlier time, a time we are close to forgetting.  Theo was both, and the book made me think that perhaps one wish I would add to my basket of "final" wishes, it that whoever may be talking or thinking about me long after I'm gone, my leftover presence still moping its way through some person's memory, is that they would simply think, "He was an honorable gentleman."