Millions, perhaps billions are thankful.

 

It's Thanksgiving in the US again, that holiday shrouded in myth and nonsense, which has traditionally offered the opportunity to argue politics and culture with relatives one more wisely avoids during the rest of the year. Somehow that's appropriate, however, given the permanent national holiday's true origin in the 19th century US Civil War to celebrate the turning of the tide against Southern oligarchy and racial terror. Some 160 years or so later, that play has been staged again, and the Lost Cause is lost yet again, thank God, this time with a twist of trumpanzian trumpery defeated.

Professionally, I've remained withdrawn for most of the year, as one might suspect from the few posts on this blog. My companheira is a Portuguese chief physician who has been deeply pessimistic about the country's preparation to cope with the Covid-19 pandemic, and I thought that if her premonitions of doom were to prove accurate, my time is better spent with her and our animals and less so wading in the bog of bought-out brokers sinking ever deeper into the unprofessional muck. My respectable clients who haven't died or retired have been largely quiet except for a few welcome check-ins as they struggle to keep their businesses afloat and meet what payroll is left as international business grinds on at its present slower pace. Perhaps that will change in the year ahead as the political winds assume a better odor than the fascist dog farts of the past few years and I develop related interests further.

The relative quiet and travel restrictions have given me the time I've needed for the past three decades to learn more about the philosophies and practical applications of permaculture. I have a lot of friends at every level in the translation sector and elsewhere who are deeply concerned about environmental issues such as climate change, but too few of them have a real background in the science underlying that, and so many of the "solutions" I hear discussed on social media and elsewhere are largely nonsense, though well-meaning. Sustainability is a popular word, so much so that I was already building special German/English corpora to aid in translating discussions of it more than a decade ago. But it needs to be a lot more than a buzzword or a wishful expression in some half-educated vegan rant.

I suppose that like so many things, the complexity of sustainable living will ultimately be reduced to simple, inclusive principles, thankfully stripped of their commercial and political overtones. I am hopeful that some progress might be made in that direction with the incoming US Executive Branch leadership and its apparent concern for competent people doing things in the public interest, but the political cards are not yet all on the table, nor is it clear who will remain in play and for how long.

"Wenn ich wüsste, dass morgen die Welt unterginge, würde ich heute noch ein Apfelbäumchen pflanzen" – if I knew that the world would end tomorrow, I would still plant a little apple tree today – words attributed to Martin Luther, and the passage from Goethe's Faust II where God cheats – Wer immer strebend sich bemüht, Den können wir erlösen – we can save the one who always tries – have been concepts to guide me since before I was old enough to vote. This year I planted that tree – a Reinette apple – and many more, also currants and citrus of various kinds, and for the long term young cork oak trees to replace the ancient ones in our forest who are dying. Along the way to the aqueduct there is an olive tree more than a thousand years old, hardly recognizable but still bearing fruit which I preserve each year. I wonder if the person who planted that so long ago imagined the generations it would feed. I will plant some of my own, and perhaps in two thousand years some animals, perhaps some of them recognizably human, will enjoy those fruits as I enjoy the ancient gifts passed down to me from others forgotten.

Signs of spring in late summer

The world is inverted, it seems. The last geomagnetic reversal occurred some 780,000 years ago, where in my understanding what we think of now as north was in fact south. But there are other geomagnetically stable times where the world is upside down and the moral compass of a society points to no familiar place. One such time was the 17th century in Great Britain, with social turmoil in which many, the king included, lost their heads, some perhaps for just cause and others in fits of madness. Such times are upon us now.

The times of year have not been what they seem. Though the temperatures in my garden have been punishing heat, there is a chill of long duration, a winter in the cycle of hope that has persisted more than any terrestrial season. It’s been a quiet time, professionally, with some disappointments, but time to reflect and to think what seeds to plant for the next season. But it’s hard to look at a barren expanse of snow or the sun-baked earth and see the green, the growth and that fruits that might come with care, hard to accept that the crop is not entirely of our own effort but also of things beneath the soil we cannot see, winds and insects which pollinate at their will more than the hand ever could, influenced too by other creatures with whom the place is shared.

The parched earth, the scorched ground of politics in the country of my birth is a source of grief for so many. Its desiccated, decayed fruits offer a taste of what so many people I have met in my life, or those close to them, must have known in the long winter of spirit in central Europe when my parents were young or in the equally hard times of war and pandemic when their parents were. We are not at the point, I think, where the body counts can be fairly compared, but it is not the quantity, but the quality, I think, which defines despair, a psychological and very individual parameter which is hard to understand fully in another, and often in one’s self as well.

In my psychological landscape, in my garden, I can see a bit of green emerging from the soil of American politics with the settled ticket of Joseph Biden and Kamala Harris for the election we hope to see. Malcolm X spoke of the “ballot or the bullet”: we’ve seen enough bullets I think, taking the lives of children in school, children who find a step-fathers service revolver in a drawer and take their own lives because there truly is no place like home, an emergency medical technician murdered in her bed by police gunfire in an unwarranted breaking and entry and so many more shards of our broken reality. Let’s give the ballot a chance and see where it takes us.

Since Mr. Biden chose Ms. Harris, who had in fact been my preference for the position as presidential candidate he now holds, as his running mate, I have felt considerable personal uplift and read many words in the news outlets and other online places from those who are inspired because they see themselves in the candidate for vice president. I smile, thinking of young girls who see in that inspiring cross-examiner of moral criminals like Brett Kavanaugh and William Barr the image of their possible future. But why am I inspired, why is the catch so often in my voice now from hope rather than the grief it has been too often. I do not see myself in her. A little in Biden perhaps: aging, sometimes stumbling for words, prone to errors, but with a belief that there is a salvation to be found in best efforts, particularly for a common cause in accord with the first principle of doing for others in the kind of way you might hope to be treated yourself. No, I do not see myself in Ms. Harris at all.
What I do see in her is people I have known and admired for much of my life. So many friends, teachers and companions, who do not fit easily into any category, and who are not zealous about finding the “right” hole into which another’s peg can be pounded. People who know how and when to stand their ground, and perhaps when to stand down. Who show consideration for all except perhaps those who refuse to do so and who live so well by the principles well expressed in Franklin Roosevelt’s first inaugural address in its full context:

So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is... fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

In this regard, I suppose I do find myself reflected, however darkly, in Kamala’s many-faceted glass. I don’t see the Democratic candidates as saviors more than as vehicles with which we might save ourselves by sharing the bread and fishes of mutual commitment to a better and more just world. I do not know myself with any certainty which way the arc of history bends, but I hope our many arms, old and young, flesh and prosthetic, in every hue and in every garb or none will bend it contrary to the direction of those who seek to do so by strongarm tactics.

What is reflected in the mirror presented to us by Donald Trump, Mike Pence and their many compromised enablers? It is a distorted image in which we see the darkest impulses of the past twisted into new but equally disturbing forms. The jealousies, the fears, even the hatreds we all sometimes feel are found there, and some find that reflection hypnotic, darkly seductive in its single pane of uniform and unrelenting wickedness. But those who can break that spell may yet find themselves in the many facets of better leadership and collaboration in the common cause of a kinder, more humanly productive society, and the rest of us will be challenged to break bread and share the cup, on better terms, with those who are presently more inclined to spit in it.

COVID-19 contact tracking app: volunteers needed

Third update from the project coordinator: 

The first three rounds of volunteers have done an amazing job. All EU languages except Maltese and Irish Gaelic have been completed or are in progress, as are some other languages. 

Development specialist Krisztian Werderits is creating a pro bono app – VirusContact – to assist in tracing contacts in the event that someone becomes infected with the novel coronavirus currently wreaking havoc across the globe. A description of the project can be found here.

Gergely Vandor of memoQ Ltd. contacted me to talk about the project and the need for volunteers to assist in localization into all EU languages if possible. Current app languages are Hungarian and English. The company will be providing server resources to organize the project. Those who are able and willing to volunteer in this effort should contact Gergely at gergelyv@yahoo.com. I'm not generally one to encourage pro bono work given the abuses one often finds with such, but I think the present world situation warrants an exception here.

The app basically works by temporarily recording proximate, unlinked Bluetooth devices (mobile phones generally) so that if you are tested positive, all such "contacts" from the past 14 days can be notified automatically. The data maintained by the app and deleted after two weeks have passed are the

• Bluetooth unique ID 
• GPS location of the encounter
• distance (if possible to determine)
• encounter's duration (if possible to determine)

Once a user confirm their own infection, all others with devices that have been near in the past 14 days (i.e. the presumed incubation period) will be notified of their exposure, with the aforementioned details included.

Here is a press article about the app under development:
https://dailynewshungary.com/hungarian-app-tells-if-you-met-someone-infected-by-coronavirus/