[This piece was originally published in off our backs, Washington, DC.]

This is my personal list of “do’s” and “don’t’s” for my friends who might find some guidance helpful in relating to my ME/CFS (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Myalgic Encephalomyelitis):

DON’T expose me to your company if you believe CFS is psychosomatic, “yuppie flu,” or anything less than one of the most frightening, tragic, and debilitating diseases of the century. Because it is.

DON’T think you’re being supportive by telling me how you get tired too sometimes after a hard day at work or a long bike ride. The fatigue (read “debilitation”) experienced by people with CFS is unlike any kind of physical or emotional state experienced by able-bodied people, even after they’ve run a marathon. This kind of comparison is as offensive as discussing your experiences with dieting to someone with a wasting disease. Just don’t. If you are able-bodied, you have no physical context for understanding my experience, so don’t think you do.

DON’T suggest that my symptoms might not be so severe if I didn’t dwell on them, cater to them, give them so much attention, let them run my life. In fact, that is the very philosophy that led to he collapse of my health in the first place. I maintain what vitality I do have by careful attention to even small changes in my body.

DON’T try to be helpful by suggesting other “normal” factors which might be causing my symptoms. Yes, no doubt there are other factors - there always are - but I am an expert on my disease and I am on intimate terms with my symptoms. It is arrogant for you to try to interpret them for me.

DON’T spend time with me unless you are grown-up enough to understand that the desires of an able-bodied person should not be weighed in the same balance with the needs of a disabled person. Forget your assertiveness training, your skills at compromise, or your “getting to yes” negotiating expertise. If I need to leave an environment because it is toxic to me and you want to stay, it is not a solution for us to stay fifteen more minutes. Those fifteen minutes may result in my spending the next two days in bed. I get my way, because the stakes are infinitely higher for me. If you think this is about my control issues or power tripping, get some help with your ableism.

DON’T say things to me like, “God, I don't know how you can stand to live without [your career, your home, swimming, running, eating favorite foods, being able to travel, being financially independent, etc.] ever again!” Don't say, “Boy, I could never give up [my career, my home, swimming, running, eating my favorite foods, being able to travel, being financially independent, etc.]” Our losses are our losses. They don't signal fortitude, sacrifice, or strength of character. We deal with them in healthy or unhealthy ways, and sometimes that changes every hour. They are our losses, and the only appropriate response is heartfelt sympathy and sincere offers of assistance. A little political activism would not be out of place either.

DON’T punish me with your frustrations at the inconveniences I cause you with my illness. Yes, in the short term, you may get me to “pass” as able-bodied or even take care of your bad mood, but in the long run, I will decide you are an ableist asshole. I have no choice but to live with these inconveniences and disruptions 24-hours a day. If you choose to be in my company, you can assume responsibility for temporarily accommodating my disability.

DON’T date me if you want to think of my illness as some footnote to my personhood. It is a central part of my identity now, just as being lesbian is. We all know how icky it is to be around straight people who tolerate our lesbianism, but who flinch every time we bring up the subject of our lover. It feels just as bad to be with friends who know I have CFS, but who become stiff and uncomfortable whenever I incorporate my experiences or needs into our interactions. If you can't take the heat, get out of my kitchen.

DON’T ever use the word “crazy” in relation to the confusion, seizures, extreme irritability, panic attacks, or periods of being emotionally overwhelmed which are part of the cognitive losses and neurological disturbances of this illness. I can identify and name these states and take responsibility for them. I have a whole battery of information and arsenal of strategies for coping with them. In fact, I see able-bodied folks acting out all the time from food allergies, blood sugar reactions, the effects of alcohol and caffeine in their systems -- and in my experience, those of us with CFS are far more aware, more accountable, and more forthcoming about mood swings and emotional states than so-called able-bodied people who have the dubious privilege of still abusing their bodies.

DON’T persist in pressuring me about an activity once I have identified it as something I have reservations about because of my illness. We folks with CFS often question our reality because of the elusive, “moving target” nature of our symptoms. Because most of us are experiencing some degree of social isolation, we are especially vulnerable to pressure which is accompanied by even a subtle threat of further marginalization. And it's always tempting to see if we can pull off a “normal” activity. But the price of being mistaken can be months of relapse. It's not worth it. “No” means “no.” Don't presume to know my limits. They change every day, anyway.

DON’T attribute your lack of sympathy to my attitude. This is a standard defense of bigots. Racists are always sure that there are right ways to be African American and wrong ways. Sexists believe that harassment and discrimination only happen to women with bad attitudes. Ableists are always convinced that there is something in the attitude or the behavior of the disabled person which is causing their own irritation or aversion towards us. Nothing unmasks your ableism more than this point of view toward me. I have to fight my way through a toxic, apathetic, and even sadistic world every day. I am assertive-to-militant about my needs, and I haven't got the energy to coddle ableist people. You will not see me looking helpless, tearful, or pathetic. Someone suffering for a few weeks with a flu virus may be able to indulge or even luxuriate in their temporary helplessness, but those of us who are sentenced to chronic illness for the rest of our lives must make other adjustments -- ones which should be valorized not excoriated. I need an ally, not a rescuer. If you can't feel empathy for an embattled warrior, it's your ableism and not my attitude. Period.

DON’T think I'm being manipulative when I have to excuse myself from a stressful dynamic. Most people will check out of an argument when it reaches the level of screaming and throwing objects. Because of this disease, I experience much lower grades of conflict as being that stressful and life-threatening, and I have to check out. I am accountable in my relationships to people, but sometimes it takes me longer, with more periods of time-out, in order to work through a difficult issue. Don't make me hang up on you.

DON’T suggest new supplements or treatments unless I have asked. Like most single women with the disease, I have experienced a drastic and terrifying reduction of resources. And like most women living on very low fixed income, I have had to evolve a highly refined and customized process for cost-benefit analysis. It has taken me years to fine-tune my regimen of supplements and foods. Yes, I am sure I would benefit from massage, blood tests, medical care, organic food, acupuncture, and Chinese herbs, but I can't afford them. Unless, of course, you want to buy them for me. Classism and ableism go hand-in-hand, and in case you don't know, health care in this country is a privilege, not a right.

DON’T mistake my periods between relapses for recovery. I have plenty to deal with regarding my own ups and downs. Don't make me have to cope with your hopes and expectations for me. What I most need from you is the reassurance that I am a perfectly wonderful friend even at the lowest point in my health, and even if I never get any better.

DON’T accuse me of being jealous of your health when I confront your ableism. I wish that my able-bodied friends were more aware of how their able-bodied privilege translates into ignorance, arrogance, and bland sadism. The issue is not my envy of your privilege, but your abuse of it.

DON’T make me take care of you around cancelled plans. Yes, I'm sorry whenever that happens. I do try to know what my limitations are, and frequently I err on the side of conservatism just so that I won't have to change them or cancel later. But every now and then I will say I can do something that I can't. Too bad. But the whole life I had planned for myself - my career, my home, my family, my social life, my sports, my hobbies, my standard of living, my quality of life -- have been permanently cancelled. I just can't get too into your pain about a picnic or a camping trip. And you know what? I'm not even going to try.

DON’T think I'm kidding when I talk about suicide. The depression that accompanies CFS has been likened to the depression that AIDS patients experience in the last two weeks of their lives. With CFS, it goes on for years. Ask me. I may have actually scavenged a piece of garden hose for the exhaust pipe. I may have stockpiled barbiturates. I will probably tell you, because I am hoping someone will help me. If you care about me and I am talking about suicide, consider stepping up your support. I'm not kidding. CFS patients do take our own lives, and we do it a lot. And part of it is because nobody seems to give a damn that we are losing or have already lost what we used to consider our lives. Give a damn.

DO make an effort to learn something about the disease on your own. There is a ton of information about CFS in the libraries and bookstores - first-person narratives, medical and alternative healing manuals, cookbooks. There are all kinds of websites on the Internet. Check out Solve ME/CFS.

DO acknowledge frequently that I am disabled. I have to run as fast as I can to stay in place, or even just to fall back at a manageable rate. I like to have that acknowledged. Whenever I do participate at a “normal” level in an able-bodied event, it has probably taken a lot of advance planning. Acknowledge that. Appreciate it. I pay higher dues, and I like to be credited for it. Even though I may look like a slacker to the able-bodied world, remember this: I am operating at the absolute top of my physical bent all the time. I am probably working harder than any able-bodied person you know. Just because I don't mention it, doesn't mean I'm not struggling.

DO ask me how I am when we get together for an activity. That lets me know that you are willing to be my ally in confronting the challenges I am meeting during the time we are together. I have come to learn that when you don't ask, it means you don't want to know. It means that your plan is to grant me the “privilege” of being considered your able-bodied peer for the duration of our activity. In other words, my illness will only be real for you if I bring it up. Experience has taught me that this attitude results in your equating my mentioning of symptoms with my causing those symptoms. And you will oppress me accordingly.

DO adopt a CFS awareness when you are in my company. No, it's not codependent. It's supportive. And courteous. Why should the member of an ethnic minority be the one to confront the racism all the time? Well, it's her survival issue, but frankly, that's no excuse for her white friends to let her do all the work. A racist world hurts us all. And so does an ableist one. And a toxic one. I love it when my companions allow me to shift some of the burden of my chemical sensitivity vigilance onto their shoulders, even for just an hour or two. The analogy I use is that of traveling with a disabled child. If you want to make it clear that the child is my child and therefore my problem, because you're only interested in my company... well, it makes me choose between my allegiance to my child (myself) or you. Guess who's going to win.

DO confront your superstitions about denial and immunity. If you are afraid to imagine yourself in my shoes, to really hear my experience, or to adopt a CFS consciousness about toxins and stress levels when you are in my company - look at the reason why. Are you afraid that you might become vulnerable to the illness if you let too much of its reality into your consciousness? That is a very human response, but also a very ableist one. If this is your truth, then stick to the company of other able-bodied people. Don't make me deal with it.

DO make it easy for me to say, “I need to leave” or “I need to lie down” or “I need to pull off the road/ trail and take a nap.” When the plan changes abruptly like that, see how fast you can get behind it, instead of seeing how guilty or ashamed you can make me feel or how difficult you can make it for me. These disruptions are normal for me, and I love it when my companions work together to minimize the social stigmatization that results from my meeting my needs.

DO offer support. Offer whatever you can. The gesture is often the most therapeutic part. I don't have a bathtub, but I experience chronic muscle pain and I love it when friends invite me to come over and take a bath. Can you cook a meal on a really bad night? Can you be there for 20-minute support phone calls? Ask me what kind of support I would like. I understand that doesn't mean you can give it. I'll just be stunned that you asked. In seven years, no one ever has, but I do keep hoping.

DO clean up your car/ apartment/ clothing. Remember what I have told you about my allergies: fabric softener, essential oils, perfumes, bleach, any and all pesticides. When you keep “forgetting,” I get one of two messages: Either you don't believe I'm really sick or you don't care. I never get the message you just forgot. That's your fantasy... and a function of your able-bodied privilege.

DO tell me how amazing I am. Tell me a lot. Praise my coping skills, my achievements, whatever I am proud of. Praise my ingenuity, my resourcefulness, my optimism (I'm still alive, aren't I?), my courage. Believe me, people with CFS hear “slacker,” “whiner,” “nutcase,” “drama queen,” “control freak” a dozen times a day in a dozen subtle and not-so-subtle ways. No matter how much you praise me, it can never be too much.

DO stand up for me when I’m not around. You will probably have more credibility than I do. Spread the word about CFS. Confront others on their ableism. Talk about the crying need for support services similar to those offered by the AIDS networks in our communities. Stop others from blaming the victims. When you hear charges that I am exaggerating my symptoms, set the record straight. The symptoms that show, the ones that I talk about, are just the tip of an iceberg.

DO share this link and pass it around your workplace.

And if all of this seems too overwhelming to remember, then try this simple formula:

Pretend it’s happened to you.

A FINAL WORD: For decades, the medical community has pretended that ME/CFS is a psychological disorder, even in the face of decades of discovery of biomarkers. There has been intense, ongoing pressure and lobbying from insurance companies to refuse to accept it as a disease, because treatment is expensive and lifelong.  Instead, patients have been  and still are "prescribed" CBT ("Cognitive Behavioral Therapy") and GET ("Graded Exercise Therapy"). Both of these degrading, so-called treatments have resulted in death. In fact, until very recently, these were the recommendations of the Center for Disease Control (CDC). Today, with rising numbers of Long Covid patients, whose symptoms are nearly identical to those of ME/CFS patients, our illness and disability are finally being taken seriously. We are finally getting apologies from the medical community, including the CDC, which refers to their history with ME/CFS as "shameful." Ironic how we were not allowed to donate blood, but it was "all in our heads."  How does that work? #theyknewtheyalwaysknew

In 1999 I reviewed Linda Lear's biography Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature for publication in  The Lesbian Review of Books. Twenty-one  years later, this review was cited in a new anthology titled Literature, Writing, and the Natural World, edited by James Guignard and T.P. Murphy and published by Cambridge Scholars.

My review had been centered on the biography's failure to apply the word lesbian to any of the intimate and well-documented relationships that Carson had with women throughout her life.  Because I thought these relationships would be of interest to my readers, I am republishing this review:

 The word "lesbian" is not in the index to Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature.  This is because the word "lesbian" is not in the text of what has been hailed by The New York Times as "the most exhaustive account so far of Carson's private, professional, and public lives."
 
This omission is peculiar in light of the fact that the author, Linda Lear, had access to the correspondence between Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman --- a correspondence that documents the two women's lesbian passion and commitment during the last ten years of Carson's life.  In fact, three years ago, a collection of the letters was published in Always, Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, 1952--1964.

To Lear's credit, she does not withhold the details of Carson's relationships with women, even when these details indicate lesbian attachments.  In fact, she has done a considerable amount of detective work in uncovering them.  What she fails to do is establish a context for understanding the significance of these lesbian relationships and how Carson's orientation as a lesbian shaped her career and her ideas. 
 
Carson, author of the ground-breaking exposé of the risks of pesticides, Silent Spring,  is remembered now as the founder of the ecology movement, but she might also be considered the first ecofeminist.  Through the network of connections she made with women during her lifetime, she evolved her philosophy of the interconnectedness of all forms of life.   Because of the censorship she imposed on herself, a censorship that her biographers have perpetuated, the significance of Carson's world of female relationships has not been explored for its impact on her career and on her writing.

This censorship, ironically, may be read by some as a mark of Lear's scholarly detachment, an index of her professionalism --- that she refuses to speculate or overlay interpretation on incidents and documents for which there may be alternative explanations.
 
Lear's predicament is not unique.  In fact, it parallels the situation of Lorena Hickok's biographer, Doris Faber, who insisted that the romantic language in the Hickok-Roosevelt correspondence "does not mean what it appears to mean."  Fortunately, her homophobic treatment of Hickok has been countered in recent years by Blanche Wiesen Cook's biography of Eleanor Roosevelt and by the publication of Empty Without You: The Intimate Letters of Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok.  Similarly, the publication in 1998 of Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson, poses a serious challenge to the assumptions of previous biographers about Dickinson's heterosexuality.  One irate male academic has characterized the publication of these letters as "an utter distraction from her outstanding intellect and her talent."

But is it?  There are some of us who would argue that it is the presumption of heterosexuality that is the "utter distraction."   Just what, exactly, are the academic criteria for determining the sexual orientation of a historical figure?  At the present time, a homophobic academy prefers the "innocent-until-proven-guilty" approach, in which the biographer must make her case for queerness beyond a reasonable doubt.  But gay and lesbian scholars do not consider homosexuality to be a crime, and our concerns lie more with understanding a politic, an aesthetic, a social orientation that potentially informs the body of work produced by men or women whose sexual orientation, however individual the form of expression, may nevertheless provide a perspective that is unique and distinct from that of heterosexuals. 
 
In addition, what appears to be "reasonable doubt" in the minds of biographers like Lear and Faber reads like homophobic panic and denial to scholars who find it unreasonable to explain away an obvious constellation of lesbian or gay relationships on a case-by-case, or even  word-by-word, basis.

Hear the words of Rachel Carson, 47,  written to her lover Dorothy Freeman, 56, in 1954:
 
"... I have been remembering that my very first message to you was a Christmas greeting.  Christmas, 1952.  I knew then that the letter to which it replied was something special, that stood out from the flood of other mail, but I don't pretend I had any idea of its tremendous importance in my life.  I didn't know then that you would claim my heart --- that I would freely give you a lifetime's love and devotion.  I had at least some idea of that when Christmas came again, in 1953.  Now I know, and you know.  And as I have given, I have received --- the most precious of all gifts.  Thank you darling, with all my heart."  (pp. 66-67, Always, Rachel)
 
Or the words of Dorothy Freeman:
 
"How sweet to find your clothes mixed in with mine, dear --- that brought you near.  I've wanted you so when I looked at the moon, when the tide was high; when the water made wild sounds in the night; when we went tide-pooling; when the anemones were exposed for a few seconds as the water rushed away from the cave; but most of all, darling, when I went back to the veeries ---" (p. 117, Always, Rachel)

On the eve of a long-awaited rendezvous in a Manhattan hotel, Dorothy wrote this note to Rachel:
 
"New York --- darling --- a week from this moment I shall be with you if all goes well -- and it must!  Yes, I think we can be casual if we meet at the desk --- just a chilly glance I'll give you and say, 'Glad you made it...'" (p. 69, Always, Rachel)
 
What is to made of the humor in this note, if the subtext is not lesbian? 
 
In the early years, the correspondence itself was carried on in a clandestine fashion, with each woman writing a letter to the other woman's family, "for publication," with the private love letter hidden surreptitiously inside.
 
In the case of Carson and Freeman, it is not even necessary to resort to Lilian Faderman's argument for the inclusion of non-genital love relationships in the category "lesbian."  In light of the women's own writings, it is unreasonable to conclude that the relationship was platonic.  One does not need to disguise a platonic same-sex relationship from the desk clerk at a hotel!

Lear's conscientious research into Carson's early years reveals another significant lesbian attachment, one which was to determine the direction of Carson's professional life.
 
Mary Scott Skinker, 36, was a professor of biology at the Pennsylvania College for Women, where Carson was studying to become a writer.  Under Skinker's mentorship, Carson began to focus her creative energies on biology.  Carson's correspondence to friends at this time indicate that she was deeply infatuated with her teacher.  When Skinker took a leave-of-absence to attend Johns Hopkins University, Carson attempted to follow her, but was unable to raise tuition money.  Instead, she founded a science club she named Mu Sigma Sigma --- Miss Skinker's initials in Greek.  After graduation, Carson rendezvoused with her former professor in Skinker's family cabin in the Shenandoah Valley.  As Lear coyly notes, "There were no longer any boundaries between mentor and protégée." (pp.56-57)  (Shades of Radclyffe Hall's "... and that night they were not divided"!)  Skinker and Carson maintained contact with each other for two decades, and when Skinker, 57, became hospitalized with cancer, she gave Carson's name as the person to be contacted.  It was Carson who stayed with her until she lost alertness, and only then was her care taken over by members of her family.

Carson found companionship and mentoring with another powerful woman, Marie Rodell, who became her agent.  Although Rodell had been married briefly, Lear notes "she kept the details of her marriage locked in a closet." (p.153)  The relationship between the two women advanced quickly beyond a professional one, and when Carson was denied passage on a research ship, because of the impropriety of a lone woman joining an all-male crew, Rodell agreed to accompany her as a "chaperone."  According to Lear, "Ten days on the Albatross III voyage had deepened their friendship, and they now closed their letters to each other with love." (p. 172)
 
Because of her failure to provide a lesbian context for Carson's experiences, the reader must read between the homophobically elided lines to understand her relationship to Marjorie Spock and Mary Richards.  These two socially-prominent, single women had bought a house and were living together.  We are told that they became members of Carson's inner circle of friends.

Mary Richards, described as a "digestive invalid," required organic food, and Spock, who had studied organic farming, obliged her partner with a two-acre vegetable garden.  In 1957, state and federal planes sprayed the property repeatedly with DDT mixed in fuel oil --- spraying as much as fourteen times in one day.  Spock and Richards sued the government in a trial that lasted twenty-two days.  They lost on a technicality, but not before Spock had sent out her daily account of the ordeal to her friends and supporters, including Carson.
 
This was a lawsuit sparked by one woman's desire to protect her disabled life-partner.  Carson, whose first love had been mercilessly harassed out of her career as a college professor and later out of a career in the government, was again faced with a situation where the survival of a lesbian she loved was being threatened.  This time Carson was in a position to do something.
 
What did the Spock-Richards relationship mean to Carson, who was still living with her mother --- who had never been able to live openly with the women she loved?  How did the passionate crusade of a woman devoted to protecting her partner affect Carson's own interest in the issue of pesticides?   Did the security and nurturing she received from the maternal Dorothy Freeman influence her decision to write a book that she knew would raise a fire-storm of controversy?  How did the persecution of Skinker influence Carson's own career decisions, as well as her decisions to live a deeply closeted life?  Did her oppression as a woman in a male-dominated field and as a lesbian in a heterosexual world influence her advocacy for respect for the diversity of life on the planet?

It will take a biography with an entry for "lesbian" in the index before we can begin to reconcile the serious mind-body split that has been and is still being historiographically imposed on Rachel Carson, lesbian biologist.

I have been thinking a lot about autism, and what it means to be defined as “neurodivergent” in a “neurotypical” world.  Even those "politically correct" labels reflect the biases of those for whom autism is "other." Anyway, this week I was watching a video about octopuses, and it opened up a new lens on autism... and I wanted to share some of my thoughts.

First, some facts about the octopus:  It's everywhere... all over the world--in the deep sea, in the kelp forests, in the coral reefs, along the rocky shorelines. It's massive, and it's tiny. It's been around for millions of years. And it's wicked smart, especially when you consider the other members of  the mollusk family: clams, oysters and snails.

The octopus can perform all kinds of learning tasks… including ones that involve object perception and short-term and long-term memory. It can make plans, which means it remembers past events, imagines future needs, and analyzes the ways that current actions can relate to both. It uses composite tools. It takes things apart. It invents games. It problem-solves. It explores the environment like a curious child.

What does this have to do with autism? Trust me, I'll get there. (I'm autistic.)

So, all the other species (dogs, cats, humans, dolphins) that are considered forms of "intelligent life" are vertebrates. In fact, most of them are mammals, and primates at that. These “intelligent life” vertebrates trace their common ancestors back 320 million years, probably to some kind of lizard. But when we go looking for the common ancestor that we share with the octopus, we have to go back more than twice as far... 600 million years, in fact. And the common ancestor was... wait for it... a flatworm.

What's my point?

My point is that, in the history of this planet, intelligent life actually evolved twice, in widely separated (vertebrate and invertebrate ) trunks of the family tree. And the point of this observation is to explain why the intelligence of the octopus is so insanely different from the intelligence of the vertebrates.

And HERE is where it relates to autism:  Our theories of intelligence have historically been derived from our studies of vertebrates, especially mammals, and especially primates. All these vertebrate forms of “intelligent life”  have been very social creatures that travel in pods, packs, herds, or tribes. Not surprisingly, our theories about intelligence have been shaped by this fact.  These theories have assumed that intelligence evolved in certain species in response to social needs for communication, for bonding, for collective action, for establishing and maintaining social hierarchies, and so on.
 
But… then there is the octopus, a form of intelligent life that is notoriously anti-social. The octopus does not bond with other octopuses, does not live or travel with them, and  does not observe any kind of social hierarchy. It is a real loner. According to our theories of intelligence, it should actually be quite stupid... dumb as a snail, in fact. But the octopus has 500,000 neurons and the snail has only 20,000.  The octopus is right up there with the pig, the dog, and the dolphin. Clearly there is a problem with our theories about the evolution of intelligence. Being social has no bearing on the development of intelligence.
 
And here we are.  Autism is "characterized by difficulty in social interaction and communication." We are wired for resistance to social pressure. We are said to lack empathy, to have difficulty reading social cues, are oblivious to social hierarchies. We don't travel in packs. Are we missing out on evolutionary forces that generate intelligence?  Or are we developing intelligence along a completely different axis, like the octopus?

How did the octopus come to be so much smarter than the snails and clams? If it wasn't social pressure, what was it? Apparently, it's all about the shell... or lack thereof.

One hundred and forty million years ago the lineage that produced the octopus lost its shell. This shell-less proto-octopus was way more nimble, way more mobile, and way more vulnerable than the other shell-encased members of the mollusk family. With all the predators in the ocean, one might have expected this new branch of the family tree to become extinct in a generation or two. But that’s not what happened.

The octopus got very smart very fast. It became a master/mistress of disguise. It developed the ability to  change not only color, but also texture in 200 milliseconds. That’s faster than the blink of an eye. It’s way faster than a lizard that takes 20 seconds to change color. And the octopus can change camouflage up to 177 times per hour. How can it do this? Because most of its 500,000 neurons are not in its brain, but in its eight arms. The stimulus/response thing bypasses the brain completely. It takes a shortcut that enables the arm to "read" the environment and send appropriate signals directly to the special camouflage cells i the arm. These camouflage cells are incredibly complex, with highly specific functions. Some control for red, black and yellow coloration. Some reflect blue and green light, others reflect white light. Another layer of specialized cells can change the texture from smooth to rough, and back again.
 
What does this have to do with autism? Well, so… let’s go back to losing that shell, that protection.  Kind of like losing one’s armor. Yes, it makes one vulnerable, but it also drives the evolution of a different kind of intelligence, an intelligence that is rooted in highly complex and subtle interactions with one's physical environment. If the octopus lacks the social intelligence that comes from belonging to a pack, it has evolved an exquisitely fine-tuned relationship to the natural world around it.

If an autistic person is lacking in social intelligence, have we evolved compensatory sensitivity to our surroundings? Without the kind of protective armor that non-autistic people develop in their social interactions, have we developed a different form of perceptual/conceptual mobility, a nimbleness of spirit? Could it be that our "special interests" are part of this protective disguise? Without the rigid shape associated with a social role, are we not able to slip ourselves into the secret nooks and crannies of a rich inner life that appear irrelevant or inconsequential to those who have never had to develop alternative resources?

I can't claim to have anything like the brilliant adaptations of the octopus. But I do feel that centering the intelligence of the octopus calls into question many of our human assumptions and theories. I have the intelligence to know that we humans have very limited understanding of intelligence, and that we may well have reached a period in our evolution as a social species, where the concomitants of our bonding, i.e. our love of  conformity, our lack of authenticity, our prioritizing of congeniality,  our staggering disregard for our natural environment, and our ongoing massacres of our fellow creatures are going to destroy  life on the planet in less than two generations. Is it possible that autism marks an acceleration in human evolution--that our intelligence is moving in the direction of the octopus--and not a moment too soon?

I just watched Wizard of Lies, the film about Bernie Madoff, the fraudulent financier who, in 2009, admitted to operating the largest private Ponzi scheme in history—one that involved nearly sixty-five billion dollars. He never invested any of the money entrusted to him by clients. He just kept pulling in new clients and using their money to pay so-called dividends to his old clients.
 
The question is, of course, “How did he manage to get away with it for so long?”

He wasn’t just scamming retired widows. His clients included captains of industry… and especially of financial industry. It wasn’t a one-shot deal, either. Madoff claims it began in the 1990’s, but federal investigators believe that it began in the mid-1980’s, or even the 1970’s. Madoff had been at it for twenty years or even forty years!
 
What was his secret?
 
Here’s Madoff himself, offering us clues:
 
“[Prospective investors] were all told by me, ‘Don’t invest any more money than you could afford to lose. This is the stock market. There’s always stuff that can happen. Brokerage firms can fail. I could go crazy and do something stupid. If you want a [safe thing], put your money in government bonds. So everybody understood this…  Everyone was greedy. I just went along. It’s not an excuse…  Look, there was complicity, in my view.”

He was making so much money for his clients, they didn’t want to ask questions. They didn’t want to look too closely at where all this money was actually coming from.
 
And besides that, Madoff had a huge firewall. He split off the “Investment Advisory” division of his business, where the fraud was actually perpetrated. This activity was located on the 17th floor, in a locked office space.  According to the film, only one other employee was privy to what actually what took place on that floor.  Most of the staffers in this division were high school graduates without securities licenses or training. They included a former waitress, a former construction worker, and a former keypunch operator. And, there were only about a dozen of them! Far too small a number to be managing billions of dollars worth of accounts. But even with such a small staff, they later testified that they frequently had no work to do. They would put their feet up on their desks and watch television.

And here’s another thing about that 17th floor. It didn’t look anything like the rest of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC. It was messy and full of out-of-date technology.  The operations on the 17th floor were run out of a hack-proof, 1980’s IBM computer, complete with tower and green screen… in 2009! This computer was not connected to any of the other computers in the company’s network. It would leave a very limited (easy to delete) electronic footprint. And there was a dot-matrix printer. Dot-matrix? By 2009, brokerage firms provided their equity statements online, where they could be accessed by clients, allowing them to track the daily activity in their accounts. The only thing  Madoff’s clients received were these dot-matrix, snail-mailed printouts on flimsy, lightweight paper never intended to last.
 
Okay…  wildly unrealistic investment returns that consistently out-performed other financial investment companies, weirdly outdated modes of communication with clients, and a bizarre culture of secrecy around the locked office on the 17th floor.
 
Again, “How did he manage to get away with it for so long?”

People trusted Madoff. In light of all the obvious red flags, why did his clients trust him?
 
They trusted him, because he made a point of gaining their trust. He deployed the six strategies for gaining trust that are identified by social psychologist Robert Cialdini:
 
1) Reciprocation. People feel indebted to those who do something for them or give them a gift. Madoff was paying his clients higher returns than they could get anywhere else, and they were grateful. Madoff also paid out a ton of bonuses to people who worked for him at all levels.
 
2) Social Proof. When people are uncertain, they want to know what everyone else is doing—especially their peers. Who was investing with Madoff? Steven Spielberg, Larry King, Sandy Koufax, Elie Wiesel, John Malkovich… banks, university, and charities… lots of charities. (Hint: They tend not to withdraw money for long periods of time… a plus with a Ponzi scheme.)
 
3) Commitment and Consistency. People do not like to back out of deals. Madoff was following through with consistent high returns. His clients were consistent and committed, too.

4) Liking. “People prefer to say ‘yes’ to those they know and like,” Cialdini says. They are also favor those who are physically attractive, similar to themselves, or who give them compliments. Madoff cultivated the country club set. Jewish himself, he cultivated Jewish investors and Jewish charities.  He was charming and charismatic.
 
5) Authority. People respect authority. They follow the experts. Madoff was the former chairman of NASDAQ, the second largest exchange in the world. And, of course, he was a billionaire with all the trappings: the homes, the cars, the clothes.
 
6) Scarcity. The more rare a thing, the more people want it. Madoff created an aura of exclusivity about clients. He made investors compete for limited slots in his imaginary funds, and then he used this competition to leverage the size of the investments.
 
Summing up:  Why didn’t people see what was going on?
 
They trusted Madoff. He manipulated that trust.

So Madoff is behind bars for life, and what was left of the assets of his bogus operation have been distributed by the courts to his victims.
 
But what if there is another Ponzi-type scam going on in this country—one that is so huge, nobody can even see it?  What might that 17th floor look like?
 
Well… I think it would be full of environmental pollution from Trump’s deregulation and gutting of the EPA. It’s expensive to comply with regulations, which is one of the reasons why the stock market soared the day of his election. But… like a Ponzi scheme, deregulation is going to have a day of reckoning... especially when it results in the gutting of natural resources and quality of life. Short-sighted isn't even the word...
 
The 17th floor is also filled with slaves and people working at slave wages in the countries where so much of our manufacturing is being outsourced. Again, higher profits for us… but at what cost? Neocolonialism is going to work about as well as colonialism, and at the end of the day, it will collapse like a Ponzi scheme.
 
What else is on our 17th floor? Weaponry. Tons and tons of it… much of it obsolete even before it’s finished. But who cares? The military is the single largest contractor in the US,  and nearly every corporation makes big bank off selling to them. But to keep that party going, we need to be perpetually at war… which we have been for decades now. But as we continue to generate demand for military goods in these manufactured wars, we are also growing our enemies, and they are forming ever-more-powerful alliances, often fighting us with weapons we built!  Again, how sustainable?  As with a Ponzi scheme, the balloon payment is going to be a real killer.

Like Madoff’s 17th floor, ours is also a throwback to an earlier era. We are being sold on racism and rigid gender roles, on the glories of the free market (which is a blatant myth in the era of globalization), and the conflation of patriotism with hyper-militarization.
 
But still we trust. We don’t ask questions. We don’t go up on the 17th floor.
 
 We trust, because investments are still turning profits. We trust because everyone else is trusting. People with even modest savings are investing. We believe in our country. We have a commitment. We like our bankers, our advisors. They are nice people. They have authority. And we believe we are  lucky to have this economy. There is so much scarcity everywhere else. We, like Madoff, are in too deep to even consider ways of getting out. And our trust, like the trust of Madoff’s clients, is carefully cultivated and manipulated.

In the film, there was one man who stood up to Madoff, who saw what he was up to. It was Ken Langone, the ultra-conservative co-founder of Home Depot. There is a scene in the film where Madoff is trying to get Langone to invest in a new, exclusive fund that he claims is going to make huge profits. He tells Langone that he is only opening it to new investors. Langone is puzzled by this. If it’s such a fantastic opportunity, why wouldn’t Madoff be offering it to his oldest and most loyal clients? Why would he exclude them in favor of newcomers?

"He said something I found repulsive. He said to us, 'By the way, this fund I'm starting is going to be better than (the ones for) my existing investors.' That turned me off," Langone said.
 
Langone was not  blinded by prospects of above-market returns and not seduced by seemingly preferential treatment by a Wall Street mogul.  Langone, identifying with the interests of others, was, apparently, the exception. Most of Madoff’s clients would fall for his pitches. (Yes, it's too bad Lagone cannot extend that kind of identifying to gays and lesbians.)
 
But That little vignette with Lagone is the key:  Identify with others.  Who is being thrown under the bus for corporate profits? Are we honestly believing that, when the crunch comes, we will not also be considered expendable? 

"The whole government is a Ponzi scheme." -- Bernie Madoff.

Oh, go ahead. Clear the room and save the planet.

I’m talking about bringing up overpopulation every time there is a discussion about global warming, alternative energy, carbon emissions, extinction of species, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the ozone layer, acid rain, or the melting polar ice caps.

That’s right… “overpopulation.” Too many people.

And, trust me, it will clear the room. There is a reason why activists and politicians never bring it up, even though it’s the biggest “duh” on the planet.

The subject was a popular, or at least controversial one about fifty years ago. Paul Ehrlich wrote a bestseller called The Population Bomb and introduced the concept of “zero population growth.” There was a huge national conversation. The type of conversation that Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring had kicked off just seven years earlier. Folks were doing the math, considering the consequences, and talking about policy changes and possible solutions.

And then, the conversation was dropped. For fifty years.

What happened? Well… For starts, not all of Ehrlich’s predictions came true. Death rates did not rise. India did not starve.

On the other hand, some of his predictions did come true. When the book was written, there were between three and four billion people in the world. In 2012, that figure reached seven billion, having nearly doubled.

Several voices criticized Ehrlich’s book. Biologist and politician Barry Commoner was one of them. He had a theory that social and technological development would lead to a natural decrease in both population growth and environmental damage. Needless to say he was wrong.

But the silence prevails, even as the elephant outgrows the living room, filling it with poop and gaseous emissions.  Why?

Because to talk about overpopulation is to talk about population control. And population control is an explosive subject. Where it has been mandated, there has been an astronomical rise in the aborting of female fetuses. The whole subject touches a deep nerve among ethnic and racial minorities and colonized people who have had to endure the horrors of involuntary sterilization, genocide, “ethnic cleansing,” and cultural genocide. It raises the specter of eugenics and social engineering. And then, of course, there are the religious arguments against birth control, abortion, and women’s autonomy.

Talk of population control also threatens the ruling elite… right down to their toes. To quote the words of Venezuelan  sociologist Edgardo Lander:

"Capitalism is an unlimited growth system. There can be no such thing as a steady-state capitalism, or capitalism with negative growth.”

Endless breeding and doubling populations spell more consumers, or, as the economists would put it, “expanding markets.” And that means greater Gross National Product, more jobs, more investment capital, more prosperity.  Who wants to put the kibosh on that?

But let me state the obvious: While human populations have doubled, planetary resources have not. While human waste products have doubled, places to store them have not. And, quoting Lander again, “Unlimited growth is not possible in a limited planet.” Capitalism, like any pyramid scheme, will run its course.

The reality is that burgeoning population growth is the cause of the environmental crisis. (Can’t wait to the read the comments on this blog.) Yes, poor distribution, mismanagement of resources, racism, colonialism, endless war, etc. etc. have not helped, but there are limits to what the planet can sustain. Some are saying we have already passed those limits.

So let’s get back to my original suggestion: Why not interject the issue of overpopulation into every discussion of the environmental crisis? 

Um, because most folks don’t care to be branded racist, facist, childhating, misogynist, ignorant, colonialist, and anti-spiritual.

Fair enough, but let’s look at why we should take that risk anyway…

Because nature bats last. Because reality always wins. Because nothing gets to the root of the problem except getting to the root of the problem. And because the plants and the animals dying for our sins do not have a voice. And if they did, they would say, “It’s the overpopulation of one exceptionally short-sighted, avaricious  and filthy species, stupid!”

The conversation will not be easy and the solutions are offensive. But let’s do it anyway. We can take it, but the planet can't.

It’s time for a new political party.  “The Party of the Future.” It doesn’t even have to be huge in order to be effective. It just has to be noisy.

I’m talking about a political party whose SOLE PLATFORM is to examine and publicize the long-term impact of any and all policies and legislation.

No focus on political expediency, compromise with corporate lobbyists, deal-making, etc. Because this party is only and ever about one thing: The Future.

We pass economic policy that binds future generations to hopeless debt. We continue to enable an economic system based on unlimited growth of markets...  This has led to colonization, the horrors of NAFTA, and now a philosophy of perpetual warfare (we destroy massive infrastructures and then hire ourselves to rebuild them again). We engage in manufacturing and innovation that is solely profit-driven with inadequate  analysis to how these technologies may impact human society. We generate incredibly toxic waste that we flush into the ocean or waft into the atmosphere or shove into landfills. We have never yet come up with a plan for disposal of nuclear waste. 

The Party of the Future would generate ongoing pressure on the other parties to make concessions to these concerns. Because the Party of the Future would not be owned, and because it would have only one focus, and because it would have moral force behind it, it would have the ability to harass and prod the traditionally  lumbering and pandering political parties. 

I actually believe that the rising generation of voters considers The Future important. Probably because they are facing the distinct possibility of not having one. 

And that is thanks to my generation.

I belong to the Generation of Irrevocable Destruction. It’s a shameful legacy. My generation of “Boomers” has seen… oh, goddess, what haven’t we seen: 

• Extinction of species
• Acid rain
  
• Global warming
  
• Nuclear accidents
  
• Air pollution
  
• Water pollution
  
• Policy of “perpetual warfare” to support corporate capitalism’s demand for ever-expanding markets
  
• Depletion of water supplies
  
• Genetically modified food
  
• Destruction of the rainforests
  
• Pollution of the ocean
• Massive oil spills

… and all kinds of things we probably haven’t even noticed yet.

What would it take to form The Party of the Future?  Not that much. A handful of committed folks with some social networking skills and a great webmaster. And a team of dedicated research folks.  Actually, scratch that. How about a team of folks with some common sense and decency who are able to communicate their concerns with clarity and accountability?

I’ll sign on. It’s the least I can do.

In her  book, The Symbiotic Planet: Evolution by Merger, geo-scientist Lynn Margulis has put forth what she calls the “Gaia Concept.”  What this is, is a serial endosymbiosis theory of evolution.

And you thought this was going to be about food . . .

Bear with me, because the food chain we all learned about in grade school is on the brink of becoming the food potluck—a paradigm shift so major that it’s going to make the discovery of fire look like an evolutionary weenie roast. What we are witnessing is the closing down of our homo sapiens executive dining room in favor of a more democratic, more inclusive, inter-species, employee lunchroom. And it’s all about the “Gaia Concept.”

So just what is this “serial endosymbiosis” that Margulis is talking about? In a nutshell, it’s a theory about relationships not just between plants and animals, but also between them and atmospheric gases, surface rocks, and water, which she maintains are regulated by the growth, death, integration and other activities of living organisms. In other words, it’s about the entire ecosystem of the Earth’s surface as a series of interacting ecosystems, which is definitely not your grandmother’s theory of evolution.

In 1859, Charles Darwin published The Origin of the Species, the book that made a monkey out of creation theory. Darwin’s theory of evolution was about survival of the fittest: Random genetic mutations would lead to “natural selection,” whereby the more rugged or adaptive species would multiply and be fruitful, while the less rugged, less adaptive species would die out. In other words, according to Darwin, competition was good for us. This notion led to something called “Social Darwinism,” a convenient rationale for the rampant and predatory capitalism that characterized the Industrial Revolution and which continues, under various guises, to manifest itself today.

But, Margulis has looked at the numbers, and they just don’t add up.  She makes the point that genetic mutations, although common and easy to induce, rarely lead to changes that are beneficial to the organism. In other words, one’s chances for becoming the lucky host of an advantageous change in DNA structure are considerably worse than those for winning the lottery—and the chances are even slimmer of becoming the founder of a new species, based on such a rare mutation.

Margulis argues that evolutionary advances are achieved, not by good genes and natural selection, but by a species’ success in achieving symbiotic mergers with other species. And just as Darwinism coincided with the economic movements of its day, Margulis’ theory appears to be right on time for a planet that has been ravaged by the proponents of Social Darwinism and headed toward a global economy.

In explaining to the lay person how symbiosis works, Margulis uses the example of lichen. Lichen is a combination of two organisms living in a mutually beneficial arrangement. Most of the lichen is composed of fungal filaments, but among these filaments are green algal cells.  If the lichen is submerged in water, the fungus will die out and the algae will proliferate. On the other hand, if there is an inadequate amount of sunlight to sustain the algae’s photosynthesis, then it will die out, leaving the fungus to its own devices. The algae gains a structure that enables it to live on land, and the fungus benefits from the food-making capacity of the algae.

Moving to mammals for her examples of symbiosis, Margulis describes the cow, not as an entity, but as a fifty-gallon fermentation vat. The cow does not digest the grass it eats. The grass is digested by the organisms that are growing—yes, symbiotically—inside its gut.

Having led us gently by the hand from lichen to cow, she now asks us to make the leap from cow to human. And here Margulis is not so gentle. She informs us that we are all hosting eyelash mites. All of us. It doesn’t matter that we take a shower every morning; we still have them. And she invites us to look at our body fluids through the lens of a microscope in order to see the plethora of exotic critters living out their lives, as it were, under our very noses. Having brought us along this far, she then asks us to consider the colon. And here, even the most rabid Darwinist must pause before the void.

The colon is host to the bacteria that constitute the largest percentage of the dry weight of the human body. And whether we like it or not, these bacteria constitute a de facto Lower GI Tract Tenants’ Association. When we are not eating with proper symbiotic respect for the needs of the bacteria in our gut, they die out or the more harmful ones proliferate, and we find, like most landlords, that unhappy tenants have a way of making their problems into problems for the landlords. Unhappy colon bacteria can form pockets of resistance, trash the place, or stage a sit-down strike.

The early 21st century has seen an unprecedented breakdown in communication between the bacterial tenants’ association and the landlord homo sapiens. Perhaps in a simpler time and place, when the human scavenger’s choices were narrowed to a unripe yam, a ripe yam, or a rotten yam, the bacteria had less to fear from the appetites of the landlord.  But in the year 2002, the human forager faces a staggering array of substances for ingesting. Notice, I say “substances,” not “food.” There was actually a time when the food industry granted an award for the “invention” of foods from substances not usually considered edible. Cool Whip forever distinguished itself by being the first, and subsequently most difficult to top, recipient. Even when the substances ingested are the more traditional fruits and vegetables of the human habitat, the consumer discovers that these have been “enhanced” with dyes, their shelf lives have been extended by the use of preservatives, the crop yield has been multiplied by dousing with pesticides, and, most recently, unnatural selection via genetic engineering has been imposed in the name of some surreal, corporate survival of the fittest—which the Supreme Court now informs us have the legals rights of persons.

Our intestinal bacteria, which are the product of hundreds of thousands of years of non-corporate evolution, are at a loss to come up with the one-in-a-bazillion kind of genetic mutations that might, over eons, enable them to adapt to what we are eating today.

Unable to cope with the increasing volume of toxins, the gut has taken to passing some of the garbage on to the bloodstream. The infamous “leaky gut syndrome” is the culprit behind strange new constellations of such seemingly unrelated symptoms as neuro-fibromyalgia, sleep disturbances, panic attacks, migraine headaches, mysterious skin lesions, and debilitating fatigue. What happens in “leaky gut syndrome” is that nutrients meant to be absorbed into the body are suddenly being taken out with the trash through the colon, while substances meant to stay in the intestine are entering the bloodstream where they trigger immune-system responses as foreign invaders. Absorbing more toxins while excreting valuable nutrients, the beleaguered body becomes more and more overwhelmed with work orders, even as it’s experiencing a cut-back in payroll.  Meanwhile, the CEO’s vote themselves another raise in appetite. Not a good situation, as any union mediator can tell you. In the final stages of this deteriorating economy, the Mafiosi of the gut, Candida albicans--also known as yeast, begins to get a parasitic toehold, and there goes the neighborhood.

Auto-immune diseases and allergies, especially food allergies, are on the rise, and we have arrived at the endgame of the food chain. Having arrogantly constructed a theory of consumption that places us at the top of the heap, we have made the potentially fatal error of overlooking our dependence on micro-organisms. The food chain theory goes like this: We eat the big animals who eat the little animals who eat the big plants who eat the little plants, and so on back to the pond scum. (Did somebody say “spirulina?”) We have deluded ourselves into believing that, as long as we humans continued to pay out thousands of dollars to have our bodies incinerated after death or pickled in toxic preservatives, we could lay claim to a dubious, but unique status in the animal world as the only species that eats, but is never eaten.

But Darwinism is failing us. We have made valiant efforts to colonize our native bodies, imposing our artificially-manipulated, corporately-driven, commercial consumerism on the inhabitants of our various viscera. We have even come up with systems of psychology, spirituality, and philosophy to rationalize this new territorial imperative: We believe that our illnesses are the result of repressed psychological needs, of abuse at the hands of our dysfunctional families, of previous karma from past lives, of negative thinking. We bring in ever more drastic implements of surgical intervention, ever more bewildering and toxic medications—anaesthetizing or poisoning our grumbling constituencies into silence and provoking new conflagrations among previously peaceful inhabitants.

We are having as much difficulty controlling our colonies as Great Britain was having controlling theirs at the turn of the previous century, and our evolution will force us to the same conclusion:  We cannot afford our colonies. Humans have no new colons to conquer. Much as it offends our theories of species superiority, we must yield to the demands of the native, single-cell organisms to whom we owe our health, whom we have systematically oppressed, and who have consistently demonstrated not only more intelligence in their operations (“wisdom” is not too strong a word), but who have also held the high ground morally, in sustaining an ethic of cooperation, shared benefits, and input from all levels of production—even with all the forces of late-twentieth-century agribusiness and biotechnology arrayed against them.

We have lost our free lunch, but what we will be gaining at the interspecies potluck is an incredible pooling of diverse resources. We will find ourselves allies, where formerly we could only dream of domination.  Listening to other species as if our lives depend on it—which they do—we stand on the threshold of undreamed of modes of communication. And the devastating isolation of predatory individualism that has bred so much paranoia, insecurity, and desperation will break up when we begin to understand that we have never been alone, that we have always lived—even in our most delusional, destructive grandiosity—in symbiotic relation to all of the other forms of life on this planet, and in symbiotic relationship with the very earth, air, and water itself.

Surrendering our crowns as kings and queens of the species, we will apply ourselves diligently to winning the true crown of the creation pageant—that which is awarded for most congeniality. As the models for property ownership yield to an understanding of the responsibilities of stewardship, our orientation toward food will undergo a natural evolution. And eating what best supports symbiosis, we may just acquire a taste for life.

Yesterday I had lunch with a friend of mine who works in hospice. She educates people about the process of dying and calls herself an “end-of-life tour guide.” She used a phrase that gave me pause: “the acceptance of denial.”

What does that mean? From her perspective, it means accepting that denial can be a natural and helpful part of living. Denial can enable us to keep up with the functions of daily life in the face of fear or grief that might otherwise overwhelm us. No doubt, our capacity for deploying denial is some kind of neurophysiological adaptation designed to aid in our survival and the preservation of the gene pool. It may have been the case that the primates the most adept at denial lived the longest and propagated the most. Acceptance of denial may be acceptance of Darwinian truths hardwired into our DNA.

But when I heard the expression, I was not thinking about hospice. I was thinking about Fukushima. I was thinking about the disaster in Japan which still has no end in sight, which is still fraught with possibilities of ongoing, uncontrolled nuclear explosions. I was thinking about the tremendous amount of water which will need to be pumped into the damaged reactors to prevent these explosions, and the as-yet unanswered questions about the disposal of those thousands of tons of highly radioactive water. I was thinking about the radiation which has now gone around the globe and which continues to spew into the atmosphere and seep into the ocean every day as a result of this ongoing catastrophe.

I was thinking about Fukushima… but I was also thinking about not thinking about Fukushima—something which is becoming easier and easier to do as the media moves on to new headlines and the lack of answers has become the official answer. Not thinking about Fukushima is facilitated by the reassurances that appear in tandem with each new revelation: "The radiation being registered around the world is negligible, insignificant." "The amount of radioactive water intentionally dumped into the ocean is infinitesimal when compared with the entire volume of water in the sea." "Passengers flying across the country are exposed to more radiation than the amount turning up most places." "It’s safe to drink the water, eat the cheese, buy the fish."

Denial. And now the acceptance of denial.

On March 11 and 12, I had been panicked. Three decades earlier, I was part of a global, anti-nuclear movement. I had been arrested for occupying a nuclear power plant—if you can call leaping into the arms of the police an occupation. With my fellow activists, I had made a study of the industry. We understood the tactics, could spot the rhetoric, sniff out the lies. On March 11, I understood much about what was happening—with multiple, core-reactor meltdowns; with the power behind the cooling systems not only knocked out, but knocked out for days and possibly weeks; with cracked containment pits; with multiple bomb-like explosions. I understood that this was the worst disaster and the most serious threat to life that has ever occurred on this planet... and with no end in sight.

And I was terrified. For two days. But terror is difficult to sustain when there are viable and attractive alternatives. I had a life. I was actually out on tour with extensive obligations. I was traveling. Besides, there was nothing I could do about it anyway. This was not the terror of being pursued by a predator, where the extra surges of adrenalin translate into bursts of energy and sustained stamina for self-defense or escape. The terror induced by Fukushima was a kind of frozen horror, where the adrenalin played itself out in obsessive speculation and nervous, non-productive activity.

In the world of the jungle, terror is incentivized. Experiencing terror saves one’s life. In a world with scenarios of nuclear holocaust, terror is not incentivized. Denial is. It becomes an attractive option in the face of helplessness and overwhelming doom, of unthinkable consequences for millions of people, for thousands of years. Denial conditions us to believe reassurances without questioning source or motive. Denial enables us to function as if nothing has changed.

I am in this denial now, and it is a great relief compared with the terror of March 11 and 12. The world has not ended. Yet. And that word “yet” appeals to my biology… the “acceptance of denial.” The patient is dying. There is nothing we can do. There is no point in dwelling on it. The best thing to do is go on with our living. For now.

Is this really what it comes down to? “Not with a bang, but a whimper…” Or, not even the whimper?

I have found a locus of resistance, one that works for me. And it has to do with what is visible and what is invisible.

We have become an increasingly visual culture. I know this, because I am a playwright by trade, and playwriting is an aural art form. People used to say they were going to “hear a play.” Fewer than one fifth of Shakespeare’s audiences could actually see the stage. There is a limited arena for action on the stage, and without special effects, the physical drama is usually embarrassingly bogus. In theatre, the drama is in the language—in the impassioned speeches, in the verbally violent confrontations, in the seduction of argument. As a playwright, I am acutely aware of how theatre has been left behind, like some kind of cultural oxbow lake, as the river of pop culture has moved over, carving out new channels in visual media: film, TV, DVD, Nintendo, 3-D movies, Youtube, Wii, etc.

And the more visual the culture, the greater our disconnect. Why? Because when it’s visual, it’s about appearances. The symbols begin to usurp the substance they are supposed to represent. Thinking, and especially deep, radical, and independent thinking becomes short-circuited as the gaze is directed by the ever-editorializing lens of the camera.

The evolution of our technology has vastly outstripped the evolution of our brain. We have not had the time in a few generations to evolve brains that can instinctively distinguish between dancing dots on a screen and dancing dots on the back of the retina. The boundaries between reality and fantasy, documentary and drama, video games and war games are blurring. Children under the age of four are acquiring Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from watching on-screen violence. Celebrities are becoming government leaders. As humans become more and more attuned to a visual world, we become more and more easily manipulated by the images that we see. We have come to believe in what we see, whether or not it is real. And we are teaching ourselves to ignore or discount what we cannot see.

This is the problem with radiation. It is not visible. It can’t be felt or tasted. It has no odor, no texture, no temperature. It’s not as if Fukushima is being covered with ashes or buried in lava. It’s not as if there is a sulfurous, unbreathable gas hanging over the town. The sun still shines, the birds sing, and the flowers bloom. People have to be prevented from entering the zone around the reactors. People have to rely on readings and reporting from experts and agencies to tell them when they can drink the water.

And, as I said, denial has become accepted and acceptable. Because denial is natural in a situation like this, and especially in a culture so heavily oriented to the visual.

But has it always been natural to ignore what cannot be seen? Anthropology and archeology tell a different story. They tell us that, historically, indigenous cultures from every part of the globe have put a lot of stock in the unseen. Indigenous people have had many names to describe the ways in which the unseen world of spirit permeates and informs the visible and tangible world. There is Maori  “Dreamtime” or Hawai’ian “mana” or Yoruban “orishas.” The spirits of ancestors, of creators, of animals, of sacred places exist contemporaneously with humans, and rituals and codes have evolved to teach humans how to honor their presence and how to avoid offending them.

The ubiquitous spiritual systems of indigenous peoples point to the fact that ongoing consciousness  of the unseen is native to our evolution and our biology.  Had we not colonized our senses, we would have understood the blasphemy of splitting the atom, of creating a deadly waste material of which we could not dispose. We would have known that we were arrogating to ourselves the powers over life and death that should never belong to one species. We would have known that what we were doing was displeasing to the spirit world, constituting a profound violation of the sacred.

The sacred has been replaced by the profane in contemporary Western culture. We have electricity instead of spiritual forces. We have digital imagery instead of visions. In the words of Gertrude Stein, “Counting is the religion of this generation it is its hope and its salvation [sic].” Radiation is the perverse counterfeit of spiritual substance. It is the by-product of the endgame of divorcing the material world from its spiritual animus. The splitting of the atom is just the final act in a brutal campaign of disconnection. In the words of Robin Morgan:

"If one had to name one quality as the genius of the patriarchy, it would be compartmentalization, the capacity for institutionalizing disconnection. Intellect severed from emotion. Thought separated from action. Science split from art. The earth itself divided; national borders. Human beings categorized by sex, age, race, ethnicity, sexual preference, height, weight, class, religion, physical ability, ad nauseum. The personal isolated from the political. Sex divorced from love. The material ruptured from the spiritual. The past parted from the present and disjoined from the future. Law detached from justice. Vision dissociated from reality."

I derive hope from the fact that it is possible to recover an apparently innate reverence for the unseen. I take comfort in this. I understand how I am incentivized by a corporate culture and by my own biology to deny the full horror of radioactivity. I accept that. I accept my  denial about Fukushima. I accept that this denial may even be natural. But I know that it was once in my ancestral biology to experience rich rewards from sensing the unseen spiritual essence of life and to find joy and peace in honoring that spiritual essence, in being a part of it, in protecting it and cultivating it in myself.

And because I know this, I choose to believe that this sensing of spirit can be recovered—uncovered, dis-covered, and revivified. And this spiritual seeing-of-the-unseen, unlike Fukushima, is powerfully incentivized… by faith, joy, and even ecstasy. It results in tangible enhancement of quality of life, of self-esteem, of sense of belonging. It also results in the reverence that would have prevented the splitting of the atom in the first place, and this reverence holds the potential to prevent the building of new nuclear reactors.

This attention to the cultivation of my spiritual sense is the most focused and effective and political response I can make to what is happening to the ocean and to the land and to the air and to all the forms of life on this planet.

Albert Einstein said, “The splitting of the atom changed everything except man’s mode of thinking.” I am choosing to believe and endeavoring to prove that he was mistaken.

Board games... I remember playing Candy Land... it was probably my first. And then, of course, there was Monopoly. I can remember figuring out early on that, unless one was adept at strategic alliances, the outcome of the game was pretty much determined by the toss of the dice.  It might take a long time to play out, but basically, if one landed early on Boardwalk and Park Place, it would be pretty tough to beat that monopoly. Then there was Risk, a microcosm of Cold War thinking and global domination.

Turns out, board games are ancient, the earliest one named "Senet" being pictured in a fresco in an Egyptian tomb from 3000 BC. "Patolli" was played by the ancient Aztecs, and the Royal Tombs of Ur contained the "Royal Game of Ur."

But let's go back to Monopoly for a second. If board games represent microcosms for cultural mindsets, it behooves us to understand the origin of this game. The game that taught me capitalism was, according to the BBC, a redesign of a board game first published by (wait for it) a woman who was a Quaker and a political activist. Her name was Elizabeth Magie. The original name was "The Landlord's Game" and it was intended to teach people how monopolies end up bankrupting the majority, while enabling a small minority to amass an ill-gotten fortune. On January 5,1904, the game was awarded U.S. Patent 748,626.

In 1933, three years after the start of the Great Depression,  the game was reinvented as "Monopoly," and it has become the most popular board game ever played. More than one billion would-be millionaires have passed Go and collected $200 in the eighty years since it's invention.

But something very strange seems to have occurred along the way from "The Landlord's Game" to "Monopoly." Life has begun to imitate art. We, as a planet, have begun to treat life as a board game, and the earth as the board.

Right now, as I write this, the greatest environmental disaster on the planet is transpiring. An explosion on an oil rig, due to lax oversight, shortcuts on materials and research, and exceptions to regulations, is causing hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil to pour into the ocean.

That's a catastrophe. Now, imagine that the explosion had taken place in a building in Manhattan... and a fire is raging, destroying PROPERTY (keep that word in mind). Fire trucks and ambulances show up. But imagine government officials sending them home. "No, this explosion has occurred in a building owned by Widgets, Inc. and it is their responsibility to deal with it." And then, of course, Widgets, Inc. who is in the business of making and selling widgets, has to scramble to get in the business of firefighting and rescuing people... for which they have little expertise, less budget, and miniscule motivation... because the bottom line of a corporation is producing profits for their shareholders. Actually, there will be a certain tension between this firefighting/lifesaving and the interests of the stockholders. And, meanwhile, the fire rages on, spreads through the city, and destroys lives.

That would seem crazy, wouldn't it? As soon as the explosion occurs, the model changes. There is a full-on mobilization to deal with the disaster.

But that's not happening in the Gulf. Everyone is standing around and waiting for  Widgets, Inc.-- in this case, British Petroleum--to stop the destruction and save the lives. And this mission is definitely in conflict with their bottom line. We can see that. They immediately began to pour millions into public relations and lobbyists, because that's the kind of damage they understand: government regulation. That's the fire they are skilled at putting out. They have mobilized to keep the press away from the coastal areas. They understand company secrecy. They have raced to pour chemicals more toxic than oil into the ocean in order to sink the oil, get it out of sight. They understand the PR value of that, also... never mind that these chemicals will kill sea life. Out of sight, out of mind. And their CEO has complained about wanting his life back. Thousands of folks on the Gulf Coast have permanently lost their livelihood and with it the life they have always known, but the BP CEO has gone off to the yacht races in England, because, in his words, it's one of the biggest races in the world!

And is this their fault? They are, after all, a corporation. They do what corporations do. There is an unforgettable documentary The Corporation, which you can watch for free (and legally) on Hulu. It lists the characteristics of a sociopath, who is, admittedly, a menace to society... and then it goes down this list, showing how corporations exhibit every one of those characteristics... that, in fact, those characteristics are built into the very definition of a corporation.  And how absolutely disastrous to society this is, and especially, now that the Supreme Court has granted them the legal rights of an individual (human).

Corporations view the world as a monopoly board. There are opponents and allies in the game, but no real people. There is property, but no real planet with nature and ecosystems. And the reason why there would be a governmental response to an explosion in Manhattan is that this explosion would be impacting private property. But the explosion in the ocean...?  Well, nobody owns the ocean.  Nobody owns the floor of it. Nobody owns the water rights to the ocean. It's up to BP to fix it.

This seems crazy to me. And there were immediate offers of funding and expertise from other governments. These were turned down. Hands off! This is a corporate problem!  Goddess forbid anyone do anything that infringes on the territory of a corporation. The last thing this administration needs is more hysterical press about socialization, government takeover of business. Which is odd, because we have certainly nationalized a ton of banks and other financial institutions in the wake of the mortgage crisis. Isn't the "failure" of the ocean as an ecosystem something that would warrant a bailout?

But, the ocean is not a property. And the billions of ocean creature lives lost in this disaster do not form a voting constituency. And life is, after all, a board game.

Except it's not. We need to remember this. We are not the lords of the planet, we do not have rights over other forms of life. We act as if we do, but the day of reckoning, when we realize our interdependence, is upon us. Life is not a board game, much as some of us would like to believe that it is. If it was, all of us would be drawing the "Go Directly to Jail" card.