The Casual Blog

I recently got back from a ten-day trip to Big Bend National Park in southwestern Texas.  I expected to do a lot of hiking and off road driving, and did.  Spending time there was a powerful experience.  These pictures are from the trip.  I also made a short slideshow, available on YouTube here.

Big Bend is a long drive from El Paso, which accounts for its getting relatively few visitors.  It’s big – more than 800,000 acres – and strange, with rugged mountains, canyons, and lots of desert.  I used to think of deserts as places where nothing lives, but actually there are a lot of flora and fauna that make their living there.  Nature is amazingly resourceful.  

Along with the vivid direct experience, I enjoyed learning something of the complex geology of the area.  It’s not as old as it looks.  As recently as 83 million years ago, it was the floor of an ocean, and as recently as 17 million years ago, it had active volcanoes.  After that the crust stretched and fractured – basin and range faulting.  Since then, water and wind have created many fascinating shapes.  Nature is remarkably creative, and patient.  

My mates were good-humored friends from the Raleigh Ski and Outing Club who are keen hikers.  We found plenty of trails, including some rough ones with substantial elevation gains.  I also enjoyed four-wheeling on some challenging unpaved areas with a Jeep. We stayed just outside the park in Terlingua, a hardscrabble little town.  The Airbnb house we rented was a minor disaster, with appliances that worked poorly or not at all, but we made do.

With Trump and MAGA continuing to wreak havoc on our country and the world, it was good to have a few days to enjoy nature.  It’s important to address our problems, but also necessary to stay sane and healthy, and immersion in nature helps.  

I’ve been trying to understand the theory of MAGA – that is, the reasoning that accounts for so many bad ideas.  Some parts are comprehensible, though mistaken, like panicked fear of minorities and foreigners and resentment of educated elites.  But others are simply bizarre.  

A case in point is the multi-pronged effort to worsen global warming.  Trump wants to increase greenhouse gas emissions with fossil fuel burning and to cut out green energy.  He calls global warming a “hoax.”  With so much evidence of climate change staring us in the face, what kind of craziness is this?

The brilliant and courageous Jamelle Bouie wrote an essay recently discussing the crazy tariff policy that suggests a possible answer, 

The fundamental truth of Donald Trump is that he apparently cannot conceive of any relationship between individuals, peoples or states as anything other than a status game, a competition for dominance. His long history of scams and hostile litigation — not to mention his frequent refusal to pay contractors, lawyers, brokers and other people who were working for him — is evidence enough of the reality that a deal with Trump is less an agreement between equals than an opportunity for Trump to abuse and exploit the other party for his own benefit. For Trump, there is no such thing as a mutually beneficial relationship or a positive-sum outcome. In every interaction, no matter how trivial or insignificant, someone has to win, and someone has to lose. And Trump, as we all know, is a winner.

Before Trump, we were doing a poor job as a civilization of addressing our environmental challenges.  Scientists consistently warned for years that, without dramatic changes, we were on course for a global climate catastrophe in the coming decades.  Now, obviously, we’re here.

Yesterday NPR reported that Trump has proposed to change the rules protecting endangered species so as to kill more of them.  The rule change would make destroying habitats of such species legal.  This, like other parts of the war on the environment, seems like bloody-minded craziness.  How to explain it?   Greed and corruption are surely part of the answer. But maybe Trump’s drive to dominate extends to non-human creatures, plants, and the earth itself!

This sounds a lot like madness – King Canute supposing he can command the tide.  At the same time, it suggests a total absence of compassion.  Indeed, recent comments by Musk and other MAGA-ites suggest that the Trumpist war on everything includes a fight against empathy.  

As the Guardian reported recently that some evangelical Christian leaders are preaching against the “sin of empathy.”  The idea seems to be that natural feelings of concern for creatures less fortunate  should be stamped out so that the MAGA project can advance. 

There is, at least, a kind of honesty in this.  The MAGA project is in many respects wantonly cruel, and the hypocrisy of MAGA-ites who claim to believe and follow the teachings of Jesus is obvious.  One way to straighten this out:  give the love-thy-neighbor idea a radical revision.  Hate thy neighbor!  

Just to be clear, I don’t think that’s the way to go.  I think there’s still a lot of empathy and compassion out there, which may yet get us through.  But we’ve reached a perilous pass.  It’s time to do whatever we can – speak up, march, call our politicians.  One of my Big Bend friends told me about 5calls.org, which gives good advice and templates for calling political leaders and expressing dissent.  It’s not my favorite thing to do, but I’m trying to make calls every day.   

P.S.  In case you’re interested, the Fish and Wildlife Service is accepting public comments on its proposed gutting of the Endangered Species Act until May 19.