Chapter 4 — History in Transition

A serial novel in the form of correspondence among a family while the world as we know it collapses around us. I recommend you start at the Introduction:

https://readmedium.com/climate-for-change-introduction-5331d5ab9313

But you can start anywhere you want.

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Chapter 4:

Email from Benji:

Dear Grandpa,

I can’t believe I have been home from the farm for two weeks already. I miss you and Grandma. I wish I didn’t have to go back to school.

I have been thinking a lot about history and climate change. Melody calls me a history nerd, but it is just about certain history that I get really nerdy. When I think about all of the changes that happened during the years of World War II, I get a sense of what people can do in a short period of time. Everything changed. All of society re-organized around the war. I think we need that same sort of transformation to stop climate change.

I am impatient for people to wake up. Wake up! Wake up! What would happen if we all woke up to the climate crisis in front of us?

Yesterday I was watching the People’s Encyclopedia pages about World War I and World War II. I say “watching” because they were literally changing in front of my eyes. The World War I page changed from talking about the war being caused by a rise of nationalism to blaming the war on entangling networks of alliances and a lack of isolationist politics. Then it changed back. And then after a few minutes it changed again. I checked to see if World War II was changing back and forth, too, and I found a full-scale battle going on between people who were revising the page to blame the war on Russian, British, and French policies in the run-up to the war and those who were blaming the war on German aggression and fascism. The revisions were coming sentence by sentence, and they were quickly being re-replaced by what I assume was the original content. This went on for about an hour. Then the pages for both wars were gone altogether, each replaced by an “under construction” page.

I called Mom in to see the computer, and that’s when she suggested I write to you about what is happening.

In other news, I am starting club soccer next week. The tryouts were a little scary because there were so many good players. But I was on the team last year, and the coach gave me a good handshake when she saw me. I’m hopeful that I will be on the travelling team again.

Melody is as annoying as ever. She has gotten back into her screen addiction. She has been asking Mom for a phone, too. I didn’t get my phone until I turned 14. If you ask me, I think Mom and I are both getting tired of her whining. She already has a tablet, and she is on it constantly playing games and not doing her school lessons. I hate to think of her with a phone.

Our chickens seem happy with the expanded coop that you helped us build when you dropped us off. They went to the new roosts right away. Mel says she thinks they are going to lay more eggs with the extra space. I think they won’t, but maybe if the weather cools off, they will start laying more again. Mel’s “forest chickens” were also accepted right away into the flock.

I have been reading a lot recently, mostly history, but also science fiction, just nothing with vampires. That is not my thing. I miss the life on the farm. I think I am reading so much to keep my mind off the fact that I am back in the city.

Well, I gotta go. Mom says I need to set the table.

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Dear Benjamin,

Thank you for your email. And yes, I agree that climate change is the issue of our time. You know from our conversations on the farm that I think about it every day.

I have been looking into the People’s Encyclopedia changes. It seems that the President-For-Life sent out a message instructing his followers to correct some of the “mistakes” in People’s Encyclopedia. They went right to work “editing” the pages. Eventually the changes were coming so fast that the website could not keep up. People’s Encyclopedia ended up having to shut down any page that was being attacked. The PFL proceeded to call People’s Encyclopedia “the enemy of the people” for only showing part of history, and he threatened to cancel their URL like he did last year with the cable news channels that disagree with him.

Other than trying to decipher the news without actual news outlets that we can trust, we have been busy on the farm. We have been harvesting tomatoes and canning them all week. There are so many tomatoes! We have been roasting them in the wood-fired outdoor oven in the summer kitchen and then water-bath canning them into quart jars. The smell of the tomatoes roasting with garlic in the outdoor oven has been wafting all over the farm. Just yesterday we had an Amish buggy pull into the driveway because they smelled the tomatoes all the way down on the road. They wanted to know what we were doing and what our recipe was. I made sure that they went home with a few jars. We have over 100 jars of tomato sauce now. Your grandmother was telling me that we have too many canned tomatoes, but I just say that we don’t know how next year will be and maybe we will need two years’ worth of tomatoes canned. She reminds me that we did that last year and still have a bunch left. Better to have too much than too little, I say. It goes back and forth like that, and then we just work together to can another bucket of tomatoes.

We also have been busy getting ready to butcher the meat chickens. They have grown a lot since you were here. There are fat white birds prancing all over the pasture right now, unaware of what is coming. We haven’t lost any to coyotes this year, thanks to your idea to move Rosie’s kennel down there for the final few weeks of pasturing them. She is a good dog. But you know that already.

You keep watching People’s Encyclopedia to see what happens. If you see anything that you think might be in danger of being taken down, cut and paste it into a document and store it on your hard drive. You never know when people might want to remember some history

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Dear Grandpa,

You were right to tell me to cut and paste from People’s Encyclopedia. Yesterday I cut and pasted everything they had on the Holocaust, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the U.S. Civil War. By this morning those pages were all also “under construction.” I haven’t seen anything on the mainstream news sites about it though. It is like it isn’t happening, except I can see it with my own eyes. I was telling Jeremy about it at soccer practice today. I made the team I wanted, by the way. Jeremy’s eyes just glazed over when I started talking about People’s Encyclopedia being down, like what happens when I tell him about climate change. I guess that’s why I am writing to you. You understand.

In other news, I started running today. My soccer coach encouraged all of us to run 3 to 4 times a week for cardio fitness. I thought I was in pretty good shape after throwing hay bales all summer, but after ten minutes of running on the track in the heat, I was bent over and struggling for breath. I guess I still need some more cardio training. Did you ever run, Grandpa?

Today is my night to make dinner. Mom says I can’t make mac and cheese again. She said to go out to the garden and find some inspiration. I went out there and noticed we have some big pumpkins coming along. They will be cool for Halloween, but not for dinner. Anyway, I didn’t get much inspiration in the garden. But since I have to cook, it is going to be baked potatoes with roasted chicken and broccoli. I know how to do all that, and we still have one of your chickens in the freezer. We need to make room in the freezer for the new birds next week.

See you Saturday!

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Dear Benj,

It was great to see you on Saturday. We sure were glad for your help. You are by far the fastest feather plucker in the family. I really enjoyed our conversations, too. You had more questions about your great-great-grandpa and World War II. I didn’t have all the answers, so I went and visited my mother in the nursing home. She told me that my grandpa was a union man in a car factory in Germany in the early 1930’s. When Hitler came to power, the Nazis targeted all of the union organizers for arrest. This was early on, when the Communists were being blamed for many of Germany’s problems. In the next city over from his, one night all of the union organizers were arrested. The news spread quickly.

The next day his parents helped him get to a port city and sign on to the crew of a cargo ship that was heading for the U.S.A. He did his best to learn English on the way over, and he jumped ship when they docked in New York. During the war, my grandpa worked in a tank factory in Michigan. He was a shop foreman. His expertise from the work he had done in Germany was very welcome in the factory. That is about all I know. He didn’t really talk about the war years much. He certainly didn’t talk about it to me. He was just my German grandpa. I’m sorry I never met my great-grandparents who stayed behind in Germany, but what happened to them is probably why Grandpa didn’t talk much about that time. I know neither of them made it through the war.

Enough about all that! Thank you for asking. Next time you come out, I’ll see if I can dig out the old photo albums.

You asked me if I ever ran. I did go through a phase when I was about your age, I ran with a friend who was very into it. But after my friend moved away, I couldn’t stick with it. I think I like to run more when there is a reason for it, like playing a sport or something. I do know that some people really enjoy running. This is how you find out who you are. You try something, and if you love it, then maybe it is part of you. I say go for it.

Our week has gone by quickly. We moved the pigs to a new pasture and cut third crop hay. It has been so hot and dry, it should dry down pretty well, but there won’t be much of it. We also have been concerned about the news about fires in California. Wildfires are awful. If we were religious, we would be praying for those people and animals out there. I just might pray anyway, to cover my bases. For now, I wrote another letter to my Congressperson and wrote another check to that Climate Action group.

Hoping for rain,

Grandpa Peter

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Dear Grandpa,

Yes! You are right. I am the fastest plucker in the family. Melody couldn’t pluck half as fast as I could. And Mom is pretty fast, but you made her process the gizzards. So I didn’t have much competition. I’m glad you got the scalding water temperature right this year. Last year it wasn’t quite hot enough, and the feathers didn’t come out as easy. This year it was like butter.

Thanks for the information about my great-great grandfather. If I understand you correctly — by saying that he “jumped ship,” does that mean he was an illegal immigrant!?! I never knew. That got me thinking.

Yes. California! The PFL said on Government News that the fire is the other party’s fault. If they had only allowed unlimited logging, there wouldn’t have been so much fuel built up. It is amazing how he can blame the other party and not mention climate change at all. It is funny how no news organizations seem to talk about climate change anymore either. In my Activist Club we used to read stories from the Internet about climate change every week. Our club never had any trouble finding stories about how a species is disappearing or the oceans are acidifying. We would choose one news story to read together and decide what action to take. Now when we look at the news, we don’t see any new news about climate change, and the links to the old stories we had talked about previously are no longer functioning. Luckily, I printed them all out and put them in a binder.

This is probably what Mom means when she says we all have to pay attention.

I have been trying to pay attention. I call it my “noticing project.” I notice how warm it is when I go running. They say the Southeast is under dangerous heat advisories. If it is so hot here that I can’t stand to run outside for even ten minutes, I can’t imagine what it must be like down there. Why would someone live there? Do you think people in Georgia and Alabama ever leave their air-conditioned houses? How do they get any work done?

I also have been thinking more about World War II. The union organizers and Jews were blamed for Germany’s problems. That is really a lot like the current campaign that the PFL has against immigrants. Wages are low, people are hurting, and he is blaming the problems on immigrant labor for coming in to work for lower wages. Of course, the business owners could just pay people more. Since you told me that great-great-Grandpa was what we would call now an illegal immigrant, I have been noticing more about immigration. There are leaflets stapled to the light poles all along the street where I run. The leaflets say that there is a reward for turning people in who might be illegal. I think those leaflets have been there for a long time, but this is the first I noticed them. When did they start? Mom didn’t remember.

Other than soccer, pulling weeds in the garden, running, and school projects, my life has been pretty much the same. Say hi to Grandma for me.

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Dear Benjamin,

Your letter scared me a little. I didn’t know they were offering rewards for undocumented people. I also didn’t notice that climate change had dropped completely out of the news. I guess I stopped paying attention to mainstream news a while ago. Since the PFL blocked Public Radio News last year, I have been a little out of it. We are somewhat isolated out here on the farm, so I don’t just see things when I walk around like you do in the city. Please keep noticing and telling me what you see.

I do know that on my neighbor’s dairy farm, the workers all left in the middle of the night last Thursday. They all had H-1 visas and were here legally. They left a note for the farmer saying that they were not getting paid enough to take the racism in the U.S.A. They talked about how their children were coming home from school in tears almost every day. They said they were sad to leave their good jobs, and they like our neighbor, but it wasn’t worth it. Our neighbor said it was a “mass exodus.” The workers from the six other big dairy farms in the area all left on the same day. He asked if we could come help with the milking. We are very busy with the garden harvest and food processing, the animals, and cutting firewood, but we are going to go over and help every other morning. In exchange, we will get as much milk as we want and extra hay for our animals. Our third crop hay was high quality but not very abundant!

Despite my letter to my Congressperson and my donation to Climate Action, the fires keep popping up out west (insert my sarcastic smile here). Alaska, British Columbia, Oregon, and Montana are seemingly all on fire now, in addition to California. And there is a big tropical storm brewing in the Gulf of Mexico. There isn’t one word about climate change on any of the main news sites. We used to get better news before the PFL blocked the English Broadcast Group and Dubai News as “the people’s enemies” and of course, before Public Radio News was converted to all classical music for being too political. I do know that five days in a row with high temperatures over 100 degrees in the third week of September feels unprecedented. Social media is full of people asking me to cut and paste a picture of a raindrop with the caption “pray for rain: like and share if you want the drought to end.” As if that will help (cue another sarcastic, but also worried, smile).

Your grandmother sends her love and wonders what you are teaching yourself this week.

Grandpa Peter

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Next chapter:

https://readmedium.com/chapter-5-noticing-2dec446f878e

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