Walking the Talk

Just like I suspect you have, I’ve fallen short on some of my resolutions this year. I stopped getting over to the gym every week (despite a running start -- literally -- toward the end of November), and I’m still inhaling sugary pastries and syrupy lattes at Starbucks.

As I’ve written here in the past, I try to avoid making classic, hard-and-fast new year’s resolutions. My strategy has been not to be too precise, because that’s mostly setting yourself up to fail. Instead, I think about general directions in which I’d like to move over the coming year.

In some ways, my 2015 plan is working. Tiramisu and Caramel Flan lattes and my absence from 24-Hour Fitness aside, on a grander scale I’m accomplishing at least some of what I’d hoped to this year.

Giving up pleasure reading, as I described on Feb. 13, turned out not to be that difficult. I simply don’t take stuff out of the library and have it lying around, if it isn’t a title chosen by one of my book discussion groups. And of course I don’t shop for books to own. Although I’ve felt the occasional jones to reach for a book whenever a quiet moment strikes, it hasn’t been too hard to fight.

The goal was to carve out more time in my life for writing, and I’m doing that -- partly because I rented a desk in a shared office space six blocks from our apartment. I go over there several times a week: sometimes to do free-lance editing and proofreading work for clients, and sometimes to work on the book or other pieces.

You’re seeing more posts to this blog, and I’ve written nearly 50 pages of a bio-memoir about my grandmother’s childhood in frontier Fairbanks, Alaska, in 1906-1910.

More important from a spiritual standpoint, I’ve looked for more opportunities to include my input, and make a difference in the community around me. When the Portland City Council was preparing to vote on a smoking ban in city parks, I wrote about it here, then attended the public hearing on Feb. 11 and testified in support of the measure. You can see video of my comments on the City Council website; it starts at 130:56 and goes to 134:45.

The council passed the new ordinance, and the Oregonian editorial board, with whom I’d tangled over the issue last year, humphed its disapproval. I sent in a triumphant letter to the editor that was probably not printed because it was too gloating:

The Oregonian editorial board failed to convince the city council not to pass a ban on smoking in public parks, so it pitched a hissy fit (Feb. 21).

Where were you at the first reading of this ordinance on Feb. 11? I was there and testified in support.

If you had been there, you would have heard better arguments in favor than the weak and bogus ones you attribute to your opponents.

You should have seen this coming and proposed better solutions. Instead, you resort to the elementary playground rationale: “Other people litter too, so why pick on smokers?”

That’s no response to the fact that it’s still wrong, it’s rampant, and it pours toxic chemicals into the environment, including the Willamette River.

The best way to avoid “bad” legislation is to come up with better alternatives.

You didn’t. So you lost.

My wife Carole and I have been longtime supporters of the Oregon Humane Society and DoveLewis. The latter is the first-ever 24-hour nonprofit animal emergency hospital in the nation. Opened in 1973 with limited hours, it went to 24-hour service in 1992.

OHS is a private, nonprofit animal shelter that saves and adopts out more than 11,000 pets a year. Unlike other shelters across the country, OHS maintains a no-kill policy except in the case of truly dangerous animals; pets live there as long as it takes to find a family for them. The organization also partners with Oregon State University to give veterinarian students hands-on surgical training before they go into practice.

We’ve been “customers” of both institutions as well as supporters. We adopted our long-lived black cat from OHS. We rushed our rat terrier to DoveLewis when she swallowed a box of chocolate truffles. DoveLewis also guided us through the process of treating our toy fox terrier’s mast cell tumor. I once hand-carried a parrot I had found on a fence on NW 21st Avenue eight blocks to DoveLewis.

Dating back to 1868, the Oregon Humane Society is the third-oldest humane society in the U.S., and by far the oldest in the West. This spring, it decided to boost its marketing game by training staff to do TED-style talks, both live and on video, to relate war stories and explain the organization’s mission in greater depth. Carole and I attended several meetings to workshop the presentations: we gave them our input on the developing talks’ effectiveness and ways to improve them.

I’ve also wanted to become more proactive about supporting stricter gun control legislation. With each passing day, more innocent Americans die in firearms accidents, outbursts of aggression, domestic squabbles, and suicides.

On March 18 I attended a meeting of the local chapter of Moms Demand Action For Gun Sense in America and met the founder and national leader of the group, Shannon Watts, as well as other Oregon activists.

We talked about Senate Bill 941, the pending Oregon legislation to expand background checks to all firearms sales in the state. Until now, people could sell guns outside of gun shows -- say, over the phone, the back fence, or the Internet -- and no criminal background check was required. Convicted felons, domestic abusers, or people in the middle of a mental health crisis could easily purchase a firearm online or through a private sale, and no one would have to assess their suitability for gun ownership.

We also hand-wrote letters to our elected officials in Salem on the issue. I already knew my state senator, Ginny Burdick, would be on our side, because she spoke at a gun control rally I attended at Portland City Hall two years ago. (That’s her at left, outside city hall in February 2013.) Burdick’s a veteran: serving her third term and currently president pro tempore of the Oregon Senate. (Last year I also lobbied her to extend tax credits to filmmakers who come to shoot in Oregon, and she was already on board with that one.)

I didn’t know how my state rep, Jennifer Williamson, stood on the issue, though I had a feeling she would be with us. Though only in her first term in the House, she was elected Deputy Majority Whip by her colleagues and has been a strong supporter of education, pro-choice, and other progressive positions.

As it turned out, Williamson agreed to be a chief sponsor of SB 941, which passed earlier this month, and was signed by Governor Kate Brown this week. No doubt the issue will come up again in Oregon, but I expect to write here about firearms and gun control issues at the national level as well.

Of course I’ve been donating blood for years. It’s been tougher to keep count since the Red Cross started taking double-unit donations, but as of today I’m probably hanging at around 60 pints of lifetime blood giving.

The aim of these small acts of activism is to fight the electronic “connection mania” of our culture. Each day the Internet gives you hundreds of reasons to obsess over people and events that have nothing to do with your life, from celebrity misbehavior to civil rights battles in other states, horrific domestic violence and instant lottery winners, and outbreaks of war and terrorism overseas.

As vital and real as these events may be in their own context, when they come over your Facebook or ISP feed, they function as little more than entertainment, in the broadest sense. You might as well be watching action thriller movies and sitcoms, for all they relate to your life as you live it from day to day and the choices you could be making. Even the things your friends in town are eating, watching, and playing mostly have nothing to do with what you should be focusing your energy on.

The cumulative effect of electronic news feeds, I would argue, is to make you feel both more anxious about the world in general, and more complacent about your daily life. You’re encouraged to become uneasy about potential threats (kidnappings and shootings and terrorist attacks) that, statistically, are unlikely ever to come to your door. At the same time, you’re made to feel lucky merely to be wasting many hours in traffic each week, chasing the almighty dollar 8-to-5, five (or more) days a week, and buying goodies, sometimes with money you actually possess, to placate your imprisonment in that 8-to-5 routine . . . because all that violence and turmoil elsewhere hasn’t struck you today.

The symptoms of our entrapment are everywhere: “It’s humpday!” “TGIF!” “What are your plans for the weekend?” It’s as if your leisure time and work hours are locked in a deathly embrace: each feeds and justifies the other. You work hard to be able to afford the things that make you feel better about having to work so hard.

One of my essential “decisions” for this year was to become more active as a citizen of my community and state: to waste less time treating distant events as entertainment … because they have nothing to do with my life and I can’t play any substantive role in their course.