A "tetchy" letter from England

Richard Wood is an old friend of 40 years. He's also a Yorkshireman, which means he speaks his mind.

So it was that I opened my e-mail this morning to find this letter (below), which he himself describes as "tetchy."

You can sense his impatience (even anger) not only with America generally but with me in particular for my choice of subjects these past few days. He is accusing us of ignorant trivializing of this election's significance to the planet.

The rest of the world has about had it with the American electorate and this campaign. Richard doesn't even cite the worst of it. The attack ads, the voting machines that change your vote (go here), the voter suppression, the robo-calls, the transformation of politics into entertainment (Read "Amusing Ourselves to Death"), the racism, the hateful claques at the rallies.

There's a lot to get tetchy about.

Here is Richard's letter.

Are climate change, ecology, the environment, the immediate future of the physical planet itself issues at all with the American public?

In your three current posted stories - the disastrous local landslide, Cindy's dollars, and the debate by the would-be presidents, there is no hint of awareness that there are huge policy questions waiting to be answered.

The whole world is watching.

We don't care what the next president looks like, his sex appeal, whether he makes eye contact, how many zillion dollars his wife earns, how heroic or cowardly he was in Vietnam. We want to know if he is going to kick-start America's involvement in saving the planet. Does he (do you) make the link between natural disaster and climate change? Did a natural fault line create the landslide or was it the result of more than usually violent weather patterns? If the latter, are they related to what used to be called global warming?

Here in North Yorkshire we have had three successive relentlessly wet summers, as predicted by the climate change theorists. We have had massive flooding, with water pouring through the homes of thousands of people more than once each summer. Snow is a thing of the past. A whole generation of under-20s has grown up without ever seeing snow, in a county whose winters were once dominated by snow and ice.

There are climate change skeptics, but not many. Most people are now making uncomfortable shifts in the way they live, think and behave.

There are many, many great American scientists standing by for signals from the new American political leadership that the dark days of Bush ignorance are over, that your country is ready to play its part in combating man-induced climate change. You are the greatest users of non-renewable energy in the world. How willing is the new leadership going to be to wake the people up, get them started on massive changes in personal habits?

Does Obama mean what he says when he promises America will have cut off its dependence on Middle East oil within 10 years? Dare he and does he know how to go about this? What are his links with Al Gore; how prepared is he to listen to and learn from him?

Let's hear these questions asked loudly so that we know what these guys are truly made of.
Maybe the mesmerising line running across the TV screen during the next debate could reflect the responses of the political blog writers!

A friend's thoughts on silence

In response to my musings about Quaker silence, my old friend Richard Wood, who lives in the village of Husthwaite in North Yorkshire, writes about his own explorations of silence.

(His reference to “molehills” is a running joke of ours. The hills in question are rolling and gentle, just south of the Yorkshire Moors. He has jokingly disparaged them ever since witnessing our Cascades.)


I enjoyed your exploration of the depths of silence, especially your search for what might lie beyond the depths.

My mind went in search of the same point made by one of the 19th century novelists. I had to use the Oxford Book of Quotations to track it down: George Eliot, “Middlemarch”: she refers to "that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”

Most of us (even those who have "retired" and should have time to do it other ways) spend our lives moving on in search of the next thing to do. When there's not much to do right now I find myself going up and down the stairs in search of something I have just put down — a pen, a piece of paper, anything.

This is straightforward running away from the clamour of one's own silence.

I enjoyed my few visits to the Quakers' silent hours, especially those I did with you, but I find my own silence in the countryside. People say it's impossible to escape the sound of fast roads and aeroplanes, but fortunately it's not true. I take to to molehills behind our house and meditate on silence itself. Or I shut out all thoughts other than the sound of the skylark. Then I think "depth" is the right word for where the mind goes — not downward depth, as in the bottom of the sea, but depth as in the place a great picture might take you.

I'm not as brave as you then in thinking that I might be where God is. Maybe that's because I live in a society that has turned its back on God.

Matata comes to Kenya

Richard Wood and I were teachers together in Kenya’s western Nyanza Province in the late ‘60s at Rapogi Secondary School. Richard was a British teacher on contract, and I was a Peace Corps Volunteer.

Although Richard lives in England, we have have stayed in close touch, exchanged several visits and write from time to time about Kenya and our students. Troubled about the current crisis there, Richard has sent these thoughts for posting on The Red Electric.


“Hakuna Matata,” they used to say in Kenya: "There’s no problem here."

For decades it was true.

There could be genocide in Rwanda, chaos in Congo, civil war in Angola, mass starvation in Ethiopia, every form of corruption in Zimbabwe and so on throughout the continent of Africa. Yet somehow Kenya stayed sane — until now.

The madness has come to Kenya. Not only to Kenya but to Nyanza province. To Eldoret and Kisumu. Tomorrow, no doubt, to Kisii, Homa Bay and Migori. Those are places I have been — to shop, to visit, to make friends. Places in my life.

Suddenly it’s like standing on the deck of a storm-tossed ship. Your belly lurches and won’t leave you alone. Hundreds massacred in a church. Fighting on the streets. Houses torched. Buses ambushed. Thousands on the move.

The TV shows the familiar red murram roads, the corrugated iron roofs and whitewashed mud walls, the banana plantations, the distant misty hills, the overarching vastness of the blue sky. And the people, talking magnificent Luo English, explaining their bewilderment, their grief and their fury that their neighbors have turned upon them, used their pangas to slash throats instead of maize.

They are Luos, my people, the people I worked for and lived among, admittedly for a short time but they were the years that transported me from boy to man.

"Hakuna matata." No problem here. But we deceived ourselves.

There was always the potential for an explosion of violent tribal rivalry in Kenya, especially between the Kiyuyu and the Luo. It was alright when the Kikuyu were in control, but the potential for trouble always was that the Luo, the second biggest Kenyan tribe, had the knack of producing charismatic leaders, men capable of taking on the Kikuyu hierarchy.

In colonial times, Kenya spawned Mau Mau, the fiercest of all the independence movements that eventually turfed the Europeans out of Africa. The Mau Mau heartland was the so-called "White Highlands," the rich agricultural land of central Kenya, where the whites made themselves comfortable beyond the imagination of the folks back home in Britain, and from where they were eventually driven by pangas in the night. The Brits imprisoned the great African leader, Jomo Kenyatta, a Kikuyu, of course. The schisms of the independence movement came together in their demand for the release of "Mzee," the wise old man.

Among the leaders who set aside his personal ambitions in order to harangue the Brits was Oginga Odinga, a colorful, intelligent, principled African who was, everyone knew, presidential material through and through. A Luo. When the Brits admitted that their time was up and allowed the great “terrorist” Kenyatta his freedom to become the first president of independent Kenya, Odinga became his vice president. It was a great arrangement and saw the new state off to a flying start, with quality men of integrity in charge. In the Cabinet was another top quality man, another Luo, Tom Mboya. Tom came to Rapogi one day and I well remember the sense of being in the presence of a powerful figure.

Shortly after I left Kenya he was assassinated. Around that time Kenyatta and Odinga fell out. The potential for massive trouble rumbled in Kenya, but the line held. Odinga’s demanded a two-party democracy. Indeed, he formed a second party, but it was soon banned.

The funny thing was that when Kenyatta moved on he was replaced not by a Kiyuyu but by Daniel arap Moi, a member of a minority tribe. That worked, in part, because the Kikuyu were not threatened by so small a tribe. The third presidency, that of Kibaki, brought control back to the Kikuyu. In December he had to face up to elections. It would have been fine, I’m sure, if his opponent had been another minor tribesman, but he wasn’t. He was no less that Oginga Odinga’s own son, Raili. The only way to have saved Kenya from its current bloodshed would have been for Kibaki to have shown his Luo rival the same respect as had existed in the days of Kenyatta and the elder Odinga.

I’m feel helpless as I watch the news. The scene has switched from the deserts of Sudan and the baffling vastness of the Congo to my own Kenya, and the only thing I know is that from now on there will be plenty — plenty "matata."