Another step on my goal to live a more sustainable lifestyle is to stop using so many products that come in disposable packaging. As a major consumer of kombucha (a fermented Chinese tea, for those of you who haven’t yet come across it), I have consoled myself that at least the drink comes in glass bottles.
But those glass bottles have plastic tops and take huge amounts of energy to create and transport. And then, in the end, you still have a heavy, well-made glass bottle that you toss in the recycling.
…I will avoid moaning about what’s happening, or rather not happening, with our recycling these days!
So here you have it: my second attempt at creating a low-waste solution to my kombucha habit. (I realize that there’s a no-waste solution, but that’s not an option!)
My first bottle from my growing batch of kombucha. You can see the half-sunk scoby in there. A new one will form on the top.
Making kombucha is a natural process. Now that I have my setup—a jar and a bunch of high-quality beer bottles—the only waste will be the packaging that the tea comes in. Since we shop in Chinese tea stores and buy in large quantities, one glass tea jar will last for months.
And since the heating pad will be run on our forthcoming solar system, I don’t even feel bad about that.
I realize that these attempts, like my Homely Green Napkins project, are small things. But I feel that what we need to do is turn back cultural change that happened as a result of the push for convenience and mass production in the 50s. If enough of us push back on our culture-bred tendency to consume and discard, we can shift our weight enough to change course.
Dead scoby…ew! I’m sorry for any mistreatment you received at my hands, dear, departed friend.
A note about failure: Why is this my second attempt? Let’s just say that a dying scoby (a.k.a. kombucha mother) is not a pretty sight! But I am determined to nurture my new scoby by feeding it and supporting its health, which in turn will feed me and support my health.
All of life is a cycle, and like it or not, what we do on a day-to-day basis influences the path.
I’m reading a fantasy novel in which the main character is a musician. When he is entrapped by a malevolent fairy, he tames her through his music.
I’m pretty certain that the story wouldn’t quite be the same if our hero had pulled an iPhone out of his pocket and said, “Hey, listen to this sick new track by Bruno Mars!”
There’s something special about live music
All hail the Great Morgani! (Photo courtesy of the Santa Cruz Sentinel.)
No matter who the musician is, whether a down-and-out traveler trying to make a buck on a sidewalk or the New York Philharmonic, musicians are in it to communicate. Recordings have many wonderful qualities, but they lack that person-to-person connection you find in live music.
What happens when you hear live music? It’s a one-to-one conversation between the musician and each listener. Though the musician may not be looking at each member of the audience, each member of the audience is within the sphere of communication that the musician has set up, whether that’s the distance an acoustic guitar can be heard on a busy street, or the surround sound of a stadium performance.
This one-to-one transmission is special, and is fundamentally different than listening to recorded music. Perhaps the continuing popularity of live recordings testifies to a bit of the live feeling being transmitted. Despite the fact that we can make “perfect” recordings in studios, live music feels more real.
All live music is valuable
Sometimes it seems that parents feel they need to choose “important” music to bring their children to. But I would argue that unless your child is enthralled with opera, a guy playing a squeezebox on the corner will make a deeper connection with your child than the greatest opera singer.
Concerts that require our children to go against their natures won’t connect with their nature. Being confined to a seat, being forced to look quietly in one direction, being too far away to make a personal connection—it’s no wonder that many kids balk at being taken to concerts.
I recommend finding a cafe that features local musicians. Go to a busy downtown on a nice day. Some of the musicians that children appreciate most in my community are an accordion player who dresses in wild costumes and a large marimba group that sets up on street corners and plays at festivals.
Music is communication
If you can find a situation where your child can actually interact with the musician, even better. My kids loved putting money in buskers’ cases. And we loved the orchestra “petting zoo” that our local symphony puts on each year.
Our local symphony hosts an orchestral “petting zoo.” (Photo courtesy of the Santa Cruz Sentinel.)
Music together
If you can’t get out to hear live music today, another thing you can do listen together—not in earbuds!—or sing together. Make music, share music, and live longer and happier lives.
They’re not actually green, and they don’t really have to be homely, but this is how I came to be in possession of my homely green napkins.
I’ve made a personal goal to identify all the low-hanging fruit in our lifestyle, trying to identify all the easy things we could do to consume less and create less garbage.
Costco was a big help.
Yes, Costco, the store we love to hate that sells 12-packs of plastic-wrapped bundles that contain 24 independently plastic-wrapped items encased in plastic-coated, non-recycled chipboard.
Some time ago, they stopped selling the big dinner napkins we liked. I know all about those big dinner napkins we liked: They are made from virgin wood pulp using all sorts of nasty chemicals. They were beautifully white due to the bleach used in the process. They’re part of what’s killing this world.
But…I liked those napkins. I kept justifying them till one day, they were gone. And they haven’t returned.
I have always liked the idea of using reusable napkins. We always did when I was a child. In the first half of the twentieth century, everyone used reusable napkins. It would have been weird to suggest replacing such a practical thing with a single-use item.
But here was the problem:
I don’t iron.
My mom irons. She says it’s relaxing. I don’t iron.
That’s partly why we were sticking with the environmentally unfriendly napkins. They came out of the package looking nice.
The other reason was probably more important: it was easy. Until it wasn’t. I kept waiting for Costco to restock, but they didn’t. So thanks to Costco, one more piece of the low-hanging fruit in my earth-unfriendly lifestyle has been chipped off and fixed.
I realize that there are many reasons why this change is not earth-shaking, or even earth-saving.
I went out and did what I knew I should do. I bought 100% cotton, washable napkins. But in my head, I could hear the voices: The cotton industry is horribly polluting. Also, I live in California and we have to conserve water so why not buy paper products that were made in a location with ample water? Finally, what makes you think that little changes like this aren’t just wasted effort?
Those objections are worth considering. There’s always a trade-off. The way I am thinking about it, step by little step, low-hanging fruit get picked off and fixed. My family is generating less garbage. We are consuming less paper. The napkins go into wash loads that I would have done anyway so I’m not using extra water.
Back to the future…
One of the ironies of the choices we are making is that families are going backwards. My napkins are washable, just like my mom’s. Like my grandmother’s.
I am sure, however, that my grandmother’s napkins, like my mom’s, were always beautifully ironed. The concession I have made to modern life is that heck, we’ll just have to live with ugly napkins.
My napkins are wrinkled.
Goodbye to double-plastic-wrapped disposable napkins!
I am enchantress, witch I am somebody mortal, a soul I am a widow woman an adult female, individual
I am skeptic, sceptic, doubter I am somebody, someone, a soul I am a face I am mortal
I am an anomaly, an unusual person An individual, a person, a mortal soul I am a rester, a slumberer I am a person
An individual
A somebody
A soul, mortal
What the Internet has done to us.
My hacker husband pointed me toward a website that will probably be defunct by the time you get to it, if you try to go. In the words of the website’s creators:
[Imagenet] uses a neural network trained on the “Person” categories from the ImageNet dataset which has over 2,500 labels used to classify images of people.
Warning: ImageNet Roulette regularly returns racist, misogynistic and cruel results. That is because of the underlying data set it is drawing on, which is ImageNet’s ‘Person’ categories. ImageNet is one of the most influential training sets in AI. This is a tool designed to show some of the underlying problems with how AI is classifying people.
I don’t think the returns on my various webcam captures were particularly misogynistic or racist, but they were…fascinating. They inspired the poem above. Here is what a machine thinks I am.
Ah, finally a photo that doesn’t highlight the fact that I’m having a really bad hair day!
Our kids are immersed in violent and despairing media every day, and it’s affecting what they write and share with each other. From the earliest days of telling tales around the campfire, violence in the stories we tell has played an important role. But not all violence is the same.
The morality of violence is important for students and caring adults in their lives to consider when they want to address violence in writing that they share with others. As I tell my students: Write whatever you need to write. But share only what is appropriate for the context.
Below are some questions that I ask my students to consider before they share work with violent content.
What is the intent of the violence?
Appropriate reasons to use violence
Artwork courtesy of Destiny Blue
Some children writing violent stories have an honest need to explore the reasons behind human violence in an attempt to understand it. In that case, the violence in their writing will raise questions about where violence comes from and what we can do to address it.
Some children use violence to heighten the danger that their characters are in, to bring about a more satisfying conclusion when the protagonist is able to defeat the antagonist. As long as the violence is appropriate within the context, like in the Harry Potter series, this is also acceptable.
Some children use fiction to create parallels to real violence that they have read about and experienced. In this case, again, it is acceptable when they use their writing to try to understand the moral basis of human conflict.
Inappropriate reasons to use violence
Some children have not yet learned that violence in writing is not just a flavoring, like grinding pepper on their pasta. Their intent seems to be to shock and titillate their audience. The violence in their pieces is often couched in revenge fantasies. Usually the antagonist wins in these stories.
Even worse, in some of this writing the protagonist is the evil person doing the violence, and they suffer no repercussions for their acts. Sometimes there is a thin veneer of “the other guy had it coming” that is supposed to explain their characters’ evil deeds, but often the violence is simply there because the writer perceives it as fun or cool. In the words of a teen writer I work with:
“I think they are trying use their edginess to differentiate themselves from their more ‘square’ peers.”
In other words, they are trying to be “cool” kids. This is not an acceptable reason to share violent stories with other kids.
What is the context for the violence?
Appropriate contexts
Artwork courtesy of Destiny Blue
Human stories of struggle often feature some amount of violence. In these stories, an individual or group is subjected to an unfair or discriminatory situation in which they are victimized by a more powerful group.
The Hunger Games is a good example. Katniss is not a violent person and tries very hard to maintain her moral judgment. But the government’s actions force her into a situation in which she has to make the decision whether to kill other people. Although quite violent, this series is deeply moral.
Inappropriate contexts
An immorally violent story sets the violence up as the main attraction. There is no particular justification for it within the context of the story. We are to accept that this is just an evil world, filled with evil people, and so it’s going to be fun to read about them.
Although I can’t come up with a mainstream published example because I choose not to read that sort of literature, Internet memes are rife with this sort of inappropriate violence. One student in my classes shared a piece based on a meme in which the narrator speaks about how fun it is to kill people. There is no context that explains his behavior, and no consequences for it.
Violence without context is always received by readers as a celebration of violence.
What is the nature of the violence?
Children’s stories have been full of violence since the beginning of time. The witch attempts to bake Hansel and Gretel alive! But in no mainstream telling of this book do we get graphic descriptions of the raised bubbles that form on their hands as they resist being put into the hot oven, and the smell of…
OK, I think you get the point.
Violence for children should be largely implied
Artwork courtesy of daveneff-d35ix6m
A child who has been exposed to many violent images will visualize plenty of details that were left out of Hansel and Gretel. But a child who doesn’t have violent imagery in their head will take the violence at face value. The witch tried to bake them, but she failed. That’s all that the child needs to consider.
We do not need to put new violent images into children’s heads. The world is full of violent images that they already live with.
Violence for children should be countered with kindness
A story in which there is only violence is simply immoral and inappropriate to share with children. The story of humanity is the struggle against our worst impulses and toward our better ones. Every religion addresses this struggle and attempts to help believers with stories that show goodness as well as evil. Children’s literature, similarly, has always tried to impart a secular version of this moral view.
The same goes for what our children write to share with others. They need to balance violence in their writing so that they can train their own perspective away from anger and despair.
A Tale of Two Stories
Last year, students shared two stories in one week that couldn’t be more different. I will keep details of the stories private, but here is what they looked like:
Story #1: The “look at me I’m cool” revenge fantasy
In this story, a narrator whose situation is never defined hears voices telling them to kill others who wronged them. There is graphic description of a dead body. There is no reason to believe that the narrator is a decent person who is in a difficult situation. In fact, there’s no context at all. We just hear this narrator telling us about their anger and despair and expecting us to share in it.
End of story.
Story #2: The Jewish diaspora, with creatures
I have no idea whether my young writer knew that they were writing the story of Jews throughout history, but the parallels were striking. In the story, a person who belongs to a maligned race of creatures moves from village to village, attempting to find others like them and acceptance from general society.
There was some violence in the story, including one member of the group being put to death. But there was only one detail, no titillation, and clear understanding in the context of the story that this person’s killing was immoral and caused anguish to the others.
It was also clear to any reader that this story was an exploration of what happens when a minority group is misunderstood and maligned. This was written by a child, certainly, but a child who was grappling with what it means to be a decent person.
Violence can be moral
Children’s fiction without conflict is the Bob books. Dick and Jane. In other words, books that attempt to do nothing but teach reading skills. Real literature explores conflict, and conflict is uncomfortable.
Not all conflicts in children’s reading need to be violent. But there is a place for appropriate violence. I believe that reading Anne Frank’s diary and learning about World War II permanently shaped my view of moral behavior in societies.
I can hardly imagine this, but what if the book I had read was an unapologetic diary of a Nazi soldier who enjoyed killing people…written for children? Even if that soldier had been put to death in the end, the point of a book like that would have been to teach me to despair that humans can act in moral ways.
What can we do?
I’ll end where I started: I encourage my students to write everything in their heads. I encourage them to keep journals and explore their worst thoughts if it helps them.
But when we share our writing with others, we are making implicit moral choices and making explicit declarations of who we are as people. I encourage all parents to ask their kids these questions, and then listen to the answers.
