“Sir and Madam, What Are Your Intentions?”

• Show dog breeders aiming for the mysterious quality called “attitude” that takes ribbons in the ring are not trying to raise the level of aggression in the puppies they produce.
• Patients who indiscriminately demand antibiotics and physicians who overprescribe to please those patients do not have as their purpose the accelerated evolution of potentially death-dealing bacteria.
• Families releasing bouquets of colorful balloons into the air do not intend to litter beaches and kill birds and wildlife.
• Neither do judges and juries sending young people to prison do so in order to provide graduate courses in criminality.

But everything is a double-edged sword, and we can never entirely separate the good we intend from the undesired negative consequences of our actions. Do or don’t. Do this or do that. Either way, there’s no free lunch. The question is the quality of the lunch, the benefits derived from it, and the cost to be paid, not only at lunchtime by those choosing the meal but by everyone else for years to come.

No one is ever surprised that independent booksellers and publishers (clinging to always-precarious marginal livelihoods) have little good to say about the online behemoth dominating book sales. Internet book purchases had risen gradually over the years and then seemingly evened out -- maybe, we thought, leaving a margin of survivability for the rest of us – and then came the shopping season that wasn’t. It came out of nowhere, a fatal tsunami of absence – empty streets, empty sidealks, empty stores. And bookstores were not the only retail stores hit. So it is hardly surprising that we in storefront retail don’t love the behemoth who threatens our self-interest so drastically. 

The figures about loss of jobs surprise no one, either: that news has been around for a long time now, as has the wisdom that a dollar spent in a local community tends to go around there many times, whereas the one sent elsewhere rarely comes back. But if it isn’t your store or your job, why shouldn’t you save as much money as possible with the greatest convenience to yourself? Maybe you don't identify all that closely with the community in which you live. Anyway, should bookstore owners expect to be subsidized by the public, just so they can go on living in their precious, rarified little literary worlds?

Grow up, softies! Re-invent yourselves!

Come on, admit it. Haven’t you sometimes wanted to say something like that to the bookseller in your neighborhood, the one insisting that he or she is your “local bookseller,” whether or not you ever cross the store threshold? Local, schmocal, yokel, right?

Well, now some interesting new figures are coming to light, having to do with much more than local stores and jobs disappearing. We are learning that there is also a much larger volume of waste material generated by in the packing and shipping of online purchases.

Surprised? And that's not all.

Another negative consequence most people don’t think about an increased number of trucks on the nation’s highway – and what those trucks are carrying and implications for the trucking industry, transportation legislation, and highway safety. One of my downstate blogging friends lost her father to a highway accident caused by a trucker who fell asleep at the wheel. She works with a group called the Truck Safety Coalition, and here is her take in her own words:

The [New York Times] article expresses some of our concerns over truck safety: "One recent study explored the environmental effect of Internet shopping in Newark, Del., and found that a rise in e-commerce in recent years by local residents corresponded to more trucks on the road and an increase in greenhouse emissions." One of many problems created by consumers needing instant gratification is that there ARE more trucks on the road...and these trucks are often carrying lots of smaller boxes (v.s. shipping to a store many of one thing) so now truck companies want larger trucks (because they are full using the typical sized trailers, but not at the max weight yet.). So...we are fighting more trucks, and the requests for bigger trucks.

 – Dawn King, blogger, in a comment to the New York Times link posted on Facebook

The original Times article focused on growing mountains of shipping containers and packing materials, but my friend’s concern is hardly less serious, I’m sure you will agree.

Recap: Because online shoppers expect and demand the fastest delivery possible of their purchases, greater numbers of smaller packages are in transit, translating to mean containers and more packing materials – in short, more waste generated. At the same time, paradoxically, trucks delivering all these little packages are not carrying their maximum weight, resulting in more trucks on the roads, plus pressure on and from the trucking industry to allow bigger trucks than the law currently permits.

Taken together, increased waste and decreased safety are powerful arguments for supporting local bookstores and other retail establishments where you live – not only for the sake of store owners and employees, but for the sake of the world we will leave to our children and grandchildren. This information needs to reach a wider audience, because I know that book people care about the broader social and natural world. And the fact that the information supports my own personal life choices doesn't make me sad, either. I need not blush for owning a bookshop. Not that I ever did.

Psst! Feel free to spread the word!

A Fog of Causes

Into the fog we go again.

While David was in surgery on Thursday morning, a good friend of ours kept me company in the waiting room. This friend is a cardiac nurse and gave me some advice about back problems I’ve been having lately: apply ice, take anti-inflammatory medication, wear a good brace to support the back, and, yes, think about investing in a good mattress. I told him I’d tried the ice a couple evenings, to no effect whatsoever, and he replied that when he tells someone to take aspirin, get bed rest, and drink a lot of fluids, the person is quite likely to report a few days later that he followed the advice about fluids but ignored the rest. “You can’t just do one thing,” he said. “You have to do it all. It all works together.”

When we human beings think about cause and effect, it’s all too easy for us to envision oversimplified schematics, such as a pool cue hitting a cue ball that hits another ball that goes into a pocket. Even the physical world of pure material causes is seldom that simple! And as for that pool cue—wasn’t someone guiding it?  And so, looking beyond the pool table at the larger realm of human behavior, a complex and confusing welter of dreams, fears, resentments, desires, hopes, and intentions, is it any wonder we want to simplify the picture? But simplification distorts and falsifies reality.

The cue ball had no choice. It offered nothing other than insufficient material resistance to the cue that struck it and no resentment whatsoever against the ball it struck. A purely causal explanation tells the story. Human beings are different. We are intentional beings, partly but not fully conscious of our own desires and aims, and there it is. If we had no intentions, material causes would explain us, and there would be no “behavior” at all. If we were fully conscious, completely aware of all our intentions and emotions, we would behave very differently from the way we do. But that’s not who or where we are. We move through a fog that obscures our own motives as well as those of others, and often, searching for simple explanations, we tell stories that serve only to generate more fog.

Much is hidden, and we see little.

Whenever there is a tragedy such as the recent school shooting in Connecticut, the same sadly predictable, two-sided debate questions are hurried onstage. Is our violent film industry to blame? (Sides form up in yes or no lines.) Is America’s love of guns the culprit? (Debaters say yes or no.) Easy access to deadly weapons? Or maybe it’s violent video games or untreated mental illness or drug addiction or divorce or one-parent families or parental neglect or parental abuse or bullying from others or social isolation or post-traumatic stress?

How can we think only one identifiable “thing” is to blame? We all know individuals, maybe even ourselves, who have suffered from or participated in any of the possible “causes” listed above but have not gone on a rampage of violence. So we say, no, bullying doesn’t explain it, because I was bullied as a child, too. Or we say, no, guns cannot be at fault, because everyone in my family hunts, and none of us would ever kill another human being. Or, no, we can't blame violent movies, because I’ve seen plenty of them, or no, it can’t be divorce, because my parents were divorced—and on and on and on. Everyone is ready to point to a cause, and there’s always someone else ready to argue that what is identified as the cause is insufficient.

Human status: "It's complicated."

I would feel more hopeful about a solution if there were more indications of awareness that the reasons and explanations for these horrible tragedies come from many directions, from time to time converging (to schematize) on a vulnerable point, a desperate individual. Can we not imagine that while every contributing cause is insufficient it itself, together they gain strength? And so, every contributing cause may be significant, even though insufficient in itself?

It isn’t enough to try only to stop bullying in schools or only to put tougher restrictions on purchase and ownership of weapons or only to intervene in troubled families or to take any single line of remediation, ignoring other sources of harm. On the other side of the coin, it is naive and unhelpful for anyone to say, “No, it isn’t my bullying or cruel teasing or gun manufacture or violent film production or violent video game creation or sales of weapons or sales of violent films or games or music or my not bothering to know my neighbor or my avoiding eye contact with people I meet or my rush-to-judgment of others’ motives and overly confident faith in the purity of my own-------.” On and on and on.

As long as I live, I will probably be enough a child of the Sixties to believe that “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” We children of the Sixties, like the children of every other decade, surely made our own contributions to this problem. The question is, can we stop pointing fingers and come together to explore possible solutions? Can we find our way into the light together?

Seeking clarity....

I have been thinking and thinking about how to say this, and here is what I think I want to say: If the last straw had been the first, it alone would not have broken the camel’s back, but each and every straw the camel was asked to carry would have contributed its weight to the final result.