Earth Day Afternoon

Got any big Earth Day plans? Probably not. The first Earth Day, in 1970, was more of a nationwide protest than holiday, with 20 million participants nationwide. In New York, Fifth Avenue was closed to traffic and people picnicked on the sidewalks. Dead fish were dragged through midtown. Demonstrators in DC poured oil in front of the Interior Department to protest oil spills. College students in every state skipped classes to plant trees.

The first Earth Day didn't pass unnoticed by American's conservatives. April 22, 1970 was the centennial of Lenin's birth, a fact made much of by the Daughters of the American Revolution, who claimed the day was some kind of communist plot against America. J. Edgar Hoover also had an interest in Earth Day, placing its organizers on his watch list and sending undercover agents to infiltrate campus activities. Richard Nixon had no comment on the day itself, but three months later he created the EPA and five months after that signed the Clean Air Act. It's been pretty much downhill since then in terms of concrete results, although Earth Day 1990 did spike interest in recycling.

At age 39, Earth Day is in that awkward stage between simple adulthood and early middle age. Today, no oil will be spilled, no dead fish thrown, no classrooms emptied of students. Instead, solitary bloggers will post truncated histories serving as a reminder that the earth still needs tending, perhaps more than ever.

Unlearn It, Live It, Love It

One's cultural and societal norms are learned in a process that begins at birth. We learn acceptable behaviors, beliefs, values, and desires, and what we have learned becomes so ingrained in us it feels like part of our nature, if not like our nature itself. Sometimes we're put in situations where we must unlearn in order to survive. When we go to war, for example, we have to unlearn the fact that we have been taught not to kill, and unlearn the fact that we have been taught to let the government or a higher authority settle disputes rather than to seek vengeance. The soldiers who return from battle psychically wounded are undoubtedly those who haven't been able to unlearn well enough.

Revolution is hard to achieve because it involves an entire culture unlearning some or all of its own norms and learning new ones at the same time. This isn't only true in politics; the "modernist revolution" in poetry involved unlearning centuries of agreed-upon ideas about representation and verse, and substituting those ideas with another, differing, value system.

The aftereffects of a generation's unlearning have defined my life. The first wave of feminists unlearned strictures of female sexuality and of women's place in the workforce, allowing me to choose any career I'd like and to cohabitate with whomever I like without regard to marriage or children. Early civil rights activists helped many unlearn patterns of segregation. Elvis helped the music industry unlearn its aversion to "black" music. Gay rights activists, by themselves unlearning conventional desire, helped unconventional desire to enter the mainstream. It's obviously a lot easier to stick with what's been learned, which is why such revolutions in thought or behavior are remarkable.

Today's primary has eclipsed the fact that it's also Earth Day. It occurs to me that the protection of our planet is one of those instances where we must unlearn in order to survive, and that the same goes for received ideas about politics. We can't go on as we've been if we want to keep going on. So unlearn something today, no matter how small. I'm off to do just that right now.