The story goes like this. Upon seeing Lauber’s golden bleached locks, Romney announced that the kid’s new look was just plain wrong. So Romney grabbed a pair of scissors and a handful of comrades and led them on a crusade in search of the reclusive blond. When they found Lauber, they tackled him and pinned him to the ground and held him there despite the boy’s tears and cries for help. Then Romney, with scissors in hand, set upon Lauber and chopped away at the offensive do.

Such stories of bullying are not rare—back then or now. But in 1965, incidents of this nature were not even considered bullying. They were, in fact, encouraged by a boys-will-be-boys attitude and a silent nod toward those who would preserve the status quo.

But Romney claims he doesn’t recall the incident, which is interesting because several of the other students who participated in the bullying now express regrets for their actions and openly accept that what they did was a senseless and horrific act. For them, remembering isn’t the issue. If anything, it’s trying to forget.

Revisiting the past with Mitt Romney

Lauber never forgot. Thirty years after the attack, he confessed to a classmate how horrible the incident had been and how terrified it had made him feel. He admitted too that he still thought often about what had happened to him that day. Perhaps he’d be remembering still if he hadn’t died of cancer in 2004.

The only one who seems to have forgotten the incident is the ringleader himself. The best Romney could muster in response to the accusations was a weak, generalized apology to anyone he might have hurt back then, and this he accompanied with an even weaker, even more generalized admittance that he “participated in a lot of hijinks and pranks during high school.” And when it came to Lauber’s perceived sexual orientation, Romney denied having even considered such a thing back in the ’60s and said he had no idea what “the individual’s” sexual orientation might have been.

Perhaps Romney is telling the truth. After all, the bullying occurred nearly 50 years ago, and he has a lot on his mind these days, what with the upcoming election and all. But that makes me wonder whether Romney’s convenient lack of recall is because he participated in so many “hijinks and pranks” that remembering one over the other is nearly impossible. Or perhaps bullying was such a commonplace event for him that he simply cannot remember one victim from the next. Or maybe he considers people like “the individual” of such little consequence that they deserve no measure of empathy or compassion or consideration, let alone a place in the hallowed halls of Romney’s brain.

Clearly, if Romney is telling the truth, he thinks so little about his past actions that guilt or remorse or self-doubt or self-recrimination has no room in the big presidential picture. Romney has made a clean break from those years gone by, and he sees little sense in returning to them now.

It is possible, of course, that Romney is lying. Not only does he remember, but he might also be troubled by his behavior. Perhaps he has considered many times since then how malicious and despicable his actions were. Perhaps he understands the grief he inflicted upon his classmate and wishes there were some way to undo what he had done, to take back the anguish and hurt and years of painful memories.

Of course, it could be that Romney remembers and simply doesn’t give a shit. He grew up the son of a wealthy governor. He grew up in an environment of affluence and privilege. He grew up with a sense of entitlement and an expectation of a world revolving around Mitt Romney.

Yet what happened nearly 50 years is almost beside the point. Sure, the fact that he bullied Lauber the way he did is pretty creepy, but others have done worse and have learned from their actions and have gone on to achieve great things as a result. Yet the fact that Romney either refuses to acknowledge the truth or has indeed forgotten it shows us more about his character than a 50-year-old misstep.

If such a person cannot or will not acknowledge such an egregious mark on his past, what sort of leader does that make him? How can he understand the plight of others when he has so little regard for those others? All he’s proven so far is that he’s capable of behaving like an ambitious politician. The bigger question is whether he’s capable of behaving like a responsible human being.

Sure, birds chattered and trees swayed and water rushed along its rocky riverbed. But such sounds rarely disrupt my concentration, not like the sudden roar of a high-powered chainsaw and diesel-powered bulldozer and the subsequent crashing of giant cedars that such machinery portends.

And that what I heard when I was working—the din of these fierce engines. It was so close, it had to be some of my neighbors, probably selling off trees to pay their mortgage. Or perhaps their satellite TV. They would not be the first and most likely would not be the last. Such are the times in which we live.

Regardless of the reasons, there’s something about a tree falling—especially the magnificent cedars and Douglas firs that populate these mountains—that makes me shudder and mourn at the loss of their protection. If you’ve ever seen the splintered remains of one of these fallen giants, you may understand the sadness I feel at hearing them fall. No matter how much the world might want to convince me that trees are inanimate objects—resources to be butchered and bartered and sold to the highest bidder—I cannot bring myself to act with such indifference and practiced equanimity. To me, these massive monoliths will always remain as wondrous a creature as any that roam the forests.

Preserving what's left of our rich forest ecosystems

So when I hear the timber crack and moan, when I hear the limbs snap and the boughs break, when I hear the sudden whoosh of deadened air and the explosive crash of a tree slamming against the earth, I feel it in every part of me and in everything that surrounds me. I feel it in the way my house rocks, in the shudder that runs through its walls and floors, that runs through my flesh, my bones, deep into my bowels, into my blood. Into the heart of my soul.

Yet my neighbor’s assault represents only a drop in the rain barrel compared to what’s happening to forests worldwide—mostly in the name of making money. According to the Nature Conservancy, nearly half of the planet’s original forests are gone, and those that are left are in serious trouble. Each year, we lose another 32 million acres to deforestation, an area almost as large as Florida. Logging accounts for much of that loss, not only in the name of paper and wood products, but also as a consequence of our recent drive for biofuels and the energy-yielding crops to support them.

In fact, the National Geographic folks say that agriculture is the biggest driver of deforestation. We chop down tree to grow all sorts of crops, as well as raise and graze livestock. Add to that the paper-and-wood loggers and the sprawling urban centers, and you do indeed arrive at a grim summation.

But direct human intervention isn’t the only influence killing our trees. Climate change, whose consequences can be felt in forest fires, widespread drought, and disease and insect infestations, is also taking a bite out of our ever-shrinking canopies. What makes matters worse, the more trees we lose, the faster the climate changes.

The world’s trees, it turns out, play a critical role in absorbing the greenhouse gases that are heating up the planet. Without our forests, we’d have fried long ago. And the process of deforestation, particularly that of the slash-and-burn variety, releases even more of those gases into the atmosphere. To make matters worse, removing the trees causes the earth to dry out faster and disrupts the natural water and temperature-regulating cycles that keep the environment in check, all of which leads to further droughts and greater extremes in temperature.

The only solution is to stop mowing down our forests. But where money’s concerned, ambitious politicians and complacent populations follow. Yet once those forests are gone, they’re gone for good. And it’s no small task to bring them back to life.

A few days after my neighbors finished butchering their trees, I walked down the road along their property. Devastation was complete. The massive corpses had been removed, but the stumps and slash remained. Along with the tractor-muddied ground, the cracked and splintered limbs made the area look like the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust.

There’s something unreal about the remains of a clearcut forest, as though the earth no longer rotates quite right on its axis. Sure, ground cover will mitigate some of the impact before long, and in a few years, we might see young saplings poke through the rubble. But never again in my lifetime will that patch of forest look as it did before the bulldozer and chainsaw waged their holy war. Never again will the sun fall in splotches on the moist and shaded underbrush once protected by those great trees. Never again will the birds and animals that sought sustenance beneath the towering canopy return to the place they once called their home.

They will go elsewhere, no doubt, until there is no more elsewhere for them to go.

For the record, I am not nor have I ever been a Zithromax dealer. In fact, until I stumbled upon the troubling Google search results, I did not know what Zithromax was. I figured it was the name of yet another techie start-up.

I was wrong. Zithromax is a macrolide antibiotic used to treat bacterial infections, such as bronchitis, pneumonia, and sexually transmitted diseases.

I don’t understand what the intent might have been for such a malicious act. I have a hard time believing that Pfizer, the Zithromax manufacturers, singled out my site as a potential marketing coup worthy of a few underhanded tactics. (And far be it from me to accuse a pharmaceutical company of less-than-ethical behavior.) Even an online drug retailer would have little to gain by such a strategy, given that no company was mentioned, nor were my pages being redirected to such an outlet.

Google results for my hacked website

It’s conceivable that the drug hack was a result of a failed all-out attack in which some criminal culprit was trying to take over my piddly site, in which case, anyone could be a suspect—from cyber-activist to teenage geek wannabe to professional hacker on the payroll of an international cyber-gang out to compromise websites across the globe.

In all likelihood, I’ll never know who carried out the attack or why. All I know is that I’m still trying to eradicate Zithromax from my horizons.

I started the cleanup process by messing with the WordPress files and database that support my site. I found nothing of significance, at least nothing I could point to that revealed a specific cause for my problem.

So I contacted GoDaddy, the company that hosts my site, the company that has for years taken my money in exchange for a safe and secure environment. I first contacted their online support, which promised a response in four hours. It was more like eight. When an email finally did arrive, it suggested that my database had been compromised—an injection attack, they said—and they would be happy to restore it to an earlier version for a mere $150. They offered no other suggestions or solutions.

Keep in mind that the reason I implemented WordPress a couple years back was because GoDaddy had announced its availability on their platform. What I don’t recall from that time were any details suggesting that GoDaddy would offer no support if I went this route. Perhaps it was buried in all the small print.

My next attempt to address the problem was to call GoDaddy directly. This time, I was not offered the $150 deal. Instead, I was told essentially that because the problem was related to WordPress, I was for the most part on my own. The guy on the phone did suggest I delete all my spam comments, which I did. But nothing changed.

So I gave up on GoDaddy, except to fill out the post-support survey sent to me via email. I took the opportunity to explain fully what I thought of their system.

Since then, I’ve been messing with the WordPress files and styles and using Google’s Fetch as Googlebot tool to see how my pages appear to the Google search engine. Prior to my changes, the returned pages included numerous instances of Zithromax For Sale. After my changes, they included none. Success, it would seem, was at hand.

Unfortunately, the search engine indexes have been slow to acknowledge this fact, and some of my pages are still listed with the dreaded drug-dredging title. But I’m seeing progress, and most of my links now show up correctly. And any progress is better than none at all.

I don’t really know whether I’ve solved the problem, but I believe I’ve at least come up with a temporary fix. In the meantime, I’ve turned off all comments (sorry, folks) and am now making regular backups of my WordPress files.

Unfortunately, Google still lists my home page with the dire warning that “this site may be compromised,” even though their tools suggest that everything is fine. I’m still working to resolve this issue.

I’m not sure how much luck I’ll have, however. We live in times of instant information and instant gratification. We can text, email, pay bills, find restaurants, check balances, and buy just about anything that’s for sale from just about anywhere in the world, all with a few clicks of the mouse or track pad or smartphone screen. That is, as long as there exist no glitches in the system.

Anyone who’s dealt with an improper phone charge or misplaced state tax form or bank that incorrectly records a mortgage payment (yep, all those have happened to me) knows what it’s like to go up against bureaucratically-controlled, electronically-entrenched systems in which common sense and the common good have long been removed from the equation.

Service providers of all sorts love to provide you service as long as that service involves no special requests that challenge their systems and, by extension, their accepted way of doing business. The notion of service is measured in numbers and dollars and swelling dividends—and rarely in customer satisfaction. The last thing any organization wants is to deal with customers who require special consideration or care. Customers who require service.

Time waits for no one in this age of digital wizardry and supersonic specialization, especially for those who gum up the works—whether intentionally or otherwise.

“Studies suggest,” the opening text reads, “that people who are socially and financially better off are more likely to lie, cheat, and otherwise behave unethically compared to those lower on the social and financial ladder.”

The graphic backs up its assertion with a number of statistics that compare the wealthy to those at the lower strata. For example, 21% of people earning between $500,000 and $1 million a year underreport their incomes to the IRS, compared to 8% of those earning between $50,000 and $100,000. And when it comes to charity, households earning over $100,000 donate only 2.7% of their income, whereas those making under $25,000 give away 4.2%.

At the bottom of the graphic, the creators provide a list of URLs that point to the sources used to back up their data. Among them are the New York Times, Washington Post, Reuters, and MSNBC. I spot-checked several of the graphic’s statistics against those in the publications to ensure that the creators got their facts right. They did.

The deteriorating state of the wealthy

I can’t say with certainty that the sources themselves represent the information correctly, but there’s enough corroborating evidence among them to suggest that the rich are indeed generally more inclined toward unethical behavior than the rest of us. In fact, they’re more likely to shoplift, cut off pedestrians when driving, cheat at games if money is at stake, and steal candy earmarked for children.

So why do rich folks think its okay to behave in this manner? Is it a sense of entitlement? Is it because they’re used to getting their own way? Or are they simply unaware of their behavior?

In one of the articles that the graphic references, I found a particularly interesting explanation. According to Maia Szalavitz in her piece “Why the Rich Are Less Ethical: They See Greed as Good,” it’s not necessarily their class that drives their activities, but their beliefs about greed and unethical behavior. “Rich people tended to take advantage of others primarily because they saw selfish and greedy behavior as acceptable, not just because they had more money or higher social status.”

Further research suggests that if poorer people are primed to see greed as good, they too are more likely to participate in unethical behavior. Any of us, in fact, who believe in the creed of greed are more likely to act out in ways concerned only with our own self-interests.

Although wealth disparity continues to grow in this country—the richer 1% captured 93% of the income gains in 2010, according to the graphic—that’s not enough evidence in itself to prove that we are a more greedy country than ever before. However, movements such as the Tea Party, attempts to dismantle our social safety nets, and the ever-growing war on the poor all suggest that we’re moving away from attitudes of compassion and empathy toward a world of indifference and self-serving aggrandizement and greed.

A friend of mine believes that this movement started during the Reagan administration, when self-interest and self-serving behavior became, for the most part, institutionalized, a movement that found fertile ground in a country already prone to idealize individualism at the expense of the common good. The fact that such idealization is nothing but a mythical construct used to win elections and undermine social programs and sell designer underwear is beside the point. What is important is that our romanticized cowboy mentality easily embraces such greedy and selfish behavior and allows us to justify whatever actions we decide best serve our immediate needs.

The irony in all this, of course, is the vocal upsurge of Christian fundamentalism and religious intolerance that goes hand-in-hand with our ever-growing avarice, an upsurge that folds neatly into the palms of slick politicians and political pundits and ambitious talk-show hosts all too keen to spew messages of divisiveness and hate in order to reach their own selfish goals.

But there is hope. As Szalavitz points out, just as people can be taught to behave selfishly they “can also be easily primed to behave more generously.” If we can learn to think only of ourselves, to put our own interests above those of everyone around us, there’s no reason we can’t learn to behave as a community of individuals looking out for the welfare of one another.

We already know what we need to do. Perhaps we only need permission to do it.

There used to be a couple places nearer than that, but they long ago flipped their last eggs and browned their last pound of spuds. And now all we have are empty buildings to mark their failed status.

Last time I counted, I came up with eight such buildings within a 20-mile radius of me, all of which had housed restaurants or cafés or some sort of eateries, a considerable number if you factor in how small these towns are. And that doesn’t count all the other buildings sitting empty from businesses having gone bust in recent years.

But that’s the reality of rural America, a fact confirmed by my travels in the last few years. From coast-to-coast, I’ve seen evidence of a backsliding economy and its disproportionate toll on rural areas and the small towns that support them. That’s not to say large urban centers have been left unscathed, but most of the cities I visited were still functioning, for the most part—unlike the small towns I traveled through, where boarded up windows and deteriorating buildings defined a new era in Main Street aesthetics, regardless of state or region or political proclivity.

One of many abandoned building in rural America

I’ve read a number of reasons why small towns might be taking the brunt of this fiscal beating. Wal-Mart putting Ma and Pa enterprises out of business. The proliferation of drugs in rural settings. The decline of tourist dollars in some regions. Farmer subsidies. Welfare. Industry outsourcing to third-world factories filled with indentured indigents. No doubt there are other such explanations out there. And probably no single one to fully describe what’s been happening. But something’s gone wrong, and a fix doesn’t appear to be looming on anyone’s horizon.

Unfortunately, the economic well being of our small communities has, for the most part, escaped the notice of the ambitious brains of Washington’s elite and those desperate to join their ranks. Rick Santorum, for example, would rather proselytize about his old time religion when preaching from the small town pulpit than offer real solutions. In fact, all four of the boys currently in the GOP band—Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, and of course, Santorum—have been playing the rural card to its fullest, attending town hall meetings, hanging out in local diners (those still open), and hunting pheasant with their fellow Christians and good-ol’-boys. Yet the focus has rarely been on how to revitalize the communities, but rather on why the communities should fear birth control, homosexuality, and the sitting president.

Politics founded on such shortsighted thinking, along with rhetoric grounded in fear and hate, are nothing new. The Romans used these tactics. The Nazis used these tactics. Al-Qaeda used these tactics. So too have a number of US presidents.

And now we have the Fab Four pounding the pavement, hoping to convince rural voters of their small town roots and small town sensibilities and small town conservative values, despite the fact that they’re all highly educated millionaires with advanced degrees in law and business and medicine, something not so typical on Main Street in any part of America.

But the candidates are a shrewd lot. They know it takes more than assuming a shared set of values and then promoting those values. What people want is someone to blame: Washington insiders, liberals, Muslims, academia, queers, feminists, and anyone else who provides an easy target. Politicians need not espouse a message that’s logical or credible or even hopeful; it need only be aimed at anyone who doesn’t appear in sync with the perceived notions of how rural Americans think and live their lives and, most importantly, decide how others should live theirs.

Of course, hate-speak doesn’t create jobs or build communities or save homes, but it does provide a distraction—an extremely effective one—just like all-terrain vehicles and satellite TVs and the barn-loads of meth filling haylofts from Bloomington to Biloxi. It’s such a winning formula, in fact, that just about any straight, white male can win an election, as long as he sprinkles in an ample helping of Jesus and a generous measure of bombastic bullshit.

I’m not suggesting that this behavior is specific to the Hispanic community. I saw the same pattern with the Asian and Caucasian populations lining the docks. And perhaps I wouldn’t have taken notice at all had I not grown up in an environment in which most of my female relations fished. In fact, my family was so stocked with rod-and-reel enthusiasts that when I came along and announced I didn’t like to fish—a declaration tantamount to heresy—I sensed even at a young age I was no longer considered a full part of the family. My line had been cast and there was no reeling it back in.

But that’s neither here nor there because it’s my present-day observations that concern me, although those concerns were mitigated somewhat when I walked out on the Santa Cruz wharf last week and discovered among the relatively few pole-waving inhabitants three women—all of them white—casting lines into the silky blue depths of Monterey Bay.

I didn’t know whether this remarkable showing of fishing females had to do with Santa Cruz or Monterey Bay or this particular wharf or other factors, such as economics or race or class, but I do know that I felt a sense of relief upon seeing the stringent stereotypes I found on the southern coast somewhat diminished by this diverse showing in Santa Cruz.

Fishing off the Santa Cruz wharf

Enough of my roots wind back to the ’60s and early ’70s to have had high hopes for ways to view the world and live lives that transcended fearful adherence to expectations and stereotypes, which serve only to maintain the advantage of some at the expense of others. Yet despite the years that have passed and the paths we’ve traveled, we seem to have made little progress as a culture in the way we think and behave and treat one another.

That’s not to say the assumptions some of us made back then or the hopes we hung our hearts on were always the smartest or wisest or had any basis in reality, but I do believe that since then we’ve missed a great many opportunities, and I find myself saddened when I continue to hear the Neanderthal diatribes of opportunists and fear mongers who peddle their pedantic pestilence at the expense of those whose only crime is not being born of the correct race or class or gender or sexual orientation.

No doubt many of you’ve heard the brouhaha that’s resulted from yet another entertaining Fox News broadcast, this time in the form of commentator Liz Trotta. In response to the 64% rise in violent sexual assaults in the military—perpetrated mostly against women—Trotta suggested that these high rates are the inevitable results of men and women being put together into such close contact. What do women expect, after all, if they insist on inserting themselves in places they don’t belong? Which is why Trotta also believes that the resources being poured into the military to address these assaults is a waste of money, especially since it’s for no other reason than to appease those now complaining about being “raped too much.”

There’s no point trying to respond to Trotta’s remarks directly. That would be like trying to hold a conversation with a three-toed sloth. Yet I can’t help but be disheartened by the fact that there are still people like Trotta making such remarks, that despite the struggles and gains women have made—gains people like Trotta have benefitted from greatly—there still exists a contingency of narrow-minded opportunists who continue to appease the dumbed-down mobs in an effort to promote their own agendas, satiate their power-hungry ambitions, and give voice to their insecurities and fears and hate—all at the expense of individuals who’ve already faced an ocean of hurdles, like the women in the US military.

Yet Trotta and people of her ilk shouldn’t surprise me. We are a culture chained to our expectations and preconceptions. Last night I watched much of the Academy Awards, including the red-carpet pageantry that preceded the show—a pretentious display of wealth and entitlement that, given the current times, made the whole shindig seem even more pointless than ever.

The primary topic of discussion? The way the women were dressed. Interviews with men mostly centered on their careers and successes in the industry. Discussions with women focused primarily on their absurd constumery.

I was reminded of Barak Obama’s inauguration, when the media, for the most part, could say nothing about Michelle Obama other than to comment on her wardrobe. That’s how it was last night. The press agog over sequins and silk and scintillating styles.

In 2010, 3,158 cases of sexual assault in the military were reported. That number was slightly higher last year. However, US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta believes the rate might actually be six times higher because few victims come forward to report such assaults.

And women outside the military are just as vulnerable. According to the National Organization of Women, as many as 600 women in the US are sexually assaulted each day, with women aged 24 or under suffering the highest rates. The Justice Department estimates one in five women will be raped or victims of attempted rape while in college. Less than five percent of those women will report these assaults.

The gains that women have made can seem inconsequential in the face of such staggering statistics. Yet the fact that women can serve in the military as they now do suggests that there has been at least some movement forward, despite Trotta and her soul-sucking compatriots. Still, female soldiers can’t officially serve in combat even though, for all practical purposes, they’re serving in combat roles—but without combat training and without the opportunities for the career advancement and better pay offered to their male counterparts.

Some things never change.

When I was standing out on the Santa Cruz pier, one of the women caught a thin silvery fish that barely hung onto the hook. Unfortunately, it was too small for her to keep, so she tossed it to a nearby pelican that seemed to be waiting for just such a snack. Then she cast her line back into the water.

Even though the fish wasn’t worth keeping, I could see that the woman was pleased to have caught something. A small catch, after all, was better than no catch at all, and the fish itself seemed indifferent to whether it had been snagged by a man or by a woman. Even the pelican seemed unconcerned. All the fish wanted was to be back swimming in the ocean, and all the bird cared about was a few more tasty morsels.

I was also fortunate that the tire still held air. I drove to the shop and parked in front. Then I climbed out and poked my head into the front office and then into the cavernous bay, but all I found were tires and tools and hydraulic jacks and posters advertising rain-treading treads. I finally located someone hovering around the side of the building—a white, middle-aged guy with a faded football build and a rapidly retreating hairline. When he looked at my tire, he decided it wasn’t the right one for my van (one of a set of tires bought recently upon the recommendation of another tire shop), so he refused to plug the hole. “Ten years ago,” he said, “I would have done it. But times being what they are, I can’t risk the liability.”

He directed me to a different shop, so I went there. Another white guy, somewhat younger, but no less smug, informed me that they couldn’t plug tires there. They could only patch them. I assumed we were once again skirting liability issues. He suggested I try the gas station on the next block, even though we both knew it was of the Kwiki Mart variety, and nothing akin to a true blue service station.

I drove past the place anyway, in the unlikely event that there might be some back-door, grease-splattered stall offering its services. There was none.

Fishing off Newport Beach pier

The next place I stopped did look more like a regular garage—a tiny tin shell amid piles of metal, perhaps remnants of engines and body parts, though it was difficult to say. Unfortunately, these guys didn’t repair tires either, but one of them directed me to a tire retailer I had not yet visited, no more than a mile from there.

Upon my arrival, I found still another white guy, although this one seemed much more willing to help. However, when he realized my tire needed to be plugged, and not patched, he informed me he wasn’t permitted to do that sort of repair, just like the guy two stops ago. Or perhaps it was three. But he was kind enough to direct me to a place called Mexicali Tires, or something like that, a couple miles in the direction opposite from which I just came, so I followed his rather vague instructions to my next destination. My tire barely seemed to be holding air.

On my first approach to Mexicali, I missed the shop, in part because there was only a small sign, sitting in front of a store that had nothing to do with tires. I should have turned into the tiny alley right before that store, an alley I hadn’t seen until I drove past it. Instead, I turned into the next alley, hoping it would connect to the fist one. It did not. It came to an abrupt end and I was forced to do a twelve-point turn to get out.

But I made it and backtracked to the first alley, making only a couple illegal turns. I rolled into the narrow passageway and eased into a small greasy parking lot with little spare room for cars or people. Several Hispanic men stood in front of an open garage door, chatting in Spanish, as they studied a late-model SUV.

One of them, a short lean man in grease-covered overalls, approached my car and asked in a thick Mexican accent what I needed. I told him about the tire and the nail. “Okay,” he said and pointed to an empty spot—the only empty spot. I pulled in and parked and climbed out and waited next to the office, a garage stall containing a low dust-brown desk covered in stacks of paper, a lopsided chair missing its back, and a refrigerator with a handmade sign on the door saying soda: 65¢. Within a few minutes, he had the car jacked up and the tire off. In another five minutes, the tire was back on and I was ready to go. It cost me ten bucks.

It would be inappropriate, I know, to draw conclusions about white men and Californians and our litigious culture and the fact that it takes so much effort to get one lousy tire fixed—in the middle of the car-worshiping capitol of the world, no less. But I will say this, in all the places I’ve visited since I arrived in Southern California, almost without exception, the people cleaning the toilets and mowing the lawns and sweeping the sidewalks and picking up trash and washing the clothes and working out in the fields—the ones doing the strenuous, low-paying, miserable work no one wants to do—have been mostly Hispanic, the exception being other minorities filling a few of those roles, plus an occasional white man or white woman breaking into their ranks.

One of the few places I saw Hispanic folks not cleaning up after white folks was out on the docks, where I usually came across any number of men—with fishing poles in hand and fishing gear at their feet and families hovering nearby—casting lines into the salty depths and chattering among themselves. I saw no women fishing. If they were there, they stood or sat nearby, or offered occasional assistance. But as with the tire incident, I’m reluctant to draw any conclusions about the workers or the fishermen or their families. Nor would I suggest that Southern California is unique when it comes to race and class or gender.

However, of the many issues these conditions raise, one is the assumption, or expectation, that this is what normal looks like, that this is what we’ve come to assume is the natural order of things. No doubt if taken to task over our assumptions, we would deny vehemently that such apparent classism is acceptable or should be permitted to continue. Intellectually, we’re all equal-opportunity liberals. But I’m not so sure it’s that simple at other levels.

When I was checking into a small hotel in Santa Barbara, I found two men standing at the front desk—one Hispanic, one white. My first assumption upon entering the lobby was that the white guy worked the desk and the Hispanic guy worked in maintenance or perhaps was a gardener, although there was nothing about the way either one dressed to suggest his respective role.

Luckily, I checked my assumptions before I said anything and approached the desk, somewhere between the two of them. And though I was able to stop myself from making too big an ass of myself, my initial reaction was still to assign roles without knowing anything about them other than their apparent races. Had I not spent several weeks trekking around southern California, I might have drawn a different conclusion. But then again, maybe not.

And here’s the kicker—my initial conclusion had been correct. The Hispanic man did work in maintenance.

Undoubtedly, issues of race and class are so complex and entrenched in this country that solutions have never been simple, nor will they likely become so in the near future, even if there are those who would have us believe otherwise. Yet even faced with such complexities, we’re not excused from being careless in our thinking. If we let our assumptions run wild, we can easily conclude that the way things exist now is exactly how they’re supposed to exist—how they must exist. But to let our lives be governed by such thinking is akin to not thinking at all, and we all know the consequences of that sort of behavior.

I left my hotel and headed down Fremont Street toward Las Vegas Boulevard. Fremont throbbed with loud, drunk revelers carrying supersized beers and giant cocktails brimming over from clear plastic containers shaped like footballs.

The celebrants were waiting for the next lightshow, a pulsating, pounding, eardrum-piercing music experience shown on the hour throughout the evening—showcased on the world’s largest video screen, an arched canopy that stretches along three casino-studded city blocks. Nowhere but Vegas can you find this sort of mega-extravaganza of flashing, glittering sights and sounds. Think MTV on steroids. Think Lake Mead and the Hoover Dam and the Mojave Desert of lightshows.

During my walk down Fremont Street, I encountered two men in wheelchairs, each man missing a leg, as evidenced by the raw, mottled stumps that protruded from their chairs. My guess is they were in their late forties, maybe early fifties, though they could have just as easily been hovering around 60. They both wore green army fatigue jackets made of heavy cotton ripstop, worn and faded and tattered at the edges. The jackets hung loosely around the men’s sloped shoulders and folded into their bent legs and stubs.

Fremont Street in Las Vegas

One said something to me as I passed, his words so mumbled and shredded and hoarse, I had no idea what he meant or even what language he was using, but the wild glare in his eyes suggested it was best not to ask him to repeat himself. Or step too near to where he had parked his chair.

The other said nothing. He sat motionless, his clothes scruffier than the first’s, his hands so greasy and soiled, they appeared not have been washed in months. He stared at his boot with slitted eyes. I saw no perceptible movement his body or even a twitch in his face, as though lost in a reality so distant that returning seemed no longer possible.

I headed south on Las Vegas Boulevard until I reached a 7-Eleven. I waited in a short line at the counter while holding a pack of gum. The woman in front of me—30, perhaps, with scraggly brown hair and a scarecrow sagging face—tapped her foot, bounced from leg to leg, picked at the candy bars on the shelf in front of her, stopped, looked around, then started her movements over again. She finally grabbed a Snickers and dropped it on the counter next to her giant can of Foster’s. Her eyes darted nervously while she clicked her nails against the can. When it came time for her to pay, she dropped a five on the counter, along with a handful of coins, and mumbled, “Keep the change,” her voice shaky and throaty, like that of a tweaking frog.

She ran out of the store and across the parking lot.

If such events were rare, they would perhaps garner more attention from the press and the public. As it is, the streets are full of people falling through the cracks. I came across more of the same in Sacramento last week. When I was standing in Capitol Park, next to the California State Capitol and amid several homeless crashed out on park benches, a man with a dark beard and Medusa-like hairdo raced past me and shouted, “I’m getting me a Bud. I’m getting me a Bud.”

After he sped away, I slipped into the restroom to pee. Perhaps it was the suggestion of beer so early in the morning. Perhaps it was the pot of tea I drank earlier.

At the sink, a man who looked surprisingly like the Budweiser sprinter, was standing at the sink, mixing a Tang-like concoction in a Tupperware container while clutching under his arm a mini-box of Cheerios. He stared and stirred and mumbled into the container. I believe he spoke in anticipation of his orange-ladden cereal.

That happened the day after I arrived from San Francisco, a city chock full of folks who wonder the streets and talk to themselves and struggle to make sense of a world that by no measure can be judged as anything even close to sane.

At one point during my stay there, I was riding a bus down Mission Street. We stopped at a traffic light at an intersection like hundreds of other intersections in that town—full of people and trash and brick and concrete and shouting and glass. I noticed a young man leaning against an ancient building worn and tagged and ready to fall. He banged his head against the wall and pulled at his hair with a ferocious grip, as though trying to rip off his scalp. A look of anguish had settled on his face, a look that ran so deeply nothing could touch whatever terror he held inside.

Later that day I ran into a drunk guy up near Castro, about 50 maybe, give or take a decade or two. Between staggering steps and gasps for breath, he belted out an offer to sell his wife for 25¢. A mere quarter, he said, so he could get some beer. Obviously he meant more beer. And at such prices, who could blame him?

I’m in Palm Springs now. Yesterday a windstorm raged through here with gusts reaching 90 MPH. Sand blew. Trees fell. Tiles flew off roofs. Some hit my van, in fact, leaving a reddish scar many inches long.

Shortly before the winds began, a slight, bent-over man stormed down the sidewalk across the street from me. He screamed with a thick Mexican accent at the cars passing by. He yelled at them to go away, get off his street, leave him alone. He huffed and puffed, until the wind picked up and blew him down the sidewalk.

Later that evening, after the gusts had somewhat subsided, I was strolling past the Jack in the Box on South Palm Canyon Drive. A young man sauntered out of the building, holding a carton of curly fries and a Coke. He said hello and offered to share his weed with me. He spoke in a rambling, slurred, nasally, pothead sort of voice. I’m not sure he even really saw me. I declined and moved on.

This morning I was driving my tile-scarred van through Palm Springs—again traveling down South Palm Canyon Drive—after hiking part way up the mountain that overlooks the valley. A man wandered into the street, all the time staring at the asphalt several feet before him. A breeze fluttered through his long, thin, unnaturally yellow hair. He reminded me of a burnt-out, one-hit wonder from the ’60s, a man unaware of the traffic about to run him down, a man unaware of the fact that he was in the street at all—the way he weaved back and forth with an unerring stoner’s gate, glancing up for only a moment, as though to assure himself that his place in this world had been secured.

I can’t say whether he was high or drunk or tweaked or whatever. I can’t say whether addiction or substance abuse or mental illness was even a factor. The same is true for all the folks I encountered. Something is going on, though—with them and a hell of a lot of other people out there.

According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, nearly 20% of US adults—over 45 million people—suffer some form of mental illness, with close to 9 million of them dealing with substance abuse issues. Then there are the homeless, 3.5 million in any given year, at least 20% of whom suffer from severe mental illness. In fact, the US Conference of Mayors considers mental illness the third largest cause of homelessness for single adults.

Given the state of our economy and our growing trend toward undercutting public safety nets—a trend with roots in Ronald Reagan but one that found an easy home with Bill Clinton and the George Bushes—we’re not likely to see the number of homeless and mentally ill and addicts diminish any time soon. In fact, I suspect the problem will grow much worse before the politicians and political pundits and the populace who put them in power take these problems seriously.

But if there’s one thing we’re good at in this country, it’s pretending that problems don’t exist, or if we do acknowledge their existence, we figure out a way to blame the victims for causing them in the first place. Perhaps if all the disenfranchised souls were to form a corporation—a friggin’ multinational conglomerate the size of Wal-Mart—they’d at long last have a voice in government. In fact, they’d probably receive more handouts than all the oil and tobacco companies out there.

I particularly appreciated his discussion about his own experiences with meditation—how it had helped to bring about a sense of happiness and balance and equanimity and connectedness to the world around him. Meditation, he believes also made him more intuitive, which he thinks is a real cool thing for guys. “I was never intuitive being a guy,” he said. “It didn’t make any sense to me. Why would anyone want to have feelings like that?”

When he said this, he spoke with the same easy drawl he’d been using all along, a way of talking that somehow emphasized his roots as a real man, despite his having slipped into a more spiritual and enlightened persuasion.

What concerns me about casual remarks such as this is the implication behind them, that normal men are not intuitive beings, which means, by extension, to be male and intuitive is to be abnormal.

Fremont Troll in Seattle

I’m sure he meant nothing by these comments, and I do appreciate his openness and frankness, yet I’m nonetheless reminded of the countless remarks of this sort that offhandedly typecast men and try to define what it means to be one of the guys, that is, someone who’s not intuitive or sensitive or self-aware or thoughtful or caring. Those who grow up not fitting into these stereotypes, who are bombarded with messages that define what it means to be male, reminded over and over that they experience the world in a way that leaves them out of the inner sanctum, are often left with a perception of themselves that make them feel inadequate, odd, and anything but normal. At least that had been the case for me.

When I was a freshman in high school, our PE class met two days a week to learn about men’s health and their sexual peculiarities. At one point, our gym teacher showed us a film—a fifties style docudrama—that tried to explain how boys are emotionally different from girls. Boys, it seems, are naturally unfeeling and much more direct when expressing themselves. Girls, on the other hand, are given to emotionality and would rather dance around a topic than risk hurting someone’s feelings.

The film illustrated the point by dramatizing the way teenage boys and girls deal with friends who have a problem with body odor. The concerned girls dropped carefully targeted hints to their female friend that tried to suggest ways to attend to her BO. The boys, on the other hand, simply threw their smelly male cohort into the shower, clothes and all, without thought to his feelings or reactions or natural inclinations. They were just being guys, after all, and what could be more normal than that?

After watching the film, I knew—although I would never admit it—that I could never do that to someone without taking into account his feelings, no more than I could be thrown into the shower without feeling deeply embarrassed and hurt myself. Once again, I was faced with another indicator that something was decidedly wrong with me. Never, no matter how I tried, could I ever be one of the guys.

From the time we plop out of the womb, we’re inundated with messages—both overt and not so—that tell us how to live and think and feel and see the world. Gross generalizations that define what it means to be a woman or man, to be sinful or pure, to be productive or lazy, to be stupid or smart, to be rich or poor. Yet this one-size-fits-all mentality is based on anything but reality and achieves little more than to confuse, hurt, and often destroy those who cannot meet the constant barrage of expectations.

And perhaps the greatest tragedy in all this is how we come to believe these gross generalizations and consequently judge ourselves with the harshest of condemnations for not living up to them. We indeed become our own worse enemies, no longer believing in ourselves or our ability to reach any sense of fulfillment or self-satisfaction because we’ve become convinced that achieving them is permanently outside our capabilities.

I suspect if we’re ever to pull ourselves out of this mire, we must start by each of us looking at our own complicity in generating these expectations and perpetuating the generalized myths. Not an easy task when we’ve come to identify ourselves by such sweeping ideas. Yet if we don’t strive to examine the things we say and the impact they might have on those around us, we may be inadvertently contributing to the hurt and frustration of others as we impose our simplistic justifications and expectations upon them.

Even casual remarks, such as those spoken by the speaker on the podcast, have the potential for contributing to the low sense of self-worth that seems to have reached epic proportions in our culture. How else do you explain our rampant consumerization and consumption of resources and addiction to entertainment? We must constantly go outside ourselves for validation because we’re afraid or incapable of finding it within.

And all this from a podcast on Buddhist meditation.

Perhaps if I were a more normal type of guy, I wouldn’t have noticed or cared about the speaker’s comments. Perhaps I would have simply shrugged them off and listened to the rest of the discussion without reaction. Perhaps I would have instead turned on sports radio and listened to a huffing and puffing announcer and his harrowing attacks against superstar athletes and the teams for which they played. Perhaps then I would have known what it felt like to be one of the guys.

About three-quarters of that increase comes from developing countries anxious to catch up with their wealthy cousins in the West, suggesting that those of us sucking up most of the resources are starting to get a handle on our myopic habits, despite the zealot naysayers who argue that greenhouse gases and rising temperatures are the stuff of science fiction and of little consequence to our everyday lives.

But closer examination suggests that all we’ve really done is export our problems to those developing countries that have taken on much of the energy-intensive manufacturing we used to do, while we continue to consume and waste and beg for more. And more is what we’re getting, especially when it comes to greenhouse gases.

Most credible scientists agree that a rise of just 2 degrees Celsius is enough to set off a series of global climate changes that can result in extreme weather conditions everywhere, whether droughts or floods or hurricanes or record snowfalls. Not only will the oceans continue to rise, but we could see widespread famine and disease.

Calving glacier in Glacier Bay, Alaska

In fact, rising temperatures may be threatening not only the quality of life for future generations, but also the ability of those generations to survive, whether in the next few decades or next few centuries. Add to this mix the record number of species at risk and shrinking pockets of sustainable ecosystems, and we have before us a doomsday scenario that makes the Mayan calendar seem like amateur hour.

Of course, it’s never easy to predict what will happen 90 years into the future, and most of us will have checked out long before we can learn if our predictions come true, let alone have to answer for our actions. Besides, even at its best, scientific theory is just that—theory. Despite the melting icecaps and record droughts and shrinking glaciers and loss of habitat and record high temperatures—all measurable, verifiable, present-day facts—we cannot know for certain what is to come at the end of the century. Yet even our most optimistic projections paint a dark and frightening future when we take into account the rapidly rising temperatures.

Even so, as a global community, as sovereign nations, as individuals, we are generally ignoring the problem and are more than willing to pass the consequences of our careless actions onto future generations.

In his book The World We Have, Thich Nhat Hanh says that each of us can do something to protect and care for our planet. “We have to live in such a way that a future will be possible for our children and our grandchildren. Our own life has to be our message.”

We all know that our planet is in danger, Thich Nhat Hanh says. The way in which we walk on the earth has a great influence on the plants and animals. “Yet we act as if our daily lives have nothing to do with the condition of the world. We are like sleepwalkers, not knowing what we are doing or where we are heading.” He believes that the future of all life, including our own, depends on us learning how to “live in a way that a future will be possible for our children and our grandchildren.”

Clearly, Thich Nhat Hanh sees no contradiction between spirituality and conservationism, a viewpoint, as it turns out, shared by numerous other spiritual leaders.

The Dalai Lama, for instance, believes that our current activities demonstrate a lack of commitment to humanitarian values and consequently threaten life on earth as we know it. Because of our greed, ignorance, and lack of respect for living things, we are destroying nature and its resources, which will result in future generations inheriting a vastly degraded planet.

It’s not just a question of ethics, says the Dalai Lama, but a question of our own survival. We have no other planet than this one, and that should be reason enough to protect it.

And it’s not just Buddhists who want to protect the environment. Sally Bingham, an Episcopal priest at San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral, heads the Regeneration Project. The Project is an interfaith ministry devoted to deepening the connection between ecology and faith. Recently, the Project brought together leaders from Muslim, Jewish, and Christian faith groups to ask the White House and US Congress to act on climate change.

Then there’s Joel Hunter, a Florida pastor and board member of the National Association of Evangelicals. In addition to being one of 86 Christian leaders to sign the Evangelical Climate Initiative, he was part of a coalition of over 20 religious groups that urged the Bush administration and US Congress to do something about climate change.

There’s also Richard Cizik, vice president of governmental affairs for the US National Association of Evangelicals. He thinks that evangelicals should become known for their love and care of the earth and their fellow human beings. He shares with others a belief that the Bible supports the idea that Christians have a duty to be environmental stewards.

Even the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, believes that Christians have a moral duty to practice sustainable consumption. In fact, the Pope himself—Benedict XVI—endorsed the need for environmental stewardship, ideas echoed by Fazlun Khalid, founder and director of the Islamic Foundation for Ecology and Environmental Sciences, and Warren Stone, founder and chair of the Central Conference of American Rabbis’ Committee on the Environment.

Then there’s Miriam MacGillis, a Catholic nun who founded the Genesis Farm in order to provide a learning center for earth studies. And Karen Baker-Fletcher, an eco-justice theologian who interprets the Bible from an environmental, womanist, and African-American perspective. And Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, leader of over 30 million Orthodox Christians, who says that crimes against the natural work are sins and that to protect the oceans is to do God’s work.

There are more, of course. Many more. People of all faiths who believe that protecting the environment is a spiritual responsibility as well as an ethical one, people who understand that you cannot express a doctrine of family values while disregarding future families. That’s not to say that all politicians in Washington and executives in corporate boardrooms are listening, but the greater the numbers who speak up for the environment, the louder the voices become. Eventually, even the staunchest anti-environmentalist will have to listen.

“When we walk upon Mother Earth,” says Oren Lyons of the Onondaga Nation, “we always plant our feet carefully because we know the faces of our future generations are looking up at us from beneath the ground. We never forget them.”

That’s the point, isn’t it? Never to forget the children and the grandchildren.