I want to take just a minute to brag.

In 2019, I started looking into the Zero Waste movement. After some reading and research, I despaired of ever reaching the “only a canning jar of trash a year” level, but I also decided to make an effort to reduce the amount of trash our family sends to the landfill. Though I don’t agree with her about everything, Bea Johnson’s book, Zero Waste Home, was invaluable to this project.

For New Year’s 2020, I resolved to get our family trash output down to one five-gallon bucket a week. The looks on the faces of the folks at the New Year’s Eve party at which I announced this goal were not encouraging. Such a thought had clearly never crossed some of their minds, and the logic behind such a goal was inconceivable.

Still, I made an attempt. Between refusing to bring home things we didn’t need, shopping to avoid packaging, recycling, and composting, we got down to buckets a week. Nothing to sneeze at.

Then COVID hit, and suddenly everything had to be sterile, which meant so much more plastic and packaging. And of course it meant so many disposable masks. It also set me back in a zero-waste area where I had been making progress: plastic grocery bags.

I had been doing a reasonably good job of remembering my reusable shopping bags, but suddenly they weren’t allowed. I was going to get plastic, like it or not. (Why I never thought to ask for paper instead I just don’t know.) And the plastic bags can be useful – I put them in small trash cans, use them to send the gobs of satsumas from our tree to friends, and they accompany the dog on all his walks. Still, I didn’t need nearly so many.

Three years later, a milestone. Reusable bags have been allowed back in our grocery stores for some time now, and this New Year’s, I’m proud to say that we ran out of plastic grocery bags at our house. I actually took some from my mom so that we’d have a stash for the bathroom trashcan.

It’s a small victory; it’s not nearly enough, of course. But it’s also a reminder that we can change our lifestyles for the better. It might take a while, and there will likely be set-backs. But when I think of all the plastic bags that aren’t blowing down the side of the highway and floating in the Vermillion and riding off to a recycling facility (where they may or may not actually be recycled), it feels like I accomplished something.

Last week, I spent some time exploring the situation our local libraries are in and how we got here. This week, I’d like to continue the discussion by looking at some of the benefits a strong library system brings to our community — in other words, what we risk losing if the millage ultimately fails and the library loses the 38% of its budget those tax dollars represent.

I’ll put a nice long list of amenities the Lafayette Public Library provides towards the end of the post, but I’d like to start with something more personal. 

We’ve been homeschooling for roughly eight years now, and I can say with conviction that our homeschool could not function as it does — almost could not exist — without the public library. 

Last week when I took stock, we had over $1,000 worth of library materials (books and audiobooks) in our home. A good portion of those are “for fun” reading (which some of us call “building fluency”) but a good portion are also dedicated to learning new information. I recently returned a stack of books on Egypt. This year our assigned (library sourced) reading has also included a children’s version of Gilgamesh, Old Yeller, The Cricket in Times Square, books on ancient Mesopotamia and how energy works…the list goes on, and it’s barely November.

The point is, my husband is a school teacher, with a school teacher’s salary. I don’t really get paid to write. There is no way we could give our children the education they currently enjoy without our libraries, and we are grateful. We could be paying hundreds of dollars for the use of these “curriculum materials,” and it would still be a great deal. For the upcoming millage, we pay roughly $11. I couldn’t purchase any one of the books about Egypt for that price.

(There is a greater good here, as well — libraries are key to a strong democracy. Because they give everyone, regardless of their ability to pay, access to information, they lay the groundwork for an educated and involved public. This isn’t my idea — it was Ben Franklin’s. But to get back to our story…)

When we first moved to Acadiana, we lived in the wild Cajun prairie between Grand Coteau and Arnaudville. We soon learned that, despite our St. Landry Parish address, we could get a Lafayette Public Library card. The Sunset Community Library (St. Landry) was closer, but North Regional Library in Carencro was on the way to most of the places we went…and it had story time. Mrs. Anna, the children’s librarian, was pretty much my kids’ first friend in Acadiana. Every week I got four small children out of the trailer and into the magic of books, songs, sidewalk chalk, bubbles, and exploring the library. We didn’t have internet at home, so it was also my only computer time, and my only access to a printer. It’s hard to express what the library meant to us that year, but one word might sum it up: connection.

Again, once the library re-opened for drive-thru services after quarantine, it was one of the few options for entertainment at that time. I’d order books online (we did have internet by then, thankfully) and pick them up at the window, along with take-home crafts for the kids. We also, appropriately, borrowed the board game “Pandemic.” The librarians provided online story times and events to help parents cope and our community stay connected.

Which brings me to the promised long list of library services we risk losing if we don’t care for our libraries. There are the obvious things that can be checked out: books, music, movies, video games, board games, air quality monitors, musical instruments. Plus all the digital resources — magazines, books, newspapers, genealogy information, and research databases. And if our library doesn’t have a book, they will go out of their way to get it. Need an obscure book on life in Roman-occupied Israel? That’s what interlibrary loan is for.

There are the spaces open to all: meeting and study rooms available for reservation, a quiet place in a world that is noisy, a warm place in winter and a cool place in summer, a place where one is allowed to loiter in a world where people are often only welcome if they plan to spend money. Our churches are usually locked these days, but the library still provides a seat and a little rest for those with no where else to go.

There are the services: tax and legal and resume assistance programs, nutrition and exercise programs (some day I will make it to the Zumba class), literacy programs for children and adults, craft time and story time and speakers on all sorts of topics. My oldest two girls and I heard Ernest Gaines speak at our library a couple of years ago. When Lucy read A Lesson Before Dying in English this fall, she already had a connection to the author. That is priceless.

There is the equipment: access to computers, internet, and printers. In the Maker Spaces patrons can use sewing machines, sergers, 3-D printers, dye-cut machines, typewriters, and more.

And there is the community a library creates. Moms meet at story time and then schedule their own play dates. People meet at craft events and become friends; people meet at book clubs and learn from each other. 

If all this isn’t enough, libraries also mean good jobs and higher property values. Even if you never set foot in the library, you still benefit.

Some people in our community argue that these resources aren’t worth our tax dollars. I disagree. I think we should be hesitant to undervalue community, literacy, and an educated populace. As Catholics, we believe we have an obligation to develop the whole person towards holiness; our public libraries (rightly used, of course, but that is another very long post!) make the space and the resources available for people to do just that. If our goal is human flourishing, libraries are a step in the right direction.

All that said, the discussion circles around and ends where it began for me. For our family, the library, more than anything else, means books. Books mean stories. Stories are where we meet people like us, people unlike us, and ourselves. I believe in stories because I believe in the Word, and I believe one place in which we can encounter Him is in stories. So join me at the polls this coming Saturday, November 13, please, and support our community’s access to these stories.

I think everyone who knows us knows one thing about us: our family loves books. The bookshelves line the walls to the point that there’s no room to hang art. There are stacks by everyone’s desk, on everyone’s nightstand, and (often) in the van. Naturally, something else comes with our love of books: a love for our public library.

The Lafayette Public Library is at an inflection point. One of its two millages is on the ballot November 13 – a millage that represents 38% of the library system’s annual operating revenue. Normally, this kind of millage renewal is almost a given. The same sort of property tax is used to fund police, firefighters, parks, drainage, and other civil services. But in 2018, Lafayette learned that public support for libraries could not be taken for granted.

In 2018, a new PAC was formed – Citizens for a New Louisiana. The PAC spent upwards of $20,000, including a direct mailing to Lafayette Parish residents, arguing that the library system had too much money in reserve to need this millage renewal.

The voters agreed — at least, roughly 650 more voters agreed than disagreed, in an election that had only 8% voter turnout. The result was a $3.6 million budget cut for the libraries. 

If that weren’t enough, voters also pulled $10 million from the library’s reserve funds and rededicated it to drainage and parks. Then property values dropped in 2020, delivering another hit to the library’s budget. The Parish council voted to adjust a remaining millage to make up for the short fall, since the library has not been receiving the full 2 mills the voters awarded them in the first place, but Mayor-President Josh Guillory vetoed the proposal.

All of which means that the November 13 millage vote is truly make-or-break for our libraries.

Geoff Daily has a very clear run-down of the implications over at The Current, so I won’t go into all the details. But the important thing to know is that if this millage fails, some of our libraries will close. $4 million are on the line, and there is absolutely no way to save $4 million by cutting corners here and there. There are a couple of possible scenarios floating out there, but if you visit any branch other than Main, your favorite library is in danger.

This situation is especially depressing because of the steps Lafayette has taken to build its library system over the past twenty years. With the 2019 opening of West Regional Library in Scott, the city completed a project voters approved twenty years ago to renovate Main and build four regional libraries. Our system, in fact, was awarded the James O. Modisette Award for Public Libraries in 2020, recognizing the improvements made in the libraries’ service to the community. That’s the highest honor the Louisiana Library Association can give to a public library system. 

It would be a shame to throw away the work of the past two decades, work that has made Lafayette Public Libraries one of the premier systems in the state, because the citizens of Lafayette don’t want to contribute $20 per year per household.

Wait – what? You can see for yourself. The Library has set up a calculator to estimate how much property tax a household will pay for this millage. 

Our family pays $11.96 a year. Less than $2 a person.

To put that in perspective, one picture book costs roughly $17 these days. I gathered up all the library books in our house (that I could find – you know how that is!) and added up the total. We have $1,011 worth of library materials in our home at this moment. And since that’s not counting computer and printer access, programming, digital checkouts, take-home crafts, and use of the space (a couple of hours a month, at least), and assistance from librarians, I think we’re getting our money’s worth.

There are many more reasons you should vote to fund our libraries…but I don’t want to try my dear readers’ patience with a longer blog post. So I plan to finish this conversation next week. If you don’t already love your library enough to make you put up some home-made “Save Our Libraries” yard signs, hopefully next week’s post will convince you that you should.

I’ve been doing some stress gardening lately. It’s a lot like stress cleaning, but with more dirt and sunshine. (And sweat, of course. It’s August.) It’s a practice that has felt natural and necessary as we endure another massive wave of Covid here in Louisiana, driven primarily by our low vaccination rates and high proportion of unwavering anti-maskers. It’s been hard to hear every day of someone else we know who is quarantined or sick, some of them very sick. 

If that were not enough, my oldest is starting school for the first time (as a freshman in high school) and Craig’s workplace is not a safe place right now. Despite how closely this pandemic is hitting us, many people, including some I love dearly, are still choosing their preference not to mask over protecting those around them. 

And it is hitting extremely close to home – I got an email from our nearest hospital last night explaining that they are so overcrowded that they are going to be rescheduling appointments. One of the board members from Craig’s school needed to be admitted with Covid, and there simply wasn’t a bed for him. He waited two days before it was his turn.

There’s not a lot I can do about other people’s choices, so I’ve been pulling weeds. Gallons of them. The summer plants are mostly done, so I pulled out the sad-looking bush beans and the dried-up sunflowers. I’m still battling the blackberries that took over the back corner of the garden and threatened to overwhelm our yard and our neighbor’s. Slowly, something resembling order is rising out of the chaos.

Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, in their vision for the Catholic Worker, spoke often of the need for scholars to be workers and workers to be scholars. Right now would be a bad time for me to live entirely in my head. But being on my knees, hands in the dirt, working to make something beautiful has helped. If nothing else, any time I spend in the garden is time I’m not scrolling Twitter or reading the most recent nurse’s plea for people to get vaccinated.

Because most of the work has been in ripping out rather than planting, and because it’s been a blisteringly hot August, the gardens aren’t much to look at yet, mostly just bare dirt. Starting over is a slow process. Still, two weeks into my refocused gardening efforts, I’m starting to see a difference. The kale and mustard greens and cosmos by the front porch have sprouted. They are a very hopeful shade of green. The long vegetable bed that came with the house is now clear except for the tomato jungle and a couple of leeks, and the bare earth looks eager for new life.

We weather storms around here. It comes with the territory. Just how much this one costs us remains to be seen, but I’m sure we’ll get through it, too, eventually. But it may not be before I start harvesting all that kale.

Obedience is a word that feels a little outdated in our culture today. When “living your best life” so often means “going your own way” and trying to just “be you,” to whom could we possibly owe obedience?

Most people would still agree that we should follow the laws, sure, and maybe we should “be nice.” But that seems to cover the extent of our obligations in many people’s minds. And being nice includes to yourself, of course, which sometimes precludes being nice to someone else. So even that leaves a good bit of wiggle room.

This is on my mind in particular at the moment because as a parent, I would like a certain amount of obedience from my children. I don’t even expect to be obeyed blindly–in fact, I hope to raise kids who question rules, especially if they seem to go counter to the Good. But I would also like their starting place to be obedience, not rebellion. First get out of the road, then ask me why you should, assuming you didn’t already see the speeding car pass by.

This is a constant balancing act in our home, but certain recent events in the public square have made it seem a very relevant topic. Because if our obedience is only (or even first and foremost) to ourselves, the result is the situation we have right now in Louisiana: thousands of people in hospitals with the Delta variant, and thousands of others still refusing to get the vaccine or even wear a face covering in public.

And here is where the obedience issue really hits home for me: we all know that the best way to teach children is by example. “Do what I say, not what I do” simply doesn’t work. So when our (Democratic) governor institutes a mask mandate (and I don’t even need to discuss the necessity of this, because every nightly news program has that covered), and the (Republican) Attorney General promptly issues statements endorsing all the loopholes he can think of, what kind of obedience are we teaching our children? That we only owe obedience to those of the same political party?

When our bishop “strongly urges” that everyone wear masks at Mass, and our priests go out of their way to point out (in parish communications and on social media) that no one is required to wear a mask and no one without a mask will be turned away, what kind of obedience is that? Obedience to those in the congregation who don’t like masks?

Coming back to the governor, if a school administration tells its high school students that mask wearing to protect others is their personal choice, while wearing a seatbelt to protect themselves is obedience to the law…what is a sixteen-year-old supposed to take away from that?

And here’s my favorite. This is part of what the Catholic Church has to say about Covid vaccines and masking.

At the same time, practical reason makes evident that vaccination is not, as a rule, a moral obligation and that, therefore, it must be voluntary. In any case, from the ethical point of view, the morality of vaccination depends not only on the duty to protect one’s own health, but also on the duty to pursue the common good. In the absence of other means to stop or even prevent the epidemic, the common good may recommend vaccination, especially to protect the weakest and most exposed. Those who, however, for reasons of conscience, refuse vaccines produced with cell lines from aborted fetuses, must do their utmost to avoid, by other prophylactic means and appropriate behavior, becoming vehicles for the transmission of the infectious agent. In particular, they must avoid any risk to the health of those who cannot be vaccinated for medical or other reasons, and who are the most vulnerable. (emphasis in the original)

Note on the morality of using
some anti-Covid-19 vaccines
https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20201221_nota-vaccini-anticovid_en.html

Sadly, often when this is quoted (at least in south Louisiana), the quote only goes though the first sentence, which I think you’ll agree misses the point of the paragraph. Now I don’t blame anyone who is nervous about putting this fairly new vaccine in their body, or who doesn’t want to participate, even with “remote passive material cooperation” (bullet point 3 in the above document) in anything connected to abortion. But the Church then requires those refusing the vaccine to “do their utmost to avoid, by prophylactic means and appropriate behavior, becoming vehicles for the transmission of the infectious agent.”

Translation: Wear a mask. Social distance. Don’t go near those who are especially vulnerable.

When our congressmen and attorneys general aren’t obedient to their superiors, we cringe and call it bad behavior or plain old politics. But when our priests and Catholic school administrations ignore not only civil law, but also the clear directives of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and their own bishop, what on earth are we supposed to tell our children?

It appears that our individual freedoms, our personal preferences, while good in themselves, have become our idols. When we can honestly say, as Catholics, that we would rather risk sending someone to the hospital than wear a mask or stay home from a social gathering…I don’t know what to say anymore. We (including many anti-maskers) spend a great deal of time railing against our culture’s individualism, and yet what is this if not choosing our own comfort over the good of our brothers and sisters in Christ?

I didn’t think I would have to write a post like this. I thought we were moving on, that this kind of rhetoric was so 2020. Clearly I was wrong. Early on, there were predictions that the pandemic would teach us to appreciate each day, appreciate each other, care for our neighbors, and the like. If it’s taught us anything, it seems to have taught us to double down on fulfilling our own desires and to entrench ourselves in whichever ideology is most amenable to those desires.

I don’t think the story has to end there, however. I think there is still plenty of room for us to grow as a country and as a church, to learn from our mistakes, and to reconcile those relationships into which politics has driven a wedge. But all of this takes humility. It takes an openness to hearing what the “other” is saying, and to imagining what the “other” is feeling. When I put myself in the place of someone with a chronic illness, and hear that my parish won’t be accommodating me, but I’m welcome to watch on Facebook, my heart breaks. At the risk of stepping on toes and sounding divisive, that is the person I choose to stand beside. And I ask, humbly–because I don’t have all the answers, but I do read the hospital numbers–be obedient to your leaders, at least about this. Listen to your doctors and nurses. Listen to those whose health is vulnerable.

Please, please, just wear a mask.

I heard a homily recently centered around the idea of the “next right thing,” or “one small change.” When I got home and turned to the reflection book I’ve been praying with at night, I found this:

“The solution proposed in the Gospels is that of voluntary poverty and the works of mercy. It is the little way. It is within the power of all. Everybody can begin here and now…. We have the greatest weapons in the world, greater than any hydrogen or atom bomb, and they are the weapons of poverty and prayer, fasting and alms, the reckless spending of ourselves in God’s service and for his poor. Without poverty we will not have learned love, and love, at the end, is the measure by which we shall be judged.”

Dorothy Day, quoted in The Reckless Way of Love

Ouch. As usual, Dorothy Day shows me just how much growing I still have to do. Poverty? Our fridge is always full, and we just bought a new couch. I consistently fail at fasting. We’re so-so at alms. Prayer? I can say that I make an effort, but not that it’s always a whole-hearted one.

And after a few days re-reading Dorothy Day’s diaries (in the name of research) all these points have been driven home even further: she complains of so many people who wish “to do big things but not little ones.” ^[1]Jan. 25, 1946

Which brings me back to the “one small change” idea. Dorothy’s diaries show her repeatedly planning small sacrifices she could make: fasting from meat,^[2]June 18, 1950 practicing “joyful silence,”^[3]Feb 1944 not complaining about the radio.^[4]Feb. 24, 1953

I started small, too. First, I signed up to bring a meal to a friend who had a baby. And as for fasting, maybe I can start skipping my post-putting-Jacob-to-nap snack. Small things.

My week’s reading/research has also reminded me of the impact of doing the small things. As they were moving out of the Mott Street Catholic Worker house, Dorothy added up how many meals they had served to the hungry and homeless during the 14 years they had lived there. She came up with 2,555,000. Conservatively. ^[5]Nov. 27, 1950

Every day they cooked what they had, opened the doors, and fed people. Many days they felt like failures – the need was just too great. Yet over time their work added up to more than they could have hoped for.

What does the sacrifice of my one snack, day after day, week after week, add up to? Fortunately, that’s not the part I have to worry about. The math is up to God. He feeds the 5,000 with a few loaves and fishes. He makes our poverty and prayer, fasting and alms, however small, more efficacious than any work we might do on our own.

Dorothy again:

“Do what comes to hand. Whatsoever thy hand finds to do, do it with all thy might. After all, God is with us. It shows too much conceit to trust to ourselves, to be discouraged at what we ourselves can accomplish. It is lacking in faith in God to be discouraged. After all, we are going to proceed with his help. We offer him what we are going to do. If he wishes it to prosper, it will.”

Dorothy Day, House of Hospitality

“If he wishes it to prosper, it will.” One afternoon-snack-sized sacrifice at a time.

This NPR story has been on my mind this week:

Known For Its Floods, Louisiana Is Running Dangerously Short Of Groundwater

Louisiana has a lot of problems – rampant industrial pollution, abysmal rates of poverty and chronic health problems, bottom-of-the barrel education, to name a few – but I, like many others, didn’t think that a scarcity of drinkable water was one of them.

Yet it’s true: between industry, farming, and lawn-watering, we are pulling water out of our aquifers faster than they can be refilled. Which is disconcerting, to say the least.

For what it’s worth, our family has been on the edge of the Conserve Our Water bandwagon for a while, with things like rain barrels and infrequent toilet flushing. I did the math, and the average American uses 3.5 times as much water as we do. So I feel like we’re on the right track…but our aquifer (the Chicot) is being overdrawn by 350 million gallons a day. Which means our few thousand gallons a month help, but not very much.

As is so often the case in our great state, one of the big hurdles to doing anything about the groundwater problem is the lack of regulation. As in, there is no regulation of how much water an individual or company can pump, and no cost for pumping it. And as Tegan Wendland points out in her story, so many of our politicians are cozied up to the industries which benefit from all this free water that there’s little hope of reform any time soon.

The rest of WWNO’s reporting on this topic:

https://www.wwno.org/post/amid-rising-seas-and-record-storms-louisianas-water-running-low

https://www.wwno.org/post/louisianas-biggest-source-groundwater-losing-water-fast

https://www.wwno.org/post/industry-overuse-puts-capital-city-drinking-water-risk

https://www.wwno.org/post/groundwater-threats-compounded-changing-climate

https://www.wwno.org/post/lawmakers-sidestep-groundwater-crisis-decades

Diane Rhem had a fascinating and timely show on yesterday, discussing the book The Big Disconnect with its author, Catherine Steiner-Adair.  She proposes, rather simply, I thought, that screen time affects our neurology and our interactions with others, and that therefore we should consider carefully the effects of screen use, especially for younger children.  Based on my own experiences, both raising children and teaching, not to mention in my own social life, I thought she was right on track.  What really amazed me was the backlash she received in the comments. It really brought home to me how desperately we are attached to our “devices”. I suggest listening, it will be an hour well spent.
And I do realize the irony of my blogging from a tablet to point out the dangers of technology and children. When we start our Catholic Worker paper, maybe it will be different. In the meantime, I guess I’m using what’s available. And I would like to note that I stopped this post in the middle to make breakfast for Samantha. Which was a struggle, because I wanted to finish. And now Clare is up, so I’ll be signing off. Check out the show, though. I will be hunting down a copy of the book.

And a post script – After grocery shopping and lunch, it took three more interruptions to check that what I wrote earlier actually made sense. Which is why the title of this blog is what it is. And the link is below, in case the one at the top of the post has issues. Still not trusting this tablet completely.

http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2013-08-14/catherine-steiner-adair-big-disconnect

So I’ve been doing most of my own baking for a few months now (hard to justify the expense of inferior store-bread, when I’m just at home all day doing, well, you know…at-home things).  And as I was clearing up lunch yesterday, including Lucy’s half-eaten sandwich, it occurred to me that I was somewhat offended that she would blithely toss out a whole slice of the bread I had kneaded by hand the day before.  How dare she be so wasteful of my hard work!
Which got me thinking, of course, about how much food we throw away in our family, and in this country in general, and how little it concerns us.  And how much the great distance (both physical and psychological – do you think about the provenance of that beef?) between us and the source and manufacture of our food has to do with this lack of interest in the end that meets so much of our food.  (Today’s Latin lesson – manufacture = “made by hand”- how often is that true of anything anymore?)
What real connection do I have to that fast food hamburger, or even to the canned soup I merely heat up for dinner?  I rarely think twice about clearing those leftovers from the fridge to the trash can.  But it seems that the more involved I am in where my food comes from, the closer I am to the “ground” of the process, the more meaningful eating, really being nourished by my food is.  And the more I care how it is used.  Or not, as the case may be.
Another argument for slow food and the simple life, I guess.  Add it to the pile.  Maybe we’ll actually get close to those ideals some day!
And, all moralizing aside, at least I’m starting to make some really good bread.

In the space of an hour tonight, the girls’ imaginative play included two hilarious and touching games.  The first was “Mass”, complete with Goldfish and water intincture for communion, the girls taking turns as priest, and a fantastic version of “Hosanna to Jesus the King” of Lucy’s own creation.

When that was finished, Lucy announced that we were going to do what the man on the computer was doing (Craig was watching the State of the Union): she would stand up and talk, and we would all clap.  The speech sounded roughly like this: “Blah, goobdy-glah, ookie jimbas.”  It was quite hilarious.