THE LINK BETWEEN CLIMATE CHANGE AND IMMIGRATION.
    by William R Morrow

A major result of climate change is rising sea levels. It doesn’t take much science to simply observe the “living lab” of sea level rise and its present day effects on Miami Beach and the Everglades. Just this January, the City of Miami Beach announced, in response to chronically rising waters, a one hundred million dollar project to raise roads, install pumps, and redo sewer connections.

   It is also clear that rising sea levels around the planet are connected to melting polar ice from small changes in temperature, whether these changes are permanent or not.

As more and more coastal lands in developing countries like Bangladesh become uninhabitable, many more people will be seriously affected. Whatever the time-line estimates of dire demographic circumstances, current observable effects are already observable in places much poorer than Miami Beach.

It is easy for those of us who live on higher ground to keep living in denial of climate change, and carry on as if the problems are minimal. But despite people’s beliefs about climate change, there is another bit of information that links immigration to climate change.

What this means is that inundated people of the planet will become refugees and immigrants. Landless people will go on the move in search of someplace else to find food and live their lives. There will be resulting pressure on world population that is bound to affect European countries, and ultimately North America. I recently heard a lecture by Karl Kaiser, Adjunct Professor of Public Policy at the Kennedy School, which pointed to this major source of new immigration that is right around the corner. I was impressed with his knowledge and experience, which has been honored with the Atlantic Award of NATO.  Immigration and refugee movement, he notes, is already destabilizing Europe, and creating social instability. Even with the U.S. restrictions on immigration, these world population shifts will affect American economic (if not political) interests.

It won’t be long before the beliefs in “America First” and “Fortress America” will be in direct conflict with beliefs about how to deal with the economic and social effects of climate change. The two issues of climate change and immigration will be clashing head-on on our own shores. An unstoppable global change in the world as we know it will, in my view, force a reconsideration of how we view immigration. It is a moral issue of what we should do, but because of the inevitable clash, it is also a practical issue of what we will have to do.

If you would like to take up this cause locally, you could get involved with a political action group right here in Lee County. Check out: Lee OFA Indivisible on Facebook.

William Morrow is an ordained Presbyterian minister and licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, in Fort Myers. He is the author of "The Rain Doesn't Fall Straight Down".

 

The Status of Community Service, Past and Future.

During the time that I was working full time, I saw the benefit of connecting up with other organizations like mine. As the director of a Pastoral Counseling Center, I was in league with other social service agencies that shared a similar vision of providing needed services to the community at large. Like the counseling center, most of those agencies were non-profits, and serviced a particular area of local human need, such as mental health, or child and family health, or disability. Together we took care our local area.

The conjoint agency was called the Community Coordinating Council, and we met once a month to keep each other up to date. Then, once a year we had a banquet where the CCC officers for the year recognized somebody’s outstanding service to the community. We celebrated little increments of progress from our efforts and hard work.

I always thought it was ironic that what we all were doing on a daily basis year round was considered “community service”, a term that just happened to be used by the judicial system to indicate a level of punishment for some convicted man or woman. Those being punished were caught in criminal acts, but, for one reason or another, were not sent to jail. Rather they had to perform a menial duty to right the wrong they did. Often it was some task that no one else wanted to do.

What we in the CCC were doing was not usually menial, but was labeled with the same term that others did as punishment. How is it that the term, community service, gets attached to both activities? We were, as professionals, certainly not down on the social scale with offenders. But work that serves others and raises human dignity does not often get recognized in the same way that corporate work does. Our “shareholders” are often volunteer boards of directors. If we had a profit motive, we probably wouldn’t be so effective.

Whenever a school or prison shifts away from a service model, I am suspicious

I read recently that artificial intelligence and robotics will eventually, in the future, put more and more people out of work, permanently, so that the (income)tax base will shrink. No work; no income; no income tax. There will be little or no money for social services.

The same article suggested that people, who would otherwise be quite willing to work, would have to rely on economic assistance because there WERE NO jobs left for humans. The author suggested that in exchange for receiving financial assistance, people who could not be retrained for the few jobs that robots could not do, would be encouraged or required to do what he calls “service jobs of love”, nuanced activities, like accompanying someone to the doctor.

So, before the predicted era of this mass unemployment, there was this group of people who were already performing service jobs of love, known as social services. I was a part of that.  Except my colleagues and I were doing it for pay. That was when there was money for it, albeit on the low end of the pay scale. I hope, that amidst the major changes caused by artificial intelligence, there will still be a place for those educated in the social services, and that there will be public monies to pay them.    

Buried Treasure

by William R.Morrow, D.Min.,LMFT . Email to:wmorrowmft@embarqmail.com

I recently had to clear out some outdated files of people I saw years ago. Proper protocol suggests

putting them (the files, not the people!) through the shredding machine, to keep confidentiality intact, and

consign all those old stories to the black hole of the universe, where passé information is sent. Probably,

by now, most of those people have forgotten what they had fretted or complained about that long ago

anyway. To keep the finely shredded papers moving in the right direction, I decided to dump them in my

backyard compost pile. Red wiggler worms in the vermiculture love to digest these old stories, as a primitive form of  “reading”. Somehow, it seemed appropriate to recycle all those life stories back into the dust they had been created out of, and put the phosphorous-rich shreds to good gardening use. What had been secrets and sad tales now were on their way to a proper burial, where they could do some good eventually next to the roots of my heliconias.

My professional contact with those struggling folks was a brief time in their lives of relationships. I

think they were unknowingly on safari, searching for themselves. The way I see it, everybody in life is on a journey, seeking and searching to discover the lost continent of the real and pristine self. Christopher Columbus didn’t know what he was going to find, but he knew two things for sure, that he was searching, and that he was on a great journey of some kind. For all of us, self-acceptance of the rough edges of our souls is the goal of the journey.

But, meanwhile, along the way, relationships become a diversion. The search gets delayed, and

becomes tied up in the pursuit of finding someone out there who will affirm us, accept us. It’s like we

budding human beings need the O.K. stamp-of-approval to validate us. But it never quite happens,

because even the greatest human relationship of love can never hope to produce this salvation, this inner self-affirmation that is, when you come right down to it, more like a spiritual experience than some kind of relationship success. This is not a lecture against having relationships, but, hey, let’s get them in perspective.

In a way, having a marriage is only incidental to having a life. I am a bad tour guide if I only work to help with the success of the relationship itself. Since it takes two whole people to have a whole

relationship, I believe it is my job, as tour guide, also to point out a few things along the individual route they each are taking. And, to some of those relationship-desperate people, I would like to say, “Get a

life!”

As the guardian of all those buried tales of old endings and new beginnings, blending of families, and sad relationship failures, I have to think seriously about what has happened to the sojourners I have met in my office. How did the story turn out? I don’t often get to hear the ending. I was just one stopover on their road to somewhere. I’m honored that they consulted me along the way, in their searches for happier solutions to their conflicts, in their searches to find some meaning in their losses, or as they looked to understand and be understood by their partners.

I assume that each one was on that awesome journey. And that each one ended up in a better place than did my files on them.

This was revised from a chapter in my book, “The Rain Doesn’t Fall Straight Down”, which is free for download on my webpage, www.WillimRMorrow.com

Are You Breathing Right?

by William R.Morrow, D.Min.,LMFT . Email to:wmorrowmft@embarqmail.com

I try hard to follow instructions, so when I went in for a medical check up, I marched through the routine obediently. After a few preliminaries, the doctor donned his stethoscope, and said, “Take a few deep breaths” while he listened to my lungs. I guess I passed that hurdle without any heavy breathing in his face, because then he commanded, “Now, breathe normally!”

Although that bit of instruction seemed simple enough, I was confused, because I know that “normal” isn’t what it used to be.

My confusion was because I know the history of human breathing. It has definitely evolved from the days before anyone was really self-conscious about it. The Primitive Human Breather was basically pretty relaxed about in-and-out, unless, of course, he had to fight or flee. But aside from those stress times on the heart and lungs, our guy knew instinctively just what to do, and how to breathe.

In this modern era, we have to restore the God-given natural inspiration/expiration, and learn how to breathe properly.

What we know as the autonomic nervous system had evolved nicely from reptiles to upright mammals. The more oxygen required for the bigger brains of the human types, meant the more our heart/lung function had to work efficiently 

I recently added a new chapter in my understanding of how we breathe from Dr. Louis Damis, a health psychologist, who helps people with headache pain. He presented his findings at a weekend conference of the Florida Society of Clinical Hypnosis.

According to him, many of the pain problems of the upper body are a result of improper breathing. The upper body is connected to the brain by the vagal nerve system. And poor breathing is systemically connected to poor heart function. This can add up to trouble, especially for people who have been subject to excessive stress.

But fortunately Clinical Hypnosis, as a health profession, is geared to restoring healthy breathing through teaching relaxation. Relaxation is already an essential part of hypnosis, (along with inner focus and suggestion). Pain relief is a result of relaxation.

So, if the goal is to promote relaxed breathing, then we have to learn what that looks and feels like. Here’s the spoiler: in the bluster of 21^st century life, WE DO NOT KNOW HOW TO BREATHE CORRECTLY. What I used to think was normal breathing was actually chest breathing. The greater stress of everyday living has trained us into this maladaptive mode for getting oxygen and staying loose and relaxed.

The human body was not designed for continual chest breathing. In order to deal with pain, and the anxiety often connected with it, we have to train ourselves in STOMACH BREATHING or diaphragmatic breathing.

Stomach breathing is associated with the calming effect of the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS). The PNS is essentially the relaxation response of the general nervous system. Proper breathing actually turns on the PNS. But people have to learn this, I should say RELEARN this, since, way back, we once came by it naturally.

The treatment for many upper body pains is learning and practicing diaphragmatic or stomach breathing, employing the diaphragm muscle and the stomach. Follow this link for step-by-step instructions.

http://tinyurl.com/U-Breathe

You can practice this for use in pain problem situations as well as other anxiety effects on the body. After daily practice sessions, of ten repetitions each of the deep breathing, your ongoing regular breath can eventually become more of a stomach breath.  Who knows, you may evolve into the way we were originally meant to breathe. It is easiest to practice lying down on your back.