Amidst the Cascade of Inhumanities

The Other America

明河可望不可親
願得乘槎一問津

 

The Other China has been a feature of my work since the frustrated Restoration, or Counter-Reform years, of the Chinese party-state in 1989-1992. More recently, I have noted that during the Xi Jinping era Official China has strained to impose uniformity on the Chinese world, be it in the People’s Republic or internationally. Despite its tireless attempts to discipline, corral and silence the voices of difference, The Other China/ Other Chinas, or what elsewhere I have referred to as the Invisible Republic of the Spirit, an ‘inland empire’ if you will, persists.

Although cowed at times, The Other China is nonetheless resilient. Long after the droning monotone of Xi Jinping and his minions has died down, The Other China will flourish in variegated and ever-newer ways. The Xi Jinping autarchy has, if anything, contributed to the international presence of The Other China, just as other periods of repression in China Proper led to a flourishing of Chinese possibility elsewhere.

Our interest in The Other China is a continuation of the work of China Heritage Quarterly, the predecessor of China Heritage, where we first introduced readers to T’ien Hsia Monthly and The China Critic, publications which were early outlets for voices from The Other China.

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Contra Trump — America’s Empire of Tedium was launched at Halloween 2024, on the eve of the US presidential election. Anticipating Donald J. Trump’s second presidential term, the series is ‘in dialogue’ with Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium, a project that has tracked the Xi Jinping era from its prehistory. In Chinese, I refer to both ‘empires’ as 無奈之帝國 (see 無可奈何 — So It Goes).

The Other America is an occasional series that focusses on a place inhabited by the kinds of thoughtful, caring and humorous people spirits have and continue to enthral the world. To date, the series has included the following chapters:

We start this chapter with Homesick: A Plea for Our Planet a poem by Andrea Gibson, lines from which inspired the essay that follows by Michele Hornish, founder of Small Deeds Done. Those lines read:

… thorns were my very first heroes
because they did nothing with their life but protect
what was sweet.

China Heritage, for its part, celebrates China’s own heroic thorns. We conclude with the 1970 rendition of El Cóndor Pasa by Simon and Garfunkel, a song that combined a Peruvian melody with lyrics by Paul Simon.

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The Chinese rubric of this chapter is taken from a poem by Song Zhiwen (宋之問, 656-712 CE), who was active during the interregnum of Empress Wu Zetian 武則天. It reads:

明河可望不可親
願得乘槎一問津

Here the poet describes the lure of the Milky Way and his hope to travel heavenward. In the event, Song Zhiwen remained very much earthbound and, when the throne was reclaimed by a male ruler, he was ordered to commit suicide.

— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
8 October 2025

Homesick

In the 5th grade I won the science fair
with a project on climate change
That featured a paper mache ozone layer
with a giant hole, through which a paper mache sun
cancered the skin of a Barbie in a bikini
on a lawn chair, glaciers melting like ice cubes
in her lemonade.

It was 1987 in a town
that could have invented red hats
but the school principal gave me a gold ribbon
and not a single bit of attitude
about my radical political stance,

because neither he nor I knew it was a political stance.
Science had not been fully framed as leftist propaganda.
The president did not have a twitter feed
starving the world of facts.

I spent that summer as I had every summer
before, racing through the forest behind my house
down the path my father called the old logging road
to a meadow thick with raspberry bushes
whose thorns were my very first heroes
because they did nothing with their life but protect
what was sweet.

Sundays I went to church but struggled
to call it prayer if it didn’t leave grass stains
on my knees. Couldn’t call it truth if it didn’t
come with a dare to crawl into the cave
by the creek and stay put until somebody counted
all the way to 100.

As a kid I thought 100 was the biggest number there was.
My mother absolutely blew my mind
the day she said, One hundred and one. 

One hundred…AND WHAAAAAT!!!!????

Billionaires never grow out of doing that same math
with years. Can’t conceive of counting past their own lifespans.
Believe the world ends the day they do.
Why are the keys to our future in the hands of those
who have the longest commutes from their heads to their hearts?
Whose greed is the smog that keeps us from seeing
our own nature, and the sweetness we are here to protect?

Do you know sometimes when gathering nectar
bees fall asleep in flowers? Do you know fish
are so sensitive snowflakes sound like fireworks
when they land on the water? Do you know sea otters
hold hands when they sleep so they don’t drift apart?
Do you know whales will follow their injured friends
to shore, often taking their own lives
so to not let a loved one be alone when he dies?

None of this is poetry. It is just the earth
being who she is, in spite of us putting barcodes on the sea.
In spite of us acting like Edison invented daylight.

Dawn presses her blushing face to my window,
asks me if I know the records in my record collection
look like the insides of trees. Yes, I say,
there is nothing you have ever grown that isn’t music.
You were the bamboo in Coltrane’s saxophone reed.
The mulberries that fed the silkworms
that made the slippers for the ballet.
The pine that built the loom that wove the hemp
for Frida Khalo’s canvas. The roses that dyed her paint
hoping her brush could bleed for her body.

Who, more than the earth, has bled for us?
How do we not mold our hearts after the first spruce tree
who raised her hand and begged to be cut
into piano keys so the elephants can keep their tusks?

The earth is the right side of history.
Is the canyon my friend ran to
when no else he knew would echo
his chosen name back to him.
Is the wind that wailed through 1956 Alabama
until the poplar trees carved themselves into Dr King’s pulpit.
Is the volcano that poured the mercury
into the thermometers held under the tongue of Italy,
though she knew our fever was why her canals
were finally running clear. She took our temperature.
Told us we were too hot, even after
we’d spent decades claiming she was not.
Our hands held to her burning forehead,
we insisted she was fine while wildfires
turned redwoods to toothpicks,
readying the teeth of our apocalypse.

She sent a smoke signal all the way from California.
In New York City ash fell from the sky.
Do you know the mountains of California
used to look like they’d been set on fire
because they were so covered in monarch butterflies?
Do you know monarch butterflies migrate 3000 miles
using only the fuel they stored as caterpillars in the cocoon?

We need so much less than we take.
We owe so much more than we give.
Squirrels plant thousands of trees every year
just from forgetting where they left their acorns.

If we aimed to be just half as good
as one of the earth’s mistakes,
we could turn so much around.
Our living would be seed, the future would have roots.
We would cast nothing from the garden of itself.
and we would make the thorns proud.

— Andrea Gibson, Homesick: A Plea for Our Planet

Photo by Ashlee Rezin of the Chicago Sun-Times. ICE agent spraying David Black, pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Chicago

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A Sea of Thorns Amidst a Cascade of Inhumanities

Michele Hornish

7 October 2025

A thorn is a hero.

I spent more time than I’d like to admit on Sunday morning, scrolling through social media – searching both for updates on the current state of affairs and distractions from the same.

It was then that I saw a spoken word performance of the poem Homesick: A Plea for Our Planet by Andrea Gibson, who passed away earlier this year.

“[T]horns were my very first heroes because they did nothing with their life but protect what was sweet.”

I hiccuped a little at the thought.

And I realized. I am a thorn. Or, at least, I want to be.

Not long after, I saw someone comment about the “cascade of inhumanities” that’s befalling us right now. It was such a perfect phrasing, and I’m sorry I can’t find the original author to give them credit. (I’m funny that way.)

But you know what I’m referring to. The cascade of inhumanities that assault our psychic and financial and physical lives.

Our news feeds are crammed with reports of masked ICE agents roughing up 84 year old women in Portland, shooting fathers and macing presbyterian ministers in Chicago. A dear friend in Chicago is buying gas masks today, just in case.

Grocery prices are up across the board. ACA premiums are set to go up for everyone by an average of 20% – and that’s before the doubling or tripling that will happen to those who qualify for subsidies. Housing costs are up, while inventory’s down. Jobs are scarce. Child care costs are through the roof. Covid cases are up, but vaccinations are down.

I got my own vaccine on Friday, but I had to pay out of pocket. The pharmacist apologized when he told me it was going to be a few hundred dollars. The woman in front of me shook her head.

“What are we doing,” she muttered.

I didn’t have an answer.

A cascade of inhumanities.

I went to the grocery store over the weekend to get fresh produce and some lunch box items for my son. For the second time in two weeks, four bags of groceries cost $244. At least I’m consistent, I thought.

The clerk looked up when I gasped at the total.

“I know it,” she said. “It’s scary how much everything costs now.” She bagged up the Little Debbies and the pasta while I took on the lettuce and broccoli and tomatoes.

Did I get too much fresh food? I wondered to myself. Maybe I should buy more frozen vegetables.

She continued. “Folks leave here with two bags of groceries and it’s over a hundred bucks. Did you see that soda’s almost $10 now?” She was a faster bagger than I was, but I was going purposefully slow because this was interesting. I wasn’t alone in the economic pressure, as it turns out. And it feels good to know you’re not alone.

“At least I’m a vegetarian,” I offered with a smile.

She laughed a big belly laugh, then nodded.

“Yep – ground beef is really bad,” she said as she turned to get the receipt.

As she handed it to me, she gestured to my overalls and asked “Do you garden?”

“I do,” I said. “Obviously not enough.”

She laughed again.

“Yeah, I’ve decided that next year I’m going to have a big garden. A really big one.”

I left the store wondering about the state of a country in which a grocery store clerk is openly talking about gardening to offset the high cost of food.

But she got me thinking about my garden, so after I unloaded the groceries I headed into the backyard. In years past, my garden has been a source of pride and joy, but this year it’s pretty beaten down. I could try to sugarcoat it and say that it’s because of the weather or lack of rain, but that wouldn’t be true. It’s overgrown with weeds, and volunteer trees, and invasive trumpet vine that a well-intentioned neighbor planted a decade ago.

There’s a lot of work to do.

But there’s also a bright spot.

Because in my raised bed, there’s a patch of everbearing raspberry plants, growing tightly together like a thicket.

They grew from one plant that I had nursed along – and that suddenly multiplied and spread itself all over.

Those raspberry plants grew so closely together that they have intertwined and supported each other – growing taller even without being staked, without being coddled, without being supported. I tried to separate them to reach a (very) late-season raspberry – and promptly pricked my finger on a thorn.

And I remembered.

A thorn is a hero.

My little backyard thicket has evolved to protect sweet things by weaving tightly together, by forcing a stronger connection. They’ve become a bramble that sets out to hurt no one – but that, with its prickly exterior, guards what is sweet and soft and vulnerable from the cascade of threats that surround them.

We are bombarded with a cascade of inhumanities, friend. And sometimes it feels as though we can’t hold all of it at bay.

But we’re not meant to. Not alone.

That grocery clerk – she’s a thorn. So is the pharmacist who apologized about the vaccine cost. And the woman who muttered “what are we doing” in solidarity. Each person who acknowledges the hardship, who offers a moment of connection, who stands between the agent and the protester, who gives water to the maced and hugs to the weary. Who marches, who calls, who writes, who screams, who offers encouragement and love and compassion –

And who dreams about gardens they haven’t planted yet.

We are a sea of thorns.

Not isolated. Not separate. But intertwined like those raspberry plants – growing close together, supporting one another, protecting what’s sweet through our connection and our presence.

One thorn can be brushed aside, avoided. But a bramble? A thicket? A sea of thorns growing together, interconnected and supporting each other?

That’s how we stand against the cascade.

We protect what’s sweet not by being invulnerable, but by being together. By growing close. By intertwining our roots and our lives and our small acts of humanity until we become something stronger than any of us could be alone.

The work ahead is daunting. My garden is overgrown. The trumpet vine keeps spreading. The cascade keeps cascading.

But the raspberries are thriving. Growing together. Guarding what’s sweet.

And so can we.

Be a thorn, friend. Find your bramble. Grow close to one another. Protect what’s sweet.

That is the work.

Let’s get to it.

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Source:

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El Cóndor Pasa

Simon & Garfunkel

I’d rather be a sparrow than a snail
Yes, I would
If I could
I surely would

I’d rather be a hammer than a nail
Yes, I would
If I only could
I surely would

Away, I’d rather sail away
Like a swan that’s here and gone
A man gets tied up to the ground
He gives the world its saddest sound
Its saddest sound

I’d rather be a forest than a street
Yes, I would
If I could
I surely would

I’d rather feel the earth beneath my feet
Yes, I would
If I only could
I surely would