My thoughts have a tendency to wander through weird pathways – wouldn’t you know it, dear reader. Here is a map of yesterday morning’s procession, just for the fun of it.

I started out to find a translation for the German word Moralpredigt: to sermonize from a moral high ground (there is NO dictionary translation…) because I intended to introduce the topic of gift giving in this consumers-on-steroids time of the year, with wagging fingers. (Never mind that I had broken my own vow not to buy anything in these December weeks before Hanukah and Christmas, because I found a perfect thing for the kids’ garden on Saturday.)

What the dictionary revealed instead in the context of moralizing was a translation of a proverb:
A hungry man has no conscience. Erst kommt das Fressen, dann die Moral.

Literally translated, the German phrase says: first comes the guzzling, then the morals. Guzzling? Alternative words were given as feeding, gorging, devouring – all somewhat connected to the animal realm. Which is of course how some relate to the poor (who are so hungry that food comes before morals) – those animal who dare to steal the turnips from the masters’ fields….

Thoughts of turnips turned to thoughts of sugar beets turned to thoughts of molasses, since earlier that morning on my Sunday walk a friend had introduced me to the Great Molasses Flood of 1919. Ever heard of it? US Industrial Alcohol (USIA) had built shoddy tanks in 1915 to hold molasses used for manufacturing munitions and liquor. A tank fell apart, releasing all of its contents into the streets of Boston.

“More than two million gallons of thick liquid poured out like a tsunami wave, reaching speeds of up to 35 miles per hour. The molasses flooded streets, crushed buildings and trapped horses in an event that ultimately killed 21 people and injured 150 more. The smell of molasses lingered for decades. One hundred years later, analyses have pinpointed a handful of factors that combined to make the disaster so disastrous. Among them: flawed steel, safety oversights, fluctuating air temperatures and the principles of fluid dynamics.”

This, in turn, had me think about first comes the guzzling, then the morals bit in relation to the rich, rather than the poor. Let’s extract money first, safety comes later – if at all.

Which brought me to thoughts about the present state of affairs: with the sorry end of the climate conference in Madrid, we are once more reminded that we simply don’t learn from history, even if prevention, in this case, would protect literally humanity’s survival, rather than a single Boston neighborhood. As the Washington Post put it: U.N. climate talks end with hard feelings, few results and new doubts about global unity. Never mind that the existential real life consequences of this failure are not even mentioned in the headline…

Not learning from history, giving in to greed and courting disaster, then, were the bits that brought my thoughts back to where I started: the craziness of giving gifts just for the sake of – well, of what, indeed? We had the perfect analysis of the need to forgo consumption of goods that will loose their allure or their functionality, or both, in no time, already almost a decade ago. Gifts are bringing death and destruction to people and environments in developing countries: here is the link to the article The Gift of Death by George Monbiot which was supposed to be the heart of today’s post! It is bitingly funny and achingly sad.

Photographs are from yesterday’s walk in Tryon Creek, my Sunday morning routine.

An unusual capture of a pileated woodpecker and his turf in the mist from far away…

Music today is as far away from profit and greed as we can get. Field never got his recognition as the predecessor to Chopin’s development of nocturnes – and yet his pieces are as beautiful as they come.