One less day and one less day

As of Memorial Day Weekend the shop no longer closes on Sundays until the end of summer. That gives me one less day to work on my own nebulous achievements -- or get a lot of household chores done. And with every passing day I have one less day, period.

When the sky looks like this all day it's hard to get moving on anything:

 Thunderstorms moved in on a long, eerie rumble around 2 a.m. The first rolls swept over us in a gradual wave, like a giant UFO. The sound echoed between mountains and across the glacial lowlands, pulsating strangely. It did not sound like your normal rumble or crash until one cell of the storm advanced on us close enough to drop a few bolts nearby. They moved on. The noise and rain subsided.

We woke to this state of unresolved grayness that has persisted all day.  Without the trees to give it context it looks like this:

It makes your brain feel the same way.

The National Weather Service has issued a severe thunderstorm warning for areas west of here. The radar shows a large mass of bright colors, but nothing bearing down directly on us yet.

I don't need excitement, but I prefer to produce more than  urine, feces, carbon dioxide and a bunch of clean dishes and clothes we're just gong to get dirty again. Still, when the mental fires are just a pile of damp wood, what can you do?

Scoop the cat boxes.

March returns to normal

The frozen house fly on the deck outside the back door says it all: March reminds us that it isn't really a summer month. Put away the shorts for another eight or ten weeks.

Gusty winds drive the chill of a day that grudgingly reaches the mid 40s. The sun is strong where you can get into it in the lee of some sheltering object. Leafless hardwoods and stolid evergreens sway above the dun earth. The light drives deep into the forest, spotlighting its suspended animation. By mid week, rain is supposed to mix with snow overnight. No one's talking about accumulation, but it's a complete retreat from the days of summer-like warmth recently departed.

Save the world?

When I was young my father used to ask me, "What did you do today to make the world a better place?" Or it might have been, "What did you do for mankind today?" In any case, it was a call to serve a higher purpose than personal gratification or even personal salvation. He wanted me to think globally. He never specified which humans or whose specific world I was to improve by my presence.

Maybe I was supposed to figure out the narrowing parameters for myself. In that case he failed completely.

Some people who serve what they call goodness feel they do their best work by exterminating the agents of badness. This category produces holy warriors.

Some people serve goodness by drawing power to themselves, so that they may have a powerful influence on human affairs.

Some people serve goodness by eschewing power and wealth. They try to lead by example. Some of them through the centuries have generated compelling legends over which later generations argue bitterly, further slicing the concept of goodness into narrow strips of turf turned into battlefields and homelands of the One True Faith.

True Believers of any sect regard nonbelievers as disposable. We are not all in this together. No one will unify a human race made up of exclusive divisions. Only if every single human identified with its own unique existence and the shared experience of being human would the race have any chance at unity. And without unity we are doomed to die in blood and fire, as the holy warriors fervently hope.

Unity does not mean uniformity. Uniformity would mask differences and lead to internal stresses that would eventually break out in civil strife. Unity requires an easygoing attitude and thoughtful cooperation. Such an attitude does destroy zealotry. This frightens zealotry no end, leading to the saber rattling that threatens us in every age. The weapons of war get more horrific as technology advances. The horror deters humanity from flinging itself so readily into war, but some ideologies consider it more important to die for the right reason than to live for easygoing unity. If it really looks like the majority will choose to learn to get along, some true believer will be ready to push the button to send us all to judgment.

The current state of the Republicans illustrates the power that zealotry has gained over a nation once supposedly proud of its ability to give people of many backgrounds a place to flourish under the warm sun of freedom. The truth is darker, of course, but for a very short time around the early 1970s it did look like we meant it. Immigrants and strivers had risen during the 20th Century to make the mythical American Dream very gradually somewhat more inclusive.

In good times people tend to graph those rising curves of prosperity right up through the roof. The same is true of inclusiveness and social freedom. The social turmoil of the 1960s led to a nice party in the 1970s. The party atmosphere masked the fact that bitter resentment was festering in the darkness outside the various circles of light in which happy people danced. The forces of division and exclusion would not be denied. While the celebrants graphed their happiness up toward an amazing future in which a unified humanity cleaned up its own planet and then journeyed to the stars, the frustrated bigots marshaled their forces.

Force is the key to conflict. If the argument is not going your way, whip out a gun and shoot your opponent. Change the basis of discourse to one that suits you. If God is on your side you cannot lose. Even in death you will be exalted because you were doing the right thing. The other side claims God as well? Blasphemers! Theirs is a false god or a sinful misinterpretation of holy word. See how easy it is to keep the bloodletting legitimate?

As long as we praise warriors as the best among us we will remain locked in a death spiral. Thus the world cannot be saved. Humanity is doomed by its own idealism that extends even beyond death. As long as we force each other to prove our devotion by facing extermination we will continue to treat each other as prey.

How do you end hatred when so many people love it so much? Even people who claim to be tolerant will rise to some bait and show themselves willing to fight the ultimate battle, to end some other person's all-too-brief span or have their own ended, just to prove a point.

So what's to save?

The Free Market Military

The defense of our nation and its interests is of such crucial importance that we devote upwards of 600 billion dollars to it annually. It is considered an indispensable service although its budget is theoretically almost infinitely variable based on present and projected future needs. Military spending has been part of the total federal budge for a couple of centuries. It's not going away any time soon.

The defense of the health of individual citizens is largely left up to the individual. The fact that "a good job" included "benefits" during the later half of the 20th Century masked the fact that individuals had no guaranteed protection. During a time when jobs with benefits seemed plentiful and easy to find, anyone changing jobs would expect to hear about the new coverage replacing their old coverage as a routine part of the transition. People did fall through the cracks, but the cracks were masked like snow-covered crevasses. The glacial metaphor is apt because, as the system fails, the ice coverage shrinks drastically, leaving more and more people either on thin ice or standing disconsolately on the mud.

As victims of a market-based system we are told we can shop around. As private insurance is reshaped we will get to select from a much wider menu of flawed solutions worded in confusing ways to mask the corporate profit that motivates insurance companies to dabble in medical care in the first place.

For various reasons, most of them not good, a lot of people are tempted to turn national defense over to private contractors because the private sector is ever so much more efficient than the dumb ol' government. It works as a metaphor but not as a real-world solution. For it to work properly as a free market, we would have to shop around for the best deal. When the country was attacked we would have to send out a request for bids, sift through the applications and choose what appeared to be the best one. It's perfectly analogous to the process of shopping for medical care and coverage when faced with a serious disease that might be advancing rapidly, like a hostile army.

A taxpayer-funded, government-run military service is accountable directly to the citizen government in ways a free-market pool of militaristic contractors is not. We tell our fighting forces to take pride in their training and the traditions of excellence attached to each branch of the service. Why not call on a similar devotion and fighting spirit in our medical forces? Create the image and then live up to it. Fund it as a social necessity like defense. Let medical contractors vie for lucrative government contracts. Make the war on ill health as high a priority as the war on real and imagined adversaries around the globe, for which we develop sophisticated weapons apparently with little regard for the cost. Huge salaries and bloated retirement packages in any part of the private sector can't be used as incentives for much longer. A solid income and a decent retirement as a government doctor or nurse might start to look pretty good to the medically inclined. And ordinary citizens would not have to make the decision to commit slow or rapid suicide rather than get regular medical checkups and take care of things in a timely fashion as they occur.

On Wheels

If you want to turn someone into a complete asshole, just put them on wheels. Look no further than the chariot race in Ben Hur for the perfect example of what I mean.

The flow is insidiously intoxicating. You don't have to be a very aggressive person to get addicted to your own smooth progress through space on the flying carpet of your well-suspended automobile. You and I develop a sense of entitlement. I'm driving, here! Step aside! I am the captain of this ship.My decisions are unquestionably correct.

Plenty of wheelers have more of a fighter pilot mentality. And not all rollers exhibit sociopathic tendencies. But sociopathic is not too strong a word for the unconscious but pure self interest that so easily takes over a driver's mind.

It may seem like the opposite of self interest when a driver sets aside safety and traffic law to magnanimously wave another driver into traffic from a driveway or side street, but it shows how sovereign each driver feels to be able to grant this boon. In some traffic-choked locales it is necessary, but frequently it is just a bad idea that balls up the orderly flow.

As someone who frequently gets around on foot or by pedaling a bike I can tell you that no motorist questions that the motor vehicle and its driver belong at the top of the chain of command. I fall into the trap myself, especially during the season when I have to drive a lot. I want to get where I'm going at the speed I choose without a lot of crap from anyone in front or behind me. If I did not have a lot of experience being smaller, slower and more vulnerable I could easily drive in my own little selfish bubble until some impact jolted me out of it.

Mitt's Messages

Way back on February 1, Mitt Romney made his careless remark about not being worried about the very poor. It's been analyzed to death and sped off into the murk and dust of dead news cycles. But words have a life of their own. In this case, they conveyed Mitt's message to the named groups: the very rich and the very poor.

To the rich he's saying not to worry, he'll care for their interests. To the very poor he's saying the tiny scrap of threadbare rug they're on won't be yanked out from under them. To those in the middle he's saying, "go one way or the other."

The American Dream was based on the illusion of unlimited resources waiting to be exploited by bold men. Bold men did exploit resources and become wealthy. Other smart guys exploited bold men. By the 20th Century the model worked for fewer and fewer people, especially as the century progressed. Anyone who could see this too soon had to decide whether to play along or start looking for the new way. But the old way has put up a complex and determined resistance.

Whether he meant it or not, Mitt laid out a method by which the struggling masses, unable to rise, could simply drop into the waiting arms of the support system. If you'll be okay very poor and it's just an endless, pointless slog to reach up for the nonexistent rungs of the economic ladder to climb to the shining summit, let go. As the monks and nuns of old believed, our salvation lies in poverty. Right, big guy?

Of course the mass of surrendering humanity will collapse that supposedly fine "safety net." But the germ of an idea lies in the notion that regular people have to construct their own economy and quit playing the rich people's game by the rich people's rules. It means dumping the 401K and all the other tempting investments in the heavily manipulated markets and putting the actual cash money into the new economy we create for our own good.

I haven't imagined it in detail, but it's going to involve a lot of cottage industry and local agriculture. It may require some changes to zoning ordinances in urbanized areas where local agriculture has been out of fashion for many years. Sure, cash earns practically nothing as savings. You'll have to discard the concept of saving for retirement during a career doing things you don't really like. It would be nice if we could preserve the better aspects of civilization, but we may have to settle for living shorter but fuller lives. I don't mean any forcible end to life, only that the fairyland of hospitals and medical miracles is already too expensive for most of us and may not survive conversion to the new economy.

Investment has to take on a different character as well. Big returns are abnormal. They're not impossible but they are unusual. That goes for a small percentage paid to a vast number of investors as well as a big gouge paid out to a small handful. In other words, the stock, commodity and financial markets as currently conducted can't work. The economy has to be built around the middle, not hung from the top or rooted in the squalor of a rotting mass at the bottom.

I know it's doomed to fail because of simple population pressure. But it's more fun to dream a nice dream and tell myself a nice story than to think only about growing old or dying young in the cold, dirty world that really exists.

Wealth creates civilization

Immense wealth is definitely immoral. The idea that a handful of people can control the resources of the entire planet flies in the face of everything American school children are taught publicly to hold dear. The alternative is communism, which also flies in the face of everything American school children are taught publicly to hold dear.

In 1491, North America had a thriving, bountiful ecosystem shared by a diverse population of native tribes. It was far from a paradise, as these tribes exerted their influence on their own citizens and on neighboring groups with the full range of human tactics from cooperation and diplomacy to violence and treachery. We are told that many of them had a different notion of property than Europeans did, so there were fewer walls and fortified borders.

They seem to have had a less adversary relationship with nature. That made them more vulnerable to nature's culling forces as weather and food supplies fluctuated. From what I have read, you needed to stay on top of your game in those days if you were going to last long. Most of us today are pretty sure we would not like to spend our lives that way. That's why we have cars and television sets and supermarkets and stuff like that. If people didn't want those things, the companies that make them would have gone out of business long ago. So clearly we have a preference for civilization.

European-style civilization is a direct outgrowth of concentrated wealth. The inhabitants of Europe evolved personalities that led to conflicts that resolved themselves in a system of enclaves centered around a rich guy's castle. Over the centuries, these accreted into nations. The shape of those nations kept changing as the basis of connection changed. Philosophies came and went or came and stayed to create a complex intellectual landscape.

The rich guys needed people to work for them. Sometimes these people would suffer hardships so great that they threatened the well-being of the rich guys. A really bad plague or famine would have such a negative effect on the work force that the rich themselves would suffer. So medicine and agriculture advanced, improving living conditions for the lowly as well as the high and mighty.

When Europeans ventured to the Americas, it was rich corporations establishing commercial beach heads, not plucky refugees seeking a place to live according to their noble consciences. Plucky refugees might have made good subjects for the dirty and dangerous work of colonization, but they did not foot most of the bill. The concept of private property arrived in the Americas like any other disease or invasive species for which the native biome was completely unprepared.

All the infrastructure of the American colonies was established to make business more profitable. Long before independence was declared, American entrepreneurs were getting their piece of the action. Between the establishment of Jamestown in 1607 and the Declaration of Independence in 1776, more than a century and a half passed. A couple of generations lived and died. In the name of wealth and power, settlers moved outward from initial landing sites into the interior.

A bold pioneer with a sharp ax, a trusty musket, quick reflexes and a good lawyer could establish a family fortune just by marking a bunch of trees and making darn sure his land claims were duly registered. The next poor schmuck to wander into that happy valley to set up a little farm or a sawmill or something would find out he was already behind on his rent.

Between 1776 and 1876 a century passed in which no one questioned the concept of personal wealth. Steal some land from the natives, chop it into parcels and sell it off. The natives weren't using it, they were just living on it. They were smelly and talked weird and just might kill you.

Interestingly, between 1876 and 1976 a lot of people questioned the time-honored concept of minority ownership of majority necessities, particularly once the 20th Century arrived. As civilization advanced on the backs of  millions of laborers and the wallets of hundreds of wealthy people, mostly men, the standard of living accidentally increased to the point where the working class and people in the middle income bracket were now healthy and well fed enough to start exerting some real political influence.

After many attempts to crush this rebellion by force, the wealthy had to accept the new economic landscape. However, they still had the advantage of their own close associations, better schools for their children, better homes and gardens to shelter and nourish their progeny and generations of tradition enforcing their superiority. In the long run, all the wealthy have to do is wait. The ignorant rabble will waste its substance. They will not give up the comforts of civilization, and civilization is still very much the property of the wealthy, run for their benefit. It's their world. The rest of us just get to live in it...as long as we don't make too much trouble.

The wealthy hold the whole planet hostage. The war necessary to dislodge them would have to destroy everything. If anyone survived, they would probably reinvent the whole messed-up paradigm anyway because the war would have reduced them to such savagery that all gentle enlightenment had been scorched out of them.

The problem with any meritocracy is that some people will be bad winners no matter what the basis of the competition is. Back in the dim past we chose warriors as our leaders. Some time in the 20th Century we switched to CEOs. Warriors are basically predisposed to be pricks, despite what you may believe about knights in shining armor. Defender of the weak, blah blah blah. When your clout comes from your actual ability to clout that can't help shaping your thinking. And CEOs are supposed to be all about earnings. What's good for the company bottom line may not be good for your individual ass. Be warned.

Whatever the basis of merit, it creates a hierarchy, which gives abusers of power the tools they need.

Consensus would be nice but we can't even agree to seek it.

So, for what it's worth, the desire of the wealthy to create good neighborhoods for themselves created the model for good neighborhoods throughout history. Their ability to put up defenses against their bad neighbors established the concept by which we still live. In wide open spaces where no one is fenced in, no one is fenced out, either. While that can be wonderfully welcoming and inclusive, it also means you could get an arrow stuck in you when you step out to take a leak in the morning. It means someone has to sit up all night to watch the horses or you might not have any in the morning. It means you may repeatedly have to kick someone's ass until yours finally gets kicked for good, just to have a little space to call your own.

The wealthy seem like greedy bastards who don't play well with others and don't like to share their toys. They are vastly annoying and downright damaging to society in a great many ways. But being a jerk is a basic human characteristic. We should at least give a nod to rich jerks through the centuries who accidentally bestowed the benefits of shelter and sanitation on the rest of us jerks who have actually built and operated it for them.