Umair Faque has a good claim to being a vampire since he is literally allergic to sunlight. Mostly because of the ultraviolet component capable of destroying plague, the sunlight raises big welts on him and maybe disturbs his inner systems. So he capitalizes on this unfortunate condition by exploring the psychological and political darkness in very convincing ways. I used to read him until I couldn’t withstand the truthful and elegant downers anymore. If you have a taste for it, he publishes on the ironically named Eudaimonia at Medium.com https://medium.com/on-arete His desperately bitter opinions come from high idealism.
Some of that is within me, too. But I also value the simple and practical. The concept that’s been haunting me for a while is maintenance. When I bought this house I simply paid for the best house I could get with the money I had. Not that I was entirely blind: I had a list of desiderata and most of them are present in this house. It has been a major plus to have the house entirely paid for except for taxes which are low because it’s such a low-grade house.
But I did not take into account that the house cost $30,000 so as a rule of thumb I should have expected to spend an equal amount on maintenance: things wearing out, weathering, changing needs, the bigger picture. Democracy is in the same pickle. We “bought” ourselves a country after WWII on the backs of the industrial revolution and many dead men, but it never occurred to us that it would end or deteriorate and that we should budget for that.
This town is about a century old, founded on the industry of irrigation through dams and canals on the east slope of the Rockies. It never occurred to us to think about climate change erasing what seemed like eternal ice glaciers that fed the streams. Or the exhaustion of soil repeatedly planted with the same crops for vast areas. Or the change in the genome base of wheat itself, drifting in spite of constant tinkering until many people are allergic.
The infrastructure of the town — water, sewer, electricity, gas lines, streets — are also as old as the town. Some had be present early and some — telephones, electronic cables, a cell tower — came later. We never thought that grain elevators and rail lines would become obsolete. We never thought that the children would leave nor that crooks and druggies would move in. We never thought that a strict leash law would mean a population explosion of cats. We never thought so many people would have diabetes or congestive heart failure and in spite of that would get so old.
We never thought that another pandemic would sweep through our lives. We never thought that the rez folks would outnumber the Euro white townspeople and be our best sources of tradesmen and cops.
In my opinion, the most destructive force in our lives today — in an unconscious way that most people would object to— is a dominating system combining status/sports/ and gambling. This is what has captured politics and reduced so much to binaries: war against this, war against that, war justifying the militarizing of police to the point of murder, urging ruthlessness for an arbitrary goal of being “number one”. War against each other.
Rules of law, ANY rules, are now ignored for the sake of consequences. So many of our worst crimes are crimes of omission like Senate Repubs blocking any progress. When the means are universally justified — even when the ends are mixed or positive for only one group — then the whole point of keeping order is destroyed. We forget that in chaos nobody wins except the lucky, because we reject luck. We want control. To such a priority, chaos looks like opportunity.
I left Portland because I knew a lot of bad things about the way the City was run. I left the ministry partly because I knew a lot of bad things about ministers. I can’t leave Valier, but when I came twenty years ago the neighbors were conscientious and protective.
Now I’m surrounded by dubious characters who bought houses on the internet or moved into houses because of romancing lonesome women who owned them. There are no racial markers. No one can tell which is which by looking at them. They don’t form into families.
I thought I would have space and time for writing and I do — here I am. But this is not Eudamonia. People thought this town would be a little fort and remembered their origin in Belgium as the seed of good conscience and rules. They didn’t know that Belgium is actually three countries pushed together like three tribes on the same rez that don’t even speak the same language. Poirot, the detective, is from the “French” side. The “Dutch” side would not tolerate his many quirks. No one remembers that the Belgian King Leopold is one of the most vicious monarchs on record, relying on routine amputations to force obedience to his need for wealth. But nevermind. Belgium is only an idea by now and hasn’t got to be realistic.
My goal here has been to rethink what we call “religion.” I started this sequence of ideas with reconsidering what a human being is and as I went along added these ideas:
Human beings are self-forming, unfolding from the instant of conception into a long sequence of development which is always an interaction with the environment, most crucially the part that is other human beings.
The ability to be a true human being comes from the necessity of mammalian care and feeding in the first three years, until a child can stand, walk, and speak. This creates a “virtual space,” a kind of imitation location between two people in which they can share ideas they have developed in the safety and challenges of that space.
Then the species is continued when the individual is old enough to conceive and bring that infant to the same point of fertility. But also, the sexually conceiving and communication-succeeding must be in a community of others who can support the newcomers, even if their parents are damaged or removed. The shared beliefs of these people, shaped by the ecosystem, must support food, shelter, and pleasure, or they will become only vague fossil records like the other past hominins.
This frame is beyond even the politics of Umair Fauque or various binary wars. It demands to know why people don’t have enough to eat, why children are neglected and deformed, why there is not shelter for everyone, why everyone is so determined to be number one by means that don’t even get to the ends we want. We have inherited a country we have failed to maintain.
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