THE MINIMUM WE NEED TO LIVE

“I have a right to live,” cried out my adult brain-damaged brother as he realized what our mother’s death meant.  The house would be sold.  He would have no income.  He could not get work.  He would die on the street.

I did not have enough money to go fetch my brother and he ran from me anyway.  If I managed to bring him back to my house, there was no room for him and I could not have afforded to feed two people.  I had let things dwindle down this far so that I could put all my energy and thought into writing, which his presence would prevent.  I had assumed writing would be a source of income, but publishing has collapsed.  Authors must now pay publishers to produce a book.  So I just write.  At least I am back in Montana.

Increasingly, this is the pickle for many Americans, regardless of class, skills or contacts.  However, since I started adulthood in 1961 on the reservation, I am aware that many -- maybe most -- people here live this way, piecing along somehow.  I can write about it and I do, besides thinking about it and corresponding with  many people also thinking about it.

Most “middle class” (whatever that is) people think that everyone should live as they do, according to their standards.  I do not.  That’s irrelevant.  And even ignorant.  Millions now live under flimsy plastic tarps, eating like livestock and washing in polluted puddles.  That’s irrelevant for this piece.  What IS relevant is that there is no way that everyone on this planet could live in the way ordinary small town Americans expect to live because there are not enough resources on this planet to build and equip a modest house for everyone alive.  Let alone the infrastructure or energy and food supplies.

In addition, our social conventions and organizations are woefully behind the curve when it comes to guiding society.  No one HAS to have babies, we can’t MAKE everyone educate and immunize their babies, not everyone even WANTS to live in a house, some people WANT their addictions, and so on.  The question becomes “what is the minimum for life?” 

This is the list of basics that the Australian government thinks its indigenous people must have as individual households for themselves and the good of the community:

WASHING PEOPLE:

Functional washing facilities reduce the spread of diseases, including diarrheal disease, respiratory disease, hepatitis and infections. 

WASHING CLOTHES AND BEDDING:

Regularly washing clothes and bedding can help reduce the incidence of infectious diseases, such as diarrheal disease, respiratory infections, scabies and other skin infections. 

REMOVING WASTE WATER AND FECES SAFELY

Waste water leaks and overflows around the living environment can make people sick. Disease-causing bacteria can be transmitted if people or animals come into direct contact with waste water or if the drinking water supply is contaminated with waste water. 

IMPROVE NUTRITION, ABILITY TO STORE, PREPARE AND COOK FOOD

Poor nutrition is one factor contributing to high rates of obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and renal disease. Poor nutrition is also a major cause of infectious diseases in children.  In remote communities, choosing a healthy diet is complicated by factors such as low incomes, the cost of food, local store management practices and the ability to store, prepare and cook food at home.

REDUCE NEGATIVE IMPACTS OF CROWDED HOUSEHOLDS

Crowded living conditions increase the risk of the spread of infectious diseases, such as meningococcal disease, rheumatic fever, tuberculosis and respiratory infections. In a crowded house it can also be more difficult to access health hardware, such as a working shower, toilet, hot water and washing machines.

REDUCE NEGATIVE IMPACTS OF ANIMALS, VERMIN AND INSECTS.

People’s health is badly affected by contact with animals, vermin and insects. Examples include:

• Mosquito borne illnesses,
• Chronic gut parasite carried by dogs,
• Dustmites causing increased levels of asthma,
• Flies carrying trachoma bacteria that impacts on eye health,
• Mice and rats attacking electrical cables and water pipes.
• 

REDUCING THE HEALTH IMPACTS OF DUST

Many small communities, particularly in rural and remote areas, experience problems with dust, caused by either unsealed roads or vacant land in the community or from dust that is blown into the community from surrounding arid, rural or drought affected lands.

Dust causes direct health problems through the irritation of mucosal surfaces and the skin, which contributes to eye diseases, such as trachoma, respiratory disease and skin infections.

CONTROLLING THE TEMPERATURE OF THE LIVING ENVIRONMENT

Living in houses that are too cold or too hot can contribute to a range of physical illnesses, as well as emotional distress. The young and elderly are most at risk from temperature extremes. Dehydration is a major risk factor for young children.

REDUCE HAZARDS THAT CAN CAUSE TRAUMA

If houses are poorly designed and constructed, or not well maintained, there is an increased risk that residents may be injured. Elderly people, people with disabilities and young children are particularly at risk. Injuries may require medical treatment or hospitalization and could result in infections or even disability.

I do not know whether they have worked out the cost for these minimums.

THESE ARE MY OWN SUGGESTIONS FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF SOCIETY AS A COMMUNITY:

1.  Re-criminalize cohabitation without a marriage license.  All fabulous social weddings should be severely taxed and the money dedicated to the prevention of infant abuse.

2.  Define marriage in two categories originally suggested by Margaret Mead.  Gender, race, and age below 16 is irrelevant.  Parents of the marrying parties should be encouraged but not obliged to participate.

a.  A registered legal agreement for the management of assets and obligations.  Leaving the relationship would be relatively easy.  There would be no provision for “common law marriage” which thus would be illegal.  Marriage would have to be conscious and voluntary.  Cohabitation would no doubt occur -- it just wouldn’t be marriage and would not be a financial advantage.  Religion would be a separated, if not walled-off, system.

b.  Acknowledgement of the obligations of parenthood, including support of children even never haved living together.  This obligation should include criminal penalties if any abuse becomes involved, whether or not there is participation in the household.  There would be no provision for divorce but only the cessation of relationship between the adults, regardless of new relationships.  One cannot divorce one’s obligation to one’s children.  Putting children out of the household before they are 16 or 18 would be a criminal offense.  Not providing proper medical care is already abuse.  (This sort of behavior towards animals is legal cruelty.)

3.  Provision in every town of a consolidated facility for washing people and clothes.  Laundromats should have showers.

4.  Provision in every town for human excretion, possibly street pissoirs as in France, so that seclusion will not be available for illicit purposes.  These should include the capacity to dispose of dog feces.

5.  Provision in every town for feeding stations.  Possibly brown paper bag meals but preferably sit-down-and-visit meals.  This exists already in towns with Meals on Wheels like Valier.  These should not be used as points of capture.

6.  Sleeping pods that can be latched from inside (with an emergency release key in the hands of a reliable monitor), space for belongings included.  No electricity.  Decent ventilation.  Heat in winter in northern climates.

I do not know how to handle medical functions in a decent way.  I just know they are too often sordid points of capture, easy to game in spite of the best efforts of everyone.  In the end, my brother was actually in a VA hospital, treated for his heart attack, and released to a conspiring cousin without anyone realizing his brain damage.  The cousin left him on the street again.  He had been terrified of being committed for insanity.  He soon died.

PERSONAL COMPASSION VS. OBJECTIVE JUSTICE

This is a parable.  Two men on a river bank spotted a baby floating in the water, clearly drowning, and then another baby and another, so one man swam out to save as many babies as he could and the other ran upstream to find out what was making babies fall in the river, so he could prevent it.  The first time I heard this tale was when the first black Portland City Commissioner told it.  Since then I’ve heard it many times, as well as other versions.  It is about the insolubility of the choice between compassion for the single innocent victim and preventive justice for an entire category.  One cannot exclude the other.  Some people lean in one direction and other people lean in the other, but they must work together to be effective.

A most crucial tension of our times has been that between the community and the individual -- reacting to one baby or reacting to all babies.  Should we focus on the suffering and death of the individual baby?   Or to all babies in general?   Which is more important, my compassionate reaction to the baby, or my desire to find ways to save all babies?  So a moral conservative might want to save from abortion this specific “tiny little baby” (as they always put it, though not all babies are those pictured by Gerber), but fails to see that on a broad social level, far more babies will suffer in the long run unless they emerge into a world where they are wanted and cared for, a result that can only be reached by vigorous contraception and judicious abortion when necessary.   An alternative might be community responsibility for all babies through funding for counseling, material needs, and effective education on all levels.  Willingness to produce the money and energy necessary for this has only been present in circumscribed communities.  Of course, tribes find it natural to do this, but at a much lower level.  All children are the village’s children, so they all take responsibility for raising them but in those circumstances it’s a different sort of job.

These days it’s hard to defend idealism.  One needs consensus and, anyway, we’ve been so horrified by so much ripping away of masks that cynicism seems the only intelligent point of view.  And yet in some of the list-servs lately I see requests for papers about EUtopias -- good worlds.  What might they be like?  The trouble is that my good world might not be the same as your good world.  Even sharper, my good world at seventy is not the same as the good world of a person who is sixteen right now, even if we’re in the same small town.  How do we reconcile?  In my dog-catching days I used to propose that all the people with barking dogs should live on one side of town and all the people who wanted peace and quiet should live on the other side.  Who lives on the boundary between them?

If we can’t reach consensus about dogs or babies, what hope is there of reaching some understanding of how society regards sex?  Some of us feel it is natural and that intelligent people can manage consequences like pregnancy or diseases.  Some of us  (Oh, “US”? as though Congo brutes were like me?)  use forced sex against conscience -- painful and deadly, zombifying, destructive of all beloved relationships -- as acts of war.  Rape is used to destroy identity in ways that prevent ever living gracefully in the world again.  In short, EVIL  In that case our own defense seems to be limited to avoidance.  Denial.

So we manage not to know about it.  How can either justice or compassion come to bear on such a double aspect of being human: the best of things and the worst of things?  So full of pain, even at the level of second-hand empathy, and yet, at its best, so creating of trust?  Where can the justice possibly be?  Who can judge and who can devise a sentence?  How do we keep from hardening off into good versus bad?  Because the deepest impulse is to get control of people who do Evil and punish or eliminate them.  But what they wanted in the first place was power over US.  Thus the motivation on both sides.

I’m beginning to read Howard Bloom’s “The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History.”  This guy is not that literary sort of Anglophone conservative professor who offends feminists.  This one has lots of credentials -- he’s a polymath -- but he’s ALSO part of the Rock and Roll world that some people consider the very plow’s nose for Evil.  This is a 1995 book, which means it’s bound to be behind the curve, but right now that’s probably where I belong.  He’s a synthesizer: a reverser; kinda Jungian.  That is, Lucifer is a Fallen Angel and humans are Gollom, craving both the prize, the power of the ring, and to be enslaved by a master.  We want to be right and we don’t trust anyone else to get us there.

I peeked at the end.  Bloom is saying “pluralistic democracy.”  That depends on nations.  When he was writing there was nothing like the nation-erasing Internet that is webbing the world now.  It’s revealing secrets, turning out tyrants, but at the same time revealing what you’re thinking and just where you’re standing right now in case some government, some drug mafia, some secret intelligence agency, some madman stalker is trying to rub you out.  That’s one-by-one.  On a larger scale it’s also a way to juggle and intercept arms and drugs so as to let nations die of AIDS (already approaching fifty percent infection rates) by withholding the meds or die of starvation or internal wars.  I get so intense about this that I become a little incoherent.

Bloody Mother Nature creates millions and millions of babies and then kills most of them by simply adjusting the climate or sliding tectonic plates under nuclear reactors.  (all that cradling and feeding is one-by-one).  Those who survive will be tomorrow’s people.  Nassim Taleb keeps talking about “robustness,” by which he means (at least in part) survival qualities.  The small, the deeply rooted, the most naturally pleasing and nourishing.  He comes back to a shared meal in a tavern or on a noonday plaza.  Nothing fancy.  Often repeated.  A cradle for ideas.

TO AND FRO ON THE LAND & SEA

My theological system, I think I’ve already explained, is about the center and the edge. The center is where you are, deepest and highest, most absolutely and at the core. The edge is what you try to find out -- and survive -- for your whole life. That’s why I like Tim -- he’s out there barefoot wire-walking over the nothingness with his dog balancing on one front paw on his head. (She’s a clever dog, that Isabella. But now Tim says he’s adding a dog, Jack the terrier! )

Maybe I haven’t explained about the duplicity of the writer, how the writer inhabits the writing so deeply so sincerely that she weeps into the keyboard while the cats look away, embarrassed. (No pun.) But on the other hand how cold and hard and mercenary and merciless the artist can be. This has nothing to do with that other schema, the one about the center and the edge. It’s about mode, mood, moves, m . . . I won’t say it. Stick your own word in here.

But it’s a mistake to think that if I write a tender story or tap out a nice email, that I’m not dangerous. I am. I want to be. It’s a human entitlement I didn’t claim for a long time, which made me more dangerous because I caroomed along indiscriminately, running over the ground squirrels. Focus gives a certain amount of control. Deliberately I chose a small sensible village where people are watchful. It is a safe place because I’m forgetful now and don’t always keep my guard up as much as I used to in the city. This village is safer than the romanticized “wilderness” where a grizzly sow with THREE big cubs (which means that she’s been doing very well, thank you, because she’s aggressive as hell and eats people) just ran amuck in a campground.

Or where a man taking his son fishing (what could be more Norman Rockwell) was approached by another man (not rough looking but maybe drunk) who demanded, “When do you want it?” Then this second man knocked the father to the ground and kicked his face in while the little boy ran for help. Is this evil? The attacker doesn’t remember it. His friends turned him in. There was no motive. Is this madness? What is the difference between an aggressive grizzly and an aggressive man? Not that all men are attackers, but then neither are all grizzlies.

We each walk our own path and linger in different places -- what choice do we have? When the cats are gone for a while and then come back, the cat flap creaking behind them, I ask, “Were you going to and fro in the grass?” In “J.B.” God and the Devil were going to and fro on the earth. (Where’s my copy of “J.B.”? I can’t play my record of the Macleish play anymore. Has someone made a CD?) The walking is part of it. I like to watch cows walking in a long line, going down to water on a summer evening. Don’t let them stay by the water. They wreck the riparian ecology unless they drink and leave. One needs lions to lie up in the brush and drive the cows out. Keep things moving.

What I never suspected (and neither did many others) in spite of all the knowledge of the birth of planets and how plate tectonics swirl the continents around, tearing them apart and slamming them together, damn the consequences to living beings, was how much my little schematic of territory was going to abruptly and wildly change. I did see change coming and expected it to be human: revolutions, culture shift, reorganization. The Internet, the genome, the cosmic knowledge, the drifting seeds of plants and viruses, pandemic and evolution. It didn’t occur to me that humans could kill the ocean as well as the jungle. A new study claims that forty per cent of the marine phytoplankton have disappeared since 1950. We won’t die if the salmon don’t return. We WILL die if the phytoplankton die. The interviewed scientist was terrified. Lions are coming for our cows.

A weed scientist in Montana once observed that what is “normal” for a landscape depends on when you first encountered it. For the people who arrived after the purple haze of knapweed bloomed everywhere, it’s kinda pretty. For the people who arrived in 1950, the decline in snowpack in the Rockies has been horrifying. Yet a geologist to whom I made this remark snapped at me that it has been inevitable all along, starting with the withdrawal of the mighty glaciers ten thousand years ago after scooping out our parks and potholes. In fact, if history is what repeats itself, at some point the glaciers may begin to return. They did before. Several times. The Rockies are the third range thrown up by tectonic collision and the worn down. We’re about due for another massive earthquake.

If I were feeling fancier this morning, I’d tie the glaciers into the ending of the era of paper publishing. Books have not just been my guides since “Make Way for Ducklings” through every book on the fairy tale and mythology page. around the corner to the sci-fi (about the time of Heinlein’s first books) and down the wall to the romances (both Ernest Thompson Seton and Anya Seton) and on around two corners to the nonfiction. Since then that library was given over to an African cultural group and I went on to the mighty Regenstein and then out into the diasphora of online resources so complex and bottomless that I need a librarian in a pith helmet to guide me past the guardians.

The book that was to be my guarantee turned out to be a ghost. I wrote it all right -- you can buy it on Amazon along with some others by me -- but there were no consequences. None. Just as I settled down to read my obsolete collection of books by others, open creaked a secret passageway behind the paneling: blogging. You’re reading it now. These are the staircases and labyrinths of my life now. Don’t bother to talk to me if you don’t read it. I have nothing else to say.

My writing is far more real to me than the unmanned and vehemently denied drones that have been practicing overhead for decades. (We saw what we said we saw.) Far more real than the wind farm on the edge of town that strobes blood red from dusk to dawn. More real than the missile silo just over the ridge. More real than the leviathan tar sands equipment that will cross our state to northern Alberta no matter the resistance.

Time is not an orderly progression -- it is an enormous storm that reverses and destroys our small temporary constructions. And yet, the joyful cries of the Blackfeet two-year-old next-door denies all that. Like him, we live in the now. That’s the real and only center. I stop blogging for a moment to watch his mom lift him into his protective carseat.

AU COURANT

People think that out here in the hinterlands we don’t know nothing, but we do. We know the BIG Nothing which is that humans are temporary. Let’s go on from there.

Much of the commotion about a place like Montana is focused on the 19th century when Euro-based culture smashed into the Native American Indians, destroying their way of life, but not them. Right now (nearly 2010) it is ALL cultures smashing into themselves. We have all barely survived our remnant cultures, the ones we used to know. Nothing anywhere is like the Fifties.

“Why Gone Those Times?” asked James Willard Schultz, and Charlie Russell painted the disappearing edge of the times his own cousins (the Bents as in Bent’s Fort) actually lived. Luckily, his determined wife was able to make his art sell and persist to be the core of museums across America. We know those paintings and bronzes now. We know his illustrated letters to friends, the stories about his high jinks in bars, the pictures he painted on the petticoats of whores or for peep shows. Somehow we’ve forgotten some of the price he and Nancy paid in that maelstrom of early days, even the 19th century versions of AIDS: goiter (which killed Charlie) and syphilis. Somehow he’s been made into a respectable middle-class grandfather. I think it was the money.

Money won’t work now. It’s not that there’s less money -- it’s that the pretense that money is SOMETHING that is gone. We see through the illusion now that we know that the government is addressing our infrastructure crisis by simply printing more money.

It’s time to color outside the lines. But you have to be someplace or everyplace or anyplace, according to your temperament and experience. I choose to be in Montana on the edge of the Blackfeet reservation. This is where I am most me, according to Flaubert’s advice to "be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” I’m pretty good at the first half, except that the village would like me to tend my yard a little better. The second half -- I’m workin’ on it.

If you watched me (you would have to look past the two fat cats dozing under their lamp in the window) you would see an old woman at her keyboard pretending she was pole-dancing alone in the dark before dawn. What I’m doing with Tim Barrus is almost psychotherapy, opening up to his stories of adventure, abuse, risk, inclusion, recovery and trying to understand what it means. His chaos, my order. My NPR Beethoven, Cinematheque’s throbbing, yearning Imeem downloads. None of it ever happened to me, but I listen and try to understand and try to find the words to explain from a slightly different angle, so those of us less driven can learn from it.

Where I am is a village. In it are crazy people, even sociopaths. In it are dying people, gentle loving faithful souls. In it are restless kids, some of them marijuana smokers and probably at least one with AIDS. Some of them get beaten by abusive men who think this will “reform” them. They think nothing ever happens here, that you have to be in Paris or Amsterdam or Italy or at least New York City, but the same things happen there.

People are wrong. Everything happens everyplace. You just have to get in touch with it.

I’m always a little surprised when diasporas are revealed. A diaspora is a population of a defined people scattered through the world. The French diaspora gave us Quebec, San Francisco, New Orleans, and the Metis population of the high prairie. Charlie Russell always wore a Metis sash. Paris is not much like the Red River country inhabited by Louis Riel’s people, but they did speak French. And they believed in “liberty, equality, and fraternity” until the British Empire hung them for trying to start their own country in the middle of Canada.

Some diasporas are invisible until they declare themselves: blacks passing as whites, gays, American Indians, writers and other artists, maybe feminists. Unitarians. The Unitarian leaders were having a meeting about how to relate to homosexuals. They said, “Maybe we should hire someone who IS homosexual.” One of them, a respected manager, said, “No need. I’m gay. I’m just not out yet. What do you want to know?” Why don’t we ask those among us who know. Just turn to them and ask, “What is it like to be you? What do you see?”

Especially the young, who roam the globe and outer space through their keyboards while you think they’re doing homework or playing video games. I’m not talking about porn or drugs. I’m not talking about the grownups sitting on the sofa watching movies about sex and violence and drinking beer. I’m talking about kids who ask “What is spirituality? What happens when you die? Might there really be life in outer space? Will there be a world when I grow up? Can I cope with it? Will anyone love me?”

One of the ways to cope is to exclude everything that’s troubling. Just don’t look. Don’t talk about it. Don’t talk about Charlie and Nancy Russell and why they couldn’t have children (scarring from VD.) Don’t talk about drugs or sex or accidental pregnancy. Nice people don’t know. Don’t you want to be a nice person?

But the world has gone far beyond that. Everything is connected. Everything is moving. It will sweep you along one way or another. It’s on your radio, in your food, printed in the newspaper, posted on a billboard, talked about in the cafes.

Dave Lull, the librarian/philosopher who so dependably keeps me on the lookout for Black Swans, says he remembers me suggesting we ought to go back to reading sci-fi. He says maybe I’m right. I’m looking for the “unknown unknowns” and sci-fi is good for that. I’m thinking there are too many people and AIDS is only the first of a wave of pandemics. Here on the high prairie we’ve been through two in the last few centuries: smallpox and Spanish flu. Maybe diabetes II is a pandemic.

It’s personal. And what it teaches me is that I must change to survive. I have and I’m prepared to do it again. This is one of the things I have in common with Barrus and Cinematheque.