Young and Old
Driving through Adrian today, about 45 degrees with a low gray ceiling and plenty of drizzle. It’s the county seat in an agricultural region, where manufacturing jobs used to pay the bills alongside monoculture cropping and its federal subsidies. The jobs are gone now and the ag companies pay the farmers roughly what they’d make managing a McDonalds (since the work is very similar, just enforcing a taylorized instruction booklet). Lots of people here are sick. Diabetes, heart attacks and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease are plagues; the average diet is pure shit, the favorite pastime is drinking, and there is – behind the zombie-like movements of people who thrive on something far less calorie dense than hope – a sense of silent panic just under the skin of things. Nothing anyone says they will do about things seems to work when they do it; and most of the other ideas about what to do seem equally implausible. No one believes the experts anymore, which has left them with nothing to believe in at all. The experts have long taught us not to believe in ourselves and our communities.
I know we are not alone. Other towns are whistling through this graveyard, too.
Passed the people who walk, rain or shine or snow. Street people, poor people, mentally ill people, people who live in various kinds of group homes. They are walking in the rain today. Lots of them are old. Lots of old people with grim faces peer from front doors and porches. The old with nothing left to do, watch. They remind us of death; so we teach ourselves how to ignore them. The young people with nothing to do are young people. They want to be noticed, as all young people do. If we ignore them long enough, they will do things that we can’t ignore. Young people with nothing to do and something less calorie dense than hope to thrive on will put their hands on you if necessary to make you pay attention to them. By and by.
I wonder if anyone has done an age demographic of our crisis. Wonder what it would tell us.
Dan:
The truly awful part is that there is plenty to do that needs doing, and plenty of people with the skill and drive to do those things.
Unfortunately, doing those things is frowned upon by those who parasitically make mega-profits on the buying and selling of hedged bets against hedged collateral that is hedged on potential future losses on hedged investments, all of which is predicated on wage slaves going into debt to buy crap made by true slaves.
The solution is pretty clear… but making it happen is not.
20 October 2011, 2:08 pmStan:
Hear hear.
That’s why transition makes sense.
20 October 2011, 6:48 pmWinston Warfield:
At Occupy Boston a week ago last Tuesday I was privileged to get a glimpse of what young people are also capable of – courage, steadfastness, loyalty and a committment to peaceful struggle. They were sitting in the dark on the grass at 1:20AM on the Rose Kennedy Greenway in Boston, arms locked together protecting their rebel encampment waiting to be devoured as the Boston riot police advanced. The cops mowed down the first line of defense – veterans, both 60+y.o. Vietnam vets and much younger Irag/Afghanistan veterans, knocking down some of us and arresting others. The kids in the grass who we were attempting to defend (as I refer to them, young enough to be my grandchildren) maintained their discipline as they refused to yield their constitutional rights to freedom of assembly. While the “Men in Black” advanced on us, 4-foot staves (thankfully) holstered and bundles of flex-ties ready for the mass arrests of 141, one in the middle of our line, Rachel O’Brien, Iraq vet, former .50cal gun-truck crewmember, now Harvard grad student, led the collective recitation of the first stanza of the military oath, “I do solemnly swear to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic…”. Just recalling the power of that scene makes me near tears, and full of admiration for those young people, the inheritors of this twisted, chaotic world we’ve left them.
21 October 2011, 8:14 pmStan:
Great account, Winston. Thanks.
22 October 2011, 1:51 pmWinston Warfield:
Hey Stan, gotta ask, as I haven’t seen anything on the Occupy movement. What’s your take? With all its contradictions (actual, real life as lived in this world), it’s definitely causing some agenda adjustments, to put it mildly.
27 October 2011, 8:40 pmStan:
Up to my waist in alligators at the moment, not writing at all really. People in hospitals, house deals falling through, etc etc. Went to Occupy Lansing, but there the mayor supported it with a pro-OWS statmenet, so no casualties or arrests. SE Michigan is suffering pretty bad from Wall Street and partisans, so there’s not a lot of opposition to opposition to banks.
28 October 2011, 4:49 pmjack:
Stan,
Are you in the south east Michigan area for the time being, or were you just passing through? Good on the folks in Lansing, unfortunately though, #occupy in Chicago is having a rough go of it so far…
Good luck,
28 October 2011, 10:48 pmJack
Stan:
Live here.
BTW, I just sent in a 425 word piece supporting OWS -with Scripture liberally cited – for publication in our next church bulletin. At the request of the pastor. Good Thing. Links to a Mother Jones piece on Wall Street’s political influence and to the Occupy Together site.
29 October 2011, 12:05 pmKim Sky:
425 Words — sure would be interested in your article. Could use it to send to some Pastor’s that I know. Possible?
29 October 2011, 9:19 pmStan:
“No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.” (Matthew 6:24)
• 15 million children – 21 % of children in the United States – live below the federally-designated poverty level. Bulgaria and Latvia have lower poverty rates for children.
• One percent of the US population now controls 43 percent of the financial wealth.
• The top 20 percent in the US controls 83 percent of the financial wealth.
• 80 percent of the American people hold only seven percent of the wealth.
• Real unemployment in the US is over 16 percent. Official figures only count those drawing unemployment insurance. Michigan’s real unemployment rate is over 20 percent.
• The wealth of the top 2% has doubled over the last 20 years.
“Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed.” (Luke 12:15)
Wall Street’s greed-driven financial institutions wield enormous political influence, even when its actions create financial catastrophe. http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/01/wall-street-big-finance-lobbyists
Christian philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre notes that successful money-men do not and cannot take into account the human collateral damage resulting from their practices – like the current economic crisis created by money-changing and financial speculation.
Walter Brueggemann said in “The Prophetic Imagination,” that in the accustomed comforts of consumer society we have been numbed to the pain of others by a secular ideology that teaches us to harden our hearts to the poor.
Power – like the power of Wall Street – depends on uncaring hearts to remain powerful. “Compassion,” says Brueggemann, “constitutes a radical form of criticism, for it announces that the hurt is to be taken seriously, that the hurt is not to be accepted as normal and natural…”
“He was moved with compassion.” (Matthew 9:36)
There is a cry of compassion and anguish in the United States now rising up from a confederation of the compassionate called “Occupy Wall Street.” It deserves our attention, perhaps even our participation. Catholics United in New York recently participated in the demonstrations there by parading a golden calf through the streets, reminding onlookers of what Jesus said about serving God and money – that serving money is service to an idol.
Check the website http://www.occupytogether.org/ for more information, including local involvement; and remember that your expressions of compassion – like those in 33 AD – can change the world.
30 October 2011, 5:21 amBob:
A quandry I have is when there was money to be made,(lots of energy development going on here then), the negatives aspects seem to predominate. Too many people would use their new “wealth” to purchase expensive mortages for oversized inefficent vehicles and dwellings and then they would try to fill’em up with toys and crap that were often purchased with more borrowed money. What were they thinking? I hope that OWS is not about just getting back what was lost. A different value system needs to be in place. I like the idea of thinking, (of consequenses), seven generations out before one acts. “To whom much is given, much is required.”
30 October 2011, 8:21 amDeAnander:
Power depends on uncaring hearts to remain powerful — well put Stan.
I just wanted to check in and apologise for my own near-absence from the internet. I’m in the middle of moving due to a house deal that worked out. Hunting for used furniture, driving large moving truck, dealing with endless bureaucratic details of identity and address, changing banks (now with a regional credit union, yay) — that kind of thing. It’s a bit of a project with 2 households merging into 1, a boat shop and lumber to move as well as domestic goods, and relocating about 80 miles N and 2 islands offshore. I expect to be installed in the new place, reconnected to internet and phone, and more or less coherent by last week November — that’s an optimistic forecast though, so it could be early Dec before the dust settles. Will try to check in and moderate from time to time but not much scribbling opportunity these days.
30 October 2011, 1:31 pmkim sky:
Occupy London could be protected by Christian ring of prayer
Saturday 29 October 2011
Christian groups have drawn up plans to protect protesters by forming a ring of prayer around the camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral, should an attempt be made to forcibly remove them…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/oct/29/christians-defend-occupy-london-protest?newsfeed=true
31 October 2011, 9:26 pmkim sky:
UNCARING HEARTS — Top Foreclosure Firm Threw Homeless-Themed Halloween Bash
If you’re one of the nation’s top “foreclosure mill” law firms—representing Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo in their attempts to foreclose on homes and evict homeowners—what better way to celebrate Halloween than by throwing a party where everyone comes as a dirty, homeless victim of your practice?
lots of other links from this site with photos.
http://gawker.com/5854540/top-foreclosure-firm-threw-homeless+themed-halloween-bash
31 October 2011, 10:07 pmStan:
I’m FB’ing this one, Kim. Truly repulsive.
1 November 2011, 7:45 ammichele:
Stan, i really appreciate the post you made up there with the statistics and references. This one point in particular:
“Walter Brueggemann said in “The Prophetic Imagination,” that in the accustomed comforts of consumer society we have been numbed to the pain of others by a secular ideology that teaches us to harden our hearts to the poor.”
It ties in a bit with a book i am reading at the moment. Silvia Federici’s “Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumluation.” Between the enclosure movement, (hedging off land..that word: hedging, has such an ignoble history) and the advent of state-based public assistance as a means of controlling and accessing forced labor in the early 16th century; the poorest members of the working class were criminalized. Not at all unlike the marginalization of the poor in these past decades. Prisons today serve as the workhouses of the past. The required parading of the poor through the streets in homage to the state for providing assistance, has been partially replaced with the swipe of an EBT card. It seems that we repeat these patterns over and over again. And i suppose we will continue to do so, until we either are extinct as a species, or we change the way we live our lives.
Granted, the church has it’s own history of denigrating whole classes of citizens as well. i cannot help but be a bit amused by the parading of a calf around the street in honor of OWS. Isn’t there already a “calf” of a sort permanently affixed near Bowling Green Park?
2 November 2011, 10:47 amStan:
Yup. (-:
Good observations, by the way. Enclosure is a critical part of how it all works. Debt is the one of the main means of enclosure.
The church is broken, as we believing types say. In many ways very broken, like all institutions. There is another definition of church though, that many of us are trying to recover – a community that casts forward the image of a loving kin-dom against the world (system).
2 November 2011, 3:07 pmjohn steppling:
great post Stan. havent been in touch for while, but working on occupation stuff out in LA and the deserts. Always good to check in with your thinking. Regards.
2 November 2011, 11:02 pmStan:
U2 John. Be well.
3 November 2011, 7:00 amRichard:
I’m excited you’re reading Federici’s book, Michele. I think it’s one of the most important books I’ve ever read; and like any great book, it points towards countless other books that can help us.
3 November 2011, 10:04 amDeAnander:
Thanks for the book referral Michele. on my list as of right now
Enclosure has been a theme and a bit of an obsession with me for years now — one reason why my brain explodes every time I hear some corporate honcho saying “we create jobs”.
My babelfish translator turns this corpspeak into the more truthful “we destroy subsistence options.”
3 November 2011, 10:22 pmStan:
Illich calls modernity a war on subsistence.
4 November 2011, 6:46 amThe Subsistence Perspective, Mies
DeAnander:
The final and crowning obscenity of Enclosure is the terminator seed technology — though all the variations on patenting life itself are obscene, that one probably wins the prize for vileness.
4 November 2011, 11:02 amJosiah:
They have a close contender, though, in Big Pharma. In case anyone needs more proof of this, check out bioethicist Harriet Washington’s new book “Deadly Monopolies”. She covers such things as the efforts of drug companies to price-gouge breast cancer patients by patenting genes (a projected sources of tens of billion in profit by the 2030s). An excerpt:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/21/deadly-monopolies-an-excerpt-from-harriet-washingtons-book_n_1024356.html?page=1
4 November 2011, 3:45 pmMichael Anderson:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/preying_on_the_poor_20120517/
Preying on the Poor
By Barbara Ehrenreich, TomDispatch
Individually the poor are not too tempting to thieves, for obvious reasons. Mug a banker and you might score a wallet containing a month’s rent. Mug a janitor and you will be lucky to get away with bus fare to flee the crime scene. But as Business Week helpfully pointed out in 2007, the poor in aggregate provide a juicy target for anyone depraved enough to make a business of stealing from them.
28 May 2012, 2:37 pmMichael Anderson:
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-mo-fed-policy-20121212,0,6927192.story
There’s been some news on this in the last 24 hrs. So, if the banks and corporations closest to the gubmint printing press just buy the bonds with some of the loose cash they’ve been sitting on since ’08 (this can apply to FOREIGN corporations, too, since capital is global), and don’t bother hiring anyone so the unemployment rate stays above 6.5% (frankly, it has a LONG, LONG way to go to get to THAT point), they will, in the twisted “legality” of these times, effectively own the government. A paper game. A racket, as long as we continue to believe in it. QE Infinity, Q.E.D. We are a society based on the rule of law, which means nothing to those making the laws.
Altermeyer’s observation on authoritarian RULERS: They don’t believe the stuff they feed the followers, it just keeps the followers in ranks. Damn fools gotta believe in something….
12 December 2012, 2:55 pm