QUESTIONING EVERYTHING

When this catastrophic attack on the Capitol happened, I cut off every correspondent, even long-time excellent friends. The reason was not their fault. They had no reason to develop background enough to understand what I was saying so to them I sounded unintelligible, maybe nuts, and because they had made themselves safe and operable by shutting things out, denying danger, staying calm, skipping over the hard parts, loving “Downton Abbey” and ignoring that the plot was about the collapse of one segment of society. Because of my “intellectualism” and “scare-mongering” I terrified them and I had no substitute to offer.

When I was a toddler, I was not just the oldest but also the only child and therefore indulged and encouraged. Then I was a force for order and conformity. In spite of all my toddler tantrums, after there were two brothers everything went haywire — out of control. Often I had no idea what was going on. For a while in classrooms I could be a person teachers approved, but I was sharply aware that the other students wanted me out. At home I was a terror in terror myself. No one tried to explain.

I never forgot a playground riot when my classmates pursued me with all the intensity of the Capitol invaders. They were a hanging crowd and no teacher was paying attention until I was reduced to mush. I wonder where Melva Jean Edwards went to. She was the other outlier child my irritated teacher finally asked to take me to the washroom and clean me up.

Melva also confirmed my identity as an outsider and judged that to be an advantage. You think I jest. Between using wet paper towels to wipe my face, she said she often snuck into the lav to get paper towels to draw on because the school never gave us enough drawing paper. I had not realized that you could use things for purposes that were not in the label. It never occurred to me that the school was hoarding paper.

Until the pandemic the grade school class still met for lunch once month. I asked them what they knew about Melva Jean, but they said, “Who?” By now she probably has a married last name. Maybe more than one. Her mother was the only divorced mom I’d ever heard of until I met her.

At that age, primary school, I learned the wisdom of not sharing everything with everyone, always reserving my private view. In fact, late in life I discovered my mother had also kept a small secret part she never shared. She didn’t tell what was in it. In her case it was probably something many people held back because of coming to the city from a small-scale ag background. Like, disappointment in promises about the city and about marriage.

Now I look at the problems of our time and don’t see them as anything easily solvable because they come from so deep within our world-templates. They are nearly unthinkable: what is a nation and how can we abandon basing them on territory/boundaries that are pretenses, convenient inventions like the 49th parallel, an indefensible imaginary construct that controls two nations?

What is “owning”? We use it as a synonym for dominating, winning. Once it meant maintaining, knowing and caring for something. In that sense, Trump has never owned anything. And I no longer own my yard, since I have withdrawn from it to avoid trouble with my dominating neighbors.

My hardest but most basic concept is that of dynamic process, acceptance that everything changes. Friends find that alarming. They want a homeostasis of life and household, even knowing that they require constant maintenance. I think my acceptance of shifting time comes from the life-changing moment when I realized I could read. Pretentious as it to say so, that changed everything, as though I’d come over a horizon and saw a multitude of communities never imagined. I’ve sought those transformative moments ever since. Found them sometimes. But it presents the problem of identity — how to stay the same enough to sustain memory, when memory is as uncertain as everything else?

One use of community is that they define who you are, so if you forget, they will push you back into your place, even if you don’t want to go. Like a fat person who loses weight, on purpose and with a happy goal, only to discover that people will INSIST that you stay fat and actively sabotage weight loss. Diane Milburn, high school buddy, said when I left for college, “We won’t know you ever again.” She was right. They can no longer help maintain my boundaries.

Partly this upsets people because it challenges the hierarchy and the pecking order, which are slightly different concepts, not always fair, but controlling in our daily lives. Changing who I am challenges who they are.

So Trump has been a gift, some people say, because he has stripped the illusion off politics, demonstrated what happens when governance is missing, and showed just how much the fly-over country of Eurasia, which is Russia, can invade and corrupt the fly-over country of North America. When the internet penetrates Russian society as much as it does this one, they will try to confine it, and they won’t be any better at it than we are.

I began this post with an account of an early terrifying experience and then told how I left everyone behind through education, repeatedly. So now I should be saying “bad things happen” and “wise up.” But I’m far too bitter and cynical for that. Now I’m looking for a major shift about what it is to be a species on this planet and recognition of how close to extinction we are. I think that in my lifetime we may see failure of our culture, including the internet, satellites, and airplanes. We might save radio and books if the population has the density to sustain them.

Consider how quickly the original population of North America was diminished to a tiny fraction by the 19th century. Consider how quickly the paradigm of old, white, entitled, wealthy, controlling men can over-reach itself and simply age out early because of poor health practices. Consider how much of the cities based on the industrial revolution are simply rubble now. Or deserted.

In the beginning I was a smart-aleck little kid with naturally curly red hair but I must have been obnoxious to be so attacked. Maybe it was jealousy. Now we are all eighty years old. Temporary. I wonder whether any of us will live to a hundred.