What Day Is It?

April 26, 2021 at 2:03 pm

One
A dozen
10,000
Five
Hundred
Thousand
Monday, Thursday, tuesday
monday again, maybe

Months and days and weeks unmoored
from their orderly procession
Lives and loves and lost regrets
All manner of mankind's made up misadventures
Swept aside by nature
Which marches on
Continuing to spin and crawl and stumble forward
Not counting the number of lights and darks

wednesday
fifteenth, twenty-seventh, ninth
twelve months
millions
billions
one
earth
monday again, maybe

For the Greater Good of the Game

April 15, 2021 at 4:09 pm

David Roth has a good write-up about COVID vac­ci­na­tions and base­ball. It swings real­ly quick­ly into big­ger ques­tions of per­son­al free­doms and col­lec­tive soci­ety. Speaking about polit­i­cal iden­ti­ties edg­ing out empa­thy and shared pur­pose, he gets to the me/us/them prob­lem and the self­ish­ness that has spread in American society.

[…] the plague was inter­est­ing to him only in how it reflect­ed upon and threat­ened him. There are, it turns out, tens of mil­lions of peo­ple who are not just also like that, but whose sin­gle most deeply held value is that they must be per­mit­ted to con­tin­ue being like that for­ev­er. For these peo­ple, hav­ing to do some­thing other than what­ev­er they want to do, at any moment and for any rea­son, real­ly is a much more urgent threat than sick­ness or death; to be with­out the agency to make the same stu­pid non-choices, every day, is not fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent than being killed, because mak­ing those facile choic­es is for them what it means to be alive.

Private Choices Have Public Consequences

I think widen­ing our cir­cle is the next evo­lu­tion­ary hur­dle. Moving from self-interested indi­vid­ual units to a con­cerned col­lec­tive might just be the Great Filter. You have to change the ques­tion “What ben­e­fits me?” into “What ben­e­fits us?” and then also expand who is includ­ed in that ‘us.’ Your answers to lots of ques­tions will change if you can think of ‘us’ as includ­ing every human being and ecosys­tem on this planet.

It involves per­son­al sac­ri­fice which is the antithe­sis of self preser­va­tion. It requires restric­tions to accept sus­tain­able growth instead of unfet­tered expan­sion. It takes con­trol­ling the nat­ur­al course of life and cre­at­ing our own preda­to­ry pres­sures to shape sur­vival — for every­one, not just the fittest.

Anyway, go get vac­ci­nat­ed as soon as you can. I’m get­ting my first dose tomor­row 2021-04-16.

One More for the Pile

December 3, 2020 at 2:45 pm

Today marks the offi­cial announce­ment that the com­pa­ny I cur­rent­ly work for is per­ma­nent­ly clos­ing. I did­n’t say ‘at’ because I’ve been work­ing remote from home since March anyway.

We made it fur­ther than most dur­ing this pan­dem­ic, but it’s still anoth­er name to add to the list. One more small busi­ness closed. Five fam­i­lies find­ing new paths. Thousands of cus­tomers pick­ing a new brand to buy. That last line should be read with a hint of sar­casm and a dose of crit­i­cism with a cap­i­tal­ist C.

I’ve still got a few pay­checks to col­lect before I join the other 20 mil­lion unem­ployed Americans or find some other way to make my liveli­hood. I cer­tain­ly feel for­tu­nate to have made it this far. I know oth­ers have been deal­ing with upheaval for most of 2020. The changes I’ve had to make in my life are hard to even clas­si­fy as incon­ve­niences. I’ve been lucky and privileged.

There’s still more stir­ring around, but I haven’t nailed down all the words. This might be all I have today. A sim­ple mark­er for where the trail changes direc­tion. A somber, grim, fore­bod­ing mark­er for the occa­sion — but hey, at least I cre­at­ed some­thing today!

Livelihood

November 30, 2020 at 3:45 pm

Livelihood: a means of securing the necessities of life

“Memaw” Ivey, as she has been affec­tion­ate­ly — or deri­sive­ly? — referred to, tweet­ed the other day. Maybe it’s the empha­sis of this being a reit­er­a­tion. Maybe it’s the con­cise­ness. Something about it sounds more like an ulti­ma­tum than a life les­son, pre­scrip­tive rather than descrip­tive. Something about ‘can­not’ is so defin­i­tive in the statement.

“You can­not have a life with­out a livelihood.”

Why do I get the feel­ing that’s the polite Southern way of say­ing, “If you don’t have a job, you don’t deserve to live.”

It’s true that if you don’t get water, food, and shel­ter — at the bare min­i­mum — then your life will end. There is a fun­da­men­tal aspect to the state­ment that is under­stand­able. It’s also false.

There are plen­ty of peo­ple right­ful­ly exempt from such an expec­ta­tion. Different lev­els of phys­i­cal and men­tal abil­i­ty might pre­vent some­one from being able to take care of them self. We cer­tain­ly don’t expect chil­dren to go it alone and secure their own neces­si­ties. On the other end of the age brack­et, we believe the elder­ly have a right to life with­out con­tin­u­ing to work. So it is pos­si­ble to have a life with­out a livelihood.

Of course, Twitter’s char­ac­ter lim­i­ta­tions pre­vent nuance. Governor Ivey would never say peo­ple who can’t pro­vide for them­selves for­feit their life. That does­n’t sound as nice as, “You can­not have a life with­out a livelihood.”