A Mine of My Own

Upon what do you let your thoughts branch out and wrap their tendrils? Words and images, mostly.

Upon what do you build your society? Dirt, mud, bricks, stones, wood. Plenty of that to be had.

Other words. Minerals. Chemicals. Where do you get those? What about ones with many syllables?

An adobe house is an adobe house is...yeah, the usual three-part comparison. Our species likes to complicate matters. We like power-hungry, energy-efficient, well-connected adobe huts. Well-to-do can't leave well enough alone.

Seems the seams of choice in my scenery growing up was organic material. Compressed. Not quite hard enough for engagement rings but good enough to light fires.

Kids carry our society on their shoulders when the line of adulthood doesn't matter or hasn't been drawn. A family with multiple children makes for a good domestic factory, easily expanded, as long we avoid the inefficiencies that discharge Bhopal-sized chaff. What else can we do with them if we don't give them something else to do?

The total cost of ownership rarely includes an educated workforce. So be it. After all, anyone could make this computer I'm using, anyone can dig up the rare minerals and bake the rare chemicals needed to let us read and write together, anyone can run a business, anyone...

Since I haven't yet seen the squirrels in the attic or the raccoons on the roof leaning over my shoulder to read this blog, I assume only someone in our species can. The total cost of ownership of this blog belongs to all of you. You have paid for the privilege of being here with me, delayed by time.

The mines and the fields are managed by my neighbours. The mines and the fields are worked by my neighbours. You are my neighbours, some of you highly-trained and some of you untrained. We ease into categorized positions in life because of who we are and who our society trained us to be. We can ease out of categories when motivated to teach ourselves despite resistance from society. In any category, we are still neighbours.

Rarely do I walk this planet in full awareness of my place here. I have not trained myself to take each step like a three-dimensional chess/Go/Chinese checkers player looking at 5, 10, or 20 moves ahead by myself and all the participants in the game. I have not perfected a role-playing role. Some may. I imagine they do. But their lives don't substitute for mine. I seek the fast brain time to calculate the effects every one of my slow steps make. Speed is relative. I make more progress walking a country mile in a week than racing my sports car across the state in an afternoon.

Ten percent of my neighbours are looking for meaningful, lifestyle-based work. They want a robust economy to invite them back into jobs with good pay and healthy benefits.

What is meaningful? Is having a warlord control open pit mining that destroys children's lives so a computer part can be made meaningful? Is a neighbourhood full of texting kids meaningful?

I have no answers. I have only questions. I am still half-asleep. Through vanity, I seek the love and admiration of others with a world-connected blog while dreaming of a world where all my neighbours can grow up and raise children who love the world in which they live. I know I can't have both. Our societies mimic our bodies and our bodies mimic life. Cancer lurks everywhere. We contract incurable diseases. We overcome sickness without a rational medical explanation.

That's why I don't let one country's people and their back-and-forth conversation about national health care coverage rile me up, even when my life will be effected/affected by the choices they make in legislative sessions. We accept despicable conditions without trying too hard to change. We fight to our last breath to overcome mildly discomforting conditions that we could change with no effort. As a people, we rarely seek peaceful means to achieve peaceful ends.

I can only live a peaceful life of my own, using humour to balance myself on this thread between birth and death. I cannot stop my neighbours who want to promote war as an industry. I cannot stop my neighbours who want to shout names at each other instead of looking at issues through the eyes of their perceived adversaries. I do not want to stop them. I want to live my life and if, by chance, my life is an example that causes my neighbours to take a quick glance in my direction and consider other possibilities besides the ones they deem the only way to live, then I have accomplished more than I dreamed possible. Their lives are their own and may include a way to live that's better than my own. If I put shields up around me, I will miss their examples, you see. To see you, I leave barriers aside. Let's meet in peace, you and I.

If you like big guns and things that blow up, let's point them at places that yes, might be mined in environmentally-unfriendly manners unless we're willing to include environmental advocacy in our TCO, but may free up our children to get an education while we blast the mines for their future. Stop destroying children in Asia and Africa. Stop turning Afghanistan and Somalia into warzones in headline news - turn them into desert oases or mountain resorts, instead. Let's quit using the means to justify the end. You know I'm a guy - I use testosterone in my lovemaking ways - but a little less testosterone in world trade might make our hearts and our global economy more healthy. We won't know unless we're willing to try.