Thursday, December 22, 2011

my witness

I used to think that I had chosen to live on a rather difficult cusp.  Not to complain, just to notice.  We chose to live differently but we also lived in the dominant paradigm too.  It was in so many areas of our lives too -- from how we worked, how we ate, how we raised our kids, everything.  And sometimes confounding and compounding this cuspiness, we chose not to live all the way over the other side of the cusp -- like we don't allow our children to do whatever the heck they please with no thought of the consequences; we eat gluten and meat; we have grid power.  There were pressures, from a lot of directions, at once, sometimes.

It was most difficult where those worlds met.  The most difficult for me was in dealing with my mother because I loved her so and she so did not understand much less approve.  Also, with children, it was like we were a pioneer family living alone on the prairie -- there was no one to trust.  Then there was work but more than work there is money, where money is required and where money can be got and what money must be spent for and how people value money and things and how not valuing those same things can lead to, well, if not friction exactly certainly unpleasant vibes.

But now I'm thinking that has switched and the most unpleasant place to be is in the position of buying into the dominant paradigm that is obviously and unutterly failing and realizing that there is nothing at all you can do about it and what the h*ll are you going to do about surviving it now anyway.  Nothing you've ever known is even out there anymore.

It isn't that I think it is too late.  I just think that I'm the one who gets to be comfortable (well, now, that's a loaded term) now.  Our life is different.  And it has been for a long time.  And those differences are now becoming visible to people.  I wonder, sometimes, how mad they will get, how much it will be my fault, that they refused to look.

4 comments:

Heather Jefferies said...

I wonder if it's not so much that they are mad that it's your fault they didn't look but that they're mad that it's your fault that suddenly you have and they do not. Because slowly and in a lot of cases very quickly the haves are becoming the have nots and what used to look like the have nots are distinctly the haves.

Define Poor.

CG said...

"Define Poor" is something I've been thinking about a lot, especially since we're "poor" but own our land, etc. Of course, Hillary dearest wanted to tax those people who had thought and planned ahead like us with an "implied income" tax . . . any way she could find to keep everybody on the same level of dumb. Anyway. Heck, I could even afford medical care if we could pay the same thing that TennCare pays (got a statement on the broken arm the other day -- $60 -- I can't even get my teeth cleaned for $60).

Eleutheros said...

Alecto, says I, it is not so much the 'haves' becoming the 'have-nots'. It's the 'thought-we-were-going-to-be-haves' becoming 'it's-obvious-we're-never-going-to-be-haves'

CG said...

I agree Eleu. We've always had what we will continue to have -- happiness, family, priorities, like of work. But modern consumerists, the people in the world who worship at the alter of the God of Money (which is most people, certainly the dominant paradigm), it's going, largely, away.