I’ve been doomsaying the American economy for the last 3 years – predicting a burst in the housing bubble and predicting a failing of the credit markets shortly after that housing bubble burst. I’m not an economist, not even an Underwriter in the financial institution I’m employed at. Hell, I don’t even have a complicated understanding of financial modeling. My of my doomsaying, early on, was simply a matter of gut instinctuality – these 0% APR mortgages with no downpayment and the low-low interest rate platinum credit cards with the extraordinarily high limits that were being handed out left and right simply seemed too good to be true. I mean, on the one hand, how were banks making any money on 0% interest rates? (Answer: fees, fees, fees, and eventual rate adjustments due to any number contractually agreed to conditions) And how was it responsible for banks and consumers to expose themselves to historically astronomical individual debt loads without a corresponding astronomical increase to individual wealth? The more time I spent lingering with these questions, the more I sought to use my job to better understand the financial industry, markets, and the dynamics of lending and leverage – leverage, I later found, being the key to my argument.

The Bush Administration has brazenly stated through most of its two terms that American wages are up and consumer spending is strong, but that didn’t exactly jibe with what I was seeing. Certainly, people were spending like mad – as the extraordinary proliferation of new box store after new box store through the 00’s attested to. That said, I knew that NAFTA had hit the heartland hard, and that jobs in the lowest class of our economy – and the biggest chunk of our population – were not only shrinking in number, but shrinking in wages. Folks who formerly held unionized factory jobs were, in the wake of NAFTA-exported labor and manufacture, ending up manning registers at Wal-Mart – certainly a reduction in wages, not to mention in benefits as Wal-Mart denied its employees more than 30 hours a week of work to minimize their eligibility for health care coverage. Furthermore, I wasn’t seeing a uniform increase in wages among my middle class peers – most of us were holding steady at our income levels, and those of us who were changing positions were experiencing the moves laterally. Certainly, there were some spectacular stories of economic climbing, but… My concern were the exhorbitant salaries of celebrity CEOs – men who earned my annual salary in an hour or even in 10 minutes, and men who enjoyed even more exhorbitant “golden parachutes” when they were forced out of their positions for failing one set of expectations or another. It seemed absurd to me that a CEO could lead a company to billion dollar losses, get fired, and enjoy a severence – a severence! – whose face value was in some cases 5-or-6% of the total value of the company’s losses. Wages, I realized, may have been “up” for all of America, but that was largely because the superrich were growing exponentially richer while everyone else held stagnant or even substantially lost the values of their incomes. I argued this point three years ago, mostly to deaf ears; now, it would appear that the news media is starting to validate these concerns.

If wages are only up – spectacularly – for 2% of the population, yet spending has been remarkably high since Bush instructed Americans to “shop” in order to defend freedom and fight terrorism, I wondered what the hell was fueling our spending spree. Afterall, I made good money but, after bills and rent, wasn’t able to go out weekend every weekend, like so many friends and family members, and come home with flat screen televisions, new furniture, iPods and other gadgets… I came to strange realization when I lived in Madison from 2003-2005, going with my brother to Target every Saturday, that we were not the only consumers who made the same weekly trek – I saw a lot of familiar faces through those 18 months. What’s more, they weren’t buying just one or two modest items – they were loading up on DVDs, video games, junk food, toys, CDs… If I wanted to consume like these people, who certainly made at most what I was making and, taking into account their children, had less disposable income than I, I knew I’d have to get access to a serious line of revolving credit. Credit cards, I decided, in addition to auto loans and mortgages, were driving the economy. New statistics are baring this out.

Working in the banking industry for almost a decade now (much to my chagrin), I’ve observed that banks have something called an IGL – an Internal Guidance Limit – for corporate customers. What this means is that there’s a maximum that a bank will allow itself to lend to a given customer – usually determined by the customer’s overall wealth and its overall indebtedness (the two taken together determining it’s ‘leverage’ – or, debt-to-worth, which is used as a reasonable indicator of how able a customer is to pay back those debts), and also to qualitative factors such as health of the customer’s industry and how much exposure the bank already has to that industry. There’s wisdom in this for the bank: Lets say the bank lends a single corporate consumer whose net annual profits are something like $1billion four times that amount on terms that require most of that indebtedness to be paid back in 3 years. Let’s also say that the customer has loans from other banks on similar terms totalling more than $5billion – that means that the borrower has to repay a total debt of $11billion in a period where it’s only going to earn a total of $3billion dollars. It’s an impossible objective to achieve – not only because the borrower isn’t making enough money to repay the debt owed, but because the size of the debt is so great that the monthly and quarterly payments are so great that they’d cripple the customer’s ability to use it’s profits – it’s capital – to keep its business healthy and thriving. It’d be like a consumer having a monthly income of $2,000 and having credit card minimums of $1,500 – the consumer can’t afford to feed herself, let alone make rent and utilties, with those kinds of debt payments weighing her down. And IGL is good business not only because it presents the bank with realistic repayment likelihood, but because the bank takes a vested interest in promoting its corporate customer’s financial health.

Banks will argue that they have IGLs for consumer customers as well – you and me – and we could certainly argue that those IGLs have been substantially relaxed during the credit boom during the early part of the Bush Administration, and that those relaxed standards and aggressive attempts to take advantage of those relaxed standards have allowed individual consumer customers to be overleveraged by their debts and financially crippled for it; that this is happening over such a large swath of the American populace should have us all wondering how such mathematically brilliant people as bankers can be so fucking stupid. It’s one thing to bankrupt a single borrower; it’s another entirely to so indebt an entire populace that it collectively cripples their spending power, their quality of life, and, as a result, the strength of their economy and currency.

Why the hell didn’t these banks have IGLs to national or regional pools of customers? If a bank takes a corporate customer’s market’s health into consideration when lending, why not look at the health of a consumer customer’s local economy as well? If NAFTA has drained good-waged factory and farm jobs out of Lansing, Michigan, and the best thing Lansing’s got going for it as thriving Wal-Mart, wouldn’t it make sense to put a cap on the total amount of collective credit card debt you’re willing to lend to that community? If everyone in Lansing makes under $25thousand a year, everyone has maxed their $20thousand Visa limits, and everyone has missed at least one payment, jacking their 0% APR up to 25% APR, how the hell do creditors expect people to survive after their monthly minimums, let alone ever make good on their debt? And if a community of people – an economy – are collectively so burdened by their debts’ minimums that they can’t make ends meet, it’s inevitable that their economy will suffer for it, and as their economy suffers, jobs will be shed, and the jobless won’t be able to make their minimums at all… The whole problem just gets disasterously compounded.

Which is where we are right now. Economists have agreed that a recession began sometime between January and March of this year (though I’d argue it began in the second half of 2007), and most economists also agree that the Bush economic stimulus checks (called by my friends Bush’s “fuck all y’all money”) did little to bolster that recession. Banks have posted spectacular losses, and while the multinationals are staying afloat, smaller regional banks are already buckling under. It would appear that the bubble burst has been slowed, and economists seem to be saying that, thanks to Federal interventions in the form of slashed interest rates and bailouts of select financial institutions (Bear Sterns, Fannie Mae and Freddic Mac), the worst is over. Everyone is applauding banks as they tighten their credit requirements, stop those naughty lending practices, and get serious about responsible lending. The recession has apparently halted, and it’s only a matter of time before we’re back on track.

Um, what the fuck? I’m not an economist, but this madness just flies in the face of common sense – as did the crazy lending practices of the last 7 years. Banks may not be lending as much nor in the same way, but that’s because Americans are already spectacularly over-indebted. Since credit was driving the economy, and now people have maxed out their indebtidness, they’re not going to be able to spend anymore of that indebtidness – and since their incomes are going to cover those minimums, spending is going to decrease – as we’re already seeing. It’s that decreased spending that’s going to drive companies to shed manpower – as we’re already seeing. The more people are out jobs, the less they’re able to spend, further exacerbating the cutting of more jobs. The more people are out jobs, they less they’re able to make good on their minimums, let alone their total indebtedness, and the more likely it is that banks are going to continue to experience financial losses – not only are more people not going to be able to make their credit card premiums, but a whole new crop of mortgages and auto loans are bound to fail as well.

Maybe the subprime bubble has burst, but there are a few other financial products bubbles about to burst as well. The worst isn’t over – not by a longshot. This recession has only just gotten started. And now I’m not the only one who thinks so.

As we slog through it, I hope we’ll begin to really consider what happen. Certainly, consumer greed is a huge, huge part of the problem, and banks definitely took full advantage of that greed. It takes two to tango. But if I were a congressperson, or a bank CEO, I’d be looking closely at the idea of “responsible lending practices” and – hopefully – I’d see pretty clearly that it’s not just important to lend responsibly to an individual – it’s just as important, perhaps moreso, to lend responsibly to the individuals who make up a community, an economy.

JHW asserts that this blog needs fewer rants and more incisive critism and philosophy, and I agree; however, this weekend cannot go without comment. I mean, Jesus Fucking Christ, we caught a hooker finishing up with a wheelchair-bound client on the sidewalk less than a block from our house Thursday night. And then John watched in horror from our living room window as she proceeded to douche herself in the bushes lining our parking lot.

We met some friends of friends for dinner Thursday night – prior to the incident – and they also live in St. John’s – the good part. When we told them where we lived, they replied, “Oh, you’re in the thick of it!” That’s putting it… mildly.

This weekend proceeded maddeningly as sweltering temps Friday and Saturday made our stuffy, unairconditioned apartment stuffier and muggier, and as the neighborhood – we assume fanned-on by the raging full moon above us – erupted into screaming matches, crashing noises, and mightily revved racing engines. By the time I managed to fall asleep, it was almost 4am Saturday, and by 530am our next door neighbors began washing vomit – from the party they had the night before – off their trashcans with a pressure hose – right outside our bedroom window. Saturday proceeded less as a story of lunar jackassery and more of as a comedy of errors as we tried to escape the 105F heat in Portland for the milder temps along the ocean – which turned out to be fogged solidy and chillily over for the day. No matter: A nap and several hours of reading listening to the crashing waves in the fog were really quite nicely spent, and the drive home as pretty great.

Of course, there was the eighteen-wheeler that nearly drove up onto the sidewalk where our open air table was positioned while we were dining Saturday night – at least the driver had the good sense to stop and jam the intersection with his rig – rather than run us over.

~

The semi incident was the last of the madness, and Sunday gave us hope – largely because we made an effort to really enjoy life in the Mississippi – currently our top choice for a new home when our lease is up in March. Dinner with a fabulous couple and their son Sunday night further confirmed that greater Portland is, indeed, quite sane and friendly – we’ve just landed in its batshit-crazy red-necked theme park. JHW described it as, “a haven for hookers, heroin addicts, harridans, harpies and homeless teens.” Indeed.

That said, as JHW and I reflected in our time in some of Chicago’s rougher neighborhoods (I lived in Roger’s Park for a while, JHW in Hyde Park), we agreed that the bravado and posturing of these neighborhood’s locales, while intimidating, was never so troubling to us that we felt unsafe – it was just bravado, afterall. But a neighborhood peopled by folks trying to out-crazy one another? There’s a scenario for uncertainty – we agreed that we’d be wise to fear it more than we do, but the insanity has reached a point where we just have to laugh at it to stay sane.

JHW tells me that I’ve been talking in my sleep with increasing frequency lately – aparently last night I was having a full-on conversation when he came to bed, even the cats were unsettled by the weirdness of it. I don’t doubt him: My dreams have been intense, wild, and entirely new since we’ve moved here – and they’ve deeply illustrated the conceptual shifts I’ve been experiencing, heavily incorporating images from our hiking and, now after this weekend, camping. I feel convicted that our world is headed on a crash course – that the cars of the roller coaster are just over the crest of the highest peak and the downward descent is just about to begin. How far and fast we fall, what the scenery will look like as we go down, what the bumps and spins are like before we land, and how we will recover after the ride is over – if at all – has yet to be determined.

Two nights ago, I had a particularly remarkable dream:

As the dream opened, modern society had collapsed four years earlier and JHW, our friends ESR and Katie, Maureen and Ken, and about 200 others had formed a village in the mountains of Oregon. We were a commune, setting out to establish a functioning self-sufficient society that could build on stronger intellectual, social and ethical foundations than our capitalist forbearers. We had meant to establish a charter and constitution early on, but getting the town’s basic infrastructure established, meeting survival needs particularly during harsh winters, and keeping people informed and active in their own governance took precidence over ideological examination and reassignment. Moreover, we had a paper shortage, and the paper we did have was being used to manage communal work loads. That said, people were happy after four years, the town was stable and we were starting to innovate in meager, rustic sorts of ways – figuring out how to make better soaps, get better crop yields, and get along better with each other. Life was hard, but prosperity was improving, and with it our spirits.

The village rejected the outside world, in part because we’d established a successful communal mentality in which labor was the standard tender – if you wanted something, you worked for it, and if you wanted something more, we all worked together to make it happen – and we didn’t want to incorporate outsiders’ with capitalist self-serving views into our society. The bigger reason for staying hidden and not accepting most outsiders was that human beings in the outside world had become poisonous: Plagues were running rampant with no infrastructure to manage treatment for them, and armed conflicts were breaking out everywhere over scarce resources; we were healthy, and we had just enough resources for ourselves and weren’t interested in fighting others for what we worked so hard to acheive. We kept a low profile, then – living remotely, thriving quietly – and tried to go unnoticed.

In the fourth year, I was elected chief of the village, and my job was to manage workloads, improve civic infrastructures and services, and manage disputes – namely, the marital variety. I also implimented weekly parties that had a really positive effect on civic cohesion. The village thrived under my management – I developed long-view work timelines that allowed people to do their own things 50% of the year and come together at various other times throughout the year to work quickly through the bigger chores – harvests, cannings, smokings, and bulk manufacture of items such as clothes, shoes, and soap. We still hadn’t figured out how to make paper, and we were running low. This was concerning me greatly as we appeared to be losing sight of what happened to larger society – or, really, that people’s memories were distorting as time away from modern conveniences elapsed, and some things were becoming more significant while others were being forgotten. We still didn’t have a constitution, and it was really beginning to get to me, but everyone else seemed to agree that it could wait. I pushed the issue when I could, but usually any progress made toward arriving at a constitution was derailed by some other more immediately pressing community concern.

Jump ahead a few more years, and I’m nearing the end of my first term as chief. I’m about 45 now and have developed a limp from a farming accident a year or two earlier; I’m quieter, mellower, more inclined to show up first to work on an proposal than politic for weeks at a time in its favor. Everyone really respects and likes me, and they all feel really good about where the village has gone since I was first elected; generally, if I show up to work on something, people trust me enough to help and see what happens. The village now had a large population of school-aged children, and educating them had become the village’s top popular priority. Again, our paper shortage was concerning me: Not only did we not have a clear charter and constitution to guide the longterm goal of our education, but our kids wouldn’t have basic resources to practice and learn valuable skills like arithmetic and reading/writing. There was also a debate about what should be taught: village elders and I wanted to teach political history and civics as much as basic intellectual and societal skills, but most parents were in favor of simpler and more basic skills – largely because the parents themselves didn’t have a ton of time to support more advanced studies. My term was nearing an end; it was obvious we needed a school, and it seemed to me that we should take the simpler option first, work up to the more complex option later. I wanted to devote myself in my life after public service to figuring out how to make paper, and then write a history of our recent societal collapse, write the history of our tribe, and work with our elders and leadership to – finally – draft our charter and constitution.

Unfortunately for me, but fortunately it would seem for the tribe, I was re-elected by a wide margin. I didn’t want to be cheif, but almost everyone wanted me to run again, and even my opponents in the election – who were advancing more radical platforms – agreed that I was a very good choice and that the tribe would benefit from a second term of my management and vision. I was very flattered, but very exhausted. The demands of the tribe were increasing as our population grew and grew more and more interested in life improvements. I wanted to take a more laid back approach to governance, manage problems and let the villagers make proposals and initiatives for improvements, but my advocacy was saught in almost everything. It seemed like the end of my second term was a long, long way off, and while I loved my village and was happy to do the work, I could see where it was taking it’s toll: I was aging hard, and JHW and ESR, particularly – both of whom encouraged me to run again – were getting worried.

About a year into my second term, three stranger men showed up – one of them was very clearly the leader of the other two. They entered the village and asked to see its leader. I don’t remember what they wanted specifically – the village’s concern quickly became about what they were bringing with them, and what they say about us if they left. They seemed rough and untrustworthy to me, and I didn’t like the leader at all – and I was quietly encouraged by the village elders to kill them as quickly and quietly as possible. This was contrary to the principals of ethicality we’d been founded on, and just as many citizens encouraged me to have the strangers stay as elders who’d encouraged me to kill them. When it became clear that the men weren’t bringing any illnesses with them, I invited them to stay and become part of the tribe – my instinct told me to kill them, but I’d run on a platform of principal and I’d been a principalled cheif in my actions – I wanted to continue to be a man of principal to my people. The men agreed to stay, and became regulary contributors to the community – although they were often disrespectful and seditious… I spent a lot of my time managing them, keeping them in line. They were huge headaches.

Several years later, I was nearing the end of my second term, and greatly looking forward to retiring. I was almost 55, and our first generation of children were growing to adulthood. Our education system was modest – because we’d never managed large scale paper production, we couldn’t offer more than the basic skills to our kids – and the new generation as well as their parents had taken the village’s status quo for granted and grew up with little factual knowledge about the society we left. Their parents’ memories were even more blurred, and it didn’t help that the Strangers were spreading some out right lies about “the truth of human life” – they were trying to bring religion into our group, and they were encouraging the idea that personal wealth was the virtuous reward for people who worked harder and smarter than anything else. The new crop of young adults were becoming competitive and argumentative and superstitious, and they wanted more say and power in the direction of our society and it’s ideals. Most parents agreed that this was a failing of our education system – that we should’ve taught history and civics. The damage was done, and society was straining under competing pressures – parents of adult children as well as parents of young children wanted revision to the education system and incorporation of history, there were strongly voiced arguments about what exactly happened in history (most of the most vocal dissenters from the truth were pupils of the Strangers), social unrest was increasing and there were calls for a police force to be formed, and the young adults were calling for an economic redistribution that was “fairer” to those who worked hardest. The leader of the Strangers often tried to get into private discussion with me, and encourage me to take a moderate ideological position and bring the separatists together with the traditionalists – basically, advance the economic principals the young adults were agruing in favor of. I remembered clearly the failings that moderate positions permitted in prior society – giving in a little to extreme factions placate them invariably meant giving in more and more to them as time went on – and told him that I’d take his opinions into consideration. I started to crack down on ideologues, and I repetitioned the tribe to draft, at last, it’s charter and constitution, and agreed to form a police force – hopefully temporarily. These were a wildly popular measures.

Unfortunately, it was during this time that certain survival crises were beginning to befall us. Rats were somehow getting into and contaminating our granaries, cisterns were mysteriously being shattered so water was in short supply, and many of the young adults were not showing up to group work functions yet demanding their share of the labors’ yields. I knew sabotage and sedition were afoot, as did the elders, but no one could prove anything – especially since the young adults were threatening to leave and find another society to join. It was after a violent storm that damaged our rain water collection system (which was deployed against by the young adults against my instruction not to – they thought they knew better and wind so badly damaged it that we lost all of the water we collected and had to rebuild the thing entirely from scratch) that social unrest reached it’s peak. The young people were calling for new leadership, openly blaming me for the mishaps befalling the tribe (including my homosexuality in their accusations and suggesting that we had displeased “higher powers” by letting a sinner lead us), and the tribe’s people were beginning to wear down and agree. I learned there was a plot to kill me, and immediately called a town meeting. I was shouted down left and right, and eventually said, “Look, don’t threaten to kill me if you don’t like what I’m doing, just ask me to step down.” The young people and Strangers got the crowd worked up and they demanded in unison that I leave. The elders attempted to fight the crowd, but I decided that I would go. It was a painful blow, but I was confident that, once the village suffered enough under new leadership and new economic and religious rules, they’d come looking for me to help them set things right. I left and moved into the woods a few miles away.

A month later, I was cooking my breakfast at my campsite when I heard a twig snap. The Strangers were coming down the wooded path to my campsite, armed with rifles. I knew this was no hunting party. The leader laughed smugly and asked how I liked my new digs. I smiled and told him that I knew he wasn’t here to inquire about my well being, that he’d come to kill me as he’d intended all along. “Can’t have them finding you after things start to go my way and they start grumbling about how they’d like things to go back the way they were, can I?” he replied. “Well,” I said, “I guess humanity really is forever condemned to itself, after all,” I said.

No week goes by for me, and hardly a day, too, without discussion with someone about a big issue. Most often, JHW is my discussion partner, but ‘most often’ doesn’t mean ‘to exception.’ I grew up on discourse, and even today when I talk to friends and some family, the big issues work their way into discussion; oftentimes arousing passionate debate, and even anger. I am a passionate, opinionated man, now; in the past, I have been these things more severely, and also intellectually competitive and unyieldingly righteous. As I’ve matured, I’ve learned the virtue of really engaging and considering alternate views. I characterize my shift in consciousness from my 20s to my 30s as the realization that billions of other people throughout human history had gone through what I would go through, and rather than beat my head against countless walls in a blind struggle to navigate through my life, I would consult the experiences of my elders and see what I could learn what I could learn from them.

By no means do I do this all the time; I certainly remain prone to stubbornness, and I freely admit that there is extraordinary value in coming to understandings oneself. I am now, however, capable of doing something I wasn’t readily capable of doing before: admitting when I’m wrong. Indeed, I do this quite willingly and happily: being wrong provides me with the opportunity to learn and to grow. Changing one’s mind is not a sign of hypocrisy nor of wrongheadedness; it is a sign of something much, much better.

As I continue to reflect on my life and on the world, and discuss the big issues with others, many things have become clear. An unsettling dynamic emerges in our quest for truth: a failure to take into account the fundamental dynamics of human lifetimes. We are, like all things, subject to change – to birth and growth, age and death, growth and decay, expansion and contraction. The me I am today is not the me I was last year, nor even last month: experience has seasoned me, and I have grown. Ideas that seemed absurd to me even a month ago are gaining traction as reasonable and even compelling with me now. Ideas that seemed perfunctory and obvious a year ago I have come to see as limited, counterproductive, and outmoded. My experience has changed me – for good or good or for ill.

We too casually dismiss what was for what is – too readily presume that the failure of one outlook is due to some inherent flaw rather than it’s inapplicability after too long in our lifetimes, after the accumulation of more life experience. Indeed, one outlook can be perfectly valid when you’re 18 and be totally invalid as a 33 year old. Does that make the 18 year old’s outlook untrue, invalid, in the grand scheme of things? Hardly: the 18 year old was doing, thinking, exactly what an 18 year old was supposed to do and think, and if he hadn’t done those deeds and thought those thoughts then, it’s entirely likely that he wouldn’t have grown to do the deeds and think the thoughts he’s doing and thinking now.

No human outlook, no human understanding, and no human expectation is good for all of us all the time. It seems like such an obvious truth, but too often we forget it entirely, or fail to extend it to concepts that it should be extended to.

Big issues that often get raised during these discussions are the types of things we fail to apply this understanding to – I have been and often am just as guilty of this as any of my friends and family. Particularly now, when economics, governance, and political ideology are raised (among many of the big issues), invariably we are drawn to question the ultimate wisdom of certain straining schemes, and judge those modes of governing human social behaviors as inadequate from the get-go. In these discussions turned critiques, we often reflect on the roots of specific movements that brought these modes to dominance – say, Free Market Capitalism – and, with the benefit of hindsight, see how they were flawed from the start, or, alternately, with the conviction of perfect belief, lobby for those modes’ virtues and insist that, with time and under more ideal conditions, they will win out.

These may well be true of Free Market Capitalism – if the economy really were entirely free of federal meddling, the economy may very well correct itself and we all may very well prosper for it, but the economy has not exactly been free of corporate-advanced meddling since the 1950s – but these arguments invariably hinge on this notion of “what’s best for humankind” – the presumption being that one really good system exists to govern one or more aspects of human behavior with everlasting success. Democratic federal governance, socialist economic principals, Christian dogmatic morals, what have you. What is beginning to become astoundingly clear to me is that in the vast scope of human history – recorded or otherwise – we’ve found no perfect mode of social governance. Yet we keep striving to create one – Marx, Friedman, Keynes, founders of communes, politicians, revolutionaries, cult-founders, Oprah Winfrey and her limitless cadre of self-help gurus – you name it. Nobody has the “right” answer. And nobody ever will.

We tell ourselves that this is because “people are different,” and this is true, but most of us have a limited understanding of how people are different. What most of us are really saying when we say, “thats’ because people are different,” is really, “people don’t always like the same things.” The truth is, people come to very different conclusions about their lives at very different times throughout their lives – the Boomers saw that the world of the ’60s needed peace and love to overcome it’s ills, but those same people now advance war and economic policies that can hardly be considered ‘loving’ in the name of securing global prosperity, which we are meant to understand implies ‘peace.’ Have they become corrupted, or do the see the themselves and consequently the world differently as a result of gained experience and age? A population of mixed experiences results in mixed preferences, certainly; any mode of social governance that we impose on a population may be good for that population at a given point in time, but as the population gains experience, that mode of social governance may become increasingly irrelevant, or even damaging, to the society. This is not so much the fault of the system – but it is the fault of the society that advances that system. Not because the society is chosing to advance a ‘bad’ system, but because the society fails to see that it has grown to understand itself differently, and so it is time for a different system.

All things on this planet are subject to inexorable change – and while we tell ourselves that systems such as socialism and democracy and religion are abstractions that transcend natural dynamics and law, they do not. Economies, religions, corporations, sciences, and governments grow and change just as the people who advance them grow and change. Just as people live and die, so, too, do modes of social governance – some die kicking and screaming, just like some of us unfortunately will. Eternal truths, try as humanity has since before the time of the Greeks to ascertain them, simply do not exist – today’s eternal truth doesn’t pass muster tomorrow.

It should also be noted that all idealized modes of social governance fall inevitably fall prey to another simple and ruthlessly effective enemy: complacency. What seems like a wonderful mode of order falls victim – in most cases within just a few years of its founding – to a large number of its constituents becoming complacent with its support and advancement – like the friends of the Little Red Hen, they would rather reap its rewards than do the work of keeping it going. An effective majority comes to tune the system out, take it for granted. Given enough time – and it doesn’t take much – a minority of people comes to understand very well what the system’s parameters are and are not, and that minority discovers abundant opportunity for personal gain by playing against and even changing those parameters. Another class emerges from these conditions as well – a restless class; perhaps they are patriots attempting to defend the purity of the system, or revolutionaries believing that they are advancing a more virtuous system, or artists expressing their reactions to some facet of the system. All three find their genesis in complacency – either adopting it or in reaction to it – and all three undermine the stability of the system. There will never be an exception to this rule.

How are we to govern our various social modes, then, if we have working against our systems changing relevancy due to age and experience on the one hand and systemic decay due to complacency and its reactants on the other? If I could advance any recommendation at all, it would be this:

Understand, humanity, that you can create no perfect system. What is good for most of us today will probably not be so tomorrow – either because we will have changed, or because this system will have fallen victim to abuse, or both. It is a not a failing. We serve ourselves best not by striving to establish one eternally perfect system, but by cultivating a degree of social awareness that recognizes when we have grown, when we have by and large fallen asleep at the wheel, when the system has become abused and irrelevant. Then, we reflect as a community on the failings of that system, endeavor to create not a more perfect union but one that better plays to our society’s current strengths while acknowledging its weaknesses, come to an accord and abide by those new rules, all the while staying abreast of our society and its systems of social governance.

This is, of course, a pipe dream – largely because it ignores certain other attributes of modern human nature: those irrepressible inclinations toward selfishess, closedmindedness, and a stubborn defense of our laziness. Or so it would seem.

We live in a time of great cultural stirrings the world over, and the current modes of social governance – particularly free market capitalism – are drawing increasing scrutiny. These may, indeed, be revolutionary stirrings. Perhaps an opportunity will exist for humankind to reexamine itself over the coming years, create new modes of social governance for itself that will better reflect the needs and experiences of its people. When that time comes, I hope – perhaps futilely – that a new kind of wisdom will prevail, and that we will see that what is needed is not a more perfect system, but a more perfect understanding of the nature of humankind and the nature of its creations, and that from that understanding we will create systems that we are mindful to reexamine, refresh, and replace as needed.

I don’t want that last post to give the impression that JHW and I are ignoring deeper disatisfactions with our experiences here in Portland, and that consequently those disatisfactions may grow, fester, unmoor our excitement. We made the right call, very frankly – not only is there so much here that we love, but just being here, exploring the surrounding areas, hiking and seeing what’s to be seen, profound conceptual and even spiritual (though I hate the connotation that word has come to have inherited from Western junk religions) growths are taking place within us. These had their roots from our time in Chicago, certainly, but the kinds of leaps we’re making now are extraordinary, and have been catalyzed in large part by being here, exploring here.

Yeah, St. John’s – the neighborhood we live in – or our block of it at least kind of blows. It’s a disappointment – it’s too far out of the rest of the city, and geography works against our favor in terms of getting anywhere in less than 20 minutes by car, an hour by bus. That’s certainly frustrating. The neighborhood’s homeless/addict population seems to swell at night and on the weekend days, which accounts for much of the fighting that keeps us up at night. And this has been a traditionally economically depressed part of town that’s seeing increased development…

All of that said, St. John’s has given me a more realistic perspective on Portland on the whole, one that I think the hipster/yuppie/hippie enclaves on the northeast and southeast sides are largely insulated from. While Portland’s attitudes are deeply and progressively green, the city has a significantly large, dirty industrial underbelly that clings to both sides of the penninsula that harbors the “north” section of the city – including St. John’s. My buses trek through a large swath of it daily, and in the afternoons these factories belch out some pretty nasty, oily fumes. That’s just into the air – I can’t imagine what’s being flushed into the Willamette, even if only by the giant sea-faring tankers and shipping vessels that dock there, exchange goods, and move on. It’s convenient, I think, to consider Portland “green” – indeed, we’ve got recycling and compost bins galore, fantastic public transportation and tons of biking – but I wonder how cognizant the locals are of their industrial sectors, which are really only just out of sight.

This weekend, after a trek to Mt. Hood (like so much of Oregon’s wildernesses, fucking fantastic), we finally got around to exploring much of the city. We checked out Mississippi, Alberta, Mt. Tabor and Woodstock, as well as – accidentally – some of Sellwood. All are artier, cleaner, less grungy and chaotic. JHW and I agreed that we’ve paid our dues through the years and are in a place where we should feel no shame in wanting to move to and live in these kinds of places (Mt. Tabor and Alberta get my votes), and indeed we’re planning on exiting St. John’s when our lease is up in March. That said, though, I’m very cognizant of the insultating and consequently myopic power of these lovely liberal enclaves. As much as I want to live there, I don’t want to disappear there, and I don’t want the rest of the world to disappear from me there, either.

Incidentally: JHW’s got a nice write up of our Mt. Hood trip this weekend. Check it out.