government

A New Way to Smell Roses.

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I’ve been thinking a lot as the world has begun to intrude on my thoughts again, the pragmatisms of life and the never-ending bureaucracy run by idiots. For example, tomorrow I will go have to deal with a government office which, on paper, put houses on my land that weren’t there.

When bureaucracy gets that much imagination, we should worry – but really, it was not very creatively sweeping something under the rug that I was made aware of a decade ago, and did try to straighten out. That will likely be a post on KnowProSE.com soon enough.

We get wrapped up in these paper cuts that modern society gives us and we bleed, and some of us lose that strength to climb the ladder to look above the nonsense. There’s a lot of nonsense in modern society we put up with. One person has called it soft slavery, but I think of it as a soft indentureship.

…Soft slavery, on the other hand, is covert. It is neither apparent nor self-evident. Everything is hidden behind comfort, apathy, security, convenience, indifference, and the illusion of freedom. It’s not clear who the slave is. It’s not clear who the master is. And the power dynamic is obscured by an unhealthy hierarchy that leads to public confusion within a chain of obedience that’s based on fear and violence.

Statists, living in a world ruled by nation states and deceived by the illusion of freedom, are more akin to the house slave from the times of hard slavery than to free human beings. The house slave of today is the typical state citizen just going through the motions, unaware of their own slavery. So caught up are they in the “rules” and the “laws” of the land that they cannot see how desperate their situation really is. To the extent that they can see, cognitive dissonance kicks in to squash the uncomfortable feeling to keep their comforting worldview intact…

‘Overcoming Soft Slavery: Building Perspective Instead of Walls‘, Gary Z McGee, TheMindUnleashed.com, Feb 19th, 2018.

I choose indentureship, perhaps because I understand the distinction between slavery and indentureship. In slavery, they offer you no light at the end of the tunnel and have to pay for your ‘wellbeing’, whereas with indentureship they give you a light off in the distance that might be the end of the tunnel and you pay your own bills.

Even imagination becomes limited by these indentureships, because when there’s enough complexity there’s almost no way to see above it.

Some people find religion helps with that, and I take no issue with it. Marx is often misquoted as saying, “Religion is the opiate of the masses”, when in fact the full quote is much more interesting.

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”

Marx, Karl. [1843] 1970. “Introduction.” A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, translated by A. Jolin and J. O’Malley, edited by J. O’Malley. Cambridge University Press. – via Marxists.org.

I’m no Marxist by any stretch – communism is a failure in so many ways, but that failure is built of truths that it’s own philosophy despised. Communism ignores it’s flaws and comes to an unfortunate end. Socialism is the same thing, Capitalism, Democracy, Anarchy… the list is as complete as our renditions of ignoring the flaws of systems we create. I’m not saying democracy is a failure, but it’s the best we’ve gotten so far we think and we’re definitely seeing some flaws around the world.

One of the interesting things about all of these systems is that fundamentally, they are thought of because of flaws in the preceding systems. Marx thought life should be more fair, as an example, and what he laid out was a framework built around fixing that flaw and what he was willing to sacrifice to do so. Like every other system.

We don’t imagine systems because we’re stuck in them, and when we do dare imagine a new system it’s defined largely by the old system. The more complex the old system, the more flaws to deal with, and… we get a paralysis as the complex systems fail. We have invested so much into them we don’t want to see them fail, and yet we see it around the world how systems are failing.

Where a baby horse first begins walking we are amazed. It happens within hours. To live in modern society, it takes about 18 years maybe to start ‘walking’ for we in a civilized society, and even then there are those that don’t get it right and end up outside the boundaries of what is acceptable, or right, or just.

When we see good people on the wrong side of those boundaries in our every day lives, when we take off our societal blinders, we need to realize that maybe something is wrong. If we believe something is worth keeping, we should keep it. That’s how bees end up with influencing flowers. Over thousands of years, they have defined the flowers they visit.

Too often we get lost in the busy work of the bee and forget that we’re also defining the flowers of the future, themselves living things.

It’s hard to think of systems of government as flowers, isn’t it? We do need some core system, and maybe what we’re looking at just doesn’t fit that anymore.

Clearly, we’ve been focusing on the manure. The plant is grown, set, and ready for us to look beyond to what we really want to drag out of the future.

There was a time when we were not so caught up in ourselves and thought of the generations to come. Maybe it’s time to smell the roses.

Do I have answers? No. But I have a lot of questions.

The Bird Feeder.

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My father, about about 5 years before he died, began feeding birds. He did this for the pleasure of hearing them sing, I suppose. In a way I suppose it was one of his ways of controlling his environment. He also found it amusing that passing birds would make a mess on passing cars.

They never really did.

He liked to think one day they would. In some ways he wasn’t all that nice, but his distaste for people using their horn around the corner was so tangible that you could see a bird feeder floating above the road.

After he died, I continued the practice a bit, but rather than hang it over the road, I brought it to a more natural setting at that old house on San Fernando Hill. I tried it near the avocado tree, and it still wasn’t too good there. Birds like places where they feel safe.

Don’t we all?

And so the feeder ended up at the back of the house, in view of the kitchen sink. As a bachelor, this was convenient for coffee and food, and as someone who seems to have taken way too many pictures (you’re seeing some of the good ones), it was a blind that the birds were used to.

The history here is that for a while the City of San Fernando would spray malathion all over to deal with mosquito issues. Anecdotally, after they did that in the 1990s, there were less birds in the area as well as less bird pepper trees, named after their planters. Whether directly or indirectly, I believe the spraying caused a decrease in the birds.

When my father started feeding the birds, I filled in when he wasn’t home to do it for very different reasons. They had stopped spraying malathion, and there was still enough wild land on the hill to allow for re-population.

The palm tanagers( thraupis palmarum), in the top picture, were the first to the feeder. They had seemed to survive the best, and so they happily fed. In time, their cacophony brought out other birds to the feeder. The Great Kiskadee was omnipresent, but they are hardy and will eat anything – including Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Within a few days, the blue-grey tanagers (thraupis episcopus) showed up in much fewer numbers. They behaved much like the palm tanagers but in their own little clique. They sounded all alike to me, but they only really fed with their own clique.

The bare eyed thrush (big eyed grieve, tardis nudigenus) came along next. Shy yet bold at the same time, they seemed on the constant lookout for predators but had no issues putting the other birds in place on the feeder. The Great Kiskadees, always looking for opportunity, would back off when they saw a bare eyed thrush nearby. This brought out the tropical mockingbirds (mimus gilvus), too, though there are plenty of pictures of them. If there was a pecking order, I’d put the tropical mockingbirds at top.

Male white lined tanager (tachyphonus rufus), with a Great Kiskadee (Pitangus Sulphuratus) in the background on the feeder.

In time, other birds showed up, like the white-lined tanagers (tachyphonus rufus), barred antshrikes, tropical kingbirds, and so on.

It became quite lively. In fact, if I did not restock the feeder by sunrise, palm tanagers would make their way to my room through the open window and act as alarm clocks. None of the other birds did that, but the palm tanagers for some reason had no trouble making a ruckus to get fed. This I considered a problem, not because I minded the palm tanagers, but because it made me aware that we had formed a relationship I didn’t intend.

I wanted to get the bird population back, I enjoyed them, but they shouldn’t depend on me. By this time, the barred antshrikes were nesting in the yard. White lined tanagers (tachyphonus rufus) had fresh hatchlings, and I had planted some fruit trees in the yard as well as let the mango tree thrive. There was food there, they could ‘plant’ more plants – I had hoped for bird pepper trees, but none popped up, likely because all the bird pepper trees in the area had died.

Bare eyed thrush (Turdus Nudigenis), locally called the Big eyed grieve.

At the same time, one of the arms of the Government of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago developed a road up the other side of San Fernando Hill, which on it’s face seemed a good idea. It’s a definite landmark, there is a lot of flora and fauna that is worth appreciating.

But instead they just had fetes, where loud music was played throughout the night, and when they decided to light fireworks, the debris landed on the galvanized roof above me and those around me.

The peace and quiet was to be no more on the Hill, as we called it, and it was no longer a nice place to live for the birds. For the other wildlife. And, I might add, for me.

I had been outmatched by drunken revelry and fireworks.

This is why when one of my father’s sisters challenged me for the house and demanded I move out, I didn’t bother fighting about it. Within a week, I handed her the keys and didn’t look back. The house did not have good memories over the years and my attempt to create some had failed.

I drove by the place last week, being in San Fernando for some other reason, and just shook my head as I drove by, looking at the disrepair of the place. My father’s sister had died not long after I had handed her the keys, nobody thought to inform me of her funeral and I probably would not have gone had I known. In the stack of bad memories, she was just another one.

Yet I remembered watching those birds thrive for that period. How very interesting they were with their social standings, their bickerings. Their families grew, and hopefully they migrated away from that horrible place as well. It could have been a good place.

Birds are little alarms.

The Contrasts.

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The sunset yesterday evening was intense, like the next 2 days of weather will be here in Trinidad and Tobago. The rains beat out their own rhythm, sometimes with the glancing blows of high wind, sometimes not, and in the Northwest of Trinidad it has been… unpredictable.

Before I left for an appointment today, it was raining one way, then another, bamboo nearby was sheared by the wind. I found it exhilarating. I always have enjoyed a good storm, but today it was only a few hours where I live, with a sunset as above. In South Trinidad, though, I imagine it was much worse, with people still having been flooded from past days.

It’s disappointing, really. The same problems keep coming back while the politicians point at each others for local elections. The flooding has been happening more frequently recently, but the Water and Sewage Company of Trinidad and Tobago somehow never seems to have enough water in the reservoir. There’s too many levels of bureaucracy, not enough accountability, and no effective change – but the government of course wants to bring back a property tax based on what someone guesstimates you can rent a property for.

Nature has no time for that.

There is brave talk about electric cars, and hybrids, but the state owned Trinidad and Tobago Electricity Commission has problems with the grid off and on, at least where I am. It’s hard to imagine the grid charging so many cars every night. I’ve heard the batteries for the cars cost sometimes more than the cars themselves to replace sometimes. All in the name of ‘saving the planet’ which will well be here long after we are not.

The reality is that if these islands, among all the other islands, went and did everything right, from renewable energy to carbon footprints, it wouldn’t have much of an effect on the global climate because these nations, while polluting, aren’t the core of it. For their trouble, they import everything they are told to at high costs, but the global situation’s problems are really in the larger nations that export these things to the smaller nations. “This is good for the climate!”

The woman with a hungry child on the corner has more immediate concerns.

Since Trinidad and Tobago refuses to believe it can produce it’s own technology solutions, hampered by the failed attempts by government to innovate. Big businesses thrive, small businesses die, and everyone wants to start a small business. Big businesses largely import things and sell them to people. Small businesses try to make local things. The bias, as it is, is evident.

The batteries for the cars will end up in the local dumps, likely. Poisoning ground water, like old cell phones and computers do. Politicians will vie to be elected while not actually doing anything, and the shell game of government corporations absolves all from blame.

It is, in it’s own right, a beautiful dystopia at certain hours, populated with a majority of good people who do not go out at night as much – partly economics, partly crime. The crime of the young has become more personal, more painful to the victims, symptoms of a deep economic divide that the government regularly excavates. It’s not an economic divide, really. It’s a moat.

It can be depressing to see on a daily basis. At busy intersections, we see women with children holding up signs with lists of what they need. There are too many for most to help. This was once a rich country. What happened?

I look toward the west, toward Venezuela, another nation which was rich – and could still be rich. I deal with Venezuelans fairly frequently, and while some call them a plague, I see the hard working immigrants that build countries given the right tools. This fresh blood could be an asset. There are intelligent people here, talented people, who in a land where titles mean more than merit, find no place here. They dream.

It’s not too much to ask for a better tomorrow, particularly if you’re willing to put in the sweat equity. I see it almost every day, contrasted against BMWs and Range Rovers while police escort Ministers through the traffic they are responsible for.

These contrasts are much like the sunset. At certain times, beautiful. The rains will come again tomorrow, properties will be flooded, government will posture yet again, and we’ll see what the sunset looks like tomorrow.

It is in it’s own way Groundhog day in a nation with no groundhogs.

Beached.

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This morning I was thinking about the medium and the message and it’s semantic intentionality about discussing the same things. Then I realized it’s Sunday, and I can take a break from that and think on other things.

The beach is always a bad idea for me on the weekends. The North Coast Road on the weekend is too annoying and peopley on the weekends, which means loud annoying music when I just want to hear the wind and surf.

On the weekends, the beach is a petri dish for all that annoys me, on Monday, it’s still being cleaned from their physical pollution. Local government efficiency in Trinidad and Tobago is about the same as that of the Russian war machine – nothing maintained, everything falling apart except the will to try to do something.

It’s not too different anywhere, really. The bus of government goes nowhere. The weight of the wheels defies the torque of the will of the people through government, regardless of the size of the engine.

Meanwhile, people on the bus fight for seats while the driver keeps asking for help on a broken radio as the engine idles, poisoning the world around it and the people on the bus – the windows are down, the air conditioner broken.

Something has to change. I’m not sure what it is. While not as prosey as above, part of this is what we discussed at the barber shop, openly between equals regardless of social standing. There are people thinking about these things, all with a hand on a piece of the machine and wondering what the hell it’s actually supposed to be doing.

By process of elimination, we find out what it’s not doing.

I’d rather have spent my life on the beach, a castaway, full of wonder at what could be out there but with no way of going beyond. To dream of something better, imagining a world as one would want it.

Such occasion would be nice.

Forest and Trees

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why hello thereShifting focus is a necessary part of being human – to be able to see the forest and the tree in the forest as needed. Deciding when to do that is a sign of education, discipline and experience. It’s also something that truly creative people can do easily.

Some people see forests, some people see trees, few people see both. Few people can understand a singular tree, how it works even in the most basic of principles – photosynthesis is a rote answer, misunderstood, osmosis is a concept that only can be learned through a permeable membrane. Nutrients, soil types, root types… all are lost if they are not found, and so a person can be limited only to the patently obvious, the growth above the ground.

And then people will look at a forest, not understanding the complex interactions with the pollination vectors, the mycorrhizal networks,  the air flow and the concentrations of different gases during parts of the day when photosynthesis takes place – and when it doesn’t. How the shape of leaves can affect not just how much photosynthesis happens but how water flows through the forest before it even hits the ground. How just as cattle have the cattle egret to keep them clean, there are creatures that keep the plants safe – and then there are creatures that do not, little microcosms of life and death happening at any given moment, an awkward balance shifting in real time. A cycle. Alive in it’s own right, a body of systems, perhaps even a consciousness of sorts that we cannot understand. Religion and fiction have played with this subject.

So, when we look at a problem, we have to understand the tree – each tree. And we also have to understand the forest, the complex interactions between trees and the other flora and fauna around them.

To often we have specialists that do only one or the other; we need people who can do both.