Blog Mirror: Sea Change

 A sad entry:

Sea Change

I've commented below the article, with my comment reading:

Very moving entry.

As an aging resident of the Rocky Mountain Region who has lived here my whole life, more and more American life strikes me as a series of compromises based on errors, broken promises and broken dreams. I’m not sure if this is always true, but a lot of it is.

Growing up I watched the promise of money=happiness take entire generations away, most often to greater wealth but also to dubious satisfaction. Those of us who stayed compromised between staying and taking what work was available. Generations after mine were outright sold the prospect that real happiness meant “moving up” and “doing better than your parents” and that meant moving to cities and abandoning things and people, indeed, often abandoning the people you formed attachments to in those new localities if they held you back from “moving up”. Later on, they’d return for cramped two week vacations and the like for a sample of the old life they’d “moved up” on.

I don’t know that its getting any better. I tend to think not. Indeed I fear our regional leadership pretty much has the view that the entire region should become the Greater Denver Metropolitan Area, and that’s somehow good for everyone and everything.

I guess its the agrarian in me that has the sense of “being native to this place”, as Wendell Berry would have it, and what that means, and from reading this blog (I rarely if ever commented) it’s pretty clear that’s what you did with Idaho. I’m sorry for you to have to move on and hope the best for you where you are going. Maybe you can manage that transition there as well, while retaining an attachment to where you’ve been for the past 21 years. I hope so.

This past week has been a horrific week for me in some ways.  I'm not going to go into it in depth, but my oldest friend suffered an unrecoverable loss.  That sort of thing puts you in a blue mood.  I haven't had much of a mental, or physical, break in other areas, and that can be draining if you are hit by other things.  I  have both of my COVID 19 shots, but my wife only has her first, so in some ways, as she's returned to work, I feel as if I'm trying to outrace a virus.  Other people I know continue to debate taking the vaccine seemingly unappreciative of the science behind it and the risks that this poses for everyone.  The most recent news is that maybe the human race can't outrace it, and its reached the point where its now so widespread and so endemic, it'll always out evolve our ability to block it.  That'll mean that a certain percentage of the human population get it every year, and a certain percentage of them will die.  Those who have said, all along, that "most people don't die" from it will have the comfort or horror of living in a world that works just as they imagined it will.

Added to that there was the horrific event in Boulder, Colorado.  I'm fully convinced at this point that these are only tangentially related to the things so often cited, particularly the easy access to firearms in the United States.  Indeed, when similar things happen in other nations difficult access is almost never noted to have existed, but it often does.  

No, what our problem is, is one we've been working on for a long time, that being a society based on money is our only value.  People move for it, fire due to it, marry for it, and divorce because of it.  Children are raised without fathers who take off due to the expense of children, and women decline to marry the fathers of their children, in some instances, as marrying the government is always an option.  People sell their patrimonies to acquire it and then use it to buy the patrimonies of other people, trying to find something to root to.  Tied to nothing, we stand for nothing and some people come to feel like nothing and strike out.

There is no perfect world.  We're not going to return to characters in a Winslow Homer painting, and even if we were too, a person should be aware that the one they might end up in might be of Civil War soldiers. There's always been problems in every age. 

But things don't feel like they've gone in the right direction.

And we're not going to do much about that.