I Had a Dream

I vaguely remember how I ended up with the kind of life I have now. It was a kind of a choice. More accurately, it was a hazy intention or "bent" actualized and playing out through opportunism and improvisation. It could have been vastly different on the surface and that intent would still be there.

As an adolescent I was an idiot, a sponge soaking up everything indiscriminately, mostly garbage. Bad luck was interpreted by me as injustice, reading meaning into something entirely arbitrary and accidental, but it caused me to start my researches, initially into Sartrean existentialism. 

Some of the early environmental writings had a huge effect on me. Small is Beautiful, by E. F. Schumacher, seemed so obviously true I couldn't imagine societal evolution occurring in any other way. Rampant corporatism would make most people miserable and so surely they would reject it, right?

Wrong! Was I ever naïve, but not about the misery. Sixties idealism, social-justice Catholicism, and encountering some Mennonites on a farm all made me want to have a simple life lower down in the economic food-chain, closer to nature and perhaps being directly, physically, elementally productive.

How hard could it be? I was living in a land awash in resources and grew up in a city with an enormous middle class. That city is now the opioid capital of the country, by the way. And for me? I have a simple and pleasant life. I am directly, physically productive. But I am plagued by the awareness of injustice.

There is nothing accidental or arbitrary about the misery being foisted on many Americans. It is deliberate and the result of deceit and a quest for unbridled power among a minority of rich, sociopathic, self-serving people. My personal dream is intact. My expectations for our society are destroyed.

Smallness is still beautiful. Find it wherever you can. Hold onto it and have it nurture you because the macrocosm is going totally to shit.