Keeping the heat off

 

 

Nov. 11, 1984

 

PASSAIC – It’s finally gotten cold. Most years I tell myself, I won’t turn the heat on until November 1 and winding up putting it on in mid-October.

This year we haven’t had to, as the queer weather continues, changing my perspective on the world in which we live.

I have a hard time imagining that a race of beings so petty as we are has the capacity to change the planet upon which we live, our machines, our transportation, our mode for manufacturing power, our means of production of anything causing fundamental changes to the environment we are largely helpless to reverse later.

In South America, greedy people tear down jungles to make room for airports and grazing land for cattle so we Americans can continue to stuff our faces with the cooked flesh of dead cows.

So we cut down the world’s lungs so we can grow fat and get heart attacks.

This is hardly what the Bible meant when God said we should be become the earth’s stewards.

Our most primitive men get their kicks out of killing animals, how much more of a thrill must then get by killing a whole planet, cutting off its balls so it can’t regenerate.

This is 1984 – and everything Orwell predicted pretty much as come true. We, humans, are a greedy bunch, selfish to the core, with rare exceptions mocked as liberals when we want to moderate our misbehavior.

But it is a pointless task. Those who lead the way with their uncaring attitudes are also too stupid to understand the implications and too arrogant to care even if some dull light bulb goes on in their brains.

The smart ones, the rich ones, they manipulate us like pawns in some international chess game, playing poor against poor in order to keep us fighting long enough for them to control us. They control the world’s resources and pass along that inheritance to equally arrogant sons and daughters, teasing the greedier of the poor in our midst with the misconception that a poor man might earn his way to the stop when only an extremely lucky few ever do, and those lucky ones generally claw the way over the backs of those who are less greedy and less ruthless.

Even the everyday cycles of life here in Passaic have gone haywire. This part of the world usually gets quiet by October as people button up their homes to brace against the onslaught of cold. The chilly streets become a winter wonderland, filled with a silent chill I embrace each morning when I wake. But with the continued warmth, the noise never stops. Last week, screaming kids woke me strung out on sugar highs from all the candy they collected on Halloween, their screeching made worse by their mothers screaming at them from the second floor to behave.

The worst of this collection is the hypocrite in the apartment directly above mine, who objects to my yelling when her son blasts AC/DC the moment he gets home from school everyday, his speakers located directly above the head of my bed.

My room mate Pauly, caught in the middle of some new piece of art work, retaliates by turning up his stereo in a never ending escalation that drives the more peaceful of us mad. I tried his game once, and never won. I hate the idea that people like the people upstairs can invade my privacy without even needing storm troopers to kick down my door. Everybody thinks they have license to do whatever they want, regardless of who they bother in the process – one more sales pitch from the Reagan Administration that sells personal greed as a virtue.

It is difficult to reason with the unreasonable, people who think they are superior to you when they are not. They do what they want and then challenge you to do something about it.

I used to get that from high school bullies, which is largely what makes up the population of these creeps. They might listen if a cop knocks on their door, but noise regulations like many so called limits on people’s freedom, give great latitude to the purveyor. The law assumes that most people in a polite society will have courtesy not to abuse their neighbors, but those writing the laws presume too much: we are not a polite people, and nothing short of an ozzie machine gun will teach some people respect.

I tend to paint all Republicans with this broad brush, since the majority of Republicans I know are the worst offenders. But there are a lot of so called liberals suffering the same lack of culture.

If I can’t influence my own neighbor to show courtesy, how on earth can I hope to move the giant corporations that rip me off on a daily basis, make lives miserable for people in countries outside our borders and generally work towards the overall demise of our planet?

I blame Reagan for a lot of the change of culture, but I understand that the roots of this dramatic change are in the hearts of greedy individuals, who embrace this call to selfishness, as they secretly build up arms cashes for the day when the poor rise up to stop them.

Reagan strikes a greedy chord inside many Americans, who have been too embarrassed in the past to openly express their hatred for poor people.

Some people call them Reagan Democrats, although they are also largely Republicans, not overly successful Republicans either, blue collar angry Republicans who hate blacks and Spanish-speaking immigrants, who jealously guard their decade old cars, their crumbling but paid off homes and other privileges against the poor people they are told will come to take them away. These poor fools, however, look one way at the poor, while the giant corporations secretly pick their pockets. These guys blame government when it is Reagan’s government that has given the corporations license to steal.
Such men and women wear red, white and blue and shout patriotic slogans, too stupid to realize that they have been betrayed and blame the wrong people for their problems.

Christ once said the poor shall inherit the earth, but I suspect it is the stupid who will, the masses of beings that spout anti-liberal slogans while allowing the masters of the world to use them, masters who hide behind the flag, behind religion, and behind so call anti-tax grass roots movements, who tell these poor and foolish men and women they are great, while turning them loose against the rest of us.

I write this as the volume of the stereo rises again up stairs. The old lady next door, who used to serve as the voice of reason by screaming for that kid and the kids in the yard to keep quiet, died last spring, leaving us to work out the peace without her.

The kid, and his mother, of course, also reflect the most common problem in America in that they know the owner of the apartment complex, and since they have an “in” when we don’t, they get away with a lot more than they did under the old owner, who hated them as much as we do.

Each time I’ve tried to get the manager to do something, he only looked at me and said, “If you don’t like it, move out.”

So the ranch war between us farmers down stairs against the cattle rustlers upstairs continues, bringing us to yet another major flaw in American values.

We grew up on cowboy movies, John Wayne as the ultimate individualist. We lay our claim to a piece of the world and defy anyone to take it. We see every instance of sharing and cooperation as an attempt to take what we believe we earned. We dump labels on such things calling them “Socialist” when in reality John Wayne and his ilk are fakes. Those big muscled idiots in jeeps with NRA stickers on their bumpers are fakes. They are not real Americans. They don’t represent freedom. They are moles who collect everything they can, useful or not, and keep it out of the hands of people who need it.

Freedom isn’t that. It is cooperation – a community working together (call it communism if you like) towards a common goal, sharing resources for a common benefit, strong protecting weak so that our whole society thrives, rather than this macho misperception of dog eat dog.

These Republican dogs don’t share anything, and praise corporations who are larger models of the same greedy, self-centered, self-important self perceptions these people have. They mow down people just like they do trees, stopped from the ultimate slaughter of the poor only by the fact that a government stands in their way.

They hate the government because it does the job society ought to do, protects the most vulnerable from Republican dogs and their greedy bite and the world view that if trees get in the way, they knock them down, if poor people hold them back, they mow them down, and if a government rises up to stop them from stealing and hurting other people, these greedy republican dogs plot to overthrow it, calling what they are doing patriotic, all the time claiming that to hurt other people is their right.

But it is only greed that operates here, not rights.

These are vacuums sucking up natural resources, getting wealthy and powerful as a result of the lack they leave behind. The more people need what they have the more powerful they become. The problem is, they are not nearly so greedy or powerful or ruthless enough to become masters of anything, and so they are also hording over the little they managed to get, too scared to go collect anything from the corporations that have all the wealth, and too mean to share any of what they have with even poorer people beneath them.

They spout on and on against government intervention, and in some ways they are right. We can’t keep passing laws because some jerk somewhere decides he wants to steal all the candy in the candy jar. As a society, we are supposed to have some sense of civility, to know when we should stop taking candy, and to leave some for someone else. But these greedy Republican dogs don’t, and then hold the poor accountable for trying to get what’s left, and protest against the government which takes the poor’s side and tries to take something back.

Laws are only as good as the society that makes them. If the society has gone so far as this one has to have greedy Republican dogs hogging up all the wealth, nothing short of a military intervention against them will get it all back – and that’s what the dirty Republican dogs want, and excuse to use all those weapons they’ve been stashing in their basements for years, to put to an end the greedy masses that come to collect what they have.

Meanwhile corporations do even more to limit the amount of material wealth we fight over,  taking over space so that poor and poorer fight over smaller and smaller plots in a crazy version of musical chairs.

Of course, this does nothing to solve the situation upstairs with the stereo or the warfare Pauly engages in when he can’t stand the volume any more.

I would go up and confront the mother and ask her to have the boy turn down the volume. But I’ve tried that, only to have her scream, “He’s got rights, too, you know,” before she slams the door in my face.