But honey, think of the property value...

I've been thinking a lot about the recent "vegetable felon" cases.  I'd be surprised if anyone reading this blog hasn't heard about them, but the ones I'm familiar with are the "Julie Bass in Oak Park, MI" case, the "Compassion Farm" case, and the "Terrorized by CEDA" case.  The cases are all a bit different, and go to different extremes (i.e., threat of three months in jail, six months in jail, and the property being seized by the city and demolished, respectively).  But no matter how psycho the aims of each are (property demolition, srsly?), there is a common thread underlying all of them--no one wants to see your veggies.

From here on out, I'm basically only going to talk about the Julie Bass case, partially because it's the one I'm the most familiar with, and partially because the other two are so off the deep end crazy that it will only obscure my ultimate point (yes, this post has been brought to you today by an actual point).  So here's the basic scoop:  the city dug up her front lawn to do some needed sewer/drainage repairs--cool, thanks for that.  Then she needed to repair her front lawn because, well, it was big piles of dirt.  The family decided to put in a vegetable garden (after, they thought, obtaining permission from the city).  Ordinance violation citations followed, and now the City of Oak Park is the preferred internet pariah for their Stepford Neighborhood goals (apparently the Casey Anthony thing finally ran its course).

Basically up to speed now?  Good, because I'm going to say something very surprising, that I doubt you would expect to see from my fingertips--I sympathize with the surrounding homeowners.  Please note that I did not say I agree with them, but I do have sympathy for them.  How not?  They're a product of their generations, their society, their upbringing.  Look, I'm a trained philosopher.  One of the real downsides to this is that I am pretty good at seeing both sides of an argument.  It does a great deal of damage to otherwise wonderful rants of righteousness.  (But woe betide the world when, after careful consideration and seeing both sides, I still have enough venom for one side to launch into a rant.)  So unfortunately for me, I can understand the surrounding homeowner's positions.  They bought their houses with certain expectations about the nature of the neighborhood, its look, and the probable nature of their property value.  And they're concerned that the vegetable garden in the front yard will do harm to some or all of these.

Furthermore, they're right.  The vegetable garden probably will affect the character of the neighborhood, the look of the neighborhood, and will likely harm their property value.  [NB:  did you see what I did there?  I only claim that one of those three will actually do harm.  Sneaky am I.]  And this brings me, circuitously, to my point.  We now live in a society where being forced to see food growing nearby is considered harmful.  I don't think anyone seriously believes that if those garden beds had been filled with flowers, that Julie Bass would currently be in the media, or would be enduring harassment by anyone.  Besides, the citations specifically cite the vegetables as the problem.

I was mulling this fact over in my head while working in my own garden tonight.  And yes, it was hotter than Hades, let's just get that out of the way right now.  What is so offensive about vegetables?  I mean, there are many things that will lower a neighborhood's property value:  the presence of crack houses, the installation of a waste dump, the house collapsing or being obviously derelict and falling apart, etc.  I totally get why any reasonable neighborhood wouldn't want that sort of thing, and why there would be ordinances to assist in preventing or dealing with those situations.  Is "seeing food growing" on the same list as "waste dump"?

Yes, seeing food growing is indeed on the same list in a great number of neighborhoods in our country.  And honestly, I think that this fact all by itself goes a long way towards explaining the mess we're in as a nation right now.  What hope could a country have that can no longer endure the sight of food in its natural state?  What is the worth of a citizenry that thinks so highly of itself that not only does each individual feel that he/she does not have to stoop to the level of farmer, but that person can actually bring the law to bear on anyone who forces them to have contact with farming or gardening or food growing in any form.  You see, I might have some sympathy with those poor, benighted neighbors, but I've lost all sympathy for the culture that spawned them.

At root, I think this is a class issue--most things in America are anymore.  What is wrong with seeing food growing?  The same thing that's wrong with seeing laundry hanging to dry, or chickens in the backyard, or any other of the myriad potential offenses that HOAs across America decry.  It's not that it looks unseemly, it's that it looks poor.  We associate growing food with poverty, and thank god we don't have to grow our own food anymore because now we're RICH!  We can afford to make other people do it for us!  (And pay them poorly, and make sure we never see them, and often bring in slave labor to make sure our prices are acceptable.)  And we can afford machines to dry our clothes for us!  And chickens?!  O.M.G., those were from, like, the depression days or something.  No one in their right mind would want to do anything like that again!  Well, except for those folks who were too dumb to become investment bankers or interior designers. They can still do those things, but *ahem* Certainly Not Us.

So I guess my take-home message here, for what it's worth, is that this isn't about an insane property inspector in Oak Park (although that doesn't help), or about an abusive city government, or a freedom fighter woman defending her land (god bless her for it, though).  This is far more systemic than that.  It's about a society that is so deeply, fundamentally broken to its core that it can no longer endure sight of the most basic things that got us out of the trees and made us human beings in the first place.  We've become totally and utterly ungrounded as a nation and a society.

So just imagine how hard its going to go when our economy finally does bite it.

Have a happy weekend.

Touch of grey

(I seem to be on some kind of video-posting kick. Please bear with me, it's probably just a phase.)

You know, I don't know if I've spent enough time extolling the virtues of my readers (or musing over the incredible fact that I have readers). You guys really rock, you know that? I was, perhaps, a bit depressed in my last post. A bit, perhaps, melodramatic. A bit, perhaps, of a pretentious gothy snot. But you all took it in stride, commiserated with me, shared your own experiences, and generally talked me back off the ledge. I even got a lovely evening of knitting with good friends in the deal. Hm. Maybe I should whine more often? (/jk)

The shoe is on the hand, it fits // There's really nothing much to it // Whistle through your teeth and spit, cause // it's alright.
We will get by // We will survive.

But, as the estimable Jerry Garcia says, we will get by. In a lot of ways, that song sums up how I feel most of the time, admittedly more acutely at some times than others. It really isn't the case that "I think we're all doomed" (I didn't even think that during my last post). I do think our way of life is doomed--and good riddance, really, so that's not even very depressing to me. What depresses, scares, and just generally cranks me off, is that we are so screwing ourselves working through our not-quite-doomed-ness. There are good ways to transition our lifestyles to a healthy, sustainable culture. There are less good ways of doing it. There are tricky ways of doing it. There are outright bad ways of doing it. And then there's the way we're doing it, which as far as I can tell is edging up on worst-case scenario bad. Everything we need to do, everything that we'll have no choice but to do, is being made progressively harder and more traumatic by our collective attitude towards it. Even the people who are supposed to be at the forefront of the battle, the avant guard, as it were, find that they only fight just up to the point where it becomes mildly incovenient for them. And because of that, everything is going to go much harder than it needs to.

Every silver lining's got a // touch of grey.
Yeah, we'll get through this, I will gladly concede that, even though it's just gonna suck for a long while. So it's good to have reminders of how we're not totally doomed, and why we might be worth saving. You readers are part of that, reminding me that the ledge isn't really where I want to be. My friends & family, playing with the kids, the cat, all those things that will still be worth doing no matter what our dumbass culture goes and does next. The first Farmer's Market of the season, seeing people I hadn't even realized that I missed until I saw them. People who loved our two sons' new mohawk haircuts (!), and had worried all winter about if B and I would ever find a job (we did!), and wanted to trade bread for cherries.

During the worst of the Soviet Union collapse, when the only food to be had was via garden or barter, and no one knew what tomorrow would bring, people still celebrated birthdays. Weddings were held (and consumated!), and babies were born. Grandmas held grandchildren, and died peacefully, having lived a full life. Games were played, people laughed. There was pain, and agony, and starvation, and death. And there was joy, and happiness, and giddiness, and love. All things in balance.

We will get by. We'll return to your regularly scheduled blogging soon. Thanks, guys, and enjoy the song!

Why I don't like horror movies

Despite the title of this entry, I love horror movies. I always have. These days, what with all of the adapting and such going on, and of course with the children around, I don't get to indulge too often. But I've been a horror film fan for probably far longer than is really healthy. I remember watching the Saturday Night Shockers (on KTVI Channel 11--St. Louis!) when I was only 6 years old. Certainly not healthy.

So anyway, I love horror films. Real ones, too. Sure, the dippy "high school horror" flicks that were all the rage at the end of the 90's are fun (think Scream), but I love the atmospheric mind-f*cks. Jacob's Ladder, Blair Witch Project, Paperhouse and so on. Movies that make you question your grip on reality. I seem to particularly enjoy Japanese horror, and in fact my favorite video game series of all time is Silent Hill (man, that game will seriously mess with you).

Okay, so why am I discussing my apparent love/hate relationship with horror films on a blog about adapting to a low-power future? Bear with me, I'm getting there.

So for the past week, my parents have had the kids at their family farm. This has left my husband and I with more free time, and more ways of using it, than we are really used to. So, we decided that we'd have a horror-movie night! Yes! Great idea. All kinds of awesome horror flicks have come out in the past few years that we'd missed, now is our chance, right? So we rent The Ring and Sweeney Todd (okay, ST isn't really a horror, but you have to admit, it fits with the atmosphere).

The Ring is everything I love, or maybe "loved", in a horror film. Relatively little overt blood & guts, most of the real horror is left to the imagination. Surreal use of graphic effects, disjoint atmosphere, just general downright creepiness. Compelling villain. Interesting backstory. Actual plot. Real evil. Perfect. The adrenaline pumped. Gasps were had. Brief moments of pure fear, tempered by the fact that this is all happening on a TV screen. The film resolved in a fairly straighforward fashion, not answering all questions (by a long shot), but letting you off the hook for worrying about the protagonists, for the time being at least. When the movie was over, I had that classic, slightly strung-out, pleasantly jumpy feeling endemic to me watching decent horror flicks.

I hated it.

What went wrong? The movie was great, and right up my alley. I reacted to it in, more or less, the same way I always react to that sort of movie. Despite the movie's best efforts to break the fourth wall and make you confuse reality with the film, I had no delusions that what had happened in the movie had even a vague chance of happening in the real world. That is--I wasn't still scared, the scared part was done. So why hadn't I enjoyed this experience which, in my past life, I'd always loved?

At some point in the discussion of the film (as my husband and I are oft want to do--we are philosophers, after all), I realized what had gone wrong. It's true that I wasn't scared of what happened in the film happening in the real world. But rather, my physiological reaction to the fear in the film (the adrenaline, heart pumping, etc.) is the same physiological reaction I have to many horrors in my now-everyday life. Contemplating an end to cheap oil--and what that means to our society--inspires the same heart-pumping adrenaline shot. Thinking about how I will feed my children when the shelves are bare and the zombies are coming inspires a level of fear that even Paperhouse cannot attain. Thinking about my community, unprepared, breaking down at every level, leaving people with no net, no hope, brings nausea. These feelings pass; it's not like I'm constantly walking around in a state of perpetual fear. But when I take a moment to really think about these things, the fear is paralyzing, and the physiological reaction is predictable.

It's the same physiological effect I get when I watch horror films. Or, to put it in a more salient way, I can no longer disambiguate my physiological reaction to horror movies from my reaction to real life. Sure, I get that the movies are fiction, but they inspire the same sickening, clammy-skinned reaction I have now when contemplating my children's starvation. That's not fun. That's just no kind of fun.

I'm a little annoyed by this. I would really like to have my horror movies back, unmolested by associations with real-world poverty, real-world pain, real-world horror. I want to go back to my previous innocence, so that I can enjoy horror movies again. But I guess my life has become too horrific for me to be able to enjoy horror. Perhaps I'll go through a middle-aged goth period (similar to my early-20's one), where I sort of go straight through horror and came out the other side, able to enjoy it again, but in a cynical, cold, detached way. Not really the same thing.

Maybe someday I'll get my horror films back. But for now, I think that Sweeney Todd will have to be the farthest I travel down that road.