*
The White House Office of Science and Technology Director John P. Holdren went on record this week as standing by his stance to de-develop the US to pre-1973 standards. “A massive campaign must be launched to restore a high-quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States,” Holdren wrote along with Paul and Anne H. Ehrlich in the “recommendations” concluding their 1973 book Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions.
Yeah, right. So let's talk about what is was like to live in the northeast during the cold winter of 1973. And let's think about what it might have been like to have been more "pre-industrial."
In 1973, Flat Stanley was starting her senior year of high school. There was a fuel-oil shortage. Flat Stanley and her mother lived in upstate New York in a double-wide, on a hill, that had just been put in that summer. That made the family "new customers." New Customers couldn't get fuel oil deliveries that winter. The closest place to buy fuel oil was in a town 20 miles away. Sales were limited to five gallons per purchase, and only on the days when your license plate ended in odd or even.
Practically speaking, this meant that on the lucky Saturdays when the fuel oil store was open on days that matched the family car's license plate, that FS's mother could spend her Saturday making as many trips over snowy roads to the fuel oil station as time and weather permitted. Unless, of course, the owner was feeling pissy, in which case he would only sell to the mother one or two times instead of three, four or five times that day. And assuming, of course, that the driver could afford the fuel to make the trips.
FS and her mother would haul those precious, smelly, heavy five gallon cans of fuel up an unplowable, undrivaeble, rutted, snow-filled, dirt driveway to stand on a rickety stool, lift the can over our heads, and pour into an empty fuel tank. It was a long, cold, hard winter.
There was no running water in that trailer, and so what if there had been? There wasn't enough heat to keep the pipes thawed. We hauled our sewage out to a pit that had been dug to hold an unconnected septic tank that remained empty while our nightsoil drained into the earth. Or froze, then flowed away with the spring thaw.
For showers that year, Flat Stanley walked about a mile to a bar that had an unlit bathroom facility in an unlocked basement for summer campers. Yes, Virginia, wet, frozen hair does break on the walk home.
De-develop? How romantic -- and naive -- can a person get? Roughing it on a camping weekend, my friends, is not the same as a lifestyle.
Sure, the US as a whole can become more energy conscious. But before we go about dictating or legislating simpler lifestyles, let's think about what that really means. As hard as it was, Flat Stanley and her mother were fortunate to have had the income to be able to haul that fuel oil; we were fortunate to have had the strength to drag it through the snow, lift it to the tank, and pour it in. We were fortunate to have been healthy enough to endure the cold (hurray for work and school!).
The Flat Stanley moral of the story is, until it's you who's cold, until it's you who can't get the same basic necessities as your neighbors, until it's you who goes without, your nonsensical ideas about returning to a "simpler" time are nothing more than hot air.
Take it from Flat Stanley: There is a place for hot air, and life-changing policy ain't the place.
*
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Tuesday, September 07, 2010
Big City Morning Commute
*
The thing Flat Stanley likes most about living and working in DC is the morning commute. No, silly reader, it's not because the rest of the day is that bad. It's because Flat Stanley lands in the middle of the city while its feet are still in slippers, before it's had its first cup of coffee, before it's brushed its teeth, combed its hair and dressed for the day.
By afternoon the city's in full swing and all these little pieces are lost in the busyness of busy.
At the bus stop a homeless man talks about his plans for the day: Go to the shelter, get a shower, then sell socks from a large duffel bag. He hopes to start a community center to provide counsel for other homeless. Flat Stanley's schedule changes for a week or two, and when she next catches that bus, the man has moved on and she doesn't see him again.
A well-dressed bag lady asks the bus driver every single day for a week if he stops at Quinn. "It's between Scott and Ridley." Another passenger, an elegant older woman, always wears huge, Hollywood-style sunglasses. One morning she boards without her glasses, and FS sees the remnants of a big ugly bruise high on her cheek.
The metro (subway to my pre-city readers) stops within a block of FS's place of work, but the chance to greet the rising sun as laborers hose the urine from the sidewalks and the homeless take up their collection stations under a cool morning breeze and red lights not yet holding up traffic — it's too tempting.
At 7:15 on the corner of F and Ninth, a black man dressed in an oversized basketball-style tank and shorts practices fancy foot-work, running in place and throwing jabs, his head bopping to the sound in his earphones and filling the entire intersection with grunts that impress even this former Marine. The porters at the Marriott gather to watch and laugh as FS tells them about her efforts to catch the guy on her cell phone camera. Passersby make a point of crossing the street anywhere but at the corner where the Richard Simmons-wannabe gets it on.
At the Ultra Bar, housed in an old bank building, the sidewalk is never scrubbed. Neatly stacked on the granite wall is a black leatherette mini-jacket and barely-worn stiletto-heeled velvet boots. They're gone that afternoon...FS makes a point of checking.
Lenny Fineman and the Troll perform their amazing violin and guitar duo at the next metro exit. They were gone for a few weeks. Vacation, probably.
The Chinese immigrant, the one FS by-passed a few months to put a buck in the Troll's open guitar case, is a case-study in brilliance, or insanity, or schizophrenia, or maybe all three. She sits on a low wall, her left elbow propped on her knee, and takes a relaxed drag on her cigarette. At the same time, she jabs a pissed-off middle-finger salute to an invisible person and shrieks a curse in gibberish. Or maybe it's Chinese.
One morning an empty old woman who reeks of stale urine drags a white tee shirt while looking in all the trash cans. Looking for something, but she does not know what, and she'll never find it. It's a horrible, heat-record-breaking day. She's still there that afternoon, exhausted and smellier, still lost, still looking, her tee-shirt now gray and ragged.
Today, FS got a laptop at work. Under the bookmarks was a tag "all dudes-gay male porn." Oopsie. Somebody's going to be in trouble.
Tomorrow, FS plans to walk down G Street. Someone scratched an interesting comment about a nearby church into the cement of a freshly poured curb, and FS wants to write it down.
*
The thing Flat Stanley likes most about living and working in DC is the morning commute. No, silly reader, it's not because the rest of the day is that bad. It's because Flat Stanley lands in the middle of the city while its feet are still in slippers, before it's had its first cup of coffee, before it's brushed its teeth, combed its hair and dressed for the day.
By afternoon the city's in full swing and all these little pieces are lost in the busyness of busy.
At the bus stop a homeless man talks about his plans for the day: Go to the shelter, get a shower, then sell socks from a large duffel bag. He hopes to start a community center to provide counsel for other homeless. Flat Stanley's schedule changes for a week or two, and when she next catches that bus, the man has moved on and she doesn't see him again.
A well-dressed bag lady asks the bus driver every single day for a week if he stops at Quinn. "It's between Scott and Ridley." Another passenger, an elegant older woman, always wears huge, Hollywood-style sunglasses. One morning she boards without her glasses, and FS sees the remnants of a big ugly bruise high on her cheek.
The metro (subway to my pre-city readers) stops within a block of FS's place of work, but the chance to greet the rising sun as laborers hose the urine from the sidewalks and the homeless take up their collection stations under a cool morning breeze and red lights not yet holding up traffic — it's too tempting.
At 7:15 on the corner of F and Ninth, a black man dressed in an oversized basketball-style tank and shorts practices fancy foot-work, running in place and throwing jabs, his head bopping to the sound in his earphones and filling the entire intersection with grunts that impress even this former Marine. The porters at the Marriott gather to watch and laugh as FS tells them about her efforts to catch the guy on her cell phone camera. Passersby make a point of crossing the street anywhere but at the corner where the Richard Simmons-wannabe gets it on.
At the Ultra Bar, housed in an old bank building, the sidewalk is never scrubbed. Neatly stacked on the granite wall is a black leatherette mini-jacket and barely-worn stiletto-heeled velvet boots. They're gone that afternoon...FS makes a point of checking.
Lenny Fineman and the Troll perform their amazing violin and guitar duo at the next metro exit. They were gone for a few weeks. Vacation, probably.
The Chinese immigrant, the one FS by-passed a few months to put a buck in the Troll's open guitar case, is a case-study in brilliance, or insanity, or schizophrenia, or maybe all three. She sits on a low wall, her left elbow propped on her knee, and takes a relaxed drag on her cigarette. At the same time, she jabs a pissed-off middle-finger salute to an invisible person and shrieks a curse in gibberish. Or maybe it's Chinese.
One morning an empty old woman who reeks of stale urine drags a white tee shirt while looking in all the trash cans. Looking for something, but she does not know what, and she'll never find it. It's a horrible, heat-record-breaking day. She's still there that afternoon, exhausted and smellier, still lost, still looking, her tee-shirt now gray and ragged.
Today, FS got a laptop at work. Under the bookmarks was a tag "all dudes-gay male porn." Oopsie. Somebody's going to be in trouble.
Tomorrow, FS plans to walk down G Street. Someone scratched an interesting comment about a nearby church into the cement of a freshly poured curb, and FS wants to write it down.
*
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