There’s a surprising amount of things I’ve been excited about this week. My Black Cat inspiration has gotten me interested in old occultist and fringe ideas, as I was researching things I could use in place of the Tao and chi kung. It’s interesting how the Enlightenment highlighted the persistence of mystical beliefs in Western society, right? Like, the rise of rationalism pushed out a lot of older ideas from popular thought in the West and discounted traditional and mystical ideas from other parts of the world. At the same time, the possibility of proving some vitalist or other occult idea with the newfound power of science gave the ideas new life. I need better resources than what I’ve been able to find on the web, because I want to know more about what these ideas were actually purporting and how they connected and compared to various traditional and religious beliefs around the world. When I started plotting, my Kyoko stand-in was going to start off as a bounty hunter, but now I think she and her new partner will go chasing Bigfoot before diving into the mystery of the vital force that allows her powers to function.
There was also the exciting Pokémon Presents that’s gotten me jazzed! I am so into Raging Bolt! Every time I see a new Paradox, I’m so happy I picked Scarlet, because I love the wild and crazy designs of the ancient Pokémon over the “but kind of a robot” designs of the future Pokémon. That’s gotten me thinking about what I would do if I were in charge of making my own Pokémon game (more to come later *DOOM*), which of course means I have to make my own Pokémon. I got really into researching dinosaurs and Ice Age megafauna (stegosaurs for life). This morning, I got my library card for the local system and spent two hours reading a book about the megafauna extinctions of the Late Pleistocene and Holocene. That’s the reason for my lateness with this post; I forgot I had to write this.
All this to say, I want to talk about city services. I hadn’t been to a library in a long while, and I forgot how nice they were. Rows and rows of all kinds of books you can use for free, and they have a lot of other resources and things going on. I need to look more into their events, like they have this weekly crafting thing that sounds neat. The librarian said they have concerts and performances. There’s this genealogy program with Ancestry.com, so if you’re paying for Ancestry.com, check your local library; you maybe can do it for free, depending on how widespread that program is. They have these classes that offer credits, apparently, which is worth looking into. Like, libraries are such a good idea and should be funded more and we should make more? It’s crazy that we have this system for providing recreation and education for the whole community, which employs some of the most helpful and amazing people around, and we aren’t championing that.
Libraries don’t have it as hard as other services, but they’re still a great, emblematic example of what we’re letting rot away. Everything that museums do, libraries could do in the name of the public interest. Schools are obviously underfunded and under-resourced while being pushed to cram for tests, to the point that people question if education has value. Public transit is emaciated and faces this unfounded distrust; it’s a system that has to be done fully and robustly for people to see it’s real value, and yet our car-obsessed culture only allows inefficient and ineffective trial runs that “prove it could never work.” As we saw in the pandemic, our public health infrastructure is laughably weak, as we saw our underfunded public hospitals struggle just as much as our for-profit hospitals. The only thing we fund in force is our police and prison systems, for all the damage that does, and they’re always complaining that they somehow aren’t funded enough.
The way we fund and use our city services is a great example of how our city planning directly reflects our choices about who we give power to in society. By not funding public transit, we give power to car and oil companies, at the cost of opportunity and freedom of movement for everyone, especially poorer people. By not funding schools, we empower…so many bad actors, right? Let’s highlight political and social institutions that want to control culture, at the cost of our own intellectual, spiritual, and political lives. By not funding or building up public parks and libraries, we’re empowering private businesses to define the town square and identity of a community, at the cost of our actual community and ability to see and get to know each other. Public hospitals go without saying, right? Healthcare is a human right, so it extends that providing it for free to everyone would likely require or at least bolster a public healthcare system; primarily providing healthcare through a profit-driven system only serves to enrich ghouls by way of an unavoidable necessity that shouldn’t enrich anyone, at the cost of all of our health.
So, for all these reasons and others, we should be supporting and funding our public institutions. In the conversations about what the government spends money on, it doesn’t get said enough that taxes aren’t a cost; they’re an investment, and we should choose to invest in good things for everyone, rather than on ways to punish people we don’t like. It just seems like an obvious conclusion? If I had more money, I’d get a better place to live and make it more comfortable and give myself stuff that lets me do the things I want, not, I guess, buy a bunch of weapons to assault people who leave shopping carts in the parking lot. There’s too much talk of who “deserves” help, and how helping “the wrong people” (which ultimately is everyone, if you follow all the talking points) will somehow hurt everyone. It would be really neat if we stopped worrying about that and just gave everyone the stuff they need, you know? It’s weird and perverse that anyone is arguing that the only way to help our most struggling communities is to starve them of money and resources, and then heavily police them so they don’t do drugs or sell sex.
That being said, for as much as I could go on about how bad those things are, and for as much as we need people explaining that stuff, I’m not that good at it. I don’t have all the figures and history books at my side to quote properly. It’s also important that we talk about how much everyone would benefit from public services, to lead from a place of joy and comfort. Like today, with the warm and fuzzies I expressed about the library. And I’ve generally enjoyed my experiences with being on public transit. I have the most experience in Nashville, where it’s not a very good system, and I’d still rate the buses as nice places to be. I feel like a city person on the bus or subway, and I like that feeling. It’s nice to be around other people going about their days, to see places and people you’d otherwise never see all cooped up in your high speed metal death trap. And when I was interning in DC, I had a great time with the metro. I could actually get places quickly and easily from anywhere in town, without having a vehicle. I’d love to live somewhere I didn’t have to own a car!
To conclude, I guess call your local politician and tell them to do more library and bus and park. The taxes we give to the government aren’t theft of a weird alien bureaucracy that descended on us out of left field; it’s a bill we pay in exchange for the things the government we made to do for our benefit. We should be feeling that benefit every day.
Weekly Thoughts 8/12/23
Life in the Gutters 