Slippery Slope: Living in our Commons
 

Tonight I am noodling on a thought. I do not know where it came from, but it seems to be rooted in our debate over a wall.

When does our collective heart tilt away from the idea of building a national wall? People that grew up near THE WALL know that we outgrew it.

When I arrived in the U.S. my mind was disconcerted between all of our fences. What happened to unity I wondered? The Statue of Liberty? Those thoughts really hit home when I worked inside the fence at the GM Technical Center. An employee was from the middle east. Story was that he lived inside the Tech Center to save on rent. He also showered with Tech Center water for free. It all made sense to me. He was efficient. What I did not understand was why engineers that purportedly worried about efficiency wanted to kick him out. :confused:

What goes through your mind as you think about common spaces and how people fence them?

Private property is not the Commons and common space is regulated.

I don't believe in private property.

Now get off my lawn!:mad:

Mister Meany. :p

I agree that you have the correct answer as to why the person should not have lived on private property.

Do you ever think about how to persuade us to live closer together and reduce our reliance on automobiles?

That's the stuff I think about lately. It seems like we all want to own our own little campgrounds but we end up getting lonely in them. Then we hop in our cars in search of hangout spots, whether they be bars, theaters, actual campgrounds, etc. Engineers are working their butts off to solve the energy efficiency problems but I think they have reached a physical limit. The pendulum has swung from efficiency being an engineering problem to efficiency being an emotional problem -- the emotions of living closer to one another. Politics.

I don't think the government can persuade the vast majority of Americans to voluntarily do something they don't want to do. The desire to have your own space is part of who we are as a species. People who can afford to have always put space between themselves and others, even within a family. What younger brother who shared a bedroom with his older brother didn't long for his own room. In addition, people who live in close quarters are as lonely as those they that don't.

I understand your concern about what Global Warming is going to bring about. It can be frustrating to perceive that we have the ability to address some of the identifiable causes. Are you familiar with James Burke's excellent Connections series? At it's close he presents four paths into the future we could take to address the problem. The last one is the path he thinks we will follow - muddle through as best we can because that is what humans have done with crises since the beginning of history. It's who we are as a species.

Here's a commons question. The other day a vacuum truck stopped right in front of my house and proceeded to dump it's contents into the storm sewer. An abuse of the commons, no? Or, might it have been legal? I doubt it. I can't see why 'legal' practice would be to go to a side residential street not visible from a main street to dump....

I've got pics. Should I blow the whistle on these guys? The most that might happen, I expect is they guys on the truck might be in trouble. There might be some risk for me to, given the rep of private waste haulers....

Great input Sir.

I think of the time the Obama administration closed monuments and parks and folks led by Sarah Palin forced their way in anyways because "Our taxes pay for it, it belongs to the people and by God we'll use it whenever we like!"......

Because something is owned by the government with our tax money means we get to use it whenever the fancy strikes? Stealing a cop car isn't really theft, because my taxes paid for it?

Of course not, that's idiotic. (Hence it's association with Sarah.)

Fences on private property? It's my property, I paid for it, I pay the taxes on ot. I have a right to keep my neighbors dog from crapping on it if I want.

I see what you are saying. The muddler camp is a big one and I must admit that it is my comfort zone. Perhaps a difference between myself and fellow American muddlers is that I have the courage to write that we need to use less land as we continue our muddling. We do not seem to want to maintain it anyway.

As I continue my journey into politics I keep learning that what is old is new again. Political discussion can get so convoluted that that we even forget what we have said and begin to disagree with ourselves given enough time. Discovering and profiting from inconsistency seems to be the new business model of New York, New York and it has infected Silicon Valley. Or maybe their fascination with profit is mutual and they are involved in a circle jerk to use a colloquialism.

In any event the notion of love/hate affair with walls struck me in the heart again with the walls that are in NYC. They take the form of little pyramid pricks that prevent people from sitting. The rich people profit from sidewalk merchants and street musicians, but yet the rich people want to exclude others. So what permanent structures do they erect to insulate themselves from the ephemeral dances of street beauty?

Little prick pyramids like the butt irritating cones in the attached photo. They say to me thanks for your money, now get the fuck out. It would be funny and inspirational if the owner sat on them to show tolerance for pain like a god or a stoic. But the owner is absent. So were the customers. The associated restaurant had an empty chairs with empty tables feeling about it. The butt irritating forms were an unnecessary barbed wired fence around a space that people did not want to invade.

Somewhere else on PC I wrote an angry piece about Michigan business owners building cities that they do not want to live in. Here is what their dreams look like in NYC space if it all goes wrong.

The low walls seem designed for sitting. The butt-spikes may have been added later because the wrong people were sitting too much. There are a million stories in the big city.

The dissonance between the sittable-walls and the butt-spikes is glaring, even upsetting. But there are barriers against the throng everywhere that property rights are maintains against it. Abandoned property has breached barriers--indeed, the expense of maintaining barriers can be a major cause of abandonment.

I hear you.

During my time away from PC I have been giving a lot of thought to the human senses. The example of prickly forms in NYC focus attention to the sense of touch and how it relates to politics. That is simple. On the other hand the sense of touch as a source of profit is a more modern political division.

During my time away I have paid more attention to the sense of smell. I saw city structures in a different light. For example let's focus on what it smells like to be in Guadalajara, Mexico and walking between its small city blocks. In one space is a person selling tractor parts. In a neighboring space might be a person raising a few farm animals. We can begin to feel the political tension in the simple smells of tractor exhaust vs organic farming within the confines of a city with new European money and Cartesian land use. Their math had infected the innocent native americans.

Bamberg, Germany is the city that focused my awareness on the sense of smell. Bamberg has a river that runs through it. On one side of the river is a castle. On the other side of the river is an old slaughterhouse. Lore has it, and I believe the lore, is that while the castle stood still the smells of slaughtering forced the slaughterhouse to move as Bamberg attracted more inhabitants. The political dance ended when the citizens of both sides of the river agreed that they had build something beautiful that all wanted to maintain.

That was castle space. That was farm animal space. That was political space of flags. Of real death over fighting about smell and borders.

The United States of America are charged with a different burden. We are burdened with making good of the promise that all men are created equal. We have to make good of our Declaration of Independence from England. As I walked through NYC and saw the form of barb wire through the ages of pricklyness of roses to the pricklyness of awful public spaces I gained the courage to write about the little things.

Little things like words in textbooks. Why did Americans really hate the royalty of England enough to have the courage to write the Declaration of Independence? Was it really about the taxes? I don't so. I think it was more about who was paying and laboring for the sewer system in London and who got to enjoy London's beauty.

I love sparring with you. You help me put important feelings into words. Barriers against the throng. Rivers, sewers, insulating one another from who is smart vs who is a tool. And arriving at a beautiful form that all want to maintain for a few hundred years.

That is efficiency. Hugs.

Now I need a smoke and a beer. That was hard to write.

Enjoying the ride, keep it up.
We had been independent of Old Blighty several decades before they determined to fund a solution to the Great Stink of London. Real engineering solutions to civil sanitation did much to make city life tolerable.

Pio1980,

When I visited London I brought my camera. As I walked around the city I tried to feel the contrast between it and America. I had a bias from Germany that said the nearest capitalist nation to America is Great Britain, and even by that contrast Great Britain allows their workers to be themselves during time off.

As I tried to capture that emotion in camera I rode the tubes and walked around the city. One morning I was lucky enough to ride the tube into the financial district during morning rush hour. My hope was to capture a sunrise over the Thames and be a hippy that I never was. But what happened that morning was that I reverted to being a European and sucking in my gut to make space that did not exist on the morning tube into London's financial district.

I felt good being courteous with my gear.

After I photographed the sunrise from the bank of the Thames, and smelled the stink of piss that was greater in days of yore :), I walked away from the river and back to reality. During that walk I found my photo. It was a contrast between the London that I was vs. the Londinium of yore. Glass tower vs. Stone wall. It was a magic moment for me. I treasure that photograph like archaeologists treasure delicate brushes and cops treasure good evidence.

Broom space.

Peace.

Some people do not want or care to share with others. Especially when the others are different from them.
Being selfish and self centered a prerequisite it seems for vocal opposition to a collective mentality.

Err Mah Gurd. My 1337 skillz are so tired that I do not recall how to Fix That For You and emoji a drink snort shooting out of my nose.

Some vs. Most.

I can't contrast it artfully anymore.

Peace.