Minimal Respect of a Person
   
   
   
   Does artistic wonder ever emerge from clean and tidy territory? Not that
I have ever seen, but nearly every artistic person I have ever known has
clearly defined areas of no innovation, which they maintain in a sometimes
frightfully tidy manner, and get self righteous about.
   A group of several young adults outside the downtown library conspired
to accost a 75 year old woman waiting at the crosswalk. While some of the
young people did a visual screen from the nearby library security people, a
girl deliberately knocked the older woman to the pavement and sat down,
leaning against her, in an apparent show of being in a seizure. The older
woman was sorely angered by this and quite convinced that the seizure was a
fake. She backhanded her assailant. The fellows who had hid the event then
launched into a discussion of what to do about the seizure.
   The older woman demanded some kind of action from the library security
people, saying she'd been hit. Her assailant spoke to the security people
also, saying that the older woman had hit her. A city bus security person
who had seen the event from across the street asserted that it was in fact
a deliberate setup, but a policeman called in a few minutes later could not
be convinced to give the matter any prosecutable importance.
   A library teenager that I live with told me that he would guess that the
attack was an asserting of social dominance on the part of the younger
group, against the normally dominant and creatively stuffy society,
represented by the security people and the formal commercially focused older
people.
   For me the attack represents the view, that I hold, that it is blasphemy
of the basest sort to consider commercial choreography as a standard for
normal human contact, though beligerent choreography seems hardly an
improvement. The public library represents a particularly striking
contradiction this way in offering a pretense of noncommercial opportunity
that costs a lot of money to provide and requires enormous attention to
commercial detail to maintain. In a saner world the library would be private
property, with a library card charged for each service based on real costs,
and a cost at the door to enter at all.
   The younger people, having graduated from high school into the nebulous
condition of being neither a student nor a worker and thus commercially a
nonperson, are seduced by the nonmonetary aura of the library into seeking
some kind of genuine human dignity there. They seek choreographic dignity
rather than the normal commercial terrorism or the customer always being
right. Their bid seems ridiculous to me, but only because the library
environment is a fake, a racket, a device deliberately intended to derail
the creative potential of unemployed energetic people. To buck the
commercial vibe there looks as silly as a picnic in a duststorm.
   The older woman is a member of a city political study and action group
that heard her story. No-one in that group expressed empathy for the
assailants and many expressed disbelief that it could even have happened.
Some suggested that perhaps what the downtown needs is a bigger variety of
similar noncommercial pretense offerings, like a community center. Others
suggested that a meaner authoritarian overlay on the whole city is in
order.
   I think there is no escape from facing the need in everyone's life for a
noncommercial life context, and that the normal adult adaptation of closet
creativity and closet exploration is tragic, for all of us and not just for
me and the young people in front of the library. I think that everyone needs
a publically recognized definition of limits on the commercial terrorism,
both in terms of time of day and territory where it can rule. We all need
places and opportunities for recognition of our real selves, a Mardi Gras
or Burning Man of the normal day, a family nudist camp where wealth is
measured in sand castle ability or handstanding or how much you can give
away, where vehicles are shameful unless handmade, where sexuality is a
marvel, where every person is a vivid living presentation, of equal
significance to any other, and so has no drive to dominate like the young
people in front of the library, the security people, and the members of the
city club.
   None of us gains by dominance, not really. Revenge is only sweet for a
moment and then the loneliness behind it re-emerges. We desperately require
respect, but not at the cost of estrangement. I need to be recognized as a
dignified individual, but even more I need to be linked as well to other
people, without compromising that dignity. There is no way to have both in
a commercial context. I think commerce is the burka of life, the rule
against showing the truly unique expression that each of us actually is all
day. I think being thus hid from each other stifles emotional and
intellectual maturation; and feeds countless cultural illusions like the
compassion for the homeless people expressed by the city club and the
bitterness of the young people about a system that equally oppresses the
older woman they attacked.
   Our city needs to grant permission for land owners to declare their
property utterly non-commercial, with a lighter code set and an acceptance
of the real estate market value loss. The nighttime and the weekend need
recognition as noncommercial time when polite formality can be set aside,
commercial offering is unprotected by police, and driving is regulated by
human feelings.
   Homeless people need to be recognized as the cultural wonder that they
are, not as a problem to eliminate. Sleeping in the free public parks has
got to be legalized and encouraged as a noble and moderate human expression,
with curfew restricted to paid private parks. Manure and urine need to be
addressed citywide in an ecologically sane way, not just with the homeless
people; we must someday have a real composting system like nature requires,
that makes a nontoxic soil, perhaps beginning with the homeless people in
parks.
   An untidy world will raise a whirlwind of feelings for sure, and so any
change that way will probably have to be gradual to prevent a panic return
to suffocation. Creativity in my life has always required an equal measure
of mature perspective about the other people affected, and I doubt there
will ever be escape from that. Ironically I imagine the young attackers
will be the first to seek the shrinking area still subject to regulation,
in a city headed the way I wish. And the older woman will join me.
  

   The area shown here is part of Alton Baker Park. The ground is quite
rough, convoluted from years of uneven settling of the landfill material
buried there. Perhaps because of that instability, it has escaped the
intense development of all the land around it. It also has no trees, perhaps
due to a high level of poisonous materials in the soil. In Brazil or Turkey
or India this area would have become a favella long ago. I think that the
old woman's attackers would have had little interest in the library area if
their creative expression had that other option.
   Outside the library I and the other loiterers are subject to a
humiliation similar to what happened to the old woman, wherein a group of
strikingly dressed thugs make a show of constructive politeness while
forcing abject humility, and wait for a radio response to a request for
information about a name. The basis for their attack will generally be
suspicion of some kind of victimless creative cultural exploration or
expression. It will be possession of a controlled substance, open container
of alcohol, trespassing, reckless endangerment with a skateboard or bicycle,
kidnapping a minor, listing as a sex offender, or failure to appear on a
previous harassment. The younger people also face suspicion of minor in
possession of alcohol or cigarettes, truancy, listing as a runaway, or
sexual involvement in any way. That I can tell, the harassment is all based
on having the creative or stereotypically anarchical appearance of people
with little money and lots of time. Actual criminally involved people that I
have gotten to know as a rule are masters of looking inoffensive and
unremarkable, or like me they deliberately get to know the members of the
enemy groups, deliberately drawing engagement while not convictable..
   A favella is a mystery to me, living my whole life in America where it
is illegal. But I fantasize about it anyway. I imagine, in Alton Baker
Park, an area bounded by a three foot high berm on two sides and bike path
on the other two, within which no cultural enforcement occurs, and no
government workers enter unless explicitly invited and escorted. The only
water available there would be from a one inch PVC pipe drawing water from
the Willamette via a solar powered pump into a shallow pool in the center of
the area. Just inside the berm would be a row of random garbage about eight
or ten feet wide, running the whole length of the boundary, serving as both
a buffer to the world of regulation and as a source of materials.
   It could serve as a very comprehendable example of cultural and
technological innovations that insurance and academic narrow-mindedness
prohibit in the regulated world. An American favella could be quite a
source of experimental ideas, having access to American garbage and
infrastructure.
   I think the scramble for personal dignity in the melting pot culture of
America, of institutionally trapped mutually dependent people picking on
each other all day, is a tragedy. In my own life dignity came easy. I was
never scolded or picked on at all in my youth, by anyone, not teachers, not
parents, not other kids, not anyone at all. I look at the struggle from
outside, like a discussion about how to swim by someone who has never been
in the water.
   My kid picks on me sometimes, for five minutes when he first gets out of
school. Sometimes the result is tears and a half hour of mutual bitterness.
And for me a foreboding. He is under attack a lot in his life. He is doing
fairly well with mental health anyway, but I cringe in horror all the same.
Compared to the knife fights of the ancient Celtic culture or the pistol
duels of early America his life is pretty low stress; but I compare with my
own life.
   I see the scramble for dignity as a major waste of wealth, a conversion
of potential wonder into symbolic gesture that gets ritually destroyed,
like art becoming a pinata. From my place the struggle looks like a drive
for self respect, not really an interactive issue. My kid is being picked
on by countless people who express desperation about their own self image,
with the relation to him being imaginary. The pain of the attacks is real
but the originating issues that I have witnessed are not. He lives in a
culture that is like a video game, wherein cause and effect are
artificially determined by programming, and not even superficially about
anything that genuinely matters outside of the game.
   Getting a building permit is maddening for me this way, with nearly all
the criteria that must be addressed having no real world benefit to anyone,
and the game itself being a major obstacle to sanity of cultural
expression through disabling nearly all the average people. My neighbors
cannot get coaching about genuine safety or long term maintenance issues in
their remodeling because to ask for feedback is to open Pandora's box.
   Nearly all of them pay rent, directly or through loan interest, in a
desperate bid to prove some kind of worthiness to themselves by somehow
convincing some other people. It does succeed, kind of, with the other
people scrambling the same way, but I am disgusted. A pretense of owning a
ridiculously expensive item, established through usury, looks like proof of
idiocy to me, a demonstration of childish confusion. I cannot see it as a
root of dignity.
   Likewise the drivers license, permission, kind of, to operate a very
heavy, potentially deadly, machine at absurd speed in a mass of similar
vehicles and potential victims, all very stimulating but a basis for
dignity? It looks to me like an invitation to be a madman, a morass of
unnecessary physical danger compounded by considerable expense and the
threat of bureaucratic robbery by the police.
   I have always had a profound level of self respect, even as a toddler,
and it was compromised slightly by the driver's license or the rental
address. My considerable success in school was an embarrassment, like
having mastered tiddly-winks in a house being wrecked by a thunderstorm. I
associate that with validation from strangers, that a rave review is a sign
that I'm an idiot in some way that I've overlooked, particularly that I've
vanquished or humiliated someone I would have liked to befriend.
   I recognize a real need for my kid and everybody to establish some kind
of stable condition of real self respect, of actually not being a jerk or
an idiot, at the very least to have a clear perspective on what is success
at being human and what is a ridiculous condemnation or admiring remark
from people flailing in emotional desperation. I recognize a need to see a
barking dog or mean person as mentally ill, not a challenge of genuine
worthiness, especially if that dog or person is me.
   
   
   
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