Taking part

Not many of my readers here will be able to see it, but I'll be on Irish television Friday to talk about the state of US politics. If you're in Ireland, feel free to look me up around 4 pm Dublin time.

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Every morning I journey to the nearest village and wait for the bus to bring me to work in Dublin– usually in rainy darkness this time of year – and chat with my neighbours doing the same. A flimsy shelter of two plastic walls and an awning provides the only protection from blasts of wind and cold rain; when the county took it down for a few months of road repair, we felt its absence each morning.  

Unfortunately, teenagers with too little supervision and too few manners have etched words in the plastic that I used to shield from my daughter, before she became a jaded teen herself. Also, a single Irish winter can coat anything with layers of grime and algae – by spring most road signs are illegible.  So I was pleased to come out of Mass the other day and find some neighbours I knew busy scrubbing the shelter clean.

“That’s good of you, Bridget,” I said – she works at the village shop and is grandmother to two of my daughter’s school-mates, so we know each other well. I hadn’t realised, though, that she spent her weekends cleaning up the town.  

“Ah, we’re only after doing this once in a while,” Bridget said, as cars moved down the road in one direction and horses clopped down the other. “Youngsters can scratch it up faster than we can fix it. Other days we walk the roads picking up rubbish.”

I told them people dump rubbish on the side of the road along the canal where we live, and my daughter and I go pick it up sometimes. I gather that many rural Irish used to throw their rubbish away in hedgerows, which was fine when it was broken stones or cinders – but once the age of plastic arrived, the rubbish never disappeared.

“Sure you’re very good,” she said, sounding pleased. She handed me one of those hand-held devices that allow you to pick up trash without stooping over. “Here – take this,” she said. “You’re part of the clean-up crew now.”

I feel like I’ve been deputised, I said.  

“Well, if you’re going to do it anyway, you might as well be part of something,” she said. I couldn’t argue.

A difficult year, part 2

This probably should have been Part 1.

Many of my acquaintances declare this to be “the worst year ever,” which seems a bit melodramatic to me – I might have picked, I don’t know, 1940 or 1666 or 1348 or any number of other possibilities. Nonetheless, I understand that a lot of friends of mine in the USA, UK and Ireland have all seen particularly contentious political debates, Europe continues to see a flood of refugees from the Middle East, and the Middle East … their tragedies dwarf anything we have seen in generations.

Interestingly, though, few people I know mention Syria, or the shrinking Arctic ice, or the increasingly dubious quality of tap water in US towns, or all the other things that affect their lives. What they usually name are celebrities – singers and actors – who died this year, from Prince to Alan Rickman to Carrie Fisher. And they don’t just feel disappointed, they feel betrayed.

With no disrespect to their genuine grief, I keep in mind that these celebrities were not people who spent their lives feeding Third-World orphans or facing down authoritarian death squads. They were show-business performers who made it big – at best, nice people who used their fame and wealth generously. I know no one who knew them personally, yet I know many people who mourned them as though they were family.

 A few reasons for this stand out. Most modern people have their first crushes and obsessions for celebrities who were famous when they were teenagers, say, 10 to 20. Since most of those teen idols will be a decade or two older than their fans, and many actors and singers have a decade or so at their peak, modern people go through life idolising people two to three decades older than themselves.

 People who were famous outside that generational window don't bother us when they die. Most people my age were hit hard by the death of Carrie Fisher or George Michael, but not by Maureen O'Hara or Stan Freberg last year, as people my age were not likely to know or care who those people were. Likewise, most of my daughter’s teenaged peers wouldn't know who Carrie Fisher or George Michael are, so those deaths wouldn't affect them.

In other words, I told people my age, we're getting to the middle-aged window when celebrity deaths tend to hit us. It’s a normal part of a cycle, and not an unprecedented catastrophe – but most of my peers had never experienced this, as they’ve never been this age before.

Another factor in our common grief is that these days, popular singers and actors fill our media screens, talk to us out of our televisions and phones, and we hear their songs and words on grocery-store loudspeakers. A modern Westerner might hear George Michael several times a day, but their grandmother a few times a year. Thus, celebrities become far more familiar than cousins or neighbours, and we feel their loss.

Celebrity deaths seems like a minor issue compared to so many others in the world, but I think it helps illuminate why other world events caused people such grief this year. Take the US election; whatever you think of Mr. Trump, we’ve had far worse elections than this, just outside of the tiny window of pop-culture memory. Yet most of my peers have never experienced a more contentious election, so this one seems like The Worst in Human History.

In the same way, our modern media spends an inordinate amount of time talking about one office (president) in one branch (executive) of one level of government (federal) in one country (USA). So many news stories focus on the individual in that one office that we see them more often than we see our neighbours, and our hopes and fears cling to that individual’s persona.

Either way, 2017 is likely to be the new Worst Year Ever, as all the trends of 2016 are likely to keep happening. I have, however, noted one group that were not devastated by the events of 2016 – those people who didn’t follow most pop culture at all.

Those people – some elderly neighbours of mine, some homesteading friends in the USA or Europe -- lived in a world with real consequences and victories, and their life was moored to people they knew. They wouldn’t feel grief at the loss of someone on a screen, but the loss of a neighbour or friend. I’ve learned a lot from my neighbours, and will feel genuine grief when they are gone – and with luck, someone like them will miss me someday.

A difficult year

 Published this week in the Kildare Nationalist. 

A lot of my acquaintances have found this a difficult year. Many of them are far removed from loved ones, and feel lonely over the holidays. A number of my friends have been made redundant this year – the crash affected mostly the working-class majority, but the “recovery” has mostly gone elsewhere. Politically, many of their countries have been torn by bitter elections – Ireland, the UK, and the USA. Even the weather feels strange to many of my neighbours, who have worked outside for generations and know such things in their bones.

I listen and sometimes offer encouragement, but I don’t have what people usually want to hear, as the coming years could get a lot worse. Fewer resources, burning more, disrupted weather, political turmoil, civil wars, millions of refugees – you know all this. Most of all, modern Westerners lack the skills to handle a crisis, or to sustain themselves for a while during a shortage, or the community and family bonds to support each other.

Thing is, we can’t change any of these things, just our reaction to them. We can get healthier – I include myself in this. We can meet more neighbours. We can learn to live more self-sufficiently on our own patch of ground, until each patch is its own lifeboat and no one need drown. We can keep knowledge, skills and resources with us until millions of families and homes are arks in the flood.

I am concerned for my friends who are having difficulties, of course. But I also think of my grandparents or neighbours, who lived on a fraction of the energy Westerners live on today, and lived long and happy lives. They were delighted to get an orange for Christmas or walk miles to the village to call on friends, and did not consider themselves miserable. When things get bad in Hollywood movies, people start ripping each other apart; in real life, they often help each other out.

Remember that you are not alone; your area teems with people who are lonely, or can’t find someone to help, or who want to make a difference. I know an old lady who is house-bound, and I know a woman who has been made redundant and has nothing to do but sit in her garden. Both of them have things around the house that need fixing, and I know a handy young man who can’t find work. I know a man who needs help on his farm, a teenager who would love to earn some extra cash and learn some skills.

Most of these people’s problems would be solved if they learned to do things for each other. The woman could garden and grow food, enjoying a hobby while providing for her family. She could also garden the yard of her elderly neighbour, doubling her growing space while she and the old woman give each other company. The handyman who needs work could fix their houses in exchange for good home-cooked meals and the produce of their garden. My farmer friend could employ the teenager, teaching him skills.

You live in a place where the garbage cans are filled every day with machines that can be reused, furniture that could be restored, and food that could be composted to make soil again. You live with libraries, internet cafes and a surfeit of cheap stuff. It means there is much that can be reused, and that it is easy to live cheaply while using up few resources. It means you have power that most people in the world will never know, and that you are too important to lose.

Most people I know feel troubled about the future, and keep it to themselves. Today we diagnose such compassion, and prescribe medicines to remove it. But if people were irredeemable – if we really didn’t deserve to be saved – you wouldn’t feel this way.

You see, people who care about their future have two big problems – what to do with all that despair, and where they get the energy to do all that activism. And the two problems solve each other – that feeling of powerlessness can be a most powerful fuel, if you put it to work for you. We could get all those lonely people together to find a solution – but if they got together, they wouldn’t need one.