Candide

A few months ago one of my readers from Chicago was planning to be in the Northeast for a few days and contacted me to ask what I might recommend he do in Springfield to get to know the place. He and his family ended up stopping by the house and we had a wonderful chat and spent a few hours at the Quadrangle. It was a wonderful feeling for me to spend time with people who were as familiar with my thoughts as I am and who had clearly gotten to know my neighborhood from my blog and had felt as though they wanted to visit the place because of the words that I had written. 

Just last week that reader, Mark Dawson, wrote a letter to the Strong Towns blog which they published. It was a marvelous articulation of many of the thoughts and concerns which I have and sometimes voice here at Rational Urbanism. The editors at Strong Towns commented that they wanted his words be used as a springboard for a conversation about how their readers and members feel about the current state of the world, their country, their community, and their lives. Selfishly, I’ve decided to use it to add to my work here on my own blog. 

I would ask you to read Mark’s work before moving on to mine if that is at all possible as my words are directly in response to his.

I am profoundly and deeply conflicted. I find myself in the most fulfilling relationship I have ever had, more economically prosperous than I have ever been, and moving forward with more ambitious long term plans than I ever have before while at the same time a huge transformation is occurring in my community including a combination of developments both long sought and altogether unexpected at every scale possible. On the other hand many people very close to me are experiencing existential crises: colleagues, family, and friends are struggling with psychological, physical, romantic, interpersonal, professional, and economic maladies from which they may never fully recover.

(A bike lane, on Main Street in Springfield, Massachusetts. No. Really.)

(Just an average arrivals and departures board at a real train station. In Springfield. No. Really.)

While any hope I had about the United States experiencing a soft landing from its imperial activities were destroyed like so many Afghan villages or Iraqi children in our belligerent response to the attacks of September 11, 2001, the expansion of our destructive behavior in Libya and Syria spurred on by Nobel Peace Prize laureates and supposed chief diplomats (and would be “presidentas”) has merely confirmed to me that democracies often do not get the leaders they need, but they may in fact get the ones they deserve.

In other words my cabin on board the Titanic is really ship-shape. 

Years ago I saw a horrific scene on a news program (or in the few minutes of The Faces of Death movies I have seen) which showed a man whose main and backup parachutes had become entangled. The camera followed him toward the ground until his final destination was obscured by a trailer of some sort. I noticed that he was desperately trying to disentangle the chutes all the way down, even beyond the point where doing so could possibly change the ultimate outcome. It was clear that he had determined to focus on the minutiae of the intertwined ropes rather than on the hard ground swiftly rising to meet him. 

That became, for me, a metaphor for my life. As with death in the poetry of Borges or García Lorca, I know that it moves towards me unceasingly and untiringly; but I also have what time I have to occupy as I see fit; and I will choose which ropes I will work to disentangle. 

The primary difference between my demise and the ultimate discontinuity of the way of life of this civilization is that my timeline is relatively well known and extremely limited. I hope to live for at least another 10 years, but it’s hard to imagine being around in another 35 or 40. By contrast my abridged copy of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire begins many lifetimes before 476 A.D.. The denouement of American civilization could be a century hence.

What to do, then, in this Long Emergency of catabolic collapse? This epoch could turn out to be even more revolutionary than the time of Voltaire, but I would say that the Enlightenment era certainly throws down a marker for us. What was Candide’s response to the upheaval he witnessed all around him? To tend his own garden. 

That, in the literal and figurative sense, is my response as well. I have just come in from watering our raised beds, our fruit trees, our grape vines, and our flowers with rain water I captured in my Rube Goldberg rainwater retention and distribution system. I’ve had fun creating it, engineering it, and re-engineering it as it has alternately worked and failed to work. Ditto my bean can solar heater. 

In my neighborhood I try to act as an urbanist philosopher gadfly. My anti-parking views are now notorious enough to be obliquely referenced by others in public venues and for many to know of whom and what they speak and some of my “crack pot” views have become received wisdom in much less than a decade; the primary driver may have been an overall change in the zeitgeist of professions like planning and traffic engineering but my importuning at the local level has helped eliminate the “but we can’t do that here” barrier. 

(Dueling a.m. prostitutes as seen from my window. No. Really.)

I’m allocating my efforts in diminishing amounts as they recede from my living room. Springfield is sufficiently entangled in problems and crises to keep me as occupied as I choose to be for as long as I choose to be so occupied. Already my interests only grudgingly spread beyond my three proximate neighborhoods: Downtown; The South End; and Six Corners. Enough children are separated from parents just a block from my house, enough violence occurs, enough drug abuse, human trafficking, and poverty exist within sight of my front doorstep to keep me busy. Opportunities to promote local food production, a walkable neighborhood, reduce carbon emissions, and improve transit afford me a chance to make a difference right here if I elect to do so. 

(Poor guy lost control of his bottle and can cart. No. Really.)

The destiny of America and of industrial society is probably set, but that of my town and my region in my lifetime, and perhaps in that of my children is not; at least I choose not to believe it to be so…as I continue my own personal…descent.