Shared Air

Years ago i wrote a piece called Shared Air, i wrote it like poetry in prose. So bear with me it was my first attempt.

i’m reproducing part of it here to establish a premise that i develop further on.  i hope this will resonate with some.

Shared Air

Look closely there are divers

One never knows when the perfect diver, one who is inexperienced, one who breaths heavily, will be found lurking amongst the coral.  Unaware of one swimming above, the diver stays focused on the underworld, inside the water-world, consumed by the liquid.  The diver exists in a vacuum never realizing someone above, someone floating above them on the surface of the water, has stopped.

Breathing is shared, but only the one above knows about the sharing.  The inexperienced one below breaths quickly, in nervous bursts, using up air, but needing more to calm the senses.  Above, the swimmer hovers, feeling excited, while she waits for the breath to reach her.  Will there be enough?

The swimmer watches and follows.  The diver looks and experiences and breaths.  With each breath the bubbles take shape and ascend to the surface to surround and massage the swimmers entire being.

The swimmer knows she is stealing a part of the life of the unknown diver but she doesn’t care.  She can participate with the diver’s life breath in a way the diver never can.  All around her is silence.  The breath encased in bubbles of all sizes burst upon contact with the swimmer.

The swimmer doesn’t need the air to survive, she needs it to sooth.  To envelope her for a moment in a world that knocks at all her senses, a private world shared but not known by those that participate.

The swimmer knows if she follows she can be completely encased in bursting bubbles.  No other world exists at this moment except the bubbles and the exhilarating feel of them on her body.  Severing the tie to the diver jolts her out of her reverie.  She doesn’t want to break away.

 How do we help establish an oasis for conditions that could create decent living for a greater majority of people around the world and here at home?

Can self interest prevailing over community be the answer?  We have just spent three decades trying this tact.

People who have forgotten how to share, who think only of themselves, will never provide a venue for the advancement of others or even themselves.  The world created from this model leaves a cold hard reality that many in America have yet to come to grips with, but will have to if we continue down this path.

Why is it that the EU, which has a larger population than the US, has a higher standard of living, longer life expectancies, provides universal health care and a safety gap for the unemployed, is so successful; why don’t they have homeless people crowding their cities and why is their economy doing better than ours?

What are we doing wrong? And why don’t we examine and emulate their methods?  They are investing in themselves to our detriment. Even Asia is investing in themselves.  All of them seem to be working with a vision of the future that they are striving to achieve, whereas we have no vision.

We see this today with the state of our economy.  Self interest has institutionalized a chaotic economic machine that no longer works for the majority of the nation.  If we continue spiraling along this path we will soon see more of every part of society on the streets and on the skids.  Elderly pushing their shopping carts filled with all their belongings, families sleeping in tents on sidewalks, single men and women scrambling for whatever low paying jobs they can find to keep them in their cars another day.  Where do we see this country going? What is our vision for the future?

An empty vision

The past thirty years have shown that the “free market” is not the answer.  We have sold or moved all our industries off shore, we have gambled away our industrial base. We have become dependent upon other nations for everything we need to survive, including making war.  All our basic necessities come from somewhere else, our food, our clothing, our energy, our bullets.  We don’t even control the quality of the products we consume and use anymore. We have become failures at providing for ourselves, and wasn’t that our mantra, “Providing for Ourselves?”

The Republicans offer only their standard prescription of tax cuts for the rich, a rollback of more regulations on predatory corporations, war and elimination of the social safety net which includes Social Security and Medicare.

This is a proven prescription for further job loss and devastation of the middle class.  Is this what our vision of the future is?

We are a service society; we know how to consume and not much else. We have stopped investing here at home.  We are letting the nation self destruct.  Our priorities have become skewed in favor of wars that kill and maim, corporations that use high profits as an excuse for offshoring jobs, and a failure to take care of our environment.  We would rather invest in the military than invest in our nation. We would rather give tax cuts than invest in our infrastructure, schools and public services. We have lost focus and are starting to crumble.

Ivan Illich once said, “True learning can only be the leisurely practice of free people.  In the consumer society we are either prisoners of addiction or prisoners of envy.  Only without addiction or envy, only without educational goals, in freedom can we enjoy true learning.”

Where is the wisdom and learning?  How do we teach comity and community and conscience to the unformed many?

i’m a citizen of St. Croix, in the U.S. Virgin Islands.  The core of my existence has been here.  So the values and personal interactions with others has more of a small town aspect rather than the anonymity of a big city.

All those we don't know

Unlike the cities, people here have the time and inclination to share their lives with others.  We have the tools to create an oasis for decent living.  Here people still share, people still work together to find ways to better the life experience for all, we haven't given up, we keep trying to make life better for those less well off.

We can participate in each other’s lives with out acknowledgment from anyone.  We can affect and be affected by those we don’t know in positive ways.  Shutting the doors to that possibility leaves all of us vulnerable to a chaotic world none of us will enjoy.  As we move towards a different world and develop a vision for the future let us think about all of us, not just ourselves.