wealth-disparity

“Good Luck in the Future.”

“And then he said, ‘Good luck in the future,'” my Someone recounted.

We were in Silicon Valley, the epicenter of technological advance and mayhem– for better and for worse. We played an energetic, fun show to an amused audience with three of our rowdy friends as ringers in the crowd. Now, we were walking our dog around the quiet neighborhood before crashing into bed, recounting what the other missed when we shook hands and sold our wares in the wake of the performance. As it turns out, we hardly sold a thing. That’s been our sliding scale as a band since we started. The nicer the house, the less we make. I don’t know if it’s our thriftstore clothes or our willful insistence on being ourselves in spite of the social cues to up our class, but we walk away beating the dust from our shoes with hopes that the door was good, and everyone else walks away empty handed with another evening of entertainment. Not a problem, just a fact. But tonight, under the barely visible stars in a dark northern California sky, my Someone was getting agitated with one of the few sales we made, a gentleman who wanted to pay with a form of payment we don’t have the technology to accept. He became frustrated, though my Someone gave him a myriad of other options to pay. In the end, our more tech savvy friends took the payment and gave us cash later, but not before the man shook his head, admonishing my Someone, and closed the sale with–

“Good luck in the future.”

“Good luck in the future?” I repeated now, “Good luck in the future?”

And then I saw us, a couple of 40-something kids who banked all their money on a stupid dream of not getting caught in the machine. I saw the stains on our clothes, the floppiness of my Someone’s hat, the lack of make-up on my face because we believed in art– in the soul, not the body– in the ideal of change and a deep sense of belonging, only to land in a hotbed of ethics-less industry and be told that we aren’t doing enough.

But then, yes. Good luck in the future– to us, and to all of us.

Good luck in a future where our precious resources are depleted for a lethal experiment, threatening our lives and fatiguing our minds with mass satiation and autopilot.

Good luck in a future where we lack the creativity and diversity of spirit and imagination that things could be any other way.

Good luck in a future where the wealthy become more wealthy, socking themselves in with no sense of a world outside of their own comforts– in a world where it may be easier to ram a camel through the eye of a needle than to have them empathize with a human experience outside of their own (to borrow one great philosopher’s sentiment).

Good luck to the artist, who is only more content floating across the rampant brain pacifying screens. Good luck to the poor, who are billed for the hubris of the rich. Good luck to the polar bears, who didn’t ask for the latest iPhone but will die for it. Good luck to humanity as a whole, who are garnering ever more solastalgia as they are told “Good luck in the future” as though they are powerless to defend it. And good luck to the rich, who are chronically trading their imaginations for convenience.

Good luck in the future, because we are being sold a narrative that it is out of our control so as to further pad the comforts of the people in power. We are sold a lie that our ability to stop the train is not merely a matter of pulling the brake in our hand. If it was true– if the story that we are merely passengers was true– than there would not be so many powerful people repeating it to us. If it was true that this is the only future, that we are being left behind, then we would not need to be told it is so, it would simply be so.

And so, good luck in the future, where the caretaker species is being asked to homogenize as we watch every other species on the planet adapt, grow, and diversify to survive. Because the fury of not accepting Apple Pay is not the fury of one little folk band not keeping up with the times and ruining their career; the fury is that you, sir, are the one stranded with the inability to pay a debt back to a society you have deemed too colorful, too unruly. You are the one who has limited your options and has expected the world to follow. And if and when the technology we have built as God, this Tower of Babel crumbles, and we are left in a swatch of darkness looking at the few stars we have not shot out with satellites, your payment will not be accepted there either. Assuming we have not poured enough repulsive, radioactive material into the soil, you would be welcome to put your hands in the dirt, to plant a few seeds, and to see with curiosity and amazement the things that could grow. Not the Apple you’ve been worshipping, but the one that will feed you.

Then again, he was buying a handbound journal. So, maybe there is hope.

Selling Sticks

“Hey, Mal– you wanna buy a stick?” my Someone called over to me. We were in Cortez, CO, setting up for a three hour gig at a Farmer’s Market. We were running late, there was a potential electric storm on the horizon, and the wind had just whipped through making merch set up impossible. I answered without knowing the impetus.

“Of course I want to buy a stick, who’s selling them?”

And then appeared a small boy, dark brown eyes and hair, grasping literally at sticks in his little hands. His name was Jackson.

“Well, let’s see them,” I said, gesturing toward the table. He laid out the sticks, mostly skinny, with variations in length and circumference. I took my time, touching each stick carefully, choosing one or two to hold up to the light and set down again.

“Are these sticks locally sourced?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, and he pointed across the town green to a tree. “They’re from right there.”

“So they’re free range sticks, too?”

“Yes,” he said more confidently, shifting in a universal way that indicates Lady are you gonna buy a stick or not?

“It’s going to need to be a very good stick, for my dog,” I said, pointing back at Puddle, who was licking her paws on stage waiting for the show to begin.

“Well,” he responded carefully, “I can do one stick for a dollar, or five for three dollars.”

Now we were getting somewhere.

“I’ll give you the whole bundle for five,” he added, nudging the pile toward me.

“All right,” I condeded, other customers lining up, “I’ll take one for my dog, and my friend here would like to buy one, too.” I looked at my Someone.

“Yeah, I’d like a stick,” my Someone said. We chose, thanked Jackson for his business acumen, and called over to our friends behind us that they may now purchase the third and fourth best stick in the batch.

We returned to our set up. I promptly handed the stick to Puddle, who took it graciously, and chewed it down to mulch before sound check began. Jackson and his mother approached after our friends had also dutifully handed their stick to Puddle, and I complimented Jackson on the quality of stick that Puddle had obviously enjoyed. I saw his mom nudge him, and he handed over a free stick for the dog, a reward for her obvious delight.

The electric storm didn’t materialize, and we played a three hour set with some of the worst sound on the tour. After the show, we were gifted hot sauce and pepper jelly from Jackson’s mom, a return for “treating him like a person.” Jackson doesn’t always get treated that way, as indicated from the illustrious gifts, but it’s not something I noticed. To me, he was a kid being a kid, negotiating a world in which we are taking common resources and transforming them into commodities to sell. Some of us sticks. Some of us oil. Some of us words. In the end, it’s gritted down to mulch in the jaws of a dog or of capitalism or of people’s brains to grow the next thing. The commonality of it is shockingly simplistic. But then add the human complication of value assignment, and here we have wealth disparity, resource guarding, and some people going hungry. All from a pile of sticks.

We spend an inordinate amount of time pressuring children into being an example for humanity. We prize them as a symbol of purity, of good heartedness. We also applaud them when they act like adults– tiny capitalists are adorable. And I think we have it wrong.

I grew up in a church that told me that I should have faith like a child, but that I was also born bad and needed God to come out of the sky to die a brutal death for how horrible I am. This leads to a lifetime of believing that I deserve the bad things that happen to me, and having to talk myself into not giving up on my pitiable life. I recently picked up a copy of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, and it is undoing a lifetime of trying to untangle myself from this core belief of self loathing.

Aurelius insists that we are part of nature, and that nature is inherently good. That the things we do that harm ourselves or others are actually against our true nature. Because our true nature, when we let ourselves be, is good.

Something about Jackson made this make sense. Because if we are going to say that we need faith like a child, that we should be trusting as children, that kids are the example we need of kindness in the world, then we are saying that children are the closest to our true, natural form. This means that we, too, are good people who want to help others as a default setting. To cause others harm is to go against who we truly are. To say that I was born bad and pitiable is to tell myself a lie. To say that I need a God to come and die for me, for how bad I was, is also a lie.

But then, the world becomes a strange landscape of snares. Suddenly, the number of things that go against our nature are prominent and abundant. The first, money. Also, power. How do we possibly eradicate these unnatural hinges of society?

This is where kids really can help. Or, at least one kid.

Jackson went back into the farmer’s market. He went to visit a woman who paints his and his sister’s face every week, for free, and he asked the woman if she was hungry. The woman, pregnant, said yes. Then, Jackson walked his stick money to the food truck and bought the woman a pizza, draining his profit.

Because maybe it is true that we are beyond the point of return for money being our central point of contact. But we can still move within our true nature around it. A kid can turn stick money into food for someone else. A folk singer can turn a song into food for thought. An oil mogul– well, that guy could probably benefit from the words of Jesus and Buddha and Marcus Aurelius and every other naturalist about giving away all we own for the benefit of others.

It doesn’t take a God falling from the sky to figure this one out.

Just maybe a few sticks.