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How long have we, like devout Muslims, looked to the east for strength and guidance, looked to our Mecca, D.C. and Wall Street? Each far suburb and bayou and city has been a satellite, a groupie, tied to the hub of the world. We don’t remember when it wasn’t that way.
But someday, sooner or later, each of us will notice, by the by, something going on near us, some disturbing little mini-revolution, some defiant anarchy. It might be a small food cooperative of local growers, or a community savings and loan, or a town board resolution saying that some Act out of D.C. is null and void within the town’s jurisdiction. It could be some experiment out of hundreds, out of thousands, trying out a new idea, or an old one, or a foreign one, something strange and alien and not-how-it’s-done, but dammit, it works so well for the people even if AIG or Disney or KBR don’t get a nickel from it.
And when each of us turns to look suspiciously at our local deviants, turns away from our eastward gaze, we see that our (what’s the word?) communities are nothing like communities; they’re FEMA trailer parks, without a center, minimal make-do addresses that sort us like inventory. Our communities, remember, were set up as warehouses for the workforce, not as a place where people find communal benefit and belonging and continuity and comfort. A manufactured pseudo-ethos of hyperindividualism makes our fellows antagonists, destroying community and giving our power to the east.
But, yes, someday these freaky ideas and experiments will knit into a new fabric of society, a profound revolution insinuated subtly into place, not as calculated and well-organized as the ascendancy of the robber barons that gutted our economy, but as influential for the good of our society as the rise of the uber-capitalists was for the plundering of society. Since hierarchy is structurally antithetical to our treating others as we would have them treat us, we will finally refuse to negotiate the point that social justice is not a luxury but a necessity of a lasting society, and we will see at last “mankind made plausible, his purpose plain” in our mores and habits and institutions. We’ll know in our bones that “the world spreads out on either side no wider than the heart is wide….(that) east and west will pinch the heart that cannot keep them pushed apart.” Oh, and, yeah, “he whose soul is flat, the sky will cave in on him, by and by.”
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