Let Us Eat And Drink …

The Amoeba — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 07:24:48 +0000

Today, a bright young thing danced up to me (she hardly ever walks) and asked me for money.

“What for?”

And time stood still.

Starve? Starve? Thirty hours is hardly enough time to get any serious hunger pangs going, never mind learn how to deal with them, to experience how they eventually go away as your body adjusts to the reality of feeding primarily on itself.

You wish to starve? Try living on less than US$1 a day, like a billion people on this planet now do. That’s about 20% of the total, by the way, the 20% that lives on 2% of global income.

What’s that? This is about solidarity with, and support for, those people? Please. The churches have been running this show for as long as I’ve been alive and conscious, and while I’m not quite old enough to go back to the time when elephants had fur, I do go back to the time when my head had some, and it had color in it. The starving are on your mind for a little while; you raise a little money, maybe enough to keep a charity bureaucrat in lattes for a few days. And within a week, you’re back to demanding the keys to the Lexus so you can go hang out at the mall and buy windspinners.

You wish to show real solidarity? Permit me to introduce you to unbleached cotton. To a daily ration of rice. Just rice. And not much of that. To walking. To a world without electricity (never mind cell phones or the Internet), without medicine (never mind insurance), without schools (never mind school plays). Hell, you do all this, you’ll not only show solidarity with the poor, you might even help save the planet.

Or not. For even all this might not reduce your carbon footprint enough to make any significant difference to the rate of anthropogenic global warming.

Yes? You don’t want to live in a cave? Young lady, if you don’t watch yourself and stop listening to people who tell you what you want to hear rather than what you need to know, you may find yourself in a cave and count yourself lucky …

Oh, great. Now I’m hearing voices in my head. What do you want?

Go, eat your bread with enjoyment, and drink your wine with a merry heart. Enjoy life all the days of your vain life that are given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might; for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going. (Ecclesiastes 9: 7-10, NRSV)

She got her money.

- O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Security Breach

The Amoeba — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 06:42:17 +0000

At the bottom of the stairs leading up to our apartment, there is a notice board. I had not been paying much attention to it, because ever since we arrived it had contained only a yellowing paper announcing a vacancy on the governing board of the complex. It looked like that notice had been there since the election of the first President Bush, and would be there until the election into that office of a woman of Navajo descent.

On this morning, however, I stopped in front of it for some random reason, probably to buckle my sandals, and the datum poked through the haze that is my mind in bus-commuter mode that the color of the paper had changed. It was now white. I focused, read.

Three youths, it said, had broken in to a ground-floor unit while its owner/occupier was away. One of the three was still free; the other two, “thanks to the vigilance of the community”, had been captured.

When I told Quilly of this later, her response was “That explains it”. She had overheard a conversation of downstairs neighbors, who were going to be locking their doors now and what the hell is happening to the world anyway?

Well, I don’t know any of the people or circumstances involved in this episode. As Sherlock Holmes repeatedly demonstrated to adoring physicians and incompetent detectives, the facts of a case can be radically different from the first impressions of a casual observer. But, as regular readers of this column know, Wai’anae is a part of O’ahu where rents have skyrocketed recently, tossing many of the less moneyed, whether working or not, onto the beach. That fact was the first thing that popped into my head when I read this burglary report. Followed closely by a verse that Ambrose Bierce, in his Devil’s Dictionary, wrote to accompany his definition of the verb “to beg”. A 21st-century reader might need to know that mendicant is a fancy Victorian word meaning “beggar; one who must beg”.

Who is that, father?

     A mendicant, child,
Haggard, morose, and unaffable — wild!
See how he glares through the bars of his cell!
With Citizen Mendicant all is not well.

Why did they put him there, father?

          Because
Obeying his belly he struck at the laws.

His belly?

     Oh, well, he was starving, my boy –
A state in which, doubtless, there’s little of joy.
No bite had he eaten for days, and his cry
Was “Bread!” ever “Bread!”

          What’s the matter with pie?

With little to wear, he had nothing to sell;
To beg was unlawful — improper as well.

Why didn’t he work?

          He would even have done that,
But men said: “Get out!” and the State remarked: “Scat!”
I mention these incidents merely to show
That the vengeance he took was uncommonly low.
Revenge, at the best, is the act of a Siou,
But for trifles –

          Pray what did bad Mendicant do?

Stole two loaves of bread to replenish his lack
And tuck out the belly that clung to his back.

Is that all, father dear?

          There’s little to tell:
They sent him to jail, and they’ll send him to — well,
The company’s better than here we can boast,
And there’s –

     Bread for the needy, dear father?

          Um — toast.

The notice continued. In words that have become familiar to Americans in the days since 9/11. Words that say nothing about underlying causes, offer no reasons, suggest no redress. Words that speak only to the need of people with stuff to hang on to that stuff.

Be alert.
Watch for suspicious activity.
Report anything you see or hear.

Complete with clipart of people listening at keyholes and whispering damning information into cell phones.

We the People have made of ourselves targets with our stuff. And instead of getting off the bullseye, we have tried to build a bunker around it. A bunker surrounded by secret police, in and out of uniform; rats with cell phones, the remnants of souls whose black fur coats are labeled “Security”.

What the hell is happening to the world anyway? And why does it all seem so familiar …?

I spent the rest of the day in black and white, walking in a 1930s newsreel.

Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!!

O'Ceallaigh & The Quill » poverty

Let Us Eat And Drink …

Security Breach