it’s a wonderful life

( – promoted by occams hatchet)

Driving home from work overwhelms me if I let it. I see the hundreds of drivers in their solitary cars, some passengers, few passengers. I realize I, too, am alone in my car on a drive that could be achieved with far less stress and daily environmental angst if a decent light rail or a well-planned bus system existed in the Northwest metropolis I live in. It takes an hour and a half one way and three buses to attempt to public transit it to work from where I live, and a mere fifteen to twenty minutes by car. I have a car to drive, which is either a hybrid or a beater Nissan Sentra, both of which cost way too much of my income in insurance and gas costs with two teenagers at home.

You – you said – what’d you say a minute ago? They had to wait and save their money before they even ought to think of a decent home. Wait? Wait for what? Until their children grow up and leave them? Until they’re so old and broken down that they… Do you know how long it takes a working man to save five thousand dollars?

The hybrid car I borrow from an ex who fortunately still likes me and wants to make sure the kids also have a car to drive once my own was repossessed, voluntarily, last Spring. (When asked if I volunteer, I say yes with a fine, secretive kind of irony, because I’ve volunteered my car to the finance company after its transmission failed at 68,000, just past warranty, and between the car payments and the repairs, I couldn’t do both and gave it up. I volunteer my money all the time, and somehow it has no impact on my principal debt balance, accrued when out of work a couple of years ago. But those interest rates are loving my contributions.) I’m not complaining; I have wheels, I have a real job now, not just a technical contractor job, where I had to stop working every year for a 100 days. I have a roof (barely, as I came close to eviction again recently, days ago in fact, even with income, even with a job). Funny how getting fulltime work doesn’t fix things, eh? What comes in still goes out, just faster when they find out you have a regular paycheck now. So it goes.

I see the hills ahead, the residential ‘burbs, the hills like big rocks covered in alternating green and drying moss that’s flowered, and the flowers are dying now and the flowers are the houses dotted densely in the drying moss, on the drying hills, on the circular streets and the dead-end cul-de-sacs and the dead-end streets that end in gullies and ravines packed with aging split level houses covered in Louisiana-Pacific replacement siding and under-insulated walls. The dead-end streets that end in what was once forest and daylighted occasional streams and where cougars roamed. Sometimes they still roam and an echo of Troy scents the odd territory of my mind in how we layer generation onto generation, civilization on civilization and cover up that original rich topsoil with barkdust and think that suburbs always existed and there was no forest for the trees, and the only trees we understand now are the artful Japanese maples with the spindly, lacelike leaves of crimson red.  

I think of the hundreds of people who live there now. Who am I kidding? The thousands of people, the millions of people. Who live their life on credit and kid themselves that life will get better, not worse. As their interest rates rise and their blood pressures rise, and the value of their dollar is shot and their kids shoplift for thrills, because they have nothing better to do but hang out in shopping malls to spend their time because we don’t, we can’t, fund afterschool programs or youth groups to salve the anxious, needy, questing adolescent heart. They can’t spend their money, because they have no money, because their parents need the money to pay the rising utility bill, or the cell phone bill that they feel they need to have just to make sure they can track down their kids, who are hanging out at the malls with other kids who might be richer, who are hanging out at malls, who are also shoplifting because a little stealing is a fine drug. The Executive branch is teaching them well.

The malls that are built in the flat areas that used to be fields and farms,  below the hills like moss-covered rocks, the ravines like sinkholes for deprecated lifestyles in a disintegrating economy spray-painted with faux cheer by an administration that sees unemployment figures decreasing because it thinks the economy is fine, when in fact the unemployed have run out of benefits and are no longer counted, or are underemployed in the work in malls and at Starbucks, moms and dads and grandmothers now, at $8 an hour to pay their utility bills and their car payments and their food bills and their healthcare bills and the donut hole of Medicare, and not their mortgage now because they have an ARM and it’s only a matter of time before the sheriff comes with his hammer and nail and the notice of auction for the door.

Just remember this, Mr. Potter, that this rabble you’re talking about… they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath? Anyway, my father didn’t think so. People were human beings to him. But to you, a warped, frustrated old man, they’re cattle. Well, in my book he died a much richer man than you’ll ever be.

Do you think the questions in their souls don’t weigh the same as the content of your own soul?

Why do we call it debate? Do you think the politics of hope is enough to float you? Do you think there are only just two Americas? Really? I see four or five, or maybe six Americas. I still see the politics of division. Do you really think we just want to review every Bush decision over the next few years? Whoever you are, throw it all out in the first 100 days and then get to business.

We need to review and reject, we must, but we need more from you than a look back.

We need more from you than the convenient patter and propaganda of bipartisanship.

We need justice. Justice says to us that scales will balance, that wrongs will be righted, that criminals do pay. That somewhere in America, life is a fair and fine thing, and not only for the richest.

We need justice and we said we are a nation of laws. Prove it.

What does change mean to you, really? Is it only a timely meme? How can I believe you want change when you’ve been working these years in the very same body with elected members who have continued the obfuscation, or the collaboration, or who have simply nodded at the crimes in the corner and rushed on by. Where do I find the evidence of your voice, your  power, your  actions under that dome in Washington in the recent years? Why is your tenor different now on the campaign trail than the meeker voice that has no echo, no compelling historical resonance in the Senate? Or the State House? Or on myriad investigative committees? You say “Move on. There’s nothing to see here.”  

Why should we believe that change means the same thing to you that it does to us, to the thousands and millions who live in dying flower-like split-level houses on moss-like hills and in suburban gullies and cul-de-sac?

Do you think we’re not paying attention, that we don’t hear? That there is something about this process that we don’t understand?

Do you think the words spilling from your lips weigh more than the evidence of our lives?

We drying flowers of houses on moss hills, we thousands, we millions.

We voters.

Don’t you see what’s happening? Potter isn’t selling. Potter’s buying! And why? Because we’re panicky and he’s not. That’s why. He’s picking up some bargains. Now, we can get through this thing all right. We’ve got to stick together, though. We’ve got to have faith in each other.

…all quotes excerpted from Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life”.