More high pressure from the north but with a little south west wind so the temperature is up a bit from yesterday. In fact a very lovely spring day. I can almost see the buds on the cherry tree stretching out and so too on our hardy old rhododendron. We always buy a plant on Mother’s Day and sad to say we are at about a fifty percent survival rate, which wouldn’t be bad for a base runner in the major leagues but I don’t think it’s great for a gardner. Some of our rhodies are sticks now and have gone to bush heaven but others, by far the saddest are like bush zombies that refuse to die. They cling to life with a few blossoms every year and some sickly leaves with brown holes in them. Honestly it looks like we feed them brains. But the old grandmother seems to weather all storms and pushes out buds like a range cow will lay down calfs. Hardy stock that we somehow can’t manage to recreate.
We almost ran out of food so we went to the store, and laid in supplies. We did not wear masks but it was not crowded. There was plenty of T.P. except for the famous name brand which was cleaned out. There were no sanitary wipes nor hand cleaner, but we’ve been making our own, or making due with liberal application of ever clear on most everything. I did not see anyone wearing a firearm today. But many people stayed in their cars and people were bringing their groceries to them. Jan and I discussed this and as long as the store is uncrowded we wanted to pick out our own stuff, cutting down on the handling, we also brought our own bags which the store doesn’t like but we bag our own groceries. then clean the counter afterward.
I am more and more certain that we as a society are going to come out of this relatively intact, it would have disappointed our son as a young teenager, because he was really a fan of Zombie Apocalypse movies, but this isn’t it I’m afraid. No… we will survive without dead eyed brain eating ghouls and having to double tap them in the head with twin shotgun blasts to save ourselves from having our brains eaten...damn it. No. We will just have to stay indoors and watch a lot of TV and probably gain a bunch of weight.
But I do wonder what else will come of this. I can see several possibilities. One: we might finally see for certain that science has something to teach us about small numbers and big consequences.. We might embrace the fact that we can predict things from the little changes that happen now and how they become the big important things that will happen in the future. Like how you steer five degrees off course at first it’s no big deal but after a thousand miles you are really lost. Or if you have an in infection rate of three to one, that doesn’t sound like big numbers but they can become really big numbers in just a month. Holy Crap! So maybe we should listen to scientists about climate change and do something now when the numbers are still small?
That could happen. We could embrace science.
Or. Because we didn’t have a Zombie Apocalypse and we didn’t get to use our guns, all the worry was just a hype by pointy headed liberals, Trump hating scientists who are trying to do one thing: get more grant money off the backs of tax paying citizens who they look down their long condescending noses on. Yeah. Where’s the big deal? We all stayed inside and the only people who died lived in crowded blue states or people who traveled a lot or people who came in contact with those people, it was their own fault. We didn’t need to isolate, we just needed to be isolated from them the snooty travelers and “urban” people who chose to live in those foreign loving cities. They love that lifestyle let them have it.
That could happen too.
the railing to my office, what Dot hasn’t eaten.
There used to be at least two types of Anarchists in America. Now we tolerate one type. The right wing anarchist like Timothy McVeigh believes that the unit of measure of American society is one: the individual. This was a concept fed by Martin Luther and the reformation. The Catholic Church was corrupt and humans can seek their own individual relationship to God. Individuals can own what they want, can worship Jesus they way they want, they can buy what they want. This is the American way, and the Constitution meaning the Government is only meant to serve the individual.
There were earlier Anarchists in America who thought that the organizing unit of society was in the hundreds of thousands and they called it: Class. This came about even before Marx, and Engles mostly in Germany, with Baukaunin, and others after the beginning of the industrial revolution. Workers were inherently exploited by the wage system and their bosses. No matter what they were paid they would come out on the short end, because the bosses were motivated not to make fair compensation but to maintain their advantage over the workers. Their prime motivation was not even to maintain their wealth but to maintain their power over the workers and the poor. The only way to change this was to change the basic equation through social revolution. Hence the IWW: One Big Union. Big Bill Haywood. Helen Flynn. These early radicals, many from the northern mid-west, were more doctrinaire than the Russian Communists. They didn’t believe in wages. “We Are All Bosses” was their cry.
It is obvious this type of Anarchy was outlawed then and now. It was explicitly outlawed for a time. In 1919 a person could be jailed in Washington State for ever having been a member of the Industrial Workers of the World. When I came to Alaska in the late seventies there were old men tucked away on the islands of Southeastern Alaska who had fled Washington: refugees in their own country. Back then the great events were bombings, A bank bombing in San Francisco. Gunfights in Everett. A riot and lynching in Centrailia, Washington. These were all battles in the great class war. Today some old Reds might see this pandemic as a great battle in that age old class war. Rich and poor alike are going to die. Moviestars and Ballplayers are going to die. What’s your money gonna do? How are we gonna fight it? You need something from every body. You need to understand that there is a communal nature to society if you want to iive through this thing. WE ALL HAVE TO DO SOMETHING TOGETHER IF WE ARE TO SURVIVE. There is nothing more radical, nothing more in keeping with the principles of the IWW than that.
Of course, there are those who imagine that they can go hole up by themselves in the wilderness or their bomb shelter and ride it out. But most of them are going to have to loot the stores for pencils to write their manifestos and while they are there they might as well pick up some toilet paper and some bottled water.
CORRECTION FROM YESTERDAY: Yesterday I said that sheltering in place in Alaska was the law. Apparently that law has not been signed yet.
Ah yes… my desk.
Twigs by her deathbed,
I asked if she was worried,
“Why” she said, “will it help?
Today I recorded myself reading from the second of the Cold Storage books while sitting out on the windy beach. Dot was digging for clams and eating them whole.
