Mark Gowan's Blog

A discussion with a friend ensued about regulations. He complained that regulations were nothing but a bureaucratic way to suck profit from his business, that they made no sense, that they made doing business impossible. He then proudly announced that he was of a capitalistic mindset. He saw no other possibility.

His claims rolled around in my head as I purposely tried to gather the gist of his statements. I thought of a world without regulations. I considered the arguments that I had heard about regulations, especially about governmental regulations, and how they impeded the march towards free-market capitalism. I thought of history.

I thought of how regulations played a part in ending the civil war in America, child-labor, environmental catastrophes that were argued necessary by profiteers since the industrial age. I also thought of how the lack of regulations had led to the stock market crash in the 1920’s, the dustbowl conditions of the 1930’s, the unquestioned, unconscionable nuclear testing (well over 300 tests), and the uses of nuclear weapons of the 1940’s and 1950’s.

I thought of the ongoing environmental horrors of corporations and societies in the name of non-impeded profit. I thought of the ongoing torture of animals everywhere. Of Wallstreet, of banks and other oligarchical institutions, suburban sprawl, over population, and now un-regulated research in AI.

I thought of all of this and one question came to mind.

“What kind of a world do you want your children, others, and yourself to live in?”

I no longer believe that situations define who we are. Rather, I believe that situations define what we need and what we desire to do. Situations do not define one’s character. They strip away the lies we tell ourselves and expose who we really are.

From the mother who is willing to watch other children die in order to save her own, to the profiteer who is willing to kill all that is good in order to become rich; they are one-in-the-same. Neither is based in love or understanding, and neither is virtuous.

We can find ourselves in situations what disallow us to do what we know is right but then we must work to change the situation or remove ourselves from it. whatever we do we must never give up the knowledge of right and wrong, good and bad, virtue and evil.

We must call a spade a spade. If we give in to stupidity, laziness, lies, fantasy, ease, and comfort; if we give in to situations that are based upon such ideas then we become lost and inconsolable.

I eat meat, but I don’t always like to do so. If I can put myself in a situation where I can raise my own animal, give it the good life that it deserves, come to know it, then I will always enjoy the meat that I get from it. I can thank it by doing my best to treat its body and its life with respect.

“Meat is not merely flesh.” John Seymour wrote. “Each animal has its own life saga…” I have come to realize the truth in that statement. It is because knowing that saga gives us a relationship to the meat that we have on our plate; to all food that we eat. It makes the food taste better, we feel better. When we have memories on our dinner plate we understand the cost of putting it there.

I have wanted, for many years now, a place of my own to raise food, to work. And while my desire has been couched in a need to fend for myself, to make my own way, to prove to myself that I can, and to live in harmony (the best I can) with nature, it is in no small part because I want those memories.

I was not raised on a farm, and had only the faintest experiences on my grandfather’s ranch when I was young. But I have been lucky enough to have had a taste of the freedom (that word so many sling around) that comes from having memories mixed in with the food on my plate.

There was really no other choice than to move forward. That was what movement was: no matter in what direction we started or finished, no matter how we coined phrases or felt regret, or despised the loss, or loved the gain; life was a march towards-or so it seemed.

Towards what?! To what end did we move? Even when we sat still, admiring the stars or enjoying a late autumn day; there still seemed to be a goal. we spent time considering consequences, always in the future; always something or somewhere else.

Always living in motion led to never looking at the past for answers, even as it faded into time immortal, forgotten or feigned. And so, we forgot what it was to live and existed rationally instead. We spent our time with probabilities and possible future outcomes instead of moving towards our dreams and desires, right and wrong, good and bad. And days passed.

We rarely considered the movement itself. We rarely considered the moment, or what it was we were moving towards, or even if we wanted it.

It was easy to think of the ways to fight and administration wrought with corruption, defined by greed, and blinded by a twisted ideology. But read history. In its annals one will find pages of fights documented of the same people fighting the same enemy time and time again.

It becomes clear that the fight that needs to be addressed is not only a political one, but a personal one as well. It becomes obvious that the horrors of history, of human-brought destruction, evil, greed, and violence are the symptoms, and not the causes of dictators, profiteers, and authoritarians. The cause of our killing the world and ourselves is, in fact, the values that we hold.

Wendell Berry said it best when he wrote: “We are familiar enough with the nature of American salesmanship to know that it will be done in the name of the starving millions, in the name of liberty, justice, democracy, and brotherhood, and to free the world from communism.”*

If what we value is consumption and ease, and only those things, then we can wish for nothing other than the world we live in and the continued fight against rank stupidity. It is the values that we hold that have gotten us here. We have to change what we value, and why we value the things that we do to end the cycle of a history filled with horror and disillusion.

He looked at his hands. They were scarred but soft. Every wrinkle had been earned. He even say the faded white line of the pig’s last dying kick, the hoof catching him between his thumb and forefinger.

The seventeen stiches on his index finger; the soft, pink leftovers of that night, slightly discolored was a reminder of a past he wanted to forget and a future he wanted to live once more.

The incidental cuts on his knuckles that showed up, often caked with dirt, left little dots. He pulled the small flap of skin of a scrape off and let the dirt coagulate the blood. One more dot.

His fingers showed his life. The broken knuckle at the end of one of his fingers, the flattened finger nail, his obsession, his hatred and his happiness. “Shit!” he almost yelled as a piece of sharp wood wedged its way into his palm leaving a red blotch and a piece of wood sticking out. He pulled it out and continued working.

Over the years his hands slowly changed from soft and dimpled to calloused and dirty and back again. His pride altered with the time stamped on his hands.

Every morning was a cool, grey reprise from the dark night of ghosts and demons that would torture him. The mornings were times when he would look out over the frontier of his future and see wide open spaces. He had grown up in a world and believed in a world of plans and goals. Now he had neither.

He was older and surrounded by a dystopian world. Computers generated music and automatic “authors” pumped out whole books in minutes. The fantasy of those who couldn’t was hurriedly becoming the nightmare of those who could.

Cellphones were a sickness and e-bikes were exercise. But he wrote anyway and pedaled his bike up hills happily. Although it was inevitable that the world would change, people were…well, they were what they were and anyway, he thought, he wouldn’t let the laziness and inanity of human ‘progress’ hold him back.

He wouldn’t be subsumed into a black hole of buying rather than learning. He would fall for cheap trinkets and sell his soul so easily. He would earn every sentence and every inch with thought and sweat. He still needed to work for what he accomplished, not because he was a good man but because he didn’t want to live in the dark world of the demons and ghosts of his nights.

It is not death that brings on judgement day, it is age. Age, the years lived or not, the lies told to ourselves and others. Age sat him down in a room of excuses made while they whispered in his ears. They were ghosts from his past, most forgotten. But age had not forgotten.

Age was judge and jury and every day in that house was another day in prison, another whisper in the room, another problem to be solved. His age sat silently making notes. It didn’t matter that he screamed “I DIDN’T KNOW!” Age would look up and past him and then down at his life’s ledger.

There was nothing to do with age or with anything. Age was reality. There was only reality and there was no escape but one. He looked around at others that had outlived their age: afraid of dying, not aware that it was age that was their enemy, not death.

He was not going to let age win. He was not going to accept its forgone conclusions. Age was an option, he remembered, and it was himself that gave it the power it had.

We are monkeys at the end of the day. Oohing and aahing, competitive and looking over our shoulders, afraid of our own shadows and smiling nervously at the unknown.

He thought about this as he looked at the hair on his arms. Rubbing his fingers across his forearm back and forth he was lost in thought. He imagined the Serengeti a thousand years ago with a tuft of trees off in the distance. He imagined the silence, the danger, the excitement. But he knew it would have been exciting for his tree-bound ancestors. They probably didn’t experience excitement but only fear and anger: the same thing in difference guises.

He rubbed the hair on his forearms again and imagined himself in the Serengeti. It was different now. And although he had never been he knew it would be different now. Probably overrun with grimy-clad people and garbage. The jungles, he imagined, were gone now. Nature, he imagined, had been burned back for the sake of prostitution and progress. And still, and still were were only apes looking over our shoulders and nervously smiling, afraid of our own shadows.

He rubbed the hair on his forearms and thought about the cost of boredom.

The famous Socratic adage rang clear and true every day, every year. Deep down he had never changed. He had remained faithful to his love and devoted to his dreams and child-like joy for approaching the world with open eyes and open arms.

Unlike his child-like joy his wise adult self succumbed to the child’s surprise. It succumbed to the strangest things. Slavery instead of freedom, whispers of trapped prisoners in dark cells instead of the glorious screams fresh air, fields, and sunshine. He ran on a treadmill instead of country paths. But all the while he fed the small child in the gilded cage inside his mind.

He was older now, if not wiser he was more aware. He realized that courage did not come at a high cost. It required honestly and nothing else. Acceptance was the real expense and he had paid. Always knowing, he had paid. Even after the debt was freed from his shoulders he had paid. Even after…

But now he was loosening the chains from the gilded cage and freeing the small curious child that had waited patiently in the darkness for his freedom.