Why I Don't Like The U.S. Any More

Yeah, well, why would I?

Things are ugly there. People hate each other and themselves. You can't get anywhere without driving, even if you only want to cross the street.

I know. I was born there, grew up there, tried one thing and another, and finally left.

I didn't want to leave so much as to re-locate what I'd lost. Peace. Quiet. Safety. Community. Adventure. The ability to walk anywhere that I needed to go. Freedom from gunfire.

I saw the following today too: 15-minute cities are making a comeback Defined as "a 'complete neighborhood' that centers around the idea that residents can meet most of their daily needs by walking or bicycling a short distance — i.e., 15 to 20 minutes — from their homes."

This is a concept I've followed my whole life. Except for brief periods I was always able to walk to work. It saves a lot of time, and preserves sanity, besides giving your feet something to do twice a day.

And besides that, there is Steve Bannon was just charged with fraud and money laundering in a border wall scheme.

Right. Who needs that? Invent a pure movement, build it up, become righteous, then fuck your followers and suck them dry.

And that is only one item from one day of this week. Those items have been flying by in whole nasty flocks for close to four years now, with no inkling of an ending. And it was nearly as bad before that. It's only worse lately, not different.

Don't expect the next presidential election to put the flames out. Expect instead to see real flames, and rival gangs doing some shooting, along with state security police, even if they won't be called that, yet. I expect that the first crisis following the next presidential election to last at least two to three months. Then there will be severe turmoil for another year or two, assuming that there will be an end to all of it somewhere. But there may be no end, only an eventual tapering off as people and their systems gradually turn their attention to other things.

Things won't go back to normal soon. In fact, Things won't go back to normal ever. It will be one novel experience following the last, for time without end. What with current worldwide political and economic crises, global pollution and overheating, overpopulation, and the inevitable nuclear wars coming Real Soon Now, we will be living in Interesting Times™. Yep.

Good thing for me that I'm already old, so I won't have to see the worst of it, probably. I'm thinking now that the ideal time to have been born in the U.S. was between 1929 and 1939, assuming that one could have avoided the worst of the Great Depression. Assuming that, and a couple of other lucky breaks, I'd be dead by now, having benefited from the development of industrialism, a hydrocarbon economy, antibiotics, telephony, radio, television, and the beginnings of the computed society, but would definitely have avoided the current and soon-to-arrive global catastrophes.

If nothing else, the earth has too many humans. That alone would take us down. With a carrying capacity of about a billion humans at the best of times but an actual human population of 7.8 billion, we now have almost eight times as many humans in the neighborhood as it will support.

We're out on a limb, population-wise, and it's going to break off, no matter what. Boom.

The other stuff (global pollution, global heating, nuclear war, successive plagues and so on) are all gravy. Overpopulation will come charging at us first and is enough to do us in all by itself.

Meanwhile, I'm sitting here 2.54° south of the equator, in a mostly peaceful country, where I can afford to live a decent life, and watching the U.S. hit the wall. It's way over-extended, especially with its philosophy of pedal-to-the-metal hyper-individuality, and get-the-fuck-out-of-my-way, mother-fucker, or I'll shoot you.

Go ahead, good old boys. Boys. Yep. Boys and girls. Up there. Not here.

People are grown up here. No one has crossed the street to tell me how to live, or threatened to kill me. Last time I was in the U.S., someone threatened to shoot me, twice, within a couple of minutes, because he thought his dogs had a right to attack me in a public place and because he thought I didn't have a right to take exception.

Which is why i don't like the U.S. any more. Nuff said.

 

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Me? Wondering why that monkey has been following me around all week.

Quake

It's always a surprise, and never scheduled.

There are no announcements, there is no setup. No one marks the date and time on a calendar. It's always a surprise. Quake.

I've been wondering about this. About when it would happen and about how bad it would be. Well, it's bad enough to be bad, but it is still too early to know the completeness of its badness. Unfortunately, however the results of last night's earthquake shake out, the bad one is still to come.

The good news is that last night's earthquake was centered off the coast. That means that it did not happen right under any city, although it was only 12 miles deep, which is shallow. I experienced the February 28, 2001 Nisqually earthquake in Washington state. That one was deeper, but epicentered only seven miles or so east of where I was in a meeting at the time. And it was 10 times less intense than last night's shaking. This all matters.

Depth and nearness matter. A shallow nearby earthquake of lower intensity creates more damage than a far-off or deeper earthquake. And around here, any earthquake is extremely dangerous because many structures are only piled-up bricks lightly attached to one another with a bit of mortar. At best.

Many, many more structures here are also made of bricks but not of real bricks, but dried mud. "Adobe", if you will, if you want to sound fancy, but it's dried mud all the same, and about the worst material to have your home made of when an earthquake hits. Which will happen. Not that last night's earthquake wasn't significant, but it wasn't directly under Guayaquil, or Quito, or Cuenca, or another city of significant size. But that will happen.

And when it does, the city will fall. Its existence will suddenly end. It will not be.

Ecuador is not now a rich country, with long-established standards for structure and infrastructure, and it has never been a rich country. Until roughly half a century ago, it was one of the most "backward" countries in the world, according to Luis Osvaldo Hurtado Larrea, former president, and author of Portrait of a Nation: Culture and Progress in Ecuador. So the country, or at least one of its cities, will suffer extremely when an earthquake hits, one not somewhere under the Pacific Ocean, but beneath one of its cities. Especially so if that earthquake is shallow, and if it is strong. Today, a city, tomorrow a dump, an endless pile of rubble, a moaning disaster as far as one can stand to see.

And there is nothing I or any other individual can do. Only time, and perseverance, and a guided communal effort can slowly rebuild the entire country before it needs to be suddenly rebuilt. We can hope for the former while dreading the latter. Let's hope then. Let's hope.