Tiki Iti

I am hopeful someday to get back in touch with Sean R. Guches, my best friend from high school who I've long since lost contact with.

His parents own the Avaiki, a 36-ft sloop (Fantasia?) and took Sean on a South Pacific trip in 1983. I tried for nearly a decade to adopt the culture of sailboat cruising but discovered it's not for me. Sean, I understand, now has his own 38-ft Down Easter, the Tiki Iti, and presumably is doing what he always wanted to do.

The idea of sailing fits well with the sorts of things I today promote -- sustainable transportation, lives not based on the wanton consumption of mindless consumer consumables, and the development of relationships with other people, both those who share common goals and with people of other cultures.

These ideas are wholly lacking around me. Few Elk Grovians truly recognize the lunacy of the way they move -- along high speed collector roads through single use zones, miles away from everything. They desire the good life now while deferring payment for it, via housal unit flipping, SUV amortization through cash-out re-fi'ing, and filling up their units with gobs of cheap foreign shit. Lastly, they view their neighbors not as social capital but as competitors, competing for the roadways, competing for that larger housal unit, competing for that elusive job.

They count on each other for nothing. This, in my opinion, is the single most destructive force we will face going forward. This will manifest itself in myriad ways. As soon as we are forced into a compromising situation, such as an economic depression or a resource scarcity, we will discover exactly how poorly we built our living and social structures. While I have never studied the American psyche during the great depression, my gut feeling tells me that most people of that era acted like citizens even under adversity. They counted on each other, they had a collective history of cooperative working relationships, there was an air of respectability towards one another. Today, people of our era act like consumers; it's me, me, me, I, I, I in a nation of demoralized over-entitled cretins who will sooner ditch you at their earliest convenience rather than attempt to pool resources, to build social capital, to share hardships. In my opinion, it is exceedingly hard to imagine any scenario where the people of our nation pull together for anything. We are already deeply polarized politically; we cannot effectively manage the finances of our nation, let alone develop any coherent energy policy. Once a real problem emerges, and it will, we will be in for a bumpy ride.

I will someday get back in touch with Sean and I'm certain to discover that for the last fifteen years he's probably followed the same course -- sharing a contempt for our culture at large. In his case he'll ditch the bow lines and perhaps find a wholly different realm where people matter; in mine, I'll continue to bicycle, promote sustainable energies, and blog on the wretched state of American affairs. We will continue to love doing what we do.