Fundamentalism

I am a fundamentalist.

I believe in the fundamental physicality of the human condition.

I believe we are mammals, animals.

I believe we have basic physical needs for and rights to nutrition, safe housing, cleanliness, sex, love, acceptance, community.

I believe it is right to love one another, to promote peace and to share what we have with each other.

I believe it is wrong to intentionally harm, to kill, to rape, to steal and to promote disharmony by selfishly ignoring the needs of one another in a shared society.

I am a fundamentalist. What are you?

Moving

Those who awaken

Never rest in one place.

Like swans, they rise
And leave the lake.

On the air they rise
And fly an invisible course,

Gathering nothing, storing nothing.

Their food is knowledge.

They live upon emptiness.

They have seen how to break free.

---The Dhammapada, Canto VII, The Master,

Shambhala Pocket Classics Edition, 1976

My propensity for moving house frequently is a matter of endless amusement among my friends and family. I have moved about 30 times in the past 40 years. As a single man in an urban setting with a job which paid a moderate salary for most of my career, I often moved out of economic necessity. Rent increases motivated me to look for more affordable digs. Sometimes I moved for environmental reasons: Noise, rough neighbors, homophobia, bad plumbing, sparking electrical systems. These various factors threatened my serenity and/or my person. Since I value both, I moved.

After certain events prompted my early retirement from nursing, I utilized my moving skills and my real estate skills to secure better housing and some financial security simultaneously. Not an avid capitalist, I was not a flipper for the thrill. I turned over property in which I lived to achieve peace with myself as well as some financial independence.

I am now moving again. Having placed my house under agreement, I have taken an apartment in a location that suits my current aspirations and relationships. I have been fortunate that my pursuits have placed me in the hands of a responsible and personable property owner. And, I feel this move has advanced my inner journey to be at one with myself so I may continue to try to become the human being I would like to be through my humanist practice.

A substantial part of the beauty for me of this move lies in the realization that the people who are purchasing my house are experiencing an advancement in their life journeys as well, from what I have been told. To achieve a sense of harmony between commerce and humanism in my life is important to me. While I have always held to a personal code of ethics in business, I have not always felt harmonious in the process of buying and selling. So many who buy and sell are obsessed with winning. And, where there is a winner, there is a loser. I have been in both roles, and I have not found much sustainable happiness in either.

I find now that I am able to see the role of consumer and the role of vendor as potentially cooperative, as opposed to competitive. This is rather antithetic to modern capitalism in the U.S.. I don't care. I relish being an odd ball in most things.

So, I intend to keep moving. My grandfather often said, "Stay where you are; keep moving." I believe he meant internal movement was more important than changing the external or circumstantial. He lived in the same apartment for decades. I am learning to cherish moving in itself, internally and circumstantially. It just seems to agree with me.

Housing

The environmental quality of housing is a clear measure of Social Darwinism in society. Anyone who doubts the rigidity of income-based class in America need only drive around a metropolitan area with open eyes. This is a given of the free-market capitalism of the post-Reagan era in the U.S..

The poor still live in communities with inferior infrastructure, bad code enforcement and lack of safe green space. Middle income communities are increasingly transitioning from spacious single-family homes with yards and gardens to converted multi-family apartment houses with asphalt parking right up to the foundations. Sprinkled here and there are the luxury apartment houses and condo complexes of displaced urbanites, drawn by access to commuter transportation.

Coastal inner cities are becoming gated communities, as part of a movement to revitalize them by attracting wealthy young professionals with children. The concept of mixed-income housing has become a developer's joke. Get public support and money. Build a complex for the wealthy buyers or renters. Then offer a handful of low or middle income units through a lottery, which is held covertly to avoid too many applicants. The units end up rented or bought by the connected few. Gradually they are eliminated through legal manipulations.

The net result widens the cultural divide apparent in our politics. Wealthy, liberal metropolitan areas in conflict with struggling, angry areas, outside the metropolis. As the oil economy collapses. this trend will worsen, unless there is a concerted, progressive housing policy in the U.S.. There is none in sight.

Free-marketeers glibly point to the current collapse of real estate values as a "correction" of some of these issues. Glib free-marketeers are at the top of the economic food chain. They are like meat-eaters that convince themselves that cows and pigs are contented sacrificial victims on the altar of human superiority.

The Soviet and Chinese experiments with collective housing under Communism were failures. This was due in part to Political Darwinism, inherent in the Soviet and Chinese models. Politicians and military leaders got the best of everything. Factory workers got the worst. It seems human nature always trumps idealism.

As the walls against human equality and universal rights are slowly chipped and chiseled away, perhaps a solution to the housing piece of quality of life will evolve. Perhaps not. The pressing environmental collapse of the planet's resources due to the dysfunctional oil economy and its accompanying unsustainable human populations may well pressurize the competitive, antisocial elements of the human psyche. So far, things seem to be going in that direction in the U.S..