Collective Trauma: The Fallout 4

It`s really difficult writing about the human condition without also somehow implicating myself, because I am human (yes, really!) and I am every bit as part of this condition as everyone else. I am a flawed imperfect self who dwells among other flawed imperfect selves in a very flawed and very imperfect world that of course is going to reflect us. I live in a social housing building because I was not able to compete successfully in the world. Nothing wrong with that, but it does say something about the state of things that we end up having to accept as normal, no matter how harsh and damaging the conditions that we end up having to accept for ourselves. I live next door to a liquor store that has considerably tainted and harmed my neighbourhood, and of course they get away with it because we live in a culture of addiction that glorifies alcohol and accepts alcohol addiction as an already given. Drivers of delivery trucks outside my window in the evenings are allowed to make as much clanging racket as they want, while delivering the precious bottles of booze, because liquor stores are good for the economy, they keep people happy and numb and less likely to complain about how much our governments are selling us down the corporate river, so the rights of business always are given priority over the rights of a poor low-income renter such as myself, because the economy is God in this city and no one cares shit about human beings. Likewise, the morning and daytime racket from construction never ends, and no one cares that this is impacting the physical and mental health of those of us who have to hear it from our apartments day after day. It isn't because people need places to live as a rather stupid individual fatuously put it to me once. Almost all those new construction developments are for well-off buyers who aren't necessarily going to live in them. That's right. It is the greed of the development companies and the greed of the real estate energy that keep the jackhammers going. Those aren't buildings for people on average incomes. a lot of them are offshore millionaires and guess how many, perhaps most of them, became millionaires? can you say money-laundering? but this is what turns the conversation very difficult because it happens that an awful lot of these nefarious millionaires come from China, and Canada carries (and rightly si) a huge burden of collective guilt for the racist and inhumane treatment that was dealt to Chinese Canadians in this country until oh so very recently. Now no one dares to mention Chinese in relation to the money-laundering of real estate because anyone can so easily yell "Racist" and shut down the conversation. Which isn't to say that greed doesn't exist in other venues. Of course it does. So, just now, I have given some concrete and quotidian examples of the damage we are all living with and helping to perpetuate. And it just keeps going on. But, you know, Gentle Reader, I had this dream last night that gives me a little bit of hope. I won't go into a lot of detail as it was all very tangled Boschian and inscrutable, though very real, as my dreams tend to be. Someone was asking me to please explain what is meant by music theory. I offered some rather conventional ideas, but I also mentioned that we should also think of music as heritage. When you hear a piece that was first composed and performed two hundred years ago, such as a Beethoven symphony, or three hundred years ago, like a Bach cantata, we are not listening to something that is two or three hundred years old, but something that has been transformed and made new because we are listening with twenty-first century ears and that is going to somehow transform the music and the experience. The Romantic and Baroque eras suddenly become subsumed into our postmodernist reality and something new and very beautiful is born through the synthesis. So, then, it is not only trauma that is passed on from generation to generation, but also the beauty and spiritual purity of what is best about humans, and this becomes part of the sustaining and renewing force that helps keep our species and our world from going entirely down the toilet. That's all for now. No comments, please.