WAY OF LIFE. WHOSE WAY OF LIFE?

I hear the words ‘way of life’ and automatically think of tribes deep in the Amazon who have never been out of the jungle.

Instead of the variety of life found in America, I go straight to pre-contact indigenous people, who of course have had contact since we know of them.

Pre-contact? Amazon jungle?

In the Americas it’s also called Pre-Columbian, marking the time Christopher Columbus stepped off his boat.

But looking at a ‘way of life’ isn’t restricted to the world before western contact.

While ancient tribes worked their way around their differences, the same can be said about our modern way of life.

Rural life on the farm is as much a way of life as loggers in the woods and miners in the hole; as a truck driver in the cab, stock broker on the floor, the teacher in the classroom.

 

 

From pre-1492 until today they all have common needs. Look at the red bar for the basics of breathing, food, water, shelter, clothing, sleep.

We all need clean air to breathe. No one signs up for black lung in the coal mine, white lung in the textile mills, but we do sign up for cigarettes.

Anything that inflicts damage to clean air, clean water, healthy food, sturdy shelter, protective clothing, and healing sleep, should be against the law?

Every way of life in the time of recorded and unrecorded history depends on these basics, this foundation.

Is that a big stretch?

How is it that important people in our current time put their needs and desires ahead of the basics?

 

The Fight For Basics

In the United States, land of the free and home of the brave, it seems odd to hear news of reduced air quality.

From The American Lung Association:

 

Older adults are at increased risk of harm from air pollution for several reasons. Even in healthy people, the aging process gradually reduces the lungs’ breathing ability, which can then easily be made worse by exposure to air pollution.

Older immune systems do not work as well to protect the lungs from inhaled contaminants, including air pollutants.

Because exposure to air pollution increases susceptibility to respiratory infections, it also increases the risk of pneumonia and other serious illnesses.

And older adults are more likely to be living with one or more chronic illnesses, such as lung and heart disease, which may be made worse by exposure to unhealthy air.

 

As an older adult myself, and as a baby boomer blogger, I encourage everyone within earshot, everyone with eyes on this screen, to think about older adults.

While I may hop around like a spring chicken, deep in my heart I know I’m not young anymore.

I did get some hop back.

I also had some work done on my windpipe.

If that sounds like old guy stuff it’s because it is.

What I’m saying between the lines is that old people are more susceptible to debilitating disease.

This is for the folks who will never see 50, 60, or 70, again: If your ‘check engine light’ isn’t flashing, it will be.

 

Things change as the decades roll past. For example:

That’s me in the picture next to the track field on the University of Oregon campus.

It’s where I watched the 1972 Olympic Trials, Hayward Field.

Now it’s the crown jewel of Track Town USA.

The dorms my kids lived in have also changed to where they used to live.

They’re gone with the winds of change.

Buildings are one thing to change; our lives are on a whole ‘nother level.

Try to live right, do right, and you catch a stray cancer from an industrial carcinogen that made a comeback so investors get better pay?

No one wants that, do they?

From the American Cancer Society:

 

The lists below are from IARC and NTP. More information on each of these known and probable human carcinogens can be found on their websites.

To learn more about these agencies and how they study and classify cancer causes, see Determining if Something Is a Carcinogen.

 

• Coal, indoor emissions from household combustion

• Coal gasification

• Coal-tar distillation

• Coal-tar pitch

• Coke production

• Coal tar pitches

• Coal tars

• Coke oven emissions

The list goes on and on. You can’t run away from it.

 

Protecting A Way Of Life 

Call me old fashioned, but I believe that hands on experience, and the experience gained from watching TV, are different, just like eating a leaf of lettuce on a soggy hamburger from a chain is different than planting and harvesting crops.

If you’ve ever been to a big city, which in my case is Philadelphia and New York, then you’ve seen how the people navigate their needs of daily life.

If you live downtown you live in an apartment and ride the subway to work, to the park, and walk to the local store.

There’s no yard, no patch of soil to call yours to do with what you please.

Let it grow, cut it back, plant vegetables, lay down a patio of stone and cement.

Hardcore urban life means no washer and dryer; you use a laundry service or go to the laundromat.

You’re not driving to Costco and loading a thousand bucks worth of food and toilet paper into your Highlander; not unloading into your garage fridge, house fridge, and freezer.

 

It’s been a minute since I lived in New York’s Brooklyn borough, but I don’t recall anyone digging up Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann in Paris for remodeling work.

 

Internationally, Haussmann is celebrated for much that is loved about the French capital; notably those wide avenues flanked with imposing buildings of neatly dressed ashlar and intricate wrought iron balconies.

To his republican compatriots, however, Haussmann was an arrogant, autocratic vandal who ripped the historic heart out of Paris, driving his boulevards through the city’s slums to help the French army crush popular uprisings.

 

Robert Moses didn’t jump up and start strong-arming everyone in his way.

 

You needn’t care especially about New York to be awed by the changes Moses wrought there: during a 44-year reign, he built nearly 700 miles of road, including the giant highways that snake out of the city into Long Island and upstate New York; 20,000 acres of parkland and public beaches, plus 658 playgrounds; seven new bridges; the UN headquarters, the Central Park zooand the Lincoln Center arts complex, racking up expenditures of $27bn, dwarfing any previous run of construction in US history.

“In the 20th century,” wrote Lewis Mumford, “the influence of Robert Moses on the cities of America was greater than that of any other person.”

Around 500,000 people, who happened to find themselves in the way of Moses’s vision, were evicted from their homes.

If he failed to grasp how hellish New York driving had become, perhaps that was because, for him, it wasn’t: the great evangelist of car culture never learned to drive, and was chauffeured everywhere he went, often on roads cleared in advance by the police.

 

PS:

If you were raised in an urban inner-city environment and didn’t have that special moment of, ‘There’s got to be more to it than this,’ you might have a hard time anywhere else.

 

PSS:

If you, like Robert Moses, have people making everything comfortable for you, that’s great. Make a call, snap a finger, problem solved.

Is that someone you expect to understand your way of life?

Is that someone who cares enough to protect your way of life?

Leave a comment and I’ll get back to you after my Costco run, with a stop a New Seasons for sablefish. (Hey Kelly)