Home and Away

Um excuse me @finmycoffee.bsky.social Patrick just told me the Ravens have a band??!

— Doris Pringle Salahari-Brule (hairdo chump) (@sammylou.bsky.social) 2024-11-08T04:20:02.291Z

Thinking a lot about community lately.

If I had my druthers, Struthers, and Caruthers, I would pursue a doctorate in history focusing on Imperialism and Colonialisms continued formation of the world we live in today. I really do think that the motivations that drove the Europeans out across the globe in the Age of Discovery still hold onto us, for better or for worse. I think that one of the most common experiences that people have now in our world is loving something, and then losing it because someone or something with more money decided to do something else. To have strangers arrive, exert influence onto everything around you, to tell you that they are not strangers but actually essential to you and everyone else there, to have them alter it until it can no longer be recognized as what you loved before. Now that kind of experience let me tell you we got so many volumes in the back.

The gears of industrialization, mechanization, and digitization have been steered towards streamlining this process as best as can be done for those with the wealth and power. The last thing they would want is someone to be able to love and be loved without having to pay the fee. The system was leaky. Conquistadors couldn't be everywhere all the time. British regulars turned out not to be as fast as a rider on horseback. Enslaved people kept getting to Canada. The themes are the same, but the details and scale of it can be different. Oh you had a little community going here? That's fantastic! And for the low low price of...

Community is an obligation to others. This can make it a hard thing to find and an even harder thing to keep. Humans are social animals, and the need for community swells from that very human need for contact, comfort, and safety. If you know someone who believes otherwise, it's either a trauma response or outright brain damage. The willingness of humans to work for this shows how important it is. Who wants to work? It stinks! It's hard to have empathy for others. It's difficult to place the needs and wants of others before yours in an act of trust that you will have those needs and wants met in turn. Hot garbage, that. Putting trust in others is how you get hurt, and how much hurt should one endure in an act of trust that your wants and needs are about to be addressed. We promise. Very soon.

I have been on the social media app BlueSky long enough to have been invited and invite others. It is an app in the classic posting model: text based limited content messages from individual accounts arranged in sequential order, with the individual user having the ability to control who sees their writing and what writing they see, along with image capability (and now video!). The nostalgia for the experience of Twitter is readily apparent, which is why there has been such a dramatic influx of new users as, now named X, has been converted to the personal gain and ideology of its billionaire owner. A stranger who claims to have never been a stranger, and indeed has a better claim to the space than you. A tale as old as the ability for a price to be named.

What kind of community is one entitled to, if any at all. What acts of preservation are even possible of the structure of a community was built on the frame of a business. What ever happened to Expos fans. Did you know the Baltimore Ravens had a band? The band belongs to Baltimore, not the Ravens, maybe even more so than the Ravens themselves. Certainly more than the Colts who they originally performed for.

Communities being destroyed, reformed elsewhere, only to be hunted and destroyed without remorse or a passing thought once again. It's because we need it. Capitalism knows it. It wants to place itself between the things we want and need. It has to in order to survive, above all else. Wherever three or more of us gather in the name of the community, he is there also, but he's Lucifer, and he sees a market.

But people are pretty resilient and stubborn. I'm kind of an idiot, but one of the few things I've learned and kept in my heart is how incredibly hard it is to kill a culture, a community, regardless of the intentions of the free market. They still speak French in Quebec 300 years after the English arrived and started telling them what to do with themselves. Indigenous peoples fill the Key Bank Center for lacrosse games 250 years after Sullivan put the torch to their lives. Stubborn. That stubbornness is borne out in small acts everyday.

On this one app, at least for now, may I present the humble block button? You do not, in fact, have to alter your community to allow in something that may pervert it beyond what values hold it firm. It was one of the first barriers to fall when X was corrupted. You were gonna be force fed the culture as dictated by the whims of capital, whether you like it or not. Your community would be destroyed because you wouldn't even be able to build a wall in the first place. The wonders of streamlining. That wall, for now, remains. And because of that, so does community.

I think what I want now, especially considering the state of things around us in the United States of America, is for people to leave me and the ones I love the hell alone. There will need to be serious work on my part to understand how and why I am reacting this way, but I know I deeply reject the values project by many of my fellow countryman. I think everyone should have a home, everyone would have a meal, everyone should be dressed, everyone should have the care they need to be their best true selves, and everyone should have the education and learning the desire, and I can't express how little I care about how much any of that will cost, and I am no longer interested in debating with people who think a tax rate matters more than a human life. I feel as if this void of darkness has been rising around me my entire life whispering means testing and but how will we pay for it in a language spoken by the eldritch Old Ones meant to haunt my soul.

I am fleeing a spiritual apocalypse, and I am not alone. I have a community now. I am to preserve it. BlueSky is not the means to a community, it's a tool to maintain one that existed before it. More boats arrive every day with those fleeing. People make starter packs and put out the word to reconnect. Communities rebuild themselves. I am an old man now, and used to stories with unhappy endings. I do not know if the wall will last. It never has before. But so what? Perhaps one day the wall is fall down and all that will be on the other side is growth, and life, and nature reclaiming what had been poisoned.