Our True Crisis is Rust Not Fire
Decay is slow but the effects happen all at once.
We spend much of our worrying time on crises. Our media is filled with warnings, coverage and fear of cataclysms. The big boom, the sudden end, the crash.
In fact, rot is far more common.
Things decay unless we persistently work to support them. Organizations, reputations, systems, health, investments… even our teeth. For every hockey player who lost a tooth in a game, there are a million people who lost one over time.
Fear the rot, the explosions are merely a distraction. — Seth Godin
It is the opposite of the meme with the dog in a burning house saying everything is just fine. What if the house isn't burning but the electric wiring is nearly one hundred years old, still covered in cloth rather than rubber, and slowly degrading to the point that it most definitely will cause the house to burn?
My third ex-wife and I moved into the third floor, three-bedroom apartment above a 4:00am bar in Wicker Park shortly after my commitment to marriage and her arrangement to pretend being married. It was older, a little busted up as apartments go but after a solid month of going from place to place, this was the building and the neighborhood we chose. The windows seemed to be installed by a dimwit using equipment ill-suited to the frames, there was no common type of doorknob on any doors, and the bedroom we decided was the bedroom had no ceiling fan (a must in a Chicago pad).
The landlord, while not full-on slum, was at least adjacent and rarely, if ever, repaired anything. We did have an in-unit washer and dryer, though. Shortly after moving in the dryer broke. The landlord simply ignored my requests to get the damn thing working. He also paid no attention to my solicitations to fix the incredibly drafty windows, repair the toilet, or install a ceiling fan. All par for the course. I'd send him a note like a message in a bottle dropped into a vast body of water, never to be acknowledged or heard of again.
One night, the third ex-wife went out and didn't come home until nearly 4:30am. I was up because she hadn't answered any of my texts and I was getting worried.
"Oh. You waited up?"
"Yeah. Where were you? I texted a bunch of times."
"I know. It was so annoying that I just turned my phone off. GAWD."
"Well... uhm... where were you?"
"Nowhere. I went to the Rainbow Room to hear some music. Met some guys and they invited me over to their place. We drank beers, smoked some weed, and listened to music. I couldn't being in that stuffy bedroom. What's the big fucking deal?"
"OK. You know that's not how married people act, right?"
At the time, this seemed a weird question to ask but it was not the last time I felt I had to explain to her how marriage worked. She never really got it.
"What are you, my father? Christ! Get a ceiling fan in there and maybe I won't stay out all night! You ever think of that?"
I had not, in fact, ever thought of that. The next day I went out and bought a ceiling fan with the intent to install it myself.
I moved the bed, got up on a step ladder and pulled the lamp that was there off. I'd been electrocuted before dicking around in my old theater so I turned the power off. I disconnected the wires and plugged everything into the ceiling fan. Like most men my age, I cursed a lot. Finally it was in place. I turned the power back on and flipped the switch. Nothing. No light, no fan. Nothing. For two hours I disconnected and reconnected the goddamned thing to no avail. Finally, I called a local electrician to come out and get this thing to work.
He came over, I showed him what I'd done and he went to work. After thirty minutes or so, he came into the main room with a clipboard and some sort of checklist. Turned out he was also a building inspector. The wiring in the ceiling was ancient, he said. It was cloth-covered. Had to be the original wiring and was a serious code violation. This shit was dangerous. He told me, while he wasn't there in his inspector capacity, he couldn't turn a blind eye to it. This was, however, Chicago. I gave him a $100 bill to give me the copy of his inspection and leave things up to me. He smiled, handed it over and split.
I used the knowledge that if an actual inspection were to be conducted the building would be vacated until the significant upgrades were in place. For my landlord that would mean a massive loss of income and fines and construction costs. I told him he was going to fix all of the stuff I wanted fixed or I would rat him out. He complied and our dryer was working. The imminent danger of an electrical fire hung over the place but, like most Americans, convenience trumps safety.
My buddy in Vegas, the writer, is having a genuinely tough time. He has a host of degenerative diseases he’s been battling for a decade or so and the steady decay of his body is a constant source of anxiety. He's a great writer but the constant pain and worry have pretty much prevented him writing anything serious for some time. His deterioration has taken over his day-to-day existence and he is afraid and because he is a GenX dude that means he channels his fear into anger.
My dad is the reason I'm in Kansas and his is the result of a decade of relinquishing to decay. Diagnosed with a specific cancer, he became incredibly depressed and resigned himself to die despite not really wanting to let go. As time wore on (because, in some cases, time wears rather than flies) he became sicker—his kidneys are now useless and he goes through the closest thing to medieval torture as I can fathom three times a week, his knees are shot, he has virtually no muscle mass at all, he has a few more cancers, he has macular degeneration. For the most part, he's cruising slowly into the grave, alive only because he wills it as the decline continues unabated yet once in a while there is an emergency surgery or days without dialysis that cause everything to spiral.
I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy let alone two people I love.
For both, going in for a check up is like bringing your car into the shop to look at that engine light only to have the mechanic tell you there are nine things broken that need to be fixed and we take Visa andMastercard, thank you very much.
Decay is slow but the effects happen all at once.
The country is experiencing the repercussions of decay and with each disaster on every front we see these not as the domino effect of decay but as unavoidable horrors. The failures of our power grid, our roads, our bridges are all consequences of neglect over decades. Likewise, our climate calamities are the gradual outcomes of convenience trumping safety and ignoring the lack of preparation we have in the face of wild fires, hurricanes, unexpected freezing in Texas, and heat domes across the nation.
Our trust in the media, in corporations, in academia, in politicians has decayed so far that the rust may have eaten away at any of the metal left following Vietnam. These things didn't happen overnight and, like the bridges and the levees, require extension rebuilding. It's gonna hurt to rebuild and the country will need to sacrifice to get these things in order. Or we can do what we always do and let convenience trump safety, comfort displace growth.
As Neil Young said...rust never sleeps.