Rats and reality

So this is in response to three posts at Chel's blog. Or rather, I should say, "inspired by" those posts and the comments to the rat poison entry below, because while those posts and the comments are floating around in my head, what I'm saying here isn't a direct response, more my own mental meanderings.

I think that the myth of American (Enlightenment?) individualism has some problems. We are surely capable of enormous individual achievement and I totally believe in the concept of individual rights. But at the same time, our ability to achieve whatever it is we achieve, to be responsible for our own lives, is surely contingent on the society in which we live. I spent a couple hours this morning trying to come up with concrete examples of this, but kept getting frustrated because I would wander off into narrative: here's a link to a more concrete story than I was able to construct. It's snarky, yes, but beneath the snark are a number of specific examples of the ways that even the most independent of us still operate in a broader social context.

The one thing about that link is, it presumes that "Joe" takes the subway to work. Well, a lot of people drive. So, off the top of my head, let me point out that driving to work (like the other examples in the link) involves not only government regulation, but also people. Roads are paid for and maintained by public funds. Stoplights, stop signs, ditto. Plus the studies of traffic patterns so that we can figure out where stop lights and stop signs belong for safety, and how to time the lights so as to keep traffic flowing, and where new roads need to be built. And all the work on those things is done by people working in the public sector, unless it's subcontracted out, but then someone's doing the subcontracting, and so on. So driving to work by oneself actually depends heavily on the labor of lots and lots of other people, even if you don't see them doing it.

That's the practical, "we're all part of society" argument. There's also a sort of fuzzier argument that I want to make on this question of individualism vs. what-we-owe-to-others. We are social animals. The mere facts that we have language, that we fall in love, that we raise our children, that we make friends, all demonstrate that we connect to other people. Yes, we all have misanthropic moments, and there are a lot of people who really prefer to be left the hell alone. But if we are completely alone, we will not survive: people in isolation go nuts, and die. We need each other. I think one thing that makes us feel anti-social is the feeling that we are being judged all the goddamn time, that other people are looking down on us, so who needs those assholes anyway? And I think that this feeling is essentially defensive, and comes from precisely the same place as the "everyone should take care of themselves" argument. It's based on a sense of what people "should" do, instead of a sense of what people actually do do. I think the stronger that sense of "should" is in a community, the harder it is for people who--inevitably, because we are only human, because the world is not a perfect place--fail to live up to the "shoulds." If the sense of what is and isn't okay, what is and isn't allowed, is very rigid, that's hard to live with.

It's why I dislike living in small-town midwesternville: there is a sense that the way people "should" live is to be married and have kids and go to work and buy a house and play baseball on the weekends and not drink and watch tv and on and on. It's fucking stultifying, and it makes me cranky. I, too, am a part of society, with my freaky open marriage, and my really well-mannered kid who does sometimes swear, and my enjoyment of scotch, and my hatred of baseball, and my stay-at-home husband, and my inability to afford cable tv. Now, I know that my neighbors aren't assholes. They're genuinely nice people, and probably some of them have the same "vices" that I do. But as a social animal, I need to feel like I belong in the larger group, and I don't, and part of that is that the larger group won't admit that some of the things I like might actually be okay.

In the city where I used to live--in cities in general, I would argue--you run into more freaky people more often. Simply because there are more people there, living closer together. So you can see that not everyone lives in a house with two cars and a husband, that people work really weird hours, that there are a lot of people on food stamps or whatever, that people get evicted because they lose their jobs, that the woman down the hall has two kids and a full-time job and one of the kids has asthma and she lacks health insurance so she keeps having to drag the kids to the emergency room in the middle of the night and she is really doing the best she can, that some people have jobs with no health insurance, that some people are artists or musicians and don't actually have employers, that some people drink too much but are actually very nice and not at all lazy, or what-the-fuck ever. And that helps me to realize that laws and regulations that don't seem necessary to me are necessary to other people, who lead different kinds of lives. And that my ability to be a good mom depends so much on shit that I don't have any control over, like Mr. B. not dying, and me having friends who will help out if I'm sick, or my job providing health insurance, or my one car not breaking down. And that other people don't have those things, and it doesn't make them lazy or whatever, and that it makes sense to have things like public transportation or drop-in daycare centers or disability checks, or kindly neighbors who are jazz musicians and are therefore home in the afternoon and willing to watch a sick kid for fifteen minutes while I run to the pharmacy to fill a prescription.

It's like leashes on kids. When you don't have a kid, and you see a parent with their kid on a leash, you think "jesus, what kind of parent puts their kid on a leash? Is the kid a dog?" And then you have a kid, and you make friends with other people with kids. And maybe your kid is pretty obedient, but your best friend has a kid who runs off every time his mother lets go of his hand to tie her shoe.

Or you're at a bakery, and you see a woman and her 2-year old getting into the car, and the mother opens the car door and leans in to put the cake on the passenger seat so she can free her hands to help her daughter into her car, and the daughter wanders out into the street in front of an oncoming car and you scream, involuntarily, in the bakery and everyone thinks you are a freak and the mom's head snaps up and she yells "NO!!" and the car swerves and doesn't hit the little girl and you suddenly realize, oh, that's why people put leashes on their kids, or lose their tempers and smack the kid hard, because they're so terrified. And that that woman, putting her cake into the car for her daughter's birthday party, is totally independent, yes, she's raising her kid on her own, and staying home, and the little girl is going to have a lovely party, but the mom needs help. She needs traffic signals, she needs laws against drunk driving, she needs speed limits, she needs driver licensing, she needs someone, maybe, to scream inside the bakery so that she sees what's going on, or maybe better yet maybe she needed someone to offer to help her put the cake into the car but who ever thinks an adult woman needs help with a little kid and a cake? So simple. She needs laws about rat poison so that if the bakery has had rats in the dumpster and has put poison out in the alley (which, you know, safe enough, because no one eats things they find in an alley) and someone walks through the alley and tracks some rat poison onto the sidewalk and the kid drops her cookie and then picks it back up and takes a bite while the mom is putting the cake in the car, the cookie will taste nasty and the kid will spit it back out.

So, I think we do all depend on other people, and we are part of the larger society, even if we're pretty independent. And I, for one, don't like the idea of kids dying of massive internal bleeding, and I'm willing to have maybe one quarter of one cent of my annual tax dollar go to whatever regulation gets put in place to make rat poison taste bad in order to prevent that. And maybe another five bucks a year, say, go to stop signs or traffic bumps. I mean, those things help me too, but even if they didn't because I didn't have a kid, there are other things that do help me that maybe don't help people with kids, like the money the opera house got from a grant to help establish online ticket sales so that I don't have to go stand in line in the middle of my busy day to buy tickets for the opera that weekend. It all evens out. And if it doesn't, because I'm lucky, I don't see why it hurts me to share a little bit with other people who are a lot less lucky, not because I owe them charity or some patronizing bullshit like that but because it makes my world a better place if kids don't get hit by cars or eat rat poison in front of me.