John Wise

I suppose to live vicariously is better than having never lived at all. In a world that favors the haves over the have-nots, the need to be witness to something “real” fills in for the instinct to participate. One needn’t hunt and kill their next meal; to kill an enemy is only allowed when sanctioned by the state, justice is not administered by the crowd but by the court, we mustn’t build our own home, and there’s no certainty a spouse will be found.

So, we passively watch the life we are not living. We watch the superman take out a gang single-handedly, the underdog is portrayed as overcoming adversity to win the day, and against the odds, the hero gets the girl. Compliment the fantasy on the big screen by encouraging the citizens to take things into their own hands while practicing fighting, driving, collecting treasure, and maneuvering through impossible scenarios so they might win and be heroes themselves. If you love fishing, there’s a tv show for that, hunting big game, a show for that too. Do you suffer from depression, witness someone else’s that’s worse than your own, and maybe you find solace that your life might not be all that bad?

Don’t like where you live? Maybe a war somewhere else will convince you that your existence is pretty good. After all, we can’t all go to the lake, mountain trail, Disneyland, Central Park, Paris, or scuba diving off Key West. But then again, we can’t let the natives become restless because we have no real idea where the boiling-over point of humanity lies. What pacifies the horde so the wealthy are allowed to enjoy the spoils of their war against those in poverty? If only the impoverished could easily be placated to accept their station in life. Just where can the balance be found between self-incarceration and minimal amounts of participation?

I’m going off-track as I came to this page after having watched a couple of dozen clips from Jack Reacher, John Wick, and The Equalizer. Obviously, I’m broken as I want to fail to understand the appeal, or maybe I don’t have a choice but to fail, as the idea of a solo Johnny Badass cleaning house to show the bad guy what it is to suffer for violating the honor of men. This primitive idea that a man’s rage, when employed for the greater honor, will propel our abilities to overcome evil; give me a break. At best, this is pandering to man’s primitive lizard brain; at worst, it drives home the ambiguities of having un-intentional, near, purposeless lives in the age of meaningless social media.

When knowledge exists in the forbidden vacuum occupied by the despised, those intellectuals, nerds, coders, scientists, engineers, professors, creators, and rarely controllers, these are then the class of people able to give context to their experiences which might take them into the corners of the Arctic, the Balkans, glaciated mountain trekking, Amazon river adventures, visits to museums, operas, and other places of sophisticated immersions. On the other hand, the vast void of ignorance holds appeal to those who needn’t lend meaning beyond the visceral, and yet, they travel with resentment that others might take more from their position of privilege while the masses feign indifference or discontent.

This then begs the question for me: where is the messaging about the importance of vast knowledge beyond the absolutely superficial surrounding manufactured drama that accompanies professional sports, television series, the antics of celebrity-based governance, vapid personalities that hawk indulgence, and finding completeness through consumption?

I can easily understand that I sound like the idiot thinking liberation from the yoke of banality can be found in intellectualism, but that would be a misunderstanding as what I mean to insinuate is that authenticity and curiosity are the missing elements that pull us forward in ways that are healthy for society.

Today, I’m asking, “Where is a place?” because a place that was once one thing has changed to become something else. There’s the fast and easy answer that says nothing has changed other than the observer, but that’s only part of the story. A crass example might be found in two plots of land found in Oświęcim and another in nearby Brzezinka, both found in Poland. Back during World War I, a migrant worker camp was built in Oświęcim. After that war, Polish soldiers took over the facility. Prior to this, I’d imagine the area was farmland, but I cannot find definitive information to confirm that. Regarding the other location, meaning Brzezinka, it apparently was wide open just before development activities got underway.

Starting in 1940, the army barracks and, subsequently, the large plot of nearby land were being repurposed. Up to this point in history, these places were of no significance at all, but that changed as Oświęcim, infamously known as Auschwitz, and Brzezinka, better known as Birkenau, became two of the most notorious concentration camps. During their years of being operated as extermination camps, approximately 1.1 million people lost their lives there. Following World War II, the camps became memorials.

As memorials, these sites have become solemn grounds that remind humanity of the atrocities people are able to commit against one another. My point is that places start out as ordinary, yet if extraordinary events transpire, they can end up inscribed in cultural memories with significance that transcends the easily forgettable.

I know that this is a heavy-handed example where readers might say that nothing should be compared to such things and that I risk sliding towards the sacrilegious, but in my opinion, places hold memories, and while it is our collective knowledge that imbues a place with such notable attributes, they do exist.

Well, this was a long-winded (I’m well known for such things) way of getting to the main gist of my post, “Where is a place?” I’m currently at a place where I find the memory of what it was to have greater meaning to me than what I perceive the location to have now. I do understand that my own trajectory is constantly moving, but I am not the change I register as I sit here writing, observing, and contemplating. The differences are arriving with others who have started considering this place as one they could consider frequenting. The place is being repurposed.

Similarly, America as a place and an idea are mutable with a plasticity that, while still pliable, could at any time calcify and appear destined to collapse due to a rigidity that steals its flexibility. Back to my ugly references to concentration camps and the prisoners whose lives ended in Oświęcim, Brzezinka, or Treblinka, those who arrived in the four-year period of mass extermination saw their limited time in a camp as the horizon looking at the end of their existence. A killing system had an infinite grasp and could never change in the eyes of those destined to die there. Similarly, in pre-Soviet czarist Russia, an empire ruled for nearly 400 years before Lenin and Stalin brought the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to be a force of control for almost 70 years before calcification crumbled its bones and wrought change. All systems appear to fail when change is lost to sclerotic stagnation.

Change is the operative word here today. Places change, and we change, but if we fail to transform ourselves and places do not change, we begin to normalize a docility that demands things stay the way they always were. The brilliance of America since its founding has been this endless metamorphosis that allowed us to adapt to the needs of the day, but today, we are seeing a pandering to base natures where those who abhor change want to pass on stability to strong men who offer promises of today being similar to the day, week, month, and years before when a place and your sense in it was known and familiar. This line of thinking negates ideas of change and, if not rooted out, risks dragging people into the inevitable convulsion that must catapult stagnation out of the doldrums.

The effort to break free of the crippling gravity found in the total loss of movement is akin to the rocket lifting a multi-ton payload into the heavens; all hell must break loose. The violence of the sort that tears apart what it is leaving behind is the revolution that upends those who brought malaise and are about to be murdered before their very eyes. War is then the inevitable outcome that must arrive to wash away the fear of change. Are we headed into that war?

I hope we are not moving towards conflagration as I surely do love the place I inhabit in my life at this time and feel loathe to change that, though I do enjoy my inner conflict that remains in a near-constant state of battle.

Our motto for the next decade could read, “Fighting an internal war against complacency for personal freedom.”