people are dumb and bad (a rant)

i'm so annoyed right now. i just ran into two groups of neighbours at the supermarket. one of them was a nice little old lady, and the other was this young-ish (late 50's, early 60's) retired couple that have stopped smiling at us in the evening when we can see into each other's houses. i've never been sure what offence we've committed, but always assumed it had something to do with the stepbug being noisy in the yard or throwing pinecones (which, for some reason, really seems to bug them).

i hate discord and people not liking each other if there's nothing really between them, so i struck up a conversation. i know when our house came up for sale there was a lot of interest and that our present landlords got it for a song -- maybe 350K? -- it has more than doubled that value in five years. so i was asking them about this and property values on our street and trying to sympathise, but they were very flat and unforthcoming. then the lady said, "well, i noticed they [my landlords] finally mowed the lawn!"

i blinked and said, "no, we do. we mow it. regularly. we just don't have a weedwhacker, so they had someone come over to trim the few inches around the periphery that the mower can't get."

i didn't add that it had pissed me off to come home one afternoon to the grasses, flowering "weeds" and flowers i had bought and planted on purpose cut down. i had liked the foxgloves, snapdragons and buttercups -- even if they do grow unbidden. i had liked the miniature field of dwarf wild barley that had sprung up under the cedar tree. j and i would watch it undulate in the wind and admire it.

so many things are irritating me right now about this whole thing that i don't know where to start.

i'm irritated by people with golf course aesthetics. who can't appreciate a tiny (and i mean, tiny) bit of wild beauty amongst cultivation.

i'm irritated by people with no scope or imagination. why a person would be so dense as to think a lawn unmowed because of a three-inch fringe of (attractive) grass is beyond me. these are the people who see a cup, plate, three crumbs and a twist tie on the counter and think a kitchen "dirty," who equate the actively lived-in with the messy. is it something in their nervous systems? some neurotic defect that requires them to view only vacant and orderly worlds to maintain serenity? i wish they would admit it because then i could have compassion and be more helpful.

even the serene and minimalist zen tradition admires a bit of well-placed nature.

i used to generously attribute this difference of opinion to matters of taste, but i'm going to jump out of my cluttered closet right now as a despiser of relentless and bland order. i think it's actually wrong headed. i think it's the wrong taste. i think it's boring, dead, annoying, ugly, inhuman, messed up and part of what's wrong with the world, inside and out.

i'm also irritated by our landlords. (again.) i've never had a real problem with one before and it bothers me that we can't find a way to live harmoniously together. i feel that they must be new to this landlording business, otherwise i can't explain their behaviour. they told us to manage the landscaping and then, years later, show up and cut things down without warning or asking or telling or anything. i can't tell you how unsettling it is to come home and find your surroundings altered. whether a person rents or owns, he or she comes to take the appearance of their living quarters for granted. and well she should. it's her nest. every reasonably well-behaved person has a right to live unmolested. we are good tenants. they could do much, much worse. if i hadn't run into the male half of the deranged duo that owns our house and brought up the weedwhacking (asking, out of curiosity, if it was him, and saying no more) i would never have known that he also plans on cutting down the blackberry bush. i just would have come home and found it gone. our yard isn't a park. it's our yard. we nap and read and play and eat there. it's almost as much a part of what i consider my home as the inside of my house is. having someone else meddle with it makes me feel like a guest. this isn't fair.

if any of you are landlords, please be sure to fill your tenants in on any changes you plan to make.

in the meantime, they, and our neighbours, can stuff their weedwhackers, lame tickety-boo shrubs and withered plants, walmarts and other category killing mega stores, their malls, fast-food chains, and all other high and low-brow mindless mass-produced homogeneity masquerading as orderliness up the huge hole in their tiny, jazzless souls for all i care. i'm sorry to share a dying planet with these greedy, selfish, rotting boors.

afghanistan and iraq

canadians have a tendency to lump what's going on in iraq with what's going on in afghanistan. and on the surface they just look like yet two more examples of the united states acting with hubris and brutality -- throwing its weight around at the expense of an already beleaguered nation, but unlike many of my fellow countryfolk, i'm beginning to really see iraq and afghanistan as two separate quagmires. after talking with professors who specialise in the middle east, and with afghani businessmen, i feel fairly proud of canada's role there, and reasonably comfortable with someone trying to rid afghanistan of the taliban. it might be better PR if that someone were middle eastern, too, but my point is that the taliban are harmful, oppressive, fanatical loonies -- and if everyone backs out of afghanistan now, they will return and the country will become a living hell for 90% of its citizens.

let me be clear: i'm a pro-choice, homo-lovin' commie-pinko pacifist. i'm horrified by the industrial military machine, and even feel uncomfortable with my kid playing with water pistols. killing people is awful, but what's happening in afghanistan isn't simply an atrocity: good is being done on so many levels apart from the battles being waged. infrastructure is being rebuilt, women walk the streets, amazing initiatives are working to provide opium farmers with free fruit and nut trees to replace their poppies, water and juice plants are opening and, slowly, tangled property rights issues are being unraveled. it's all happening and it's good.

the biggest problem seems to be that afghanistan shouldn't really exist. like pakistan was artificially created by britain, afghanistan was set up more or less arbitrarily as a buffer between lucrative colonialist interests to the south, and russia. it contains about five very distinct ethno/cultural groups living in separate regions, and the challenge of finding a man who can inspire trust in such a diversely rooted place has so far proven impossible. eventually a leader will emerge, though, and this will do a great deal towards stabilising the country. in the meantime, the taliban mustn't be allowed to return. they simply mustn't -- as a human rights issue completely independent of this nonsensical so-called war on terror.

i felt compelled to write this because canadians have such a delicate sense of honour when it comes to peacekeeping, and i hate to hear afghanistan tossed into the same pot with the horrific disaster that is the situation in iraq. especially now that the CBC has, by association, created a tenuous connection in the minds of its listeners between the 17, uh, Gardening Enthusiasts recently arrested in toronto, and canada's involvement in afghanistan. we don't need to be there ourselves, but somebody should be.