Lucky Boy

And yet indoctrination rarely takes place by allowing the free flow of ideas. Indoctrination instead rather takes place by banning ideas. Celebrating the banning of authors and concepts as “freedom from indoctrination” is as Orwellian as politics gets. Jason Stanley, The Guardian

The other day I took a four mile walk from my house, up Santa Barbara Street, past large stately homes with manicured yards, past the Old Mission, through the adjacent park with its carpet of green grasses and wildflowers, and up Alameda Padre Serra. I stopped to take a photograph of the remains of the adobe structure where the Spanish padres jailed misbehaved Chumash. I was thinking about the victims of the earthquakes in Northern Syria and Turkey, the incredible devastation and loss of life. When you live near a major fault line as I do, the possibility of a major earthquake is an ever-present danger. You appreciate strict building codes and zoning regulations, seismic retrofitting of public facilities. 

If any region was unprepared for a major quake it was that area of Turkey and Northern Syria, where three fault lines converge. Decades of civil war in Syria, massive destruction from bombardment, refugees and displaced people, scarcity of critical infrastructure and civil society, exacerbated everything. Turkey is run by an autocrat and the response by the government was predictably slow and haphazard; most autocracies are riddled with corruption and incompetence. Americans got a small glimpse of this with the Trump administration’s incoherent, bungled response to the Covid pandemic. A little taste of the human cost of governmental indifference and incompetence. 

It could happen here I thought as I walked. And what would we do if our little house suddenly became uninhabitable? No walls, roof, heat, food or water, all the easy comforts we take for granted. Where would we turn? And what if we turned and no help was available? I think this is what happened to many of the earthquake victims. 

The sun was shining, the day as pleasant as can be, and my family was safe, housed, fed, clothed. The accident of being born here, not there. Dumb luck. Born in Santa Barbara, on the California coast, surrounded by affluence. The mystery of life, brief, fleeting, and so much more precarious than we perceive. Impermanent. In time we will be forgotten, not even dust in the wind. 

What matters but compassion as we move from birth to death? A line from a song by the American singer/songwriter Greg Brown. Leave it to a poet to capture the tension between joy and sadness, exultation and despair. We need the arts to remind us of what’s important, real, as we navigate our way through life, through all the inexplicable things that happen to innocent people through no fault of their own. Like being born in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

Walking on, past one unique house after another, millions of dollars worth of real estate, yet not a soul in sight, still wrestling with the idea of blind luck, with images of collapsed buildings in my head, piles of rubble, slabs of concrete and twisted metal. I see the city below and beyond it the Pacific Ocean. Life is beautiful. Life is cruel. 

How long will my luck hold?