52
Miles couldn’t help but wonder if he’d made some kind of mistake. Taken a misstep as he navigated his path. But it had all felt so right at the time. So maybe it wasn’t that he was in the wrong place, maybe he just hadn’t learned the lessons he was here for yet. He had slipped from being present to distancing himself, forgot to pray for his own acceptance and hoped another would change, lost focus of his three levels of activism. It was easy to slip on a personal level when you’re still the most conscious for miles, and he’d given up on trying to contribute an element of change to the financial blueprint of his local chapter, and what was he possibly doing for the world through his grievance? He couldn’t wait for this lesson of patience to be over.
But during one morning’s five hour delay, he got deep into prayer as he soaked in the sun. He saw that the real work to be done was within. He had to become content with the moment. He had to reclaim his abundance amid a constant barrage of scarcity. He had to live his truth, regardless if anyone else saw him. He had to take initiative to just do things the right way, he was doing most of the work anyway, so who could really stop him? And he started thinking of his bigger picture, he had been through some experiences, evolved from a lost soul to a weathered journeyman, maybe others could benefit from his long line of lessons, so he wrote a few down.
He was good, felt good, he’d capitalized on the free time and found a way to be productive with his passion, everything was as it should be. He wasn’t ready to settle though, so it unsettled him when the contract was up and the trip had been pushed back another two weeks, or maybe a month, we’ll get there when we get there, we’ve got so much more busywork to get done while there’s cheap help available.
It was time to move on, even Timps knew it. Miles had three hundred minutes to pack, he did it in ten. Nestled his bag inconspicuously behind the seat, and flipped the downhill neighbor’s public display of nationalism, as their anthem crept past an apple pie in the window. He arranged a gift basket of echinacea and piñons, suggested that Timps ride along, and when they rolled into town, he casually offloaded his baggage as he escaped from the dismay of his disgruntled employer.
“Toksa brother.”
Now that felt gratifying.
They found a coffee shop patio that didn’t mind such a pretty dog loitering for a while, and since he had his own cup, he got a free refill before they poured it out, it was after four already. So here he is, minding his own business like your average American, when this lady moves to the table next to him, and once again Miles was reminded that humanity is quite capable of being personal.
“Excuse me,” she said. “I hope I’m not intruding, it’s just that, well, where are you from?”
Miles chuckled as he assessed his appearance, broken-in layers of browns and greens, a bag with a boomerang, no, he wasn’t from this world anymore, he was from the Earth. She recognized his vibe, she also felt out of place in this place, she’d moved here for work and it had been sucking her soul dry. She’d been reading and researching and trying to find a way to get out into the world, a way to help a planet full of people and hopefully lose the anxiety of helplessness, she knew that this stagnation was killing her.
They talked for an hour, she was enthralled with every facet of Miles’ story, and in tears of inspiration as he reinstilled her thirst for more, assured her that there are others like us out there doing big things, and gave her such hope as he remained incessantly upbeat about some of the heaviest issues on the market.
It inspired Miles even more though. This was what it was all about. Connecting with those who’ve woken up but were still lost in the jungle, showing another way through his own actions and sharing the words of his heart. As she walked away, they both tingled from the intensity of genuine connection, and he was once again certain that he was exactly where he was supposed to be.
Before she left, she passed him a flyer from the bulletin board, there was a concert tonight, a local legend who was an outspoken advocate of change, and he was a Water Protector, maybe Miles should go check it out.
Ziggy Zag tickled his banjo as he delivered a humorous blend of social commentary and soul searching motivation, anecdotes of the front row lifted Miles back to the trees, the song of Unci Maka had found a conduit through the craft of her loyal fanbase. Miles snagged his attention after the set, they were brothers long before the introduction of pleasantry, the tributaries of water protection ran deep as he dove into the fringe benefits of their common unity.
“I imagine it’ll come as no surprise,” assumed Ziggy. “But I’m actually headed that way tomorrow on a little mini-tour. I’d love to have some good company for the drive and I can drop you off wherever you want, it’s always an honor to tighten the threads of our family and help manifest the journey of a relative.
You guys can sleep in my van tonight too if you want, but not before we hit the town and spread a little decolonization of our own.”
He’d been living in his van for years, all year long, but those who felt sorry on the longest nights of the year had no concept of the temperature tolerance held by the survivors of Standing Rock. The street was his home, not a last resort, and he’d made it his life’s work to humanize the castaways of colonialism. He also took it upon himself to challenge the enforcers who metered his lack of domestication, one quarter at a time.
“And these things are a total racket, just another way to bleed the lower class under the ruse of equal opportunity taxation. But how many bureaucrats are out there feeding the meter while their constituents are struggling to feed their families? And how many times have you ever voted to install new meters? And can you see your city council running down a few flights of stairs to move the car down a block before the street sweeper sticks them with an eighty dollar ticket?
But that’s not even the messed up part. You wanna know what the majority of our parking tax goes toward? It’s to pay for parking enforcement. What kind of ludicrous ponzi scheme have they got us all wrapped up in? Hundreds of attendants and those little dreaded three wheelers and everybody’s gotta have a boss, and it’s all a scam to make more work for those who technically did vote for more American jobs.
And the system doesn’t even sustain itself on parking fees alone. The whole point of it all, is that they plan on you violating the rules that are only in place so that you’ll violate them. In this city, we bring in nearly twenty million through the meters and parking passes, but it takes fifty million to facilitate the infrastructure, so it’s only through the 5000% fines that they can even afford to pay the people whose job it is to hand out fines.
And they do end up making some excess money through the struggle of the working class, which pretty much never goes to road upkeep, or to building a free parking garage, it’s pretty much exclusively used for projects that promote further tourism and shopping, which only congest our pathways even more as our own citizens pay the price.
And our whole tourism industry’s backwards too. Our hotel tax doesn’t go to any of the municipal allocations that an influx of visitors would drain, it goes to televising commercials in other cities as we lure more tourists to our decrepit streets. And we demolish local landmarks to throw up these stupid looking hotels, destroying the culture that was what made our city worth visiting in the first place.
And now there’s all this Air B&B madness, which sounds like a great alternative to funding the tourism board. Except that most of them are being managed by real estate developers, who buy up the dwindling affordable housing market, splash some paint and opulence for those privileged enough to take a vacation from their lives, and now half the people I help out here are working full time jobs, but there’s simply no houses available within their tax bracket.
This whole system we live inside of is built to keep us bent over and progressing the privilege of our masters. It’s all so complex and multifaceted that it’s overwhelming to even think about how to start fixing it, especially when those most depressed by it, are the ones who are barely surviving. Rent’s designed to tear apart the lower class. Mortgages are meant to constrict those in the middle as they become chained to funneling down the oppression. And in a country with way more empty houses than homeless people, where we’re completely overstocked yet destroying the Earth to build more and more, we still find the need to evict human beings to the street as we ignore the most vulnerable throughout this pandemic of inequality, and somehow they’re the ones being looked down upon.
So I know that whatever little bits of resistance I’m offering up here and there, may not be breaking the bank, but I’ve seen them cause some pause for contemplation, and once we’re ready to band together and topple the tower, I know for a fact that there’s a deluxe apartment up there with my name on it.”
As they walked along the sidewalk of dropboxes, he slyly slipped a can of Great Stuff expanding foam from his Moog hoodie and disabled each coin slot mechanism, if the tax collector was out of order, then the whole block could stay for free. The grassroots rent strike was underway.
Miles dug into his bag and offered half a tube of epoxy putty, Ziggy was over the moon and called for a little midnight mayhem. The foam could eventually be melted free with solvent, but the rock hard glob was designed for engine repair and held a kindred spirit of resistance to petroleum. The newspaper had once run a story on the vandalous act of defiance, city officials and meter maids were outraged at the blatant disregard for bending over and taking it, but the commoners applauded their hero and hailed him as Robin Hood of the Parking Lot. Ziggy even wrote a tribute for him.
In the morning, they stopped into the cheers of coffee shops, everyone knew Ziggy’s name all over town, and within the first cup, Miles had been unhesitantly accepted into the fold of friends. The coffee was free, and the breakfast sandwich, but not because he was in the presence of a celebrity, it was this way for everyone.
It was a pay it forward business model. Your order was at no charge, it had already been covered by a previous patron, and if you felt compelled to share a few cents worth of your privilege with another, you could trickle down a sliding scale donation to ensure that someone in need had access to the most basic fundamental human right, coffee.
A financial advisor educated in the market of scarcity would insist that it would never succeed. If you don’t force people to pay, then they won’t. If you don’t force people to work, then they won’t. Nobody’s ever going to feel so inspired by your low cost impact on the world, that they toss in a twenty for their half-caf vanilla latte. But they did, and it enriched their own life as they were directly connected to the stomachs they were filling, instead of just padding another CEO’s pocket.
“It’s a beautiful thing they do here,” admired Ziggy. “And it works. And it just goes to show you that given the opportunity, people want to do good in the world, even for a complete stranger.
And it tells me that there are ways within the money system, to dismantle the money system. It would be too much of a shock to society to just crash the market, but if we simply begin investing our inherent wealth into the fundamentals of another’s survival, freeing them from the downhill spiral that limits their own contributions to the world and pushes them into whichever illicit lifestyle society deems a menace, if people just had everything they needed to live, then the world would come alive.
Obviously it’s more complicated than that, the people pulling the strings have everyone’s hands tied, and they make their living by restricting the vitality of the population. It’s economics 101, find a product no one can live without, corner the market by eliminating competition, raise the cost of living. They’re not going to change their business plan, they’re sitting on a gold mine, which is why we’re the only ones who can do anything about it.
We live in a country of excess; food, water, housing, and the most advanced healthcare in the west, but our people die everyday from things we know how to fix, they just didn’t have the money for it.
And then when someone does suggest something crazy like Medicare for All, an already established public healthcare system that works within the money world, well the money world says it’s just a pipe dream, how could we ever afford to care for all those we’ve sworn to protect? And you never hear someone suggest to breakup the pharmaceutical monopolies that push addiction into our communities, or that once everyone’s on Medicare we’ll have the ultimate negotiation leverage, they’re all too worried about extended wait times and choosing their own physicians.
Well I got news for you, if everyone’s on Medicare, then most doctors will be accepting it. And if your privilege is simply too proud to share a waiting room with the millions of citizens in need of care, you don’t have to sentence them to death just so you can be in and out, I’m sure your privileged pockets can still afford the private practice of equal inequality. I mean, it’s like refusing food to the starving because you don’t want to wait in the checkout line, be a human for God’s sake.
And what they really don’t want us talking about, is how for the majority of this country’s noble history, we took care of our people by taxing the top one percent of our wealth at a ninety percent rate. Oh my, that sounds terrifying, what if one day I get to be the richest man in the world and they want to take it all away to feed people, ruthless scoundrels, that would leave me financially destitute with only forty-eight thousand million left to my name.
That’s the way it was for a long time, but don’t start collecting donations to feed the wealthy, the marginal tax rate didn’t kick in until the first several hundred thousand was already in the bank. And this was just back in the fifties, and then seventy percent by the eighties, and then Reaganomics cut taxes on the most privileged and raised them on those struggling to meet ends, as we were promised that the upper class would trickle down all over the rest of us.
And the income tax has only even been a thing for a hundred years, and back then it was only for the highest earners. It wasn’t until the wartime repatriation of Pearl Harbor, that we convinced the middle-class to chip in a third of their livelihood with the rest of their civil rights, but you gotta do what you gotta do in times of crisis, and gotta keep that war machine rolling in the dough long after the internment camps are closed, and only a fool would expect the IRS to offer any kind of return on investment.
And they’re just a collection agency for the Fed anyway, a privately controlled institution that’s whole purpose is to syphon the interest on the paper products it loans the government, a government whose constitution states that it should be responsible for its own money printing, not some subsidiary of the Bank of England. Plenty of presidents even agreed with the constitution on this one, but they were all assassinated, and now they just buy them off in a world where every human life has a dollar value.
But we are the ones with the authority to set things right, ninety-nine percent of three hundred and fifty million is way too many voices to suppress into submission, we just have to prioritize taking care of our own over this stupid illusion of what’s rightfully mine. I’ll tell you what’s rightfully yours, water and food and health and a place to exist, that’s your God given right, it’s all of ours, and it’s about time we stood up for what is right.”
Ziggy took him to the edge of civilization as he broke down the cage that contains it, the rest of the napkin would guide his two day trek through the woods, as long as he didn’t lose it at the halfway point, a landmark aptly titled Secret Waterfall.
The pen-scratched diagram was actually quite accurate, Spaz had made this journey more than once, and Timps had obviously been here before. The river gushed over a twenty-foot cataract and reconvened in the most glamorous pool below, which then flowed through another twenty-foot drop. It was a double waterfall with an oasis halfway down, deep enough to cliff dive into, it was still a bit cold out, but once Miles had a fire going, neither one of them could resist.
They roasted some piñons, plus Ziggy had packed them both a lunch, but Timps was ready to eat big, now that she’d developed a taste for small game. This one was bigger than the last, which probably made Miles’ work cut out for him a little easier, he was glad he’d paid attention and sharpened his edge. And as the sun set on Secret Waterfall, the pair dined by firelight on rocky raccoon kebobs.
Timpsileh licked him awake and announced that she was packed and ready to go home. He filled their water bottles from the falls, gifted some tobacco to the flow, and the two set out for the rest of their lives.
The hike gave plenty of time for reflection, he looked in the mirror at the person he’d been before, defeated and helpless, beyond hope, and he imagined what that guy would think if he could see himself now. He had passion, and drive, and a deep-seated belief that he could make a difference, that he was making a difference, and that there were many others out there doing the same. He had words now, and actions, and love, and a dog.
He hadn’t had a dog since he was a kid, it was hard enough to navigate the concrete world for himself, how could he sentence an animal to the cage? Now he was responsible for another’s life, in a society run by a species who don’t even understand it for themselves, how could she ever make sense of the insanity? But out here she was in her element, they were partners, equals, she brought home the bacon and he cooked it.
This is how it’s supposed to be, we’re all related, and we all have purpose, it’s just that we think ours is to be in charge. It’s a God given right to some of us, and just common sense to others, if we’re capable of taking over, then why shouldn’t we, and if anybody’s got a problem with human supremacy then they should speak up. In english please.
He didn’t need to talk to her to know they were close, she jumped up to kiss him and took off once he was beyond getting lost. A few hundred yards deeper into seemingly nowhere, he walked through a tall stone arch, there was no fence, but this was the south gate, and just to make sure they had the right place, he checked the inscription overhead.
He’d officially arrived at Liberation’s Garden.