“There’s no individualist so rugged they were born being able to change their own diaper.” That’s a quote from a story in progress that I thought was good enough to hoist up into the blog, just in case it turns into a “darling” and I need to cut it. The point is not to be against individualism – our world is better if most people are capable of pulling their own weight most of the time – but that none of us, literally none of us, are truly autogenic: self-made men who pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps.
You cannot fake reality in any way whatsoever: No matter how rugged an individualist is, no matter how much a person has made with how little, there was a point in their life where they could not clothe themselves, feed themselves, or change their own diaper. And yet we’ve cultivated a mythos in this country that deifies the self-made individual to the point where it has become fetishized – and signaled through purchases and action, as in the residential construction worker who purchased that huge truck, parked it on our grass in the rain, and proceeded to rut up our lawn and track our driveway with mud on the way out. Not even the neighbors doing that construction want this to happen – but it keeps happening, as this patch of our driveway is just out of sight from the office where I work, and we don’t often catch them.
In contrast, we have no problem working with our neighbors across the street. When a package was mis-delivered due to a missed digit, I could have kept it, or mailed it back (to Ohio!) with the note “No Such Person At This Address”. But I took a few minutes to find them by phone printed on the pacakge, and we quickly worked out that they were a short walk away. On the way out the next day, I dropped the package off, hidden slightly behind their porch columns so it wasn’t visible from the road. Working together, we made sure they got their package quickly without it having to be shipped halfway across the country.
I’m all in favor of individualism, even the rugged kind. But we shouldn’t fetishize it to the point that we run roughshod over each other to the point that we pretend that other people aren’t there or don’t matter – we should work together to make sure we have the best world possible.
-the Centaur
Pictured: a construction truck, for which our responsible neighbor apologized – yet once every week or two, the construction trucks creep back onto our land when they think I’m not looking, leading to torn up grass as in the second picture; also pictured, the package I left for our neighbor, rather than shipping it back.
