I am back in Colorado for another work stint.
I am in a different house.
I am in a neighborhood, of cul de sacs that don’t connect. My house is quiet in front but backs on a very busy road, an artery. The speed limit is 40 mph but people often go faster.
The house seems odd to me. There are curtains and shades on every window, all closed when I arrived. I open them, because I like light. There is a 3 by 4 foot television in the living room, another in the master bedroom and a third in a guest bedroom. There is a large kitchen with tons of shelves and cupboards, but a table only seats two, and there are two more chairs at the counter. This feels very odd to me. It seems as if the whole house is arranged to watch television.
I go for a walk in the neighborhood. There are many houses. There are beautifully trimmed lawns and there are flowers and some roses. What is missing? There are no people. Walking a mile and a half, finding the mostly hidden corridors from one cul de sac to the next, I see one man working on his lawn. Even though it is Saturday afternoon, I seen no children, no dogs, no toys. I see two garages that are open, one with a man and in the second I hear a child. Why are there beautiful lawns and no people? And many of the lawns have little flags saying, poison sprayed.
I do turn on one of the televisions after my first day of work. The living room one says that the antenna is not hooked up. The guest bedroom one works. I look on the service. Nearly every movie is about violence and conflict.
I do a little research on the internet. I go to the library and take out 8 books. One is Nonviolent Communication, by Marshall Rosenberg, PhD. Most of the others are fiction. Yet so much fiction is about conflict too. Good triumphing over evil. I am pretty good at nonviolent communication in clinic after 30 years: I want to meet each patient somewhere that is helpful. Sometimes they don’t like what I find, or don’t want to do what I recommend, but I have a deep and abiding faith that everyone can change, that they are smart, that I can make a difference and that they are capable. I think that belief helps daily in clinic.
I choose this book because I want to be better. Some of my family is estranged. I thought that was rare and horrifying at first, years ago. Now I think that it is horrifyingly common, much more common than I realized. How do we heal this? What can we change? I don’t want to be in a dark house with the shades down watching “good” triumph violently over “evil”.
There is a pond, man made, with a fence around it, half a block from my house. There are two male mallards, a female, and eight ducklings. They are fuzzy and delightful. I stop my car and watch the first time I see them, and I walk over too.
I haven’t seen anyone else there. I think we can change. I have hope. I have a deep and abiding faith that we can change.
For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: garlic.
KO Rural Mad As Hell Blog 
I have a TV. It’s in the spare room. It’s pretty old but it works to stream Youtube videos of bike rides which is all I ask of it. Otherwise? I use my laptop. I watch international programs via PBS.
Can people change? It’s like the joke about “How many shrinks can change a lightbulb?” where the punchline is “One, but the lightbulb has to want to change.” Something like that.
My doctor is wonderful and she will listen to me and she will respond. She wants me to do things I don’t want to do, but when I tell her why, she gets it. I need to do all the old lady exams but after breaking my leg, I am just tired of going to the doctor, the hospital, to radiology, all of it. I said, “OK, I will, but right now I need a break from being old. I need to do something else for while.” You seem to me to be the kind of doc who — like my doc — would “hear” that. Will I change? I have changed. Breaking my femur changed me. So, there’s that.
Television…I bought one maybe 15 years ago. It was far bigger than the one it replaced that was now obsolete. Due to a shipping error, two came. A co-worker said she might take the extra because such a small TV would be okay in the bedroom. At the other extreme I have neighbors who no longer use their television. They sit together on the couch with a laptop on their knees between them.
That sounds like a scary neighborhood. Beautiful lawns meant for your neighbors to see as they pull into their driveways just before disappearing into the garage from which they can enter the house without ever having to actually be outside.
Is it a coincidence that, during the Cold War we had “Mission: Impossible” to teach us that it’s okay for the CIA to overthrow governments, that post-9/11 we had “24” to teach us that torture is okay, that just before djt’s first election we had “Blacklist” to teach us about the nefarious “deep state”, and that now we have too many shows to name that tell us how the police protect us from all of those dangerous criminals who would otherwise overwhelm us? (I find it interesting that polls show that we think violent crime is much more rampant than it actually is, but that it is only bad everywhere except where we live. Folks have a fairly accurate idea about crime in their own town and a wildly inflated one about the rest of the country.)
My house has two televisions that I haven’t turned on for more than 12 years. I have watched a little Netflix but not any of those shows: 24, Blacklist. I was tired the first two nights so watched an Asterix cartioon, French, and enjoyed that, even though the title is “The Big Fight”.
A friend said to me that if I rented a room I shouldn’t rent it to people of lower income or less educated. He was assuming that they were more likely to steal from me. I think the biggest criminals and thieves in our country are rich and many are in our government. I am still thinking about his comments and want to ask about the assumptions behind them.