30. ~~~

A week of running and not stopping. J—- visited and we saw many fine sights and had a good time. Although, underneath everything, there is a layer of persistent sadness from the revelation of how I was betrayed and made a patsy. That still stings. I will struggle with this for some time. I don’t think it will change my outlook, but it is what we might call a chastening experience. I’m not sure why we say “chastening”: shouldn’t that have something to do with becoming chaste?

I’m just saying.

In the book pile: two Conrads; Proudhon; Buber; Illich (always Illich!); War and Peace (close to finished; might be delaying the last section so that I can draw it out and savour it); Cleanth Brooks’ The Well-Wrought Urn; Gitlin’s Media Unlimited (not as good as I hoped); Nietzsche; Becker, Rousseau. Bring on the winter blahs. I’m well armed. ~~~

I don’t know what to say. Is this thing on?

Coming to the end of a few things and the beginning of a few more. All the time: changes. Nothing stable. I invent my work and my non-work anew every day. This is not easy, but maybe it’s how more of the world works than I had previously imagined. I don’t know. It’s the sort of subject which is so central to life and identity that we can’t even see it. So we can’t talk about it.

I feel chastened by recent events which made me feel like a schmuck. It’s really hard for me to accept the duplicity and secrecy that was going on around me. It hurts. I want to believe that people are more capable of treating each other decently and fairly. Every time that turns out to be false it comes as a shock. It’s embarrassing to be so easily misled and duped. But better than always being on guard and ready to think the worst of people. ~~~

Our good intentions can go bad if we’re not watchful. This is what I learned this week. It has been a painful crisis for me, but like most crises something good has come of it: the realization that it’s not enough to work towards admirable goals — we need to work in an admirable manner and constantly interrogate our motives and methods.

This is something I knew already, but now I can hang this slice of knowledge on a hook marked “A- A–”. If I ever find myself treating other people the way I was treated during this incident, I will be deeply ashamed. I cannot imagine causing so much heartache for myself. It must never happen.

And I continue to wonder what those four women thought they were up to. Did it strike them as something good for the community? Was there an explicit understanding that they needed to operate in secrecy? Were they protecting the community from itself?

I find it hard to imagine a good justification for this. The trail of damaged egos and hurt feelings is damning. ~~~

It’s lonely here. I miss G—–. Meanwhile, I’m a one-man fruit preservation society: peaches, pears, plums, and apples. It’s so much work to be even partly self-sufficient in food; imagine the amount of work that lies ahead of us. The obliteration of these skills and habits has been invisible and slow-moving but no less devastating for all that. It’s a slow drip that creates a canyon.

The weeks fly by. The winter is approaching quickly. Mornings are darker, and evenings briefer. Here we go again. ~~~

Calmness returns once more to my life. I find myself (for now) more able to relax, enjoy the little moments, and expect that all will be well. That sounds simple, but for me it is not always. ~~~

I don’t like dogs. ~~~

The first ever EGT went off almost without a hitch. What a relief after weeks of work. Am I getting better at these things? Maybe. One thing I do know: I need to plan for the aftermath better. It’s too much to go from planning mode straight back into everything else.

And I need to get better at understanding that many people are so damaged that they cannot accept a gift. So many of us have been conditioned to look for the price tag on everything that comes into our lives. That price tag gives us meaning and comfort.

Organizing this event was a real operation. So many little details to get right, and I nailed about 97% of it. I wonder how anyone else would have been able to pull it off — which is not to say that I doubt anyone could; in fact many people are better than I am at wrangling hundreds of little details — since I think that it requires a real head for the minutiae and an ability to keep it all swirling around at all times. (Which leads to mental exhaustion, as I can now attest.) ~~~

After a couple of weeks of waiting, I got a reply to my email to the president of the new community radio society. I was asking him what was going on and whether this new organization wanted to have any volunteers or programmers. The upshot is that they appear to be operating in secrecy and deliberately excluding members of the community whom they know to be interested in participating.

This is just maddening. The people who have come together to form this new association are deliberately limiting the number and diversity of voices which will determine the goals and methods of the new station. And this in the context of a project which is supposed to be as inclusive as possible, as representative of the whole community as can be. Do they even have one woman on their board? I doubt it. It’s a bunch of middle-aged white men who fancy themselves ‘professional’ radio types, and who think they understand the demographics of the region and the local culture better than anyone else. (Meaning that those others can be disregarded and kept away from the design process, because their ideas would only be stupid ones.)

I don’t know what I’m supposed to do about this. Push further? Drop it? My problem is that it’s not enough for me to decide that this effort is doomed to failure (although I do believe that it is) and therefore I should just wait for it to fall apart and then swoop in and try again. I’m increasingly unsure that community radio is a viable project in this place, because of the deeply entrenched and horrifically retrograde attitudes that people have towards radio. And not just the attitudes of the self-styled experts, but also the genuine reality: that radio is dying slowly, being replaced by new technologies and being utterly consumed by television as the medium of choice.

So there’s a real sense in which I’m fighting to get involved in something I wouldn’t choose to be involved in if it weren’t already out there as an existing community project. But it’s galling to have to sit back and see these people pervert community radio and turn it into the preserve of middle-aged white frat-boy ‘DJs’ and right-wing control freaks. It’s clear that they think that our efforts to open up the station to more community involvement and to diversify the programming were wrong-headed and, worse, were some kind of attempt to take over and impose some sort of left-wing régime. Somehow that led to the demise of the station, and so this time around they are determined that that won’t happen again.

Oh, there is a comical side to all of this. They’re fighting so hard to cling to something that is going to be such an uphill slog under the best of conditions. It’s going to be very hard to find committed volunteers, programmers, and supporters. And yet they act as though they have the luxury of turning people away who are offering their help and support, simply because they are terrified of conflict, contemptuous of alternative points of view, and certain that they have all the answers.

And there is no easy way to intervene in a case like this. I might have to try to sit down with this person, or with the entire board of directors, and try to make them understand what they are doing, how their actions are likely to be perceived by the people who they should be most concerned to enlist and listen to. But it’s degrading to beg for attention like this. And so I might just as well sit it out until such time as the rabble are once again welcome to take the orders and follow the rules.

What a nightmare this is. ~~~

Friends visiting. Catch you later. ~~~