I love summer in Eastern Europe. The various commieblocks turn into lush forests and going outside to run an errand or work out becomes a pleasure and not a grimdark journey into the depths of depression and back as it is for the other 9 months of the year.
I was getting my stroll on recently when an old enemy reared its ugly head and ruined my mood: trash from the dumpsters had spilled out and covered the entire playground in the backyard of my khrushevka. I raged and seethed internally and decided to write this post then and there to complete the trinity and find a way to cope.
The most frustrating aspect of this recurring tragedy is that I know why this problem keeps occurring in the various commieblocks that I’ve lived in over the years from St. Petersburg to Krasnodar, to Kiev and Minsk and so on. I’ve seen it happen with my own two eyes.
In short, grannies and old coots have a habit of spilling their trash out into these dumpsters instead of keeping it in the bag, tying up the ends of the bag, and then throwing the sealed bag into the dumpster. No, they, for some reason, think they’re seeding the dumpster as if it were a virgin wheat field with their trash-seeds. Then, when there’s a storm or a strong wind, the trash blows out of the dumpster and absolutely ruins the commieblock forest.
I even went so far as to ask younger people why the old people do what they do and the answer, invariably, is just a shrug. “They’re used to doing it that way, I guess.” Naturally, I’ve delicately asked members of the older generation why they treat their trash this way and it’s never gone well. As a rule, older people don’t like it when you ask questions about their accumulated collection of bizarre habits. Younger people already know this. You do not question Elder Law. You just try to avoid old people as best you can as you go about your day. Headphones are generally senior kryptonite and it’s always a good idea to not leave home without them.
Back when I was living in the suburbs of St. Petersburg, I hit a point where I couldn’t wait for the end of the month for municipal services to come and clean up the old people’s mess. I lived on the first floor of my building and because the trash ruined my view, I decided to take a sharp stick and start cleaning up the lawn in front of my window. It only took half an hour, and I felt like a good comrade indeed once I had finished. Naturally though, my civic activity had been spotted by the sentinel granny on the 4th floor who spent her days keeping a hawk-like watch on the dvor, the playground and the gazon in front of the building. The next day, my landlord called me up to tell me that she had called him to complain about me acting in a suspicious manner and walking all over the grass (this was in winter, what grass???).
I quickly learned that the Grannystapo makes sure that no good deed goes unpunished in Russia.
But I wasn’t willing to give up just yet. “Surely, I’m not the only one who realizes this is a problem,” I thought to myself. Maybe we need a whole public education campaign, state-sponsored commercials, large billboards along the highways, spam phone-calls and the like to get old people to start disposing of their trash properly? Maybe I should write a letter to my local government chinovniks and pitch the idea? This was the progressive in me talking.
Then, I envisioned myself going full eco-terrorist, publishing a manifesto declaring the coming of Judgement Day for violators of the purity of my backyard view. I would impose strict Dumpster Law, and become the prophet of recycling (Peace Be Upon Me).
Finally, I considered a form of activism by which I could change old people’s behavior by appealing to their better senses. In this case, their sense of fear. I would put on a mask and hide behind the dumpster, only to spring out and terrorize the old lady who had just seeded her trash into the dumpster. A sort of Shock and Awe approach if you will. Pavlovian conditioning of a gentle, loving, but firm nature.
But my girlfriend at the time convinced me of the futility of any of these ideas and I had to abandon them. I eventually settled on calling the trash people to ask them to clean up the yard again. They came by a week earlier and did a good job. About 10 days later, the trash was back again.
I suppose the point that I’m driving at here is that it’s difficult to change the habits and attitudes of old people. You may as well forget about trying to convince anyone past a certain age (probably around 28) to consider your esoteric political views. Consider how in America and the UK, there are still old Whites who vote for the Democrats and Labor, respectively, because they think that these are the parties that represent blue-collar workers. Put another way, if I can’t even get old people in Eastern Europe to stop mucking up their own backyards, how are right-wingers in America going to get Boomers to stop worshipping Israel?
Another point I’m trying to make is that while it may be easy to come up with grand macro solutions to change the course of history and human civilization and post them on the internet, it’s far harder to actually effect anything on a micro level that improves your actual lived quality of life. It’s hard not to feel completely powerless to make any positive change whatsoever in anything that involves the cooperation of people other than oneself nowadays.
Cooperation, in general, strikes me as a lost art form. Most people seem to be incapable of interacting in a positive, constructive manner with one another. They would much rather get mad at a fellow prole or peasant than come to an accord with them on anything. In the villages and towns, the situation is only marginally better. Most of the neighbors have grudges and grievances against one another that they have spent half a century accumulating. They are quite eager to share them with you and get you on their team in their petty disputes.
I’ve often wondered what exactly we need to do to develop a renewed sense of cultural solidarity and to re-attain higher levels of social cooperation. America, despite all its problems, used to have a noticeably higher level of assabiyah, and it made the texture and rhythm of life noticeably more pleasant. My parents used to tell me that they left the door to their house in Boston unlocked and that their neighbors would offer to drive them and show them around when they didn’t have a car. This was in the 90s. It’s hard to imagine that kind of social cooperation existing anywhere in the White world now.
More than any laws (Dumpster Law included) or any social policy measures, the ability of people to self-organize, cooperate and generally get along with others seems to be the most salient factor in determining quality of life. But people have allowed themselves to become anti-social and uncooperative to a level that would seem hardly imaginable to our ancestors. Without the state stepping in to regulate our behavior and clean-up after us, I believe that we would simply descend into internecine savagery for a period. Naturally, it was the state that had the most to gain by reducing our ability to organize and work out our problems ourselves, and so even though it has become indispensable for modern life, its quite obvious that the state also created these conditions of dependency in the first place.
I have come to believe that the politicization of the peasants was part of nefarious policy by the elites to turn people against one another. More than any other factor, politicization has done more to erode cultural and social assabiyah than anything else. A people’s cohesion and ability to cooperate with one another is their greatest and only defense against predation by hostile elites. Once that’s gone, they find themselves in a condition of being divided and conquered. Allegiance to one political party or another is a weak substitute for allegiance to one’s family, friends, neighbors, community, tribe and so on.
In second place, however, we would have to consider the deleterious effects that the the scourge of forced association has had on the people. Forcing strangers of varying moral, intellectual and social character to live tightly together in commieblocks was probably the most damaging thing that the USSR did to its hapless Slavic population. Shorn of their ability to practice exclusionary best practices and to kick out those who refused to adhere to the standards of the community, the best ended up being forced to rub shoulders with the worst. This led to a noticeable behavioral sink. In America, the Left does its best to use the battering ram of forced association to attack white Americans through the bussing of brown kids into White schools, section 8 housing and all manner of forced diversity programs. It’s an old Communist strategy, really.
But can assabiyah be restored? Can cooperation be re-learned? Can the peasants and proles learn to stand together and on their own two feet again?
Looking around me, I can only point to the successful example of various religious organizations and cults as models for re-establishing and forcing successful cooperation strategies on average non-cooperative people. These organizations demand that people change their behavior for the better and somehow manage to pull it off in many cases. Unsurprisingly, most people who get involved in these organizations in the first place do it because they just want to be a part of a community and if believing in aliens is part of the deal then so be it. They’re willing to put up with a lot of bullshit to get that feeling of assabiyah back into their lives.
It occurs to me that the improvement in cooperative behavior that religious organizations engender in their members could be successfully divorced from the various mumbo-jumbo voodoo doctrines that they preach. Seeing as there are all sorts of successful religious denominations and cults worshipping various gods, demons, and holy men, the key might lie not in what these people are taught to believe, but in how they go about believing in it, together.
Getting everyone to believe in Communism or Nazism or Catholicism seems to be a waste of time. Getting everyone to share meals together, however, well, that’s a different story.
With so many people nowadays feeling lonely, adrift and totally divorced from any meaningful community, I can’t help but come to the conclusion that the first group or organization to offer lost souls a chance at experiencing a taste of assabiyah in their lives will win out over all other groups, regardless of what they preach. In fact, the less time they spend preaching and the more time they spend implementing successful assabiyah-building strategies, the better the results would be, I’m sure of it.
Me, I would call my new ideology/cult/organization the Friendship Alliance of Socially-inClined Individuals Solidarity Movement and I would organize barbecues and fishing trips and group jogs for the members. The curriculum would focus on teaching people how to be good friends to one another and how to share. We’d create an organization with extremely high levels of trust and solidarity, which would translate into our ability to cooperate on all manner of projects together and play ultimate frisbee.
Then, when the time came, I’d rally my Friendship Cult against the powers that be, luger in one hand and the Declaration of Eternal Friendship in the other, pronouncing myself the First Friend (Peace Be Upon Me) and the forced imposition of Friendship Law on the entire country.
I wonder if during communism plastic bags were hard to come by, leading to everyone developing the habit of reusing them and, therefore, dumpster seeding. My grandmother used to wash milk bags for reused and dry out paper towels, habits she picked up during the Depression.
Japan is also instructive. There's basically no litter in Tokyo. There are also no public garbage cans, and no bylaws against littering. People just don't do it. They keep their trash in their pockets until it can be disposed of. Smokers even carry portable ashtrays to avoid leaving cigarette butts around. It's just a sort of collective understanding that if they're going to live in such close quarters, it will all be much more pleasant if they aren't choking on their own trash. The Japanese, of course, possess probably the most assabiyah of any group incorporated in the Western order.
Your post reminds me of my early years growing up in a run down low rent Brooklyn tenement. We had a gaggle of old ladies there too. One of them now long gone and not missed Ida Glazer (guess what tribe she belonged to) sat by her window like a guard in a GULAG watch tower. A total "yenta" we called her "the crow". Same attitudes that you describe. In truth and all candor I'm more or less fed up with old people AKA senior citizens. Most are crabby, pushy, whining and like the WOKE have a strong sense of entitlement. The world owes them something syndrome. Constantly reminding you of the "good old days". Really? If they were so good and their generation was so on the ball, then why is the world in the hot mess it's in today. Yeah right. Regarding trash NYC is slowly becoming a public dump. I see people near trash cans dropping refuse on the street. Subway station tracks are loaded with garbage, hypodermic needles and rats. Not to mention the "homeless" and garden variety panhandling low lives. Charity begins at home. With such a public of this type a swift kick up the ass is in order. As the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius said, "Stand erect, or be made to stand erect."