In the parking lot at the mall

I’m sitting in my truck at the mall waiting for my daughter and her friends to get out of a movie.  It’s a backwater mall in a minor city at the edge of the United States.  The mall consists of pale yellow concrete block rectangles set up as wings around a central corridor.  It is an older structure that has been minimally maintained, but as the only mall for hundreds of miles around it is still very popular wit h the teenagers.  Inside are the collection of chain stores that can be found in just aboutany city in the US, along with an equal number of local businesses.  And the whole thing is chock full of merchandise, mostly of questionable quality but astonishingly cheap, thanks to the globalization of labor and capitol.

Yesterday I was taking down a length of barbed wire fence at the edge of a bamboo thicket when I noticed some moss covered boulders half hidden by the bamboo. I hadn’t noticed them before although they’re just a hundred feet or so from my house, where the pasture turns to forested hillside.   They were beautiful in that Zen rock garden way.  It was clear that there was a relationship between the rocks and the bamboo thicket that allowed for such verdant mosses to grow, a kind of intimacy between the three. The quiet beauty of those moss-covered rocks stay with me. 

The scent of a joint being smoked trails through the truck window.  It’s what people do after work, young people anyway, and it’s becoming more socially acceptable every day, whether medical or recreational.  Something loosens up, there is a return to a less high-strung way of life as the young people get stoned in their cars.  Is that a good or bad thing?

I think of the “bellicose” young 17th century Dutchman, Jan Pieterszoon Coen, who, in the service of the Dutch East India Company  wiped out the native people of the nutmeg-producing islands of Banda with a cruelty that the IS would have admired. He shaped the world for centuries to come with his “successes.” But was that a good thing?  I could talk about colonialism and capitalism but I won’t because we know all about it.  But we still worship the kind of success that transforms the world, most of the time for the worse in the long run.