About

Nov. 30, 2010. 1:02 a.m. Why ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’

 I grew up in a world that largely doesn’t anymore exist. Only the shells of a few buildings downtown remained standing after urbanization, and even they were gutted and prostituted into a.m coffeeshops, health and wellness emporiums and stores dedicated solely to selling fancy candles. Or soap maybe. The rest of the city was torn down, turned upside down, inside out. Seed shops turned trendy architecture firms, real estate offices. Hotel dive bars redeveloped into highrises with first floor espresso muffin bars. Family run groceries replaced with office supply. My childhood neighborhood burst asunder again and again before my very eyes until I couldn’t recognize its face anymore.

While my urban world was collapsing, the suburbs became wide and expansive. Testimony to the American Dream, to how well life could be for all if they just worked hard. The suburbs were stamped out of nothingness to give every hard-working family a home. So many I couldn’t name them. Inverness hill, Summer Glen, Golden Oaks. dozens of them.

But even the suburbs were fleeting. Many of the older, had themselves, already become run-down ghettos. The cycle continued. The death and rebirth of our geography.  Homes with a lifespan as long as mosquitos. Like ant hills washed away and rebuilt.

Perhaps I misunderstood the words, the meaning of my elders when I was growing up…but I could swear it wasn’t supposed to be like this.

We were supposed to be to mars and beyond by now. Robots should be serving tea and cars flying and humanity working together as one big family to fight aliens. We were supposed to building something, going somewhere, taking everyone to a higher level. On a mission.

That’s what all the change was for. Ever expanding growth to make all our lives better and all the boats would come up swimming and we would lead the way for the world to fly to mars.  That’s how I remember it. Why I played so much Space Invaders. Training.

Politically, my elementary classmates and I ducked under the desks when the intercom played a warning signal. The Soviets could be coming. When I changed schools we then went down into a long skinny cement corridor down in the bottom of the building. And I felt safer against all out nuclear war. Several thousand warheads on each side aimed at the other.

And then Red Dawn came out. The threat was real.

“Just imagine,” we said to each other.

My classmates and I and our parents waited in long lines down the street to fill our cars with gas. My friend had a shirt with ”Ayatollah ass-a-hola” like the Simpsons captured later. It’s all true. The sheiks and the Ruskies were out to get us.

“I knew it the day the war ended with the Germans,” my grandfather told me once, as I sat sitting playing with G.I. Joe on the floor below, “I thought we should have fought ‘em then.”

So Ronny solemnly smiled and warned we might be the generation to face the Armageddon. And Ronny invaded half of South America to save from the End Times. And cuts throughout the American infrastructure and taxes were needed to save us further. The money would all trickle down later, if we made sacrifices now. Things were kind of tight.

But then the Soviets fell to pieces and we were saved. Freedom won. The markets loved it. The West pissed itself in profit.

Markets and labor as far as the eye could see. Bananas were rushed in. Capital rushed out.  We consolidated that mother. The End of History, it was said. Sure a few folks were forced to flee.

Taste the pain of asunder, bitches. It’s good for ya.’ Builds character. In the long run it was for the best.

Their boats would rise eventually. Just as soon as our did.

No. Thirty years after Star Wars, after 2001 and The Jetsons, we have none of it. Nothing.

Cellphones and laptops, Xbox and Wii. Personal consumer items that make us all feel really important…but nothing more. The only robots are toys, vacuum cleaners, or stuck in factories, making more crappy consumer items. Automobiles, not only didn’t fly, but they still get relatively the same gas mileage as thirty years ago for cristsakes.  The US never even went Metric!

We wasted all the time and money on war in the thirty years since I was born just like the thirty years before that and the thirty-thousand years before that. A wasted effort.

And that pisses me off. I’m not ready to give up on robots, on flying cars, on humanity building a better world and getting along and actually achieving something.

I’m looking for the essence behind the American Dream, that all men (I’d add women too) are created equal and have a right to life, liberty and happiness.  But that dream is the Human Dream. America has no monopoly on that dream. The United States was born of that dream, not the other way around, and that dream has to be earned through reaffirming its principles each and every day, year after year, decade after decade.

I would argue that humans have much more in common, than not. To varying degrees, humans either respect each other, or they do not, they have rights, liberty and happiness, or they do not, in each and every village, town and city, all around the planet, every day. You can feel it when you walk down the street. The level of respect in a place. And that feeling might be different for another person. We all respect certain people…other perhaps, we do not. Starting with the people close to us, our trust extends outward. We all have a different social web connecting us to the world around. A rare few trust only themselves, some trust only their family or friends, others trust total strangers. I want you to trust strangers.

Eggs and Toast, this website, is intended to document my daily search for the trust between strangers: humans, objects and places. Eggs and Toast is a reference to a story I wrote about feeling alienated by world politics, by my the identity world politics forced on me because of my country of origion.  To document my time and place and the people around me in the city I live every day and all the little individual worlds, where the people come from and what inspires them, the history behind a place or what it’s become, the reasons things are what they are, and all this,  in the hopes that others will see this collection of such, and be inspired and perhaps extend their circle of trust a bit further…that is the absurd goal. This is my attempt at bringing a bit of cohesion to a world that is changing and moving and reinventing itself faster than the eye can see.

Cohesion to combat the world bursting asunder around us, to combat the instability in our ‘ever changing world,’ to combat fear. There’s already enough fear in the world. Fear robs us of our wallet every day in the back alley. Fear, we are getting good at. We have enough of fear. Fear is the opposite of Trust. We have to work on trust.

Ich bin ein Berliner, was Kennedy, trying to get Berliners to believe in trust, telling Berliners the world stood behind the city in its rough hour at the beginning of the Cold War. Kennedy, you, me, everyone was a Berliner, he meant supposedly. Berlin as a metaphor for the world. And in the following almost 50 years now Berlin has become inversly a microcosm of the world. My hope is that my showing the myriad lives in Berlin, the idea that Berlin could be anywhere in the world, should not be forgotten. Even if that place means jelly-donut.