VIEW FROM THE PEW
Infrastructure. Bah humbug.
The word has become an expletive in my life, a yardstick to measure how I’ve failed to tackle basic maintenance, a possible scary signal that I’m losing it. I mutter it when I navigate through a room that has become the graveyard of abandoned projects, because whose fault is this but mine. It’s a road rage shout at a tire-wrenching jolt because I didn’t swerve around the years’ old neighborhood entrenched pothole. Would it be too much to ask that the Board of Water Supply and other city crews, who pass over it daily, notice it and deal with it?
A mere neglected pothole is nothing compared to the infrastructure crime the city government has perpetrated in Kaimuki, a parking lot repaving project with the collateral damage of the slaughter of several shade trees. The crime wasn’t as public as the Ala Moana Park tree killings so no tree lovers succeeded in stopping it. Can the city claim to be going green when it kills these large oxygen-producing plants?
I have little sympathy for those guys in Congress who duck fixing the vast infrastructure they’re responsible for. If they can’t even navigate the middle aisle between two parties sitting in the same room, can we trust them to deal with bridges and dams? But now that the topic is in the headlines, I can’t help thinking about the age and state of the viaduct or bridge I’m rolling on. I remember our cross-country Amtrak trip not long ago when the train slowed to a crawl over a long stretch of track due for rail maintenance; that’s fodder for a memory-turned-nightmare.
I applaud those people who can look back on the past year as their triumph of resilience and sustainability, using the COVID shutdown as a time to tackle home infrastructure problems and fix things, hiring carpenters, roofers, painters and tree-cutters. Better yet, they energized themselves to clean out closets and carports and clutter.
Hooray for you, but don’t tell me about it. I didn’t do any of that. I’m as bad as those Congress members I was bashing. My strategy with home infrastructure issues is to just accept wanky windows that won’t open all the way and cracks in a lanai wall and deteriorating furniture. Well, I did call the termite inspection guy and he sure cheered me up; yup, that’s termite dust in the cupboard. I don’t know if he heard me snarl “infrastructure.”
Even going to church is not an escape from my fixation on infrastructure. The parish church is undergoing mega repair: the new roof is on and now the three-story scaffolding is up inside as replacement of fallen or rain-stained ceiling tiles is underway. It will be inhabited only by workmen for the next few months.
Losing the battle
Meanwhile, Masses are in the vintage school auditorium where we are lucky if a breeze wafts in the door while we watch father at the altar on the stuffy, dark, curtain-draped stage. It’s become a bonding experience; as we share this slight discomfort, we seem to be chatting together more. And we even had our first hospitality hour after Mass a couple of weeks ago — outside, distancing a little bit, masks askew to deal with the doughnuts.
Oh no, what am I doing? I’m turning cheery … distracted from my temper tantrum. And I haven’t gotten to the punchline yet, about the collapse of a “punee” leg while I was exercising my right to take a nap to escape actual exercise and chores. I wasn’t hurt but I am guilty of ignoring that annoying squeaky fixture for months. It’s urgent because that serves as the bed for a visitor. It’s beyond me to fix it. Oh, infrastructure, I’m losing the battle.
All of this rant is a rerun of some I-can-top-that conversations I’ve had with others of my ilk. There’s one with water dripping from the ceiling during heavy rain — but hey, it’s more often a sunny day, no rush to find a roofer but cringe at possible worst news. Another, whose asphalt driveway looks like the buckled surface of a lava field — and is about as treacherous to walk across — is leaving it for her kids to fix after she’s gone on to her mansion in heaven. And several others display their devolving infrastructure to public view: carports with no room for cars because they’re stacked with stuff that doesn’t work, doesn’t fit, is rejected by charitable collectors. It’s a problem resolved by donning virtual blinders, that headgear they put on horses to keep them from being spooked by what they might see beside them.
Some of us have pondered organizing ourselves. No, not for group motivation but to broaden our horizons, expand the storytelling, find soul mates with more egregious examples. We discussed becoming DMA — Deferred Maintenance Anonymous — but that implies we are seeking a cure. Proud Procrastinators was proposed but it does have a belligerent edge; we are not militia-minded. On second thought, maybe we are when it comes to tolerating people who fixed things and brag about it.
As the recognized “church lady” at hand, I was urged to find a faith-based theme to our disinterest in our worldly goods. I mean, we aren’t people in love with our material things and wanting to flaunt them with an extreme makeover. That’s a plus, right? We also don’t exactly qualify for “blessed are the poor …” but there’s certainly no stashed fortunes to be tapped. We don’t consider ourselves deliberately destructive, just not motivated, not coping. There must be some way to justify ourselves, scripturally speaking, right?
So I turned to my regular source, the Gospel according to Google. I didn’t tell the pals that the L-word was buzzing my brain a bit. Are we just lazy? Is it a sin? Should we stop being so pleased with our attitude and repent? When I sought connections between laziness and the Bible, a spate of passages from the Old Testament book of Proverbs spewed forth. But then, here’s the Catholic catechism list of seven deadly sins and SLOTH is on it. It’s defined as “a habitual disinclination to exertion. “ I’d forgotten that.
Worse than that, the list also includes PRIDE. Suddenly my Catholic schoolgirl conscience is wondering if our cocky viewpoint about failure to fix stuff is going make this a double-header sin-wise. This won’t bother my non-Catholic compadres. But I didn’t really start this column to be making a public confession. I’d like to plead mitigating circumstances: no one else is suffering because of my inaction — yet.
One gal in the group asked if that saying, “God helps those who help themselves,” is from the Bible. It’s not; it traces back to an ancient Greek expression about “the gods” helping the ambitious.
Diving into the internet, looking for a connection between God and taking care of the infrastructure, brings a seeker into the dark depths of “prosperity theology.” The theory is that God rewards believers with wealth and success on earth. It is preached by popular televangelists and self-help gurus whose pitch is that donations to the preachers will generate prosperity for the donor. It certainly does for the multimillionaire evangelist-salesmen.
“The notion that God gives back financial or material gain in response to donations … is a travesty of the Gospel of Christ, who was himself poor and lived frugally with what was offered to him,” Msgr. M. Francis Mannion wrote in a Jan. 20, 2019, essay for the Catholic News Agency. “There is also the notion, derived from the Swiss reformer John Calvin (and assumed generally into Protestantism) that material and financial prosperity is a sign of God’s blessing of the righteous. By the same logic, those who are poor and struggle with poverty must be sinners and lack God’s blessing,” Mannion wrote. That notion got woven into a non-spiritual theory about the power of positive thinking that arose in 20th Century America. Unfortunately, the way capitalism developed, we have a culture where the super-rich become superheroes because of the way they display their wealth.
Moth and rust
Well, I’m not going to tell anything more about those guys, but I don’t think they’ve been reading the same Gospels that I have. How about from the Gospel of John: “Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride in possession is not from the Father but from the world.”
I gave up the idea of pumping up my gang of infrastructure deniers with a smart-aleck label for us. But I thought these words of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew might work for a plaque on the wall if we had a clubhouse: “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven … for where you treasure is, there your heart will also be.” Then there’s this passage from Luke’s Gospel: “And he said to them, take care and be on your guard against all covetousness for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.”
We sure can relate to anxiety about moths and rust but that’s not what our focus should be in the long view. I always knew that, but I’ve been focusing on excuse, not inspiration. Maybe I could pull out the text about the birds in the sky and the lilies in the field not toiling and yet God takes care of them. Wait, that wasn’t about skipping work but a message about not being anxious.
So I struck out on the search to find a blessing for neglecting our infrastructure. In fact, from beginning to end, we hear about work being expected from us. From the Genesis story with Adam ejected from Eden to till the soil and toil for his bread, to Jesus growing up at the side of Joseph the carpenter and recruiting hard-working fishermen as his disciples and telling parables about man’s stewardship of his possessions, there are no grounds to excuse my laziness.
So, I find myself not so content about my flawed stewardship of my earthly treasure, an aging cabin with all its flaws. No search for a perfect quote to ease my conscience could make that as clear as the sight of a massive Moiliili monument to dysfunctional society and failed infrastructure. The stack of minimal possessions owned by the poorest people, another homeless tent encampment; we drive past them every day. We want someone else to deal with this problem, this annoyance, these people.
I drove past, with tears in my eyes and “Kanaka Wai Wai” in my head. The song tells the Gospel story of the rich young man who asked what he must do to get to heaven. Jesus told him to sell his goods, give the money to the poor “and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” But the man turned away sad because he could not bear to let loose of his possessions.
It’s something to ponder when I wash the windows and seek a carpenter to fix the bed.