Basements of the World Unite!
Why do we have basements?
Is it just affordability?
Privacy?
Somewhere to get high?
Somewhere to hide during bad storms?
Or? Does the word underground still have meaning to people? It did once. It was somewhere where blacks and jews were hidden. It was the underground railroad.
But what are people hiding in their basements today? The answer might surprise you: it’s poverty.
Who wants to live in basements? They are difficult to heat, susceptible to molds, dark even dreary and sometimes they flood.
But what does that say about the people who live there? Are they equally dreary?
And yet somehow after all these years the term underground has not lost its appeal. Why? It’s because people form closer relationships with each other in adversity than they do in good times. They are like fish jumping through difficult rapids together and feeling stronger. Not like the bottom-feeders who only know easy currents.
That is why people line up at the box office to see how Bob Dylan wrote the Basement Tapes, or why engineers write “underground capital projects” on their business cards.
Are our basements here the same as anywhere else in the world? Or are we just somehow world-class in this regard? Are our basements meeting places and not just hiding places?
Sure! No question!
Or do we even need to relegate basements to hiding places? Can they not also be meeting places? Places of change and of open discussion.
Historical basements, cool cafes, these are places where we reclaim our poor from the realm of dissidence and let them be fish, strong fish, maybe even Jesus fish. Who jump and dip and dive together whether they have legs or not.
The Labyrinths of the underworld are populated, with people who believe. They believe in fate, and have hope. They believe in a better future and they carry on. It’s really something.
And yet, we sound-proof the heck out of rooms, so no one will ever hear you sing. Living in a basement is not some kind of Beach Wedding unless you take the vanilla candles. Is that what poor people need? Pheromones of attraction? Wow we have really come a long way.
Think about it. What people really need is each other.
OR as Mike Myers so sagely said
"We belong to the earth, not the other way round."
Let us basement dwellers unite around a common cause! To protest climate change and these storms and floods ruining our dwelling places.