Experience resides in memory, while memory is an unlocatable ghost 'experience' seems to speak of something like an essence. Something must be there. As if the accumulation of memory is meaningful if that accumulated memory is experience, and the meaningful essence of experience will justify the attachment to memory.

What do we have? The clothes on our back? The back on our spines? Our consciousness on our brains, which is moving about and acting through an alien body? Do we even have our consciousness?

We don't properly own anything, and if we can't locate the self in any satisfactory manner, the self is then most likely an evolved construct, purposed to motivate us to care properly. If we care properly about ourselves we won't just let our bodies or our material assets parish. Reasonable, one might say.

But then the eternal question: why do I care so much? With my clothes and my back and my spine and my brain and my restless restless mind?

So is experience isn't ours; it's lack of self grates against our illusory sense of self which is only a concept that we allow to be.

Why care so much when it hurts?

There is and always has been a certain amount of alienation between government and the governed. That is the very nature of government; the alienation of those who have direct access to the mechanisms of power to those who have indirect access or no access at all. The conservative, liberal, and even the socialist response would be that such a separation is inevitable. The conservative would say it is a good and right separation, the liberal would say we can live with the separation as it is now, and the socialist would say that such a disparity should be reduced and eliminated when possible but ultimately there will always be some distance.

The socialist position is by far the most sympathetic. The vision of the left is that of communities and individuals reclaiming their own sovereignty and reappropriating their own resources so those resources aren't used against their or other sovereign people's interests.

Modern liberal democracy is as close as we have gotten to a left vision of the world where this central disparity is reduced. The people are not nearly as distanced from the means of power as they have been in the past and it has meant huge material gains. However, people are still fundamentally alienated from governance, and lately that real and mental distance has grown in the United States in elsewhere. It's an open secret in the US there is hardly anything left of a representative republic; the people's voices are routinely sidelined through the influence of the economically powerful and those that are in government to represent the people are part of this powerful class or closely aligned with it.

More than ever in history the common ideal of the left to reclaim governance for the people is relevant and pressingly obvious as the solution to the ongoing crisis of political legitimacy. What is the road map for a left in the United States that wont be subsumed into the capitalist Democratic party?  

Life comes apart very visibly toward the end. There are so many little cycles of birth and death; the death of a town is one.

You likely didn't see your town come to life some summer of capital years ago. Maybe it was the mills, making the earth hum with the urgency of constant production. Maybe it was a fortuitous location on the sea, with crushing hopeful crowds piling off boats to partake in the commerce of others who had similarly come ashore. Or maybe a new route between the places of commerce and production had bought the lives of commerce and production to the wild.

You probably are seeing some community's not-so-august fall, with the humming machines silent, the crowds cynical, and the routes between places empty of trade. Frost came early to end summer, and the fall seeps into every yard and home.

Walking and riding the streets of the new ghost town are those spirits who are only vaguely aware they are dead. They are still flesh and blood, they still dream, and they still rear pale little children. 'What went wrong?' they say, 'Are we less daring? More selfish? Too caring?'

Did we do anything different at all? The world moved on without us, and we let it go.

So now, fellow spirits, we must be called back to life, or, more precisely, cry out we never stopped living. These, our streets, we once built and will build again. Our roofs we'll reroof. Our stores we'll stock. Our larders we will fill with the fruits of our own labor and our own land.

Ours together, we'll say,

because the world moved on without us,

because we forgot the world is ours,
and  it wont be taken again.

Never forget,

and enjoy the spring.