Imagine if you will, you living in the home your
great-grandparents built. One day your neighbor from across the street shows up
at your door unannounced and hides in one of the corners of your home. They
didn’t even knock. One day, you address the elephant in the room and you
approach them, offering them food as they’ve been there for quite sometime and
they haven’t eaten. They are grateful for the offering and tell you their
story. As it turns out, their mom sent them out on a quest to find out what was
actually across the street. “Mom is hard of seeing” they say. Things between
you and your new housemate are going good until one day, while having some
friends over, you discover they’ve started building an addition to your house.
“We want to have our own space” they say.
That’s fine. But one day, you notice they have their family
come stay with them too. You go investigate and you find they have friends and
even strangers living in your house. You begin to wonder if they are planning
to leave at all. They keep building and keep inviting friends and strangers to
live in the areas they’ve built. But by this time your own children and
families have grown old, some have died, other’s have moved away. On your death
bed you tell your grandchildren to cooperate with your neighbors and guests.
And they do, your grandchildren are now in charge of caring for your home and
keeping your neighbor’s grandchildren from harm. For the most part everyone
gets along.
Generations go by and
now your great-great-grandchildren are caretakers of your house. And your
neighbor’s great-great-grandchildren have approached them, telling them they
want to take over the whole house so they can build as they see fit. Seeing the
value of the house that’s gone back 7 generations, they enter into negotiations
with each other over who controls the house. They find they’ve entered into
negotiations under the guidance of their mom across the street, so it’s really
her they’re negotiating with. She wants full control of the house, but she is
willing to compensate them fairly.
The mother proposes they give up the house and she will take
care of them and all the generations that will come after them, for as long as
the rivers flow. Your great-great-grandchildren are smart, they negotiate from
the mom, medicine, a yearly allowance, they want their children to get an education. In exchange, they get
their own room in the house while the mom across the street is free to build as
many additions and invite as many people over as she wants. Your people find
this to be fair compensation for conceding care over the house. To make things
official, the mom across the street wants to make this a contract, and you all
sign it.
By now, many more generations have passed, and the rooms
your people were promised got smaller and smaller, and have never been repaired,
some don’t even have running water, and those that do, the water is terrible.
Your people can’t even drink it. But the house gets bigger and bigger. The mom
across the street and all her people have now started posting rules around the
house, and have even made it illegal for her people to enter your people’s
rooms. The mom has even made it against the rules for you to watch TV, go
shopping, to speak to one another in the language of your choosing, or to even
build your own additions to the house.
The mom across the street figures it’s best if your people’s
children go to school, a school she chooses. She hires the police to come take
your children to bring them to a school several neighborhoods away. Some of the
children will never come home. Then, when you thought the mom couldn’t do any
worse, she tells the police that you are unfit and they come and take the
children away and put them in other neighbor’s houses. Now all the children are
gone.
But in addition to being smart, your people are strong. They
find new ways to speak their language, they find new ways to bring their
children home, and new ways to celebrate who they are. You see your people
making a come back, they start making a stand against the mom across the
street. She sees this and begins to rethink her strategy. She allows your
people to start weighing in on the rule making, even lets them make their own
rules, in their own rooms. She promises to never make changes to contract
without your permission. But the mom across the street has given power to other
people, people living within the house that once belonged to you.
Another couple generations go by, and your people find that
the mom and her people haven’t been exactly been honoring their end of the
bargain. Yet they continue to build additions, other houses even. They build
walkways and whole new neighborhoods.
You begin to see that the rule makers absolutely want your people
out of the house for good, but try to hide that fact by apologizing for taking
your children away, making them selves look good, no one would suspect a thing.
Then, behind closed doors, they decide they are going to make changes to the
contract. All they’ve done was slide a little note under the doors of your
people and go right ahead and make those changes. Those changes to the contract
make it easier for your people to concede their rooms, and easy for their
people to call a meeting to ask them to concede their rooms. And they’ve made
those changes despite the disapproval of your people, other people in their
part of the house, and other people from other neighborhoods, even people from
across the street.
What would you do?
#idlenomore
#idlenomore
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