Roiled
I find the word roiled to be very useful and descriptive in many circumstances. I find myself often using it to describe markets, which can become very agitated. I particularly used it in my testimony with the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York (Tillary Street in Brooklyn) as the financial crash of 2008 was unfolding. Now those were roiled markets. It is meant to describe a mixing of fluids that creates a disturbed environment and a degree of confusion which makes otherwise transparent situations more opaque. I feel we are living in a roiled world right now, less in the markets and more in everyday life (thank you, COVID) and in global politics (thank you, divisive nationalism). I am tempted to paraphrase Forrest Gump and say that roiled is as roiled does.
At this very moment, the weather here on the hilltop is feeling a bit roiled. It was supposed to rain yesterday and today, but that has mostly passed us by, but not without some menacing clouds and some very brisk weather. This followed some warm Santa Ana winds in the weeks prior. I have a very good system for warning me about the weather on this particular hilltop. As part of my garden art, I have a grand total of nine wind sculptures. Seven of them are on the back hillside where they twirl and spin to their hearts content. But I have two positioned in the Cecil Garden between our house and our detached three-car garage. Where that space had been where the prior owner kept citrus trees and all the garbage bins, we decided that it was too nice a space to not have it be a part of our garden. We kept the citrus trees, but added an Irish Strawberry tree, a basalt column fountain, a bonsai garden and a blend of bougainvillea and other flowers. I also placed a garden archway with a wind sculpture next to it and tossed in another wind sculpture to the north. Without knowing it, I had set up my own wind early warning system with the windmill by the garden gate spinning freely when the wind comes in from the ocean with its moisture and cooling breeze, and the spinner nearer the north side of the garden entrance where it catches the wind coming in from the mountains to the East. That northern spinner is usually catching the Santa Ana winds with their warm dry desert orientation. I feel like I can watch in the best of Mary Poppins manner when the wind shifts from one direction to the other with all its incumbent characteristics that roils our hilltop.
The world is roiled today as the U.S. soccer team gets ready to play against the national team of Iran. I turned off the TV as the pundits were trying to explain the accusations of the Iranians that their flag had somehow been desecrated by the Western media and the USSF in showing it without the Islamic emblem, supposedly in support of the Iranian protestors who are opposing the strict and autocratic Islamic rule of their country. Iran says this was an intentional move by USSF to strip the word of God from their national symbol and an attempt to foment division in a country already suffering daily protests by young women and men opposed to the strict religiously-oriented government. Iran’s solution is to lodge a protest with FIFA, the governing body of the World Cup matches underway. That is the same FIFA which is embroiled in its own roiled mess over its selection of Qatar as the site of this year’s World Cup tournament. It seems that Qatar, like most Arabic nations in the Middle East use what is called the Kafala System that defines the ability of these Arabic states to employ migrant workers predominantly from the much poorer subcontinent of India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Pakistan. The stadiums built for the World Cup have supposedly led to the death of some 6,500 migrant workers who work for slave wages under a system that does not employ enough OSHA-like safety standards and offers bare-bones living standards all for the sake of inexpensive construction that cuts every corner imaginable. This is a roiling issue to be sure since the people volunteer for the much-needed work, but then are abused to the limits of human tolerance in a system that puts a fancy name on what is nothing more than age-old human slavery.
The world is getting upside down and sideways all at once. The biggest protests are in China, Russia and Iran, implying that people’s tolerance for autocracy and suppressive tactics are being stretched to their limits. The opioid for the masses, sport, is not only not providing sufficient palliative to the condition, but is contributing to the problem by killing or endangering people who are being deployed to make it all happen in a glossy, front-page manner. Soccer/football is clearly the global sport of choice for the masses as it requires no more than a rough leather ball and a patch of dirt to play, but the laws of large numbers cause it to be turned into a spectacle for prime time much as the Olympics with its once every four years schedule gives the money-makes and developers of the world the opportunity to promote new venues and claim advancing development as their justification. The truth is that high impact activity that comes from a World Cup or Olympic selection, with all its back-channeling and likely corrupt flows is a cause unto itself. This is less about showcasing Qatar than it is an opportunity for Qatari developers to make money off the backs and lives of migrant laborers while putting the patina of modernity over the blood, sweat and tears of the less than fortunate. Is it any wonder that these forces are driving the common youth of the world, especially in the less emergent parts of the world, to rise up and go over the walls that are forever being built to keep them away from the very spectacular venues they have toiled to create?
Back in 1973, when I was in college studying economics and government (having transferred out of engineering, less as a statement of protest and more for reasons of sheer interest), a small country in Latin America set off an alarm for the rest of the world. It was the Chilean coup d’etat wherein Salvador Allende, a communist, was upended by Augusto Pinochet, the dictator that created modern Chile. Communism was bad. Dictators were bad. Oppression was bad. Poverty was bad. I studied those times in a classroom in far-away Ithaca, New York and was incensed by the outrage of totalitarianism. I then was sent to Chile a decade later to see for myself and to reclaim millions of dollars lent to the people of that country. It is said that communists pay their debts and autocrats abrogate their debts, but the Pinochet government (I personally met the man on several occasions) worked to give us an exit for our capital and did so by allowing us to own a piece of the national patronage of the country in the form of the pension system of Chile. We brought modern financial ways to the company and resold it to locals years later in fulfillment of our promised exit. It worked well for us and worked well for Chile. But still, there were the thousands of youthful protestors still buried under the stadium steps in Santiago.
My mind and soul are roiled by the events I have seen and participated in and still see happening today in the world. I simply do not know where the best path lies on these things. I know I want peace, prosperity and equality, but those are just words that do not connect easily with the events that confront us on any given day. The roiled world goes on and we, as the flotsam and jetsam of the moment get tossed hither and yon and do our best to steady our own course and do what we can to salvage the rest of the world.