Sometimes I feel like the 2020s are a lot like the 1020s must have been in medieval Europe. Now hear me out! I know we have a lot of technology and progress and modern day luxuries. But I feel like our mentalities, and a lot of our social and economic structures, are stuck back a thousand years ago.
The wealthiest live in castles on hilltops, beautiful manors with gardens and plenty to eat, not a care in the world. In the golden city - the desired place - the castles, the gardens, the fountains - are surrounded by dangers and treachery. Moats made up of snaking highways encircle the forbidden city, impossible to cross on foot. The wealthier ones have steeds they can mount to cross over into the golden city. Horses in the 1020s ... cars in the 2020s ....
There are bridge trolls at the off ramps into the golden city, demanding payment or exacting revenge. Panhandlers? Or criminals, waiting to pop tires and steal the precious jewels of a catalytic converter from underneath the steed ....
Small towns are like medieval fiefdoms. Each one is run by a boss - who has his own manor on the hill - running whatever the enterprise is in the town. Used to be factories, now pharmaceuticals, prisons, agribusiness. The peasants all have to suck up to their local boss if they want to be able to keep their small plots of land. And they are caught in a cycle of poverty and ignorance - holding onto ancient ideas that still hold sway despite their glaring hypocrisies. Glassy eyed, they bow down to their local warlord, paying homage, offering up daughters to be lifted up out of poverty by his benevolence (so they think), offering up sons to go invade Arab countries and bring back the spoils of their Holy Crusades.
The 'unholy' are banished away from the small-town fiefdoms into the cities. People with poxes, with blemishes on their body or soul - people who refuse to bow down to the local warlord, or those with gender dysphoria, those whose desires and love transcend the narrow-mindedness of small-town America, the broken men who return from their Crusades with afflictions of the body and mind -- they are banished from their fiefdoms and their clans. Sent to the edges of the golden cities, broken-down, hurting, in pain. There, they are kicked around and beaten down by the kings of the golden city. Forced to live as beggars, wearing rags and no shoes on their feet.
If they manage to make it past the bridge trolls of the golden city, they'll find the gleaming neighborhoods of the royals hidden deep within. Places like Alameda, the West Hills, Westmoreland -- in these green-tree-lined neighborhoods, the royal children ride bicycles along flowery, manicured streets. These children soon become teens whose posts on Instagram of their joyous, carefree lives are the modern equivalent of the displays of wealth made at medieval royal balls, that Tinder app of the eleventh century European elite.
But on the other side of the moat is a morass of human misery - people huddled in makeshift tents, or some with no covering at all, shivering in the cold and mostly ignored by the elite, who toss them a coin now and then to assuage their feelings of guilt. Some of these peasants were former royalty - kicked out and kicked down the ladder for challenging or resisting the top-down beat-down culture. But some come from generations of poverty - hunger beating them down, from mother to child to grandchild, until they are too weak to fight back.
Women who wanted to end an unwanted pregnancy in the 1020s would know which wise woman healer to seek out, and that healer would give her an herbal concoction to bring on the miscarriage. But if caught, this medieval abortion doctor would be tortured or killed as a witch. Are we really so far from that now? Abortion doctors are targets of assassinations, and in some states can be imprisoned in a gulag if they help a woman preserve her own bodily integrity by helping her end a pregnancy through abortion. And women can be forced to carry a pregnancy to term - her body is not her own, but the property of the state/fiefdom where she lives.
There are many more parallels, I'm sure. But these are the ones in the forefront of my mind as I navigate our modern/medieval cities, towns and fiefdoms and encounter all around me attitudes and mindsets and habits that have stuck around for a thousand years, decaying the bodies and poisoning the minds of the people who perpetuate them year after year, generation after generation. If we look outside these cycles of violent, forced poverty and wealth, we can see that there are other ways to live. I think it's about time we get out of the 1020s, and look outside of medieval Europe for instructions on how to live together in a society.