Skip to main content

A New Housing Policy

Cleaning up after the fight
They have this really good idea at The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem:  "If you clean it, you own it!"  As a consequence, the Greek Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox, and Roman Catholic priests clean as much of the floor as they can, every year.  


Actually, each of the three groups think they own it, but they have worked out a rough, but contested, agreement about who cleans what part of the floor.  They have also worked out rough, and contested, attempts to clean a little bit more of the floor, each year.  The result is not pretty.


They get into broom fights.  And fist fights.  And they say damnable things to each other.  


This year, again, the police had to get into the church through that little door of humility to break up the fight.  The police said they didn't arrest anyone because all of the participants were priests.  


The roof leaks, too, and has done so for a long time, but the priests can't agree who should pay to fix the roof, so the art work is going to hell in a hand basket.  A lot of it has already gone, as have a lot of the priests.  


But we shouldn't scorn the men of God who are just doing their best to protect what is said to the the location of Jesus' birth.  We should, instead, recognize that the principle, "If you clean it, you own it!", might be a way our of our housing crisis.  Our cities are littered with empty houses, not exactly owned by the banks.  The banks have bundled the mortgages into those magical-money-making-derivatives that nobody seems to own. 


Maybe we should take a lesson from the holy men in Bethlehem, and say, "If you want to move in and clean it, it's yours!  And if you won't keep it clean, you can't have it!"  


Of course, we would have to work out a better roof policy.  But that is probably not insurmountable, either, if we can keep the Greek Orthodox, and Armenian Orthodox, and Roman Catholic priests out of the way.  They aren't good at roofs.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Watching a Formerly Sane Man Descend into Abject Religion

If you read the previous post, you know the apparatus, pictured here, is a torture machine. There are ten of them in our house, purportedly to circulate air to dry out all the problems caused by a water leak. We live in Tucson:  it has not rained in Tucson since the Gadsden Purchase. A mudslide the size of the one in Washington State could course through our neighborhood and it would be bone-dry and stone-hard before it quit moving. I suspect it is the CIA, and probably the Border Patrol! We are, after all, only about a hundred miles from the border. I fully expect a large suburban assault vehicle to pull up to the house, and for lots of people with UPPER CASE LETTERS on their shirts to interrogate us, and I will have to explain that all the drugs I use come from Walgreens and Total Wine. But it won't work.  Our minds are going. We are getting short with each other and, if they promise to turn off the fans, I will confess to having invented the Arab...
Post a Comment
Read more