Limitations

After the activities fair, I had a small mountain of papers, pamphlets, and propaganda sitting on my bed.  Every group, it seemed, managed to leave me with a sheet stating their name and the date of their first meeting.  Quickly I tired of sorting through the rubbish.  Instead, I ended up settled in, looking at all the books I’d picked up - magazines, journals, and anthologies produced by student organization.  I was flipping through Latent Image, a student photography publication, when I noticed the image below.  

Pretty picture, but one I have seen before.  The late night cityscape is a tired image, borderline cliché.  What makes this picture interesting is not the number of people up for midnight snacks with their lights shining, but the title.  The photographer named it Invincible.  Invincible to what?  The rural way of life?  The aching call of late night sleep?  The toll of time?  Power outages?  

What resonated most with me is a city impervious to outer pressure.  Throughout years and years, the city as the place of trade and education, as the place where culture is made, this model of a city has stayed constant.  It’s a hustling, bustling, busy area with everyone going to everything, everywhere.  A city will always be that sort of place, due to the sheer number of people who flock to cities every year.  As long as people want the city to stay the way it is, the citizen’s will insulates a city from change.  It will evolve internally, but only internally.

Because there will always be an abundance of bodies, there will be a constant need for energy to support them.  Food, water, shelter, and electricity are necessary for sustenance, survival, protection, and power.  These are human “needs” now.  If they are available, these amenities are desired and sought out.  How, then, does one go about breaking down this system?  How does someone, even someone with the best of intentions, walk into city life and expect to fundamentally change it?  According to Bill McKibben, to survive the impending climate apocalypse we, the citizens of the world, must become citizens of our own towns and villages again, and scale back from city life.  It seems sometimes an impossible task, taking down the current culture and replacing it with something so much less exciting.  In this way, the city seems invincible, with so many minds to change and things to build.  But maybe, just maybe, McKibben's view of the future can pass muster in the public eye.  Perhaps with enough concentrated effort, with enough strikes to fault lines and strokes to city pride, those in favor of local living can break down some city walls.  Maybe the city, the electricity, the destructive culture, isn't so invincible after all. 

We can't know until we try.

Image from: Latent Image 2011 Vol 31, page 24

Potentially Correct Image Citation: Kuo, Nina. "Invincible." Latent Image Vol. 31. 2011: 24. Print.