Existence is interesting. It’s even more so when you consider we live in bubbles. Big, plastic bubbles with our arms and legs sticking out so we can walk and eat. We’d have some form of evacuation system for bodily functions but see it in your mind and say no more about it.*

We picture ourselves as something alive, free, and agile but take a minute and seriously imagine navigating your life inside your big, plastic, see-through bubble. What happens when you say something inside your bubble? What happens if you see somebody inside their bubble and their mouth is moving but you don’t hear anything? What happens if bubbles collide? Can a bubble save us from a mass shooter?** What happens if someone’s bubble bursts and yours doesn’t?

You can easily imagine living in a bubble because we do. If your neighbor’s house burns down, does yours? If your co-workers son dies in accident does it effect your life? These are extreme incidents but what if your neighbor loses her job and can’t support her family? What if a man is robbing an elderly couple and you’re across the street? Do you run over and bump into the robber’s bubble? Or use your phone to film the robbery through your plastic skin?

It’s probably easier to think of the bubble in non-active terms. Imagine your friend becomes a Trump supporter and you don’t, what happens to both your bubbles? Anything?

The Bubble is a symbol for the growing phenomenon of its cousin, “NIMBY.” Not In My Back Yard. Imagine your whole home and family in one, large bubble. In the old days we needed nuclear power plants for electricity and NIMBY was often the deciding factor in where the plants were built.  We see it now with data centers. Windmills. The homeless. Taxes. Policing. Education. Et. al***

We are not wrong when we protect our bubbles, either personally or the home kind. But we need to know our bubbles are not the only bubbles, and some bubbles are not as safe and secure as our own. Maybe we can help?

So? What’s your point?****

In our political discourse (and all others, too) we have become obsessed with our own bubble. Think of the Tribe Over Truth concept but to a magnitude of 100. Many comments like this are heard these days, almost simultaneously: “Taxes are too high.” Followed by “We need more Police”. Or we need better roads. Better schools. Better bubbles.

If you’re living in your bubble what do you need, anyway, just as long as someone doesn’t touch your bubble with a large steak knife or blow torch?

An old saying by old people when I wasn’t one of them went like this: The world is going to hell in a handbasket. Ai says a handbasket is “A woven or rigid basket equipped with a handle” and explains the phrase about hell is “an expression describing a situation, economy, or person deteriorating rapidly toward total ruin or disaster.”

What will happen to bubbles and NIMBY, then?

I’ve no idea what to do about bubbles, or NIMBY, they are facts of life, but knowing something and what you can do about it, is better than not knowing something and doing nothing about it,…even if you don’t do anything. And maybe we should all imagine how much like us the other person in the other bubble might be.

PS It IS hard to type from a bubble.*****

*The Bubble is SYMBOLISM. If you’re the type who likes to nitpick and ask where do we keep our clothes and whether or not me need toilet paper, go ahead.

**As noted: IMAGINE.

***More Latin. Keep reading these essays and you’ll be speaking it soon.

****Writer’s mistake assuming a new, third party voice. Get over it.

*****New euphemism for you-know-what: bumping bubbles.