Ok see, in a utopian society, we should be better able to support parents and fund childcare initiatives!! Providing that support at a societal level is in a country’s best interest for the child and the adult, and is something that isn’t as easily supplied by the grassroots community.
I was recently visiting my sister, and she and her husband both work. Trying to line up summer camps all month was extremely expensive and they didn’t make the waitlist into all of them, so there were days thing 1 had to sit in their bedroom and watch tv all day while they worked. And this is for a couple who is relatively well off!
In this case, it’s definitely up to the government to install universal childcare (a top down approach!) and many countries have done so with fantastic results. Leaving it up to the community to figure out isn’t as easy. But I’d be very curious to know how you think about that!
So glad you are able to provide dad duty!!!! Hardest job there is!
ohhh yes, we're very familiar with the unreliable patchwork of summer camps. we lost almost two weeks of care for Thing 1 this summer: at the first camp, several days were cancelled due to air quality concerns from wildfire smoke (we briefly had the worst measurable air quality in the world here) and then a *different* camp cancelled the entire week at the last minute due to unspecified "safety concerns." it was kind of a blessing that i was already home with Thing 2; otherwise, i would have been scrambling to find adequate care, as i'm sure many other parents were. it's a nightmare for families with more than one full-time job. we're very fortunate, and still only squeaking by with what would have been a middle-class lifestyle for previous generations.
as far as utopian solutions—i completely agree that socialized support for reproductive labor (like childcare) is the only way we can maintain a sustainable society. however, my own personal level of fatalism (which, again, i absolutely wouldn't wish on anyone) says that we missed our window for creating those systems. we had a brief moment of prosperity and stability, and we blew it all gambling on Wall Street, instead of building durable social infrastructure. i'm optimistic about local, self-organizing solutions to crises, since those will be the only ones that many people can access—but i'm not sure that qualifies as "utopian" in the traditional sense. a utopia within a dystopia? anarcho-solarpunk? nomadic utopianism? i'm not sure!
Ok I feel like this made me understand your perspective a lot more!!! Ok so yes to big government changes that make everyone's life better, but that's hard to do and maybe even impossible, so we might as well focus on the things we can affect in our local communities?? I can totally understand that. (And I still think there's hope to change the system 🤓)
welllll... with the added caveat that many of the top-down solutions that were billed as utopian visions of "the future" in centuries past have done more harm than good: both in terms of the (economic, environmental, social) damage they've directly caused, and also indirectly, by disempowering local communities and making it harder for them to respond to crises at a grassroots level. learned helplessness has a very long half-life. but yes! i would certainly never argue against hoping for change.
whew! big question. i looked at one concrete example in this post: https://open.substack.com/pub/phasmatopia/p/spirits-of-place-part-15 . the American healthcare system is already a Kafkaesque nightmare for many people, and that's bad enough. but we've *also* built up the expectation that it's flawless—that people don't need to learn basic medicine so they can be more self-reliant, because that would mean admitting a weakness in the system. many of the past century's utopian projects treated the State as an absolute. that worked well enough, as long as the State was capable of delivering on the services and protections it promised. i think a lot of those promises are already failing—and we haven't even gotten to the really hard parts of the coming century. there are stories from places where the State has always been distant and ineffectivethat we can use as guides for how to handle these failures. but they tend to be outside the canon of Western utopian/dystopian fiction.
Oh well yes, I do not think the US healthcare system is utopian. Nor do I think the state is absolute. But I do think both could be more utopian! But we're actively figuring out how to do that in real time and it's very messy.
Welcome back! Hope your break was nice. I feel you on childcare—our Thing 1 is also between daycares right now but I’m trying to view it as a nice break from the daily rush to get out of the house.
thank you! it's good to be back, i'm sorry i never responded to your comment from last month. hope you enjoyed your vacation and are continuing to enjoy time with your little one.
Ok see, in a utopian society, we should be better able to support parents and fund childcare initiatives!! Providing that support at a societal level is in a country’s best interest for the child and the adult, and is something that isn’t as easily supplied by the grassroots community.
I was recently visiting my sister, and she and her husband both work. Trying to line up summer camps all month was extremely expensive and they didn’t make the waitlist into all of them, so there were days thing 1 had to sit in their bedroom and watch tv all day while they worked. And this is for a couple who is relatively well off!
In this case, it’s definitely up to the government to install universal childcare (a top down approach!) and many countries have done so with fantastic results. Leaving it up to the community to figure out isn’t as easy. But I’d be very curious to know how you think about that!
So glad you are able to provide dad duty!!!! Hardest job there is!
ohhh yes, we're very familiar with the unreliable patchwork of summer camps. we lost almost two weeks of care for Thing 1 this summer: at the first camp, several days were cancelled due to air quality concerns from wildfire smoke (we briefly had the worst measurable air quality in the world here) and then a *different* camp cancelled the entire week at the last minute due to unspecified "safety concerns." it was kind of a blessing that i was already home with Thing 2; otherwise, i would have been scrambling to find adequate care, as i'm sure many other parents were. it's a nightmare for families with more than one full-time job. we're very fortunate, and still only squeaking by with what would have been a middle-class lifestyle for previous generations.
as far as utopian solutions—i completely agree that socialized support for reproductive labor (like childcare) is the only way we can maintain a sustainable society. however, my own personal level of fatalism (which, again, i absolutely wouldn't wish on anyone) says that we missed our window for creating those systems. we had a brief moment of prosperity and stability, and we blew it all gambling on Wall Street, instead of building durable social infrastructure. i'm optimistic about local, self-organizing solutions to crises, since those will be the only ones that many people can access—but i'm not sure that qualifies as "utopian" in the traditional sense. a utopia within a dystopia? anarcho-solarpunk? nomadic utopianism? i'm not sure!
Ok I feel like this made me understand your perspective a lot more!!! Ok so yes to big government changes that make everyone's life better, but that's hard to do and maybe even impossible, so we might as well focus on the things we can affect in our local communities?? I can totally understand that. (And I still think there's hope to change the system 🤓)
welllll... with the added caveat that many of the top-down solutions that were billed as utopian visions of "the future" in centuries past have done more harm than good: both in terms of the (economic, environmental, social) damage they've directly caused, and also indirectly, by disempowering local communities and making it harder for them to respond to crises at a grassroots level. learned helplessness has a very long half-life. but yes! i would certainly never argue against hoping for change.
Oooooooh you mean like reaganomics?? Give me an an example of one of the bad ones??
whew! big question. i looked at one concrete example in this post: https://open.substack.com/pub/phasmatopia/p/spirits-of-place-part-15 . the American healthcare system is already a Kafkaesque nightmare for many people, and that's bad enough. but we've *also* built up the expectation that it's flawless—that people don't need to learn basic medicine so they can be more self-reliant, because that would mean admitting a weakness in the system. many of the past century's utopian projects treated the State as an absolute. that worked well enough, as long as the State was capable of delivering on the services and protections it promised. i think a lot of those promises are already failing—and we haven't even gotten to the really hard parts of the coming century. there are stories from places where the State has always been distant and ineffectivethat we can use as guides for how to handle these failures. but they tend to be outside the canon of Western utopian/dystopian fiction.
Oh well yes, I do not think the US healthcare system is utopian. Nor do I think the state is absolute. But I do think both could be more utopian! But we're actively figuring out how to do that in real time and it's very messy.
Welcome back! Hope your break was nice. I feel you on childcare—our Thing 1 is also between daycares right now but I’m trying to view it as a nice break from the daily rush to get out of the house.
Looking forward to the fall posts!
thank you! it's good to be back, i'm sorry i never responded to your comment from last month. hope you enjoyed your vacation and are continuing to enjoy time with your little one.