I am blessed to live in U.S. News and World Report most livable American town, Boulder, Colorado. With incredible access to mountains, glorious weather, and compact infrastructure, Boulder is an amazing place to live. Boulder’s awesomeness brings relief to its shitty aspects: housing prices and inflation are driving the cost of living skyward, and local wages have remained more or less flat. I can only afford living here by dint of my privilege and my hardcore frugality. Instead of revising exclusionary zoning to give affordable housing options, the city has doubled down on building multi-million dollar single family homes and generic, expensive rental apartments. Many of the city’s workers —teachers, shopkeepers, etc. —have been priced out of the city, and live in commuter towns like Longmont, Louisville, and Broomfield, thereby increasing area traffic. I wrote about these situations extensively in the Daily Camera, the city’s main newspaper.
The increase in cost of living is driving up rates of homelessness, and encampments and people sleeping in underpasses abound, even with recent, frigid temperatures. I wonder what these people think about Boulder’s designation as top town? I wonder what they think about the war in Ukraine, which is dominating the news?
Schrödinger’s Cat is a thought experiment that explains a quantum mechanical principle about the role observation has on observed phenomena. In the experiment, the location of a cat in a box (or any object in space) can be determined as a mathematical probability, but once an observer tries to measure location through direct observation, the observation changes the probabilistic formula, and therefore the proof of that cat’s location and existence. Put extremely simplistically, objective reality can’t be proven through direct observation because the observation changes the observed thing.
I could claim reasons to observe what’s happening in Ukraine. My great-grandfather, Israel, was born in Ukraine in 1876. After moving to the States, where he had a large family, he returned in 1920 on relief mission for Jews fleeing Soviet pograms. He was murdered a day after my grandpa’s tenth birthday. Current events are part of an imperial and industrial-military continuum of conflict my family is directly connected to —yet I am less confident than my great-grandpa that the region requires my attention more than the struggling people I see daily in Boulder. Like the physicist who killed the boxed cat, I think my observation of the Ukrainian conflict will only increase its reality and violence.
Like most modern wars, the Ukrainian conflict is largely about petroleum security and feeding various military industrial complexes (humanitarian tragedies rage in non-strategic areas). Congress’s $13.6B aid package —with line items for $80K Javelin anti-tank missiles —is directly related to a societal obsession with war, violence, and strife, in Ukraine and beyond. Rather than chant for more weapons to show my solidarity, I’m doing what I’ve been doing a lot lately: minding my own damn business and paying attention to improving conditions for me and those in my immediate environment.