Research

[degringolade]

Orangeness

 

 

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I am mentally going through my old obsessions to try and figure out the state of the world here in my dotage.  

I suppose that I need to review things I've read and mentally chewed over a long time ago.  I started down the curmudgeonly and jaundiced path back in the 80's.  Fresh out of the Army and with a view of the world that was just beginning to be questioned.  Jimmy Carter had just been tossed and Ronnie Reagan sold his bill of goods that we are still paying for.  The Soviet Union was still around and there were hairline cracks showing in our feet of clay.

There were two books that still reside somewhere inside my brain:

Entropy:  Jeremy Rifkin ISBN: 

Voluntary Simplicity:  Duane Elgin

The crowd that I ran with in those days of partying, grad school, and serious research informed me that they wanted nothing to do with such balderdash.  I suppose that I can now be accused of “selling out” but social pressure, the siren call of the dollar, and the arrogance of patents bestowed made me discount the insidious thoughts of Messrs Elgin and Rifkin for around 25 years.

The first crack in the deliberate dismissal of the ideas in the books came in the early nineties in Olympia, Washington where I was driving through town and a beautiful, new Volvo station with a roof rack (new status symbol at the time) with a kayak and what appeared to two sets of high-end skis pulled in front of me.  After admiring it for a bit, I looked down at the bumper and saw a bumper sticker that read “Live simply so that others can simply live”.  

It went downhill from there.

I guess what I am trying to get across here is that folks have ignored the problems that were outlined in these two books for almost a half-century now.  They weren’t perfect.  At the time, they were referred to as “jeremiads”.  But taken together they do define how we landed on the path we are treading, seemingly heading toward a future that doesn’t match the beliefs of the society.