My Effect on Things

[degringolade]

Family day today.  Heading over and seeing folks who need to be seen and who I want to see.  I think that I am working out the deal for how to have some say in the control of the time to be spent.  With the young men becoming more independent, I can get safely to the point of seeing folks when the desire to see them, not like the past where my presence was being required to establish a show of family unity.

Today's Screed:

I supposed that today's writing turned out to be a gloss on Keith Huddleston's blog post last week. 

The conversation that he seems to be having on the internet appears to be one that I have with my friends on a far too routine basis.  Why don't people do more?  Why don't other's see why things are going wrong the way that I see it?  Why don't other people go out and change things while I sit safely behind a wall of electrons and fight the good fight on my keyboard? 

Look, we are like fish in the sea.  H. Sapiens have, through the astonishingly wasteful use of a limited resource (oil) that has created a system that allows population overshoot and an artificial ecology that supports that overshoot.  The overcrowding and overpopulation are the intended outcome of that misallocation of resources.  The rules and the politics and the mental oddness that everyone follows and exhibits are the logical outcome of a system that lives well past it's means.

I am a strange ranger in the strange land.  For the longest time I took to politics, war, oppression and other such hobbies with the energy of the true enthusiast.  I studied, I attempted understanding, I followed the rules and accepted the role assigned me.  But looking around me now, I realized that the truth of the matter is that the passion and the anger and the effort that I put into watching and understanding and discussing things that I had no effect on was truly a waste of my time and my life. 

I do like to keep up, I do try to read the updates on the world once a week.  I miss the days when The Economist wasn't a shameless shill and apologist for every rich bastard in the world.  In the 80's and 90's when they were my go to, a once a week read followed by some drill-down on specific issues kept me pretty aware of my surroundings.  But those days are gone, and to keep up and keep out of the clutches of the mass-media hysteria machine, I have to refine the extremely low-grade ore that is the internet.  

And truthfully, I can't really say that the act of assay and refining something that resembles the real world out of the near-mindless posturing, willful misdirection, and ideology-promotion that serves as the day to day output of the internet is near-fruitless. 

We are starting out on a series of changes that have already spun out of our control.  We are coming into a banquet of consequences.  How we handle ourselves will have a big impact on our individual souls.  The myth of eternal progress and the climb to our future role as demigods is looking fairly shopworn and past it's pull date.  To complain that the political system and economic system that got us into this mess on a computer connected to a technology suite (the internet) that almost serves as the poster child for the decisions that got us here.

Nope, Ran's decision to drop out, play video games, and get mellow aren't necessarily invalid, the positions advocated by Mr. Allen are equally ambiguous.  I think that one derives from a desire to be right, the other derives from a desire to be left alone.  I think I know which one I would prefer to hang out with.