Category: Uncategorized

It might not be immediately obvious to people in this blog, but growing up my family lived fairly close to the bone.  We were never outright destitute except for a couple of years and that was for weird reasons.  But we never had a lot of money.

Now most of this was probably because mom was socking away every spare cent, in fear of being destitute.  BUT we were close enough to the bone (and to be fair when I was very young there was no money to sock away) that in summer the shoes I’d outgrown during the winter got cut down at front and back and used as sandals.  If there was some money or someone gave me sandals, they were bought very large and worn as little as possible to preserve them for the next year.  Later on, I mostly lived in flip-flops during summer, because they were really, really cheap.

And most of the time I was growing up, I wore a lot of my brother’s cut-down and refashioned clothes, which since he was almost ten years older and built like my boys, mostly meant I lived in a lot of brown pants and largish sweaters.  I also wore dresses mom fashioned from remnants and left overs but since those tended to be rather fashion-forward for the village and also since I was the terror of new clothes (something I paid for with younger son) this didn’t happen often, except for pictures.

This has a point. I’m not complaining.  I was never really hungry, except for two years, and we made do.  A lot of my toys were empty containers and detergent prizes (like cereal prizes but given away by things like Tide) but mostly I amused myself making up stories bout what I did have.  Not saying I didn’t nearly die of envy when all my friends had the fad toy of the moment and I didn’t — I wrote me getting one of those into a story, once — but it was a metaphorical “die” which didn’t mean much.

However, as I advanced in schooling, I became aware that my family’s economics were… well, much tighter than most people’s.

There is a reason for this, and keep in mind what I’m describing is at least 30 years out of date.  I don’t know what goes on in Portuguese education now.

Thirty years ago, Portuguese education was free through college and mandatory through ninth grade (I was amused, shortly after moving to the US, to see some religious organization asking for money for Portuguese children, so that they could have schools to attend — which the organization was supposed to build. — I’m not going to say the schools were that great, but through about 4th grade not only ws it fine, but there were schools those kids were ALREADY supposed to be attending.)

I can hear the “oohs” from the audience though possibly not this audience, which has the values of TANSTAAFL engraved on the inside of their eyelids.

The school was free… if you could get it. And yet for each level you went up in studying, you hit another strata of society, much more so than in the US now or at any time.

EVERYONE was supposed to be in elementary, and because even parents without education saw the value of learning to read and write, most kids attended this.  At least most boys.  Some families saw no value in it for their daughters.  However, the wave of “removals” started in 3rd grade.  Your kid had mastered the basics, and you went to a doctor and got them certified as educable mentally retarded, which took care of the poorest of the poor, who viewed kids as cash cows to help the family survive.  Most of those kids ended up in the textile factories, which were allowed to hire them since they’d been certified as mentally incapable to do more.  (Note their school records weren’t even looked at.)

After fourth grade came “preparatory school” for two years.  About half of my class went to this.  Unless you were really low middle class, you’d send your kids to it.

But at the end of it there was another flurry of removals with the same certificate that they couldn’t do more.  This took a lot of the poorer middle class.

There was a reason for this.  By seventh grade you started on physics and pre-calc, and teaching ranged from the rare brilliant teacher to a lot of dross.  Which meant in seventh grade a lot of people started failing unless their parents hired tutors for them.

A lot of middle-middle class people and high-middle class people could afford that.  A lot or our close family did it, but our nuclear family could not. However, my mom, for various reasons, was determined to show that we were just as good as anyone els,e so “removal” was never even considered for either of us, and we were told we would have the highest grades or else.  Sometimes doing this required finding old books that explained what our teacher didn’t, or simply hitting your head against the wall till you managed it.  Both of us had very creditable grades and went to magnet High schools in the city.

Perhaps because it was a magnet high school, I found I was seriously outclassed in terms of clothes, food, and general consumer goods.  That was fine, as I settled on being a rebel and weird.  (What do you mean that couldn’t have been hard?)  That was fine because it fits the Portuguese myth of genius and just impressed my classmates.

And going to the magnet school instead of the high school the village kids attended and which was staffed lower down the teacher vine — so without tutoring you just COULDN’T get it.  I know.  My best friend went there — when they instituted a brand new and designed to weed out students test in 9th grade.   It failed, either by outright failing or by not making as good a grade as they should, about 3/4 of the class where I attended.  It failed almost everyone at the school the village was assigned to.

The ones who didn’t “outright fail” were channeled into “professional training” mostly elementary school teaching, secretarial, book keeping, mechanics, etc.

The ones who stayed in were assumed to be university bound.  By this time most of my classmates were not just richer than I but so much richer than I that I didn’t even get it.  I was insulated from realizing it, because my closest friends were like me, battlers who came from lower economic/regional backgrounds, and who just wouldnt’ quit.  Even then some of them were having tutoring.  I used tutoring a lot as an excuse to avoid things like mandatory rallies and such.  “Oh, sorry, I have tutoring.”  But I never had it, except that in college I had tutoring in the sense I tutored others.  During the very bad, no good, awful two years of our family life, my brother tutored and kept the mortgage paid and enough food on the table we didn’t outright starve.

Mom chose the living room sofas for tutoring convenience.  Ie they must not break easily, since kids will do stupid things.  BUT neither my brother nor I were tutored, we simply used it as a money maker later in life, when things like film tickets or stamps to write to one’s boyfriend in the US became important.

By the time I hit college, I knew I was in a social sense “outclassed.”  But you have to understand, not only did I still live in the village, where our family was relatively well off, or at least socially influential, but my mom had retired (heart condition and tight deadlines don’t mix, so the doctor made her retire) and acquired a new hobby: designing and making new clothes for me.  I had so many clothes, of so many styles (particularly since dad managed a textile factory and there were always end-rolls and things that didn’t get picked up by the client for some reason) that in my little mini village circle I was considered a clothes horse AND incredibly well dressed.  (It was all very eighties.)

In college I made new friends and for reasons that would be hard to explain, one of those groups were people not just wealthier than I but wealthier than most people in Portugal.

They knew I wasn’t up to their income, but to their credit, they didn’t care, and had a tendency to include me in stuff by having my restaurant bill show up mysteriously paid, or by inviting me to all paid vacations.

The first of these I went on, my mom spent weeks making my wardrobe and truly excelled even her excellent skills.  I looked… uh… much, much richer than I was.

It wasn’t till we were at the beach house and comparing stuff we’d brought that I realized I’d brought rags and hand me downs.

No, no, no one had switched my clothes, and objectively there were well made, fo good materials and DESIGNED to my body, so they made me look good.  But there was a problem.  They had no LABELS.

My friends were oohing and aaahing over completely unremarkable t-shirts and jeans, because they had labels of international designers.  They politely ignored my clothes, so as not to embarrass me.

I watched and after the dismay passed was mostly amused.  I — and my close friends back in the village — thought my clothes were amazing, because they were unique, made me look good AND would last, even being washed against stone in a water tank.  BUT our friends who were much richer took that stuff for granted (even when it wasn’t true and the clothes didn’t fit their body type) and concentrated instead on the labels that meant these clothes were very, very expensive and therefore exclusive, particularly in Portugal.

I realized that I’m watching something very similar to that clothes comparison session, for the last 10 years or so.

There are countries in the world where food is scarce, or at least expensive.  There are countries in the world where women can get killed and mutilated for daring to learn to read; there are countries in the world where gay people get pitched off roofs.

Meanwhile anyone who matters in America — the opinion makers, the cognoscenti, — obsess about micro aggressions, over what what gender pronoun to use, over whether we should ONLY read minority authors.  They beat their chests and apologize for the racist/sexist/homophobic sins of ancestors (or field ancestors) about whom they PLAINLY know nothing.  They will descend on you like a pack of dingoes for using the word/thought/concept that isn’t IN this week. They lecture you on the lack of privilege of an NYU graduate who frankly tans a different TONE than I but about the same darkness.  They demand “safe spaces” carefully stratified by skin color and preferred sexual partner, because people might STARE at them.  STARE.  How does that compare to being knifed in the street or raped when outside the protection of males, which is the reality for most women in the world?

Labels.  Only the very rich obsess about labels.  Go a little further down, where things are actually slightly less of a give-me, and people are quite happy with homemade clothes that are good.  Or put in societal terms, people are happy to have clothes to cover themselves with, that are adequate for the weather.

Maybe there is a strata of American society that NEEDS this and doesn’t have it, but other than the outright homeless, I doubt it.  I doubt it because for the last 30 years I’ve shopped for clothes at thrift stores, and my winter coats average about $15 which most of us can afford every few years.  Because we have so much surplus, that we donate so many almost-new clothes that the stores can sell them CHEAP and still fund their cause.  (Mostly I shop at ARC.)

Which means in global terms most of us are rich.  And the people who command the heights of the media and the culture (mostly women and ivy league educated, btw) are really, really rich.  So they’re obsessed with the labels, and never mind what the clothes — or society — are actually suited for or supposed to do.

They’re all fretting dowagers making sure the chairs in the Titanic are well arranged enough to give a hint of their social standing.

Because the thing is, there are real problems in the world, both in our structural economy and in the drums of war echoing around the globe which can very well engulf us while we’re changing “no blood for oil” because that’s such a COOL novel, that all the special kids are wearing.

It will change.  In the Titanic, even dowagers scrambled for the lifeboats when the going got real.

I pray it will not change as hard or as fast as our divorce from reality is inviting.  And I prepare in case it does.  And I give the fretting dowagers, looking for labels on their social standing and importance, the smirk they deserve.

Reality always wins.  And no one is rich enough to be insulated from it forever.  And in the first stages of things getting unstable, the dowagers get louder and obsess more on the irrelevant, because it’s their way of telling themselves everything is fine.

Hold on to the sides of the boat.  I have a feeling there’s choppy water ahead. Keep your cool and row.

Sometime in the late nineties there was a common spam email that went “I’m a time traveler stranded in your time.  I have reason to think you know what I’m talking about.  There is this part I need.”  Anyway… I don’t actually know what they were meant to be except a prank, because there were no links to follow.  Or perhaps they harvested the emails when you responded.  One of these hit strikingly close to home because the signature was my nephew’s name.  And while our last name is common, in Portugal no one goes just by the last name, but by two conjoined names, and his is  an ancestral thing in our family (which I don’t have) that my brother chose to recreate, and therefore relatively arcane.

No, I didn’t answer that email. And this is a good thing. (Probably.) BUT this morning when I was thinking of the “uniqueness of the American experience” what I thought was most unique about us was innovation.

Yes I know.  You’re going to come through and rant that Israel is eating our cake on research (bet you I know a lot of those projects, too) and so is Germany, and, and and–

But books for technical fields abroad are often in English, imported from America (I should know, I’ve shipped off my share of those, and got on the most FASCINATING mailing lists.) and even in fields like plumbing and car mechanics, most of the time you have to learn from Americans how to do it.  (Yes, yes, there’s some things we got from abroad, but some of them don’t even become widespread till they come to America.)

Even science fiction (yes, yes, Mary Shelley and Jules Verne and H. G. Wells — pfui) as a popular and widespread genre wouldn’t exist without Americans.

Which brings us to why.

It’s not magical.  And it’s not genetic. What pushes a country to excel in this or that is often the fruit of a confluence of happy accidents.

I spent a lot of time studying why the Portuguese discovered new lands; why larger, better equipped countries didn’t do it first (and yep, without Portugal starting it off, the whole age of discovery might have been delayed another 100 years, at least.)  The answer, if I remember correctly started with: Stayed out of the 100 years war; had a tradition of seafaring and knowledge from both Greeks and Moors; didn’t lose as much population as other countries to the black plague; is a tiny, not particularly fertile (landwise) country.  Etc.

In the US if you ask why we tend to be more… future inclined than other lands, I would start with: the people who came here broke with their past.

You can’t start to understand how much Americans underestimate the influence of the past in other countries.  Sure they go elsewhere and see modern appliances/plumbing, etc.  And they attribute the differences to quaint culture stuff.

Which is true.  It’s also true it goes all the way down.  A friend once told me that she grew up among people still refighting the Civil war in arguments.  I told her that was nothing.  I grew up among people who in every day association, unconscious prejudices, reaction to certain features, and occasionally verbally, are still refighting the Punic Wars.  And most of this is subconscious, so it’s hard to tweak.  You just feel there are things you do and things you don’t do, people you associate with and people you don’t, at a GUT level, and it’s very hard to bring it to the light and examine it.

My older son describes Portugal as an iceberg: a tiny, above the water part, towing an immense weight of history, some of it so deep and dark no one is sure about it.  BUT all of it influencing how the iceberg moves and what it does.

Note some of this is changing with TV and mass media.  And that’s part of why Americans have this advantage in creating the future: because people came here and changed languages (most of them) and therefore lost touch with the old legends and the things grannies teach their kids.  They became people who learned stuff from the same mass media.

Sure, there is a shallowness to that type of culture — everyone complains about it, even us — but then again there isn’t.  When the culture is purposely designed for that (and some of it was.  A lot of it… well.  More in another post) it can create a society that thinks over what it does and what it wants to do: a society uniquely suited for innovation.

This contributes to the US being like the aspergers kid in the playground.  Things other cultures do (or more likely don’t do) instinctively, we think over to the nth degree, then try to do consciously.

Now what we are and what we do is largely an accident. It is, it occurs to me, what China tried to achieve all the times it burned its books, jailed its storytellers and wiped out its history.  But because they were all the same people in the same place, stuff leaked through, and while they managed to forget a lot, it was just enough to repeat the same old blood-soaked mistakes again.

So, it’s purely an accident.  And one that forces on both extremes keep trying to undo (both weirdly trying to make us more like Europe, only their own version of Europe in their pointy little heads.  None of them would know the real Europe if it took a bloody chunk out of their asses.)

However doubt not that if America goes down for the long count, so does innovation, at least for a while, and maybe forever, until the same accident strikes again elsewhere.

Which is why we’re not going to let it go down.  We’re Americans.  We’re time travelers.  We come from the future.  And we’re going to take the world there.

 

 

Generation Ships – John Carlton

Kim Stanley Robinson wrote a book recently apparently to show that interstellar travel is impossible. He expresses his point of view in this post.

http://boingboing.net/2015/11/16/our-generation-ships-will-sink.html

And this one.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-will-it-take-for-humans-to-colonize-the-milky-way1/

As far as Mr. Robinson is concerned, once the solar system is filled up that’s it, game over.  Only one earth, one solar system, that’s all there is.  It’s not possible to travel between the stars and even if we could, the missions would all fail.  Of course he also believes that utopia is possible as some sort of Socialist paradise.  Now that’s a fantasy.

David Brin has some rejoinders here.

http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/brin20150915

As does Stephen Baxter.

http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=33838

And Gregory Benford.

http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=33736

As an engineer, I think that Mr. Robinson is clearly wrong. Or at least, he doesn’t understand the basic rules for setting mission parameters and designing to meet those parameters. Mr. Robison’s vessel failed because he wanted it to fail. But to extend that to saying that ALL such proposals would fail is more than a little egotistical. And wrong, really wrong.

Now I haven’t as yet read the book. Reading Greg Benford’s review left me going WTF, WTF, WTF, are you kidding? If you are going to write a book on pioneering could you at least set it up so that the pioneers are at least a little realistic. A ship without a captain or seemingly a crew? No community structure? What was it, a commune in space? Of course something like that is going to fail. That’s what happens to fragile structure and the commune is the most fragile of all. Just look at all the failed examples in the 19th Century. So that’s fail #1.

Then we get to the system and apparently the crew has forgotten the idea of pathogen protocols. And they all go down to the planet. Why? When you have the capability to build starfaring craft, planets suck. they have those nasty deep gravity wells and keep all their good stuff in their centers where it’s tough to get to. This is a spacefaring society. Why would they care about planets at all, at least in the beginning? Fail #2.

Then there’s the ship itself. I kept asking myself why it was so fragile and so small. Here’s how Greg Benford describes it.

Aurora depicts a starship on a long voyage to Tau Ceti four centuries from now. It is shaped like a car axle, with two large wheels turning for centrifugal gravity. The biomes along their rims support many Earthly lifezones which need constant tending to be stable. They’re voyaging to Tau Ceti, so the ship’s name is a reference to Isaac Asimov’s The Robots of Dawn, which takes place on a world orbiting Tau Ceti named Aurora. Arrival at the Earthlike moon of a super-Earth primary brings celebration, exploration, and we see just how complex an interstellar expedition four centuries from now can be, in both technology and society.

First of all, why the biomes? Doesn’t that add complexity that may not be necessary? Also why the wheel on axle design with such large wheels? Why add complexity where you don’t need it? When your vehicle is expected to be under thrust you want the mass as close to the center axis as possible so that you avoid dynamic stability issues. And having all that extra surface area just makes radiation shielding more difficult. Fail #3 and out.

Now it’s obvious from the way Mr. Robinson is presenting the story that the ship and it’s culture were set up to fail. Otherwise he wouldn’t be able to make his point. But does that mean that a ship couldn’t be designed to succeed? Of course not.

Now one of the most interesting SF books of the 1980’s was this one, to me anyway.

http://www.amazon.com/Lion-Tharthee-Grant-Callin/dp/0671653571/ref=la_B001JSFHV4_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1448640721&sr=1-1

It’s interesting because it was written by a Senior Boeing system engineer. And the story is mostly about how the engineering process works written in an entertaining manner. While it wasn’t Hugo material, at least the writer knew what he was doing. I learned a lot from Callin’s book on how to make a mission a success.

See, a while back , way back in the late 1980’s the National Space Society ran a contest on designing a space habitat. I entered. At that time my wall had been covered with space colony posters for years and I had been collecting space books and whatnot for years. And I had just graduated from college and did not yet have a job and I wanted a design project as a portfolio.

So away I went. Back then, doing the homework was harder because you couldn’t just go online and find stuff because the internet wasn’t available to everybody. Still, UB, my college and the local library had a bunch of stuff and I was able to come up with some design numbers. I’ve since lost the design sheets in one move or another, so I no longer have the exact numbers and the only drawings printed at full scale were sent off with the contest entry so I don’t have any pictures to show and the files themselves are long gone several hard drive crashes ago.

Still I do remember a few things about the project. Being able to calculate how much volume each person needed and what the requirements for hydroponics were going to be. Some numbers were fuzzier, like air recycling, but I worked out most of that for my colony size of 65,000 or so, which would make good size for a generation ship. I did make some guesses like how much gravity is “enough.” I think I went for 1/6 g but it might have been 1/3, which made the habitat space more compact.

If I were to approach such a design project again I would have much harder numbers for a lot of it simply because we have so much more experience in space. A lot of numbers that were vapor in 1988 are solidified by experience now. And that’s going to continue. I’m frankly surprised that Robinson had trouble finding hard data, because I know that I didn’t and doing research is so much easier now with so much online.

Of course, the reason his spacecraft failed in the end was not the ship itself. It was the society that Robinson had build the ship. From what I can see from Robinson’s posts, the reason that humans can’t go to the stars is because the Socialism he likes so much can’t handle pioneering and he’s right, Socialism and pioneering just don’t work. but then neither does Socialism and anything else work, except as bloody messes.

The fact is that the first colonies on the Northern american continent did fail, for the same reasons that Mr. Robinson’s mission failed.  Too much Socialist idealism and not nenough hard practicality.  But it’s the ability to be free enough to make your own decisions and get rewarded for those decisions that makes pioneering antifragile.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dAmroKyzGY

I come from a family with a long pioneering history. MY family came across the pond, not to a bustling NewYork in the  late 19th or early 20th Century, but to a Massachusetts where Boston didn’t even exist yet. I think that we probably paid for the first farm in Roxbury with arrow points and tools. Yet my ancestor persevered and thrived, because that is what pioneers do.

Real pioneers don’t fail because failure is not an option and incompetence is something that can’t be tolerated. They do the work that needs to get done because they are working to make a better place for the next generation, not themselves. We as a culture have suppressed the pioneer spirit in the last few decades and maybe that’s a mistake. Because pioneers desire and understand liberty and the alternative is tyranny.

Here’s a bunch of links to get the pioneer spirit started. Sorry, Mr. Robinson, our carracks to the stars will not fail because the pioneer spirits in them, will not let them fail. Look if my ancestors can cross the North Atlantic in a tiny leaky little boat, can I say anything less?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_colonization

http://www.nss.org/settlement/

http://www.space.com/22228-space-station-colony-concepts-explained-infographic.html

http://settlement.arc.nasa.gov/

http://www.nss.org/settlement/space/

http://www.nss.org/settlement/ColoniesInSpace/

http://discovermagazine.com/2013/jan-feb/0-space-colonies

http://space.alglobus.net/Basics/what.html

http://io9.gizmodo.com/8-things-we-can-do-now-to-build-a-space-colony-this-cen-1631995142

http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a19116/history-of-space-stations/

 

My husband is very very (very) nearsighted.  Periodically you accidentally move something he’s counting on early morning before he had his glasses on, and he — no longer goes ballistic, but — says “stop moving my cheese.”

This is of course a reference to some manual or other that said we’re like mice racing to the cheese and don’t like it when our cheese is moved.  Keep this in mind.  the whole post might seem to be about something else but this too is relevant.

The other day we had occasion to drive by the old house, and while I still don’t miss it (Victorians REALLY are a load of work) I realized I missed the neighborhood.  I missed the streets I knew, the places I used to go shopping.  There was this cranky “I wanna be where everybody knows my name” even though that’s not even remotely true, since this is an urban neighborhood and we had neighbors on the street we didn’t even exchange “hellos” with in 13 years.  But there was that longing for the familiar, even the familiar that annoyed, like the little Safeway that never had anything you needed, no way no how.

I found myself driving out of the way to go to the old, pokey, stand in line for hours neighborhood post office.

This has absolutely nothing to do with rationality. It has everything to do with habit in a very physical sense. Because we’re creatures of habit, we like the familiar.  yes, even those of us who like to try new things and explore.

There is a ratio there, and if you flip the ratio of old to new, you start getting panicky.  There is an actual sense of de-stressing as I immerse myself in familiar places, even those I didn’t like that much.  I guess that’s why they say moving is so stressful.  Also why, bizarrely, I found that watching people PACK was stressful, while unpacking and seeing my familiar stuff made me feel better.

Also I noticed as I get older, I find that the change I CAN tolerate is a smaller ratio than when I was younger.  I could travel more, for instance, and stay away longer before I longed for the familiar.

I don’t think I’m strange.  I’ve seen it in other people as well.  In fact I probably fal on the low side of the need for ordered and familiar experiences.

This move, and the prospect of another move soonish, though, has me rattled.  For a year and a half now, some of my stuff has been packed away, and I can’t find my research books in the expected places.

I found on my last move, when we changed my desk and the wall pictures and everything, that I actually prefer the crappy old, cut from magazine pictures I had on my walls when I started out and I was broke, to the new, art stuff I can buy now.  Because the early ones are “How I’ve always worked.”

And that is affecting me in more ways than one, because these last two years have been no-stop change.  Not only in houses, but we lost one of our oldest friends, and also older son moved away, to pursue his studies in medicine.  Not to far away, in our son’s case, and it’s a good thing, but it’s a huge change in family dynamics and all, particularly as our younger son has very little time for us this year.

I find myself disquieted and … off… and longing for “home” even though our next home might very well end up being a place we haven’t even seen yet.  But it will be a place to settle and become familiar with.  A place to make into home.

And as I realized the load of subconscious/unconscious/not really logical stress building up, and that I was powerless to stop it, short of moving to a permanent place and settling in, and making it home, I realized the way tech has affected society, too.

It was sort of okay when it was just computers making communications easier.  And cell phones are so convenient.  Who doesn’t like ease and convenience.

But now the fast communications and the ability to live and work anywhere, and the tech to bypass publishers, and the tech to bypass newspapers, and the tech to bypass stores, and and and and and, are making real and permanent changes to the way we live.  A lot of them.  Faster ones.  We found when looking for a house the first time in 13 years that things had changed completely, even to the sites in which you look.

And I wonder if we’ve flipped the dial on change too far for those who aren’t even particularly addicted to the familiar.

And if that — as well as the crappy economy — explains why we’re all so stressed, out of sorts, filled with apocalyptic feelings that can’t be fully blamed on watching the election season unfold.

Are we a nation of people wondering who moved our cheese?

In The Future We’re All Ducks — a blast from the past post from 10/9/2011

When I woke up this morning, I realized two things. One, I hadn’t written a blogpost last night to go up today. I was supposed to, but I’ve been away two weeks, so I had a whole lot of house and postponed “stuff” to catch up on. Two, the blogpost was supposed to be at Mad Genius Club as well.

This last immediately sent me into a tail spin, because what I post on my own blog can be whatever, including bits of novel. But Mad Genius Club is a grown up blog for grown up writers and mostly deals with the business. Which means… I was staring into an abyss of lack of ideas and – yes, thank you for reminding me, darlings – I was already late.

And then, because my life is a constant game of “I can top that” I got a title for the post in my mind, and it wouldn’t go away. AND it was In the Future We’re All Ducks.

At which point I started running around in circles, metaphorically speaking. VERY metaphorically, because I was still lying in bed doing that catalog of body parts every science fiction writer does in the morning. “Item, two arms. Item, two legs. No tail. No tentacles. So far so good.” (What do you mean other sf writers don’t do that? Really? Odd of them.)

And then I thought: Duck, Donald. And suddenly I realized what this post was all about. However, the fact it came to me this way is a level of bad news I can’t begin to talk about. You see, until now my stories come to me this way, but my non-fiction came from the rational side. “Today, I’m going to write about…” Well, apparently those halcyon days are gone. From now on, non-fic will do what fic does and ambush me in the nook between the pantry and the basement door, prepared to jump out at me when I’m not thinking of anything in particular. Mark my words, no good will come of this.

But other than the fact articles have joined the viciously aggressive fiction ideas, what the heck do I mean about Donald Duck? Do I mean in the future we all stop wearing pants? I don’t know about you, my friend, but at 48, with fifty staring me in the face, you can have my jeans when you pry them off my cold, dead legs. So, no, that’s not what I’m talking about.

No. What I’m talking about here are Disney comics. (Which are subtly different from the other Disney productions in that they are sort of like sf classics to literary fic. There’s no money in them – they say – the houses are constantly changing, and finding them can be a little difficult, since even most comic bookstores don’t carry them. However, for some of us they’re an acquired taste.) I first started reading Disney comics when I first started reading. Or rather, they taught me to read. See, they had images to help me remember the words, and people read them to me over and over (stories about Atlantis and such. FAR more interesting than See Spot Run or even Dr. Seuss) and eventually the words and letters started making sense, and I figured out which letter went with which sound. I was very bored. Also, I didn’t have tv.)

What I’m talking about is this: In Disney comics, people don’t really have real jobs. Occupations are something that come and go, flit in and out of their lives. Donald will become a master beautician in one story. In the next he’s working as a janitor for Uncle Scrooge. And they never really seem to worry unless the story is about money.

For some time now I’ve been following Susannah Breslin’s blog Pink Slipped over at Forbes blogs. From her work and others, an image is sort of emerging.

First a little retrospective. In my father’s day, even when it wasn’t, we tended to view employment as a life-time thing. Heck, my brother – because Portugal is 20 years behind this stuff, though, for their sins, catching up fast – worked for only one company his entire lifetime.

When my generation came of age, we found a different world. For one, a lot of us only found work as contractors or (for the liberal arts majors) as “temps” with no security and no promise of anything beyond the two months or whatever the contract lasted.

Mind you, there are arguments pro and con that sort of thing, and this change was not only in response to tech, but in response to regulations. Absent the regulations, the employment market would have been more stable. But if you have figured out a way to make governments understand that economics is a SCIENCE and stop trying to play witch doctors with a chaotic system that even the best practitioners don’t fully understand, all I can say is “Use your powers for good.” Oh, yeah, and “Can you make pigs fly? It would be so cute.

However, the more mobile and adaptable work force did improve business efficiency and adapt us to a technology where computers replaced typewriters and office messengers and, oh, yeah, tons of other things and jobs.

Now the tech is different yet again, partly because of the internet, partly because of easier manufacturing, partly because of new ways of delivering information (so long, paper.) Government responded as government often does, in this case more or less explicitely surrendering to fantasies of being back in time, before WWII. Do what, right? We don’t elect futurists. We elect mostly lawyers, which means people who think the world is not only made of words (writers run into this, too) but that if you change the words the world will change. Yeah. They also think that laws do what you want them to, instead of unleashing a storm of unintended consequences along with the intended or sometimes instead. Never mind.

So we have an employment crisis and people who are finding employment (a minority) are finding it pays less and often lasts only a few months. Or days.

The same is true for writers. Most of us are either getting run out of contracts with publishing houses (not yours truly, yes, but I can read print when it’s twelve feet long and on fire. I might have employment for another decade, or forever, but it won’t be as much or as secure as I had before.) And those of us lucky enough to still work for the major players are getting nickle and dimed. Meanwhile there’s a new world of indie publishing and some people are getting rich at it, while others are making… nickels and dimes. And their relative positioning in the market before this doesn’t seem to mean much.

So… What is the future?

From reading Susan Breslin, and Kris Rusch, and a ton of others both in the industry and out, who are blogging these changes because they’re either going through them or because they too can read print, I have a few tentative conclusions:

1- In the future we’re all ducks.

It used to be, even for writing freelancers, that we had something close to “employment.” If you did well for your house, they kept “hiring” you and eventually you became a “solid sell” for them, and if you were lucky made a living wage. This was, with the exception of a couple of houses, before my time, when you – largely – got treated as a disposable temp. Now, you’re not even that, because the houses are desperate and bookstores are imploding. Even if your title did very, very well and they’d consider pushing your second title, do you know that particular imprint will be there in six months? Or that they won’t decide to cannibalize your potential promo money to back a “sure thing” bestseller? (Who nine times out of ten isn’t, but never mind that either.) So… Take the money and run. And don’t sign anything that ties you to that house forever. And:

2- Learn to be flexible

While I don’t envision a future where you learn a skill like beautician but are just as happy sweeping sidewalks the next week (except as a stop-gap measure) you MIGHT have to learn to be more flexible in your own field. Say you have a beauty salon… Learn to do nails as well as hair. Consider learning braiding if it’s not regulated in your state (really! Yep, dangerous skill and all. GAH.) Look into makeup as well. You might not have the same slate of dedicated permers or whatever, but you can make the same money from different sources.

For me – because I was so hidebound <G> – this is meaning more and more learning non fiction as well. For others it might mean learning to write shorts and releasing those indie, because the nickles and dimes it provides will fill in the cracks between novels. Also, it might help publicity. Look at other opportunities in your area. Be creative.

3- My husband tells me there is a concept in business called, Nibbling. This is when businesses bid on projects as contractors. Instead of bidding on the whole job, you claim a little insignificant corner of it, and then “nibble in” i.e. find more and more ways to be useful in the project, until you’re doing a considerable chunk of it. Consider this. That house which is still treating you well does sf and mystery, say? You got in with mystery? Do a side novel and ask the editor to consider it. Make it sf. (See the be flexible thing.) Your short story is a runaway seller on Amazon (#1 son, I’m looking at you!) consider a novel in the same world. Or just increase your effort at shorts.

4- Freelance as a way of life

No, I don’t think EVERY occupation will be freelancers. Some have obvious limitations. But I think where writers are now, others will be soon, where more and more they’re freelancers loosely attached to various companies and projects. And where looking for work is just a normal part of life, so that the freelancing can continue. This has some serious drawbacks: Security is a big one, and some of us have serious issues with lack thereof, which means we’ll have to find a way to live with that. The other is the constant job search, which can make even sane people a little odd, particularly in a world where everyone lives in the limelight. But hey, it has side benefits too. Breslin says she now makes more money out of freelancing than she did out of her regular job. But she has more fun. And that’s part of this. The few times I’ve had honest work type of jobs (TM) I found that 80% of it was rote and boredom. Whatever the freelance lifestyle might be, it ain’t boring. It gives you a chance to learn and grow. In fact, it’s learn and grow OR die. And if you do exceptionally well one month, you can relax a little the next and to an extent your time is your own – or at least you have more control over it.

And to me that’s the ultimate reward. No, I’m still not sure how to make a living in the new world, but I guarantee I’ll figure it out. Yeah, times might get scary between, but look… I don’t know how to give up, so I’ll figure it out. And when I do, I’ll be my own woman. Win or lose, it will be under my control, and not at the mercy of someone else’s whims or perceptions.

I rather like that.

Quack.

*Sorry this is so late.  I got sidetracked into generic “errands” this morning.  I’m not dead, though all week I felt like it was a close thing.  I’m fairly sure I’ve not been taking thyroid meds in the morning, only midday, which means… Well, it feels like I’m getting the flu.  I’ve solved it by getting a box with compartments per day, which is why I’m fairly sure I’ve not been taking it.  I mean I woke up with a vivid memory of taking it, but the compartment was full.  So there you have it.  And yes, I need a minder, but in our current distracted state my minder needs a minder, so I’m finding short cuts to mind myself.

Derp fish is doing better.  Yes, I saw all the little Viking fish funeral links, thanks guys.  But I’m hoping it’s not needed for a while yet.  Hungry fish is doing loop dee loops for his food every morning.  I’m going to clean his aquarium today.

And Darkship Revenge is re-taking shape, and guys, honestly, Athena is freaking me out.  She’s growing up.  Not … well… she’s still Thena, but she’s almost an adult.

Now hark to the Mollusc’s book hawing.  Oh, yea, and buy my book too.

Yes, it has sex — a reviewer said the sex scenes are not needed for the plot, about which he is wrong.  It’s needed to know what vamps can do, and it’s VERY needed for book two because of La Chevreuse, but that’s something yet to come.  Anyway, buy my book.  Vampires guaranteed not to sparkle.  Never have.  Never will.*

The Books Blossom – Freerange Oyster

Happy Saturday, everyone! To get your weekend off to a bookish start, I bring to you a foursome of fine fantasies from some first rate female fabulists. So go, have yourselves a wonderful day with a good book, and if possible enjoy some spring sunshine. Heck, if given the chance do both at once! As always, future entries can (and should!) be sent to my email. Happy reading!

Jason Dyck, AKA The Free Range Oyster

Henchman on the Half Shell

Alma Boykin

Hubris

The Azdhagi Reborn

Two little genes can bring down an empire.

Maker Seeri promised to create the perfect super soldier: strong, fast, telepathic, and endothermic. Three generations later, the survival of the Azdhag Empire, and perhaps of the Azdhag species, depends on six Azdhagi and an undersized True-dragon barkeeper.

Lord Kirlin’s disapproval of genetic technology rivals his disgust with Lord Tarkeela. Tarkeela thinks the Pack Lords deserve the disaster they created. Tarkeela’s ears on the street, the story-catcher Cheerka, suspects the Makers and Pack-Lords know more than they admit about the surge in dead and dying juniors. When the truth boils out of hiding, Pack Lords and commoners must hunt together, reunifying the Azdhag Pack before all hell breaks loose and hubris becomes nemesis.

Renaissance

A Novel of Azdhag Survival

The ghosts of the Great Relocation still haunt the Azdhagi.

Can a Lineage be allowed to die? Tartai says yes. The King-Emperor says no. A crisis on Pokara colony forces Tartai and the Prince Imperial to reconsider long-held beliefs while investigating either terrorism or further evidence of the bribe-ability of the local code enforcement agency.

But trouble never comes in twos, only threes…

J.M. Ney-Grimm

Caught in Amber

When young Fae awakens in a locked and deserted castle, she remembers nothing. Who she is, where she comes from, none of it.

Beauty from all the ages graces the castle – medieval towers, renaissance columns, and gothic vaults – but underneath the loveliness a lurking evil stirs.

Fae hates the loneliness and the sense of hidden malice oppressing her. Even more, she hates the feeling that just around some receding corner of lost memory lies the answer to her predicament – an answer just out of reach.

Karen Myers

Mistress of Animals

The Chained Adept Book 2

AN ERRANT CHILD WITH DISASTROUS POWERS AND NO ONE TO STAND IN HER WAY.

Penrys, the wizard with a chain and an unknown past, is drafted to find out what has happened to an entire clan of the nomadic Zannib. Nothing but their empty tents remain, abandoned on the autumn steppe with their herds.

This wasn’t a detour she’d planned on making, but there’s little choice. Winter is coming, and hundreds are missing.

The locals don’t trust her, but that’s nothing new. The question is, can she trust herself, when she discovers what her life might have been? Assuming, of course, that the price of so many dead was worth paying for it.

*Sorry this is so late.  Yesterday I was out of sorts most of the day.  I thought I was coming down with a cold but apparently other than seasonal allergies that’s not so, so either I forgot to take my morning meds OR it was tiredness from the move.  At any rate, I slept late, and then decided to do a Blast From The Past post.  Only WordPress has decided to mess with my ability to search my own posts, by not showing dates.  Also, the only way is either searching by keyword (and I didnt have one already in mind) or to just endlessly page downward.  Which I swear took me longer than it would to write a new post.  WordPress, I’m glaring at you!
And now I’ll go have more coffee and go do real work.*

A Passion For Cubbyholes A Blast From the Past from February 2015

Yesterday I took a shashay down to Otherwhere Gazette, where someone in the comments of the posts was asking what the difference was between us and the SJWs, except they had a college degree and we didn’t.

The assumption dumbfounded me. Of my friends, I’m one of the least educated ones, as Kate and Amanda pack multiple graduate degrees, Dave Freer is a doctor (of fishology. Okay, it might be marine biology) and Tedd Roberts… well, a supervisor to doctoral students, besides being a doctor himself. As for the people involved with Sad Puppies, I have clue zero what Brad’s degree is. It doesn’t normally come up in conversation. I do know that Larry has an accounting degree for which he most certainly went to college (and paid his own way.)

Myself, as most of you know, I’m about a year short of a doctorate and now not likely to ever take it, because it was in languages, but over thirty years those have gone rusty and besides what good does it do me, now?

[Addendum: I just wanted to note I also have brilliant friends without college degrees and that I don’t consider a degree a stamp of intelligence.  Never have.  I took my degree in the hopes of a secure job.  Until the third year I didn’t learn anything I didn’t already know. (And then it was Swedish.)  Because the Author up there has a sense of humor, other than two brief stints teaching when Dan was unemployed, my degree has been of zero use for my actual work.  And I’ve learned more about areas like history that I never took in college than I ever did about the areas I did take in college.]

So the assumption that we didn’t have college degrees puzzled me. It reminded me of when a new girl about ten years younger than us, joined our writers’ group and assumed Rebecca Lickiss (physicist) and myself had no degrees. Why? Because we were married and had kids and chose to stay home with them. Therefore we clearly weren’t “educated.”

If you’re doing the sinal salute right now – fingers on either side of bridge of nose, head slightly bowed – yeah. I was too last night. It’s like they can’t conceive of people who have been “educated” choosing a different life path from them or even having different opinions.

I could say this was an effect of maleducation and their having illusions of intelligence. I.e. they let some college professors convince them that there is a “smart path” and a “stupid path” and the “smart path” for good little boys and girls with good grades obligates everyone to be a clone of whatever the professors envision.

I could, but we all went through the same maleducation and the same lectures which are mostly supposed to sell a point of view. And a lot of them are no dumber than we are. Yet we emerged… different. In fact, it’s almost a joke among my friends, and something that makes my kids’ blood run cold as they pursue their specialties, that few of us work at what we studied in college. And some of us have had intricately convoluted paths to get to doing what we actually enjoy.

So something different is at work here. It is in fact as though they thought that being “smart” obligated you to be an exact clone of them. As thought “smart and educated” were a category under which you get filed when you prove worthy of a college degree. (Which these days is not exactly hard. In my day, sonny! Also, get off my lawn.)

My son calls Wreck it Ralph the evilest movie ever made, because the moral of it at the end is “you should stay where you’re assigned.”

Yesterday I didn’t watch – but Dan was watching in the family room while I cooked – this movie where people got assigned a “role” and a station in adolescence. (That the authors thought there were only five and one was “thinker” was kind of funny. And sad. But mostly funny.)

I have no idea what the movie was, but what struck me was that as with Wreck it Ralph, the movie seemed to believe this putting of people in pigeon holes was a good thing.

It is a lust I’ve noticed among the people on the left, in the last oh, ten years. People should be assigned places according to their capacity judged by an “impartial” third party. That way they wouldn’t have the great unwashed crowding them about. Every person in his place and a place for everyone.

It’s all of a piece with their believing that the government must be brought into the most minute transactions and decisions affecting someone. There must be after all a government authority that decides I must have healthcare insurance, and I must have the package my ‘betters’ designed, providing for both birth control and abortion, even though I’d only need the first if I had a completely different body and I’d only have the second if I had a lobotomy. There must be a (benevolent) government dictating for whom one must bake wedding cakes. No decision too large and no decision too small when it comes to you not making it.

Because, you see, you’re just a widget, supposed to fit into a slot and do what you’re supposed to do, while all decisions, all rules control what you can do, so you’re no different than all those other widgets in the same slot.

This is of a piece with their inventing a multitude of genders (how many was it at last count, 41?) including “seeking” which means “don’t know.” It’s like they believe being a man or a woman and gay or straight means you have to absolutely conform to the stereotypes. If you don’t, you need a new word to describe what you are because every widget must be described so the right slot is found for him/her/shim/sher/blob. The seeking part always makes me think goes something like this “ZOMG, I’m not being attracted to anyone right now. I don’t know what I am. Seeking, seeking, seeking.” If you imagine that said in a little robot voice it’s just about perfect.

What amazes me is their assumption that not just them but EVERYONE would be happy in a world like that, where each human is put in a cubby and expected to live there forever.

I do them the justice of thinking their mistaken even about themselves. Particularly about themselves. A lot of the people who hold hardest to the idea that every little human comes stamped with a function (sort of like an egg) and an identification which determines his/her destiny are the sort of people who wake up on Tuesday morning and decide their real identity is dragon, something previously unsuspected in their sixty years of life. They’re the people who abandon a marriage of twenty years to “go find themselves” because apparently they somehow slipped behind the sofa cushions unnoticed. They’re the people whose resume goes from barista to physicist to astrologer and back again.

I think that’s why the lust for the ordered world. They feel out of control, bewildered by too many options, and lust for an ordered world where someone would psychically know where they belong and put them in the place where they’d be happy.

Two problems: first who can do that? We don’t have immortals among us, who can read the heart of men (yeah, and women and seeking, too) and tell exactly where you belong and where you’d be happy. Himself up there might be able to tell you that but He didn’t and gave you free will instead. Second what if there isn’t a place you’d be happy? Perhaps you weren’t built to be contented. Perhaps you’re someone who never quite fits in and pokes every away and towards the edges. Those have existed throughout history and there really is nothing wrong with being one of them.

In fact, the attempts by communist regimes to do this sort of thing were all more or less disastrous. Human beings, real human beings, aren’t easy to second guess or to “place” and tend to resist having their lives dictated to them.

So, beyond not making assumptions about the IQ or education of their opponents, I’d counsel our friends on the left (or anyone who thinks like that, though for some reason that’s mostly on the left) to possess their souls in patience and realize this utopia they seek is not only impossible, but it would be a nightmare for everyone, even the bureaucrats assigned to assigning people. (Can you imagine a more soul-eating job? For the corrupt it would be a chance at more corruption. For the conscientious trying to guess ‘right’ it would lead them to suicide.)

You have free will. Learn to use it. And kindly remove your boot off my neck and your governmental mandates off my life.

They will not bring me happiness, and I will ensure keeping them there and attempting to lord it over me doesn’t bring you any either.

Because I am not widget. I am a human being with distinct opinions, thoughts, and power of decision. You will never be able to understand the complexity and contradictions in a single human being, much less mandate what will make that person happy forever or what role they could fulfill for the rest of their lives.

And that’s a good thing.

 

This is not about Bernie Sanders.  Amanda wrote that post.  It’s not even about price as we’re used to thinking about it, in dimes and nickels and dollars and all.  This is about other prices (though in the end money is usually a translation of time and effort and other trade offs we’ve made too.)

Yesterday Older Son realized that he has to mothball his Ninja Nun comics and bid sister Agnes Day farewell possibly forever.

Perhaps you’ll say this should have occurred to him before, but like many other things in life, it came on so gradually that it didn’t hit him full force till last night.  He hasn’t updated in over a year, first because he was helping me rebuild the Victorian almost from the ground up (more like refinish, but that’s about it) while working almost full time, and then because he was accepted into medschool, we had to find him an apartment, and then he was getting hit with the hammer of MS1 — now almost finished — which I understand like many military disciplines IS supposed to break you, so they can reassemble you the way they wish.

Suddenly he was faced with the fact the upcoming summer is the only summer he’ll have ALMOST free for the next seven years or so, and while he can resume Agnes and take her to a point where she can be safely parked, he’s not sure when or if he’ll come back to it.  Sure, theoretically, he might have more time when he is a full doctor, but is that time better spent on comics, or novels?  And if comics can you pick up after ten years on the same character and setting?  I’ve tried to do that with novels, and let me tell you, it’s a task.

We had a rather maudlin conversation last night, as he realized, to put it in simple terms, that when you pick a path you can’t walk the other as well.  You either follow one road or the other.  You can’t walk both.

Now most of us here are… uh… insane would be the term, but overachievers or polymaths would work if we want to be polite.  We — almost all of us — have enough work and hobbies each for a platoon of busy people.

And for a long time (the boxes in my basement attest to this) I refused to believe that to walk one path is to deny the other.  I still do writing and art (and can’t wait to have a permanent abode again, so I can settle in and pull out the art computer and start working on everything I’ve lost through lack of practice) but I have boxes and boxes of fabric, and unless things calm down considerably once both boys are out of the house, I don’t think I’ll ever resume dressmaking.  I’d like to make stuffed dragons, at that edge where they’re almost sculptures, but I’d have to learn.  I still do fillet crochet but at glacial speed, since I only do it when I watch TV, which is rare these days.

What I mean to say is that I’m 53 and only now coming to grips with what my kid figured out: you pay in time and in yourself, as well as in money, for what you want to do.

As with a novels, where each time you make a choice you collapse all the possible choices, which makes the novel always less than it was in your head (and sometimes three novels, but that’s something else) every time you make a choice in life, you collapse the choices you can make from there.  Your range of choice becomes smaller.

For instance, when I chose to spend my time practicing writing, instead of rebuilding my freelance translation business after the move to Colorado, I didn’t realize I was paying for the opportunity to maybe one day be a professional writer with my mastery of languages, so that 24 years on, I could not really remember most of them (even if I can still read in them) and my own brother calls me an “Ex speaker of Portuguese.”

It’s not all bad.  It’s entirely possible I’d have made a lot more money if I’d stayed in translation, but you know, there’s no way to tell, and if I hadn’t tried writing, I’d be regretting it now.

And honestly, I never wanted to be a translator, I wanted to be a writer.

The trick of managing life is to accept you’re going to collapse your choices, but if you never collapse your choices, you never do anything or achieve anything.  You’re just living in a formless sea of unmade choices.

I have no idea whatsoever why older son wants to be a doctor.  But when he actually gets to do the hands-on stuff (rarely since he’s young in craft) you can’t help but realize that there might be more than volition here.  In the sense that someone is born to do something, he might have been born to do this.

I don’t know if I was born to write.  I know it’s what I always wanted to do, even when I thought it was impossible.  And I’ve paid the price, because there’s always a price.

The same with having the boys.  No regrets, butit cost us not just money, but time and health and energy.  However if I hadn’t done it, I’d have lived half a life, and I really — trite as it it sounds — wouldn’t trade the boys for anything, not even a Bil Gates sized fortune and a Stephen King sized career.

You puts down your bet, you collects the winnings.

I got maudlin, too, thinking of the paths not taken, and of everything I now lack the energy to do.  BUT we live in a blessed time.  It used to be you were done raising the kids and you were DONE.  Nothing in front of you but doddering old age or premature death.  Now you can start a career at fifty and still have 20 good years in it.

So… As we’re buffeted and besieged with the technological changes that are turning society upside down remember that every choice has a price, and some of the price you won’t even know.  But there’s no point getting mired in might have beens.

Choose.  Be.  Do.  A life where you never pay any price is a life where you never do anything.

Be not afraid.  Build. Live.  The price will take care of itself.

One concept we keep coming across is that of a “silent majority.”  It is a concept easily ridiculed, because if they are the majority, why are they silent?

It is also a concept that proves itself again and again.  The early eruptions of tea parties here, the demonstration I attended in Portugal when I was (I think) sixteen.

The problem is that “the silent majority” brings up the wrong image.  This is not a crowd of people sitting at attention, stewing, unable to speak.

A more accurate name would be “the have a life majority.”

I got obsessed with politics early by being exposed to the fact that while I might want to ignore politics, politics doesn’t ignore me, and if you give people with power their head soon enough they’re intruding into your innocent pleasures: cancelling ballet classes; mandating you spend whole days painting murals; decreeing that your grade be by vote of the class… that type of nonsense.  And worse.

So I follow politics like a guard dog following an intruder.  But most people don’t.  Even my husband has no clue what I’m exercised about at any given time.  (Weirdly younger son inherited mom’s issue and he’ll roam around the house periodically going “Marshall smash” for reasons his father can’t fathom, relating to names he can’t recognize.)

I figure it’s kind of like most people are interested in the lives of celebrities and I just don’t get it.  Not meaning to say the lives of celebrities affect our daily lives or are interesting, but I figure that’s what most people think of politics too: too far away, too remote, too boring.

Are these people the majority?  I’d guess so.  From conversations heard in public spaces, even among the supposed cogniscenti, they might be an hyper majority.  Most people don’t understand anything of politics, and care even less.  In fact, most people think of politics as the business of people running for office.

But, Sarah, you say, what about the left which is on all the time?  Oh, most of them, except for the ringleaders, don’t really care either.  It’s just that “making progressive noises” is considered akin to “saying I’m a good person.”  That’s because the messages put out by our education, media, entertainment and even art in the last 100 years are so stilted as to equate “having progressive ideas” with “being a good person.”

What they’re doing is the equivalent of artists and noblemn in the middle ages making extremely Catholic noises, even though when you dig into their lives, most of them weren’t any better than current day celebrities.  I mean, DO keep in mind that Henry VIII pre-reformation, often listened to six or seven masses a day.  Yeah, he sure was a pious and well behaved gentleman.  Except for all the mistresses and all the byblows.

The truth of it was that they didn’t REALLY believe anymore than the masses on the left really believe in progressive ideals.  Oh, if pressed, they’ll parrot them, and if endangered they scream them, but this is all “look at me, look at me, I’m a beautiful and good person.”  Which btw, is how leftism persists as a positional good after communist country after communist country has been exposed as a sewer of moral corruption and material poverty.

So they’re louder, but they’re just as uninterested in truth and in what is going on in fact.  They just want to show they’re nice and thoughtful and belong to a certain class.

In fact, the only thing that brings out the silent majority (on either side) is real hardship.  They’re not fully out and bitching yet (it will take a lot more than that) but some of the crazy in this election season is from their first blinking at sunlight.

Rue the day they become fully engaged, because neither side knows a heck of a lot about economics, or society or … well, anything.  They haven’t paid attention.  they know about managing their lives, not about the macro society.  (Which is how most people are.  Not because they’re stupid but because they don’t care.)  And when they wake up the only thing they know is that they “don’t like” what is happening.  So the reaction tends to be … interesting.  It’s the sort of reaction that fed the guillotine.

Which is a danger to avert.  Because what comes after is never better, even than the horror of the the ancien regime.  And unfortunately good men as well as bad can drown in the rivers of blood.

Which is why years ago I decided to start speaking out.  To put myself out there.  I’m frankly the sort of person who, left to her own devices, wouldn’t interact with unknown people and would write only under pen names so no one knew.  At some point it because clear to me that some measure of fame is needed to make a fortune in this field.  I understand it, but I still don’t like it.

And yet, at some point I couldn’t stay silent and blend into the silent majority anymore.  Because as grandma used to say “Silence is consent.”  And what I was consenting to was the sort of spiral that ended in blood on the streets. Our “aristos” having taken over the media and all the means of information live in a bubble and ignore the vast, uninterested majority who is suffering from their stupid reality-divorced decisions.  This only ends one way.

No, my voice alone won’t avert it, but I’m doing what I can, and I can sleep at night, and I can look at myself in the mirror.

Can you?

 

In the move, we’ve — somehow — managed to lose our forks (and the one flash drive that contained the almost ready to go Darkship Revenge, leaving me about half.  The copy on the computer is corrupted, the directory has disappeared AND — for what must be the first time in my life — I didn’t send the work in progress to friends.  WTH?  Anyone cursing me lately?  It gets better: I’ve narrowed “where the flash drive went” to the pocket of the jeans I wore while moving.  Which have disappeared.  Not in the wash, not washed, not hanging.  Seriously, this is ridiculous. It’s starting to feel uncanny.  I am going to rewrite the d*mn book from middle on (it’s not a raw rewrite, as I wrote two books conjoined) and maybe I’ll find where it went wrong, yes?  Because clearly someone is trying to tell me something.)

I was telling mom that all we have are dessert forks, and she freaked out “You lost your wedding cutlery.”  I had to explain, in small words, that no, I didn’t.  I lost the every day forks, not the good forks.  And then I got all brave and announced that when we move to the “final” (well, probably not really, as ten to fifteen years from now the boys will probably be settled elsewhere in the country and we’ll either move near one of them or get small places near each of them, and divide our time.  BUT “Final” for a while.) house, we’re going to get rid of the every day silverwear set (bought at big lots 17 years ago and such high quality the forks bend if you look at them wrong) and start using the good one every day.  “I’ve been married 30 years mom.  What am I saving the good set for?”

She thought about it, or at least there was a silence, and I prepared for an explosion, and then she said, “You have a point there.  I have “good” sets and “good” dishes, and yet if I die, no one wants them.  Everyone wants their own stuff.”

Which brings me to when mom’s grandmother died.  We got her good wool blanked.  I remember, because I used it to nap on the sofa (usually with the cat) all through my adolescence.  The wool blanket was of some artisan manufacturing and no longer made when Great-grand died, which meant it was probably valuable (I wonder if it still exists or moths ate it.)  At any rate great grandma’s possessions, when I was 6, were all subject to much dispute among children and grandchildren.  And you may say well, they were antiques.  Sort of, except no one treated them like that.  They treated them as everyday use stuff, and still they fought over them.

There was also the fact that my grandparents on mom’s side had an uneven number of chairs.  I.e. they had five children, but seven chairs.  Grandad used to joke (I think it was a joke) there would be a fight over the remaining two chairs.  In the same way, my parents had an extra kitchen stool, and my brother and I would stage mock fights for the extra stool.  (Five stools, two kids.)

It was a joke in our case, and in fact when my paternal grandmother died 24 (really, that long?  I still miss her everyday) years ago, there was no fight, not even over the land she owned, or the antiques in the house.  (I got some everyday use things: her religious books and guest towels.  It’s all I wanted, and it’s not the value.)

BUT at some point, possibly when I was very little, this stuff wasn’t a joke.  Which is why mom is keeping all her “good” stuff (in her case acquired late in her marriage, when they had the money.)  Because at one time high quality silverware and dishes were left to children and grandchildren.

And it’s why I’ve kept my “good” wedding silverware immaculate and used cheap-ass cr*p for 30 years.  Which is ridiculous.  If my boys get married, their brides will want their own stuff, not a handmedown from me, no matter how good a quality it is.  (Though I hope one of them marries a woman who REALLY likes tea, possibly British.  I have in my possession, come down both sides of the family — well, Dan is from new England — tea sets dating back to the 19th century.  “Wedding” tea sets, though on my side, more often than not acquired later in the marriage, when they had money.  And my own wedding teaset is added to it.  I think I used it twice in our marriage.  Anyone up for Writer’s Tea Parties after we move?  Perhaps A Writer’s Holiday Tea?)

So.  Our politicians are crappy, our social structures are decaying, our education sucks, but can we forget all the Rousseau crap already?

We are prosperous beyond measure.  Yes, a lot of what is made is crap, but we’re prosperous enough that the parable of the man who gave half his cloak to the beggar seems weird.  Why not give him a new, cheap cloak?

In the developed worlds no one goes naked for lack of clothes (which still happened in my day, often with children.)  They might wear crappy-ass clothes, but they don’t go naked.  No one goes hungry for lack of food (they might eat awful stuff for lack of the skills to cook better or lack of give a damn, but they don’t outright not eat.  Those children with distended bellies from honest-to-Bob famines?  We don’t have them.)

This is the day (relative) freedom has made.  Let us rejoice and be glad in it.

And then we can get back to fixing our culture, our education and our politicians.  (What, I think they should be neutered.  You?)

Go and make/build something today that can give fruits for generations to come.

We make, we build, we elevate.  It’s what we do.  If we work hard enough, we’ll do it faster than they can tear it down.

Meanwhile: It’s ALIVE!  Sword and Blood has gone live.