Category: Uncategorized

Recently I came across a news article estimating that 80% of NYC graduates cannot read and write and are functionally illiterate.  I’d bet those numbers are not far off across the country, and it wasn’t a surprise.  What was a surprise was what my son told me when I discussed the matter with him.

Five years ago, those numbers would have shocked me.  Then my blog got invaded by “children” in the eleventh grade of a gifted and internationally respected program in the high school my son was attending.  They seemed to have erratic spelling, the vaguest of acquaintances with grammatical rules and a thorough lack of ability to think.  (If you tried to challenge their assumptions or what amounted to received dogma, they reverted to profanity, in the hopes that it would make you pass out or go away and stop saying things that made them uncomfortable.)  It was clear their reading comprehension was iffy and their writing ability shaky.  (And the scary part is half of them were accepted into Ivy League schools a year later, which put paid to any idea I had this was a meritocracy.)

As bad as those kids were, they were at least semi-functionally-literate and, yep, they were the “cream of the crop”.  Since then, with the kids being in college and my having contact with kids the same age, I’ve got to see the work of the average student.

I’ll just say that I once screamed at Robert for three hours for writing something about half as bad as what I see from college students.  He was in third grade.  I told him unless he improved he would be an illiterate peasant at the mercy of people who could express themselves better.  (More on that later.)  He took it to heart and improved.

Anyway – it is neither a brag, nor preening – to say my kids are better than that.  Robert is gifted with words, and Marsh is gifted with storytelling.  But beyond all that they WERE TAUGHT to use language.  We were reading to them from before they could talk (Ray Bradbury is as effective as lullabies) and they watched us read, write and discuss writing.  More importantly, I corrected their grammar and taught him rules of exposition.  While they attended public school, I mostly used it for what it does well: babysitting.  Robert once let the cat out of the bag by telling his seventh grade ecology teacher that the only reason I sent him to school was to have 8 uninterrupted hours to write in, and that his real learning took place in three hours after school.  It was true, of course, but stunningly tactless of him to say it.

And yes, both the kids are high IQ.  However, that’s neither here nor there.  So were the kids invading my blog, and they were writing at the level of D students in my day – and I was in an English as a Second Language class.

Look, we all went through school and we all saw the kids who came through.  About 1% were “natural born” learners.  (Though in most cases those might be from environments where learning was facilitated.  It’s hard to tell where genetics ends and environment takes over.)  The next 5% or so were strivers who, in varying degrees and for varying reasons (either love of learning or an interest in an intellectual profession) were determined never to have less than B and if possible to have A.  After that came the large, lumpish, group of C students: some of which might have very high IQ but who had absolutely no interest in academics.  Most of them, at least in my day, were intending to get jobs in that vast non-intellectual middle class, from retail onto auto mechanics or other specialty, non-academic professions.  Depending on how smart they were, they were either aiming for clerk or manager, but they had their life planned and reading Shakespeare wouldn’t really have helped it in any way.  Nor would quadratic equations.

So they made a mental calculation and applied their effort where it mattered, learning about life outside school.

THEN at the other end of that, and as rare as the 5 or 6% top learners, were the hopeless – the addicts, the petty criminals, and the apathetic.  The ones who had already charted a course to government dependence and had no interest in ever making their way by themselves.  They too had made a rational decision and since what they wanted was to drift through life, learning anything beyond basic reading/writing and how to count wasn’t in their interest.

I will note though that even most of the hopeless, unless they were impaired in some way, could read fairly fluently and could write at least enough for every day life.

So – how do you take most of the youth of a country, a country, moreover, rich enough that most kids have no major developmental disabilities, and make them functionally illiterate?

You WORK at it.

And this comes to the part I didn’t know, and the part that shocked me.

My son happened to be loitering in my office (they do this a lot) when I read that headline and I said “I’m not exactly shocked, and I’d be surprised if it were much different across the country, because I sent you and your brother to the school reading, and then spent the next three years screaming at you to sound out words and stop guessing them.  So they took kids who COULD read and would have made them illiterate, if I hadn’t stayed on top of it and made you re-learn.”

At which point my son said “Oh, you have no idea.  Let me tell you what happened in Title One.”

Here we break to explain that Title One is – afaik – a Colorado program for children with learning disabilities.  To my knowledge, neither of the kids had been in it.

However, as I’ve learned over the years, my knowledge is often far from complete, and what happens OFFICIALLY is also not what happens in truth.  (For instance, if I’d known both the kids were sent to the school psychologist once a week through elementary, to fish for stuff that might be considered “abuse” – probably because Dan and I were troublesome – they would have been out of there so fast that the school’s head would spin.  Unfortunately both kids assumed this was “normal” and didn’t tell me till high school.  On paper, it never happened.)

I think the other day I said it was in third grade that the school gave us trouble over Robert.  I was wrong, it was actually in first grade.  I sent them a kid who could read, write and was working on fractions.  Imagine our shock when in our first first grade conference, the teacher informed us that Robert was learning disabled and would probably never learn to read and write.  This was particularly surprising since one of her pieces of evidence was a worksheet that consisted of 1+0, 2+0 etc. across the top of which Robert had written in properly spelled words “this is stupid and boring.  A number plus zero always equals the number.”

Dan and I threw a fit – we would – and they insisted Robert needed to be in Title One and remedial education.  We insisted he didn’t.  In the end, they had him IQ tested, after priming the school psychologist, who used a “set” that topped out at 107 IQ.  Then they informed us his IQ was 107 and he needed to be in Title One and remedial education.

At that point I wanted to go raze the school or perhaps set it on fire.  (I did say I’m excitable, right?)  But Dan wouldn’t let me.  Instead we burned around 1k dollars we didn’t have (we were so tight in those days we hugged each cent till it squealed.  Considering whether to buy an extra head of lettuce was existential.  We drove a $1500 car, and only had one for the two of us,) found the most reputable psychologist in town, and had him tested over Christmas break.  (They were making noises about a “staffing” meeting in January and how they’d take our parental rights away if we didn’t sign Robert for “what’s best for him.”)  We said nothing, just had him tested.

He tested profoundly gifted (which is a technical designation.)

So, next thing you know, Dan marches into the staffing meeting with the results, authenticated by a psychologist who was known and respected in the region.  He first asked them what they thought of her, and they said she was very good, but of course very expensive.  Then he laid the results on the table.

Shock, horror and confusion ensued, the most important – the teacher, who btw, we later found out did this every year to a kid she perceived as ‘minority’ (this, btw, in a town that is one of the most liberal areas in CO.  I told this story to a leftist friend who absolutely refused to believe it.  And yet it happened.) and her friend, the school psychologist were both present – reaction being BETRAYAL.  “How could you go and do this behind our backs, without warning us?”

Then the meeting broke up in disarray, Robert got put in “gifted” classes and no more was said about it.

Which is all very well… except…

Except that not only did we have the right to have our own kid tested and no, we didn’t need to “warn” the school – but that I didn’t find out till this week that, before we had signed on to their diagnosis of him as “disabled”, they’d sent Robert into Title One.  (This btw should NOT shock me, as they put Marshall in speech therapy before we’d signed an agreement to let him be put in – we never did, because the way it was worded, it amounted to signing our parental rights away, including giving them the right to put him in a foster family if they thought we weren’t making “the right decisions” for his “welfare” as determined by them.  Instead, we again cut out other stuff and put him in a private speech therapist.  Who, in six sessions, fixed what the school therapist hadn’t in a hundred.)

More shocking yet is what happened in Title One.

Remember, Title One is supposed to teach kids who are disabled to read at normal level.  Remember too, the kid they sent to Title One was reading The Life of Caesar at four.  (Though he did get stumped by the meaning of “incest.”) While they were sending him to Title One, one of the books confiscated for reading in class was one of our signed Pratchetts (can’t remember which now, but might have been The Color of Magic. I remember because instead of telling me – he wasn’t supposed to take those to school – he broke into the teacher’s closet and stole it back.  He was never caught.)

He told me last week, when I said I had to fight his and his brother’s tendency to “guess” words for three or four years until they got it through their heads that these are not ideograms and you don’t “guess” (I think every other sentence out of my mouth those years was “Sound it OUT”) that when he was in Title One, they FORCED him to guess.  He said, “No, look, I’d read the word correctly at a glance, and then they’d shout at me I was supposed to GUESS.  And I’d have to come up with words that sounded like it, before they TOLD ME the correct one.  They trained you to NOT read.”

This explained Robert’s best friend in elementary who was at least as smart as Robert but who got sent to Title One by another teacher.  I tried to tell his mom at the time there was nothing wrong with the kid except maybe needing glasses.  But she was working class and respected teachers.  That child left elementary school unable to read.

Right here, let me tell you that if your kid is in school, chances are he or she is being taught to “guess” words, aka, “whole word.”  If you ask him if they use whole word, they’ll act shocked and say oh, no, they use phonics “in combination” with other methods.  They told me all of this too, at the time.  However, the entire lesson plan is geared towards guessing words, sometimes working from the meaning.  (I.e. Terribly and Therapy are the same word at a glance because they begin and end with the same letters, so you’re supposed to “guess” one of them, and then work out which it is by the meaning of the rest of the sentence.  [This was referred to, ten years ago, as the “whole language” method.])

Do I need to tell you that in a language that is largely phonetic – yes, I know all the exceptions, but it’s easier to work to the right word from a mispronounced version than it is to do it from “meaning” or “guess” – this is NOT only the way NOT to teach reading but is, ultimately the way to teach kids not to read.  By turning words into ideograms, which they were never meant to be, you make reading too difficult for all but the most dedicated strivers.

I’m surprised the literacy rate is 20%  I’m surprised it’s not 5%, and I wonder how many of those kids read well enough to read for pleasure.

Now, I realize that an illiterate peasantry is needed for a proper neo-feudal regime, but I wonder how many of these people are actually malicious, and how many are just full of their own self-importance and convinced that they are doing what is best for these children?

Judging by those I dealt with, most of them aren’t bright enough to see any overarching social aims in this.  They are simply full of their own “good intentions” and they’ve been TAUGHT this is the best way of teaching to read.  In fact, if you push them they become either irate or lachrymose and tell you that you don’t UNDERSTAND, you’re not an expert and you weren’t taught the latest METHODS.  (This reminds me of when we stayed in NYC in a new hotel and every night our bed was, essentially, short sheeted – it’s more complicated than that, but that was the effect.  When we complained the maid, with an accent stronger than mine, informed us it was “latest, Russian bed-making technology. … that one too didn’t end well, at least as soon as I stopped rolling on the floor laughing.)

Dave, yesterday, made a comment that the public school system for all its flaws might teach a kid to read who would otherwise not know how.  Since I don’t know every teacher in every corner of the US – but I know from other contexts that at least some of them will be decent and competent and tell the system to stuff it – nor every kid, nor every school, this is POSSIBLE.  What I guarantee and would put my hands in the fire for is that the percentage of those is dwarfed by the MASS of what would otherwise be competent “middle brow” C students, who could read and express themselves passably in writing, if they were left alone/had online teachers with just a class supervisor/were taught by anyone (retirees? Mothers?) BUT people who had been convinced they were education experts and that teaching children to read – something that village teachers managed for centuries.  (And BTW my first village teacher was a discarded fallen woman, whom some guy had seduced and set up in a little cottage with no running water and only two rooms.  She was, it was rumored “of good families” and left with no other means of support, taught the kids to read and fancy work (needlework, guys!) to the girls and died respected and almost revered in her eighties.)

But whether it’s from malice or misguided credentialism and do-goodism, what I can tell you is that our system of education is accomplishing the “miracle” of turning out a population MORE illiterate than the poor never-taught people in Tudor England.

Malice or incompetence, it comes to the same.  If you have kids in the system, look to their future.  If they read by “guessing” (the signs are easy.  They’ll think words that start and end with the same letter are the same) stop that right now and teach them to sound it out.  They’ll hate you for a month, but the hatred will pass and the literacy will remain.

However remember most parents are too busy living their lives to follow the kids that closely/teach them after the kids get home (it doesn’t take very long.  Most of the school day is filled with cr*p.  You can teach them the essentials and more in two/three hours after school.), and even more most parents think they’re not qualified to teach the kids.  Which leaves us in the mess we’re in.

As a nation founded on the consent of the governed, we can’t afford to have a school system that turns out illiterate peasants.  Whether it’s by design or incompetence, it doesn’t matter.  We simply can’t afford it.

If we are to survive as a people and a culture (and our “methods” have spread across most of Eastern Europe) SOMETHING else much arise in place of public anti-education.

Local systems, with trustworthy people, known to have succeeded in other fields, would be better, as would practically anything else.  It’s time we realize that the Public Education System is designed to do the exact opposite of its stated goal.

UPDATE: Welcome Instapundit Readers.  Thank you to Glenn Reynolds for the link!

No, I’m not going to confess to long bouts of schizophrenia.  Besides, for a writer having other people’s voices in their heads (either as thoughts or as actual auditory hallucinations, I understand, though, thank heavens I never got the second.  It would freak me out) is perfectly normal.

The difference you could say is between listening to a voice telling you to cut up the neighbors and put them in trash bags and doing it – or at least considering doing it – and listening to a voice telling you to cut up the neighbors and putting them in a trash bag and going “ooh.”  Then starting a story with “That was the day I cut up the neighbors—”

The second is perfectly normal for writers, though I’ve heard of certain lost souls who don’t get these and have to do every one of them, step by step by skull sweat, with no freebies from the subconscious.  Of course those people might be lying.  They might think it makes them sound smarter or more important to say that they have to sweat every little detail.

It’s always unwise to take as gospel truth the word of a pack of people who lie for a living.  Particularly when they’re telling you about the process by which they construct those lies.  The magician always keeps some secrets, etc.

But, at any rate, it is not this peculiar problem – or ability – of writers that I wish to address.  It might be freaky or neat to have several voices in you head.  They might or might not be variations of you (I hope not.) BUT in the end you have them or you don’t.  And if you do you learn very early on not to talk about them or people freak out.

The problem I want to talk about – which is right now hitting me with the full baseball bat with nails in it – is something we all face, arguably more so (though it’s debatable) in our present day, with present ways of living.

You know the thing about people being several persons: father, son, brother, husband, worker, etc.

Of course, to an extent this has always been so – I remember being shocked at watching my father being dressed down by his mother, as though he were about five years old, all authority gone.  Because he was my father, but her son, and in a traditional society like Portugal that means currents of authority.

Every man – or woman – alive has always faced this.

It applies, too, in relation to work.  You might be facing a disaster with drains at home, but when you enter the office building you’re supposed to forget about it.  If it’s something really important, and if you’ve worked for the company for a long time, you might (or not) be able to get time off to deal with it, or the fact that you’re working with a quarter brain might be forgiven.  For instance, my husband got time off to deal with my being in ICU with pneumonia, back when the kids were little.  And Baen has put up with delays caused by my uncertain health with not a complaint.  (Though occasional with prods with a sharp stick.)

To a certain extent, as I said, it always was like this.

The problem is this – since the beginning of the twentieth century – give or take twenty years – we’ve been blurring those lines some more.

It started with two things, both of them good: first the disappearance of domestic service.  (Don’t want to hear it.  People didn’t leave to go work in factories because factories were worse.  I’ve read about the drudgery of domestic service.  A lot of my mom’s friends had maids of all work, some of them as young as ten or twelve.  (Mom had a daily while she was actively working.  The problem was her dailies were usually sixteen or older – she dislikes the idea of child labor.  [Unless it was mine, and that’s because she thought she was training me.] — She always felt sorry for these girls and would – in her spare time – make them a full wardrobe.  They would then, in a highly class conscious society, “look like ladies.”  Next thing you knew they were married off and mom was minus a daily.  Fortunately there was a line waiting to work for her…) Heck, I’ve done it myself for a summer in Germany.  While a lot of those books about Victorian “servitude” are exaggerated and aim to horrify us and make us feel soft and fuzzy about our sensitivity, the real thing was no picnic.  Of course people left when another opportunity offered.  For one, in factories – particularly as the century progressed – there was an opportunity for advancement, which was lacking in domestic service.  Unless you married the boss, you as a servant would never become the boss.

The second good development was that people had more free time (in large part because factories made things cheaper.  It makes a huge difference.  All these books I’m reading from early century talk about women spending their evenings mending clothes or altering them, even well-to-do women.)

The free time gave people time to pursue what they really wanted to do – aka to have lives beyond work.  A lot of these involved things that wouldn’t pay, like volunteering at church or being secretary of some club.  (The vibrant club-life in America from sewing circles to the local group of the exchange student program that brought me over amazed me in the early eighties.  Is it still that way?  Doesn’t seem that way to me, but maybe it is I who am isolated and overworked and other people have more normal lives.)  But some people started developing second careers in their free time – which in the late twentieth century often turned into a first career when the first suddenly collapsed.

The problem is that the first development created what the whipper snappers of the sixties interpreted as the domestic servitude of women.  Since there were no servants, mom stayed home and did the house work.  Yes, many of these women would have been maids, without the tech developments made maids obsolete, but they were living middle class lives and had no household help.  So they were the household help.

This created the backlash among children who grew up with this and the idea that housework was horrible and demeaning and EVERYONE should work outside the home.

So the vast majority of people do.  And housework largely goes undone – I’ve always thought that we should be able to create the machines from The Door Into Summer.  We probably have the tech.  The problem is that most people have got used to living in a mess.  This is btw, how history/science don’t progress in a logical way.  SF writers in the fifties would look at our houses and go “why didn’t they create machines to do that?”  Well, first because the tech wasn’t quite there, and then because people got used to the mess and stopped seeing it – but a minimum must still be done.  We still have to feed ourselves and most of us clean at least the minimum not to have vermin.

So, where there used to be division of labor, there is now one person doing two jobs.  That’s at the very minimum.  First, the amount of jobs that get piled on us by a society that waves “oughts” in our face are mind-boggling.  Glenn Reynolds has pointed out, and I second, that being a parent these days is a ton more work than it was even when we were kids, partly because laws (which I think aim at all of us running away screaming and putting kids in daycare.  And partly, I think, because we have a lot fewer kids and so are obsessed with keeping them safe) make it so.  For instance, we couldn’t leave the kids alone in the house for more than two hours, until one was over 14.  Both of my kids COULD be left in the house for a day or so at age ten.  And they could reach me on the phone with any questions instantly.   But the law wouldn’t allow it, and if something happened and a neighbor found I’d left a ten year old and a six year old alone for a day, I’d have to face Social Services.

Contrast this with my mom who would go and deal with business (she administered finances for several relatives abroad) in town for entire days by the time I was eight, and who not only expected the house still standing and me unscathed at the end of it, but who would have been very shocked had anyone suggested the other possibility.  (She did have this litany she did when she went out, which she started doing for a couple of hours by the time I – and before me, my brother – was five “Don’t open the door to strangers, don’t tell anyone on the phone that you’re alone, don’t play with knives, don’t light matches. If you have any trouble, call grandma.”  By the time we were ten or so, we took great delight in telling her that when WE were leaving her alone in the house.)  Likewise, it was not unusual to turn vacationing kids out the door in the morning with a packed lunch, and only see them again in the evening.

Now being a parent is a nitpicky job.  You’re supposed to watch them every second, in case they spontaneously combust or something, and the government stands over your shoulder to make sure you DO.

Then there are taxes.  If you do anything more than the standard 9-5 (and sometimes even then) your taxes become a nightmare that consumes months.  My husband does it, but I see how much work it is.

And then there’s our jobs.  At least for those of us in skilled/technical professions, they’ve been taking more and more time since the early nineties.  For writers this was due to our dysfunctional industry offloading a bunch of work on us, stuff they used to do: proofing became so spotty we had to either proof twice or pay proofers; publicity as expected to be on our lap.  Etc.

But I see a lot of it with my husband too —  let alone that since late 07 those still employed are doing three or four jobs and getting paid for one – if he wants to stay relevant and useful, he has to learn continuously.  This is nobody’s fault, just a consequence of the rate of change.  However learning, no matter how much you like doing it – particularly highly technical/scientific learning – requires a heck of a lot of outside-the-hours study.  So there’s that.

And then, well… my family are Odds.  I don’t know if other people are like this.  I suspect a lot of people reading this blog are.  My older son, the pre-med student writes novels and does cartooning on the side.  He’s also teaching himself animation AND (at last) trying to learn Portuguese.  His aerospace-engineering-student brother is cartooning, doing art and apparently modding/designing games, while teaching himself programing.  He also writes, but I’m not supposed to know that.  My husband writes, of course, but also composes music and creates programs-of-use-to-indie-publishers.

Then there’s me.  Do I need to tell you the sad tale?  This extended whine comes about because yesterday I “didn’t do anything” which means I spent the afternoon redoing the cover of Death of A Musketeer – as in drawing a cover for it, with an Icarus board and oil pastels.  This is because we’re reissuing it, and taking it paper at the same time, and then hopefully in April doing The Musketeer’s Seamstress, then in May The Musketeer’s Apprentice, and in June A Death In Gascony (retitled to the original The Musketeer’s Inheritance, with a note that it was originally published under another title.)  In July The Musketeer’s Servant (formerly Dying By The Sword) which needs serious edit because I was very ill when I let it out of my hands.  This brings my due date to finish and bring out The Musketeer’s Confessor to August.

Coincidentally this is the same date Through Fire is due.  There are also six stories I’m contracted for before May.

Yes, I can do a short story in five hours, and that means I can push it to the weekend.  Unfortunately, I’m also pushing to the weekend artwork.  And when it comes to the musketeers, for instance, I don’t have much choice.  Until I have  a substantial number up, I don’t have the money to pay an artist, and while Dreamstime has LOVELY fantasy paintings (and SF) no one draws musketeers – or at least no one does them in a style suited for mysteries.  There are any number of pictures of women dressed and musketeers, children dressed as musketeers, and dogs dressed as musketeers (!) and there’s any number of anime musketeers.  There just aren’t many illustrations of musketeers.  I can do it (I think.  I’ll run the finished product by y’all in case I’m deluding myself.  If I get a ton of courage, I’ll ask Dave Mattingly if it’s horrible.)  But it takes time.

At the same time I’m editing two books for indie publication and it’s work no one else can do, since it involves my internal feel for how the books should be.  I’m still publishing back list short stories.  I’m finishing up – but still involved in – a blog tour for AFGM.  I’m still (sporadically at least) working for PJMedia, and would like to do more.

And through all this, I must still be wife, and mom and household manager.  (This is not to say I don’t enjoy the first two.  I do.  That’s why I take time to spend with the guys.)

And then there’s the mentoring.  This, like the wife/mothering is stuff I enjoy and also things I feel I SHOULD do.  I got a lot of help coming up, and I’m paying it forward.  But it too takes time, and I’ve been shirking it.

Those who’ve wondered why my web page is atrociously out of date, or why I forget to answer emails, now have somewhat of an idea.  I’m being several people.  And when Sarah D’Almeida is editing musketeers, she’s not drawing a cover for the books.  Worse, when I’m being Sarah D’Almeida, I’m not writing space opera.  When Sarah Hoyt is writing Space Opera, Sarah Marques isn’t writing the second vampire book.  When Sarah Marques is writing the vampire book, “romance” writer Sarah Hoyt is not planning her War of The Roses series.  When Sarah Hoyt is planning her War of the Roses from the distaff perspective series, she’s not writing the sequel to A Flaw In Her Magic.

And while I’m writing or doing art, publishing isn’t happening.

And when all this is going on, that course on the history of medicine sits unwatched.  Worse, so does the course on Game Theory.

What to do?

Yes, I could punt back, do only the traditional publishing.  Baen has a very good chance of surviving this upheaval (unless S & S crashes so spectacularly it takes Baen with it, and I don’t see that happening or not in a way Baen can’t find other distribution.  Advantages of being small and nimble.)

That would mean writing books and doing blog tours, which is insane but doable.  BUT…

But I am a Heinlein girl.  The chances of Baen crashing are minimal, but I believe in always having an escape hatch and in always, always, always having it in my power, not someone else’s.  Belt AND suspenders.

And then there’s the fans.  There are fans who still send me weekly emails asking for the next musketeer mystery.  What am I to do?  I know the pain of unfinished series.

And there’s the books themselves.  They were planned.  They want to be written (as do the next three to finish the Shakespeare series.  No, I’m not promising that any time soon.)

And there’s the concept of building under – more on that later.

But more than all that, there’s the fact that doing these, indie, on the side, can bring me the money to relieve the load a little.  If this works out, these backlist and indie books will bring in enough to get a cleaning lady, to send clothes to the laundry service, to maybe take the one week a month away to just write, which I need (honestly) to keep on schedule.

Yes, traditional publishing brings in money too, but even though that’s growing it has well-known boundaries.  The indie stuff can add to it markedly.  And I can write four/six books a year.  I’ve done it before.

It’s just that right now it’s a lot of insane work.

And I don’t know any way around it.

You know, it’s like all the Building Under strategy.  It’s going to make you insanely overworked – let this be a warning – because you still have your regular work, and then you have another under.  And you have all the other insane demands of life, still.

Don’t give up.  It’s doable.  You might be very tired for a few years, but it’s doable.

Things that might help are a good planner system (I don’t have this, and I desperately need it.)  Scheduling and – paradoxically – taking breaks.  (Try to plan these if your spouse/partner/best friend is also building under.   My husband claims with some justice that I always need time at the museum/park when he’s slammed under stuff.  I need to get better.)  Find inexpensive amusements that DO work for you.  Yes, to an extent rotating what you do provides refreshment, but not that much.  For me, I like the Natural History Museum and a cheap Greek diner in Denver.  It’s not happening as often as I’d like it, partly because of gas prices, but we try to do it every so often.

One thing I’m trying to learn is how to “rest in mini increments” – a walk around the block but thinking of no work.  That sort of thing.

I hear exercise helps, and I need to find time somehow.  It’s hard to remember we live in bodies sometimes.

And if you’re going “this just doesn’t work.  I’m insanely busy.” No, that means you’re doing it right.  In any building-under scheme, where you create a structure to take the load when the other collapses, you will be insanely busy.  But it should be only two/three years at most and then either this will be your main occupation, or you can hire contractors to help.  Hopefully.

In the meantime, de-clutter your life.  You know the things you do that you neither enjoy nor help you or anyone else. And do schedule fun/stuff you love in HARD.  Try a variation of the Heinlein dictum “Budget Luxuries FIRST” – I’ve found this works when we’re broke.  I don’t mind eating soup two days a week, if we can go to Denver once every couple of months and molest dinos.  The same seems to apply emotionally.  I don’t mind working like crazy sixteen hours a day if I get an hour to cuddle my husband and watch old mysteries with him in the evening.

And good luck.  This is very much a work in progress.  I’m still learning how to be more than one person.

*Ladies, Gentlemen, and those who just looked down to figure out this difficult conundrum, put your hands together (not there, geesh) for our very own TXRed who is here to discuss on nature, nature (the other one) and the environment.*

Environing Your Nature: the Difference between Nature, nature, and Environment.

“I’m an environmentalist.” “The First Nations/Amazonian tribes/Sami lived in harmony with nature.” “There is no such thing as a natural disaster.” “They are destroying the environment!”  “I’m a naturist.”  All these phrases . . . Hey, wait a minute! You, yes, you, put some clothes on. This is a PG-13 blog.

Ahem, sorry about that. As I was saying, all but one of the phrases at the start of the previous paragraph work on some basic assumptions, including the idea that nature, Nature, and environment have the same meaning, and that those meanings never changed. As the great moral philosopher Sportin’ Life sang, “It ain’t necessarily so.” This little essay is going to look at the history of nature vs. environment, how ideas about nature changed over time, and what this means for us as writers and thinkers.

A quick fast-forward to modern usage: environment refers to one’s surroundings, be they human made or otherwise. “Nature” (or as I sometimes call it Nnnnnature) is the personified, idealized non-human environment, and nature means whatever modern English speakers believe it to mean at the moment. Clear as mud?

Nature is the older of the two words, and has changed the most over time. It is a direct Latin translation of the Greek word physis, meaning growth, specifically of plants. The Romans added it to their word natura, relating to birth, and gave the word two meanings. One meaning refers to the essential qualities of something, such as in the phrase “human nature” or “the nature of the beast.” The second meaning was that of something not created by a rational being, such as natural vs. artificial (created by skill or artifice).  This is source of later meanings of “nature.”

In contrast, “environment” came into English via the Old French in viron, meaning “in a circle,” from Latin vertere to circle (around something). Environ was first used in English in 1603 and at the time meant a state of being environed, like what the Persians did to the Spartans at Thermopylae. It was not until 1827 when we find the first use of the word in the modern scientific understanding — “a being’s surroundings”  — as a translation of the German Umgebung. We still find the older use when we talk about something or someone’s environs. Unlike the word nature, the meaning of environment has changed relatively little.

OK, now this is where we have to wade through some academic stuff, so please bear with me. (I said, “bear,” not “bare!” Will someone get that naturist out of here? Mike, Wayne, Free Range, please? Thank you.) The idea of nature is a Western concept in large degree, that’s what I’ll be focusing on.

In many ways nature is a human construct. Not all cultures have the idea of “nature” that Westerners do, and in fact most cultures did not or do not view humans as being separate from their environment. Pretty much all historians and anthropologists agree that Native Americans and other tribal groups saw no difference except in shape and form between themselves and their surroundings. They were part of the greater energy system flowing and functioning around them, one to which the landscape, animals, most plants, and humans all belonged. Everyone and almost everything had medicine power, manitou or puha or whatever term they used, to some degree.

The Western idea of nature as being the non-human environment goes back to Aristotle and Plato, when they tried to make sense of things not made by a rational mind, be that the mind of a man or of a deity. Some scholars argue that one can go back further, to the Gilgamesh epic and the walled cities of Mesopotamia. The Romans still believed that nature contained deities, but by the Imperial era, one could find prayers to use when cutting down a sacred grove, sort of “to whichever deity it may concern, I need this more than you do.”

Christian theology came to describe humans as a special creation, unique because of being made in the image of the divine. But since nature had been made by G-d, it remained a textbook and guide for people, a place where one could see G-d’s will and learn to understand Him better. St. Francis of Assisi is one of the best examples of this approach. In some senses, nature was the Lord’s deputy, rewarding and even chastising believers.

Changes began with the Renaissance and accelerated with the scientific revolution.  According to Raymond Williams, in his chapter about “Ideas of Nature” (1980), artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and writers such as Galileo began setting the landscape behind humans, diminishing nature and enlarging the role of man. The Enlightenment then simplified the earlier complexity through developing ideas of natural laws. The English in particular came to value reason and experimentation over the older, perhaps more syncretic view of man and his environment, although even Francis Bacon urged people to “rule by obeying Nature’s laws.” Hobbs and Locke’s writings on man and the “state of nature” in some ways finalized the mental separation of society from nature. This is the age of experimentation, vivisection, and eventually of Rene Descartes’s formulation of dualism. (If you really want more about how this may have come about, Carolyn Merchant’s book The Death of Nature is the classic. There is much to disagree with, but it is one everyone points to. See also Neil Evernden’s The Social Creation of Nature.)

By modern times, we writers have several different meanings of “nature” to sort out, to use or not use depending on our readership and intentions. There’s the idea of nature as the non-human environment (trees, hills, fuzzy bunnies). The popular understanding of nature is almost the same as wilderness, such as when people talk about getting close to nature in a national park or wildlife refuge. A more radical interpretation, voiced most notably by Bill McKibbin in The Death of Nature, holds that nature is something completely without influence of humans, a pristine wilderness sort of thing that no longer exists. And then there’s Nature, a non-human environment (and its denizens) that is morally better than human-created environments. This is the Nature of EarthFirst!, some members of the Sierra Club, Sea Shepherd, and other organizations. A similar, and often related sense is that Nature is where non-Westerners are (the so-called White Man’s Indians and the primitive peoples so beloved of Rousseau and the New Agers.) Yes, you in the back waving your hand. What about women? Sorry, ecofeminism and the idea that females are more representative of Nature than males are is another topic for another day.

Environment first came into common use in the English-language scientific literature in the late 1800s. It retains the sense of referring to all surroundings, be they man-made or otherwise. One can talk about the built environment, the legal environment, an artificial environment (space ship or space station), or the non-human environment. In the 1960s and 1970s “environmentalism” became the term of choice to separate the new activists from the older conservationists (new version of the Sierra Club vs. Ducks Unlimited, for example), naturalists, and naturists. And that’s another topic for another post, too.

So what does this mean for writers? I prefer to use environment as a general term for someone’s surroundings. My characters tend to take a rather jaundiced view of Nature, in part because they are too familiar with the “red in tooth and claw” part to take cries of “slimemold is people too” very seriously. It comes down to the sense that you are trying to capture. Are you describing a manicured park or the River of No Return Wilderness? Is someone protesting terraforming a world? Does a character see himself as a conservationist rather than an environmentalist? Those considerations should affect your use of words, especially words with as much emotional freight as nature and environment.

Any other questions? Yes, on the third row, behind the laptop. Naturist? That’s an Anglo-English term for . . . no, no, you don’t need to demonstrate the meaning. Put that kilt back on right now!

UPDATE: Sarah speaking, I put up a sample of A Few Good Men at Mad Genius Club.

I should be starting in on Rogue Magic, but I underestimated the amount of time I needed just to catch up on household stuff when I finished Noah’s Boy, so I’m only now starting on the revision of Witchfinder. I’m also nearing “almost donness” on guest blogging, which WILL help.  (It’s very frustrating to write four to five thousand words a day and NONE on a book.)

I did start the revision of Shadow Gods, but one of my friends who read it for the first time made me realize (it wasn’t what she said) that the intro scene needs to be completely rewritten.  This is okay, when you’re pulling out a mythos and putting in another, and I’m glad her comments pinpointed it (even though I’m fairly sure that’s NOT what she thought she was saying).

I have the general idea for Rogue Magic which starts with Jonathan hating like poison being an Earl (which we expected) beset by mamma with marrying prospects, and unable to find his fair unknown of the night of the magical attack.  Meanwhile the magic his household sells is coming apart at the seams.

He catches a glimpse of the redhead and follows, only to find the Royal investigators dealing with a magical murder…  They immediately suspect him.  (The dead woman is NOT his enamorata.)

To save his neck he must catch this gruesome magical Jack The Ripper (And prove it’s not Ginevra, which is kind of important to him) and stop the leakage of rogue magic that is destroying the magical works of Avalon (including their factories!)

The adventure will take him across several worlds, as he pursues the fair unknown and the foul villain.

… and it might end up being first person, heaven help me.

Meanwhile, yesterday a friend sent me a link to a story about Chavez, who is about to get stuffed… er… embalmed and put on public display, following the truly tasteless examples of Lenin, Mao, and even (it is rumored) Eva Peron.

So… what is with communists and this passion for pickling?

I asked my friend Bill Reader that, and he said “Well, see, communists can’t stand for things to change or be unpredictable.  You’re not supposed to decay and disappear.  It’s funny because they talk about wanting change, and they talk about being progressive, but really all they want is to return to a time when the world made sense to them – which is the thirties – and when people could be sorted into the classical Marxist classes.  In the same way, people are supposed to stay in the class they were born to.  They’re supposed to act in perfectly predictable ways according to that class.  No one is supposed to change, and tech is not supposed to upend all their categories.  Communism (and its weaker sister, socialism) is a form of OCD.  They want everything separate and put away neatly in categories, even when the “things” are people.  And dear Leaders are supposed to be the same forever.”

The theory has some flaws, of course – all historic theories do because people are (DUH) unpredictable – but overall, it seems right to me.

And if Marxists are truly imbued with a passion for not having their cheese moved, then the pace of change we’re entering now will make them have a nervous breakdown and will result in spectacular fireworks.

Maybe it’s already started.

And now I’m going to clean the litter box (Nothing is worse than Apocalypse with a smelly litter box) and do a quick dust/clean so I can write.

I leave you to the contemplation of communist cheese.  (It’s not really cheese, it’s not edible — it might in fact be wax — but everyone gets an equal share!)

Okay, this is not a self improvement blog – at least it’s not in the usual way – but first of all we are all suffering from The Great Depression (by which I mean more psychological than financial.)

Actually I have no idea how universal the great depression is, but I think it’s pretty wide spread.  First of all, at any given time, I know at least two and often three people at risk of losing their job – I’m not talking young and flighty people, who are moving from job to job and trying to find themselves, but people my age or ten years younger, who have had a completely stable career so far, and who  have families and obligations.  Yes, some of them don’t lose them, but the ax remains poised.

I think I know ONE person who is secure in his job for a year or so.  Everyone else is going day to day and biting his/her nails.  None of the young people – my kids included – are finding jobs or moving out on their own.  For people like my kids, who are in college, we, parents, had to compromise and send the kid to state school because we couldn’t afford better and this is no time to be taking on debt.  (And frankly, though parental opinions may vary, ours got told “STEM or no help from us.”  It’s not that we disdain the liberal arts (though these days they’re more liberal and less art) but I think the chances of getting your money back on those are slim and also I’ve found that with the exception of art or other hands-on work, languages and the hard sciences [and some of those] you can teach yourself practically everything. Of at least I can.  And yeah, I know some people can learn languages on their own.  I think I need – at minimum – a study partner, or I don’t stay on it regularly enough to learn.)

I’m oddly more secure at the writing thing than I’ve been in years, but just in case, because life is insane and the economic seas are choppy and tomorrow a meteor might fall on Baen headquarters (I hope not, since most of the people there are friends!) I feel a need to work indie too, which means I’m working three jobs, and one of them barely pays for now.  And of course the bulk of our income comes from my husband’s work, which has been giving us the cold grue for a while.

The places where I used to walk, downtown, are now boarded up.  Granted this is only partly because of the recession, and partly because of the city’s anti-broken-windows, no-vagrant-shall-be-picked-up services which, coupled with lavish services (granted a lot of them provided by churches and such) have cities as far away as Kansas putting their “homeless” on a bus to our city.

There is an odd quality to all of life, right now.  My friend Kate pinned it, the other day, when she said that it’s like everyone is trying to go about their normal routine, while pretending they don’t see the ice crack under their feet.

Perhaps that’s just our peculiar view of the world, in the “skilled middle class” and most of my friends with at least one foot in writing, a profession undergoing catastrophic technological change.  Maybe.  But I see the same tension in the faces of total strangers, and frankly people are driving like their minds are on something else.  No, that last is not up for debate.  Yes, I know any number of people drive while texting or talking on the phone, or generally not paying attention.  But there is a peculiar type of mistake one makes when one is really worried – like when I found out my three year old had a serious heart defect (he grew out of it.  The problem with that kid was not being FINISHED when we got him.  Next time we pay more) and drove out of the pediatrician office and turned THE WRONG WAY, onto six lanes of oncoming traffic.  I was lucky and managed to get onto my proper lane FAST, but consider I never drove in England or another country that drives on the other side of the road.  There was no excuse for it, except my brain leaving my body on automatic, and my body getting turned around on its sense of direction.  I wasn’t even seeing the surroundings.

I see this type of mistake from someone else at least once per day I go out driving.  That’s an incidence I wouldn’t expect.

You know how we learn about Weimar, and how it had a veneer of frantic merriment against the certainty of disaster?  Well, I feel like we’re doing the same, but, because we’re Americans and not decadent Europeans, we do it with normalcy instead.

In a way, maybe that’s keeping us sane, but I don’t think so.  I also think in the long run it’s not particularly productive.  Our “normal” was designed around a world that in many ways no longer exists.

There is absolutely no point to sticking your fingers in your ears and going “lalalalala, I’ll work another five years and retire” when your pension may not be there, and your social security benefits almost certainly won’t.  If you’re in one of the professions undergoing catastrophic change, like writing or journalism, or teaching, it’s all very well to keep a foot on the traditional way of doing things while it’s working for you, but to say “Oh, the main publishers are doing fine, they’re still submitting books for awards” as a newby told me the other day is to be foolish beyond permission (or reason.)  Just because the corpse is still twitching it doesn’t mean it’s alive.  (And look at what they’re doing with the self-publishing scam.  “Author Solutions” indeed. And their new epub lines which grab books for the life of copyright. These people are desperate.)

To insist things must go on as they have is to be an aristocrat after the plague killed a third of your people and sent the rest fleeing from the domain insisting that your feudal domain will still support you, because that’s the way  it’s always been.

The old order has passed away. And while pretending that everything is just the same will keep you from having the screaming megrims out of sheer anxiety, it will NOT make things go back the way they were.  (Not even if you hold your breath until they put it back.)

We’re dealing with instability and upending at a level most of us can’t even dream of influencing.  Yes, some of it is brought about by sheer incompetence at high levels.  But that was brought on by either enemy action or fantasy theory teaching, or both.  I mean, these people are exquisitely educated… for a parallel world that never existed.  Their education could kind of pretend to connect to the world as it was, but most of them are completely blind to the changes taking place.  The average person might be wishing things will be put back, but these people KNOW they’ll be put back.  Because they have to be.

They’re those feudal aristocrats in every play and funny poem, who demand their due even as the world moves past them.

What this means is that you can’t count on them – any of them – to come to their senses and get us out of it.  You have to.  You and you and you and you.  You have to look at your life and start building parallel structures and side lines.  (I don’t have time to go into it, but trust me “multiple streams of income” even small ones.  It’s the way to go.)

This means you have to wake up.  You have to stop pretending that everything will go back to normal just-any-minute-now.  It won’t.  You want to stay upright, you have to learn to roll with the punches.  And there will be punches.  And I’m not telling you the time till you have something else in place won’t be rough.  It will.  You do as much as you can, as fast as you can and you move on.  But this is part of the reason you have to start now.

And if you’re sitting there going “but Sarah, for now I still have this nine to midnight job – because I’m doing four people’s jobs unpaid – and I can’t afford to lose it, and what should I do?”

And we’ve entered the self-improvement portion of this blog…

First of all, I can answer your question from my own experience “with extreme difficulty.”

I acknowledge most of us still employed are overworked, most of us not employed are depressed.  Even the ones with kids still in the house are having to negotiate protocols for a household of adults with young adults who are not used to being responsible for the house as you are, and who do cause work even if they don’t mean to.

I acknowledge that finding time to start an indie career/start your own news blog/starting a craft/clothes business, whatever the escape hatch that applies to you is not easy.  It will cost you comfort and free time.  BUT it can – in the end – save your life or at least your financial life and your sanity.

And, hey, compare yourself to your grandparents.  They worked a lot harder even than you do now.  You DO have some free time somewhere, might not be a lot of time, but there is some.  There is something you’re doing less than efficiently, things you could do faster and with less pain.  (Yes, I’m talking to myself here.)

Since I don’t know each of you, I can’t speak to each of you.  However…

We get in habits.  I know I do.  There are things I do now – like laundry – that probably cost me more than if I sent them out to be done, in terms of lost income, etc.  There’s the fact I’m cooking every day (which is about to stop) when I have a very talented cook in the house, who should take over three or four of the meals a week.

Anyway, you have to look at your day, and see which habits you can sacrifice (and I don’t mean your relaxing or fun habits.  You might actually have to pick up some of those.  I’ve taken up crochet again and make it a point of taking an hour off before bed to watch something (right now old episodes of Columbo) with my husband, and crochet.  It’s helping.)  I mean routines you’ve got into that serve nothing and take up too much of your time.  No matter how busy you are, I bet you have some.  And if not, then you might need to introduce time for fun and relaxation, which will (trust me) help you do your job faster.

Don’t be afraid to involve your family, either in your new venture or in streamlining household routines.  It’s something that will actually help, psychologically.

And if you’re a writer and striving to improve – at least your saleability.  As I argue here, sometimes it’s hard to know what “improvement” is in this field – do the same thing.  Look at your routines.  You have some, I bet.  Look at your stuff from outside.  “What mistakes are you making over and over again?”

And then look at your life from outside and carry that thinking through (this writer, for instance, needs a regular publishing day every weekend.)

We are creatures of habit, and we get caught in snags and counterproductive routines.  The way to fix that is to change them and establish new and productive habits.

And the thing is, normally you have some room, but not now.  Right now, you need to be moving and doing.

Management, government, administrators, the people who are paid to keep things running are at best not doing it, and at worst making things harder for everyone.

Well, then, you always believed in individual rights and individual creativity, right?

We might end up like the fallen caryatide, but that’s better than not trying at all and going through life trying to pretend everything is fine.

Put your back into it and LIFT.

UPDATE: I did a blog on religion in SF for the View From The Foothills.  BTW, I want to make clear I’m not saying religion in itself is illogical, but that it accrues rituals and practices by custom and tradition and emotion so that the practice might not fit with strict theology.  (Just in case someone should desire to argue this point — I’m tired and trying to write.)

The other day Dan and I found ourselves in a buffet line behind two college students who each outweighed me by double – and I need to lose sixty pounds or so.  They were talking about how no matter what, they couldn’t seem to lose weight.

Being born-again-thin my husband had to share what worked for him, of course.  (It’s the Gary Taubes method.  I hasten to point out it doesn’t work for EVERYONE.  It’s possible in the future, if we don’t destroy our medical industry, we could get our diet prescribed according to our genetics.  I once had a friend who ate only carbs and at a prodigious rate [and we’re talking fries and nachos, not healthy stuff] and was incredibly svelte.  But for a lot of us that’s the kiss of death.)

These two young women looked at him, not as if they resented the intrusion, but as though they had no clue what he was saying.  And then they nodded sagely and said “We must avoid processed foods.”  From then on, no matter what he said, that’s what they heard.

I shouldn’t laugh, truly.  I was once like them, and bought my sugar “in the raw” and my rice brown and…

To our purpose nothing.  If you don’t process carbs well, then eating honey or eating white sugar (or eating some of the fruits that have more sugar, like bananas) comes to exactly the same.  Your body does not have your prejudices.  It has not clue if it’s “natural.”  If it can use it, it does and it doesn’t much care how it came in.  (Now fiber might be an admirable thing, but it turns out we don’t need nearly as much of it as people used to think, and besides whatever else it does it does NOT slow down the absorption of calories or what have you.  At most it makes you feel full longer.)

But to these girls, “not processed” had become sort of a magical quality.  Their body was supposed to know that they bought it from the expensive organic grocery store and not their corner store.  Which probably explained their weight.  When you think “virtuous calories” don’t make you fat, you are bound to expand.

It’s the same thing as people who buy all their meds from the “natural” or “herb” store, and know they’re fine, because “it’s natural.”

The sad thing, of course, is that there is enough “natural” stuff that can kill you.  I mean, apple seeds contain cyanide, if you take them in enough quantity.  And as Friar Lawrence goes on at length in Romeo and Juliet, almost every “natural” fruit or flower has components that can cure in one concentration and kill in another?

So, whence this fetish made of “natural?”

As far as I can tell it started with the Romantics.  (I shall be beating up on the Romantics and their myths at MGC too.   And I might be doing it for the next several days. At least when it comes to writing.)

Round about the eighteenth century, society had advanced enough that most people thought they were losing something.  Now, I want you to take in account that, unlike shown in the wretched Pride and Prejudice movie, most manor houses might not have chickens living in the house  (Actually during the peninsular war, the strange closeness between Portuguese and their livestock was one of the permanent complaints of English soldiers) but they had a home farm.  And while the daughter of the house wouldn’t go barefoot (what were the filmmakers thinking?  That England in the Regency was the middle ages?  Heck, the daughter of well-to-do merchants or even middling ones wouldn’t go barefoot and the daughter of a prosperous farmer probably wore something like clogs.  Going barefoot was a sign of extreme destitution) she probably was acquainted, at least to walk by, with beast and fowl and their ways.

Some of the more sheltered and really wealthy girls might not know that oh, dear little lambs grew into ill-tempered rams, and that all creation puts out massive quantities of manure.  But the average person was close enough to nature to smell it, every day of their lives.

Which makes us chuckle at the idea that they considered themselves so far removed from nature that nature became something magical and almost sacred.

But then look at it the other way.  Turn it around.  Compared to how people lived just a couple hundred years before their time, they were removed from nature in the most important sense of all: for the first time society had a significant surplus, so that there were no famines.  For the first time, it was possible for a farm to produce more than it needed to provide a bare livelihood.  For the first time, even poor people could have two suits (though probably both bought very used.)  For the first time things like the Black Plague didn’t rage through killing massive numbers.  And while their child mortality seems appalling to us, if you birthed 10 children, you had a good chance of raising five.  More if you were relatively wealthy.  (This led to a population explosion.)

So from their point of view they were getting dangerously refined, and needed a little nature.

All of which would be fine, if the leaders of this movement weren’t also the sort of people who ARE far from nature and who romanticized everything in nature.

I don’t fully understand this, unless they had excuses like “but that’s not really nature because the chickens are penned and that’s why their sh*t stinks” or whatever.  They probably did.  The communists are convinced the only reason for sin is “capitalism,” and not just “human nature” and blame capitalism even in times when there was none.

But anyway, they imagined what it must have been like to live in harmony with nature, and put all the virtues in the past.  They rejected Christianity (except when they decided there had been a “primitive” Christianity which suited their tastes – by which we mean was sort of like paganism with crosses) and embraced the ancient religions, but of course without what really went with paganism: the fear of the quasi-understood gods and the constant “bribery” of said gods.  They embraced “natural” diets, which mostly consisted of eating stuff they imagined had “just growed”, they liked ruins because they spoke of an older, more natural time.  They preferred the affectation of poverty over the ostentatiousness that signified wealth in their society.

It’s very easy to laugh at the romantics.  What’s really hard is to see they are still with us.  Yeah, yeah, okay, very few people these days build ruins.  At least on purpose.  However, in my region, people build “authentic adobe houses” – with all the modern conveniences, of course.  And they haven’t given up on the idea that “closer to nature” is better.

I will confess I’m one of the world’s born non-campers.  No, seriously.  I can see it as part of military or survival training, where it serves a purpose, but having lived a significant portion of my life without an indoor bathroom (grandma wouldn’t have the bathroom indoors.  It was a BATHROOM mind, not an outhouse – mom’s family had an outhouse and I have myself urinary track infections holding it in rather than use the thing when we visited every Sunday afternoon – with shower and everything, but to her mind it was “dirty” having it indoors.) I will not voluntarily subject myself to it again.  As with roller coasters, where I find my ears giving me issues and halfway through the ride I go “I’m paying for THIS?” I don’t see any point leaving my house and going somewhere to be uncomfortable.

Your mileage may vary.  And yes, there’s a lot to be said for going some place quiet now and then (most camping sites don’t qualify.)  But the craze for camping relies on the idea that even if you are in a bunch, being close to nature has its own peculiar virtue.

Camping, though, annoys me (particularly when people try to convince me I’d really, really like it if I just look at it another way) but not markedly.  Like drugs and roller coasters it falls under “uh… you’re odd, but carry on and be your crazy self.  Just don’t drag me into it.”

HOWEVER… the… ah… ethos of camping (not the Athos of camping, which involves sharp pointy things) has invaded how we think of life.  The idea that all you need is a tent – or cabin – a bottle of wine and your true love has become sort of what to aim for in society.

Only not really, because, well, we’re humans and even the people who camp for fun would rather not do it in the dead of winter, under a blizzard.  (Or under a lizard, if you’re camping in the Jurassic.  – yes, I AM very silly.)

So what we have is this schizophrenic mentality where the most conspicuous consumption aims to make things look simple and unadorned.  And don’t go and tell me that’s just “good taste” – according to whom?  This sort of thing used to change every so often until the Romantics.

And you know, people who are advocates for nature, and who think that the human race should leave no mark on the Earth live in 5000 square feet homes.

We are divorced from nature, in the sense that even my kids – whom I take time to shove into the hardships of life now and then – except for Portugal have never seen a chicken outside a petting zoo (and even in Portugal, Marshall was so taken with a baby duck that a vendor offered to give it to him.  I had to explain to the then 14 year old the mess it would be to bring a pet duck to the US.)

So people take a lot of things for granted that just ain’t so, and have made nature sort of a goddess and the Earth a sentient thing that must be “served” and “preserved” and who knows what else.  And they think their bodies react differently to “natural” things.  And they think that even if they eliminated all those factories, that terribly unaesthetic work thing, the world would go on humming.

This is how we get to the wonderful point that an intrusive and counterproductive healthcare bill can be sold as “giving you the freedom to pursue your art or craft” – because in the future, food (unprocessed of course) just magically appears, while we’re all happily writing novels, creating sculpture, or simply painting seashells.  (With Recuerdo de Espana, of course.  Because by that time it will be ironic and … never mind.)

Worse is projecting this fetishization (I’m sure using that word a lot) backward and outward.  This leads to the idea that other humans, who live in ways different – and often more brutal and primitive – than ours, must have some virtue, because they’re “closer to nature.”

This is what accounts for both the love affair with brutal tyrants (the natural man!), wanting distant places to remain poor and quaint (as much as I like Bollywood’s Bride and Prejudice, their entire idea that India should stay poor and unsullied is gag-worthy) and PREFERING the most dysfunctional cultures (like most forms of Islam) to our own – because they’re poorer, they’re closer to nature and therefore “better.”  It also accounts for a good deal of not just human hatred but Western hatred.

And all the time these poseurs are shamming it.  Not just to us, no, to themselves.  However, take one of these “the little brown people have the right way” and dump them in Portugal, outside touristic areas, in an unheated stone farmhouse in the mountains in the middle of January (and Portugal has a temperate climate) and see how fast they start ranting and raving and longing for central heating, and hating everyone and everything around them.

Or watch them try to grow and harvest their own food and see how quickly they give it up (like most of the back-to-the-earth people in the sixties.)

Do you know when I’ll believe their sincere about their “natural” and “voluntary poverty” fetish?  Not when they’re living in 300 sq feet, perfectly designed to maximize utility houses, set in scenic regions where they can live outside a great part of the time, no.

I’ll know they’re serious when they do what Dave Freer does and move to a rural/more primitive (by which I mean early twentieth century not tenth) community and live as a member, not lording it over people.  (I know why Dave did it, and respect his choice, but I’m sure he also wouldn’t mind a few more creature comforts.  I also know most eco-fluffs in this area would have a nervous breakdown after a month living as he does.)

Or easier – I’ll know they’re serious when they move to a rural community here in the US (which is still miles more comfortable than anywhere in the world) and integrate without patronizing the locals (who, from those I met, are just smart as anyone else, even if they don’t read the stuff I do – but then not many people do that.  They usually go higher brow…)

Until then, I wish they’d leave me alone and stop shoving their “unprocessed”, their “natural” and their “unspoiled” in my face.

I’m the product of five thousand years of civilization.  I’ve EARNED the right not to go back to nature.

Related post on nature vs. nurture — “I’m a Genius” at Mad Genius club.  (And yes, that declaration implies tongue is pressing so hard against cheek it will eventually perforate.)

Also, if you are inclined to do so, consider Raygun Chronicles fundraiser.  It would be good to see a totally indie anthology with pro writers, etc.  And trust me, they’re doing it on shoe string as is.  This model pays pro rates while avoiding big publishers.  Give it a try.

The time has come, in the light of the tragedy that IS our schools to consider teacher control.  In this case, the sort of control that forces teachers to think like rational human beings before going off half cocked and doing stupid things.

It might also be time to think of administrator control.  A good first measure would be to say that no one not in possession of a brain that functions AT LEAST at cat level can be a school administrator.  Above all, they will NOT be allowed to make any type of safety policies.

I live in Colorado, so I have been in doubt that my school system could or would protect my kids in the event of someone wishing to massacre school kids wholesale.

The problem, you see, was Columbine, followed by what has to be the most stupid set of rules ever created by man – or monkey.  Or mongoose.

It started with my younger son’s preschool teacher, assuring us with tears in her eyes and voice, that she would willingly DIE for all or any of our kids.

Uh…  First of all, this was a woman who couldn’t be bother to notice that my kid was bored out of his gourd, and who kept trying to get me to have him classified as autistic.  (As far as I can tell because she had taken autism in school.  Clearly not WELL.  I mean, what she thought was a symptom was that Marshall would listen to instructions, then look to see what his classmates were doing, or ask a classmate what to do.  That’s not autism.  That’s deafness – which it proved to be, in a specialized form.) Second… I didn’t want her to DIE for my kid.  I wanted her to prevent my kid being killed.  Whether she died or not was, frankly, quite immaterial to me.  I mean, I’d prefer people don’t get killed, but her getting killed or not was not a guarantee my kid wouldn’t also be – or not – killed.  And her self-dramatization as “martyr for preschoolers” was seriously off-putting and meant – to me – that she wasn’t using her brain over this, but trying to think with her emotions.

Then she outlines the plan handed down by the administrators.  Their plan, basically, is to – at the first sign of a threat – lock all the kids in the class.

I’m going to be blunt: in a school where the doors aren’t bullet – or strong kick – proof, locking the kids in the class just ensures if THERE IS a gunman, he can systematically go down the row of classrooms, kick the door, shoot everyone.  Reload.  Next classroom…  Or throw a grenade in the there.  Or…

In fact, I can’t conceive of a single circumstance in which locking the kids in, and keeping them all like sitting ducks in a group will keep them safe.

This is when I realized the system had gone nuts.

A)    NOTHING in their plan prevented an attack like Columbine’s.  In fact it could be said to facilitate that type of attack.

B)    It allowed teachers to self-dramatize as protectors, even though most of them weren’t armed; couldn’t have shot a lame rat in a barrel; would have wet themselves at the sight of a gun; and would never think of doing those things that could/should be done to prevent an actual massacre.  You know – throw books/desks/water/vase, then make a desperate rush at the gunman while he’s confused.

And that in a nutshell is where we’ve got.  Because of some well-publicized massacres and because the emphasis is put on guns (Columbine involved bombs also, which fortunately failed to go off, and the worst school massacre in the US – unless I misremember – involved bombs only) this allows the bureaucratic mind to go … stupid.

Instead of genuinely trying to prevent casualties in the case someone with evil intentions comes into the school, they try to control THE STUDENTS.  This is the equivalent of keeping everyone safe by preventing them from running with scissors, even if the scissors are desperately needed to cut a noose that’s strangling someone.

Keeping the students locked in classrooms does nothing but make it easier to identify the bodies.  Oh, yeah, it also allows the school to say “We did everything we could.  Ms. So and So died for her students.”

Then there is the fetishization of elements in whatever the latest well-publicized shooting.  When I was picking up the kid from school, in a downpour (we had only one car.  The school was five blocks away.  We walked) wearing a raincoat, they made me stop, remove the (dripping) raincoat and FRISKED me, at gunpoint, because, you know, Columbine involved a “trench coat mafia” (turns out it didn’t, but that’s besides the point.)  This of course meant that I, a middle aged mother of two was somehow a member of a highschool Goth clique fifty miles away.

When my friend’s kid wore a t-shirt to school showing a sword and “puncture marks” and saying “Dueling society, an ever diminishing group” (or something like that.  It was a standard con t-shirt) they made him turn it inside out, because it “could be considered a threat” (in a madhouse.  A threat is something like “I’ll kill you.”  Not “Hey, I make jokes about a dueling society” – do these people even KNOW what dueling means?)

Then there’s the fact that these people have decided guns are what causes the deaths.  Only guns.  Not anything else.

This means that the kid who chews a poptart into the shape of a gun MUST be suspended; that the kid who wears a Marine Corps t-shirt to school is threatened with suspension that the student who disarms a gunman gets suspended and that singing the Fresh Prince of Bel Air’s theme song on your cell phone message can get you arrested.

This is not only insane, but counterproductive, and it comes totally from “bureaucratic mind and procedure.”

Note in the last article that they said everyone did what they were supposed to: so, mishearing lyrics, then arresting an innocent student, disrupting classes in the entire district and messing up people’s schedules is what the rules are DESIGNED to do?

Good to know.

Note that if the student had recorded a song – his or another – about shooting people after school, it still would not be evidence of anything, not even a vague intention to do so.

This is the type of thinking that had a teacher FROM A SCHOOL MY SON NO LONGER ATTENDED call us because “a concerned student” had called HER because my son was posting blues lyrics on his face book page and one of them referenced suicide.  The teacher called us DURING SUMMER.  And tried to bully us into taking the boy (who when the call came was goofing around with us on the subject of going out to play mini-golf) to a psychiatrist.  BECAUSE HE QUOTED BLUES LYRICS, which he identified as blues lyrics, and was posting then analyzing in relation to the themes of blues.

Even when we pointed the context to the teacher, she insisted it was her “duty” to make us take our son to a psychiatrist.  Because someone willfully misunderstood him.

I think it was NOT her duty, but her pleasure, to stick her nose in everyone’s business.  And I think these rules ONLY encourage sticking their noses in everyone’s business.  Instead of stopping potentially homicidal students (or people from outside) who, usually, are more careful about not giving themselves away, they only encourage teachers and schools to persecute kids (or parents) who are odd, who deviate from the norm, who behave in quirky or unusual (but completely harmless) ways.

They also encourage beating back any student disposed to fighting back or self defense.

In other words, all of these are tools for enforcing conformity.

Which is why we need teacher and administrator control.  They need to be reminded sharply that their DUTY is to teach our kids academic subjects: not to raise them, not to “form” them, not to indoctrinate them, and certainly not to emasculate them.

Arm the sane teachers (yes, there are a few.  More precious than rubies and rarer than diamonds, but a few in each school) and tell them it’s their duty to shoot any attacker.  Then teach the kids to throw everything on hand at an attacker – NOT sit still and wait for death.

I don’t want the teachers to give their lives for my kids.  I want them to fight back and defend my kids.  And I want them to stop trying to stick their noses where they don’t belong.

They’ve forgotten they’re our employees and think they’re our (and our kids’) parents.  It’s time to stop this crazy train.

And those who do things like bother parents at home in summer, over a student that doesn’t even attend their school; those who make kids turn innocuous t-shirts inside out, those who charge students for chewing a pop tart in the shape of a gun, and those who causes incidents over misheard lyrics, or charge someone for saving lives (because, well, he was near a gun.  He’s “tainted”) need to be liable to criminal prosecution.  Only then will this nonsense stop.

Another post in a couple of hours, but it’s been born in upon me that I should do a little promo for A Few Good Men, which, as far as I can tell has a hard release date: today!

So…

A Few Good Men is the third book set in the Darkship continuum, but it’s not in the sequence.  As a main, voice, character, it has the — er — older brother of Max Keeva, who is killed in Darkship Thieves.

It can be read as a stand alone, and in fact I made sure some of my betas had not read Darkship.

Some men are born revolutionaries; some have revolution thrust upon them; and some find themselves becoming the pivot of long-simmering resistance and rebellion and joining the greater cause for the sake of those they must protect.

In a world in which “Good Man” means totalitarian ruler, no one could be less prepared for the position than Lucius Keeva. Unexpectedly released from prison after more than a decade imprisonment, he finds himself at risk from both his own class and the forces that would overthrow them. His only hope of survival lies with a notoriously unstable character, Nat Remy, and the organization he belongs to. Lucius Keeva would much rather not involve himself with the armed rabble that are The Sons of Liberty, much less the mystical and strange Usaian religion to which they belong. But they and the revolution they dream of are his only hope of protecting himself and the people entrusted to him.

So I’ve forgotten to turn on my humidifier for the last… week, and this morning I woke up completely stuffy – having the effect of a hangover without having had the fun of getting gloriously drunk.

Which is why this post is so late.  I couldn’t figure out what to write about, until RES suggested the joys of breathing.

I added the breathing free.

You see, when it comes right down to it, there’s only three types of political views: those who want to tell others how to live, those who want to be told how to live, because then if it all goes wrong it’s not their fault, and those who want to be left alone.  I fall in the later.  I want government to leave me as alone as possible.

I’m willing to tolerate a modicum of intrusion.  While I think there might be better ways to build roads and finance armies, for instance, the ancient and quaint custom of our civilization is to do this via taxes.  (We should just be glad taxes are no longer collected irregularly and in varying amounts so you never know how to plan f… never mind.)  I’m even willing to tolerate stuff like taking money from me on the promise of an old age payment that will never come or from my husband on the promise of an unemployment payment that will come but that we hope not to need.

I’m willing to admit some poor relief might be undertaken, though I think it should be local and on very different lines.  I would seriously prefer any of those three functions be private – old age insurance; unemployment insurance; charity – and I think those are way more efficient, but when you idiot-proof your form of government someone builds a better idiot, and I don’t think privatizing those functions will be possible without a complete (and slow) change in culture.

I don’t like any of those intrusions, mind.  If everyone in the world were of my kind, we’d probably not have a government.  (We might also not have roads or armies.  I don’t play well with others – or at least that’s what Kindergarten said before they expelled me.)  And we very well might be lacking a civilization altogether (but hey, we’d have some COOL stories.)

Everyone in the world is not my kind.  There will always be those who want to tell people what to do and those who want someone else to choose for them, either out of a becoming modesty or because they want someone to blame.  (My dad always makes mom pick where to go out to eat, because then if it’s horrible, he can blame her. It’s the worst of his non-endearing habits.)

America has a higher proportion of people who – while gregarious or even cooperative with their fellow citizens (we give more to charity than any other country) – don’t want anyone telling them what to do.  This is what gives me hope for us.

But of course, even here most people want to be told what to do or to tell others what to do.

Right now I’m seeing this in my chosen field: Big publishers and small are preying on newbies who want to be “real.”

They might be doing very well indie, but they will ditch it all to go with the big house, which these days most of the time means less money, but it makes them feel “real.”  (The world is full of velveteen authors.)

Since I generally don’t care what people do, and it’s their money and their bet, this should leave me untouched.  It doesn’t.  It doesn’t because I’ve read some of these contracts or heard talk of the terms.

I’m going to say it here, once and for all: MONEY FLOWS TO THE AUTHOR.  (Thank you Kris Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith for beating this into my head.)

Most of you have heard this and are at least somewhat leery of outfits that ask you to pay a fee to read/edit/publish/submit your book.  Bully for you.

What you aren’t – and you need to be – is aware that your writing itself has a value.  Yes, even you Ms. Beginner Writer, with the manuscript mostly about having breakfast, picking outfits and shopping.

The value in many cases is miniscule, or at least minimal, but in an era of ebooks, there IS a value.  (The (Ric) Locke Theorem:  For any book, no matter how ridiculous the subject, poor the plotting and lousy the language, there will be at least 1000 buyers worldwide who think it’s the best thing ever.)

If you’re putting it up Indie, you might only see you know, $700 dollars over ten years or so.  BUT YOU WILL SEE IT.  And meanwhile your writing will get better.

If you hand it to one of these scammers (and for the love of heaven, stop signing away your copyright – more on that later) and they bring it out, you’ll see zero.  (No, seriously.  Not just because you are probably not looking at the contract enough and half of these are for 50% of NET which means their expenses come out first, but also because these companies go under regularly.  One of my favorite indie authors appears to have had a nervous breakdown after the publishing company went nuts and went under. – No, I’m not going to identify author or company here, because it’s a hot mess all over the net, and I don’t need into the middle of that.)

The other part of this is that no author is good at evaluating his or her own work – NO AUTHOR.  Not even I with twenty five (six?) novels published traditionally and a few on their way to indie publication, much less a newby author.

We’re even worse at evaluating how much these things will sell. It was relatively easy to evaluate what would sell to some publisher (mostly in magazines.  In books only Baen has a recognizable brand.  Which is why the others are hosed… er… are in trouble now, when brand IS the only thing you can give a newby.)  While it’s sort of possible to predict what an editor/publisher will like, when you’re dealing with two or three people, max, the brand gets diluted for something like TOR with their rent-a-editor, and it goes outright nuts when you’re selling directly to the public, where … unless you’re psychic (if you are I apologize for doubting you.  Most authors are only psychotic.  The publishers made us that way) you can’t tell what the mass of humanity will like.

If you’re bleating that this is why you need a publisher, I swear I’ll come out there and bring my Oxford’s English dictionary for foreign learners (the most formidable blunt instrument ever created.)

I mean nothing of the sort.  What I mean is that your learner’s novel, which you think is just all thumbs and glue might take off and sell millions.  (I talked to someone who works for Amazon and who assures me even they have no clue what makes something take off freakishly.  They’d LIKE to.  But they’ve spent hundreds of thousands studying it, and they can’t tell.)

And then, if you gave it to one of the scammer’s companies, they’ll be making the millions, and selling the movie rights, and–  You’ll be living under the bridge and suffering repetitive stress injuries from kicking yourself.

For big publishers, if you’re going with a reputable publisher who can offer you brand support – and right now I can’t think of any but Baen, frankly that I’d trust enough – going with a publisher is trading your rights for a mess of… nothing.  For small publishers, make sure you get AT LEAST 50% and that it’s GROSS.  The dollar comes in, you get fifty cents.  And do it only to diversify your output.  Put some out on your own ALSO.  Then compare the outcomes and decide accordingly.  (And remember that short stories sell poorly unless you have a lot out.)  And make sure the contract with small publishers has a term limit.  Two years, at most.  One year if you can get it.

AND READ THOSE DAMN CONTRACTS.  Get a lawyer friend to skim them, at least.  ALWAYS.  Even with Baen – they might have been attacked by brain worms overnight or something.  You never know.  I respect them and trust them, but it doesn’t mean they couldn’t be taken over by aliens – or lawyers! – tomorrow.

Your work.  Your livelihood.  Your responsibility.  FREEDOM ALWAYS REQUIRES RESPONSIBILITY.

If you want someone to make choices for you, you’re also giving them power over your life.  This might be worth it or not.  I don’t know.  But it is worth thinking about, instead of blithely signing it all away for “prestige” particularly with small press that can give you none.

The glory of being “traditionally published” won’t keep your rent paid.  Indie work might.

(And yes, the reason this p*sses me off is that I can see stupid young me falling for this.  We writers all want to be “real” and are willing to risk starving for it.  I’m older and wiser, and I wish I could protect the young ‘uns.)

And now the cranky author is going for a walk before the snow (!) to clear her head so she can do some guest blogging.  (I apologize to those waiting for guest blogs.  I’ve found I can only do about five, before I HARD block on them for a month or so.  I think the fact that I’m also doing these posts everyday makes it harder to guest blog.  Like I only have so many non-fic pieces in me a month, and have to regenerate.  Maybe I’m like that author in TX and only have so many words.  I should avoid answering the phone or dinner time chat.  I don’t know if my family would be relieved or worried.)

I now have plot and voice for both Through Fire and Darkship Revenge, and I HAVE to clear the decks so I can work on them.

Because death, taxes, and demanding characters shall always be with us.  (Or at least me.)

It occurs to me that when I say things like “How to survive the soft slide down” or “How to prepare for chaos” I’m confusing some people.  (Like those who advise me to emigrate!)

I suspect I’m also confusing some people who go “But, Sarah, you say that they only captured government, and we will eventually win, because what can’t go on won’t.”

So, I thought I’d set down, once and for all what I believe about the current situation, and what I think lies ahead.  Call it Sarah’s grand, unified version.

Be aware that this author does not possess a crystal ball or even a dinkum thinkum to calculate probabilities.  I don’t even expect to be EXACTLY right.  I expect things will happen in different time frames/at different rates/in different ways than I expect.  But I expect the result to be roughly what I’m predicting here.

I spent the seventies saying something like this about the fall of the USSR, based on roughly the same thing: culture, technology and the history of the people involved.  The fall surprised me because – I’m a pessimist, okay.  Or at least, I’m a novelist, and at the time I was I guess and embryonic novelist (writing 20k words by hand every month) so my mind instantly goes to “what would be most interesting here?”  which usually involves death and destruction – there were no last-spasm missile launches.

Anyway, this is how I see the situation in the US right now:

First, there is nothing wrong with our fundamentals, by which I mean the people and view of economics.  Yes, I know we have some fantastic number on welfare. (The big issue with Romney’s mentioning that, by the way, is that he didn’t distinguish chronic welfare takers with those who are trying like heck to get out of it.  Right now we have any number of those thanks to the craptacular economy.)

BUT – though you guys might not be aware of this, I am every time I go back to Europe – our hardware-in-the-head is the best in the world.  You run into this every time you discuss welfare or taxes or anything with anyone from abroad.  (Excepted here, to an extent are the other Anglosphere colonies.  To an extent.)

It is assumed abroad that you BELONG to the country (and whoever is presently ruling it.  – yes, I know we have our share of complete idiots, too.  But nowhere near universal.)  Therefore the country can give you everything and take everything and it’s morally just.  It’s a mind set leftover from kings, where you held whatever you owned by gracious permission of the king.

Look at it this way – in Greece, in Spain, in Portugal, the people scream and shout NOT to have their benefits cut.  (It’s also not as universal as the media there – and here – portrays it, but it’s close enough.)  Here, we scream and shout to have our taxes cut.  If you think that makes no difference, you never lived elsewhere as a native.

Second, Our elites hate us.  This has been a cultural current since the very early days of the US.  The idea that Europe is somehow superior and should be imitated tends to corrupt a certain number of our elites.

From their point of view, of course, they’re right.  Almost anywhere else in the world their position would give them far greater scope (notice the ever continuing lamentations “I’m not a dictator.”  “I’m not the premier of China.”) and they would have the “people” on their side.

But here, as much as they have indoctrinated the kids (I have news – indoctrination doesn’t STICK.  My generation in Portugal was pounded with Marxism.  We turned out the most conservative generation the country has ever had.  Of course conservative means something different.  Of course, some artifacts of Marxism do remain – like the idea that the state should regulate this or that, or the inability to understand that economics IS a natural science – but by and large, indoctrination (particularly what our kids are getting, which is not just a-factual but counter-factual) rarely survives contact with the real world.) if you assume they didn’t cheat massively (and if you are assuming that, may I interest you in the Brooklyn Bridge.  You can have it for cheap.) they’re barely holding on to just a little over half of the country.  AND any number of those are the very young/woefully un-informed, one at least a condition that is self-remedied.

Three, tech is going our way.  It just is.  Despite the fact that the moguls of tech want to be cool and hip and keep joining the side of the retrogressives, the tech we now have makes it d*mn hard to keep total control over vital things like news.  Yes, yes, we’re still losing the geriatric generation who thinks that nets are for fish, and the kiddies who think comedy shows are news.  But the kids will grow up, the new kiddies will not be used to TV and… well… the elderly shall pass.  HOWEVER two things: the ability to type documents helped bring down the Soviet Union AND we’re nowhere near where they’d like us to be.  This current administration, any other time in history (before) would have something like 70% approval and an overwhelming majority of the vote.  Or, to quote younger son “We’d already be in camps.”

They’re losing the news but more importantly they’re losing entertainment AND they’re starting to lose education.  The future is a never-end of pain for them, not for us.  Which is why people who call themselves “progressives” are madly trying to return to the 1930s because, to quote Athena in the beginning of Darkship Revenge (you will see it when I’m done.  Shut up and sit down.) “Life is full of these little ironies.”

Four, unfortunately governments have hold of certain functions (if you consult this moldy document called The Constitution, they are delineated there.  Not saying a free people can’t replace them, but it will take organization of a parallel governmental structure.  It will come to that, but not soon. Or not soon enough.):  Common defense is one of them.  Negotiating with foreign powers is another.  Regulating relations between the states is another.

They’re not doing any of these, because to our elites these aren’t nearly as much fun as telling you what to eat and drink or distributing free contraceptives, or determining what treatments grandma can and can’t have.

In some cases they’re not just not doing them – defending the borders – but are preventing others from doing them.  In other cases, they are doing things that are not that convinced it’s that – getting us involved in wars where we have nothing to gain, under the impression the only good war is one undertaken for altruistic motives.

This will have consequences.  Also under that regulating interstate commerce, they’ve decided it’s their right and duty to regulate how much State A gives to their indigent, who is indigent, etc.  I read this article about sequester was stopping free school lunches (which to begin with is bullshit.  A cut of 2% in the projected increase for the year does not stop school lunches.  The INCREASED spending is STILL going somewhere.  This is the equivalent of our city, when we don’t let them jack up the taxes, turning off the street lights, but still paying for “art” downtown.) and my first thought was “that’s a federal function HOW?”  Which explain why school lunches are a boondoogle of favored providers and of kids dumping the whole thing uneaten.

However, the Federales big noses and their sins of commission and omission WILL still bite us in the butt over time.  Trust me on this.  Until… the system changes.

Five – we are living through a time of massive tech change.  Catastrophic change, is the proper name.  This is LARGELY for the good – in the end we’ll all be better off, but the way there is iffy.  Like the industrial revolution it will displace massive groups of people and change how people view themselves. It will bring upheaval and confusion, which will add to the problems we have of a disconnect between governing elite (not just politically.  I see this everywhere, from churches to scientific disciplines to industry) and the people actually doing, creating and trying to fix things.  It might contribute to accelerate the transformation staring us in the face, but it WILL also make it more brutal and painful.  Count on it.

So, put it all together and this is my prediction: In the end we win.  I’m not sure what the end result will look like, but in the US at least I expect something like our founding documents, though the implementation might be modified in a different direction than the road we’ve been on for well over a hundred years.  In some ways our founding documents are more adapted to our society as it’s emerging than they were for the rural age they were written in.  Or maybe in a way they’re eternal verities.

(Adaptations will be needed for voting procedure/assembly times and such – because a lot of these had travel by oxcart (okay horse) built in.)

I expect our way might infect the world even more, as the rest of the world starts using the newer tech also.

I think in fifty years the world will be more prosperous, freer, and more respecting of individual human liberty and dignity than it’s ever been.

I also don’t expect to live to see that.  (Though I might.  I come from ancestresses who lived to their late eighties with village healers and occasional recourse to over the counter meds.)

I am fifty and I expect, if I’m lucky, to see the beginning of the rebuilding and the sketching of what comes after.  (I’d like to.  I wouldn’t write Science Fiction if I weren’t mad in love with the future.)

In the mean time…  Well, look at those things the elites still control and will control until a combination of tech advance and their craptacular ineptitude wrenches them from the little know-it-alls hands.

I expect we’ll lose a city, maybe more.  (I could be wrong, okay?  As I said, I expected actual nukes over the collapse of the USSR.  Wounded bear and all that.)  We MIGHT for all I know be the Almighty’s favored child and escape unscathed like a child who falls from a tenth floor window and walks away.

That and the multiple regulations (until they become unenforceable, which they’re close to being now, through sheer number and contradictory nature) will make economic life a misery, because you can’t regulate economics any more than you can regulate the weather – but you can collect all the water before it hits the fields and starve people (to stretch a metaphor.)  The one thing government regulation has proven really good at in the economic realm is creating famine.

I think we might very well lose California (and I don’t mean to nukes, though that might be part of it.  And I don’t mean to the sea.  I mean, just leaving to aggregate with Mexico, or going it solo or something.  In many ways it sounds already lost.)

I expect the next 5 to ten years to get increasingly rough, the amount of roughness depending on where you live.  I expect we’re going to get a crash course in reality, with emphasis on “crash.”

But I expect us to survive.  More.  I expect us to thrive and continue improving on tech.  Humans are curious monkeys.  Americans are to an extent self-selected as troublemakers and descendants of trouble makers.  Yes, we have some throw backs who want mommy.  Yes, we have a generation of wounded children, the result of crappy families.  BUT we’re still the world’s last, best hope.

And the merchants of despair and retrograde oppression lose.

As long as we keep our chins up and keep fighting, as long as we’re prepared, ready and willing to work for it – I think that’s how the story will go.

And though at times I feel tempted to say “poor world” – I think in the end we win.  We, freedom lovers, we Americans, we, the human race.