whups, fellover

[freckles_and_doubt]

It's been a maddening few days for Teh Internets: the current state of the bandwidth is intermittent and horrible owing to the fact that they've dug up the Seacom undersea cable for repairs, and everything is consequently being re-routed via a slow boat to China and the New World. Web pages thus fail to load, or load very slowly, or occasionally pretend there's nothing wrong and load very fast just to confuse me and give me false hope, and loud are the lamentations in the land every time the bloody thing falls over. After a couple of days of random internet deprivation I become very grumpy indeed. About the only way I can come to terms with the whole situation is to imagine that the undersea cable has broken because a giant squid is gnawing on it, or Deep Ones have stolen bits of it to make jewellery from, or Eric Linklater's undersea pirates have knobbled it and the repairmen. Or, as first_fallen says, grindylows.

In one of the bandwidth's Up moments I followed a Felicia Day tweet to a remarkably sane, thoughtful and beautifully written reflection on, if not quite Life, certainly Earth, the Universe and Everything, specifically the fact that we live on a planet that's halfway to being ruined, perhaps irreparably. This is, as you are all too painfully aware, a recurring preoccupation of mine; I am chastened and abashed in my despair before the contextualisation provided by the writer, and his exceptionally good case made for claiming rather than writing off the future. This bit in particular got me, possibly because I think it was utterly true of my dad:

The people most deeply traumatized of all in our society may be the older men who've devoted their entire lives, in grinding hard work and out of love for the people around them, to building companies and communities and systems they thought represented a pinnacle of human endeavor and free enterprise, but which instead -- they would now find, if they could bring themselves to admit the possibility -- have become components of what is quite possibly the most destructive way of life ever made by human beings.

I generally don't buy beef, because I think large-scale beef production is a horrible and illegitimate resource-consumer. My dad was in beef cattle research all his working life. It must have felt like a betrayal of his achievements for his daughter to refuse to consume the result, and to know that she might even have had a point.

Comments

[schedule5.livejournal.com]

Thank-you for that link. I really liked it - it made me feel more positive and less sticking-my head-under-the-pillow-and-taking-a-valium about the future. Given that my kids will just more than my age in 2050, making it the best space it can be is really important to me.

[veratiny.livejournal.com]

Ditto on the betrayal of one’s father's life work: My father is a marine biologist heads up an international conservation organisation and has won the Duke of Edinburgh WWF award for his conservation work in relation to Antarctic fisheries. I don't eat fish.

Daughters betraying their fathers...it must be common...based on this extensive sample of two!

[wolverine-nun.livejournal.com]

Great essay. I really like it, thanks.

[pumeza.livejournal.com]

Wow, thanks for that -- I try to follow WorldChanging but they write SO much it's hard, and I was on track to miss that one.

I like this line especially:
"optimism is a political act, and a radical one at that."

Jeffery Sachs said something similar in his Reith lectures a couple of years ago. Optimism as a moral imperative - hard to keep hold of, but worth it...