Tag Archives: nature

Good and Bad   (2017Jun26)

Posted by XperDunn on

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Monday, June 26, 2017                                            9:30 PM

Good and Bad   (2017Jun26)

We had a lot of good stuff before the world became industrialized, polluted, and overpopulated. But we had to give that good stuff up in the name of progress. There’s a lot of good stuff in idealistic youth, fresh from school. But we have to teach them to be cynical, distrusting, and acquisitive before we consider them grown men and women fit for the business world.

For humanity, something isn’t really useful until it’s been broken in—our sweetest gift is a handful of flowers, cut down in their prime, with only days to droop before they are thrown away. Not that I disapprove of flower bouquets—but they are, objectively, murdered plants—and that’s the way people like them.

I’ve always been fascinated by the muddy mess of the old Main Streets. See, before paved roads, every street in town became a muddy, impassable obstruction. Back in those days, there was never a big patch of mud, unless people were there. What strikes me about this is that even before exhaust pipes, factory chimneys, diesel engines, or chemical plants that dumped toxic waste in the rivers—even before all that, people were messing up every place they gathered in groups larger than a tribe.

Which is why the muddy obstacles were found in settlements’ and boom-towns’ streets—and not in the Native American villages. Even the slightest deviation from the hunter-gatherer tribal traditions (like a higher population density) would have changed things—and whether change is good or bad, I tend to admire the fact that there was a terrible balance in their lifestyle.

Think of it—coast-to-coast, groups of people living solely off the land—in comparatively miniscule numbers, sure, but with zero infrastructure that wasn’t already being supplied by Mother Nature. And before their feistier, paler brethren came sailing up, they hadn’t even needed to spend a dime on national defense.

I’m telling you, Europeans didn’t so much discover the New World as find the corner of the world that they hadn’t already ruined, deforested, overhunted, or incubated plagues in—and then proceeded to ruin that New Corner as fast as they could (experience tells, right?) And their specialty—weapons and war—made it easy to wipe out any previous residents, wherever they went.

Ironically, the reason the New World was so full of un-ruined goodness was because Native Americans kept it that way—and the Europeans judged them too inferior to hold claim on their land (or their lives), partly because they weren’t sophisticated enough to have ruined it all, already, themselves. That’s what you call a ‘bitter irony’.

Thus I always feel that when we discuss people, humanity, whatever—that we have to talk about two kinds of people—the kind of people we were evolved to be, by nature, and the kinds of people we learn to become, as part of civilization. These two very different aspects of humanity are nevertheless melded into each personality.

Virtually no one is so civilized that they don’t breathe air—nor so natural as to never use money. Some of us dream of going forward—colonizing the solar system, where there is no air. Some of us dream of going backward—to a naturalism so idyllic that money becomes obsolete. Trekkies dream of both—but there are very optimistic types, don’t you think? Still—beats pessimism.

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It’s Getting Serious   (2016Apr08)

Posted by XperDunn on

Friday, April 08, 2016                                              3:32 PM

We’ve reached an awkward point in the political process now—things are narrowing down. People begin speaking of candidates they formerly criticized as the solution to the problem of ‘the lesser of two evils’. Conversely, Bernie Sanders can no longer be unaggressive towards Hillary Clinton, and answered Charlie Rose’s question “Would you support her, if chosen?” by prefacing his ‘yes’ with “I’d consider a Trump or Cruz presidency an unmitigated disaster, so yes, I would support Hillary Clinton is she wins the nomination.” He couldn’t just say ‘yes’, like he would have a few months back—he’s got his gloves off and he’s got to keep them off.

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The funniest part of this process is the simple truth that the very best possible next President of the United States would have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the Oval Office and be locked inside—sentenced, in his or her mind, to the jury duty from hell—and a hell of a way to reward years of selfless public service. Any sensible person can just look at the before and after hair-color of the last few presidents and be able to tell that the job redefines the word ‘difficult’. Only a spark of ambition would drive someone to the madness of seeking the post—and now that we’re getting down to it, that flaw is being brought to the forefront.

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It’s attack time—and, hey, does anyone else get the impression that both Bernie and Hillary were more comfortable when it was still ‘gloves on’? I get the sense they are both sane enough to be uncomfortable with the egotistical sniping that the final days of a head-to-head must inevitably become. This is in marked contrast to the GOP—they’ve long since disqualified themselves from the list of respectable candidates. They are far too happy in their playpen, holding dick-measuring contests when they had an opportunity to discuss the issues for months—hell, years now. Their ambitions are front and center, completely overshadowing any sense of service or responsibility to the public—and while you may think it an old-fashioned attitude, in my view it disqualifies them from serious office, be their platforms whatever they may.

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We forget sometimes that the election is not wholly a popularity contest—no matter how much we treat it as such, it remains a serious decision with mortal consequences. Sanders’ young supporters flock to him because young people don’t need convincing, they just need inspiring—and it is a good thing that they are being inspired to play a part in their own democracy—I hope it lasts beyond Hillary’s nomination. Because the problems Sanders talks about need more than a populist president to fix—those problems require a quantum-level rise in political engagement from coast-to-coast, over several election cycles, if we’re ever going to have a chance at taming the super-wealthy’s de facto march back to monarchism.

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It’s daunting to think of—a quantum-level rise in political engagement, obtaining objective news sources, growing neighborhood bonds while our youth are ever more deeply seduced into the twitter-verse or VR-gaming helmets—the list of impossible things we need to do to fix the future goes on from there. We could just let the powers that be continue doing what they do—it might not be pretty, but who’s to say they won’t avoid destroying us all in the end, right? They know what they’re doing, don’t they? After all, they are in charge—even if they did grow up in an age when phones had busy-signals and cords—even if some of them don’t even understand how the world has changed—even if most of them see change as dangerous. They want the power? Let’em have it. At least, if it all goes to hell, we’ll have someone to blame. Why be so serious all the time?

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Friday, April 08, 2016                                              4:15 PM

The Bird Hearing   (2016Apr08)

I went for a walk yesterday—the birds were so noisy, I went back inside and got my camera. I shot three minutes and change of bird cacophony—the video is pretty unwatchable—I was focusing on the sounds—but that didn’t stop me from making two improv videos with the same bird footage. The music is different in each, but the bird songs are the same. I suggest just listening to the audio—the video, in spite of all I did to stabilize it in post, is nauseating.

It’s kind of a shame I got so wrapped up in the birds singing—the music is pretty good on both of these—they would have been nice all by themselves, I think.

 

Oh, and here’s one more from the day before yesterday:

 

bu-bye now.

I Don’t Flyin’ Give A   (2015Oct17)

Posted by XperDunn on

Saturday, October 17, 2015                                              1:14 PM

I don’t know—I mean, I know a little, but not enough. I have no confidence—I mean, I have a little, but not enough. I don’t have the strength—well, maybe I could manage one effort, but not over and over. Most importantly, I lack enthusiasm—I can forget the past and enthuse for a moment, but inevitably I remember the past—entropy, illness, betrayal, and indifference—and I feel the enthusiasm melt away, a mist in sunlight.

Was it a wrong turn I took—and if it was, was there any life I could have lived that didn’t come to cynicism, eventually? (Maybe it’s Maybelline—right?) If I could have lived a life that avoided the lessons I’ve learned, would that ignorance have been better? No—I struggled equally hard with a lack of information. People are animals—once I learned not to judge that statement, once I learned just to accept it, I had to stop believing in the ‘but’. “People are animals, but…” But there is no ‘but’. Take away convention and pretense and all that’s left are animals, social animals—but animals just the same.

One divergence we like to point to is the ‘path of least resistance’—a dog will bark and dig from behind a fence, trapped because it cannot move forward; a person will look around and walk away from the fence to take a route around the obstacle. We cite this as a sign of human intelligence. Yet our powerful skills in finding obtuse escape routes seem to fail when we try to deal with society—we bark behind self-imposed fences at things we could easily work around, had we the imagination to walk away from conventions and acceptance.

Such open-mindedness might bring people further away from their animality—but whenever an open-minded person suggests getting away from conventions and acceptance, a close-minded person will jump on the idea and say, “Yes! Let’s start by ejecting morality and inclusion.” The desire to act out among others without consequences is really more animal, not less. A good liberal wants to avoid the strictures of conventions and acceptance, but retain the cooperation and inclusion that are society’s best features—it’s never easy and it’s never simple.

So we see that being a ‘rebel’ is an ambiguous role—breaking the rules encompasses both forward progress and devolution. To be conservative is to consider the whole thing as being too dangerous, too unpredictable—better to just keep things as they are, warts and all. A liberal considers change a necessary risk that it is better to engage with purpose than to strive to avoid. I’ve always considered conservatism as cowardice—but to believe that, I’m implicitly agreeing with conservatives that change is dangerous. It’s really quite a pickle.