There's more than one reason, and more than one kind of cat, involved in this idea, from my point of view.
We're not all kids anymore.
Most of us still care about kids, though.
So we want tomorrow to be better than yesterday was.
How is it that this is such an unpopular idea in most of the good old USA nowadays? How is it that we've so limited our definitions of citizens?
We're not all old folks anymore.
Most of us still care about old folks, though.
We have parents or mentors or teachers or friends or grandparents we care about. It makes us sad to see them set aside as "unproductive," by the very people who should be paying homage to the work those parents, mentors, teachers, friends, or grandparents did to advance their descendants' futures.
Every last damned one of us who has, or loves, someone young or someone older, knows exactly what I'm talking about when I say that much of the emphasis in our America today is on money and "productivity", cutting expenses and doing more with less, at the wrong time for the wrong reasons.
We're forcing our lives to be not enriched by our work, not defined by our productivity, but inextricably commingled with our earnings -- to our detriment as a society, as a people, as a nation of citizens.
Something's got to give.
- Sarah's blog
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... or somebody.
[ ] Very tepidly voting for Obama [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.
The Expanded Manifesto
put me in mind of this thing I ran across today about the Delusion Revolution:
http://www.alternet.org/story/95126/the_...
Some interesting ideas in there that reminded me of some recent topics around here -
"For all our cleverness, we human beings are far more ignorant than knowledgeable. Human accomplishments -- skyscrapers, the Internet, the mapping of the human genome -- seduce us into believing the illusion that we can control a world that is complex beyond our ability to understand. Jackson suggests that we would be wise to recognize this and commit to "an ignorance-based worldview" that would anchor us in the intellectual humility we will need if we are to survive the often toxic effects of our own cleverness."
It's not all doom and gloom, though. It's kind of like the end of the world as we know is near, but it's far enough away that we can turn it around in some as yet undefined way:
"Whatever the limits of our predictive capacity, we can be pretty sure we will need ways of organizing ourselves to help us live in a world with less energy and fewer material goods. We have to all develop the skills needed for that world (such as gardening with fewer inputs, food preparation and storage, and basic tinkering), and we will need to recover a deep sense of community that has disappeared from many of our lives. This means abandoning a sense of ourselves as consumption machines, which the contemporary culture promotes, and deepening our notions of what it means to be humans in search of meaning. We have to learn to tell different stories about our sense of self, our connection to others, and our place in nature."
The part about recovering a sense of community that has disappeared from many of our lives may be much of the driving force behind the PB2.0 discussions. That said, I don't know whether online communities are going to be sustainable in the brave new world to come.
Before the Deluge
Jackson Browne(lyrics) (the antithesis of Michael Brown):
Some of them were dreamers
And some of them were fools
Who were making plans and thinking of the future
With the energy of the innocent
They were gathering the tools
They would need to make their journey back to nature
While the sand slipped through the opening
And their hands reached for the golden ring
With their hearts they turned to each others heart for refuge
In the troubled years that came before the deluge
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