A semi-sorta kinda-positive look towards our future

Which I find refreshing and a little encouraging, as it is my wont to look at the most terrible outcomes and see them coming true. (Many posts on this blog will back this up.)

Ms. Hoyt, however, due to her quite different experiences in life (which you’ll have to read about in her blog to learn of), has a- well, not necessarily positive outlook, but one that on reflection may be a lot more accurate and a bit less dismal than my own.

Here are some bits and pieces from her post “It All Ends In Chickens“. (Seriously, it does.)

I’ve said before, and I’ll say again, that this country is in for a very rough time, maybe the roughest time we’ve ever endured, simply because what can go on won’t, and because in a time when technological change is pushing is towards greater individual choice, responsibility and freedom (yes, I can expand on it) our exquisitely trained “managing” class (not just in government, companies, churches, charitable societies are all on the same boat) has been TRAINED to hate our foundational principles and to idolize Europe’s centralized system which was moribund back in the seventies, and which is now completely at odds with the direction of the technology.

I can’t fully tell you all the ways in which America is different – or how little the rest of the world “gets” us.  I just can’t.  I can’t even explain it to them.  My brother, for instance who likes reading history (though mostly historical fiction) was once telling me about this history book he found and how it was probably something I couldn’t get here, so he’d send it to me when he was done reading.  This is when I sighed and informed him that back then (pre-Amazon which changed my buying methods) I belonged to the history book club, and I’d read that book a year ago, and by the way there was also this, this and this.

See, in Portugal they have this idea of the US as “futuristic” which to them means that nothing that isn’t as new as tomorrow matters here.  The idea of oh, my plumber, who is a civil war reenactor and can tell you what a soldier ate for breakfast on any given day of any given year of the war (perhaps a very slight exaggeration, but very slight, trust me) and who spends his time, money and considerable skull sweat studying the civil war, doesn’t fit into their idea of America.

Yes, some areas will go Mad Max.  I was telling a friend shortly after Sandy that he really must have a backup plan in case NYC goes all “Escape from NY” because I don’t have enough guns to go in and rescue him.  (Will NYC be one of the areas that goes Mad Max?  I don’t know.  Actually I think they’re first on the list of “most likely to glow with radioactive light” – but that’s another aspect.)

In law and on paper, yeah, we’re headed to a total collapse that would lead to that sort of thing…  But the US, never having experienced that sort of collapse doesn’t know, bone deep, that collapses are never that absolute.  Having watched collapses – Zimbabwe – at a distance, we see them as absolute.

But humans are humans.  Humans are no more law abiding when society falls apart than they are when it’s whole – in fact, they’re less.  Even in a country as law abiding as the US (we are.  Truly) we’re each of us already violating three laws before breakfast because the d*mn things have multiplied to the point to obey one you have to violate the other.

When laws and rulers (yes, I know they’re supposed to be administrators, but most of them, right now, from corporate managers to the president, are under the misguided impression they’re rulers and acting as such) are suicidal, the normal person still chooses NOT to commit suicide.  And contrary to the Marxist view of society which has influenced many of us whether we know it or not (having it shoved down your throat for seventy years does that) humans are not in general “everyone’s hand against everyone else” unless a kindly government prevents their killing each other.  Humans, in general, are social animals who cooperate for mutual benefit.

Just a taste- read the whole thing for the full flavor. And a ray of (some) hope.

And to learn about the chickens.