Weird Community Ramblings

So, here's why it's unreasonable to think all people *should* just have big stockpiles of things we eat and regularly use, in this day and age.  Or that it's okay to make pokey pokey motions at people finding parts of this whole international debacle challenging.

First off, guys, society has spent the last X years or so encouraging, then forcefully insisting, that people 'move with the times' and become steadily more connected.  First you have an industrial revolution, bringing people off the farms in search of jobs, then you keep them in increasingly paved-over cities for generations, then you make fun of them when they can't fathom growing their own food.

Society has prioritized certain skills over certain other skills, which is not actually a problem.  I'm grateful that we've put the effort into making clean drinking water more accessible, for example, and if that happened at the expense of everyone naturally absorbing the skill of reed weaving well, so be it.  Of course, though, it isn't that linear.  There were always non weavers in society, and those people did other things.  You grow the vegetables and I raise the meat and you make the clothes and I build the barns and so forth.

No, the problem is two-fold.  1) We romanticize the pastoral lifestyle.  2) We all focus on the same skills.

There's really no easy way to avoid #1 ~ I mean, people always romanticize the 'exotic' and unknown.  All people, not just boring Western people, if reading travel writing has taught me anything.  People want to know 'that place you're from/the place you visited, is this thing I've heard about it really true?'  Romanticizing the past or the unknown is nothing new and, honestly, the truth is an afterthought.  I buy my eggs at a farm.  It looks like a farm.  There is broken machinery on the property.  The farm wife answers the door, and she looks like she's sweaty.  Sometimes the eggs have chicken poop still on them.  This is not because this is a bad place to buy eggs, it is because this is a farm.  Farms with crops and animals look like places where birth, death and poop happen.  They smell like that, too.

It's #2 that I think we might have a chance at changing.  All this fuss about people who aren't prepared for a pandemic is avoidable.  Start by encouraging individual talents and not insisting on a Victorian ideal one-size-fits-all class society.   Embrace the differences!  Some people are not going to make their own yarn!  Some people are not going to program computers!  This is wonderful news because we need the yarn makers and we need the computer programmers. The yarn makers aren't  'better prepared ' than the programmers.  The programmers aren't 'more important ' than the yarn makers.  They serve different needs, each of which has its moment.  If you are in need of a cabbage, you don't go talk to your plumber, but you're probably not going to ask a farmer to unplug your sink, know what I mean?

This mass flattening out and sanding down of society will be our ultimate downfall.  Not this pandemic,  I hope, but sometime, someday, we will need a cabbage and all the world will be filled with plumbers.