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Newsletter #19
In This Issue:
-Confessions of a Swing Voter, Part II
-The Sinking Ship Analogy
::CONFESSIONS OF A SWING VOTER, PART II::
Last month, I briefly visited the role of government in fixing this mess we’ve gotten ourselves into. In light of upcoming national elections, the response was greater than any I’ve ever gotten to a single newsletter. Apparently this is not an issue that plagues my mind alone.
While a few of you urged me, politely and respectfully, to sway in one direction rather than the other, the majority of you shared my sense of futility when it comes to voting.
I still felt torn, and I felt like I was somehow settling in choosing between the lesser of two evils. Just the way I settled when I recycled (or, really downcycled), or used the air hand dryer in public restrooms rather than the paper towels (which is worse - cutting down trees or reinforcing our dependence on non-renewable fossil fuels?). That kind of stuff drives me crazy.
After watching the Bush/Kerry debates, I found myself backed into a corner with only two alternatives: Vote or do nothing. It’s a sorry state.
Don’t get me wrong—there ARE other alternatives. One subscriber alerted me to election reform, specifically instant runoff voting (IRV), which cracks the door a little further open for third-party candidates so that we don’t have to end up choosing between the lesser of two evils. But IRV isn’t a part of this election, unfortunately.
Ironically, I think that what gave me that final push in deciding to vote was the sheer ignorance expressed by many people who DO intend to vote. There’s such an emphasis on getting people to vote in this country that what you end up with is a ridiculous number of uninformed voters (most of whom, may I add, think that environment is fine and dandy the way it is and is always going to stay that way).
Yes, I do want to fulfill my responsibility as a citizen by voting, but moreso, I’m driven by the prospect of canceling out the vote of someone who’s choosing their candidate for all the wrong reasons.
Perhaps one day I will be able to vote for much more noble reasons…
::THE SINKING SHIP ANALOGY::
In response to last month’s little poll, I got as many different responses as were possible. Many of you couldn’t resist figuring out what the ship stands for, and for the most part, you were right. The sinking Titanic is a metaphor for our grand civilization.
Each course of action had its merits, and it was interesting to see how each alternative was interpreted.
A lot of you liked the thought of getting everyone on the ship to chip in with the bucket brigade and patch the leaks. This is the traditional grassroots alternative, which depends on getting people involved. But as you can guess already, I have my doubts about grassroots efforts being the be-all and end-all.
If the ship is poorly designed, things are going to continue getting worse, and you’ll need more and more people spending all their time patching leaks and passing buckets. It’ll eventually get to a point where you need EVERYONE on the ship participating in order to keep the ship from sinking. This can only be accomplished in two ways: Persuasion or force. Persuasion isn’t likely (people like to remain ignorant, especially if it serves their own immediate interests) and force, in this scenario, would smack of downright tyranny.
Then there was the idea of airlifting some passengers off the ship—a metaphor for the overpopulation argument. This was probably the least popular alternative, perhaps because it was the most misinterpreted.
The premise was that the ship could be sinking because there were too many people on it, and that by reducing the onboard population, you could stop the ship from sinking. There’s validity to it, if you think that 6 billion people exceeds the carrying capacity of our planet. Then there’s the consumption factor—maybe 6 billion people living like Somalians can thrive on this planet, but 6 billion living like Americans can’t.
The third option, designing and building a new ship, is my personal favorite, but I was pretty much alone in that. A few of you mentioned that it was better to fix the current ship than make a new one.
My take on it is this: Our “ship,” our civilization, was designed when people didn’t have as much information about making things “float” (work) as they do now. Whether you call it fixing or redesigning or even rebuilding, I don’t think these design flaws should be ignored or just “patched.”
By far the biggest design flaw in our civilization, in my opinion, is that it crucially depends on oil. That’s because when our system started to take shape, particularly in the Industrial Revolution, people saw a world that was unlimited in every way—we’d never run out of anything, we’d always have somewhere to dump our garbage, and we’d always be able to grow and grow and grow. Now we know better. Our system needs to reflect that.
It’s like having a ship made of stone. Maybe we got it to float for a little while, but now we know that a ship made out of stone is bound to sink, and that we could make a much better one out of wood or metal. Incorporating what we’ve learned over the years should be a long-term priority.
The final option, getting a lifeboat, was actually my second favorite. Translated into real life, it means creating a bubble of self-sufficiency in an unstable world. Of course, that’s not completely possible (this unstable world is also an interdependent world, no matter how much we try), but it’d sure be nice to have a house that will still be a home if we run out of oil. Being in a place that uses renewable energy, harvests rain water, and has a little farm in the backyard has always been a fantasy of mine.
But my intentions aren’t completely selfish. A “lifeboat” can serve as a model for the NEW ship you’re trying to create. It can be a testing ground for incorporating what we’ve learned about how humans can stay “afloat” in this environment of ours. And it can be an opportunity to view the existing ship from outside, rather than from within…Sometimes when you’re not so tangled up in something, it’s easier to figure out what’s wrong with it.
Ultimately, these are all workable, and we need to do ALL of them in one way or another.
When I first came up with this analogy, I thought that we should all have the same priorities. But after hearing back from you, I realize that our different priorities reflect our individual roles in making this work.
We can’t ALL be designing a new ship, or no one would be around to patch the leaks and we’d sink! And we can’t ALL be patching leaks and passing buckets, because no one would have the time to look ahead and think in the long-term to make the ship better (or make a new one entirely).
But now you know what I’ve got my sights set on—a better civilization, a new “ship,” and something to look forward to.
Till next month!
-Krystle C.
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