cantdog
Waybac machine
- Joined
- Apr 24, 2004
- Posts
- 10,791
I wrote one today, and sent it off in the post. Here it is. It's just a rant.
http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y90/sysladobsis/3rdMachias-5thLakeStream2.jpg
To the Editor, Daily News:
Justin is gone; he went downriver to hang with the family. Yesterday was a luminous day. No rain, but we were shielded from the sun most of the day; hours on the water with an engaging task. When we came home, filet mignon with friends, followed by a long walk in the long evening with other friends. Wow.
He reflected this morning that it was the sheer ease with which a person can get into the woods here that sets Maine apart. I told him it was illusion, nowadays. In the Portland area, one is hours from it, always. The obscenely overdeveloped coast narrows as you go east, but none of it has to do with woods. It's hardly even rural through the whole western half, near the coast.
So it's more like Michigan or Connecticut down there. The character you speak of is being attacked, year by year; more and more development is always in train. People have, up here, this resource, which is wildness, and which is irreplaceable, but they see no advantage to preserving it if sixteen more Jobs can be Created by the wave of a developer's wand.
These are not big businesses, usually, either, barring Irving and WalMart, but small business, which is the real enemy. Small business insists on the particularity of property. We hold nothing in common, they say, and if one holds a property right over something one owes no consideration to any community at large or any heritage to follow.
Small business makes all decisions on money and decides all community and posterity questions on money. It is the greatest force for crassness and irreflective self-indulgence. It insists that all questions of the common good are moonshine and gossamer. Far from being the backbone of community, they are its opposition in every case, reducing to dollars every good, and keeping score with dollars in each measure of mankind's life.
A sweep of complex and beautiful majesty from headwater to the big lake? Who owns that, exactly? Well, then, he can destroy it, of course. Next question.
A culture? A civilization? Future generations? Larger issues? None are allowed to impinge on development. Wildness is merely a tourist draw. You can make much more money by converting it to tract homes.
Culture, civilization, and future generations are mere words to spice up an ad campaign. If we believed we owed anything to our children's children, we would have acted like it and saved something for them. If we really imagined we participated in a civilization or possessed a way of life worth improving or preserving, we would have made at least one decision which gave those things any regard.
And yet, they all tell us that Small Business is the central term of life itself, the heart of the culture and the backbone of the community. What makes you think your desire to step into a canoe in a place where you can no longer hear the highway should carry any weight whatsoever?
This was a democratic republic, once, with a capitalist economy. Now it is entirely a capitalism. People have no bearing on policy, except that we may need more cops to preserve the policy from its domestic victims and a bigger army to protect policy from its foreign victims. He thanked me for my views on the matter, and went down the river. We shall still be canoeing, though, while the season lasts. I can only despair to imagine how my grandchildren will manage to have such another day as this one was. Wildness is going, and I see it, year by year, leaking away.
Sincerely,
http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y90/sysladobsis/3rdMachias-5thLakeStream2.jpg
To the Editor, Daily News:
Justin is gone; he went downriver to hang with the family. Yesterday was a luminous day. No rain, but we were shielded from the sun most of the day; hours on the water with an engaging task. When we came home, filet mignon with friends, followed by a long walk in the long evening with other friends. Wow.
He reflected this morning that it was the sheer ease with which a person can get into the woods here that sets Maine apart. I told him it was illusion, nowadays. In the Portland area, one is hours from it, always. The obscenely overdeveloped coast narrows as you go east, but none of it has to do with woods. It's hardly even rural through the whole western half, near the coast.
So it's more like Michigan or Connecticut down there. The character you speak of is being attacked, year by year; more and more development is always in train. People have, up here, this resource, which is wildness, and which is irreplaceable, but they see no advantage to preserving it if sixteen more Jobs can be Created by the wave of a developer's wand.
These are not big businesses, usually, either, barring Irving and WalMart, but small business, which is the real enemy. Small business insists on the particularity of property. We hold nothing in common, they say, and if one holds a property right over something one owes no consideration to any community at large or any heritage to follow.
Small business makes all decisions on money and decides all community and posterity questions on money. It is the greatest force for crassness and irreflective self-indulgence. It insists that all questions of the common good are moonshine and gossamer. Far from being the backbone of community, they are its opposition in every case, reducing to dollars every good, and keeping score with dollars in each measure of mankind's life.
A sweep of complex and beautiful majesty from headwater to the big lake? Who owns that, exactly? Well, then, he can destroy it, of course. Next question.
A culture? A civilization? Future generations? Larger issues? None are allowed to impinge on development. Wildness is merely a tourist draw. You can make much more money by converting it to tract homes.
Culture, civilization, and future generations are mere words to spice up an ad campaign. If we believed we owed anything to our children's children, we would have acted like it and saved something for them. If we really imagined we participated in a civilization or possessed a way of life worth improving or preserving, we would have made at least one decision which gave those things any regard.
And yet, they all tell us that Small Business is the central term of life itself, the heart of the culture and the backbone of the community. What makes you think your desire to step into a canoe in a place where you can no longer hear the highway should carry any weight whatsoever?
This was a democratic republic, once, with a capitalist economy. Now it is entirely a capitalism. People have no bearing on policy, except that we may need more cops to preserve the policy from its domestic victims and a bigger army to protect policy from its foreign victims. He thanked me for my views on the matter, and went down the river. We shall still be canoeing, though, while the season lasts. I can only despair to imagine how my grandchildren will manage to have such another day as this one was. Wildness is going, and I see it, year by year, leaking away.
Sincerely,
