Home » Random Bubbles (Page 7)

Category Archives: Random Bubbles

The way we (would like to think) we were

Posted on by | 9 Comments

People of a certain age, and of a certain background, when talking about poverty, have a tendency to minimize its impact.

“Hell, we didn’t have anything, but we didn’t even know we were poor,” they might say, and sage heads all around nod in agreement.

“We didn’t have television, or the internet.  We made our own diversion from stuff we found in alleys: a ball of tape for a baseball, an old broom handle for a bat.  We always had enough to eat, though.  We just made do.  We didn’t whine about our lives like the kids do nowadays.”

Two things strike me about such sentiments.  One is the inevitable filter of childhood memories.  We tend to remember things as much better than we thought they were at the time we experienced them; the farther away we get in time, the better things were.  Add the fact that, as children, we had a kind of natural optimism engendered by the fact that we weren’t responsible for keeping things above water.  It’s a certainty that our parents didn’t remember those times in such glowing terms.

Keep in mind we’re not talking about abject poverty; people who lived through that rarely even bring it up.  These are typically the lower middle class (working class, if you’re a socialist) reminiscing about days of yore.

The second thing that strikes me is the implicit sense of smugness, as if we were somehow superior to the young people of today.  I say “we” because I, too, come from that history; born in a refugee camp, I came to the US on the boat with my parents.

But what I feel, instead of smugness, is mostly good luck.

True, we didn’t have TV.  Hell, it was just invented.  Every block in my neighborhood had two or three houses with television; every other block someone knew of someone who had a color TV.  The internet simply didn’t exist.  There was radio, and the daily newspaper, and you could take in a movie twice a month or so.  Some of the theaters downtown even had AC, but you might pay a buck or more there; it was typically 25 cents elsewhere.  For anything else, you relied on the rumor mill.

The point is, we really had nothing to compare our lives with.  Like children everywhere, we looked around us, and thought that was what normal was.  You wore hand-me-downs because it was stupid to throw away perfectly good clothes.  You walked everywhere or took a bus because buses were ubiquitous and frequent, and cost pennies.  You’d cross the street to avoid some people, others would cross the street to avoid you.  Occasionally, if you saw someone coming, you’d turn around quickly, and hope you hadn’t been seen.  But nobody gunned you down (unless you happened to be black, and then it was open season).

I have to say, if I want to be scrupulously honest, that we whined as much as anyone today, though we called it grousing, or pissing and moaning.  There was one kind of angst, though, that we didn’t have a lot of, and that was class envy.

Rich kids, if we even knew of any, just seemed incompetent, had to have everything done for them, judging from stereotypes in the movies and comic books; we felt sorry for them, though we had no real idea of how they lived.  We envied guys with construction jobs, or steady work in a factory.

In today’s connected world we all know how everyone else lives, or rather how commercial interests would like us to believe everyone else lives, so we’ll want to buy their stuff.  We are probably the most propagandized and pitched bunch of humans in history, and, for the first time ever, we’re in it all together, all of humanity, pretty much everywhere.  As a result, it’s very easy to become envious of others, even if we don’t have it so bad ourselves, from an objective point of view.

Why is that?

It’s because we’re humans; it’s what we do.  We are the social species par excellence.  There are no authenticated cases of feral humans, that is, humans who have grown up without the company of any other humans, anywhere, at any time in history.  I say this with full knowledge of the alleged cases, none of which stand up to scrutiny.  We’re hard wired to be keenly aware of our situation relative to other humans around us, our place in society, if you will.  Add to that the fundamental concept of fairness (and not just human apparently!) that informs our moral and ethical rules, and poverty becomes a relative thing.

In short, we weren’t any better or wiser then than young people (or old ones for that matter) today, just less informed.

For the first 2.5 million years of our existence as a distinct species, we lived in groups of fewer than a hundred people, all of whom were of roughly equal status; when we interacted with other groups, they weren’t much different either.  Still, forget the paradise of the noble savage; the latest studies suggest hunter-gatherers lives were filled with conflict and jealousy as much as ours, but they didn’t see global disparities, and certainly nothing like the magnitude of the differences we see today.  That, and the hard fact that killing someone put a significant dent in the work force, which for them had an optimum size within a pretty small range, kept actual killing at low levels.

Not us, more’s the pity.  Fortunately, we’re intelligent.

Aren’t we?

 

Tough love economics

Posted on by | 10 Comments

I was in the grocery store, jam-packed on this gorgeous day, when I saw a lane with nobody in it. Unbelievable, I thought, and went for it. As I was unloading my cart, I joked with the check out person.

“Jeez, was it some thing you said?”

“No, I don’t think so.”  Then she pointed to the bagger: “It must have been him!”

“Sure,” I said, “blame it on the lowest wage person here!”

We all shared a laugh, and then the check out person got this pensive look on her face, like an infant child about to fill its diapers.

“It is funny, though,” she said.  “He works much harder than I do, and gets paid less.”

Well, this got me to thinking.  What if the hardest working people got paid the most?  Would that be fairer?  Would it solve any of our social problems?

Nah.

If that happened, then everyone would want the hardest jobs.  Before you know it, everything would be done.

There we’d be, nothing to do but sit around and talk revolution.

The bloggings will continue until morale improves

Posted on by | 13 Comments

Is it possible that blogging hurts your chances of getting published elsewhere?  That depends.

The ordinary opinion piece, like this one you’re reading now, can only help, always assuming you write well.  Even if you only have 30 followers, that’s 30 more than would ordinarily see your ideas expressed so fully otherwise, and potential publishers can get a very good overview of your writing skill with a click of a mouse.  Since opinion pieces tend to be transient, there’s little danger of “using up” good ideas, so you’re not competing with yourself.

For more imaginative writing, however, it’s a different story.  That’s because most publishers consider your work, whether it’s fiction or poetry, to have already been published if you’ve posted it on your blog, and almost none are open to work that’s already published elsewhere.  Most writers would like to be published by someone else, if only to validate their work.  Although it’s true that self-publication has lost some of its stigma these days, there still remains the issue of whether anyone else whose opinion you might value thinks your work is worthwhile.

So, if a blog is considered a publication by the majority of editors, who want only unpublished material, where does that leave the poet or short story writer? You could simply consider your blog just another publication to which you submit your work. That’s fine, but you know it will get accepted there, because the editor is…um…you. As a result, you will tend to send what you consider your best work elsewhere, either by design or unconsciously. Your blog becomes a repository for second-rate work, stuff you have low confidence in, or that has been rejected elsewhere. In the best case, it will have experimental material that you feel will have little chance of exposure elsewhere. In this blog, I often post pieces which blur the boundary between fiction and essay, or which I think are simply too short to be considered by magazines and journals, although I have to admit, that seems to be all I write in the way of fiction anyway. Still, I don’t feel I’m competing with myself.

For me, the problem is with poetry, which I post on my other blog, Exile’s Child.  Lately, I find myself neglecting Exile’s Child, because if I write a poem I think very highly of, I tend to send it off to a journal.  Rather than posting just leavings on the blog, I have to sit down and write specifically for it, which leaves me questioning the wisdom of not sending the result elsewhere, or, if I don’t think it’s good enough, of posting it on the blog.  I like to think I have enough sense not to post second-rate material, but we are all very good at self-deception when it’s required, aren’t we?

I would love to hear your thoughts on this subject, especially if you happen to be an editor.

Where to put everybody?

Posted on by | 7 Comments

Just exactly how many of us are there?

Well, the world population is somewhere around 7.2 billion and rising.  At the same time, less than half of the earth remains in wilderness, much of that endangered.  It seems we need to to something, the sooner the better.  How much of the earth could we sequester from the likes of us?

Let’s see; if we give each of us a square meter to stand on, that’s about 7000 square kilometers we need, or about 2700 square miles to us colonial types.  Could we put the entire population of the world in, say, Rhode Island?  Not even close.  R. I. has only 2710 square kilometers.  How about Delaware?  Nope, just a little over 5000.

But don’t despair, New York City has 8633, enough for everyone, and more than 1600 left over for parking lots, and there’s some logic in putting everyone somewhere that’s already screwed up, wilderness-wise.  It’s the only city that qualifies, though; the next largest, Tokyo/Yokohama, at 6993, would leave 7 people out in the bay swimming.  Given Mothra and Godzilla and what-not, that’s probably not very safe.

Of course, we could go with industrial world tradition, and put everyone somewhere else.  Palestine is too small, and anyway, Israel is already building enough settlements there to use up all the available space.  Puerto Rico has as much room as NYC, but it’s technically part of the US (Territory?  Colony?  Never mind.)  Same goes for Akhazia, which may or may not be part of Georgia by the time we decide.

It looks like it’s New York City.  Too bad; the rent for a square meter there is already as high as a mortgage elsewhere, and just wait till Donald Trump gets wind of this.

Damn that Galileo!

Posted on by | 7 Comments

I find myself thinking about Galileo, for no apparent reason, and his famous Tower of Pisa experiment, which he may or may not have actually performed.  You know the one: dropping two balls of unequal mass simultaneously to show that acceleration due to gravity is independent of mass.  In short, the two unequal balls arrive at the earth at the same time.  In physics, this is an example of what is known as the Weak Equivalence Principle (WEP), which I point out only for the pleasure of using such a silly term.

Despite being undeniably true, this is, to me, counterintuitive.  Think of the implications.  Suppose you are in the vacuum of space, maybe took a wrong turn on the way to the coffee shop, or something.  About ten feet away is a softball.  According to the WEP, you and the softball will move towards each other at exactly the same rate as you and the earth, if it were ten feet away.  Lucky for you, though, the damage inflicted by the softball will be considerably less than that inflicted by the earth in a similar situation.  Okay, the softball is much smaller and has much less mass than the earth, so what’s my point?

Let’s substitute something else for the softball, say, the moon.  By the magic of imagination, retracing your steps to see how you missed the coffee shop, you find yourself ten feet from the moon.  Once again, you and the moon move together at that same rate, independent of mass.  This time, though, you will definitely feel something when you finally make contact, because the moon is much, much bigger than a softball.  (Never thought you’d see that phrase in print, did you?)

We’ve all seen that footage of Neil Armstrong bouncing about on the moon.  I love that little tune that he sings, by the way.  Anyhow, it’s apparent that jumping that high on earth would result in much more jarring to the body.  But the moon, though smaller than the earth, is easily sufficiently massive to stop you cold when you hit it.  Remember, starting at ten feet away, you will strike the surface of the moon at exactly the same speed as you would on earth, coming to a full and immediate stop in both cases, or as close to full and immediate as measurable.  So why is there more damage to your poor, unsuspecting body when you do it on earth?

I remember reading a variation on this question years ago, in some “Ask the Scientist” thingie: if two cars of identical mass collide, how is the force different from one of those cars hitting a stationary wall?  Mr. Scientist, no doubt sighing inwardly, patiently explained that it had to do with the momentum of both masses.  To get the same force with just the one car, it would have to be going twice as fast, and even the thickest of us can see the difference there.  But what if you substitute a mountain for the wall?  Or drop the car from a sufficient height so that it’s going the same speed at impact as in the collision with the wall?  Even double the speed, to take account of the second car?

Or jump off a ten foot platform on the moon?

Don’t mind me; I still can’t see why levers work; and don’t even bring up pulleys.