I didn’t realize that General Pulaski of Pulaski Highway (and also the Revolutionary War) is theorized to have been intersex! Neat!
Knife Logic
Today, my friend mentioned the phrase “Knife Logic” to me, and when I asked her what she meant, she had this to say:
The logic that there’s always a knife at your back, that there’s always a scarcity you’re outrunning, and always someone who can replace you if you falter, and so if you choose to help another, you’re slowing yourself down by carrying them. That’s not to say that you should never help anyone, but it always has costs, about which one must be clear-minded. The brutal logic of scarcity and survival is always the deepest underpinning. Similarly, because everyone else is operating under those constraints, you should never expect others to slow their own flight from scarcity by helping you or extending you grace.
That’s…pretty harsh, but it also pretty much encapsulates my own attitude towards other people. I do help people, but I’m always very limited in how I do it, because I have a scarcity mindset about resources — probably due to my grandmother’s influence in my upbringing. She moved to America in 1930, and lived through the Great Depression. My grandfather literally starved as a teenager before cheating his way into the CCC’s (by bloating to make weight, per family lore). Scarcity is one of the Gods of the Copybook Headings that I don’t think I will ever be able to ignore.
Would I like to live in a post-scarcity society? Yes, I would. But technologically, we are not there yet. And until we are, this fact of scarcity will always be the fundamental underpinning of anything we do.
Remember: we are living our ancestors’ wildest dreams.
I really appreciated this Instagram video (weird lemon template and all):
Remember: if some kid comes over to your house and can’t eat anything because he has celiac disease…that means he SURVIVED HAVING CELIAC DISEASE.
We are living our ancestors’ wildest dreams. Our children LIVE.
And quite honestly, this post gives me the same feeling as Hope Eyrie.
Leslie Fish – Hope Eyrie https://genius.com/Leslie-fish-hope-eyrie-lyrics
We are living in the future. And despite all the bad in the world, I think the future will keep getting better.
History is something that we make
Seeing all the retrospectives on Queen Elizabeth II’s life today makes me remember when my own family did that, at the end of my great-aunt’s life. (She lived to be 100 years old. We think she was holding on for that milestone, at the end.) She remembered when Amelia Earhart went down. She lived through both World Wars and the Great Depression. I don’t know if she ever had her own bank account.
I love this quote, from Terry Pratchett, about the speed of monarchic succession:
“The only thing known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle. He reasoned like this: you can’t have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no gap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir instantaneously. Presumably, he said, there must be some elementary particles — kingons, or possibly queons — that do this job, but of course succession sometimes fails if, in mid-flight, they strike an anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plans to use his discovery to send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to modulate the signal, were never fully expanded because, at that point, the bar closed.”
Terry Pratchett, Mort
And the title of my post comes from this video by John Green.
It has been a long century. The next one will also be long. History is something that happens to us. But it is also something we make together.
John Green
Emilybook 