Sometimes you can't see the forest when you're standing inside of it and it takes a foreign perspective to realign...
Sometimes you can't see the forest when you're standing inside of it and it takes a foreign perspective to realign your sight until you see the trees.
Originally shared by David Brin
This very moving essay by an immigrant engineer tells of his shock - at first - over something simple. He had seen American cars and houses and streets and hugely exaggerated violence on TV and in films. But what stunned his early year was the reliability of infrastructure. Like how smoothly citizens rely on the Postal Service, taking for granted and even maligning what he found miraculous. And libraries. And utilities and streets and all the gracious-relaxed assumptions we hold, that stuff just works.
"Almost every aspect of the most innovative parts of the United States, from cutting-edge medical research to its technology scene, thrives on publicly funded infrastructure. The post office is struggling these days, in some ways because of how much people rely on the web to do much of what they used to turn to the post office for. But the Internet is a testament to infrastructure, too: It exists partly because the National Science Foundation funded much of the research that makes it possible. Even some of the Internet’s biggest companies, like Google, got a start from N.S.F.-funded research. Infrastructure is often the least-appreciated part of what makes a country strong, and what makes innovation take flight. From my spot in line at the post office, I see a country that does both well; not a country that emphasizes one at the expense of the other."
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/03/opinion/why-the-post-office-makes-america-great.html?_r=0
You'd expect this to resonate with me. It is what I I spoke of, frequently, on the pages of The Postman, how most of us would not respond to a collapse of civilization the way masses are depicted doing, in Hollywood fluff. (Especially the latest, wretched, Max Max flick.) Rather, as Rebecca Solnit shows in A PARADISE BUILT IN HELL, millions of us would have one priority we would put ahead of our own lives.
Civilization. Saving it and bringing it back.
Let's do that, this year.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/03/opinion/why-the-post-office-makes-america-great.html?_r=0
Originally shared by David Brin
This very moving essay by an immigrant engineer tells of his shock - at first - over something simple. He had seen American cars and houses and streets and hugely exaggerated violence on TV and in films. But what stunned his early year was the reliability of infrastructure. Like how smoothly citizens rely on the Postal Service, taking for granted and even maligning what he found miraculous. And libraries. And utilities and streets and all the gracious-relaxed assumptions we hold, that stuff just works.
"Almost every aspect of the most innovative parts of the United States, from cutting-edge medical research to its technology scene, thrives on publicly funded infrastructure. The post office is struggling these days, in some ways because of how much people rely on the web to do much of what they used to turn to the post office for. But the Internet is a testament to infrastructure, too: It exists partly because the National Science Foundation funded much of the research that makes it possible. Even some of the Internet’s biggest companies, like Google, got a start from N.S.F.-funded research. Infrastructure is often the least-appreciated part of what makes a country strong, and what makes innovation take flight. From my spot in line at the post office, I see a country that does both well; not a country that emphasizes one at the expense of the other."
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/03/opinion/why-the-post-office-makes-america-great.html?_r=0
You'd expect this to resonate with me. It is what I I spoke of, frequently, on the pages of The Postman, how most of us would not respond to a collapse of civilization the way masses are depicted doing, in Hollywood fluff. (Especially the latest, wretched, Max Max flick.) Rather, as Rebecca Solnit shows in A PARADISE BUILT IN HELL, millions of us would have one priority we would put ahead of our own lives.
Civilization. Saving it and bringing it back.
Let's do that, this year.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/03/opinion/why-the-post-office-makes-america-great.html?_r=0
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