How’s that for mixed references?
I found some comments on David Brooks interesting. Not because I am familiar with him or with Brian Delong, who did the critique, but because there is something about the big events of life that beg the big questions. Now that, perennially, interests me.
The up close and personal looks at those events through the magnifier of the internet simply details the ways people approach the intrusion of these events into their consciousness.
I don’t think it is strange, or even so self-interested, that one would wonder how to slot it into ones frame of reference. That is a very human thing to do.
I do have one question, however. Why fault a “those [of us] who have no explanation” from thinking along self-centered lines? What else do they have to gauge anything by? What else is supreme on their line of measurement, …. or could be?
Just asking.
Another thing that was sort of interesting…. Brad writes: “Moreover, he says, let’s not forget to trash environmentalists, back to John Muir and Henry David Thoreau:”
about Brooks quote:
“The nature we saw this week is different from the nature we tell ourselves about… at the organic grocery store…. This catastrophic, genocidal nature… a long way from the… circle of life in “The Lion King.”…”
The thing I thought was interesting was that it doesn’t really seem that environmentalists were being criticised, it seemed, rather, that the anthropomorphous picture of natural creation was being revisted. In light of the tsunami devastation.
Not everyone has the same form of assimilating and reacting to their understanding of the world and their own place in that.
Some ask themselves what these things can mean, others rush to the rescue… and of those some from their understanding of what their place is in times of need; others to find a place they didn’t know could exist. And whether we think about that analytically or not, it changes us.
and that shouldn’t come as such as surprise as it does… we are interconnected in this world. We are all flesh, and inside we know that what happens to one could happen to another as easily.
This brings me to another post trackbacked from JustOneMinute. I really liked it. It had to do with the geography lessons of a little girl and how it saved the day… for her family and 100 others… read about Tilly Smith.
Ponder that 🙂
“The thing I thought was interesting was that it doesn’t really seem that environmentalists were being criticised”
they were – there was more in the original article, focusing on Thoreau (mid-19th century) and Muir (early 20th century), most likely because Brooks couldn’t misrepresent ideas from modern environmentalists quite as easily.
Brooks is very, very good at the “I’m just honestly musing in an oh-so-balanced, oh-so-reasonable, almost dull” style of writing, so much so that it’s easy to miss the wicked little barbs right below the surface. Chapman at the Tribune had a much more honest column about how folks who babble about living in harmony with nature are delusional, and we must instead subordinate her to our every economic desire . . .
-Dan S.
This site
http://www.fransgroenendijk.nl/index.php?id=P461
talks not just about Tilly Smith but also how passed-down knowledge reportedly helped save a village of Thai “sea gyspsies”
-Dan S.
Hi Dan! I can tell I like you…even tho’ I hardly know ye 😉
Will look more carefully at articles mentioned + the sea gypsies sound fascinating….