At times we're all afraid of the future. Sometimes this is actually rational.
For instance, it's 2024, and an election year. And we know what the fun, zany "experts" who have infested every institution and bureaucracy cooked up in 2020. The near future looks clown world, with a high possibility of crazy cakes, and the possibility of a squall of kinectic passing through where any of us lives, at any time.
If you're not scared, you're not paying attention. Or you're lulled to a false sense of normalcy by the droning of the MSM and haven't realized they lie with every tooth in their mouths.
This is what's known as a rational fear.
But there are fears that are not rational. Whether or not you believe the government's recent "admissions" (Splorch, giggle) that there are aliens and the government has touched the sky seen them, living with a dread fear of being kidnapped by an alien and anal-probed is not rational.
Even if it were possible, even if it had happened here and there, the incidence is so small the chance of it happening to you as you go about your lawful occasions is somewhat less than zero.
And then there is a pervasive, all penetrating fear of things changing.
I've noticed, sometime ago, that the left routinely accuses us of fearing change. Of course, the change they identify is not a change anyone is really afraid of, because.... well, it's not a change. Take the late kerffufle in science fiction, for instance. We were accused of being afraid of "Women and people of color writing science fiction."
This is outright in your face clown world, when you consider how many of us pissed off at log-rolling within a small clique were either women or minorities. But it's even more clown world, because the minorities and women have always written science fiction. Or in fact whatever the heck they wanted to.
Look, bub, when I was sending out manuscripts, in the days before the internet, all they knew was my name on the manuscript. Yes, my name -- all of them, as it happens -- was female. But yes, of course, I experimented with initials. it made no appreciable difference. And anyone reading the story didn't know if I was blond, or dark-sand-colored (guilty) or in fact purple with tentacles. Also, no one particularly cared. I might have had a leg up if I had a cool truly exotic name Smokes With Clouds Littlebottom or Purple Tentacles Blopfog but not so much because cool name sounded ethnic, but because cool name would be remembered. So if I were sending things in, say, every week, it would be noticed I was trying really hard, and it might have got a slightly more charitable reading. (Unless it were truly stupendously horrific, in which case it would get circular-filed with malice.)
Yes, I know, when one was starting out it felt like the universe was against us. And since it took me about 4 times the average 3 years to break into pro -- many reasons, some of them being the fact that I tend to go at things backwards and sideways, which provides a unique perspective, but is not the most efficient method -- I KNOW that feeling intimately. From the inside. It didn't help that sometimes you got your story back (back in the day when printing was expensive, and you had to take it somewhere to daisy-wheel print, because they didn't accept dot-matrix print outs. Yes, I know they were hard to read, but it was also a socio-economic filter) looking like it had been stepped on multiple times with malice.
I suspect it was easy for someone who -- and this was already true in the 80s -- had been indoctrinated into victimhood and into thinking that everyone was against him/her due to color or sex or sexual orientation, to assume only he/she/it was this badly treated.
But actually we all were. It was a market with a million would be suppliers and room for maybe ten people per month. To make it worse, as I found out when I was briefly an editor of a bottom wrung magazine, the million submissions had a solid 750 thousand, at least, that were absolutely abysmally bad. Because I was young and stupid, I read the whole thing, instead of quitting at the first couple of horrific paragraphs. And it never got better. Most of them read like a kid retelling a Saturday morning cartoon, or an indistinct dream. Some were pamphlets for some kind of ideology, but you often couldn't tell what the ideology was even.
However the hardest was the quarter million that were good. Sometimes very good. Here you had six slots, and you were paying nothing. How do you choose? And if you choose you're using this brilliant story's first shot at publication. And it's not like the author will get a credit that is worth much. Might have negative value.
Anyway, so, not only didn't the editors have a chance of knowing what you were -- unless you informed them. A not inconsiderable minority of cover letters told me the author's race, sex and sexual orientation. Which seems to me would be particularly stupid if they thought themselves discriminated against -- but also it didn't matter, because most stories (including my early ones. Granted not cartoon retellings, but extremely peculiar.) were rejected with extreme prejudice because they sucked. Badly.
The only thing that gave you an advantage was knowing someone on the inside, which is why the field was incestuous. (Still is, as far as trad pub.)
But beyond that, women and minorities had always been in science fiction. If they were less represented, it was for cultural reasons, not because of discrimination. (As a geekling girl, I'd have given my right arm for female friends who were as much into science fiction as I was, but even my friendly geekling girls didn't read that "weird stuff." It was all either romances or, for the branier ones, history and philosophy and such. Or "Literary" stuff. Because Science Fiction had no prestige. We were the pimply guy in the corner, while women preferred to run off with the son of the mayor -- Literary -- or fool around with the bad boy -- romance -- so there was no chance. I just got used to being part of groups of guys, some much older than I.)
Anyway, there was actually no change happening. To the extent there had been change, with a great courting of female readers and writer, that was in the seventies with wholesale traipsing into fantasy. By the eighties the process was almost complete. By the time I broke in, in the late nineties, the publishing field: writers, editors, publishers, even readers, was primarily female. That it was females screaming that they were being discriminated against for being females was something that none of them found funny, so I never pointed it out. It reminds me of this. It was all very cool and edgy to be a woman in science fiction. If you were 20 or 30 years earlier, that is.
Which is sort of the left's schtick. It's much easier to fight battles that are already won, of course. And much more satisfying to speak power to truth than the other way around.
But I started noticing this was being shouted in the face of anyone at all who complained or tried to change anything at all in our crazy, ossified institutions. "You're just a white male scared because you're being replaced by superior and more able women and minorities."
The fact that black female friends got this shouted in their faces is something else, but-- leaving that aside: since this is deployed everywhere and at all times, as "you're afraid of the future," and since the left projects like an IMAX, I started looking around and going "uh."
Look, being afraid of the future is natural, particularly when you live in a time of catastrophic change. Catastrophic change is so called because it is so rapid that things change suddenly and unpredictably and is experienced like a flood or a hurricane, destroying the landscape you know. EVEN WHEN THE CHANGE IS FOR THE BETTER.
Humans aren't geared for a high rate of change, for the simple reason that for most of our evolution when things changed rapidly it was a catastrophe and limited in time duration -- war, flood, hurricane, fire -- and then things went back to changing very slowly. In fact, cultures and tradition are designed to keep things from changing vertiginously. It's a minor miracle we're not all still in the fertile crescent, scratching at the ground with a stick.
But the type of change we're really not geared to is the type of change that affects your every day life, in every aspect. That's the kind of thing great mythological sagas were written about. "And then the world was covered in ice, and--" because even catastrophes were usually on the macro scale, but not the micro. You still ate about the same thing, cooked over the same fire. You still wrapped your babies the same way, sang them the same songs, rubbed the same salve on their gums for teething issues, etc, even if you were doing it while running away from fire or flood.
Then the 20th century. Boy, howdy! Innovation came fast and furious. People born in a time when the horse-pulled carriage was the height of transportation might (and most did) have grown up to fly in airplanes in late middle age. The "it's always been so" suddenly wasn't. Those very important markers of status and class, that all apes rely on, were suddenly upended, then upended again, and then yet again.
And the 21st century came in roaring like a geek boy who just can't leave his toys alone without improving them every other week.
While the change in my life has not been as shocking as that in my father's, it has been, really as total, just in a more close-in, personal scale. Look, when I was young, I had pen pals in America (technically to improve my English. Actually because I could send my mind here, part time.) Getting them was a pain involving several dedicated organizations (probably run by one little old lady in a basement), and continuing the correspondence involved a slow exchange over unreliable mail (on my end at least) and a wait of weeks for a question to be answered. These days, I can and do talk to friends across the world by sitting at my social-media computer and firing up one of many programs that allows me to talk to them more or less instantly, either voice or text, and it costs nothing. (When I was first married, and my parents were anxious, the phone bills on either side of the Atlantic were epic.)
Then there is the nineties, only -- checks -- 30 years ago. My kids, born in the nineties are now in his thirties, and almost in his 30s. I don't know how much they remember of our early "family vacations." In Denver, which to us back then was an hour and a half away. We usually went up for a weekend, stayed two nights at the Embassy Suites in the tech center (Cheap on the weekends, since they catered for business travelers. And listen, the advantages of a single room that allowed you to put the kids in another room with a door that closed should not be underestimated) which our younger kid at one point referred to as "our Denver home." This happened twice a year or so, three times if we were flush. We'd do the museums, the zoo and, in the early days, hit as many used bookstores as we could, because the used bookstores in the Springs were no great shakes, or were thoroughly mined by us on a regular basis. (Four corners and Poor Richards, downtown.)
Getting to the bookstores, or for that matter any restaurant we'd never been to before, or any attraction we didn't have a pamphlet for, involved getting out the phone book and the map, and plotting a course. And we took the -- hotel's -- phonebook with us in the car, so that if we got lost we could stop at a phone booth and call the place and ask how to get there.
All of this sounds like alien maneuvers to my kids, now. You get in the car, look up the thing in your GPS (only not ours. We have to use the phone. For reasons known only to itself, our GPS is convinced we only want to look up things in Montana. It knows where we are. When you put an address in, it directs you correctly. But obviously if we want to go to Hobby Lobby it's one in some city in Montana. No, the car has never been in Montana, at least not according to its history. I guess it's pining for the Fjords altitude.) set the course and go.
There have been myriad such changes, including the fact that applications for jobs are all via applications, some of which seem to be mal-functioning in odd ways. And all of which require "keywords" which, as with publishing, are arcane magic, understood by no one but a minority of marketing brains. (And now increasingly AI, which is why wordpress suggests keywords for my posts that range somewhere between laugh-outloud and WHAT?)
And a lot of occupations have changed and turned upside down since people started, but more so in the last 10 years or so.
I'm not going to argue that the so called "elites" haven't done dirt to the rest of us. They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe, sent jobs abroad, for cheaper labor and fewer regulations. They inflicted regulations on this great land that make it near impossible to start a business or make an honest buck. They are now trying to take away anything that works, from appliances, to food production. And in the name of making it so that the future is female (what the heck crazy slogan is that?) they are destroying our young men and older male teens, not realizing that also destroys females, because humans don't live in a vacuum. Frankly the fact we still shamble on, even if greatly hampered, is a minor miracle.
But I am going to argue, as justifiable as it is to be scared of whatever the heck they'll think up to do to us next, we are less fearful than they are, and have less reason to be. The reason is the same one as usual: We, Odds and Nonconformists who hang out on this blog, including the one on this side of the screen, are more flexible and adaptable, and ready to make the best of what we can, while seeing the problems and trying to fix them. I think growing up not fitting anywhere, while uncomfortable, makes it easier to adapt to catastrophic change.
And I'm going to argue part of the reason for the horrible things that are inflicted on us is the left-elite's panic-fear of the future, of change, of things being different.
First and foremost, they're terrified of losing their lefty privilege. I'm convinced somewhere, deep inside, beneath the synapses stuck on talking about what brave fighters and allies (most of them aren't actual minorities -- not the vocal ones --) they are, they are very aware of having been given breaks and pushed ahead due to espousing positional-good-leftist-views. They know that most of them are no more qualified for whatever position of power and/or respect they have than my cat. And certainly not more qualified than all the "unpopular" or less sightly people passed over.
And they're scared the system will be upended. Dry mouth/clenched fists scared. They are all in for "minorities" and "women" taking over, because, of course, that change is predicted in all their "expert" theories and everything they learned from earliest schooling. So, it's almost reassuring, you know. It's "according to the prophecies."
But their job suddenly changing, or going overseas or whatever that is unexpected, and terrifying. So, it's easier to send other people's jobs overseas, to be done in the same old way but cheaper, than say to install automation and to have things change completely, and have to learn new skills to manage.
More importantly, they're terrified of this hypothetical future where all jobs go way, and you just have to deal with all this population, that simply aren't smart enough to do anything else. This of course, requires that you consider yourself the pinnacle of human evolution and also be dumb enough about history not to figure out that if jobs were ever going to go completely away it would already have happened.
You have to not be aware that once upon a time all humans scratched at the soil from sun to sun to get a bare subsistence and that now only 2% work in agriculture, while the entire multitude of us is fed perhaps too abundantly. (Eyes midriff.)
You have to not be aware that buggy whip makers didn't starve when horse transportation went away. And that people who did computations by hand didn't starve when computers came in. But oh, for the plight of the typewriter repairman! Seriously.
Yes, in all the great changes, some people simply can't adapt, and are unemployed forever, or become depressed and bitter, but they're by far the minority. Usually people -- absent the generous subsidies of a government run by the left who again is sure "surplus humans with no function" are a direct result of innovation -- adapt and innovate some more to find a niche. Most of our close personal circle have had three or four completely different skilled jobs in the last 40 years. And many of those have nothing to do with their degrees. Also, some came from a hobby they had while working their first job years ago.
The left can't conceptualize this. Even when they, themselves, do it, they're convinced other people (yes, yes, particularly other races, because they're arrant racists) can't do it, and therefore must be kept in the dim servitude of the government dole, just enough to keep them quiet, and not enough to give them any freedom, and always having to reapply and go through bureaucracy. Or of course be given "government jobs" many of which are a sort of sinecure like FDRs job corps, which do and undo the same thing over and over.
The truth is that if you don't do stupid laws and regulations -- say, Oregon's forbidding the pumping of one's own gas (Will no one think of all the now very old gas station attendants on the corner, with a sign saying "please give" in all other states?) -- and don't swathe the economy in welfare and more welfare, and don't create make-work jobs, as innovation displaces people, people find other ways and new things to do, or even new ways to do the same job.
I say this as someone who has been assured that AI will write my novels better in the near future (Splorch, giggle. No, do go ahead. Bah) and that this thing I have to do for some reason I don't even understand can be done better and I'll be unemployed forevah! Only I can see ways -- if I didn't enjoy the process -- how it could make my life easier, or at least stop the long, depressive silences, if nothing else by driving me batty. (Yes, that works. No don't get any ideas. If clownworld hasn't done it yet!)
And I say this precisely at the dawn of AI, when the left is convinced their veddy veddy important jobs, all with nose in the air and mysterious and caballistic procedures, like, oh, news reporter, are going away.
They're losing their minds. If they balk at all sorts of innovation, things that threaten their function -- even more than their jobs -- directly are even more terrifying.
The people who have made an entire scaremongering movement out of wanting the weather to be exactly as they remember for childhood forever, are not going to allow innovation of any kind. Much less innovation that might free other people to be inventive and foster most innovation. Nooooo.
The only kind of innovation they're ready for is the one that's already happened, and that they're sure people who are not them -- those "uneducated white males" they are sure are lurking in the dark and plotting against them, --fear. That "innovation" is fine because it isn't, and it's under their control anyway as powerful "allies."
But real innovation? Things happening that they haven't foreseen or authorized? Noooo. Don't you dare move their cheese.
They will go to any lengths, seize as much power as they need to, silence as many voices as they need to, kill as many people as they need to, destroy as many things and nations as they need to so that they remain in control and no changes happen that they dislike.
They have only 3 problems:
1-The current situation is highly unstable, and changes will happen, anyway, and probably rather fast and in the near future.
2- Their attempts to follow their learned script (China, Russia, Cuba) don't and can't account for the new and vast territory, or for the fact their end-system never worked and was subsidized by free nations to even subsist.
3- They are so terrified of change that they can never plot second and third order consequences from anything they do or impose from above. And lately --oh, forever, but particularly lately, because they're exceptionally unqualified, being 4th generation; and because the situation is highly unstable -- everything they do tends to turn around and bite them in the fleshy part of the ass, by creating a lot more "unforeseen change" and making things more unstable. (See, lockdowns. Or vaccines. Or installing Brandon. Or--)
Hold on to the side of the boat. Things are going to go very topsy turvy and of necessity, probably dangerous.
Be aware this situation is global, and weirder abroad, because we can't fully understand the implications of their culture without deep study no one is making.
Stay flexible. Even for those of us who are older, that's not exactly difficult. Because if you never fit anywhere, you can sort of fit everywhere.
And most of all, be not afraid. Let them be afraid. We have a future to get to.
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