Entered on 03 September 2002 at 8:39 a.m..
Weight of the World
I'm getting a cold. GRRR... Hopefully it's just the change of weather, and I'll be able to sleep it off before Saturday.
Lots is going on here right now, well at least in the news. The summit on sustainable development and the environment, although mostly a joke, has captured all of the headlines. The more I listen to it the more guilty I feel. It is a rather catch-22 situation for me and for, well, most of the industrialized world.
I as a citizen can do very little on my own, and I'm not even sure how much I want to do, or what would be most beneficial. I don't really feel like devoting my life to fighting the bureaucracy for environmental policy. It is the same for most of the industrialized world. Some things are quite obvious like switching from coal produced energy to cleaner alternatives, but others are much less clear. What is the best water policy, which is worse building damns for hydroelectricity (water-life) or gas-turbines (the atmosphere)?
The west is also demonized for both doing doing too little, too late, and too wrong. For instance the government of Zambia? refusing food aid that contains genetically modified crops, well there goes the food aid. I admire his principles, but when your people are starving I question the true intention of his principles.
It's enough to make you throw up your hands and walk away. Fine if you don't want my help, then I don't want to help you anymore. There are others who need my help too, and some of them just live across a river from me.
Then on the radio last night was a story about how Miami is becoming a Spanish-only enclave. Great. I don't know why the proliferation of Spanish as a first and only language makes me feel threatened, but it does. Maybe if I spoke more Spanish, I wouldn't feel this way. I guess I just don't appreciate feeling like a foreigner in my own country. I've signed up for a one-day introduction to Spanish in late September, I don't know if I've been accepted yet though. If I get to go, we'll see if I still feel the same way.
As I said rather depressing entry today. The good news is that the weather matches my mood, nice and gray. Becca and Sarah arrive on Saturday :) so things should liven up then.