DAILY PHOTO: Tainan Manhole Cover
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PROMPT: Outdated Technology
We’d be better off if the bleeding edge of weapon technology were the pointy stick — not just because of atrocities averted. Also, we’d all have to be more capable in such a world — there is no imposter syndrome among people who have to kill a deer or fish with a spear they hewed themselves. Also, if you are cheesed off with one or more people (or the world,) it is entirely different (and more calming) decision space if one has to go out spearing them individually than if one can spray them with automatic fire from 50 feet away. You’d still have the option, but you’d have to want it more and to accept the inevitability of consequence more fully. Finally, it is quite hard to run an authoritarian dictatorship if your army has weapons of similar capability to any random person.
I don’t know for sure whether “an armed society is a polite society,” but I suspect it is if the pointy stick is the pinnacle of armaments.
I know this makes it sound like I was around in the pre-Bronze era. I was not.
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Night [Free Verse]
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DAILY PHOTO: 85 Sky Tower from Singuang Riverside Park
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PROMPT: Best Excuse
“I was tossed by a bison.”
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Steam City [Haiku]
Relentless [Free Verse]
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DAILY PHOTO: Waterfall & Mossy Rock
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PROMPT: Who We Are?
Daily writing prompt
Do you think we’re shaped more by our experiences or by who we are?
Is a salad lettuce or is it tomato? [It’s both, yet it’s neither. It’s an amalgam that cannot be spun out into component parts any more than one can pluck a solitary fart out of a football stadium — i.e. the fart, the whole fart, and nothing but the fart.]
It sounds like this is meant to be a restatement of the nature versus nurture question, though I’m not sure I understand the question. I would argue that it presents a false dichotomy. Who is one (if not an experience-having machine?) I can’t answer because I think the question assumes a simplification that doesn’t exist in the real world.
I’ve just been reading David Brooks’ book, How to Know a Person, in which he offers a relevant quote from Aldous Huxley: “Experience is not what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens to you.” I can’t say whether Huxley was entirely correct, but I believe that how one experiences what happens to one is inseparable from who one is. (Also instructive is Brooks’ definition of a person as a point of view.)
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Reading Clouds [Haiku]
at rest on a hill,
clouds form & shift shapes;
i read their story.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 