Responding to Naïveté Anonymous
The following message is to the friend that, although well informed, chose this juncture to fly through a war zone to go on holiday and romantically thinks:
I don’t live in fear
I live in the moment
Dear ….
I have scarce interest in reading your long explanations.
I shall talk about myself instead.
Throughout my 70 years I have travelled a lot and if I remained in the country for longer than 5 years it was too long.
I have slept in my VW Beetle in communist countries, slept on dung floors in India with scant regard to safety.
In 2007 before the meltdown I traveled to Europe and took as active an interest in the countries I was in, often by talking to taxi drivers.
The flight back home was so traumatic that I vowed, never again.
When I retired from acupuncture due to ill health I shredded a lot of documents including, inadvertently, my passport.
So, that was that.
I have not gone anywhere apart from a trip to Christchurch which was both heartbreaking and traumatic.
Perhaps that might go somewhere in showing you that I am not “isolated” (in your words) by choice.
Because of my having had a Russian family I have a good second hand knowledge of what repression looks like and with that knowledge, if I was sensible I would shut the fuck up and just settle down to detective fiction.
But I can’t do that and have devoted myself to being a prophet of sorts and warn of what is coming.
I also live in the present moment but responsibly. I, at least, have the privilege of just living for myself.
So, in the context of all this, if I was ever asked for advice, given what I know, I would counsel getting on the first plane home, via LAX, certainly avoiding the Middle East.
But who am I?
If I am wrong and you get on a plane safely, without jet fuel being diverted to the military no one will be more delighted than me.
I just thought I would share some comments from my very conservative sister who lives in Kent. They stopped even me in my tracks given where it is coming from.
Back to harvesting - yes very worrying as there is likely to be food shortages due to the drought, fertiliser prices incredibly high plus the fact, as you mentioned, some farmers may not be able to cultivate & plant next year’s crop.
Previously -
We are having a very hot, dry summer with temperatures 22 - 35 degrees with no rain for over a month, quite extraordinary. We have finished harvesting the oil seed rape and wheat early with oats and linseed left to do.
The quality is ok but the yield is 25 per cent down.
So, I wish you luck for the rest of your holiday and that at the end of it you will say it was all worthwhile.
Best wishes,
Robin
You have got me worried about your friend, but really there's a million others in the same "boat" (lol). I will worry about all the others later, which will be when it's headline news!
I can understand her situation; that she's paid thousands of dollars for a non-refundable ticket and no one but you is panicking.
She would feel foolish to cut short her pre organised holiday and buy another ticket home.
She might think that you are a killjoy for creating fear when the MSM and the people whom she meets are all business as usual.
Trump keeps giving people optimism, just alternates it with the opposite. Take your pick.
Many of similar thinking I sense. Even my young great nephew who is currently travelling in Sth America with friends. His twin brother working in London on his 2 yr O/S sojourn. Older friends who are heading off to Europe on their 4-6week holidays without a deeper thought for what is probably coming. Even more heading to OZ to 'defreeze' for 2-3 weeks.
We do certainly waiver from the optimism, pessimism conundrum. Key is to be prepared, but not panic as that uses energy unwisely. Have a plan in hand. A colleague of mine now working in eastern Europe for 9 mths of the year says NZ is 'gone'. Economically, politically and as a culture. Issue is where would one go???