Finding Balance

For me the world is about balance. We have to balance our time on a day to day basis and we need to keep our views balanced. We are hopefully coming off of a period of great inequality and gaining our balance again as we allow people to live their lives without others telling them what to do. I have learned that a great many civilizations around the world used to have this balance, but many have lost it. Some of the Native American tribes saw gender as more fluid than we do today. Parts of the world that today is death to try to live the LGBTQ life used to be haves to those very same people more than a century ago.

An area where I see balance desperately needed is in the process of rectifying the mistakes of the past. I have seen what doing it the wrong way leads to and it really makes the situation worse. We can’t correct the past. We can’t try to right the wrongs by bending the opposite directions. What we need to do is move forward to create the world we want to see. To do otherwise causes a whiplash effect that leads to more suffering.

Native people’s around the world have had it rough. But in studying world history through the many thousands of years of historical and archaeological information, I would say they have come away lucky. So many civilizations have been wiped of the face of the planet with little trace. I was just reading about the waves of immigration into Europe. The Neanderthals were there first, for hundreds of thousands of year. Wiped out by the first wave of modern humans except for the faint 2% trace that is left from interbreeding with modern humans. The second wave lived side by side with the first for a while, bringing farming techniques from the middle east. But the first wave slowly vanished. The third wave, the one we have even more information on since all but a handful of the modern languages of Europe come from them, were the Indo-Europeans from the Steppes of Russia who brought horses and mead. But even though their culture came to dominate, genetically the previous three waves still survive. Modern Europe is a mix of those and others who came later in smaller numbers (such as the Jews in the first centuries of the modern era and the Moors in Spain).

Today we are trying to honor the displaced cultures and help them flourish in our mixed up modern world. The days of suppressing native languages and cultural practices is over. We do our best to live in a diverse nation. Prior to certain recent political occurrences I thought we had made more progress than we evidently have. But that is not unique. I think of England and the plight of those with red hair. Almost worse than being from the Indian subcontinent. Old animosities and prejudices still linger. To gain proper balance these must be dealt with.

I carry that over to my writing. I don’t care to divulge just exactly when my stories are set, but they are well over 5000 years in the future I have envisioned a very unified human race without care of race. Not only that but without care for species. Not a perfect world - I’m not trying to recreate Star Trek after all - but relatable and minus bigotry except in rare instances.

But back to restitution. There is an area that I think this can be done. We signed on to many treaties with the native peoples in the US and over time we have failed to honor those. But many of those lands are now in the hands of the Federal or State governments. I think those lands should be returned in some form. Not paid for, but returned. Perhaps maintain a management system. I admit it is not a well thought out idea, but that is where community discourse comes in.

But another situation has arisen in the last few years. One where I can’t seem to side with the native people. In Hawaii on Mauna Kea there exists an observatory complex. They have been trying to build a new 30 meter telescope there to peer deeper into the blackness of space to peel back the billions of years of time to the earliest light. The native Hawaiians have been protesting and have delayed the construction for the last 6 years. I have researched it and it appears that the Hawaiians have a blanket claim to the entire mountain being sacred. But modern Hawaii is not just Hawaiians. It is the most diverse state in the nation and one of the most diverse places I’ve ever visited. Immigrants from American, Japan, China, and many other places have give it a very diverse modern culture. It has been those voters who have elected leaders who have made the decisions that have finally approved the telescope to go ahead. Everything is in place for the lands on the mountain not in the observatory area to be preserved and protected in terms of being sacred and in terms of the environment.

What seems to have happened is your typical bureaucratic nonsense. In other words a total failure to do what was promised. Probably due to lack of funding. I haven’t fully researched all areas of this yet. But what it boils down to is that many native Hawaiians are of the mind that they have had enough promises not kept and they want the observatory gone and definitely no new telescope. I have an issue with this. This is not balance. This is a whiplash effect due to years of broken promises. Balance is taking stock of the situation and making sure that funding is tied to telescope time (making all the researchers who use them pay equally) to hire the people to do what is needed to properly conserve the environment and any sacred sites on the mountain. And the people hired should be native Hawaiian. But those who want to see the observatory removed I feel have taken a far from balanced approach. The observatory benefits all of us and it doesn’t make a profit. No one is getting rich off those telescopes except in terms of the amazing discoveries that they have led to (and hopefully more discoveries to come).

We cannot rewrite the past. We cannot erase things that have happened. We must move forward and build the world we want to see and avoid doing things that lead to bad feelings. Yes, some groups have oppressed others (I’m not just talking the US here so I’m not being specific) and restitution needs to be made. We going so far that the former oppressors feel oppressed in return, while it feels good in the short term to get revenge, results in the oppressors becoming more entrenched in their bigotry and teaching new generations rather than new generations learning to live in a proper, balanced world. Everyone, regardless of race, gender, nationality, gender identity, sexual orientation, or any other meaningless label, should be treated equally. They should get equal pay for the same job. The should get equal consideration for any job. We are all human and we should all be equal to each other. We need to let the past go and move forward to the future. Dwelling on the past is a curse that will eat your soul until you become that which you hate. Don’t try to oppress your former oppressors. Live with them as equals. That is the best revenge of all. That is balance.

Time Marches On

I guess writing is a discouraging business. I just tried to peruse a bunch of fellow writer blogs to see if they had Instagram (since I am new on there - https://www.instagram.com/srseldon/) and I found that virtually none of them are still around. One moved so the others might have also, but they left no trace. It's kind of depressing. Nearly everyone I encountered as I was forging my world and writing my first 6 novels (sorry that number 6 isn't out yet - it is written, but not edited) has not continued. I may have been on hiatus for the last few years, but I have not quit and have plans for more books, life has not been kind with time so planning, much less writing and editing, has been sparse. I look to get back in the swing of things in the near future. I hope I can get to my next project before George R.R. Martin finishes his Song of Ice and Fire series.

How many others out there have seen old compadres in writing hang it up and vanish? While being self-published has been hard, the reviews have been good and at some point I may still find a way to reach a wider audience. I think of a line from one of my favorite movies, Galaxy Quest - Never give up, never surrender. I didn't start writing to tell just a couple of stories. I started because I have far too many stories to every get written. And I'm not done with Ven yet.

So never fear, my blog and my site will stay up as long as my host exists. At some point I should buy a domain, but for now, this works.

Until next time....