Kevin Roden wrote:
I hope other GFA members have a longer term view of gliding clubs for them to have any hope of surviving.
This is where the "I just want to go gliding!" approach favoured by some on this list (and out there in the wonderful wide sky we all share) collapses. Such an attitude is pernicious as it eats our own gliding future, by consuming without returning. Even when this attitude is extended to include the immediate club, the focus is still too self centred as it ignores (wilfully or through ignorance) the myriad of other work that has to be conducted out beyond the club, for there even to be a club.
For any of us to "just go gliding" we need far more than the surface appearance, although that in itself is considerable when one thinks of the immediate needs to get into the air. As with any significantly complex activity, there are levels of interdependence that we ignore at our long term peril.
Many of us were trained, encouraged and, where necessary, prodded forward by people who felt that by so doing they were repaying a debt to the people who trained them. This 'repaying forward' is an important part of what holds all voluntary organisations together: without it there are no instructors, no club fleet maintainers, no tug pilots, no ground crew.
If even provision for these obvious needs is denied (as they are in the worst case of "I just want to go gliding!"), that is a local disaster - but at least it affects only that club.
Hidden beneath all manifestations of this philosophy, however, lies the reality of the death of gliding in this country. "I just want to go gliding" gnaws away the roots of the ecosystem in which our personal gliding exists. I fully intend to be gliding well into my 70s as, I suspect, do most of my age cohort. At the current rate of decline in gliding, that may well not be possible - and it certainly will not be possible if we "just go gliding".
We all need to 'repay forwards' to ensure that we can still "just go gliding" in 20 years. That means finding our own individual ways to contribute to the ecosystem that sustains our flight - and there is such a wide choice that there is a place for every disparate talent.
"Just going gliding" makes you a future eater: but you are eating your own gliding future as well as that of everyone else.
-- Robert Hart [EMAIL PROTECTED] +61 (0)438 385 533 http://www.hart.wattle.id.au _______________________________________________ Aus-soaring mailing list [email protected] To check or change subscription details, visit: http://lists.internode.on.net/mailman/listinfo/aus-soaring
