Years ago I left my beloved cricket club, largely because the committee was discussing whether to accept Asian members - a matter I took be be racist rather than about sexual matters beyond interest to me. My batting and bowled averages improved two-fold at my new club and one of the great friendships of my life began with a West Indian bloke who bent the ball like a Brazilian soccer player. I didn't improve as a player at all, despite my batting average going up from 25 to 40 and taking wickets for fun at three times my previous rate. The reason, of course, was that everyone around me was so much better than in my old club. I was much less individually important in the new team, yet so much better in the statistical ratings.
I'm making a new start now, delayed by the imposition of vile, criminal neighbours - though I suspect had it not been for them I would probably have gone on much as before. They've gone now and the combination of them, the dismal authorities who should have dealt with them and illness really rocked Sue and I to the core. The situation raises many parochial issues, but I find myself wondering what it is that locks us into the 'wrong lives'. A young student was talking to me the other night about why everything was so difficult in terms of being able to do something you really want to. Listening to so political gawps talking about social mobility, I find myself quite sure they haven't got a clue. I might hope to fall on my feet amongst people I get on with - perhaps as I did in my move in cricket - yet the key is that the big team isn't working because society is the barrier and what it demands of us to be in it. There are many lengthy 'explanations' of this - Habermas, Rawls, Foucault and endless lists of social theorists, but somewhere we lack the facts to work with, perhaps in a similar way to the obvious one about my bowling - that I'd take more wickets playing with colleagues who could catch! One key is our lack of knowledge of what resources we have and how we can create and share them. One could think here of a Brave New World driven by wind power in the Hebrides, but a smaller scale thing might serve to get us thinking. Sue has been selling books through Green Metropolis - about 20 this week as she's just listed a pile of my old interests - though normally one every now and then. There's a variable set price. Mostly stuff sells at about £3.75 with GM taking 75 pence of which 5 goes to planting trees. She buys books with the money she makes, but could take it in cash. GM is set up, in principle, rather like this group. It's taking 3/13ths of the turnover. Its stock is held by members. There are interesting questions here about GM's resources and what we might develop from this and other working models. I'll go on if anyone shows interest - there is a potential challenge to "capitalism" here through the use of local-global economic transfer schemes. With enough technology we could get all our energy from an area about the size of Austria in the Sahara desert, but we might want to think small first. We might, at least, develop an action-oriented alternative to social theorising! --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups ""Minds Eye"" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/Minds-Eye?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
