RE: It Takes A Village so what's wrong with asking for help?
Yep, this is true. And when you try and dislodge the "stranger danger" mentality from the common hive mind, you get cognitive dissonance.
Like, look, I'm not naive; I was raised by paranoid New Yorkers and came of age in a shitastic neighborhood where I was regularly chased and stalked by perverts (yes, really), so I'm not saying the world is all sunshine and rainbows. But the fact is, the world is safer now than it used to be (and most of the time if people are assaulted it's by someone they know), yet parents helicopter over their kids and won't let them play in the neighborhood or walk home from school because they think it's "dangerous." It's dangerous if you live in the shitastic neighborhood perhaps, but generally not otherwise. When I was younger we had that all the kids on the block played together and had run of the neighborhood thing. Parents knew each other and all the kids. You knew which house the pervert lived in and didn't go there (yes, we really had a resident peeping tom pervert on the block that everyone knew about - still allowed to play all over). The kids would go visit the elderly lady who lived alone to keep her company, and on Halloween she gave us kids who did full size candy bars, and it was the Halloween highlight. Oh, yeah, and we trick or treated - at homes. Of strangers. We didn't die.
And the world is SAFER now, despite the news and the mass shootings (see the book: The Better Angels Of Our Nature by Steven Pinker). I wish everyone would read that book!
Anyway, I'm kind of digressing, sorry. But nowadays people stay walled up in their homes and the kids' friends are across town and you have playdates, the elderly lady has no company, and everyone is afraid and alone. I really would like us to get back to having community again!
wow @phoenixwren what an awesome comment! I couldn't agree with you more - I definitely know it ain't all sunshine & rainbows. I've had my share of troubles and bad luck but we are allowing these scare tactics to now dictate our lives and society.. it is way safer nowadays! I liked your thoughts on this a lot - thank you for taking the time to comment! 🙏✌
Exactly. I used to have really high anxiety, both from the bad neighborhood experience and because I was a news junkie so always heard about doom and gloom. My life ain't perfect my any means, but since I learned to let that go, I feel much better than when I was afraid to go out at night, or afraid of the dire predictions on the news. It doesn't dictate my life anymore, and I am far better off!
In the fifties and sixties, we walked alone hand in hand to school, and home again. At five I was taught where adults/perverts would be immensely hurt if I struck sure and fast and ran away, so in our village the silly old men were known, and at times like Guy Fawkes, needed to be wary of the older primary kids of nine and ten who might light a three penny banger and frighten them, and tease and run, as we laughing kids could be cruel if we knew a bully. But by young teens I knew every kid within ten mile up to two villages away in any direction by bicycle. We were often the news carriers, not tale-bearers of spite, but real news, like old granma Kennedy fell over and has an arm in a sling, and some adult parent would call in and do her shopping therefrom. We all worked the picking harvest, and not just the farms, but the hedgerows for the old ladies Jam's and chutneys or the old men's sloe wine or elder-flower or berry wine. Villages are wonderful places in which kids can learn a great deal from old vet's and the vet's left at home womenfolk. One old lady showed my gang how to hold birds with car or cat injuries, and let us watch when she bandaged and fed them in her cat proof glasshouse. We stood for hours watching the blacksmith, or puffed up his flame and earned a cup of 'char' - the strongest tea I've ever tasted, but he only let us kids have a small cup for helping his forge-fire, and never offered any adult, with whom he always appeared grumpy and sour until they left his forge. We felt 'SO' privileged to work on chopping sticks and pumping the bellows. Ah, the village, the horse chestnuts, the blackberries, the water so clear you could see the hunting pike. 😇
In the 80s, we'd pick green beans in the garden and eat them raw, or blackberries at a different friend'a house, or honeysuckle at our house.
But the nearest river was the most polluted river in all of New Jersey, which is saying something. 😂
When pre-school in Boxford in East Anglia, the local University at, I think Colchester, sent a grad' student once every little while to test the water as the river beside our house, which used to be a mill, was actually drinkable (4 microns, is it?), well anyway, when I was Four I specifically remember the excitement among the adults when Trout were seen swimming up river to the spring-pool behind our land. This on the East Coast. The Box empties into the Stour estuary and now the mouth of the Orwell and Stour have Harwich seaport on their south head and Felixstowe containerport on the north head, where used to be the wetlands and marshes, very similar to further north just south of Walberswick at Shingle Street. Mind you, I don't know if Shingle Street has also been filled, since I've not been there since early eighties. But I doubt very much if trout are found in the Box or the Stour.
Remembering the Trout in an East Coast river, I've thought that after the mid-west USA study, on oysters that picked on the East Coast of USA, we're transhipped to the mid-west where they closed, then began opening two weeks later as if still on the coast, because apparently they tune in to the Moon no matter the water. My idea was milking Trout/Salmon, and putting row and milk together in Moon-time in a spring-pool such as the Box, and breeding the fish out of cleansed or re-cleansed East Coast Rivers and any western rivers that they no longer breed in. If the fingerlings born in that water/soil make it to the sea, they should in their Moon-time return to that pool. I've heard biologists who have papers from book-learning say nay, but I've yet to hear from a practical trier, or one of those oyster research fellows. 😇
Scientists can hypothesize, but until a practical trier does some tests, they don'tnknow for sure!
Yay! That's what I reckon. That's what immediately came to mind when I read about the behaviour of the oysters. Where one might find clean enough rivers to experiment is a conundrum, but once proven to work, it becomes an enormous incentive to spend cleaning the rivers. 😇
yesss me too totally! You just gotta cut out their fear tactics and live your life! It's so nice to be separate from all that BS