[Paddlewise] pfds...whoa, will this stir the waters

Mark wrote, "To me, a safe but sanitized society is not what I want." 

Mark,

I bet you'll like this quote from JM Coetzee's Age of Iron. I keep thinking
about it as this pfd - pretty frustrating debate - rages on. Makes me think
of how differently we all define and value "life."

Courtney 

In the picture you sent of the two boys in the canoe, for instance, my eye
wanders from their faces to the ripples on the lake and the deep green of
the fir trees and then back to the orange life jackets they wear, like water
wings of old. The dull bland sheen of their surfaces quite hypnotizes me.
Rubber or plastic or something in between: some substance coarse to the
touch, tough. Why is it that this material, foreign to me, foreign perhaps
to humankind, shaped, sealed, inflated, tied to the bodies of your children,
signifies so intensely for me the world you now live in, and why does it
make my spirit sink? I have no idea. But since this writing has time and
again taken me from where I have no idea to where I begin to have an idea,
let me say, in all tentativeness, that perhaps it dispirits me that your
children will never drown. All those lakes, all that water: a land of lakes
and rivers: yet if by some mischance they ever tip out of their canoe, they
will bob safely in the water, supported by their bright orange wings, till a
motorboat comes to pick them up and bear them off and all is well again. A
recreation area, you call it on the back of the photograph. The lake tamed,
the forest tamed, renamed....What can these two poor underprivileged boys
paddling about in their recreation area hope for? They will die at
seventy-five or eighty-five as stupid as when they were born...By no means
do I wish death upon them...No, I wish your children life. But the wings you
have tied on them will not guarantee them life. Life is dust between the
toes. Life is dust between the teeth. Life is biting the dust.


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