Best Wishes to the teachers

Will it be a new era, or merely a minor spat as the citizens of America give up yet another of so many rights that we have lost this decade? Last I heard, the teachers had even accepted the budget changes, all to their loss despite their typically low state government pay (but nice benefits such as every full-time employee should be able to have). What they really want is to keep their democratic rights, collective bargaining, hard won and long accepted as a symbol of the power of the people, now so active in Egypt and its neighbors. To have it snatched away without debate (I smile with delight and offer encouragement to the senators,too, who delay the premature vote and aide the debate their rivals would end unbegun) is not democracy but short sightedness and the loss of yet another freedom in the name of expediency. Power to the teachers and the other state employees. Power to the people and to the remnants of American democracy.

side characters

I enjoyed incorporating the character Karinne into Beyond the Wall. I still have some difficulty in cultivating related characters in science fiction and know it is an inappropriate bias: the future, spece, the world of science, more "appropriately" has strong, intelligent, not-so-feminine characters as those in fantasy, where classic ladies in silk gowns, gentle manners, and all the actionable aspects of lady-like feminin flavor are almost assumed except for the worst or wildest women.

But really, we have some pretty feminine women these days with gentle, good manners, even if they can rarely lay the perfect table, and nervous as well as bold women. Why shouldn't the distant future? The question becomes, where do they fit? Mxyra in E-ships offers something of the question, but she is about as far as it goes in her world as I've built it, at least outside the mountains. In flashbacks, I could offer something of her fellow village women, and there's the Chancellor's daughter... easily sliding into the negative connotations rather than the positive, bright personality of Karinne. Karinne is one of those characters that fits her world well, I think: at least I can't quite picture her handling Mxyra's world very well. I wonder, though, is that a weakness for Karinne, or a problem with my expectations for the future?

Best Wishes to Egypt

I'm not a big news watcher, and these days my first thought is always, how distorted is the news from reality, still, the apparent awakening of the populace in Egypt struck me as classic democracy in action that I felt a desire to cheer when I first heard about it. It's never just the people all getting fed up with an out of date system all at once. There are surely triggers, though nothing necessarily that an outsider would notice or comprehend, but still, the need for change became recognized and thus we have a classic revolution, though it is unfortunate that it has turned to violence.

In some ways, I suppose that it is inevitable, though violence should never be. A man who has ruled for thirty years should be ready to retire, but no one likes to be pressured into change, especially into a change that feels like a loss instead of merely a change. the fact remains that no one can rule effectively for thirty years, even in middle management. The ivory tower at the top or even the upper windows of the corporation highrise, offers too poor a view of what is happening on the ground, and thirty years of memories, even if they are undistorted by time, convey nothing of the changes in technology, culture, attitudes, needs, and expectations. A leader cannot lead effectively a people that they no longer know.

A few years is typical, ten if the leader is a good listener and brilliant, but no one in a position of ultimate power can be effective for thirty years. If nothing else, being effective is typically exhausting unless there is a solid structure beneath doing most of the ruling and maintaining contact with the people. If that were true Cairo, I suspect there wouldn't have been more than a token protest, as a reminder, and the leader would have been more ready to step down to contented retirement long ago.