Spring Lake

It's nice to go to Spring Lake just for a shot of green. Surrounded as we are by mowed grass fields and mounds of construction dirt the redwoods and other trees around the lake are a welcome sight. And it's only about a mile away. The water, alas, is full of toxic blue green algae, so welcoming as it looks it isn't....There used to be a restaurant/snack bar with tables set out on the beach. It didn't survive the Covid restrictions, but there is an application for a license to sell wine and beer on the front of the building, so perhaps , like the Trail House, someone is hoping to reopen it.

I was sitting at a traffic signal this morning and started ruminating on whether compliance and cooperation is a basic tendency among humans. Politics have become so divisive and hostile that we start to believe that there is no longer any regard for law and order, and yet, most people seem to understand and accept the fact that this busy intersection would be chaos were there not traffic signals that people comply with unquestioningly. We might complain about them, but for the most part, unless they are drunk or otherwise impaired, everyone understands the reasons for them.

When Dana started school, she had a teacher who was a lovely person but had a pretty crazy idea about educating children. She was wonderful with them socially, which was a good thing for kindergarten, but as they moved on to first grade, her theory that given the opportunity, children will gravitate to their area of greatest need just wasn't true. It seemed to me that what happened was quite the opposite. A case in point was Walter, who needed glasses in order to see well enough to read, glasses which were always lost, gravitated to the record corner and avoided the book corner like the plague. 

When we moved to Scotland we soon found that the very traditional educational methods suited Dana much better. She liked for instance, being given a set of flash cards to help her memorize multiplication tables. She knew exactly what was expected and she was happy with that. It isn't a narrow world, but compliance with certain moral and ethical 'rules' still allows for growth while still giving basic guidelines for behavior.

I think most of us need some sort of frame of reference within which to function well in society. We understand that we can't just do as we please, and we appreciate the need for cooperation to get things done. The fact that this has broken down on the political level here demonstrates, to me at least, that the inability to cooperate has resulted in a complete stalemate. And without its basic framework of guidance and cooperation, society as a whole has become less civil and far less able to function effectively.

And yet on an individual level, the desire to be caring doesn't exclude the need to cooperate. They say that 'good' news isn't newsworthy, but I disagree. I think it's important that to believe that most people are basically good and need to be reminded of the fact that good news is  a reflection of our everyday lives. The 'bad' news is only news because it isn't ordinary.

It was obviously quite a long traffic signal....