Thinking Small

I stopped looking at Facebook fifty times a day--mostly because the enormity of the earth's problems--that my FB friends harp on/are concerned about/are not really doing anything about except signing an endless round of petitions which are destined for the delete button--is crushing when I'm trying to do the nearly impossible optimistic feat of creating alternate realities in fiction.  

And now that I've said that, I wonder why leaders don't ask fiction writers to help them design a better world.  After all, that's what we excel at.  Almost of all the futuristic fantasies and doomsday warnings in earlier fiction have come true, so maybe we're not as inventive as prescient.  We can see the logical progression of where things are going, because that's what we do all day. We follow plot lines to their inevitable conclusions. You say you didn't see THAT coming!  We did!  So we should be at least sitting on well-paid panels telling the powers-that-be where things are going and perhaps--if the outlook doesn't look good--how we can steer the ship away from the rocks.  But there is that darned enormity of things--girls being abducted in Nigeria and sold into slavery for example.  We're all getting into a lather about that, but the fact is that right here in Allentown Pa--or your town anywhere--are sex slaves.  Maybe some of those girls will land up here.   I read after the last superbowl right here in the good ole USA that the high rollers in the mile high boxes were enjoying the services of underage sex slaves.  I don't see a lot of continued outrage about that.  Maybe it's because we would recognize some names.  It's easier to think of those distasters over there--where ever there is--perpetuated by foreign men with dark skin and dark religions.

So, I'm downsizing my expectations of what I can reasonably do to make the earth a less foul place.  Number 1: I stopped getting my nails done at big mani-pedi factories when I realized, after asking several manicurists where they came from--that I was getting the same, obviously made-up, story.  You can't fool a storyteller with a tricked up story.

cool tiny house pictured is called the Mica.  Go to link  Tumbleweed Tiny House Company