The frustrations of life in an imperfect world! The rectory phone has now not worked properly since before Christmas, although the occasional call makes its way in or out, inexplicably and randomly. Internet access, equally inexplicably, is intermittent. Phone calls to Telstra have met with varying degrees of success, the low point probably being the hour long phone call that ended in the visit from a technician who solemnly declared that it wasn’t Telstra’s problem and we needed to contact Fred’s Pass. Go figure.
This almost Third World level of incompetence was heightened before Christmas when the plumbing system collapsed (now fixed, after more than $10,000 parish expenditure) and the laptop that I dropped in October finally decided to give up the ghost, croak and die. I purchased a new computer, although I now have the frustrations of trying to learn the vagaries of the execrable Windows 8 and all the related changes.
Unfortunately I am all too human, and mutter and curse with untrammelled abandon (had to avoid that “g” word) at the vagaries of life. In moments of sober piety, however, a thought crosses my mind. As I mutter about malfunctions in my sophisticated world I forget those for who sewerage is a bucket near a waterway, rapidly becoming typhoid infested, those for whom email is a crawl across a street pock-marked by Syrian or Malinese army and rebel gunshots, for whom a laptop is scratching lessons in the dust.
I too am now so deeply enmeshed in the softness of the me-now generations’ lifestyles that I can barely imagine life without such luxuries. Like most of us in the West I would have little enough skill to survive if (when?) our infrastructure collapsed. Grow your own veggies? Shameful though it is I haven’t successfully grown a bean for 30+ years (though we had backyard chooks in New Zealand, laying magnificently for us).
I suspect the softest amongst us are the most vocal in expressing the fear that all greenies and other fear-mongers want to do is put the clock back, destroy our lifestyle, throw us back into the dark ages. While I wouldn’t necessarily want to return to mediaeval standards of hygiene I often wonder if we don’t need to step back, as we over-use and unfairly distribute the available resources of our God-given planet. Does my car really need to do 0-100 in less than 10 seconds? Do I really need all those gigamegawhatsitbytes? He asks, sitting at his shiny new computer.
