[LMB] [SPAM?] Legacy: "Assume it's true ...

[Beth Mitcham]

Hmm, no plot spoilers but read at your own risk.

On 7/14/07, Paula Lieberman <paal at gis.net> wrote:
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "PAT MATHEWS" <mathews55 at msn.com>
>
> Why should they have been proven to be false long before? Look at all things
> that people believed for millennia on this planet which turned out to be
> false!

Well, lets assume they are true for a thought experiement here.

>
> > He [Dag]  has followed the most anarchistic organ he has into - note this well! -
> > telling his duty to go jump in the lake

>
> Is it?  They were willing for him to stop being a patroller decades before,
> and trying to get him to engender.

Men don't stop patrolling when they marry.  He was supposed to marry
in addition to patrolling.  Not just marry; procreate.

>  He served his time as a patroller, more
> than served his time.  Failing to contribute children is a different issue,
> and one that he failed to do for -decades-.  One might argue that he
> "deserted" long ago

Yes, that was explicitly stated.  His aunt said it nicely, his mother
less so.  He has not been doing his job.  However, he's been doing
half of his job so well that he's not getting officially censored
about not doing the other half.

> Dag didn't produce children grown to adulthood to take a place in Lakewalker
> society, but he had destroyed a significant number of malices and spent more
> time on patrol than the vast majority of Lakewalkers... and most by his age
> would have either have retired from patrolling or been dead quite a while.

I didn't get that feeling.  Some die on patrol, but he was a (farmer)
generation or so short of retirement age.  Heck, his aunt is a
generation ahead of him, and she was going strong.

> Dag's trying something different, and the social conservatives are upset not
> only by that, but by his -continued- failure to comply with their
> prescriptions for proper Lakewalker lifestyle.

But it's not an etiquette thing.  That's what we're saying.  The
proscription to have kids isn't because that's what "respectable
people do."  It's because if there aren't kids then the world will
die, and it is the job of Lakewalkers, a job that Dag accepts, to
prevent the end of the world.

So saying that you are too /unhappy/ to have kids is a bit selfish.
Marrying Fawn is a declaration that he NEVER intends to help out with
the "produce the next generation" duty, as opposed that he is is just
procrastinating the hell out of doing it.  It's closing doors.


> But, it;s not as if
> Dag never showed up back at the enclave after an absence of months, and took
> off again a few days later, not to return again for months, if ever.

Huh?  Whenever he left, it was on patrol.  He's never just gone off
for a vacation, especially an unexcused vacation.


> Marrying a farmer, to me looks like something that's a lessly undesirable
> situation that the previous one.

Is that your opinion, or what you think the opinion of the people at
the camp would be?  It makes sense as your opinion, but I don't
understand how it makes sense as theirs.

>
> For that matter, would Dag have been happy in a second Lakewalker marriage?

Is Dag's happiness the only thing that matters?  Is his happiness more
important than the kids he might have had in a love-less but not
hateful marriage to a Lakewalker woman that he respects?

I understand Dag's inability to remarry, but I don't blame the people
around him wishing he would overcome his reluctance.

Beth M.