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

[Paula Lieberman]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Beth Mitcham" <mitcham.beth at gmail.com>


> 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.

Procreation however doesn't require marrying...  and historically in this 
world there was a lot of engendering outside of marriage! See also e.g. Jack 
Cohen's descriptions on the web about being " naughty" in the sense tht the 
offspring of  couple isn't necessarily the offspring of -both- members of 
the couple...

>>  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

Socials rules and "jobs" are not the same thing.  And what if he were 
sterile?!  The natural infertility rate is higher than most people realize. 
Modern medicine has dropped it somewhat...

> 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)

Most patrollers seem to retire from patrolling if they survive all that 
long, and do other things--note that there was a push for Dag to stop being 
a patroller and find a vocation that kept him with the rest of his extended 
kinship group.

> 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.

Not everyone is suitable breeding/childrearing stock, and I presume the same 
is true of Lakewalkers.  Dag as successful patroller might be someone wanted 
to be kept in the breeding pool, but still....

> 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.

Bluntly, if his sperm is wanted so badly, there are ways to collect it 
without his consent...
A modern day analogy is "offspring of a turkey baster" (though that tends to 
involve consensual activity....).

>> 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.

Other patrollers don't spend so little time at their ostensibly home 
locations and anywhere near so much out on patrol.  They tend to spend a lot 
more time in home camp than Dag does, Dag is notably for almost always 
being -away-.

I wouldn't call it "going on vacation" when one is home from  a patrol-lhe's 
like the traveling sales person who lives out of hotel rooms and sometimes 
drops in on relatives in the hometown for a few days and takes off again, 
annoying all the hometown folks who think the salesperson owes the hometown 
and relatives more time and attention and at least having a furnished 
apartment and coming back and saying in it for several day every few weeks, 
instead of showing up for maybe a week to two after being away a year and a 
half or more.

>> 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.

They haven't declared him ritually dead, which is what some folks in some 
cultures have done when the person marries outwide the culture!

>> For that matter, would Dag have been happy in a sand econd Lakewalker 
>> marriage?
>
> Is Dag's happiness the only thing that matters?

Children of unhappy marriages can become enormous societal problems, in 
addition to often being utterly miserable stuck between parents who are 
spiting one another.  One friend said that when his parents were in divorce 
wars, he felt like a football which neither parent so much wanted because 
the parent cared about -him-, but rather, the kids were -possessions- to 
fight over to spite the -other- parent, as in fighting over "capture the 
flag"--expect thinking about it, the flag held more intrinsic value to the 
people fighting over it.  It wasn't "I can do a better job raising the 
kids/I want what's best for the kids," it was more in the nature of coup 
counting, of "child custody grants status points, and I'm not going to 
let -you- get those status points!  You want the status points, so I;m going 
to grab them from you."

> 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?

And what about the children then, growing up with a father who's out 
patrolling and isn't going to let himself -care- about those kids, who 
aren't going to see the man who engendered them except the odd few days out 
of a year and a half or more of time.

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