All in my head?
I’ve written quite a few blog posts in the last months. Unfortunately, the ones destined for this blog all stayed in my head.
As I’ve mentioned on my Twitter stream, I’m deeply immersed these days in a local issue.
How the local has chipped away at my confidence in assessing any kind of global perspective (including my own “place”) could itself be the topic of a blog post, however. From where I’m standing right now, local politics are much “heavier” than national or global politics. You come to know in your bones how local politics will dis-lodge you. Mess with global issues and you can always return to your nest at the end of the day. But local politics infiltrates your “place,” shows you that your hold is both tentative and atavistic, a throwback that can’t last because immortality (including the pretended one of blowhard politicians) is illusion…
I think most people ignore local politics for that very reason, even though affecting local politics is in some ways easier and more rewarding than tilting at national or global windmills.
Some national and global issues might be starting to give us a foretaste of how they’re going to affect us locally.
In the US, health care issues are a beginning of a confluence between local and national. Climate change will probably bring global to local.
We live in interesting times.
Indeed, we live in interesting times. Ignoring the local for the global, I think also helps us with illusions of grandeur about our abilities to affect change, when, as you noticed, those made at the local level have so much more power. Ah, but those are also the ones that take the most work and the least illusion….
Comment by maria — December 7, 2009 #