Thank you, readers. Many of you will recall The Mamas and The Papas song from the ‘60s. They were singing about Mondays, of course, but their phrasing came to mind as we processed your lovely comments about getting last week’s Sun on Thursday, instead of Friday. That used to be “our day,” until the experiment a year ago with publishing twice a week, and now Thursday is ours, and yours, once again.
Weekly seems to be a more comfortable fit for the pace of life here in Sonoma Valley. Our mission has always been to provide free news to reflect and inform our community. This stems from our belief that there is something valuable about “community,” the shared sense that our lives and our neighbors in this place are intertwined in some special way. And we believe that we can help to strengthen that community through shared knowledge, leading to shared understanding.
It remains our pleasure to serve these goals, and with your support and the support of advertisers, we will continue to do so for years to come … every Thursday.
Kept people
The image of a “kept woman” seems not so au courant in the new millennia, yet perhaps it is more relevant than we think.
Noticing telecommunications workers high up in a tree along Broadway recently made us realize that the tree they were in was fake. Who knows how long that cell site has been there, as we noticed it only because of the bucket trucks around it. The animal habitats at the zoos are often fake, too, and we’re sure the giraffes, for example, aren’t conscious, either, that their trees are not real. After all, what is the tree to such a giraffe other than simply a place for its keepers to set out food?
Our “trees” for that function don’t have to look quite the same, as people are more adaptable to gathering food from shelves in big buildings. Most families no longer store weeks of food at home, being dependent instead on frequent trips to the supermarkets, which themselves no longer store substantial supplies of foods, depending instead on frequent deliveries by truck to replenish their shelves.
Yes, houses replaced caves thousands of years ago, but it is only in the last hundred years that we have become so dependent on people we don’t know to keep us fed – interrupt those trucks for a few days, and we’re in trouble, especially in urban areas, where most of the people in this country live.
The windstorms over the holiday weekend also brought this realization to mind, as power was lost to many homes mid-day on Thanksgiving, with turkeys half-cooked in electric ovens and ice cream melting in electric freezers. PG&E, that reliable energy provider, restored service within hours, but we’d be in trouble, too, if those keepers failed to supply us constantly with power for light, refrigeration and “fire.”
In many parts of the world, power is regularly rationed, being available only at certain times of the day or week. There, the role of the keepers is not taken so much for granted. Water, too, is rationed in many places, with clear recognition of the keepers. And today’s “horses” hold only a week or two of fuel – if our keepers failed to supply gasoline whenever we need it, virtually any time of night or day, we’d be in trouble.
There are a few hard-working volunteers in our community aiming to raise awareness of these potential problems, but we are, as a community, woefully unprepared. That’s what happens to “kept” people, lulled into a false sense of security and unprepared to fend for themselves, should their keepers falter.
