Teotihuacan, Mexico State rest day or two
Posted by scott in Leg 2, tags: Batteries, Canon PowerShot, Knife, Lithium-ion battery, Shopping, Swiss Army knife
The weather took a little turn for the worse so I decided to hang out here for another day. Maybe two. It gave me a chance to wander around town in the rain which was a nice break from riding. A bike shop caught my eye so I picked up some new handlebar tape since the cork was falling apart and no amount of duct tape was keeping it together. I ended up breaking the small blade on my Swiss army knife trying to get one of the old bar ends out though. 
Knives and I don’t seem to do well together.
I also found the camera I want to get. I just can’t stand not being able to take clear, sharp pictures of things like I used to be able to do. Anyway, here’s the beauty that I’m going to keep my eye out for: Canon PowerShot SX20 IS. The lens is fast (F2.8), it has a great zoom range (28- 560 mm) and it has shutter/aperture priority modes. I’m not crazy about the AA batteries but then again maybe they’ll be better in South America. Replacing a Li-Ion battery might be tricky. It’s smaller and lighter than the DSLR I had which also has its advantages.
I was also catching up on the news and it got me thinking about something. Without getting too deep I was wondering what other people think the root cause of society’s problems are? There are a lot of symptoms like poverty, crime, wars, environmental problems, corruption, racism, etc. But is there one thing that drives all this? Is it greed? Over population? Selfishness? Apathy? Hippies? Lack of morals (religion)? Fear? This bike trip has given me some new insight into how different regions/countries see things but it’s hard to put a finger on any one thing if there even is just one thing. The Contact form up top can send email anonymously–just make up an email address.
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Hi, Scott. Regarding the AAs, when I was traveling by bike I used a $20 solar battery charger to charge AA and AAA NiMH batteries (and a plug-in charger when I had power). I carried a couple disposables in case the rechargeables gave out on me, but I never wound up using them (in 10 months of touring). If you have the chance to buy the equipment and go that route, my one warning is that solar battery chargers are not as waterproof as they look! Put your charger in a bag before mounting it on your pannier or leaving it unattended in camp. Even just condensation will corrode the connections and total the charger.
Regarding the root cause of social problems, I used to think it was overpopulation, but now I think even that is a symptom. Derrick Jensen’s excellent (but heartbreaking) book The Culture of Make Believe convinced me that the root cause is our illusion of separateness. All of science and religion tells us we’re interconnected, but it’s when we imagine ourselves to be separate from other races, other classes, other species that we commit atrocities against them, because we think we can benefit at their expense without hurting ourselves. Every time it turns out that we can’t.
Ben, first thanks for commenting. You saved me from emailing you because I really wanted your opinion. The book sounds interesting and if my circumstances were different I’d buy the book so I could answer the question I’m about to ask you. Is the conclusion of the book what I read in a review: “get rid of civilization because it is a framing condition under which each of us are raised”? Is what you mentioned, our illusion of separateness, this framing condition? In other words we’ve built ourselves an infrastructure meant to sustain us (civilization) with no regard for the impact this has on the rest of the planet (or each other)? I’d totally agree with that but something still drove us to be “civilized” in the first place right?
All people share the same genetic makeup that makes us who we are. The instinct for survival being something hard-coded into us that drives everything we do (universal among all living things). And the problem, as Andrew commented below, is that people–defined as having the ability to overcome instinct as our primary motivator and instead use rational thought (critical thinking) to guide our actions, are what need to change. We overcame our animalistic instincts in the first place (mostly). Murder, rape, theft and incest, for example, are no longer considered necessary to sustain personal survival in a civilized society. It just took time for us to evolve. Unfortunately now we’ve evolved too much. Our instinct to survive, together with advances in technology, has triggered a population explosion that we attempt to sustain by consuming more and more natural resources. I think we’re well beyond a sustainable level because we have all the symptoms of an unsustainable population: poverty, crime, wars, environmental problems, corruption, racism, etc.
Like you, I also thought overpopulation was the root cause and realized that it too must be a symptom. I think its just a byproduct of our need for self-preservation as a species. My reason for posting was to see if there was a root cause that I hadn’t considered. I thought fear was it but that to is just an instinctive way we avoid situations that we perceive to be dangerous and thus ensure our survival.
So today I’m sitting here (its still raining) wondering what would make things better. It’s not impossible right? I see it coming down to we either a) change who we are and consider the impact we have (and do something about it), b) we find a way to sustain our population through less invasive means (create food/water/shelter out of thin air) or c) we drop about 98% of our population so the planet has time to recover before we start all over again. The way we’re gong option c seems most likely but it’ll probably happen as part of a natural process (inadequate food/water supplies, rampant disease, war over depleted resources). I don’t think 98% will go; a lot will and it’ll just be miserable for everyone (except the 2% of rich people).
tl;dr: people suck. we’re screwed.
people don’t ‘have’ problems. people are problems. fix the person, fix the problem.