Wednesday reading, fish 'n' birds, and messages on trucks

[asakiyume]

In Aventura en el Amazonas both Mayam and Nashi are learning about the chain of life--Mayam when her mother talks to her about piranhas and other carnivorous fish, and Nashi when he sees a cayman gobble up a roseate spoonbill.

"Some fish feed on others," their mother tells Mayam, who is feeling like it would be good to get rid of some of the more marauding of the the carnivorous fish. "It's like a staircase: if you take away one step, all of it comes crashing down."

And

"Nature knows how to do its thing, even if at first we don't understand" says their father to Nashi.

I didn't see a roseate spoonbill, but I did see a harpy eagle, with its fierce, strange face. (The one I saw looked like the one on the right--photo from the Miami zoo's Harpy Eagle Project)



And I didn't fish for piranhas, but I had some kind of carnivorous fish one meal--and I saw a truly gigantic fish in the market. (It's a bit daunting--it's behind a cut)




Yesterday I took Little Springtime and her fiancée to see my father, and during the drive, I passed a truck with a message on the back of its trailer: "Don't like trucks? Buy less stuff!"

Very strange! The driver feels upset about other drivers, presumably car drivers, not "liking" trucks? But the driver is in a great huge 18-wheeler--why should they fuss about the opinions of car drivers? How can it possibly affect them? (Where are they hearing all this negativity?) I'm pretty neutral on trucks, but my impression is that people who feel negatively about them are mainly expressing nervousness about driving near them--or are complaining about bad driving on the part of the trucks--not, y'know, saying trucks are evil or that trucks should disappear, which is kind of what the driver's message seemed to imply.

"Buy less stuff" is disingenuous when all sorts of necessities travel by truck, but okay, let's say people could truly buy less stuff ... then the driver of the truck might lose their job? So on that level too the message was a head scratcher.

Comments

[lilysea]

I have bad feelings about long-distance trucks (city to city, as opposed to within-the-one-city), and those bad feelings are

- rail transport causes much less carbon emissions for long distance freight than trucks do

- long distance truck driving has a high level of deaths in accidents, both for truck drivers and for drivers around them.

[sartorias]

That bird on the right is very striking in its fierce way!

[rushthatspeaks]

I suspect the truck sticker is meant to be sarcasm, and that the truck driver is trying to point out how dependent everyone is on trucks, because anyone who thinks about it for a little while will realize how difficult it would be to 'buy less stuff' to the extent where we are no longer dependent on trucks. There's that whole right-wing political thing in the U.S. and Canada where some truckers have been calling themselves salt-of-the-earth working-class patriots who are being unjustly persecuted, and doing things like that convoy which was so obstructive in Toronto. So this reads to me like an Everyone Hates My Poor, Embattled Honest Profession Without Which None Of Your Lives Would Work sticker.

And I'm like yeah, truckers are overworked, understaffed, and underpaid, and the unions should be more helpful on that, as soon as possible, please. But what truckers are not, in my experience at least, but also from what I know of the U.S. culture in general, though of course there may be divergent subgroups-- what truckers are not is generally vilified. Especially not to the point where that would be an even vaguely reasonable reaction.

[minoanmiss]

*reads and contemplates and rulls eyes at defensive trucker*

[rimturse]

Harpy Eagles are so fascinating. I'd love to see one. :)

Devourings and speculation about truckers

[amaebi]

What a good mother! That's how I tried to approach natural history with the then-tiny chun man. In a media environment that, to my horror, *villified* some carnivorous animals and tried to acculturate children to d=fearing them.

(When he was three, Chun Woo told us Three Terrifying Stories:
1. There was a Great Big Shark!
2. There was Nile Crocodile!
3. There was a Big Shell full of Hot Water!
It was very clear that that last story was Most Terrifying Ever.)

As for truckers: Much like you, I didn't give them much thought after the age of about five, until I was regularly driving infant Chun Woo across the breadth of Wyoming, stopping at truck stops for gas, diaper changes, and so forth. Pre Chun Woo I hadn't grasped how small US persons tend to go through a transportation stage, in which fascination with Thomas the Tank Engine and trains go along with interest in trucks. So Chun Woo loved seeing truck drivers, and eventually having few-words conversations with them. One of them gave Chun Woo some small thing I can't recall, and told me in a very heartfelt way, "Toddlers are the best friends we truckers have."

And I thought then about the long isolations of truck drivers, how contracts have over time(*) decreased remuneration while shipper speed requirements and government regulations limiting continuous drive time(**) have straitened.

So I can understand truckers feeling separate from a lot of the US human world-- and that as well as hard work for less and less pay can lead to a feeling of being held in hatred or contempt.

* Since 1980, in the years in which unions have been vilified and weakened, and the public has been brought to think of labor as a class, as a bunch of mendicants.
** This regulation is apparently actually pretty strictly enforced, and penalties are too great for the individual truckers who wind up paying them to be fast and loose with.