When you think about it, a jump from Minneapolis to Dalkeith, Scotland, is a journey both in miles and in time. Nothing in Minneapolis is much older than the US Civil War, and there's very little of that about. The palace in Dalkeith, Scotland, where Joe High School, OLGS, and I are now installed, is built on the foundations of a 12th-13th century castle. But it's not just the age of the structures that differs. It's an attitude about how one should live that appears foreign, even though the house is equipped with wi-fi, and KLM will deliver the missing luggage to the front door. The issue of resources, especially heat and electricity, is a big one in this house, with warnings everywhere to turn out lights, turn off the space heaters (don't ask), and guard against the insidious dripping of faucets.
Americans live in a land of seemingly inexhaustible resources, with cheap access to almost everything. There are cheap meals, cheap gas, large cars, cheap housing, and a throw-away attitude about all of these things. In the rest of the world, most middle class people do not live in large detached houses with three car garages. It's incomprehensible to most peoploe that they could, or should live like that. And the Brits, while certainly immersed in the modern world, still exhibit a slight WWII rationing mentality. Hence the notion that there is a cost, however, slight, to using heat, eletctricity, etc. We could probably use a little bit of that.
2 comments:
You've hit on the thing that is most interesting to me... the lack of history we have here in Minnesota. We have wilderness - which feels eternally the same, outside of time. But even when I worked at a living history museum (from the beginnings of white occupation) it represented only a few generations. Who might we Americans be if we had more history?
um, of course, you Mainers have a whole lot more history than us Minnesotans.
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