Quail, feisbuc and I nearly had a car crash. (Quarantine Diary 1)
Versión en español
Yesterday I decided that I would not enter facebook. I have always been a feisbuquero (someone who spends a lot of time on FB), but I got scared of the time I spent being stuck to the screen of the cell phone and the overdose of information I was having. It was quite difficult for the first eight hours. My fi ngers moved, without asking me, towards the little blue icon.
I guess my attention was diverted from the cell phone when the quail died. My mom had a quail, well, actually she had had about four, but this is the only one that had survived more than a few days. It turns out that poultry do not like to have a lot of movement, so we probably shouldn’t’ve brought’em every month from Mx City to Puebla and back again. It also turns out that they are stressed by living close to cats and dogs – and we have eleve of those - and certain noises that are inevitable in the city. It was almost a miracle that this one had not gone before, like the others.
The knowledge that we had at home about caring for birds was nil (almost still is) and this is a very rare thing. Every day we eat chicken eggs, from time to time we eat chicken meat, and we completely ignore what it takes to put any of those on our table. The same happens with facebook, I know how to use so many of the things available at the touch of an icon, but I totally ignore where all that information is stored or where it passes on its way to a place I also ignore.
From my experiences in rural communities, I do not know a single campesino who ignores what it takes to put a certain food on the table and who, when he talks to a neighbor or compadre, ignores what it could happen with that information in the town. .
Urbanites live on chains of production and distribution of goods and services, of which we ignore almost everything. We live in a bubble of objects and icons that we can push, eat, buy, place, slide, grab, scrub, swipe, connect and so on, all at our fingertips and out of our minds.
The last time I was in the Sierra de Puebla, a Canadian mining company operated in the region. I do not know what they extracted, but it was surely the beginning of one of those chains that will later end up in some city’s bubble. I had a slight car accident because the mining company had put into operation some heavy transport trucks that were too big for the small two-lane mountain road, wuthout shoulders and full of curves and ups and downs. At least thirty of these trucks circulated a day. In the maneuver to prevent one of those from colliding head-on with me when he came out of a curve invading my lane - which they did all the time and everywhere - I hit the facia of the car behind me. I was lucky, because a few weeks later, a boy who lived on the roadside was run over and died.
The family of the girl who was driving the car I hit, told me that trucks often crush smaller cars, they do not stop and it is not possible to make them respond, that once a federal highway officer followed one of the trucks until the place where they carry the cargo, he was waiting outside the company and by the end of the day they came out to say that he would have to speak with the company's lawyers.
It may be that the mining company has brought some jobs to the region – and we still have to check fo the wages and labor rights - but it did not adapt the roads to its trucks, it did not instruct its people to take responsibility for anything, there was no improvement seen in any services. Until that moment they had killed who knows how many people just with the trucks and not to mention the holes in the hills that are visible from Google Earth and who knows what they will do to the ecosystem of people who live in nature.
My question is, when the miner arrived, did they tell people that all this was going to happen? Those of us at the end of the chain don't know anything about it and those at the beginning find out too late. The overdose of information that I was scared of these days is a lot, but it tells us very little. Why would development have as an immediate consequence ignorance and dispossession?
Yesterday I decided that I would not enter facebook. I have always been a feisbuquero (someone who spends a lot of time on FB), but I got scared of the time I spent being stuck to the screen of the cell phone and the overdose of information I was having. It was quite difficult for the first eight hours. My fi ngers moved, without asking me, towards the little blue icon.
I guess my attention was diverted from the cell phone when the quail died. My mom had a quail, well, actually she had had about four, but this is the only one that had survived more than a few days. It turns out that poultry do not like to have a lot of movement, so we probably shouldn’t’ve brought’em every month from Mx City to Puebla and back again. It also turns out that they are stressed by living close to cats and dogs – and we have eleve of those - and certain noises that are inevitable in the city. It was almost a miracle that this one had not gone before, like the others.
The knowledge that we had at home about caring for birds was nil (almost still is) and this is a very rare thing. Every day we eat chicken eggs, from time to time we eat chicken meat, and we completely ignore what it takes to put any of those on our table. The same happens with facebook, I know how to use so many of the things available at the touch of an icon, but I totally ignore where all that information is stored or where it passes on its way to a place I also ignore.
From my experiences in rural communities, I do not know a single campesino who ignores what it takes to put a certain food on the table and who, when he talks to a neighbor or compadre, ignores what it could happen with that information in the town. .
Urbanites live on chains of production and distribution of goods and services, of which we ignore almost everything. We live in a bubble of objects and icons that we can push, eat, buy, place, slide, grab, scrub, swipe, connect and so on, all at our fingertips and out of our minds.
The last time I was in the Sierra de Puebla, a Canadian mining company operated in the region. I do not know what they extracted, but it was surely the beginning of one of those chains that will later end up in some city’s bubble. I had a slight car accident because the mining company had put into operation some heavy transport trucks that were too big for the small two-lane mountain road, wuthout shoulders and full of curves and ups and downs. At least thirty of these trucks circulated a day. In the maneuver to prevent one of those from colliding head-on with me when he came out of a curve invading my lane - which they did all the time and everywhere - I hit the facia of the car behind me. I was lucky, because a few weeks later, a boy who lived on the roadside was run over and died.
The family of the girl who was driving the car I hit, told me that trucks often crush smaller cars, they do not stop and it is not possible to make them respond, that once a federal highway officer followed one of the trucks until the place where they carry the cargo, he was waiting outside the company and by the end of the day they came out to say that he would have to speak with the company's lawyers.
It may be that the mining company has brought some jobs to the region – and we still have to check fo the wages and labor rights - but it did not adapt the roads to its trucks, it did not instruct its people to take responsibility for anything, there was no improvement seen in any services. Until that moment they had killed who knows how many people just with the trucks and not to mention the holes in the hills that are visible from Google Earth and who knows what they will do to the ecosystem of people who live in nature.
My question is, when the miner arrived, did they tell people that all this was going to happen? Those of us at the end of the chain don't know anything about it and those at the beginning find out too late. The overdose of information that I was scared of these days is a lot, but it tells us very little. Why would development have as an immediate consequence ignorance and dispossession?
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