Fleeting Reality

Wes Flynn

, writing over at The Fleeting West wrote a scathing piece about the surge in Search and Rescue (SAR) activity in the Mountain West as a result of the area’s recent new residents who tend to be inexperienced in basic outdoors skills likely from living a lifetime in large cities away from such opportunities and who treat the actual hostile outdoors as if it were Disneyland.

The two pieces, as well as the entire ‘stack are worth a read.

Novice users are changing the face of public lands in the West

Calls for SAR triple in Colorado - it's a sign that our visitors and residents mistake the West as one big resort

One has to wonder how much overlap there is between these individuals - coined by Denver Post columnist Marjorie “Slimm” Woodriff as “Instagram tourists” who need SAR due to making facepalmworthy mistakes in “nature” and those who not only read but take seriously propaganda rags such as the New York Times who swooped in this week to save us from ourselves.

From what exactly?

Going outside!

Here’s the article itself, archived of course, to deprive the Grey Lady of advertising revenue. (Restorative Justice for the win. I’m sure they’ll understand.)

The format of the article is repetitive as can be - almost to the level of a Buzzfeed listicle. It lists an item, typically what normal people call “an extreme weather event” then follows with three items: “what to check for”, “where to check”, and “what to do.”

With all of this, these noble rescuers help a hapless person answer ye grand ol question: So how do you know when it’s safe to venture out?

Oh what would we do without you, New York Times?

If only we lived in a world where such advice given was common sense.

That word just might exist beyond ya’ll’s heads but you’ll need a better map than this.

One furthermore has to wonder if there’s a correlation between people with such a disconnect from “nature” who are in need of such “guidance” and their proclivity to become Climate Crisis Hysterics.

Public

‘s Michael Shellenberger asked this question some time ago regarding forest fires.

The Reason They Fear Fire As A Violation Of Nature Is Because They’re So Alienated From It

These are often people who live in some of the greatest conditions ever imagined over the course of human history and have everything brought to them (likely by everybody but themselves) - in other words are members of what Christopher Lasch called “the thinking class.¹”

The thinking classes are fatally removed from the physical side of life… Their only relation to productive labor is that of consumers. They have no experience of making anything substantial or enduring. They live in a world of abstractions and images, a simulated world that consists of computerized models of reality – “hyperreality,” as it’s been called – as distinguished from the palatable, immediate, physical reality inhabited by ordinary men and women. Their belief in “social construction of reality” – the central dogma of postmodernist thought – reflects the experience of living in an artificial environment from which everything that resists human control (unavoidably, everything familiar and reassuring as well) has been rigorously excluded. Control has become their obsession. In their drive to insulate themselves against risk and contingency – against the unpredictable hazards that afflict human life – the thinking classes have seceded not just from the common world around them but from reality itself.

Christopher Lasch in The Revolt of the Elites

That’s all.

1. An even more in depth discussion of this concept, as well as the quote, is the excellent

N.S. Lyons

piece Reality Honks Back