Turkey and Construction

I like to read blogs and watch TED talks. So naturally, staying home with a fever allows me to catch up from Thanksgiving travel.

Tuned In had a great perspective on Turkey and Thanksgiving. How often do we cook turkey aside from Thanksgiving or order turkey from a restaurant?  I never considered this take on turkey. It was ingrained. I need to enhance my turkey perspective since i know that turkeys are now bred for Thanksgiving. Is this a sustainable practice?

Earlier I watched a builder (Dan Phillips) discuss the philosophical underpinning behind modern construction techniques/practices. he said there are two groups of people for which I am sure the spellings are completely wrong: Dionysians and Appelonians. The former demands perfection and elegance, brand new materials, constructed perfectly, no imperfections anywhere. This view of modern construction produces a lot of waste. Waste that this builder uses to build imperfect houses. And they are interesting! Clearly I am a practical Appelonian who can live with flaws. Things only need to be fixed when they cease to function. When they cease to function you harvest the parts, or break them, to create new parts.  His closing statement said that we have put vanity at the foundation of our lives. And this is not sustainable.

This was a fascinating talk on many levels. So why blog about Turkey and Philosophical Construction Practices?  Both are ingrained into our perspective of how things are. Right Now. As a society we need to be concerned with how we want the future to unfold. We want our perspective to be rich, dense, and broad. This is how we make our traditions sustainable. We need to be aware of the consequences or at least put some forethought into what the consequences might be. Our founding fathers did and stated this. They wrote it down in many ways and acknowledged the imperfections both in the document itself and themselves. That is pretty profound and very rich in perspective.

We are failing in this regard. Our perspective is about wants in the here and now. We all need to get back to needs. And perhaps it starts with changing our perspective. Unless you try to serve ham at Thanksgiving.