Alb. Vecinii mei batavi, înfofoliți ca pentru expediție, își curăță trotuarele cu gesturi aproape vesele, de copii puși pe șotii. Zâmbesc și mă salută. La mulți ani. Beste Wensen. E frig în Olanda la minus patru grade. Îmi amintesc de alte ierni, cu troiene mai înalte decât ochii mei de copil, ierni cu Crivăț și ger și foc de lemne în sobă, și îi salut la rându-mi. Beste Wensen. Cele mai bune dorințe. Pentru noi toți.

E liniștit orașul, tăcut sub două palme de zăpadă, uimit pesemne de această iarnă neașteptată și străină, o imigrantă rusoaică trecută de prima tinerețe, cu un zâmbet șmecheresc și ochi albaștri-oțelii. Copii gălăgioși, cu zulufi blonzi își încearcă patinele pe canalele înghețate bocnă peste noapte, sub privirile îngăduitoare ale părinților. Doi oameni de zăpadă cu priviri agere și nas de morcov stau strajă intrării în parc. Este voie?

De rătăcit ne-am rătăcit cu toții în această nouă, neașteptată Narnie. Puțini dintre noi însă ne dorim să nu găsim drumul înapoi – sau cel puțin nu încă. Mai lasă-ne un pic afară, mamă, nu e întuneric încă și ne jucăm așa de frumos… Luminile orașului se aprind una câte una, umbre galbene plutind pe albastrul zăpezii înserate. Închid ochii și gust în vântul iernii miresmele zăpezii de-altădată.

Peter, a Canadian citizen, was on his way back to Canada after helping a friend move house to Nebraska over the weekend. He was stopped at the border crossing at Port Huron, Michigan by U.S. border police for a search of his rental vehicle. When Peter got out of the car and questioned the nature of the search, the gang of border guards subjected him to a beating, restrained him and pepper sprayed him. At the end of it, local police laid a felony charge of assault against a federal officer against Peter. On Wednesday, he posted bond and walked across the border to Canada in shirtsleeves (he was released by Port Huron
officials with his car and possessions locked in impound, into a winter storm that evening). He’s home safe. For now. But he has to go back to Michigan to face the charge brought against him.

Several blogs have taken up this story, most notably Cory Doctorow over on boingboing and John Scalzi on Whatever. Compared to those two oceans this post is just a raindrop, but I’ve decided to put this up anyway, because I like Peter Watts both as a writer and as a blogger — reading his ‘crawl is so enjoyable it must be illegal, at least in the State of Michigan. Also, because the perspective of going through what he did just for crossing a border — in this day and age -  scares the hell outta me.

I’ve donated some of my cold hard cash to go towards his legal defence fund — it’s the least I can do after reading his books for free. That’s right, you’ll find all of his books freely available to download on his site.Read them, copy them, send them to your friends. I’m sure Peter wouldn’t mind. Here’s a donation link to the backlist page on Peter’s website.

A simple measure of just how successful a predator you are is making a list of the five most frightful things that you believe threatening to your existence right at this moment. Go on, I’ll wait. And I’m willing to bet, dear reader, that by the time you come back, at least three out of five perils on that list are caused, or relate to fellow humans.

We used to fear rustles in the grass, shadows at the cave entrance, footprints in the snow. Now we fear chain collisions, market crashes, identity thieves. How many times per day does an average human cringe in fear of being eaten alive? I’m talking about fear based on actual fact, not the poor souls suffering from phagophobia. Unless you clean the tiger cage at the zoo, I’m guessing your answer is “not at all”.

We build our fortresses in such a way that nothing in the real world can even dream of being our hunter. We fight with mice, mosquitoes and cockroaches – pests, instead of perils. Our biggest fears are hinged on fellow humans, or natural disasters, or disease. We have no natural enemies in the real world, so we imagine unnatural ones — werewolves, vampires, aliens, perilous man-eating beasts. We tell stories about them, about how big and fearful and intelligent they are, how thirsty for our blood — and about how we still win in the end.

You know what omnivore means, right? It comes from ancient Greek. It means, literally, “eats everything”. And we do. Eat everything, that is. Some of the things we ate we probably spat out in disgust, but ate them we did. The Moa birds – we ate those into extinction. The dodos also went their merry way because of us. Our agriculture and habitats irreversibly changed ecosystems, completely destroyed others. Today’s civilization is built on oil – which is nothing but the transformed remains of long-dead organisms. That’s why it’s called “fossil” fuel.

They say love conquers all, but it’s our hunger. We’re hungry for time, we’re hungry for space. We’re hungry for knowledge, sometimes. We’re hungry for more and more resources. We’re hungry for energy. We are a hungry, hungry species, fellow humans.

And we’re well on our way to eating our planet.

I was going to write a post about risk and reward today. About executive pay, and how it relates to responsibility in business. The news have been abuzz these days with managers and executive officers raking up the millions in bonuses, even if their companies don’t function very well. Which is another way of saying “bankrupt”.

I was going to write it – in fact I got most of the way through, but I got stopped in my tracks. What have I got to do with all this? I don’t even know what a million dollars looks like. Most of us don’t, and most likely never will.

It’s an alien world, the one I was going to write about. What I learned of it are disparate, small, loose pieces of a puzzle I never got to see before it broke down. What do I know about how these people take decisions? They’re flipping coins in their penthouse offices, for all we know. Or maybe they rent time on SETI@home and fire up huge, complicated social simulations that model market behaviour for the next 5 to 10 years.

We hear the stories of CEO excess, the unbelievable nerve of some early-pensioned bankers, the huge stock incentives that compensate for those symbolic one-dollar salaries. The private jets. The yachts. The lifestyle. The news would boil them alive, just. And we still know nothing about them.

Footballers, we can understand. They too rake millions, but we know why. They can hit a ball. We can hit a ball. We can relate. CEOs, they don’t even speak the same language. They gather thousands upon thousands of air miles a year – the closest any living human ever got to be Superman, with the notable exception of skydivers. They choose, and the companies follow. Like the clans of old, we follow, while at the same time asking for their blood. Metaphorically, of course – that’s what the tabloids are for. Maybe we’re envious. Maybe. Maybe we just want to prove they’re human.

Oh yes we are, don’t pretend otherwise. Those celebrities, they got talent. They got a chance to use it. We don’t grudge them that. These managers, they’ve just been working hard. You could have done that too, if you had a vision of that future. They made it, that’s reason enough to hate. Isn’t it, my dear lynch mob?

The thing is, we have it easy. Eight, nine hours of work, then our work is done, we get to go home and relax. A good manager gets to go home and worry some more. Was that the good decision just now? Was that the good strategy? Where are we going? Where are we going to be in five years’ time? Am I letting my people down?

Yes. They mean us. The good ones always do.

Back in the days of  the Cold War, we though the third great world confrontation was months, if not days ahead. We had a visceral fear of the Nuclear Holocaust, with all that entailed – the millions of deaths, the fallout, the radiation poisoning, the endless nuclear winter… A whole generation grew up taught to think in terms of us and them, fed on fear and propaganda, but mostly fear. We had the Berlin crisis and the Cuban missile crisis. We had the standoffs, the nuclear tests, the war games and the wars-by-proxy. We even had Comrade Krushchev telling the West quite literally “we will bury you”. The year was 1956. People were listening to Elvis and building fallout shelters in the backyard.

But the years went by, and crisis after crisis was averted by means of diplomacy and concessions on either side. Leaders came and went, but the doctrine remained the same. Arm yourself more than the other guy. Talk tough. Make a show of strength. DO NOT USE IT. It kept on going for 40+ years, right until the Berlin wall collapsed, taking with it an ideology and a way of life that dominated the XXth century. There were, of course, several occasions where war was narrowly averted – for instance this was one of them. But the thing is, it didn’t happen, and that is probably why today we are alive and well and able to click our way around the Internet, instead of scavenging for tins in the ruins of the Western civilization.

What I belatedly came to realise is that World War III did actually happen. In the military High Commands of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, on the boards – and later the computer screens – of intelligence analysts, in the nightmares of world leaders, World War III happened over and over again. And no matter where it played, no matter how it started, it always ended the same way. Nobody won.

That is why, in this nuclear age, the era of the great war has passed. Never again will we see tens of millions of soldiers marching across the world to re-enact the clash of the Titans. The political leadership of any faction, group or country may still be use the Cold War rhetoric – indeed, North Korea still does it to this day – but they will always stop short of action. That is why I am not concerned, for instance, about Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Oh, they might huff and puff about the great Iranian nation, but the most a nuclear Iran can hope to get out of an alleged military nuclear program is a stronger position at the bargaining table.

This does not mean we saw the end of wars. There will still be skirmishes, thawing conflicts, African civil wars, nationalist guerrillas, jihadist terrorists and Somali pirates, and many more. Plenty of opportunities to field test the new generation of weapons and to let the new recruits cut their teeth on a real theatre of confrontation. There won’t be peace in my lifetime, no matter how hard we may wish for it.

Still, one can always hope.

Listen to Edward James Olmos - known as Admiral Adama from “Battlestar Galactica” –  speaking on race at the United Nations:

In my mind I was the hero. Oh, the volumes I could write about the gleaming sword, the shining armour, the white faithful steed and the rest of the accoutrements that I put on every morning… In my head, you see, I wasn’t taking the bus to school, I was riding for justice. And learning. Six hours a day, except for sports class, which didn’t really count, but it was fun nevertheless. After all, heroes are allowed to have fun, aren’t they?

One side-effect of being a hero is that you tend to be very judgemental toward people. The process is quite simple — it begins with “If I was in their place…”, then sword! armour! shield! ride to save the day!, and it ends invariably with a look halfway between pity and disgust towards the unsavoury compromises chosen by said person. Chosen in place of the “full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes” approach that you envision yourself doing. It is the privilege and pleasure of young people everywhere to save the day, sometimes even more than once, be the hero and maybe get the girl. In their heads.

Of course, as we get older, things get much more… gray, shall we say. You make mistakes of your own, ones which you cannot readily justify and absorb inside your hero persona. You make compromises. You live with them. And you begin to understand the world a little better.

Because, you see, when the hero slays the dragon, he gets to ride off into the sunset and out of the story, sometimes accompanied by the girl of his dreams. And we never find out how it really turns up. Like, for instance, when he realises that the dragons were an intelligent species that could have lived quietly alongside humans, enriching both our lives and theirs, only they never got the chance, because the hero killed them all. Or that time when the princess, sick and tired of his heroing around instead of helping take care of the kids, goes back to her mother and takes said children with her. Or when he hung up his sword, promising never to use it again, only for his children to hate him for it — because there’s this ogre, you see, and he could easily have taken care of it, but he promised his wife he’d never… And so it goes.

So next time you’re in a rush to judge somebody, allow at least a tiny little doubt in your mind, saying you might be wrong. Saying you might have done the same, had you been in their place. It is quite easy, being the hero.Much harder, being human.

When you get your driver’s license and you go driving on your own for the first time, you’re three parts excited to one part scared. Everything is new, everything happens at once, you have to pay attention and you are doing an amazing thing, it’s an achievement, LOOK OUT! TREE! phew that was close. Where was I? Oh yes. It’s a wonderful sensation, a whole new universe you’re discovering, boundless and filled with joy.

Then, come Monday morning, you decide to drive to school (or work, as the situation may be). You sit in the traffic for an hour and you still do not mind, because it’s your first hour of traffic and you’re so absorbed by the fact that you remembered how to use the clutch pressed halfway just so, and never once stalled the engine that you fail to get irritated at all by the snail pace and the fumes and the noise. Indeed, you’re getting out of the car still smiling, like you used to smile after getting a good grade in physics class in your 7th grade, and you decide there and then to have a great day as well. Even if it still is a Monday.

This is how you start learning how to be a driver. Because you’re not a driver yet; you’ve only just learned to move a car from A to B without having bits of it fall off. In the next couple of months you will slowly become accustomed to “feeling” the car, the engine, knowing what shift you’re in (if you’re driving a shift) without looking down at the stick. You learn where your boundaries lay when you’re at the wheel, and your parallel parking improves. You begin to know where is your car in relationship with the road and the other cars. And you realize one simple truth: this driving thing is EASY, you were scared for naught, why did you put it of as long as you did is really beyond you. You discover that you enjoy driving; it’s fun, relaxing, and it gives you a simple sense of grown-up purpose and control that  few other things did until now.

As days and months go by, you’re becoming more and more confident in yourself and your abilities. You learn to know your car and its limits. You might even get a ticket or two, just because you got curious at the wrong place and the wrong time. But that’s normal, isn’t it? Everybody gets caught every once in a while, and you know you weren’t in any real danger, Officer, it’s just this stupid law, why, in Germany they don’t even have speed limits! Your car does everything you tell it to, it is now more than a car, it’s your personal space, you have your music, your pine-shaped air freshener, your lucky dice (or maybe a cute furry animal) keep you company on the dash. You’re a driver, hands down.

And this is your turning point.

It usually comes about 2–3 years after you got your license, for some sooner rather than later. If you’re lucky, it’s going to be just a small accident; nothing beyond a few scratches and a wounded ego. If you’re not so lucky… well, let’s not go there now, shall we?

For this to mean something, you have to be in that special state that the ancient Greeks called “hubris” — defiance of the gods. And that comes to us all after a while — especially to those who love driving. It’s a feeling of supreme confidence in your abilities. You think you can control your car in any circumstances; you notice (sometimes out loud) the people that make mistakes on the road; you can drive and talk on your mobile or drive and read a map or drive and eat a sandwich at the same time, because that’s how awesome you are. And one day you do something stupid and you don’t get away with it. You can’t believe your eyes; this is not happening, you are a really good driver, really, and maybe the other guy just hit the brakes too hard, and how could you have known that? There was rain that day, or you were tired, or the phone just rang — a million excuses come forth, ready to be used. And you should shun each and every one.

Every good driver I know has had an accident like this in his past. And what made him a good driver instead of a reckless and dangerous road menace was the fact that he assumed his mistake. He was able to tell himself: “I was really stupid that day. I should have kept my distance. I should have slowed down. I shouldn’t have assumed that the guy would stay in his lane.” His lesson was hard, but fair, and once learned, was never forgotten again.

And the lesson was this. Just because you’re at the wheel doesn’t mean you’re in control. Life is full of surprises, some good, some bad, some downright ugly. There is no way you can predict and avoid each and every one of them. You make a mistake, you assume it, you learn from it and you move on. That’s the best thing you can do. Indeed, sometimes it’s the only thing you can do.

Just drive.

Like any child of that age, I was really into adventures. It started with fairy tales — folk legends, the Greek mythology (the children’s edition, I’ve got to the heavy stuff quite a few years later), 1001 Arabian Nights, novelised history… Then I ran into Jules Verne, Karl May and Alexandre Dumas (all of them translated in my native Romanian, of course) and that sealed the deal. I was hooked.

As years went by, I kept on going through miles and miles of fine typography. “Shogun”, James Clavell’s masterpiece that dragged me kicking and screaming into adolescence. Frank Herbert’s “Dune”, with its unparalleled world and insightful characters. Tolkien. Asimov. Clarke. Orson Scott Card. Then Dostoievski, Gabriel Garcia Marques, Hugo and Sartre. Mircea Eliade and Eugen Ionescu. I was moving up in the world. Thomas Mann. Herman Hesse. John Fowles. Heavy, heavy books that I was struggling to understand, complex characters and motivations, refining years and years of the author’s experience and shaped by mature thoughts and desires. Like many before me, I’ve moved then to the arid world of philosophy. Plato. Descartes. Hegel. Kant.

And then there was Nietzsche. And then I stopped.

There’s no describing the sensation after finishing “Thus spoke Zarathustra”. It was as if a perfect mirror was suddenly and without warning placed before me. There I was, trying to find truth among the ink-stained souls of long-gone trees. While I was reading, the world was floating by.

Thus passed the longest two months of my life. No books were open during that period, except for the manuals needed for school. Time was gained, and invested in introspection and long walks. Battles were lost. Battles were won. The world kept on spinning, indifferent to my book-free existence. Indeed, friends, adolescence is truly the Age of the Extreme.

At the end of those months, however, I came to a conclusion. Books were no longer to be read as guiding lights, shining a path upon which one should be striving to walk. Instead, they were to be companions, friends to whom one would turn for comfort. They were objects of art, not worship, and needed to be treated as such. The truth was hiding elsewhere — but that, friends, is a different story, for another sleepless night.

In the years that passed I found more great writers, storytellers, bards and poets. I couldn’t remember them all if I tried, so I won’t even try. What I belatedly came to realize was that my insight of those many years ago, hard-earned as it seemed, was also wrong. Books did left their mark on me, through the choices they made me imagine, the points of view they advocated, the many sorts and flavours of human emotions and social interactions. Books taught me politics and honour and why cats always land upright. They made me laugh. They made me bleed. They made me who I am.

You are what you read.

1. Book Readers Anonymous — and if it doesn’t exist, it really should