From: Robert Hart <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
This is where the "I just want to go gliding!" approach favoured by some on
this list (and out there in the wonderful wide sky we all share) collapses.
Such an attitude is pernicious as it eats our own gliding future, by
consuming without returning. Even when this attitude is extended to include
the immediate club, the focus is still too self centred as it ignores
(wilfully or through ignorance) the myriad of other work that has to be
conducted out beyond the club, for there even to be a club.
Great straw man, Robert. I know nobody who's said, on this list or anywhere
else, "I just want to go gliding".
If you mean me (and as the only parade rainmaker at the moment that seems
likely), I said that the most useful thing I could do, in fact the ONLY
thing I could do (and you could do too), was to help ensure my own club
survived. If we're talking about the survival of gliding (and you certainly
appear to be), then the survival of our own club is fundamental. I
sometimes feel that we lose our sense of proportion on this list and Kevin
Roden's sad story reminds us what the priorities are. Without GFA accident
reports, we can still go gliding. Without our club with its field, its tug,
its instructors and its gliders, we can't.
Gliding existed without and before all the supra-club apparatus that so
engages your attention. I find it difficult to take your cries of "We're
all doomed!" seriously when you spend most of your efforts discussing in
great earnestness topics such as whether the GFA should publish accident
reports. If gliding is facing certain death, why are you playing with
trivia?
Nothing you've said about repaying debts or keeping the infrastructure
contradicts what I said about giving 100% to the survival of each club. The
clubs provide the essential infrastructure and to its instructors and
officers, I owe and hope to repay debts. What I see on this list though is
none of that. I see people arguing about the number of angels that can
dance on the head of a pin - or whether the number of US glider pilots are
more accurately recorded by FAA licences versus SSA membership. This
MATTERS??? And glider pilots in Australia can make some useful comment on
it??? Get real! (I learned that from the juniors at Leeton!).
Cheers,
Graeme Cant
For any of us to "just go gliding" we need far more than the surface
appearance, although that in itself is considerable when one thinks of the
immediate needs to get into the air. As with any significantly complex
activity, there are levels of interdependence that we ignore at our long
term peril.
Many of us were trained, encouraged and, where necessary, prodded forward
by people who felt that by so doing they were repaying a debt to the people
who trained them. This 'repaying forward' is an important part of what
holds all voluntary organisations together: without it there are no
instructors, no club fleet maintainers, no tug pilots, no ground crew.
If even provision for these obvious needs is denied (as they are in the
worst case of "I just want to go gliding!"), that is a local disaster - but
at least it affects only that club.
Hidden beneath all manifestations of this philosophy, however, lies the
reality of the death of gliding in this country. "I just want to go
gliding" gnaws away the roots of the ecosystem in which our personal
gliding exists. I fully intend to be gliding well into my 70s as, I
suspect, do most of my age cohort. At the current rate of decline in
gliding, that may well not be possible - and it certainly will not be
possible if we "just go gliding".
We all need to 'repay forwards' to ensure that we can still "just go
gliding" in 20 years. That means finding our own individual ways to
contribute to the ecosystem that sustains our flight - and there is such a
wide choice that there is a place for every disparate talent.
"Just going gliding" makes you a future eater: but you are eating your own
gliding future as well as that of everyone else.
--
Robert Hart [EMAIL PROTECTED]
+61 (0)438 385 533 http://www.hart.wattle.id.au
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