Australia 2016 - Getting There

The first big thing is getting here. The three flights - Seattle-LA, LA-Sydney, Sydney-Perth - combined to make 23.5 hours in the air. Larry calculated total travel time at 37 hours. Perth is the most isolated city in the world. We believe it!

The flight to Sydney was in a behemoth Airbus 380 - the world’s biggest passenger plane. It was a remarkably smooth flight, but it sure does hold a lot of people! The accouterments weren’t as good as a Boeing plane, I thought, but I am prejudiced at that point, although the flight attendant whose jump seat was across from our seats independently volunteered the same opinion.

Long travel time and giant planes encourage profound thinking on big topics, and I was helped in this by a New York Times movie review of the Son of Saul. Here’s the link: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/son-of-saul-kierkegaard-and-the-holocaust/. The ideas here are well worth pondering as the objectifying rhetoric of the political campaigns gets even worse. The author writes: There is less of a tendency for modern humans to live thoroughly immersed in life, experiencing it, and more of a tendency of being mostly distracted by its abstractions, by all the ways our culture conceptually frames our existence as individuals, Democrats and Republicans, man and women, one percenters, workers, consumers, and so on. And here, as a result, is the problem: by becoming less subjective, we become more cut off from sources of meaning and value. identifying the naming of categories for persons is certainly true in my (subjective) experience. Our own state of Washington, which used to be a model of good democracy with people from both parties in significant offices in our government, shifted to the totally objective mode when the political parties insisted on a party-dominated primary election. It used to only be caucuses for the purpose of delegates to the state conventions. Now it’s another media draw, although the primary itself is meaningless. It’s another sad commentary on our larger civic problems of isolation and separation, in other words, objectifying one another. So these are the loft thoughts I had as we were carried across the Pacific onto another continent and into another WA (Western Australia).

Another interesting aspect of our flight was that we crossed the International Dateline on February 29. I posed this question to our grandsons on the way to the airport: If we cross the International Dateline on “Leap Day” have we missed it entirely because it only happens once every four years? Or, do we really get the time back when we return to GMT -8 (a.k.a. Pacific Standard - or Daylight it will be -  Time) ? They thought that was a good question (they’re 11 and 8) and gave it some serious thought. The conclusion was that we haven’t lost any minutes of our lives, but we’ll certainly have to wait another four years to experience another “Leap Day.”