Canaries in the coal mine

 Canaries in the Coal Mine

As much as I feel disgust toward the January 6th rabble and the Canadian KKKonvoy, and my neighbour across the alley who called me a Nazi jew, I can well understand what has them climbing walls and semi-trailering across the country. The world as they know it is dying, even more directly and precipitously than the planet as a whole is dying. Drawn out from their squalid double-wides and emboldened by a deranged narcissist, then confronted with the harsh reality of economic marginalization, these struggling masses of threatened white supremacists have arisen en masse.

Normal doesn't live here anymore. Beaver Cleaver (you'd never get away with that name in this day and age) has left the building along with Wally, June, and Ward. Andy is no longer the sheriff of Mayberry and the Six Million Dollar Man is doing windshields for spare change at Hollywood and Vine. Jackie Gleason would never get away with threatening to punch Alice to the moon and the Happy Days crown are either dead or in rehab. A nation founded on racism and slavery is no longer safe for Jedediah, or Big Frank, or Penny or Marsha. Because a black man threw the lie in their faces.

A lifetime ago there was a black president who was more articulate and poised than the Caucasians who bracketed his tenure. His competence and charm, his impeccable use of language was a resounding slap in the face of white America. The country had a first lady who was educated, intelligent, talented, poised and gracious. And white America blew an aneurism deep in the recesses of its racist brain. They carried a northern grifter and his slattern, dull witted trophy wife to the halls of power and attempted to erase the impact of the previous eight years. But his tenure was short lived, even though the poison of his brief tenure continues to pollute discourse and shatter common sense.

Decade upon decade of pale skinned, rough hewn machismo did not prepare the current European descendants to take a back seat to people of colour: it was always the black man who sat at the back of the bus! Now we had black CEOs and generals, Hispanic judges, and Asian lawmakers. The social landscape was no longer clearly defined in darkening shades as one moved from top to bottom.

LBJ famously said, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." This truism has served the American south and much of rural America since the emancipation; however, today's poor, uneducated, unemployable white man has to resort to major self delusion in order to keep the fantasy alive.

And if you can maintain one fantasy, why not entertain a host of outlandish conspiracies and deceptions. If the world is deceiving people to believe that white supremacy is dying, why not believe that the Clintons run a sex slave racket out of a Florida pizza parlour or that jewish space lasers are responsible for California's wildfires. Climate change is a hoax and Bill Gates is planting 5G chips in vaccines. If you don't like the truth, change it or find an alternate truth.

That's why 'fake news' was such a master stroke (Trump may be an idiot but he has a nose for promotion) providing a 'get out of jail free' card for all the lies, misrepresentations, frauds, and crimes that Trump, Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, and Marjorie Taylor Greene (to name a few) perpetrated. When the Sandy Hook massacre of little children was attributed to crisis actors, the whole world should have risen in an ear piercing scream. Instead, the group who Hillary Clinton would later brand as Deplorables showed why they are worthy of the moniker.

Economic marginalization is the other edge of the double edged sword that hangs over the deposed white dregs. Where their strength had been the colour of their skin, the new world, having automated unskilled labour out of relevance and relative stability, now chose to profit the trainable and educable. Service careers such as health care and social services far outstripped the want ads looking for pump jockeys and stock boys. Self checkout, Uber drivers, ATMs and Skip the Dishes have decimated the ranks of low skill/no skill employment and left the subsistence employables to stand on street medians with their cardboard pleas for food and money. The uneducated caucasian is reduced to the mendicant he always was but could, until now, deny.

At the root of the new paucity of lower end employment lies the nature of the economic system. As corporations and CEOs extract more and more wealth from the system, those who can be dispensed with to save money are thrown aside. The pool of available wealth that was divvied up in such a way as to carry the marginally employable now tilted away from the poor and carried an ever growing pile of wealth and power to the very rich. And, before you start feeling too secure, your turn, unless you can find a safe niche in the capitalist world order, is coming.

We are all Canaries in the Coal Mine, it's just that some of us will take longer to marginalize and dispose of. As the most vulnerable in our society, the poor white is the first to be affected. There is no room for passengers on this slave ship and the indigent, poorly educated whites can see the planks being extended all around them. Why not mention poor blacks and people of colour, you may ask? Because they're used to getting the shit end of the stick. They had nobody to look down on because the whole racist structure of law, finance and society as a whole relegated them to the bottom rung on the ladder of success. When you've got nothing, you've got nothing to lose.

In the same way that canaries in a mine don't realize what is killing them, neither do the good old boys. The right wing media that has egged them on by pandering to their paranoia and scepticism has helped to ensure that they will never sense the carbon monoxide that is killing them. Not only that, the rest of us miners breathing an ever more poisonous atmosphere won't acknowledge what's killing us either. The reality is that the obscenely wealthy are draining the oxygen out of the system. There is only one mine. There are lots of canaries.

Five reasons for the elimination of Abrahamic religions

What worked for neolithic camel herders doesn't work any more.  The tools that provided middle eastern tribes with a way to make sense of the world and, at the same time, established a code of conduct for social cohesion, is now an impediment to social cohesion on a global scale and, in its recklessly delusional cosmology, threatens the future of the world. For the reasons that follow, Abrahamic religions (and, perhaps, all theocentric religions) belong in the dustheap of human development.

The survival of the biosphere.  A cosmology that places homo sapiens as different in kind from all other living things is a precursor for dominion, exploitation and destruction. It disconnects us from other living things and grants us an exceptionalism that precludes our existence in the 'Garden of Eden".  Furthermore, the possibility of an afterlife in some ethereal Paradise removes the responsibility of either recognizing or working toward a tangible paradise on Earth.  As long as the "undiscovered country" remains in human consciousness, we have a virtual reset available to us once we flee the shit pile of temporal existence.  Somebody else can clean up our mess.

Women. Rather than acknowledging that, biologically, males are mere flowers in women's lapels, the Abrahamic religions hamper the self actualization of females. Their myths (as well as those of classical origin) hold females responsible for the ills that beset us. Whether it is Pandora releasing all manner of evils because of her inquisitivenesses or Eve yielding to her naivety, or Delilah or Lott's daughters, men are left as poor victims of women's missteps or outright sinisterness. The first item in the playbook of any cult is to control the women and then use the women to control the men. The ultimate control lies with an exclusive group of men whether they be popes, cardinals, imams, rabbis, elders, or what have you.

Science. Although they have been apparent allies through the ages, science and religion are at opposite poles on the knowledge/belief continuum. Religion has tolerated science and logic only if they verified belief.  Discovery was about unravelling the mysteries of creation until it found evidence that was anathema to faith - then it became heresy. Evolution, although it has been coopted by the religious establishment in the face of its incontrovertibility, reveals creation myths to be idiotic at best and sinister at worst. In throwing cold water on the idea of a first woman and first man, evolutionary science explodes the idea of original sin, male dominance, miracles, racial superiority, binary sexuality and free will. Beliefs are all well and good as long as they yield to knowledge and expertise when those become available.

Wealth. Although supposedly promoting the idea that it is as easy for the wealthy to enter heaven as it is for a camel to squeeze itself through an impossibly small aperture, the real message that pervades is that property is a sign of God's favour. A mansion, four Maseratis, a private jet and a Rolex are signs, not that the owner of these luxuries will find it difficult to claim their instrument of choice in the afterlife, but that God has given them an advance on heavenly riches to ease their way into the hereafter.  What should be perceived as an obscenity in the face of rampant poverty is, instead, seen as being smiled upon by the creator. It has always been in the best interests of the Abrahamic religions to salve the conscience of the rich while keeping a healthy supply of the poor.

Awareness. Awareness (and self awareness in particular) is severely crippled, if not impossible, if the focus of human reflection is metaphysical. Rather than examining existence and one's place within it, 'the faithful' are led down a path that, rather than leading to a greater awareness of existence, involves either the exaltation of the ultimate patriarch or pointless navel gazing. The important paradigm altering questions are relegated to divine mystery or taboo. Contemplation of truth, mortality, relationships (social, familial, environmental, etc.), and personal cosmology  are seated at the back of the bus while the driver has his gps focussed on a fantasy destination and his eyes glued to heaven.

The Social Contract

In a capitalist system, a contract exists between the capitalist and his/her workforce, in simple terms, between the 1% and the rest of us.  For our part, we indemnify ourselves to wage slavery for our natural lives and, in return, the capitalist commits to maintaining whatever industry that sustains the system.  It is understood (at least it used to be) that the capitalist would be afforded a level of compensation that repaid him for his 'risk taking'.
That contract has been broken.  Entrepreneurs have forgotten (perhaps never really believed) their end of the bargain and have allowed the system (as have we: the engine that powers the system) to get seriously out of touch with the balance (or imbalance, if you will) that allowed the contract to perpetuate itself.
In a rapacious quest for riches, the oligarchy has allowed its members to overreach their grasp and throttle the masses that generate their wealth, in effect throttling the goose that lays their golden egg.  These are not the actions of evil people but of stupid people who have only one skill: avarice.
The faceless minions, you and I, would have been content to toil away our lives in servitude to the manor house but the din of their revelry has become too obtrusive.  Our masters no longer share our world but have created their own Edens from the blood and sweat of mankind.  We no longer work under contract but as indentured servants to the bloated 'captains of industry'.

Where Truth Lies

We are living in a post truth world.  Whereas lying has persisted for as long as humans have been able to vocalize a thought, modern discourse has blurred the limits of dissemblance to the point of removing any meaningful barriers to mendacity. (If you're a Trump supporter, this means that people are telling bigger lies more often, yw.) And the lies are getting bigger and more ubiquitous: to paraphrase Hitler, if you’re going to tell a lie, make it a big one and tell it often.  Somehow, grifters and politicians have always known that a good lie is more acceptable to human ears than an uncomfortable truth.  Now they have also learned that raising doubt as to credibility is as good as destroying it.

The recent lightning rod of public outrage, the Catholic school boy/native American thing, is a case in point.  Forget about all the chest beating on both sides of the question and ask yourself, what possible scenario would put the righteous adolescents on the right side of this issue (right meaning ‘correct’)?  Do adolescents behave poorly?  Do groups of people wearing the Trump uniform and marching to oppose women’s reproductive rights tend to be confrontational?  Do frogs have waterproof skin?

And yet, a groundswell of support for these sectarian storm troopers (The Trump Youth, if you will) has popped up all over social media with one of the central figures (the grinning white kid in the MAGA hat) claiming that he was reciting a prayer of peace at the time.  He claims that his entitled smirk and stare weren’t about intimidation or disrespect but out of fear, uncertainty, and a desire to defuse the situation.  I figure you have to be the king of confirmation bias to turn this little turd’s explanation into anything resembling truth.

But already, some of my ‘friends’ are expressing doubt or being thankful that the situation didn’t descend into violent confrontation and that it epitomized freedom of speech.  I suppose we could be grateful that National Guard wasn’t called in or that Donald Trump didn’t waddle into the fray (oh wait; he did) but maybe a little violent confrontation was what was called for.  After all, one of the reasons we have gotten to this sorry juncture in history is that we have been tolerant of the intolerant.  These future humans should have been taught that freedom of speech has boundaries that they crossed and that crossing boundaries demands consequences.

Civil society can not work under the laws of advertising or the glaring injustices of the American courtroom.  By all means claim that your cleanser removes 99% of germs, (leaving the remaining 1% to flourish and reproduce without competition) but don’t propagate the lies that cripple social justice and beggar the vast majority while enriching the parasitic few.  By all means try to keep a man from lethal injection by introducing doubt into a jury’s minds but don’t use the same tactic to obfuscate the guilt of the rich and felonious who presently hold justice by the throat.

Not gluttony, not lust, not wrath, but deception should be the deadliest sin for those who purport to follow a religion.  If we don’t value truth above all else, what does that say about our beliefs and aspirations?  If we don’t expose and oppose the Wormtongues and serpents in our Garden of Eden, what sort of paradise are we creating?

Social Media Lynching

There are more and more instances, most in the third world, of the internet and social media becoming the noose of modern day lynch mobs.  With cell phones as their latter day torches, groups blinded by hatred and egged on by virtual friends advance down the information highway with the single minded purpose of exacting their own brand of justice.  Their evidence is hearsay, their witnesses are biased and often imaginary and their motives are highly questionable, but all that becomes irrelevant in their rush to judgement and their lust for retribution.

Two innocent men (and their innocence or guilt should be irrelevant) were recently beaten and burned to death outside a police station in Mexico.  Their crime?  They were out-of-towners who had gotten into a disagreement with some locals and a scuffle had broken out.  A self styled social crusader had read something somewhere about child abductions (on a dubious source) and had gotten it into his head that these were the perps.  Facebook and Whatsapp started buzzing with rumour and innuendo and, quicker than you can say Alex Jones, a mob began to coalesce at the police station.  Bells were rung, shouts were carried from megaphones, and humanity, at its ugliest. did the rest.

From India to Brazil to Kenya to Poland, the same social media that brings you flash mobs to sing Handel's Hallelujah Chorus at a food court brings a howling, slathering mob of knife wielding, petrol splashing 'villagers' to the steps of a police station.  And we, like gaping idiots take in both scenes with slack jawed equanimity.  But then, aren't we all guilty of the vigilantism illustrated here?  Aren't we, in our own way, complicit in the orgy of self righteousness that social media has often descended to?

Public shaming, for example, is ubiquitous on Facebook and other forums.  Although far from causing death or serious injury, character assassination only leaves reputations and careers tattered and torn.  The transgressions which lead to a person being 'outed' on social media are also far less severe than the heinous acts attributed to those who are subsequently murdered by outraged citizens.  Most of them involve a lack of decorum or 'decency' rather than any overt crime.

How many of us have joined in the harassment of white women who call the police on people of colour?  How many of us have had a part in ruining careers and lives and relationships when invited, by someone we have never met, to add our voices to the howl for the blood of a transgressor caught on a cellphone camera acting badly?   It used to be that we muttered, "You're an asshole" when we encountered bullying or racism or misogyny but now we go for the throat.  Sound familiar?

I got caught up in the Jian Ghomeshi thing a while back.  I didn't take his side in the storm that raged around the allegations of sexual misconduct at the time but urged people not to rush to judgement.  It didn't matter that the courts later decided that his accusers didn't seem credible (it was a man's court after all some would say), the palpable outrage of the anti Ghomeshi side declared him guilty in the court of social media opinion.  For taking the side of reason and justice, I was branded a woman hater, a Ghomeshi apologist, and a closet abuser.  I was pilloried, unfriended and blocked.

I know that there are bad people out in the world who should be shown the error of their ways.  I know that men who beat their wives or people who abuse their children should be arrested and their victims sheltered from further transgression.  But publishing pictures of an old woman with a bloodied face above text that names her abuser is not what we do in a civilized society lest we bring about the extra judicial violence referred to above.  Are we going to encourage like for like?  Should the perpetrator be bloodied like his victim?  Shades of Hammurabi!

Our ascent into humanism and our descent into madness continues unchecked.  We have never known as much or understood as little about ourselves as is currently the case.  The internet has brought information to our awareness like never before, shown us the world, eliminated borders and restrictions and allowed us to share with others in times of tragedy or disaster.  But our darker natures will not disappear overnight and our tribal instincts, our fear, and our anger will continue to frustrate our evolution into the cohesive, actualizing society that socialists in particular envision.  Domage.

An Explanation Better Than 42 (Part 5)

 

Now I’m tempted to say that having an enlarged ACC is superior to an enlarged amygdala, but we do need both.  Granted, we are not likely to encounter a poisonous snake or hungry bear in our travels (unless we are the new Secretary of Education), but we do still encounter situations that require unmitigated response.  Seeing a car approaching out of the corner of our eyes should alarm us into retreat back onto the curb.  Thank you, amygdala.  Reaching to pet a dog that suddenly snaps at our fingers should cause us to immediately pull back our fingers.  Thank you, amygdala.  Fearing that a Muslim fanatic will cut off your head or send you anthrax through the mail, if you’re an accountant in Trenton, New Jersey, is also attributable to the amygdala but not nearly as worthy of gratitude.

Our brain structure goes a long way to explaining the differences between us.  One of the refrains in discussions of social and political topics is right wing belief versus left wing reasoning.  Lefties constantly accuse righties of failing to see reason when they encounter righties who use articles of faith, tradition, memes, and such to advocate their position.  Think about the Benghazi fiasco in the States.  Benghazi became a rallying cry for opposition to Hillary Clinton when much more salient repudiations of her character were available.  Right wingers chose to ignore tampering with the democratic system under  Hillary’s watch and her burgeoning wealth from association with Wall Street and chose instead her use of a private email server (?) and the Benghazi incident which was kyboshed almost as soon as it came out.

But on closer examination, these two red herrings that conservatives pursued so vociferously in the shallow end of the pool represented the sort of rallying cry of paranoia that characterises people who are amygalalicly gifted (say that quickly three times).  Like ‘Remember the Maine’ or ‘Remember the Alamo’ or ‘Osama bin Laden’ or ‘Terrorist Threat’ or 'Lock Her Up' these memes resonated with the emotions of the alarmist cadre of Reaganites, Bushites, and Trumpites.  Alarm is okay, but when it becomes obsessive and self perpetuating, it no longer responds to reason but becomes the basis of Angst, conspiracy theories and paranoia.

continued by popular demand

An Explanation Better Than 42 (Part 4)

Leftists are more concerned with sustainability than exploitation.  It is no coincidence that social innovations such as universal health care, pensions, and unions are seen as leftist undertakings; their existence is predicated on protecting the interests of the common man/woman as well as the weak and marginalized.  Leftists are in an ongoing battle to keep the right from skewing the social contract to their advantage.  Where the right clamours for the marketplace to determine the distribution of goods and services and to allocate wealth, the left seeks to keep society on an even keel by advocating for equality in wealth distribution.

Our basic social nature dictates that we derive affirmation, not from goods but from interaction and relationships.  The difference between the left and the right is that the left reaches out to the world and the right insulates itself from it.  The xenophobia of the right wing is a direct outgrowth of their fear and distrust: because they are so invested in their material goods (and because many have so much conspicuous wealth), they guard their hoard like the dragons of myth.  At the same time, they are extremely loyal to their friends and families and display a patriotic zeal for their city, province, state and country.  

There is basis in brain research to bear out the fact that the left and right don’t just appear different but are physiologically diverse.  Recent brain research purports to be able to identify conservative and liberal individuals, with about 70% certainty, solely on the basis of their brains’ physiology.  It seems that conservatives have a noticeably larger right amygdala whereas liberals have a more developed anterior cingulate cortex (ACC).

An oversimplification of the function of these two structures would be that the Amygdala is your survival brain.  One of it’s primary responses is fear because fear keeps you safe.  When we first encounter something new or surprising, we don’t know whether to eat it or run away lest we be eaten (the famous ‘fight it, flee it, or fuck it’ response).  That’s the amygdala at work: determining, with a shot of hormones, that something is very wrong and we have to respond.  In this way it is easiest to think of the amygdala as a car alarm that has a hair trigger.  What it needs, in order to resolve the nature of the ‘threat’ is a rational input from the cortex to say, ‘It’s okay to switch off; it was just a gust of wind” or, “keep wailing because there is someone breaking into the car and I need you to scare them away.”  That’s what the cortex is for.

An Eplanation Better Than 42 (Part 3)

 

Although I seem to be setting up a good guy/bad guy scenario here, it is not my intent to do so.  Okay, maybe that’s a bit disingenuous.  Although our duality as both individual entities and social animals has served us well, with a balance of competition/cooperation, self/social interest and materialism/altruism, we have to evolve our paradigms in order to survive into a twenty second century and beyond.  What this will involve is growing from our current rugged individualism to a new cooperative model based on sharing, cooperation, and an appreciation of the real world bereft of the delusion of metaphysical beings and fulfillment in an afterlife – an appreciation of the fact that this is all there is, all we have is each other, and that the best way to make our own life better is to make everyone else’s life better.

The question for me has always been, what price should we be willing to pay for the perpetuation of the species?  At what point does the individual disappear and the collective assume the primacy of human existence?  In other words, is life as an ant, or bee, or penguin the sort of actualization that awaits?  Because that is what I envisage as necessary for the survival of the species: a differentiation of roles under an umbrella of communal interest.  Only by working together toward a common vision of what will maintain the community can we weather the coming ecological maelstrom.

Competition is the essence of individual survival whereas cooperation is fundamental to the survival of societies.  Rightists tend to exploit the concept of competition because that’s the world in which they live.  We see it in the bidding for contracts, in the competition for employment, in the rat race, in the race up the corporate ladder.  We see it in the concrete jungle which is every bit as deadly as the original tooth and fang infested environment.   Death in the concrete jungle has less finality and the victims shed their life’s blood over decades of insecurity, seeking to fill a hollowness that has been carved inside them by the craving for the unattainable.

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An Explanation Better Than 42. (Part 2)

The divide between our social and individual selves and our evolution as a community has been essential to our survival and our propagation across the globe.  The evolution of human societies has far outstripped that of the individuals that comprise it, largely because societies are not shackled by the biological limitations that govern the evolution of the species: paradigms are easier to grow than an extra digit.  Of course there are vestigial appendages, analogous to the appendix, such as religion and racism but, if we can survive the next fifty years, these will eventually disappear.

So how does the individual/social dynamic manifest itself in the real world?  If we look at the most salient representatives of each, far right religious and secular humanists, we can see ample illustration of the two camps.  The far right religious, although they cloak themselves in the social mantle of church groups, service clubs, and women’s auxiliaries, use socialization as a vehicle for status, influence, and power.  (Now I realize that I am tarring people with a broad brush, but I am referring to the way the group manifests itself rather than any particular individual.)  Those who are totally invested in this group spurn the paying of their fair share of taxes, oppose ‘outsiders’, see themselves as guardians of the dominant culture, festoon themselves with material goods, and defend traditional institutions and values.  They are the bastion of rugged individualism and self indulgence.

On the other hand, secular humanists are cut from a different cloth.  As a group they tend to protect the marginalized, advocate for the maintenance and growth of the public good, see religion as an impediment to human growth, and show genuine concern for their environment and a sustainable economy.  The groups that they gravitate towards, when they do step out of their tendency to spurn hierarchies, center around protest, humanitarian aid, protection of reproductive rights, and civil rights. Where a rightist doctor might join a country club, a secular humanist doctor might opt for Doctors Without Borders.  They spurn charity in favour of social justice.  

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The Individual and Society - An Explanation Better than 42 In 2 Minute Bites (Part 1)

Inside all of us is a being in conflict who is part social self and part ‘essential’ or independent self.  The two ‘selves’, although resident in the same physical envelope, are anathema to one another.  That they have managed to survive for millennia together, without some major chernobylian meltdown is a tribute to the resiliency of the human brain, To have gone through generation after generation without triggering mass extinction or a bonfire of self immolation is truly remarkable.  But now, self immolation is imminent and it must be stopped and, as far as I can see, we have no choice but to understand each other and ourselves.

There are two protagonists in this battle: our individual self and our social self.  The self, also known as the ego in psychological parlance, is the essential you.  It is basically the pilot light at the heart of your existential furnace – the first thing to get lit when you come into existence and the last thing to go out when you stop.  It precedes language and socialization, is fiercely independent, and rates survival above all.  Later in our development, a second ‘self’, the social self, emerges.  From day one they battle for ascendancy.  Their natures are so vastly different that conflict was inevitable.

Where the essential self or ‘individual’ is an objective entity, society is a concept.  As a physical entity, we have basic physical needs: food, shelter and clothing; as members of a society we have developed other needs: affection, aesthetics, approval, and status among others.  When we consider that the meeting of needs requires prioritization (some needs will need to be repressed or foregone in order to meet others) and requires the allocation of personal resources, it is easy to see that there will always be a conflict between social and essential self.  A simple example might be suppressing the need to go to the bathroom (a personal need) until a speech is finished (a social courtesy).

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From the outset, let’s be clear, nature has one over-arching rule/message: evolve or die.  Whatever else is in play on this wonderful planet, in its streams and lakes, its mountains and meadows, the result of failure to adapt is, inexorably, death.  The family trees of countless species have been pruned at a point where change, whether in the form of new competitors or transformation of the surroundings, came too rapidly or too overwhelmingly for previously successful organisms to cope.  Nature is an ongoing experiment, and mammals are the latest to come up against the objective conclusion of their trial: adjust or perish.

Man is merely the pinnacle of sentience (at least from our biased perspective) and not the whole ball of wax.  All organisms on the earth today are the most ‘advanced’ of their species from bacteria, to ferns, to octopi, to alligators, to humans.  Yet it is we humans who have brought life itself (which may merely be another ‘experiment’) to the brink of annihilation.  We have been the agents of a change in climate that threatens not only our own future but the future of the majority of the biosphere.  But we have only acted in accordance with our nature because how could we do otherwise?  Nothing comes from nothing.

So how do we evolve?  Since we are limited in how to evolve physically in a much too short period of time, we have to evolve socially.  This has been happening in a move toward a more progressive society in much of the first world.  Driven by the urban populations of countries throughout Europe and North America, the idea of cooperation, sharing, and the common good has become a unifying vision among our progressive cores.  The message of tolerance and compassion currently being drowned out by the fear and hatred of traditionalists, marks a step forward in the evolution of social consciousness, but will it be enough and will it be in time?

I don’t think so.

If current climate predictions are to be believed (rather than being discounted as alarmism and fake news) then we have already passed the point of no return.  All the environmental laws and treaties and accords have/will come too late to avert the climatic apocalypse that awaits in the not too distant future.  We can no longer make the world a healthy place for life no matter how many resources we pour into the effort.  “The Moving Finger writes and, having writ, moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.”

Does that mean we throw in the towel?  As is the case with incurable diseases, we may not be able to thwart the final outcome but we can extend the life of the patient.  The mammal experiment has failed (or succeeded, depending on the original hypothesis).  Perhaps humanity/huwomanity has been the agent/catalyst of proving life to be an imperfection in the cosmic harmony of the inanimate.  But in our remaining decades or even centuries, I hope we continue to evolve to what we could have been. I hope we move beyond the confines of greed and self interest to usher in a swan song that only we will ever hear.

Standing in our way is conservatism, as it has always stood in the way of progress and human aspirations for a better world.  With its anchors of tradition, religion, and materialism, the right wing has always acted as a retarding influence on social evolution.  Conservatism killed its own Christ, enslaved half of the world, and stifled the emerging humanity of much of the world.  It WAS the Inquisition, the Famines, and the Concentration Camps.  It IS Guantanamo, the American Government, Saudi Arabia, Russia and strongman regimes around the world - from Turkey to the Philippines, to North Korea.  It is the down-turned mouth of old men and old women whose smiles have been inverted by a lifetime of discrimination, fear, jealousy, and hatred.

Fear masquerading as hope and hatred masquerading as love are also the underpinnings of the right wing's main ideological weapon: religion.  Organized religion has capitalized on the fear of death that is the hallmark of egotism and has preached unity while promoting divisiveness.  In promising a life after death (or eternal torture for unbelievers), the various churches have sold their followers an illusion far greater than the snake oil of yore: the promise of eternal life.  At the same time, they have launched holy wars and propaganda attacks against their competitors that put Goebbels to shame.  We are all one - as long as we can come to some understanding that YOU are joining US rather than vise versa. 

We have a choice, it seems, to either cling doggedly to traditions and gods and hatreds that no longer serve us and the world, or to show that nature was on the right track but just ran out of time. 

An open Letter to the American People in the Age of Trump

Dear Friends,

As your neighbour to the north and a member of the world community, we, the citizenry outside your borders, feel compelled to address you at this critical juncture in your/our history.

We have long tolerated your high spiritedness and have even envied the Jerry Lewis like way you conduct your lives.  You are good natured yet often mean spirited.  You are generous to a fault and yet your generosity often comes with conditions and strings attached.  You espouse liberty and equality yet imprison a disproportionate number of your poorer citizens and show a decided LACK of equality between your races and economic strata.

You speak at length about freedom yet your majority are increasingly yoked by a system that forces you to work longer and harder for less.  Multiple unrewarding jobs and the resulting lack of quality time with your loved ones are becoming the norm as you are herded from material obsession to an unfair and unequal tax burden.

And it is about to get so much worse.  University studies, the most salient of which was undertaken at Princeton, show that there is little or no correlation between what you want and what your Congress enacts – unless you are rich or a corporation.  One need look no further than the current tax bill which will have been passed by the time you read this.  Although the majority of you realize that indebting your country by a further one and one half TRILLION dollars, mainly for the benefit of the ultra rich, will indemnify you and your offspring for decades to come, your President and his co-conspirators actively work to frustrate your hopes and aspirations.  Your voices, again, are not heard or, worse still, heard but ignored.

With Donald Trump’s unsteady little hand on the tiller, your ship of state is ploughing dangerous waters on the way to world instability.  The obscene amount you already divert to your military has risen dramatically under this unbalanced buffoon and more is earmarked for the RESUMPTION OF THE ARMS RACE.  This – and I am being presumptuous here – is NOT what most Americans or world citizens want.  This world is scary enough in the hands of the Dutertes, the Trumps, the Putins, the Netanyahus, and the Kim Jung Uns of this world without increasing the dangers inherent in a proliferation of world destroying weapons.

You have been too nice to your unbalanced brethren of the religious right.  Where for decades your majority have been characterized as devout but not crazed followers of some deity or other, the rise of fundamentalists has been allowed to ratchet up the hatred which is inherent in their belief system.  Steeped in the Old Testament of barbarism and misogyny, the purveyors of tainted Christianity ignore the Gospel they pretend to champion and morph into prophets of hatred, intolerance and anti-intellectualism. 

We, your fellow human beings, can not presume to tell you how to run your country but we MUST, in good conscience, share our concern for your welfare and for the viability of life on earth.  Spaceship Earth is the only vehicle that we have to ferry us through the universe and, despite claims of an everlasting afterlife, which is a crapshoot which many of us refuse to wager on.  The animals and plants and, dare I say, humans, on this beautiful blue marble can not survive the policies of the current American administration.  You and your loved ones will not survive the megalomania and avarice of the current President and Congress.  It is us or them.  You must find a way, for your sake and ours, to bring sanity back to your halls of power and your oval office.  Each moment you delay will tighten the shackles around your ankles and those of your children.  

Act or risk the spectre of future generations living in chains – of your children and grandchildren as indentured servants to the manor house or grubby faced skeletons in the poor house.  Your move.

Sincerely,

The rest of us.