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Dawkins in Boston, Oh Yeah

dawkins_tour_landing-page-6Owing to … well, owing, I don’t often get to attend the big atheist events. But this time there’s one near me, so I’m going to see and hear Richard Dawkins in Boston this Thursday, June 11.

I’m carpooling with some of the cool people of the Capital Region Atheists & Agnostics Meet-Up group.

I’m pretty excited about it. Always wanted to meet the guy, and I hope that will be possible here.

Tickets are $35. I’ll be the guy in the cowboy hat.

…………….

I’ll also be posting a followup with some pictures, a day or so later.

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The Book of Good Living: Tools 2

BGL copyTools are under-appreciated by most of us officey types. Whether it’s a circular saw, a drill, a planer, an arc welder, or just a simple car jack, too many of us aren’t ready to get our hands dirty.

It’s not the dirt, of course. It’s just that certain tools can be outside our bubble of competence, and it’s human nature to shy away from getting involved in something we probably, in the beginning, won’t be much good at.

But here’s the really great thing about tools: If you have the right tools – and the skills to use them – you can turn anything into anything.

You can turn a discarded old oak pallet into a beautiful jewelry box. You can turn scrap metal into sculpture, or a rusty steel pipe into a gleaming barbecue pit. You can turn a ragged old house into a welcoming home.

You can turn garbage into gold. Metaphorically, at least.

Three rules for tools:

  1. Buy the best tools you can afford.
  2. Learn to use them safely and thoroughly.
  3. Never lend them out for any reason.

Rule 1: Anybody who’s bought a cheap tool has lived to regret it. That bargain socket wrench set that LOOKS just like the more expensive ones, is not. It’s a cheap knockoff of something better, and it will neither last nor perform as well. And there’s nothing worse than getting halfway through a critical job and having your socket or screwdriver or router bit fail on you. The cheaper ones are also dangerous. If you’re leaning on a wrench to try to break free a rusty nut, and the socket breaks loose, it’s gonna hurt. Buy the best, always. Good tools are made well enough to last pretty much your entire lifetime. Which means they’re cheaper in the long run.

Rule 2: Power tools aren’t kid stuff. Get some safety training if you’re unused to, say, a circular saw or a jointer-planer. If you use it wrong, it really can take your hand off in a split second. The same blade that rips into a length of pine can put you in the hospital, or worse. Keep your insides on your inside by being damned careful.

Rule 3: Can I borrow your new mower? Can I borrow your expensive wheelbarrow? Can I borrow your paint sprayer? No, no, and no. Find a way to gracefully beg off, or just be blunt about it, but don’t lend your tools to your neighbors, your friends, or your kids. Go over and use the tool for them, if you must, but don’t lend it out. It sounds harsh, even unfriendly, but there are some good reasons for it. First, if your chainsaw rips into some kid’s arm, or your powerful mower slings a rock into somebody’s eye, oh boy are you going to feel bad. Not to mention the lawsuit. And then there’s this: Nobody loves your tools like you do. They WON’T take care of them the way you do. The guy who loves tools as much as you do – and yes, there are plenty of them out there – probably has his own, and won’t be asking to borrow yours. There’s also the fact that most tools have a service period built into them. Well-maintained, they just might last forever. Poorly taken care of, they won’t. You do the math.

Finally, Rule 4: Use them! Turning garbage into gold is exciting! Satisfying! Fun!

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God, The Wet Blanket

COE SquareOne of the things I enjoy doing on my daily van trips — I’m in transportation at an addiction recovery facility, and I drive every day a round trip between Schenectady, NY and New York City — is play tourguide. Since the trip is close to three hours long each way, there’s plenty of time to point out interesting details of the scenery along the way. I often see deer (today I saw a doe with a newborn fawn in the roadside grass), sometimes wild turkeys, occasionally great blue herons. There are apple orchards along the way, cattle, horses, a grass-field airport, hills and forest.

But I also drive through numerous road cuts which bare sections of Upstate New York’s fascinating geology. Most of the rock here is sedimentary — that layered, sometimes multicolored stuff — and almost all of it has undergone folding or uplift. It’s common to see the layers standing on edge, or at some angle quite far from the horizontal, and you’ll sometimes see it humped and bumped so that the naturally flat layers are rippled into a crude sine wave with red and white layers alternating.

My knowledge of geology is rudimentary. I have wished all too often that I could drive the roads of New York with a qualified local geologist, so I could learn how old the stuff is, what era each layer originated in, how far back in time I’m seeing.

Anyway, today I’m driving two clients, a man and a young woman from New York City, and pointing out bits of this and that along the way. (Orange County Choppers, the motorcycle customizers from TV, is right along the way, and that always piques interest.) But as we come up to a section of vivid vertical layers in a road cut, I start to explain about sedimentation and layering, and how significant it is that these normally-horizontal layers of stone are now almost completely vertical.

For myself, I LOVE knowing that this stone MOVED, over however many millions of years, and is, in fact, still in ultra-ultra-ultra-slow motion. And I love imparting that tidbit of knowledge to others.

But this time, as I’m in mid-explanation, the man breaks in and says happily “And you know who did all that? One guy! God! He made EVERYthing! He did it all! Ain’t that amazing!” He wasn’t correcting me or anything, he was just sharing HIS knowledge, adding his own remarks to what he thought I was getting at.

That was the last of the tourguiding on today’s trip. For the next hour or so I thought about how limited, how disturbingly frozen and ungrowthy is religious thinking.

I’ve often reflected that the entire world around us, every aspect of it, projects information at us. If you have ears to hear and eyes to see, the entirety of existence is this constant COMMUNICATION, and that fact in itself is endlessly fascinating. For the open mind, the world burns hot with knowledge — throwing off the sparks of pictures, processes, drama, wonderfully deep sequences of ideas and understandings — and it just makes me laugh to think of it.

But religious thinking of the “God did it all!” sort is a wet blanket tossed on that fire, dousing it to ashes. Nothing remains but the dead gray cinder of faith, separating each believer from an entire world of luminous knowledge.

Damn. That’s just so … sad.

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The Book of Good Living: Tools

BGL copyAdvice to moms, dads, grandparents, aunts, uncles, older cousins, anybody with young people in your lives:

There are few material things you can give kids that will make such a difference in their lives as good tools. Carpentry tools, woodworking tools, mechanic’s tools, plumbing tools, metalworking tools, electrician’s tools, — kitchen tools! blacksmith’s tools! — tools for servicing appliances, computers, mechanical devices.

The card should say “Dear One: Build things. Make things. Fix things. Take apart the world and see how it works. Then make it work again.”

We go through our lives depending on auto mechanics, electricians, plumbers, service and repair people. We stand back and feel disempowered as someone else makes our everyday lives work, and then charges us handsomely for it. (We also get rooked more often than we want to know.)

If you learn from an early age to live hands-on, to understand how things work and how things are made, to engage the world with your own powerful hands and mind, you become somehow realer than those who have to depend on somebody else for everything. You’re also able to help friends and family in ways that few others in your family will be able to (the hardest lesson will be learning to say no!).

If you have a feminist bone in your body, give your little girl tools. If you understand what it means to be a complete, independent man, give your little boy tools. If you want to be the uncle, the aunt, the cousin, the friend who gets remembered for giving a lifetime of real power over into the hands of your young loved one, give them tools.

(And yes, tools are dangerous. Everything powerful is. Make sure the power of the gift comes with the precautionary knowledge and respect that makes it safer.)

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Post-Teen Guilty, Middle-Aged Goddy

COE SquareI have friends in Texas who did some pretty questionable stuff in their wild teen years — we’re talking lying, stealing, animal cruelty, just plain meanness to each other, and yes, a certain amount of socially-unapproved sex — who have become extremely religious as they’ve gotten older. I often suspect there’s a direct mechanism that makes this happen. Here’s how I imagine it working:

Inevitably when you’re younger and you have a childish sense of right and wrong, a childish sense of other people’s or other creatures’ feelings and rights, you do stuff that seems fun or exciting in the moment, but which can spark remorse in later years.

The thing is, if you’re a decent person at all, your level of understanding and compassion rises throughout your life, and things that seemed cool when done in your teens can later disturb you very much. An adult-level conscience looking back on teenage acts can generate immense amounts of guilt. But most of us have no idea how to process that guilt.

My view of how to deal with it is this: You just have to feel the guilt, live with it, to keep it as a reminder that you have to do better. But also, you have to understand that kids do crazy shit. If you’d forgive — or at least understand — some other kid that age doing the same thing, you can somewhat forgive yourself for those early-life acts that now bother you. And after all, the guilt is an indicator that you already are a better person. Otherwise, you wouldn’t feel bad about things you did 30-40-50 years ago.

But not everybody is this self-aware, or thoughtful. And certainly we have no formal social organ to propagate that message.

Fortunately or unfortunately, we have religion, which replaces wisdom with faith. The religious paradigm that God will forgive those bothersome acts — IF you devotedly believe and pray and all that — provides a tool that allows believers to imagine forgiveness (*). But it also locks them into the goddy framework. If they give up the belief, it brings the guilt surging back into consciousness.

 

(*) That there may be a drawback to the practice — it could make repeated acts more palatable — is a mere side-effect.

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A Dark Tide in Human Affairs

Dark Tide copyI was thinking today about large-scale social motion in a negative direction. Not as some sort of accident, but as the result of some deeper human sociological/psychological tides.

I think of bikers and biker culture. The skull motif so penetrates biker culture that it makes its way onto everything — bikes, t-shirts, leather jackets, bandanas, helmets, face masks, even tattoos. It’s interesting to me that this nihilistic image is of such unquestionable importance, and has no positive-direction counterpoint. (For instance, you don’t see Hello Kitty biker art, with the possible exception of the very rare joke.) And I think of bikers as early-adopters of the sort of darkness the skull represents.

But following in the footsteps of those early adopters, that darkness — the studied opposite of health, respect, sanity, goodness, love — has now entered the mainstream. Politics has it. The news media has it. Style has it. Music has it. We have it as tattoos, saggy-ass pants, piercings, trashy dress, repellent physical condition, the easy bile and bullying of online commenters, the vapidity of entertainment, all sorts of other data points, all a part of a powerful counter-culture that insists whatever majority culture we have had is a hate-filled, freedom-restricting malignancy — hell, even the admonition to maintain a good healthy weight is seen as a violent attack on a helpless victim class — and that everything which is NOT majority culture is good.

Currently, there is almost no human practice, however scary, low or disgusting, that someone will not instantly leap to defend, as if some vital issue of freedom is at stake — “People should be allowed to shit in public! It’s perfectly natural! Only a bunch of hateful prudes would say otherwise!” And one of the defensive weapons is the ever-ready “You shouldn’t judge people!” — an admonition that resonates with the opposition to having social or personal standards.

I actually saw the election of George W. Bush as a signifier of something dark going on below the surface of things, and it appears to me that that whatever-it-is is spreading, solidifying its grip and influence. It was almost irrelevant that it was George W. Bush specifically who got elected; anyone of his sort — intellectually dull, pompous, grandiose, incurious, shallow, self-absorbed — could have fit the bill. Because that was what we unconsciously wanted and needed in that moment.

The hate flowing like a firehose at President Obama — a genuinely intelligent, genuinely good man who has served as a target for spitting spite from the first moment he entered the public spotlight — is another data point. This dark whatever-it-is HAS TO attack a decent person, because it can no more tolerate his existence than disease can tolerate antibiotics.

The thing is, I don’t know where this thing is coming from. Like I say, it feels like something weirdly inevitable in this moment — a necessary product of certain factors arising out a confluence of human psychology and the progression of civilization itself. I feel like we made a wrong turn at some point, or started from poisoned initial conditions, but I can’t see what that turn is or those conditions are.

I worry that this whatever-it-is would be see-able by humans slightly brighter, slightly better, and that we’re missing it because we’re just us.

It also disturbs me to think that just-us is tragically unequipped to stop it, and that it will sweep over the human world, damaging everything, as we stand by and observe in busy impotence, always convinced some less-relevant, flavor-of-the-month factor — racism, sexism, ‘the patriarchy’, teabaggers, underpaid teachers, Republicans, Fox News, liberals, video games, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton — is to blame.

The bright spot, to me — the hope — is a Venn Diagram that overlaps the several circles of atheism, reason and education, and an intelligent activism that spotlights these as the necessary foundation of any kind of real-world solution.

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Dog Years

Ranger3I aspired to be a scientist, once: I was a genetics major at a western university, way back when. (To show you what a cerebral nerd I was, the most exciting class I ever took in college was Calculus.)

If you had asked me in those days what I thought went on in an animal’s head, I would have related the majority view of the day: the most you could say about an animal was that they “exhibited certain behaviors.” There was no evidence for the presence of feelings, or anything resembling thought. Animals were little more than clockwork mechanisms, without love, or grief, or any other of our familiar human passions.

And then I got my German shepherd, Ranger. I picked him up from a kennel in Riverside, California back in March of 1986, at the age of ten weeks. Twelve years later, on a winter’s day, he died.

I wish I could relate to you all the good times we had together in those years in between. Some of the highlights:

I drove draft horses on hay rides and sleigh rides for eight of Ranger’s years, and he came with me on every one. He ran alongside in obvious joy, sometimes leaping up to make mock bites at the horses’ annoyed noses, frequently dashing off to check out interesting smells or wildlife, always coming back to check on me, making sure I was there, and pleased with him.

We went for hikes twice a day, almost every day of his life. We hiked along clear mountain streams, where my four-legged friend could cool off on those hot summer days. We passed through clean, green mountain meadows, and Ranger would flop down and wallow luxuriously in the grass.

As a special treat for him, some nights I drove to a nearby gravel pit, shining my car lights across the flat expanse to spotlight lanky rabbits. Ranger would spy them and charge out with an unbelievably graceful  long lope, happy carnivorous thoughts driving him to his limit – which was never fast enough. But he dearly loved the chase, and it made me happy to see him happy.

For about the first three years of his life, he was with me every second, and he got to run free all that time; he was well over two before I even bought him a collar. He lived most of his life as a mountain dog, able to roam loose over vast expanses, but he almost never took advantage of his freedom. He was a compass and I was his North Pole, and the whole of his life was being with me. Some late winter nights after I put away my big draft horses Duke and Dan, and went into the ranch house for dinner, Ranger would circle the house and somehow locate me indoors, sitting outside on a snowbank and peering in through the window nearest me. The guests would sometimes startle at the sight of a huge wolfy face looming out of the darkness.

I surprised myself by developing a fierce protectiveness for him. Somebody asked me once if he was a guard dog, and I said, “No, he’s a guarded dog. If somebody tries to hurt him, they have to answer to me.”

One afternoon as we walked along a street in our little mountain town, another German Shepherd, larger and heavier-bodied, bolted out of a yard in our direction, in full attack mode. I pushed Ranger behind me and stepped towards the dog, perfectly furious, ready to wreck him. I can remember his eyes, aimed ferociously at Ranger for the first half of that charge, all intent on mayhem, then suddenly switching to me as I moved into his way. He skidded to a halt with a shocked look, then backed off into his own yard.

Ranger was always, always either there with me, or there waiting for me when I came home. How do you deserve devotion like that? I don’t know. But in twelve years of unceasing effort at canine affection, my friend worked a gradual and permanent change in me. This animal which I would formerly have said was without feelings of his own was the catalyst for working a transformation in my own human heart. By being there all the time, he forced me to notice him and his feelings – and, by extension, the presence and feelings of others – in a way that I doubt I would have on my own.

I still appreciate the objectivity of science, the necessity of standing back and waiting until you get a lot of evidence for a hypothesis before you allow yourself to embrace it.

At the same time, I know for myself that each of us is trapped in the cage of our own heads, and the only key to that cage is the learning that we’re not alone. We share in this world the experience of others, human and animal both. And those feelings – of loneliness and pain and fear, but also of playfulness and joy and warmth – are as real as anything we’re capable of experiencing.

Oh, how I miss my dog. My teacher, my example. My best and forever friend.

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Earth Day 2015: Thoughts Like Falling Leaves

[This is a repost of a piece I did several years ago, slightly edited for 2015. This essay is also part of the conceptual force driving my thoughts on the need for Beta Culture.]

Leaf One

Con games and sleight-of-hand magic work because, one, we humans only have so much attention to spare at any one moment, and two, they direct that attention deliberately in one direction. If you look at where the finger points, you miss … well, everything else.

Like the movie teen backing through a darkened doorway in the serial killer’s lair, we focus intently on one thing while something more important takes place just outside the sphere of our focus.

I’ll give you a real-life example that has bugged me for a long time.

I met Timothy Treadwell some years back in Flagstaff, when he came to give a talk about grizzlies. Tim’s the guy who got killed and partially eaten by a bear in 2003 in Alaska, and was immortalized in the 2005 film “Grizzly Man” a “documentary” by filmmaker Werner Herzog.

I hated the film (and I think Herzog is a pandering jackass for making it as he did) because it projected exactly two messages into the minds of viewers: 1) Tim Treadwell was crazy. 2) Grizzlies are deadly killers.

The finger pointed in those directions, and most of the viewers looked that way. Treadwell was in fact killed by a grizzly. But off-screen, what the finger didn’t point at, and what most of us failed to notice, was that he lived within spitting distance of these huge bears for 12 summers.

Unprotected.

Unarmed.

Unhurt.

Out of all the things we might want to know about grizzlies, we already know “Any sane person knows them goldurned bears’ll kill yuh!” What we don’t know is “There’s a way to live right in among grizzlies for 12 years without getting hurt.”

I can tell you in one second which of those things I’d like to see in a film, which of those things I’d like to KNOW. Herzog, sleight-of-hand documentarian, wasn’t interested in it. Today we have one more titillating, somewhat stupid film pointing a finger at something we already “know,” and most of us still view bears as unpredictable, inevitable killing machines.

So here we are on Earth Day 2015, equally awash in sleight-of-hand: Oh my gosh, are we ever jumping on the “green” bandwagon. You can’t watch TV for half an hour without seeing five commercials about companies going green. Corporations are going green, politicians are going green, builders are going green, banks are going green, cities are going green, for all I know states are going green. Green green GREEN — Yowzah!!

TV, billboards, radio messages, magazine ads, newspaper stories, websites — everywhere you look, clean, well-fed mommies and daddies and happy children are pitching in to cut water consumption! Save energy! Produce less trash! Reduce, reuse, recycle!

Man, I already feel better about it, don’t you? We’re DOING SOMETHING, at last, to Save the Earth. Let’s all heave a deep sigh of relief. Yessssss.

Meanwhile, in all those places where the finger doesn’t point …

Leaf Two

Was it just a dozen years or so ago I was writing an article about Baby Six Billion? She was born on or about October 11, 1999. I wrote about the world of progressive scarcity she would be born into, and I wished her well.

But we’re already living in the world with Baby Seven Billion, who arrived on Earth — as estimated, anyway — on October 31, 2011.

Halloween was the SECOND scariest event on that date. Even though you’d expect Baby Seven Billion to be a daughter or granddaughter of Baby Six Billion, she’s not. (Unless Baby Six Billion got pregnant at the age of 12, that is.)

Instead, Baby Seven Billion was born, give or take a few years, to the same generation that produced Baby Six Billion. The SAME generation.

Jeezus holy jacked-up shit.

Knowing that, I have to ask: What exactly is the point of going green?

I mean, if you and I conserve and recycle and stop eating endangered fish and refuse to support companies that log the Amazon, and do everything we can possibly do to keep the Earth green and growing …

And we each of us cut in half our annual environmental footprint on the Earth …

Where’s the net gain if, during that same period, our neighbors produce more than 205,000 more kids EVERY DAY?

That’s 75 million a year, in case you wondered — roughly equal to the combined populations of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Colorado, Alabama, South Carolina, Louisiana, Kentucky, Oregon, Oklahoma, Connecticut, Iowa, Mississippi, Arkansas, Kansas, Utah,Nevada, New Mexico, West Virginia, Nebraska, Idaho, Hawaii, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Montana, Delaware, South Dakota, Alaska, North Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming.

Or more than the individual populations of Turkey, Thailand, France, United Kingdom, Italy or South Africa.

Or, if you prefer, more than twice the population of Canada. Each and every YEAR.

Oh, and by the way, prepare to greet Baby Eight Billion in NINE YEARS.

Your piddly-ass half-person conservation effort vanishes in the noise.

Leaf Three

I saw a beautifully designed book on the environment a few years back, a thick, well-researched tome about all the possible things you can do to Save the Earth. (Wish I could remember the name, but I seem to have put it out of my mind.) I was so excited, I ordered it immediately. And man, when it came, I unwrapped it lovingly, admiring its heft, its colors, its stunning cardboard slip cover. I dove into it with excitement — it was like a whole weighty library of greenitude.

But I made the mistake, within an hour of getting it, of delving into the index for articles on population control.

Nothing.

Huh? I couldn’t believe it. I tried different words, different combinations. In the end, I discovered the entire book seemed to contain only two PHRASES related to the subject. I mean, there weren’t three whole sentences about it. Amid stories of fish farming and water conservation and energy from wind and sun and recycling plastic and improved strains of rice, there was virtually nothing about human numbers.

It was like going through a million-word book of instructions on how to save a sinking ship, reading a thousand different formulations of “Bail faster and better,” but finding no mention at all of “Hey, stupid, plug the fucking hole in the hull!”

I instantly lost interest in the damned thing. I mailed it to a friend who’s into green stuff, and have since then entertained several brief imaginings of punching the authors in the face if I ever get to meet them.

But … can I really blame them? I haven’t had the chance to read every book ever written on saving the earth, but I’ve found few recent ones that deal with population as the real core of the problem.

Is the subject taboo? Is it simple despair that puts it off-limits?

Maybe it’s the inevitable over-reaction. The instant you start talking about encouraging people to use condoms and contraceptives, to pursue various avenues of family planning, etc., to limit human population, the shriekers slam down on you like a rain of neutron bombs — blam, blam blam! “You want to murder babies!! You want to commit genocide!! Oh my God, why do you hate human beings so much!!?”

Whew.

Leaf Four

I had a cowboy friend, Tom Wood, who was an eternal optimist. I noticed the day I met him that he had this small purpley bump on the side of his face, and I asked him about it not long after, when we’d had a chance to get to know each other.

“Ah. That ain’t nothing.” Big smile, dismissive gesture with can of beer. “Been there for years! You gotta go sometime!”

Two years later, the purpley bump was bigger, but the gesture and optimistic dismissal was the same. Every time the subject came up: “Hey, you gotta go sometime!”

Except for the day he found out he had malignant melanoma, and the three or four months he lasted after.

Turns out optimism, like anything, is misusable. If you have a problem, but you refuse to grapple with it because you’d rather be optimistic and hopeful about the future … well, there are side effects.

To get well, you first have to admit you’re sick. To climb out of a financial hole, you first have to admit you’re not handling your money well. To stanch the bleeding of a gaping wound, you first have to notice the gushing blood.

Sometimes, for a while, optimism has to slide over into the passenger seat, keep its smirking mouth shut, and let pessimism take the wheel.

In the midst of an emergency, in the face of a deadly threat, you have to think more about the worst that can happen, rather than the best.

The population of Planet Earth has yet to realize this.

Leaf Five

I’ve had people tell me I shouldn’t use the word “retarded.” And I get the point — it can be an insult to people with mental handicaps.

But like the shock value of carefully-applied profanity, it can also serve to slap people awake.

Here’s retarded: The smug idiot who laughs “Hey, we can’t hurt the Earth! Ha-ha! It’ll be here and fine long after we’re gone!”

Here’s retarded: “Even IF we were capable of wrecking the environment, God could fix it with a wave of his hand.”

Here’s retarded: Buying into all those corporate messages that if we recycle and reuse (with their corporate help, of course), everything will be just fine.

Here’s retarded: Every environmentalist and green advocate who ever lived who failed to recognize that the foundation of EVERY environmental problem is too many people.

Here’s retarded: The guy who repeats the vague reassurance that “Educated women tend to have fewer children. All we have to do is raise the level of education and social welfare in the world, and world population will level off at some sustainable level.”

Problem is, we’re out of time on hopeful reassurances. The planet is already over the load limit on humans — there’s nothing left, no excess capacity to hold us until that optimistically hoped-for population leveling begins to kick in.

If ever there was a moment to be pessimistic, to attempt to be thoughtful and worried and to imagine the worst, this would be that moment.

We’re killing the Earth NOW.

Leaf Six

I don’t see it getting better in my lifetime.

Don’t think I don’t hate to say it.

I hate to even think it. Hey, I’ve been a fan of science fiction since I was about 11 years old and first read Zip-Zip Goes to Venus.

As an SF fan, I’m a devoted futurist. For years I thought about the possibility of cloning my dog, the Best Dog I Ever Even Met, but I held off on doing anything about it. Then one day he got sick, and it hit me that I could either 1) read about all the possible technological innovations but do nothing to make ready for them, or 2) I could live and act as if these imagined futures would be real.

I picked the second option. The future is a real place, a real time, and many things will become possible. I set the wheels in motion for collecting tissue samples when Tito died. Today those samples are frozen in liquid nitrogen, providing me a doorway into one of those possible futures. When (if) cloning gets to be reliable and cheap, I’ll be ready to have them build a puppy for me, the latter-day twin of the Best Dog I Ever Even Met.

But futurist or not, no matter how much technological progress we make — on gene-engineered crops, fish farming, pollution-free energy — none of that can fix the hole in the boat, the hole of more and more people, more and more mouths, arriving daily like unstoppable civilization-smashing dreadnoughts of unthinking hunger.

Leaf Seven

The truth is — brace yourself for some carefully-applied profanity —

We’re fucked.

Seriously. We’re raping ourselves to death with our own appetites. We are bent over, grabbing our metaphorical ankles, while a dick the size of Montgomery, Alabama — population 205,764 — rams repeatedly, daily, up our collective butts.

And it looks like we don’t have the brains to stop it.

For instance: Even the idea of conservation has enemies. And not quiet enemies, but active, loud, wealthy enemies. Enemies with TV and radio shows. Enemies with audiences of admiring millions. Enemies with the backing of huge, globe-spanning churches. Save the environment? Do something about global warming? It’s un-American, it’s crazy, it’s EVILLLL!!

But even those who aren’t active enemies of possible solutions are still thinking we can do pretty much all the same stuff we’ve always done. Everybody can drive cars and live in big houses, and buy everything we buy wrapped in a disposable plastic sheath, and have two or three or four kids. As long as we all pitch in and conscientiously — voluntarily! — conserve, everything will be fine.

Even those of us who are active champions of the environment, as long as we fail to bring the subject of human population into every single discussion, are little more than enablers, co-dependents who help wreck things by failing to admit the real problem.

Taken together, we’re the battered wife who won’t admit she needs help. “I know he loves me. He only does it when he’s drinking.” Wham! “It’s all my fault. I shouldn’t provoke him.” Wham! “He doesn’t really mean to do it. I just can’t leave him.” Wham! Wham!

Out here in the real world, we’re already dying. We’re already killing everything else we care about. It’s just that it’s been happening in slo-mo.

Like the stupid pigeon that stands still while the cat sneaks up on him in broad daylight — “Yeah it DOES look like a great big predator, but hey, it’s barely moving, and nothing bad’s happened SO far, right?” — we’ve sat mired in calm complacency in the midst of a slow motion crash.

But things are speeding up.

The Earth is bleeding to death under us, faster and faster, and the best we’ve managed so far is a string of very small Band-Aids.

When the real way to stop the blood loss, the only workable treatment, is the tourniquet of Everybody Stop Having Children. For a while, anyway.

Leaf Eight

Nothing I’ve said here is meant to imply that I have absolutely no hope. Even the statement “we’re fucked” is not something I feel in any final way.

But I’m not optimistic. The only hope I DO see is if we admit the problem, the real problem, and deal with that. Plug the hole in the hull first.

Stop human population growth. Now. Reverse it. Get our numbers down to four billion, two billion, whatever number really IS sustainable in the real world.

Because this is it, kids. The photo finish where humanity as a group crosses the line a split-second ahead of Mr. Death and lives as the better selves we could be, the ones who become rational adults and enter the next Age of life on earth.

Or the photo finish where Mr. Death beats us across, and stands mocking as we murder each other attempting to claw our individual selves out of the sucking pit of our own sewage and malignant runaway growth … and kill everything else we care about — all the whales and wolves, the polar bears and eagles, and even the cats and dogs and horses — along the way.

There is a possible future, maybe even a probable future, where quite a lot of us will live to see the squalid, dehumanizing background-world of Blade Runner, or Mad Max, or Idiocracy, as the depiction of an enviable Golden Age.

(Just FYI, all you uber-rich people thinking you might survive inside some kind of walled compound, I’d bet real money that the zombie hordes will be eating you FIRST. After all, you’re the fat, juicy ones. Besides, do you really want to live in a world without toilet paper? Without coffee? Without chocolate? )

You, or your kids if you have any, will face this fact: A decidedly unpretty future of death, death and more death is coming soon to a planet near you.

Leaf Nine

And now — deep sigh — cue the shriekers. I obviously want to murder babies, and commit genocide on poor people, right? I’m crazy, I have no proof for my silly dark fantasies and I should probably just shut up — Why do you hate people so much, Mr. Gloomy? — and try not to kill other people’s optimism.

Anyway, things aren’t really that bad, and Science Will Find A Way. Like, you know, mining asteroids and colonizing the Moon, sending our surplus population into space. Stuff like that.

Besides, somewhere out there somebody smarter and better informed than you and I has the problem in hand and will fix things up.

After all, those wise strangers, wherever they are, whoever they are — you know, like government people and corporations and such — care SO MUCH about you and I and our families, right?

Right?

Right.

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Rumination on Death, and Love, and Life

Cowboy DadThree years and a bit later, I don’t dwell on the death of my Cowboy Dad all the time. When I do dwell on him, I can have these surges of sorrow, missing him with painful intensity. But it’s not all the time now.

The loss of him is kind of fading into the background of my daily life. He’s passing into a sort of history in my mind. And I hate that. But I’m sort of okay with it too.

I’ve said many times: “When you lose someone you truly love, it should break you forever.” That’s the fitting tribute for the loss of a loved one, and nothing less will serve to honor them. But if you’re going through this right now, the terrible truth, and the wonderful truth, is that you’re going to get through it. You’re eventually going to be okay. You’ll go about your day and you’ll have happiness and you’ll smile and laugh. It’s probably going to take a couple of years.

The fact that they pass into the history of our memories is an ugly thing. But it’s also a good thing. You want to honor them by being broken, but if you honor THEIR love for YOU, you’ll understand that it’s okay to go on and live your life. Because that’s what people want for each other.

What do you want for the people in your life? There are people for whom I would step in front of a car and push them to safety, or step in front of a bullet, and say “Save yourself! Run!” And I wouldn’t regret it. It wouldn’t bother me at all to give up my life for someone I love.

The thing is, the people you love and who love you back, they feel the same way. It’s okay to go on and live, and be happy, and even, someday, to find other people to love. Because that’s what THEY would want for you.

Remember that.

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A Little Ditty About Recent Events

ffffffI became an atheist, and joined in with others, because I wanted to belong to a Community of Reason. This current (and lengthy past!) shit I see going on with the flaming, mob targeting, jargon-slinging, code-wording, character assassination, labeling and pigeonholing — I hate being even on the edges of it, because the people doing it are as stupid and evil in their own way as the righty-religious community I escaped from. Waaaaay too many of the people I once thought were members of my Community of Reason are instead flaming, vicious assholes, working to hurt or silence people — sometimes relative innocents — for their own nasty pleasure. Or for blog hits (money), which is just as bad.

Something I’ve said many times: “Under the lash of strong emotion, humans become less intelligent.” I’ve characterized Fox News as Entertainment of Outrage, and I despise them for it, for controlling and parasitizing their audience with constant high-emotion stories that do nothing but ramp up the fear, anger and hate, leaving their viewers, stuck on a constant Fox diet, unable to reason even at very simple levels.

But in the past year or so, I’ve realized that a lot of what gets projected at we liberals is the exact same thing — stories of outrages done to women, to the homeless, to black people, to kittens. Blogging — and blog commenting! — conducted with blaming and finger-pointing AT MEMBERS OF OUR OWN COMMUNITY, all delivered at the level of an outraged scream. We’re being poisoned with anger, not just against rightful targets of that anger, but against each other — to the point where too many of US (!) can no longer think rationally, or plan and conduct long-term, broad-scale campaigns to right things — and it’s being DONE to us by people we think are allies, but who are really just more parasites.

The end result of all this? We’re that bucket of crabs that pinch and push and fight EACH OTHER, while people operating at levels of power and influence and deadly action far above us are continuing to conduct wars, poison the planet, lie, cheat, steal, murder, etc. … unimpeded.