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Bear People, Wolf People, People People

Image courtesy WolfPeople.com
Image courtesy WolfPeople.com

I’ve been thinking about that gorilla that just got shot to death at the Cincinnati Zoo.

The outpouring of sympathy for the poor, poor mother who only looked away for a few seconds, the tearful “You people just don’t know what it’s like being a mother!” is only one of the annoying mass responses.

Meanwhile, here’s this innocent gorilla, killed with no second thought, the moment a human child plops down in his enclosure.

Something I’ve said on social media:

What bothers me is that we’re framing the incident in this simplistic homocentric manner — the life of a human baby against that of a Dangerous Wild Animal — even though the issue is MUCH larger and more important.

The thing is, if we can’t keep ourselves from shooting to death an endangered animal WHICH IS ALREADY IN A CAGE and which is breeding stock to keep the species alive, we can’t keep ourselves from killing anything and everything. Which means, inevitably, WE WILL.

EVERY time the life of a human — or the appetite, or comfort, or property — of a human comes up against the life of an animal, we will kill the animal.

The calmer and more forgiving we are about that, the faster it will happen.

I have to imagine Native Americans — Stone Age people everywhere — thought of birds and animals in a dramatically different way than we do. Living with and among them day by day, they saw and understood things about them we modern people almost never even notice.

The modern idea is one of separation, differentness. They’re not US. We have nothing in common with THEM.

But living among them — living WITHIN nature rather than on the edge of it as we do today — depending on observing and coexisting with them, Native Americans would have seen those in-common things that really are there. Would have used them in their daily thinking. Would have felt closer to everything around them in a deep and profound way that we today are normally incapable of imagining.

I try to picture what that might have been like, and I think I have a handle on it with a simple linguistic transform that redefines the word “people” to mean a bit more than we normally allow it.

Currently we define it to mean US. To recreate something of our earlier commonality and connection, the word could be expanded to mean — well, still “us,” but an “us” larger than the human species.

Maybe we’d add an extra tag to each descriptive use of the word, identifying the species referred to. Thus humans would become “human people.” Likewise, dogs would be “dog people,” and the individual dog would be a “dog person.”

Extending it outwards, bears become bear people, or perhaps Bear People. Around us in the natural world there would be Bird People, Wolf People, Coyote People, Elephant People. Lion People. Mouse People.

It wouldn’t extend to everything. I’d include only those things that had brains and shared our common sensory and possibly emotional experience. (And undoubtedly, we would not like all of them. I don’t have any great fellow-feeling for alligators, for instance; I’m willing to see them as real, still don’t want them in my neighborhood swimming hole.)

But it would build a bridge for us to explore from our side, looking to understand — to FEEL — the commonality.

Without actually using the word “people,” a lot of us already have the strong feeling of connection contained within it when we think of our dogs. I have friends who see their horses and mules that way. But using the words out in public would send that message to others: There’s something here, a new viewpoint, worth thinking about.

We’ve spent several thousand years with the idea that they’re separate and lesser than us, and it’s freed us to kill and poison them, to level their habitat, to drive them out, to casually extinct them. Or to breed them down to defenseless and helpless forms that become permanent prisoners of whatever indignities we choose to heap on them.

Those people with small dogs, I’m often convinced they have no concept of what they have. They have in their heads some silly image of a disposable entertainment device, a toy, a comical baby — Oh, he’s so KYOOOT!! — and it never really occurs to them they have a BEING in their care, something, someONE, who would much rather run and swim and wallow in mud rather than spend time dressed in a costume, propped grossly overweight and gasping on a pillow, or imprisoned in a purse.)

We see them as inferior THINGS — either useful or annoying — rather than co-equal SELVES. The average city-dweller has zero respect for animals. (Hell, they have little enough of it even for their fellow humans.) But if we’re going to keep the world alive around us, we have to feel more than ownership for it and the things in it. We have to have fellowship.

I expect there will be plenty of people who won’t get it.

No doubt some will interpret what I’m proposing in that icky-sticky, bosom-clutching “animal spirits” way. “Ooh, yes, we’re all SPIRITS together, we and the little animals! We should go out into the forest and show them our love!”

Others will soundly reject the concept, crying “But they’re different! They’re not people! They’re nothing like us.”

But they are like us in so many ways, not least that they have our same feelings, the same sense of self, the same desire to live their lives. Anyone who works closely with horses, or elephants, or so many other critters, knows it. They’re People.

So the next time you see me, yes, I’m going to be using it. I’m going to speak to your dog, “Hello Dog Person!”, to your cat “Hey there, Cat Person!”

Hey, I might even manage to notice YOU. —Because that’s just the kind of People Person I am.

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Beta Culture: Movement Cuckoos

cuckooI’ve said many times that every time atheists put up a billboard or other public display, they should absolutely expect it will be vandalized, and should set up cameras to record the vandals in the act. Anytime we think “billboard,” we should also think “vandalism preparation.”

It’s probably impossible to prevent the vandalism, but we could start a YouTube video collection to argue that nice Christians vandalize atheists’ property about a thousand times more often than evil atheists target Christian properties.

But I really want to talk about something else at the moment. Rather than enemies and backpressure forces outside the atheist movement, I want to talk about enemies WITHIN atheism. Or indeed, within any new organized social movement.

You’re probably aware of the European cuckoo, a “brood parasite” which lays its eggs in the nests of other species of birds. It’s a pretty creepy little bastard, actually. After the cuckoo chick hatches, it shoves the smaller eggs or nestlings out to die, and then obliges the hapless instinct-drive parent birds — which can be a fraction its size — to feed it to adulthood.

I bring it up to make a point about movements, which is this: Every movement or social justice organization which presents any sort of challenge to the status quo — or, indeed, a new idea of any sort — will inevitably end up with cuckoos. Or so I suspect.

The FBI in the J. Edgar Hoover era was notorious for infiltrating all sorts of organizations. The civil rights movement, anti-war protesters, environmental movement, hell even major political parties, had FBI plants within them, gathering information and sometimes actively sabotaging the movement from the inside.

Some years back, I had an extended conversation with an undercover cop, a massively-muscled man covered in tattoos, who’d spent more than two years inside a motorcycle gang. He worked his way into the post of second-in-command, not only gathering incriminating evidence, but assisting in, and even instigating, criminal acts. (The personal price of it, he said, had been damned high, as he necessarily alienated himself from his wife and children, but also because he developed a great deal of sincere liking for the men he would later betray.)

I watched the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement gather momentum and then diminish into apparent insignificance, a progression helped along by people I suspect were cuckoos. At a major demonstration in Washington DC, a drum circle sprang up, an extended effort that did nothing more than vigorously and monotonously bang on drums, but which disrupted and destroyed the thrust of the movement.

I’m not CERTAIN these weren’t all well-meaning drum enthusiasts, there to present their own attention-getting version of protest, but the fact that they could not be moved to stop leads me to think some part of the incursion was deliberately staged. Add in this data point from the linked Gawker article:

Unfortunately there is one individual who is NOT a drummer but who claims to speak for the drummers who has been a deeply disruptive force, attacking the drumming rep during the GA and derailing his proposal, and disrupting the community board meeting, as well as the OWS community relations meeting. She has also created strife and divisions within the POC caucus, calling many members who are not ‘on her side’ “Uncle Tom”, “the 1%”, “Barbie” “not Palestinian enough” “Wall Street politicians” “not black enough” “sell-outs”, etc. People have been documenting her disruptions, and her campaign of misinformation, and instigations. She also has a documented history online of defamatory, divisive and disruptive behavior within the LGBT (esp. transgender) communities. Her disruptions have made it hard to have constructive conversations and productive resolutions to conflicts in a variety of forums in the past several days.

A plant sent there by the FBI/Wall Street/some other government agency? It’s not all that hard to believe, is it? Yes, this is a conspiracy theory, but … conspiracies do exist. If you don’t believe that, in the age of tobacco and petroleum, Fox News and the GOP, you haven’t been paying attention.

Cuckoos don’t necessarily arise from enemy camps. They can spontaneous spring up from within the roll of faithful members, and perhaps completely unintentionally create major rifts in the solidarity of the movement.

The atheist movement was early-on a very friendly club of people discovering the pleasures of freethought and reveling in the newfound freedom to think and express themselves. I was one of those early celebrants, writing and commenting variously in Yahoo chat rooms, on my own GoatOnFire and Hank Fox blogs, on Unscrewing the Inscrutable, in my book Red Neck, Blue Collar, Atheist, and finally on FreeThought Blogs, taking a rather meek place alongside PZ Myers, Ed Brayton and other notables. The excitement of atheist solidarity eventually led to the first Reason Rally, and I never felt so HOME as on that one drizzly day in Washington DC.

And then Atheism-Plus came along. The idea was atheism PLUS social justice causes. I was already working on my concept of Beta Culture, and didn’t immediately jump in, but I was sympathetic at least as far as not offering vocal opposition.

I wanted to believe in it. I disagreed somewhat with atheist purists whose response to Atheism-Plus was pointedly negative, insisting that atheism was this ONE thing — atheism — and nothing else. One FTB blogger responded with the equally pointed “If you’re not with us, you’re against us.” In my view, that statement was the tipping point for creating a major rift within the movement, where we became “these atheists” and “those atheists,” rather than just “atheists.” FTB was suddenly presented with a seeming tidal wave of hate — not from religionists, but from other atheists.

Add in the fact that the major fraction of Atheism-Plus was an aggressive feminism which came to actively target other atheist bloggers — I got to see this from the inside at FTB, and I can tell you it could be nasty as hell (I seem to recall one astonishing declaration that no man should speak or write about feminism unless a woman was present, essentially to check his work!) — and we soon had a situation where you couldn’t be an atheist in good standing unless you were FIRST an ardent feminist. You might agree on every point in the feminist cant, and yet become an enemy with a single “wrong” word. And whoo! They would COME AFTER YOU.

I talked to other bloggers and commenters around the atheist web, and eventually had something like a dozen writers who said they would never again engage with the issue of feminism, because the price of making a mistake — which, again, could hinge on a single, often deliberately-misinterpreted, word — was too high.

Cuckoos. Feminists in the atheist nest, shoving out other atheists. It certainly worked on me! I moved to Patheos and largely stopped reading FTB, because I couldn’t bear all the heat and light of victim-feminism. (I find it interesting that Ed Brayton, one of the founders of FTB, also eventually joined Patheos, possibly for much the same reason I did.)

[ Side Note: Typically, any male blogger who addressed feminism in any even slightly critical way would preface every post with immense protestations of agreement and solidarity with the feminist cause. But I’m not going to do that for two reasons: 1) It never helped. You could be 99.95% in favor of women’s rights, equality, safety and choice, but that 0.05% disagreement would bring attacks which could be literally vicious. And 2) If you don’t know me by now … eh. Go read some other blog. ]

In the end, I think I have to agree with the atheist purists.  Social justice issues, no matter how greatly worth pursuing on their own, dilute and poison the ATHEIST movement when they are shoved in as part of it.

But to conclude with what is really my main point: Too often, those of us working toward progressive social or political goals are naively unprepared for the sophistication of opposition, or even the fact of it. Some level of opposition will likely come from outside, but it can also come from inside and be no less destructive.

But just as with the strategy suggested for atheist billboards (go into it with the absolute expectation of vandalism), every social justice movement should START with the expectation of aggressive, often deceptive, opposition and consider how to deal with it.

Definitely expect opposition from outside, but don’t neglect the possibility of enemies of internal origin — cuckoos — and plan some sort of approach to their potential arrival.

 

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Random Stuff I’ve Learned

COE Square•  Dogs like icewater in the summer, just like people do.
•  The burger you get at the counter has no resemblance to the picture of the burger on the poster.
•  If they tell you it’s “for your own good” or “to serve you better” … it isn’t.
•  Once you lose half your hair, the pressure’s off.
•  Everything mouse-sized and bigger has feelings.
•  The death of a loved one makes everything else small change.
•  Most everybody else is too busy dancing to watch how good or bad your dancing is. But you probably do suck at it. On the the other hand, the point of dancing isn’t to impress others.
•  Charity is cheaper if you do it directly.
•  You can’t wait for real life to start at some nebulous future date. Life has to be enjoyed every day. Get on with it.
•  I can overlook a lot of your peccadilloes as long as you’re self-supporting.
•  Never lie to a child or a dog for any reason.
•  The thing is, nobody really knows how things are supposed to be. As long as you don’t hurt anybody, including yourself, do the stuff that makes you happy.
•  In playing with your dog, let him win. Every time.
•  Little people think the way to be big is to hurt or control other people. Big people want power FOR people, rather than OVER them.
•  One of the nicest things about children is that they give adults an excuse to blow bubbles again.
•  Someday you’re going to be dead. Might as well make the best of the situation while you wait.
•  In court, bigger and better and higher-priced liars almost always win out over simple honesty and good faith.
•  Not all beliefs and cultures deserve respect. If you believe in treating women as property, your culture is an inferior pile of doodoo. I don’t need to respect you. You need to change.
•  Talk to children as if they were adults. Expect adults to sometimes act like children.
•  The brains of die-hard smokers are incapable of imagining cigarette butts and litter can be the same thing.
•  Human beings often go to war over their differences, despite being 99.99 percent the same.
•  Nobody outside Texas knows what real barbecue is.
•  Cats look a lot smarter than they really are.
•  Pretty much everybody is a well-meaning doofus. Including you and me.
•  Step in and put your hands on. Every person should know how to build things, how to create things, how to fix things. No sitting back playing helpless.
•  Some large fraction of what passes as acceptable business practice is purely predatory on the customer-victims.
•  No animal on earth smells worse than an unwashed human. Whatever else is happening in your life, if you’re not showering regularly, I’m not sitting next to you.
•  If you ask for a favor in a way that assumes I can’t say no, I’m saying no. If it’s obligatory, it’s not a favor.
•  Not only are you not the boss of me, I’m pretty sure I didn’t even hire you as a consultant.
•  Fame is a cheat, because it depends more on what other people think of you than on what you think of yourself.
•  Not every member of a downtrodden social class is an innocent fluffy bunny. Some of the people cops shoot actually deserve it.
•  There is no place you can get to in life, however low and helpless, that there isn’t somebody who’s figured out a way to suck just a teeny bit more life out of you. Sometimes that method is called “state lottery.”
•  If you turn your car stereo up to 10 and then go into a store with it blasting, it’s not about your love of music.
•  There are artists and there are people who say they’re artists. If you tell them you don’t understand their work and they retort that there must be something wrong with YOU, they’re probably the second type.
•  If you’re going to have a pet, don’t complain about a little fur on the furniture.
•  If they “deserve” it, you can do anything to them, including torturing and killing, and sleep well at night. Now you just have to figure out how to make it look like they deserve it.
•  There are creatures who walk around upright, wearing human clothes and speaking human language, but who are no more human than sharks. Many of them seem to do well.
•  Money can’t buy happiness, but if you’re going to be miserable anyway, you might as well take the money.
•  If they’re selling religion, just close the door.
•  Listen to someone closely and he’ll think you’re the brightest person he’s ever met.
•  Every discussion is about learning something, or reaching agreement. Every argument is about winning. There are people who CANNOT have a discussion.
•  The War on Drugs is like trying to put out a forest fire by doing away with Bic lighters. It’s the wrong solution. But then again, it keeps alive the richly profitable prison, lawyer and cops-and-courts industries. And hey, destroying people is a small price to pay for that, right?
•  Sports fanatics are idiots. But they seem to have more friends.
•  Skin color is a stupid way to divide people up. But there are people of every color who think it is.
• “Feminist” doesn’t automatically mean “right.” But don’t dare try to tell them that.
•  People who deliberately breed small, stubby-legged, brainless dogs are not really animal lovers.
•  The shrieking modern rejection of the occasional physical punishment administered to children is probably misguided. Civilization was built by people who had their butts whupped.
•  Everybody farts. But when the Pope does it, nobody notices.
•  Some people have never had an original thought in their lives. Fortunately, they never notice.
•  Give people compliments. If you think something good about somebody, tell them instantly.
•  It’s okay to be wrong.
•  Nobody gets enough hugs.
•  Your parents probably didn’t mean to do it to you. They were stumbling through life just like you are. But that doesn’t mean everything is forgivable.
•  Nobody ever thinks it’s their own fault.
•  If two young people take up living together, they will both immediately assume the other one is doing the housekeeping.
•  Used to be, if you were overweight, you were just overweight. Now you can be a victim of horrible oppression. Every. Goddam. Time. Someone brings up the subject of fitness.
•  Cities are not the natural environment of humans. You can never feel so alive, so free, so centered, as when you’re in the wilderness. But well over 90 percent of us will never know this.
•  European tourists dress funny. If they’re French, that goes double.

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We Are SO F*cking Doomed

Jesus LightSaw this pic on Facebook, with the caption

do you see jesus? type “amen” if you see him

How many typed “amen”? I didn’t go through and inspect every single response, but in the looking I did do — the most recent several hundred responses — every person typed “amen” or something even more goddy.

As of 9:45 p.m. today, the post got 125,177 comments, 310,000 likes, and almost 13,000 shares.

Oh, and Donald Trump just won the primaries in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. It wasn’t even close.

Gah.

On the plus side, I think Hillary is going to crush him. The comedic dynamic of the GOP primary is that the “joke” candidate is kicking the asses of the “serious” candidates. The GOP built this monster, and if he runs amuck and destroys the whole party — while they tear out their hair and scream to the heavens “What have I done!!?” — that’s fine with me.

But still … that he’s getting votes at all is a testament to the utter gullibility of some of you Earth people.

Hey, come to think of it, that light in the clouds looks a lot like Donald Trump! Someone alert Fox News!

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Thinking Tools: Weather and Will

BGL copySome of what you work out — hopefully, anyway — as you go about your daily life, are what I call “thinking tools.” These aren’t just facts, they’re ways of viewing or understanding the world around you  in a way that allows you to deal with life in a more productive, or less painful, way.

I wrote about something I call “Nailing” quite some time back, and that concept is one of my own thinking tools, something that helps me understand a bit of seemingly irrational human behavior. (Such as why people can be MORE supportive of war after their kid gets killed in one.)

I often have these things in my head for years before I finally sit down and think about them, much less commit them to paper. One such idea is something I call “Weather and Will.”

“Weather” as I’m using it here is meant to represent natural forces as distinct from human ones. It’s all the stuff we have no control over, and have to just be aware of and careful about.

“Will” is what humans do, and it’s subject to, well, human will.

Anytime there’s some sort of incident involving Weather — say Bob gets hit by lightning while playing golf during a thunderstorm — we tend to think it was Bob’s fault, if anybody’s. He should have taken into account that standing out in the open during a storm — and holding a long metal rod aloft — was a bad idea. It’s no fault of the weather itself, which was only doing what weather does — be weather.

We might generously call the event an “accident,” but if there’s any blame to be leveled, it would definitely go to Bob. Recognizing that one of the factors involved has no human volition and the other does, we’d never say the weather should have done something different, but we would definitely say Bob should have done something different.

You challenge Weather, or ignore Weather, or forget Weather, you better expect a bad outcome.

But “Weather” is not always WEATHER. It’s all those other uncontrollable, non-volitional forces too.

If a man lies down drunk on the railroad tracks at night — even through trains are human-made and human-controlled — whose fault is it if he gets hit by a train? We tend to think it’s the drunk guy’s fault. Trains are Weather in the sense that they have this sort of inevitability about them: They can’t be stopped quickly, but even if they could, the train engineer might not be able to see the guy lying on the tracks at night.

Besides which, it’s not like trains leap out of nowhere, or chase you down and kill you. They’re not stealthy, or malevolent. Not only do trains run on tracks which are unmistakable for anything else in civilization, their crossings are always clearly marked, AND a train makes a noise like … well, like a locomotive. Civilization has been SO careful to make trains safe, it’s extremely rare that we could say “Yeah, that whole family was killed after stopping their RV on the clearly-marked rail crossing, but it wasn’t their fault.” No, most of the time it IS their fault, or at least the driver’s fault, and not that of the train or its engineer. There’s really very little about it which is accidental.

But there’s a confusing idea out there about Weather and Will. We see situations — both in fiction and in real life — in which one person gets blamed for something another person did: “The bank robber wouldn’t have shot Bob if Bob had only done what he said. It’s his own fault, really.” “He wouldn’t beat her if she didn’t provoke him.”

Both of those formulations make the bad guy’s actions out to be Weather — as if he’s some sort of unstoppable natural force, something nobody, not even he, could do anything about — when they’re really completely about Will. It’s NOT Bob’s fault for getting shot, not even a little bit. It’s never the woman’s fault when she’s hurt by an abusive boyfriend.

In both cases, the injury done to the victim was 100 percent the doing of the aggressor. There is no element of Weather about the thing. That guy shot Bob because he wanted to. He might have set up this bogus choice for Bob — “Obey me, or die!” — and in truth it might be good in that specific case for Bob to just obey, but nothing in the situation says responsibility for any later shooting rests with anyone but the guy with the gun.

An abusive boyfriend might say “I wouldn’t hit you if you’d just be quiet when I tell you to!” but at no point does that become Weather. It’s his CHOICE to hit her, and he can choose not to. We might say “My gosh, woman, get away from the bastard! Leave now and go as far and as fast as you can!” But this is more in the way of a avidly suggested precautionary measure. At no point does the physical abuse become her fault.

We tend to see large-scale human things like government or war as Weather, and in the sense that they’re big and unpredictable, or take on a Weathery life of their own independent of the human wills within them, it certainly can seem to be true. But it’s important to continue to think of them as the result of Will. Government is a thing humans do, and they can do it differently. War is a thing humans choose to do, and can choose not to do.

There are statistical effects from massed human behavior — actions or effects that arise from our own unconscious nature — that we tend to consider as Weather. For instance, we might say that anytime large numbers of humans gather together — for an outdoor event, say, or just crowded together in cities — there will be masses of litter left to pick up. We expect it, grimly resign ourselves to it, as if there’s nothing that can be done but hire people to try to keep up with the deluge of garbage.

This is certainly true in New York City, where I travel every day in the course of my work. But a half day’s drive to the north, Ottawa, Canada, is the fourth cleanest city in the world. The streets and sidewalks are spotless. Not because the Weather is any different, but because the people of Ottawa CHOOSE to act in a different way.

I think the point is, only Weather is Weather. When it comes to human behavior on any scale, even when you’re dealing with what appears to be unavoidable results, it’s still Will.

Meaning it can be changed. Altered. Done differently, and better.

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Free College? I’m In!

I heard a guy in Subway a couple of years back loudly ranting about public schools. He finished with “They want us to pay to educate other people’s kids! That’s how you destroy a country. That’s how you bring down America.”
 
He was talking about PUBLIC SCHOOLS.
 
I had this brief happy vision of a giant Monty Python thumb coming down from the ceiling and just crushing him into jelly. Silly ninny. Those young people — other people’s kids — are the ones who will eventually shoulder the load of making the world work. Not just doing all the physical and mental labor, but learning about the world, understanding it, and making decisions about it. They will be tomorrow’s movers and shakers and VOTERS. Tomorrow’s doctors and inventors and scientists and, hell, DMV workers.
 
Having them educated — as opposed to ignorant and helpless — is a damned good thing. Having them educated a LOT is a double-damned good thing. That part of my taxes that goes toward education — as opposed to, say, military spending or giving tax breaks to big corporations — oh boy am I happy about that.
 
This business about free college that’s come up lately — I see people reacting to it as if it’s some monstrous idea proposed by people who hate America. But I can’t help but think that investing in the minds of the people who will someday soon run the country and some significant portion of the world, that would be a good thing.
 
Yes, somebody has to pay for it. But no, it’s not the sort of point-of-a-gun robbery some people are making it out to be. Education is not an Xbox or a Ford that starts to lose value the day you take it home. It’s not you paying for your neighbor’s above-ground pool. It’s an INVESTMENT IN THE WORLD, one that pays off and pays off and pays off, over and over, for all the time to come.
 
I’d rather live in — and grow old in — a society filled with as many educated people as possible.
 
So: Free college? Yeah, count me as a supporter.
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When We All Grow Up

adults2Every major change in life — and probably a lot of the minor ones — is accompanied by something I call Turbulence.

New job, turbulence. New baby, turbulence. Loss of a loved one, MAJOR turbulence.

It’s that period of discomfort and confusion that happens between one steady life state and another. Eventually you get used to new conditions of life — the new job is as familiar and comfortable as the old one — but meanwhile, you suffer the bumpy ride of the necessary transition.

I bring up Turbulence because I think we’re in it, society-wide, worldwide, right now. I suppose the people of every era feel their discomforts, but this one is a one-of-a-kind, first-ever-in-history discomfort, the sign of a BIG transition.

I’m thinking about Humanity on Planet Earth, and the changes in store for us, major ones, some of which are already taking place. What will be the end result of those changes? Where are we going?

Up til now it’s like we’ve been living through the human species’ childhood, where we could explore and play and fight and kill and burn and break and do pretty much anything we pleased, without any very serious repercussions. We could reproduce without limit, experiment with weird beliefs, exotic ways of living, silly fantastic ideas, and see what happened. All the while, we were rich enough in room and resources that our failures made only local differences. We could try out this thing and that thing and the other thing, and no matter how much we broke or burned, we could just walk away from the wreckage and try something new.

But there’s that time to come when we won’t be doing that stuff anymore. The time when we will practice restraint and finally become grownups, comfortable with ourselves and with life on Earth, living more or less gracefully and successfully, into the indefinite future.

I don’t say we’re GOING to make it. But if we do, it will be because we did this other thing, and so became able to survive. It’s like our doctor has said “Your heart is laboring, your liver is shot, your cholesterol if through the roof and your diabetes is getting worse. You’re going to lose 100 pounds or you’re going to die in a matter of months. There is no third choice.”

In the only good future imaginable, in the single survivable scenario, we change. Non-change, or half-assed change, will bring either extinction or something few of us today would want to live through.

The in-between time, the turbulence-riddled NOW, is our teen years. We’re still experimenting, playing and fighting and stumbling and living our rich fantasy lives, but with global warming, Peak Oil, so many other real-life realities being forced upon us, we’re discovering we can’t do just anything. Not forever. We’re finding out some things have uncomfortable, even deadly, results, both to ourselves and to the planet. We’re living in the midst of the transition from carefree childhood to … something.

I’m thinking about that “something” — the full adulthood of humanity, hanging out there in some hopefully not-too-distant future.

What will things be like when the human species is all grown up? What will be necessary? What will be necessarily avoided? How will we live? How will we relate to Planet Earth, and each other?

Humanity’s adulthood is a way off, sadly, and none of us will live to see it. It’s going to require generational changes; more than a few generations will be necessary before a critical mass of grownups appears on the world scene. The lot of us are unfortunately stuck back here in adolescence.

Doesn’t mean we can’t speculate. The fine details of that era are impossible to guess at — there will be arts and careers, entertainments, technology, unimaginable to us today — but I think we can predict something of the bigger picture, because some conclusions are pretty much unavoidable.

There’s a lot of stuff we simply can’t afford, or afford to do, anymore. For instance, we won’t be using fossil fuels in that future, because most of them will just be gone. Used up by we human children in a burning, partying, indulgent spree.

And some things, we just have to hope will be a part of the picture, because otherwise, that future won’t be anything those of us today could enjoy.

So here are some of my guesses about what it will mean for us to be sane and successful grownups on Planet Earth.

Population and Energy

First, like I said, we’re going to give up petroleum, and maybe even nuclear energy. Solar’s the way to go. Everything in our adult future will be powered by the sun.

Or yes, some “might be” futury energy source. But having gotten to 2016 with no sign of widely-available flying cars, which I’ve been reading about since the 1950s, I’m not counting on the rescue of out-of-the-blue science-fictiony solutions. I’d love to see fusion power perfected, but a question I’ve asked myself over the years is: What if it’s just not possible? What if it takes an actual star to keep a fusion reaction going? I’d like to see the research continue, but I don’t think it’s something we can count on.

There are going to be a lot fewer of us. Idiot optimists notwithstanding, Planet Earth just can’t support 7 or 8 or 12 billion humans. My guess is that somewhat less than a billion humans, maybe only a few hundred million, can live on the planet without eventually eating it down to bedrock. And why would we want more? If there are resources enough to allow 500 million people to live like royalty, or 12 billion people to live like slaves, cramped and poor, what good argument is there for NOT living comfortably within our means?

The question for me — and I think grownups in the human future — isn’t “Do people have the right to have as many kids as they want?”, it’s “Do children have the right to be born into a family, or a world, that can support them?” Note that I’m not saying some draconian governmental edict will come along and nix human population growth. I’m saying the real world will enforce some sort of solution, either voluntary on the part of Homo Adultus, or involuntary via any of a number of mass die-off scenarios.

There will be fewer of us.  How we get there is up to conscious decisions by us might-be grownups, or due to the already-in-progress default course set by the equivalent of idiot teenagers refusing to accept responsibility in a world of real consequences.

Education and Equality

We have to have full equality of every human, everywhere on the planet. Everyone has to have the right to vote, to medical care, to an education.

Speaking of education, we’re going to stop treating our kids like they’re children, and start treating them as if they’re going to be fellow adults expected to shoulder the load of making the world work. We’re going to give every one of them a full, free education — which we will expect them to actually work at and benefit from — up to and including college or trade school.

Speaking of medical care, we’re going to live a lot longer than we do now. Think about it: What’s the real goal of the field of medicine? To cure everything. Pretty much every disease is going down, and life extension will become a major focus of research. Because what is aging but just another disease? The end result of that research is going to BE life extension. How much? I like to think it would be well into the hundred-and-somethings.

Environment

We’re going to learn to live on Planet Earth without damaging it. Our smaller population will allow us to abandon large areas and allow them to go back to nature. We’ll have a reverence for life, with absolute protection of endangered species with no regard to national borders. Those mountain gorillas, for instance, are not Africa’s mountain gorillas, they’re everybody’s (and nobody’s) mountain gorillas, and we’ll feel they must be protected no matter what.

Society

We’re going to stop tolerating lies. One of the things we haven’t yet understood is that Freedom of Speech has to have this other freedom attached to it, Freedom From Lies. Every person (and corporation) has the right to say whatever they want to say, but that freedom is limited by every OTHER person’s right to hear the truth.

I can lie to you in person and you and I will deal with that privately, but on public airwaves or wires, where millions might hear and be adversely affected by it, there can be no “right” to lie, to incite others to believe falsehoods, and the penalties will be severe.

Lying is a form of pollution, when you think about it. Lies are a poison that destroys human understanding of the truth. It’s like secondhand smoke — when the lies flow over your metaphorical property line and into my life, your right to lie has ended.

(In my view, there is already no right to lie to a child, about any subject or for any reason.)

We’re going to have a common language. English? Probably. Doesn’t mean all the others will go away. Does mean we’re going to talk to each other, all over Earth, in this common language.

We’re going to have a LOT more public transportation, a lot fewer cars. We’re going to spend a LOT less money on wars and weapons.

We’re going to end racism and sexism. Skin color is about the stupidest, most superficial way of judging people, and we — all of us — will eventually realize that. As to sexism, we’ll eliminate the prejudices and limitations based on gender, but we’re also going to accept that men and women each have their own specific needs, and figure that more into the balance.

Our lives are going to be a lot more transparent, but we’re also going to become a lot more comfortable with our own nature and the inevitable foibles which attend it.

We’re going to come to understand that not all cultures and cultural practices are equal. That some are good for human freedom and dignity, some are simply not, and we’re going to abandon the not-goods. Speaking of which:

Religion

We’re going to do away with religion and mysticism. Goodbye Islam — don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. But also: Goodbye Christianity — don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. Schools will teach evolution with gusto, and every kid will grow up knowing he’s connected as family to all life on Earth. The idea of the universe being poofed into existence by a great big guy in the sky is going to seem like a fairy tale straight out of the Dark Ages.

We’re going to end genital mutilation of babies. Sorry Jews and Muslims, snip off the end of your own dick if you want, cut out your own clitoris once you’ve achieved the age of choice, but you can’t do that to kids anymore. They don’t BELONG to you, they belong to the adults they will one day become, and it’s that adult — and only that adult — who has the right to choose to make permanent changes to their bodies. You would no more cut healthy body parts off a baby than you would install garish permanent tattoos on their bodies. In both cases, it’s a trespass on THEIR right to choose.

We’re going to stop being ouchy about sex education for young people. Every kid on Earth is going to receive the full, unaltered Handbook of the Human Body in classes taught from kindergarten onward.

Business and Politics

We’re going to push corporations out of the driver’s seat of government. We’re going to end tax evasion by corporations and the wealthy, and the huge income inequality that flows out of corporate culture. In the coming era of transparency — particularly in international banking — I suspect most organized crime is going to go away.

Science and Technology

We’re going to use space, but probably not move into it. The minimum necessary life support system for humans is probably the size of a planet, and we only know of one. We’ll have robots out there, or humans for short periods, but we’re never going to have humans like you and I living on other planets.

Every person on Earth is going to have full, unfettered access to the Internet, and they will carry it around with them.

It’s almost inevitable that we’ll tinker with our own genes, improving ourselves in countless ways and ushering in an age of transhumanism. Not everyone will change, but everyone will have the chance. Overall, average intelligence is going to go up — we’re going to be a lot smarter.

Speaking of intelligence, we’re going to have Artificial Intelligence. It’s not going to be just like us, but one way or another it’s going to exist. It’s also going to be friendly, an intellectual partner rather than some horror-story master or adversary.

How?

I doubt that nations will go away. Local units of government are better at handling local issues. But a worldwide community of individuals — and yes, I’m thinking Beta Culture — who agree that certain things must happen can make those things happen. Not by undercutting government, but by convincing a critical mass of people in each country that certain things — women’s equality, for instance, but also all this other stuff — absolutely must happen.

Here’s hoping.

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Saying Goodbye to the 100-Year-Old Man

Today I went to the funeral of a friend, someone I’ve only known for about 5 years, but who was one of those quality people who brightens the life of everyone he comes into contact with.

Ed lived just shy of 100 years. He saw 100 Christmases, 100 Halloweens, 100 summers and winters and falls. And up until a couple of weeks before his death, he was still driving his own car, still — IN INK — working crossword puzzles. A mere three days before he died, he was traveling country roads with a friend, riding and enjoying the warm springlike day, laughing and making bad puns.

After the lengthy opening by a priest, his two sons stood up to speak, and one of the stories they told tickled me greatly, as it was both funny and warmly, completely ED:

In his early years as a math professor, Ed had a math-faculty friend who didn’t have a car. Ed readily volunteered to help out, giving him rides to and from work, day after day. One day as Ed and his wife Barbara were having dinner in a local diner, the guy happened in and saw them. “Ed! I just got a new car! I can start paying you back for how kind you’ve been over the past year. You have to let me give the two of you a ride home!” Ed and Barbara happily accepted the ride home, thanking the man warmly as he deposited them on their doorstep, waving as he drove out of sight.

After which, the two of them walked the mile or so back to the diner to pick up their own car.

It’s been a while since I’ve been to a religious memorial, and I had forgotten how utterly odd they are. It may be the ritualistic ceremony really does give comfort and peace to the friends and family of the departed, but they’re still, to an atheist, distinctly strange.

The opening I mentioned consisted of a retired priest / friend of the family welcoming everyone and asking all to be seated. He waved a program (there’s some more devout name for it, but it’s not coming to me at the moment), making sure everybody had one so they could follow the ceremony. The program is 15 pages long, and it consists of long sections to be read by the priest, but also included call-and-response sections where the priest reads one line and the celebrants read a line back to him, with lots of Glory to Thee-ing and Amen-ing and bowing-and-praying along the way.

It is 12 pages before the name of the deceased gets mentioned, which in this case was some 32 minutes into the ceremony. To my atheist ears, the entire show up until that time seemed to be an extended arm-twisting, moment-of-grief commercial for God.

Again, if it gives people comfort, I can’t knock it TOO much. And if that’s what Ed would have wanted, I’m entirely at peace with it.

But … when I did the memorial ceremony for my Cowboy Dad, the entire thing was about the man. Not only did I read his entirely non-religious eulogy, everybody at the event was invited to share stories and memories of him. There was a single Bible verse — “To everything there is a season” — read by one of his cowboy friends near the end, but most of the ceremony was meant to focus on the life and happy effects this tough, good man had had on all of us. The purpose of the event was to celebrate a man’s life, not to send a tidal wave of religiosity over the attendees.

I often wonder why African-Americans and Native Americans can be Christians, as the religion was so obviously used to bludgeon them into line, but I can appreciate that if you grow up with it and never examine any broader context, it feels good and right to you.

Looking around me at this funeral, I could see that THIS ceremony felt good and right to the people there with me. But it still put me in mind of, oh, a tiny little sandwich in the middle of a heaping platter of garnish, or that friend who does you a 5-minute favor, and then spends ten times as long telling you what a nice guy he is for doing you the favor. It was a lot of goddy STUFF and only a little of Ed, and I would much rather have heard more about Ed.

 

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Lefty Pet Peeve

mass hangingThis picture was shared on Facebook with the caption, “Americas (sic) largest mass hanging of Indians.”

Hey, I’m in. I’m on board. The LEAST you can say about the alleged incident is that it deserves to echo through history as one of our most shameful moments. It deserves to be remembered, reflected upon, regretted.

As a compassionate, reasoning being — or so I like to think of myself — my first impulse is to find out more. This is something that needs to be a part of my thinking, right?

But … no further information is attached. No link. No explanation. No date. No location. Nothing.

I can’t tell whether this incident was perpetrated by forces of the newly-minted United States, by the pre-Revolutionary British, by Mexico, France, Texas, some pre-1776 state, or just generic “white people” acting on their own. I can’t tell whether it was even on this continent.  Might it have been India? Australia? Feudal Japan? China?

We don’t know. Not only do we not know, we can’t even guess. (Okay, from the architecture, I’m going to wager it’s probably not Japan or China.)

I’d think it would be obvious why this pisses me off, but I’ll tell you anyway:

In my mind, there’s a stark difference between INFORMING and MANIPULATING.

Informing is when you introduce a subject and tell me the full details. Or at least give me a start and then point me to somewhere I can (without, say, flying to England and digging around in historical accounts) find out the whole story.

Manipulating is when you project a knee-jerk emotional appeal with NO FURTHER INFORMATION.

Here’s the pisser: I’M ALREADY SYMPATHETIC TO THE MESSAGE. I’m on the “this is truly terrible” team. I don’t need to be manipulated, I need to be informed. He who informs me is on my team, he who manipulates me is not.

I’m willing to do a little research to find things out for myself, but it would be peachy if the original assertion contained SOME sort of clue as to where or when to start looking.

But whoever posted the thing didn’t do that. Is it that they couldn’t be bothered? That it was enough to rile people up in righteous anger? Was this aimed at evoking pure emotion, with no action or understanding necessary?

Was it meant only to inspire the lame-ass conclusion that White People Are Evil? Because THAT conclusion I’m  not on board with. It’s as racist as any other race-related generalization.

Actually, I have no trouble believing this act happened, and was carried out by “Americans.” But I can’t AUTOMATICALLY place that blame any more than I can automatically blame fresh graffiti on my fence on the first random teenager who walks by.

In both cases, you have to KNOW.

Projecting an emotional message at me, a message which I am already inclined to sympathetically consider, but which contains zero facts, is either the act of a careless idiot, or someone deliberately manipulating his/her audience — me. Either way, it’s a betrayal of the faculty of careful thought and reason I like to think sets me apart — sets US apart — from those people who make up the crazy, excitable rabble who so vividly fill the ranks of the teabagger movement.

Two conclusions:

  1. The person who would do this is no friend. He/she is, in fact, my enemy.
  2. I have no need to look any further into the claim. The bullshit level is high enough that I can ignore the thing entirely, and suffer no loss.

 

 

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Hillary, This Time You’re Goin’ Down! I Mean It! Really Really!

This bubbled up elsewhere, shared by someone I like.

Tell you what I think:

More than 20 years of investigations, accusations, smears, and innuendo have resulted in exactly zero charges. Is it because the fix is in, or is it because none of that stuff is true? Here’s the thing: If any of the accusations were true, Congressional Republicans — who hate Hillary and Bill with rabid passion, and who not long back CONTROLLED THE WHITE HOUSE AND BOTH HOUSES OF CONGRESS and had a free hand to do any darned thing they wanted — would have made sure she (and anyone else they deemed culpable) was arrested and charged and tried.

They would move Heaven and Earth TODAY to make it happen.

This woman is likely going to be the next President of the United States. Not because of some “fix,” but because a majority of American voters prefer her to all the alternatives. She’s one of the most admired Americans in the world.

Gonna be interesting to see how the real “patriots” react to her election. Will they attack and undermine her at every turn, the way they’ve done with Obama, or will they decide to support her? I’m predicting a breathtakingly vicious attack that will last every second she is in office, just as they’ve attacked Obama every second he’s been in office, further undermining American stature, effectiveness and progress.

And damn, I wish that wasn’t so. It’s disturbing to see even good friends, people I otherwise respect, falling into line on this never-ending nonsense.

Obama and Hillary aren’t the problem. The problem is that Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and company would rather get ratings by broadcasting outrageous paranoid crap than they would help America succeed. The problem is that too many of US would rather attack and attack and attack, rather than cooperating and trying to get things done. Too many of US hate Obama — and Hillary — more than we love and support America. We would flush the entire country down the toilet before we’d believe in them or work with them on the least little thing.

Here’s something I’ve realized: If John Smith can’t think of a single good thing to say about some supposedly evil person, unless that person is Hitler himself, it’s not the “evil person” who is the problem. It’s John Smith. NOBODY is as underhanded and deceitful as certain conservatives paint Obama and Hillary. Hell, I hated Richard Nixon with a passion, but even I had to admit he did some good stuff.

People are STILL claiming Obama is a secret Muslim, born in Kenya, bent on destroying America, avidly trying to take all our guns and put us in FEMA camps.

At some point, you just have to start thinking “Wait, if this accusation was a lie, and that accusation was a lie, and this OTHER accusation was a lie … maybe all of this stuff is just lies. Maybe whoever’s sending out all these lies, maybe THEY are my real enemy, manipulating me for their own ends. Making me so angry or scared I can’t think anymore.”

What’s really destroying America is the unrelenting hate, the constant lies. The hatred and suspicion of government itself.

And I really don’t get why it’s all happening. We are freer and richer and safer than any moment in history, and some large part of that is because American government, and government regulation, WORKS.

And just FYI, I’d bet the Clinton camp itself worked to make this investigation happen, with the FBI carefully examining every detail and bringing the whole thing out in the open, so it would be determined OFFICIALLY she did nothing very wrong. It will be a non-issue by November — again not because of any fix, but because it really is a relative non-issue.