Duped

Up early the morning of my 75th birthday. Log on. The Google doodle catches my attention: blue, yellow and red letters with a small candle-like flame above each one. I was beguiled. By some accident of fate, this particular mprning, Google had no festival, or person it wanted to recognize. So it simply posted the candles of a birthday cake and directed the viewer who clicked on the doodle to a Wikipedia page listing all the famous people born on November 17.

A nice coincidence, I thought, that today of all days Google had nothing to say about someone else. It felt almost like a blessing, a sign. I took a screen shot of the birthday-candle doodle and forwarded it to several friends. Little did I know I had been duped.

It was late in the day when someone pointed out that Google has my personal information. Google knows me. It knows what ads to send to me. It knows my birthday. Google has an algorhythm that automatically sende this ego-stroking doodle to every birthday boy. Google's thinking may be, get people to feel loved by Google and they'll spend more time on Google. More time means more ad revenues.

Instead, I feel creeped out. I feel like the victim in a horror movie who receives a call late on a foggy night. The phone rings. I pick it up. A breathy, threatening voice says, I can see you. I know exactly where you are and what you're doing. Shaken, I hang up and close all the blinds. But the phone rings a second time, and the voice describes the food that's on my plate and the other choices I have in the fridge.

I am spooked. Someone is watching every move. Someone knows more about me than I know.

Google probably thinks of itself as benign, even friendly. But is like a man walking toward me with a gun. He thinks he's the good guy, but he doesn't look at all loke that to me.

Thankful for . . .

I am thankful for dirt, for our sweet-smelling soil, for the 15,000-year-old Missoula alluvium that organically produces half the food my wife and I eat, that nourishes shrubs in which birds nest, and that shoots up a thick matt of weeds where mice and snakes find balance. Thank you, loam, for the bounty of leaves, their movements and colors, their graceful descent to rejoin you, the homes they assemble for salamanders, earthworms and beetles, for making the perfect seedling nursery. Thank you too for an explosion of flowers all summer, magnets to hummingbirds, honeybees, bumblebees and praying mantises. And with respect to the old-growth firs that shade our house during hot spells and keep inside temperatures as much as 20 degrees cooler, many long sighs of relief. Especially, thank you for letting us give back. By composting our wastes, you sanctify our tiny contributions to your eternal, sacred cycle of Life.


(“My whole life had been spent waiting for an epiphany, a manifestation of God’s presence, the kind of transcendent, magical experience that lets you see your place in the big picture. And that is what I had with my first [compost] heap.” - Bette Midler)

75

On the eve of my 75^th birthday, I think about Corky, the six-year-old who lived across the street from me in 1949. “Mom’s gonna buy a new radio,” he announced, “and it’s gonna have moving pictures on it.” I could not imagine. But ever since our first TV, the ‘impossibilities’ of technological progress have come at a staggering pace.

Black-and-white was soon replaced by color, and a mere fifteen years later Americans walked on the moon. By 1974, the web connected research universities, and within decades the public had personal computers, the internet, smart phones and millions of other world-changing innovations, most of which were beyond the comprehension of someone who as a kid sat before the radio on Saturday mornings envisioning the faces of the rough-and-tumble cowboys whose gravelly voices made it clear that in the battle between good and evil, good would always win.

Technology has no allegiance to good or evil. Technological progress seemed “good” because it shone the light of knowledge into households worldwide. It connected 7.3 billion culturally-diverse people. It built the substructure for us to unite as one people on one small, traumatized, exhausted planet.

But technology buffs ignored the greatest impediment to true progress, which is human nature itself. Techies and investors assumed gadgets would miraculously eradicate flaws in our genetic wiring. Instead, we got viral conspiracies, internet trolls, hate groups and mass shootings. Technology, in effect, put AR-15s in the hands of cavemen.

Had we taken just half the money that went into developing and making high-tech stuff, plus much of the wealth that IPO investors pocketed, plus many of the billions ‘earned’ through rising stock values, if we had taken a hefty chunk of all that money and spent it on understanding human nature, we might be well on our way to stopping the dual threats to human health and survival, namely, the widening social, economic and political divisions, and a rapidly deteriorating environment.

But we didn’t. And it won’t happen soon. Here’s why.

Throughout my life, the country was ‘parented’ by two political parties. Dad was the protector who united his supporters against a foreign enemy. He borrowed money and built up the military. When Mom was voted into office, she united her supporters around the sense of community. She wanted money for schools, healthcare and a safety net for the disadvantaged. Being fiscally responsible, she didn’t want to borrow money, but to tax those who had made money from the war economy. Dad was furious. “Tax and spend,” he hollered. And soon, he was back in office.

The cycle ended in 2017 when our newly elected Dad lacked the courage to stand up to foreign enemies. He still needed to unite his supporters against a common foe, and since Mom had achieved extraordinary social progress, he attacked her.

Obviously, spousal abuse is not the ‘good’ that cowboys promised! The abuser shrugs, “So what? Women have no recourse.”

Women, though, do have recourse. United, the suffragettes secured the vote and passed protective laws. #MeToo held wealthy, powerful abusers accountable and stripped them of sexual ‘privileges’. United, women could secure the institutions essential for a peaceful, sustainable global village - education, healthcare, the environment, a free press, the right to assemble - democracy itself.

Corky. You and I are now leather-faced cowboys. We must champion the ‘good’ cause. It’s time we got off our high horses and backed women. Female leadership qualities befit a filled-up Earth.

Destroy in order to win

It's part of the male gene, the need to get ahead by first destroying something. One man defeats a rival for political dominance. Another crushes a meadow under cocrete as an architectural claim on territory. War. Dam building. Teasing a girl - a put down - as a way to win her.

But what does a man in America do if he has lost every battle? It's not his fault, by the way. He was tricked. Bamboozled. Cheated. Men blame someone else. Trump is the quintessential example: never takes responsibility for anything that goes wrong.

Well, thank god, the defeated man can buy an AR-15, and with it shoot kids in a school or partiers at a club or worshippers in a synagogue. Well thank god the U.S. President is the Commander--in-chief and can orffer up the army. He can feel like a real man by destroying something. Or by killing somebody.

We don't need to ban guns. We just need to prohibit men from having them.

Lies

"A Party Defined by its Lies" - Paull Krugman

Response in the Comments section:

Republicans lie about their agenda because they must. They lie because the greatest threat to human survival cannot be talked about. Look at their policies. Taken as whole, they point to a single objective: environmental sustainability. How to get there? First, secure the power of the wealthy by helping them build legal and political walls around their wealth; make their class unassailable. Second, weaken the masses; reduce food support; take away health care; keep wages low so the poor are so busy making a living that they have no time to protest, or even to know that they are dispensable; take away social security so people have no free time to evaluate what's happening to them; make it difficult for people to vote. Third, close the borders, reduce immigration and cut subsidies to foreign countries; make the dark-skinned people of the world know they too are dispensable. Republicans are dealing with a problem Demcrats refuse to even talk about: overpopulation. The world has five billion more people than it can support sustainably. The rich don't want to curtail their lifestyles, so Republican have come up with a solution: let nature have it way with the masses. Quietly orchestrate a massive die-off. That would return the world to health in a couple of generations. The rich could then hunt elephants and lions with no fear of their going extinct.
The only sensible way to solve the problem of overpopulation is through lower birth rates, but population control is taboo.