Our Government at Work

In case you thought our government officials didn't care, consider this: Who cares to debate arguably the most burning question today? Well, apparently we only have 3 takers:
http://www.sais-jhu.edu/pubaffairs/media_events/Media_Advisories/MA2007/democratsdebate060107.html
(I don't know if that link will persist). Only Biden, Gravel and Kucinich care to participate in the Democratic debate on Iraq. Perhaps it is too in-depth for the others? Disgusting, pure and simple. The vapidity and outright condescending parsimony is infuriating. When will we demand more?

In case any one is interested in what some dare to debate beyond the 1 minute sound bite:
Video
Click here to view video of Senator Joe Biden's remarks.
Click here to view video of former Senator Mike Gravel's remarks.
Click here to view video of Congressman Dennis Kucinich's remarks.

Audio
Click here to download or listen to audio of Senator Biden's remarks.
Click here to download or listen to audio of former Senator Mike Gravel's remarks.
Click here to download or listen to audio of Congressman Dennis Kucinich's remarks

Regardless if you agree or disagree, in a civil and intelligent society we should debate our ideas.

Why is Growth Good?

Growth is at the basis of life. Organisms grow and organisms die. To persist their genes, organisms must leverage their genes beyond themselves. OK, we all know this and this sounds perhaps a bit grandiose..."So what?" You may ask....Well, if this is at the basis of us, then we may easily conclude that growth is good. Biology concludes this easily, but some thought may bring it into dispute, if controversially.

Beyond the hard ethical debate of when too much population growth is bad, and then what to do about it, there is the ever present, day to day reality that faces many of us - unchecked urban and suburban growth. My county is receiving 100 new people a day. What was once open land, wooded forests and rural roads is giving way to sprawl --- housing developments of ever larger houses on ever shrinking lots, crowded schools that are beyond most rational approaches of management, water restrictions, longer commutes, constant streams of traffic and the smile of the "friend" from the boom towns of the past that ends as quickly the stage coach departs. Try to get away from it all and visit a State park, and you are greeted with Disney World-like crowds. In fact, even admission fees to State parks is rivaling commercial entertainment. So much for our tax dollars at work.

Logically and physically there must be an upper limit on the number of people that this planet will support. More pointedly, there is an upper limit on the number of people that this planet will support with a "high quality of life." Even if technology can overcome many of the resource constraints that we face, at a certain point space limitations will drastically affect us, baring a miniaturization scheme from Slapstick. Then consider what disparate and incompatible cultures living in close proximity will yield....

I wish there were some studies about this or at least some greater public dialogue particularly in how to create an environment that is essentially steady state or optimizes the quality of life for everyone. Even over 150 yrs ago, some wondered what this all will amount to..

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending , we lay waste our powers:

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

Getting and spending , we lay waste our powers:

....

Hopefully we are waking up and not treating this world like our personal playground but rather like good stewards would. Yet, too many, especially those with disproportionate power, seem to believe that the world is theirs to extract as much individual value as they can often at the expense of everyone else, and like the monkey grasping the fruit in the clay pot, their greed will not let them release any "treasure" even if it means their ultimate destruction.

If we are already losing the biodiversity of our planet, what will more population and development growth yield? Is this merely alarmist? Will everything simply work its way out, laissez-faire? It will, but we may not like the resulting state.

Balance or Psychosis

It is hard to maintain balance, to maintain the equilibrium of our lives. We are the product of our upbringing and for many of us, we are the product of an idealistic age. I remember the back of the station wagon, the huge land yacht, facing rear, flashing fellow travelers stuck in traffic the peace sign, and wondering why only the young drivers flashed you back with a smile on their face. An age when MIT graduate students came to our 5th grade class to show their solar car, which while only miniature, sure impressed me. From Star Trek to Star Wars, from Kung Fu to Kimba, from Speed Racer to Run Joe Run, we grew up thinking we could make a difference and that anyone could be President and the limits were truly the stars.

We looked upon the open territory, and felt like Lewis and Clark, if not totally, at least in spirit. And now, as we approach or pass the middle part of our lives (hopefully) we are faced with the dream crashing down upon us. The bright sun, the warm beach, is erased by the wave embracing us, tumbling us effortlessly in the dark, silent power; we are powerless and cannot breathe. We know the air is above us, the life giving oxygen is somewhere near, but we are disembodied, unbalanced. We are at the point, where either we will escape the grasp of the tide and surface, thankful and strong yet somehow unsure, or we will disappear into the expanse of the sea, another bit of life floating through the currents like so much plankton.

Melodramatic you say? I long for the times when I could listen in the dark to interviews with Philip Glass and the performance of Einstein on the Beach on celestial radio no less. Why do I remember this 24 years later and perhaps more importantly what will I remember 24 years from now? (note to reader, I remember this almost verbatim, but I looked it up for accuracy)
...
Two lovers sat on a park bench with their bodies touching each other, holding hands in the moonlight.

There was silence between them. So profound was their love for each other, they needed no words to express it. And so they sat in silence, on a park bench, with their bodies touching, holding hands in the moonlight.

Finally she spoke. "Do you love me, John ?" she asked. "You know I love you. darling," he replied. "I love you more than tongue can tell. You are the light of my life. my sun. moon and stars. You are my everything. Without you I have no reason for being."

Again there was silence as the two lovers sat on a park bench, their bodies touching, holding hands in the moonlight. Once more she spoke. "How much do you love me, John ?" she asked. He answered : "How' much do I love you ? Count the stars in the sky. Measure the waters of the oceans with a teaspoon. Number the grains of sand on the sea shore. Impossible, you say. Yes and it is just as impossible for me to say how much I love you.

"My love for you is higher than the heavens, deeper than Hades, and broader than the earth. It has no limits, no bounds. Everything must have an ending except my love for you."

There was more of silence as the two lovers sat on a park bench with their bodies touching, holding hands in the moonlight.

Once more her voice was heard. "Kiss me, John" she implored. And leaning over, he pressed his lips warmly to hers in fervent osculation...

Sometime, I will tell you about when I met Philip Glass at Duke University. I think he may rather continued his conversation with me about La Mont Young (whom after I had "discovered" in my youth, my mother I told me how she met him at parties in the early '60s in Greenwich Village) but his "hosts" were eager to take him out to dinner and discuss their academic appreciation of him. I digress, and I need to end here and not ponder on the current state of music...BUT if you want to listen to something nice, check out the Metheny Mehldau Quartet

Kempis

I could not (nor even try) to say it better:
http://www.leaderu.com/cyber/books/imitation/imb1c21-25.html#RTFToC61

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers...

How many of the up and comers and already arrived, the power brokers and the window washers, the cooks, the tourists and the by-standers on 9/11, left home early, rushed to work, and forgot to kiss their loved ones good bye?

Sound bite, channel surfing, multi-tasking

Continuing on with this theme and responding again to a discerning and probing reader. While the majority of the media is most definitely left of center, their reporting is more directed by business than bias. However, while the human interest story with the war, with VT plays out in the short term, old news is no news at all. I think the media takes that maxim literally.

While some would perhaps like retrospectives and celebration of lives pieces on the many soldiers who are needlessly being used like the fodder of so many soldiers before them. I would prefer some real thoughtful analysis of the current situation. One balancing the current state, with likely outcomes and possible mitigations. This is not a math problem with clean boundaries and provable solution. It may not even be a single chess game in a multi-game match, but something far more complicated. That is, we need to look at the larger picture, the longer time frame. We must plan our moves far in advance, and take some lessons from Sun Tzu if not Lao Tzu. We cannot continue to risk lives and put our children's mortgage up on the basis of the next election.

It is sad, tragic the many stories that you (I) read about the many casualties behind the current conflicts. Yet the vast majority of people grow tired, and in fact we all grow tired. Why with the constant drumbeat of negative, disturbing news, we see so little about what it all means? Even in the case of the VT students, where is the analysis, the in depth reporting on what the living VT students are going to do differently? What is the lesson the living take away? The dead are gone. Yes it is tragic, yes loved ones are crying...but what is it worth if we do need heed anything from it? Moreover, what does it say about us, if we make promises to live our lives differently, to change our lives because we see how short life truly may be, but summer comes, we relax on the beach, we turn the page.

Life is happy, life is tragic. It has always been that way, and before we became enamored in our ability to cheat death, it was all the more apparent. The quest of man, has always been to create meaning that lasts out of the transient and profane. So what is the meaning we make of our time?

Press Obsession

A kind reader left a comment wondering why there is so much media and public fascination and tributes to the VT victims where we barely hear much of the military victims these days. There are sites dedicated to remembering the fallen soldiers and occasionally the newsprint and other media will run specials on the individuals killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, there are at least a couple factors at play here regarding the differing coverage.

One is the cold hard reality, that despite the media's sometimes holier than thou business attitude, they are, increasing a real business that seeks viewership, ratings and advertisers. They push the sensational, the pieces guaranteed to get big audiences at the expense of the weighty, not easily digested or yesterday's news stories. Unfortunately, for many people in the audience, they turn the channel or page on the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts.

The second philosophical factor, is that while you cannot really weigh one tragedy against another, at the fundamental level, one may argue the greater tragedy of the VT students since they were not volunteers putting themselves into harm's way, they did not sign up for a deadly mission, they were like many of us, once living an idyllic college existence. Moreover, from a relational point of view, more people can relate to the college students or even have family members as college students, in comparison to the military.

All tragic, nevertheless.

It Should Be Clear

One point that seems to be lost in the Virginia Tech killings by Cho, is that when one truly does suffer from mental illness, at the point where they crack, they really do lose it. People do crack, and reality because a jumbled mess of illusions and perceptions. If he were under the influence of heavy duty psychoactive drugs, people would have chalked it up to that. Being crazed, without the help of any psychotropic substances, is not much different.

What Does it Mean?

What will the calamity at Virginia Tech amount to? Will it just go down in the history books as the worst mass murder in modern American history? Already it seems to lose some of the impact that we had with Columbine. Perhaps we were more innocent then. Perhaps in the midst of war we are hardened. While we look for meaning, while we look for reasons, what if there really aren't any? Only because of our believed significance do we attribute meanings and reasons to events that happen in our experience. If we do accept an existential existence, then events do indeed happen for no reason, without meaning. People are killed, you get cancer, the "Best and the Brightest" author gets broadsided and killed, a terrorist blows up a bunch of children, and there is no justice. There is no real meaning of any importance. A leaf floats on the wind and falls into the river. The currents take it into the rapids. Another leaf is whisked into the bank and finds refuge. What does it meaning? Nothing.

But is the meaning what we make of it? How we deal with it; how we face the challenges and randomness of life? Is this noise hiding a truer reality? Or is it nothing?

I think it is easier for those living to deal with these tragic events than those who are killed. This may be contrary to conventional wisdom, but actually it is a self-evident fact. The living have an opportunity to deal with it, despite their apparent difficulties. Thus while the living, grieving in their pain, can perhaps find meaning, what of the dead? What do they find? Are they the leaf pulled into the rapids?

Things get more difficult once we assume a non-existential existence. More on that later...