IF OBAMA WERE TO WIN:
15 years ago I predicted that with Republican Presidents in the White House the inevitable 'march off the cliff' for this country (several other countries have already taken the great leap) would occur roughly 3 yrs from now. There are so many factors driving the downfall of modern life, as many of us know it, that predictions of any accuracy regarding when the U.S. takes an irreversible dive into the depths of chaos and misery---such predictions must be taken with a grain of salt. For me personally, if I can be off with my prediction around 15 years too soon, it will all likely happen over my dead body.
Back when I was making my prediction there was no Barack Obama in sight, no one able to stir into voting a good number of the roughly 50% who don't bother to vote in this country. Just like no rational political pundit at the time of Lincoln could have predicted his ascendency to the Presidency, there is little in traditional rationale to predict Obama could get to be President. As I write this, a week before the big Feb 4th primaries, the odds are slim, but I guess exist for Obama to eek his way in. If he had another month, perhaps he might even be favored. But this is not about whether he is likely to win the nomination and then the Presidency, but what if he did? Would such a drastic change in our priorities alter the course of history for us?
In many respects, a lot of things would change (assuming Democrats also get control of Congress). I doubt Obama could ever get elected without that happening. But in the larger sense, Obama could not likely change the inevitable fall off the cliff, perhaps at most delay it a few years.
We all are aware of the Holocaust and the roughly 6 million victims. It stands out as the ultimate example of what humans can do to other humans. While the mantra at the aftermath of this tragedy was one of 'Never again', human nature in the short run, does not change. Today, there are genocides all across the globe---oh maybe not 6 million at a clip, more like a million here, 600,000 there, etc.---- but the global reality is that we are rapidly approaching the slaughter of millions of avoidable deaths each year and like the melting of the icebergs, the rate of such dying is accelerating exponentially. As Hitler is not behind this current ruthless destruction of human life it behooves us to seek the ultimate cause elsewhere. After all, HItler may not have personally slaughtered anyone, but it was his mentality, accepted by others, who effectuated the end result. Bush may not personally have slaughtered anyone, but his mentality allows millions to to die unnecessary deaths, be maimed, terrorized by thugs, bombs, religious cults, or foreign agents, left homeless or jobless, etc---you know, just a regular day in the life of trying to live in an occupied country.
Today there is a mentality loose, yet unchallenged, which is imposing a reign of misery, often followed by ghastly means of death. Most of us are vaguely aware of it, but we don't see it, we don't feel it, no aspect of it is part of our own lives, and unlike the lives of those trapped into a life of quiet desperation and futility, we essentially are quite alive and well in our best of all possible worlds. I never really know how to feel about the way I live---to be endlessly grateful? endlessly embarrassed?, endlessly angry about the injustices to the less fortunate? endlessly proud of my 'self achieved' accomplishments? endlessly praising God for personally blessing me along the way? Deep inside I realize it was essentially a crap shoot---a blessing of parentage, location of birth, the schools I happened to go to, the neighborhoods I grew up in, a genetically healthy body, and most broadly put----a combination of genes and environment, coupled with a lot of luck, that determined my destiny. In my clearest moments I don't see myself deserving of awards, I don't really think God personally interceded on my behalf by going through life with his arm around my shoulder, walking me through the land mine of life. I feel more like the guy who pulls a lever on some kind of gambling machine and some sort of jackpot rolls out. Let's face it, a roll of the dice hardly makes anyone better than anyone else. Frankly, I really want to make myself the exception---attribute all my blessings to some sort of inner superiority over some others on a level playing field. I now know that is self illusionary. I don't feel any need to be the biggest winner, the most successful on the face of the earth, and in my later years I don't feel any need to feel brighter or better in any way over those vast hordes of humans living quiet lives of desperation under conditions unimaginable to my mind. "There but for the grace of God goes I" might be one way to look at it, but I no longer believe that either. LIke most others, I know God exists just like I know if I get an anonymous gift I know the gift giver exists. Given the evidence of a long drawn out evolutionary process over billions of years, I now see God as the creator of this evolutionary process of life. While I can't say whether God ever tinkers with His created evolutionary process, there is no reason to believe he very often does so. The neat thing about seeing God in this light is that God is no longer cast in the light of causing this or that good or bad thing to happen to this or that person at any particular point in time. It also puts our own sense of personal importance in perspective. The God created evolutionary process is a brilliant, complicated, self driven, ever advancing, endless process driven by God's laws which just happen to be the Laws of Nature. From time to time there are those humans who write up laws purported to be dictates from God, but I regard them as nothing more than food for thought, the validity of which, like the validity of anything else in our lives, is dependent on sound reasoning for giving adherence. Seeing life as I now do in no way sheds any light on the possibility of life after death or in anyway denies the validity of ethical or moral principles based on human reason. These kind of ethical or moral principles are universal---applicable to all cultures and diversified political states.
With all this as background, what would happen if Obama became President. Clearly our priorities would change for the better. Justice would be elevated, hope arise in quarters where hope has been absent. Respect for others and toleration for diversity would soar. Feelings of superiority over race, religion, political beliefs, culture, and economic status would become out of line, less free to be exercised openly. The use of military power to solve conflicts would truly become the option of last resort. It is less clear whether the U.S. would continue to maintain 750 military bases in 130 countries, many of which exist primarily to prop up and protect a 'friendly' government. Yes, the kind of changes one might expect from Obama are big changes, welcome changes, admirable changes---BUT, in themselves not enough to save us from the edge of the cliff.
SO WHAT IS MISSING? There are roughly 15 million refugees scattered across the globe, and the number growing at an exponential rate. While these are not exactly extermination camps like for the Jews in Germany, in a larger sense they often lead to the same tragic end. What percent of them are dead in a few years from malnutrition, preventable disease, community violence, untreated post traumatic stress syndromes, etc. is only a guess. I suspect it is very high. Neither can I even roughly estimate how many millions perish before ever reaching these refugee camps. Now if we add to all these millions all those who die needlessly from preventable or curable diseases, the toll now is in the hundreds of millions. Fortunately for the rest of us, these people are mostly passive, helpless, forlorn, too weak and too without hope to resist their fate. They linger on for various amounts of time living lives of quiet miserable desperation---total nothingburgers in the pool of humanity.
But as their numbers grow, in ever new corners of the globe, like some sort of spreading plague, there also grows an ever increasing number of 'victims' who refuse to go quietly. These are angry desperate intense fearless 'warriors' willing to attack at any cost those whom they perceive responsible for their misery. From these numbers come the suicide bombers and 'terrorists' of various ilk. Whenever civilized wealthy societies face these kind of 'nothing left to lose' Have-Nots, the Halves always lose. Despite the irrational patriotic rhetoric that we can protect ourselves from these 'terrorists' we cannot. As we have found out in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and I guess now Pakistan, short of blowing up the whole country and practically everyone living there, we are helpless---battalions of troops hiding behind walled off bases---with soldiers dying whenever they venture out of the bases, and unprotected civilians dying by the hundreds of thousands with millions left homeless from the chaos. Even our smartest of bombs end up killing more innocents than criminals, and it would be hard to call people who fight to rid themselves of foreign troops in their land----criminals, let alone terrorists. If Americans could resist mindless patriotic gibberish, we would acknowledge that in some sense there hasn't been a good guys/bad guys war since World War II. If Amercans could see past our noses we would realize that placing 750 military bases in 130 countries is setting us up as targets for all those citizens of those countries who want to topple their own government but can't as long as we prop up and protect the government they despise. To hear our own politicians babble on about how evil gangs in foreign lands are hell bent on destroying America, I guess even capturing us, is arrogant illusionary poppycock. None of these terrorists have any goal of capturing our country---their goal is always to get us out of THEIR country. It is hard to precisely pinpoint when this country decided sovereignty did not apply to any country weak enough militarily to oppose our intervention in their own internal affairs. I really don't understand why the U.S, is the only country who feels such a great need to establish 750 military bases in 130 countries. I can easily imagine what Americans would feel about any other country in the world establishing a string of military bases across our own country---you know, maybe to make sure no one tries to get President Bush out of Office, that sort of thing. We do this to other countries all the time and accept this sort of thing as legitimate, even helpful charity, calling the soldiers stationed all over other people's lands---'peacekeepers'. Since vast majorities of the citizens in countries like Iraq want our troops out these people must hate the peace we bring to them. Maybe they just want their jobs back, or their homes, or some place safe to live, no matter how humble. We now even brag about military surges---in which if we kill enough people, and topple enough buildings, producing a widespread enough desolation---then we can call it PEACE---the peace of absolute desolation, the kind of Freedom which essentially means nothing left to lose. It just makes you wonder, how did America ever get to this kind of mentality? Of course I never did understand how the Germans could accept the mentality of HItler either.
But as usual, I stray from the point. The real force pushing human society to the brink of chaotic collapse is overpopulation. The resultant sequence of events is not exactly rocket science. By definition overpopulation depletes natural resources. Depletion of resources limits quality of life. Limitations on quality of life produces conflict, conflict produces deaths by barbaric emotional savage acts, and finally any society affected is reduced to rule by thugs in some kind of Darwinian struggle. Add to all this the pollution, generated by technological affluent societies, affecting our climate, and the future for all species on this planet is too depressing to accept as a reality. There is no indication that even Obama intends to lead any crusade to enforce responsible reproduction. There is no indication that even Obama is prepared to lead any crusade that forces us to live simpler, more inconvenient lifestyles in order to reduce pollution and take the pressure off depleting the earth's natural resources until appropriate population levels can be established across the globe. In the absence of this, terrorism will multiply exponentially, and no society, of any form of government, is going to escape the subsequent chaos, mayhem, and collapse of their society into a lawless Darwinian thug state.
I am also reminded that just before the Civil War virtually no one predicted slavery would be ended in the South, not even Lincoln. But somehow, after a devastating civil war, the impossible was achieved. Interestingly, we achieved it without some kind of foreign intervention, or foreign military bases all over our country, or foreign military surges to kill off those Americans targeted by a foreign power as 'terrorists'. Thus, the election of Obama might once again, as it did with the election of Lincoln, give us the last best hope for salvation. I mentioned earlier that there was no way to know whether God ever intercedes with His process of evolution. As kind of a Lincoln buff there always struck me the possibility of Lincoln being some kind of divine intervention to solve a situation beyond human capabilities for solution. Everything about the life of Lincoln just seems strangely scripted for a particular purpose and when the purpose ended, the curtain dropped. I know this is silly perhaps, and all of us are entitled to some silly thoughts, but it just seems way too much about the life of Obama seems strangely scripted for a particular purpose. Maybe without any realistic hope for the 'immediate' future of mankind there is little left to hope for except some sort of divine intervention.
Finally, I don't think I am going to lose any sleep over all this. It is the big picture which should always prevail in our outlook. In this case, I am not going to get depressed over the forest for the sake of individually dying trees. After all, we all live in a little 'gleam of Time between two eternities', God's evolutionary process proceeds---and the continuum of life achieved by endless shuffling of DNA with the resultant 'new' and sometimes 'improved' participants in this eternal evolutionary stage play is never about individual bit players who strut about in their 'little gleam of Time between two eternities'. There is no evidence to the claim by some that God created man in his own image. God must be better than that. In the last analysis to be Somebody is less important than to have been lucky enough to participate in this evolutionary process, to have had the opportunity to live and think and make decisions. The process is obviously not really about any of us as individuals, but that hardly diminishes the brilliance or admiration of the process. For those surviving to old age, contentment seems directly proportional to how gently one is willing to go down the stream. I try to pick a stream where the water flows gently with ample opportunity to spend time out in nature, avoiding every opportunity for pushing and shoving. It is best when older to leave others alone, let them live their lives their way, and if anyone throws a punch---duck and change directions. If you fail to see the punch coming and you get hit, well don't worry about it---no doubt you deserved to be punched for something or other. Just get up, dust yourself off, and still change directions. Too many older people stand in one spot and let themselves be some sort of punching bag. And if you have a need to see some deserving people get punched out, vote for Obama. Let a good guy with a small army do the punching out. Me, I think I will now go and eat something scrumptious for lunch, sit for a rest, doze off, and be as useless as possible for a few hours each day.
