Never Thought I Would See The Day:
A lot of things in life just don't seem possible. NO WAY. Yet, not often, the impossible happens. I suppose the most unimaginable event was the creation of life itself. For every creation there is a Creator and thus God exists. I'll put this phenomenon at the top of the list here but any analysis of how, why, or when is far beyond human capabilities. If ever there was a case of what is, IS----life itself is it.
The most recent improbability was the election of a black to be President of the United States. As one upscale lady at a pool told a friend of mine, "I never thought I would see the day when pickaninnies would we running all over the White House."
It is hard enough for anyone to get most people to trust him/her---and then it is mostly a trust from those in the same social, economic, ethnic, religious, or cultural group. The Catholics trust Their Pope, American Indians trusted Their Chief, the Germans trusted Their Hitler, Protestants trusted Their Billy Graham, Blacks trusted Their Malcolm X, a team trusts Their coach, and so it goes on and on. We all tend to trust the familiar.
What odds would anyone have demanded 5 years ago that a black would be the next President of the United States? 1000 to 1 maybe? But it happened. It happened because an individual was able to project trustworthiness independent of race, culture, gender, economic status, country, and religion. Precisely what there is about Barack which generates this kind of trust is beyond my ability to explain. Barack really is Lincolnesque. And the multitude of grave problems facing Obama are of the same magnitude, if different in nature, as the grave problems Lincoln faced. Both came out of nowhere, both from humble backgrounds, both with respect for a justice and fairness unmatched by others, both with a lovable physical ugliness, both with a quiet strength, not so much like a steel beam, but more like a cable that shifts with the wind, this way and that, but ever so steadily leading to the distant predetermined end point. Lincoln educated the public and moved only so fast as the public could be made ready to follow. Barack seems to govern the same way. Lincoln used to tell the 'purists' on important issues, that "you do what you need to do to stir things up and create pressures, and when the time comes I reckon I will put my foot down firmly for the right principle. But I only intend to move so fast as the people are willing to follow" (this is paraphrased but accurate in content).
Given the HISTORY and the LESSENS learned from alcohol prohibition, who would have thought we would ever have had the kind of War on Drugs generated by making marijuana illegal? The logic for such a War as this doesn't exist. The results were predictable. Our country had already gone through all this with alcohol. But the War on Drugs took on a political life of it's own and the more it failed the more outrageous the war became, both in terms of cost, increasing the jail population, creating urban, rural, and suburban ghettoes, creating of all sorts of drug trafficking gangs, and turning hordes of young people into violence prone street thugs. Without marijuana to sustain the madness of it all, this whole vast underground illegal drug trafficking would be reduced to a minor problem. Most everyone knows, at some level, that abuse of recreational drugs is a medical problem requiring medical assistance, but only in recent months, mostly because of the ever increasing costs of this police War on Drugs, have there been some slight political movement. I guess more and more people are finally realizing that you can only maintain so many expensive war fronts. We all know it is not too smart to place yourself in the middle of family feuds, but it seems a lot less understand that placing our country in the middle of internal politics in other countries, does not exactly bring us the desired rewards or serve the best interests of citizens in these other countries either. We developed this notion of some sort of God driven 'manifest destiny', coupled with unmatched military superiority, which created the notion that we could police the world and even had some sort of moral imperative to do so. Even with the most backward of countries---like Vietnam, Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.---we are stymied. We level infrastructure, we generate millions of refugees, we eliminate hundreds of thousands with 'smart' missiles, we employ serious torture of prisoners, and yet, when the dust settles, it is we who tire of it all, it is we who scramble for some excuse to withdraw, and ever so slowly begin to realize that the days of wars like World War I and World War II are over.
I also thought I would never see the day when euthanasia would begin to become acceptable. Ten years ago any serious consideration of letting people control their own dying process, including euthanasia, would have been considered an impossibility. But I guess too many people have watched too many others die a slow agonizing death and at a cost, in the last three months of a person's life, that amounts to one third of all medical costs in the country. In the 'good old days' the elderly got sick, or had their heart attack(s), cancers, etc. and then died shortly thereafter. It is not unusual for the elderly to be medically kept alive for decades in the most incapacitated conditions. It isn't just the dying person who suffers, but the caretakers who may find a good portion of their own productive years saddled with intensive caring for a parent or someone close to them. It has become a medical, social and ethical nightmare. Thus, we now have at least two states which empower individuals to control their own destiny, including euthanasia with strict guidelines. The guidelines are too narrow, but once started, this relegating decisions about the dying process to the dying, will move rather quickly to a point where the dying have more or less total control over their own dying process. The religious right may claim God controls who dies when, but in reality it is THEY who mandate the laws controlling just exactly how a person can die.
Is imperialism dying? Is this another thing that we thought we would never see the end of? Imperialism might be dying, if only because the strongest countries have increasingly little capability to control the weakest countries. When wars involved armies, some country would always win. But there are no armies in today's wars except on one side. We have hundreds of thousands of uniformed soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, mostly all huddled in some sort of secure green zones. For the most part, who deserves a bullet or missile up their ass is unclear. The 'tips' you get as to who the enemy really are, these tips are mostly quite unreliable, as are the tips as to where they actually might be. So you make educated guesses and a lot of innocent people die, get tortured, or lose their homes. So, yes, maybe imperialism is dying in the old fashioned sense of imperialism. But the replacement is even scarier-----terrorism. Everything about modern problems and conflicts, as people compete for more and more scarce resources amidst a human overpopulated globe, fosters terrorism as the only recourse for those angry about this or that. I never thought I would see the day imperialism would die out. But then I never thought it would be replaced by terrorism either. Not a good trade off.
Who would have thought, 20 years ago that gay people would ever be allowed to marry? When I was young if anything was hidden out of sight, with dire personal consequences if it were not, was the existence of gay people. It just never occurred to hardly anyone that the right to choose an of-age spouse should be unrestricted.It seems simple enough logically that each person should have the right to marry anyone of their choice. After all marriage is a bonding of love, not some sort of sexual orientation. There is probably nothing some gay people do in bed that some straight people don't do in bed. And anyone who thinks sexual compatibility or preferences has any intellectual foundation must have a mindset at the lowest level of the gene pool. Then of course was the notion that gay marriage would destroy the institution of marriage. I wonder how many straight married couples have gotten divorced in those states where gay marriage is legal because their own compatibility was affected? It is the old case of you really can't compare apples and oranges. In fact you really can't compare any marriage with another marriage, period. Each marriage is unique. And personal. My problems with marriage have always been far broader: In most cases I haven't a clue why some marriages last and others don't. If anyone needed my personal approval for their marriage what a farce that would be---I simply don't know who should marry who. And I don't know why I should lose any sleep over it either. Love is good. Hate is bad. Tolerance for diversity is good. Intolerance for diversity is bad. The Golden Rule is good. Any religious dogma which goes against the Golden Rule is bad. All else is smoke and mirrors.
At any rate I never thought I would see the day for many things. Of course for many things I never will see such a day. I think one of the hardest things in life is not to be too rigid. In sports, ok. Defend your team and favorite players with all the bias and energy you can. That is what keeps you welded to the sport. Anyone truly objective about sports could not possibly find it exciting. Sunday afternoons (and Sunday evening, Monday evening, often Thursday evenings and Saturdays) find the TV awash in pre game rantings by all kinds of commentators with all kinds of backgrounds, all spouting off about who will win, which players are good or bad, worthy of respect or not worthy of respect, and after all the shouting, ridiculing and pontificating is done, if any of them can pick the winners, in like 60% of the games, they usually are the most successful picker for the day. It is rare for anyone who can predict something with a 60% accuracy, to be viewed as an expert.
So it is with evolutionary progress: illogical barriers fall, human concocted religious dogmas crumble under their own weight----even the belief that humans are the endpoint of God's evolutionary process is totally lacking in any proof, let alone that God Himself is meddling on the behalf of specific individuals to tamper with His own evolutionary laws. Perhaps on rare occasions He does, hard to know, but on a large scale, highly improbable. And if He did so on a large scale, the evidence would be there for all to see. It is not there. The cards are dealt at random, you do the best you can with your hand, be thankful for the opportunity to be in the game, and find contentment through the Golden Rule---the inborn sense of ethics found in the human species. All other avenues for contentment fail.
