Culture Shock

Culture Shock

If any of you are like me, not that this could be willingly imposed, life sometimes feels surreal, unreal, or too-real.  There are certainly times when we sigh, "Stop the world, I want to get off'.  But we hang on, not that we can be survivors---none of us will "ever get out of this world alive".  

But really, we understand so little and understand too much for our own sanity. We win some battles, albeit the effort may be long and exhausting---if not physically, then mentally---and what do we win, if we win?  A chance to fight another battle. Some get to pile 'things of possession' higher and higher only in the end to be no more contented than some semi retarded Bozo down the street.  We all know the guy/gal---smiling, wasting time, bullshitting, impulsively gobbling down some unhealthy tasty morsel we fear to touch, going merrily through life having no real knowledge of the world or it's leaders, whose philosophy extends to the next meal, inane TV shows or computer games, and lives in some sort of cluttered accumulation of junk no one else wants.  Well, enough, but all this is enough to make us wonder who are the stupid amongst us?

In one 24 hr period I was exposed to worlds so different they could not possibly exist on the same planet.  But they do.  There is this educational program, I think in New York, where students still go to school, but once at school, they sit down before this computer whose internal program knows more about that particular student's mind than can be imagined. This computer is the student teacher.  Using past input from the student this computer knows a great deal about how this particular student's mind works---what it can do best, at what speed, and with what kind of program (input). So let's say the student is going to learn physiology. 

I can remember walking into lecture halls with 150 students all specifically arranged (by me) to sit in a certain place with two seats between each student, and for 1-3 hrs I would lecture on physiology.  Of course the lecture was pitched to the way I best understood body function and if some students were lucky, we would be on the same page and going at the correct speed.   

I have been retired now like 17 years and this New York classroom is something else. The computer does the teaching and it approaches the subject matter in ways which best suit the mental attributes of the particular student.  The student's rate of progress is determined by the student, not the computer.  So we have a room full of students all learning the same subject matters at their own rate in the way best designed to meet their particular mental strengths.  When the computer decides the student is ready to be tested, then they are.  If the student has questions or is confused about something, there is no raising a hand or searching out the instructors office and office hrs, the teaching computer can help at any time.  I reckon the computer probably even knows when it is time to take a break.  This is not going to speak well for the future of college campuses.  I don't think this computer program is going to cost tens of thousands of dollar a year, not to mention it can be done at home at any time. There is no longer even a need to juggle your work hrs with your course schedule.  So I finished reading about this computer program and sighed, "The world has really changed". 

The next day I attended a presentation by Doctor's Without Borders in Chicago and they had videos about the work they do in the most backward and dangerous countries in the world---like Sudan, the Congo, Afghanistan, the Middle East, etc.  Nothing penetrates my consciousness with such pain as looking into the eyes of these hapless human forms suffering in ways unimaginable to someone living on the 11th floor of an affluent suburban area high rise.  These people have essentially nothing.  Not enough food, not enough water, no schooling of any note, nothing resembling adequate health care, no personal safety, no rule of law---and if this is a child, often has no parents.  If we were caring for a pet in conditions like this we would be put in jail.  And the eyes tell it all---pure incomprehensible vacant stares like we are getting a glance at pure hell.  There is nothing sadder than a child/teenager, emaciated, in pain, with tears streaming down their cheeks, totally helpless with no possible insight to understand why this is happening.  In the worst hopeless cases, the eyes transmit nothing but the last fading flicker of life.  How can a world capable of creating a computer for individual learning allow other humans to suffer in this way?  In terms of sheer numbers there are more humans suffering from starvation, curable diseases, lack of water, homelessness, death from violence, and no personal security than ever before in recorded history.  At the same time there is a small percentage of humans who have wealth piled higher than ever before in recorded history.  How can humans, collectively, allow such an obscene distribution of wealth?  How can churches and civilized governments permit this?  What kind of priorities do the affluent in the world have to tolerate any of this? "The answer, my friend is blowing in the wind" (This song dates me).

Later that day I read an article about forest fires in this country. The stats are indisputable. 

In 1980 670 structures were lost to wildfires. 

In 2012  4, 244 structures were lost to wildfires. 

In 1986  2,719,162 acres were burned

In 2012   9,326,238 acres were burned

In 1986---property damage was $2 million (adjusted for inflation)

In 2012----$1.1 billion dollars in damage

1901-1910 average summer temperature was 70.5 degrees

1981-1990  average summer temperature was 71.7 degrees

In 2012  average summer temperature was 73.7 degrees

1901-1910  average summer precipitation was 8.6 inches

1981-1990  average summer precipitation was 8.3 inches

2012---average precipitation was 7.2 inches

How is all this interpreted?

Science: the combination of higher temperatures and lower moisture tends to produce larger and more frequent fires. Earlier snowmelt (fact) extends the fire season, and in parts of the west it is already 2 months longer than 15 years ago. 

A small temperature rise can cause an outsized impact on water evaporation. So we get more severe droughts. The southwest can expect multi-year mega-droughts at increasing frequencies.  The rise in global temperatures correlates closely to the rise in carbon dioxide levels and the rise in carbon dioxide levels is related to human activities from human overpopulation of the planet. 

Conservative political interpretation: There is nothing happening here which has not happened in the past and this is just a cycle we are going through. The solution to everything is to foster maximum industrial/economic growth and the way to do this is to give all sorts of tax breaks and loopholes to the wealthiest entrepreneurs and their accumulation of wealth will trickle down and improve the economic standing of the less affluent. This must be a really slow process since this mentality has been in effect now for at least 50 years. 

The average personal response: Few are willing to sacrifice in any way with their own lifestyle to help reduce the rise in carbon dioxide.  Few are willing to pay more for products which are more environmentally friendly.  Few are willing to pay more for alternate sources of energy. Few are willing to purchase energy efficient cars.   On almost all matters, including reduction of the national debt, the battle is always to see which groups are will be forced to sacrifice and which groups will be spared. Strangely, no one suggests everyone sacrifice and the wealthy more than the non wealthy. Self interest, not fairness is rampant. 

So I sit and ponder over all three images I was exposed to in a 24 hr period. The conservatives are right in that the history of our planet has gone in cycles which included ice ages, and flooding from ice cap melts---and evolution went on, albeit there were often hundreds of thousands of years between these cycles.  Animals have gone extinct before, but rarely at the rate which species extinction is now occurring, and never before has such an extinction rate been due to human activity (overpopulation).  So this is a new one for Mother Nature.  Fortunately, Mother Nature bats last, and she will with this situation too.  At my age I just have one more hope---that Mother Nature doesn't step to the plate for another 10 years.  It is never pretty and when the 'shit hits the fan', with nature induced global corrections, there are going to be a lot of eyes that view the world with the same look we now see in the populations being served by Doctors Without Borders.  No big deal I guess, that is the next generation. Let's invade another country with a winless war fought by paid mercenaries and dump the bill on the next generation---the party, for those of us more fortunate, is not over yet, albeit I think most of us have inklings what is waiting down the road.  

Related thoughts:  Ok, let's say there is a Heaven for humans and God will select who goes there?  Who will be favored, the affluent kid at the computer or the kid in a refugee camp painfully dying?  But wait, maybe the dying kid in the refugee camp, if allowed to live, will grow up to be another Hitler. Why should this kid go to heaven?

And if the planet does suffer from human overpopulation, what purpose is served by saving the lives of any of these refugees?  If we do, they will just reproduce and there will be increased human overpopulation.  Population growth is highest in the poorest areas of the world, so maybe we should just let them be, after all, we or I gots mine, so all is well, at least for our, or my lifetime.  But hold it, does it really make any difference where the overpopulation is occurring? The battle for limited resources continues no matter where the overpopulation occurs. Well, maybe so, but we got mega bombs and smart bombs and tanks and drones etc. So we are safe.  Really?  What good did all of this do us in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan?  We killed 10 of them for every one of us killed and it is always us who tires of it and runs out of money for the massacre to continue.  We have all the heavy weaponry, as do many governments around the world, but the have-nots have terrorism---abroad and at home.  Mass randomized killings are virtually a daily thing now, and the inner rage of more and more people is using this new found retaliation as the final escape from their demons. Is war the right word anymore?  War used to be battles between uniformed armies. The casualties were almost all soldiers. Today there are no uniformed soldiers except Americans (for the most part) who sort of just serve as targets for snipers, land mines, and suicide bombers. The vast majority of casualties are civilians and if we include refugees forced to leave their country the figures become really lopsided. For every active combatant dead there are far more civilians dead, displaced, homeless, and out of work.  We have ceremonies to honor soldiers, who 'volunteered' to do this sort of thing, and call them 'heroes' but I am not aware of ceremonies to honor the dead civilians, and certainly we don't call them 'heroes'.  I guess we really know why we use the term heroes for these soldiers who die from sniper bullets, land mines, and suicide bombers: while we often support these kind of wars, we have no intention of participating ourselves, paying for it, or making any kind of sacrifices, and so those who take our place are 'heroes'.  I, as an adult, have lived through major and minor invasions of other countries and have yet had to, in any way, had to sacrifice to support these wars.  If we ever were to reduce the military industrial complex where would all these soldiers find a job?  Many of them enlisted precisely because they could not find a job.  We lost 35,000 young soldiers in Vietnam.  It turned out to be a total waste of life for so many of our own young, not to mention the far greater death toll on the Vietnamese.  Logic, in hindsight, would seem to indicate the real heroes were the young people who refused to fight in that war.  After all, had they prevailed, all these deaths on both sides would never have occurred.  Life can be so confusing. 

If we were President where would we start and where would all the money come from to attack all the issues bearing down on us from every direction?  I know I could not last as President for a week.  Just last week some Congressman complained the President never calls and talks to him about anything.  Really?  There are like 400 Congresspersons, all handsomely rewarded by lobbyists, and a President should spend his days chatting with them?  They certainly have the resources at hand to make correct decisions on their own. This makes me think about that teaching computer which knows so much about a particular student. Maybe our country needs a computer like that to be our President. We could input all these problems on our country's plate and the computer would make decisions about what to do on every problem. Then, if all of us had a 'personal' computer programmed for our own individual understanding and learning about things, our personal computer would just enable us to understand why the actions of the 'Presidential Computer' are correct. Thus, the best national decisions are made, and all citizens are brought on board by their personal computer and there will be no need for elections anymore, just technicians to ensure all these computers are functioning properly. Ah, never mind, what would I muse about?